Interview of Albert Maltz

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
FEBRUARY 13, 1975

GARDNER

Mr. Maltz, as we discussed beforehand, the interview begins with the chronological beginning; so if you'd like to discuss your birth and early years and perhaps something about your family....

MALTZ

Yes, I will. My family, as with anyone, is very important. But an observation occurs to me with which I might begin. My first wife [Margaret] came from a long line of people who had come first to the United States around, I think, 1630, in one branch of the family, and the other in around 1650--one branch English and Scotch, and the other German. And she had a genealogy that went back in through all of the United States: this uncle had been an engraver in the Philadelphia mint; and Paul Revere had borrowed his horse from Deacon John Larkin, who was her so-and-so (her name was Larkin, the family name was Larkin), so on and so forth, and it went back into England. And at one point in my life, when I was already quite mature, I tried to question my mother's sisters (my mother was then dead) and my father about their background, their history, and what happened to them. And I found out with them (and I have since found out with almost anyone I can recall) that if you were the American-born children of immigrants, the immigrants have practically no history to tell you. I don't know of any person whose parents were foreign-born where the parents can say, "Oh, we came from such and such, and such and such, and we went back such and such, and such and such and such." Presumably there are some. I'm sure that there are some English people who live here and others who go back far, but at least among those I've asked, and particularly, I would say, among Jewish immigrants, there is a lack of knowledge of their history. So that I know about my father that he came here when he was about fourteen with his father and mother, whose name was Maltz. They came from Lithuania, and I presume from somewhere near the German border; I'm not so sure but that their forebears might not have originally come from Germany, because the name Maltz is fairly common, I've found, in Germany. But I have no memory. I think that his father was a miller in Lithuania. Why they left, I don't know--maybe for the general reasons that most immigrants did: to seek a better life or to avoid army service or this kind of thing. And I don't even know--I never knew my grandfather, so that he died fairly early along the way. I know that my father had no schooling here, but [he had] a multitude of jobs such as many immigrants had: he was a peddler; he worked in a grocery store; at one point he, I think, painted flowers on cups. He had a certain artistic bent, as a matter of fact. Along the line he seemed to have picked up the knowledge of how to play the mandolin, because when he courted my mother, whose name was Lena Sherry, he courted her in the course of teaching her how to play the mandolin. And the mandolin was an instrument in our family, when I grew up, that he would occasionally play.

GARDNER

At what point did he come to America? Do you know the date?

MALTZ

Well, I can say this: he died in the year 1934--no, 1933, at the age of fifty-six. So if I get a pencil, I can figure it out.

GARDNER

So that would mean that he was born in 1878, then.

MALTZ

Yes, in 1878. And he worked at a great many jobs. I don't know at what point his father died, and I don't know anything of any brothers, but at some point along the line, before I was born, he became a house painter and met and married my mother. I'll now pause with my mother's family. She was, I believe, two years older than he and came to this country from Poland as an infant in arms; I think she was about a year old. I was told that her father--no, her grandfather had been some sort of foreman on a rather large estate not far from Warsaw, which is an unusual story for a Jewish man. But you find exceptions in the general history of things, so it may or may not have been true. In any instance, her own father was, I think, a Hebrew teacher, and he died shortly after they came to the United States, leaving his wife--that is to say, my grandmother on that side--with four daughters and one son. And my grandmother, who was a marvelous human being, apparently made a living on the East Side of New York by being a bootlegger. [laughter] She made bathtub liquor, or Wishnick. (I forget what Wishnick is--it's a brandy, I believe, made out of raisins or prunes, that's what it is.) And she used to apparently lug bottles of this, or pails of this, up the four- and five- and six-flight tenements, and she would sell [it] in order to keep her family alive. And one of her daughters became a schoolteacher; a second one became a bookkeeper; a third one was rather retarded, a bit on the slow side--not excessively so, but I suppose she had some petty jobs; and another one I knew when she was married--what work she did, I didn't know. And then her son at some point along the line went into the navy and remained a career man in the navy for some years. He became a petty officer, chief petty officer. I know that he was in the Philippines around the period, either around--I'd have to check this out--or after, shortly after the period in which the United States was putting down the Aguinaldo insurrection, because in her home there was a book of photographs which I've pored over many times showing Filipinos being garroted and having their heads chopped off and being lined up as prisoners by American soldiers. He had this book of snapshots, and presumably he had taken them himself. He remained in the navy until I guess I was about ten or twelve. Then he got out and with my father's help (I'm going on like this in no special order) he became a businessman--and at the same time, a confirmed alcoholic. And the alcoholism gradually took over from the businessman, and he died of alcoholism.

GARDNER

Could you fill in some of the names?

MALTZ

Yes, I'll fill in names.

GARDNER

My historian's bent.

MALTZ

Of course. I'm just going along. My father's name was Maltz--it had always been that.

GARDNER

First name?

MALTZ

Bernard. My mother's name was Lena, and her family name had been Sherashevsky but it was changed to Sherry, apparently when they landed on Ellis Island--that kind of deal. One sister was Sadie, and another who was the teacher and who taught all her life in the Brooklyn school system and apparently was quite good at it, was Bertha. Then there was... I think I'm leaving out a sister somewhere along here. Wait a minute.

GARDNER

Well, you mentioned the retarded one.

MALTZ

Then there was May, who was the retarded one, slightly retarded. And the man who became the sailor was David. And perhaps we'd pause for a moment while I just think. [tape recorder turned off] There was another daughter whose name was Ada. She married a man who ran a little penny grocery, a little penny-candy store on a corner in a section of Brooklyn, where he used to get up at about four in the morning in order to receive the newspapers and be ready to sell them to the people who had to start work by 5:30, leave for work by 5:30. He would be up until about eleven at night for the late customers who came in to buy some candy or other little things that those little general stores had. And he died at about forty of a coronary--probably some of it having to do with the intensity of his work to try to earn a living. My mother (and this was very important in my life) wanted very much to be a teacher. But [at] about the age of thirteen or fourteen, she had to go to work in a factory (I believe it was a factory that made buttons or buttonholes in garments) to help out. She was the oldest of the sisters, the oldest of the children. And there she contracted trachoma, which was, as you know, a much more prevalent disease at that time and which Ellis Island tried to keep out but couldn't altogether, and this affected her her whole life. Her vision was saved. I don't know whether the first physician who came into her life was the physician who was in her life for the rest of it, but somewhere along the line she encountered a marvelous German émigré, a tall, slender, Prussian-looking gentleman, by the name of Dr. Denig. I remember his name; I would like to kind of immortalize it as much as I can. Of course, I don't know whether it was an operation he invented (I have questioned an ophthalmologist about this and he doesn't know), but this would go back now fifty, sixty years. He did operations on her eyes whereby he took skin from the inside of her mouth and transplanted it on the cornea--what is the white part of the eye?

GARDNER

I can add and subtract, but I don't know.

MALTZ

Well, we'll have to get that word. Yes, it's not the pupil, it would be the cornea. And [he] must have done other things. She had a succession of such surgeries, and as a result of this, she was able to see and to function, but she couldn't read. The most she could ever do was to very briefly glance at the headlines of a paper. And out of that, and because she was not an educated woman, because reading was a strain for her, she got the concept that reading was a strain for everybody. As a result, she would say to me, "I don't want you reading this Tom Swift stuff and things like this. I want you to save your eyes until you go to college." Even at that early time when they didn't know whether they would have the money for any of their children to go to college, there was the hope that they would. And so I was forbidden, for instance, to have a library card at any time in my life. And there were no books in the house, except there were a few sets that they obviously had bought because it was the thing to do; they bought a set of Turgenev and a set of Tolstoy and a couple of other things like this. A set, I remember, of a book on the History of the Jews by Graetz, which, when I had the opportunity, I would sneak little readings. And that was the extent of the reading I did. As a result, I read, when I was an adolescent, Tolstoy--I think it was The Kreutzer Sonata--saying what a bad thing sexual intercourse was, and I read Graetz on how many millions of Jews had been killed by anti-Semites all down the ages. And that was about the extent of my rounded reading. Now, before I was born, which was in October 1908, my father had an up-and-down career supporting the family. I was the youngest of three; I have two older brothers.

GARDNER

They are...?

MALTZ

My oldest is Edward, who is about seven years older than I. And the middle brother is Ernest; he is about three and a half years older than I. At a certain point I think there was a depression in the United States around 1906, and I know that he tried to make a go as a farmer. They moved out to Freehold, New Jersey, which was a farming community, and there they worked very hard to try to raise potatoes and strawberries, and there are various tales from that year that I wouldn't particularly go into, but that failed also. And about the time it failed, he came back and went to work again as a painter, and fairly quickly he apparently was able to be not just a painter working for someone else but a small contractor with another man or two working for him. And he would get little contracting jobs. That has a relevance in that about the time that this was so, my mother was pregnant with me, and there was one night, Sunday night, apparently--I just learned this the other night from my brother; I knew of it in general, but he refreshed me--when my father and the man who worked with him went down to the paint shop, which was very near where we lived. We lived at that time in Williamsburg, [Brooklyn], on a street that I wrote down called Vernon Avenue, in Williamsburg. And when they went into the shop, my father apparently went into the back, and the assistant lit a match above an open barrel of turpentine. There was an explosion and he was set on fire, and my father was set on fire. They both ran out, and my father, whether by intelligence or by accident, fell on the ground, and in rolling around, he put out the fire. But the other man became a torch and burned to death. That sent my mother to the hospital for premature delivery, and I was born weighing three-and-a-half pounds. There wasn't any incubator around apparently at that time, or one available--they had them--and so, according to the stories I've been told, I was kept wrapped in cotton wool for about six months.

GARDNER

That's a fiery omen though.

MALTZ

[laughter] Yes.

GARDNER

Almost mythic.

MALTZ

And apparently my father, who was then ill and under the care of some kindly, non-Jewish doctor, and who recovered, somehow so impressed this doctor that he, my father, must have been brash enough to ask, or got hints that the man felt kindly disposed toward him, and borrowed $1,000. And with that money [he] was able to set up in business again and to proceed. A little later we moved to another area which was apparently Park Avenue, which I remember because my father had a shop, paint shop, downstairs where he just stored his paints and, I think, also kept his horse. I think at that time he still had a horse to navigate around, although he was one of the first men around to purchase an automobile and had one very early. But I remember living upstairs, up a long, long flight of stairs, and looking down. I can remember that as an early memory; it must have been sometime between the time I was two and three. And apparently this was a mixed neighborhood of Irish and Jews at that time. But then, when I was three, and when my father was still a painter but by that time had graduated to an automobile (because I remember driving), he purchased a house in the Flatbush neighborhood. It was about, oh, I can best describe it [as] about a mile from Ebbets Field, old Ebbets Field. Because Ebbets Field, and all that it meant, dominated a good deal of my psychology as a youth. I hoped to become a big-league ball player. And the very day that we moved in, something happened that I think probably affected me very profoundly. A group of boys gathered in our backyard. It was on a street which was what you would probably call pleasant, lower-middle class, mostly frame houses of two stories with an attic, all of them having a little patch of grass in front of them, a little patch behind, a little driveway, and all close together. There were some brownstones on that street, but mostly they were the type I described, with maple trees. But that, of course, was a big step up from a Williamsburg slum. And when I asked my brother why [our] father moved there, he said he knew of no reason excepting that he [the father] wanted to make improvements for his family. He wanted them to live better, and this was an opportunity to live better. But there gathered a group of boys, and my brother thinks they were not boys from the street but boys from other streets around, shouting anti-Semitic slogans and throwing some stones--because I remember the stones broke our back window and cut my lip. And since it's an incident that happened when I was three and I've never forgotten (not that I have dwelled upon it, but it's just something I've never forgotten), it's quite obvious to me that it made me sensitive to anti-Semitism, first of all, but I would say, more importantly than that, sensitive to the whole question of injustice. It was my first experience of something that was not just. And very early in life, I can remember very early I hated injustice wherever I saw it, to whomever it applied, and I think it came out of that personal incident.

GARDNER

Having brought that up, what.... Well, I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this. How much Jewishness was involved in your family upbringing? For example, did your family speak English exclusively, or lots of Yiddish, or...?

MALTZ

No, it's a good question, important question. There was certainly a basic foundation of Jewishness in my upbringing in the sense that we knew we were Jewish, first of all; and second of all, we knew we were Jewish in a Christian neighborhood. Although later all of the boys in the neighborhood became my friends: I played with them; I went to school with them; they were at my home for my birthday; I was at their home for their birthday parties, so that there was not an unpleasant atmosphere at all in any sense. My family kept a kosher home, but they did so only because first my father's mother lived with us. And then afterwards she died, and then my mother's mother came to live with us when her own daughters had married and were away. She lived with us and was a very welcome member of the family; she was such a really warm, lovely human being. But if not for that I'm sure they would not have kept a kosher house. I remember how startled I was when I was about twelve or so and went on a little automobile ride through several states in New England with my parents. They had taken me out of school to do it for some reason or other, and I saw my mother order bacon in the morning, and I was just absolutely flabbergasted. She said, "Well, when we're out of the house we do it, it tastes so good." And on the other hand, I also on all high holidays went to synagogue, and this continued until I revolted at about the time I went to college, or even before. [phone rings] And we celebrated Jewish festivals like Passover and so on, and as a matter of fact, at a certain point my father urged that I.... Oh, I had to go to Sunday school for a while. I think it was Sunday school where you learned actually history; that's what they taught. It was taught in English. At a later point I remember my father wished that I might read Yiddish, but I was impatient. After school I wanted to be out playing with the boys; I didn't want any of that muck. And now of course I'm sorry; I wish I knew the language. Now, father, for instance, took one English paper and one Yiddish paper. I think he took the English paper for the news and the Yiddish paper because they ran certain serials.

GARDNER

Which paper was it, do you remember?

MALTZ

I remember what it was; it was called the Day. It was neither the Communist nor the Socialist one; it was, I guess, a daily middle-class [paper] or whatever it was, but I believe that they ran short stories and things like that, and he enjoyed reading them. But he took the English newspaper for the news. Somewhere along the line, without schooling he'd learned how to read and write. Or maybe he had had some night schooling. I don't know. But he was a man who always spoke with an accent even though he had come [to America] at fourteen. It was not a gross accent, but you knew that he was not American-born. With my mother, as I recall, there was no such accent. She spoke as though she had been born in the United States. It was not, let's say, a heavy religious atmosphere. Even my grandmother, who was religious, was never tyrannical about it. She was such a gentle human being, and she was so tolerant that the weight of this never pressed on any of us very much. And I know my desire, which was classical, was to be as American as possible. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted the approval of my peers, naturally. There was something else, however, in the early psychology which was important, and it was part of the awareness of anti-Semitism. I remember my father's attitude was that a Jew must learn to fight. Very interesting; it was the opposite of meekness. He had been the witness to a pogrom in the village in which he lived, a village that was obliterated during World War I. And he told stories of how a powerful man, the butcher--I think he was the butcher; maybe he was the blacksmith--came out with a club in which he had studded nails and swung that club around, hitting the local anti-Semitic citizenry who were looting and pillaging and so on. And my father said, "You've got to fight." I remember his telling with absolute delight, and repeating it more than once, the story of an old Jew who had a pushcart on the East Side and whose beard was pulled by a hulking anti-Semite. A small man next to him said, "Don't you ever do that again," and this guy turned around on him and started to hit him, and the small man turned out to be a Jewish boxer. He beat the daylights out of the big man, and my father told that with great relish. Now, that affected my psychology because, although I was not brought up in an atmosphere such as others were, where there were real gangs around and where one lived a life of fists, I was prepared to fight and I did fight. Not only that, but as I grew older I wanted boxing lessons, and I got them from a pro. Now, this obviously came to the point of neurosis, because when I was at Columbia University in my freshman year, I was continuing to take lessons from a pro, and I was preparing to enter the Golden Gloves. Now, this is of course too contradictory; by that time I should have been over it. But nevertheless I had that in me as part of my psychology: you don't lay down, you fight--maybe you lose, but you fight. Apparently my early years, as I recall them, were years of tremendous physical activity. I was fortunate in that I lived on a straight street without too much traffic and where there were other children my age. So that before we went to school, or then after we went to school, when we came back, and weekends were spent in incessant physical activity. My friends for the most part weren't readers, although they did some of it. I, as I've told you, didn't have the opportunity; but I didn't miss it, because I was glad to get up in the morning and, whatever the season, there might be two or three hours of punchball. If you know that game, it's generally not known out West here.

GARDNER

I grew up in New York.

MALTZ

Oh, you grew up in New York. Then another season there would be touch football, and it would be ring-a-levio, if you know that game--chasing everybody around like hare and hounds--and then it would be roller skates. And when one roller skate ran off, broke up, you went on one roller skate and used the other foot. And then after a while most people were able to afford bikes, and I'll always remember my sadness that I was the last boy among my group who was able to afford a bike. I was riding bikes for hours. And there was playing handball. Life was physical, and that was what you wanted all the time. That was my existence. There was really certainly never any intellectual talk around my family because they didn't have it within them. Excepting that there was native intelligence there; there could be thoughts about things. I remember my father, for instance, was very proud to be an American. This was genuinely the land of opportunity to him, and he was so very proud of it. This came in later, because at a time when he was very ill in a hospital, and I was taking state examinations which were obligatory for all high school graduates and suddenly was confronted with an essay to write, it clicked with my father lying ill in a hospital (I'll explain later, he was having his legs amputated): I wrote about my father and what he felt about America, which I felt, having embodied it from him. But at the same time that there was this kind of life, there was also apparently a preparation in me of what I guess analysts call "free-floating anxiety." Without attempting to assess what this came out of, I think it came out of parents who demanded, who gave approval when you excelled, who gave approval when you achieved, who didn't give approval unless you performed according to their expectations. That would be my general judgment. I know that very early I had the concept that I needed to try to excel in anything I did, whether this was in athletics or whether it was when I first went to school. That was part of it. But I also recall that when I first went to school--I never had kindergarten; other children did. I don't know whether my parents were just ignorant of it or what. At that time there weren't private kindergartens; maybe there were for wealthy people, but there was nothing like that in my aura, my ambience. But when I went to school, for about the first year as I can recall, I ran all the way to school in the morning in order to be on time. I don't suppose the school was more than about a half a mile away, but that after all wasn't necessary and was a sign, I think, of already there, at the age of six I guess I was, of that kind of built-in anxiety. I do think that several things not unimportant in my background were the fact that there was an extended family. When we had Passover it was held at our home, and the aunts and their husbands all came. And then as they had children, all came, and I had a sense of having family and of being cherished by more than just my immediate parents, but [also] by this aunt and that uncle and so on down the line. And I think that had an effect upon me. Now, somewhere along in my childhood and before 1918, which would have made me ten years old, probably when I was maybe only about five, my father branched out from being a house painter to becoming a small builder. And he would build--I guess he started with one-family houses, but presently, I know by World War I he had several apartment houses, and that's when he began to go nuts. Because in World War I coal was in short supply; as a result, water pipes froze, tenants called up, you couldn't get money for more building. And I remember I grew up--oh yes, this is very important: although later my father made money, my psychology never went along with what happened to it. I grew up with the feeling of poverty. Now, my wife Esther really grew up in poverty. She grew up in that kind of poverty that I never knew where she knew that if she would say, "No, I've had enough, mother," then her mother would eat one piece of bread, say, or half an egg. And if she didn't say that, while being hungry herself, her mother wouldn't eat anything. Well, I never had that. But I grew up knowing that the kids around the block had water pistols that cost ten cents, or maybe they were even a quarter at that time. Remember what a water pistol was? I wanted a water pistol. My mother said, "We haven't got money for a water pistol. You can't have a water pistol." And I grew up with the psychology that we were poor. It was not so much poor; rather, the more accurate phrase was "money is tight." Money was tight. It was always tight. That went on for years like that, that money was tight, and that affected my psychology a great deal. Now, at this point--oh yes, one thing that came into the house moderately early, perhaps.... I don't know, it must have been perhaps--no, I guess it was after the war, because during the war my father wouldn't have the money, but he bought a Victrola. And with it were perhaps a half a dozen records. Now, at that time you wound up each time you played one record, and these were all great arias: [Amelita] Galli-Curci singing from--I forget what it's named; it's about the fisherman--and Caruso singing his Pagliacci, and so on. Something in me instantly responded to that music. I used to play that hour after hour after hour. Although later, when my parents tried to give me music lessons, I hated every minute of it, quit it as soon as possible. But I loved to listen to that music. Now I don't enjoy opera because I can't stand the recitative that goes on in between, but great arias as well as, of course, all orchestral and chamber music and so on, are things I love. And actually, I work to music.

GARDNER

Oh, is that so?

MALTZ

Yes. I didn't always used to, but I learned about working to music, oh, it goes back now about eight, ten years ago. Almost all day long I have music on. Usually it's baroque music, gentle music. It's not usually orchestral, although sometimes it may be. And it's never voice, never voice, because that interferes. But I find it benign, and for that reason I'm delighted with KUSC.

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
FEBRUARY 13, 1975

GARDNER

Now you were talking about your musical....

MALTZ

Well, just talking about the music, but that's all it meant. We never had any collection of records or anything like that. But as frequently with families of that sort, at a given age my oldest brother was given piano lessons, and then the next brother was given violin lessons. Now, each of them had some interest in music and did some practicing and learned how to play a bit. But I never liked it when my turn came.

GARDNER

What instrument were you doing?

MALTZ

A violin, and I did it only out of dutifulness. And at rather an early age for me, because I was "a good boy," I said, "I don't want it. I don't like it. I don't want to do it." And it went side by side with the fact that at certain evenings the son of a tailor--there was a man who had a tailor shop in the area, his son was rather a good violinist--and on a Friday night, when the music teacher came to teach my second oldest brother, Ernest, he and the music teacher and the son of the tailor would come and play music at the house. I always enjoyed that very much. At a certain age along the way, when things were a little easier, we went to an occasional concert, especially one that was recommended by the music teacher, who said a friend of his was having a debut at Carnegie Hall or something like that. But we never had any record collection or anything like that. And as a matter of fact, when I went to college I had just a little box that you carried; you put on one record at a time and wound it up one at a time. And I had half a dozen Bach records--I was very fond of Bach at that time--and that was all that I ever had. It was a cultural education [that] was sort of very spotty. My parents did go to the Yiddish theater, but I didn't know Yiddish. I knew at that time some pidgin Yiddish because my grandmother knew practically no English--she could understand a few words, but she only spoke Yiddish--and I could get along with her but have lost all of that really because I was twice married to women who were not Jewish. Now that I am married to a woman who is Jewish and who knows Yiddish, I'm beginning to relearn some words that I knew as a child. And I have recently been reading, with fascination, Leo Rosten's extraordinary book about "the joys of Yiddish." I think that's an absolutely magical book. I have known him in the past, not well, but I never realized what a truly erudite and brilliantly witty man he was. Oh, that reminds me of something which is really absolutely precious. I thought I had it down, and, you see, I think I look over too quickly--no, I see I have it here. When I was a resident here in I guess my mid-thirties, over at the house as a guest one evening was Ralph Greenson, the psychoanalyst, called Romy by friends. And I don't know what prompted it, but I related a story that when I first went to Europe, and went to the board of health in Brooklyn for my birth certificate, there was none for me. There was one that gave my birthdate and the names of my parents and the correct address--but the first name was Romeo Maltz. And instantly Romy Greenson said, "My father delivered you." He said his father was a general practitioner and a nut on Shakespeare, and every child he delivered he wrote down a Shakespearean first name for them. [laughter] So I had to officially have a name change, and I still have a copy of that original Romeo Maltz birth certificate. Isn't that a fantastic coincidence?

GARDNER

That's wonderful.

MALTZ

Well....

GARDNER

We won't discuss the obvious ways in which that might have influenced you.

MALTZ

Well, it didn't very much, unfortunately. [laughter] More fantasy I think than anything else. Anyway, I didn't discover it until I was already in college, you see, because I never went to Europe before then.

GARDNER

At this time we're talking really about when you would have been in grammar school.

MALTZ

Well, we're talking about the time I started grammar school. I started grammar school at the conventional age of about six.

GARDNER

Would there have been any added influences due to the fact that your brothers--your older brother now would be in junior high school?

MALTZ

They didn't have junior high schools then.

GARDNER

Well, then--oh, I see, he would be around eighth or ninth grade then.

MALTZ

They were both older and their lives, although we were part of the same family, were rather separate from mine. They were both older. They had things in common that I didn't. Their friends on the block were an older group; I played with a younger group. And it was not like growing up with a brother who is, let's say, just a year older than you. One was about six years older, six and a half, the other three and a half to four. And I was the kid brother. (If you can believe on the telephone my middle brother still says, "Hey, kid." You know, that was the atmosphere.) When I began in school, I was a dutiful student. I must say, for the schooling that we had--we had a school in which the classes were so crowded at one point that I remember that for a period of about two years another boy and I shared one desk, which meant that each of us sat on one buttock for the entire day. But by gosh, we learned geography, we learned certain basic elements of history--probably some of them gravely inaccurate, but we learned them. But the geography was accurate, and I mention that because you know I had occasion not too long ago to be at the home of a physician and his intelligent wife and his intelligent son. This intelligent son goes to Beverly Hills High School, and I said, "Did you ever have a class in geography?" He said no. I said, "Do you know where Istanbul is?" He said no. I said, "Do you know where Rio de Janeiro is?" He said no. He doesn't know the world in which he lives!

GARDNER

That's incredible.

MALTZ

But I have since heard that this is largely true of almost all people entering colleges; they have absolutely no knowledge of geography. There are some schools that apparently combine geography with aspects of sociology so that people do get a sense of places. But I know that I still can recall, you know, that Peru produces a certain kind of basic crop and basically where it is in Latin America. We had to make maps. And I feel that in many respects I was infinitely better educated than a great many who are going to school today. Although when I was living in Mexico City, some young friends of mine who were going to what was called the American School there, which had combined American and Mexican students and which taught some classes in Spanish, everyone was bilingual. They were already reading things in literature that I was not assigned until I came into college. The literature was much more advanced, and I believe that the literature that is read even today in, say, good high schools in the United States is much more advanced. Just as I was told, I remember, when I was in England in 1959, Galsworthy is really only read by high school boys or whatever they called them at that time... high school boys--probably schoolboys. This was shortly before they had a radio program a few years later in which Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga was so successful, and then they had a TV thing. And now I think Galsworthy, whom I consider one of the great modern masters, finally came into his own again. But in so many respects it seems to me that I was given a better foundation in education than many young people are getting today in school. I know that as one of my first obligatory English classes in college--and there were only two and I only took two--I had to do composition, one composition a week, to learn how to write. And apparently this is one of the gravest problems today, that so many students can't write anything. They cannot put sentences together. I suppose it's one of the results of TV, but also it must have something to do with the way writing is taught in school. A most unfortunate development. Anyway, I went to school...

GARDNER

What was the school, by the way, just to have...?

MALTZ

Oh, it was a little school in Brooklyn called PS 92. And when I had occasion to visit in Brooklyn in the year '59, PS 92 was still there but had been rebuilt and was carrying on. And that school had a very mixed population; it was for the most part, oh, I'd say very mixed. One type that rather stood out were some very poor Italians who lived in a kind of a Hooverville about a mile away from the school, but who came very neatly dressed to elementary school. Although I once wrote a story based upon the fact that one Saturday morning I saw one of the girls in my class walking barefoot, following her father with a pushcart, walking through our street, looking through rubbish barrels. But when they came to school they were neat. [sound interference--tape recorder turned off] Otherwise I think practically all the children were lower middle class or poor. I remember once a year, or twice a year, there would be examinations for head lice. And at that time, if you had head lice you had to leave the school; your hair was shorn; the only treatment they had for it was kerosene, that I can recall. I remember the bitter tears on the part of one young girl when she had to leave school. Classes were orderly. There was no cutting up. When you think of what happens nowadays in what we read of schools, there was none of that in our area. Of course, in other areas of New York I'm sure that things were different. This was basically a lower-middle-class to poor area where I think all parents wanted their children to get an education.

GARDNER

I think for the most part in those days education was revered to the extent that....

MALTZ

Revered a great deal. All I know is, for instance, in Harlem kids were getting an education; they were getting some sort of an education, because when I was a member of a theater group in the mid-thirties and we put on a play in which almost all of the actors were black actors, they all knew how to read and write damn well. And there were people of literacy. So there have been massive sea changes in a city like New York since I grew up there. I do know that when Halloween came we all had the custom of changing, taking our jackets and putting them on inside out, because on that day you could put flour in a long black stocking and hit other kids in the back. But we were always afraid of the Italian children because they put stones and broken glass in their stockings. They were a tougher element--poorer and tougher. I'm sure today they are magistrates and so on. And out of our area, different from other areas of Brooklyn, such as one of my dearest friends who grew up in, I think, basically the Williamsburg area, a great many of his young friends ended up in Sing Sing and in the electric chair, or as gangsters.

GARDNER

The old Murder Incorporated.

MALTZ

Yes. But that didn't happen in my area, to anyone I knew. One, I remember, went on to become a teacher; the second one, poor fellow, became a paraplegic in World War II; the third one, I never knew what happened to him educationally, but his father was a minor executive of Standard Oil Company; another one was an accountant. And so on. It's a different kind of atmosphere. By the time World War I ended--oh, I must say that World War I had a great effect upon me because I learned how to read, let's say, in about the first year of elementary school, I would think. I would then read the newspapers, so that I was very well aware at that time of things like the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme--90,000 men dead in one day and 40,000 prisoners--and poison gas and tanks. I was around, like other children, selling bonds, selling war bonds to neighbors, and collecting scrap and doing other such things. And [I was] also very well aware that a couple of my uncles were in the army and going to Camp Upton, which was in New Jersey. [I remember] watching a parade once of soldiers. This had an important effect on me, because after World War I, by the time I was in high school, there was the reaction to the fact that World War I was an imperialist war fought to divide up territories and gain markets, and there was a great deal of debunking of the war. The very first political position that I ever took in my life occurred in high school when I developed a pacifist attitude toward war, and that was very important. The horror of World War I was borne in upon me very, very deeply. But certainly during elementary school I was just a patriotic American boy who believed all of the stories of German atrocities, some of which were true and some were not. I didn't know of anything else that was occurring, such as the fact that the French were not shelling certain German factories in which they had financial interests, and that kind of thing. And I do remember one very important thing: when Allenby, General Allenby--when the Balfour Declaration was declared, there was great excitement in my family. I remember that we went to synagogue, and I remember that everybody around was excited because something new was going to happen for the Jewish people. I don't know about growing up in New York City now, or many other cities, but it seems to me that there was much more sensitivity to anti-Semitism in the United States at that time than there is now, purely because there was more active anti-Semitism. I always remembered that when I went to camp one of my counselors had been a Princeton quarterback who had studied engineering, and the great question was, in spite of the fact that he was Princeton and a quarterback and All-American, whether he would get a job as an engineer because the engineering profession seemed to be closed to Jews. And the kind of awareness that I think I had of anti-Semitism all through childhood, even though, as I say, most of my friends for the most part were non-Jewish, I just don't have now. I very definitely lost it when I went to live in Mexico, where I never felt anything like that at all. But I think that the world changed in that respect and, God knows, can change again, depending upon world events. I seem to remember very earnest teachers in elementary school, teachers who really tried to give us our basic tools of learning. And I remember something most fascinating which is very different today, which is that in my last year of elementary school, which meant I was thirteen going on fourteen, the question was put: How many children are going to high school? (Because at that time, as I recall, there was no sixteen-year-old limit; you could immediately go to work from elementary school. In fact, I don't think you even had to finish elementary school.) And with satisfaction our teacher saw about half the children in the class say they were going on to high school. I remember later, when I graduated from high school, there was the question, "How many are going on to college?" and there was a small minority of hands that said they were going on to college--but only a small minority. The situation now, where such a vast portion of young people go on to one type of college or another, is a day-to-night difference from what it was when I was a child. There was a very small minority of us who ever went to college. Now, something very important in my life, which I didn't realize at that time was important, occurred when I was about nine, I think. I was in a grade such as 2B, something like that, 2B or 3B. I got a very severe pneumonia and was out of school for about three months. Apparently behind the pneumonia there was a hidden polio that was not recognized, and was not recognized, I would say, for about fifty years. Because, although it turned out (some time ago I found out) that my left foot is half an inch less wide than my right and that the arches of each foot are different from the other, my gait was never affected, or at least I compensated in such a way that it was never affected. No doctor ever saw it. Army doctors never saw it; no athletic director ever saw it. And I assumed that when someone played two or three sets of tennis, his feet ached. And I assumed that when someone stood in a museum for an hour, his feet ached. I didn't know that other people didn't. All I knew is that I could never be an elevator man, let's say, or work behind a counter in a store. Of course, I knew my feet couldn't take it, and along the line I did various things to try and compensate for my problem. For instance, by the time I was in my thirties and able to afford it, I used to buy two sets of shoes each time I bought a pair of shoes--one size six, and the other six and a half--and I'd throw away one of each, and that way have one. Or else I would buy a pair of shoes, and I would take a stretcher and work on the right one and work on the right one until sometimes I almost burst the seams in order to make that one large enough so that the left one would work. And actually it was not until I was living in Mexico and once happened to mention this to an internist that he sent me to a bright orthopedist. And I said, "You know, I've always had great trouble with my shoes, and I've tried to have shoes made in Mexico because I heard that Mexican craftsmen were very good. But I've had no success, and I think that I just have unequally sized feet because I had a badly sprained ankle in baseball once." He said, "That wouldn't have any relationship to your problem." He said, "You've either had a hidden polio at one time in your life, or else you had a very rare form of meningitis which would cause this." So, for the first time in my life, when I was already, I believe, in my fifties, I had a thorough examination, and he found that my entire left side was weaker than my right, that my left thigh and calf were smaller than my right thigh and calf, but never so noticeable that even stripped in gym anybody knew. And you know, I made the tennis team in college, and I made records in swimming, and that kind of thing, and I didn't notice. But that's why I wear these shoes nowadays, which are built to a mold and help me out. But I had this hidden polio as a kid and never knew about it.

GARDNER

That's fascinating. And never knew about it.

MALTZ

Never knew about it; nobody knew it at that time. I was reminded of that fact because in 1917, which means when I was nine, in the summer there was a great polio epidemic in the United States, and as many parents as could afford it got their children out of town. Now my second [brother], Ernest, the middle brother, had had asthma as a child, and so my parents scrounged up the money to get him to go to camp because that was thought to be good for him. But neither my oldest brother nor I went away that summer. But when the epidemic came along, my parents packed us into their little auto, and we went up to that camp and stayed there until school reopened, as it did about a month late. I don't think school reopened until about mid-October or late October in the year 1917. And that was the first summer, I think, I maybe had spent out of town. I think, on the contrary, there probably were little vacations of about two weeks in the year, or one week in the year, when my mother would be able to go up with us children to some summer place in the Catskills and have a cheap room for vacation. My father might join her on the weekend. But thereafter my father's fortunes went better as American capitalism went better. After World War I there was rather a building boom. I remember there was another little bust around 1922, but there was a building boom and a good deal of speculation in real estate, of which my father took advantage, and he was apparently an extremely adept man in sizing up the value of real estate. I know he would come in and say, "I bought a lot today for $8,000." And a week later he would say, "I sold it for $11,000." And then later it might be twenty [thousand dollars], and then it might be thirty. So he made some money there, and he made enough money to begin building on a larger scale. He was a man with a good deal of enterprise. There was a section of Brooklyn called Parkway Gardens that was once merely a horse ranch. And it was he who bought the ranch, and he built about twenty-five one-family houses, and thereafter, others built more--he built more. All of Astoria [Queens] was nothing until he built about the first fifty houses or something. And Varick Street in New York, which is now a basic area of industrial buildings, was all brownstone buildings; he built the first industrial building on Varick Street. So he was obviously a man with a considerable amount of vision. As he went along he acquired a good deal of property, a considerable amount of money, and then, fortunately, smelled the Depression of 1929 coming. And unlike many another man who had kept building new properties and then financing the way they were going by getting a mortgage to buy another one, and paying off the last one with the new mortgage, but never really having enough cash, and when cash was called for during the Depression, they went broke, my father smelled the situation and sold out half of his holdings for cash to partners and was able to weather the Depression in good fashion. That was a very fortunate thing for him--and for us as well. Now, I could go into high school. I've made no notes on it. High school has a few important things.

GARDNER

Well, we could just begin. I have about ten minutes more tape.

MALTZ

Well, if you have about ten minutes more tape, let me give you a little...

GARDNER

Well, let me ask a question or two.

MALTZ

Sure.

GARDNER

At this point, since you're entering high school, your brother, your eldest [brother], would have already been of college age. Did he in fact go on to college?

MALTZ

No, my oldest brother did not. He was just old enough to be drafted in 1917, and he was going to be drafted, I think, and then the war ended. At that time my father's business was very bad, and the question was what to do with him. And at that time textiles began to boom, so my father said, "Aha! Textiles," and he went to a textile industrial school in Philadelphia.

GARDNER

It's still there, Philadelphia Textile.

MALTZ

Is it?

GARDNER

Yeah.

MALTZ

He learned all about textiles, which he hated, and in the summer he worked in a textile factory, which he abhorred. And by the time the war was over, by the time that period was over, textiles took a drop and he never went back into textiles. My second brother never finished high school. He was not very good at studies, although he's a very intelligent man. He was not good at formal studies, and at a given point, he got into an argument with a teacher and hit him, and he was kicked out of school. Thereupon he went to work with my father and began to learn the building business, and he learned a good deal and became a very successful man himself. He happens to be a man who very early developed a great passion as a fisherman and also as a hunter, and all in him that might have gone into creative study--and didn't--went into the creative work of being a real fisherman. For instance, when he goes fishing (and this has gone on many years) he never buys lures; he comes along with a box of tools and with different types of feathers which he's gotten. There may be a camel hair from Tibet, whatever. And he goes to a lake, to a stream where other people are fishing and not catching anything, and he takes the temperature of the water, and he sees what the fish are biting on, and he sits down and makes the proper little fly and throws it in--and now he starts to catch. As soon as he catches them, he counts the number of scales, and then he puts a little bind on them and makes a notation and puts the fish right back. He works with the fish and game commission in order to improve the stock of fish, and works this way. His knowledge of fish.... He was able to prove, for instance, that trout could live to a much larger size and to a longer age if you didn't take them at a too early age from a certain stream in New Jersey. He established a whole thing about that. And as a duck hunter, for instance, he doesn't--like others [do]--say, "Well, let's go hunting next Tuesday." He waits until a chief of police in New Jersey calls him up and says, "Hey, Ernie, the barometer is dropping." He drops whatever he is doing, gets his gear, and goes out, because that's when the ducks are going to land, and he knows it. [laughter] He comes back with some ducks. It's been a very interesting thing, and he's been able to spend a good deal of his life, on the one hand, managing some buildings and doing some business and, on the other hand, fishing and hunting for half of each year. He fishes for trout, he goes up to Canada to fish, goes to Florida to fish bonefish, never goes out on a boat to fish a big fish; it's always the fish that you have to catch delicately, gives you a long fight. Occasionally he will keep a fish like a salmon to eat, or a bluefish; for the most part he catches them and puts them back. And his wife is also a superb fisherman.

GARDNER

Fascinating.

MALTZ

Yes. Now, in high school....

GARDNER

High school, now, is really....

MALTZ

There were no junior high school.

GARDNER

So it's really from eighth to ninth grade, then, isn't it?

MALTZ

I guess so. I went from the age of six to fourteen, and then I had four years of high school. So, what would that be--eight grades and four more?

GARDNER

What high school?

MALTZ

I went to Erasmus [Hall] High School in New York. By the way, the entire district in which I was brought up is apparently now either totally or partially black. It's very interesting. When I went back in 1959, I found that the street on which I lived was half-populated by black people already. And I regret to say that the park in which I spent a lot of happy times. Prospect Park, which would be so free and easy, and we'd walk on a Friday night (I'd go by myself to feed squirrels, which I loved to do), is now so dangerous that one dare not enter it at night and scarcely in the daytime. That's a most unhappy development. And I think Erasmus Hall High School has now become largely black. Erasmus Hall, incidentally, when I went there, had a pre-revolutionary building in which some classes were carried on, an old wooden building in the center of what was a stone high school. Erasmus was very good for me too, on the whole--except for geometry, which I could never comprehend. I remember particularly a small, thin, elderly lady who loved poetry, and the way she taught poetry to us was merely to read aloud Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth. That was all. I suppose she gave us some talks in between, but mostly I remember her reading beautifully these poets. I had never read any poetry in my life before, and I came to love them. I thought they were so beautiful, these poets. And that's what a good teacher can accomplish. I remember once walking down the street with her on an icy day when we both happened to leave the school at the same time. For some reason or another as we were going along I kept slipping and falling on the ice and falling down. She was asking me, "Are you going to college?" When I said, "Yes, I am going to college," she just became radiant. There was a devoted teacher, that one of her students would go to college. And she had seen that I was interested in the poetry, because I remember asking her some questions about it.

GARDNER

At this point, then, you were beginning to read some more.

MALTZ

At this point I still was not allowed to have a library card. Oh, I haven't talked about summer camp, which was important, because I started in to go to camp in 1919. I was still in elementary school, and I went to camp thereafter every summer until I finished my sixteenth year.

GARDNER

Which camp? Where was it?

MALTZ

I went to several camps. One was in Pennsylvania; I think it was called Harlan. And the second was in New Hampshire and it was called Norbey. And my interest there was all athletics, with one new development that came in, which was drama. There was a teacher at the first school, at the first camp, who then moved up to the second as well, who was a dramatics teacher who loved Shakespeare and put on plays. I asked to be in a play, and I evidently had certain abilities as an actor compared to the other kids. So after lunch, instead of resting as we usually did since all morning it was baseball and then swimming, I would go and rehearse for a play. And I was in play after play from a fairly early age on. I don't know, I never conceived of becoming an actor, but I think it led to an orientation of interest in the theater. I believe I started to say earlier that I never saw theater particularly. My parents went to the Yiddish theater.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

And since I didn't know Yiddish, I didn't go along. But at a certain point they took me to a couple of plays, and I watched them with some amusement because a couple of them were burlesque, and they told me a little of the sense of it.

GARDNER

Would that have been in Brooklyn or in Second Avenue?

MALTZ

It was in New York, Second Avenue I think--yes, surely that. But then at a certain point in my life, I remember going with my older brother to Broadway, where I saw Cyrano de Bergerac with a man who made it his vehicle for a long time. (I forget his name. He was very well known and very good at it.) And oh, how I loved it, how I wept, how enchanted I was! I had the experience that a million others have had the world over in finding myself absolutely captivated by the theater. And from then on, when I had the opportunity I did go to the theater, and that particularly developed when I was at college. Then I used to go to the theater. But I'm going ahead of myself, because there were certain things else that happened in high school that were important.

GARDNER

Well, the camp interests me too because it seems to me that that was an avant-garde thing to be doing.

MALTZ

Oh, I forgot something very important which I must take up in my next time--or if you have more time I'll do it even tonight. My life was dominated at an early age by the fact that my father was ill. My first memory of my father was of his fainting. Whatever he had that caused him to faint, I saw him fall to the floor in his nightgown, up on the second floor where we lived. My room was adjacent to my parents'. And during World War I, during bitter weather when he had to go out in the cold on tasks, in an unheated automobile of course, he developed frostbite. Now, I have never known the entire truth about this, but he was diagnosed by the end of World War I as having Buerger's disease. Do you know what that is? Well actually, there was a man called Dr. Buerger who dealt with trench feet on the part of American soldiers during the war--trench feet came in cold and wet feet--and developed a certain injection to improve the circulation. My father went to him and was declared to have Buerger's disease. It was subsequently told to me that it was more likely to have been arteriosclerosis of the legs, because Buerger's disease was usually a young man's disease, and my father was already, I guess, in his forties. But whether it was or not, I don't know; it was officially declared to be Buerger's disease. And there began a long period of problems with his legs. Even before that, I became very sensitive, as did both my brothers, to the question of health. I remember one year when we were going away to camp my father suddenly had an embolism--not a stroke in his brain, but an embolism which paralyzed him on one side for several days. And he couldn't speak at the time. But we were sent away to camp anyway, and the embolism dissolved and he recovered. But he had a number of those which were already a sign of a circulatory problem. Now, he was a chain smoker, or he was a heavy smoker of cigarettes.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE
FEBRUARY 13, 1975

MALTZ

My father had a number of these embolisms. He also had stomach trouble which we were aware of. I think he probably had high blood pressure, because I grew up to learn, when I came in contact with others, that they salted their food in a way that I didn't and I still don't. I'll get a restaurant dish and I'll say, "I'm sorry, I can't eat it; it's too salty for me." And my wife cooks practically without salt, and I never add salt. So I imagine that he must have had that, although I wasn't told it as such. But at about the time of 1918, 1919, he was having great trouble with his feet. I know he used to have mustard baths at night. And he also, at a given time, bought a machine, an electric machine, that was placed in my room. He would come into my room perhaps around 6:00 in the morning because I had to get up by about 6:30 or 7:00 to go to school. As a matter of fact, my first two years in Erasmus High School I had to be there at 8:00, and I was through by 12:30. It was that kind of a split session. And he would sit with a blanket over his head, reading the Yiddish newspaper, as I recall, and having some electric treatment for his legs that was supposed to improve them. Whether or not it helped, I don't know. He had had his stomach trouble all along. He was a big man, husky, but he put on weight too early, at about the age of thirty-five. And at various times, as he could afford it he would go away for certain periods to Hot Springs, Arkansas, alone or with my mother, and that was supposed to be good for him--a lessening of tension, I think. But I know that there was a great deal of tension between them in their marriage, I think purely on a sexual basis. They liked each other, and they really loved each other, but there was a very bad sexual adjustment, and this caused a great deal of tension. (This I didn't know at the time, I found out later.) In any instance, there came one day when I was seventeen when my father who had for about a year and a half been going to Dr. Buerger weekly for injections (no longer could drive a car, by the way, he had a chauffeur) came back from having had one injection, and whether the substance in the injection was not sound or not, it closed off circulation in the leg, and there came about three days of my father lying in bed, screaming. He was screaming and screaming so that you could hear it halfway down the block, the doctors coming in consultations. He was finally taken to Mount Sinai, where he was put in a room that was padded, and you could hear his screams down the hall. He smoked cigarettes between amputations, and I mention that because, if indeed he had Buerger's disease, there is no known case of Buerger's disease that is not caused by cigarette smoking; and there is no case of Buerger's disease that has not been arrested when the person stopped smoking, and there's no case of Buerger's disease that has not advanced if the person continued smoking. Of course, there are poor people who have continued to smoke, been unable to stop, and first a leg has been taken off, and then another leg, and then a hand, and then another hand, and they can't stop smoking. So whether it was arteriosclerosis or whatever, my father had both legs amputated. It was at this point at which I found in myself, not consciously, but as I look back on it, a certain kind of ability to communicate that my mother didn't have with him and my brothers didn't have with him. Because I would go in and say to him, "Look, you're still a man," because he felt, you know, a terrible depression. "And you are the man--your brain and your mind and your heart." It was at that time that I was graduating and coming up for these college boards, I guess they were, or whatever the hell they were.

GARDNER

Regents.

MALTZ

Regents, and I wrote this thing I did on my thoughts about my father and his illness and his being an American. At that time both my oldest brother and myself (my youngest was working in the business, carrying on for my father) got mononucleosis. But it was before mononucleosis was a recognized disease, so we were not told to go to bed. I was then a freshman in college. My father was six months in the hospital at that time because he healed very poorly. A young man who goes to war and has a leg shot off, the wound heals within a week or two. But with my father, because of the bad circulation, it didn't heal; it went very badly and very slowly. And so we dragged around, and I became so trembly that I had to leave college. We both were unwell for months, but we kept trying to go every day to the hospital to see him. We lived in Brooklyn and Sinai was up at Ninety-ninth Street and somewhere or other.... That reminds me, I made a marvelous friend during that time that he was ill. I used to walk the streets sometimes when I wasn't with him, and there was a little lady, little black lady, who had a bookstore. Now I was able to get books and borrow them, and she loaned them and sold them very cheaply. Then she took an interest in me, and she told me with great pride that her son was becoming a biochemist, and he was working as a Pullman porter in order to do so. (Well, not a Pullman porter, I think just a porter in Grand Central Station.) But I always remember that woman because she was very motherly toward me, and she liked my interest in books which was newly awakened for the first time. Ah, but there is one thing about books. When I went to high school, somewhere around my junior year, aside from doing the homework that I always did, all my free time was in sports. I discovered a book written by an English journalist which was a muckraking job on World War I, and said what dirt had gone on during World War I. And I used to take my lunch, I guess a sandwich from home, whatever, and instead of going to the cafeteria to eat, I bought a little bottle of milk, and I would run up to a certain place in the library where that book was. I didn't take it to a desk, because they had desks there, I'd somehow just take the book out, as though I weren't allowed to, and put it on top of the bookstand, and eat my lunch and read that book. And a powerful effect it had upon me in learning what had gone on during World War I; it had a very powerful effect on my mind at that time. But I can't remember reading much else except the little sneak reading that I did in Tolstoy at a wrong time in my life. I remember I owned a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea that I kept hidden up on a shelf. When my parents went out on a Saturday night, I would get the book and I would read for a while, and then I would put it up and go to sleep. By the time I went into college, I met a lot of young men, particularly a young friend that had a lot of influence on me for a while who had read all sorts of things, you know, Dickens and all the people you could name. I hadn't read anything, nothing at all. That was how I started. I wanted to do well in grades because that was taken for granted, but my chief aim was to make the swimming team and the tennis team. And we can go on from there.

GARDNER

Have you covered all you...?

MALTZ

High school?

GARDNER

No, not high school, we can finish up with that. Have you said all you wanted about your father's illness and its effect on you?

MALTZ

Well, it was very complicated, really. For a while we all had the silly notion that we could somehow hide the fact that his legs had been removed, that he could get prostheses--which were then far, far inferior to what they have now--and that somehow we would keep it a secret. It was as though it was a dirty thing that had happened, and not just a sad thing. Now, of course if my mother--her mother had been a wiser woman than she evidently was.... There would have been none of this nonsense. But for a while we tried to keep it a secret, and finally it came out. We went to the country when he was finally let out of the hospital. There was about a four-month period when we went up to Monticello, New York, where he got a house, and he had a nurse with him. I spent the summer with him, and sometime during that summer he got his first pair of prostheses with which he could walk very badly, but he walked. By God, that man went on, and he went on in business to do other things. He went to Europe, walking on the whole like an automaton--calling attention to himself and so on. But he had a strong spirit for which I admire him very much. I wish that I had been older and been able to understand him better, understand my mother better and so on. I have the pictures of my grandmother and so on that I can show you tonight perhaps--sometime. But I think he was a very enterprising man. I once asked an attorney who had been his attorney what sort of a man he was, and he said, "He was one of the nicest and most honorable men I've ever met in my life." And I don't think it was said out of special partiality; I think it was probably so. He seemed quite a good guy, a very good guy. Why don't we kind of finish off now, and I'll listen back before our next session.

GARDNER

And we'll come back to high school a little bit and on to college.

1.4. SECOND PART
(August 5, 1976)

GARDNER

As we just discussed, we had talked about your father, and we're going to come back and discuss your high school years at Erasmus.

MALTZ

Yes. Well, I made some notes and tried to sum up what high school was for me and what it did, and I would say that its general role was a benign one. It increased my capacity for learning, my ability to go at things and study, including materials that were not interesting to me, such as the two years of Latin I had to take, which I didn't enjoy, but I passed the course. And I also had to have a year of Spanish. I passed that but it didn't interest me. And the high school also helped me learn what is after all perhaps the most fundamental thing in learning: the ability to learn by myself, which is what they call homework. But they might better introduce it to students not by saying, "Now, I'm going to give you some homework." Everybody said, "Oh, [grumbling sounds]." Instead they should say, "I'm going to teach you the most important thing: how you study by yourself when you're all finished with school." All of American history, which I'm deeply, deeply interested in, I've learned since I left college--that kind of thing. And it introduced me to the richness of poetry, which I mentioned in the first tape. And also I recall certain assignments--the reading of some novels, which was new to me. I remember I read A Tale of Two Cities, and we had some Shakespeare, I think, and some Emerson essays. Certainly A Tale of Two Cities was something that gripped me, and since I hadn't been able to read novels, it was great. And high school told me something about my, let's say, innate abilities, or interests. For instance, I could handle algebra but I just couldn't comprehend geometry, elementary geometry; the thing was so difficult for me. I enjoyed a course in civics that we had, which was an aspect of social studies. Today it would be an aspect of social studies. But I remember I had an elementary course in biology and one in chemistry--no lab work, because they didn't have labs--and I don't think either course left any kind of residue whatsoever. I remember the word Paramecium, and I remember drawing it, but nothing stuck at all. And during this period my athletic interests continued all the time, but with some specific concentration on some things like tennis, which I love very much. And in this period boxing under a pro started when I was about seventeen, which I mentioned last time.

GARDNER

What was the milieu at the school? What were the students like and so on?

MALTZ

The school? I would say that they were there from middle-class, lower-middle-class to poor [families], with quite a mixed ethnic group. I think, as high schools went, the standards were probably quite high. And I think it was a wholesome atmosphere.

GARDNER

Was there any sense of social consciousness at this point?

MALTZ

None. On my part?

GARDNER

On your part, or in general in the high school.

MALTZ

There was none in the high school that I can recall. But I had, and I mentioned this in the last tape, already a strong pacifist conviction, which was nurtured after my reading about the war by this one book, which, during my senior year, I used to read at lunch hour, with its exposures of the imperialist nature of World War I and of the way in which the munitions makers made their own private deals to make money no matter who died. And that was, as I can recall, the only aspect of social philosophy that I had. Now, I had skipped a grade in elementary school, and as a result I was going to graduate from high school in January '26. Since my high school grades were very good, I was sure that I would be admitted to college. (There wasn't the competition then to get into colleges that there is these days.) And I applied only to Columbia University. The idea of Columbia, Columbia College, was that I would combine living at the college with being within a subway ride of home. And I had won a scholarship on the basis of--what were they called? they weren't state boards....

GARDNER

State regents.

MALTZ

State regents. I won a scholarship on that and then found a rejection letter from Columbia. I had gone up there to take a kind of an orientation exam (I think it was a plus-or-minus one, I'm not sure; I believe it was that) somewhere along the line after I had applied, and when I went up, I went up to see some official, dean--assistant dean or so on--and he said, "Well, you failed this exam." And I was thrown into a heap; I hadn't applied to any other college. He said, "Well, your grades are so good, I'll give you another exam." And I took the other exam. I failed that also.

GARDNER

What was the exam?

MALTZ

It covered a lot of different subjects, and it covered things like, I don't know, I don't remember it well, but I seem to recall questions about an automobile, other kinds of questions. And I couldn't answer them. I don't think it was, let's say, nervousness, because if I had any tensions about exams--and I expect I did--they were never of a kind to make me unable to summon up what I really did know. But it was something about them. But then I went and saw him again, and he said, "Well, you did so well in high school and so well on your regents, we'll give you a try." So they admitted me. [laughter] I remember that there were two things that hit me when I started college: one was the feeling of being overwhelmed by the load of work, which was of course a usual freshman feeling; and second was, how the hell was I going to work? I lived in a dormitory which I think--no, it couldn't have dated back to the original King's College, that's too long, but it was a very old one. And as I sat in my room at night, and in the next room adjacent there were a couple of guys talking, I heard every word as you can hear me. I don't know whether there were earplugs then. I didn't think of them. And then in the morning, if my alarm clock was set for seven, alarms started to go off beginning at a quarter to six or half past five--guys who maybe waited on table or did other things. Every ten minutes the alarms were going off all around; you could hear every one of them. And I thought, Jesus, you know, how am I going to survive this? Well, I was going every day to the hospital to see my father. I spoke about the amputation of his legs. And then I guess fortunately for me at that moment, I got mononucleosis, which at that time was not a defined disease. But I had to drop out of school because of physical weakness. And I and, as a matter of fact, my brother got it at the same time and we went through batteries of examinations. They thought maybe we had tuberculosis of the glands, because of the swollen glands involved, decided not, and then we just rested as we had to. Time passed and we very slowly began to get well, because we didn't stay in bed; we would have gotten well more quickly if they had known about it as they do today.

GARDNER

When would this have been, your freshman year?

MALTZ

This was my freshman year. I had to drop out after about a month of school.

GARDNER

That soon?

MALTZ

Yes. And it came, I'm sure, from being around the hospital. It's a disease that doctors and nurses get more than anybody else. Oh, I think another thing that hit me already in the little bit that I was in college was the sense that the other students knew so much more than I did because they had been reading through their high school years and earlier. But also [there was] a determination that I was going to come back and going to work, that's all, to make it.

GARDNER

Well, during the time that you were sick did you try to make up any of those deficiencies and lie in bed and read all those books that you hadn't read?

MALTZ

No, I think I began to read then. I'm quite sure I began to read, because I told you about a secondhand bookstore where there was an elderly black woman with whom I made friends, and she was so sweet. I must have been getting books from her. At that time, being already in college, my mother wouldn't have said, "Don't read," so I presume that that was the time in which I began to read and try to catch up. And knowing by this time the name of Dickens and other such writers, I would seek their books. And to what extent I read contemporary literature then.... I imagine that was when I read--you know, Sinclair Lewis was a best-seller at that time; I would have read things like that. And I do remember sometime along in there, it was probably at this time, that there was a discovery of secondhand-bookstores in general. Perhaps the bookstore of this woman was the first. I remember being down on lower Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, around there, in that area where there were secondhand bookshops, and I probably started to get some. And somewhere in here (perhaps it was not as early as this) I discovered the Modern Library and had its roll of names and books to get. So I began reading. Now, that summer my father took a house in the Catskill Mountains town of Monticello because he needed a great deal of recuperation still. He had been six months in the hospital. I went up there with him, with my mother and a nurse, and I divided my time between hours of exercise and hours of reading. I remember reading Dickens and Chekhov and de Maupassant and Galsworthy, Bernard Shaw and Andreyev, and reading poetry; I remember particularly Bram Stoker's--was it Dracula?

GARDNER

Dracula, right.

MALTZ

Because I remember reading it in the daytime and getting scared, so damn scared I couldn't continue with it. What's the one with vampires? Is that Dracula?

GARDNER

Yes.

MALTZ

I never finished the damn thing, and I never went to any of the films. I don't like that kind of film, I don't like that kind of story. But I remember I could feel chills down my back. [laughter] I was looking around for vampires.

GARDNER

And bats.

MALTZ

Yes, that was the effect of the book, powerful effect. And naturally a thread throughout this long summer of about four months....[sound interference--tape recorder turned off] And of course, during the whole summer there was a psychological problem with both my father and my mother over what had happened to him: the time when he got his first set of prostheses, which then were very primitive compared to what they have now, and trying to learn to walk on them--a question of waddling from side to side with what they had at that time, an extremely noticeable thing--and some of the psychological problems attendant to it. However, by fall he went back to the family home in Brooklyn and I believe at that time began already to start to engage in business again and, as a matter of fact, had been doing some, in terms of carrying on things, even while in his hospital bed. My first year of college, then, really was from October '26 to June '27. And fortunately, in the interim a new dormitory had been built at Columbia where the walls were thick enough so that you wouldn't hear anybody in an adjacent room. I was fortunate enough to have a room in it, and that was fine. I came back psychologically geared for the burden of work that I got, everyone else got, and I had as my ever-present friend a dictionary. I don't know how it was, say, when you went to college, but I don't think there was a page that I turned over in which there wasn't a word that I didn't know through lack of reading. And so I kept looking up words and after a while, of course, learning them.

GARDNER

You just mentioned your ever-present friend the dictionary. One thing you haven't talked about--and this may be on the level of personal and not really interesting--is the subject of friends, people you were close to in high school, and now starting off college. Did you have a circle of friends?

MALTZ

Yes, I had really the same friends with a few new additions all through elementary and high school because the same boys I grew up with went to the same high school. I advanced about a year beyond them as we went on but would see them, and when we came back from classes we just continued our same games. Except that I knew a fellow who moved to our street when I was about ten or twelve or so, and then when I went in for playing tennis, it was with him rather than the others. But the various sports and the handball and touch football and so on continued with the same group of guys. There was one new friend that I remember making in Columbia who didn't live in my area, but who went on to college with me, and I'll speak about him. I had made some friends in camp, also, whom I saw in the winter upon occasion, not too often, but they were very good friends.

GARDNER

So there was more than your dictionary.

MALTZ

Oh, yes. When I got to college, of course, I was eager to make friends and did make friends, and I'll speak of this. The most important course in the first year at Columbia at that time was a course called Contemporary Civilization, which was five hours of classes a week with a considerable amount of reading and some very rich reading. For someone like myself, it just opened windows on areas of life and history that were to me marvelous. And I think maybe for the first time in a profound way I got caught by the excitement of learning, just learning things that you hadn't known about that were interesting and were revealing. I remember sometimes when I'd go back--I suppose I'd go back to my family home, I'd say, about once a month--and I would just talk and talk and talk to my parents about these things about which they knew nothing but which they found interesting and which I found so profoundly interesting. I believe that I had to take another entire year (maybe it was only a semester) of Spanish and ended up able to read, with a dictionary, a [Vicente] Blasco Ibáñez novel, but not able to talk at all, which was the wrong way to teach Spanish. I remember I took a course in trigonometry and that was one of the few math courses I enjoyed and was able to do well. I had a brilliant teacher who made his lessons a constant series of witticisms, absolutely brilliant. But nothing remained of it for me; I've forgotten everything about it. I never used it in my life. And I have wondered, in terms of theories of education, as to the value of something like that or the value of the two years of Latin that I took. I know there's the claim that if you know Latin you understand the roots of a great deal of the English words, but it seems to me if I put those two years in on studying Fowler's English Usage or other such things in English, that I would have gotten further ahead than by taking Latin. But I don't know.... One would have to speak to educators at the source.

GARDNER

Well, they don't emphasize Latin a great deal anymore, but they don't seem to emphasize English anymore to a great extent.

MALTZ

Well, the fact of what is not emphasized today would not make me conclude that I was right, because they don't teach geography today and they should. They have apparently guys in law school here--an attorney was telling me recently, an attorney who taught in law school here, that, let alone teaching his students law, that he had to teach them how to write a business letter so that they carried an idea through from A to Z in a letter.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

Now, this is no system of education, if that's what you have with the men in law school. I understand today there are young teachers of English in universities who don't write well, who don't write proper English.

GARDNER

It's true.

MALTZ

Well, the system has gone haywire. If you can't communicate, where are you? So that I can understand now. In the second half of my freshman year, there was an obligatory course in philosophy, and I was fortunate enough to have an absolutely marvelous instructor. His name was Irwin Edman, a name that you might know; if you don't, a slightly older generation of men would know it. Anyone would know it because he published some books. One was a best-seller, as a matter of fact, on philosophy, a popularization. He was one of the most gifted talkers I've ever known. Have you read any of [George] Santayana?

GARDNER

Yes.

MALTZ

You know his really eloquent prose, if you agree with me about it. Irwin Edman talked like that. He got up before a class and he talked with such beauty, with such grace of phraseology, with such felicitousness, that it was like listening to music, but it was full of ideas. His summation in a given hour of what one dialogue of Plato consisted of and the philosophy of Plato behind Aristotle, something like that, was just incredible. Ah, if I only had had a tape recorder at that time. And indeed, if his lectures had ever been tape recorded.... Because I think I've never known anyone else like that. I've never known anyone else like that, and I've had some splendid teachers in my life. It was not just his teaching, of course, but something about the materials, for reasons I may not wholly understand now, that hooked me. I believe probably that I was searching for some truths about life, searching for some sort of intellectual foundation in an unconscious way, not in a conscious way. And I felt as though I'd, let's say, come to a well and I was thirsty, and all I had to do was drink. How much it meant to me is exemplified in an interesting way. It had been my dream that when I got to college I would make the tennis team and the swimming team. There was no swim team at my high school. There was a tennis team, and I won't go into what happened there, where I didn't make that team. But I made my freshman tennis team and played a doubles match by the time I finished my second exam in this course in philosophy. I had gotten an A on the first exam. He gave an exam each month. In the second exam, as he went down the aisle giving out the papers. Professor Edman said, "You didn't do so well on this exam, Mr. Maltz," and I looked at it and I had a B. I had an A on the first one. And I stopped tennis. I don't mean I stopped playing, but I got off the team because of the amount of hours that you needed for practice. I knew that I had spent less time reading philosophy; I just hadn't had the time, what with the other courses as well. And that was an example of [snaps fingers] an abrupt change. I didn't have to think about it. I didn't have to argue with myself. I didn't have any debate. I just quit. I wanted philosophy. It's just fascinating to me. By the way, Irwin Edman was a small man, oh, probably about five-[foot]-four, and an albino. His eyes--I don't know whether this is also characteristic of albinos--his eyes moved a little bit. His pupils were not static, they kind of had a little vibration, as it were. Well, maybe that was some eye condition that he had. And he had this white hair--no, kind of reddish hair, it was whitish hair--white face, red eyelids, as I recall. Not a very prepossessing-looking man until you listened to him for five minutes and then he was. [laughter] And [he was] always a very, very popular teacher because he was so damned good. He was a close friend of Santayana's, by the way. And oh, it was during the first semester (this was the second semester) that I stopped that sort of neurotic side play of my interest in studies. I stopped the boxing. I used to keep going downtown from Columbia about twice a week to this little gym where pro fighters were being trained, you know, and I didn't belong there really, of course.

GARDNER

Did you just work out there? You sparred and so on?

MALTZ

Yes, and I was being trained. I was being trained for the Golden Gloves that I was going to start, see. But one day a curious little thing happened which resulted in my having kind of a semiconcussion almost, and I quit at that point--which was about time. [laughter] I was very eager at that time also to join a fraternity, and I did; the high point for me was being accepted, and after that it was all downhill. By the spring of that year I was no longer going, and the next year I severed from it.

GARDNER

What was the fraternity?

MALTZ

It was called ZBT [Zeta Beta Tau]. Now, I made some friends at college in the first year [who] were my friends throughout. One was a marvelous boy really. He came into college at about sixteen as a prodigy, and he had the celebrated name of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Jr. He was the grandson of the baseball commissioner, an Indiana boy whose father was a judge. And between his first year and his second he grew about a foot. I guess he was about a little taller than I am when he first came in; when he came back, turned up the next year, he was over six feet, with pipestem arms and legs but very strong. And he and I just hit it off in the most marvelous way. We used to talk together and eat together and visit each other's rooms and so on. He may have come in a semester after I [did], I don't remember anymore, and we remained friends for years and corresponded together. He had to leave college in his senior year because he got TB, and he was in a sanatorium for part of the time out in California. When I came out here at a certain point I saw him. We then corresponded and so on, but he died at an early age. He died when he was about forty. I remember being appalled by something he did in his sophomore year. He needed money. His father, in spite of being a judge, didn't have very much, or maybe he was an ex-judge by that time. As a matter of fact, he had run for governor of Indiana, and Ken left college at a certain point, I don't remember whether it was his first year or his second year, to help his father's campaign. His father lost. It was a campaign to get the Democratic nomination, I think, or Republican nomination, I no longer recall. Ken came back and told me that in the convention hall there had been an interruption for about an hour in the convention while backers of his father's opponent went around and handed out, I think it was, $100 bills to delegates. And then they voted. Just openly! [laughter] But he needed money and went in for poker playing. That was Prohibition time. He and the group who were playing with him used to start playing on a Friday night, and they would play straight through till Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon. And I remember I'd go around and watch them for maybe five, ten minutes on Friday night--never had an interest in cards--and then I would come and watch them for five minutes on Saturday and then on Sunday. And what Ken had over the other guys was that he could drink and stay sober, and he would win money at this, on which he lived. Whether or not that had anything to do with the tuberculosis that developed, that kind of life, I don't know. But that was so of him. Another friend I had was one I had met in high school. Jules Eisenbud went to college with me and in subsequent years became an analyst. He is an analyst in Denver and has been known, both with approval and with disapproval, for his great interest in extrasensory perception. And he's written on that. He gave a lecture here on that, as a matter of fact, in the sixties. I came and attended it. I remember that, oh, very early after he got out of college and came back from Vienna where he had gone for his studies, I think with Freud, I'm not sure, he manifested that interest. My closest friend, and the man who became my roommate in the second year, was Beryl Levy. He was a Brooklyn boy.

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO
AUGUST 5, 1976

MALTZ

Beryl Levy's background, or way of life before college, had been the very opposite of mine: he never took any exercise of any sort, had none of my interest in sports, but loved the dictionary. And my first impression of him was watching him in class, I think it was Contemporary Civilization; he asked some questions, and I heard words used that I had never heard before in my life. [laughter] And I felt very ignorant and thought how brilliant this guy is. He was an extremely lively, ebullient man, a very bright mind, had great interests in all sorts of things intellectual. [He was a] great devotee of Gilbert and Sullivan, whose songs he could sing at the drop of a hat. And as the year passed we came to see more and more of each other and found each other just the company we wanted, so that we agreed to room together in our second year. He was, for that phase of my life and for several years thereafter, excellent company and marvelously stimulating. He too was majoring in philosophy, so that we had this common interest and a number of classes together. Another friend was Milton Katims/ who has been the conductor of the Seattle Symphony for a good many years and plays the viola. At that time he was a violinist who played a lot. And since he lived off campus, he used to use my room in between classes when he had no place to go, used it for study and so on. But [he is] a man I haven't seen since college. Still another was Ben Maddow, who is a screenwriter, and at that time he was a poet very highly thought of by Mark Van Doren, who tried to get a book of poetry of his published. I never understood his poetry, but Mark did apparently and liked it, and I would trust Mark's taste more than my own.

GARDNER

What sort of poetry was it that you didn't understand it?

MALTZ

Well, let's say I don't understand Ezra Pound's poetry.

GARDNER

It was in that sort of...?

MALTZ

Perhaps, I don't know. Or the poetry of--who was the man that died at sea, the poet that either fell overboard or [was] a suicide? He was a well-known contemporary poet, the name is just not in my mind. Well, he was a name at that time in a way that Pound was not yet, and it was in that vein. But side by side with Edna St. Vincent Millay then, who was quite a name at that time, there was this whole other strain of poetry which I didn't understand then; I don't understand now.

GARDNER

You mean Eliot?

MALTZ

No, not Eliot. Eliot is one I understand. I forget the name. But there is a good deal of modern poetry that I find no reward in reading because I don't understand it. And [Maddow] is no longer my friend, by the way, because of his testimony before the committee, [House] Un-American [Activities] Committee. Among the other men I knew were Arthur Krim and Robert Blumofe, two men who became attorneys and then, with another man, took over United Artists around 1950, Krim becoming the head and Robert Blumofe one of the vice-presidents. I don't remember anymore the name of the law school senior who happened to be next door to me at the time I was preparing for final exams in the spring of my first year. Because I knocked on his door one night and I said, "Would you mind telling me who this author 'Ibid' is?" I had seen "Ibid" in the footnotes for a year, and I didn't know. [laughter]

GARDNER

He certainly was a versatile and prolific author.

MALTZ

Certainly was a prolific author. [laughter] That spring semester the way I did in my exams established the pattern of my years in college in terms of studies, because I was an A student and remained that, and as I went on I had the confidence that in any subject I chose which I enjoyed, I would remain that. And for me it was a good and I would say healthy feeling (of course, there were other feelings of inadequacy) and was part of the total excitement I felt and continued to feel at this marvelous process of learning, which was so very exciting. That year, by the end of the year I think the question began that would loom more and more in my life, which was: What am I going to do with my life? I had not entered college with any kind of profession in mind. My father had wanted me to be an attorney, and I don't know whether it was just for unconscious opposition to him, I made up my mind that I wasn't going to be an attorney. Maybe there were other factors in that that I no longer recall.

GARDNER

What were your brothers doing?

MALTZ

Well, my brothers were both by that time in business. [tape recorder turned off] My brothers were in business with my father. Well, that summer my father again went to Monticello, and again it was with a nurse he still needed, and my grandmother, whom I didn't mention before, was there as well. From time to time my brothers or an aunt would come up for a weekend, or something like that. And I spent the summer much as I had the previous one, only now my reading started to include dialogues of Plato, which I had been introduced to, and Aristotle's Poetics and things like that, as well as novels and other materials. However, I guess I can say now that my concentration on philosophy in college made my acquaintanceship with other subjects very haphazard. In some ways I think it was wrong for me to concentrate that much, but I did it and it also paid off in certain benefits, I think, real benefits. But aside from the two obligatory courses in English that I took, one in my first year which was English--well, no, English composition, which was valuable, and at the end of which the instructor said to the class, gratuitously, "No one in this class will ever become a writer." [laughter] I don't know why he said that. Maybe he at that moment was submitting material to magazines or had published something and felt very smug about it. I always happened to remember the remark, even though at that time I had no intention of writing. And [aside from] another course which was very important to me because of what came out of it (which I'll mention), I took no more courses in literature. So there are books which I would have read along the way if I had which I've still not read. I took no courses in history, I took no courses in economics. I once started a course in economics and found the instructor boring and, under the latitude of the Columbia system at that time, after three sessions I was allowed to drop out. I dropped out and took another course in philosophy.

GARDNER

You were able to take nothing but philosophy?

MALTZ

No, there were a few other courses. If I'd been aiming for medicine I would have had to take an allotted amount of scientific courses. And I had to have a year of science, but since I was not interested in science, you could take a couple of easy courses--one was astronomy and the other was geology--and that was my science. That was fine for me because it was more literary than anything else. After I'd finished my year of Spanish and a course in hygiene that we had to take, and I mentioned trigonometry, there were, as I recall, not many things that I had to take. I voluntarily took one semester of French once, my own decision, and I voluntarily tried a course in chemistry once. I'll skip at this point because it comes into this. In my agitation over what I was going to do, I thought, well, maybe I want to become a physician--a good profession, romantic, you help people. I said, but I've got to have some science, I've got to know I can do science. And I think in my junior year I took a course in chemistry. And then I started to learn the theory of the thing and found out later on the first exam they didn't want the theory; they wanted the formula, and I hadn't learned the formula. Well, what really told me where I stood with chemistry was going to lab. We had three hours of laboratory on Saturday, and by the time I got my test tubes and Bunsen burner and other little things out of my locker, the other students around me had finished their first experiment. Every Saturday (and this still continues in my life, by the way) I would grab a hot test tube, and I would come away with burns and have a bandage on my hand for the weekend with burns. I was always grabbing the goddamn hot test tube. [laughter] And then somewhere along the way, after about six weeks or so, we had to do an experiment with some potassium permanganate, and I remember putting it in the solution; it was a perfectly beautiful, purple color, and the sun was shining, and I held it up to one of the windows and shook it, and the bubbles were there. An assistant instructor was passing at the time, and I said, "Look!" And he looked up and said, "Yes," and he gave me the formula and went on. I said, "Oh, this is not for me. I'm interested in the beauty of this." [laughter] So I quit the course, as I could at that time, because of my grades and standing, without even getting a bad mark or a "fail" on it. And that was the end of my trying to be a doctor. But for those in the liberal arts at that time, or humanities (whatever they called it), if you maintained I think a B average or a B+ average, something like that, after you had completed a small number of these obligatory courses, you could take whatever you chose. And I just took course after course in philosophy. In my second year there was a very intensive five-hour-a-week course in the history of philosophy, one year, with a lot of reading. I also remember a very important course to me which was one in comparative religions. Because whatever doubts and conflicts I still had about the question of God and did God create the universe and so on--you must remember that was, after all, fifty years ago when the hand of religion was much more over people than it is today--this course was one in which I could see, through the study of comparative religions, how different things thought to be sacrosanct, handed down from on high were related to the growth of one culture into another. And it just ended, for me, all questions of deity and religion--not the ethics of religion, of course, which are universal; the Sermon on the Mount is as valid today as any other equal doctrine. All religions have them. But in, I think, the second semester of the second year, or the first semester, probably the first semester, I had a course with John Erskine in Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser (Spenser is the poet, is he not?), and a few others. And I wouldn't have taken it if it hadn't been obligatory. Does the name Erskine mean anything to you?

GARDNER

I know the name.

MALTZ

Yes. Well, he was a really Renaissance man. He was professor of English at Columbia. He was the head of the Juilliard School of Music, which was attached to Columbia. He was a concert pianist, and he was a very successful writer of light, historical romances. And he was a marvelous teacher We had to read the Faerie Queene, Spenser's; I read it, and although in some respects it was dull, in other respects I was enchanted by the man's quality of poetry. It was extraordinary. We had to write an essay about it. I came in to class a week or two later, and Erskine said he wanted to read one essay. And he read mine. I was flabbergasted by his reading of it and his praise of it, and out of this business of what am I going to do in life, I went up to him afterwards, stammering, and asked him if he thought I could be a writer. And he said, "If you have something to say, yes." And that put the thought in my mind, gee, maybe I could become a writer. That seemed to be a most marvelous profession. And I said, all right, I'll see if I have anything to say. But as a result of that I did the next year take a course in short-story writing and begin to think of that. (Although, as I say, in my junior year I also took a course in chemistry to see if I could be a doctor.)

GARDNER

Had you essayed any short stories before you took the course?

MALTZ

No, I had not done anything. I had not tried any kind of writing that I can recall....

GARDNER

Other than what was required in classes.

MALTZ

...other than what was required in school. I had had no bug for writing before that. But that bug grew very powerfully from that time on. Because in my senior year while carrying on my studies, I wrote a novel at the same time, a fantasy novel as a matter of fact, kind of a science fiction novel. I did take in my second year--I think because a friend suggested it, another friend, a man who became a rather distinguished reporter, Harold Isaacs, who is now teaching at MIT, I think--I took a course in the history of something I think like the theory of government. And yet that wasn't quite the name of it. [It was] with a marvelous teacher, Peter Odegard, who wrote books and subsequently became head of Reed College for a while and then head of the Department of Political Science at Berkeley. And now he was a friend at college, Peter Odegard became a friend, and as a matter of fact, when he left Columbia in our senior year, Harold Isaacs and I hitchhiked up to Williams College and spent a weekend with him and his family. In succeeding years when he was at Ohio State and I was passing through the country, I would stop at Ohio State and see him and his wife and kid. Then he stopped on his way to Reed College to see me in Los Angeles. And we were friends. He was a very, very stimulating man, a marvelous teacher. I suppose you've had the same experiences I've had. Teachers, good teachers are just golden, absolutely golden; they're so marvelous in what they can do for a human being. And they're not honored enough, really. I have a friend in East Germany who is not only a professor but he's "professor doctor." Apparently over there and in Europe in general, certain countries of Europe, there is a kind of respect for a professor, which not all professors deserve, I'm sure. But a good teacher remains with you forever in what they contribute to your soul, you know, to your mind. I took this course in extension, and I got no credit for it. It was just extra work and extra reading, but that was exciting, that thing. And in that year, having given up tennis, I went into wrestling, and not for the team because I never would spend the time ever again trying to get on a team. But it was something. It was a sport I liked. I don't know if you know anything about it, but it is very scientific. I'm not talking about the crap, you know, the vaudeville acts the professionals do, but really scientific wrestling is just marvelous. And I used to watch the matches; that one indulgence I gave myself on Saturday afternoons in winter. Probably about fifty of us in the whole college watched it. Nobody else was interested. I don't know what I did that summer; I'm trying to think and that's where my notes just about stopped. The summer of my second year, I just don't remember; it's a blank. I don't remember whether I was up in Monticello again. But the third year introduced, in addition to whatever other courses I took--oh, I remember, it's the third year or fourth year--well, courses in philosophy, Aristotle, and Santayana. As a matter of fact, since I've just been talking about good teachers, I think I'll mention an example of a brilliant but bad teacher. I had I think in my senior year, or junior year it might have been, a single seminar where I was alone with the instructor. We met once a week and he gave me reading to do--a man called [Richard] McKeon, who went on to become, I think, dean of students at Chicago, probably now retired, very respected, with a fantastic knowledge of his field and fantastic mental recall. And his field was Greek and medieval philosophy. I'd go in there having studied, let's say, some of Aristotle's Logic during the week that was tough going for me, and I would come in with some questions for him and certain observations. And although I didn't understand it at first and came to understand it later, he would take my propositions (and he wasn't just being, let's say, Socratic in upsetting my apple cart to make me think more), but he would beat down what I said by opposite propositions from Aquinas, and send me off to study some Aquinas. I'd study Aquinas during the week and that was tough going too, and I'd come in with this Aquinas thing and then he'd beat me back with Aristotle. After a while I realized that he was not interested in teaching me, he was interested in showing off. And even though I was just an audience of one, he was enjoying being a smart aleck. He didn't give a damn what I learned or what I didn't learn. Now, of course it was a rigorous time in the sense that I had to apply myself with every nerve fiber, but it was in no sense a happy learning time or a creative learning time. It was just getting hit on the head with an intellectual club once a week, and that's the opposite of an Odegard or an Irwin Edman. In a year, half a semester later or something like that, I also had a one-man semester with Irwin Edman on Santayana, and it was a very different kind of experience.

GARDNER

But what sort of philosophy was taking shape within you at this point?

MALTZ

Personal philosophy?

GARDNER

Right. Were you drawing from what you were learning? Of course it was very early on for anyone to be carving out a personal philosophy, but still, was there a direction in your attitude?

MALTZ

No, I don't think there was a direction in my attitude, and for certain reasons. There were things that happened to me as a result of it and not a direction in my own philosophical attitude. Of course a great deal of philosophy and history of philosophy is occupied with the problem of knowledge, epistemology--do you know reality or do you not?--and each philosopher in turn grappled with it for centuries. So what you did was to study their grapplings with this problem. Do we know reality or don't we? Or maybe you're dreaming. And I'm going to tell you later, when I come to the question of my reading of Marxism, why I was so impressed with Engels because of what he said in a footnote about the question of epistemology. But as a result it isn't as though you were reading a contemporary work which, facing the world in which we exist--let's say Sartre, who was saying, "What can we believe in?"--most of philosophy was not occupied with that, and therefore I was not consciously grappling and saying, "Yes, I believe with him in this, or I differ with him in that," and thereby formulating my own philosophy. Now, along the way, of course, I remember I got certain lasting attitudes towards aesthetics through reading Aristotle's Poetics, because I think his Poetics are basically sound dramaturgically today. And I certainly got out of his Ethics that sense of the mean, which I've retained--the mean between opposites. What I think philosophy did do for me very much was to call upon me to try and use whatever intellect I had in a stern way, stay with the material and try to think it through. And if I didn't understand something, to reread it a second a third or fourth time, and to grapple with the concepts. That was good training for me. In a sense, if you march a soldier sixteen or twenty miles a day, you're helping him survive. And also it emphasized logic for me. Whatever other talents I lack, I have been unable to use characters and events illogically. In film work that I've done, there's motivation for the characters and there's logic in the events. I don't accept the way in which people leap from one thing to another without having motivation, the kind of comment I made about High Noon. This kind of thing bothers me about any material, and certainly if I'm working on it, and this affected all my writing. [It] probably affected an attitude I developed early while I was still doing playwriting, which was the decision that if I came upon something that I was working on, preparing, where I didn't know what the facts were, instead of just making it up out of my head, which other writers do, I would, say, go to the facts, find out the material. Usually if you find out the real material, you invent something better than you would have invented if you had just made it up out of your head. You don't have to be afraid of facts. They're not your enemy; they can be your aid. I think that came out of the study in philosophy as well. I think it also stimulated very much my search for moral values in my life and in the society in which I exist. So that it was rather attitudes, rather than the full-blown philosophy, which I think was created.

GARDNER

Let me ask one other question somewhat along that line. The year we're talking about now is '28-29. There would have been a presidential election in 1928. Were you either aware or involved politically in any way?

MALTZ

I was not involved politically, but I do remember that my roommate said, "Hey, let's have a lark. We'll take the night train down to Washington, and we'll watch Hoover being inaugurated." And so we did. I remember how sleepy I was through the inauguration because I hadn't slept all night--the noisy train of people going down--and I was half a mile away from the steps of the Capitol. We were there but that was all it was. However, I don't know whether it was then or the next year, more likely the next year, that somewhere by accident, maybe someplace where I would pass, I would occasionally run across a copy of I think at that time it was called the Masses (and then later the New Masses). Well, it was the Masses then. And this was like getting my hands on a curiously fascinating object from another world, and I remember reading those copies with interest. It didn't stimulate me to do anything or go to a meeting; as a matter of fact, during this period, I recall, in kind of a snobbish way I gave up reading newspapers altogether. When I was in high school I had read the papers at home, and I think at the beginning I began to read the New York Times, but I know there was a period, and probably it began by about my sophomore year at least, that I just didn't read the newspapers. I was reading philosophy--what did I need the newspapers for? It was that kind of attitude. Oh, I've forgotten that one thing I did have all through college was a little wind-up Victrola, where every time you played a record, you had to wind it. And I had about, I don't know, ten records, twenty records, and as I recall they were mostly Bach and Beethoven. I would play the same things over and over again with great satisfaction. Why I didn't get more records, I don't know, because I think I could have--financially I could have--I just didn't. I guess the idea of owning more.... In fact, I didn't know anybody else who had any music in his room. I met a student who was a friend of mine there, his father was a bandleader, Edwin Franco Goldman. His name was the same, junior. He was a friend of mine. I'd forgotten about him. He went on to conduct his father's band until recently, or I think he's still conducting in New York. He was a guy who impressed me because he would speak about music in ways that I had never heard in my life. Now, in my third year I began the course called Honors. I think it was from this course that the Great Books came into existence, because Mortimer Adler was intimately involved with the Great Books, and he was involved with teaching Honors. My two instructors I had basically for two years who were both present in the Honors course were Adler and Mark Van Doren. We sat at a table like this in a room smaller than this, and there were probably about twelve or fifteen students, and each week we had another great book that we read. We talked about it, and it was very, very stimulating, very, very exciting. It was very interesting to have a man as brilliant as Adler was and as valuable and as deliberately show-offy, against a man of far greater simplicity and far more interest, I think, in really getting students to learn. Much quieter, who spoke not one-tenth of the words of Adler in a given evening, but when he spoke I listened to him more closely--and that was Mark Van Doren, whom I came to treasure, a marvelous teacher. I think once or twice when Mark might have been ill or occupied, his older brother Carl came. Subsequently I taught at a summer school some years later where Carl was and came to know him. And he was the same kind. These are just great men, great human beings. Mortimer Adler (as I discovered later, I didn't know at the time) was capable of great phoniness. Not that he wasn't, you know really stimulating and an excellent teacher and a great deal of good things that he did, but when we had the session on Freud I asked him later, because he conducted it mostly, I said, "Well, what I don't understand is why people change in analysis." And he said, "Well, as to that, I would have to explain it in mathematical terms that I know you can't understand." I accepted that because I knew that he knew some mathematics, and I didn't know any. But later when I was in analysis myself and learned why people change, I knew what crap this had been from him, you see. Now, Mark would never have said that. He would have said a simple, "I don't know." Now, since--it's a leap, but I'll talk about Mark for the moment, if I may. He has an autobiography, which I read. As a matter of fact, about a year before he died, it was about a year or two, there was an article on him in Life magazine showing where he worked in his summer home. On a happy impulse, I wrote him a letter, in care of Life, I guess, or to a small town or to Columbia, to tell him how much he had meant to me as a student. And [I] got back a card from him saying he remembered me, he had followed me over the years, and he was very glad to get my letter, and so on. I was pleased that I did write him since he was to die the next year, but just so a guy would hear from one of his students who did appreciate him. Do you remember what happened with his son?

GARDNER

Yes.

MALTZ

Well, this is something I would love to write as a drama. Really, it belongs on TV, but no TV station would do it because it could be exposing themselves. In his autobiography Mark says: And then came the time when Charles was invited to participate in the "Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question" on TV, and within a few weeks all of America was watching him. He made the name of egghead important (or however he phrased it). And thousands of letters came in from all over the country, and it was wonderfully exciting, and we all waited for these Monday nights or Tuesday nights, or whatever they were. And he goes on like that, and then he says: And then Charles married so-and-so and went off to Europe. He just completely omits what happened in terms of the fraud being discovered and the appearance of his son before a judge and all of that. And I said to myself, I can understand how Mark would have blotted it out because it was so painful to him, but how could the publishers let this go through? And then I thought, well, maybe they just said, "It is too painful to him. We're not going to ask him to take it out. We're not going to ask him to put anything in that should be there. We'll just let it go through." And they did. And it's an absolutely unbelievable thing to read. If I were able to write it, I think I would do the tragedy--the tragedy of pride, of hubris, I guess--of a young man brought up in a household where a great many celebrated people came, just normally, and where he met Joseph Wood Krutch, and Wendell Willkie coming around, and authors and so on and so forth, and [he] aspired to be celebrated like them. And when this thing came up with the "Sixty-four Thousand Dollar Question," and the moment came of saying, "Will I or will I not," that desire, I think not so much for money, but to be celebrated and to be important was something that he had had burning in him from the time he was a kid, much more than his father would have when he was just the son of a country physician, of a midwestern physician. That's the way I would write it. Maybe the surmise isn't true, but I think it is. And then the parents' reaction, these sensitive parents, to the fact that their son had done something as gross as that, to cheat a whole nation.... What a tragedy, what a frightful tragedy. Well, anyway, those two years in Honors were just great, marvelously stimulating. Of course [they were] in a sense superficial in that you only discussed one book for two hours or two and a half hours of an evening, once a week; but [it was] opening a door and saying, "You can come back to it if you wish." And in the group were the brightest students around. You didn't want to miss any of the classes. That summer I went to Europe with my oldest brother, Edward, a long, four months' trip in which we went to a lot of countries. And not knowing languages, we got only superficial [tape recorder turned off] impressions of countries--of course the museums, naturally, and what the eye could take in.

GARDNER

How many countries did you go to?

MALTZ

Oh my, we went first to France, and then Holland. We met some girls on the boat going over, and they were the reason we went to Holland at that time. They invited us because they were members of Moral Re-Armament [MRA], which was at work then, and they hoped to get some recruits and were having some sort of a meeting there. So we joined the group in Scheveningen and were around there. We made no hay with the girls, pulled out of the Buchman movement within a couple of days, but found Holland an enchanting place. We didn't see much of France, a little bit, stopped off, I remember, in some wine country town, Bordeaux maybe. And we went to Spain, where we were in Madrid and Barcelona. I remember there getting some sense of the poverty that I had not seen before, because in certain areas of Spain at that time people were living in caves. Now actually, cave life can be pretty good, I think, because they can keep people dry and be cool in the summer and warm in the winter. But I didn't know that and it seemed bad. But walking around Madrid at night at that time, you'd see beggars asleep in doorways at night, and one had a sense of something there, but I didn't think in social terms beyond that. As a matter of fact, I thought so little in social terms that when we were in Germany and in the town of Heidelberg, we had an encounter with some anti-Semitic students, probably Nazi students who were saying things and making insulting gestures as we were going to our little pension. And they were stopped by a cop. But we didn't know what this stood for. And though it was '29, we didn't know about Brownshirts or anything about it. I remember we met a family, an English-speaking family in Austria, and they didn't speak about this kind of thing at all. We were in Italy and I knew that there was Mussolini in Italy. I knew that. But for us, going to Italy was the same as going to France. I guess those were about the countries we were in. It was essentially a tour of museums, to an extent--as I said, the superficial impressions of what your eye can gather. When we came back and I went into school, of course the Crash happened in the end of October, as I recall, '29. And while it didn't affect me in any immediate way, it started to affect friends who left school. I mentioned particular friends, but of course I knew a great many more men than that. I know that a number I knew had to drop out of college because their fathers went flat busted, and paying tuition was out of the question; the fellows had to go out and get work. I don't know whether or not I started to read the newspaper then. I don't know as I did. The full impact of the Depression, in terms of unemployment and the apple sellers and so on, didn't begin immediately in '29, as I recall. It came a little more gradually than that. And so one didn't begin to see the apple sellers on the streets and Hoovervilles springing up along Riverside Drive, where I used to walk, until later. Otherwise I was little affected by it immediately. And so for me I think the year was once again a year of intensive study and a year of making Phi Beta Kappa, which was a big aim of mine, a hope. Oh, but I've forgotten, I left out something from my junior year. In the junior year I took a course in short-story writing.

GARDNER

You mentioned that before.

MALTZ

It had a limited value only, because the man who taught it had a theory about writing, which he carried out himself, which is that you should only write about what people do and what they say and not what they think. Why he wanted to leave out what they think, I don't know, but he insisted that that was how we write.

GARDNER

Who was it?

MALTZ

I forget his name.

GARDNER

No one...?

MALTZ

He had published some novels, [but he] doesn't remain as a well-known writer--a pleasant man. And it was a certain exercise in descriptive powers, which is all right but not really in short-story writing. And I don't remember anything about the short stories I wrote. I never kept any of this stuff, unfortunately. My senior year I took a course in playwriting from a man who had won a Pulitzer Prize, Hatcher Hughes, and it was a useful course.

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE
AUGUST 5, 1976

GARDNER

You were talking about playwriting.

MALTZ

I'm talking about playwriting. I know that in my senior year--I don't think that it would have been earlier because I believe it was the first semester of senior year that I took this course--I wrote probably half a dozen one-act plays which I sent away to contests. I expect by that time I must have been buying a writers magazine, something like that, so I was trying for contests. I also wanted to write a three-act play about a personal subject, which I have forgotten to mention, which was important in my college years. I was dissuaded from writing it by Hatcher Hughes, because he said a current hit on Broadway called... oh, it was by Marvin Flavin, a prison play... I'll think of its name in a moment [The Criminal Code]. It was a very, very well-done play and really precluded another play on the same subject. But my play had to do with my uncle, and this is something I've forgotten. In my freshman year an uncle of mine, an uncle by marriage, was arrested and charged with robbery--actually, the holdup of a truck with furs in it, an armed holdup. And [for] this crime, as charged under the laws of New York State at that time, he could receive from fifteen to thirty years although it was a first arrest. He was a small, not too pleasant, not well-educated, very violent-tempered man who had been a shoe salesman. During the Prohibition period he became a small bootlegger, and I expect he earned a little more money being a bootlegger than he had as a shoe salesman. Just what his bootlegging activities were, whether he ran liquor or what he did, I never knew. But I judged by what came out in the course of this trial and what I heard later that he became involved in a scheme that someone had where they would be able to ship bootleg liquor as though it were paint or turpentine, which would make it easier for them to distribute. But in order to set up the plant that they needed to do this they needed cash, and this holdup was the result. It was my impression--I attended the trial, and I did so really out of compassion for his wife, who was my aunt, who was a sweet (and I mentioned her in the first tape), somewhat retarded woman. It was my impression that this uncle--his name was Charles, I don't even remember his last name--probably was involved in receiving the stolen goods and in planning the robbery. I don't think he was in on the holdup. But what happened when detectives came to his home and wanted to enter his garage was that he tried to bluff them out of it by saying, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" and so on and so forth, and was very insulting to them. And they said to themselves, "All right, you want to act like that..." and they hung the holdup rap on him as well. They just testified that he was one of the men in the car. That may not be true, but I got that strong impression out of the trial, out of what his wife said, and out of such other things. During the course of the trial something that made me sympathetic to him was that I began to notice the behavior on the part of the defense attorney which I didn't understand, For instance, when my uncle was on the stand or when he was delivering his summation to the jury, he pointed to my uncle and he said, "Now look at that mug face. Could you ever forget a face like that?" And he was using this, as it were, to present the innocence of my uncle, but in fact it was casting an unpleasant light upon him. And in fact, he did not have a mug face; he didn't have a particularly handsome face, but it wasn't a face that one would say, "Oh, look at that thug." It wasn't that kind of a face at all. I said, "Why is he saying this?" Subsequently I was told--and this again is lost in the mist of time, but it is something I've remembered as believing it to be true--that the man behind the whole operation, and the one who had suggested the hold-up, was a well-to-do crook who lived on Riverside Drive, who never was the one to carry out any action, who never got in trouble, and, in this case, was apparently ready to have these men go up to prison in order to save his own skin. This was my impression. Now, this may have been just a myth, but that was why the defense attorney was behaving in the way he did. In any instance they were held guilty, and my uncle was given fifteen years and sent to Sing Sing. All through college and for years afterwards, about once a month I used to go visit him. And it was this story that I wanted to deal with in the play. Hatcher Hughes suggested that I now go into something else. Going up to Sing Sing, as I did over the years, added a certain little dimension to my understanding of society. I remember the Saturday morning train (that wasn't the one I always took), but it was distinguished by the fact that women and children would be packing it. That was the day when kids were not in school, that was the day when working mothers might be able to go. And you'd see them come out of the poorer sections of New York--at that time not many blacks; they were the ethnic groupings of New York, the white ethnic groupings. At that time there was a rather advanced, progressive thinker in charge of Sing Sing, Warden Lawes. The waiting room at Sing Sing was a pleasant room; there were little open cubicles in which four people could sit for a visit. I would see how women would go into a restroom and come back, and it was noticeable that they had taken off their corsets. And you would see a man in the course of a conversation with a woman lean over facing her as though to whisper something in her ear, but she might move her coat a little bit so that he could slip [his] hand behind the protection, the visible protection of her coat, in order to put his hand on her body. And there was tremendous pathos in that. My uncle was for a good deal of the time in what was called the old cell block, which was right along the Hudson River. And he said that the moment they came into the cells, from wherever they were outside, you had to wrap yourself in your blanket or else you would be stiff by morning from the damp. The damp water ran down the cell wall. During those years, from time to time he would ask me to go on errands that might help him get out, and I would do that. Once I went up to Syracuse, New York, to find a man who worked in a certain plant, and at various times I hired various lawyers with sums that I saved from my own allowance. I might say that my father had turned completely against him, although he was supporting his wife and child, because at one point before this robbery, when my father was out of town, my uncle had had a meeting in his office, in my father's office. He had access to the office, being a member of the family; he could walk in and the secretaries knew him. But apparently he brought together some of his henchmen and had a meeting there, and my father was outraged because, he said, he could have gotten him into trouble, and refused to have anything to do with him, and nobody else in the family saw him. So I just went on seeing him out of this sense of compassion. And so I spent some money on this lawyer and that lawyer (they never did anything), and, I remember, once went way the heck out in Brooklyn to see somebody and asked him some questions. And this man just looked at me with a stone face, and he said, "I don't know. I don't know nothin', don't know nothin'." And I turned around and went back the hour and a half. [laughter] It was that kind of thing. My uncle finally got out of prison around 1935, which means that he was in--I guess he was let out after about nine years out of his fifteen-year sentence. And I let him have an automobile I had then. I think that was the last time I saw him. A few years later he died. But in that last year of college I also wrote a novel. It was--oh, it's not important what it was about, a certain fantasy base, but one thing I remember and which gives some insight about myself: I had a very savage portrayal of a lynching, to express my horror at this. So it means that about that time, by that time in my life, I not only had a pacifist conviction about war, but I had deep hatred for that type of merciless behavior on the part of mostly white southerners--not only white southerners--toward blacks.

GARDNER

Well, and judging from that and also from the theme of the prison play, there's a consciousness of injustice at this point.

MALTZ

Yes. By this time there's a real consciousness of injustice, and wherever I met injustice, wherever I saw it in my limited knowledge of society, I revolted against it just automatically, as though I were touching a hot stove. I'm sure that if I had had a more rounded college education, let's say if I had taken some history, if I had taken some other courses which would have opened the current world to me, I would have been much more advanced in this area. But since I was so locked into philosophy, I didn't. And during this year, the last year, and with my deep interest in playwriting and my growing interest in writing of all kinds, I got the idea, because I found out about it, of trying to go to the Yale School of Drama. And since at that time in my life my father could afford that, and since he was an indulgent man in the sense that he knew that I had always done well in school, and if I wanted to go on to something like that (although he would have preferred me to go into law), he was willing to take a ride on it. Maybe I could do something, because I hadn't disappointed them in other areas.

GARDNER

Is there anyone at this point who--forgive me for interrupting...

MALTZ

No, that's all right.

GARDNER

...who you could look on as a literary source or influence? I mean, by this time, obviously you were reading quite a bit, you were interested in playwriting--was there a playwright whose work affected you?

MALTZ

Well, I don't know yet. Oh, I would say by the third year, by the end of my third year in college, I not only was starting to go to theater when I could, but there was a period in spring after you took your exams and before the grades came through that you had to stick around. It was about a week, and I would go down every day to Broadway and see plays. I remember going to the Theatre Guild and seeing some wonderful plays. It was a great institution then. I remember seeing Pirandello's "Right You are If You Think So," [*Right You Are If You Think You Are] with Edward Robinson playing the lawyer, a young lawyer I think he was, a notary--a marvelous performance on his part (even though he lied about me years later before the committee). And that was tremendously exciting to me, tremendously. I remember going with my friend Beryl Levy [to], I believe it was, Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, which was about a five-hour play, and going out and having dinner in between. That was so enormously exciting. I don't know at what point various influences came in. I do know, for instance, that Strindberg, who was an important playwriting influence, I didn't learn about till I was in drama school. At what point Andreyev, who was one of my important influences--at what point I read him I don't remember; it may have been while I was still in college. There was a particular book, The Seven Who Were Hanged--do you know it at all?--that influenced me very greatly. I felt, gee, this is the way I would like to write. Another man who was an influence on me was Liam O'Flaherty, who has remained an important writer to me and I think a writer who should have gotten a Nobel Prize in light of other writers who have received the Nobel Prize. Galsworthy's short stories and plays were an influence--not his novels--but he's a marvelous, marvelous short-story writer, and those influenced me. I guess it was still later that Gorky's short stories played a role. But as I look back upon the early influences, it was really Andreyev and O'Flaherty--was it O'Flaherty as early as that? Maybe not, maybe a little later--I think Galsworthy, O'Neill somewhat, as a playwright somewhat, Strindberg and Ibsen, I'd say, more, and André Malraux in Man's Fate. But my passion for writing had grown to such an extent that I was able to write a novel that was about--I think it was about 250 pages, during I think practically my final semester, one semester while carrying on all other things and getting A's and preparing for an oral exam in philosophy, which I took. So I guess I was full of steam at that time. And then I think that about finishes off college. I guess I must have spent the summer--again I don't remember where I was that summer, but I'm sure that I must have spent it in writing. Oh yes, in order to get into the Yale Drama School, you had to submit a one-act play, and I wrote a play and was accepted.

GARDNER

What was the play?

MALTZ

I don't know what the play was. Alas, I threw away all that earlier writing. To my great regret. I would be so interested to be able to see it now. But at a given point a few years later I thought, you know, it's all junk, and I didn't have the sense that when I was older I might find it interesting, and I didn't have anyone to advise me, and that was that. So I tossed it away. And I think maybe at this point we might end our session.

GARDNER

And pick up again in New Haven.

MALTZ

And pick up again in New Haven.

1.7. SECOND PART
(August 12, 1976)

GARDNER

Now, at the end of the last tape, or the last session, as the transcriber knows, we said we'd resume in New Haven.

MALTZ

Yes, and that's where we will. The Yale School of the Drama, which was its official name (I always refer to it as the Drama School), was established by George Pierce Baker, who previously had been at Harvard for some years, where he established the celebrated 47 Workshop, which was a workshop in playwriting. And two of the most distinguished students he had in Harvard were Eugene O'Neill, and a second never proved to be a playwright--Thomas Wolfe. He found his strength elsewhere. Baker, as I recall, wanted Harvard to provide him with a whole theater so that students could not only study playwriting, but even if their purpose was to become playwrights, that they would have a knowledge of directing and of the other aspects of theater, lighting for instance (to know something about lighting is not unimportant for a playwright in the period of dress rehearsals when he can make his own suggestions on lighting), and to know something about scene design, know something about costumes. And Harvard didn't want to put up the money, as I understand it, but Yale offered to do so and he came to Yale. I don't know exactly what year it was he came to Yale. I think the school was moderately new when I came there in 1930, the fall of 1930, perhaps it was about five years old, maybe somewhat more, I'm not sure. It had a student body of about 200, I think at that time, and to my best recollection, about 20 percent were women. It was a perfectly splendid school. The faculty was very, very good in all departments, and everyone on the faculty was in earnest and wanted to give all that could be given to the students. The atmosphere was serious and in earnest; hard work was expected and hard work was given. The departments included everything except acting, although plays were put on there. There was playwriting, directing, speech and dialects (which of course is an aspect of acting), costumes, lighting, set design. And the actual history of the drama school is one in which an immense number of men and women who have been prominent in the theater, and successful in the theater and also in film, for the last forty-five years have been graduates of the Yale School of the Drama. Now, that was not the only drama school in the United States. There was one at Pittsburgh that was quite good, as I understand it, and good people came out of it. But there was just an overwhelming majority of people in the Broadway theater, and also people teaching at universities, heading up departments of drama, who came through the Yale Drama School. George Pierce Baker, I might just comment for a moment on, was a man from Boston and a man of great personal reserve, who had a dry wit, was certainly by present standards (but even by standards such as I had at the time) rather prissy concerning language in plays, but was a man with a very great feel for the theater. [He] was an excellent teacher, was very honest in his approach to students and was certainly very liberal about ideas in theater, even though he himself might have been, let's say, a rather conservative guy. He was, I think, probably about fifty-five or perhaps even sixty when I was a student there. I certainly learned from him, but I think I learned even--and I learned from him not only from.... Oh, I think I might pause to say that in the first year our class perhaps numbered about thirty, and there were students attending the classes on playwriting whose main interest was directing, but they were allowed to attend. And one of the things that we did was to read and study a very good book he had written on playwriting, which, if one were to read today, the majority of playwrights he referred to in his illustrations and whose work he gave are not only dead, but their names would not even be known today. Because he was naturally drawing on the theater as he had known it, which meant from, let's say, playwrights (aside from classic playwrights like Ibsen and Strindberg), more current playwrights like Arthur Wing Pinero, who was to him a very living playwright. So he was giving illustrations from plays of 1890, 1900, 1910, and so on. But his book on playwriting was I think a superb one. I don't recall his giving particular lectures; he might have at the beginning of the course, but I don't remember that. But his main mode of teaching was to read aloud a play by one of the students at each session, and then have the students comment on that play and then sum up his own comments. Now, that had great value, [and] it was something that I followed later when I taught myself. It had great value because one of the very important things for a writer is to develop his own critical faculties toward his own work. The tendency when one begins, and if you write something with some enthusiasm, you may feel that it's absolutely great (if you don't feel that it's absolutely rotten), but there isn't real perspective. And listening to the plays of someone else, making your comments, listening to the comments of other students, then hearing Baker's comments was a slow process, because it can't come quickly, by which you began to develop a self-critical faculty. It's possible for me now, let's say, to reread a scene or a chapter I have written, and while not being 100 percent perfect in what I do, to say, "Oh, this is too long here. It lacks a core of drama at this place." I can see things about my own work that I was utterly unable to see when I was beginning. In some ways I learned more about playwriting, however, from the instructor in directing, whose name was Alexander Dean. Because in dealing with directing he inevitably touched on aspects of playwriting; in dealing in the way in which a director could build tension in a scene by the way he handled his actors, he was dealing with the ways in which writers could improve their work. He dealt with such important questions as to the nature of a villain. For instance, if a villain is just a coarse heavy, in the way that we've seen it in so many Hollywood films, he's much less interesting than if he is a person of intelligence, of aspects that are admirable, but at the same time has within him a drive that results in his villainy. He becomes more human, he becomes more interesting, and the entire drama is raised up on a much higher plane just because your villain is not the conventional heavy. Questions like this began to occupy my thoughts very much because they're really philosophical questions about aspects of the drama. Aristotle's Poetics, which I first read in college, began to come back, and now in terms of practical drama and not merely the theory of drama. For instance, the question of a fatal flaw in an otherwise high-minded character is one which takes one into the realm of tragedy. Such questions as the fact that you can mix light comedy and tragedy, or farce comedy and melodrama within the same play, were discussed, but that you cannot mix farce and tragedy--that's impossible to do, they're too far a reach; the world of farce is too far away from reality. Now, as a matter of fact, I observed that over the years to be absolutely sound, and there's only one dramatic work that I've ever known that successfully breached that, and that was Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, because he does go, in the same film, from farce to tragedy. I know of no other work that I've ever read or seen in the theater, and no work in film, that did that. Those that have tried it have floundered. [There were] many other such questions that by now I would have absorbed automatically, just as I can no longer, for instance, recite the rules of grammar which I once knew. If someone began to ask me about the subjunctive, I really don't know what the subjunctive is--I think it involves the word if but I'm not sure--but I'm quite sure I use it correctly in the main. So in the same way, things that I was then studying I've long since incorporated. I would have to stop and ponder to give further illustrations. I don't think there's any great point to it. I would mention two other people. Donald Oenslager, who was an extremely successful Broadway scene designer, taught set design up at school and would come up, I guess, for about two days a week, and this was an example of the caliber of the people. There was a lighting expert there who did various kinds of government projects at different times but taught lighting at the school. And John Mason Brown, the theater critic and lecturer, came up and gave a course of lectures while I was there. He was amusing but rather superficial. I was very interested later on to read that on D-Day, when American troops landed in France, John Mason Brown was on a battleship keeping up a steady report of the action to the men below decks who couldn't see what was going on, and apparently, at that he was simply marvelous. Interestingly, later, after the war he became an immensely popular lecturer around the country for women's clubs and so on. He was a very witty man.

GARDNER

The training was very much technical, then, and disciplinary, wasn't it?

MALTZ

Well, let's say, as someone who was majoring in playwriting, I also had some classes in costume, but not nearly as many, and in lighting and in set design. I remember I had to draw up some sets and so on. Particularly, there was practical work when a play was put on. There were plays that were put on just for the student group and the faculty in a little theater that was down there, and that was for workshop purposes. For instance, I remember one of the things that we learned was to distinguish between writing, acting, and directing when we saw a play. I can do now what I remember doing there on one exam, saying the directing was fine but the play was not good. Because you don't usually find that, for instance, among critics. They usually say, well, the directing was great, and for all you know, often they're referring to something that was already in the script, say, a movie script. But it is possible to make those distinctions. We would have that kind of play put on, but then we also put on plays for the public. They would run about four or five nights, and there was a subscription audience that came to them; I think they came free, but they had to be on a list. And those either were classics or the best plays that were done by students. And for that we had sets and costumes and so on; if it was my turn to be on the set crew, I was involved in building the sets, and then in managing them backstage, in changing sets and so on. Or in costumes: I remember once working, ironing for many hours on a new type of costume that was being tried for a Shakespearean play where they wanted to try the experiment of having very heavy canvas costumes and changing the colors of the costumes by changing lights. And so I was always ironing heavy wet canvas by the hour. And then I acted in a play or two, and all of this totality of experience was useful in making one a total person of the theater. Am I going at too great length in here?

GARDNER

No, not at all. I'm fascinated by the depths in which you were trained. I think that's really interesting.

MALTZ

Yes, it was a total immersion in the theater. One aspect of life up there for me was reading of plays. I read voraciously, and this meant early hours, less sleep, and so on. But I started with Ibsen, and I don't know whether anything of Strindberg's was assigned to us in the course, but I found Strindberg most impressive. I read everything that I got my hands on (there was a fine drama library there): all of Ibsen, all of O'Neill. And although our basic orientation was to the Ibsen-Eugene O'Neill school of writing and the well-made play, let's say, the well-made three-act play, more or less, there was considerable interest on the part of certain of the students, myself included, in German impressionism and expressionism as it had exploded after World War I in the 1920s. A play like Ernst Toller's Masse Mensch meant a great deal to us. Georg Kaiser's--was it From Morn to Midnight? I think, I'm not sure--meant a great deal, and as a matter of fact, reflected itself in the second play that George Sklar and I wrote, though I'll come to that later.

GARDNER

Did you know Brecht's work at all at that point?

MALTZ

No. I had seen a play of Brecht's in Berlin in '29. Did I mention that in talking about it?

GARDNER

No, you didn't.

MALTZ

Well, when I was in Germany on that trip to Europe, I saw The Threepenny Opera. I didn't know German, but the production interested me very much, and I brought home a set of records, seventy-eight [RPM] records, which I played. George Sklar and I, after we were collaborating, just played it to the point where I think we wore holes in it; it was unplayable afterwards. And we were very interested in that music. But there was no Brecht studied at--he was not a name at all, you see. He was really not a name in the United States until after World War II, when he went back [to East Berlin]. And by the way--do you want to shut off a second? I'll ask you a technical question. [tape recorder turned off] I had a flash thought to something that occurred to me: when I came to Mexico to live and discovered Mexican art, not only contemporary art but of course the art of centuries back, which was so rich and old, I realized that I had taken one year in the history of art when I was at Columbia. We had Greek art and Roman art and Egyptian art and a little bit of the art, I guess, of India, perhaps of China, I don't remember, and then went through all of European art from early Christian art on, up to modern art. But Mexican art was not even mentioned. And here was Mexico, contiguous with the United States, physically, and absolutely not one word about Mexican art in the year 1929, say, which is a fascinating...

GARDNER

It really is.

MALTZ

...fascinating thing to realize. And as a matter of fact, the Spanish that I took there was the theta Spanish, the classical Spanish of Spain; it was not Spanish as it's spoken in Mexico, which of course now would serve people much better if they knew that. Anyway....

GARDNER

But I think that--this is a curious aside--but I think that that's probably still true most places.

MALTZ

Oh, that they teach theta?

GARDNER

Outside of the West, Southwest. I suspect most universities teach the Castilian.

MALTZ

Castilian, yes. I was thinking of the word. I suppose that may be true. However, Castilian and Mexican Spanish can understand each other without any problem. And later, I don't want to forget to tell about how I spoke in Israel with people who were speaking Ladino. One of the things that I discovered and advised students ever since, and it would be true for film as well as the theater, is that if I came upon a playwright, like O'Neill, who is impressive, or Strindberg, it was very good to take one play that I liked, and having read it through and knowing the story, to read it a second time and a third time and a fourth time. Because then, after you knew the story and felt the emotion, you began to see how he got his effects. It was as though you, I don't know--as though you looked under the hood of a car for the first time, and then took a carburetor and took it apart, and you began to say, "Oh, this is what it does!" For instance O'Neill had a technical device (in the best sense, nothing derogatory in my saying that) which he used to use often: he would have a long line of suspense, and then a sudden surprise that led to another line of suspense. Now, surprise is a very effective device in the theater: it shakes one up, it shocks one, it comes... well, it's a surprise.

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO
AUGUST 12, 1976

MALTZ

I was saying that surprise is the effect of a moment and has its important uses in theater or film. But it is never to be substituted for suspense if there has to be a choice between them, because suspense is what can keep you on the edge of your seat for a sequence or an act, and surprise, as I said, is of the moment. Now, I remember when I was teaching I would try to impress my students with the importance of suspense through various illustrations. And one of them was this: I'd say, supposing you raise a curtain and a man and wife come into an apartment and sit down to talk about a play that they've just seen, an experience they've just had together, and they just chitchat about it, and the audience will sit there waiting for something to happen. Or, if they disliked it, they will say it is too talky. You often read critics saying a film was too talky, a play was too talky. Well, they really don't know what they're talking about because all theater is talk. That's what theater is--it's talk. How much actual physical action do you have in the theater? You have more in film. We have a car chase in a film; you can have no talk, and you can just have autos chasing each other, and it can be suspenseful. But in theater you might have an occasional fight that would last, faking, half a minute, but that's all. It's talk. But the difference between a play that they say is too talky and a play that is not too talky is that the one that is not too talky has drama in it, and conflict, and suspense, and you find it interesting, therefore you say it isn't talky. Talky means the absence of any suspense. To go back to the illustration I made: if you have two people talking about the fact that, let's say, they took a walk in the park, and they saw a bird of a certain color, and they thought it was beautiful, and then they saw a squirrel and got that squirrel to come over and take some peanuts, and then they watched some children on a bicycle, and after a while you say, "Hey, this isn't why I paid my money to come to the theater." But supposing before they come home you see a window open, and a masked man with a revolver in his hand steps through the window with a flashlight and begins to look around and take things out of drawers or examine drawers to see what he can take. And suddenly the door starts to open and he has no chance to get out, and he just hides right behind the sofa, and the two people come in and sit down on the sofa. And then they begin to talk about the bird and the boy and the squirrel, and you're on the edge of your seat. That's the difference between suspense and no suspense in a play. You have to have that suspenseful thing going for you, and then you can characterize and you can give exposition and so on. I might add, since it comes to my mind, that such things were taken up in directing like the "strengths" of various parts of a stage. If there are characters in the center of a stage, one's eye goes to them more than [to] characters on either side. But you can't keep your people in the center of the stage at all times because it would get visually boring, and you have to move them around. And so there are all sorts of skills, all sorts of knowledge involved, in how you make the stage fluid: when should you have something concentrated in the center stage, when should you have it stage left and stage right, or backstage center, or backstage right, or backstage left. [There are] all sorts of questions, as: Do you say the line first? Or, do you hand the knife to the person first? Which is the more dramatic? There're all sorts of technical questions like this, and all of them are part of what a good director knows when he directs. The first play that I wrote was a one-act play, and I learned a lesson from that that I've never forgotten. I thought the play was a wonderful one when I gave it to Mr. Baker to read, and he only said one thing to me: he said, "You know, Mr. Maltz, it's very easy to write empty symbolism." And I thought it over, and he was right; I was trying to do something that was important and impressive, but I really didn't know what I was trying to say. I had nothing clear that I could state, and that's what it was--it was empty symbolism. It reminds me so much of some of the plays of this period where I think authors have been given license to think they're writing well when they're really writing very obscurely. When I sit in the theater and I cannot understand what a play is about, and when there are sometimes great symbols in it, as in--I think it is Ionesco's Caligula, I'm not sure what it is....

GARDNER

No, Camus did Caligula.

MALTZ

Is it Camus's Caligula? Yes, I think this is being done as a film now with Vidal doing the screenplay. All I can say is I saw it in a theater in New York, and I didn't know what the devil it was about and it bored me. To take another kind of thing which is comparable, the marvelous, the poet who.... Robinson Jeffers--what is the vehicle that Judith Anderson played in so much? It has a Greek name....

GARDNER

I've forgotten.

MALTZ

Is it the Sophocles play?

GARDNER

Antigone, is that it?

MALTZ

No, it isn't Antigone. It's the play where her children....

GARDNER

Medea.

MALTZ

Medea... are taken from her. Now, that is marvelous poetry, marvelous drama, and marvelously clear--the opposite of one of the others. But I think that we have seen so much empty symbolism in a great deal of modern painting and in a great deal of modern sculpture, and I have never perceived it as a value. This goes way back, and I just haven't changed in that area. One aspect of life at Yale was that it was my first knowing encounter with homosexuality. A rather significant portion of the excellent faculty and a significant minority of the students were homosexuals. Now, homosexuality has rather a long, acceptable history in the theater, and some of our finest theater people--actors, directors, producers--have been homosexual. And the attitude of people within the theater has been much more accepting of sexual life-style that isn't the majority style than the rest of society. I know that in the thirties, when one found this in the theater or one found this at Yale, the attitude that I had would have been very different from the attitude of most American men. And I didn't have the derisive attitude that, let's say, average American men would have had towards homosexuals--not, I think, because I had at that time any greater understanding of the nature of homosexuality, as the fact that I had come so immediately to respect the integrity, the teaching abilities, the intelligence, the knowledge of these men on the faculty, say. And then in retrospect I realized that the teacher who had given me so much, and whom I admired so much, at Columbia College, Irwin Edman, also had been a homosexual. Because there had been an incident once, when I was at his apartment for my seminar on Santayana, that I didn't understand at the time. He asked me to wait while he got into bed and said that I could put out the light for him. We were friends by that time, and if another friend had asked me that, I would have said, "Well, he wants that; fine, I'll do it." But then there were some overtones. There was nothing that he attempted to do physically, but I kind of just sensed vibrations that I didn't understand but that made me uncomfortable. But when I got to Yale I realized that this man must have been a homosexual, although nothing was ever said on the campus about it (because I'm sure he was very discreet), and that he never in any way did anything but set a situation where, if he were dealing with a student who was homosexual, something would have happened. But since I didn't know what a homosexual was at that time, why.... You see, it's a laughing matter now because anyone of college age is hep to that in our society, but it wasn't so at that time. There may have been any number of students around who were homosexual. I didn't know it, and I never heard any conversation about it. And there were never any jokes about it; it just didn't exist in that society. And I'm sure that if I had said to my father that someone was a homosexual, he wouldn't have known what it was, simply wouldn't have known. It was a very different aspect in the society at that time, so that when I met it at Yale, it was being confronted by a completely new phenomenon. And all I know is that it never lessened my respect for those teachers who were homosexuals, or I don't know whether I had.... You know, I was friendly with students there who were homosexual, with some lesbians, but I guess none of them were any particular close friends of mine. I lived off campus, as everyone did (there were no dormitories for people of the Yale school), and we who went to the Yale school were so heavily engaged in our work that we had no contact with the rest of the university at all. We were encapsulated in that one building which was the theater, and then we had rooms wherever we had them. I had there, I think, my first encounter with people who were concerned about family. I believe that in fact when I was in college, my roommate. Beryl Levy, gave me some information that I had simply not known: that German Jews had looked down upon Jews of Polish or Russian origin, or other East European, and that Sephardic Jews in their turn had looked down upon Germans, and I had simply not known anything about this. But now I met something else. There was a girl I got a crush on, and had a tender and affectionate friendship with for a number of years, who was a very sweet girl but automatically carried with her the attitude of the long Boston line from which she came of saying about someone else (not someone like myself, but someone else from Boston), "Oh, she has no family." And I'd never met this in my life before. I'd never heard my parents or anyone else talk about the importance of lineage. Now, this lineage didn't make this nice, sweet, very attractive girl any more intelligent than she was, or any more learned than she wasn't, but family was important to her and eminently important to her family. And that was very interesting to me. I had a good many friends at Yale, but I'm not going to mention them because they proved not to be lasting friends, and not in the sense that I didn't--I kept up with some of them for a number of years after I left Yale, but my life went in a different direction. I was not in close contact with them physically in any way, that is, I didn't live in the same city. And it's all forty-five years ago, and there's no particular reason to go into it. But I would speak of several who remain in the picture. One is George Sklar, who is my oldest friend, and our lives have been together, really, ever since we came together and started to write together in the fall of 1931, We not only collaborated together on several plays but when we came down to New York we lived in the same apartment house. Later, when he married and I married, we were a foursome of friends. I drove--he doesn't drive a car--and I drove two of his children to be born. The children are to me somewhat surrogate children of mine; he has three, he and his wife. And we've been close down the years and remain so. George came from a family in Meriden, Connecticut, which was a factory town, and his father was a factory worker for quite some years, I believe, in a factory that was making umbrellas for a while, but then it turned to munitions during World War I. Subsequently, he and his wife opened a sporting-goods store, and it was a kind of a hanging-out place for the men of town who would come in there to get their things for fishing or their ammunition for hunting, and would stay around swapping stories. And very interestingly, after his father died (he died when he was rather young), his mother carried on the store by herself. There was many a man in the town who came to unload his troubles to this foreign-born Jewish woman, speaking with a considerable accent, but the center of an entire circle of townspeople. It was very delightful. A second friend there was Elia Kazan, who got the nickname "Gadget" there, as I recall, given by a mutual friend, because Kazan was very handy with his hands, and when making sets, he would always have a tool there or something, and he was called Gadget. That's my recollection of it. I think he may have come here either as an infant from Turkey (his family was Greek) or else he was born here, but he knew from his family of the very harsh treatment of Greeks which he embodied in his later film, America, America. He was never an intimate friend of mine at Yale, but we were very cordial friends and remained so in later years. Until the time that he became an informer, and of course [our friendship] ended. He was a very interesting man. He had a capacity for what I would call powerful silence. He could be with others and talk very little--not that he wasn't capable of considerable talk when he was so minded, but one would feel his presence very much even though he was silent. [He was a] very intense-looking man, not conventionally good looking in any way, great intensity. It perhaps didn't surprise me when, after the first summer away, we came back the second year, he asked me to read a play he had written over the summer, although he was there to study directing. And when I read it, the amount of violence in the play was simply appalling. We're getting a great deal of violence in films now, but this was in a different period, and it would hold a candle to the most violent things that you could see nowadays. I think it was an example of some of what was inside of him. A third man with whom I was quite friendly and who had come down--he had been at college at Williams with Kazan--was Alan Baxter, who was an actor. And I mention him because he took the lead in a play of mine (I'll remark on that later), and he was a man I liked very much who had a great deal troubling him inside. As for others, I'll mention one or two others when they come up in turn, but I won't go into them. During this time I had a growing social awareness, although not the time to read a good deal much about it. The Depression, of course, was becoming more and more acute. I'm quite sure I was reading the papers, newspapers, again, but rather intermittently, I imagine. I don't remember, without looking it up, just at what point Japan began its incursions into China, into Manchuria, into Shanghai. I think it was later. But I know that I was very outraged by that. And some time along in this period I think I started to read intermittently the Nation and the New Republic. I don't remember whether it was in the spring of '32 or not until the fall semester, but I think it was the spring, I was invited, I don't know in what way, to the home of an attorney by the name of Charles Recht. He lived in Larchmont or someplace like that, and that was a Sunday and there must have been about, oh, thirty young people there. For all I know, maybe I was invited by somebody who was a member of a Young Communist League and I didn't know it, something like that. This attorney, as I learned later, was a foreign-born man but very well spoken--I should say and very well spoken--was a civil liberties lawyer, not acting for the [American] Civil Liberties Union, but he took civil liberties cases, a good many of them labor cases. And I just have the impression of that Sunday afternoon in his home as being kind of a small earthquake for me because he put very salient and pointed questions to us, shaking us out of accepted grooves of thought, challenging us, I'm sure, with left postulates and things out of Marx, and referring, I suppose, to the Soviet Union. I don't remember particulars, but I know that it had a kind of radicalizing effect upon me just in one afternoon. It changed me, it made me begin to search with different eyes and with different ears and a certain different perspective from then on. And that's all I remember, but it's worth mentioning because sometimes one meeting with one individual can have a very profound effect, and this did for me.

GARDNER

How did you then translate it into...?

MALTZ

I didn't translate it into any action; I was busy at school. But it affected my mode of thought and provided, I think, a certain platform from which thought and reading proceeded thereafter. During this whole period, I, with friends, saw every opening of a play in New Haven, and it was one of the towns in which plays were brought for tryouts. And we also would take, I'd say, it might be a weekend a month, or a weekend every six weeks, that usually one friend and I, a man called Paul Scofield, would go down to New York, as I recall, on Friday and see a play. It might be Friday or it might be Saturday, but we'd see a play perhaps Friday night and Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, and come home Sunday morning, that kind of thing. And we'd always go to a speakeasy, usually the same one, because that was speakeasy time still, and it was a wonderful one which served venison. I found venison to be a great food, and it was always exciting to do the manly thing of going into a speakeasy and having a cocktail before dinner.

GARDNER

What was the speakeasy called, do you remember?

MALTZ

They were called--what, the name of it? They had no names, they just had addresses. As a matter of fact, my first acquaintanceship with speakeasies, not in terms of reading about them, of course, but in terms of going to one, was when I was in college. I couldn't wait as a freshman, as I recall, to go into a speakeasy, and I was so excited when I was admitted. I don't know as I went to many at that time. But then when I was in Yale--I mean, I think after I had gone to a few in my freshman year, I never went to any again because I wasn't a drinker and there was no occasion for it. But when we were coming down from Yale, and my friend knew about this speakeasy where they served this delicious venison, it was just nice to go there and eat that before theater. Now, during this period I'm sure that I was--just like every other student of playwriting at school--if you're a serious writer and you undertake to write plays or novels or anything else, you naturally have the hope and fantasy of being a fine writer. You'd hope that you might turn out to have the gifts of an O'Neill or an Ibsen, and you don't know whether you will, but that fantasy is a very normal one, and you keep hoping that it will be true. I know that that was mine. Now, I think that's probably a description of my first year. In addition to the one-act play that I mentioned before, I must have begun a three-act play. I don't have any memory of a three-act play being read in that first year. I know that I handed in one when I came back in the fall, one that I worked on over the summer and perhaps I had begun in the spring, but I don't recall anymore.

GARDNER

Do you recall what sort of themes you were dealing with?

MALTZ

Yes, they were very personal. The themes at that time were not in any way social themes, which is an indication of the limits to which my own social thinking had taken me, since my themes later were very social. I know that I returned in the fall of '31 with a full-length play that had to do with my family. Whether or not I had read Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov shortly before or several years before, there were qualities of Brothers Karamazov that I believe were influencing my mood when I wrote this play. There's one line that I've never forgotten that one of the brothers says at one point. I think it is, "I must have justice done," or, "I must see justice." "I must have justice done," I think. And I know that that was in my mind, and it was not referring to social justice or political justice but was rather sort of moral justice. [sound interference--tape recorder turned off] And so it was concentration upon this personal thing. I think in....[tape recorder turned off] So my writing was involved with a concentration upon the personal. I think I might mention here that I began to learn from my fellows something that I had not been aware of about myself--that I was considered an overserious young man. Now, I think that was certainly true, and it didn't mean that if somebody told a joke I wouldn't laugh, or that I didn't love the Marx Brothers, but that my general mien was a very serious one--overserious, I would say--and it probably came [that way] from a number of factors. One was that there had been so much illness in my family on the part of my father, my mother's eyes, and so on, that life had kind of a grim aspect; the world seemed a kind of a dangerous and.... Oh, aligned with that, the psychological atmosphere of my family, as it influenced me, was one where the world was a dangerous place. So that there was a kind of tension in me, I think, that was just an underneath flow of current that caused a tightness. And I remember later, when I was in the Theatre Union, and the chief organizer of it was a man in his early forties, a World War I vet and vigorous, strong, full of laughter, when I found out he was about forty-three and I remembered my father at forty-three, it was an unbelievable shock. I didn't know that men of forty-three could be like that. I think of this in the light of a play that I was writing. It was a play about family tragedy and was a reflection of things within myself. That summer I had several out-of-town visits. I spent the summer in my home, Brooklyn. I went up to Provincetown, where my friend from Yale, Paul Scofield, was with his mother. His mother was an artist. And there I met Hans Hofmann, the artist, and some others around him, and I had the reaction then that I've had today. I've never changed. I don't take any pride in never changing in any area, but I couldn't understand his painting, I didn't get any pleasure from it, I didn't get any ideas from it, I didn't get any visual enjoyment from it. As you see by the rugs here, I am enchanted with Navajo rugs. Now, these are just patterns, but the patterns of most nonobjective painting I don't find have the beauty of this. I find they're empty of visual beauty, empty of intellectual meaning, empty of representational quality, such as, say, that Modigliani there. Or empty of what I get in that still life up above, because I love still life too. I just have never been able to get anything from it. Nor have I been willing to concede that it has particular merit. George--not George--Charles White, the artist whose work is representational, explained to me in ways that I thought I understood why Picasso and Picasso's nonobjective painting meant a great deal to him, even though he himself is a representational painter. And he gave, as one illustration, Joyce: that Joyce introduced for all writers the opportunity to do free-associational writing, and that even if you didn't practice it yourself, it changed all writing from then on. And so, he said, that was Picasso's contribution. And I understand that intellectually, but I don't see it. I love certain periods of Picasso's work--his Blue Period, Rose Period--but the three-headed, nonobjective stuff I never have been able to fathom. (And I might say, since I just finished a piece of work on Modigliani, neither did he. Modigliani didn't. They were friends, well, they were kind of friendly enemies all the time, but Modigliani just didn't care for that stuff at all, which is interesting.) And I also had another little glimpse at what I would call those people who live a great deal with family tradition, because I went up to the summer home of the girl on whom I had a crush. This was their summer home in Maine, a very large, formal house, where her mother was not present but her father looked me over. And it was just a very, very interesting insight for me into quite a different world. I later married a woman whose family tree was as long, or longer, than theirs, but she came from a lower-middle-class family, so it was an entirely different kind of thing. The second year at Yale began in September '31 and actually ended prematurely sometime in March of '32 with, of course, the production of Merry Go Round, which I'll come to. Most of my friends of the first year had not returned to the school for the second year. And George Sklar, whom I had known but not been intimate with, we came together and began to see each other, and he was much more solidly aligned in his thinking and in his feeling with the American Left than I was. He had read a great deal more than I. He had firm opinions. And we used to discuss world affairs and peace and war and so on. It was in this period that Japan was carrying out its brutal invasion of Manchuria and other sections of China. I reacted very intensely to this--as I would a few years later at Mussolini's rapacious conquest of Ethiopia. The course in playwriting now was around a round table with about fifteen students, twice a week, and very shortly after I came there, I believe, I gave my play (that I'd written in the summer and then did some rewriting on) to be read, and it was read in the class with a great deal of warm response. I was very excited by that, and one of the instructors in the school who had contacts with the Group Theatre took it down to them. I was very excited by that because the Group Theatre was a new theater under the leadership of Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, and I was very interested in what they were doing and had liked very much several of the plays that they had done (they had this fine group of actors, of course, whom they were developing), but nothing came of that. As a matter of fact, I think they were already looking for more social materials. Early in October, which means within about five weeks after my school opened, I came back about one in the morning from something or other and found a special delivery letter that my father had had a stroke. And I left school for, oh, I suppose about a week, during which time he began to make something of a recovery. He was able before I left to talk again and make movements. And so I was able to return to school. Sometime very early in November, I went to pick up George Sklar at the library, where he had a part-time job, at the main Yale library, to go to dinner with him. And he said, "While you're waiting, there's an article I just read in the New Republic that I'd like you to read." So I read it, and it was an exposé of something that had happened in Cleveland. A young laborer had witnessed a gang killing. I don't recall whether the police had happened on the scene so quickly that they knew he had witnessed it, or whether he'd told the police what he had seen, and they wanted him to testify. They wanted him to testify about the murder. I think they kept him in jail as a material witness so that he wouldn't get hurt. But very shortly, the gangster involved in the killing revealed privately to I think the city officials that he would--now I may be mixing up what we did in the play with the truth--but the fact was that he revealed the connections between these gangsters and the city officials. So that the young man they had wanted to testify against the gangster would, if he now testified against the gangster, cause the administration great grief. And so he became an enemy of the administration, all in his own innocence, and one morning was found hanged in his cell, an alleged suicide. When I came back to George and said, "Hey, I think there's a play," he said, "That's what I think." And we went to dinner and talked about it, walked home, and by the time we got back to, I guess, the area of the school, we had the broad outlines of a play. And we went right to work on it immediately. It went not easily, but rapidly. We worked very hard, while continuing in our classes, of course, and by around December tenth we had the main story in all its detail, the characters, and the first act written. And then I had to leave because it was urged upon my father that he take a sea trip and go elsewhere, for him to go to Los Angeles by boat through the canal, and with my mother and with a nurse, and it was very desirable that I accompany him. My father, as a result of the stroke, was in a very bad psychological state--all sorts of tensions, dissatisfactions, and great tension between him and my mother--and it was felt that I could be of help if I were there. And so I went and I took with me the outline that we had. I don't remember what the trip was, whether it was a ten-day trip or a two-week trip at that time, from New York, first to Havana, then to Panama City, and I had a day in each city, walking around--and then around up the coast to Los Angeles. But during the ten days, working at night when my father was asleep and other times during the day when he was asleep, I did the two acts and mailed them off to George.

1.9. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE
AUGUST 12, 1976

GARDNER

I had just asked, as the tape ran out, what the nature of your collaboration with George Sklar was. [tape recorder turned off] Okay?

MALTZ

George and I collaborated in the following way: we sat together and we thought out every idea together. That means we discussed and we also argued. And as I look back upon it, sometimes it was really very childish of us, because let's say if I said, "Well, Joe should say, 'yes,'" and he'd say, "No, I think he should say 'uh-huh.'" I don't know whether we would do it today; I doubt it. I know I wouldn't, and I don't think he would either. It really made no difference if you said "uh-huh" or "yes." And if I were watching a play of George's and a man said, "uh-huh," I would find it acceptable; if he were watching a play by me and a man said, "yes," he would find it acceptable. But we were growing as writers, seeking to find our way of saying things, trying to mold our styles, and therefore we sometimes could spend a lot of time over a thing like that. It was waste time but, I suppose, necessary to us as persons. However, we got along well enough in this, or else we wouldn't have been able to do the play and do it as rapidly as we did. And so every line of dialogue, when we were together, was worked out together. Of course, then when I sent back the two acts that I had done in first draft, George worked them over by himself, and then we came together and worked on them together. And that's frequently a way in which other collaborators work. One does a first draft and then they work together; or sometimes one does a draft of one act, another one drafts another act, and so on. But that was the way George and I worked on that play and also on our second play. I didn't stay in Los Angeles more than about, I guess, a week to see my parents set up in a hotel, and on my way back I stopped at two places to see old friends--one was Kenesaw Mountain Landis, whom I mentioned, and I stopped off at Logansport, Indiana. I think I must have stayed at his home, because I saw in a diary that I had at the time that I met his father, and I have no recollection of meeting his father; and also [I saw] that we had an agreement that if his father ran for a certain public office next spring, I would come out and help campaign with him. And this I just don't remember at all. But what I do remember was our warm reunion and the fact that, through his father's acquaintanceship, we were taken on a tour of the giant U.S. Steel mill at Gary, Indiana. That's right outside of--it must have been Gary, Illinois, right outside of Chicago.

GARDNER

Gary, Indiana.

MALTZ

Is it Gary, Indiana?

GARDNER

Yes. The Illinois and Indiana are....

MALTZ

I see. And that was a very profound experience, because here was this massive plant, and let's say if there were thirty smokestacks, I don't remember how many there were, perhaps there was one smoking. And [there were] these immense yards and the immense inside areas for steel, and just a few men working and just a little bit going on. I think it was working at perhaps, I don't know, 12 percent of capacity, or something like that. And it was a very dramatic lesson in what this Depression was doing. And then I stopped off at Columbus, Ohio, to see my old instructor Peter Odegard, who had moved there and was on the faculty there, and who had, in about the six months before I saw him, been on a sabbatical in Germany. Now, this was not too long before the Nazis took power, so he was in a Germany that was convulsed and he went interviewing Nazis. He went interviewing the Communist party officers. And I remember that he had tales at that time which began to awaken me. One awful thing pops into my mind of the Nazis grabbing someone, I think a Communist, and they of course had descended into this type of street warfare, and getting him down to a cellar and poking his eyes out with a billiard cue. And this was the kind of thing that he came back with and, I'm sure, affected my thinking very much. George and I finished our mutual work on Merry Go Round by about January 10. It was read to the students, and I remember Alexander Dean said it was the best play ever done by students at Yale, and they scheduled it for immediate spring production. We both had in mind, after the reception of the play, trying to get a Broadway production for it, and from some place I must have gotten the name of an agency called, I think it was, the Pinker-Morrison Agency, or maybe it was just Eric Pinker. Morrison, who was Pinker's wife (I forget her first name), was one of the three Bennett sisters, the actresses. Which one she was, I don't know, but she had been an actress and retired and was acting as an agent and was married to Eric Pinker, who was a very well-spoken Englishman whose father was a very respected and successful agent in England. Now, I'm going to pause for a moment about him, because although he and his wife served us very well--let me see, when was I on the board of the Dramatists Guild? Oh, maybe by about '35 or so. It doesn't make any difference.

GARDNER

Yes, it would be around the last part of the thirties.

MALTZ

In '35, '36. I was part of a decision that the guild had to make about turning data on Eric Pinker over to the district attorney's office. He had represented a woman who lived in California. She was a novelist, I think, and she was an invalid confined to a wheelchair, but perfectly able to write. And a sum of considerable money, I don't remember whether it was something like $30,000 (which was a lot of money in that time) or even more money. Pinker had withheld from her for an undue time after receiving it, and then had doled out part of the money to her and had never given her the full amount. It was a clear case of fraud. And she had appealed to the Dramatists Guild, I believe, or maybe it was the Authors League. It must have been when I was on the Authors League executive board. And she had appealed, and this finally was brought to the attention of the district attorney, and this very urbane, well-dressed English gentleman went to Sing Sing. Since my uncle had been there, and was of such a different kind, and I knew the Sing Sing background, it had always been my desire to write a story about that. But there have been a lot of stories like that which I've had in my files, and life somehow has not worked out for my writing them. But it is still a story that I would be interested in writing. Because one somehow doesn't expect that that type of person will turn out to do such a cheap, dirty thing as cheat an invalided author out of her royalties. During the period that the Pinker-Morrison office was submitting Merry Go Round around, I remember we went to see a number of different producers. The only one whose name I can recall was Jed Harris, who was then an immensely successful, respected, and electric figure in the American theater (and deservedly so) for the plays that he had directed and produced. And I guess he just wanted to see who these boys were, because.... Oh, I remember--I'll interrupt--I remember he kept us waiting for a long time. He lived in some house on the East Side, and we just had to hang around outside. We hadn't brought along anything to read, and so I think I did something that was sort of typical with me: went down and found a little candy store or something, and bought a--no, I don't remember now whether I bought a tennis ball and played a game that we used to play, putting a dime on a crack and then trying to hit it, each an equidistance away, or whether we pitched pennies against a wall. But it was very much part of my automatic thinking that if you had an hour like that, or any length of time, you played a game. I was still going on the way I had as a kid. (I remember going for a walk in a snowstorm up at Yale with Gadget Kazan and Baxter. Well, we made snowballs, we threw them at each other, at cars, at houses, at everything, just carrying on in that way.) And so then we were ushered into the great man's presence. He just wanted to look at the boys, I think, because he said, well, he had just done such-and-such a play and he didn't want to do another political thing or whatever, and that was about it. We were disappointed. And I think it was shortly after that that I heard a marvelous story that I've never forgotten. George Kaufman once came to his house for a session on something, and when Harris admitted him, or when he was admitted by the butler (I think he had a butler), he found Harris naked, and he didn't say anything. They had their discussion for however long it was, and Harris of course wondering, waiting all this time--why didn't Kaufman say something? And then he just said goodbye, and then he paused at the door and said, "By the way, Jed, your fly's open," [laughter] which was of course a perfect George Kaufman thing, just perfect. Our play, after having been refused by not all producers but a considerable number of them came to a couple of young men: one was Walter Hart and the other was Michael Blankfort. Now, these two men were both a couple of years older than George and myself, but only a couple. [sound interference--tape recorder turned off] Hart and Blankfort had been at the University of Pennsylvania together, and Blankfort had majored in psychology, I believe, and had already taught a year at Princeton in psychology. But they were both interested in theater, and a year before, they had taken a play that others had rejected called Precedent, which was about the Mooney-Billings case. They had produced it with success at the Provincetown [Playhouse] theater in Greenwich Village, on Macdougal Street, as I recall, the one that had seen the beginning works of Eugene O'Neill with the Provincetown Players. And this theater, which seated only about 100 to 150 people, was used as a kind of a tryout place. Critics would come down and review plays that were done there because it was known that it was used in this way, and the hope was that if the play got good reviews, then there would be offers from uptown Broadway producers to bring it uptown. Since we had no better opportunity and since they had done well with Precedent, we signed a contract with them, and rehearsals started about the twenty-second of March, as I recall, right around in that period. And we found that Walter Hart was doing just beautifully in bringing the play alive, and doing things with it in the movement of actors and in the tempo--he had a marvelous sense of tempo which we hadn't visualized. And of course that's one of the great things of theater and indeed of film. If you write a novel or a story, nobody else adds anything to it, and the impact is there or not. But in theater, if you have a good play, and then it's well cast, and then it's well directed, something comes into existence that is better than the script you wrote. It couldn't have come without the script, without the play, but that marvelous melding of actors well directed and the actors' qualities make it a living thing which is just marvelous. In our case the producers didn't have money for the best actors available; it was done on a low budget. But they had, in the main, competent actors--some who were better than competent, some who were a little less. I remember one man who had a kind of an inability to walk well, and why he was cast in the first place, I don't know; but Walter Hart so staged things that he blurred that over. There was a phenomenon in the rehearsal at that time. As I recall, [Actors] Equity, the actors' organization, had not yet achieved--yes, I'm sure of it--they had not yet achieved rehearsal money for actors; that came in later. And so we started to find the phenomenon, when we broke for lunch, of various actors saying, "Oh, I never eat lunch." And then, after a while, Walter Hart used to invite one or another of them out to lunch with us, and they ate. It was just that this was deep in the Depression and they were broke, and they didn't eat. The play opened, and the reviews as a whole were very favorable; they went from middling favorable to excellent favorable. And the day after we opened, we had, I think, ten, twelve offers from different theater owners to go uptown.

GARDNER

Do you recall any of the specific reviews?

MALTZ

Well, I meant to ask you about that. I have scrapbooks where I have reviews of all plays and novels and stories and movies and so on. What do we want to do about that? Do you want to turn it off while we talk about this? [tape recorder turned off] What were we talking about?

GARDNER

Well, we were talking about the following day after the premiere of Merry Go Round.

MALTZ

Oh, yes. The following day (and I may correct this; I'll listen to a tape before next week in which I gave some data on the Theatre Union)--I think we had about ten, twelve offers to take the play uptown. That meant that the owner of a given theater would finance the building of new sets and would arrange a rental agreement and so on, and we'd put on the play. Now, we were committed to running two weeks in the Provincetown; that was in our contract. That was fine because it allowed time for the sets to be built. And we had in our play a revolving stage, because Merry Go Round has a great, a good many, scenes, and in order to make things work rapidly, we used a revolving stage, which was then used in the theater rather more than I think it is now, and it was a very good device. The theater was packed after the reviews, a small theater, and very special people would come and search us out. For instance, D. W. Griffith came, and he was then out of film but hoping to get back. He wanted to make a film of the play, and we of course were very interested, but he couldn't raise the money, and didn't. And Otto Kahn came down to look us over, and I guess we probably knew at that time that he was a patron of the arts, had been behind--what was the name of the theater he was behind? Oh, I should remember it... John Howard Lawson was in it and had plays produced... Francis Faragoh, John Dos Passes... I forget the name of it, but they had been doing theater in the late twenties [New Playwrights' Theatre]. And then came a very interesting man. He was someone whose name we knew because he was one of the friends of that great bon vivant, Mayor Walker, Mayor Jimmy Walker. Oh, I've omitted something very important. During this whole period there was an investigation of the New York municipal administration, the mayor's office, going on, called the Seabury investigation (that was the name of the man [Samuel Seabury] doing the investigation, the chairman). And more and more had been exposed about the corruption of Mayor Walker's administration. In actual fact, when our play appeared I think Mayor Walker was about six months away from being summoned by Governor Franklin Roosevelt to appear before him for some kind of hearing connected with this. And instead of appearing before him, because I think it was a gubernatorial commission, Walker took off for England or France and never came back. He remained in exile until his death, I believe, because if they'd pursued it enough, he would have gone to jail. He was a very engaging man, and behind the engagement he was as sleazy a crook and a companion of gangsters as one could ever imagine, a dreadful human being. But so many people were charmed by his wit and his debonair manners. So that when our play, which we said took place in a midwestern city in our program, Cleveland or wherever it was, when we bound it up, we bound it up with something that read and looked like the Tammany administration. And we did it, of course, very purposefully. The reviews, some of them at least, made it very clear what this was about and where it pointed, and it was therefore a play with some explosive quality for the time. A. C. Blumenthal came to see us (I don't know whether we knew at the time that he was a crony of Mayor Walker's, or whether we found out later; we knew his name from the papers), and he came to George and me and said, "This is just such a marvelous play. But you're doing the wrong thing in going uptown now because plays can't last through the summer." (At that time there was no air cooling in theaters. And there was often, if a play was doing well, when it came into the real heat of the summer the play would close until the fall and reopen again. Or sometimes plays just died because of the heat; people couldn't be in a theater.) And he said, "I want to form a company. I want to close this down, reopen it in the fall, make a film of it," and he tried to sell us on this. We didn't realize that there might be anything else behind it. In fact, I'm sure we didn't know he was in any way related to Walker, but we found out later. But we wanted our play to go on and we had a chance to go uptown. We wanted to go uptown, that was all. (He, by the way, fled to Mexico after Walker fled to Europe; he fled to Mexico and was there, I believe, until his death. I think, I'm not sure, that he was married to a former chorine called Peggy Fears, who, it was suggested, was also one of Walker's girls.) But what he wanted to do was to get us to shut up our play; he'd get control of it, and he would bury it. And so without realizing it, we didn't give him the opportunity. Well, when the two weeks were up, we went uptown. We had perhaps a week of rehearsals, I'm not sure, a few days of rehearsals on the larger stage, and were to open on a Monday night. And around seven o'clock Monday, police on horses, as well as some police on foot, came to the street. It was Forty-fifth Street, the Avon Theatre, a very good theater on a street full of theaters, and they said that the play couldn't open because the theater did not have an up-to-date fire license. Now, it proved to be so that the theater didn't have an up-to-date fire license because of the custom among theaters: they would apply for their license, and in due course the license would come without respect to the particular date of lapse. But in the meantime the theaters would keep playing. And there were other theaters on the same street that didn't have their new licenses, but they were playing. Only, the administration was using this in order to prevent the play from opening. Well, it was front-page news the next day. The means that the administration was using was so transparent that nobody was fooled by it. The American Civil Liberties Union came into the case right away, and I remember Mayor Walker was seen by reporters, and he was quoted as saying that he hadn't seen the play; he just understood it wasn't a good one. And that he had nothing to do with this; this was just the fire department. But they couldn't make it stand up, and so the fire department issued the license. But they then demanded that all of the curtains be fireproofed again. I remember the day before the play opened again, an officer of the fire department stood with a long, lighted taper burning away in his hand next to the curtain, trying to set the curtain on fire to prove that it was improperly fireproofed. But they also said we had to have an orchestra pit even though there was no orchestra required in our play, and no music. But they took out about four front rows of seats, just as a means of molesting the theater. (And in the fall, when the first play to open there was one produced by Peggy Fears, they put the seats back again.) And so finally the play opened. Now, George and I had gone around that week, and we were all hot, and Blankfort said, "The play's going to run forever. It's gotten such magnificent front-page notices, you know, this is just marvelous, it's great." But it didn't run forever at all. In spite of a quite full house on opening night, the audiences began to dwindle, and it limped along for about six weeks and then closed.

GARDNER

Why is that, do you suppose?

MALTZ

I think I know absolutely why it is, because I tried to study it out. And I believe that it's a lesson that I think has stood me in good stead all my life, and I've seen the same mistake made by others. We wrote an honest play, in that we followed what happened in life in Cleveland. We had our bellboy, at first with the police saying, "We want you to be man enough to testify and you'll help clean up the city." And the bellboy's scared because he witnessed an accidental--we had a bellboy, that's right, who witnesses a gang killing accidentally. But finally he's persuaded that he will testify. And then the brother of the gangster who is under arrest comes around with his little book and says, "Here are the names and addresses of everyone with whom we've had financial relations in the administration, and this is going to hit the paper unless you quash the indictment against my brother." And at this point the bell-boy becomes a danger, and it ends up with his being found hanged in his cell. Now, I learned a real lesson from that. I remembered Aristotle's Poetics: that in a tragedy, your hero would have to have a fatal flaw, which made him human. But he went down to his death bloody but unbowed because he was a man of dignity. He was a tragic figure because he had dignity, because he was noble. But he was human at the same time, and his flaw brought about his demise. So if you will, let's say the death of Macbeth is a tragedy. In many ways he's a--or Othello is better; he's a noble man but he has a fatal flaw, which is his too-quick jealousy. There was no flaw in the bellboy. Aesthetically speaking, it was as though we were asking the audience to watch a child being run over on a street, and its head squashed. Now, in life children are run over on the street, but there's the difference between life and art. You cannot always do in art what is acceptable in life. And when the audience watched this innocent bellboy being crushed and finally hanged, they came out of the theater and wanted to beat their head against a wall. They hadn't witnessed a tragedy which purged them in their understanding of what can happen in life; they had just seen a child run over. And if you saw a child run over and its head squashed, you'd probably vomit, you'd feel sick, you'd want to cry. And you don't say to people, "Hey, I saw a great play last night. You've got to go see it." You say, "Hey, stay away from it, it's just... it kills you." To get another example of the difference between life and art, which I learned even earlier through a play that was done at Yale, you can read in a book that a man on a chain gang is whipped, or a slave is whipped and blood spurts from his back. But put that on a stage, and if you simulate, well, blood spurting from the back of a slave, as you could do, you'd find your audience getting up and walking out; they couldn't take it. I saw audiences walk out of a play in Yale called Steel in which my friend Alan Baxter had the central part. He was [playing] an ignorant Slav immigrant, and he was walking on top of a building, or he went up on a building to look for something, and by accident he picked up the cone with which men used to catch rivets (in the days when they threw rivets from one floor to another), and he caught a hot rivet which was thrown in there and put his hand in on it... and screamed. People got up and left the audience. They could not take that. It was just too painful. But you could read about it.

GARDNER

Or you could put it in a film.

MALTZ

You can put it in a film, but in a film.... I was hiding my eyes, and so was my wife, the other day in The Return of a Man Called Horse, where they have a terrible Indian rite--well, I couldn't watch it, could not watch it. And usually what they do is they have a quick cut and go away. It's kind of bloodless. Film can mask things. So I felt I had learned a very important thing about the nature of drama and of tragedy, and what you cannot do in just an unrelenting drama. [background noise] Let me shut this off and ask my wife to stop making.... [tape recorder turned off] And so that was, to me, a very important lesson, and I have seen illustrations of playwrights and film writers going wrong on that. For instance, you don't feel that way in a true tragedy like Man for All Seasons. At the end of that a man is decapitated, that's how it ends, but he has fought for something knowing the dangers involved. He has refused to bend, and at the end he walks up to the platform, and he gives a penny to the man who's going to cut his head off, and you say, "Yes, it's too bad he dies, but he dies fighting for something." And you're ennobled by what he did, and you feel purged in the Aristotelian sense, and you don't feel like beating your head against a wall. You say, "How admirable and wonderful," and it's an entirely different feeling. It's a fascinating point of aesthetics to me.

GARDNER

That is! It's interesting especially in the light of the war films that became popular in the middle sixties and on about the meaninglessness of death. Because despite the fact that the life isn't one like Thomas More's, in which nobility is played out to the end, and the death can be, not necessarily accidental, but not purposeful in any way, not due to tragic flaw, nonetheless there is the same sentiment, the same feeling in the audience that the person is dying for a reason, a cause. That's sort of a statement and a question, I suppose.

MALTZ

Yes. You go back to the war films of World War II. Somebody's dying, and he's dying to stop fascism, to keep a country secure, to keep democracy and so on. So it's a different thing. It isn't the innocent run over and squashed by a steamroller. So we didn't earn any money particularly. As a matter of fact, we didn't receive our royalties. We agreed to that to try to keep the play running. We got a little bit of money out of it. And then we sold the thing to films. At that time, since it wasn't a big success, we sold it for about $10,000 to films, and at that time the producers got 50 percent, so I guess George and I had $2,500, less agent's commission. But that was in the Depression, and that was a little money. And a little bit later--I'll take that up next time--we went out to Hollywood. But before we do, I'll read a few of the reviews that we got on Merry Go Round a few little excerpts.

1.10. SECOND PART
(August 19, 1976)

GARDNER

Now, we left off last time in the midst of the Merry Go Round.

MALTZ

Yes, now let me just stop and check.... [tape recorder turned off] There are some additional points that I thought of that I think are worth recording about Merry Go Round. First, when the script was copyrighted and when George Sklar and I sent it out to producers, I had a pseudonym on it. And the reason I had a pseudonym was that I read the play to my father after we both finished it, and he had come back from California and he got scared. My mother was frightened too, and he said, "Tammany Hall will kill me," because, since he was a builder and since anything he built or any building he maintained was subject to inspection, an administration that was angry at him could absolutely bankrupt him. Any building that he was building, they could say this is wrong and that's wrong, you can't proceed, and so on and so forth, and what are you going to do about it? You have to have their licenses or you can't function. That was why I put on a pseudonym. But as the time approached for a Broadway production, he had an internal struggle because he was also so very proud of having a son who was going to have a play produced professionally, and finally his pride won over his anxiety. And so my own name was put on it. Otherwise, I was going right ahead with a pseudonym.

GARDNER

What was the pseudonym?

MALTZ

Oh, you know, I was trying to think of the pseudonym when I made this note. Couldn't think of it and I didn't want to go to my bank vault where I have my copyrights and find the original copyright. But as I began to tell this to you, it jumped to my mind--Eric Trent. And why I said Eric Trent, I don't know. I later had occasion to use some pseudonyms beginning in the sixties, and I'll come to that later. Now, I didn't mention something interesting... just one second...[tape recorder turned off] We had twelve offers to move Merry Go Round uptown after the opening at the Provincetown, and we took the offer made from a theater that was owned by the Leblang Agency. That was a marvelous thing, I don't believe it exists anymore. It was an agency which would sell tickets at cut-rate, frequently as much as 50 percent below the box office price, with the agreement of the given theater. And what would happen was that if a play was running and it was beginning to lose its audiences and was running downhill, they would give their tickets to Leblang, where a lot of people seeking cheaper seats would go on a given day to buy tickets. And by an influx of a lot more people who had bought cheaper tickets, the theater would be able to keep its play running. I know that in those years I always went to try and get tickets at Leblang to go into a theater. And the reason why we took that theater was that we were opening now in April, I believe, and since there was no air cooling in theaters at that time, most plays, or all plays, had to shut up for the summer. They just couldn't continue playing because audiences couldn't stand the heat inside of a theater. And then some would reopen in the fall if they were big successes, but those which had not been big successes probably would never open again. And having the Leblang Agency for a play was a way of giving us greater strength. Two days after we took the offer of the Leblang Agency, they called us and said that they had decided not to take our play. They reversed. And we then called each one of the eleven other theaters in turn and all of them said that they had reversed. It was then that we began to realize that something was afoot. Fortunately, one of them--no, eleven of them, eleven of the twelve reversed--but the final one, which was a very good house on Forty-fifth Street, took us. Merry Go Round sold as a film, for at the time, the not large but not insignificant sum of $10,000, and under the rules of the time half of that went to the producers. So that after payment of agent's commission, George and I each had about $2,250, which was a very nice little sum for that period, if you consider that people got.... Let's say the Actors Equity minimum at that time was $40 a week for an actor; you divide $40 into $2,250, and that was a considerable amount of living. It was made into a film called Afraid to Talk, and it was a poorly made film and never made any stir of any sort.

GARDNER

Do you want to go into your Hollywood experiences?

MALTZ

I'm going to go into that when I finish Merry Go Round, yes. We were not involved in the film Afraid to Talk.

GARDNER

I thought you were.

MALTZ

No, we were not. We just sold it and somebody else did the screenplay.

GARDNER

I see.

MALTZ

Now, there was a very funny incident when Merry Go Round was optioned by someone in Chicago to make a production. He did have a production; we don't know what kind it was, we never saw it. We didn't know anything about the guy, but it was professionally done, and we gathered that he must have had contacts with political people. We know that he invited the mayor and a good many others in the top circles of the municipal ruling group in Chicago to come to the opening night. And as they sat and watched this play unfold, one by one they got up and left the theater. [laughter] It was an absolute disaster for the producer because this was a play, you know, that was just throwing water on them, or mud on them. Really crazy. I don't know whether the producer never saw the play, you know, just put up money for it, or what. Merry Go Round was never done after that anywhere until in the fifties, when it was done in the Deutsches Theater in East Germany in Berlin. The Deutsches Theater was a theater on a very high professional level. Its director was a man whose name I knew, Wolfgang Langoff, who died a few years ago. Because around 1935 or '36, a book appeared in the United States by an actor who had been in a concentration camp for about a year in Germany and then was released by the Nazis. He made his way, I think, to Sweden, and that book, which I read at that time, was by Wolfgang Langoff. He apparently was in Sweden during the war years and then he returned, and I guess he was a convinced Communist. He went to East Germany and established this theater, and he was a very good theater man because I saw a filmed version. In East Germany they've had the practice of filming.

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO
AUGUST 19, 1976

GARDNER

You'd begun to talk about the East German film industry.

MALTZ

Yes, I interrupted myself and I'll go back and say that I did see a film version of the production that Langoff did of Merry Go Round, and it was a very well-directed play. In East Germany there is the practice--or there was, if it doesn't continue--of filming a stage play just as it is and then just showing it. I find it quite satisfactory. I don't know whether it has ever been attempted in the United States, but I also saw in that theater The Diary of Anne Frank, which happened to be playing in 1959 when I was in East Germany, and with the daughter of some dear friends playing the lead role (some friends I had known in Mexico). He was a very fine theater man, so that this was a most interesting experience to encounter this man first in a book and then as a director of this play.

GARDNER

As long as you introduced that aside, let me ask you a couple of questions. Do you think that there is any connection between the fact that the German expressionist theater, which really--Brecht went back to East Germany after World War II and so on--is such a filmic medium? There's so much embellishment in the expressionist theater that adapts well to film. I think particularly of The Threepenny Opera, which can be filmed really as a stage play without losing anything. Do you think that that might have something to do with the fact that they film theater?

MALTZ

No, I wouldn't think so. I would just think that as a practical matter someone said, "Shucks, why don't we just film this play? We like it when we sit in a theater, why wouldn't people like it when they watched it?" And it's not unknown in the whole world. I believe that Laurence Olivier's Othello was filmed in that manner. I think various performances of Marcel Marceau have been filmed. (He's a friend that I want to talk about later. Help me remember if I forget.) But I don't know if it's done extensively except there, and actually I don't know how extensively it is done. I just know that they do do it. And in the case of Merry Go Round, there was nothing expressionistic about it. It was a realistic play, realistic melodrama. That was it. Something that I want to mention is that in New York in the year 1932, when Merry Go Round went on, there were 166 legitimate theaters, and there were an equivalent number of play producers looking for plays. I think that in New York now, theaters, meaning both in the Broadway area and off Broadway, number about forty, so that's a little less than one-fourth. All of this is of considerable cultural implication for the United States in the field of drama. Quite recently Brooks Atkinson delivered an address here. He's in his eighties, a man who has loved theater, and he said something that was a little odd within an otherwise very interesting talk, at least as reported in the press. He said this is a time of great events and yet there aren't the playwrights; the playwrights haven't come forward in a way you'd expect for a time like this. What he was forgetting to weigh was that writers are not going to turn to writing for the theater if they have no opportunity of having their work played. And nowadays on Broadway, if you are trying for Broadway, if you want to try and make a living, let's say, you have to decide to write a comedy with one set, with about six or seven characters at most. Otherwise you have written a play that no producer will even weigh. Because the producers either want British successes or a comedy of the type I described or something from an already established playwright like Williams or Albee or Miller. The costs have become so prohibitive that they cannot do what was done in the American theater in the more golden years of the twenties and thirties and forties and fifties. And we will see, comparatively speaking, the extinction of American drama if this is somehow not changed. Now, there has been a growth of regional theaters, like the Mark Taper in Los Angeles, and these will help keep alive the desire to write plays. But I know that I myself.... For instance, although I turned to fiction after 1935, I did have an idea for a play I wanted very much to write in the late fifties and I wrote it, it has never been produced. It's a play called Monsieur Victor: it's about Victor Hugo. But there was a reason for me to write it even in the late fifties. Although the number of theaters was smaller than in the early thirties, there was still reason to think that if I wrote a play that was good, et cetera, it might get on. I would never write a play now, not at all. Unless, perhaps, I had been commissioned by a theater, by the Mark Taper, I would consider it a waste of time. Similarly, I am sure there simply cannot be the wealth of excellent short-story writers, or writers of excellent short stories who later went on to become novelists of distinction, today as there were in the thirties, because the number of magazines that will print an adult short story has dwindled enormously. And this just means that nobody can write in a vacuum. I don't know how many people, to give an exaggerated illustration, how many writers would write if they were cast on a desert island, were alone, and knew that their work would never be read by anyone. I don't think anybody would write, really, unless it formed a way of keeping sanity perhaps. When you write, you want people to read or see what you've done. And if the opportunities close down, as they have for economic reasons in the United States, you begin to lose the richness that you had in two previous forms. And now to finish off with Merry Go Round I'll read...

GARDNER

Can I ask a question to sort of conclude that thought?

MALTZ

Yes.

GARDNER

Are more young writers, then, channeled into film? I think that's the next question to ask. Where else can they be channeled?

MALTZ

Oh, I think you now find many more writers who are looking, who are beginning--many more writers whose aim as writers is to write for TV or film...

GARDNER

Since that's the only available market.

MALTZ

...since those become some of the prime markets. But this type of writer frequently today is more ambitious than film writers, let's say, in the forties were. Because things have changed in films also and the writer hopes to be not just the writer, but the director and perhaps the producer as well--in short, to have complete control of his material from conception to final film: to be an auteur as Ingmar Bergman is of the Europeans or as a Francis Ford Coppola is. And this is something new and something, I think, highly desirable, highly creative, that has been added to the cultural scene in the United States. I have the reviews of Merry Go Round and what I'll do is to read some small excerpts from a number of the reviews to give as balanced a sense as I can of them. The first review is from Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. It says, "Despite its incidental crudities of workmanship, Merry Go Round, which was acted in the Provincetown last evening, is an exciting political melodrama chiefly because of its local resemblances.... Neither the playwright or the production is of superior qualities. If the play comes uptown, both may improve. But the pertinent nature of the material and the vigor of the story make Merry Go Round an experience in the theater." John Anderson, New York Journal: "It is a play of blunt attack and ferocious intent, and its blemishes do not damage the fury of its accusation. It makes its points and makes them relentlessly, and it plainly fascinated an audience jammed into the Macdougal Street stable to its last breathing space. I found it engrossing." (The reason why he says "Macdougal Street stable" is that I remember now that the Provincetown theater was once a stable before it was converted into a theater.) Richard Lockridge, in the New York Sun, April 12, 1932 (and that must have been the date of all the other reviews): "A play with the bite like an angry bulldog's was unleashed at the Provincetown Playhouse last evening. It hides behind a fairly innocuous title, Merry Go Round, but there is no frolic in the scenes through which Albert Maltz and George Sklar, the authors, throw their whole weight against corruption and brutality. No light music plays them on as they tell the story of an insignificant bellhop who got in the way of a machine and was run over." And then finally, Robert Garland in the New York Telegram: "All in all Merry Go Round is bitter, brave, and as good an antidote as any for the spring fever from which the theater is suffering. I heartily recommend it but not to policemen, children, or the tenderhearted." Now, that's a sufficient cross section I would think. It will be a guide for the future and other reviews that I give. In July George Sklar and I went out to Los Angeles because we had been offered a contract for three months by Paramount Pictures and....

GARDNER

Did they solicit you or did you...?

MALTZ

No, they solicited us. They were not the studio that had bought Merry Go Round; that was bought by Universal. But we wanted to earn the money. The money at that time was $300 for the both of us, which, after a $30 commission was taken off by the agent, meant that we each were getting $135 a week. Well, that was a lot of money at that time, and I remember that I didn't have a bank account or make a checking account that I can recall out in Los Angeles. Maybe I did. I know my father wanted me to send the first check back to him, because he wanted to frame it, he was so proud of the fact that his son was earning some money already. (I haven't mentioned that we didn't finish our semester at Yale; we didn't go back for classes anymore.) And so we arrived in Los Angeles and came out with the man, Walter Hart, who had directed Merry Go Round and who also got a contract at Paramount. His was a contract to continue if they liked his work; ours was not, because we didn't want to continue on as film writers. We wanted to come back and write plays. And we were put on what might seem to have been an interesting assignment, and that was a novel by Dashiell Hammett called The Glass Key. Now, in fact, it was not a good assignment at all. I don't know how it is with every one of Hammett's books--for instance, The Maltese Falcon might be better worked out, I think perhaps it is--but I know that I had occasion to once be asked to dramatize another one of Hammett's books (I forget the title of it), and I found there the same problems that I found with The Glass Key, and George found: namely, that his books are immensely readable and the suspense that he builds is such that it keeps one's attention reading rapidly, but if you have to pause and examine what literally happens in certain scenes, and make it real visually on the screen, it is just about impossible to realize because it's phony. His books are full of highly readable phony elements which do not stand up under a moment's reflection.

GARDNER

For example, do you recall...?

MALTZ

No, I don't recall any examples. I would have to get the book, and then I could pick it out from page after page after page. But if I can try and think up an example. Let's say... he would write by saying Sam Spade was in a taxicab and he was looking at his notebook when there was a sudden screeching of brakes, and the next thing he knew he was on the sidewalk, and he looked up with blood running out of his mouth and saw that the cab had hit another one. He had apparently flown through the open window and landed on his face. He pulled a loose tooth out of his mouth, looked at it and threw it down the sewer, stuffed a corner of a handkerchief between his lips, and went on the next several blocks to his office. He uncorked a bottle of rye and drank until the pain no longer bothered him, and suddenly a voice said, "Put 'em up, so-and-so." And you start to say, you know, how'd the guy get in the door? What did he do about the tooth by next day? I don't know, I'm not giving a good illustration....

GARDNER

I get the idea.

MALTZ

But I can just tell you that when you had to dramatize it, and you had to provide a visual picture, you couldn't do it. We spent weeks on this thing and finally I think after about six weeks, we gave it up. And then afterwards we wrote an original story which Paramount wasn't interested in, and there's an interesting little footnote about it. The studio probably hired us because someone said, "Here are a couple of young hotshots, got a lot of talent," so the studio executives probably decided, "Oh, we're not going to lay our tired hands on them. We want their unspoiled talent to be fresh," and so on and so forth. So they put us in an office and nobody knocked on our door to say, "Hey, you know, should we talk about film writing a little bit?" If we had been working with a producer or director who might have given us a little guidance, we might have done better for them. But they had some idea of their own about leaving us alone, and leave us alone they did. At the end of three months we came back home with great pleasure. However, I will say that it was my introduction to what I call the great pleasures of the better aspects of Los Angeles living--the marvelous weather and so on. We had no contact with film circles, met a few people at the studios: one man, Lester Cole, whom I came to know much better later on, and another man, who had been a manager of wrestlers, told very funny stories about wrestlers. His name was Oscar Serlin. He subsequently went on to produce Life with Father, and having made an enormous amount of money with that, he then retired from all production of all sorts. What he did with his life, I don't know. But I don't think he ever did another play. And that was about all. During that summer I was making notes for a novel that I thought I might want to write someday, and aside from the notes, I had a title and, with it, there's a little story. The title of my novel was Bury the Dead. And about 1934, I guess, or '35, after Irwin Shaw's--oh no, before Irwin Shaw's play of the same title had come out, my friend George invited me to take a walk with him and, with considerable tension, said he had something to tell me. It was that a young playwright had come to him with a long one-act play, and he had found a lot of good stuff in it and made some suggestions for rewriting. But then had said, "You ought to change the title. The title is terrible." The title was Bury Them, They Stink. And this young man said, "Well, have you got any ideas?" George said, "Why don't you call it Bury the Dead?" And the young man said, "That's a fine title." And then George said, "His name is Irwin Shaw, and the play is going to be produced" (I forget by whom), "and gee, I gave away your title." And I said, "Well, I probably am not going to write the novel anyway, so you haven't done me any great harm. And don't worry about it."

GARDNER

Was the novel the same sort of thing, an antiwar...?

MALTZ

No, the novel was a family novel. [It] had to do with my family.

GARDNER

Oh, how interesting.

MALTZ

Yes, it was just a very personal novel. There were a number of interesting things that happened on our way back from Los Angeles, which of course in those days meant train travel. And actually, it was four nights and three days in a non-air-conditioned train. During this period I was reading the New Masses; I'm sure I read the Nation, the New Republic; I'm sure I had begun to read various Marxist pamphlets. George and I were always talking about events in the world and world politics, and I was moving leftward in my thinking. And so having read... yes, I guess it must have been in the Daily Worker... no, it might have been at that time the Nation or the New Republic... about what was going on in the building of Boulder Dam near Las Vegas, [Nevada], we decided to stop off there and take a look at it. Now, at that time (this is September--no, early October '32) Las Vegas didn't have any of the hotels that it now has. It was a small Nevada town with perhaps all dirt streets. I remember there was one street where there was a row of cribs, small little rooms with just about enough room for a cot and a way to move around it, with a woman standing in the doorway of each one, inviting men in. It was open prostitution. And in the town at that moment, sleeping out of doors since it was still warm, were about 10,000 men waiting to get work at Boulder Dam, which was about, I think, twenty miles away or twelve miles away, something close. The reason why they were there is that word had gone out all over the country that Boulder Dam was hiring. It was a very big project run by seven companies; seven companies were involved in the building of that dam. [sound interference--tape recorder turned off] Boulder Dam was being built by seven companies in association, and they had indeed sent word out throughout the country (I'm sure it was deliberate publicity), saying that they were hiring men at Boulder Dam. And so men from all over the country hopped freights, hitchhiked to try and get work. I'm going into this story and another one as a way of reminding any readers of this material in the future of just a few of the aspects of life in America in those days which impinged upon the consciousness of someone like myself. There was a reason why the seven companies enjoyed having 10,000 men in the town of Las Vegas waiting to get work, and the reason was that they wanted to keep their project a nonunion one. If they had a constant turnover of men (and they saw to it that they did), there was no opportunity for them to get organized.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

So what they would do is this: aside from men who were perhaps very skilled in certain kinds of crafts that they needed, they saw to it that everybody else they hired was hired for a certain specific job--for instance, the digging of one tunnel. And when that tunnel was dug, let's say it took several months or weeks or whatever, they would then say to those men, "You're fired, but stick around because we'll have some more work for you," Now, in general they never had any more work for them. They hired other men, and the men they had just fired stayed around the company boarding houses which they maintained, where they got a decent bunk, a bed in a barrack, and where (since we had a meal in one of them) [they had] adequate food, quite adequate I would say, but for which they had to pay a certain amount of money. Now, there also were available gambling houses run by the company and whorehouses run by the company. Not only that, but when these men were fired, if they wanted their money they were given scrip, which was company money which was only acceptable in these company enterprises. Also there was a company store for the purchase of groceries and clothes and so on. And I know, because we spoke to some men, if they insisted that they wanted their money all in dollars because they wanted to leave, they couldn't get it. They wouldn't give it to them; they would give them a portion in dollars, and if they wanted to make a fuss there was the chief of police, who was a company man, and on some trumped-up charge they would be in jail. And whom could they appeal to? To a company judge?

GARDNER

What was your access?

MALTZ

I'll tell you. So that here was a structured situation whereby the companies running the construction of the dam had the men who worked for them work considerably for free, because the money that they paid the men turned a corner and came back to the company in the form of payments for board and room, gambling, whores, and so on. And also by their hiring and firing practices, they prevented organizers from ever building unions there. The men weren't there long enough. Actually, the only organizers that I think were there were some Wobblies. I met one man selling a Wobbly paper and he was just in jail every other day; they hauled him in and let him out, hauled him in and let him out. There wasn't much he could do. I might say that some years later, when I was teaching in Boulder, Colorado, at a writers conference at the University of Colorado, one of the students there had worked in the clerical office at Boulder Dam during the building of the dam, and she verified what at that time had been revealed in one of the papers I had read--that is, either the Nation or New Republic or Daily Worker, whatever it was: that there were a great many accidents and deaths in the building of the dam. [There] probably are some in every dam; you can't help it. But these were all written down as pneumonia in order to avoid any hue and cry, in order to avoid possible suits and workmen's compensation and so on. Now, when we went there, we just went by bus. It was not a closed area because men would come and ask for work. The area itself was not like a plant which is rigged with fences where you show a pass to get in. And we fell to talking. I think perhaps the first man we talked with was the Wobbly organizer, seller of the Wobbly paper. Within, I think, an hour or less of the time that we stepped into the town.... Oh, I forgot, we also wanted to ask about a disaster we'd read about. Apparently one of the barracks had been in such a position that a large boulder had crashed down from the mountainside, gone through the roof of the barracks, and killed several men. And the barracks had been ordered by government inspectors to be shut, but we understood that they were still using them. And so we made an inquiry about that. Within an hour or less after we came into the town, the chief of police came up to us and wanted to know what bus we were leaving on that day. "Because," he said, "if you're not out of here by night, you are going to be in jail." Just like that.

GARDNER

Just like in the movies.

MALTZ

Yes. And we said, "Well, we're going out on the so-and-so bus," and he said, "You be on it." And we were. Of course, we could observe that men were working in very difficult conditions, but those could not be helped; that is to say, there was nothing that could be done really about clouds of dust where there was drilling, or the hot sun of October at that time. That would have been present in any instance. And men dangling from ropes as they drilled in the sides of cliffs were doing dangerous work, but that had nothing to do with everything else we learned there and in Las Vegas about the general way in which the company operated, which I have already described. I think I would add that at that time in Las Vegas, or at the time we were there, some bootleg whiskey had been sold which affected the nervous systems of men, so that innumerable men were walking in the strangest fashion: some with their bodies way over on one side, some with their bodies leaning back, some with their bodies leaning forward. How long that had gone on, how long it lasted, we never knew. But it was there for us to visually observe. Now, the type of brutal and conscious exploitation of workingmen that existed in that dam project, and which we knew was duplicated in a thousand ways in other enterprises over the United States, fed the ideas that we were beginning to have that socialism as we read of it would be a much more humane system under which people could live and work. We stopped off in Chicago to see a friend of mine, a particular friend of mine who had been at the drama school, Paul Scofield (I mentioned him).

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

And just at that time there was an immense funeral march. (I don't remember how many people, I just remember visually how large it was. George, whom I asked the other day about it, said that there were 100,000 people marching, which seems to me larger than I would have expected, but let's say it was only 50,000--still a lot of people.) They were marching because there had been the following incident: a family had been evicted for nonpayment of rent. The local Unemployed Council had gathered and taken the furniture off the sidewalk and put it back into the apartment. The police had come, and the members of the Unemployed Council had prevented the police from evicting the people again. (Or maybe it had been that they never put their furniture out in the first place because the people were there. It's the same thing.) And one man was shot by the police and died. I might give a little background to that. There were a number of different organizations of the unemployed, the two most important were those led by the Socialists and those led by the Communists. I think the Socialist one was the Workers Alliance and the one led by the Communist party was the Unemployed Councils, and that was by far the largest organization. The Communist party was much more successful than the Socialists in organizing unemployed in the United States and in conducting demonstrations. Now, conditions were such that there was a naked clash between the needs of people to have minimal shelter and the needs of landlords to get rent paid. The election of Roosevelt did not occur until the fall of '32, later than this, and under Hoover there were no means that I can recall provided by government, local or federal, for the assistance of a family where the father became unemployed, where he could not find other work, and where presently he was unable to pay the rent. The landlord had his own needs. He was not necessarily a wealthy landlord like Trinity Church in New York. He might have been quite a small landlord who depended upon the rents of one apartment house for his own livelihood, and he couldn't have a nonpaying tenant. But when he had the police come and put the tenants' furniture on the street, and there was a family with children and his furniture on the street, you had a human condition which was dreadful. And into that situation stepped force: the force of the police, on the one hand--the force of the law, enforcing property rights--and the force of the mobilization of bare-handed people by the Unemployed Councils on behalf of the elementary human needs of the people who had been evicted. It was the same as the penny sales of farm properties. I don't know if I mentioned them last time, did I?

GARDNER

No.

MALTZ

Well, I will again because of what happened in my own life. But I think it's worth mentioning now that there were comparable situations all over the United States in farming areas. A farmer would find that prices had fallen so disastrously that he could not sell crops or cattle for a sufficient sum to pay his debts. Or there would be drought, as there was terribly in '34 and '35. And not being able to pay the mortgage on his farm, the farm would be repossessed, usually by a bank or a finance company. And farmers who might have worked the land many, many years, and who were good farmers, and hardworking, would find their farm and all its implements taken from them. And as this happened a sufficient number of times, local farmers, farmers who had voted Republican all along and are still voting Republican today, gathered--some with pitchforks and some with axes and some with weapons--and when the auctioneer came to auction off the property, which frequently happened, and its implements, there would be anywhere from 200 to 500 to 1,000 farmers. And even if they had 10, 20, 30 or 40 deputies, if you have 40 deputies, however well armed, and 1,000 really angry and determined farmers, the deputies aren't going to do anything when the farmers buy a tractor for one penny. Which is what they did: they would buy the whole farm and all of the implements for a dollar and give them back to their neighbor, the farmer. And that was the way in which force and right on one side were confronted by force and right on another. And so George and I walked alongside on the sidewalk, watching this demonstration, which took hours to pass a given point because of the multitude. And it is a tremendously impressive thing to find that number of people not in a holiday mood, serious, grim, walking behind a corpse with signs indicating certain slogans and certain chants which they had, and the significance of it was very deeply impressive. I think I just want to pause for a moment to check what this tape sounds like. [tape recorder turned off] When George Sklar and I returned to New York, we each got a separate room in a rather old apartment house at 50 Commerce Street, which is a little street kind of hidden away in Greenwich Village. We chose that street and building because it happened to have the rooms available, and that was where Michael Blankfort and his wife Laurie lived. Blankfort had been the producer of Merry Go Round. We immediately set to work on our second play, Peace on Earth, the idea for which we had conceived and talked about in general while we were in Los Angeles, and had decided to write. At that time, we established contact with those individuals who had started talking about the creation of a theater that would deal with people in their social contexts, a theater, let's say, of social significance and which was later to be called the Theatre Union. A contact had already been made between the leading spirit in this theater venture, whose name was Charles Rumford Walker, and my friend George. Before we went out to Los Angeles, Walker had met George in the office of an agent and had immediately begun to talk with him about this project which he and a number of others had. And George was keenly interested in it and told me about it. George and Walker exchanged some letters during the summer. And when we returned in October, we made contact with them and very shortly afterwards began to meet with them. I'll wait to say more about the Theatre Union until I come to discuss it more fully. At that time, while working on Peace on Earth, we were living, as were all Americans (some more sensitive to it than others, of course), in an atmosphere which I have already begun to describe by speaking of Boulder Dam and the funeral march in Chicago, but which I want to go into a little more fully. Violence by what we could call the Establishment was constantly manifest in the United States at that time. For instance, it was, I think, in that fall of '32 that there was a considerable demonstration, perhaps by the Unemployed Councils, I'm not sure, in front of the Ford Motor Company asking for jobs. Five men were shot dead by the police; others were wounded....

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE
AUGUST 19, 1976

MALTZ

I don't remember exactly when a large textile strike occurred in Gastonia, North Carolina, but the public relations person for the union when it took place--it might have been in 1931--was a New Mexican woman, Margaret Larkin, who later became my wife. And while she was there, she narrowly escaped a lynching, and the leader of the union, or one of the leaders of the union, who was a folksinger singing her own songs about the union, a woman called Ella May Wiggin, was shot dead while driving in a truck back from a union meeting. These are merely two examples of hundreds and hundreds that occurred at that time, one of the most celebrated being the violence that occurred--not celebrated, the most notorious--the violence that occurred in Harlan, Kentucky, at a coal miners' strike, where the miners also had weapons since they were Kentucky mountaineers. [It was] a violence, however, which was much greater on the side of the employers, where national guardsmen were brought in, I believe, and where a delegation of eastern intellectuals headed by Theodore Dreiser went down to investigate what had happened and were put in jail. (Dreiser later went on trial, and there was an attempt to stain his character in the public eye by saying that he had had a prostitute in his hotel room while down there. And Dreiser refuted that by saying, "I didn't because I can't.") However, in addition to this violence, there were all the pitiful signs of misery everywhere. For instance, all along Riverside Drive in New York City, which was a long area of many blocks and considerable width, and alongside of which I had walked when I was a student, all down there wooden shacks, improvised by the men with a hammer and a few nails, with tar-paper roofs or roofs of corrugated iron, whatever they could get, sprang up, and some thousands of men lived there. They had no place else to go. And [they] fed themselves by panhandling, or perhaps they were among the apple sellers, or they went down to various missions for one meal a day. In the year... when did I write...? I think it was as late as the year 1936, in the summer or in the early fall, I was walking near Wanamaker's department store, which was, I think, around Tenth Street and Third Avenue in New York City. There was one whole street in which the sidewalks, which are quite wide there (I think because of the department store), had a carpet of men--one man next to another, just sleeping. You couldn't walk on the sidewalk. They were asleep, usually with some newspapers under them and perhaps newspapers above them. This was the period in which one of the most celebrated songs was "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?", sung by a man who... the lyrics saying: once I was an engineer, once I was this, once I was that--brother can you spare a dime? I have in front of me a volume put out by Time-Life Books, part of a series called This Fabulous Century, and in a section called "Hard Times," which has photographs of migrant workers, it has a quotation from a migratory worker's logbook. And it reads the following: "October-December 1932: Cut Malaga and muscat grapes near Fresno. About $40 a month. December 1932: Left for Imperial Valley, Calif. February 1933: Picked peas. Imperial Valley. Earned $30 for season. On account of weather, was fortunate to break even. March-April 1933: Left for Chicago. Returned to California. May 1933: Odd jobs on lawns and radios at Fresno. June 1933: Picked figs near Fresno. Earned $50 in two months." Now, living was cheaper then, but fifty dollars for two months would not have kept a family, or a single man, for that matter. They have a picture of a very broken-down Ford automobile, with some mattresses on the top, with pails and a kitchen table, and a large seeming garbage can attached to the back, and the car is just waiting at the side of the road. The caption says, "Yessir, we're starved, stalled and stranded." Well, when I was driving around the country in 1934, there was more than once when I stopped (because I had purchased, after running into this experience, a rubber tube) where there was a car that was stalled like that, that was perhaps trying to go to California. And this might be in Iowa, it might be in Arkansas, and the family had no money for gasoline. They would stand and wait for a car to come along and stop as I did and siphon out a couple of gallons of gasoline into their tank and drive on until the gas ran out and then wait for another tank, another car, to come along. And this was the way they made it across the country. Here there's a quotation from a debt-ridden farmer: "If they come to take my farm, I'm going to fight. I'd rather be killed outright than die by starvation. But before I die, I'm going to set fire to my crops, I'm going to burn my house, I'm going to p'izen my cattle." They have a portrait of two miserable-looking children, barefooted, in dirty little smocks, one with dirt all over her face and hands and feet (she's gotten into a coal scuttle or something). The room is papered with old newspapers and the caption is: "The daughters of a WPA worker and a sick mother are left home unattended." A bitter father said, "A worker's got no right to have kids anymore." Now, they are already talking here about the WPA, which means it was under Roosevelt when the Works Progress Administration was established in order to help people. And it did help people. They were much better off than they were under Hoover. But still, with two children, and both parents working, they had no one to help with the children. Now, I don't want to go on any longer. I think these illustrations are sufficient to give a tiny indication of a country and a people in great trouble. It was against this background that one needs to understand the radicalization of a great many people. Here is one example of it. The presidential election was on when we returned from Los Angeles in October '32. The Communist party was running for its candidate a former trade-union organizer by the name of William Z. Foster, who was rather well known because, among other things, he had led the great steel strike of 1919. He was a man with a very important labor history behind him who had joined the Communist party some years before and had become its secretary. It was running as vice-president a man called [James W.] Ford, and he was a black man. Now, this in itself was very striking because what party in the United States had ever run a black man for vice-president? It was something which was a token of the best side of the communist movement at that time: namely, that it took a position, and a very firm one, against discrimination of any kind and for the equality of all peoples. Not only that but it had the principle and the, let's say, courage to nominate a black man for vice-president. This brought a very interesting response. I want to quote from a book called The Long View from the Left by Al Richmond. He says: In 1932 the list of intellectuals who endorsed the Communist presidential ticket, William Z. Foster and James W. Ford, resembled a who's who in American arts and letters.... (I'll interpolate by saying unfortunately he does not give the whole who's who. That list exists somewhere. I've seen it and I think I probably have it in my own library. But I've been unable to locate it in these days, and anybody who wants to find it would be able to research it.) But going on from the quotation: ...The committee of intellectuals for Foster and Ford staged a public meeting at Cooper Union, attracting 2000 persons who jammed the hall, and an estimated 2500 who were turned away. The program was structured to present the viewpoints of several disciplines.... Sidney Hook performed a philosopher's chore; he was chairman.... Now, if someone reads this twenty years from now they may not know that Sidney Hook, professor of philosophy for many years at NYU and now of Stanford, was one of the most prominent, articulate, active, cerebral anti-Communists from at least 1936 or '37 right on to the present, which is 1976. But here he was chairman of the Foster-Ford meeting in the fall of October '32. ...Malcolm Cowley presented the viewpoint of the critic; James Rorty, of the poet; Hugo Gellert, of the graphic artist; John Herman, of the novelist; Eugene Gordon, of the black writer. Waldo Frank also spoke but I forget whether he doubled in some category or had one of his own.... That's the end of the quotation from Richmond. I do know that one of the others who endorsed the Foster-Ford platform candidacy was Edmund Wilson, and Edmund Wilson at that time was writing in the New Republic and saying, "I'm a Marxist." Now, if we add, let's say, some hundreds of names or a hundred other names to this list, then you begin to get a sample of the temper of the time, and how many people at that time must have thought that there was a great humane promise in the leadership of the Communist party and naturally attached to it what was going on in the Soviet Union! For myself, this period, during which I was at work with my collaborator on a play, was a period of intensive reading in Marxist literature. One of the earliest books I read, a rather short book, was Friedrich Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. And for a reason that I'll explain, I was especially impressed with it. The reason is this: I would say that probably at least 50 percent of my reading of philosophy at college had to do with what's called "the problem of knowledge" or epistemology. And this was a question that philosophers wrestled with from... oh, I guess... I don't remember now whether ancient philosophers, or I'd say the Greek philosophers, wrestled with it quite as much as later philosophers beginning with Hume and Locke and others--Spencer, Bradley. But it was broadly the question of whether or not, with the senses that we have of vision, hearing, touch, taste and so on, we really get a true measure of the world; or whether, as it sifts through our senses--the sensations come through our senses to our brains--it is, let's say, refracted, as the angle of a stick may be when it's thrust into water, and that what we get is only a partial image and a distorted image of reality. Or to give another example, one could have a dream so vivid that one wakes up screaming, and yet it was nothing but a dream. So how do we know (went the extreme argument) that what we think is reality is any more than a dream we are having in our own heads? Now, philosopher after philosopher wrote books on this, wrestled with the problem. There was the famous phrase of the French philosopher Descartes, "I think therefore I am," which was his attempt in one phrase to sum up the validity of his reality. I remember something from Aquinas on the question of truth on which he had a little syllogism saying. There is no truth: therefore the proposition "there is no truth" is true, therefore there is truth. And so, very able minds struggled with this for centuries, and we who were studying the history of philosophy struggled with each philosopher in turn and learned what his thinking had been. In this book by Engels he mentions the problem of epistemology, and he has a footnote and the footnote says: man's practice had solved the problem before man's ingenuity had invented it. And it was such an intellectual shock of a delightful sort for me to read this and say, "Well, of course, that's true." When men had an idea that if they walked through a body of water they would drown, and built a bridge and safely crossed, their practice solved the problem long before some philosopher came along and said, "How do you know there's water there?" They had seen somebody drown, and they knew there was water there. And I said, well, to myself, why didn't some of the instructors of philosophy along the way make the observation: Look, this is what this philosopher was grappling with here in the eighteenth century, but, in fact, man's practice has solved the problem. The problem doesn't exist, and you can predict with science that you're going to set a fuse and that a certain building will go down with it; and if you think that maybe it's in your own mind, you get in that building if you distrust your sensations. And the fact that, just in passing, while writing a book on another subject, Engels had the intelligence and the brilliance to clear away this whole problem in one footnote was very impressive to me. It was an extraordinary credential for one of the classicists in Marxism, so far as I was concerned. But there is something else about the classic literature in Marxism which was most impressive to me, and which I think is most impressive today, and which influenced me very much, and subsequently, I would say, blinded me very much to what was going on in the Soviet Union, and it's this: if you just read the literature, it is, I think, the noblest body of literature ever penned by man, because it speaks of the abolition of every type of human exploitation. Its goals are the abolition of the exploitation of colonial countries by more developed or imperialist countries, the end of the exploitation of people of color, or of nonwhites by whites, which of course at the time, in the 1930s, when you still had the enormous empires of Britain, France, Holland, Belgium and others, you had tens of millions of people probably living under foreign domination. And it called certainly for an end to all ethnic discrimination in all countries. It called for an end to exploitation of women by men. In this respect, classic Marxist literature, and indeed the platform of the Communist party of the United States, anticipated the women's liberation thesis--not in all of its aspects, but in its fundamentals. Equal pay for equal work was a Communist party slogan back in the 1930s, 1920s. It speaks of the end of wage slavery, of wage exploitation as defined in communist economics. Its declared aims were those of human brotherhood on all levels, with mutual respect of all people for one another, and for freedom. Marx wrote, "Socialism is the kingdom of freedom." The fact that it has not turned out to be the kingdom of freedom in the Soviet Union, but in so many ways precisely the opposite, is something I came to know, as others did, later. But in terms of the literature itself, its aspirations and its advocacy, it precisely appealed to all of the idealism that not only I as a young man had but millions of other young men and women [had] in all countries of the world. And this was the reason why, in all countries of the world, you had the growth of the communist movement, and of those in it or around it who followed its leadership. Turn off for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] There was at this time as well a great deal of interest in what was going on in the Soviet Union. There had been all through the twenties a campaign of incredible slander toward the Soviet Union which found markets, I think, even in such newspapers as the New York Times. (It's noteworthy that the first book that brought Walter Lippmann to national attention was one done in collaboration, I believe, with another writer, and it was an exposé of the false stories on the Soviet Union, I believe--as a matter of fact, the false stories in the New York Times.) Because what would happen then, what would happen over the twenties, was that a reporter sitting in an office in Riga, in Latvia, and never going into Russia, the Soviet Union, would write up anything that came to his head, or anything that somebody told him. For instance, widely accepted in the United States and, I suppose, elsewhere in the world was that the advent of the communist government in Russia meant the nationalization of women. That was supposed to mean that any man could just take any woman sexually if he wanted to. And after about a decade of these stories, Lippmann's book exploded them, and apparently so demonstrably that I think he was subsequently hired by the New York Times. So that by around 1932, in addition to a continuing campaign of that sort which went on eternally in the Hearst press and in newspapers of that sort, there were also different stories being written about it. And in the meantime, people had traveled to the Soviet Union and some with reputations, such as Lincoln Steffens, came back to write about it. Steffens said, "I've seen the future and it works," a celebrated phrase of his. And other information came back: for instance, that there was free medical care, and that marriage and divorce were purely matters [to be decided by] the individuals involved, that they could marry if they wished, and they could divorce when they wished. Well, this made a great impression on, let's say, free-thinking persons in the United States because the divorce laws were much stricter then than they are now. There were many people who were caught in miserable marriages who would like to have been out of them, but there was no way, say, in New York state in which you could get a divorce short of, I don't know, being in prison like my uncle (my aunt was able to get a divorce). There were a few other situations in which you could get a divorce, but in practically no other way. I think going to Reno, Nevada, still was something, but that was for a minority of people who could afford to go, and it was just that divorce was infinitely more difficult. So to find a country that said, "Look, marriage and divorce are matters of personal decision," was very impressive. The fact is, of course, later the Soviet Union changed somewhat and made divorce somewhat more difficult. But that was the effect then. It also made a great impression that abortions were free in the Soviet Union, something that we have come to here in a good many states, although many people object to it. But it was so then, and for women who had perhaps had abortions done under very brutalizing circumstances, this was a very meaningful thing. It seemed to indicate a society run by humane people. At that time also, there were films that were very impressive that were coming out of the Soviet Union, since they had a number of filmmakers, led by Eisenstein, who were very innovative in the way they were doing films, so that just cinematically they were of profound interest. But in addition to that they had a humanism about them which was impressive. For instance, there was a film called, I think, Wild Boys of the Road [Road to Life], which was based upon a very important problem that the Soviet Union had as a result of the years of war and civil war and starvation and disease: there were innumerable orphans. And the boys, many of them, gathered in bands in which the boys, by being in a band, they were supportive; each boy was supportive of others and received support. They turned into thieves, and they stole in order to survive. They were young thugs. (Since, I've read a book about it, and apparently the film was quite true to reality.) There was a most admirable teacher who conceived of a plan of handling these boys. They were rounded up by the police, and the story of the film was made of one particular group that he led at the beginning where they were put into a decent environment in the country and given the opportunity to work, and given food, and handled with a certain kind of understanding coupled with firmness. It was such a heartwarming study of the way in which one particular boy, the leader of the group, began to change in a different environment and with different handling, and what he turned into. And the film was enormously successful amongst intellectuals at that time. Everybody that one knew said, "Go see it. It's marvelous," and, "I've seen it twice or three times." There were the classic films like Potemkin, on the fall of St. Petersburg, by Eisenstein, which were very exciting and in which one felt the excitement of those who had made the revolution against tyranny. Who can ever forget the tremendous scene in Potemkin where the soldiers in white uniforms walk down the steps firing volley after volley at the civilians, some of whom are demonstrating and some of whom are just there, or the baby carriage with a baby in it, where the mother is shot and the carriage just keeps rolling down the steps in Odessa? And there were not a few other films like that. It was a period of very great filmmaking in the Soviet Union, and with great humanism, with profound humanism, in the films. And all of this was part of what was calculated to affect me and others at this time when the situation in our own country seemed to be so lacking in hope. What the Soviet films brought was a message of hope. They didn't say, "Everything is fine here and we have no problems," but they said, "We're moving to a brighter future. And this is how we're moving and these are our values." Whereas one couldn't feel that about the United States, especially at this time before Roosevelt was elected. Once Roosevelt came in and got his programs started, a new hope did start in the United States. But this was still Hoover's time, the bleakest time. [sound interference--tape recorder turned off]

1.13. SECOND PART
(August 26, 1976)

GARDNER

You mentioned that you wanted to go back and touch some points of your college days.

MALTZ

Yes. There was something fascinating each year at college and that was a debate between the Columbia College debating team, of which my roommate was a member for two years, and either Oxford or Cambridge students, since they came in alternate years. The Columbia University students, under the guidance of some professor, would prepare themselves on aspects of the topic that had been agreed upon beforehand. They would work for months researching it and writing their speeches, coordinating ideas, and seeing to it that their speeches weren't repetitive. And then, I think, almost invariably they would memorize their speeches so that they could deliver them in perfect style. The English students obviously had not memorized their speeches, and it made no difference whether they were from Oxford or Cambridge, they had clearly read in the subject and given it some thought. They spoke extemporaneously, and invariably each one of them was witty in a way that the Columbia students were not. It was always much more delightful to listen to them than to the Columbia students, and they were always awarded the winning side (a palm leaf, or whatever you call it) in the debates. This went on, I think, all four years of my stay at college. I'm not so sure what all of the lessons are that could be drawn from that: perhaps that there is a superiority in the English school system as compared to the American; or perhaps not, because if we go into various fields of endeavor, I don't know whether per capita the endeavor of the English is that much better than the Americans'. And yet there's something there that made me want to put it down in this history. For instance, I became good friends in Mexico with a Hungarian writer [János Székely] whose pen name was John Pen. When we talked it was constantly obvious to me that the breadth of his knowledge as a graduate of a Hungarian university was far greater than mine. He knew more literature, and while that in itself could be, oh, partially explained by my concentration on philosophy, he knew more history. There were few fields in which I didn't feel that this man was just better educated than I. (I wanted to identify him before by his best-known work, published in English, and forgot it for the moment, but it is Temptation.) And this is just a passing observation on the fact that it is my general impression that if a serious student emerges from an American university, the cultural wealth that he has within himself is inferior to that of a graduate of many European universities. I'm thinking now of a Czech whom. I know; I think the same was certainly true of him. How it happens, I don't know. Now, to move to another topic.... My span of life has been such that there have been vastly more changes since I was born than there would have been if I had been born, I think, at a similar time in the nineteenth century. Of course there's no way of knowing what the years ahead will bring. But when I was a boy in Brooklyn, the fire engines were still being drawn by horses, and this continued for not a few years. I don't remember exactly when fire engines became purely automobiles, fire trucks. One of the exciting things was to run down to the corner when we heard the fire engines coming out, since there was a fire station about five blocks away from my home, because there were Dalmatian dogs attached to the fire houses, and they used to run alongside of the horses. And it was just tremendously exciting to see this pounding of these powerful horses and the dogs running along beside them. When I was a boy, also, there were very heavy snows in Brooklyn (I don't know whether the climate is the same now, or the snowfall is the same; I have the impression it may be less), and frequently there was snow packed down on the streets for weeks at a time. And local merchants, such as butchers who had deliveries to make, would have horsedrawn sleds that would cover the entire area in order to make their deliveries. Now, perhaps that was due in part because the mechanism of clearing snow from the streets was at that time vastly inferior. I don't believe there was any mechanical means whatsoever; it was just men with shovels. Probably that was a good part of it. When I moved into the house I lived in when I was three years old, there was only gas lighting. Electricity did not come in, I think, for, oh, perhaps five, seven, eight years. There was no shower bath until about the time I went to high school. Before that there was only a bath. And as a matter of fact, it was in the high school, I recall, that an instructor urged us students to abandon the time-honored policy of bathing only once a week and to take a shower every day. And it was then for the first time that I began to shower. Previous to that it was normal for members of my family to take a bath once a week. On Friday afternoon it would be my turn, and I can remember how much dirt would accumulate between my toes with all the running around and playing I did, and not bathing. I don't know how often I changed my socks, as a matter of fact. Maybe that was only once a week too. The automobile was then only in its early stages of development. The Model T came along when I was a boy. At that time there was not even a gas gauge on the front panel of a car. One had to keep a stick handy and constantly watch and go back to your gas tank and check, or else you'd stop for lack of gas. The airplanes came in primarily with World War I, and it was during that time that I saw my first plane. Radio didn't come in for people until after World War I, and I remember the excitement I had when, I think, around 1920 or so my father bought a little radio, and I stayed up as late as I could at night because that was when you could get to hear out-of-town stations. I remember the excitement with which I heard something, I believe, in St. Louis. It was tremendously exciting. Such things as pro football, basketball, and hockey didn't exist when I was a child. Perhaps the most profound change, in one way, affecting the life of human beings occurred in the realm of attitudes toward sex.

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO
AUGUST 26, 1976

GARDNER

We left off in the middle of your sex education.

MALTZ

Yes. [laughter] I was saying that the attitudes of my parents would have been formed by the prevailing level of education and also the level of society at which they lived in the 1890s: that is to say, very clearly it was Victorian. I'm sure, for instance, that my father, entering marriage around... let me see... just a moment please... [tape recorder turned off]... entering marriage around 1900, had no understanding whatsoever of the sexual needs or sensitivities of his wife. The stress that I received--the only education I received then about sex was that any indulgence in it before marriage surely resulted in venereal disease. There was never any suggestion on my father's part that I could buy condoms and avoid that. There was certainly no other education of any sort. And I remember conversation with a friend at college in which he had a lovely fantasy. There was a sister college to Columbia, Barnard, only across a wide avenue, really, from some of our buildings, but as far different that it might have been in Chicago since there was really no contact between the two student groups. My friend's fantasy was that he would have the ability to go each night to a different room in the girls' dormitory at Barnard and lay a different girl. Now, the extraordinary difference between that (and we're speaking now, say, of the year 1926) as compared to 1976, when there are dormitories in which both young men and women students live in many American universities, is of course an enormous one. And whatever else has not improved in, let's say, American life, or whatever burdens we have today of pollution that we didn't face fifty years ago in our natural environment, that is an enormous improvement, I would think, in human well-being. Now, paralleling that, there is a very fascinating change in the literary field. I think I may have mentioned that when George Sklar and I wrote Merry Go Round (this being the year 1931 when we wrote it; it went on in '32), it was very important to us at one moment in the play to have someone call another "bastard." Did I mention that?

GARDNER

No.

MALTZ

Oh, well, it was a scene where it called for an epithet like that. But, to my best knowledge, the word bastard had never been uttered in that way in the American theater before that time, and it was part of our young rebellious spirits to fight for that right to have that word said. And there was uncertainty on the part of various people connected with the production, but it was said, and we got away with it. Now, on the other hand, around the year 1935, I think, I was down in Philadelphia to, oh, make a speech on something or other in connection with a theater there, an amateur left-wing theater. That theater had done a production of a one-act play of mine, Private Hicks, before an audience consisting of union members and their wives. Now, Private Hicks probably had a few similar words in it, maybe a few damns and a few hells and so on, and the organizer of the union said to the head of the theater company that they didn't want them to come back. And the theater man said, "Well, what's wrong, didn't you like the play?" And he said, "Oh, yeah, it was a good play, but we didn't like the language in it." He said, "Well, what do you mean, the language?" He said, "Well..." and then he illustrated. And the theater man said, "Well, isn't that the way you fellows speak?" And he said, "Yeah, but when we're with our women, we don't want words like that spoken before them." Now, this was a problem that one faced culturally in the year 1935. Twelve years later, or eleven years later, in 1946, Little, Brown and Company had the opportunity to publish From Here to Eternity by Norman Mailer. The chief editor...

GARDNER

From Here to Eternity is James Jones.

MALTZ

Oh no--yes, I mean.... That's right, Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer... and the chief editor and vice-president of the firm which published me, and he was a friend of mine, wanted to publish the Mailer book, but the head of the company wouldn't do it because Mailer used the word fug repeatedly in the text. And that was in itself a startling innovation: Mailer was really very creative in deciding on using the word fug. Oh, I've forgotten something earlier. I had to fight, but I succeeded in the fight, in having in my play Black Pit, which was produced in 1935, in showing a pregnant woman with the actual silhouette of pregnancy. That also had never been shown in the American theater before, to my knowledge, and for years afterwards it was never shown in films--a pregnant woman could not be shown. You are smiling at this, and properly [so].

GARDNER

It's incredible to me. And yet, I'm smiling because I'm thinking back and making connections and realizing it's true.'

MALTZ

Yes, and you see that's one of the values of this kind of an oral history. Because you wouldn't think of it, but having experienced it, I know that it took place. As a matter of fact, when we come to a discussion of films, I really should have here the Hays Code as to the kinds of things you could and could not do. While I'm at it, for instance, you could not all through the twenties and the thirties and the forties and, I believe, the fifties, and I don't know when it stopped, you could not show a husband and wife in the same bed: you had to have twin beds. And so many of these changes occurred after World War II and increasingly as the years went into the fifties and sixties. This becomes all the more interesting when you contrast it with cultural attitudes in different countries. For instance, I was told in the thirties that German literature, which I don't read in the original, had all of the words that we were not allowed to have. I'd like to have that checked by someone, but I do know from an American who has been living in China since the late forties, and with whom I was in correspondence in the fifties, that in China at that time there was no word that was forbidden for anyone to say. Anyone of any age said any word that existed in the language. This is still different, say, in France, where there has been for years much greater license to use words but where certain words continue to be really too vulgar to be said. Apparently nothing is too vulgar to be said in China; but on the screen, at least in the fifties, a man and a woman could not kiss. So these cultural elements vary and change in different societies at different times, and we finally have come to, let's say, the word enlightenment that other countries reached long before us. It was just last night that I picked up a magazine that I suppose I have read something in three or four times in my life, and that's McCall's magazine. I saw it near my wife's bed, and I saw that it had a couple of short stories in it, and I wanted to read it. I was just flabbergasted to see the word fuck in McCall's magazine. Now, I don't know when it came into usage there, but not having seen it for a great many years, I would never have expected that it would be there. And so it is that language changes. And now turn a page and get to 1932.... [tape recorder turned off] In the summer of 1932, while George Sklar and I were in Hollywood, the tremendously important Bonus Expeditionary Force march occurred in Washington. This was a gathering of thousands of World War I veterans in Washington asking that they be given a $300 bonus each, which had been promised them for the year 1945 by some legislation that had already been passed. (Now, I'm not absolutely sure it was $300. I think it was, I'm not quite sure, but I may be a little bit in error on that.) There certainly was organization of Right, Center, and Left behind the coming of these veterans to Washington, but they wouldn't have come if there hadn't been an enormous, spontaneous response on the part of individual veterans of all shades of political ideas, or of no political ideas, to the slogan of Give Us the Bonus Now. On June 7 some 7,000 veterans paraded in Washington. Now, if you realize that this was summer of '32, and, let's say, a good many of these men had been demobilized as veterans in, say, the summer of 1918, you've had fourteen years pass during which a great many of them were members of the American Legion, which stood for everything patriotic and nationalist in the United States; and yet here in this economic crisis, many of them were workingmen without jobs, and farmers who had lost farms, and white-collar workers who had lost jobs, and they came to plead with their government for some money. The parade was not interfered with, but it was clear that the officials of the government. with the president then being Herbert Hoover, wanted them to go home after their parade. But instead of going home, they began to build shacks in a nearby area called Anacostia Flats, next to the Anacostia River. They also got the use of a good many tents, and I don't know who supplied the tents. By the end of the week of June 7, 4,000 more veterans had poured into Washington. In mid-June, some of these veterans had moved into certain vacant sites near the city center, not too far from the Capitol and the White House. Increasingly in those weeks, the press in general played a role of fomenting hysteria about the presence of these veterans in Washington. Increasingly they were called Reds. One banner headline said that dynamite had been seized at the Anacostia camp. Some vets coming in a boxcar through close-by Alexandria, Virginia, were declared to have been carrying arms, and it was asserted that they were disarmed. To my best knowledge, these headlines were fabrications, and they were part of the right-wing, deeply reactionary attitudes of the publishers of most newspapers at that time. And as a result of this campaign and of other factors, on July 28 cavalry and tanks under General MacArthur drove the bonus marchers out of Washington, with bayonets and gas grenades. Two babies died because of the gassing (since some families had come along with the ex-soldiers), and two of the men died by bullets fired by the police. This sent an enormous shock wave through the entire country, and was something that orators would always refer to throughout the thirties: these men had fought for their country, and yet this was how they were being treated. And it was events like this that helped radicalize me. In the fall of that year, there was another such event. I have mentioned the Unemployed Councils which were led by Communists, but of course there would have been no one in them if the Communists who were leading them had been advocating policies that the people in them didn't like. I mention this, and perhaps I'll pause over it for a moment, because even people who pretend to be serious scholars have often accepted a kind of a myth about the communist movement: that somehow Communists conspire behind the scenes and thereby successfully influence people to do certain things. In a curious way this is the other side of the coin from the Hitler thesis that international Jewish bankers manipulated England and France and the United States into doing certain things. How this manipulation occurred is explained in neither situation. It is just a myth. As an excellent example of this myth, at lunch I was reading about a period through which I lived, but about events of which I remembered little because I hadn't participated in them, and that was the activities of the Theater Arts Committee in the Left theater in New York. It was enormously successful. It was a movement to do skits and songs and burlesque and review material before audiences in nightclubs, and it attracted a great many people in the theater at that time. Maybe later, when I come to discussing the thirties, I'll read the names of some of the people who were involved, because it is very interesting. But after the Soviet-Nazi pact of August 1939, when this group, which had been led by Communists, also supported the line of the Communist party, practically all of its membership fell away. It suddenly lost its ability to "manipulate" people, to cunningly make them follow its will. Obviously people don't go where they don't want to go. But if the abolitionists at a given period, or the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] at another period, or the Roosevelt New Deal at another period offers a program that people need, then they will follow it. And so now I come back to the leadership of the Communists in the Unemployed Councils. Those unemployed by the many thousands who joined the councils would not have had anything to do with it if the leadership had been proposing slogans and programs that they didn't like. And in 1932, in the fall, there was a mobilization on the part of the Unemployed Councils to travel to Washington from all over the United States in order to present certain demands to the government for aid to the unemployed. Now, it was called a march but in fact the men and women who went on it came in trucks. Of course, to go in a truck from California or Texas to Washington is no small matter. Sometimes I believe there were places en route in which homes were found where they could sleep through a night, perhaps have a bath, but often they were passing through alien territory or unfriendly territory, and there was no such opportunity. And so people slept in the trucks, and perhaps there were two drivers and they just drove day and night. I don't remember any longer, and I haven't been able to pause to research, find out how many thousands finally arrived in Washington, but there were hundreds of trucks and I would think.... Those who came were delegates from councils, each delegate representing 50, 25, 100, 200 people, I have no idea anymore. But I would think there probably were at least 1,500, 1,000, or 2,000 people who came; I don't think it was any more [than that]. There had been a request on the part of the Unemployed Council in New York and several other eastern cities for professionals to go down to Washington in support of this hunger march, and I was one of a group that came down from New York. When the trucks came together and the first trucks came along, they were directed by the Washington police in such a way that they ended up on what was called a viaduct. Now, I've looked up--it was an unfinished viaduct--I've looked that up and the word viaduct speaks of a crossing over a bridge. I don't remember whether this crossed over a bridge. I remember a very large expanse of concrete with kind of a steep hill on one side, very steep, and a rolling rise on the other, and I remember it more as a kind of an unfinished freeway. But in any instance, it was quite easy for the police, once having directed the trucks into this area, to then bottle them up so that there was no escape for them; they could not go forward or backward, and they couldn't drive to either side. And there they were kept. It was very cold. I remember at night that the police had bonfires--those in front and on the side, on the rolling side, had bonfires--and they stood around it, as a matter of fact, doing a good deal of drinking. The people were not able to make bonfires because there was no wood for them. In addition to the cold they had the fatigue of their rides, a good many of them for very long distances. A lot of them suffered from a kind of truck sickness, which turned out, I think, pretty much to be constipation, because they hadn't been able to make regular stops. And although they were bottled up there, no sanitary facilities were provided for them. And as a result, when the women walked off into this rolling area, they were subjected to the jibes of policemen who were lined up there. The action of the government and police in doing this was not wholly approved of by the newspapers. I remember at least one cartoon in one paper in which it showed a small group of people in their trucks and surrounding them on all sides, a ridiculous number of planes, tanks, soldiers, howitzers, machine guns, and so on. It made absurd what had been done for them. I remember having dinner one night at the home of Robert Allen, the columnist, political columnist, who was in fact the brother of Paul Peters, one of the playwrights who was a member of the Theatre Union, which I have yet to describe. And he was upset by the unnecessary cruelty and hysteria surrounding this event and was doing all he could with people in Congress whom he knew to try and get the situation changed. One tiny grace note, for those who may have read something by Edward Dahlberg: there was an office of the Unemployed Councils in Washington, and a number of us assembled there one day to do various things in an effort to relieve the situation of the people in the viaduct. I know that I took on the task of writing a leaflet. I sat down at a typewriter (although that was not my normal way of writing), and after I had been there about a minute or two or three, I was rudely pushed away from the typewriter, physically pushed away by Dahlberg, who said, "You don't know how to write a leaflet." And although my immediate reaction was to clip him in the jaw for the way he had handled me--mishandled me--I didn't [laughter] because of the common purpose and the circumstances. Whether he wrote a satisfactory leaflet, I have no idea. But this is rather typical of our friend Dahlberg. [laughter] There was one afternoon in which rather an extraordinary thing occurred. When it became clear that the hunger marchers were not going to be allowed their march in Washington, the leadership, headed by a man called Herbert Benjamin (whom I subsequently met some years later, more than ten years later, I guess, and was then no longer politically active)--but, led by him, the marchers assembled and said that they were going to have their march on the viaduct. As I recall, there was much on this in the previous twenty-four hours in the newspaper about what the police would do if they attempted to break through the police lines. And long before the hour at which this was to take place (it was in the daytime), the lines of the police were heavily reinforced. So that when the march started, the police were there with rifles to their shoulders, and shotguns, and I don't recall whether or not they had machine guns as well. The marchers, moving from about 400 yards or so, as I best recall, away from the police lines, moved steadily toward them, I suppose singing a song like "Solidarity Forever" (whether or not they had any musical instruments, I don't recall). And yard by yard, as they approached the police lines and as the safety catches were pushed off on the weapons, the situation became more and more tense. But then about perhaps ten yards from the police lines, the leading line swung around and moved back, and the whole line of marchers turned. It was not, I think, an empty gesture; on the contrary, for these men and women who had been locked up and kept in miserable circumstances for a number of days and nights (I don't remember how long), it was a gesture of their defiance and their determination that they would continue to struggle for what they wanted. I think it was that night that Michael Blankfort, who had been the producer of Merry Go Round and was with us, did something which required a lot of nerve and a lot of feeling. The chief of police came to the viaduct to look over the situation. I believe that there had been some agreement (I'm not sure of this) beforehand that women could be taken out and put into homes that the Unemployed Council in Washington had secured for them. Blankfort just said that he was a member of the Civil Liberties Union, and I remember the chief of police immediately cautioning several of his underlings that the Civil Liberties Union was a different kind of an outfit from the Red organizations. And from then on he consulted with Blankfort about what to do, and I know that through Blankfort's intercession in this nervy role things were speeded up. I believe more people got out than would have because I think it was a question not just of women but of those men who were ill. I recall at the time that a black church was put at the disposal of the Unemployed Councils where the people could lie on the floor or be on chairs or benches, and where there was some warmth... and toilets. At the same time, this being the sort of interplay that occurs in such situations, about every third or fourth taxi going out past the police lines had its tires pierced by ice picks, so that they came to a halt within a few yards and had to change a tire. I do remember another little footnote: that was the first time I ever saw Michael Gold. He was there with a rather large group that had come down from New York, and I saw him taking voluminous notes during the days that the people were bottled up there. And if ever someone looked like a "proletarian" writer, it was Michael Gold--very handsome in a craggy way. And I would have said, surely out of this will come some wonderful book, since by that time I had read his fine book Jews Without Money and thought that he had a big talent. Jews Without Money was really an autobiographical book rather than a novel. And Gold did have talent, but, as I discovered later, he completely lacked what the greatest majority of writers must have, and that's the dedication to his work--a dedication to his work sufficient to command him to write and rewrite until what he was after was good. I later came to know a woman who had lived with him for a number of years and she explained how he would write. He would write a short story and give it to her to read, and she would say, "I like it, Mike, but I think it would be improved if you would do such and such and such and such." And he would say, "Yes, you are right." And then some weeks later, she might say, "What happened to that story? Did you rewrite it?" And he'd say, "No, I decided not to rewrite it. I just sent it out to a magazine. If they want to print it, let them; if not, to hell with it." He just didn't have within him the ability to sit and work at a piece of material. As a result, his life consisted mainly just of journalism in which he did some fine things and some things that were not fine. But it's a very interesting sidelight on one of the aspects of writing since there was no question of his basic talent. This is all that I want to say about that particular incident of the Unemployed Councils. But like the bonus march, it was such a cruel example of naked repression that it continued for me the radicalizing process. Because there was no reason whatsoever why 1,000 to 2,000 people could not have marched in Washington. They were not dangerous. They had no weapons. Even if every one of them had had a machine gun, they were still helpless before the might of the U.S. Army and the police force and the FBI and whatever else. It was just ridiculous to treat them that way, and it seemed as though everything that one might read in the Daily Worker or the New Masses about the cruelty of capitalism was being played out before one's eyes. During this year and beginning in the previous year, I believe, and to continue on for some years after, there was the terrible case of the nine Scottsboro boys, ranging in age I think from fourteen to about eighteen, who had all been accused of raping two white girls on a railroad train moving through Alabama. The youngsters had denied the rape, and it was quite conclusively proved later that they were innocent of it, but they were held guilty and.... Were they all sentenced to death? All of them except perhaps the youngest. There is much source material on this, so I don't have to bother to verify it. But it was a terrible case, and the case took a sharp turn in the year '32, or '33 I think, when one of the two girls. Ruby Bates, repudiated her testimony after seeing the Protestant clergyman, Fosdick, in New York City, and said that it had not been true. I subsequently met her and spoke on a platform with her, and I'll deal with that when the time comes. But inasmuch as the horror and disgrace and undemocratic nature of racial discrimination was one of the earliest aspects of my social awareness, I was especially sensitive to this issue of the Scottsboro boys. I know I gave money to their legal defense. I'm sure I signed petitions for them. I seem to remember that I did some public speaking for them, but I'm not absolutely sure of it. You want to...? [tape recorder turned off] At this point, in order to present what my own psychology was, I'd like to mention some facts about the world in which I was living. And I would say--emphasize--I was living day to day; by that I mean that each day's newspapers brought with them new horrors. Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. He became chancellor not because he had the majority of votes of the people--he didn't. Because in the last election, before he became chancellor, his total vote had fallen, I believe, from 38 percent to 32 percent. His was the largest party of all the parties, but it was not a majority party. However, he was offered the chancellorship by President Hindenburg and he accepted. I want to refer now to a book on the history of that period, before and later, called The Cold War and Its Origins by D.F. Fleming. This is a very long, two-volume work which begins in the year 1917 and goes to 1960. Professor Fleming is a professor emeritus at the moment of Vanderbilt University. And I think that this is the most objective and perhaps most extraordinary work of political history that I've ever read. The man's knowledge and sources are enormous, his presentation extraordinarily clear, his ability to sum up a year on a page is unusual, and it is, I think, an indispensable reference work for the years that he covered. He says about this period before Hitler took power the following: "With equal blindness the Kremlin continued to support the German Communists in their fratricidal war with the German Socialists, until Hitler mastered both of them." I want to stop and comment on that because I have a strong belief about it that I haven't particularly seen expressed elsewhere. (For all I know, it has been expressed many times, and I merely have not read it elsewhere.)

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE
AUGUST 26, 1976

GARDNER

You were about to....

MALTZ

What Fleming was referring to is the policy that the German Communists pursued from the 1920s right through to Hitler's accession to power--a policy called "social fascism." Now, the origin of this policy came about in 1918 or '19 when there was an unsuccessful revolt in Germany led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. This was in the period after the disastrous German defeat in World War I, and I believe it was called the Spartacus rebellion [Sparticist revolt--January 1919] (I can't be sure of that without looking up the data). In any instance, it was decidedly a Communist-led revolt, which was put down in very bloody fashion by the government (which was then, as I recall, in the hands of the Social Democratic party). As a result of this action, the Communist International, which was an association of all Communist parties led by the Communist party in the Soviet Union, and therefore by Stalin himself, adopted a political line which declared that the Socialist leadership was not Socialist but was social fascist. Under this political line. Communists should always try to have association and political unity with rank-and-file Socialists, but never with the Socialist leadership. The result of this, of course, was to maintain and deepen the hostility between the Socialist and Communist leaderships. In addition, the Socialists had been, before the war--and continued to be after the war--the leaders of the German trade unions. I think I might add something. There was a great betrayal of the working class, the organized working class of Europe in World War I, and this is how it occurred. Shortly before World War I, the First International of working-class parties, led by the Socialists, met and declared that in the event of war the Socialists and Socialist-led workers would not support their own governments: that they wanted peace, and they didn't want to participate in the slaughter of workers from other countries. But, in fact, when World War I broke out, all of the Socialist parties of Europe without exception supported their own governments. And throughout the four years of World War I, there was the spectacle of Socialists from Germany shooting at Socialists from France, and workers of France killing workers of Germany, and so on. And this, too, lay behind the doctrine adopted by the Communist International of social fascism. As a result of this doctrine, the German Communists established German-led trade unions, and those Socialist workers who followed the Communist party broke away from the Socialist unions and joined the Communist unions; and others who were not Communist party members joined the Communist unions. But the Socialists still continued to lead by far the strongest unions as a whole. This action and this doctrine on the part of the Communist International and the German Communist party, however much it may have been justified in their minds when it originated, had clearly become out of date when the rise of the Hitler movement and its growing strength quite obviously threatened but the Socialist and the Communist parties, and the intellectuals and others in Germany. Two neighbors may have been deeply hostile for a long time, but if a fire comes into their area that threatens to burn both their houses down, it is certainly the part of stupidity if they don't join hands to try and put the fire out. The Communists did not join hands with the Socialists, not with their leadership. As a matter of fact, very late in the game, on some tricky issue or another, the Communists voted side by side with the Nazis in the Reichstag. Now, the failure to perceive that the situation had changed enormously and that a peace had to be made with the Socialist leadership against a greater common enemy was directly the result of Comintern policy, or the Communist International policy. (For the moment I forget: there's a differentiation between Comintern and Communist International, and I forget it. Maybe Comintern was later than the Communist International.) But the Communist International policy, in turn, had been formulated by Stalin and could be changed only by Stalin, because such was Stalin's grasp on the entire international Communist movement. Now, I don't know the history of Germany intimately enough, but I would say just offhand that I wouldn't absolve the Socialist leadership of certain failures it must have probably committed in that period. But it does seem to me, as I look, back upon it, that the prime reason for the continued disunity of Socialists and Communists in the face of the rise of Hitler was the policy enunciated, the policy formulated by Stalin and kept in command for far too long. In March 23, 1933--that is just about three months after he became chancellor--Hitler was given dictatorial powers.

GARDNER

How aware were you of not simply Hitler's succession--which was of course in the papers and so on--but of the interplay of the Communists, Nazis, and so forth at the time? And how much of this was sort of review?

MALTZ

At that time I was certainly not aware of what I have just been talking about. As a matter of fact, I would say that I had not formulated the culpability of Stalin in all of this until, oh, three, four years ago. I hadn't dwelt on it, or I hadn't formulated it. I think perhaps it was the reading of the Fleming book about three years ago that brought about this realization. And I haven't tested what I have just put down here, what I've just spoken, with some friends who would have some knowledge of the period and ideas of their own. I expect to do so with someone in the course of the next week or so, and I will be interested to see whether I change my mind at all. But for the moment it's in order and I want to put it down. Hitler received dictatorial powers after the carefully staged burning of the German parliament, the Reichstag, by the Nazis (who blamed it upon the Communists), and after the forcible dissolution of all other parties, except the National Socialist party, and of the trade unions, and of the immediate outbreak of violence that began with the official and unofficial arrest of Communist and Socialist trade union leaders and various left-wing intellectuals, the beatings and torture that began in Nazi headquarters, and the open violence against Jews. I am not going here to go into that because anyone reading this oral history who wants more information will have more than enough sources to which to go. But I merely want to register these things as horrors on an enormous scale that affected my consciousness and passions and that of, I think, many millions of others. On May 10 the same year, 1933, there was another terrible, terribly shocking event: the burning of books that the Nazis staged opposite the University of Berlin. You want to shut off for a moment, I want to get.... [tape recorder turned off] Many of the books tossed into the flames in Berlin that night by the joyous students [Nazi students, of course] under the approving eye of Dr. Goebbels, had been written by authors of world reputation. (I'm quoting now from William Shirer, page 241, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.) They included, among German writers, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jakob Wassermann, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr, and Hugo Preuss, the last named being the scholar who had drafted the Weimar Constitution. But not only the works of dozens of German writers were burned. A good many foreign authors were also included: Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, H.G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, Arthur Schnitzler, Freud, Gide, Zola, Proust. In the words of a student proclamation, any book was condemned to the flames which acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces of our people. I just want to pause and say that, while not at all subscribing to the belief (that not a few people have) that the Communist dictatorship in Russia, or let's say the Stalinist dictatorship and the Nazi dictatorship are the same (because I don't believe this at all), nevertheless, in the insistence on books that serve the state, there is an identity here of policy. Now, it is true that you will find a Jack London and Upton Sinclair and H.G. Wells and Zola and Proust in the Lenin Library in Moscow. But I think it is also true that you would not find Freud: he would probably be restricted to maybe a psychological library, and you'd have to get permission to read him. Nor would you find Havelock Ellis on the general lists there. However, the important thing is the shock that my friends and I felt at this burning of books and burning of authors we cherished, and what it meant about the Nazi system. I remember that I attended a meeting of the John Reed Club at which protests were voted and sent to the German government about this book burning and about the arrest of certain figures we had heard about. (The John Reed Club, incidentally, was a literary cultural organization with branches in various cities in the United States, organized by the Communist party. I forget just when it was organized. It was around when I came down to live in New York after Yale, and I went to some of its meetings, and I know I was present at this one.) Later that year, both Japan and Germany resigned from the League of Nations. And while the League of Nations had not proved to be the international organization that President Wilson had hoped it would be, nevertheless its seat in Geneva was a place where nations could meet and talk and debate, and there was something clearly ominous about the decision of Japan and Germany to resign. Can we just turn it off for a moment? [tape recorder turned off] In the United States, during this period of the coming to power of fascism in Germany, there was quite an opposite phenomenon--the assumption of office by Franklin Roosevelt and the beginnings of the New Deal. [It is] perhaps illustrative of the differences between the two countries that some of the instructors I had known at college, like Rexford Guy Tugwell, who had taught a couple of classes that I had, and Raymond Moley, went to Washington as important advisers to Roosevelt. And various students who had become attorneys, whose decency and humanity I knew, went down to Washington to work in the agriculture department and in other phases of government. And certainly, contrary to the burning of books, you had a significant cultural advancement under Roosevelt when the government sponsored the WPA theater and dance and art projects in an effort to give artists a minimum amount of support in those very difficult economic times. What resulted from this action under Roosevelt was quite a burgeoning of artistic activity. I still have on my shelves the magnificent WPA set of guidebooks about all of the different states in the United States which were written by writers under the project and which researched all aspects of every state in the union. And it was under WPA that the United States made one of its two rather unique contributions to dramaturgy that I know about, and that was the living newspaper, which was a very exciting form of journalistic drama, which we could use in the theater today, but it perhaps would be too expensive for commercial production. The only other American contribution that I know of which was, let's say, decidedly American was the development of the musical comedy in the form that we know it here. At the same time, during these early years of the Roosevelt New Deal and stretching right up throughout the thirties, reaching a peak in '37 and '38, there were labor struggles for elementary rights, the right to form a union, an independent union, being the most fundamental one. Because in that period in American life many of the industrial companies formed their own unions; this was their way of trying to assure their workers that they were indeed a member of the union. in fact, these unions were responsive not to the needs of the workers but to the needs of the company. And so they were called company unions. Side by side with that, there was a tremendous use, by large companies especially, of detective agencies and hired thugs to see to it that no independent unions were formed. To be a union member at that time, let's say in the year 1934, in auto, or in steel, or in electrical manufacturing plants, or among seamen, to be a member, that is to say, of an independent union was first of all to be a secret member. If you did not keep your membership secret, you were liable from anything to being fired from your job and being blacklisted throughout the given industry in which you worked to a beating, to death. And all of these occurred to individuals whose membership in unions was discovered. And since my sympathies lay with all of those men and women who worked on jobs where their wages might be thirty cents an hour; where the conditions of their work were such that often they were not given permission even to go to the toilet; where there was a great lack of safety devices of all sorts so that the accident rate, from lost fingers to corroded lungs to death, was enormously higher than it need have been.... At this point I find I don't remember how I began my sentence, but I'll let you do some editing to fix it up. Unless we want to reverse and let me hear.... But I'm painting a picture, in brief, as I wanted to be, of industrial conditions where my sympathy lay with the working people, who were being frightfully exploited and abused. Throughout this entire year, the Scottsboro case continued, and it was in March of this year that Ruby Bates reversed her testimony and said she had not been raped by the Scottsboro boys. And I believe that it was in the year 1933 that another case came up and got national attention--and that was the Angelo Herndon case. Angelo Herndon was a young black man (it so happens an exceedingly handsome man) who was framed on some charge or other (I don't remember what anymore, and I haven't paused for research), but he was finally freed, as the Scottsboro boys were saved from death, by the intercession of the International Labor Defense. Now, I mention this because once again we find an organization with Communists in leadership and control. It took principle and it took courage for attorneys of the ILD to go into the Deep South, in the face of what the Deep South was in the year 1932 and '33, where lynching could be the price they paid, and there to fight in court against a frame-up of black men. And I was aware of the nature of the ILD and what it was accomplishing. Nineteen thirty-three was also a year of considerable, very profound, personal importance to me. My father became fatally ill in January. It was the recurrence of a cancer which had been dealt with surgically in the summer before, and he died early in February. And in October my mother, who had fallen ill some months later, also died. Very strangely, she died on my twenty-fifth birthday, and it was on my thirty-ninth birthday that I testified in Washington before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (a double coincidence which I just happened to recognize when I was writing these notes). In that year, when personal affairs permitted, George Sklar and I continued our work on the play Peace on Earth, and in the spring of that year, 1933, it was accepted by the Executive Board of the Theatre Union for production as its first play. We had revisions to do, which we promptly began to work on and which we worked on through the summer. In the spring, and at various times during the summer and in the early fall, one of the things that I did was to read the play to groups of individuals, who would be gathered in a home, in order that we might raise money. We'd say, "Here's the play we want to do, and what money can you give us?" And in September we began casting the play. And now I want to go into the whole story of the Theatre Union, which played an important part in my life in those years. [tape recorder turned off] I was a member of the Theatre Union Executive Board from the time that serious planning first began on the part of the Executive Board in the fall of 1932 until the time that we dissolved the theater, through our inability to handle its mounting debt, in the summer of 1937--almost five years of very intensive work, and a period important in my life, and so I want to give relevant information as briefly as I can. The leading spirit in the organization of the theater was Charles Rumford Walker, who was a man in his early forties when the theater began. And although others who joined the theater board were of great importance in its functioning, I don't think the theater would have come into existence without Walker because he was the man who raised most of the money for our first several productions, particularly the first. He was able to do this because he was a Yale graduate and numbered some wealthy men among his friends. George Sklar was also a Yale graduate but had not had friends on the same economic level as Charles Walker. The group that came together was an interesting one because, unlike those who made up the directorship of the Group Theatre or the Theatre Guild, all of whom were theater people, only a portion of the Executive Board of the Theatre Union was made up of people whose prime interest and training had been in the theater: these were George Sklar, Paul Peters, Michael Blankfort, and myself, and within another year, Victor Wolfson. But important in the Executive Board were Mary Fox, who was a leading member of the Socialist party and a director of an organization called the League for Industrial Democracy, and Samuel Friedman, another member of the Socialist party who was, I believe, one of the editors of the New Leader. [Then there was] Listen Oak, who was a Communist party member and who worked in different mass organizations in one leadership capacity or another, minor leadership, and Manuel and Sylvia Gomez. Sylvia Gomez was an actress without much of a career behind her, but that was her orientation. Manuel Gomez had been a Communist party member until about five years before and had been one of the leaders of some anti-imperialist organization during the twenties when the United States sent troops into Nicaragua and other Latin American countries. He was now, under another name, a columnist in the Wall Street Journal, of all places. And finally, there was a former newspaperwoman and trade union publicist, Margaret Larkin. Now, I go into these different names because, although they are mentioned in at least one of the books that I am going to mention myself here, they aren't mentioned with the real meaning of these names made clear. This was a unique coming together of people who had training as organizational leaders, but not specifically in the theater, although they were interested in the theater, and of those who had training in the theater but no organizational experience. And the day after our first production opened, this peculiar meld began to take on an unusual dynamic--something I think that had probably never been seen before in the American professional theater. There's perhaps another reason for my going into this in the way I'm going to: the records of the Theatre Union, for the most part, were given to the New York Public Library when the organization ceased to exist, and then by the New York library to the library of Lincoln Center. And a scholar whom I know in New York had occasion to look at these records about five or six years ago. He told me that they were in an absolutely deplorable state: that they are so faded and they've been so badly kept that they're likely pretty soon just to fall to pieces. And so I want to use this opportunity to give my point of view of what I remember about this organization. Now, I do want to mention that there are a number of books that I'm aware of (and perhaps some that I'm not aware of) that deal with the Theatre Union as part of a study of the theater in the United States in the 1930s. The two best of these books that I know are The Political Stage, by Malcolm Goldstein (published by Oxford University Press), and Stage Left, by Jay Williams (published by Scribner's). Absolutely the worst is a book called Drama Was a Weapon by Morgan Himelstein (published by Rutgers University Press). [Another] one, of which I haven't read much, but the little I've read dismays me, although it may be that the author had certain things of value in it, [is] called People's Theatre in Amerika. America is spelled A-M-E-R-I-K-A, and anything spelled that way impresses me badly. This is, I suppose, an author of the New Left in the sixties and, as I understand it, the spelling of America in that way is supposed to indicate that America is a fascist country. And the author of this nonsensical title is Karen Malpede Taylor. I'll have more to say about the Himelstein book as I go on. It's very interesting to see the list of people who were willing to have their names used as part of the advisory board of the Theatre Union. Now, in fact, I doubt whether very much advice came from these individuals. Advisory board [is] another name, really, for sponsors, or "Go ahead, fellas, we hope you do well." But among the advisers, among the advisory board, were Sherwood Anderson, Paul Muni the actor (very celebrated then), John Dos Passes, Elmer Rice, Edmund Wilson, Morrie Ryskind (who later became a very bitter, savage, anti-Communist columnist), Roger Baldwin (one of the heads of the American Civil Liberties Union), and Stephen Vincent Benét. And this is a comment on the temper of the times. It has for me the same meaning as the list of names, the partial list of names I read earlier, of those who supported William Z. Foster and James Ford for the presidency in the fall of 1932. There had been for some years in the United States a number of left-wing theaters, which called themselves by different names and were all amateur theaters. And for the most part, they talked rather than did: they discussed theory; they tried to train themselves in acting; they tried to write. And where they produced material it tended to be what was called agitprop theater. Agitprop comes from the larger words agitational propaganda, and it was a form of theater that frequently could be very effective and very interesting and was modeled after left-wing educational theater, really, that had been produced in Germany by workers' groups before Hitler's coming to power.

1.16. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO
AUGUST 26, 1976

MALTZ

The word propaganda has a different meaning in Europe than it has in the United States. Here we tend to regard propaganda as something that is self-serving to the organization or person who puts it out, and likely not to be true. But in Europe it has more the sense of educational. If, for instance, one were to take a lyric by Bertolt Brecht, with music by Hanns Eisler or Kurt Weill, and sing that from the back of a truck in a street meeting, that would be called an agitprop presentation. But in fact it was, let's say, just an attempt to educate on a social or political theme, and these amateur groups sometimes did some interesting work in that way. But the Theatre Union board was composed of individuals who had a different goal, and that was to create a professional theater that would aspire to the theatrical excellence of the Group Theatre, because we were admirers of the Group Theatre's high standards of acting, directing, and general presentation; but we wanted to be more consistent in dealing with plays of social importance. When I refer to plays of social importance, the words should not be construed narrowly. We were living at a time when the failures of society, not only in the United States but in all the countries of the world, which were also suffering from a depression, impinged with terrible force daily on the lives of millions upon millions of human beings. Social problems were everywhere about us, were in every newspaper we opened every morning, and we felt that there should be theater that dealt with these problems. It was not, let's say, that if I went to Broadway myself and saw a delicious farce comedy like Three Men on a Horse that I wouldn't laugh and wouldn't say, "Well, of course there is a place in the theater for such plays." But rather we felt that there was a lack in the theater of plays that also dealt with the lives of working people who made up the largest percentage of the American population; and yet their lives, their conflicts, problems, hopes, ambitions, failures were scarcely ever mirrored in the American theater. And just as a novelist like Zola can be considered a social novelist, so, let's say for myself, I hoped to be a social playwright at that time, and we on the Executive Board hoped to make the Theatre Union a theater of social importance. I might say just in passing that there was really a long history to such theater: not a few of the plays of Ibsen have dealt with social problems--a play like An Enemy of the People, a play like A Doll's House; not a few of Galsworthy's plays--Justice, The Silver Box, The Skin Game, Foundations--dealt with social problems, and I could go on and on in mentioning this. Nevertheless, for this time in American theater, the program, or the goal of the Theatre Union, was something fresh and of course came out of the convulsive events of the Depression. We published a statement--or probably more than one statement, but the only one I have on hand--expressing our point of view is the following: "We produce plays that deal boldly with the deep-growing social conflicts, the economic, emotional, and cultural problems that confront the majority of the people. Our plays speak directly to this majority whose lives usually are caricatured or ignored on stage. We do not expect that these plays will fall into accepted social patterns. This is a new kind of professional theater based on the interests and hopes of the great mass of working people." As I go through my discussion of the Theatre Union plays, I will comment on the extent to which I think we realized this objective and the extent to which we didn't. There were several specific practical policies that the Theatre Union developed that need to be mentioned. First of all, and something that we who were members of it can remain proud of, we ended all seating discrimination in the American theater. Until the first Theatre Union play came on, even in New York City all black people who wanted to go to a play had to sit in the balcony; they were not permitted in the orchestras of any theater in New York City. We ended that with our first play, and although it was not immediately copied by the other theaters, I believe it may have been copied fairly soon by the Group Theatre. And during World War II, it was copied by the other theaters because it was part of the national push against fascism, and the stress on American democracy to do so. But this is something that we started. Secondly, the members of the Executive Board worked without any remuneration whatsoever. And the actors, the director of a given play, and the staff whom we needed to run the organization day by day (a small staff but it was a staff) worked for forty dollars a week. The forty dollar figure was chosen because that was the minimum that the actors' union, [Actors' Equity, would permit professional actors to work for. And so, taking the forty dollar minimum, which was all we could afford for our actors, we gave the same salary to our executive director and to the publicity person and so on. (And, I might say, to the janitor, the one who cleaned out the Theatre Union and who was kind of a watchman--he received the same salary.) When we had some stars, as we did for certain plays--for instance, in our first play a very well-known actor, Robert Keith; in our second play, Tom Powers, who was associated with the Theatre Guild and many of its important productions--[they] received the same salary, forty dollars. We established a ticket price of a maximum of $1.50 in the first half of the orchestra at a time when in Broadway the equivalent seats were $3.30; the balance of the orchestra was $1.00. The first balcony was seventy-five cents and fifty cents, and the second balcony, because it was a very large theater seating 1,100 or 1,200 people, was thirty-five cents. And we also had a policy, once we began to perform, of appealing to the audience between acts for any contributions they wanted to give on their way out so that free tickets could be given to members of unemployed organizations. And whether or not we got the contributions, whenever there was room in our house we always distributed free tickets to members of Unemployed Councils--or unemployed organizations, because we didn't select the Communist-led as against the Socialists; we gave equally. We also developed something very interesting. There had been in the New York theater before (and I don't know how many years before) the practice of selling benefits from time to time to different organizations that might want to take over a house or a portion of a house. But we developed this into a very fine art. Because there were in the whole perspective of the Left, and this includes all stripes of people, many organizations--sometimes rather small ones, sometimes large, and constantly proliferating in that period in the thirties--organizations that needed money. Consequently, if we had a given chapter of the Socialist LID or of a Communist group or of a civil liberties group that wanted to take anywhere from 50 to 100 to 500 tickets to 800 tickets, we would give them those tickets at half-price. Selling at half-price, we were able to keep going. But they could then sell their tickets at the regular rate to their members; they would make the difference of the half-price as profit for their little organization or their large organization. We sold them to trade union groups trying to raise money. And in this way, by the time we had finished the first two plays we had about ten weeks of benefits sold in advance of the raising of a curtain. Now, that does not mean that we had every seat for the ten weeks sold out (for the performances of ten weeks), but what we did have was a sufficient number of benefits sold that we could sell them up through a ten-week period and know that we would get enough individual tickets sold to fill the house sufficiently to keep our play going. Now, when we did that we were also able, by the time of the third play and even before, by the second, to start to use that advance benefit money to raise the curtain on our plays. Because raising money to start each new play was a big job in itself. Charles Walker did that primarily for the first play, and I think it cost us on the average about $7,000 at that time to raise the curtain on a play. Probably on Broadway it cost $20,000, $25,000, $30,000. And in this manner we were able to survive. Now, we also had to get a theater, and we found out in exploring Broadway theaters that they were too costly for us; we would not have been able to function in them. But a theater opened up that was very desirable, and that was the well-known Civic Repertory Theatre on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue in New York, lower Manhattan. This had been, for a good number of years, certainly at least from about 1929 or earlier (I began to attend it, I guess, starting in '29)--it had been the theater run by Eva Le Galliene, who was an excellent actress, a fine director, a woman of great love of theater and taste in theater, and who had a repertory theater that did important plays... [sound interference--tape recorder turned off]... from the literature of all countries. She had been unable to continue her theater for financial reasons, and we found that the rental of the house was possible for us to manage. The fact that we moved into the Civic Repertory after she had been there gave us the advantage of being able to invite critics to it, and they came from all the newspapers for our first production. It was also a house to which people with a love of theater had been accustomed to go, even though at that time there was no off-Broadway theater in the way that has developed in recent years. Peace on Earth, our first play, required a very large cast. We reduced the number of actors we had to hire by having some of the actors play two and three roles, and this could be done because some of them were brief speaking parts that didn't occur again. And it was a play with not a few sets. We had as director a man who had been, I think, an assistant to George Kaufman--Robert Sinclair--who had not directed a play as such before, who proved to be a good director and went on from Peace on Earth to direct a whole series of important plays in the theater. We had some splendid actors, among them Robert Keith, whom I have mentioned, who had a leading role in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes; Howard Da Silva, who is still acting today; Martin Wolfson, who was to remain a prominent character actor for the years ahead; Millicent Green, who had had the lead in Elmer Rice's Street Scene a few years before; George Tobias, and others. So that even though we were not opening with much money, and even though we were not paying more than the Equity minimum, we had quite an excellent cast. We couldn't afford to go out of town the way most producers tried to handle their plays at that time--going out before audiences in New Haven and Philadelphia and Baltimore and so on. So what we did was to inaugurate what became a practice for us: preliminary previews at which certain people were invited, and most were asked to pay but got still cheaper seats. And so we got audience reaction and sometimes did some rewriting, changing, and so on. We opened Peace on Earth on Thanksgiving eve, 1933, and the reviews for the most part were disastrous. I'll now read a few of them. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times said: "As propaganda against war, Peace on Earth is pathetically inadequate. Being conceived in a mood of adolescent hysteria, it is as maudlin as the mob it denounces." At the end he said: "And this column must conclude by simply confessing that, although it holds no brief for the ideas or the workmanship of Peace on Earth, it was made furiously to think. Perhaps that is all the authors intended." I know that at that time--and still today, I would say--that a play that made Brooks Atkinson "furiously to think" was not quite as adolescent and pathetically inadequate as he asserted it was. On the other hand, I do not have the impression that it was a very good play. I think it was strident. I think it was overwrought. And I think there is a good reason why it has not entered into the repertoire of theater since. Percy Hammond of the Herald-Tribune said: "The drama was a militant thing of thirty scenes or more, frothing at the mouth in anger with the profiteering warlords and contempt for their supine subjects. It was often theatrically effective also in a front-page way since it contained murders, riots, strikes, parades, hot oratory, and battle cries. Presented so swiftly that it sometimes lost its breath, it moved along at a jazz tempo to which scores of excellent cooperative actors kept step." On the other hand, Joseph Freeman, writing in the Daily Worker, said: "The Theatre Union's production opened Wednesday night before a mixed audience of evening clothes and flannel shirts, who were swept by the play's power into prolonged applause. The house was filled not merely with the intellectual response evoked by good propaganda, but with the emotional tension aroused by good art." Well, he was reflecting the much warmer response of those who welcomed the politics of the play, really, and who therefore were less inclined to be critical of other aspects--although he was critical of certain aspects of it. The next morning after the opening, the Executive Board of the Theatre Union met. Personally, I can't remember a Thanksgiving morning in which I felt more blue. Since George Sklar and I only knew the experience of the professional theater, we would have expected that the play would have closed after a few more nights. But then we found a quite different attitude on the part of the members of the Executive Board, whose personal experience was an organizational one and who had worked, or were working, in mass organizations. They said, "Oh no, we're not going to close this play, we're going to fight for it." And they proceeded to suggest all of those measures which they had used, let's say, in situations when they were fighting to support strikers, or to advance a civil liberties cause, or to arouse people against American intervention in Nicaragua. As a result, plans were immediately drawn up, of which I can remember some. One was to raise emergency money to keep the play going long enough so that word of mouth about it could spread. Now, how was word of mouth to spread since the reviews were so bad? Well, first of all, we would invite to the theater, free of charge, the heads of as many trade unions and mass organizations as were willing to come. We would call them and get right after them, and lists were drawn up of those contacts that different members had. If they liked the play, we would then urge them to urge their constituencies to come. And we would also ask for the right to have members of the Theatre Union board address their executive board meetings or their union meetings or organizational meetings. A leaflet was composed that in effect said: this is a play that you will like; the prices are only such and such. And plans were laid to immediately get ahold of unemployed workers who, for a small fee or for support of the Theatre Union (I don't remember what), would stuff these leaflets into mailboxes in the whole area around our theater--just put them there as flyers. And I imagine that the benefit system probably began a great push at that moment to get benefits. What happened on the play as a result of this and other such moves--and it resulted, by the way, that for the first time of our lives George Sklar and I, and others like us in the theater, began to make public speeches. I can remember with what trepidation and with what headaches I faced my first public speeches. It might have been before audiences of maybe only 50 or 100 or 200 people, but it was not easy going to do that; and yet we went and did it in order to fight for our play and for our theater. And a fascinating thing happened. The play did not break even in its running. I think it cost probably about $3,000 a week or $2,500 a week of intake to pay the salaries of the actors and our small staff. We, the authors, didn't take royalties. And for the first weeks it lost money. In order to pay the salaries and to pay the rent and the electric light bill and the phone bill, money had to be raised to keep the theater going. And it was also quite cold in the succeeding months, which would keep people away from the theater. But nevertheless, as the weeks went on the size of the audiences began to grow, and it became apparent that here was a play that had a good word of mouth when certain people came to it. And sometimes these people, as we discovered, had never seen a play before. They came out and said, "That was a great picture show I saw." (I overheard someone saying that.) And the naiveté of some of them was such that once we found in an alley outside of the stage-door entrance a group of men, of seamen I think, who were waiting for one of the villains to come out, and they wanted to beat him up. What we called the carriage trade--that is to say, people who came in taxis or in limousines such as you see in the Broadway theater--did not appear until the play had been running for about ten weeks; but then the carriage trade began to appear. And this play had a twenty-six-week run, which is half a year's run, and then was taken over by some outfit, a commercial outfit, and ran four or six weeks more on Broadway. Now, that's a hit run for a play--or it was at that time. And it never would have occurred without this group of people on the Executive Board whom I have described. And interestingly enough, some of the reviewers came down to take another look at it and wrote some more favorable pieces about it. In some of the papers where they had derided it as hysterical, they now described it as "excitingly militant." So it was certainly not the best play in the world, but it was not without its merit, and it did have a theatrical appeal for people. During the period of its run and subsequently, I and others had constant work to do for the Theatre Union. It was very time-consuming but very exciting for us. There were the weekly board meetings, and sometimes there had to be two and three a week if there was a crisis of some sort. These [were] always in the evening or on a weekend since various of our members had jobs. There were the making of speeches, which I mentioned, but there was constant reading of new plays because we were seeking new material. And as the occasion would warrant, one or another of us, or several of us at once, would be working with different playwrights and trying to have a play that had partial quality, but was not right, rewritten--and we would do that. And then myself, I was going on to try and write another play and so also were the others. During the run of the play Peace on Earth, George Sklar got together with Paul Peters to write a play called Stevedore, This had been based upon an earlier play by Peters [Wharf Nigger] which was more limited than the one that they finally put out together. Theirs was a very successful collaboration, and their play proved to be the most successful, both aesthetically and in terms of audience, and financially, of any that we were to put on in the next period. [tape recorder turned off] The Theatre Union board decided that Stevedore would be its next production and that it would be in the fall of 1934, since Peace on Earth continued up through to the summer of 1934, as I recall.

GARDNER

Were you working on other projects at this time?

MALTZ

I had started work on another play, yes. By myself.

GARDNER

Which was...?

MALTZ

A play that--I don't remember its title; it never matured and never came to anything. I don't think I began it until well into the spring because of all the other involvements. However, I would like to pause at this moment to discuss one of the books I mentioned before, Drama Was a Weapon, by Himelstein, because it explains in part why I am anxious to do this oral history. Himelstein, at least when the book was published, was teaching at Rutgers University; the book was published by the Rutgers University Press. It's undoubtedly in all libraries around the United States, and anybody who reads it will get an absolutely wrong thesis about the Theatre Union and the Left theater, and indeed, the theater in general in the thirties. In effect, Himelstein's thesis is that in the thirties there was a decision on the part of the Communist party to take over the theater for its purposes. That is to say, some Communist leaders sitting together at a table said in effect, "Let's take over the American theater." Hence they established the Theatre Union and the Group Theatre and the Theatre of Action and other of the Left theaters, and they wormed their way into the Theatre Guild. And although they didn't succeed in taking over the Theatre Guild, they did succeed in getting it to produce John Wexley's They Shall Not Die about the Scottsboro boys, and Parade by George Sklar and Paul Peters. Now, this absolutely vulgar and stupid thesis is the kind of thing that I want to correct insofar as my experience permits me to do so in this oral history. It never occurred to Himelstein that since the United States and the world were convulsed by events like the Depression and the coming of fascism to Germany, that this would be reflected in what people in all forms of art did. People react to events like this, therefore it was very natural that certain painters would paint certain things that reflected the world that was around them. And you began to get in painting and photography portraits of unemployed people; it was a natural piece of subject material. You began to see it reflected in short stories, in magazine articles, and in novels. And it wasn't that the Communist leadership sat down and said, "Aha! We will take over the American novel! We will take over the American magazine!" They could have said that until they were blue in the face, and it would not have made any difference unless writers themselves had reacted with their hearts and their guts to what they were seeing. So in the course of events, the people who ran the Theatre Guild decided that they would do something like the Wexley play because they found it stirring and meaningful. And after they had produced Parade--which was not too successful itself, and which cost them, as I just read, $100,000 and was a failure with their audiences--they didn't do any more of that kind of thing. But it was they, nevertheless, who sponsored a new theater called the Group Theatre and helped it with money at first. And the Group Theatre was the response of a certain number of people who had ideas about society; they weren't in general as Left as the people in the Theatre Union but they were reacting. And it is, to me, so unfortunate and so outrageous that a man like Himelstein would have his book on library shelves, and people will read it and say, "Aha! This is what happened in the thirties!" But my outrage doesn't last long, because one has to be philosophic about it. This is the way all history has probably been written and rewritten, and there is no way to prevent that. The only thing that one can do, if one has participated in certain events, and if one has the opportunity as I have now, is to try and set whatever record you do know straight. And that's where we are. So I think at this point we probably should stop because I enter into a whole other thing after this.

GARDNER

Okay, fine.

1.17. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 3, 1976

GARDNER

Now, you wanted to begin with a flashback.

MALTZ

Yes, I wanted to begin with just a little note on Theatre Union. Margaret Larkin, who was the executive secretary of the Theatre Union but also its publicity person, began something new in the theater. She put notes into the back of our programs on the actors and what plays they had been in beforehand. This was the first time that it was ever done in the American theater, and it became something that all theaters have subsequently done. In the spring of 1934, April I believe, the Theatre Union opened its greatest success, Stevedore, written by Paul Peters and George Sklar. The cast of characters was largely of black people in New Orleans, and we had an absolutely marvelous cast of actors. The reviews on the whole were excellent, and the play had packed houses at all performances. It ran for 111 performances, until we had to close in August because of the summer heat (knowing that we were going to reopen it in the fall, which we did, and which I will mention when I come to the fall). It is a play that I feel should be in more than one anthology of American plays, and I am convinced that only political prejudice kept it out--or, let's say, timidity on the part of editors and publishers. I have reread the play in recent years, and I think it could be put on as written today and would again be immensely popular with audiences because of its enduring values.

GARDNER

What is it about?

MALTZ

Stevedore is a most eloquent dramatization of race discrimination in the South. The main characters are stevedores working on the wharves, and their wives and sweethearts and members of their families. It involves the possibility of a lynching because of an alleged relationship between--or of an alleged attack by a black man on a white woman, which the audience knows is complete nonsense. It had a marvelous humanity involved with its drama. It was the only Theatre Union play that made some real money, so that when in the fall of 1934 we produced our third play, there was no need for us to go out and raise money in order to finance the opening of that play. But I'll come to that presently. In the summer of 1934, beginning I think probably in early May, I left New York in a secondhand Ford Model-A, two-seater car, with a little rumble seat, that proved to be a very durable automobile indeed. In the four months I traveled some 10,000 miles and covered a good deal of ground. My purpose in going out was to get material for a play on a rather famous, although now perhaps a bit obscure, figure in American labor history, a woman [Mary Jones] called Mother Jones. She had been a very courageous organizer of coal miners, jailed not a few times, and I had read a biography of her and felt that I wanted to do a play about her. But in order to write it, I needed to learn about coal mining and coal miners and so on. I went out armed with two letters. One was from, the New York Post indicating, not that I was a regular correspondent for it, but that I was a freelancer, and that they were interested in articles I would write. I got this because of a couple of friends on the newspaper--I. F. Stone and Sam Grafton. I had a similar letter from the New Masses. And so I was able to move either in ordinary circles or in left-wing circles with those letters. The first place I went was not to the coal fields but to Toledo, Ohio, because at the time there was a strike going on in that city, and martial law had been declared as a result of it. This was a strike at a large plant that made parts for General Motors cars (I believe spark plugs and perhaps batteries, also). And in some conflict that I no longer remember, four of the workers on the picket line had been shot dead by the national guard. There was an inquest going on when I arrived in Toledo, and I was able to attend it because of my New York Post letter. I heard that there had also been a court-martial of a number of the guardsmen who had not fired upon the strikers when they had been ordered to do so. And from sitting in on this inquest for a number of days, and from other things I learned while in the city, I subsequently wrote a short play, Private Hicks, about a guardsman who refuses to fire and is court-martialed.

GARDNER

Did you also do any articles on the...?

MALTZ

No, I didn't do any articles on the Toledo situation. I did a few articles that summer on things I observed and learned. I'll mention just in passing that I was very angry at Heywood Broun, the noted columnist, who attended the inquest one day when I was there, because he couldn't keep his eyes open. His eyes were bloodshot, and since he was noted for his drinking and late-night card games, I assumed that he had come from one of them to the inquest. And I thought it was insulting for him to be three-quarters asleep. This was the same Heywood Broun who a year or two later took a remarkable role in the successful organization of the Newspaper Guild. He was simply marvelous in the way he behaved over a long, long period. I think I might mention just for the record that the general labor picture in the United States at that time was that most working people were unorganized; they were not in unions. Wages were very low. They were thirty cents an hour or less in many industries. Working conditions were very bad. For instance, such simple basic human matters as the right to go to the toilet didn't exist, and people could be fired. if they broke off work before the noon whistle to go to a toilet. The employers didn't care because there were five people outside for every job inside. Safety regulations were completely lax and working people were injured and killed, and there was tremendous speedup on various of the automatic lines. There were a great many company unions, which meant unions under the control of the company, therefore not responsive to the real needs of the working people. Wherever possible, the companies, if they owned the entire town in which an industry was situated, would establish [their] own company stores where prices were always higher than they were in stores in a neighboring town, but where the people who worked in the industry could buy what was in the stores with company money, called scrip. There was the very widespread use of instruments of intimidation and terror against the efforts of workers to get their own unions: for instance, newspapers who printed only the side of the employers, informers who would report anybody trying to organize, thugs who would beat up organizers or union members, and judges who gave injunctions preventing picketing within blocks and blocks of a plant or who sentenced people to jail, and such institutions as the state police of Pennsylvania, who were called the coal and iron police because they acted on behalf of the owners of coal mines and steel mills against unions. There then was a very profound problem within the labor movement itself, such as it existed. That is to say, the AF of L existed, but it was organized on craft lines, not on lines of industrial unions, and it fought against the organization of industrial unions because it didn't want any change in the status quo. Or going into the Deep South there were many states where the farm workers owned no land; instead, they were sharecroppers and virtual peons, or half-slaves, on the large plantations of owners who would give them enough each year to let them stay alive in terms of food and a little money, but would see to it that at the end of each year the debt that they owed the owner increased. Now, if a sharecropper then would try to move away, the owner would say, "You can't move away until you have paid your debt." And if he still tried to move away, the sheriff was right there at the owner's request and would put the man in jail, where he could be sent to a chain gang. So you had the perpetuation of a form of wage slavery, certainly, if not the chattel slavery that existed before the Civil War. At the same time, side by side with all that I have just mentioned, you had a wave of new policies coming out of the Roosevelt administration that were prolabor, and you had with it a drive for unionization and industrial unionization. From Toledo I went directly to Pittsburgh, and I had a name or two of people on the Left in Pittsburgh (I no longer remember who gave them to me; perhaps it was from the New Masses or maybe somebody on the Daily Worker). And there I saw the example of the tremendous effort on the part of some people on the Left, including some Communists I met, to organize steel along industrial lines. And they were as underground in their effort as members of the French Resistance were in fighting the Germans because they had to be afraid, both of everything that could be brought to bear on them (which I mentioned) from the employers in steel, and also from the leadership of the AF of L, which didn't want any change in the crafts that they had organized. At that time I visited a girl I met who lived in Monessen, one of the industrial towns adjacent to Pittsburgh--of which there were many all along the banks of the Monongahela River, a river that ran rusty from the issue of the various plants. And I used that situation to write a short story. The girl had a brother who was working in a nail mill and who, in his twenties, was going deaf from the extreme noise in the nail mill. And I used the home in which they lived, which went up about, it seems to me without looking at my story again, over a hundred steps from a street in order to reach their house. This story was called "Good-by" and was in my first volume of stories. I went to various meetings of the Unemployed Council in Pittsburgh, and it was an introduction to me to life in an industrial town. I then went down to a coal town where there was a very large mine, extremely large, and it was only about, I think, twelve or fifteen miles outside of Pittsburgh. It was called Library. There I had the name of a man who was a man from Appalachia, I would have thought, from a long line of mountain people. His name was Fred Siders and he looked very much the way Eisenhower looked when he came along. He was an organizer of the unemployed and of the national miners' union, which was the left-wing union headed by Communists in the mine organization--in mining. Now, that union exemplified an American Communist policy, which was similar to the policy of Communist parties of Europe, of establishing Left-, Communist-led unions. And within the course of the next year, that and all the others were dissolved, and the workers in them merged with the larger unions, which were able to be established under the more benign Roosevelt policy. But this contact with him led to the core of my play Black Pit. He had a brother, whom I met, who worked at a coal mine some miles away, and the brother had been involved in a strike some years before and had been accused (I don't know whether justly or unjustly) of having dynamited the tipple of the coal mine. The tipple is the structure of a mine, where the coal is deep in the earth and has to be reached by elevators, and the tipple houses the mechanism by which these elevators function. He had gone to prison for two or three years and, now that he was out, would have nothing to do whatsoever with any trade union. I took his situation and his attitude and from that built the central character of what was to become my play Black Pit. I stayed in Library for a while and stayed with a miner in his one-room home, and then after a couple of weeks I went further south to a mining area called Brownsville, where I stayed a week in a coal camp, waiting to get a job. I'm sure it was very lucky for me that I couldn't get a job because, although I was young and in good physical condition, I'm sure I could not have handled that mine work. But I was allowed to stay there because I had to pay board and lodging. I stayed in the barrack for single men, and by staying there and talking with the men and eating what they got, I learned a great deal about what it was like to be a miner. Just hold up for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] I summed up the portrait of so many of these small coal towns, which were company towns, in the preface that I wrote to the published edition of the play Black Pit.

GARDNER

At this point were you now sending articles back to the...?

MALTZ

No, I had not yet sent any articles back to anyone. I don't remember whether I sent any things to the New York Post, I may or may not have.... I don't think I did at this time. I would mention that somewhere along in here I also went to a town in Pennsylvania, or in Ohio, because I was given a contact of a leader of a steel union, a left-wing union, a man called Joe Dallet. And I went to a union meeting, a strike meeting--or a meeting of strikers--with his wife, Kitty. Dallet subsequently died as a member of the Lincoln Brigades in Spain and his wife, Kitty, I discovered years later, had married the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. While I was in Brownsville or Library, I forget which, I got a letter from the New Masses asking me if I would do an article on the situation among the farmers in South Dakota, where there had been some auctions of farms. The local farmers, under the organization of the National Farmers Union, I believe, had gathered, and prevented an actual auction by buying the farm and its implements for one penny, and then giving them back to the farmer. This had gotten a great deal of front-page newspaper publicity. And so I drove from Pennsylvania to Sisseton, South Dakota. Always, in traveling that summer, there were people on the road wanting hitches as they traveled from town to town, seeking work. And picking them up and talking was always an interesting and sometimes a literarily useful practice. There had been, in a considerable number of states that summer, a terrible drought which continued into the next year. This was the era that we know of where the Okies and the Arkies went west to California because the land was turned into a dust bowl. And in South Dakota, while there wasn't as yet that dreadful a situation, it was very bad. So much acreage was just dry, nothing growing. There were cows who grazed right along the roadside because sometimes there was a little bit of grass along the road. There were numberless jackrabbits that would run out in front of the auto (all of the roads, most of the roads, became dirt roads; they were not paved) and would just run ahead of my car sometimes for forty or fifty yards before they ran off to the side. There were in that area fewer people hitchhiking. I think that the dreadful situation of people at that time was summed up for me when I pulled into a gas station and there was a car that had just arrived before me with some farmers in it; the gas station owner walked over to ask them what they wanted (and I think to say hello), and he put his hand on the driver's car door, and the door came right off in his hand. When I came to Sisseton, I found a town utterly lacking in the kind of charm that a New England village would have [which,] even if it was in a state of drought, by its layout and its architecture, would have a lovely quality. This was just a wide dirt street with some buildings, largely un-painted, on both sides of the street, running for a certain distance and then becoming country. The architecture was dull and there was just nothing attractive about it. No trees, for instance, had been planted because there was no way of really giving them steady water, although...no, this was not irrigating country so they must have had enough rain for crops. They would have had enough for trees, but nobody had planted trees. I remember I had a room in a hotel that must have been built around 1890, and it was hot and stuffy and so on. I had letters too; I had been given the address of two men, father and son, who were among the leaders of the National Farmers Union in that area. Their name was Walstad, and the father was Knut and the son was Julius. The father had homesteaded there about 1870, coming, I believe, from Denmark. And the son, who was then, I guess, around forty, had been a World War I hero, a decorated hero, who had a slight limp because some toes had been shot away. But this is important for what I will tell later: the town had wanted to name the legion hall after him when he had returned, but he hadn't wanted that. And now because of general conditions they were very active organizers in this left-wing union.

GARDNER

Let me ask a question here. At a similar time in California there would have been incredible pressure from townspeople and so on and farmers' unions against, first of all, the unions that were forming and, second of all, people such as yourself coming in and looking around and participating. Did you run into any of that, vigilante committees and so on?

MALTZ

Yes, and that's what I'm going to talk about very shortly.

GARDNER

I anticipated you.

MALTZ

I was not aware when I first met them that there was building up in that area a great deal of anger toward the National Farmers Union on the part of certain elements in the society--for instance, businessmen, bankers, of course, who were mortgage-company owners, grain elevator owners, and a certain number of people who were just right-wing, or extreme right-wing in attitude. But that came to play a role which I will talk about. While I was getting material from these two men in order to write an article about what they had been doing and what had happened there, I was asked by them if I would speak to some farmers at a regular meeting that they were having in a schoolhouse. And I said I would. They wanted me to talk about what conditions were like in cities, in New York and so on. The schoolhouse stood on untilled prairie land and about three miles from the main road, and to get there, there was just a set of ruts over the prairie. When we were coming back, a young man who was with us said he knew the road much better than I, and would I let him take the wheel because I was going too slowly. So I gave him the wheel, and he got us out faster onto the main road. Now, the main road, which was of dirt, had also just one set of ruts, and cars used it going in each direction. But when two cars saw each other approaching, they were each supposed to get out of the ruts and move to the side of the road, and there was plenty of room. But in some way, while we were (the three of us--that is, there was this young man and Knut Walstad and myself) singing some songs, and I was looking out over the countryside, I half-turned and suddenly saw a blaze of light, and we had a head-on collision with another car. Fortunately, my little Ford, which was a touring car, I had put up the top because of rain, so it had this light frame which was crushed in but which saved us from what would have happened if it hadn't been on, because we turned over twice. And since I was sitting in the middle, I only received a sprained right wrist; and the other men, because we were packed in closely, had all of their ribs broken on the side where they were sitting, but nothing else for them. And this caused me to remain in the town for three weeks, because the local garage had to send to Chicago to get parts for my car. As a result of this, I was there in time for a Fourth of July celebration, when there was a sideshow in town which brought people in, and some 2,000 farmers from many areas came in, I was asked to be one of the speakers and talk more or less about the same thing I had in the schoolhouse, and I agreed. I was getting ready to leave at that time, and a few nights later--a few days later--I did leave, and so I missed a dance which the national union had in some local, two-story building... and missed something else. In the middle of the dance, armed vigilantes led by the local sheriff raided the dancehall and beat up everyone they found there, excepting those who jumped out of second-story windows and got away. They also stopped cars on the road of people coming to the dance and beat them up. Now, I learned about this only later in a letter I received from Knut Walstad, who had not been one of those who was beaten up. But among those who were terribly beaten up was Julius Walstad and then, after the beating, something happened that was incredibly bizarre. At least a dozen of the National Farmers Union men, or more I believe (I'd have to check this in my short story; this was a short story called "Letter from the Country," which I based upon the letter I had received), were taken down to the union hall--no, to the legion hall, to the same American Legion hall that Julius's name might have been on. And there they were kept for about an hour while men and women, drunk, came over to them, abused them, put out cigarettes on their flesh, finally made them run a gauntlet, and danced around while they were lying on the floor with their various injuries, and finally had them run a gauntlet where they were beaten again after they were led out. Now, I think if I had been caught at that dance as a foreigner from South Dakota--that is, someone from New York--I probably would have been left dead in a ditch. And who was going to complain and who was going to do what? But it was my good fortune that I left. However, the savagery, the ungovernable hatred that was displayed there was very important for me emotionally because it was a direct counterpart to the Nazi phenomenon in Germany. And it was one of the things, if nothing else, that made me realize that it can happen, it could happen in the United States. Sometime that summer, and I no longer remember where it was or how it came about, I spoke on a platform somewhere I think in a... I don't know where... maybe it was the outskirts of a city or town, in a country area. I know it wasn't in a city environment... with a very celebrated young woman. Ruby Bates (whom I mentioned before in connection with the Scottsboro case). She was one of the two girls who first had charged that they had been raped by the Scottsboro boys and later, through apparently a crisis of conscience and a meeting with the clergyman [Harry Emerson] Fosdick in New York, she had the extraordinary courage of going into a southern courtroom and saying that she had lied, and changing her testimony. She was a slender girl, very meek looking, with eyeglasses; if I had seen her, not knowing anything about her, I would have said she was a rather prissy schoolteacher. But her readiness to face a perjury charge and to face possible lynching exhibited a type of courage that I never would have judged from just looking at her. From Sisseton I drove straight down to the very tip of Louisiana, covering that immense section of the United States and going down through the Deep South, because I wanted to see what I could see in traveling. Now, I'll mention in passing that there is a story by, I think, Erskine Caldwell or Faulkner--I believe Caldwell--about one man or two men who stop for the night in a whorehouse and are not aware that they had done so. I pulled into a hotel in Kansas City; I would go to an area in an unknown city like that and just look for a hotel that said one dollar for rooms, since that was what I had been paying all along. I saw one such and stopped my car and went in and asked if there was a room. I remember, and noted at the time, that there was a very attractive girl sitting next to the desk in the very small lobby who looked at me with eyes that were like stone. I think they were the hardest eyes I had ever seen in my life, although she herself, as I said, was very attractive. And I got the room and I paid in advance, which one had to do. I don't remember whether I put my luggage up, because I ran out to supper and I knew there was a movie I had seen coming to the hotel that I wanted to see. And when I came back to my room, there were a succession of knocks on my door, and one girl after another knocked at the door trying to find which one of them would interest me. I didn't realize until that had happened where I had landed. Out of my traveling through the South there came a novelette. The Way Things Are, which was in my first volume of short stories. [sound interference--tape recorder turned off] When I headed north from Gulfport (I went down as far as Gulfport just to see a friend from Yale), I headed for a mining area in West Virginia that I knew about called Scotts Run, and on the way I picked up an unemployed miner. When we passed through a town called Gauley Bridge, he told me what had transpired rather recently in that town: that the federal government--that a company, not the federal government--a company had been building a... gosh, I think now it was a... building a tunnel through a mountain, and I no longer remember the industrial purpose for it, but the stone which the miners had to cut had a very heavy concentration of silicate in it, and the men were not furnished the protection of masks. As a result, a large number of them, and including a large number in this community of Gauley Bridge, had inhaled such a quantity of silicate that many had contracted the disease of silicosis, and many already had died and others were waiting for death. This resulted in my short story "Man on a Road," but it also resulted in my awareness that this was news that ought to be told, it ought to be written up. And even though I knew I could write it for the New York Post, I was then in such a hurry to get to work on the play I had been developing about a coal miner that I told it to my friends on the Post and then learned from them that there was nothing they could do to follow up on the story. I believe I told it to some other newspaper people, but finally I told it to a left-wing labor news service that I think was called the Federated Press. I may be wrong about that, but that's the best I can recall. And they did send a reporter down to Gauley Bridge and, as a result, in their weekly paper ran about six to ten issues--stories over six to ten issues--on what had transpired, and this resulted in a congressional investigation of what had occurred. In the morning that the debate on the investigation opened in Congress, every congressman had on his desk a copy of the Federated Press articles and my short story. I believe it resulted--I no longer can remember--I believe it resulted in some legislation concerning safety regulations.

GARDNER

Where was the story first published?

MALTZ

The story was first published in the New Masses and, as I look back upon it, why I sent it there instead of sending it out to the New Yorker or Harper's or any of those which I am sure would have published it (because of other things of mine they subsequently published), I don't know. Maybe I thought, because they had given me a letter or something, that I ought to repay them by offering them something. Oh, I did during the summer write the article about conditions in the South Dakota area that I had gone to write, the article I'd gone to write, and they did publish it.

1.18. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 3, 1976

GARDNER

Did you have anything to add about the publication of the short story?

MALTZ

Well, only that it is one of the short stories of mine that has been most widely reprinted. It went into The Best [American] Short Stories of the year of 1936, and since I look at my records, it has been reprinted maybe about eighty times the world over. But I think maybe at a later point I'll sum up what has happened to some of my things. Back in New York I immediately plunged into writing the mine play that I came to call Black Pit, and immediately also into continuing work for the Theatre Union--the usual stuff of meeting with the Executive Board and making decisions, reading plays, seeing playwrights, speaking, and so on. I did interrupt my work to attend for one day a meeting of the longshoremen, their annual convention. I did this because I was very interested in the personality of the West Coast longshoremen's leader, Harry Bridges, about whom so much had been written in the previous year. He had brilliantly led a longshoremen's strike in San Francisco, which was one of the two great strikes in the spring and summer of 1934 which were successful; the other was on the part of the Teamsters in Minneapolis. And this was the wave of the future in American labor, because both of these were industrial unions, and they were both led by militant rank-and-file union leaders instead of the entrenched bureaucracy of the AF of L, and both had involved tremendous struggles, and both had been successful. There had been killings by the police in both of them; nevertheless, both had been successful. Now, the longshoremen's union in New York, or the longshoremen's union based in New York, was the International [Longshoremen's Association], and for the moment, the Bridges union, I believe, was still a part of it; that was why he was going to come to the convention. But the longshoremen's union in New York was noted for its corruption, for the fact that the working longshoremen had to pay bribes to the men who handed out jobs on the docks, that they didn't have the hiring hall which was fair and took men in rotation, which had been established by the Bridges union in the West Coast, and that they were bitterly opposed to Bridges. So, using my New York Post credential, I attended the convention. Now, I somehow learned, perhaps by meeting somebody outside (I no longer can recall), that no one from the Daily Worker was allowed into the convention, so I was asked if I wouldn't telephone a report of what was going on in the convention to the Daily Worker, and I said I would. While I was waiting for a session of the convention to start, a man who was unmistakably a thug and who was one of those passing on the credentials of the reporters, came over to me and asked me to help him spot any Reds who got in there if I could--and I said I'd be glad to. This was a character whom I later used as a character in my first novel, The Underground Stream. The head of the union, whose name was definitely Ryan (and I think it was Joe Ryan), was a husky, well-larded man in his sixties, with a hard, florid face and unmistakable authority. He spoke quietly unless a different voice was needed, as occurred at one time when I was there when some one of his faithful followers jumped up to present a motion that Ryan didn't want, and he said, "That's out of order," in his quiet voice. The man went on, and Ryan's voice suddenly changed, and he said, "Sit down." And when he said, "Sit down." it was as though lead had come into his voice, and it had dropped a couple of octaves, and that man sat down so fast that it was almost comic. But one couldn't listen to him for more than a few minutes without knowing that he was a very formidable man. I mention this because I was so profoundly impressed by the way in which Bridges behaved. He sat not too far in front of me and at a certain angle, so that when he arose to speak I could watch him in profile quite easily. He was speaking in an atmosphere that was dripping with hostility toward him. He had only, I think, two other representatives from the West Coast on his side, and everyone else there would have been ready to hit him over the head with a club. But he had the courage and the principle to get up and present his case for about forty-five minutes--that is, the case for his union and for the reason why his union should not be expelled. I came upon a description of Harry Bridges in the book A Long View from the Left by [Al] Richmond, and I want to quote a paragraph from it because it's the best characterization I can think of. Richmond writes: "It was the first time I heard that sharp blend of Australian accent and intent assertiveness, free of rhetorical flourish but not devoid of argumentative device. I have since heard him speak at formal public meetings where he was meandering and disjointed, so that people asked: what's he got? Anyone who has heard him as the rough-and-tumble debater in a labor setting does not ask that question. To me, at that time, he was the articulate protagonist of working-class consciousness and militancy, of the power and the promise revealed in the general strike." (The general strike refers to the fact that after the killing of several longshoremen in their strike, there was a general strike of workers in San Francisco in sympathy, and that led to the successful end of the longshoremen's strike there.) But this is a wonderful description of Bridges in debate at this congress. The Theatre Union reopened Stevedore in September of 1934, and it ran for another 64 performances--making it 175 in all at the Civic Repertory--and this is a successful play. It then went to Broadway for a few weeks under other auspices, and then we sent it to Philadelphia, Washington, Detroit, and Chicago. In Chicago it opened on the night of such an enormous blizzard that nobody came to the theater. The snow and icy conditions continued for another several weeks while we on the Executive Board debated about how much money we could continue to pour into this play which we knew could be successful in Chicago, but could not in those adverse circumstances. Finally we had to close it for lack of funds, and we lost money that we could ill afford. I read that the play was performed professionally in England, with Paul Robeson in the lead, but in London it was only moderately successful. However, the first two plays of the Theatre Union had played to some 300,000 people, and that was a considerable success for what we had set out to do. Early in the fall, either in the fall of 1934 or early in 1935, I was elected to the executive board of the Dramatists Guild. The Dramatists Guild and the Authors Guild make up the two wings of the Authors League of America. This is the professional organization of all authors in the United States. It's not a political organization. It could be called... well, it can't really be called the union, although the Dramatists Guild is kind of a union, but it is the economic weapon of professional writers in trying to promote their interests. And it was something that from time to time took a great deal of my time; but I had the attitude in those days that it was my obligation, when called upon, to do something for such an organization as that was. Before the end of the year, my play Black Pit was accepted for production by the Executive Board of the Theatre Union. But before that we opened another play, Sailors of Cattaro, by Friedrich Wolf, adapted by Michael Blankfort. Friedrich Wolf was a German physician and playwright, and the Sailors of Cattaro referred to the sailors in the Austrian fleet who in 1918, I believe, had mutinied against the continuation of the war. And their mutiny had involved about six other battleships. But because of a certain indecisiveness on the part of the leadership and the sailors, the mutiny had been successfully put down, and the leadership of the sailors were court-martialed and executed. The production was a very fine one, but the play was only a middling success in terms of audience popularity; in fact, I would say a little less than a middling success. I think it had sixty-odd performances. Let's hold up for a second. [tape recorder turned off] Early in January 1935 a theatrical event occurred that launched Clifford Odets on his career. On one of the Sunday nights that were held from time to time at the Theatre Union's civic Repertory Theatre, a production of the first performance of Waiting for Lefty was given. It was an enormous success with the audience that was there that night, very much a left-wing audience, and it was very well acted by members of the Group Theatre. In the light of the fact that Elia Kazan subsequently became a celebrated director in the theater and then a notorious informer for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, it is of considerable interest that in Waiting for Lefty he stood center stage passionately denouncing a stool pigeon who had informed on the taxi union, and saying, "Do you know who he was? He was my own brother." Since Kazan had been a schoolmate and a friend, I have remembered his performance in that role and what he had to say. Waiting for Lefty was an extremely well-written play of the agitprop type, and it ended up with a kind of euphoric hymn to the revolution to come, with one character saying, "coast to coast, hello America! Hello. We are storm birds of the working class." And this was marvelously exciting to the people of Left political sentiment in the hall. Although I was of that sentiment also, I remember that at that moment I did not at all feel the wild excitement that most of the audience were exhibiting because I felt this was, I guess, rhetoric, not really in tune with reality. And I mention this because of what I'm going to tell about the reaction to my play Black Pit in a little while. The rehearsals on Black Pit began in February. As one example of Theatre Union policy, we made an effort to get as the director of it Herman Shumlin, who is a very well-known director and who had done several of Lillian Hellman's plays. Shumlin liked the play and wanted to direct it, but when I said that we could only pay forty dollars a week, he threw up his hands and said he simply could not afford to work for that money. The director was another schoolmate of George Sklar's and mine, Michael Gordon, who did a very good job indeed. We had an excellent cast except for the leading character--the leading character who was an actor I myself had strongly recommended for the role. He had been at Yale, I had seen him act in a number of different plays. Physically, he was very right for the role, but I didn't knew that emotionally he had become so tight in the years since Yale that he was just unable to give the range to the character that the role needed. I had the task early in rehearsals of teaching the actors the proper Slav accent to use, since the play demanded it, and it was not any more difficult, of course, for them to catch on than it had been for me, and they did it very well. [tape recorder turned off] During the rehearsals of Black Pit, an extremely interesting phenomenon occurred: a rumor developed and then caught fire among left-wingers around the theater in New York that Black Pit was the glorification of a stool pigeon. Now, it was indeed the study of a man, a working-man, who under great pressure becomes an informer for the company superintendent in a coal town, informing on his fellows who are trying to organize a union. It was certainly not a glorification. I would expect that, looking back, the origin of the rumor was the kind of malice that can exist in any social movement, or indeed in a bridge club. For instance, there were still some left-wing amateur groups who were continuing to train their actors and to talk about the theory of theater and who had not yet done any production--or if they had, it had been some performances in a small hall. They were envious and resentful of the fact that the Theatre Union had come into existence and had done what they had dreamed of doing but had not. Or perhaps it was just some narrow-minded idiot, even associated with the Theatre Union, who had started this. But before the play opened, there were a good many people who were convinced that this was so. And you will see how it was reflected in a review or two on the Left. But the general reviews were mixed and mostly not very favorable, and in some cases, I would think, not very fair. For instance. Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times said: "Having finished with the ocean and the waterfront, the Theatre Union has turned to coal mining in Albert Maltz's Black Pit, which was put on at the Civic Repertory last evening. Although it gathers into a redolent group a number of flavorsome characters and lightens the occasion with a few flickers of community humor, it is written in the old pattern of Bowery melodrama. In this column's opinion, Black Pit is the least original of the working-class dramas that have been flourishing on Fourteenth Street." That's the end of the quotation from Atkinson. There is no possibility of my quarreling with his judgment; that's his judgment. But when he begins in what I consider to be a patronizing manner and says, "Having finished with the ocean and the waterfront, the Theatre Union has turned to coal mining," he could say about plays of Eugene O'Neill: Having finished with the condition of labor in--what was the play with Waldheim [that] takes place on a ship and he's a stevedore? Hairy Ape. Having finished with labor and with the black in Emperor Jones, Mr. O'Neill is now considering the emotional turmoil of middle-class people. This is a kind of a silly thing but, as I say, I can't quarrel with his other judgment. In the News Burns Mantle said: "Again there is vigor in the speech and a good theatrical foundation beneath the play. Again the production is of such a first-class quality there is no doubting the conviction of the producers or the sincerity of the play's author. And again there is the familiar handicap of all propaganda drama, that the auditor of open mind finds himself wondering at what point the authenticity of the picture is to be accepted and the injection of the theater is to be suspected." Now, here we have something quite interesting. The reviewer is in earnest, but he knows nothing about the conditions of people in labor or coal mining areas. [He] obviously has read nothing about it, and he simply doesn't know whether what was pictured in Black Pit was true or not, and so he is standoffish about its "propaganda." On the other hand, he would go to see Sidney Howard's interesting play, The Silver Cord, which is surely a propaganda play in the sense that it conveys an idea or a message: namely, that people who are tormented by having a mother who tries to keep them tied to her umbilical cord have a need to break away in order to find independent lives. But he wouldn't call that propaganda because that concerns a psychological, emotional matter, and this concerns a social problem. Well, to me, philosophically, one is propaganda as much as the other--one no less than the other. And that's what one runs into. John Mason Brown, New York Post, said: "Mr. Maltz's action may be slower than one has come to expect down at Fourteenth Street. His last scene may prove to be his weakest, and in his overdrawing of such characters as the villainous superintendent, he may have succumbed to the regrettable weakness of most so-called propaganda scripts. But there can be no denying that he does succeed in holding one's attention in most of the ten episodes of Black Pit, that he does justify his plea for a union, and that he does compel one to suffer with his hero as he faces his dilemma." Well, I was not really pleading for a union at all. I was doing a character study of a man in a squeeze, and if he had been in a squeeze about money or a job in an advertising firm in New York, it wouldn't have been considered a plea for a union in advertising. This is what one ran up against.

GARDNER

That brings up an interesting point. When you were talking about Waiting for Lefty, you said it was an agitprop play, essentially. Of course, in a strong sense this is propaganda, but at the same time, as you say, it is a character study. Now, did you delineate between the two as you were writing it? Did you write it as character study in a setting?

MALTZ

That's how I wrote it.

GARDNER

Or did you have the consciousness of also doing a social drama?

MALTZ

Well, of course I knew it was a social drama, but let me put it this way: isn't Tolstoy's War and Peace a social document in the sense that the lives of its characters are played out against events as they then occurred in Russia, with the invasion of Napoleon and all that happened as a result of it? One can write plays, novels, stories that concentrate purely upon interpersonal relations and that's certainly a valid form of literature. But if one chooses to present the interaction between individuals and their environment, their social environment, in crisis, that, to me, is no less a valid literature. But what one finds is that those people to whom the implications of that literature are socially unpleasant point a finger at it and say, "Aha! That's propaganda." And I maintain that the presence of an idea in a work does not make it propaganda, no matter what the idea is. I think it's a very false dichotomy. For instance, when I brought Fred Siders and some other friends in Library, Pennsylvania, to see Black Pit, as I did; they didn't consider it propaganda; they considered it a play about their lives.

GARDNER

In a sense, then, wasn't the Theatre Union the wrong place to have that play? If you see what I mean?

MALTZ

No, I don't. Where...?

GARDNER

In the sense that....

MALTZ

You mean, if it had been produced by the Theatre Guild?

GARDNER

Right, if it had been produced in a setting that hadn't the established reputation as presenting that sort of thing.

MALTZ

No, because the alertness of critics to a play about labor.... If Eugene O'Neill, then as now, the leading American playwright, had, let's say, written Black Pit, they would have said he had turned to a propaganda play. [It] wouldn't have made any difference what the setting was. Although Grapes of Wrath was very successful, there was a great storm of hostility against that, an effort to prevent it from being made into a film. And sure, there can be crudely written plays or amateurishly written plays, which Brooks Atkinson claimed this was, and maybe he is right--I'll concede it. But it is not amateurish because it deals with labor; it could be amateurish because I was an amateurish writer handling those materials. Similarly, you can get an amateurish play about boy meets girl. The fact is, you see, that in the main there just hasn't been in American theater plays that dealt with the real problems of working-class people. Now, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, which was very successful, did deal with the real problems of a black family in Chicago. But when you had Stevedore you had those real problems not in terms of a son who couldn't hold onto money, as I recall it, and who lost it to a confidence man, which was easier for critics to accept; but in Stevedore you had the plight of black people on the dock who needed a union and who needed freedom from persecution because of their skins. And that was accepted as a propaganda play, albeit an exciting and good one. And to me this attitude does not bear any analysis, it breaks down. I think it's a false one. Now, here was a man, John Anderson of the New York Journal, a very good critic of that period. He says: "As a picture of labor in a West Virginia coal mine it is vivid, richly atmospheric, and muscular. Mr. Maltz obviously knows what he is writing about, and having chosen sides, he writes with unswerving power and singleness of purpose. There are no two ways about it." Now, there was a man who reacted rather differently. And Robert Garland in the New York Telegram said: "Of all the plays the Theatre Union stood for and projected, Black Pit is the most theater minded, the least obviously propagandist" (contradicting Brooks Atkinson). And then from the Federated Press it says: "When Bill Stang, president of District 1 Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers, saw Black Pit, he is supposed to have barely restrained himself from leaping to the stage during the card game scene in which the miners plan organization and strike. 'That's it. That's the way we really live down there. That might be me and the gang right now,' Stang is reported to have said excitedly." So you see, it depends upon where a person sits. Oh, turn off, please, for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] The reviews in the Communist press reflected the rumor I mentioned, that Black Pit was the glorification of a stool pigeon. In The Political Stage the author, Malcolm Goldstein, writes as follows: "But the Communist party press argued one point at length: the propriety of the dramatic use of the worker as villain. In the Daily Worker Carl Reeve took issue with Maltz for holding up to view a proletarian traitor without mention of the many loyal members of the working class and their equally loyal wives," Let me pause for my comment. If this is an accurate reflection of the Carl Reeve article, and I have been trying to find it in my scrapbooks, it's really a nutty comment because all of the other characters in the drama are loyal to the union, or most of the others, and it's just a nutty comment. Now, going on from Goldstein: "Joseph North stressed the same issue in both the New Masses and the Daily Worker, observing that it was better to give the workers a dramatic protagonist to emulate than one to revile." Now, my comment: this is a remarkable example of a desire to go to the theater and feel comfortable, and it is a curious counterpart of the attitude of those people in those days who would go to Broadway only to see a comedy. They didn't want to see a play that disturbed them in any way. And in the same way, these extreme left-wingers and Communist party members were thrilled out of their minds with the rather rhetorically funny ending of the Odets play--"Storm birds of the working class arise"--just as though that day had already come. That was the effluvia that came from the ending. And they didn't want to face the fact that one of the enormous problems in the American labor movement was the presence of informers. As a matter of fact, as a result of all this there was after some weeks a Sunday night discussion of this issue at the Theatre Union in which there was a spokesman for the Communist party, an official one (I emphasize again that we were a theater group of no party and that our Socialist members were just as active in the group as those several Communist members). And so the spokesman of the Communist party, whose name was Clarence Hathaway and who had been a machinist for many years and had lost a number of fingers while on the job, just stated what I have mentioned: that one of the great problems in organizing trade unions was the problem of the informer, and that a study of how informers were made was a very relevant one. His position caused the rumor to die down. But nevertheless, the play, like Sailors of Cattaro, was not enormously successful. It ran for about eleven weeks, broke even, I guess, and then closed. It and Peace on Earth were both published in book form. The next play that the Theatre Union put on, and it followed Black Pit in the fall of 1935 [tape recorder turned off]. My personal activities were, of course, occurring in a world that was moving toward the explosion of World War II, and as a necessary background for my own personal psychology and emotion, I want to record a certain number of events which I followed with closest attention. I might mention that I have gone back to the very scholarly work The Cold War and Its Origins by D.F. Fleming in order to refresh my memory on the actual sequence of specific events. In March 1935, Germany decreed universal military service. This was a violation of the Versailles treaty, and Britain and France could have stepped in with their armed forces to stop this, but they did nothing. Several months later, in June 1935, Great Britain signed a naval treaty with Germany, which also was a violation of the Versailles treaty in that it gave Germany the right to build as many submarines as it wished. It did this in spite of the fact that German submarine warfare had almost starved Britain into surrender in World War I. At that time only American aid and the convoy system had saved Britain. In 1935 Italy clearly was moving toward the conquest of Ethiopia. It was moving troops on a large scale to its North African possessions. England and France made it. clear to Italy and Mussolini they would not impose sanctions, economic sanctions, through the League of Nations if Italy did invade Ethiopia. During this period Japan's invasion of China was continuing, and I believe this may have been the period (I can't recall exactly) in which forward-looking American women....

1.19. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 3, 1976

GARDNER

You were discussing the political background.

MALTZ

In short, it became clear that Britain and France were completely ready to appease any Nazi or Italian fascist move; and at the same time, they were not responding to the repeated pleas and arguments of the Soviet Union's representative [Maxim Maximovich] Litvinov in the League of Nations for joining with the Soviet Union in collective security against fascism. And so the question is: Why weren't they? Just this morning I heard Admiral Zumwalt mention this appeasement of Hitler by Britain, and he said that it was because Chamberlain knew that Germany was strong and England was weak, and therefore he felt he had to appease it. Well, what Mr. Zumwalt, or Admiral Zumwalt, has never learned is that there was a fundamental reason for the appeasement, and it had nothing to do with the strength or weakness of the two countries. Because certainly when Germany had just begun to rearm, it was not stronger than England, and England and France combined could have walked right in and deposed Hitler for violating the Versailles agreement. And not only did they not need to allow Germany to do the various things I have just mentioned, but I haven't also mentioned that there were loans of money to Germany from England and, I believe, from France also. They had a purpose and they felt they were achieving it: namely, moving Germany into the position where it would attack the Soviet Union. In so doing they felt Germany would topple or gravely weaken the one communist country that they had tried to overturn themselves in 1918 to 1920, and that they would do so without any cost of blood on their part. And unless this is understood, nothing about that period can be understood. In fact, the road, or the path, taken by both England and France would seem to be suicidal--since it turned out to be suicidal--but it was not a deliberate suicide on the part of either nation. They thought they were pulling a fast one and that they would succeed. Hitler, very shrewdly, in his various speeches and communiqués, kept moving, seemingly, toward the east at first, and kept promising that there would be peace between his country and England. And this was accepted. It was in fact only the Soviet Union and the Communist parties of the world at that time that I know about... maybe I've forgotten the role of the Socialists... I really don't recall whether they... but certainly outstandingly the Communist parties that kept saying this will lead to war. And in the United States, the Communist party of the U.S.A. organized the League Against War and Fascism, which became an influential organization with, I think, at one point about a million members. And this perhaps is a very good example of how the Communist party or any other minority, let's say dissenting movement, at any point in history works. I want to pause for a moment for some observations about this. The role of the Communist party in the thirties is frequently referred to as being one where the Communists bore from within in some trade union or some organization, and they got hold of the leadership by their cunning and by the fact that they stayed later at meetings than other people, and they worked harder than other people. This is a kind of absurd mystique which first of all makes of the other people who are, after all, other Americans, fools who have been led by the nose. But there are some very good examples in American history--for instance, the abolitionists in the 1840s were for the most part reviled in America, at least by the powers that be. They were not encouraged, they were slandered, but they maintained their point of view that slavery was wrong and was to be condemned, and they won people to their side because their ideas were sound. It was not that they were cunning or that they bored from within; if they had had unsound policies, nobody would have followed them. In the same way. Earl Browder, the secretary of the Communist party at the time, was not boring from within in the Roosevelt administration when as early as 1928 (as I recently learned), but also in Washington in 1935 at a meeting of the unemployed, he proposed a system of social security. He was proposing something that was sound, and it's now the law of the land, and there would be a violent uprising in the United States if there was an attempt to take Social Security away from the American people. Certainly it's so that when the Communists have taken positions in any free country which the people don't want, the people don't follow them. To leap ahead, there was an organization called the Theatre Arts Committee in New York City (and branches in other cities) which was led by the Communist party, or by Communist party members not identified as such, and which had come into being around 1938. It did skits at mass meetings, and it had vaudeville nights which people attended. It did some very funny things and some very interesting and satirical things, had some very fine people appearing for it, like Zero Mostel, Danny Kaye, and others. But in 1940.... And it had a very large following. When it wanted a communiqué to go down to the White House, I think it was about Nazi Germany, and sent a delegation down, the delegation was headed by Helen Hayes. But when in 1940 the Nazi-Soviet pact came about and when TAG... [sound interference--tape recorder turned off]... when TAG took a position of defending the Nazi-Soviet pact, its members left it by the hundreds, and overnight it became a nothing organization. So that when the Communist party organized the League Against War and Fascism and found thousands of Americans responding to it, they were responding to it because they felt that the aims of the organization were sound. And that's the only basis upon which anybody ever follows anything. At the same time, the Communist party organized (and I was involved in this organization and knew that the Communist party was involved in it) the League of American Writers. This was in the spring of 1935--an organization that became a very influential one in the cultural-political scene in the United States for five years, and I will talk of it at greater length a little later. Now, concerning the Soviet Union in this period, no thinking person--indeed no one who read the front pages of his newspaper--could be without some opinions about the Soviet Union. And this would have been so, actually, since 1917, when the Soviet Union was invaded by armies from France, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Japan, and by one or two divisions of troops from the United States. I might say it's to the great credit of the United States that the role of our troops there was largely an inactive one due, I think, in great measure to the humanity of General Graves, who was in charge of our expeditionary force and who apparently was repelled by what he saw of the treatment of Russians by the various other armies. But from that time in 1917, there was an ocean of anti-Soviet propaganda all over the world. [tape recorder turned off] Fleming, on page 46 of his first volume, in a chapter called "Communism Confined and Ostracized," writes: "Beginning in 1925, Schuman..." (a scholar, I think at Williams) "... collected the following series of headlines in the Tribune." (This was the Chicago Tribune.) This newspaper, says Fleming, "boasting on August 25, 1926, that it 'alone among the great American journals' had painfully but successfully defied the 'garbling censorship of the Red government,' published a stream of articles which would lead its widespread readers to conclude that there was a never-ending series of revolts in Russia." For instance, October 26, 1925, headline: Soviets Fight Famine As Grain Myth Explodes. June 15 of the same year: Claim Starving Poor Threaten Doom of Soviet. November 15 of the same year: Russians Free! To Rob, Starve, Murder, and Die. November 26: Siberia Tries to Shake Off Moscow's Yoke. March 26: Secret Report Shows Russia Near Collapse. July 30, 1926: Uncover Secret Terrorist Plot to Seize Russia. August 7, 1926: Rumania Hears of Widespread Russian Revolt. August 4, 1926: Soviet Party in Chaos as Trade, Industry Totter. I won't go on with these headlines, but they are an important example for this reason: after a while people ceased to believe them. I remember that when I was at college, [Aleksandr] Kerensky, who had been the Social Democratic premier of Russia when he was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, gave a lecture. He proved to me and, I think, to others in the audience that Soviet finances were in such a state that within two months at the outside, the Red government would collapse. Well, then it didn't collapse. And so I and others said, well, he was so sure, and he convinced us--what's wrong? And then there came a rather celebrated exposé of the New York Times role in this false reporting on the Soviet Union. The exposé was done by Walter Lippmann, I think with a collaborator. And the Times, as a result of it, changed its policy, and I think it began to change some of the reporting, at least, in other newspapers in the United States. But the result of these years of phony reporting conditioned not a few people to believe that all negative reports on the Soviet Union were probably fallacious. Now, I'm sure--I know--that all negative reports were not fallacious. But I was one of those who came to believe that, if not all, practically all negative reports were probably fallacious. And "defend the Soviet Union" became the serious political slogan of millions the world over because at that time, without knowing other things that were going on in the Soviet Union, it seemed to a great many people, and to an increasing number of people as they watched the Soviet role in trying to stop fascism, that the Soviet Union had to be defended against these new attempts to destroy her. As an example of this, for instance, I want to quote a hymn written by Sean O'Casey: "Morning Star, Hope of the People, Shine on Us. Red Star extending till thy five rays come a'covering the world, give a great light to those who still sit in the darkness of poverty's persecution. Herald of a new life, of true endeavor, of common sense, of a world's peace, of man's ascent, of things to do bettering all things done; the sign of labor's shield, the symbol on the people's banner; Red star, shine on us all." Now, Sean O'Casey was a very distinguished man of letters. I don't know whether he was ever a member of the British Communist party, but obviously there's no question of where his sympathies are and one has to ask: Why did O'Casey write something that today many people would look at and say, "Why, this is idiocy. What was wrong with the man? He had a hole in his head"? Only if one understands that he wrote this without a hole in his head, with the deepest sincerity, with such gratitude in his heart for what he thought the Soviet Union meant to the future of humanity, can one understand the political activities and positions taken by millions of people in the world in the thirties. I don't know what O'Casey would have said before he died in. I think, the fifties, but this is what he wrote in the thirties. And it is really a most profound symptom of the attitudes at that time on the part of many people. Since the Soviet Union hid from the world the Gulag side of its life, which first started to be officially exposed by Khrushchev in the year 1956 or 1957--I think '56--(and which is carried to its height by the volumes of [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn on the Gulag Archipelago--since it was quite successfully hidden by the Soviet Union, millions like myself knew nothing about it. I would say that the self-serving propaganda of the Soviet establishment was something new in world history, because good and evil were so inextricably mixed in their society. It was a society that took a vast country--it was, let's say, a governing body that took a vast country that had been industrially backward and changed it into an industrial power of great strength. It was an establishment that changed 200 million who were illiterate to being literate. It was a society that brought universities to every section of the country where there had been none, who took the Moslem veil off the women in certain sections of the country and freed them from their oppressed status. And side by side with it, but unknown to most people in the world, it was inhumanly torturing and executing those whom it considered to be its political enemies and, even worse, imprisoning or shooting or deporting into Siberia enormous sections of the peasantry who resisted government policies. But as a result of its successful propaganda, when the Communist party leader of the Leningrad organization was murdered in 1934, I and others accepted the official assertion that various prominent leaders of the Communist movement, who had been for years fighters for communism, that is to say, men like Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others, were guilty of this murder. [tape recorder turned off] However, as an example of what actually went on in the Soviet Union, I would refer readers to an extraordinary volume called Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism by Roy A. Medvedev, published by Knopf. This is the first available study in English by a Soviet scholar of the Stalinist system. In the spring of '35, in April, there was a.... [tape recorder turned off] The organization of this league was signaled by what was called the First American Writers Congress, which was held in New York. And I hope before I finish these tapes to get hold of the book that was published of the proceedings of the congress--and a second and, I believe, a third of subsequent congresses--so that I can give a little more material on what was contained in them. For instance, I do know that among the signers of the call for the first congress were John Dos Passes, James T. Farrell, Waldo Frank, Michael Gold, Langston Hughes, John Howard Lawson, others like Paul Peters, George Sklar and myself. And I remember that it was attended by people anywhere from, let's say, the liberal sector of society or by writers to, let's say, the Communist--those who were Communist party members. And it was a mobilization of people, not for economic purposes as with the Authors League, and not for craft purposes, although at certain times, especially in the second congress, I think, in 1937, there was an attempt to deal with certain craft problems. It was primarily a political, cultural gathering for the purpose of fighting fascism. I've left out the name of Lillian Hellman--I'm sure she was there--and I know that Dashiell Hammett gave a paper at the second congress, so I presume he may have signed at the first. And I guess--since I may forget it while I go through these materials--I ought to mention, since it is in my mind now, that President Franklin Roosevelt became a silent member of it. That is to say, he sent a note asking to join and that his name be put on the lists, and I heard this from the executive secretary--not immediately but later, although it was never publicly announced. The result of the first session was the election of Waldo Frank as president, first president of the league, and of an executive board of which I was a member. Oh, yes, I remember Malcolm Cowley was another of the signers, and I remember him on the executive board. But I hope to get some more materials. During that spring the Theatre Union board approved an adaptation by Paul Peters of a play, with music by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, called Mother. This was not the play Mother Courage, which is a better-known play by Brecht, but it's a play that was a dramatization of a novel by Gorky. Paul Peters had translated the play from the German and had read it to the Executive Board and as well had given us his suggestions for ways in which, by an adaptation, he would adapt the play and add some new scenes. The board considered that the play was gravely inadequate in its literal translation, and we would not have accepted it for production at all, but we felt that the ideas Paul Peters had were very good. We got in touch with Bertolt Brecht, who then was living in Denmark since he had fled from Germany, and he gave his permission for an adaptation to be made. And so we authorized Peters to do it. I'm going to talk about what happened subsequently, when I come to dealing with the fall of that year. The summer of 1935 was one in which I spent in the New York area. By that time I had developed a relationship with Margaret Larkin, who was the executive secretary, and she had a serious illness and was in the hospital, and I stayed around New York because of that. And then when she was recuperating, she had the offer of a home in the town of Croton, and I went up there with her for some weeks. I'll mention about her that she came from the town of Las Vegas, New Mexico (this is not to be confused with the Las Vegas in Nevada), a small town, and because she enjoyed playing the guitar and enjoyed singing, she gathered, without any particular purpose in mind, while she was a young woman there, cowboy folk songs. And after her graduation from college and working for a few years in that area as a newspaperwoman, she met some easterners and decided to try to come East, and arrived in New York with about ten dollars, a ten-gallon hat and her guitar, and got her first job singing cowboy songs in a Yiddish cafe on Second Avenue. I think it was not too long before she sang some of her songs at a party at which Alfred Knopf was present, and he said he would like to publish a book of them. And a book did result in which the musical arrangements were made by Margaret's friend Helen Black, whom she had met in Santa Fe. This book Singing Cowboy was the source book for a generation of singers who took songs from it, some of them cowboy singers in films who were well known. And subsequently, she took jobs as a publicity director in a strike that went on for many, many months in Patterson, New Jersey, and then for a textile union in Gastonia, North Carolina. [tape recorder turned off] If any material is wanted on her, what exists is in the Boston University library. I forgot to mention that I used to urge her (and she never would) to join the Daughters of the American Revolution because one part of her family had come here from England starting, I think, in 1630 or so as indentured servants, and others from Germany around 1650. She had the entire genealogy. And one of the things that she had of her past was a sword that I guess a great-grandfather had used in the Civil War as commander of a regiment of black troops. And she had a flag which we used to hang out, after we were married, every Fourth of July, which had only about twenty or twenty-two stars on it--somewhat tattered, but very lovely. And to my horror, the flag somehow disappeared during the time that we moved, as we did many years later, to Mexico. It really should be in the university along with some of her other things. This is perhaps the moment in which to make this kind of comment. There is among the young generation today a descriptive phrase of "a man and a woman living together" in what they call an "unstructured relationship," meaning that they are living together and they're not married. And it is felt that this is a new and radical departure in American society. Well, in fact, the bohemian, intellectual set in the United States in large cities like New York and Chicago and so on after World War I went in for that type of relationship. And among them it was considered very bourgeois for a couple to get married. So that if a couple really wanted to get married for their personal reasons, they usually sneaked off and got married quietly without telling any of their friends. And interestingly enough, it was quite the accepted thing when Margaret Larkin and I began to live together. It was later, under the influence of the Communist party, that left-wingers, intellectuals, began to marry because the Communist party wanted its membership not to be unlike other American people who believed in marriage. So you have this curious turn of history in this area of personal relationships. In the fall I....

GARDNER

What were you working on yourself at this point?

MALTZ

Oh, yes, I'm glad you mentioned that, because I had a note and I forgot about it. That summer, I know, I wrote the short play Private Hicks, and I wrote it really because the New Theatre League, which was an organization that came into being and published a magazine called New Theatre, had a $100 play contest. I took a whack at trying to get the first prize, and I did. Now, $100 in those days, I think, probably was close to... I don't know, maybe it was... I think breakfast, at that time, of orange juice, a couple of eggs, I don't know whether bacon, but toast and coffee, cost about a quarter. What would it cost today?

GARDNER

Depending on where, but generally two dollars.

MALTZ

Yes, well, mine I was just getting in a drugstore in Greenwich Village.

GARDNER

I'm sure in a drugstore in Greenwich Village it would be at least two dollars.

MALTZ

It'd be two dollars. All right, so that's eight times--right?--twenty-five. So $100 would be about $800 today. That feels about right. Because with $100 you really could do things. When I consider that I bought a very good suit in the year 1939 at a shop--and I'm going to talk about this later because it's amusing--at a clothing store on lower Fifth Avenue which deliberately said, "We have cheap prices," and so on and so forth; but it was a marvelously strongly made, good tweed, Irish tweed suit for twenty-five dollars--with vest. There is that comparison. So when I was after $100, it was a lot more than $100 seems to be today. Now, since Black Pit had been done...oh, yes, since it was done and went on in February of 1935, I know that after that I was trying to work on a play, and I went out of town various times to a place in Connecticut I knew, but I hadn't gotten anywhere particularly on it. And I don't remember whether as yet I started to turn toward short stories. I think I did probably by the fall of '35. But in the fall I did a number of things that were important for me personally. First, Elmer Rice, whom I knew from the Dramatists Guild, accepted the post of head of the Federal Theater [Project] in New York, which had been newly created under the WPA, and he asked me to be his assistant. And I thanked him but said I wanted to give all my time to writing, something like that, and didn't do it, I did, either then or maybe it was a little later, agree to serve on the contract committee of the Dramatists Guild, which was the committee within the guild set up to prepare the ground for a new contract with the producers, and that took a good deal of time--a great deal of time to study the imperfections of the old contract and work out a new one. And I remember that on that committee were Elmer Rice and Owen Davis, and a man whose face I can see but I forget his name. I don't know.... There were about eight or ten on it, and I guess I was there as the youngest member to provide whatever that would give. But that fall I also took the most important move of all, which was to join the Communist party. I had been moving toward that step, I guess, ever since around 1931. When I took it, I certainly didn't take it lightly, and I had to overcome some anxieties on my part about it. Because I think that this is something rather important that I have not seen written about and that is just generally not understood at large: to join the Communist party in the year 1935 or in subsequent years was to be aware that it might result in one type or another of personal harm that you certainly didn't look forward to. On the one hand, everyone knew what had happened to Communists in Germany at the hands of the Nazis: they had been murdered, beaten to death, put into concentration camps, others were underground, others with more good fortune had escaped the country, No one was given any bonus of any sort for joining the Communist party. If you had a small career going, as, say, I did, you were not going to enhance that career; more than likely, it was going to be the opposite. You certainly received no financial return for it. You kind of closed off your thoughts to the possibility that the time might come when you would be treated as Communists in Germany were being treated, or as I myself might have been treated if I had not left Sisseton, South Dakota, when I did. But on the other hand, Sisseton, South Dakota, and a good many other events in the United States were signals of what could happen in the United States if people did not get together and work for a society in which that would not occur.

1.20. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 16, 1976

GARDNER

Now, you had left off last time at the beginning of a discussion of your joining the Communist party.

MALTZ

I want to perhaps comment a little on my last statement. It is true that if I had known of the deeply repressive aspects of the Soviet system, I would not have joined the Communist party of the United States because the two were linked so much. And yet, in the year 1935 this contradiction existed: that even if I had not joined the Communist party, the political situation in the United States and the world was such that I still would have supported the aims and policies of both the Communist party of the United States and of the Soviet Union. My mind would have allowed no other choice because I wanted to stop the spread of fascism. I wanted to stop the spread of fascism and prevent the world war that I felt was looming up. The Soviet Union was the only major power struggling to do this, and the Communist party in the United States was leading the educational and organizational struggle against it here. However, returning to my actual situation, since I at that time had no knowledge of this repressive side of the Soviet system, I knew only the benign aspects as the Soviet Union promulgated them to the world. And since I believed that the Soviet Union on the world scene, and the Communist party on the American scene, stood for humanity's hope for world brotherhood and peace and social progress, my conscience made me join the party despite whatever personal anxieties I had. It literally was an act of conscience on my part. And I believe that it was an act of conscience for, let's say, 99 percent of the men and women who joined in every country in the world. Now, of course I am not speaking of the Soviet Union or of any subsequent country where a Communist government was in power, because there would be many reasons, including opportunistic reasons, for joining the Communist party. But speaking of all the other countries of the world in 1935, the Communist parties making up the world Communist movement offered a glorious vision: that they would end man's inhumanity to man. Now, I joined a rather special group. I might say that Communist party groups which have been referred to in many accounts as cells were never called cells in the Communist party: this was a term that someone invented, but it's a myth. Groups in the Communist party were generally organized on either a neighborhood basis or a job and industry basis. That is to say, if someone worked in an automobile plant, then that person would be likely to be in a group of other automobile workers. But let's say the wife of a man who worked in an automobile plant might be, if she were a Communist party member, in a group formed in her neighborhood. That about sums up for the most part the way in which Communist groups were organized. But the group I joined was of selected professionals. It was very small and there were rather a number of people who, because of their positions in society, had to be protected from any knowledge, even among other Communist party members, that they were members. And so we in that group did not disclose even to other Communist party members that we were members of the party. Now, this brings me to a larger question of secrecy. I not long ago was discussing with someone the whole matter of why members of the Communist party in the United States for the most part remained secret members during the thirties and the forties, aside, usually, from actual Communist party functionaries. One can understand why this was so by taking a look at history. For instance, from the years roughly of 1830 to 1860, no one who lived in the southern half of the United States and who was an abolitionist could admit to being an abolitionist without suffering very serious consequences, up to death through lynching. Now, someone who believed that slavery was an evil would gladly have spoken out about that if the society in which he lived were truly democratic and would permit free speech. But when your free speech can result at the least in your losing a job or a farm, or at the most in your being tarred and feathered and beaten to death, or shot down--as abolitionists were in the South--then you keep quiet about it. Or to give another example, in the 1930s it would only be at the risk of a beating or worse that members of trade unions, of secret trade unions, in certain communities all across the United States would admit that they were union members. During the years, for instance, in which auto and steel were being organized into industrial unions, those years comprising, let's say, from about 1933 to 1937 and '38, membership in a steel or auto workers union had to be kept secret. It was the only way in which people could be safe. Therefore, to charge the abolitionists, or to charge the members of trade unions, with being moles burrowing from within, or in being secretive for some, let's say, unpatriotic reason, is to miss the fundamental fact that they were not living in a society that permitted them to stand openly for what they did stand. A fully democratic society would, of course, never punish people who had radical ideas. The society, if it were truly Jeffersonian, would follow his principle that all ideas should have the right to be heard, and then they could be discussed and refuted if they were wrong. But some of the very people who would most loudly condemn, and justly so, the Soviet government today for its repression of all dissident ideas are blind to the fact that they themselves helped to create an atmosphere in the 1930s and 1940s and later on which forced Communists or others here to remain secretive about their full opinions and organizational ties. Now, the manner in which the party group of which I was a member functioned was the following. [tape recorder turned off]

GARDNER

Before you go into that, I'd like to ask, out of my own curiosity, I guess, what were the mechanics of joining? That's something that is cloaked in mystery as well.

MALTZ

I wish you'd ask all such questions like that that occur to you.

GARDNER

Oh, I will.

MALTZ

The mechanics for joining were generally this. Let's say someone was active in the League of American Writers or in the Theatre Union or in the League Against War and Fascism.... Or to put another example, one became friends with someone, and after some time and many conversations, one felt that here was an individual whose concerns for humanity, whose sense of justice, whose appraisal of politics were such that he might be a proper member of the Communist party. And so that question might be broached: How would you like to join the Communist party so that you can put your ideas at work in association with other people? Now, I don't recall whether I happen to have mentioned this earlier, but in all history where people have sought to effect any change in society they have had to get together for a common purpose. For instance, suppose the purpose is to prevent rheumatic heart disease in children, and there is a need for additional research. The research cannot be carried out without funds; to raise funds you need people to get together to plan programs, to educate in society, to have, let's say, door-to-door campaigns raising money, or to try and get some personality as... I forget his name... as Jerry Lewis, who is interested in muscular dystrophy and who raises so much money on a TV program. This is an example of social action. Social action by and large cannot be the work of one person. There are extraordinary instances, perhaps, in which it is, but in the main social action depends upon groups, and the larger the group the more effective it is. This was a very fundamental argument, let's say, that brought me into the communist movement. If I really wanted to try and stop a second world war, if I really wanted to see fascism stopped from spreading, was I going to do it just by thinking right, by myself? Or was I going to join with others in action? And it would be that which would be presented to someone. You'd say: hey, how about you join the Communist party and put your shoulder to the wheel with others and become more effective than you can possibly be alone?

GARDNER

And so then you'd be invited to a...?

MALTZ

Then you would be invited. If someone, let's say, might say, "Well, I've been wondering about it myself, but I'm wondering about this, and how about this, and what about party discipline, and what about the dues, or what about how much work there would be?" all of these things would be answered. And if they were answered to the satisfaction of the person, he might then say, "I'm ready to join." And at that point, usually, he was brought a party card and asked to sign a card (actually, in the group I belonged to, there were no cards. I did not sign any cards), and then was invited to become a member of a given group, along the lines that I explained before. Now, such a person might eventually become a... might quickly become a dedicated member of the Communist party or might quickly drop out of the Communist party. One never knew. Or one might be a member for two years and then drop out; and [one] might drop out and remain friendly to the party or might drop out and become very hostile to the party. One never knew. [tape recorder turned off] Have I answered your question?

GARDNER

I think so, yes. Now, I guess you can describe more fully the group that you were in.

MALTZ

Yes, I'm going to now. The group that I was in met, as I recall, once a week but it may have been (so long ago) once every two weeks. I'm not sure. But it was not rigid in the sense that, let's say, since we were small, if a number of people had something very special that bound them up in time, we might skip a meeting. For the summer, since we were professionals and most of us left the city for a period of time in the summer or longer, we wouldn't meet then.

GARDNER

When you say professionals, what do you mean? Were they mostly in the arts: lawyers, doctors, that sort of thing?

MALTZ

They were a cross section of people--an educator, several writers, people in some other professions. Now, a meeting would consist always of a political discussion of certain current events, and there might be a presentation by the group leader of certain things; or it might be any one of the group who might have been asked the week before to prepare a discussion on some topic. Or it might be a discussion of a certain work of Marxism that we were reading in common. One of the members would always bring in the newest pamphlet or pamphlets, if there were some, that had been produced by, let's say, printed by the Communist party and some issues of Political Affairs, which was the theoretical journal of the Communist party, which we would then buy. There were always things for ten cents or fifteen cents, [that] kind of thing. Certain basic questions were discussed from time to time--for instance, what was then called the "Negro question" (which was the word then in use amongst progressive people, rather than black). That question was greatly involved with the Communist position at that time which had to do with self-determination for the Negro people, but it isn't something I want to linger on now. Or [there were discussions of] the "woman question." Now, the woman question, interestingly enough, let's say about thirty years before the women's liberation movement began here, was a discussion of women's liberation--not with the fullness with which we've seen it in recent years, but in its fundamental aspects: namely, that women should be the equal of men in all areas of society; there must be equal pay for equal work; there should be special consideration for working women who became pregnant with proper time off before and after the birth of a child, and proper facilities for child care if they went back to work; that it was the obligation of male members of the Communist party to see that their wives did not have the whole burden of household chores. When the man came home from work, since the woman had been working also, either in an outside job or in the home with children, the man could do dishes just as well as a woman, and to just sit back and read the newspaper, or read a Marxist text while your wife did the dishes, was not the behavior of someone who was trying to fight against the chauvinism in our society toward women. Now, this I think was very admirable and, I expect, little known. But I've known more than one household of couples who once were in the Communist party who maybe have not been in the Communist party for twenty years, but where the sharing of certain chores around the house are still being carried out by the husband equally with the wife because of the attitude that they accepted which came down through the ranks of the Communist party. And certainly at our meetings we would discuss the events in Europe because that was a time of profound and very serious political movements in Europe. Now, if some of us had certain problems or issues in connection with organizational work that we were doing and wanted to have some discussion of it in our group, we could bring it up and ask for discussion and advice. For instance, supposing there was some problem in the League of American Writers, that could be brought up. Or anything could be brought up. We paid dues to the party. The minimum dues were always very small, I think something like a dollar a month for employed persons and perhaps ten cents for unemployed, or five cents. I no longer recall. But if someone was earning more money, then it was expected and encouraged that the person would give more money. And it was assumed that if someone joined the party they joined it for a good reason. And undoubtedly in a party group which was in a trade union, formed of trade union members, there would be discussion of trade union activities, and decisions would be arrived at at how to vote on certain issues that were going to come up before the trade union. And to me, this is a perfectly natural phenomenon, although it has been described very negatively as boring from within and as being conspiratorial in nature. I want to pause over this because these terms of opprobrium, I think, don't bear any serious reflection. For instance, let's compare the Republican convention of August 1976, where delegates came pledged to Reagan and others care pledged to Ford and where they maneuvered on the platform committee, maneuvered in the platform committee and during the debate on rules, and where, by the use of demonstrations and noisemakers, they did everything they could to win for their candidates. This is of the very nature of what all people do when they have convictions and they want their candidates and their ideas and their ideals to triumph. It is not antidemocratic, but it is a part of the democratic process itself. In a sense in which the terms "boring from within" or "conspiring to take control" have been applied to the Communist party, they apply with equal validity to both the followers of Reagan and those of Ford. But the terms are as false as applied to the different sides in the Republican convention as they are to the role of the Communist party members in different organizations in the thirties and the forties and the fifties. To give another example, when at the end of the forties various trade unions led by Communist leaders were expelled from the CIO, obviously this expulsion was preceded by private caucusing on the part of those who did the expelling. Was this conspiratorial? I don't think so; I think it was the nature of the democratic process. And then we have as regular features of our national government Republican and Democratic caucuses in Congress. Therefore, if within a trade union there was a caucus of Communists or a caucus of anti-Communists or caucus of Socialists who then would present their ideas to the trade union as a whole, which the members of the trade union could accept or reject, there was nothing, to me, undemocratic in the existence of those caucuses, I'm going to go to something entirely different now, unless you have any questions.

GARDNER

No, I don't think so. I think you've described pretty well what the setting was into which you went. As things occur to me, as this goes along....

MALTZ

Fine. Now we are in the fall of 1935, and my personal activities at that time, aside from my writing, consisted of my steady work in the Theatre Union, which was always substantial, my being on the executive board of the League of American Writers and helping to decide the policies of that organization, and at that time, I believe, being on the contract committee of the Dramatists Guild and with others working to prepare a new contract to present to the producers association. And always, from time to time, there were other matters that would be called to my attention, things that I have forgotten. But such a thing pops into my mind as being asked to read the manuscript of a friend--of a book or of a play. These were all time-consuming matters, and it brings me to something that affected my life deeply, and that was the enormous problem of my struggle for writing time. [tape recorder turned off] There's a dictum that Thoreau wrote, but I unfortunately did not become acquainted with it until, oh, perhaps ten or more years ago, and it is this: that the cost of something is the amount of life-force that you put into it. And I believe that I paid too high a cost of, let's say, my life-force for too many things that had too little result. Now, the reason why I did it is because there was my great desire to write, on the one hand, and on the other hand, there was the tremendous pull that I felt of what one might call my obligations as a citizen. Now, if I had been someone who, let's say, was just unequipped temperamentally to work organizationally with other people, or if I hadn't had the ability to make public speeches, as I discovered I could, or if I simply had not had the response I did to the issues of the day, then I never would have had any problem in this area of finding writing time. But the history of literature demonstrates that an enormous number of writers have been similarly affected. For instance, Victor Hugo became a member of parliament in the 1840s and became less and less of a writer in terms of how he was using his days, and more and more of a politician as he saw his country being moved toward the dictatorship that came about in the year 1850 when, because of his opposition to the coup of Louis Napoleon, he had to flee for his life because there was a price on his head. He then after that was in exile for sixteen years, and while he did a great deal of writing in the course of those years, the first years especially were occupied with an enormous amount of just political work: of writing tracts against Napoleon, of meetings with other exiles to decide on policies, and so on. Or we have Zola, who provides something very illuminating, Zola was a young man trying to make his mark as a writer in the year 1870, when the Paris Commune was established and when German armies were surrounding Paris. The only thing that apparently concerned him at the time was that the noise of artillery made it difficult for him to write. He was not concerned with the political issues. But around the year 1897, I think it was, when he became involved in the Dreyfus case, he was a completely political man, fighting a case of injustice, forced to sleep in different houses at night in order to evade vigilante mobs, and finally forced to flee to England to avoid prison. [tape recorder turned off] And if one wants to follow out, if one wants to examine the life of Diego Rivera and the life of [David Alfaro] Siqueiros, you find the same factors at work. As a matter of fact, a speech that I made in 1947, "The Writer As the Conscience of the People," is concerned very much with the activities of citizen writers and goes down the line of a great many writers who were so involved. In the urgencies of the thirties, I never solved the question at all; let's say I solved it very poorly, because if, as a member of the Theatre Union with a desire to see the theater keep alive, I was asked to go make a speech to the Finnish Cultural Club in Brooklyn, I might travel an hour on the subway and find myself in a hall where there were fifty people. And yet those fifty people might take a benefit and might sell 200 tickets, and this would be a help to our struggling theater. And so when one enters into an activity such as the Theatre Union, an immense amount of work that you don't foresee accumulates and must be taken care of if you are not to fail the main aim. And so, involved as I was in that and other things, I know that there were periods of time--I guess as we moved toward World War II--when I might have spent fifteen hours of work a week writing and, let's say, sixty hours doing other things which were concerned with social urgencies. What kept me producing was that my wife and I did take long summers away from New York, lasting anywhere [from] two to four months, and I did intensive writing in those periods.

GARDNER

In other words, what you are saying is that, in retrospect, you sold your writing short in a lot of ways by the....

MALTZ

I feel that. For instance, the contract committee of the Dramatists Guild was a useful thing, but since I was so heavily involved in the Theatre Union as I was, I think I should have said, well, I've got to decide: the Theatre Union or the contract committee, I can't do both; or if it is the Theatre Union or the League of American Writers, instead of taking them all on. [sound interference--tape recorder turned off] The reason why I say that I was wrong not to make a choice was that, after all, for every organization for which I worked, there were many for which I didn't, all of which were worthwhile. So at what point do you stop? And obviously, I did stop somewhere, and there was no reason why I shouldn't have stopped short sooner than I did--or shorter than I did. [laughter] During this period I made a turn from playwriting to fiction, and there were two reasons why I did that. The first was that I became impatient with what could happen to a play in production. One worked very hard to make the play the best thing you can, to do the best work you can, and then by selection of the wrong actor, such as a selection I participated in in my play Black Pit, what comes out for audiences is not as good as what you wrote. But since that's always possible in the process of transmuting a play from script to theater, I felt that I would prefer if possible to have the security of fiction, where what you write is what is printed. But secondly, I felt that I wanted to try and create characters with more depth and complexity than I felt the play form permitted me to do. (I can't say permitted anyone to do, because Shakespeare obviously created characters of infinite complexity.) But I felt I might achieve better results in the field of fiction. So I began then to write some short stories, and later I'll comment on what happened to them. During this period a play I had written in the summer, Private Hicks, a one-act play, won first prize in the New Theatre League contest and was presented in a very fine Sunday-night production of the Theatre Union, together with a play by Paul Green (a marvelous play, by the way). And it received a great many performances in what we might call "new theaters" all over the country, which were left-wing theaters that sprang into existence around the middle thirties in perhaps thirty or forty cities in the United States, Canada, England, and in one or two cities in Australia. (Interestingly enough, many of them began with a first production of Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets; it was the spark plug that excited people interested in the theater.) And a stream of letters began to come into the Theatre Union from groups all over the country, asking advice on how to organize a theater, how to sustain it, how to do this and that. And as a result, Margaret Larkin wrote a pamphlet on how to organize a theater, which was sent out whenever somebody wrote in with these questions. I think I want to mention that it was, I believe, in the fall of 1935, or the winter of 1935, that I attended a trial in a Manhattan court for one day. Now, I must have done 100, 500 things in those days which were like this, not necessarily attending a trial, of course, but I've forgotten them and I've remembered this for obvious reasons. There were several demonstrations by antifascists when the Nazi passenger ship Bremen came to New York City. And in one of the demonstrations some of the demonstrators got on board the ship and were subsequently arrested and held for trial. I learned that one of the men had been seized by Nazis on board the ship, taken below decks, and castrated and then let go. He was on trial for disorderly conduct, or whatever the charges were, and I went to the trial. I remember his face: he was a tall, husky man, young. He looked as though he might have come from one of the Scandinavian countries. And I thought then, as I have thought since, of the price that he paid for his political passion. I feel sure that if he had known what price he was going to pay, he wouldn't have left the dock and gone on board the ship. Why he went on the ship, I don't know. But this is a theme that later found its way into a film I wrote, Pride of the Marines--the question of the price that you pay for a position you take. And I guess that's all I have to say about it at the moment.

GARDNER

It is a theme that reappears not only in your fiction or in your screenwriting, but in your life.

MALTZ

Yes. Yes. As a matter of fact, there is something similar, because while I, in the Hollywood Ten case, knew the penalty that I would have if we lost the case, I didn't know that it was going to involve blacklisting and everything that happened to my writing career. So that it is somewhat comparable--not, of course, to the degree of what this poor man suffered.

GARDNER

Let me turn off the tape now.

MALTZ

Yes.

1.21. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 16, 1976

MALTZ

I'd like to bring up a point. I'd like to go into a point that I forgot in talking about the Communist party. In the New York Times obituary on Dalton Trumbo which appeared last week, something was quoted out of his book Additional Dialogue. It was the following: "I joined the Communist party in 1943 and left it in 1948 on the ground that in the future I should be far too busy to attend its meetings, which were in any event dull beyond description, about as revolutionary in purpose as Wednesday evening testimonial services in the Christian Science Church." This, says the obituary, he said in 1970. Around 1970, around 1972, I think, '71, I listened to an hour's interview with him on KCET in which he spoke about political history, among other things, and he referred to membership in the Communist party as being akin to membership in the Parent-Teacher Association. Now, I don't know his purpose in saying these things, but they're nonsense. If anyone knew Trumbo, he would know that he would not have been a member of any organization for five years when its meetings were dull beyond description. He just would have left after the first meeting or [after] the second; he was completely intolerant of dullness. If the organization was no different from a Parent-Teacher Association, what was he doing in it? He had some public relations reason for making these statements when he did make them, but a moment's thought would reveal that he did not remain in the Communist party for some years for nothing. I've seen similar statements by other former members of the Communist party, and it's in part to correct these self-serving misstatements that I have wanted to explain why I joined the Communist party, and why I stayed in it, and why I cannot today say that I made a mistake in doing so. [tape recorder turned off] Now, in chronological terms, I want to discuss the Theatre Union production of the play with music, Mother, by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler. And I will mention that I've given the Oral History Program an article by Lee Baxandall called... [tape recorder turned off]... "Brecht in America, 1935," in which this production is discussed. In previous remarks I made about events in the spring of 1935, I said that the Theatre Union had authorized one of its playwrights and Executive Board member, Paul Peters, to make an adaptation of Mother. However, we didn't give this directive without consultation with Brecht, who at that time was in Denmark. We had previously written to him and gotten his agreement for an adaptation. And if we hadn't received his agreement, we would have abandoned the project at once. Sometime in early summer, Peters finished his adaptation. In order to strengthen the play, which was rather fragmentary, he had used material from Gorky's novel Mother, upon which the play was based. He had turned the fragmentary play into one that had a solid structure, one that was warm and that had good personal scenes that we felt were missing from the Brecht version. We (meaning the Executive Board) were delighted with it, and we sent a copy to Brecht. Now, since there was no airmail to Europe before the end of World War II, it took quite a good deal of time for the script to go by boat and then train until it reached Brecht--and for his reply to reach us. Presumably, he had to have it translated by someone for him because he didn't at that time speak English. So that it was the fall and we were already casting the actors when the letter came from Brecht attacking the adaptation by Paul Peters as a violation of the original and refusing to let us go ahead with the production. This instantly precipitated the Theatre Union into a very serious crisis. Since we worked on a shoestring, once we set the mechanism of a production going, we had to use the money that we received from selling benefits to help us open the curtain, lift the curtain on the production. And consequently, by the time Brecht's letter came we had already sold benefit parties, we had already promised a play, we had our small staff at work, and if we were to call off the production, we would have to refund the money, and we would have lost everything that we had expended up to that point--something that we could scarcely afford to do. The decision of the board was to immediately send one of its members, Manny Gomez, to Denmark because he could speak German, and we wanted him to negotiate with Brecht. He left in mid-September and, after some days with Brecht, arrived at an agreement which permitted us to go ahead; but we would pay for Brecht's passage and expenses in the United States and New York, and he would be at rehearsals. And it was agreed between Gomez and Brecht that the Paul Peters version should, and would, be modified considerably. This was told to us by Gomez when he returned. Brecht was still to come, but we, I think, had already begun rehearsals, or were just about to begin rehearsals. With the exception of myself, the Theatre Union board voted to proceed with the production upon the basis of that agreement between Gomez and Brecht. I voted against it because I felt that if we departed from Paul Peters's adaptation and returned, even if only in part, to the Brecht text, that we would have a complete failure.

GARDNER

Why?

MALTZ

Why? Because I felt his play was inadequate and that Peters had made an adequate play of it, a good play of it. But if you started to cut down the Peters play, you wouldn't have anything to be successful with.

GARDNER

How do you mean adequate and inadequate?

MALTZ

How do I mean it? Well, let me say that if we take a good Hemingway short story, I could do some cutting and some rewriting and omit things here and there, and instead of its being a first-rate story it would be a very mediocre story. That's the only way I can explain it. For instance, many a play producer has received a play and had a consultation with the author and said, "You have a good idea here, and you have a number of good scenes, but your characters aren't well enough developed, and you've missed the drama on a number of different occasions. It just isn't a whole play here. You've got to go to work on it. You've got to do a real rewrite." That's the difference between adequate and not adequate.

GARDNER

Of course, Brecht's comments (maybe I'm jumping the gun) and his perspective were that his was a new style of play.

MALTZ

Right. Well, now, let me talk about that in a moment, because I will get into it.

GARDNER

Fine. Fine.

MALTZ

Brecht arrived in mid-October, after about two weeks of rehearsals had gone on, and we had only four. Now, Brecht immediately, or quite soon after he arrived, handed out to us on the Executive Board, or to people on the production committee (as I was), a statement in English, perfectly clear, on the type of theater that he was advocating--which he called the "epic theater." I wish that I still had a copy of that statement--I don't--but I remember its central principle was that a play should be a teaching vehicle, and that in order to teach properly, it needed to reduce the amount of audience emotion so that the audience could think and learn. Emotion interfered with learning. For this reason, for instance, it was his insistence that before each scene in a play, there should be a movie screen lowered on which the content of the scene to come would be stated in a short statement. Because if then the audience knew what was going to happen, they would have less suspense, and therefore they would pay more attention intellectually. Now, although I understand in later years, after he returned to Germany and established his own theater, he began to modify this somewhat, this was his theory at the time. I thought then (and I think now) that it was nonsense; I think it's psychological nonsense and I think it's dramatic nonsense. This doesn't mean that produced in his own theater, with his own style, with his own actors acting in the way he directed them, that he might not have produced an effective theater, or an effective play. But he was advocating this as the only way in which theater should be presented. And that's why I say it was nonsense. To think that audiences cannot learn through their feelings and that they can only learn through their mind, I think, is psychological nonsense. And to feel that you must remove most of the suspense from a play, I think, is dramatic nonsense. So that what happened then was a terrible clash between Brecht and ourselves. To quote from the article by Lee Baxandall.... I wrote the following in a letter to Baxandall: Being the man he was, Brecht tried to take over the direction by badgering Wolfson, the director, with constant comments, by running up on stage and trying through an interpreter to tell the actors how to play their parts, or by shouting out in German, in a voice of thunder, 'This is shit!' He was a slender, slightly built man, but he had a voice that would have humiliated the fight announcer at Madison Square Garden; it blasted out of him. Conduct of this sort did not endear him to us. We were not only members of a theater trying to put on a play, we were individuals who had come together in late 1933 to try and create a theater of a particular sort. As unpaid, volunteer members of the Executive Board we had struggled for three years to make the Theatre Union a stable theater. We had raised money, made hundreds of speeches to win public attention and support, sat through a thousand hours of meetings, worked with playwrights, mounted four plays, and so on. Now we had in our midst a screaming banshee who had, we felt, sold us out by going back on our original agreement about an adaptation and who now, when we had achieved a compromise text, would not allow rehearsals to proceed without disrupting them. The financial lifeline of our theater was so thin that one complete failure could wipe the theater out... Of course, we quickly put a stop to Brecht's grosser antics by threatening to bar him from all rehearsals. He agreed to keep quiet, not to go up on stage, not to talk to the director, and to limit himself to making suggestions to a go-between, Gomez, or calling for a meeting with the production committee. I can still hear, after forty years, his Prussian drill master's call, Sitzung--that is, meeting. We often had several a day. With all that was at stake from my point of view I came to loathe Brecht as a person. If we had met under other circumstances, I might have felt differently. Now, I want to say that on Brecht's part he was, of course, a man with tremendous passion about his work. He felt that he had successfully maneuvered us into a position where, if he came over here, he would be able to win back every word of his original text and get the actors to act as he wanted, and so on. Because actually, he had directed all of his plays when they were done in Germany, or several plays that were done in Germany, and he directed later in his own theater. And what we were doing to his play was as though we were cutting his own flesh with knives. So from his point of view it was horrendous, and from our point of view it was horrendous. And as a result, the play was very unsuccessful aesthetically. It was not our version; it was not his version. It was by far the least successful of any play that the Theatre Union had put on, and the financial loss that we took from it was a very serious one from which we never really recovered. It put us so much in debt that from then on in the several other plays that we did put on it was a terrible struggle to keep our head above water.

GARDNER

One thing Baxandall seems a little vague on is the relationship of the Communist party to the whole thing. He says that Brecht tried to influence the [Theatre] Union through the party.

MALTZ

Yes, well, I'm awfully glad you bring that up. I want to say, as an overall matter, that Lee Baxandall, who wrote this article, had the opportunity of going to living sources. Because all of the principals involved in it except Brecht himself were around to be questioned; and Brecht, on the other hand, had left textual material which could be called upon. In spite of that opportunity, people's memories are so affected by the passage of time, and by their own point of view, that on a considerable number of important matters Baxandall, from my point of view, is greatly in error. And so I made written notes on not a few of these points in the article. On this question of the Communist party, I recently listened to a tape of an interview with me by a professor James Lyon, who is at work on a book called Brecht in America (same title as the Baxandall article). Lyon quoted someone else to me as saying that "Brecht was a one-man political party in close coalition with the Communist party." And I think that's brilliant, because it was always my understanding that he was not a Communist party member. As a matter of fact, when he went back to East Germany, he retained Swiss citizenship and had all his money in Switzerland. Nevertheless he, I believe, collaborated with the Communist party of Germany before Hitler, and it's Professor Lyon's contention that he remained actually a Stalinist in his thinking. Now, in this article by Baxandall, to answer your question very specifically, he refers to meetings that Brecht had with a cultural functionary of the Communist party, V.J. Jerome, whom I knew. But I never knew of those meetings, and I was fascinated to find that they apparently--I don't know whether I found this from Baxandall or Professor Lyon--apparently Jerome and Brecht had a long correspondence for years thereafter. But the Theatre Union was completely independent of any party, as I said when I described its founding. There were Communist party members on the board, and several (this was when it was first founded) Socialist party members there, and known as such. The rest of us were not--although later, as I described, I myself joined the Communist party. But there was no... Policy was formed by the Executive Board in everything, and there was never any consultation with the Communist party, with the Socialist party, in determining board decisions. So it may well be that Brecht had meetings with one or another Communist, but that didn't affect any decision that we made on Mother.

GARDNER

Did Jerome talk to the board in any way?

MALTZ

No.

GARDNER

Who was Jerome, and what sort of things did he do?

MALTZ

V.J. Jerome was a Communist party functionary, an intellectual guy with some cultural background. (As a matter of fact, a secret writer of poetry, I believe.) He was one of the men who went to jail on the Smith Act, and after he came out, he was no longer a functionary. I think the party as then constituted could no longer pay a salary for him. And the last work he did was to write one book that was published, and one that I think remained unpublished, about his childhood. They were very sensitive vignettes about life in Poland. I wouldn't have thought that that kind of thing would come out of him because in my knowledge of him he tended to be very stiff and kind of a rigid guy. But the Socialists on the Theatre Union board, to give an example, would have what--how can I say it?--they would have cut their own throats before they would have sat down in a meeting with V.J. Jerome to listen to what he had to say; they wouldn't have had anything to do with him. It would have violated everything in their principles to invite a Communist functionary to advise them on what to do about Brecht's Mother. So it just wasn't so... just wasn't so.

GARDNER

Is there anything about Brecht and Eisler that you'd like to say that's not contained in the article or in your notes on the article?

MALTZ

I don't think so.

GARDNER

Let me ask another question. Did you have any contact with him later on? I guess not. I guess you would have been in jail during the time....

MALTZ

No. No. Brecht lived here in....

GARDNER

...in '46 to something....

MALTZ

Brecht and Eisler both lived in California. I don't know about Eisler; I think Eisler lived in New York. But Bertolt Brecht arrived around 1943, I think, or maybe it was '42, as a refugee from Denmark. He was an old friend and had collaborated with Lion Feuchtwanger--he was an old friend of theirs--collaborated on one play, I believe. And they helped sustain him in California. But I disliked him so much from the experience in the Theatre Union that I never saw him here although I knew he was here, and I knew people who went to see him.

GARDNER

And you did know the Feuchtwangers?

MALTZ

I didn't then know the Feuchtwangers. I had met them once but I didn't know them. I only came to know Marta Feuchtwanger after I came to live here in 1962.

GARDNER

I see.

MALTZ

And the only time I saw Brecht again after the Theatre Union experience was in 1947, when the Hollywood Ten, or the Hollywood Nineteen, went to Washington, and he was one of the nineteen. And just in a casual fashion I shook hands with him in the hotel in Washington, didn't have any talk with him, and that was all. However, I must say that in later years after he established his theater in East Berlin, and I began to read appreciative articles by people like Harold Clurman, whose judgment I respect very much, I had a very keen desire to see his theater in action, even though I didn't understand German. When I went to East Germany in 1959 I was quite excited about the idea of seeing his theater, although he had died, I think, the year before. But alas, his theater was in London at the time that I was in East Berlin, and I couldn't get to see it. I did walk with a friend in the churchyard where he was buried, and that was it.

GARDNER

Is there anything else about the incident you'd like to add?

MALTZ

No. I don't think of anything else at all excepting that it put a terrible stone, a terrible millstone around the neck of the Theatre Union. Oh, yes, I want to emphasize about the Baxandall article that reading this after reading some of the books on the theater of the thirties, I feel a very great sense of disquiet about the way history is written. I used to think that certain outstanding books--for instance, the book Jefferson and Hamilton by Claude Bowers was, I thought, an extraordinary picture of the struggle between conservative and liberal forces within American society after the revolutionary war until the time that Jefferson became president. The work seemed to me to be one of great honesty and great verisimilitude because of the sources quoted and so on. But when I read the Baxandall article with the feeling that he's perfectly honest in what he has written, and yet at the same time see all of the errors that I believe he has made, I begin to wonder how many errors there were in the Bowers book. And the same when I think back to the scholarly works of [W.E.B.] Du Bois, which I have regarded as so fine, or of the Fleming book, The Origins of the Cold War, and I begin to feel that, well, the best that we can ever get is a certain percentage of truth, and that total truth must elude us in probing into the past. [tape recorder turned off] I want to add a postscript on the play Mother. It only played for thirty-six performances, and we canceled the benefits that remained and returned the money. We were then in a very, very difficult situation but were able to help ourselves out by the fact that we transferred to our theater a play that was failing on Broadway. It was called Let Freedom Ring, written by Albert Bein. This was a play based upon a novel which had to do with a textile strike in the South, and although it was not securing adequate audiences to continue on Broadway, we felt that it would be liked by what we called in a broad fashion "our audience." And arrangements were made to bring it into our theater. As a result, after it had been ready to close on Broadway following twenty-nine performances, it ran for seventy-nine in our theater, and it helped us pay the rent and keep our staff going while we prepared our next production.

GARDNER

Do you think it was a mistake, looking back, to have produced Mother?

MALTZ

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I look back with what I would call no pleasure in the fact that I did vote against producing it. We would have been much better off as a theater if we had not done it--not just financially but in terms of critics and in terms of audience. Because with the humanity largely taken out of the play and with its being such a mixture aesthetically, such a bad mixture aesthetically, it was no good. It was most unfortunate. In the year 1936, I continued to write short stories and some novelettes, and they began to get publication. I had a story published in Scribner's, another one in New Masses

GARDNER

Which ones?

MALTZ

The Scribner's was called "The Game"; the New Masses, a story called "Good-by." In the course of once going to a meeting on the Dramatists Guild contract matters at the home of Elmer Rice, I stepped out of a subway to see some cops struggling with a drunken man, and that resulted in a short story "Incident on a Street Corner" which was published in the New Yorker. (I might add that when I went into Elmer Rice's apartment, which was in a residential hotel on Broadway in the mid-seventies, as I recall, it was my first experience, that I remember, in seeing walls covered with art. I had never been in a home of that sort in my life, that I can recall, and he had a collection of what I can now recall were quite celebrated names of modernists, and I just never knew of that phenomenon.) At that time also there began for me the reprinting of some of my short stories: for instance, earlier in 1936 "Man on a Road" was reprinted in The Best Short Stories of that year and in Scholastic magazine. I mentioned that because the reprinting of my short stories, which continued throughout the thirties and forties, stopped dead once the Hollywood Ten case began. In March of that year, the Theatre Union opened what I regarded as a very interesting play, Bitter Stream, which was a dramatization by one of our board members, Victor Wolfson, who had directed Mother, of a novel by the Italian author [Ignazio] Silone, called Fontamara, an excellent novel. And by the way, this is an interesting little footnote to the political nature of the Theatre Union. Silone had been a leading Italian Communist who had broken with the Communist movement and was now anti-Communist, and we were doing his book. Now obviously, if we had been an arm, the theater arm, of the Communist party, we wouldn't have done such a production. The play was only moderately successful, however, and it ran for...I'm trying to see here... it didn't have too long a run, probably some seventy performances or so, which means about nine weeks. A play like that is not a failure, but it certainly isn't a real success, and for the Theatre Union it meant that our debt constantly rose. I think that probably about the time Bitter Stream closed we must have had a total indebtedness of perhaps about $10,000, which for us was a great deal of money. This meant, let's say, certain printing bills which we had not paid--we were paying on the bills but we were not clearing them up, and certain other bills like that. Perhaps we were a little behind in our rent, I don't know. Around this time we learned to our great dismay that we were no longer going to be able to continue in the Civic Repertory Theatre because the bank that owned the theater had decided that it could make more money by having a parking lot; they were going to tear down the theater. And in a little footnote I might mention that Victor Wolfson and I went down to see a young man in a bank who had an executive position, and we implored him to let us continue to stay there. We tried to persuade him by telling him the kind of theater we were, that we who were on the Executive Board were working without any money. He just stared at us as though we had come from a foreign planet and kept asking, "But why are you working if you are not paid?" And we tried to convey the fact that we were doing something that we considered important and that we were willing to do it without remuneration, but he couldn't comprehend it, just couldn't comprehend it. It did no good in getting the bank to change anything, so we began to look for another theater into which we could go. Because by that time, probably, I believe we had already read and decided upon, or were in the process of deciding upon, our next play, and had decided on a play Marching Song by John Howard Lawson. That summer Margaret Larkin and I spent in Westport, Connecticut, and moved in together for the first time. I spent most of the summer writing, excepting for certain Theatre Union work, and perhaps some other things that I no longer recall, and in the fall we settled on West Twentieth Street in New York, between Eighth and Ninth avenues. It was a small apartment. I guess it had three rooms and a kitchen so that it provided working space for both of us, since she needed working space at home as well as I. But I mention the area because that will come in later in reference to the struggle I became involved in against Coughlinism. Now, since it was the year 1936 I think it's very relevant to pause to give some of the political background at that time.

GARDNER

Before you do, I'm going to turn over my tape, and then we can pick it up without interrupting you.

MALTZ

All right. Fine.

1.22. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 15, 1978

GARDNER

You were about to set the political background of the year.

MALTZ

Yes, of the year 1936. In March 1936 Hitler occupied the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles England and France made no move about this, and Hitler promptly fortified the frontier with France and Belgium. I want to read now from The Cold War and Its Origins, by Fleming, page 62: French surrender to this militarization of the Rhineland opened wide the fascist assault on France. Having locked his own front door. Hitler, along with Mussolini, now boldly took possession of France's back door and in the process killed what was left of French spirit. Nor was any time lost. In July 1936 a Rightist revolt was begun against the Popular Front Government of the Spanish Republic. The rebellion was planned in Berlin and Rome as well as in Spain, and was instantly given military support by both Germany and Italy. This move into Spain struck straight at the very life of France and equally directly at the imperial interests of both Britain and France. Axis control of Spain threatened Britain's "life line" through the Mediterranean as sharply as it could be done. Spain in the Axis camp also put France in mortal peril of having her communications with her African colonies cut, at the same time that she was surrounded by fascist states on all sides. In this situation every instinct of self-preservation called for a firm British-French union to defeat this dangerous thrust to their very existence. For France especially the issue was mortal. Yet outwardly it was France in the person of Leon Blum, Socialist Premier of a Popular Front cabinet, which took the first step toward appeasing the Axis with non-intervention...! Britain at once insisted that the Non-intervention Committee meet in London instead of Geneva. Some twenty-seven European governments were invited to join, and did so. This amounted to organizing a new ad hoc League of Nations under British control. The committee adopted an attitude of trying to prevent any military help from reaching either side--a completely new departure in international law and usage. The Spanish Government was a democratic one, legally elected by the whole Spanish people. By all past precedent it had the right to buy arms for its defense anywhere. It would be the insurgents who would have all the difficulties and be discriminated against, but this traditional situation was completely reversed. The Government was reduced to the same level as the rebels. Its fight for survival against its own rebels, plus Italy and Germany, was placed on the same moral basis as that of the rebels and the foreign governments intervening. Embargoes on arms were laid against both sides. The democracies, with spasmodic exceptions in France, obeyed the rules. The Axis didn't. Italy sent everything she had, including troops totaling upwards of 100,000 men.... Germany sent technicians, equipment of every kind, and troops. The Germans used the Spanish Republicans as guinea pigs upon which to test all of the new arms they were preparing to use on Europe. The bombing of Guernica, on April 26, 1937, was the classic example of this policy. Guernica was a town of several thousand people in the Basque country. It was not on any military front, but it was a sacred place to the Basque people. Its destruction would be a heavy moral blow to them, so the German aviators came on market day, when the town was crowded with peasants and ruthlessly obliterated the whole place. Then as the people fled out on a hub of roads they machine-gunned and bombed the roads.... On five separate occasions, covering a period of two years, the Spanish Government appealed to the League of Nations for help against the organized aggression of the Axis, but always in vain.... Only Soviet Russia spoke out plainly and strongly in Spain's behalf. The Spanish Government first called the League's attention to the international war which was raging in Spain on September 25, 1936. The warning was carefully ignored. Another appeal, when full documentary proof of Axis intervention was available, led only to a resolution hoping that "Non-Intervention" would be made stronger. [sound interference--tape recorder turned off] In May 1937 Spain appealed again to the League of Nations, whose Covenant was stern about intervention in any state's domestic affairs, as well as definite on what to do about international aggression. On May 28 Litvinov spoke, citing the indisputable evidence presented of armed intervention, reminding the Council that the Spanish Government would have coped with the rebellion long ago, if left alone, and warning that the safety of every European state was at stake. That's the end of the quotation from the Fleming book. For myself, the importance of reading from Fleming this way was that it was events like this that cemented my loyalty to the Communist party and the world communist movement, and my support of what I considered to be the principled position of the Soviet Union. It was Russian aid to the Spanish republic, at great cost to itself because its arms were not being paid for, and not a few of its ships bearing arms were sunk by German and Italian submarines on their way to Spain, that was keeping the republic alive. It was the communist movement of the world that organized the International Brigades of volunteers who came from a great many countries in support of the republic, numbered some 35,000 men, much more than half of whom died there. Not all of them, of course, were Communists; many were non-Communist antifascists. My sense of patriotism, of American patriotism, was seriously wounded by the Roosevelt policy of acquiescing in nonintervention, which was such a grisly farce, and refusing to sell arms for cash to the republic. Now, this, of course, Roosevelt did because of the Catholic vote in the United States. The Catholic Church had taken a very strong pro-Franco stand even though there were many individual priests on the side of the republic; but with his awareness of the Catholic vote, this is what Roosevelt did. However, all of this, in the view of the communist world movement, was contributing to the advent of inevitable war later on, and this was proved to be absolutely true. These events also helped explain why in 1940 the Soviet Union entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and I will be talking of that when I come to that year in my narrative. That's it.

1.23. SECOND PART
(September 16, 1978)

GARDNER

When we left off we were talking about the impact of the Spanish civil war on not only yourself but a generation.

MALTZ

Yes, I think that this generation of Americans born since World War II can understand that impact best by recalling its own reaction to the war in Vietnam. Certainly the intensity of our feelings about the Spanish civil war was the same. But in addition there was an absolutely extraordinary phenomenon in that war which, to my best knowledge, has had no precedent in the world: some 40,000 foreigners volunteered to fight on behalf of the Loyalist cause in Spain. They became the International Brigades. These men came from France, from England, from Yugoslavia, Poland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. They came from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Holland, and many other countries; among them, and among the best of all fighters, were German and Italian refugees from fascism who were in exile in different countries. Often it required tremendous persistence on their part to get into Spain; in almost every case they had to climb the Pyrenees from the French side of the border and evade customs agents in order to be able to do it. And of their number, half died. In terms of the casualty lists of modern armies, this is an enormous percentage; and of the rest, most were wounded once, twice, and three times. This is the real measure of what that civil war meant to us.

GARDNER

Did you have any close associates who were...?

MALTZ

Oh, yes. I had friends who went and died there, and friends who went and came back. And this was a very intimate thing. Those who didn't go did everything we could to organize support for the Loyalists. I think I may have mentioned in the discussion before that this was one of the terrible blots on American history, that our government did nothing, and by doing nothing, indirectly was lending its support to the fascist countries. However, I'll now go on to something else. In discussing Mother, I discovered that I omitted a physical description of Brecht. He's a man about five-feet-six-inches tall, very slender. He was largely bald except for short, stiff, black hair around the sides and back of his head. He had blue eyes behind wire eyeglasses that had been made centuries ago. They were an antique from, I think, the Middle Ages, and he was extremely proud of them. The first time I met him he saw me looking at them. He took them off to show me what they were and to tell me. He always was dressed like a workingman, wearing a black leather jacket and no tie. (And that always amused me a little bit because at least in the United States and, I should imagine, in Germany as well, when a workingman was ready to go somewhere on Sunday, his day off, he put on his best suit of clothes, and he indeed wore a tie.) Joe Losey said about Brecht in print that "he ate little, drank little and fornicated a lot." I don't know whether I mentioned that it was almost intolerable for me to sit next to him in the theater. Did I mention this? Did I mention the fact that Marta Feuchtwanger told me he had an organic condition of which he had no control? Ah, maybe I learned it only since. I always thought he simply was one of those people who do not wash. But this is not true. Apparently he was afflicted with a condition in which a very distressing odor came from his feet, and he had no control over that. I have heard of this before, and this is what he had, so it was not his fault in any way. Now, on the previous tape I mentioned writing several novelettes during the summer in Westport in 1936, but I also wrote a number of short stories which I'll mention when I come to their publication the following year. But it is germane to say now that none of this writing came easy to me: writing a story was a constant wrestling match to find the means of expressing myself, of handling the materials, of finding my style, and of studying other writers. I also rewrote a great deal. Now, I'm sure that 95 percent or more of all writers go through the same process, and I merely make mention of it so that I don't pass lightly over the fact of saying, "Well, I wrote such and such." That phrase represents many hours of intense work.

GARDNER

What was the procedure you followed? Did you write a number of pages, then go back and rewrite them? Did you write a page at a time and work on it?

MALTZ

My method usually was to try and get each page right as I went along. Now, that might mean there was no one pattern to it. It might mean that I would write a paragraph and make some changes, or perhaps start over and rewrite it again and constantly rewrite. Perhaps by the end of one work session, which might have been anywhere from two to five hours, I might have several pages. Well, the next day I might change them all again and constantly rewrite, and I might be on those several pages for one week; or it might come more rapidly than that. I might have a story finished within one week and then find that I made more changes. But it was always a process of writing and re-writing, and I was never one of those few people, few writers (and there are some), who are able to write and don't have to rewrite at all. They are very rare.

GARDNER

Did you generally stick to one project at a time? I mean if you were in the middle of a short story and thought of something that was exceptionally interesting, did you remain with the first short story?

MALTZ

Yes, usually I would just write down the new idea. I was constantly getting ideas, whether they were good or not, I would say for everything I have written and published, I probably had at least a hundred other ideas. Now, as I say, maybe they weren't good, but some of them probably would have been.

GARDNER

That's an awesome number.

MALTZ

Well, but the number is correct. When I say a hundred, that's true. I just put them into files, and I have files and files and files; I've never thrown them away, and they'll just go into the garbage somewhere, sometime, I don't know, into a university, something or other. [laughter] But that has happened. Now, I wonder if I.... This might be a moment to speak of--to your recollection, have I spoken of the myth of the lonely writer?

GARDNER

I couldn't say. It's probably safer to say no so that you'll speak about it.

MALTZ

Yes, and then we can cut it out. I don't know how this myth--and there are a lot of myths in the world that people continue--I don't know how the myth of the lonely writer has crept up, but it's inevitable that anyone reading writers talking about their own work will hear them say, "Oh, writing is such a lonely business." Now, this self-serving glorification is nonsense from several points of view. In the first place, there are an enormous amount of professions or types of work in which people are alone. A house painter painting rooms is alone, usually alone all day, painting. A physicist working with a pencil and paper on mathematical problems is alone. A forest ranger looking for forest fires is alone. A street sweeper is alone. I don't think I really have to go down and mention more types of work than that for people to recognize that this is so--that there are a great many such things. And secondly, if you are absorbed very much in the work you are doing, time goes rapidly. You don't feel you're alone; you're fully preoccupied. If you're having a nice swim, you don't say, "Oh, what a lonely thing it is to be swimming." You don't have to swim hand in hand with somebody to enjoy swimming, and, if anything, you don't want anyone intruding when you're doing something that you are concerned about. Even if you are reading, you read by yourself; you don't want someone popping his head in every five minutes and saying, "Do you feel lonely?" You don't feel lonely. There is perhaps one aspect in which writing differs from most professions and that is in the length of time that it sometimes takes to complete a work. Sometimes a novel can take, as it did, say, with Flaubert (although that's unusual), seven years for the completion of Madame Bovary. And that's a long time to see the completion of a piece of work. Even if it is only one year, it is a considerable piece of time. But, of course, scientists work at a research problem for five, ten, fifteen, and twenty years. A historian will work years on a piece of work, and so will others. So even though that makes it different in kind from, let's say, the fire watcher who may see a fire once a week, or the street sweeper who goes home at the end of the day and has his work finished, nevertheless it doesn't mean that the writer has any reason to stand up on a platform and say, "Oh, what a lonely, harsh life I have." And I just want to kill that particular myth. There are other myths, by the way which.... I went out to the mine fields, hearing first that miners--(maybe I'll put this in also)--were all pale because they didn't see the sun. Well, miners aren't pale, because if they're well fed they have color in their cheeks. And two, I had read that miners have little pock marks on their faces from the dynamite that they use in blasting. When I asked one of the miners about that, he said, "Hell, if you got close enough to dynamite to get pock marks on your face, it would blow your head off!" So those two myths went by the board. Then most recently, just this past year, I read an article in the New Yorker about a study of men in prison which spoke of men with prison pallor. Well, that's nonsense too: if they have an adequate diet, then they don't have any pallor just because they are in cells.

GARDNER

Perhaps they don't have adequate diet.

MALTZ

Well, that could be, that could be. But it would only be from diet. But I don't think the diet is that bad, actually--it's not enjoyable, but I don't think it's that bad. However, I'll go on to another point. I haven't yet mentioned that in mid-1935 I made a connection with an agent, literary agent, to represent me, who was certainly one of the best literary agents in New York. He was Maxim Lieber who represented, among other authors, Gorky (until his death), Erskine Caldwell, John Cheever--do I need to spell some of these names?--Anna Seghers, and a host of fine writers. Unlike many another agent, Lieber ran a one-man operation: he had no readers but read everything himself, and was willing to sit and make comments about a piece of writing, and try and work with an author to improve it. As time passed, our relationship became one of friendship that has endured until today (although he gave up the agency business in 1952 for reasons that I will go into when I come to that time). A point I want to raise is to what extent was I, as a writer, by this time a member of the Communist party, subject to the discipline of the Communist party in relationship to my writing. It is a common assumption everywhere that writers who were members of the Communist party were subject to discipline in reference to their writing. Now, I'm going to exclude from my comments at this time the specific "Maltz controversy" that occurred in 1946 and which was dealing with what I call "ideology," and I will discuss it when I come up to that year.

GARDNER

Well, it's much later. I don't think it really has to do with discipline on a creative writer so much as discipline within the media.

MALTZ

It was a question of ideology, and I will come to it and discuss that fully. But in terms of my selection of material to write, let's say, as a play, a story, or a novel, there was absolutely no discipline ever exerted, or ever attempted, in reference to myself and, so far as I know, in reference to any other member of the Communist party who was a writer. Now, the reason why I think a confusion exists, and a wrong assumption, is that in the Soviet Union discipline is very definitely exerted upon writers. You have a closed situation in the Soviet Union where, number one, a writer in order to publish must be a member of the Writers Union; secondly, in order for anything to be published, it must pass a government censor. Now, if then a writer submits a book to a publisher or to a magazine and the censors say that it cannot be published the way it is, then he must either change his work, as frequently he does, or he must withdraw it and put it into a desk drawer. These are the only two alternatives he has. So he is very definitely subject to censorship. Not only that but as we know in recent years, if he persists in any way and tries to publish it himself by the self-publishing method of circulating typewritten copies, then he can be expelled from the Writers Union altogether and be completely blacklisted so far as publication is concerned. But nothing like that existed in the United States. The Communist party here had no such control over writers and never tried to exert such control because it would have been futile. I have no question but that in a socialist America it probably would have, at least the Communist party would have because it followed in the footsteps of the Soviet Communist party.

GARDNER

There is no instance in which a writer might have been asked to leave the party, say, because of something written? Let's continue to deal with this pre-1940 period.

MALTZ

Yes, yes, I want to go into that. Now, I am sure that there may have been instances in which a writer who was a member of the Communist party--I don't know of these instances, but I'm sure a writer who was a member of the Communist party, let's say, submitted a creative piece of work to the New Masses for publication. Let's say it was a story and let's say it expressed ideas that the editors of the New Masses felt were antiblack, anti-Negro. I'm sure they would have called in the author and talked with him about it. Now, if the author persisted in that position they would have said, "Well, we won't publish it." But if in addition the author was a member of the Communist party, I'm sure they would have reported the fact to the party, and then it would have been a matter of discussion in his group in the party. I'm sure that if he had persisted in saying, "This is right and I'm going to publish it elsewhere," and did publish it elsewhere, and it was an antiblack short story, that he would have been expelled from the Communist party. That's how that would have happened.

GARDNER

And you know of no instances of this?

MALTZ

I don't remember any instance where that happened. I remember a different kind of instance. A well-known communist intellectual, Joseph Freeman, published a book called American Testament, an autobiographical work; he was then only in his thirties, but he did it as an autobiographical work. I liked the book. But about a year or so after it was published, there was a very severe and savage criticism of it in a Soviet newspaper, and the criticism of it was translated and reproduced over here, I believe, or summed up over here. To my best knowledge he was not expelled from the party because of that, but he dropped out of the party. Because I later talked with Mike Gold about it--Mike Gold had been a friend of his--and I asked him whether he had been dropped from the party, and he said in effect, "Certainly not. He was given the opportunity to discuss this review on a platform with me, and he just wouldn't come. His feelings were hurt, and he dropped out of the party." Now, however, I did have experiences like the following. When I was researching my first novel in Detroit during the sit-down strikes, I witnessed something that I wanted to use in my novel. In a small plant (I was at the front gate) there were workers sitting down inside, and I saw a black striker expose another worker, another member of the plant who was a black and who had not been sitting down, because he said he knew that that black man had been going around to the homes of other black workers in the plant telling the wives that their husbands were screwing women in the plant (because there were women sitting down in the plant too), and that they were drinking; and they were trying to get their wives to come, to say to their husbands, "You got to get out of the plant." Now, he was doing this obviously for the company. He was a company agent. And I said, "That's great, I'm going to use this in some way in my novel." I happened to mention this incident to a Communist party organizer in Detroit whom I knew, and he said, "Oh, you shouldn't do that. You shouldn't have a black stool pigeon." And I said, "He is a stool pigeon. He was a stool pigeon." And he said, "Yeah, but you shouldn't do that." And I went and did it. That was his opinion. But that's just the way it was. I went and did it. And there was never any request that anybody should discuss the idea for a piece of material with any Communist, or a Communist functionary; you just wrote the way anybody else wrote. However, when I came out to Los Angeles and into the film industry, I discovered that in the Communist party here, the Hollywood Communist party, there was such respect for John Howard Lawson that a tendency had grown up for individual writers who, let's say, wanted to write a piece of fiction to bring a manuscript to Lawson and ask him if he would read it. Now, Lawson was very generous with his time (I think too generous for his own good and for the good of the people he was trying to help), and he would take on the reading of anything--which meant, I'm sure, that in many cases he read it much too hastily and without proper thought. But he encouraged this; he encouraged people to bring him their manuscripts. So as a result, by the time I arrived this had grown into not only something that you did because he might be helpful--and there were many who said, "My goodness, he helped me so much, I'm so grateful to him, he set me straight"--but it became a situation, it was a situation when I came out here, where one really ought to show a manuscript to Lawson or discuss an idea with Lawson. And that was turning a helpful thing into something which was its opposite. That was very bad. Now, I never submitted an idea with Lawson, I never discussed with him anything I wanted to do, but I know that others did--others who surprised me. And I have learned that a number of people who intended to write books didn't write them because they discussed them with Lawson and he said, "Oh, I don't think that's a useful kind of thing to write at this time," or, "I don't think that's a subject you ought to go into. Why don't you take a subject like this?" and they dropped their projects.

GARDNER

Could you give any examples without getting sticky?

MALTZ

Without what?

GARDNER

Getting sticky.

MALTZ

Yes. I know that Guy Endore, who was a fine writer in his own right and an extremely independent man, dropped a book project that he had. I didn't know it at the time--I learned of this only recently from a mutual friend--and it astonished me that he would do that. I don't think of any other names at the moment. I do want to go back, however, to two other subjects, two other examples of so-called censorship. Budd Schulberg published What Makes Sammy Run when I was still living in New York. I believe it came out around the spring of 1941. That's my impression. I liked the book and I wrote a review of it for a magazine for which I was one of the editors, and I praised it. I think I did. Yes. But I know I liked it and that I appeared somewhere in print praising it. But apparently out here Schulberg gave the manuscript to Lawson and, I think, a few others, and they didn't like the book. The issue was really that he was presenting a central character, who was Jewish, as an intense opportunist. Now, for reasons I will explain in a moment, I ran into something like that myself in a piece of writing earlier. But all that was occurring there was that Schulberg voluntarily, because he didn't have to, gave his manuscript to some others to read, and they said they didn't like it, and they thought it was anti-Semitic, let's say. Well, Schulberg went ahead and published it. That, to me, is not an example of censorship. But Schulberg later, in appearing before the Un-American Activities Committee, used that as a reason why he had left the Communist party--because of the attempted censorship. And that's phony in my opinion. Edward Dmytryk did a similar thing on a film project (and I don't want to spend the time to go into it), but it was a similar question of discussion where he went ahead and made the film he wanted anyway, but people were discussing it. Now, to me, let's say if Schulberg had chosen to revise his book, or even not to publish it, that would have been a case of self-discipline. Let me give two examples of this. I have one unpublished novel--the last novel I wrote. It is the only novel I've ever written--the only story I've ever written--that I've submitted that has not been published. It is a dramatization of the Soviet use of psychiatric coercion to curb dissidents and to intimidate them. Without going into the reasons why it wasn't published, it occurred to me at a certain point some years after it had been just lying in a file that I might submit it to TV, and so I took it out and read it again. Now, I was very concerned in writing the book to strike a balance. This misuse of psychiatry is horrible, but it doesn't mean that all of Soviet society is a psychiatric hospital. The Soviet leadership over the years has done things that have been of benefit for the Russian people. The Russians live a hell of a lot better now than they did under the czars. And, to me, not to strike a balance would have been false. But when I looked over my manuscript again, I realized that in TV that balance would not have been struck; they would have just concentrated upon one thing, which was the misuse of psychiatry, and what would have come out would have been a complete distortion of my novel. And so I never submitted it. Now, this is between my conscience and me. I'm not a member of any party, therefore there's no party censorship on the part of anybody. But back around in the year 1935..

1.24. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 15, 1978

GARDNER

Back in 1935....

MALTZ

Yes, back in 1935 I had an experience of what I would call "self-discipline." I was not yet a member of the Communist party, but I might have been because I joined just a few months later, as I recall. I had written a story called "The Bluegrass Jew." My agent had submitted it and it had been bought by the American Mercury. But after the magazine bought it, the editor called up my agent and said, "Don't you think it is a touch anti-Semitic?" My agent told me that and I immediately said, "Well, I've got to investigate this by letting others read it." Now, the story was based upon my meeting a man at college who was in graduate school, who came from the bluegrass country of West Virginia and who, on the one hand, had adopted all of the most, to me, degraded and vicious antiblack attitudes of his worst white neighbors and, on the other hand, spoke proudly of his black mammy who used to slap him across the face if he came in drunk. At the same time that he boasted that his family had lived in West Virginia for 100 years and he had forebears who had fought in the Civil War on the Confederate side, he told me in a whisper that his father was not able to join the country club, and he couldn't work in the local bank, because he was a Jew. And he went on to say that he was a white Jew, however, and he was not one of those goddamn Eastside New York Jews. I did this story to present this stupid guy who spouted prejudice from every orifice constantly and at the same time felt that he was being discriminated against. I remember that at a rehearsal of a play that was going on I gave it to about, oh, half a dozen or more of the Executive Board, or whoever was around in the theater--I don't remember who the individuals were. And all of them agreed, with no exceptions, that it seemed to them to be anti-Semitic. Now, I'm convinced now that it wasn't anti-Semitic, but we were then in a situation, of course, when fascism had taken power in Germany, and anti-Semitic movements were rising on all sides in the United States, and therefore it was an extremely touchy subject. And so I voluntarily withdrew the story from the magazine, and it has never been published. I just found it the other day in my file and reread it, and I think it is a good story. I'm sorry.

GARDNER

Do you think it is anti-Semitic?

MALTZ

No, I don't think it is anti-Semitic; it's a true portrait. Everybody knows that there are prejudiced people, no matter who they are--as any intelligent person knows--and I think I should have published it then and argued the question with those who wanted to argue it. But that is an example of self-censorship. And that goes on all the time because that's between a writer's conscience and what he does. I'm sure that if a given writer today were to give a manuscript to a friend of his who was a woman, and the woman said, "I like your novel, but don't you think this portrait is pretty male chauvinist in this instance?" If the writer were sensitive to the question, he'd say, "Gee, I think you're right. I'll make a change." Because I don't want to be a male chauvinist, and I think it's horrid, I don't agree with it, and so on. Now, have I covered this subject? Do you have any questions on it?

GARDNER

No. No. I think those that I've asked, I think, covered what my questions were.

MALTZ

Good. At this time in my life, perhaps early '36, I began something that I've continued at different times throughout my life, and that is readings in American history, which I had not done in college where I had concentrated so completely on study of philosophy. I began with the period of the American Revolution and with a very notable book which I find just as good today as when I read it, oh, forty years ago, and that's Jefferson and Hamilton by Claude Bowers. You know the book? Yes, marvelous book, I think. And I went on to read other works about the period, and I got the idea for a novel that would be based on the movement organized by Jefferson against the Alien and Sedition Acts and against the presidency of John Adams. I made notes for the novel, which was going to have the title of The Tinker and be about a man who traveled from town to town; but like many another project, it fell by the wayside. I also did some intensive reading in the Know-Nothing movement and the American party, and the persecution of Catholics in the United States that occurred during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1870s, and I had a title for that called The Beautiful Maria, based upon an actual person: a low-IQ woman who had been in a nunnery for some years and then had come out, and who was exhibited around the country as an example of how women were mistreated, I guess, within the Catholic establishment. She was a beautiful woman and made a useful appearance for demagogues who were arousing anti-Catholic hatred. I never wrote that novel either, but my knowledge of that came in very usefully when Adrian Scott was preparing the film Crossfire, and when I come up to that I'll discuss it. I'd like now to go to certain political events that occurred in 1934 and 1936, 1937, in the Soviet Union and that are summed up by the general term, the "Moscow trials." Because, like Spain, like the civil war in Spain, the Moscow trials had tremendous reverberations in the United States and in the world and were something that commanded all of my attention and that shook me up, I'm reminded of something interesting. Certainly a monumental event in 1870 in France was the siege of Paris by the German army and, at the same time, the commune of the Communists who defended Paris and led the people for a short period. Victor Hugo was in Paris at that time, having been in exile for many years before, and was close to all of the events. But Emile Zola--who was also in Paris at that time and who later was to be so involved in the Dreyfus case--had no interest whatsoever in what was going on and was annoyed because the cannon fire was disturbing him at his writing. So people react in very different ways to the events of history, and I reacted with tremendous intensity and concern to the Moscow trials. I mention them here because I was among the many millions who accepted the Moscow version of those trials, and I now believe that version to have been completely false. And so the question of our blindness seems to me to require analysis. Briefly, in December 1934 one of the top Soviet leaders, [Sergei Mironovich] Kirov, was shot in the back and killed. There is reason now to believe that the assassination may have been ordered by Stalin. (In terms of material evidence on this, I recommend what I consider to be a magnificent work of history, Let History Judge by Roy Medvedev. This is the only history of the Stalinist period written by a Russian who remains in Russia.) In January 1935 a group of leading Communists, men who at times had opposed Stalin's policies, were put on trial for responsibility in the assassination; among them were Zinoviev and Kamenev. They denied their guilt and were given sentences of five and ten years. During 1935 and the first half of 1936 many Soviet citizens were arrested and shot or sent to labor camps. In August '36, Zinoviev and Kamenev and others were put on trial again, with the reporters of the world allowed to be in attendance. This time they confessed that they had caused the murder of Kirov and had planned to kill Stalin, Molotov, and other leaders, and that they wanted to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union, that they had connections with foreign governments. Specific useful reference here is page 169 of Let History Judge. Now, in the United States there was a tremendous amount of attention that was given to this. I and others read about it and talked about it incessantly. Not without agitation, not without pause, I and others accepted the Moscow version and these were the reasons. I said to myself that if I was on trial and knew I was going to be shot (and these men had to know they were going to be shot after what they confessed), I would not confess falsely. All I would have left would be my honor, and I would proclaim my innocence and say, "All right, shoot me if you wish, but I am innocent." And so I asked, why didn't the defendants do this? Secondly, there had been turncoats in many a revolution, including our own. Benedict Arnold was one of the leading generals in the United States. He was in charge of the fort at West Point. If he could turn against the United States in the way he did, accept money from the British, prepare to turn over a fort to the British, why couldn't this happen with some of the Soviet leaders? Third, the alternative to believing the confessions was to believe that these men were framed by Stalin and the other government leaders. And that seemed to me to be impossible. Because, I said, why should old comrades frame one another? I wouldn't frame any member of the Communist party that I knew, and I wouldn't believe that they would frame me. We weren't in this for any narrow or selfish purpose. That was naive on my part because I had no comprehension, in my young idealism, of the lust for power that can arise among people. And finally, as I mentioned earlier in this narrative...

GARDNER

Will you respond to those?

MALTZ

Will I comment upon them?

GARDNER

What I'm curious about...

MALTZ

Please interrupt me.

GARDNER

I wanted to wait until you were done with the series, with that series.

MALTZ

I have, finally; I have something to say finally.

GARDNER

Well, since you've put the page down there, let me ask--it's a little easier than coming back--what now is your reasoning on the confessions?

MALTZ

Let me come back. I will come back.

GARDNER

I just wanted to make sure.

MALTZ

Finally, as I mentioned earlier in this narrative, I, like millions of other Communists, had been conditioned by the overwhelming amount of lying and anti-Soviet propaganda to disregard all negative comments about the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, from where I sit now, these reasons, however weighty, don't adequately explain our acceptance of those trials whole hog. Because during these trials, and afterwards, there were very searching analyses of them in the press and especially in magazines, especially for me in magazines like the New Republic and the Nation, which could not be dismissed as just wholesale anti-Soviet. For instance, I recall items like this: that one of the men on trial had been placed as meeting an agent of a foreign government in a hotel in one of the Scandinavian countries some years after the hotel had been torn down. Now, when you come upon an error like this, you should pause and say, "Hey, why is there an error like this?" And there were not a few other blatant holes like this in the prosecution evidence. And I read them and others did also, and why did we nevertheless accept the verdict? Because our emotional commitment to the cause of socialism, which we identified with the policies of the Soviet Union, blurred our intellectual perception. This is an explanation, it's not an excuse. If I had known in 1937 what I came to know in '57, I would have dropped out of the Communist party. Nevertheless I would have supported, let's say, the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war, as the Communist party did, and I would have opposed the cold war and the House Committee on Un-American Activities later, but I would not have remained in the party. Now, recently I have had some extended conversations with two historians in their mid-thirties, and they can't believe that I and others knew nothing about the internal oppression in the thirties in the Soviet Union--the arrests, imprisonments, tortures, executions. I won't maintain that there was no blindness involved here also, but I insist that there was no knowledge, and I believe I can prove it by the following facts. In 1956 at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev revealed what had gone on. And when these savage facts were printed in the Daily Worker, thousands left the American Communist party, and those who remained entered into a frenzied debate about the causes and meaning of these horrors. In the next several years thousands more left the party. Within a few years the party was left with about one-quarter of the membership it had had in '56. The same intellectual and moral revulsion affected a larger group who were not party members in 1956, but sympathizers. Now, if those Communist party members and sympathizers had known in the years before '56 what was going on, why would they have been surprised and revolted by the Khrushchev revelations? They would have had their rationalizations ready and would have gone about their business unperturbed, just the way members of the Communist party do today. I want to add one other thing. When confronted by the confessions and saying, "Well, I wouldn't confess," I did not then know of the ingenious, or ingeniously fiendish, methods that the Soviets invented of breaking down human beings. I now believe that there is absolutely no human being--well, no, I won't say.... I was going to say there is no human being they couldn't break down because I know that there were instances of people they couldn't break down. They merely shot them then. But there was a film called The Confession made a few years ago, and since most who happen to read this particular oral history will not have seen the film, I might mention that the Soviet practice is very simple. They wear people down by.... [tape recorder turned off] I said that the Soviet method is simple, and that's an error. Let's cut that one. The Soviets had different methods of breaking people down. And the book Confession by London, who was one of the Czechs involved in the [Rudolf] Slansky trial in 1952, gives a portrait of it. In addition there is The Gulag [Archipelago] by Solzhenitsyn. However, I was told one story in 1959 in Poland, which is a symbolic example of what the Soviets do--not a literal example. It is perhaps one of the things that happened, but it can stand symbolically for what they achieved with people. The man who told this to me was the editor of a publishing house who had been a colonel in a Polish division attached to the Russian army during World War II. And he spoke very frankly to me when I became friendly with him and said, "How did it happen that people confessed?" I raised the very question that I've put here: that I myself would not confess--why did they? He said, "I'll tell you a story." He said, "First of all, you must understand that many did not confess and were shot. I know from someone who was there that one example of this was..." and he mentioned someone who had been in the foreign department--what do you call the foreign department? No, no, in the Soviet Union.... We don't say foreign department...

GARDNER

State Department.

MALTZ

State Department. One that had been that equivalent. And [this person] was brought down before a military court and was charged with crimes, and he said, "I am innocent and you are fascist murderers, and some day the party will catch up with you," and he was shot. And he said there were many like that. However, he said there were others like this; and he told of a leading member of the Communist party, a member of the Central Committee, who was arrested and put into a cell with a good many others whom he recognized. And they said, "Oh, hello, So-and-so," and he said, "Don't talk to me. You are Trotskyite saboteurs and I am an honest Communist." And they said, "Oh, you don't want to talk to us? Okay." A little while later he was taken down to a room, a cellar room where there was a young, strong peasant in an army uniform, or maybe it was a secret-police uniform, and the man said to him, "What's your name?" And he said, my name is So-and-so. The policeman looked at him and after a moment said, "I'll ask you again: What is your name?" This leading Communist said, "But I just told you, sir, everybody knows me, I've been a member of the party for so many and so many years. I've been this. My name is So-and-so." A pause. The man said, "For the third time--and last time--I'll ask you: What is your name?" The man said, "I don't understand what's going on here. I've told you my name. My name is So-and-so. There's nothing else I can do." The young secret-police man gets up and knocks this man down, knocks his glasses off. He is bleeding from the nose and the policeman says, "Get up." The guy feels around, gets his glasses, puts them on, gets up, and the guy says, "What's your name?" He's unable to talk. He says, "What can I tell you other than what I told you before?" The policeman gets up and knocks him down again. And when this has been repeated for a number of times, the policeman says, "I'll tell you what your name is," as the man is lying on the ground, "Your name is shit! Now get up." And the guy gets up and the policeman says, "Now, what's your name?" And he says, "Well... my name is... my name is shit." And he is then taken upstairs and put back in the cell. He comes into the cell and he says, "Comrades, what's going on in this place?" And they said, "Aha, now you are ready to talk to us, huh!" How do you like that for a story?

GARDNER

Terrific. [tape recorder turned off]

MALTZ

Immediately after Christmas 1936, I believe, I went to Detroit to get material for my first novel, The Underground Stream. I no longer remember exactly the idea that was the genesis of the book, although I know that it came to me the previous summer while I was still in Westport. But I do know that when I went to Detroit there were several things I wanted to find out about. The first was the murder of an organizer of the Unemployed Councils in Detroit by the name of Marchuck; and the second was the nature of an organization called the Black Legion which was an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan and was operating in the Detroit area. It happened that there were sit-down strikes in many of the General Motors plants, and I think [in] the plants, perhaps, at Chrysler at that time in Detroit, and in Flint, Michigan, and in other states. These strikes were the culmination of the effort of the CIO to organize the automobile industry. The technique of workers sitting down inside the plants at which they worked was a new one in the United States that had occurred previously in France and had been taken over by the American workers. In Michigan, because of the governor. Murphy, who was a liberal and a man of principle, there was no use of state troops or the national guard to get the workers out of the plants by force. This removed from the power of the companies the most effective weapon that they might have had. They could, of course, hire as many company policemen as they wished, and they hired a great many. They bought a great many weapons and a lot of tear gas, but when they were faced by some hundreds, or in certain cases thousands, of workers sitting in a plant it was not so easy to get them out. In addition to workers in the plants, there were picket lines outside. The automobile union in general had a very well-running organization to supply the men and women inside the plants with food and water, and then when the company in winter turned off the heat, with blankets and warm clothing, and to provide food and coffee for the pickets outside. I had introductions to several people in Detroit. One of them was the head of the Communist party of Detroit--a man called Weinstone, William Weinstone--and he put me in contact with certain others who were very active in the field so that I was able to do things like go to all of the large union meetings and hear what was going on in the meetings. And I observed the picket lines and, in one or two cases, marched on them. (Observed the picket lines in action, I mean, and in one or two cases marched on them.) And I had a good deal of contact with a particular individual who was extremely stimulating. He was a local--I wouldn't say organizer; he was a Communist and I don't remember now whether.... I think he was organizing among the auto workers. He was a Scotchman with a slight accent who was a fancy baker. He was so skilled as a baker that at that time he could make about twenty-two dollars a night (twenty-two dollars for twenty-four hours' work was an extraordinary wage), and then he'd live on that for the rest of the week. So he worked one night a week and would give the rest of his time to organizing. But he was a man with a great deal of charisma and a lot of knowledge, and I learned a lot from him about local conditions. I found out a good deal about the Black Legion (I won't go into it because I used the material in my book), and then at one point I was invited by Weinstone to accompany him (I guess there were a few others) up to Flint, Michigan, where there was a particularly important crisis in the sit-down strikes. In one General Motors plant there were, I think, about 1,000 or 2,000 men. The union knew that there was going to be an attempt by force to eject the men, and I was there on the night on which this was attempted. This was done by firing tear gas into the plant through the windows. But the workers knocked out other windows and they were able to resist the effect of the tear gas. I might say that I never knew how powerful a weapon tear gas was until that night because I was with a very large group of pickets just hanging around on the outskirts when the company police shot tear gas at us and in a fraction of a second my eyes were tearing so violently that I was absolutely blinded. I didn't know where I was. I ran with the group as we were running but I couldn't see anything. My eyes, of course, were burning in addition. And on that night I saw firsthand--I had not seen such things before--an excellent example of what the press can sometimes do, or what the press will do, when it is biased. There was a restaurant about twenty yards from the end of the building of this plant, and many of the pickets would go inside to drink a cup of coffee because the night was extremely cold. And I saw a company policeman walk in front of the restaurant and shoot a tear gas shell right through the plate-glass window. The next day the press reported that an unknown striker had thrown a tear gas bomb into the restaurant. I wrote a piece about that night [tape recorder turned off] which was called "Bodies by Fisher" and was published in the New Masses, and another piece called "Marching Song," which was published in New Theatre magazine. There was one particular episode which I will never forget. At a moment when the police were firing tear gas into the plant, there was a union truck with a loudspeaker in the center of the wide street that separated two of the company's plants, and Victor Reuther, the younger brother of the man who would later become president of the union, Walter Reuther, was in the truck. His voice, urging the strikers to hold fast, rose higher and higher and higher above the sound of the exploding shells, and above the yells, and above the police sirens, and kept on indomitably--on and on and on. It was a moment of drama that was quite overwhelming. I remember that the next night when the workers of the sit-down had won that battle, I returned to Detroit in a car driven by a man who six months later died in Spain as a volunteer.

1.25. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 20, 1978

GARDNER

We left off talking about the sit-down strikes, and you mentioned that you'd like to say a little more about that.

MALTZ

I have a few more points on that. One correction: I believe I was in error in saying that Governor Murphy of Michigan did not call out the national guard. On the contrary, I believe he did call it out for duty in Flint, but it was for a unique purpose: it was to prevent vigilante attacks against the strikers, and this was very different from its usual role. For instance, I have mentioned that in 1934 I visited Toledo, where there had been an intense strike. And the national guard was called out. In the course of something that happened, three of the workers were shot and killed. Another point about the events in Detroit was the manner in which white and black workers put aside feelings of hatred toward each other and got together out of common necessity. For instance, I was introduced to a white picket captain who oversaw a whole section of line of pickets in front of a General Motors plant (I think the Cadillac plant, I'm not sure). He, I was told, had held the rope at a lynching a month before he came up to work in Detroit. But in the crucible of the strike, when the workers needed solidarity each for his own sake, this man overcame his prejudices enough to cooperate with black workers without revealing anything of what his feelings might be. And I used this man in part as a basis for one of the important characters in my novel about men in prison, A Long Day in a Short Life; the name of the character was McPeak. I also drew on my experiences for, naturally, a great deal of the information and some of the characters in my novel The Underground Stream. The head of the state police of Michigan was an unusual man who made a practice of reading Marxist pamphlets and books and apparently took a great deal of pleasure in arguing with Communists under arrest and showing his knowledge of Marxism. I used him as the basis for a character called Grebb in my novel. Also in part I used the notorious Bennett, who was the head of the Ford Motor Company's security personnel. I used the fancy baker I have referred to for aspects of my leading character, Princey, and various other individuals whom I met. And in addition, of course, I gathered general material in the course of visiting one of the auto plants that was not struck. I observed, among other things, a man at work on a heavy drop forge and I used that later in my novel The Cross and the Arrow. It's relevant, I think, to mention at this point that the Communist party played an enormous role in organizing the CIO.

GARDNER

Now, were you aware when you went to Detroit of what was going on between the AFL and the sort of fledgling CIO at that point?

MALTZ

Oh, yes, I was very aware because, first of all, that was general knowledge and had been since at least 1934. In '34 when I was out in the Pittsburgh area, for instance, I met with a group who called themselves--who were rank-and-file steel workers, led by some Communists, who wanted to create an industrial union in steel and were being fought very bitterly by the AF of L union in steel, which represented only a small portion of the skilled workers and was not interested in the others. This question of industrial unions versus craft unions was a major one in the trade union field in those years. And of course the reason why the CIO unions, under the leadership of John L. Lewis, broke away from the AF of L is because the old-line AF of L leadership refused to countenance the organization of unions which would take in all of the workers in a plant. And unless that were done there could never be any raising of the level of working conditions and pay for the great mass of working people.

GARDNER

And then when you went to some place like Pittsburgh and then Detroit, you did meet with the--or hobnob is not exactly the word--but did you meet with the leaders of the various unions?

MALTZ

No, I didn't meet with the leaders of unions; for instance, in Pittsburgh I certainly didn't meet with the leaders of the AF of L union.

GARDNER

I meant the CIO.

MALTZ

I met with some of the rank and file of the CIO, and in Detroit and Flint it happened I met Walter Reuther (just being introduced to him). I met two of the leading organizers in Flint--Wyndham Mortimer and Robert Travis--but I didn't work with them. They were very busy individuals and therefore it was just a passing meeting. But I was aware of what they were doing, and I was in touch with rank-and-file members of the auto workers union so that I learned what was going on. I also was able to attend the meetings, the public meetings of the auto workers union.

GARDNER

Were you doing any writing on these for the Worker, for example?

MALTZ

No, not while I was there. Well, as a result of what I observed in Flint, I wrote two articles which I have mentioned: one for the New Masses and one later for a theater magazine. But I wasn't there to report it.

GARDNER

You weren't there as a reporter?

MALTZ

No, I went purely to try and gather material if I could for the novel that I had envisioned the summer before. However, just coming back, and to make mention, the role of rank-and-file workers who were Communists, and the role of leaders like Mortimer and Travis, whom I have mentioned, was such that by 1939 members of the Communist party emerged in top leadership, or second-level leadership, of many unions--among them auto, steel, rubber workers, mine, mill and smelter, electrical. West Coast longshore. New York transport workers. New York fur and painters union, the Florida ship-building, aircraft and agricultural unions, the newspaper guild, and so on. Now, this leadership was not achieved, as is often said in ignorance, or slanderously, by cunning or by sitting longer hours at meetings than others; it was the result of advocating policies and tactics that were to the advantage of the workers. It was the result of intelligence, sincerity, hard work, personal sacrifice for the union and, on many occasions, physical courage in the face of attacks by company goons or vigilantes or police. The Communist party made a great contribution to the unionization of American workers in the thirties, and this unionization ended corporate despotism for millions of workers who had been suffering miserable wages and working conditions. It also brought some democracy into communities where none had been before. For instance, some years before, a few years before, the mayor of Duquesne, a western Pennsylvania steel town, said, "Even Jesus Christ couldn't speak for unions in this town." And that was the measure of the general democracy that would have been permitted there. I returned to New York about the end of January and began to work out the form and direction of the novel. And I returned, of course, to those time-consuming activities which I was compelled by my inner needs at that time to continue--work in the Theatre Union, work in the League of American Writers, on which I functioned on the executive board, and work in the Authors League, of which I was a member of the council. I think I have mentioned already that the Authors League was not a political organization, but it was in effect the trade union, or guild, of all professional writers. I continued to meet with the very special branch of the Communist party of which I was a member, but which involved no outside work beyond meetings. However, it did involve some reading and study, and in this respect it was different from other branches of the Communist party where members were asked to take on different sorts of assignments. My life, of course, at this time, and all others, always included reading and occasional movies and al] interesting theater, of which there was a good deal at that time in New York. And in addition, it was part of the routine of life to attend certain political meetings which went on in the general community--let's say, a rally about Spain or on any other subject of concern. I remember being present at one rather small public meeting at which there were three Spanish priests who had come over to try and lecture to the American public and tell them that not all of the Spanish clergy was aligned with fascists. And I remember the severe attacks on them in the newspapers beforehand by the Catholic establishment and verbal attacks on them in that meeting. The last production of the Theatre Union, Marching Song, written by John Howard Lawson, opened in February 1937. Due to an illness I had in the fall of '36 and my subsequent trip to Detroit, I had very little part in its production. Since the Theatre Union had lost the Civic Repertory Theatre, a committee of the Executive Board searched for a theater in the Broadway area that was not too costly. One was found on Forty-second Street, the Nora Bayes Theatre. It was cheaper than others because it had been built on top of another theater and could only be reached by elevators. Although our price scale was raised, our tickets continued to be much lower than that of the regular Broadway theaters, and we hoped to make a new start there.

GARDNER

What street did you say it was on?

MALTZ

On Forty-second Street. I believe it was Forty-second Street, I wouldn't take an oath in court. [laughter] However, Marching Song opened to bad reviews, except in the Left press, and it had only a run of seven weeks. By the time it closed, the Theatre Union was also ready to shut up shop--not willingly, but because of bankruptcy.

GARDNER

How had the character of the Theatre Union changed, or had it, during that period? Was it more or less the same people?

MALTZ

It had not changed. Some new people had come in. One or two people had ceased to be active. It basically had not changed and perhaps would have been better if it had changed. There was a certain lack of elasticity, I would say, and I'm going to talk about that in a moment. I think that the theater at all times lacked, let's say, some very gifted individual who might have brought to it a style and élan which we associate with some of the great theaters of the past. But we didn't have it. Now, in four years we had put on seven plays, and each year our indebtedness to the printer who placed our newspaper advertisements and to certain other services increased until it amounted to about $17,000 by the end of 1936. And that was a considerable sum of money at that time. Perhaps half of it was in personal loans to friends of the theater who we knew would be gracious about accepting their loss. But the balance had to be met in part at least, and we could no longer do so, especially since the setup at the Nora Bayes Theatre was more difficult financially than the Civic Repertory had been. During the four years of its existence and the year of initial planning and propaganda, an enormous amount of energy and effort was expended by a considerable number of people. One of the biggest rewards to them--that is to say, to all of us--was an emotional intangible: the sense of fraternal warmth, togetherness, and comradeship that comes when people join together to work for a common goal that they believe to be a worthy one. The goal can be anything as long as they think it's worthy. Individuals, of course, have goals. A husband and a wife have goals. And the striving to achieve these goals can be an intense and rewarding experience. But an additional and very powerful, very wholesome, emotional experience comes from an endeavor linked with others outside of one's family. At least this was how I felt during all of the total five years of endeavor, and I can remember it now with a good deal of pleasure. I was to experience this again a year later as a member of the Hollywood Ten--ten years later as a member of the Hollywood Ten. When I look back on what the Theatre Union achieved and didn't achieve, I feel that its contemporary achievements were noteworthy. It established a left-wing theater, which until that time had been completely amateur, on a professional basis in its writing, acting, direction, scenic design, and so on. Everyone of any talent connected with the theater went on to further professional work in theater or film or both. The Theatre Union ended racial discrimination in seating in the New York theater years before it ended in other areas of life, even in New York City. For instance, in restaurants, I can remember at one time, by example, right in the thirties wondering whether Richard Wright and I would find a restaurant that would accept him for lunch when we wanted to find a place to eat.

GARDNER

I wasn't aware of that.

MALTZ

Oh, yes. Nowadays things are very different in those areas, but it was impossible in the thirties for a black man to walk into any of the hotels in mid-Manhattan and get a room. Just couldn't. And as late as, let's say, the forties, when black ballplayers first came into baseball, into so-called professional baseball (they had been in the black leagues), they were not allowed in the same hotels as the white players.

GARDNER

Even in New York?

MALTZ

I don't know whether that was so in New York, but it was certainly true in cities outside of New York and in restaurants in New York throughout the thirties that black people did not enter. There was one hotel in Harlem, the name of which I forget...

GARDNER

The Teresa?

MALTZ

Yes, that's right, the Teresa... which was the hotel that blacks went to when they came to New York. And it was part of Fidel Castro's style that he went there when he visited the United States shortly after he came to power in Cuba. The total audience attendance for the Theatre Union's seven plays amounted to over a half a million people, which is considerable for a theater that seated, let's say, about 1,200. And it included many individuals who had never before seen a play. Because, although they lived in New York City and there was theater in New York City, it was foreign to their way of life to go to a Theatre Guild play. It was just not part of what they did, and the Theatre Union changed that for them. The theater launched the careers of a number of new actors who went on to have quite brilliant careers--John Garfield, Canada Lee and Lee Cobb. It also developed a system of audience organization with its theater parties that has been used ever since by other theaters.

GARDNER

I didn't realize that was the...?

MALTZ

Yes, that was the creation. There had been theater parties, you see, before the Theatre Union came along, but the manner in which we handled them, the policy we developed, was one in which we allowed organizations to make a profit on the tickets. It was beneficial for us to have them take tickets at a cheaper price, and since the organizations could sell to their members at list price, they made a profit for their organization and worked hard to push the tickets. And as a result, we enormously expanded the method of having theater parties, and it proved to be a very solid manner for a way of organizing audiences. The existence of the Theatre Union in New York stimulated and supported left-wing amateur theater throughout the United States, and it contributed to the growth of other professional theater groups like the Actors Repertory Theatre, which was headed by Will Geer. However, the Theatre Union did not invent any new forms of theatrical expression which had any lasting effect upon the American theater, nor did it develop, let's say, an acting technique as the Group Theatre did under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, and which was then carried on in the Actors Studio. Regrettably also the plays that the Theatre Union produced did not become part of what I would call the lasting dramatic literature of our time, although I think that at least Stevedore deserved to be, and probably also Sailors of Cattaro. I think that it was for political reasons that Stevedore never went into any anthologies, because reading it over just a few years ago, I found it to be a stunningly dramatic and, I think, fine play, which should be revived--which could be revived now, I think, with great success. In fact, I would say about the Theatre Union plays that, although they were different in content and locale, they tended to have a similarity of pattern that was summed up by Nathaniel Buchwald, a perceptive critic who wrote for a Communist Yiddish newspaper [Morning] Freiheit. He said, just in conversation at one point, that the plays could be characterized by a pattern that said: first act, we suffer; second act, we organize; and third act, we strike. And there was an element of real truth about this. I believe that if the Theatre Union had lasted longer, it would have broken out of this pattern, but it was a fair and astute remark. Now, in 1963 Rutgers University Press published a book called Drama Was a Weapon by a simpleminded professor of English at Adelphi College whose name is Morgan Himelstein, He stated the thesis of his book on the first page: "Armed with the slogan 'Drama is a weapon' the Communist party attempted to infiltrate and control the American stage during the Great Depression of the 1930s." This is the thesis of his whole book, and he comes to the satisfied conclusion that the Communist party failed in this attempt. Now, with this thesis he reduced a large social phenomenon to a Communist party plot: that is, the world economic depression of the thirties, the existence of the Soviet Union, the existence of fascism in Italy and the rise of a more malignant fascism in Germany, the New Deal under Roosevelt, the struggle of workers to get their own unions--all these were phenomena of the time. It was impossible for people not to be affected by them, and it was impossible for these events not to be reflected in the theater of the period. For instance, the Theatre Guild, which had been for some years the outstanding theater organization in New York and in the United States, and which was noted for its truly splendid productions of good American and European and classical plays, proceeded in the course of the thirties to put on They Shall Not Die, by John Wexley, which was not only a dramatic play about the case of the Scottsboro boys, who were then imprisoned and awaiting the final judgment in their case, but it was also, to an extent, an agitational-propaganda play. They put on Idiot's Delight by Robert Sherwood, which dealt with the question of war. They put on Parade by Paul Peters and George Sklar, the authors of Stevedore, which was a satiric musical review, and quite a few other plays that were decidedly different from their previous repertoire because they involved issues of social content rather than merely interpersonal relations. I don't mean by that that the Theatre Guild completely changed its bill of fare--because it didn't--but it did proceed to add this new dimension of social plays, plays of social content, to its repertoire. Now, the Group Theatre, which had come into existence in 1931, provided a varying bill of plays over the next ten years that varied from something as left-wing as Odets' play Waiting for Lefty to such a, let's say, middle-class play as Men in White by Sidney Kingsley. And this is a theater that can be best described as a liberal theater. During these years there was the growth of other theaters as well: the Actors Repertory, of which Will Geer was the leader; the Theatre of Action, which was very left wing; the Mercury Theatre, under Orson Welles, which on the one hand produced Shakespeare and, on the other hand, The Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein. And there was the WPA Theatre, some of whose plays had as much social content as the plays of the Theatre Union. And finally in this period, a magazine called New Theatre came into existence and in a few months achieved a circulation that made it a competitor of other theater magazines of the day. Now, Professor Himelstein, however, instead of viewing all of this theatrical ferment and activity as a natural result of the events of the period, finds it evidence of his simpleminded thesis that the Communist party tried to take over the American theater, and that the production of a play of social content by the Theatre Guild was a manifestation of this plot, and the Group Theatre was a manifestation of this plot, and so on. Now, this foolishness is an example, not only of his personal shallowness, but of the influence of McCarthyism on the writing of history. There are two books about that period that have come to my attention that have much more merit (although, in my opinion, both are flawed): one of them is The Political Stage by Professor Malcolm Goldstein, and the other is Stage Left by Jay Williams I think I ought to mention that some of the records of the Theatre Union are to be found today in the library of the Lincoln Center in New York [New York Public Library at Lincoln Center]. I understand that they are not in good condition. And some data is among my materials in the University of Wisconsin's Center for Film and Theatre Research.

GARDNER

Do you think Theatre Union could have made a go of it had it varied its fare, or would that have been philosophically impossible? In other words, had there been a classic or something that was more likely to make some money tossed in?

MALTZ

You mean had it, in addition to doing plays of social content, let's say, also put on Shakespeare? Well, I think that it might well have. I'm not sure. No, I think it might well have, and I think perhaps it would have been a much profounder approach to such a theater to have done that. I know that I, for instance, was very well aware during the years of the Theatre Union of the plays of Galsworthy, many of which I thought were simply remarkable, and I do still today. I would have loved to have us present a play like Justice or The Silver Box or The Skin Game, which were plays, let's say, of social content. But they would not have had the type of a more Marxist approach which we wanted to have in the Theatre Union--a broad approach but nevertheless touched by Marxism that was satisfactory to the Socialist members of our group as well as the Communists. I think that if we had done plays like that, we might have come off better financially and so have had a longer life. But it's also true that the Group Theatre did more plays like that and, for instance, did a play by Maxwell Anderson, who was a very successful American playwright, a very successful playwright in the commercial theater. Nevertheless, that particular play was a flop. Running a theater is a gamble. But, let's say, if I were starting all over again, I would want to do what you just suggested.

GARDNER

Was it a conscious choice not to on the part of the people who ran it, or did it just develop that way?

MALTZ

It just developed that way. We wanted to start a theater that would be a theater of social meaning. I think, well, let's just turn off for a second and I will... [tape recorder turned off] The Theatre Union's opening statement to the public when it announced its first play said: "We produce plays that deal boldly with the deep-going social complex--the economic, emotional, and cultural problems that confront the majority of the people. Our plays speak directly to this majority whose lives usually are caricatured or ignored on the stage. We do not expect that these plays will fall into accepted social patterns. This is a new kind of professional theater based on the interests and hopes of the great mass of working people." Now, this is what guided us and we tried to adhere to it. But I think, to name these plays of Galsworthy that I have, it would have been a more interesting theater if we had continued in that way. But we didn't. [laughter] Now, my discussion of the Himelstein book leads me to the brief, very brief, discussion of the manner in which history is written. I would say in the last fifteen years I have read some books which deal with events of which I was a part, and I have been appalled by the enormous amount of errors, both of fact and of interpretation and understanding, that appear in them. For instance, an article appeared in a magazine on theater about the production of Brecht's Mother, written by Lee Baxandall. Now, Baxandall sent questionnaires to all of the living members of the Theatre Union he could not see in person and interviewed the others. He certainly made an effort to be thorough and accurate in his research, and yet, from my point of view, there are various errors in the article that came not from him but from other members of the Theatre Union whose memory I regarded as being fallacious. But I certainly would never take the position that only my memory is infallible, and therefore I recognize that I too, in the writing of history, would make errors. However, one of the reasons why I was very eager to do this oral history was that I felt that whatever errors I would make (and I hoped I would make few), I knew that I could set the record straighter on certain events in which I had participated than many of those who were writing about it. And so, as I have gone along, I have tried to check my memory by all available books in order to at least avoid errors of fact. Interestingly enough, I would still go back to a work like Jefferson and Hamilton by Bowers and, I'm sure, be persuaded by it and feel that it was soundly written. Nevertheless I now do come to the conclusion that we are always reading, at any given moment, flawed history, and that there is no way around the subject. In a conversation just today with someone, I remembered that Charles and Mary Beard, who certainly were very well-respected historians, in a large book that was a history of America and American democracy (I don't remember the exact title) passed over the Civil War without making any mention of the black troops in the northern army. And yet one of the decisive military factors in the last year of the war was the presence of this 200,000 body of black troops in the army and of the half a million other blacks who were in transport behind the lines, digging trenches, carrying ammunition, so forth. So this is an example of the way in which history can be written. I'd like now to give a little attention to the phrase "proletarian literature," which I was supposed to be writing, among others, and to ask what it is. In 1935... [sound interference--tape recorder turned off]

1.26. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 20, 1978

GARDNER

You were about to begin talking about proletarian literature.

MALTZ

Yes. In 1935, an anthology, Proletarian Literature in the United States was published by International Publishers, which was the Communist party publishing house. And it was published not many months after the first League of American Writers congress, and its contributors had for the most part been present at the congress. Now, some of the contributors, whose names are well known forty-three years later as I dictate this, are Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passes, James T. Farrell, Michael Gold, Langston Hughes, Kenneth Patchen, Muriel Rukeyser, Richard Wright, Clifford Odets, John Wexley, Malcolm Cowley. The fact that these well-known writers--plus others of merit whose names are not so well known--would all have agreed to have material of theirs published in a volume called Proletarian Literature in the United States, which was to be published by a Communist publishing house, is a comment on the spirit of those times which needs no explanation. Now, actually, the anthology contained a miscellany of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism, which was unified by a common denominator--that is, its materials were of social criticism or social protest. The term proletarian literature was the subject of much discussion at that time and down the years. What did it actually mean? According to Webster, a proletarian was a member of the wage-earning class. Now, could we say that a poem or story written by a worker or by a farm laborer was ipso facto a piece of proletarian writing? Well, in practice, what if the author was a southern white laborer who described with glee the lynching of a black man? Or if a middle-class writer presented a play sympathetic to the cause of coal miners, as I did in my play Black Pit--did that make it a proletarian play and make me a proletarian writer? Actually it was a term that defied accurate definition and yet was used constantly. Joseph Freeman, in his introduction to the volume Proletarian Literature in the United States wrote this: "Often the writer who describes the contemporary world from the viewpoint of the proletariat is not himself a worker. War, unemployment, a widespread social economic crisis drive middle-class writers into the ranks of the proletariat. Their experience becomes contiguous to or identical with that of the working class. They see their former life and the life of everyone around them with new eyes. Their grasp of experience is conditioned by the class to which they have now attached themselves. They write from the viewpoint of the revolutionary proletariat. They create what is called proletarian literature." That's the end of the quotation. Well, there are some inaccuracies here. In the first place, Freeman was making an assumption that because of the Depression, middle-class writers were being driven into the ranks of the proletariat. Well, actually I can't remember any writers who particularly... well, there were some writers, let's say, who when they came upon hard times took factory jobs for a while, like Ben Field, or became a carpenter, like Alexander Saxton. But whatever the temporary financial difficulties during the Depression, or the need to go on WPA, most of the middle-class writers who felt sympathetic to the working class and who wrote about problems of the working class remained what they were: they remained middle-class people. So that this was an inaccurate description of what was happening. But in actuality, in practice, when Freeman says that "they write from the viewpoint of the revolutionary proletariat," in practice what this meant was they--in practice, this viewpoint of a revolutionary proletariat became the Communist party political line at any given moment. For instance, if you had someone who wrote a play, as I did, or if you had someone who wrote a play or a novel that was approved by writers on the Daily Worker and the New Masses, they would say, "This is a fine novel or story about the proletariat, this is a proletarian writer." If the same writer the next year wrote, and his particular point of view was not in accord with that of the Communist party political line, he would no longer be granted that term of approval--proletarian writer. So in fact this was a definition that meant nothing in theory and, in practice, meant something extremely narrow. I'll pause for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] Long before I left the Communist party on political grounds, I decided that the word proletarian literature was meaningless, and I ceased to use it as a description of anything. However, I never tried to raise a discussion of it in print because my writing interests lay elsewhere. Now, during the general period I've been discussing, my own effort to write fiction was advancing quite successfully. In 1935, when my last full-length play was produced, I published my first two short stories. One of them, "Man on a Road," was reprinted in The Best [American] Short Stories of 1936 and to date has been reprinted over fifty times in other anthologies and magazines, and in many countries. It was also reprinted in the Fifty Best Short Stories of 1915 to 1939.

GARDNER

Say something more about "Man on a Road" first. I'll ask you a couple of things about it.

MALTZ

Oh, yes, there are a lot of things I can say about it, but....

GARDNER

First, was it based on an actual event?

MALTZ

Yes, I should have mentioned that, I guess. "Man on a Road" came about in the following manner. I was driving in West Virginia from a southern part of the state up to an area of the soft-coal mining section called Scotts Run where I wanted to do some research for Black Pit. And I picked up a man who was a miner. As we passed through a town called Gauley Bridge, he told me of the tragedy that had occurred there when a great many unemployed miners living in the town had gone to work, very happily, for a company that was building a tunnel through a mountain. Unknown to the men, the tunnel was made of a great deal of silica, which caused a dust that got into their lungs, and they were not issued any masks while doing this work with steam hammers. And as a result, men contracted silicosis, and by the time the job had ended--I think it took about a year--many of them were fatally ill. I recall his describing to me the fact (I believe I recall accurately) that he told me that in a... not dissection--what do pathologists do? I forget the word.

GARDNER

Dissect?

MALTZ

Not dissection... in a...

GARDNER

Autopsy?

MALTZ

...in an autopsy of a man who had died of silicosis, the doctor took his lungs and put them on the ground, and they stood erect from the amount of silica in them. I now forget how many men had already died and how many had contracted it, but it was a blight on the whole town. When I got back to New York--Oh, during my stay in Scotts Run, while doing my research (I was there for about a week), I got the idea for the story "Man on a Road." Sitting nights in a hot little crib of a hotel room, I wrote it on the back of the hotel stationery and finished it within that week. But when I got back to New York, I told some friends on the New York Post about this, and nothing came of it. So I then told someone I knew who worked for a labor wire service which no longer is in existence. This wire service not only sent material to other papers but it published a weekly of its own. And it sent a reporter down to Gauley Bridge and he came back with material on this. They ran it serially in their newspaper, and as a result of these stories a congressional investigation came about. And at the time of a congressional vote about it... on the subject, these articles and my short story were put on the desk of every congressman to acquaint them with the facts. Well, that's it. That's about all.

GARDNER

That's fine. No, I had read that--that it was used during those hearings--but I also had wondered whether or not that had come from an original conversation.

MALTZ

Yes, it did.

GARDNER

Because, to me, one of the most fascinating things was the capturing of the language of the hitchhiker, which was remarkable for a writer who was really from such a more academic kind of New York sort of background.

MALTZ

Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that I did, when I say I did research, was always to try and capture the language of the people I was talking to. For instance, in the mine area, where a great many of the miners were Slavic-born, I wrote down the way in which they spoke and practiced it. So that when I came back from those fields, I could talk like any Slavic miner who....

GARDNER

As in Black Pit.

MALTZ

Yes, as in Black Pit. And when I went South, I not only tried to practice southern speech, but when I stopped off for a night at a hotel, for instance, I would speak like a southerner to the hotel clerk and ask him for a room, just in an effort to command it. Well, it's just one of the things that writers do, you know, many writers--nothing unusual about it. Well, go on. In 1937 I published two more short stories, one of them in the New Yorker and a novelette in Story magazine. The title of the latter was "Season of Celebration," but Story magazine, on its own, changed it to "Hotel Raleigh, the Bowery." The following year it was printed together with four other novelettes in a Book-of-the-Month selection called The Flying Yorkshireman. The title of the anthology was also the title of one of the novelettes by Eric Knight, and this brings me to another topic, which is what I would call "lost works of literature." In the late twenties, when I was a student at Columbia University, a professor of English there, Raymond Weaver, rediscovered Moby Dick. It had been a forgotten book. And in fact Herman Melville did no writing the last twenty years of his life because he was so disappointed in his career. Now, when I started to write, there were works that I studied and that I loved and that had an influence over me. One of them was The Seven Who Were Hanged by Leonid Andreyev; the second was a volume of Galsworthy's short stories; another was a volume of de Maupassant's short stories; and then there was the work of Liam O'Flaherty. I would be fairly sure that Andreyev's The Seven Who Were Hanged and the works of O'Flaherty are not on the reading lists of college majors in English these days. And I know that when I visited England in the year 1959, Galsworthy, I was told by my literary agent there, was read only by high school boys; whereas I considered him, then and now, to be a major writer of the English language. Now, Eric Knight's marvelous mix of fantasy, humor and tenderness in The Flying Yorkshireman and in Never Come Monday and other stories I should imagine are foreign to readers today--including, say, majors in English literature--and this is a very sad phenomenon. I remember meeting in 1962 a PhD student of English literature at UCLA who had already taught a year at Princeton in the English department and who asked me, among other questions, whether I thought he ought to read some of the short stories of Erskine Caldwell. Now, for anyone in the thirties and forties to teach English literature and not to know the stories of Erskine Caldwell was unheard of. But here, in '62, this completely earnest, hard-working man had not been called upon in any of his courses to read those stories. I've tried to wonder if there's any solution to this problem. Because as one goes along, there are always new books coming out, and there's the pressure to read new books that are being written about and talked about. I think the Modern Library used to perform a considerable service in this regard by maintaining in print worthy books that were of the past; and Everyman, the Everyman series [Everyman's Library] in England did the same. And it's occurred to me that what we need is a government-subsidized, but not supervised, edition that would be maintained in all universities, high schools, and public libraries in the land to keep alive work of literary merit. I think we're better off in the field of records of classical music in this respect, where we're able to hear, not only the works of Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, and others of the top composers, but less great composers who nevertheless have written superb individual works. That is, I would hate not to be able to hear Pachelbel's Canon in D as I would hate to have missed Gorky's extraordinary story Birth of a Man and Eric Knight's The Flying Yorkshireman. With this modest little suggestion, I leave it to future generations to try and solve the problem. One of the phenomena of the thirties and early forties was the coming to the United States of some of the outstanding intellectuals of Europe--from Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. Many were Jews, like Einstein; others were not, but were purely political refugees, like Thomas Mann. Scientists, authors, scholars and teachers, psychiatrists, social scientists--it was an immigration of intellect into our land such as I think the world has never seen into any other land. It was of enormous benefit to the United States. It is, for instance, dubious if the atom bomb (whatever we may think of it now) would have been constructed by the time it was without the contribution of foreign physicists. The realistic assessments made by these outstanding intellectuals of the nature of the Nazi regime was also of a great deal of importance in fashioning political consciousness here. Among those refugees that I personally came to know were the former Minister of Justice of the state of Prussia; Franz Weiskopf, a Czech author and critic of whom I will speak later. (By the way, Clifford Odets unashamedly stole a short story of Weiskopf's that was printed in the New Masses, and he fashioned it into his one-act play Till the Day I Die. I know about this because Weiskopf and I had a mutual agent, and the agent got after Odets for it, and Odets paid up.) Two other refugees I knew were both Czechs. One was Egon Erwin Kisch, a very urbane journalist who published not a few books that are most engaging reading. The second could be called a--well, the second was a political leader who had two names. André Simon was one name under which he had published a book in France that was translated into English and which I read in the mid-thirties, a book on political events in the world. His other name, and real name apparently, was Otto Katz. And he came here in the middle thirties to raise money for the German underground. After the war was over, he went back to Czechoslovakia and there became editor of the official Communist party newspaper. He then in 1952 was one of the Czech leaders arrested and put on trial with the secretary of the Communist party, Slansky, and he "confessed" in court to the lies of having been both a British and a Zionist agent against Czechoslovakia, and he was hanged. Finally, I would mention Karl Billinger and his wife, Hede Massing. Billinger was a tall, handsome, blond German who had been a teaching functionary, on a minor level, of the Communist party of Germany, had spent a year in a German concentration camp, and then had been allowed to go free. The Nazis did that sometimes in the early years. He escaped from Germany then with the aid of his wife and came to the United States. His book, Fatherland, had been published here around the year '36, I guess, and I was one of those who read it and was enormously impressed with it. Subsequently I met him, and it came about that he and his wife, and my wife and I, became friends. I valued them very much and learned a great deal from him. In the year 1939, I believe, they took a trip to the Soviet Union, and when they returned, they were changed people. They didn't want to speak about what was going on in the Soviet Union, but we gathered that they had learned things that were tremendously distressing to them. I no longer recall whether they let drop some hints or I found out subsequently that what they had learned was that many German refugees whom they had known at home, and who had gone to the Soviet Union, had disappeared into Stalin's concentration camps or had been shot. The result of this was that Billinger retired from public life and, so far as I know, from any position on politics. When I last heard of him, he was teaching at a small college. But his wife, Hede Massing--I don't know whether they remained married--became a very active informer for the FBI. Her anti-Soviet hatred took her to the point where she appeared as a witness in various trials against left-wingers. I guess that about covers that point for the moment. In the spring of 1937 the second conference of the--Second Congress, not conference--of the League of American Writers took place, I would say that this was the high-water mark of Communist party leadership among the nation's writers. For instance, at the large public mass meeting at Carnegie Hall among the speakers were Hemingway, Vincent Sheean and Archibald MacLeish. What this congress was essentially was a mobilization of writers to express antifascist political sentiments, and sentiments in favor of the Loyalist side in Spain. Now, although in the course of the several days there were working panels on literary matters--and I recall Dashiell Hammett reading a quite fascinating paper on tempo in writing--it was primarily an assembly of writers for common political purposes. Unfortunately, I no longer have the publications, the books, that resulted from these congresses, although they must be in some libraries. In the summer of 1937 Margaret Larkin and I took a small cottage in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where our only lighting was kerosene lamps, and I went to work writing intensively on The Underground Stream. I finished a first draft by the end of summer. I think I might mention that I had a certain formulated approach to the writing of that first novel, a general theory of writing, which consisted of the following. First, I wanted to avoid the dangers of journalistic writing by writing every novel as though it was a historical novel. That is to say, my purpose was not to affect current events by my novel in the way in which a writer might try to affect current events by writing an editorial or a leaflet or an article, or by the way in which John Wexley wrote They Shall Not Die. I had nothing against anybody doing that kind of work.

GARDNER

You just didn't want to do it yourself.

MALTZ

But I didn't want to write a novel in that manner. I wanted it to have, if possible, those qualities that might make someone want to read it ten, fifteen, or twenty years from now, when the current events that were going on had been forgotten. Secondly, I felt that the richest and most profound work came from novels that provided characters in their social setting--the reason for this being that characters do not live, let's say, purely within themselves, but they live at a given time and place and that they can't help but be influenced by the world, the city, the country, the town in which they live. Now, War and Peace is perhaps the best example of a major novel that embodies this. On the other hand, I loved Look Homeward, Angel as a novel, and I loved stories of interpersonal relationship by Chekhov and de Maupassant. But on the other hand, I rejected the thesis of those who felt that dealing with social materials was not art. I couldn't see why the dramatization of social injustice was not as valid a subject for literary materials as the dramatization of a love affair. And it's interesting that those who have accepted war novels as art... (I guess I have to get a piece of paper)... [tape recorder turned off]... now reject strike novels as propaganda. After completing the first draft of The Underground Stream, I circulated a few carbon copies among friends for the next month. Those were the days, of course, before Xerox machines, and only if you lived through the work of making carbon copies and trying to get the best carbon paper and the best and the thinnest paper so that you would eke out five or six copies, perhaps, that were legible, do you appreciate Xerox machines as I do now. And it's always been my practice to ask for reactions, when I finish a manuscript, from selected friends because I would much rather make changes in a book before it's published than say afterwards, "I wish I had thought of that." And on the basis of the comments I received, I decided to do a considerable revision. But I delayed work on it because in the early fall I was offered the chance to do some part-time teaching, and the money that would be involved was something important to me. The offer came through my friend Michael Blankfort, who had been doing this teaching at the adult extension division of New York University in downtown Washington Square. He had decided to go to Hollywood to try and improve his financial fortunes there and had suggested me to the dean of the adult education school, whom I visited and who found me acceptable.

GARDNER

Do you remember the name of that person?

MALTZ

The dean? I don't.

GARDNER

If you don't, don't worry about it.

MALTZ

A marvelous man, a lovely man, but I don't remember his name. The class I taught at first, because subsequently I enlarged the number of classes, was one to which anyone could be admitted who wanted to sign up. I prepared lecture notes with great care so that the first ten sessions of the course were just occupied with my lectures on basic playwriting. It was a two-hour course that met once a week at night. I gave a writing assignment, at first merely an exercise, and secondly, a one-act play. I read all of the work and either wrote written comments or had personal interviews before and after the class with the individuals--not interviews, but personal sessions with the individuals. And this continued for that semester and went on later. I guess I might mention that I continued this right through the year 1940... I continued this until the spring of 1941. And the classes grew. I established a workshop to which admission could only come on the basis of my having read a one-act play which I felt had some merit, and so I had a round table of about twelve students. By the second year it required two such sessions, two round tables, so that, in all, by the end of the first year I was teaching three courses about six hours a week on two different nights. And I found that I enjoyed teaching very much. Now, although this is not a personal autobiography, it's necessary to give certain personal data. Late in 1937 Margaret and I decided to adopt a child, and for that reason we got married. Now to a larger subject. I don't know whether it was because of my reading of Let History Judge by Roy A. Medvedev (a book I have mentioned before) that I came to the conclusions I am going to discuss now, or whether I had come to the conclusion myself and then found it fortified in my reading of the book. But it is my belief that German fascism would not have achieved power if not for Stalin and for Stalin's theory of social fascism. We have to go back to the end of World War I, in which various efforts were made to establish Communist governments--one in Germany and the other in Hungary. And the Socialist party in each country sided with the government in power to put down these uprisings. Now, it was the international socialist movement that had really betrayed the European working-class movement in World War I by supporting the war. Not long before the war began there was a meeting of the Socialist International, and it was agreed that the Socialists would not support their governments in any way which they declared in advance would be an imperialist war. But when only a few months later the war broke out, the Socialist parties of Germany, Austria, Hungary, France, Italy, Britain all violated their own agreement and proceeded with patriotic fervor to support the war. In the light of these events Stalin, who was not only the leader of the Soviet Union but was the head of the Comintern (which was the international association of Communist parties of the world), promulgated the theory of social fascism. To quote Let History Judge: "At the beginning of the thirties Stalin came down hardest on the left Social Democrats who enjoyed considerable influence among the working class in several European countries. He called them the most dangerous part of social democracy because they concealed their opportunism with phoney revolutionism and thus drew the people away from the Communists...." The practical result of calling the Socialists in these countries social fascists, which was the Stalin doctrine, was that in practice there could be no unity between the Communist party of Germany and the Socialist party in the face of the Hitler threat. The Communists advocated a united front with Socialists, but only from below--not with their leadership. Well, of course, this caused the Socialists to warn their rank and file against any unity with the Communists. Even worse, the Communists set up separate trade unions and thus split the working class; instead of, let's say, having their workers remain in the Socialist unions, they drew them apart from the Socialist unions into Red....

1.27. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 20, 1978

MALTZ

Now, if there was any possible justification for the phrase "social fascists" in the late twenties, or in the twenties, and even in the early thirties--to maintain that attitude, and to maintain separate trade unions, in the face of a rising Hitler movement was to be completely blind to realities. Again, to quote Let History Judge: "All the Social Democratic workers everywhere were not only insulted to the depth of their souls, they were infuriated by the communist position. And they could not forgive the Communists for this. The theory of social fascism month by month week by week was paving the way for Hitler."

GARDNER

Now at this time, though, you would have been very much in Stalin's...

MALTZ

Well, actually, it's very interesting about me personally. When the Theatre Union began, the word social fascist was also used in the United States. And indeed the other countries, like Germany, but not in such a critical situation, had carried out a similar principle. The American Communist party had set up left-wing trade unions, set up Communist-led trade unions, in certain industries especially in the light of the AF of L maintaining craft unions. But first of all, in 1934 when I was out in the coal fields, I ran into this in practice, and I remember a Communist party organizer on a low level saying to me, "This policy of maintaining our trade union is crazy. Now that the United Mine Workers has been recognized by the NRA, the miners are just going into [John L.] Lewis's union, and we've got to dissolve our union and go into that, too. I keep telling them up in Pittsburgh, and they're not paying any attention to me." So I listened to what this man said, who was on the ground, and I thought this made sense. And secondly, we in the Theatre Union, without any instruction from anybody, had come to our own united front back in 1933. We didn't need the debacle of fascism coming to power to take a more intelligent course. So that I heard this doctrine of social fascism but, you see, by the time I really came around--let me see, the Reichstag fire... seems to me that it was... yes, it was in '34, I believe...

GARDNER

Well, that's easily verified.

MALTZ

Yes, I know because one of my first acts when I came--no, it seems to me--was it '32? No, seems to me in '33 I was in a meeting protesting the burning of books in Germany after the Reichstag fire... it must have been '33. In any instance, the main point here was that--I said the early thirties, I was wrong... no.... Well, I'll correct it later. The main point is that this doctrine of social fascism helped keep the German working class split. There were even certain moments when, on issues in the Reichstag, I know the Communist party voted on the same side as the Nazi party on certain issues. And there was a general attitude that the Nazis were so nutty that if they came to power they would fall out of their own stupidity within a few months. There was not the awareness of what was going to happen. And so, looking back, this indictment of Stalin is a most profound one because from Hitler-fascism came World War II. And if this could have been avoided by a united German working class, humanity would have been saved, I guess, the cruelest period of its whole history.

GARDNER

The many tens of millions killed....

MALTZ

Incredible. Incredible the amount of human suffering and destruction. So I think with that...

GARDNER

...on that cheery note... [laughter]

MALTZ

...we'll call it a day.

1.28. SECOND PART
(October 3, 1978)

MALTZ

I'd like to make a correction of the last point I made in our previous session. I believe I said that the Stalin policy of declaring the Social Democrats to be social fascists--which resulted in separate Communist trade unions, in a united front only from below and not between the leaderships--paved the way, or brought about, Hitler-fascism. And I want to amend this to say that it was one of the factors that contributed to the conquest of power by Hitlerism, but that I think I had an overemphasis on it in the first way I put it because there certainly were other important contributing factors. I'd like to mention that in the general period of 1935 to 1939 people on the Left and, I would say, people who were liberal and not further left than that, were all affected to some extent, and some quite profoundly, by the songs of the period which came out of the Left. For instance, the songs that came out of Spain, out of the International Brigades and the Lincoln Brigade and so on, were not only played at meetings having to do with Spain but they became records and people played them in their homes and played them for friends; and they cannot be discounted as factors that contributed a good deal of emotion to the political feeling of the time. One song, "The Peat Bog Soldiers," was a song that had come out of one of the concentration camps in Germany for politicals where the inmates worked at cutting peat in, apparently, a very harsh climate. And the song, which was somber, and yet lively as a marching song, and which was strong, gave a sense of men who were prisoners who were doing work that was hard and that they certainly didn't want to do, but men who had an indomitable will to survive and triumph, and they were marching with their heads unbowed. And even today when I hear that song I react to it. It was during this period that Pete Seeger, who has been such a durable figure in our cultural scene, first emerged as one of a group that involved Woody Guthrie and the Almanac Singers. And his songs and the songs of the whole group were emotionally affecting.

GARDNER

Did you know them personally?

MALTZ

I didn't know any of them at the time. I once shook hands with Pete Seeger, but I've never known him. The only one I knew of that group, and subsequently, was Millard Lampell, and he left singing to do writing. But he was the man who wrote the words to "The [Lonesome] Train," to which Earl Robinson wrote the music, and I knew him. It's very interesting, by the way, that Woody Guthrie, about whom a film was made, and who's become a symbol of Americana in a way, during the thirties wrote... I think it was a daily column, or maybe a weekly column, for the People's World which was the West Coast Communist party newspaper. This period saw the national applause for the "Ballad for Americans," first sung by Paul Robeson, a song to words by John LaTouche and music by Earl Robinson, and was sung at the Republican National Convention in, I guess it was, 1936. I've mentioned "The [Lonesome] Train," which was, I think, a beautiful work. And then there was the song "The House I Live In," to which Earl Robinson also wrote the music, and the words, interestingly (and I think I may have mentioned this earlier), were written by a man whose pen name was Lewis Allan. Lewis Allan also had written the words to that terrible and yet beautiful--agonizing and yet beautiful--song "Strange Fruit," which Billie Holiday made famous. And Lewis Allan's real name was Meeropol. Let's pause while I get his first name. [tape recorder turned off] Lewis Allan's real name was Abel Meeropol, and he and his wife, Anne, were the couple who adopted the two children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after they were executed. And the two sons [Michael and Robert] go by the name of Meeropol today. I have often thought that there is a great novel to be written about that saga of adopting those children.

GARDNER

There have been a couple of novels written about the....

MALTZ

Yes, there was one, to me slanderous one which a great many people like, written by [E. L.] Doctorow. What's the name of it?

GARDNER

I've forgotten.

MALTZ

Yes, I have it on my shelves.

GARDNER

The Book of Daniel.

MALTZ

That's right. The Book of Daniel. I find a great many people like it. I don't like it. I think it's pretentiously written, and I think it's a slander on the children. I think it's disgraceful. Now, going on.... During this period (I'm now specifically thinking of 1938) the terrible struggle in Spain continued, and although there wasn't the coverage of TV that we had in the Vietnam War, there was intense newspaper and magazine coverage. And in addition to what one might call regular reporting, a great many individuals who were sympathetic to the Loyalists went over to Spain and, because they were prominent, were given newspaper and magazine space in which to write about those events. So that you had reporting by Hemingway and Dorothy Parker and Martha Gellhorn and Lillian Hellman and a great many others. I think it is accurate to say that millions of people in the world felt the agony of the Spanish Republican citizens trying to defeat fascism against what proved to be insuperable odds. In spite of the fact that--oh, at the same.... There also were a number of films made, one of them being The Spanish Earth, which was made by Joris Ivens, [who was] a Dutch documentary filmmaker, and Hemingway, about the struggle. It was a most affecting film that was shown quite widely here, but of course not in regular commercial outlets. Now, in spite of the fact that President Roosevelt, seeking the Catholic vote, maintained the policy of nonintervention in the civil war, public opinion in the United States moved increasingly to the side of the Loyalists and for an end to nonintervention. A Gallup poll before the end of the war showed 76 percent of the American people in favor of lifting the arms embargo. Would you shut off for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] I'm quoting now from The Cold War and Its Origins by Fleming, page 66...

GARDNER

Let me stop you a second. [tape recorder turned off]

MALTZ

Quoting from The Cold War and Its Origins, page 66, Fleming says that the nonintervention policy that Roosevelt followed was to be "the outstanding blot on the diplomatic record of the Roosevelt Administrations. Former Under Secretary of State Welles wrote in his Time for Decision that it was 'the cardinal error' of the long Roosevelt-Hull conduct of our foreign affairs--'of all our blind isolationist policies, the most disastrous.'" Fleming continues: "Certainly it was a blunder which tied the United States in deeply with the policy of steady surrender to fascist conquests. With our aid the sacrifice of the Spanish people was nullified and they were restored to the ruthless rule of the old regime." I might say that it became increasingly clear to, let's say, us on the Left who agreed with the thinking of the Communist party that the struggle in Spain was a prelude to World War II. In addition to the songs of the period and the films like Spanish Earth, there were various speakers who came back from the front and toured the country raising funds. One of them was an English novelist, Ralph Bates, who had been a political commissar with the British volunteers to the Republican side, and he was an astonishing orator--one of the greatest I have ever heard. I remember an evening at Carnegie Hall, with every seat taken, in which he spoke for about two hours without pause on all of the questions involved in the war, and it was an overwhelming experience. It turned out several months later that Bates needed a place to stay, and this came to the attention of Margaret and myself, and we invited him to sleep on a couch that we had in our dining room. He moved in, and about a week later a girl moved in with him, and the two seemed to make out comfortably on this small couch and were there for about three months. It was, of course, a tremendous experience for me to have breakfast with him every morning and talk over events. A second speaker was an American woman who had been a nurse on the Madrid front. Her name was Lini DeVries. She came back early in 1938 to raise funds for ambulances and medical aid, and I met her at that time. I mention it now because our lives touched a good deal subsequently, and we have been friends ever since. During this period the British and the French continued their appeasement of German fascism in the rest of Europe. Twice in the fall of 1937 Hitler told the British ambassador that the first and last German objective was unification with Austria. Meanwhile the Soviet delegate to the League of Nations, [Maxim] Litvinov, kept pleading for collective security against fascism. The French and the British ignored him. On March 7, 1938, Chamberlain, the British premier, said the following in Parliament: "We must not try to delude small and weak nations into thinking that they will be protected by the League," (meaning the League of Nations), "against aggression." Almost at once, German troops marched into Austria. "Marched into Austria" is just a phrase, but for us at the time it was a matter of day-to-day radio and newspaper and magazine information about concrete events of a dreadful nature: the establishment of concentration camps for left-wingers, with all of the ferocious brutality within the barbed wire perimeters that we now knew about from the work of Billinger and others; the desperate efforts of Jews to leave the country, in most cases fruitless efforts because of doors closed to them in other countries; the swastika appearing everywhere; the Brownshirts; the book burnings; the dismissal of Jewish and left-wing academicians from all schools, universities, and institutes, and so on. We of that generation lived with this barbarism day by day--felt it, hated it, abominated it. These events could not but bind me and others closer to the Soviet Union because of its steady efforts to achieve collective security to stop fascism and also because of its position against anti-Semitism. I think this is perhaps a good moment to say something about this, especially since the anti-Semitism now present in the Soviet Union is manifested in various ways. This is a change from the Soviet Union in its earlier days. One of the first acts of Lenin after the Bolsheviks took power was to make a Victrola record in which he attacked anti-Semitism and explained its political uses by reactionaries in Russia. The old Bolsheviks knew very well that anti-Semitism had been used by the czarist establishment as a means of diverting the Russian people from their own woes. And the Soviet Union in its early years and, I think, right up through World War II, was singularly free from anti-Semitism as compared to czarist Russia. In fact it was a crime punishable by imprisonment to express anti-Semitic attitudes. I won't try to go into the reasons why this changed from the years since the end of World War II until now, but it has changed. Certainly the Soviet Union is not today anti-Semitic in the way in which Hitler's Germany was--light years away from that. Nevertheless there are marked expressions of anti-Semitism there. However, in the thirties this wasn't so, and it was therefore a powerful contrast to the policies of fascism. It was during 1938 that the League of American Writers, on which I continued to function as a member of the executive board, established a committee to aid exiled writers and raised funds and used all influence it had to bring them safely to the United States. I remember I wrote something for the league on this issue. I no longer recall what it was, but I presume it was some sort of public statement that the league gave out. This committee helped bring a good number of writers to this country. During this same period my own writing progressed in the marketplace. I wrote a short story "The Happiest Man on Earth" which was published by Harper's magazine and was reprinted in the annual anthology called O'Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories. It received first prize for the year 1938, and it got all the more attention because the second prize was won by Richard Wright and the third by John Steinbeck. And I might say that the $300 that came with the prize was very happily received by me at that time. [laughter]

GARDNER

I'm sure.

MALTZ

Yes. I don't know what that $300 would come to today; maybe it would be $3,000.

GARDNER

Probably.

MALTZ

But that's the way it felt, I'm sure. That short story has since been very widely reprinted. Let's find out how much. [tape recorder turned off] That story has been reprinted some eighty times since its first publication, and the reprintings continue. I finished a one-act play called Rehearsal, which received amateur productions and was published in One-Act Play magazine. And a long one-act play, Transit, was written by my friend Philip Stevenson, which was a dramatization of my novelette "Season of Celebration," and this received quite a number of amateur productions. During that year I published a first volume of short stories. The Way Things Are. I think it merits a personal comment. I think it was just a sense of inferiority on my part that made me say yes to an offer by International Publishers to publish a volume of my stories instead of my seeking a regular publisher. Now, by "regular" I mean one of the publishing houses that was in the mainstream of American publishing and published materials of every sort. International Publishers was the Communist publishing house. Its materials were almost exclusively books on Marxism or books written by authors whose position was a Marxist one. And as I look back, it just seems incomprehensible on my part, and perhaps even more incomprehensible on the part of my agent, to have agreed to give a book of stories to this publishing house. Perhaps if I had already received the O'Henry Memorial Award before I arranged for the book publication I might not have done it. In any instance, I did do so, and it's a comment on what I was personally at that time--which is a quite different man than I am today. Now we'll pause and I'll get some reviews.

GARDNER

Okay. [tape recorder turned off]

MALTZ

Alfred Kazin, writing in the New York Tribune on July 24, 1938, said: "Albert Maltz's favorite subject is pain--the appearance of pain, the conditions of pain. Yet it is because he writes out of a hot, lacerated fury that never raises to a scream that these few stories are so burningly effective." The New York Post on July 20: "Albert Maltz is one of the best and most considerable of the proletarian writers, and his short stories, including the novella 'Season of Celebration,' have been highly praised... a collection called The Way Things Are deals with the woes of the underprivileged and downtrodden and with much more art than is usual in books of this character." Harry Hansen in the World-Telegram, July 19: "Albert Maltz is a thirty-year-old playwright whose short stories are vivid proof that proletarian fiction is marching on. Lots of us have heard of Bowery flop houses, but no one has seen the inside of one until he reads Maltz's 'Season of Celebration,' the first of eight short stories that make up his book. The spectacle of these broken men and jobless youths paying their dimes and quarters into Baldy White's chicken-wire cage to get a place to sleep shows with what a keen eye Albert Maltz sizes up the unfortunates of city life." I would say that other reviews went along in this vein, but there was one that was rather different, and that was by Fred R. Miller in the New Republic, August 17, 1938: "Proletarians have their fun as well as their hard knocks, but you never would suspect it reading these eight stories. Disease, degradation, death--if there were nothing else to the proletarian lot there would by this year of capitalism be no proletariat for Maltz to write about. Such a preoccupation with the black is unwholesome, obsessive, defeating its own purpose. For while the sympathy poured out over the underdog is genuine enough and open to respect, anyone who has ever been one himself must find this group portrait of sad underdogs lopsided and, that being so, atypical. So the idea is not to read the book at one fell sitting. Collectively, the stories have an exasperating sameness of tone; but individually, they move you, if you can be readily moved, and one of them, 'Man on a Road' is, to quote the literary editor, 'absolutely first rate. The best story the New Masses ever printed.'" Now, I think that this critic had an important comment to make. The title of the book was The Way Things Are and he was saying, looked at as a whole, this isn't the way things are, and he was right. Today if I used that title on a book, I would want the volume to have many different facets. And mine did not. I might say in passing that the fact that a book published by International got the reviews that my short stories did is a comment on the temper of the times. In the year 1938 in the United States there was infinitely more hospitality to a book published by the Left than there was to be in subsequent years. And I was to find that out in the sixties, as I will mention when I come to it. Again, a literary point--there is always a lag between writing and publication: in the case of a short story, from two to six months or longer; in the case of a novel, eight months to a year. So when I speak of a volume of stories coming out like The Way Things Are in July 1938, it means that the volume was completed at least by November 1937. During 1938 I was working on my first novel, The Underground Stream, which was published in June 1940. This means it was completed by October 1939. And I just mention that for general understanding.

GARDNER

That's interesting too from the point of view of someone who is trying to write or who is writing material that's timely.

MALTZ

Oh, yes. That's a really important point. Because I sometimes have had people come to me and say, "I'm so excited about such-and-such material. It's got to be written about. Somebody has to say so-and-so, and I'm going to do it." And I would say, "Now, look, how long do you think it will take you to do it? Will it take maybe six months with rewriting? Okay, six months. And then it's going to take anywhere from eight to twelve months to publish it if you get a publisher. So if you add six to six to eight in order to be conservative, you're talking about twenty months. What's going to happen to this situation? Will it be in anybody's mind twenty months from now?"

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

That's a tremendously important thing. And furthermore, one always hopes that something you write will have some life to it, that it will be read a little longer than the day after you publish it.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

So what's going to interest people? And that's where the desire to comment on immediate situations is a trap for a writer.

GARDNER

Right. There's got to be a more general point of view--a timelessness rather than a timeliness.

MALTZ

That's right. I want to make mention of what I would call the gambler's aspect of a writer's life, and of the earnings of writers. A professional person of competence has financial security in a great many fields over a large portion of his adult life. (I'm assuming now that I'm talking about a country with a certain modicum of economic stability, the way the United States has been in all but the thirties.) For instance, an attorney, physician, an engineer, accountant, a business executive, a librarian, a civil servant, an educator, a newspaperman in general will, as they go along in their profession from youth to middle age, earn more and will have a general sense of stability in their job. A competent physician could certainly expect to have a going practice at the age of fifty, fifty-five, and sixty. None of this is true of the free-lance writer--that is, a novelist, playwright, a short-story writer, a writer of articles. And it is even less true by far of the poet. The writer's economic life and his work satisfactions--both of them are closely akin to those of a gambler. (Now, in parentheses I would say that this is also true to an even greater extent of the fine arts--that is, of painting and sculpture. It's also true in theater and film for actors, directors, and set designers. But I will deal here only with writers.) The best-sellers and the enormous sums of money made by a sprinkling of writers who've hit the jackpot is no indication whatsoever of the economic realities of 95 percent of writers. For this reason professional writers who have been published often, who have been celebrated because of their work, also need to teach, write for TV or radio or for movies or for advertising agencies, need to give lectures, and work at an infinite variety of other jobs. There are tremendous ups and downs, both in income and in work satisfaction, for writers. For instance, I recall that in 1937, unable to pay the modest phone bills that I had (which probably at that time amounted to no more than about ten dollars a month), I had the phone removed from my apartment. I made business calls from a phone on the ground floor of the building, and it was not easy for anybody to reach me. But about ten days later, a story sold and I was able to put the phone back. In the summer of 1938 when I was in Las Vegas, New Mexico, I was unable to see anything of the surrounding countryside because I didn't have a car. And this was a great shame because close by Las Vegas was beautiful country, and quite close were cities, towns like Taos and Santa Fe and so on. In Las Vegas at that time mail was delivered on the Fourth of July, and on that day I had a check for about $900 from the Book-of-the-Month Club selection of The Flying Yorkshireman. As a result, we were able to get a car and see things that were part of important experiences for me. Now, in terms of work satisfaction, a lawyer, a librarian, an educator, and so on can note daily that he has done work that is of value; but even a Eugene O'Neill wrote plays that were never put on stage. To labor for weeks over a story and have it rejected, and for years over a novel and have it unpublished, or perhaps published and then to have it drop like a stone in a well--which is what happens to most novels--is very discouraging.

1.29. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE ONE
OCTOBER 3, 1978

GARDNER

We were talking about the vagaries of the writer.

MALTZ

The free-lance writer's life. It takes fortitude to go on to the next story and the next novel. Most writers, even those with considerable reputations, produce all of their lives without having a novel that's commercially successful in a big or even a medium way. I have had literary work published in over thirty languages; but I could not have lived down the years or supported a family on my earnings from it. I've had to supplement it, and this is the only reason I've spent the years I have working on screenplays. Yet there is another side to a writer's life that is a most important counterbalance to all of the problems that I've been mentioning: his work is never monotonous, never repetitive, never dull, never without challenge. Each day's work demands the maximum use of whatever talent he has, and there are daily satisfactions in pages written, even though the wait may be long for the work to be completed and published. And there's always a dream that a serious author has: that his work will live and will be read in the future. I know that I am very pleased that my novel The Cross and the Arrow has been constantly in print in one or more countries since it was first published thirty-five years ago. And naturally I hope that this will continue. I think if I had a second life to live, I might decide to become a historian because the study of history has interested me so much. But I think if I had a third life to live, I'd go back again to being a writer. The good balances out the bad. But it is a gambler's life. And a little footnote to all of this is a story about the very, very able novelist Meyer Levin. He wrote a novel called Citizens which he completed in the year 1939 and, like some other authors--Edna St. Vincent Millay being one of them--he had only one copy of it, and he left it in a taxicab and never could get it again. So he sat down, having spent two years in the writing of it, and spent another year rewriting it. And it was published on the day that Germany invaded the Low Countries and France, and consequently nobody read any book reviews and the book died instantly. In the summer of 1938 when my wife and I went to Las Vegas, we found that the nurse, Lini DeVries, we had listened to as a speaker on Spain was now working in that town. She was working for the U.S. Public Health Service. Since I went with her on one of her days of work, I would like to mention the extraordinarily fine work that the U.S. Public Health Service was doing at that time in New Mexico. Outside of Las Vegas there's hill country, and the farmers who live in those areas are descendants of the Mexicans who had been living there in 1848 when the territory changed hands. They were illiterate in both languages. Lini took me to one village where, before the U.S. Public Health Service came in, there had been fifty child deaths in one summer from dysentery, the reason being that the people used to drink water from the irrigation ditches in which their cattle defecated. They had no knowledge whatsoever of elementary sanitation. The Public Health Service would send in a team with a film and with a microscope. The film would be a short education in the nature of microbes, and they would scoop some water out of the irrigation ditch and put it under the microscope and let every adult and child who wanted to take a look at what was swimming in the water that they were drinking. And they could then make the connection between what the film had told them and the realities of their lives. As a result, they cooperated at once in digging wells and in screening their homes from flies and in recognizing that the fly was an enemy of theirs. By doing this, in one year the child deaths from dysentery went from fifty down to two. An essential requirement for the Public Health nurses working in these villages was to get the cooperation of the local priests and the local midwives; without that they could make no headway whatsoever. But they found that with the proper approach they got very warm cooperation. The midwives, for instance, were often very skilled in basic knowledge; but what they didn't know about were drops to put in the babies' eyes to prevent them from getting gonorrhea if one of their parents had it. So once it was established by the Public Health nurse that she was no danger to the functioning of the midwife and to the income of the midwife, then the midwife was very glad to accept these drops. And so on. Another function of the Public Health nurses, and the doctors who came from time to time, was to find out which of the people had syphilis, which was apparently rather endemic in the area, and to have them come into Las Vegas once a week for shots. This became a rather gay expedition in which many of the young folks every week went in a truck to Las Vegas and had their shots and didn't think anything of it because so many people had need for the same. In spite of this vast improvement, I remember going into one small house with Lini on a day that was intensely hot and finding a woman in a spick-and-span house with a very young infant whom she had wrapped in layers of blankets and had placed in front of a roaring hot fire. Why she did this, I have no knowledge--evidently thinking that the infant needed it to survive. But of course the child had prickly heat, and Lini persuaded the woman that it didn't need all of these covers. In the fall of 1938 my wife and I moved to a very pleasant area in Queens called Sunnyside because that was where we could have a small balcony on which to put our young son, and it would be a pleasanter area for a child to grow up than where we had been living in Manhattan. During this period my teaching expanded. I now had a larger class for beginners and two workshops for those who had produced writing that merited their going on. The statistical chances of there being genuinely talented people from a classroom of hopeful writers is not too large; but a number of writers did emerge from my classes--one who's a moderately successful TV writer today and...

GARDNER

What's his name?

MALTZ

His name is Alfred Brenner. And one whom I had a great desire to help who was a gentle, New Jersey minister who wrote one-act plays solely designed for church productions, and who was doing it primarily to supplement his meager salary by the small royalties that he would get with each production. And I gave him a good deal of time in private sessions to try and help him along the way because he touched me very much. One very interesting character who was in my classes was Dr. Maxwell Maltz, the man who became celebrated for writing books on cybernetics—emotional [Psycho-Cybernetics] cybernetics, I guess. He was a very successful plastic surgeon and, I believe, a very skilled one, from certain references I have seen to his work. And he had the idea for a very interesting play based upon the life of an Italian physician who could properly be called the first plastic surgeon. His calling came about because he learned how to repair the noses and faces and ears of men who had been in sword fights. And some of the instruments, the surgical instruments that he devised to do this, are still in basic use today or in modified use. Also, this man was hailed before the Inquisition on the grounds that by repairing faces that had been injured he was interfering with the laws of God. And I don't particularly remember the outcome of the trial, but it formed an important part of the play. I spent a great deal of time with Maxwell Maltz (and we became friends in the course of it) in an effort to get that play right, but he never did get it right so far as I was concerned. However, he got it put on himself some years later and it was not a success. (I learned from friends that he used to introduce himself as my cousin in the years before he himself published his work on cybernetics; but he stopped calling himself my cousin when I got into political trouble later.) We come now to the most terrible moment in the year 1938, which was the Munich Pact signed on the thirtieth of September. That day and that pact absolutely set the stage for World War II. As I mentioned earlier, in the fall of 1937 Hitler had told the British ambassador that incorporating Austria into Germany was his first and last objective. However, very shortly after he got his way in this, he began to raise demands about ethnic Germans who allegedly were being persecuted in the Sudeten border provinces of Czechoslovakia. In actual fact, these Sudeten Germans enjoyed all rights of other citizens in Czechoslovakia and were not being oppressed at all. The Sudeten region had tremendous fortifications on the Czech side that, later, German generals said they could not have taken at that time. In addition, the Sudeten region had 66 percent of the nation's coal, 80 percent of its lignite, 86 percent of its chemicals, 80 percent of its cement, 80 percent of its textiles, 70 percent of its iron and steel, 70 percent of its electrical power and 40 percent of its timber. We can begin to understand why Hitler was suddenly weeping over the condition of the Sudeten Germans. With a series of increasing demands Hitler finally arrived at the insistence that the Sudeten borderlands had to be ceded by Czechoslovakia to Germany. Now Czechoslovakia, which had a well-trained army beside these fortifications, also had a military alliance with the Soviet Union and France obligating the latter two countries to come to its defense if attacked. I'm not going to recite the history of events here that led up to Munich. They will be found very succinctly related in volume 1 of The Origins of the Cold War by Fleming or in greater detail in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer and many other books. But a summation is needed. The dominant wing of the British establishment headed by Chamberlain tried constantly to push Germany toward a war with Russia. It was completely willing to have Germany get not only the Sudetenland but Czechoslovakia as a whole. The dominant wing of the French establishment wanted the same. Both therefore made clear to Czechoslovakia--Oh, the French establishment therefore made clear to Czechoslovakia that it would repudiate its military alliance unless the Czechs gave in to the German demands. The Germans threatened to march, and the British and French ambassadors told the Czech president, [Eduard] Beneš, that Hungary and Poland would also attack them. So although Russia had stood by its alliance and said it would fight, the Czech government gave in. German troops took over at once 11,000 square miles of territory, the tremendous fortifications and all of the industrial and mineral wealth I mentioned earlier, Poland and Hungary also got slices of Czechoslovakia. This was the immediate effect of Munich. I recall that month of September as one in which there were days in which I, as one of millions, turned on the radio half a dozen times to hear any new scrap of news. We prayed that the Czechs would not give in because we knew what would follow. And it did. World War II followed. In the spring of the next year a tragic documentary film of these Czech events was played in New York. The man who had made it was Hans Burger. The film was called Crisis. I became friends with Burger and will tell about him later in my narrative. However, Hitler, having promised that Germany had no interest in having any Czech under his authority, on March 15, 1939, five and a half months after Munich, sent his troops marching into Czechoslovakia as a whole. Thirteen days after this German, Italian, and Spanish fascist troops took over Madrid, and the Republican struggle of three years was at a bloody end. Fascist firing squads then took over and tens of thousands were executed summarily in cities, towns, and villages throughout the areas formerly held by the Republicans. I want to discuss now the growth of anti-Semitic movements in the United States. Maybe we can pause for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] Now, I want to talk about the rise of the anti-Semitic movement in the United States in those years. From the time that fascism first took power in Germany, one of its main exports was anti-Semitism. This led to the growth of anti-Semitic movements in most countries in the world. Historically, anti-Semitism is one of the most potent political weapons ever invented. Since Jews have been dispersed over a great part of the world, it has been a ready tool for reactionary political leaders in many countries. It has the great value of blinding persons to the reality around them. The Jew becomes the source of all problems and calamities. The United States was not free of anti-Semitism in various forms before Hitler came to power. But there's a vast difference between anti-Semitic attitudes that may be held by certain individuals and anti-Semitism as a political policy, as an organized banner. In the United States dozens and dozens of anti-Semitic groups, anti-Semitic and profascist, sprang up after Hitler came to power. In a pamphlet published by the League of American Writers which had a--There was a partial list of anti-Semitic publishers and individuals in America, and this partial list had 135 names on it. Weekly newspapers came into being. Tens of thousands of anti-Semitic leaflets were distributed every month. Public rallies were held. The leading groups were the German-American Bund, Gerald L.K. Smith's group, one led by William Dudley Pelley called the Christian American Crusade, and the movement headed by a Catholic priest. Father [Charles Edward] Coughlin. [tape recorder turned off] For instance, in a New York State gubernatorial campaign around the year 1938, I believe, the following leaflet was distributed widely among railroad workers by their foremen: "Don't vote for [Herbert Henry] Lehman. The Communists are voting for him because he is a Jew." I'm now reading from something I myself wrote that I will identify later: We see the basic methodology of anti-Semitism expertly applied. The railroad workers are among the lowest paid in average of all industrial groups in America since they suffer from a short working year. At the same time it is impossible for them to apply for relief since they are classed as workers at jobs. Obviously their economic situation is serious, and acute discontent is widespread among them. Oh, no, I'm sorry, that isn't the quote I wanted, dammit. Now I have it. All right: This is the invariable purpose of anti-Semitic campaigns: to divide the mass of people; to divert the wrath of discontented sections of the population from the true causes of their misery; to blur in all instances the nature and anatomy of economic crises; and to mobilize the population in support of the program of the reactionaries who are conducting the anti-Semitic campaign in the first place. Father Coughlin was the most dangerous of all of the anti-Semitic agitators. He had a Sunday night radio program which had 40 million listeners. And he was a most powerfully affecting orator. He published a magazine called Social Justice in which the anti-Semitism was much more blatant and vicious than he dared express himself on radio, and increasingly the sale of his magazine on the streets of New York and other cities began to take on the quality of the Nazi Brownshirts in Germany selling their written materials before the taking of power. There would be a little group of men around the salesmen making anti-Semitic remarks at any person who passed whom they deemed to be Jewish. They were street bullies ready for physical violence. Out of great concern about this development, both for political and personal reasons, I did some special research on the subject of anti-Semitism, and I was part of a small seminar led by a Jewish Communist scholar on the subject. In 1939 the League of American Writers published a pamphlet--or, I'd say, a brochure, not a pamphlet--a brochure of 125 pages called We Hold These Truths. It included statements on anti-Semitism by fifty-four leading American writers, statesmen, educators, clergymen, and trade unionists, and the proceeds from the sale of the brochure were donated to exiled antifascist writers. Among those making statements whose names would be meaningful today were Theodore Dreiser, Ruth Benedict, Van Wyck Brooks, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Justice Robert H. Jackson, Dorothy Thompson, Tom Mooney, and many more. There was an introduction of some twelve pages to the brochure which was written anonymously by me.

GARDNER

Why did you do it anonymously?

MALTZ

Oh, because... [sound interference--tape recorder turned off] I wrote it anonymously because it was requested that I do so, and the request was sound since this was going to be a brochure to which many people contributed, and these many people had not selected me to be their spokesman in analyzing the total phenomenon of anti-Semitism. And so it was just thought proper that it should be just an introduction as though written by the league. I think that was right. A little later, or about this time, I had occasion to drive down to Philadelphia with my friend George Sklar for production of some play, perhaps a play of ours, in Philadelphia and while there heard that anti-Semitic leaflets had been showered on the city from an airplane only the day before. This was a last straw for me, emotionally, in propelling me toward an activity that could combat this sort of thing more efficiently than anything that I personally had done up until now. I no longer recall how exactly those of us who founded the magazine called Equality got together, but I do know that it happened very quickly. One of the other founders with myself was a scholar I knew by the name of Albert Deutsch. He was a historian who had given me my first instruction on how to use a library for historical research. During the forties he became a columnist on the New York Post on matters of medicine and public health issues and became very widely read and very popular. A second man, who I believe I had previously met, was Nathan Ausubel, who had been a volunteer soldier in the Jewish Legion in General Allenby's army that entered Jerusalem in 1917. He was a man of letters and subsequently edited three volumes of Jewish poetry, folklore, and humor. There was Harold Coy, a free-lance journalist and a southern WASP, as I believe, and Leo Schwartz, a scholar in Jewish culture. I know that founding the magazine took a great deal of my time and that I went with others to see people to raise money and that when we came to our first issue, I wrote quite a number of things anonymously for it: the prospectus to get support and raise money, and to do all of those things that are involved in starting a magazine. On our masthead for the first issue, which came out in May 1939, we listed an editorial council that included, among others. Professor Franz Boas (the anthropologist), Bennett Cerf (the publisher), Dashiell Hammett, Moss Hart, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, and Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein. (I pause to say that Prince Loewenstein was an antifascist Catholic German in exile in the United States who worked earnestly and diligently for all antifascist causes during that time. I came to have a good deal of respect for him.) I wrote three of the editorials of the first issue, anonymously of course. They were "To All People of Goodwill" and "Peace or War" and "Equality Is Not Divisible." We did a good thing in distributing our first issue. The first printing was 5,000 copies, as I recall, and we hired unemployed seamen and longshoremen to stand next to every seller of a Coughlin magazine in the central area of Manhattan and sell them alongside of that individual, with some friends around if protection was necessary. As a result, the first printing was sold out immediately, and our first issue ended up with a total sale of 20,000 copies.

GARDNER

Terrific.

MALTZ

Yes, it was an important achievement because people were able to rally around it and say Coughlin does not own the streets. I will mention that the issues of Equality were collected and published due to the efforts of Professor Jack Salzman of Hofstra University and were issued by the Greenwood Reprint Corporation in 1970. [phone rings--tape recorder turned off] I'm now reading from the introduction by Professor Salzman to the bound publication of the copies of Equality: In October 1939 Equality published its most important and influential piece: "The Christian Front and the Catholic Church: an Open Letter to Archbishop Spellman." (The latter was the archbishop of New York City.) The open letter asserted that the Christian Front movement in New York, following the leadership of Father Coughlin, served a double function. And now he quotes Equality: "It is first a membership organization formed along semimilitary lines limited to men over eighteen years of age; and second, a coordinated center for a united front of various anti-Semitic, fascist and Nazi groups in this city." Salzman continued: Spellman never bothered to reply to the open letter. On January 14, 1940, seventeen members of the Christian Front were placed under federal arrest in New York for plotting to overthrow the government. Father Coughlin disavowed any association with the group and expressed the hope that J. Edgar Hoover would substantiate every contention made. It was the open letter that most clearly exposed the corruption of the Christian Front and Coughlinism. Not only did the Nation, the New York Post, and several left-wing organizations join in the attack against Coughlin but so too did the Churchman and Commonweal. I'd like to pause to insert my own comment here that one of the factors in every aspect of human life, not only political, but every aspect, is that if an individual or a group speaks up, it brings others to rally around and speak up as well. Certainly the Nation is and has always been a fine magazine, and yet here we find that this little magazine that we established, and in which we hammered what we had to say about Coughlinism, brought the Nation and the New York Post and the Protestant Churchman and the Catholic Commonweal to come forward in ways they had not previously. Going on, Salzman says: In 1941 Cardinal Mooney [*Edward Mooney was appointed cardinal in 1946--Ed.] ordered Coughlin to cease his broadcasts and to end publication of Social Justice... The extent to which Equality can be credited with the demise of the Coughlin terror obviously cannot be accurately gauged, but that it was an important instrument in silencing the radio priest is beyond doubt. And if for this reason alone, it was an invaluable publication.

GARDNER

How long did publication continue?

MALTZ

Publication of Equality continued--Its last issue was, I think, October/November of 1939--wait a minute... was it '39 or '40? 1940. Yes, October/November 1940. But then it kind of merged into being another magazine; but as such it ended in 1940.

GARDNER

Did you retain the editorship throughout?

MALTZ

Yes, I was an editor throughout. And I gave a great deal of time to it. It's another example of why I, with my particular emotional chemistry, let's say, spent so much time on organizational work rather than on writing in those years. Nobody told me to do this; it was my own concern.

GARDNER

Were you involved in the fund raising as well?

MALTZ

Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

GARDNER

How did the magazine do. Did it...?

MALTZ

Well, you know, none of us who worked on it--There were a couple of people who were paid who were full-time office workers, but none of us, of the people like myself, got money from it; we just gave money to it.

GARDNER

Did it break even? Or did it lose money over the period that you were involved?

MALTZ

No. I think it broke even. I no longer remember its finances. Maybe it didn't break even. We got some ads. Maybe we just kept on raising money, but we got it. Well, of course I don't remember that we ended with any debts to anybody particularly.

GARDNER

Who absorbed it afterwards? You said it became...?

MALTZ

I know that the current magazine which I presently read called Jewish Currents somehow was tied to it, but not directly; I think there was another magazine in between. I'm not sure. It's lost in time. Oh, in the course of it--I say, in the course of publishing Equality we got quite a number of people to write for it. For instance, in our first issue Dr. Fosdick, who was a very well-known Protestant pastor in New York, Lewis Lawes, who was warden of Sing Sing, Dorothy Thompson, were in our first issue. If I pick at random an issue of August 1939, well, none of the names would be known today, although they were at that time. That's an important difference. For instance, Donald Ogden Stewart was a real name, and I don't think he is very well known today by, let's say the current generation.

GARDNER

But by book collectors?

MALTZ

Or here in Equality, in October 1939: Albert Gerard, leading professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, Meyer Levin, the novelist; artists who contributed: William Cropper, Birnbaum, and so on.

1.30. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE TWO
OCTOBER 3, 1978

GARDNER

You are continuing to thumb through Equality.

MALTZ

Yes, I'm interested to see that in an issue of January 1940, there's an article "Justice for the Foreign-born" by Ernest Hemingway and W. A, Neilson; "End Lynching" by Walter White, who was head of the NAACP; "Lindbergh's Tailspin" by Emil Lengyel, who was a very well-known foreign correspondent; and an editorial, "The Strange Friends of Congressman Dies: An Exposure," and so on. Well, I think now I'll move on from Equality. During 1939 I did a number of other items of fugitive, anonymous writing--fugitive or anonymous writing. One was a book review of Ruth McKenney's fine book Industrial Valley for the New Masses, and I will mention her. Ruth McKenney and her husband, whose name was Richard Bransten and who had the pen name of Bruce Minton as an editor of the New Masses, were friends of mine. Her "My Sister Eileen" stories in the New Yorker had been very popular and were made into a very successful Broadway comedy. And she was an interesting personality because on the one hand [she was] writing the light and amusing material she did; on the other hand, she combined it with open membership in the Communist party. And I will mention something that transpired later in the forties with them. I observe that I wrote something for the Drama Festival Bulletin of Union College, the Mohawk Drama Festival, called "The New Trend in the American Theater." I remember going up to Union College and making a speech to some outdoor gathering where others also made speeches, but now I no longer remember why or how I got there. [laughter] And I published a story in the New Masses called "A Gentleman and His Son," which got one reprint in England and then expired as a story. In the summer of 1939 I spent three weeks in Boulder, at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, at something called the Writing Conference in the Rocky Mountains. Most assuredly I did it, interrupting the rewrite of my first novel, because of the fee paid, and I don't recall now whether it was $300 or $500. But I know that I went there sitting up in a train all night in order to save the cost of a berth and once there, of course, did my best to be of value to the students. An English poet was the head of the conference. His name was Edward Davidson, a man of great charm and one who said something that I will never forget. One night after having listened to him on quite a number of nights in which he talked marvelously about a host of different subjects, I asked him why he didn't write some of these things in a book. And he laughed and said candidly, "Well, you know, I've talked my life away." And I've never forgotten it because I think this is true of a certain number of talented people. A man who was teaching there at the same time was Eric Knight, whom I have already mentioned in discussing The Flying Yorkshireman. We became good friends, and his death several years later was very painful to me. I think I may not have mentioned that he wrote a best-selling novel during the war called This Above All about England under the bombing. He went as a journalist in a plane carrying other journalists to the Teheran Conference, and the plane went down over a South American country... and his talent was cut off. A second member of the faculty was Norman Corwin, for whom I had enormous admiration because of his stunning work as a radio poet-dramatist, and we have remained friends. Still another was Carl Van Doren, who came only for about a week, as I recall, but with whom I had the opportunity of conversation during an all-day automobile ride. Having known his younger brother as a student, it was of interest to me to see in the older brother the same calm, thoughtful, and friendly personality that Mark Van Doren had. I think they were both remarkable human beings. A final member of the faculty whom I will mention was a professor of English from Union College, Surges Johnson. I often think of him as representative of many thousands like him whose name and work are likely to be forgotten, and yet who was really an outstanding human being and teacher. Burges Johnson was a witty man who published absolutely delightful poetry from time to time, usually on such occasions as his wife's birthday, and who had published rather a number of books, and who was, I'm sure, an absolute delight in the classroom. I remained friends with him and his wife all down the years until his death in the late fifties. He would send me his holiday poems and his poems for his wife. I don't know any way in which the world will ever be any different in respect to men like him. I don't see how it can be, and I suppose that it's just for those of us who meet individuals like that to cherish him. And that's the end of it. I don't think I've been very coherent about this, but I'm going to be doing things on editing, I'm sure. Before and after this three-week session, which was a very intense one in which one lectured to classes every day for several hours, read a good deal, read material written by everyone in the class (and this included full-length plays and short plays and so on) and, in addition, prepared and delivered a speech to the entire university... I went back to Provincetown, Massachusetts, from which I had started, sitting up again on the way back, of course, to return with as much money as possible and went on with the final weeks of revision of my novel. [tape recorder turned off] I come now to the immense event of 1939 which was the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact on August 23, 1939. I first heard of it when I was in the middle of a tennis game at Provincetown, and the man I was playing with was someone who had been helpful to the Theatre Union. He was a member of the Socialist party, a very nice and sincere man.

GARDNER

The name?

MALTZ

I forget his name. But I will never forget what happened when we were told by someone who came over to the tennis court. He flung his tennis racket down on the court and shouted in a fury, "This is a sellout!" I was just as unprepared for the pact as he was and I was as bewildered by it as he was, but with my enormous amount of attachment to the Soviet Union as a political entity, I was not prepared to say that it was a sellout. In the course of the next days and weeks I came to have a position that it was not a sellout at all, and I can best express what I came to feel by reading from Professor Fleming's The Cold War and Its Origins (this is from volume one, page 84): There remains the question whether the appeasement governments deliberately planned to turn Hitler toward the East and into a war with Russia. There was no question that the Nazis had done their best to convince the world that they were out to smash Bolshevism and conquer the Soviet Union. Hitler's speech saying that if he had the Urals all Germans would be swimming in plenty was only an outstanding example of this propaganda... If London and Paris had not consciously sought to speed Hitler's march to the Urals, they had exerted themselves mightily to place within his grasp the necessary power for an attack upon the Soviet Union. Until the Czech bastion was swept away he could not effectively take over the Balkans, which he required to give him the necessary food and raw materials for a really great war machine, in addition to putting him on the borders of the Soviet Union. After Munich the British and French had lost all power to prevent Nazi Germany from becoming a colossus capable of attacking the Soviet Union or of turning upon them. To say that this certain and inevitable result of the long and persistent appeasement of Nazi Germany never occurred to the British and French Governments is to vastly underrate their astuteness and perspicacity. And now I want to quote again from page 96 of his book: In the Western world the Nazi-Soviet Pact caused widespread indignation... The Soviets were accused of executing the greatest double-cross in history. People everywhere said that this proved how treacherous they were and how wise the Allies had been in being slow to trust them. Anti-Communists all over the world charged that this treaty was the cause of the Second World War. Others, a little more discriminating, said that it had touched off the war, made it certain. The pact, it was said, gave Hitler the green light. In this form the charge was to be repeated perpetually for many years, especially when Soviet-American relations became acute after the Second World War. Actually, the Nazi determination to settle accounts with Poland had for months been as plain as anything could be... The decision to obliterate Poland was therefore fixed before the pact with Russia was signed. Without the pact the Nazi Panzer divisions would have rolled up to the borders of the Soviet Union, occupying the White Russian and Ukrainian half of Poland to which the Soviet Union had a far better right. This fact alone should dispose of the contention that if the Soviet Union could not come to terms with Britain and France it should have at least stood neutral like the American Congress. Moscow, it is said, did not need to make a deal with Hitler and give him the green light, but in reality the Soviet Government did not have this choice. By standing aloof it would have lost not only Eastern Poland but the Baltic states as well. By rejecting Hitler's promises, and the threats that always went with them, the Soviets would have placed themselves in the daily and imminent danger of fighting the German-Russian war for which they believed the West had tried to bring about. This seems to me a sober presentation of the actual facts. I find that now, after the passage of a great many years and no longer having the allegiances that I did at that time to either the Communist party or the Soviet Union, I nevertheless feel that the Soviet Union had every right to sign the nonaggression pact that it did, and that in fact the British and French had been signing nonaggression pacts with Hitler from 1935 on. So their screams were only those of people whose plans had fallen to the ground. Now, from that date until June 22, 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union--a period of twenty-two months--the Communists of the United States learned what it was to be against the mainstream in a way that they had not experienced since the days of the [Alexander Mitchell] Palmer raids after World War I. (At least most of the party personnel had not had the experience.) Now, perhaps for a certain type of emotionally combative person being against the mainstream and finding hostility on all sides is a situation that is enjoyable. But I think for most individuals, like myself, there's no pleasure in it, but I felt and others felt that we had to take that stand however unpopular it made us. Psychologically it was, to a certain degree, a preparation for the McCarthy years. The twenty-two months that--No, let's pause for a moment while I get a date. [tape recorder turned off] The twenty-two months were a period of enormous complexity. During that period I adhered to the Communist party position. This meant that my attitudes, like that of other Communists, were based upon a series of propositions: (a) That the most urgent need of mankind was the preservation of the first and only socialist state. Defend the Soviet Union was a cardinal slogan of the Communist parties throughout the world. Now, this attitude involved an abiding trust in the Soviet Union, a belief that what it did was right not only for its own security but for the future of all peoples. It also involved the belief that in the leadership of the Communist party of the Soviet Union there was a deep well of wisdom based on a scientific socialist analysis of events. I look back at the latter proposition now and I smile at my innocence. In today's world in which we see China pitted against Russia, China against Vietnam, Vietnam against Cambodia, Russia against Yugoslavia, and so on--to speak of scientific socialism is to talk nonsense. However, I believed it at the time and many others did. (b) My attitudes also involved profound bitterness toward, and hatred of, the governments of England and France who had cooperated in the murder of the Spanish Republic, the incorporation of Austria, the rape of Czechoslovakia and so on. Finally, finally, they had given Poland a paper promise to come to its aid. And then when Poland was invaded by Germany, France did not take the obvious move of driving into the Rhineland. So far as I was concerned, the treachery of those leaders had been demonstrated once more. This, then, seemed to me to be a quarrel between imperialist antagonists--one side more savage than the other, but both sides imperialist. (c) Although now I think the Soviet aggression against Finland was a blunder, I didn't think so then and it was far from being a simple matter. However, if I had ever thought that it was a serious error, practically and in principle, I would not then have ceased supporting the Soviet Union. And this is no different from those, let's say, who supported Roosevelt in the election of 1940 in spite of the fact that they perhaps had detested his position about Spain during the years 1936 to 1939. (d) We watched with enormous dismay and anguish as Hitler Germany successively overran Greece, Yugoslavia, Norway, and Denmark; and yet what was to be done? Who was to stop it? And then finally came the attack in the spring of 1940 on Holland, Belgium, and France. Then followed the fall of France and the British evacuation of its expeditionary force at Dunkirk. And after that came the air battle for Britain which Hitler apparently hoped would be a prelude to a land conquest of Britain. It's my belief now that with this battle the character of the British government, which had already changed--Let me phrase it different... that with this battle a genuine anti-Nazi struggle began on the part of England. Previous to this, the Chamberlain government had fallen, Churchill had come into power. And I think we were no longer faced by the phony war that had existed between France, Britain, and Germany before the invasion. But now there was a genuine struggle on the part of England against Germany, the sort of struggle that the Soviet Union had pleaded for in its policy of collective security. However, I didn't see at that time, and the Communist parties of the world did not see at that time, that the character of the war had changed. This was a terrible error, and it was due to the fact that in foreign policy the Communist parties were not independent politically. They waited for political signs from Moscow so that their foreign policies could be coordinated with that of the Soviet Union. As a result, the Communist party of the United States, for instance, took a stand during the battle for Britain, at a time when Roosevelt was ferrying planes to Britain, of opposition to this and to lend-lease, and its slogan was The Yanks Are Not Coming. As a result, at times the position of the Communist party came close to that of the isolationists in the America First group, who were political reactionaries. Now, the Communist party switched its position within twenty-four hours after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. This certainly did not win it any respect. It appeared to make of it a party without any principle beyond support of the Soviet Union. Now, this was true of its foreign policy, but it was not true of it as a whole. I was very unhappy and very troubled at the time over this event, but I continued to feel that the Marxist parties were the only path to human brotherhood, and I asked myself what persons or parties have never made grave mistakes. And so the events of that time did not cause me to lose my allegiance. As a footnote to the period of 1939, I was asked by V. J. Jerome, whom I have mentioned before as a Communist functionary in the cultural field, to write a statement... Can we hold up a second? [tape recorder turned off] I was asked to write a statement in collaboration with Dashiell Hammett on the efforts that were then going on to suppress the Communist party and to imprison its general secretary, Earl Browder, on a technical charge of passport violation. I was willing to do this, and I believe it was the first time I ever had any private conversation with Hammett, although I can't be sure of this; of course, we might have had other conversations that I have forgotten. However, for about three weeks I came once a week to his home somewhere downtown off Fifth Avenue and we discussed some materials that I had prepared. (I could mention in passing that our appointments were usually for noon or one o'clock, and when I would come, invariably I was not met by Hammett but by a sort of butler, I guess a butler who worked for him... not a butler but a man who worked for him, and who told me that Mr. Hammett would be right down. But Hammett was never right down, and when he appeared in a dressing gown over his pajamas, it was obvious to me that he had just been awakened and that he was probably suffering from a hangover.) I can't say that his contributions to what finally appeared were very great, but I did meet with him on each occasion and get his approval and occasional suggestions. It was a statement in defense of the Bill of Rights and I think there was considerable soundness to it. But although sent out to the press in general with the names of sixty or seventy intellectuals attached to it, so far as I know it was published only in the Daily Worker. However, I think that's all. And I think we're finished for the day.

1.31. TAPE NUMBER: XIII, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 8, 1978

MALTZ

Nineteen forty was a year of considerable publication for me. I had a short story, "Sunday Morning on Twentieth Street," in the spring issue of Southern Review. In June my first novel, The Underground Stream, was published and I'll read from some of the press reviews. [tape recorder turned off] This was the review in the New York Times, July 7, 1940, by Harold Strauss: "He has brought the labor novel back to the heroic pattern, and he has created a hero of massive proportions, a man who is not a poor creature of his immediate environment but one strong enough to avow and even to pursue an ideal of human dignity and universal justice." And in the New York Herald-Tribune, Alfred Kazin: "The simplest characterization of Albert Maltz, and perhaps the truest, would be that he is a left-wing writer with real talent. What Maltz has tried to do in this novel is not merely to present communist heroism, but to describe and analyze the life of two antagonistic social groups. It is true that, while Maltz's workers are superb and superbly presented, his capitalists and aspirant capitalists are more confusing than devilish. But Maltz's effort to analyze, to characterize scrupulously, is obvious. And while it leads him to some fairly clumsy writing and occasionally embarrassing simplicity, the intelligence of his effort is refreshing. There are many qualities lacking in The Underground Stream, qualities that have been popular with proletarian Homers, but qualities that one would dearly love to see in the American novel. Yet what Maltz has to say is important, and he says it strikingly. There are other virtues in the novel, other ambitions, greater excellences. These may be enough at the moment. These are warm and arresting now." In the daily New York Herald-Tribune, Lewis Gannett: "Albert Maltz's first full-length novel, The Underground Stream, might, with a few minor changes, have been about an earlier Christian martyr. It is head and shoulders above the proletarian novels of recent years both in originality of conception and dramatic power. It is terse, earthy, exciting. It makes, to be sure, initial assumptions that most of us are unwilling to accept. It identifies the integrity and self-respect toward which Princey works with acceptance of Communist party discipline without ever discussing the goals toward which that discipline is directed. But the larger theme--man does not live by politics alone but yearns for identification with something larger than himself--is the stuff of which great modern novels are made. Drop the specific terminology and Mr. Maltz might be writing about religion or patriotism, which is a modern form of religion." Daily New York Times, Ralph Thompson: "I think that the important thing to say about it is the one thing that the publishers forgot to say on the jacket--that it has an American Communist for a hero. Some reviewers, I note, have followed suit and treated it and admired it as a labor novel. So it unquestionably is. But it is not so much a labor novel as a party novel. In fact, it is almost a hymn in praise of the party--its politics, its methods, its leaders, its rank and file. The Underground Stream need hardly be discussed apart from this tendency. It has dramatic moments, melodramatic moments, clumsy moments, some excellent description and some humor. The point is the party, and the test is the ideal." Let's stop for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] I think there's no doubt that if The Underground Stream had been published before the Nazi-Soviet pact, those reviews which just attacked it on political grounds would not have done so--or most would not have--and its reception would have been a warmer one. It probably would have sold better. As it was, it sold out its first edition of 4,000 copies and was not reprinted. After the war it was reprinted, however, in some sixteen languages and earned some foreign royalties over the next fifteen years. It has never gone into paperback in the United States.

GARDNER

What's your own feeling toward the novel, in the context of your writing?

MALTZ

I really can't tell you, because I haven't reread the novel in many years. And in these past years I've sometimes had occasion to reread something of my own because it was going to be republished and some editing was wanted or something like that--some specific reason. And I find that sometimes I feel good about the work, and sometimes my opinion of it goes way down, so that I can't tell you what I would feel about The Underground Stream now. There will come a time presently, I think, where I'll want to read everything I've written and try to assess the way I feel about it. I don't know about that one.

GARDNER

What about the problems of the novel? This was really your first novel. You've done plays that required similar structure.

MALTZ

Yes. Well, working on a novel for me involved a great deal of thought, many pauses in which I would look at the writings of other novelists just to learn simple techniques. For instance, questions of tense are very interesting. I learned, and then was able to apply, a methodology that is common in many books but which I had never noticed because I hadn't had occasion to notice--namely, use of the past tense in this way: John had first seen Mary when they were in Grand Central Station at adjacent ticket windows. It so happens that she had dropped something out of her purse and he had picked it up for her, and this had led to a bit of conversation. It was obvious that each found the other very interesting, and they went about.... I've now slipped from had to the past tense. I forget all the grammar names. I use grammar, but I don't know the names of it anymore: I don't know what "he had seen"--what is that?

GARDNER

Pluperfect.

MALTZ

Yes, pluperfect. All right. And then into the simple past. Well, things like that were things that I had to learn and apply, and sometimes they took some time. I don't know whether this is true of other writers, it was true of me. But then there were questions of style. I know that I spent time studying certain writers whose style I admired at the time I was writing The Underground Stream: one of them was [André] Malraux, Man's Fate; a second was Andreyev, the Russian writer, author of The Ten Who Were Hanged--what was it? This is absurd....

GARDNER

I think that's what it is.

MALTZ

Just turn this off for a minute. [tape recorder turned off] The Seven Who Were Hanged and, as I recall, some of Galsworthy. This was in the period of my first novel. I found what I would call simple, clean writing, something that I wanted to try and achieve. While I could admire the lush prose of a Thomas Wolfe--did and do--it was not something I had inside of me to write. I do know that in that novel and I think in all of my novels, I tended to use short time spans in what was a combination of dramatic and novelistic technique because the dramatic form came very naturally to me. But, in addition, I felt that there was an automatic tension and suspense that was set up by the tight time factor that one finds in a book like Man's Fate, and also in The Seven Who Were Hanged, which I liked.

GARDNER

What about characterizations? In working with the theater it's a completely different problem because, first of all, you have dialogue; second of all, you have actors, live actors; in the novel you are left only with characters.

MALTZ

Yes. One of the reasons I turned to the novel from theater--not the only reason--was that I felt I wanted to try and achieve some depths of characterization that I couldn't achieve on the stage in plays, [because] there wasn't time for them. I wanted to be able to go into a character's thoughts and into his past in a way that the novel permits. [tape recorder turned off] The novel is a much freer form than the theater, especially the Ibsen theater to which I came. It permits all of the devices of theater in terms of dialogue, but it also permits an author to comment; it permits train of thought; it permits flashback scenes into the past; it permits memories, fantasy, dreams in a way that's not possible in theater. And the fact is I found fiction a more agreeable form in which to work than the theater, or else I would have gone back to the theater. I don't know, in fact, whether--yes, I'll change that. I do know.... I feel that I did better work in fiction than I did in drama, and I'm only sorry that the way my life has gone I had to spend so much time at film writing and was not able to concentrate purely on fiction.

GARDNER

Okay. Oh, go ahead.

MALTZ

I'm sorry. Please.

GARDNER

I was just going to say, were you--well, go ahead.... When did you go to Hollywood then?

MALTZ

Well, I'm going to come to that. I find that sequences by years are the easiest for me to recall. Now, in 1940 I wrote several reviews in Equality magazine. One was of the novel Native Son by Richard Wright, and I ended that review by saying: "It's a fine and noble book. Read it and be proud of the author." The second was a review of the film Gone with the Wind, and I titled my review, "Slandering the Negro: Four Million Dollars' Worth of Wind." I did anonymous writing for Equality, and I'll mention it for what value it has for a record like this: in 1940, in February, an editorial, "Father Coughlin streamlines for War"; in March, "Grapes of Wrath Folk," "Take Your Choice" and "The Dies Committee and Anti-Semitism"; in April, "Labor and Democratic Rights"; and in May, "The Fog Comes in on Little Cat Feet." I wrote an anonymous leaflet for Mother's Day, May 14, for distribution by the Queens-Long Island branch of the Communist party. And I mention this because I am glad at this moment to see the slogans after these many years which were: Boycott Germany and Italy; Stop Munition Shipments to Japan; Stop the Fascist Warmakers; Let America Join with All Peace-Loving Nations to Bar Further Aggression. I mention this because it's illustrative of the complexities of the politics of that period. May 14, 1940, is a period in which Roosevelt was already sending lend-lease shipments to England, which I was not supporting; on the other hand, he was selling munitions to Japan, which I was against, and those munitions were used, in effect, on Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. In addition, with the Communist party somewhat uncertain--certainly the Soviet Communist party--on how it handled its antifascism in that period, I had the slogan Boycott Germany and Italy, so that my support of the pact had not made me personally lessen my hatred of fascism, I also wrote anonymously a statement, "The Writers Don't Want War," for the League of American Writers, which was signed by 300 writers. This must have been written before Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, because I notice among the signers Irwin Shaw, and I know that in a personal encounter with him he expressed his differences with me after that time. But it's interesting that at that period among the signers were Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Ruth McKenney, Rockwell Kent, Robert Coates, Harold Clurman, Nelson Algren. My scrapbook tells me that at the fourth [congress] of the League of American Writers that year I was elected one of the vice-presidents, Richard Wright was another, Dashiell Hammett became president. And I see by the board of directors that a split had occurred and that men like Malcolm Cowley and Archibald MacLeish and Hemingway had cut themselves off from the league.

GARDNER

For what reasons?

MALTZ

Well, because they were supporting Roosevelt in that period and were for aid to England. In June there came an invitation from some--I guess really from members of the Communist party in Hollywood for either George Sklar or myself to come out and do a revision of our play Peace on Earth; to update it to the immediate scene and have a production in Los Angeles. I asked George Sklar the other day just how it came about, and he remembered that they sent one train ticket with a berth. We decided that we would both go, and we went out sitting up four nights and three days as a way of getting in under the same amount of money.

GARDNER

Who was it that extended the invitation?

MALTZ

Well, it came from a group which would have involved, I know, Herbert Biberman and--gosh, I don't know what specific others. I know Jerry Chodorov.... And out here we discussed what they had in mind, and we decided what we could do, and I did a first version rapidly. And then I had to go to Boulder, Colorado, for another summer session, and George stayed on and stayed right through changes and rehearsals, which were apparently very painful for him. The play that resulted I don't suppose was very good, and it ran about three or four weeks and then closed. On the faculty at Boulder were some interesting men: Robert Penn Warren, who was just a very nice gentleman, as well as being a fine writer; and Harry Hansen, the book reviewer; and Frederick Lewis Allen, a very interesting author whose works Only Yesterday and another one with a similar title were important histories of the period. After that I returned to our apartment in Queens. About this period a financial squeeze started between the higher expenditures caused by the fact that we had a child and the fact that my novel hadn't earned anything over the $500 advance.

GARDNER

Five hundred?

MALTZ

Yes. At that time an advance of $500 was a going advance for a first novel. As a matter of fact (I'll look it up) for my second novel I think the advance was about $1,500 down and $500 when I turned in the manuscript. The advances that we read of today are very different. It's a very different book scene. For instance, a leading best-selling author like Hemingway never earned from his books probably a fifth of what is earned by best-selling authors today. And my volume of short stories had also not earned anything, and so I went into a period in which I intermittently tried, in addition to my teaching and my other writing, to write stories for the Saturday Evening Post, which at that time was paying $750 and $1,000 for a story; whereas the most I would be getting for a short story would be $100 to $300. None of my stories sold to the Post, but several sold to very low-paying papers and magazines, and I gave that up. I have noted that my earnings from purely literary work from 1932, when I did have a film sale, part of a film sale, through 1940 averaged out at $2,300 a year, or less than $200 a month. Now, that was not too bad for a beginning writer in those days.

GARDNER

Or for the era, when things were probably cheaper.

MALTZ

But it was not enough to live on if you had a child and wanted to live above poverty level. My wife in that period did do some work, but not after we had the child.

GARDNER

Well, in addition, didn't you have the earnings of your teaching and so on?

MALTZ

Yes, I had earnings from teaching, yes. Now, reprints--that's why I could get along: reprints of my work continued, and I'm going to continue to mention this because we'll see the contrast when we come to the blacklist years. "Man on a Road" and "Happiest Man on Earth" went into literary anthologies for college students. "Incident on a Street Corner" went into Short Stories from the New Yorker, and payments for reprints varied from $25 to $50 each. And nowadays they would be $250 or $300 or more. In the fall the financial squeeze deepened because young people, who had been on WPA, started to get factory work, and my classes became smaller. In 1941 I published "Afternoon in the Jungle" in the New Yorker, and this has been reprinted often in many countries. I also published something which I hoped was going to foreshadow a novel that I wanted to write, and that was a story called "The Piece of Paper" in a magazine called Direction, which had a short life. The title "The Piece of Paper" referred to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. During this period of 1940 and 1941 I had been reading in black history, which of course at that time we called Negro history. My reading had started with a book that was startling in its information: it was Negro Slave Revolts in the United States by Herbert Aptheker, published by Columbia University Press. This scholar, who later became a Communist party functionary, had uncovered an entire vein of ore, let's say, of Negro slave history which at once changed one's picture of the centuries of slavery. Because he established that there were no less than 400 organized revolts against slavery by Negroes and that therefore they had not been the, quote, "happy slaves" that the southerners, the southern slave owners, said they were. There was also a best-selling book by Henrietta Buckmaster called Let My People Go about slavery and the underground railroad, the events of the period, which was a fine work of scholarship. And there were the books of Du Bois to which I was introduced. The result was that I conceived of a three-volume project of novels, with each novel able to stand on its own feet, and my following all the characters through from beginning to end. The first novel would encompass the period of slavery, the second the period of the Civil War, and the third of Reconstruction. I became very excited by it and began to read in all my spare time, to make research notes, and notes for the story, and I was on a very high level of excitement about it. During the year 1941, short story reprints continued to grow and be in college anthologies of literature, and my story "The Happiest Man on Earth" was made into a short film by MGM. MGM said that it was embarking on a program of doing short stories as short films so that the double feature in films could be changed and that they would have one feature and a short film based upon a short story of quality. But, in fact, it never followed with any others after mine.

GARDNER

Were you well paid for the movie rights?

MALTZ

Oh, I think I got $1,000 for the movie rights, or $900. In those years, for me, getting $900 was great. That was unexpected and it was fine, but of course it was a small sum. Now, I have not discussed politics in this period because I covered this period, really, in earlier discussion.

GARDNER

Talking about the Nazi-Soviet pact and so on.

MALTZ

Yes, and that whole period. I note from my scrapbook that on January 8, '41, I spoke at a Westchester town meeting in a hall at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Now, I have no idea why I spoke. Maybe I was offered fifty dollars and spoke for that reason; it is more likely that I spoke just because someone asked me to. But I do recall that this talk had to do in considerable part with the role of black troops in the Civil War, which was one of the things that I was very excited about. I think I will mention in passing that due to manpower shortages the enlistment of freed slaves, or northern blacks, in the Union army--so that there were 400,000 of them--and the use of blacks in transport and supply and digging trenches and so on were so significant that President Lincoln said that if they were on the other side, instead of on his side, he would have to give up the war. And, in fact, the central political discussion in the South for the last two years of the war was whether or not they should free their slaves if they would fight on the side of the South. And this was a terrible issue for the South because the southerners had maintained that blacks were not morally fit to be free. If they now said they would give them their freedom if they fought, they would acknowledge the bankruptcy of their previous moral stand. So that the South was split on this issue. But it was the intervention of General Lee, who said, "We will know how to take care of them after the war," which led to a final vote in favor of freeing slaves who would fight. But it was too late when the South did this. Now, I had all of this material in my hands, was very excited about it, and I knew of the absolutely brilliant military record of the black troops in the northern army. They were tremendous as soldiers because they were fighting for what they desperately wanted. And I wanted to follow in my novel a slave who became one of those troops. After my talk a professor of Sarah Lawrence who was present wrote me a furious letter denouncing me (probably I have it somewhere, but I'm not sure), and I answered him with documentation, probably taking a full day to do so. But I observe at this time how much time went into this one talk, and I don't think it was the way to spend my time. It would have been better spent working on the novel. In January I see by my scrapbook that I also attended a meeting of authors and educators on the problems of anti-Semitism. Now, this is interesting because it reveals to what extent the issue of anti-Semitism was one of great concern to decent people at that time. The meeting was held under the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and among those present were Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, Henry Seidel Canby, Edna Ferber, and John Marquand. You just simply would not get a gathering of that distinction on the issue of anti-Semitism today because there isn't that kind of issue. The financial squeeze that I have been mentioning became too great in the spring of 1941. My wife and I owed Bloomingdale's department store $800, and I suppose that would be about $4,000 today, or maybe more, and I used to say that they owned our son. My friends Michael Blankfort and George Sklar had gotten work in Hollywood, and we made the decision that I would try also. And as soon as teaching was over, I went out to Las Vegas, New Mexico, because my mother-in-law was ill and my wife had taken our son out there earlier. And then after a few days I went overnight by bus to Los Angeles. And I, for about ten days, slept on a couch in the tiny cottage that the Sklars had. Although he was working, they had not yet accumulated enough money to move into anything better than the very simple little quarters that they had. By luck I got a job very quickly. The film director Frank Tuttle had a piece of material--had a novel, actually, by Graham Greene called This Gun for Hire which had been owned by Paramount, and he had worked out a way in which the story might be done which was acceptable. He wanted a writer just at the time that I came into town and heard about me and knew my work, and I got the job at $300 a week. Now, that was not the actual net that one received, because Hollywood salaries always involve a 10 percent deduction for an agent, and in my case it was 15 percent because I had an arrangement whereby my literary agent got 5 percent and there's 1 percent... [phone rings--tape recorder turned off]... and deducted from a Hollywood salary there's always 1 percent for motion picture relief, and it would have been about 1 percent for dues to the guild, the Writers Guild, and taxes, so that $300 salary does not mean that. But, on the other hand, compared to the kind of money that I had been earning, it was wonderful; it was just what I hoped to achieve. There's an amusing story that's worth telling in passing about this. I worked for the first several months up at the home of director Frank Tuttle, who lived in a very large house in the Hollywood Hills; not only a large house with large grounds, it had a swimming pool but also had a very large poolside place where there was a gym and where guests could dress and undress and so on. And it was there that a table was set up and I worked. Now, I had come from Los Angeles with one suit only...

GARDNER

To Los Angeles.

MALTZ

...to Los Angeles with one suit only, which was a very heavy green tweed suit which I distinctly remember buying in New York in a cut-rate haberdashery for twenty-five dollars the winter before. It was wonderful for the New York winters. It had a vest, it was very heavy tweed, it was water-repellent, and it was just great. But when I hit Los Angeles in June, the weather was warm, and Frank Tuttle was out on the side of his pool just in a pair of swim trunks taking the sun. And while I would take off my jacket (I had left my vest at home, of course), and I'd take off my tie, I was still sitting in this heavy pair of tweed trousers. And Frank would say, "Why do you wear such a warm suit?" And I would say, "Oh, I'm not warm." And it occurs to me that I could have borrowed money from George Sklar or Michael Blankfort for a new suit; why I didn't, I don't know. But I went through this comedy until money accumulated and I was able to get some clothes and an apartment and a car. On the twenty-second of that month, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the political atmosphere began to change rapidly. With the Soviet Union at war with Germany, the U.S. establishment stopped considering the Soviet Union its enemy, and vice versa; the Communist party stopped considering the U.S. establishment an imperialist seducer of the masses. Now the Communist party wanted Roosevelt to send lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union as well as to England.

GARDNER

Did you immediately make contacts in the party out here when you came?

MALTZ

I did very shortly after I came here, and I'll come to that in a moment. On the bottom level in Hollywood, and this was representative of other areas in the country, Communists and fellow travelers were able to function together with liberals who had been opposed to the Nazi-Soviet pact because they all found themselves now on the same side. Here I think I might discuss briefly the functioning of the major studios in the 1940s, since the way they operated is very different from the way they do today, and I don't believe we're ever likely to return to the way it once was. In the forties the major studios still owned chains of theaters. When I say chains of theaters, it meant not only for the sale of tickets to those people who came to see their films, but for the popcorn sales which meant so much in terms of general income. At that time there was no TV on the scene to be a competitor, and some 90 million people a week went to the films. The Saturday night habit was a strong one all over the country. At that time studios turned out 400 to 500 films a year instead of perhaps 200 at most now, and frequently there were double bills in theaters. And since the companies got a profit by not only making the films but by exhibiting them, they were able to have on their payroll producers, directors, writers, actors and so on. It was the great profits of the film industry that brought about the huge salaries for the top people who worked in them. For instance, if a writer at that time earned $500 a week and spent twenty weeks on a film script, that was $10,000 that he earned. But if at that time his film grossed $3 million and returned a profit, let's say, of a million and a half to the studio, it is easy to see why the studio was willing to pay him $500 a week, which was far more than, let's say, a physician was earning at that time. [tape recorder turned off] The same was true of actors and directors and producers. As a result, studios competed with one another in order to get those writers, directors, producers, and actors who would bring in the most at the box office, and it was out of this competition, and of the general high profits of the industry, that the salaries of those who worked in it were as high as they were. Since there was not a similar competition among secretaries and others who worked in the industry, their salaries were no greater than the salaries they could have earned if they were secretaries in businesses of clothing manufacturers or paper concerns. Now, the level, what I'd [call] the artistic and intelligence level of the executive personnel at that time varied from the extreme vulgar to men of very genuine taste. (And I say men because women were all but excluded.) It was my very good fortune in my years in Hollywood in the forties, for the most part, to work with individuals of taste. But I know a lot of my friends who did not. I came to....

GARDNER

You don't care to name names on that, I take it?

MALTZ

Well, I....

GARDNER

People who stand out on either end of the spectrum?

MALTZ

I will. I'm going to mention Jerry Wald in a moment and a few other people of specific things I worked in, so I will probably do it that way. I came to the film industry with a personal plan which I adhered to for the six and a half years from my arrival until the blacklist, and that plan was to do everything I could to minimize the amount of film work I did in order to have as much time as possible for fiction. So that I intended to live modestly, and my wife was in accord with this: save all the money we could, and as soon as I had enough money to go to work on some fiction, to do so. And this is the way I did live. I'd like to make a passing comment about writers who go to work in films. There is a general attitude amongst, let's say, intellectuals outside of the film industry, a general assumption that if a writer moves from New York or Chicago or some other area to look for work in films he has, quote, "sold out." The same people who do not look down at a businessman for making money sneer at writers who work for money. They have "gone Hollywood," and they somehow have betrayed a sacred trust....

1.32. TAPE NUMBER: XIII, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 8, 1978

GARDNER

Before we resume our conversation we are going to copy something that was recorded while the tape was running out.

MALTZ

Now, in the first place there are various kinds of writers--and always have been. For instance, a writer may have had a play, a first play performed on Broadway, that was a comedy, let's say, and the writer never had any desire to do serious work: he wrote in the hope of making money. Well, why shouldn't such a writer go where money was paid for his talents? And sometimes, of course, there are a great many writers who talk about serious creative work but never do it. There are such people to be found in New York and San Francisco and so on, and they're not declared to have sold out because they just sit in basements and chew the fat but don't go out to Hollywood. There are very serious film writers, like Dudley Nichols, who was a newspaperman and who did some of the best work of his career in Hollywood, who nevertheless... [copy tape recorder turned off]

GARDNER

Okay, we're now resuming our human-to-human conversation.

MALTZ

...who nevertheless had a deep yearning to write a play for Broadway. I happen to know of a peculiar problem he had, because I knew him and liked him very much, and the problem was this: he felt that he could not do work on a play when he was living in Hollywood. He had a large house in Connecticut, which I had seen, and which he kept going with a caretaker all year round. Every few years he would leave Hollywood for six months or three months on that Connecticut place, where he would not be able to write a play, and he would come back then to Hollywood because he had to keep the place up. And the poor fellow went on like this year after year. It must be borne in mind that, as I've mentioned earlier, most serious writers in the United States, and I think elsewhere in the world as well, are not able to earn a living from their serious work. Nobody sneered at Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, because he worked in an advertising agency. He was not said to have gone Madison Avenue. And people didn't sneer at Archibald MacLeish and Robert Penn Warren and Saul Bellow for teaching, but they were only doing the equivalent of what others did who sought work in radio or in films. For me, until the blacklist came, Hollywood was a blessing. It was the way in which I could finance my serious writing while meeting my other obligations: one child, and then a second in 1942, and a wife with heavy medical and psychoanalytic bills, who was in bed ill for half of each year from 1939 until 1950. If it had not been for Hollywood, I would have had to try and catch on in radio or in some work unrelated to writing. And on the whole I was also fortunate in the film work I got. Most of it was interesting. I worked at it as hard as I could, and I did well at it. My ability to save money earned in film writing also freed me to work at novels with no concern whatsoever for anything except my subject. Farthest from my mind was whether or not the novel might become a film. Now, this was not necessarily true of others, but it was true of me. From the time that I began work in the middle of the year with Frank Tuttle, things went like this: the treatment for the story (a treatment is, let's say, the story itself told from beginning to end in anywhere from twenty to sixty pages) was accepted by the head of the studio and a producer was assigned to the project. In the forties the position of the producer was a very different one from the one it is today. The film producer was a counterpart to the play producer in New York, who was the dominant person in choosing a play and working with the writer on revisions, and then deciding who would direct it, and in casting the play with the director, and so on. In film, before a director was ever hired, it was the producer who was hired, and there were producers who had marvelous records in the quality of what they did: Pan Berman, for instance, a producer at MGM, and Jerry Wald, a producer at Warner Brothers. The producer was the one who would work with the writer on the script, so that my first work with Tuttle was an unusual situation. Usually, in the setup at that time the producer would finish the script with the writer, the writer would then leave the studio, and the director would come in; and the writer and the director might have no contact whatsoever. And then it would be the producer with the director who would cast, and the producer would supervise the shooting, and the producer would have the last say on the cutting--as indeed the producer does today. But it was a sign of the fact that a project had become a reality, was going into screenplay, that a producer was assigned to it. An amusing little thing happened on This Gun for Hire. The head of the studio at that time was a Broadway character by the name of Buddy DaSilva, who had been in the musical comedy field in New York. He knew the field of musical comedy, but I think little else. And he was afraid that I might not be able to write a sound screenplay so that, without waiting for my first screenplay, he hired a Warner Brothers writer who had done some fine scripts at Warner Brothers, W. R. Burnett, and Burnett did me a marvelous turn. As I would write sequences of the screenplay, they would be sent to Burnett for revision. He would look at them and perhaps change a word and then send them back, untouched, and he did this for the whole screenplay. He got a joint screenplay credit for this because it was written into his contract that he had to get one. And at that time there wasn't the arbitration machinery in the Writers Guild which would have permitted me to protest this. But I was grateful to him because I didn't have the problem of wrangling with another man's taste. The usual practice of a second writer on a script like that is to try and change the script so that it will be his own. The screenplay was completed at the end of September, and Alan Ladd, who had had a few small parts in films but had been noticed by Frank Tuttle, the director, was cast in it, and a passing sensation, Veronica Lake, was cast in the female part. The film went into production within about two weeks of the script having been finished, which was most unusual. I was assigned to be on the set because they had nothing else for me to do, actually, and I found this both useful in the learning process but essentially boring. And since I was not interested in becoming a director, I spent as much time as I could reading in the historical materials for my novel.

GARDNER

What problems did you confront in dealing with a screenplay? It's interesting to me that, having just gone from playwriting to novel writing, then you're taking a novel and turning it back into screenwriting.

MALTZ

Well, actually, in the most fundamental way I had little problem with screenwriting, and the reason was precisely because I was a dramatist. Of all writers, I think.... Let me put it this way: most of those who have written plays, to my best knowledge, make a transition to film writing very easily. But one never knows whether, let's say, a novelist will be able to do a screenplay.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

There are excellent novelists who cannot do screenplays because they don't see... they don't write in terms of dramatic scenes. But since the film form, as a dramatic form, is very close to the play form, the transition for a dramatist is easy. It was easy for me to--There was the same type of story construction, basic story construction in the play as in film, and, therefore, that fundamental requirement I had. Something that I did not have was the brevity of writing which is a requirement in the film form. I remember that I would turn in scenes of four pages to the director and to the producer, whose name was Richard Blumenthal, and those would emerge, after they cut them, as two-page scenes, one-and-a-half-page scenes. I would turn in two-page scenes that might become half-a-page scenes. And what was happening was that they were moving the story from dramatic moment to dramatic moment with nothing extraneous, absolutely nothing extraneous. The rule was that, if you wanted to characterize, you had to characterize within the circumference of a dramatic event. You could not have some characterization for its own sake and then have the dramatic event. The characterization for its own sake had to go out, and this was a process that I had to learn, and, as a matter of fact, I would say that I still have not learned it fully. For instance, a few years ago I did a script, which was never made, working with the director Mark Robson. Now, Mark Robson had begun as a cutter so he was expert in going to the core of a scene. And again and again Mark was able to cut down scenes that I gave him. I agreed with his cutting, but I couldn't have done it myself. However, the important fact right from the beginning with me was that I wrote scenes that they didn't throw out as scenes; they merely wanted to make them shorter. I was giving them the drama that they wanted and the step-by-step movement that they wanted. You have any other...

GARDNER

No, I think that's a good point. If there's another question, it would have to do with the specific problem of doing a screenplay from somebody else's novel as opposed to original work, which, of course, was what you were used to doing.

MALTZ

Well, it is much easier, usually, to do something from, let's say, a novel--take a novel, then put it into a screenplay--than to write an original screenplay story, perhaps, because the story is there. There are many things you have to do to transmute it to the film form. They're not the same forms, but you have something that you can work with. It's the difference, let's say, between having a lump of clay which is just a ball of clay, or a head which has been sculpted by someone. Now, you must take that sculptured head and, while trying to keep the essence of it, let's say, you have to make it fit a somewhat different space; therefore you know that you have to push in the nose and make it smaller, and you have to make the ears a little larger, and you have to do this and that, but you're working with something that's already in a form. And so in general I consider it easier to do that work. But there are problems that are special to film. For instance, when I was blacklisted I did a film (which will be nameless) based upon a novel that was about 700 pages long and that went over a period of years. If I had followed everything in the novel, I would have produced a screenplay that would make a film eighteen hours long. The question is, how do you get a film that will only be two hours long? Well, you have to study the novel and get one scene that you invent which is not alien to the spirit of the book, but which stands for five chapters which you cannot reproduce because they would be too long, and yet which conveys the essence of the five chapters. So film writing is a very definite skill. To look down upon it is nonsense. And one of those who really appreciates it is the author... [tape recorder turned off]... Gore Vidal, who did some film writing before he became a novelist. Another one who appreciates it is James Michener. For the most part, I think a great many people are schizophrenic in their attitude toward Hollywood. They may have seen a given film that they thought was very beautiful, let's say, like Marty; on the other hand, they look down upon the Hollywood product because all too often they have said, well, let's go to the movies tonight--what's playing? And that's a ridiculous way to go to the movies. You're statistically likely to see some piece of garbage.

GARDNER

One last question and then I'll let you get on with your....

MALTZ

No, I'm glad to have you ask them.

GARDNER

Since what you had been writing all along was material that had a great deal of your own philosophy in it...

MALTZ

Yes, yes.

GARDNER

...were you able to incorporate anything into a screenplay of a philosophical subject?

MALTZ

As a matter of fact, you bring up a whole question which I think we might discuss, which is the question of getting in.... The charge was made in the Un-American Activities Committee about Communist writers trying to influence films, and so on. I don't know whether this is the moment to take it up; I think it might be better to take it up later. But in the case of Frank Tuttle and myself there was a harmony of attitude, and in order to make This Gun for Hire work when changed from the English scene to the American scene, and changed in the year-period, we found it necessary to make use, I believe, of a munitions maker who was a fascist in his general outlook. I don't remember the story very well. But we did that because we were seeking a motivation for what happened in the story, and we were not doing it because we wanted to try and say something politically. Actually, any writer, of whatever political or human persuasion, cannot help but write out of what is in his head and his heart. And a given characterization in a comedy by Neil Simon, for instance, obviously comes out of what is in him--in his thoughts, experiences, and emotions. And the same was true of me when I worked on given material. For instance (not a bad illustration although so trivial), the leading character in This Gun for Hire is a man who kills for money. And after the first murder you see him stop on a stairway, I think, where he pets a cat. Now, I happen to like cats very much, and if I didn't, probably the idea of him petting a cat would not even have occurred to me. But it did occur to me. And yet I wasn't trying to put that scene in in order to get people to like cats. So it's that difference.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

Now, the success of the script for This Gun for Hire locked me into a contract that I didn't want but had no way of escaping. At that time when someone like myself sought film work, the producers always signed him to a seven-year contract. And if I had rejected that contract, I wouldn't have gotten that job which I so badly needed. Under the contract they had the right after the first three months, as I recall, to drop me; or they had the right to pick me up for another six months or another year. And then at the end of that period, if they wished, they could drop me; or if they picked me up, then my salary would go up by a given amount of dollars. If I stayed the whole seven years, my salary might then have ended up to be $1,000 a week. Now, I didn't want to be on contract, and I certainly had no intention of working seven years if they picked me up, but there was no way I could avoid the contract. So that they did pick me up, and in the middle of November when the shooting on This Gun for Hire was completed, or almost so, I was assigned to work for Cecil B. De Mille on a Mexican theme called Rurales. The rurales were mounted police in the countryside of prerevolutionary Mexico noted both for their efficiency and their brutality. Can we pause for a moment?

GARDNER

Sure. [tape recorder turned off]

MALTZ

For the first month of my working with De Mille, it was fine because I was reading Mexican history, which is fascinating, and getting ideas. And then came the problem of the once-a-week meetings with De Mille. De Mille at that time came into the studio just on Fridays, as I recall, and he had a separate table in the commissary. He always came in wearing a pair of riding boots. He was a man of about five-feet-seven or -eight, brawny and strong, bald-headed and very macho in his conduct. And when he came in for lunch, those of us who were in his retinue ate lunch with him. He had one woman who had written for him in his early years and whom he kept on payroll although she didn't contribute anything that I knew of, and some other person. He had myself on as a writer and he had some junior writer, a young man called St. John on. And after the lunch we would have a meeting, and I discovered that De Mille, in my view of him, was a man who had X number of pigeonholes in his head, and when you suggested an idea, as I suggested quite a few, if it fit into a pigeonhole, then he said fine; and no matter how good the other ideas were, if they didn't fit any of those pigeonholes, they were no good. I did hit one pigeonhole right off, and I thought, "this is going to be great," because he was very pleased about it, and I don't think I hit another pigeonhole for the time I was with him. [laughter] And so the work, as the weeks went on with him, started to get less attractive. I'll tell what happened to that in a moment, but now I want to pause to say that early, during the seven months of 1941, I became attached to a party branch in the film section, and in the course of the next six and a half years, I was in several branches of the party. Many of the members were writers, but there were also readers and some secretaries and so on. Meetings were weekly. There were serious discussions of the Communist party programs and issues of the day. Special topics were discussed after certain people had given reports and pamphlets had been read [on] such [issues] as, say, the woman question and the matter of equal rights of women, and of foreign policy. Literature was sold and sometimes a book review was given by someone who had been assigned to do it, or volunteered to do it, and selections of classics. Marxist classics, were discussed. Members might be urged to join in an election campaign, and discussion of recruiting more members would go on. We would meet at different homes. I attended branch meetings quite regularly, but I was not involved in inner-party work at any time. What I mean by that is that any organization needs wheels within wheels to make it operate, and so we had members who were elected to be branch organizers and who would be responsible to section organizers--to get literature, to deliver dues, and so on. And I didn't do that kind of thing. I was never a branch organizer and I didn't want any of that kind of work. I did from time to time function somewhat in the Hollywood branch of the League of American Writers. And another thing that I did do was to read the work in progress of other party members who had a novel, a short story, a screenplay that they sought help on. In that period I avoided organizational work as much as possible, after my experience in New York, so that in free hours I could do some of the very extensive research that was needed for this historical work I was planning. And I was now able to buy some of the basic books in the field and so avoid the time that used to be involved in my going to the public library for research. I came in contact in the course of my first six months in Hollywood with what I would call the benign and the malign role of John Howard Lawson in dealing with the material of other writers. I am not going to discuss him as a functionary of the Hollywood Communist party, of course; although I had certain strong impressions about it, they were not at firsthand. But I will discuss what happened with him and other writers. I had known Jack Lawson in New York in connection with work in the Dramatists Guild and Authors League when he was living there for a year and a half, or two, in the thirties. I had heard about his very leading role in the creation of the Screen Writers Guild, of which he was the first president. And there seems no doubt that he earned almost universal respect from other writers for his work and his achievements and his leadership. By the time I came out here I found that he was held by most of the members of the Communist party out here in a respect that amounted almost to awe and subservience, none of which I felt for him. But there was already an attitude that if a writer who was in the party was embarking on a project, he or she would serve themselves very well if they asked Jack to talk over the project with them, that he was always willing to be helpful (and he was), and that great good would come from this. Or, if somebody had written something, they asked Jack to read it and Jack would read it. Now, I have no doubt that he was helpful to certain writers and certain projects, just as I know I was, or feel that others would be. But it's one thing to be asked to read someone's work and make what helpful suggestions or criticisms one can; it's another thing for all of the people in an organization to begin to feel that they really should not publish anything or submit anything unless Jack had approved. That becomes censorship. And indeed it worked itself into a most terrible kind of censorship because I know of instances where writers gave up books that they were going to write because Jack said, "Well, I don't think that's the sort of thing you ought to be writing now." I know of this.

GARDNER

Can you cite any examples, or do you care to?

MALTZ

Yes, I do. I know that Guy Endore gave up one book. Now, Guy Endore was a writer in his own right, and I know that he gave up a book that Jack said, "I don't think you ought to be writing it now." I don't remember other names, although I have talked about them, and I know that they exist. But this was a widespread thing, and it was a malign thing, and it came out of a fact that Jack just got a bigger and bigger ego, all of which was hidden by an outward show of modesty. But it was expected that you would show your work to Jack. And I thought this was wrong, and I never made an issue of it because, as I look back upon it, it never occurred to me to make an issue of it and perhaps I should have. And yet I want to qualify that by saying that at the memorial meeting for Lawson, which was held within the past year, there was an outpouring of respect and love for him which absolutely astonished me. I remember that Abby Mann, who had come on the scene much later, felt that Jack Lawson's book, and a meeting he had with Lawson, had been inspiring. I remember a wire from Ring Lardner [Jr.], who was not present, was so laudatory that I was astonished. And [there were wires] from other people as well. And yet that doesn't cause me to temper my feeling that the role he played was malign as well as benign. I think I might mention that my social and recreational life was very limited in Hollywood, and it was just about as it had been in New York: that is to say, there were certain circles of friends that we saw on a Saturday night or so, and that was it. We were as far from the Hollywood social life that is written about in movie magazines as we were when we had lived in New York. We had one friend with a swimming pool and we were glad to be invited; but when we swam, it generally was at the beach in the summer. I spent as much time as I could, and that was considerable, with my young son, since my time could be flexible. And by the end of the first year, I did get to be a part of a Sunday softball game and kept that up all the years in Hollywood because I was always crazy about baseball. And I would see occasional movies, what you'd call the important ones, but I was not a movie buff, and all time that I could spare for it went to research.

GARDNER

In 1942, also, you had a credit for a film called Moscow Strikes Back in which you wrote English commentary.

MALTZ

I'm going to come to that. I'm still in '41.

GARDNER

Oh, all right.

MALTZ

When I come to '42 I'll speak of that, and I'll speak of what happened with This Gun for Hire when it opened and so on.

GARDNER

Okay.

MALTZ

That's why going by years is for me an easier way of organizing.

GARDNER

Well, my note has Moscow Strikes Back after This Gun for Hire, that's why I wanted to make sure it got included.

MALTZ

Yes, it will be. From the time of Pearl Harbor, December 5, 1941, on, there wasn't, of course, one day in which I, like millions of others, didn't follow every event of the war with riveting concern. And the events of the war were the constant subject of conversation. It led to certain activities that I barely remember, such as participation in meetings of the [Hollywood] Writers Mobilization and those of the League of American Writers to help the war effort, and there was a writers board, war board or some such name, established by the Authors League in the East. I remember I wrote a short, little playlet for children having to do with the war to explain things, and later on I'll refer to other things I did do. Pearl Harbor was a Sunday, or the news came on a Sunday, and the very next day, when I went into the Paramount studio where I was working, there was big, heavy drama, I suppose in Hollywood style: the studio gates were locked, and a pass was required, and no one was admitted until his name was phoned up to an office, and there were police there with their weapons and so on. During the next period there was the terrible shame of the relocation of the Japanese citizens here and the cruel manner in which it was done so that they were robbed of lifelong work, possessions. I was one of those who bought the spy danger based upon what allegedly had happened at Pearl Harbor. I can remember reading about alleged Japanese spies on Pearl Harbor who had been living there for years and were planted there by the Japanese secret service and who had lights on to show Japanese planes where to bomb and so on. And I accepted what happened. I do know that individuals, like Carey McWilliams, did not accept it and protested it, and I wish I had been among them--but I wasn't. And that's how it happened. Now, at that time I was thirty-three and, with a sickly wife and a four-year-old child, I didn't consider enlisting. But I was 1-A, and there was no telling if I would be drafted so I intensified my research work. And, in a certain sense, the war gave me the opportunity to take time off from organizational work, because in all of the previous years on so many things, I, as a member of the Communist party, had been urging certain public policies that we hoped would take place; but now we were in accord with the main public policy, and we didn't have to urge Roosevelt to wage the war, as it were, as we once had tried to urge him to allow Loyalist Spain to buy arms. Early in 1942, I went to the story editor of Paramount, a very nice man by the name of Bill Dozier, and told him that I simply couldn't continue with De Mille. And the reason for it was not alone the difficulty I had in working with him, but the treatment that he gave to the young writer I've mentioned, a man called St. John (I forget his first name). There was one Friday when he said something so cruel to St. John, something like, "You haven't said anything this afternoon--is there anything in that head of yours?" And he said this in a voice that was cutting and sadistic. And I just told Dozier that I just couldn't work with a man who would do that. And Dozier was sympathetic. He tried briefly to persuade me to continue, but I said I couldn't and he said all right. I was still on contract to the studio, and for several weeks they tried me on a number of different pieces of work that they had. There was a lousy Dashiell Hammett book that I couldn't see into a screenplay.

GARDNER

Which one?

MALTZ

I don't remember the name of it anymore. And when I say a lousy book--maybe it's a good Hammett book...

GARDNER

...but it just wasn't...

MALTZ

...it wasn't, I thought, something for a screenplay. And then some other thing. And then for four months I was put on the only absolute piece of tripe I ever had in film work, and this was something called The Man on Half-Moon Street. I was on it with a director, an English director, and, I think, another writer, and it was, to use a current word, a piece of cockamamie in which a man of about 110 years old kept himself looking youthful by drinking radium, I believe. And he had a desire to marry a young girl, but there was a big problem: because he drank radium, he lit up at night. [laughter] And so here was this nonsensical piece of work, this garbage that we were supposed to make into a story, and the only way we survived work on it, I know, was talking about all sorts of things while doing it. But finally, apparently, we worked out a treatment. I have no memory of it, but I know that I have an official credit for, I think, story treatment on it. It was ultimately made and I never saw it. That was an unfortunate experience. In May 1942 This Gun for Hire came out, and Alan Ladd became an overnight star. The film was very successful and got a lot of attention, and I have been interested in these past years to see it and find that it was a very creaky melodrama--in my opinion, pretty second-rate. It doesn't stand up at all, and I just don't know why it was successful in the way it was.

GARDNER

What about compared to some of the other films like that of that period? Do you think it holds up any worse than they do?

MALTZ

Yes, worse. For instance, I believe that a film like, I don't know.... I only saw small portions of--What is that Hammett thing that Bogart was in?

GARDNER

Oh, The Maltese Falcon.

MALTZ

Yes, The Maltese Falcon, I believe, would stand up infinitely better, and I know that a number of my own films of that period stand up well. But that one doesn't. And I was shocked, when I first saw it perhaps six or seven years ago, at what a contrived--It's a very contrived melodrama, but it made me remember the work with Tuttle. I recall times with him in which I would say, "Well, you can't do a thing like that, it's ridiculous." And he'd say, "We'll find an answer, we'll find an answer; there's nothing you can't lick." Well, we did find answers but they were very contrived. In June 1942 my agent arranged with Paramount for me to get a six-month leave on my contract. The problem with Paramount having me on contract was that they did a great many light comedies and musicals, neither of which I was able to work on. They didn't have the kind of material that would have fitted me better, which Warner Brothers had. And so they wanted to keep me on contract, but they arranged the six-month leave of absence. And I had now been working steadily for twelve months on films, and during this period I had paid off my debts and bought the car necessary to life in Los Angeles and bought some clothes for the L.A. weather and saved up enough to start work on the novel. But then I found that because of gas rationing, which had come in during the war, I could no longer go to the South in an auto for the research I needed. I needed to go to various battlefields. I needed to go to a good many places....

1.33. TAPE NUMBER: XIV, SIDE ONE
November 8, 1978

MALTZ

I had to postpone that project, and although I didn't know it at the time, it turned out to be forever. And I turned to the material that was to become my second novel, The Cross and the Arrow. The Cross and the Arrow in a way began from an intellectual concern of mine. At that time in the war there were a great many people who accepted the attitude of an Englishman, Lord [Nicholas] Vansittart, I believe (I'm not sure of the spelling), who argued that there was something in the nature of the German people that had led them to make war in 1870 and in 1914 and again in 1939, and that as a people they were destined always to be war makers, and that therefore, when the war was over and the Allies had won, the Germans had to be curbed forever in such ways that they could never again make a war. Now, without denying what the Nazi war machine had done (and I would say, in parentheses, although at that time we did not know of the existence of the death camps in Europe, we did know of enough atrocities to be horrified), it was nevertheless counter to all of my beliefs as a Marxist to accept that there was something genetically in the nature of the German people which destined them always to be war makers. Marxism repudiates racism of any kind. And so I had been giving a good deal of time to thinking on this question and to reading about it, and it was the intellectual platform from which my novel began to evolve. However, before I went to work on it I worked on a voluntary basis for a week and a half on something that was quite fascinating, a documentary short film called Moscow Strikes Back. This was tremendously vivid footage taken by Russian combat photographers in the tremendous battle which had seen the Soviet forces throw back the Nazi armies in front of Moscow, and it was the first defeat that the Nazis had suffered in the war. However, the footage was somewhat random, and the commentary that they had sent did not fit properly: there was no unity to the commentary and the scenes. But there was enough there for me to go to work on it. And it was a new experience for me to work with a moviola. I would sit all day and most evenings running the film back and forth and, using their commentary as a guide, write my own commentary. So that I took the somewhat scattered footage and unified it and tied it together by my commentary, and it came out as a whole. It was a very successful job. Edward G. Robinson was brought in to read the commentary, which he did very well, and it was released immediately and played very widely. It later received an Academy award for distinctive achievement in documentaries. From the middle of June until the middle of October I worked on The Cross and the Arrow, which I conceived first as a novelette. When I finished it, however, I did not submit it to my publisher because, first, my wife was very critical of it and I respected her opinion; and then I took it East, where I had other friends read it. I didn't go East for that purpose but for another, but I used the opportunity, and their analysis and comments about the novelette made me see its possibilities as a larger work. And I decided to reconceive it. My trip East came about because I had been offered a very special film job. Some refugee from Europe, a film man, wanted to take the famous Eisenstein movie Potemkin and add a frame to it so that it would be told in a contemporary setting, and he wanted to dub it, the dialogue, into English so that it could be shown widely in theaters in the United States. And he offered the magnificent sum of $600 a week for me, and I was very happy to take it and very fascinated to try and do the job. I worked on it for about four and a half weeks and did the work, but it never did find much of a market.

GARDNER

That's very interesting because....

MALTZ

It was called Seeds of Freedom, by the way.

GARDNER

Right. That's very interesting because in looking through the Times reviews of your films, the Times is very enthusiastic about much of the film, but it played at the Stanley, I believe--didn't it?--which is not [inaudible] New York.

MALTZ

I have no idea.

GARDNER

But they said that the writing by Albert Maltz has strength and heart. I don't know whether you recall that or not.

MALTZ

No, I don't. I don't believe I kept any reviews of it or saw any. Well, of course, Potemkin is a fine film, and I believe I've seen it recently on TV, and I don't know in the entire history of movies a more graphic cinema scene than the...

GARDNER

The Odessa steps?

MALTZ

...the Odessa steps scene. That is just an incredible piece of cinema making. I know nothing that I think surpasses it, and I don't know if anything equals it. Just extraordinary. I then returned to Los Angeles and worked at reconceiving The Cross and the Arrow. My agent arranged for another leave of absence for me from Paramount and I worked through 'til March of 1943 on the novel. At that time Paramount did what was a custom in the film industry: they loaned me to Warner Brothers, which paid $500 a week to Paramount while Paramount continued paying me $300. [laughter] And this was for a novel called Deep Valley, which was interesting material and was designed for Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino and involved, I know, a big forest fire. Now, due to what was going on, I had now a real fear that I would be inducted into the army before I had been able to finish the novel. And so I set up a work procedure which was one in which I worked intensively on my screenplay from the moment I arrived at the studio, which was ten o'clock in the morning (I was in a car pool with other writers), and I would finish the amount of work expected of a writer, which was a certain number of pages a day, by about one o'clock or two o'clock. From then on, after lunch I would work on my novel. And I proceeded to discourage, with success, the kind of visiting that writers tended to do in studios where they would go from office to office for a chat. I also avoided lunch at the writers' table in Warner Brothers, which was full of very bright, fast-talking men like Phil and Julius Epstein, and others, who would keep the jokes going. I would go out after I finished the screen work and go to a lunch room where the grips and others ate and nobody was there I knew, and I would be able to eat lunch and read something. Then I would take a walk, a short walk, around the studio's grounds, and then I'd go back and work on my novel. I kept this up for two months, but then before it was completed I was switched to work on the film Destination Tokyo....

GARDNER

Before you get into that--because I know you're going to have a lot to say about that film--in working on The Cross and the Arrow, were you the sort of novelist who had the whole thing mapped out? You had the complete structure and filled in, scene by scene, as you would have in the play?

MALTZ

Well, no, not as detailed as a play, but I always did plan. I would plan out the general story; I would plan out individual scenes; I would plan out characterization. I had to do research for The Cross and the Arrow, but that was not too difficult. I might say, since it comes up at this moment, that people have asked me how it was that I could write about Germany in that period. Well, I limited my book--my book took place in, I believe, the summer of 1942. Now, there had been American reporters in Germany as late as December 5, 1941, and they had written about it. Then there were Swedish and other neutral reporters in Germany after the summer of '42, and they wrote about it while I was still working on my novel. There were also very useful sources in religious magazines, interdenominational, which had representatives in Germany who would meet from time to time in Switzerland, where they would publish monthly reports on what was going on in Germany. So that, with one exception, it proved that my facts were accurate, and I found this out later when my book was published in Germany--the work was accurate. In addition, I myself, out of my own cultural background, was able to write about the German scene which I had visited in Germany, although never really lived there, never lived there, but I was able to write about it with a sense of feeling I was writing truthfully in a way that I would not have been if I had, let's say, tried to write about Sweden. I just felt that way. And also, I had known Germans and I had known German refugees, and the material was at hand. I also had the assistance of a former member of the Nazi party who had come here as an exchange student and had remained here because he didn't want to continue on in Germany, and he told me a great deal about the structure of the Nazi party, so that I knew that and the thinking of Nazi party members, about which I asked him; he was a man whose sister was married to a Jew.

GARDNER

What was his name?

MALTZ

His name is Peter Pohlenz, very nice man, and his sister and brother-in-law were on the St. Louis, which was in the film...

GARDNER

The Voyage of the Damned?

MALTZ

...The Voyage of the Damned. They were landed finally in Holland and, when the Germans came, were in a concentration camp--or they were put into a concentration camp by the Germans. But they survived. So that I had the materials I needed to work on this book. I did plan, and planned very carefully, but at the same time--and this is true of plays too--new ideas would come in the course of writing, and I would follow the new ideas if they seemed to me right. But I was not one of those writers--and there are some--who have just a main idea and begin writing immediately without any planning. I have such a friend, and she can write 700 pages and then she says, "Now I'll look at it and see what kind of a book I want to write." Then she may cut it down to 400 and change it, and so on. I don't work that way.

GARDNER

Fine. Destination Tokyo....

MALTZ

Yes, I was called in to work on Destination Tokyo by Jerry Wald, who had known my work and had, I found out, tried to buy the short story "Happiest Man on Earth" because he thought he could make a feature film out of it. And the film script of Destination Tokyo had been written by a writer now directing his first film, Delmer Daves. It was based upon an idea, a short treatment by someone else, and Daves had gone up to a submarine base in the San Francisco area and gotten all of the technical material and had written a story that hung together. But as Jerry Wald said, and Daves agreed, it lacked certain dramatic qualities, it lacked certain characterization, it lacked certain things in content. And Wald had asked that I be put on it. I read the material and made suggestions as to what I might do to it, and this was accepted by both of them. I might say about them that Jerry Wald was a man who probably had only completed high school. He was very much a New Yorker character--a New York City character who had been one of the people who submitted things to Walter Winchell. He had come out as a writer in some way or another and had been one of Ben Hecht's "boys" whom Hecht had doing first drafts of scripts for him, which he would later rewrite. And Wald had become a writer and had done some work, but then had become a producer, which was his real field because he was a man with a superabundance of ideas, some of them excellent, some not, but he was always churning. He sought to do good dramatic and important material. He had taste. And he was a prodigious worker. And if a writer had enough self-confidence to say to him, "That's good and that's bad," then the two could get along very well; if the writer was lacking in confidence, then that would be bad because, inwardly, Wald was also lacking in confidence, and he would get very anxious then. But I worked very well with Wald and liked him. Delmer Daves was a man of very different quality. He had graduated from Stanford. He had become an attorney but had then gone into film work. He was a man of many interests, a photographer, metallurgist, he had studied art, and he was, on the whole, excellent to work with. Destination Tokyo, at the time I came on it, had a shooting date and the leading actors were already cast--Cary Grant and John Garfield. And so I had to abandon work on my novel, and I worked on Destination Tokyo evenings as well as days. The rewrite took four weeks and went into production immediately. One example of content which I supplied and which made for a useful piece of characterization, and for drama, was interesting--is an interesting example of what I said earlier, that writers write out of what they are. There was a scene in Destination Tokyo in which, when the submarine is somewhere in the Aleutian Islands, I believe, above water, waiting to make contact with a plane that will bring to it some special officer who has a special mission to perform, the submarine is attacked by a Japanese bomber. And although the plane is shot down, a bomb lodges in the body of the submarine and does not explode. Now, I'm not absolutely positive of this, but I think it was something like this. The Japanese pilot.... I don't want to go into this anymore because I may be in error, and I don't want to bother to read the script, but I can just say this: a character played by Dane Clark, by something he did, fell into strong disfavor with the other members of the crew, and these two events--the bomb in the body of the submarine, and the character--give some examples of, first, what I did on the script and, second, of a political point that I was going to make. In the case of the bomb in the body of the plane, Daves had so written it that the captain sent a young, slender sailor who could wedge himself into a certain narrow area and get out the fuse of the bomb, because without that there was danger that it would explode at any moment. But in the Daves script the audience didn't see this happen. I changed it so that we saw the scene and we saw the man going in and we saw the bomb, and it dramatized the danger. And, at a given moment, he started to turn the fuse the wrong way, and the captain said, "No, counterclockwise!" or "Clockwise!" or something like that. And the guy said, "Yes, sir, I said it wrong but I knew the right way to do it." And the whole crew--we dwelt on the tension in the crew, because it was life or death if he got that fuse out. So that that was a way of taking something that happened off scene and making it dramatic by putting it on scene. But secondly, the character played by Dane Clark at a given moment says, in effect, "You want to know why I did what I did?" And he proceeded to talk about the fact that he was Greek and that he had an uncle who was killed by the Nazis, who was a professor, a brainy man, an educated man, not like him, and he was killed because the Nazis didn't want there to be any thinking people in the countries they conquered, and that's the kind of people they were, and that's why he did what he did. And so his saying that was dramatic, and it changed the attitude of the other men on the crew toward him. But I could write that because of my understanding of what had gone on, of what was going on in the war...

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

...whereas someone else with a different understanding would not have thought of that.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

And that's a good example.

GARDNER

An interesting point.

MALTZ

When that rewrite was finished, I returned to the Deep Valley film and to part-time work on my novel. And it was during this time that my Paramount contract came to an end, and Warner Brothers now started to pay me the $500 that it'd been paying to Paramount. In the last days of August I got notice from my draft board to take my physical for induction. I did it and passed it, and I had just enough money saved to finish the book, and I refused an offer that Jerry Wald gave me to write what later became Pride of the Marines. This was a very fine piece of material that I'll discuss later, in spite of its awful title. And I know he was very upset with me for that because that project was dear to him, but I tried to explain that I had to finish my novel, and I went off. I then went to work on the novel every day and every evening of the week. At that time I asked for a leave of absence from party branch meetings. That was necessary because, while people missed meetings for one reason or another, if they missed them for a succession of meetings without any explanation, the branch chairman would always want to know why and would pay a visit. And I explained why and the matter went up higher, and then I had a session with Jack Lawson in which he felt I should not take a leave of absence, that it was not a good thing to do, that it was a bad precedent and so on. And he had a phrase that used to exasperate the hell out of me: he would say, "You can do that as well as go to branch meetings. It's all a matter of how you organize your time." If you said to him, "I don't have time to do this and this and this," he'd say, "It's all a matter of how you organize your time." And with that little magic wand, he presumably settled everything. And I just said, "No, I'm not going to go to branch meetings," and it became such an issue that I was summoned to a meeting downtown where the Los Angeles Communist party functioned. I don't know any longer whom I met with--there were three or four people as well as Lawson--and they just did everything to persuade me, and I said, "No, I want to finish this book and I may be inducted," and so on, and I just held to my position. So far as I recall, they held to theirs, but there was nothing they were going to do about it. They didn't want to expel me for that and so I didn't go to branch meetings. There was an interesting example of Lawson's rigidity in this. And by the end of '43 I did receive an induction notice from my draft board with a January date, and this came just about the time I had finished the novel and sent it off to my publisher. [tape recorder turned off] In January 1944 I went to Boston to see my editor, Angus Cameron, about my novel. I think I might pause for a moment to talk about Cameron. He was generally acknowledged at that time to be one of the best editors in publishing. He was a vice-president of Little, Brown, and we were friends as well as having a professional relationship. It is interesting that after the blacklist came along, Cameron's position did not protect him from being booted out of Little, Brown and Company because he refused to stop certain political activities that he had been carrying on. Cameron was a very, very bright and thoughtful man who combined with his sagacity as an editor a great love of hunting and fishing and of the outdoors, and I understand that when at times things might get too high-pressured for him in his work, he would simply leave and be found next in Idaho or Canada with a gun or a reel in his hand. In any instance, Cameron liked my book but had suggestions that I accepted for cutting and revisions, and I then immediately went to New York City to see my draft board in Queens.

GARDNER

Let me just interject for a second. Who were some of the other writers...

MALTZ

At Little, Brown?

GARDNER

...that Angus Cameron dealt with?

MALTZ

Oh, that Angus dealt with?

GARDNER

Would you know, offhand?

MALTZ

I would. Let's turn off a second while I think of the names. [tape recorder turned off] To answer your question....

GARDNER

I don't think your.... [tape recorder turned off]

MALTZ

Thank you. Little, Brown and Company was one of the most successful publishing firms in the country. It was based in Boston. Among the authors that Cameron would have dealt with at that time were A.J. Cronin, James Hilton, John P. Marquand, Howard Fast... they were a big-selling house. I went to the draft board because of the fact that I'd received notice of induction. I explained that I had a novel on which I'd spent a great deal of time and that I had six weeks of revisions that needed to be made. I told them that I was completely ready to go into service and was not in any way trying to evade service, but I asked for the six weeks of extension and this was given to me. I was told that I would get another notice as soon as the six weeks were up. I returned to Los Angeles immediately, rewriting in the compartment on the train, and I finished the revisions in time and started to arrange my personal affairs for leaving for service. But just then a new regulation went into effect limiting draftees to the age of twenty-nine, and since I was thirty-five, that meant that there would be no military service for me. [tape recorder turned off] Destination Tokyo had opened in New York, just when I was there, to wonderful press notices. It was listed as one of the ten best films of 1944 by Crowther of the New York Times, and it did very well at the box office. I finished the manuscript of--When I finished the manuscript of The Cross and the Arrow, I returned immediately to Warner Brothers to work on the story of Al Schmid, the blind marine, which Jerry Wald was producing.

GARDNER

Had he given you the...?

MALTZ

Wald had wanted me to do this film before I left Warner's to work on The Cross and the Arrow in October of the previous year, but I had refused it. He had put another writer on the story in the interim, and a screenplay had been written, but Wald was not satisfied with it. And I was very glad to go back to the project because the material was wonderful. It concerned a very average young factory worker living in Philadelphia who had joined the marines in a burst of unthinking patriotism immediately after Pearl Harbor, and who had fought very bravely and been decorated in the battle of Guadalcanal, but who had been blinded. And when that happened, he had few resources to fall back on, facing his life. And since his patriotism had been really one of unthinking enthusiasm, he was not ready to pay the price that some men have to pay in wartime. (I will mention that my salary went to $600 a week at this time, and I will keep mentioning what happened in that area as we go along.) I worked very hard on the story and finished a screenplay by mid-August. Since the House Committee on Un-American Activities raised the phony charge that Communists had been putting subversive material into films, I think it is worthwhile to pause over one scene in Destination--in Pride of the Marines (which became the title of this Al Schmid story) because, of any scene in the film, this is one where critics might have said, "That's where Maltz tried to get in some propaganda." It was a scene in a base hospital in San Diego where soldiers, recovering from wounds, were in a room where billiards--where pool was being played, and they began to talk about their anxieties in reference to returning to civilian life. They wondered whether there would be jobs for them, and they wondered what the country was going to be like, and so on. There's no question but that it was a scene with very direct political overtones. Now, this was a scene that I had not had in my screenplay, but Jerry Wald had suggested the scene to me because he felt that the film needed to say things about the contemporary scene. And I resisted putting it in because I felt that it would have a flavor of political propaganda that was not germane to the story of Al Schmid. But Jerry kept insisting on it and finally I said, "Well, I'll take a crack at writing a scene, and let's see how it is after I've finished it." When I finished it, Jerry said, "I like it and I want it in." And, as I recall, I was hesitant, but I just went along with him. And this is, I think, an amusing example of...

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

...of the opposite of what HUAC was saying. Jerry and I had a constant running battle with executives of the studio over the title. We suggested different titles, but the people in the studio in charge of exhibiting remembered only the fact that Pride of the Yankees had been a successful film, and therefore they wanted to call this Pride of the Marines. And finally they won out, and that ghastly title, I think, has been an impediment to general reaction to the film down the years. Although it was very well received at the time, exceedingly well received, I don't think that it has received the position it should have as a film of merit--just because the title is so obnoxious.

GARDNER

What would you have preferred?

MALTZ

Oh, I don't remember now any longer, but not a kind of a martial title like that, which makes it seem like the second half of a bill, you know, just dealing with bang-bang marines in the Halls of Montezuma, and so on.

GARDNER

Did you get to know the actors and so on who worked in the film? Garfield was in this one.

MALTZ

They were people I knew. Garfield, John Garfield, had had his first part in a play in Peace on Earth.

GARDNER

Right. Right.

MALTZ

And I knew Garfield from all down the years, but never intimately. He was not one of my real friends.

GARDNER

But did you associate while filming the...?

MALTZ

No, I wasn't there in the filming. I just went out.... It was all done by Delmer Daves, the director, and I went out once to watch a scene being shot. Dane Clark was an actor I knew from New York, and we were friendly, but in a casual way. At that time it was most unusual for writers to be present when a film was being shot. The fact is that unless there was a very special reason, the studio didn't want to pay them, and the director usually didn't even want them around.... [tape recorder turned off] I think I would like to mention several things about this film. It has only one battle scene in it; and just accepting the verdict of the reviewers, it was an extraordinarily intense scene and one that gave a very true feeling of battle. Now, I had never been in a war situation, and I was not capable of imagining the particular quality that that scene had which made it so very effective. This was the fact that two men working a machine gun--Al Schmid, with his hand on the trigger, and Diamond (I forget his first name), feeding the machine, the belt of cartridges into the gun--talked at a tremendous rate while firing. Especially Schmid. I got this from a marine officer, a Major Aronson, who had been in the battle of Guadalcanal and who was assigned to me when I was writing the screenplay. He told me that soldiers in combat are at such a pitch of excitement that frequently they do talk aloud at a great rate of speed and intensity. And that was how I wrote the scene, and that was how Daves directed it, and it came off with great effectiveness. (There was a sad note that Aronson, who had been decorated for his action in Guadalcanal, where he was a spotter, an artillery spotter in a small plane that went over the Japanese lines, committed suicide several months after he worked with me.) Something that I need to mention is a small conversation between Jack Warner, the owner of the--or the head of the studio, and myself on the night that the film was previewed. I had a small conversational relationship with Warner....

1.34. TAPE NUMBER: XIV, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 15, 1978

GARDNER

Your conversation with Jack Warner.

MALTZ

Yes, with Warner. Because during the time I was working on Pride of the Marines, Jerry Wald on a number of occasions had taken me to the executive dining room for lunch. Warner always presided over that table. And after the preview there was a discussion in the office of the theater, as there always was after the preview of a film, and then I went down to the men's room, where I was joined a few seconds later by Jack Warner. As we stood side by side, he commented about a scene in the film which he said he was very glad to see in it. This was a scene in a train compartment when Al Schmid and his buddy Diamond were on their way back East after their discharge from the hospital in San Diego. Diamond had had a shoulder wound from which he had recovered, and Schmid, of course, was blind, and miserable at the thought of going back to the area he had been brought up in, where he would no longer be able to see anything, and terribly anxious over the impending reunion with his girl. In an attempt to get Schmid to look at things a little differently, Diamond (whose first name was Lee, I recall, and who, by the way, was a real man who came from Boston, I believe) said to Schmid that he wasn't the only man in the world who had problems--that his was a terrible problem, but he wasn't alone in that. For instance, he, Diamond, was worried over what kind of work he would get, that there were limitations on the kind of work he could get because of his name, the fact that he was Jewish. Warner said to me that he was so glad I had that scene in the film, and that he always had it in mind that if he had not been born in the United States, he might now be a cake of soap. Now, I've mentioned this because of the testimony that Warner gave when he was on the stand in Washington in 1947, approximately two and a half years later--no, three years later, in which he lied about this very scene. Jerry Wald wanted me to go on immediately to another piece of material he had which became the film Mildred Pierce, which was very successful, but I again wanted to get back to work on fiction, and I left the studio. In that year my wife and I bought the house in which we'd been living and paying rent at about $75 a month, if I recall properly. The house cost $10,500, and it was recently priced for $137,000, [laughter] which gives a good example of what has happened over the years. It was a three-bedroom house with a small lawn in front and a little larger lawn in back, and about ten feet from our neighbors on each side. It worked fine for us and the children, and had very little upkeep. (I don't think I have mentioned that in 1942 we had adopted a second child, a girl.) For the rest of 1944, with the exception of a six-week interval, I worked on research for a new novel. I had been given a classified document on the treatment of combat fatigue in North Africa by the use of the drug pentathol. This work was being done by two psychoanalysts attached to the air force, Roy Grinker and John Spiegel. The material excited me very much, and I began to plan a novel around it. The six-week exception to my steady work was six weeks of work on a film called G.I. Joe where my salary went to $1,200 a week. The producer, Lester Cowan, was extremely uncertain about his screenplay and wanted me to write an opening frame about events before the main story. When I studied the material, I told him that the film would be long enough as it was, and I was sure he wouldn't use any frame; but he was insistent that he wanted it, and I was perfectly willing to write it. Subsequently, the frame was never used. During this period, and from now on until I was blacklisted about three years later, I got steady offers of film work which my agent, Mary Baker, automatically turned down. She was a woman I liked very much and respected, and she was very good at her job. Other agents would have tried by one device or another to get me to drop my fiction in order to take film jobs from which they would get a commission. But Mary Baker never did this. And I appreciated it. I might say that we had a relationship from the time I first came out to Hollywood without ever signing a contract. The Cross and the Arrow was published in September 1944 [tape recorder turned off] On the whole, the reviews were very, very good. In the daily New York Times.... What is this? Excuse me, sorry.... [tape recorder turned off] Orville Prescott in the daily New York Times wrote: "Maltz has achieved a new stature. The Cross and the Arrow is written with fire and fury, but the breadth of its sympathies and the scope of its vision of humanity are not confined within a narrow pattern." Whicher in the daily Herald-Tribune wrote: "Elements of a powerful psychological detective story and of a deeply spiritual probing into the degeneration of Germany under Nazi rule are combined in an example of serious fiction at its very best by Albert Maltz. Mr. Maltz has taken a theme of central importance to our time and treated it with a large-minded wisdom that can never go out of date. Few novels offer a greater reward than this." In the Sunday Tribune.... Hold it. Sorry. [tape recorder turned off] There were excellent reviews in the Sunday Tribune and in the Boston Herald, the New Yorker magazine, Chicago papers, San Francisco, Harper's magazine, and so on. There were, however, certain reviews that argued with my interpretation of events in Germany. And then there were some what I would call middling reviews, and there were several bad ones--one by Diana Trilling in the Nation and by Porter in the New Republic.

GARDNER

On what grounds, for the bad reviews?

MALTZ

Well, if I can find...

GARDNER

If it's trouble don't worry.

MALTZ

...Diana Trilling's... Diana Trilling never liked anything I ever wrote. And I think just on pure political grounds she found the way to put it.... Oh, yes, she said, for instance: "But although The Cross and the Arrow is not without excitement, it is the kind of excitement that makes me feel used, as if I had been made to keep a death watch over someone with whom I had no vital connection. And Mr. Maltz's characters are either unconvincingly simple or unconvincingly complex."

GARDNER

Interesting. [laughter] Whatever it means.

MALTZ

The book began to sell, and its word of mouth was very good, and the publisher, as a result, began to advertise it. There were excellent quotes to use, such as the ones I quoted. Its hardback sale in the first year was 22,000 copies, which fell just short of getting it on the best-seller list, which would have been useful. And there was a curious little wrinkle to this. At the end of February 1945 Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a column about it. At that time I happened to be in a hotel in Florida, where I was doing some research, and I know everybody in the hotel rushed out to get a copy of the book. I'm sure other people in the country who admired Eleanor Roosevelt would have wanted to buy the book, but the book was not to be found in any stores because it had been taken by a new book club called The Book Find Club as its, I think, its first choice at its beginning. The club had used the printing plates of Little, Brown and Company, and when it shipped them back, they had been shipped to an incorrect address. So there was a period of about eight weeks in which there were no copies of the novel in any bookstore in the United States. And that was just when Eleanor Roosevelt's column appeared.

GARDNER

Masterpiece of timing. [laughter]

MALTZ

Yes. There was also, in addition to the book-club sale of 36,000 copies, there was a special Sundial edition of 10,000, and then an armed forces edition of 140,000 for soldiers. The novel was not published abroad, of course, until after the war, and it has had some fifteen foreign editions, followed by paperback editions in England, Denmark, East Germany, Hungary, Holland, and China. It has been continuously in print in some countries in the world since it was published. And it has had radio and TV dramatizations in England and a good many other countries.

GARDNER

Was there any thought of filming?

MALTZ

I'm going to come into that.

GARDNER

Oh, okay. I always anticipate you.

MALTZ

In the fall--Well, you're with it. [laughter] In the fall there was an offer to buy the novel to make a film by two very distinguished filmmakers: Lewis Milestone, the director, and Robert Rossen, who at that time had not yet become a director but was a very successful screenwriter. They offered, I think, $30,000 or $40,000 for the novel, with a percentage of the profits. And this was very exciting to me for financial reasons: a sum of money like that would have meant that I would be able to write my new novel without stopping at all to do film work, because the sale of the book itself had returned gross royalties of less than $10,000. Now, a sale of 22,000 hardback copies nowadays would return much more because books sell for much more, but I believe the price of my novel was $2.50 at that time. And I was constantly hoping for the day when I would be free of all film work. Now, the agreement with Rossen and Milestone was a verbal agreement: we met in my agent's office and shook hands, and this was the way in which business has always been transacted in Hollywood. Verbal deals are absolute and are not changed, because the actual written contracts sometimes takes months before the lawyers have them prepared, and there would be no way in which things could be bought and sold unless people could trust one another's words. So that when a month or two later Universal Pictures offered 50,000 [dollars] for the book, we turned it down. But then the contracts never came through from Rossen and Milestone, and I didn't know at that time that they had had Ingrid Bergman in mind to play the woman in the film and that she had turned down the role. And apparently they were not successful in getting the private financing they had hoped for, and, as a result, they each started to blame the other for not producing the contracts. Finally, after months of their lying, it became clear that they were welching on the deal. This was generally unheard of and I was furious. I discussed suing them with an attorney but took his advice that it would not be worth my while to go through everything that would be involved. I think I might mention that when it was published in Germany after the war I learned that I had one error of fact in it which was a significant error. As is generally known, millions of men and women from other countries were taken forcibly into Germany (or, in some cases, they volunteered; but usually it was forcibly) for work in factories and on farms, and this was in fact slave labor, unpaid slave labor. I had stated in my novel that in a farming area foreign workers had been put up on an auction block and had been bid for by farmers. I wrote this because in my research in religious magazines I had come across this in an article. But in fact it was an error; it never happened. What did happen was that local authorities sent out to farmers the number of workers that they needed, foreign workers that they needed on their farms, and the farmers had absolute power over those workers. But aside from this, the book was sound, and it was very widely printed in Germany--in East Germany, this was. By a peculiar happenstance, when I signed the contract for Germany, I thought it was a publishing firm in the West, but it turned out to be one in the East; and because of the division between the two countries, once it was published in the East, the eastern publisher would not give rights to the West because they hoped to sell it to the West. This book has sold, all in all, close to 700,000 copies to date. Now, during 1944 among some of my civic activities were the following. I was one of the speakers at a public rally to support the Roosevelt-Truman ticket, and I remember that on election day I drove elderly people in Santa Monica and Venice to their polling places. I no longer remember how it came about, but I wrote a documentary film about New York City for the Office of War Information. It was never made and that's all I remember about it. I also attended a number of secret meetings called by a representative of the State Department, I believe, or it could have been the Office of War Information or some other official organization, to discuss the reeducation of the German people. And I guess after a while there was a decision to go another way with it, and there were no more meetings. Of course, throughout the war years I attended public meetings, contributed funds to the Red Cross and Russian War Relief, bought war bonds, and followed the events of the war with intense concern, anxiety, and sorrow. In '45 there was a very important change in the Communist party. In late '43 there had been a meeting in Tehran of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, and in mid-1944 a book appeared by Earl Browder, the secretary of the Communist party, called To Tehran and Back.[*Tehran: Our Path in War and Peace] In it he presented the thesis that progressive tendencies existed within capitalism that allowed for a peaceful development in the world toward socialism. Browder "used the agreement Stalin concluded with Roosevelt and Churchill... as the point of departure for his thesis that the wartime collaboration would extend into the postwar world," and that this "collaboration could be and should be reinforced with class harmony on the domestic scene." I should have said that the quotation above was from Al Richmond's book, A Long View...

GARDNER

...from the Left

MALTZ

A Long View from the Left. Thank you. I, like every other member of the Communist party, read the book and discussed it. It didn't seem to me, and to quite a number I talked with, that Browder's thesis had any connection with the classic Marxist literature that had nourished us. Classic Marxist analysis rested upon the thesis that there was an inevitable class struggle in capitalism between the owners of the means of production and the workers whose labor power they exploited. Moreover, classical Marxism believed that capitalism was an outmoded economic system and carried within it the seeds of its own destruction, that it was the opposite of a progressive system. We also had believed that German fascism was precisely the manifestation of a dying capitalism seeking to perpetuate its rule. Now, this difference between the substance of Browder's book and what we had hitherto believed was no mere theoretical matter to be left in the realm of theory: very important practical decisions flowed from it. We in the rank and file of the party did not know the struggle that was going on in the national leadership in which William Z. Foster, who had been the secretary of the party until he had had a very serious heart attack some years before, was leading the fight against Browder. Browder won out, and Foster remained silent so that he would not be expelled for factionalism and because he felt that the party would get back on the track sooner or later. The practical result was a decision in May 1944--no, it couldn't have been May...

GARDNER

Forty-five.

MALTZ

...May '45, yes... to disband the Communist party and substitute for it a Communist Political Association which would be a kind of a loyal opposition to the American capitalist establishment. The perspective for the future would be Communist Political Association clubs or branches like those, let's say, of the Democratic party. And the concept that capitalism was a dying system that.... No, let's pause for a moment, I want to rephrase that. [tape recorder turned off] And the concept that there was an inevitable class struggle in American society, as in any capitalist society, would have to be eliminated. Now, I've been giving this very briefly because there's no reason to spend a lot of time on it. What is important is that I, like a lot of others, had great respect for Browder, and so I just said to myself, well, I don't really see this; I don't agree with it but I'll go along with it. So I joined the Communist Political Association. Interestingly enough, I remember the house in which I signed up. It was the house of Nicholas Bela, who was one of the few foreign-born members of the Hollywood Communist party and who later became an informer. Oh, no--I said '45 and I'm wrong, when I gave the date of the changeover from the Communist Political Association. It was...

GARDNER

It was '44?

MALTZ

...'44, yes. It was '44. In January 1945 I decided that I wanted to see the work being done by Grinker and Spiegel, who were now at an air force hospital on the west coast of Florida, north of St. Petersburg. Warner Brothers helped me get to the Pentagon, where I saw the head of the armed--of the, I guess, air force medical service, a General Grant who was a descendant of Ulysses Grant, and arrangements were made for me to go to this hospital. It was adjacent to a small hotel, and I was there in February and March, and I got the material that I wanted. I not only talked with the physicians I've mentioned and others but I was permitted to sit in behind a screen and listen to and observe a number of different pentathol treatments, which were enormously dramatic. Pentathol, of course, is a drug that is used in surgery nowadays, and it puts patients out of consciousness altogether. But when used in smaller doses it has a kind of hypnotic effect, and the psychiatrists there were using it in order to have patients relive--with the, as it were, the calming and soothing and interpretative help of a doctor--those events in battle, in combat, that had resulted in their getting what was then called combat fatigue. Men who had become too nervous to fly anymore, men who had various psychosomatic difficulties such as the inability to eat, loss of hearing, loss of vision, and who had been completely healthy or, let's say, had been functioning in a healthy manner before certain traumatic events, were greatly helped by this treatment. And I listened to men recount fearful experiences, and cry and scream while under pentathol, and then, after they emerged from its effect, the psychiatrist was there to discuss it with them and to help them adjust to what had happened, to accept it and to relieve them of their emotional problems. Now, before I went down to the air force hospital, I had had an interview with a film producer, Frank Ross. He had purchased a best-selling novel, The Robe, and he had three or four screenplays written on it and had not been satisfied with any of them, and he asked me to go to work on it. I told him that I was going off to do the research and would not interrupt it for film work, and I knew that at this time there were almost daily film offers coming in for me. But while I was away in Florida, the sale of The Cross and the Arrow to Rossen and Milestone.... The fact that the sale was not going to go through became clear, and at the same time, close to the end of my stay I got a telegram from Ross offering me 1,000 [dollars] a week to work on The Robe. When I went back, I got in touch with him and read the novel and decided that there was material in it that I could use to make a screenplay that would be interesting. I talked about what I would do with it with Ross, and I saw in it, let's say, the profound social phenomenon that was Jesus and the effect that he had on that world, and Ross accepted my stipulation that I wouldn't write any scene that supported religious mysticism; that is, I would give a psychological interpretation of the effect of the robe on characters, but I would not endow the robe of Jesus with mystical properties. And I also wanted to set Jesus in his proper historical frame as one of a long line of Galilean preachers who had come out of Galilee trying to reform the spiritual life of the Jewish people. Ross accepted these provisos and we worked extremely well together. He was a man of taste and intelligence and an extremely nice human being. It was a very big project. It required a good deal of research, and I worked eight months on it until my screenplay was finished. In August of '45 Pride of the Marines opened. The reviews were magnificent, and it was again named by the New York Times as one of the ten best of the year. And I was nominated for an Academy award for the screenplay, but didn't get it. The writers of Lost Weekend did. I was on a special project for just a week or so in that year and that was The House I Live In, which came about in a curious way. Soon after I went to work on The Robe, I was invited with Frank Ross to the home of a man who at that time was going to direct it, Mervyn Le Roy, and Frank Sinatra was there for supper. During the evening, Sinatra began to talk about the work that he had been doing, from the time he was still unknown, about racial prejudice. He has always been deeply concerned about race prejudice, and he used to go around to high schools talking to children about it. And he.... I forget now whether it was he or Frank Ross who made the suggestion that it would be awfully good if we could do something about it on film. The next morning Frank Ross came to me, and he had an idea for a short film, in which Sinatra could perform, which would say something about racial prejudice. I thought it was a good idea and sat down on it and developed a story that would take about one reel and would involve Sinatra's scene. And because of my friendship with Earl Robinson, I knew the song for which Earl had written the music which was called "The House I Live In."

GARDNER

I don't think you previously mentioned that friendship with Earl Robinson.

MALTZ

Well, I haven't mentioned my friendship with a lot of people I know.

GARDNER

Well, as long as Earl Robinson is brought in now, it might be interesting for you to mention how you got to know him...

MALTZ

Well, I....

GARDNER

...and something about him, since he's not very well known.

MALTZ

Oh, I see. He isn't [well known] now; he was at one time.

GARDNER

Exactly.

MALTZ

Yes, perhaps Earl is a good example of what can happen with people's reputations. Earl was a man from the Seattle area who had a real gift for, I would say, lovely ballad music and first came to my attention in New York in the late thirties as the composer of "Ballad for Americans," the words of which had been written by a man called John LaTouche who also did some Broadway musicals. It was sung by Paul Robeson in its first performance and was an enormous success--so much so that within the same year, I think, the Republicans asked for it to be sung at their presidential convention. And it was played again and again on radio. Subsequently, Robinson wrote the music to words written by Millard Lampell for "The Lonesome Train" which was enormously successful and I think very beautiful. Both the Ballad for Americans and "The Lonesome Train" are pieces that I myself enjoy playing at least once a year, and have all down the years. And Earl did other such works. He was a very well-known man, and I met him, I think, only when he came out to Hollywood looking for some film work for the same reason I had come out, and we became warm friends, I knew about his song "The House I Live In," for which words had been written by.... [tape recorder turned off] The words to "The House I Live In" were written by a man whose pen name I forget for the moment [Lewis Allan]. His real name was [Abel] Meeropol. He also wrote the words to the song "Strange Fruit," which Billie Holiday made so famous. And it was he and his wife who, in the early fifties, adopted the two orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The song fitted the concept of the one-act film beautifully, and it made an excellent title for it, and this was acceptable to Ross, and to Sinatra, and to Mervyn Le Roy. All of us did what we did without remuneration, of course, and RKO got hold of film for it (since film had to come through government allocation), and it subsequently played for years and years in schools all over the country. It was initially released to 20,000 schools, and it was played on the Paramount, Warner, and RKO chains, and it got a special Academy award.

GARDNER

What exactly was your role in that?

MALTZ

I wrote it.

GARDNER

You wrote it. You wrote the whole thing... in a week?

MALTZ

Oh, less than a week. It was just a short thing I don't think it was any longer.

1.35. TAPE NUMBER: XV, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 15, 1978

GARDNER

Return to 1945.

MALTZ

Yes, I ought to mention that this was the beginning of a cordial relationship between Sinatra and myself in which we would see each other on a social basis. And there would be phone calls on one matter or another. I mention it because of what happened in 1960 with a film project that he wanted me to do when I was still on the blacklist. Somewhere in this period, in 1945, I had a discussion with a Major Winston and with the former head of the German film company UFA, a refugee whose name I cannot recall. Winston was somehow associated with this man in civilian life and they wanted to do The Cross and the Arrow as the first film in a reconstituted Germany. And this, of course, was very exciting to me. My records turn up some examples of my civic activities in 1945. I made a speech at a Negro church on the role of the Negro troops in the Civil War. My doing this was probably the result of a friendship I had with a Mrs. Charlotta Bass, publisher of a black newspaper, the [California] Eagle. I no longer recall how I got to be friends with her, but I know that I saw her rather a number of times and met her nephew, whom she wanted to succeed her as editor of the paper and who, sadly, was killed in the war. I also spent a lot of time working with a young woman, Beatrice Griffith, on a book that was subsequently published called American Me. She was working with Chicanos at that time and had an extraordinary command of their way of talking English and of their psychology. And this was one of the writers I worked with who did get a book published. I remember in passing, worth relating I think, a very amusing evening at the Russian consulate to which I was invited, and the other guests there, besides my wife and myself, were Theodore Dreiser and his wife, and Charles Chaplin and his rather new bride Oona. In the course of the evening, Dreiser got very drunk and Chaplin began to tell a story--tell about a project that excited me enormously. He wanted to do a film, he said, about the Haymarket martyrs (I won't go into who they were for this), and he spoke with great passion and eloquence about the beauty of the moment when one of them, [Louis] Lingg, committed suicide by putting a percussion cap between his teeth and biting it. And as Chaplin told this story, Dreiser kept saying, "That's it kid, go ahead kid, I'm with you kid." [laughter] And in subsequent days, when I happened to tell certain friends about this, among them were some who knew Chaplin rather well, and they told me that he had been talking about this project for years and that he was never going to do it. [laughter] My records also turn up that I was part of a Screen Writers Guild public discussion in a theater in Westwood about the new film Tomorrow the World; that I attended a dinner of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee at which Paul Robeson and General Evans Carlson spoke; and that, because of my novel, I was asked to lecture on the German question, and I did so for discussion groups or in public lectures on April 29, May 12, 20, 23, June 10, July 7 (and at that point I had a note that I was plagued by requests to speak). Oh, yes, I see that on May 17 I had dinner at Warner Brothers Studio with Jerry Wald and Jack Warner and Delmer Daves, and then we went to Huntington Park for the preview of Pride of the Marines that I've already mentioned. There were, of course, always [Screen] Writers Guild meetings which I attended. And there were meetings with the Hollywood Writers Mobilization and one with the Lawyers Guild on war criminals. I have a note that I spent all one afternoon reading Richard Wright's Black Boy, and made the notation that, to me, it was one of the great personal documents in all literature, and I despised the left-wing criticisms of it. That has relevance because of the thing I'm going to come to about the "Maltz controversy." And during this period, Warner Brothers offered me a contract of six months on and six months off each year, and I rejected it because I didn't want to be on contract to anyone.

GARDNER

How much would it have paid?

MALTZ

I don't remember what they would have paid, but I have....

GARDNER

If they would have wanted to keep that updated..

MALTZ

Yes, I will have that updated in a moment.

GARDNER

Okay.

MALTZ

On October 17 I was down to a meeting of the board of education with others to protest their allowing Gerald K. Smith to speak in a school auditorium. And my position has changed now: I would let the bastard speak. [laughter]

GARDNER

Well, wasn't that the incident in which Al Wirin fought in the courts to allow him to speak, and then he and Lauren Miller picketed outside?

MALTZ

It may well have been. It may well have been, yes. I see that I made a speech in the Embassy Auditorium downtown which was sponsored by the Jewish People's Fraternal Order on the opening of a million-dollar rehabilitation drive for Jews in all lands. By the middle of November, when I had finished my work on The Robe, I went to work on the novel for which I had done research at the air force hospital. My overall story was that of a factory worker who had gone into service and had broken down in combat. He would be treated in a hospital, would recover, and then, going home, would become a union organizer. I wanted to follow his career. And as I worked on it I knew that I wanted to do some factory work as part of my research because I had never done any in my life. On December 15 I had a note in a diary that I was keeping at the time that I refused an offer of $75,000 from Milton Sperling to work on a film having to do with the OSS [Office of Strategic Services]. But I did tell him, because he was so insistent, that I wouldn't take any other film job without letting him have a chance to bid for me. Now, since I had started four and a half years back with a salary that would be the equivalent of $7,500 for a complete film, this was an enormous leap in the pay I could command. I worked through the fall on the novel, and then in January Frank Capra, whom I had not known, asked to see me and I did meet with him. He wanted me to work on some material which I read, and I didn't want to; I wanted to keep working on my novel, and I had enough money to carry me for perhaps four, five, six months, I don't recall anymore. But he was very insistent, and I finally came to a decision that I would ask a salary so high that he would certainly reject it. But if he took it, it would be worth my while to interrupt the novel to do it. But there was the promise I had made to Sperling, and so my agent told Frank Capra what the situation was and said that Sperling would have to have the first right. But she asked him for $5,000 a week for me, and he said, "You've got it," and then she said the same thing to Sperling, and he said "You've got it." [laughter] And so I did go to work with Sperling on this OSS material. Fritz Lang was the director and Gary Cooper was the leading actor, and, very regrettably, they had a production date on it, which is a terrible way in which to begin to work on a screenplay.

GARDNER

He was already cast? Gary Cooper was already cast at the time...?

MALTZ

He was already cast. He was already cast, yes. And Ring Lardner was already at work on the script. And I worked for some time separately from Ring. I had been led to believe that both Sperling and Lang wanted to make an important film out of this material, which was just material. But after a few weeks I realized that what they wanted to make was a melodrama with a patina of importance, and I told Milton--I felt very frustrated with the material as I worked at it, and I told Milton that I wanted to quit.

GARDNER

Before you continue, let me just ask you: what was the project that Capra had in mind for you?

MALTZ

I forget what it was. I forget what Capra had...

GARDNER

I just wondered if it was something with people...

MALTZ

I think it was a fantasy film, I'm not sure. But I'm not sure. And Milton Sperling, whom I liked as a person, asked me please not to leave, not to leave them without a script when the shooting date was so near. And I stayed on it, although I regretted afterwards that I had. When finally a script came together, putting together the work of Ring and myself, I felt that it was a very mediocre script, and indeed the film turned out that way. It's time now. I come now to what has become known as the "Maltz controversy."

GARDNER

Before you get into the controversy, let me just make one or two comments about Cloak and Dagger.

MALTZ

Oh, yes.

GARDNER

As I mentioned to you last week, it was the one script that I was able to find at UCLA. And I also found several commentaries on it and various books of criticism. The major criticism seems to be that it had the potential to be an outstanding spy thriller, one of the best, but the love theme sort of ended up pushing that aside. What is your comment? Do you have any comment on that?

MALTZ

Well, you know, I really can't comment on that because I don't remember the film well enough. I have not seen it in these years of viewing old films on TV. I've not seen it. I don't remember the script; I haven't reread it so that I can't comment.

GARDNER

Okay, I just wondered. You've really pushed that one aside, haven't you?

MALTZ

Yes, it's certainly not something I wanted to look at again.

GARDNER

Okay, okay. Then the "Maltz controversy...."

MALTZ

In late October '45 an article appeared in the New Masses that commanded my attention. It was written by one of the editors, Isidor Schneider, and was entitled "Probing Writers' Problems." It invited discussion and I immediately wanted to respond to it. For a long time I had had growing opposition to what I considered the narrow, vulgar manner in which the Communist party slogan Art Is A Weapon was interpreted. I also carried a burden of resentment at some of the ridiculous criticism I had read in the New Masses and the Daily Worker--literary criticism, I mean. So in spare time I wrote an article that the magazine subsequently entitled "What Shall We Ask of Writers?" and it was published in the New Masses on February 12, 1946. It so happened that the article appeared at a time when the Communist party was in a state of ferment, a state that was close to frenzy, actually, and I have to go back a year to explain this. Around May 1945 the Daily Worker printed an article written in the form of a letter from a leading French Communist, Jacques Duclos. In it he sharply and fundamentally condemned the Browder theories that had led to the dissolution of the Communist party and the creation of the Communist Political--C.P. I.? What? Communist Political.. I thought it was Communist Political Association....

GARDNER

So did I.

MALTZ

Well, maybe it's a...

GARDNER

International?

MALTZ

No, not international. Must be C.P.A. It was obvious that Duclos was not speaking as an individual. He was voicing not only the opinion of the French Communist party, which had come through the war with enormous prestige and growth, but the opinion of Moscow as well. Open discussion started at once in the Daily Worker with Foster attacking Browder's revisionism, as did others. Some months later, the national leadership dropped Browder from all posts and called for the dissolution of the Communist Political Association and the reconstitution of the Communist party. This decision, however, didn't end the turmoil in the party. A drive started to cleanse party thinking of all manifestations of Browderism. Finally Browder himself was expelled from the party at a meeting of the national leadership in February 1946. This meeting happened to coincide with the publication of my article. And one of the top leaders, Robert Thompson (who, incidentally, was a decorated hero of World War II), jumped with both feet on my little contribution to a literary discussion, denouncing it as, quote, a "smear Trotskyite article," closed quote. Since anything that smacked of the doctrines of Leon Trotsky was anathema to all members of the Stalinist Communist party, this raised my article to a political level far different from the one on which I thought I was writing. Instead of my being a participant in a discussion limited to the pages of a magazine and to writers, critics, and readers, I had become, for the entire Communist party, an example of a cultural Typhoid Mary. [laughter] I was the advocate of Trotskyite aberrations, Browderite revisionism, anti-working-class and antiparty doctrines that had to be exposed and refuted. A series of six articles immediately appeared in the Daily Worker by Sam Sillen analyzing my article point by point and arguing that it was un-Marxist, unsound, liberal, bourgeois thinking. Sillen was a former instructor in English at New York University who had become a full-time critic and editor in the communist movement. We had been near-neighbors and cordial friends in my last several years in New York. He was one of those who had been creatively helpful in discussing with me the first version of The Cross and the Arrow in 1942. There was nothing personal in Sillen's attack: it was a sincere, sharp discussion of Marxist theory. Very different were two articles by Michael Gold. He announced that I had succumbed to Hollywood corruption and was now deserting the cause of the working class, and so on. I wrote him a furious letter, which he proceeded to use against me in the same slanderous manner. Late in the month Howard Fast attacked my article in the New Masses. Now, it is not my purpose in this history to go into the ideological discussions that went on. What I do want to set down here is what I felt about the hammer blows I was receiving and why I wrote the second article as I did. I had never considered myself to be a theoretical sage. Far from it. Therefore I didn't feel that in my first article I had laid down the ten commandments which I now had to defend as I would my honor. My self-respect was involved with something quite different: with a desire to think my way through all of the arguments to a position of clarity if I could achieve that. And this desire was strengthened by several factors: first, by my study of philosophy at college and the training it gave me in trying to be rigorous about my own thinking; second, by the very strong insistence in Marxist literature, and in the practice of the Communist parties, of the need to listen to criticism sincerely and to accept it if it is merited. It was an ideal that I respected deeply. In addition, by this time in my life, if not always before, it was not a devastating blow to my ego to acknowledge that I had made a mistake. For these reasons, as I read and listened to arguments against my article that went on for a month, and included party meetings also, I came to feel that I had made various assertions that weren't sound within the orbit of Marxist philosophy. In the final analysis, however, despite my intentions, it was not primarily with my intellect that I wrote my second article. It was largely written by my emotions. Once my article was made into a major political issue of the entire Communist party, I was automatically faced with the choice of being expelled from the party or of accepting the criticisms and repudiating those fundamental positions in my article that were under attack. I didn't perceive then what I realized subsequently: that I was as incapable of calm, analytic thought as a shell-shocked soldier under artillery bombardment in the front line. Above everything else, it was a matter of my conscience and self-respect not to leave the party. Since it was so, it inevitably dominated and shaped everything I tried to formulate intellectually. The second article I wrote came about because the New Masses offered me space to continue the discussion. Undoubtedly the party leadership had been consulted beforehand It already knew from reports from the L.A. leaders that I was not taking an intransigent position. To the contrary, at a meeting toward the end of February, which was chaired by Sam Sillen who had been sent out by New York to join in the discussions out here, I listened to some very abrasive remarks by various party members.

GARDNER

Do you care to name them?

MALTZ

No, I wouldn't go into names. Without accepting their strictures at that time, I nevertheless made clear that my article had not been the result of any attempt on my part to consciously attack fundamental party doctrine. Until the middle of March all of my working hours were necessarily devoted to intensive labor on Cloak and Dagger. After that I started to write the second article, with Sam Sillen at my elbow. In the state I was in, it was impossible for me to write with a calm and analytical mind. Since my overwhelming emotional need was to remain in the party, I repudiated many things in my first article. Hostile critics broke out in a chorus of agreement that I had recanted like cultural figures in the Soviet Union when they were called to account for having strayed from the Stalinist line. This comparison has come down the years, but it was, and is, superficial and inaccurate. The Soviet citizens who recanted had done so out of fear. The easiest thing in the world was to leave the American Communist party. It had no power to harm me or anyone. Indeed, hundreds and thousands of Americans joined it and left it between 1920 and 1950. Actually, if I had chosen to leave the Communist party and to defend every comma of my first article, those same critics, with the same superficiality, would have called me a brave fellow and an honest soul, and the editors of Life magazine, Reader's Digest, and Saturday Evening Post would have come running to me with checkbook in hand. However ineptly or embarrassingly expressed, my second article was one of conscience and fundamental loyalty to an ideal. I wanted to remain linked to the movement that represented, in my eyes at that time, the hope of mankind for a decent future. My integrity depended upon that and not on the rightness of my first article as a whole or in any part. Unfortunately, I was not at that time able to state any of this. To have acknowledged party membership would have meant the end of my ability to work in films.

GARDNER

Really! At that point?

MALTZ

Oh, at that point without any question. There was no open Communist writing in films. There was not one studio who would have had a Communist one hour...

GARDNER

Really!

MALTZ

...if he had acknowledged this; he would have been off instantly and automatically blacklisted. Nor could I acknowledge it a year and a half later when the blacklist came because then political conditions made it impossible. Now, this controversy was written about in Newsweek, Time, the New Republic, the Saturday Review of Literature, the New Leader, and other magazines, and has been mentioned in not a few books since, with the same false identification between my act and that of a Soviet writer in the Stalin period. It has been written about not only superficially but also absurdly. For instance, Garry Wills referred to it in his introduction to Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time, published in 1976. He wrote: "Maltz was called to account for his deviations--typically, at a cell meeting in a Hollywood nightclub." It is truly astonishing to find that a serious social analyst and political thinker has swallowed the prevailing myths about Hollywood so completely that he has even invented one of his own. [laughter] He might be forgiven if he had only borrowed someone else's nonsense. But in the thirty years between 1946 and 1976 I never read in the testimony of any informer a reference to a Communist party meeting in a nightclub, and I never saw any reference to it in a magazine or newspaper or even by an imaginative Hearst columnist. It remained for Mr. Wills to invent it. I have wondered why he didn't add that I listened to my critics with one hand holding a glass of champagne and the other on a starlet's thigh. [laughter] Now, I have a bibliography that I thought I might put on this.

GARDNER

Fine. Sure, that would be good.

MALTZ

Of the printed materials of the controversy, there was first the article by Isidor Schneider in the New Masses, "Probing Writers' Problems." This was on October 23, the issue of October 23, '45; my article in the issue of February 12, '46, "What Shall We Ask of Writers?"; in the same issue another article by Schneider, "Background to Error"; and then in the Daily Worker, six articles appearing February 11 through 16, 1946, called "Which Way Left-wing Literature?" I said Sam Sillen, didn't I? Yes. In the Daily Worker, Michael Gold, columns on February 12, '46, February 23, and March 2, March 16; Howard Fast in the New Masses, February 26, '46; Joseph North--now, I don't know whether North is the New Masses or the Daily Worker.

GARDNER

The New Masses. It was the same issue as the Fast.

MALTZ

Ah, February 26, '46. A.B. Magil in the Daily Worker, March 1, '46. Alvah Bessie in the New Masses, March 12, 1946; Sonora Babb in the New Masses on March 12, '46; John Howard Lawson in the New Masses in March 19, '46, with an article entitled "Art Is a Weapon"; and then I, again, with an article "Moving Forward," in April 9, 1946; Sam Sillen in the Daily Worker, on April 14, 1946, "Better Politics and Better Art"; and on the twenty-first, in the Daily Worker, by Sillen, "The Basis of Social Realism"; James T. Farrell in the New Republic, on May 6, '46, and May 13; the Saturday Review, in July 16, '49,... I know that it's discussed in a book by a man, David Shannon, I believe The Decline of American Communism, and discussed in Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left. Murray Kempton in Part of Our Time discusses it in a chapter called "The Day of the Locust." It is discussed in The Inquisition in Hollywood by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, and in other places. Now, do you have any questions about this?

GARDNER

Yes, I certainly do. [laughter] Well, since I read through the material yesterday, there were a number of questions. I think the first question I should offer is what your thoughts are now on the material as literary criticisms.

MALTZ

I can't tell you. And I can't tell you for a number of reasons: the first is that I actually haven't sat down to try and say, well, now, who was right and wrong on what pieces and so on; and secondly, I am not, as it were, steeped in Marxist thinking, or in an effort to do Marxist thinking, in the way I was in those years. In those years I believed in the soundness of Marxism, and I wanted very much to try and think in a dialectical manner, and I read Marxist materials. I haven't really read Marxist materials now since... well, it's twenty years. And not only that, but while I retain a belief in the classic ideals of Marxism--namely, human brotherhood, a lack of exploitation of man by man--I no longer believe that the body of Marxist literature is the sound thinking that I once thought it was. For instance, I now laugh at the phrase "scientific socialism" because in a world in which the Soviet Union opposes China, the Soviet Union versus Yugoslavia... China opposing Vietnam, etcetera, ad infinitum, and all of them claiming to be scientific Marxists, it demonstrates the absurdity of the phrase. And so I'm not prepared to assess this.

GARDNER

Okay. Well, one of the phrases I wrote down from your first article was the one that was picked up, of course, by Lawson later--where you say, "Art is a weapon only when it is art." Do you still agree with that?

MALTZ

Oh, I would agree with that, yes. Although--yes, sure, sure I would agree with that....

GARDNER

Because it seems awfully simple on its surface. It seemed to me also (and you touched on this briefly) that part of the reason for the controversy was the moment, the time, but also the fact that what aggravated it was that two of the writers that you picked were at that moment anathema to the party, namely, Farrell and Wright.

MALTZ

Yes. Well, see I was--One thing I could have done in the second article, which I didn't do and I regret this, I could have said (in the second article), now look, whatever we say about Farrell and so on, Studs Lonigan was praised by the Daily Worker and the New Masses when it appeared. The book has not been revised. If it was good then, why isn't it good now? I liked it then, I like it now. And the same about Wright. But I was so punchy, really, that even that I let go. You know, I kept fumbling the ball, as it were.

GARDNER

Yes. Howard Fast called you a liquidationist. What does that mean?

MALTZ

Well, as that term was used, it means that you, let's say, dissolve away the Marxism, or you dissolve away a Communist position or a Marxist position or a class-struggle position--that's what he meant.

GARDNER

I see. Since he later on recanted, rather vocally, his entire Marxist position, in the book The Naked God....

MALTZ

Well, that was.... See, he didn't... he, let's say, didn't recant, as the term is used; he changed his political position.

GARDNER

No, perhaps not. He changed his political position.

MALTZ

In a book that's full of lies, by the way.

GARDNER

There's a certain sense of irony in his criticisms.

MALTZ

Yes, well, of course. I mean, that book--I don't know if I'll mention it, I might mention it because of my contact with Howard in prison... I really ought to put it down to mention it, but that was such a dishonest book. In fact I think I want to remember to discuss that book, The Naked God, and also a book written by Ruth McKenney called, I think, Love Story.

GARDNER

Okay. I'll keep those in mind as well.

MALTZ

All right, yes.

GARDNER

North's article on you, as was Alvah Bessie's, as I recall, was not quite as meaty as Fast; I think Fast was perhaps, of the ones I read in New Masses--there was one comment in there that I found very interesting because at the time it seemed probably true and the last thirty years have changed that perspective, which was that over the previous fifty years, from the turn of the century, all important American writing had been left-wing in character, from Jack London to John Steinbeck. Now, you could have gotten away with a statement like that in 1946, and you certainly can't now.

MALTZ

Who said that?

GARDNER

I think it was Fast. But it may have been Bessie.

MALTZ

Well, I wonder whether that was true even in 1946 about all important American writing. For instance, immediately, Thomas Wolfe--I consider him a very important American writer. And he wasn't left-wing.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

There was the school of social criticism, let's say, that we found in Dreiser, Frank Norris, and one other man whose name I forget. But.... Did he mention only fiction or literature?

GARDNER

Well, I think his implication was--Of course, you had divided journalism and art...

MALTZ

Yes.

GARDNER

...and so the point of the article, the rebuttal article, was anyway to say that journalism can equal art...

MALTZ

Sure it can. I know that.

GARDNER

...anyway. Yes, right.

MALTZ

Of course you go into playwriting, O'Neill had some anarchist ideas, but it doesn't mean that he was a left-wing playwright. I wouldn't consider him so. And, gee, you know, when you start to think of novelists, all of a sudden you forget... you forget who were the novelists and so on.

GARDNER

Well, of course, even in 1946 I suppose that's--Well, Faulkner had been writing for twenty years...

MALTZ

Faulkner, of course Faulkner.

GARDNER

...Fitzgerald, who had.... Hemingway...

MALTZ

I wouldn't consider Hemingway a left-wing...

GARDNER

...of course Hemingway had just come off the Spanish civil war and World War II.

MALTZ

Yes, but his book was attacked by the Communist party.

GARDNER

Oh, was it?

MALTZ

Very seriously, because in it he gave a picture, which proved historically later to be absolutely true, of an absolutely crazy Communist leader who was shooting people. And that was André Marty, the French commissar in Spain, who was a nut and shot a lot of innocent people, had a lot of innocent people shot. And Hemingway saw what was happening, reproduced it, and the party attacked him.

GARDNER

So even then it didn't hold up, and that's one of the things that seemed most interesting to me is that.

MALTZ

Sinclair Lewis.

GARDNER

Sinclair Lewis, right.

MALTZ

I mean if we start to go down the line of writers, you don't think of them offhand...no, that's not true... what Fast said.

GARDNER

But your first article really did seem to be an interesting kickoff for literary discussion.

MALTZ

Yes, for discussion, but... it changed.

GARDNER

What about repercussions on that afterwards? You mentioned some of them, and you mention that the thing still pops up with Garry Wills and so forth and so on.

MALTZ

Yes, it's going to go on forever. And, I mean, I have never before given an explanation fully in this way, I did in several previous interviews. Books not yet published go into it more that I have previously, but not as fully as this. So this is the only place, really, in which my whole... just what happened is laid down. And, repercussions... well, something I've lived with. That's all. I regret it happened, but it happened, and this is why it happened.

GARDNER

Well, I think that covers my questions. Shall we adjourn for the day?

MALTZ

Yes, I think we might.

1.36. TAPE NUMBER: XV, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 21, 1978

GARDNER

Now, you mentioned just now that there were some additions you'd like to make.

MALTZ

Yes. I happen to recall that I had a binder of letters that I received on various books, and I've selected several of the letters that came in on The Cross and the Arrow because they attest to the authenticity of the book. Lion Feuchtwanger wrote: "I'm sure that it is a literary and political achievement which will last always." Erwin Piscator, who was one of the leading theatrical directors of pre-Hitler Germany and who was working in New York at the New School for Social Research, asked for the dramatic rights to the book so that he could stage it when the German theater began again. And he said, I quote, "I think it is a great and effective work." There was a letter from a man who signed himself André Simone, whom I had met in New York before I moved to California, who said: "I consider it the best novel written on Hitler Germany. The most astounding thing to me is that an American writer was able to penetrate more profoundly into the little secrets of a German isolated behind an iron wall, was able to comprehend the psychology of the little man in Nazi Germany better than any exiled German writer who tried it." Now, I want to mention about Simone that he had been very active in the antifascist movement in the years before the war. He was based in Paris and he was the chief editor of a book called, I think, The Black Book of Nazi Germany. [*The Black Book--Jewish Black Book Committee] I'm not absolutely sure about title but it was...

GARDNER

That can be checked.

MALTZ

Yes... it was a very important compilation that came out in around 1936 or '37, I believe. He also came to the United States on several fund-raising drives for antifascist work, and I have been told that he was, in part, the model for the main character in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine. I can't be absolutely sure of this. I just have heard this; I don't know that it's certainty. Now the more important thing about--or not the more important, but another aspect to André Simone was the fact that he was born in Czechoslovakia, although he apparently lived in Germany, lived and worked in Germany, and that his real name was Otto Katz. He went back to Czechoslovakia directly after the war and became editor of the leading Communist newspaper. In 1952, I believe it was, he was one of those arrested in the Slansky trial. He was tortured and he confessed to a lot of nonsense, such as saying that he was a Zionist spy and a British agent as well, and he was executed. There was a letter from two Germans, two German translators--I received letters (I'm sorry) from two German translators living in the American zone after the war was over who asked to translate the book. And I also got a letter from a German war veteran in the American zone who had been a prisoner of war in the United States, and he asked if he could translate the book. And there was a letter written in June '45 by an American lieutenant with the occupation forces saying that he was stationed in an area where everything fit the description in my novel: the camouflaged factory, Polish and Russian slave laborers on the farms, and so on. And that's all I wanted to put in. [tape recorder turned off] Now I want to continue with the history of the year 1946. On March 5 of that year a momentous event occurred: Winston Churchill, no longer in office, made a speech at Westminster College, Missouri. The college was in Truman's home state, and Truman was in attendance at the speech, and it was clear from other evidence that Churchill had had prior consultation with Truman. The essence of his speech was a portrait of the Soviet Union as a nation out to conquer the world, and that there had to be a world crusade to contain and smash world communism in the name of Anglo-Saxon democracy. That Churchill should make such a speech was quite consistent with his prior record because he had been in charge of the British invasion forces in the Soviet Union in 1918, '19 and '20. And throughout the twenties he had preached the menace of the Red Revolution. There was a temporary alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II when Britain's life was at stake, but now he had returned to the same tack again. [tape recorder turned off] I'm now quoting from a small portion of his speech that's reproduced in volume one, page 349, of Fleming's The Cold War and Its Origins. Churchill said, "Beware, I say: Time may be short. Do not let us take the course of letting events drift along until is too late." He then went on to say that nobody knew "what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the future, or what are the limits if any to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies." He then went on to say that "from Stettin to Trieste there was an iron curtain." And this was the creation of the phrase "iron curtain." This speech was the opening salvo in the cold war that followed. Debate immediately started in the United States press, and the tone toward the Soviet Union, which was our very recent ally in war, and toward American Communists, began to change in the press. Now, in saying that this was the start of the cold war I don't mean to imply any conclusions about the merits of the disputes between the United States and the Soviet Union. I'm merely recognizing that there was the pronouncement of a political stance in a way that had not occurred before, and one of such a nature that historians have dated the beginning of the cold war from that speech. In the middle of--now coming back to myself--in the middle of April 1946 I was able to start research work on the novel I was hoping to write, for which I had a title, working title, Johnny Dragoo, and, as I mentioned earlier, I believe, I wanted to do some factory work because of who the central character was.

GARDNER

What did that name mean, Johnny Dragoo?

MALTZ

Just the name of a guy, name of a man. I did about seven weeks of factory work, which was enough to get me what I needed. Jobs were easy to get at that time because a considerable number of men had not yet been demobilized from the army. My first job was too heavy for me physically although I was in good shape for someone who was essentially a sedentary worker. I could not handle with any comfort an all-day job which consisted primarily of lifting fifty-gallon oil drums which weighed about sixty pounds. I started in the morning with some other men lifting and rolling them so that we loaded an entire boxcar of a train, a freight boxcar, and by about 11:30 in the morning, when we had finished, I was out on my feet and knew that I had to seek other work. I don't know how I lasted the day. I was about three weeks in a factory where my small shop was making egg beaters, and I was putting two parts together to the ruination of a hand. I had another job soldering parts of a plumbing fixture, and the boss of the shop did an unaccountable thing. Although he knew that it was important to protect the hands of the man doing the soldering from the acid that was involved or else the acid would eat the flesh, he gave me a pair of gloves, a pair of rubber gloves that had rents in them. So, as a result, within a few days I had an open wound on one hand and had to quit. This is an incredible....

GARDNER

What were the factories?

MALTZ

The names of them?

GARDNER

Yes. Who were you working for?

MALTZ

Well, the first factory, with the oil drums, was something called the Levine Cooperage. And there they took old oil drums and they cleaned them out. And if they were dented, they blew them out and they renovated them and painted them and then resold them. A terribly noisy place. It was cacophony going all the time, out of doors. And the second one, I recall, was something called Na Mac. I don't remember the name of the soldering shop. And then I spent about three weeks in the loading and shipping division of Magnavox Victrola. Perhaps the most important thing I got out of that work was the realization in my gut and head of what job monotony means. I had not seen job monotony written about in any novel that I had read, and I intended to go into it in this novel because it is a terrible affliction for many workers. To repeat, as I did with the egg beater, the same operation about 900 times a day, and to do that every day is very difficult to sustain for some people. Now, I remember there was a middle-aged Ukrainian woman Ukrainian-born woman, working beside me with a small machine in which she repeated the same operation more than that--about 1,500 times a day. And she wasn't affected by job monotony. But many of the workers were. Now, however, these weeks of work were interrupted in a highly contrasting way by one week of film work. There was an emergency call for me from Delmer Daves, who had directed both Destination Tokyo and Pride of the Marines. He had written a film called The Red House, and he was directing it on location in Sonora, California. He found that there were some things in the script that would not work, and he was too busy with his directing to rewrite them himself. And he urgently wanted me to come up because he felt he could tell me the problem and that I could rewrite to his satisfaction and that he could depend upon me to do it within the week that he had before he had to shoot the material. My agent, without my knowing it, asked an incredible price for that week, and apparently he and the producer were so boxed in they said yes, and it was $10,000 for one week's work. So I drove up there and worked very intensively for the week and did the work. There were two other things to mention. One is that one of the stars of the film was Edward G. Robinson and he wanted to talk; so every evening after supper--I had supper with him every evening--and then after supper, before I went back to work again, we'd walk for about a half an hour. And this was very pleasant, and I mention it because there will be some sequels to it.

GARDNER

Okay.

MALTZ

Now, on the way back I stopped to pick up an old man who wanted a hitch. In those days I always picked up people on the road because it was a chance to talk with varied persons. And when this man picked up his old-fashioned Gladstone bag and began to walk toward my car, I saw that he was unable to take a step of more than a few inches at a time. This man turned out--His name was Stevenson, and I didn't know it at that time but I was to write my next novel, The Journey of Simon McKeever, about him. He told me that he was running away from an old-age home and that he wanted to get to Glendale, where there was a doctor that could cure his arthritis. We traveled together (and paused for meals) for about eight hours, as I recall, and I found him an absolutely fascinating man. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, good-looking man, born in Ireland, with a slight Irish accent, and he had so much life force and spirit and laughter about him that I was enormously taken by him. He was, by the way, eighty-three years old and had not hesitated to go out on the road hitchhiking because he wanted to get cured of his arthritis, and he expected very confidently to go back to work as soon as he was cured. He had been working, he said, until three years before. When we got to Glendale I asked him whether he had money for a motel and he didn't; so I took him to a motel and paid the night's lodging and gave him some money (I forget, not much) and said goodbye to him, and went away thinking what a marvelous man I had met. I didn't know for some months later that I would find I wanted to write about him. I then went back to those factory jobs, and at the end of May, with my family, I went to the island of Catalina, where we had rented a house and where I had hoped to work uninterruptedly for about four months. I had several projects that I had in mind to work on. One, of course, was the novel. But also I believe that it was on my way up to Sonora that I stopped overnight in Modesto, California, and there I wandered into one of the open gambling saloons they have, where I fell to talking with a young man who told me things about his life that I felt I wanted to use for a story. I had a title for it called "Evening in Modesto," I recall, and I wanted to work on that story as well. I might mention now (of course, I'll forget later) that although I never quite finished it as a story, I happened to tell it to someone I knew, whose name I no longer recall, who asked me whether I had any material he might use for a film. This was the next year, I guess. He was in some sort of an experimental project at RKO under Dore Schary, and I told him this story. Since it involved migrant workers on farms, it was something that he wanted very much to do. And so I went in and told the story to the people at RKO, and although it was unfinished, they bought it for $15,000. I was so casual about it that I never even told my agent, and she said later that I was foolish because she could have gotten a lot more money for it. I found that my work on Johnny Dragoo did not go along very well. In part I think that there were things about the material that I was having difficulty in handling. I had never done and, as a matter of fact, still have never done, a novel that handles a character's life over a good many years. All of my novels have been compressed within a short space of time.

GARDNER

Right. A dramatic situation.

MALTZ

Yes. And I suppose that this is in part my early dramatic training and the thing that I feel comfortable with. I'm not sure of all the reasons, but I know that it didn't move along well. But another reason why I think it didn't move along well was that I was still very shaken up inside over the controversy and disturbed by it, and that this affected me when I was alone at my desk. I believe that I have omitted mentioning two activities that may have started in 1945 but I know were going on in 1946. I was asked by the secretary of the Authors Guild in New York, Louise Sillcox, if I would not organize a western branch of the Authors Guild in Los Angeles. I undertook to do this, and, for me now, it is a good example of the kind of activity I should not have engaged in because it involved the writing of very long letters to Louise Sillcox and Oliver La Farge, and meetings and phone calls with people out here, and then meetings when we got together. And, actually, we got a good branch in existence, and I was made the chairman, or president, or something like that. But I don't remember what we really achieved, and I just think it was an example of my dutifully being a good citizen when I should have been giving that time to writing. But I was also, and this I know was worthwhile, a member of the executive board of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions [Committee], which was an organization out here with real clout. Harlow Shapley, the Harvard astronomer (and I understand a very great astronomer), was the chairman of it, was the national chairman. And the [committee], which had a large membership including people from all cultural and scientific areas, was, I think, on the side of the angels whenever social problems arose. All of the records of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions [Committee] are in some university library. I don't know whether it's Wisconsin or whether it's UCLA. Someone who would know, I could call up and ask, is the widow of the man who was secretary of it.

GARDNER

I suspect I would know about it if it were at UCLA.

MALTZ

The secretary of it was George Pepper (incidentally, a fine violinist who had had to give up the violin because he developed a physical problem in playing, which I understand is sort of an industrial disease of violinists). I don't know which university. Now, in September '46 I was called back and was asked by Frank Ross to make some changes in The Robe. The Robe was expected to go into production immediately, and I worked for two and a half weeks but then had to interrupt for almost three weeks because my wife had some major surgery. I then returned to The Robe for a month and was finished by mid-November. And then it didn't go into production after all because Howard Hughes took over the studio. And he disliked the project and not only wouldn't let Frank Ross make it at RKO but he wouldn't allow him to take it elsewhere. He acted as though the project was his personal enemy. And it was not until 1951 that Ross was able to get it away from RKO because Howard Hughes had left the company. [tape recorder turned off] While I was at RKO on this occasion, I saw something of Adrian Scott, whom I had known only casually and found him a most attractive man, charming, sincere, modest, and keenly intelligent. He had a fascinating project which became the film Crossfire. Now, that was based upon a novel called The Brick Foxhole, which had been written by Richard Brooks while he was still, I think, in the marine corps in World War II... or perhaps it was just after he had come out of the marine corps. It was a mystery novel in which, as I recall, it turned out that a man who had been murdered had been so because homosexuality was involved. Interestingly enough, I had been sent the book by Gadget Kazan about a year before with the request that I read it and see whether I wanted to try and turn it into a play which then Kazan would direct. And I didn't see it as anything that was of interest to me. But Adrian wanted to do it now as a film, and he had come up with something that was very fascinating. He wanted the motivation for the killing to be, not homosexuality, but anti-Semitism. And that made it really a more contemporary story from the point of view of the United States in the year 1946 since we had just come through World War II and the Holocaust. In the course either of my discussing the project with him or of my reading something that the writer on the film, John Paxton, had wrote, I made a small contribution (I said "had wrote," didn't I? For God's sake, had written. My mind was....), I made a small contribution to the film. Before I mention it, I want to say in passing that the Adrian Scott-John Paxton collaboration, which was ruined by the blacklist, was something wonderful. They had known each other in New York when they both worked on a theater magazine, and they had worked on two previous films together They were friends and fine working partners together. And Paxton, who is a very good writer, also says that he needed to work with someone and that he was not a self-starter, and that Adrian was a marvelous partner for him. But Adrian was looking for some--He was looking for either motivation or characterization, or both, for the character of the detective who discovers the reason for the murder. Now, due to my research work for the novel The Beautiful Maria, about the Know-Nothing movement that I had never written, I suggested to Adrian that if this detective, who was an Irish Catholic, had had a grandfather or grandparent who had suffered in some of the anti-Catholic riots of the 1840s or fifties or seventies, he would be more sensitive to the question of racial prejudice. Now, Adrian was born a Catholic, and of Irish background, but he didn't know anything about that history. Fascinating! It had not come down in his family. He had not happened to do any research about it, and I know that in general it was not something that came into history books. So that I was able to provide it and he leaped at that and said, "Oh, that's just wonderful," and he was able to use it. And it worked very well in the film. Now, there's a topper to this. In 1977 I was in the hospital because I had suffered some malpractice, and in order to be cured from what had happened, I was facing some major surgery. At that time I got an article written by two men at NYU who were working for their Ph.D.s in film and who had been advised by someone (whose name I forget) that I might be able to check some of the data in their article. As a matter of fact, a great deal in their article was completely erroneous, because they had the automatic concept that Crossfire was, of course, Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire since he had directed it. And they had all sorts of fanciful theories about how the script was what it was because of its connection with previous projects that Dmytryk had done. And I immediately checked with John Paxton and got a copy of the letter to him, and Paxton reinforced my memory that the script had been finished before Dmytryk ever saw it. So we both wrote our comments to these authors, I scribbling very fast the night before my surgery. And then I came upon a footnote which said that Dore Schary, in an oral history interview, had revealed that it was he who had given Adrian Scott the concept of a detective whose grandfather had run up against prejudice because he was an Irish Catholic. [laughter] Now, here is Schary (I'm going to leap ahead), whose contribution to Crossfire was basically that of not preventing it from being made, because the script was finished before he became production head of RKO and then, after Scott and Dmytryk were blacklisted, he received awards for the film. And now that Adrian is dead, he told this lie in an interview.

GARDNER

I wonder who it was done with? Probably with a film institute.

MALTZ

No, I don't think so. I don't know with whom. I didn't make a record of it.

GARDNER

I'll check and see.

MALTZ

Yes, this thing has been published now, I presume in some theater magazine. I didn't even keep their names. And I don't mind in this oral history, when we run up against things as blatantly outrageous as that, putting it down in stone. In mid-November, having finished the work on The Robe, mid-November '46, I returned to my own work. But in the months since I had picked up the man Stevenson, I'd kept thinking about him, and I felt now that I wanted to write a short story about him. And so I began it, and before I had gone too many pages, I realized that I couldn't do it, couldn't do the story that had begun to develop in my mind in a short time, and so I felt, well, I better make this a short novel. And then I decided that I wanted to know more about where he came from and the home he was running away from, and so I got in my car and started back to Sacramento, went up to Sacramento. He had told me enough for me to find the place. It was different from my novel. He had never become a citizen of the United States because when he was a young man and had emigrated to Canada, he decided to move into the United States for purposes of work, and he just walked across the bridge; nobody ever stopped him. And down the years he had taken out first citizenship papers on several occasions but following--Since he was a worker in the oil fields, he would move from field to field as work opportunities came up, and he never settled long enough in one place to really get his citizenship. Consequently, he didn't have social security, and when he got arthritis, there was no place for him to go except the county old-age home. So I went to the old-age home and found it to be, on the outside, a very nice-looking building that had been built by WPA; but inside it was pretty awful. I remember a very large room with rows of beds; I think there must have been about four long rows of beds with no space between them, with no more space between them than someone needed to walk. And perhaps there were footlockers, but I don't recall. I know that the mattresses were of straw. And the sight of old men lying there doing nothing except waiting to die was a terrible one. There was a library, small, in which there were some men who were reading, and I always remember one man with palsied hands reading Havelock Ellis's Dance of Life, which fascinated me. And I went through this room, and I guess maybe there were several more, wondering whether I might find Stevenson. I didn't. I asked for him by name and nobody knew about him. And as I was leaving the building, some man who worked in it passed, and I asked him and he said, "Oh, yes, I know him. He's in the county hospital. He went there for an operation." So I went to the county hospital, and I asked for his name and got it, and it so happened that I walked up to his bed in a ward within perhaps fifteen minutes or a half an hour after he had been brought down from surgery for a prostate operation. And he opened his eyes as I looked at him, I don't recall whether I even mentioned his name, or perhaps I did, and he said, "Oh, I know you." He said, "You're the man who picked me up on the road." And so we then talked a little bit, and, as I recall, I came back the next day and talked with him more, and then maintained a correspondence with him all through the writing of the book. And I'll tell later what happened in our relationship. I then went around in the Sacramento area investigating old-age homes because I didn't want to have my character in--I wanted to have him a more universal type, not have him a noncitizen. And so I went to various homes and told the proprietors that I had a relative who needed a place, and I wanted to see their place and find out what things were like. And, as a result, I got the information I needed about the way these homes operated. And I went home and went to work with a good deal of enthusiasm, and I worked out an outline by the end of the year. Now, I just want to sum up and say this had been a year in which I had spent only four months on film work. And I hoped to continue on that basis or do even better in the years to come.

GARDNER

Better in the sense of more fiction and less film?

MALTZ

Of more fiction and less film. My agent thought that she could now get $5,000 a week for me, which was unheard of. There wasn't anyone else getting that, and that would mean that I'd only need, say, four weeks of work a year to get along splendidly on the level at which I lived. And I would have been just as interested in just doing four weeks of rewriting a script that needed more work rather than spending more time and getting a solo credit.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

So things looked extremely rosy for my fiction work at that time.

GARDNER

Why don't we stop here since the tape is about to run out, and then we can take up on the next tape.

MALTZ

Yes.

1.37. TAPE NUMBER: XVI, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 21, 1978

MALTZ

I began to write the story of Stevenson, whose name I changed to Simon McKeever, in early January 1947, and the writing went along at a good rate. Now, I need to turn again to the political scene. In the turmoil of postwar conflicts, I personally went along with the positions taken by the Soviet Union and the Communist party. Now, on March 12, 1947, about a year or eleven months after the Fulton, Missouri, speech of Churchill, President Truman pronounced his Truman Doctrine in a speech to Congress. Professor [Denna Frans] Fleming, in volume one, page 446 of his The Cold War and Its Origins, wrote the following summation: that all revolutions everywhere in the world were forbidden by Truman. "Wherever a communist rebellion developed the United States would suppress it... The United States would become the world's anti-communist, anti-Russian policeman... The president went on to say that the... method by which this nation was born was outlawed. There would be no more revolutions thereafter, in spite of the fact that many hundreds of millions of people lived a miserable existence under the misrule of a few." This was a period in American life in which there was tremendous discussion of the atom bomb: Should we use it at once on Russia? There was sudden suspicion of the loyalty oath of all physicists, all scientists involved in the making of the bomb. Then, in the same month, Truman suddenly gave an executive order calling for the examination of the loyalty of all federal government employees, more than two million of them. And he ordered the creation of loyalty review boards who could examine the records of all federal employees, and see to it that those whose loyalty was questionable would be dismissed from government work. Now, it's interesting to reflect that it had not been necessary in wartime to check on the loyalty of all government employees, but here, by a presidential edict, it was necessary now in peacetime. Why was that so? Apparently, in part, it was a demagogic attempt on Truman's part to repair the results of the 1946 congressional election, which swung votes to the Republicans on the grounds that the Democrats were soft on communism. In a larger part, I believe that it was designed to create in the country a cold-war psychology that would support larger military budgets, military aid to selected countries abroad, the creation of the CIA, and the establishment of foreign military bases. And furthermore to create an atmosphere in which any criticism of Truman's foreign policy would be made difficult and would seem to be disloyal. Now, the result of Truman's Loyalty Oath was an immediate poisoning of the national psychology, because people said: "Who is loyal? Who is not? Is my neighbor loyal? How do I know he's loyal?" Carey McWilliams, in his book Witch Hunt--[tape recorder turned off] The practical result of this poisoning of the national psychology was that very shortly there began to be state loyalty oaths for all employees, and city loyalty oaths and loyalty oaths for faculty members of universities, and oaths in public schools, in defense industries, in trade unions, and in other sectors. It's perhaps worth pausing for a moment to quote from The American Inquisition, 1945-1960, by Cedric Belfrage [p. 130]. Scene: Reno, Nevada. The 105 employees of Brodsky's gambling saloon--dealers, B-girls, pit bosses, waitresses, janitors--are lined up before Murray Brodsky, who exhibits a loyalty-oath form. BRODSKY: All right, you guys. Either sign or get out. GIRL WHO POSES NUDE IN A CHAMPAGNE GLASS: Me too? BRODSKY: Yeah, put your John Hancock here and don't argue. [laughter] Isn't that something?

GARDNER

They all had Communists in a champagne glass.

MALTZ

Another by-product of Truman's loyalty order was the attorney general's list of "subversive" organizations. This list was compiled by J. Edgar Hoover's boys and presented to the public by Attorney General Clark. It was a list of seventy-eight organizations that were allegedly subversive, and the list was later extended to several hundred [organizations]. Past membership in one of these organizations, or support of it in any way, was instant evidence of disloyalty. All government employees had to swear that they never had supported these organizations in any way. If they had supported them they were fired. And if they lied, they would be prosecuted for perjury. So, for instance, the term came, of "premature antifascist." That is to say, if you had attended a rally of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, or given a dollar to someone who did, and you had done so before the United States was in World War II, then you were a premature antifascist, and disloyal. This list was utterly arbitrary. There were no meaningful standards. There was no opportunity for organizations to defend themselves against the charge of subversion. And this list then became used by states, cities, private industries, and so on in the testing of the loyalty of citizens.

GARDNER

It still is used.

MALTZ

It still is used?

GARDNER

In certain obscure cases.

MALTZ

Well, it's illegal now, I believe.

GARDNER

Well, loyalty oaths on a statewide level are illegal, I believe, but for certain government organizations that list is still presented.

MALTZ

Really? I didn't know that. Now, another result of the loyalty oath was that informers were asked by the federal government to come forward and promised that their identity would never be revealed. There was one earlier period in American history, from 1798 to 1800, when a similar atmosphere prevailed. Under John Adams, the Alien and Sedition Laws were passed, and I quote from Claude Bowers's Jefferson and Hamilton, which is subtitled The Struggle for Democracy in America. He says [p. 376], "The purpose of the Sedition bill was to crush the opposition press and silence criticism of the ruling powers." In the debate on these bills in the House of Representatives, Edward Livingston, a follower of Jefferson said this [p. 378]: "The country will swarm with informers, spies, delators, and all the odious reptile tribe that breed in the sunshine of despotic power." And he was describing the United States in the years that followed Truman's loyalty oath. It is for this reason that it is completely inaccurate to refer to the McCarthy era. McCarthy certainly took center stage in the fifties, for a period of the fifties, but, properly speaking, these must be called the Truman-McCarthy years, because it was Truman's loyalty oath that created the atmosphere in which McCarthy could flourish. There is, however, an interesting contradiction about Truman. It appears that, to some extent, he was utterly blind about the havoc he was causing in the country, because at one point he said that the House Un-American Activities Committee is the most un-American thing in the country today. And in the film that was made about him, called Give 'Em Hell, Harry, he made a magnificent speech in Boston against McCarthy. And one can only assume that he did not connect the role of the committee or of McCarthy with the atmosphere that he himself had created. I don't think that he was a hypocrite, but in this area he was certainly less than intelligent.

GARDNER

Do you have any idea as to what the forces were that led him to...?

MALTZ

Well, I think they were the things I mentioned at the beginning: one, the fact that the Democrats had lost seats in the 1946 congressional election, with the Republicans charging that they were soft on communism. So he wanted to show that they weren't soft on communism, and the loyalty oath was that. I think he didn't foresee the consequences. And then there was the fact that he didn't want any criticism of his foreign policy. Remember, at that time Henry Wallace (I'm going to come to Henry Wallace), who had been first secretary of agriculture under Roosevelt, then vice-president under Roosevelt, then, I think, secretary of the interior under Roosevelt until his death, and then under Truman, broke with Truman on foreign policy, and was going around the country making speeches attacking Truman's foreign policy. And Truman wanted to shut him up, as he wanted to shut up others who were following Wallace.

GARDNER

And succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

MALTZ

Oh boy, yes! Now, I'd like to mention a few books as reference on this which come purely from my own library. There are, of course, many more. One is the best compilation of what actually happened from 1945 to 1960 in the United States, and that's Cedric Belfrage's The American Inquisition, published by Bobbs, Merrill in '73; Grand Inquest by Telford Taylor, Simon and Schuster, 1955. Telford Taylor had been chief prosecutor at the War Crimes Trial in Nuremberg and is at present on the faculty of Columbia University Law School. And Witch Hunt, by Carey McWilliams, 1950, Little, Brown and Company. [tape recorder turned off] I mentioned there had been a great debate about the atomic weapon after Churchill's Fulton, Missouri, speech. But, as time passed, that changed, the debate passed, and there was a tremendous campaign in the press and radio that grew and grew about the Russian menace and its fifth column of Reds inside the country. And any position left of center began to be called Red. Henry Wallace, whom I've just referred to, was called a Red, and he had eggs and rotten vegetables thrown at him at various times when he spoke. And at one time, somewhat later, the New York Times, which did not print his speeches, even refused to accept paid advertisements that would have carried the text of his speeches. This in a newspaper that says "All the News That's Fit to Print."

GARDNER

Right. The newspaper of record.

MALTZ

Cedric Belfrage, whose work I've just referred to, gives some illustrations of the atmosphere of the period [p. 56]. When the House Committee on Un-American Activities wanted to increase its budget for 1946, [John] Rankin, at that time the head of the committee, and a man who referred openly in Congress to "niggers and kikes," reminded the Congress "of the Russian custom of indiscriminate rape," and he was given a budget of $125,000. "[Rankin] had clarified HUAC ideology by recalling that 'after all, the Ku Klux Klan is an American institution; our job is to investigate foreign isms and alien organizations.' Courteous questioning of anti-Semite Gerald Smith added such show-business names as Orson Welles, Ingrid Bergman, Eddie Cantor, and Frank Sinatra to the list of citizens who would need to clear their skirts." In the atmosphere created by Truman, the House Committee on Un-American Activities began to conduct investigations at a rate it never had before. "By the fall of 1946 HUAC had fed into the contempt mill George Marshall of the Civil Rights Congress, the Rev. Richard Morford of NCASF [National Committee for American and Soviet Friendship], and nine leaders of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (relief for Spanish Republican survivors) including novelist Howard Fast and Edward Barsky, a New York surgeon...." They had declined to give the names of contributors to their funds for Spanish relief and declined to give the names of those to whom funds were sent, since they knew that the names of people to whom they sent funds would be turned over to the Franco government, and the names of people who contributed would cause them to be brought before the Committee. So, they ended up with three- and six-month jail terms. And in December '46 Harlow Shapley, chairman of the ASP--Art, Sciences, and Professions [Committee]--was called before HUAC, and he called Rankin a fascist. This was only one of thousands of incidents in a scene that was flaming higher and higher every day. For those who didn't live through the period, Belfrage is indispensable reading if they want a picture of what occurred at that time. One of the things that also happened was that several dozen liberal commentators on radio, news commentators, were dropped from their jobs, and one of them was William Shirer, later to be author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The various events that I've been touching upon led to a mobilization against them in the summer of 1947, in Los Angeles. The Arts, Sciences, and Professions [Committee] organized a Conference on Thought Control in the United States, which lasted for three days at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It's revealing to bear in mind that the Truman executive order for a loyalty oath had occurred in March of that year, and so quickly had changes occurred in the United States, that already by July the alarms were being sounded. [tape recorder turned off] The various papers that were given at this conference dealt with the legal aspects of thought control and what was occurring in the press, radio, literature, music, the arts and architecture, medicine, science and education, film, and with actors. The proceedings were printed by the Arts, Sciences, and Professions [Committee] of the Progressive Citizens of America, and the copyright is by the Progressive Citizens of America. This was not published by a regular publisher, so I hope that it is to be found in the library, because it is a remarkable picture of what was going on at that time in the United States. The opening session was chaired by Howard Koch, a very distinguished screenwriter, and the speakers were John Cromwell, a director, John Howard Lawson, Bernard Smith, who was a film story editor and had been chief editor of Knopf publishing house, and Norman Corwin. And I would like to read a bit from the comments from the paper of Norman Corwin: Overnight, at the drop of an issue, you can become a Red, although you may not know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx. Opposition to the Truman Doctrine became prima facie evidence of Communist leanings, if not connections. Objection to the disloyalty bill on any ground, legal, moral or political, became prima facie evidence of disloyalty itself. If you fight for lower rents, higher wages, better working conditions; if you are against silicosis in the mines or fraudulent advertising; if you are for health insurance and protection of the rights of the foreign-born; if you favor consumer cooperatives and fair employment practices; if you are for equality of opportunity and education; if you are against Jim Crowism and the poll tax; if you are for foreign cultural exchange; if you stand for one world or any of the doctrines tributary to it; if you believe literally what is said in the great documents of freedom upon which the United States and the United Nations are established, then you are suspect of participation in a colossal international Communist front. That's an excellent summation. I spoke in the panel on literature, and the title of my piece was "The Writer as the Conscience of the People." [tape recorder turned off] The conference ended with the following statement by the participants: The law may be utilized either as an instrument of thought control, or as the guardian of the freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion through which the democratic process functions. We ask you to take a clear stand, Mr. President, affirming the full power of the law for the protection of the people of our country, and not as an instrument of economic intimidation and political power. We ask you specifically to take the following steps: one, to abolish the discriminatory and un-American loyalty tests; two, to instruct the Attorney General of the United States to dismiss the charges against all those who are today being prosecuted for alleged contempt of the Thomas-Rankin committee; three, to join your illustrious predecessor in emphatic rejection of the Thomas-Rankin committee's illegal methods and objectives; four, to speak out against those who are denying meeting places and freedom of the press and the air to the people. I believe the denial of meeting places would refer, certainly, to Paul Robeson, who had not been allowed to sing in various towns and cities in the United States. And I don't know whether it also applied to Henry Wallace, but it certainly would apply to different organizations in various communities. We come now to the investigation of the film industry by the House committee. This committee had made prior efforts to investigate the film industry. There is a book that will be published next year by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, by Doubleday (which as yet has no title [*The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960.]), which gives the specific history of these various attempts. The most important fact about this history is that, when the right-wing senators Wheeler and Nye made moves for an investigation of the film industry in 1941, the motion picture company executives got together in a united front to prevent it. They hired Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for president in the 1940 election, as their counsel. And the investigation bill never went through. In the spring and summer of 1947, the committee, with its new chairman, Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, came out for secret hearings in an executive session. I might mention that the background of Parnell Thomas was that of a stockbroker. Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer and others were known to have testified, and some things about their testimony were leaked when the committee wanted to, but their testimonies as a whole were not revealed. I note, in a scrapbook that I have of the events of that time, that I didn't cut any clippings of this executive session. And what it means to me now is that apparently I was not concerned at that time. I didn't find it to be any threat, let's say, to the community I lived in or myself personally.

GARDNER

But you must have known that, given the circumstances of a loyalty oath and so on, and given your own affiliations, that if they did come knocking, yours would be one of the first doors that they would knock upon.

MALTZ

Well, apparently I was not thinking of it, because I remember that when I got the subpoena I was surprised. This is the point at which to mention the role of an organization called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. It had been created in 1944 to combat "a growing impression that this industry is made up of and dominated by Communists, radicals, and crackpots." It was a militant anti-Communist, pro-free enterprise group. The committee was led by Rupert Hughes, a screenwriter who had also written a biography of George Washington, by Adolphe Menjou, John Wayne, Ward Bond, and other actors; by Sam Wood, a director; writers Ayn Rand, Fred Niblo, Jr., and Morrie Ryskind; and James K. McGuinness, who may have been a writer or an executive, I'm not sure; and by Roy Brewer, who was an important addition from the trade union movement, since he was head of the IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees]. And the alliance asked the House Committee to investigate the motion picture industry. Now, I guess I haven't mentioned that I was again spending the summer on the island of Catalina, where I was working on my McKeever novel, and I interrupted only to write this speech for the Conference on Thought Control. The elementary question of why the House Committee chose to investigate Hollywood before it investigated universities and trade unions and so on, was that it was purely for publicity reasons. Hollywood made copy in a big way, and people paid attention to it. I received my subpoena on September 17, calling for my appearance in Washington about a month later. I no longer recall whether I was summoned to be in Washington at the time the hearings opened, which was a week before I myself testified, or whether I went there of my own volition with the other men earlier, or whether I was summoned for the day I testified. I've garbled this, but I think you can make it out. [laughter]

GARDNER

Right. We can clarify it later.

MALTZ

Yes. I see a note in the diary that I kept at that time, which was "Got a subpoena from the Rankin-Thomas committee, and had a momentary shock." But the next day, I recorded that I was very tense over it, so it seems as though I had received it without really anticipating it. Now, this was the last of my entries in the diary for not only that year but forever, except for two days in 1948 that I'll refer to later on. Quite clearly, I became too busy with what followed after the subpoena to continue with my four-line daily notes in my diary. Even four lines were too much. [tape recorder turned off] I was saying that at the time I received the subpoena I was working on Simon McKeever, and I suddenly realized that there's some contradiction in my records as to whether or not I started McKeever in January of '47, which I said earlier, or whether I didn't start it until August, because some other record says that when I got the subpoena, I'd been writing McKeever for one month, and that I had eighty pages in hand, and that it was going fine. Now I think I can solve the discrepancy. I think what happened was that in January I began to plan the book, after I had gone up to Sacramento, and that it took me, probably, with the other things I had to do, five, six months to do all the planning, and then I began to write. And I think that's definite from my records that by September 17 I had eighty pages and I had been writing for one month. But from September 22, I see from my records, five days after I got my subpoena, until the week of January 11, '48, I couldn't write anything on the novel. I only remember some of the activities that took up my time for those fourteen weeks, but they were all connected with the fight of the committee. Here I have some of the activities that I do remember. Some forty-one or forty-three subpoenas were given out in the course of several days by federal marshals, and the committee shortly made clear what we were ascertaining, by questioning people, that the subpoenas went to opposing groups: to left-wingers who were going to be under attack by the committee, and to right-wingers who were going to support it and who were called "friends" by the committee itself. The fact that the committee called them "friends" led us, who were presently to be known as the "Unfriendly Nineteen," to create that word for ourselves. We placed an advertisement in the trade papers announcing that we were indeed not friends of this committee, and we signed ourselves the Unfriendly Nineteen. At that time it seemed like an excellent idea, but it proved to be a most unfortunate mistake, because the name unfriendly was used for us years afterward, and still is referred to today, out of context of the reason why we had used it. And, consequently, it seems to be a description of nineteen hostile--

GARDNER

Unfriendly people.

MALTZ

--unfriendly, disagreeable people.

GARDNER

The nineteen referred to the ones who were originally subpoenaed?

MALTZ

Yes. Now I'm going to name them and talk about them. There were thirteen writers: Alvah Bessie, Bertolt Brecht, Lester Cole, Richard Collins, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Samuel Ornitz, Robert Rossen, Waldo Salt, Dalton Trumbo, myself. There were four directors: Herbert Biberman, Edward Dmytryk, Lewis Milestone, Irving Pichel. There was one producer, Adrian Scott, and one actor, Larry Parks. I think I'll mention now that, of the nineteen, there were four who were not members of the Communist party, and the rest were. And since, in an article in the L.A. Times by Richard Shere, there was an erroneous mention of the number of Jews who were members of the Hollywood Ten, an error that I sent him a letter about, but neither he nor the Times would publish. I think I want to mention that the nineteen divided into nine Christian, nine Jews, and one of mixed parentage. Two points: Bertolt Brecht never functioned with the group that kept being called the Unfriendly Nineteen, or the Nineteen, because he was a noncitizen. While he had received a subpoena, he couldn't act in a political way. And I also mentioned that once the Nineteen got together, I swept under the rug my resentment of the ill-treatment I had received from Rossen and Milestone in the film deal for The Cross and the Arrow. Our activities, as a group of Nineteen, were as follows: first, there was a campaign to get the motion picture executives, and as many people in the film industry as possible, to oppose the investigation. In line with this, I want to read a portion of an advertisement that we put into the trade papers. I have no memory of writing this, but from the style, I think I must have participated in it. This was an open letter to the motion picture industry on the issue of "Freedom of the Screen from Political Intimidation and Censorship," and it was signed by all of the nineteen. In it, we said: Let us quote Rankin directly from the Congressional Record, July 19, 1945, "But I want to say to the gentlemen from California that these appeals"--(let me explain, the appeals meant appeals to investigate Hollywood) --"are coming to us from the best people in California. Some of the best producers in California are very much disturbed because they're having to take responsibility for some of the loathesome, filthy, insinuating, un-American undercurrents that are running through various pictures sent throughout the country to be shown to the children of this nation." Which films? we ask. Margie? Pride of the Marines? The Best Years of Our Lives? Let us be clear. The issue is not the historically phony one of the subversion of the screen by Communists, but whether the screen will remain free. The issue is not the "radicalism" of nineteen writers, directors, and actors, who are to be singled out, if possible, as fall guys. They don't count. No one of them has ever been in control of the films produced in Hollywood. The goal is control of the industry through intimidation of the executive heads of the industry and through further legislation. The goal is a lifeless and reactionary screen that will be artistically, culturally, and financially bankrupt. In 1941 Willkie said, "The industry is prepared to resist such pressure with all of the strength at its command." What will the industry say in October 1947 to Rankin and Thomas? Who will decide what stories are to be bought, what artists hired, what films released? Who will hold the veto? Who will be in control? Who? I want to comment, thirty years later, that I think just about everything that we said was at issue proves to have been correct, excepting one very, very important thing: that the goal of the committee would be a screen that would be financially bankrupt. Because, first of all, it was not the goal of the committee to bankrupt the film industry, and indeed the film industry continued to make profits after the blacklist came into existence, so that we were dead wrong on that point. But I suppose it can be forgiven because we were trying to persuade the producers that the thing most important to them, their pocketbooks, might be hurt.

GARDNER

That's right. Did that run in the dailies? in the Daily Variety, Hollywood Reporter?

MALTZ

The Daily Variety. Did I give the date?

GARDNER

I don't think that--

MALTZ

Would you like the date? I think I ought to. Yes, it was in Variety and in the Reporter. And this was on October 16, 1947.

GARDNER

Right before the hearing.

MALTZ

Yes.

1.38. TAPE NUMBER: XVI, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 29, 1978

GARDNER

Now, as you mentioned, we somehow overlooked Naked City--

MALTZ

Yes.

GARDNER

--chronologically.

MALTZ

In the spring, in March 1947, when I was at work planning the Simon McKeever novel, I got the opportunity for the kind of film job that, at that time, I really preferred over others--namely, a job of revising an unsatisfactory screenplay with good material. This was the film Naked City, which came from some original research done by Malvin Wald in collaboration with the producer Mark Hellinger. Hellinger told me that the idea for the film had been his, based upon a celebrated murder case in New York when he was a newspaperman there. Wald now says that the idea was his, based upon some general research he did in the police department files. I myself don't know what the truth is. However, Wald had very interesting materials for the film, but it was not a good screenplay, and Hellinger asked me if I wanted to go to work on it. I was happy to do so, and I did a complete revision, making real changes in characterization and aspects of the plot line and in scenes, and worked on it for a little over a month--about five weeks. A few days later in September, when Jule Dassin was brought onto the film to direct it, Dassin, Hellinger, and I did some cutting together. It was a very pleasing job, and I think I was paid about $15,000 for doing it. And I didn't know at the time I was writing it that Mark Hellinger was going to give me 5 percent of his end of the profits from the film. This turned out after I was blacklisted to be very useful indeed. I'll now come back--

GARDNER

Let me ask you a question or two about Naked City

MALTZ

Yes.

GARDNER

Had you known Hellinger from the New York theater?

MALTZ

Oh, no, I had not known him from the New York theater.

GARDNER

Because he really is best known for that sort of production, isn't he?

MALTZ

No, he is not. No. You are thinking of this because a theater in New York is called the Mark Hellinger Theatre, but that was just a kind of tribute to him as a man. In New York, I don't believe he ever did any theater.

GARDNER

Oh, really?

MALTZ

He was a newspaperman, and he was a columnist, and a very celebrated and popular columnist. In fact, he continued to write a column through the period of Naked City, I haven't really said anything about Hellinger. I had met him, just to be introduced, at Warner Brothers. When Pride of the Marines came out, he had liked the film so much that he personally took out a full-page ad in Variety to speak about it, and to speak about my screenplay. And so he obviously liked my work, and that was why he had come calling when he wanted a revision of Naked City. And that was a very happy experience with him, he was a very friendly man, very intelligent, and my relationship with him, brief as it was, was most cordial. I'm going to mention him later on again. I haven't mentioned anything about Jules Dassin. I called him Jule, which was his American name. He became Jules after many years in France. But we were old friends, and it's interesting to note that he began his theater career acting in Yiddish in a communist theater in New York, Artef, and he is not French-born as many people assume.

GARDNER

Because of the in ending of his name. It looks so French.

MALTZ

Yes, it looks so French. Especially changing Jule to Jules. And he's a man of high talent, whom I've always liked and enjoyed as a friend. Now, we come back to the hearings. And I left off at the point where subpoenas had been given out by federal marshals. Those who were opposed to the committee who received subpoenas were the following nineteen people: Alvah Bessie, Bertolt Brecht, Lester Cole, Richard Collins, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Samuel Ornitz, Robert Rossen, Waldo Salt, Dalton Trumbo, and myself. Now, this divided up into four directors--Biberman, Dmytryk, Milestone and Pichel--one producer, [Adrian] Scott, one actor, [Larry] Parks, and the rest of us were writers. Since there has been mention made of the number of those who were Christian and those who were Jews, I will say that they divided nine and nine, with one who was of mixed parentage. And of this number, there were four who were not members of the Communist party. When we came together, I swept under the rug my resentment of Rawson and Milestone for the way they had dealt with me on The Cross and the Arrow. We came to be known as the Unfriendly Nineteen, and the Ten began to be called the Unfriendly Ten, and in some instances still are, because of a tactic that we ourselves employed early in the game. The committee had announced that there were going to be witnesses friendly to it who would appear, and so we at one point had an advertisement in the trade papers, in which we announced with pride that we, indeed, were not friendly to the committee, and didn't intend to cooperate with it, and we signed ourselves "the Unfriendly Nineteen." That turned out to be quite a misfortune, because the name stuck, but without the context behind it, and so it carried, down the years, the aura of a group of men who were unfriendly personalities. Oh, I already have done this, that's right. You know, I've done this, and I had a note--

GARDNER

Well, that's okay. We'll just go on from there.

MALTZ

It's repetitive. I see where we stopped, and I made a note for it, and so on. Well, there were a series of intensive meetings among the Nineteen (and just say in parentheses that Bertolt Brecht never met with us, because he was a noncitizen). These meetings were to find out how we felt about the investigation and to decide on policy, because we were not all known to one another. Of the nineteen, for instance, I had never met Pichel and Parks, and the only ones I had had much contact with were Bessie, Cole, Lawson, Ornitz, and Biberman--no, and Adrian, Adrian Scott--but not much with the others. It became clear that all of the nineteen were opposed to the committee, and this is the point at which to pause briefly to give a small bit of the history of the committee. The House Committee on Un-American Activities had been created in 1938 by Congress to investigate any activity deemed to be un-American. Actually, the committee was an expression of the power of the right-wing forces in the United States at that time, even though under the [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt administration. Now, there are law enforcement agencies to prosecute people who commit crimes--local police, state police, the FBI, and so on. But this committee did not investigate crimes, and it didn't accuse people of crimes: it investigated the political ideas and activities of law-abiding citizens. It investigated the newspapers they subscribed to and the books they read. In short, it investigated the area that the Constitution forbids Congress to enter. The First Amendment of the Constitution doesn't say what citizens may or may not do. It says what Congress may not do: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." To our minds, then, this committee, by the very act that had created it, was unconstitutional. Now, the actual, practical job of the committee had been from the beginning to fight the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. And, in addition, to express and give a forum to all that was reactionary in the United States. Following Congressman [Martin] Dies, its first chairman, the chairman for many years was John Rankin of Mississippi, who was a vile example of all that was worst in American life. He was the man who referred openly in Congress to "niggers" and "kikes," and called the Ku Klux Klan an acceptable American institution. The committee opposed a fair employment practices act. It was against emergency housing for veterans of World War II. It was openly against the New Deal. Moreover, the function of committees of Congress is to propose legislation. This is why they have investigations, and I believe that this is a very sensible procedure from the point of view of a working democracy. Committees hold hearings and investigations in order to gather facts, and upon the basis of the facts they have gathered, they propose legislation. However, in the first ten years of its existence--that is to say, from the time of its creations until the time that we were called to the stand--the legislative record of this committee was that one bill had been passed by Congress, and that was immediately declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. So, one had a right to ask, "What legislative purpose was it serving?" From 1947 on, its practical purpose was to promote thought control in the United States, to eliminate from public life every individual whose political ideas and activities the members of the committee did not like, and, if possible, to deprive them of work. Dissent, which is the beating heart of a democracy, was to be ended. And there was general agreement amongst the Nineteen that this committee was a cancer in the American body politic. The nineteen men were also agreed that the purpose of this investigation was for the committee to exert control over the film industry, and they agreed to oppose this and to carry out a public campaign against it.

GARDNER

Let me break in and ask a question. I have a couple of questions here. First of all, how were you nineteen selected from all the possible persons who might have been? Do you have any idea?

MALTZ

Yes, I think so. First, it's clear that they went after men who were--some of them who were most successful as screenwriters, but also very active organizationally, and were Communists. If they had chosen, let's say--instead of Trumbo, Lawson, Lardner, and myself--four unsuccessful writers, it wouldn't have had the same impact. Then, they chose men who had been very active organizationally in the community. Now, Herbert Biberman, for instance, who had done very well in the theater, didn't do well in film, and possibly the main reason why he didn't do well was that he spent so much time on political matters, such as the Anti-Nazi League. He neglected his film career. And Samuel Ornitz had never been a distinguished screenwriter, and by the time the case came along, he was unemployable. But he had been very active in the Anti-Nazi League and in various organizations. And they had in mind the dossiers that they were going to read out after each man came to the stand. I think that covers a good many of the men. On the other hand, they chose someone like Larry Parks because he was a new star; I think the reason was that he was a new star. He was not an entrenched star who would be harder to knock over. They went after John Garfield later when they did their hearings in 1951 and '52, because then their power was greater. But to have gone after John Garfield in 1947 was a less comfortable thing for them than going after someone whose name was known, but who was not as entrenched as a star. And I think that this about explains it. They also brought in a number of nonparty members because they had been organizationally--for instance, Howard Koch--active and had followed policies that were inimical to the committee, and the committee wanted to knock off such people also. And I guess that's the best answer I can give you.

GARDNER

At the time that the Nineteen first started getting together, had there been a decision made as to legal counsel?

MALTZ

No. No, I'm going to go on to that.

GARDNER

Okay. Fine. I just wondered if--

MALTZ

No, no, no. Now, this policy decision on the part of the Nineteen to oppose the committee led to some very practical decisions. There would be a need for a central office for research work to be done about the committee. There would be need for funds to pay for public advertisements. And, very important, attorneys would have to be found. In order to get the money to pay for all of these, there was a mutual decision to assess ourselves chunks of money that we would throw into a kitty. Now, several of the members of the Nineteen had been employed for some time. Several were very wealthy, or should have been if they hadn't been careless with high sums earned over many years. And others were working. So assessment suggestions were made by a small committee that went from zero to $5,000. And a sum that I seem to recall was about $60,000 was raised from the Nineteen. Money would also have to be needed to pay for costs of travel to Washington and remaining in Washington, despite the fact that the committee paid travel fare and a small per diem. At that time, we made no appeal for funds to anyone else. On the legal question, the members of the Communist party had to meet privately, because their legal position was different from those who were not in the party. They, for instance, could not deny party membership without opening themselves to perjury, nor could they state freely that they were party members, which some of them wanted to do, because, as we quickly learned--I'm perhaps anticipating the discussions with the lawyers, but I'll state it now--if you went before this committee and stated, "Yes, I am a member of the Communist party," then you had legally opened the door for the committee to say, "Very good, now give us the names of others you know in the party." If you refused to give the names, then you would be held in contempt, and the law would be upheld, that you were indeed in contempt because you had answered one question on the part of the committee. And so what would you have gained by saying, "Yes, I am a member of the Communist party." These were the problems that we confronted. We agreed first on two lawyers, neither of whom I personally knew. One was Ben Margolis, who had come down around the year 1942 or so, I guess, from San Francisco, and the very first job he had had was writing the successful appeal brief for the zoot suit--

GARDNER

The Sleepy Lagoon--

MALTZ

--for the Sleepy Lagoon defendants. And on the basis of his brief, the conviction against them was reversed by the supreme court of California, and they were set free. And Margolis had been involved in various civil liberty cases since. The second, who was also a man deeply concerned with civil liberties matters, was Charles Katz, who was the personal lawyer of a number of the men. There were very lengthy discussions of the legal position that we might take, and the final decision we came to is best set forth in three letters that I want to include in the record. Two of them are a reply to an inquiry from me of Margolis and Katz, which I made in 1973, and the third is a reply by Margolis to an inquiry by Ring Lardner in 1977. [*See supporting documents.] Now, do I just give you the letters, or do you want me to read them--

GARDNER

How long are they?

MALTZ

Well, you take a look at them. [tape recorder turned off] Margolis and Katz recommended that--Oh, let me say that some of the Communist members of the Nineteen conveyed to the non-Communist members the general position, then, that we intended to take, and, I'm sure, recommended that they take the same. But I don't know what they might have taken if brought to the stand, but I do know that in one instance, at least, it was the intention of Koch--because he later said this in a public advertisement--to state on the stand that he was not a member of the Communist party, but he didn't believe that the committee had the right to ask these questions. And this brings me to a very important distinction that must be made. It would legally have been a violation of the law, I think--maybe conspiracy--if all of us had agreed as to what we would say on the stand. And we didn't do that, because our lawyers advised us about this. [tape recorder turned off] I didn't know, for instance, what Lawson was going to say when he got up as the first member of the Ten. I only knew he was going to oppose the committee as I would, and that he had been advised of the same legal pitfalls that I had. So that distinction was made. Margolis and Katz recommended that we ask Robert Kenny to join as chief counsel. Kenny, whom they knew, and I personally didn't, was former attorney general of California and was a man of lovely wit and great erudition. And the Nineteen went along with this suggestion. The attorneys talked with him, and he was in accord with the positions that we intended to take. He was very strong on civil liberties. Then Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk decided by themselves to get a more conservative lawyer who would represent them, and they asked Bartley Crum of San Francisco to be their attorney. Bartley Crum was a corporation lawyer who had represented the shipping companies in negotiations with the longshoremen. He had also been on a presidential committee on Palestine that issued a very important report. Kenny, Margolis, and Katz welcomed Crum as an associate, and, apparently, he was in agreement as to the positions that were going to be taken, and advised Dmytryk and Scott similarly. I might mention here that the lawyers received some modest fees from us for their work until the time we were blacklisted; and thereafter until the time we went to jail, and even after that, they worked for no fees whatsoever. The research group that we created had on it a number of people. I remember two only: one was my old and dear friend, Philip Stevenson, who dropped his personal work to do research, and another was Andreas Deinum, a young man of Dutch birth, with whom I was very friendly, and who is now, I believe, on the faculty of the University of Oregon. They turned up some marvelous materials which we were able to use in public meetings and for statements, and so on. During this period, independent of anything the Nineteen did, the Committee for the First Amendment came into being. This committee was initially created by John Huston, William Wyler, Philip Dunne, and Alexander Knox--Dunne, a writer, and Knox an actor. The committee did not intend to support the Nineteen, but it did want to protest the investigation because it felt as we did about its purpose. In early October, it issued a public statement of which this is an excerpt: We, the undersigned, as American citizens who believe in constitutional democratic government, are disgusted and outraged by the continuing attempt of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to smear the motion picture industry. We hold that these hearings are morally wrong, because any investigation into the political beliefs of the individual is contrary to the basic principles of our democracy. Any attempt to curb freedom of expression and to set arbitrary standards of "Americanism" is in itself disloyalty to both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution... Even at the risk of being called Reds by those who deliberately refuse to make important distinctions, our chief concern is still to protect and defend the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. [tape recorder turned off] By October, this committee had a membership of 500 prominent individuals, including many screen stars. It did much private talking to producers and executives, trying to get them to take a stand against the committee. The Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild had issued similar statements attacking the committee, and in New York a Stop Censorship Committee was formed, which attacked the hearings. In the L.A. press, however, there was already a procommittee, anti-Red campaign going on in the Hearst press, which at that time was a very strong nationwide chain. And also, on the part of the Hollywood Reporter, a trade paper, and on /the part of columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who were purveyors of gossip who were read nationally. The Progressive Citizens of America staged a testimonial rally at the Shrine Auditorium on October 15, very shortly before we left for Washington. I believe the Shrine seats about 5,000 people.

GARDNER

Some 5,000 or 6,000.

MALTZ

All of the Nineteen except Brecht were present. I think we sat on the stage, but I don't remember, and not all of us spoke, and I find that I don't remember whether I did. Of course, we made good use of the research material there in exposing the history of the committee, and in discussing our general opposition to it. The hearings were scheduled to open in Washington on October 20. We left on the sixteenth, yes, and arrived in Chicago, and that night we spoke to a meeting of about a thousand people in a hotel. We came to Washington the next afternoon, and that evening, or the one after, appeared in another public meeting before an audience that was only several hundred, because Washington was, after all, a company town. We stayed at the Shoreham Hotel, which was one of the best and most expensive hotels in Washington. A certain number of the wives of the Nineteen had come along, and their costs were assumed by the individuals. My wife was one of them. And as I recall, we were all quartered on one of two floors, and one of the rooms was a large suite where we could meet with our attorneys. The number of our attorneys was increased by two in Washington: Martin Popper, who was secretary, I think, of the Lawyers Guild, or president, and by a constitutional lawyer, Sam Rosenwein. Bertolt Brecht was there, but he didn't come to our meetings. At some point I did meet him after the many years since the Theatre Union. I shook hands and said hello, politely, as he did to me, but I had no more to do with him. I was still angry at him for the Theatre Union.

GARDNER

Was there any reason that he didn't participate with the others? Was it the language barrier?

MALTZ

No, it was that he was not a citizen.

GARDNER

It was his noncitizenship.

MALTZ

He was not a citizen, and he was going to take a stand that was all his own. And this was legally right. He was not going to be mixed up with us, on the advice of attorneys. And I might mention that several days after arrival, my wife and I left the Shoreham, because we wanted more quiet and privacy after the day was over than we could get at the Shoreham, where everybody was always knocking on everyone else's door to discuss the events of the day. Just before the hearings opened, a most bizarre meeting occurred in our central room. We were told by our attorneys that the chief counsel of the CIO, Lee Pressman, a man whom we knew well by reputation, because his name had been in the newspapers a great many times, wanted to talk with us. We assumed that he wanted to meet to give us some advice and support, and so on. Instead we found ourselves listening to a man who was in a state close to hysteria. The central thing he had to say was that although we were taking a fine stand, that was not enough; that unless we literally destroyed the committee in this hearing, we would fail our obligation to the American people. We looked at one another in great dismay. How the hell could we destroy the committee in this hearing? And he was a husky, good-looking man, I guess in his forties, and his quite evident hysteria was most disquieting and was a presage of what he was going to do within another two years. I will mention him later, because I met him again in Washington. On Sunday night, October 19, with the hearing scheduled to begin the next day, there was a most important meeting between our attorneys and representatives of the film studios. By this time, the committee had leaked to the press the fact that it was going to ask for the blacklisting of noncooperative witnesses in their work in the film industry, and so this meeting involved that fact. For the studios, there were Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Maurice Benjamin, an attorney, and Paul McNutt, another attorney, who had been high commissioner of the Philippines. The producers' representatives--I am now reading from Gordon Kahn's book, The Hollywood Ten [Hollywood on Trial], page 5: The producers' representatives were shown copies of the memorandum filed by the attorneys for the Nineteen, in which the authority of the Un-American Activities Committee to issue subpoenas was challenged. "We are maintaining," said Kenny, "that the Thomas committee aims at censorship of the screen by intimidation. I'll explain that, by this time, the chairman of the committee was [J.] Parnell Thomas. This accusation is not merely rumor. There is ample reason for this in the public statements of its chairman. Mr. Johnston replied, "We share your feelings, gentlemen, and we support your position." Mr. Kenny then remarked, "The subject with which we are chiefly concerned is the character of the statements attributed to J. Parnell Thomas by the newspapers. He was quoted as saying that the producers had agreed to establish a blacklist throughout the motion picture industry." Indignantly, Eric Johnston answered, "That report is nonsense. As long as I live, I will never be a party to anything as un-American as a blacklist. And any statement purporting to quote me as agreeing to a blacklist is a libel upon me as a good American." Mr. Crum rose to shake Mr. Johnston's hand, saying, "Eric, I knew you were being misquoted. I'd never believe that you would go along with anything as vicious as a blacklist in a democracy." "Tell the boys not to worry," Johnston concluded, "There'll never be a blacklist. We're not going to go totalitarian to please this committee." [laughter]

GARDNER

Famous last words, as the saying goes.

MALTZ

So we were given this good news on the eve of the hearings. It is relevant to mention that timed with the hearings, the Hearst newspapers throughout the nation started a carefully timed campaign for a federal police censorship of the motion picture industry. Quoting from Kahn again, on page 139: Emblazoned on the front pages owned by Mr. Hearst was this message: The need is for federal censorship of motion pictures. The Constitution permits it. The law sanctions it. The safety and welfare of America demands it.

GARDNER

A newspaperman coming out for censorship. What a contradiction.

MALTZ

Oh, boy! The hearings were held in the caucus room on the second floor of the old House Office Building. It was a very large room with seats perhaps for about 300 people. There was always a long line on the stairway leading up from the ground floor rotunda to the caucus room, with police in attendance to see that order was kept. The committee members sat behind a wide table in front of the seats, and there were newsreel cameras, all the radio networks, and TV cameras (although TV was then in its infancy), and there were ninety reporters in attendance. The committee members present were always chairman J. Parnell Thomas, [John] McDowell of Pennsylvania, [Richard B.] Vail of Colorado, and a freshman Congressman, [Richard M.] Nixon of California, and most of the time, or part of the time, [John S.] Wood of Georgia. It's perhaps worth mentioning as a passing piece of comedy that chairman Thomas was a small, pudgy, red-faced man, and when he was seated on his chair, was too small to be caught by the television cameras, and so he sat on a cushion placed on top of a telephone book. [laughter]

GARDNER

I didn't realize that.

MALTZ

Yes. Rankin was never present. The chief investigator was Robert E. Stripling. I'll be making mention of him after these hearings, once again, in the year 1953 or '54 when he was fired. He, like the other investigators, were all former FBI men, and it was very evident in the hearings that the committee got its data from the FBI. I might pause just to explain why. This committee had several investigators. It had money to do investigations.

1.39. TAPE NUMBER: XVII, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 29, 1978

MALTZ

When the committee put the political dossiers of the various unfriendly witnesses into the record, there were items in it that went back to the early 1930s, years before the committee had been even created. Now, it was clear that the FBI had files that dated to that time and that it would have been an enormous work of duplication for the committee to try to get similar files, much more difficult, since papers were out of date and so on. And in view of the support that J. Edgar Hoover gave the committee, and the committee gave Hoover, in the presence of the former FBI men on the staff of the committee, it was not hard to feel confident that the origin of the files of the committee were in the files of the FBI. The chairman, Parnell Thomas, opened the hearing with a statement of its purpose. I am reading now from page 1 of Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, First Session, printed by the United States Government Printing Office, and it's entitled: Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry. Thomas said: Before this hearing gets under way, I would like to call attention to some of the basic principles by which the Committee on Un-American Activities is being guided in its investigation into alleged subversive influence in America's motion picture industry... We all recognize, certainly, the tremendous effect which moving pictures have on their mass audiences, far removed from the Hollywood sets. We all recognize that what the citizen sees and hears in his neighborhood movie house carries a powerful impact on his thoughts and behavior. With such vast influence over the lives of American citizens as the motion picture industry exerts, it is not unnatural--in fact, it is very logical--that subversive and undemocratic forces should attempt to use this medium for un-American purposes. Now, clearly, then, the hearings were to be an inquiry into the use of the film medium by Communists for subversive purposes. But, on page 3, he was already shifting the purpose of the hearings somewhat, because he said: "The question before this committee, therefore, and the scope of its present inquiry, will be to determine the extent of communist infiltration in the Hollywood motion picture industry. We want to know what strategic positions in the industry have been captured by these elements, whose loyalty is pledged in word and deed to the interests of a foreign power." Now, there's a distinction between saying that there were Communists working in the industry, and finding out what positions they hold, from saying that they were influencing the product which people saw in their movie houses. In a way, it was a shift; in another way, what he was doing was linking the two. That is to say, he was trying to establish the position that, if he could find Communists in the motion picture industry, then, ipso facto, they must be influencing the content of the motion pictures. And as would be seen in the course of the hearings, this would be done without ever referring to any except three wartime pro-Soviet motion pictures, but not to others. Now, I am taking for granted, of course, that any scholar interested in looking at my oral history would read the materials of the hearing themselves, but there are certain things that I want to point out about them. In the first week of the friendly witnesses, Jack Warner was the first important witness, as head of Warner Brothers films. He was on the spot with the committee, because his studio had produced Mission to Moscow, which the committee considered to be outrageous Red propaganda. So he was out to prove--and this he had done, of course, in wartime, when Russia was our ally--that he was an American patriot who never had allowed anything in his movies that was communist. And that, indeed, he was such a diligent bloodhound in watching out for Communist efforts to inject propaganda into Warner Brothers films that he had, in fact, fired an entire slew of Communist writers. And he named them. They were Alvah Bessie, Gordon Kahn, Guy Endore, Howard Koch (one of the authors of Casablanca), Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, myself, Robert Rossen, Irwin Shaw, Dalton Trumbo, John Wexley. All of this was to substantiate the committee's charge that Communist propagandists were slipping propaganda into films. And he said that he had fired us because we had tried to put Communist propaganda into films, or he had found out that we were Communists and he wouldn't have Communists on his payroll. One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I didn't jump up in the hearing room at that time and shout out that he was a perjurer. Because I could easily have proven that he was, inasmuch as, ever since I had last worked at Warner Brothers, on, I guess, Cloak and Dagger--or ever since I had finished with Pride of the Marines--they had not only offered me a contract, but they had called my agent about every two weeks since, and, in fact, two weeks before I went to the hearing, there had been a call to her to ask if I would take a film job. So that it would have been very easy to prove that he never fired me. Howard Koch had insisted upon getting out of his Warner Brothers contract after the violent behavior of Warner Brothers police against strikers in front of the studio--back-lot strikers. And I have not been able to ascertain whether it was Koch himself who paid Warner Brothers $10,000 to get out of a contract, or whether it was [Samuel] Goldwyn who paid Warner Brothers $25,000 to take over Koch's contract, but there was clear evidence by canceled check that Koch had not been fired. And the same was true of all of the other people. This was a list that Warner had been supplied by the committee when he was in secret executive session with them during the previous summer, and he was brazen enough to come out with this piece of perjury. Now, the reason why I didn't jump up and yell that he was a perjurer was that the Nineteen had decided upon a policy which--it had still not ended--was that we agreed that we would not attack the producers; we would attack the committee only, because the First Amendment committee was still at work, and we hoped that we would still bring the producers into open opposition against the committee. Well, that was a sensible policy, and maybe I myself was in error in not seeing that we could maintain that policy while taking a different position with an individual executive who was indeed on the side of the committee. In any instance, I felt bound, whether rightly or wrongly, by that policy decision, and so I didn't say anything. I have really never ceased regretting it, because it would have been a sensational thing to do in the most useful sense. I would have been thrown out of the hearing room, the reporters would have crowded around me, and I could have proved that he was a perjurer.

GARDNER

Right at the beginning of the hearing.

MALTZ

Right from the first witness. Now, Warner's testimony was an example of the outrageous unfairness of these hearings, because we were not allowed to cross-examine him, or any other witnesses, and also we could not sue them, legally, because testimony given on the stand is privileged and not open to libel suits. And when we got on the stand in our turn, we weren't allowed by the chairman to discuss the testimony that anyone had given against us. There is the question of why we didn't call a press conference, say, every afternoon after the hearings were over, to discuss the given testimony, and the reason for that was twofold. On the whole, what was going on in the press was good, because the press in general was very critical--not the Hearst press--but the press in general was very critical of the way these hearings were conducted. And, in that sense, we were getting a good press, so that we didn't want to rock the boat. But secondly, we felt that if we called a press conference, there were bound to be some reporters who would just keep insisting on asking whether we were members of the Communist party, and that that would be so disruptive that we would not be able to get across anything else we wanted to do. And certainly that's what the Hearst reporters there would do; we couldn't keep them out. Now, Warner also made, in his testimony, a specific reference to my film Pride of the Marines. And he was asked to identify the films that those writers he had fired had worked on, and when he came to my name, and stated "Maltz in Pride of the Marines," the chairman, at this point, asked, "Did Maltz get much into Pride of the Marines?" "No," said Warner, "but he tried." And he said that he ran the film himself, and he detected "one little thing where the fellow on the train says, 'My name isn't Jones, so I can't get a job.'" This isn't an accurate quote from what was said in the film, but that's the way Warner put it. And Warner went on to say, "It was this kid named Diamond, a Jewish boy, in the Marines, a hero at Guadalcanal." Warner said that there might have been something there, but if there was, he didn't really recognize it. And he said, "Some of these lines have innuendos and double meanings and things like that, and you have to take eight or ten Harvard law courses to find out what they mean." Mr. Stripling: They are very subtle. Mr. Warner: Exceedingly so. Now, on the one hand, it's so dirty on his part, and on the other hand, it's so ridiculous. I made mention in discussing the preview of Pride of the Marines that Warner stood beside me in the urinal and told me how pleased he was by this particular scene in the film. And it is this very scene that he picks out to say, out of one side of his mouth, that that was my attempt to get some Communist propaganda into it, and on the other hand to say quickly out of the other side of his mouth, however, he didn't think there was anything there because it was so subtle that you have to take eight or ten Harvard law courses to find out what they mean. And the chief investigator, Stripling, plays along with him, and they do this strange charade to both confirm and deny that there was propaganda that I put into a film. A little later in the testimony, they were talking about Action in the North Atlantic, a Warner Brothers film that John Howard Lawson had written, and Warner says, "Naturally, John Howard Lawson tried to swing a lot of things in there, but to my knowledge there wasn't anything." Mr. Stripling: John Howard Lawson tried to put stuff in? Mr. Warner: Yes, I would say he did in one form or another. But they don't go on to say what. And this is a congressional committee. The highest body of our land. [laughter] Of course, J. Parnell Thomas, perhaps one might say, had not had much training in investigative techniques. He had been previously a stockbroker and an insurance man. Now, these statements by Warner, however, bore directly on the charge that Communists were sneaking Communist party propaganda into films, and it's perhaps at this point relevant to mention exactly what does happen with a film script. Any film script that is made into a film had to be read at that time by the producer, who worked with a writer, and by the secretary or secretaries who typed it; and if the producer felt satisfied with it, it then had to go up to the executives. And there it was read by a number of executives before it was produced--for instance, in Warner Brothers, at least by Warner's important assistant Steve Trilling, and if it was to be an expensive film, presumably by Jack Warner himself. And then a director was called in, and the producer called in also an art director and hired a cameraman, and copies of the script went to the various backstage departments, to the costumer, and to the set people, and to the casting director. And then as it approached production, scripts went to the actors who were called in on it, and certainly as it was in production, the dialogue was heard by everyone on the set, let's say twenty or thirty or forty grips of various sorts. So we have at least 100, let's say, 100 percent pure Americans who have pored over or listened to this script on its way to production. And after each day's shooting, it is looked at by the director and the producer and the executives of the studio, and in spite of this fine-tooth examination, the assertion is made by the committee that Communist propaganda is being put into films, and nobody sees it because it's so subtle, and yet it has a powerful influence on the American people. Now, this, of course, is Alice in Wonderland absurdity, but one has to ask why there were not investigative reporters, such as the ones who investigated Watergate, who found out facts like this which were not at all secret. No Deep Throat was needed to reveal what happened to a film script in Hollywood. And indeed, in his testimony, Louis B. Mayer, who followed Warner to the stand, made a general reference to the fact that "our scripts are read and reread by so many of the executive force, producers, and editors, that if you looked carefully at 1,200 to 1,500 pictures I produced with my people out at the studio, you would be surprised how little you could possibly point to, even now, when we are on the lookout for it." But the press never picked up on it to say, "This is nonsense." And this was of the temper of the time, that this should have been said. Now, there was a further absurd charge that came into the hearings in the testimony of a well-known director, Sam Wood, which was that Communists in the industry were carrying on a blacklist against non-Communists. Here's the testimony [p. 59]: MR. STRIPLING: Now, Mr. Wood, would you give the committee some of these examples in which the Communists have exerted influence in the motion picture industry? In other words, how do they go about it? What are the mechanics of it? MR. WOOD: ...For instance, a man gets a key position in the studio and has charge of the writers. When you, as a director or a producer, are ready for a writer you ask for a list and this man shows you a list. Well, if he is following the party line his pets are on top or the other people aren't on it at all. If there is a particular man in there who has been opposing them they will leave his name off the list. Then if that man isn't employed for about two months, they will go to the head of the studio and say, "Nobody wants this man." The head is perfectly honest about it and says, "Nobody wants to use him, let him go." So a good American is let out. But it doesn't stop there. They point that out as an example and say, "You better fall in line, play ball, or else." And they go down the line on it. MR. STRIPLING: That is true in the case of writers. Would you say it is true in any other branch of the industry? MR. WOOD: I don't think, in any part of the business, they will use a party who is opposed to their ideas, if they can avoid it, and they can usually avoid it. MR. STRIPLING: They operate as cliques, in other words? MR. WOOD: Oh, yes, they have their meetings every night. They are together; they work for one purpose. And that's the end of his testimony on that. Well, this is something that, again, any investigative reporter would have found out is absurd, because, in fact, there were no Communists in any key positions in the industry in a position to do something like this--aside from the fact of whether or not they would have wanted to, or could get away with it if they tried it. But they weren't in hiring positions. Furthermore, directors don't live in limbo: they know who the good writers are. They know who writers are whom they want. And, finally, to say as he did that if a writer hasn't been working for two months the studio will not want him is, again, Alice in Wonderland nonsense. So, we have here something that I think was created in the back rooms of the committee as a kind of fiction story to say, "Let's add this onto it, this will sound good." And they put it in. Wood also testified that Communists, or alleged Communists, had tried to take over the [Screen] Directors Guild. Now, I'm sure that the Communists, or the progressives in the Guild, may have advocated some policies that Sam Wood was opposed to. But just how this contributed to the corruption of the 85 million moviegoers each week was never explained. Wood went on to explain why he had been one of the organizers of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. He said, "Well, the reason was very simple. We organized in self-defense. We felt that there was a definite effort by the Communist party members, or party travelers, to take over the unions and the guilds of Hollywood, and if they had the unions and the guilds controlled, they would have the plum in their lap, and they would move on to use it for Communist propaganda." Well, the plum, of course, here, obviously stands for the film industry. This is another piece of Alice in Wonderland, because if you had all of the guilds and unions headed by the Communists, they still wouldn't be buying a given novel to do in a film studio, and the decisions on what would be done and what would not be done were all in the hands of the executives who owned the studios. Now, Mr. Nixon, our future president, made his contribution in these hearings in the following way. He said, with Wood on the stand, "So far as this group is concerned" (this group being the Communists), "it is 'thought control' whenever the motion picture industry might make an anti-Communist film; but it isn't 'thought control' if they were to make an antifascist or an anti-Nazi film? In other words, they welcome the first but oppose the latter?" MR. WOOD: If you would read the review of that meeting of the "thought conference" held at Beverly Hills Hotel [Conference on Thought Control] you would know exactly what was in their mind. It is only one thing. It is not America. As far as investigation is concerned, we would welcome an investigation. [MALTZ: He means, "We, the Motion Picture Alliance."] Our books are open to you at any time. MR. NIXON: You have indicated that the main success of those who follow the Communist line in Hollywood has not been in what they have been able to get into pictures but what they have been able to get out? MR. WOOD: I think they are both dangerous, but I think what they keep out is doubly dangerous. You wouldn't notice that. If the script is accepted, you don't check back. I do. I generally go back over the book and try to check to see if anything important was left out. But if they don't check back, they leave things out that puts this country and our way of living in a favorable light. And I merely note that no reference was made to any specific film. At the end of Wood's testimony, a comedy routine was played out by the chairman that was standard for the friendly witnesses. Wood was congratulated for his courage in appearing before the committee and damning Communists in films. "In other words," said the chairman, "you've got guts." Just how and why it took such courage [laughter] in 1947 to go to Washington and say, "I hate Communists," I don't know. Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the second important friendly witness, took a different position from Warner. He said that he hadn't fired any Communists, because no Red propaganda had been slipped into any of his films. However, he acknowledged that several writers under contract--Trumbo, Cole, Donald Ogden Stewart--had been called Communists. When pressured, he agreed that he wouldn't have any of them on his payroll, if it became clear that they advocated the overthrow of our government. And it was this that the committee wanted to get out of him. There was then a carefully prepared piece of dialogue between the committee and Mayer, and between the committee and other friendly witnesses at this point, and it's best exemplified by dialogue between Stripling and Adolphe Menjou, who was soon to take the stand. [tape recorder turned off] I misspoke myself a little bit, just before we stopped. I want to go back. When pressured, Louis Mayer agreed that he wouldn't have any of the men who had been called Communists on his payroll if it became clear that they advocated the overthrow of the government. And it was this that the committee wanted to get out of him. Now, another point: the carefully prepared dishonest dialogue between the committee and friendly witnesses is well illustrated by this exchange between Stripling and Adolphe Menjou, the actor. MR. STRIPLING: As an actor, Mr. Menjou, could you tell the committee whether or not an actor in a picture could portray a scene which would in effect serve as propaganda for communism or any other un-American purpose? MR. MENJOU: Oh, yes. I believe that under certain circumstances a communistic director, a communistic writer, or a communistic actor, even if he were under orders from the head of the studio not to inject communism or un-Americanism or subversion into pictures, could easily subvert that order, under the proper circumstances, by a look, by an inflection, by a change in the voice. I think it could be easily done. I have never seen it done, but I think it could be done. MR. STRIPLING: You don't know of any examples? MR. MENJOU: I cannot think of one at the moment. No sir. Now, this is just incredible! [laughter]

GARDNER

Alice in Wonderland is really the most apt description.

MALTZ

Incredible! But just think, you have ninety reporters!

GARDNER

One wonders, you're right. Certainly journals such as the Nation must have picked up and had the material, and yet there really wasn't anything major that I can recall in the reading that I did in the press of the Left in research in different places--

MALTZ

I think--

GARDNER

--until later, until the fifties.

MALTZ

Well, even in the fifties--You see, I have on my shelf books on the hearings and all that touch upon and deal with them, and they deal in a generalized way. They don't go into examining this kind of--

GARDNER

Right!

MALTZ

--this kind of analysis of the points. And that's why I'm doing it here, and that's what has failed to be done.

GARDNER

But it is surprising that even the left-liberal magazines didn't go into greater detail.

MALTZ

Well, one would have to come back to the time; it may well be that they picked out certain things. But their space is limited, and so--

GARDNER

And their readership was definitely limited at that time.

MALTZ

Well, the same readership I think they have now.

GARDNER

Perhaps.

MALTZ

I don't think it's grown--

GARDNER

It goes up and down.

MALTZ

There was testimony from John Charles Moffitt, who was a screenwriter and a journalist and a film critic. He'd had quite some years of being a critic. He also had some prepared dialogue that was extremely artificial and vulgar, and again I note that none of the books I have read that touch on the hearings have mentioned it, and the question is: "Why not?" and, "Why didn't allegedly serious scholars of the period pick up items like this? MR. MOFFITT: ...I had several conversations with Mr. Biberman, Mr. Lawson, and others of that organization. During the course of it, Mr. Lawson made this significant statement: He said: As a writer, do not try to write an entire communist picture... The producers will quickly identify it and it will be killed by the front office... As a writer try to get five minutes of the Communist doctrine, five minutes of the party line in every script you write... Get that into an expensive scene, a scene involving expensive stars, large sets or many extras, because... then even if it is discovered by the front office, the business manager of the unit, the very watchdog of the treasury, the very servant of capitalism, in order to keep the budget from going too high, will resist the elimination of that scene. If you can make the message come from the mouth of Gary Cooper or some other important star who is unaware of what he is saying, by the time it is discovered, he is in New York, and a great deal of expense will be involved to bring him back and reshoot the scene. If you get the message into a scene employing many extras it will be very expensive to reshoot that scene because of the number of extras involved or the amount of labor that would be necessary to light and reconstruct a large set. Said Moffitt, concluding, "That was the nucleus of what he said at that time." Now, since I went in earlier and described how many people had to read a script, this thing is incredibly, not only phony, but it's so stupidly phony. But I have seen this quoted again and again by people who were procommittee as an example of serious testimony right from the mouth of John Howard Lawson. Similarly, Mr. Moffitt said [Hearings, p. 121]: I think that the most infamous aspect of Lawson's technique is that of involving innocent people. I think that many a time that actor plays that five minutes without knowing the significance of what he is doing. I think on many occasions--I think on practically every occasion that I know of, the producer, both the associate producer and the studio heads, was in complete ignorance of what was done. I think, very often, the director may not know. Now, this is done occasionally in pictures involving budgets of one-and-a-half or two-million dollars. That gets into the picture, and if I name that picture I will be working a hardship on innocent people. I would very much prefer, with your permission, to name those pictures in executive session. Here you have the director, the executives, and they all don't know that that five minutes is in the script. [laughter] But he doesn't want to name any pictures; he's going to whisper it in executive session. You know, this nightmare of incredible statements. Rupert Hughes, a writer, testified that the reason anti-Communist films weren't made (which was another of the committee's questions) was because producers had been told that Communists would destroy the upholstery and put stink bombs in any theater that played them. The fact that dozens of anti-Communist films were exhibited in subsequent years without damage to upholstery or stink bombs in the theaters has gone unnoticed. The committee was constantly pushing the policy of a blacklist in a very open way with the friendly witnesses. But it found resistance on two grounds. Some said they didn't think employment should be conditioned by a writer's politics, and others were afraid that depriving a person of his right to work would come into the area of conspiracy, of felony. So that by the time James McGuinness, an MGM executive, came to the stand, the committee had formulated a way of getting around both objections. Here is Congressman Wood of the committee. I'm referring to the Hearings, page 150: MR. WOOD: Wouldn't it be very simple, in your opinion, Mr. McGuinness, if the Congress would simply by a mandatory legislation provide that the controlling heads of any industry may, if they have reasonable grounds to conclude that a man is engaged in activities detrimental to this Government, and aiding a philosophy that is designed to overthrow it, would have the right to eliminate them and that other people in that industry would have the right to decline to employ them for that reason, without fear of future legal implications? MR. McGUINNESS: I agree to that in principle, Mr. Wood. And then, Mr. Nixon, our future president, summed up another aspect of the testimony of McGuinness in the following way [Hearings, p. 151]: MR. NIXON: In other words, the situation at the present time is that those who are following the Communist line as writers in Hollywood are under direction to distort the facts about America and to suppress the facts about totalitarian communism? MR. McGUINNESS: I believe that to be true. [tape recorder turned off] However, neither Nixon nor any other member of the committee saw fit to ask McGuinness to name one film in which distortion occurred at the present time. I'm separating out other films from the three that the committee attacked: Mission to Moscow, Soul of Russia, and North Star were the three films made about the Soviet Union during the war. And then came some stars. Robert Taylor played footsie with the committee, and was congratulated on his patriotism for being such an honest witness, even though he would suffer Communist criticism for it and might be hurt at the box office. Howard Rushmore, a former film critic of the Daily Worker testified that I was one of the writers sent out by the Communist party in New York to Hollywood. He specifically stated that I and others did not go on our own. He also stated that before any manuscript could be sent to a publisher by a Communist party member, it had to be submitted to his cultural commission for approval. Of course, no cross-examination was ever allowed. The actors Robert Montgomery, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, and Gary Cooper were presented in succession, because in addition to being glamorous stars, their expert advice was needed on the constitutionality of a law making the Communist party illegal. The level of intelligence and probity in these hearings reached a triumphant peak in the following statements by Mrs. Lela Rogers (the mother of Ginger Rogers, the actress) and Congressman McDowell of Pennsylvania. Now, I'm going to read from page 236 of the Hearings: MRS. [LELA] ROGERS: Remember, Communists are in control of many of the schools, your clubs, your study clubs, even the little women's clubs, where women come to read books to them and explain plays to them. Communists have their cohorts that do the reading and choosing of the books--and the leftist book always got by beautifully. It has been a long time since we have had the feeling that we have a clear school, that our children are being taught about America. I think that when we show the people America, as against the face of this thing, we have just about licked it. THE CHAIRMAN: Well, can't the moving-picture industry aid in that to a great extent? MRS. ROGERS: Oh, immeasurably, but it has been a long time since you could get a good American story bought in the motion picture industry. Aside from the marvelous patriotism she displays, and her clear understanding of what's going on in the United States, the clarity of her thoughts and the way she expresses them are also to be admired. [laughter] Most of the friendly witnesses were asked to give testimony about the effort of the Communists to take over the unions in the film industry, particularly the Screen Writers Guild, and it was constantly asserted that if these efforts were successful, the Communists would then control the industry itself and the content of films. And I've already commented on the absurdity of this. The hearings had made national headlines, and of course the presence of the film stars augmented this, and that was why they had been summoned. There was strong press criticism of the hearings at this point, and there had been during the week. I'm now reading from Report on Blacklisting by John Cogley, published by the Fund for the Republic: After two days of the hearings, the New York Herald commented that the testimony so far had "produced exactly what was expected of them." Mr. Thomas's labor, the paper declared, had brought forth "an abundance of unsubstantiated charges, some dizzying, new definitions of communism, and a satisfactory collection of clippings for the Congressman's own scrapbook." The editorial asserted that the beliefs of men and women who write for the screen are like the beliefs of any ordinary men and women, and nobody's business but their own, as the Bill of Rights mentions. That was certainly a good statement, but, as I look back and compare the activities of the press around Watergate with its activities at the time of the hearings, I feel that the press should have been much more engaged than it was in combating what the committee did. And of course, in succeeding years, it became less and less critical until it ceased criticism altogether. In the testimony the friendly witnesses took up the entire first week of the hearings, and in the second week came the testimony of John Howard Lawson as the first of the Ten. Before he came to the stand, our attorneys, Kenny and Crum, made two vain attempts to attack the committee legally. For instance, here was one of them, and I'm reading from page 289 of the Hearings: MR. CRUM: May I request the right of cross-examination? I ask you to bring back and permit us to cross-examine the witnesses Adolphe Menjou, Fred Niblo, John Charles Moffitt, Richard Macauley, Rupert Hughes, Sam Wood, Ayn Rand, James McGuinness--THE CHAIRMAN: The request--MR. CRUM: Howard Rushmore--(The chairman pounding gavel.) MR. CRUM: Morrie Ryskind, Oliver Carlson--THE CHAIRMAN: The request is denied. MR. CRUM: In order to show that these witnesses lied. THE CHAIRMAN: That request is denied. Mr. Stripling, the first witness. MR. STRIPLING: John Howard Lawson. And Lawson was brought to the stand.

1.40. TAPE NUMBER: XVII, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 29, 1978

MALTZ

Contrary to the practice in the first week with the friendly witnesses, here was the dialogue about Lawson's request to read a statement, page 290 of the Hearings: MR. LAWSON: Mr. Chairman, I have a statement here which I wish to make--THE CHAIRMAN: Well, all right; let me see your statement. (statement handed to the chairman) ... I don't care to read any more of the statement. The statement will not be read. I read the first line. MR. LAWSON: You have spent one week vilifying me before the American public--THE CHAIRMAN: Just a minute--MR. LAWSON: And you refuse to allow me to make a statement on my rights as an American citizen. THE CHAIRMAN: I refuse you to make the statement, because of the first sentence in your statement. That statement is not pertinent to the inquiry. Now, this is a congressional committee--a congressional committee set up by law. We must have orderly procedure, and we are going to have orderly procedure. Mr. Stripling, identify the witness. MR. LAWSON: The rights of American citizens are important in this room here, and I intend to stand up for those rights, Congressman Thomas. MR. STRIPLING: Mr. Lawson, will you state your full name, please? MR. LAWSON: I wish to protest against the unwillingness of this committee to read a statement, when you permitted Mr. Warner, Mr. Mayer, and others to read statements in this room. My name is John Howard Lawson. It soon became very clear that the committee was determined to limit the unfriendly witnesses if it could to a yes or no answer to two questions: "Are you a member of the writers' guild or actors' or directors' guild or producers' guild?" and "Are you a member of the Communist party?" Now, the Nineteen had made a decision to try and break through any attempts of the committee to shut us up. And with the very first witness, it was clear that they intended to do so. And this was the background for Lawson's very vigorous efforts to be heard. Many who have written about the hearings, like Eric Bentley, have been extremely critical of the fact that Lawson shouted, as indeed he did, and he had a strong voice. To me, this is an utterly superficial reaction. I think they should have cheered his refusal to be muzzled. When you have a situation where those friendly to the committee have been permitted to talk at random for as long as they wish, and then you find yourself unable to say anything about the lies that have been spouted about you, this is so manifestly unfair that to accept it meekly would be silly. And I think it's just amazing that people should have been critical of Lawson's behavior. Now, as a matter of fact, there's every reason to believe that the committee knew beforehand how each member of the Ten would testify, because I know that I and others had our telephones bugged from the time we got our subpoenas. Things suddenly began to happen to my phone. I'd pick it up to dial and I would hear a click, and sometimes when I was waiting for something, I would hear some voices whispering at the other end. I believe that at that time the technique of bugging was not as subtle as it probably is now, or the people doing it were careless. I'm sure that our meeting room in the Shoreham was bugged, and I would assume that every telephone in every bedroom occupied by the unfriendly witnesses was bugged. Furthermore, I think that most, if not all, of the sessions between each individual and his attorney was bugged. For instance, when I had my private session with Ben Margolis about the way I would testify and we discussed it, we did so out in a large garden area of the hotel, of the Shoreham Hotel. When we sat down, a man strolled over to a bench that was out of hearing of where we were, and he sat down to read a newspaper and put a small portfolio down next to the bench. I didn't know at that time, nor did Ben, as we discovered later, that it was perfectly possible to have a tape recorder at that distance from where we were and to catch everything that we said. And there were incidents of finding people in telephone booths who were listening to a conversation being carried on and so on. So I do believe that the chairman was prepared in advance to gavel Lawson into silence. And Lawson had no recourse except to continue talking and to raise his voice above the hammering, which was very loud, if he was to be heard. Now, a very important legal maneuver came into play in responses given by Lawson and others. And that was a phrase, "It is a matter of public record." On page 292, for instance: MR. STRIPLING: Mr. Lawson, I repeat the question: Have you ever held any position in the Screen Writers Guild? MR. LAWSON: I have stated that the question is illegal. But it is a matter of public record that I have held many offices in the Screen Writers Guild. I was its first president, in 1933, and I have held office on the board of directors of the Screen Writers Guild at other times. Now, our lawyers had pointed out to us that where things were a matter of public record, it was perfectly all right to state that, but it had to be prefaced by the fact that you were not answering the question itself.

GARDNER

But citing the public record.

MALTZ

You were merely citing the public record while saying the question is illegal. And that was attached to something else that was not easily understood, in fact, that was confusing to people, and it's best illustrated from Trumbo's testimony [Hearings, p. 332]. MR. STRIPLING: Are you a member of the Screen Writers Guild? MR. TRUMBO: Mr. Stripling, the rights of American labor to inviolably secret membership lists have been won in this country by a great cost of blood and a great cost in terms of hunger. These rights have become an American tradition. Over the Voice of America we have broadcast to the entire world the freedom of our labor. THE CHAIRMAN: Are you answering the question or are you making another speech? MR. TRUMBO: Sir, I am truly answering the question. Now, we all of us used the phrase, "I am answering the question," even though we did not answer yes or no as the committee wanted. And the reason why was the following. We could have answered, "Your question is illegal and I just won't answer it," but we didn't do that because our attorneys felt that the Supreme Court might sustain a contempt citation if we merely said, "I won't answer the question." And for this reason, we were all individually advised to insist that we were being responsive to the committee, but we had to answer in our own way. Now, it turned out that the public effect of this position was bad. It created confusion because we couldn't explain to the public why we weren't answering yes or no. And I've already said why, as Communists, we wouldn't say no, and why we wouldn't say yes, because that would give the committee the legal right to ask us who others we knew who were Communists. And, on top of that, our saying "I have answered the question" was a very confusing thing. [tape recorder turned off] For instance, the reaction of the Committee for the First Amendment illustrates this. I am now reading from Cogley in his Report on Blacklisting, page 7. The Committee decided to send a delegation to Washington to watch the hearings, to "see whether they would be fair." (And, incidentally, to take some of the newspaper play away from Parnell Thomas and the big-name Hollywood personalities he had summoned as "friendly" witnesses.) The group also decided to make coast-to-coast radio broadcasts at which stars would discuss the Constitution and civil liberties. I might say, interrupting the quote from Cogley, that two nationwide radio broadcasts were made by the Committee for the First Amendment with very prominent people making superb statements about the hearings. And it was a committee of very prominent actors, led by Humphrey Bogart and his wife [Lauren Bacall], and Danny Kaye, and others who came to the hearings. Back to Cogley: After the Hollywood delegation, in a blaze of publicity, took their places in the hearing room the chairman called John Howard Lawson.... His behavior on the stand came as an enormous shock to most of the Hollywood visitors. None of them expected him to "cooperate" but they were not prepared for shouting and unabashed insolence. A press conference was held that same afternoon, attended by dozens of newspapermen. At the conference, the Hollywood delegation was hopelessly demoralized when newsmen suggested that their appearance in Washington would be interpreted all over the country as support for Lawson. The next day, after two more unfriendly witnesses were called, the group left Washington. Many of them were utterly disappointed and angry. "We've been had!" they told each other. [tape recorder turned off]

GARDNER

What's interesting about that, and vaguely contradictory, is that according to the Fund for the Republic report, the Hollywood people, the Committee for the First Amendment, and so on, went home abashed after the hearings of the twenty-seventh.

MALTZ

Yes.

GARDNER

And yet the second broadcast was November 2, which means that even after they had gone back to Hollywood abashed, according to the report, Norman Corwin still was able to put together a broadcast. It's just a strange contradiction that comes out in my research and yours. I don't know what the answer to that is.

MALTZ

Maybe there isn't really a contradiction. They were dismayed by the conduct of Lawson and by the two other men, who would have been Trumbo and myself. And it started the decay of the committee, and yet, if the broadcast had been paid for, they would say, "Well, we're still against the committee, so let's reiterate our position against the committee." Actually, those broadcasts--I should have given a little more time to them. For instance, Thomas Mann said: I have the honor to expose myself as a hostile witness. I testify that I am very much interested in the moving-picture industry, and that, since my arrival in the United States nine years ago, I've seen a great many Hollywood films. If Communist propaganda had been smuggled into any of them, it must have been most thoroughly hidden. I, for one, never noticed anything of the sort. I testify, moreover, that to my mind the ignorant and superstitious persecution of the believers in a political and economic doctrine--which is, after all, the creation of great minds and great thinkers--I testify that this persecution is not only degrading for the persecutors themselves, but also very harmful to the cultural reputation of this country. As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends: spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged state of emergency. That is how it started in Germany. What followed was fascism; what followed fascism was war. Marvelous, a marvelous statement. The list of people who were on the broadcast, just reading down: Judy Garland, George Kaufman, Fredric March, Gregory Peck, Bennett Cerf, Lucille Ball, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, John Garfield, Myrna Loy, Frank Sinatra, Edward G. Robinson, and Archibald MacLeish and so on. I think I'll mention in passing—I'll quote MacLeish, because I want to make a statement. MacLeish said this: "No issue was ever clearer than the issue of the Thomas Committee as tossed into the faces of the American people. The most American of all American rights is the right of any man to think as he pleases and to say what he thinks. That right is protected against congressional interference by the American Constitution. The question before the country is, Can a committee of Congress go indirectly by inquisition into a man's beliefs, what the Constitution forbids Congress to do directly? And, if it can, what is left of the Constitution and the freedom it protects?" Now, that's a marvelous statement, but in the two and a half years that we were fighting our case after we were held in contempt, I don't remember that Archibald MacLeish ever came forward. He certainly never sent $5.00 to our committee, and I never heard any protest from him. And this, I'm afraid, was true of everyone else in his position.

GARDNER

When you say "in his position," what do you mean?

MALTZ

Well, what I mean is--I'm going to come to this later--no leading American people in the literary field came out in defense of the Ten. They were all silent. Going back to the testimony that Lawson gave and others of us gave, in later years I decided personally that it would have been equal legally, and much more wise in terms of our public position, to stand on a platform of simply refusing to answer the question because it was illegal, and not to say, "But I am answering the question." When I discussed this with Ben Margolis, he pointed out accurately that we were one of the first cases, and that the attorneys were trying to work out the best way to have us both challenge the committee constitutionally and at the same time stay out of jail if that was possible. And that's a perfectly sound comment. There's a very fascinating little footnote about Brecht that I was told about; I didn't witness this. After Lawson's testimony, and after he had been held in contempt, the other members of the Ten came back to the hotel. And since Lawson had been held in contempt, no one was feeling very happy about that, although it had been generally expected, and they found Brecht all smiles. He had been watching on TV. And he said, "There's not going to be fascism in America, because nothing like this ever happened in Germany. If something like this had happened in Germany, there wouldn't have been fascism in Germany." What he meant was the mobilization of a group of intellectuals to fight in this way. I was the third one called--Dalton Trumbo was the second of our group--and it happened to be my thirty-ninth birthday. When I asked for the right to read a statement, the chairman, Parnell Thomas, asked for a copy of it, and he looked at it for about two minutes in silence, and to my absolute astonishment said, "You may read it." I feel quite sure that the reason he permitted it was a decision during lunchtime by the committee that they were having so much newspaper criticism about the manifest unfairness of not allowing any of us to read statements that they'd come to this decision, and I was the next one up. After me, they allowed Alvah Bessie to read a portion of his statement, not all of it, and then they didn't allow any of the others to read theirs. And my statement is in The Citizen Writer, a pamphlet of speeches I published, and I can just give that to you as an adjunct--

GARDNER

Okay.

MALTZ

--to [the interview], I guess. [*See supporting documents.] Later in my testimony I handled myself awkwardly, I believe, because in a private conversation with Margolis in our legal session, he had urged me not to pause too long to answer questions, because radio listeners would be waiting, and it wouldn't sound right if I took too much time. Whatever the effect of the advice on others, it was not good for me, because it made me too tense in the desire to answer immediately, and I don't believe I answered well. As I was taken off the stand, I said something which has been referred to since by one or another writer, and the wonder has been done as to whether or not this was accident on my part, an accidental slip of the tongue, or whether it was purposeful. It was, indeed, purposeful. At the end, Stripling said, "I repeat the question. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?" And I answered, "I have answered the question, Mr. Quisling. I am sorry. I want you to know--" Now, that was deliberate. I felt that Stripling was a quisling. And there was a very interesting aftermath some years later. It turned out that, around the time Edward G. Robinson was called to the stand, which would have been in 1952 or 1953, at that time, or a little later, he loaned Stripling $10,000 and Stripling never paid the money back. And when this was discovered, Stripling was fired from the committee. Now, unfortunately I lost a scrapbook on transferring from Mexico up here, and so I can't cite the newspaper date, but I know that I had it and clipped it, and that Stripling was fired. The last of the Nineteen to be called was Ring Lardner, and that made ten of us. Although Bertolt Brecht testified after Lardner, as a foreigner he didn't combat the committee, and he was not held in contempt.

GARDNER

Why were the others not called? Or were you--?

MALTZ

At this point, even though the chairman had promised important revelations about espionage, the hearings were abruptly called off, and there seems no doubt that it was because of the bad press that the committee had been getting. The testimony of Dore Schary before that of Lardner was of great importance, because he was the head of production of RKO. And he insisted that he would not refuse to hire anyone because of his politics; he would only fire someone if it was proven that he was a foreign agent, dedicated to the overthrow of the government by force and violence. And we will come to that a little later. There was a final statement by Parnell Thomas in which he said that the committee had a special staff studying Communist propaganda in motion pictures. The committee, he said--that is, the whole committee--would resume hearings on that matter in the near future. And it not only did not resume hearings in the near future, but it never took up the topic, and the special staff never made a public report on Communist propaganda in motion pictures. And that, too, is something which I didn't see the press pointing out. He asserted that the adjournment was only temporary, and that hearings would be resumed as soon as possible. In fact, there were no further hearings in the film industry for two and a half years, not until the Hollywood Ten lost its case and then went to jail. It's at this point very relevant to state that all during these hearings, this patriotic chairman of this patriotic committee was committing a felony. He had forced his secretary into giving him kickbacks on her salary, and when this was exposed by a newspaper columnist and he was brought to trial, he pleaded nolo contendere and went to jail before we did. Directly after the hearings were over, I was asked if I would go on a short speaking tour with Henry Wallace, who was then a very, very controversial public figure because he had left the Truman administration and was campaigning against Truman's foreign policy. And I joined his group in Pittsburgh and participated in one-night public meetings there and in Cincinnati and in Cleveland, and then I left and went home. One of the men with Wallace on that speaking tour was Canada Lee, an actor, and I'll pause to tell a small story about him. He had been a very successful professional boxer who almost became champion at his weight class--just missed out. And then turned actor, and, to my best recollection, the first job he had was in the very important role in the Theatre Union play Stevedore, which he took over when Rex Ingram left for, I think the role of God in All God's Children. And Canada Lee did the role very well. He had natural aptitude as an actor and went on to a successful acting career. I remember we had long talks in spare time during that three-day tour, and I must have met him again around 1950, because at that time a--No, it must have been later than 1950. No it couldn't have been later than 1950, because I was out of the country. About 1950--and he was then blacklisted also. And at that time, I think, Cry, the Beloved Country was playing in a theater on Broadway, and he had the lead in it. And he told me that he had wanted to sit out in front of the theater with a shoeshine kit and shine shoes right in front of this theater of which he was the featured player, because of the fact that he was blacklisted, and he wanted to dramatize it that way, but that he had been persuaded, I guess by lawyers or friends, or so, not to do it, and he regretted not having done it. Canada Lee died at an early age from hypertension and a heart attack, I think, and one can guess that being blacklisted might have contributed to his hypertension. This tour with Henry Wallace was the beginning, for me, of two and a half years of a great deal of public speaking. I think I made more speeches than most of the Ten, because some had no ability in public speaking. I know that a week or so after I got home, or only a few days, there was a meeting in Gilmore Stadium at which I spoke along with the others of the Ten, and that was a meeting to raise money for us as well as to reach the public. And then, with Karen Morley, an actress, I immediately went up to Santa Rosa for a convention of the California CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations]. I recall that in the talk I gave, I brought up the issue of blacklisting and connected it with the fact that blacklisting had existed in industry, so far as trade unions were concerned, ever since the year 1811, when Philadelphia shoemakers had tried to stop the first trade union, and that this was surely going to turn into a committee attack upon unionization as well. I remember that Slim Connelly, who was the secretary, I believe, of the CIO of California, told us that it had been a dead convention before we came, and he was so happy that we had been there. The citations of contempt that were voted by the committee had to be approved by the House of Representatives, and this occurred on November 24, 1947. Although I had been the third one to be called to the stand in Washington, I was the first one brought up to be cited for contempt, and I assume that the reason was because the man who presented me for a contempt citation to the House was McDowell of Pennsylvania, and he gave a paragraph to the "Maltz controversy" to show what a disciplined Communist I was. And beside referring to that, he had the following to say. I'm reading from the Congressional Record, Monday, November 24, 1947, volume 93, number 151. He said: Maltz is by no means a minor figure in Hollywood or in the Communist party. Maltz is a brilliant, colorful writer. Maltz, believe it or not, is way above the $100,000 a year income bracket. I pause in reading from him to say that, regrettably, I had never attained $100,000 a year. [laughter] Going back to McDowell: The citation of Albert Maltz was called here first because this man was the most arrogant, most contemptible, the most bitter of all of these people who do not believe in their own country. Here is a typical Communist intellectual, burning with a bitter hatred of the country he was born in, its government, its officials, and its people. Here is a man whose gifted pen has for years dripped with a scorn and hatred of the Congress of the United States, who refused to answer the direct and simple question this Committee has put to him. When Albert Maltz was asked again if he was a Communist by Robert Stripling, he replied, "I have answered that question, Mr. Quisling, I'm sorry." And there, the examination of Albert Maltz abruptly ended as I objected to this, and the Committee sustained the objection. This Maltz addressed Robert Stripling as Mr. Quisling, a worldwide synonym for traitor. Bob Stripling, who has stood for years against the things that Albert Maltz is trying to turn our nation into, who served honorably and with distinction in the armed forces of this republic. The vote citing me for contempt was 346 yeas, 17 nays, answered present 1, not voting 68. [telephone rings--tape recorder turned off] The meeting of the motion picture executives and the bankers who control the studios, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, convened on the twenty-fourth of November, the same day as the citations for contempt. I don't believe that this was an accident: I think they must have known that the citations were coming, they knew when they were scheduled to be brought up in Congress, and therefore they set their date to be at the same time. And on the twenty-sixth the meeting executives issued its blacklist statement, which is well known. I think there is no doubt but that the producers as a whole, with a few exceptions, did not want to have any blacklisting in the studios, because they wanted to use the men whom they blacklisted. And because, I think, most retained the attitude that it was not fair to interfere with a person's employment because of his politics or his thinking. However, the ones calling the tune were the New York bankers, and the executives and producers had to decide whether they wanted to continue in their jobs, and as Dore Schary later said, with complete candor, "I wanted to keep making films." Because the statement firing us was a reversal of everything Eric Johnston had sworn he would never do, and it was a reversal of what Schary had said, and what others had said, and they just quite coolly reversed themselves.

GARDNER

By New York bankers, you mean those who financed the films?

MALTZ

Yes, I mean those who financed the films and who had the real financial control of the studios.

GARDNER

Beyond the Jack Warners, and the--

MALTZ

Yes. Warner--If the bankers, from whom Warner Brothers might be getting a $50 million loan a year to finance a new product, didn't want to give the loan, Warner would be out. The fact that the studio had his name made no difference. Fox was forced out of Fox many years ago. And so they issued this blacklist statement. Carey McWilliams, in his book Witch Hunt, wrote: "Ten writers were... blacklisted in the motion picture industry as a result of direct pressure applied by a congressional committee. If the Committee had subpoenaed ten editorial writers from ten newspapers... and then told their employers to fire them, it could not have been any clearer that the intention was censorial." Now, this decision that was made at the Waldorf was more important by far to us in the Ten, and subsequently to some 240 or 250 others in the film industry, and, as a matter of fact, to thousands in the country, than just the contempt citation. Because, without the Waldorf statement, we, when we lost our case, could have gone to jail, served our time, and come back to work in the industry. And then, blacklisting would not have been carried out for others in the film industry and it would not have spread to all areas in American life. So that it was of enormous and maligned importance for the future. As evidence of that, two individuals who had not been involved in the hearings were immediately blacklisted: one was Gale Sondergaard, wife of Herbert Biberman, and the other was Frances Lardner, a less well-known actress, wife of Ring Lardner. The blacklist, not the contempt citations, was a tremendous shock to each one of us personally in the Ten. Financial problems faced everyone.

GARDNER

Hadn't you expected it, though? Had you really believed Eric Johnston?

MALTZ

Yes, we had believed Eric Johnston; all of us had. We knew what the committee was trying to do. But when Eric Johnston, who was head of the motion picture producers, said, "I promise you that as long as I live there will never be a blacklist," yes, we believed them. Now, it is true that right after we came back from the hearings, the five men under contract to the studios--they were Trumbo, Cole, Lardner, Dmytryk, and Scott--were fired by the studios, summarily. And that was a bad omen. But it still didn't mean that there was any policy which said that "You ten men will not be hired again." So that when that statement came out, saying we would not be hired, I remember that it was a distinct shock to me. So obviously I had not been prepared, and I don't think the others were prepared for that. I know that the Lardners, for instance, immediately put up for sale a house that they had just bought shortly before the hearings began. I think I was in better financial condition than most of the Ten because my home and my way of life was more modest. There were two men, Ornitz and Bessie, who lived more modestly still, but they didn't have the savings that I did, because they hadn't been working. And Trumbo, who had made the most money of anyone, was land poor. I think I might pause for a moment to say that Trumbo, who had enormous qualities as a man in terms of talent, in terms of a most engaging personality, a brilliantly sharp mind and an offbeat, marvelous wit, was a man who had one fatal flaw, from my point of view, which interfered with the exercise of his talent: he loved to live on a very grand style. At one point I remember being in his home, before the hearings; I didn't know him well, but I was in his home on this occasion for some reason, I don't know. And it was a very large house on Beverly Drive, a house constructed like a southern mansion of pre-Civil War days. And in his study, on a kind of large board such as draftsmen use, he had the outline of the characters for what would have been a very large novel, or a series of novels. And this, like others of his books that he mentioned in one way or another, was never written, because the money was always going into real estate. Some years before the hearings came, he bought a ranch somewhere near the Cajon Pass, in a remote area where he had to build a road to get to the plot of land, and I don't know how many tens of thousands of dollars he had sunk into this whole enterprise. And so, right after the hearings were over, Trumbo had to rush back to that ranch in order to try and turn out film stories that he could sell to keep up with his enormous obligations. I might mention that my wife and I let the houseworker go whom we had had previously to help with our two youngsters, and we invested in a dishwasher as a way of making household chores easier. One other consequence, immediately, of the hearings, was the breakup of Adrian's marriage--Adrian Scott. He had been married to some actress whose name I forget, and the marriage ended. One problem that all of us with young children faced was the task of how to explain to them why we were in the trouble we were in, why we were being written about in the newspapers and talked about on the radio, and this was not easy at all. At the time of the hearings, my son was almost ten.

1.41. TAPE NUMBER: XVIII, SIDE ONE
DECEMBER 8, 1978

GARDNER

We'll continue with the trials.

MALTZ

Yes, I was talking about the effect of the blacklist on individuals and spoke of the problem of those among us who had young children, and that was not a few. At the time of the hearings my son was almost ten (that's '47), my daughter was five. And it's extremely difficult to explain to children, especially the ten-year-old, what is going on because the ten-year-old can read the newspapers and he can listen to the radio (thank goodness there was no TV at that time in our house or around the neighborhood), and he will hear his father being called all sorts of names. And we found it, at the least, extremely difficult to explain why I was getting all of the attention I was, and often with such malice. In the case of one of us, Adrian Scott, the events in Washington caused the breakup of his marriage. He was married to some actress; I forget her name. Not too long after we came back, however, the discovery was made that it was still possible for members of the Ten to write and sell original stories under pseudonyms, or with some practicing screenwriter putting his name on the manuscript. I know that Lester Cole and Dalton Trumbo did this through a very important agent who was himself going to be blacklisted several years later, and that was George Willner, who was a very old friend of mine. (I had known Willner in Long Island City when he was at that time a business manager of the New Masses. He subsequently left that work and became an agent in Hollywood). However, this is not to be accepted as a picture of the blacklist situation as it was after 1951; then it became very different and I will describe it in due course. This was an interim period in which the studios, studio heads, I'm quite sure, did not believe that we were going to go to jail and had no anticipation of the stern blacklist that would occur in the future.

GARDNER

Nor the pressure that would come upon them in the next five years.

MALTZ

That's right. Very important. Nor the pressures that would come upon them. And so there was a laxness to it. At the beginning of December Mark Hellinger called me and asked me if I would work on a film story, and I was happy to take it because now the situation was changed for me, of course, and I knew I was going to need to try and earn some money. He brushed off the events in Washington. He just didn't care about them at all, and we set to work. There was some piece of original material with a story line that was quite interesting. I remember that the title of it was An Act of Violence, and I believe that a poor film was made of it five or six or seven years later. And I worked on it for only a week. During that week Hellinger made a quick trip to Sun Valley in order to see Hemingway, who was there skiing. Hellinger had option on all of Hemingway's short stories for films. He had made one, The Killers, and he wanted to talk with Hemingway about something or other. As he described it to me when he returned, it was a grueling trip because he had to change planes several times and finally fly into Sun Valley in a one-motored plane. He caught cold, and Hemingway was off skiing most of the day, and Hellinger sat at the hotel, coughing. When Hellinger came back and I met him at night at his home, he wanted to hear what I had come up with after working on it for four or five days. I began to tell him but he would interrupt me with paroxyms of coughing that were so severe that I begged him to just go to bed, and we'd meet when he felt better. But he kept saying, "No, no, don't mind this. This is doing me good. This is better than medicine"--meaning that he liked what I was telling him. And so I told him what I had in my notes, and we agreed to meet on Saturday, which was, I guess, two days off. But I was to call him first and when I called him, he came to the phone and said that he really didn't feel well enough to meet with me, and we set it up for Monday, I believe. That night he apparently felt better and went down to a projection room where he had to see a film, and he died of a second heart attack. I don't know if I mentioned in this earlier about his having had a heart attack while Naked City was shooting. Did I?

GARDNER

I don't think you did, no.

MALTZ

Well, this is perhaps an interesting thing to comment on. In the summer of '47 this... well, it was not many months before this, during the shooting of Naked City in New York, Hellinger had had a heart attack. The doctors wanted him to stay in bed a given number of weeks, but he felt better after several weeks, and he just left the hospital. Feeling better after a heart attack is a frequent phenomenon, and Hellinger, more than most, had a magical feeling that he was just the same as he had always been; it's as though he hadn't really experienced anything that was damaging. I saw the same thing with Martin Rackin, with whom I had worked in the late sixties and seventies. And Hellinger came back to New York in a plane, although he was advised not to do so--that was before the time of pressurized planes--came back to Los Angeles, I mean, in a plane, and he went right to work. He called me very soon after to see a version of Naked City, to see Naked City in a projection room. The projection room was on the second story and the stairs leading up was quite long. When we were halfway up, he had to pause to recover his breath. Now, he hadn't told me that he'd had a heart attack, but I could see that something was wrong, and I asked him why he didn't order a projection room on the first floor. He said, oh, no, he didn't want to say anything like that because then word might get around that he was not physically fit. And this was just a temporary little thing, and he was talking a big deal with David Selznick, and he didn't want any word to get out that he was not well. I thought nothing more about it. And so here was this man who knew he had had a heart attack and should have known that severe coughing is a strain for a heart, and yet he just went on ignoring what had happened to him and died at forty-four. I was reminded of the fact that only, I think, the year before, in 1946, when I was in Catalina I had been asked to teach chess to a man I didn't know, a film producer who had done a lot of Tarzan films. I don't think of his name at the moment, although I should know it [Sol Lesser]. Because his physician had said that in the long recuperative period that he needed from his massive heart attack it would be good for him if he could have an interesting game like chess. And he was on Catalina in an area that required me to take a motorboat and go there, and I did, and taught him the game. And he's still alive in his eighties as I talk now. And Mark Hellinger died at his young age. Another man who was somewhat similar in his belief in magic about his own physical state was Oscar Lewis, who was a friend of mine. Oscar was the anthropologist.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

And he also died in his middle fifties by working under pressures that were too big for him. So that's that point. Oh, there is an item that should have been mentioned earlier in the year 1947, because there will be more about it later. Even though I was--Oh, no, Edward Robinson--No, this was before the case, Edward G. Robinson, whom I had met in the course of my one week of work on The Red House, got in touch with me and asked me to write a speech for a meeting that he was going to be at which was organized by the Hearst press each year and was called I Am an American Day, and it took place in Soldiers Field in Chicago, which always attracted 100,000 people. And I didn't know that I was just the newest one in a long string of writers that Robinson had gone to have people write speeches for him. However, he was a man who had ideas of his own and he told them to me, and they were very good ones. He just needed somebody to put it into words and I was perfectly happy to do it for him. There will be rather a payoff on it when I come to his testimony before the committee. As soon as the Ten, who had been held in contempt, had returned from Washington, there was the need to organize ourselves into a group that would be active in our own defense. We were facing the trials for criminal contempt of Congress, and there would be the costs of the trials which were enormous because, in order to properly handle them, in order to make a proper appeal, we had to buy the daily transcripts of the court reporter, and those would be very expensive. And even though our attorneys would work for nothing, the sums involved would be very large. So raising funds became an imperative duty, and we were no longer in a position of being able to assess ourselves for money. We also, on the strong advice of our attorneys, set about to launch a public campaign for support because the Supreme Court always has shown itself to be responsive to public opinion. If we want to put it this way: if, on a given day in the United States, 50 million people walked all over the cities and towns in the United States saying "Free the Hollywood Ten," or "Don't let them go to prison," they would have an effect on the Supreme Court. And while the lawyers would take care of the legal cases, we had to organize the public campaign. It came to our hiring an office at the Crossroads of the World in Hollywood, and recruiting volunteer helpers and, I think, probably one paid secretary, who might have been (I'm not sure whether she was paid or volunteer) Pauline Lauber Finn, a friend of many of us who had been formerly secretary of the Writers Mobilization during the war. Very, very interestingly, a young girl, extremely attractive and sweet-natured, by the name of Lori Niblo volunteered to help us, and this was of great interest because her brother Fred Niblo was one of the writers who was a member of the committee opposed to us, the Motion Picture Committee for the Preservation of American Ideals. [*Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals]

GARDNER

Did the others of the original Unfriendly Nineteen participate at all in this?

MALTZ

I'm going to mention that. That's a very relevant question. One very important project that was launched was the writing of a book that became Hollywood on Trial, by Gordon Kahn. Gordon was a former New York newspaperman who had worked, I think, in the Daily Mirror, and he was very well fitted to write a book rapidly as well as accurately. He was a very small man, probably no more than about five feet three, and an extremely witty man, and the only man I've ever known who wore a monocle. I think that we probably got some contributions to start our organization off from Robert Rossen and Larry Parks and a few others of the Nineteen. But I know that we saw very little of Milestone or Irving Pichel or others later. Some money was raised at a meeting we had had in mid-November at Gilmore Stadium, which was a much larger place than we could fill at that time. I remember that we planned a fund-raising dinner, which we held before the end of the year, where we raised a good sum of money and where we began to see a sign of the times. Because John Huston, who had been very active in the Committee for the First Amendment, agreed to be the chairman of the dinner, but he was a very soft chairman indeed, and there was no militancy at all in his attitude, and it was not long before he drifted away from any activity involved with us. I remember that we also planned a New Year's Eve party to raise money at the home, I think, of Larry Parks. Larry Parks at that time was very, very militant about the committee, and the change that occurred later is well known. The dynamo who made our committee work at the pace it did for the next two and a half years was Herbert Biberman, and I want to pause to give a bit of a sketch of him. Herbert was a man about six feet one or two, broad-shouldered, lean and muscular. At that time, I think, let me see, in '47.... Just shut it off for a moment please. [tape recorder turned off] A man of forty-five, he had been a director with the Theatre Guild in New York and had done some outstanding work. I think we spoke of this.

GARDNER

Briefly.

MALTZ

Yes, yes. And at the memorial meeting for him in 1971, different individuals said things about him which add up to a very accurate description. Stephen Fritchman, the Unitarian minister, said this: "People responded to Herbert, to his contagious enthusiasm for a common cause. He was endowed with an Old Testament righteous indignation. He had exuberant rhetoric and adrenaline. His very presence was impressive and could be formidable. He was ardent and earnest, a crusader in a hurry, and he brooked resistance reluctantly." Alvah Bessie spoke of his fanatical devotion. Adrian Scott recounted speaking in eastern colleges before hostile audiences and saying to Herbert before he went that he didn't know how to speak before audiences and never had spoken. And Herbert said, "You can speak, you'll go." And Adrian said, "I went." Lester Cole said Herbert managed to get many people to do things they would not otherwise do. And Trumbo said, "The man had style." And perhaps Trumbo was referring in part to the fact that Herbert was always impeccably dressed, and on his frame clothes looked magnificent. He always had a handkerchief in his jacket pocket and, for many years, a fresh flower in his lapel. He wore at least one very large ring on his large and powerful hands, and he unabashedly used perfumed toilet water many years before it became the habit for men to do that. And Mike Wilson spoke of his courage and fortitude and the capacity to endure and to achieve brotherhood in spite of opposition. And this sums up the various sides of Herbert. For two and a half years he did absolutely nothing except act as the motor wheel and dynamo for the activities of the Hollywood Ten. And it was in every respect due to him that we carried on as active a national campaign as we did. You want to... [tape recorder turned off] Immediately after the hearings had ended, we put--the Unfriendly Nineteen put an advertisement in Variety which was headed by the following box: "Man Wanted for Motion Pictures. Must be willing to take dictation, must pass Americanism, religious, political and racial examinations. Apply Mr. Thomas, Washington, D.C." And then we had some text to follow it for a full page.

GARDNER

What was the date of that?

MALTZ

That was October 31, 1947, in Variety. I don't have a date for this next advertisement. It was in Variety, and it was declared a reprint of an advertisement appearing that day in the Washington Post. It was addressed to the members of the House of Representatives of the Congress with an earnest request that the Congress consider certain facts which I won't repeat here. But it was the attempt to influence the members of Congress not to vote contempt citations. On the twenty-sixth of November, Howard Koch put an advertisement into the trade papers--this one was from Variety--which was just excellent. He said: "I am not and have never been a member of the Communist party. In making this statement, which I do under oath, I reserve the right to refuse to make it if I so choose at any future hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In my opinion the refusal of the ten men to answer this question on the stand was consistent with their deepest convictions that their silence was more eloquent than all the words spoken." He then went on to condemn the Un-American Activities Committee and to try and enlist the support of others for his position. It was a remarkably fine statement. [tape recorder turned off] Early in December a meeting of the Screen Writers Guild occurred in which there was a great deal of drama. The Producers Association had asked the Writers Guild to permit a committee from the producers to address them about the events that had occurred, and the board of the Writers Guild agreed. It was stated at the meeting that no Guild member would be permitted to make any comments while this committee from the producers was in the hall. The committee consisted of Walter Wanger, who had been a very liberal member of the community and, indeed, had been the producer of the film Blockade about Spain; and two MGM executives, Edward Mannix and James K. McGuinness; and Dore Schary. And it was Dore Schary who was chosen to be the spokesman for the group. Schary, who had said on the witness stand that he would not fire anyone for his political associations, but who had remained within the ranks of the producers when the Hotel Waldorf statement had been issued, now said, in effect, to the assembled screenwriters: Give us these ten men. Don't do anything about the fact that they have been blacklisted and we promise you that there will be no more blacklisting in the film industry. That was the sum and substance of what went on. Just the other night a friend of mine, a former screenwriter, Val Burton, described something that I had forgotten. He said that when... as the committee then left the hall on the way out, James McGuinness, who had produced Trumbo's film Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, sort of tried to half embrace Trumbo as he passed him on the aisle, and Val said that Trumbo looked as though he was hard put to restrain from hitting him, hitting McGuinness When they left the room, Trumbo jumped up and asked for the floor and was given it. And he spoke with tremendous passion, in great cutting fashion, about this request, starting with the fact that on a certain night at two in the morning he had been called by Walter Wanger and asked if he would fly to San Francisco and write the speech that [Edward Reilly] Stettinius used in opening the first meeting of the United Nations. The Guild did not at that... [phone rings] Excuse me. [tape recorder turned off] The members of the Guild did not take the position that the producers wanted at that time, although they would take it within several years. They voted to reject the request of the producers and voted to launch a legal suit against the producers for the firings and the blacklist. Thurman Arnold, who had been, I think, a former [assistant] attorney general, was engaged to represent the Guild in this case. The Guild itself did not--I don't know whether the Guild voted any Guild funds for the case; I do know that there was an appeal to the members for contributions on it and that I contributed $500 to it. Whatever happened to that $500 I don't know--but nothing good. This was a period in which we began to feel the pressures of political reaction. At random, certain examples come to my mind: for instance, a kind of rogues' gallery of our faces appeared in the whole Hearst press in which it was very easy to see how the photographs had been touched up so that we looked like a row of gangsters. It was the beginning of a steady stream of slander on the part of columnists like Westbrook Pegler, George Sokolsky, Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Fulton Lewis, and others. I know I got letters from crazy schizophrenics and some poison-pen letters and several death threats by phone. Phone tapping, of course I mentioned before, occurred always.

GARDNER

Did you have any significant support in the press of columnists of any kind?

MALTZ

No. There were in the press attacks, sometimes, or criticisms of the Un-American Activities Committee. There was that; but I don't recall any support of our position except in the Left press, and there was support in, let's say, in the Nation. And there was certainly support in the press that was the Communist press. There were all sorts of little incidents. I remember one morning I paused at a liquor store on my way to my office (the office I then had where I worked), and as I turned around to go out of the store, a woman and a man came up to me, and a flash light-bulb suddenly exploded in my face, and then they ran off and got into a car. This was probably just some independent photographer who had connected with me in some way, and she was going to try and sell a picture. Stupid irritations like that. At the same time, there was another type of public reaction which was very good and very warming. For instance, a watchmaker who, when my wife gave her name, asked if she was my wife and then wouldn't take any money to repair my watch; a stewardess on a plane who paused just to whisper to me that she was all for the position we had taken, and other manifestations like that. On December 11, there were preliminary--I think I must have mentioned that we were indicted by a grand jury, but if I haven't, we were [indicted] within a short time after the citations by Congress. And we were booked, we had preliminary bookings downtown in Los Angeles, with the usual press photographs. There were photographs for just about anything. And so it amounted to being fingerprinted, pleading, and there was a $1,000 bail assessment for each of us, and Herbert Biberman put up $10,000 so that we wouldn't have to pay any bail bond money. My income from writing in 1947 was $43,000, and it came from The Cross and Arrow royalties and what I had earned from Naked City and from the story "Evening in Modesto" that I had sold. The first event in 1948 was that we had to go to Washington D.C. for the actual arraignment. Our lawyers, of course, had requested that we be formally arraigned in Los Angeles, but the government insisted that it had to be at the scene of the crime. And it was very clearly the government's desire to drain us of money. We had to cross the country for a one-hour arraignment in court and come back again. But that was costly. And the government also wanted to hold the trial in a city that it controlled much more than it did in L.A., and so we had to go. I went by train, with Adrian Scott on the train with me, and I hired a small bedroom, I guess it's called, and I set to work immediately on McKeever, which I think I had stopped with about ninety-three pages in hand. In Washington we appeared before a judge, and each one of us pleaded not guilty. We were then taken downstairs in an elevator to a booking room. It was in this room that we would descend in two and a half years on our way to jail. We were fingerprinted and photographed, and I'm quite sure that I had mixed feelings of apprehension on the one hand, and a measure of pride on the other. And, since it came to my mind the other day in preparing these notes, I expect that at that time I remembered reading in Gorky, some autobiographical material of Gorky's, that he felt an immense pride when he was first arrested in czarist Russia because he had then officially joined those on the honor role of being opposed to czarism. Well, I was not living in czarist Russia, and I didn't feel the same way about it, but there was a certain measure of pride in the situation. Naked City opened in January to very fine reviews and to smashing business. Alas, Hellinger was not there to witness it, and that was very unhappy. I was very glad about its commercial success because Hellinger had told me after I finished the script that he was going to give me 5 percent of his profits. This was not a contractual matter between us, but it was something that he said he always wanted to do with people with whom he worked. I know that Jules Dassin got a percentage, and I don't know about Wald, but I presume he might have also. And this proved to be important to me in the years of the blacklist. Naked City broke all box office records in the twenty-eight-year history of the Capitol Theatre in New York. And members of the League of Women Shoppers distributed petitions in front of the Capitol Theatre which were addressed to Louis B. Mayer, chairman of the Producers Steering Committee. The leaflet said Naked City was written by Albert Maltz in collaboration with Malvin Wald; Maltz, one of the Hollywood Ten, is blacklisted by the motion picture industry; and Maltz and nine other men cannot earn a living, they cannot work on another picture unless you, the audience, demand that the producers end the blacklist. And it said, "Fold this leaflet here and mail," and attached to it was something already addressed to Louis B. Mayer. Well, this was prepared in the office of the Hollywood Ten, and it was an example of the type of campaign that we waged throughout the two and a half years; we sought any opportunity we could to advance our case. The political scene at this time was the following. The hysteria that had started at the top level of government with Truman's loyalty oath order in March '47 had spread in the course of the year. Truman himself had extended the oath to cover employees of industries filling military contracts--some millions of individuals--and of those millions, not quite 500 resigned rather than sign the oath. But only a few hundred were ever fired even though among the questions used to test loyalty was whether an individual had ever listened to the music of Hanns Eisler or read a novel by Howard Fast. The rise to prominence and power of informers became the fashion of the day even though they invariably seemed to be afflicted with pasts that couldn't bear examination, or problems like alcoholism, or the inability to give testimony that wasn't easily disproven as perjury. School and town libraries began to remove books like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Fast's Citizen Tom Paine, and Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit, and magazines like the Nation. Bertrand Russell proposed that the Russians should be threatened with atomic annihilation if they continued to reject America's bomb control plan. Norman Thomas, a longtime Socialist party leader, expressed the belief that civilization depended on obliterating the Soviet Union. Columnist after columnist and public figure after public figure spoke as though there had to be a war with the Soviet Union, or that if the Soviet Union ever got the atom bomb, the United States would be finished. Samuel Grafton, the columnist on the New York Post, and an old friend of mine, wrote that the nerves of the American people were being rubbed raw. There were voices against this: Henry Wallace, Alexander Meiklejohn (former president of the [University of] Wisconsin), [University of] Chicago's president Robert M. Hutchins, Henry Steele.... [phone rings--tape recorder turned off]

1.42. TAPE NUMBER: XVIII, SIDE TWO
DECEMBER 8, 1978

GARDNER

You left off as you were describing...

MALTZ

Yes.

GARDNER

...your support.

MALTZ

Yes, Henry Steele Commager of Columbia University, Zechariah Chafee (a constitutional expert) of Harvard, and Supreme Court justices Douglas and Black. But it was extremely interesting that leading literary figures like Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Eugene O'Neill, Norman Mailer, and others of that status were silent. However, the forces of the Left and liberal progressive forces were full of fight. On Labor Day, 1948, there was a fight-back meeting in Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles at which Henry Wallace spoke. Wallace, to paraphrase a footnote on page 78 of The American Inquisition by Belfrage, Wallace had been barred from the Hollywood Bowl and the University of California campus. He spoke to an overflow audience of 30,000 in Gilmore Stadium. Among his active sponsors at the time, or accompanying speakers, or financial contributors at the meeting, were Katharine Hepburn, Jose Ferrer, Paul Draper, Zero Mostel, Lillian Hellman, Canada Lee, Uta Hagen, Paul Robeson, Charles Chaplin, Edward G. Robinson, Dorothy Parker, John Garfield, Hedy LaMarr, Frank Tuttle, Budd Schulberg, and Paul Henreid. Linus Pauling, Nobel laureate scientist, was a speaker and California's ex-attorney general, Robert W. Kenny, chaired the meeting. I have mentioned these names in order to give an additional comment. First, I wrote Kenny's speech. Of the other names I've just read, the following happened after the Ten went to jail: Ferrer, Frank Tuttle and Budd Schulberg became informers; Paul Draper, Zero Mostel, Lillian Hellman, Canada Lee, Paul Robeson and Dorothy Parker were blacklisted; Canada Lee died. In 1948 Wallace became a candidate for president on a third-party ticket, the Progressive party. The media treated him not as a former vice-president but as an agent of Stalin. For documentation of this I would recommend a book The Press and the Cold War by James Aronson, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1970. Norman Thomas labeled Wallace "a Communist captive, preaching peace by blind appeasement." This and infinitely more comprised the atmosphere in which we in the Hollywood Ten prepared for our trials. The Hollywood Ten received support from many individuals and from varied groups in different communities. It was small groups of people who invited the Ten to send speakers to different university campuses. Nelson Algren, the novelist, headed a group in Chicago. The Arts, Sciences and Professions [Committee] of the Progressive Citizens of America was very active, primarily in New York and Los Angeles. The Unitarian church in Los Angeles, under the leadership of Stephen Fritchman, gave us full support. The Communist party of Hollywood helped us, but the Communist party nationally did not. To my best recollection, the national Communist party gave us no help whatsoever. It was embattled by various attacks upon it, and indeed, in the summer of 1948, its top leadership was arrested under the Smith Act. But even beforehand, its attitude seemed to be, by implication, you're doing fine boys, go ahead. And we had no leadership from the Communist party in Los Angeles. We made all decisions and did everything on our own. At the end of March 1948 I spoke in New York City at a "Stop Censorship" meeting in the Hotel Astor ballroom. The people who had been active in the committee had done a fine job of organizing, and the audience of perhaps 300 or 400 was an audience of very distinguished people in literature, theater, and the arts in general. I know I recognized certain individuals in the audience like Elmer Rice and John Hersey and Joe Hirsch (the painter) and others. I was the main speaker and I was preceded by Burgess Meredith, Florence Eldridge, Jose Ferrer, and Christopher La Farge. I made my principal appeal on the issue of censorship. [phone rings--tape recorder turned off] I said this in the course of my remarks: We who are assembled here tonight are varied people. We cannot possibly have the same tastes, creeds, sympathies or ideas. It is not urgent that we do so. It is extremely urgent, however, that as artists working in different fields we preserve for ourselves the right to work free of censorship. That right depends upon the freedom to think and to express our thoughts. And then, in a reference to remarks I had made earlier, I said: This evil has a long history. Are you or are you not a Christian, you who commit treason against the Roman state by your belief in Jesus Christ? Are you or are you not a Jew? Keep silent at your peril because it is the Inquisition that asks. Do you uphold the God-given right to own slaves? And if you don't, you'd better not speak out, you damned abolitionist, because you'll rot in a swamp. Are you or are you not an Irishman and a Roman Catholic? And why should I, a member of the American party in 1854, give you a job, rent you a house, allow you liberty the equal of mine? Are you or are you not a member of a trade union? If you are, you can't work here. The question varies, the punishment varies, but it is essentially the same question directed to the same ends. For myself, I will not go along with these questions. I ask the right to my own ideas, the right to speak them or hold them in private, free of inquisition. My newspaper scrapbook tells me that I received an ovation after this, and it's interesting that I completely forgot that over the years, because the temper of the times was such that this committee languished and did very little afterwards. Each time that I returned home from a trip like this, I put in as many hours on McKeever as I could. But there were always meetings of the Ten, meetings with the attorneys, sometimes I made three local speeches a week. However, my adrenaline was flowing at a very high rate, and I kept going many hours a day. The others of the Ten were also very busy, of course, but didn't have the same schedule as mine. I'm sure that Lawson did a great deal of local speaking. I don't recall whether he went on any of the national tours. And I think it was the same with Sam Ornitz. Lester Cole, Adrian Scott, Ring Lardner, and Alvah Bessie had various speaking engagements in the East and Midwest, although Lardner went to Switzerland for some months to work on a film, and Dmytryk was abroad for about a year and a half in London, during which time he made two films.

GARDNER

There was no objection to...

MALTZ

No, this...

GARDNER

...any of the Ten leaving the country?

MALTZ

No, there was no passport policy at that time. But later, as I will mention, after we lost our case in the appellate court, both Dmytryk and, I think, Lardner, who was also still abroad, were asked by the Justice Department to return home, and they did so. My records tell me that in the middle of May there was a meeting in Madison Square Garden which was an anti-Mundt Bill rally under the auspices of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. The Mundt Bill, which I think later became the Mundt-Nixon Bill...

GARDNER

Your tape's out.

MALTZ

Thank you. [tape recorder turned off]... Nixon bill established a Subversive Activities Control Board that required so-called heretical groups to register as traitors. Howard Fast and I were the featured speakers at this meeting, and I don't remember anything about it at all. [laughter] It was just another meeting. Now, it could be that at this time, when I was in New York, I was telephoned and asked to join Charles Katz, one of our lawyers, in a trip to Washington for purposes that I'm now vague about; it could possibly have been in 1949 rather than in this year. All I know is that it was in the baseball season, because when Charles and I were in Manhattan, Charlie said, "We've got an afternoon, let's take a cab over to Brooklyn and watch Jackie Robinson play, I've never seen him play." So we went to a Dodger baseball game. But I do recall several events in Washington that I want to mention, one in particular. We saw and chatted with a man who was a member of Truman's private cabinet. He was his adviser on minorities (and I don't remember his name), and I guess all we did was talk about the significance of the case to him and hoped that he might drop a little pearl in Truman's ear. The fascinating thing that occurred there was when we went to dinner in Washington at Harvey's Restaurant--I don't know whether I mentioned Harvey's before, have I?

GARDNER

No, I don't think so.

MALTZ

Well Harvey's Restaurant at that time was probably the best, or one of the best, eating places in Washington. It occupied several floors of an old building, and it had superb fish and a great ale which was a blend of its own. It also had an aura of age and tradition about it. And so whenever we were in Washington we went and ate at Harvey's. I had heard, I think, before this night that J. Edgar Hoover ate in Harvey's a good many nights a week, but since I had previously only been on one of the upper floors, I had never seen him. This time we were seated on the ground floor and with us was Lee Pressman, a chief attorney of the CIO whom I have mentioned earlier. And after we had been there for a little bit, J. Edgar Hoover came in. Now, it is interesting that in a period when gossip columnists like Winchell thought it was a neat scoop if they could mention that some prominent individual was a swish that there wasn't a whisper about Hoover, because I have never seen someone who was more obviously homosexual than Hoover was. He was a much bigger man than I realized, heavy and paunchy, with a very red face. And his behavior was unmistakable. Now, while we were sitting there, a man my age came with a party, passed me, and said with a little smile, "Hello, Albert," and went right on. This was Leon Keyserling, who was President Truman's chief economic adviser and who had been a schoolmate of mine at Columbia College. We had been friends there, and it was revelatory of the period that he didn't stop to shake hands, and stop for a moment or pause for some short chat, but said hello and went right on. However, it was also interesting that another party came in, and one of the members I recognized. It was the attorney, Morris Ernst, who was active in the [American] Civil Liberties Union and who had been an ally of mine in the council of the Authors League of America in opposing those who wanted to kick the Screen Writers Guild out of the Authors League. Morris Ernst threw up his hands in joyful surprise at seeing J. Edgar, and both men shook hands very warmly--I forget whether they embraced. I learned later that Morris Ernst had become Hoover's personal lawyer. However, the most interesting person of that evening was Lee Pressman. From the time that Hoover entered, Pressman became impossible. He changed his body position in his chair about three times every minute, exclaiming, "Oh, I can't look at that man! Oh, how I hate that man! How that man hates me!" And he went on like this in a manner that was impossible to curb. He spoiled dinner for me, if not also for Charlie Katz, because of this terrible restlessness and that repeated refrain. It's very fascinating that it was about... I think it was shortly after we entered prison that Pressman became an informer. And this was the payoff on his behavior that night. One further grace note about this: somewhere along in the case Herbert Biberman told me that--Oh, no... it was later, in Washington when we were waiting to go into jail, that Herbert Biberman told me that he had made a speech at someone's home in which he referred to Hoover's homosexuality. (It was, I think, the kind of invidious reference that nowadays Herbert would not make about someone who is homosexual.) However, the next morning two FBI men were at his door, and they said, "You made a reference to Mr. Hoover last night, and you're going to have to either put up or shut up." And Herbert told me this because, as we were waiting to be sentenced, he had the fear that he might get two years for having made that remark. The reason why he could get two years, and it was the same for all of us, was that we had been indicted on two counts for refusal to answer two questions, and each of them could have gotten us a year. It turned out quite differently, as I'll mention in due course. In April '48 the book by Gordon Kahn, Hollywood on Trial, was published. It remains today an excellent book after thirty years. And whenever we, any one of us in the Ten spoke, we would take copies of the book with us for sale. All royalties went to the financial needs of the case and not to Gordon. On May 2 or 3, I was in Washington for my trial. John Howard Lawson, the first of us to go on trial, had already been convicted, and Dalton Trumbo was on trial. Now, all of us were staying, not at the luxury Hotel Shoreham, but at a very modestly priced old hotel, the Lafayette, which happened to be across the large area of Lafayette Park from the White House. I remember that I was in a room, a two-bed room, with Ben Margolis. I'd like to pause and make a comment on the role of the FBI in those trials, and I'll speak now of the role of the FBI in the blacklist. When Lawson and Trumbo were on trial, the FBI went to the neighbors of the jurors. Now, J. Edgar Hoover invariably asserted before Congress, when he was asking for money for his outfit, or when he was giving out publicity releases, that the FBI was merely an investigative agency and that it turned its findings over to the attorney general and did nothing else. Well, this was as large a lie as that liar has ever told. Because it was in fact a very active secret police following Hoover's directions. Now, most of the jurors in the Trumbo and Lawson cases were government employees. And by sending FBI agents to the neighbors of the jurors, the FBI knew very well that the neighbors would immediately run to the home of the jurors and say, "Hey, the FBI has been here asking about your husband." No more intimidating an act could have been conceived to get those jurors to vote guilty in the case of Lawson and Trumbo. Later, during the blacklist when someone hired a blacklisted person, the FBI immediately intervened there. It would go to an employer and say... two men would go to an employer and say, "I wonder if you know that so-and-so is a subversive and that he refused to testify before the Un-American Activities Committee?" Most often the employer would say, "I didn't know that. Thank you very much. I will get rid of him immediately." And in that way the FBI sought to continue barring the given individual from any employment whatsoever. But if the employer said, "Yes, I know that. It doesn't make any difference to me," the FBI agents would say, "Well, now, that's very interesting. We wonder why you are willing to hire a subversive, and you're not concerned about it." And thereupon they would begin to investigate the employer. And this was all of a part with what was later revealed in the Watergate period, that the FBI had entered into secret activities to influence election campaigns, that it had committed burglaries, and that in general it acted like the secret police of any dictatorship. In view of the fact that Lawson had been convicted and that it looked as though Trumbo would be as well, our attorneys had discussed trying something with me that they hoped might possibly have an effect upon the jury. That was to have me act as a cocounsel with them, and have me speak to the jury somewhere along, I guess, at the end of the case in the final summation. And so I didn't attend the last several days of the Trumbo trial, but I worked in the hotel on an assignment that Ben gave me. And when he came back in the afternoon and heard the way I had handled it, I had done everything wrong from the point of view of the court, because he said that I would be interrupted by objections by the prosecutor in every line I suggested, and I felt very frustrated and didn't know how I was going to be able to do the job. It proved that I didn't have to because, when my day in court came in the next day or so, the attorneys, after I had been in court for about an hour, came to an agreement with the prosecutor which was as follows: that the eight of us who had not yet been tried would agree to accept the final verdict in the Lawson and Trumbo cases. If the verdict was that they go to jail, then we would automatically go to jail, and vice versa. This was desirable from our point of view because the cost of eight more trials was enormous, and also the time involved for the attorneys; and it was satisfactory to the government in order not to repeat all of the cases. And so I did not go on trial at that time, nor did the other seven. This might be a moment for me to express what I felt so keenly then: the enormous debt that I think this nation owes to those courageous and principled and hardworking attorneys who have helped keep the United States a democracy. Because in so many instances the law of our land has depended upon particular decisions and cases, and if not for attorneys who were willing in many cases to risk their own status in society and to work, often without fee, for principled reasons, this would be a very different nation. After the agreement had been reached, I drove back to Philadelphia and New York for meetings with Eddie Dmytryk, who had come for his trial also, and with his fiancée, Jean Porter, a young actress. They wanted to get married, and they had picked some place in Maryland where instant marriages were legally possible. I stopped off with them and, since I was there, became their best man. I mention this because it became extremely important later in my ability to write a certain article I did about Dmytryk in the year 1951, when he became an informer. In June, [for] three days--June 4, 5, and 6--there was a peace conference in Hollywood that was held at the Roosevelt Hotel. I don't know how it was that I became as involved in it as I did. I think it was just that there was a vacuum in the organization of the conference, which was done by the ASP [Arts, Sciences, and Professions Committee], and in some way I gave an enormous amount of my time to it for about three weeks. [tape recorder turned off] The conference took place at the Hollywood Masonic Temple on Hollywood Boulevard, and the honorary chairmen were Thomas Mann and a scientist, I believe, Frits Went. We had a good many scientists involved in the several days of discussion, the most prominent of whom, perhaps, was Dr. Philip Morrison, who had been the physicist who had assembled the first atomic bomb in the plane when it was dropped over Hiroshima, and it was of course of great significance that now he was out in a public campaign for peace. Carey McWilliams spoke and Thomas Mann spoke, and I remember I spoke at it also. I remember with feeling a private meeting that took place before that conference at the home of two people I knew casually and whose names I forget with embarrassment. I'll think of it later. They subsequently were the authors of the play Anne Frank [Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich]. And this was a meeting of some people in the film industry to try and get their support, their public support, of this peace conference. I remember a moment in which Shelley Winters, who was then a young rising person in the field, said to Burt Lancaster, "I'll come out for it if you will, Burt." And she added very frankly, "I don't want to lose this little career I've got going. I've been a hoofer for too many years." The purpose of telling this story is to illustrate the climate of fear surrounding the word peace. [doorbell rings--tape recorder turned off] In the middle of June there was a meeting at the Embassy Auditorium on the case of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, the members of the board who were on their way to jail, and I forget who the speakers were--I have it somewhere in my scrapbooks--but one of them was Dorothy Parker, and I was asked to pick her up because she needed transportation. I had never met her before. She lived with her husband, [Alan] Campbell, in a musty apartment, a musty old apartment in Hollywood, and she made me wait for about fifteen minutes while, with a vacant look, she went on a hunt for her gloves. And I didn't know whether she was swacked or what was happening with her, but I know that I was astonished by that empty look in her eyes. However, she spoke extremely well when we were on the platform. And so I never figured her out. On that day Variety published an open letter from the Ten on the case of the Anti-Fascist Committee which Alvah Bessie and I wrote. And in the middle of August I published a letter in the Saturday Review of Literature on the case of the Anti-Fascist Committee in which I said the following. [tape recorder turned off] I said that I believe that the Saturday Review needed to call upon the leading literary men and women of America, calling upon them publicly by name--Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Pearl Buck, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Louis Bromfield, Robert Sherwood, Carl Van Doren and Bernard De Voto, John Marquand, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill--and ask them to interrupt their work and their lives in order to speak out on this issue, to agitate and split the sky with their indignation. "And I believe deeply that you must insist that if they remain silent, then they will be abdicating their moral responsibility." And those people remained silent. And the issue in the Joint Anti-Fascist case was very much simpler than the Hollywood Ten case. The members of the board had refused to hand over to the Un-American Activities Committee the names of contributors to refugee relief. And yet there was silence. When I was about three-quarters finished with the Simon McKeever novel, I got the offer of an excellent film job from an independent producer. It came to me through Adrian Scott. The material was splendid and the money was good. It was not what I would have gotten if there had been no blacklist, but it was much higher than the black-market rates that generally obtained after 1951. And I wanted it, in part, to use the money for the legal fund of the Ten I continued work on McKeever while I was starting to plan the film, and when I finished McKeever at the end of September, I began full-time work on the movie.

GARDNER

What was the film?

MALTZ

It was a film that we'll call the unnamed film. I can't name it still today because of the individual who put his name to it. The individual who put his name to it had no knowledge of what would happen to it, and it became an extremely successful film when it came out. It was the most successful film that he had ever written, and he got a great deal of mileage out of it. Now, when he put his name to it, he didn't know that would happen; and yet there was no way for him to repudiate it when it did happen. He had to accept the rewards that came with it, and it would be an unfair penalty on him ever to say that he hadn't written it. So I....

GARDNER

You never intend to reveal that?

MALTZ

No. I'm stuck with it as he was stuck with it. When I finished the manuscript of McKeever, I asked a number of friends to read it and give me their suggestions and criticisms, and one of them was Adrian Scott. And Adrian came back with a comment that astonished me: he said that he thought it could make a very good film. It had never occurred to me in the course of writing it that there would be a film in a story about an old man. But he asked me if I would let him try and set up an independent production, and I said of course. And he went out and gave the manuscript to Walter Huston, who was then about the leading actor in American films, and Huston was delighted with the role and used to go around reading from the manuscript at parties. And so I just waited to see what would happen. I think I might mention that whenever I was in Los Angeles, there was during this whole period, once a week, a five o'clock tennis game with Judd Marmor, who was an old friend of mine--in fact, we had gone to college together, and he was now a practicing analyst and would become president of the Psychiatric Society of America--and with another analyst, and then with either Adrian Scott or a motion picture producer, Julian Blaustein, who was my friend. The Sundays at Roxbury Park continued with my kids and always with a tennis game in the afternoon with Phil Stevenson and a journalist we knew, Michael Simmons, and one of his two sons. During 1948 signs of what the blacklist in film writing would mean to my literary career as a whole began to become apparent. The project by the former head of German UFA to make The Cross and the Arrow as a film went down the drain, and I had been in correspondence since '46 with a translator in the American Zone of Germany. It was a very cordial correspondence, and she had translated and published a number of my stories. But I suddenly received a letter which she wrote me with great regret telling me that she could no longer collaborate with me and asked me to stop writing to her because it would get her in trouble. However, there continued to be reprints of my work abroad in many other countries. I see by my publication ledger that I did two other pieces of writing in 1948. I wrote a brochure called "We Stand Against the Inquisitors" that was signed by Harlow Shapley, Carey McWilliams and others. I have no copy of it. And I participated in writing the conclusion to the appeal brief of the defense in the case of the United States against John Howard Lawson. This was merely a request on the part of the lawyers for me to try and get, I don't know, some flowers into the brief. Now, my income from writing in 1947 had been $43,000, and in '48 it was fifteen thousand and a half. Most of this was from The Cross and the Arrow royalties in the United States and abroad, and several thousand from the Naked City royalties, and 7,000 from the unnamed movie. In....

GARDNER

I'm just about at the end of the tape, so why don't we break for the moment here.

MALTZ

All right.

1.43. TAPE NUMBER: XIX, SIDE ONE
DECEMBER 18, 1978

MALTZ

I continued to work on the unnamed film until mid-February, when the producer and I were satisfied with it. It was a big job, but it had gone very well and had taken me only five months. Before I was finished, we had had to get a writer we knew to put his name on it, and this was accomplished. The screenplay sold very quickly to a studio for a large sum. Since there are so many stories about producer-hustlers, I would like to mention that there had been a misunderstanding between me and this producer about the sum that I would get if it were sold. I thought it was going to be about 5,000 more than he recalled it to be, and since he knew that I wanted to use most of it for the legal fund of the case, he just gave me the larger sum. And he's not the only producer I've known who is a man of absolute honor.

GARDNER

You couldn't name the producer either?

MALTZ

No, I can't name the producer.... A man of absolute honor. At the end of February, I spoke at a testimonial dinner in San Francisco for a labor, Paul--Well, I have to pause just a second... [tape recorder turned off] It was Paul Schnur. And I want to quote from it a little bit, because in order to face what was all around myself and others in our society, I had a need to work out philosophic and political attitudes, and this is one example of that. If there are things we cherish about this world and this nation of ours, and there is much to cherish, none of these goods have come to us by accident. The majesty of the American nation is the result of a process in which many people, celebrated and anonymous, participated. Ralph Waldo Emerson had a hand in the shaping of our lives when he joined the executive board of the Boston vigilante committee for the abolition of slavery [*Abolitionist Vigilante Committee of Boston]; so also Dr. [Joseph] Goldberger, eating pellets of dung in order to demonstrate that pellagra is a disease of malnutrition and not of infection; so also the conservative jurist Charles Evans Hughes, condemning the 1921 Palmer raids against radicals as an outrage upon the entire American people. These were but three of the movers and shakers who, by one action or another, helped mold the world in which we live, and all that they did was part of the large turning wheel that is the march of the people. The New York City trade union that went to the Civil War in a body in order to abolish slavery; the Philadelphia shoemakers who organized a trade union in 1809 even though it was declared a conspiracy against the government to do so; the millions who have spoken up with courage to a neighbor and cried shame, who have signed petitions, tossed tea into Boston Harbor, given pennies to save Sacco and Vanzetti, walked picket lines--we are part of this, each one of us. We stretch far back, go deep, and can be effective. We have reason to feel kinship and take pride. We will not lose in the end in our quest for peace and social justice. It is impossible ultimately to lose a good fight. The struggle on behalf of a good fight is in itself a victory. That's the end of that quotation, and perhaps I might want to reflect a little more upon the sum of what I said as to whether or not I believe it holds up. But the main point of it is that I was then not just speaking to others, I was speaking to myself. And it was of the greatest importance at that time, and it proved to be of even greater importance in the blacklist years, to find a philosophy by which one could live contentedly. At the end of February '49 our attorneys argued the appeals of Lawson and Trumbo before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. During this period, hysteria, manufactured on high, continued in both the foreign and domestic scenes, and in both scenes it was fed by real events: for instance, the struggle with the Soviet Union over Berlin and the successful American and British airlift. This went on for six months. Domestically, among the prime events was the first Alger Hiss trial of 1949, and this is perhaps the time to mention that, as everyone knows, Nixon started his real career, and it led to the presidency, over the Hiss case. In 1975 the bulletin of the New York Committee on Emergency Civil Liberties came out with a photograph of Nixon holding the microfilm found in the--allegedly found in the pumpkin papers by Chambers, the witness against Hiss. I've garbled my sentence, but it was Nixon holding the microfilm up and peering at these photographs of "secret" documents that Hiss had allegedly turned over to Chambers. In '75, under the Freedom of Information Act, the content of these pumpkin papers was revealed. Several of them were blank, and the others were routine reports dealing with navy lifeboats, I believe, and fire extinguishers. So that here was a man who started on his way to the presidency by what must have been known as an absolute falsehood at that time.

GARDNER

Turn off for a second, let me tell you something. [tape recorder turned off]

MALTZ

At the same time that the Hiss case was being tried in New York, there was the trial of the eleven Communist party leaders on grounds of conspiracy to overthrow the government by force and violence. And in late August there were the terrible events at Peekskill, New York. Just in case this oral history is ever read by someone who is not familiar with the events, I would like to give a short quote on it from the Belfrage book. [tape recorder turned off] This is a quotation from page 107 of the Belfrage book: "Learning of a plot by male, female, and child heretics to hear Paul Robeson sing of peace and brotherhood in a quiet spot near Peekskill, New York, American Legionnaires mobilized local patriots to frustrate them with clubs, rocks, and police and state-trooper support. The heretics refused to take warning from the first onslaught and organized a second concert with subversive war veterans forming a protective ring around the audience. The strategy of the patriots, among whom women and teen-agers abounded, was to line the only exit road after Robeson finished singing. Police formed a gauntlet through which concertgoers could be forced for the club-wielders' convenience, and in a polyphony of shattered car-windshields and cries of 'Commies, nigger-lovers, kikes, string 'em up!' substantial casualties were inflicted: 145 injured, one almost totally blinded, two not quite killed." Howard Fast, who was on the platform at both meetings, wrote a pamphlet called Peekskill, U.S.A., which was published by the Civil Rights Congress and which is a very graphic account of the absolutely hideous events. At the second meeting there were close to 25,000 people, but the attack upon them was so tactically organized by the police and the vigilantes that no defense was possible once they had left the meeting ground. During this period the blacklisting and blackmailing activities of Red Channels, Counterattack, and AWARE were going on and getting strength. Adrian Scott had been unable to get backing for a film based on my McKeever novel. And some weeks before official publication date, I received bound copies.

GARDNER

Who was your publisher?

MALTZ

Little, Brown and Company.

GARDNER

It still was Little, Brown?

MALTZ

Yes, they had published all of my novels before I was blacklisted--well, my three novels, that's all there were. And I gave the copies to Mary Baker, my agent, and after she read the book she said, why don't we submit it for films? Because, at that time, the blacklist statement, the blacklist edict, applied only to the employment of the ten men and not to original material. To my absolute astonishment, three studios bid on it in the first week. And we sold it for the highest price offered, $35,000, to Twentieth Century-Fox.

GARDNER

So you couldn't write for the studios, but they could buy your novel?

MALTZ

That's right. That was the situation then. Fox immediately began production plans. Fox hired Jules Dassin to direct it, a writer whose name I forget to do the screenplay, and they opened negotiations with Walter Huston to play the role. Now, I want to read.... [tape recorder turned off] Within four or five days after the announcement by Fox that it had purchased my book, a campaign was started in the Hearst press to have Fox back out of the purchase. And the Motion Picture Committee [Alliance] for the Preservation of American Ideals began to bombard the board of directors of Fox in New York in protesting this purchase. And within two weeks of the date of its purchase, the board of directors in New York announced that McKeever was not going to be made as a film. And the New York Times noted that "studio abandons The Journey of Simon McKeever in a move unique in Hollywood," saying that "public abandonment of a story property less than two weeks after its purchase is unique in Hollywood practice... and although neither Spyros Skouras, president of the corporation, nor Darryl Zanuck, vice president in charge of production, was available for comment, it was understood that the decision was reached as a matter of corporate policy, in effect disavowing the purchase because of Maltz's alleged Communist connections." The Nation wrote the following: "The cancellation emphasizes the importance of a statement issued by the Authors League at the time of the Hearings. In the past, the statement says, 'censorship commonly operated only against a work produced and issued to the public and only against one work at a time, with the author being afforded the opportunity of refuting the specific accusations in a court of law.' But the new censorship runs not against the work but against the man. For the motion picture industry has now made it painfully clear that the anti-Communist hiring policy applies not merely to the employment of certain writers but to the entire work of these writers, past, present, and future, regardless of content or subject matter." And so this was the extension of the blacklist to all original work written by the ten men, and later this applied, of course, to everyone else who was blacklisted. There was a protest meeting organized by the Hollywood Ten at the El Patio Theatre in Hollywood on March 25. The chairman of the meeting was Stephen Fritchman of the Unitarian church, and the speakers were Carey McWilliams, Bob Kenny, Karen Morley, and myself. There was also a dramatization of the novel by Arthur Laurents with Will Geer playing the leading role. And the dramatization was done as though it were a radio drama, around a microphone. My talk had the title (in the small book I later published called The Citizen Writer) of "The Anti-American Conspiracy," and I want to read a few remarks from it. I said: "For this is the purpose behind the blacklist of a university professor or of ten men of Hollywood, of forty postal employees or eighteen county workers or a dozen scientists. The purpose is the regimentation of all professors and all government workers and all film artists. One is destroyed in order that a thousand will be rendered silent and impotent by fear. Through fear and hysteria Americans are to be induced to give up their rights as free citizens." Less than a month later the [Arts, Sciences, and Professions Committee] had a meeting at Carnegie Hall in New York to launch a new cultural center. The chairmen were John Martin, the dance critic of the New York Times, Arthur Miller, and Clifford Odets. And Joseph Bromberg, the actor, redirected the dramatization of McKeever written by Laurents and did it in the form of a regular play. I was not present. They also did a short work, "I've Got the Tune," by Marc Blitzstein. I might pause to remark that Joe Bromberg was a man I knew cordially although not intimately, who happened to be the man to teach me how to play chess, and his son Conrad used to play ball with me at Roxbury Park. And Marc Blitzstein, I will take the opportunity now to say, was a very dear friend when I lived in New York and someone I cherished. He was talented and was a most engaging man personally, with a tragic emotional problem. When I met him he was married, and his wife died within a few years of that time. And Marc even then was, I believe, a homosexual, and he seemed to have a compulsion to go down to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and pick up sailors. And the last time I saw him, he was staying for a while in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and we had a very fond reunion. And then in the early sixties, I believe--in the mid-sixties he was beaten to death, I think in the Virgin Islands, by several sailors. And I've always tried to change my thoughts when I... when the image comes of that sensitive, marvelous man... just being bludgeoned to death.

GARDNER

He, too, suffered from the...

MALTZ

...the blacklist?

GARDNER

...the blacklist, didn't he?

MALTZ

Marc? No, I don't think Marc was blacklisted, no. Well, I don't know.

GARDNER

Because it seems to me the volume of his work really was not significant after the late forties, and suddenly he was revived again in the sixties.

MALTZ

No, no, that's not right. Because now I remember it was during the blacklist era that he had long, a very long-running version of The Threepenny Opera for which he had done the translation.

GARDNER

Oh, I wasn't aware of that.

MALTZ

...and he had done the lyrics; it played in New York. And Marc was not blacklisted. He was just such a lovely person. And it's so tragic that he had this compulsion. McKeever was then published, and it had, interestingly and significantly, about half the reviews in the country that The Cross and the Arrow had had. I made a mistake in deciding to list, in addition to other work published, the films that I had worked on because this was a clue for various reviewers to say that of course I had written the book with Hollywood in mind; and with that disparaging comment, they tossed the book aside. However, it had quite a number of quite good reviews. In the New York Times the review by William Du Bois said, "in a tightly plotted short novel Mr. Maltz achieves an effect all too rare in current fiction, an affirmation of faith in man's courage, man's will to put things right in a badly off-center world." The Sunday New York Herald Tribune, with the critic being Milton Rugoff: "Albert Maltz has once again attempted to fuse a fine talent for storytelling with an urgent sense of our social problems. It is an attempt illuminated from time to time by vivid characterization and by the author's faith in the underlying kindness of the average man. But as a story it strains credibility and as a message is forced. Mr. Maltz's narrative would seem to have much more of what we call plot and suspense. Like so many other novels that are Hollywood bound, it achieves these at the expense of plausibility. The Journey of Simon McKeever's clearly constructed with much good brick and some fine wide windows, but the foundation is one of those illusions in which movie cameras are expert." And it was precisely because--and it was also because there had been all the publicity about its being purchased by Fox that they said this. The daily New York Herald Tribune, with Lewis Gannett reviewing it, said: "Albert Maltz's short novel is the Pilgrim's Progress of this old man, a discerning and humorous legend of old age in our time that somehow just misses shining success. For all its weakness, this is an appealing and heartwarming story of the essential dignity of an American." And finally, in the New Republic, Richard Gehman said: "Yet because some people say that Mr. Maltz is guilty of something or other, I find it impossible to disassociate this word from his name. I find him guilty in this book, for example, of believing that people are for the most part good hearted, that life in the main is not all bad. I find him guilty of saying that some men make mistakes in their life and regret them later, that some men are forced by circumstances into situations they find distasteful; but upon finding themselves in these situations, they can adjust. I find him guilty of expressing the thought that a man's work may be so precious to him that he does not want to quit it, that a man can get sincere pleasure and satisfaction from serving others. Worse yet, I find Mr. Maltz guilty of having written a book... [tape recorder turned off]... that is altogether human: a little too slick in some spots, a little too rough in others, a book that is, like most human beings, interesting clear through." McKeever was finally published in ten countries, which is the smallest foreign publication of my first three novels. And interestingly, it was published primarily in the Western countries; only two socialist countries issued it. I have no explanation for that. The Commonwealth Club in California gives a prize for literature--I don't know whether every year or every several years or when--but this got a silver medal for that year for literature. And as I learned from some insiders, it was a final contestant for National Book Award in the first time that that award had been given. It was won by a man with whom I was friendly, Nelson Algren, for his very good book, The Man with the Golden Arm.

GARDNER

What's your own feeling toward the book?

MALTZ

Toward McKeever?

GARDNER

You're very fond of it, aren't you?

MALTZ

Yes, I'm fond of it. I think that on the whole it's a very good book, or it's a good novel. I do feel, now that I wrote a screenplay on it and had to examine its tissues very carefully with the director, that there is an aspect of it which was not clearly thought out, rather muddy thinking, and that had to do with McKeever's dreams. Because there was no way of translating them into the screenplay, and some of that had to do with the difference in form, but some of it had to do with the original writing in the novel. So I would say it's flawed, but I do like it. In March '49 the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Committee had a large peace conference in New York at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. It was attacked and sabotaged by the government and by a group of intellectuals led by Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, and Sidney Hook, who used the opportunity to say, quite truthfully, that there were no civil liberties in the Soviet Union. Of course there were not, but what that had to do with being against a peace conference was never satisfactorily explained. There is a very excellent short summation of what happened in the Belfrage book, pages 95-99, and, without reading them, I just want to give one little quote. He says that "the combined efforts of federal and local probers, blacklisters, familiars and free-world intellectuals would see to it that no such gathering occurred again until the third year of America's war in Vietnam. Presence at the Waldorf Astoria in March 1949 became almost as black a mark in a dossier as presence in the wrong part of Spain between 1936 and 1938." In April or May of that year I had an interlude of about one week which was very charming. Burt Lancaster's manager, Harold Hecht, whom I had known, came to me and said that Lancaster, with his former circus partner, a man by the name of Nick Cravat, were going to join a circus in the Midwest for several weeks for publicity purposes. Lancaster and Cravat had for some years before World War II been partners and had played in circuses and in nightclub acts. And after the war Lancaster quite quickly became--was cast in a play in New York and from that play came to the film industry. And Nick Cravat came along and used to work out with Lancaster, who was always concerned about keeping up his physical condition. They used to run together in the morning and so on. And Hecht asked if I wanted to go along with them to the circus and see if I could come up with a film story based on the circus. I was free and able to do it, and I was delighted to do it because I'd always been a circus buff. And so I joined them in Indiana in some small town and traveled with them and with the circus for a week. It was an absolutely fascinating week for me, and I came back and wrote out a great many pages of notes about it. And I came back with two short stories that I wrote, but I was never able to find a satisfactory film story. One of the short stories was "Circus Come to Town," which is in my second volume of short stories, and the other was never published as a story, but in the early sixties it sold under the name of Julian Silva (which was a pseudonym I was using at the time) to a TV show--sold to a network. And it became--maybe not to a network but to some program--and it became a TV show in which Cornel Wilde appeared and was called "The Great Alberti." I never saw it, and I never knew on what program it appeared. In May I began to work on "Circus Come to Town," and around this time I also began work on something that occupied a good deal of my time and also took a great deal of my money, and that was the amicus curiae campaign. As we started to approach the Supreme Court, our lawyers had spoken of the desirability of our getting friend-of-the-court briefs from organizations such as the Civil Liberties Union and others, and as I inquired about it, I learned that it would be considered of great value if we could get a great many briefs. And so, with the agreement of the others, I sort of went off on my own and worked with Pauline Lauber Finn on developing an amicus curiae campaign. I seem to recall that we worked out a form of suggested brief that organizations could use if they wished, and Pauline was the one who got addresses and got the letters done, and we circulated a great many organizations. I don't know whether--I must.... Yes, I believe that later I will tell what happened as a result of this campaign. If I don't, I hope you will remind me.

GARDNER

Okay, I will.

MALTZ

In the middle of June, the convictions of Lawson and Trumbo were confirmed by the appellate court, and so we were on our way to the Supreme Court. And at that time Dmytryk and Lardner were ordered home--I think Lardner may have been home already--were ordered home by the Justice Department. At the end of June my records tell me that I went to New York--oh, yes...no, this was in my book, in my little, small book--went to New York for a Madison Square Garden rally that was sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress. Paul Robeson spoke, and several of the Communist leaders, who were already sentenced to jail, spoke. And the title of my talk was "Books Are On Trial in America," and I want to read some small portions of that. I began it by saying: On October 27, 1553, a man was burned at the stake in the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His name was Michael Servetus, he was a mathematician, a physician, and a student of theology. He was burned because he had written a small book on Christian doctrine called On the Errors of the Trinity. It was a book that expressed for the first time the creed now known as Unitarianism. And when Servetus was tied to the stake, the book he had written was chained to his body; book and man burned together. We Americans have reason to ponder this today. I went on to say: It is easier to understand the events of the past than the confused turmoil of the present. It is a bitter thing for our nation, I believe, that so many people do not know that today in the city of New York other books are in the process of being banned for a similar purpose. Point number nine of the indictment against the Communist party leaders in their current trial says this: "It was further a part of said conspiracy that said defendants would publish and circulate, and cause to be published and circulated, books, articles, magazines, and newspapers advocating the principles of Marxism-Leninism." Here is a volume of literature, some of which has been in existence for a hundred years and has been circulating in this nation for that length of time. If the principles of Marxism advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government as alleged, why has it taken a hundred years to discover it? Furthermore, the Smith Act, under which the indictment against these books was brought, was passed in 1940. In view of the number of informers who have allegedly been reporting steadily to the FBI that the books and the Communist leaders did indeed advocate force and violence, why did it take eight years to draw up a two-page indictment? It did not take eight years. And it is not the Communist party alone that is on trial in New York today. Surely one need not be a believer in the principles of Marxism to recognize what it means to America when books are put on trial. That summer, as soon as I got back from the meeting in New York, I took my oldest child, Peter, who was now almost twelve, to a camp near Seattle that had been especially recommended to us. He had just entered junior high, and although he had been moderately competent in his work in elementary school, he suddenly began failing in junior high. He didn't at the time tell us, but we learned later that he sat in his classroom in the new school feeling that the teachers were looking at him with accusing eyes because of his father. And we felt that if we could take him out of the inevitable heat of his home environment, because of the case, and put him where things would be more comfortable for several months, it would be good for him. And this was a camp in which there was no rigid schedule, and he would be in the woods with an opportunity to fish, which he loved to do. He was frightened of going away by himself, but I told him that I would put him in the camp and stay in the vicinity for one week, and if at any time he wanted to quit, I would take him home; but that if he liked it for a week and wanted to stay, then he could. And he found he liked it; so I left him there. It was later in the summer that the two youngest justices of the Supreme Court, and the two most liberal, [Frank] Murphy and [Wiley] Rutledge, both died within one month of each other. I felt then that our case was lost and that we would be going to jail. That was the first time I had believed that we would lose. My records tell me that I spent two weeks in the East in September on some business for the Ten, and I no longer recall the purpose of it, but it might have been the search for a very celebrated attorney to argue our case before the Supreme Court. I do know that I had a meeting with Telford Taylor and the associates of his law firm about the case. Taylor had been the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials and was very good on civil liberties. I know that I had an exchange of correspondence with Zechariah Chafee of Harvard, and that I was in touch with Professor [Walter] Gellhorn of the law faculty of Columbia University (a brother of Martha Gellhorn) and with Professor [Thomas] Emerson of Yale University. But nothing came of our efforts. I no longer really remember why. Toward the end of September 1949 Truman announced that the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic weapon. I have read not too long ago that this moment was really the start of the Rosenberg case because it is said that J. Edgar Hoover's reaction to this announcement was to leap to his feet and say, "Who gave them the secret of the atomic bomb?" Apparently, Hoover, like many Americans, was under the illusion that there were some special secrets to the atomic bomb and that if these were conveyed to the scientists of another country, they would be able to make the bomb, and without it they could not. Now this was a piece of ignorance contrary to the open statements of many scientists that there was nothing about the making of the bomb that physicists in other countries could not understand, that the only problems in making it were engineering problems. But from that point began, apparently, the FBI hunt to either find, or to manufacture a case against, those who allegedly had stolen the American atom bomb "secrets." Sometime during this period, in spite of my preoccupation with problems of our case, I got a call from Edward G. Robinson asking me if I wouldn't write another speech for him because he had had a visit to Israel, and he was very excited about the country, and he was going to go on a tour to sell Israeli bonds, and he needed a speech. I found it very interesting to learn that he had been turned down by a number of others, because I asked him if he wouldn't go to others, including my old friend Michael Blankfort, who had also visited Israel and had become very pro-Israeli. (I might mention that Michael Blankfort had not been active in supporting the case of the Ten in the way that I would have assumed he would be. And I had not gone to the mat with him about it because of reasons that I have since forgotten.) In any instance, I went to Robinson's home, and he gave me various pieces of data that he wanted to include, and I wrote his speech for him. It was somewhere along in this period, I think, that Warner Brothers rereleased the film Destination Tokyo on Hollywood Boulevard, and we picketed the film and put out a leaflet asking people to contribute funds to the Ten and write protests and so on.

GARDNER

The tape is just about out. Shall we quit for now?

MALTZ

Yes.

1.44. TAPE NUMBER: XIX, SIDE TWO
DECEMBER 18, 1978

GARDNER

And we return to the case of the Ten.

MALTZ

Yes, just a correction of a detail. The speech on Israel that I wrote for Edward G. Robinson was in March 1950 and not in 1949. The amicus curiae campaign, which I had worked on and financed, produced briefs by a great many organizations representing some 20 million people. As a result of it, the Supreme Court changed its rules about such briefs. The rules now are that briefs--that they must give permission for briefs before they can be filed, and that had not been the procedure before that. I think that all in all we probably raised about $260,000 for our case in the two and a half years from the time that we were first held in contempt. Not a little of this came from Hollywood people, some of whom, of course, were able to anonymously give donations of 1,000 or more dollars, as Burt Lancaster did. And that was used to support our whole public campaign and to pay all of the very expensive legal costs. I had not mentioned one notable piece of writing which Trumbo did, and that was his marvelous pamphlet Time of the Toad, which we circulated vary widely. In the year 1949 there was a considerable amount of reprinting of my work abroad, and two anthologies appeared in the United States with my stories. Those had gone into the works before the blacklist. With the exception of those two stories that could not be omitted from retrospective anthologies like the O'Henry Memorial Award Stories from 1915 to 1950, that kind of thing, no story of mine was printed in an anthology in the United States for the next thirteen years. My income in '49 was large, just under $70,000. Half of that was the film sale of McKeever, and almost another half were sums from Naked City and the unnamed film I've been referring to. The balance was royalties from The Cross and the Arrow. The political scene in 1950 began with the second Hiss trial in January, and he was convicted this time and received four years in prison. And when I come in this narrative up to 1978, I will talk about Hiss again because I am in contact with him, and he now has the data proving his innocence. Perhaps I ought to amend that: it would not so much prove his innocence as prove that he had been convicted with tainted evidence used by the government. In February an event occurred which was very serious and had a terrible effect. I'm reading now from a chronology of events in John Wexley's The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the edition that was put out in 1977: "Dr. Klaus Fuchs, German-born British nuclear physicist, arrested in England on the basis of a voluntary confession that he had transmitted atomic information to the Soviet Union... Fuchs tried and sentenced to fourteen years" in prison. Now, the seriousness of that was not that one individual had betrayed his trust and provided the Soviet Union with some useful information as that it laid the basis for wild charges that were made after that about atomic espionage as the source of the Soviet Union's ability to manufacture atomic weapons. Despite the assertions by scientists everywhere that not only did the Soviet Union but many other countries have the ability to make such weapons, and certainly the theoretical knowledge, the Klaus Fuchs incident was the basis for a public belief which the government built on to the contrary. Early 1950 also saw the emergence of Senator McCarthy on the public scene and his particular style, which was much more aggressive and flamboyant than that of any other of the witch-hunters. In April the Supreme Court refused to hear our case. Now, legally, this did not mean that they had ruled on our case or on its issues, it had merely decided not to hear it at that time. Therefore, the decision of the appellate courts stood and we had lost. As I said earlier, if the two justices who had died in the summer of 1949 had lived, I think the outcome would have been quite different. And if we had won our case, there would not have been the so-called McCarthy years. Because all of the committees of Congress--that is to say, aside from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, there were the McCarran Committee on Internal Security [Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee--SISS], and McCarthy's committee [Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Government Operations], whose name I forget for the moment, and all of them depended upon the same ability of summoning people before them, asking them questions about their political lives, and then getting them blacklisted. So that if we had won, that could not have taken place. Certainly it would not have ended the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it might have--I think it would definitely have made an enormous difference in the domestic scene. It is relevant to mention here that at no time had Edward Dmytryk been as militant in attacking the committee, and in defending our position, as he was in the period of six weeks between the announcement of the Supreme Court turndown and our going to jail. Actually, it was eight weeks. When we held a press conference, Dmytryk was in the forefront, speaking out boldly and strongly. And he was very active in that period. I mention this, of course, because of his subsequent positions. Our attorneys made use of what the law permitted in asking the Supreme Court for a rehearing. They didn't actually expect the court to provide one, but their attitude was, why not delay for six weeks--which was the period allotted--delay your going into prison? You never know what can happen, and it will give you time, anyway, to arrange your personal affairs. I just mention in passing, as the kind of thing that individuals faced, that when my daughter, aged seven and a half, was told that I would be going into prison, she looked at me with startled eyes and then asked if I would have to be naked in prison. Where she had gotten this concept I don't know, but it's the kind of thing that I'm sure happened in different ways to the other men. She went out shortly after asking that question, and my wife and I continued to talk with our son. Then, after a little bit, we heard a noise in the hallway, and then Kathy appeared with some sort of makeshift costume on, leading some other girls more or less the same age, and in an effort to cheer me up, came in singing "Here Comes the Bride." [laughter] I suppose it's not an irrelevant footnote to say that I had a particular anxiety based upon what had gone on during the thirties in certain jails and prisons where Communists were beaten by other prisoners who had been urged on to that by the guards. And at this time to be going into prison was to be going into enemy country, and so I took a crash course in judo, going every day, practically, for the six weeks. Since I had a background of boxing and wrestling, I came out feeling equipped, not certainly to take on a cell full of men, but one or another individual if that happened. I'm glad to say that nothing actually did happen in prison, although on two occasions there were men who began to get ugly with me, and in each case a man as big as a tree trunk, and I played it very quietly and they didn't do anything actually violent. But it made a considerable difference in my inner feelings to know that I would have been able to handle them.

GARDNER

Were these fights--they were averted?

MALTZ

Yes.

GARDNER

Were they political?

MALTZ

Yes. There was--I'll mention it now, I'll come to it--there was practically no politics which came into jail life excepting for these two men--because most of the men in jail just didn't have any politics; they weren't concerned. But these two men did, and I imagine that they were trying to provoke me into doing something violent to them because it is very important in prison that if a fight occurs, the question is who started it. A man has a right to defend himself. And they wanted to be in the position of defending themselves, I suppose, and that's why they didn't go further.

GARDNER

For a writer who always sought out various situations and scenes as background material for writing, and also for the nature of speech and different kinds of speech, did you find yourself, at least in part, excited by the opportunity to get into this other world?

MALTZ

I'll mention that when I come to it. Because you're quite right, it's very interesting just to be in jail... for a while. [laughter] In the six-week period while our rehearing was being decided upon by the Supreme Court, I largely wrote, with some changes by Herbert Biberman and the ten of us made, a one-reel film called The Hollywood Ten. It was directed by John Berry and narrated by Gale Sondergaard. And I want to mention that because I went to Mexico after jail and because of other events, I never saw the film, the completed film, until 1974, I think it was, and I was impressed by the degree to which it held up. The assertions that we made stood the test of time and of later events. I remember a small incident which is interesting. Somehow, a luncheon was arranged with a Polish Communist who was in the United States, I don't remember his name, and perhaps three or four of us in the Ten were present. One of them was Dmytryk. And the only thing that I remember from the conversation is that the Pole said, in an effort to encourage us, or as a dry jest, "Your first term in prison is always the hardest." And I remember Dmytryk gasping aloud at that. [laughter] There was a great difference between men like ourselves and a guy who had worked in the Polish underground under [Joseph] Pilsudski. It was all the difference between.... Well, there was a polar difference. As soon as the sixth week was over, Jack Lawson and Trumbo had to surrender in Washington, and they left at once. There was a big demonstration in Grand Central Station in New York (I guess they had gone by train) where they were hoisted onto the shoulders of members of the crowd and carried out. But a week later we had to report in Washington for formal trials, the outcome of which was already decided by our signatures but nevertheless had to be held. Just before I left, I got a warm supportive note from Nelson Algren, who, without my knowing it at the time, had served some jail time for robbery when--Oh, not a robbery, not for robbery, no, no, no, no... for theft when he was a young man, and actually it had been a theft of a typewriter so he could do some writing. [laughter] And he said something about being sure that I could do the year sleeping on my ear, which was a jail term, and I was very appreciative. There was a--oh, yes, there was a final rally under the auspices of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions [Committee] to raise funds for our case. I might say that several of the Ten were absolutely indigent, and in one case there was a child to support as well as a wife in the other case, and so we tried to raise funds for them. And two speeches were made at the rally which were subsequently published in a pamphlet, one by Gale Sondergaard and the other by myself, and the title of the two was "On the Eve of Prison." I want to read a short part of the talk I made. I said: If we go to prison [still putting an if on it], I for one will go with a deeper anger than I have ever felt in my life. What is the substance of that anger? For myself and my colleagues, our families, our work, our lives--yes, of course. But even more because I abominate the manner in which our land is now being befouled by the men in charge of the machinery of government. You will notice here that I do not limit my charge. When this case began in the fall of 1947, I did that as did others. I pointed to the evil actions of certain committees like the Un-American Activities Committee, to certain individuals like J. Parnell Thomas, [John E.] Rankin, Attorney General Clark. But many things have happened in our land in two and a half years, bad things. And today it would be blindness to view such events as the work of a few individuals alone or a few reactionary committees of Congress. On the contrary, the time has come when it must be admitted that what is at work here is the total machinery of our men of government on a policy level and on an executive level. And I must say that in the years that have passed, looking back upon it and reading materials about it, I consider that that was a completely accurate statement. During the six-week period, I went to Edward G. Robinson to ask for money for the two women and one child who needed it, and he told me that he didn't think he could manage it. He had just given a loan to one of the men, and I had no doubt that he had; I could almost guess to whom he had given it. But here he was in a house choked with very valuable paintings, and he knew he was going to work immediately, and he could have done a little more, I'm sure. And I didn't feel too good about it, but there was nothing to say. It was a small pleasure to me, but only a small one, that I signed twelve contracts for books to be published abroad--that is, foreign editions for my wife to take care of mailing. And at the airport a farewell had been organized. I don't know how many people were there--as I think back, it was anywhere around 5,000--to say farewell to us, and we took a night plane.

GARDNER

Was that all ten of you?

MALTZ

No, that was actually seven of us. Lawson and Trumbo were already in jail. Adrian Scott was ill and did not come into jail until, I think, a couple of months after we went in so it was the...

GARDNER

...seven who remained.

MALTZ

...seven who remained. In New York we stopped overnight and there was a meeting at a midtown hall--Town Hall, I think it was--in which Paul Robeson was a featured speaker. And on my way to the hall, I met an old and very dear friend whose wife was already in prison. This was Bernhard Stern, a sociologist whom I had known since the early thirties. He taught at Columbia University, and he had been blacklisted, actually, since about the year, ah, 19--.... I think it was around 1919. Because at that time he had been an instructor in the University of Washington, and he had given his support publicly to, I think, some IWW strikers, or some others in some labor struggle in the Northwest. And he was fired for his radical activities from the University of Washington and never again in his life did he ever get tenure at any university. For years he taught at Columbia University in extension, where what he earned was based upon the number of students he had. And since he was an immensely popular lecturer, he got along all right. At a certain period he was a visiting professor of sociology at Yale for a couple of years, but never got tenure. He published enormously. And his record of getting grants was a terrific one, but he, to one degree or another, was blacklisted. His wife, Charlotte, was one of the members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and so she was in the women's prison at Alderson, Virginia--Alderson, West Virginia, on a three-month sentence, and I remember his telling me that it was quite hard for her. And that makes me recall that, in some ways, you can never predict how given individuals will react to situations that are completely new to him. For instance, one of the members of this committee who was a hard-bitten trade unionist apparently could not take jail, and I was told that he cried every night that he was in jail. It was very surprising to me, but that's the complexity of human nature. We then went immediately to Washington, and then after going into the courtroom at once, we found that there was going to be a delay in our sentencing for one week. I no longer recall what the reason was, whether a given judge was not in town, or--I've forgotten entirely. But while all of the men except Herbert Biberman and myself went back to New York to see friends and theater or whatnot, Herbert and I decided to stay in Washington. And this was, for me, an absolutely wonderful stay. One of the first things we did was to take a trip to Mount Vernon, which neither of us had seen. And that was the beginning of the enormous respect that I've had all down the years for George Washington. Previous to that visit I, like a good many others, had read somewhat disparaging comments about Washington, especially in comparison to an intellect like Jefferson. But there were two things in Mount Vernon that set me to thinking very hard. Above a doorway, right where a stairway led to the second floor, there was the key to the Bastille which had been sent to Washington by Lafayette. Now one has to ask--I immediately asked myself, and spoke to Herbert about it, saying, why would Lafayette send that key to Washington? Why not to Jefferson or Franklin, or why not to someone else somewhere in the world? Why did he pick Washington? And it was at once clear that Washington, who had been the head of the American Revolutionary army and its first president, stood in the mind of Lafayette and others in Europe as the leading force for liberty in the world, the liberty that they wanted. And this impressed me tremendously. And then came something else in the small museum that is on Mount Vernon to house various of Washington's effects such as--I remember some dental tools that he had, eyeglasses and so on. From some letters on the wall it became clear that when he went away from Mount Vernon he left a nephew in charge of it. Now, in the first place, Washington was one of the most wealthy men in the colonies. But he was away from Mount Vernon, except, I think, for perhaps one very brief return of a few days, for eight years, living often in unpleasant conditions. Certainly he had put his life on the line when he accepted the post he did. As a wealthy man he could have sat out the war as many in the colonies did. So one had, first of all, the realization that here was a man of principle and a man of courage who had an alternate path in the Revolution and had not taken it. And in the letter exchange, the nephew wrote to George Washington and told him that a British fleet had come up the Potomac and had anchored just outside the plantation and had demanded stores of food and other items with the threat that if they didn't get them, they would burn down the plantation. And the nephew said that he gave them the stores, and the plantation was intact, and that he hoped his uncle would approve. And Washington wrote back that he should have let them burn it down. Now, the man who wrote that was in my opinion one hell of a human being.

GARDNER

Right. [laughter]

MALTZ

I began afterwards to read about Washington, and I now have in my possession the two-volume history, biography of him by [James Thomas] Flexner, and in the added reading that I've done in that, I've found no reason to change my mind. He was, I think, a most extraordinary man and did things I won't go into now in military strategy that were very fine. It's, by the way, one of the things that has troubled me about the writing, or some of the writing, that Howard Fast has done. Because, although he is a writer with an immense narrative gift, I saw in one of his two books about Washington (I forget which name it is, what the title of the one is I'm talking about) a willingness to absolutely pervert history in order to achieve an effect. In this story he portrays Washington as a gentleman farmer who knew nothing about war and therefore committed blunder after blunder until, gradually and painfully, he learned how to be a commander. Well, that just isn't true. Washington was not just a gentleman farmer; he was one of several officers who had had maximum military experience in the French and Indian Wars. And to present him in that way was just utterly false. He was not chosen at random by the members of the revolutionary committee (I forget the name of it). Subsequently, Herbert and I went to the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, which are so enormously impressive, and we went to the home of Frederick Douglass, which was very hard to find because it was not in any way an official museum and was scarcely taken care of. But it was enormously exciting to see his home and to be able to sit down in his chair at his desk, as I did, and to put on his half-spectacles, which were still there, and to open the drawers and see his account books of what he spent for coal and food, because he was a man whom I enormously admired. Actually, I hope the notebooks and the spectacles are still there, because we could have walked off with them if we had wanted to. And in the course of....

GARDNER

Your [tape] just ran out.

MALTZ

Oh, thank you. [tape recorder turned off] In the course of walking around Washington and seeing other such monuments--the statue of [Tadeuz] Kosciuszko, for instance--I felt that even though it was the Establishment in this Washington that was sending us to prison, that we were in contact in our spirits with the other Washington, with the Washington that did stand for liberty. And I felt that we were connected to the newspaper editors who had gone to jail in the Alien and Sedition period, and to Abraham Lincoln when he opposed the Mexican War as a representative in Congress, and to the abolitionists who had defied the Dred Scott decision. And so it was a very healthy and warming week for me, I know. I want to mention that during that week I saw I. F. Stone and his wife a number of times. They were old friends of mine whom I had not seen during my time in Los Angeles. And then an odd thing happened. At 7:30 one morning, when I was very sound asleep, there was a hard knocking at my hotel door. I stumbled to open it, and it was Iz Stone, who had been up all night watching a ticker tape on the invasion of South Korea by North Korea and who was so enormously disturbed that he needed to talk right away and had come to talk about it with me. Stone had been very much a part of the peace movement and of the Stockholm Peace Petition, and he felt that this action on the part of North Korea, which must have been directed from Moscow, was a horrible blow at the world peace movement, and he was just deeply, deeply upset. And that was the beginning of a period of thought which caused Stone to go abroad with his family for a year so that he could have access to the newspapers of France and England and other countries. And it resulted in a book, The Hidden History of the Korean War, in which he came to a conclusion that was just the opposite of the one he had had when he awakened me: namely, that the war had really been prepared by the United States, with Dulles as its chief stage manager, and that the North Koreans had fallen into a trap in invading. The night before our appearance in court, which resulted in our going right into jail, there was an interesting meeting, a kind of symbolic meeting of the executive board of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions [Committee]. Harlow Shapley came down for it, and there were several of us from the Ten who were on the board, and some others had come from New York. When the meeting was over, we sat around having some drinks and Shapley talked about astronomical matters. He was noted for his contribution to understanding of nebulae, I believe, and I've been told that he was one of the most important astronomers since Copernicus. But it was fascinating to get away from our small problems and to look at the world and the universe through the perspective of an astronomer talking of the millions of light years and the fact that conditions for life surely existed on many other planets besides our own. The next day in the court we were tried before three judges in three separate courtrooms. Each of us made a statement before sentencing which we had prepared, and I waited with considerable anxiety for my sentence, because, not yet knowing what any of the other men had received, I knew that theoretically it was possible that we would get two years because there were two counts against us.

GARDNER

What had Lawson and Trumbo gotten?

MALTZ

They had gotten a year, but I still felt it was possible that a given other judge would feel differently. But I got a year also, and the sentence was immediately carried out--that is, we were taken downstairs to the same place where we had been fingerprinted at the beginning of the case. But now we were put into a large room which traditionally is called the bullpen and where there were benches circling the room (or not circling, because it was a quadrangular room) and where there were other men who were being held to be taken back to the Washington jail. It was marvelous to have Herbert Biberman and Dmytryk come down because they had been sentenced before another judge, and he had given them only six months. And that was, of course, exciting. We were in the bullpen for quite some hours. What we didn't know, but found out, was that every court morning the bus brought inmates from the Washington jail to the courthouse because they were up for trial or sentencing or some kind of hearing, and the bus did not return to take them back until the court day was over. And the men who had come from jail had come with some sandwiches which had been given them, but we had not been given anything and so we had no lunch.

GARDNER

The tape's about to end. Why don't we stop here?

MALTZ

All right.

1.45. TAPE NUMBER: XX, SIDE ONE
DECEMBER 18, 1978

MALTZ

Of course, for me, the hours in the bullpen involved natural concern and anxiety about the way prison would be, about the way the jail would be for me. But also an anxiety that I had--perhaps the other men didn't have it the same way--was that if the McCarran Act were passed, I might go from prison to a concentration camp. And this fear never left me during the time I was in prison, but it only increased because the McCarran Act was passed.

GARDNER

Could you explain why you felt that it would place you in a concentration camp?

MALTZ

Well, yes, the McCarran Act (without my now looking it up) had provisions for the arbitrary detention by executive order of the president of individuals thought to be dangerous to the government in a crisis that the president would decide. And even before the act was passed, the government began to build concentration camps, and this was publicized. So that, in that atmosphere, there was no reason to doubt that if such an executive order were made, that I would be one of those who would be put into a camp. And since, when we were going into prison, there was no chance to run as others might do and try to go underground or get into some other country. It so happened by accident that Ring Lardner and I were handcuffed together in the walk from the bullpen through some long corridor to the prison bus, and we were photographed and that photograph appeared in Time magazine. I remember being asked later, perhaps it was on a visit by my wife, about how I felt about the "indignity" of being handcuffed. And I recall that I hadn't felt any indignity about it at all. That was routine, and I accepted it just as I was accepting the fact that I was going to be in jail. But, on the contrary, I felt that being handcuffed to Ring was a warm bond between him and myself. We were put into a bus such as one has seen with barred windows and taken to the jail, and there we were processed through taking off our clothes and showering. Then we had temporary jail clothes, some denims, because the next day we got our own clothes back, stinking from some disinfectant. And then we were moved through various barred doors until we came to the various cell blocks in which we were put. Only Lester Cole and I were finally in the same side of the same cell block, and we were on different floors. I remember that when a cell door was opened--When a barred door was opened for me to walk alone down to the cell where I was to enter--the cell I was told to enter--it was a very strange time indeed, and I suppose a very lonely walk. I do recall very definitely that when I entered the cell and the door closed with the loud percussive sound that happens in jails like that, I looked at the bars with a sense of shock and thought to myself, my God, I'm locked up and I'm going to be locked up here for a year. And that was a moment that had to be bridged. I might explain in passing that the cell block was a rectangle that was very tall because it had five tiers. On the first tier on the ground floor there were white inmates; on the second tier there were just several inmates waiting for execution--that was death row; the third tier were white inmates, and I was on that one; the fourth tier had black inmates; and the fifth tier was open, and it was where we had our daily exercise, with the exception of two days when we were out of doors. From what I've read, the jail is integrated now, but just how it is integrated I don't know... how the men are. A quite--for me--anxious thing happened at my first meal. I had finished breakfast at 7:30 in the morning, and I believe that the evening meal in the jail was at about five o'clock, so that I was very hungry. And the rule in jail, in that jail, was that you had to--You didn't have to take any more food than you wanted to as you passed the steam table with your tray, but what you took you had to eat. If you didn't eat everything on your tray, you were due for punishment. If you had taken an insufficient amount, then the men who served passed during the meal with a tray with extras, and you could ask for more of this or that. Now, without any experience, I don't remember what the--I do remember that there were beans that night and perhaps the usual beets and onions, and I asked for two pieces of bread. It was white bread. We sat down at tables and our only utensil was a spoon, and the rule at dinner--the rule at mealtime--was silence: no speaking whatsoever. I think the reason for that is that [of] better control of the inmates because if you have some inmates who are hostile and who are in separate tiers, they could meet at mealtime and begin to insult each other, and the result might be a physical fight. The minute I bit into the first piece of bread, I knew I was in trouble. I don't know how that bread was made, but never, before or since, have I encountered a piece of bread so heavy, so tasteless, so bulky. To merely finish one piece of bread with the other things on my tray would have been as much as I could possibly do, and I simply knew that I would not be able, without vomiting, to eat the second piece. Now, we knew already, I guess from the bullpen, or perhaps from talking to my cellmate between the time I entered and dinner time, that the punishment for bad behavior was the hole, and the hole in that jail was a dark cell with bread and water for a certain number of days. But most of all I was upset because we in the Ten had agreed that we would try to comport ourselves in prison so as not to give a bad name to left-wingers. There were going to be others who would follow us in, and we didn't want them to face hostile attitudes on the part of the administrators because we had made trouble. And so I thought, well, here I am, first thing off and I'm going to maybe go to the hole and get in trouble, and I was miserable because of it. The whole eating time only took about twenty minutes, and I finally, looking around at the guards, whispered to my cellmate, who was sitting next to me, and said, "I took too much, what will I do?" And he said, "In your pocket".. which should have occurred to me, I suppose, but didn't. And I then proceeded to break off pieces of the bread and get them into my pocket as I ate, and I think I got some beans into my pocket as well, but I was not observed, and I made it back to my cell, sweating, and got over that crisis. I use this in the novel I wrote about prison. (I would mention that Lawson and Trumbo were no longer there; they had already been shipped off to a penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky.) The novel I mentioned, A Long Day in a Short Life, was set in this jail, but since the novel is not in most libraries, I'll describe just a few things about the jail here and.... [tape recorder turned off] The eighteen days that I spent in the Washington jail was very hard time, very difficult, and this was not because of any ill treatment on the part of the guards or any of the inmates. It was purely because the Washington jail was a holding jail for all different types of men charged, or declared guilty, of everything from the smallest misdemeanor to premeditated murder, and therefore it was very tight security. There was also, I think, perhaps a lack of enough guards for us to get out to the yard for exercise and so, including our mealtimes, we were only out of our small cells four hours out of every twenty-four. It was hot and humid at that time of year and, I imagine, cold in the winter. One perspired a great deal, but there were only two showers a week. And we who were transients were less fortunate on clothes than those who were there ready to be transferred to prisons because they had prison denims and were given changes twice a week. We had only our own clothes, which we were given back after the first day, and I remember washing out my socks and waiting for them to dry overnight and half the next day, and washing out underwear and so on. And we had no work; we used to envy those few inmates who were able to mop the floors because they had something to do. There were newspapers that did come in and were passed from cell to cell so that one could read a newspaper, and a truck came from a so-called library once a week and you could order a book. I remember ordering books that I knew would be long, like Dumas's [Three] Musketeers, which I read for the first time in prison. And that one came, but on another week I ordered something and it didn't come; something else came. And there was a great lack of reading material. I borrowed everything I could because we passed things from cell to cell by extending our hands out. And it was tough for people who had been--tough for someone who had been active intellectually all his life to be deprived of the opportunity to do, to read, to think, and so on--well, you could think. [laughter] I do want to pause to say that that jail was a luxury hotel compared to some of the jails in the United States--some, not only of the southern jails which one is aware of, but, for instance, the jails and some of the prisons in Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, which at that time were simply horrible.

GARDNER

Really. I wasn't aware of that.

MALTZ

Yes, I wasn't aware of it until I met a couple of inmates who came out of it. It was just hell. And certainly, compared to the concentration camps of, let's say, not the German concentration camps, which were killing camps, but those a little better, not designed for mass murder at least, like the Soviet concentration camps, this was paradise. So I want to keep that perspective. The food.... I don't seem to have the list here. Now, just a second. [tape recorder turned off] For someone like myself, who had eaten well, the food was bad but there was no question that it could keep one alive and, I imagine, had some nutritional balance. For instance, a breakfast was some fried potatoes, oatmeal, a little skim milk, white bread, a pat of apple butter, and a hot liquid that they called coffee. [laughter] There were beans, of course, at other meals, a nutritious food. I remember terrible powdered eggs. It was flat, but if you're hungry enough, then you eat. I remember flapjacks; they had flapjacks a number of times. And so it went. I found that everything went very easy with the other inmates. I made no attempt to be with them anything other than I was, and I found there, as I did later in the prison camp, that inmates react on a very simple direct plane: if someone is agreeable they accept him; if someone is disagreeable they don't like him, and that's all there is to it. They did have a little problem in understanding what my crime was, because when I would say, "Well, I'm in for contempt of Congress," they would say, "What the hell is that?" [laughter]... having never heard of it before. And when I'd explain, someone might say, "Well, I'll be goddamned. I never heard of anything like that." Someone else might say, "Well, good for you, I'm glad you didn't stool," or something of that sort. And very soon, with an awareness that I had education, one or another would come to me for help in preparing a petition for parole or some other such item. I remember the first time, the first of the two times, we went to the yard. That was an occasion in which the seven of us could meet again because those from the other cell blocks would join us, and that was when I saw Herbert and Sam Ornitz, and so on. And that was a strange experience because now we were playing out a movie, as it were, because there were signs on the walls which said Stay Twenty Feet Away, and there were guards with guns watching us from the turret, and it was very strange to feel that we, who had never gone in for anything criminal, would be in that position. I remember a conversation with Dmytryk in which he said that he was glad to be here because he would be able to speak with pride to his grandchildren about what he had done in this period, and I mention that because of his later behavior, of course. I had a very, very pleasant cellmate, a man who was a barber in civilian life but who was cursed with terrible alcoholism, but now in jail was most agreeable and did his best to pass time easily. I think it was when I was only there for about a week that I got the idea of writing this novel that would be called A Long Day in a Short Life because each day stretched so long. And I by that time had been able to go to canteen, and since we had deposited some money, each of us was able to get pencil and writing-paper tablet, and so I started to make notes. In the course of the next ten, eleven days I made about seventy pages of notes about prison routine and about various of the men. There we had to learn, quickly, to write letters that we knew were going to be read by someone. It was forbidden to have any information in them about the jail so that you had to draw on other things in your life besides the immediacy of things around you. I had one visit from one of my brothers while I was there, and this was strange because the visits in the Washington jail were of the porthole variety where you talked by telephone, and it was a new and strange experience. And there were two events that I subsequently used in my novel. One was the attempted suicide of a man who had just come in (but he had been in prison before). And the night he was committed to the Washington jail, he cut himself with something, and I remember the guard running down the tier to get to his cell and then, later, men coming with a stretcher, and I never learned what became of him. And something else which was just enchanting. There was one night after lights were out when I saw, in the big range area beyond the tier runway, a firefly. How the firefly had gotten into the range was very odd, but in the dark cavern it floated up and down with its light winking on and off, and it was just amazing. I discovered that other men like myself were at the door watching it because it was somehow a symbol of absolute freedom there. Around day fifteen of the time there, Herbert left and I heard on the grapevine that he was going to go, and I was watching for him to go. I might say that the grapevine is just a word for the fact that a prison is run in considerable part by the inmates taking direction from the officers. But if you have inmates in the administration office, they get to see certain lists, they hear certain things, and then they quickly pass down information because that's one of the pleasures of working in a job like that: you know something and you tell it to your fellow inmates. And so that was how I learned. I stood at the door of my cell waiting for him, and as he passed he looked over at my cell and there was just one second in which our eyes met, and we waved to each other and he went on. And then I, of course, was not to see him for a long time. I knew that I could not take the notes I made for the novel out with me, and so I memorized the notes that I had made, and when I was notified the night before I was to leave that I was due to go, I tore up the notes and flushed them down the toilet. All of us, of course, could have been sent to prisons closer to our homes in Los Angeles, but I'm sure it was by design that we were, on the contrary, sent to places in the East. Ring Lardner and Lester Cole went to Danbury, Connecticut, where they met former Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, who was already there for stealing from the government. And Herbert Biberman and Alvah Bessie went to Texarkana, Texas. Samuel Ornitz, who had a large tumor on one side of his neck, was sent to Springfield, Missouri, which was the hospital prison in the federal prison system. When Adrian Scott came into prison later, he was sent to Ashland, where Lawson and Trumbo were, and where, while we were in prison, Dashiell Hammett was also sent. He went there because, as one of the officers of the committee... let me see... I'd have to get that....

GARDNER

Well, we can check that.

MALTZ

All right. It was a committee on civil rights. Maybe it was just the Civil Rights Committee [*Civil Rights Congress]. He had been asked, along with Frederick Vanderbilt Field and Alphaeus Hunton, to deliver the names of the people who had put up bail money for individuals being defended by the committee, and they refused and so were sentenced for contempt and went to prison. Dmytryk was sent to Mill Point prison camp with me, and we went by car with two deputies. We left very early in the morning, and there was of course an absolutely marvelous feeling to be free of the walls after eighteen days and to be outside. And then a very amusing thing happened. The deputies got lost in all of the freeways around Washington, and Dmytryk said, "Look, I'm a pilot and I know how to read maps; maybe I can help you." And so they gave him the maps and indeed he did help them. And he not only got them out of Washington, but he directed them all the way to Mill Point. Now we were taken in--with normal security precautions, that is--Dmytryk and I were handcuffed together, and we also had a leg cuffs with a chain between us. But at a certain point the deputies stopped and went into a store and got us some sandwiches and some Coke bottles and drove on, and we could have hit them over the heads with the Coke bottles. And so much for their security arrangements. [laughter] But I imagine that they weren't very afraid of us...or afraid of our running, I mean. The Mill Point prison camp was in the mountains of West Virginia in the east central part of the state. It was near a state park and a wilderness area, about seventy miles from Charleston, the capital of the state, and about fifty miles from the town of Gauley Bridge, where, sixteen years before, I had found material for my first real short story, "Man on a Road." The Mill Point camp had been a former CCC camp. It consisted of an administration building, workshops, a hospital, a mess hall, and three barracks for men, and a quarantine building for new inmates. It was laid out quite attractively with a central walk that led from the administration building down to the mess hall and which was bordered in some sections with flowers. There were no bars, no walls, but there were signs around the perimeter of the camp which read Stay Inside. And if you went beyond those signs, then you were judged to be escaping and you would have a penalty for that. The atmosphere, however, in this prison camp was much more pleasant than that of penitentiaries, where the general attitude was that a guard was your enemy and that men seen talking with guards might be considered to be informers. Here the guards were trained for a situation in which men either had short terms or they were coming off long terms, and the prison system wanted to help them adjust to freedom. And so the guards had a more friendly and casual attitude with the men, conversation was possible as a normal part of prison behavior, and as long as men behaved, did their work, and obeyed orders, there was no problem at all. There was a five-and-a-half-day work week. Some men worked in maintenance, that is to say, in cleaning the dorms, in working in the kitchen and in the mess hall, and then others did outside work. There was a sawmill there, timber was cut, and the sawmill provided materials for building in other prisons. There was a farm on which vegetables were raised, a chicken house, and pigs and so on, and there was a strip coal-mine in which coal was cut. The population varied from 280 in the summer to about 150 in the winter, when fewer men were needed because they didn't work the farm. One-third of the men were black so that they occupied one dormitory. Fifty percent of the men there were illiterate, and most of those were in for the making of illegal whiskey, moonshine. These were men, usually, from the mountain areas of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Some of them had never been more than ten miles away from the place they were born until they came to this prison. Some had never seen a shower bath before they came to the prison; they had never been to school; they had never voted; they had never used a handkerchief. It was astonishing to find this in the United States. And 60 percent of the men in the prison were in for whiskey, either making it or transporting it. The rest were in for petty and grand larceny, for arson, auto theft, transporting narcotics, hiking a check, forgery, passing counterfeit bills, Mann Act, mail fraud, income tax, but no one was there who was a real professional criminal. And, basically, these men were farmers, they were miners, they were sawmill men, especially the whiskey men who might--a mine might close and they would have no way of making money and so they would fall back on what their forefathers had done, and make whiskey. A sawmill would cut up all the timber in an area and move away, and so they'd start to make whiskey, and that's how they came to be in prison. We were able to receive as many letters from home as one's wife wrote, and I could write three letters a week, using one sheet of paper and writing on both sides of it. Similarly, one could not write anything about the prison. There were counts several times a day in which we had to be at our work place, and there were two counts at night. In addition to the pleasanter atmosphere than being in a walled prison, we had three days a month of extra good time. But the food was worse than it would be if we were in a larger prison because they didn't have the supplies or the money, so that I never saw an egg for six months, for instance, and what they called milk was blue from adulteration, and I knew from men who were transferred from Ashland that they ate much better there. We did all sorts of work for a while in quarantine. Just let's stop for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] In quarantine we had a variety of work: cutting lawns where the officers lived, working in the kitchen, helping a butcher, but mostly Dmytryk and I worked on a small dam in freezing water, and it was pleasant work in spite of the cold water. We could get out and warm up our hands and feet every twenty minutes or half an hour. But we were out of doors, and we both liked physical work, so it was okay. Then when we were assigned to permanent work, Dmytryk got work, a kind of bookkeeper's work, in the garage there which managed the trucks and cars of the camp, and I became hospital orderly and janitor, which is what it amounted to. The hospital there was a very pleasant one which had six beds plus an isolation room, and it had another room which was mine for sleeping. It had a clean dispensary, and I was extremely fortunate--and, oh, it had an office for the paramedical man, whom we called Doc.

GARDNER

Cleverly.

MALTZ

No, that was what everybody called him. He was "Mister," of course, but he was called Doc. It was extremely fortunate for me to have a private room instead of being in a dormitory with fifty other men. And it was especially valuable because in all free time the administration put on music which was piped into the barracks. Now, the music, two-thirds of the time, was soul music, because that's what the southern inmates wanted to hear--not soul music, it was country music...

GARDNER

Country music.

MALTZ

...which is what the southern inmates wanted to hear. And one-third of the time it was soul music, which was what the black inmates wanted to hear. This was by agreement between committees of both groups. Now, it happened that I abominated both types of music. As a matter of fact, the popular music of practically all countries, as soon as I get to know it, I begin to loathe it. [laughter] This is not a virtue on my part, it's just a statement of fact. And so I had the opportunity of turning off the music, the loudspeaker, in the hospital, and that meant so much to me that I can't--it's impossible to calculate how much it meant to me because otherwise I would have had to spend hours on Saturday afternoons and Sunday and evenings listening to music that I detested and, moreover, which was played over and over again because of a lack of a variety of records. The doc had been in the merchant marine, where he was, I suppose, a medical orderly. I think he probably had received a little extra training, but he was limited to the dispensing of pills and of deciding which men needed a doctor's attention. If they needed doctor's attention, they were kept waiting, unless it was acute, for a doctor to come up from a town about twelve miles away, as he did perhaps every three weeks or longer, depending upon the number of men who needed to be seen. If someone had a broken limb, as occurred, then he was taken to a hospital thirty miles away; the doctor did not set bones. Oh, he did more than dispense pills, of course. There were cuts and there were other injuries that he could treat. He had a lamp there for certain types of backaches and other such things. And he, interestingly enough, did absolutely nothing to train me. When Saturday afternoon came, he went off to this town, Marlinton, twelve miles away and didn't come back till late Sunday night, and things could happen in that interval in which I was on duty. So I borrowed some books from him and studied first aid as intensely as I could, and would ask him questions which he would answer. But I think he was basically indifferent to the welfare of the men and so didn't want to take the trouble. He didn't want to get any marks against himself so that he did what he could if he was on duty; but if he wasn't on duty, then nobody could blame him. My routine was as follows. I was up at 5:45 in the morning and dressed in whites to be the medical orderly. I put on a sterilizer in which there were some instruments in case he had to....

1.46. TAPE NUMBER: XX, SIDE TWO
DECEMBER 18, 1978

MALTZ

I would then go down to the mess hall for breakfast, and if there was anybody in the hospital, which happened about, perhaps, 25 percent of the time, I would bring breakfast back to him in a special container that was provided for that. The camp was up at about 6:30, awakened by loudspeaker into the various barracks, and almost invariably with the same call no matter what the weather was. It would be something like "Time to get up, it's a beautiful morning on Cranberry Hill." Cranberry Hill was the original name, apparently, of that area. Then at 7:15, as I recall, there was sick call in which.... By that time the doc would be there, and men would line up in a hallway and would be admitted one by one. I would be seated at a table with the inmate's medical record to put down any notation of something the doctor ordered for him (and would occasionally come across a card in which, stamped in red on it, was the word syphilis.) And sick call lasted perhaps about half an hour, and then I had the basic job of cleaning the hospital. That was my janitor's work: that is, the hospital had to be swept out and laundry taken care of and taken down to the laundry, the toilets (we had several toilets and a washroom) and showers had to be taken care of. And a big thing was waxing the floors, which sometimes I would be doing on hands and knees and which I never minded very much because it was my physical exercise to do it. On different days of the week I did special things, such as one day a week I cleaned all the instruments that were there, most of which the doc never used, and another day I would clean his office and polish his furniture, every damn thing. And so it went. But during the hours in which I was doing this kind of janitor work there would be individuals who would come up and would want pills for a headache, someone would come up with something in his eye from the sawmill, and I would have a solution to put into his eye so that I could go after--that would dull pain for a minute so that I could go after something in his eye. Doc taught me how to lift a lid, which I didn't know, or I watched him do it, I guess. And sometimes there were more serious accidents. There were cuts which I would tend to. And then there would be special things. Every two or three weeks the dentist came from Marlinton, and the dentist did nothing except pull teeth; he didn't do any other kind of dental work. So that when he was finished, I had to go in and clean up a lot of blood all around, and he was apparently not a very good dentist, because some of the men would have pieces of tooth coming out of their jaws for days afterwards. And occasionally I had a night call with a man who was bleeding, still bleeding, and I had to try and pack his gum cavity with cotton in order to stop the bleeding. I might say in passing that the attitude of many of the southern hillbillies toward teeth was that the sooner you got rid of your own teeth and got false teeth the better off you were. Men would come in who were only in their early twenties, and they had no more than three or four teeth left in their mouths; this apparently from their diet. And if you could get a free set of teeth made by the government, that was desirable.

GARDNER

Worth going to prison for. [laughter]

MALTZ

Yes, men would come in and let's say they had a three-month sentence for their first time on whiskey, and they would say, "Gee, Doc, can you pull the rest of my teeth and get me some teeth made?" Because they knew about the government teeth. The doc would take an--the dentist would take an impression, but the teeth were made, I think, in Springfield, Missouri. And so the men would want their teeth taken out for that purpose. And one other job that I would have every few weeks was to take care of new men coming into the prison camp. Since they came usually from filthy jails in small southern towns, my most important task was to see that they took showers and, after they took showers, to put DDT powder on all their hairy parts because otherwise there might be an infestation of body lice in the prison. So this task of cleaning up the hospital, and taking care of men who came up, usually would take me up to the time of lunch. Sometimes I would be through a little before, and then I was free to do whatever I wished. I could go to my room and sit down to read the New York Times, which I got there, or I could take a walk if I chose, or do anything else... go to the library as long as I was in hearing distance of the loudspeaker, which might summon me for an emergency. And, oh, as soon as I was through with sick call, I would change to regular denims and not wear them again until the next morning, not wear the whites again till next morning. My afternoon responsibilities were usually light unless I had a man in one of the beds who needed tending to, as, for instance, someone who had a sprained back and needed hot packs constantly, and so on. And so the afternoon could be spent, generally, in a fairly leisurely way. After I had been there in that job only a little while, I saw that my time was being cut into in a very ridiculous way. That is to say, there would be sick call, and I would start doing some cleaning, and then a man would come up and ask me for some working pills. (That was the southern term for a cathartic, workin' pills.) And so I'd have to stop my work and wash my hands in order to go into the medicine chest and get him the working pills. And then I would start to work again, and another man would come up, and he might want some working pills. So I went to the superintendent and told him what was happening and said, "It isn't as though a man had a headache and needed aspirin to cure the headache. This is something that they could ask for at regular sick call in the morning, or if you'll let me do a sick call in the evening, they could do it then and not keep coming up every five, ten minutes for the same damn thing because they don't feel like coming to sick call." And so he agreed to let me establish an evening sick call which I held by myself, and I very quickly got the men to know that if they had any emergency they could come at any time; and if they didn't, they were not to come except at the two sick calls. I also learned very quickly that the men there had been accustomed to giving the medical orderly before me occasional bribes in order to get him to give them things. Otherwise, he had one device or another of putting them off, or saying come back later, I'm busy, or some such thing. Some of them would start to come with bribes to me; they'd offer me candy when I gave them some pills, and they'd offer me cigarettes. And then when I, you know, made clear that I wasn't going to take anything from anyone, it made for a changed situation in the camp in reference to the medical orderly. Like others, I learned very quickly to try and work at what I would call the passing laugh. For instance, a man would come in and ask for some aspirin, and I'd say, "Well, all I have today (tonight) are some secondhand aspirins; I don't have any firsthand." And he'd say, "That's all right, I'm secondhand myself." And this kind of thing would go on. During the warm months before, let's say, October, the evening recreation, if you wanted, was softball, and since I had played softball all through my years in Los Angeles, I went out for one of the teams. I was asked if I was willing to go on a team which I found out had all black men on it, and I said sure. And then I found that the man who was the leader of that team, who was in for whiskey, but was basically a farmer, was a most admirable man. He was a very powerful, illiterate, but keenly intelligent man, and very stern in his effort to stimulate other men toward what I'd call black nationalism. And one of the things he wanted to do was to have his team, all black, beat the white teams. And so, while he accepted me on the team, he didn't let me play. And within one game I saw that I was a better player than four or five men on his team, and I raised hell and said I wasn't going to be treated like a patsy, I was a better player than some of those on the team, and he was forced to let me play. But the games were not too enjoyable because, as I found out very soon in that area, most of the men who were in, not for whiskey but for crime, were in because of their own character failures: they were grossly neurotic men. And this was manifest even in baseball games because something would happen in a game, such as a call by an umpire that they felt was unfair, and they would throw down their glove, and they would walk away from the field and wouldn't play anymore. And pretty soon a game would be called off. So I never knew when I started a game when it would end. The other recreations possible were the library and, surprisingly, for a small prison with a small library, they had excellent books. I could have spent years just reading my way through the books that they had there. They also had a librarian for about three months who put all the books--not all the books, who put half of the books in upside down because, apparently, there was something wrong with his eyes. [laughter] And there were checkers and dominos, and there was chess, and I found a number of chess partners so that we could play that. And actually, we were taught a special chess game by a man who came from Atlanta prison (which I'm using in a short story I've already written the first draft of), a game which involved four men and took a long time, and, of course, any game that took a long time was very desirable because time was your enemy. I got the New York Times, I got the New Yorker, and I had that reading and I had library reading, of course. And we would have movies usually once a week. In the summer months they were out of doors where all the men could see them at once, and when the cold weather came, we went by barracks to see them in the library. At first the movies were lousy Monogram movies which were hard to watch they were so bad, but later in the year we got a few good ones, and that was very delightful.

GARDNER

No Maltzes?

MALTZ

No. As a matter of fact, just after I left they played the little short The House I Live In, and I heard that from an inmate who came out later. But it didn't play while I was there. Would have been interesting if it had, yes. Among my friends there, because I developed cordial relations with quite a number of the men, there was Dmytryk, of course, who in general was a very pleasant man, very agreeable to be with, but with a certain shell of armor around him so that you got so close and no closer. And he had a gentle wit which involved something that I wasn't aware of at first and then perceived later, which was a gentle wit of putting down someone else, not in a harsh way, but it was nevertheless based upon putting someone down. And I began to learn things about him. I had never known him at all well; I had never known him well. For instance, we learned on our auto trip down that we both enjoyed chess, and so we said, well, let's play together. And from the way he talked about chess, I had a strong impression that he was a better player than I was, and I think he was. So in our first chess game I played with maximum attention and care, and Dmytryk with a certain amount of overconfidence, I think, so played that I beat him. I imagine if we had played more he would have beat me quite regularly, but the interesting thing is that he never played me chess again. And so that sort of told something about him. In the prison when we came there were Howard Fast and Professor Lyman Bradley of New York University, who had been chairman of the German department, and both of whom were on the board of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Bradley, whom I had never known before, was a very gentle gentleman, and he was really not cut out for, I think, the kind of struggle that he had found himself in, although he had behaved with absolute honor. And I came to like him very much in our short time together. They were only to be in there for another four weeks or so. And Howard I had only known in passing so that this was my first opportunity to get to know him, and what I learned about him I didn't like very much. For instance, at one point, he asked the superintendent if he could make a sculpture of a little boy that would be put in a fountain. There was a marvelous black stonemason in the prison who was in on income tax, a middle-aged man, and the prison was using him to do all sorts of work that they had wanted to have done for a long time. And he would make a little patio near the black barracks, and a fountain, and this little boy that Howard would sculpt would be in the fountain. And the superintendent gave his permission, and Howard did the sculpture so that the water would come out of the boy's penis. And this was something that was done in fountains in Europe and so on and very charming, and he did a very nice figure. And I said to him, "How can you do a thing like this?" And he said, "Oh, you just do it." He didn't tell me what I learned from Who's Who after I came out of prison: that he had been a student at the, I think, New York Academy of Design after high school, so evidently he had some artistic leanings before, or concomitant with, his beginning to write. And then on another occasion after prison I received his biography from an East German organization of Anglo-American literature. And I knew what that was about because they had asked me for my biography as well. And they reproduced both of them in English, and in Howard's he spoke of the fact that he had been born in poverty; and when he was a young man, he roamed the country in boxcars; and he carried brass knuckles and he used them. And here was a self-portrait of a kind of contemporary Jack London, which was, of course, something that delighted the East Germans, I'm sure, but it had nothing to do with a young man who had gone to the New York Academy of Design and who said nothing in his Who's Who about roaming the country as a hobo. So that he was telling one biography for Who's Who and another biography for someone else. And actually, when he left the Communist party, he published an article in the Saturday Review about his background, and there he told about his poverty in the same way that he had in the--this was now to be an excuse for why he had joined the Communist party. So that with that, and with the way he had written about George Washington, while at the same time knowing his very great creative talent, I nevertheless was turned off about him as a person. A kind of a final turnoff occurred one day in the barracks when I was down there talking with him and with Lyman Bradley. Howard said to us in slow and measured tones, "You know, I've been giving a great deal of thought to something." [tape recorder turned off] Howard, in measured tones, said, "You know, I've been giving a great deal of thought to this matter, and I've come to the conclusion that I am the most important living American writer."

GARDNER

At what point was this?

MALTZ

This was in prison. And Lyman Bradley gave a kind of inarticulate gasp and just jumped up and bolted out of the barracks. [laughter] And I don't know what I said, but I mumbled something or other out of my astonishment and... that was Howard. My closest friend through most of my stay was an educated black man, an engineer, Arthur. We became very good friends and closer and closer as time went on. We played chess together, and the atmosphere of the prison was such that we could go walking together, and if there were comments about it behind our back, there was no trouble from it. But I was also very friendly with a lot of the other men and, of course, learned as much about them as I could.

GARDNER

You talked about your being an orderly. Did Edward Dmytryk have anything similar to that that he did?

MALTZ

Oh, he was in the garage. And he was sort of a checkout man keeping records of what trucks went out and how much gas was used and this kind of thing. The general rule for visits was that one was allowed two hours a month. But if you had three months of good work reports by your supervisor, you were given an extra half an hour. And I remember saying to the doc when he had given me a certain grade, but not the grade that would entitle me to the half-hour extra, "What do I have to do to get such-and-such a grade?" And he didn't say anything, but he just gave me that grade. And so I had two-and-a-half-hour visits every month from my wife beginning in August. The first time she came, she came with Jean Dmytryk, and they both flew to Charleston and then they hired a car and drove to Mill Point. They stayed overnight in Marlinton, and because they had not visited in July, they had four hours, so they visited two hours on one day and two hours the next day, which was permitted. I guess I might mention now that when I came to Mill Point after Washington, the first thing I did, as soon as I could get my hands on paper and pencil, was to write down all seventy pages of the notes that I had memorized. And since so much of this was about--since all of the notes were about the operation of the Washington jail and details about life there, and things about the inmates there, I was afraid that I would forget them in the months that I was going to be in Mill Point, and I wanted to get them out for a novel. This was very interesting psychologically because I would not have done anything. I remember, for instance, that at one point a man there offered me a drink of some booze of some sort that had been made illegally, I think in the kitchen, out of fermented raisins or something like that. I refused it although I would very much have loved to have had some alcohol and had myself a drunk and gone to sleep, let's say, if I could, or just a drink. But as against getting into trouble, which could have happened if, let's say, there was a medical emergency and they found that I had some whiskey smell on me, I would never have touched it, and I didn't touch it. I had a few other kooky offers of that kind, and I would have nothing to do with it. But when it came to getting out some material for a novel, I was ready to risk something for that, which is an interesting contradiction. And I finally decided on a method that I thought could work. I was a smoker at that time, and I was able to get some onion-skin paper in the doc's office. I then printed my notes very minutely (printing making it clearer) on the onion skin, so that I must have gotten perhaps twelve, fourteen, fifteen hundred words on a page (perhaps not that many, but a great many words). Having measured this before, I then folded the paper in such a way that it came out to the exact size of the cigarettes I was smoking. And I rolled the paper up very tightly and then stapled it with Doc's stapler. Then I took a package of cigarettes, took out all of the cigarettes, and put in, I think, two or three, no more, of these rolled cigarette papers, so-called rolled cigarettes, in the pack, and this was something that went on over a period of months. I had previously told my wife, who didn't smoke, to come next time with the same type of cigarette that I was smoking. And as we smoked, I offered her one from my pack, and she took it; and then we exchanged packs, because this wasn't a porthole visit. We were in a room in which there were some other couples, and there was a guard. All I had to do was to keep my eye on the guard and shift the package of cigarettes from one lap to the other, and she was able to take them out. Now, if they'd been found on her, I probably would have lost my good time.

GARDNER

Really.

MALTZ

Oh, yes, I would have lost my good time, and I might have gotten some extra time. I certainly would have lost my good time and would have been transferred from Mill Point to a prison of a different--tighter prison. But I was willing to risk that. And in that way I got out all of my notes which were invaluable to me when I came to writing up the novel. The food at Mill Point was better than in the Washington jail, and I have some examples of it. There would be always at breakfast a little stewed fruit from a can, which was good. There would be cold cereal. There would be some blue milk and some bread, which was edible, and coffee, or there might be some flapjacks. For lunch there might be a wiener or sometimes one hamburger patty, which would be half-fat and a quarter bread and the rest meat. Or there would be a piece of fish on Friday, and the fish was usually edible, quite edible. There would be some beets and onions, bread, say some string beans and potatoes and some cold tea. And supper would be beans or fatback and kale or turnip greens, and there might be a cup of good soup, or there might be spaghetti, soup and spaghetti, beets and salad and a cabinet pudding. It was high on carbohydrates, of course. But I did some reading on nutrition and, as a result, I forced myself to eat the turnip greens and the kale, which may be good tasting in some type of cooking but weren't good there: the kale was like eating dry straw, but I covered it with vinegar to give it some taste, and I ate it down because it had vitamins in it that I knew I needed. And I noticed, in looking over some diary notes that I smuggled out, that one Sunday dinner there was chicken, and I wrote underneath that it was very tasty. So one got along on the food. I didn't, actually--I'll come to that later. But it was better than Washington, and it was okay. The political scene at this time was one in which Julius Rosenberg was arrested just as I left Washington, and Ethel Rosenberg [was arrested] in August. The Korean War, of course, was going on, and the political atmosphere. [tape recorder turned off]... the political atmosphere was one in which you could have the following dispatch to the New York Times from Hollywood. I'm quoting from page 130 of Cedric Belfrage's American Inquisition--no... yes, The American Inquisition: "Fear that a motion picture dealing with the life and exploits of Hiawatha might be regarded as Communist propaganda has caused Monogram Studio to shelve such a project. It was Hiawatha's efforts as a peacemaker among the warring Indian tribes of his day, which brought about the federation of five nations, that gave Monogram particular concern, according to a studio spokesman. These, it was decided, might cause the picture to be regarded as a message for peace and therefore helpful to present Communist designs." [laughter] You know, it's just beyond belief that this stuff could be printed this way, seriously, that people could think this way.

GARDNER

That people could accept it.

MALTZ

And people accept it. Of course there were others that laughed at it at that time the way we did, but laughed bitterly.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

But it's symbolic of the times. Now, in September the McCarran Act was passed, and it ordered the establishment of concentration camps. And such was the temper of the times that not only did Senator John Kennedy vote for it (because at that time John Kennedy was part of the McCarthy atmosphere, his brother was an assistant of McCarthy) but Senator Humphrey voted for it, and Wayne Morse voted for it, and [James W.] Fulbright voted for it. At this time also there was the arbitrary imposition by the State Department of a new passport policy that passports would not be issued to those individuals whose travel abroad, in the opinion of the department, would not be in the interests of the United States. Now, after prison I wrote a letter to Bob Kenny, which I had forgotten but some researchers called it to--two men who did some research recalled it to my mind that I wrote that this was the hardest year of my life, the prison year. And it wasn't because there was discrimination against us; there was in fact small and meaningless discrimination so far as I was concerned personally. Although 60 percent of the inmates were illiterates who were supposed to go to classes in prison, there were orders from Washington that neither Dmytryk nor I should be able to teach them. And I was not allowed to work in the library--I had hoped at first to be a librarian. But in terms of life in the camp, those men who had been in the army, as I had not, said that Mill Point was a lot like an army camp, but there was less discipline and there was less chicken shit. However, what made it hard were the cumulative frustrations of a routine that became increasingly monotonous, a life that was basically arid. There was separation from wife and children, and there was the anxiety about what would happen in the future that I was mentioning, and there was the sheer violation of one's spirit that comes from being locked up. The diet there did have an effect upon my health, and I must say that there are mysteries to nutrition as far as individuals are concerned. I did my best to eat intelligently while I was there, but I saw men who rejected all vegetables, who loved the fatback, which had nothing in it but fat pork, and who worked hard in the coal mine or on the farm or in the timber, cutting timber, and they remained perfectly well; but I came out with a swollen liver from malnutrition and felt quite depleted when I first came out.

GARDNER

Well, it could have been just that, the fact that your diet had been richer before you went in, whereas theirs was no change in diet whatsoever.

MALTZ

Yes, excepting why hadn't they--I mean, some of them ate what I would consider almost a pellagra diet, and as a matter of fact, some of them came up with rashes to the hospital, and from what I read, I thought that those might have been an initial pellagra rash. You know, that's a guess from a layman; just reading about something doesn't mean you know it in medical matters. But I know that I would recommend that they eat some of the vegetables, and yet others who ate the same diet didn't show that. So I just don't know. I could, in my spare time in Mill Point, have done some writing, but the rule was that any writing you did had to be read by the superintendent. I knew that I couldn't work on the novel I had conceived because that was about prison. They would never let it out. And somehow, any other writing that I had had in mind was just not in the forefront. I had to do this prison novel or nothing else. And so I spent my time as pleasantly as I could in free time, and that meant chess and reading. I got along very well with the other men, and the black men in the jail learned very quickly that there was no discrimination in the way I dispensed services, and so I developed some friendships with them. Like the others, I applied for parole, and there were many times in which men who applied for parole got an answer within a few weeks. But mine didn't come for months, and it was a denial. Elmer Rice was among those who wrote to the parole board for me, but the members of the board said frankly to Margaret, my wife, when she went down there, "What's he going to do when he gets out? He's going to be against the Korean War, isn't he?" And so made it clear that, on political grounds, no parole would be forthcoming. From time to time I would get verbal communications from Trumbo through some man being sent to our place from Ashland. And things like that were small pleasures. [background noise] Is that noise going to come out on the tape?

GARDNER

I don't think so. We'll find out.

MALTZ

Well, I can have them quieted.

GARDNER

Well, it's almost over, anyway.

MALTZ

My relationship with Dmytryk was a very friendly one. We certainly had special things in common as we did with no one else in the prison, and he would come to me to tell me that he had gotten a letter from Jean about what had happened to a film of his that he had made.

GARDNER

I think this is.... [tape recorder turned off]

MALTZ

I want to add something to the parole thing. I cut out with amusement something in June. Attorney General [Griffin] Bell said he would have been inclined to put former Attorney General John Mitchell on probation rather than send him to jail. Not having done that, he said, "I think I might have had him serve ten days or sixty days. That's enough." Bell told television interviewer Barbara Walters that Mitchell was a first offender who most likely would have been given probation if he had been an unknown bank robber. "And even the rich have rights," he said. "We lean over backwards, and we are a little less careful with the rights of the rich than the poor." Well, I'm thinking of that in reference to this treatment of us. With Dmytryk... he revealed in a current autobiography that in the first meeting with his wife, in which she came to the prison with mine, he planned a statement about the Korean War that he gave subsequently to Bart Crum in which he disassociated himself from the rest of the Ten. But of course, he didn't say anything to me about it. And a very interesting thing happened. The unnamed film that I had been working on, worked on before prison, came out, and to marvelous critical reception, and became a large commercial success. And it was the most natural thing in the world for me to want to tell someone about it. And whom could I tell with more assurance of trust than another man in jail with me? And at the last moment I said to myself, hey, what's the matter with you? What kind of immaturity is this? You just don't talk about these things, that's all. You don't talk about it even with someone in jail with you, and so I never told Dmytryk. But if I had, in the atmosphere of that time when he became an informer not too many months later, I think he would have ruined the careers of the man who put his name on the film, of the producer of the film, perhaps of an agent involved, and of a number of others who knew about the thing. So it was marvelously fortunate I didn't. Among the pleasures....

GARDNER

This side's out.

1.47. TAPE NUMBER: XXI, SIDE ONE
DECEMBER 22, 1978

MALTZ

One of the pleasures that came in prison were letters.

GARDNER

Now let me just play this back to see if it came through. [tape recorder turned off]

MALTZ

My wife was marvelous about writing, and almost invariably I received a letter every day from her. Perhaps other men would not have looked forward to each letter as much as I did mine, but that was so with me. Under the prison rules I could have an occasional letter from two friends whom I had asked if they wanted to write to me. One was George Sklar, and he was very faithful in writing and wrote lovely letters, because mostly he told me about his children, to whom I felt close, and he wrote about them in a very charming way. The other close friend, Michael Blankfort, wrote me only one letter, that I recall, in the nine months, and that was clearly a self-serving letter designed to tell whatever persons read it that he was not a radical. The letter distressed me, but there was nothing I could do about it. There were various types of small pleasures that I had from time to time, and some that I cultivated. For instance, on Lincoln's Birthday I was delighted to hear "The Lonesome Train" played with the words by Millard Lampell and music by Earl Robinson. It is a piece that I always had loved, and it was kind of a triumph for me to hear it under these circumstances. Not only was Earl Robinson an old friend but I was very, very fond of Millard Lampell and his wife Elizabeth, whom I adored. Another small pleasure was to run out when there were still some flowers along the central walk in the prison and to pick up those which were cut and take back two or three zinneas and marigolds, put them into a tin drinking cup in my room, throw in a couple of aspirin (which I had been told would prolong their life), and so enjoy these flowers. Humor, laughter, was something that one always sought. I remember once... I remember this kind of thing that went on as much as possible, as much as the inmates could do it. Some new men came in, and a black inmate was talking to a new white inmate in for whiskey who asked what a white patch off in the distance was, and the black man said that it was the graveyard. And then he explained to the newcomer that if a man died while in prison he was buried out in that graveyard until he had served his time, and only then could his family come and get his body and take him home. The newcomer was very upset about this and thought that this was a terrible rule and, of course, this became a source of great laughter. I am now in the process of trying to build a sort of memoir-story about a day, Sunday, in which I and some others were hurriedly piled into a truck in order to aid a couple of men who had crashed in a plane some miles from the camp. I was taken along, of course, because of being the medical orderly, and while I wanted to do everything I could for the men who were injured, there was another aspect to the whole day which was that we got out of the camp; we got to go to a town, and we got to see a few people other than the camp inmates. That made it a glorious and exciting day. In November 1950 Dmytryk left since he had completed his six-month sentence less good time, and his manner with me was cordial and warm; but as I know now from his autobiography, he had already decided on a complete political split with the rest of us. That year, in 1950, the collection of my speeches, The Citizen Writer, was published and also a short story, "Circus Come to Town." There were a great many foreign reprints of my work, and my income in the year was a little over... just a second, I can't... [tape recorder turned off]... was a little over $4,000.

GARDNER

Quite a drop from the previous year.

MALTZ

Yes, yes. This was not wholly indicative, as you'll see, of what happened in succeeding years, because of foreign royalties and so on. During the months of 1951 I gave increasing thought to the way in which I wanted to live from now on. I knew that I wanted surcease from the kind of intense organizational activity which I had accepted as part of my life from about 1935 on, and which had been exaggerated in the two and a half years of the Hollywood case. I wanted maximum time for writing, and I had no interest in making further speeches. I also knew that if I would go back to Los Angeles, there would be absolutely no way in which I could remove myself from organizational activity because it would be regarded by others as an abandonment of responsibility and duty. And no matter what explanations I would try to make, and no matter what justification I would offer, it would still be regarded in that way by those who were themselves active. And I knew that the pressures would be enormous and that feelings would be involved. And so in view of the fact that there was no chance of going abroad, since the passport policy established after the beginning of the Korean War would prevent me from getting a passport, my thoughts turned to Mexico where our old friend Lini DeVries was now living. And my wife and I began to plan for that in our monthly meetings. The routine of prison life went on as I have described until the time came that I was to leave. I must say that in the weeks, and then the days, in which I was "getting short" (which is the prison term for coming close to leaving), I became more and more tense over the question of whether or not I would be met at the exit from the prison by a couple of marshals with a hold order.

GARDNER

Why is that?

MALTZ

I had that on my mind because there were a number of inmates who had committed state crimes as well as the federal one for which they were in Mill Point, and they all said that just as they left prison there would be state officers there with a hold order to immediately arrest them and take them either for trial or to a state penitentiary. And in my case, although there was no other infraction in which I was involved, nevertheless there was my anxiety about the concentration camps and the McCarran--under the McCarran law. However, nothing like that happened to me, and it was a sign of the times that when I left, at about six o'clock in the morning before any of the other inmates were awake, the superintendent of the prison emerged from behind a car (parked near the taxi that had come for me) to shake my hand and say goodbye and wish me well. Now, the superintendent was a very decent man, and it's certain that what I would call the benign quality of the camp was due to him in considerable part. We had had several conversations during the course of the year, and he had also read some notes that I made which I wanted to take out in my hand; I thought that he would pass them, and he had read them and he did pass them. But he could have summoned me to his office the day before and said goodbye to me, and he didn't do that. It's my belief that he used the method of hiding behind a car in the semilight of very early morning because there were FBI informers on the staff of the prison camp who would have reported him for this. I may be wrong about that, but his behavior needs some explanation. The taxi which I had been allowed to arrange for--or, no, the taxi which my wife had arranged for at her last visit drove me seventy miles to Charleston, West Virginia, where my wife was. We took a plane to St. Louis, where we remained overnight and the next day took another plane to Mexico City. I think I might mention now that there were two hangovers that prison left me with, and they were not what people would have guessed. For instance, some people in later years very delicately asked me if I would mind speaking about, telling, answering some questions about prison as though they were asking me about something that would churn up so much feeling that I would be convulsed with pain. Well, it was nothing like that at all. It was perfectly comfortable for me to talk about it as about any other experience I had had. It gave me no turn whatsoever to see a prison scene in a movie, and so on. But even though I wore blue jeans in the years before prison as an ordinary working garment, I have been unable to put on blue jeans since. It's a most curious hangup. I've tried to, but when I start to put my leg through one of them, I get just a bad feeling. It's not logical, but that's my reaction, and I've never worn a pair of blue jeans since. And the second reaction was perfectly fascinating. In 1972 it was necessary for me to have a pacemaker, and I was in intensive care in the hospital for several days after the surgery. During that time my motion was severely limited because I was hooked up to a cardiac monitor and it was not possible for me to get out of bed or to turn very much. And my wife Esther visiting me every day, being with me all day, actually, was under the impression that I was depressed. I wasn't aware of this. But she definitely thought so. And at my very first meal at home I commented--without any thought except for what I was saying--"This is better food than I got in that jail," and I didn't even realize I had used the word jail until my wife pointed it out to me. And the next day, referring to the man who had been in the room with me after I was moved out of intensive care, I said, "You know, my cellmate was a pretty nice guy." And once again I didn't realize that I had used the word cellmate, so it's quite clear that the "imprisonment" of intensive care had thrown me back into prison.

GARDNER

And that you were affected much more subconsciously than you realized.

MALTZ

I suppose... although I don't feel it in other ways. Amusing, isn't it?

GARDNER

Yes.

MALTZ

We only stayed overnight in Mexico City, and then we moved right down to Cuernavaca where our friend Lini was living. I want to pause now and tell a little of what happened to her since the occasion when I traveled with her in New Mexico into the villages where she was acting as public health nurse. She remained in that job for several more years, and then she became head of public health nursing in Puerto Rico for several years, and from that job she moved to being chief nurse in a very large venereal disease clinic in Chicago where a major effort was under way to carry out a campaign of education on the VD problem. And from that job she moved to be head of public health care for the Mexican crop workers who came to California during World War II in order to do harvesting. They came by arrangement between the U.S. government and the Mexican government, and there were stipulations in it about the conditions under which they would live and these involved health care. And Lini was in charge of all of the services involved in that from the nursing point of view, and inspection of conditions and so on. But when the war was over and when, finally, enough soldiers came home so that this arrangement with the Mexican government came to an end, her job came to an end, and by that time the inquisition had begun, the political inquisition had begun, and she was named by Elizabeth Bentley as a Communist. And from then on it became impossible for her to hold any of the government jobs that she once had held. Nursing in a hospital was now too hard for her physically, and she finally had a job for some months as the nurse in an old-age home; but the FBI caught up with her there by speaking to the superintendent, and she was fired from that. At that point, with a three-year-old daughter and a divorced husband who provided no support, she decided to try and make a new life for herself in Mexico, and she went there. She had had contact with a very well-known Spanish refugee, a woman whose husband had been one of the top officers of the Spanish Republican air force. She was now living in Cuernavaca and running a textile business, and Lini went down to live with her and to help her in the management of her home. But by the time we came to Mexico, Lini was no longer living with that woman, who had tragically been killed in an automobile accident. She was now in a small apartment in a suburb of Cuernavaca, earning a precarious living by giving English lessons. Lini had rented a house for us on a temporary basis, with our prior agreement, of course, and it turned out to be the home in which German political refugees, who had been in the United States but who had had to leave the United States at the outbreak of war, had used as a rest home. I don't know if I stated that clearly. I prefer to state it over again. Various of the German refugees in the United States such as some I have mentioned--André Simone... well, he was Czech--André Simone, the novelist, Anna Seghers, and many others, had not been permitted to remain in the United States once we went to war with Germany. They had accordingly gone to Mexico and lived there. And they were able to rent a large home in Cuernavaca as a kind of weekend place, as a rest home for their group. By the time we came in 1951, all of them had returned to Europe, to their various countries, and so we by accident moved into the same house. It was a very spacious house, old and poorly built and, for some reason, had tinted windows on its second floor so that it looked as though it were a whorehouse. But it provided adequate space for us, and it had a big lawn and an unheated swimming pool. I arrived in Cuernavaca not feeling too well and was at once introduced to a local doctor, an Austrian by birth, Ernesto Amann. He had been a volunteer to the Republican side in the civil war in Spain, and had married a Spanish woman, Pilar, and then had been one of the many Spanish refugees from the war, from the Republican side, who were admitted by the Mexican government. He was practicing medicine in Cuernavaca. He found that I had an enlarged liver due, he felt, to inadequate nutrition in prison, and he put me on a high-protein diet and gave me shots, and within a matter of weeks, I believe, I began to feel better, I began almost at once to dictate notes on life in Mill Point and on the characters in Mill Point because I wanted to have a permanent file on this. The notes I had put on cigarette papers had already been typed out by a secretary my wife had hired, and as soon as I completed these notes, which took several weeks, I began to plan the novel for which I already had a title of A Long Day in a Short Life. The second round of hearings of alleged communism in the film industry opened just as I arrived in Mexico. Dore Schary and the producers who had come to speak to the Writers Guild two and a half, now three and a half years before, had said, "Give us these ten men, and we will promise you that no one else will be blacklisted." Well, now the blacklisting was ready to start in earnest. In March Larry Parks had appeared before the House Committee with his impotent plea that they not force him to drag himself through the mud, and now starting in early April there came a parade of informers. One of the first was the most interesting, Sterling Hayden, the actor, because in the sixties he published a book called Wanderer in which he flagellated himself for having been an informer. Edward Dmytryk appeared, and I have always had this theory about Dmytryk and have found no reason to change my mind: I think that if he had been allowed to go to Europe to make films, he would have done so and merely would have been quiet politically. But since the passport policy prevented him from doing that, he just made a cold decision that he was going to work no matter what was involved in his doing so. And so he became an informer. So also did Richard Collins, who had been one of the Hollywood Nineteen, and Marc Lawrence, the actor, and Frank Tuttle, the director of This Gun for Hire, the first man I worked with in Hollywood, and Budd Schulberg. Now, it has always been very interesting to me that various individuals sought to find justification for becoming informers [pause in tape] by blaming the Communist party for something it did. For instance, in Schulberg's case, he was angry that members of the Communist party had asserted that his novel What Makes Sammy Run was anti-Semitic. And in Dmytryk's case, he always repeated that some members of the Communist party had wanted him to change the way he had made his film Cornered. But no matter what the Communist party's sins were, even if they had been magnified a hundred times in the case of each one of these individuals, it would not have explained why they were cooperating with a committee that was trying to promote thought control in the United States. And this is what is so often missed in any discussion of the testimony of people before that committee. The real issue, for instance, was never whether people were going to state whether or not they had been Communists; the issue was whether or not they were going to accept the committee's right to inquire into the political thinking and the political activity of citizens. Now, as against these friendly witnesses to the committee, a whole host of individuals I had known and, in some cases, been very friendly with stood up against the committee: for instance, in this early April period Leonardo Bercovici, John Bright, Paul Jarrico, Abe Polonsky, Waldo Salt (who had been one of the Nineteen), John Wexley, Jay Gorney, Karen Morley, Lloyd Gough, Howard Da Silva (who had acted in several of my plays), Ann Revere, Lionel Stander, Gale Sondergaard, Robert Lees, and Will Geer (who had been going around with Ann Revere playing the radio play of The Journey of Simon McKeever).

GARDNER

How did you hear about that? How did you follow this through...?

MALTZ

Well, I got the New York Times.

GARDNER

Did you also have correspondents here? Did George Sklar, for example...

MALTZ

Oh, yes, I corresponded...

GARDNER

...keep you in touch?

MALTZ

...I corresponded with friends once I was out, indeed. But we got the New York Times every day, a couple of days late down in Cuernavaca, of course, some days late, and I shortly, I think, subscribed to an airmail edition of the New York Times so would get it in a couple of days. And, you know, [I] very soon subscribed to a whole list of periodicals--did I use the Spanish word then?

GARDNER

No.

MALTZ

Yes, I started to think in Spanish. [laughter] And so there was no problem. Now, I'd like to pause just a moment and comment on the Fifth Amendment. None of those who opposed the committee in this second round of hearings stood on the First Amendment as we in the Ten had done, and for very good reason. There was no point in quixotically taking a position that would result in jail and would not result, in the present, in that atmosphere, in any possible court reversal. Now, in all of the years in which there were individuals who protected themselves by the use of the Fifth Amendment before this committee and other committees, the members of the committees and various people in the media tried to say that they were hiding behind the Fifth Amendment. They tried to make the Fifth Amendment something dirty. And they tried to make it an automatic confession of guilt. This was an extraordinary perversion of the meaning of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution and the reason why our forefathers had included it. The Fifth Amendment had come into existence as a means of protecting citizens against the potential tyranny of the state. Our founding fathers had very much in mind certain events in England in which Catholics, for instance, were forced to testify by a Protestant government about their religious beliefs, and were then punished for having them. Therefore they gave (in the Fifth Amendment) all citizens the right to decline to answer questions under oath on the ground that it might incriminate or degrade them. And the real purpose of the Fifth Amendment was to compel the state to make a case and not to coerce an individual to make a case against himself. But that's precisely what the House Committee on Un-American Activities was trying to do: it was trying to degrade people, to cause them to lose their jobs even though they had committed no breach of the law for which they could be legitimately prosecuted. And with the exception of some individuals like Alexander Meikeljohn and Carey McWilliams and Telford Taylor and Walter Gellhorn of the Columbia Law School and Tom Emerson of the Yale Law School and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia University--with the exception of such individuals, everyone in the media expressed tremendous disdain and contempt for those who took the Fifth Amendment. This was an enormous perversion of the democratic process, and the very fact of saying that any part of the Constitution, or any one of the constitutional guarantees to citizens, was something that a citizen should not use was a perversion. Returning now to myself, my children came down to Cuernavaca very soon after our arrival with their aunt, Katherine Larkin. And since there was no school adequate for my son, we made an arrangement with Lini for tutoring, and Kathy went to a bilingual school run by a German refugee couple. Very soon after I arrived in Cuernavaca I was surprised to have a phone call--no, not a phone call, I was surprised to get a letter or a telegram from Frank Ross, the producer of The Robe, who was in Mexico City. This film had not yet been made because, as I believe I may have mentioned earlier, Howard Hughes had become head of RKO and he had refused, not only to make it there, but had not allowed Frank Ross to take it somewhere else--a fine example of the capriciousness of enormous wealth. But now someone else was at the head of the studio, and Ross had been given leave to take the script elsewhere, and he wanted to see me. I can only assume at this late date that I had written my agent upon my coming out of jail and he had gotten the address from her. He came to Cuernavaca and told me that he had a deal with Darryl Zanuck at Fox, Twentieth Century-Fox, for the production of The Robe (and he had now been trying to get this project done for about eight years). My name on the script was now the only thing that stood in the way of its being done. I told him at once that I would not stand in the way but I of course was not happy at the... [tape recorder turned off]... I was not happy with the fact that my name was going to be taken off....

1.48. TAPE NUMBER: XXI, SIDE TWO
DECEMBER 22, 1978

MALTZ

I was not happy with the fact that my name was going to be taken off the script... and, oh, well, taken off the script--that's the end of that sentence. It so happens that a year later the Writers Guild, the Screen Writers Guild, gave producers the right to take names off scripts if someone had appeared before the committee and had not cooperated. But at this time there was no such right. I made clear to Frank Ross that I felt that I should be recompensed in part by something financial, but I left it up to him as to what that would be, and he responded with a letter after he got back to Los Angeles giving me 2 1/2 percent of his profits from the film, and those proved to be very substantial later on. In the May 10 edition of the Saturday Evening Post an article appeared called "What Makes a Hollywood Communist" by Richard English. English was both a screenwriter and a journalist, and it was all based on Edward Dmytryk and a phony portrait of what he was, and when and how he had joined the Communist party and so on. It so happened that I was able to write a commentary on this, exposing every lie in it, and I could do that without reference to any documents. For instance, he claimed that he was completely on the outs with the other members of the Ten by a certain date. Well, more or less after that date--not more or less, but it was after that date that I was best man at his wedding. And since this was a matter of public record, there was no way he could get around it. There were any number of such things. I wrote my commentary and sent it up to Herbert Biberman, and he went down to the Hollywood Reporter--oh, I had arranged, in sending it to Herbert, I had arranged with Herbert that I would pay the cost if he could get it into one of the Hollywood trade papers as an advertisement since I knew that the Saturday Evening Post would never publish my response. And Herbert went to Variety and they rejected it. But then he went to the Hollywood Reporter and said that he wanted to place this as an ad, and it was accepted and appeared on the twenty-ninth of May. It can now be found on page 400 of Thirty Years of Treason by Eric Bentley. (It is not listed in the chapter headings.) It's quite evident that my comments were very upsetting to the people backing Dmytryk because there was a reply in the Hollywood Reporter on June 6 that was entitled "You Can Be Free Men Again!" and it was signed by Ronald Reagan, Roy Brewer, and others. And there was another article by Victor Lasky, a commentator in the New Leader, on August 6 about it. And finally, in Dmytryk's autobiography published this year, 1978, he refers to this and says that the Communist party selected me to be the hatchet man after he'd testified because I had been his best man and because I had been in prison with him. He then says that my comments were half-truths and distortions, and that's all he has to say about it. By the way, I have found this with Blankfort, too: whenever you nail somebody, their only response is that you ripped things out of context, you had half-truths and distortions, and that's all they say. [laughter] They never give an illustration. It was fairly early in my stay in Cuernavaca that somebody introduced me to David, well, that's David [Alfaro] Siqueiros. And I remember we stood around on some plaza in Cuernavaca talking for about an hour. Siqueiros spoke excellent English. That was about the longest conversation we had until a few weeks before he went to jail some years later, because I purposefully stayed away from Siqueiros. He was a very active, very prominent member of the Mexican Communist party, and it was Mexican law that foreigners not get involved in Mexican politics. I had no desire to be involved, and it would have been foolish from every point of view for me to try to lead any kind of a political life as a foreigner in that country. But I knew that if I were seen enough in his company that conclusions would be drawn by the Mexican government about it. I remember something that was a fascinating little insight on Mexico. On one occasion that summer, when my wife and I were in Mexico City on some business, we were invited to a special comida, eating about 2:30 in the afternoon in the open air in a beautiful garden in a district called the Pedregal. Now, this was a dinner attended by perhaps 100 people, and it was to signalize a renewal of the friendship between Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. I would imagine that their break had occurred quite some years before, when Diego Rivera had espoused the cause of Leon Trotsky, who was a refugee in Mexico for some years, and Rivera helped him financially. At that time Rivera was expelled from the Communist party of Mexico, and I'm sure that he and Siqueiros broke off personal relations. Subsequently Siqueiros led a small group of men in an attempt to assassinate Trotsky. The attempt was a failure, and Siqueiros fled from Mexico for several years and lived in a South American country. Siqueiros, by the way, was the most political of all of the great Mexican painters. For a certain period he was secretary of the Mexican Communist party. He went to Spain as a volunteer in the Mexican brigade in the civil war, and I have an idea that the amount of painting he did would always increase whenever he was in jail because he would have more time for it. But now Leon Trotsky had been dead for some years, murdered by an agent of Stalin's, and Rivera had been attempting to get back into the Communist party. He had been saying openly that he wanted to be readmitted, and this formal reunion between Siqueiros and Rivera was a very early harbinger of Rivera's readmittance, although it didn't in fact take place for some years. All of this is preface to the fact that at the end of the dinner Siqueiros and Rivera shook hands, and both jumped to their feet and pulled pistols out of their pockets and shot into the air. Now, Rivera's pistol, it so happens, didn't go off, which made it funny, but that brings me to the real point of this story, which is that in Mexico at that time the number of men of all classes who carried weapons was enormous. The reason for this was that the Mexican revolution had lasted ten years, and there were a great many people still alive who had lived through those years and many men who had fought through those years. They had carried weapons for so long that it was a matter of habit and comfort to them to continue to carry weapons. For instance, a friend of mine was driving on a country road when all traffic was blocked by a boulder that had fallen from a mountain. It was a hot day, and half a dozen men got out of their cars to push the boulder, and all of them were wearing pistols strapped around their waists. And this being a habit with the older generation, it was passed on to some of the younger ones so that, for instance, at a time when there was a party in my house for my daughter at the age of fifteen (which was the time in which such parties are held in Mexico), a quarrel began between a young Mexican college student, university student, and a young American university student, and in our crowded living room full of dancers the young Mexican pulled a pistol. Now, this never would have happened among college youths in the United States, but there it was not unusual. At this time, Herbert Biberman got in touch with me and said that he was raising money to do an independent film and asked me if I would write it. And I told him that no, I wanted to concentrate on fiction, and I was already at work on a novel. The broad political scene at this time was one in which the Korean War was going on with all of the alarms that surrounded it, and the international tensions. The first group of Communist party leaders who had been arrested several years before went to jail at this time after their appeals were turned down, and all sorts of trials and hearings were going on, and two days after I left prison Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death by Judge [Irving] Kaufman. Dashiell Hammett and Frederick Vanderbilt Field entered prison for reasons I've mentioned earlier, and the American scene was a total nightmare. I can only again refer scholars to the Belfrage book. Rather early in the summer of 1951, we were introduced to Herman Wouk and his wife at some party to which we were invited. He took occasion on that evening, in rather gratuitous fashion, to make sure that any FBI informants who were at the party knew that he disagreed with my political position. And I didn't blame him for doing that because he had no prior knowledge, I'm sure, that I was going to be there, and he wanted to make clear that he wasn't of my political stripe. By coincidence, the Wouks rented a home about fifty yards away from mine, and it turned out that a young son of about five, I think, perhaps even just of four, whose name was Abram, was going to attend the same school in which our daughter Kathy was going. And since Wouk didn't have an automobile and we did by that time, an arrangement was made through Lini, who was the next-door neighbor to the Wouks, for Abram to be brought to our house in the morning by a maid, and then he was taken to school by my wife. Abram was a remarkable little boy, very handsome, and with an amazing articulateness very rare in a child of that age. He must have had a very high IQ, and I recall that I welcomed his appearance every morning because he was so attractive a little personality. In the course of the next weeks there would be days in which it might be chilly and I wouldn't go for a swim, but I would take a walk. On one or two occasions Herman Wouk joined me, and we walked a little together. And, as a result of this, we invited him and his wife to dinner. About half an hour before dinner he came around in a rather agitated state and, I believe, said that his wife was not well, and so they didn't come. But a few days later, when I was swimming, Wouk came over and sat down on the edge of the pool, and we had a conversation for perhaps half an hour as I paddled and swam around, talking about various things associated with the writing business. I had not yet read The Caine Mutiny, but I knew that it was on the best-seller lists and rising to be number one, and it was a very pleasant conversation. During the course of it, Wouk asked me if there had been drownings of children in Hollywood due to the presence of swimming pools, and I said there had been. And he told me that he was arguing, talking with the landlord about putting a fence up around the pool, and there was a question of whether the landlord should pay for it or he should pay for it. The next morning, just after I had gotten dressed, Wouk dripping with water, came running to the front of the house and shouted, asking whether I knew anything about resuscitation, and I said I did, and ran with him back to his home. His child Abram had been--He had pulled his child out of the pool. The child had been left with a maid while they were getting dressed for breakfast, and he evidently had a small boat that they had given him. The maid got involved in talking with some young man over a fence, and presumably the child sat on the edge of the pool with the boat and reached for it and fell in. Now, in Cuernavaca a type of disinfectant was used for pools which was not like the chlorine here: it turned the water a deep opaque blue, and there was no knowing what was below the surface. So that when the child was missed, Herman finally, thinking it might be the pool, had jumped in and had had to swim backwards and forwards underwater until he encountered the child's body. Lini was already trying the methods then in use at resuscitation, and I took over. And people rapidly gathered so that the whole, say, English-speaking community, although some were of German origin, and all different types of people gathered; no matter what their personal differences, everyone centered on the hope that this child could be brought to. Now, I had read in my first-aid book in prison that hope should not be given up for a drowned person until about four hours of efforts had been made at resuscitation, and so I had that in my mind. And we kept that up for hour after hour even though Dr. Ernesto Amann came around after about an hour and gave the boy a shot in the heart, and then whispered to me that there was nothing to be done. But I had this compulsive need not to quit before the four hours were over. Of course, I couldn't remain on my knees all that time; others took my place and so on. But there was no--The child was dead. And I knew, of course, that Wouk would have cut off both his arms rather than delay having a fence put in because he was discussing with the landlord who should pay for it. It was the kind of thing that must have provided enormous guilt for him because he loved this child certainly as much as any father ever loved a child. And his wife was stricken. It was very fortunate for both of them that she was pregnant at the time as I recall and... or did she have a...? I think she was pregnant... not about to have another... without a little one. I forget whether there was a little one already, or she was pregnant. But then, at their request, I spent the next several days with Herman trying to occupy his time and doing things like opening letters and telegrams for him, because this death had occurred on a Friday, Friday morning, and on Saturday Wouk, who was a very orthodox Jew, could not open a telegram or anything like that. They left on a Monday, and that was the last time I've ever seen him. Just pause for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] Living in Cuernavaca at this time was the author Willard Motley whose novel Knock on Any Door had been a best-seller. I never met him, and at a certain point this was deliberate on my part for reasons that will be clear. An incident occurred in which Motley and some friends were seated on the veranda of an old hotel in Cuernavaca called the Bella Vista. This was a hotel in which various celebrated events had occurred, and although there were few people who used it now as a hotel, it was a fairly favorite drinking spot for people. And on the veranda one night when Motley and some friends were there, there was a woman, an American woman, who was there on vacation and who was a scientist and wanted to be sure that she would get a passport. Now, she had been one of those who had come around when Abram Wouk died. And she and her husband had been to our home for dinner, and we had taken her children swimming on a number of occasions at different spots. But now she had run into some trouble in getting a passport, for reasons I know nothing about, and this time she was having a drink on the hotel veranda with some man she knew who was a Texan. The Texan had begun to make nasty remarks about Motley because Motley was black, and then had demanded of the proprietor that he not allow Motley and the others to be on the veranda with him. And the proprietor had replied, "This is Mexico, not the United States, and anybody who wants to drink here has the right to do it. If you don't like it, you can leave." And so the Texan and this woman left. This incident made Motley and his friends so excited and pleased that they proceeded to get very drunk, from the reports I had, and to sing various songs that came to their mind, including the communist song "The International." I have no reason to think that Motley had anything to do with the Communist movement, but the song was one that was well known, and so, out of a kind of defiance, they had sung that as well as, I suppose, "The Marseillaise" and so on. But it was noted that this song had been sung. And I subsequently heard that this woman scientist had become friends with a member of the American embassy. And then a series of three articles appeared in the most important Mexican newspaper, Excelsior, calling for the deportation of the American Communists who were now agitating in Mexico and in Cuernavaca, and linking me and Motley, and saying that I was at a party at his house (to which I had not gone), and, I believe, linking me to the event on the porch, the singing of "The International." I am no longer able to find those articles. This was very uncomfortable especially because at this time we were trying to change our status from that of tourists to that called inmigrante, which is the equivalent of immigrant. Our sole reason for wanting to change the status was that tourists could only stay in Mexico for six months, and then if they wished to stay longer, they had to leave the country and get a new tourist visa and come back in. This would mean that we would have to go up to Texas or go south to Guatemala. It would be a nuisance, it would involve taking our children, it would be costly. And the status of inmigrante would allow us, by posting a certain sum of money, to assure the government that we would not become public charges, would allow us to avoid these trips. I had been introduced to a very fine man who was an attorney, Benito Noyola, and he was seeking to get this new status for us. (I might mention in passing that in Mexico the colloquial word for an attorney is coyote because so many of them indeed are unscrupulous in the way they will try to milk money out of any client. Not only that, but in Mexico--moreover in Mexico, practically omnipresent in dealings with the government is the giving of bribes which are called "bites," in Spanish morditas. The word for attorney in Mexico is licenciado, and I can only refer to him as Licenciado Noyola.) Not only was he absolutely honest in all of his dealings with clients but he refused to give a bribe to anyone. And he said, "I don't believe in it. I believe it's corrupting for the government, and I don't do it. And we will manage without it." The fascinating thing was that he always did manage without it, he was such a respected man. Now, at one point he asked me to go to the American embassy and get a certificate of citizenship, that it was wanted by the Mexican government. And I went to the embassy, and I had some war bonds that I had purchased that I wanted to turn in because they had matured, and I showed the young lady my passport, which was an old one, an out-of-date one, but I asked for a certificate of citizenship. And because she was very busy she asked if I could come back a little later in the day when she would have typed out the numbers of all the bonds and fixed up the papers she had to. I said I would. When I came back, she gave me the proper papers for cashing the bonds and then said that the consul would like to see me. I was ushered into an office where the, I believe, consul or some official said to me that the woman who had attended to me in the morning had not known who I was and that they were not going to give me a certificate of citizenship. And I got very angry and asked whether he was trying to tell me that I was not a citizen. And he said, "No. But the State Department is not interested in facilitating your residence in a foreign country." He then asked me for my passport and, with the passport in a briefcase under my arm, I said I didn't have it, that it was with my lawyer. And we had a few more words and I left. I told this to my attorney, and he said, "Well, we'll do the best we can." And I think we had an--I know we had, yes, an appointment for the very next morning at the Department of Interior, which opened at eight o'clock, and he said that we should be there at eight o'clock in the morning, before the American embassy could do anything, so that we could take our next step in getting the papers. Now, I don't know whether it was exactly that night--I think, no, I think it was a few days earlier that a most extraordinary coincidence occurred. My wife and I had been taking a walk in the evening, and we passed a bookshop, and there in the window of the bookshop were about ten copies of my novel The Cross and the Arrow in its Argentinean edition. The edition had been published in Argentina a few years before, and how they happened to be in this bookshop in Mexico City, and why the owner of the bookshop had put it into the window I never found out because at that time I couldn't talk Spanish well enough. But we went there the next morning, and I bought about fifteen to twenty copies of the book (I think all that he had) because I felt that it might be of some value to me. And the very next morning, when we went to the office of the Department of Interior, we saw on the wall, as we were waiting to be dealt with by a clerk, a note that said in effect: if Albert Maltz comes in, please notify the American embassy... please call the American embassy. Which meant that the consul had hot-footed down to the Department of Interior the afternoon before in order to post this note. So we immediately left. But I subsequently got my status because my attorney went about it in another way: he didn't give bribes but he did use the fact that, as a former attorney in the Department of Energy, I think, in hydraulics and energy, he went around introducing me to various officials in the government, several of whom later became presidents of Mexico, and giving them autographed copies of my novel. There is in Mexico great respect for people of the arts. For instance, I learned as I was learning Spanish that I was not to tell people I was a writer because that meant that I was a journalist: I was to say I was an author because that was the word that was used. And introducing me also as one of the Hollywood Ten was a factor that gave me sympathy in Mexico.

GARDNER

The nature of political exile.

MALTZ

Yes, that's right. There's a whole tradition of political exile in Latin America. I recall now that he also had me write out a statement in which I explained why I had taken the position that I had, and why I was living in Mexico. And I got the inmigrante status which was one that lasted for five years; and then, afterwards, I got the status above that, which was--I forget the name now [inmigrado], but it not only carried the previous privileges but it allowed me to work in Mexico and allowed me, with proper permission, to own property. In September 1951 there were again a series of hearings on Hollywood by the House Committee, and, at this time, blacklisting was also spreading all over the country in every possible area of work and life. Among our friends in Cuernavaca at this time was a Hungarian couple, the man's pen name, by which he was known, was John Pen; His real name was Székely. His wife, Elizabeth, had a nickname that I'll inevitably refer to, Erzi, and a daughter, Kathy, who was a friend of my daughter's. Pen's best work, perhaps, was called Temptation. He had also received an Academy award for an original film story. He and his wife and daughter came to be people I was very, very fond of. Then there were Gordon Kahn, author of The Hollywood Ten, [*Actually entitled Hollywood on Trial] who was living there, and his wife Barbara, and the Austrian doctor Ernesto Amann, and a miscellany of other people. A good deal of my novel was written by the end of 1951. I had expected it to pour out of me--and so it seemed to come. I did interrupt the novel to write one piece for Mainstream (the successor to--well, first there was New Masses, and then there was Masses and Mainstream, and now it was Mainstream) called "The Whiskey Men," and this was a presentation of the economics and sociology of the business of making moonshine liquor, which actually involves a vast number of people when you include those who drink it and those who try and catch the moonshiners, and the whole administration of justice in this. In this year my foreign publication abroad was in some ten countries, with the first publication in China. And my earnings were a little under $3,600; so I was right back to where I was when I decided to move to Hollywood.

1.49. TAPE NUMBER: XXII, SIDE ONE
DECEMBER 22, 1978

MALTZ

[tape inaudible up to this point] Odets had given me $1,000 for the Hollywood Ten case, and later, after we came out of jail he had given the principal speech at the funeral services, or the memorial service, for Joe Bromberg, who had been a member of the Group Theatre with him for years. And yet about six months after doing this, he himself became an informer at a committee hearing and named Bromberg. His behavior was especially peculiar because there was a meeting--there was a gathering at someone's home, or a gathering, I think, at Odets's apartment the night he came back from Washington, and everyone there assumed that he had defied the committee. There was a very rollicking evening apparently, and people drinking and congratulating him, and the party lasted until early in the morning; and lategoers, those late in leaving the party, saw early copies of the New York Times in the lobby of the apartment house and saw that he had named them before the committee. It's a perfectly incredible piece of behavior. I have other stories about him, but I'll push on. Something that both fascinated and angered me was the.... [tape recorder turned off] In April 1952 Edward G. Robinson appeared before the committee. Now, he had had rather a proud history, I feel, of supporting worthwhile humane causes. And I have already stated the extent of my involvement with him, which amounted to writing several speeches for him, but nothing political. Yet, in his testimony the following occurred. [Francis E.] Walter of the committee said, "Mr. Robinson, you stated that you were duped and used. By whom?" Robinson: By the sinister forces who were members and probably in important positions in those organizations. Walter: Well, tell us what individuals you have reference to. Robinson: Well, you had Albert Maltz, and you have Dalton Trumbo and you have--what is the other fellow, the top fellow who they say is the commissar out there? Walter: John Howard Lawson? Robinson: Yes, John Howard Lawson. And so this is the way in which he bought back from the committee his right to continue to perform as an actor. In late February the conviction of the Rosenbergs was upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. And I sent a letter out to about five of the most prominent nuclear scientists in the United States. The only one I had ever met was Philip Morrison, but I sent it also to Harold Urey, and to I. [Isidor] Rabi at their universities and to two others whom I forget at the moment. And what I said, in effect, was this: I said that appearing--that Harold Urey had stated that it would take about ninety volumes to put down all of the material needed for the manufacture of an atomic weapon. And I said if that's the case, how could the Rosenbergs be guilty of giving the Soviet Union the knowledge of how to make the atomic weapon, and if they couldn't have done that, why should they die? And will you, as an atomic scientist, speak out on this? I never heard--the only one I ever heard from was Urey. And he wrote to me that what he had said was perfectly true; nevertheless there were certain concepts that perhaps could be very important if transmitted. But later he became extremely active in trying to save the Rosenbergs, and I have never known whether my letter had played any part in it. I hope that it had.

GARDNER

Will you excuse me? [tape recorder turned off]

MALTZ

As I listened to the comments of friends on my first version of my novel, I decided that I'd been too documentary in my approach. I was so close to all of the prison material, and it was all so interesting in itself, that I had used it and obscured the central story. So I sat down and revised the concept and went to work on a new draft. The blacklist freeze in the studios was now absolutely solid, and there was no way whatsoever in which any of the blacklisted people could write anything for a major studio. Some of them did succeed in writing for independents like the King Brothers. And in existence now was the "graylist" on which someone like Howard Koch was. Just because somebody had been mentioned, or had been mentioned by error, or whose name was like the name of someone who was mentioned, people were on a list of which they were not aware. They were not openly blacklisted and yet, in effect, were blacklisted. The book by John Cogley called Report on Blacklisting gives an excellent description of this on pages 141 and 172. And he also discusses, on page 166, the technique of getting off the blacklist, a clearance procedure that was begun in 1952 whereby individuals would have interviews with Roy Brewer or Martin Gang, an attorney, or George Sokolsky, the Hearst columnist, or with the clearance committee of the American Legion, and would write a letter; and if the disclaimers met with the approval of these individuals, they would be able to get back to work. There was a second article by Richard English in the August 30 edition of the Saturday Evening Post on the Reds in Mexico. And this time it was myself and others who had sat around in the Bella Vista Hotel drinking pink planter's punch. I happen never to have had a pink planter's punch, but I think that English, who reportedly was an alcoholic, was probably well acquainted with it. [laughter] The article said that we had had a dinner in a room in the hotel in which we were plotting our various activities in Mexico, and we got drunk and proceeded to walk around the room singing "The International" until some Texans came in and cleared us out--this being his, let's say, dreamy expansion of the event that had occurred with Willard Motley. He also said that Gordon Kahn and I were disrupters in the parent-teacher association of a school in Cuernavaca because I wanted Russian taught and Kahn wanted Chinese history in the curriculum. Now, there was absolutely no way of replying to a malicious and untrue article like that because the Saturday Evening Post wouldn't publish it. I did publish a letter in the September 20 issue of the Nation in which I spoke about its fallaciousness; but, of course, what was the readership of the Nation compared to the readership of the Post? This article caused my son to quit high school, which he had just matriculated in, because he felt so miserable thinking that the others in this American high school would be pointing their fingers at him, and there was no redress for this. On September 24, 1952, a very bizarre event occurred. My wife and daughter were on a plane going to Oaxaca to visit our friend Lini DeVries, who had moved there, and a bomb went off in the plane and tore a hole in the fuselage and knocked out all of the instruments; but the plane was able to keep flying, and my wife was injured by a piece of flying steel hitting her ankle. The doctor said later that it was like a grenade wound. And the plane almost crashed as it ran out of fuel but finally managed to land through a cloud, through clouds that obscured the ground, at an emergency air force base. And the bomb had been placed on the plane by two characters who had hoped to get insurance for ten Mexican--for ten peasants they had sent down to a nonexistent job in Oaxaca after buying large insurance policies on their lives. It was an absolutely nutty scheme because if it had worked, the police would immediately have wanted to know who was getting the big payoffs on the insurance, and they would have been caught. But this bizarre event almost seemed to be part of what we expected in the turbulent experiences we were undergoing. We had hoped for some tranquility, but within weeks after we reached Cuernavaca in April 1951, my wife got polio, and after she recovered from that (without damage fortunately), this was followed by the death of her best friend and then by the newspaper attacks on us. And both of our kids were not in good shape because the year I was in prison had been very bad for them, and there seemed no end to what was happening from all sides. My wife subsequently wrote a book about these events and about the trial of the two men, and it was called Seven Shares in a Gold Mine--oh, it was not ten peasants, that's right, it was seven peasants that they had sent down... Seven Shares in a Gold Mine, that was published by Simon and Schuster in 1959. During the year, BBC did eight broadcasts of a ninety-minute radio play based on The Cross and the Arrow, and I was published once again in a good many foreign countries. I did have one exception to the lack of publication in the United States. A volume called The Best of the Best Short Stories was published and "Man on a Road" was included. My earnings that year went up to almost $11,000 because of foreign royalties and royalties from Naked City. In 1953 McCarthyism was riding so high that President Eisenhower campaigned in Wisconsin for McCarthy's reelection. At the same time, Charlie Chaplin was driven from the country and Thomas Mann left the country. In Czechoslovakia the dreadful Slansky trial took place in which men were framed because it was part of the Stalin era that this be carried out. I later met two of the men who survived it: one of them is a good friend, Eduard Goldstucker, who is a literary man; and the other was an Israeli who happened to be in Czechoslovakia at the time. A book was published about this trial called The Confession by Artur London, who was one of those convicted. It was published by William Morrow and Company in 1970. Stalin died in March. We thank God for that. [laughter] And the Korean War came to an end. In March there were also hideous attacks on the film Salt of the Earth, which was being shot in New Mexico. This was the project that Herbert Biberman directed and Paul Jarrico produced and Michael Wilson, one of the best screenwriters in the world, wrote. Representative [Donald] Jackson, of California, attacked the film as it was in production and without having read the script. He said... [tape recorder turned off] He said in Congress: "Mr. Speaker, I've received reports of the sequences filmed to date during the making of the picture, and it depicts exactly what might be expected from a group of Communists engaged in the making of a motion picture. The picture is deliberately designed to inflame racial hatreds and to depict the United States of America as the enemy of all colored peoples." This was simply not true. But he said it on the floor of Congress and, as a result, the leading actress in the film, a Mexican woman, Rosaura Revueltas, was suddenly deported before the last scenes of the picture were shot. And so it was made clear that we were not only to be blacklisted in the film industry, but we would be prevented from doing independent movies. In August of 1952 my family and I had moved up to a rented house in Mexico City because we wanted to put our children into school. I should have mentioned this earlier. In June 1953 the terrible event of the execution of the Rosenbergs took place. Like so many others, we had followed every step of the last struggle to save them with a great deal of anguish, and the day after they were executed, in a great burst of feeling, I wrote a piece that was published in the People's World. I remember that same month there was a story, actually on June 22, just a few days later, there was a story in the New York Times on the front page that the books of forty authors had been banned by the government in overseas libraries. And my book The Cross and the Arrow was one of them. Now, this had the gravest consequences for me of anything that had happened in the blacklist years because a great many librarians in the United States apparently took a hint from this and proceeded to take my books out of the libraries. For instance, when I happened to be in Boston in 1961, I discovered that although my books had been published by a Boston publisher, they were not on the shelves in the main Boston library, and one of them was listed as being accessible by special permission. And none of my books were in the Beverly Hills library when I visited here. An author can die, but his books remain in libraries to be read down the years; but if an author's books are taken out of libraries, then it's as though he never lived and wrote at all. And this was a bad blow. You want some water?

GARDNER

No, I'm okay.

MALTZ

During this summer, I finished the second version of A Long Day in a Short Life and again had it read by some friends, and I entered into a long correspondence about it with Lloyd Brown. Brown was either a union organizer, I believe, or a Communist party organizer. I don't remember. But my book was given to him by Sam Sillen of Mainstream, and Brown, who himself was the author of an interesting novel, had various critical comments to make about the way in which I handled the black characters in my book. And I respected him and entered into a very considerable correspondence with him before beginning some further revisions. In September The Robe opened with Philip Dunne's name on it as writer. Have I made clear that he didn't know of my connection?

GARDNER

You have mentioned that.

MALTZ

Oh, I'm glad, I'm glad I asked you. It's very important to make that clear, as I didn't know at the time, but now know, that when Darryl Zanuck took on The Robe, he wanted some cuts in it and some changes. The cuts were made necessary by the fact that costs on making of films had increased enormously from the time I first wrote my script until the time when they were ready for production. And Philip Dunne was given my script without my name on it and told by the producer that it was an amalgam of so many scripts that no one could get any credit on it. He subsequently told me that if he had known that it was my script, he would not have done any work on it. And he is, I know, a very principled man. So he did the changes that were required, and his name was on it as the writer. I had a very mixed reaction to the film. I thought the direction by Henry Koster was very stiff and lacking in earthiness. Some reviewers, like Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, agreed with me, but most of the reviews were excellent. And it was, I believe, the largest-grossing film up to the time, larger than Gone with the Wind...

GARDNER

Really?

MALTZ

...in its first...

GARDNER

Oh, in its initial run.

MALTZ

...in its initial run--some $30 million. By today's theater prices that would be a gross well over $120 million.

GARDNER

How much did you realize from it?

MALTZ

I finally realized, I think, about $75,000 from it, which, of course, was very important money at that time. And during that year, a dramatization of my novel The Underground Stream played in a theater in Paris, and BBC broadcast at various times a radio play based on Simon McKeever. Cross and the Arrow came out in China, and I began a very interesting correspondence with a writer called Mao Tun. This came about because I had asked several questions of my correspondent in China, and he said they would be answered by a writer, by another man. In the course of our correspondence, Mao Tun sent me a volume of short stories and then a novel, and I thought his short stories were marvelous. I had a discussion with him about socialist realism in which I expressed my complete dissatisfaction with this theory of literature. He defended it but in a somewhat feeble manner. And then after about three years of correspondence, I discovered that he was the Chinese minister of culture, and he hadn't let me know this. [laughter] He is, as I write, still alive and eighty-one.

GARDNER

Do you still correspond?

MALTZ

No, the correspondence ended when I came up to the United States. I had regards from him recently through another person there. But I have an idea now that his position, which I saw reflected in a newspaper article, has solidified in a way that would make us feel very differently about literature, or make us think very differently about the purpose of literature. However, from his stories, I feel sure that if we met it would be personally very pleasant. My earnings in that year went up because of foreign royalties (and not yet anything from The Robe) to almost $17,000, and since living at that time was about a third cheaper in Mexico than in the United States, that was a very good living. Early in the next year I met Bruno Traven. I presume you would like some material on him. [laughter]

GARDNER

Yes, definitely!

MALTZ

And I met him no differently than anyone else who met him in Mexico, under the name of [Hal] Croves. Traven was a slender, small man who looked like a midwestern university professor, and who talked with a Germanic accent, talked English with a Germanic accent, and who gave no sense from his person of the kind of varied life he had lived in Mexico, which must have taken a man of great physical endurance. And the occasion for my meeting him was that he had been down in the state of Chiapas, where his novel The Rebellion of the Hanged was being filmed. Along with the company there, there was an American woman whom I knew, Elizabeth Timberman, whose husband, Charles Humboldt, I was especially friendly with, and she was there as a still photographer to take photographs of the production. She was a marvelous photographer. But there had been very heavy rains in the area so that shooting had been interrupted for several weeks. And during that time conditions of life were very difficult, under primitive circumstances, and excepting for the camera crew led by the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, everyone else took to a good deal of drinking. And in that period my friend Elizabeth, who had great emotional problems and who suffered from manic-depression, became manic, and Traven took it upon himself to bring her back to Mexico City. He apparently almost suffered a disaster with her on the light plane flying them out of Chiapas. But they made it up to Mexico City, and in moments of lucidity she told him that her husband was in the States for a visit and gave him our name and address. And so he brought her to us early one morning, and we had her on our hands. Now, I subsequently met Traven again due to the production of a film of his which Phil Stevenson wrote. And when he was dying, in 1969, I was in Mexico on a brief visit and [door bell rings]--oh, I must stop for the moment in case my wife doesn't.... [tape recorder turned off] Since I fell ill with turista, I realized something about Traven: that he was one of those very fortunate individuals who have a built-in resistance to any of the dysentery germs. My son was like that. My son, from the time we arrived in Cuernavaca, ate anything off the street, the very thing that was forbidden by all doctors, and he never got ill. Whereas my wife, for instance, not only got turista but got amoebic dysentery half a dozen times. And unless Traven had been immune in that way, he never would have probably survived to live and, certainly, to write, because he obviously, from his books, lived in back areas of Mexico for a great many years. What I know about Traven comes from his very close friend, Gabriel Figueroa.

GARDNER

Did you know him as Traven, or did he...?

MALTZ

No, nobody knew him as Traven. No, they only knew him as Croves. Now, even Gabriel Figueroa was so close with Traven that when Gabriel wanted to take an option on one of Traven's novels, which I worked on subsequently, they didn't need a piece of paper between them; it was just their word. And Traven bought an automobile, for instance, for the sixteenth birthday of one of Gabriel's sons. They were deeply close friends. And yet, Gabriel told me, when he went to see Traven within two or three days before his death, he continued to call him Hal Croves and never anything else. Now, the reason behind this was that Traven, although sane in every other way, had an absolutely paranoid fear that if he was known as Traven, he might still be deported to Germany and executed because of his role in an insurrection after World War I.

GARDNER

The Munich...?

MALTZ

The Munich, yes, events. And he had been arrested and sentenced to death and had escaped. And for a man to carry on all down the years in that fashion is bewildering, but he nevertheless did it, and even with so close a friend as Gabriel. So that really... it answers the mystery of Traven and, I'm sure, answers it correctly, because Gabriel Figueroa is a man of dignity and honor, and he just never would have told me anything like that unless it was true. During this period we had to move from our rented house. We found another one in a most beautiful section of Mexico City called San Angel. Actually, we were about two blocks away from Diego Rivera's residence and studio, and it was an area with cobblestone streets and high walls and very attractive. It was in this year that a new American family came down to live in Mexico. I had read about them some weeks before in the Nation. Their name, as I came to know them, was Charles and Berthe Small. His name, however, from birth, and for many years before that in his work in the trade-union movement, was Smolikoff. I had read about them in the Nation because there had been some events in Miami, Florida, where, in spite of Supreme Court rulings on the Fifth Amendment, a judge in Miami had put them both in jail for taking the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury. And now, out of jail, they had come down to Mexico to be free of harassment, and we met and they became our dearest friends there. Hold up one second. [tape recorder turned off] Charles Small died this year, and I wrote a short piece about him which I will give you for inclusion with my materials. And I won't say anything more about him now. This was a year in which the idiocies continued in their pernicious fashion in the United States, and it was also the year in which the CIA engineered a coup in Guatemala with the results that the United Fruit Company was able to get back land which it had held uncultivated and which had been given to hungry peasants in the country to cultivate. And ever since this "great" coup, which was fallaciously called an anti-Communist coup, the jails of Guatemala have been full and the torturers have been busy. Actually, the government in Guatemala at that time was about as Left as the Roosevelt government, but it did make the error of saying that uncultivated land should be cultivated, and so Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles ran to the rescue, and we in Mexico City helped finance some of the refugees who came. I completed my novel in this year, and I sent it out at once to Little, Brown and Company, which had published my three previous novels, and they rejected it. I had expected that they would reject it because they had already fired the chief editor, Angus Cameron, and dropped other writers on their list. And so I had had a secretary make many copies so that I could send it out to foreign countries. By this time I no longer had my agent Maxim Lieber, who had retired from the business since he too had been mentioned--in his case by... oh, that character in the Hiss case... Whittaker Chambers had mentioned Lieber and a great many of his authors had immediately deserted him, including Erskine Caldwell, and so Lieber was now in Mexico. And since those were the days before Xerox machines, my secretary had to type many times in order to get seventeen--in order to get the copies that I sent out to foreign countries. In the course of the next two years I got seventeen rejections from American publishers while getting sixteen contracts with foreign countries. And finally, when my agent (another agent I had just for the United States) told me that he didn't think he could get a publisher, I gave it to International Publishers so that at least my friends could read it. It sold less than a thousand copies, I think, but it did have a small book club sale of a Left book club that took about 3,000 or 4,000 copies. I think I might mention that the agent in New York who handled the book for the United States was about the fourth agent I had tried. All others declined to take the book, and this man, whose name was Ivan Von Auw, was someone I had known when he was an executive of the Authors League. And I want to pay my respects to him for his courage. I had, like everyone else, to work out a philosophy in order to live the blacklist years without bitterness. Now, some were not very successful in this--for instance, Adrian Scott was not. Adrian was a bitter man about the blacklist although it didn't mar his personal sweetness as a human being. But it was very necessary for me to find a philosophy with which I could be comfortable, and I had this attitude toward it: I felt that only two years after the defeat of German fascism, and only one year after the Nuremberg trials, we in the Ten had found ourselves in a fight against an American fascism; and that if I had been a Frenchman and, let's say, had had the principle and courage to join the resistance movement during the war, I might have been dead or ended in a gestapo torture chamber, and that this was all part of the same world struggle, and that blacklisting was a very minor price which we in America had had to pay for joining in that struggle. It is the philosophy on which I still lean today, I find. Because, while I don't regret the stand I took and would do the same thing over, I do regret that I was not permitted to do the work that I feel was in me to do. And, of course, it has not been lost on any of us who were blacklisted then, who were casualties of those years, how the Watergate conspirators came out. A short time ago I watched Ehrlichman being interviewed by Dick Cavett, and the books that they have written, the money they have earned for committing perjury and obstruction of justice, and so on, is quite a contrast to the way we were treated. It's not been lost on me, either, that the Soviet Union has been using the weapon of job blacklisting--and worse--on its dissidents. One of the things I determined in those years was that I would never be party to the blacklist of anybody, no matter what their political position.

1.50. TAPE NUMBER: XXII, SIDE TWO
JANUARY 3, 1979

MALTZ

I published an article "The Law Behind McCarthy" in the English magazine the New Statesman and Nation. I can't remember now why the author was "an American correspondent" and why it was done anonymously, but it was republished in a dozen countries. I did have a publication of one short story in the United States because of an anthology which was called [The Pocket Book of O'Henry Prize Stories], and mine could not be left out. But nothing else was published. And in that year I earned about $30,000 from The Robe and foreign royalties. And at that time I had much more economic security than most of the blacklisted writers I knew about. I had, of course, an outlet with foreign countries for my fiction writing. This is, I think, a relevant moment to put on record the true severity of the blacklist for people who had previously worked in films. The blacklist that started in April 1951 finally embraced some 250 individuals who had worked in the film industry. They came from many categories: craft workers and technicians, secretaries, readers, public relations, agents, set designers, cartoonists, musicians and composers, story editors, directors, producers, and writers. Of these, only the writers could do their work alone and at home; all of the others had to pass through the studio gates by the nature of their work. And no one of them ever did. They were all out... absolutely out. Among actors, for instance, this included two Academy award winners, Gale Sondergaard and Ann Revere, and such well-known actors, who were always in demand previously, as Morris Carnovsky, J. Edward Bromberg, Howard Da Silva, Victor Killian, Lionel Stander, Elliott Sullivan, Dorothy Tree, Lloyd Gough, Karen Morley, Jeff Corey. It was not until ten to fifteen years had passed that some of them got film work again. Now, the writers were the largest category of blacklistees. A myth has grown up that they all went on writing merrily at their usual salaries, but under other names. This was absolutely not so. In the year 1954, for instance, blacklisted writers whom I personally knew were earning a living, such as it was, in the following occupations: bartender, Ned Young; commercial fisherman, Harold J. Smith (these two men were to write under pseudonyms, or Ned Young under a pseudonym, The Defiant Ones, in 1958) [*Young as Nathan E. Douglas, Smith under his own name.]; stage manager in a night club, Alvah Bessie; office clerk, Lester Cole; maitre d' in a hotel, Robert Lees; salesman for a wholesale-paper house, Fred Rinaldo (those two, Lees and Rinaldo, were responsible for most of the big successes of the Abbott and Costello films); TV repair shop, Edward Hubesch; printing shop, Louise Rousseau; camera shop, Val Burton. The only writers who were doing films under cover at this time that I know about were Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson. They were doing them together and getting $3,000 a script instead of $75,000. But then Wilson got a passport by the accident that he had a first name that he hadn't used in film writing, and he went abroad and then was able to work under much better terms. Along the way, after several years, Ring Lardner Jr., and Ian Hunter were able to collaborate on a TV series, "Robin Hood," because the producer was in England and she wanted to use them. What did open up in New York and then in L.A. after several years for some writers was TV under other names. TV was a new operation, and the close watch on who the individuals were was not the same as it was in films. And TV did provide work and a kind of living for some writers, but certainly not all. In short, the blacklist was a devastating blow to all who suffered it. And for some it meant that they never again worked in the film industry. It was about this time that the Writers Guild completely capitulated to the executives and to the blacklist by voting that the name of any uncooperative witness could be removed from a script even if he had written it before he appeared before the congressional committee. Michael Wilson's name, for instance, had been on A Place in the Sun, for which he won an Academy award, on Five Fingers and other films, but was not on the Friendly Persuasion, even though he had written it before he was blacklisted. In the year 1955, submissions and rejections of A Long Day in a Short Life continued in the United States. I began work on a short story and research for a play about Victor Hugo. It was the first time I had wanted to write a play in some twenty years. Around this time I met Diego Rivera for the first time and confirmed at once what I had already heard--that he loved to tell whopping lies. This was a peculiarity that he had. And during this time (he was then, I think, perhaps, in his late sixties) I watched him paint from 7:30 in the morning until 7:30 at night doing the mural on the outside of a theater on a boulevard in Mexico City that I had occasion to travel on frequently. And I remember once being at a party where I left at about midnight, and I was told that he continued there until three in the morning, dancing and kissing the hand of every girl he danced with, but he was out at 7:30 the next morning anyway. His studio was about two blocks from my home. It was on the second floor of a building with a skylight instead of a roof. The particular feature of his studio was that he had about a dozen Judas figures which were made of papier maché and were eight to ten feet tall. These are figures that in Mexico are wound with firecrackers at Eastertime and blown up as a symbol of destroying Judas. But he liked them as an example of ethnic art and had them around in his studio. I never knew him well. I met a number of other Mexican artists at this time who became my friends, and I saw not a little of them; among them were Jose Chavez Morado, who had begun drawing as a Mexican wetback around campfires at night in the United States where he was a crop worker. And others--I think there's no point in just listing their names. It was in this year that there was a publication of a monumental work, The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by John Wexley. Since we were then in a period of tremendous repression, it stands as an example of the enormous value of a free press in any society. Because, even though no major publisher took the book, it was published by a small, let's say, publisher of dissident works, Cameron and Kahn, this being Angus Cameron who had been fired from Little, Brown, and Albert Kahn, a Communist writer who had had a number of best-sellers in the thirties. And this book by Wexley, which indicted the FBI, which indicted Judge Kaufman in the Rosenberg case, and the prosecutors, nevertheless was published and did find its way to readers by its sheer power and by word of mouth. It was the beginning of the trend toward the wider acceptance of the fact that the Rosenbergs were innocent. The book involved an enormous amount of research and great cerebral power on the part of the author. I know that after reading it I was so profoundly impressed and moved by it that I wrote people about it, and I wrote an article in the National Guardian that was published in 1956. I want to.... [tape recorder turned off] This same year an attorney, Marshall Perlin, came down to Mexico and came to see me on the case of Morton Sobell, who had been tried with the Rosenbergs and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Perlin wanted to get more data on the question of Sobell's illegal apprehension and kidnapping in Mexico City by secret police acting for the U.S. embassy. In fact, the United States and Mexico did not at that time, and perhaps still do not, have a treaty of extradition. And so in the case of Sobell, and it has happened with others, when the United States wants someone who is in Mexico, it pays certain members of the Mexican secret police to do something without the knowledge of the Mexican government; or perhaps it may be with the knowledge of the government--I don't know. [tape recorder turned off] In the case of Sobell, the secret police agents rang his doorbell one evening, and when he answered it, they just grabbed him and hustled him by force into a car and drove without stopping up to the border at Nuevo Laredo and walked him onto the bridge that is between the two countries and there pushed him into the arms of waiting FBI agents. And Perlin wanted data on this and to try to get evidence of the kidnapping. I invited various of the left-wing Americans I knew there to my home, and Perlin talked to them, and we raised some money for him to work at this.

GARDNER

He was from New York.

MALTZ

He was from New York, yes. And I might mention that he is still today working with the two Rosenberg sons to prove their parents' innocence. This has been steady for him since, say, 1955, at least. One example of the--one footnote about the blacklist: my literary agent Maxim Leiber had come down to Mexico around the year 1952, I believe, because, having been mentioned by Whittaker Chambers, he found his clients leaving him and was no longer able to carry on business. But he found that in Mexico he had nothing to do, and he was going out of his mind with boredom. Since he had been born in Poland, it occurred to him that he might be able to function in the publishing industry there as someone who knew American and English literature, and he went to the Polish consulate and set up contacts. And as a result, in the year 1955 he and his wife and children moved to Poland. There he did function with several publishers, and I saw him there in 1959, which I'll mention. But it's very interesting that by 1962 he returned to the United States in disgust at the society he'd found there. During this year, the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated twenty-seven members of the New York theatrical world, and individuals like Zero Mostel were blacklisted. Two men, Pete Seeger and my friend Elliott Sullivan, took the First Amendment for the first time since we went to the stand, and that was an exciting development. Since I may forget to mention it in the future, on different grounds neither man ever went to prison. But it was not for a basic constitutional reason. By this time of my residence in Mexico I was getting a real awareness of the meaning of the word motherland in respect to one's work. Although I was being published very widely in foreign countries, it just didn't mean the same thing to me as being published in the United States. In 1956, in the spring, there was the comedy of an Academy Award being given to the writer of the film The Brave One, and the only name to turn up was one Robert Rich; but nobody turned up in person, and it became clear to the assembled audience that it had been written by someone on the blacklist. After a while, it became generally assumed that it was Dalton Trumbo who had written this script, as indeed it was, but this did not break the blacklist. Trumbo continued on it for another four years. I'll now turn to an event that had the most profound consequences for me, and that was the secret report of Khrushchev in February '56 to the twentieth congress of the Communist party. It was published in the New York Times on June 2. I want to read from The World Since 1939 by Carroll Quigley, [*Part II of Tragedy and Hope] page 357: "All of the rest which the fellow travelers throughout the world had been denying for a generation poured out: the enormous slave labor camps, the murder of innocent persons by tens of thousands, the wholesale violation of law, the use of fiendishly planned torture to exact confessions for acts never done, or to involve persons who were completely innocent, the ruthless elimination of whole classes and of whole nations such as the army officers, the kulaks and the Kalmuk, Chechen, Ingush and Balkar minority groups. The servility of writers, artists and everyone else, including all party members, to the tyrant was revealed, along with a total failure of his agricultural schemes, his cowardice and incompetence in the war, his insignificance in the early history of the party, and his constant rewriting of history to conceal these things." The shock effect of this report on me, and I know on many others, was absolutely disemboweling. I can indicate one aspect of its effect by saying that for six months I could do no writing. I tried to digest the meaning of these revelations, and to ponder them, and to ask why they had happened and what sort of society and governmental system had allowed them to happen. I went back to the Marxist classics to see what clues they could offer me, and I also read every word published by commentators, Left and Right, on these revelations. And it was not only I who was affected in this way. I want to read from A Long View from the Left by Al Richmond, page 367: "Words for reactions in Communist ranks were used by very political men: 'Shock... pain' (Dennis)," and by Togliatti of Italy, "surprise... grief... bewilderment... perturbation..." Says Richmond: "It might appear odd to invoke their descriptions of such intimate feelings, and yet I quote them to stress the universality of these responses. To tell how searing one man's pain was, how anguished his perturbation, may be trivial in itself; the difficult remembrance has its true validity only as evocation of what went on within millions of Communists the world over when they were suddenly confronted with the nightmare of terror, suspicion, fear, megalomania, and cruel caprice that Khrushchev unveiled. Their trauma reflected the political and ethical impulses that motivated them, for to speak of pain and bewilderment is also to speak of confrontation with things abhorrent and alien. Not that the reactions were uniform but the chords above were widespread." [tape recorder turned off] One of the results of the report was that a great many people left the Communist party, or if they had been, let's say, sympathizers, left its orbit. I emerged from this period of thought and emotional turmoil with quite a number of conclusions. Among them were the following: first, that it was nonsense to speak of Marxism as a science. It was the custom of Communist parties to do this. But the events in the Soviet Union had demonstrated that it certainly wasn't a science. Two, [I came to] the conclusion that Stalin could clearly not have grown to be the tyrant he was, or committed the horrors he did, unless the political system permitted it. The official Soviet characterization of the Stalin era as the cult of personality was a way for me of sweeping the problem under the rug. It did not answer the crucial questions of what in the social fabric and political system permitted this so-called cult of personality to grow and flourish, and to imprison, torture, and murder millions of innocent Soviet citizens dedicated to the welfare of their country. Actually, the Khrushchev report and others that followed did not nearly reveal the full damage done by Stalin, as was subsequently revealed by a Soviet historian, Roy Medvedev, in Let History Judge, published by Knopf in the seventies. Third, I concluded that no society could have any real freedoms if the press and other media of communication were owned by the government. This is not to say that I previously had been unaware that there was no freedom of press and speech and political activity in the Soviet Union in the way that we cherish them in the United States. But I had postponed final judgment on the matter because of Russian history and the belief that these freedoms would evolve as the country grew stronger and less afraid of attack by the capitalist nations. But now I no longer postponed judgment because it seemed to me clear that the dictatorship of the proletariat inevitably transformed itself in practice into the dictatorship of a handful of men at best, and of one man at worst. Under such a system free speech and press and political rights would never develop because it was so exceedingly comfortable to rule without them. These conclusions did not turn me away from the ideals of a world without exploitation of man by man, and it did not change my belief that a planned economy made much more sense than an unplanned one. But it did make a profound difference in my attitudes toward the socialist countries. From then on, the form of government in all existing socialist countries was unacceptable to me. I also felt that what had occurred in the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy in all of human history, a much greater tragedy than the murder of people in the Nazi holocaust because the Nazis had made clear that they had certain enemies that they wanted to get rid of whereas in Soviet society, with its magnificently proclaimed ideals, there was such gross hypocrisy hidden behind the ideals in what was done by individual to individual! In addition, the Soviet Union with its ideals embodied all that mankind, I think, had hoped for down the centuries, and that this should have been betrayed in such a terrible and needless fashion was what made it the greatest tragedy in human history. However, this did not make me feel, as I know it did others, that I had thrown away three decades of my life in taking the political positions I had. To go to a quite different experience, I learned something about Catholicism due to one trip in Mexico that I had never understood before, and I think it is useful to put on record. In the city of Puebla there is now a museum that's called the Secret Convent. Around the year 1870 President Juarez of Mexico ordered the abolition of all secret monasteries and convents. There were practical reasons for this, as it was explained to me. For instance, let's say that a brother and a sister were due to inherit the estates of parents. It had happened more than once that the brother maneuvered to have the sister put into a convent which was a closed convent and like a prison, and the sister could never emerge, and he took over her part of the estate. Or parents discovered that a daughter was pregnant and promptly had her transferred to a secret convent from which she never emerged, and where the child was either brought up or, from the testimony of many bones found in the secret convent when it was opened in 1934, perhaps left to die. It was very fascinating, architecturally, to enter the secret convent from a small secret door in another house and to discover then an extremely large area involving gardens, involving place for quite a number of people, and backing up to a church where the nuns could sit on one side and listen to the ceremony without being seen by anyone on the other side. And to realize that the entire neighborhood had had to cooperate with this convent for about sixty years or else its secrecy could not have been maintained because food had to be brought in, and garbage had to be taken out, and firewood, and so on. But there was one aspect about it that struck me most forcibly. The sisters ate, in pleasant weather, in a balcony area where the walls were hung with paintings of saints, female saints, being tortured in the most horrible way by Romans. For instance, I remember one female whose breast was being torn off with pincers by Roman soldiers. Now, to have human beings, albeit nuns, eat in such surroundings struck me as being... as having an extraordinary emphasis upon the macabre in this religion. And then we were led to a basement where there was an altar and where it was dark except for candles that would be lit. And there, there was a clothes rack on which hair shirts were hung, and there were crowns of thorns, and there were whips. We were told that the nuns would come down, remove their garments, put on hair shirts, press crowns of thorns into their scalps and then flagellate themselves with whips as they kneeled before the altar. And there was a painting of Christ on the cross. It occurred to me that I knew of no major religion in the world which stressed death in the way that Catholicism did. In the history of the life of Jesus, it would have been possible to make as a symbol for the church his Sermon on the Mount, and he could have been represented as a teacher speaking to people. But it was not that: it was Christ suffering on the cross that was emphasized. And it was His pain that was being revered and extolled as that which others, if they were to be most holy, would similarly try to suffer. There is nothing comparable to this that I ever read about in Hinduism, Muhammadenism, Shintoism, or any other religion, and I just found it tremendously revelatory. In late October there came the uprising in Hungary, which was certainly a popular uprising against a repressive Stalinist regime. It was crushed by Russian troops, of course, and the Russians asserted that fascist elements from Berlin had been poised, waiting for the uprising, and had rushed in to be part of it. As a matter of fact, when I was in Hungary in '59, only three years later, I met an American Communist, who had been a trade unionist and had been deported from the United States, who told me that in that uprising he "knew" that arms had come in from the outside. And he "knew" that very quickly anti-Semitic slogans had been raised by agitators in the crowd. And that may all be true, but it doesn't change the fact that masses of people and a portion of the army, at least, were part of that uprising. You could send in all the arms you wanted into Beverly Hills, but I think you wouldn't get an uprising of people in Beverly Hills against their mayor. And that's the difference. In this year, 1956, the first of three foreign editions of--the first three foreign editions of A Long Day in a Short Life came out. And I wrote a play about Victor Hugo in this year, and my agent started submitting it to New York producers.

GARDNER

Did you have any hope of production?

MALTZ

Yes, I could have hope of production because the theater was not in a state of absolute blacklist at all. The theater was composed of individual entrepreneur producers, and in spite of the investigation that occurred in the year before that I referred to, it was still perfectly possible that if someone had the interest and the courage and the money to put on a play by me, he would be free to do it. I can't say I felt optimistic, but it was worth submitting to see what would happen. In 1957 I did my first film work [*Flor de Mayo] since 1949, and it came about by accident. A film was being shot in both English and Spanish because the producer, a man called Olallo Rubio, had gotten enough money to hire some American actors as well as Mexican actors. The screenplay had been written by an American, and the producer hoped to have a world market for it. But the screenplay was being rewritten during the production, and after three weeks of shooting, the screenplay writer quit the picture after a quarrel with the producer and went back to the United States. And so the production was left in an absolutely desperate situation. I got telephone calls and telegrams asking if I would come to their rescue, and out of a feeling that I had of gratitude to Mexico for giving me residence there, I got on a plane and read the screenplay on my way to the West Coast. They were shooting in the state of Sinaloa and in a town called Topolobampo. This town was a small fishing village on a beautiful bay, but without any water, so that water had to be brought in by tank car from another town twelve miles away. The screenplay was quite bad. But I saw, I thought, some ways of patching it together so that it could make sense. And when I arrived, I gave thoughts to--presented my thoughts to the director and producer, and they accepted them and I started to work. The American actors in it were Jack Palance and Paul Stewart, and there were two outstanding, or two very popular, Mexican actors, Pedro Armendariz and Maria Felix. They waited for about a week while I wrote and I had to keep what they had already shot, or part of it. And by a combination of hard work and luck, with the camera always about a day and a half behind me, I worked out a screenplay that held together. It was certainly not anything that I would have chosen to do. It was written under the most extraordinary circumstances because the only place I and the cast had to stay in was a fish cannery. And we were in a little bungalow--I was in a little room which was a single motel room with a bath--where there was a shower, not a bath. And as the weeks went on into June, it became so hot there that I would sit all day in a pair of swim trunks and about every twenty minutes--oh, I had a very large fan in the room that went twenty-four hours a day--and every twenty minutes or so I would walk into a cold shower, which was tepid, of course, and turn on the water and not dry off, but come out and dry my hands and face only, and sit down and go back to work. And that was the only way in which I could survive the heat.

GARDNER

Amazing.

MALTZ

Pardon?

GARDNER

It's amazing.

MALTZ

It was fantastic. And so that was a five-week seminightmare, but there I got to be acquainted with Gabriel Figueroa, the cameraman, cinematographer, who is a most admirable man and who remained a friend. During that summer I got an offer to have my Hugo play produced from a man I had known for years who was functioning as a stage manager on Broadway. And he said he had backing for it. But by then I had received some comments on the play, and I felt it needed more work. So I revised my concept and wrote another version, and by the time I finished the new version, my friend had lost his financial backing. My agent continued submitting it, but there were no other takers. In this year there was a series of events that affected the left-wing American community in Mexico. The first had to do with Alfred and Martha Stern. Alfred Stern was a man originally of Chicago with considerable inherited wealth. He was, I know, interested in public housing and very knowledgeable in the field apparently. He had been associated with liberal and left-wing causes in New York. I was sure that he had never been a Communist party member by things I came to know about him. Martha, his wife, was the daughter of a former ambassador to Germany, Dodd. She had been a young woman at the time that her father [William Edward Dodd] was ambassador, and she was very attractive so that she was taken out by German officers, and she had an opportunity to see what was going on somewhat from the inside. When they left Germany, she wrote a book called Through Embassy Eyes, which was very antifascist and which became a best-seller. At a certain point around 1953 they moved down to Mexico. They had one young son. And they settled down there in a very expensive apartment and began to collect Mexican art. Martha was writing, and I don't think Alfred was doing anything, particularly, except taking care of his private affairs and getting very interested in Mexican archaeology and so on.

1.51. TAPE NUMBER: XXIII, SIDE ONE
JANUARY 3, 1979

MALTZ

I had not known Alfred and Martha in the States and never came to know them intimately in Mexico, but I did see them and we had cordial relations. In the summer of this year, 1957, my wife and I visited them in Cuernavaca one day and spent the afternoon with them. They were at that time building a very large house in Cuernavaca. Alfred took me aside, and, as I best recall, he asked whether I knew if someone resident in Mexico had to answer a grand jury subpoena. I did know the answer to that because, a year or two before, I had received (I think I had this... well, this may be a duplication of something that's already in) a telegram from the McCarran committee of the Senate telling me that I was under subpoena to appear before them by a certain date. I got in touch with my attorney, and he said that I did not have to honor a subpoena from a congressional committee when I was living in another country--but that if it had been a subpoena from a grand jury, I would have had to respond to it. And Alfred and Martha had received a subpoena from a grand jury in either New York or Washington. I don't recall whether it was on that day or later that I learned what was involved. There was a music composer and a would-be producer of films in Hollywood called Boris Morros. He had done the music for a couple of films, and he was charging that Stern had been in a business with him, a music publishing business, and that this was a cover for espionage, and that he himself was a double agent. Now, Stern told me that he had indeed been in a publishing business with Morros briefly, but that he hadn't liked the way in which Morros had been conducting the business. I think Stern had put up the capital and Morros was in charge of it. And he had sued Morros and had collected in court--had gotten a jury decision in his favor and had collected in court. But it was this business that Morros asserted was the cover. Cedric Belfrage, on page 265 of his book, says about Morros that he "introduced himself to spy aficionados as a piano and cello prodigy who had conducted the Tsar's imperial orchestra at 16, and at 22 had come to America as musical director of Balieff's Chauve-Souris for which he composed The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. On a return visit to the old country in 1945 the Russians had asked him to spy for them, and he had reported this to Hoover. In 1950 Hoover had sent him back as a counterspy and a Russian secret-police general had 'wined and dined me for ten hours straight.' The Roman-candle headlines for Morros flickered out after Balieff's widow said he had neither been Chauve-Souris's musical director nor composed the Wooden Soldiers." Now, the Sterns, I know, tried to stay in Mexico, but finally the pressure on the Mexican government from the U.S. government became too strong. And then I learned that they had left the country and found out, in the course of a little time, that they apparently had bought a Paraguayan passport. And with that they had taken off and gone to Czechoslovakia, where they were given residence permits. I know that I was absolutely convinced that the one thing Alfred Stern could not have been was a spy. I wouldn't have said the same thing about Martha Dodd, not that I thought she was, but perhaps she had it within her to be many kinds of things. But Stern was such an anxious man that he never could have embarked upon something so anxiety-producing as spying. When he came down to Mexico, for instance, he asked me and other Americans to recommend a physician, and we all recommended the same physician, an American resident there whom we had been using. But Stern went around to about ten physicians with his medical records, sounding out all of them anxiously until they all wanted to get rid of him; none of them wanted to handle him, he was such an anxious guy. And I just knew that such a person could not have been a spy. [laughter] But I do believe that the Sterns were being set up to be another Rosenberg case. They would have been perfect for it. Here was a woman whose father had been an ambassador, he was a wealthy Jewish guy--it was a perfect combination. Oh, and they were both on the Left; they both had had a history of supporting the Labor party in New York and various left-wing causes. The second event that affected the community was an article in Time magazine which appeared in its issue of September 1, 1957. It was headed by photographs of Frederick Vanderbilt Field, whom I have spoken of before as having spent six months in prison, and his former wife, whom the article did not designate as his former wife, and of myself. I know that the pose that they chose for both Field and myself was one designed to make us look extremely sinister, and, in addition, the photographs were so touched up as to darken our complexions. The story added up to the phony conclusion on the part of the article which read as follows: On the fringes of the Communist upper crust drift several hundred fellow U.S. Communists and fellow travelers of lesser rank. Bearded and beardless, they idle away the hours in avant-garde jazz cellars, drink tequila, and loaf. But the top-line expatriates live well. Most of them rent comfortable, well-staffed houses in Mexico City or the flower-splashed resort town of Cuernavaca, talk art in stately houses set amid the ancient colonial towers and belfries of San Miguel de Allende. Shying away from publicity, they entertain one another at dinner and avoid noisy nightclubs. They operate businesses in travel, real estate, even eggs. Now, I don't know what the Time magazine writer was thinking of in travel--oh, I think I do know. There was a left-wing couple down there, the man was nearly blind, and his wife had a kind of hanger-on job with a travel agency in which she was able to pick up a few pesos by guiding people to it. And they were living on minimum funds, and so this was the travel thing. Now, the eggs was fascinating. Because there was a small egg farm being operated by a blacklisted physicist and a blacklisted builder from Miami--a builder whom I will talk about presently--and they had gone into this in desperation to earn a living and were getting a precarious income from it. So this was called an egg business. They clip coupons or live on fat inheritances. A few are reported involved in genuine cloak-and-dagger plotting under the command of Urey Poperov, who is cultural attaché of the suspiciously oversized Soviet embassy in Mexico City and reputedly the working boss of all active Communists in Mexico. All this reputed, reputed, reputed and nothing else. One thing that came out of this was a legal suit that Time settled because they had mentioned, as a gathering place for the colony of Communists, "the spacious home of Sterling Dickinson, U.S.-born director of art-conscious San Miguel de Allende's biggest art school. A resident of Mexico for twenty-odd years, he keeps open house for Communists and fellow travelers." Well, Dickinson, whom none of us knew, was a Catholic very friendly with the archbishop, having absolutely nothing to do with politics of any sort and especially not left-wing American Communists or left-wing Americans. And he sued Time magazine and got a settlement on it. But of course none of us that Time mentioned was able to sue, but here we were being wrapped up in a mantle of probably being spies for the Soviet embassy in Mexico. This article was perhaps part of a somewhat larger campaign that might have been orchestrated by the American State Department and culminated in the kidnapping of two members of our community in December. One was.... Want to hold it a second? [tape recorder turned off] One was Sam Novick. He was a businessman who had been a manufacturer in Chicago. He was one of those unusual businessmen who were sympathetic to the Left, and I gather that he had been a contributor to left-wing causes. And when the Truman-McCarthy era started, various kinds of pressures had been put on him and things done to interfere with the way he was conducting his business, and he sold it or closed out and came down to Mexico. At the time I knew him, he had started a small firm to manufacture flashlight batteries, and that's what he was doing. The second man was Max Shlafrock. He had been a carpenter, originally, who worked up to be a builder in Miami. And there he had built, among other things, a certain number of public schools. He also had been left-wing in his sympathies, and in the late forties, contracts began to be pulled out from under him, and mortgages that he had expected were denied him, and so his business folded and he came down to Mexico also. In Mexico he was really in very great financial difficulties and had ended up about this time in the small chicken farm on the outskirts of Mexico with another man. Each man was picked up on the street by Mexican secret police. As we learned the next day, it was a completely extracurricular kidnapping because there was no official data on it, there was no order for it in the Department of the Interior. And the only way we knew it was because the secret-police agents, feeling complete confidence in themselves, I imagine, drove each man to his home to pick up, I guess, toothbrush and pajamas, and to tell his family that he was being deported. Now, if this fake deportation had succeeded, more than likely J. Edgar Hoover would have announced their expulsion from Mexico for spy activities, and then the various congressional committees would have jumped on them, and this would have laid the ground for doing the same with other individuals. So our small community mobilized more or less in my home, and we went to work to try and stop it. One phase of our work was to get American attorneys who could be trusted to try and work from their end, and I called Ben Margolis and got the names of two lawyers in Texas who were members of the Lawyers Guild. And a second phase was to try and get a lawyer in Mexico City who could reach into the presidency and tell what was going on. And what we wanted to get was something in the Mexican legal system called an amparo. Mexico does not have habeas corpus in the way we do, but it does have a kind of a preventative writ that one can obtain in certain situations from a judge. An amparo will say that so-and-so cannot be arrested unless the people who want to arrest him come before the judge and prove that they have the right to arrest him. This prevents arbitrary arrests on the part of the police. We set out to try and get an amparo to prevent arbitrary deportation of these two men without a hearing before a judge. And I remember remaining up until three o'clock in the morning one night writing a letter to ex-President Lázaro Cárdenas, whom some of our Mexican friends could reach, in the hope of getting him to intervene on this. The result was that, after three weeks and the expenditure of about $10,000, we succeeded in preventing the deportation. I remember going with a few others once to see a most important lawyer who was going to be the one who could reach into the office of the presidency and talk, perhaps not to him personally, but to his private secretary. It was a cold day in December, and when we went to see him in his home, he was in his office in his large old house, and he had a few electric heaters burning in the room and he was wearing an overcoat, as we wore overcoats, because in Mexico practically no houses have any central heating. And here was this well-known, successful lawyer, conducting business in an overcoat. But we were able to get the men back and prevent the deportation. And after this I myself never went out of the house without carrying $200 in cash and $500 in traveler's checks so that if I were ever snatched and deported, I would not be left penniless wherever I landed. In November of that year I got my first offer since 1948 (that was nine years) to work on a piece of film material for a Hollywood film. And this was made possible because the director, David Miller, wanted to do a historical novel called Silver Nutmeg written by Nora Lufts. It so happens that Miller's very first film-directing job was my short story "The Happiest Man on Earth," for MGM. And Miller is perhaps best known for the Dalton Trumbo script he directed called Lonely Are the Brave, with Kirk Douglas. United Artists had bought the book for Miller, either bought or optioned it, and since United Artists was a loose outfit in the way they operated, it was possible for Miller to hire me at a low figure. Actually, I think his attorney put up the money. He worked through the Paul Kohner Agency. I fell in love with the material and wanted to do it, although it would require months of research before I could start writing. It was a story set in the seventeenth century in the Far East at a time when the Dutch were the most powerful seafarers in the world and controlled most of the Eastern spice trade. It was a story of both love and of a revolt of natives against their Dutch masters. And I felt it could be a very good film. I was extremely naive about the contract I signed, because I had never done any speculative writing before. I merely assumed that I would write a good screenplay and that the movie would be made; but in fact Miller was getting a top screenwriter to do a major film project for $7,000 plus great expectations. On the free market at that time I would have gotten anywhere from a low minimum of 75,000 up. Miller did have someone who would do research for me, and I went to work. One important clause of the contract left the date of my completion open-ended. I didn't have to work on it exclusively. I ought to mention I wouldn't have undertaken it at all if I weren't beginning to need money. My reserves were dwindling, and in the past several years my earnings also had been dwindling. I signed the contract with a pseudonym that I used on certain other works subsequently, John B. Sherry. My mother's maiden name was Sherry. In this year, 1957, A Long Day in a Short Life was published in the United States by International Publishers. I had come to the point where I felt I would like to have it read by my friends at least, although it only sold 700 hardback covers, hardback copies, and outside of the left-wing press and several black newspapers, there were no reviews. Whereas in England (it came out in the same year) it was reviewed quite well by the main newspapers, and it was only crapped on by Dwight MacDonald in Encounter magazine, which was later revealed to be financed by the CIA. In December Diego Rivera died of prostate cancer. He had gone in the summer, I believe, or spring, to Russia for treatment there; he returned on a hot night with a photograph taken of him as he stood on the top step of the exit from the plane with a big cossack fur hat on. He pronounced that he was cured--something, I was told, which put the Russian embassy people in a tizzy because they had been advised that he wasn't cured. And he wasted away and died in December. The tribute to him by the people was extraordinary. Since his studio was so close, I went there in the morning and found it absolutely packed with people; and by midday, his body, in a casket, was on one of the levels of Bellas Artes, the very large building in which there was the concert hall for the Mexican philharmonic, and in which there were... [tape recorder turned off]... in which there were several floors containing paintings and murals. It was the custom in Mexico that when someone very celebrated died, the body would be left in Bellas Artes in state for a day or two with an honor guard, and with the public having the right to walk past the body and view it. The honor guard was there and kept being changed every ten or fifteen minutes, and there were all the intellectuals of Mexico and ex-presidents and so on [who] were eager to take their place by the bier. During the middle of the day, the lobby of the very large building was full of well-dressed, important people who could afford to take off from their work and come there. But as the late afternoon came and the evening, the composition of the people on the line began to change. One began to see working people: women with children in their rebozos, because they had no one with whom to leave the little ones, and other little ones holding onto their hands; students with books; men coming from factories, which was very clear by the way they looked. And the line lengthened until it was not only down the whole of one block but around the side of another block, It was bitterly cold for Mexico: the temperature might have been, at that time, about twenty degrees. But when I left at eleven o'clock at night, the line still stretched way around to a second block. Nothing like this happens in the United States when an artist dies--and by artist I can include someone who works in the theater or a writer. There simply is no cultural tradition for that kind of an outpouring of people.

GARDNER

The first thing that comes to my mind is Elvis Presley. But that's....

MALTZ

No, but that's good, that's good. Elvis Presley, that's all right. Because Elvis--that's a very good point. Because in our country then, let's say, the death of someone like Presley has a meaning to people on a broad level. But it's interesting that an artist of Diego Rivera's greatness had that meaning to people in Mexico. Now the reason for it is, of course, that Diego Rivera was a muralist, and the murals spoke directly to people. The Mexican people who never would have thought of going into an art gallery were able to see the murals in parks, on buildings, and so on, and they did look at them and felt that he spoke to them. There was something amusing at Diego's funeral. He had two grown daughters: Ruth was a lawyer, I knew her, and she was a Communist like her father; Lupe, who was older (her full name was Guadalupe), was very Catholic and very right-wing politically. And when it came to what would happen at the cemetery, Ruth had given permission for the Communist party to be very much in the forefront of events. I should mention that about three or four years before his death the Communist party had finally allowed Diego Rivera to rejoin, and he was very proud of this. And so Ruth, in accord, surely, with his wishes, had said that the Communist party could be present, that it could have a flag there, that it could have one of the speakers. But Lupe was ferociously against this, and so the two grown daughters had a screaming match in front of the spectators and in front of the newspaper people as to who would win out. And there was a compromise finally effected, and the funeral continued. Let me get some water. [tape recorder turned off] Yes. I think I might add that in the fight at the cemetery I seem to recall that there was a question of whether or not a priest would officiate or the leader of the Communist party. At the end of February of the next year, 1958, David Miller came down to Mexico to ask if I would interrupt Silver Nutmeg and revise another United Artists project that he had, Short Weekend, a melodrama set in Naples which had been written by John Wexley from a novel. Miller was not satisfied with the script. The movie was scheduled for production that summer. There were things that I felt I could contribute to it, and I worked every day and night for six weeks. And Miller went away satisfied, and I was paid $4,000, less agent's commission. I went back to the Silver Nutmeg research and to inventing the screenplay. Around this time Trumbo phoned me to ask if I wanted to do the screenplay on Howard Fast's Spartacus. He had been offered it, but he had too much other work, and I said I was already working on a screenplay and couldn't do it.. [sound interference--tape recorder turned off] And I remember Trumbo saying, "Take two, take four." I couldn't do that, although he was someone who did do that and was able to keep various screenplays going at the same time and various producers and directors satisfied. But since Spartacus finally was made and Silver Nutmeg wasn't, I'm afraid I made a bad choice. In mid-July my wife and daughter and I went up to Los Angeles. This was our first visit since leaving the United States in 1951. Now, it's relevant to mention that we went by plane to Tijuana, there hired a car and drove to Los Angeles. That is to say, we didn't fly directly into the United States.

GARDNER

What about border checks?

MALTZ

There was no border check, as a matter of fact, just went through. They said, "Are you American?" They could tell by our answer that we were. And I mention this because of something that happened later that I will talk about. In Los Angeles I went over the amount of story I had so far developed for Silver Nutmeg with Miller, and we were in agreement about it. He went off to Italy to do Short Weekend, and I settled in for further work on Nutmeg and to see friends. About ten days or two weeks later Miller returned, having called off the production because the actor that he had signed to use had gained a great deal of weight and was just impossible for the role, and Miller had no substitute at that time. Very shortly after my arrival in Los Angeles, the passport policy instituted by the State Department in 1950 was upset by a series of cases appealed to the Supreme Court by Paul Robeson, Rockwell Kent, and a psychoanalyst in Los Angeles, Dr. Walter Briehl. I immediately applied for a passport, because my wife and I had wanted to go abroad if we could, and my request was rejected. This was merely an example of the kind of harassment that the passport office and the State Department went in for. I had to hire a firm of attorneys, [Victor] Rabinowitz and [Leonard] Boudin, who had handled these passport cases. They threatened suit--they filed a suit against the State Department, and the afternoon that they filed a suit, the State Department said they would grant me a passport. So it cost me an $800 fee for the attorneys and for filing and so on, and it's an excellent small example of what a government can do if it wants to be nasty toward its citizens. In late August there were some events in Mexico that had a personal bearing on me and my family. There was a students' strike because of an increase in bus fares. In Mexico City the buses were not owned by the city itself but were owned by different, individual companies. And there was a general increase of fares. Although the increase was seemingly quite small, perhaps only twenty or thirty centavos on a one-way ticket, this was important to students, a great many of whom worked. In Mexico City a student might go to classes at the university from seven till ten in the morning, having traveled by two buses, let's say, to get to the university. He then might go downtown by two more buses in order to work during the day, and then he would return to the university for classes in the evening, and then he would go back to his home. So that a twenty or thirty centavo charge on each bus fare might add up to five, seven pesos at the end of a week.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

And for a poor student that was a very significant sum. The students proceeded to fight the increase in fare in an ingenious manner. A group of ten to twenty of them would get on a bus and tell the bus driver to drive to the university. If he did, nothing else happened; if he didn't want to, they could chuck him off the bus and drive the bus to the university themselves. At that time the university grounds were sacred--they no longer are--but then neither police nor soldiers could enter the university. So after the students had captured perhaps 40 or 100 buses, the situation became serious. The government, which had not faced any such situation before, decided in its hysteria to claim that the situation was caused by foreign agitators, among them American Reds. And I'm sure that part of this decision came from the American embassy because of what specifically happened. Three Americans, that I can recall, were deported. One was a businessman, Bernard Blasenheim, whom I didn't know and who apparently had no connection with politics. And I heard that someone who was a competitor of his had seen to it that he was deported. Two of them were men I did know. One was John Bright, the screenwriter, who had been resident there quite some years, and he was just picked up, taken to a holding place, and then taken by plane to Texas and dropped in some town without any money in his pocket. He was, I think, taken from his home. A second man was Allan Lewis, who had been teaching drama--he was essentially a teacher--he had been teaching drama at the National University. Some photograph of him had been taken and superimposed upon a group of students as though he were making a speech to them--which he had never done--and this appeared in the newspapers. He also was summarily deported. Now, as I learned, police came to my house on successive days. And the occupant of the house at that time was Helen Sobell, Morton Sobell's wife, and their young son. Sometime before I went to the United States, Morton Sobell's mother had come to Mexico. She had been on a fund-raising trip, and I believe she ended in Mexico just for a rest. I do remember driving her somewhere. I didn't have much contact with her, and I no longer recall how the arrangements were made for Helen Sobell to stay at our house while we were gone, but she was there for about six weeks. The Mexican newspapers proceeded to say the following about me: one, that I was a fugitive from the United States (even though at that time I was in Los Angeles, living in a hotel, telephoning people, seeing friends and so on); secondly, that the Mexican police, finding that I was not at home in Mexico, had put a watch on all border points to be sure that I didn't slip back into Mexico under an assumed name; three, that even though I had resided in Mexico continuously for seven years, I was the secretary of the American Communist party; and four, that Helen Sobell was residing in my home, which was a nest of spies. Well, the aftermath of this was that, although I had intended to stay in Los Angeles for a shorter period, I remained in the United States until the new president was inaugurated on December first, because I didn't want it to be the old regime. As soon as I got back, I got in touch with Gabriel Figueroa, who was not only a man of importance in Mexico but happened to be the cousin of the new president who was just elected, who had just come into office, a man whose name was Adolfo Lopez Mateos. And I wrote a letter which my attorney, Benito Noyola, revised in proper Spanish, stating what I was, what I had been doing, referring to my whole history, and saying that I was very willing to leave Mexico at any time that the Mexican government desired me to leave, but that I did not want to be deported because I didn't deserve it. And this letter was presented with the signatures of Figueroa and the director of the film I had worked on, [Roberto] Gavaldon, who in the meantime had become a deputy of the Congress. And I had no trouble after that from anything at all, but I always continued to carry cash and traveler's checks in case there was a switch. Along this time I met Oscar Lewis and became friendly with him and read some of his material in manuscript. I think I might mention about him something very unusual. Distinguished as he was in the field of anthropology, he was a disappointed opera singer. That was what he had always wanted to be, and even while he was down in Mexico doing his research, he still kept taking singing lessons. He was a very, very compulsive worker, with no ability whatsoever to relax. Even before I knew him particularly well, on impulse I once sat down and sent him a letter and said, "I don't care whether you ever want to talk to me again, but you're such a perfect candidate for a heart attack that I want to do my best to try and help you change a little bit." He took the letter very warmly, as a matter of fact, but he was too compulsive to change. He also had a tremendous compulsion to see his work on film, and I never really understood that. He used to telephone me about Children of Sanchez or other film possibilities right up until the time he died. And it's perhaps fortunate that he never lived to see what happened to Children of Sanchez when it was made into a film. I had warned him that his work wouldn't come out well, but he was blind to it. He was a very, very nice man, and he had an absolute genius for getting people to talk to him frankly. He won their confidence, and of course he never misused their confidence. But other people could have been as sincere as he and not have the particular qualities that he had that made people talk to him. At the beginning of December 1958 I started actual writing of the screenplay Silver Nutmeg. It was a project that I had started a year before but there had been interruptions. In February 1959 I was due to make a speech at the [First] Unitarian Church in Los Angeles. This was a church headed by that extraordinary and admirable man Stephen Fritchman, and it had been a center of resistance to McCarthyism throughout the fifties. So that when I was asked to speak there, I decided I would come up to do so. I arrived in the afternoon of the night I was to make the speech (or afternoon of the day, I guess, on which I was to make the speech), and I was told by the officer who examined my passport that he would like me to wait. He indicated a chair behind him in the office where I was to sit down. I immediately assumed that the FBI in Mexico had notified Los Angeles that I was coming up and that was why I had been stopped. And I had no idea what they were going to do about it, but after I had been kept there for about a half hour, until all of the other passengers had left the baggage area....

1.52. TAPE NUMBER: XXIII, SIDE TWO
JANUARY 3, 1979

GARDNER

Continue at the Los Angeles airport.

MALTZ

After the other passengers had passed through customs, I was taken out and told to take everything out of my suitcase. I had a very large valpack and I took everything out. The customs inspector examined everything minutely. I had a little pouch in which I kept a Minox camera, and the pouch was opened and the camera was examined and so on. Then he said I could put the stuff back, and I put the stuff back, and we waited longer. I asked how long I would have to wait. The man said he didn't know. And more time passed, and then I was told to open the suitcase again, and this time not only was everything reexamined but the man started to look through the folders I had of my notes on Silver Nutmeg, because I had brought them up to talk with David Miller while I was there. And then he proceeded to go into folders, and I asked him whether he had the right to do that, and he said yes. And when he went into folders that carried correspondence, I again asked him, and he closed those folders and didn't look at them. It was a situation, of course, in which I was inwardly seething with anger and yet knew that the one thing I had to do was to keep my temper and not comport myself in any way that would enable them to make any charges against me. My friend George Sklar and his wife had come to pick me up at the airport, and I didn't know that he had called down to Ben Margolis, and that Margolis had called into the immigration service. And [it] was probably as a result of this, and as a result of their getting in touch with the FBI downtown and learning that there was no reason to hold me, that they finally let me go after about an hour and a half of detention. There is more to this that I'll tell about later. I made my speech at the church and stayed for a few days to talk over the Nutmeg material with David Miller. And then I was got in touch with by Ingo Preminger, Otto Preminger's brother. To my best recollection I had not known Ingo, and I don't recall now how he reached me--perhaps through Trumbo. But I saw him, and he told me that his brother was going to produce and direct Exodus, which was then a current best-seller, and would I be interested in the job. Of course, I said I would be. I had not read the book and I sat down to read it. I found it to be a mixture of high passion, which I liked, and of cheap writing in many sequences, which I didn't like. But I then had a meeting with Otto Preminger, and we talked about the story and agreed that I would work on it. I told him that I intended to go to Europe in April for a three-month visit and that I would include Israel now in my trip. He said that as long as he had the screenplay by the end of December it would be okay. I returned to Los Angeles and continued very intensive work on Silver Nutmeg. I was not quite finished with the last sequences when the time came in late March for me to start for Europe. Miller was in New York, and I wanted him to have the screenplay and, at the same time, I didn't want to run the risk of being stopped at the airport again and perhaps slapped with some phony charge that might prevent me from taking off to Europe. I had, in the meantime, learned from a friend that it was possible to go by train to Nuevo Laredo, and then to take a taxi across to Laredo where I would pass through customs and where he had done this without being stopped in any way. Then I would have to take a train to St. Louis and, from St. Louis, another to New York. It would be a long trip of, I think, three days and three nights, but it would accomplish what I wanted. During the time on the train, I would be able to finish the last sequence so that I could give the screenplay to Miller. And this was exactly what I did. And I slipped into New York and had the last sequence typed and gave it to Miller and took a train to Montreal. And from Montreal, we went off on our trip. It happened that I had block royalties in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia, and we had planned a trip that would be largely paid for by those royalties. Just one second.... [tape recorder turned off] In Israel our quick one-week look made me know that I needed more time for research, and I decided that I would return to Israel at the end of my trip. We had one experience that resulted in a book by my wife. We went to a kibbutz right close to the Gaza Strip; it was called Yad Mordechai. We had an English-speaking Israeli with us who worked in the Ministry of Information and who guided people around. A man we met, who was the gardener of the kibbutz, was also its librarian, and he proceeded to tell us the extremely dramatic story of the way in which the kibbutz had resisted the attack of three Egyptian brigades in the war of 1948, the war of independence. The Egyptians had had tanks, heavy artillery and planes, several planes, and the kibbutz had had, I think, 120 fighting men with rifles and a few machine guns; and yet they had held up the Egyptians for three days and nights in their area, allowing forces to assemble for the defense of Tel Aviv. It was a very extraordinary story, but I didn't understand the reason why he told it to us in such detail. We discovered after we left that they had two books of mine in Hebrew in their library and that they had been looking for someone to write their story ever since 1948, that several Israeli writers had come down but it had not been worked out, and that he had told the story at that length in the hope of getting me interested in doing it. I was not interested in doing a nonfiction book, but it turned out that my wife got very intrigued by it and, during the course of the winter, thought about it a great deal and decided that she would do it if they would cooperate with her, because she wanted to interview every one of the survivors of that battle. She set up communication with one of the English-speaking members of the group, and, as we found out later, they had considerable discussion as to whether they wanted a non-Jew to write their story; but they finally decided that she would be acceptable. And so the following year she went back to do her research on it. Our next country we visited was East Germany where we had as our guide and companion Eberhard Brüning. He is today Professor Doctor Brüning. At that time he was an instructor at the University of Leipzig, which was renamed Karl Marx University. He had originally gotten in touch with me in the early fifties, when he was a graduate student, to ask data about my work and to ask me to send him some of my things. I did this, and we carried on a correspondence, because he eventually wrote his doctoral thesis on my work. And later he wrote a book about my work. In East Berlin I had a lot of royalties stored up. We were put into a once-celebrated hotel, the Adlon. I knew the name of the Adlon from various novels I had read. It was the posh hotel of Berlin in the Weimar Republic and then later even in the Hitler period. But now it was cut in half; it had been cut in half by artillery fire. I remember once walking down the hall from my room just to sort of explore the place, and I saw a door and opened it--and I opened it on empty air: there was about a forty-foot drop to the ground from where I was. The hotel looked out on the remains of Hitler's bunker where his headquarters had been in the whole last phase of the war and where he died, This had been hit by heavy artillery and perhaps dynamited as well, I imagine, so that there was an immense expanse of some acres in which there were mountains of rubble and huge stones--not stone, but pieces of concrete upturned and on end. It was an incredible scene of desolation--and yet, of course, fiercely dramatic because of what we knew had taken place there. At that time the government of East Germany had made a decision that I regarded even then as very foolish. They had decided not to build anything close to the border with West Berlin because they thought there was going to be the possibility of war and they didn't want to construct anything that would then be knocked down. So as a result, while they had swept the streets, the rubble was still everywhere for blocks. It was possible--since at that time there was no wall and people could walk freely from East to West, or could take an elevated train from East to West--it was possible for people to walk from the reconstructed west part of Berlin, which was all shiny and lovely with new buildings constructed with American money, and walk into what seemed an area of absolute desolation which was East Berlin. The fact that further to the east in the city they had built a great many new apartment houses, and so on, made no difference in terms of the impression that it would give visitors. I did find myself very moved by the fact that the editor of my publishing house, Schalike, and a theater director, Wolfgang Langhoff, who was the director of the current play Anne Frank, and who previously had directed the play Merry Go Round by George Sklar and myself--that these two men and others like them had been themselves in concentration camps. It seemed a token of the new regime in East Germany that there were dedicated antifascists in that position. I know that the head of the publishing house, a man called Schalike, had written a very warm and tender note to my wife just before I went to prison. And I was so struck to find him obviously a sick man after his years in a concentration camp, and indeed it was only about a year later that he died. I met Stefym Heym, who had been a refugee in the United States and had published novels here, and then had been a volunteer in the American army and after the war remained in East Germany. He was now in a fight with the East German government because they wouldn't publish a novel he had written about the 1954 antigovernment demonstration by German workers, by workers in Berlin. He previously had had a book published there which had been a great success, and they valued him as a citizen, but they wouldn't publish this book, and he wouldn't take it quietly. But in spite of that, there was apparently much more tolerance in East Germany then in the other socialist countries. Heym lived in a lovely private home full of antiques, and he had a motorboat on which he took us out on a beautiful, large lake which is part of the Berlin area. I must say I was impressed to see how many sailboats there were on the lake and how many boats, large boats, belonging to different trade unions were there, and it was certainly not a picture of a starving nation deprived of all pleasures. At Stefym Heym's home I met several people whom I hadn't seen since I left the States. One was Earl Robinson, my very good friend, who at that time was teaching music in a private school in Brooklyn. He was blacklisted, and he was now in Berlin because he had been invited to conduct several of his works with German orchestras. And I met Joris Ivens, the documentary film worker, filmmaker, very great at his role, who had been in the United States during the war years but had left when the war was over, and I hadn't seen him now for, oh, about thirteen years. I also met someone at his home with whom I was to become very considerably involved. This was a French singer by the name of Fania Fenelon. I learned that she had been in a women's orchestra in Auschwitz. I had not known that there was such a thing, and it intrigued me very much. She was going back to Paris very shortly after, and we intended to be in Paris so we arranged to meet when we came there. I wanted to learn more about it. I had a reunion there with our friends from Mexico, John Pen's widow, Erzi, now there under his name as Mrs. [János] Székely, which had been his real name. Pen had died shortly before I came there. They had left Mexico around, oh, 1956, not willingly but because, as alien-born citizens of the United States, they could not remain out of the United States more than five years without returning or they would lose their citizenship. And so they had gone back to the States, but he had not been able to make a financial go of it. He couldn't get work in film, and so they had gone over to West Berlin to see if he could do some writing there, and he did a little but found that he could do more writing in East Berlin, so they had moved over to East Berlin. And then he had died. But at that time his daughter Kathy was acting the chief role in Anne Frank, which was done in the Deutches Theatre, the main theater in East Berlin, outside of Brecht's theater. And so we and Kathy and Erzi had a sad-glad reunion. I might say that there's enough that's wrong with a country like East Germany not to have to go in for lying about it. At that time, for instance, I read reports by American reporters about the lack of food in East Germany. But my personal experience was one of going into an ice cream parlor, or whatever they would call it over there, where my wife and daughter had ice cream with whipped cream in such quantities as obviously meant an abundance of milk and cream. And I also found out that doctors in East Germany were trying to get workers to cut down on the amount of butter they were using because of the incidence of heart attacks. So that it's just unfortunate to have stupid lies instead of the criticism that would have been valid. With a car and a chauffeur furnished by our publisher, we drove down to Leipzig. I must say that some of the untouched medieval towns of Germany are simply beautiful, as well as a great deal of the countryside. And there, in some of the small towns, we saw well-dressed people walking the streets on a Sunday with their children in new prams, and there was again no sense of a suffering, starving people. In Leipzig I spoke to the students at Brüning's university, and I remember being taken to the church where Bach had played for many years. And then we went on to Dresden purely in order for us to see Ernesto Amann. He was the Austrian doctor who had been my physician in Cuernavaca. By about 19... oh, '55 or '56, he was very eager to leave Cuernavaca because he felt that the practice of medicine, as he was doing it, was not what he really wanted to do. He wanted to practice social medicine instead of private, and, in addition, he had a marriage that he didn't want to continue. He tried at first to go to China, where he would have liked to practice, but found that he couldn't arrange that, and he did arrange to get to East Germany. So that by the time we came, he had been there about two years. We found that he had made an alliance with a German doctor, a woman who had also been in Spain, and that they wanted to be married. They had been living together, and, knowing that we were coming over, he had delayed his marriage until the day we arrived in Dresden so that we could be best man and woman there. And so we were. And then we went and had dinner at a very nice writers club across the river in Dresden and then walked around Dresden, went to a museum. Dresden was a terrible place to look at because immense areas of it were nothing but rubble carefully swept up, but no new building had gone up, and the results of the terrible bombing there were evident everywhere. That night, in their apartment, Ernesto began to talk to me about medical practices in the hospital where he worked which outraged him. He spoke of a patient who died because the doctor who was his (Ernesto's) superior insisted upon a certain type of treatment, and he, Ernesto, knew that it was wrong and even brought the doctor literature to show him. And the doctor said, "In this hospital, this is the way we do it." And he couldn't get past that Prussian stubbornness, as he called it, and he even felt that some of the doctors were ex-Nazis. He was immensely agitated over it, and, as he began to talk, he began to become incoherent. I didn't know then, as I learned later, that he had been in a psychiatric institution for some weeks, due to a breakdown, until just before we came. The knowledge that we were coming had enabled him to pull himself together and come out and act in a perfectly sane manner for most of the day in which we were there. But now, as he talked about these things that were agitating him so much, he began to go to pieces. And he pleaded with me to write to Khrushchev. He said that if I wrote to Khrushchev, Khrushchev would listen to me and would learn about these practices. We passed a very distressing several hours until, finally, we went to sleep. And I remember the next morning, when we left and said goodbye, his wife couldn't speak. She just stood in the doorway, weeping. I didn't understand then, since I didn't know he had been in an institution, the depth of what she was afraid of; but I did learn about a month after we came home when I received a letter from her that he had committed suicide. On our way back to Berlin we stopped at the concentration camp--we stopped first at Weimar, which was the home of Goethe, and then went above it some miles to a height on which there was the concentration camp of Buchenwald. Unlike many other concentration camps where the buildings are largely intact, the buildings at Buchenwald had been torn down: there was nothing but a very large, flat area. However, at the rear of that area, small buildings did remain where people had been executed. This was not a death camp with gas chambers where people were taken by the tens of thousands for killing. But it was a place where a good many men were shot in the back of the head and then cremated in ovens. Several ovens were there in a kind of a "museum" attached to it. I was very impressed to see the photographs of individual Germans, or small groups of Germans, who had been arrested and executed for anti-Nazi activity during the war. They were young people, and it was obvious that they had not been organized Communists or Socialists before the war, but they had just moved into antifascist activity because of their loathing for what was going on. I was very impressed also by the large contingents of schoolchildren who were present when we were there, and I learned that every schoolchild of a certain age in East Germany was brought to one concentration camp or another to teach them what fascism had meant. We went on then to Prague, where we were met by my old friend Hans Burger and his wife, Puck. I forget whether I mentioned earlier who Hans Burger was. He was a Czech, a young Czech film man, who came to the United States as a refugee around 1938 with a film that he had worked on called The Lights Are Going Out in Europe. We became friendly and were in touch until the time that I went to Hollywood. I am sure that in some way we got in touch before--I know that there was some way in which we got in touch again before we came to Prague because he met us at the plane with his wife, who was a German girl. I'll tell about her for a moment. Hans was a combat photographer with the U.S. Army, and at a certain point he was in Munich, I believe, doing a film about what had been known by Germans about the concentration camps. He was filming in an office with a large group of industrialists and one secretary, who was this young, pretty girl, Puck. He asked questions, and all of the industrialists were denying that they knew anything about the concentration camps. At a certain point the girl jumped up and said, "You, Herr so-and-so, who lived in Weimar, didn't know that right above there was the concentration camp of Buchenwald? You are a liar!" And she went down the line of the other people, calling them all liars. And Hans said, "And I married her." She was a lovely, lovely girl. As we drove from the airport, Hans told a story of what had happened to him during the war. He said that when his outfit came very close to Prague, he found it absolutely insupportable not to know whether the old city of Prague, which was so beautiful, had been damaged. And so at a certain time, without permission from his superiors, he commandeered a jeep and drove himself into Prague. He drove in a certain way so that when he turned around a wall he would see the old city. And as he finished his story, he drove his car around that same wall and we saw with him the beautiful Charles Bridge over the river there. It's a spectacularly lovely sight, and Hans said that when he saw that, saw that it had not been touched by artillery fire or bombing, he just burst into tears. And the old city of Prague is just magnificent. At that time my play Black Pit was being performed in one of the theaters of Prague, the Realistic Theatre, and it was very pleasant to go there and to see it done. And although, of course, I couldn't follow the language, I knew the story and I could see that the quality of the ensemble acting was very good indeed. I might mention that one of the best actors was a man named Walter Taub, who was also a distinguished film actor, and he now is one of those who is without work in Czechoslovakia because he was a part of the Prague Spring [1968] that sought to reform the country. [tape recorder turned off] A man with whom I had a reunion was Francis, or Frantistek, Vrba. He was a literary critic, literary and cinema critic, who had translated Black Pit. He previously had come through Los Angeles around the year 1949 when he was cultural attaché to the Czech embassy in Washington. He was a man who had been in, I think it was, nine different Nazi work camps. He was arrested for anti-Nazi activity as a youth of about seventeen and put into these work camps--not sent to Auschwitz because he was not a Jew. And when he came out, he weighed ninety pounds--but survived it. And when he came through Los Angeles, he looked me up, and I found him to be a most personable and charming man, and I was glad to make his acquaintance again in Prague. I will mention about him that he too was a member of the Prague Spring. In his case he was sent to prison in 1968 by the Czech government that came after [Alexander] Dubcek was kicked out. I know that after about a year or so he was allowed out of prison, and I had the very briefest exchange of cards with him. I think he may be working as a day laborer. We also visited the concentration camp of Terezin (it has a longer name in Czech), and it figured considerably in the TV film of Holocaust. It was an unusual concentration camp in that it had an outward show of being a normal community and was used to fool the Red Cross when they sent inspection delegations; but behind the facade, there was misery and death. We next came into Warsaw, which was a miracle of rebuilding because, after the uprising in Warsaw by the Polish nationalists in 1944, Hitler had ordered that the city be razed--and it was. Everything in it was destroyed, so much so that after the war the question was raised as to whether or not it should be left as it was and a new city built further up the river, the river Vistula. But it was finally decided that what was underground, that is, the pipes, the sewers, and so on, were so important in the building of a city that it was better to clear the rubble out and rebuild. And the rebuilding, by the time we came, was extraordinary, because, unlike a city like Dresden, one saw no rubble; there were only well-built buildings. And miraculously, there was a section called Old Town built around a square, and the old designs for it had been found, and so all of the buildings were restored on the outside exactly as they had been since medieval times, excepting that now they had proper plumbing and electricity and so on. It was very beautiful. Of course we saw our friends the Liebers, and at that time they had only been there about three years--no they'd been there four years. And Lieber was functioning well in several publishing houses, and his wife was studying at the university to get a Ph.D. so that she could teach, and they had a nice apartment. They were able to use funds that they had to buy things from England and the U.S. so that they had clothes and various foods that they could enjoy, and they had a car. At that time they thought it was very nice there. I had an evening with my publisher there, and he told me something that I have never forgotten because it was so revelatory. He had been a colonel in a Polish division attached to the Russian army and...

GARDNER

What was his name?

MALTZ

I'm not sure, let me....

GARDNER

No, we can put that in later.

MALTZ

All right. I'll have to try and look it up. (His name was Burgin.) I think he may be in the United States, I'm not sure. Oh I don't know... no, no, no, no, he's there on a... I don't know. I know that he is no longer a publisher, because he was Jewish, and he.... Anyway, I told him my bewilderment about the manner in which various of the old Russian Bolsheviks had confessed to all sorts of crimes they had not committed--my confusion about their behavior. Because I said that if I had been in their position, I would have known that my life was over, and I would have said, "No, I'm not guilty of any of these things. Shoot me if you want, but I'm not going to tarnish myself before the world, I've been an honest man." And he said, "Well, let me tell you a story--" Oh, he said, "let me explain about that." He said, "In the first place, there were many who said that, and they were just shot out of hand. They never came to trial." He said, "For instance, I know that shortly before Stalin's death, an assistant secretary of the foreign ministry was suddenly arrested. And he was brought before a military tribunal who demanded that he confess to a crime, and he refused and he said, 'I am a Communist, and you men up there are fascists, and someday the party will catch up with you.' And he was shot. And he said there were others who were promised that if they would confess, the party would see to it that they would remain under house arrest for a few years and then they would be rehabilitated. And they believed it, and they did as they were asked and then they were shot." And he said, "And there was another method. And let me tell you a story about it." He said, "A leading member of the central committee of the Communist party was arrested and brought to a cell in which there were a good number of people. And there are calls to him, they say, 'Hello, so-and-so, so you're here now, huh?' And he replied to them, 'Don't talk to me. You're counterrevolutionaries, you're Trotskyites, and I am a Communist, and I don't want to have anything to do with you!' And they responded, 'Well, if that's how you feel, okay.' A little while later he was taken down to a cellar room in which there was a very young, strong man in uniform who had obviously not gone through anything of the history of the Communist movement that he had. And the man, the interrogator, said to him, 'What's your name?' And he said, 'My name is so-and-so.' And the interrogator said, 'Look, I want the truth now. I want to know what your name is.' He replied, 'Well, comrade, everybody knows me. I'm a member of the central committee, I've been a member of the party for so many and so many years, my name is such and such.' And the interrogator looked at him for a moment, and then said, 'This is the last chance you're going to have. I want to know what your name is.' And the central committee man said, 'Well, what can I tell you except what I've told you before? My name is so-and-so.' Whereupon the interrogator got up, standing a foot above the central committee member, and hit him and knocked him down. The man was terribly shaken, and the interrogator goes back to his chair and sits down and says, 'Get up!' The man gets up slowly, and the interrogator says, 'What's your name?' And the man doesn't know what to answer. And he says, 'Come on, what's your name?' The man says, 'I can't tell you anything except what I've told you. My name is such and such.' The interrogator gets up, and hits him again and knocks him down. And he looks down at him, and he says, 'I'll tell you what your name is. Your name is shit.' And he goes back to his seat and he says, 'Get up. Come forward. Now, what is your name?" And, trembling, the man looks at him. And the interrogator says, 'What is your name?' And the man answers, 'My name is shit.' He's taken back to the cell, and he cries out, 'Comrades, what's going on here? What's happening?' And they say, 'Oh, now you call us comrades!'" [laughter] And this was a symbolic example of one of the ways in which men were finally led to confess to anything that the police wanted them to say. Of course other methods were used and are best presented by the novel Confess--not the novel, the autobiography Confession by Artur London, the Czech who was one of the men in the 1952 trials in Czechoslovakia who was imprisoned and sentenced to death; but later it was commuted, and he was let out. And that was the explanation of what happened in these trials. Isn't it incredible and shocking?

GARDNER

It really is.

MALTZ

Isn't that a story?

GARDNER

My tape's just about out, so I think we should.

MALTZ

All right.

1.53. TAPE NUMBER: XXIV, SIDE ONE
JANUARY 9, 1979

MALTZ

From Warsaw we went on to Moscow, and I'd like just a few quick comments before I tell the one important thing that's relevant to this oral history. I found that I had had in my mind an image of Moscow that came out of Dostoyevsky and other Russian materials, and I was not prepared to see a city with the broadest avenues I've ever been to. It's relevant to mention, because of something that I'll discuss later, that I was given royalties by my publishing house there of 17,000 rubles. [tape recorder turned off] I was given royalties of 17,000 rubles for one edition of 100,000 copies of The Cross and the Arrow. I mention it because it became a key for my figuring out a rate of royalties later when I needed to do that. One of the people I met there was a man by the name of Lev Kopelev. His wife who--he is a literary man, a translator who specializes in German literature--and his wife is a critic and a translator of English materials. Her name was Raya Orlova. They talked to me very freely about themselves, and Lev told the following story. In World War II he had been the political commissar of a Latvian division. And when their division entered Germany, the soldiers began to pillage and rape. Kopelev went indignantly to his military commander and said that, no matter what the Germans had done to the Russians, it was simply not behavior that any Russian army should indulge in, that this was absolutely forbidden. He was arrested, and he was charged with slandering the army and with "bourgeois humanism." He was put on trial before a military judge. (At the time he was put on trial, various members of his Communist party group in the division sent a telegram to Stalin because they believed that if Stalin knew what was happening, he would interfere. I mention this in passing as a wonderful example of the delusion of the Russian people about Stalin). And the judge declared him innocent of the charges. That judge was then dismissed and Kopelev was rearrested, and another judge was appointed, and he held Kopelev guilty and gave him three years. And that judge was dismissed, and another judge was appointed, and there was a third trial, and he was given ten years and he served them. Now, his comment to me was that the way he had felt about it all through the ten years in a prison labor camp was that if he was on a train and the train was going in the right direction and the conductor threw him off the train, it still didn't mean that the train wasn't going in the right direction. Later he changed. Let's shut off for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] Now, at the time that I met him, I didn't know his surname. I assumed that it was the same name as his wife's, which was Orlova. If I knew then what I now know about the endings of Russian surnames, I would have known that that was impossible because Orlova was a feminine ending in Russian. Now, over the years, as I started to follow what was happening to Solzhenitsyn, I read of a Lev Kopelev who had been in--oh, did I make clear earlier that I knew him only as Lev?

GARDNER

No, I don't recall....

MALTZ

Oh, well then, I've missed my point here. I called him Lev Kopelev, but when I met him... I first met his wife, who was Raya Orlova, and she introduced me to her husband Lev.

GARDNER

I see.

MALTZ

And I never knew a different surname, so that the name Kopelev, which I give him now, is not one that I knew him by. And over the years I read of a Lev Kopelev who had been in prison with Solzhenitsyn and was the model for the character of Rubin in Solzhenitsyn's book The First Circle. I also read that it was Kopelev who had taken the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the editor of the magazine that first published it. And at another point I read that Lev Kopelev had had certain manuscripts of Solzhenitsyn in his possession to hide them and protect them. But it was not until 1976 that I discovered that the Lev I had met and corresponded with over the years was Lev Kopelev--that they were the same man. I learned this because I had a letter forwarded to me by a reporter from a leading newspaper, who was returning from Moscow, and he had a letter for me from Raya. I wrote to her in reply but I've never had an answer. I looked Kopelev up and discovered that in 1962, which was only three years after I met him, he was attacked for defending the right of Soviet artists to develop abstract techniques. And in 1966 he wrote in behalf of two writers, [Andrei] Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who were imprisoned for an offense I will discuss in a moment. And he signed a petition urging their release. As a result, he was expelled from the party and dismissed from the Institute of Historical Sciences. Also, some of his books previously approved for publication were removed from the publication list. About the same time in 1976 that I got the letter from Raya, I read some newspaper reports on him which indicated that he was in a dangerous political position in the Soviet Union, and also that he had coronary trouble and had been in and out of hospitals. For whatever help it might be, I wrote an article about him which was published in the L.A. Times on April 22, 1977. I want to read the last sentence of it. In the article I discuss the fact that Kopelev had published a book which was now in English, and I will say in passing that something very unfortunate happened to it in its U.S. publication. It was a book of over 700 pages, and it was cut down in half so that it is very fragmentary indeed and not satisfactory as a book. I said: "Kopelev has written his autobiography and smuggled it out to the West in manuscript. Had he been able to find a publisher in his own country, he would not have needed to seek foreign publication in this clandestine way. He borrowed the title for his book from the stamp placed by the Soviet secret police on the dossiers of all political prisoners, 'To Be Preserved Forever.'" Isn't that an extraordinary title and concept? I had never heard that before and never seen it written about. In all the data on the Soviet Union no one ever came up with that.

GARDNER

Right.

MALTZ

So far as I know from any reading, he is still at liberty. I might say that not only I but others who have met them, like Lillian Hellman, regard them as just simply marvelous people. In Moscow, I met Angus Cameron, my friend and former editor at Little, Brown, for the first time in about ten years, and discovered, to my great pleasure, that he had just been hired as an editor at Knopf--which was a sign of changing times. And I also met Corliss Lamont, whom I had never known before. I used the opportunity to talk with both of them about the question of the failure of the Soviet Union to ask permission of any foreign writers when it published their works. At this time, as a legitimate complaint against the Soviet Union but also, in part, as a political weapon for some people, there was a demand that the Soviet Union pay royalties to authors. Now, there's a long history to this that I won't go into except to say that the new Soviet state in 1917, and in the twenties and thirties, simply didn't have the money to pay royalties. It wasn't even recognized by a country like the United States, and yet it wanted to publish books for its people. And so I regard with sympathy its failure to pay royalties at that time. But the times had changed by 1959, and I took the position that even if it still could not afford to pay hard currency royalties, one thing that it could do with authors was to write to them and ask permission to publish their books, and explain that they could not at this time pay royalties, but that if any writer came to the Soviet Union, they would be glad to give them royalties in rubles, which was already their practice. I also believed that it would be pleasing to writers, and their due, if the Soviet editors also kept them informed of the number of copies printed, and perhaps of any book reviews, and of reactions of readers. I urged Cameron and Lamont, who both were seeing various people around in the establishment, to try and push this idea. So that we had a little... what's called a fraction working in the Soviet Union on this point. Well, the result of my discussion of this with the head of my publishing house and with various critics was that a meeting was arranged between me and the assistant minister of culture. Just at that time there was some top-level political thing going on in Moscow, and it was explained to me that the assistant minister was taking his lunch hour to talk to me. I was taken by my translator to an old czarist palace, which was now the headquarters, apparently, for the Ministry of Culture, and there I met the head of my publishing house and his assistant, and I noticed with some dismay their nervousness at the fact they were going to see the assistant minister of culture. Several times each of them whipped out a comb to comb his hair, and they straightened their ties, and they shifted their jackets, and it didn't feel good to me. We finally went up a long stairway and into a very large room which must have been a ballroom at one time, and there, sitting at a desk, was the assistant minister with a translator and someone else, I forget all of it. I was introduced to him and waited for the moment to talk. When it came, I began to explain my position to him, and I don't think I had spoken for as much as fifteen seconds when he interrupted me with the assertion that American authors ought to be happy that the Russians publish their work for Russian workers, and with that he launched into an uninterrupted talk for perhaps ten minutes. And when he was through, I was through and I was ushered out. He had not heard what I came to ask him to consider at all, and I could not have received a better example of Soviet--I could not have experienced a better example of bureaucracy.

GARDNER

You never tried to break in or...

MALTZ

No.

GARDNER

...say a few words on your behalf?

MALTZ

I don't remember anymore. I might have. But there was such a kind of imperial flood of talk, this man lecturing me, and just by nature I'm not, let's say, a rough-and-tumble fighter in conversation where I would just... I... you know. I was waiting politely for him to finish and give me an opportunity; but when he finished, the interview was over. That was it. I never got to Leningrad because of illness on the part of both my wife and daughter, and I went next to London. The only thing I will mention there is that Paul Robeson was playing Macbeth at Stratford-on-Avon. I went up to see the play and to see him, and I saw him before the performance. He had changed since the last time I had seen him by gaining a good deal of weight. He now had considerable weight around his middle, and his face had gotten quite round. But he was full of buoyancy about the future. He told me about an Australian tour that had been offered him, and that now he could go back and sing in the United States any time he wanted to. It was quite a surprise to me to learn, I guess about two years later (I'm not absolutely sure, it may only have been one year later), that he was ill and in a sanitorium. I discovered from friends that what had happened was that Robeson had gone into a very serious depression--from which he never recovered. This was hidden by members of his family and by friends from the public, but this is what happened to Robeson. And from '61 until his death in, I guess, '77, he never appeared in public other than in one brief period when he made a kind of recovery and made a bit of a tour, a bit of a speaking tour with his wife Eslanda. I was in the audience when he appeared at the Unitarian church in Los Angeles. He spoke very differently than in previous years, and I was very sorrowful. I know that my friend Earl Robinson told me of meeting with some others at his home in Philadelphia in the late sixties and trying to cheer him up by having a songfest, but he just sat in a depressed state and couldn't respond. I'll just say, in parting, that I think he is one of the few geniuses that I've met in the course of my life. After London I went back to Paris for a few days and, there, had some intensive talks with Fania Fenelon. She had been in the French Resistance and, after her arrest, was sentenced to death but in order to save herself said that she was Jewish; and thereupon they said, "Well, we'll handle you some other way," and they sent her to Auschwitz. And there....

GARDNER

That's sort of an odd line in order to save herself.

MALTZ

Yes, well....

GARDNER

Did she honestly...? She was just really postponing, she thought, I suppose....

MALTZ

No, no, she was advised to say that by someone in the group with whom she was with: say you're Jewish, and they won't shoot you. Now, I don't know--I know that that was not a regular rule, because I've met other members of the Resistance who said that Jews found with weapons on them were shot just like anyone else. But in her case, she did say that after having been sentenced to be shot, she was sent to Auschwitz. Now in fact, this blue-eyed girl was half-Jewish, I think--I know. I don't think... I think one of her parents was not Jewish. And in Auschwitz, after a little while she became a member of the women's orchestra. I might explain that the Nazis used an orchestra both in the men's and women's camp for two purposes: one was to play marching songs when those prisoners who went to work outside the camp marched out and also when they marched back at night; the other was to play music of a sort of a light classical variety for the SS guards when they wanted recreation. For instance, after a train came in with new prisoners and they were separated--a portion to go into the camp and a portion to go immediately into the gas chambers--some of the guards might come in and say they were tired and they wanted to hear some music. And the orchestra would play for them. For a certain period, the conductor of the orchestra was herself a professional musician, Anna Mahler, the niece of Gustav Mahler, the composer. She died in Auschwitz. I told Fania that I hope to work on this material. I had the screenplay of Exodus to write first, and I hoped to return to work with her. Oh, another thing that happened then was that I had a reunion with Jules Dassin, with whom I had been in correspondence for a number of years, and he was then new in his relationship with Melina Mercouri, who was later to become his wife. He was then separated from his first wife. At that point, Margaret went home, Margaret and my daughter went home, and I went back to Israel to do some intensive work for Exodus. In Israel, where I had the assistance of some top-level people as a result of Otto Preminger's connections, I found that many of the main sequences in the book of Exodus, in the book written by [Leon] Uris, were phony. For instance, he has a very important section where quite a number of Jews on the island of Cyprus are taken off by the Jewish underground to a boat in a certain harbor. Well, that particular harbor that he spoke of could not take anything but very small boats. And so I learned from Israelis what actually happened in the very incidents that Uris used. After about ten days of this, I had a very long meeting with Preminger, who had come to Israel, in which I told him of my findings, and I told him of my proposal to change sequences in the story so that they would be accurate. And he was in complete accord with my doing this. Either at this time or later, in Mexico, he told me that he wanted to put my name on the screen, and there was some question about whether or not the United Artists executives would agree to this; and if not, he felt that there could be a compromise in not announcing it beforehand but just having my name appear on the screen. Of course I was very pleased about this, because I thought it would mean the ending of the blacklist or the beginning of the end of it, for everyone. I returned to Mexico via an Air France flight, and this flight had a normal refueling stopover in New York for two hours. It was the custom for all passengers who had people they wanted to see in New York to first pass through customs inspection, and then they could freely visit before the flight took off again. But I ran into this book in the customs office, and I was detained for an hour and a half before they let me out. I had my brothers outside waiting, and it was something I was very angry about. This is perhaps a point to mention the kind of thing that can happen and that doesn't get into the newspapers. One of my friends in Mexico, a painter and teacher by the name of Francisco Mora, had gone to Guinea in Africa with another friend for a teachers conference. And I think he had gone by Air Canada and so had avoided the United States; but for some reason or another, on his return flight there had to be a stop at LaGuardia. He was taken off the plane, he and his friend, and put into a large automobile. It was nighttime, and I think it was for about three hours, with another automobile following them, they were driven around the LaGuardia area at very rapid speeds, with the brakes suddenly being put on so that they were thrown forward and sideways, and this went on and on for almost all of the three hours--every attempt being made to get them to lose their heads and perhaps try to jump out of the car, at which point they could be arrested for trying to escape from customs, or do something violent to the driver. At the last they were left for about one half-hour just sitting in a gas station in the LaGuardia area without the drivers there, in the hope that maybe they would make a break for it. And both men were very disciplined and supported each other and did nothing, and finally they were put back on the plane and allowed to go to Mexico. Shortly after my return, I opened a correspondence about this thing that occurred at airports with me with Ben Margolis and questioned him about whether or not there might be some legal action on this. I also wrote to I. F. Stone, who had visited me in Mexico--or had visited Mexico and had come to see me shortly after my return from Paris--and I had forgotten to talk to him about it while he was there. I wrote him asking if it was something that he wanted to discuss in his bulletin. Ben Margolis felt that there would be some real point in a legal suit, and I asked him to go into the costs of it, which he did. I then decided to postpone it until after Exodus was finished because I didn't want anything legal happening that would be in the paper and might interfere with my getting my name on the film. And subsequent to that, I finally decided not to do it because the costs were too high, I felt, for me to undertake. I worked very intensively on the planning and research for Exodus, and then began to write the screenplay. Preminger visited me in mid-September to hear the plot, and I told him the plot from beginning to end, and he was delighted with it and tremendously moved. At several points he asked me to pause because he had to wipe tears from his eyes, and I mention this for a reason that will become clear in a moment.

GARDNER

You'd made substantial changes from the novel though.

MALTZ

Yes. What I did, for instance--the changes were not in the story line--but instead of having a phony escape to a ship in a harbor which couldn't take such a ship, I did what they actually did in Cyprus: they prepared tunnels for a breakout; so I would do that kind of thing. Or there was a breakout in the story from a prison at Acre, and I talked with some men who engineered the breakout in the prison and found that it had been done differently--as a matter of fact, with much more excitement than in the novel, but there was still the breakout. So I did the breakout actually through a Turkish bathhouse, which they used, which was adjacent to the prison. I did it that way. So I didn't change the general line of the novel in any way; I just made the incidents authentic where they had not been. And so I was working along with great intensiveness and great excitement, and around Christmas, when I was finishing the last sequence, I got a phone call from Otto, with no prior preparation, saying, "I'm sorry, but I don't know what kind of a screenplay you're writing. It's a sort of a travelog about Israel, but it isn't what I want. And I may be making a mistake, but I've decided not to use your screenplay and to hire another writer. I'm hiring Dalton Trumbo." This was, of course, an absolute thunderbolt. There was no relationship between what he called a travelog and the plot which had moved him to tears, and it was the same plot. And my subsequent surmise about what may have happened was this. The novel was an immense international best-seller, and it may be that, as Otto got the sequences of my screenplay which I was mailing up to him, he decided that the audience would come into the theater expecting certain actions, like people escaping in a ship, and they wouldn't get that in the film, and that they would be disappointed. He may have been right about that; but the point is, why didn't he know that in advance? Well, perhaps one can't blame him. He didn't know in advance, and he finally recognized it, and he didn't take it up with me by saying, "Look, this is the problem. How about rewriting it even though you know it's phony in the way it was in the book?" If he had done that, I might have decided to do it or I might not have. But it was never something that we came to grips with. So in retrospect, this was a very unfortunate happening for me personally. If, for instance, I had sat down after he hired me and written a script based upon the book without ever having gone to Israel, Exodus would have come out in the way it did, and I would have been on the screen, and it would have changed my whole career. But this is what happened.

GARDNER

When Trumbo did the screenplay, he really did it...?

MALTZ

He did it from the book. Yes, he did it from the book.--which I could have done, too.

GARDNER

Right. [laughter]

MALTZ

In 1960 Margaret and I were planning a return to Europe in May. First we were going to Israel because--oh, I don't know if I mentioned that she wanted to.... Over the months from our leaving Israel, she had decided that she would like to write the story...

GARDNER

You mentioned that last time.

MALTZ

...of kibbutz, yes, Yad Mordechai. And so she set up correspondence and there was agreement. So we were going to Israel to get her set up there, and then I was going to go on to Paris to work with Fania Fenelon getting material for her story. Early in April I got a call from the lawyer of Frank Sinatra, Martin Gang, asking me if I knew a book called The Execution of Private Slovik, by William Bradford Huie. And I didn't know it. He sent the book down to me. I read it at once--oh, he said Sinatra wanted to make this film; he didn't want to act in it, but he wanted to direct it, and he wanted to know whether I was interested in doing the screenplay. I read the book and I was very much interested in doing the screenplay. But there was an important question about it because I did not agree with the author's interpretation of his own material; I couldn't agree with his conclusions, and I didn't know whether Sinatra would agree with mine. So they asked me to come up, and I came up and saw Sinatra for the first time in, oh, I guess, twelve, thirteen years, and we discussed the book. Now, this was the account of the life of a man, [Eddie] Slovik, who was the only American shot for desertion from the army since the Civil War (although there had in fact been thousands upon thousands of deserters in World War I and World War II, but no one had ever been shot for it). Huie's conclusion was that this was an obvious miscarriage of justice that he should have been the only one shot. But I looked at it differently from his own material. It so happened that Slovik's desertion was not one of emotional panic which occurred in the middle of an action. He had come to Europe, and shortly after coming near the battle zone, he had been close to some shelling for a little bit, and he had decided that he was simply not going to serve. And so he did something unusual. He wrote a note to the army authorities saying that he was going to desert, and if they sent him to the front lines, he would desert. When he did this, it was just at the time when there was the Battle of the Bulge, and the position of U.S. troops in that sector was very bad; there was great danger of a German breakthrough. And Slovik's attitude seemed so brazen to the high command at that particular time that they felt they couldn't overlook it. As one general said (it may have been Eisen--no, it wasn't Eisenhower... another one), "If I let Slovik go without a court-martial, I won't be able to look in the face of those poor guys out there who are lying in foxholes in the mud and the cold and getting wounded and killed." And when Slovik was court-martialed, the men who were his judges were not West Pointers, they were civilians in uniform. And on the first ballot they all voted for death, and when they found out what they had done, they were shocked, and they said, "Well, wait a moment, let's think this over and take another ballot." And they talked about it and took another ballot, and they all voted the same way. I believe, I'm not sure, that they took a third ballot. But it was under these circumstances that Slovik was shot. And, for me, the villain in this was not the United States Army, it was war. It was the whole concatenation of circumstances which had brought him to do what he did, and the army to do what it did, and I just felt that I would not indict the army; I would not follow Huie's conclusion. Well, Sinatra agreed with this, and we discussed it further and arrived at complete agreement about how to handle this. He told me that there was a young actor on TV that he thought would be very good in the role. He told me his name: it was [Steve] McQueen. I said I didn't know anything about American TV, but I'd try to catch him in a program, and Sinatra told me which one he was on, and I looked at it and said, oh, yes, I think he would be fine for the role. [laughter] Sinatra told me that he wanted to announce to the public that he had hired me. In the case of Trumbo, Preminger had announced that Trumbo had done the screenplay of Exodus, and it was a fait accompli. But Sinatra didn't want to do that: he wanted to announce it in advance. He said it was very important to him, and he'd thought about it a long time, and that if the American Legion didn't like it, that was too bad, that he had hated the American Legion from the time he was a kid and that they would run into the goddamnedest buzz saw that they ever had seen. Well, I was of course very happy about this. I felt that with Trumbo now announced as having been hired, and that with me hired, the blacklist would be over for everyone. I got a call from Martin Gang asking who my agent was, and even though Ingo Preminger had been my agent on Exodus and I liked Ingo very much, I thought this was an opportunity to bring in another blacklisted person, and I gave as my agent George Willner, who was an old friend but who had never been my agent. Willner had been blacklisted around '51, but now, in the last year, as I knew because of our personal relations, he had been trying to get back as an agent and had been operating in New York. His name was perfectly agreeable to Gang, and an agreement was made for me to write the screenplay for $75,000. I had told Sinatra that I had some work I wanted to do in Europe for several months and would begin the screenplay afterwards, and he said that was perfectly all right with him. At this time, I also took occasion to see David Miller about the script of Silver Nutmeg, and he said that he was busy with other work but that he was uncertain about my script and wanted to think more about it, and we agreed to meet again on it when we each were free. Before I left Los Angeles for New York, I had a call from Martin Gang, asking if I would mind waiting until the New Hampshire primary was over because Sinatra was a known supporter of John Kennedy, who was running for the Democratic candidacy for presidential election, and he was in the New Hampshire primary. And I said, no, I wouldn't mind waiting at all. When I was in New York for a week or so, Kennedy won in New Hampshire and then immediately headed for the West Virginia primary. And I began to wonder whether the announcement would be postponed if he won in West Virginia and then postponed until the convention, and then if he became the candidate, whether it would be postponed until the election. And this troubled me because I wanted to see the blacklist broken. I called Gang and asked him about this, and he said he couldn't answer, and he told me to call Sinatra, who was then in Florida doing some singing and what Sinatra calls saloon dates, which were nightclub performances. I did call him and I said I wondered if he announced it, whether it would interfere with fund raising that he might be doing for Kennedy, and he said, "No, I'm not doing any fund raising for Kennedy. I'm not doing anything special at all. I just support him because I think he's the best man for the job." And I said, "Well, then what about making the announcement of your hiring me?" And he said, "Fine. I'll do it." So I then went off to Europe. And when I was in Tel Aviv and had been in Israel for, I don't know, let's say a week or so... let me see... I forget just how long... about that length of time....

1.54. TAPE NUMBER: XXIV, SIDE TWO
JANUARY 9, 1979

GARDNER

You were in Tel Aviv.

MALTZ

Yes, in Tel Aviv I received a letter from one of my brothers with a package of press clippings announcing that Sinatra had fired me. Now, Sinatra's announcement that he had hired me was made on the twentieth of March and.... Hold up just a second. [tape recorder turned off] The story of his hiring me got a great deal of attention. The New York Times had a featured article which started: "Frank Sinatra has flouted the blacklist tradition of Hollywood by hiring a writer who for political reasons has not been permitted to write movies under his own name," and went on. It was treated as a piece of news by the New York Times, but the Hearst press treated it as though there had been some natural calamity like a volcanic eruption and the death of millions of people. Because they had headlines on their newspapers such as this one in the Hollywood Citizen News: Fuss Over Sinatra's Script Man, and in great big black letters, top of the page. On the twenty-second of March, two days after the announcement, Senator Mundt and others described my being hired as shocking--Mundt in Congress. And John Wayne and Robert Taylor spoke up, and the Hearst press started a national campaign to have me "dumped." On the twenty-fourth, the Maltz controversy was exhumed. On the twenty-fifth, the Catholic War Veterans said they would boycott Private Slovik if I wrote it. And on the twenty-eighth, there was a public advertisement from Frank Sinatra which said, among other things, "I spoke to many screenwriters, but it was not until I talked to Albert Maltz that I found a writer who saw the screenplay in exactly the terms I wanted. This is, the army was right." He then went on further to say, "I would also like to comment on the attacks from certain quarters on Senator John Kennedy by connecting him with my decision on employing a screenwriter. This type of partisan politics is hitting below the belt. I make movies. I do not ask the advice of Senator Kennedy on whom I should hire. Senator Kennedy does not ask me how he should vote in the Senate." And also on the twenty-eighth of March, there was an editorial in the Journal American saying, "Dump Maltz and get yourself a true American writer." On the twenty-ninth....

GARDNER

You were unaware of all this?

MALTZ

I was unaware of all this, but I got the clippings.

GARDNER

Later.

MALTZ

I got the clippings later, yes. I was completely unaware of it. On the twenty-ninth, there was an editorial writer in the German American--[laughter] in the [New York] Journal American, [which] said, in talking about me, "Some of the other members of the Hollywood Ten have recanted. But not so with Comrade Maltz as is evidenced by the following revelations obtained from authoritative sources. Following his release from federal prison April 2, 1951, after serving a sentence for contempt of Congress..." (and so on) "...he went to Mexico City. Maltz was considered the leader of the American Communist group of exiles in Mexico City. Maltz obtained passport number 120028, dated August 8, 1958, ostensibly for a visit to England, France, Holland and Italy. There was litigation over the original refusal of the State Department to grant it. Maltz, without telling the State Department of his intended itinerary, visited the Soviet Union and such iron curtain countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, hobnobbing with Red leaders along the line. Maltz is a member of the Writers Union in Moscow." [laughter] Now, here's a guy who takes the fact that I visited those countries to do this kind of article, makes the assertion about me having been a member of the... about my being a member of the Writers Union of Moscow, and this was the kind of campaign that was put on. And on the fourth of April, Sinatra fired me. There were big headlines in the New York Mirror and on the twelfth, he took another ad explaining, in very unfortunate terms, that the American people had voted that they didn't want me to write this screenplay. Well, of course the American people had not voted any such thing; there merely had been a campaign in the Hearst press, with the support of the American Legion and Catholic War Veterans and so on. And it was just an unfortunate phrasing for which I don't blame him at all. There were publicists and lawyers and so on who were involved. I have never been told what really happened. I know, without any question, that Sinatra was sincere in hiring me, he was sincere in what he wanted to do. I'm sure that he was tremendously upset by the pressure that was put on him, and since he was prepared for attacks on him by the American Legion, I can only assume that something completely unexpected happened which he felt he could not fight. It has been suggested, and even was in the press in a column or two, that John Kennedy's father appealed to him to fire me because this could be used against his son. Now, interestingly enough, there may be some real practical point to it, because Kennedy only beat Nixon by 100,000 votes. It's not inconceivable that 100,000 votes could have been lost by Red-baiting Kennedy with Sinatra and me. And it's only in that area that I can see any possible psychological explanation for Sinatra's behavior. I'm sure that he was very unhappy over it. It was, for me, a second very unfortunate occurrence. It was my second chance to break through and I didn't. Actually, the opposite happened it made me a much hotter potato than I had been before because in this same year, 1960, three other men who were blacklisted broke through--In England three other men broke through by a film made in England: Joe Losey, the director, and the writers Millard Lampell and Ben Barzman. But it was four years more before I was able to sign a contract under my own name.

GARDNER

Have you spoken to Sinatra since?

MALTZ

No, no. I've not seen Sinatra and I've not had any communication from him. Oh, there's a little aftermath that I want to put on record. My agent, George Willner, had not been able to afford an office at that time. He had been given a desk and a telephone in the office of some left-wing attorneys. About a week after I learned of the firing, I got a very fat letter from the attorneys with a whole brief already prepared, and with them urging that I institute a legal suit against Sinatra. Number one, I had no desire whatsoever to sue Sinatra; and number two, I had no desire to get involved in any more legal suits. I'd had enough of those. And so I rejected this, and even though they urged me further, I just absolutely refused. But there was something more to this that I didn't find out until fourteen years later. Sinatra through his attorney, had offered Willner full payment for the script after firing me. But the lawyers went over the head of Willner and rejected it because they wanted to sue, and they expected me to agree to a suit without asking me. By the time Willner heard from me from Israel that I wasn't going to sue, the lawyers had gotten Sinatra's lawyers so furious that it was all Willner could do to get a settlement of half of the money. Now, this was real ambulance chasing on the part of some upright left-wing lawyers. I stayed in Israel until my wife was launched on her project at the kibbutz, and then I went to Paris. I worked with Fania Fenelon for about a month, asking questions and taking notes. And I was projecting a two-volume novel: one about her and the French Resistance, and the second about Auschwitz. And then we went to Poland in order to see Auschwitz. My friend and former agent Max Lieber, now living in Warsaw, went there with us. And we had the complete run of the camps with a guide with us. This is the time in which I want to put something on record that I perhaps will write a book about, but life may not permit me to do it and so I want to state my thesis here in the hope that, if I can't write it, perhaps someone else will. There is a myth that the Jews who died in Auschwitz and other such camps went knowingly but unresistingly to their deaths in the gas chambers. Now, this myth has been considerably sponsored by a psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim, born in Germany, was in a concentration camp for one year before World War II and came out to write a book about it, and because of this particular experience, assumed the mantle of someone who knew all about concentration camps. Well, indeed he knew his own experience; but he didn't know, and has not troubled to find out, what happened in the concentration camps of World War II. It has been said to me, and I'm not sure yet, that this myth was also spread by Hannah Arendt, author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and other works. And I am currently reading more of her work to investigate this. However, for reasons that surely go way beyond Bettelheim, this myth has been accepted in the entire world. Nevertheless, it is a myth, and I began to perceive how fallacious it was in my visit to Auschwitz. For instance, in the summer of 1944, when all the Jews in Hungary that the Nazis could find were shipped to Auschwitz, the trains came in so fast that frequently they were backed up because the people could not be killed, and their bodies disposed of, fast enough. Actually, in that summer the crematoria could not handle the number of people who were killed, and so the Nazis began burning people on wooden pyres, bodies on wooden pyres. When the trains backed up, there would be occasions in which they would be opened and the people inside would be let out. That summer was very hot, and the women's orchestra was allowed out of the building they were in (which was called a block) and was allowed to practice out of doors. Since their block was right close to the electrified twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fence that enclosed their camp, they were close to the railroad tracks. The railroad tracks separated the men's camp from the women's camp, and there was an area, on each side of the tracks, of earth. And the people would come out of the railroad cars, and old men would start to say prayers, children would begin to bounce balls and run around, and people would come over close to the wire and call in, in different languages, and say, "Hey, what's it like inside?" Now, no one who knew he was going to his death would say "What's it like inside?" They found themselves in an area between two barbed-wire fences, and they saw women playing music, women in prisoners' stripes. Now, the women were forbidden to talk to them, and even if they had said anything, what were they going to say? What would be the use of saying, "It's hell in here"? What could the people do about it? To say that to them would be to do no more than to give them anguish. And in fact--oh, by the way, this which I say was not just what was told me by Fania but I knew this from others; for instance, another woman, a Belgian woman now resident in Paris who was in the orchestra also, was Violette Jacquet. Her maiden name had been Silberstein. And she told me the same. Now in fact, the Nazis had carried out a very simple and logical policy of not causing trouble for themselves. They always told people who were going to be deported from their own country that they were sending them east for resettlement; and in one place they said, "You will work on farms"; in another place they said, "You'll work in a cement factory." The train that took Fania from France had in it people who said they had heard five or six different things of what they were going to do. But no one knew that they were going to a camp like Auschwitz. And this policy of the Germans, the fact that this is what people believed, I have learned from an endless number of people that I interviewed. For instance, very recently, because I was discussing this matter with the dean of Tel Aviv University, I asked some friends who were in my home about this. I asked, "Did any one you know, who was deported, ever know what was going to happen to them?" Now, the people I asked were the Czech film director, Jan Kadar, his wife Judith, who was Hungarian by birth and upbringing, and whose mother was in Auschwitz. I asked, in the same evening, Vladimir Pozner, a Frenchman, and his wife, Ida, who was German-born, and I asked the dean of Tel Aviv University, who was in Auschwitz with the author Elie Wiesel, and all of them said "No one knew." They were all told they were going for resettlement and some work or other. Now in fact, if the Nazis had not carried out this policy, then we couldn't have had the kind of situation I described of people coming out of trains and saying, "Hey, what's it like in there?" Furthermore, still to be seen in Auschwitz today are the storehouses of musical instruments, of suitcases, of children's toys, and of other such objects which people brought with them. Now, the Nazis had a desperate need for transportation for warfare; they wouldn't have allowed valuable space to have been taken up in the boxcars by such things as cellos and bass violins if there hadn't been a purpose to it. But if they had not allowed it, it would have meant that they would have had to--If people knew that they were going to their deaths, then from wherever they were taken from--Athens, Budapest, any other place--they would have had to drag each individual person onto the boxcar. The number of troops that would have been needed in order to pile them into the boxcars would have been enormous. This way they just did it with half a dozen troops, saying, get in, you're going for resettlement. Bettelheim also spoke of Jews of "ghetto psychology" who went to their death like sheep. But in Auschwitz, in fact, there were not only Jews: there were 10,000 captured Russian soldiers who went to their death; there were 25,000 gypsies; the first people in Auschwitz were Polish Christians, including priests, who helped set up the camp and put it in shape. And so this kind of sweeping generalization on his part is absolute nonsense. Further support of what I say is in the hard fact of the way in which the Nazis constructed the gas chambers. That is to say, people went down steps into an area.... Oh, first when they came in, first when people came out of the boxcars, a selection was made, the significance of which the people didn't know. Some were told to go to the left and some to the right. The old people, children, people in general who could not perform work satisfactorily, were told that they were going to take showers. They were led to dressing rooms underground. Men and women were separated, and small children went with their mothers. They were given towels and soap and told to undress and to remember the number of the hook on which they put their clothes. Why would they have participated in this farce if they had known what was going to happen? And if they had known, of course, then each one of them would have had to have been dragged, screaming, to their deaths. And finally they were sent into a large tiled room that had what seemed to be shower spigots in the roof; and the moment the doors were slammed shut, cyanide pellets were thrown in from the vents. It was only then that they knew. And if one or two of them with special sensitivity felt that something was wrong as they were being taken into the shower room, what could they have done?

GARDNER

But....

MALTZ

Yes?

GARDNER

Now, what about those who went in the other direction? They must have realized when they never saw...

MALTZ

I want to tell you. For instance, Violette, whom I have mentioned, was sent in one direction and her father and mother in the other. And she was put through processing, and the next morning, when she had her first opportunity, she said to the capo in charge of the block where she had been sent to sleep, "Can I find out what happened to my mother and my father?" And the capo said, "Which way were they sent?" And she said, "They were sent to the right" (or the left, I forget at the moment which direction it was). And the capo said, "Come here," and took her outside and pointed to two huge smokestacks which were belching black smoke. And she said, "You see those smokestacks? There's your mother and there's your father." And that's how Violette found out about the crematoria and the gas chambers. This was exactly representative of the way other people found out.

GARDNER

So those who were already in the camps, then, did know?

MALTZ

Those people who were in the camps knew, yes, and there were tens of thousands of them who did go docilely to their death, knowing; but who were they, and why did they go that way? Well, as I said, they were not necessarily Jews of ghetto psychology. Several hundred thousand inmates of Auschwitz in its three years who died were not Jews. In addition to those that I have mentioned, there were non-Jewish political prisoners, many of them Communists from Poland, France, Greece, Holland, Yugoslavia. Now, these prisoners, first of all, were unarmed--take them from the moment they came in--they were unarmed, they were confined within electrified barbed-wire fences twelve feet high, they were constantly under the gaze of guards in watchtowers who had heavy machine guns. At night, searchlights played on the whole camp. They were no more able to revolt than did American prisoners of war in Germany, or German prisoners of war in England or the United States. There were incidents of individual attacks on SS guards, but that was not a general revolt. Now, with few exceptions, in the course of a few weeks or months, these prisoners were turned into dying creatures by malnutrition, harsh overwork, and physical abuse. For instance, at times of the counting of the prisoners, they might be kept two, four, six, eight, ten hours on their knees in all sorts of weather while being counted. What did that do to the human body and spirit? They suffered constant psychological shock. Let me give one example. The morning after Fania was in her block, a woman, ill with dysentery, soiled the floor, unable to contain herself. The capo, a woman--actually, a German criminal left in charge of the prisoners--came over with a club and beat her to death. Now, when you have come from a different world and this is just a "trivial" incident that you see, the psychological shock of that is incredible--as it is to go to the latrine once a day and be beaten on the head and shoulders with a club by someone who yells, "Quicker, quicker." In Auschwitz so many varied ailments afflicted prisoners that doctors there had never seen examples of them before, in addition to more familiar ones like typhus and dysentery. So what happened is that people became apathetic, human beings weighing 90 to 100 pounds. And when they were herded from the hospitals or from barracks into trucks, and knew they were going to the gas chambers, they were no longer capable of any kind of resistance. I will finish off by saying that I am trying to get someone to write this book because I don't particularly want to write it, but I feel that it should be done because this myth is so unfortunate and pernicious. And for anyone who wants to undertake it, the dean of Tel Aviv University would be able to furnish, for modest funds, Ph.D. students who would go and interview former inmates of concentration camps or of Auschwitz from different countries and from different parts of different countries, and provide actual evidence by name that could be kept on record of what I've said just in terms of analysis. Fania Fenelon and I returned to Paris, and I continued my work with her until the end of August. I returned sooner than I wanted to Mexico because of family problems. I began reading and sending questions to her. I don't think I've mentioned that when I first met her she had a large lump on one leg which she had neglected to go to a physician about. And so when I was in Paris, it had already been operated upon, and it was a melanoma cancer. After I returned to Mexico, I received word in the fall that the cancer had moved up to her groin and that she needed another operation, and I went over to Paris. But after I got there, the operation was postponed and we worked together for another month. And then I came back to Mexico again. (I might mention that in these flights I went either by Air Canada to avoid U.S. immigration, in one case on a flight via Portugal with a layover in Lisbon. But on one return flight, I couldn't avoid a Miami transit stop, and so I had to go through customs there and, once again I was detained, and the plane was held up for a half an hour until they got word from the FBI in Washington.) I continued work on the novel about Fania's experiences for the balance of '60 and the first half of '61. My tentative title at that time was The Orchestra. The winter issue of the Southwest Review, a literary quarterly issued by a university in Texas [Southern Methodist University], announced the winner of the second annual John McGinnis Memorial Award for the best work of fiction appearing in the Southwest Review during 1960 and 1961. The winner was Julian Silva, of Mexico City, for his story "With Laughter." There was a prize of $200, and Julian Silva was one of my pen names. This story had appeared in 1961. During the early months of '61, while I was continuing to work on The Orchestra, I met another woman who had been in Auschwitz. Her name was Dounia Wasserstrom. She had been born in Russia, had lived her adolescence in Poland, had migrated to France and there married an airplane manufacturer. She spoke Russian, Polish, French, and German, and our way of communicating was in Spanish. In Auschwitz, because of her ability at languages, she was a secretary to a gestapo officer. Fania Fenelon and a great many other of the prisoners who survived until the end of 1944, when the Russians were approaching Auschwitz, had been transferred by train to another concentration camp in Germany, Bergen Belsen. But Dounia had remained until the very end and she, with about, I think, 40,000 other prisoners, both men and women, had been in a march that left in a snowstorm from Auschwitz and walked toward Germany. Dounia had bad footwear and her feet became swollen. When the time came in which they got the first rest after about eight hours of marching, she and a friend of hers who walked by her side, a Dutchwoman, were put into a barn the floor of which was covered by hay. Dounia knew that she couldn't go on, and anyone who couldn't continue to march was shot by the Nazis. She saw by the way in which the building was constructed that there was probably a depth of hay beneath where they were sitting, and she said that she wanted to try and escape by burrowing into the hay. Her friend decided to do it with her, and they found that they could go down deep into the hay, and air still came down, and they did that. When the Nazis roused the prisoners to go on, they remained and were not found although the Nazis poked bayonets into the hay to see if anyone had done that. In fact, they slept then for about twenty-four hours. They awakened to hear a men's group resting in there and then saw a man burrowing down toward them, and they waited in silence. When the men's group had departed, they discovered that four men had done the same thing as they, and now all the prisoners had passed and they had escaped. And she told me what happened to them after that, and I felt that it would make a very good short novel. I continued to work on The Orchestra, but in the summer I spent five weeks in Los Angeles seeking work, film work, but I found I was untouchable. Others were now starting to work. Ned Young had gotten work, so had Michael Wilson, under their own names. I spoke to Ingo Preminger and told him the story of Dounia and her friends, and asked if he thought it might sell to films. He said that he felt very confident it could sell if I would write it up as a novel, and I thought that this might be an excellent solution to my financial problem. The Orchestra was going to require several more years of work and I was beginning to need funds, and I thought if I could write this in a short space of time and sell it to films, it would finance the writing of The Orchestra. I wrote of my decision to Fania, and she was very furious about this because she wanted her book to come out, for which I can't blame her. I completed the Dounia story, which I called A Tale of One January, by June '62, and my agent in New York sent it out to publishers, and Ingo submitted it to film studios. It found no publisher and no film studio wanted it. Let me pause for a moment. [tape recorder turned off] Before I left Mexico in the summer of '62 I agreed to write a screenplay as a kind of matter of friendship with Gabriel Figueroa. This was to be a film made on Traven's book Bridge in the Jungle, which at least a dozen people, starting with John Huston, had taken an option on over the years but had never been able to crack as a story. And I felt I knew how to do it, and, because Figueroa asked me to and I was appreciative of what he had done for me, which I've already mentioned, I said I would do it provided he would leave the date of my completing it open in case I got some paying work in Hollywood. And that was agreed to. While I was up in Hollywood, Margaret went to Israel with the manuscript of her book because she wanted it checked by the people in the kibbutz before she submitted it for publication. I'll mention in passing that the book, called The Hand of Mordechai, which was published in... I don't think it was published in the United States, it was published in England and was a best-seller in Israel... and is, I think, a very fine book. It has some of the most vivid battle scenes I've ever read in a book, even though, when Margaret started it, she wondered how she could possibly write about battles since she hadn't experienced it. But by taking down very careful notes of what the people had to say, the scenes came out magnificently. In Hollywood I discussed some revisions of Silver Nutmeg with Miller, but that work was interrupted a month later when Margaret returned from Israel. Although I've given no preliminaries to this, at that time our marriage broke up, and she went back to Mexico. My work was interrupted for some months after that, but I resumed work in October. By the end of January, '63, it became clear that the revision of Nutmeg was becoming a second screenplay, and I wanted some more remuneration for that, modest as the first payment had been. Miller and his attorney refused, and so I went on strike and stopped work. At the end of April I got a lucky job through the Paul Kohner Agency and went to Italy for five weeks to give my opinion of four films that an Italian producer, [Franco] Cristaldi, intended to make in English. He had a very distinguished record; among his films were Love Italian Style [*Divorce Italian Style] and The Organizer. And the man who wanted me there was someone who was going to go into partnership with him on the four films, an Italian film distributor by the name of [Robert] Haggiag. I said that I felt none of them would be successful, and Haggiag pulled out of the whole deal because of my judgment, and it turned out they weren't successful. I wish I had been as accurate as that at other times of my life. A little after my return from Italy I went to Mexico to work out the terms of a divorce with Margaret. The division of community property and the need to pay alimony left me with an absolute need to earn money. I couldn't return to work on The Orchestra as I had hoped. If not for the blacklist, which was still affecting me, I might have gotten a good advance on it from a publisher as other authors do, but I was not in a position to get that. During that period I wrote the script of Bridge in the Jungle. And by August I had a new agreement on Nutmeg with David Miller consisting primarily of future promises and very little money in hand, and I finished it on the first days of January. It turned out that all of my work and two long screenplays went for nothing because Miller went blank on the project and said that he just didn't know, he couldn't offer any judgment on the screenplay whatsoever. And after about a year United Artists dropped the option. This is a very good example--I've gone into this at this length because it's a very good example of what could and did happen under the blacklist. It never would have happened to me, of course, if I hadn't been blacklisted. In January '64 I signed a film contract under my own name for the first time since Naked City in 1946. It was not the sort of material I would have chosen, but I felt I could write a sound screenplay. Most important, I felt that now I was at last on my way to reestablishing the position I once had in which I could do screenplays, save money, and return to fiction. I was very keenly aware of the fact that I was now fifty-five years old and that for the past fifteen years I had been excluded under my own name from the American marketplace--magazines, book publication, movies, and TV. And this was the opportunity that I had hoped would come. I needed it because I had no reason now, anymore than earlier, to count on my earning a living from my fiction. Furthermore, in another ten years I would be sixty-five, and in fifteen, seventy. Ever since the time in the thirties that the Theatre Union had given the Civic Repertory Theatre for a benefit for the great cartoonist Art Young, I had had a horror of living an impecunious old age. I didn't want any benefits given for me. So there was a need I had now to earn and harbor some financial resources for the years ahead. I could no longer take the attitude that if I could save a few thousand dollars, I could turn to write a novel because the future lay so far ahead. However, for various reasons, my hopes were not fulfilled. I did get some film work, and I earned and accumulated some needed money, but I didn't get the film credits that would have made me a writer in demand. I didn't, in the main, get offers of good material from major studios. Most of the offers came from independents who had bad material and were looking for some writer who might, by the magic of his talent, turn it into something good. I turned down about thirty projects in ten years.

1.55. TAPE NUMBER: XXV, SIDE ONE
JANUARY 9, 1979

MALTZ

However, I did get one producer-writer offer from Universal which would have paid me very well, but I turned it down because I simply did not want to set my path into one of being just a filmmaker. And if I had accepted the offer, it would have involved a commitment on my part to write and produce films and continue doing that. That's what would have been expected of me. I've reckoned up two periods of my writing life, and the comparison is very telling. In the first period I had five screenplays and two short screenplays produced. These were periods of more or less the same period of time. The forties and, let's say, from about--no, from.. this is a period from '32 to '50, and from '62 to '78. In the first period I had five screenplays and two short screenplays produced; in the second period I wrote twelve screenplays, but only one was produced and two are now pending, with no certainty about them. With more than twice as much time having gone to film, it reduced time for my other work. So in the first period, I had three novels published, in the second, one published and one unpublished; in the first period, three full-length and three short plays produced, and in the second, one unproduced; and in each period, one volume of stories. Now, there are varied reasons for this marked difference in the two periods, but I'm not going to go over them. The key question is whether it demonstrates a diminution of my powers as a writer, and I'm confident it doesn't. And I think there's objective evidence to support my feeling, although I won't go into that either. The question is a key one for me because I'm now entering a period in which I'm going to write only fiction, and I'm going to begin with short stories; whether or not I follow with some novels will depend upon unknown factors in the future. I've covered the fifteen years from 1964 until now so far as my work is concerned, and now I want to go over other matters. I married for the second time in 1964. My wife, Rosemary [Wylde], died in 1968. A year and a half later I married my present wife, Esther [Engelberg]. In the year 1966, I received a most poignant letter from two Greeks living in the port city of Piraeus... no, it was in 1965. As I recall, it was addressed to me in Mexico, and I really don't know how it reached me but it did. They told me that they had just been released after eighteen years in a concentration camp. I could guess at once that they must have been members of the Communist party, and of the Greek forces that had been fighting the government at that time and that had been crushed by English troops. They said that their concentration camp had been on an island and that for most of that time they had had no newspapers and no books; but that in the several years before they were released, they had been allowed books and papers, and that an English friend had sent them some books, among which was my novel The Cross and the Arrow. They had read it, and they had made a Greek translation of it, and all 500 prisoners on the island had read it. And now they were asking me for the right to try and get a Greek publisher. Well, I was of course overwhelmed by this tale and wrote them that of course they could have the rights to it. Then they wrote back after a bit and said they had found out that it might help publication if I would reduce the royalty rate I asked for, and I said they could make the royalty rate anything they wished. And we had something of a continued correspondence. I sent a New Year's card to them at the turn of 1966, and I didn't get one back from them. And in the last days of May, I went to New York with a producer, Malcolm Stuart, to see Jules Dassin, who was there at the time because he had directed his wife in a musical theater version of Never on Sunday. Malcolm Stuart hoped to make a film out of my novel A Long Day in a Short Life, and he had called Dassin to tell him about it and ask him if he wanted to direct it. Dassin was interested, and so we had gone there to talk with him. He and Melina Mercouri were in a state of high tension because, just a few days before we came, she had had an interview on TV about the political situation in Greece, where some colonels had taken power in a coup d'etat, a military coup d'etat, and she had suddenly burst into tears and said that they were fascists and that people should not go as tourists to Greece and Greece should be boycotted and so on. At that time, due to death threats that she had received, they were having to be guarded by both the police and the FBI. And I knew then why my two correspondents in Piraeus had not answered my New Year's card. They either had known what was coming and had gone underground, or they had been rearrested after their few years of liberty and were once again in prison. I've never heard from them since. Their names are Damigos Nikos and Dimitrios Kanelopoulos. And my New Year's letter to them finally came back, and on it was "address unknown." After my return from Mexico in 1962, I took up residence in the United States and only went back to Mexico on business or some visits. My public appearances in these past eighteen years have been only very occasional, by deliberation. A number of times at the Unitarian church, once in San Francisco on behalf of Morton Sobell before he was released, and a speech in defense of Angela Davis when she was on trial, and a few other occasions such as an annual meeting of the Civil Liberties Union in 1974. I rejected all other invitations because I did not want to get involved in that type of public activity again as a general rule, and I wanted maximum time for writing. Actually, despite the negative results in those eighteen years, I spent much more time writing than I did in the first period. Of course, not too long after I came up to reside in the States again, the Vietnam War occurred. I was vehemently opposed to it from the beginning, and I considered the alleged Tonkin Gulf attack on U.S. ships to be a transparent phony. But again, I deliberately refrained from public speaking or activity in any of the committees and, in this case, because I didn't want to give reactionaries a chance to Red-bait the committees on my account. I gave money, and I would go to large demonstrations where I would be one more person on the scene, but that was all.

GARDNER

Were you at Century Plaza?

MALTZ

No, that was the one thing I was not at. I had some urgent, I think it was a medical thing. It was the only one of those things that I missed. I was up in San Francisco, and a lot of the demonstrations downtown and so on, but I was not at Century Plaza. And that was dreadful, I know. From 1956 on, that is to say, from the time of the Khrushchev report....

GARDNER

Your tape ended.

MALTZ

Oh, thank you. [tape recorder turned off] From the time of the Khrushchev report in 1956, my attitude toward all the socialist countries was affected by what I knew had gone on during the Stalin era. I now considered all of them to have seriously deficient political systems. Now, this didn't, on my part, mean an embrace of capitalism, which I considered seriously deficient for other reasons; but it did mean that I no longer found acceptable any explanation or justification for those states in which dissent was discouraged or made a crime. There were specific developments in the post-Khrushchev era in the Soviet Union that aroused my indignation because they indicated a retrogression to Stalinist oppression. First was the arrest and trial of two writers in February '66 They were Yuri Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky for publishing works abroad which were critical of the Soviet Union and for which they used pen names. Well, this was as though I should be arrested for publishing in England, under a pen name, an article critical of the United States involvement in Vietnam. The charge against them was anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. A loose movement of Soviet dissidents came to life in support of the two writers, and in January '67 there were two demonstrations in Moscow on their behalf. This led to the arrests and imprisonment of four of the demonstrators. They were charged with participating in group activities that grossly violated public order. This didn't stop protests which, to the contrary, increased, and since then a kind of guerilla warfare has gone on with the government, the secret police, and the courts against the dissenters. I won't attempt to describe these events further, but I do need to comment on two cases: that of General Piotr Grigorenko and of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I followed the newspaper and magazine accounts closely, and I became a subscriber to the magazine called A Chronicle of Current Events, which was an underground publication in the Soviet Union by the dissidents and was translated into English in London. The case of Solzhenitsyn is well known, of course. I read his work and admired it without--admired most of it, let's say--without considering him the Tolstoy that some Western propagandists have claimed him to be. (Incidentally, I think that the book published as 1914 is the most serious failure of any serious novelist I've ever read. The book is inexplicable to me, it's so badly put together. But on the other hand, I thought Cancer Ward was a very fine novel.) I was extremely indignant about what was happening to his work because after Khrushchev's downfall his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich began to be removed from libraries and was no longer in print, and no new books of his could be published. He was dismissed from the Writers Union, which meant permanent blacklisting, and he was persecuted in other ways. The policy that made me more indignant than any other was the incarceration of a certain number of the dissidents in psychiatric institutions. The Soviet logic on this score was simple: any Soviet citizen who was critical of the regime was giving proof that he was mentally ill. Because who other than a mentally unbalanced person would be against the regime? Major General Grigorenko was a professor of cybernetics in the Frunze Military Academy, which was the equivalent of our West Point. He was a decorated hero of World War II who had been severely wounded several times. He was the author of many articles on military tactics. And he began open criticism of the government in 1962, saying that de-Stalinization had not gone far enough. He was reproved and told to be silent. He continued to criticize. He was dismissed from his post, stripped of his rank and pension, and expelled from the party. And he worked as a loader, which is hard physical labor, in order to earn a living, in spite of his age and his disabilities (he had problems with his legs). And then on February 1, 1964, he was arrested and charged with anti-Soviet activity. But his case was not investigated or brought to trial because he was sent to the Serbsky Institute, which was the main forensic psychiatric institute in the Soviet Union, and there he was found to be "mentally disturbed." On the basis of this finding, he was sent to a Leningrad psychiatric hospital--no, he was sent to a Leningrad psychiatric prison for compulsory treatment. Incidentally, a mentally unbalanced person cannot be tried in the Soviet Union so in this way he was not allowed to defend himself against the charge that he was either anti-Soviet or mentally unbalanced. From 1964 until he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1978, and then stripped of his citizenship so that he couldn't return, Grigorenko spent as much time in psychiatric hospitals as outside of them; and whenever he was out, he returned to be an active dissident. His case, and many like his, formed the basis of my unpublished novel, The Eyewitness Report. In the case of Solzhenitsyn I did something that had an unexpected and surprising result. In December '72 I read an interview with him in A Chronicle of Current Events, The interviewers were the Moscow correspondents of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and their interviews appeared in their newspapers on April 3. But I didn't read them at that time; as I say, I didn't read them until December '72. Now, in the interview Solzhenitsyn stated that he was having a desperate time financially because he was not allowed to earn anything at that time. He said that he had lived six years very frugally on the royalties from Ivan Denisovich, and then he had lived three years more on a bequest from a writer of children's stories who had died. He could not get any of the royalties that had accrued to him in the West, and the Nobel Prize money had not come to him; and if any of it did, most of it would be taken by the state in taxes. In addition, he described "the contaminated zone that has been created around my family, and to this date there are people dismissed from their jobs for having visited my house a few years ago.... There even have been cases when my name was used as a litmus paper to check the loyalty of applicants for graduate studentships or some privileged position. They are asked, 'Have you read Solzhenitsyn? What do you think of him?' and the fate of the applicant could depend upon the reply." And I thought, my God, in my one-act play "The Morrison Case," I had the shipyard worker asked by the loyalty board, "Have you read any of the books of Howard Fast?" I decided to write a letter to the New York Times about this... well, more than just about it--I'll explain: I decided to write a letter in which I would offer Solzhenitsy my uncollected royalties for books published in the Soviet Union. Now, although I couldn't have great hope that the Soviet authorities would permit this, nevertheless the fact that they had allowed him to receive a bequest in a will made me think that there was some possibility that they might permit this. I knew that if I merely wrote the letter in private to the Soviet authorities nothing would happen, and therefore I hoped that it would be published in the Times. I also had a basis for calculating roughly what my royalties might be since, as I stated earlier, I received 17,000 rubles for 100,000 copies of The Cross and the Arrow. Now, after leaving the Soviet Union, I had received a letter in, I think, 1962 stating that over 2 million copies of my books had been published in the Soviet Union. If I then calculated at the same rate of 17,000 rubles for 100,000 copies, it was easy to arrive at what I would be owed, and that even excluded what copies might have been printed between '62 and '72. I didn't count that. I also subtracted from the total the $700 that I had received way back around 1937 and the $10,000 that I had received around 1955. I then did another thing. There had been a change in the ruble so that what was formerly 1,000--or what was formerly 17,000 would have become 1,700. And I made that conversion as well and ended up with a figure of about 34,000 current rubles that I felt could be paid to me if I got all of my royalties, and it was this that I offered Solzhenitsyn. When I sent the letter off to the New York Times, my attitude was one of hoping that they would print it, because about a year before, I had written another letter which I had sent to them, and they had not printed it. On that occasion my letter had been an open one to Kosygin and Brezhnev protesting the cancellation of a U.S. tour by [Mstislav] Rostropovich. I had tickets for the concert at UCLA, and I said that, as a musicgoer, I didn't think that his tour should have been cancelled, and it was cancelled because he had allowed Solzhenitsyn to live in a small cottage in the country where he had his own country house. To my astonishment, the New York Times didn't print my letter as a letter but made a four-column feature story out of it, with photographs. I'm going to give you copies of that material because I think it's relevant to this. And as I found out, it became a story that went around the world. I was called by Time, Newsweek, BBC, and it was broadcast by Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and Voice of Liberty. A friend teaching in Japan wrote me about it, and I heard from friends in France, Israel, and other countries. I have been told before that I have no sense of publicity, and this was an apparent example of it because it never occurred to me that it was that newsworthy; but in the eyes of the Times and other people, apparently, one of the Hollywood Ten doing that was something unusual. In Moscow at that time there was a winter arts festival which was being opened by the minister of culture, a Madame Furtseva. She was told of my offer by Western reporters, and said that she didn't know anything about it and that there was no precedent for it. But she then went on to say, "Our fellow countryman, Solzhenitsyn, doesn't live badly. He has received the Nobel Prize and bought more than one car for himself, and, honestly speaking, he isn't in need of charity, believe me." Well, this was contrary to what Solzhenitsyn had said, and what he said in response to this was that he didn't have a car (apparently he had had one briefly and had had to sell it to live on it), but when Furtseva said the word honestly, what she was doing at that time was building a country house for herself by appropriating state funds. And this was brought to light, and she was dismissed from her post as minister of culture. At that time Robert Penn Warren and Bernard Malamud stated that they also would offer their royalties to Solzhenitsyn, and, as a result, I know that a book of Robert Penn Warren's was canceled--a book that was supposed to be published in the Soviet Union was canceled. At that time there also was cancellation of a book of mine that was going to be published in the German Democratic Republic.

GARDNER

Which one?

MALTZ

They were going to issue a new volume of short stories. But now they've again started to print me in the German Democratic Republic, but not in the Soviet Union; in the Soviet Union I'm finished.

GARDNER

That must be a rare double: to be blacklisted in both the United States and in the Soviet Union. I wonder.... [laughter]

MALTZ

Yes, it didn't occur to me. [laughter] Yes. Yes, I suppose so. No, there may have been other instances. Well, yes, there were because Howard Fast, really, was in a situation of just about both. You know, he was really in that situation after he left.... Now, this whole business about Solzhenitsyn came as I was at work on my novel The Eyewitness Report, and I want to give just a little more background for that. In 1968 two events, two political events, happened that had great moment. One, of course, was the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the attempt of the Czech people, led by the Czech Communist party, to have communism with a human face, and this was smashed in the summer by Russian troops who came in and put in a Stalinist regime. I was tremendously indignant about that and was very aware of something that happened in Moscow. Eight persons gathered on Red Square around an ancient monument and sat down with small banners, protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Within minutes secret police were running from all sides of Red Square, and they proceeded to beat some of them and tried to arouse crowd hatred for them, and they hustled them into cabs and took them away. All of them received one degree of punishment or another. One of them, Litvinov, a scientist who was the grandson of the great Russian diplomat [Maxim Maximovich Litvinov], was sent into Siberian exile for three years. And several of them were put into psychiatric institutions. I used this event as the opening scene of my novel. And so I combined the events of Czechoslovakia as the initial platform for this drama of someone put into a psychiatric institution. The second event of that year, which affected me enormously, was the outbreak of official anti-Semitism in Poland. This came about because there was a struggle for power between the head of the secret police, and the secretary of the Polish Communist party and head of the government, [Wladyslaw] Gomulka. (By the way, I got my information for this not only from reading but from a Polish friend who came here on a brief visit and who told me exactly what had happened.) The secret-police chief had used data he had been gathering for a long time as part of an anti-Semitic campaign to blame Gomulka in connection with certain student riots which occurred in Poland. It so happens that many of the older Communist leaders in Poland who had been members of the Communist party before World War II were married to Jewish women, because there had been Jewish women in that prewar party and there had been few, apparently, women who were not Jewish, and so they had married. Gomulka, in order to fight this, and in order to blame Jews for the riots, proceeded to order the dismissal of all Jews from posts in Poland. My friend told me of a general... no, I forget whether he was a general or a colonel... who had been in East Germany on some mission important to the Polish government and who had accomplished it successfully and returned. He was given a decoration with one hand and dismissed from the army with the other, and was now on a small pension. My publisher, whom I spoke about earlier, was also dismissed from his post and was on a small pension. Scientists and university educators and professors were out. They were not persecuted in any other way, they were not sent to prison; but they were dismissed, and they were allowed to leave the country provided they said that they were going to Israel. That was the only way in which they would be let out. Well, along with others, I joined in public protest at this, and I thought it very revelatory that the Soviet Union, which considered that it had to interfere in the internal affairs of Czechoslovakia, did not consider that this policy of governmental anti-Semitism was anything to be concerned about in Poland. And I'd say that we stop at this point.

GARDNER

Okay.

1.56. TAPE NUMBER: XXV, SIDE TWO
JANUARY 26, 1979 [video session]

GARDNER

Now, if you'd like to pick up where we left off....

MALTZ

Yes, I would. I'll start with a couple of things that go back. One comment on the American Communist party: from the very first that I knew anything about it, it denounced all forms of racism and applied itself to this in many different ways--in all of its educational work, in the way it handled demonstrations, in the fact that peoples of all ethnic backgrounds were part of the organization and so on. And it's a sign of the corruption of that party that when in 1968 there was an eruption of official anti-Semitism in Poland, it was absolutely silent about it. And it has remained silent about the clear manifestations of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union today. Just that point. Now, also a minor correction about my film work. I said last time, I think, that I had had only one screenplay produced of those I wrote in the period between '64 and '78. Actually, three were produced, but I don't count two because of what happened to them. The one I mentioned as having been produced was Two Mules for Sister Sara, which was written to be a comedy with some drama in it; but the director, Don Siegel, turned it into a melodrama with some comedy in it because he didn't know how to handle comedy. The second was Beguiled, with Clint Eastwood in it, and that was produced but I removed my name from it because they rewrote my screenplay and turned it into a piece of trash. And the third, from which I unfortunately didn't remove my name, was an equal piece of trash called Scalawag with Kirk Douglas, but I understood that it was going to be a children's film and it turned out not to be anything--not a children's film, not an adult's film--with what was done to it, and so that's the third film.

GARDNER

Two Mules for Sister Sara--will you be coming back to that later?

MALTZ

No, no.

GARDNER

That got very good reviews at the time that it came out.

MALTZ

You know, I don't really remember. I think the reviews called it, let's say, an effective entertainment. That's all it was, a passing entertainment. But it could have been very delightful if it had been played with a deft comedy touch, which was what I'd intended, and in certain places with farcical touches. But Siegel would take a scene designed to be funny, and he'd turn it into a piece of drama--a melodrama, rather, because he doesn't know how to direct with humor. And I say this with great deliberation since there's a bit of a cult around him, which he doesn't deserve. I want to make one note which is a kind of a necessary footnote on my novel A Tale of One January, which was not published in the United States but published in England and other countries. There is a story told by a character in that novel which is identical with a story told by a character in The Deputy by Hochhuth, and the reason for it is this. I got the story of A Tale of One January from a woman Dounia Wasserstrom, who had been in Auschwitz and had been the secretary to a gestapo officer. She told me this terrifying story. One day a group of about, I think, eighteen or twenty-odd Jewish children, who had been hidden by Christian Polish families and had been discovered, were brought into Auschwitz. This was the men's camp, not Birkenau, where the gas ovens were. One of the children had a large apple--he was playing with it, he was rolling it and running after it. Dounia's boss came out of the building and stood looking at the children. And then he walked over to this child with the apple, and he picked him... swung him up by grabbing his ankles, and bashed his head against a wall. Then he picked up the apple and put it in his pocket. Later in the day, his wife and his small child came to visit him, and he took the child on his lap and fondled it, and then reached into his desk drawer and took out the apple and gave it to his child. Now, after she had told me this story and while I was writing it, she was called to testify in a trial of this gestapo agent and others who had been caught in Frankfurt, I think, in West Germany. She went there and testified and told this story about that man. And Hochhuth used it in The Deputy, which was produced before my novel was published in England. I had to write this explanation to my publisher who said, "How come that's the identical story?" So I just wanted to make that little note. Now, in view of what I did with Solzhenitsyn, I want to make a comment about his political thinking as he has revealed it since being expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1974. In an interview that he gave the French paper Le Monde on May 31, 1975, he was very critical of the United States for ending the war in Vietnam. Because we did, he said, we were condemning millions there to concentration camps. He said nothing about the Vietnamese whom we were killing... oh, I had a note on the back that I've lost.. that we were killing, or the land we were rendering useless for a hundred years by chemical defoliation, or what the continuation of the war was doing to American servicemen and American society. It was clear that he had only one social and political goal and that it dominated his thinking: at whatever cost, all Communist regimes had to be defeated and destroyed. Now, this theme that all Communist regimes were evil incarnate and the enemy of humankind was developed by him further in two speeches he made to the AFL-CIO on June 30, '75, in Washington, and a week later, in New York. I taped the first one. Among other things, he stated the following: one, the United States should not have recognized the Soviet Union in 1933; two, that the United States should not have aided the Russians in World War II (the significance of this was hair-raising because it was preferable to have had Hitler take over the Soviet Union rather than have a continuation of the Communist regime); three, the United States, France and Britain won World War II (he made no mention of the Russian role in that war, and this incredible omission is a revealing indication, to me, of his frenzy on the subject); four, the United States should now stop trade with the Soviet Union, and there should not be détente. The West should make no treaties with the Soviet Union. His thesis that the Soviet economy depends totally on United States trade and loans is as false to the facts as his assertion that World War II was won by the United States, France, and Britain. He ignores the fact that from 1947 until the mid-sixties, and yet the Soviet Union grew stronger year by year.... (I want to get a cushion. And... my back... it's that couch; that isn't my favorite seat.) On May 24, '76, he gave a TV interview in Spain, when Franco was still head of the government, in which he told the Spanish people that they enjoyed absolute freedom, and he declared that the Falangist victory in the Spanish civil war had been a victory for the concept of Christianity. In June he made another speech during which he attacked workers who went out on strike. Now, it's clear then that Solzhenitsyn is a kind of Russian Foster Dulles. He's a clerical reactionary who is willing to link arms with anyone, including fascists, so long as they oppose the Soviet regime. I didn't know this about him when I offered him my support in '72. If I had known that he was willing, in retrospect... no, if I had known that he was willing to make common cause with Hitler, I would not have lent him my support. However, I didn't know it, and I don't in the least regret what I did because in the events from '64 to '74, the Soviet government was wrong and he was right. Now, on to another point. One of the changes in the cultural scene in the passage of the years between, say, the thirties to the seventies, which was for the worse in our country, is that in the thirties it was possible to raise the curtain on a play with an investment of, say, $25,000. And nowadays, the same play would require $250,000. This has resulted in limiting what playwrights can do in the theater. Producers ask for one-set plays with four characters. And I know, for instance, that when I wrote my play Monsieur Victor about Victor Hugo and I started around 1956, it was possible to do what I did--have several sets and a large cast of characters. Now there's practically no chance whatsoever for a play of that size. And when you think of the literature of the theater, this is enormously limiting. Similarly, when I first started writing short stories, there were quite a number of magazines that published and paid for adult short stories.... To say serious stories would exclude, let's say, amusing short stories and I don't mean to do that. Now that number has shrunk by about 70 percent. And that again begins to close off a whole area of writing which is the field of the short story. Now, in 1971, for instance, I published a volume of collected stories, Afternoon in the Jungle, and I got some very good reviews in Look and the L.A. Times and several other places, but it wasn't 10 percent of the reviews I had gotten with my first book of short stories in 1938. There are now fewer newspapers that review books at all, many fewer short stories are published, and many fewer are read; and yet the short story has often been the ground where a writer first begins to find his footing. One of the things that happened, beginning around 1965 and continuing on to today, was that the years of the blacklist and of the Hollywood Ten were revisited. Starting around 1968, there was an article in the L.A. Times magazine, the Sunday magazine, and since then there's been a steady increase of interest in the Hollywood Ten. There were other articles, including a long one in the New York Times Magazine by Victor Navasky, the present editor of the Nation. And there were many requests for interviews by people writing books on the era and requests from students doing Ph.D. and master's theses. In '73 I was invited to speak at Stanford, and I am fairly sure I wouldn't have been able to get a drink of water on the campus ten years earlier. But now I was introduced with some fanfare, and the same thing happened at a conference staged by UC Berkeley in '75. In fact, in the film industry it started to become chic to have been blacklisted. For instance, a radio, TV, and film writer, Mac Benoff, who had been a cooperative witness before the committee, and incidentally had been disowned by his own father, evidently had had several years of unemployment at a certain period. And in the seventies he proudly claimed that he had been blacklisted. I laughed when I saw that in print, but I became furious when my onetime close friend Michael Blankfort had the gall to lie in the same way this past year. There was an article about him in the L.A. Times Book Review on June 25, '78. The author, Jay Martin, made use of biographical data that he could only have gotten from Blankfort. The portrait he presented to his readers was of a man of integrity who, testifying before the House Committee, had affirmed with pride his many activities devoted to social change and who was blacklisted for a time. I wrote a letter to the Times that was published on July 16 in which I pointed out that Blankfort had a writing credit for a film produced each year from 1950 through 1956--the worst of the McCarthy years; but no blacklisted writer got credit in those years. In actual fact, when Blankfort completed his testimony, during which he had repudiated a good many of the social causes he once supported, the chairman applauded him for helping the committee. Hypocrisy and roguery fit together very well. Now on to another point which is very important to me and which is not over, really. There was, for me and for many others, a most extraordinary development in postblacklist history when Dalton Trumbo made a speech in March 1970, and I want to read part of that speech. This is to be found in his book Additional Dialogue, and it's at the very end. Trumbo received the Writers Guild annual Laurel Award, quote, "For that member of the Guild who has advanced the literature of the motion picture through the years and who has made outstanding contributions to the profession of the screenwriter." In the course of his remarks after accepting the award, Trumbo said this: I presume that over half of our members have no memory of that blacklist because they were children when it began, or not yet born. To them I would only say this: that the blacklist was a time of evil, and that no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides; and almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities in his own person, in his own acts. When you who are in your forties or younger look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us--right, left, or center--emerged from that long nightmare without sin. That's the end of the quotation, which is of course a very eloquent one, but wrongheaded. I was not present when he made this speech, but I read in the newspaper the next morning that he had received the Laurel Award, and I telephoned him immediately. When he told me about the speech and about the great reception it had received, he omitted any mention of what I have just read. I didn't know it then, but it was to lead to a public dispute and to something very regrettable, personally, between us. I was enormously disturbed when I finally read this. For me, Trumbo had wiped out all differences between those who opposed the committee, which was promoting thought control, and those who supported the committee. He equated those who had suffered blacklisting, with all of its consequences, with those who had helped promote it. I was bewildered. Since he was the most prominent member of the Ten, and since he had made this speech at the annual meeting of the guild, it had the effect of absolving the informers in the audience and in completely confusing the younger writers who had no basis for estimating the situation. With a Christ-like air, Trumbo had said that everyone was a victim of the times. To me this was philosophic nonsense. We were at that moment conducting our foul war in Vietnam. Was the pilot who dropped napalm on a Vietnamese child equally a victim of the times as the child? To understand all is not to forgive all. Is there no right and wrong in what people do in life? Exactly a year after Trumbo's speech, Elia Kazan published a novel called The Assassins. In an interview, Kazan, who had been an informer, said, "I didn't find any heroes or villains in life, so I didn't write any. We're all victims." In another portion of the interview, he said, "Everybody is culpable, no good guys and bad guys." Commenting on this in a letter to the L.A. Times, Richard Powell, a TV writer, said, "'We are all guilty' is a rationale no society can afford. It cripples advocacy by decent men and puts no rein at all on the indecent. If the inmate is equally guilty with his guard, then how shall we ever do away with concentration camps?" However, I knew that there was no point in calling Trumbo at that moment about it because Trumbo was a man of very strong opinions, and under the circumstances, with the reception that his speech had received, I didn't think that he would be capable of some serious talk with me about it. I called some friends who had been at the dinner, and they reported to me that all of the informers present had been ecstatic with delight. Trumbo, the best known of the Hollywood Ten, had absolved them. I called Adrian Scott, who had been married in Trumbo's house. He agreed with me but said he wouldn't talk to Trumbo about it; he didn't want to quarrel with him. Adrian did tell me something I had not known: that when Trumbo traveled, he carried a Bible with him. That, to me, was fascinating. I didn't feel I could really interpret it, but obviously it had some meaning. I remember no one I spoke to who agreed with him. One or two tried to, as it were, sympathetically interpret him while not really agreeing with him. But all of them said they were not going to discuss it with him. And their reasons were twofold, although they didn't have to state them to me: one, they admired him so much that they didn't feel like crossing swords with him; secondly, even if they had wanted to cross swords, they were afraid of him. Trumbo could be incredibly cutting and vitriolic. And he had a formidable mind, personality, and tongue. I knew that I would talk to him sooner or later, but there seemed no point to it at the moment, and I let it drift. It so happened that both of us were very busy, and we didn't happen to meet at any social or public gathering, and so time passed. And it was not until July of the next year that I called him and went to see him. I told him what I felt about his speech. And Dalton's reaction was that, well, I felt that way and that was my privilege, but he knew that a great many others didn't, and there was no point in discussing it. That was on July 30, but two weeks later, on August 15, we were together at a memorial meeting for Herbert Biberman. Those of us of the Hollywood Ten in the area spoke--Adrian, Lester Cole, Trumbo, and myself--and I taped the meeting. I was astonished to hear one thing Trumbo said about Herbert Biberman. He had been talking about the fact that Herbert was deeply interested in people, that if he asked about your family, he truly wanted to know. He then said the following (I am quoting from the tape): "He was a man who, during a trip to Europe, encountered someone who had informed on him. And they talked for an hour and a half. And Herbert was interested in the man." I knew Herbert quite well and this astonished me. I simply could not believe that the man I knew would have talked for an hour and a half with an informer. Two days later, Gale Sondergaard, Herbert's widow, came to our home, and I asked her about it. She said, well, it was nothing like that. Herbert wanted an actor, Stephen Boyd, for a film he was going to shoot called Slaves. Boyd was in Madrid in a film being directed by Dmytryk. Herbert got in touch with Boyd and then went to Madrid to see him. After their talk Boyd invited Herbert to a cast party that was to be held that night. Herbert declined, explaining that he didn't want to meet Dmytryk. The next morning, as he was checking out of the hotel, he heard a voice saying, "Why, Herbert, what are you doing here?" Herbert turned and saw Dmytryk. He replied sharply, "I'm proving there's more than one way to get to Spain." This was their conversation. And since that was Herbert's only trip to Europe in all of those years, it was this that Trumbo had blown up into an hour and a half of conversation with an informer. It was my belief then, and I have not changed it since, that Trumbo said this about Herbert in order to buttress his own position about informers, which I had challenged. He was doing it, moreover, before what one could call a captive audience: that is to say, all of Herbert's old friends, Trumbo's old friends, the people of the Left who remained. However, I didn't draw full conclusions from this until well over a year later. And at the time, I ascribed it to a sort of egotistical caprice on Trumbo's part. However, there were further developments. On various occasions I saw in print Trumbo's phrase "only victims" used by one person or another. Later in 1971 an important book appeared, Thirty Years of Treason by Eric Bentley. The frontispiece quote was from Trumbo's Laurel Award speech, and it began, "The blacklist was a time of evil," and it quoted the core of the position to which I objected. The next year Robert Vaughn's book entitled Only Victims appeared. It was now unmistakably clear that Trumbo's position was getting very wide acceptance, and I regarded this as an absolutely dreadful perversion of history. I decided that it was absolutely necessary for me to make clear that there was not a wholesale acceptance of his position by other people. I wrote a statement and the question was, how would I get in into print? I thought of placing it as an advertisement in Variety. But then a call came from a journalist, Victor Navasky. He was writing an article on the Hollywood Ten for the New York Times Sunday magazine, and he wanted an interview. He came to my house early in December, shortly after I had written the statement. I showed it to him and asked him if he would like to use it. He said he would and asked if he could show it to Trumbo. He had an appointment with Trumbo for the next day. I said that of course he could. Navasky's article on the Ten appeared in the New York Times Sunday magazine on March 25, '73. But before that, something happened that caused me to open a private correspondence with Trumbo. The guild had a series of meetings in which individual writers spoke and one of their films was shown. Trumbo was one of the featured speakers and Blankfort was announced as the moderator. I again was astonished. I couldn't go to the county museum auditorium where it was held, but I wanted to know what would be said, and I had someone go for me with a tape recorder. The result of that was the decision to write him a letter with nothing withheld. I need to mention that we'd become quite close as friends, and my letter was not written impulsively--quite the contrary. This is a portion of what I wrote: I think the time has come just now to write you a blunt letter. I cannot stomach your current behavior. It bewilders me, saddens me, outrages me. If I had not for so many years admired you, liked you, and rejoiced in the bond between us, I would not bother to write this letter. Indeed if you were not today in so many, many ways a man whose public behavior still commands my respect and admiration, I also would not bother to write to you. How can you be so blind to what you're doing? I recently received the Time of the Toad from your publisher, undoubtedly sent to me at your request. I reread it with care. It was a magnificent polemic when you first wrote it; it now has stood the test of twenty years and is no less magnificent. Yet how bewildering that at the same time that this book comes to me in the mail the author sits on a platform of a theater, where one of his films is to be shown as part of a retrospective program, and listens with a satisfied smile to the remarks of the moderator, who ate toad meat before the committee with unctuous relish. "I never was a fellow traveler of the Communist party," Blankfort said, in effect, to the committee. "I actually was a fellow traveler of yours." Now, twenty years later, in a voice greased with similar unction, he praises his friend Dalton Trumbo from A to Z, and Trumbo sits complacently. With what does Blankfort conclude his remarks? What else but the seemingly Christ-like quotation from your Laurel Awards speech about that time in American life when there were no villains or heroes, only victims. Naturally, naturally. Trumbo has absolved the Blankfort. If Blankfort had to eat toad meat, it was only because he was a victim. And Kazan joyously echoes this in his latest novel: everybody is culpable. Interviewed about the writing of the book, he states, "I didn't find any heroes or villains in life so I didn't write any. We're all victims." Now, where did that phrasing originate? And why does Kazan find it so true and felicitous? How come this philosophic bond between Trumbo and Kazan, Trumbo and Blankfort? How on earth can the author of Time of the Toad be merry with those he once pissed upon? That's the quote from my letter. The result of my letter was a private correspondence that continued over a period of several months. However, in a letter to me on February 7, 1973, Trumbo's tone suddenly changed. Previously we had been two close friends who were engaged in a serious dispute about issues of moral and philosophical significance. The debate between us was sharp, but it was civilized. Suddenly, in this letter, Trumbo's tone became one of bitter sarcasm with an underlying rage. At the end of it he broke off all relations with me. This was not the first time Trumbo had done this with a friend; it was something of a pattern in his behavior, the cause of which I never knew. But I recall the time in the sixties when he had told me that there had been an irreparable break between him and Hugo Butler. Hugo Butler was much closer to him than I was, and in 1963, when Trumbo and I both happened to be in Rome at the same time doing some work, we went to dinner at the home of Harold J. Smith, who was one of the coauthors of The Defiant Ones and other screenplays. At the end of the dinner, Trumbo suddenly erupted in a personal attack on Smith so contemptuous and venomous as to be inexplicable. He told me later that it had been calculated because the Smiths had been annoying him, and he didn't want them to continue. Later, he attacked his close friend Ian Hunter. [*Trumbo later resumed close friendships with Butler and Hunter.] Therefore, his breaking off relations with me did not disturb me. I regretted it, of course, but this was Trumbo's problem, not mine. I replied to his letter on March 22. He never received it because it arrived at his home when he was in Jamaica working on the script of the movie Papillon. Cleo, his wife, returned it to me unopened. When Trumbo returned from Jamaica, it was for the purpose of undergoing urgent surgery. From then on until his death he was an invalid, and I didn't want to send him a letter that I knew would enrage him. I think I have to change my.... [changing tape] Guess it had run out a while ago. While Trumbo was still alive, Bruce Cook, his biographer, interviewed me. Trumbo had given him the correspondence to read without, of course, my last letter. Cook told me that he considered it an important correspondence that he would like to publish as an appendix to the biography. I said I would be willing to have it published but only if it included my final letter. I explained what had happened to it and suggested that he consult Cleo about it. He said he would and that I would hear form him before he left Los Angeles. I didn't hear. I sent several letters to him. There was no reply. I finally sent a registered letter with a return receipt requested. I got the receipt but no reply from him. I was afraid he might do something very unfair, which he had mentioned to me as a possibility--namely, publish Trumbo's letters and summarize my replies. This was, I understood, legally permissible, however unfair. He did this to a small degree in the biography, but I wouldn't say that he had been unfair to me. However, he has rather a number of errors in his references to me in the book, some of them due to what Trumbo told him, and some of his own. Trumbo's death in September '76 was one of a series of deaths of old friends that's now becoming larger and larger. The first was that of my very dear friend Philip Stevenson. The next year it was Hugo Butler, my neighbor and fellow blacklistee in Mexico for seven years; and then Guy Endore; then Herbert Biberman in 1971; to be followed a year later by Adrian Scott. All of these men were so much a part of my life that it's as though trees in an orchard surrounding my home had been cut down. The view is now less pleasing. I mention this only because I, like everyone else, have been intellectually aware that anyone who is long-lived must experience the loss of friends. But only now do I feel it... and feeling it is much keener than merely knowing it intellectually. It's a pleasant coincidence that in my seventieth year a book about my work has been published for school libraries. It's by Jack Salzman, a scholar in the English department of Hofstra University. He got in touch with me about ten years ago, saying that he wanted to write a study of my work. I supplied him with biographical material and other data, but his judgments on my work are his own, without any consultation with me. The book, with my name as title, is in the Twayne series of studies of American authors and has been published by G. K. Hall and Company, of Boston. Unless you have questions, I think I'll close this history with a projection of what I would like to be my epitaph: on the last day of his life, an hour before his death, he was listening to Schubert's quartet number 13 in A minor, while he wrote down the name of a book he wanted to read, the idea for a short story he wanted to write, and the date of a holiday he hoped to take with his wife.

GARDNER

That's such a lovely thing, I wouldn't think of asking anything else. Thank you very much.

MALTZ

Thank you, Joel.