When Kazan received a lifetime-achievement award at the 1999 Oscars, Schulberg watched it on TV. He remembers a hesitant, flustered Kazan on stage with his statuette and the camera panning the audience and focusing on Steven Spielberg, Nick Nolte, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Ed Harris, who sat out the standing ovation, hands in their laps, while applause rained down.
“Even though the Academy’s [executive] committee voted unanimously to give [Kazan] the award, I worried about how he’d be received,” says Schulberg, shaking his head, wincing. “I felt he should have said more. I wish he had been up there longer. Those [audience members] who sat there didn’t know the story, couldn’t have known what it was like.”
huac subpoenaed about one hundred witnesses. (The exact number isn’t known because some testified in closed sessions.) Many artists, such as the screenwriter Walter Bernstein (The Front), were blacklisted without ever having been subpoenaed. A third of the known witnesses co-operated with huac by naming people they knew or suspected were members of the Communist Party. The rest, citing the Fifth Amendment, refused to co-operate.
The screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who spent almost a year in jail for defying Congress, expressed a loathing of informants that is still typical among the blacklisted: “. . . show me the man who informs on his friends who have harmed no one, and who thereafter earns money he could not have before,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “and I will show you not a decent citizen, not a patriot, but a miserable scoundrel who will, if new pressures arise and the price is right, betray not just his friends but his country itself. I do not know of one Hollywood informer who acted except out of duress and for money. . . .”
Schulberg, however, doesn’t neatly fit that profile. “I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for Budd Schulberg,” said Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation and author of Naming Names, which won the National Book Award in 1982. “He believed that Stalinism was a greater sin than McCarthyism,” Navasky says. “Am I persuaded by his argument? No, ultimately, I’m not.” But Schulberg “makes that argument to this day,” Navasky says; “I have no doubt that he holds this position honestly and seriously.”
Schulberg’s father, known as B.P., was one of Hollywood’s founding moguls. Young Buddy grew up “a Hollywood prince” on the lot, hearing stories about B.P. being excluded from what would have been his biggest deal, the launch of United Artists, and watching his friend, the naïve silent-screen star Clara Bow, crash and burn the instant talkies came in. “I could observe the wheels of The Industry turning from the inside,” he once wrote. “A little later I looked at the studio tycoons with an affection considerably this side of love. All my life, mine was a love-hate relationship with those tycoons, my father’s associates, rivals and enemies. . . .”
Buddy Schulberg grew up privileged but not sheltered. At Los Angeles High School, many classmates were impoverished Mexican immigrants. “Their families could barely feed them,” he remembers. “I begged the limo driver to drop me a couple of blocks away from the school. I felt a tremendous sense of guilt about my family’s advantages.”
Politically and intellectually, Schulberg’s key influences were his parents: B.P. was a New-Deal liberal, a rarity among the moguls; his mother, Adeline, broke ranks with more conventional studio wives and worked for charities that aided the poor. In 1931 she even travelled to the Soviet Union, bringing back a short-story anthology featuring Maxim Gorky and Isaac Babel, whose work left young Buddy in awe. Schulberg later wrote that Adeline’s glowing accounts of her trip effectively made her “Joe Stalin’s advance woman.”
Comments