Unrepentant

Budd ended up at Dartmouth studying sociology, hoping to become a writer – not a screenwriter, but a novelist. In 1934, while a sophomore, he travelled to Moscow, where he took a Russian literature course and met Gorky and Babel at a writers’ congress.

His own writing, however, would have to wait. After graduation his first job was in Hollywood: $50 a week to read the equivalent of a novel a day and provide a plot synopsis. He also did some script work as a junior writer. One assignment, working with a ruined F. Scott Fitzgerald, would inspire Schulberg’s 1950 novel, The Disenchanted. Eventually he began working for Sam Goldwyn.

“Goldwyn had been very flattering to me, called me a genius,” Schulberg says. “[He] made a big production of it whenever I came into his office. He held the door open for me and bowed. I could do no wrong.”

That wouldn’t last, thanks to Schulberg’s extracurricular activities over the next few years. In late 1936 or early 1937, after being targeted by recruiters, he became involved with the Communist Party. As he later explained to huac, “I felt like many young men in that particular period; I was disturbed by the unemployment problem [and] the rising tide of aggression in Europe.” Screenwriter Stanley Lawrence, a recruiter for the Party, first invited him to join a Marxist study group for young people, telling Schulberg they were “leading the way . . . against the Nazis.” Schulberg eventually realized the study program was a system of indoctrination into the Party. His attendance at meetings became spotty within a year. After learning that all the writers he’d heard at the writers’ congress in Moscow were either dead or silenced, he stopped regarding the Soviet Union as a socialist utopia.

Much of Schulberg’s testimony before huac was about the Party’s attempts to influence how he wrote his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run? The novel’s toxically ambitious protagonist, Sammy Glick, first appeared in a short story published in Liberty magazine. Party leaders were unenthusiastic about Schulberg’s plan to turn it into a novel, calling Glick an anti-Semitic stereotype. They suggested Party-friendly storylines.

However, when Party officials reviewed the book upon publication, they initially approved of it, says Schulberg. “But later on it was reviewed by [Communist Party president and screenwriter] John Henry Lawson and it was brought up at meetings that I chose not to attend to defend myself and my work. They said that I was expelled from the Party. The truth is, I quit.”

It wasn’t only the Communist Party that objected to Sammy. “My father begged me not to publish the book,” Schulberg says. “He said that it would ruin him and our family in Hollywood.” Sure enough, though his book was a hit with the critics, it made Schulberg a pariah in Hollywood as well.

The week the book was published, Schulberg could feel the chill when he showed up for work at MGM. For a week his phone didn’t ring. “Silence is the sure sign that you’re on your way out in Hollywood,” Schulberg says. When he was finally summoned, Goldwyn wasn’t holding the door open, he was holding his head in his hands. His message to Schulberg was as old as the Hollywood sign: you’ll never work in this town again.

“I had Lawson on the left and the moguls on the right attacking me, and nobody in the middle defending me,” Schulberg says. “I had to go east, to the publishing world, where the Communist Party and the studios couldn’t follow me.”

During his stint in the U.S. Navy from 1943–46, he worked with the director John Ford producing government films, including a documentary of the Nuremberg trials in 1946. By the early fifties, the Communists and Hollywood were a decade and three thousand miles in Schulberg’s wake. Then Igor Gouzenko in Ottawa and Whittaker Chambers in the U.S. exposed an extensive Soviet espionage network in North America, and the drive to flush out more spies gathered steam.