Freedland - Witch Hunt in Hollywood

Danny Kaye, Humphrey Bogart, June Havoc and Lauren Betty Becall. They were enthusiasts for the Committee for the First Amendment. Later it became inconvenient. (Getty Images)

I would like to acknowledge from the start the invaluable work of Barbra Paskin, who in so many ways smoothed the process of writing this book.

I am also very grateful to Jeremy Robson, who first offered the project his blessing and am also extraordinarily grateful to Merle Kessler for her help in the early days of this undertaking.

Those interviewed were: the late Larry Adler, Ed Asner, Norma Barzman, Walter Bernstein, Dan Bessie, Sonya Dhal Biberman, Theodore Bikel, Betsy Blair, Paul Buhle, Jean Rouverol Butler, Larry Ceplair, Michael Cole, Hope Corey, Norman Corwin, Joanne Crawford, the late Oliver Crawford, Jean Porter Dmytryk, Kirk Douglas, the late Glenn Ford, Jonathan Foreman, Julie Garfield, Betty Garrett, Ellen Geer, Larry Gelbart, Madeline Lee Gilford, Bernard Gordon, Roderick Gorney, Sondra Gorney, Lee Grant, Marsha Hunt, Bill Jarrico, Sylvia Jarrico, Tony Kahn, Hal Kanter, the late Evelyn Keyes, the late Erie Jolson Krasner, Kate Lardner, Gabriela Maltz Larkin, Jeff Lawson, Arthur Marx, Patrick McGilligan, the late Zero Mostel, Hilda Ornitz, the late Gregory Peck, Eileen Penn, Ronald Radosh, Alex Raksin, the late David Raksin, Joanna Rapf, Carol Eve Rossen, Stanley Rubin, Mary Davenport Salt, Francesca Robinson Sanchez, Joan Scott, the late Artie Shaw, Jill Robinson Shaw, the late Sidney Sheldon, Eric Sherman, Peter Spelman, Bella Stander, Ann Strick, Gloria Stuart, Dennis Sykes, Christopher Trumbo, Nikola Trumbo and Rosanna Wilson-Farrow.

To them all my sincerest thanks.

Michael Freedland

Who do you think theyre really after? Whos next? Is it your minister, who will be told what he can say in his pulpit? Is it your schoolteacher, who will be told what he can say in the classroom? Is it your children themselves? Is it YOU who will have to look around nervously before you can say what is on your mind?

Actor Fredric March, on the radio programmeHollywood Fights Back, 1947

She was nine months pregnant and had been groomed as one of the darlings of the most glamorous studio in Hollywood. Her husband wascertainly in most peoples eyeson the verge of becoming a superstar. The term hadnt yet come into common usage (or perhaps any kind of usage) but after two sensationally successful movies, who could doubt that he was up at the top of the list?

Yet as Betty Garrett kissed Larry Parks goodbye that morning in March 1951, both knew that it was all about to come crashing to the ground. Once her baby had been born, she now so firmly understood, MGM werent going to get back on the phone with an offer of another role like the one she had had with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in the 1949 film On the Town. Much more significantly, for her husband there would be no new follow-up to The Jolson Story of 1946 and Jolson Sings Again three years later, the second sequel that the trades had been predicting for months.