Keeper of the Flame: A Blacklist Survivor

It was to have been a six-week trip. The year was 1949, and Hollywood screenwriters Norma and Ben Barzman were headed to London on the Queen Mary so that Ben could rewrite his script for “Christ in Concrete,” which Edward Dmytryk would soon direct. Expecting to return soon, the Barzmans left everything they owned in their Sunset Plaza Drive home. Then they sailed with their two children, Norma pregnant with a third. But investigations into Communist influence in Hollywood were intensifying, and the Barzmans, passionate intellectuals who had joined the party believing in its promise of social justice, heard they might be subpoenaed and decided not to return. The blacklist era, during which Americans suspected of Communist affiliations were hounded, fired and even imprisoned, was to last for decades. It would be 27 years before the Barzmans set foot on American soil again.

When they finally did, they found themselves pitching movies to executives who hadn’t even been born when they left America. After Ben died in 1989 and many of their fellow travelers began to pass away, Norma, whom longtime friends remember as a shrinking violet, slowly found herself thrust into a new role. In the last three years, she has metamorphosed into an eloquent conscience of the blacklist as she travels the world, speaking out about injustice and the contributions of its Hollywood victims.

“She’s become the keeper of the blacklist flame,” says Larry Ceplair, co-author of “The Inquisition in Hollywood.” “She insists that the sacrifices people make shouldn’t be forgotten, that we must never forget what happened lest we repeat it.”

These days, Barzman--who turned 80 last month--speaks frequently at universities and film schools about the blacklist and the toll it took on her friends, movie makers and activists. “Any time there’s a program that deals with blacklisted writers, she’s there speaking out on the issues and organizing people; she’s got enormous vitality and engagement,” says Robert Rosen, dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and a friend for 30 years.

Barzman charges forward with the same joie de vivre that sustained her through the years when many others fell into depression and despair. She devotes every morning to writing her memoirs, delving into her life with Ben in Hollywood and France while working, first as one of Los Angeles’ early female newspaper reporters, then as a screenwriter, a novelist, a political activist and not least as mother to seven children.

Many find it remarkable that the blacklist didn’t leave her bitter. Barzman delineates it this way. “I was angry,” she explains. “I couldn’t bear to see my friends and comrades hurt, their families and careers destroyed. I felt terrible pain and anguish for them. But that [has] only spurred me on to write.

“I’ve been so blessed, even when I was suffering. So I wasn’t bitter then, and I’m not bitter now. I guess because I still feel there’s so much hope. You have to work at things, whether it’s a marriage or a democracy.”

Barzman retains the precise, cultured diction of her upbringing, and her conversation moves effortlessly from 21st century genetics to 17th century French painters to pioneering Soviet filmmakers and Hollywood movie stars.

Ask her a question and it’s like launching an ocean liner on a colorful voyage, filled with historical digressions and personality sketches. But unlike many raconteurs, Barzman, 5 feet 3 with brown hair that frames her face, always returns to the point, diligent as a schoolgirl in providing the answer.

There is an urgency about her that is almost palpable, as she toils each day to put her stories on paper, strolling to the Beverly Hills library to do research and calling up friends in Paris, London and New York to confirm memories shrouded by 60 years of history.

For Barzman, the work is paying off: Her lobbying has spurred the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to mount a multimedia exhibition about the Hollywood blacklist that is due to open next year, and she is now organizing a retrospective of blacklisted films to screen concurrently.

“The Right has always tried to show that we poisoned American filmmaking, that we tried to get Communist propaganda into films, when what we tried to do was support the democratic tradition and neutralize the most racist and stereotypical of characters,” she says. “ ‘Back to Bataan’ [which Ben Barzman wrote] was the first Hollywood film to have an interracial romance between a major star, Anthony Quinn, and a Filipina. That was our Communist propaganda.”

How the Barzmans Met in Los Angeles

Barzman comes from a long line of hard-working, independent women. Her grandmother founded a pincushion and comforter factory in Chicago in the 1860s. As a child, she lived in Europe for several years with her parents, who were in international business. She attended Radcliffe for two years, then dropped out in 1939 and sailed to France, where she got a job on the Paris Herald at 19. Three months later, her parents went to Europe and brought her back as Hitler invaded Poland, striking the first chord of World War II.

The next year, she married Claude Shannon--who became known as the father of information theory--and settled with him in Princeton. A year later, she divorced and moved with her mother to Los Angeles where she enrolled in a screenwriting class and realized that the politically active people she admired were Communists.

She met Ben Barzman at a Halloween party in 1942, and they saw each other every day for three months before they married.

In early 1944, she got a call from Jim Richardson, the city editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, after sending in a resume in which she lied about her experience. Within a week, her inexperience became obvious, and she was about to be fired, when she wrote a story about a poor boy and a dog that prompted William Randolph Hearst himself to cable his praise.

“Give him a byline and tell him I’m watching his career,” read the first telegram.

“Well give HER a byline and tell her I’m watching HER career,” read the second.

It wasn’t Hearst’s last intercession on Barzman’s behalf. When the Red scare first spread, Hearst editors got their investigative reporter to follow the Barzmans around, she recalls.

“The managing editor told Hearst I was ‘Red,’ ” says Barzman, and Hearst replied, “I don’t care if she’s Red, she’s a good reporter, and I never fire a good reporter.” On nights and weekends, Barzman helped her husband write screenplays, striving for stories that focused on women’s rights and worker exploitation.

“She’s always done things with a real sense of moral responsibility,” says UCLA’s Rosen. “She has an unyielding commitment to being creative and being alive and encountering the world with a great sense of passion and enthusiasm.”

It wasn’t so easy in 1945. When she wrote a screenplay called “Never Say Goodbye” about a departing soldier and the woman he left behind, Warners bought it and hired Errol Flynn for the lead. But the studio didn’t want Norma’s name on the screenplay; they wanted Ben and another writer, she says. Because the Barzmans needed the money, Norma gave in.

Then came two babies in quick succession, and Norma quit the Examiner at the urging of Ben, who promised they would write screenplays together. By now it was 1948 and they were raising money for the Hollywood 10, screenwriters and directors who refused to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating Communist influence in Hollywood. The Hollywood 10 would eventually go to prison for contempt of Congress.

When the Barzmans packed for London in 1949, there were rumors that Ben might also be subpoenaed. At the time, they hoped the Red scare would blow over by the time they got back. But on vacation in Cannes after “Christ in Concrete” wrapped, writer-producer Adrian Scott, a longtime friend and one of the Hollywood 10, told them things were getting worse.

Scott urged them to stay in Europe, saying he could find them work. And so began their long exile. Over the years, Ben grew depressed and bitter despite writing critically acclaimed films, many under pseudonyms. The couple was also initially racked by money woes and fears. Yet for Norma, the time turned out far more luminous and stimulating than she could have imagined.

For starters, they settled in Paris. “It was after the war, people were poor, but they wanted to have fun,” she recalls. “We had dinner with Picasso every Tuesday night when we were at our country house in Provence. Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, Jacques Prevert were all friends. Plus we got to work with all the amazing European directors [including Vittorio De Sica and Constantin Costa-Gavras]. It was hard, but it was also the time of my life.”

In 1976, the Barzmans decided to finally return to Hollywood. But their homecoming was not the triumph Ben had hoped.

They were hired to write scripts, but none was ever made into a film. And a heart attack felled Ben in 1979. As her husband deteriorated, Barzman began writing a column about aging for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner called “The Best Years.”

“What I discovered doing the column was that people who were active and engaged and doing things they liked were the ones who stayed healthy and lived longer and had a better quality of life,” Barzman recalls.

The column ran from 1985 until 1989, the year the Herald and her husband died. Later that year, she moved back to Paris to write a novel, returning in the early 1990s to write screenplays. It was then that Norma found herself breaking out of a 50-year shell.

“Ben was a great raconteur, he used to tell my newspaper stories better than I did, so after a while, I didn’t speak,” she recalls. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but not until he died did I come blossoming out.”

New Interest in the Blacklist

Recent years have seen a burst of new interest in the blacklist. Scholars and historians have plumbed its depths and added to the historical record with a spate of books expressing a variety of outlooks.

While some continue to maintain that it was right for politicians to question why American Communists and their sympathizers should be allowed to express themselves, several recent actions have brought honor to those blacklisted.

The Writers Guild of America has restored authorship for 100 films written by blacklisted writers who had been forced to write under aliases. The films included Norma Barzman’s “Luxury Girls” (1953) and Ben Barzman’s “It Happened in Paris,” “Strangers on the Prowl” and an added screenplay credit for “El Cid” (1961).

Academic recognition has come too. Last year the Barzmans were among blacklisted writers honored with a lifetime achievement award by the UCLA graduating class in screenwriting. A monument and sculpture garden commemorating the blacklist by artist Jenny Holzer was also unveiled at USC.

Over the years, many blacklist survivors have died, others have dropped out of politics and some have continued to speak out, such as Jean Rouverol, who is publishing her memoirs next month (“Refugees From Hollywood, A Journal of the Blacklist Years,” University of New Mexico Press).

Barzman attributes her own backlist activism to the death of blacklisted writer Paul Jarrico in 1997 just days after he had helped organize a historic dinner in which all four major Hollywood talent guilds officially apologized for the first time for their role in the blacklist.

Relatives and friends--including Barzman--believe that Jarrico, who was 82, was so exhausted by the emotional culmination of his five-decade crusade to gain justice for blacklisted screenwriters that he fell asleep while driving home to Ojai and his car crashed.

That same year, Barzman was one of 35 blacklisted writers and directors featured in the book “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist,” by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, and went on the road to publicize it. “It energized her,” recalled Ceplair, who contributed a chapter on Barzman. “She became the big promoter. It’s a role she was born to play.”

Her activism swung into high gear in 1999, when film director Elia Kazan was given an Oscar for lifetime achievement. Kazan had testified before the House committee investigating Communist influence in Hollywood and named names. Barzman became a key organizer of the protest.

“I was afraid that maybe 25 old fogies would turn up and we’d be laughed at, but it was just the opposite, it grew and grew,” she recalls with pleasure. On the night of the awards, 500 people gathered in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Among them were Barzman and her 14-year-old grandson.

Barzman says that for her, the Kazan award dramatized the importance of exploring the historical record of the blacklist. The urgency was only brought home further with the death of Abe Polonsky, 88, another outspoken screenwriter and director who had been blacklisted.

“Young people are growing up in history classes and they don’t know what it was,” Barzman explains. “So I thought, to hell with shyness, Norma, this needs to come out.”