Norma Barzman, blacklisted screenwriter who took on Hollywood, dies at 103

Norma Barzman, a blacklisted screenwriter who spent nearly three decades in exile and later forced Hollywood to reckon with its red-baiting past, has died at her Beverly Hills home. She was 103.

Active until late in life, Barzman died Dec. 17, 2023, according to a social media post from her daughter Suzo Barzman.

“I lost a big piece of my heart Sunday afternoon,” Suzo Barzman wrote in a Dec. 19 Instagram post. “My mother Norma Barzman died at home peacefully surrounded by family. ... Had a long life full of stories and accomplishments.

“Her sharpness and joy was intact to the end. Whenever someone asked her secret to longevity she would just answer that she loved every part of life, people and never stopped working. I’m grateful to have been able to spend these last years with her. I will miss her deeply but she will live on in me.”

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Barzman’s early gains in the film business, like those of other blacklisted writers, evaporated rapidly after the House Un-American Activities Committee launched a purge of suspected Communists from Hollywood beginning in the late 1940s, and she devoted her later years to exposing the era’s hurtful and often career-altering practices.

But she always maintained that her career was stymied by something more: She was a woman in male-dominated Hollywood.

“The blacklist can only be partially blamed,” she told an interviewer for the 1997 blacklist chronicle “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist.”

“Much of the problem resulted from the position of women and from my not having fought adequately enough for my rights,” she added.

She said she was denied screenplay billing for one of her first successful screenplays, “Never Say Goodbye” (1946), written with husband Ben Barzman, not because of her membership in the Communist Party but because the studio didn’t want a woman’s name in the credits.

After moving with her family to Europe in 1949 to avoid being subpoenaed by HUAC, which had launched an investigation into suspected Communist infiltration of Hollywood two years earlier, she said she became a retiring housewife. A mother of seven, she lived in her husband’s shadow, contributing to his work but neglecting her own ambitions. The couple returned to Los Angeles in 1976.

Norma Barzman, photographed at home in 2000, lost much of her writing career to the Hollywood blacklist of the late 1940s and ‘50s

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Only in her later years did Norma Barzman flourish anew as a writer and activist. She became a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, completed two memoirs and advocated on behalf of writers whose careers were ravaged by the blacklist.

In 1999, she helped lead a campaign against the awarding of an honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan, the celebrated director who informed on friends suspected of being Communists. Though Kazan received his Oscar, many attending the awards ceremony refused to applaud and hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that night.

Barzman later spoke on national television, accusing Kazan of seeking to advance his career in Hollywood at the expense of his former friends. The episode prompted a wave of blacklist remembrances, and the Barzmans were among the writers honored with a lifetime achievement award from a UCLA graduating class in screenwriting. Kazan died in 2003.

Barzman’s recollections of the blacklist years, though, always remained entwined with her struggles as a woman in Hollywood. Feminism was high on the list of reasons she had become a Communist, she wrote. She had been struck by how women in the Soviet Union worked alongside men. And when asked about her years in exile, she responded that she resented most “that being away had deprived me of participating in the American women’s movement.”

Born Norma Levor in New York City on Sept. 15, 1920, Barzman attended Radcliffe College. As a young woman she moved briefly to Paris, where she spent much of her childhood.

After a short marriage to mathematician Claude Shannon, she ended up in Los Angeles, where a cousin, Henry Myers, had forged a successful career in Hollywood. She got a job as a reporter at the Los Angeles Examiner and began working as a screenwriter. She met Ben Barzman at a party to support Russian war relief, married him in 1943, and soon after joined him as a member of the Communist Party.

When editors at the Examiner told the paper’s owner, William Randolph Hearst, that Barzman was a Communist, Hearst shrugged. “I don’t care if she’s a Communist, she’s a good reporter, and I never fire a good reporter.”

The Barzmans supported the “Hollywood 10,” a group of writers and directors connected to the Screen Actors Guild who were subpoenaed by HUAC but refused to cooperate with its investigation. Studios refused to hire writers named as Communists or fellow travelers, and formerly successful writers such as Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. were drummed out or relegated to writing under fake names.

The Barzmans avoided being forced to name names by remaining in England during a filmmaking trip in 1949. They stayed overseas, living in Paris and the South of France, after others in Hollywood identified them as Communists and the government suspended their passports. Years later, when she obtained the FBI files on her husband and herself, Barzman discovered that agents had tailed them for years in Europe.

Ben Barzman, whose successful films include “The Boy With Green Hair,” continued to write uncredited films for European filmmakers while his wife’s career foundered.

His uncredited contributions, later restored, include “El Cid,” starring Sophia Loren and Charlton Heston, “The Locket” and “Luxury Girls.”

Barzman said it was only after her husband died in 1989 that she came “blossoming out” and began writing again.

Her 1990 columns for the Los Angeles Times combined humor with reflections about aging. She also became “a keeper of the blacklist flame,” said Larry Ceplair, co-author of “The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community 1930-1960.”

Barzman continued to work and contribute to blacklist retrospectives well into her 90s. She wrote two memoirs, “The Red and the Black List: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate” and “The End of Romance: A Memoir of Love, Sex and the Mystery of the Violin.”

In reviewing her Hollywood memoir, the New York Times wrote: “The book is also a testament of anger toward the squalid congressional committee that made bean soup of the First Amendment and toward the men who held her back.”

Barzman told Ceplair that she had ceased involvement with the Communist Party in 1949 but did not fully abandon her former feelings toward Communism until 1968. Although she reproached herself for being “blind,” some critics found fault with her unapologetic stand.

Barzman countered that the Communist scare “mutilated and degraded our culture for generations.”

Her writings blended political reflection with explorations of her struggles as a wife and mother. In 2000, she explained her activism to a reporter this way:
“You have to work at things, whether it’s a marriage or a democracy.”

Barzman is survived by her seven children, including Suzo Barzman and writer-director Paolo Barzman.

Leovy is a former Times staff writer. Staff writer Carlos De Loera contributed to this report.