The specter of Communism has recently been raised as the “greatest threat” that America has yet to face. Not the Russians, the Iranians, income disparity, the cost of living, nor the fact that most Americans cannot afford a home, let alone health care, but … communism. That is the threat. That is the thing about which we must all be wary. Well, I must say, if nothing else, that has a familiar ring to it.
I was in high school when then-Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a list of communists who had infiltrated the State Department; that list was never produced, but remnants of that awful time cascaded into my undergraduate days at the University of Southern California during the late 1950s, as well as after that into my career in show business.
The so-called “Hollywood Ten” predated my tenure in “the business,” but I worked, and became friendly with, director Martin Ritt, writer Mel Levy, actors Lee Grant and Howard da Silva. All of them had lost some of their most precious years for building their careers and sustaining their families because of (as it turned out) the nonsensical rantings of one crazed member of the U.S. Senate. That one Senator, along with the nation’s subsequent “Red Scare” and the blacklisting that followed, was all it took. At this juncture, one can only wait and wonder at how impactful this current President’s message of singling out “the other,” will be. So far it hasn’t augured well for Hispanics, Muslims, Asians, LGBTQ, or Jews.
An interesting sidebar to all this is that McCarthy’s Chief Counsel for that Senate Subcommittee in the 1950s was Roy Cohn … later to become lawyer and mentor to a youngish Donald J. Trump who obviously learned a great deal at the feet of this “master.”
I bring all this up in what is normally a very non-political forum because of the happy coincidence of turning on Turner Classic Movies on a rainy afternoon in the tropics. There, I enthusiastically discovered The Way We Were on my television screen, presented on TCM, sans commercial interruption.
The movie may have been director Sydney Pollack’s best film, the screenplay by Arthur Laurents is terrific as were the stars, Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. An abundance of riches.
Once again, within minutes (more like seconds if you were there keeping track), I am captivated. The Award-winning Marvin Hamlisch score (with lyrics by erstwhile Hollywood friends, Marilyn & Alan Bergman) continues to enhance scene after scene, but it is so much more than that. The aggregate of the movie … the perfect casting of the two leads, the period, the settings, the wardrobe choices, the screenplay, and the music … intertwined with memories of my own life … all converging as I watch through tear-stained eyes.
If you haven’t seen it … is that a silly thing to ask? I mean, who among us has not seen it? (I know, I know, short shrift yet again for Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and beyond.) Well, for those who need a refresher for whatever reason, The Way We Were is more than a romance; it also accurately depicts … and makes comment on … the politics of the 1950s, heavily impacting the Hollywood of my youth.
I was late to the game, arriving at my first job in show business at MGM in 1959 months before my 22nd birthday; it was more than a year later when director Otto Preminger and actor/producer Kirk Douglas publicly announced screenwriting credit to previously black-listed writer Dalton Trumbo for Exodus and Spartacus. Chalk that off as an anomaly? Need I define what blacklisting meant, where only the most brilliant of those accused of being communists could get work behind the scenes using a pseudonym or worse yet, a substitute … a character who would take the meetings (and the credit) for a black-listed/unfriendly/alleged communist sympathizer?
Folks, it took the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences twenty-five years after Douglas and Preminger’s singular act of courage to finally (in 1985) get around to posthumously award the Oscar for best screenplay to Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson for The Bridge on the River Kwai. They waited that long even though Foreman and Wilson were NOT part of the “Hollywood 10,” but simply two members of the show business community who refused to cooperate with the now infamous House Un-American Activities Committee.
People were all but ruined by those historical and awful events … some, losing not only their savings but their lives. I got through that period unscathed, but I can (at least) begin to imagine how painful it would be for those who did not survive to be with me in the present day … watching the Pollack movie … revisiting those years.
Even thinking of those times, especially as I watched the film from the comfort of my lovely living room, brought about pangs of nostalgia as well as an abundance of emotional fodder.
There was my over half-century crush on the leading lady; the uncomfortable remembrance of being rendered literally speechless by a happenstance first meeting of the one and only BARBRA, while walking the very same sands of the Malibu Beach Colony depicted in the film; those Colony days I so longingly recall in my soon-to-be-released memoir, Before and After Cagney & Lacey. (Do I risk the stigma of too much self-promotion? Why not? Don’t trees have leaves?)
There, too, is the recognition that a great deal of the motion picture’s sum total resonated with memories of my own life in Hollywood … for despite whatever struggles I may have written about in my two (… count ‘em … two) memoirs …regardless of the fact that Redford was more athletic, and much better looking … was the epiphany that, not unlike his characterization of Hubbell Gardiner, that in retrospect … paraphrasing that fictional character’s first line in his first novel … most everything in life had come easily for me as well.
The fact that one of my wives looked a bit like Streisand, that I have … more than once in my life … been loved as unconditionally as Streisand’s fictional Katie Morosky adored Robert Redford’s more-than-beautiful Hubbell Gardiner, no doubt contributed to the mix of my emotional response.
The movie also recalled for me that evening, late in my second marriage and even later in Redford’s career … when he was no longer as handsome as he had been … my then-wife turning to me in that studio screening room saying, “… well, Barney, it has finally happened. You are, at long-last, better looking than Robert Redford.”
Meanwhile, back in my living room and The Way We Were: the total commitment of a woman for her man, that level of emotional allegiance … his wonderment at the depth of her devotion … knowing it was something he was somehow not capable of experiencing, coupled … at least at some level … with my own regret at not being able to evoke that kind of vulnerability. It is a thing that … at nearly 89 years of age … still resonates for me.
Sitting in my easy chair on this rainy day in the sub-tropics, thinking of loves past and present, worried about a government gone mad, I find myself reacting as I would bet Hubbell Gardiner would: is this a private diary entry (after the Dr. Fauci experience, is anything ever really private?) or is it something for my readers on Substack? You decide …
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“Before and After Cagney & Lacey,” a second memoir… coming this Fall from McFarland Publishers. Pre order here.