I would sit by that pool, reading Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby Stories and Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?—the latter with its vivid portrayal of the Hollywood Left during the birth of the screenwriter’s union—wondering where I fit in all this. While at Yale, I had been an anti-war demonstrator and civil rights worker. Soon enough, I was a member of the very Writers Guild described by Schulberg, an organization still operating under the ghost of the blacklist in those days. I eagerly got to know some of the formerly blacklisted writers; they were especially welcoming to me when I first joined, making sure I was invited to the necessary events—fundraisers and socials in old union meeting halls in East LA, more Workman’s Circle than show biz. My left-wing reputation had preceded me.
This romance with the blacklist was cemented when, as a debutante Guild member, I went to the WGA’s annual awards banquet in 1970. Indeed, I was so new that I went without realizing that this ceremony was for the most part disdained by the membership and attended only by nominees and a few Guild officers. As luck would have it, this particular awards ceremony was one of the most interesting such evenings, before or since. It has found a place in film lore because it was there that Dalton Trumbo, the most renowned of the Hollywood Ten, delivered his famous speech of blacklist-era reconciliation, “Only Victims.”
Seated at a back table with my wife Dyanne and our friends the husband-and-wife screenwriter team Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, I was excited by the drama of the occasion, but increasingly disappointed by the speech. Why was the author of Johnny Got His Gun, of all people, preaching forgiveness for the horrid censorship and McCarthyist blackballing of writers by the right wing? Of course, Trumbo had seen those events up close and personal. I knew them only from books and documentaries, or from those few fleeting moments when, as a six year old, I glimpsed “Tailgunner Joe” on my parents’ four-inch black and white Dumont television, during the Army-McCarthy Hearings. My parents despised him and therefore so did I.
I can remember arguing with the Huycks that night, staking out, as I so frequently did, my position to the left of what I considered the weakwilled Hollywood mainstream. I relished my image as an actual Sixties activist, a reputation my agents used to my advantage, and could not so easily forgive as one of the blacklist principals himself. In fact, after that day, many of his blacklist peers criticized Trumbo and deemed him a sellout. I also felt let down by Trumbo, and judged him an old man desperate to get his career back—nothing the hardcore leftist blacklistees, such as ex-longshoreman Alvah Bessie. Of course, Bessie never had much of a career in the first place, and I didn’t want to be like him. So I was caught in a bit of a quandary. I wanted to be like Trumbo, but a Trumbo who had kept the faith.
I doubted that my friends the Huycks would keep any kind of political faith, and they probably knew it. Willard’s father had been a Republican state representative, of all things, and Gloria’s Beverly Hills parentage was de facto suspect, unlike my Scarsdale, New York background. I assumed they were in it—the movie business—for the “main chance” and lacked the requisite ideological purity of the era. Needless to say, all of us were as ambitious as could be, regardless of our political beliefs. When Gloria and Willard achieved enormous Hollywood success only a few years later, writing the screenplay of American Graffiti and the bar scene from Star Wars—not only reaching “A-list” status but also making themselves financially independent for life while still in their twenties—I wasn’t the only one who was wildly envious of them.
On the night of the “Only Victims” speech, however, I was the one whose career was in ascendancy. My first novel, Heir, had just been made into a film called Jennifer on My Mind, with a screenplay by Erich Segal of Love Story fame. The movie stank and only remotely resembled my book, but the novel—inspired by the true story of a wealthy Dartmouth College classmate of mine who accidentally overdosed his girlfriend with heroin—had opened a lot of doors for me, including the chance to work for Charles K. Feldman. I was the last screenwriter hired by the famous agent-producer, who had been involved with The Seven Year Itch (this was long before I came to live in the Marilyn House or even dreamed of such a thing), not to mention the likes of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Elia Kazan. I sat in his living room surrounded by Bonnards and Modiglianis, watching his then-wife Capucine walk in and out while he fielded phone calls from Billy Wilder, and I couldn’t help wondering what the hell I was doing there. Frankly, not much. Unbeknownst to me, the man was dying of cancer, and I suspect I was really there to help him fill his time, pretending he would produce yet one more movie—a film version of Calder Willingham’s Eternal Fire.
I worked on the screenplay in Feldman’s Beverly Hills office at a mahogany desk, beneath a Degas I can only assume was real. Once a week I’d drive up Coldwater Canyon to his home when, depending on the hour, tea or cognac would be served by the staff. The aging producer, an elegant man with silver hair and tailored shirts, would put his feet up on a divan and dial Warren Beatty, telling the young actor that he had a script in the works that would be perfect for Warren and “his girl,” then Julie Christie. I would come to know Beatty later in a rather different, more politically fraught way. But at that point I was peripherally involved in the glamorous atmosphere of the Old Hollywood that was even then fading fast. I was lucky to have seen it.
Feldman was, as they almost all were in those days, a liberal of sorts, and he was fascinated by me, a live specimen of the New Left. It wasn’t that he expected me to breathe fire or throw bombs or anything—but he found it amusing that I planned on using the money from the Willingham adaptation to go to Stockholm, hang out with Vietnam deserters (we were in the midst of the war), and write a novel about them. I could tell that he was skeptical of my will to resist the blandishments of Hollywood and to follow through with this plan. He held out all manner of possibilities to me, including directing films before I was twenty-five. The truth is I have no idea what I would have done, but Feldman’s pancreas got the better of him and my gravy train was derailed. For the moment, my options were closed. Dyanne and I and our six-month-old son Raphael were on our way to Europe.
This was the spring of that epochal year, 1968, and I traipsed around the rainy Gamla Stan—Stockholm’s Greenwich Village—trying to get the inside story on the deserters. Finding them was relatively easy, but they proved to be a dull and predictable lot, lost in more sophisticated Europe and finally more interested in scoring the next joint than in discussing revolution, or much of anything else. I was unsure what to write about them.
Nevertheless, I continued across Europe with my young family, arriving in Paris days after May ’68 événements to see the cobblestones of the Left Bank streets torn up and the buildings papered with anti-de Gaulle posters. Something was happening. My generation was about to change the world, and I wanted to be part of it. The feeling intensified when we reached London and I watched the Chicago Democratic National Convention on the BBC. Everything exciting seemed to be taking place in the American streets and I was stuck in a grungy one-bedroom over a Tube station in Belsize Park. I wanted to go home. I wanted to participate.
But I had to write my book, not least because I’d already leased a “writers’ villa in Southern Spain” from an ad in The Saturday Review. Its owner, ironically, was the editor of London’s New Left Review; he justified having property in Franco’s Spain by saying that it allowed him to bring banned subversive books into a fascist state. Rationalization or not, he was right. The office I worked in until the spring of 1969—a separate one-room writer’s house outside of a villa in the picturesque village of Mijas, Spain—was lined top to bottom with the works of Marx, Gramsci, Che Guevara, et al., a more complete library of the Left than I can recall seeing before or since in a private home. The office’s picture window had a panoramic view of the Mediterranean, with Gibraltar in the distance.
Not that the fabulous digs