I don’t remember the names of the Panthers who came those nights—they were foot soldiers—but I did meet some of the leadership then, including Eldridge Cleaver, his wife Kathleen, and Elaine Brown, their Minister of Information, who played first-rate blues piano at fundraisers. Brilliant and sexy with a bourgeois background, Elaine was the kind of woman that fed the fantasies of young liberal Jewish boys from New York until they broke into night sweats. Just knowing the Panthers then was a great talking point in Hollywood meetings. Of course, I didn’t know them very well, but who cared and who knew? The point was to give off a whiff of radical danger, but not so much that people would be worried about working with you.
The radical edge was closer then. Granted, most young movie people dabbled in this kind of activity for show, or to be part of a particular crowd, but there were those hardcore types who abandoned the film industry to become actual members of the working class. I knew some recent graduates of UCLA Film School who’d quit the movie business to join the various industrial assembly lines—not to say that their film careers were all that promising in the first place. Nevertheless, they went about the business of being “de-classed”—just as people had in the Thirties, although these were the early Seventies and Stalin was already long dead, long exposed as a tyrant of epic proportions. One man—an aspiring director named Peter Belsito who had written a script called “Stalin’s Children”—and his wife Judy moved from their groovy cottage on the Marina Peninsula in Venice to grimmer digs in City Terrace, in the heart of Latino East Los Angeles. Peter joined the line at the Buick plant in Southgate; Judy, who had a degree in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, got a job as an information operator with the telephone company so she could organize workers there.
A group called the California Communist League, led by a man named Nelson Peery, was at the center of this extreme left-wing organizing. And when I say “extreme,” I mean it. At the invitation of the Belsitos, Dyanne and I attended a barbecue in East LA given to introduce members of the entertainment industry to the CCL, presumably to enlist us. The problem was, although there were well over a hundred people there, the only actual working movie person, besides Dyanne and me, was our friend Linzee Klingman, who later went on to edit One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And she had come with us. We tried to make the best of an awkward situation, munching on the tamales while perusing a long table of pamphlets—all of them produced by the Labor Party of Albania and most authored by its chairman, Enver Hoxha. Albania was evidently the only socialist country pure enough for the California Communist League. Even Mao’s China, still in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, was suspect.
After lunch, Nelson addressed the attendees. He warned us, particularly we three film people, that the revolution was nigh and that we had to decide which side we were on because afterwards there would be an accounting. If we stood with the revolution, we would be rewarded. Otherwise, there was no telling what would happen. He frowned ominously.
I remember dismissing this as pure insanity, then wondering: What if he’s right? I didn’t want to end up in a reeducation camp—or worse. Absurd as it sounds now, I felt then that it was best to keep my options open. Even if Nelson was an ideologue, who wouldn’t sympathize with the working-class blacks and Latinos who populated the barbecue that day? They were a lot friendlier than the rich Hollywood types I worked with, far less competitive and slower to judge. If there was going to be a revolution, I wanted to be on their side. And maybe, despite all evidence, something was about to happen. The “illegal” war in Asia was still raging. The inner cities were in turmoil. When people asked me my ambition in those days, I said, only half in jest, “I want to be Minister of Culture.” I even thought of having those words on the frame around my license plate, the way some had “My Other Car is a Porsche.”
Actually, my car was a Mercedes, a used or (in modern parlance) “preowned” one I’d bought from the Republican father of Willard Huyck, the screenwriter with whom I’d shared a table the night Dalton Trumbo spoke. I’d driven the Mercedes to that Writers Guild event, which was at the Beverly Hilton, but not to the barbecue in East LA. For that occasion I’d preferred our more anonymous Volvo, by then fairly beaten up and victimized by a particularly hideous $29.95 magenta Earl Scheib paint job.
My life was filled with this kind of schizophrenic behavior, and would be for years to come. My inability to reconcile my beliefs and my lifestyle probably had something to do with my anger at Dalton Trumbo that evening. Speeches about reconciliation didn’t fit with my self-image—not as a “revolutionary” or as an aspiring Hollywood “player.” I wanted it all on both sides, to be lionized as Fellini and idolized as Che. I wasn’t alone in those dual ambitions. Many never outgrew them.
2
FROM SOUTH CAROLINA BACKWARDS
I have only a dim memory of how I felt in August 1966, when—standing by the side of the road between Sumter and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina—I stared dumbstruck at the severed fourth finger of my left hand. I can’t remember if blood was streaming from the stump as I stooped to pick the finger up with my good hand. I assume it was, though all I can be certain of is that I was trying not to faint and that the Southern cop opposite me had a terrified look on his face.
That cop may not have been older than I (I was twenty-two), but he was about a head taller and a lot broader. Only minutes before he had been pointing angrily past my wife Dyanne at Bruce Dinkins, the thirteen-year-old African-American kid in the back seat of the Corvair, demanding to know what “that boy” was doing in our car.
We were on the way to integrate the segregated bathhouses of Myrtle Beach, but I wasn’t in a hurry to tell the cop that under the circumstances. Already I felt guilty about dragging young Bruce along on the enterprise. Dyanne and I had made him the lead in our student production of A Raisin in the Sun, and he regarded us as gods from the North, but this situation had spun out of control. Bruce probably blamed himself when the junior redneck dropped the jack at my feet.
We’d had a flat and, lacking our own jack, had flagged down a highway patrol car. The young cop had seemed happy to oblige us until noticing our racially mixed group. He turned surly, muttering, “Y’all do it yerself,” with his eyes fixed on the young teenager. But I didn’t know how to use the jack and had barely gotten it up when the whole car came down on my hand, breaking my finger off at the base.
Now Bruce was standing there watching one of his gods potentially bleed to death. I urged the shell-shocked cop to drive me to the nearest hospital. “Don’t get blood on my hat,” he said, referring to the pristine Stetson on the seat beside him, as we barreled toward a small clinic in the town of Clinton. Dyanne waited with Bruce at the side of the road for a tow truck to come. When I got to the hospital, the receptionist asked for my address and emergency contact. I hesitated. The hospital was all white. Was it actually still segregated, I wondered? This could be a big mess. But I didn’t have a choice. I told them to call the man who ran our program back in Sumter. I didn’t bother to mention that he was the cousin of Martin Luther King.
I then slumped against the wall and nearly passed out, feeling as if I were living my own low-rent version of Edward Albee’s play about the death of Bessie Smith. At least I was still alive, unlike Andy Goodman, my childhood best friend from New York’s progressive Walden School. He’d been shot the previous year by the Ku Klux Klan in a racial incident that inspired the film Mississippi Burning. There hadn’t been a day that summer when his murder was far from my mind.
Minutes later I was being wheeled into an operating room in that tiny clinic in rural South Carolina. I have never been religious, but I have a fleeting memory of saying a short prayer—before the anesthesia put my lights out—that the Southern doctor sewing my finger back on had been trained at some fancy out-of-state medical