Big Peace: Professor Kengor, Hollywood is celebrating its Academy Awards, a look back at great actors and actresses and films.

Kengor: For me, it’s a moment to look back at Hollywood’s worst communists, communist sympathizers, Stalinists, and duped liberals and progressives—as well as the good guys (and gals) that fit none of those categories.

Big Peace: Fair enough. This should be fun. Let’s start with communists.

Charlie Chaplin comment, “Thank God for
communism!” will make you see (him) red.

Kengor: How about the Hollywood screenwriters who liberals still insist were innocent lambs? Dalton Trumbo, Communist Party code “Dalt T;” Albert Maltz, party no. 47196; Alvah Bessie, no. 46836; John Howard Lawson, no. 47275. Or, if you turn to page 191 of my book—if you don’t have a copy yet, shame on you—you can view Arthur Miller’s party application. Miller wrote The Crucible, about how Joe McCarthy pursued “liberals” unfairly suspected of being communists—“liberals” like Miller, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, Lawson.

Big Peace: As you say in Dupes, Hollywood produced “quite a cast.” Let’s narrow the focus to the Academy Awards.

Kengor: Among films that have canonized communists, Julia (1977) celebrated the scowling Lillian Hellman and her mystery lover/writer, Dashiell Hammett, who we now know was a CPUSA member. Hellman wrote a bitter play called Scoundrel Time, about Joe McCarthy. In Hellman’s universe, it was Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin, who was evil. Winning Oscars for Julia were Jason Robards and Vanessa Redgrave. Fittingly, Lillian Hellman was played by Jane Fonda, recently retired from her real-life role as Vietcong go-go girl. “If you would understand what communism was,” Fonda pleaded with a student audience, “you would pray on your knees that we would someday be communist.”

Big Peace: Another film from that period that celebrated American communists was Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).

Kengor: That film lionized American Bolshevik John Reed. Reed today is buried in the wall of the Kremlin, a structure responsible for upwards of 60-70 million deaths. Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her role in that film as “Red” Emma Goldman, a woman so radical that Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department deported her to Russia.

Big Peace: Which Academy Award winner made the worst statement about communism?

Kengor: I would roll out the red carpet for Charlie Chaplin. “Thank God for communism!” said the silent film star. “They say communism may spread all over the world. I say, so what?” The Daily Worker thrust that comment onto its front page. Communism, of course, did spread around the world, killing 100-140 million. How’s that for a “so what?”

Big Peace: You have several Oscar winners in Dupes whose names were raised as potential communists by a party organizer in Los Angeles who testified under oath to a grand jury and to Congress.

Kengor: The party organizer was John Leech. Most of those he named turned out to be proven party members. Among those who denied Leech’s charges were Jimmy Cagney, who won an Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, Fredric March, who won it twice, and Humphrey Bogart, who won for The African Queen. I think Cagney was at least momentarily interested in the Communist Party.

Big Peace: We talked previously about your fascinating material on Humphrey Bogart, profiled in a feature by Big Hollywood (click here).

Kengor: In the Soviet Comintern Archives on CPUSA, I found a “Bogart” at the Workers School in New York in 1934. With great care, and with all the declassified documents, I consider whether this was Humphrey Bogart. I found no smoking gun, but it’s extremely intriguing.

Big Peace: We do know that Bogart was a dupe.

Kengor: He was a self-admitted dupe, ashamed at how the communist screenwriters lied to him and other celebrities that formed a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. They flew all the way to Washington to defend their “progressive” friends, only to learn that the screenwriters were closet Stalinists. Bogart was enraged, snapping, “You [expletives] sold me out!” Yes, they did. The Reds had no concern for the reputations of these actors.

Other duped liberals who threw their support behind these communists, and won Academy Awards, were Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, and Judy Garland.

Big Peace: Perhaps the biggest Oscar winner is also one of your biggest dupes: Katharine Hepburn.

Kengor: Yes. One of the sorriest episodes in Hepburn’s illustrious career came when she delivered, in flame red dress, a speech at a May 1947 Progressive Party Rally. The speech was unerringly close to the Soviet line. Why wouldn’t it be? It was written by one of those “liberal” screenwriters: Dalton Trumbo. People’s Daily World reprinted the entire text. Hepburn hit a home-run for the comrades.

Big Peace: Burl Ives won an Oscar for The Big Country (1958). Tell us about Ives.

Kengor: Burl Ives also sang some wonderful Christmas tunes. He was in a folk group called “The Almanacs,” which alternately included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and (among others) Will Geer—“Grandpa Walton” on The Waltons, a wild left-winger, and Columbia University grad, naturally. Some of these guys joined the party. “The Almanacs” were exploited by the seditious communist front-group, American Peace Mobilization, which appeased Hitler because Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. They were the musical entertainment for the mobilization’s signature event in New York in April 1941. Go to pages 142-157 of Dupes, which presents materials from that rally—including Soviet orders to sucker “social justice” pastors, which occurred with tremendous success.

Big Peace: On the plus side, you highlight duped liberals who learned and changed, including in Hollywood. Sticking to Oscar winners, give some examples.

Kengor: If I were giving awards for best converted dupes, male and female—who also won Oscars—they would go to Melvyn Douglas and Olivia de Havilland. Douglas warned his fellow liberals about being duped. Ditto for de Havilland, who we discussed previously (click here). Unlike Katharine Hepburn, de Havilland, who played “Melanie” in Gone With the Wind, refused a pro-Soviet speech written by Trumbo.

Big Peace: Also on the plus side, list some Oscar winners who remained committed anti-communists throughout their career.

Kengor: Top billing goes to John Wayne, of course, who won for True Grit, and declared that Hollywood needed a good communist “de-lousing.” Others: Charlton Heston, Red Buttons, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Loretta Young, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple. William Holden, who, with Ronald Reagan (click here), crashed a meeting of Hollywood communists in 1946. Gary Cooper, who won two Oscars, testified before Congress as a friendly witness on communist infiltration in Hollywood. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert both won awards for It Happened One Night (1934).

Finally, I tip my hat to Haing Ngor, real-life survivor of Pol Pot’s Cambodian holocaust. Ngor won an Oscar for playing “Dith Pran” in The Killing Fields (1984). After all that, he was murdered in California in 1996.

Big Peace: Most of those we’ve noted are deceased. Give us some names of dupes or potential dupes among recent Oscar winners.

Kengor: George Clooney won for Syriana (2005). Mercifully, he didn’t win for Good Night, and Good Luck, another film where anti-communists are the demons. Barbra Streisand won for Funny Girl (1968). Of course, Sean Penn won in 2003 and 2008. Penn fits the theme of my book well, as he’s somewhat of a bridge from Cold War dupes to War on Terror dupes.

Among the non-dupes who won recent Oscars, there’s Jon Voight (Coming Home, 1978). His role in a major film on Pope John Paul II was wonderful, and would never garner modern Hollywood’s approval.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, thanks for a unique take on the Academy Awards.

Kengor: My pleasure.

Beery was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the youngest son of three. He dropped out of school in fourth grade (“I was too dumb to get any farther”) and ran away for a few months, bumming around the Midwest, spurred onward not by a hatred of family but by a sense of pure adventure. At sixteen he lied his way into a job as an elephant handler with a circus, spending the next three years traveling across the country, and even crediting himself with being the first to train elephants to use their trunks to grab the tails of the elephants in front of them in order to keep them all in line. But eventually he realized that, where bull handling was concerned, “my ambition had been no ambition at all, that I was just drifting.” When Beery heard that his older brother Noah was working on Broadway in New York, he hurried there to try his hand at the acting game.

He first got a job in a stage chorus, singing and dancing. “Chorus men wore tights and frills,” Beery remembered with disgust, “and carried pink wands with ribbons on them, and made thorough asses of themselves. I didn’t like it, but it was the place to start. . .with a straw hat, cane and everything, including rouge cheeks and lips, I sang for a couple of years.” He also took whatever parts he could find in various stock companies, playing dramatic roles, villains, comedy — anything. Stock companies, he would later opine, “are the greatest training schools in the world for actors.”

In 1913 he went to Chicago and joined Essanay Studios, then-home of Charlie Chaplin. Beery made his name playing Sweedie, a maid (in drag!) always engaged in pie-throwing style hi-jinks. It was also there that he met his first wife, the future silent-film superstar Gloria Swanson. Beery later reminisced that

Gloria was about sixteen and the nearest thing to an angel that this elephant trainer had ever seen. I feel in love with Gloria at once, but I was twenty-seven and felt old enough to be her father. She liked me and we got along splendidly, and I did all I could to help her. To her I was a big motion picture star, just what she wanted to be. . . My salary was $125 a week, and I had a yellow speedster that was hot stuff. I think Gloria looked at the yellow paint instead of at me.

A two-year marriage ended with Swanson running off to other beaus who might further help her career (she would eventually marry seven times). “For a year I was entirely worthless,” Beery said later. “In the meantime I had got an uncontested divorce from Gloria on the grounds of desertion.” As his ex-wife quickly grew into one of the great stars of the silent era, he saw his own career fading away.

It was the opportunity to play villainous World War I roles that reignited his career. He played sadistic German officers both in The Unpardonable Sin (1919 — notable for featuring Rudolph Valentino’s first starring role) and in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). About the former film he said, “I put inside the part all of the hatred against the world that had been piling up inside me for a year,” and in the latter, audiences gasped as his character blithely munched on an apple while directing the slaughter of scores of women and children. Beery’s performances were judged “screen masterpieces” at the time by critics, with breathless newspaper articles boasting that “Beery fairly lives on the hisses of the crowd.”

These roles, and the multi-faceted ones that followed, propelled him through the rest of the decade as one of the top stars of the silent era. The 1920s were good to Beery. Now in his thirties, he was in his prime as an actor. In 1924 he remarried, to an actress named Rita Gilman, and would eventually adopt (and cherish for the rest of his life) the orphaned daughter of one of his wife’s relatives. He bought a beautiful Spanish-style home in Beverly Hills, branched out into a successful new comedy series, won accolades in now-classic films such as Robin Hood (1922), The Sea Hawk (1924), and The Lost World (1925), and became an accomplished pilot. By the end of the decade, books and magazines about Hollywood were hailing him as “one of the screen’s greatest actors.”

But those same publications were also delving into his personal life, and more often than not they were startled by the lack of pretension they found therein. Arriving at his home, reporters inevitably found him garbed in “an old sweat shirt” and “flannel trousers that had been pawed by his dogs.” One noted that, “Beery, happy-go-lucky and downright homely, is careless of his grammar, swears freely, prefers his new Ford to his two Lincolns, loves his beautiful home and his wife, the lovely Greta Gilman, and has no social ambitions.” When asked about their jobs, most actors are wont to give a long spiel about high Art, but Beery would just shrug and say, “To me pictures are merely a means of making a good living along the path of least resistance.” Whereas other actors bragged about their yachts and art collections and jewelry, Beery would admit, “Me, I like huntin’ and fishin’ and the simple life.”

With his Hollywood money he bought a series of hideaways in distant mountain locations: a cabin in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; an isolated lodge on a lake in the High Sierras of California; and ranches in Idaho, Utah, and Arizona. Having become certified as a pilot (going so far as to earn a aerial commission as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve), he logged thousands of hours flying to these remote vacation spots, where he would spend weeks out in the woods or on the water, far away from Hollywood, communing with the natural world. In a town where image is everything, many glitzy stars mocked Beery as a simpleton and an unmannered boor, but Beery seldom gave a damn what anyone else thought of him. “Maybe I do look like a bum,” he said,

but I have lots of fun. . . Vacation time to me means an opportunity to get away from civilization and rough it. I would rather spend one week knocking around my cabin at Silver Lake than a month visiting the famous spas or other resorts of Europe, and when summer rolls around I feel my fingers itching for a fishing rod or one of my game rifles.

As it happened, 1929 was an awful year for Beery. The “talkies” hit Tinseltown like a tsunami, and overnight scores of longstanding stars found their jobs in mortal jeopardy. Beery ruefully remembered how, “A horde of elocutionists were brought from New York to the studios, and they were the people who decided whether you were out or in. They made a test of my voice and said it wouldn’t do. I was, they said, a silent actor.” Finished, just like that. Try as he might, he couldn’t get new roles. Days, weeks, and months passed with him hanging out at M-G-M every day, waiting for a single break and getting nowhere. At the same time, the stock market crashed, taking Beery’s $750,000 in securities and bringing them down to zero. A further $165,000 was lost due to two bank failures. And to top it off, a faulty heater burned his beautiful Beverly Hills house to the ground.

In a few short months, he had gone from being one of Hollywood’s top actors to finding himself wiped out, a forty-five-year-old broke has-been.

It was while gloomily eating spaghetti in the M-G-M commissary one day that he was spied by ace screenwriter Frances Marion, who saw in the burly, ugly hulk and his sloppy table manners a certain unvarnished quality that she felt might be well put to use in a prison movie she was making called The Big House. An impassioned talk with M-G-M production head Irving Thalberg, and Marion had given Beery a new chance at breaking back into pictures. He made the most of it, playing “Machine Gun” Butch Schmidt with equal parts sadistic menace and pitiable loutishness. The role reminded audiences of Beery’s talent, and with his first Academy Award nomination all worries about his sub-par “talkie” voice vanished. Just like that, Marion had put his career back on track. In the following years she continued to write a series of parts specifically for him, star-making turns in Min and Bill (1930), The Secret Six (1931), and finally The Champ.

In hindsight, The Champ took fuller advantage of Beery’s personality than anything that had come before. His Andy Purcell remains one of the most sympathetically flawed characters ever put on-screen — a self-destructive alcoholic and gambler who, thanks to Beery, never comes close to leaving the audience’s good graces. In a way, his character epitomizes the entire era of The Great Depression, that peculiar mixture of raw hope and monumental failure that defined a generation. The movie allows Beery to veer effortlessly from raucous laughs (in the lighthearted scenes with little Jackie Cooper) to horror (as when he punches his bloody fist into a jail-cell wall over and over) to abject tears (the famous ending, of course, but also several other memorable scenes).

While Frances Marion wrote the script, it was Beery’s performance that brought it to such startling, natural life — the smiles, the physicality, the mugging, the hesitations. And, above all, that natural charisma that simply can’t be taught. “You must understand life,” Beery insisted when asked how he managed to nail such roles. “You must have received some of its hard knocks, as well as a few of its benefits and enjoyments. Otherwise one cannot attain any depth of emotion, or carry conviction to the part. The fact that I have gone through the mill of experience is what has let me get by as a character actor.”

The Champ gave Beery his second Academy Award nomination, and when the ballots came in he had lost to Fredric March’s acting in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by a single vote. The Academy promptly declared a tie and gave both men an Oscar, a decision eliciting cheers at the ceremony but also some grumbling among the rank-and-file. It’s hard to argue that Beery wasn’t as fully deserving of the award as March was, especially since Beery earned his with a very human and unadorned performance that didn’t rely on fancy makeup or effects.

In the wake of The Champ, Wallace Beery became not just successful but an enormous star, and would spend the rest of his life as a sort of American treasure. Yet to the end he stayed as unpretentious as ever. “I have no art in my soul,” he said in a 1940s interview, “except on Saturday night, when I draw a paycheck.” When Beery died in 1949, the news caused nationwide mourning. A writer at The Detroit Michigan News concluded: “No other Hollywood career provided more amusement and innocent satisfaction than that of the lumbering moose of a man that at one time or another in the last 38 years touched every heartstring in the beholder.” The Muncie Indiana Star added that, “Beery managed to pack more emotional wallop into his roles than most of the carefully-trained products of the dramatic schools. He was truly a ‘natural.’ Now he has joined W. C. Fields and many another beloved performer whose names may mean little to today’s youngsters but who will never be forgotten by their elders.”

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the kid who set the bar for all other child actors to come.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

There is precious little about Wallace Beery on the Internet or in print. No biography, no documentaries — just isolated tales and rumors, usually centered around gossip concerning how much of a pain he was to work with. That charge is apparently accurate as far as it goes, but it takes two to tango, and a lot of the people he worked with were no angels themselves. Beery, for his part, comes across as surprisingly polite in the interviews he gave during his life, even when others (like ex-wife Gloria Swanson) were slyly dissing him. In any case, it should be remembered that he didn’t live long enough to hear and answer the various sniping stories about his on-set behavior, and so they should be read and interpreted in the context of a one-sided story.

A few more vicious rumors about Beery — that he raped his first wife, Gloria Swanson, on her wedding night, and fed her poison to abort the baby; that he beat Three Stooges creator Ted Healy to death at a Hollywood nightclub in 1937 and had M-G-M cover up his involvement — are, as far as I can discern, baseless slander promulgated decades after his death by people with a grudge and/or a penchant for Hollywood Babylon-style gossip. Don’t believe everything you read. . . .

Here’s a YouTube tribute video to Beery that someone posted, which offers a lot of rare pictures both from his movies and from his private life (such as him posing by his airplanes).

A blogger called the Mythical Monkey has a fine post on Beery’s star turn in The Big House, complete with some nice pictures.

Beery’s brother Noah Beery was also a popular character actor, although he never fully broke into the leading man A-list the way his brother did. And Noah’s son, Noah Beery Jr., followed in the family footsteps and became a noted actor in his own right (he’s most famous for playing James Garner’s pop in The Rockford Files).

“Reel Chicago” by Robert Loerzel in Chicago Magazine: a well-researched article about the old Essanay Studios where Wallace Beery got his start in movies, complete with lots of rare high-quality photographs.

6:45pm PST – A Star Is Born (1937)  – A fading matinee idol marries the young beginner he’s shepherded to stardom. Cast: Janet Gaynor, Fredric March, Adolphe Menjou, May Robson Dir: William A. Wellman C-111 mins, TV-G

While few films top the marvelous Judy Garland musical update of this classic, cautionary Hollywood tale, this version (itself a sort-of remake of George Cukor’s1932 “What Price Hollywood?” – Cukor would direct the Garland version, as well) offers up a memorable, heartbreaking performance from Fredric March as the sad and sodden Norman Maine, a has-been movie star living in the shadow of his famous wife. Lionel Stander also blazes through his scenes as a ruthless studio press-hack who inadvertently brings ruin to those around him all in the name of doing his job of creating movie stars and keeping them movie stars.

Hollywood has always been interested in films about itself, but unlike many (not all) of the self-referential films released today, ”A Star Is Born” doesn’t romanticize or glorify those tragic and self-destructive elements that have been around since the idea of celebrity was born. That doesn’t mean the glamorous aspects of the film industry are repressed, but that there’s a realistic balance provided mainly through Adolph Menjou’s interesting and complicated character.

Produced by David O. Selznick, directed by William Wellman, scored by Max Steiner, shot in Technicolor and all wrapped in a screenplay touched by the likes of Budd Schulberg, Ben Hecht, and Ring Lardner Jr., this was quite the event film of its day and seventy years on holds up perfectly. Compelling from start to finish.

Thankfully, TCM has a pretty good print of “A Star Is Born,” much better than the public domain DVDs that have been floating around in various forms for a decade.