Command Performance

For the second time, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee set out to determine the extent of Communist infiltration among Hollywood actors, actresses and screen writers. In its first expedition, though it lost its chairman along the way,* the committee had gotten the Hollywood Ten--producers, directors and screen writers--convicted and jailed for contempt in refusing to answer the question: "Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" This time, having studied the old committee files and made further investigation on its own, the committee knew just what it was looking for: Are well-heeled Hollywood Communists a major source of party funds, and to what extent, if any, have they gotten party propaganda into films? Before the week was out, the committee had found a start to the answer.

Actor Larry Parks (The Jolson Story) flew into Washington to face "the most difficult thing I have done in my life." Chain-smoking restlessly in the crowded committee room, he confessed that in 1941, at the age of 25, he had joined the party. Off & on, he went to ten or twelve meetings, paid $50 to $60 in dues. But he had always been "a pretty bad member by their lights"; by 1945, when he began to get his first movie breaks, he lost interest in the party, "drifted out of it the same way I drifted in."

Bad Judgment. During his membership, Parks said, the party engaged in nothing more subversive than coffee discussions. It had not tried to use him as a propaganda wedge; if it had, he added, it could never have gotten the party line past Hollywood's producers. Now, he realized, the party was "a power trying to take over the world"; but when he joined, he was guilty of "nothing wrong" except possibly "bad judgment."

Actor Parks had one more question to answer; the committee wanted to know the names of his Communist cellmates. Replied Parks: "Don't present me with the choice of going to jail or crawling through the mud by being an informer." The committee agreed to force no public disclosures, instead closed the doors and let Parks finish his confession in private, later let the press know that he had named a dozen other movie people as members of his cell. After the closed hearings, Parks rode off to face his future, "doubtful, after appearing before the committee, whether my career will be continued."

Good Actor. Because of his frank statement, Parks did not seem to have much to worry about. The committeemen went out of their way to praise him as a "good American and a good actor." In Hollywood, Actor John Wayne, president of the anti-Communist Motion Picture Alliance, also rallied round: "I think it's fine that he had the courage to answer the questions and declare himself . . . The American public is pretty quick to forgive a person who is willing to admit a mistake."

Despite a similar statement by the Motion Picture Industry Council, Hollywood's producers seemed to be less sure of the American public. Columbia Pictures announced that it had canceled his assignment to a new picture--obviously waiting for M-G-M to make the first move with Parks's latest movie (Love Is Better Than Ever), which is ready for release.

No such doubt was shown in the cases of two other witnesses examined by the House committee before it recessed for three weeks. Actor Howard da Silva (Fourteen Hours) and Screen Villainess Gale Sondergaard (Anthony Adverse), wife of Herbert Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten, both refused to answer the committee's questions. Though they stood on the ground that their answers might incriminate them, they left the committee room with the threat of a contempt citation hanging over them.

*New Jersey's Republican J. Parnell Thomas, who was paroled from the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Conn. last September, after serving nine months of a six-to-18-month sentence for padding his congressional payroll.

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