They've Got a Secret

Every few years, it seems, somebody wandering in a deep forest comes across a bearded old hermit who asks whether Prohibition was ever repealed or whether William Jennings Bryan ever got elected President of the U.S. Last week the House Un-American Activities Committee, investigating Communist infiltration in the entertainment industry, flushed a covey of even odder birds. They were hermitically behind the times, but they had been living in high-rent Manhattan apartments rather than wilderness caves. There was not a single white beard or coonskin cap among them: they were well-dressed, prosperous and seemingly very up to date. Chief specimens:

Charles S. Dubin, 39, highly paid director of NBC-TV's Twenty-One quiz show and a summer replacement, The Investigator, denied current membership in the Communist Party, but refused to say whether he was a member before May 8, the day the committee first questioned him in a closed-door session. NBC promptly dumped Director Dubin as "unacceptable."

Joseph Papp, ne Papirofsky, 37, floor manager for I've Got a Secret and other CBS-TV programs, founder and producer of New York City's nonprofit Shakespeare Festival, balked at saying whether he was a party member before February 1955. CBS fired him.

James D. Proctor, 50, pressagent for Broadway Producer Kermit (The Music Man) Bloomgarden, drew an even finer line than Dubin's. He said he was not a Communist Party member that day, but he dodged behind the Fifth Amendment when asked whether he had been a member two days earlier.

Israel Lazar, also known as William Lawrence, 54, sometime manager of the now extinct Daily Worker, was identified by ex-Communist Witness John Lautner as head of a Communist Party "cultural division" that directed and coordinated the work of secret Reds in the entertainment industry. Lazar refused to confirm or deny anything.

A total of 17 witnesses, mostly actors, directors and musicians, refused to make it clear whether they were or recently had been Communists. The whole batch together proved that the frenetic blacklisting by Red Channels, much criticized for its scattergun damage to innocent bystanders, had also scored some clean misses. They also proved a remarkable medical fact: it is still possible in mid-1958, after Korea, after Hungary, after the Kremlin's own post-Stalin confessions, for an apparently sophisticated U.S. citizen to be, or at least make noises that sound very much like, a Communist or a fellow traveler.

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