THE CONGRESS: Hollywood on the Hill

His bald pate glistening in the hot glare of the klieg lights, New Jersey’s ruddy Representative J. (for John) Parnell Thomas squinted through the clutter of newsreel cameras and microphones. Beyond the press tables, 391 spectators filled the big, gloomy caucus room to capacity. Outside, hundreds more strained against a cordon of Capitol Hill policemen.

Right on cue, a dapper, greying man in a brown double-breasted pin stripe, wearing a pair of heavy shell-rimmed glasses, sauntered jauntily up to the witness stand. As the applause quickened, he turned, bowing and smiling to his expectant audience, maneuvering his profile skillfully in the fusillade of exploding flashbulbs. With forefinger dramatically outstretched, he raised his hand for the oath. To the first, identifying question he replied: “Motion picture actor—I hope.”

“No Bones.” Movie Veteran Adolphe Menjou was delighted with himself. Settling back and lighting up a Pall Mall, he readily admitted that members of the House Un-American Activities Committee could not have found a better witness. As it happened he was “a student of Marxism and Stalinism and of its probable effects on American people.” He was also “a Red-baiter,” he added cheerfully. “I make no bones about it. I’d like to see them all in Russia. I think a taste of Russia would cure them.”

Like the first day’s witnesses, Cinemactor Menjou was perfectly willing to name names (TIME, Oct. 27) of those who were Hollywood’s Reds. He repeated the names of Director John Cromwell and Scripter John Howard Lawson, though he could not be sure that they actually carried party cards. Twirling his mustache, sipping artfully from a glass of water, mugging for the camera men, he admitted that Communism in Hollywood was on the decline, mainly because so many people were becoming aware of its dangers. But there were still Reds aplenty, and he had a surefire, if somewhat simplified, method of spotting them. “Anyone attending any meeting at which Paul Robeson appears, and applauds, can be considered a Communist,” said Adolphe Menjou.

When Chairman Thomas asked, a little self-consciously, what Menjou thought of charges that the committee is trying to censor movies, Menjou reassured him: “I think that is infantile and juvenile; it couldn’t be made by any man with the intelligence of a louse.”

Names & Numbers. As Witness Menjou stepped down, Chairman Thomas declared a two-minute recess. After that Man of Distinction, anyone else was bound to be something of an anticlimax. The next witnesses felt their fate but did their best. Esquire’s Movie Critic John Charles Moffitt fired in all directions.

He aimed one blast straight at Scripter Lawson, called him “an out & out Communist.” The Screen Writers’ Guild, he said, is “under complete Communist domination,” and so is the Story Analysts’ Guild. For that matter, 44 of 100 plays produced on Broadway since 1936 “have contained material to further the Communist line.”

As Witness Moffitt was reciting his list, Los Angeles Attorney Charles J. Katz, counsel for several of the accused, leaped to his feet, demanding the right to question Moffitt. Pounding angrily with his gavel, Chairman Thomas ordered the interrupter thrown out. Like most other congressional investigators, the Un-American Activities Committeemen had adopted a rigid rule against crossexamination. A squad of policemen converged on Lawyer Katz, hustled him from the room.

By the Smell. Then, aging Novelist (and screenwriter) Rupert Hughes took the stand. “Any Communist is an enemy spy or agent,” he said. “They are worse than Benedict Arnold and should be treated accordingly. The party should be outlawed.” He too had a simple way of identifying Reds: “You can’t help smelling them.”

Next day, as all Washington knew, Robert Taylor would appear. The crowds were even bigger and earlier. Handsome Actor Taylor had a point to clear up. When Chairman Thomas had sleuthed out to Hollywood last summer for a preliminary sniff, Taylor had announced that he had been forced by New Deal pressure to appear in MGM’s Song of Russia. Said he now: “I wasn’t forced because they can’t force you to make any picture.”

But he was sure that Communist pressures were rising in Hollywood, and he offered the same cure-all as Menjou: “If I had my way about it, they’d all be sent back to Russia or some other unpleasant place.” He was a success: when he had finished, more than half the spectators stamped for the door, clustered happily around him and followed him triumphantly more than a block down the street to his automobile.

The witnesses, famed and photogenic, the heroic, romantic faces known to all the U.S.—and to all the world as representing the U.S.—kept coming. Robert Montgomery turned up, looking like a handsome, but not incredibly handsome, broker. Said ex-Naval Commander Montgomery: “I gave up my job to fight totalitarianism called Fascism, and I am ready to do it again to fight totalitarianism called Communism.” Dancer-Actor George Murphy and lazily-drawling Actor Gary Cooper followed him to the stand. By week’s end the committee had heard testimony from 21:

Morrie Ryskind, Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright (Of Thee I Sing), accused Fellow-Scripter Gordon Kahn of being a fellow-traveler. “We don’t talk to each other,” said Ryskind, “but I arn pleasant to his children and he is pleasant to mine and our dogs are very good friends.”

Howard Rushmore, an ex-Red and now a Hearst reporter, identified Film Writer Lawson as one participant in a meeting of the cultural commission of the Communists’ central committee and later as the Communist “in direct charge of activities in Hollywood.” Rushmore named others who toed the party line: Playwright Clifford Odets, Actor Lionel Stander, Writers Alvah Bessie and Albert Maltz.

Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, soberly warned against the dangers of Red-baiting. Said he: “I abhor the Communist philosophy, but . . . I hope that we never are prompted by fear of Communism into compromising any of our democratic principles.”

Leo McCarey, director of Going My Way, explained why his hit movie had never been shown in Russia. “I have a character in there they don’t like.” Bing Crosby? he was asked. “No,” said McCarey, “God.”

Walt Disney, film-father of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, told how the Reds had first tried to put a crimp in World-Girdler* Mickey, the traveling salesman of the U.S. When the Disney studios went on strike in 1937, he said, Labor Leader Herbert Sorrell admitted that Communist money had financed the walkout.

Lela Rogers, busy mother of Ginger, discussed her suspicions of Communist hanky-panky in the movies. As an example she cited None But the Lonely Heart, a film full of “despair and hopelessness,” with background music by Communist Hanns Eisler which was “moody and somber throughout . . . in the Russian manner.” (Cracked a bystander: “It’s a good thing Poe didn’t write for the movies.”) There was also a scene where a son refused to work in his mother’s second-hand store and “squeeze pennies out of little people poorer than I am.” In the U.S., explained Mrs. Rogers, “we don’t necessarily squeeze pennies from poor people.”

Number 47275. As the hearings reopened this week, the testimony changed abruptly. So far, most of the witnesses had been hand-picked by Chairman Thomas last summer. Now the committee turned to less friendly voices. First on the stand was Scriptwriter John Howard Lawson.

In a stormy uproar punctuated by Chairman Thomas’ gavel and boos from the audience, Witness Lawson was asked four times whether he was or ever had been a Communist Party member. Four times Lawson challenged the committee’s right to ask, and refused to answer. When Lawson was ordered from the stand (and contempt proceedings against him started), a committee investigator produced copies of Communist registration cards for 1944. Number 47275, he said, was in the name of John Howard Lawson.

* His Russian-made cousin: Mikki Maus. Some names of the original Mickey, elsewhere: Miki Kuchi (Japan), Miguel Ratoncito (Spain), Michel Souris (France), Musse Pigg (Sweden), Camondongo Mickey (Brazil), El Raton Mickey (Argentina), Mikel Mus (Greece).