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“ONLY VICTIMS”

I live in the Hollywood Hills in a Spanish house once occupied by Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. Built in 1929—for Los Angeles, the early Paleolithic Age—it is not as grand as its legendary past suggests, but it does have a nice canyon view and some beautiful old Mexican tile. I bought the house in 1989, at the height of my movie career, not because of the Joe and Marilyn connection, but because I liked the place. It projected the right image for my lifestyle: a child of the Sixties turned upper bohemian lord of the Hollywood Left.

That was then. I’m not sure that person even exists any longer. I still like the house, but I no longer have that image. Indeed, I’ve shifted positions to such an extent that I often think I’ve undergone the ideological equivalent of a sex change operation.

Hence this book, which is an attempt to find out what happened—to discover how the idealistic young man who came to Hollywood fresh off the civil rights movement; created the hippie detective Moses Wine; trafficked with Abbie Hoffman, the Black Panthers, Tim Leary, and the SLA; was recruited by the KGB, and wrote (or didn’t) screenplays for such paragons of the Hollywood Left as Woody Allen, Paul Mazursky, Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand, ended up voting for George W. Bush and being publicly reviled as a neocon. How did that man come to be favorably profiled by both Mother Jones and National Review in a single lifetime? (Talk about sex change operations.)

I hope to understand it better by writing this memoir, a memoir I am typing in the very room Joe and Marilyn shared during their brief marriage. That marriage ended after only 274 days when Monroe filed for divorce for “mental cruelty” in 1954, at the height of the Hollywood black list.

Ironically, it was that famous list that cast an ambiguous shadow over my arrival in Los Angeles back in the late Sixties. In a sense, I was a wannabe black listed screenwriter myself—a young man with left-wing political street cred, but without sufficient funds to live the upper middle class lifestyle of my parents. I was radical chic from the start, or aspiring to be. But it was hard to be chic in my first LA residence, a Nathanael Westian motel-ish affair on Franklin known as the “Coral Palms.” Now ploughed under to make way for a mall, it was a far cry from the “Marilyn House” and composed of a dozen or so dingy, shag-carpeted one-bedrooms surrounding a cracked concrete patio and a tiny over-chlorinated pool. I lived there with my then-wife and former Yale Drama classmate Dyanne Asimow and soon our infant son Raphael. Our immediate neighbors were an unemployed actor and his Playboy bunny girlfriend on one side, and, on the other, Jill Bogart, Humphrey’s seventy-year-old alcoholic sister.

I would sit by that pool, reading Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby Stories and Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?—the latter with its vivid portrayal of the Hollywood Left during the birth of the screenwriter’s union—wondering where I fit in all this. While at Yale, I had been an anti-war demonstrator and civil rights worker. Soon enough, I was a member of the very Writers Guild described by Schulberg, an organization still operating under the ghost of the blacklist in those days. I eagerly got to know some of the formerly blacklisted writers; they were especially welcoming to me when I first joined, making sure I was invited to the necessary events—fundraisers and socials in old union meeting halls in East LA, more Workman’s Circle than show biz. My left-wing reputation had preceded me.

This romance with the blacklist was cemented when, as a debutante Guild member, I went to the WGA’s annual awards banquet in 1970. Indeed, I was so new that I went without realizing that this ceremony was for the most part disdained by the membership and attended only by nominees and a few Guild officers. As luck would have it, this particular awards ceremony was one of the most interesting such evenings, before or since. It has found a place in film lore because it was there that Dalton Trumbo, the most renowned of the Hollywood Ten, delivered his famous speech of blacklist-era reconciliation, “Only Victims.”

Seated at a back table with my wife Dyanne and our friends the husband-and-wife screenwriter team Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, I was excited by the drama of the occasion, but increasingly disappointed by the speech. Why was the author of Johnny Got His Gun, of all people, preaching forgiveness for the horrid censorship and McCarthyist blackballing of writers by the right wing? Of course, Trumbo had seen those events up close and personal. I knew them only from books and documentaries, or from those few fleeting moments when, as a six year old, I glimpsed “Tailgunner Joe” on my parents’ four-inch black and white Dumont television, during the Army-McCarthy Hearings. My parents despised him and therefore so did I.

I can remember arguing with the Huycks that night, staking out, as I so frequently did, my position to the left of what I considered the weakwilled Hollywood mainstream. I relished my image as an actual Sixties activist, a reputation my agents used to my advantage, and could not so easily forgive as one of the blacklist principals himself. In fact, after that day, many of his blacklist peers criticized Trumbo and deemed him a sellout. I also felt let down by Trumbo, and judged him an old man desperate to get his career back—nothing the hardcore leftist blacklistees, such as ex-longshoreman Alvah Bessie. Of course, Bessie never had much of a career in the first place, and I didn’t want to be like him. So I was caught in a bit of a quandary. I wanted to be like Trumbo, but a Trumbo who had kept the faith.

I doubted that my friends the Huycks would keep any kind of political faith, and they probably knew it. Willard’s father had been a Republican state representative, of all things, and Gloria’s Beverly Hills parentage was de facto suspect, unlike my Scarsdale, New York background. I assumed they were in it—the movie business—for the “main chance” and lacked the requisite ideological purity of the era. Needless to say, all of us were as ambitious as could be, regardless of our political beliefs. When Gloria and Willard achieved enormous Hollywood success only a few years later, writing the screenplay of American Graffiti and the bar scene from Star Wars—not only reaching “A-list” status but also making themselves financially independent for life while still in their twenties—I wasn’t the only one who was wildly envious of them.

On the night of the “Only Victims” speech, however, I was the one whose career was in ascendancy. My first novel, Heir, had just been made into a film called Jennifer on My Mind, with a screenplay by Erich Segal of Love Story fame. The movie stank and only remotely resembled my book, but the novel—inspired by the true story of a wealthy Dartmouth College classmate of mine who accidentally overdosed his girlfriend with heroin—had opened a lot of doors for me, including the chance to work for Charles K. Feldman. I was the last screenwriter hired by the famous agent-producer, who had been involved with The Seven Year Itch (this was long before I came to live in the Marilyn House or even dreamed of such a thing), not to mention the likes of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Elia Kazan. I sat in his living room surrounded by Bonnards and Modiglianis, watching his then-wife Capucine walk in and out while he fielded phone calls from Billy Wilder, and I couldn’t help wondering what the hell I was doing there. Frankly, not much. Unbeknownst to me, the man was dying of cancer, and I suspect I was really there to help him fill his time, pretending he would produce yet one more movie—a film version of Calder Willingham’s Eternal Fire.

I worked on the screenplay in Feldman’s Beverly Hills office at a mahogany desk, beneath a Degas I can only assume was real. Once a week I’d drive up Coldwater Canyon to his home when, depending on the hour, tea or cognac would be served by the staff. The aging producer, an elegant man with silver hair and tailored shirts, would put his feet up on a divan and dial Warren Beatty, telling the young actor that he had a script in the works that would be perfect for Warren and “his girl,” then Julie Christie. I would come to know Beatty later in a rather different, more politically fraught way. But at that point I was peripherally involved in the glamorous atmosphere of the Old Hollywood that was even then fading fast. I was lucky to have seen it.

Feldman was, as they almost all were in those days, a liberal of sorts, and he was fascinated by me, a live specimen of the New Left. It wasn’t that he expected me to breathe fire or throw bombs or anything—but he found it amusing that I planned on using the money from the Willingham adaptation to go to Stockholm, hang out with Vietnam deserters (we were in the midst of the war), and write a novel about them. I could tell that he was skeptical of my will to resist the blandishments of Hollywood and to follow through with this plan. He held out all manner of possibilities to me, including directing films before I was twenty-five. The truth is I have no idea what I would have done, but Feldman’s pancreas got the better of him and my gravy train was derailed. For the moment, my options were closed. Dyanne and I and our six-month-old son Raphael were on our way to Europe.

This was the spring of that epochal year, 1968, and I traipsed around the rainy Gamla Stan—Stockholm’s Greenwich Village—trying to get the inside story on the deserters. Finding them was relatively easy, but they proved to be a dull and predictable lot, lost in more sophisticated Europe and finally more interested in scoring the next joint than in discussing revolution, or much of anything else. I was unsure what to write about them.

Nevertheless, I continued across Europe with my young family, arriving in Paris days after May ’68 événements to see the cobblestones of the Left Bank streets torn up and the buildings papered with anti-de Gaulle posters. Something was happening. My generation was about to change the world, and I wanted to be part of it. The feeling intensified when we reached London and I watched the Chicago Democratic National Convention on the BBC. Everything exciting seemed to be taking place in the American streets and I was stuck in a grungy one-bedroom over a Tube station in Belsize Park. I wanted to go home. I wanted to participate.

But I had to write my book, not least because I’d already leased a “writers’ villa in Southern Spain” from an ad in The Saturday Review. Its owner, ironically, was the editor of London’s New Left Review; he justified having property in Franco’s Spain by saying that it allowed him to bring banned subversive books into a fascist state. Rationalization or not, he was right. The office I worked in until the spring of 1969—a separate one-room writer’s house outside of a villa in the picturesque village of Mijas, Spain—was lined top to bottom with the works of Marx, Gramsci, Che Guevara, et al., a more complete library of the Left than I can recall seeing before or since in a private home. The office’s picture window had a panoramic view of the Mediterranean, with Gibraltar in the distance.

Not that the fabulous digs helped me write. I spent most days poring over the International Herald Tribune for news of the political battles back home. Toward the end of our lease I had all but given up on working and would sit at my desk, gazing catatonically through the picture window with all kinds of gloomy fantasies going through my head, including Dyanne having an affair, à la D. H. Lawrence, with Esteban, the villa’s gardener. Also, I was pretty much broke, my generous Charles K. Feldman “annuity” reduced to a couple of thousand bucks. I was relieved when it came time to go home.

Once back in LA, I did what any normal American boy with no prospects and no money would—I took the last of my cash and bought a house. That home, which belonged to some nice socialist friends of Dyanne’s similarly nice socialist parents, was in Echo Park, a barrio plagued by Chicano gangs. I loved it, especially for the apprehensive faces of my Hollywood contacts when I told them where I lived after inviting them to dinner. But, despite the gang graffiti on the garage door, the house itself was quite welcoming, a slightly long-in-the-tooth craftsman left over from the long gone days (1920s) when that neighborhood was tonier.

It was there, shortly after returning from Europe, that I entertained Love Story author and screenwriter Erich Segal. Just in the nick of time, the film adaptation of Heir was heating up and our mutual agent, Ron Mardigian of William Morris, brought Segal over. Segal was only a couple years older than I, but vastly more famous. “I wrote a book on Plautus,” were the first words out of his mouth. Evidently he wanted to make sure that I regarded him not as a mere author of schlocky best-sellers, but as a full-fledged Harvard classicist. His study of the Roman playwright, I was informed immediately thereafter—and, needless to say, without asking—had received “excellent reviews from the scholarly press.” I stopped myself from giggling. Much as I instantly knew the pompous Segal was an absurd choice to adapt my “noir-ish” novel of a rich boy driving his dead girlfriend around in the trunk of his car, I didn’t want to jeopardize the movie. I was still living more or less hand-to-mouth and would receive a significant check only upon filming.

In fact, I had been typing my next book practically from the moment I stepped off the boat from Europe, working against the clock to preserve my dream of becoming a writer from the encroaching reality of supporting a family. I gave up on the deserters, reaching for my subject into the world of my friends and acquaintances—the adventures of Barbara Garson and her husband Marvin. Politically speaking, they interested me more than the deserters. Barbara, a left-wing activist who had been in Dyanne and my screenwriting class at Yale, was notorious then for writing the anti-Vietnam War hit MacBird, a satiric Shakespeare knockoff in which a dolt-like LBJ was presented as a modern Macbeth. It ran Off-Broadway for several years. Marvin had been a somewhat less prominent Berkeley student protest figure. The theme of my book was to be what happens when a “revolutionary couple” sets out to change the world and ends up making a million in the process.

To demonstrate my growing support for women’s lib, or perhaps for the shock value of a man doing such a thing, I wrote the book in the female first person, looking backwards from Barbara’s point of view, or rather from the vantage of the fictional Barbara, Tanya “Mama Tass” Gesner. It was called The Mama Tass Manifesto and had the opening sentence, “If Emma Goldman could see me now, the only female gas station attendant in Brixton, Oklahoma.” The title was printed in the curvy font of a Grateful Dead poster and the flap copy included a quotation from Chairman Mao about the necessity of picking up the gun. (It was 1970!) Instead of the normal author photo on the back, the book had a reproduction of my driver’s license with the address crossed out, to give the impression of a mug shot.

Some of these packaging ideas came from my editor from Heir, Alan Rinzler, who bought the book for Holt, Rinehart & Winston when the manuscript was half finished. To this day, I thank him for it. It wouldn’t be the last time that he’d rescue me in a moment of need, although he would never publish the book you are reading or probably anything else I write for the foreseeable future. Alan—who published seminal works like Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—now considers me an apostate and recently emailed me “I knew you when….”

And he isn’t the only one. At a cocktail party a few months back, I ran into the liberal humorist Harry Shearer of This is Spinal Tap and now of the Huffington Post. A mutual acquaintance, not realizing we had known each other for over thirty years, attempted to introduce us by asking Harry if he knew me. He replied cuttingly, “I knew Roger when he was another person.” There are plenty of others who just turned away.

But am I “another person”? I will leave that to the reader to decide.

In any case, The Mama Tass Manifesto is steeped in the radical politics of its time, which were all around me. Echo Park had become a haven for the refugees of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Most of them were grouped around an organization called the Echo Park Food Conspiracy, led by the lawyer Art Goldberg and his sister Jackie, both of them ‘red diaper babies’ and self-proclaimed Maoist revolutionaries. Art still practices law in that neighborhood. Jackie is currently a California State Assemblywoman in the forefront of the gay marriage movement.

In those days, Jackie, occasionally accompanied by longtime California Communist Party leader Dorothy Healey, taught a course in American labor history one night a week at our house. Art, more of a glad-handing sort, ran the Food Conspiracy. The idea was to use cheap, cooperatively bought food as an organizing device, setting up a neighborhood market where young activists could radicalize the mostly Latino poor of the community. I remember the jovial Art walking among the various shoppers, thrusting his fist in the air and clapping some on the back. “Venceremos, amigos,” he’d say, “La lucha continua!” The struggle continues! He interspersed his barely serviceable Spanish with smiling nods to local Asians, whose native languages he couldn’t identify, let alone speak. Whenever he saw me, he’d pull me aside and say, “Hey, Roger, the struggle continues! Howzit goin’ in Hollywood, man? When’re we gonna get some of your movie star friends down here? Teach them a little Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung thought?” It was hard to tell if he was joking or not.

But in truth there were developing connections between the film world and the young radicals of the time, and I was a part of them. One of my first studio screenplay assignments after returning from Spain was an original idea of mine called The Black Wizard of the Dakotas. Inspired by John Ford and the left-wing Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha—and based on information I’d gleaned from Jackie’s labor history class—Black Wizard was a Marxist Western (with a hint of magic) about the nineteenth-century Colorado mining strikes. The script was developed at Warner Brothers for director Paul Williams. Williams had just made a critically-acclaimed but low-budget film called The Revolutionary, the tale of a college student known as “A” (played by Jon Voight, today one of the few movie star supporters of the Iraq War) who rebels against his bourgeois father and gets caught painting anti-capitalist manifestos on the wall. But I don’t think even Williams and his producer partner Ed Pressman had any idea of just how left my script would be. (Let’s say Maxim Gorky couldn’t have done better.)

Not that the executives at Warners seemed to care. There was no mention of the script’s politics in our meetings, but they eventually chose to make another film with Paul Williams on a subject they deemed more commercial: marijuana. Unfortunately, Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost Bag Blues was a flop. Williams—whose career skidded and who has had trouble making movies ever since—went on to attempt to help fugitive Black Panther Huey Newton escape to Cuba under bizarre and ironic circumstances, which I witnessed.

That Panther connection may have been what attracted Pressman and Williams to me in the first place. They probably knew something about it when they came to dinner in Echo Park the first time. At the time, I donated some of my Hollywood money to the Black Panther Breakfast Program; I regarded this humorously as a tithe, though it was considerably less than ten percent. (The Breakfast Program, which fed inner city children, was well publicized then and helped distract from some of the Panthers’ more controversial activities, like drug dealing and murder.) Around ten o’clock at night and often unannounced, some of the brethren in black berets and leather jackets would arrive at my house with a half-dozen or so kids in tow. “Hey, Rajah,” the ringleader would say, “these children got nowhere to go for ham ’n eggs tomorrow.” He knew how to con a Hollywood mark when he saw one. How could I turn them down? I would write a check for a couple of hundred bucks—payable to cash, of course—trying not to wonder whether the money would be used for food or for AK-47s. I guess I didn’t care to know, so long as they left quickly. I have to admit I was a little nervous having the Panthers in my home. I was always pacifist by temperament, even when I flirted with more violent types, and I did have children of my own in the house, first Raphael and then Jesse, born two days after Christmas 1970.

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.