Flashback, September 1955: Blacklisted Actor Philip Loeb Dies in Suicide

The next time Ann Coulter rants about how there were no blacklist victims, somebody should stop her and ask how it came to be, then, that Philip Loeb, a 64-year-old actor chronically underemployed after being fired from the hit sitcom The Goldbergs, killed himself in New York City on September 1, 1955.

Yes, Ms. Coulter might retort that no single thing drives a person to suicide. Yes, she might point to Loeb's ongoing depression from the death of his wife and the institutionalization of his schizoid son.

But no honest accounting for why Loeb swallowed barbiturates in the Taft Hotel, can leave out the fact that several years before, General Foods, the sponsor of The Goldbergs, was so alarmed that he’d been fingered as a Communist that they demanded his ouster from the long-running radio and TV hit; that not even the show’s shrewd and resourceful star, Gertrude Berg, could get them to relent; that Loeb had been reduced to infrequent, less remunerative work; and that anguish over his family’s medical bills (and his own) was compounded by his inability to pay for them.

In the months before his death, Loeb’s despair was palpable to close friends. Another blacklist victim, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, wrote in his memoir, Inside Out: "I never saw Loeb smile, even when Zero (Mostel) was at his hilarious best."

Mostel and wife Kate allowed Loeb to live for awhile with them before he died. Two decades later, the larger-than-life actor would play a character, Hecky Brown, whose tragic fate mirrored Loeb’s in a movie that Bernstein wrote, The Front (1976), starring Woody Allen.

For a long time, I wondered why so many Hollywood liberals sat in sullen silence as director Elia Kazan received an honorary Oscar in 1998. Yes, “Gadg” might have owned up to regret about turning informer during the Red Scare of the 1950s, but many leftists had been equally unapologetic about conceding their own errors from the period, such as excusing the excesses of Stalin's Soviet Union.

Then I found out that Kazan had named Loeb, as well as seven other friends from his days as a union activist, before the House Un-American Activities Committee in April 1952. The director could justify his action by saying that everyone he’d named had been previously cited by someone else.

In Loeb’s case, that was true: five years before his death, he’d been listed in the rabidly anti-Communist magazine Red Channels as a Communist. Several aspects of his background made him vulnerable: his union activism with Actors Equity, his 1938 defense of Stalin’s “show trials,” and even his religion. (One-third of the 151 people listed as communist by Red Channels were Jewish.)

But Kazan’s testimony could have slowed, at least, the momentum of this campaign. Even if you don't buy Victor Navasky's overly broad whitewashing of the motives of Communists and former Communists targeted by McCarthyism in Naming Names (1980), you can't help but understand their visceral anger over the loss of a life.

Additionally, Loeb was not a Communist, he was at pains to say so repeatedly, and the J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would clear him only a few days after his death. But it came too late for the actor.

After his termination from The Goldbergs, Loeb returned to the stage, where he had worked for three decades before his stint as the lovable father on the sitcom. But his last job came in 1953, in a revival, for $87.50 a week.

After this point, his prospects, already dim, became bleak:

* Supporters who initially sent him small checks stopped writing;

* He was forced to accept a $40,000 settlement from The Goldbergs that was less than half what he’d originally rejected;

* He developed cataracts;

* He was fired from a job teaching at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts;

* New York taxation authorities notified him that he owed $1,000—but he had less than $300 in the bank.

Loeb didn’t leave a suicide note, but it was obvious to those who knew him at the time—just as it should be to anyone reading about his life now (including Ms. Coulter)—what had caused his death. A letter to The New York Times expressed it best: he “died of a sickness commonly called the blacklist."

One other note: the particular form this particular “sickness” took was different—and, in some ways, more virulent—than the more famous blacklist emanating from Hollywood. The East Coast-based radio and TV industries employed more entertainment professionals at the time than the film studios, according to David Everitt’s A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television. This meant that the reach of potential smears was greater.

Moreover, rather than originating from the House Un-American Activities Committee, the virus for this “sickness” was spread by a cabal involved with Red Channels: three former FBI agents, an upstate New York grocery chain tycoon, and an ex-naval intelligence officer.

In other words, a completely unofficial body had the power to affect actors’ employment—and, in the case of Loeb, life itself.