This Day in Film History (Death of Ward Bond, Prolific Character Actor and Wayne Sidekick)

Nov. 5, 1960—Ward Bond, an actor with more than 200 credits on the big and small screen—including his starring role on the long-running TV western Wagon Train—died of a heart attack in Dallas.

Most likely, you have seen this busy character actor with the gruff voice and everyman persona in at least two films during the course of a year: on March 17, as a fishing- and boxing-loving priest in The Quiet Man; and, at Christmastime, in It’s a Wonderful Life, as James Stewart’s small-town cop friend Bert. 

In all, he appeared in 13 movies nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (though he himself was never cited).

It is doubtful that Bond, when he heeded a recruiting plea by USC football teammate John Wayne to serve as an extra in the 1928 John Ford film Salute, expected to enjoy a three-decade Hollywood career.

Bond made 23 movies with Wayne and at least that many with Ford, and offscreen the trio would form a boisterous friendship marked by hijinks and epic drinking bouts, often on the director’s yacht. Ford even had Bond play his alter ego (a director named "John Dodge") in the 1957 film Wings of Eagles.

Despite their friendship, the cantankerous Ford gave Bond (and Wayne) endless grief while filming. At one point, during location shooting of The Searchers, Bond had pulled the plug on a camera in order to use his electric razor, unaware that a scene was being filmed then. 

Knowing the director’s explosive temper and penchant to humiliate cast and crew members for an offense, the cameraman didn’t tell Ford what Bond had done till several years after the actor’s death.

Bond’s collegiate athletic career and continued burly build in adulthood encouraged the illusion of a vigorous physical health that he did not possess. He was disqualified from serving in World War II because of epilepsy and suffered from high blood pressure during the four seasons he spent on Wagon Train.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who questioned Bond’s professionalism or work ethic. But he was not universally beloved in the industry, particularly after he co-founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944. 

In the postwar period, this organization became one of the most virulent forces behind the blacklists maintained to stamp out communist or even merely progressive views in Hollywood.

This right-wing activism turned off many Hollywood liberals so that, ironically, Bond found himself underemployed in any films that did not involve Wayne and Ford. 

It wasn’t until he secured the role of western scout Major Seth Adams on Wagon Train that Bond could reach something like his former presence on the screen. But at that point, his presence loomed larger than ever in Hollywood, as the NBC series placed #2 in the Nielsen ratings from its second through fourth seasons.

It came as a surprise in the industry, then, when Bond had his fatal heart attack. Wayne delivered the eulogy for his longtime friend, and, he observed not long before he died, he would think of what roles his friend and extremely versatile character actor might have played had he lived longer.

This Day in Film History (John Garfield Dies, KO’d by Blacklist)

May 21, 1952—No longer able to land a film role in Hollywood despite box-office success for the prior 13 years, back in the New York theater scene close to his heart, John Garfield died at age 39 of a heart attack.

Assigning causes of death can be difficult, and in Garfield’s case it was certainly problematic: 

*Did he die as a result of the rheumatic fever he had contracted almost 20 years before, maybe worsened by his smoking habit? 

*Had the middle-aged star absorbed more punishment than he could stand in an attempt to portray a young boxer in a revival of the Clifford Odets drama Golden Boy? 

*Had his coronary incident occurred during a romantic interlude with the female friend he was visiting at the time of his death, as some salacious gossips had it?

But there is another factor that underlies all of these theories: the stress of lingering questions about alleged Communist associations that, after nine years, had resulted in his blacklisting from Hollywood.

In perhaps his signature movie role, as an ambitious boxer struggling to win a title and maintain his integrity in Body and Soul, Garfield received his second Oscar nomination. When he was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1951, he found himself in the uncomfortable position of life imitating art.

Like his character Charlie Davis, Garfield was reluctant to give up the position in his profession he had worked so intensely to achieve, including creature comforts. Like Davis, he did his share of bobbing and weaving when faced with his moral dilemma, including releasing a ghostwritten article for Look Magazine, “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook,” claiming he had been duped by Communist ideology, in a futile try at compromising with investigators.

But in the end, again like Davis, he found one demand too many to stomach, in this case violating the moral code of the Lower East Side and the Bronx of his childhood: Don’t be a snitch. His bottom line was that he refused to name names.

It may be so hard to assess all that Garfield lost by making his stand because we have lost a sense of his place in movie history. He opened doors to others (Ben Gazzara cited him, in an interview with Lillian and Helen Ross in The Player: A Profile of an Art, "the first actor I had seen in the movies who felt close enough to my own life to be reachable"), but at the same time his reputation was so Himalayan that it could intimidate those who hoped to follow. (For the same book, Kim Hunter recalled how, in rehearsals for A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon  Brando kept saying, "They should have got John  Garfield for Stanley, not me; Garfield was right for the part, not me.")

*He was the first film “Method Actor”. Before Brando, Clift and James Dean became famous for using this naturalistic style of portraying characters, Garfield got there first.  He learned it originally as a member of the ensemble Group Theatre in New York, then brought the style to Hollywood. As author Isaac Butler described it in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Garfield made a crucial adaptation for his first film, Four Daughters in 1938: “He couldn't just do a stage performance on camera. If you've ever seen someone just give a stage-size performance on camera, it's really too much because the camera picks up so much that an audience at the theater will not see. It can really see you think or people talk about it reading your mind. ... So he really had to learn how to do much less and much less and much less, and to strip away and to learn how to perform with a new kind of ease and spontaneity that the camera would kind of pick up and enjoy.”

*He was "the first Jewish film sex symbol," according to Gil Troy's 2018 "Daily Beast" article. The actor’s given name was Jacob Julius Garfinkle, but his friends nicknamed him “Julie.” He was more than handsome; his intensity gave a palpable erotic surge to his scenes with Lana Turner, for instance, in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

*He was crucial in the development of film noir. Other actors—Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum come to mind—are more indelibly associated with the genre. But Garfield not only brought a rebellious persona, but also what TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller called, in Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, “a fiery desire to Make a Difference,” leading to “a caravan of writers, directors, and actors from the New York stage.”

*He pioneered the movement of movie stars into independent production. So chafing at the largely “B” movies to which he was relegated at Warner Brothers that he was suspended 11 times during his nine years at the studio, Garfield started his own production company, Enterprise Studios. A decade later, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas would follow suit with their own companies.

Ironically, the creative freedom that Garfield won through this daring move also helped lead to his blacklisting, according to his daughter Julie in this YouTube clip.  Hollywood studios resented the challenge to their ironclad control that his new venture represented. When HUAC approached them, looking for a liberal Jewish star that they could make an example of, they had three men in mind: Edward G. Robinson, Danny Kaye, and Garfield. Now on his own, Garfield had the least protection.

The actor had first appeared on a list of names of Hollywood actors with suspicious associations in the early 1940s, but within a few years—especially through the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—he came under heightened scrutiny. Garfield was not and had never been a Communist, but he knew people who were: his associates at the Group Theatre and his wife Roberta Seidman.

Additionally, Garfield was vulnerable because of his habit of signing petitions and joining organizations without questioning who might be behind them. A self-described "Democratic liberal," he did it all "without giving it a second thought, almost as if he were autographing for a friend," observed Robert Nott, author of a 2003 biography of the actor, He Ran All the Way.

Eventually Garfield’s phone would be tapped and he would be subjected to surveillance—even when he went to Harlem to visit his dying friend, blacklisted actor Canada Lee. He told HUAC that he would gladly testify about himself but not his wife or his friends. Though he thought this deal had gotten him through his trouble, he learned that HUAC investigators were poring over his testimony for possible perjury charges.

At this point, he was brought into an FBI office and told that the agency already had paperwork showing his wife’s membership in the party, so all he had to do was confirm it and he would be cleared. Instead, he told them what they could do in unprintable terms and walked out.

Altogether, Garfield went 18 months without work. Under the strain of the investigation, he drank more heavily and separated from his wife.

On the day of Garfield’s death, his friend, playwright Clifford Odets, confirmed, in his own HUAC testimony, what the committee knew already: that the actor had never been a Communist.

Garfield's penultimate screen appearance was in The Breaking Point, a Warner Brothers adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. Like a Hemingway hero, Garfield was, in the end, a proud loser, someone willing to experience grievous sacrifice--even the loss of his life--rather than break with the code by which he lived. 

You can sense something of this bloodied yet unbowed attitude in this still from Body and Soul. He didn't have a chance to make enough such classics (his early death precluded him from the chance to make On the Waterfront and The Man With the Golden Arm), but he put all of himself into his work, and film watchers discovering his less-famous films for the first time are in for a treat.

This Day in Broadway History (Robbins Ducks Blacklist by ‘Naming Names’ to HUAC)

May 5, 1953—After three years of dodging inquiries into his past membership in the Communist Party, the threat of exposure of his homosexuality led Jerome Robbins to inform on eight people before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The decision to “name names,” the product of his terror over homophobia, drove a wedge between the rising dancer-choreographer and the associates blacklisted because of his action.

This year marks the centennial of the birth of Robbins, the taskmaster and perfectionist who left indelible marks on both Broadway and American ballet. He had already collaborated with the equally young composer Leonard Bernstein on the jazz-infused dance piece Fancy Free and the Broadway musical that sprang from it, On the Town. As a dancer, he had enthralled New York City Ballet audiences in George Balanchine’s Prodigal Son and Tyl Ulenspiegel, as well as with his choreography of such works as The Guests, Age of Anxiety, and The Cage. His innovative choreography for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I lent an unexpected element to that musical. 

Another choreography assignment, this time for Wonderful Town, brought Robbins further success. But only three months after that musical premiered, Robbins ended up informing on that show’s book writer, Jerome Chodorov. 

In later years, Chodorov was forgiving toward his old theatrical collaborator: “I never was bitter about Jerry, because I figured in those days a homosexual was very vulnerable...Jerry was a weakling, but he was a very talented weakling. And I don't think he did it out of viciousness. He did it out of fear. That's my personal feeling. He didn't want to hurt anybody. He certainly didn't want to hurt himself."

But Chodorov was unusual in his live-and-let-live attitude. More typical was Robbins’ sister and brother-in-law, who were so appalled by the testimony that they would not speak to him for more than two decades. 

To understand the depth of the bitterness Robbins aroused, it should be remembered that he not only informed, but, unlike several of the so-called "friendly witnesses," did not warn those friends he named before the committee. Moreover, he informed on an unusually large number of people—some being what HUAC craved the most: new names not identified before. In addition to Chodorov, the eight included:

* Madeleine Lee Gilford, an actress and activist, who had taught Robbins “the lindy” as he was preparing Fancy Free;

* Lloyd Gough, an actor;

* Elliot Sullivan, another actor, in the hearing room at the time of the testimony; 

* Edna Ocko, a dance critic who had been his friend ever since she had favorably reviewed his Frankie and Johnny in 1938; 

* Lettie Stever, who worked in the office of Robbins’ agent Dick Dorso and had recruited the choreographer into the Party;

* Lionel Berman, a filmmaker; 

* Edward Chodorov, Jerome’s brother, and a playwright, author and film producer in his own right.

After testifying, Robbins, sitting on a sofa, said to playwright Arthur Laurents, “It’ll be years before I know whether I did the right thing.” Laurents, his best friend, was much more certain: “I can tell you right now, you were a shit.”

However stung he may have felt initially by the remark, Robbins’ feelings about the matter later tended to agree with Laurents. In his journal he wrote, “Maybe I will never find a satisfying release from the guilt of it all.”

While there were some who felt that Robbins was primarily motivated by ambition in informing, the general consensus followed Jerome Chodorov’s line that Robbins wanted to conceal his sexual orientation from the public. Edward Chodorov, not as forgiving as his brother, was one. Told by Jerome that Robbins had named them (remarkably enough, without any prompting from the committee), Edward responded cynically: “Stabbed by the wicked fairy!”

What were Robbins’ alternatives to informing? He could have simply remained on Broadway as he had been doing. A number of blacklisted actors, writers and directors were able to choose this route because theatrical funding was more diffuse than in Hollywood and, thus, less likely to boycotting by pressure groups such as the newsletter Red Channels. 

But work in the theater was more sporadic and not as well-paying as the movies. If Robbins hoped to make it to Hollywood—as he would do, triumphantly, in the not-so-distant future—the film world would be closed out to him. Aging out as a performer, with choreography jobs harder to come by, he might have had to become simply a dance teacher.

But exposure of his homosexuality was simply nerve-racking to him. An engagement to dancer Nora Kaye (with whom he was then living) would have helped only temporarily in providing protective cover for his orientation. But Ed Sullivan, who was sympathetic toward HUAC, had already threatened him with exposure in his newspaper column for his lifestyle. 

In those pre-Stonewall days, public knowledge of his true orientation would have wrecked Robbins’ career. The impact of being “outed” (a term not used at the time) could readily be seen outside the entertainment industry, for instance, in the “Lavender Scare” of the time. Though running parallel with the “Red Scare” at the time of Robbins’ testimony, it extended longer and caused more lasting damage to those in national security positions. Thousands of workers were driven from the federal workforce from the late 1940s into the 1960s because of their sexual orientation.

So Robbins testified. As a result, Madeleine Lee Gilford, and her husband, the comic actor Jack Gilford, saw their film and TV work disappear through the end of the Fifties, forcing them to survive “mostly on unemployment insurance,” she said later.

Over a half century later, the Gilfords’ travails would be chronicled, in thinly fictionalized terms, by their son Joe. Robbins (who, before he died in 1998, burnished his Broadway legend as director of both West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof) appears in the script as “Bobby Gerard.”

The play’s title gives a sense of the opprobrium that Robbins, despite his reputation as a dance genius, earned for his testimony: Finks.

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.

This Day in Film History (Robert Rossen “Names Names”)

May 7, 1953 – Two years after refusing to reveal the Communist associations of friends and acquaintances, the Oscar-winning, blacklisted writer-director-producer Robert Rossen made a dramatic about-face before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). His appearance highlighted the dilemmas of Hollywood’s creative talent during the cold war period of the “Great Fear,” while also mirroring the ethical quandaries of Rossen’s best films.

Film fans are likely familiar with the phrase “The Hollywood Ten,” the group of writer-directors who defied HUAC subpoenas in 1947. Part of the reason for that list—containing a nice, round, even number, it should be noted—was that the committee’s media-savvy investigators had whittled it down from a larger list of “The Hollywood Nineteen” or “The Unfriendly Nineteen,” with the ones in the smaller group picked to appear immediately because they had not served in the armed forces during WWII and could therefore look like a “Fifth Column” of Soviet sympathizers. Rossen was among the original 19. (Billy Wilder had this characteristic quip about the “Hollywood Ten”: “Two had talent, and the rest were just unfriendly."

Rossen’s pre-HUAC films reflected his personal background as well as the intense class consciousness that arose from his then-fervent Communism. His 1937 script for They Won’t Forget was a fictionalized version of the notorious Leo Frank lynching in the South. Though he did not write the screenplay for the 1947 John Garfield movie Body and Soul, the boxing milieu was one he knew intimately as a young pugilist in New York City. Other notable films of his during that period – A Walk in the Sun, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and Johnny O’Clock –preceded his career-topping triumph, the adaptation of All the King’s Men that netted him a Best Picture Oscar.

Two of these films, Body and Soul and All the King’s Men, feature protagonists led, by their fierce drive and ambition, to an ethical crossroads. John Garfield’s pugilist in the former must decide whether to go along with the corrupt byways of the boxing profession; Broderick Crawford’s Willy Stark, a Huey Long stand-in, decides that cheating is the best way to win election as governor if it means he’ll be able to accomplish the reforms they want.

Both men make Faustian bargains in pursuit of their goals. Now Rossen was tempted to do the same.

Witnesses before HUAC faced a Catch-22. Refusing to testify on First Amendment grounds was not allowed by the courts and would only open them up to indictments. Taking the Fifth Amendment was legally permissible but would immediately lead to suspension by the studios.

And then there was informing, a smelly business all around. Even if you no longer believed in the Communist Party – and Rossen appears to have left it sometime between the end of the war and 1949—informing meant testifying against longtime friends.

After two years of refusing to name names, Rossen – by now, living in Mexico – could no longer find work. His health was in serious disrepair because of diabetes and worsening drinking. He needed a job. He was ready to do what had to be done.

Nevertheless, his testimony in 1953 was shot through with unease, including his answer to a question about whether he would be regarded as a stool pigeon: “I think that is a rather romantic--that is like children playing at cops and robbers. They are just kidding themselves, and I don't care what the characterizations in terms of--people can take whatever positions they want.”

After his testimony, Rossen was able to find work again. After some indifferent films in the rest of the 1960s, he rebounded with the Paul Newman film The Hustler (1961), for which he was nominated for another Oscar, and the Warren Beatty movie Lilith (1964). But none of these post-HUAC films evinced the social consciousness of his earlier films.

Though he had continued to make films, Rossen stayed away from Hollywood after that. I’m not sure why – disgust at the suits that had forced him to testify? Unwillingness to show his face around friends he’d betrayed? Both? Whatever the case, the health difficulties that had led to his 180-degree turn before HUAC eventually led to his death, at age 57, in 1966.

Two full-length accounts of the blacklist period and that of the era preceding it, Nancy Lynn Schwartz’s The Hollywood Writers' Wars and Victor S. Navasky’s Naming Names, are diminished somewhat in value because of their simplistic depiction of the blacklist victims as unblemished heroes. In a way, it reflects the black-and-white viewpoints that divided so many back then.

It is equally as true that the Communist Party in Hollywood (including Rossen) crushed internal dissent and performed unseemly ideological somersaults to reflect the Soviet line as that HUAC flagrantly abused witnesses’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and association. Yet you’d never know it from several years ago, when much of today’s Hollywood sat in their chairs, without applauding, when director (and, like Rossen, informer) Elia Kazan was awarded a special Oscar for lifetime achievement. Unfortunately, it reflected what has become painfully true in recent years: Hollywood has become better at moral posturing than at making movies.