<\/p>\n
\n\tIt turns out the history books<\/a> have it all wrong. Richard Nixon was a hero. Dalton Trumbo<\/a> was a snitch. And Elia Kazan<\/a>, the most notorious name-namer of them all, was simply a courageous patriot who told the truth.<\/p>\n \n\tAll this is courtesy of James Ellroy, the cantankerous 78-year-old crime novelist \u2014\u00a0The Black Dahlia<\/em>,\u00a0L.A. Confidential<\/em>,\u00a0American Tabloid<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 who never met a consensus he didn\u2019t want to burn down. His latest obsession \u2014 aired out in part in\u00a0Red Sheet<\/em>, his 18th novel, out June 9<\/a> \u2014 is the Blacklist<\/a>, which in Ellroy\u2019s estimation was a greatly misunderstood act of flag-waving righteousness that Hollywood has been scandalously misrepresenting ever since.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe Hollywood 10 \u2014 they were either ex-Party or Party,\u201d Ellroy tells The Hollywood Reporter<\/em>. \u201cEverybody knew what Stalin was doing. They just threw in their lot with Stalinists and with the enemies of America. \u2026 That\u2019s who [these] people were.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn the new novel, Ellroy once again resurrects Freddy Otash, the real-life Hollywood private dick who, in the 1950s, was famous for wiretapping movie stars for\u00a0Confidential<\/em>\u00a0magazine. Otash last popped up in Ellroy\u2019s fiction in 2023\u2019s\u00a0The Enchanters<\/em>, which delved into the cover-up of Marilyn Monroe\u2019s \u201cmurder.\u201d This new tome picks up a few months later, in the jittery aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and has Otash mixing it up with Nixon\u2019s doomed gubernatorial campaign and a corrupt communist trade union as he heads a Red-hunting government probe launched by Robert F. Kennedy.<\/p>\n \n\tThe plot of\u00a0Red Sheet<\/em>, though, only grazes the surface of Ellroy\u2019s unique historical perspective. He believes a genuine Moscow-controlled espionage network was operating in Hollywood back in the 1950s, that the Soviet threat was grave and that history has gotten the era\u2019s heroes and villains exactly backwards. The Nixon he remembers was a benighted figure who would slip his handlers and quietly roam America\u2019s streets. \u201cHe would lose himself and walk into the inner city,\u201d Ellroy tells THR<\/em>. \u201cNot looking for women, not looking for anything in particular.\u201d His Trumbo is certainly a lot darker than Bryan Cranston\u2019s saintly version<\/a>: a \u201cfat-cat wealthy Hollywood screenwriter\u201d and FBI informant who \u201cnamed names in private\u201d while performing martyrdom in public. And Kazan, the director of\u00a0On the Waterfront<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0A Streetcar Named Desire<\/em>, who notoriously named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, was simply a man who did the right thing \u2014 unlike half the attendees at the 1999 Academy Awards who sat on their hands when Kazan finally received an honorary Oscar.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cPunk-ass chicken-shit bullshit,\u201d Ellroy says of the snub.<\/p>\n \n\tBut don\u2019t worry, Hollywood \u2014 the author has already moved on. His next book, he promises, will have \u201call kinds of dirty shit\u201d about the Los Angeles Dodgers.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat follows is a condensed and lightly edited version of our conversation.<\/em><\/p>\n \n\t***<\/p>\n \n\tI started at The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> in 2012. One of the first big stories I remember was our apology over the Blacklist \u2014 acknowledging THR<\/em> founder\u2019s Billy Wilkerson\u2019s hand in it all<\/a>. I was raised to believe the Blacklist was a terrible thing, that THR<\/em> was a villainous part of it, that McCarthy was a horrible human being and these were wonderful people \u2014 Dalton Trumbo, etc. <\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tYour book flips the script. And I don\u2019t think you\u2019re just doing it dramatically. I think you actually believe it. Am I right?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tYes. There are some things here. The government didn\u2019t mandate the Blacklist. It was the studio heads. It was Harry Cohn and Louis B. Mayer, Dore Schary and \u2014 who else? Jack L. Warner, and the gentile crew over at 20th Century Fox. They were the ones who initiated that. And it was very, very loose from the beginning. Some guys worked if the studio guys liked them, and let them work under pseudonyms. And that was that.<\/p>\n \n\tThe book reaches back further than the Blacklist, though. There\u2019s a whole strand running through the Spanish Civil War.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThe reign of terror that I describe goes back to Mexico in the \u201920s. There have only been three novels that I know of written about the communist rule and the torture of churches and the murder of priests and the forbidding of the mass and the raping of nuns. Graham Greene\u2019s book, which I think was published in \u201939 or \u201940, The Power and the Glory<\/a><\/em>. My earlier book, This Storm<\/a><\/em>. And now Red Sheet<\/em> \u2014 only I extend the narrative up into the Spanish Civil War [1936\u20131939], where the International Brigade is held to be the good guys of the conflict when there were no good guys in the conflict.<\/p>\n \n\tYour choice was between [General Francisco] Franco, who was a minion of Hitler, and the IB [International Brigades], which was full of all kinds of whacked-out idealists and hardcore Soviet Reds who murdered 200 Trotskyites on Stalin\u2019s orders because Stalin didn\u2019t want anyone to know the Trotskyites were fighting on the so-called right side. The religious atrocities were truly horrific and astounding. And then Stalin in the 1930s with the show trials and the estimated 35 million people he killed during that horrific decade.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd how does that connect back to Hollywood?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThe Hollywood 10 \u2014 they were either ex-Party or Party, and they were mandated. The hatchet man, of course, was John Howard Lawson, and his boss was a man named V.J. Jerome [the Communist Party USA\u2019s longtime cultural commissar]. I can give you one example. They thought that Budd Schulberg\u2019s very fine Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run?<\/a><\/em>, wasn\u2019t proletarian enough. And they held him up, in an apartment off of Hollywood Blvd. and Fairfax Ave., hostage. He finally quit the Party over that.<\/p>\n \n\tEverybody knew what Stalin was doing. They just threw in their lot with Stalinists and with the enemies of America. And in effect \u2014 this is the core of it \u2014 a grand jury was impaneled, and you\u2019re not allowed to cite either the First Amendment or the Fifth in a grand jury, you have to answer the questions or you go to the can for a year. So the Hollywood 10 guys, most of them didn\u2019t even make the one-year mark. They just cut them loose. And a bunch of them, like Dalton Trumbo, were FBI [informants] in four months and named names in private. That\u2019s who the people were.<\/p>\n \n\tCan you explain a bit about where Whittaker Chambers fits into all this?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tYou want me to give you a primer on Whittaker Chambers? He was in the CP for years \u2014 years and years \u2014 and he was good friends with Alger Hiss. And when he said goodbye, he said, \u201cAlger, I\u2019m going on the run. They could find me and kill me with a Makarov pistol pop to the back of the head.\u201d And Hiss replied with the old line: \u201cYou want to make an omelet, you got to break a few eggs.\u201d And Chambers got the last word. He said: \u201cYes, but where\u2019s the omelet?\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHe wrote a book and it\u2019s heartrending. It\u2019s one of the greatest books I\u2019ve ever read. Witness<\/em>, his autobiography<\/a>. He was a brave, brave guy. He went to the Feds in \u201939 and \u201940 and they just blew him off. And then he volunteered to testify at the \u201948 hearings.<\/p>\n \n\tIt was an open secret that there were a bunch of Reds in the State Department, and Hiss was one of the people who put together the UN Charter in San Francisco after the war. The Democrats, still in power, were terrified at the recently lost and much beloved Franklin Roosevelt and the fighting-for-his-life and feisty Harry S. Truman \u2014 they didn\u2019t want this stuff coming out, so they just sat on it. Chambers came and testified, and a few men \u2014 Richard Nixon, Robert Stripling, who was the chief investigator \u2014 believed him. Hiss was a good-looking guy, a good-looking wife, the chief architect of the United Nations. But some people believed Chambers. And then the evidence started coming in. <\/p>\n \n\tAnd then Chambers did an astoundingly brave thing. He went to Nixon and said, \u201cCongressman, I\u2019m a homosexual, and if you think it will help our cause, I would admit this in open court so that Hiss\u2019 lawyers don\u2019t dig it up and use it to discredit me\u201d \u2014 which took a lot of balls in 1948.<\/p>\n \n\tSo who was Dalton Trumbo, really? Because he\u2019s played as a hero by Bryan Cranston in the 2015 biopic Trumbo<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tOf course, that\u2019s the myth.<\/p>\n \n\tSo who was he really?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tHe was a communist. He was an ex-communist. He was a fat-cat wealthy Hollywood screenwriter. He was a federal informant. He was a dandy and he made a shitload of money. At one point he was as high a paid screenwriter as there was in Hollywood, along with Dudley Nichols, who worked with John Ford all the time.<\/p>\n \n\tSo he was informing even though he\u2019s thought of to have not spoken, not ratted?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tHe informed before. He informed whenever his handler called him and gave up people. And they all did. Snitch culture makes police work go \u2019round. Virtually \u2014 if you want to fast-forward a little bit \u2014 every third man in the Black Panthers and the Black Muslim groups was an FBI informant. They\u2019re everywhere. The militias, they stepped it up when Obama was elected president because they figured, being half-Black, he was a high-risk target for assassins. Maybe every second man in those crazy groups was an informant. The federal government paid them, they reported.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd then on the other end you have Elia Kazan, who\u2019s been turned into a villainous figure in Hollywood history. And Budd Schulberg, who did name names. And you\u2019re saying they did the right thing. That they were heroes.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\t\u201cYou\u2019re going to lose half a million dollars a year if you do this\u201d \u2014 do what? Kazan never made half a million dollars a year in his life. That kind of money wasn\u2019t around back then. He lived big and fat, the equivalent of three million a year today. But he did it to work. And he did it. I\u2019ve read his autobiography. V.J. Jerome came in when Kazan was a kid member of the Group Theater in the 1930s and said: \u201cLet me tell you how it\u2019s going to be. You\u2019re going to make proletarian dramas to further our message, and that\u2019s it.\u201d He was a member of the Party. He started wrangling then.<\/p>\n \n\tDon\u2019t you infer that On the Waterfront<\/em> was a message about informing? I feel like I\u2019ve heard that somewhere.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tYeah, I\u2019ve heard it. It\u2019s in Kazan\u2019s autobiography. But Schulberg believed it to be true. And actually Schulberg was a better guy than Kazan. Just a very, very, very good guy. He was the son of B.P. Schulberg, who ran Paramount. His best friend was a kid named Maurice Rapf, who was another son of a studio head. They went to Russia in the early 1930s when FDR lifted the travel ban and were astounded at the oppression and the poverty. Yet he stayed in the Party. He had friends in the Party. And he stayed in it until V.J. Jerome and John Howard Lawson locked him up in an apartment on Hollywood and Fairfax and told him to rewrite his book from scratch. And Schulberg said, \u201cFuck you.\u201d And the book was published. And it\u2019s still in print today.<\/p>\n \n\tBut Schulberg didn\u2019t do something that Kazan did. Kazan took out an ad talking about himself in world-historical terms and why he did the right thing. And it was a grandiose, stupid and self-destructive thing to do, whereas Schulberg just went about his life as a family man and a screenwriter.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat year was that ad?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tShortly after Kazan testified, in the winter into the spring of \u201952. The New York Times<\/em>. April 1952.<\/p>\n \n\tAmy Madigan just won an Oscar this year, and it brought up that she wouldn\u2019t stand for Kazan at the \u201999 Oscars. She\u2019s been asked about it. Spielberg didn\u2019t stand, or didn\u2019t clap. What do you make of the way Hollywood treats Kazan?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tI just think it\u2019s punk-ass chicken-shit bullshit. Fifty years in the past \u2014 who are you going to stand up for? Who are you not going to stand up for 30 years from now. Who\u2019ll stand up when some biopic comes out about Donald Trump and some actor wins the best actor award? We move on, we live, we change, we forgive.<\/p>\n \n\tYour argument involves a lot of civil rights and race relations \u2014 and you\u2019re basically saying that the Communist or ex-Communist Party members were a hindrance to that movement, not in fact a help. Explain that to me.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tOne thing on the Kennedys: the Kennedys were ardently anti-communist, and Robert Kennedy did want the CP members and ex-CP members expunged from the civil rights movement. John F. Kennedy spent a very long two- or three-hour walk around the Rose Garden at the White House telling Martin Luther King, \u201cDoctor, please check out these ex-Reds so you won\u2019t be discredited.\u201d And King refused. They were foursquare anti-communist and foursquare civil rights \u2014 as Freddy Otash and Tom Bradley become in the course of this book.<\/p>\n \n\tSo when people start calling me a red-baiter over this book, they certainly can\u2019t call me a race-baiter, given the way I portray the civil rights movement and Tom Bradley. But there was a very bad deal going on in Detroit in the summer of 1943, systemic bigotry at its worst, and the CP flooded the place with bad dope and real bad cheap rot-gut booze. There were a lot of OD\u2019s that are attributable to the Reds. The cops in Detroit believed it at the time.<\/p>\n \n\tThey also were secretly steadfastly against FDR passing anti-lynching legislation in the South. They didn\u2019t want it. They wanted Blacks to be lynched in the South.<\/p>\n \n\tWait \u2014 the Communist Party?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tCP. Yeah. And Roosevelt didn\u2019t consider it an issue because he wanted to carry the South and he didn\u2019t want to offend the Democratic congressmen down there. It was finally his wife, Eleanor, who talked him into, in fact, passing anti-lynching legislation.<\/p>\n \n\tWhy was the CP against anti-lynching legislation?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tBecause it made America look bad. They were out to take this country down. They were running espionage networks here as early as the mid-1920s.<\/p>\n \n\tWe haven\u2019t talked about Richard Nixon. He\u2019s running for governor in the main time period of the novel, and you paint a very different Nixon than the one we know from movies and books and pop culture. Was that based on your own research? What were you trying to show?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tHe did have those fugue states that I describe. They began as early as \u201956, when he was a sitting vice president and almost became president on the occasion of Dwight Eisenhower\u2019s very serious heart attack the previous year. He was a heartbeat away. But he would lose himself and walk into the inner city. Not looking for women, not looking for anything in particular. Having a few belts with people in bars. Some people honestly didn\u2019t recognize him. Some did. He did it in the \u201960 election when he ran against Kennedy. He did it in the \u201962 election when he lost to Pat Brown, which is what I portray in the book. And finally John Ehrlichman told him: \u201cDick, you got to stop drinking and chasing women and going off on these walkabouts, or if you ever run for president or any other public office, I won\u2019t work for you again, and neither will Bob Haldeman.\u201d They were always rescuing him, finding him in some coffeehouse at 24th and Western, talking to people.<\/p>\n \n\tYou depict one photo of him giving a birthday cake to Black children in the city. Is that a real photo, or did you make it up?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tI made it up. It\u2019s really the one question I don\u2019t answer, which is what\u2019s real and what\u2019s not. He was strangely, strangely \u2014\u00a0and keep in mind, this is 10 years pre-Watergate \u2014\u00a0he had gone bad in a very big way between the time he ran for governor and was subsumed by Pat Brown and subsumed by his own self-pity.<\/p>\n \n\tJust to be clear \u2014 Joseph McCarthy, you also consider was a bad man. You\u2019re not defending him.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tYeah. He was a very bad guy. He made up stuff out of whole cloth and he was batshit crazy, closeted homosexual, bad, bad alcoholic who succeeded in drinking himself to death on the good side of 50. Everything now is called \u201cMcCarthyism,\u201d and it\u2019s a whole bunch of different things.<\/p>\n \n\tSwitching gears. There\u2019s a separate dedication page in the book \u2014 just Judy Henske<\/a>\u2019s name and her dates, 1936 to 2022. Freddy ends Red Sheet<\/em> engaged to her. What was she to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tOh man, I had it bad for her. There\u2019s a clip on YouTube \u2014 it\u2019s The Judy Garland Show<\/em>, early July 1963<\/a>. Judy Henske is a guest. She sings \u201cGod Bless the Child,\u201d the Billie Holiday song. It breaks your heart. And then she does a goof on folk music with Mel Torm\u00e9 and Jerry Van Dyke, and she towers over them. She was so fucking lovable. And awkward and big. The second my head hit 6-foot-2, I realized Judy Henske could be my girlfriend, because I was taller than her.<\/p>\n \n\tSo what\u2019s next? You said something at the top of our conversation about Dodger Stadium.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThe next book I\u2019m writing has all kinds of stuff about the dirty shit that the Dodgers and the L.A. City Council pulled to get the poor people out of Chavez Ravine. All I\u2019ve got to do is write the damn thing and go on this upcoming book tour.<\/p>\n \n\t***<\/p>\n \n\tRed Sheet<\/em>\u00a0by James Ellroy is published June 9 by Knopf ($35)<\/a>. Ellroy\u2019s tour brings him to Vroman\u2019s in Pasadena on June 10<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It turns out the history books have it all wrong. Richard Nixon was a hero. Dalton Trumbo was a snitch. And Elia Kazan, the most notorious name-namer of them all, was simply a courageous patriot who told the truth. All this is courtesy of James Ellroy, the cantankerous 78-year-old crime novelist \u2014\u00a0The Black Dahlia,\u00a0L.A. Confidential,\u00a0American […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[4737,4736,1693,1942],"class_list":{"0":"post-5219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fashion","8":"tag-blacklist","9":"tag-ellroy","10":"tag-james","11":"tag-wrong"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5221,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5219\/revisions\/5221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}