“Dr. Romeo Greenschpoon, now known as Dr. Ralph R. Greenson. Nineteen thirty-seven. An active member of the Los Angeles Communist Party.”
Another image leapt on screen: a photograph from the same era that I immediately recognized as of a much younger version of the rather horse-faced Dr. Engelberg.
“One of Dr. Greenson’s closest friends, since those early, early days-Dr. Hyman Engelberg. On occasion they have even shared medical offices. Dr. Engelberg has been a particularly zealous Communist, and in his spare time has been an instructor for the Communist People’s Educational Center in Los Angeles.”
“Excuse me-you have me at a disadvantage,” I told the darkness. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
“Mr. Smith.”
“Yeah, well, that’s who Capra sent to Washington, right? Look, Hollywood in those days was full of young liberals who got caught up in this Commie stuff. Budding intellectuals who took the Depression as a hint America wasn’t perfect. Plus, they dug the cult of secrecy-aliases, underground meetings, double identities. Youthful follies, says I.”
Mild defensiveness came into the voice: “Both Greenson and Engelberg were highly active in the Hollywood League for Democratic Action, a well-known Communist front.”
I went ahead and laughed at that. “Mr. Smith, that started out as the Anti-Nazi League, if memory serves. This brand of all-American Commie was up in arms about fascism long before Pearl Harbor. I mean, it’s your show-I’m your guest, right? But don’t hand me peanut shells and tell me somebody stole your peanuts.”
That actually got a dry chuckle out of the darkness.
A face flashed on the screen that I didn’t recognize, same era, a young guy in a flannel shirt and denim overalls with a hammer in his hand (no sickle, though).
“Meet John Murray. A carpenter by trade, originally. Before the war, he formed a leftist coalition designed to take over the Hollywood locals. During the war, as a colonel, he worked with a young army psychiatrist who was using Freudian-Marxist techniques and philosophies in dealing with mental casualties of war.”
A slightly older Greenson, in the uniform of an army captain, popped onto the screen.
“That psychiatrist, of course, was Dr. Ralph Greenson, stationed at Fort Logan, Colorado. To give the devil his due, Greenson had great success with many of his patients.”
I must have missed the part where Greenson was shown to be the devil. But I was starting to think I was not a guest of the CIA, rather the FBI. The paranoid, McCarthyesque slant reeked of J. Edgar Hoover.
A more recent photo of Greenson, outside his office, took the screen. Another surveillance photo.
“Greenson, of course, became a successful Beverly Hills psychiatrist. Murray worked and traveled for a company we believe to be a Communist front, most frequently going to Mexico. During the ’50s, despite the House Un-American Activities Committee making a target out of Hollywood, neither Greenson nor Engelberg was dissuaded from pursuing their radical beliefs. Communist cell meetings were frequently held at Greenson’s home, and also at Murray’s Santa Monica home, where he lived with his wife…”
A younger, more attractive photo of Eunice Murray with her husband, John, outside a modest clapboard home, shimmered on the screen.
“… Eunice.”
Another click announced a more recent picture of Engelberg, this a studio portrait.
“Though he had been particularly active and outspoken, Engelberg finally went deep underground during the rest of the so-called Red Scare years.”
I sighed and said, “Marilyn leaned left, but she was no Commie.”
“Her husband was and is.”
“Her ex-husband Arthur Miller? Far as I’m concerned, he’s just another one of these arty dilettantes. Like Marilyn’s poet pal, Norman Rosten, and for that matter the Strasbergs. What are you trying to convince me of? That a lot of stars and Beverly Hills doctors are politically naive? Sold. By the way, doesn’t your file say my father ran a leftist bookstore on the West Side in Chicago? So obviously I’m a Commie, too, right?”
“These are dangerous people, Mr. Heller. Zealots behind their American masks.”
A blurry color photograph came on of a heavyset guy who seemed vaguely familiar. He wore a Mexican-print shirt and was drinking a beer and smiling at somebody off-camera. Then I pegged it: his features echoed Eunice Murray’s husband.
“This is Churchill Murray, John’s brother, who runs a Communist propaganda radio station in Mexico City. He has countless questionable political contacts, including diplomats from the Cuban and Soviet embassies there.”
Now came a color surveillance photo of a balding guy with glasses and a pipe, talking to Churchill Murray outside a cantina.
“Frederick Vanderbilt Field-great-great-grandson of the railroad tycoon. Notorious silver-spoon Communist who was exposed as a Comintern operative and fled to Mexico City. There he was a mainstay of Zona Rosa, a colony of expatriate Americans, Communists mostly, including John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, and of course Churchill Murray-Eunice Murray’s brother-in-law.”
Wearily I said, “So Marilyn had some extreme leftists in her life. I would imagine that’s true of a lot of Hollywood stars.”
“I’m sure it is, Mr. Heller. But not a lot of Hollywood stars have had intimate access to the president and the attorney general.”
“Now you’re imagining Marilyn is a Commie spy?”
“No. A dupe. And we’re not imagining anything.”
A click announced a very recent picture of a beaming Marilyn at a restaurant table with Vanderbilt Field.
“Field is who Miss Monroe stayed with, Mr. Heller, when she went on her buying trip to Mexico, for new furnishings and decorations for her home, a trip on which Miss Monroe was accompanied by Eunice Murray.”
“Okay. So?”
“So, Mr. Heller-Frederick Vanderbilt Field is an active Soviet agent.”
I didn’t say anything. What had seemed foolish at first had become something real and troubling as hell. Marilyn getting friendly with Field, in the middle of her affairs with Jack and Bobby, had made security risks out of the president and the attorney general.
“We have surveillance tapes in which Field, in the guise of conversation, is heard pumping Miss Monroe for confidential information she learned in discussions with the Kennedy brothers.”
“Was Marilyn forthcoming?”
“She was. From her point of view, she was answering questions from an expatriate longing for news of home. Much of what she and Fields discussed was only tangentially associated with politics, her interest in civil rights for example, or her frustration that Jack Kennedy hadn’t fired J. Edgar Hoover. But she also talked about what she viewed as her own intellectual shortcomings, her desire to quit show business and change her life completely.”
The latter was typical Marilyn, and a daydream she would have under no circumstances pursued, at least not until age caught up with her.
Which now it never would.
“Mr. Heller… frankly, we believe Dr. Ralph Greenson, like Vanderbilt Field, is a Soviet agent. Greenson helped form, and then secretly ran, the National Arts, Sciences and Professions Committee, a major force in promoting Communist ideology on the West Coast. Heading up this group, Greenson has influenced sister organizations like the Doctors Professional Group, of which Engelberg was at one time a prominent member.”
“I thought the government had stopped looking for Reds under every bed.”
“Perhaps under beds, but not in psychiatrists’ offices. It is Soviet espionage policy for cell leaders to have psychiatric training, aiding them in the periodic need to interview key cell members, to appraise their state of mind and continuing loyalty. Mr. Heller, psychoanalysts’ offices around the U.S. have been regularly used by Soviet agents as safe havens for the transfer of intelligence.”
“And I’m supposed to buy that Greenson is one of those?”