This didn’t hold up, though, because he got off on the wrong foot with me right away. He was making a film called Battleground, which he figured was going to set the pace in Hollywood for war films. He figured there was going to be a big run of them, and I disagreed.
I said, ‘The timing is wrong. The public is fed up with war.’ I was fed up with it, so I figured the public was – that was my mistake, to assume the mass thinks as I do – and I told him to stop production on it. What I didn’t realize, and what I know now, is that the public loves blood and violence more than anything, even more than sex, and blood and violence is always a moneymaker, because the mass of people are sick.
That was one item of disagreement. The other one was that he was trying to make a star out of Barbara Bel Geddes. And that one I was right on. I didn’t see star quality there, and it wasn’t there. Schary and I came to loggerheads over these two things.
He said, ‘Howard, you’re trying to make a messenger boy out of me.’
So I said, ‘Quit.’ And he did.
I was wrong about Battleground. He bought the property from me, took it with him to MGM and made a mint out of it. It was the biggest hit of 1949, as I recall.
Then I buckled down and lopped off some heads, cut off a lot of fat, fired about 700 people who were totally unnecessary. That’s when Peter Rathvon quit. This was also the time I got into that terrible wrangle with Paul Jarrico. As usual it was only one incident of many – Jarrico was one screenwriter out of fifty or sixty who was blacklisted by the movie industry, and I was only one producer out of fifty who was wielding the axe and doing the blacklisting of left-wing people, but I was Howard Hughes and that meant headlines on page one.
This was during the McCarthy era, which in retrospect I view as one of the more shameful periods of American political life. But at that time it was a kind of mass purge and mass hysteria, and I got sucked up by it.
Everyone in Hollywood was bleating about Communist domination of the industry. I had no use for communism as a workable philosophy, and I thought for the most part that the Communists I knew were misguided idealists who were all messed up emotionally and got starry-eyed and wobbly-kneed and simply lost every ounce of their common sense when they talked about the glorious life in the Soviet Union.
I think I was right in the long run, and the simplemindedness of their thinking was proved to me when the same people who swore there couldn’t possibly be such things as slave labor camps in Siberia – their argument, if you recall, was that it was theoretically incompatible with a Marxist workers’ state, and if it was theoretically impossible it had to be impossible in practice as well, and it was just another lie coming out of Wall Street – it was these same people who quit the party and dived like lemmings back into the liberal and capitalist ranks when Khrushchev made his famous speech denouncing Stalin.
They knew, I think – because most of them were superficially intelligent men and women – that they were being intellectually dishonest. What they didn’t know was that they were emotionally unstable, and they were just waiting for a chance to bail out with what they could call honor. Khrushchev’s speech gave them their chance, and they took it. It’s like a pilot who’s flying an experimental plane he’s claimed is the best in the world. The nuts and bolts start to fly off and the plane loses altitude, but he can’t and won’t give up. Then the engine drops out and he says, ‘Thank God,’ and bails out. It happens all the time in politics and marriage. And it’s happening now in Vietnam.
Anyway, at that time, in the fifties, when I fired Paul Jarrico, I was head over heels in the fight against so-called Communist domination of the film industry. Jarrico, I’m convinced, was not a member of the Communist party, not a card-carrying member. He couldn’t be; this guy was on a salary of $2,500 a week from the studio, which put him pretty clearly in the capitalist class. He was what they called a fellow traveler.
When he went up before that committee in Washington, he took the Fifth Amendment. The one thing that really got my goat, one thing that made me boil over, was a man who wouldn’t stand up for his principles. Now if the man was a Communist or even if the man was only a sympathizer, he should have stood up there and said, ‘Yes, this is what I am, I believe such-and-such, and I’ll take the consequences for it.’ For not saying that, I couldn’t respect him, and I couldn’t respect any of those guys who looked the other way and ducked out and avoided the responsibility. I didn’t like those Reds who went to prison, they were hardly my friends and idols, but I had respect for them insofar as they said, ‘Yes, that’s who I am and that’s what I stand for. You want to throw me behind bars for my beliefs, okay, my conscience is clear and I’m an honest man.’
Of course, far worse than someone like Jarrico, was a man like Elia Kazan, the film director, who went before the witch-hunting committee in Washington and snitched on all his friends. His excuse was that the committee already knew they were Communist; other snitches had named them. All the more reason not to give the names, since they weren’t needed. The committee’s purpose was to intimidate and humiliate, and Kazan bent over and spread his cheeks in order to insure his career. Arthur Miller, who wrote Death of a Salesman, refused to testify. He survived. Kazan was a great film director and a creepy human being.
After all these years, do you regret the role you played in the witch-hunt?
The answer to that isn’t a simple one. If it has to be ‘yes or no’ I’d say, ‘Yes, I do regret it.’ But that would be a fundamental dishonesty on my part, because it would be too easy a way of skating out of something. I can’t deny that I did what I did – I even went so far as to try and get the RKO Theaters Corporation to ban the showing of Limelight, because I considered Charlie Chaplin a pinko and a man who’d run away to Europe rather than stay at home and fight for what he believed in, whether it was right or wrong.
But I refuse to talk in terms of ‘if I had it all to do over again,’ because that’s equivalent to saying, ‘If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.’ I did what I did because I was the man that I was. If I had done anything else I would have been a hypocrite and a coward and then I really would regret it now.
In other words, I don’t regret what I did but I do wish that I had been a different kind of man, the kind of man who would not have done those things. That’s also, I suppose, a kind of shadowy statement, but it’s the best I can give, because I realize now that I was swept along with the mob and that’s always demeaning to the soul and damaging to the man as a whole.
But it’s even more damaging to go against your own nature. Sometimes you have to plunge in headfirst and wallow in the trough of your own stupidity just in order to climb out and take a bath and feel your own clean skin again.
As far as the anticommunist battle went, it was a battle, and in battle you fight with whatever weapons you’ve got and with whatever allies you can find. I was obsessed; I admit it. I’m not proud of it. I gave a talk before the American Legion at that time. Not that I was a great backer of the American Legion, I want to make clear. They’re a bunch of warmongers, as I realized later on. It’s simply, as I said, that you had strange bedfellows in those days. Must have been a good talk, though, because it was put in the Congressional Record by Richard Nixon.