James Ellroy Says You Have the Hollywood Blacklist All Wrong
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 — The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid — who never met a consensus he didn’t want to burn down. His latest obsession — aired out in part in Red Sheet, his 18th novel, out June 9 — is the Blacklist, which in Ellroy’s estimation was a greatly misunderstood act of flag-waving righteousness that Hollywood has been scandalously misrepresenting ever since.
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“The Hollywood 10 — they were either ex-Party or Party,” Ellroy tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Everybody knew what Stalin was doing. They just threw in their lot with Stalinists and with the enemies of America. … That’s who [these] people were.”
In 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 Confidential magazine. Otash last popped up in Ellroy’s fiction in 2023’s The Enchanters, which delved into the cover-up of Marilyn Monroe’s “murder.” 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’s doomed gubernatorial campaign and a corrupt communist trade union as he heads a Red-hunting government probe launched by Robert F. Kennedy.
The plot of Red Sheet, though, only grazes the surface of Ellroy’s 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’s heroes and villains exactly backwards. The Nixon he remembers was a benighted figure who would slip his handlers and quietly roam America’s streets. “He would lose himself and walk into the inner city,” Ellroy tells THR. “Not looking for women, not looking for anything in particular.” His Trumbo is certainly a lot darker than Bryan Cranston’s saintly version: a “fat-cat wealthy Hollywood screenwriter” and FBI informant who “named names in private” while performing martyrdom in public. And Kazan, the director of On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, who notoriously named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, was simply a man who did the right thing — unlike half the attendees at the 1999 Academy Awards who sat on their hands when Kazan finally received an honorary Oscar.
“Punk-ass chicken-shit bullshit,” Ellroy says of the snub.
But don’t worry, Hollywood — the author has already moved on. His next book, he promises, will have “all kinds of dirty shit” about the Los Angeles Dodgers.
What follows is a condensed and lightly edited version of our conversation.
***
I started at The Hollywood Reporter in 2012. One of the first big stories I remember was our apology over the Blacklist — acknowledging THR founder’s Billy Wilkerson’s hand in it all. I was raised to believe the Blacklist was a terrible thing, that THR was a villainous part of it, that McCarthy was a horrible human being and these were wonderful people — Dalton Trumbo, etc.
Your book flips the script. And I don’t think you’re just doing it dramatically. I think you actually believe it. Am I right?
Yes. There are some things here. The government didn’t mandate the Blacklist. It was the studio heads. It was Harry Cohn and Louis B. Mayer, Dore Schary and — 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.
The book reaches back further than the Blacklist, though. There’s a whole strand running through the Spanish Civil War.
The reign of terror that I describe goes back to Mexico in the ’20s. 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’s book, which I think was published in ’39 or ’40, The Power and the Glory. My earlier book, This Storm. And now Red Sheet — only I extend the narrative up into the Spanish Civil War [1936–1939], where the International Brigade is held to be the good guys of the conflict when there were no good guys in the conflict.
Your 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’s orders because Stalin didn’t 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.
And how does that connect back to Hollywood?
The Hollywood 10 — 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’s longtime cultural commissar]. I can give you one example. They thought that Budd Schulberg’s very fine Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, wasn’t 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.
Everybody knew what Stalin was doing. They just threw in their lot with Stalinists and with the enemies of America. And in effect — this is the core of it — a grand jury was impaneled, and you’re 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’t 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’s who the people were.
Can you explain a bit about where Whittaker Chambers fits into all this?
You want me to give you a primer on Whittaker Chambers? He was in the CP for years — years and years — and he was good friends with Alger Hiss. And when he said goodbye, he said, “Alger, I’m going on the run. They could find me and kill me with a Makarov pistol pop to the back of the head.” And Hiss replied with the old line: “You want to make an omelet, you got to break a few eggs.” And Chambers got the last word. He said: “Yes, but where’s the omelet?”
He wrote a book and it’s heartrending. It’s one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. Witness, his autobiography. He was a brave, brave guy. He went to the Feds in ’39 and ’40 and they just blew him off. And then he volunteered to testify at the ’48 hearings.
It 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 — they didn’t want this stuff coming out, so they just sat on it. Chambers came and testified, and a few men — Richard Nixon, Robert Stripling, who was the chief investigator — 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.
And then Chambers did an astoundingly brave thing. He went to Nixon and said, “Congressman, I’m a homosexual, and if you think it will help our cause, I would admit this in open court so that Hiss’ lawyers don’t dig it up and use it to discredit me” — which took a lot of balls in 1948.
So who was Dalton Trumbo, really? Because he’s played as a hero by Bryan Cranston in the 2015 biopic Trumbo.
Of course, that’s the myth.
So who was he really?
He 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.
So he was informing even though he’s thought of to have not spoken, not ratted?
He informed before. He informed whenever his handler called him and gave up people. And they all did. Snitch culture makes police work go ’round. Virtually — if you want to fast-forward a little bit — every third man in the Black Panthers and the Black Muslim groups was an FBI informant. They’re 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.
And then on the other end you have Elia Kazan, who’s been turned into a villainous figure in Hollywood history. And Budd Schulberg, who did name names. And you’re saying they did the right thing. That they were heroes.
“You’re going to lose half a million dollars a year if you do this” — do what? Kazan never made half a million dollars a year in his life. That kind of money wasn’t 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’ve read his autobiography. V.J. Jerome came in when Kazan was a kid member of the Group Theater in the 1930s and said: “Let me tell you how it’s going to be. You’re going to make proletarian dramas to further our message, and that’s it.” He was a member of the Party. He started wrangling then.
Don’t you infer that On the Waterfront was a message about informing? I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere.
Yeah, I’ve heard it. It’s in Kazan’s 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, “Fuck you.” And the book was published. And it’s still in print today.
But Schulberg didn’t 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.
What year was that ad?
Shortly after Kazan testified, in the winter into the spring of ’52. The New York Times. April 1952.
Amy Madigan just won an Oscar this year, and it brought up that she wouldn’t stand for Kazan at the ’99 Oscars. She’s been asked about it. Spielberg didn’t stand, or didn’t clap. What do you make of the way Hollywood treats Kazan?
I just think it’s punk-ass chicken-shit bullshit. Fifty years in the past — who are you going to stand up for? Who are you not going to stand up for 30 years from now. Who’ll 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.
Your argument involves a lot of civil rights and race relations — and you’re 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.
One 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, “Doctor, please check out these ex-Reds so you won’t be discredited.” And King refused. They were foursquare anti-communist and foursquare civil rights — as Freddy Otash and Tom Bradley become in the course of this book.
So when people start calling me a red-baiter over this book, they certainly can’t 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’s that are attributable to the Reds. The cops in Detroit believed it at the time.
They also were secretly steadfastly against FDR passing anti-lynching legislation in the South. They didn’t want it. They wanted Blacks to be lynched in the South.
Wait — the Communist Party?
CP. Yeah. And Roosevelt didn’t consider it an issue because he wanted to carry the South and he didn’t want to offend the Democratic congressmen down there. It was finally his wife, Eleanor, who talked him into, in fact, passing anti-lynching legislation.
Why was the CP against anti-lynching legislation?
Because 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.
We haven’t talked about Richard Nixon. He’s 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?
He did have those fugue states that I describe. They began as early as ’56, when he was a sitting vice president and almost became president on the occasion of Dwight Eisenhower’s 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’t recognize him. Some did. He did it in the ’60 election when he ran against Kennedy. He did it in the ’62 election when he lost to Pat Brown, which is what I portray in the book. And finally John Ehrlichman told him: “Dick, 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’t work for you again, and neither will Bob Haldeman.” They were always rescuing him, finding him in some coffeehouse at 24th and Western, talking to people.
You 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?
I made it up. It’s really the one question I don’t answer, which is what’s real and what’s not. He was strangely, strangely — and keep in mind, this is 10 years pre-Watergate — he 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.
Just to be clear — Joseph McCarthy, you also consider was a bad man. You’re not defending him.
Yeah. 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 “McCarthyism,” and it’s a whole bunch of different things.
Switching gears. There’s a separate dedication page in the book — just Judy Henske’s name and her dates, 1936 to 2022. Freddy ends Red Sheet engaged to her. What was she to you?
Oh man, I had it bad for her. There’s a clip on YouTube — it’s The Judy Garland Show, early July 1963. Judy Henske is a guest. She sings “God Bless the Child,” the Billie Holiday song. It breaks your heart. And then she does a goof on folk music with Mel Tormé 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.
So what’s next? You said something at the top of our conversation about Dodger Stadium.
The next book I’m 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’ve got to do is write the damn thing and go on this upcoming book tour.
***
Red Sheet by James Ellroy is published June 9 by Knopf ($35). Ellroy’s tour brings him to Vroman’s in Pasadena on June 10.
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