The Hollywood Ten

Alvah Bessie (1904 – 1985)

The son of a New York businessman, Bessie joined Eugene O’Neill’s Provincetown Players as an actor after graduating from Columbia University. In 1935 he published his first novel, Dwell in the Wilderness, while a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 1938, he went to Spain to serve with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting the Franco-led fascists. Hemingway praised Bessie’s 1939 memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Men in Battle, as a “true, honest, fine book.”

In 1943 Bessie moved to Hollywood, where he worked as a Warner Bros. contract writer on The Very Thought of You (1944), Hotel Berlin (1945), Objective, Burma! (1945) and other features. When called to testify before HUAC, Bessie refused to cooperate, saying, “I will never aid or abet such a committee in its patent attempt to foster the sort of intimidation and terror that is the inevitable precursor of a fascist regime.” Bessie served his 12-month sentence for contempt of Congress at the minimum-security federal lockup in Texarcana, Texas.

Prison marked the end of Bessie’s Hollywood career. He moved to the Bay Area, where he wrote novels, edited a union newspaper and worked as publicist for arts organizations. For seven years he was the stage manager and soundman at San Francisco’s Hungry I nightclub, earning $70 a week.

Herbert J. Biberman (1900 – 1971)

Biberman began his career at age 28, directing plays and helping run the Theatre Guild in New York City. In 1935, he moved to Hollywood, where he graduated from dialogue director to writer to director of modest films, including Meet Nero Wolfe (1936), King of Chinatown (1939) and The Master Race (1944), an anti-Nazi film.

Three years later, the HUAC committee handed him the shortest sentence of the Hollywood Ten — six months in the minimum-security Texarcana, Texas, prison that housed fellow defendant Alvah Bessie. Biberman’s wife, Gale Sondergaard, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in Anthony Adverse (1936), also refused to testify before the HUAC and was blacklisted.

Biberman never worked in Hollywood again. In 1954 he teamed with other blacklisted artists, including screenwriter Michael Wilson and producer Paul Jarrico, to direct Salt of the Earth, an indie drama based on a miners’ strike in New Mexico. The House of Representatives formally denounced it, and the FBI investigated its financing. After a run of more than two months at about a dozen theaters, it was banned for 11 years. In 1993, the United States National Film Registry selected the film for preservation as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

Lester Cole (1904 – 1985)

The child of Polish immigrants, Cole (ne Cohn) owed his political leanings to his Marxist father, who was a garment union organizer in New York City. In the eighth grade, Cole’s school principal denounced Lester as a traitor for opposing America’s entry into World War I. He dropped out of high school at age 16 and eventually became a stage director and playwright.

In 1932 he moved to Hollywood to work with 17 other writers on one of Hollywood’s first all-star extravaganzas, the W.C. Fields comedy If I Had a Million. The two successful plays Cole had written in New York landed him a five-year, $250-a-week contract with Paramount.

In 1933, while writing B movies, including several in the Charlie Chan series, he co-founded the Screen Writers Guild (with future Hollywood Ten collaborators John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz), the first of the Hollywood guilds. The following year Cole joined the Communist Party and remained a committed Marxist throughout his life.

From 1932 through 1947, he churned out more than 40 produced scripts, most prominently for The House of the Seven Gables (1940) and the Errol Flynn war picture Objective Burma! (1945), which was based on an original story by another future blacklister, Alvah Bessie. In 1946, his career got a major boost when MGM put him under contract. It didn’t last long: The following year Cole refused to testify before HUAC. In 1949, before turning himself in at the federal prison in Danbury, Conn., to serve his sentence for contempt of Congress, he penned the story for the Humphrey Bogart aviator feature Chain Lightning (1950).

The blacklist destroyed Cole financially and professionally. His unfinished script for Viva Zapata! (1952), directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando, was reassigned to John Steinbeck, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the picture (story and screenplay). In 1961 he emigrated to England, where he wrote the screen adaption, under the name Gerald L.C. Copley, of Born Free (1966), Joy Adamson’s book about raising a lioness in Kenya. In the last two decades of his life, he found a second career teaching film writing in San Francisco.