Exit Robert Taylor - controversy over actor's testimony before House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 - column

National Review, March 5, 1990 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

A few weeks ago Hollywood residents discovered that there was no longer a building called the Robert Taylor Building. Disappeared, gone with the wind. Not the building itself, understand. It was still there, with its new owner, Lorimar Productions (Dallas, etc.), but it was now the George Cukor Building. Was this an attempt to say something about the late Robert Taylor, the glamorous movie idol who died in 1969 after making almost fifty movies for Metro Goldwyn Mayer? Well, yes, it was. What happened is that a petition circulated by writer Stan Zimmerman was deposited on the desk of Lorimar executives, asking that Robert Taylor's name be expunged on the grounds that he had been a "cooperative" witness when testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and had committed that grave sin in the moral bible of antianticommunism. He had, as they say, "named names." Manifestly, he was unfit to adorn a building in which screenwriters continued to work.

Now, in 1947 there was much turmoil in Hollywood over the Communist question. We had just finished a very bloody war in partnership with Josef Stalin, and Stalin was the leader of that great dream which, to be sure, failed, but which gripped a great many prominent Americans during the period of its hypnotic trance over minds given to making ideological commitments, and declining to examine evidence undermining the reasons for making that commitment. In those days, the Communists did exactly what one would expect conscientiously organized revolutionaries to do. They worked to extend their influence, and to diminish the influence of those they opposed. During the war, Warner Studios had produced Mission to Moscow, a film that might have been written by the KGB: but after all, we were partners of Moscow at that time. MGM produced Song of Russia. Ayn Rand testified before the investigating committee that the film was very simply Communist propaganda. Louis B. Mayer, although a heatedly cooperative witness who named a dozen-times-more screenwriters, directors, and actors than Robert Taylor did, declined to classify the political content of Song of Russia but did say that it was true that Robert Taylor had objected to playing in the film, but that such was the enthusiasm of the United States Government to see it produced, that a deferment was given to Mr. Taylor, who went from completing Song of Russia to service in the Navy as a fighter pilot.

When Robert Taylor's turn came to testify, what he said was that Communists were very active in Hollywood, that they used many techniques of disruption in order to further their enterprise. Asked to name names, he gave out only three. Howard da Silva and Karen Morley (actors) he characterized as disrupters at meetings of the Screen Writers Guild, without weighing in on whether they were motivated as Communists. He went on to say that a third-the writer Lester Cole-had been identified by others as a Communist, but that he did not know whether this was true or not [it was true]. Beyond that, Taylor simply said he would not willingly act alongside a Communist actor, so strongly did he object to Communist practices abroad.

It is the thesis of the objection by the Zimmerman group that merely to have named names was a morally disqualifying act. Leaving aside the question whether this is so, one wonders if the same protestors are prepared to boycott the distribution of any films produced by Warner (Jack Warner testified endlessly about specific Communists in Hollywood) or Louis B. Mayer (who did the same thing); or films in which Gary Cooper appeared, or John Wayne, or Ronald Reagan, Robert Montgomery, George Murphy; or films directed by Leo McCarey, or written by Morrie Ryskind. John Charles Moffit, film critic for Esquire, testified that 44 plays out of one hundred produced on Broadway during the 1936-44 seasons used "material to further the Communist line." And gave the names of the writers who conspired to inject pro-communist sentiment into these plays.

It was a big fight, and the Communists used every weapon to distort what we now know of as the truth, weapons used by their counterparts in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. Finally, they failed. And now, in a gesture of retroactive vindictiveness, the statue of Robert Taylor has been removed from the public square, and replaced with director George Cukor, who not long before his death in 1983 made a reference to his predecessor: "Robert Taylor was my favorite actor. He was a gentleman. That's rare in Hollywood."