Very interesting post, jem-93, but a couple of corrections and augmentations to the story.
John Wayne didn't "get" Foreman or anyone else blacklisted, and how much influence he wielded in getting anyone blacklisted by the industry is very debatable. Wayne had tried to save the career of Larry Parks, who had first denied to HUAC that he'd ever been a member of the Communist Party (which was a lie: he had been), then recanted his testimony when his old party card was produced. Wayne tried to intervene to get Parks off the hook with both HUAC and the studios, to no avail. Having Wayne against you might not have helped matters, but it's highly doubtful that Wayne or any one person exerted any real influence in having anyone actually blacklisted. I doubt you could find anyone who would not have been blacklisted had Wayne not supported it.
As to Carl Foreman, Wayne -- according to Foreman -- went to see the writer at his home to ask him to voluntarily remove his name from High Noon's screen credits. By this time it was clear that Foreman would be blacklisted, and he was involved in suing the State Department to restore his passport so he could leave the country for Britain (where he would live until 1975, becoming a leader of the British film industry and the writer and/or producer of such classics as The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Mouse That Roared, The Guns of Navarone, Born Free, Young Winston and many others). Foreman said that Wayne bore him no malice, that he had nothing personal against him and realized that Foreman's past membership in the CP had been a matter of youthful zeal and did not make Foreman a traitor or threat to the nation; he knew that Wayne was simply concerned that Foreman's name would hurt Cooper's chances at winning the Oscar. Foreman refused but said he understood Wayne's point of view, even though he disagreed with it.
Wayne may have tried (before or after meeting with Foreman) to get Stanley Kramer to remove his credit, but this brings up another aspect of the story. Though Foreman's name stayed on the credits, Kramer -- the great, fighting liberal, foe of injustice everywhere -- refused to speak with Foreman or have anything to do with him, avoiding him at all costs, to save his own career. Kramer was, in short, a coward and a hypocrite. Gary Cooper -- a conservative Republican, but a western libertarian who loathed attacking people for their politics -- supported Foreman until things got too hot even for him, and Foreman understood and sympathized with Cooper's own plight. (Cooper had planned to join with Foreman in forming a production company to produce their own films; not until Foreman got out from under the blacklist a few years later did he finally form his company, in England.)
Anyway, after a year in Britain (still poor and under rationing), Foreman's wife returned to the States and divorced him. Foreman later married an Englishwoman and had a new family, and after a secret meeting with HUAC in 1956, in which he was partially "rehabilitated" (though he still couldn't yet return home to work), he was able to have on-screen credit again and prospered. One day in the early 60s, Foreman, who had gone to Hollywood on business and taken his family, saw Wayne in a restaurant and brought him over to meet the new family he would never have had but for his blacklisting. He certainly wasn't thanking Wayne for his efforts to have Foreman remove his credit from High Noon or support of the blacklist, but he understood and respected Wayne for being forthright, and not malicious, in expressing his views, and they had a pleasant meeting. On that same trip, Foreman ran into none other than the "fearless" Stanley Kramer in an elevator at Columbia Pictures. Kramer saw Foreman and turned his eyes away, refusing to say anything to him or even make eye contact. (Foreman also kept silent as a result.)
Foreman always took his experiences as an example of how few things in life, or Hollywood, are black and white, that you can never judge others simply by their political views, and that people act from complex and often contradictory motives. Though his politics were always very different from Wayne's (and Cooper's), he respected both men for their honesty and candor and their commitment to doing what they thought was right. By contrast, he held a lifelong contempt for Kramer -- for whom he had worked on several films before High Noon -- for his cravenness and hypocrisy, and his willingness to betray others just to protect his own career. Foreman was quite right. This might also explain why Wayne thanked Foreman for his script in accepting the Oscar: he bore Foreman no ill will and was trying to say something decent about him.
Incidentally, I don't know that a statement by the OP, that Wayne was jealous of Cooper winning the Oscar because Wayne wanted to win for The Quiet Man, is accurate. Wayne wasn't even nominated for that film, which he couldn't hold against Cooper. However, it may be that that film's director, John Ford, won his fourth Oscar as Best Director because of his stand against Cecil B. DeMille's effort, in 1950, to overthrow the board of the Directors Guild because it was dominated by liberals, many of them of foreign birth. Ford had come out against DeMille at the crucial session, much to the surprise of DeMille's targets (people like Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Billy Wilder, William Wyler and others), and swung the group behind the beleaguered liberals against DeMille. I always though Ford's Quiet Man Oscar was a thank-you from his fellow directors, made especially sweet by the fact that one of the men Ford defeated was DeMille, up for directing the year's Best Picture winner, The Greatest Show on Earth.
(And yet... in 1956, when DeMille asked his longtime composer Victor Young to do the score for The Ten Commandments, Young -- who was dying, and trying to complete his work on Around the World in Eighty Days -- declined, and recommended a struggling composer named Elmer Bernstein. Bernstein had begun well in Hollywood but had then been "gray-listed" because of his leftist sympathies, though he was not a Communist, and had been forced to find work composing the scores for Cat-Women of the Moon and Robot Monster. When DeMille met with Bernstein, the composer told him his political views and situation, but DeMille said he had checked him out and thought Bernstein had been given a bad deal. As a result, Bernstein got the big break he needed to go on to have his hugely successful career -- all thanks to an arch-conservative who nonetheless wanted to judge and treat him fairly.)
As I said, you never know about people.
reply
share
gillies
10 years ago
If wayne tried to get Foreman to take his name off the screenplay then Wayne is as big a coward as ANY of the townfolk in that godforsaken town of Hadley!
reply
share
hobnob53
10 years ago
I'm no defender of Wayne's politics but whatever you could call him about trying to get Foreman to take his name off High Noon, "coward" isn't one of them. The term doesn't have any logic to it in this context. You could call him contemptible, self-righteous, unjust, things like that, but "coward"? That doesn't even make sense here.
At least Wayne was acting in accordance with his own beliefs, which was Foreman's point. Nothing "cowardly" about that. Quite the opposite, if anything: asking someone to remove his credits from a film isn't a "cowardly" act; it took some guts. By contrast, Stanley Kramer's actions in ducking Foreman and trying to shunt him aside were the acts of a coward, not to mention a hypocrite, since Kramer ostensibly opposed the blacklist.
reply
share