Front Burner - Weekend Listen: Hollywood Exiles

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

From the BBC World Service and CBC Podcasts comes Hollywood Exiles. Host Oona Chaplin tells the story of the decades-long campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It’s a campaign that eventually drove her grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others out of tinseltown. Hollywood Exiles is a tale of glamour, duplicity and political intrigue that reverberates to this day. It’s the story of how Tinseltown became an ideological battleground. The toll of the fight was enormous – reputations, careers and families were torn apart by the campaign to drive communists from the movie business. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/zeWK1tTg

This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Damon Fairless. So we have a special bonus episode for you today from a brand new podcast from the BBC World Service and CBC Podcasts. It's called Hollywood Exiles. History remembers Charlie Chaplin as Hollywood's first superstar, but at the height of his career, the FBI considered him something else. A threat to America. Hollywood Exiles is a story of glamour, duplicity, and the U.S. government's decades-long campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. The series is hosted by Una Chaplin, Charlie

Chaplin's granddaughter, and she takes listeners through the story of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's personal vendetta against her grandfather. Now, here's the first of 10 episodes, An American Dream. Have a listen. I don't know if you've ever walked down the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There are more than two and a half thousand stars there now. It runs for 15 blocks down Hollywood Boulevard, in front of fast food outlets, museums, hotels, and boarded-up shops. Julie Andrews, Tom Hanks, even Mickey Mouse has a star. All the stars of Hollywood, all of them forever commemorated in the city's concrete.

The idea of honoring the artists who made the city famous with brass plaques was concocted by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in the 1950s. All the names that had made the city great, all the people who'd contributed to putting Hollywood on the map, 1,500 names were chosen. Throughout 1957, committees representing the different branches of the entertainment industry started choosing the names of the honorees. When it was eventually published, there was one name missing. The shopkeepers of Hollywood objected so strongly to the inclusion of this particular Hollywood star

that they refused to foot the bill. And it's pretty crazy, because this guy wasn't just any old actor. He was a producer, a director, a writer too, a composer. Thirty years earlier, he'd also been the very personification of Hollywood. His little tramp was a global sensation. You've heard of Charlie Chaplin, right? Well, Charlie Chaplin was my grandfather, and there was a time when he was the biggest star in all the world.

But something happened, not just to him, but to hundreds of artists in Hollywood. They were forced to leave, forced out. And it was all because there was a question of how American they were. Come in, come in. Thank you. Is it shoes on or shoes off? On is fine. This is Mitzi Trumbo. She clearly remembers that year in 1957.

Mitzi's dad was a screenwriter at the time. When he wrote a script called The Brave One, the King brothers were the producers, and the name they used on it was Robert Rich. So Robert Rich was nominated for an Oscar. And amazingly, it won. Robert Rich was not Mit an Oscar. And amazingly, it won. Robert Rich was not Mitzi's dad's name. I remember watching with the family.

We were all watching on TV. And my first reaction was, Daddy, let's go get it tomorrow. And I had to kind of be reminded that this wasn't something that we could do. That wasn't going to happen. Mitzi's dad was far from the only person in the 1950s who was exiled and forgotten, rather than being honored and celebrated. The growing menace of communism arouses the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee.

The censorship is against Chaplin, an enemy of godliness in all forms. Their goal is the overthrow of our government. This is not just a Hollywood story. It's a story that shook the cultural foundations of the United States. People left the country. Some went to prison. It had a profound effect, not only on the nation, but on the people, the families caught in the eye of the storm. Writers and actors, about six or eight of our friends went to jail,

the Hollywood Ten. We didn't leave immediately, but we decided we should get out of town. And it's hard to watch your family fall apart. I want to know how and why families fell apart, why my own family had to leave the United States. I want to understand a divide in America that resonates to this day.

From the BBC World Service and CBC Podcasts, this is Hollywood Exiles. I'm Una Chaplin. Episode 1, An American Dream. Thank you. London, 1889 If you've read Dickens or seen the movie adaptations, you might recognize the London Charlie Chaplin was born into. Dickens himself had died 20 years before my grandfather was born,

but this was still a London that he would know. The city was dominated by industry and commerce. Queen Victoria was on the throne. And there was extreme poverty. How a boy goes from this London to worldwide fame, it's extraordinary. I'm just noticing the volume of my boots. I've come to the Cinema Museum in Kennington, South London, not far from where I know my grandfather was born. Hello. Hello. Uma Chaplin. Hello. Pleasure

to meet you. Thank you so much. I'm Martin Humphries, the co-founder and director of the cinema museum, and it's my pleasure to show you around. Oh, my goodness, thank you so much. What a pleasure. The museum is a tribute to the cinema experience, with old reels piled high beside movie posters and all kinds of memorabilia. And this is an usherette's uniform. Oh.

You see, cinema staff all wore uniforms. The ushers and the usherettes. The manager would look very formal, sometimes wear a dickie bow and a dress suit. Even the projectionists had their own coats, brown coats. Wow, it looks like an air hostess. It does. Going to the cinema was such an occasion.

Thank you. So this is our main hall where our events take place. Wow. These days the main hall at the cinema museum is filled with statues, large and small, of icons of the cinema, including more than a few little chaplains. There he is, in black and white himself. And here he is again. With the kid and his Betty Boop. What a lovely little trio. And Betty Boop. What a lovely little trio. This building is imposing and beautiful.

And as we'd been approaching, I'd wondered what it had been before. What was its history? I was stunned to find out. You may be surprised to learn that this building started life as the Lambeth workhouse and your grandfather was here several times as a child. Working here? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. His childhood was very poverty stricken. This main hall, this beautiful main hall, this was the chapel and he would have attended services here, because everybody had to, they had no choice. This building and this part of London had a profound effect on my grandfather.

How could it not? He would have been six or seven when he first showed up at the gate of the Lambeth workhouse. They did all the cleaning, all the cooking, making the beds beds it wouldn't have been an easy life i mean they made it difficult for people because they didn't want people to come into the workhouse unless they absolutely had no other choice yeah he from everything that i've read he was he definitely had a lot of painful memories yeah i think memories from here. My grandfather died before I was born, so I never got to meet him. I only know him as everybody's hero.

But over the years, books and articles and films have raised questions about certain aspects of his character, especially his relationship with younger women, which we view with a very different lens nowadays. One of these relationships will become a big part of this story, actually. And his relationship with money was curious, too. He said he wanted governments to do more to help the poor, and he believed in justice, but he didn't always like to pay his taxes. I want to tell you this story as objectively as I can. To understand what happened to him,

we have to try and understand Charlie Chaplin, the man. Charlie's mother, my great-grandmother Hannah, was also a performer. A vaudevillian is how my grandfather describes her. She would sing on stage, entertaining audiences across London and the surrounding area. But she wasn't well. Her voice wasn't strong. And the slightest cold brought on laryngitis.

Entertainment at the turn of the 20th century was theatre, live performance. The music halls of London filled every night with people looking for a good time. And they could be a tough crowd. One night in 1894, Hannah was performing in the canteen in Aldershot, Hampshire, a grubby little theatre, before an unforgiving crowd of mostly military men. Her voice began to break. The audience shouted, jeered and booed, as Hannah's voice lowered to a whisper. and she was forced to abandon her performance and return upset to the wings where young Charlie had been standing

watching his mother. In an effort to calm the crowd the stage manager pushed Charlie Chaplin out onto the stage in his mother's place. Charlie Chaplin was five years old. It was his first appearance on stage. And the crowd loved him. He had such a gift.

And this, this was the beginning of his life's work. But the beginning of the end of Hannah's. Hannah's performances became less regular, and losing her income would send her family into a spiral. A spiral that would lead them to the gates of the Lambeth Workhouse. The workhouse is such a different place now. It's hard to imagine what it must have felt like to walk through the great iron gates as a boy of six, to be separated from your mother at that early age.

For my grandfather, that was the life that he wanted to get away from, you know, to escape. And he found his ticket as a performer. In his teenage years, he joined the renowned Carnot's Circus Company, and the circus would bring Charlie Chaplin to the United States of America. He left behind a cold winter in England and arrived to an early wave of summer heat in New York City. On the night that he arrived, he took a walk down Broadway. Tall skyscrapers overhead, bright lights and thrilling advertisements. This is it, he thought.

This is where I belong. Not long afterwards, that English clown arrived on the west coast of America. Amidst olive groves and wooden houses, a motion picture industry was thriving, churning out picture after picture after picture. On the 7th of February 1914, an icon of cinema had his first appearance on screen. Back in those days, movies weren't all that well thought through before production commenced. Stories, jokes, and characters would be thought up on the spot, whatever worked in the moment. On the lookout for a character one day, Charlie Chaplin set about creating a costume that was an ensemble of contrasts. A tiny hat, and huge shoes, baggy pants and a pinched jacket.

To top it all off, he added a toothbrush-sized mustache. And this character would become synonymous with Chaplin. He would be known to audiences everywhere as Charlie or the Little Tramp. And he would feature in more than 50 movies. In 1915 alone, Chaplin made 13 movies. He made nine the following year. He was on a roll, and The Little Tr was on a roll. And The Little Tramp was a sensation. One of the movies that really stands out for me in that era is called The Immigrant.

Here's Tony Shaw, author of Hollywood's Cold War. It's immigrants coming across the Atlantic to Ellis Island in the United States. And the little tramp is among them. When they arrive, the men in uniform, the guards, they rope off the crowd of immigrants, penning them in. This is classic Chaplin.

He's poking fun at the authorities. The tramp actually kicks one of the officers in the butt. And he's pointing a finger at the authorities, immigration officials, those who run the ship line, and their abuse of the ordinary man and woman. Like almost anything that bore the chaplain name in that time, audiences loved it. Think of the people who are going to the movies in this period, the ordinary people.

Many films don't appear to be for them, whereas Chaplin's movies were explicitly aimed at them. And the tramp represents someone who is just like them, whether it's the immigrants, etc. So Chaplin tapped into that big audience that wanted films that were, on the one hand, uplifting, in his case funny, but also something they could relate to because it was about their lives as well, especially new immigrants, many of whom could just about afford

to go to the Nickelodeons, the early cinemas. These movies were produced in an age of innocence in Hollywood. The aim was to make movies that people wanted to see. The aim, explicitly, was to make money. But movies like The Immigrant would raise eyebrows in the years that followed. People would start to ask questions and see something more in Chaplin's comedy. Some people are going to look at this film and think this is anti-authority. It's not politically capital P, but it's somewhat dangerous. What's

Chaplin playing at here? He's poking fun at the authorities. Is that something which might be related to the threat of communism on the other side of the world? A revolution in Russia that same year had brought a far-left Bolshevik government to power. The fear that a wave of communist revolutions would follow was quite real. This was during the dying days of the First World War. Societies were being upended, and this was the moment that the immigrant was released into theaters. Their goal is the overthrow of our government.

There is no doubt as to where a real communist loyalty rests. Their allegiance is to Russia, not the United States. This is J. Edgar Hoover. For decades, he would run the FBI, taking it from strength to strength under successive presidents. His first task for the federal government in 1919, long, long before the establishment of the FBI, was to hunt communists. And this task started just two years after the release of Chaplins the immigrant.

This is Hoover speaking years later. Communism in reality is not a political party. It is a way of life, an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic. And like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting this nation. To be accused of being a communist was akin to being accused of being a traitor. This was no laughing matter. So here's something I didn't know. The authorities in the United States were looking into communism in Hollywood as early as the 1920s.

And the focus of their investigation at the time was my grandfather. His FBI file is the earliest evidence experts have that U.S. authorities were interested in Hollywood. Investigators thought there was something funny about Charlie Chaplin. There are multiple cases that are attempted to be built against Chaplin over the years.

This is John Spadalati, author of J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies. There is a file that started on him that way back in 1922. And this is before the FBI was the FBI. It was just the BI or the Bureau of Investigation. It's before J. Edgar Hoover was the director. He was an assistant director, and he was actually copied in on these files from bureau agents in Los Angeles.

And why did agents at the Bureau of Investigation, the BI, think that Charlie Chaplin, the comedian and filmmaker, was a threat? They have concerns about, first and foremost, about what they consider to be radical propaganda in the motion pictures. They have concerns about funding of the Communist Party and of other radical organizations. They have concerns about simply associations

between creative figures such as Charlie Chaplin and other artists and radicals, figures as prominent as William Z. Foster, who would later be the head of the Communist Party USA. There are flags that are raised. They didn't like his friends. They had suspicions but no evidence about where he might be spending his money. But they also didn't like his movies. They didn't like the stories he was telling.

And this, this is the beginning of a much bigger story. At the same moment the Bureau is zeroing in on Charlie Chaplin as a possible communist, my grandfather is, ironically, doing very well by capitalism. His career is skyrocketing. This is La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, and here you'll find a very distinctive row of cottages that wouldn't look out of place in an English village. This was the studio that Charlie Chaplin built. The little boy from South London, who 20 years before was living in the Lambeth workhouse, now had his very own studio in the heart of the movie-making industry. He was living his version of the American dream. This is Vince over here. Hello, Vince. Hi, nice to meet you.

Thank you for letting us come in here for a moment. And this is it. My goodness. These days, the studio is owned and occupied by the Jim Henson Company, which I'm personally very happy about. Kermit the Frog with the Tramp's trademark hat and cane greets visitors as you enter. We're in a room here that I've never been allowed into before.

These days, it's Brian Henson's office, Jim Henson's son. But it used to be my grandfather's office. And this is the original fireplace, except it's not a fireplace anymore. It's a gas fireplace? Yeah. I don't even think it... Yeah, we haven't had that thing on for a long time. I mean, why would you? It's a gas fireplace? Yeah. I don't even think it, you know, we haven't had that thing on for a long time. I mean, why would you? It's hot here. This is a cozy English lounge,

not a plush American office. And I like that it's not super big and ostentatious. I mean, it's a big office, but homely. I mean, it's a big office, but homely. As a fiercely independent creative, this studio was Charlie Chaplin's dream, his own production facility. And then, a year after he built it, he co-founded United Artists, his own distribution outlet. Hollywood had become increasingly concentrated around a handful of powerful studios, often owned and controlled by businessmen and financiers. United Artists had a different vision, a studio run by the people who make the movies, who wanted to make better movies.

It provided an alternative to the Hollywood model of the studio system. They had the idea of a more artistic approach, a more personal approach. Don't get me wrong, my grandfather was making a lot of money out of it. Charlie was definitely a businessman, but he had artistic integrity and he wanted to support other artists. but he had artistic integrity, and he wanted to support other artists. So here was Charlie Chaplin in the early 20s. Superstar actor, studio executive, major independent distributor. He was somebody who didn't seem to play by Hollywood's rules. He was willing to go outside the system, to do things differently, to think differently. Behind the scenes, the Los Angeles branch of the Bureau of Investigation was

interested in him. He was a foreigner, an Englishman, an outsider. He had an appeal to the common man, and he had friends that they didn't like. They were building a file on Chaplin. In a lot of ways, Charlie Chaplin was the very embodiment of the American dream. A poor kid who makes his way to wealth through hard work and a little luck. Thirty years later, he left America. His political opponents became too powerful. We were going to the premiere of the film that he had just made called Limelight.

This is my mom, Geraldine Chaplin. I wanted to talk to her about her dad leaving America because she was there. And it was going to be a royal premiere and Princess Margaret was there and I was to help a little blind girl give flowers to Princess Margaret. And we spent most of the day learning how to curtsy. This was 1952. And little did my mom know that on the journey across the Atlantic,

her father had received news that he wasn't welcome in the United States anymore. Do you remember being on the boat? I remember being on the boat, yes. It was the Queen Elizabeth, and I kept saying because I became great friends with the man who ran the gym. because I became great friends with the man who ran the gym. And he would let me, I guess there were horses that you got on and you'd put them on and turn them on and they would gallop. And I remember he let me ride the horses. He would put me on the horses and turn the horses on.

And he gave me, when we left, he gave me a little pig, a little China pig. And we arrived at the Savoy Hotel and the pig fell into the empty bathtub and smashed. And I remember Kate saying, can we go back on the Queen Mary? But my parents were so great. They were such extraordinary parents that they never mentioned what was happening. It was just a holiday.

It wasn't just a holiday. It would be almost a quarter of a century before Charlie Chaplin was allowed back into America. He was older than my father. Here's Mitzi Trumbo again. She was telling me earlier about the Oscar that her dad had won, the Oscar that he hadn't been allowed to collect. And I asked her if it was likely that her dad had known my grandfather.

And I don't know if they knew each other. I'm sure they met at some point. Probably. Crossed paths. Around the same time my mom and her dad had taken the boat to England, Mitzi's dad decided his family needed to move, too. There was no work and there was no money, and somehow he decided that going to Mexico might be the best way to do it. Mitzi, her siblings, her parents, and some family friends, who were also facing a kind of exile, left for Mexico City. Thinking it would be easier to get work there. Wow, and do you remember the trip down?

Oh, yes. I remember the trip down really well because we had three kids and a dog and a cat. So we were, somebody was always sick. Of course. We'd get the flu over and over. It took two weeks to get to Mexico City, but I remember it really well. It was great fun. They were good, close friends.

Great fun for a little kid, but no doubt filled with anxiety and concern for her parents. The Trumbos were not alone in taking their family to Mexico. her parents. The Trumbos were not alone in taking their family to Mexico. Many more families whose parents had been involved in the movie industry were also heading south. It was a tight little community we had, which was very nice as a kid. Yeah. It's just hard learning Spanish. Right. My father absolutely refused to learn Spanish. He said, I spent my whole life learning English and using English. So I ended up being his little translator. And he'd have to bend down and talk to me, ask me what somebody was saying. It was so, I felt so powerful.

Oh, my God. I've never had that kind of control over my father, ever. Oh, wow. What an amazing position to be in. That was fun. Mitzi's dad was, for a time, a member of the Communist Party, a perfectly legal organization to be a member of, by the way. But his views, his politics, meant that he didn't feel welcome in the United States anymore.

His views, his politics, meant that he didn't feel welcome in the United States anymore. Mitzi's dad had to leave town because he couldn't get work. And he couldn't get work because of his politics. And his family got dragged into that, too. When you're that young, you just go where your family goes. Yeah. Do what they do. My mom asked my granddad once if he was a communist. She didn't know about what had happened to him until she was well into her teenage years.

When I found out the whole story, I was already a Marxist myself. I was about 15 or 16 and was gravely flirting with Marxism. And how did you find out? In school. In school, the kid said, you know, your father was kicked out. Your father's a communist. Your father's a communist.

And I said, oh, yeah, really? Really. I'm really proud. But then he wasn't. I asked, Daddy, is it true you can't go back to the States because you're a communist? He said, I'm not a communist. Look at the way we live. I'm not a communist. We lived in this enormous house, which is now a museum having lived in such abject poverty when he was a child

really left its mark on him but that you saw it in a movie and if you defend the underdog you're a commie he had friends who were communists he had friends who were whatever but he had friends who were communists, he had friends who were whatever. But he wasn't. I think that poverty, that terrible poverty, leave its mark

and you'll become someone who defends the underdog. This story involves actual communists and people who were unfairly accused of being communists. It involves movie stars and regular folk, people who lost their livelihoods, and some who were forced out of the United States altogether. Over the next nine episodes, we're going to hear their stories and find out about the people who wielded such power over them. Are you a member of the Communist Party?

Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Hollywood Exiles is a production of BBC Audio Wales for the BBC World Service and CBC Podcasts. I'm Una Chaplin. Our producers are Glyn Tansley and Megan Jones. Music by Phil Channel and sound design by Cathy Robinson and Phil Channel. Our theme is by Nick Thorburn. Executive producer for BBC Audio

is Martin Smith. At the BBC World Service, Prabhjeet Bains is Senior Producer and John Manel is the Podcast Commissioning Editor. At CBC Podcasts, Jeff Turner is Senior Producer. Chris Oak is Executive Producer and Arif Noorani is the director.

Thank you for listening. Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok That was the first episode of Hollywood Exiles. You can listen to more episodes right now everywhere you get your podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.