Bad Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

cobra had been stretched over the bone structure of Montgomery Clift.
    She wondered what had happened to him. Perhaps he had been badly burned in the War, and had had to be patched together by expensive teams of plastic surgeons intent on performing miracles. In the shadows of the courtroom, he looked older than Dracula, but, when he was firing questions at unfriendly witnesses like Kim Hunter or Zero Mostel, he was younger, more virile, more in control, than a matinée idol on a triumphant opening night.
    ‘Are you now,’ Farnham kept asking, always with the biting pause in the same place, ‘or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’
    Unlike McCarthy, Farnham did not pronounce it ‘commonest party’. The only thing her father had ever said about the Monster was that, at the height of the televised hearings, Hugh Farnham received more fan mail from women than Elvis.
    Thirty-five years later, it was all clear. McCarthy was stupid – a blustering clown. It was incredible that he had got away with it for so long. The one indelible image of the period was of McCarthy whispering in Roy Cohn’s ear like a school bully suddenly desperate for advice, and the lawyer looking shocked and shattered as he realizes just how doomed his buffoon boss is among all the smart lawyers. Nixon was a glowering, unshaven crook, a sweaty Boris Karloff in
Arsenic and Old Lace.
Anne understood why he had been God’s gift to the protest movement, an Establishment villain who always looked and acted like one. And the ‘friendly’ witnesses – Robert Taylor, Adolph Menjou, Therese Colt – embarrassed themselves and flushed lesser people down the toilet as they blurted out their hatred of anyone in Hollywood they thought might be communists even if they could not think of any actual proof of their left-leaning politics. But Congressman Hugh Farnham was John Wayne, Captain America, Parsifal and the young Jack Kennedy rolled into one.
    Sweet Jesus, this man could have been
president.
    Waving a petition against the Committee signed by various Hollywood notables, Farnham even got chilling laughs with one speech. ‘I want to read you some of these names,’ he began, in a mildly sardonic manner, a brow arched. ‘One of the names is June Havoc. We found out from the Motion Picture Almanac that her real name is June
Hovick.
Another one is Danny Kaye, and we find his real name is David Daniel
Kaminsky.
Then we have the case of Mr John Garfield,
né
Julius
Garfinkle.
Eddie Cantor, known to his mother as Eddie
Iskowitz.
The famous Edward G. Robinson, a.k.a. Emmanuel
Goldenberg.
A fellow who signs his autograph Melvyn Douglas, but who is really not a Douglas at all but a
Hesselberg.
A promising Broadway gent called Cameron Nielson whose birth certificate reads Comrade… pardon me,
Conrad
Nastase. There are others too numerous to mention. They are attacking this house for doing its duty to protect this country and save the American people from the horrible fate the communists have meted out to the unfortunate Christian people of Europe.’
    When her father showed up, late in the day, she did not recognize him. It was a fluke that his hearing, which was officially an ‘enquiry into the misuse of a United States passport’ although the criminal charge hanging over him was actually Contempt of Congress, had been televised. By the time his name came up, everyone but the witchfinders had lost interest. It must have been a ratings-slow period. It was hard to connect the young man with the dark hair, quick grin and self-confident way with words to the person she had grown up around. All that was there were the horn-rimmed glasses and unearned Ivy League tie.
    In the film, Cameron Nielson was confident that he could defeat the Monster. His daughter knew that he had been destroyed by it.
    In 1957, the days of the blacklist were supposedly over, but her father was unemployable in Hollywood, his TV play
The Crunch
had been bounced without comment