April 6, 2020 The Nation. 33I
n the summer of 1950, Lillian Ross start-
ed following the acclaimed director John
Huston around Los Angeles as he tried
to film Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel
The Red Badge of Courage. She was on a
return trip for The New Yorker to report on
blacklist-era Hollywood. Two years earlier,
Ross wrote a long feature about the imme-
diate aftermath of the House Un-American
Activities Committee hearings across the
industry. The mood was one of bafflement,
apprehension, and reaction. At parties, peo-
ple tried to deduce one another’s communist
sympathies by asking “who was or was not a
guest at the White House when Roosevelt
was president.” A pamphlet titled “ScreenGuide for Americans” was making the
rounds, with headings like “Don’t Deify the
‘Common Man,’” “Don’t Glorify the Col-
lective,” and “Don’t Smear Industrialists.”
Lela Rogers—Ginger Rogers’s mother—
cheerfully informed Ross that her “friend
Ayn Rand wrote it.”
In one of that essay’s central scenes, Ross
had lunch on the set of Key Largo (1948)
with Huston and two of the actors—Lauren
Bacall and Humphrey Bogart—with whom
he recently flew to Washington, DC, to
protest the HUAC hearings on behalf
of a short-lived liberal group called the
Committee for the First Amendment. Ross
stayed in touch with Huston. When she
visited him at New York’s Waldorf- Astoria
Hotel one day, she wrote, he invited her
back out to LA. “I’m going to show you
how we make a picture,” he told her.“Huston as a person is almost too in-
teresting to be true,” she wrote to The New
Yorker’s editor, William Shawn, two weeks
into her trip. Here, she thought, was some-
one “outside of the conventional pattern of
Hollywood, yet drawn and held by it, and
people in the business are attracted and held
by him.” Huston had stayed close to the in-
dustry’s center. He could give Ross a direct
line into the sites of Hollywood power: its
offices, restaurants, and parties. But because
he affected a persona of what she called
“lonely” distance from its operations, he
also seemed to show what it looked like to
struggle against the film industry’s confor-
mity and reaction. “It is going to involve so
many of the elements of Hollywood that it
is too good to let go by,” Ross wrote Shawn.
“You see, if the story turns out to be what I
think it is, it’s really almost a book, a kindMAKING PICTURES
Lillian Ross in Cold War Hollywood
by MAX NELSON
Max Nelson has written for The New York
Review of Books, Art in America, n+1, and other
JOHN HUSTON (WITH MEGAPHONE) ON THE SET OF publications.
MOBY DICK
, 1956 (ERNST HAAS / GETTY IMAGES)