Read Online Murder on High by Stefanie Matteson - Free Book Online

recognition.
    “I owe much of my success to Iris,” Charlotte said.
    “Then what?” Tracey prompted.
    “HUAC,” she said as if it explained everything, which it did.
    Pyle looked at her with a quizzical expression. “The House Committee on Un-American Activities,” she said. “Otherwise known as HUAC. Self-appointed guardians of American internal security from 1947 to 1953.”
    “Oh,” said Pyle, who still looked baffled.
    “Their mission was to expose Communists, and their special target was the entertainment industry,” Tracey explained.
    Charlotte continued. “Iris had some friends—other screen writers, mostly—who were self-confessed Communist sympathizers, or com symps, as they were known. She had been very close to some members of the Hollywood Ten, who went to jail for their beliefs, as well as to other blacklisted writers.”
    “Blacklisted?” asked Pyle.
    Charlotte sighed. She was feeling more and more like a time traveler these days. She realized that she would have to start from Square One.
    “If a writer was called to testify before HUAC, and refused to answer the sixty-four-dollar question, as it was called, after the quiz show, which was, ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party,’ his—or her—name was put on a list and he or she could expect never to work again.”
    “Unless he or she implicated others,” interjected Tracey, who, thank God, had some acquaintance with the events of that era.
    “Right. Those who were subpoenaed had the option of getting off the hook by naming names. And many of them did. Losing your swimming pool or your tennis court were powerful threats. But there were some who would rather have lost everything than turn stool pigeon.” Like Linc Crawford, she thought.
    “Was Iris O’Connor a Communist?” asked Pyle in the same tone of voice one would use to refer to a child molester or a rapist. It was clear which side he would have been on had he been born a generation or two earlier.
    “It didn’t matter. It was a witch hunt. Two hundred and fifty people were blacklisted. Thousands more were graylisted. And the FBI had dossiers on hundreds of thousands more, myself among them, I suspect.”
    Pyle looked contrite.
    To be fair, she thought, it was probably difficult for a thirty-year-old to see the idealistic appeal of a system that in those days was still young enough not to have demonstrated its essential unworkability or revealed the evil and corruption that went along with it.
    “Anyway, in answer to your question: I don’t know. She wasn’t a card-carrying Communist, to use McCarthy’s phrase. She may have gone to a few meetings, but so did a lot of people.”
    “Of the Communist Party?” asked Pyle incredulously.
    Charlotte tried to explain. “The line between capitalist and Communist was thinner then. No group could have been more plugged into the capitalist system than the Hollywood screenwriters. Yet a lot of them were outraged at how blacks were treated; remember, there was still segregation then.” She paused for a moment to eat her dinner, which was indeed delicious, and then continued. “Then there was the Spanish Civil War.”
    “The Abraham Lincoln Battalion,” said Tracey.
    “Yes. A lot of actors and writers supported the Loyalists; some, like Hemingway (and Linc, she thought), even joined international battalions that were formed to fight Franco. Though that was all in the late thirties, the Red hunters had long memories.”
    “I guess I don’t know much about history,” Pyle apologized.
    What were they teaching in school nowadays? Charlotte wondered. “Anyway, it didn’t matter whether Iris was a Communist or not. It was enough to have breathed the same air as a Communist, and Iris had associated with a number of self-confessed Reds.”
    Thinking about those days, Charlotte remembered a story she’d once heard about someone who was subpoenaed because they’d been at the same bullfight with