Blacklisted screenwriter Norma Barzman dies at 103

Norma Barzman, the screenwriter who moved to Europe in the late 1940s rather than submit to the congressional investigations and professional ostracism that had dominated her industry for a decade, died on December 17 at her home in Beverly Hills, California. At the age of 103 years. He is widely considered one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.

Her daughter, Suzu Barzman, confirmed the death.

Ms. Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, were among hundreds of film industry figures — including screenwriters, actors, directors, stagehands and technicians — who found themselves shut out of Hollywood after World War II because of their unwillingness to discuss the matter. Their affiliation with the Communist Party or several front groups associated with it.

The Barzmans were long-time members of the party, having joined in the early 1940s. Although their membership officially ended when they left the country, they did not abandon the party until 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

“I am very proud of my years as a communist,” Ms. Barzman told the Associated Press in 2001. “We were not Soviet agents, but we were a bit silly and idealistic and enthusiastic, and we thought there was a chance to make a better world.”

For a period of time in the 1930s and 1940s, being a communist, or just sympathetic to the cause, was de rigueur among the Hollywood left. But with the beginning of the Cold War, attitudes began to change. Rumors spread of a government crackdown.

The couple was sitting on their front lawn in July 1947 when a woman in a convertible stopped to talk. After a cautious introduction – her name was Norma – she told them that there was a police car at the bottom of the hill, blocking anyone who turned into the street to ask about the Barzmans. Years later, they realized that the other Norma had taken the stage name Marilyn Monroe.

That fall, the House Un-American Activities Committee invited a group of screenwriters, directors, and producers to testify about their ties to the Communist Party. Ten of them refused to answer questions, and each was later found in contempt. Although the Barzmans were not among that group, which came to be called the Hollywood Ten, they feared they would soon be called out.

A few weeks after the hearings, a group of Hollywood executives issued the so-called Waldorf Statement, which announced that the ten witnesses, as well as anyone else who refused to discuss their connection to the Communist Party, would be blacklisted from the industry.

Business for the Barzman family quickly dried up. Finally, in 1949, Mr. Barzman had the opportunity to work on a film in London, where the blacklist had not arrived. They sailed on the Queen Mary, anticipating a six-week voyage.

They would not return to the United States until 1965, and would live abroad until 1976.

After several years in London, they moved to Paris. They eventually settled in Provence. They became local celebrities – the family that defied the blacklist – and made friends with the likes of French actor Yves Montand and Pablo Picasso.

Mr. Barzman continued to write screenplays, usually for European productions, though often uncredited. Mrs. Barzman also got some work, but it was more difficult, especially since she was also raising seven children.

Another friend, Sophia Loren, said in an interview for the book Giving Buddies: The Back Story of the Hollywood Blacklist (1997), “One day, she pinched my cheek and called me ‘La Mama,’ which drove me crazy.” Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.

By the time the Barzmans returned to Hollywood in the 1970s, the film industry and surrounding society had changed significantly, and they were never able to resume their careers.

“I’ve been very fortunate, even when I’ve been struggling,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. “So I wasn’t bitter then, and I’m not bitter now. I think it’s because I still feel like there’s a lot of hope. You have to work on things.” “Whether it is marriage or democracy.”

Norma Leavore was born on September 15, 1920, in Manhattan, precisely, as she liked to remember, over the kitchen table in her parents’ apartment on Central Park West. Her father, Samuel, was an importer, and her mother, Goldie (Levenson) LeFur, was a homemaker.

Norma attended Radcliffe College, but left in 1940 to marry Claude Shannon, an MIT graduate student who later became famous for his work in computational linguistics and was called the “Father of Information Theory.”

They moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he held a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and where she worked for the Economic Branch of the League of Nations, which had moved there from Switzerland at the beginning of World War II.

The couple separated in 1941, a year after her father’s death. Looking for a fresh start, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles, with a six-week stop in Reno, Nevada, to finalize her divorce.

She worked as a feature writer for The Los Angeles Examiner while taking screenwriting courses at Writers’ School, which was later added to the federal government’s list of subversive organizations.

“Shortly after my arrival, I realized that all the progressive people I liked who were politically active were communists,” she was quoted as saying in Giving Buddies.

She met Ben Barzman, another aspiring screenwriter, at a party at the home of Robert Rossen, another screenwriter. Mr. Barzman insisted that modern films were too complex for women to write. She shoved a lemon meringue pie in his face. They married in 1943.

Ms. Barzman wrote the original stories for two 1946 films: “Don’t Say Goodbye,” a comedy starring Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker, and “The Locket,” a noir thriller starring Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum. In Europe, her work included another script, “Luxury Girls,” but her name was removed from it until 1999.

Mr. Barzman died in 1989. Mrs. Barzman, along with her daughter Suzu, is survived by another daughter, Lolly Barzman. five sons, Aaron, Daniel, John, Paolo and Marco; Eight grandchildren. and six grandchildren.

After her return to Los Angeles, Ms. Barzman wrote a column on aging for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and a memoir, “Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoirs of a Hollywood Expatriate” (2003).

She also became vocal in her criticism of the blacklist and the role many in the industry played in it. Larry Sibler, a historian who has written extensively about the blacklist, described her as the “keeper of the flame” of the era.

In 1999, she joined about 500 other people outside the Academy Awards, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, to protest a tribute to director Elia Kazan.

To avoid being added to the blacklist, Mr. Kazan testified before a House committee, identifying several friends and industry colleagues as former Communists, earning the long-standing enmity of many in Hollywood.

Ms. Barzman, who was there with her teenage grandson, was holding a sign reading “Kazan is where you are.”