Chapter Seven. Pinks and Finks

“That Mitchum movie we wrote just opened at the Chinese!” Johnny yelled. “Let’s go!”




The movie started at 7:00, so they parked at the Chinese Theater at 7:40.





The previews and newsreel must have run long, because the scene with Mitchum and Guy Madison at the cocktail lounge hadn't even started yet.





Then Harry Von Zell, playing Scuffy, the lovable waiter entered, and said, “You kids sure are groovy.”





There was something exotic about Miriam that reminded Johnny of when he was nineteen and he first saw Sylvia Sidney in Dead End and thought maybe Hollywood was a place he’d like to be.





Ed had caught sight of Sam Ornitz and Al Maltz glaring at them from across the lobby.





"Come on," Johnny said. "Gotta be a thousand tan Fords in this burg."





The stresses of the morning had left Ed ravenously hungry, so he suggested they stop by Schwab's for a sandwich on the way back to the Edna.






Ed checked out the line of gussied-up cuties who sat along the counter hoping for that talent agent who was going to walk through the door and discover them.






Then the man did the thing that for twelve years Ed and Johnny had never learned to handle with equanimity. He reached inside his jacket and whipped out, not a gun, but a badge.




"Your FBI never sleeps," the man said. "We've been keeping our eyes on you fellows."





"Do you feel Dmytryk hired you for this job because he felt you would be sympathetic to what he calls his ‘political opinions’?”





Ed could see it all now. If he didn’t pay, Variety or The Hollywood Reporter or, God forbid, Hedda Hopper would sit on it until it could do him the most harm.





Then the Oscar would go to some pampered rich kid, some Ring Lardner Jr., and he would be branded forever as blue-collar, low-class, ignorant.





“Do you think we don’t know that Communists take up manual labor in order to deceive contented American workers into believing that they write with ‘authority’ about the supposed evils of the free market system?"





"Did you propose a motion picture to star Paul Robeson, the known apologist for the Soviet Union?” the man asked.
“I thought he was a singer,” Johnny said.





“The FBI knows that the Screen Writers Guild is rife with Communist propagandists. These men are threats not only to the future of our beloved motion picture industry but to every freedom we Americans hold dear. "





"I see you were decorated for being the Most Prolific Writers in the History of Stars and Stripes. Not exactly the Medal of Honor, was it?"





"Louis B. Mayer, that fearless defender of American values who has given us the inspiring adventures of Andy Hardy, that true-blue son of democracy, told me so personally."




"Hell," Ed said, "we’ll buy Pickfair and make Pickford live in the guest house!”





"Remember when Hammett kept buying us Scotch as long as we kept telling him ideas?" Johnny asked. "And he never stole a single one of our plots?”






"Wait," Johnny said. "I'm thinking of Zeppo. Which one is Karl?"





“Like, he’d take a bunch of money from Louis Mayer and give it to us?” Johnny asked. “And I’m supposed to think that’s a bad idea?”





"Why," Leona said, "just this past autumn, when the bosses of this very studio put down the strike of the Conference of Studio Unions…”





“As a matter of fact, the wife and I were talking about going on some sort of European holiday with Dalton and Cleo Trumbo,” Hunter said.





The men looked nothing alike, yet somehow they seemed identical, down to the tie, the hat that never left the head, and the impenetrable gaze.





Then Ed took a long look up toward the hills above Benedict Canyon, and Johnny knew where his mind’s eye was gazing. “You wouldn’t be happy there,” he said.



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