Olivia de Havilland saved Hollywood from Stalin

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Olivia de Havilland, who died on Sunday, aged 104, is remembered mostly for her on-screen work, including her role as Melanie Hamilton in Gone With The Wind. But we shouldn’t forget her contribution to ending the communist influence in Hollywood at a critical moment.

De Havilland was involved with the Hollywood Independent Citizens’ Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions, which brought together liberals and communists as World War II was ending. Its leader, Hannah Dorner — who would move to England and produce The Adventures of Robin Hood TV series — was a secret member of the Communist Party. As the early winds of the Cold War blew, Dorner began to shift the group towards a pro-Soviet position. By October 1945, she was leading the group in opposing “the incipient native fascism” she said emanated from President Harry Truman’s administration.

De Havilland, an anti-communist liberal, was shocked when she heard communist screenwriter John Howard Lawson tell the committee the US was starting “to strangle democracy everywhere”.

In June 1946 she accepted an invitation to speak at a committee rally in Seattle. She received a draft written by Hollywood’s most gifted, prolific and highest-paid screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo wanted her to condemn “the drive of certain interests toward a war against the Soviet Union”, and his text condemned Truman for union busting, anti-Semitism and racial bigotry. What de Havilland did was unprecedented and gutsy. Without informing Trumbo or anyone else in the committee’s leadership, she read to the rally not Trumbo’s prepared words but her own, written with the help of James Roosevelt, president Franklin Roose­velt’s anti-communist son, who was one of the committee’s leaders.

From 1932 to 1945, she told her audience, a “coalition of all liberal and progressive forces” supported the New Deal.

But in this new era,“reactionary forces have driven a wedge in the liberal coalition” and were trying to make it appear “that the great liberal movement is controlled by those who are more interested in taking orders from Moscow and following the party line than they are in making democracy work”. The only answer was for liberals to distance themselves from Stalin and his followers, the American communists. “We believe in democracy,” she told the crowd, “and not in communism.”

Ronald Reagan and Olivia de Havilland have lunch in Los Angeles in 1938.

De Havilland’s speech, Trumbo wrote to her in an angry letter, was nothing “but a denunciation of communism”, an exercise in “red-baiting”. With the support of another actor in the group, Ronald Reagan, James Roosevelt and de Havilland proposed that members make a statement strongly opposed to communism.

After a stormy meeting, Reagan, producer and screenwriter Dore Schary and others proceeded to de Havilland’s apartment, where she told them she had decided to “smoke out” the communists and openly oppose them. Roosevelt publicly resigned in July 1946 and it was soon apparent that the committee’s only remaining members were the communists who had created it.

Ronald Radosh is co-author, with Allis Radosh, of Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance With the Left.