The untold story of an author's struggle for the freedom to write in America

A story of twists and turns and even a small Iowa connection

This is the story of one man whose political beliefs destroyed a part of his life.

It is a story that begins almost a century ago. It comes to mind today for a couple of reasons.

One was the Broadway run of Good Night and Good Luck, a play focusing on an almost forgotten time when those who disagreed with those in power in America were made to pay a heavy price for their beliefs. The play closed on Broadway this past weekend following an unprecedented telecast of a complete, uninterrupted live performance on TV worldwide.

The other is the fact that those whose beliefs are not in sync with the powers that be in America at this moment find themselves increasingly under attack.

This story also has a personal connection for me.

The man was married to my father’s first cousin, Inez Garson. Though I never knew Inez or her husband, Arnold Perl, the story upon which this newsletter is based was told to me recently by their son, Adam Perl, of Ithaca, New York.

The story has numerous twists and turns, so there’s a surprise waiting near the end. For now, I will call it Anatevka.

Arnold Perl was born in New York in 1914, which made him ripe for service in World War II, beginning in the early 1940s. He and Inez appear to have met when both were attending CCNY (City College of New York) in the early 1930s. They married in 1935. Their first child, a daughter, Rachel, was born a few weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.

Arnold Perl and Inez Garson with daughter, Rachel, and infant son, Adam, 1946. Family photo.

Arnold Perl’s primary role during the war was writing Army training manuals and making training films.

He must have liked the work. After the war, he began writing for radio.

The Eternal Light opened on NBC radio in 1944, becoming a huge success. It featured interviews, commentary, and dramas from a Jewish perspective, but was successful with an audience that reached well beyond Jews. Arnold Perl was one of the writers.

Soon, he moved to a radio network crime drama, Bulldog Drummond, and then, to radio’s The Big Story, a recreation of a newspaper reporter’s true crime story from somewhere in America every week. Foreseeing the future, The Big Story moved to television in 1950, and Arnold Perl moved with it as one of its three writers.

Note for Iowa readers: Wikipedia’s history of this radio program references Russ Wilson of The Des Moines Tribune for his “authentic and exciting story” of The Case of the Ambitious Hobo as an example of how the program worked. The program aired in December 1947.

Arnold’s career was on the move.

By 1951, Arnold and Inez had three children and had moved to a “big, lovely, gorgeous” home, as Adam Perl described it, in Mamaroneck, Westchester County, New York.

McCarthyism: One of America’s dark hours

Joseph R. McCarthy was a Wisconsin native who served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron in World War II. In 1946, after the war, he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin. He was a backbencher there until 1950. The Cold War had begun, and suspected Communist sympathizers in America were being targeted for criticism or worse.

The anti-Communist focus soon narrowed to those working in two areas – the U.S. government and the entertainment industry.

The government seemed a logical focal point. The entertainment industry’s targeting was less clear. Perhaps it was a concern that those in the entertainment business might influence people through their creative work – except that there does not appear to ever have been an effort to prove or demonstrate that this was happening.

Some historians believe it more likely that the entertainment industry was targeted because there were a great many Jews at high levels in that field. In effect, targeting the entertainment field was a two-fer – suspected Communist sympathizers and/or Jews could be removed from positions of power and wealth based on evidence that was minimal or even non-existent.

McCarthy jumped into action.

He soared into the national spotlight with a speech to a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, by holding up a piece of paper that he alleged to be a list of known Communists working in the State Department.

Four months later, he received, in effect, a gift that would make him the de facto leader of a national campaign to drive possible Communist sympathizers out of government and the entertainment business. An organization that called itself Red Channels published its Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. The pamphlet listed the names of 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists*, and others associated with the entertainment industry. A list of citations accompanied each name, purportedly linking them to Communist sympathies in some way.

* A small sampling of the other names on the list: Leonard Bernstein, Lee J. Cobb, Aaron Copland, Jose Ferer, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin, Burl Ives, Judy Holliday, Dashiell Hammet, Lillian Hellman, Burgess Meredith, Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel, Dorothy Parker, Edward G. Robinson, Pete Seeger, Howard K. Smith, and William L. Shirer, who grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and graduated from Coe College.

McCarthy now had a list of people in the entertainment industry to begin attacking. He would accuse many of them of having Communist connections without providing hard evidence for any of the accusations. It became known as McCarthyism.

The 151 persons in the entertainment industry targeted by Red Channels would end up with two choices. They could accept being blacklisted by the entertainment industry, meaning that they could not be employed in any way within that industry. Or, they could choose to testify before Congress and provide names of additional people in the entertainment industry who had Communist connections of some kind. This would result in their names being removed from the blacklist.

About two-thirds of the 151, including Arnold Perl, refused to testify and were voluntarily barred by executives of entertainment businesses from receiving work in the entertainment business.

Adam Perl said there is no doubt that his parents, both Inez and Arnold, had Communist friends and attended meetings in the 1930s and the late ’40s after the war. It was a part of who they were. They had a wide circle of friends that was inclusive of people often shunned during those years – biracial couples, gay people, and, yes, Communist sympathizers.

The citations against Arnold Perl:

• He was a contributor to a periodical that published information about current films and the film industry worldwide, including in Russia.

• He received praise for a documentary radio broadcast in The Daily Worker, a national newspaper that reflected a broad range of left-wing thinking, including the Communist Party USA.

• He was an instructor in radio and television writing for a writing program sponsored by an alleged U.S.-based Socialist organization.

• He had written a sketch that was presented at a national rally in 1946 marking the 27^th anniversary of the Communist Party; more than 16,000 people attended the event at Madison Square Garden in New York.

• He had been a speaker at an organizational meeting of a committee that was opposed to the efforts of Congress’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Note that these citations do not include a single specific example of anything he said or wrote that might be considered to be threatening to the future of democracy. But that did not matter.

Suddenly, Arnold Perl’s income dropped to zero, and there was no way he could use his skill set as a writer to get a job. He and his wife also had three children under age 10 at home.

The family was in dire straits at a time when there was no network of social services to provide aid. Little wonder that the economic troubles also produced cracks in the marriage of Inez and Arnold.

In desperation, Arnold Perl and a friend, also blacklisted, eventually began producing plays off Broadway. They were working for themselves, thus side-stepping the blacklist.

Arnold also began ghostwriting screenplays for other television writers who were not blacklisted. He would sell his work to these writers for a small amount of money. The purchaser, in turn, would sell them to a production company for 10 times what Arnold had been paid. As a final insult, the name credit that would appear with the work was that of the purchaser.

Still, the off-Broadway productions were having some success, Adam Perl said. Then, Arnold Perl decided to write a play himself.

Sholem Aleichem: The American Mark Twain

Sholem Aleichem was born in Russia in 1859. He was drawn to writing as a youth and began composing articles in Russian and Hebrew. He soon turned to Yiddish, however, a German dialect that incorporates Hebrew words and was the language of the Jewish masses in 19^th century Russia and Poland.

His works were stories of the times, providing a unique record of Jewish life in the area of the world where most Jews lived at that time. Between 1883, when he published his first story, and his death at age 57 in 1916, he published more than 40 volumes of novels, stories, and plays.

Arnold Perl turned to Sholem Aleichem’s works in the 1950s for his inspiration as a playwright. He picked two stories by Aleichem and another by I. L. Peretz, which he dramatized for theatrical production. The result was The World of Sholem Aleichem, an evening of one-act plays, which played at the Barbizon Plaza in New York City for more than a year. “It was a tremendous success,” Adam Perl said.

Indeed. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt attended the play in New York in January 1954. She described the experience as “an evening of near artistic perfection” in her syndicated newspaper column that week.

Unfortunately, however, the theater is a business of nights and weekends, Adam said. His father was rarely home during this time.

And then came 1956, when Adam’s world fell apart. During the first six months of that year, the Perls’ house in Westchester burned down – an electrical fire destroyed 70 percent of the structure. Then his parents’ divorce became final. A few months later, his father remarried.

Inez decided that she and the children needed to start over in a new place. She took a job at Cornell University as assistant director of their art gallery. Slowly, Inez would rebuild her life and her career – and she would have some fun while doing it. Maybe a story for another time.

For Arnold Perl, The World of Sholem Aleichem had been so successful that he took another Sholem Aleichem character and created another play.

Tevya and His Daughters. The story of a poor Jewish milkman. It ran for three months off Broadway in New York. Maybe just enough to break even.

The year is now 1959. The blacklist remains in effect. Channel 13 public television in New York decides to produce The World of Sholem Aleichem with the actor Zero Mostel in a starring role and many of the original blacklisted actors who performed it off Broadway in the cast.

Except that this time, they ALL got on-screen credits for their work. The blacklist had been set up by public broadcasting to crumble.

Arnold Perl was soon back in business as a major screenwriter for primetime TV.

He wrote the pilot show for the acclaimed N.Y.P.D. series and was one of the co-writers with David Susskind for the entire three years it ran.

He produced the TV series East Side/West Side about social workers starring two all-time greats, George C. Scott and Cicely Tyson. It may have been the first TV series to co-star a white man and a black woman in leading roles.

Now it is 1964. There’s a major new musical on Broadway. Arnold Perl and his second wife, Nancy, join another couple, Nancy’s cousin and his wife, to see the show. The lead character is a milkman named Tevya. The actor playing Tevya is Zero Mostel.

Yes, Yes: Fiddler on the Roof, set in the fictitious shtetl of Anatevka and loosely based on the play written by Arnold Perl, Tevya and His Daughters.

The show is proceeding, and Arnold suddenly looks at his theater-goer companions and speaks four words:

“I wrote that line.”

Whoa!

Arnold’s lawyer soon was in discussions with Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist, and Jerry Bock, who wrote the music.

An agreement was reached. Arnold Perl and later his descendants would receive a share of the royalties from Fiddler forever.

And every time you see the play, you will find this line displayed prominently in the program:

“Based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem by special permission of Arnold Perl.”

Was it plagiarism? No, not really. Adam Perl said. The stories are alike in theme, but not significantly in dialogue.

Arnold Perl, however, had made a business decision that would compete for the smartest of whatever year in which it was made, as he worked on the Sholem Aleichem stories.

He had purchased the rights to Sholem Aleichem’s entire body of work from Aleichem’s daughter.

Fiddler on the Roof would win nine Tonys and run for eight years on Broadway, a record at that time.

Arnold Perl, once an impoverished blacklist victim, would become wealthy. The blacklist was on its way out.

Arnold Perl continued to work as a screenwriter until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 57 in 1971.

At the time, he was working on a documentary film on the life of Malcolm X.

He received a posthumous Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Film in 1973.

NOTE TO READERS: I write this newsletter, Arnold Garson: Second Thoughts, as a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. You can subscribe for free. However, this newsletter requires substantial time. If you enjoy reading it, please consider showing your support by becoming a paid subscriber at the level that feels right for you. Click on the “Subscribe now” button here. The cost can be less than $2 per newsletter.

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