Deb Aronson

Broken by the Blacklist

Actor Larry Parks ‘36 LAS was on the brink of Hollywood stardom when the McCarthy Era brought his career to a stunning halt

First appeared in Illinois Alumni in December 2008 under Profiles

“‘Ma, … how do you really feel about the blacklist? Angry? Frustrated? How?’”

“That needed to be answered, and I thought about it a lot. Angry? No. To me, anger is a futile emotion. I think I can sum it up in two words: deep sorrow. Not for myself - I’ve survived, and my life is full of joy - but a deep sorrow for [my husband] Larry that will be with me in my heart for the rest of my life.”

• Betty Garrett

On the long list of accomplished alumni of the University of Illinois stands one that few people know about - a man who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Stumped? It is Larry Parks ‘36 las, born Samuel Klusman Lawrence Parks, who was brought to acclaim for his lead role in the 1946 smash hit, “The Jolson Story.” But while Parks seemed to be on a sure path to success in the years before World War II, his acting career was abruptly cut short when he was swept up in the anti-communist hysteria spearheaded by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the mid-20th century. Parks’ accomplishments have faded from history in part because, as the first actor to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was blacklisted and disappeared from the big screen.

As the 2008 movie “Trumbo” (about celebrated screenwriter Dalton Trumbo) so aptly portrays, fighting the blacklist was like fighting smoke. It meant all of a sudden not getting jobs and never knowing why. It meant having your picture plastered across movie magazines one day and seeing your career destroyed the next. It meant having the cloud of suspicion created by the blacklist follow you relentlessly - to the very hour of your memorial service. And while blacklisted screenwriters could get some work using pseudonyms, actors - with their well-known faces - had no such recourse when the livelihood they so passionately loved was denied them.

Years later, Parks’ son, Garrett, told his mother, “Ma, Pop didn’t die of [not taking care of his heart]. He died of disappointment. I’ve never known a man who had more disappointments that were not his fault.”

Falling in love with the stage

Born in 1914, Parks grew up in Joliet. At the U of I, he was a pre-med student majoring in chemistry and an enthusiastic member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. More significantly, it was at Illinois that he discovered his passion for the stage, drawing attention for his performances in plays and musicals such as “Mad Hopes,” “Amaco,” “The Little Clay Cart” and “Riddle Me This.” As the 1937 Illio yearbook stated about the Illini Theatre Guild production of “Behold This Dreamer”: “Klusman Parks turned in an excellent performance as the very sane artist, Charley Tanner.”

After graduation, Parks was thrilled to get a job with the Lake Whalom Playhouse in Fitchburg, Mass., for $30 per week.

“That was the end of his medical career,” quipped his widow, Betty Garrett, a notable singer-actress in her own right, who is still performing at age 89.

After one summer in Fitchburg, Parks went to New York and became involved in the Group Theater, an acting company and school founded in 1931 by director Lee Strasberg and others. In 1940, Parks went to Hollywood on the promise of a movie part. Although that fell through, he talked his way into a screen test that resulted in a contract with Columbia Pictures.

With his dark hair and conventional good looks, Parks had a charming, earnest, clean-cut demeanor. Parks also maintained a very fit physique, as he worked out every day, partly in response to frequent childhood illnesses, which had left him with a weakened heart.

While Parks may not have had the charisma of fellow actor Cary Grant, he worked hard, and he was good. As part of the studio system in Hollywood at the time, Parks appeared in more than 40 B movies, those low-budget films that were intended, like the B side of a 45 rpm recording, as the less publicized half of a movie double feature.

“Columbia churned them out like pancakes,” said Garrett of the B movie scene.

Doug McClelland, author of “Blackface to Blacklist: Al Jolson, Larry Parks and The Jolson Story,” describes Parks as Columbia’s “busiest if least recognized utility actor.” But Parks wasn’t just a hard worker. He had real talent and versatility, appearing in musicals opposite Ann Miller, in dramas like “The Deer Slayer” and “The Black Parachute” and even in horror/comedy, like “The Boogie Man Will Get You” with Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. Parks’ screen credits include “Love is Better than Ever” with a young Liz Taylor, “Down to Earth” with Rita Hayworth, “The Swordsman,” “The Gallant Blade” and “Counter-Attack.”

“Larry was good for anything you needed him for,” said Garrett. “He was a good dramatic actor, and he also could be very funny.”

Movies and marriage

Garrett was already a well-established Broadway performer when she and Parks met in 1944. (She would go on to play and sing opposite stars including Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante and is perhaps better known to more modern television audiences as the liberal neighbor in “All in the Family” and the landlady in “Laverne and Shirley.”)

Garrett had come to Los Angeles for a gig and became involved in a show for The Actors’ Laboratory Theater, a professional theater and school formed in Hollywood by former members of Strasberg’s Group Theater.

“I just started rehearsing, and every once in a while this cute guy would stick his head in and ask, ‘Is everything OK?’” remembered Garrett. “So finally I said, ‘Who is that guy?’ That’s when I learned that that was Larry, and he was producing the show.”

While they dated a few times after the performance, Garrett returned to New York shortly afterward. A few months later, she returned to Los Angeles to marry him, with actor Lloyd Bridges, one of Parks’ closest friends, serving as best man.

“Sometimes I was surprised Larry decided to marry me so suddenly,” said Garrett with a chuckle. “He is the kind of person who would do research before he bought a toothbrush.” But his instinct proved true - Parks and Garrett were married for 31 years until he died in 1975 of a heart attack. He was just 60 years old.

Within a few years of their wedding, things looked rosy for the Hollywood couple, both professionally and personally. In 1946, “The Jolson Story” catapulted Parks to national acclaim; the next year, Garrett got an MGM contract and was able to move to Los Angeles. The Jolson sequel, “Jolson Sings Again,” also starring Parks, appeared in 1949. The couple also had two sons. Parks appeared to be on the brink of superstardom.

The horror of HUAC

“The Jolson Story” won Academy awards from the Screen Actors Guild for best scoring of a musical picture and best sound recording and earned Parks a nomination for best actor. Unfortunately, the role brought him not just acclaim but the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy fanned America’s fears about the growing threat of communism in Eastern Europe and China in the 1940s and ’50s by publicly stating that the danger came not only from the outside but within America itself. He instigated one of the most repressive campaigns in American history, searching for more than 200 communists he claimed had infiltrated the U.S. government. His unsubstantiated assertions were notoriously difficult on writers and entertainers (some of the accused even committed suicide). People at universities and at businesses were required to swear loyalty oaths. To refuse was to risk one’s career. In Hollywood, it was the same.

Parks’ ordeal with HUAC began in 1947, when the panel called 19 members of the Hollywood establishment to testify, of whom 10 actually appeared. Those “Hollywood Ten” resisted the committee by refusing to recognize its prerogative to conduct the investigation. None admitted to being members of the Communist Party; all were jailed for contempt of Congress.

After being suspended for a few years, the hearings reconvened in 1951. Parks was the first to be subpoenaed. Even as he left for Washington, D.C., Parks was undecided as to his response. Once he knew, Parks told his wife, he would call and tell her his plan.

That never happened. Garrett says her husband was in such turmoil that he didn’t make up his mind until he sat before the committee on March 21 (the same day as the conclusion of the federal case against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, later convicted and executed as Soviet spies). Ultimately, Parks chose to simply tell the truth - he had joined the Communist Party in 1941 and left in 1945 when he lost interest. The first Hollywood personality to publicly admit such an affiliation, Parks had hoped that by respecting the law and responding to the summons, he would be cleared when the committee understood the legality of joining the Party and his subsequent disillusionment with it.

Parks also told the committee, “I would like to point out that in my opinion there is a great difference between - and not a subtle difference - between being a Communist, a member of the Communist Party, say in 1941, 10 years ago, and being a Communist in 1951. … Being a member of the Communist Party fulfilled certain needs of a young man that was liberal in thought, idealistic, who was for the underprivileged, the underdog. … I think that being a Communist in 1951 in this particular situation is an entirely different kettle of fish when this is a great power that is trying to take over the world.”

But the trauma of testifying under such circumstances is evident in Parks’ remarks, as he came to realize that the committee was not responding to his straightforward reply to the summons. Despite having made notes to himself the night before on how to remain calm before the panel, his resolve broke under the stress of steely questioning. “I would prefer, if you would allow me, not to mention other people’s names,” he said in tears. “Don’t present me with the choice of either being in contempt of this committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer. … This is not the American way.”

According to Garrett, Parks did not tell HUAC any names of other members of the Communist Party but, presented with a list of names the committee already had, pointed to ones he knew were Party members at some time. In the end, Parks was shunned both by actors who thought he should have denounced others more loudly and those who thought he should not have cooperated at all.

In any case, Parks did not grovel enthusiastically enough and was blacklisted; Garrett says it took Columbia only a few hours to cancel his next movie role. As the only actor among the 19 Hollywood people to be called (and thereby familiar to the public), Parks seemed to take an especially hard hit on his career. Garrett recalls the singer/actress Lena Horne telling her, “Larry’s taking the rap for a lot of us.”

Speaking up and falling out

To me the whole thing was absolutely ridiculous,” fumed Garrett. “We were against unfairness [and] discrimination and for fair housing. Our leanings were always liberal. They still are. I think show people are inclined to be more liberal because we have to put ourselves in others’ boots, which makes us more simpatico. … It was so obvious to me that Larry was called as the first witness because he was the most prominent. It got headlines 3 inches high, so the committee got its publicity.”

“He was very bright and very patriotic,” said Parks’ older son, Garrett (Garry), grief and frustration still in his voice more than 30 years after losing his father. “He believed in fairness and for speaking up for what he thought was right.”

Though he may not have described it this way, Parks believed in “speaking truth to power” and in addressing unfairness wherever he witnessed it - indeed, his testimony before the HUAC is not the first time he did so. The actor also had butted heads with the Screen Actors Guild and the studio. For example, as a member of the SAG board, he co-authored the first report to show that the average actor did not make a living wage. According to Garrett, the report infuriated future U.S. President Ronald Reagan, then a Hollywood actor and head of SAG, a position he held during the HUAC hearings.

Parks also had sued Columbia, saying the contract he signed just before “The Jolson Story” was done under duress, as the studio threatened to pull him from the role if he didn’t sign a seven-year contract. While the judge in the case decided for Columbia - saying Parks should have sued before he signed the contract - he went on to say that outside of Major League Baseball, he had never seen a contract so inequitable. If such contracts were ever tested in court, the judge said, they would surely be overturned. According to Parks’ son, Garry, the judge’s decision spelled the beginning of the end of the studio system.

“To his dying day, Larry was humiliated by how he was treated,” Garrett said of being blacklisted. “He was so hurt by this that he stopped auditioning. He was offered a couple of pictures, but they were terrible parts, and he had a lot of pride in his acting. He didn’t want to feel like he had to work his way back into the studio’s good graces.”

As close and loving as the Garrett-Parks marriage was, Parks’ testimony and the effect of the blacklist on their lives was something the couple never talked about. Instead, they buried the pain and frustration and tried to go on.

Parks turned his attention to supporting his family by ramping up his construction business, using and expanding on skills he gained building theater sets at Illinois. But the hurt festered.

“The only time Larry ever flared up at me was at a party where I was bragging about what a good builder he was,” remembers Garrett. “And he yelled at me, ‘You think I don’t miss being an actor?’”

“You could never find out where [the blacklist] edict came from,” says Garrett, who remains disgusted but resigned at the injustice of that treatment. And, though Hollywood movies were out for Parks (he did just one after the blacklist, playing Sigmund Freud’s mentor in the 1962 movie “Freud”), he and Garrett did tour the United States together, performing in numerous musicals. They also created a live act that toured venues in England, including London’s venerable and prestigious Palladium. Parks also had guest roles in television shows such as “The Untouchables,” “Dr. Kildare” and “Ford Television Theater.”

After the storm

By 1956, the McCarthy maelstrom seemed to have blown itself out after the notorious senator was censured by Congress. It was as if the fear-mongering and redbaiting had been a bad dream.

But the blacklist cast a lingering shadow on Parks. Indeed, Garrett reports, during her husband’s memorial service at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles - 24 years after Parks’ HUAC testimony - a woman attempted to stop such a “disgrace” from taking place there.

“Here is a man who made an amazing movie,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many young people have told me, ‘I saw that movie, and it made me want to be an actor.’

“Every year, we collect 70 signatures of famous people,” Garrett said of her efforts to have Parks’ accomplishments recognized with a star on Hollywood Boulevard, “and every year there is some excuse or another.”