Lucy and the Communists

Recently, Turner Classic Movies embarked on a podcast series delving into Hollywood history. The inaugural launch of the series, which can be heard on iTunes or watched on YouTube began with the life of actress/comedian Lucille Ball. This was soon followed by Aaron Sorkin's treatment, "Being the Ricardos." The TCM multi-part series on Ball begins with her birthplace of Jamestown, NY, through to her early successful television programs, and her relationship with husband and business partner, Desi Arnaz.

"Being the Ricardos" takes artistic license in condensing into one week a pivotal moment in Lucy's life when she confronts her philandering husband and is exposed as having registered to vote as a member of the Communist Party USA.

Part seven of the TCM podcast is titled “Red Scare.” It explores this controversial, and infinitely interesting, chapter in the comedian’s life. Infinitely interesting because showing how these otherwise one-dimensional public figures live complex, personal and political lives makes those lives richer and more believable - and more relatable.

Controversial because Hollywood in general and Ball in particular had every motivation, given the extent of the Red Scare, to put this chapter behind them and move on for the sake of their careers, profit, and salvaging the film industry.

In James Baldwin's last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, is about the child murders in Atlanta in the 80's. Baldwin's thoughts return again and again to an indictment that this particular mobilization around these deaths was about saving commerce in Atlanta.

Commerce, not Christianity, is this nation's religion.

Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, the TCM podcast contributes to this white washing in the name of commerce. Not surprisingly, so does Sorkin.

According to sworn testimonies before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, from Ball, her mother, and her brother, they had all registered to vote in California as Communist Party USA members in 1936.

Lucy's registration is about the only fact TCM almost gets correct. The podcast does not include Ball’s mother or her brother, and neither does Sorkin.

Though impossible to tell whether intentional or not, much of the podcast, despite the sworn testimony in HUAC transcripts, obscures the known facts of Ball’s alleged connections with the Party, and it seems to become another PR revision.

This we know from the testimony:

* Lucille Ball not only registered as a member of the Communist Party USA [CPUSA], but also so did her brother, Fred Ball, and mother Désirée E. Ball (all were subpoenaed by HUAC)

* Her grandfather, Fred Hunt, is described in the podcast as a "socialist" who held CPUSA meetings, which seems to leave in question whether the man was a Party member or a sympathizer. Hunt was in fact a CPUSA member and organizer in NY state [before a series of strokes]. He conducted those weekly meetings. 

*The Party meetings referenced in the podcast were in Lucille Ball's Los Angeles home. 

* Ball was named to the Party’s California state central committee, a fact omitted by the podcast and the film.

* Ball signed an affidavit at the time she registered to vote to sponsor a fellow CPUSA member to run for the 57th Assembly District of California, also omitted by the podcast and the film.

On Friday, September 4, 1953, Lucille Désirée Ball presented herself for questioning to HUAC in Hollywood. Between 1947 and into the 1950's, HUAC roamed the country and as far away as the Hawaii Territory [not yet a state] to ferret out Communists. 

This September testimony was actually her second time testifying, the first behind closed doors, a year earlier, and which testimony is still classified. 

As the podcast suggests, Ball thought her initial closed-door testimony settled the matter. It did not.

Part of the transcript, titled “Investigation of Communist Activities in the Los Angeles Area,” reads:

William A. Wheeler: "Would you go into detail and explain the background, the reason you voted or registered to vote as a Communist, or as a person who intended to affiliate with the Communist Party?"

Lucille Ball: "It was our grandfather, Fred Hunt. He just wanted us to, as we just did something to please him. I didn't intend to vote that way. As I recall I didn't.

"My grandfather started years ago - he was a Socialist as long as I can remember. He was the only father we ever knew, my grandfather. My father died when I was tiny, before my brother was born. He was my brother's only father.

"All through his life he had been a socialist, as far back as Eugene V. Debs, and he was in sympathy with the workingman as long as I have known, and he took the Daily Worker.”

Ball denies throughout the testimony ever being a member of the CPUSA or a communist, and that “I thought things were fine just the way they were.”

Yet, the same year she registered to vote as a CPUSA member, she, her grandfather, and a third person, Emile Freed, are appointed to the Communist Party’s California central committee. 

The HUAC investigator, Wheeler, reads from an alleged Party announcement of this appointment and passes it to Ball for a response.

Asked how she thinks her name was listed, Ball replied “Possibly my grandfather, Fred Hunt.”

After she confirms her signature on the nominating affidavit, the HUAC investigator asks for an explanation. Once again, “… Doing what I could to appease grandpa … “

At other points, in this same vein, she suggests to HUAC being duped into making a radio announcement on behalf of the Okies - the migrant, destitute farmers described in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; or being mentioned in a Daily Worker article. Again and again, she pivots to her grandfather Fred Hunt. She asks the investigator at one point if a certain allegation was during “Being nice to Daddy week”?

Whatever the actual depth of her Party membership, the performance reads through the transcript. She’s playing them, and, it turns out, they may be getting willingly played. Records suggest after Ball's first, behind-closed doors testimony, the panel was satisfied, save one politician who alerted a radio journalist.

It was the radio journalist's subsequent broadcast that triggered this more public testimony.

We learn some other interesting biographical notes from her testimony, like that she attended but never graduated high school. And that her father died when she was very young and her brother not yet born, making the grandfather the only father they really knew [and she says as much in testimony].

We learn that her grandfather’s advocacy for a living wage extended to maids Ball employed in the house. She recounts to HUAC: 

“We were never able to keep a maid, although we paid the highest prices we could afford, or they were getting at the time. My grandfather would walk out into the kitchen and see a maid and would say ‘Well, what is your name? How much are you getting?’

‘Oh, $20 or $25 a week,’ or whatever they were being paid.

“And he would say ‘That is not a working wage. What are you doing here?’

“And after a few times like that, you know, they would leave.”

But none of these things are brought up in the TCM podcast or the Sorkin film, and this is disappointing. Since the presumption is left against the Communist Party as a bad thing. 

The producers seem to do their level best to continue the performance Ball gave HUAC in 1953.

Instead of being ashamed of people's membership in the CPUSA and keeping up this revisionist nonsense, like "my grandfather made me do it," let's remember why tens of thousands like Lucille Ball joined the Party, why many more joined in the 30's at the height of the labor movement, why her grandfather was a Party organizer. As Ball herself explains her grandfather’s involvement: the Communist Party USA was the party of working people. 

The CPUSA was also the party for Black people, an anti-lynching party, and anti-Jim Crow party. It was the Party that staffed the CIO and its unions. That's why so many joined, and we should say this explicitly.

Unlike many other artists, teachers, government workers, and laborers who were so accused and subpoenaed, Ball’s Red Scare storm lasts but about two weeks and blows over. In my opinion, this is for two reasons. She attributes her actions to her grandfather, which I doubt a male actor or worker would get away with [Ball’s brother, Fred, faced a life of employment problems after his subpoena].

The second reason is that Desilu, the film company Ball and Arnaz founded and ran, had become a huge moneymaker for an industry that by the early 50’s was facing an identity crisis as the age of the major film studios was waning rapidly and the studio system in disarray. Desilu was infusing life [read: cash profits] into a dying corpse and taking down Lucille Ball would destroy their cash cow.

That’s why, as the podcast reveals, tobacco giant, Philip Morris, the main sponsor of the "I Love Lucy" show, stood by Ball and its sponsorship of her TV series.

The pivots and deflections aside, Ball’s HUAC testimony is in parts a touching acknowledgment of her grandfather's work. Even in the Sorkin film, she is shown as someone who wants to maintain loyalty to the "only Daddy we knew" and who raised her.

She says at one point to the panel:

"[The politics] never meant much to us, because he was so radical on the subject that he pressed his point a little too much, actually, probably, during our childhood, because he finally got over our heads, and we didn't do anything but consider it a nuisance, but as a dad, and he got into his 70's, and it became so vital to him that the world must be right 24 hours a day, all over it, and he was trying his damnedest to do the best he could for everybody and especially the workingman; that is, for the garbageman, the maid in the kitchen, the studio worker, the factory worker. He never lost a chance doing what he considered bettering their positions."

Rather than continuing to portray these "Hollywood legends" as naive dupes, how about we flip the script and consider they were the advanced ones, and elite society the albatross around our necks? We will not progress if we keep telling these Red Scare stories like this.

Click here to read a full version of the HUAC testimony and here, which is followed by Ball's mother, then brother.

Lucy and Desi hold an informal press conference
at their LA Valley ranch

[Note: this article originally appeared in People's World on December 7, 2021, but for reasons unknown to me it was taken down. It can be read here via web archive]