But oh, how she missed the life she’d had to flee. No, the life from which she’d been banished! She’d worked so hard to make it. Given up so much over the last five years. Gone to countless open calls. Accepted stupid, minuscule roles she hated, just to get noticed. Allowed womanizing Neanderthals to patronize and grope and use her just so that she’d be remembered. And to have achieved the career of a lifetime after all that only to have it torn from her grasp?
Melanie pivoted from the window and then sat down under it, for no reason other than she’d not done that yet. She leaned against the wall and tipped her head back. Some days, the unfairness of it all was unbearable. Truly unbearable.
The hoopla surrounding the rooting out of Hollywood communists had been decidedly waning the last few years. Those who’d earlier worried they might be targeted surely felt safer, Carson Edwards especially, though when Melanie had started dating him, she had no idea he probably believed he’d dodged a bullet.
In the months she’d been hiding out in Malibu, Melanie had learned that when Carson’s career was just getting off the ground, he’d dated a folk singer who happened to be an American Communist Party member. There was no reason Melanie should’ve known this; that had been eight years ago and Carson Edwards had dated a lot of people since then. He was famous for it.
But while the newest Hollywood Red Scare was indeed in decline, the studios’ blacklist was still very much intact. Everyone in Hollywood knew that. If a person’s name was on the list, the only way to get off was to testify before the HUAC to clear their name.Clearing a name had become synonymous with naming others. That was something everyone in Hollywood also knew.
Carson had found out right after they’d both been blacklisted that a screenwriter whom Carson was only marginally acquainted with, who’d been on the Hollywood blacklist a long time and who was desperate to reclaim his career, had suddenly decided he’d had enough. The man wanted his life back and to be seen as a part of the solution, not the problem. He’d volunteered to testify. He’d flown to Washington and told the HUAC he’d been naïve and uninformed—for that brief time in this life—when he was a Party member. He’d gotten caught up in the crusade for equality, not just in the workplace but everywhere, but he learned quickly communism was not the answer to America’s socioeconomic problems. He’d repented for his socialist leanings years earlier. Left the Party. The HUAC could ask anyone who knew him; he’d been open about his leaving. And when the HUAC had next asked him who else had been influenced as he had been by communist thinking, he named names—fresh ones—including Carson, and, by association, Carson Edwards’s current love interest and his closest friends. This testifier said he had seen Carson at Party meetings back in 1948 when he was also there, and several times, not just once. And while he had publicly turned his back on the Party, Carson Edwards never had.
The controlling belief among the members of the HUAC was that there were no good reasons why an American went to meetings of the Communist Party, only unpatriotic, dangerous ones—even if said person didn’t actually become a dues-paying member. In other words, it was safe to assume Carson had gone to those meetings because he’d wanted to be there.
Likewise, there was only one reason why someone like MelanieCole would become intimately involved with a communist thinker like Carson Edwards.
It was because, as HUAC logic went, she was a sympathizer.
Carson had gotten the phone call that changed everything for Melanie the same day the testimony of this man was made public and every Hollywood studio either read it or heard about it. Melanie was on Carson’s patio that June afternoon, lounging by his pool. Their blockbuster movie had been out for six months, and the studio was putting the final touches on a new script for Carson and Melanie for a film that was supposed to begin shooting on location in Honolulu in three months.
He’d just taken a dip in the pool when he heard the jangling of the telephone, and he’d gone inside to answer it after toweling off, leaving the sliding glass door open behind him.
Melanie had heard him pick up the phone, greet one of their producers by name, and then go quiet. For the next few minutes and until he came back outside and told her what had been said on the other end of the line, all she heard were his words in reply.
“I was only dating a gal who attended those gatherings; that was it,” he’d said in a peeved voice. “She was the one who brought me.”
Short pause.
“I went to a bullfight in Tijuana that year, too,” Carson had said derisively. “That didn’t make me a matador!”
Melanie had sat up in her chaise to gaze at the half-open patio door and at Carson standing just inside in his slightly dripping swim trunks and bare feet. Bullfights? Some girl he dated? What were he and MGM talking about?
She’d watched as Carson ran a hand through his wet hair. “But I wasn’t a member!”
The conversation had gone back and forth with Melanie beingonly seconds away from learning that in 1948 Carson had attended multiple meetings of the American Communist Party. He had never publicly disavowed his attendance at those meetings before the HUAC. He should have. He’d had plenty of time and opportunity—and reason—to contact them and do so. But he hadn’t, which suggested he was hiding who he was or at least who he’d been. He’d been named by someone. MGM’s hands were tied. There was nothing the studio could do about keeping Carson employed until he also testified before the Committee and set the record straight.
“And name names, you mean.” When Carson had said this, Melanie suddenly knew exactly what they were discussing, and a chill slunk through her despite the day’s heat. Carson had been tagged a Hollywood communist? A ridiculous notion. Inconceivable.
“This is insane,” he’d then said, as though he heard her unspoken thoughts and voiced them himself. “But I was never a member! I told you that. And who cares what I did eight years ago?”
Long pause.
“Are you nuts?” he’d yelled. “Melanie was in high school then! I didn’t even know her.”
And at these words, the subtle chill in her bones had morphed to ice. They were now talking about her.
For the next few seconds, Melanie had heard nothing but the sound of a low-flying two-seater plane high above her, the neighbor’s poodle barking at it, and her pulse thrumming at her temples. Carson was listening, saying nothing.
Then he hung up the phone.
Time had seemed to skid to a halt as she waited for him to come back out. She watched as he mixed two martinis at the bar by the patio door, downed one, and made another in the same glass. He came back outside, the two drinks in hand.
Carson extended one of the cocktails to her but she didn’t take it.
“What just happened?” she’d said, her question little more than a whisper.
He’d set the drinks down on the squat table in between the chaises and then sat down on his lounger next to her. He replayed to Melanie the half of the conversation she hadn’t heard, and she listened mutely, mouth open in disbelief.
She had kept pinching the inside of her thigh as he went on, convinced she had fallen asleep in the warm sun and was having a bad dream. Her thigh became polka-dotted, and still she didn’t wake up and still he kept talking.
