[After she and her husband, a fellow writer, saw work in Hollywood
dry up during the Red Scare, they continued their careers in
self-exile overseas.]
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NORMA BARZMAN, BLACKLISTED SCREENWRITER, DIES AT 103  
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Clay Risen
January 10, 2024
New York Times
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_ After she and her husband, a fellow writer, saw work in Hollywood
dry up during the Red Scare, they continued their careers in
self-exile overseas. _

The screenwriter Norma Barzman in 1944, when she was a features
writer for The Los Angeless Examiner, via Barzman family

 

Norma Barzman, a screenwriter who moved to Europe in the late 1940s
rather than be subject to the congressional investigations and
professional ostracism that overtook her industry for a decade, died
on Dec. 17 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 103 and widely
considered to be one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood
blacklist.

Her daughter Suzo Barzman confirmed the death.

Mrs. Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman
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were among the hundreds of film industry figures — including
screenwriters, actors, directors, stagehands and technicians — who
found themselves iced out of Hollywood after World War II because of
their unwillingness to discuss their affiliation with the Communist
Party or its many associated front groups.

The Barzmans were both longtime members of the party, having joined in
the early 1940s. Although their membership officially lapsed when they
left the country, they did not renounce the party until 1968, after
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

“I’m very proud of my years as a Communist,” Mrs. Barzman told
The Associated Press in 2001. “We weren’t Soviet agents, but we
were a little silly, idealistic and enthusiastic, and thought there
was a chance of making a better world.”

For a time in the 1930s and ’40s, being a Communist, or just
sympathetic to the cause, was considered de rigueur among the
Hollywood left. But with the onset of the Cold War, attitudes began to
shift. Rumors of a government crackdown percolated.

The couple were sitting on their front lawn in July 1947 when a woman
in a convertible stopped to talk. After a guarded introduction — her
name was Norma, too — she told them that there was a police car at
the bottom of the hill, stopping anyone turning onto the street to ask
them about the Barzmans. Years later, they would realize that the
other Norma had taken the stage name Marilyn Monroe.

That fall, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called a
group of screenwriters, directors and producers to testify about their
connections to the Communist Party. Ten of them refused to answer
questions, and each was later found in contempt. Though the Barzmans
were not among that group, which came to be called the Hollywood Ten,
they feared they would be subpoenaed soon.

A few weeks after the hearings, a group of Hollywood executives
released the so-called Waldorf Statement, which declared that the 10
witnesses, as well as anyone else who refused to discuss their
relationship to the Communist Party, would be blacklisted from the
industry.

Work for the Barzmans quickly dried up. Finally, in 1949, an
opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London, where
the blacklist didn’t reach. They set sail on the Queen Mary,
expecting a six-week trip.

They would not return to the United States until 1965, and they would
live abroad until 1976.

After several years in London, they moved to Paris; they eventually
settled in Provence. They became local celebrities of a sort — the
family that defied the blacklist — and made friends with the likes
of the French actor Yves Montand and Pablo Picasso.

Mr. Barzman continued to write screenplays, usually for European
productions, though often without credit. Mrs. Barzman got some work,
too, but it was harder, especially since she also was raising seven
children.

Another friend, Sophia Loren, “pinched my cheek one day and called
me ‘la mamma,’ which drove me wild,” she said in an interview
for the book “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood
Blacklist” (1997), by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.

By the time the Barzmans returned to Hollywood in the 1970s, the film
industry and the community around it had changed significantly, and
they never managed to restart their careers.

“I’ve been so blessed, even when I was suffering,” she told The
Los Angeles Times in 2001. “So I wasn’t bitter then, and I’m not
bitter now. I guess because I still feel there’s so much hope. You
have to work at things, whether it’s a marriage or a democracy.”

Norma Levor was born on Sept. 15, 1920, in Manhattan — specifically,
she liked to recall, atop the kitchen counter of her parents’
apartment on Central Park West. Her father, Samuel, was an importer,
and her mother, Goldie (Levinson) Levor, was a homemaker.

Norma enrolled at Radcliffe College, but left in 1940 to marry Claude
Shannon
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a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
later became known for his work in computational linguistics and was
called the “father of information theory.”

They moved to Princeton, N.J., where he had a fellowship at the
Institute for Advanced Study and where she worked for the economic
branch of the League of Nations, which had relocated there from
Switzerland at the start of World War II.

The couple divorced in 1941, a year after her father died. Seeking a
fresh start, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles — with a
six-week stop in Reno, Nev., to finalize her divorce.

She worked as a features writer for The Los Angeles Examiner while
taking courses in screenwriting at the School for Writers, which was
later added to the federal government’s list of subversive
organizations.

“Shortly after I arrived, I came to understand that all the
progressive people I liked and who were politically active were
Communists,” she was quoted as saying in “Tender Comrades.”

She met Ben Barzman, another aspiring screenwriter, at a party at the
home of Robert Rossen
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yet another screenwriter. Mr. Barzman insisted that modern movies were
too complex for women to write. She pushed a lemon meringue pie in his
face. They married in 1943.

Mrs. Barzman wrote the original stories for two films made in 1946:
“Never Say Goodbye,” a comedy starring Errol Flynn and Eleanor
Parker, and “The Locket,” a noir thriller starring Laraine Day and
Robert Mitchum. In Europe, her work included another screenplay,
“Luxury Girls,” but her name was kept off it until 1999.

Mr. Barzman died in 1989. Along with her daughter Suzo, Mrs. Barzman
is survived by another daughter, Luli Barzman; five sons, Aaron,
Daniel, John, Paolo and Marco; eight grandchildren; and six
great-grandchildren.

After returning to Los Angeles, Mrs. Barzman wrote a column on aging
for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a memoir, “The Red and the
Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate” (2003).

She also became outspoken in her criticism of the blacklist and the
role many in the industry played in it. Larry Ceplair, a historian who
has written extensively about the blacklist, called her the era’s
“keeper of the flame.”

In 1999 she joined some 500 other people outside the Academy Awards
ceremony, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, to protest
an honor being given to the director Elia Kazan
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To avoid being added to the blacklist, Mr. Kazan had testified before
the House committee, identifying several friends and colleagues in the
industry as former Communists and earning long-lasting enmity from
many in Hollywood.

Mrs. Barzman, who was there with her teenage grandson, carried a sign
that read “Kazan Is a Fink.”

_Clay Risen [[link removed]] is an obituaries
reporter for The Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the
Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the
author, most recently, of “American Rye: A Guide to the Nation’s
Original Spirit.” More about Clay Risen
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_Subscribe to gain unlimited access to all of the The Times.
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* Hollywood 10
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* Hollywood Blacklist
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