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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TONY KAHN: BOY FUGITIVE IN THE COLD WAR  
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Paul Buhle
January 6, 2025
Portside
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_ This is a poignant tale of remembering parents in trouble, careers
dashed and of steady FBI harassment. The end is not happy, except that
the boy survives and makes his own life as an admired cultural
commentator on radio. _

Unleashed Books: “Fugitive” / Tony Kahn An exciting graphic
memoir from a victim of the nightmare Congress visited on some of
Hollywood’s greatest talents in the depths of the Cold War … a
bitter object lesson for today's world. , (Andelman Unleashed - David
A. Andelman)

 

The larger historical saga of Hollywood writers on the run from the
FBI and Congressional hearings gets a small boost from time to time,
then slips back into the memory hole of events and personalities, long
ago. That history has special interest for this reviewer, who
interviewed several dozen survivors, saw as many of the films the
future Blacklist victims wrote as possible (something like 400) and
tried to figure out, across several volumes, the meaning of it all. My
collaborator Dave Wagner, a blacklist victim in the newspaper
trade—guilty of leading a major strike in the late
1970s—understood the deeper personal part better than I could.

Fugitive: My Boyhood under the Hollywood Blacklist
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by Tony Kahn
Self-Published by Author, Available from Amazon
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Pages: 120
Paperback:  $29.99;  Kindle:  $9.99
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0D6CSWLX5
 

_Fugitive_ also calls to mind a little-noticed book of last
year: _Flights: Radicals On _t_he Run_, by Joel Whitney. Here,
nearly twenty writers’ sagas spread out in front of the reader,
across several continents of artists and their pursuers (mainly, not
only the FBI), Graham Greene and Lorraine Hansberry to Seymour Hersh
and Malcolm X. The relentlessness of the authorities stands out, along
with the massive budget obviously needed not only to pursue them but
to feed the press with distortions and outright lies. The State is not
our protector, far from it.

The most amazing part of Tony Kahn’s own story may be that more than
a handful of the Hollywood victims had become spectacularly successful
during Wartime, writing Oscar-winning films (my Republican parents’
favorite was “Woman of the Year,” because Katharine Hepburn won
their hearts). Others made a living and seemed ready for better
success ahead as films raced upward to their audience peak in
1946—and a very few years afterward. The rise of TV, of course,
meant that film audiences would never be the same, although the rising
prospects for film art, mainly from abroad, gave the more fortunate
and prestigious victims like Joseph Losey a chance for decades of
successful work.

What had been their winning themes in happier Hollywood years?
Patriotic, anti-fascist crowd-boosters; revelations of democracy’s
dark spots including racism and anti-semitism; also slapstick comedy,
musicals and kids’ films. All of these continued until about 1950,
when Congressional commttee subpoenas anticipated or followed trips
from FBI agents and denunciations in the gossip columns.

During happier years, film work had been a good run for B film writers
as well as the famous “swimming pool communists” who contributed
heavily to leftwing causes. Writers in trouble could look back a few
years to fundraising parties with Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball,
Frederick March and naturally Katharine Hepburn among many others in
the hills near the famed Hollywood sign.

Suddenly, it was all over.  Tony Kahn’s father Gordon Kahn had his
success mainly in “B” features, most notably the
musical-and-action feature that brought Roy Rogers and Dale Evans
together on the screen for the first time: _The Cowboy and the
Senorita_ (1944). A decade earlier, he made a “Script
Contribution” to the first version of heavily antiwar _All Quiet on
the Western Front._ But his Left politics got in the way….until
wartime. Studio chiefs hated activists in the screenwriters’ union
until they needed them, that is, after Pearl Harbor and the US entry
into the War. 

Things went great, seemed to go great in every possible genre, cowboy
films (a couple of left-oriented Hopalong Cassidy features among
them), witty adaptations of Broadway hits, slapstick comedy, heavily
patriotic battle films, kids films, and after the war, just as heavily
noir. Some were great cinematic art, within Hollywood limits, some
were second-feature seat fillers. None of the pre-1950 films were
taken off the screens after the screenwriters got the boot, although a
large handful made in the next years never reached US theaters. They
were as good as banned as soon as the writers became known.

The Kahn family, meanwhile, landed in Mexico in 1952, and Gordon Kahn
wrote a wide variety of journalistic pieces under pseudonyms, while
also trying to continue with films. Their little community of
screenwriters gathered, found ready friends in the Mexican Left, lived
inexpensively, and might even have enjoyed a sort of extended holiday
exile. Except that more than a few, including the Kahns, took terrible
advice, investing with a supposed Mexican ally who stole their
savings, pretending to pay “dividends” until he had cleared out
their accounts. The Kahns were broke and had to come back, with the
FBI never far out of sight.

It is unclear why J. Edgar Hoover had a special interest in Gordon
Kahn except that perhaps, as an editor of _The Screenwriter_ during
the 1940s, he played an important union role. His son provides
documentation, with personal memos from Hoover, demonstrating great
persecutory interest as the family travels back across the border,
finally to relatives in New England. There, they struggle to make a
living, face new redbaiting but manage to get along until the stress
is too great. Gordon Kahn succumbed to a heart attack.

That author Tony Kahn would tell this story in “comic”
form—actually an illustration form that combines photoshop
techniques with dialogue boxes—offers the working of a highly
creative mind. Many images feature himself as a kid, his father and
the rest of his family, also newspaper clippings, personal letters,
FBI memos and so on. Thus the side story of his brother Jim, ten years
after father Gordon’s death, seeking a public health position but
facing FBI officials who urge him to “clear” himself by denouncing
his father (he refused).

If_ Fugitive_, the Family Blacklist story, were to reach its logical
end, Tony Kahn’s fellowship from getting a National Endowment for
the Arts to develop a radio show around his family’s life, would
have been broadcast and offer a kind of  vindication. No such luck.
Just at this time and by coincidence or not, Newt Gingrich denounced
the National Public Radio programming in Congress. The fellowship
suddenly disappearing without explanation: his payments stopped. 

Who suddenly developed Cold Feet about an approved federal grant? No
one knows, no one has blown the whistle and probably no one will ever
find out. 

This story does not end because Tony Kahn is too tough to be silent.
His radio work, so highly praised by NPR, goes on. 

On the film front, at the end of the 1990s, some of the Hollywood
writers got back their credits for films written in the 1950s under
pseudonyms or friendly “fronts.” The Screenwriters Guild, become
the Writers’ Guild, issued an apology for blacklisting its own
members forty-some years earlier, and several of the famous writers
received public acclaim and apologies in 1999, the fiftieth
anniversary of the Blacklist. 

It was something, although surely not enough. The survivors of the
Hollywood Blacklist are now all gone. If contemporary reports are
accurate, writers and actors supporting the Palestinian cause face
another generation of blacklisting. In one form or another, the story
goes on.

_[PAUL BUHLE, with Dave Wagner, wrote Radical Hollywood
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Sight
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stories of the writers and their films from the early 1930s to the
late 1970s.]_

* Blacklist
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* Hollywood Blacklist
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* Hollywood
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* McCarthy Period
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* McCarthyism
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* FBI
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* Cold War
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* 1950s
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* Red Scare
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* FBI harassment
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* Culture
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* Films
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* children
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