Books in the Mirror

Bad Times, Hard Times, Good Times

Dalton Trumbo’s wife Cleo took this photo of Mike Butler and her daughter Nikola and their horses in Mexico.

Jean Rouverol and
Refugees From Hollywood

Clara Sturak
Associate editor

   Like everything else in the last couple of weeks, my conversation with Jean Rouverol is colored by the events of September 11 and their potential consequences. Only this time, it’s not just a case of two traumatized people sharing stories of the people they knew in New York that day, fears of the coming “war,” and concerns about how that war might impact the civil rights of everyday Americans – especially Arab-Americans.
   This time it’s different because Jean Rouverol knows what it’s like to be considered an enemy and a traitor in her own country, knows how easy it can be to go from productive citizen to dangerous subversive in the eyes of her own government. She also knows more than she’d like to about just how wrong-headed those charged with protecting our freedom can be.
   In her memoir, Refugees From Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years (University of New Mexico Press), Rouverol, whose white hair is the only thing to hint at her 85 years, tells of weekly softball games played by a group of American expatriates living in Mexico City. Moms, dads and kids, friends and neighbors noisily running the makeshift bases, and knocking the ball into Diego Rivera’s backyard, afterwards sharing a meal, and singing folksongs.
   It’s a charming scene, one that’s broken by the revelation that comes next: “But while we were enjoying it all, the baseball, the picnic lunches, and above all the fellowship, it didn’t occur to us (how could it?) that not everyone viewed these gatherings with the same eyes. Years later, when the blacklist and the Cold War had ended and most of us had returned to the United States, several of us (out of morbid curiosity, I suppose) sent to Washington under the freedom of information act for copies of our FBI files. And that’s how we discovered, shuffling through pages ninety percent blacked out (for “security purposes!), that the FBI had been regularly reporting our ball game Saturdays those years as a cover for “Communist meetings.”
   Sitting over coffee and cookies at Fromin’s Deli, the Santa Monica resident muses, “I wonder if they’re still that inaccurate.”
   Some history: In the 1940s, Rouverol and her husband, Hugo Butler, were successful writers living and working in Hollywood, and attending local Communist Party meetings. “We were quite proud of the political position we had taken, we felt it was the most compassionate [position to take.]” By 1951, their good friends Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner, Jr., along with eight others, had been jailed for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Referred to as the “Hollywood Ten,” these men were only the first wave of people harassed, hounded and even jailed because of their suspected affiliation with the Communist Party, or simply because they would not cooperate with red-baiting Congressmen in the throes of a modern-day witch hunt.
   Rouverol was filled with “indignation and outrage” at the accusations made by the U.S. government that all communists and “communist sympathizers” were dangerous revolutionaries — especially, she says, because “the fact is that, if anything, we were 125% patriotic. I didn’t know one left-winger who wasn’t.” But Rouverol also admits to being “very good at denial,” and says that even after Trumbo and Lardner were arrested she and her husband “couldn’t really believe it would happen to us.”
   The Butlers, Trumbos and Lardners were close, and, according to Rouverol, one of the reasons they didn’t flee sooner was because “Hugo didn’t feel we should leave the country when the guys were in jail. It wasn’t fair to the wives, who were left raising their families alone.”
   But, the day came when two “men in hats” arrived at the door attempting to serve Hugo Butler a subpoena. After cleverly putting them off, Rouverol packed up her children and began life on the run: “…there we were, without even a change of clothing or our toothbrushes, moving each night to the house of a different friend while we tried to formulate a plan of action and cope with all the loose ends. For the moment, we could only hope there would be no publicity about the subpoena so we could keep on working for a while longer. One thing we would certainly need, with our long-range livelihoods in the industry now at stake, was money enough to live on for the foreseeable future.”
   Butler and Rouverol had a real fear of the recently passed McCarran Act, which allowed the U.S. to intern in “relocation camps” “potential spies or saboteurs” in time of “war or insurrection.” The Butlers’ fears that their family might be interned helped them to decide that they could not stay in the U.S. They chose Mexico for the simple reason that they did not need passports to travel there. Following a trial run in Ensenada, the Butlers made plans to for a longer-term stay in Mexico City.
   After Trumbo’s release (he served 8 months), the Butlers made their move, driving in tandem with the Trumbos. The convoy carried Jean, Hugo and their 4 children, Dalton and Cleo Trumbo and their 3 kids, and the families’ assorted animals.
   Though the trip was bogged down by a persistent strep virus that managed to infect the throat of every Butler and Trumbo child, it was a charmed journey. Of crossing the border, Rouverol writes, “Perhaps it was our imagination, but suddenly the very air seemed to change, to be fresher, more free. Anxieties fell away. We found we loved the very backwardness of the little towns we passed, and Cleo stopped her car to take a commemorative picture of the first honest-to-goodness adobe hut we saw, a tiny place huddled under tall cottonwood trees.”
   The Butlers spent the next decade in Mexico, making a home, raising children – including two more who would be born in there – building a community with the other blacklisted families, and attempting to make a living however they could. The bulk of Rouverol’s book is set in Mexico, and it is the Mexico of memory – with brightly painted cottages covered in tropical blooms, bullfights, delicious food and wonderful music. Rouverol clearly loves Mexico, at least the Mexico of her particular time and place, and that love infuses nearly every page of the book.
   The interesting thing about life is that is just goes on, and a good deal of Refugees From Hollywood revolves around the everydayness of the Butlers’ life in Mexico. Blacklist? Yes. Those ever-present Feds? Yeah. But, also birthdays, illnesses, horseback riding lessons and going steady. And work, always work. During that time Hugo Butler wrote Torrero! and The Young One, among others. Trumbo penned the Oscar-winning screenplay for The Brave One. (But, of course, neither of them could use their real names.) Rouverol, who kept her own career alive by writing short stories using her maiden/professional name, credits the “two non-Red heroes of the book,” producer Bob Aldrich and agent Ingo Preminger (Otto’s brother) with helping to keep the careers of many blacklisted writers afloat. “They were completely independent and loyal to their friendships. A lot of us would have had a much rougher time without them,” she says.
   Hugo Butler’s health, like that of many blacklisted screenwriters, actors and directors, would take a hit from which he would never fully recover. Rouverol explains, “we didn’t fully understand the relationship between stress and arteriosclerosis at the time,” but she remembers once late in the decade, a get-together of some of the men who worked so hard to support their families, always under threat of exposure and jail. “They all had been given diuretics, and they all had gout,” she says with a rueful laugh. Hugo, after suffering a devastating battle with arteriosclerosis of the brain, would die in 1968.
   Rouverol continued to write -– films, teleplays and books -– and spent 30 years on countless committees of the Writers Guild. It was after she lost her last television job writing for a soap opera (“I was 66 — an unlikely candidate for another”) that she began Refugees From Hollywood. Her children have grown up to become writers and educators. They still stay in touch with their schoolmates from the American School in Mexico City.
   The other interesting thing about life – no matter how bad things seem — is that it has a way of tricking you, tilting itself on its head before you even notice. And in the case of Jean Rouverol, what began as a nightmarish flight from a situation-out-of-hand became, she states emphatically, “one of the great adventures of my life.”
   Refugees From Hollywood should be read as a cautionary tale about what can happen when our government, as Rouverol says, “puts its principles aside.” It should be read as an important account of the blacklist by a woman. But mostly it should be read as a tribute to friendship, to family and to country. The country, Rouverol writes in the dedication of her memoir, that “took us in when we needed a home.”