Bernard Gordon, one of the younger screenwriters blacklisted during the McCarthy era whose proudest moment late in life was the protest he led against the honorary Oscar awarded director Elia Kazan, has died. He was 88.
Gordon, who wrote for years under a pseudonym but saw many of his film credits restored, died Friday at his home in the Hollywood Hills after a long battle with bone cancer, said his daughter, Ellen Gordon.
When Kazan stepped onstage in 1999 to accept an Academy Award for lifetime achievement, many in the audience withheld their applause. Outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center, hundreds of demonstrators noisily protested, holding signs bearing such messages as "Don't Whitewash the Blacklist," a result of the campaign Gordon helped orchestrate.
In 1952, Kazan had denounced colleagues as onetime communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Gordon had been subpoenaed to appear before the committee but was never called to testify. The exiled screenwriter was forced to work abroad. He made more than 20 films, including penning the scripts for "The Thin Red Line" (1964) and "Battle of the Bulge" (1965).
"Some very, very prominent people had been affected by the depths of that campaign against Kazan. That was Bernie Gordon's handiwork, and he lived long enough to experience some vindication," said Patrick McGilligan, co-author of "Tender Comrades," a 1997 book about the Hollywood blacklist that included a lengthy interview with Gordon.
In an interview Friday with The Times, Ellen Gordon read from the telegram summoning her father to the hearings and remembered how he hid from the subpoena server. Her parents told Ellen, then 2, "not to open the door to the magazine salesman" at their front door.
Unable to find work because of the blacklist, Gordon became "the world's worst plastics salesman" in downtown Los Angeles, he said in a 2000 Times story. His boss was Ray Marcus, a friend whose name he would use as an alias on several scripts. "Raymond T. Marcus" was his original credit on "Hellcats of the Navy" (1957), which starred Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy Davis.
Through a friend, Gordon met film producer Philip Yordan, who would become known for acting as a front for blacklisted colleagues. Gordon moved to France and then Spain to work for him from 1960 to 1973.
As a writer and producer, Gordon made such science fiction classics as "The Day of the Triffids" (1962) and such big-screen spectacles as "El Cid" (1961) and "55 Days at Peking" (1963).
