I was watching a late-50's To Tell the Truth on the Game Show Network the other night and an interesting exchange went by, almost without notice. Panelist Johnny Carson was about to interrogate the three contestants, each of whom was claiming to be an experienced lumberjack. The host of the show, as usual back then, was Bud Collyer, better known to comic book fans as the voice of Superman on radio and early animation. Here's how the dialogue went…
CARSON: I know almost nothing about lumberjacking. Number Two, is it true that Smokey the Bear's a Communist?
(Big laugh over the audience, during which the host makes this comment:)
COLLYER: Don't let him plead the Fifth, Johnny.
Why this is interesting to me: During the blacklist period of the fifties, when performers were going unhired strictly due to unproven allegations about their politics and some were being hauled before Congressional committees, Bud Collyer was a staunch supporter of the practice. That is to say, he approved whole-heartedly, urged it on, and headed up factions in the actors' union that sought to block any condemnation of Red Channels or other instruments of blacklisting. He thought those who wouldn't inform on their friends and who took the Fifth Amendment instead were traitors — or, at least, that's how it sometimes gets reported. Others, either because they were his friends or because they just don't want to believe the man who played Superman would have done such a thing, have claimed that, yes, Collyer was pro-blacklist, but he wasn't hysterical. He had, they say, a deep, humane fear of Communists making inroads into the entertainment industry and believed that the cause was right, even if some of the tactics employed to ferret them out were wrong.
I never knew what, if anything, to think of Mr. Collyer. But now, here he is on a show done when blacklisting was on the decline but still being defended, making that remark. Gotta make you wonder.
For that matter, To Tell the Truth was an interesting — and, given its name, ironic — venue for folks on both sides of the blacklisting issue to come together. The show's producer, Mark Goodson, was one of the few strong opponents of blacklisting in the management side of the industry. He not only fought it, he often booked as panelists, personalities like Orson Bean and John Henry Faulk who were being refused work elsewhere. Those two men had, in fact, been part of a slate of candidates within the performers' union that ran on an anti-blacklist platform and succeeded (in a landslide) in ousting Collyer's faction from office. Still, on the game show, Collyer was by all accounts a gentleman and a professional. He'd welcome them, introduce them, play the game…and then scurry off to a union meeting to argue that such people should be barred from ever working again.
Game Show Network is also rerunning vintage episodes of another of Goodson's shows, I've Got A Secret, which had its own battles with blacklisting (and another ironic title). In this case, the firing was demanded of panelist Henry Morgan for, as usual, rather vague, unproven allegations that were in no way against the law. Someone said he'd gone to the wrong meetings or hung out with the wrong crowd. Whatever, the sponsors wanted Morgan removed, and Goodson refused. He got the show's host, Garry Moore — something of an American icon — to join in a strong statement denouncing the blacklist. In this case, the blacklisters retreated and Morgan retained his seat on the Secret panel. Would that more producers and performers had had the guts of Mssrs. Goodson and Moore.