Lester Cole

Lester Cole (June 19, 1904 – August 15, 1985) was an American screenwriter. He was one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and directors who were cited for contempt of Congress and blacklisted for their refusal to testify regarding their alleged involvement with the Communist Party.

Lester Cole
Lester Cole in 1947
Born	(1904-06-19)June 19, 1904 New York, New York
Died	August 15, 1985(1985-08-15) (aged 81) San Francisco, California
Occupation	screenwriter

Biography

Born into a Jewish family in New York City,^[1][2] Cole was the son of Polish immigrants. His father was a Marxist garment industry union organiser, and Lester developed his socialist ideology at a young age.^[3][4]

He began his career as an actor but soon turned to screenwriting. His first work was If I Had a Million. In 1933, he teamed with John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz to establish the Screen Writers Guild, and in 1934 he joined the Communist Party (CPUSA).^[5] Cole incorporated left-leaning political commentary in many of his scripts.^[4][5]

Between 1932 and 1947, Cole wrote more than forty screenplays that were made into motion pictures.^[6]

Blacklisting

In 1947, he became one of the Hollywood Ten who refused to answer questions before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) about their Communist Party membership. Specifically, Cole was asked whether he was a member of the Screen Writers Guild and then whether he was a member of the Communist Party.^[7] He replied that it wasn't a simple "Yes|No" matter but required a more complete response that he had prepared in a written statement. But unlike most other HUAC witnesses, Cole was not permitted to read his statement into the Congressional record because his statement was harshly critical of the House committee itself. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, HUAC Chairman J. Parnell Thomas realized they were at an impasse and excused the witness.^[7]

Cole was convicted of contempt of Congress, fined $1,000 and sentenced to twelve months' confinement (along with fellow Hollywood Ten member Ring Lardner Jr.) at the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut, of which Cole served ten months.^[8]

As a result of his refusal to cooperate with the HUAC, Cole was blacklisted by studio executives. In the next couple of decades, only three of his screenplays—submitted under the pseudonyms Gerald L.C. Copley, Lewis Copley, and J. Redmond Prior—were made into films. The best-known of the three was for the highly successful Born Free (1966), credited to Gerald L.C. Copley.

Personal life

Cole was married three times. His first two marriages ended in divorce and he separated from his third wife. He married his first wife Jeanne “Jonnie” March in 1935.^[9] Together they joined the Communist Party.^[10] The couple had two sons and divorced in 1953.^[11] He was then briefly married to Isabel (Dowden) Johnson,^[12] who later married Alger Hiss.^[13] Cole and Katharine Hogle married in 1956 and separated in 1977.^[14][15]

Later life

In 1981, Cole published his autobiography, Hollywood Red. In it, he recounted a 1978 incident when he phoned into a radio talk show on which ex-Communist Budd Schulberg was a guest. Cole wrote that he berated Schulberg (who had testified before HUAC as a friendly witness and "named names"), calling him a "canary" and a "stool pigeon":

"Aren't you the canary who sang before the un-American Committee? Aren't you that canary? Or are you another bird, a pigeon – the stool kind.... Just sing, canary, sing, you bastard!"^[16]

Cole added he was then abruptly cut off the air. About this incident, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley comments, "Whether this actually happened is uncertain, but one can guess."^[17] The fact that Cole chose to cite it in his autobiography shows how even decades after the HUAC hearings, bitterness still existed between friendly and "unfriendly" witnesses.

In his last years, Cole taught screenwriting at the University of California at Berkeley and at a New York University Summer Writers Conference in Vermont.^[18] As Ronald Radosh observes, Cole "remained a hardcore Communist" until the very end.^[19] Lester Cole died of a heart attack in San Francisco, California, in 1985.^[18]

Selected filmography

• Walls of Gold (1933)
• Nothing More Than a Woman (1934)
• The Crime of Doctor Hallet (1938)
• Secrets of a Nurse (1938)
• Pirates of the Skies (1939)
• The House of the Seven Gables (1940)
• Pacific Blackout (1941)
• Among the Living (1941)
• None Shall Escape (1944)
• Blood on the Sun (1945)
• Objective, Burma! (1945)
• Men in Her Diary (1945)
• The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947)
• High Wall (1947)

See also

• Biography portal

• The Hollywood Ten documentary
• Hollywood on Trial