This is the last in a series of posts about Jack Lait, co-author of the Confidential series of books, first published in the late 1940s. All previous posts are archived at the Facebook Page for Year 4 of the blog. If you'd like to begin at the beginning, here's a link to the first post on this topic.
I don't mean by today's title that Jack Lait alone is solely responsible for the Red Scare or the Lavender Scare. It was a group effort by Joe McCarthy, Howard Rushmore (editor at Confidential magazine), Roy Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover, and lots of other awful people. They all stirred the pot night and day. But Lait and his co-author Lee Mortimer, authors of bestsellers like U.S.A. Confidential, played a huge part in smearing innocent people as traitors, spies, and sexual "deviates."
These bizarre claims went beyond ridicule to truly endangering people's psychological well-being and costing them friends and family, jobs, and sadly, sometimes even their lives.
Besides all the damage done to the LGBT community as a whole, several of the people connected with Confidential were soul-poisoned by the homophobic hate they were immersed in.Case in point: Angela Calomiris.
Calomiris took money -- which she said openly later had been her motivation -- to infiltrate a Greenwich Village photography club which was rumored to have communists in it. You heard it here first: There were communists in Greenwich Village. Imagine that. Anyway, Calomiris used the name "Angela Cole" to join the Communist Party of the U.S. and she snitched on people to the FBI for seven years, from 1942 to 1947. Her testimony sent eleven party leaders to prison and membership the Communist Party in the US. rapidly dropped.
Calomiris not only got money, but a girlfriend (the sister of her FBI handler!) and (fleeting) fame. Calonmiris wrote the memoir Red Masquerade, and she was the subject of many author interviews.I've seen the photos which went with these stories, with Calomiris looking debonair, with typewriter and cigarette. Like so many people profiled in this blog series, she loved fame.
Our state library system still had a copy of Red Masquerade and I was able to borrow it. From the stamps on the inner covers, I see it belonged to both a teacher's college and to a public library. The book's binding is starting to split but the pages are intact and readable.
Unhappily for Calomiris, the book got bad reviews because of Calomiris stilted writing style, and she and her girlfriend broke up. And, unsurprisingly, friends from Greenwich Village and other parts of New York wanted nothing to do with Calomiris. She moved to Provincetown, where she snapped up some rental properties and turned them over at a huge profit. She had money and property but was estranged from the people she used to know, and then health p;roblems began to plague her. Calomiris went to Mexico, in the hope that a change in climate would help her but her health continued to deteriorate and she passed away.
A few years ago, a lesbian historian, Lisa E. Davis, wrote Undercover Girl about Calomiris. The blurb: "Undercover Girl is both a new chapter in Cold War history and an intimate look at the relationship between the FBI and one of its paid inform-ants. Ambitious and sometimes ruthless, Calomiris defied convention in her quest for celebrity."
The former "undercover girl" does not come across as a pleasant person, with the community around her telling interviewers that Calomiris "put the finger" on a lesbian who was a police officer. This woman was dating an actress who would later become a celebrity, and it's not clear if it was jealousy, internalized homophobia, and a desire for bribe money which made Calomiris out the officer to authorities.
In this era where gay and lesbian people were not considered fit for public office or public service, Confidential magazine saw the benefit of putting a spotlight on the (real or imagined) LGBT community.They began doing this much more intensely than Lait & Mortimer had done in the book series, which is certainly saying something. (The "Garden of Fairies" chapter of Washington Confidential contained the menacing sentence "With more than 6000 fairies in government office you may be concerned about the security of the country.")
Howard Rushmore, Confidential's editor, was
a former Communist who'd hoped to curry favor with McCarthy and
publishers of McCarthy-friendly Hearst newspapers. At first he tried to win points by exposing film stars
as Communists, but he was unable to scrape up much. So he focused on
attacking suspected gay and lesbian celebrities. Rushmore hoped to get in good with not only McCarthy but Roy Cohn, as he'd once criticized Cohn in print and lost a newspaper job for doing so. Rushmore penned
articles like "Hollywood -- Where Men Are Men, and Women Too!" For this he used pseudonyms including "Juan Morales." Yikes, what a jerk.
So here we have books and magazine pushing gays as security risks, which was right in line with Joe McCarthy's line of virulent loud-mouthing and Roy Cohn's twisting of our judicial system.
According to Wikipedia, "Cohn and McCarthy targeted government officials and cultural figures not only for suspected Communist sympathies, but also for alleged homosexuality."McCarthy and Cohn were responsible for the firing of scores of gay men from government employment, and strong-armed many opponents into silence using rumors of their homosexuality."
Wikipedia also quotes former Senator Alan K. Simpson as having written this: "The so-called 'Red Scare' has been the main focus of most historians of that period of time. A lesser-known element…and one that harmed far more people was the witch-hunt McCarthy and others conducted against homosexuals."
In Washington Confidential, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer attacked not only closeted gays or suspiciously unmarried people, people suspected of communist leanings, Communists turning people gay and gay people turning capitalists into Communists, but government officials in general.
All anyone needed to do to become a target was to put forward a policy or a piece of legislation that seemed Leftist, or exhibit a human foible or two. After mentions of "power broker" Burton Wheeler, attorney Abe Fortas, and "the IRS man" Joe Numan in Washington Confidential, there's a reference to Leon Henderson (a fiscal-policy guy) being seen "making a fool of himself with some young blonde" on a dance floor in New York. The quotes imply Lait & Mortimer got this directly from a witness but do they identify the source? Unsurprisingly, they don't.
Remember that knee McCarthy gave Drew Pearson in the Senate cloakroom? This is
why. From Wikipedia: "In 1952, using rumors collected by Pearson as well as
other
sources, Nevada publisher Hank Greenspun wrote that McCarthy was a
frequent patron at the White Horse Inn, a Milwaukee gay bar, and cited
his involvement with young men. Greenspun named some of McCarthy's
alleged lovers, including Charles E. Davis, an ex-Communist and 'confessed homosexual' who claimed that he had been hired by McCarthy to
spy on U.S. diplomats in Switzerland.
"McCarthy's FBI
file also contains numerous allegations, including a 1952 letter from an
Army lieutenant who said, 'When I was in Washington some time ago,
[McCarthy] picked me up at the bar in the Wardman [Hotel] and took me
home, and while I was half-drunk he committed sodomy on me.' J. Edgar
Hoover conducted a perfunctory investigation of the Senator's alleged
sexual assault; Hoover's approach was that 'homosexuals are very bitter
against Senator McCarthy for his attack upon those who are supposed to
be in the Government.'"
This is where you decide for yourself who is the most credible source of information.
Lait and Mortimer discovered it was not as easy to bully Congresspeople as it was regular citizens. Margaret Chase Smith fought back. Smith was a Republican who served in the House of Representatives before taking a Senate seat in 1948. In 1950, Smith gave her famous "Declaration of Conscience" speech against McCarthyism.
This was the kind of thing that spurred Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer to accuse Smith, in their book U.S.A. Confidential of being an "associate" of Communists and "sympathetic" to their cause. Smith filed a libel suit for a million dollars.
Jack Lait died before the trial ended but his estate was part of the settlement along with Lait's living co-author. If you want to know more about the trial, you can go to this 1954 New York Times article.
Journalists also fought back. Among the first and bravest was Drew Pearson, who wrote about homophobic bullying. Pearson reported that the victims of the witch-hunt included not only elected officials but the officials' adult children, with tragic results. A Democratic from Wyoming, Lester Hunt, had killed himself after Republican Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Idaho Senator Herman Welker, also a Republican, threatened to reveal how Hunt's son had been arrested by the Washington police on a morals charge.
There's a biography of Senator Lester Hunt, and I just arranged to get a copy.
And then came Allen Drury, author of Advise and Consent.
Drury was a New York Times reporter who covered the Senate. His colleague remembers Drury's work as groundbreaking because the Senate reports were written in "plain English."
Advise
and Consent was on the New York Times Best Sellers list for almost two
full years. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book
was adapted into a well received Broadway play, and then into the 1962
film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Henry Fonda. Drury was
"unmarried" and private." Nixon was recorded on one of the White House tapes
saying Drury was "a homosexual."
Here's the trailer for the film version:
What will be remembered about Jack Lait when the last of the battered bare-boards copies of U.S.A. Confidential are pulled from library shelves, judged unsalable at the library book shop, and dumpstered? Bloggers like me can only do so much with the scant material the harder workers among us are willing to hunt up. And while people are still writing about Lait, will they be factual and objective? If those who analyze Lait's life use Lait's approach, maybe the work will be done by less-kind, less-honest among us. Maybe even people who will say terrible, untrue things about him.
The next generation of online writers, with only our archived essays, if they can be found in the cloud, will figure out the soup is too watery (or bitter) to make anything attention-grabbing from.
The sources I used won't be of any use. For instance, I found material in books about books, specifically books about bestsellers. But the whole "bestseller" concept's been overturned by digital media. For every purchased download, how many non-purchased ones go to a device? Ten? A hundred? The "Follow the money" investigative journalism adage from the Watergate era isn't usable any more.
Well, there's YouTube. Two movies were made from Confidential books -- the New York one and the Chicago one. New York Confidential also became a 1958 TV series and starred Lee Tracy.
YouTube also offers us a 1927 silent film called "Are You Fit to Marry?" The movie is based on the Jack Lait story "The Black Swan," about eugenics laws which classified people by what percentage of each race was in a person's heritage.
"New York Confidential" (1955), trailer plus movie from Pizza Flix:
"Chicago Confidential" (1957), starring Brian Keith.
Here's an ad for TV version of "New York Confidential."
Jack Lait brought us the Confidential books, which inspired the magazine of the same name. Then we got "A Current Affair" and similar TV gossip shows. And now we have TMZ. What a cultural boon that's been.
Hurriedly, let's move to the children of Jack Lait and his wife Laura.
Their youngest child was Lois and this is literally all I could find about her, a screenshot from a genealogical site I'm not signed up for:
Further searching brought me images of a can of condensed milk, ("lait" is of course French for "milk") and a publicity still from the college version of "Saved By the Bell." ( Can't explain that.)
The Laits' middle child wes Jack Lait Jr. I found out a bit more about Jack Jr. Not a lot, but my searches got better results compared to what I found about his and George's sister.
The same site where I found Lois had the only photo I could find of Jack Jr., after putting some serious effort into searching Google Images.
I did the math, and Jack Jr. was 52 when he died. I don't know if he was ever married or had children. I do know he was radio and television editor at the L. A. Examiner. I found a write-up about him starting the job in TIME magazine. Jack Lait Jr. was the subject of "The Press" section in an issue from October 1946.
The Press: Let's Be Amusing
Monday, Oct. 21, 1946
At 83, William Randolph Hearst had fallen hard for male society gossip columns.
Los Angeles society was apprehensive, and the Los Angeles Examiner's society staff was in a pout. Without consulting either group Hearst had ordered a newsy, nosy, plain-speaking society column called "Artie Angeleno Observes." Hearst's San Francisco Examiner already had a "Fred die Francisco." Both were patterned after the New York Journal-American's long standing "Cholly Knickerbocker." In Los Angeles, Hearst picked a newspaperman, and a social unknown at that, to do the job.
"Artie Angeleno" is green-eyed Jack (short for Jacquin Leonard) Lait Jr., 3 7 -year-old son of the New York Mirror's editor. A onetime screen writer and free lancer, he went to New York last summer to help his dad do vacation relief for Walter Winchell. He was a night-shift city deskman when his bosses shifted him to society a fortnight ago, set him up with an assistant and a telephone of his own. His assignment: to treat real society in cafe-society style. Lait's maiden column, sent to the Chief on approval, came back with minor blue-penciling and a marginal note: "Let's be amusing, but not vicious."
Like Igor ("Cholly") Cassini, his Manhattan opposite number, Lait does most of his work at night, gleaning items from bar tenders, waiters and customers in Mike Romanoff's restaurant and at Giro's, the Mocambo and the other "Sunset Strip" clubs. So far he has stuck to items about society celebrities (the Herricks, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers, etc.) and feature stories about forgotten heiresses and play boys. But some of his pieces have sent Princess Conchita Sepulveda Pignatelli, pillar of the Examiner's society staff and of local society, flouncing into the editor's office to complain about Lait's irreverent treatment of her friends. The friends were not amused, but the Examiner's traditionally dull society page was getting more readers.
The part about Jack Jr. subbing with his father for Winchell got me. Going with Dad to work, learning to do what his father does, cute. He was 37. The curse of Jr., I suppose.
I can't tell you what a relief it was to find the tiny blurred image of Jack Jr. I put into the screenshot above. Every time I tried to find out anything about Jack Lait, Jr. I got information about his father, often duplicates of information I already had. Lait Sr. had established himself in every form of media and entertainment, and here was his son trying to be seen over that, as in a palimpsest. Though it feels more like Jack Jr. trying to come through an overlay of his father's achievements.
George, the elder brother, thoughtfully provided (from the Great Beyond) a few search hits when I typed in his name. First I got a short newspaper article, which turned out to be from the New York Times, published details of George's wedding to his wife Jane in 1945. I found out they had one child, whose name I could not find, though I know Jane had a son and daughter from a previous marriage do George was also a stepfather. Fun fact about George, who was a publiicity manager at Columbia Pictures: he's credited with coming up with the idea of the Universal Studios Tours. George died in 1958.
I thought I'd found out all I could about George, then stumbled into something interesting. George Lait turned out to get the best profile of anybody in this month-long series on Jack Lait and the people in his life! I found a great photo and write-up at a website celebrating the typewriter, of all things. George Lait was an at-the-front journalist who typed his stories, as you see here, in a tent.
What of Jack Lait himself? By the time Lait and Mortimer's Confidential books series really took off in sales, Lait was already dying. He'd had to take medical leave in 1952 from The New York Daily Mirror. He died in 1954.
The tack I\ve taken with this multi-part blog post has been trying to figure out why such a talented and successful guy would throw himself into the slime-pit of libelous tabloid junk journalism. In an earlier post I compared him to Dorian Gray, because of the changes in his appearance from an early image to a later one. I'd been assuming Lait was just a stinker at the end of his life. But was he actually a stinker from the start? This bit of show business news is from early in Lait's show-biz career, when the chorus girls had to strike to get paid.
Despite what I personally think of him, Lait was admired by some people during his life, and serves as a mentor for a few people even now. I came across his writer's biography, and he created one of the pen names he used by taking Jack Lait's first name. I suppose it's something.
Next week: Nothing whatever to do with Jack Lait!
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