SOLA: Hollywood, McCarthyism, and a Motherless Childhood Abroad

Prologue

Lights Up

Beverly Hills, 1954. I was two years old, accompanying my father to Dunhill Tobacconist on Rodeo Drive so he could get his fancy British pipe tobacco. He put me down on the floor while he was purchasing his Charles Leonard custom blend, and I wandered out the door unobserved and into the street. Greta Garbo, in a big floppy hat, scooped me up and brought me back into the shop and asked, Who does this baby belong to? My father thought this was a hilarious story, movie star saves kid.

I am not sure it was so funny. We were surrounded by movie stars on account of my parents’ work. My father was a screenwriter and worked in film PR. My mother was a talent agent. So, the lesson in the story, as far as I was concerned, was either that I was a slippery little devil or that my father was irresponsible. Not that Greta Garbo was my savior, which really, she was.

My childhood seemed like a wordless place, although it was filled with sounds and scents. I remember the hiss of garden hoses, held by silent Japanese men in khaki shirts and pants and pith helmets, as they washed the fallen leaves of camellias and oleanders off driveways. I remember the chk-chk-chk of automatic sprinklers as they stuttered across green lawns. I remember the sound of crickets chirruping in the night as my mother carried me to the car for the drive home from my grandparents’ house, the cool evening air perfumed by night-blooming jasmine. But I don’t remember many conversations that included me. I was ignored, spoken over, or I was admonished.

I was born on February 29, 1952, by elective cesarean, in Los Angeles, California, which in those days was under the dark cloud of McCarthyism. My father’s ties to the Communist Party were never very clear to me. He became a member in the 1930s, I believe, alongside a number of his Hollywood colleagues, but I never heard him speak of those ideals. He lived the good life, as far as I could see. I knew him as a Democrat, and a somewhat progressive one at that, a man who championed labor unions but also bought bespoke tobacco on Rodeo Drive. Today, he would probably be a Bernie Sanders supporter. I could see him helping displaced refugees (just as he did during World War II) and using his PR skills to help Amazon workers trying to unionize. The ideas of Communism and a socialist state that grew in popularity in the 1930s and 1940s seemed to be a dream of a better world that would end monarchies and introduce equality, with organized labor and an end to oppression. But the realities of Communism were devastating and maybe that’s why he never spoke of it. The dream was not the reality. And as concerns about un-American activities grew, anyone like my father, anyone with a connection to the Communist Party, was seen as subversive and a threat. My father, subversive? A threat? Un-American? These concepts were foreign to me.

I’m the only child of Charles Leonard Appleton and Betty Raskin Appleton. Sometimes I think being an only child is a good thing, but mostly I wish I had real siblings to share the traumas with, or who might have helped avoid them. Wondering what it would have been like is a stupid and painful guessing game because one can never really know what, if anything, would have been different. Would Charlie have left if Betty had more kids? My father told me more than once that he never wanted me, that it was Betty who wanted a child so desperately she had her tubes blown open. He also told me that I was too much for my mother, who, until she died of a heart attack when I was nine years old, was a very healthy woman. I grew up believing that were it not for the demands of a burdensome little girl, of this little girl, she would still be alive to take care of me. Once I became a mother myself, I realized that I had been no more demanding than most children. But my guilt and shame were firmly tethered by then.

My mother was forty-one when I was born, my father fifty-two. My mother’s past is more vague to me than my father’s. My parents met in 1947 at an acting retreat led by Michael Chekhov at the New Canaan, Connecticut, farm of actress Beatrice Straight. At the time, my mother was a theatrical agent in New York City. Her clients included Peter Falk, Telly Savalas, and Deanna Durbin. I’ve been told that Danny Kaye (then Kaminsky) proposed to her. I know hardly anything else about her life before me. I’ve got photos of her on her parents’ farm in Mountaindale, New York, in the Catskills, when she was in her teens, with her hair in long corkscrew curls and a burdened look on her face; of her maybe in her twenties or thirties on the deck of a cruise ship, wearing white sailor shorts that fall below her knees, canvas crisscross platform sandals, and a jaunty smile; at her desk in her office, wearing a suit with an elephant pin near her left shoulder, her hair rolled up atop her head and on either side of her face in a popular 1940’s style, looking pensively at the camera.

Was she happy? Did she choose to be single until she was thirty-eight? Were her Orthodox Jewish parents upset that she went on a cruise alone? Was it true that she planned to marry a man they did not approve of, so she married my father instead, her second choice? Why did they have such control over her life? And if they did, then why wasn’t I raised Jewish like everyone else in my family?

I will never know the answers to these questions. But my guess is that my mother wasn’t happy, that she would have been better suited to an era where one could be a mother and have a fulfilling job and not have to put up with the self-aggrandizing, arrogant man who most likely cheated on her. I’ve heard rumors throughout the years that my father had affairs, that my father and mother had even separated, and that my father threatened to take full custody of me. That makes no sense, given how he treated me after my mother died. But there are no relatives or family friends who can verify any of the rumors.

Some people tell me, to be helpful, that it really doesn’t matter, that I should live in the present. But it does matter. Knowing who I am, why I am who I am, might help me understand the roots of my fearfulness and insecurity. But all I have to rely on are my own experiences. Glimpses into my parents’ lives are through the eyes of others, two dissociations away, and surely not entirely true. So perhaps truth is not the issue but a better understanding of my reactivity. What matters is how I feel and why.

1

Genealogy

My dear, he wrote, I am trying to fathom this morale-destroying attack on my psyche

And what’s all this about your genealogy?

Who cares?

If you must know the truth,

we have no genealogy

Like animals

we are the issue of sperm let loose inside birth pockets

in a moment of passion

When I first read this

when my father wrote me this letter

I was thirty-two

And I laughed

He was a ridiculous,

cloudy, demented, old man

He was eighty-four

As always

his pockets were empty

But I was angry

He was denying me

MY history

Just like he denied me

his time

his attention

his hand to hold

his money

his love

his compassion

And after telling me, Who cares?

he went on for two

single-spaced pages

on his old Smith Corona

the ribbon gappy and faded

letters missing from his words

lines x-ed out

notes handwritten in the margins

He did not appreciate the plundering

of his memories

But he still reached for some of them

The earliest ones

He recalled being saved, twice, from child murder

during the two Kishinev pogroms

1903 and 1905

The Cossacks who drank (heavily, he said) at the inn

next to his grandfather’s kvass stand

told his mother to hide him

inside goose down pillows

in the attic

And she did

These were the same Cossacks

who slaughtered Jews

who tore babies apart

Did these Cossacks intentionally

pass over pillows?

Or just these pillows,

the Epelbaum pillows?

From Kishinev, Russia

to Bukhovia, Austria

my grandmother

and her three young sons

and baby daughter—

Etta

Fishel, Chaim, Ezriel

and Mariam—

trudged through sleet to cross the border

at Grenitz, he says

Mariam almost froze to death

They stopped to warm her alive again

My aunt Leah was born in Austria

So my grandmother was pregnant on this trek

How long were they there?

He doesn’t tell me

Just that our name was changed there

to Apfelbaum

before it was changed

to Appleton

in New York City

That his father was a woodcutter

with a red mustache

And his mother’s father a vintner

(his grandfather, my great grandfather,

the one who sold kvass

in the town square)

That he ate his first banana

on the ship to Ellis Island

That they lived on the Lower East Side

Norfolk Street

and Ludlow Street

and then Suffolk Street

where my aunt Clara was born

and then 113th Street in Harlem

and then Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx

and then 179th and Southern Boulevard in the Bronx

When?

And then what?

Let’s say that was 1922

I was born in 1952

That’s thirty years of my father’s life

and his memories that

I can’t find

except for gummy, dusty bits

that he shared three years before he died

in 1986

Then there’s hearsay

from relatives and friends

added to my own overcast memories

perhaps scenes my father shared

with me

or with an audience of friends

that I overheard

He, Uncle Ezriel, and their friend Jimmy Cagney

boxing their way home from school every day

the allegiances shifting between

Jews, Irish, and Italians,

all tossing epithets as fast as their punches

Jimmy and my father moving

to Hollywood together

in 1924?

Jimmy boxing with his kangaroo Joey

My dad and Jimmy finding a white hood

under the pillow of a friend of Jimmy’s

When?

My dad being crushed like a bug by Hollywood

and choked by his own bitterness

Jimmy finding fame

even if he puked before every live performance

I never met my father’s parents

I haven’t even seen photographs

Would they have loved me?

What work did they do when they got to New York?

When did they die?

Where are they buried?

All those lives

Whose tendrils touched other lives

and should have touched mine

And those memories

They belong to me too

but I can’t find them

Who cares?

I do

2

Red Diaper Baby

At the time of my birth in 1952, my father worked at Twentieth Century-Fox studio on Pico Boulevard. From 1949 to 1951, he had a two-year stint as the director of national press and publications at the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, working first in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and then in Wichita, Kansas, where I was conceived. The Foundation was on the verge of financial collapse and closed because of bankruptcy in February of 1952, by which time my parents were back in Los Angeles. Following the bankruptcy, it was rebranded as the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International, and Scientology as we know it was born.

I have no idea how sympathetic my father was to Hubbard and his ideas, though I don’t think he was a fan of any kind of organized religion. When I was in my teens, Daddy bragged to me that he ghostwrote the book Dianetics. I’ve obtained his Hubbard Dianetic Auditor certificate (dated November 17, 1950) and his 1951 federal withholding statement from the Hubbard Foundation, Wichita ($4,750, the equivalent of about $52,000 in 2022) and found press materials he wrote, so I know when he worked there. I’ve also looked through lots of L. Ron Hubbard’s FBI files and found Hubbard’s own words: …the 1950 and ‘51 public relations man, Charles Leonard, registered positive on Communism in the police check at Wichita in or around April of 1951, possibly May. And that was when Hubbard fired him. I will never know how he ended up representing the Foundation, but I can only assume his decades-long career at multiple film studios made him valuable to Hubbard as a press director.

My father spent the Golden Age of Hollywood helming publicity and advertising departments for RKO, Universal, and United Artists. He was also a writer involved with the progressive Hollywood Theatre Alliance, founded by a group of New Yorkers living in Hollywood. He worked with Langston Hughes and Donald Ogden Stewart, and his name was often in the Hollywood trade papers. I think my father thought of himself as a writer who did PR, but he was a PR man who happened to write.

Everything changed while my mother was pregnant with me. On September 18, 1951, screenwriter Martin Berkeley named my father and over 150 others as Communists before a sub-committee of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). On March 24, 1953, another fellow screenwriter, David Lang, named seventy-five additional names and my father’s was one of them.

My father was indeed crushed like a bug by McCarthyism and the Hollywood inquisition. He went from being Somebody in Hollywood, with a capital S, to an angry, embittered man who suddenly had to rely on others to get work.

McCarthyism didn’t just affect the Hollywood players—the actors, directors, writers, and all the people behind the scenes like my father. It affected the wives and husbands of those named, too, as a whole cadre of people were now jobless or penniless, some living with friends, others leaving the country to live cheaply abroad, or living out of their cars. It also affected children—the red diaper babies as we’re called—whose lives were often uprooted by McCarthyism and who sustained the impact of having one’s parent (or both parents) suddenly and so publicly deemed