Norma Barzman, screenwriter who fled from Hollywood to Europe during the ‘blacklist’ years – obituary
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Norma Barzman, the screenwriter, who has died aged 103, was one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist; she was forced to live in exile with her family in Europe for 27 years.
When it came to the commemoration of the blacklist, Barzman was indefatigable. In 2021, her name was at the top of a list of relatives of victims who co-signed letters to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Turner Classic Movies to mark the 75th anniversary of the start of the Hollywood Ten’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
She was born in New York on September 15 1920. Her maternal grandmother had made a fortune from founding a pin-cushion and comforter factory in Chicago, and her mother married Sam Levor, who made his fortune importing Swiss fabrics to America after the First World War.
With her well-off background, Norma was educated at Radcliffe, and during her junior year she married Claude Shannon, a PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was later acclaimed as the father of modern digital communications and information theory. The marriage had ended by the summer of 1941, and through a boyfriend who was working at the Museum of Modern Art she acquired an interest in early European cinema.
In 1942 she and her mother moved to Los Angeles, where Norma “pruned, raked, hoed, weeded, and wrote a novel”, and, in the evenings, “dated junior writers and attended a screenwriting class”. At a party for Russian war relief on Halloween night, she met the successful screenwriter Ben Barzman.
Although impressed by his wit, she was irked by his disdain for female writers and directors, and threw some lemon meringue pie in his face. It was the start of a relationship that would encompass 40 years of shared radical commitment, exile in Europe, marriage (by a defrocked rabbi), seven children, and several extra-marital affairs on Norma’s part. During their courtship, when she called at Ben’s house one evening and was barred entry, she suspected him of having another girlfriend there. Later he explained that it was not a girl, but a Communist Party meeting.
In Hollywood, Norma Barzman became the first female reporter on William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner. When he found out that she was a communist, the notorious Red-baiter refused to fire her, saying: “I don’t care if she is a Red. I don’t care what she is. I never fire a good reporter.”
She wrote the original screenplay for The Locket (1946), a noirish thriller featuring Robert Mitchum, and collaborated with her husband on other movie scripts; the Errol Flynn comedy Never Say Goodbye was based on a story by the Barzmans. Ben wrote Back to Bataan, a John Wayne war film, and got on well with the Duke despite their obvious political differences. “You goddamned communist!” Wayne would exclaim. “You goddamned fascist!” Ben would rib him back.
The Barzmans’ phone was bugged, and they were warned by a blonde girl (also named Norma) about the sheriff’s department keeping their house under surveillance. Only a couple of years later did they realise it had been the then-unknown Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson).
When HUAC began subpoenaing writers, directors and producers to testify about their alleged communist sympathies, 10 famously refused, and a group of Hollywood executives released a statement saying that the Hollywood Ten, and anyone else who refused to testify, would be blacklisted. So when Ben Barzman was asked to work on the British film Give Us This Day, the couple set sail for Europe aboard the Queen Mary.
The Barzmans exchanged the Hollywood progressive community of the 1940s for the Paris of the 1950s among their fellow-exiles; Ben likened the Paris exiles – “working together, incestuously sharing our personal, psychological, political, and financial problems” – to “a barrel of herrings packed closely together in brine”.
The blacklistees who went to Europe were not simply exiles; they were dépaysés (“uncountried”), because the US government withdrew their passports or refused to renew them. The Barzmans persuaded a sympathetic French bureaucrat to grant them 10-year residency permits, which enabled them to travel: in England they mixed with another group of exiles; in Italy, they befriended Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren; and while they were in Spain, Ben wrote the screenplay for the Charlton Heston epic El Cid, though without receiving credit. (When their passports were restored, the US Internal Revenue Service unsuccessfully tried to demand that they pay back taxes for the period of their exile.)
Apart from the screenplay for a successful Italian movie, Luxury Girls (1953), also known as Finishing School, and an Italian television series, Il triangolo rosso (“the Red Triangle”, 1967-1969), Norma Barzman put her writing career on hold until she was in her eighties. “My creativity had gone into making babies, having affairs (with creative men), being a chatelaine presiding over a salon of film folk.”
In 1982, the Barzmans came up with the idea for a book satirising the sort of sex-money-power novel written by their friend Harold Robbins. Warner Books paid them a $200,000 advance for “The Writer”, but instead of marketing it as a satire they marketed it as if it were a straightforward exemplar of the genre, renamed it Rich Dreams and paid the Barzmans an extra $50,000 to agree to dispense with a hardback edition.
Despite being praised by Art Buchwald, it was hardly reviewed and went nowhere. But a French edition under the title Convoitises (envy, or lust) received positive reviews, went into three editions, and was sold to a book club, earning the Barzmans good royalties.
Anthony Quinn asked Ben to write a screenplay in which he, Quinn, could play Picasso. Since the Barzmans had been present for the painter’s 80th birthday, they came up with the title “Picasso’s Birthday”, on which Quinn’s favourite producer took out an option, but the project foundered when Quinn asked them to turn it into a Broadway musical.
As Ben Barzman’s energies dwindled, Norma wrote a column about aging, “The Best Years”, for five years, first for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and then, when that closed, for the Los Angeles Times. Ben died in December 1989 after a long illness. Ten years after that, the Writers Guild restored his screenplay credit for El Cid and gave Norma sole original screenplay credit for Luxury Girls.
She was always ready to engage in discussion about the blacklist, and when the Academy bestowed an honorary Oscar on Elia Kazan, who had named names to HUAC – it was an honour she opposed– she urged the Academy president Bob Rehme to “do something for us” (i.e., the blacklistees).
He agreed to an exhibition about the history of the Hollywood blacklist, which took place in 2001. While Ben Barzman and some other blacklistees had “hugged their bitterness”, as Norma put it, she went on to write a cheery memoir, The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (2003), which received enthusiastic reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.
A subsequent novel, The End of Romance: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and the Mystery of the Violin (2006), was regarded as distasteful by some critics, since it concerned her attempt in 1973 to co-write a novel about violin-making in Cremona with her cousin Henry Myers, who, she revealed, had raped her when she was 14 and he was 25 years her senior. Norma Barzman was working with a producer on a screen adaptation of The End of Romance last year.
She remained politically active, attending fundraisers and supporting Democratic candidates. Following hip operations late in her life, she was still able to perform high kicks and continued to drive around Beverly Hills well into her nineties, while her mental faculties remained sharp and her mischievous sense of humour unmuffled.
Norma Barzman is survived by two daughters and five sons.
Norma Barzman, born September 15 1920, died December 17 2023
