Norma Barzman, Screenwriter Who Was Among the Last Survivors of the Hollywood Blacklist, Dies at 103
She and her late husband, fellow screenwriter Ben Barzman, fled the U.S. in 1949 to avoid being subpoenaed and did not return until 1976.
Born Norma Levor in New York City on Sept. 15, 1920, and raised between the U.S. and Europe, Barzman moved to Hollywood on her 21st birthday. By that time, she had already attended Radcliffe for two years before dropping out and had spent a year living in Princeton, New Jersey, as the young bride of Claude Shannon — later known as “the father of information theory” — before their divorce in 1941.
Out west, Barzman was enrolled by her older cousin, a writer, at the left-leaning School of Writers. In 1942, after a fateful meeting at a Halloween party, she married the up-and-coming screenwriter Ben Barzman, who was 10 years her senior, and in 1943 she joined the Communist Party, of which he was already a member.
At the time, Barzman felt that capitalism wasn’t working. Moreover, as she told the Los Angeles Times in 2014, “Hitler was invading the Soviet Union, so there was no reason to be anti-Russian, they were our allies.” She also told THR, in 2012, that much of her attraction to the party was due to the smart, interesting, idealistic people that it brought together: “The Hollywood progressive community in the ’40s was so wonderful, so exciting to be part of.”
After a stint as a newspaper writer and serving as a trusted confidante of her husband as he wrote scripts including Back to Bataan (1945), she began writing for films herself. Her credits include the stories that served as the basis for two 1946 titles, the Errol Flynn/Eleanor Powell rom-com Never Say Goodbye (she would later assert that she wrote the script but the studio insisted that her name be taken off) and the Robert Mitchum thriller The Locket.
But in 1947, 10 screenwriters were called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. They refused to divulge whether they were or had ever been members of the Communist Party or name others who were or had been. The 10 were held in contempt of Congress (and later jailed), prompting the Hollywood studios to declare that they would henceforth “not knowingly employ a communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States.”
Barzman and her husband, by then parents of two, learned they were under government surveillance in 1949. To avoid being subpoenaed if named by others, they turned what was to be a six-week trip to London into a decades-long exile, remaining in England until 1954, when they relocated to France, where their social circle included the likes of Pablo Picasso. (They were indeed later “named,” in 1951, by Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten.)
Even overseas, the Barzmans continued to be monitored by the FBI. But they managed to continue to earn a living — and to support a family that ultimately grew to include seven children — by writing under pseudonyms and fronts. (Only years later was she given credit for writing the script for 1953’s Luxury Girls.) “Those were intensely difficult years,” Barzman told THR.
It would be three decades before the family returned to America, first for a summer stay in 1965 — a year after they visited the Soviet Union, where they witnessed firsthand the effects of communism and disavowed the party — and then on a permanent basis in 1976. Barzman told THR, “When I got back here, by God, I was gonna be the Norma that I was supposed to be, that I started out as.”
Barzman’s beloved Ben died in 1989. In her later years, she wrote a popular newspaper column and several books, including an acclaimed 2003 memoir, The Red and the Blacklist. She helped to organize a protest outside of the 1999 Academy Awards ceremony at which filmmaker Elia Kazan, who had named names, was presented with an honorary Oscar. And she gave talks and granted interviews about the blacklist era. A Los Angeles Times profile in 2000 described her as “an eloquent conscience of the blacklist.”
