You may not know the communist-turned-ex-communist actress’s name, but her story is worth knowing.
You may not know the communist-turned-ex-communist actress’s name, but her story is worth knowing.
W hy do conservatives remember Whittaker Chambers but not Hede Massing? What the latter lacked in pumpkin patches and prothonotary warblers she made up for in courageous, dramatic stare-downs of the last century’s evilest forces.
Hede Massing launched an acting career at Vienna’s famed Burgtheater after the First World War. She soon turned her back on it in favor of a life of communist zealotry and intrigue. After the Second World War, her turning her back on communism did no favors for her Hollywood hopes.
“Last night I saw the new film ‘I Was a Communist for the F.B.I.,’” actor Adolphe Menjou wrote Massing several weeks before that movie’s 1951 release. “In my opinion it was a wonderful film. Talked with Mr. Jack Warner of Warner Bros. about your book for filming. If the film I saw last night makes money and I feel sure it will your book has a big chance.”
Neither Jack Warner nor anyone else in Hollywood transformed Massing’s This Deception into a feature film. Why?
Lloyd Billingsley provided answers to this question in his 1998 book Hollywood Party. Now, nearly three decades later, he offers an updated version that explores, among other questions, why Hollywood greenlit so few anti-communist stories. He writes:
One of the Party’s major goals had been to block anti-Communist content in the movies. The major political movement of the century became taboo, despite a mountain of story material. Scores of films dealt with the National Socialist regime in Germany, which passed out of existence in 1945, but Hollywood films showing Communists committing atrocities have an existential problem. It’s hard to find any Hollywood film dealing with Stalin’s forced famine in Ukraine, the Moscow trials, or the Nazi-Soviet Pact . . .
Not so much a Hays Code as a Stalinist censorship squelched the captivating stories of Stalin’s onetime servants Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and, yes, Hede Massing.
History knows her if at all for her role in the conviction of Alger Hiss.
“I don’t suppose you want to testify in the next trial,” ACLU Executive Director Roger Baldwin wrote Massing in 1949, “and I wonder why they want you anyhow, considering that you can throw only incidental light on the defendant’s connections.” In the startling letter found, along with ones from Menjou and others in Massing’s papers at the Hoover Institution, Baldwin, a friend of Massing’s dating back to her Communist days, insisted that she “would find the cross-examination most unpleasant.” The ACLU co-founder offered to “arrange” a lawyer, gratis, to convince prosecutor Tom Murphy that “he better pass you up” as a witness.
Codenamed “Redhead” by her Soviet spymasters, Massing invaded headlines by buttressing Chambers’s testimony against Hiss during his second trial and helping to secure the January 1950 conviction that had eluded the prosecution when a judge kept her off the stand at his first. Her witness-box addition came not after significant pressure of dubious legality upon her.
Chambers’s respect for Massing radiates from the pages of a 1957 letter in which he repeatedly uses “we” and “us” to differentiate them from those who remained silent rather than tell the truth. “You resisted in the front rank,” Chambers wrote. “That is why I salute you.”
Massing married three prominent communists during her cinematic life (she apparently had a type). She wed Gerhart Eisler after a brief courtship in 1920. Eisler’s sister, Ruth Fischer — listed as member #1 on the rolls of the Austrian Communist Party — and brother, Hans Eisler — who later composed the East German national anthem — also played active roles in international communism. But Gerhart’s importance prompted both Time and Newsweek to describe him by the late 1940s as the top foreign agent in the U.S. After federal felony convictions aided by the testimony of his sister Ruth and ex-wife Hede, he somehow managed to jump bail, feign blindness to obtain passage on a Polish liner, and then, upon his capture in Great Britain, leave there unmolested for East Germany. By that time, he had been long divorced not only from Hede but from her younger sister, for whom he had left her.
Paul Massing, the man for whom she left her second husband (the publisher and Frankfurt School votary Julian Gumperz), remained the love of her life for the duration. In 1933, she risked her life to see him, from a distance, in the Oranienburg concentration camp in Nazi Germany. In Berlin, she obtained his passport from a hiding place and gathered funds to help him in case of release, which came later that year.
The Massings dived headlong into espionage work for the Soviet Union. She acted as a courier between the United States and Europe for the Soviets. She recruited important contacts within the U.S. State Department, to include Laurence Duggan and Noel Field. It was through Field, whom Alger Hiss attempted to recruit for his spy group without realizing a second spy group that Massing oversaw had already recruited him, that Massing’s consequential interaction with Hiss occurred.
In 1937, after Paul Massing naively agreed to state the reasons for his second thoughts on the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union, Hede dutifully followed him to Moscow. The Soviet government held them captive. In a meeting with the head of the NKVD, an exasperated Hede Massing defiantly addressed Nikolai Yezhov during the height of the Great Purge and demanded passage home. Hede Massing’s dramatic threats regarding publicity, and the wise decision to travel on American papers rather than the false documents their Russian handler had proposed, forced an exit and probably saved the couple’s lives.
She stared down German concentration camps and Soviet commissars; testified in the most studied and celebrated spy case in American history; loved, left, and was left by prominent communist husbands; and lost so many of the comrades she encountered on her journey, including Richard Sorge (executed by the Japanese), Boris Bazarov (executed by the Soviets), Nikolai Yezhov (executed by the Soviets), Alger Hiss (imprisoned by the Americans), Walter Krivitsky (killed by his own leap or likely with a nudge from former comrades), Laurence Duggan (likely killed by his own leap or with a nudge from former comrades), Noel Field (imprisoned, along with his wife, brother, and adopted daughter, behind the Iron Curtain despite his loyalty to communism), and, perhaps most painfully of all, Ignace Reiss (assassinated in Switzerland by Soviet agents), who became her handler only after he became her favorite customer when she observed that this stranger curiously purchased rather than stole titles from the left-wing Berlin bookshop she oversaw during the 1920s.
In the introduction to Billingsley’s Hollywood Party, he cites a real Hollywood party from the 1990s in which actors portrayed the dramatis personae of the Hollywood Ten. Billy Crystal portrayed Larry Parks, whom Adolphe Menjou described to Hede Massing as “number eleven” and who, through “chicanery,” avoided the prison fate of Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, and other comrades. He did suffer a professional fate that history falsely claims befell the Hollywood Ten (Trumbo, for instance, found more work as a screenwriter, albeit under pseudonyms, during the 1950s than he did during the 1940s). Parks ultimately named names. “Only the menace of lost income forced him to talk,” Menjou judged. Both Menjou and Parks misjudged. Only after Parks talked — he starred in the highest grossing film (Jolson Sings Again) of 1949 after the Hollywood Ten debacle — did he lose his career in Hollywood.
Parks successfully transitioned to real estate after Hollywood shunned him. Hede Massing never quite recovered from the traumatic years in which Hollywood chose to ignore her.
Paul Massing divorced Hede, who ultimately agreed to it under the plaintive condition: “That I will have the legal right to your friendship till the day I die.” Although he mostly provided that, along with somewhat consistent financial support, the Frankfurt School epigone and Rutgers professor later attempted to suppress a reissue of This Deception. She occasionally wrote for pay, with William F. Buckley Jr. and William Rusher providing a letter of press credential from National Review in 1957. She acted as a pen pal of former National Review senior editor Suzanne La Follette during the 1960s and followed with interest friend and former NR editor Willi Schlamm’s European resurgence the next decade. She applied for Social Security in the early 1960s and battled health problems. By the time Massing died of emphysema in 1981, her notoriety had so morphed into obscurity that the New York Times misrepresented Gerhart Eisler’s third wife as first wife Hede Massing in the photograph that they used to accompany her obituary.
It was not a Hollywood ending. Perhaps audiences at the Burgtheater could more greatly appreciate her story’s ironies, subtleties, and tragedies, tiny and otherwise.