Henry Blankfort, part two

 

Henry Blankfort, far right, confronts HUAC in Hollywood, 1951.

The Hollywood Theater Alliance was also responsible for Zero Hour.   After Meet the People and before Jump for Joy? 

A professor who is fired because of the hierarchy.  [director] Sidney Salkow was out here.  So was Albert Maltz.

Of the Hollywood Ten.

Yeah.  And they wrote Zero Hour.

It didn’t have a successful run.

No.  As a matter of fact, at the end of the second act I posted a closing sign.

On opening night?

Yeah, I smelled it.

I have something about another production by the Hollywood Theater Alliance, a thing called  They Can’t Get You Down, but by that time you were gone.

Departed.  And They Can’t Get You Down did not do well.  Really, its main success was Meet the People, number one.   And I see, Eddie Eliscue, one of the writers, has just written a show directed by his son, up north.  It’s playing near San Francisco.  My son, who lives up around San Raphael, read the reviews.  Brilliant, great reviews.  Eddie Eliscue is still writing plays; how do these guys stay around?  I thought they were dead!

Getting back to Ellington, was the person that you got to know very different from his suave, sophisticated onstage persona?

No.  He was a very suave and sophisticated guy, very much onstage, all the time.  A wide-ranging imagination.  The one reservation I have about Ellington is that he never really did anything strong for his people.  I think there were a number of reasons for this; one was his religiosity.  Everything that happened was God’s will.

Do you mean to say he was fatalistic about things like segregation?

It wasn’t fatalism.  I’m an atheist.  The God-fetish that too many people accept isn’t fatalism, but there’s a meaning in it I just can’t understand, that there’s some hand or some chemistry that’s the reason for all this.