Norma Barzman, a blacklisted screenwriter who spent nearly three decades in exile and then forced Hollywood to confront its red-baiting past, has died at her Beverly Hills home. She was 103.
Active into old age, Barzman died on December 17, 2023, according to a post by her daughter Suzo Barzman on social media.
“I lost a big part of my heart on Sunday afternoon,” Suzo Barzman wrote in a December 19 Instagram post. “My mother Norma Barzman died peacefully at home surrounded by her family. …she had a long life full of stories and achievements.
“His wit and joy were intact until the end. Whenever someone asked her what the secret to her longevity was, she simply responded that she loved every aspect of life, people, and that she never stopped working. I am grateful to have been able to spend these last few years with her. “I will miss her deeply but she will continue to live in me.”
Barzman's early achievements in the movie business, like those of other blacklisted writers, quickly evaporated after the House Un-American Activities Committee launched a purge of suspected Hollywood communists beginning in late 2000. the 1940s, and she dedicated her final years to exposing the hurtful harms of the time. and often career-altering practices.
But she always maintained that her career was hindered by something else: she was a woman in a male-dominated Hollywood.
“You can only partially blame the blacklist,” he told an interviewer for the 1997 blacklist chronicle “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist.”
“Much of the problem was due to the position of women and that I had not fought enough for my rights,” she added.
She said she was denied screenplay billing for one of her first successful screenplays, “Never Say Goodbye” (1946), written with her husband Ben Barzman, not because of her membership in the Communist Party but because the studio did not want a woman's name. . in the credits.
After moving with her family to Europe in 1949 to avoid being summoned by HUAC, which had launched an investigation into alleged Communist infiltration in Hollywood two years earlier, she said she became a retired housewife. The mother of seven children, she lived in the shadow of her husband, contributing to her work but neglecting her own ambitions. The couple returned to Los Angeles in 1976.
Norma Barzman, photographed at her home in 2000, lost much of her writing career on the Hollywood blacklist of the late 1940s and 1950s.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Only in her final years did Norma Barzman flourish again as a writer and activist. She became a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, completed two memoirs, and advocated for writers whose careers were devastated by the blacklist.
In 1999, he helped lead a campaign against the awarding of an honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan, the famous director who exposed friends suspected of being communists. Although Kazan received the Oscar from him, many attendees at the awards ceremony refused to applaud and hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that night.
Barzman later spoke on national television, accusing Kazan of trying to advance his Hollywood career at the expense of his former friends. The episode sparked a wave of blacklist memories, and the Barzmans were among the writers honored with a lifetime achievement award from a UCLA screenwriting graduating class. Kazan died in 2003.
However, Barzman's memories of the blacklist years were always intertwined with her struggles as a woman in Hollywood. Feminism was high on the list of reasons she had become a communist, she wrote. She had been struck by how women in the Soviet Union worked alongside men. And when she was asked about her years in exile, she responded that what bothered her most was “that being away would have deprived me of participating in the American women's movement.”
Born Norma Levor in New York City on September 15, 1920, Barzman attended Radcliffe College. As a young woman she moved briefly to Paris, where she spent much of her childhood.
After a brief marriage to mathematician Claude Shannon, she ended up in Los Angeles, where a cousin, Henry Myers, had forged a successful career in Hollywood. She got a job as a reporter at the Los Angeles Examiner and began working as a screenwriter. She met Ben Barzman at a party to support Russian war aid, she married him in 1943 and soon after joined him as a member of the Communist Party.
When Examiner editors told the paper's owner, William Randolph Hearst, that Barzman was a communist, Hearst shrugged. “I don't care if she's a communist, she's a good reporter and I never fire a good reporter.”
The Barzmans supported the “Hollywood 10,” a group of writers and directors connected to the Screen Actors Guild who were subpoenaed by HUAC but refused to cooperate with its investigation. Studios refused to hire writers named as communists or fellow travelers, and previously successful writers such as Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. were pushed out or relegated to writing under assumed names.
The Barzmans avoided being forced to name names by remaining in England during a film trip in 1949. They remained abroad, living in Paris and the south of France, after others in Hollywood identified them as Communists and the government suspended their passports. Years later, when she obtained FBI files on her husband and herself, Barzman discovered that agents had followed them for years in Europe.
Ben Barzman, whose hit films include “The Boy with Green Hair,” continued writing uncredited films for European filmmakers while his wife's career foundered.
His uncredited contributions, later restored, include “El Cid,” starring Sophia Loren and Charlton Heston, “The Locket” and “Luxury Girls.”
Barzman said that only after her husband's death in 1989 did she “blossom” and begin writing again.
His 1990 columns for the Los Angeles Times combined humor with reflections on aging. She also became “the keeper of the blacklist flame,” said Larry Ceplair, co-author of “The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community 1930-1960.”
Barzman continued to work and contribute to Blacklist retrospectives well into his 90s. She wrote two memoirs, “The Red and Black List: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expat” and “The End of Romance: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and the Mystery of the Violin.”
Reviewing his Hollywood memoir, the New York Times wrote: “The book is also a testament to anger toward the sleazy congressional committee that made bean soup of the First Amendment and toward the men who withheld it.”
Barzman told Ceplair that she had stopped participating in the Communist Party in 1949, but did not completely abandon her former feelings toward communism until 1968. Although she reproached herself for being “blind,” some critics criticized her unapologetically stance.
Barzman responded that communist fear “maimed and degraded our culture for generations.”
Her writings combined political reflection with explorations of her struggles as a wife and mother. In 2000, she explained her activism to a journalist this way:
“You have to work on things, whether it's a marriage or a democracy.”
Barzman is survived by his seven children, including Suzo Barzman and writer-director Paolo Barzman.
Leovy is a former Times staff writer. Staff writer Carlos De Loera contributed to this report.
