Norma Barzman obituary

The writer Norma Barzman, who has died aged 103, was believed to have been the last survivor of the Hollywood blacklist, one of those who was identified as a communist before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (Huac), and whose career was stymied by their activities.

She and her screenwriter husband, Ben Barzman, avoided having to testify before the committee by emigrating in 1949, and for years worked in Europe, often anonymously. In her later life, after returning to Los Angeles, she was one of those who kept the legacy of the “red scare” alive, in writing and interviews, and by leading campaigns to restore credits to those forced to labour in disguise.

Norma already had original story credits on two films – with her husband for the Errol Flynn comedy Never Say Goodbye, and alone for John Brahm’s noirish The Locket – when, in the summer of 1947, their Beverly Hills neighbour Groucho Marx told them in passing that “they were hot”.

They found out what he meant when a young woman, also named Norma, stopped on her way to a party at Vincente Minnelli’s to tell them the police were surveilling visitors to their house. A couple of years later they realised that young woman was the future Marilyn Monroe.

When Ben, whose screenwriting credits included the hit movies Back to Bataan (1945) and the racial prejudice allegory The Boy With Green Hair (1948, with fellow blacklisted writer Alfred Levitt), was called to London in 1949 to revise a screenplay for Edward Dmytryk, one of the high-profile Hollywood 10 leftists who could only get Give Us This Day made abroad, the Barzmans decided, with the situation worsening in the US, to stay in Europe. They moved to Paris, and eventually settled in the Provençal town of Mougins, where their neighbours included Pablo Piccasso.

In 1951, the screenwriter Leo Townsend was the first to name the Barzmans as communists before Huac. Dmytryk followed; he had been imprisoned on his return to the US. “In order to get out of prison he named us and a lot of other people,” Norma said; the American embassy in Paris confiscated their passports.

The blacklisted community worked together: her screenplay for Finishing School (AKA Luxury Girls) was made in Italy by Bernard Vorhaus (her credit went to an Italian “front”), while Ben worked on a number of projects with Joseph Losey. They also worked in television, but Norma had the extra task of raising seven children. As the blacklist weakened, and Ben worked on big films such as El Cid, The Damned and 55 Days at Peking (initially uncredited), they returned to the US for the first time in 1965, and moved back permanently in 1976, to Los Angeles.

Born in Manhattan, New York, Norma was named after the Bellini opera by her parents, Goldie (nee Levinson) and Samuel Levor, an importer. The family spent time in France when she was young and, after starting at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts, she dropped out to visit the country, returning after war broke out. She then left Radcliffe again, to marry Claude Shannon, a mathematics prodigy at MIT who later became known as “the father of information theory”.

She moved with Shannon to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, New Jersey, where he became a colleague of Albert Einstein’s, while she worked for the fast-fading League of Nations. The marriage was over after a year, in 1941, and Norma moved to LA with her widowed mother, stopping in Reno, Nevada, along the way for a quickie divorce.

Her cousin Henry Myers, an established Hollywood writer and a founder of the Screen Writers Guild, recommended Norma study at the League of American Writers’ school, while she worked as a features writer for the Los Angeles Herald. Myers was also a Communist party member; at a 1942 fundraiser for Russian war relief held by the director Robert Rossen, he introduced his cousin to Ben Barzman. When Ben told her modern movies were “way too tough for women”, she threw a lemon meringue pie in his face. A few months later, in 1943, they were married.

She also joined her husband in the Communist party, partly because she admired the way women and men were working equals in the Soviet Union. When her leftist sympathies were pointed out to the Herald’s owner, the fiercely rightwing William Randolph Hearst, he reportedly said: “I don’t care if she is a Red. I never fire a good reporter.”

In 1982, she and Ben collaborated on a novel, Rich Dreams, fictionalising the life of the schlock writer Harold Robbins; one reviewer called it “not lurid enough”. Ben died in 1989, after which Norma became more open in expressing her belief that she had been held back by male attitudes as much as by the blacklist.

She wrote a column on growing older, The Best Years, for the Los Angeles Times, and was interviewed for studies of the blacklist, most notably Tender Comrades by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (1997). In 1999 she led the protest outside the Academy Awards when a lifetime achievement Oscar was presented to the director Elia Kazan, who famously did name names.

She published two memoirs, The Red and the Blacklist (2003), followed by The End of Romance: A Memoir of Love, Sex and the Mystery of the Violin (2006), combining the hidden history of Cremona, Italy, with her affair with a young violin maker and her love/hate relationship with Myers.

In 2017 she was involved in a memorial of the blacklist at the Writers’ Guild theatre; five years later she helped spur the Academy and Turner Classic Movies to honour those blacklisted on the 75th anniversary.

Asked about her activism, she told Film Talk: “I’m not bitter, because there’s always something to work for, whether it’s a marriage, or democracy.”

She is survived by two daughters, Suzo and Luli, five sons, Aaron, Daniel, John, Paolo and Marco, and by eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Norma Barzman, writer and campaigner, born 15 September 1920; died 17 December 2023