Il maccartismo e la caccia ai comunisti

McCarthyism and the hunt for Communists form a climate of scrutiny in which political suspicion threatens both livelihood and reputation. In the novel, that pressure reaches Hollywood through loyalty demands, investigations of actors’ associations, the threat of blacklisting, and the expectation that people will identify others. Marilyn Monroe’s private hearing and her father’s letters show how public anti-Communism can enter both professional decisions and intimate relationships, even when she tries not to engage with politics.

Loyalty demands and Hollywood investigations

The political backdrop begins with President Harry Truman’s 1947 Executive Order 9835, which required federal employees to take loyalty oaths and participate in security programs. The novel describes private businesses following with demands for loyalty oaths of their own. An actor who had spoken publicly against the government initiative, gathering signatures and defending freedom of speech and assembly, became a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The threat was not limited to a formal inquiry: the investigation could turn public advocacy into evidence of disloyalty.

The actor’s labor history compounds that exposure. In 1945, the actor had participated in Screen Actors Guild contract negotiations seeking health care, better working conditions, a higher minimum wage, and payments when films were reissued. Because the union was accused of Communist infiltration, a campaign for workplace improvements could be recast as political suspicion. Anonymous anti-Communist informants further alleged long-standing ties to prominent Communist Party members, including screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. The novel presents accusation itself as a weapon: an allegation could place someone under investigation before any public proceeding established what the person believed or had done.

Informal pressure and the threatened blacklist

The prospect of a summons to Washington, D.C., carried consequences beyond questioning. The actor expected a damaging national spectacle, boycotts of films by the American Legion, the Catholic Legion of Decency, and other patriotic organizations, and eventual inclusion on a blacklist whose existence the studios publicly denied. The comparison with Charlie Chaplin, once celebrated and now branded a traitor, makes the danger legible: public esteem could be reversed into stigma, with professional exclusion following political suspicion.

I.E. Shinn, the actor’s agent, arranged a private meeting with influential Republican representatives at a lawyer’s Bel Air villa. Rather than a public hearing, the encounter became a lavish dinner with French wines, during which the representatives questioned the actor informally. The actor answered with patriotic candor and invoked wartime service in Germany, while also placing the accusations in the changing context of the recent alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union. The episode shows scrutiny operating through private access and negotiation as well as through public committees. Shinn’s usefulness lay in his connections: he could arrange a channel that might avert the publicity and professional damage expected from a formal summons.

Suspicion, silence, and professional self-protection

Elsewhere, Shinn responds to a new commission by steering Marilyn Monroe away from thoughts of Otto Öse and Cass Chaplin Jr. and toward the public figure whose reputation is at stake. His hush gesture, familiar among people in Hollywood, is treated as comic on its surface but rooted in genuine fear. Political danger in the novel therefore takes the form not only of interrogation but of conversational limits: names, associations, and the possibility of further scrutiny make silence seem prudent.

Monroe’s attitude is more complicated than simple ignorance. In 1954, she knows that people have been questioned by anti-Communist committees and have named the Playwright. She avoids the newspapers and television news, does not wish to pursue political developments, and tries not to think about government informants or the possibility that her cinematic alter ego appears on a list. Her withdrawal is portrayed as a deliberate turning away from matters she believes she cannot influence, but it does not remove the surrounding pressure. Political surveillance remains present as a possibility she does not want to examine.

Monroe’s hearing and the performance of compliance

When the Subversive Activities Control Board summons Monroe to Sacramento, the political conflict becomes immediate. Her husband advises her to tell the truth and suggests she disclose the names of any Communists she knows. She refuses to treat her private knowledge as something the committee is entitled to demand. The exchange exposes a central tension in the novel’s treatment of anti-Communism: a demand framed as truth-seeking can also demand that one person become an informant against another.

Studio lawyers intervene, and what had been expected to become a public interrogation before the California State Assembly is converted into a private hearing in an elegant room at the Capitol. The change removes public questioning, press coverage, and the appearance of an official proceeding. After three hours, Monroe produces photographs of Marilyn Monroe and signs them individually for the committee members. The conclusion is neither a conventional public confrontation nor a simple refusal: her celebrity image becomes the means by which she completes the encounter. The scene links political examination with the machinery of stardom, showing how a carefully managed public persona can serve as a form of accommodation when direct political disclosure is resisted.

The father’s politics and the intimate afterlife of the hunt

The politics of the anti-Communist campaign also shape Monroe’s attempt to understand her absent father. In a letter written after a heart attack, he says that reflection has made him ashamed of aspects of his past conduct, and he seeks contact with Norma Jeane after more than twenty-seven years. Yet the letter makes reconciliation conditional on an ideological warning. He declares his support for Senator Joe McCarthy’s campaign, treats the Communist threat as an imminent danger, and invokes Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as deserving execution. He criticizes her past defense of free speech and condemns Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson, using the language of national security to lecture the daughter he has only just begun to address.

The letter does not merely report the father’s politics; it makes those politics part of their family relationship. His promise to visit and his appeal to be forgiven coexist with denunciations of people associated with Hollywood and political dissent. The novel thus presents anti-Communism as more than a system of committees and professional sanctions: it supplies a vocabulary through which private estrangement can be defended, judged, and potentially repaired. Across the investigation, the private hearing, and the letter, the recurring cost is pressure to prove loyalty—by answering, by naming others, by remaining silent, or by performing an acceptable public self.