Lester Cole

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Lester Cole
San Francisco, California
Occupationscreenwriter

Lester Cole (June 19, 1904 – August 15, 1985) was an American

Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and directors who were cited for contempt of Congress and blacklisted for their refusal to testify regarding their alleged involvement with the Communist Party
.

Biography

Born to a

socialist ideology at a young age.[3][4]

Lester Cole began his career as an actor but soon turned to screenwriting. His first work was

American Communist Party.[5] Cole incorporated left-leaning political commentary in many of his scripts.[4][5]

Between 1932 and 1947, Cole wrote more than forty screenplays that were made into motion pictures.[6]

Blacklisting

In 1947, he became one of the

House Committee on Un-American Activities about their Communist Party membership. Specifically, he was asked whether he was a member of the Screen Writer's Guild or the Communist Party.[7] Cole was convicted of Contempt of Congress, fined $1,000 and sentenced to twelve months' confinement at the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut along with fellow Hollywood Ten member Ring Lardner Jr.,[8]
of which he served ten months.

As a result of his refusal to testify, Cole was blacklisted by studio executives, after which just three of his screenplays were made into films - submitted under the names Gerald L.C. Copley, Lewis Copley, and J. Redmond Prior.

His best-known screenplay was that for the highly successful Born Free (1966), credited to Gerald L.C. Copley.

Personal life

Cole was married three times. His first two marriages ended in divorce and he separated from his third wife.

Cole married his first wife Jeanne “Jonnie” March in 1935.[9] Together they joined the Communist party.[10] The couple had two sons and divorced in 1953.[11] In the mid 1950s he briefly married Isabel (Dowden) Johnson,[12][13] who later married Alger Hiss.[14] Cole and Katharine Hogle married in 1956 and separated in 1977.[15][16]

Later life

In 1981, Cole published his autobiography, entitled Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole. In it, he recounted a 1978 incident when he called into a radio talk show on which ex-Communist

stool pigeon
" before he was cut off:

Aren't you the canary who sang before the un-American Committee? Aren't you that canary? Or are you another bird, a pigeon – the stool kind.... Just sing, canary, sing, you bastard![17]

About this incident, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley (Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry) comments, "Whether this actually happened is uncertain, but one can guess."[18]

Lester Cole died of a heart attack in

San Francisco, California, in 1985. He was a professor for screenwriting for the University of Southern California at Berkeley up until the year before his death.[19] Ronald Radosh, Emeritus Professor of History at City University of New York, wrote that Cole "remained a hardcore Communist" until his death.[20]

Selected filmography

See also

References

  1. ISBN 9781628941166
    .
  2. ISBN 9781557537638
    .
  3. ^ "Alvah Bessie (1904 – 1985) - The Hollywood Ten: The Men Who Refused to Name Names". The Hollywood Reporter. 16 November 2015.
  4. ^ a b Dick, Bernard F. (1989). Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 29–44.
  5. ^
    hdl:10788/533
    .
  6. ISBN 978-0-7486-2455-3
    . Retrieved 2013-08-04. Lester Cole, also one of the Ten, wrote two scripts dealing with war subjects: Hostages (1943) and None Shall Escape (1944).
  7. ProQuest 304327168.[page needed
    ]
  8. JSTOR 3815610
    .
  9. ISBN 978-0-87867-085-7
    .
  10. ISBN 978-0-87867-085-7
    .
  11. ISBN 978-0-87867-085-7
    .
  12. ISBN 978-0-253-00732-2
    .
  13. ^ "Collection: Papers of Isabel Dowden Johnson Hiss, 1907-2000 | HOLLIS for". hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2022-02-01.
  14. ^ "Collection: Papers of Isabel Dowden Johnson Hiss, 1907-2000 | HOLLIS for". hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2022-02-01.
  15. ^ "Katherine Hogle Cole Obituary (2004) Deseret News". Legacy.com. Retrieved 2022-02-01.
  16. ISBN 978-0-87867-085-7
    .
  17. ISBN 0-87867-085-8
    . Retrieved March 9, 2011.
  18. ISBN 0-7615-1376-0
    . Retrieved March 9, 2011.
  19. ^ "LESTER COLE DIES: IN 'HOLLYWOOD 10'". New York Times. August 18, 1985.
  20. ISBN 1-893554-96-1
    . Retrieved March 9, 2011.

External links
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