Norma Barzman, one of the last surviving members of the Hollywood Blacklist, has died at her home in Beverly Hills at the age of 103, according to media reports.
Born in New York City, Barzman moved to Hollywood in the 1940s and married fellow screenwriter Ben Barzman. Looking for ways to organize around progressive politics, the pair joined the Communist Party from 1942-49.
“Hitler was invading the Soviet Union, so there was no reason to be anti-Russian. They were our allies at the time,” Barzman told the blog FilmTalk last year.
But after World War II, Barzman began to get warnings from her neighbors that her family was under surveillance, and one day heard a conversation she had with a friend days prior when she picked up the phone.
“I could hear it playing back. Then I put down the phone because I realized that my phone was tapped and I knew they were watching us,” she told FilmTalk.
Barzman also recalled how one of the people who warned Barzman that she was being watched by the FBI and local law enforcement was a young blonde lady who only introduced herself as Norma. A few years later, after Barzman and her family fled the United States, she reunited with Norma in Paris and learned her full name: Norma Jeane Mortenson, a.k.a. Marilyn Monroe.
That encounter with Monroe took place during a 27-year exile the Barzmans spent away from the U.S. from 1949 to 1976. The exile began when the two traveled to London to work on “Give Us This Day,” a 1949 film directed by Edward Dmytryk, a member of the “Hollywood Ten” who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. While there, they were warned by friends that they too would be asked to testify if they returned to America.
The Barzmans spent most of their exile in France, where they wrote film and television scripts for French and Italian productions. It was also during that exile that the Barzmans disavowed their support for the Communist Party after a visit to the Soviet Union.
After her return to the U.S., Barzman shared her story at film schools across the country and in her 2003 memoir “The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate.” She also organized efforts to restore the credits of blacklisted screenwriters who wrote films and TV shows under aliases.
Barzman is survived by seven children, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
