The Rise

McCall wasn’t used to being denied. The granddaughter of John A. McCall, the president of insurance giant New York Life, she came from rarified stock and soon entered decidedly glamorous circles. Actors James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were friends. (Cagney’s working-class bad boy allure led McCall to use him as the basis of the hero of “The Hoofer,” one of her early popular short stories.) In 1927, at age twenty-three, she married the dapper, worldly Dwight Franklin, a costume designer and miniature artist who was much in demand as the film industry churned out swashbuckling adventure flicks; he’d even appeared alongside Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate.

McCall soon gained a foothold of her own as a short-story writer. Her tales were often satirical and largely concerned with working-class women, a subject that would interest her throughout her career. Despite publishing in top magazines like the New Yorker, Collier’s, and the Pictorial Review, the money wasn’t enough; in 1930, she’d had her first child, and life in Manhattan was far from cheap. Glossy magazines were suffering following the Great Depression, which meant McCall was too. As Cagney and Bogart went Hollywood, it was only natural that McCall would try her hand in the land of plenty. The Goldfish Bowl was her gambit to enter the industry.

The book was a fictionalization of the mania that surrounded Charles Lindbergh, who had in 1927 become the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris. In McCall’s version, young submarine officer Scotty McClenahan becomes an overnight sensation after he saves his crew, electing to stay behind and suffocate so as to get everyone else out. He’s rescued at the last minute, and the parades commence: Scotty had been planning to quit the Navy and marry his girlfriend, Janet; instead, he finds himself the face of the American military, an adored celebrity. Unable to enjoy even a moment of privacy, the celebrity proves suffocating, all but ruining his and Janet’s lives.

McCall’s instincts proved correct: in 1931, Warner Bros.’s Darryl F. Zanuck bought the script and offered her a $300-a-week contract. The studio changed the title to It’s Tough to Be Famous, and it remains a gem of pre-code cinema, before the industry began enforcing a stricter, Catholic-inflected code that banned riskier, racier material. (It Should Happen to You is a better-known send up of American celebrity worship, but for my money, McCall’s film is far better.) McCall, who Smyth describes as “a writer who knew everyone, went everywhere, was quoted everywhere, and yet had a problematic private life,” quickly became romantically involved with the film’s star, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, the son of her husband’s old pal. She and Franklin maintained a remarkably progressive open marriage.

But if McCall expected an easy go of it in Tinseltown, she was soon disappointed. Most writers hold tight to their work, their byline their calling card; in Hollywood, McCall found herself written out of credits, her work often handed over to male writers to punch up (often to ill effect). It was the golden age of the studio system, when the handful of major studios that controlled the industry were at the height of their powers, flush with cash and willing to hire more women than many creative industries. When McCall got her start, women comprised some 25 percent of the industry’s writers. But while McCall moved up the ladder in fits and starts, soon earning more than many other writers, she continued to be underutilized, under-credited, and paid less for her work than the men who were brought in later to fine-tune her words.

If this was how Hollywood worked, she would change it. It’s often the case that the better-paid, more secure fragment of a workforce plays a key role in labor organizing, and McCall was a prime example. Her industry connections helped draw others with sway into the effort.

The Writers Guild Federation had first formed in the 1920s as a social club, but in 1933, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House and the legal climate for organized labor greatly improved, it had become a fledgling union. Members paid dues and signed a first contract in April of that year, but the protections were weak, and the organization embattled; a counter-union friendlier to the studios, the Screen Playwrights, quickly formed to scuttle the guild’s organizing. Blacklisting of members by enraged producers was not uncommon, and while Warner Bros. may have expected the gilded McCall to oppose the union, they were mistaken: she joined as soon as she was approached about it. (Inspired by the writers, the Screen Actors Guild [SAG] formed the same year, with Cagney a founding member.)

When Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, the SWG executive board sent a letter to the studios declaring itself the sole legitimate bargaining agent for the industry’s writers. McCall, who said she “believed very strongly in the necessity of a strong writers’ union, not only for the financial benefits which can be obtained by collective bargaining, but also for the professional advantages,” was elected to the executive board that year.

Several women were on the board, but life in the industry had gotten worse for them. When Warner Bros. signed McCall in 1934, she was one of only two women writers under contract, a paltry 6 percent of the studio’s writers. As Smyth writes, McCall knew that “in order to get a better deal for women, she had to negotiate for the rights of all writers.”

As her professional frustrations mounted after repeatedly being undercut by men in the industry, McCall no longer hid her guild membership: in 1935, she agreed to head the new Screen Guilds’ Magazine, a joint effort of the SWG and SAG. She recruited friends like actor Bette Davis to contribute, and penned pieces herself, taking swipes at the industry and her own employer in the process.

It was all too much for studio head Jack Warner, who fired McCall for her organizing activities in 1936. Columbia’s Harry Cohn, one of the few producers who would hire guild-affiliated writers, threw her a lifeline, giving McCall enough work to keep her from calling it quits and moving back East.

As McCall’s guild activities grew, she began to come into conflict with the union’s left wing.  Popular understandings of early Hollywood’s lead screenwriter-organizers paint them as almost uniformly Reds and fellow travelers, but while there was certainly a cadre of Communist Party members in the union, others of the early leaders, McCall included, were hostile to that faction, taking issue with its prioritization of political issues like the Spanish Civil War. As McCall once recounted, “I always felt that, in their activities, the guild came second and the Party came first.”

Despite her increasingly notorious reputation as a union stalwart, McCall’s agent Mary Baker then secured a lucrative contract with MGM in 1938, with McCall making $1,250 a week (the average weekly wage for a guild-affiliated writer that year was $356). That same year, the newly formed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) affirmed that screenwriters had federal protection to unionize under the Wagner Act.

At MGM, McCall would create her most reliable franchise, a character by the name of Maisie who would be the vehicle of ten films over the course of nearly a decade. In an era of Westerns, McCall’s Maisie was an unusual protagonist: a working-class girl from Brooklyn, a rough-and-tumble wisecracker who “loves ’em and leaves ’em.” As Smyth puts it, Maisie, loosely adapted from Wilson Collison’s play Red Dust, was “the quintessential working-class girl in search of a job. Things don’t always break her way, but Maisie’s tough humor and Irish-American good sense are her armor against any adversary.” McCall reckoned that women wanted to see someone more like themselves on screen, and the box office success of Maisie (played by Ann Sothern) confirmed it.

In many ways, Maisie was a stand-in for McCall. As the character puts it, “When Heaven forgets to protect the working girl, she has to do the best she can on her own.” Around the time McCall wrote that line, she ran for the SWG presidency, losing to Sheridan Gibney. But in 1942, the guild secured its first NLRA-backed contract, with members voting unanimously in its favor; later that year, McCall was elected president of the union. By that point, her guild activity was so prolific that she became the basis for Kit Sargent, the screenwriter and guild leader heroine of What Makes Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg’s classic fictionalization of the era, which follows the ambitious young titular character, Sammy Glick, as he rises from New York copyboy to Hollywood producer, betraying his fellow writers along the way.

By the mid-1940s, McCall’s body of work was enormous. In addition to the Maisie franchise and It’s Tough to Be Famous, she’d worked on dozens of movies, including the 1935 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Craig’s Wife (1936), and The Fighting Sullivans (1944). Yet even as she was at the height of her professional powers, McCall’s personal life was in free fall. She divorced the older Franklin to marry Lieutenant David Bramson, a handsome military publicity man, but he turned out to be domineering and abusive. She was still getting screenwriting gigs, but Bramson, despite his discomfort with his wife’s work, seemed to spend it as quickly as she brought it home.

The Fall

In February 1944, a group of ardent anti-communists that included Walt Disney, John Wayne, and director Sam Wood would usher in an era of repression that would hit McCall too, no matter her disagreements with the radicals in her union. The group, calling itself the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA) met at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, where they “declared their opposition to ‘a rising tide of Communism, Fascism, and kindred beliefs.’”

The group, many of them right-wing Republicans feeling a growing ire at the New Deal, began spreading the names of supposed “subversives” in the trade papers. McCall, as SWG president and a member of both the Hollywood Writers Mobilization and the Hollywood Victory Committee, two organizations the MPA deemed Communist Party front groups. McCall considered the organization’s targeting of unions during wartime an unconscionable act, calling the MPA union-busters, a quote that was widely circulated in the national press.

McCall saw her wages rise when she left MGM and the Maisie series for Zanuck and a $3,000-a-week offer at Twentieth Century Fox. Yet at her new home, her projects were increasingly shelved, her star fading fast, replaced with a target as the MPA “approached conservatives in Washington, demanding that Hollywood be purged of supposedly communist screen content and the left-wing writers responsible for it.” A showbiz focus guaranteed headlines, so the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) came to Los Angeles.

Many of McCall’s friends and colleagues were called to testify before the committee, including Dalton Trumbo, whose name would become synonymous with the Hollywood blacklist that followed from the witch hunt. She saw the writing on the wall: the guild’s opponents, buoyed by the passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, were out to destroy the union, and they’d do it by targeting leaders like her. A report by the committee named several of the organizations of which she was a member as Communist front groups. McCall was still well-paid, but in the years that followed, assignments grew scarce, and publicity mentions scarcer still.

A 1952 tangle with Howard Hughes, president of RKO Pictures, further doomed her prospects. Hughes was unyielding in his opposition to SWG’s claims to jurisdiction over screen credits. When the executive removed a blacklisted writer’s name from one of the studio’s films, McCall went to war to enforce the union contract. Said McCall, “I did not intend to permit Mr. Hughes to trample on a labor agreement with muddy tennis shoes.”

The young mogul in turn began to relentlessly smear her as a Red in the press. McCall may have been an anti-communist herself, but that didn’t protect her from the union’s enemies, who cared little for the truth.

McCall, tough as nails, hung on for years to come. She tried her hand at television — as TV gained a foothold in the industry, the SWG would change to the Writers Guild of America — and remained a force in the union through the 1960s. In 1954, at Bramson’s urging (he claimed her reputation was hurting his career too), she testified before the California State Committee. There, she stated that she “would rather be dead than a communist” and had never been a fellow traveler. She declined to name names, instead noting that the inclusion of her name in a 1948 report had “adversely affected her reputation and damaged her economically.”

The move led studios to bring her back onto the payroll. But deals for pictures stalled. McCall would enjoy lucrative employment in television, but her days as a screenwriter were largely behind her. In the battle between her and witch-hunting McCarthyists, the McCarthyists triumphed.

Hollywood’s unions are one of the unlikeliest accomplishments of the US labor movement: in one of the most hierarchical, dog-eat-dog, industries, film workers have organizations that include and fight for each and every one of them. How did that happen, and what did it cost the people who built them? Smyth’s book offers one answer, with all the color one would expect from a dive into the depths of early Hollywood.