By Carol Tannenhauser
Walter Bernstein, a renowned journalist and screenwriter, who was blacklisted in the 1950s for being a Communist and refusing to reveal the names of other Hollywood sympathizers, died Saturday morning at his home on Central Park West in the West 90s. He was 101. The cause was pneumonia, according to his wife, Gloria Loomis, a literary agent.
Bernstein captured the experience of being blacklisted in his 1976 Oscar-nominated movie, “The Front,” starring Woody Allen, which illustrates how people “fronted” for blacklisted writers who couldn’t use their own names. (It lost the Oscar to “Network.”) According to The New York Times, “[Bernstein’s] blacklisting was lifted by director Sidney Lumet” — also an Upper West Sider — “who hired him in 1958 to write the screenplay for the film “That Kind of Woman,” starring Sophia Loren. Thereafter, Bernstein distinguished himself with such strong scripts as “Fail-Safe,” “The Molly Maguires,” “Semi-Tough” and “Yanks.”
Born in Brooklyn on August 20, 1919, Bernstein went to Dartmouth and “sold his first short story to the New Yorker while still an undergrad,” Variety reported. “After graduation, when he was in the military during WWII, he served as a reporter at large for the magazine and also contributed accounts of his wartime experience to Yank magazine. One of his wartime coups was an exclusive interview with Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito behind German lines.”
Bernstein also wrote for television, winning an Emmy in 1999 for “Miss Edgars’ Boys,” a drama about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. He continued writing, as well as teaching and advising at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts until his death.
AP added an interesting note: “While many were blacklisted just for supporting left-wing causes, Bernstein actually was a member of the American Communist Party and remained so until 1956, when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev revealed the many brutalities of Joseph Stalin, who had died three years earlier. Bernstein would remember his decision with ‘relief’ over no longer abiding Soviet dogma, and ‘sadness’ for the people who were fellow idealists. ‘I had left the Party, but not the idea of socialism,’ he wrote in his memoir, ‘the possibility that there could be a system not based on inequality and exploitation.’”
