There is a long unsavory tradition of famous, talented, wealthy, privileged Hollywood actresses making inane political statements and getting a free pass by the elite media. The names Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, Barbara Streisand, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, and Emma Stone come to mind.
In her narcissistic memoir, Scoundrel Time, scurrilous lies were issued from the unrepentant Stalinist stooge Lillian Hellman, apologist for mass murder, the Moscow Show Trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the Soviet gulag where tens of millions were imprisoned and perished. Hellman later wrote what became the basis for the Academy Award-winning agitprop drama, Julia, starring Fonda (a self-admitted communist) and Redgrave (a self-admitted Trotskyist). It was Meryl Streep’s first film debut. Upon its 1977 release, psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner claimed she was the basis for the title character and that she had never known Lillian Hellman. Hellman denied that “Julia” was based on Gardiner. Hellman and Gardiner had the same lawyer (Wolf Schwabacher). He had been privy to Gardiner’s memoirs. The events in the film conform to the memoirs. Hellman had ripped it all off.
Although Lillian Hellman claimed the story was based on true events that occurred early in her life, the filmmakers later came to believe that most of it was fictionalized. Director Fred Zinnemann would later comment, “Lillian Hellman in her own mind owned half the Spanish Civil War, while Hemingway owned the other half. She would portray herself in situations that were not true. An extremely talented, brilliant writer, but she was a phony character, I’m sorry to say. My relations with her were very guarded and ended in pure hatred.”
The quintessential Connecticut Yankee thespian Katharine Hepburn actually delivered speeches for 1948 Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace ghost-written by Stalinist Dalton Trumbo, the highest paid Hollywood screen writer and later member of the infamous Hollywood Ten cadre indicted for contempt of Congress and sentenced to prison by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for perjury concerning denial of his Communist Party of the United States membership. The Wallace campaign was dominated and run by the top echelon of the CPUSA.
Hepburn the actress was held up by the media as an intransigent outspoken individualist who voiced her own mind. Actually she was a life-long follower of her mother’s atheist and socialist opinions. Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn was an American feminist social reformer, a Marxist, and a leader of the suffrage movement in the United States. Hepburn served as president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association before joining the National Woman’s Party. Alongside Margaret Sanger, Hepburn co-founded the organization that would become Planned Parenthood.
The over-ripe leftist fruit did not fall far from the tree.
8:51 am on September 9, 2017
