Norma Barzman, 103; blacklisted screenwriter
Norma Barzman, a screenwriter who moved to Europe in the late 1940s rather than be subject to the congressional investigations and professional ostracism that overtook her industry for a decade, died Dec. 17 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 103 and one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.
Her daughter Suzo confirmed the death.
Ms. Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, were among the hundreds of film industry figures — including screenwriters, actors, directors, stagehands, and technicians — who found themselves iced out of Hollywood after World War II because of their unwillingness to discuss their affiliation with the Communist Party or its many associated front groups.
The Barzmans were both longtime members of the party, having joined in the early 1940s. Although their membership officially lapsed when they left the country, they did not renounce the party until 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
“I’m very proud of my years as a Communist,” Ms. Barzman told the Associated Press in 2001. “We weren’t Soviet agents, but we were a little silly, idealistic, and enthusiastic, and thought there was a chance of making a better world.”
Norma Levor was born Sept. 15, 1920, in Manhattan — specifically, she liked to recall, atop the kitchen counter of her parents’ apartment on Central Park West. Her father, Samuel, was an importer, and her mother, Goldie (Levinson) Levor, was a homemaker.
Norma enrolled at Radcliffe College but left in 1940 to marry Claude Shannon, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who later became known for his work in computational linguistics.
They moved to Princeton, N.J., where he had a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and where she worked for the economic branch of the League of Nations, which had relocated there from Switzerland at the start of World War II.
The couple divorced in 1941, a year after her father died. Seeking a fresh start, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles — with a six-week stop in Reno, Nev., to finalize her divorce.
She worked as a features writer for The Los Angeles Examiner while taking courses in screenwriting at the School for Writers, which was later added to the federal government’s list of subversive organizations.
“Shortly after I arrived, I came to understand that all the progressive people I liked and who were politically active were Communists,” she was quoted as saying in “Tender Comrades.”
She met Ben Barzman, another aspiring screenwriter, at a party at the home of Robert Rossen, yet another screenwriter. They married in 1943.
Ms. Barzman wrote the original stories for two films made in 1946: “Never Say Goodbye,” a comedy starring Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker; and “The Locket,” a noir thriller starring Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum. In Europe, her work included another screenplay, “Luxury Girls,” but her name was kept off it until 1999.
Ben Barzman died in 1989. Along with her daughter Suzo, Ms. Barzman leaves another daughter, Luli; five sons, Aaron, Daniel, John, Paolo, and Marco; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
After returning to Los Angeles, Ms. Barzman wrote a column on aging for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a memoir, “The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate” (2003).