Lionel Stander


Lionel Jay Stander was an American actor, activist, and a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild. He had an extensive career in theatre, film, radio, and television that spanned nearly 70 years, from 1928 until 1994. He was known for his distinctive raspy voice and tough-guy demeanor, as well as for his vocal left-wing political stances. One of the first Hollywood actors to be subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was blacklisted from the late 1940s until the mid-1960s.
Following his experience with the Hollywood Blacklist, Stander moved to Europe, where he appeared in many genre films, including several Spaghetti Westerns. He returned to the United States later in the decade, playing the role of the majordomo Max on the 1980s mystery television series Hart to Hart, earning him a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film.

Early life

Stander was born in The Bronx, New York City on 11 January 1908, to Louis and Bella Stander, parents of Russian Jewish extraction.
During his one year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he appeared in the student productions The Muse of the Unpublished Writer, and The Muse and the Movies: A Comedy of Greenwich Village.

Career

Stander's acting career began in 1928, as Cop and First Fairy in Him by E. E. Cummings, at the Provincetown Playhouse. He claimed that he got the roles because one of them required shooting craps, which he did well, and a friend in the company volunteered him. He appeared in a series of short-lived plays through the early 1930s, including The House Beautiful, which Dorothy Parker famously derided as "the play lousy".

Early film roles

Like many New York-based stage actors, Stander found additional work in movie short subjects filmed in New York. He signed with Vitaphone and was featured in the two-reel comedy In the Dough, with Roscoe Arbuckle and Shemp Howard. He made several other Vitaphone comedies, usually as a comic tough guy, villain, or authority figure; his last Vitaphone short was The Old Grey Mayor with Bob Hope in 1935. That same year, he was cast in a feature, Ben Hecht's The Scoundrel, with Noël Coward. He moved to Hollywood and signed a contract with Columbia Pictures. Stander was in a string of films over the next three years, appearing most notably in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town with Gary Cooper, Meet Nero Wolfe playing Archie Goodwin, The League of Frightened Men, and A Star Is Born with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March.

Radio roles

Stander's distinctive rumbling voice, tough-guy demeanor, and talent with accents made him a popular radio actor. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was on The Eddie Cantor Show, Bing Crosby's KMH show, the Lux Radio Theater production of A Star Is Born, The Fred Allen Show, the Mayor of the Town series with Lionel Barrymore and Agnes Moorehead, Kraft Music Hall on NBC, Stage Door Canteen on CBS, the Lincoln Highway Radio Show on NBC, and The Jack Paar Show, among others.
In 1941, he starred in a short-lived radio show called The Life of Riley on CBS. Stander played the role of Spider Schultz in both Harold Lloyd's film The Milky Way and its remake ten years later, The Kid from Brooklyn, starring Danny Kaye. He was a regular on Danny Kaye's zany comedy-variety radio show on CBS, playing himself as "just the elevator operator" amidst the antics of Kaye, future Our Miss Brooks star Eve Arden, and bandleader Harry James.
Also during the 1940s, he played several characters on The Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda animated theatrical shorts, produced by Walter Lantz Productions. For Woody Woodpecker, he provided the voice of Buzz Buzzard, but was blacklisted from the Lantz studio in 1951 and was replaced by Dal McKennon.

Activism

Stander espoused a variety of social and political causes, and was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild. At a SAG meeting held during a 1937 studio technicians' strike, he told the assemblage of 2000 members: "With the eyes of the whole world on this meeting, will it not give the Guild a black eye if its members continue to cross picket lines?" Stander also supported the Conference of Studio Unions in its fight against the Mob-influenced International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Also in 1937, Ivan F. Cox, a deposed officer of the San Francisco longshoremen's union, sued Stander and a host of others, including union leader Harry Bridges, actors Fredric March, Franchot Tone, Mary Astor, James Cagney, Jean Muir, and director William Dieterle. The charge, according to Time magazine, was "conspiring to propagate Communism on the Pacific Coast, causing Mr. Cox to lose his job".
During the Spanish Civil War, Stander fundraised for the Republican cause. He also campaigned for the release of the Scottsboro Boys. He was a member of the Popular Front from 1936 until 1939, and subsequently belonged to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Regarding his political beliefs, Stander once described himself as "lefter than the Left" and said he supported the Communist Party USA prior to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. As he later put it, "I worked very closely with the Communist Party during the ’30s. But I never joined."
In 1938, Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn allegedly called Stander "a Red son of a bitch" and threatened a US$100,000 fine against any studio that renewed his contract. Despite critical acclaim for his performances, Stander's film work dropped off drastically. After appearing in 15 films in 1935 and 1936, he was in only six in 1937 and 1938. This was followed by just six films from 1939 through 1943, none made by major studios, the most notable being Guadalcanal Diary.

Stander and HUAC

In 1940, Stander was among the first group of Hollywood actors to be subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee for supposed Communist activities. At a grand jury hearing in Los Angeles in August 1940—the transcript of which was leaked to the press—John L. Leech, the self-described former "chief functionary" of the L.A. Communist Party, named Stander as a CP member, along with more than 15 other Hollywood notables, including Franchot Tone, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Luise Rainer, Clifford Odets and Budd Schulberg. Stander subsequently forced himself into the grand jury hearing, and the district attorney cleared him of the allegations.
Stander appeared in few films in 1944 and 1945. Then, with HUAC's attentions focused elsewhere due to World War II, he played in a number of mostly second-rate pictures from independent studios through the late 1940s. These include Ben Hecht's Specter of the Rose ; the Preston Sturges comedy The Sin of Harold Diddlebock with Harold Lloyd; and Trouble Makers with The Bowery Boys. One classic emerged from this period of his career, the Preston Sturges comedy Unfaithfully Yours with Rex Harrison.
In 1947, HUAC turned its attention once again to Hollywood. That October, Howard Rushmore, who had belonged to the CPUSA in the 1930s and written film reviews for the Daily Worker, testified that writer John Howard Lawson, whom he named as a Communist, had "referred to Lionel Stander as a perfect example of how a Communist should not act in Hollywood." Stander was again blacklisted from films, though he played on TV, radio, and in the theater.
In March 1951, actor Larry Parks, after pleading with HUAC investigators not to force him to "crawl through the mud" as an informer, named several people as Communists in a "closed-door session", which made the newspapers two days later. He testified that he knew Stander, but did not recall attending any CP meetings with him.
At a HUAC hearing in April 1951, actor Marc Lawrence named Stander as a member of his Hollywood Communist "cell", along with screenwriters Lester Cole and Gordon Kahn. Lawrence testified that Stander "was the guy who introduced me to the party line", and that Stander said that by joining the CP, he would "get to know the dames more" — which Lawrence, who did not enjoy film-star looks, thought a good idea. Upon hearing of this, Stander shot off a telegram to HUAC chair John S. Wood, calling Lawrence's testimony "ridiculous" and asking to appear before the Committee so that Stander could swear under oath he was not a Communist. The telegram concluded: "I respectfully request an opportunity to appear before you at your earliest possible convenience. Be assured of my cooperation." He also brought a slander lawsuit against Lawrence, which Stander later described in a 1983 interview: After Lawrence's 1951 testimony, Stander was blacklisted from TV and radio. He continued to act in theater roles, and played Ludlow Lowell in the 1952-53 revival of Pal Joey on Broadway and on tour.

Blacklisting

Two years passed before Stander was issued the requested subpoena. Finally, in May 1953, he testified at a HUAC hearing in New York, where he made nationwide front-page headlines by being uproariously uncooperative, memorialized in the Eric Bentley play, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been. The New York Times headline was "Stander Lectures House Red Inquiry." In a dig at bandleader Artie Shaw, who had tearfully claimed in a Committee hearing that he had been "duped" by the Communist Party, Stander asserted: An excerpt from that statement was engraved in stone for "The First Amendment Blacklist Memorial" by Jenny Holzer at the University of Southern California.
Other notable statements during Stander's 1953 HUAC testimony:

  • " is like the Spanish Inquisition. You may not be burned, but you can't help coming away a little singed."
  • "I don't know about the overthrow of the government. This committee has been investigating 15 years so far, and hasn't found one act of violence."
  • "I know of a group of fanatics who are desperately trying to undermine the Constitution of the United States by depriving artists and others of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without due process of law... I can tell names and cite instances and I am one of the first victims of it. And if you are interested in that and also a group of ex-fascists and America-Firsters and anti-Semites, people who hate everybody including Negroes, minority groups and most likely themselves... and these people are engaged in a conspiracy outside all the legal processes to undermine the very fundamental American concepts upon which our entire system of democracy exists."
  • "...I don't want to be responsible for a whole stable of informers, stool pigeons, and psychopaths and ex-political heretics, who come in here beating their breast and say, 'I am awfully sorry; I didn't know what I was doing. Please--I want absolution; get me back into pictures.'"
  • "My estimation of this committee is that this committee arrogates judicial and punitive powers which it does not possess."

Stander also denied having been a Communist "now or yesterday." But when asked if he had ever been a party member, he refused to answer, calling it "a trick question."
Stander was blacklisted from the late 1940s until 1965; perhaps the longest period.