erik lundegaard

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Tuesday May 27, 2014

Ward Bond: Friend of McCarthy, Traitor to Orson Welles

This is a continuation of a recent post, “Ward Bond: Oaf, Loadmouth, Anti-Semite,” which focuses on Bond's role as self-proclaimed judge, jury and executioner for the Motion Picture Alliance, the right-wing, Hollywood organization working hand-in-hand with the FBI and HUAC to create the blacklist of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 

Turns out Bond was also a friend of Joe McCarthy:

When John Ford was making The Long Gray Line in West Point, Ward Bond would head over to a bar across the street from the location and watch the Army-McCarthy hearings. Bond knew McCarthy, and, according to Mahin, Wayne had Bond pass a message from him to the senator: “You’re going to have to name names because you’re just throwing out accusations and innuendo and not producing any facts, and you’re making everybody look bad.”

Plus he screwed over Orson Welles ... not to mention John Ford:

[John]Ford had made a tentative deal with Orson Welles to play the part of Frank Skeffington in The Last Hurrah, and as soon as the trade papers announced it, Harry Cohn at Columbia received a packet supposedly documenting Welles’s “communistic or subversive activities (alleged). . . . These were sent by an actor who had said all over town that he was to play the part—a Ward Bond. . . .“

Welles wound up not getting the part. Neither did Ward Bond. It went to Spencer Tracy. 

All of this is from Scott Eyman's ”John Wayne: The Life and Legend.“ 

The year ”The Last Hurrah" was filmed, by the way, was 1957: three years after the supposed demise of McCarthyism.

More, I'm sure, later. 

Ward Bond

Ward Bond: self-appointed cop for the far right in Hollywood. 

Posted at 06:26 PM on Tuesday May 27, 2014 in category What Liberal Hollywood?