Lester Cole

Lester Cole (June 19, 1904 – August 15, 1985) was an American actor and screenwriter born in New York City to Polish Jewish immigrant parents. His father worked as a Marxist organizer in the garment industry, and Cole developed socialist political convictions early in life. He began his professional career as a performer, appearing on Broadway between 1926 and 1930 in productions that included the play Room of Dreams and the musical Peggy-Ann. He subsequently transitioned to screenwriting, a field in which he would build a substantial body of work.

From 1932 to 1947, Cole wrote more than forty screenplays that were produced as motion pictures, among them Walls of Gold (1933), The House of the Seven Gables (1940), None Shall Escape (1944), Objective, Burma! (1945), and High Wall (1947). His first produced screenplay was If I Had a Million. Cole frequently incorporated left-leaning political perspectives into his scripts. In 1933, he joined with John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz to found the Screen Writers Guild, and in 1934 he became a member of the Communist Party of the United States.

In 1947, Cole was among the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and directors who refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) regarding their alleged Communist Party membership. When asked whether he belonged to the Screen Writers Guild and the Communist Party, Cole declined to give a simple yes or no answer and sought to read a prepared written statement into the Congressional record. HUAC Chairman J. Parnell Thomas refused to allow the statement, as it was directly critical of the committee itself, and after a brief exchange the hearing reached an impasse. Cole was subsequently convicted of contempt of Congress, fined one thousand dollars, and sentenced to twelve months at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, where he served ten months alongside fellow Hollywood Ten member Ring Lardner Jr.

Following his conviction, studio executives blacklisted Cole, effectively ending his ability to work under his own name. Over the next several decades, only three of his screenplays reached the screen, each submitted under a pseudonym. He used the names Gerald L.C. Copley, Lewis Copley, and J. Redmond Prior. The most prominent of these projects was Born Free (1966), a commercially successful film credited to Gerald L.C. Copley.

Cole was married three times. He wed his first wife, Jeanne "Jonnie" March, in 1935; the two had joined the Communist Party together and had two sons before divorcing in 1953. His second marriage, to Isabel (Dowden) Johnson, was brief, and Johnson later married Alger Hiss. Cole married his third wife, Katharine Hogle, in 1956, and the two separated in 1977.

In 1981, Cole published his autobiography, Hollywood Red. In his later years he taught screenwriting at the University of California at Berkeley and at a New York University Summer Writers Conference held in Vermont. Cole died of a heart attack in San Francisco, California, on August 15, 1985.