The Red and the Blacklist

the long version

"When Norma Levor first hit Hollywood, she was a vivacious twenty-one-year-old, fresh out of Harvard and her first marriage, clad in her perky pink cashmere top. Within an hour of being unleashed on Hollywood society she was squabbling with a left-wing screenwriter named Ben Barzman who claimed technology had made modern cinema "way too tough for women." Angry, Norma plunged a lemon meringue pie into his face. Three months later they were married by a defrocked Rabbi.". "So begins Norma Barzman's extraordinary memoir, The Red and the Blacklist, which fizzes with the wit and energy found in the classic Hollywood comedies of the forties. But it is also laced with the fear and claustrophobia found in the forties film noirs, as Norma and Ben are driven from Hollywood - during the post-war McCarthyite witch-hunt - into an emotionally difficult thirty-year exile in France.". "While studded with celebrity, adventure, gossip, and sex, The Red and the Blacklist is also a unique record of the political tempests of the time, marked by the author's dazzling power of reflection and insight, and animated by a larger than life cast of supporting characters including Pablo Picasso, Harold Robbins, Sophia Loren, Charlton Heston, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Losey, John Wayne, Anthony Quinn, Groucho Marx, and - in a delightful cameo - a very young Marilyn Monroe."--BOOK JACKET.