Warren Beatty’s 1981 love story Reds about American
Communist Party founding father Jack Reed and paramour Louise
Bryant left a crucial, embarrassing detail on the cutting room
floor.
Jack Reed, the playboy of the Greenwich Village Left who
practiced the free love that he preached, infected his wife with a
dangerous venereal disease. Neither Reds nor the two major
American biographies about Reed — Granville Hicks’s John
Reed and Roger Rosenstone’s Romantic Revolutionary —
note this inconvenient detail. Who has time for VD when there’s a
free-love love story to be told?
“I’d like to know what your idea of freedom is,” Warren Beatty’s
Reed asks Diane Keaton’s Bryant. Then married to a Portland
dentist, Bryant bluntly answers: “I’d like to see you with your
pants off, Mr. Reed.” Easy sex didn’t start in the 1960s.
Nominated for more Academy Awards than any film since 1966’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Reds devotes the
first half of a three-hour-plus movie to the theme of open
relationships among the freewheeling characters of the Greenwich
Village Left of the 1910s.
Jack Nicholson’s Eugene O’Neill lustfully confronts Bryant. If
Reed’s girl were his girl, he declares, she would be his and his
alone. “Possessive,” a moralistic Bryant responds. “That’s
something else. It’s a waste of time. I’m not. Neither is Jack for
that matter,” “Ah, yes! I know,” the famous playwright responds.
“You and Jack have your own thing.”
An annoyed Bryant lectures, “He has the freedom to do the things
that he wants to, and so do I. And I think anyone afraid of that
kind of freedom is really afraid of his own emptiness.”
Bryant’s arguments win the day, and the pair immediately
commence upon a sexual affair in Reed’s absence. The fictional Reed
responds to the discovery of his girlfriend’s relationship with
O’Neill by asking for her hand in marriage, which, along with
awkwardness and the occasional possessive impulse, is about as
complicated as promiscuity gets in Reds.
THAT’S THE FREE-LOVE story Beatty wanted to tell. In Bryant’s and
Reed’s real life, their ideals crashed into harder realities.
In the extant correspondence between the First Couple of
American Communism, the theme of infidelity and the health
consequences unleashed by it pervade. I relied on these letters,
currently housed at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, for a
chapter focusing on Reed and the origins of American Communism in
my new book. A Conservative History of the American
Left.
They are open to the public’s inspection, and were available to
Hicks and Rosenstone. Reds, in fact, includes a montage of
Beatty-Keaton voiceovers of love-letters. But neither the
consequences of Reed’s free-love philosophy, nor the casual racism
in his letters that denigrated African Americans as “niggers” and
“coons,” made it into their first draft of history.
“My whole left insides (ovaries, etc.) seem to be inflamed and
infected,” the real Bryant wrote to the real Reed in December,
1916. “They think maybe I got it from your condition.” Noting the
prospect of surgery, Bryant concluded by wishing her husband, then
convalescing after an operation to remove a kidney, to get
well.
An obtuse Reed replied that his wife’s delay in seeing a doctor
“wasn’t fair to me.” “I didn’t mind what you said about my
infecting you — if it were true,” Reed wrote Bryant. “But honey,
it’s awful to remove your ovaries, isn’t it? Doesn’t it make you
incapable of having children and everything like that? I never
heard of that being done to anybody but dogs, cats and horses.”
The letters never mention a disease by name. The subject is
delicately, though frequently, addressed. (And Bryant, thankfully,
never had her ovaries removed, evidence of which most glaringly
displayed in the ironic birth of a baby girl to William Bullit,
first U.S. ambassador to Soviet Russia.)
The missives show Reed and Bryant getting sick at roughly the
same time, an ovarian infection afflicting Bryant, a doctor
informing Bryant that a disease had been transmitted to her, and
Reed repeatedly pledging fidelity. For instance, after detailing
the sad case of a fallen actress with the same medical condition
that Bryant had suffered from, Reed wrote his wife on June 14, 1917
that she “may believe that nevermore is there going to be any
chance of any girl coming between me and my honey.”
The promise, coming after his description of a woman afflicted
with the malady Bryant suffered from the year prior, makes sense
only if Reed’s philandering had caused Bryant’s condition.
The following month, Reed reports of a young temptress’s
advances, which he repels. He reports that “she wanted to make
love. I didn’t + couldn’t.” Reed explains that women have made him
weak, and “now without a mate I am half a man, and sterile.”
Ten days later, Reed writes: “I know, my lover — I realize how
disappointed + cruelly disillusioned you have been. You thought you
were getting a hero — and you only got a vicious little person who
is fast losing any spark he may have had.” In the margin, Reed adds
as a postscript: “Don’t be alarmed by this last. I have kept my
word to you — lover.”
THE POSSIBILITY OF Reed contracting syphilis, let alone
transmitting it to Bryant, is dismissed out of hand by biographer
Roger Rosenstone and not addressed at all by biographer Granville
Hicks. Both authors quote from the letters that indicate such a
scenario and do no more than that.
But a European doctor diagnosed Reed, a notorious benefactor of
whores, with syphilis and an American doctor subsequently diagnosed
Bryant with a venereal disease as well. Do Reed’s biographers, and
his Hollywood hagiographer, know something that these doctors did
not?
The methodology is one Jack Reed knew well. Never the detached
observer, John Reed’s journalism always reeked of the interested
partisan.
Reed covered the Paterson strike of 1912 with such passion that
he was arrested with the strikers and later organized a disastrous
consciousness-raising pageant in Madison Square Garden in which the
picketing laborers played themselves. Riding with Pancho Villa’s
band in Mexico, an exuberant Reed reported the fall of Torreon a
week before it occurred. From the German trenches during the Great
War, “journalist” Reed took shots at French soldiers.
Reed’s most famous work of advocacy journalism, Ten Days
That Shook the World, is perhaps the most famous book on the
Bolshevik Coup and the tome that launched dreams of Soviet Russia
as a heaven-on-earth in the making. Reed picked up a gun alongside
those he covered, invented third-person accounts of events when
first-person accounts stood to harm commissars, and snitched on
Russians foolish enough to give him their negative opinions of the
Bolsheviks.
Declining George Creel’s job offer on Woodrow Wilson’s wartime
propaganda board, Reed nevertheless accepted the Bolsheviks’
subsequent job offer in their propaganda outfit. That John Reed
wrote Ten Days That Shook the World as an employee of the
Soviet Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda has
strangely not detracted from its reputation.
At century’s end, a panel of prestigious journalists convened by
New York University named it as the seventh best work of U.S.
journalism in the twentieth century. In Reds, one of the
senior-citizen talking heads whose reminiscences are deftly
interspersed with the cinematic drama, recalls, “As a journalist,
Jack Reed topped them all.”
But Jack Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World is as
much journalism as Warren Beatty’s Reds is history. Soviet
Russia turned out not to be the heaven on earth prophesied in
Reed’s book, Warren Beatty wasn’t Jack Reed and Diane Keaton wasn’t
Louise Bryant, and free love rarely turns out as uncomplicated in
real life as it does on the silver screen.
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left,
released today by Crown Forum. He blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.
