A Difficult Woman: The Disobedient Life of Jean Muir

At every turn, Muir was disobedient, unconventional, and disruptive; she simply didn’t care what people thought. At no point did it occur to her that she should curb her activism, rein in her interests, or close her mouth if she wanted to keep her job. Instead, she followed her passions and did what she thought was right, thereby making her road a more difficult one and leading to increasingly frequent suspension by Warner Bros.

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When Jean Muir signed her Warner Bros. contract in the spring of 1933, a friend told her she had been hired because Hollywood, in response to ongoing attacks on industry morality, was “signing up all the virgin types they [could] find.” A novice actor with only a few New York stage appearances under her belt, Muir was, her friend assured her, “the very epitome” of the virginal type: “tall, blue-eyed, blonde, and frosty.”1

Unfortunately, mere months after arriving in Los Angeles, Muir saw her utility as an all-purpose virgin vanish with the new enforcement of the Production Code. Undaunted, ferociously curious, and dangerously self-assured, this new girl immediately made a nuisance of herself around the studio, strolling onto soundstages and interrogating everyone from electricians to lighting directors about their work. In Muir’s own telling, she quickly earned the nickname “the studio pest,” believing no one too important to be questioned, and never doubting her right to ask.2

And the questions never stopped. When she was cast in films, Muir questioned her directors, seeking explanations for their orders rather than simply doing as she was told. On the set of As the Earth Turns, the film in which she had her first major leading role, Muir got into a fight with director Alfred E. Green, declaring his insistence that her character would take her apron off before entering into a romantic scene “the ultimate in stupidity.”3 Later, she charged into the office of famed, powerful producer Hal B. Wallis and demanded that he change his mind about marketing her as a star. To Muir, “You don’t just ‘make’ stars out of such unpromising material as myself. Movie stars had to have what was called sex appeal. I had none of that quality, whatever it was. . . . Nor was I a great actress [yet]. . . .”4 Less than six months into her contract, Muir must have already struck Wallis as being more trouble than she was worth.

It wasn’t only Muir’s questions that set her apart from the other young actresses on the Warners lot. Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, she enrolled at USC, taking economics to learn more about both the Marxism that was on the lips of so many, and the philosophies that opposed it. She also became politically active, offering financial support to striking lettuce workers in California’s Imperial Valley and signing on as an early member of the newly formed Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Not content to simply join the union, Muir marched in its first Labor Day parade, held organizing meetings at her home, and made phone calls to secure picketers ahead of the union’s first possible strike. When she wasn’t making movies or engaging in activism, Muir started a small theater company in her spare time.

At every turn, Muir was disobedient, unconventional, and disruptive; she simply didn’t care what people thought. At no point did it occur to her that she should curb her activism, rein in her interests, or close her mouth if she wanted to keep her job. Instead, she followed her passions and did what she thought was right, thereby making her road a more difficult one and leading to increasingly frequent suspension by Warner Bros. Eventually, in 1937, her contract was terminated. Said to have “talked herself out of the industry” with her passionate activism, Muir happily packed up her car, and she and her dog drove back to New York and the theater she loved.5

In New York, Muir continued to be disruptive, becoming a respected union organizer, speaking out against the poll tax, and appearing at NAACP events to talk about the status of Black actors in the industry that had washed its hands of her. In 1943, on the heels of the Detroit race riot, Muir pitched a Pledge of Unity “against race hatred and violence” to NAACP executive secretary Walter White, who took it to an enthusiastic New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. As detailed in her FBI file, over the next several weeks Muir made dozens of speeches about the pledge and against racial violence, ultimately collecting 100,000 signatures. According to White, Muir’s Pledge “was one of the factors that kept the Harlem disturbances [in August of that year] from flaring out into open and bloody riots.”6

None of this public activism could, of course, go unremarked by the self-proclaimed protectors of the nation’s political honor and security. So, in addition to being watched by the FBI, Muir also found herself on front pages nationwide in August 1940, accused of being a communist. Alongside much bigger names like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Muir was alleged to be a member of the Communist Party by a former organizer, an accusation to which she issued a cursory denial and then ignored for the rest of the summer.

Muir’s fellow accused beat paths to the door of the hotel room occupied by House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) chairman Martin Dies, who traveled to New York and Los Angeles specifically to make himself available to the Hollywood supplicants. In exchange for treating him like a man capable of telling communists from capitalists, each of the accused received Dies’s official declaration of their status as a loyal American. Muir, meanwhile, stayed in upstate New York, continuing her planned work in summer stock theater. Much to the consternation of her entertainment lawyer fiancé Henry Jaffe, who had a hand in arranging “clearance” meetings with Dies for some of the other alleged reds, she refused to pay either Dies or the accusations any mind, treating them both as unimportant.

Unfortunately, ignoring the charges until they went away would not prove as successful during Muir’s second communist rodeo. Almost exactly a decade after the first round of accusations, she was again targeted. This time, however, she was all alone on the front pages, having been fired from her first-ever major role in a television series, thanks to the presence of her name in an anti-communist pamphlet called Red Channels. More accurately, it wasn’t Muir’s name on the page that got her fired, but rather the fact that a handful of people called NBC and the show’s sponsor, General Foods, and asked why, exactly, they were comfortable putting their names on a show starring notorious communist Jean Muir. The answer, needless to say, was that they were not, and she was fired hours before the first episode was set to air.

For weeks afterward, newspapers nationwide talked incessantly of “the Muir incident” and subsequently referred to other victims of conviction-by-accusation as being “Muirized.” What set Muir apart from the many who suffered similar fates is that she was the only one who was explicitly fired because she was accused of being a communist. Whereas the employers of other accused communists – fiercely denying the existence of a blacklist – explained dismissals with reasons like contracts ending or changes of creative direction, Muir was fired because she had become a “controversial personality,” purely by dint of being accused.7 With everyone else, there was no blacklist. With Muir, there was a blacklist – and she was on it.

Unlike the first time around, these accusations had Muir shaken. Though still false, her firing showed they were being taken seriously, and the specificity of the accusations – Red Channels listed a series of allegedly red organizations with which each of its “communists” was associated – demanded that she refute each one in turn. It was a situation Muir must have found infuriating, having to engage in such theatrical absurdity, particularly in response to charges that were not accurate, but she acquiesced for a number of reasons. First, she wanted to clear her name and go back to work; second, her young children were facing cruel teasing in school over having a commie for a mother; third, her husband, Henry, who was now a lawyer for a radio union wrestling with its own issues around “communist” performers, was finding his position at work complicated by his wife’s situation.

While this time she was willing to answer the accusation in specific terms, Muir again put her foot down about seeking “clearance” from one of the many agencies that had sprung up to profit off of the victims of communist allegations. In exchange for financial considerations, such groups and individuals would, they claimed, do their own investigations and then issue official statements confirming that those who paid them were, in fact, loyal Americans. It was a racket built to feed off of human misery, and Muir refused to be part of it.

But without clearance she couldn’t work – and the cloud of suspicion continued to hang not only over her head but also over those of her three kids and husband. Over the next few years, she drifted, unable to find anything to hold her attention and too toxic to resume her work as a talented, visible activist and organizer. It didn’t matter that the great majority of the dozens of editorials written about her case had been in her favor. Muir was poisonous, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Or, rather, there was one thing: she could capitulate.

Assured by Henry that testifying before HUAC would secure her official clearance, Muir traveled to Washington, DC to grovel before the committee. Afterward, she instantly regretted her choice, not because there was no clearance forthcoming – though there wasn’t – but rather because it made her feel like “a craven turncoat against all my principles.”8 This betrayal of everything she believed and stood for was so traumatic that, looking over her testimony with an interviewer twenty years later, Muir was stunned to discover that she had named names. She had completely erased this detail from her memory.

Already drinking heavily, Muir sank even deeper into the bottle after that day in June and spent the next six years in an alcoholic fog. At one point she was told that she had months left to live, and instead of quitting alcohol, she simply cleaned up her desk and waited to die. Alienated from her children and her husband, Muir couldn’t see a future for herself.

And yet, eventually, she found one. In July 1959, almost a full decade after she was fired, Muir decided that her survival depended on ending her marriage and controlling her addiction. Within the space of a few days, she told her husband she wanted a divorce, boarded a train for Reno, and stopped drinking.

Even in her darkest moments, Muir’s old self-reliance was there – rusty from a lack of use, perhaps, and in bad condition after so many years of being drowned in alcohol, but there nevertheless. She found a way to forgive her one, catastrophic betrayal of principle before HUAC and to believe in herself again, building a new life out of the will that had long been dormant.

Acutely aware of the years she had lost to her addiction, Muir was determined to again become useful to society. The path she found turned out to have been her vocation all along: she became a college acting teacher and director, spending many years at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. Stephens is a women’s college, and Muir worked hard through her acting classes to instill in her students the same self-reliance that had been so central to her own life. She encouraged them to define their own worth, as she strolled around campus in pants, without a touch of makeup on her face.

Looking back, Muir often said she’d had three lives: her life in Hollywood, her marriage, and her life as a teacher. It was during the third that she was happiest, and it is easy to understand why: she finally knew exactly who she was. Tired of talking about both her acting career and her suffering at the hands of the Red Scare, senior citizen Jean Muir kept looking ahead, planning new research, creating new courses of study, and mapping out trips to learn more about the work she loved.

It is hard to imagine what the glamorous, “tall, blue-eyed, blonde, and frosty” girl who had gone toe to toe with Hollywood conventions would think of this later, gray-haired version of herself, but, fundamentally, the two had a lot in common. Both believed they had an obligation to fight the problems they knew existed in their country; both believed “hard” was more worthwhile than “easy”; and both were constantly striving to learn, to understand, to grow.

Works Cited

“AAAA, AFA Fight Threatens U.S. Amusement Industry,” The Times, Hammond, Indiana. Aug 10, 1939. https://www.newspapers.com/

“Actress Loses Job, Accused as Pro-Red,” The York Dispatch. Aug 29, 1950. https://www.newspapers.com/

“Film Actors’ Peeve at Radio Gossip Takes Squawk to FCC,” Billboard, January 23, 1937. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/30s/1937/BB-1937-01-23.pdf

“‘Pledge of Unity’ Signers Number More Than 100,000,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 25, 1943. https://www.newspapers.com/

Federal Bureau of Investigation, File on Jean Muir. https://cstabile.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/jean-muir-fbi-files1.pdf

Miller, Merle. The Judges and the Judged: The Report on Black-Listing in Radio and Television for the American Civil Liberties Union. Doubleday & Company, 1952.

Muir, Jean. Autobiography typescript, n.d. Box 1, Folder 1, Jean Muir papers, Coll 530, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon.

Muir, Jean. Interviews by Alanna Nash, 1975. Box 7, Folder 3, Alanna Nash Archive, Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.

U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities. Investigation of Communist Activities in the New York Area (testimony of Jean Muir). 84th Cong., 1st sess. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d035643399&seq=8