Are You Now or Have You Ever Been an Oscar Honoree?

A union supporter in “On the Waterfront” is chucked off a roof by a couple of thugs. It comes as a shock to Marlon Brando’s character in the film, longshoreman Terry Malloy, to whom a hood then says, coldbloodedly: “The canary could sing, but he couldn’t fly.”

A canary was synonymous with a stool pigeon then, 45 years ago, when this superior movie was made. And pigeons were rats, rats were finks, finks were snitches and snitches were dirty double-crossers, in your lingo of choice. Informers have never lacked for labels.

While none deserves to go flying involuntarily from rooftops, they certainly don’t rate being held in esteem, either. A rat is a rat is a rat, a fact of life again demonstrated in a recent political scandal, when greater condemnation was generally afforded a friend guilty of betrayal than the culprits on whom she blew the whistle.

There is no statute of limitations on back-stabbing.

That is why Hollywood figures large and small, with elephantine memories, have decried the awarding of an honorary Oscar two days from now to Elia Kazan, 89, the director of Budd Schulberg’s “Waterfront” and other classic films.

That is why some of them spent Thursday morning in Beverly Hills, name-calling the man who named names.

Forgive? Forget?

“This is not a question of forgiveness,” veteran actor John Randolph said. “It is a question of remembrance.”

And of not applauding the canary.

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There are 2,850 seats in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and come Sunday they will be occupied by formally attired dues-payers from the 6,000-member motion picture academy, from unions as fiercely protective of their reps as the ones once found on waterfronts, plus assorted spouses, squeezes and temporary seat-fillers.

Few in the auditorium will feel that Elia Kazan is unworthy--artistically--of an award.

Academy voters do not, as a rule, disqualify an artist for his or her personal foibles. They are willing to squabble at length over the impact that a political statement of a Vanessa Redgrave or a Jane Fonda might or might not have on a vote of a particular performance, or whether the refusal of a Brando or a George C. Scott to accept an award is any reason for an artist not to receive it.

By and large, though, Academy members had no say-so in the decision to hand Kazan an award. Only 39 of them, a committee empowered to act for the whole, elected--unanimously--in January to bestow upon the director a lifetime achievement award.

It was a decision met with revulsion by the artists whose own lifetime achievements were limited by men like Kazan.

To them, he was not a winner, not a contender, but a bum.

“He ruined and destroyed their careers, their families, their lives,” said a former screenwriter, Norma Barzman, 78, at the Beverly Hills protest, on behalf of Hollywood artists of the ‘50s who were blacklisted and infected with professional leprosy.

The careers of many were interrupted and never resumed. Some, for example Lucille Ball, narrowly avoided having the House Un-American Activities Committee cut short a brilliant career before it could peak, through unfounded innuendo. Others, like the writer Dalton Trumbo, had to wait for a courageous individual--Kirk Douglas, in his case--to intervene and put him back to work.

When he testified before the HUAC in April 1952, identifying those who, like himself, had been Communist Party members briefly, Kazan did so to save his own neck. In so doing he resembled the head of the White Star Line who scrambled into the seat of a lifeboat, leaving doomed passengers of the Titanic on deck.

Kazan later was quoted as saying he had seen no need “to defend people who’d already been named, or soon would be by somebody else,” in his willingness to rat them out. In other words, he was yellow and sold out a few Reds, so what?

Ready for your close-up, E.K.

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You don’t have to be of that era to appreciate the pressure, including that from peers, that Hollywood’s leading men and women felt in those hysteria-filled ‘50s.

You can be a generation younger to feel as does, say, actor Richard Dreyfuss, who just this week expressed his disapproval of Kazan’s “terrible moral lapse.”

It is a great temptation to separate an artist from his art, when an act is self-destructive. But when the art of others is diminished at the furthering of one’s own, it is difficult to salute a gentleman for a job well done.

Kazan won one Oscar for his work, in 1947, before he named names. That was his lifetime achievement, not this.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: [email protected]