Born on October 17, 1917, Marsha Hunt was, at the time of her death last week, the oldest living actress from the Golden Age of Hollywood as well as the oldest living member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She never became a  star of the very highest rank, but at one point, at least, she came titillatingly close: in late 1938, she was assured by producer David O. Selznick that he’d chosen her to play Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind – only to learn three days later that the part had gone to Olivia de Havilland.

At the time, Marsha was under contract at Paramount. Raised in a well-off family, first in Chicago and then in Manhattan, she’d been a top New York fashion model before heading out to Hollywood at age 17. Her Tinseltown heyday came during the war years, when, as a contract player at MGM, she took the lead role in a number of still eminently watchable B-pictures and played prominent supporting parts in a string of cinema classics. I haven’t seen all of the films she was in (her IMDb page lists 116 acting credits), but I’ve seen quite a few of them, and I’ve never known her to be less than enchanting.

In Pride and Prejudice (1940), she gave a wonderfully funny performance as the plain, goofy Mary Bennet, who in Jane Austen’s novel is introduced as follows: “Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.” Although Marsha was a preternaturally poised beauty who radiated intelligence, she’d begged the studio heads to be allowed to play this homely, bespectacled ditz; indeed, while other actresses campaigned desperately for star parts, Marsha routinely urged producers to cast her against type, in small, offbeat roles outside her comfort zone. She was always more interested in developing her acting skills than in being the biggest star on the lot.

Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, was played by the sublime Greer Garson, who also teamed with Marsha in the first-class tearjerker Blossoms in the Dust (1941) and in the undeservedly obscure The Valley of Decision (1945). In addition, Marsha played supporting roles in the hokey but touching The Human Comedy (1943), written by William Saroyan and starring Mickey Rooney, and in the Susan Hayward hit Smash-Up (1947). If you want to see Marsha in leading roles, I’d heartily recommend The Affairs of Martha (1942), A Letter for Evie (1946), and Carnegie Hall (1947).

I refer to her as Marsha because she was a close family friend. She’d been my father’s movie-star crush when he was a teenager in the 1930s, the son of working-class Polish immigrants living in a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York. By 1951, my father had graduated from NYU, where he edited the literary magazine, and had paid his way through medical school by writing radio plays for the major networks. In that year Marsha starred as a doctor and medical researcher, along with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Dane Clark, in a TV play, The Guinea Pigs, that my father wrote for CBS.

As a result of that production, Marsha and her husband, Robert Presnell Jr., who’d met each other at a party thrown by Orson Welles (whose radio show Bob produced), became friends with my father and his then wife. After my father divorced and remarried, they befriended his second wife, my mother, as well. Although the Presnells lived in L.A. and my parents were in New York, my father came to consider Bob, a fellow writer with whom he corresponded regularly and copiously, his best friend. Bob appreciated my dad’s friendship. At one point, when Bob couldn’t figure out how to fix a script he’d written, my father – who was not just brilliant at diagnosing medical maladies but also a genius at story construction – spotted the problem immediately and told him exactly what he needed to do. On another occasion, Bob contacted my father about a girl in New York who wanted her pregnancy terminated. Bob swore that the baby wasn’t his. My father hated abortion – which at the time, of course, was illegal – but because the girl was very young he made the desired arrangements.

When my father met Marsha, she was in the midst of a career crisis. In 1947, she and Bob, along with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Huston, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, and a few other showbiz luminaries, had flown from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to voice their opposition to hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) at which ten screenwriters – the famous Hollywood Ten – were being grilled about their political beliefs and associations. Marsha and Bob’s group called itself the Committee for the First Amendment, and their initiative was as noble as it was naive. Most of them were liberals, and most of them appear to have assumed that the Hollywood Ten were liberals, too. In fact, all ten were diehard Communists, sworn to serve Stalin’s bloodthirsty reign of terror and his nefarious goal of toppling democracy. Because of their anti-HUAC posture, both Marsha and Bob ended up on the Blacklist. Suddenly she was unable to get film work – which was why she ended up doing a TV play and meeting my dad.

She also did theater, starring in four Broadway plays in three years and snagging the cover of the March 6, 1950, issue of Life Magazine – a great coup at the time – because of her star turn in a revival of Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. But although, in the decades afterward, the Blacklist would be the topic that journalists always wanted to hear from her about – and that became the centerpiece of a 2015 documentary about her, Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity – the Blacklist-related gap in her film résumé was in fact a relatively brief one: her IMDb page shows no movie credits for 1956 or 1958, but in every other year between 1947 and 1960, when the Blacklist collapsed, she appeared in at least one picture. It wasn’t until after that collapse that she underwent a decade-long absence from the silver screen; and when she did return in 1971, it was to star in Johnny Got His Gun – written by, of all people, Dalton Trumbo, the unapologetic follower of Stalin who’d been the most eminent of the Hollywood Ten.

In the postwar years, Marsha, still a devoted liberal, forged a close relationship with the United Nations, on behalf of which she gave countless speeches and produced promotional TV shows and documentaries. As she told NPR in 2018, “The first time I heard the term, I thought: the United Nations, yes! That means no war. That means getting along with each other. And that’s for me. So how can I help?” Still noble; still naive. She seemed never to fathom the difference between getting along with oppressed foreign peoples and collaborating with the tyrants who ruled over them – and thereby legitimizing their tyranny.

She had other causes, too. In November 2020, she told the L.A. Daily News about a pet project she’d been pushing since the 1970s: “Thankful Giving.” The idea was that every Thanksgiving, before chowing down, families should pass around an empty bowl, put as much cash into it as they could spare, then decide whom to give it to – a charity, a needy neighbor, a food bank. Although Jimmy Carter talked the proposal up during his presidency, nothing ever came of it.

Marsha was also politically active on a local level. Back in the day, many of the communities in the city of Los Angeles named resident celebrities as their honorary mayors. Marsha, who lived in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, was invited to serve as its honorary mayor in 1980. Three years later, wanting to turn that ceremonial post into something meaningful, she organized several of her fellow honorary mayors into an all-volunteer charitable organization called the Valley Mayors’ Fund for the Homeless.

Even though Marsha was no Communist (in her 1992 book The Way We Wore, she celebrated the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Tiananmen protests), she certainly became terribly close, in the post-Blacklist years, to people who were. At the age of 99 she honored Ed Asner – a member of the Democratic Socialists of America – at a film festival; in Sweet Adversity she’s praised by at least two longtime friends who were also fans of the Soviet Union: Harry Belafonte and Norman Corwin. The problem, I think, was that she never grasped the full horror of Communism. Although card-carrying Party members had connived in the 1930s and 40s to take over Hollywood unions, to insert Stalinist propaganda into scripts, and to crush the fortunes of anyone who got in their way, Marsha, in Sweet Adversity, criticizes not these ruthless totalitarians but the few brave industry figures who dared to resist them, such as Ronald Reagan and Olivia de Havilland – about whom she laments: “They were so busy to catalogue people.”

I didn’t know much about Marsha’s political history when I first met her in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. (Technically speaking, we’d first met in 1956 or 57 when I was in my crib on East 89th Street in New York, but I don’t count that.) For a while there, I had ample opportunity to spend time with her. In those days, the Presnells’ friends were welcome to drop in on Sundays at their unpretentious ranch-style house at 13131 Magnolia Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. At one end of this sprawling abode was Bob’s charming, book-lined office; at the other end was Marsha’s office, which I don’t think I ever set foot in.

My mother, after moving to L.A. in 1980, became a fixture in that house (and a volunteer for the Valley Mayors’ Fund); later, when my father started splitting his time between the coasts, they often dropped in at the Presnells’ together. And during the early 1980s, when I spent almost as much time in L.A. as in New York, I was also a guest at the house on Magnolia, where there were always interesting people – mostly a cross-section of old Hollywood. It was a bit like the dinner party in Sunset Boulevard, except with a buoyant rather than funereal atmosphere. That atmosphere was set entirely by Marsha, who was invariably gracious, welcoming, and vivacious, making amusing (and probably oft-repeated) remarks about her long-ago Hollywood colleagues. Apropos of Errol Flynn’s acting ability, for example, she commented slyly: “Well, he swashed well, and he buckled beautifully!”

Those open-house afternoons enabled me to get better acquainted not only with Marsha but also with Bob. He was smart, swift, sardonic. In Sweet Adversity, Marsha sums him up posthumously as follows: “He was a clown, he was a tease, he was a philosopher, he was a critic.” Yes on all counts. Our tastes in literature, art, music, and film turned out to be surprisingly congruent; among other things, it turned out that we both worshiped the actress Jean Simmons, who’d been my teenage crush just as Marsha had been my father’s. To my delight, Bob found me interesting to talk to – even though I was in my twenties and he was in his seventies – and on those Sundays we talked a lot. One day, he mentioned to me that he’d just been talking to his friend Leonard Bernstein, who, he said, was having an affair with a fifteen-year-old boy. He called them “lovers.” Fifteen? “Affair”? “Lovers”? I was startled both by this information and by his matter-of-factness about it.

On another occasion, the Presnells’ guests included a young blond guy of about my age who quickly proved to be as dumb as he was handsome. Like virtually every other dumb young blond in L.A., he was an aspiring actor. I remember him admiring some Japanese tchotchke on a shelf. “Where do you think it’s from?” Bob quizzed him. “Um, China?” the guy guessed. Bob turned to me, knowing I’d be able to correct him. “Bruce?” “Well,” I said, uncomfortable with being used to show up this poor dope, “that’s awfully close.” The dope, I learned, was residing in Marsha and Bob’s guest house. That puzzled me. Who was he? What was he doing there?

Marsha’s creativity, I discovered, extended beyond acting. One day when I was at their house I noticed a half-completed lead sheet on the piano. She explained that she’d been writing a song. When I showed interest, she dragged out the lead sheets to dozens of other tunes she’d written – both music and lyrics – and I spent the next hour or so playing them. I liked them. I remember a lovely one, entitled “Jacaranda,” about the trees of that name that have lush violet-colored flowers and that grow in southern California. Although I’m entirely ignorant of fashion, moreover, I also enjoyed her aforementioned book, The Way We Wore (1992), in which she provided charming and witty annotations for old modeling shots and publicity photos of herself in the chic styles of the 1930s and 40s.

It was a nice, uncomplicated relationship. Then something happened. One day Bob phoned to invite me to lunch – just the two of us. I was flattered. I met him at their house and got into his car. We drove to a terrific bookstore in the Valley, unfamiliar to me, and browsed for a while, swapping comments about favorite books. It was loads of fun. I admired his taste and treasured his company; I didn’t know anybody else on the West Coast with whom I could have such conversations. After the bookstore, he drove us to a restaurant for lunch, where we had a few drinks with our food. Then, on our way back to Magnolia, he somehow steered us into a conversation about women. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was followed by a question that went something like this: “But that’s why we love taking them to bed, isn’t it?”

At the time, I was only selectively out of the closet. A few close friends knew I was gay, but not Marsha and Bob. Nonetheless, I’d made it a rule for myself never to lie about it. So when Bob popped that odd question, I replied with a palpably tentative “Well…” He picked up on it instantly, as if he’d been prepared for it – as if, indeed, he’d introduced the topic solely in order to confirm his own suspicions about me. “Oh,” he said. “Are you gay?” “Yes,” I replied. I couldn’t read his reaction. But once we got back to the house, where Marsha was busy in her office, Bob led me to his office – and immediately he began making moves on me. He actually chased me around his desk, as in some creaky old movie farce – except that it wasn’t funny.

In the end, I managed to flee the premises without having to physically fight him off. I never did tell my parents what had happened. And I never saw Bob again: he died in 1986. My parents went to his funeral, and continued to see Marsha frequently afterward. In fact, the last photo taken of my father before his death in April 2000 is of him and my mother with Marsha. For my part, I saw Marsha again some time in the late 80s or early 90s, when I was invited to a big, splashy party thrown in her honor at somebody’s Manhattan townhouse. My only memory of that event is of exchanging quips about the pompous host with a wickedly funny Celeste Holm.

I mention what happened that day on Magnolia not to censure Marsha or even Bob, but because it gave me a slight shadow of a taste of a side of Hollywood of which I was innocent at the time. Then as now, it’s a community whose members tend to consider themselves moral exemplars – something which Marsha herself, I must underscore, actually was – but who can give Roman Polanski a standing ovation at the Oscars, cozy up at parties to Harvey Weinstein, and, well, describe a minor being sexually abused by Leonard Bernstein as his “lover.” How does this sort of thing work psychologically? Treated like demigods, do they see themselves as having divine prerogatives? Do they feel that they’ve done so much good – by putting politically correct images on celluloid and donating large sums to the right causes – that they’re entitled to misbehave? Do they think they’re so far above the rest of us that the rules don’t apply to them?

No, I’m not comparing Bob to Polanski or Weinstein. And, again, I’m not faulting Marsha at all, in this or any other matter. The very opposite of an exploitative person, she was forever trying to do good for others. She was consistently well-meaning. She sincerely loved her country and believed in freedom and was a more than generous friend. (My sister, who spent a great deal more time over the years with her than I did, wrote on Facebook this weekend that “Marsha was one of the kindest souls I have ever met….I never heard an angry or bitter word from her about anything.”) And she had genuinely strong principles. When asked to lie in order to keep her career at MGM, she refused instantly. That was a test that few people anywhere, at any time, could’ve passed. For doing so, she deserves the greatest admiration.

Yet this intelligent, principled person could sometimes seem blind – in, now that I think of it, a rather Melanie Hamilton-type way – to the moral and political decadence of the subculture in which she spent most of her life. By the time I entered her orbit, one of the fixtures at her Sunday gatherings was the above-mentioned Corwin, a legendary left-coast writer, producer, and intellectual who seemed to be something of a household Svengali, having convinced Marsha that, among other things, Dalton Trumbo was infinitely more virtuous than, say, Ronald Reagan. While she never stopped talking about the anti-Communist Blacklist – which had lasted a few years and had affected just a few dozen people – I never knew her to admit, let alone lament, that boatloads of conservatives had been frozen out of Hollywood for decades.

Marsha’s Achilles’ heel, I think, was that, smart though she was in many ways, she’d never had much exposure to the real, rough-and-tumble world. A child of privilege, she was, by age seventeen, one of America’s highest-earning models. Soon after that, she was a Hollywood star, inhabiting a tight-knit community which even then had something of a political monoculture. When, on a round-the-world flight in the 1950s, she finally became aware of the depths of Third World underdevelopment, it didn’t lead her to appreciate her native country all the more; on the contrary, she became, in her own words, “a different person,” a “planet patriot”: what we now call a global citizen.

Instead of recognizing, in other words, that her own shock at the depths of Third World destitution was a testament to the merits of the American system under which she’d spent her life – and that the best way to help underdeveloped countries was to encourage the spread of that system – Marsha learned to parrot zero-sum rhetoric that blamed global poverty on American prosperity. Believe it or not, Sweet Adversity includes a clip from a 1966 TV interview in which Marsha asserts that movie stars like herself can play a vital role by helping ordinary people to understand social problems.

It seems never to have occurred to her, alas, that a lot of ordinary people might have a far better grasp of the workings of the real world than she and others who’d spent their lives inside the Hollywood bubble. In this regard, Marsha was not unlike such present-day Twitter oracles as Rob Reiner and Bette Midler. The difference is that while these egomaniacs preach obnoxiously from their Malibu mansions while doing absolutely nothing for anybody other than themselves, Marsha Hunt spent most of her life engaged in often exhausting work, almost all of it entirely unsung, that she fully believed to be in the service of humanity. In short, she was a deeply good soul who, however ideologically misled she may have been, truly meant well. May her memory be blessed and her creative legacy endure.