ObituaryFrank Tarloff
He stood up to McCarthyismWhen Frank Tarloff, who wrote the successful 1960 comedy film School For Scoundrels and won an Oscar for his screenplay for Cary Grant's Father Goose, lectured students at the University of Southern California about Hollywood's McCarthyite period, it was more than an academic subject. For Tarloff, who has died aged 83, had himself been blacklisted after being called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the early 1950s.
Born in Brooklyn, Tarloff went to high school, and then wrote gags for "borscht belt" comedians, who plied the Catskill mountains summer resorts entertaining Jewish audiences.
In 1942, when he and his wife Lee, whom he had met when she sang in his off-Broadway show, moved from New York to California, he got work with MGM, and Lee did occasional singing jobs before starting a family. Tarloff joined the Communist party in the mid-1940s but found the meetings "very boring" - he had not attended any for years by the time the red scare caught up with him in 1952.
For Tarloff the impact was immediate and devastating. He recalled that he was in the studio office writing a mundane television comedy series when an investigator handed him a subpoena. Within 15 minutes he was fired by his agent and, a few moments later, he was sacked from the studio.
When the news came out, friends dropped him - not because of his political associations, but through fear of the FBI agents who were following him. His children were ordered not to mention the case at school.
Tarloff's career ended completely for six months. Then a friendly producer suggested he get a "front" and invent a name. Lee suggested their son's first and middle names, so he became Erik Sheppard.
It was submitted to his agents, William Morris, as a new writer, but they balked. "Then I looked at my successful colleagues," said Tarloff, "and they all had names like Gelbart, Dorfman, Simon, Rubin, Goodman and so on. I would guess 90 per cent of the comedy writers had names of that ethnic persuasion. So I came up with David Adler, and the new 'find' got the agency's blessing."
After a while "David Adler" began to accumulate some credits, but it was difficult when studios wanted to see him in person. For a time Tarloff successfully used a physical "front", a writer partner called Henry Sharp, who posed as Adler.
Tarloff had refused to name names at the committee hearing, and his writer friends loyally kept his double life secret, but the strain of working under a pseudonym became unbearable and the couple moved to England, hoping to get by, but not expecting much. Instead, he was feted as a hero and immediately found work writing. Lee sang in night clubs and they moved to Eaton Square, Belgravia.
It was in England that Tarloff was commissioned to co-write a 1964 Hollywood film featuring Cary Grant. The actor played a shiftless loafer on a wartime South Seas island who sheltered Leslie Caron and a group of schoolgirls fleeing from the Japanese. Father Goose won Tarloff an Academy award in 1965. At the Oscar ceremony in Los Angeles, his two co-writers saw him for the first time.
Tarloff returned to Hollywood the following year and continued a successful writing career. He wrote a memoir, The Lighter Side Of The Hollywood Black List, and is survived by his wife, a son and daughter.
Francis 'Frank' Tarloff, screenwriter, born February 4, 1916; died June 25, 1999
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