THIS IS THE STORY of a lesbian FBI informant who worked undercover in the American Communist Party from 1942 to 1949, and who testified at the 1949 trial of the Party’s leadership in New York City’s Foley Square. Like all the Communist trials of the period (including that of the Rosenbergs) it was a conspiracy trial, which meant that no overt act was alleged. Under the 1940 Smith Act (officially the Alien Registration Act), the charge was “conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence.”
A witness for the prosecution, and the subject of my investigation—Confidential National Defense Informant Angela Calomiris—“Angie” to her friends—was not exactly the kind of heroic figure most GLBT people were looking for. Nevertheless, during the fifteen minutes of fame that she managed to stretch into almost five years, she enjoyed considerable celebrity. If anyone in the anti-Communist network (FBI, press, American Legion) thought she was a lesbian, they didn’t say so. And even if there was a hint that she was a little “different,” she was still their All-American Girl, fighting bravely against an alien and dangerous philosophy. It was one of those rare moments in American history when there was something worse than being a lesbian—and that was being a Communist.
Angela Calomiris (1916–1995) was a little butch dyke (under five feet tall, weighing about 100 pounds) from Greenwich Village. She was not only masquerading as a Communist for her undercover assignment; she was also trying to pass for straight. Old friends of hers with whom I spoke said that Angela dressed up and “put on earrings” to go to the Party meetings she had to report back on. The very unreliable book she published (written by a ghost writer), Red Masquerade: Undercover for the FBI, included a lot of girlie talk about having no immediate plans to marry, avoiding romantic entanglements with male comrades in the Party, choosing fetching outfits for the trial, and doing her hair. Since she was the only female witness for the prosecution, the New York press seized the opportunity to talk about her wardrobe and compare her to Mata Hari. As far as the spy business was concerned, she came out better than did Mata Hari, the Dutch-born double agent who was executed by the French as a German spy during World War I. But Calomiris was on shaky ground of her own. The short hair that she described as a “slightly waved bob” was described by the press as “cropped.” One Village acquaintance remarked, when told about Angie’s description of picking out just the right dress for her appearance on the witness stand, retorted: “That would be the only time she ever wore a dress!”
To be sure, this is not the first time that we’ve seen gay people lining up on the wrong side of history. Many prominent anti-Communist figures of this era—Roy Cohn, Whittaker Chambers, J. Edgar Hoover, and arguably Joseph McCarthy himself—were closeted homosexuals whose homophobic fanaticism undoubtedly sprang from their own fear of being outed. An article in these pages by Cheryl A. Bates (“The Gay McCarthyites,” March-April 2010) highlighted the more than casual relationship of both Cohn and McCarthy to the young and handsome David Schine, for whom they tried to get preferential treatment during his U.S. Army service.
People who remember Calomiris as the longtime owner of Angel’s Landing and other properties on Commercial Street in Provincetown are not surprised to hear that she had had an interesting past in New York. They knew her as a hard-nosed businesswoman. In the business that was the Red Scare, she did not do badly, but not as well as more prominent—and more ruthless—informants who became “professional witnesses.” A former Communist, Louis Budenz, once managing editor of The Daily Worker, was the lead witness for the prosecution at the trial where Calomiris testified, and he made a bundle. Some ten years of appearances at other trials and before Congressional committees netted him an estimated $70,000 to $100,000 ($600k to $850k in today’s money).
Calomiris’ earnings (plus expenses) were nothing by comparison, but spying on the Communists for the FBI was the best job she ever had, financed by the generous Congressional appropriation that Hoover received for safeguarding national security. Her extensive FBI file, the most reliable of all sources about her life and work, documents payments to her from $25 a week in 1942 ($350 today) to $225 a month in 1949 ($2,200) and beyond, until the Foley Square defendants’ appeal before the Supreme Court was denied (1951) and they began serving their prison terms. For a perennial outsider molded by economic factors that included an impoverished immigrant upbringing on the Lower East Side, childhood years in a Bronx orphanage, and the Great Depression, it was her chance to get out from under. No matter what she said on the witness stand or wrote in her book, whatever the anti-Communist jargon she spouted, Calomiris’ ideology was of the very practical variety, deeply rooted in a determination never to be poor again, or at the mercy of uncaring people. She figured out early on that the key to success was to get in good with the people who had money and power, like Hoover’s FBI, and make yourself useful. Anybody who did anything else, and that included the American Communist Party, was more or less a fool.
But Calomiris, who was otherwise intelligent, even crafty, made a few miscalculations. While making more money than she had ever made in her life working for the FBI, she also told the biggest lie. On the witness stand, in interviews with journalists, and in Red Masquerade, she asserted that she had not been paid for her services by the FBI, that she did it all out of patriotism. As former friends confirm, it was all part of her wanting to be somebody, to be the kind of hero we would have wanted her to be. Maybe she remembered, as Victor Navasky always insisted in Naming Names, how people from the old neighborhood despised a stool pigeon, a snitch, a squealer, a fink, a rat, a tattletale.
By raising her actions to the level of patriotic sacrifice, almost wartime bravery, she acquired an adoring public. Among them was one Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the 32nd president, who wrote in her syndicated column in Washington Daily News (October 19, 1949), in response to Calomiris’ plight, that “someone who undertakes a considerably risky job” for our government should have “some kind of decent financial arrangement.” J. Edgar Hoover, who had the figures for Calomiris’ compensation right in front of him, was livid when he saw the comments by Mrs. Roosevelt (that “old hoot owl,” in his words). His anger spilled over into various handwritten notes, calling the situation “grossly unfair to the Bureau,” and Calomiris “difficult” and “temperamental.” Because she had put the Bureau’s reputation in a bad light, and—perjuring herself on the witness stand—had opened a possible door to appeal the convictions of the Communist leadership, Hoover and the FBI began to distance themselves. Of course, the truth was that once she had testified, her cover was blown, her usefulness ended. She was so much more dispensable than she could ever have imagined.
Eleanor Roosevelt was more loyal, and, soon after the publication of Red Masquerade, she invited Calomiris on her radio show Today with Mrs. Roosevelt, where she was welcomed as “a young lady of great courage,” one who was going to “tell us how the Communist Party actually operates in the United States.” If the former first lady, 66 years old by that time, seems a bit too trusting, one explanation is that Calomiris had undoubtedly been recommended to her by a staunch old friend, Mary Margaret McBride. A name that may mean little now, Mary Margaret, as she was known to one and all, was the “First Lady of Radio,” earning a salary rumored to be around $200,000 (almost $2,000,000 in 2012). A pioneer talk-show hostess, she had interviewed some 30,000 people by the time she quit the business in 1954, including Calomiris (October 25, 1950) and her friend and favorite guest Eleanor Roosevelt, who appeared on the show many times. Despite the enormous popularity of the radio persona that Mary Margaret had depended on over the years—that of a heterosexual woman who had chosen an exciting career over marriage and motherhood—she (like Eleanor Roosevelt) had her own secrets and her own masquerade. When Calomiris came on the show, she and Mary Margaret must have recognized each other instantly.
By the time Calomiris’ book came out, the market was crowded with books about the Communist threat to America. Herbert Philbrick, from Boston, who had testified at the Foley Square trial, got his I Led Three Lives (1952) made into a popular TV series (1953–56). And I Was a Communist for the FBI (1950), by Matt Cvetic, who had been undercover in Pittsburgh, became a radio show, then a major motion picture from Warner Brothers, nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary of 1951. Calomiris, because she had made other good connections in anti-Communist society by then, thought her story deserved a break. She found ready collaborators in Victor Lasky in New York, who made his career covering the Alger Hiss trials, and Martin Berkeley in Hollywood, who had the distinction of naming 155 people as Communists before HUAC, far more than anyone else. But she was just a little late, as she was informed by producers; her story had already been told too many times. The Red Scare and McCarthyism were losing their appeal, and the project faded.
At least, she reasoned, the FBI would provide her with a job, one to replace her spy career. That was something the Bureau did for all the informant–witnesses who testified in court. But Calomiris did not want just any job. She was a professional photographer, she claimed, who had taken hundreds of pictures for the FBI—of Communist Party personnel, May Day parades, etc.—to identify people in case they had to be picked up in a security sweep. The FBI did give it their best shot, so to speak, calling in favors from all of Hoover’s business connections, including Ford Motor Co., Twentieth-Century Fox, Life magazine, and Standard Oil of New Jersey. They all wanted to help someone who had helped put down the Communist threat to the American way of life. But nothing seemed to pan out. Either they had enough staff already, or no permanent staff, or they did not hire women for that kind of work. As for the world of independent and commercial photography, there she had done herself irreparable damage on the witness stand at Foley Square by naming the long-time head of the Photo League school—where she herself had taken classes—as a Communist. Sid Grossman, the person named, never worked in New York again, and died a few years later at age 42, another victim of the Red Scare.
In fact, it had been Calomiris’ principal mission at Foley Square to disparage the reputation of the Photo League (active 1936–1951), an organization of pioneering documentary photographers who had chosen to document urban life in the shadow of the Great Depression. They had photographed poor people, even poor African Americans, and Harlem was one focus. The League was already under attack for these and other transgressions and found itself on a list (dated December 1947) of organizations labeled “totalitarian, fascist, Communist, or subversive” by the U.S. attorney general. Calomiris provided additional ammunition with information and names of Photo Leaguers that the prosecution wanted spoken from the witness stand, especially the name of Sid Grossman. What she did not foresee was that the end of Grossman’s career would also spell the end of her own ambitions as a photographer.
The Red Scare business was a heady brew that caused many ambitious—and, like Calomiris, somewhat unbalanced—people to lose all perspective. Not content with ending her photography career, she went on to alienate much of the Greenwich Village lesbian community by giving the Red hunters another name they wanted badly, a name from the entertainment world that garnered headlines for committee hearings. Judy Holliday (née Judith Tuvim, 1921–65) one of the brightest screen stars of her day, won the 1950 Oscar for Best Actress as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday, a role Holliday had created on the Broadway stage. It was no small feat, considering that other nominees that year included Bette Davis for All About Eve and Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard. Holliday was a big moneymaker for the irascible Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures—until she was called before the McCarran Committee (the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security) to answer questions about her leftist tendencies, and about her former girlfriend Yetta Cohn, who had been fired from the NYPD because someone blew the whistle on her for being a Communist. That someone, of course, was Angela Calomiris—a fact confirmed by her FBI file and by an interview that Joan Nestle taped, in 1983, with the late Buddy Kent (aka Bubbles Kent, Exotic Dancer, aka Malvina Schwartz of East New York, Brooklyn). It was on that tape that the name Calomiris first surfaced, alongside Buddy’s identification of a “Petite Feminine Girl on Stand [Who] Tells Her Undercover Work for the FBI” as “this dyke who put the finger on one girl [Yetta] who was on the police force and she was going with Judy Holliday.”
Buddy Kent had not spoken to Calomiris for more than thirty years. Fast forward to a Florida restaurant just a few years ago—fifty years after the fact—when an older lesbian, one of Calomiris’ closest friends, was accosted by another old gay girl from the good old days in the Village. “How could you be friends with that squealer?” the woman screamed. The squealer was Calomiris, who would have had to acknowledge that even a lucrative enterprise, like spying for the FBI, had its drawbacks. As Victor Navasky remarked in Naming Names: “They named the names, because they thought nobody would remember, but it turned out to be the one thing that nobody can forget.”
References
Calomiris, Angela. FBI Headquarters File #100-HQ-3722384.
Calomiris, Angela. Papers, Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, NY, Special Collections #99-02.
Calomiris, Angela. Red Masquerade: Undercover for the F.B.I. Lippincott, 1950.
Dennis v. US (1949 Smith Act trial), January-October, 1949. 22 vols. National Archives, Northeast Region.
Judy Holliday Resource Center. www.judyhollidayrc.com.
McBride, Mary Margaret (interview with Angela Calomiris). Recording LWO 15577 107B, October 25, 1950, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
Navasky, Victor. Naming Names. Hill and Wang, 2003 (1980, 1991).
Nestle, Joan. (interview with Buddy Kent). January 27 and February 8, 1983, Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, NY.
Roosevelt, Eleanor (interview with Angela Calomiris). Recording RWC 5544 A1-3, December 1, 1950, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
Lisa E. Davis is the author of Under the Mink (2001), a novel. Her book about Angela Calomiris, The FBI’s Lesbian, is forthcoming from Magnus Books.
