“I may have disappeared from the limelight in the 50s, but I didn’t disappear from life.” — Marsha Hunt
She knew when the time came to write the obituary on her life, the Hollywood blacklist would get top billing over everything else. Marsha Hunt hated the idea, but she knew she couldn’t change it.
Or, could she?
Her death at 104 was all over the news last weekend, and sure enough there was the blacklist getting top billing — as if a political witch hunt from 70 years ago was more important than all the years she spent working on the real headline she wanted written of her life.
Her work with the United Nations for 25 years focused on fighting world hunger and making sure the aid money we earmarked for the poor in Third World countries got to the people who needed it, and not into the pockets of dictators.
Her years as the leading advocate in the San Fernando Valley for the homeless focused on providing safe haven for abused mothers with children trying to escape spousal violence.
“She was a passionate, tireless crusader for the most vulnerable in society,” said Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben who met Marsha through her work with the Valley Interfaith Council fighting homelessness.
“She was so much more than somebody who had been blacklisted.”
There’s no way to tell how many of the people sleeping in tents or in cars with their children in the back seat recognized the familiar face of the woman handing out blankets during the severe economic recession of the early 1980s.
She knew they were trying to put a name with her face. It happened all the time. You’re somebody famous, aren’t you? An old movie star maybe? What are you doing out on a frigid night in Reseda Park, handing out blankets and hot chocolate to people sleeping in their cars and tents because they lost their jobs and homes to the crippling recession?
Marsha knew all about losing a job. She had just landed another as honorary mayor of Sherman Oaks, returning to the San Fernando Valley after her work at the United Nations.
The new job didn’t pay anything or require any special skills other than using a pair of scissors to cut ribbons at a new mall or bank opening. But it did give her a platform to speak from, and just enough power to get things started.
It wasn’t long before she had the ear of the real mayor of the city, Tom Bradley, and she began the Valley Mayor’s Fund for the Homeless, joining forces with the Valley Interfaith Council to form a network for emergency services.
“Somehow, our Valley — ‘the bedroom of Los Angeles’ — was never geared for hard times,” Marsha said at the time. Well, she was back and ready to gear it up.
She helped buy a rundown motel on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood and turn it into the Valley’s first, major homeless shelter where families could live free for a month or two while they got back on their feet.
She helped open a second and a third shelter, turning seedy motels frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers into clean, safe housing for hundreds of families without a roof over their heads.
She personally showed up every day with supplies and donations to make sure mothers had the essentials for their children while their husbands looked for work.
She opened safe houses where battered women and their children could escape abusive relationships, and then she went out after work to hand out blankets — and hope — to others in their cars and park tents waiting their turn for a room at her inn.
That should have been the headline on Marsha Hunt’s life, not the blacklist.
She died peacefully in her own bed in the same home on Magnolia Boulevard in Sherman Oaks that she bought in 1946 when her movie career was flourishing.
In her last years, memory loss was setting in, said Roger Memos, a filmmaker who produced a compelling documentary of interviews with Marsha called “Marsha Hunt: Sweet Adversity.”
“It came to a point in her 100s where she did not remember the blacklist,” he said. “She’d ask me what it was. She remembered New York in the 1930s, Paramount Studios and her work with the homeless, but nothing about the blacklist.”
It was as if it never happened — as if Marsha Hunt decided to write the headline she wanted on her life.
Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.