ODYSSEY PART SEVEN - I: Hollywood shows its heart

You had a close friend, Don Murray, an actor who was in “Bus Stop” with Marilyn Monroe, among other roles.

Q. What was he like? And, what is it like when what we now call a “celebrity” is part of real life?

This was when you were seeing that refugees “wanted to know the future before the future exists.”

A. When I learned in latter 1956 that Don Murray had just finished the movie “Bus Stop” with Marilyn Monroe, I was very proud of him, not only for the film but because he publicly announced that he intended to use his new stardom to help resolve the refugee problem in Europe. I wrote to congratulate him on his success and especially on his commitment to refugees.

Soon thereafter when he visited Chicago on a publicity trip, he called me. Lisa and I were hunkered down in our prefab at the University of Chicago, where I was sweating out my Ph.D. studies. We sat up most of the night reminiscing about Italy. Before leaving, he urged me to return to Italy with him to help move refugees out of the camps. Since I had developed some ideas about this, I said I'd assist with a study, but my first priorities now were taking care of our 2-week-old Eric and the Ph.D.

I had first met Don when he followed me as a volunteer working with homeless Italians in Naples. Both of us were in our early 20s, and he was to replace me as director of our social settlement center, Casa Mia. He was serving his two years of alternative service as a C.O. (conscientious objector) with the Brethren Church. For several days before Lisa and I departed, I introduced him to the surrounding wartime ruins and our intensive work. We also visited the barbed-wire camps where escapees from communist Eastern Europe were still stranded – perhaps for life.

My next contact with Don, about a year later, was on a trip to New York when I learned from the Congregational Christian Service Committee, which supported our Naples work, that Don was having big difficulties. He had contracted yellow jaundice, and through unexpected political maneuvering, he never became Casa Mia director. He wrote me: “This is the most difficult, exasperating and discouraging eight months that I ever hope to see.” He ended up spending much of his time in the refugee camps, appalled with the “hopeless imprisonment of guiltless people.” He began to write a movie script about a service worker and a refugee girl.

I knew Don had done bit-part acting but had no idea about his movie career. Some days after his Chicago visit, he called from New York, urging me to come East to meet him and Hope Lange (his actress wife, also in “Bus Stop”). They were about to leave for Europe on film business, but while there they expected to explore the potential support for a refugee project. On New Year’s Eve, 1956, he called from Hollywood: the United Nations authorities in Geneva and the Italian government in Rome had both given the green light for a project.

At our next session in New York at the end of January – every free minute when he was not shooting a movie – we got down to details. Were a project to emerge, Don and Hope would be co-chairs, I'd be project director, and two church organizations close to us would provide administrative backup. Both Lisa's family and mine hoped and prayed that no project would materialize; they wanted me to finish the Ph.D. and get a regular job.

In April, Don called to say that his latest film, “Bachelor Party,” would be featured at the Cannes Film Festival in France in early May. He'd exchange his first-class air ticket for two tourist seats, and we'd both fly to Italy. After making some initial surveys together and talking to several refugees we personally knew in the camps, he had to return to Hollywood. Luck was with us, however, and there were startling results: 1) We found that if we bought land on the island of Sardinia and agreed to create there an innovative project to resettle 15 families from the camps, the Italian Ministry of Interior would give all the necessary permissions, and the development agencies interested in this depressed area would provide generous subsidies; and 2) If we could figure out how to rehabilitate these “hard core” refugees who had been stagnating for 10 years or more in camps, who'd been given up on by most world authorities, we'd receive heavy financial backing from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

These, of course, were two big “IF'S” since, to date, no one had pulled off such a plan. The agencies appreciated our idealism but argued that our project was a HUGE gamble for everyone, as well as for the two of us personally. Don and Hope were in the early stages of promising acting careers. This complex undertaking would prove an enormous career distraction, not to mention a serious personal financial risk. Don had agreed to put up the start-up capital: initially $50,000 to buy the land and at least another $50,000 to begin operations until we could pull in the subsidies, although at that point he had little idea where to find the money.

The rest is history: the project worked, more or less as planned. When we faced financial desperation, Don arranged with NBC television to get us on the “This Is Your Life” show where we raised $90,000; people cared enough to send us 40,000 letters. (It was about my life, but Don, Hope, Lisa, the U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees from Geneva and others all appeared on the program.) Subsequently, I was hired by the UNHCR for almost two more years to help clear the camps in Italy. The policy implications resulting from our experiment were widespread in refugee circles.

I never thought of Don as a celebrity. As when we first met in Naples, we just saw ourselves as two young idealists with a dream and a lot of determination; we believed we could make the world better by attacking one of its great humanitarian problems. Although we lacked the credentials of more experienced professionals, we had a couple of advantages: we personally knew some of the refugees and had built at least some minimal mutual trust, and we didn't accept the word “impossible.” Certainly, we never would have had a chance without Don's star status; I was always impressed at how we were able to move through impenetrable bureaucracies. Also, we had a naiveté that actually served to our advantage; at one point I asked the mental health adviser to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees how we were able to deal successfully with these difficult refugees when most others had failed. His response: you started with the assumption that they could make it. You didn't know how many different plans had been tried and had failed.

When we met with reporters, whether in New York or Italy, their first question to Don usually was: What's it like to kiss Marilyn Monroe? They soon found that these “glamour” questions held no interest for him; he'd talk about his philosophy of life and refugees. In the early period after he had made several films and was considered one of the brightest new stars in Hollywood, he was constantly pushing the press and the gossip columns to write about our project, about which they had zero interest. When they did, their comments had grandiose exaggerations and inaccuracies. For example, when pundit Hedda Hopper wrote about how our project had already become “worldwide” in scope before we even owned land and had not as yet received any official permissions, I voiced strong displeasure. Don replied that we needed to decide whether we wanted to tap into the publicity that the entertainment “Magic Lantern” world offered; “Hedda Hopper's estimated 25,000,000 readers don't give a hoot about refugees ... They don't care what the problem is or what is being done to solve the problem ... If you decide to continue with filmland, just prepare to accept the slings and arrows of outrageous articles...” We decided we had no choice but to go along. Even inaccurate publicity was better than none.

NOTE: ODYSSEY PART SEVEN – II, Belden and Lisa’s response to the above question, will continue in Thursday’s Review.