Reluctant Witness: Robert Taylor, Hollywood & Communism by Linda J. Alexander

by Linda J. Alexander
(Frederick, MD, USA)

"Reluctant Witness: Robert Taylor, Hollywood, & Communism" chronicles the life of Robert Taylor, royalty of "Classic Hollywood" and one of Hollywood’s most handsome leading men of all times. The book starts with his small-town Nebraska roots in 1911, and goes through to his untimely 1969 death from cancer in California.

Robert Taylor’s single most defining public moment, despite a career in film and TV that spanned four decades, became his subpoenaed appearance in front of the United States Goverment's 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee, when there was tangible fear throughout the country of the invasion of Communism into the American Dream. Taylor was as popular as compatriots Ronald Reagan (his best friend) and even John Wayne—when Taylor passed away, the New York Times ran his obituary on the front page, an unheard of honor, with the caption, “Death Ends An Era”—yet today he is incorrectly remembered most often as the actor who “named names.”

Linda Alexander’s biography of this actor/activist's life sets the record straight and tells the truth of that political “circus,” Taylor’s own word for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and a period of overwhelming change in the United States of America.