Success
Hollywood man
As a lawyer practicing in Hollywood during the height of the McCarthy hearings, it is surprising that Gerber did not mention anything about the hearings, especially considering that as a man with a socialist background he would have been likely to have had the hearings touch his life in some fashion. Not one reference to McCarthy appears anywhere in the autobiography. Again we are left to speculate: perhaps his desire for acceptance induced him to collaborate in a manner which he later regretted. Perhaps he knew people who were adversely affected by the hearings and preferred not to bring up those issues.
On the whole, his autobiography focuses on positive events of the 20th-century. While he talked about the nastiness of Hitler and totalitarian communist regimes, it was with the advantage of an evil that had been beaten. He may have felt that the perniciousness of the McCarthy hearings—criminalizing people’s thoughts and ideas—had not been wiped away, even once McCarthy was finally contained.
Gerber perceived his associations in Hollywood as a mark of his success and achievement. He talked fondly of his experiences with Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman. He seemed proud to have had some part in arranging their joint tour and acting as sometimes lawyer to Peggy Lee, as if the hard work he put in paid off not only in making good money at the time, but also later as social capital.
Gerber’s career as a movie producer provides the reader with an interesting paradox of self-making. Initially our impression of a movie producer equates to a vision of success; upon realizing that Gerber produced a few bad, or at best mediocre, movies, and that impression changes to one of failure. Yet, in the strange fashion of Hollywood, it seems that it was more important that he could claim the status of producer than the fact that the production work he did was of mediocre quality.
Gerber admitted that “like the pictures, I, too, was mired in mediocrity.” The saving grace, it seems, was that the movies gave “me interesting experiences—enabled me to travel….”26 Gerber provided a realistic assessment of the kind of movies he produced and simultaneously reminded the reader that it was not the quality of the movies that was important, but that he could claim such an experience. Gerber viewed it less as a failure than as an interesting interlude to his legal career; an experience that made him a more well-rounded person. It would seem that his career as a producer came to an end at a perfect time: he had added to his social capital without losing that which he had.