I Led 3 Lives

TV Noir

A CLASSIC CYCLE

I Led 3 Lives

SYN 1953 — 1956

“Wouldn’t it be a fine thing, I often thought, if the evil I was trying to fight consumed me instead?”
✦ HERBERT A. PHILBRICK

I Led 3 Lives is docudrama as propaganda as noir. Its basis is the published memoir of Herbert A. Philbrick, a Boston advertising executive, who “for nine frightening years did lead three lives—average citizen, high-level member of the communist party, and counterspy for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Philbrick, a father, husband, and devoted Baptist, met his first communist at the age of twenty-six. It was 1940 and Philbrick, who chaired a local youth council, was perturbed to discover that some communists had quietly taken over his organization. Rather than resign, he went to the FBI, who suggested that he stay on, and perhaps uncover the intentions of these interlopers. What ensued was a fascinating and hazardously layered triple life. By day, Philbrick supported his growing family; by night, he wound his way through the cellular structure of the Communist Party of America; then, in the gray hours of the morning, he would retire to a hidden room in his house and type out everything he had seen, heard, and done, which he then passed on to his FBI handlers.

In his book, Philbrick describes his years as a counterspy as “manufactured schizophrenia,” and writes of how his interactions with communists “rendered me susceptible to their infectious poison.” The performative nature of his decade-long masquerade, and the psychic toll it claimed, is made clear:

I was sinking so deep that it was no longer possible for me to “play” the role of a spy. I could no longer simply make believe that I was a Marxist. Like an experienced actor, who must sublimate himself to his part and immerse him- self in the playwright’s creation, whenever I walked into the stage setting of a cell meeting, I had to be a young Communist. The costume alone was not enough. No disguise would have been adequate.

In the passage from print to telefilm, this sense of apprehensiveness and fracture is severely amplified: the television Philbrick, played by Richard Carlson, is a jittery, jumbled mess. He sees everything as a conspiracy—a “red menace” that threatens to swallow him whole. In this, the series heartily aligns itself with the prevalent McCarthyism of the era.

In 1940, as the real Philbrick began his infiltration of America’s communist apparatus, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies, albeit uneasy ones, in the fight against Nazi Germany. Fascism, rather than communism, was the greater enemy. By the time I Led 3 Lives arrived on television in 1953, the fear of a commie lurking behind every bush had become grist for popular culture, especially postwar film noir. When Sen. Joseph McCarthy appeared on See It Now in 1954 and likened the “worldwide communist conspiracy” to a “trail of deceit, lies, terror, murder, treason, blackmail,” he might as well have been outlining the ingredients of a crime melodrama.

Among the more notorious examples of the pulp fictions and cheap thrillers that sprang up in response to the Red Scare is The Red Menace (1949), which tells of a disgruntled war veteran (played by Robert Rockwell) unwittingly lured to his doom by debauched communist agents. Gravely narrated by Los Angeles City Councilman Lloyd G. Douglas, who frames the story as something of an instructional manual for anticommunist vigilance, it’s a work of alarmist fervor, complete with an opening graphic of a giant red octopus devouring the free world.

Little wonder then that the TV Philbrick speaks to himself in second person. “Watch yourself, Philbrick,” he warns as he scurries down a dark street. In its entry on “Paranoid Conditions and Paranoia,” the American Handbook of Psychiatry (1959) states that “the paranoid engages in solitary observation, searches for hidden meanings, asks leading questions, pondering over the answers like a detective, and listens attentively for clues in others’ conversations to help him understand.” Forever looking over his shoulder or misreading the gaze of another, Philbrick exists in a paranoiac hothouse in which the ordinary chaos of the outside world has been internalized. His is the only narrative line to which we’re made privy. Coupled with his dissociative voiceover, such subjectivity yields an unsettling sense of claustrophobia in which the viewer is meant to share in his state of edginess and panic—a not-surprising aim given the cultural and political climate in which the series was made.

ABOVE and BELOW: Secret Call (I Led 3 Lives, 1953) with Richard Carlson.

It Came from Outer Space (1953) with Richard Carlson.

The Splintered Man (Eton Books, 1952). I Killed Stalin (Permabook, 1957).

LEFT TO RIGHT: Promotional flyer for I Led 3 Lives (ca. 1953). Lobby Card for The Red Menace (1949).