²⁰ This brief and undocumented story seems an unlikely scenario. It is possible that HOM included this story to support the notion that Hollywood was crawling with Communists. However, D&S also briefly mention this trip. They point to an entry in Frankfurt, Germany travel records showing that "a Dr. Richard Sorge left for America on February 2, 1926." HOM's and other's overzealous and venomous anticommunism should not, however, lull one into believing that Stalin's henchmen did not make their way into the elite circles of Hollywood at this time and throughout the 1930s. While the vast majority of those involved in the Communist Party in Hollywood were, as Stephen Koch calls them, communists of country houses, Rolls Royces, and champagne - fellow travellers along for the ride of radical politics - there were hard-core Stalinists working with Otto Katz (alias Andre Simon) and other leaders of the Popular Front towards some semblance of influence in the movie capital of the world. Katz, a close associate of Willi Münzenberg, was at the center of Stalinist influence in Hollywood. (D&S, p.46; Koch pp.269-70 and 78-9)