Walter Winchell began mentoring him. Leaving behind his old communist comrades, Rushmore also separated from Ruth. During 1944–45, he met a new staff writer on the Journal-American, Marjorie Frances McCoy (née Everitt), a widow with two young daughters, Jean and Lynn. A former beauty contest winner from Charlotte, North Carolina, McCoy became a Powers model-cover girl and later an editor at Woman's Day. After the death of her first husband, she returned to New York City, where at the Journal-American she became fashion editor. In 1945, after obtaining a Mexican divorce from his first wife, Rushmore married McCoy in a ceremony in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In response, Ruth attempted to have him arrested for bigamy, with her lawyer maintaining that the Mexican divorce was invalid. HUAC In 1947, Rushmore became a key witness in the House Un-American Activities Committee's hearings in Washington, D.C., the first of two investigations of the film industry to assess communist infiltration of Hollywood through the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and labor unions, and the extent of communist propaganda that made it into films. The investigations were motivated by the domestic activities of the brothers Gerhart and Hanns Eisler, both communist refugees living in America during World War II. At the hearings, Rushmore testified against Edward G. Robinson, Charles Chaplin, Clifford Odets and Dalton Trumbo as potential or actual communists: "the Daily Worker regarded Charles Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson as what we call in the newspaper business 'sacred cows,' people you trust favorably. I don't know whether or not [Robinson] is a Communist, but for ten years he has been joining front organizations and is still doing it." However, unknown to the public at large, since 1943 the United States Army Signal Intelligence Service was decrypting Soviet intelligence traffic through the Venona project, which revealed that most Soviet agents operated in the eastern U.S. While Soviet agents like Otto Katz operated propaganda fronts like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in the 1930s, Venona failed to reveal any Soviet agent working in Hollywood directly involved with espionage or sabotage, though many film industry figures associated with the CPUSA would be blacklisted by the major studios. The public's unawareness of Venona enabled Rushmore to exaggerate the threat of communists in Hollywood. But at the HUAC hearings, Rushmore did correctly identify Gerhart Eisler as the probable Soviet leader of the CPUSA. The opening of the Soviet archives decades later showed that