At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not.
No one I’ve known can more aptly be described by the word “fascinating,” but a word of almost opposite meaning, “abrasive,” also belongs in the description. So, too, do a good many other modifiers, including wise, funny, greedy, generous, vain, biting, solicitous, ruthless, tender-hearted, devious, contentious, superbly rational, altruistic, prophetic, short-sighted, and indefatigable.
A determined indoorsman, Trumbo liked to write in the bathtub, pen in one hand, cigarette in the other. His major leisure activity was argument, carried on in voluminous correspondence with friends and strangers alike, and in conversations that, once Trumbo got going, made his listeners grow as forgetful of the hour as he was. It seems to me there are two general divisions of human temperament. One, comprising the vast majority and including many persons of superior talent and intelligence, embraces those who tend to accept the world as they find it, to go by the established rules and yield to the authority of expert opinion, particularly in fields outside the range of their special interests. The other kind, much fewer in number but large enough to contain its share of fools, scoundrels, geniuses, and mischief-makers, are inherently and often arrogantly skeptical, dismissing the solid credentials of expertise and insisting on proving each proposition by themselves, no matter how limited their qualifications for the task. Trumbo belonged unequivocally to the second group.
Late one night in out pre-blacklist days, I remember Trumbo walking me to my car outside his house on Beverly Drive, and waving his arms in a grand gesture that encompassed the neighbors for miles around. “All those crazy bastards sleeping away their eight hours,” he said dismissively. “They’re living only sixteen hours a day and I’m living twenty. So if I die when I’m sixty, and they live to be seventy, I’ll still be ahead of them!”
Against all reasonable expectation, he made it to seventy, dying of lung cancer in 1976. But I think his figures were off anyway. He had lived at least three normal lives—a sheer outpouring of energy so disproportionate to the intake of fuel as to transcend the laws of physics. But with the possible exception of his astonishing antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun, I’d rate Trumbo’s almost single-handed assault on the blacklist as the major achievement of his career.
As the blacklist solidified, Ian and I shifted our energies almost completely to writing for television, and our attitude was to make a living as best we could under the circumstances. Trumbo, by contrast, remained focused on the movies and, almost from the start, seemed to be looking for a way to bring the whole edifice of the blacklist tumbling down. In fact, when M.G.M. gave him his walking papers (shortly after Fox gave me mine), he refused to acknowledge the action, proceeding to finish the script he had been writing, turn it in, and request his next assignment (and paycheck). By these means and the lawsuit he filed when M.G.M. failed to deliver, he eventually extracted a small financial settlement.
After his move to Mexico, Trumbo wrote an original screen story and devised an elaborate cover to sell it in the Hollywood market. As part of a group of writers and journalists who had covered the Pacific Theater in World War II, Trumbo had met a young New York newspaper man named Ray Murphy. Since Ray wanted to try his hand at screenwriting, Trumbo asked him to represent the script as his own and take it to a Hollywood agent to sell for him. In exchange, Ray was to keep one-third of the net proceeds up to a maximum of ten thousand dollars, and use the sale as a basis for his movie-writing career.
Ray followed instructions, and after some mixed reactions and a rewrite job, Trumbo heard that an agent was submitting the revised script around town. Then came silence. A month or more passed without word. Trumbo had grown concerned and impatient by the time he came across, in a three-week old copy of the Hollywood Reporter, a story bearing the headline “20th Buys Love Maniac,” that being the title of the work in question. He could only speculate and ruminate until, a few days later, Louella Parsons’s column in the English-language Mexico City News reported the tragic death (from the flu) of young Ray Murphy, just after selling his first screen original. The amount of money involved was not revealed in the press, and Trumbo was still wondering how to approach Ray’s family when a letter arrived from the dead man’s brother, who had opened one from Trumbo and was seeking an explanation. Trumbo sent him a detailed account of the arrangement along with some letters from Ray to corroborate it, and a reasonable settlement of the affair ensued. His final net, of course, was only a fraction of what a Dalton Trumbo screenplay had brought in a few years earlier, but that was just a fact of blacklisted life.
Of all of us, Trumbo and our mutual friend Mike Wilson probably fared best in the black market while making the most trouble for the industry. Mike, though he had a quieter and less confrontational temperament than Trumbo, was a problem from the start, winning an Oscar in 1952 for the screenplay A Place in the Sun, a job he had completed shortly before a H.U.A.C. appearance in which he took the Fifth. The response from the Producers Association was to declare all blacklistees ineligible for screen credit, even for old work that was belatedly released. As a result, Friendly Persuasion came out in 1956 with no credited screenwriter at all—a bizarre circumstance that threatened to wreak further havoc when the film won a Writer’s Guild award and became an odds-on favorite for an Oscar, despite widespread awareness in Hollywood that the script was yet another Mike Wilson leftover.
To head off another major embarrassment, the Academy passed a rule declaring that if a blacklistee’s work (credited or otherwise) was nominated in any category, the nomination would be invalidated and the five nominees reduced to four. The Academy thus joined the three guilds in their full cooperation with the studio-enforced principle that not only jobs but credits could be denied on political grounds.
With the doors thus bolted, the leaders of the Academy approached the 1957 ceremonies confident that they would not again get caught honoring one of the miscreants. Among the Best Original story nominees that year, however, no one noticed the unknown “Robert Rich” in the credits of a low-budget sleeper, The Brave One, about a Mexican boy who raises a bull as a pet only to see him taken away for the bullfights. Announced as a winner, Rich’s name failed to elicit any response until Jesse Lasky, Jr., a Screenwriters Guild vice president who had co-written The Ten Commandments the year before, stepped forward to accept the award on behalf of his “good friend” who, he reported, was at the bedside of his wife as she gave birth to their first child. Considering his total lack of preparation, Lasky handled his part well, not only repeating the producers’ cover story with conviction but claiming the absent writer as an intimate. The following day, however, he had to admit that Robert Rich was neither a friend nor a member of the guild, nor, as far as anyone could tell, a real person—a separate one, that is, from Dalton Trumbo. For The Brave One was Trumbo’s work, inspired by a trip to the bull ring in Mexico City, where he had learned about a rare phenomenon known as an indulto. When a bull has fought with unusual courage and grace, the crowd, if sufficiently moved by the animal’s performance, may call on the matador to spare its life; this desire is expressed by a vigorous mass waving of handkerchiefs. Instinctively pro-bull, Trumbo had resisted Hugo Butler’s invitations to the ring. One look at the spectacle of an indulto, however, and he saw the ingredients of a memorable movie climax.
The Brave One was one of several scripts that Trumbo wrote, under various names, for the King brothers, a trio of low-budget producers who were brutally honest about their eagerness to employ a writer they could not have afforded in ordinary times. Within the limits of their overstretched means, they treated him decently, even going as far as to help Trumbo finance the purchase of a house on his return to Los Angeles in early 1953. And they didn’t seem to mind much when his cover got blown. Not that Trumbo himself ever acknowledged the rumors making him responsible for many of the best screenplays of the day, to the dismay of their actual authors. His coy position was that, under the circumstances, he could neither confirm nor deny authorship of any movie. But he could and did seize these opportunities to call attention to the growing black market and its injustices, and to introduce reporters to some of the other writers who had been forced to work under false names at cut rates.
A year after the Robert Rich affair, the Academy honored the script of The Bridge on the River Kwai. Once again, the recipient, Pierre Boule, failed to show up to collect his award; unlike Rich, Boule was a person in his own right—he was the author of the novel on which the movie had been based. He had never written a movie before, however, and, as would have been readily apparent if he had appeared on the podium, was a Frenchman with only a modest command of English, the language in which he had ostensibly written a screenplay notable for its elegance and its wit. Trumbo, who saw a comic side to the blacklist that tended to elude the rest of us, helpfully pointed out these facts to interested members of the press, who soon ascertained that Kwai was the work of Carl Foreman, a blacklisted writer-producer, and, once again, Mike Wilson, who was putting together perhaps the most distinguished record of any American screenwriter in the 1950s, blacklisted or otherwise.
The farce was not yet over. The next year, the Best Original Screenplay award went to the team of Nathan E. Douglas and Harold Jacob Smith for The Defiant Ones, the story of a white escaped convict (Tony Curtis) inconveniently shackled to a black one (Sidney Poitier). Douglas was, it turned out, a pseudonym for the blacklisted actor-turned-writer Nedrick Young. His writing partnership with the unblacklisted Smith proved to be nearly as problematic as the alliance between the two convicts in the movie. Weak-kneed as it was, the Academy could not bring itself to punish the innocent Smith for the sins of the guilty Young, so it reversed itself and reluctantly honored them both. It was getting harder and harder to keep us in our shadowy place.
The mood of the nation, meanwhile, was becoming more relaxed regarding applications of cold war spirit to American nonconformists. In 1954, Senator McCarthy was censured by the Senate and the following years saw a reconstituted Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, reach a number of decisions that seemed to justify our 1947 stand, broadening its interpretation of the First Amendment and asserting that Congress could not function as a “law enforcement or trial agency” or expose for the sake of exposure.
In 1959, the Italian producer Carlo Ponti and his partner, Marcello Gerosi, summoned me to Hollywood to talk about rewriting a script for Ponti’s wife, Sophia Loren, who was about to launch an American career at Paramount. Ponti, like other Europeans, found the blacklist mystifying, but the sponsorship of Paramount required him to observe the rituals. To maintain my cover, I was told to register in a hotel under a pseudonym so that the producers could speak to me through the Paramount switchboard without “violating security.” I chose the first name Rick, so that if my own were used by mistake it might pass as a bit of carelessness, and the last name Spencer for no particular reason. When my daughter Ann, then a student at Stanford, came to visit me and share my quarters, a decent respect to the opinions of the day required that she should register as Miss Spencer rather than Miss Lardner.
The picture, A Breath of Scandal, ran into trouble while shooting in Vienna, the setting of the Ferenc Molnar play on which it was based. No one realized yet that the director, Michael Curtiz, who died the following year, was already a sick man. I was called in, did some more work on the script and returned to New York. Shooting was transferred to Rome to permit the reshooting of several love scenes by the famed Italian director Vittorio de Sica. I was summoned again by producers desperate to save what was becoming a lost cause of a movie. (Its other difficulties aside, Paramount had chosen, as Miss Loren’s lover, a young actor named John Gavin who was not on the same plane in terms of either acting talent or inherent cinematic interest. Mr. Gavin would go on to serve as the United States Ambassador to Mexico in the Reagan years, and though I have no detailed knowledge of his work in that capacity, I am confident that it more than matched his performance in A Breath of Scandal. As for Miss Loren, it is a tribute to her abilities that a movie bad enough to kill some careers had virtually no effect on hers.)
It was in the Paramount office in Rome that I realized something I should have understood before about the nature of the blacklist. Paramount executives in Hollywood were increasingly concerned, and with good reason, about the poor footage that was coming into the lab. They wanted a key scene rewritten and reshot. A group of us sat around listening while the head of the Rome office conveyed our thinking to Y. Frank Freeman, the man who headed both the studio and the Motion Picture Producers Association. To my astonishment, I heard the speaker on our end repeatedly say that “Ring” thinks so-and-so or “Ring” feels such-and-such. Suddenly it became clear to me that Ponti and Gerosi could never have hired me without Freeman’s permission. The need for a false name for the switchboard had never been a safeguard against the front office learning I was around but against someone at a much lower echelon leaking the information to one of the many anti-Communist vigilante groups that would have liked nothing better than to expose the studio’s hypocrisy.
The blacklist had outlived its time, but it was not going to simply fade away. A force and a weapon were needed to strike the death blow. The force was Trumbo, and his principal weapon was ridicule.
When Kirk Douglas hired him to write the screenplay of Spartacus, Trumbo deliberately encouraged the British actors in the cast—Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier, and Charles Laughton—to come to his house to discuss their script problems with him. They had no sympathy for the strange American custom of making writers use pseudonyms, and with Trumbo’s dispensation, they did what they could to circulate knowledge of his role on the picture.
From Spartacus, Trumbo proceeded to another Kirk Douglas project, the modern western Lonely Are the Brave, and then to the Otto Preminger production of Exodus, a movie that was rushing toward production with all the elements in place except for a script. There was no script, that is, other than a 400-page opus that tried, like the Leon Uris novel on which it was based, to tell the entire story of the Jews from the Old Testament to the Twentieth Century. After reading the thousand-plus-page novel overnight, Trumbo convinced Otto that the movie should concentrate on the birth of Israel; then he worked through the Christmas and New Year holidays in order to meet the goal of delivering a workable screenplay by April 1960, when Exodus was scheduled to start shooting. With Douglas after him, simultaneously, for revisions on Lonely Are the Brave, Trumbo was over-stretched even by his manic standards. Still, I think it was in this hectic period that, without ever exactly articulating it, he conceived the idea of setting his two employers against each other in a competition to see which of them would have the honor of breaking the blacklist and restoring him to his former standard of living.
In his days at Fox, Otto had bristled at the restraints of the studio system; the censorship code, in particular, was a constant annoyance to his middle-European sensibility. After previewing a rough cut of Forever Amber, he was summoned to New York for a conference with leaders of the Catholic Legion of Decency, where, to Otto’s dismay, he saw Spyros Skouras, Zanuck’s East Coast boss, knuckle under completely to the demands of a young enforcer in priest’s garb. Otto would make any changes the legion required, Skouras promised. “Just show him what you want cut and he’ll cut it.” There ensued a day’s worth of clerically monitored editing in which the movie (which, for all its dramatic shortcomings, had some risqué charm) lost, among other things, virtually every moment of contact between one character’s lips and another’s.
As a result of this and other unhappy experiences, Otto had negotiated the right to make a certain number of movies outside his arrangement with Fox, and by the mid-fifties he had left the studio orbit altogether, becoming an independent producer—one with, by the terms of the agreement he demanded and got from United Artists, complete control over the editing of his films. Flexing his muscles, he fought the censors repeatedly while making some of the boldest movies of the decade, including The Man with a Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, and The Moon Is Blue. In the case of the last-named picture, he ignored the protests of both the Hays office and the Legion of Decency, refusing to cut a line, and with a movie officially and loudly denounced by the church hierarchy, made the invigorating discovery that most American Catholics (to say nothing of non-Catholics) seemed to look elsewhere for their moviegoing guidance. The experience also taught Otto that by defending a mild comedy from attacks, he could generate the kind of publicity and controversy that no amount of advertising money could have bought.
Grateful to Trumbo for salvaging Exodus, Otto informed his United Artists backers that he had decided to make the writer’s identity official. He explained later (and I have no doubt truthfully) that he considered it “absolutely a crime” the way, having served our sentences, we were being denied our livelihoods or employed at rates of pay far below what we would have commanded in an open market. It is probably also relevant to note, however, that Trumbo’s work on Spartacus was now an open secret, inevitably raising in Otto’s mind the possibility that, if he didn’t take the plunge, he might be remembered for tolerating an injustice that someone else then decided to repudiate. Douglas was, in fact, also close to Trumbo, who had now written a couple of his best roles. He didn’t have Otto’s chutzpah, however, or his comfort level with defiance, and he doubted that he could sell Universal, the studio behind Spartacus, on the idea of giving Trumbo credit. So it was that, on January 19, 1961, I bought an early edition of the New York Times with a front-page story revealing Trumbo as the screenwriter of Exodus—a piece of news that spread quickly through the extended blacklist diaspora in Los Angeles, Mexico, New York, and France, signaling us that the end was near.
But not quite at hand, even though Douglas and Universal, prodded by Otto’s action, soon followed suit and both epics were box-office hits. (They faced picket lines in a few cities, organized by the American Legion and the Catholic War Veterans, but, as Otto had anticipated, few potential ticket-buyers paid much heed.) The blacklist had never been officially acknowledged, and thus couldn’t easily be disowned. For the better part of another decade, the question of employment and credit had to be fought out producer by producer, studio by studio, and writer by writer.
Shortly after the Exodus story broke, Frank Sinatra announced the hiring of the blacklisted writer Albert Maltz to write a movie about Eddie Slovik, the only American soldier executed for desertion in World War II. Like Preminger, Sinatra was denounced; unlike him, Sinatra caved in, paying off Maltz in cash and eventually scrubbing the project, perhaps partly out of fear of harming his friend John F. Kennedy, a candidate for President at the time. (Following the election that fall, however, the President-elect and his brother, Attorney-General-to-be Robert Kennedy, crossed a picket line to see Spartacus at a theater in Washington, D.C., and pronounced it good.) Another six years passed before Albert got his name on the screen with Two Mules for Sister Sara.
In 1961, American audiences saw a version of Lawrence of Arabia that listed the playwright Robert Bolt as sole screenwriter, though Mike Wilson (who had done the first draft) got joint credit everywhere else. Lester Cole, my fellow Danbury alumnus, had to settle for a pseudonymous credit on Born Free as late as 1965; Columbia Pictures had tried to remove him from the project altogether, but its formerly blacklisted producer, Carl Foreman, had refused. Abe Polonsky’s career as a director suffered a twenty-year gap between Force of Evil, in 1948, and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, in 1968. And, of course, many more blacklistees never made it back at all. Only about ten percent of us, in fact, managed to go back into the movies, according to Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund’s book The Inquisition of Hollywood.
In my case, another two years of semi-surreptitious work intervened before I could write under my own name. It was Otto, once again, who made that possible, by announcing in 1962 that he had hired me to adapt a book called Genius by Patrick Dennis. The American Legion responded with a letter of protest, demanding to know why he couldn’t find a “patriotic writer” for the job. Just as it was their right to boycott the movie when it was released, Otto replied, so was it his right to pick a screenwriter.
Genius was never made. Otto had said from the start that the movie required a top star, and none of those he pursued—Laurence Olivier, Rex Harrison, and Alec Guinness—proved to be available. True to form, however, Otto had me working sub rosa on The Cardinal, the movie he was shooting while Genius was in the works. That fall, I accompanied him to Vienna and then to Rome, ostensibly to confer about Genius, but in reality so I could edit what he was going to film the next day. In Rome I discovered that he also had Gore Vidal writing parts of the picture, which ended up, remarkably enough, as quite a respectful view of the Roman Catholic Church, for all the grief that some of its representatives had given him over the years. I don’t know whether Otto realized that both Gore and I were atheists. Another thing we had in common, and which we jointly communicated to him, was our verdict that he had fallen into the habit of buying the movie rights to some of the worst-written best-sellers on the market.
With my future as a screenwriter still difficult to assess, I responded eagerly to an invitation to collaborate with Ian on a musical. We would be doing the book and Ian’s old friend Johnny Mercer, with whom he had written Second Chorus twenty years earlier, the lyrics. (It was Johnny’s one great professional frustration that, for all his triumphs as a songwriter and performer, he had never been part of a successful Broadway show.) The production, an adaptation of Ben Jonson’s Volpone relocated to the Yukon in the time of the 1898 gold rush, had been conceived for a commemorative festival in Dawson City, where it was the reopening attraction of a historic opera house in the summer of 1963. With Bert Lahr as a vengeful prospector and Larry Blyden as his slippery sidekick, Foxy rewarded us with not only the satisfaction of operating in a new medium and finding we could make it work, but with the joy of watching top professional performers take our material and build on it. Back in New York, the producer, Robert Whitehead, was preparing to mount the show on Broadway the following season when he was offered the job of running, with Elia Kazan, the theater company of the nascent Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. We liked and trusted Whitehead and lamented his loss, but from a commercial standpoint our show didn’t seem to have suffered much since David Merrick, perhaps the most successful Broadway producer of the postwar era, swiftly stepped into the breach.
Mercer and I, in fact, were so optimistic that we broke the old rule against creative people putting up their own money. My share, I remember, was thirty thousand dollars; Johnny’s must have been substantially more than that. And our bet was still looking good when Foxy began its pre-Broadway tryout in Cleveland, generating enthusiastic reviews, large audiences, and plentiful laughter. Standing in the back of the theater taking all this in, none of us paid much attention to a development unfolding in New York that, in hindsight, was fatal to our efforts. I am referring to the highly successful opening of another Merrick production, Hello Dolly!.
In our naïveté, we had failed to take note of an important nuance in the business arrangements. By the time Merrick agreed to produce our show, it was already fully financed. That meant that neither Merrick himself, nor any of his regular backers, had a stake in it. As soon as theatergoers began lining up for Dolly, he made it plain with his every Foxy-related deed that the promotion of that other production and the maximization of its profits had become his consuming interest, without regard for the effects on what he had sized up as our less financially promising enterprise. In that spirit, Merrick didn’t even bother to exercise a contract requiring RCA Victor to record an original cast album—standard procedure for any musical that survived its opening. Instead, he encouraged RCA to defer the Foxy album and spend the money it had thereby saved marketing the Dolly album.
We were dealing, by now, not just with one of Broadway’s great showmen, but with two, for on opening night, amid the post-performance celebrating, Merrick sold the production to Billy Rose, owner of the Ziegfeld Theater, where Foxy was in residence. The reviews were favorable if not ecstatic, and perhaps that fact had a tempering effect on Rose’s enthusiasm; like Merrick, however, his attention soon seemed to shift elsewhere—in his case, not to another show but to a former wife whom he chose, at this moment, to remarry and with whom he abruptly departed on a second honeymoon before even signing the papers sealing his handshake deal with Merrick. Thus we found ourselves without anyone who could properly be called a producer, and without a line of advertising or promotion of any sort.
Still, with all four authors waiving the royalties due us, and with neither impresario doing a thing on its behalf, Foxy ran for nine weeks in the cavernous Ziegfeld. Its closing was a grave disappointment to all of us, the more so to Johnny and me because of our investments. Four decades later, however, I can still relish the memory of Bert Lahr impersonating a British aristocrat and singing this Mercer lyric:
Dear were the homes of Cheltenham
Large were the hearts that dwelt in ’em
I but a tad of a lad
Mum and Dad at the pub—just beltin’ ’em away
Now I’ve attained seniority
And come to my majority
I’ve travelled far
Tasted snails—caviar
So with some authority—I say
If you want a bon vivant to brighten up the scene
Or a jolly extra man to give the party sheen
Strolling on the Parthenon—or bowling on the green
I play mandolin—and tambourine
Will travel . . .
As it turned out, I had entered a period of working for fickle producers. Shortly after Foxy’s demise, Martin Ransohoff, an independent moviemaker with a good deal of street smarts and not as much polish, hired me to adapt a novel about a poker-playing showdown between a young card shark played by Steve McQueen and an old pro played, or so we expected, by Spencer Tracy. In the summer of 1964, The Cincinnati Kid took me back to Hollywood and into the gates of the much-diminished Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which was financing the production. Louis B. Mayer was, of course, long gone, and his great studio was contracting fast. For a brief moment, however, it looked as if we had a chance of claiming, as a dividend for casting Tracy, a cameo appearance by Kate Hepburn as the Tracy character’s old flame.
Tracy, however, was not in the best of health and was playing hard to get. Soon after my arrival, accordingly, Ransohoff asked me to join him in a visit to Tracy’s cottage off Sunset Boulevard, with the object of overcoming our intended star’s resistance. For me, it was a first chance to see the two since Woman of the Year twenty-three years earlier. It was also an opportunity to thank Kate for her letter to the parole board, which (embarrassed by such expressions of gratitude) she chose to deny having sent. Both Kate and Spencer were generous, on the other hand, in their praise of the automobile that Mike Kanin and I had given them; they had used it, they told me, to tow a succession of broken-down vehicles of more recent vintage into the shop.
For reasons that may have been more apparent to Ransohoff than they were to me, he elected to make small talk about a movie biography of another former M.G.M. star, Jean Harlow. “And guess who they’re casting as Harlow?” he exclaimed, naming a popular actress of the sixties whom he described, with evident disgust, as “the titless wonder.” It was not in Marty’s nature to consider the indelicacy of such a comment in front of Hepburn, whose beauty had never been the buxom kind. My eyes went to Tracy as his did to her, to gauge her reaction. Whatever it was, she didn’t reveal it.
Had there been any real prospect of wooing either of them into our movie, I’m not convinced that Ransohoff’s brand of salesmanship would have been up to the task. Even before our visit, however, M.G.M. had effectively vetoed Tracy, who was accustomed to getting $400,000 a picture, in favor of Edward G. Robinson, who could be had for a quarter of that amount (and who nevertheless gave a fine performance in the movie, as did Steve McQueen and Tuesday Weld).
Hollywood had changed profoundly over the years of my exile, and in some ways for the better, to judge by my initial experience with The Cincinnati Kid. Sam Peckinpah, our director, held a reading of the script with the actors and me sitting around a table, and when one of them raised an objection to a line or an action, I was in a position to adjust it. When shooting began, I returned to New York confident that for once a picture would come out more or less as I had written it. In a matter of days, how- ever, I learned that Ransohoff had fired Peckinpah, ostensibly for shooting an unauthorized nude scene featuring the actress Sharon Tate. As if this was not disconcerting enough, his designated replacement, Norman Jewison, was bringing in a new writer, Terry Southern. His reason for doing so was evidently not any profound objection to my script; many of the changes they made were cosmetic, including a shift of locale form St. Louis to the more picturesque New Orleans, where they could incorporate one of the famous funeral parades that take place in that city.
My next movie assignment was another lesson—a more satisfying one—in the ways of the new Hollywood. It began when I received the galleys of a comic novel about an army medical unit in the Korean War, written by a surgeon who had served in such a unit and a professional writer recruited by the publisher, William Morrow. What Morrow wanted from me, and I happily supplied, was a book-jacket blurb. (“Not since Catch 22 has the struggle to maintain sanity in the rampant insanity of war been told in such outrageously funny terms.”) Then I found myself wondering whether the novel, with its ramshackle structure and mordant humor, could be made into a movie. Not easily. Robert Altman, who read it only after he had signed on to direct my screenplay, commented that he would never have considered the book as film material. For one thing, a major plot point was that in order to raise money to send their Korean houseboy to college in Maine, the doctors made one of the medics up to look like Jesus Christ on the cross. Then they took him on a tour of army posts where they introduced him as the Savior and sold photographs of him autographed with the Holy Name. Even in the post-studio Hollywood of 1970, this was not going to pass muster. Nor would a scene in which the dentist, known as the Painless Pole, took what his buddies assured him was a suicide pill after losing his sexual prowess. His unit then arranged to have him dropped unconscious from a helicopter with an open parachute, and on recovering he found tied to his all-star penis a blue ribbon, which somehow restored his male ego. I had to invent a character called Lieutenant Dish, worried about returning to her husband in a state of sexual frustration, and have the hero, Hawkeye, let her glimpse the dentist’s naked body and proceed to take care of Painless’s problem and her own.
And, of course, all through the movie version, I was looking for ways to deal with story developments in visual rather than narrative terms. In the book, for instance, when Hawkeye realizes he has seen a new co-worker before but can’t remember where or when, the answer comes to him undramatically after days of frustration. In the movie, Trapper John intercepts a football and throws his “Dartmouth pass” right into Hawkeye’s arms, triggering his memory.
After reading the novel, I passed it on to Ingo Preminger, who had been my agent throughout the blacklist days and since. Ingo was, like me, eager to play a less reactive role in the movie business, and he quickly read M*A*S*H and agreed not only to sell the project but to produce it himself. Meanwhile, though, I had developed misgivings that led me to give the book to Ian. After he had read it, I told him what I was worried about. It wasn’t really a novel, I had decided, but a series of short stories about the same characters in the same place and time. And the comedy depended on their maintaining the same iconoclastic attitude from beginning to end. I was struggling with a basic rule of dramaturgy: One of the things that makes a good story, I had always believed, was a character or characters changing in the course of it. In this case, in violation of the rule, the two heroes, Hawkeye and Trapper John, would be exactly the same people at the end as at the beginning.
Ian saw the point and responded to it cogently. “Forget the rule,” he told me, and I did.
Before long, Ingo had made a deal with the studio that had summarily dismissed me in 1947. Indeed, Fox was now under the active management of Darryl Zanuck’s son Richard and his partner David Brown, and the elder Zanuck, though he had moved into a sort of semi-retirement in Paris, was officially back as president of the company. In all our M*A*S*H experience, however, I don’t remember a word of recrimination or regret passing anyone’s lips, or, indeed, any reference at all to my prior association with the studio. The blacklist, we all now seemed to agree, had been one of those acts of nature for which it would be petty and small-minded to assign any personal responsibility.
Richard Zanuck, Brown, Ingo, and I were very enthusiastic about M*A*S*H. At first, not too many other people were. More than a dozen directors turned it down before Ingo sold the rest of us on the almost unknown Altman, whose accomplishments at the time consisted of a large body of television work and a couple of little-noticed feature films. We were a mature team by Hollywood’s evolving standards, Bob in his mid-forties, Ingo and I our mid-fifties, and grandfathers the lot of us. It was a source of satisfaction to me, at any rate, that this trio of comparative graybeards could jointly create a film that proved to be immensely popular with the younger moviegoers Hollywood had been losing in the fifties and sixties. (When Ingo made this point to reporters, however, Altman bristled, not wanting to be lumped with us geezers.) I was also pleased by the realization that, through our comic tale of a war that the nation had begun to forget, we could illuminate something about the military mindset and cultural arrogance of the war that was on every American’s mind—the one we were waging in Vietnam.
For about two minutes, Ingo and I weighed the idea of transferring M*A*S*H from Korea to Vietnam. But the current war was just too close for us to be funny or properly irreverent about it. By keeping our story at a safe distance in years and miles, we could safely look askance at an American military adventure in Asia, and let people draw their own parallels.
Bob Altman made a number of major contributions to the finished product. One, building on a single scene in the script where “Hot Lips” Houlihan’s lovemaking with Frank Burns was broadcast to the entire encampment, was to make the P.A. system a recurring element throughout the movie. He also added the business of the stolen Jeep at the beginning and the subplot of an affair between the nurse Leslie and Colonel Blake, and he was responsible for several notable pieces of dialogue, including what is probably the movie’s biggest laugh: Dago Red saying, “He was drafted,” in answer to Hot Lips’ furious rhetorical question about how someone like Hawkeye ever got into a position of such responsibility. (Part of the reason the line got such a big laugh, though, was that for once Bob stopped all the extraneous noise, allowing the words to be heard clearly. A number of what I thought were pretty funny lines when I wrote them had to compete with a high volume of incidental chatter going on at the same time.)
He made a few miscalls as well. That was my assessment, at any rate, of some extreme slapstick in the opening scene and of a later bit in which, for no apparent reason, virtually the entire company joined Hawkeye and Duke in singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in response to the spectacle of Major Burns on his knees, praying. And Bob let the football game drag on to a length far beyond its proper proportion in the story. But these were minor failings alongside all the good things that he added, including the powerful glimpses of combat surgery, which made the extracurricular antics of the heroes much easier to understand. At the end of the screening where I first saw those sequences, however, one of the other members of the small audience registered his strong disapproval. This was Darryl Zanuck, who, after watching M*A*S*H with a very young French actress friend of his, summoned the key people involved to the back of the projection room in order to tell us that the whole thing was an outrageous breach of taste. “You simply can’t combine broad comedy and bloody operating-room scenes,” he declared, with all the weight of his long experience as an arbiter of the acceptable and unacceptable. There would be a meeting in his office at ten o’clock the next morning, it was decreed, to decide on the re-cutting and re-shooting that would be needed to make the movie fit for release.
At the appointed hour, however, Zanuck announced that no changes would be necessary after all. “Turned out my friend liked those operating room scenes,” he told us. “So maybe the young people will go for the picture.” It was the first time anyone could remember the old man’s lechery leading to a constructive result.