CHAPTER THREE

THE DAVIS PERFECTION BAKERY

It was the sort of odd couple you used to see fairly often in cities not so long ago—a man and his daughter. (Less so today; why is that?) The two of them would go out walking every day along the bright, palm-lined side streets of southwest Los Angeles. And each day the route varied just a little. The two of them, obviously not well acquainted with the neighborhood, were out exploring, finding out all they could about their part of it—identifying the trees, pointing out the birds to one another, even spying a lizard every now and then, dead-still in somebody’s garden. Each day the route varied, but somehow there was one point the father and the daughter always seemed to pass in their stroll through the neighborhood. You couldn’t call it a park exactly—just a lot on a corner among some others along their way, though this was one claimed by the city. There were a few extra trees here, a little grass, a couple of benches, and a peanut man. They regularly stopped there at the peanut man’s cart—one of the old-fashioned kind with glass sides and a steam whistle poking up through the top—and every day the man bought a bag of peanuts for his daughter. The game was that they shared them, only of course they didn’t really share them at all. All that “sharing” really meant was that he cracked them open for her as they walked along and popped a couple in his mouth at the start just to get her going. That was usually all the encouragement she needed; she would eat them as fast as he could shell them. But, of course, whenever she said, “Daddy, you have some, too,” he would break the next peanut and toss its contents into his own mouth. He didn’t have to do that very often, though, for the girl was just eleven, and she loved peanuts.

The two of them would take such a walk every day toward the latter part of the afternoon, talking back and forth and laughing, too. But it was odd—every day they seemed to laugh a little less. And something peculiar: each time they took that walk, it seemed to take a little longer. The little girl adjusted her pace to his. Unconsciously, she used her energy in little side trips along the way, kicking at things in the gutter, peeking inside cars parked along the curb, running ahead to look at flowers in the next garden, giving her father time to catch up. Each day he moved a little more slowly. Each day he seemed less well, until each day he began to seem more sick.

Finally, they stopped one afternoon and bought peanuts from the peanut man, and the father said the things he usually said to him, observing that it was certainly a bright, sunshiny day, and asking if the peanuts were fresh. And the peanut man—swarthy, mustached, collar buttoned up without a tie—said, as he always did, “Oh, nice and hot, nice and hot.” It was never really clear whether he meant the weather or the peanuts, but that seemed to satisfy them both. The price was paid. The big bag—you did get more for your money in those days—then changed hands, and the little girl looked at it expectantly.

But this day something was terribly wrong. The man moved especially slowly. He seemed in great pain. He carefully opened up the bag of peanuts and looked inside. The little girl stopped and watched him.

“What is it, Daddy?”

“Here, Catherine,” he said, handing the bag of peanuts over to her, “you’ll have to crack them. I just don’t have the strength to do it.”

“Sure, Daddy,” she said, frowning. “I’ll do it for both of us.”

That was Orus Trumbo’s condition only weeks after Dalton left the University of Colorado and joined the family in Los Angeles. By then he had lost the only job he held there—driving a motorcycle truck for a downtown Harley-Davidson agency—and he was reduced to looking after the girls while Maud Trumbo went out and earned what she could for them working in the office of a Pierce-Arrow auto agency.

Things were very much worse than Dalton had realized. It was clear to him he would have to find work somewhere, in spite of his announced intention to live at home and continue his studies at the University of Southern California. And so, in July 1925, he went out and got a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery at 2nd and Beaudry Streets in downtown Los Angeles. “But it was temporary, always temporary. I kept saying that for three or four or five years until it began to sound foolish even to me.”

He started there as a wrapper, which meant, in this commercial bakery’s conveyor-belt, assembly-line operation, that he was simply the operator of an automatic wrapping machine. It wasn’t long, however, before he had been promoted to checker—a kind of glorified shipping clerk. From the main plant where he worked a fleet of trucks went out each morning to cover two hundred separate retail and wholesale routes. Working through the night as bread and other baked goods came out of the ovens, the checkers would make the rounds of the bins in one of which the order for each truck route was filled. And then at five o’clock in the morning, the trucks would arrive. They would check the morning’s load, get it on the truck, and go home.

Trumbo later referred to this period at the bakery as “eight rather unbelievable years. Kind of a period of horror.” He grew to hate the job, going off each night to work as a condemned man, with a sense of almost physical loathing for what he knew was waiting for him. “Yet the quality of play is always there.” Shaking his head, baffled, remembering. “We hated the management of the bakery. But the checkers, the group I worked with, would organize races to fill order sheets just to see how quickly it could be done. Kids making a game of it, just racing up and down those aisles, tossing bread in the bins. What did this do? Well, it helped the bosses. But somehow that was secondary to the play of it all.”

As this indicates, a fundamental change was worked in his thinking during those years in the bakery, and it was evident to him after he had been there barely a few months. He began to split the world in two: them and us. On the other side were “the bosses,” whom he soon grew to hate; and on his side were the boys at the bakery, with whom he competed in that crazy bread-race game. So imbued had he been with the principles of rugged individualism that a year or two before, orating at Grand Junction High, or arguing in fraternity bull sessions at the University of Colorado, he would have automatically identified his own interests (had he thought about it at all) with those of the bosses.

This change in him, bubbling quite near the surface, was due partly to the example provided him by his father: look what love of the bosses had gotten him. Orus Trumbo was fifty-one, practically penniless, and lying on his deathbed. The family had by then moved to a place on 55th Street in Los Angeles—or just off it, really, for the Trumbos were in a little apartment above a garage that faced onto an alley. There Orus Trumbo lay all day long, unable to take walks with Catherine, as he had done before, only rising occasionally to sit with the family at supper—and this he did less often as he grew weaker. His condition deteriorated. Weakness and increasing pain soon made it impossible for him to get out of bed at all.

The pain would sometimes become altogether unbearable for Orus Trumbo. Elizabeth Baskerville, Dalton’s sister, who was then just a little girl, recalled the terror she felt at her father’s suffering: “When my father was sick in bed I can remember times when he was in such great pain that he would pound on the wall and groan. It put me in an utter panic.” It is easy to imagine. Suppertime. Maud Trumbo, Dalton, Catherine, and Elizabeth seated around the table. The groaning begins and reaches a climax at something near a shout, accompanied by thumps punctuating his agony like so many exclamation marks. Maud would get up, telling the children to continue eating, and then go over to the sickbed. The place was so small that they ate in the same room where their father lay, and they could hear Maud’s voice in soothing tones, trying to comfort him, as the groaning started again. They couldn’t eat. The three children would just sit, silently exchanging looks, and wait for him to stop. “Afterwards,” Elizabeth remembered, “when the pain had subsided a little, we’d look in on him and Papa would say, ‘I’m sorry for having made all that noise and frightened you.’”

During the long period of Orus Trumbo’s illness there was, of course, no doctor called in. Maud Trumbo was a practicing Christian Scientist and would remain so the rest of her life; she attended church every Sunday and believed profoundly that prayer would cure every ill. Did her husband believe, as well? Dalton said no—that Orus merely accompanied her to church. According to Elizabeth, though, he may have believed, after a fashion, in Christian Science, but only “because she wanted him to, and if Mother had wanted him with two heads, he would have grown another.”

And since no physician had been in to see Orus Trumbo, the family was ignorant of the cause of his suffering. At the very end, however, when it was clear that his father couldn’t last much longer, Dalton prevailed upon his mother to allow him at least to bring a doctor in. This was only to fix in advance the cause of death (otherwise an autopsy would have been ordered), so she consented. The doctor’s diagnosis was pernicious anemia; Orus Trumbo’s mother had died of it at the age of fifty, and an aunt had died of it, too. The prognosis was as they had guessed: he was terminally ill. It was only a matter of time—and a very short time, at that, for Orus Trumbo died the day after the doctor’s visit. “It was nice to know,” Dalton said almost wistfully, “that there was nothing we could do for him in any event. This was a couple of years before the liver extract cure for pernicious anemia had become known.”

Nice to know perhaps, but still the episode left scars on the three Trumbo children. Catherine, then fourteen, recalled: “It disturbed me for years when Daddy died. I think it really hurt my relationship with Mother because she had kept saying he would get well. Well, he didn’t get well. He died. Obviously somebody was lying.”

What did Dalton Trumbo feel at the time? Relief? Shock? Grief? Did he feel intimidated as he looked to the future and saw himself as the chief support of his mother and two sisters? Did he feel an impulse to run away from such overwhelming responsibility? Since no record of his immediate response exists—he kept no diary—the best evidence is perhaps provided by a passage from Johnny Got His Gun. Here, Joe Bonham, Trumbo’s spiritual alter ego, had been called from his job at the bakery with news that his father had just died:

He looked down at a tired face that was only fifty-one years old. He looked down and thought dad I feel lots older than you. I was sorry for you dad. Things weren’t going well and they never would have gone well for you and it’s just as good you’re dead. People’ve got to be quicker and harder these days than you were dad. Goodnight and gooddreams. I won’t forget you and I’m not as sorry for you today as I was yesterday. I loved you dad goodnight.

His father’s death left him in the role that he had unofficially assumed eleven months before: he was more or less head of the family now. His mother worked when, and as much as, she could. She continued in her job as bookkeeper in the Pierce-Arrow agency; later, she would give that up but continue to work at home as a seamstress. The money Dalton brought home from the bakery was what the family depended on during the years that followed. Brought up, as he had been, on the work ethic, he had always placed immense value on money as a measure of material success: a wealthy man was a successful man. Well, the years of deprivation that followed—years during which the Trumbos would sink very close to real poverty—did nothing to convince him that there was some other, better and truer, measure of success. Years without money did nothing to diminish it in his esteem. On the contrary, it must have seemed to him by the time things got their worst—they climaxed at the bank holiday in 1933—that there was no problem that money couldn’t solve.

He did well enough at the bakery, while he continued to assure everyone who asked that he was there only temporarily and would be going back to college soon. Eventually, they made him an estimator, a break for him because the hours were shorter, and this eventually made it possible for him to pick up odd credits at the University of Southern California. The bakery produced over a hundred different kinds of goods. When the drivers came in at the end of the day, they would check in with the estimator to let him know what they had sold. On the basis of this, he had to estimate production orders for the night shift which had just come on and the day shift for the coming day. Other factors, as well, had to be taken into account in estimating orders: the weather, the day of the week, whether or not a holiday would fall on that particular day, and so on. Obviously, it was a position of considerable responsibility, and it shows that no matter what Dalton Trumbo may have thought of them, the bosses put a good deal of trust in him when they made him an estimator. It was the sort of job where danger and even potential disaster threatened with the slip of his pencil.

One day the pencil did slip. The item in question was vanilla cream pies. Trumbo put in a routine order for two hundred of them, only to return the next day to find the place unexpectedly piled high with vanilla cream pies. He protested that he had only asked for two hundred of them. But then they took him aside and showed him his order from the day before: the base of his “2” followed the line on the order form so exactly that anyone who looked at the number as he had written it would say that he had written a “7.” The situation was further complicated by the fact that it was summer, and the vanilla cream pies would literally turn poisonous in just fifteen hours.

Trumbo: “Well, I figured it was my job. But we had an interesting salesman there at the bakery, a man who used to hawk at the drivers as they left on their routes, getting them to take on this item or that. I reported to him that I had made a mistake and we had an extra five hundred pies. And this guy, who was a genius as a pitchman, got the orders from the drivers for over four hundred extra pies so that we only had to consign about seventy-five pies. Well, I figured I was the heavy until the next day the manager of the bakery came up to the salesman and myself and said, ‘What the hell have you people been doing? There’s obviously a market for between six hundred and fifty and seven hundred vanilla cream pies and you bastards have been selling only two hundred! Now get on it!’”

He began at the University of Southern California as a full-time day school student and took sixteen hours that first semester. In order to do it, though, he had to take on a second job. He went to work for his uncle at the Harley-Davidson agency—the same uncle his father had worked for there in Los Angeles as long as he had been able to work. The purpose of it all was to learn to be a writer. He emphasized, he was learning the craft: “I was bright as a kid and a young man, tolerably bright, but I don’t think that I had any real talent for writing, because talent should develop faster. It took me years to learn to write. There is a kind of talent that can’t be denied. You see it and you recognize it. But I had to learn.”

The learning process had begun back in Grand Junction, when he had written his first short stories. The single surviving example, “The Return,” which must have been written sometime in 1924, is remarkably good work for a boy of about high school age. There is a sure use of language in it that shows the benefit to him of his experience on the Sentinel. It is worth mentioning that the story tells of the return of Jim Norton to the town of Plainville as he approaches middle age. Jim had left for Chicago twenty years before with high hopes, but there found himself just “one among many human ants.” But now he is back in his hometown, deeply ashamed that he had not achieved the success that he had hoped to: “Yes, that was the heartbreaking part of his vacation trip to his home city. They had all expected so much—predicted so freely, and here he was. Probably poorer than the majority of his friends, without family or success in any tangible form.” His best friend had prospered, his high school sweetheart had married happily. Jim, in an agony of chagrin, buys a can of gasoline, walks to the outskirts of town, and immolates himself, a burnt offering to the bitch goddess success. Remarkable, this fear of failure, even when Dalton Trumbo had barely begun.

Ever since those days back in Grand Junction, then, he had been teaching himself to write. Going to the University of Southern California was just part of the process. During that year he attended the university full-time, he took as many writing courses as he could, received encouragement from instructors, and kept right on writing, writing, writing. Besides short stories, sketches, and papers done for courses at USC, Trumbo wrote just about six unpublished novels during those years at the bakery. If “just about” seems imprecise, it is because although he completed six separate manuscripts, material from one can be found, somewhat revised, in another. Basically, there are only two stories that he is telling in them: that of the events in Grand Junction, his father’s troubles, and his own high hopes in growing up there; and that much grimmer story of the life in the bakery which he was living as he was writing it. Nothing illustrates the extent of his desperation during this time quite so well as a note found scribbled on the last manuscript page of “Bleak Street, or, American Sonata,” a last attempt at a bakery novel:

Completed, Wed-8-28-29 at 2:12 AM

If this is published, I make a promise to myself

that 1/10 of the net proceeds accruing to me will

be expended for the education of youth.

—James Dalton Trumbo

It wasn’t published, of course, and so he was never put to the test. But it is clear from this high-minded vow that he sorely missed the opportunity for the college education he had been denied, and that he now saw success as a writer as the only practical way out of his situation. He was right, but his escape was four years off.

Why did he feel trapped? Why was he so desperate? There was, first of all, Sylvia Longshore—or Sylvia Shore, as she was then known professionally. The two still saw one another and wrote back and forth faithfully whenever she was on tour. She was doing quite well. Trumbo’s high school friend Hubert Gallagher remembered that while he was an undergraduate at Stanford he saw her in the San Francisco company of Sunny. She was still seeing Trumbo then. Imagine Trumbo as Gatsby without the fortune. How much more impossible his yearnings for Daisy would have seemed to him had he been no more than an estimator at a commercial bakery in Queens. He must have wondered if he would ever be able to marry Sylvia Shore. Would he ever reach that green light across the water?

And there were Trumbo’s responsibilities at home. His position was ambiguous: although he was the family’s chief breadwinner, he was also Maud Trumbo’s son. The two fought, if not constantly, at least regularly. Dalton’s drinking was usually the issue. Money was always a worry, too. They were never totally without food at home, but often the four of them would dine on nothing more than beans and day-old bread and some fancy cake that Dalton had lifted from the bakery. His sister, Catherine Baldwin, remembered: “Those were rough, rough days. But we had a lot of fun on 55th Street. We were really a crazy family. We laughed a lot, even with all the trouble we had.”

The fundamental source of their conflict was probably that Maud and Dalton Trumbo were very much alike. The two shared a quick wit and were both fierce opponents. He may have lacked his father’s grace and gentlemanly style, but at the same time his was not in the least a submissive nature: he was a fighter.

What was Maud Trumbo like? Dalton’s sister, Elizabeth: “I think of her as something like Helen Hayes in age and size and general appearance. She was very short and very feminine and pretty. Oh, but strong—she could certainly be ornery and was no saint. Mother was a remarkable woman—intelligent and very capable. Much of Dalton’s strength, I think, comes from her.”

She was thirty-nine when her husband died, and she lived forty-four more years.

Driving the freeways in Los Angeles, you seem to travel over the city rather than through it. The houses on either side have no identifiable shape or order as they flash by, and the people, if visible, lack real identity. The blocks the freeway intersects have about the same sort of reality as those green and brown patches of Ohio farmland that reel by beneath the wing of a jet. What was Los Angeles like before the freeways? There is no telling now, of course. Streetcars clanged through the streets, hauling their passengers through one neighborhood after another. Before the freeways were built, there were neighborhoods there to travel through.

It is only when you take the exit ramp and merge with the local traffic that the streets surrounding the freeway take on some degree of reality. Trumbo’s old neighborhood has become a black area. It is not the faces of the pedestrians that tell you this—how many pedestrians are there likely to be on any street in Los Angeles?—but the faces on the models in the billboard photographs, selling American dreams. Glamour? Afro-Sheen products. Happy families? Contemporary African-American families enjoy a breakfast of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes together.

So it’s black now. The area where Trumbo lived those eight years of his life when he worked at the bakery has, in the parlance of northern cities, “changed over.” Here we are on the sprawling south side of Los Angeles. It is placid enough now, however, as you turn up West 55th Street from Budlong. There is something of the small-town neighborhood about the street. It is a sleepy, palm-lined drive that looks much the same as it must have in 1933 when the Trumbos lived there last. There is a little gabled house over the garage in back, almost in the Swiss style, with its red-brick chimney and single gable overhanging the garage door. That’s where the Trumbos lived, in three rooms—mother and daughters in the big bedroom and Dalton in the small one, with one room left in which to cook, eat, sew, and sit. It seemed tight to them then, just as it probably does to the people who live there now. Poverty in Los Angeles is masked by sunlight, hidden behind palm trees and blooming blossoms. And though it is not nearly as evident as it is on, say, the south side of Chicago, it is there all the same. The Trumbos were well acquainted with poverty when they lived here on 55th Street. The present residents probably know it even more intimately.

I had seen the inside of the place in Trumbo’s movie, Johnny Got His Gun. He took the company on location and filmed right here where he and the family had lived all those years. No, there was nothing more to be seen here, and there were no questions to be asked. I started the car and headed back for the Harbor Freeway which would take me toward downtown Los Angeles. Emerging from the underpass, with the sound of cars blowing by above me, I come upon the site which my street map tells me is an important one to this narrative. But it doesn’t look quite as it should. Pulling up to the curb at the northwest corner, I get out and check the street sign. Yes, 2nd and Beaudry. This is where the Davis Perfection Bakery was located during the years when Dalton Trumbo worked there. But there is no bakery here. A chain-link fence surrounds the entire area, and a sign affixed to it says that the complex is a facility of the Los Angeles Water and Power Company. The large factory-like building closest to the corner is the one in which the bakery was located. It seems to be used today as an equipment warehouse.

Satisfied, I climb back into the car and head toward Hollywood, deciding to drive through town rather than resort to the freeway. The neighborhood surrounding 2nd and Beaudry is desolate today and utterly crummy. In the years when Trumbo was here, it was a lot worse.

“The atmosphere at the bakery was remarkable. This was during Prohibition, and there was a very corrupt police force. Cops used to constantly come in there, and we’d give them bread and cakes to keep them happy and they gave us whiskey. And it was quite customary for cops to have girls. The girl would be on probation, and as a matter of fact a cop would set her up and trap her, and would put her in a hotel room to do business for him. That way the cops—a lot of them—had strings of girls, and there was no way to get away. If a girl tried, bang! the cop has her for prostitution—and she would be back in for another one hundred and eighty days, plus ninety on probation—and back again at the mercy of the cop who had arrested her. One of the policemen used to pass out cards, entitling the bearer to a complimentary lay with one of his girls. He would offer this around, you know, as you would treat somebody to a drink.

“The despair of that particular area—honky-tonks, whorehouses, everyone scrounging, scrambling—well, it was just beyond belief. There was real Depression there. We would give away our hard, two-day-old bread. Two or three men would stand on the ramp, handing the stuff out, and there would be a line three wide—for a block and a half. Kind of a hopeless state.”

It was quite an education for Trumbo. If we remember the young man who had won the Western Slope Rhetorical Meet only a few years earlier with a high-minded oration entitled “Service,” and imagine him thrust into the sort of environment he has just described, it is not surprising that what emerged from it all was a radical. The first overt indication he gave of the direction he was headed in came when he led a successful strike of key employees in the shipping department for better pay. As he sized the situation up, there was no way an ordinary strike would work. If they began negotiations and gave notice beforehand of their intention to strike, they would all simply be fired and replaced—so they would have to arrange it so they couldn’t be replaced. They chose their night, and at fifteen-minute intervals, one of four of them went into the office and quit—walked out, leaving word that they would be over at a nearby coffee shop if the night manager wished to discuss the matter further. Well, they had him where they wanted him: he was simply not going to get out those perishable baked goods without their help, and they knew it. So he came over to the coffee shop and agreed to hire the four back at a substantial increase in pay. It was an “elite strike,” Trumbo admitted, one that really only benefited the four key employees in the shipping department. But, as it turned out, it was a beginning.

Years after he had left it, he used to go back to the bakery—partly to renew old acquaintances, and partly, too, to bring friends there (as he would do five, six, and seven years after he had left) and show them what he had come from. The bakery was his bona fides, the only credentials he need show to prove who he was and why he was.

“There was a fellow named Red who worked there, who was primarily evil—but imaginative. I don’t know where he came from. And we had a young man who came in to work, and the first mistake he made was to brag about how beautiful his wife was. Naturally, for a night shift worker, that’s a stupid thing, because ultimately somebody tested him out about his wife. He didn’t know that, though. Then his mother-in-law got arrested for vag-lewd [lewd-vagrant—soliciting], and that required fifty dollars’ bail. This was a hell of a problem for him, and we were all interested in that problem. And Red, the fellow I mentioned, finally said, ‘Well, we might be able to raise ten bucks of it.’ The idea was, he had a little game for the young man, if he were foolish enough to play—that he could masturbate and come in three minutes or something of the sort. They got a pot of money together. They got two cops to act as judges, and they went up into the locker room—and he made it. His name was Larry, and after that he was called Larrupin’ Larry. Well, he was still short of money to get his poor mother-in-law out of the vag-lewd charge, and Red came up with another idea that Blackie, an ex-lumberjack who worked at the bakery, would cornhole him. They could get thirty bucks for that. That would do the job. Well, Larry said it was all right with him, so Red went to Blackie and offered to pay him out of the pot, but Blackie said, ‘Hell, I’ll do it for nothing. Certainly.’ They went to the cops, and the cops themselves were putting up money by this time. Word got upstairs, and before that contest was held, Larrupin’ Larry was fired. Hence, the whole enterprise fell through.

“This, you see, was the time, the place, the period, the thing. Amazing. How can I account for it? At least this was something interesting to get us through the day—like the bread races we used to have. And then, of course, there was the drinking, which was really heavy drinking—wild, sodden, mad drinking on a night off. There wasn’t an excuse for that. It was just… the way it was then.”

It was all this that he sought to escape through his writing. The act of writing itself gave him an outlet for the very real pressures of resentment and frustration that welled up inside him. And it was only by achieving some degree of success with his writing that he thought it possible to escape this trap that had closed around him: “Sometimes I would walk to the bakery full of sheer horror, feeling, ‘Well, here I am. This is the way it will always be.’ By this time, you see, I was approaching thirty. And I was full of just a frantic determination to get out.”

His sense of desperation, fed by the atmosphere of wild lawlessness inside the bakery and in the squalid area around it, led him to try things, crazy things, he would not otherwise have done. There was the heavy drinking, of course—but that was the least of it: “Almost everything you did was criminal one way or another. I was part of the crime. Not only were you yourself stealing bread and cakes, but you were also passing them out to the cops because it was the bakery’s policy. The company had two hundred trucks on the streets, and they didn’t want to have to put up with tickets, so they wanted to keep the cops happy, no matter what it took. So we were all involved with crime in one way or another. And that brings me to what I think was the most horrifying part of my life.”

He began kiting checks. It all started, as such episodes do, in a modest enough way. He had an immediate need one day for about fifty dollars, and so, even though he knew he didn’t have sufficient funds to cover it in his Bank of America account, he wrote a check for that amount and cashed it at the cashier’s window of the bakery. At that time it would take from three to four days for a check to clear, and he must have felt that he would have money enough from some source or other in the interim to cover the check. But at the end of three days no money had come in, and so he was forced to cash another check for fifty dollars at the bakery and deposit the money from that one in the bank in order to cover the first check. And then he continued to do it again and again, week after week, keeping the same fictitious fifty dollars floating between the bakery and the bank. It wasn’t easy. The bakery cashier, who did all his business with drivers checking in at the end of the day, didn’t open his window until two o’clock in the afternoon, and the bank, located near Trumbo’s home on 55th Street, closed at three. On days when he had to cover a check—two or three times a week—he would have to take the streetcar in to the bakery, cash a check as soon as the cashier opened for business, and take the streetcar back to the bank to make his deposit within the hour. Then he would return to the bakery to start work as an estimator. Of course on such a schedule as this, there was always the lurking terror: What if the streetcar broke down? What if he failed to make it from the bakery to the bank within the hour? But somehow such threats failed to deter him. Not only that, but human nature being what it is, and a man’s reach inevitably exceeding his grasp, that floating fifty dollars was soon eighty dollars, and up and up, and before he quite knew what had happened, it was two hundred fifty dollars he was keeping in the air. Quite a sum in the Depression.

It went on that way for about three years. The episode began sometime in 1930, and it ended, with a bang, in 1933. The bang was provided quite unexpectedly by President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he declared the bank holiday on March 6, 1933, and stopped the machinery of banking. That meant, as Trumbo well knew, “that every check would come home to rest at its final destination.” He was certain to be discovered and was desperate.

There was, as he saw it, only one hope. The parents of one of his high school friends, Jim Latimer,* from whom he had borrowed money in the past, happened to be vacationing in the Los Angeles area. They were quite well-to-do, and, he felt, might take pity on him. As long as the bank holiday held, he knew he would be all right. The trouble would begin when the checks had returned—and he knew that if they caught up with him, it would be very bad for the cashier at the bakery, too. And so, since there was only one chance, he took it: on March 10 he traveled on the Inter-Urban streetcar line out to where the Latimers were staying. He talked to the two of them, telling the whole story. Mr. Latimer really didn’t believe it; he thought Trumbo might have made the whole story up. But Mrs. Latimer did believe him and loaned him the money.

Trumbo remembered boarding the Inter-Urban Railway and starting back to the city in kind of a daze: he wouldn’t go to jail; it was as simple as that. He remembered looking out the window, as the streetcar pulled past a tall building on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and as he watched it, the building began to disintegrate before his eyes. It was only moments after that that he felt the first shocks of the Long Beach earthquake of March 10, 1933.

“First the banks closed,” he remembered, “and then there was the earthquake. And people said, ‘Well, the banks are open at last,’ because the windows were all broken. It was interesting the way the people took the bank closing. There was a feeling almost of relief: ‘Now nobody has any money!’ You see, if you have a hundred thousand dollars and I haven’t got anything, then I’m not comfortable about you; I need some of that. But if nobody has anything, then there is that feeling of relief, of equality. Well, nobody had any money. I know Studs Terkel and that was a fine book of interviews on the Depression he did, Hard Times. But there was one aspect of the Depression experience that none of the people in his book commented on, which was that you were no longer ashamed of not having any money. It was a very nice thing. You know, we lived on the alley on 55th, and in front of us lived a man with his wife and two or three children, and they were on the government support. They got salt pork, and some ham, and a lot of beans. Well, I would bring home bread and rolls, cakes and pies from the bakery. We would exchange without the slightest feeling of embarrassment. And I would swipe these goods from the bakery without the slightest feeling of being a thief. I always honored the biblical injunction that he who labored in the vineyard was entitled to the fruits thereof, or some proportion.”

The check-kiting episode, though it may have caused him the greatest terror, was not his only venture on the wrong side of the law, nor was it probably the most dangerous to him. He became a bootlegger, as well. Whiskey was sold then from five-gallon cans and doled out from them. Going on the rounds, one speakeasy might be a two-gallon stop and the next a three-gallon stop. Trumbo’s bootlegging kit included, in addition to the whiskey, a hydrometer, for testing the whiskey, and a fifty-dollar bail bond if worse should come to worst. He worked for “a man at the drugstore” who worked, indirectly, for one of the big guys.

Trumbo would go to a speakeasy and order whiskey, sample it, and say loudly, “This stuff is no good.” He would then pull out his own bottle, and, with a lot of people around, he would say even louder, “Taste this.” The owner would taste it, and would admit it was better—because what he was offering was better stuff. Trumbo would take out the hydrometer, which he always carried with him as an important part of his sales kit, and on the spot he would make a comparison test on alcoholic content, his brand versus the house brand. That would make quite an impression on the customers. In this way, in certain places, he could get them to switch to what he was selling because the customers who were present and had watched his pitch would demand that the owner give Trumbo’s booze a try. It wasn’t often he was able to effect this because, as he said, “there were other, more lethal ways of preventing a switch.” But he could occasionally pull it off, and when he did he was able to get five dollars per week per can on what he sold. At one time he was making up to sixty dollars per week on his bootlegging efforts alone.

He was doing well for himself. Things were looking up. It began to seem for a while as though bootlegging might provide a way out of the bakery—that is, it seemed so until one night when he visited the drugstore that kept him supplied and paid him off, and he found out what had happened that day on Aliso Street, just four blocks from the bakery. There was a unique setup there. Cars would line up at a grilled manhole cover. Pulling up beside it, the driver would open the door, put two dollars down through the grill opening, and in return have a pint of whiskey pushed up at him. That morning, however, a car door had swung open, and instead of two dollars, six bullets had been pumped through the manhole cover. “Louie and the other guy,” the two who ran the operation, were both dead. Competition had suddenly gotten very tough, and the druggist was scared. He opted out of the business—and that ended Trumbo’s career as a bootlegger.

It proved to be the beginning of his career as a writer. He used his experience as a bootlegger as the basis for an article that he did for Vanity Fair. The piece, which appeared in June 1932, while he was still working at the bakery, is not by any means the sort of raw, slice-of-life account you might expect from someone writing from firsthand experience of the racket. That, for one thing, was not the style or tone Vanity Fair had established as its own—which was as sophisticated and above-it-all as it was possible for a magazine to be in that bottom year of the Depression. And Trumbo’s article—“Bootlegging for Junior,” as it was called—conformed perfectly to the magazine’s established style. It is in the nature of a travesty, a learned discourse on the economics and techniques of bootlegging written in prose so ornate, highfalutin, and grandiloquent that it satirizes not just the subject at hand, but in the end, itself as well. The keenest touch of irony in it, however, was not the disproportion of style to subject, but rather the fact that it was written by Trumbo in so decorous a manner between squalorous stretches in the bakery, and under the daily threat of disclosure for his check-kiting activities.

Vanity Fair was delighted with the piece. After it had been accepted, Trumbo received a letter from Frank Crowninshield, the editor, telling him that an associate editor, Clare Boothe Brokaw, would be coming to Los Angeles soon, and if he would supply his phone number, she would contact him when she arrived. Crowninshield said Mrs. Brokaw would then have an opportunity to discuss other article possibilities with him. That, of course, Trumbo did, but then promptly forgot about it, probably supposing she would never really call. But she did. One morning not long afterward, a call came when he was sound asleep, having just come off the night shift at the bakery. He was called to the telephone by his mother, and the woman at the other end of the line, identifying herself as Clare Boothe Brokaw, invited him to lunch at a downtown hotel. He groggily accepted.

Clare Boothe Brokaw, of course, was to become Clare Boothe Luce. She would eventually blossom forth as syndicated columnist, Broadway playwright, the queen of a media empire, congresswoman and politician, and finally an ambassador. At that time, although only a hard-driving and relentlessly climbing editor on Vanity Fair, she was already beginning to make her mark. By all accounts, she was a remarkable woman—clever, quick, beautiful, and with an aura of charm about her that men found simply irresistible. Trumbo responded to that charm and beauty. To him, she seemed the very epitome of glamour. “She was,” he recalled, “the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.”

He in turn looked to her like the sort of contributor they needed out in Los Angeles, one who could write about Hollywood from the inside: “They assumed I knew something about movies, and I had never been inside a studio. I knew nothing about motion pictures. To fake it for an hour and a half, as I did, with Clare Boothe Brokaw was not easy. It was an appalling task. But somehow I pulled it off, or I tried, because it meant to me that I might do more articles for them.”

As it happened, though, he did no other pieces for Vanity Fair. What that meeting did for him, however, was to bring home to him the possibilities inherent in motion pictures as a field of immense potential for a writer. When he had thought of himself in that way before, it had always been as a writer of books, of novels, of stories. But here was a whole field that needed writing about, that needed writing pure and simple. His interest in movies before had been only as a member of the audience. Now he began thinking otherwise.