CHAPTER FOUR
BEGINNING AS A WRITER
Originally, Dalton Trumbo had come to the attention of Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield as the author of an article that was at least ostensibly about the movies, which was why Clare Boothe Brokaw quite reasonably assumed some knowledge on his part. George Jean Nathan had earlier published a piece in the magazine that was really no more than his standard highbrow jeer at the movies and the garish culture they had spawned in Hollywood (“rhinestone-studded swimming pools,” etc.). Trumbo had bravely taken him on and had written a rebuttal which he submitted to a little magazine published in Los Angeles, The Film Spectator. It was accepted. Except for newspaper articles in Colorado, “An Appeal to George Jean,” as it was titled when it appeared in January 1931, was Trumbo’s first published work. It is a bit of fluff, bantering and facetious in tone, no more a serious defense of the movies than Nathan’s attack was to be taken seriously. What it demonstrated most convincingly was that James Dalton Trumbo, as he signed the article, was a young man who had great resources of wit and a way with language. Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair took notice when Trumbo sent a copy of the article to him. So, too, certainly, did Welford Beaton, editor of The Film Spectator. Trumbo looked to him like a good prospect as a steady contributor.
Beaton, a bouncy, enthusiastic movie critic of considerable erudition, ran what was then the only film journal on the West Coast. He took an immediate liking to Trumbo and made it clear he wanted him to do as much writing for the magazine as his work at the bakery would permit. In subsequent issues under the byline of James Dalton Trumbo appeared an appreciation of Charlie Chaplin and reviews of a number of films. Having caught the drift from Clare Booth Brokaw—this was what they were interested in—Trumbo resolved to learn as much as he could as quickly as he could about the movies. Welford Beaton, an intelligent and enthusiastic critic, proved an apt schoolmaster.
Beaton came to count on him as a reviewer more and more and soon had his young protégé doing the sort of odd-job editorial work that he himself never seemed to have time for. Finally, in 1933, right after the successful solution of his check-kiting problems, Trumbo was asked by Beaton if he would like to come on full-time at the Spectator. “I’ll carry you on the books at fifty dollars a week,” Beaton told him. “How does that sound to you?”
How did it sound? It sounded like something he had waited eight years to hear. It meant he would be able to leave the bakery at last. He would be making enough to contribute the major share to the support of the family, as he had been doing right along while working at the bakery. And best of all, he would be earning that money as a writer.
And so Dalton Trumbo at last quit the bakery and took the job as associate editor of the Hollywood Spectator.* It was only then that he found out just what shaky financial condition the magazine was in. “The first week passed,” he remembered, “and I got my first paycheck—but it was only for thirty-five dollars. I went to Beaton and said, ‘Look, you said you’d pay me fifty dollars—what about this?’ And I waved the check at him.
“‘Now wait a minute,’ Beaton replied just as cheerfully as you please, ‘I said I’d put you on the books for fifty. All I’ve got for you this week is thirty-five.’”
And it was true! He sat down with Trumbo, showed him the figures, and had no difficulty convincing him that that amount was all that was available for his paycheck. Perhaps next week—maybe it would go better then. Or the week after that.
Sometimes there was enough left over from the magazine’s absolutely necessary expenses for Trumbo to be paid his full salary, and sometimes there wasn’t. It was as simple as that. However, this did not keep Welford Beaton from thinking big. He decided his associate editor should have a car in order to get around to screenings and interviews and make trips to the printer. And so once when he hit a good week, Beaton scraped together one hundred dollars for a down payment and put it on a car for Trumbo. The young associate editor used it for a while, came to depend on it, then walked out of the house one morning to find the car gone from where he had parked it the night before. It had been repossessed.
“I came to him about the auto, and he shrugged it off. He said, ‘Well, you see, you didn’t have an automobile, and then you had one for several months—and that was good.’ He said, ‘The man who sold the auto had one he wanted to sell, and he did—and that was good. And the magazine needed it and got the use of it—and that was good. And now,’ he said, ‘we won’t have to pay any more on it—and that is good for me. So you see? Only good came out of the entire affair.’ He was a marvelous man.”
Ultimately, of course, the magazine folded. But by that time, Trumbo was long gone. Welford Beaton had advanced him in title to managing editor but, needless to say, at no increase in salary. Trumbo worked for him for just about a year. In fact, it was because Beaton could no longer even pay him as meagerly and irregularly as he had been that he was forced to let him go.
The problem then, of course—for Trumbo was still supporting his mother and two sisters—was how he might earn money enough by writing so that he need not return to the bakery or to some other dead-end job. It seemed it might be possible. He was just beginning to sell fiction. His first published story, “The Wolcott Case,” came out in International Detective Magazine late in 1933. It was nothing special, the story of a kidnaping with heavy vigilante overtones. He would afterward shrug it off as a piece of “Fascist crap.” Nevertheless, he was concentrating on fiction, still sure that this was the kind of writing he wanted to do—that he was really meant to be a novelist. He now also had an outline for a new novel, one in which he might make use of his Grand Junction material. This would be less personal—not really autobiographical at all—but it would provide a focus on the town as a social entity, an approach that interested him more and more. And so he felt it was important to him to keep writing, to continue to think of himself as a writer, and not give in and once more become a slavey at the bakery.
The immediate solution to his problem came from an unexpected source. He came in contact with an Austrian nobleman living in Hollywood, one Baron Friedrich von Reichenberg, who was much in need of “editorial assistance” in the preparation of a biography of Metternich. Trumbo became the Baron’s ghost writer. There was no doubt the man was an authority on the leading statesman of the Hapsburg dynasty; von Reichenberg simply could not organize the mountain of material he had collected and present it in comprehensible English prose; that, it turned out, was to be the job of his young editorial assistant.
“I didn’t know it then” said Trumbo, “but I had found my way into a real nest of Nazis. One or two of the Baron’s friends, who used to visit him at his apartment on Fountain Avenue just below Sunset Boulevard, were indicted later on. Hitler had just come into power. The Baron himself didn’t like Hitler too much—there was a certain aristocratic squeamishness involved there and also the fact that he was an Austrian. But his friends loved Hitler—anti-Semites all. I stayed in contact with the Baron for quite some time after the book was finished. As anti-German sentiment grew, he became de Reichenberg instead of von. And during the war, as I recall, he was interned up in Canada. That was actually the last I ever heard of him.”
Trumbo finished the book in six weeks’ time. Eventually, it was published in England as Metternich in Love and War. In his preface, Friedrich von Reichenberg thanked his young friend James Dalton Trumbo for “editorial assistance,” a formula which should be familiar to anyone who has done any ghost writing. Trumbo was paid in full by the Baron and that was the end of that. By the middle of 1934, he badly needed another job.
It was the Depression, after all. The economic pressures on the Trumbo family, as on everyone else in those grim days, were real, brutal, and relentless. And for him, especially, having now had a glimpse of that world of “rhinestone-studded swimming pools” that George Jean Nathan had satirized so scathingly, the thought of joining the breadlines must have seemed a most bitter prospect. Through his work on the Hollywood Spectator and the contacts he had made in the film world, he knew there was money to be made there—money, in fact, was being made by young men far less talented and less prepossessing than he. The better he came to know the ins and outs of Hollywood (a surprising number of his early pieces for the Spectator deal specifically with the economics of the movie industry), the more his taste for luxury must have grown, and the more keenly aware he must have become that a comparative fortune awaited him. There were riches in the midst of overwhelming poverty; he had now seen both at first hand. And he must have been torn somewhat between indignation at this state of affairs and an eager desire to dip in for his share.
Things were still hard at home for the Trumbo family. They had by then moved from the alley house off 55th Street to a duplex on Cahuenga, a step up of sorts. But ever since Dalton had left the bakery, money had been coming in less regularly than before, while at the same time family expenses were spiraling up and up. Elizabeth was in high school, and Catherine was in junior college. Maud Trumbo continued as a seamstress, working for various Hollywood dressmakers and doing special jobs (ruffles were her specialty) for movie actresses, Norma Talmadge and Constance Bennett among them. But again, the major financial burden fell on Dalton. When they needed money, it was up to him to get it any way he could—and somehow he always came through, though at times the means he used were rather irregular. His sister Catherine remembered a time, for instance, when she badly needed ten dollars to buy a new dress for a dance. She went to him, and he said he would get it for her. He went out and came back a little over an hour later with that amount and a bit more. She asked rather fearfully how he had come by it, and he assured her it was all right: he had found a crap game, come in lucky, and got out quickly.
Perhaps Tolstoy was only half-right. Not only are happy families all alike, but members of one unhappy family also seem to strain and rub against one another in just about the same way as do those in the next. Dalton and Maud Trumbo, his mother, had often fought across the generations over politics. Just as Maud had crossed over and become a Republican when Orus Trumbo went for Woodrow Wilson and became a Democrat (in order—she made no secret of it—to cancel out her husband’s vote), so Dalton had followed his father’s lead and voted Democrat in the first presidential election after reaching his majority. As it happened, that ballot went for Al Smith in 1928, the “happy warrior,” the first Catholic ever to run for president. And didn’t their Christian Scientist household rock during that campaign! Trumbo admitted it took quite an act of will for him to cast that ballot, for he had, he says, held on to his “populist anti-Catholicism many years too long.” (For that matter, Maud Trumbo eventually came around: she voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, unable to bring herself to vote for a man who sat on the congressional committee that had sent her son to prison.) Theirs was an intensely political household. The Trumbos not only exercised their franchise in every election—national, state, county, and municipal—but all of them argued the issues and were called upon to defend their choices. Things reached a pitch with the coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the advent of the New Deal. Families all over America split along generational lines and took opposing positions. As the Depression deepened, so did the rifts between parents and children over “that man in the White House.” The Trumbos were no different from others in this.
They all remembered the fights. I talked to Dalton’s two sisters on the same summer evening and found them both regretful that the rancor and contentiousness were what they recalled from that time. Everybody, after all, wants to believe his was a happy home. Elizabeth Baskerville and Catherine Baldwin lived within a few miles of one another on the same long hill, in Altadena and Pasadena, respectively. I visited them separately in their homes and found them quite different, each more like Dalton than like one another. But because they lived so close, the two sisters saw a good deal of each other and got along quite well. They saw Dalton less often but stayed in close communication by telephone, calling back and forth at least once a week, more often should the occasion arise. They were still very much a family. The mutual claim they shared existed between them, almost unnoticed and never referred to. All the same, you sensed it was there.
Elizabeth resembles Dalton physically, both of them favoring their mother. She is a small, pretty woman in her late fifties—the baby of the family, as the rest reckon it. Coming back to California, as she did, at the age of eight, her memories of Grand Junction are rather dim. She grew up in Los Angeles and considers it home: “We have two grown daughters living out of the state, up in Oregon and Washington,” she tells me. “And criminy, I don’t know, it’s beautiful up there, but I’d hate to leave California. It’s so interesting politically and socially. I wouldn’t like being where everyone who lived around me was alike, the way they are up there.”
Settled in the comfortable living room of the hilltop house where she lives with her husband in Altadena, I ask Elizabeth about Dalton’s position in the family following the death of their father.
“Well, it was hard on him, of course,” she replies. “It was hard on all of us. But there was no doubt when I was growing up that he was the dominant force in the family—not by giving orders or giving us advice or any of that—but just because it was always assumed he was going to be somebody important. We were quiet during the day because it was understood Dalton had to get his sleep while he was working in the bakery. And when he got up, we would clean his room for him.”
“This must have come from your mother, somehow,” I suggest.
“Yes, she knew she had a special child in him, and I suppose she communicated that to us. Catherine and I were there to be educated and cared for. Dalton was different, though—he had a special talent. He had to do his thing. That was what Mother got across to us, though we recognized it, too.”
“Still, your mother didn’t exactly bow to his will, did she? There were fights, weren’t there?”
“Oh, there were fights between them, all right. Believe me, there were. It seemed for a while as though there would never be an end to them. I think Mother thought he was drinking—and he was. And she didn’t like the girls he ran around with, either.
“I don’t know. When you look back, you ask yourself what the cause of all of it was, and there were so many things involved. Things were hard then for all of us. Money was such a problem for a long, long while. We were dependent on him and must have been an awful burden. But he did take care of us all. He took his responsibilities very seriously back then—and still does. He sent me to UCLA a couple of years, but then I got impatient and cut out and went to business school at Woodbury, here in Los Angeles. I went out and got a job then, and so I was off his back. I continued to live with Mother, but I wasn’t dependent on him any longer. Then of course I got married when I was twenty-four.”
It is funny. As I sit listening to her, watching her, that youngest Trumbo daughter, the kid sister, is somehow there before me in the living room—more real, more tangible than the woman, nearly sixty, who is telling me about her. So often we are frozen in the roles in which our families cast us. Elizabeth Baskerville is a kid sister still, quiet, retiring, like Dalton physically yet much less assertive than he. It is remarkable. Her brother must have seemed an almost overwhelming personality to her then.
“You said Dalton was the dominant force in the family,” I begin.
“Well, did he wield any direct influence on you? What did he talk about? Did he give orders?”
“He certainly never ordered us around, Catherine and me. He would never have done that, never even have tried. But I think, especially with me, he tried to open up our minds. Dalton talked ideas at home. For instance, now they talk about women’s lib, but that was old stuff to us. I was not raised in a household where I felt discriminated against because I was a girl. We talked all that through. He was for equality. No, we knew discrimination of any sort was wrong—so wrong that we didn’t even know who was discriminated against, how they were different. Why, I was fairly old before I even knew what a Jew was.
“I’d say these feelings and this atmosphere came from Mother, too. She was always fair. She really believed in justice. That was why that Hollywood Ten business was so hard on her. We sort of drew together as a family. I think if you talk to Catherine about all this she’ll tell you just about the same thing. She’s got her own viewpoint, though.”
“What’s she like?” I ask.
“Catherine? She’s a feistier person than I am. She made waves, too, when she was young, just like Dalton did. She was going out with boys Mother didn’t approve of. And of course she was much closer to Dalton’s age and would talk back to both of them.”
“Feisty” was Elizabeth’s word for her sister, and I must say it seemed appropriate, for you don’t talk to Catherine Baldwin for very long before you perceive in her a certain tough, scrappy quality. Physically she is quite unlike her brother. There is an angular quality to her appearance, just as there is to her personality. In this—a certain undercurrent of contentiousness in her conversation, a certain tartness in her expression—she resembles Dalton most. Seven years his junior, she was nevertheless old enough to come into conflict with him sharply and often over the years they were growing up together. Things never settled down completely between them. There was always that tension, the slight charge to their relationship that is so often there between the first and second child in any family. Until fairly recently, their tempers had occasionally flared at one another. I caught hints of prolonged trouble between Dalton and Catherine back sometime in the early sixties. But they are on good terms when we meet.
Her house, down the hill from her younger sister’s, on a quiet Pasadena side street, is furnished with a certain bold flair. Catherine seems to be a woman who knows her own mind. Elizabeth had offered me a soft drink; Catherine gives me a tall, dangerously brimming glass of Scotch.
“… You’ve got to remember that drinking, smoking, anything like that was a terribly immoral thing at our house because of the Christian Science thing. This conflict between Dalton and Mother went way back to Grand Junction. I can remember when we lived back there, Mother came in and found crumbs of tobacco in the pockets of his pants. Then she and Dad had a long, very concerned conversation about it. A kid came up to me there one day and said that Dalton smoked. I said that that was a lie, then one day I saw him out on the street with a cigarette in his mouth, and I was horrified.”
Catherine is puffing all the while on a cigarette herself and sipping at a drink as she continues on Dalton’s conflicts with his mother: “Their battles about his drinking continued until Dalton moved out. I remember when we were living in the house on 55th Street. One night Dalton came weaving and stumbling up the stairs, and I ran out to him to keep Mother away from him. I got him into his room, but Mother was in hot pursuit, and she was there before I could shut the door. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ I told her. And just to prove it was so, Dalton stood up to pull off a sock and fell flat on his face.”
That was how it went between Dalton and his mother. The two of them never resolved that particular issue; they simply managed, after years had gone by and events separated them, to ignore it. In her personal conduct, Maud Trumbo was quite conservative, the very picture of a lady. Catherine can remember only one friend of her mother’s there in Los Angeles who ever called her by her first name, a woman named Hattie Bell. The two were Daughters of the Confederacy together. (Remember that the Tillerys were from Missouri; Maud Trumbo herself had been born in St. Joseph and her grandfather had ridden with Morgan.)
“I guess you could say that Dalton and Mother maintained a sort of love-hate relationship for years and years,” Catherine comments. “She was so proud of him because actually all the things he was doing—the writing and all—she had wanted to do herself. All of us believed he would write and write successfully, and of course that’s just what happened.
“All this will give you some idea why we were so furious at what happened in 1947—the hearings and the blacklist and all. It was an awful shock for us, those damned trials back in Washington—we listened to them on the radio. We were so infuriated at how it was handled. You know, I lost one job because of it. I was at Republic, a dialogue director and a script girl, but when the blacklist started, just being Dalton Trumbo’s sister was enough to lose me my job. The name itself was poison around town for a long time. Frankly, I’m glad to be out of the studios, though I loved working in movies while I was at it. I loved working on the set.”
I ask her about her relationship with Dalton as she was growing up. “Back on 55th Street, you mean? Oh, up and down, you know. Something I never forgave Dalton for, though, was that he was a terrible tease. Whenever he thought I was getting too carried away with my romances, he’d sit down at the piano and he’d play ‘King for a Day’ very soulfully. Real soap opera music. And in particular situations he’d hum the tune just to needle me. Oh, I hated it. I remember once I had a date with a lieutenant or a captain in the army. I can’t even remember much about him now, but I was terribly impressed then. We were sitting down in his car beneath Dalton’s bedroom, and we were necking. Dalton made as if to call Mother, then he leaned out the window with this fake gun we had around the house—it was a prop for a play or something, I forget. Anyway, Dalton leaned out the window with it and said, ‘If you don’t come in this minute, Catherine, I’ll shoot!’ Well, the captain wasted no time getting away then, and I never saw him again. He believed Dalton!”
I laugh. She laughs. It is funny. But she ends with a sigh and a shake of her head. “I guess I did my share of teasing, too,” she concedes. “The first time I realized how difficult it was to write and how hard it was to take criticism was once when I came upon him when he was typing up a story to send out to a magazine. I grabbed it up and started reading it, and I didn’t like the beginning of it at all. I began acting it out, making fun of it, burlesquing it, and I told him what I thought was wrong with it. It made him just livid. He rushed out of the house in a rage. Next day I happened to check his typewriter, and I found there was a note to me on it. ‘For your information,’ he wrote, ‘your criticism of the story was right, and I have rewritten accordingly. Now please go to hell.’”
Catherine sighs and again wearily shakes her head, remembering. “I think back on that now, and I ask myself how I could have been so brutal?”
Trumbo knew his share of frustrations. At that point in his life, at the age of twenty-eight and in the midst of the Depression, he was once more casting about for a job. It must have seemed to him then that he really had very little to show for the ambitions that had kept him going so long. After all those years of writing—six novels finished, unpublished, lying in the bureau drawer!—the only substantial piece of work of his which was to see print was the biography of Metternich he had just finished for the Baron. And that, of course, would appear under von Reichenberg’s name. Trumbo was by then positively starving for recognition.
And he had begun to suspect, more than just hope, that it might finally be coming his way. He was at that time finishing up what would be his first published novel, Eclipse. He believed in it as he had not in the others he had written before. He had been working steadily at the manuscript, watching it grow, since just after he had left the bakery. For the first time in writing fiction he felt completely in control of his material. This was to be a long novel, one that would focus on a single key figure in the town of Grand Junction, a character through whom it would be possible to view the entire town, examining its social structure at a number of different levels. He had to get a job so he could finish the book.
Help came from a man named Frank Daugherty whom he had met while with the Hollywood Spectator. Daugherty had written for the magazine himself but worked in the Warner Bros. story department. During a chance meeting Trumbo mentioned to him that he was looking for work, and Daugherty, who knew and liked his writing on the Spectator, urged him to come up to the studio. He would, he promised, put in a word for him where he worked. Daugherty did just that. Trumbo was hired in the summer of 1934 as a reader in the story department at a good, steady thirty-five dollars a week. It wasn’t much. On good weeks at the Spectator even Welford Beaton had paid him better. Still, it was a way to get on with the work he considered most important. Not for a moment did he suspect—or even wish—that he was beginning a career in films.
Alice Hunter remembers him from those early days in the Warners story department. Then Alice Goldberg, she is now Mrs. Ian McLellan Hunter, the wife of a close friend of Trumbo’s, herself a friend and the one person in the industry who has known him longest: “He was the kind of person you noticed immediately. The first day Trumbo came in it turned out he didn’t even have money for lunch. He had been working at the bakery, I remember. He talked about that then, talked about it a lot. Even in the story department he was different from everybody else. There was a quickness and a drive to him, and he had such an original turn of mind. He was the most industrious person I ever knew. He was a writer—he talked about that, too—and he knew he would be successful.”
A reader in the story department of a major studio may only have had his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, but he was nevertheless in an important position. The job took some writing ability, but still more literary judgment. Novels, plays, literary properties of all kinds were submitted to the motion picture company’s story department to be considered for purchase as the basis of film adaptation. The reader in the story department went through the material, judging it for literary quality and its movie potential, and then he wrote his report, a synopsis, and a comment. If he liked the material and recommended that it be considered further, his report might go three or four pages—otherwise, only a page was needed. One of the first books Trumbo remembers reading and reporting on there in Warner Bros. story department was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. “I wrote a glowing recommendation for it,” he says, “but of course they didn’t buy it.”
It was in the early fall of 1934, while he was working in the Warners story department, writing early mornings and the evenings, that he completed Eclipse. He sent it out once on his own to Dodd, Mead, and had it rejected; then, thinking he might do better with help, he wrote to O. O. McIntyre, a syndicated newspaper columnist with the New York Evening Mail, who was a remote cousin of his. Trumbo pointed out the relationship and quickly made it clear he was only writing for advice. He asked if McIntyre could suggest an agent who might be suitable to handle a novel he had just completed. McIntyre wrote back promptly suggesting Curtis Brown, Ltd. Trumbo wrote to George Bye of that agency, who declined but in turn recommended that he try Elsie McKeogh. She had recently formed her own agency, Bye explained, and might be on the lookout for clients. It turned out that she would be pleased to take a look at Eclipse, and subsequently, that she would be delighted to take him on as a client. Thus began a very congenial author-agent relationship that lasted twenty-one years and ended only with the death of Mrs. McKeogh in 1955.
She offered the novel to a couple of American publishers, then heard that Lovat Dickson in England was beginning operations as a book publisher and was looking for manuscripts there. Dickson, born Australian and raised Canadian, had emigrated to London and had made quite a splash there as the editor of the Fortnightly Review. She sent him the manuscript, reasoning (erroneously) that it would be easier to sell Eclipse to an American publisher if it had already been accepted by an English one. Since Dickson was more or less a Canadian, it seemed likely to her that he would be receptive to young American authors. And so he was.
In a letter dated December 12, 1934, Elsie McKeogh communicated Lovat Dickson’s offer to publish Eclipse to Trumbo, suggesting that if he accepted she thought she could swing a sale to Macmillan in the United States. Dalton Trumbo never thought twice about it. He wired his acceptance, then followed that up with this letter to her on Warner Bros. stationery, dated December 15, 1934:
My Dear Miss McKeogh:
I am, of course, awfully pleased that Mr. Dickson is such a courageous gambler; and needless to say I hope his example will inspire Macmillans to similar daring. As I stated in my wire, I am willing to abide by any decision you make in marketing Eclipse, and you may govern yourself accordingly.…
Because my grandfather took a vigorous part in the building of the portion of Colorado which the story deals with, I should like to add a dedication to the book. He is a grand old man who cleared the land, fought in the cattle-sheep wars, put in twelve years as a sheriff when fast shooting and hard riding were essential, and is still hale enough to enjoy any slight triumph his grandson might render him. Hence I should like the dedication to read:
To
My Pioneer Grandparents
Will you please notify Mr. Dickson of this alteration, and also any subsequent publisher?…
Cordially,
Dalton Trumbo
Eclipse is a first novel any writer could take pride in. It tells the story of John Abbott, who is, when we meet him in 1926, the most successful businessman in the town of Shale City, Colorado. His department store, the Emporium, the largest between Denver and Salt Lake City, is doing a thriving business. His bank is prospering. He is the most respected and admired man in town. However, Abbott is not without problems: he wants desperately to be free of his wife so that he may marry Donna Long, an intelligent, hardworking woman who is his second in command at the Emporium. The two have carried on an affair for years, and his wife has just discovered the fact; she makes it clear to them she will not step aside. Donna Long dies suddenly, mysteriously. Although the cause of death is given as “acute indigestion,” the implication is clear that she may have committed suicide.
At first Abbott seems to rebound admirably. He comes back from a trip east, which he has taken to get over the shock of Donna Long’s death, bursting with ambition and ideas, plans to make the town better. Among them is the new public swimming pool, which he donates when a town boy drowns in the river. The pool is dedicated on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, and at just about that same time Abbott receives word that his wife, who has now left him, has died.
He faces the Depression alone. One by one, those who had admired him and sought his favor reject him as his enterprise declines. His bank fails. His department store goes into receivership, and he is kept on as an employee. Physically disabled by a stroke, Abbott has sustained even greater damage to his psyche. Disoriented, bewildered, he is partly to blame for the fire that sweeps the Emporium, the one in which he himself perishes.
Thus Eclipse is a kind of Babbitt-in-reverse. Where George Babbitt loses his identity and is all but swallowed up by his own success, John Abbott is made unique by his failure. Among Sinclair Lewis’s cast of Zenith businessmen, Abbott is personally much more like Sam Dodsworth. He is a personable, honest, intelligent man, one who has good impulses. In fact, Abbott is the very model of the enlightened capitalist: a philanthropist, a man who accepts the responsibilities of his wealth. And it is in this that Trumbo succeeds most impressively in Eclipse: he successfully attacks the business ethos at its strongest point, presenting Abbott as simultaneously the champion and the victim of small-town capitalism. John Abbott is no caricature. He is a man of dimension and depth, a man worthy of admiration, yet even he is crushed by the system he serves and the town in which he believes.
This makes Eclipse sound more tendentious than it really is. It is no tract, after all, but a novel and a rather good one: one of Trumbo’s purposes in writing it was to present a picture of life in Grand Junction—the ebb and flow of events, the frustrations and choked passions—and he does this well. But if anyone should doubt that his primary purpose was something more than offering a slice of small-city life, he need only consider a few of Abbott’s conversations with Hermann Vogel. Vogel is something of an amateur scholar and philosopher; he is inclined to take a coldly intellectual view of things. Of his friend, John Abbott, for instance: “I think you’re going to die of pedestalization, old friend, just as your archetype did.” And his archetype, Vogel tells him, is Napoleon, who made the condition clear when he declared, “‘Your legitimate kings can be beaten twenty times and still return to their thrones. But I am a soldier parvenu… and my throne rests upon my successes in the battlefields.’” And so we are invited to see John Abbott as a businessman parvenu, one whom society and the system say must continually earn and re-earn his place on the pedestal with new triumphs in the field of business, ever grander gestures of philanthropy. Let him falter, let him fail to produce, and he will be tumbled down, never to be granted even the grace of the hundred days that fate extended to Napoleon.
The great law of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately prevails, and when Abbott fails to satisfy the insatiable Shale City Moloch, few show him much pity. Not even his friend Vogel, the immigrant intellectual:
“I love America,” murmured Hermann Vogel. “And I’m not going back [to Europe]. Not now, at least. I wouldn’t miss the glory of these times for anything on earth. It’s like—taking a clean bath. It’s like seeing a dog deloused, with millions of filthy little insects dropping dead after having made him miserable for God knows how long. That’s what is happening to America, my friend. The lice are being driven from the body politic. If an occasional ant like you, or a spider such as I, is killed in the process—well, it’s a regrettable affair, but a sacrifice we can cheerfully make. I, for one, am almost exhilarated at the thought.”
An old revolutionary image—parasites dropping from the body politic, leaving it healthy at least. In hints and suggestions such as this, and in one overtly radical scene in which a young Red harangues a street-corner crowd and sings the “Internationale” as he is hauled off by the cops, Eclipse turns out to be a far more radical novel than we might have expected Dalton Trumbo to write at this time in his life. We see that in 1934, at the age of twenty-nine, he was well on his way leftward.
The protagonist of Eclipse was drawn directly from life. W. J. Moyer was a Grand Junction businessman, a merchant who, in nearly all particulars, resembled precisely Trumbo’s John Abbott. Moyer’s department store, The Fair, closed during the Depression, and his bank failed to open following the 1933 bank holiday. His character, too, was very much like Abbott’s—open-handed and generous, he was also given to philanthropy. In fact, he donated a swimming pool to the city of Grand Junction, which was called the Moyer Natatorium, and at the dedication none other than Elizabeth Trumbo, then six years of age, was the first to jump in. In other details, too—Moyer’s rocky marriage, rumors of an affair of long duration between him and one of his employees—there are marked similarities. Those in Grand Junction who knew him well maintained that, item for item, detail for detail, John Abbott quite simply was W. J. Moyer. And many resented this, for after all, in one important particular Moyer differed from Abbott: he was still alive when the novel was published (he died in 1943 at the age of eighty-three). He could still be hurt.
So some there in Grand Junction counted Trumbo’s portrayal of John Abbott as an unkindness to W. J. Moyer. Among them, as it turned out, was his old boss at the Grand Junction Sentinel, Walter Walker. Trumbo sent the editor an inscribed copy of Eclipse shortly after its publication in England. In the letter which he enclosed, he remarked of the novel:
As for “Eclipse,” I hope you will not be angry if you find characters whom you recognize in it. I am convinced that all novels are based in fact, and distorted for fiction purposes to suit the author’s particular talent. I do not pretend that any of the portraits in “Eclipse” are real, yet you will, I am sure, see at least some characteristics of their counterparts in real life. I have no apologies although I do confess to some qualms. But the job is done, and it took a long time in the doing, and since I understand that one or two copies have already hit Grand Junction, there is no use trying to keep the book a secret. I am enclosing a copy of the review which appeared in the very snooty London Times Literary Supplement*—a review which, as you can easily guess, made me extremely happy.
The letter, which he ended, “Sincerely, Dalton,” might more frankly have been signed, “Anxiously, Dalton,” for Trumbo was clearly uneasy about the reaction of some back in his hometown—and of Walter Walker, in particular.
His old editor, the man who had given him his start as a writer and at the same time encouraged him to consider a career in politics, replied to Trumbo after a month. Writing more in sorrow than in anger, he said:
My dear Dalton:
… It goes without saying that “Eclipse” has caused a great deal of local comment. While in your letter you say you do not pretend that any of the portraits in “Eclipse” are real, nevertheless people in a town that is used as the locale for a story or a novel are prone to accept as real any characters which they think they recognize.
Naturally, I have no feeling of anger toward you concerning the book. After all, it was your privilege to utilize your old home town in demonstrating your talents as a writer if you wanted to do so. Furthermore, I might say, in looking at it from a selfish standpoint, that I have no cause to complain because you treat me very decently in the book. Frankly, however, with the personal regard and affection I have for you and the admiration I hold for your talent, I do regret that you saw fit to release this story at this time. The only personality involved in the book that actuates me in saying this is that of W. J. Moyer. Had not misfortunes piled up on him quite so heavily and so frequently, and if he were not alive, this regret of mine would be considerably reduced in volume.
I cannot help but believe that your book was inspired by some real idea or fancied that you or your family had received a great injury from this community and perhaps from the man you call John Abbott, and in which case I certainly do not attempt to condemn your action.…
Sincerely,
W. W.
The feeling was widespread in Grand Junction that Trumbo wrote his book out of resentment—and in a general way, it is probably true he did. Walter Walker was correct, in other words, in assuming that Eclipse was inspired by a feeling that Dalton Trumbo and his family “had received a great injury from this community.” But specifically from the man he called John Abbott? This interpretation—still a popular one in Grand Junction—does not hold up. It urges that Trumbo’s portrait of Moyer as John Abbott is unsympathetic, which it certainly is not. Trumbo presents him as the most decent man in the town, one blessedly free of the hypocrisy that rules there. Eclipse is an honest effort to understand one man and his relationship to the town he lived in.
Why then were the people of Grand Junction so angry at the book and at Dalton Trumbo for writing it? “Really, what they hate about the book is that it’s an attack on them,” said Trumbo, “on a faithless town. They could take so much from a man, kiss his ass so soundly, and then just turn their backs on him. And that’s what they don’t like.”
But how did Trumbo settle on W. J. Moyer? Why did he choose to tell his story, and what did he hope to say through it? “Mr. Moyer, I think, served to a degree in the novel as a substitute for my father and the treatment he received in Grand Junction. Being fired, as he was, from Benge’s Shoe Store after working there for so many years, well, it came to him like a bolt out of the blue—this was the end! Now I perhaps reacted to this more unfairly than I should have. But as I pondered the fate that befell Mr. Moyer after the Depression—I kept up with it all in the Grand Junction paper—I could realize it was in essence the same thing, a man destroyed. And that possibly accounted for some of my passion against the town itself, which actually had been quite good to me.”
Although Elsie McKeogh tried, as any good agent would, to find an American publisher for Eclipse right up to, and even after, the date of its English publication, she found none for it. In all, the novel was shown to nineteen houses—and nineteen rejected it. But Trumbo left all of that to her and wasted no worries on it. Instead, he concentrated his attention on writing. In February 1935, he sent Mrs. McKeogh a package of five stories, asking her to handle them for him.
The longest of them (9,400 words) was a story called “Darling Bill,” which Trumbo described as an “anti-New Deal satire.” Was it political? No, he looked at politics then simply as material. Would it make a good story? What sort of background would it provide to the usual boy-meets-girl formula?
“Darling Bill” is an inconsequential bit of fluff told in letters, clippings, and a press release or two. But the New Deal had made Washington interesting to America, and the Saturday Evening Post, always sensitive to such fluctuations on the national seismograph, bought “Darling Bill” at first look. It appeared in the April 20, 1935, issue. By any standard he was doing well for himself. Another of the four stories he sent off to Elsie McKeogh eventually sold: “Orphan Child,” a comic piece with a Hollywood movie background, appeared in Liberty in the September 7, 1935, issue (reading time thirty-three minutes, thirty-five seconds).
With the acceptance of a story by the Saturday Evening Post Dalton Trumbo was launched as a successful writer of fiction. Much encouraged, he started a full-length political novel in the same vein—light, satirical, one that traded on the same developing interest in Washington politics and New Deal bureaucracies.
And in the middle of that, suddenly taken with a new idea for a story, one that seemed a natural for the Post, he took time out to write “Five C’s for Fever the Fiver.” The trick title is the tip-off: it is a horse-racing story, a saga of bettors and bookies, more or less in the style of Damon Runyon. Again, the story is of negligible worth but clever enough in its way and well executed. “Five C’s for Fever the Fiver” is most notable, however, in that it marked the absolute finale to his long romance with Sylvia Longshore. The two had broken up while Trumbo was still at the bakery, but he had never gotten over her, nor over the feeling that he had been cheated by circumstance out of possessing the girl fate meant to be his. Now, suddenly flush with success as a writer, he thought he would make one last effort to reach her and renew their relationship.
“I worked out a system of names in the story,” he recalled, “that was to be a message to her wherever she was. I remember that the hotel in the story was the Shore Arms—well, that was part of it, and there were other little details that would have been immediately understood by her—a code, so to speak, with the intended result that she get in touch with me. Well, the circumstances were perfect. The story sold to the Post, and it appeared in the November 30, 1935, issue, the week of the Army-Navy game. The Navy goat was on the cover, and my name and the title of the story. Well, I told myself that she had to see that, no matter where she was—and I believe she was on tour. I called her mother, told her what I had done, and jokingly added that if Sylvia had all her teeth and was not pregnant, I’d be delighted to see her. That was when her mother told me that Sylvia had married her dancing partner, a man named Harris, the week before the Post came out.”
As early as February 1935, Trumbo had written to Elsie McKeogh mentioning Warner Bros.’ interest in “Darling Bill” as a possible motion picture property. Nothing came of that, but he did take the occasion to ask her help in getting a good Hollywood agent. And although she made a specific recommendation, in the end he declined her advice. Trumbo defended his choice of Arthur Landau as his Hollywood agent: “Landau is a robber”—he wrote to Elsie McKeogh—“but he is an efficient and a fearless one, which is exactly what a writer needs in a town filled with robbers.” The dichotomy implied here is interesting. There was then and evidently would always be a sharp contrast in Trumbo’s mind between his honorable literary work and the work he would do for the movies. He saw the latter purely as a means to an end—or so he put it to Elsie McKeogh, when he gave her his reasons for signing his first modest movie contract: “I wanted a place in which to hibernate, safe from the ballyhoo and the pressure to which the highly paid movie writer invariably succumbs. In a word, I want the movies to subsidize me for a while, until I establish myself as a legitimate writer.”
The contract negotiated for him by Arthur Landau was not quite as modest as it might have been. Warner Bros., for whom Trumbo had been working all along as a reader, acknowledged at last—after a novel had been accepted for publication, and perhaps more important in their eyes, after two stories had been bought by the Saturday Evening Post—that they had a writer of some ability in their employ. They offered him what in 1935 was a standard contract for a junior writer: beginning at fifty dollars per week he would be committed to a seven-year contract, renewable by the studio on six-month options. Landau, however, was able to give him something of a headstart. He took that offer, together with a list of Trumbo’s published works, to an unspecified “rival studio” and got an offer from them. Using this as leverage, they managed to pry a better deal out of Warner Bros. Finally, he signed for quite a raise in pay: in moving from screen reader to screenwriter at the same studio, he went from thirty-five dollars to one hundred dollars per week, with future salary steps raised accordingly.
In the end, however, it was not dollars and cents but literary considerations that proved stickiest in the negotiations. The usual Hollywood writer’s contract specified that the studio had full rights to everything the writer produced during the terms of that contract. In negotiations and prior to signing, it was up to the writer to declare exceptions—works already written, under way, or under contract. Trumbo declared them at great length and with considerable ingenuity. He called for permission to write two novels for Lovat Dickson and another that he specified by title. The Washington Jitters (his new political satire). In addition, he appended a list of titles—two novels and forty-one short stories—which he declared he had written before the drawing up of this contract, but which he really had not. Trumbo’s comment to Elsie McKeogh:
This, of course, is deliberate fraud on my part, but it is a fraud which I understand is regularly being perpetrated by Hollywood writers. What I propose to do, of course, is to write stories and affix to them one of the titles I have reserved. In the event the title is not in keeping with the story, I think it would be well for you to write me stating that such and such a publisher has changed the title from the one under which I submitted the story to whatever is considered more appropriate. The letter would cover me at the studio.
And so it was, at the end of October 1935, with all exceptions noted and reservations duly made, that Dalton Trumbo signed a contract with Warner Bros. and became a screenwriter. He had, he thought, marked out his career very clearly before him. There seemed little doubt in his mind then he would someday be a full-time novelist. Writing for films was to be no more than a temporary solution to his money problems, a bargain struck with necessity. The old story, of course. Nobody, it seems, ever went into films with the intention of staying there. The studios were to serve as way stations to the ivory tower, or back to Broadway—yet passengers collected there in Hollywood, and coaches never departed; those who left usually straggled out alone and on foot. Better than most, Trumbo kept his resolve to concentrate on the writing of fiction: between 1935 and 1941 he would publish four novels—this in addition to a full career as a screenwriter (twenty-one screen credits during that same period). But for a number of good reasons, there were no books written after that. Money considerations played a part here, obviously, although it was not simple, crass love of luxury that made an immensely successful screenwriter out of a promising novelist. Those who think that sadly underestimate the very real satisfactions offered by working at the craft, of knowing you are one of the best at a kind of writing so particular in its demands that some of the finest novelists and playwrights of our century have failed dismally at it.
Screenwriting surprised him right from the start by being far more difficult than he had ever expected it to be: “When I began to write, it seemed to me I would never learn how. It seemed two or three years before I had any confidence in myself. The problem of plot, as with most young writers, troubled me greatly before I got used to it and learned how to handle it moderately well, and then I began to feel at home.” The craft of writing—whether novels, screenplays, essays, or whatever—held a special fascination for Trumbo. And his work always showed great technical proficiency. Even as flimsy a story as “Darling Bill,” his first in the Post, is made interesting at least from the standpoint of technique because of the epistolary form in which it is cast. So with Trumbo, the early difficulties he experienced in learning the craft of screenwriting would enhance the enterprise in his eyes.
He joined the B-picture unit at Warner Bros., then under the command of Bryan Foy, a producer whose specialty of low-budget production had earned him the title “king of the B’s.” The idea was to keep the budget for each B picture at about one hundred thousand dollars. Such films would always be, in effect, remakes of successful A pictures. Now, these were not out-and-out thefts, because Foy always wanted the original scripts to be completely rewritten—characters added and changed, plot and situation altered, and so on. In this way, the job of screenwriter for Bryan Foy was that of adapter. Ingenuity, rather than creativity, mattered most. Trumbo remembers that the first time he talked to Foy, the producer confronted him with a problem. He asked him to imagine a man at the bottom of a pit, sixty feet deep, with smooth, vertical walls and absolutely no way to get out: “Can you imagine how you would get him into that situation?” Foy wanted to know. Trumbo thought a moment and said, yes, he believed he could get him into that pit. “Well,” said Foy, “if you can get him out, too, then we’re in good shape.” That, he told Trumbo, was just the kind of thing they wanted on the B unit.
It was a good place to learn the craft. A screenwriter had to work within all sorts of limitations. The one that governed all the rest, of course, was budget. Because the actors and actresses available for such productions were often not much better than semiskilled labor, great emphasis was put on visual storytelling: the fewer lines there were for them to remember, the fewer retakes would be likely. But there were visual limitations, too. Tracking shots were out, as well as any other expensive camera setups. Establishing shots were kept to a minimum—none of this getting out of the car and walking into the door of the building then into the elevator, before you begin that scene on the twenty-third floor. You got into a scene just as quickly as possible, got through it, and got out of it. As a result, there was a kind of quick, nervous energy to most B films which gave them a visual style much different from that of the A films of the same period. Looked at today, there is a “modern” quality that emerges from the way the old B’s were shot and edited, a quality that was created almost wholly out of financial necessity.
Working on the B unit, a screenwriter found his selection of material somewhat limited. Theoretically, Trumbo and his colleagues could have turned down any project; but he wanted to learn, and so he turned nothing down. He did two films at Warner Bros., both of them released during 1936. The first, Road Gang, was based loosely on Paul Muni’s fine film from 1932, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. This was the source of Trumbo’s original screenplay, which was directed by Louis King, then already a veteran of B-picture production (eventually, as many did, he would graduate to A pictures and direct Thunderhead, Son of Flicka, The Green Grass of Wyoming, and Mrs. Mike before his death in 1962). Trumbo’s second film at Warners was Love Begins at 20. He shares screenplay credit on this one with a Tom Reed, but in this case it was not a previous film but a play that provided the source—Broken Dishes, by Martin Flavin.
Visiting Trumbo’s friends was not always so pleasant. Oh, they’d all talk. If they could squeeze you in while they were pressing hard to finish this movie or that, or if you happened to catch them when they had just finished an assignment, then all you had to do was ask and the answers poured forth. There was among them all a common desire to go on record, for each to do what he could to get the man’s story told. It made things a lot easier.
Not all of them were doing so well, however. You realized, visiting screenwriters who have been between assignments for years, that for them the blacklist was not over, and perhaps never would be. It was much too easy for us to think of the blacklist as something unfortunate that happened years ago, an episode in the past. After all, Trumbo was working again, and so were Albert Maltz, Michael Wilson, Waldo Salt, Ring Lardner, Jr. But not everybody. If you were on your way up—or worse, on your way down—when the House Committee on Un-American Activities struck, then the odds of ever returning from exile were not nearly so favorable. For every screenwriter, director, and actor who made it back after the blacklist there were probably four or five who never did.
One of these was John Bright. He had managed to make an honorable living on the fringes of the movie business. He had done some work in television, and he did occasional articles and reviews for some of the smaller magazines. But his career as a screenwriter is over when I meet with him, and he knows it.
He lives on a street in North Hollywood, a kind of blue-collar annex to the movie town. He is a tall, ungainly man—pleasant and polite but slightly reserved, and—how to put this? He doesn’t quite connect. Or we don’t. There are, anyway, awkward gaps in our talk. We jump around a lot.
“Where did I first meet him? That would have been Warner Bros.—oh, very early in the thirties. I was a writer and he was a reader.”
They got along well right from the start—and that speaks well for Bright, for at that time he was just about the hottest writer at Warner Bros. He and his partner Kubec Glasmon had blown into town from Chicago, filled with racket lore, bursting with arcane anecdotes of Capone and Bugs Moran, and they had headed for the one studio in Hollywood where that knowledge and those stories were most in demand. Warner Bros.–First National had just finished Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson, and it was a great hit—so great, in fact, that the studio initiated what was to become a whole cycle of gangster movies. And Bright and Glasmon wrote the biggest and best of them all, The Public Enemy, the movie which, as brought to the screen by William Wellman, made Jimmy Cagney a star. Bright was a master of the hardboiled; his dialogue was written to be delivered from the corner of the mouth. Blonde Crazy, Smart Money, Taxi—they were all big A pictures that helped set Warner Bros.’ tough, strident, swaggering image during the thirties and into the forties. And although the two were about the same age, Trumbo was then professionally very much John Bright’s junior.
“What was he like then?” I ask him.
“Trumbo? Oh, he was an acerbic, rasping, extravagant character. The way he is today, only more so. Only, no. There was a difference in him back then. He was unhappy. He put some of this in the novel he wrote back then. What was the name of it?”
“Yes, that’s it. The main thing was, I think, that he wasn’t happy with what he had achieved. He thought he should be further along than he was. He was too talented to be just a reader. Anyone could tell that. Most readers played it safe and said no to everything. But not him. They had to notice him because he made these wild recommendations on movie projects—Ulysses, Lady Chatterley, Candide, Rabelais.”
“And that was how he became a writer?”
“More or less. I mean, he was bound to catch their eye anyway. He was just too talented to ignore. They made him a writer at Warners, then he went on to RKO, and the rest is history. It was hit after hit. You look him up in the book. He’s probably got the most successful set of credits of any screenwriter ever to work in the business.”
He hesitates then and shrugs, coming to a full stop.
“Did he change much? I don’t know quite how to put this,” I say, “but when he began getting money, he got his money all at once, didn’t he?”
“Oh sure. He was just like anybody else would have been. He’d been a poor boy, after all. I take it you know all about the bakery and his father dying and everything? Well, when he got some money, then all of a sudden he wanted five of everything. He just couldn’t get enough of the creature comforts. I remember I visited him once up at the ranch. And he asked if I thought I might get cold. Well, just in case—and he pulls out six electric blankets. Six!”
He shakes his head, remembering, then looks up and fixes me with his eye. “You talk about whether he’s changed. He is, believe me, the most unhypocritical man I have known in a town of hypocrites. A strictly no-bullshit character in a town of bullshitters. Also a compulsive man at the typewriter. I suppose you know that. I share the same syndrome with him. When he finishes something he goes on to something else immediately. It’s almost impossible for him to take a vacation. That’s the way I am myself. When he gets wound up in a project, well, there’s just no getting him away from it. I remember when he was living in Altadena and was working on Exodus. He called me up and read me thirty to fifty pages of it—on the telephone! Just wanted to get my reaction. That’s the way he is.
“Oh, and I think it should be noted—though without any specific names—that if the truth were known, Dalton Trumbo is one of the softest touches in the world. If anyone’s ever got any trouble, they turn to him. Right now he’s probably owed thousands by people around town. He’s more open-handed than anyone I’ve ever known. I ought to know. I myself was beneficiary of several legs up from Dalton. That’s one reason he’s sentimental about me, you know.”
“Oh? What…?”
“I helped support his family when he was in prison. But I was just paying him back money I owed him—money he never asked me for. I’m very much in his debt. I always will be. Why, when I came up from Mexico in 1959, and the blacklist was still on, Trumbo got me my first job on the black market. I went on and did four pictures for that producer. I’m not sure he’d want me to give his name even now, though.”
The Brave Bulls, a good film produced in 1951, was John Bright’s last credited job as a screenwriter. That was the year he was blacklisted. When he was named in testimony by a number of “friendly” witnesses before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, his career (which was even then rather shaky) came to a sudden stop. Although, as he mentions, he did work on the black market and had kept busy since then at various writing projects of one kind or another, his career had never really gotten started again. He worked for a while in the sixties as a kind of combination reader–story editor and literary advisor for Campbell-Silver-Cosby, Bill Cosby’s production company.
“That’s right,” Bright tells me, “one of my first acts as functionary there was to recommend Johnny Got His Gun as a project. That’s what eventually led to the production of the movie. You know Bruce Campbell? He produced the picture, of course, and Dalton directed. I was the one who told him he ought to do that—that he was the only one who should direct that movie, who could direct it. Various other people wanted to do it—Luis Buñuel, for one. But Dalton was the one to do it. I told him that. I told him.”
Dalton Trumbo worked less than a year of his seven-year contract with Warner Bros. His work was certainly satisfactory—two pictures in so short a space of time was a very good beginning for a writer on the B unit. What happened? The answer to that takes us back to 1933 and the founding of the Screen Writers Guild. It was formed with no defined political goals and only to establish the role of the screenwriter more firmly and boost his prestige in Hollywood. John Howard Lawson was the first president of the Guild and was elected by acclamation.
Lawson, who had enjoyed some success in New York with avant-garde productions of his Expressionist dramas, was one of the first playwrights to come to Hollywood when the movies began to talk at the end of the twenties. When he returned in the early thirties, with productions by the Group Theatre and on Broadway behind him, he was committed to the aesthetics of social realism. He was a convinced radical when he was elected president of the Screen Writers Guild in April 1933. In November 1934, he announced in an article in the left-wing theater organ New Theatre that he had become a member of the Communist Party. As president of the Screen Writers Guild, Lawson appeared at a hearing of the House Patents Committee in April 1936. He called for copyright legislation that would assure screenwriters greater control over their material. He said that producers were responsible for the quality and content of motion pictures, not writers; they were to blame if movies were bad.
John Howard Lawson’s testimony angered not only the movie producers and studio executives but the whole right wing of the Screen Writers Guild as well. A split of some sort had been in the offing ever since the formation of the Guild. Many members resented Lawson’s outspoken radicalism and felt, probably with some reason, that he might be using the Guild as an instrument to achieve political ends. This was the occasion they had anticipated. Under a banner of “loyalty to the industry,” Rupert Hughes and James K. McGuinness withdrew from the Screen Writers Guild and formed a rival group, the Screen Playwrights. It was embraced immediately by the studio executives as their approved bargaining agent, for they frankly feared the potential power of the Screen Writers Guild. In effect, the Screen Playwrights was from birth nothing but a company union.
Dalton Trumbo’s own experience underlines this. He had joined the Screen Writers Guild at the first opportunity, glad to be a member. He was subsequently surprised when the same man who had recruited him for the Screen Writers Guild came by one day with a form for resignation from the Guild which had been prepared and mimeographed right there at Warner Bros. The idea was that he was to resign from the Guild and join the Screen Playwrights. Trumbo remembered: “I refused to resign from the Guild, and they said, ‘You will go on your six-weeks layoff, and then at the end of your six-weeks option period, if you haven’t changed your mind, we will drop your option.’ So I said, ‘Well, why don’t I get out now?’ And they said, ‘Fine.’”
So that was it. He was out of work. That seven-year contract with Warner Bros. that had seemed to assure him such a comfortable living for years to come was now terminated by mutual agreement: “I left Warner Bros., and I’ve never been back, a little over thirty years. They never have allowed me to darken their door, nor have I wanted to particularly.”
This marked the beginning of Trumbo’s long involvement in the leadership of the Screen Writers Guild. He held on to his membership, though writers all around Hollywood dropped out and joined the new Screen Playwrights, as they had more or less been ordered to do by their studios. The Guild’s roster of members dropped in a few months’ time from several hundred to about fifty. Because they suddenly felt themselves in need of official support of some sort, the remaining members voted to affiliate with the Authors Guild of America. They went underground. In order to survive, it became necessary to meet in secret and to keep confidential the names of those who stayed on.
This brought charges from the Screen Playwrights and from studio executives that the Screen Writers Guild constituted a conspiracy—and a Communist conspiracy, at that, for such was John Howard Lawson’s reputation even then. Were there any grounds to such charges? “It was secret,” Trumbo conceded, “as secret as we could keep it, because if it were known, you would lose your job. It was that simple. Communists participated in it. Though I wasn’t a Communist at the time, I knew people who were. Still, it was not a Communist activity per se—it was a union activity.”
This was how it remained for a little over one year, during which time the Screen Playwrights did virtually nothing for the benefit of its membership but rather gave away the few benefits the Guild had gained for writers in Hollywood. However, in 1937 the National Labor Relations Board was founded to deal with just such situations as this. Trumbo was one of those to testify before the NLRB when the Guild moved to challenge the Screen Playwrights—which it did successfully in an open election in 1937. And although they were now no more than a minority group of right-wing activists, the Screen Playwrights managed to hang on to their contract with the studios until 1940, when the Guild took over rightfully and completely from them. By then, Dalton Trumbo was on the board of directors of the Screen Writers Guild. In this jurisdictional dispute with its political overtones are to be found the seeds of conflict from which the blacklist grew. For in 1944, James K. McGuinness and Rupert Hughes, who had led the Screen Playwrights, banded with other like-minded members of the Hollywood establishment to found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. This was the vigilante organization that provided the House Committee on Un-American Activities with most of its “friendly” witnesses and went on to maintain and police the blacklist that emerged from the HUAC hearings.
Although fired from Warner Bros., Dalton Trumbo may have felt he had reason to be optimistic, for he was expecting great things of Washington Jitters, his satirical novel of New Deal politics. He had completed it in November 1935 and sent the last ten thousand words of it off to Elsie McKeogh then. He had hoped to see it serialized in a magazine, probably the Post, but Mrs. McKeogh had another idea. Without informing him of her intention, she simply followed her hunch and sent it out. And so he was quite unprepared when, on January 30, 1936, he received a wire from her that informed him tersely:
MOSS HART WILL DRAMATIZE WASHINGTON JITTERS STOP CONTRACT WILL FOLLOW STOP THIRTY DAYS SECRECY INSOFAR AS HOLLYWOOD CONCERNED AND PUBLICATION OF NOVEL TO FOLLOW THIRTY DAYS AFTER OPENING STOP
Trumbo could not help but be wildly elated by the news. Moss Hart was then well established as George S. Kaufman’s new collaborator. The two had done Once in a Lifetime and Merrily We Roll Along, although their superhits You Can’t Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner were then still ahead of them. If Hart—and presumably Kaufman, too—wanted to dramatize Trumbo’s new novel, it looked like money in the bank to him—and a lot of it at that.
A few days later a letter from Elsie McKeogh told him that Alfred Knopf would publish Washington Jitters in conjunction with the production of the play. In fact, as it turned out, Knopf reserved the option not to publish the novel at all if there were no play production—or even if it should be produced and prove a flop. The publisher also declined to offer an advance. But neither Trumbo, nor (unfortunately) his agent, were inclined to read the fine print, for at that point both were excited by the possibility of production by Kaufman and Hart.
For reasons known apparently only to Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, the playwrights declined finally to do a dramatic adaptation of the novel. This left Trumbo high and dry, thinking at first he might do a dramatization; but that proved impossible, for he had had no experience writing for the stage, and even if he had done an acceptable job it would have been difficult to find backing on short notice for a play by an unknown. So there would be no production whatever prior to publication, and for a brief, miserable period it looked as though Knopf might decide because of this not to issue the book at all. But it came out after all in an attractive edition in September 1936, and by the end of the month Trumbo had written to Elsie McKeogh venting his anger at Knopf for “sneaking the book out on the Coast.” He told her he had taken matters into his own hands and was publicizing it himself. In fact, he had hired a local publicist to help him do the job. “Nobody knows better than I that Jitters has absolutely no literary merit,” he wrote her. “Nor am I particularly fond of personal publicity. But the book came out of headlines, and it can be sold only through headlines. I don’t know whether Knopf gives a darn whether or not he gets another book out of me (I fancy he doesn’t) but I do know that this is the last time I’ll undertake to write a book and sell it too.” Not much could be done for it, however, for the last word on Washington Jitters from Knopf indicated that returns exceeded sales of the novel by ninety-four copies.
Its hero, Henry Hogg, is the plain man whom everyone is sure could clean up that mess in Washington if he were only given half a chance. Fate provides that half in a rather far-fetched instance of mistaken identity: A signpainter by trade, he is sent to paint the name of the new coordinator of the ASP (Agricultural Survey Program) on an office door in Washington. It develops that there really is no new ASP coordinator, but Harvey Upp, who writes the popular newspaper column “Washington Jitters,” doesn’t know this. He bursts into the office, finds Henry Hogg there, and interviews him under the impression that Henry is the new coordinator. The columnist is overwhelmed by Hogg’s plain speaking; he spreads his name across newspapers all over the country, boosting him as the one man in the New Deal who is talking good sense. One thing leads to another, absurdity follows absurdity, and before he knows it, Henry Hogg really is the new coordinator of the ASP administration, and he is being hailed around the country as the man most likely to lead America out of the wilderness. In the end, Henry mourns his lost innocence: “I’m not a signpainter any more,” he says. “I’m not even a man. I’m nothing but a politician.”
Washington Jitters’ satire may strike us today as rather obvious, its targets sitting ducks. It is not that it is a bad book, but rather that it is a slick and inconsequential one, and this is what is distressing. For Trumbo to follow a book of real quality and great promise like Eclipse with one such as Washington Jitters seems an abuse of his talent. Even in the writing of fiction he could not resolve the conflict he felt between the literary impulse on the one hand, and on the other, the desire to influence, to be part of his time—essentially, a political impulse—and to be commercially successful into the bargain. He himself was quite conscious of it. In fact, at about the time Washington Jitters came out, he wrote to Elsie McKeogh, telling her:
Right now I am in somewhat of a literary quandary. I have for years projected a long, serious novel on the bakery in which I spent almost a decade. Then again I have a much shorter novel idea—shorter, perhaps than Jitters—satirizing the conflict between the left and the right through the problems of a Henry Hoggish sort of Liberal who eventually encompasses his complete destruction by reason of the fact that he can’t decide on which side of the fence to jump. I think it can be very amusing.
There is no record of her response. And for that matter, he never wrote either novel—unless Johnny Got His Gun, which opens with Joe Bonham in the bakery, grew out of the “long, serious novel” he wanted to write. In any case, these problems, which are granted only to those who possess both immense writing facility and an artistic conscience, would continue to plague Trumbo for years to come.
By the time he wrote this to his agent—the letter is dated September 14, 1936—the problem was no longer quite so immediate, for he was already under contract again to another studio. His rebellion at Warners in behalf of the Screen Writers Guild actually cost him only some weeks of employment. More or less out of the blue, Harry Cohn of Columbia called him. Arthur Landau, Trumbo’s agent, had put in a good word for him and subsequently arranged a meeting between his client and the head of Columbia Pictures.
Living up to his reputation, Cohn was quite direct when they met. “You’re blacklisted,”* he informed him—this was because of Trumbo’s refusal to sign an application of membership to the Screen Playwrights.
Trumbo had come to suspect this and said that it was probably so.
“But,” Cohn said, “I don’t care about blacklists. I’m going to hire you anyway.” And he did, in the grand style, raising him from the one hundred dollars per week he had made at Warner Bros. to two hundred and fifty dollars a week at Columbia.
Trumbo did only a couple of films there. The first was the extravagantly titled Tugboat Princess, released late in 1936, for which he did not do the screenplay but shared credit for the original story with Isador Bernstein. The second was something called Devil’s Playground, on which he was listed as collaborator on the screenplay with the Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty and the playwright Jerome Chodorov. In most cases, a shared credit on a motion picture does not mean that active collaboration between two or three writers has actually taken place. It means, rather, that two or three writers have had a crack at a particularly troublesome script before it was judged ready for the cameras.
Occasionally, though, studio executives would place two writers in one room and hand them a single assignment, hoping that that miracle of spontaneous generation known as true collaboration would actually take place. They tried this at Columbia with Dalton Trumbo and William Saroyan. And while it did not accomplish quite what Columbia had intended—no picture was ever produced from the script that was brought forth—still, it proved a memorable experience for Trumbo.
The two of them agreed on one thing right from the start: they would not write about one another. Trumbo told Saroyan that he had noticed that sooner or later Saroyan seemed to write about just about everyone he knew. And, Trumbo admitted, he had written about a few he had known himself. So he proposed a contract: he wouldn’t write about Saroyan if Saroyan would agree not to write about Trumbo. That seemed fair enough, and they shook hands on it.
They sat around the next few days swapping stories and avoiding discussion of the job at hand. Finally, it was Trumbo again who took it upon himself to mention the unmentionable. “You know, Bill,” he said, “why don’t we decide which one of us is going to write this screenplay? Because together we’re never going to get it done. Do you want to write or do you want me to write it? I don’t give a goddamn.” Saroyan thought it over and decided that he would really rather be out at Santa Anita watching the horses run and placing an occasional bet. That was okay with Trumbo—“a perfectly good arrangement, for he was an extraordinary man”—and he covered for his supposed collaborator and wrote the script on his own.
During the course of this alleged collaboration Saroyan showed up one night at Trumbo’s home, the house on Hollycrest Drive up in the Hollywood Hills where he was living with his mother, his grandmother, and his sister Elizabeth. It seemed that somebody had sent Saroyan a baby alligator from Florida and it had arrived in rather sickly condition. Could he keep it in Trumbo’s bathtub for a day or two until it got better? They put it in a few inches of water, and although the creature was still moving, it sank immediately. Trumbo decided he had better provide something more for the alligator, or it would surely drown. He put in an upturned pan and placed the alligator up on it where he could breathe. It didn’t help much, though, for the next day he got up and checked the bathtub, and there was no sign of life there at all. Not only that, but the alligator smelled suspicious to Trumbo. He got on the phone to Saroyan, who said he would be right over. They looked into the bathtub, sniffed the air together, consulted, and concurred: this was one dead alligator that would have to be buried—and quickly. They wrapped it up and drove to a hill overlooking the Hollywood Freeway, and there they buried it behind are advertising billboard. Finally when they were finished and about to go, Saroyan said they just couldn’t leave like that—somebody really ought to say a few words over the grave. And so William Saroyan extemporized a eulogy over that dead alligator, going on at length about the beauty of life in the best style of My Heart’s in the Highlands and The Beautiful People. It was done only half in fun and was finally, Trumbo remembers, rather moving.
Not long after that Dalton Trumbo moved on to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he met a girl who worked in the story department named Katherine Trosper. As it happened, she had known both of his sisters in high school. She had learned from them that his family came from Colorado. Well, hers hailed from Wyoming. They must have felt a sort of kinship, rugged, no-nonsense Westerners together, congratulating one another that they weren’t really part and parcel of this circus called Hollywood. At any rate, she and Trumbo got on well and began going out together.
“Dalton was a very gallant young man, not sophisticated but very generous. He always did things on the grand scale—he’d take me to Musso & Frank’s, the Brown Derby, all the big places. But he wasn’t pompous or phony about it because actually he was a lot of fun. He’s always had a good sense of humor and has been known as a good storyteller—in a town of good storytellers. There was a great sense of fun to him and to our relationship. It was no great romance. The only thing was, I think it always embarrassed him that I was taller than he.”
Her name is Katherine Popper now. She lives in New York City and is married to Martin Popper, an attorney who was part of the team of lawyers who served as counsel to the Hollywood Ten in 1947 and subsequently handled their defense and appeal on the contempt of Congress citation each was handed. This is less of a coincidence than it might at first appear. The two moved in the same social circles long after she and Dalton had stopped seeing one another and he had married. Even after she had moved to New York, going there with the Orson Welles company when he had completed Citizen Kane, there were mutual friends, a kind of Hollywood East colony made up of theater people and writers who commuted back and forth between the two coasts. Through these associations she met her husband.
One important factor in her relationship with Dalton was that Katherine had known his sisters earlier in high school. She was in that sense a friend of the family and was welcome at the Trumbo home. The hard years had left a mark on them all. The Trumbos had withdrawn somewhat. Maud Trumbo, especially, seemed to regard outsiders with suspicion and perhaps a little hostility. But Katherine Trosper was different. She had known the girls when times were hard. She was practically one of them.
One of the funniest evenings she remembers with Dalton, in fact, was not a night out on the town but one spent with the family in which they were all busily engaged in an important enterprise: “Dalton had one of those contracts where he was practically under bondage to the studio. Anything he wrote belonged to them. The only exceptions made were stories that he had written earlier, and I guess a novel that he had begun that developed into Johnny. He had just written an original screen story—there was a big market for them then—and he was sure he could sell it if he could just pass it off as one of those stories he had supposedly written long ago.
“That was the problem. Here was this sheaf of bond pages, about twenty or thirty of them anyway, obviously right out of the typewriter. How could we make it look like something old, something that had been sitting around in a trunk for years? As I remember, the whole family was there, and we did everything to those pages. We sat on them, we burned holes with cigarettes into them, we applied heat with irons to yellow them. Everything. And I want to tell you it worked—perfectly! Not only did it look old enough to fool even Dalton’s agent, but the story actually sold. But don’t ask me what it was or to who because that was thirty-five years ago, and I just don’t remember.”
He was always working, as Katherine Popper recalls. “During this period he was very much taken up with supporting his family. He really felt the responsibility. And the way he took care of it was just to write and write and write. He was doing screen stories and magazine stories and working on a novel, plus pulling down his regular salary as a screenwriter. That was about three hundred and fifty dollars a week, the way I remember. Not a grand sum, but back then, toward the end of the Depression, that much money went a long way.
“And as I say, he liked to do things in the grand style. It wasn’t just that we went to all the best places—and we did—but he dressed to the teeth, too, always very dapper. If he could have gotten away with it, I think he would have carried a gold-handled cane. And then there was that car of his. Was it a Chrysler? And he hired a chauffeur.”
A chauffeur? I am taken somewhat aback. I guess I must have asked her if she were really certain about that.
“Oh, yes,” she assures me. “I remember him very well. He used to drive us everywhere and then just be right outside to pick us up. I had reason to remember him because of what happened one night. I had been out with somebody else and got home about two A.M., and I don’t know, it looked to me like there was some sort of shadowy figure disappearing around the corner of the house. My date didn’t see it, and maybe I was imagining things, but I was all alone there—my father and my brother were both away, someplace, for some reason—and I was scared. My father had been a railroad cop, and he had two billy clubs around the house, all the protection I had. Well, I remember I went to bed that night with one of them in each hand, just rigid with fright. Then, of course, I woke up an hour or two later thinking I had heard a noise, and all I could think of was I just had to get out of there, so I called Dalton and told him I was surrounded. He sent his chauffeur over for me with the car, and I want to tell you I was glad to see his face at my door when he came and got me. I stayed with Dalton and his mother and sisters for a couple of weeks—until my father and brother got back.”
Her brother was Guy Trosper, then a story editor at Goldwyn Studios, who would himself later become a successful screenwriter with important films to his credit such as Birdman of Alcatraz and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold before he died in 1963. “My brother,” she declares, “was a real maverick. He wanted nothing to do with Hollywood, except to do the work and get paid. My brother and Dalton didn’t really like each other, but Guy respected Dalton’s craftsmanship all through his life. He used to say, ‘They’re not paying him all that money for his personality.’”
“What did he mean by that?” I want to know. “What sort of personality did Trumbo have?”
“You’ve got to keep in mind,” she says at last, “that there are many people who dislike Dalton violently. He could be vicious. After all, he is well known for his sharp tongue. There was that famous encounter of his with Howard Fast where he was just so devastating.”
I ask her to tell me about it.
“Well, the way I remember it, it was at a party here in New York that was given for Howard Fast right after he had come out of jail for serving three months on a contempt charge, and maybe he was carrying on a little about the hardship of it all. Anyway, that’s what Dalton, who was there at the party, seemed to think. This was during the blacklist. He began to cut him up verbally, just slice him to ribbons. ‘A three-monther?’ he said to him. ‘You call that a sentence?’ Oh, the scorn, the contempt! I must say it was done with class and was just devastatingly funny.”
Eventually, Trumbo’s newfound taste for luxury proved his undoing. The bill for that chauffeur-driven Chrysler and all those nights out on the town came due with a vengeance when he woke up one morning in the latter part of 1937 and found himself about ten thousand dollars in debt on a salary of no more than three hundred and fifty dollars per week. He was in trouble, and he knew it. He would have to sue for bankruptcy. The course he undertook, however, was one usually reserved for corporations, whereby they are permitted to stave off their creditors on a short-term basis until they can reorganize and pay off their debts. He then had his regular weekly M-G-M paychecks sent into the court. But if he had depended on them alone to settle the debt, he would have been paying on it for months and have had nothing in the meantime for himself and his family to live on. That was clearly out of the question. Instead, he did what he would do again in ten years’ time when he was next threatened with economic extinction: he went to his typewriter and wrote his way out of trouble. He produced original screen stories and discharged the debt in record time. The judge who had presided over the case told him then that Trumbo’s was the only instance in his jurisdiction in which this course, once undertaken, had ever been completed by an individual. Trumbo’s comment on the entire affair seems characteristic: “You don’t learn the value of a dollar by being poor. You learn the value of a dollar by being rich. The Rockefellers understand the value of a dollar far better than I ever will.” He was without money for a very long time, and then suddenly he found himself quite dramatically with it—and he went on a spending spree. Never again was he forced into bankruptcy, although we shall see that on one later occasion, he came close. Still, his attitude toward money had not materially altered since that near-disaster. He would probably have agreed that he had not yet learned the value of money, except that he had become profoundly convinced that it was good to have a lot of it. As much as possible, in fact.
In any case, he was in rather shaky financial shape when, toward the end of 1936, he met Cleo Fincher and began the unusual, dramatic, and nearly violent chain of events that culminated in their wedding many months later. Katherine Popper recalls very well the sudden change in him: “One time we had a date, and he called me up and said he’d like to see me and talk. It turned out that he wanted to break the date. He told me that he had met this extraordinary woman who worked in a drive-in, and he didn’t think he wanted to see anyone else again. This was Cleo, of course, and as far as I know, this—his love for her—has been his one fidelity through it all.”