CHAPTER FIVE

CLEO AND JOHNNY

Enter Cleo. I don’t know quite what I expected Trumbo’s wife to be, but still, I was surprised when she first appeared at the gate to let me in. That time and every time afterward she was preceded by a great commotion of dogs. There were two miniature schnauzers, mother and son, I found out, always yapping; and a slower, deeper-voiced, and terribly earnest Irish setter. First would come the noise of the dogs, followed then by Cleo—smiling, quiet, contained—opening first the door and then the gate to admit me.

If, at first, she was somewhat restrained in her greeting, well, it was understandable. I was entering into their home at a time when Trumbo seemed to be in almost immediate danger of death. Following his pneumonectomy and heart attack, during the time when it was difficult for him to talk and even hard to breathe, it must have been a kind of victory for them all when he woke up each morning. And then I came with my tape recorder. I probably seemed to them during that first visit to be robbing him of the little strength he still possessed.

And so she would show me in, and down the stairs to his room below, along the way accepting my assurances that I would not stay too long, that at the first sign of his weakening, I would switch off the tape recorder and be on my way. Accepting them, perhaps with a grain of salt, for she had seen that eager look in my eye and knew the nature of writers who appear with tape recorders in their hands: they stalk as predators and attach themselves as parasites. But once, in fact, I did leave early, and that seemed to establish my credit with her. I am on her side, and I want her to know it.

For a woman now living in such comfortable circumstances, Cleo Trumbo has had her share of hard times, and not all of them came to her by courtesy of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. By the time of that particular ordeal, she was used, not to say inured, to trouble. A native Californian, she was born Cleo Fincher in Fresno on July 17, 1916. The Finchers, an old family in that territory, once owned the land on which Friant Dam, outside Fresno, was built. They were prosperous, middle-class people, but her parents were divorced when she was quite young. Her mother, Elizabeth MacElliott Fincher, kept the children, and looking for some sort of independence, coached them into a kind of kid vaudeville act. Brother Dick played the violin as his sisters, Georgia and Cleo, did tap and ballet numbers, and then a song by Georgia and an acrobatic solo dance by Cleo. It went over pretty well. They played the local movie houses (in the twenties, almost all theaters ran a few vaudeville acts in before the feature), and others in small and middle-sized cities in the same general area—Madera and Tulare among them, as well as clubs and lodges, such as the Elks and the Shriners. They were going great guns, in fact, up until the child labor laws were passed in 1927, and the Fincher kids were thus put out of show business. Cleo’s stage career ended then and there at the age of eleven, but her brother and sister went right back to work at it as soon as the law allowed—Georgia in a song-and-dance act that eventually won her work as a dancer in the M-G-M musicals of the thirties and forties; and Dick into music, in which he worked in and around Fresno, until his untimely death in an automobile accident in 1943.

Following the act’s forced retirement, Mrs. Fincher took the children and moved from Fresno to Los Angeles in order to be near her brother, who was operating a laundry in Pasadena. Cleo went to school there, quite independent, more or less bringing herself up: her mother was working, and by the time Cleo started Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles, both her older brother and sister were out pursuing their own careers as teenagers. It was while she was in high school, at the age of sixteen, that she went swimming in the ocean off Santa Monica Beach and nearly drowned. The undertow got her, and when at last she was pulled out, her lungs were filled with water. As a direct result, she developed empyema, an accumulation of fluid in the chest cavity which led to surgery, the collapse of her left lung, and a six-month stay in Los Angeles General Hospital. The whole experience left quite an impression on her: it wasn’t just the scare she got when she came so close to drowning; it was also the painful recuperation and the long, depressing stay in the hospital. She remembered in particular how, in the open ward, they would place screens around a bed, and that would mean its occupant was dying. When they did that, a pall descended over the place as they waited for the screens to be removed and the corpse to be carried off: it was just a matter of time.

Those six months that Cleo Fincher spent in Los Angeles General Hospital were in 1932. That was Trumbo’s last full year at the Davis Perfection Bakery at 2nd and Beaudry, only blocks from the hospital. She returned to high school, still in some pain and carrying drainage tubes in her back to keep her left lung clear. All in all, she lost nearly a year in the episode and graduated from high school in 1933, the year Trumbo left the bakery. And so the two came out into the world more or less at the same time, at the very bottom of the Depression: he to try to earn his living for the first time as a writer, and she as a waitress at a small drive-in out in the San Fernando Valley. The drive-in was operated by two sisters, friends of Cleo’s who were not much older, Lucille and Wilma Thompson. The girls made a valiant struggle of it, but the Valley was comparatively empty in those days, and after not much more than a year the stand failed. The three of them went to work then at McDonnell’s Drive-In at Cahuenga and Yucca. That was where she was working when Trumbo met her.

During my second series of visits to Trumbo, months later, I found him much improved. He was working again, doing a screenplay—an adaptation of whatever for whomever. And with that, he had gone back to the bathtub, spending long hours as he had for a long time past in a tepid soak, writing in longhand on a tablet propped on a writing stand balanced across the tub. When he wasn’t working, he spent a lot of time in bed, for he was still recuperating, had a long way to go, and knew it.

Cleo was consequently more relaxed and open when she met me at the gate, her smile a little broader, her voice a little surer. Was it that time she wore tennis clothes? It was then, or a day or two later—during that second visit anyway. When I saw that she was on her way to or from the courts down at the bottom of the hill, I knew that Trumbo was much, much better. That made it official.

He seemed so, too. I remember I talked to him in the bedroom. His voice was stronger. He seemed to be much more in control of his breathing; there were none of those distressing pauses as he would sit for a moment or two, waiting to catch his breath before resuming. The talk flowed on smoothly for an hour or two. Miscellaneous stuff, mostly—questions I had brought back with me from Grand Junction, points I wanted cleared up after further reading through his correspondence and papers which were on file at the University of Wisconsin. We covered the waterfront.

Finally, toward the end of the session, when we had already agreed we were about through for the day, he said, after a long moment’s pause, “Now, there’s one area that you haven’t touched upon, the only area on which I would place a compulsory approval by my wife—namely, the story of our courtship and marriage. I don’t think you know anything about it.”

“I know a little about it,” I said. I had heard sketchy details from a few of his friends, people I had interviewed already.

“Well, if you know a little,” Trumbo replied, “you should know all. But since it does deal with her, I think she ought to be able to read it.”

“I think that’s fair,” I said. We had decided between us that there would be no manuscript approval by him. Accuracy would be my responsibility. Better a few errors of fact than to write a book intended first to please its subject. This proviso on the material dealing with Cleo and their courtship was, then, the only exception he made to our original agreement. And, as I said to him then, it seemed only fair.

Irving Thalberg had told the head of his story department, Samuel Marx, to go out and get him the best writers there were, and Marx had taken him at his word. That was how it happened that during the mid-thirties, the time they refer to at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as the Thalberg era, some of the brightest and wittiest people in America came to work at the studio. Seated at the writers’ tables in the M-G-M commissary on any given afternoon back then, you might find the likes of Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, S. N. Behrman, George S. Kaufman—and perhaps in one corner, a little in awe of the rest, Dalton Trumbo and his friend Earl Felton.

That, at least, was where the two were one day in the spring of 1936 when they had a conversation that changed Trumbo’s life, eventually for the better—though for a while the issue was in doubt. At that time he was living in the house in the Hollywood Hills with his mother and his sister Elizabeth, who then was having her brief fling as a student at UCLA. Trumbo was ill at ease, discontent, still waiting, at thirty-two, for his life to begin. He was drinking too much, and he knew it. And as it happened, he did a good deal of that drinking with Earl Felton, a fellow B-movie writer there at Metro who was physically handicapped and possessed of a fierce wit that was as often as not turned against himself. On dismal, drunken occasions, Trumbo had poured out his discontents to Felton and had confided that what he really wanted most was to get married.

That was where they stood when, that day in the commissary, Felton asked him if he were still sure that he wanted to get married.

Trumbo said he was, and then began to hold forth once again on the many advantages in it he saw for himself.

But Felton cut him short. “Never mind that now. I think I’ve found the girl for you.”

Involuntarily Trumbo glanced around the commissary, as though he half-expected to have her pointed out to him from where they sat. “Who is she?” he asked. “Where?”

Felton frowned. “Never mind. Trust me. We’ll go out tonight—drinks and dinner—and then I’ll take you to her and introduce you.”

That was it then. Trumbo knew enough not to press his friend. The night proceeded just about as Earl Felton had outlined it until, after dinner, they set out to meet the young lady Felton had picked out for him. Much to Trumbo’s surprise they drove to the McDonnell’s Drive-In, then at the corner of Cahuenga and Yucca.

“Here?” Trumbo asked.

“Here,” Felton said firmly.

In 1936, the drive-in restaurant—complete with carhops, curbside service, and short-order menu—was a fairly recent innovation. There were not all that many of them, even in Hollywood, and the McDonnell’s at Cahuenga and Yucca, part of a small but successful Los Angeles chain, was one of the few all-night stands open in town. It drew heavily from the surrounding area where there were film studios and low-rent court apartments in which extras, bit players, technical people, film people of all kinds were living. And so McDonnell’s was a lively place with a lively regular clientele. It may not have been Musso & Frank’s, but it drew its share of famous names and faces, especially late at night as they trailed in for the coffees and hamburgers which they hoped would sober them up. It had become a favorite last stop for Earl Felton.

He knew his way around it. He waved a greeting to a couple in another car as he pulled in. Then he flashed his lights for service. A carhop two or three cars away called over that she would be right there. Felton pointed her out to Trumbo as she walked quickly away in the direction of the service counter. “See her?” he asked. “That’s the girl for you.”

It was Cleo Fincher, of course. When she came over to take their order Trumbo saw that she was really a remarkable girl. Good-looking, yes, young, trim, and pretty—but something more. She knew how to handle herself. Trumbo joked with her when Felton introduced them. Cleo came back with retorts that showed she was bright enough to parry with the best of her customers, and she had been given plenty of practice. She was the favorite there at McDonnell’s Drive-In. Working nights—from six to two or eight to four—she attracted the attention of the men, who usually said they might be able to give a pretty girl like her a big break in the movies. They buzzed around her like flies around the sugar bowl. A well-known cinematographer seriously offered to arrange a screen test for her. A slightly sinister movie stunt man frightened her by making a habit of trailing her home. She was propositioned almost nightly.

But not all the attention directed her way was of that sort. Cleo was—and was still when I met her—a very likable person. The late director Frank Tuttle and his wife, Tanya, for example, were frequent visitors to McDonnell’s. They came to know and like this nineteen-year-old carhop well enough to invite her to dinner at their home on one of her Mondays off. Cleo had told Tanya Tuttle, who happened to be a Russian-born dancer, that she herself had done some dancing when she was younger. The Tuttles were intrigued and invited Paul Draper, the dancer, to the same dinner, to see how the two would hit it off. In effect, they were matchmaking. But it didn’t take. Cleo was much less sure of herself than she seemed at the drive-in, her turf. She was slightly intimidated by Draper and the Tuttles.

And so with all the attention she had been receiving at the drive-in Cleo Fincher was used to glib and impetuous plays for her. Even so, Trumbo surprised her, even astonished her, when he asked her to marry him at the end of that first night’s visit as she came to collect the door tray from Earl Felton’s car.

Marry him? What was with this guy, anyway? Nice enough looking and well dressed. He didn’t look drunk. It didn’t seem like a joke; he seemed absolutely serious about it. Cleo could only conclude that this guy who had been introduced as Dalton Trumbo was crazy. Literally that.

Trumbo did not do much during their courtship to persuade her otherwise. He began showing up every night at the drive-in in that chauffeur-driven Chrysler Imperial of his. And the more he persisted, the more certain she became that he was insane. Every night he appeared he put the question to her again.

“Why don’t you at least give it some serious thought?”

“Oh, sure.”

“You’re not married now, are you?”

“No. I told you I wasn’t.”

“Then marry me.”

“Be serious.”

“I am being serious. Can’t you tell? Look, at least let me take you out next Monday night.”

“I can’t. I’ve got a boyfriend. I told you that. I’m going out with him.”

It was true enough. She did have a boyfriend. Nevertheless she had told herself in the beginning to pay no attention to Trumbo no matter how persistent he might become, no matter how he protested his love, and no matter how ardently he declared his wish to marry her. She refused to believe any of it. She was sure he was crazy.

Lucille and Wilma Thompson, her friends from that early independent effort at a drive-in in the Valley, were a good deal less certain than Cleo that Trumbo was mad. They kind of liked the guy. He was, in any case, a lot nicer than that brash bartender-restaurant manager Cleo had been going out with. They advised her to look more favorably upon Trumbo. Maybe he really did want to marry her. Maybe he wasn’t as crazy as she thought. The Thompson sisters became Cleo’s advocates there at McDonnell’s Drive-In. They encouraged him, passed on to him information about his rival, and kept him up to date on the progress of his own petition. And to Cleo they argued in his behalf.

Just like the cameraman who had preceded him at McDonnell’s, Trumbo became convinced that Cleo had a future in motion pictures; that if she were only given a screen test and her special quality captured on film, then a studio—M-G-M, as he imagined it—would certainly see her potential and sign her to a contract. He told her this. She told him to forget it; she’d heard that one before. But he persisted, and she kept turning him down. In all, he must have brought it up to her a dozen times and just as many times she turned him down. Finally, in utter exasperation, she agreed to meet him for the proposed screen test. She was never serious about it because she was sure he wasn’t serious about it. But he was! He lined up a cameraman and, on the appointed date, had him come to the home of a married couple whom they both knew, because he didn’t want the test to seem to Cleo “a prelude to seduction.” The big night came. Trumbo had worked up a scene for her. The cameraman was ready. They waited. She never came.

Anybody else might have been discouraged by this—but not Trumbo. He redoubled his efforts. He wanted to win her away from this “boyfriend” of hers, whoever he was, and if possible, to get her to leave the drive-in and work someplace else—practically anyplace else where she wouldn’t be so completely available to others. As long as she was there at McDonnell’s, anybody in Hollywood could talk to her for the price of a hamburger. What if Clark Gable should happen in and turn on the charm? What chance would Trumbo stand against him? He had to get her out of there somehow.

One night he put it up to her. “Look,” he said, “have you ever thought of leaving here? Taking some other kind of job?”

“Leave the drive-in? But I like it here.”

“Well, I know, but you don’t expect to work here all your life, do you?”

“No, maybe not. But where else would I work? I don’t know how to do anything, really, except what I’m doing here.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Trumbo said. “How would you like to go to secretarial school?”

Not very much at all, as it turned out. He urged it upon her, offered to pay the tuition, told her she ought to think about making some sort of future for herself. Again, she turned him down time after time. But again, too, Trumbo persisted. He kept insisting soberly that she think of her future, that she take the long view (when all the while what he was most interested in was getting her away from all those hungry wolves at the drive-in). In the end, she had to admit that it was probably practical to get job training of some sort, and secretarial seemed as good as any. So she gave in at last and agreed to go.

It was a disaster. In a way, it could hardly have been otherwise, for to work at all, it meant that Cleo had to get by on three or four hours’ sleep each night—up at seven to be at the school by eight; there until twelve; perhaps a nap in the afternoon; and then, depending on her shift, in to work at McDonnell’s Drive-In at four or six P.M. to work until two or four A.M. She told Trumbo she got “sleepy.” Not surprising. What is surprising is that she managed to stick out the schedule for two weeks before deciding she really didn’t want to be a secretary, anyway, and paying him back the money he had invested in her future.

The screen test was one bit of difficulty; the secretarial school was still another; but the biggest difficulty of all for Trumbo—and for Cleo, too—was Hal. Call him that. It is as good a name as any for her boyfriend, the front-runner, the suitor who was there long before Trumbo appeared on the scene. He had established prior rights—had staked out his claim on Cleo. Just as Trumbo did, Hal wanted to marry her. Lucille and Wilma Thompson quite frankly did not like him. They were suspicious of him from the start. He seemed to be not quite what he said he was. He had declared he wanted to marry Cleo but then delayed, saying he was waiting for his divorce to become final. Then, however, when he learned about Trumbo as a competitor, he was suddenly eager to marry her; the time was suddenly just right.

Unwittingly, Trumbo forced the issue. At this point he had been courting in his crazy fashion, receiving little or no encouragement, for better than a year. He had never even had a date with her. He kept pressing her to go out with him. Cleo, feeling she had let him down on the secretarial course and growing fonder of him as she got used to him, agreed at last. They would meet at the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for the show and go out to dinner afterward. Given even this much encouragement, Trumbo was suddenly certain that he could win her. But somehow Hal got wind of the upcoming date and, feeling the pressure from his rival, he told Cleo that he had just gotten word that his divorce decree had come through and the way was now clear for them to marry. He wanted to take her away immediately. This was what they had been waiting for, wasn’t it? Well, yes, but now Cleo was a little less certain about wanting to marry Hal than she had been before. Still, she allowed herself to be persuaded, cajoled, and finally pushed into it—she was only nineteen, after all—and the two drove off to Reno to get married. That was the day of Trumbo’s date with her at the Pantages. He waited for her for an hour and a half in front of the theater and finally went to McDonnell’s to find out what had happened. Then he heard the bad news: Cleo had gone off with Hal. Trumbo later realized that if he had not made that date with her, she would probably not have been stampeded into marrying his rival.

Cleo came back, already a little less than ecstatic about her newlywed state; she feared, and had begun to suspect, that she had done the wrong thing. Perceiving this, Lucille Thompson called Trumbo aside one night at the drive-in and confided her own misgivings: “You know,” she told him, “that divorce of his certainly came through at just the right time for him. I’ve got a suspicion that he either didn’t need to wait for the divorce in the first place and was just stringing her along. Or, when he heard about you, he got scared and told her the decree was final just to get her married to him, which would mean they got married early, and it’s not really legal.”

“Thanks,” said Trumbo. “I’ll look into it.”

He did. He hired a private detective who did some checking back in Michigan—Hal was from Detroit—and when the report came through, it confirmed what Trumbo had suspected: the divorce was not yet final, and so Cleo’s marriage was invalid. In the meantime, Trumbo did a little detective work on his own. Although the two rivals knew something about one another, they had never met, never even seen each other. Trumbo took advantage of that, and began hanging out at the small bar and grill that Hal managed in Hollywood. Inevitably, the two fell into conversation. Soon they were having long, convivial, philosophical talks that Trumbo managed to steer in the direction of marriage and domestic life.

“You’re not married?” Hal asked him one evening. “I don’t know but what you’re better off. I’ve been married twice—I’m married right now—and I’ll tell you something, you just can’t keep them happy.” He went on in that vein, unburdening himself to this sympathetic stranger, making plain what Lucille had hinted to Trumbo: that Cleo was not happy with her marriage. In the course of their talk, Hal also let slip where the newlywed couple was then living (information Trumbo was tempted to use but never did).

From there, Trumbo would return to McDonnell’s and compare notes with Lucille and Wilma on Cleo’s emotional state, for she would never complain to him. Finally, knowing all that he did about her feelings and armed with the information he had received from Michigan on the divorce, he brought Cleo around to the back of the drive-in one evening and told her what he had learned. “Now look,” he said, “this guy may be fine, but you are not legally married to him. He married you three months before he should have—and if you stay with him, you’re going to be stuck with him. From what I hear, you’re not so happy with him. You should be stuck with me.”

He was persuasive. He was eloquent. His frank intention was to separate them, to woo her away from her supposed husband, and so he suggested to her a cooling-off period. He proposed that he would rent an apartment for her, for which she alone would have the key, and there, at least theoretically free from emotional pressures, she might coolly and wisely decide with whom she preferred to spend the rest of her life. Trumbo was betting that it would be with him. Cleo agreed to try it. She left her would-be husband without notice, quit her job, and moved secretly into the apartment Trumbo had provided.

The next day he telephoned her there repeatedly but got no answer. Finally, he went to the drive-in and asked her friends if they had any idea what had become of her. With that, Lucille took him aside and upbraided him for what he had done—or rather, for what he had not: “You fool!” she said. “You shouldn’t have left her alone like that. Don’t you understand anything about women? The girl was lonely, confused. She got up in the middle of the night, got dressed, and walked back home to Hal. What the hell did you expect her to do?”

“You’re right, of course,” he sighed. “I can see that now. But what am I going to do?”

“Well, whatever you do, don’t give up. You don’t think she would have agreed to that apartment idea in the first place, do you, if you weren’t winning her over? Of course not! Keep after her!”

Christmas was coming—Christmas 1937—and it seemed to Trumbo that he had to win her away from Hal by then, or his cause would be lost absolutely and finally. Cleo’s fault in this was her virtue: she was intensely loyal. She knew by now that she wasn’t legally married to Hal; she had also come to realize that she didn’t even like the guy much; but she felt that since she had made her commitment to him, it was up to her to honor it. Trumbo understood all this, and he was afraid that if she spent Christmas with Hal it would put a “sentimental seal” on their relationship. The two could then repair the marriage at their leisure and go through the ceremony again, and that would be the end of Trumbo as far as Cleo was concerned. He felt it was now or never.

And so with Cleo once more back at McDonnell’s, he mounted his final campaign, choosing a day on which she reported at six P.M. to work until two in the morning. He put Lucille and Wilma Thompson on notice and asked them to let him know as soon as she showed signs of weakening. Every half an hour that day Cleo got a telegram pleading his case, accompanied by a gift—“not sumptuous or lavish but something chosen to please her.” Each time a telegram came, it was brought directly to her by a kid from Western Union on a bike; business was slow at the drive-in, and as the night wore on and the telegrams piled up, Cleo found herself going broke tipping the messenger boys. In the meantime, Trumbo had gone to the house of a friend, Morton Grant, who lived in the Valley, determined to wait it out. There, about ten-thirty that night, he got a call from Lucille Thompson, telling him to come right away—not to waste a minute, for Cleo at last saw things his way. He ran out and jumped into his car (on such a personal mission as this one he was driving the Chrysler himself and had given his chauffeur the night off) and roared off into the night—in the wrong direction. He was in Burbank before he discovered his error, then had to backtrack to Cahuenga, then down to Yucca, where he arrived at the drive-in many minutes late.

Wilma was motioning him to park his car at the rear in a dark area of the lot. Then she ran into the women’s rest room, and they emerged, Lucille and Wilma, one on each side, bringing a weeping Cleo across the parking lot to his car. That was that. She had given in completely. Distraught, confused, hoping for the best, she surrendered to him.

This did not mean, however, that there were not trials to come. That very night, after driving and talking for hours in the car, Cleo and Dalton went to Wilma Thompson’s for a late supper, then left for a little while to buy some things at an all-night market. They returned to Wilma’s with groceries to learn that Hal had been there in their absence, brandishing a pistol, demanding to know where Cleo was. He had gone through every closet, looked under the beds, and left, promising to return. He was a very angry man—not without some cause.

Cleo had no clothes, no bags, nothing but the brief, military-cut uniform she had worn that day to work. In it, she went with Trumbo late that night, and they took rooms in a Hollywood hotel. He could hardly take her home to his mother, and he was not about to leave her alone again. She had to have something to wear, of course, and so the next morning Trumbo called his business manager, filled him in on what had happened, and had him buy and bring a couple of dresses so that she would have something, at least, to wear out of the hotel. He took her out in one of them and bought her a wedding ring, demonstrating that his intentions, at least, were honorable. Then on to a department store to buy a wardrobe for her. There—perhaps she was growing ill with flu, or more likely it was just the emotional strain of the events of the past twenty-four hours—Cleo fainted. Trumbo took her back to the hotel and nursed her back to health as best he could over the next few days, running into M-G-M from time to time to convince them he still worked there.

That was where he was one afternoon when the guard phoned him from the gate to tell him that there was a guy patrolling the area, asking for Dalton Trumbo. The guard had asked the guy—it was Hal, of course—what he wanted with Trumbo. “I’m going to kill him,” Hal told the guard.

“What do you want me to do, Mr. Trumbo?” the gate guard asked. “Shall I call the cops?”

“Uh, well, no. See if you can get rid of him. Tell him I’m not here today or something.”

That day it worked. Hal left. Trumbo knew that next time it might not. The only thing to do, it seemed, was to get out of town until Hal cooled off. (He was a deputy sheriff of Los Angeles County and entitled to carry that gun wherever he went.) And so they left, the three of them: Trumbo thought, under the circumstances, it would be best if his chauffeur, Harvey, accompanied them; Harvey thought, under the circumstances, it would be best if he took along a gun, which he did. Only a .22 rifle, but it rode next to him on the front seat all the way on the drive down to La Jolla, just in case Hal should show up with his gun. On their first night in La Jolla one of the bus boys at the hotel where they were staying developed a sudden crush on Trumbo’s Chrysler and decided to take it out on a joyride. In the process, he wrecked it. They chose not to press charges. After all, the bus boy was not much more than a child, and besides, Cleo and Trumbo were feeling so guilty by that time that they hadn’t the heart to prosecute anyone. While they waited for the Chrysler to be repaired, Trumbo took her to visit his sister Catherine, who was living in San Diego with her then-husband, William Baldwin. She was the first member of the family to meet Cleo, and the two of them hit it off marvelously well.

About a week elapsed before the car was ready. That, they felt, was just about right for their return. They drove back to Long Beach and registered at a beach hotel. There they continued the long, hard process of meeting and winning over the family, one by one. It was about that time that they took Cleo’s mother out to dinner and provided her with her first glimpse of the man who had turned her daughter’s life upside down; Trumbo passed muster. The not-quite-newlyweds spent Christmas with friends—among them, Earl Felton, the man who had started it all—at a little apartment they had taken in Hollywood. And finally, after Christmas, they made ready for their severest test: meeting Dalton’s mother.

Maud Trumbo had known, or strongly suspected, for quite some time that there was a Cleo in her son’s life. He had confided nothing, but there were hints and clues that only one less acute than she would have missed. There were, first of all, a year and a half of evenings spent at McDonnell’s Drive-In. She must have been aware, if only from Dalton’s desperation during the latter months, that there was something important happening in his life. And then that sudden departure and the trip to San Diego—that must have made her curious. If all this weren’t enough, upon their return, Dalton had been unwise enough to call for service from the same laundry his mother used. Inevitably, there was a mixup, and some of Cleo’s things showed up in Maud’s bundle.

So when the invitation came to her from Dalton to come to his apartment for dinner “to meet someone,” she was well primed to expect something. Nevertheless Cleo surprised her. Although rather straitlaced, Maud Trumbo knew quality when she saw it. The dinner went beautifully. Dalton explained their situation and made sure his mother understood the reasons behind it—Hal, the invalid marriage, all of it. She understood, all right. Toward the end of the evening, with Cleo out of earshot, Maud took her son aside and said severely, “You have disgraced this wonderful girl, and now you must marry her.” Dalton assured her that nothing would suit him better, and that as soon as they could get the legalities of the matter ironed out, he would do just that.

It took a while. And in the meantime, there were further developments: circumstances conjoined to bring them even closer. First of all, Trumbo lost his job at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His single-minded pursuit of Cleo during the two years he was there had played hell with his screenwriting career. Although he had worked on a number of projects, he had not a single credit to show for his time at Metro. When he had left with Cleo to escape Hal, Trumbo’s friend, the producer Sam Zimbalist, had covered for him as long as he could. Finally, there was no help for it—Trumbo was fired. Zimbalist had taken the news to the couple just after Christmas. Trumbo, unemployed, had just $1,200 left to his name. He put it in a box and assured her they would get more somehow. And of course they did. Money was not their worry.

He managed to sell an original screen story, later the basis for the film The Kid from Kokomo, to his old studio, Warner Bros. His friend Frank Daugherty, the man who had gotten him his first movie job there in the story department, was the person Trumbo dealt with. Daugherty happened to mention to him in the course of things that he knew of an absolutely terrific buy in a ranch far up in the mountains of Ventura County. It was a 320-acre spread with a cabin and ranch buildings on it for only $7,500—and just $750 down. Trumbo told Daugherty he wanted it sight unseen; it seemed just the place he had in mind for Cleo and himself to settle down in and start their lives together. He borrowed the money for the down payment and bought the ranch. Next weekend he and Cleo drove up to look it over. It was primitive, all right—there was no telephone (he never had one installed), the only light was provided by individual kerosene lamps, although there was indoor plumbing. But it was remote from Hollywood and isolated from the outside world, and that suited him just fine.

Cleo had filed for an annulment on grounds that Hal had not been legally free to marry when the ceremony was performed. The facts were all on her side, but because three states were involved—she and Hal were residents of California who had married in Nevada; and Hal’s divorce had been filed in Michigan—it took a little time putting the case together. At last the judgment came, the marriage was annulled, and she and Trumbo were free to wed. The ceremony took place at Maud Trumbo’s apartment on March 13, 1938. Presiding, appropriately enough, was Ben B. Lindsay, the controversial judge of the Los Angeles County Courts who had gained national notoriety for advocating “companionate marriage.”

Cleo presented Trumbo with a dowry of sorts. Quite unknown to him, she had carefully kept all the tips he had given her after their first night at McDonnell’s Drive-In. She had saved them apart from the rest. Why? Had she suspected from the start, in spite of her repeated rejections, that the two of them would wind up together? Probably. In any case, she handed Trumbo back his tips, over one hundred dollars. She called it her dowry.

Cleo had read an earlier version of the preceding account, and Trumbo told me she seemed a little uneasy about it for reasons he couldn’t exactly define—though he did say she let him know the information he had given me about the affair was both inaccurate and insufficient.

And so when next I saw her, I asked her to read through the earlier version with me present. Trumbo was there, too. This way I hoped to get at what it was, besides facts and dates, that troubled her. She turned the pages, one by one, frowning and shaking her head.

I looked over at Trumbo and shrugged. “What’s wrong?” he asked her.

“It doesn’t make it clear here that if you were an ordinary man, things wouldn’t have been nearly so difficult for you.” She kept reading—and kept frowning. Finally with a sigh she finished.

“Well?”

“You don’t get the feeling out of this of how glad I am I married this crazy man instead of some dull son of a bitch.”

Later, I talked to her alone and asked her about that.

“Well, it’s true!” she protested. “He is just not an ordinary man. He goes at everything like a sort of dynamo. Imagine how he seemed to a kid like me. He’d be there, night after night, maybe he would have been drinking and maybe not. It didn’t matter. Either way he was so intense, so single-minded in his courting—if you want to call it that. He goes at anything this way. He’ll do anything to get what he wants. That was how he was; he acted crazy. Eventually, of course, this crazy quality of his—and I do mean slightly nuts—which had frightened me at first actually began to attract me. He just isn’t like other men. The better look I had at the rest of them, the more I thought that was really in his favor.”

“And what about Hal?”

“Well, what can I say? I’d been going with the man for a year and a half. And in that time I’d discovered so many things I didn’t like about him. I was in that old dilemma of being in love with a man I didn’t like a lot. Basically, I didn’t want to be married. But of course Hal pushed me into that when he felt me getting interested in Trumbo. He made his move the very night we were going out on our first date, you know.”

I nodded. I knew.

“And then, well, Trumbo convinced me I’d made a mistake. It didn’t take all that much convincing. Hal and I must have been married—together, anyway—all of two weeks.”

“What was life with Trumbo like?” I asked.

“After Hal? Mostly Trumbo was different from what I expected, though I can’t imagine now what that could have been. I had to get used to a few things. You may not know it, but he used to spend days in the bathtub, soaking, writing, talking on the telephone. The telephone was like his best friend. He’d spend hours on it, it seemed. When we got to the ranch, I was so happy because there was no telephone. I would never have guessed that he could have gotten along without it.”

No episode in Dalton Trumbo’s life is more revealing of the man than this story of his courtship and marriage. The way that he went after Cleo, apparently impetuously but with a sustained and almost obsessive concentration, foreshadowed the intensity with which, in twenty years’ time, he would be working to break the blacklist.

Dalton Trumbo was a romantic, and the shade of Jay Gatsby, so casually summoned up a couple of chapters back to suggest Trumbo’s pining after Sylvia Shore, seems to fit him better and perhaps more specifically than I had realized. It is not just that Gatsby, too, was a romantic—the romantic hero of American literature—but that there was a fabulous quality to his life, a sense of making it up like a story as he went along, which seems to fit Trumbo perfectly. The life Trumbo wrote for himself rivals, and really surpasses, any literary work he undertook. You get the feeling, looking back over it, that nothing he did, no decision he made, should ever be taken at face value, for all of it had immense significance, mythic and moral, to him. His courtship of Cleo Fincher is such a fascinating story because in a very real sense it is a story—that is how Trumbo must have experienced it, with himself as hero and she as heroine. How else could he have seen it through as he did to its successful completion? He believed passionately and profoundly in happy endings.

All this goes a long way toward explaining his affinity for film-writing. It was his métier, perhaps the kind of work that suited his deeper nature best. And so it shouldn’t be surprising, nor even too disappointing, that he returned to movie work at the earliest opportunity. The invitation came from RKO Radio Pictures in April 1938. His agent, Arthur Landau, worked out a contract for him there which contained an important proviso: it stipulated he had the right to work at home—in this case eighty-five miles away at the Lazy-T—as he called his new ranch up in Ventura County.

At RKO Trumbo was once again installed as a writer in the B-picture unit. There, as at Warners, the accent was on quantity; speed and craftsmanship were the qualities that mattered. Movie production was up all over Hollywood. In the midst of the Depression every studio in town had started cranking movies out as fast as they could make them. The reason was that at that time the studios owned nearly all of the movie theaters, vast chains of them, all around the country. They had to keep them filled, and to do that they had to keep new films flowing through them constantly. The double feature was born during the Depression as just another means of pulling audiences in. And with the double feature came the B picture, second feature, the “bottom of the bill.” As a result, the studios were forced to keep movie production very high, even though they were losing millions in the proposition. Only those who were actually involved in the making of films were doing well at all. Salaries—even salaries for writers on the B unit—were high and getting higher. Everybody in Hollywood seemed to be getting fat in the midst of the Great Depression.

His first assignment at RKO, a routine B production titled Fugitives for a Night, was discharged in short order. It was shot, released, and passed into extinction quite without notice—the fate of most such films. His next, however, was somewhat different. A Man to Remember was a remake of a 1933 film, One Man’s Journey, and both were based on a published story (not an original for the screen) by Katharine Havilland-Taylor, “Failure.” Working up at the ranch, Trumbo did the screenplay in two weeks, and Garson Kanin, in his first directorial assignment, shot the film in just fifteen days. They actually came in under budget at $108,000 and so were able to argue a musical score at $8,000 (originally unbudgeted) out of the studio.

It was a good film, one that stood head and shoulders above the usual B product. Starring Edward Ellis, Anne Shirley, and Lee Bowman, it told the story of a small-town doctor (Ellis), a supposed failure who has died in debt as the film begins. The events of his life, related in a series of flashbacks, demonstrate that no matter what the merchants who are pressing their claims against his estate may have thought, he was no failure but a man who brought life and hope to the entire town, one to remember.

Obviously, this was material with which Dalton Trumbo could identify personally. The small-town setting, the theme questioning the nature of failure and success—these he had treated at length in his novel Eclipse, and would give incidental treatment to again in Johnny Got His Gun. He put his stamp on the film. The atmosphere, the general feeling of it, is what might have come from a movie adaptation of Eclipse, and the small-town doctor is so much like the protagonist of Trumbo’s novel that as a kind of final gesture of authorship Trumbo gave him the same name; the protagonist of A Man to Remember is Dr. John Abbott.

It was the first film with which Trumbo was involved to gain any sort of special attention. He was singled out for praise by, among others, the New York Times critic, Frank S. Nugent, who noted in passing that it was “one of the most uncolossal pictures of the year.” He categorized it as a good little movie and put it on his ten-best list that year. It appeared on a number of others. And while the job Trumbo did on A Man to Remember didn’t immediately change his status as a screenwriter—he continued on the RKO B unit—he took pride in the film for years to come.

During that first year at RKO, a production of Washington Jitters was eventually brought to Broadway. As it finally happened, though, Kaufman and Hart had nothing to do with it. The team had had some success the year before with their own political satire, I’d Rather Be Right, and perhaps by the time John Boruff and Walter Hart got their adaptation of Jitters untracked, the vein had been temporarily exhausted. At any rate, when the Theatre Guild produced it in association with the Actors Repertory Company in 1938, the play ran only twenty-four performances in spite of reviews that were, on balance, favorable.

Trumbo, of course, had nothing to do with the adaptation of Washington Jitters. His only participation in the enterprise, as original author of the work, was the receipt of a box-office statement and a modest check during each of the few weeks it ran. But that doesn’t mean he had been doing no writing of his own. In the course of that long period he spent in pursuit of Cleo, he had begun a novel, one as different as could be from Washington Jitters. It was certainly the most serious and—as it would turn out—also the best work of any kind he had ever undertaken.

The move out to the ranch was undertaken partly* to give him a chance to finish this new novel, which was to become Johnny Got His Gun. He wanted to insulate himself from Hollywood, perhaps to avoid social occasions that (with the Spanish Civil War in 1936–1939, and the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 followed by the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany) had grown increasingly political as war seemed more imminent. He was personally convinced that America should stay out of a European war that now seemed inevitable. His reasons had their roots in his experience as a boy, seeing the young veterans he had known returning from World War I—some maimed, blind, and broken—to Grand Junction. But it was more than sentiment that swayed him. His was also certainly an intellectual position. He held to it firmly because he thought any other was then quite unreasonable.

Never one to avoid an argument, he must frequently have found himself in bitter debate at that time with people he had always felt in fundamental agreement with before. Nothing is so ruinous to the writing of a novel as to find oneself arguing the intellectual point of it night after night. It was for this reason, to avoid such occasions, that he removed himself from Hollywood to the Lazy-T during the writing of Johnny Got His Gun. The important thing was to get the novel written and let that stand as his statement against the war, rather than dithering it away in a hundred separate wrangles.

He had begun the project in 1937 after carrying the idea with him for a number of years. Early in the thirties he had seen an item in the newspaper telling of an incident that had occurred during an official visit to Canada by the Prince of Wales. In the course of a tour of a Canadian veterans hospital, the prince was seen by reporters to emerge weeping from a closed room. Inquiries disclosed that behind the door lay a World War I soldier who had lost not only his limbs, but all his senses except touch as well. According to the newspaper account, the only way that the prince could communicate with the soldier was to kiss him on the forehead—and that he had done.

Well, Trumbo thought, why not a novel from the point of view of such a man? The basket case, war’s most extreme victim, could surely make the most eloquent and persuasive statement against it, if only a novel could actually be written under such difficult restrictions. And so very early, the composition of Johnny Got His Gun presented itself to Dalton Trumbo as a series of technical problems to be dealt with and solved. And perhaps that was just as well, for if he had allowed himself to become totally immersed in the dramatic reality of this emotionally loaded subject, then he might have been tempted to raw excesses of passion—to bathos or to rage—and the book that was Johnny might never have been written as it was written. He managed to solve those technical problems by the intelligent use of a number of devices. Since the action of the book was to take place totally within the brain of his young soldier—“a dead man with a mind that could still think,” Joe Bonham calls himself—Trumbo quite properly employed a modified stream of consciousness technique and deviated from it only toward the very end of the novel (doing some slight damage in the process to Johnny’s integrity of tone).

Trumbo also uses film techniques to good advantage. Flashbacks, in such a context as this one, seem so inevitable that if the technique were not then available, it would have had to be invented. The success of the flashbacks in Johnny is due partly to the skill with which they are handled: each of Joe Bonham’s memories is sharp and incisive, introduced logically, and each is essential to the structure of the novel. But partly, too, the success here is due to its naturalness in the context of the novel’s situation. You would almost expect the entire novel to be done in alternating flashbacks and soliloquies. What is perhaps more remarkable, given the fact that his protagonist has lost all senses but touch, is that Trumbo is able to extend his narrative through present time in the latter half of the book, putting Joe in contact with the outside world, and ultimately in conflict with it.

Trumbo also employs the movie technique of montage, covering space with sound brilliantly in the scene of Joe’s departure for war. Bits of talk between him and his girl Kareen are jumbled with an orator’s highfalutin rhetoric, shouts from the crowd, and lines from “Over There,” the George M. Cohan war anthem that gave the novel its title—all of it sketching in the scene and evoking the period with a shorthand that is essentially cinematic.

And finally, though this may seem a bit vague, his treatment of time in Johnny Got His Gun is not novelistic in the usual sense, but more in the nature of what you experience seeing a film. There is little of the density of detail and incident that you usually get in a novel: it is actually a rather short book. Yet time passes. This in itself is surprising in a narrative that is so nearly static, the only real action coming in the second part with Joe’s breakthrough to the outside world. But what is especially impressive is that although the period of time that passes is an unspecified one, Trumbo manages to create the impression that it is of rather considerable duration, several years certainly. He uses fade-outs suggesting loss of consciousness. He fixes our attention firmly on Joe so that Joe’s subjective experience of the passage of time, whether faulty or not, is totally believable to us. It is like movie time, an emotional dimension, an empathetic reality.

The first of Johnny’s two “Books” begins with Joe Bonham’s numbed and agonized wish that the phone would stop ringing. It is an auditory hallucination, and in with it rushes the memory of his father’s death: The phone rings at the bakery where Joe works, and he is summoned home by his mother, telling him that his father has just died. Joe’s reaction, as he views his father’s corpse (quoted earlier in Chapter Two), leads him to the realization that something is wrong, that he is sick, that there really is no telephone ringing, and that he is stone deaf. He drifts in and out of consciousness, and it is not until toward the end of the chapter that any memory or mention of the war comes, and then only fleetingly, for he is quickly back with his parents in Colorado—living, as he then must, in the past, existing only in his memories.

As Book I, entitled “The Dead,” moves on, we follow the pattern established in the first chapter. Joe Bonham continues to remember, and his memories center, for the most part, on his early life in Shale City, Colorado. These individual scenes are brilliantly realized; the past is evoked with the economy and vividness of film. A paragraph, or sometimes just a sentence, will call forth the precise image, the remembered detail that makes it all real to us: the smell of a hamburger stand down on Main Street, and the warmth of the hamburgers inside his jacket as he ran them home to his family; the old men of the town sitting around the cigar store, discussing the progress of the war in Europe, with America still neutral. And the longer sections—the story of his last fishing trip with his father and the lost fishrod, and the hellish couple of days spent working out on the railroad in the Utah desert with a Mexican section gang—these, among others, tell not only what it was like growing up in Shale City, but also what it was like to be Joe Bonham. This last is, I think, quite important, for considering his condition and all he stood for in the novel, there must have been some temptation to generalize Joe’s character, to make him the pacifist’s Everyman, the universal victim. This, however, Trumbo wisely refused to do and instead made Joe Bonham into a person, a very specific person—himself. For clearly Joe’s Shale City is Grand Junction, his parents Orus and Maud Trumbo, his eagerness to succeed and be somebody, to be admired—this, as we know, was certainly also Dalton Trumbo.

By contrast to the sections of Book I dealing with Colorado, some of those set in Los Angeles seem a bit weak. Could it be that the alterations Trumbo made in chronology offered some fundamental difficulty? The problem was this: because he wished to combine the bakery material with his Colorado boyhood, he was obliged to shift the locale. But he did so in the most arbitrary sort of way: “Then his father decided to leave Shale City. They moved to Los Angeles.” Only that. It is one of the few instances when the bones of the book show through its flesh. Why was this necessary? It may be that Trumbo’s sense of identification with Joe was so keen that he felt he had to share whatever he could of his own life with him, even though it meant bending years to fit.

In the course of Book I, Joe Bonham has learned, little by little and sense by sense, that he is not only deaf but also blind and dumb, and that all four of his limbs have been amputated or blown off. Each separate discovery stirs a memory within him that makes the loss just that much more painful to him. The only sense left him is the sense of touch; at one point he has a tactile hallucination and believes that a rat has come to nibble at him, just as the rats chewed at the corpses in the trenches. But later he realizes that real as it was to him at the time, “the rat was a dream.” He knows then that he must regain control of his mind, or these hallucinations will continue and he might go mad. He must learn to keep track of time passing. He does so, finally, through the warmth of the rising sun in the morning and the nurse’s hands on his body beginning him on what he comes to recognize as his daily routine. And once he has mastered that: “He had a mind left by god and that was all. It was the only thing he could use so he must use it every minute he was awake. He must think till he was tired tireder than he had ever been before. He must think all the time and then he must sleep.”

And if thought is to provide his salvation—as, in a sense, it does—Book II of Johnny, entitled “The Living,” details the working of that salvation. Put briefly, it is brought about through Morse code. Joe had learned it as a kid. It occurs to him that since he does have control of his neck muscles, he can use them to beat his head against his pillow. And so he begins, hoping he can get through to someone, sending out the SOS signal over and over again. It is remarkable, but Trumbo manages to pump a great deal of excitement, even suspense, into these efforts by Joe Bonham to get through to the nurse, or to a doctor, or to anyone out there he can communicate with. Finally, he does, and the reply to his SOS comes back to him from the outside world, tapped by a finger on his forehead: “What do you want?”

Then follows a very moving chapter in which Joe must deal with that staggering question. His mind races. He remembers that once he saw an exhibition of a man turning to stone: “You could tap a coin against his arm and it sounded as if you were tapping it against marble it would ring so.” If that was bad, thinks Joe, then he is worse. They could put him out on exhibit in the same way:

He would be doing good in a roundabout way. He would be an educational exhibit. People wouldn’t learn much about anatomy from him but they would learn all there was to know about war. That would be a great thing to concentrate war in one stump of a body and to show it to people so they could see the difference between a war that’s in the newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is fought out lonesomely in the mud somewhere between a man and a high explosive shell. Suddenly he took fire with the idea he got so excited over it he forgot about his longing for air and people this new idea was so wonderful. He would make an exhibit of himself to show to the little guys and to their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and wives and sweethearts and grandmothers and grandfathers and he would have a sign over himself and the sign would say here is war and he would concentrate the whole war into such a small piece of meat and bone and hair that they would never forget as long as they lived.

And so he taps out his request, asking that he be let out, that he be put on exhibit at beaches, county fairs, church bazaars, circuses, and traveling carnivals. The answer: “What you ask is against regulations.” His response—and we are now in the last chapter, so it is meant as Trumbo’s final statement—seems uncharacteristic of Joe, perhaps even a false note here. Denied his request, he suddenly has “a vision of himself as a new kind of Christ” and begins preaching a new kind of gospel, one of threat and what-will-happen-if: “If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed if there are bullets to be fired if there are men to be killed they will not be us.” Who then?

It will be you—you who urge us on to battle you who incite us against ourselves you who would have one cobbler kill another cobbler you who would have one man who works kill another man who works you who would have one human being who wants only to live kill another human being who wants only to live. Remember this. Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots you fierce ones you spawners of hate you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything in your lives.

By rhetoric—and certainly it is impressive rhetoric—Trumbo tries to elevate Joe from a figure of pathos to one of heroic dimensions. It does not really work. Joe Bonham cannot but be a victim, a living reproach to the world that makes war and leaves its surviving victims tucked away neatly behind locked doors in hospitals.

To say this is simply to concede that Johnny Got His Gun has its faults. What is remarkable is that it hasn’t many more of them, considering that Trumbo’s overriding purpose in writing it was to get his antiwar message across to a world hurtling toward war. That he did, certainly, but in so doing he also created a profoundly moving novel.

Few have found it less than that. When, at the end of August 1938, he sent the first half of Johnny off to Elsie McKeogh, she responded immediately and enthusiastically: “I am tremendously interested in your new book and I am very curious to see what you are going to do with the other half of it. It is an amazingly vivid and touching job, and I haven’t been able to get Joe out of my head since I read it.” She believed in the book and was sure that any publisher she showed it to would feel just as she did.

That, however, was something of a problem. Trumbo had resented the treatment given Washington Jitters by Alfred Knopf and was not especially anxious to turn over the new novel to him. Mrs. McKeogh urged him to reconsider: “If you were in my position you would realize that every publisher has certain authors who are dissatisfied with his labors in their behalf, and even the ones that you are particularly eager for are not exceptions.” The question of the publisher hung fire. When he had completed Johnny Got His Gun, he wrote to her on February 20, 1939:

One of the things that disturbs me is the fact that there is growing up in this country among liberals and intellectuals a strong pro-war sentiment. They appear to view war as the only salvation for democracy, whereas I see it as a sure destruction for the kind of democracy we know at present. These perfectly sincere war mongers are becoming louder, more influential and even more dangerous. If Knopf were in sympathy with them—and I suspect that he might be—he would certainly be out of sympathy with “Johnny Got His Gun.” In such an event he might deliberately delay a decision, and if he decided to publish it he might further delay its ultimate appearance. If the book is any good at all it is good as an argument against war; and it will be utterly valueless if the country is either in war or in favor of war by the time it is published.

Note the press of time felt by Trumbo, the need to get the book out before the world—and America with it—was plunged into war. The immediate problem of the publisher was dealt with directly and, as it turned out, was solved easily when Mrs. McKeogh went to Alfred Knopf himself and explained that her client was dead-set against publishing his new novel with Knopf. Nothing could be simpler. Trumbo was released from his contract. Johnny Got His Gun was offered to J. B. Lippincott and was snapped up immediately.

He was right, of course, to feel a certain sense of urgency in getting Johnny out. Although Lippincott wasted no time in seeing it published and out into the bookstores, Trumbo and his novel were ultimately overtaken by events: Germany invaded Poland a week before the book came out. World War II was several days under way when the reviews began to appear. All were respectful, and Ben Ray Redman, in the Saturday Review of Literature, was quite bowled over. “This is one of the most horrifying books ever written,” he began, but manfully continued with a full and accurate synopsis of the novel, concluding his review with this paragraph:

To say that this book is a terrific indictment of war is to employ a phrase that has been robbed of its proper weight of meaning by careless and promiscuous use. Yet the phrase must serve. To insist that this book should be required reading for all men big and little, for those who are capable of making wars and for those likely to be herded into them, is to betray an innocent and mistaken faith in the power of the printed word. Yet one must insist, even though one knows that there are some indictments that simply will not stick, and that war has survived them, and doubtless will survive them, beyond numbering. It is possible to insist conscientiously, too, on more grounds than one for “Johnny Got His Gun” is not merely a powerful anti-war document; it is also a powerful and brilliant work of the imagination. In giving voice to a human experience that has hitherto been voiceless, Mr. Trumbo has written a book that can never be forgotten by anyone who ever reads it.

There has grown up a tradition among Trumbo’s liberal and right-wing detractors that Johnny Got His Gun was purely a product of the rather ignominious von Ribbentrop Pact period, during which world communism did an abrupt about-face the moment the Soviet Union signed its nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany, suddenly beginning to talk pacifism and nonintervention, leaving Hitler free to range across Europe. None of that, however, had anything to do with how or why Johnny was written. Trumbo was not a member of the Communist Party during the time the book was in preparation, nor for years after it was published. When it was being written, its antiwar message was very much contrary to the Party line. It was simply an accident of history that the book was published when the Party line itself had been altered so that it suddenly and quite surprisingly conformed with what Trumbo had freely expressed in his novel. As a result of this accident of history and at J. B. Lippincott’s suggestion, Johnny Got His Gun was serialized in the Party organ, the Daily Worker, soon after publication—giving rise, I suppose, to the myth that it was written to order, a hack job.

None of this concerned Trumbo much at the time, nor would it even bother him greatly in retrospect. Once he had written Johnny, and publication was assured, the matter was out of his hands. Now he would spend correspondingly less time up at the ranch in Ventura County and more with the new friends he had made about the time he began pursuing Cleo. There were three of them—Ring Lardner, Jr., the son of the short-story writer; Ian McLellan Hunter; and Hugo Butler—all junior writers at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer when Trumbo got to know them, all around Cleo’s age, about ten years younger than he. They remained good friends for life (Butler died in 1968). All four were blacklisted.

Ring Lardner, Jr., and Ian McLellan Hunter live within a few blocks of one another on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It suits them. Having met these two New Yorkers in their native habitat, it is hard even to imagine them elsewhere. They started out as reporters together at the New York Daily Mirror and were on their way west to become screenwriters by the time they were twenty-one. Not much more than a decade later, however, they were back in New York, blacklisted, pariahs of the movie industry. During that period they eked out a living writing for television under pseudonyms (a lot of it for the old Robin Hood series which was filmed in England). With the blacklist ended, both resumed their rightful identities and continued to write for films and television. Lardner’s post-blacklist credits include The Cincinnati Kid and M*A*S*H. And although Ian McLellan Hunter (he used his middle name to distinguish himself from the English actor Ian Hunter) did some work on theatrical features after emerging into the sunlight, most of his writing was on television for such distinguished shows as Hallmark Hall of Fame and the PBS production of The Adams Chronicles. Neither Lardner nor Hunter felt it necessary or especially desirable to move back to Hollywood, and though they were at a continent’s remove from Trumbo, the three kept in close touch. They visited when trips took them to the other coast. They called at all hours of the day and night. After more than twenty years apart, they still spoke of one another as “best friends.”

I met with them in the apartment of Ring Lardner, Jr. Also present were Frances Lardner and Ian’s wife, Alice Goldberg Hunter, who has known Trumbo longest of them all—since the days the two worked together in the Warner Bros. story department. With all of them—the two men especially—I sensed a certain reticence born of propriety, as though it bothered them a little to speak of something as personal as their friendship with Trumbo. But they did speak freely and quite personally, almost out of a sense of duty. More than from anyone else I talked to (with the exception of Trumbo himself), I got the feeling from Ring Lardner, Jr., and from Ian McLellan Hunter that they were consciously and carefully speaking for the record.

“We were all writers at M-G-M,” Lardner remembered. “It must have been about 1937.” He looked to Hunter for confirmation and then nodded. “Yes, 1937. We looked up to him because he was very much our senior, the old pro. Remember by this time he’d published a couple of novels and many stories and had a number of movie credits, too.”

“My first memory of Trumbo?” Hunter echoed my question. “Well, that would have to be him in his big black Chrysler. I saw him in it before I actually knew him. He was in a hut down the road from where I worked, which was in a location hut near Metro’s Tarzan jungle. But as for when we actually met, I guess that was at a party. He came up to me and congratulated me for a script I didn’t write, an Andy Hardy, as I recall. He was embarrassed by his mistake but then we got that sorted out and became friends.”

Alice Hunter remembered the Chrysler, too: “I recall going out with him once before Cleo sort of exploded into his life. He invited me to the Philharmonic Hall for some event, and in the course of getting there, I did something terrible to the Chrysler. As I recall I must have opened up the car door extra wide and chipped paint off his car. Anyway, he was just princely in the way he handled it—so gallant. He neither cut me off his list for all time or said one word of reproach. We simply went off and saw the concert.”

I asked her what he was like then. “Physically? You mean what did he look like? Well, he was sandy-haired and had a mustache off and on. He was slight but strong, kind of wiry.”

“We’ve got a picture of him someplace on a yachting trip,” Ring Lardner put in.

Alice Hunter nodded and remembered, “And we have a picture of the three of you wrestling.”

“That wrestling got to be a big thing with us,” Lardner mused. “I don’t know why exactly. We’d all gang up on one—say, Trumbo, Ian, and me against Hugo—then suddenly switch sides and start in on another. We called it the treachery system.”

“The way Trumbo was,” said Alice Hunter, “he challenged all comers. This was how his son, Chris, grew up, arm wrestling his father practically every day. Meanwhile the kid was getting stronger and stronger, and finally, when he was in high school, he took Trumbo and took him with a vengeance. Trumbo put all he had into it, but Chris forced him down. Finally, Trumbo strained so that he tore the muscle in his arm, just detached the bicep completely. Couldn’t use that arm for weeks. And that ended the Indian wrestling.”

They talked about Cleo and how right she was for him. During Trumbo’s relentless courtship, his friends had gradually become aware of her and finally had gone to the drive-in to see for themselves, “Who is this girl everyone’s raving about?” Hunter summed up: “With us, she was from another world, you might say. But she immediately sized us up and her assessment of us and our relationship with Trumbo was always correct.”

(Sometime before, I had talked with Jean Butler,* Hugo Butler’s widow, in Hollywood, and the subject of Cleo had come up with her, too. “I remember Trumbo bringing her to dinner for the first time,” Jean Butler had told me. “She was coltish, lovely—a shy, awkward girl. I don’t think she said a word all night long, just gave us that big grin of hers and charmed us all.”)

“It was funny with him,” said Lardner. “When I first got to know him he was going through bankruptcy, chauffeur-driven Chrysler and all. And he no sooner got through that crisis than he was into another. It seemed that little time ever elapsed between one set of money problems and another. He would get out and then overextend himself again. Buying the ranch was part of that routine—or not so much just buying it as what he did to it afterward. When we first went up there to visit them, it was just a little shack, way the hell and gone up into Ventura County. But that shack grew and grew. Before you knew it the shack itself had become the kitchen and there were two additional rooms.”

“And then the landscaping,” prompted Alice Hunter. “He put in a big lake and all.”

“What a place that was!” exclaimed Ian Hunter. “When they were finished adding onto it, it had a marble floor and a bar, a formal bar in an elaborate room. And off that was an enormous dining room done in some high-class Philippine wood, the kind of paneling job that would be just prohibitive today.

“But it was always a working ranch. There were farm animals, and at its height there were a lot of horses. Cleo wasn’t a bad rider but Trumbo himself could hardly stay in the saddle. I remember once in the winter a couple visiting them had headed down in a car to the little crossroads general store when it started to snow, a real blizzard, very suddenly. We were quite rightly worried and headed out on foot to look for them. Dalton disappeared. We went out and found the car stalled in the snow some distance away. There was a kid in the car, I remember, and I was carrying the kid back with the house already in sight through the heavy snow when Trumbo suddenly came galloping out of the barn and up to us on a horse to join the search party. He had taken all that time just trying to get the horse saddled. He was no cowboy.”

Ring Lardner, Jr., nodded. “The place was so remote and inaccessible that you were really at the mercy of the weather. No Hollywood producer could conceive of a place so inaccessible. The telephone process was just horrendous—to get a call through they had to get hold of the store at the crossroads and convince somebody there that the call was important enough for them to drive twenty miles to get Trumbo, which wasn’t easy, and then have Trumbo drive twenty miles back to the store to take the call. In most cases, the producer would be reduced to driving up to the ranch. And producers didn’t really like to do that. You’d take 101 north along what they called the ridge route—it had a fearsome reputation, that stretch of road. Trucks’ brakes would give out all the time. In fact, Cleo’s brother and his family were killed by a truck that went out of control along there. At the crest of the ridge was this little crossroads town of Lebec. You turned due west there and went up this crappy little road twenty miles to his ranch. If all this was a barrier between Trumbo and the producers, as he intended, it also made difficulties for him.

“We used to drive up there on the weekends. I remember one Friday we left about ten-thirty at night. And on an impulse we turned off to visit Hugo Butler in the valley. We got there and found the house dark but the door unlocked. The Butlers were asleep. We tiptoed inside and had a couple of drinks at the bar and got to thinking what a great joke it would be on Hugo and Jean if we were to rearrange their furniture and then leave. So that’s what we were doing, and in the course of it making some pretty big bumps and scrapes, when we heard this very tough, ‘Don’t move!’ We looked around to find Hugo standing in the doorway with a shotgun. We dropped down behind the bar and called out that we were friends. So we all had a big laugh and more drinks, and Trumbo and I slept on the living room floor and left the next morning.”

(Jean Butler had remarked earlier to me of that time in their lives, “That was early, 1939, when the Katzenjammer period began. All this wrestling and the pranks they’d play—it was crazy. I don’t know how the other wives felt, but to me we seemed superfluous—the husbands were absolutely self-winding. They had a life of their own. In that movie of his, Husbands, John Cassavetes touches on it a little. It was like that.”)

“With all these elaborate jokes and with the expeditions we used to go on,” said Alice Hunter, “Trumbo was sort of an instigator, a regular Clausewitz. He got a lot of enjoyment out of planning strategy, putting together moves, like a general.”

(Jean Butler: “It was a little like having Dickens or Twain as your buddy. Even in this foursome, Trumbo was very much in the lead. It was the impact of his personality on all of us, the speed of his wit. He had the theatrical qualities of a Twain or a Dickens, too. It was just the way the room sorted itself out. You listened to him. Everybody else tended to take second place in the relationship.”)

“Occasionally, however,” said Ring Lardner, Jr., “we were serious. About writing, for instance.”

“That’s right,” said Hunter, “but the general philosophy was, don’t bother your friends with your work problems if everything’s going basically okay. To this day Ring will only know in general what I’m working on without the nitty-gritty details. The idea was always that we consult each other when we have soluble problems with alternatives and are past the blockage. There was never any shoptalk as such, however.”

“But,” said Lardner, “about specific story problems, yes, we might ask for help and you’d read perhaps half the script and have a conference of several hours in which you’d get everybody’s best ideas. It was truly a free interchange. That happened.”

“Then there was his idea book,” said Ian McLellan Hunter. “Like most writers Trumbo had more ideas than he could execute, so he would put them down for future use. If he wrote it and sold it, he would check it off in his book. But if one of us was in trouble—‘between assignments,’ as the euphemism goes—he would be invited to ransack the idea book. My screenplay The Day It Rained Money was sort of a collaboration of this kind.”

“Look,” said Alice Hunter, summing up, “in many ways it was an enormously meaningful relationship for all four of them, Hugo included. The blacklist brought tremendous closeness to them. When Ring and Trumbo got out of prison, Hugo split what he had in the bank with them. Anybody who got a check would share it with the other guys. The type of banter they engaged in could only come out of a deep and close relationship. In no way could any of the kidding they did—and they did a lot of it—be taken as a threat, an attack, or an insult. Even today, if we were in serious trouble, we would turn to each other, which may be why we still keep in close touch.”

Silence hung over them for a moment. Ring Lardner, Jr., started to speak, then hesitated. He was a pensive, careful man, as laconic as his famous father. He chose his words well and thought out his statements before he made them. He was the first of the Hollywood Ten (with the exception of Edward Dmytryk, whose motive was self-serving) to reveal that in fact he had at one time been a member of the Communist Party and was one when called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. He wrote about his membership in the Party in the Saturday Evening Post in 1961, when he surely might still have been considered blacklisted. He spoke plainly and directly on this point that would certainly have troubled the readers of the Post. With that same spirit of directness, of putting his cards on the table, he brought up what we had all carefully avoided to that point.

“You’ll want to know about the political part of it,” he said.

I agreed that I certainly would.

“Well, this is more or less how it went. I was the first of this group to declare myself a Communist. I kind of involved Ian not long afterward. But Dalton, because of his pacifism, was reluctant to take this sort of position. This was during the period when American Communists were supporting the front against Hitler. During the Pact period when Communists were against the war, our points of view were very much in agreement, of course, and we worked together on the American Peace Mobilization. In June 1941, when the Nazis attacked Russia, he found it very difficult to support the war. But Hugo, who had been quite nonpolitical, then said he saw things our way. Gradually Dalton, too, became increasingly less pacifist in his approach, and by the time of Pearl Harbor, America’s entry into the war had changed his mind. We didn’t see as much of one another during the war, but I remember that he and I did happen to get together in Washington when he was in to do research for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. I remember how he put it then. He said, ‘Well, I’ve joined the Red Cross.’ I knew what he meant, of course.”

I glanced around at the others seated there in Lardner’s living room. There was general agreement. His statement seemed to satisfy them all.

As America’s entry into World War II grew nearer and seemed more and more certain, the political atmosphere in Hollywood became warmer and more turbulent. What began with organizing activities for the various guilds and craft unions led to radical-chic benefits for Spanish Republicans and subsequently to aid for the Spanish refugees. During the Pact period pacifist sentiment was instantly mobilized, then just as quickly, with the invasion of Russia by Germany on June 22, 1941, rallies were organized urging America to make a quick entry into the war and stem the tide of fascism that was sweeping over the world. It was not the finest hour of the American left. Such sudden reversals of position were clearly dictated by the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy.

The American right had noticed and was carefully taking the measure of the “Hollywood Reds”: they looked vulnerable, and they were. A chapter of the Order of the White Camelias, a Klan-like organization, had been founded in Hollywood to combat what was seen as the Red Menace there. A member of the White Camelias, director Sam Wood, invited the first House Committee on Un-American Activities, under the chairmanship of Texas congressman Martin Dies, to come out to Hollywood to investigate Communist infiltration of the movie industry. In fact, the Dies Committee did come to Hollywood in August 1940 and held what promised to be a sort of dress rehearsal for the Hollywood Ten hearings in Washington seven years later. A few of the same names were named—director Herbert Biberman and his wife, actress Gale Sondergaard, and writer Samuel Ornitz, for example—but the Committee left, Dies promising to return and see to the job of exposing individual Reds in the movie industry. World War II intervened, however, with the consequent alliance of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Anyone could see that the day of reckoning had only been postponed. When the opportunity presented itself, the right would strike, and Hollywood—because of its prominence and because of the movie industry’s vulnerable dependence on good publicity—was certain to be a prime target. A more prudent man would have avoided political activities of any kind during the years that followed, but of course prudence had never been a virtue cultivated by Dalton Trumbo.