CHAPTER SIX

THE WAR YEARS

Johnny Got His Gun was the first of Dalton Trumbo’s books to be widely and well reviewed. It caused quite a stir, coming out as it did the week the war began. In fact, it won the American Booksellers Award for him in 1940 as the “most original novel of the year” (which it certainly must have been). He had then with Johnny what he had really never had before, the beginning of a literary reputation.

As an almost inevitable consequence of this, Trumbo suddenly felt an urge to be free of the movies, to end his state of contract dependency. It seemed evident that if he worked less for films he would have more time to work for himself, to write the kind of novels he was then sure he could write. Something of the sort was in his mind when he was approached by RKO to work on Kitty Foyle, a screen adaptation of the best-selling Christopher Morley novel. By that time, he had done eight films for the RKO B unit, including A Man to Remember. He had also received screen credit on five other films produced by various other studios during this same period; these were original screen stories, for the most part—everything from the popular The Kid from Kokomo (Warner Bros.) to the forgotten Half a Sinner (Universal)—all sold by the usual slightly devious means. By then, he had earned a reputation as an excellent craftsman, and so he seemed the logical man to turn to when trouble developed on Kitty Foyle.

Donald Ogden Stewart, who happened to be a friend of Trumbo’s, had turned in a script on Kitty Foyle that had a lot to recommend it but was judged unshootable by studio executives. Dalton Trumbo seemed a likely man to save the project; he could work quickly and could, if his recent work were any indication, be counted on to come up with a well-crafted, cinematically sound screenplay that would, at the very least, be ready for the cameras when he had finished it. And so RKO put it up to him: if he did Kitty Foyle for them, did a good job and on time, he would be through with the B unit; he could expect from then on to work on nothing but A productions.

But Trumbo wanted out. “I had some time to serve on my contract,” he remembered. “So I agreed to do Kitty Foyle if they would cancel my contract, which they did. So I did the screenplay, which received an Academy nomination for me and won an Oscar for Ginger Rogers. They got what they wanted. So did I.” He was free for the time being. Eventually he would return to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but not before he had written another book—almost by accident.

Kitty Foyle was released in December 1940. By then, he was at work on a novel that had been pre-sold to the movies. Or was it merely a movie for which he agreed to write a screen treatment of novel length? “The General Came to Stay,” as the project was first known, was begun in spring 1940, after a deal had been made with Paramount on the strength of a brief story outline. He was to receive $20,000 on signing, $7,500 on publication of the novel by a reputable house, and $2,500 if and when it were given magazine publication. (All this was money from Paramount; he could expect something, in addition, from the book and magazine publishers.) Further, Paramount guaranteed him $1,000 a week to do the screenplay from his own novel—if he were available. On the face of it, this looked like a pretty good deal. “But,” as Trumbo later commented ruefully, “I found out a novel should be written for itself alone.”

He was right. The Remarkable Andrew, the novel written to order for Paramount Pictures, effectively ended his career as a novelist. He had misgivings from the start: “I am going to try to get some time off from the studio immediately and go to work on the book,” he wrote Elsie McKeogh at the end of his tenure at RKO. “It will be the first time I have ever had a chance to work uninterruptedly on a single job and I am going to do my absolute best to try to make ‘The General’ as good a book in its fluffy way as ‘Johnny’ was. I dread any critical comparison of the two but I’ll just have to make the best of the situation.”

It would have been hard to follow Johnny Got His Gun with any novel. In it, he had achieved something unique, real, and lasting. But to turn from that to The Remarkable Andrew, promising to make the latter “as good a book in its fluffy way,” was to emphasize craftsmanship and professionalism out of all measure. The Remarkable Andrew represents an almost criminal abuse by Trumbo of his recently proven talent as a novelist. It is not merely puzzling that he should have written it when he did, but revealing and deeply unsettling as well. It indicates that he had somehow ceased to value his talent as worth something in itself. Perhaps he never really did.

The Remarkable Andrew starts promisingly in Shale City, Colorado, the thinly disguised Grand Junction in which Eclipse and much of Johnny Got His Gun are set. Young Andrew Long is a bookkeeper in the Shale City government who, upon close examination of the city’s account books, discovers evidence that the mayor and a couple of his cronies have been embezzling considerable sums. When they learn of his suspicions, they manage to shift the blame from themselves to him. An investigation of young Andrew—his reading, his stated opinions, even his thoughts—is undertaken by a committee of concerned citizens with the same sort of vigilante passion that Trumbo remembered from the activities of the Loyalty League back in Grand Junction during World War I. The onus is shifted to Andrew Long: he is presumed guilty, unless (worse luck) he should manage to prove his innocence.

So far so good. Some of the details of small-town life are done well in the opening chapters. And if Trumbo draws his characters rather broadly, they are at least recognizable as small-town types. And finally, the situation in which Andrew Long finds himself, while uncomfortable for him, is one rich with plot possibilities.

Rather than treat any of them, however, Trumbo summons up the specter of President Andrew Jackson—visible, of course, only to his young namesake. Except for the last chapter or two in which Andrew successfully defends himself before the townspeople, the rest of The Remarkable Andrew, nearly two hundred pages of it, is a kind of extended seminar conducted by Old Hickory on true American values. These turn out to be, for the most part, populist (certainly consistent with the historical Jackson) and antiwar in his international position (can this be the Jackson we remember as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans?). It may seem remarkable that the issue of war or peace should have come up at all in their extended colloquy. But remember that Trumbo was writing in 1940, and the burning issue of the moment was whether or not America should enter World War II as a gesture of solidarity with Great Britain in her darkest hour. Jackson, of course, was simply the mouthpiece for Trumbo. As it comes from Andrew Jackson, it sounds like old-fashioned isolationism.

There is eloquence in The Remarkable Andrew, but it is rhetorical eloquence, essentially political oratory. It has nothing to do with the art of fiction. And if The Remarkable Andrew was unsuccessful as a novel, it was not much better as a motion picture. Trumbo did the screenplay, and not even he could sustain it after the first shock of Brian Donlevy’s unexpected appearance as Andrew Jackson (in full regalia, of course) and the first round of discussion had taken place with William Holden as Andrew Long. The deficiencies of a story in which very little actually happens become quite glaring when translated to the screen.

Early in the filming of The Remarkable Andrew, during the summer of 1941, Donlevy and Holden together came into serious disagreement with the director of the picture. Both were sure they would get along better with Trumbo, and so they came to him and asked him to direct the film; they would, they said, force the issue by threatening to quit if he were not substituted. Trumbo refused—“You just don’t do that,” although in fact other screenwriters have become directors under similar circumstances. “I never regretted it, since I never envied a director that much. I always felt I had a lot more freedom than directors. My occupation, the steady hours, and the fact that I worked in an office, all quite different from directing—freer.”

He stayed on at Paramount because he had become involved with Preston Sturges and the French director René Clair in the adaptation of a bit of Thorne Smith nonsense titled I Married a Witch. Eventually, of course, it was produced with Paramount’s new blonde bombshell Veronica Lake in the starring role, but without Dalton Trumbo’s name among the credits. He remembered the project, for the most part, as a series of uproarious and bibulous lunches at which the three of them kept reminding one another that they really had to get down to work sometime soon. Eventually they did, and what developed there were differences between Sturges and Trumbo on the interpretation of the material. The last of these, on which Trumbo finally bowed out altogether, took place on a Sunday for some reason. Trumbo remembers coming away from it, not discouraged but hungry, wanting to eat the breakfast he had missed. He stopped off at a place on Sunset, and while he was there eating he heard the news: the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

It was war, of course. Trumbo must have expected it, for he had thought it out beforehand. What would be his response, he must have asked himself, when the war that seemed so inevitable finally came? This is how he had put it beforehand in The Remarkable Andrew, speaking here in the person of Andrew Long:

Now a lot has been said about my being a pacifist, although I haven’t said a thing about it. I want to point out that this is a lie. I suppose if this country went to war, I would go to war too—even if it was a bad war—because once you’re in it there doesn’t seem anything to do but fight your way out of it. But I also think it is my right, if I want to, to oppose this country going to war, even if the war is a good one. Because the people of a country should have something to say about whom they will fight, and when, and where, and how. I don’t think it’s pacifism to be against war. I think it’s just being decent.

If that does not, in itself, constitute a change of position, then it certainly prepares the way for a change. Of course Trumbo was never a doctrinaire pacifist—perhaps not a real pacifist, at all. The radical final chapter of Johnny Got His Gun (“Remember this well you people who plan for war.…”) shows that although he was emotionally—passionately—opposed to war, he drew the line well short of unconditional surrender. At any rate, he had no real choice now: he deferred his doubts and resolved his difficulties; and he threw himself as completely as a 4-F could into the war effort.

He did one more original screenplay during this free-lance period, one that came back to haunt him at the Hollywood Ten hearings. Very early in 1942—the war had just begun—he approached RKO with a project that not only seemed right to them, but also seemed right in particular for Ginger Rogers. And the idea of pairing Trumbo and Rogers, an Oscar-winning combination in 1941, was irresistible to them: they had him proceed with Tender Comrade. The film that resulted from this collaboration was a prime wartime tearjerker and certainly not a good film. Released in 1943, at a time when girls all over America were saying goodbye to their men, it told of Ginger’s brief affair with soldier Robert Ryan on the eve of his departure for duty overseas. They marry and have one night together before he must leave. He is killed in action, and in the last scene she goes to their baby, holds up Ryan’s picture to him, and says, “Little guy, you two aren’t ever going to meet. He went and died so you could have a better break when you grow up than he ever had. Don’t ever let anybody say he died for nothing, Chris boy.”

Now, there are plenty of reasons to object to a movie like that, but it is hard to see how anyone could find fault with it on ideological grounds. However, during the 1947 hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities before Trumbo or any of the other “unfriendly” witnesses were called, Lela Rogers, the mother of Ginger Rogers, appeared, and in her testimony cited Tender Comrade as a specific example of a movie in which her daughter had been given lines that contained Communist propaganda. And it was, of course, Dalton Trumbo she blamed. What annoyed her most, it turned out, was the fact that in the movie, after Robert Ryan ships out, Ginger persuades three female coworkers to pool their resources and move into a big apartment together where they can live “just like a democracy.” Of just such flimsy stuff was the case against the “infiltrators of the motion picture industry” made.

By the time Tender Comrade was released, Trumbo was safe under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had gone back to the studio which he had left in 1938 to marry Cleo. And in the latter part of 1942 he returned to Culver City, happy to renew his friendship with Sam Zimbalist and others there. What was the attraction that M-G-M held for Trumbo? “It was immensely the best studio,” he declared, “in all respects. If you were going to work for a studio, that was the one you wanted to work for.” And that was it, of course. Trumbo, who wanted to be the best at all cost, could only see himself working at the best studio in town. He had—no more than temporarily, he would have said then—stopped thinking of himself as a novelist. So there was no reason not to work at M-G-M.

They knew how to use him there. The first full-blown project they put him to work on was A Guy Named Joe. By the time Trumbo got hold of it, it had been through a couple of versions, the latest by the old western writer Frederick Hazlitt Brennan. The production was scheduled. Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne were set for it. All Trumbo had to do was come up with a shootable script.

It was to be a big picture. Not only were Tracy and Dunne set for it, but so also were Van Johnson and Ward Bond. The project brought him together with one of the studio’s top directors, Victor Fleming (Captains Courageous, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind), a macho right-winger with whom Trumbo might not have been expected to get along. Yet he found Fleming tough, direct, and honest in his personal dealings, and the two grew to like one another quite well. This is worth mentioning because it underlines the fact that in the pre-blacklist days, film people of very different political persuasions usually got along on the professional level. Their business was making movies. Too bad, in this case, the movie they made was not a better one. A Guy Named Joe is a far-fetched, at times almost fatuous, story of an Air Corps pilot who is killed in combat but comes back as a benign ghost to look after the woman he loves, who is also a pilot. Enough said. Still, as a star vehicle for Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne it was quite successful. When it was released in 1943, audiences flocked to it and laughed, thrilled, and applauded at all the right places. Dalton Trumbo’s future at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer seemed assured.

Late in December 1943 he joined the Communist Party. Why? How? Remember that it was wartime. The United States and the Soviet Union were allies. Under the leadership of Earl Browder, the Party line at that time was in strong support of America and the war effort. Browder, Kansas-born with a Russian wife, softened the Party’s customary stand on such bread-and-butter issues as race and trade-union militancy in order to flow with mainstream opinion and to make Marxism more widely acceptable. In a way, Browder was successful; for in May of 1944, approximately six months after Trumbo joined, the membership increased to its all-time high of eighty thousand. And the following year, 1945, Communists registered some success in local elections—principally in New York City, where two candidates running openly as Communists were elected to the city council. Browder even changed the name of the Party slightly, to the Communist Political Association.

That’s the background—not the excuse. Trumbo made no excuses for having joined the Communist Party. He may have gone to jail once rather than discuss it, but on this day in his study, he is more than willing to talk. I had probably been a little too discreet to suit him earlier. In my questions over the past few days I had skirted the question of his membership a couple of times, as though it were an embarrassment between us. Pussyfooting, you might call it. But the embarrassment was all on my side. He brought the matter up himself:

“Now,” he says, “there is one area we haven’t gone into yet that I think we must.”

I clear my throat. “What’s that?” I ask.

“That’s my membership in the Communist Party.”

“Yes. You joined during the war, didn’t you?”

“It was in 1943.”

“Did that have a lot to do with it? The war and all?”

“No, not much. You see, I had worked with Communists, friends who said they were Communists, from the time the Screen Writers Guild began to reform itself in 1936. In the organization of Hollywood labor—the talent guilds, and in particular the Readers Guild—I had been very active, and working along with me were men who were Communists and men who were not Communists. The Readers Guild came above ground—of course it had to be secret during the period it was organizing—at my house on Hollyridge Drive, where I was living with my mother just before I was married. And the principal speaker to greet them was Dashiell Hammett. I was delighted because I had been a reader myself and had helped out at the beginning of the Readers Guild. You see, I had been a part of every such movement, and some of my very best friends were Communists. And no one had pressed me to join. There was really no reason to. I came to trust them, to admire them, to like them. And when the war came, I worked with Communists during the war—Communists and others—until it seemed to me that I was traveling under false colors.

“I hope this doesn’t sound as some might interpret it, but the growing reaction against Communism—and in Hollywood the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—convinced me that there was going to be trouble. And I thought I wanted to be a part of it if there were. I didn’t want to have the advantage of those years of friendship and then to escape the penalties. Now that may sound odd. I don’t think it’s odd at all. That was part of my motive. If they hadn’t been my friends, I wouldn’t have joined. Someone asked me to an open meeting, and I went, knowing full well what that meant. And then someone said, ‘Would you like to join?’ And I said, ‘Well, look, I wouldn’t have come to the meeting if I hadn’t decided to join.’ And I was a member. To me it was not a matter of great consequence. It represented no significant change in my thought or in my life. As a matter of fact, I had a Party card that I put in my shirt pocket, and I left my shirt at my mother’s house for laundry because we were at the ranch part of the time, and I used to leave my laundry there. So that was where I left my Party card, and that was the last I saw of the Party card. So that it was just casual. It wasn’t a traumatic moment in my life. I would not remember the year or the exact time, as I would remember the year of my marriage. It was literally no change. I might as well have been a Communist ten years earlier. But I’ve never regretted it. As a matter of fact it’s possible to say I would have regretted not having done it because, I don’t know, but to me it was an essential part of being alive and part of the time at a very significant period in history, probably the most significant period of this century, certainly the most catastrophic.”

There is nothing, as he talks, of the bantering manner of the raconteur that he sometimes adopts. He is talking directly, and (I’m convinced) frankly, setting the record straight. “What kind of people did you find in the Party?” I ask him.

“Well,” says Trumbo, “you must remember that about a million people passed through the Communist Party in the period between 1935 and 1945. Very few intellectuals were not influenced in one way or another by the Communist Party. And, you know, there were some pretty nice people among them. With all the damnation we’ve heard directed against the Communists since the forties, I’ve never seen it set forth just what kind of people we had in the Party. There were self-seekers, self-servers, there were neurotics, et cetera, as there are in any group, anywhere. But the people who joined the Communist Party didn’t join it in order to become popular. They didn’t join it because they thought it would make them rich. As a matter of fact, they knew that if their membership was known, they would probably lose their jobs. There are very few selfish reasons why anyone would join the Communist Party. They didn’t join it because they expected a revolution to reward their efforts because as far as I know there was no expectation in the Communist Party of a revolution in the United States, except in some remote future. So that reward was not there. They knew that they would be watched by the FBI. They knew that at the first moment of trouble, in the pattern that had already been established by the old Palmer raids, they would be the first to go to jail.”

“All right,” I say, “why did they join then?”

“Well, they joined for very good, humane reasons, in my view, most of them. In a time that began with the Depression and the total collapse of the American economy, with fourteen million unemployed, and soon spread throughout the world. In a world that had fascism in Germany, and Spain, and Italy, and an era that culminated in the forties in a war that killed fifty or one hundred million people—and saw the fires, not only of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the fires of Auschwitz and Treblinka—in such a world and such a time, it was not madness to hope for the possibility of making a better sort of world. And that, I think, is what most of those who joined wanted to do.”

Trumbo learned firsthand of the FBI’s interest in members of the Communist Party shortly before he joined up. (“You must remember that at this time the secretary of the Communist Party of Los Angeles was secretly working for the FBI.”) The incident, which he described at length in his introduction to the Ace paperback edition of Johnny Got His Gun, had to do with some odd correspondence he had been receiving from certain readers of the book. He found that because of the antiwar message of the book, it had suddenly become useful as propaganda to the far right in America as Axis fortunes began to fail. Anti-Semitic and native fascist groups put on a big push for an early peace, demanding that Hitler be offered a conditional peace. Trumbo was understandably distressed that he and his book had been embraced by such as these—so distressed that he did something imprudent: he invited the FBI to come and take a look at this correspondence, some of which he was sure bordered on the treasonous. They came, all right, “a beautifully matched pair of investigators,” but it turned out that they were far more interested in Dalton Trumbo, his left-wing opinions and activities, than in his right-wing fans. He realized then that he must have been the object of their scrutiny for quite some time. In the letter he wrote them following the incident (actually only a draft written but never sent), he objected to the interrogation he had been put through and set out to account, point by point, for his shift from the antiwar attitude of Johnny Got His Gun to his then militant support of the war effort, which included a recent pamphlet urging the establishment of a second land front in Europe in relief of Russia.

That pamphlet was not the only war writing he did. He became deeply involved, as did most of the movie writers who stayed behind, in the production of the apparently never-ending stream of war propaganda that issued from Hollywood for all official sources. He was a member, as were most active members of the Screen Writers Guild, of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, a sort of clearinghouse to provide writers for every war-related project and purpose for which they might be needed.

Trumbo did more than his share of work of all kinds for the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, but eventually he found his calling as a speechwriter, the old Western Slope Rhetorical Champion coming to the fore once again. And it was this talent that led him into one of the most unusual episodes of his wartime years: his service for the American delegation to the United Nations Founding Conference in San Francisco in 1945. It all came about rather suddenly when Trumbo was waiting to hear from the Army Air Force whether or not he had been accepted as one of a group of writers who were to be taken into the war zone for a firsthand look at combat. When a long-distance call came through to him one night then, he expected that it was the Department of the Army at the other end, telephoning the permission he had been waiting for. Instead, it was Walter Wanger, the motion picture producer. He was calling from the first United Nations Conference and asking Trumbo’s help. The problem was putting together a proper speech for Secretary of State Edward L. Stettinius to deliver to the Assembly. Nobody there could write, Wanger said. Could Trumbo come up at once?

He flew up the next morning. Wanger, who had arranged for the travel priority and Trumbo’s accommodations with the American delegation, was anything but a radical. As a young man he had been a junior member of the American delegation to the World War I peace conference at Versailles. And although he had come out to Hollywood immediately afterward, he had always kept his hand in politically and was an official member now of the American delegation to the UN Conference. He had no idea of Trumbo’s politics—or, if he did, must have felt they didn’t matter.

Trumbo spent the first night at the Mark Hopkins Hotel and met members of the delegation, which included Thomas K. Finletter and, by the rarest sort of coincidence, Trumbo’s old Delta Tau Delta roommate from the University of Colorado, Llewellyn Thompson. “It was a reunion after many, many years,” Trumbo said. “Wally [Thompson] and I talked at great length. Obviously none of them knew anything about my political tendencies.” And probably a good thing, too.

The next day he was moved into quarters with the delegation in the Hotel Fairmont. “I was given a room on the fourth or fifth floor, between [John Foster] Dulles and [Harold] Stassen. It was a rather weird sensation to get off the elevator and look down the hall and see white-gaitered MPs standing guard in front of each room, and then, walking down that hall, to hear typewriters going behind each door. I went into my room, and for some reason I looked under the blankets in the closet, and I found two copies of the People’s World [the West Coast Communist weekly]. Now, this obviously wasn’t a plant on me. The previous occupant of that room had read the People’s World and left two copies there. But the People’s World was the last thing in the world I wanted in the room, so I went into the bathroom, and I carefully tore both copies up and burned them and dropped them down the toilet to get rid of them.

“I worked for Tom Finletter, for example, sometimes for whole days. We corresponded later on, and afterwards he became secretary of the air force, I believe.”

The problem Trumbo had been summoned to work on was the admission of Argentina. The Fascist government of Juan Perón had sympathized with Germany all through the war. The speech Trumbo was called in to work on was intended to be an appeal to be delivered by Secretary of State Stettinius over the head of Perón to the people of Argentina. As such, of course, it had to be both carefully and passionately phrased.

In a few days of intensive work there in the Fairmont, Trumbo solved the problems and finished a draft of the speech that was acceptable to everyone present in San Francisco. “I have a copy of the original speech as it came back among my papers at the university,” said Trumbo. It is now probably the only copy of it in existence. “Finletter and I went to the top of the hotel where they had cable machines, mixer machines, and we received our speech, approved by the President. I have it in that form. I kept it. Two days later, when the Argentine foreign minister had been in town for a week, he had a good idea of what was up. But it was Nelson Rockefeller who gave it the shaft. He was able to stop the speech, which was pretty tough, and we had to go back with it, and the speech was rewritten—though not by me. Rockefeller even brought his own speechwriters in to work on the new, tame version in which they practically welcomed Perón with open arms. I got out of there as quickly as I could.

“It was interesting that within two years I was on the witness stand before the Committee. Then, of course, Wally Thompson was in a much higher position indeed, and Stettinius was rector of the University of Virginia, I believe. I had worked closely with all of them. And there I was on the witness stand. If I had been willing to play it chicken-shit, I could have said, ‘What do you mean I’m unpatriotic? Didn’t I do this? and this? and this?’ But I didn’t say that, and I made no attempt to get in touch with any of them from that time forward. However, Otto Preminger and his wife were in Moscow many years later while Wally [Llewellyn Thompson] was ambassador there, and they had dinner there at the embassy. My name came up, and Wally said to Otto, ‘You know, that man saved my career. If he had mentioned my name or sent me a letter, I would have been through.’”

The three from the San Francisco UN Conference were not the only names he could have used. George MacKinnon, with whom he had grown up in Grand Junction and who became a judge in the United States Court of Appeals, was serving his only term in Congress when Trumbo appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As a congressman from Minnesota—even a freshman congressman—MacKinnon would have been in a better position than almost anyone to put in a word for him at the Committee. Did he? No. “I didn’t go to the hearing room that day Dalton was up,” Judge MacKinnon told me. “And he made no effort to contact me while he was here in Washington.”

Hubert Gallagher, the boyhood friend who had even worked with Orus Trumbo in Benge’s Shoe Store, was on Truman’s staff in the Executive Office of the White House when Trumbo made his appearance before the Committee. Gallagher told me when I talked with him that he had been deeply ashamed ever since that he had failed to contact Trumbo when he was in Washington. He felt he had let him down: “I talked it over with the people I worked with, and they pointed out that if I had gone out to visit him I would be tagged and watched closely from then on. I didn’t want to lose my clearance, so I let it go. It’s been on my conscience, I can tell you. You see, just a couple of years before that he had been through Washington on publicity for that movie of his, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. We had a great old time then. I remember he even insisted I come along partway with him on the trip to New York, so I rode with him as far as Baltimore in his drawing room on the old Congressional. Would you believe it? We downed four Scotches between Washington and Baltimore.” Gallagher laughed, remembering. “They had to pour me off the train. That was just three years before all that Un-American business. I was ready enough to share his good fortune with him, but when the crunch came, I let him down. I’ve had to live with that ever since.”

I had wondered about Thomas K. Finletter’s impressions of Dalton Trumbo from the San Francisco UN Conference. The two men worked very closely and for extended periods during that time—“for whole days,” as Trumbo remembered. And of course, had Finletter’s memory begun to fade, it would have been refreshed rather dramatically when, in less than two years’ time, Trumbo’s name appeared in the headlines.

I was encouraged when I talked to Thomas Finletter on the telephone and told him why I wanted to see him.

“I’m writing a book about Dalton Trumbo,” I told him. “And I understand that he worked with you at the UN Founding Conference in San Francisco in 1945. Could you talk to me about that?”

“Yes,” he said, “certainly.”

The name of Thomas K. Finletter is one at least familiar to anyone of my generation. He is one of those men who seemed always to have held prominent positions in successive Democratic administrations. Like most such men, he was from a socially prominent Eastern family—the Finletters are from Philadelphia. Born in 1893, he grew up there, attended the University of Pennsylvania, and married a daughter of Walter Damrosch, then the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, he began the practice of law in New York City and eventually became a highly successful corporation laywer there. Among his posts in a long public life which began in 1941 were a number in the State Department during the war; he attended the UN Conference at San Francisco as a special consultant. Following that, he was minister to Great Britain in charge of the Marshall Plan mission; and from 1950 to 1953, under Truman, he was secretary of the air force. With time out during the Eisenhower years, he returned to government service as the United States ambassador to NATO, under Kennedy and Johnson, from 1961 to 1965.

At the age of eighty-one, Thomas Finletter looked fifteen years younger. He was bald but what hair he had left was dark. Erect and positive in his movements, he indicated where I might sit, a secretarial table opposite him, and took a place himself at his desk. He then turned his direct, rather cold gaze upon me and indicated with a slight inclination of his head that I might begin asking questions. I inquired about his role at the United Nations Founding Conference.

“My own role?” he echoed. “It was very minor. It was advisory, I suppose, more in the nature of personal contact. I was not even a member of the American delegation to the conference.”

“A consultant?” I prompted.

“Was that the title? Yes, I suppose so.”

“How well do you remember Dalton Trumbo?”

He fixed me with a stare. “I do not remember him at all.”

“Really? But…”

“It’s all been so long ago that I’ve forgotten most of the details. I did stay there during the conference, yes, but as to the details, I remember very little.”

Why had he let me come? If he wasn’t going to talk about Trumbo, what was the point in talking to me at all? I decided to press as delicately as I was able. “Dalton Trumbo came to the San Francisco Conference to help in the writing of a speech,” I said. “He came at the invitation of Walter Wanger, the motion picture producer. Do you remember Walter Wanger being there?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Finletter, “I remember Walter Wanger.”

“Llewellyn Thompson, too. Mr. Trumbo worked with him there, and he knew him from earlier. They were fraternity brothers in college.”

“I remember him, of course. I knew all the American delegation. But I don’t remember Llewellyn Thompson’s role in the San Francisco Conference.”

“I was also told that he—that Dalton Trumbo—worked with you,” I persisted. “The speech that he helped write, did a draft on, you would say, concerned the problem of the admission of Argentina. You recall the problem?”

“Yes,” he conceded, “I recall there was a problem.”

“Wasn’t that your area? Weren’t you more or less responsible for that?”

He shook his head and frowned deprecatingly. “I doubt that I had such authority as that.”

“Then you don’t recall working with Mr. Trumbo on that?”

“I have already said, I do not remember Dalton Trumbo at all.”

“Do you know who he is?”

Once more he directed that level gaze at me. “No. Who is Dalton Trumbo.” I have omitted the question mark in the interest of stenographic accuracy, for there was never a question asked with less curiosity. I told him briefly of Trumbo’s reputation as a novelist and screenwriter, that he was a Communist at the time of the San Francisco Conference, and of his subsequent blacklisting. He waited until I was through, then nodded curtly and rose. The interview was over.

On the way out, for want of something to say, I remarked that I knew of his books—this was true; I had read one and looked through another in preparation for the interview. “Are you doing any writing now?” I asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I am,” he said.

“Not your memoirs, I hope.” In less than a minute I was in the elevator on my way down to the street.

Why? Why had Thomas K. Finletter changed his mind about talking to me? Was he afraid that at even this late date his name would be dirtied if he were to acknowledge his association with a Communist at so crucial an occasion as the founding of the United Nations? If Finletter was a man who had played a role in the shaping of the modern world, he was certainly also a man who had been shaped by it. His attitudes were fundamentally those of the embattled Cold Warrior, the liberal in public life trying carefully to pick his way between the excesses of American isolationist conservatism on the one hand, and on the other, the very real threat offered by Stalinist communism abroad. Such men had, since the McCarthy era and well before, been judged by the company they kept; it was not surprising that he should be reluctant to admit working with a member of the Communist Party, even though he had had no knowledge of his politics at the time.

While Trumbo was at the UN Conference in San Francisco, the word he had been awaiting from the Army Air Force on the tour of the Pacific War Zone came through. He was to report in a few days’ time for transportation. A list of basic items he was to bring along on the trip yielded one surprise and very nearly caused a crisis. He had no passport. A rush priority was put on his application, and the passport was actually delivered to him from Washington in Stettinius’s pouch.

Most of the civilians who were traveling in Trumbo’s party were writers like himself—that is, novelists, screenwriters, and feature writers, rather than news correspondents. The reasoning behind this was that since it looked as though the war with Japan would last for many years more (the war in Europe had just ended), there would probably be plenty of time for novels and films to be written, and it would be best to have them accurate in their depiction of combat and service life. Trumbo was chosen because he had already written a film that pleased the Air Corps immensely, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Of the writers who accompanied him, however, he recalls only one: the mystery writer George Harmon Coxe, whom he heartily disliked.

There was a good deal of war left for Trumbo to see during the six weeks he spent in the Pacific—and in fact, he saw quite a lot. He was in on one island invasion, one of the last amphibious assaults of the war, the invasion of Balikpapan. It was a combined Australian-American operation of some importance, for its purpose was to cut Japan off from one of her last sources of oil. The crude oil pumped from this South Borneo island was said to be so pure and rich that it could be used as diesel fuel just as it came from the wells. The assault was mounted July 1, 1945. For some days before the island had been under continual bombardment, but the Japanese were, as always, very well dug in. The Australian soldiers who were landed by the American amphibian teams came under very heavy artillery and mortar fire. It took them most of the day to secure the beach and begin to move inland. The party of correspondents set out for the beach only fifteen minutes after the operation had begun and hit Balikpapan between the first and second waves of assault troops. They stayed for the duration of the brief campaign and were, of course, under fire through nearly all of it, though back far enough that none of their number was so much as wounded.

Later that month Trumbo came under fire once again during a combat mission he flew with a B-25 crew against targets in the southern islands of Japan. During the course of this episode he had his only real close call of his four weeks in the Pacific. Bad weather kept them circling the island of Kyushu, waiting for it to clear so they could make a run over their primary target, all the while under antiaircraft fire from the ground.

Then we received orders to turn back. The crew are disappointed. It means a flight under combat conditions, but no credit for mission. They brighten at the thought of Tanega Shima. Perhaps there. But Tanega is completely overcast. Kikai Shima is the last chance. The weather begins to clear. Far below a yellow stain shows up on the sea—the dye spot from a fallen Corsair. Later we spot another. Kikai Shima is clear as a bell. We come down to 6500 feet for the bombing run, plant our whole load on Wan airstrip and scoot for home.

The bombardier-navigator comes back to check figures with the pilot. The co-pilot leans toward him, and the three of them shout soundlessly to each other. The gunner and I watch, trying to make out what they’re saying. Then it comes over the intercom. The hour and twenty minutes over Kyushu has consumed too much gas. Prepare to jump if the engines conk out. Calculations give us less than enough fuel to make it back to Kadena.

They did make it back, however, and discovered upon landing that there were just fifteen gallons left in each tank.

The account from which I have just quoted appears in a long article, “Notes on a Summer Vacation,” which Trumbo published in the Screen Writer* upon his return. It is a fine piece of first-person journalism, graphic and precisely detailed, brought to life with the sights, the sounds, and even the smells of war.

How did Trumbo find time for such extracurricular activities? He had done war work for the Writers Mobilization; gone to San Francisco to write a speech for the secretary of state; made an extended tour of the Pacific combat zone; and had even managed to edit a magazine on the side. While all the while he was supposed to be working as a screenwriter at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The truth was that he did very little work for M-G-M during the war, for the terms of his contract there were so favorable that they made it possible for him to work in almost a part-time capacity while on (very) full salary.

“The result was I really didn’t do very many pictures there,” said Trumbo. In a way, it is remarkable that those he did were as good as they were. But quality was what Louis B. Mayer was paying for. He knew it, and he knew he could get it from Trumbo. And if, objectively, A Guy Named Joe was a rather dismal beginning, from M-G-M’s point of view, at least, it couldn’t have been much better, for it was a solid box-office success. Trumbo’s next film for the studio was probably the best of all his pre-blacklist screenplays—Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). It was based on the memoir by Captain Ted Lawson of the bombing raid early in the war (1942) on Tokyo, led by then Colonel James Doolittle. The raid itself had been almost in the nature of a publicity stunt and of no appreciable military value. Just to be able to tell the folks on the home front they had really bombed Tokyo, it was necessary to send out a small flight of B-25 medium bombers from the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet with no expectation of returning. Their fuel range permitted them only to make their bomb run over Tokyo and continue on for crash landings on the Chinese mainland. This was officially Japanese-occupied territory but was effectively controlled by bands of Chinese guerrillas; many, though certainly not all, of the crewmen from the Tokyo raid were thus rescued by the Chinese and smuggled through Japanese lines into northern China, whence they were able to return to America.

This was the story told by Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. The film dwelt upon the rigorous training of the airmen for the mission, including dangerous takeoffs from a flight deck never intended to accommodate planes so large. It built nicely to the natural climax provided by the raid on Tokyo, about two-thirds of the way through the picture. There was, unfortunately, no way to prevent the remaining third from turning into a protracted anticlimax. It was simply inherent in the material—especially so since the protagonist Ted Lawson, played by Van Johnson, was injured in the crash landing in China and had to be carried out hundreds of miles in a litter. Robert Mitchum starred as Lieutenant Bob Gray, and Spencer Tracy received star billing for what amounted to a supporting role as Colonel Doolittle. As for Trumbo’s contribution, it came chiefly in the form of exercising restraint. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is blessedly free of the phony heroics and unreal wisecracks that mar just about every other war movie made during World War II. There is a certain grit to its dialogue and a careful attention to detail that makes it believable and enjoyable today. It stands the test of time. And if Trumbo failed to solve the problem of the film’s anticlimatic final third, at least he did not try to inject suspense and plot interest into it artificially with old B-movie tricks. He was true to his material. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is an authentic and in some ways an austere film. It is certainly the best that Mervyn LeRoy, who directed it, ever made.

As for the final picture Trumbo did at Metro, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes is, like Thirty Seconds, the kind of movie that can be viewed today without consternation or discomfort. Although it starred Margaret O’Brien, her lugubrious displays in the film were kept to the absolute permissible minimum. In fact, Trumbo’s screenplay manages to save the film from the sort of cloying sentimentality that marked most of her other films. For good reason, he was extremely fond of Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. “That turned out to be a lovely picture, I thought. It wasn’t wildly successful, but it was a very sweet, honest, decent picture of farm life, and that’s because it came from a lovely novel.”

This is probably another instance of Trumbo doing his better work when he found something personal in the original material with which to identify, as was the case, for instance, with A Man to Remember. And for him, the personal element in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes must have been its rural setting. He continued to think of himself as a landowner, a rancher, a man of the soil. Even though trips out to the Lazy-T were restricted because of wartime gas rationing, the ranch continued to be important to him as an expression of something in him, something in his conception of himself. The place continued to have great symbolic importance to him, even when it became necessary to buy another house in town, a rather palatial one on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills (which was a dead ringer for the manse David O. Selznick used as his trademark). They only held on to it through the war, and then they sold it. It was all right: Trumbo could afford it.

Shortly after Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, he had his contract renegotiated. The new one was at that time the best that any writer in the motion picture industry had ever held: three thousand dollars per week or seventy-five thousand dollars per picture, as he preferred; no layoffs for the period of the contract; and no morality clause. Why was he worth all this? Because he had written three hits in a row. And, as Louis B. Mayer told Trumbo, the studio had faith in him to write more. Negotiations had been prickly, but they had come to terms quite favorable to Trumbo. Mayer summoned him to his office, and Trumbo came, prepared to hear almost anything. Still, he was surprised when Mayer sat him down on the couch and came around in his sockfeet to talk in his most haimish manner. “Look, I know your record,” he said. “And I’ll tell you this. You sign this contract. You make the first picture, and if it fails, you won’t hear a word from anybody. Make another picture, and it’s a failure, and nobody will say anything to you. You make another picture, and it fails—not a word! Because the fourth picture will not fail, and that one will make up for the first three.” Mayer knew his averages, and he knew his writers, and he knew that Trumbo was batting at the top of the league.

It was at that house on Beverly Drive that the Trumbos spent most of the war, with occasional trips to the Lazy-T, just to prove to themselves that it was still up there waiting for them. They were living in Beverly Hills when the youngest of their three children, Melissa (Mitzi), was born October 4, 1945. These were quite important years for them. For better or for worse, Trumbo was now deeply committed politically. He gave his time and energy unstintingly to what were essentially political causes, including war work of one kind or another. It was a time—as indeed most times were for him—when Trumbo was tremendously busy. Yet it was also a time of waiting, of marking time, for they could sense the crisis that lay ahead.

On the bottom of the first page of his account of his tour of the Pacific war zone, “Notes on a Summer Vacation,” published in the Screen Writer, there is a note that in retrospect seems almost sad: “Dalton Trumbo submits notes on a recent Pacific trip. Since he is using them as the basis for a novel, he requests no re-publication or quotes without written consent.” Yes, he did intend to write such a novel. Considering the period in Trumbo’s life during which he planned it, it is not surprising that this one was to be a political novel. Trumbo knew that he had had an unusual look at the top and bottom of the war in the period of a month, going from the UN Conference in San Francisco to the war in the South Pacific. Trumbo wanted to write the kind of novel that would use and encompass such experience, one perhaps necessarily with a strong political point of view. But the more he thought about it, the more the project expanded in his mind. At one point, late in 1945 or early 1946, he wrote to Elsie McKeogh that he saw it as a cycle of six novels, in which he would borrow heavily from his own experiences, beginning with his vivid memories of life in the bakery and concluding with the postwar years which he saw then only as a question mark. He took notes, drew up a list of 161 characters, and did a first chapter; but nothing more was done on it for a few years. Ironically—or perhaps inevitably—the only one of these novels on which he actually did much work was started and half-finished during the only period in the coming years that he would have any time for extended writing projects of this sort. That is, during the time he spent in jail.