CHAPTER EIGHT

THE BLACKLIST BEGINS

The day Trumbo returned from the hearings in Washington, he was contacted by a man named Frank King who asked him if he would like to write a movie for him. “There was no big deal to it,” said King when I interviewed him. “We just had a short budget to make a picture and saw this as an opportunity to get a fine writer to work for us whom we could not otherwise afford.”

The King brothers—there were three of them: Maurice, Frank, and Herman (born Kozinski)—were known to Trumbo and to the rest of Hollywood as independent producers. Very independent. They eventually found a place for themselves in film history and attained almost legendary status as among the last masters of B-movie production. And they did so very largely on films written for them by Dalton Trumbo.

Trumbo got to know them very well over the course of the next decade, and he grew to like them quite well. He found, perhaps to his surprise, that he had a lot in common with them. During the years he was struggling to become a writer, and at the same time support his mother and two sisters, the King brothers were struggling, too: “Maury, the oldest one, fought as a pug,” said Trumbo. “And that enabled Frank to get through Franklin High School in Highland Park. Hymie was the youngest, and he got through high school, too. The father had died, and they were supporting their mother. The boys had to make it on their own, and they did it bootlegging and in the rackets.” Trumbo, of course, had done some bootlegging, too.

With the end of Prohibition, the King brothers got into motion picture production—first for PRC during the late thirties and subsequently for Monogram. In 1945, at Monogram, they made the very successful Dillinger. Budgeted at $193,000, with Lawrence Tierney, Edmund Lowe, and Anne Jeffreys, and directed by Max Nosseck, Dillinger brought in over $4 million worldwide. With that hit under their belt, they decided to go independent. Their first film was The Gangster, released in 1947; it featured Barry Sullivan and Akim Tamiroff, and while the movie had its moments, it failed to make money for them. The King brothers were in the market for a new script when the craziness in Washington caught their eye. The brothers noted the quality of talent that had been hauled before the Committee, heard with interest the talk among producers that was circulating during the hearings about a political blacklist, and drew some shrewd conclusions. Frank King put in a call to Trumbo.

“Politics didn’t enter into it at all,” said King, some slight annoyance evident in his voice. “What a man’s politics were didn’t concern us one way or the other. I guess he spoke his mind before Congress, and that was all right with us. But we never discussed that at all. We were just interested in making pictures.”

For his part, Trumbo realized that he was probably as of that moment unemployable as far as the major studios were concerned, and that he would have to fight for every cent that remained to be paid to him on his lucrative M-G-M contract. He owed $40,000 in short-term debts for improvements on the ranch. He faced terrific legal expenses for the appeal of the contempt of Congress citation that he had received. And he was financially responsible not only for his wife and three children, but also for the support of his own mother. The modest deal offered him by King Brothers Productions—$3,750 to be paid over the period of a year and a half—looked good to him then. They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. They shook hands on the deal, and he started to work on Gun Crazy the next day.

As Trumbo told me, he wanted it understood that he did not feel he was taken advantage of by Maury, Frank, and Herman King, or by the others who employed him at cut rates on the movie black market. The King brothers paid him what they could afford. “A lot of independents never paid more than that,” he said. “When I and others plummeted in value, we naturally found ourselves in this new market, and naturally these independent producers availed themselves of our services because they felt that for this money they could get better work. So there wasn’t really this brutal exploitation of black market writers that has sometimes been referred to.”

Trumbo and the King brothers agreed that some other name besides his own would appear on the script and on the screen (Millard Kaufman offered the use of his), thus beginning a practice for many over the years to come. At that point, however, it was as important to Trumbo as it was to the King brothers that his name be kept out of it because he had begun legal action through his personal attorney, Martin Gang, to force Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to reinstate him or to make settlement on his contract. Obviously he could not himself be found in violation of that contract by working for another producer, so a “front” writer offered the best solution.

Following the Waldorf Agreement he was put on suspension by the studio—and not fired. That may have been because the studio’s lawyers themselves were uncertain how Trumbo’s contempt of Congress trial and inevitable appeal would turn out. Or, with good reason, they may have felt on shaky ground in taking any punitive action against him within the limits of his contract because he was the only writer at the studio, perhaps the only one in Hollywood, who had managed to get the standard morals clause excluded. (His position in negotiating the contract had been, “When Louis B. Mayer signs a morals clause, I’ll sign a morals clause.”) So the question for the lawyers was, of course, on what grounds could Trumbo even be suspended? Barring disclosure of his little job for the King brothers, it seemed to Trumbo and Martin Gang, the only legitimate grounds M-G-M would have to take action against him would be his failure to fulfill his obligation under the contract—which was simply to do the work that had been assigned him by the studio. That being the case, Trumbo saw to it that that exit was closed to them: he took down from the shelf his half-finished first-draft screenplay of Angel’s Flight, the project on which he had worked with Sam Zimbalist, and he completed it. On December 15, 1947, Martin Gang submitted it to Loew’s Incorporated, then the parent company for M-G-M, with a letter pointing out that Trumbo was hereby fulfilling the terms of his contract by completing the assignment and was now awaiting his next from the studio. Loeb and Loeb, Loew’s Incorporated’s Los Angeles attorneys, returned the script in the next mail, insisting rather vaguely that “Mr. Trumbo’s employment and the payment of compensation to him have been suspended pending the occurrence of certain events.” Thus the way was clear for the lawsuit that would follow.

Partly because of the situation with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and also partly because he was then sincere in wanting to break out of motion picture writing, Trumbo decided that it was time for him to try his hand at writing a play. Sometime in late December 1947, he wrote Elsie McKeogh of his intention, and she got busy on his behalf. In the first week of 1948, she wired him that producer Lee Sabinson was willing to pay Trumbo an advance on any play he was working on, topic unspecified and sight unseen. As it turned out, the offer was a fairly substantial one under the circumstances: one thousand dollars down and one thousand dollars upon agreement to make whatever revisions were deemed necessary. Trumbo wrote his acceptance to Elsie McKeogh and asked her to pass on to Sabinson a little information about the play, which he expected to have in first draft by the middle of March of that year. The title, he told her, was Aching Rivers (in production it subsequently became The Emerald Staircase and finally The Biggest Thief in Town); it had three acts, one set, and eleven characters (twelve in its produced version). He went on then to add a note of reassurance for Sabinson: “In the sense that no thoughtful work can escape having social point, it will have a certain import in line with my convictions. But it will contain no exhortations, no social declamations, no obvious political demands.… I see nothing in the theme and its treatment which would place the play outside the main stream of general serious drama and into the specifically radical category.”

The idea for the play had its genesis in Trumbo’s experiences as a cub reporter on the Grand Junction Sentinel, when he had been assigned to the “mortuary run.” It proved quite an education for him: “I saw many prominent citizens without their clothes on, as well as other alarming things.” He never quite got over his experiences in Grand Junction’s funeral parlors, and he became convinced that a play could be written set solely in a mortuary. Eventually that play was written, and it was The Biggest Thief in Town. It turns on the theft of the body of the richest man in town, a Citizen Kane-like character who lives in a castle overlooking Shale City. Bert Hutchins, the town’s philosophical undertaker, learns of the death and claims the body, thinking to turn a handsome profit on the funeral before the cadaver can be shipped off for far more expensive burial in Denver. As it turns out, however, John Troybalt, the tycoon, is not even dead. In the play’s funniest scene—and it has a number that are very funny indeed—Troybalt is prayed back to life by supposed mourners whose intention is to send him off in the opposite direction.

Trumbo has commented that the essential difficulty with this play is that it was really two plays in one—a serious piece and a comedy. In rewriting before production and while out on the road prior to its Broadway opening, the serious play within it was somehow irretrievably lost. Only the comedy survived. In the final text—that is, the one that was performed on Broadway—you can see vestiges of the original play in undertaker Bert Hutchins’s ruminations on his responsibilities as a parent. He has a daughter, Laurie, who is a dancer (remember Trumbo’s old flame, Sylvia Longshore?), and he is trying to arrange her future.

As for the moral of all this, if indeed the play that survived does have a moral, it would seem to be contained in Bert’s justification for one last bit of wheeling-and-dealing that stops a good deal short of the body-snatching with which the night’s enterprise began. In the last lines before the final curtain he declares, “I’m just like anybody else. I only steal what I absolutely have to have—and then I work for the rest.”

A complication developed with regard to Trumbo’s situation on the Metro contract. It seemed that the terms of the contract stipulated that he was able to write plays while on a leave of absence but not while on suspension. This meant that when it came time to submit the play to Sabinson, at the end of March 1948, the secrecy he had stipulated earlier had to be maintained more vigilantly than before. It was not until August 1948 that this difficulty was ironed out and he was able to sign with Lee Sabinson. By that time, however, plans were well under way for production. Herman Shumlin had been engaged as director, and discussions had been begun on casting.

By that time, too, Dalton Trumbo had gone to Washington to stand trial for contempt of Congress. He had been convicted and sentenced to a year in jail. The process of appeal had begun.

“I remember that trip to Washington” says Lester Cole when I interview him. “He and I went back together to stand trial for contempt. All the way across the country by train, the way it used to be done. We shared a compartment, and we drank a lot of whiskey. We managed just to float across the country in a state of euphoria and fine spirits.”

The look on Cole’s face as he remembers is interesting to see. A rueful smile. Or call it amused indulgence toward that younger self who could carry on in such circumstances.

“He and I are alike in some ways,” he continues. “We’re both raucous and boisterous guys, especially with a couple of drinks in us. We’re about the same age, too. Actually, I’m a year older than he is.”

This comes as a surprise, for Lester Cole looks nearly ten years younger than Dalton Trumbo. He is balding, but the hair he has left is close-cropped, giving him an almost military appearance. A man of medium height, he is stocky and deep-chested and appears physically strong. Both Cole and Alvah Bessie, who left Hollywood for San Francisco, seemed younger than their years when I met them. Trumbo, who had worked continuously in the movie industry since 1933, looked every year of his age and then some.

“It’s true, really,” Cole assures me. “I think one of the things that’s kept me young is getting out of that rat race in Hollywood. There has always been this carnivorous attitude there. I found that to some extent it was restrained among us—among people who had common political goals. We were under the same pressures, of course, but there was the feeling we had that there was something beyond the next big payday. Let’s say it alleviated the competitiveness and envy among us a little. It wielded a kind of humanizing influence.”

Lester Cole and Dalton Trumbo were thrown together frequently during the period between the hearings and their imprisonment. There was that trip to Washington, and there was also the civil case against Loew’s Incorporated, their suit on their contracts. They were the only two of the Ten who worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at the time the Waldorf Agreement was announced and the blacklist begun. Cole had started in films in 1932 and had actually tallied more screen credits than Trumbo at the time of the hearings, though most were done for the B units at various studios. He had begun working at Metro just after the war and was there from late 1945 to 1947. While there, he did three films—The Romance of Rosy Ridge, an Esther Williams vehicle called Fiesta, and High Wall. Oddly enough, however, he worked picture to picture on a free-lance basis during this period. Not so unusual in itself, but what is curious is that Lester Cole was not offered a contract at M-G-M until after he was under subpoena to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as an “unfriendly” witness.

“You see,” Cole explains, “the contract had already been drawn up and was to be offered when the subpoena came. When it did, they didn’t dare not go through with it until they knew which way the wind would blow. They may have struck a pose at the Waldorf, but they were anything but hard-liners. Listen, the last thing I worked on at Metro was a film biography of Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary. Eddie Mannix, who was Mayer’s right-hand man, was skeptical about the project at first. But then he was shocked to find out that the Mexican government was so anxious to have the film made that they were offering one and a half million dollars in services and cooperation to M-G-M and wanted to make it the first Mexican-American coproduction under their big producer Gabriel Figueroa. When Mannix heard about the deal, all his doubts were resolved. He said, ‘What the hell, Jesus Christ was a revolutionary, too.’ For a couple of million he was willing to compare Zapata with Christ! And he was a Catholic!” It was about this time that they shoved the contract under Lester Cole’s nose and he signed on the dotted line. The Zapata picture was never produced by M-G-M. The studio sold the entire project to Twentieth Century-Fox, where it became Viva Zapata!

To give you the homely details of this conversation between us, Lester Cole and I are having lunch at a restaurant on the fringe of Chinatown. A nice restaurant. Secretaries from the financial district have strayed over. He glances appreciatively at them once or twice as they file past us. It is easy to imagine him in Hollywood and hard, in a way, to imagine him away from it.

It took some time for him to cut the cord. He had put in his years on the black market, too—had even begun, as Trumbo did, by working for the King brothers. Although he has no idea whether or not Trumbo recommended him to them, he was made to feel welcome by them. He sold a story under an assumed name to them sometime between 1947 and 1950.

“Then I worked for a major studio with another writer fronting for me. That was how I was involved until I went to jail. To Warner Bros. I sold a couple of story ideas under a pseudonym—Every Man for Himself and Chain Lightning, that Bogart picture. When I came out of jail I went to New York and remained associated with the radical movement. I put on shows, wrote TV shows under another name, and even worked for a while as a cook in a restaurant. Then in 1956 I left New York for Hollywood, where I continued to do some television work, a little on the film black market, and saw Trumbo, of course, from time to time. Then, in 1960, that was the year he broke the blacklist—it was kind of a mania all those years with him—I went to London and worked there for five years. What did I do there? Let’s see. Well, I wrote the screenplay to Born Free under an assumed name. Other things. But when I came back from there, the idea of returning to Hollywood just wasn’t attractive to me, so I came here, to San Francisco.”

I ask Lester Cole if he continued to think of himself as a radical, if his political attitudes had remained fundamentally the same.

He nods. “Oh yes. I’ve never taken a political position that would have eased my personal position in any way. Some did, of course. Some informed and others altered their stand in more subtle ways to make themselves acceptable. I never did. The Ten was a pretty disparate group before they became the Ten, you know. They stuck together in the crisis. Conflicts and differences were submerged. But when that need was gone, the men followed their original feelings and related to world events as they had before they restrained themselves and their feelings and became the Ten.

“But no. No, I don’t think my own position has altered at all. I’ve always written from what I believed in, too. I got into a debate once with the original author of The Romance of Rosy Ridge.* He claimed I had destroyed the film by politicizing it when I adapted it. Well, it’s true I altered it. The original had the soldier just sort of wandering through after the Civil War. I gave him some purpose to come back. I don’t think I destroyed it, but I do think it gave the story a more distinct viewpoint.

“Sure, I suppose we did seek to bring our own convictions into the films we wrote. But were they subversive, as the Committee claimed they were? There was nothing subversive about The Romance of Rosy Ridge. For myself, if I had it to do over again, I would do just the same. Some who testified claimed to have been betrayed by their political beliefs, by the times, by who knows what else. I don’t feel I was betrayed, or misled, or bamboozled. I knew just what I was doing, and I don’t regret any of it.”

As the appeal process ground on, the Hollywood Ten and their attorneys became increasingly aware of just how important it was that the public know about their case and that opinion be marshaled in their favor. In 1948 it may have seemed just possible to win mass support for their cause. That was the year of Henry A. Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign for the presidency. Dalton Trumbo’s personal involvement in the Wallace campaign was minimal. He made a speech or two and wrote a letter in support of Wallace to be reprinted in advertisements along with statements from others of the Ten. There was an effort to identify the cause of the Hollywood Ten with that of Henry Wallace—and vice versa. When Wallace lost so decisively, it must have discouraged them and their supporters.

And 1948 was also the year Trumbo left the Communist Party: “We were living at the ranch, and it was an eighty-five-mile drive into town. I was hopelessly engaged in the Ten’s problems and so forth. And I just drifted away. I changed no beliefs. I just quit going to meetings and never went back—with no more feeling of separation than I had before I started with the Communist Party.”

The next year, 1949, brought further discouragements to the Ten, for that was the year that Supreme Court justices Frank Murphy and Wiley B. Rutledge died, in succession, thus reducing the chances of having the contempt convictions heard on appeal before the Court from fifty-fifty to about thirty-seventy. Something had to be done. And so Trumbo sat down and wrote a pamphlet, “The Time of the Toad,” which, even allowing for its strongly partisan viewpoint, is still the most lucid discussion of the issues in the case.

He devotes the first half of “The Time of the Toad” (which derives its odd title from a rhetorical conceit employed by Zola in his pamphleteering on behalf of Dreyfus) to an exposition of the events leading up to and through the contempt citations before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In the second half of the pamphlet, Trumbo deals at length with the larger issues raised by the Hollywood Ten case. He establishes it—and he may well have been the first to do this—as a domestic manifestation of the Cold War that was only then just developing: “We are against the Soviet Union in our foreign policy abroad, and we are against anything partaking of socialism or Communism in our internal affairs. This quality of opposition has become the keystone of our national existence.” He then focuses on that species which would soon become the most avid of all the Cold Warriors—the New Liberal, the champion of the anti-Communist left. His chief target here was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who had already made statements during a panel discussion that in principle denied academic freedom to university teachers who were or had been members of the Communist Party. (Schlesinger subsequently attacked the Hollywood Ten directly in an article published in the Saturday Review of Literature, “The Life of the Party.” He became a particular enemy; it would not be overstating to say that Trumbo despised the man.)

In “The Time of the Toad,” Dalton Trumbo attempted to sound a general alarm, tying the plight of the Ten to the threats posed to free speech and intellectual freedom which were, after all, at the heart of the position he and the rest had taken before the Committee. They took the show out on the road in an attempt to stir up popular support during the final appeal period. Speaking around the country, appearing at rallies and meetings, they would sound this note again and again. They packed Carnegie Hall at a rally for the Ten at which Trumbo spoke, but the message was brought out to Middle America as well. He remembered going to Duluth, Minnesota, on a winter night and finding that thirty-five or forty people had braved the cold to hear what he had to say about the Hollywood Ten and freedom of speech down at the local union hall.

“Adrian [Scott] and I went to speak at the University of New Hampshire,” he remembered. “We got off the train and found the Liberal Club, which was the sponsoring organization, had a guard on hand for us. And I suppose it was a good thing, too, because there were some rocks and eggs being thrown at us there at the depot—feelings ran high, you see. Rather than take us to a hotel where we would be available, they took us quite secretly to a rooming house, an immaculately kept place with two beds in a single room. Well, before night the university revoked our permit to speak on the campus, and so the Congregational Church threw its doors open for us, and we spoke there. But sitting in the front row were six members of the football team wearing blazing red sweaters—the opposition, you see. They glowered at us the entire evening and did their best to intimidate us.

“I remember Ring and I met during this time in Chicago. We went to the Pump Room of the Ambassador at noon. Now, the Pump Room in those days had enormous martinis, and we began to drink martinis. We stayed, and stayed, the two of us, and we were there at dinner time, and we had dinner. And we continued drinking, until about twelve-thirty, Artie Shaw came in, having just finished an appearance with his dance band. He sat down and we drank a little bit with him. A fantastic thing—and we were able to get up and get to our hotel! We just spent the whole day drinking those God-damn martinis and talking. We were young and healthy then and could get away with it.

“What did we talk about? Well, I know it wasn’t politics because, God, politics was running out of our ears by this time. Oh, we might have been critical of the job we had been sent out to do. You know it was rather embarrassing because one of the problems of the Ten was that they were known to have been very highly paid. And it was embarrassing to go into a union hall in Chicago and make a speech, then somebody would make a pitch and a collection would be taken. You might get thirty dollars or maybe more. There was something fundamentally wrong with this, it seemed, yet the people wanted us at the union hall and wanted to contribute. But publicly there is no way you can allow much indignation for people who are making only ten thousand dollars instead of the hundred thousand they made before. We had some personal difficulties over that, and that may have been about the closest we came to discussing politics.”

Part of the time during which Dalton Trumbo was touring for the Ten was also taken up with his involvement in the production of his play. He had kept his work on the black market to a minimum then and was betting boldly on its success. But there were problems with it right from the start. Director Herman Shumlin was calling for rewrites even before rehearsals began. There were problems in casting, too: for instance, Thomas Mitchell, who was not their first choice for Bert, never completely satisfied Trumbo, Shumlin, or Lee Sabinson. But he was a name, and the play badly needed whatever prestige he could lend it. The biggest problem, however, was the very fundamental one of just what sort of play this was going to be. Rewriting furiously on the road, Trumbo altered the play completely in Boston and Philadelphia; the name was changed a couple of times before it became The Biggest Thief in Town; and one character was totally eliminated in the rewriting. As Trumbo put it to Sam Zolotow of the New York Times in a brief interview published on March 30, 1949, the day it opened: “The play started out as a drama of frustration. Then the audience and other factors changed it into what it is today. We hope it’s a comedy.”

There seems little doubt he succeeded in making people laugh. William Pomerance, Trumbo’s friend from the Screen Writers Guild, who by that time had moved back to New York and started a television production company, remembers the play as “one of the funniest I’ve ever seen. I heard they had to carry two people out from laughing in Boston.” And even Brooks Atkinson’s negative review in the Times allowed that the opening night audience had certainly enjoyed itself: “To enjoy ‘The Biggest Thief in Town’… you have to do Dalton Trumbo one favor. You have to agree that an undertaker’s parlor is a comic place and that body snatching is hilarious. To judge by the laughter in the theater last evening, many people have no difficulty in agreeing with Mr. Trumbo’s ghoulish point of view.”

Although The Biggest Thief in Town would eventually have a run of nearly a year in England, the play was finished in America. The project on which he had spent so much time and on which he had counted so to rescue him financially had come to nothing—or next to nothing. Immediately after it closed, there was some brave talk between Trumbo and producer Lee Sabinson about another play. Sabinson went as far as to offer him another thousand-dollar advance, which Trumbo declined. He wanted to write another play, all right, if only to put Brooks Atkinson in his place; but he knew very well now that at least for the time being, his only real salvation lay in screenwriting. He took a deep, desperate plunge into the black market.

To do it, he had first to find an agent willing to represent him, one who would do so on a completely confidential basis. His agency-of-record had been Berg-Allenberg, the high-powered outfit that had negotiated his surpassingly favorable Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract. Because the agency wanted primarily to stay in the good graces of the studios, it was certainly not going to do much—if anything—on Trumbo’s behalf. One of the principals of the agency, Philip Berg, had angered Trumbo during an interview in April 1948, when he took it upon himself to lecture him for “making long speeches” while he was before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Berg then went on to suggest seriously to Trumbo that he and the other nine might throw themselves on the mercy of columnist Westbrook Pegler, a friend of the agent’s, and thus gain forgiveness (along with their old jobs, presumably) by cooperating fully and telling him whatever he wished to know about their allegiances and associations. Finally, Berg refused to make him the loan of ten thousand dollars he asked for, or even to take a ten-thousand-dollar trust deed on the Lazy-T—and Trumbo had always maintained that an agent’s primary function was to loan his clients money. All these and other complaints are detailed in a long letter he wrote on December 17, 1948, to his contact there, a letter that becomes ironically amusing when we note that it was addressed to Meta Reis (now Meta Reis Rosenberg) at that agency. She appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on April 13, 1951, and cooperated fully, admitting her former membership in the Communist Party and giving the names of twenty men and women known to her to have also been members.

Dalton Trumbo’s name was not among them, but the name of George Willner was. He was the agent, a principal of Goldstone-Willner, who said he would be willing to take Trumbo on as a secret client and help him find work in the black market. Trumbo had written to him first on July 17, 1948, asking if Willner could get him some work—a polish job or a shooting script to be written from a story already set. Nothing developed for a while, for Trumbo was traveling for the Ten and was involved with the play, though Willner did help him collect money that was owed him by the King brothers for his Gun Crazy script. However, when Trumbo floated back from New York, clinging to a spar from the shipwreck of The Biggest Thief in Town, he sent a Mayday to Willner. The agent responded with a job, an original story, Fairview, U.S.A., for the comedian Danny Kaye. Not long afterward (June 1949), Willner lined Trumbo up with independent producer Sam Spiegel to do a screenplay on a “fairly commercial yarn, somewhat similar in theme to Double Indemnity.” What resulted was The Prowler, a thriller that after starts and stops, and many demands for payment from Trumbo, was brought before the cameras the next year only a little before he went off to jail (more about this one later). And then George Willner pulled off a real coup. He sold one of a couple of original screen stories Trumbo had written the year before, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend. The purchaser was Twentieth Century-Fox. It carried the name of Trumbo’s friend Earl Felton, and it brought them both some money. “Whatever he got,” says Trumbo, “he deserved every penny of it because if it was discovered, it could have been his career. Earl was a friend.” Felton subsequently did the screenplay for Preston Sturges, who made the picture. It failed disastrously, however, and did neither of them any good.

In the midst of all this occurred an incident that was silly enough in itself but had some negative effect on the image of injured propriety that the Hollywood Ten had sought to project. It all came about when Trumbo made one of his rare trips into town from the Lazy-T. He had errands to run and shopping to do and wound up going out to dinner with Ian and Alice Hunter. He and Ian drank a little before dinner and quite a bit afterward—so much that he decided he had better spend the night. In the course of it, he felt a powerful urge to urinate, and, finding the bathroom occupied, Trumbo marched out the front door to the curb and cheerfully urinated in the gutter. Just as he was finishing, a car turned the corner and bore down upon him, illuminating him in its headlights. It was a Beverly Hills police prowl car, and Trumbo had been caught in the act. The police took him into the station, as he insisted all the while he was not drunk and demanded a sobriety test. They refused to give him one, but rather, realizing who he was, invited reporters down for the story. Once the press had been satisfied, Trumbo was allowed to pay twenty dollars bail and leave the station. He went immediately to the home of a doctor he knew, woke him up, and asked to be given the sobriety test the police had refused him. He took it and passed.

By the time the case came up, Robert Kenny had represented his client’s case informally to the judge who would try it. “I called him up before things got tense,” Kenny recalled. “It was all very easy. We’d been in Stanford together, and I simply told him what happened, and the judge himself said that things had come to a hell of a pass when a man hasn’t got the same rights as a horse. ‘That’s right,’ I told the judge, ‘it’s a constitutional question.’” It may not have been an artful argument, but considering that Trumbo had passed a sobriety test within the required time and could prove it, it was enough to persuade the police not to prosecute.

There was no need to. The newspapers had already done that job. The story was splashed through them all. If the object had been to ridicule the Hollywood Ten, that band of “swimming pool Communists,” then they succeeded. But if the intention was to cause Trumbo himself personal embarrassment, they failed. He took it all with equanimity. His only real concern was the effect the publicity might have on his mother. She had always opposed his drinking when he was a young man; as he grew older, she tolerated it. He was afraid that she would assume from the lurid accounts of the incident in the papers that the pressures under which he was now operating had made a drunk of him. And so he wrote Maud Trumbo, assuring her that reports of his depravity were greatly exaggerated. He ended the letter with two paragraphs that illuminate the rough sort of bargain mother and son had struck during a time that must have been hard for both of them:

When I look back on my own convictions and rebellion, I find nothing remarkable in it. For I am reminded that at a younger age than I my mother too, rebelled, left her church, joined an unpopular and ridiculed faith, insisted upon the immunity of her children from supervision of medical authorities; and that the church she joined was fighting for its life before various legislatures, and that was in the newspapers, falsely and outrageously, and fought them off to the end. How, then, could a rebellious mother produce anything but a rebellious son?

Disagreeing as we do and have, we have finally struck a relationship which I am sure pleases us both—one of mutual respect. I love you very much, but I respect you even more, and that is what I hope to earn from my own children, after suitable conflicts and disagreements. Instead of regrets for my present plight, I have only renewed confidence, and a joy in writing that five years ago I thought would never come to me.

Time was growing short, and Trumbo knew it. When he wrote that letter to his mother he and his nine co-defendants were sweating it out, waiting to see whether the Supreme Court would hear their case. Their petition of certiorari was turned down on November 14, 1949. They knew then that delay was possible, but jail was inevitable.

He chose to spend the few months he had left to him hard at work. If he was to be lost to his family for a year, then—he told himself—he would have to earn enough in the time remaining to take them through that year. He managed to do just that. This was remarkable enough in itself, considering the legal expenses he had incurred, the debts and running expenses attached to the Lazy-T, and the number of people who were financially dependent upon him; but even more impressive was the quality of work he did during this time. Working under the gun, falling back on Dexedrine and Benzedrine to keep him at the typewriter and Seconal to bring him down and put him to sleep, Trumbo somehow managed to pull off some of the best work he had done in years.

The Prowler was one of the two jobs lined up for Trumbo by George Willner immediately following his return from New York. He completed rewrites called for by Sam Spiegel late in 1949, and the production, directed by Joseph Losey, was brought before the cameras the following year. Although Trumbo never set foot on the set, of course, he and Losey did work closely together on this one, and the movie that resulted from their collaboration can be presumed to be very close to his original conception. It is a “little” movie, essentially a good B picture, a sleazy morality in which an all-night disc jockey (whom we never clearly see) is cuckolded by the cop on the beat when the wife calls in a complaint about a prowler. The details of the film are sharp and accurate, and the leading roles are good, strong characterizations that are well played—by Van Heflin and Evelyn Keyes. Trumbo himself completed the triangle: since the husband is really present only in voice, Losey thought it would be a great joke for Trumbo to be heard throughout the film as the disc jockey. And so he took him to a recording studio, and Trumbo dubbed the all-night deejay’s patter which he himself had written. The Prowler was released while he was in jail and Trumbo forgot about it completely—so completely that when, years after the blacklist, he caught it on the late-late show, he was astonished to hear his own voice suddenly issuing from the set. It was only then that he remembered that he indeed had recorded it, a ghost come back to haunt himself.

Cowboy was an anti-western, the first of that sub-genre which includes most of Sam Peckinpah’s pictures, as well as such other good films as Tom Gries’s Will Penny and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Trumbo adapted it from Frank Harris’s My Reminiscences as a Cowboy for Sam Spiegel, and John Huston was originally supposed to direct it. Production was delayed, however, and Delmer Daves finally made the picture in 1957, featuring Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford. Hugo Butler lent his name to Trumbo for this one, as he did for the other two written just before jail. By the time Cowboy was released, however, the Writers Guild had entered into an agreement with the producers whereby the name of any political undesirable could be summarily removed from the credits. By that time, too, Butler himself had been blacklisted, and so Edmund North, who had done some rewriting on the script just before it went into production, was given sole credit on Cowboy. “North is a pleasant enough man with good feelings,” said Trumbo. “He later and privately expressed to Hugo his repugnance at receiving sole screenplay credit in this fashion.… This credit was a good one because the reviews were good. And this is an excellent example of why no record of credits between 1947 and 1960 can be considered even remotely accurate.”

He Ran All the Way was a tightly written melodrama, the quintessential John Garfield movie—and sadly enough, also Garfield’s last. He played a criminal on the lam, forced to hide out with a family of strangers whom he holds hostage. Shelley Winters, the daughter, falls in love with him in spite of herself—as the song says, ladies love outlaws—and he is gunned down at movie’s end with only her to mourn for him. Not a new story, certainly, but Trumbo breathes life into it with the perfect sense of fitness he achieves in writing for the Garfield persona: the part suits Garfield like a bespoke coat; the lines are his completely. John Berry directed it, the last movie he did before he himself was blacklisted, and achieves in it a feeling of sustained tension that is perfect for the material. Hugo Butler did some rewriting on He Ran All the Way while Trumbo was in prison and received sole credit for the picture.

Trumbo worked on so-called original screen stories during the last weeks before he was to report to serve his prison sentence. At that time there was still a market for these extended narrative treatments, and George Willner had had good luck with one of them earlier. Trumbo wrote three such stories in about three weeks, each of them ninety to one hundred pages in length. Only one of them sold, but the deal was made before Trumbo left for jail. It was The Butcher Bird, a thriller that was never produced but brought him and his family forty thousand dollars when they most needed it.

The family was holding up rather well. It helped, of course, that Dalton, Cleo, Nikola, Christopher, and Mitzi were there almost isolated during the last winter together on the Lazy-T. Trumbo had bought a Jeep station wagon with which he drove the children to school through even the worst of the mountain snows. But with spring coming apace, they stayed just as close as they had during the high-country winter. They were bundling, not against the cold but against the future. What did it hold for them? The children could not help but be confused by what lay ahead, for they had been told that it wouldn’t be long before their father would be going off to jail. Dalton and Cleo carefully explained why this was so and made it clear that he had done nothing that he—or they—should be ashamed of. Still, it worried the children, as Cleo found out when she overheard Christopher (then nine) ask Nikola if, when a father was sent to jail, it meant his son would have to go to reform school.