CHAPTER TEN

“ENGAGED IN SELLING”

During his term of ten months at Ashland, Trumbo learned to obey the sound of a whistle. When he or any other prisoner heard it, that meant he was to stop whatever he was doing and “stand for a count”—remain where he was, rigidly motionless at attention, while the guard came through, took his count, and made his inspection. The whistle was sounded at any time of escape, to restore order, or just to satisfy a guard’s curiosity. Whenever he heard it, though, Trumbo had been taught to stay rooted where he stood.

“When I got out,” he remembers, “the first New York traffic policeman who blew a whistle within earshot, well, I stopped immediately. I was conditioned.”

It took him years to unlearn prison. In some unexpected ways he was changed permanently. He had, for instance, always been a night worker before—a legacy of his years at the bakery. Prison changed that. He came out a confirmed daylight worker and remained so. But the time stayed with him in more important ways: “What I have never regretted is the experience of it. It’s one a hell of a lot of people don’t have, a very valuable one. And as you see, I remember it, and I don’t remember it as I remember the bakery, with a sense of horror. No, not that at all.”

What prison did not do was subdue or intimidate him. After visiting for a few days with friends in New York City, he and Cleo returned to Los Angeles. On the trip back they had a long time to talk things over and to think about what might be done. It was the same old problem, really, and that was money. They could cut their expenses, but there was only one source of income open to him, and that was the movie black market. Consequently, upon arriving in Los Angeles and before returning to the Lazy-T, he got in touch with the King brothers and declared himself ready to work. And again, Frank, Maury, and Hymie came through. On April 28, 1951, they sent him three original stories which they felt had movie potential, as well as a novel they thought was right. He did quite a lot of work on one of the projects, an original called The Syndicate, which he rewrote extensively and so successfully that the King brothers later turned down an offer for one hundred thousand dollars on the script, still intending to do it themselves. Only one of the originals was produced, Carnival Story, which the King brothers produced in Germany and released in 1954. Trumbo did the screenplay for the picture, Steve Cochran and Anne Baxter were featured in it, and Kurt Neumann directed. The King brothers, whose genius was getting a lot of movie out of a little money, worked their magic again on this one. It is quite a respectable B picture, not least because of the literate script Trumbo provided.

As for cutting expenses, Dalton and Cleo knew that the Lazy-T represented the biggest and most constant drain on their resources. The ranch was also clearly their most negotiable piece of property. And so they decided to sell it. This wasn’t quite the heartrending decision it might have been, for their daughter Nikola was ready in the fall to go to high school, and the nearest was so far away that commuting was out of the question; they did not want to send her to a boarding school because it seemed especially important to them to keep the family together. After making private inquiries and the necessary arrangements, they put the house and surrounding property—the entire Lazy-T—up for sale in July 1951.

As Trumbo was making plans to sell the Lazy-T, he received a pointed letter from Herbert Biberman regarding a subject the two had discussed earlier in Los Angeles. Since his release from prison, Biberman had been working hard to put together an independent motion picture production company in which the key personnel would be blacklistees like himself. Biberman, who was one of the leaders of the Hollywood Ten’s defense, had a flair for organization and was eventually able not only to bring together such a group, but also (and far more difficult) to find modest financing for their first production. That turned out to be Salt of the Earth, and it was the only film Independent Productions Company ever made.* Right from the start, Biberman had declared his intention to make socially conscious, politically engaging motion pictures, the kind that could no longer be made in Hollywood.

In his letter, Herbert Biberman appealed to Dalton Trumbo for help. He was soliciting Trumbo’s services as a screenwriter for a small payment to be deferred against possible profits. Trumbo, who had initially indicated his willingness, was forced to decline; his reply to Biberman is worth quoting because in it he set forth the principles that would guide him in his dealings during the next nine years—or until the blacklist was broken:

I sired these kids of mine, and I’ve got to support them, and even the noblest intention to write a screenplay with social content cannot excuse me for not having present the money to buy their badly needed clothes for the new school term. That is a primary obligation, and, in accepting the assignment for reasons which were perfectly decent, I made it secondary. That was wrong. Since the problem is exclusively mine, I am the only one I know of who can solve it, and the first step to solution is clear.

I am, from today on and for some time in the future, not interested in pamphlets, speeches, or progressive motion pictures. I have got to earn money—a considerable sum of it—very quickly. I cannot and will not hypothecate two or three months, or even a month, for any project that doesn’t contain the possibility of an immediate and substantial sum. Once I have earned the money, once I have sold the ranch, once I am in a position where the slightest mishap no longer places me in peril, I shall again function as I should like to. But this is well in the future.

No screenplay with social content, no pamphlets, and no speeches. He was adamant—because no matter where his political sympathies might lie, his obligations to his family lay that much deeper. This was surely the gospel according to George Horace Lorimer, a frontier conception of masculine responsibility. But as we shall see, Trumbo was as good as his word: he provided.

Money came to him at last when he most needed it, for an original that was one of his best and certainly his most charming: Roman Holiday, the Paramount picture released in 1953 that shot Audrey Hepburn to stardom and gave the Lincolnesque Gregory Peck his only successful light role. The original deal on this was to have been made for Trumbo by George Willner, just before Willner himself was named in testimony before the Committee and barred from the studios. But Ian McLellan Hunter agreed to front for his friend on this one. Lending his name and dealing through his own agent, Hunter got his established price of forty thousand dollars from Paramount on it for Trumbo. Frank Capra was originally to have been the director of Roman Holiday, but he and Paramount had a falling out. Trumbo recalls that in the meantime Hunter had done considerable rewriting on it for the studio: “At Paramount he greatly improved the script, but ran into many subsidiary difficulties, the principal one being that he himself had fallen under the shadow of the blacklist. The end of his employment with Paramount was also the end of his employment in Hollywood.”

In the midst of all this scrambling after money came some unexpected good news that unfortunately had little effect on the Trumbos’ financial situation. Elsie McKeogh, his literary agent, wrote him from New York of English producer Peter Cotes’s desire to stage The Biggest Thief in Town in London. The plan was to do the play in a small theater production later that year. If it went over well, the production would be moved, as was the custom, to a big West End theater. And that was just what happened. When the production moved to the Duchess Theatre in the West End on August 14, 1951, Trumbo received an advance in anticipation of a long run there. The play had gone over well and would have had that long run had it not been for the sad death of J. Edward Bromberg in the leading role in January 1952. Trumbo had recommended the American character actor, who was himself blacklisted, and Bromberg had had a great success in London—always gratifying for an American actor. But then he died, and with him died the production.

By that time, Trumbo, Cleo, and the children were down in Mexico. Quite a colony had been established there. John Bright, Trumbo’s friend from the old days at Warners, remembered this gathering of fugitives: “I was the first person to land in Mexico City. At the time I got there only Gordon Kahn was around, and he was in Cuernavaca. I registered in the Imperial Hotel down there, and one by one, they all came, and everybody on the blacklist, I swear, passed through the Imperial Hotel. Why, at one time, fourteen of the sixteen apartments in the place were occupied by blacklistees. I remember the English-language paper down there, the Mexico City News, got wind that we were there and ran a story on us, who we were, and so on. So when the news broke, the clerk at the Imperial found out all his tenants, who he thought were Hollywood big shots, were just lepers in disguise. He was one disappointed hotel clerk, let me tell you. Let’s see, John Wexley was there, Maltz—until he moved to Cuernavaca—Ring Lardner, Trumbo—until he moved to something grand—Ian Hunter, later, and, well, just all of them. You can imagine the bull sessions we had down there as they arrived one by one.”

As it happened, the Trumbos didn’t arrive alone, however, but in caravan with the Butlers. Hugo Butler and his family had been down in Ensenada in Baja California for most of 1951. He was there, literally hiding out from a subpoena by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Shortly after his release from prison, Trumbo had taken the family down for a visit and had heard Hugo talk in glowing terms of the prospects for blacklisted writers in Mexico; there was work for them all in the Mexican film industry, Hugo told him. He himself had done a job for a Mexican producer who had assured him there would be more. The Butlers proposed that the Trumbos move with them down to Mexico City, where expenses would be only a fraction of what they were in California. It was an attractive proposal. Not long afterward, it looked as though they had a buyer for the Lazy-T: a rancher who owned property next to theirs wanted to annex the Trumbo spread and make his home in their luxurious ranch house. When the deal was apparently clinched, they decided to move south and began making preparations. And when as suddenly it fell through—the prospective buyer was unable to raise sufficient cash to swing the purchase—they decided to go anyway. The Lazy-T could and would be sold without them present to show the property. Any doubts they had were resolved when word came from the attorneys handling the civil suit of the Hollywood Ten against the studios that had terminated their contracts—this included Trumbo’s action against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. They said settlement was in sight, the studios were negotiating seriously, and there would soon be money coming to all. That settled it. The Trumbos sent word to the Butlers that they were ready to go. They left for Mexico in November 1951.

The Hollywood apartment just off Franklin where Jean Butler lives with her two youngest children is a bit crowded with furniture when I visit her there. There are some well-worn, handsome pieces that look as though they may have traveled with the Butler family from California to Mexico, where they sat out the blacklist, to Italy, where the family lived in the sixties, and then back with them to California. One whole wall of the rather small apartment is filled with books from floor to ceiling. I admire the handsome Oxford University Press set of Dickens, all with the original illustrations, and Jean Butler tells me they were bought in Mexico and went with them everywhere—“practically in our suitcases.” There seem to be mementoes and reminders of their former life everywhere. Not just the furniture and books but articles and keepsakes as well. And photographs: in many, or most of them, her late husband smiles out almost shyly next to Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., or Ian McLellan Hunter. And photos of the children in all manner of exotic settings. It’s a family with some mileage on it.

“I guess you know we had already refugeed out of Los Angeles to Ensenada about the time Trumbo got out of jail,” she begins. “There was a subpoena out for Hugo so that made it fairly urgent we stay out of sight. And so there we sat, two hours below Tijuana, just trying to wait the Committee out. Well, we didn’t have too many illusions about that—they were running things, and we knew it, so we just wanted to stay out of their way.

“Anyway, eventually we decided to go down to Mexico City and managed to convince the Trumbos this was the thing to do. But we stayed down in Ensenada, making plans to go, until November 1 that year. We set out together—or actually, we had some kind of rendezvous point worked out with the Trumbos, and that was San Diego, as I remember. Then we traveled in three cars and had seven kids between us—our four and their three—and the adults of course, and lots and lots of luggage. All this we had distributed between three cars—our ten-year-old Cadillac limousine, the Trumbos’ new Packard, and their jeep pulling a trailer, which had most of the luggage.”

“Were you worried coming back into the United States with the subpoena out for Hugo?” I ask.

“Certainly! When we crossed the border into California to meet the Trumbos we were filled with fear and trembling, expecting to have the paper served on us right there on the spot or something. We were all kind of paranoid about it by that time, you see.”

They proceeded by stages across Arizona and New Mexico, traveling in caravan, and then crossed the border at Juárez into Mexico. Besides the children, the Trumbos and Butlers had an English sheepdog and a Siamese cat between them, and the pets managed to complicate their journey considerably. Still, they continued to see something of the country, pretending—if only for the children—that it was really an awful lot of fun. And part of the time it was.

“But every stop we made one of the kids came down with strep throat. The first was in Gila Bend, Arizona—Nikola—next was Christopher, who came down with it in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and then Michael, our son, got it in El Paso. Each time we lost a few days. The last one was finally in Guadalajara. The mothers and the kids stayed there. It just didn’t seem practical to push on because all the young ones got sick there. So we just waited in a hotel while Trumbo and Hugo went on ahead by plane to Mexico City to rent houses for us. Which they did. Ours was big, but Trumbo’s was a small marble mansion, hideously inconvenient, with a yard and a patio in it the size of a small park. And a full staff of servants, of course.”

Their status in the country was a matter of some concern to them. They had come to stay, not knowing how hot the political climate in America would become: the Korean War was in its second year, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was just then getting up a full head of steam, so it didn’t look good. Ironically, Trumbo had earlier explored the possibility of transferring the necessary cash to Mexican banks and entering the country officially in the “capitalist” category (he was willing to go to any lengths, apparently). This would evidently have made it easier to secure “immigrant” status in Mexico, should that have proven necessary. In the end, both Trumbo and Hugo Butler settled for “tourist” status, even though it indicated only temporary residence in the country. This could be extended more or less indefinitely, however, by making trips up to the border every six months and re-declaring themselves as tourists. They were able to do this without bringing up their families because George Pepper had found a man at the border who would give out renewals of the tourist status for the usual mordito (the customary bribe they called the “little bite”).

George Pepper was a Los Angeles businessman who had been executive secretary of the Hollywood Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions and was named as a Communist Party member in testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Pepper came down to Mexico City and in no time at all was a real presence on the scene, an entrepreneur for all the Un-Americans. For example, Hugo Butler had spent the long days of unemployment in Ensenada at work on a screenplay adaptation of Robinson Crusoe. He had brought it with him down to Mexico City, of course. George Pepper took a look at it, and told him that he had friends he thought might want to invest in such a production. It wasn’t just talk. Pepper found the money, and eventually the Butler screenplay was realized in a production by the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel, which featured the Irish actor Dan O’Herlihy in the title role.

If Trumbo was willing to enter Mexico as a “capitalist,” then he was more than willing to play whatever games were necessary in order to maintain his status there. That was one of the reasons he rented that huge house and hired all those servants. It was important, he supposed, to keep up a good front—and if that was what it took, then the “marble mansion” should certainly do the job. He had to have a “coyote,” too. That was the Mexican colloquialism (and how apt it was!) for an ambulance chaser, a lawyer who could fix anything for you. Trumbo, characteristically, had hired the best, the most high-powered operator available. He advised Trumbo to have a party in that big palacio of a house and to invite all the politicos.

“I remember that party very well,” says Jean Butler, “and it was wild! Trumbo hired a mariachi band, and there was lots of music and dancing. The Mexican women were so peppy that they were dancing at two or three A.M. As it turned out, all the American men present brought their wives and the Mexican men brought their mistresses. That was why the party was so lively. The lights failed once, and the toilet blocked once. It was one of those parties. Jeepers, I found myself dancing with a fellow named Iturbide, or something like that, who said he was a descendant of the first emperor of Mexico. He was irritated that I didn’t know who he was. Well, of course I explained that we had just arrived and none of us spoke Spanish. Which was, unfortunately, true enough.”

Their politicking in Mexico was limited to just such practical ventures as that party. They were guests; it was important for them to stay on good terms with their hosts. As for what was happening north of the border, all Trumbo and the rest could do was shake their heads in dismay and reassure one another they were lucky to be where they were. “Trumbo enjoyed himself down there,” says Jean Butler, “but only as long as it seemed an adventure to him. Politically neutralized the way he was, and without the immediate pressure of work, he became almost uncomfortable. He’s the sort who has to have an adversary, or be behind the eight-ball in some way. He just has to have those windmills to tilt.”

But there were no windmills to tilt in Mexico City—nor, contrary to their expectations, was there very much movie work to be had there. Trumbo was given long stretches of time with nothing to do. Others worked on novels: Albert Maltz wrote A Long Day in a Short Life in Mexico; and Ring Lardner, Jr., began his satirical novel, The Ecstasy of Owen Muir, down there. Trumbo left prison with a 150-page start on his war novel, yet he did nothing more on that one in Mexico. Why? Were money worries so troublesome that he could think of nothing else? A few months after he arrived in Mexico City, the settlement on his M-G-M contract came through, and though it was not nearly as much as he had expected, it might have held him long enough to finish his own novel if he had budgeted it a little more carefully—or budgeted it at all. No, Trumbo was as profligate with his cash as he was with his time; he squandered a good deal of both down there. For some writers, once it is endured and bested, pressure becomes addictive, a kind of necessary elixir that must be drunk if one is to have the power to produce. Trumbo, I think, was one of these. He was evidently as unable to work without the constant, nagging demands of time and money on him as are many newspapermen who can write only to deadline. Whatever the explanation, he wrote no further on the novel in Mexico City. He looked only for some chance to do movie work. And the longer he looked, the more certain it seemed to him that his only real hope was to do an original of some sort. But what sort of story was there in Mexico for him to tell?

Jean Butler remembers: “Hugo was very interested in bullfighting and got Trumbo interested in it, too, more or less by stages. There was a great but modest little restaurant near the bullring that he would take Trumbo to during the day sometimes, then persuade him to come over and watch them working out in the ring during the week. That was how he got Trumbo into it. Hugo told him that he couldn’t defend it on moral grounds but that he still thought it was something beautiful. And Trumbo had to admit there was something to that all right, although when they started actually going to fights on Sunday afternoons, he and Cleo were very pro-bull. The first time they went, I think, they saw a bad kill and that almost sent them away for good; but Hugo—and I guess I was along, too—got them to come back a couple more times, and then it was fairly soon they got to see the indulto, which is pretty rare. We had read about it but hadn’t seen one ourselves. And that, of course, made quite an impression on Trumbo.”

Those visits to the bullfights, and in particular the one at which he witnessed an indulto, were what gave Trumbo the idea for an original screenplay, on which he soon began taking notes. The indulto (literally, a “pardon”) is a verdict of clemency pronounced by the crowd at the bullfight upon a bull that has fought with a particular show of bravery. The members of the crowd signal to the matador that the bull’s life is to be spared by taking out their handkerchiefs and waving them vigorously. It is quite a sight, and Trumbo knew when he saw it and found out what was going on that it would make a marvelous climactic scene for a motion picture. He began researching the project with the sort of thoroughness he usually showed, reading whatever books he could find in English on the subject, and asking questions and more questions of those who knew something about bullfighting and the raising of fighting bulls.

Before long he was ready to talk about the project. He went—where else could he go with it?—to the King brothers, flying from Mexico City to Los Angeles on May 10, 1952. He was there for a week, attending to various matters that had to do mostly with payments due the Internal Revenue Service and the hoped-for sale of the Lazy-T. While he was there, he visited the King brothers’ offices, sat down with Maury and Frank, and outlined the story he had in mind of the bull that comports himself so well in the ring that he is granted a reprieve from the usual death sentence in the form of an indulto. The bull is almost a pet of a young Mexican boy on the ranch where the animal was raised—hence the title under which it was offered to the King brothers, “The Boy and the Bull.”

Maury, Frank, and Hymie knew a good thing when they heard it. Frank King, then head of the company, said, “Sure, he wrote the story while he was living in Mexico City. He came up and outlined it to us, and the story he told us had his forte of heart to it, so we told him to go ahead. He was calling it ‘The Boy and the Bull’ then. What he did was to give his particular and very special feelings to the script. We gave him some money to go ahead with it and kept telling him we needed this one pretty fast because it looked like a sure thing.” It was a sure thing, of course. When it was produced as The Brave One, the film did very well financially for the King brothers. And it eventually won Trumbo an Academy Award.

The period in Mexico City was the last in which Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., Ian McLellan Hunter, and Hugo Butler lived and worked close to one another. They never planned it that way, but after Mexico they all simply drifted in different directions, Lardner and Hunter moving up to New York to work there on the television black market, Trumbo returning to Hollywood, and Hugo Butler hanging on a bit longer than the rest in Mexico and then heading for Europe. All four left for fundamentally the same reason: there simply wasn’t work for them there in Mexico City, nor was there likelihood of getting much from the States as long as they stayed there. And living in Mexico—at least at the level they wished—proved far more costly than they had expected.

“When we all went down there,” Ian McLellan Hunter remembered, “we discovered that rents were not that cheap. We rented a little house in San Angel for a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. Hugo got a bigger house because he had more kids. I guess we all had live-in maids—well, because all the houses had provisions for them, a room and whatnot. You just had to pay her a hundred pesos and give her every other Sunday off, though with our turn of mind we all offered a little more money. And then, before you knew it, you had added a cook and a laundress, and a gardener because from the Mexican point of view you represented some kind of rich character.”

“That’s right,” his wife, Alice Hunter, agreed. “You doubled the salaries and it was still embarrassing because it was so little, and pretty soon you were supporting the whole native population. You had attracted a crowd of beggars outside of your house just like it was one of the rich places. Which, believe me, ours wasn’t. But that’s how we got into that situation—at least partly out of concern for the people there. Trumbo attracted the biggest crowd of all of us—not surprising because his was the biggest house.”

“Yes, that’s an important thing in understanding Trumbo,” said Ian Hunter. “He always did things on a bigger scale than anybody else. In an odd way, he always seemed to be in competition with everybody on practically everything.”

Alice Hunter: “For instance, the way he competed with George Pepper on this whole thing of pre-Columbian art. Now, George was a collector in every sense of the term, and he had taken an interest in pre-Columbian art, mainly through his wife, Jeanette, who convinced him there really was something in those little clay figures. The workmen were pulling them out, one after another, from a brick quarry. They would turn up the stuff and sell it for a few cents to George or Jeanette Pepper right on the spot. For a while Trumbo was disdainful of this. He came, he looked, and at first he simply wasn’t interested. Then finally, he got hooked on it through Cleo’s friendship for Jeanette Pepper. Anything that interested Cleo was of vital interest to Trumbo—and she got interested in George and Jeanette’s collection of the stuff. And when Trumbo got interested, then everything—the whole market, if you want to call it that—changed immediately.

“You see, the men who dug in this brick quarry lived right out there by the site. You went out there and looked around, and it was pretty bad, just hovels around you and kids running around naked with starvation bellies on them. The man who ran everything there was the one they called the Butcher. Why, I don’t know. Well, when Trumbo got interested in buying pre-Columbian figures, he and the Butcher soon developed their own relationship. They would sit down and deal in this stuff, and it would be pretty heavy. Soon the prices went up, and the Butcher’s standard of living was noticeably better. He made improvements on his house, painted it—all thanks to Trumbo. I swear, when Trumbo left Mexico the whole economy must have collapsed.”

“Anyway,” Ian Hunter summed up, “that was Trumbo, the collector. He began in the clay pits with the rest of us who were buying these pieces just because we liked them as funny knickknacks. But pretty soon he was making deals with other collectors, making arrangements and deals with the Mexican government for taking the stuff out of the country and everything. He was out of our league and dealing on a different level entirely. Now, of course, he has a very good and valuable collection to show for it. That’s how he goes at things.”

For the rest of the Trumbos, life went on somehow—though Mexico City was, in a way, as hard for Cleo and the children as it was for Dalton. They had lived up at the Lazy-T ever since his name had first appeared in headlines. There the children had experienced no change in attitude from the neighbors or from other children in school; things were as they had always been for them. “In Mexico City it was different,” Cleo remembered. “We were more ostracized there because we were not part of the regular community.”

The children went to the American School in Mexico City. “Basically,” said Christopher Trumbo, “it was a place for sons and daughters of the resident imperialists, some of whom had been there through the second and third generation—these and a few Mexicans whose parents wanted them to be like us. It was a curious mix.” Once the Mexico City News ran its story on the blacklist colony there, suddenly it was all over the school who the Trumbo children were. “We had a pretty distinctive last name, so we weren’t able to hide behind something like Smith or Jones. We were the only Trumbos in the school. The effect was pretty immediate. We didn’t make many friends there.

“In a way, we were a lot better prepared than some of the other kids of parents who were blacklisted. In 1947, my parents took us aside and very clearly explained what the whole situation was, whether they were or were not Communists, why they said and did the things they did. Some kids’ parents didn’t level with the children along that line, and it had a bad effect on them. It made it seem like it was coming out of the blue, like there was no sense to it at all. And that’s a bad feeling to have.”

Christopher Trumbo learned to play baseball down there in Mexico City, taught by his mother in the big yard of the house on Llomas de Chapultepec. “I believe in exercise and Trumbo doesn’t. Chris wanted to learn, and I was the logical one to do the teaching.” Even with the big house, the servants and all, the children still missed home, and for Cleo, Mexico City was just “not all that great for living. After a while we all wanted to come back.”

Trumbo, of course, was well aware of this. But his chief problem was, and continued to be, finding work and getting money. They had gone rather quickly through the settlement on the M-G-M contract. The sale of the Lazy-T had fallen through once, and a new buyer had not yet been found. The Internal Revenue Service was demanding quarterly payments on his back income taxes—payments Trumbo was finding it harder and harder to meet. The longer they stayed in Mexico, the deeper they were stuck in their dilemma. It seemed certain that he would have to resettle himself and his family in the Los Angeles area if he was to find regular work in the movie black market. Yet as they stayed on, it came to seem less and less possible to put together the kind of sum it would take to get them moved up to Los Angeles and into a house there. In December 1952, they moved to less grand and less expensive quarters in Mexico City. In January 1953, the Trumbos were in such straits that when the Mexican import duties were due on the Packard automobile in which the family had driven to Mexico, they simply didn’t have the money to pay them, and so Trumbo drove the car up to Brownsville, Texas, and put it in storage there.

He crossed the border January 10, 1953, and flew on from there to Los Angeles. His mission was twofold: first of all, he hoped to clear up matters with the King brothers on “The Boy and the Bull.” He badly needed the money that was owed to him on the script. They, however, were in bad financial shape at the time and prevailed upon him to take a loan to alleviate his immediate financial problems. This he agreed to do, and they arranged it for him with a business associate of theirs, thus making it possible to have an IRS lien lifted on the deed of the Lazy-T.

He also went to Los Angeles to see his friend and “collaborator,” Ray Murphy. This meeting of theirs in Los Angeles was an important chapter in a long and bizarre story that had begun years before, during Trumbo’s tour of the Pacific theater of operations during the summer of 1945. He met Murphy there then, one of the group of correspondents on the war junket. His first impression of him, written in a letter to Cleo, was not at all favorable: “Murphy is an impossible young ass who thinks Huxley and Beerbohm the greatest writers of this century. He is completely tactless and behaves exactly like a young Noel Coward, minus only the wit and brains which Coward must certainly have had at such an age.” But if Trumbo thought ill of him, the others in the group thought far worse. The writers, most of whom fancied themselves tough-guy writers, loathed Murphy’s prep school accent, his manners and assurance, because of the wealth and social position they implied. He was young—only twenty-two—and a bit pompous, and he had clearly been included in the group through political connections of some sort, because he was the only one of them all who was not an established writer; for these reasons, he became a figure of derision and the butt of every sarcastic remark and cruel joke that passed among them.

That was enough for Trumbo. He took Ray Murphy under his wing. The two saw action and were under fire together on Balikpapan, and they grew fairly close after that. Close enough, at any rate, that when the tour of the Pacific had ended, young Murphy broke off from the group which was returning to New York and went with Trumbo to spend two weeks with him and his family in Beverly Hills. He mystified Nikola and Christopher Trumbo (Cleo was pregnant with Mitzi at the time). They had never seen—or heard—anything quite like him. Trumbo remembered: “He spoke—whatever the accent is—so eloquently that my kids couldn’t understand him at all. It was just hopeless. They would just stare at him.” The two were friends, as close as the years, miles, and social differences between them permitted. Murphy returned to the East, to Yale, from which he had graduated. He became curator of rare books at the Yale Library, and wrote and published a biography of Lord Mountbatten, The Last Viceroy, though he never tried his hand at fiction, as he had told Trumbo he would. They kept in contact by letter during the next few years, and Murphy expressed outrage and shock at Trumbo’s treatment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and at his subsequent imprisonment for contempt. They differed politically, but Murphy—young, fair-minded, even idealistic—was totally opposed to the blacklist and found it impossible to reconcile the treatment Trumbo had received from the Committee with his notion of a democratic society.

The two did not actually meet again until the summer of 1951, when Murphy visited Los Angeles. Trumbo had him up to the Lazy-T. And Murphy, giving way to curiosity, asked how he managed to survive financially. Trumbo told him about his work on the black market and that, for the most part, he had managed to survive because other writers had been brave enough to lend him their names—but that they had also been rewarded for this. Murphy declared that Trumbo could use his name anytime and that he need not pay him a cent for the privilege. Trumbo, who was not likely to turn a deaf ear to an offer of this kind, told him to go home and reconsider and that if Murphy really meant it, they might indeed get together on a project. Trumbo, however, insisted that he must pay for the use of the young man’s name; there was, after all, some risk to him.

Ray Murphy wrote to Trumbo after he had returned to the East, assuring him that he was quite serious about the offer he had made and asking when they might get together on something. By this time perhaps Murphy had come to look upon such a “collaboration” as a possible entry into film writing for himself. Trumbo delayed. The move to Mexico intervened. Finally, after he had finished “The Boy and the Bull,” he came up with an idea that he thought might be done as an original screen story and submitted to the studios under Murphy’s name. He finished it and mailed it to him on October 4, 1952—ninety-five pages of typescript, bearing the title, “The Fair Young Maiden.” The William Morris Agency agreed to handle it. This and other details were communicated to him through an elaborate medical code in which Trumbo was to be addressed as “Dr. John Abbott.”* By January, a few changes had been made in the story, but the Morris agent was asking for more. Ray Murphy had traveled to Los Angeles. Trumbo went there to find out, through Murphy, what the difficulty was.

They met on a couple of occasions during that January 1953 trip of Trumbo’s to Hollywood, discussing this story and others in the planning stage and the problem of the agent. The latter problem was cleared up when Jules Goldstone, the Hollywood representative of Murphy’s New York literary agent (and also, incidentally, George Willner’s old partner), agreed to take on the original screen story, which in its revised form bore the title “The Love Maniac.” Trumbo left it at that and returned to Mexico City on January 27, 1953, Murphy remaining on in Hollywood to be accessible as the author of the story, should it be sold immediately.

And then… nothing. Trumbo waited for a month and a half without word from young Murphy. But then in the middle of March, a friend brought by a stack of the Hollywood trades from the past few weeks, and browsing through them, Trumbo came across an item headlined “20th Buys ‘Love Maniac.’” Evidently it was true, and the paper—it was the Hollywood Reporter—was almost three weeks old. Trumbo wrote Ray Murphy, got no reply, and saw an item a few days later in Louella Parsons’s column, which was carried irregularly in the Mexico City News: “I am sorry if my item about ‘The Love Maniac’ gave the impression that Ray Murphy, a fine young man, is still alive. He did write the story, but he died about a month ago.” Trumbo was shocked. Had he missed the earlier item, or had that column simply been dropped by the News? He ran to a library to search through the New York Times obituaries, reasoning accurately that the curator of rare books at Yale would rate a notice there. It was there, all right—a report that Ray Murphy had died on January 29, 1953. With the sparse information he gathered from the short item, he wired Elsie McKeogh up in New York, where Murphy’s mother lived, and said it was urgent he be put in touch with her. Wires flew back and forth during the next few days. Finally Trumbo heard from Ray Murphy’s brother, Dr. James Murphy, who, writing on his own initiative and addressing him as Dr. John Abbott, informed him that Ray had died “following an attack of the flu.” Dr. Murphy was executor of young Murphy’s will, which left his entire estate to the Yale Library. However, he understood that the screenplay had been a collaboration of some sort and was willing and anxious to make the right sort of settlement.

Trumbo wrote him back a very long letter, revealing himself as Dr. John Abbott and explaining the one-sided nature of his collaboration with Ray Murphy. He enclosed documentation to prove his claim and appealed to Dr. Murphy for an immediate payment of three thousand dollars in advance of settlement so that he might make that quarterly payment on his income tax; once again, the Internal Revenue Service had put a lien against his deed on the Lazy-T. Toward the end of the twenty-five-page letter, Trumbo had this to say about his own situation and the help Ray Murphy had extended him:

In writing this letter to you, I do not feel that I have in any way dishonored Ray’s memory. On the contrary, I have revealed to you that his last professional act was a profoundly generous and noble one. To help a friend and fellow-writer who had been rendered mute by circumstances, he placed his name, his reputation and his career in jeopardy. If the facts of my authorship of the story had ever been disclosed he would have been blacklisted throughout the motion picture industry. Ever since my unhappy profession first was practiced, writers have been at loggerheads with constituted authority, any efforts to suppress them or stave them off are as old as the history of government itself. There are many examples in past literature of one writer lending his name in order that another, temporarily out of favor, might continue to write. This is what Ray did. He did not consider it dishonorable, nor did I: it was, on the contrary, an act involving the essence of honor, and the moral courage it required in these troubled times is very considerable.

Dr. Murphy offered not the slightest resistance to Trumbo’s claim; in fact, he rushed him the three thousand dollars needed to pay off the tax lien. It arrived just in the nick of time: the Lazy-T was saved once more.

And a good thing, too, for not long after that the ranch was finally sold. Had it gone in auction for taxes, the Trumbos would not even have had the money they needed to make their return to Los Angeles. And by the fall of 1953, they were making plans to do just that.

Before they left, however, they received money that was unexpected—though not unhoped-for, of course. It came from McCall’s magazine. Trumbo had written a short story based on something that had happened to friends there in Mexico City. Their three-year-old daughter had misbehaved, and so the father had given the child a smart whack at the usual place. But the child put her hand behind her to protect herself, and somehow he had caught her little finger with his hand and had broken it. As Trumbo told it: “He and his wife felt like animals, and they rushed her off to the doctor to get that poor little finger taken care of, which was crooked. And of course the child was well aware of her power. They got to the doctor, and the doctor asked how it happened. And the parents didn’t say anything, and the child said she fell on it.”

Published as “The Child Beater,” it was a charming story that captured perfectly the father’s feelings of embarrassment and shame before the doctor, his wife, and his child. Trumbo had written it and submitted it under the name Cleo Fincher. Betty Parsons Ragsdale, fiction editor of McCall’s, had picked it out of the slush pile—what are the odds against that?—and written her acceptance to Cleo along with a check for $850, asking for a little information about the author. Trumbo wrote back as Cleo Fincher, telling her when Cleo was born, the number of children she had, and so on. He added: “My husband is engaged in selling,” and later commented, “A truer line was never written.”