CHAPTER ELEVEN

BREAKING THE BLACKLIST

Others managed to stick out the blacklist in Mexico and a few even thrived there. Why not Trumbo? Because, as he explained in a letter to Michael Wilson, “We are living out an old truism: ‘The first time you see Mexico you are struck by the horrible poverty; within a year you discover it’s infectious.’ I am broke as a bankrupt’s bastard.” He had caught the disease of poverty down there, and to hear him tell it, he was wasting away fast. He had to get himself and his family out before it proved financially fatal. And it looked as though Hollywood, which for the sake of economy they had forsaken a little more than two years before, was the only place that a cure might be effected.

But understand, they were relatively poor. The mere taste of poverty he had had in Mexico City was nothing like the stomach full of it he got as a young man working at the bakery and living on 55th Street in Los Angeles. Trumbo and his family were certainly not surviving in the style to which they had been earlier accustomed. He could—and did in that letter to Wilson—recite a long list of items of value they had been forced to dispose of in the pawnshop with the grand name, run by the Mexican government, Monte de Piedad (Mount of Pity). Nevertheless, when the time came at last, in January 1954, for the family to depart, they left in reasonably good style. Cleo flew ahead with their youngest, Mitzi, who was judged not up to the journey, and Trumbo took the other two in the Jeep wagon which they had kept in storage. His biggest problem on the trip back was getting the valuable collection of pre-Columbian art he had acquired while in Mexico through Mexican customs at Matamoros (he never did; in the end he went through the motions of returning the ceramics to Mexico City, where Hugo Butler got them to him in Los Angeles by trans-shipping through a friend in Ensenada). Upon their arrival, the Trumbos borrowed enough to get their furniture out of storage and got a second car, a Nash Rambler. They installed themselves in an ancient old Spanish fortress of a house—literally that: it had been used in the days of old California as an outpost against the coast Indians—which they rented for two hundred dollars a month. There Trumbo set up shop; he had resolved to write his way back to financial health.

His immediate problem was finding an agent; George Willner, who had represented him in the early years of the blacklist, was now blacklisted himself. Trumbo wrote letters to a number of independent Hollywood agents explaining his situation and asking if they would care to discuss the matter further. Some of them did, and in the next few years (until he settled on an unusual arrangement with Eugene Frenke) he used more than one at a time—among them, Arthur Landau, his first Hollywood agent. It seemed ethical enough, and occasionally an outright necessity, to be represented by more than one agent, for using all the pseudonyms that he did and working with a number of different writers who would “front” for him, Trumbo was himself some several different writers all at the same time.

As he later explained his situation and strategy in a letter to Hugo Butler, “I started from scratch, without any contacts, and operated on the theory that every satisfied customer was a future customer for steady work at rising rates.… The black market is like the old one on a much smaller scale: that is, you enter it virgin and new and unknown (I haven’t had a screen credit for ten years—styles change—writers fade). Therefore I decided I had to prove myself as a newcomer.”

He started somewhere near the bottom. He had worked for the King brothers, and now he would work for their competitors. With the control of the major studios over the movie industry rapidly weakening under the pressure of television, there was increasing activity in independent production. Quite naturally, in the beginning, most of it was of the low-budget, B-picture sort. It was here that Trumbo concentrated most of his efforts during the next few years, working for producers such as Walter Seltzer. The first bona fide job given him following his return from Mexico came from Seltzer, who approached Trumbo with a sheaf of clippings and other research material on a gangland murder in Kansas City and asked him if he thought he could do an original screenplay from it. It was worth $7,500, not a bad price in that market. And Trumbo gave him his money’s worth and more. The movie made from his script (screenwriter Ben Perry allowed his name to be put on it) was a tough, fast-moving little genre picture, called The Boss, released in 1956. It featured John Payne and was directed by Byron Haskin, a B-picture veteran.

As Trumbo intended, Walter Seltzer returned, a satisfied customer. Trumbo did another script for him, Bullwhip, which was never produced. And a few years later, 1957, he did an unscheduled rewrite of the screenplay for another Seltzer film, Terror in a Texas Town. How Trumbo came to do it tells a good deal about the way he operated on the Hollywood black market and why he came to be so successful at it. He had long made it a practice to guarantee his own work: rewrites were included in the price agreed upon. He would keep making changes—not always happily and not without argument—as long as the producer or director kept asking for them. He also made it a practice to do all he could to see that work he couldn’t take on himself was passed on to other blacklisted writers. That was how he happened to get involved in Terror in a Texas Town. He had been offered the job by Seltzer but because he was too busy with other projects to take it on, he had recommended John Howard Lawson, one of the original Hollywood Ten, and Mitch Lindemann, also blacklisted, for the job. Trumbo went as far as to offer his personal guarantee that their work would be satisfactory. Well, ten days before Terror was to begin shooting, Seltzer was notified by the film’s backers that they were unhappy with the script; if they were, of course, then he was, too. And so he went to Trumbo with their objections, and Trumbo, having offered his guarantee, sat down and rewrote the script in four days. Walter Seltzer came up with one thousand dollars for the job.

Most of the jobs that producers came to him with were rewrites of one kind or another. This was hard work, usually done under pressure, which offered Trumbo the dubious pleasure of knowing he had been sought out as the last resort. But it kept him busy. He remarked of his script-doctoring—again in a letter to Hugo Butler: “Of course I always come in on the tail end, generally following four complete drafts by writers whose names would surprise you, all drafts desperately bad. It is really an eye-opener, and makes, for anyone who can rescue one of these dreadful wrecks, a continuing market in the future.” Trumbo’s reputation as a doctor specializing in such “last aid” was one he retained.

When jobs were not immediately forthcoming he managed not to pine away but to get to work on some original screenplay or screen story. This was how he came to write Furia, bought by Hal Wallis for Anna Magnani, which was made as Wild Is the Wind in 1957. There were others. Trumbo wrote a science fiction original which he sold to Benedict Bogeaus, who produced it in 1958 under the title From the Earth to the Moon. Then there was a sort of original, one at least that he initiated and completed on his own with no buyer in sight—and that was his adaptation of the Herman Melville novel Typee (in public domain, of course). Ben Bogeaus bought that one, too, though he never produced it. Trumbo began early on to acquire an underground reputation in Hollywood, not only for his abilities as a script doctor but also as one who could work with producers and write originals to given specifications.

It was the latter which brought Gladys Sylvio, one of the most formidable of all movie mothers, around to Trumbo one day. If that name doesn’t exactly ring a bell, her first husband was named O’Brien, and she was the mother of Margaret. She telephoned and told Trumbo she had been trying to get in touch with him for years. She wanted him to write a movie for Margaret O’Brien. A director named David Butler was interested in doing a film with the former child star, who was now eighteen. She was sure that Trumbo was the man to do the script because he had written her daughter’s last successful film, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. It turned out that there was another reason she thought Trumbo was the man for the job: she wanted him to write another Roman Holiday for her.

“That might be difficult,” he told her.

“It shouldn’t be difficult at all. You wrote Roman Holiday, didn’t you? That’s the kind of script she needs.”

“Well, these rumors do get around about a lot of pictures. Most of them are untrue, but I make it a point never to deny them. Why don’t you go to the guy whose name is on it?” Meaning Ian McLellan Hunter, who fronted for Trumbo on the picture and did some rewriting on it as well. He was in New York by that time, blacklisted, and writing under cover for TV. Trumbo wasn’t sure he wanted this job.

“No, no,” said Margaret’s mother, “I want you!”

In the end, although she waged quite a campaign, she never got him; nor, though she also waged quite a campaign, did Margaret O’Brien ever make that successful comeback her mother had planned for her.

Of course Trumbo continued to work for the King brothers, as well. Exasperating as they often were, and hard as it had been to get from them the money he was owed for “The Boy and the Bull” (The Brave One), he nevertheless liked all three of them and knew they were trustworthy enough—just spread a little thin in their enterprise. Following his return from Mexico he did two scripts for them: another gangster movie, The Syndicate, which turned out rather well but was never made; and Mr. Adam, an adaptation of the Pat Frank novel about the last fertile man left on earth, which at the time was considered too hot to handle. One of the between-job originals that he wrote, Heaven with a Gun, was also sold to the Kings with the name of Robert Presnell, Jr., on it. They held on to it for years, and in the meantime Trumbo had broken the blacklist and had once more become an eminent screenwriter and not the éminence grise he was when he wrote the thing. In 1966 they announced production plans for Heaven with a Gun and, without checking with Trumbo first, announced that it was actually an original screenplay by Robert Presnell, Jr., and Dalton Trumbo. Presnell promptly set the record straight on that count, leaving Trumbo as sole author. But Trumbo was reluctant to have his own name appear on the film, reasoning they had bought it for production under a pseudonym and that was the way it ought to be produced.*

But that was business. Maury, Hymie, and Frank wanted Trumbo to know that he was their friend—he could count on them. And it was true enough: he could. They had even made it possible, through Lionel Sternberger, a stockholder in King Brothers Productions, for Trumbo to buy a house within six months of his arrival from Mexico with no cash at all in hand. Sternberger was a well-to-do restaurant owner in Highland Park, who was putting his house up for sale. It was a big place, built in 1905, surrounded by six separate lots so that it had the look of an estate. There was a swimming pool. And the house itself had been beautifully remodeled so that it was like new inside and out. It was actually much too grand a place for the neighborhood, which was lower middle class, but Sternberger had lived there for years and loved it, and now he wanted to make sure it got the right sort of owner. For a number of reasons he was convinced Dalton Trumbo was just the man.

“Lon Sternberger was a crazy, charming man,” Trumbo remembered. “He was a health nut, though he was very fat. He had gotten in trouble with the law for prescribing to people—foods, diets, even drugs—and they had his phone tapped in the process. He wasn’t trying to take anyone, just a fanatic believer in these health foods and so on. But he had gotten into this difficulty with the law, and as a result he hated cops and people who listened in on telephones. When he heard that I had been in trouble with the law, and he met me and took a liking to me, why, he offered me the house for what was very little money even then. But we didn’t put any money down, and Lon even lent me $2,400 to get the rest of the furniture out of storage. We just literally got the house for nothing.”

That house on Annan Trail in Highland Park came to mean something special to those who continued to see the Trumbos through the blacklist. There weren’t so many of them, and most were blacklisted themselves. A lot of people in the industry, even those who did business with him, were afraid to be seen with Trumbo in town. “They were bad days in Hollywood,” said his attorney, Aubrey Finn, “for him and for the whole town.” But in a way that seemed to bring the outsiders closer together. They went to Trumbo’s as to a manor house, a kind of castle where they were all safe from that crazy society outside that had hounded them out of their jobs.

Trumbo seemed to think of it that way, too—or perhaps, remembering the old Spanish house in La Cañada, as a kind of redoubt. “Look at this location,” he told Al Leavitt, “up on the hill with all this territory around me. I bought this house so they couldn’t outflank me. We’re in a true command position here.”

Al Leavitt, blacklisted in 1951, had known him since 1941, during that brief period when Trumbo worked on The Remarkable Andrew at Paramount. Much his junior and much in awe of him, Leavitt told me that he practically learned the craft of screenwriting by taking to heart the advice and criticism handed him by Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson. “My wife and I are the only blacklisted writers who never left this community,” he said. He became a commercial photographer and moonlighted on the side in the television black market, and he kept in contact with most of the rest going to those parties at Trumbo’s.

“They were marvelous parties there. I remember a Sunday afternoon around the pool. There were a great many writers and directors—he was cracking through at this time and had become somewhat more acceptable to those not on the blacklist. And who should be there but Linus Pauling, his wife, and his daughter. I recognized him from his pictures, but of course Trumbo actually knew the man. People there were kind of intimidated by Pauling—understandably—and he was sitting alone a great deal of the time. That was how my kid found him. My son, then fourteen, went up and engaged him in conversation. Afterward, as soon as we got him in the car, we said to my son, ‘Let’s have it—that conversation you had with Linus Pauling—what was it all about?’ ‘You mean that was Linus Pauling?’ my son said. ‘I thought he was a high school chemistry teacher, and so that was what we talked about, my high school chemistry.’ But that was it, you see, that was the kind of gathering we had there at the time. Trumbo kept us together but helped us remember there was a world outside by bringing people like Linus Pauling around.”

Aubrey Finn remembered the house and the Trumbos’ situation there much less amiably: “Well, it was a very unusual area to have motion picture people living in it,” he said. “Here it was a working-class neighborhood, and he’s got the biggest house in the neighborhood and a swimming pool to boot. His children were shunned in school. It was a bad place and a bad time for them. The neighbors used to throw stuff in his pool, garbage, dead things, anything. And there was once—but I suppose you know about this—when Dalton was beaten up there in front of his house.”

I did know. Over the years, of course, Dalton Trumbo took his share and more of abuse in print. Through the mail, he received a trickle of hate letters that had not stopped even in the last few years before I first interviewed him.* But only once was he attacked physically because of his politics, and that took place, as Aubrey Finn said, right in front of Trumbo’s home in Highland Park. It happened during the latter part of the blacklist period, after the Robert Rich Affair, when he was being interviewed often on television and radio, and his politics became widely known in the neighborhood.

Trumbo remembered: “We came home late in Highland Park. In front of our house was our own parking lot, paved and with a stone fence around it. It was about twelve-thirty or one o’clock, and there were two boys and a girl standing in front of the house as we drove in and parked. They were singing something about ‘get rid of the Commie bastard’ or something of the sort. So I went over to them and told them to get the hell out. Well, I was knocked down, jumped on, and I could see the girl’s heel smashing my glasses on the pavement. They were kicking me, but finally I caught one of them by the feet, and then there was total panic because they were trying to get me loose of him. And I was hanging on through a portion of the fence where I couldn’t be moved, and I had him—though I don’t know what I was going to do with him. Finally, of course, they broke away and ran down the hill. We let them go. The last thing we needed was to have the police chase them. I didn’t go out for two weeks until the black eyes went away.”

So there was no love lost between Trumbo and the community he lived in. But it was characteristic of him that he refused to be intimidated by his neighbors—not when they sent a deputation to him demanding he move out, and even less when they sent their delinquent children on that dark night to enforce their demands. He had made up his mind: by God, the Trumbos were there in Highland Park to stay. If they did move, it would be when he decided they should and not a minute before. (And that, for the record, is the way it was.)

He had a friend, an artist who had come from Chicago by way of Paris, named Charles White. White had not been in Los Angeles long when he happened to mention to Trumbo at one of those Sunday afternoon gatherings on Annan Trail that he and his wife were looking for someplace to build a house. Now, this was more of a problem for Charles White than it might have been for another man, for he was a black man married to a white woman, and this was 1957. Finding a lot for sale in a good location mattered less than finding a man who would sell it to him. Trumbo knew this, of course. That was why, when White told him, Trumbo gestured casually toward a corner of the hilltop just below the house and said, “How about over there?”

“You mean there? On your land?”

“It wouldn’t be mine,” Trumbo explained. “I’d sell it to you, of course. There are six separate lots here besides the one the house is on. I could sell you one of them.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

“Certainly I’m sure. The reason I wanted all this property in the first place was so I could decide who would live beside me. And I can tell you, Charlie, I’d sooner have you beside me than anyone I’ve seen in Highland Park.”

So that was that, more or less. Of course Trumbo explained what kind of neighborhood it was and warned that Mr. and Mrs. Charles White might find life difficult there,* but then in a few days’ time the papers were drawn up (Trumbo sold the lot for precisely what he paid for it and on easy terms) and the transfer was made. Charles White and Dalton Trumbo were neighbors. They came to know one another very well.

When I think of Charles White I find myself continually reminded of photographer–writer–movie director Gordon Parks. Except for the deep mahogany color of their skins and the fact that both men wore mustaches, there was little in the way of physical resemblance between them—or perhaps one other thing: both had a quality of encompassing directness in their eyes which came from having trained themselves, photographer and painter, to see more than other men. But beyond the physical impressions, there was a sense of presence, an emanation of authority, that was, in a way, the most prominent thing about them. White was a quicker, lighter, less reserved man, but that quality of personal strength was just as surely there in him.

Charles White was a painter. His love of his art and the sense of identity it gave him is apparent in the quality of light and the strong colors of his canvases; his is a very positive style. Through his teaching at the school of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art he managed to make a very comfortable living indirectly from his painting, one that gave him time and opportunity to keep at it directly. He was at the school the day I met him. I found him in his office, and together we walked over to a Mexican restaurant directly behind the Museum building. I could tell from the way he was greeted at the door that he was a regular there. I could also tell by the time we were through the gazpacho that this was a talk I was going to enjoy.

“Well, I’ve known him for years,” he began, “just as soon as I got here, I think. Europe ruined New York for me, so when I came back it seemed natural to head out here—and just as natural to get to know Trumbo. We had many mutual friends, writers, film people, theater people. It was easy to get to know him. And once I did, well, I just took to him. For one thing, his humor—very attractive. Sometimes it is sardonic and biting and at other times light. He has a way of using it as a weapon that can be quite devastating.

“How? Well, let’s just say that he knows his own weaknesses and strengths and is very intolerant of stupidity. He doesn’t use sarcasm in a malicious way, understand. It’s just there as a weapon to be used, so don’t cross him.”

I cleared my throat and must have frowned a little, for White gave me a little smile of sympathy. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Nobody talk much about that?”

“Well…”

“He is very much king of his household. There is a point he doesn’t allow anyone to infringe upon, a line nobody can cross. I remember there was a large gathering of people at his house. Some of the Hollywood Ten were there and some old friends—people like that. There was, I recall, a discussion of some book, and he was challenged on the use of a word. It was done humorously and jovially, of course, but Dalton defended his use of it, and this led to a general discussion of words and how to use them. Which should have ended it gracefully. But the people there persisted, brought him back to a discussion of his use of that particular word, and they began to gang up on him and insist that he was wrong. He became angry and began sticking the needle in them in return. They were putting him down, and he was furious. Finally, he took it as long as he could until he reminded them that they were guests in his house, then he pointed at somebody present—I can’t remember who—and he said, ‘Okay, I’m appointing you the host. I’m leaving.’ He walked out on them, and that was that. Everyone left.”

“And you?” I asked. “Have you ever found yourself on the wrong side of him?”

“A couple of times, yes, I guess I stepped out of line—but it was out of affection for him. I really love the man, you see.”

There was such directness and earnestness in Charles White’s manner just then that I had the feeling I was hearing some of the same things he must have said on an occasion or two to Trumbo. (His was the old attitude of one who enjoys the immunity of friendship: This may hurt, but… )

“If you disagree openly with Dalton, he will respect you more than if you bow to him. If you do that, he loses a little respect for you. I like to argue, and I like to do it vehemently. We’ve had our little run-ins, but with me, the real difficulty I have in the relationship is that I’m in awe of him. Oh yes. And people I’m in awe of I have difficulty talking to. So much of the time during the last years I’ve spent observing him—his response to people he comes in contact with and their response to him. And there is one thing that has become clear to me from this.”

He paused portentously, his fork in the air, and a frown on his face. (It may well have been then that I first noted the likeness to Gordon Parks. It was there somehow in the way he leaned forward and fixed me with his look. That intensity.)

“What’s that?” I asked. “What’s become clear?”

“There are only two ways to relate to Dalton. You either love him or you hate him. Picasso is like that. Chaplin is, too. There are people in Hollywood, a lot of them, who hate Dalton.”

We lapsed into less charged discussion. It was then he told me the story of how he happened to become Trumbo’s next-door neighbor. And he also told me a little about his own background—growing up in Chicago, the years before the war when he was struggling to get an education of some sort in art, and of his own friendship then and there with Richard Wright—“I’ve always seemed to have more writers than painters as friends.” Finally, he approached rather gingerly a subject that until then both of us had skirted. It came up just about the time the waiter came by with our coffee. It had to do somehow with Trumbo’s work on behalf of the Angela Davis defense: “… a party in that mansion he lives in now,” Charles White was saying. “Some were fearful to commit themselves for her defense.…” He trailed off, then added almost as an afterthought, “His relationship with blacks has been mostly with intellectual blacks—artists like myself, or with Carlton Moss, the director. At times I have felt he never had an astute knowledge of black life. It seemed reasonable to me once to demand that whites have as much knowledge and intimacy of my people as I have of theirs. But they never have had the entree to black life that I have had to white. Anyway, they should have more knowledge than what I can tell them. If you use me to pick my brains, then your knowledge will be limited. That’s simply all there is to it. I don’t know what the answer is, though. Whites cannot automatically establish contact with poor blacks and ghetto street life. But Trumbo had his humanism. He relied on that for his knowledge of black life, and maybe that was enough most of the time. It’s just too bad there aren’t greater opportunities for real acquaintance, real knowledge.”

Trumbo kept hard at work. The jobs he did on the black market—twelve scripts in his first eighteen months back from Mexico—had restored some sort of financial equilibrium to his life. But as long as he was forced to work for independent producers of low-budget B pictures, he would have to continue working at just such a furious pace or pitch dangerously down into destitution. As it was, he was sufficiently well off by the middle of 1956 that he could repay money to those he had borrowed from in Mexico. Albert Maltz, for one, had loaned him three thousand dollars, which Trumbo had begun paying back to the tune of fifty dollars a month until the sum was entirely repaid. At Trumbo’s instigation, Maltz began to do movie work by mail for the King brothers and other independents.

Trumbo was in close communication with blacklistees who had remained in the Los Angeles area or, like him, had returned. By the time he moved to Highland Park, he had become a kind of one-man clearinghouse for information and writing jobs, passing on to others work he couldn’t handle, keeping everyone in contact. One job came to him through this network he had set up. Early in 1956, Adrian Scott, one of the original Hollywood Ten, brought to Trumbo a young lady named Sally Stubblefield who wanted to be a producer. She was working as an editor in the Warner Bros. story department and had been in the business long enough to know that her best shot at producing—perhaps her only one—was to approach her studio as the owner of a filmable script. To get one she had borrowed three thousand dollars from the bank and gone out with Adrian Scott to talk to Trumbo. She herself had an idea for the film: it seemed that a few years ago she had worked at a home for delinquent girls in the Los Angeles area, and she was sure they would find a good story among the many at such a place. Why not go out there and talk to the girls? Sally Stubblefield was right; they went to the home for delinquent girls where she had worked, and after a couple of trips Trumbo had his story. The movie from his script was made by Warner Bros. in 1957 as The Green-Eyed Blonde. As they had agreed, Sally took credit for the screenplay and in that way got that associate-producer credit she was really after. It did not, however, lead to the career in production that she had hoped for. “She was someone,” said Trumbo, “who, if she had been a man, would have had no difficulty in doing whatever she wanted to do in film production.”

Before being blacklisted, Adrian Scott had been a producer himself, and before that a screenwriter. Now, on the black market, he was working as a writer again, but only eking out a living in television. Scott had worked out a permanent partnership with a young woman whose name went on all his scripts. One of the television shows Scott did in this way was developed from incidents during World War II that had to do with a group of Italian nuns who smuggled Jewish children out of Germany and Italy and on to Israel. He was sure there was enough there for a full-length film, and so he went to Trumbo about it. Trumbo thought so, too, and wrote the screenplay on speculation. Robert Presnell, Jr., offered the use of his name, and the script was sold for English production. Both Dalton Trumbo and Adrian Scott made some money from the deal, and that might have been the happy ending to this short story—except that there was a slight twist. The movie made from Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay, Conspiracy of Hearts, was released in 1960 and did very well with critics and audiences alike. Catholics were especially keen on it; the picture even got an award of merit from the Legion of Decency. Yet just down the street from Conspiracy of Hearts in many cities that year the Catholic War Veterans were picketing Exodus and Spartacus because Trumbo’s name was on them.

The most constant and perplexing problem for any writer on the black market was not so much getting work as it was getting paid for it. Producers would often hold the blacklisted writer at arm’s length while they settled with other creditors. A few of the more unscrupulous burned their writers for all or part of the script fee (this didn’t happen often, and never to Trumbo); in such cases the writer had no appeal. And sometimes even the mechanics of payment became horrendously complex. Pseudonyms were necessary not just to get a name up on the screen, but also to get checks past prying bank officials. The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the vigilante group that enforced the blacklist within the movie community, had a network of spies and informers that even went into the major banks in and around Hollywood. If a company drew a check to a name that had appeared on the blacklist, then the word would be passed to the Alliance and pressure would be brought upon the offending company. Independent production companies were not really independent at all, for they relied upon the major studios for the use of facilities, for film distribution, and at that time often for talent as well. Threatened with the loss of any or all of these, the producer would have no choice but to promise to sin no more. As a result of all this, a writer working on the black market would have to maintain at least one bank account under a fictitious name—Trumbo had several: John Abbott, Sam Jackson, C. F. Demaine, and Peter Finch, to mention just a few he used over the years. Now, any lawyer will tell you that it is very tricky to try to do business under a name not your own, for even if channels for payment are worked out, the Internal Revenue Service is sure to assume that your motive for using another name is not just ulterior but illegal. Add to this the special interest taken by the Los Angeles office of the IRS in the tax returns of anyone who had been mentioned in testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and you will have some idea of the dangers that lurked each year after April 15 for every black marketeer. Because he was determined not to let the IRS do to him what the Committee had done, Trumbo kept meticulous financial records, ready at a moment’s notice to go before the examiner. This was quite uncharacteristic of a man with an attitude toward money such as his; he was simply being realistic.

One way to avoid the bank trap without resorting to a pseudonym was to ask for payment in cash, but in that there were also obvious pitfalls awaiting the unwary and the unlucky. Early in the blacklist period, for instance, even before Trumbo went to jail, George Willner had sold a story for him, the one that eventually was made by Preston Sturges as The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend. Earl Felton had let Trumbo use his name on the story and had offered to deliver the money up to him at the Lazy-T. Trumbo had asked for the money—all twenty-six thousand dollars of it—in cash, and Willner got it for him, put it in an envelope, and handed it over to his son, asking him to deliver it to Earl Felton without telling him what was inside. Willner’s son drove over to Earl Felton’s house late on a Friday afternoon with instructions to hand it over to him. But unknown to them all, Felton had left for the weekend. Not finding him at home, and thinking no more about it, the young man simply left it there in the space between the front door and the screen door. There it stayed until eleven o’clock Monday morning, when Earl Felton returned, opened up the envelope, and found the twenty-six thousand dollars that had been lying out in the open all the time he was gone.

On another similar occasion, Christopher Trumbo, then in high school, was sent to Ben Bogeaus to pick up payment from him. In this case, Bogeaus opened up the envelope and showed the ten thousand dollars in big bills inside to Chris, who had come prepared. A friend had come along to “ride shotgun” on the trip back. Chris drove home very slowly, determined not to have an accident while carrying that kind of money.

Television proved a salvation for many blacklisted writers. It was a new medium, ravenous for material but unable then to pay enough to attract top Hollywood writing talent. It was a field left comparatively open; all a talented blacklisted writer needed to work the black market in television was another writer willing to front for him, or a producer eager enough for material to play along in the complicated arrangements necessary for payoff. In West Coast television, the blacklist pressure was not quite so severe as in the East. The organizations that enforced the television blacklist—Aware, Inc., and the newsletter Red Channels—were located in New York City, where they put the squeeze directly on the networks through advertising agencies and corporations.

Even with all this, Dalton Trumbo did little in television himself, and that little proved to be almost too much. An independent producer he knew named Dink Templeton was interested in getting started in the medium and asked Trumbo to write a pilot for him. Trumbo agreed and signed to do it before he had a firm idea of just what the proposed series, Citizen Soldier, was to deal with. He discovered then, too late to back out, that the subject was military intelligence in the Cold War and its hero was an intrepid 007 stationed in Germany. He was appalled at that, then downright frightened to find out that Templeton had been given classified documents by the army and the Department of State to use as background material for the series. “I read the necessary documents in a state of shuddering panic,” Trumbo remembered, “gave them back to Mr. Templeton and insisted that he never bring them under my roof again, did the assignment as quickly as possible, and, happily, have heard nothing of it since. One slip and I dare say I’d have been arrested as a spy.”

Amazingly enough, he even managed to do some writing intended for the theater during this period. It continued to interest him. The Biggest Thief in Town may not have been a success, but on the other hand, it had not been a total failure. The English production had rescued the enterprise and restored his confidence in himself as a playwright. Moreover, there was life in the old show yet. It turned out that Peter Cotes, his English producer, was a half-brother of John and Roy Boulting, the English film producers. The Boultings took an interest in the play and optioned it for movie production in 1955. In fact no film adaptation was ever done, but it did give Trumbo a little money and reason to take heart.

Writing for the theater would have tempted him in any case, for it was the only medium during that entire bleak period that resisted the pressure of the Committee. The blacklist remained relatively ineffective there: even actors unable to work in films and television found employment on the stage—though not always on Broadway. He had made it once to Broadway and believed he would again with something called Morgana, a kind of farce treatment of the Strange Interlude theme that just never came right for him. He was eventually offered a production on the play in 1962 but declined because he himself was dissatisfied with it. And as he tinkered with Morgana, he corresponded fitfully with his friend E. Y. Harburg, back in New York, over a plan to do Orpheus as a musical, an idea that seemed a natural but never really worked as a project. All in all, Trumbo’s playwriting activities during this period were less remarkable in themselves than in the fact that they were undertaken at all. Perhaps, perversely, he could only have tried at all when under extreme financial pressures and while at work on as many as eight movie jobs at once.

As any writer will, he assured himself for quite some time that he had deserted none of these projects, simply postponed them. In a way, the death of his literary agent, Elsie McKeogh, on October 29, 1955, must have made it terribly difficult for him to continue with the work he considered his “serious writing.” Through the years he had come to depend on her as his artistic conscience (an unusual role for an agent), the voice of the New York literary world, who from time to time urged him ever so gently to get back to work on his novel. He welcomed her urgings, and came to depend on them, so much that he eventually accepted the invitation of another agent, Jacques Chambrun, to represent him in New York, even though he had little prospect of completing the war novel, which he was then calling Babylon Descendant; he must have half-hoped Chambrun would nag him into finishing the job. But Jacques Chambrun was not Elsie McKeogh; eventually, the association inevitably withered.

During this period, against all apparent reason, Trumbo once more became politically involved. A more careful man would have maintained a low profile; Trumbo became so incensed at the conviction of fourteen officials of the California Communist Party under the Smith Act (the Alien Registration Act of 1940) that he threw himself headlong into their defense and wrote a pamphlet, “The Devil in the Book,” attacking the decision. A more cautious man would have avoided his old associations at all cost; Trumbo rejoined the Communist Party briefly as a protest against its persecution and as a gesture of solidarity with his old comrades. “I could see no hope for the Communists,” he said, “no hope at all, no future. But I… just felt that I wanted to join and get back in, in a sense, to clean up the mess and help me find a way to put a period to that part of my life.”

Dorothy Healy had been a Communist most of her life when I met with her. She had recently felt the curb of Party discipline when remarks of hers made over the Los Angeles Pacifica station, KPFK, having to do with the harshness of Soviet policy in Czechoslovakia, brought her up before the Party leadership. Whatever her personal position, she had now made a break with the Party over the question of censorship and discipline. She was in that sense, then, still a Communist, though one without a Party.

She lived her religion. There was nothing of the near-bourgeois Party functionary about her and even less of the drawing room Communist. She owned a house, a small one in which she and her college-age son lived, the only whites in a black neighborhood not far from the area around 55th Street where Trumbo lived first in Los Angeles. Physically, she was a small, attractive woman, more conventionally pretty than I would have expected. She had been a Communist since she was fourteen and joined the Young Communist League. She stayed in, too, working in the labor movement through the CIO. And that was in the thirties. “That’s where my background is,” she says. “It was an enormously important period. No one who lived through it was unmoved by it. The toughness of it, the sharpness of the struggle, the clarity of the issues—this was what shaped my whole generation.”

It was not yet two months since her very public departure from the Communist Party of Los Angeles County, of which she was once chairman. Newspaper articles had been written, television commentaries made, and by now she had had it up to here with interviewers. That was why she was reluctant when I called and asked to talk to her. I explained that it was specifically about Dalton Trumbo I wanted to speak and she said that in that case she’d think it over. Afterward, when I had called back and we had made our appointment, she explained that her son had insisted she see me since it was about Trumbo. “Trumbo is typical of those who are able to be responsive to the new and can communicate with the young. My own son is critical of me because he feels I haven’t done things quite as I should. In a way, Trumbo belongs to my son’s generation. He is theirs. When my son heard what this was about, he said, ‘This is one interview you must do!’”

So here we are. I have just settled in, and the subject is Dalton Trumbo. “I don’t know,” says Dorothy Healy, “when I think about him, well, he and the period [when] we worked so closely together are so intertwined that just mentioning him brings it all back together again. He is a very special person in my memory because of the fifties. They were hard times for me, for us all. Others weren’t there, but he was. He was always available to help. There was nothing he wouldn’t do in a public fight. Which included his writing, of course, which was just unique. That pamphlet he did really helped materially in what was the first defeat of the Smith Act. And all this was done by him at a point of such enormous pressure in his own life.”

“When did you first meet him?” I ask.

“Oh, that would have been 1946. I first remember him from then. As a matter of fact, I remember the first time I was at his home in Beverly Hills. A bunch of us rode out there on the bus, and we had a walk of about a block. We were looking at these houses and trying to imagine what they were like inside and what Trumbo’s would be like. And we were jesting among ourselves about how ineffective as fighters against the status quo any of these people who lived out here would be.

“That’s a lesson I’ve learned, you see. If there is integrity and an informed consciousness, then the superficial trappings a person surrounds himself with don’t matter. You don’t have to sacrifice the trappings to live the kind of life that matters. You know, there was an important lesson for us to learn from the way that those attacks came first on the cultural figures on the left—on the Hollywood Ten and all the rest who were blacklisted. The question we had to ask ourselves was Why? Why did the reactionaries go after these people first? Actually, I think they showed more perspicacity than we in the Party did about the importance of culture in the struggle. I am not a devotee of the conspiracy theory of history, but I do think that some planning went into this—the idea was to get the cultural leaders first and then the rest could be whipped into line. In their own way, in a significant way, the writers and artists represented a threat to those who were then setting about to enforce Nixonian standards on the rest of the country. Now, twenty-odd years later, we see the result of that campaign in Watergate. What we had said in the forties was going to happen, actually happened in the seventies. We tried to tell them, ‘It’s not us Communists or radicals that they’re after—it’s you.’ And it was. It was you, the rest of the country.

“The way they talk, the way they act, the reactionaries try to convey that they represent the American tradition. Well, they don’t—not all of it by a long shot. Actually there are two American traditions that have existed side by side for as long as this country has been here. There has been the democratic tradition and the Tory or reactionary tradition right from the beginning. I think it’s terribly important not to allow them the ownership of the American tradition. The young people see this, and they have such disdain for the way the American tradition has been used that they say, ‘The hell with it.’ They shouldn’t. The American tradition belongs to us, to them, too. But always those in the democratic tradition seem to be on the defensive. The abolitionists had to keep their identities secret, too—just as we sometimes have had to.”

“Has such secrecy really been necessary?” I ask her. “A lot of people have been put off by it. I’m sure you know the argument. They take silence as an admission of some sort of guilt.”

“Well, there’s been a lot of pressure on everybody for a long time—the Un-American Activities Committee, the Smith Act, the McCarran Act. And all through this period I have been publicly known as a Communist, made no attempt to hide it whatever. And there’s no doubt in my mind that my life has been easier for this because they couldn’t do anything to me. They couldn’t take anything away from me. And I think those who had a great deal to lose—their jobs, of course—were quite justified in keeping their associations secret. Besides, many wanted to say, ‘Yeah, I am a this, a that, or a whatever,’ but there was always the concern that they would be forced to talk about others. Once they had opened the door to that one question, they had validated the right of the investigators to ask any question on anything or anybody. And in fact, the government has no right to ask these questions—about you or anyone else. It was kind of a ridiculous exercise, anyway, because when they started asking you questions, you knew that the FBI knew who everybody was and what they belonged to, anyway. That was simply the way it was.

“I don’t know, though. I do think in retrospect that it would have been better for—what? morale or solidarity, I guess—if individuals who had been put on the spot had identified themselves politically. Maybe they should have. Trumbo, of course, did identify himself at a very crucial time when he dove into that Smith Act fight. That marked him. With that he said publicly what his politics were. And I couldn’t help but admire him for it then, and I still do now.”

Oscar night, 1957. Deborah Kerr takes the card from the opened envelope and announces in a loud, clear voice that the winner “for the Best Motion Picture Story is… Robert Rich!”

The sacred moment. Applause! Jesse Lasky, Jr., Cecil B. DeMille’s favorite screenwriter and then the vice president of the Screen Writers Guild, jumps up and bustles down the aisle to the stage. He accepts the award on behalf of Rich, whom he refers to as “my good friend,” because Rich was at his wife’s bedside, and she was about to give birth to their first baby. More applause, and he strides off the stage, statuette in hand.

Lasky later admitted in his account of the episode in his book Whatever Happened to Hollywood? that he really had no idea who Robert Rich was. But the name sounded familiar, and it seemed to him that an officer of the Guild really ought to know the members, so… Lasky’s good friend he was. And as far as Rich being at his wife’s bedside, that was what Lasky had been told. It all seemed quite routine to him at the time.

The next day, however, when they had had the chance to check the Guild files, it was found that there was no Robert Rich listed in them. He was not a member and never had been. Nobody really had any idea who he was or how he could be reached, not even the King brothers, who had produced The Brave One, the film for which Robert Rich had just won the Academy Award. Had he really been at a hospital waiting for his wife to give birth? Somebody had called the afternoon of the ceremony and had said so. Just on the outside chance they might locate him that way, they put a team to work telephoning the obstetrics wards of every hospital in Los Angeles County to inquire if there was a Mrs. Robert Rich registered. No luck.

It wasn’t long before the news magazines picked up the story and reported this rather sticky situation. Then they did a follow-up when rumors began to fly around Hollywood that Robert Rich was really just a pseudonym used by Dalton Trumbo. And Trumbo? Well, he denied nothing: “It was that Robert Rich thing that gave me the key. You see, all the press came to me, and I dealt with them in such a way that they knew bloody well I had written it. But I would suggest that maybe it was Mike Wilson, and they would call Mike and ask him, and he would say no, it wasn’t him. And they would come back to me, and I’d suggest they try somebody else—another blacklisted writer like myself who was working on the black market. I had a whole list of them because we kept in close touch. It went on and on and on. I just wanted the press to understand what an extensive thing this movie black market was. And in the midst of this, I suddenly realized that all the journalists—or most of them—were sympathetic to me, and how eager they were to have the blacklist exploded. There had been a certain change in atmosphere, and then it became possible.”

By the time of the “Robert Rich Affair,” as it eventually came to be known in the news magazines, the black market in screenplays was not just a thriving enterprise, it was also an open secret in the movie industry whose very existence made a joke of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and of the blacklist enforced by the Committee’s Hollywood supporters. Trumbo was not the first blacklisted writer to have won the Academy Award. That honor went to Michael Wilson, who was awarded an Oscar the year that he was blacklisted (1951) for A Place in the Sun, written, produced, and released before he was named in testimony before the Committee. As a direct result of that, the Producers Association* ruled that no blacklisted writer was to receive screen credit—even for work done earlier. And so when Wilson’s pre-blacklist script for Friendly Persuasion was produced a few years later, his name was simply excised from the credits; no writer’s name at all appeared on the screen. Then, when the film won the Writers Guild Award and it looked as though Friendly Persuasion was a shoo-in for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, credited or uncredited, the Motion Picture Academy ruled that under no circumstances could a blacklisted writer be awarded an Oscar. The Academy had, however, overlooked the possibility of a writer winning under a pseudonym; and Trumbo was the first to do that with The Brave One.

The Robert Rich award thus marked the beginning of the end of the blacklist. The next year the French novelist Pierre Boulle won the Academy Award for the marvelous job he had done adapting his own novel The Bridge on the River Kwai for the screen. Among insiders the award provoked knowing looks and wry smiles, for the truth was that Boulle hardly spoke, much less wrote, English (and, incidentally, did not “write” for films before or after). The script was actually the work of two blacklisted writers: Carl Foreman and, again, Michael Wilson. A year after that, the award for Best Story and Screenplay went to the team of Nathan E. Douglas and Harold Jacob Smith for The Defiant Ones. And while, true enough, there really was a Harold Jacob Smith—it turned out that Nathan E. Douglas was the blacklisted actor-turned-writer Nedrick Young.

In the meantime, Dalton Trumbo had begun a coordinated and deliberate personal campaign in the media against the blacklist. It was a crusade, a vendetta. It became almost an obsession with the man. As a result of that first round of statements to the press and interviews with local Los Angeles television reporters, he had not only made the public aware of the existence of the black market but had also managed to cast doubt on the authenticity of practically every screenplay produced in Hollywood. Producer-writer Jerry Wald, always outspoken, was so incensed at this tactic of Trumbo’s that he himself complained to the press that “by innuendo Dalton Trumbo has been insulting the whole Screen Writers Guild.… In essence, he’s been saying to the public, ‘No matter who you vote for [for the Oscar], I’m writing the scripts.’ Trumbo… has done a tremendous injustice to the screenwriters of Hollywood.” Putting it mildly, this did not distress Trumbo greatly, for he felt that he and every other blacklisted writer in Hollywood had been betrayed by the Guild.

He continued on the attack, writing his own account of the so-called Robert Rich Affair and attendant details of the movie black market for the Nation (“Blacklist Black Market”). Trumbo’s old friend from postwar liberal campaigns in California, Carey McWilliams, was now the editor there. McWilliams welcomed him as a contributor and kept him busy for some years more. “Mencken was his master,” Carey McWilliams recalled. “He had a fierce style and could have been an important social critic if he had kept at it. When Trumbo broke the blacklist we lost a first-rate commentator on the American scene. Too bad, but of course I’m not complaining.”

He was then invited to New York to appear on the John Wingate Night Beat show on September 19, 1957. Wingate, a sort of lesser Mike Wallace, had earned a reputation for himself as a mercilessly tough television interviewer whose staff researched his victims in such detail that they were utterly powerless before him. Well, Trumbo took the trouble to research Wingate and, in a modest sort of way, turned the tables on him. It should not be surprising, after all, that he was able to hold his own in an exercise as fundamentally like formal debate as adversary interview. He had had a lot of experience in that line, and unlike most of those who appeared on the show, Trumbo had long before thought out his position on every point Wingate questioned. It gave him an advantage that few enjoyed, and Variety, the only major publication to review the performance, declared that Trumbo had won in a walk.

He became a kind of media consultant to others who had, because of the blacklist, been thrust into the public eye—to the King brothers, for instance, who later, in 1959, were forced to concede that what had been bruited was true: Dalton Trumbo was indeed Robert Rich, the author of The Brave One. Because they had, for far too long, remained resolutely vague on the identity of Rich, they had been hit by a number of lawsuits which alleged that this yahoo or that was the real Robert Rich. To answer them, Frank King appeared on KABC television, interviewed by reporter Lou Irwin, while at the same time Trumbo was confirming the story elsewhere. King, who had been coached in his responses by Dalton Trumbo, acquitted himself admirably, disposing of the facts of the case in short order. He was then brought up short by the question—fair enough in context—“Did you ever ask Trumbo whether he was a Communist?” Frank King replied:

Of course not. I’m not interested in his politics or his religion or his color. I was interested in his work. It was good work. It was the story of a little Catholic boy and his pet. Is there anything Communistic in that? I’ll show you reviews from practically every country in the world that proves exactly the opposite. What this business needs is better writers and fewer politicians.

King excused his earlier statements regarding Robert Rich as “what Wendell Willkie said of his campaign speeches that weren’t exactly accurate. He said that was just ‘campaign oratory.’” And the producer concluded the television interview by affirming, “I’ll continue to buy the best material I can get regardless of a man’s politics. I’m not hiring their politics, I’m hiring their writing talent.”

So there it was, a year before the blacklist was actually broken, a declaration of defiance from an independent Hollywood producer in good standing in the industry. Cracks were thus appearing in the rampart with routine regularity. But Trumbo kept pounding away at it, determined to breach it at any price. He sent word out to his contacts among producers who were dealing on the black market that he would be willing to do a screenplay without any sort of financial payment at all—literally for nothing—if they would publicly announce him as their writer and put his name up on the screen. In simple dollars and cents, this was quite an offer he was making, for he promised his best work, and by that time—1958—he was getting up to seventy-five thousand dollars a picture, even on the black market. As it happened, he had no takers, but the offer stood until he had later accomplished just what he had intended without resorting to measures so drastic and so alien to his nature.

And finally, early in 1959, he kept the kettle bubbling with his announcement, complete with television interviews, of the founding of Robert Rich Productions, Inc. Adrian Scott was president of the new company, and Anne Revere, the blacklisted actress, was named as secretary-treasurer. Trumbo, who named himself as vice president, was chief spokesman. Although the name, Robert Rich Productions, was undoubtedly chosen as a kind of red flag to the Committee and to the entire motion picture industry, the founding of the company was certainly not just a publicity stunt to show blacklistees fighting back. By this time, after all, the climate was changing. They had every expectation of taking the two story projects they had initiated right through into production. And so they incorporated and made ready to do business. However, though they might not have intended it so, the end of the blacklist brought an end to Robert Rich Productions as well. Scott went off to England to work, and Trumbo found himself even more in demand than when on the black market. Anne Revere, one of the finest actresses in American films during the forties, never made a comeback in the sixties.

But these episodes I have been recounting were merely the more spectacular moments in a sustained, one-man media blitz which demonstrated a kind of natural genius on Trumbo’s part for handling the press. If he had not been a screenwriter he could have made a fortune as a public relations man, or might have made his mark in history as a presidential press secretary. He made himself available always to members of the press. Even to newspaper articles and television features in which he did not figure directly he contributed information tips, sometimes the news pegs on which the pieces were hung: he worked behind the scenes as well as in front of the cameras. And he was responsive to the problems of reporters; he did not simply work them for what he could get out of them. The two Los Angeles television newsmen with whom he worked most often and most closely were Bill Stout of KNXT and Lou Irwin of KABC. He realized the two were in competition, but he also knew that he owed a debt to them both for the coverage they had given his cause. When Trumbo himself conceded that he was Robert Rich in a filmed interview with Stout in January 1959, he knew that this would put Irwin at an awful disadvantage. And so, having explained the situation to Stout, he arranged for the same story to be given to Irwin on KABC by Frank King, producer of The Brave One (this was the context of the King interview quoted earlier).

All in all, as a media manipulator, he proved more than a match for the Producers Association and the Motion Picture Academy, against whose members he was most often pitted. He wisely avoided direct confrontation with them, trying to make retreat as attractive as possible from the pro-blacklist position they had held for years. At the time of the Robert Rich revelations, when The Defiant Ones debacle was bubbling on the back burner ready to come to full boil at Oscar time, director George Stevens, who was then president of the Motion Picture Academy, issued a statement directed against Trumbo personally, and beyond him at other writers who were working on the black market. At Trumbo’s urging, producer George Seaton prevailed upon Stevens and persuaded him to withdraw the statement, which appeared only in the early edition of the Los Angeles Times. Trumbo recognized in Seaton a reasonable man, and so he wrote to him then asking that Stevens be persuaded not to make any more such statements in print or on the air, for if he did, Trumbo would be forced to answer him directly, and “there must be no showdown in the press between George Stevens and me.” He went on to explain in this letter, the tone of which is quite conciliatory, “[Stevens] should also be made to understand that I am no longer in a position where men can throw mud at me with impunity—particularly men toward whom I feel no ill will and whom I have never injured in any way. The working press are on my side, not only the wire services, but local and New York staffs, and TV commentators as well.”

He was dealing from a position of strength, and he knew it.

When a television camera crew unpacked and began to set up in a neighborhood like the one the Trumbos were living in on Annan Trail in Highland Park, it drew attention of the wrong sort from blocks around. And in places like that, when your name appeared in the newspaper identified (however tenuously) with the Communist Party, then you could expect trouble. Well, the whole family found trouble, all right, though not all of it of the sharp, violent sort that left Trumbo bleeding with blackened eyes and broken glasses in his driveway. There was really only one such incident. But the other members of the family—Cleo, Mitzi, Chris, and Nikola—were systematically snubbed and subjected to petty indignities through most of the years they lived there.

For a while, when Cleo went to PTA meetings, she sat by herself. Nobody would sit down beside her, and people would move away when she took a place too close. At the height of their difficulties, the principal of the grade school her daughter Mitzi attended refused even to speak to Cleo. All this was during and following a rather grim episode that centered on Trumbo but directly involved both Cleo and Mitzi as well. “Mitzi had such a hard time as a kid in that school,” said Cleo, “because she didn’t know, really, what was wrong. She assumed, as kids will, that if there was trouble, then she must have been to blame. We didn’t know how much trouble she was having, though, until the PTA business.”

That all began with trouble in the school-sponsored Campfire Girls troop. Mitzi had been a member of the younger Bluebirds, and Cleo had performed the usual chores of chauffeuring girls around and playing hostess for her daughter at meetings—all this before her husband became suddenly prominent in the news. About the time he did, Mitzi was up to join the Campfire Girls. Some of the mothers questioned whether Cleo, because of her husband’s political background, was fit to play the same role with the Campfire Girls that she had been playing with the Bluebirds: perhaps she would defend the purge trials or extol the new Five Year Plan as she baked brownies with the girls. An angry letter from Trumbo over Cleo’s signature, in which he threatened legal action, put an end to the overt opposition. However, much hostility remained, and it was made suddenly and unmistakably manifest during the rehearsal of a Campfire Girls program for presentation at a PTA meeting. Cleo was flagrantly snubbed by all, including the principal, in front of her ten-year-old daughter. Afterward, it developed in conversations with Mitzi that the girl had been receiving just such treatment herself at school and at the Campfire Girls meetings. For three months the child had been given the silent treatment by her classmates, only yelled at occasionally in ridicule. None of her friends had stuck by her during this ordeal, and she was called a “traitor” by the rest. Upon hearing this, the Trumbos realized that Mitzi had been “sick” a great deal of the time lately, just not quite up to going to school one or two days each week; suddenly they understood why. Now Mitzi declared miserably that she never wanted to go back to Highland Park School again. Well, with the aid of the sympathetic school nurse and Trumbo’s friend and former attorney, Robert Kenny, it was arranged that she would not have to. The nurse recommended that Mitzi stay home during the two weeks remaining in the school term, and Kenny quietly arranged a transfer to nearby Eagle Rock School. She had little trouble of any sort there.

Christopher Trumbo was a bit wary right from the start. His experiences in Mexico City had taught him to be careful in choosing his friends there at Franklin High School in Highland Park. “I was an outsider,” he remembered. “They knew what my father did, though not really who he was in the beginning, so I tended not to make friends where that might be a problem. I had only two close friends in high school. Not that I had such an abnormal time there. What I did mostly in high school was play trumpet at dances and stuff.”

He was college-bound, if his father had any say in the matter—and Trumbo did, eloquently and at great length in a letter to the director of admissions for Williams College, which was Chris’s first choice. In the end, however, Chris chose Columbia because when taken to lunch by a Los Angeles businessman who was an alumnus of Williams, he had been assured that he would like Williams since there weren’t a lot of Jews there. Unwittingly, the man had touched upon the one issue that moved the boy profoundly in high school. Chris’s two friends were Jews. Through them and because of them, he had even managed to join AZA, B’nai B’rith’s boys’ organization. Once, with his friends from AZA, Chris had gone to hear a lecture by Gerald K. Smith, to protest his appearance at Hollywood High. It gave him his first opportunity to hear how a real anti-Semite sounded. He came back visibly shaken, almost unable to believe he had heard what he had heard—and from the stage of Hollywood High School’s auditorium!

Columbia (which he entered in 1958) was, in many ways, a relief to him. Even though he did not distinguish himself as a student, he got on well there. “I remember about 1961 there,” says Chris, “people would come up to me and say, ‘Are you related to Dalton Trumbo?’ Only it was different than it was at Highland Park High. They meant good things by that, instead of, ‘Are you related to that Commie rat?’ I don’t know, though, growing up the way I did does give you a different perspective on life. If you’re on the outside instead of the inside, then that’s the way you stay, basically, your whole life. That’s not necessarily bad, though. If there were no blacklist I might have grown up a perfect Hollywood brat.”

Nikola, the oldest of the Trumbo children, had troubles of one kind or another on the way to the University of Colorado. She finished high school in Highland Park a couple of years before her father was thrust into the limelight. She wasn’t likely, however, to have permitted herself to be intimidated by her classmates. As early as 1955, Nikola’s senior year in high school, she was so deeply involved in causes that her grades suffered. Trumbo wrote of her to Ian and Alice Hunter, “She is so far left that she terrifies me and occasionally reprimands me for backward habits.” Between high school and college she put in a year in Europe, most of it with the Michael Wilsons. After a couple of years at Los Angeles City College, during which she buckled down admirably, Nikola transferred to Colorado. Trumbo’s only visits back to the state came during her time at Boulder.

Cleo: “We’re a tight-knit family, all right. Yes, I guess you could say we’re very close. He’s always worked at home and he’s always wanted to know what was going on—more, I think, than most fathers, even when he was younger.

“Have we triumphed over the blacklist? We, as a family? Not completely. The reticence, socially—that stays with us. We keep to ourselves a great deal. Nikki seems to be reaching out more—but she’s defensive, so I doubt that she ever got over it. The whole period made a mark on us, I’m sure of that. I remember that Chris’s wife, Sherry, had no idea what we were really like as a family until after they were married. Then she saw. She couldn’t understand why he wasn’t out more, why he wasn’t more social, and so on. And of course Chris talked to her about the blacklist period, and how it had affected us as a family, and so she began to understand why we were the way we were—or rather, are.”

A sure sign that the end of the blacklist was near could be seen in the increasing size of Trumbo’s checks. He was dealing more openly with producers and directors and had become involved in some big-budget pictures. Still, there were difficulties, evasions, and silly games to be played—and he was obliged to play them as long as there was a blacklist. Occasionally, even he had to laugh at the results. There was, for example, the work he did on an adaptation of a novel by Richard Powell, entitled The Philadelphian. It was eventually produced as The Young Philadelphians and starred Paul Newman—though not before it had gone through a number of rewrites. That was how Trumbo got involved in the project. Producer Alec March came to him with a version of the script that he was not really happy with and asked if he would be available to do a rewrite. Trumbo was not likely to turn this one down, for it was a major studio production and would be one of the biggest films he had been involved in since his days at M-G-M. There remained, however, the sticky problem of a front man—not just a matter of borrowing a name, in this case, because March needed someone to bring into story conferences with him, nod understandingly, and take notes. They persuaded screenwriter Ben Perry to fill in for Trumbo. He went onto the Warner Bros. payroll at a salary of one thousand dollars a week, showed up each morning for work, and attended every conference with March. What Perry did in his studio office was his own business, for Trumbo was at home writing the script. The arrangement worked quite satisfactorily for all concerned for about twelve weeks, when Alec March was suddenly fired from the picture, and Perry/Trumbo naturally had to go, too. The kicker to the story came, however, a few months later. Because Trumbo had so successfully covered up his tracks on The Philadelphian, he was visited by Paul Newman and the director of the film, which was then just about to go into production. They were unhappy with the script they had and, not knowing he was the one who had written it, told Trumbo they were sure he was the only one who could repair it. He managed to keep a straight face in declining their offer. He told them he had other work to do—which was, by then, true enough.

Eugene Frenke played a major role in the greening of Dalton Trumbo’s bank account. This independent producer took the place for Trumbo of the agent that the writer so badly needed to legitimately offer his illegitimate services, sub rosa, on the movie black market. Frenke simply made Trumbo an employee of his own Springfield Productions; he went out and got work for him, made the deals, and maintained him on a minimum salary in slack times. It was, of course, a very profitable arrangement for Frenke, for some of the original screenplays Trumbo wrote on speculation during those slack times eventually sold for very fancy figures. Two of his best were never produced. Montezuma,* which posed the Aztec king against his captor, Cortés, and explored their curious friendship, was sold to Bryna Productions and Universal Pictures for $150,000. Another, Will Adams, based on the adventures of the sixteenth-century seafarer who was the first Englishman to set foot in Japan, was optioned, reoptioned, sold, and sold again, so that through a succession of deals over a period of a dozen years or more, the screenplay brought $300,000 to Springfield Productions. Trumbo himself considered Montezuma and Will Adams to be among the best he had done.

Bryna Productions, which bought Montezuma with Universal’s backing, was Kirk Douglas’s production company. Toward the end of the blacklist period, Trumbo worked for Bryna on one project after another, a fruitful association for both, which led to the production of Spartacus and reached its artistic culmination in Lonely Are the Brave. Along the way, Trumbo wrote, or at least worked on, a number of other scripts for Bryna pictures which were, both commercially and artistically, less successful than those two, such as The Last Sunset and Town Without Pity. There were a couple of others (besides Montezuma) that were written for Douglas but, for one reason or another, never produced.

The man responsible for Trumbo’s association with the company was not Douglas, but a partner in Bryna, Edward Lewis. “I was struggling to become a producer back then,” Lewis remembers, “and we bought a novel with Douglas in mind, The Brave Cowboy, by Edward Abbey. We just looked around then, and Trumbo was the one and only screenwriter who was right for that novel—what it said, the western background, all of it. It didn’t matter that he was blacklisted. His relationship to the material was what made him right for the project.”

They signed him as “Sam Jackson,” a writer on loan from Frenke’s Springfield Productions. (The pseudonym became a nickname: Kirk Douglas gave Trumbo a watch at the end of Spartacus with an inscription to Sam Jackson; and Trumbo continued to sign his letters to the actor as Sam.) He began work on the screenplay—which ultimately turned out to be one of his best—only to have Lewis ask him to put it aside. Something more urgent had come up. Lewis: “I had optioned Howard Fast’s Spartacus and had made an arrangement with Universal that would make us producers of the picture. There was some steam on the deal because there was a competing project, Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators, covering the same Roman slave rebellion, which Anthony Quinn was preparing for production. We had engaged Howard Fast to do a first-draft script of his own novel. Well, he simply couldn’t work quickly enough to do the job for us. We had to go to an experienced professional, and there was no more experienced professional around than Dalton Trumbo. He was and is the most skillful and the quickest writer in the business.”

Lewis did have some misgivings about bringing Trumbo in on Spartacus; he knew he had long disliked Fast personally and had been deeply annoyed at the novelist’s noisy leavetaking from the Communist Party.* When Lewis mentioned this, however, Trumbo told him he had no objections at all to working on the adaptation of the novel, for if he were to turn down material on the basis of a writer’s politics, then he would be guilty of practice of the sort that had kept him blacklisted for the past twelve years. And so in May 1959, he signed—as Sam Jackson—to do a complete rewrite of the screenplay of Spartacus. The wheels were grinding inexorably now. The chain of events which would lead to the end of the blacklist had begun winding tighter and shorter. It wouldn’t be long now, though not even Trumbo could be sure of that at the time.

The rewrite presented no special problems; Trumbo finished it in fairly short order, altering freely and adding much of his own. The difficulties with Spartacus arose afterward, during production. The director hired by Douglas was Anthony Mann, a good journeyman with an impressive list of recent credits behind him. Mann knew the identity of Sam Jackson and quite reasonably wanted to discuss the script with him in order to clear up a few matters in planning the production. Trumbo had no objection, and when Mann telephoned and asked if he might also bring Peter Ustinov with him to discuss his role in the film, he told them both to come right over. Trumbo assumed that the two had come with the knowledge and permission of Kirk Douglas and Edward Lewis, though as it turned out, they had not. It was a cordial and quite routine meeting. The director and the actor finished up their business in about four hours and left. It might not have mattered at all, except that when shooting began a week later, Douglas and Mann argued violently over the first rushes, and Douglas fired Mann from the picture. Stanley Kubrick, who had similarly quarreled with Marlon Brando over One-Eyed Jacks and had been fired, was immediately hired by Douglas for Spartacus.

Mann, who was miffed at Douglas, began talking quite freely around town about just who Sam Jackson really was. Eventually, even the gossip columnists picked it up. The rest of the cast found out from Ustinov that Trumbo had written the script, and they felt that if Douglas and Ustinov had had access to the writer, then they should, too. And so, first Laurence Olivier and then Charles Laughton arranged to see him. This was the first time that Trumbo’s security precautions had broken down completely. He had always managed to preserve his anonymity before, at least through the production of a picture. With Trumbo so openly discussed as the author of the Spartacus screenplay, there was considerable pressure on Universal either to announce the fact openly, or (as the American Legion urged) to abandon the production altogether. Douglas had hoped from the start to give screen credit to Trumbo but considered it unlikely because of the keen sensitivity of Universal to outside pressures. The giant talent agency, Music Corporation of America, had just bought the studio, and the new management was proceeding very cautiously.

In the midst of all this, with shooting of Spartacus virtually completed, Trumbo was smuggled onto the Universal lot to view the assembled footage in rough cut. He didn’t like what he saw and said so in an eighty-page memo to Lewis and Douglas which he wrote overnight and through the next day and sent to them by messenger the next afternoon. As far as the cast and crew were concerned, the picture was completed. They were toasting the occasion in champagne and exchanging gifts when the memo arrived from Sam Jackson. Douglas retired to his dressing room to read it and came back wearing a glum expression.

“Well,” Stanley Kubrick asked brightly, “how did he like it?”

“He didn’t like it,” Douglas said, waving the sheaf of typescript, “and he’s right!”

His criticisms were detailed and wide-ranging, but they centered on Kubrick’s handling of the aftermath of the picture’s most expensive sequence—its spectacular climax on the battlefield. That, he convinced Douglas, had to be completely reshot—and other scenes, as well. Neither Douglas, Kubrick (in particular), nor any of the rest of those involved in the production were very pleased at the prospect. But Trumbo was persuasive; he prevailed.

Meanwhile, he returned to the western he was writing for Douglas, The Last Sunset, which the actor was to go into after Spartacus. That one, which pops up now and again on the late-late show, seems uncharacteristically haphazard in conception and execution, as though it were thrown together all at once—which, in fact, it was. It didn’t get the rewriting that it deserved because by that time Trumbo was involved in another important project. Or, as Kirk Douglas told the story: “It was a curious morality those guys on the blacklist developed. We were pushing him on this project [The Last Sunset], and Trumbo turned to me and said, ‘Look, you know while I was doing Spartacus I was screwing Otto Preminger. Now it’s your turn to get screwed.’ You had to admire him and take that from him because he was so direct. There was absolutely no bullshit from him.”

Screwing Otto Preminger? Perhaps. But there was a legion of sadder, wiser men who would tell you that was not easily done—and Dalton Trumbo did not happen to be one of their number. The director and the writer were on very cordial terms. What these two, whose personal styles were so different, seemed to have most in common was their feeling for their work. For both, it seemed to be the driving force in their lives.

Trumbo and Preminger had earlier been involved in two projects, and as Kirk Douglas had it, it was at about the same time that Trumbo was working on Spartacus. They were adaptations of two novels—Pierre Boulle’s The Other Side of the Coin and Ugo Pirro’s The Camp Followers. And as for Trumbo giving his best to Preminger, The Other Side of the Coin, at least, was shelved because of the guerrilla situation in Malaysia, where it was to be shot. He thought enough of the script that he later tried to buy it back with an eye toward reselling it, or making it himself.

By that time, Preminger was living in New York. The two, who had never met during the studio years in Hollywood, were brought together by Otto’s brother, Ingo Preminger, who after the blacklist became Trumbo’s agent. The director thought a good deal of Trumbo’s work, especially of his now-renowned ability to work quickly under pressure. And so, quite naturally, it was Trumbo to whom he turned when he found himself in a very difficult situation with regard to his upcoming production of Exodus. It was the beginning of December 1959. Contracts with the actors had been signed, and the film was set to begin production in April. The trouble was, of course, that Preminger simply didn’t have a usable—shootable—script. It had been through a number of drafts by two different writers: the first was the writer of the novel, Leon Uris; the second was another blacklisted writer, Albert Maltz, who had engaged in vast historical researches of his own and had finally delivered a screenplay of some 400 pages in length (the average script then ran no more than 150 or 160 pages). This, then, was his predicament when he telephoned Trumbo from New York and told him to get a copy of the novel from his brother, Ingo, and read it that night (it is a book of over a thousand pages in length); he would be in Los Angeles the next day and Trumbo would then begin the job of adaptation.

The fundamental mistake made by the two previous writers was that they had both tried to adapt the whole novel to the screen, that is, to go back to Old Testament times and follow the Jews through the centuries of the Diaspora and the horror of the Holocaust, and then bring them back at last to Palestine for the climax in the creation of the modern state of Israel. In the novel, this epic approach worked, within Uris’s limitations as a writer, well enough. However, to try to translate it directly to the screen would have been to show a profound misunderstanding of the uses to which the medium could be put. Trumbo realized this, and he was not about to make that mistake himself. When Otto Preminger arrived the next afternoon, Trumbo actually had read the novel. He sat him down in his study and told him that it was impossible to do the novel as it was written—there were far too many stories in it. He asked him which one he wanted to tell in the picture. And when Preminger said, as he had anticipated he would, that of course he wanted to show the birth of Israel, Trumbo said, “Fine. Let’s get to it.”

They worked intensively and in close cooperation on the script. Preminger would arrive each morning at Trumbo’s house in Highland Park at seven o’clock. The two would go over the pages that Trumbo had completed and handed over to Preminger the night before. Then they would discuss the scenes he would write that day. Preminger would leave, and Trumbo would get to work, first rewriting last night’s work according to Preminger’s suggestions, then writing the new material for the director to take away with him that night. They would get together at the dinner hour, have a martini together, and Preminger would leave with that day’s pages. The process was repeated day after day for more than thirty days. They worked through Christmas and New Year’s Day, 1960, Trumbo taking an hour off on Christmas morning to open gifts with his family. Preminger was present and waiting, a Teutonic Scrooge. When they had finished, the two adjourned immediately to the study and continued on schedule. But the pace paid off. When Preminger left Los Angeles for New York in the middle of January he had the completed screenplay of Exodus under his arm.

As the script began to work into shape and the task that had once loomed so large before them now began to seem at least possible, Otto Preminger permitted himself to joke a little. He began to tell Trumbo that if the picture came out badly he would make sure Trumbo got the blame. With that between them, the call that came from New York on January 19 was not a complete surprise. It was Preminger. “Your name is on the front page of the New York Times tonight,” he said. “I’ve announced you as the writer of Exodus.”

“How did it happen? That’s easy. I went to lunch with Arthur Krim of United Artists at the St. Regis when I came back with the script, and I said it was absolutely a crime what was done to these men. They had served time, and if that was what they wanted from them, then that was what they had given. They should be permitted to earn their living in an open way. He agreed, and so I made the announcement.

“Now, I personally was never told about any blacklist. But there was, of course, a silent agreement never to use writers implicated in the Joe McCarthy witch hunt. Some exploited these men, but I always paid Dalton a decent salary. There was no discussion of him receiving a credit on this script or the others he did for me until I made the announcement to the Times.”

Otto Preminger punctuated his pronouncements with a nod. His manner, notoriously punctilious and autocratic, made him an ideal subject for interview. He spoke directly and to the point, and when he had finished, he let you know with that little nod of his head that he was ready for the next question.

It is a Saturday morning in the fall, and I am sitting in his living room. An air of quiet hangs over the place—not so much a pall of silence as a kind of insulated stillness. A dim, subliminal awareness persists that there must be some noise out there in Manhattan, even on this quiet street in the East Sixties on which his townhouse faces, but it is clear that disturbances of any sort will not—cannot—penetrate the elegance of this large, simple room in brown. Preminger seems as much at ease sitting at his desk here as he would be anywhere, neither more nor less. A contained, direct, and forceful man, he is the sort who could defy any pressure group and simply do what he chose to do.

“There were threats of actions. Yes, of course. Threats of all kinds, but in the end, there were only a few picket lines in Boston, and a few other places. Nothing major, however. This famous opposition just wasn’t there when they said it would be. It was an illusion.”

“So the blacklist was maintained for years on an illusion of retaliation?” An interesting point. Preminger was in a position to know.

“Yes,” he says, “and when it disappeared, it opened for Dalton a whole legitimate career. He is very successful, you know.”

It was my turn to nod. Yes, I knew.

“And he deserves it all. I find him personally an enchanting man. He has a sense of humor, and just as with Ben Hecht, he is never pompous or pretentious. He is a man who loves his children. I have seen this in him. He cares very much for his family. This is dull for you, perhaps, but I have never seen bad traits in Trumbo.”

“You mentioned Ben Hecht,” I prompt him. “You seemed to be comparing the two.”

“Yes, I always think of the two of them as very similar talents. Dalton is able to write anything. He has great facility. People might criticize him even for that, but I find it very good. There is only one other writer I have known in my long experience who had a similar facility, and this was, of course, Ben Hecht. I did seven scripts with him. But with both of them, too, I have the feeling that if pictures had not used the talent of these people, then they would have become greater writers. They got used to a higher life style, and they were spoiled for higher ambitions as writers. In pictures, you know, a writer can never be as important as he is in writing novels and plays, and so on. I’m thinking of them in this, what they could have done. On the other hand, we film people should be grateful that such talents will write for us.

“Still, with Dalton, there was his novel, Johnny. He came to me, you know, with the film he made from it. And I liked the film very much. I had some suggestions on editing, but I thought he directed it well. But that novel—well, he’s a very talented writer, and without films and the lure of easy money, he might have written more books like Johnny, you know. He would have had time to go into deeper writing.

“In all this, you see, he is like Ben Hecht. Both of them could have been, should have been, more.”

Whether or not Universal would have permitted Kirk Douglas to give screen credit to Dalton Trumbo for Spartacus without the impetus that Preminger provided is, of course, open to doubt. In any case, he did get acknowledgment for Spartacus, as well as for Exodus. Does Preminger deserve all the credit, then? Was it simply a grand personal gesture on his part that ended the blacklist for Trumbo, and eventually for others as well? Yes and no. For without detracting in the least from the moral courage he showed in the matter, it should also be pointed out that Otto Preminger might never have made the announcement if it had not become common knowledge that Trumbo had written Spartacus, too. It had, after all, been so reported in the gossip columns and in the trades, and there existed the possibility, at least, that Universal would sniff the wind and decide that the time was ripe for such a revelation. If there was a risk of blame attached, there was certainly also praise; Preminger was willing to risk the former to reap the latter. He was, in spite of his authoritarian personal style, solidly liberal in his outlook. He was acting on principle—but in a most circumspect manner. Perhaps Arthur Krim and the management of United Artists deserve more credit in this than they have been given. They, after all, had more to lose and less to gain in the matter than Preminger. And they backed him up all the way.

But they, too, were businessmen, and they must also have engaged in a bit of wind-sniffing. If they did, they knew the wind was blowing in a favorable direction. All this happened, remember, during an election year. And not just any election year, but 1960, a watershed year in American politics. What may have been a calculated risk for all concerned paid off with the nomination and election of John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy himself played a part in the breaking of the blacklist. For both Spartacus and Exodus were picketed in a few cities, and among the most active in the campaign against them was a group who called themselves the Catholic War Veterans. A gesture from him in support of them could well have turned the tide against Trumbo and in effect would have reinstated the blacklist. Instead, John F. Kennedy threw his weight to the other side. The president-elect shortly after his election made a public visit to a Washington, D.C., theater with his brother, soon to be attorney general, where they crossed the picket lines and saw Spartacus. They asked him afterward what he thought of it, and he said simply that he had enjoyed it, that it was a good film. And if anyone doubted it, or wished to argue the point, that mild endorsement put an effective end to resistance from the Catholic War Veterans, or the American Legion, or the Motion Picture Committee for the Preservation of American Ideals, or the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The blacklist had been breached.