CHAPTER THIRTEEN

HEROES AND VILLAINS?

On March 13, 1970, at the time when Trumbo was poised to plunge into the production of Johnny Got His Gun, he was honored by the Writers Guild with its Laurel Award. It is conferred annually on “that member of the Guild who has advanced the literature of the motion picture through the years and who has made outstanding contributions to the profession of the screenwriter.” It proved to be an almost historic occasion, which was as the Guild had intended. The circumstances were such that the Laurel Award that year was extended as a conciliatory gesture—or more, as a symbolic request by the membership for forgiveness from one of the scores of writers whom the Guild had wronged in the blacklist. The Screen Writers Guild did not originate the blacklist but it did cooperate in it willingly and completely; otherwise it could not have been made to work.

Trumbo, of course, was alive to every nuance and vibration of the moment. He came prepared, not just to receive the award, which under the circumstances would have been enough, but also to address the moral issues raised by his presence there that night. Not that he held the membership responsible—more than half there were far too young even to have the facts of the matter firmly in mind. He knew this, of course, and in his short acceptance speech, he addressed them directly:

I presume that over half of our members have no memory of that blacklist because they were children when it began, or not yet born. To them I would say only this: that the blacklist was a time of evil, and that no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides; and almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities in his own person, in his own acts.

When you who are in your forties or younger look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us—right, left, or center—emerged from that long nightmare without sin.

It was not merely a statement appropriate to the occasion. It went well beyond that. Trumbo was eloquent, generous, forgiving. He had, in that instance, been extended the powers of a priest, and as a priest he had granted absolution.

Some, even one quite close to him, felt he had gone beyond the mark. It so happened that the Laurel Award dinner coincided with the thirty-second wedding anniversary of Dalton and Cleo Trumbo. His attorney, Aubrey Finn, and Pauline Finn, both of them longtime friends of the Trumbos, attended the dinner with them. “When he made that speech we all heard it for the first time,” said Finn. “There was no prior notice as to what he was going to say. I remember that in the car afterward, Cleo didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. She felt he had been entirely too generous.”

And others, including some of the original Hollywood Ten, objected to what he had said. Lester Cole, for one: “I didn’t agree with that ‘only victims’ speech of Trumbo’s. It really came as a shock. It was like Ford pardoning Nixon, if you ask me.”

Alvah Bessie: “Well, I thought there were villains and heroes. And it seems to me he used to think so, too. There were villains, all right, and if there were heroes, Trumbo was one of them.”

But of them all, Albert Maltz was the most intransigent and outspoken in his opposition to Trumbo’s Laurel Award speech. Oddly enough, although the two lived only a few blocks from one another and were in reasonably close communication, Maltz did not express himself fully on the matter to Trumbo for well over two years—and then not until he had given a public statement criticizing the speech to Victor Navasky of the New York Times. Navasky was preparing an article on the blacklist which subsequently appeared in the New York Times Magazine. What Maltz said, in part, was this:

There is currently a thesis pronounced first by Dalton Trumbo which declares that everyone during the years of blacklist was equally a victim. This is factual nonsense and represents a bewildering moral position.

To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.…

[Trumbo] did not advance this doctrine in private or public during the years in which he was blacklisted, or at the time he wrote his magnificent pamphlet, “The Time of the Toad.” How he can in the same period republish “The Time of the Toad” and present the doctrine that there were “only victims,” I cannot say—but he does not speak for me or many others. Let it be noted, however, that his ethic of “equal victims” has been ecstatically embraced by all who cooperated with the Committee on Un-American Activities when there were penalties for not doing so.

Navasky, in turn, showed Maltz’s statement to Trumbo and asked him to comment. Trumbo made a very mild statement, refraining even from pointing out that nowhere in his Laurel speech had he said that “everyone… was equally a victim.” He told Navasky that he didn’t want to get into a public dispute with Maltz. But that certainly didn’t prevent the two from getting into a private one. Long before the article appeared in which they were actually quoted, Maltz and Trumbo had entered into a correspondence that grew increasingly angry and more personal in tone with each letter.

Maltz taxed him bitterly for having altered his position, implying (without actually saying so) that Trumbo had sold out to the enemy, and pointing out that at the very least he had handed them a ready justification for their acts of treachery. But Trumbo stood firm: “In a country which, after a reasonable period of punishment returns murderers and rapists to society on the humane theory that it is still possible for them to become decent and valuable citizens, I have no intention of fanning hatred which burned so brightly twenty-five years ago.”

Maltz reiterated angrily at length and in detail that Trumbo had given aid and comfort to the enemy. He insisted that the stand that they had taken before the Committee, as described by Trumbo himself in “The Time of the Toad,” had been taken essentially on constitutional grounds—that they had gone to jail in a bid to save the First Amendment. He was arguing, in effect, that indeed there were heroes and villains during the blacklist: the Ten, who had gone to jail, were the heroes, and the informers were the villains. Trumbo, however, would have none of it:

Our primary aim was to avoid becoming informers. To defend and justify our refusals we used the Constitution as a shield. We needed that shield so we fought for it. Our conduct was not quite as bold, noble, intrepid as it would have been had we voluntarily leaped to defense of the Constitution without regard of the blood we might lose.… It is quite enough that we acquitted ourselves honorably on the right side of a good fight which deserved the admiration it then received and now receives again. But our behavior was not, by definition, heroic.…

If the Ten weren’t heroes, what were they? They were, quite simply, ten men who chose in that particular moment and situation (although not necessarily in all other moments and situations) to behave with honor; and who, in the face of enormous opposition, have had the courage to remain honorable in that aspect of their lives to this day.

About those who did inform, Trumbo was just as emphatic and even more eloquent:

Some sixty of the persons who were commanded to take the test under pain of punishment failed it—i.e., they became informers. There is very little evidence, if any, that they wanted to become informers. There is an abundance of evidence that they did not want to inform; that they did so with great reluctance; that they acted out of fear (not at all unfounded) and under great pressure.…

Motives? There were all kinds of motives: a man, to support a business venture, had hypothecated everything he possessed in anticipation of future income, without which he would have been bankrupted; a man caught in a homosexual act and given the choice of informing or facing exposure and prosecution in a time when it was more disgraceful to be a homosexual than a Communist; a woman who had worked her way from secretary to writer, now three months pregnant, the sole support of herself and a worthless husband, whose brother had a long record of crime and imprisonment; a man who had left the CP to avoid constant attempts to meddle with the ideological content of his writing; a foreign born citizen threatened with revocation of his naturalization papers; a man who left the Party because he could not stomach its insistence that the early phases of World War II offered no choice between Hitler and the West; a person whose spouse suffered from recurrent spells of melancholia which, in such a crisis as political exposure, could have resulted in suicide; a person whose disagreement with the CP had turned to forthright hostility and who, when the crunch came, saw no reason to sacrifice his career in defense of the rights of people he now hated; a resident alien threatened with deportation; a person who had been unjustly treated and testified to get even—and then, of course (since fear rarely brings out the best in any of us), the weak, the cunning, the ambitious and the greedy.

Whatever their faults, those sixty-odd unwilling witnesses were ordinarily decent people put to a test which you and I have declared to be immoral, illegal and impermissible. They failed the test and became informers. Had they not been put to the test, they would not have informed. They were like us, victims of an ordeal that should not be imposed on anybody, and of the Committee which imposed it. As for calling them villains, that cannot be done until the history and definition of villain is rewritten to conform with what you believe it should mean even though it doesn’t.

If they weren’t villains, then what were they? They were people who chose in that particular moment and situation (although not necessarily in all other moments and situations) to abandon honor and become informers. So be it. They have lived with that terrible knowledge of themselves for over two decades, just as—even more terribly—their children have lived in such knowledge of their parents.

The letter from which I have quoted at such length here runs forty-one pages. This, however, did not end the exchange. Each wrote another letter more acrimonious than his last. Finally, Trumbo broke off the correspondence—his last letter is dated February 7, 1973—and headed for Jamaica for the major shooting that remained on Papillon.

I am well aware that my presentation of this exchange of letters—paraphrasing Maltz and quoting Trumbo—gives a considerable advantage to Trumbo. If this seems unfair, well, it is not entirely my fault. After all, if you have read this far, you must know that I think Trumbo was substantially right in the position he took, so there probably would, in the process of selection, have been some favor shown him even if I had been free to quote Maltz as well. But I wasn’t. I asked Albert Maltz for permission to quote selectively from these letters to Trumbo, but he declined, saying that the only way he would consent to that would be for me to print the entire correspondence, both sides, without paraphrasing or abridgment. I told him that might be possible in an appendix to the text of the book. But then it turned out that by the “entire” correspondence, Maltz meant that a final letter should also be included which he had sent to Trumbo after the latter’s departure for Jamaica. Cleo had returned it unopened, and Trumbo had never seen it. When her husband returned from Papillon to have a lung out, she wanted to make damned sure he didn’t see that letter and get embroiled in that controversy with Maltz again. And so when I brought the matter up to her (Maltz insisted that the decision must be hers because he felt the material in that letter of his was so devastating that Trumbo might be physically shaken by it), she told me to forget about it. By that time it seemed best to me, too.

Albert Maltz was a rather testy, fractious individual. After the episode between us, he began sending me letters by registered mail more or less daring me to print the complete correspondence. He clearly wanted to have the last word. He was the sort of man to whom it is of all-consuming importance to have the last word. But so, also, for that matter, was Dalton Trumbo.

That said, it should also be made clear that no matter what my personal experience of Albert Maltz was, I respect him as a writer. He worked on a number of good films during the war at Paramount and Warners—This Gun for Hire, Pride of the Marines, and Destination Tokyo. His last film before the blacklist, a fine one, was The Naked City. He sat out the blacklist in Mexico, and only toward the end of it did he even attempt any work on the movie black market. He did, in any case, make a relatively successful comeback, having picked up screen credits on Two Mules for Sister Sara and Scalawag. He would have had another on The Beguiled, but he was so displeased with what director Don Siegel did with his script on that one that he had his name removed from it (he was, as I said, greatly given to dispute).

He also wrote plays, short stories, and novels; in fact, he said he had a novel under way when I talked to him. His fiction is solid stuff in the old social realist mode—not flashy or terribly exciting but, like the man who wrote it, square, conventional, and obsessed with a high-minded passion to set the world right. Earlier there was a strike novel, The Underground Stream; an impressively imagined view of life in Nazi Germany which was published during the war, The Cross and the Arrow; a kind of latter-day proletarian novel, The Journey of Simon McKeever, which I liked quite well when I read it years ago; and A Long Day in a Short Life, a convincing look at people inside the D.C. jail. A Long Day was written while Maltz was in Mexico, during a period when Trumbo, too, had time to write fiction but could only curse his luck and wish the King brothers would come through with another job for him. Maltz was disciplined; he was precise; he seemed perfectly in control of himself.

“I met Trumbo probably the year after I first came here, in June 1941, I would say, but I knew him only very casually then. In fact, we were never then close friends. As I look back on it, though, there must have been something sufficiently cordial in our relationship a little later on because after Trumbo came back from the Pacific and started his novel, he asked me to read some of it. He certainly wouldn’t have done this to a stranger.

“And later? Well, even after we both got ticketed by the Committee, I didn’t really come to know him much better. After the hearings he went to his ranch and stayed there. There were meetings of the Hollywood Nineteen and the Hollywood Ten and a two-year campaign we waged, but basically he was away during this time, up in the mountains, writing. In Mexico, well, for much of the time we lived in different cities—I was in Cuernavaca at first. During that period I was never at his home for dinner, and vice versa. But afterward, when I moved to Mexico City, we did see one another.”

We are talking in Maltz’s study. It is unmistakably a writer’s room. Maltz sat, as I remember, behind his desk during the hour or more that I was there, fingering the typewriter, touching the keys, signaling his desire to get back to work. Although he lives only blocks from Trumbo and on the same street, the two have not seen each other for a number of years. They have, however, corresponded. It is about that correspondence that we talk most on this afternoon. He tells me about the “missing” letter, the one returned to him unopened by Cleo; but he does not offer to show it to me. And then, in general about the correspondence, he says, “The central issue in the letters is the philosophical one, in the differing fundamental positions we stated, he in his speech and I in my letter to the New York Times. I just wish we could have kept it at that level—or perhaps resume it there. But I suppose it’s out of the question now because he’s ill, and that makes a difference, of course. He’s a very feisty man, you know, a regular fighting cock. It’s that damned cigarette smoking of his that put him in the shape he’s in today. He just couldn’t stop. He used to smoke the things one after the other.”

Maltz picks up a couple of sheets of paper from the desk and begins looking them over. “I started making some notes yesterday when you called, things I thought I ought to cover. Let’s see. I mentioned the Pacific novel already, of course. It was quite interesting, as I recall. I read one or two chapters. I don’t remember its content, but I made some suggestions. But that whole story points to an aspect of Trumbo’s character that I find really disturbing. I remember we were in his study talking about this Pacific novel of his. It was around 1946, and it was in that house on Beverly Drive. He had an enormous board up on a stand, white cardboard, and he explained to me that this Pacific novel was just one of a whole cycle he intended to write. He had a genealogical tree covering them worked out on this chart, showing where each one fitted in and what period and action it covered and all. It was a very ambitious project, but of course he never wrote them. Never wrote any of them.

“Yes, and on another occasion, too. It was in 1962 when I had come back from Mexico. He had had a piece published in the Nation, and it was very good, very incisive, acidly witty. I said to him, ‘Dalton, why don’t you so arrange your life that you write more pieces like this?’ He shrugged and said nothing more about it. There is no question that Trumbo had talent for much greater literary work than the film work that he produced. The reason he never did what he could have done was this obsession of his with making money and living in a grand manner. I never knew what it was that made it necessary for him to have both a house on Beverly Drive and a ranch that he had to build a road to get to. It kept him writing, and writing, and writing, though. Why do writers write, after all? I know all about Balzac’s desire for money, Stendhal’s wish to woo women, and whatever it was that drove Victor Hugo. Flaubert didn’t produce what Hugo did, but what he did write was infinitely more important. So it may be foolish for me to say this about Trumbo, perhaps. He is what he is. He must have some reason for doing what he did, for using his talent the way he did. Though it’s a mystery to me.”

Maltz pauses and shakes his head as though the thought disturbs him, then his eyes drop back down to the notes he had prepared. “Yes, well, let’s see. In 1963 Trumbo spent a year in Rome and wrote a film script for De Laurentiis. I had been asked to read the book by De Laurentiis myself—the siege of some city. The book was actually a piece of crap, and I told this to De Laurentiis. Trumbo thought so, too, but he got two hundred and fifty thousand for doing the job. Recently I had occasion to read the script, and it was a good one. He actually used only a little from the book. But yes, I was there in Rome on work of my own and for about six weeks we had dinner together about once a week. I remember that for the first time Trumbo got interested in travel, and he did it then. It didn’t take him a year to write that script. If he had had a strong bent to write a novel, he could have used it then. Instead he traveled.

“I remember—I don’t know if it was then, though, it must have been earlier—but I remember he once gratuitously made a defense of his film work as compared to novel-writing. He said, ‘When people see my films they will know more about what the United States was like in 1958 than they will find out from any number of histories.’ That would be nice if it were true, but a great many of his pictures have a layer of crap on them.”

With that, Maltz launches into an unexpected critique of Trumbo’s produced films. He goes after them quite aggressively, and yet seems to find serious fault only with Papillon, The Sandpiper, and, surprisingly enough, Lonely Are the Brave. He rambles a bit then, recalling the comradeship of the period in Mexico, how they had all taken joy in each other’s triumphs, how those on the blacklist had been so close. And now, says Maltz, he feels that Trumbo had just wiped out that old feeling of comradeship with his Laurel Award speech.

“I went and talked with him about it later,” says Maltz. “Not from that talk or from the correspondence afterward have I ever truly been able to understand what made him present this ‘only victims’ thesis. I remember that Adrian Scott told me once, ‘Did you know that whenever Dalton travels anywhere he takes the Bible with him?’ I didn’t know that, but I was certainly interested. And I have thought of it with regard to this. Maybe there was some idea of Christian forgiveness at work within him that led him to propound such a thesis. I’ll tell you, though, what caused me to write that statement for Navasky. People feel that Trumbo is speaking for the Hollywood Ten when he says this. I wanted to make sure they didn’t think he was speaking for me.”

He nods, having made the point he wished to, then ducks back to his notes: “There is an aspect of his personality that is not so pleasant—this thing of his sudden outbursts. I saw it myself in 1963 in Rome. It was at a dinner with Harold Smith—he, with Ned Young, was the author of The Defiant Ones. In the middle of an otherwise pleasant dinner Trumbo suddenly opened up with a vitriolic personal attack on Hal Smith. I was dumbfounded. Hal was not only dumbfounded but was white as putty. Not long after that he left.

“A couple of years later I was present during a similar outburst directed against one of his close personal friends. The friend was just devastated, even left town because of it.

“It could be the drinking, I suppose, which at one time was fairly constant when he was not working. But not anymore, of course, not for some time. It was at its worst during the blacklist. The pressure then must have had something to do with it, of course.”

Much—all, probably—that Albert Maltz said about Trumbo was accurate and true. There was a dark side to his nature that moved him to strike out suddenly and often inexplicably at those around him, sometimes at those quite close to him. I would go so far as to say that he was so frequently and profoundly moved to vengeance that the “only victims” speech that he made before the Writers Guild took an act of will that was of, well, heroic proportions. It came, I think, as the result of a great struggle with himself and represented what he himself believed to be the most honorable and moral attitude to take toward the experience of his lifetime—a triumph over that darker side of himself.

Trumbo was a complex man, one whose impulses and attitudes were frequently, perhaps constantly, in conflict. He had a novel under way for years, begun in 1960, set aside, rewritten but never abandoned. It was a curious one for him to write, one that would have been immensely difficult for anyone to do. It is the fictional autobiography of a Nazi, an old comrade from the days of the Freikorps who rises in the Party, serves in an SS Einsatzgruppe, and finishes the war on the staff of Auschwitz. The tone of the novel is most striking, for it is a spiritual autobiography, one that perfectly captures the elevated idealism of the Hermann Hesse generation and contrasts it shockingly with the squalorous reality of their deeds, as recorded in diary entries interspersed through the text. But, reading through more than a hundred pages of it, I was struck that this is more than an impressive act of literary impersonation; it is in some private sense also a kind of spiritual autobiography of Trumbo, a mighty effort to understand not just a Nazi but part of himself as well, and thus to master his own demon.

Many people have remarked that Trumbo should have written more novels; none, I’m sure, wished it more profoundly than he did. Not that he was ashamed of the screenwriting he had done. He loved films, loved working in the medium, and he was surpassingly good at it. Yet in the end, perhaps particularly in the end, as he took stock of what he had done, Trumbo may well have wished that he had a solid pile of books that he could claim as indisputably his. Film is flimsy stuff, essentially of the moment; that is its glory and its shame. He joked about this, always a sign with him that it was something he took seriously. When he sat down with his publisher and signed the contract for his Nazi novel (another earnest of his intention to finish it), he told the editor, “You know, I’ve got ideas for several books, and I’d like to do them all. It’s just that I really feel uncomfortable selling out to you guys like this. I wouldn’t do it, but I need the money so I can go back to Hollywood and write screenplays.” Talking about his earlier novels, including those begun but never finished, he said something to me that may have been a rationalization but made a good deal of sense: “Except for Johnny Got His Gun, those other books had no need to be written. With Johnny there was a need, something that had to be said, and so it was written.” There was, similarly, some necessity behind the Nazi book, though one of quite a different kind, and I thought it would also be written—obviously I hoped so, too.

There is no use pretending that the money Trumbo had made working in motion pictures did not play an important part in the direction his life took. But his attitude toward money was as complex and apparently contradictory as everything else about this man. He liked it, liked what it bought him, liked the life it gave him. He also took pride in the price he commanded in a craft where achievement is both measured and rewarded in great sums. Probably because he knew real poverty in his early life, he suffered few of those pangs of guilt regarding money that are supposed to torture most of the gifted people in Hollywood. Probably because of his early life, too, he had a kind of casualness toward the stuff that bordered on contempt. He spent it, borrowed it, loaned it, even gave it away without much real regard for it. His lawyer, Aubrey Finn, told me that on more than one occasion Trumbo had torn up a contract and returned a small fortune just for the grand pleasure of telling a producer to shove it. The idea, as far as Trumbo was concerned, was always to earn so much money that he could do whatever he wanted with it. In our society, money is freedom—and that is what it always meant to him. If our society were different, then his attitude might also have been different.

For if the facts of Trumbo’s life tell us anything at all about the man, they tell us that he was shaped, as all of us are, for better or for worse, by the conditions of his time and situation. If he was an odd sort of Communist, and he would have been the first to concede that this was so, then he was the sort of Communist that would necessarily emerge from the childhood and youth he spent in Grand Junction and the Davis Perfection Bakery. That is, a peculiarly American sort: materialistic, professionally ambitious, and half-drunk on the romanticism he poured into his motion picture scripts.

I’m not, certainly not, suggesting that some simple social determinism has defined Trumbo precisely. No, what was most remarkable about him was not the extent to which he was shaped by his time, but rather the extraordinary way that he himself—by himself—shaped it. He proved at a time it badly needed proving that what one man does can matter. Even here, he made his point not by giving speeches, circulating petitions, or organizing demonstrations—as he had tried earlier—but by keeping his silence when it counted and working at his craft as best he could.

“Sometimes,” Trumbo said to me once, “I think what a terrible state we’re in when a man can be considered honorable simply because he isn’t a shit.” Earlier, I offered Trumbo as a kind of exemplar—one who so incarnated certain qualities worthy of emulation. But is this then all that Trumbo has to offer? That he wasn’t a sheep? That he wasn’t a shit? No, there is more to be said for the man than that. For even in a time like our own, one practically inured to the power of myth, a life like Trumbo’s takes on something of a fabulous quality. His was a fabulous life—a tale told, an old-fashioned story that illustrates the virtues of hard work, of keeping faith with oneself and one’s ideals, a quintessentially American story that he could, with only a few important details altered, have written himself for the Saturday Evening Post back in the thirties. But no: he didn’t write it; he lived it—improvising it from the days and hours he was given, making it up as he went along. Let him be remembered by that story, and his place is assured.