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  FOREWORD

  THE BOOK AND I

  In the spring of 2008, a Writers’ Guild of America strike was just ending. Pitting all professional TV and movie writers in the United States against the major studios employing us, it had lasted five draining months. Like a lot of my brethren, I emerged with some frustration, some satisfaction, and one actual need—a job. For most of my career, I’ve written and produced TV; of that, mostly one-hour dramas. In fat times, I’m a creator and showrunner; in lean, a consultant or freelancer. These were the latter, and I’d set a wide range of meetings with friends, strangers, and even a few enemies. Pride goeth behind the job search.

  Kevin Kelly Brown is a longtime friend. Cheerful in all weather, a skilled TV producer and a quality hang, we met in my home office to see if we could conjure a TV series I might write for us to produce together. Fun as the get-together was, we both knew it wasn’t going to happen that day.

  As I walked Kevin out, he passed my floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, zeroing in on one.

  “I knew him,” he said, reaching for a book with bold typeface—the original 1977 hardcover edition of Dalton Trumbo.

  “You knew Dalton Trumbo?”

  “No.” He opened the book. “Bruce Cook. Great guy. Died a few years ago.” He fanned the pages of photos. “Who’s Dalton Trumbo?”

  My answer took about fifteen minutes, during which Kevin just listened, occasionally punctuating some of the more dramatic twists in Trumbo’s life and career with “Wait, what?” and “No!” and “Come on!” It goes without saying that when you have a good tale to tell, there’s no better audience than Kevin.

  As I wrapped up my brief Trumbo recounting, Kevin said, “That’s a movie.”

  “What’s a movie?”

  “That. Trumbo. All of it.”

  “What’re you talking about?” I may have been just a hair less patient than usual. My goals that day were stubbornly short term: a check with my name on it, preferably several, definitely soon. What I didn’t want was to get caught up in some “art movie notion.” So I cut Kevin off before he could answer, listing on each finger the reasons this conversation would be ending: “The hero is a Communist—”

  Kevin cut my list off with a surprised, “Wait, he was?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I gave him what my wife calls That Look. According to her, it’s somehow analogous to a knife-throw; I couldn’t say, I’ve never seen it. In any case, That Look convinced Kevin to move past his question.

  “Well, okay, fine but…”

  I continued my finger-tick over him: “The story is about Hollywood. And politics. It’s a period piece, so it’s expensive. With no sex and no violence, so how is this story—which I love, by the way, I’ve read the book ten times, I love the era because I love Hollywood and politics—but how is any of this in any way an actual movie that would actually get made, let alone seen by anyone?”

  I can be a raging dick, which bothers Kevin not a bit, hence our fifteen-year friendship.

  “Because,” he said evenly, “it has an amazing hero, battling huge obstacles, persecuted by powerful enemies, the whole thing really happened… and it’s the rarest of rare things—a true story with a happy ending.”

  I was still and quiet as his words seeped in. “For fuck’s sake,” I said, “we don’t know how to make a movie.”

  Kevin smiled. Because he knew I was right. And he knew we were going to try anyway.

  I stared at the book in his hands. That copy of Dalton Trumbo by Bruce Cook and I had a long history. Considering the years we’d logged together, it was in amazing shape then: jacket still glossy, pages still supple. The only reason Kevin had seen it on my crowded shelf that day was I’d taken it down to reread a section the night before. I was curious about the early strikes of the WGA in the 1930s, to which Trumbo had been central. My copy normally sat alphabetically among the Ts at ankle level. But I’d lazily replaced it on an eye-level shelf, at the end of the Es, its front cover even facing out, right where Kevin would see Bruce Cook’s full name.

  If I’d not placed this book there, then and just so, no movie. But this movie hinged on a lot of ifs, the inciting one in 1982 when I met writer and director Arthur Laurents at the Young Playwrights Festival. A national student playwrighting competition founded by composer Stephen Sondheim, the winners’ one-act plays were produced Off-Broadway that long-ago spring. I was one of those winners, eighteen years old, a sophomore at New York University and one of the Festival’s oldest writers (the youngest that year was eight—and his play was excellent.) Among many theatre and film credits, Arthur was the author of one of the first and most successful movies ever made about the Hollywood blacklist, The Way We Were. I knew almost nothing about the actual blacklist at that point but I liked the movie a lot. So in the break room between rehearsals and the theatre lobby before performances, I’d sometimes corral Arthur into chatting. Diminutive but commanding, wittily acidic and less intimidating with each exchange we had, he told me The Way We Were was autobiographical, that he himself had been blacklisted. The portrait he painted was terrifying, with Washington, D.C. the hammer, Hollywood its willing anvil, and all the lives caught between, shattered. That the U.S. government and the movie studios once colluded to punish artists for thoughts and beliefs seemed like the stuff of a dystopian thriller. But the personal stories Arthur told about friends betraying one another to save their careers—or, like Arthur, refusing to do so and suffering the consequences—made it all excruciatingly personal. Neither of us could have known how deep an effect those half-dozen casual chats would have on me. I was as blank as a fresh canvas, and his anecdotes would color my thinking for years, then later shape my work.

  In early 1984, I had the chance to audit an NYU graduate screenwriting class taught by Waldo Salt, Ian McLellan Hunter, and Ring Lardner Jr., all formerly blacklisted. They were brilliant screenwriters with much to teach about their craft, but I was also there to try to extend Arthur’s lessons and learn what they’d lived through.

  One night in an elevator I complimented Ian McLellan Hunter on a movie he’d written (and won an Oscar for) that I’d just seen at a revival house, Roman Holiday. Ian’s sad basset eyes stared into the blue smoke of his lit pipe. “That movie,” he said, “was written by my great friend Dalton Trumbo.”

  Ian and Ring Lardner Jr. had both been very close to Trumbo, and now in class they regaled us with stories of his deep loyalty, epistolary tirades, jaw-dropping profligacy, and stoic political courage.

  It was Ian who told me to buy Bruce Cook’s biography. But in that pre-Amazon age, acquiring out-of-print books could mean a long, vigilant hunt, and I didn’t actually come across a copy till after I’d moved to L.A. later in 1984. The book and I made our way through the next three decades. Together we dated, married, and divorced; had career highs and lows, moved in and out of homes; mourned the death of my dad, celebrated my second marriage and the birth of my son. It was loaned to friends and, thank Jesus, always returned.

  We have aged side by side, my hair thinning as its pages have crisped. But the book suddenly began to take bigger and more regular beatings after Kevin optioned the film rights from Bruce Co
ok’s widow, Judith Aller, and I started writing the adaptation. The book’s pages were soon dog-eared and covered in Post-its. It was carted in bags and backpacks to libraries. Its best passages were highlighted, margins filled with scribbles. The spine collapsed. The cover was scratched and torn, then slipped into a drawer so it wouldn’t ultimately disintegrate.

  A draft of the screenplay was finished in 2009. And as I’d predicted, Kevin and I had no clue how to get it made, as the next three years’ complete lack of progress proved.

  In 2012, Michael London (Sideways, Milk) and his company, Groundswell, joined us as producers. If Kevin and I knew nothing about getting a movie made, Michael knew everything. Yet the first thing I liked about him (and still do) is how lightly he wore his wisdom. The book went to every early meeting, and when Michael (an incisive former journalist) would ask a question that usually began “Did Trumbo really…?” I could usually flip right to the answering passage.

  “That book’s seen some miles,” said the director Jay Roach (Game Change, Meet the Parents) when he saw my jacket-less copy at our first meeting. Jay has a detective’s eye for detail and a gentle wit. He’d liked the latest draft of my script but wanted to know more about the real man before signing on. He’d ordered his own used copy along with reams of other reference materials by or about Trumbo. But it was to Cook we’d often return: to check the timeline of events, the intersection of friends, family, and enemies, and to best access the man in his own words.

  Later, that weary copy was on my lap in the home of Trumbo’s youngest daughter, Mitzi, as Jay and I complimented her on the iconic photo she took of her father writing in the bathtub. Decades before it would be in vogue, she’d helped identify Trumbo’s “brand.” Mitzi steered us to parts of the book we hadn’t yet included in the script (but would), then shared with us scores of other photos she’d taken, many of which ended up in the movie, as well as i this new edition.

  After Bryan Cranston signed to play Trumbo, his first piece of research was to read this book. As meticulous as he is versatile (and funny and charming and hardworking—his success may be the least accidental in human history), he absorbed thousands of Trumbo details large and small, stitching them into a seamless performance. The battered copy here in my home office, as I write this, is still stuffed with stationery from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City, where Jay and I had traveled in the spring of 2014 to meet with Bryan, then starring on Broadway in All the Way. With us were Trumbo’s eldest daughter, Nikola, a consultant on the film, and her partner, Karen Fite. Karen, Niki, Jay, Bryan, and I ate and talked for hours about Trumbo. As this book was passed between us I took notes on the hotel’s gilded stationery, tucking the papers between the book’s pages. Here’s a scrawled line from one, pocked with a dab of brunch: Niki: ‘D.T., two-fingered typist.’ Playing Trumbo, Bryan would then only type with two fingers.

  When we started rehearsal in New Orleans, this book was at the table every day as scenes were read aloud and polished under Jay’s precise direction. Many of Diane Lane’s questions about playing Trumbo’s wife, Cleo, were answered by consulting the book. Beautiful but shy to the point of being nearly opaque, the real Cleo Trumbo was not easy to define on paper. Diane was determined to get to the heart of her, especially in silence, tirelessly exploring Cleo’s quiet shadows. Details we’d mine from the book’s passages on Cleo were etched into new drafts of the script. It was Diane who coined it “The Cook Book.” Since it held so much practical information being used not just by us but costuming, locations, production design, props, almost all the department heads, The Cook Book it stayed. While Diane did indeed get to the heart of Cleo, and then some.

  Louisiana’s heat and humidity accelerated my copy’s decay. The covers bowed and the binding melted, loosening the pages like stones in a castle ruin.

  So it’s nice to have this new edition and fitting it’s tied to the movie that desecrated my original. This is the only book about Dalton Trumbo written with his cooperation. Cook was able to gain Trumbo’s trust and respect, so as you read, you get the whole of the man and those affected by him. All of us who worked on the movie tried to get those same feelings of immediacy and intimacy on screen.

  I’m lucky I wandered onto a path that led me to this book; luckier still it stayed with me, guided me, comforted, challenged, and occasionally intimidated me, as it did my hundreds of collaborators on the movie.

  When shooting was almost wrapped in late 2014, I wrote a letter to Niki Trumbo, who’d become a good friend. I told her I was beginning to miss her father. With me for almost seven years, his voice, now entwined with Bryan’s, defined most of my waking hours. But I could feel all the DaltonTrumbos I’d lived with—real, imagined, and performed—beginning to recede.

  I felt he’d belonged to me alone for such a long time, then to me and Kevin, then Michael, Jay, Bryan, Diane, certainly always to Mitzi, Niki, and the rest of his remaining family; but as scores of collaborators joined us along the way, I gave up more and more of my exclusive ownership, realizing now I never really had it to begin with. Trumbo was his own man, always, and now he was going his own way, again. I was on the verge of surrendering him completely. Which was as it should be: The only movies that stay completely the author’s are the ones never made.

  In a way, I was losing Bruce Cook as well. Cook’s effect on me was subtler than Trumbo’s but just as deep and lasting. His biography is no longer just my deteriorating, thirty-eight-year-old secondhand copy. It’s been reborn now to find the newest, largest audience it can—as it should.

  I hope you enjoy it. One favor? Make sure it sits on a shelf where anyone passing by can see it, reach for it, and ask about it…

  John McNamara

  Los Angeles, California

  June 2015

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE LION IN WINTER

  The production chronicle of Papillon was such a saga of bad luck, dissension, and difficulty that it seems remarkable that a motion picture came out of it at all—much less the reasonably successful one it turned out to be. There were financial problems right from the start. One company started the project only to drop out when the budget began to get out of hand. That was when Allied Artists took it over. And when that happened, it was decided that the picture needed the sort of box-office insurance that two stars could provide—make it a kind of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on Devil’s Island was the idea. Steve McQueen in the title role was good, but Steve McQueen plus Dustin Hoffman as his prison pal would be that much better. Hoffman, it turned out, was willing, and the deal was consummated only a short time before they were committed to begin production.

  The trouble was, the screenplay they had in hand, by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., though otherwise quite satisfactory, had no part in it for Dustin Hoffman. A star needs a starring role. One would have to be written for him—and it would have to be done almost simultaneously with production.

  In a situation like that, there was one writer—and just about one alone—to turn to: “I may not be the best screenwriter in Hollywood,” Dalton Trumbo once said, “but I am incomparably the fastest.”

  There were many who considered him the best, too—among them, Franklin Schaffner, the director of Papillon, who put the problem before Trumbo and explained that it would mean coming along on location to rewrite the script as it was being shot. Trumbo took the job for a good price; he was still trying to write himself out of the financial hole he had been put in by the failure of his own production of Johnny Got His Gun. There was very little he could do in the way of preparation and research, for there simply wasn’t time for that. He read Papillon, of course—“a pretty damned dull book, if you ask me,” he later commented. He sketched out a structure to accommodate Dega, the counterfeiter, the character to be played by Dustin Hoffman, a basic outline structure that satisfied everybody, more or less.

  As for building the role of Dega, there wasn’t much to go on in the book by Henri Charrière; he was only a minor character—in
the story and quickly out of it. For the film, of course, he would have to stay in. What sort of man would he be? Trumbo and Hoffman got together during the few weeks that remained before shooting began and talked at length about the problem. And the longer they talked the better Hoffman got to know Trumbo, and the more certain he was that Dega should be in some important ways like Trumbo himself. “He’s a real feisty man,” Hoffman later told an interviewer, “and he’s got a combination of toughness and sophistication and integrity that I felt were right for Dega.… So I said, why didn’t he write the character off himself, so to speak?” And that was what Trumbo did, traveling off to Spain with only sixty pages completed of a very long script, and then to Jamaica, writing never more than twenty pages ahead of them, as the film was being shot. It is not, to say the least, an easy way to work; but Trumbo was equal to the job, and if there were delays in the production of Papillon (and there were plenty), they were not attributable to him, as long as he was on the picture.

  The shooting in Spain went well and quickly enough. This was the part of the film that was supposed to take place in France: the prisoners bound for the penal colony herded like animals through the streets by soldiers and into a dusty, sun-baked prison yard. There they are made to strip and listen as the warden of the prison informs them that few of them will live out their prison terms and that none will return home again—that for France they no longer exist. It is a cruel speech, certainly, but important and even necessary in that it perfectly sets the tone of the film, preparing the audience for the saga of inhumanity that is to follow. In the picture, it is delivered by the man who wrote it, Dalton Trumbo.

  Franklin Schaffner, who chose him for the part, insisted that there was no special story here, and that there was certainly no irony intended (the warden played by a jailbird). When he said that he interviewed a couple of English actors for the part but that one morning he awakened, sat up in bed, and said to himself that it had to be Trumbo—well, what he was telling us, I think, is that he had by then suddenly come to recognize the intensely theatrical quality of the man, the sense of drama that Trumbo projected almost casually but never, certainly, unconsciously. Dalton Trumbo was a natural actor.