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  “I came to him about the auto, and he shrugged it off. He said, ‘Well, you see, you didn’t have an automobile, and then you had one for several months—and that was good.’ He said, ‘The man who sold the auto had one he wanted to sell, and he did—and that was good. And the magazine needed it and got the use of it—and that was good. And now,’ he said, ‘we won’t have to pay any more on it—and that is good for me. So you see? Only good came out of the entire affair.’ He was a marvelous man.”

  Ultimately, of course, the magazine folded. But by that time, Trumbo was long gone. Welford Beaton had advanced him in title to managing editor but, needless to say, at no increase in salary. Trumbo worked for him for just about a year. In fact, it was because Beaton could no longer even pay him as meagerly and irregularly as he had been that he was forced to let him go.

  The problem then, of course—for Trumbo was still supporting his mother and two sisters—was how he might earn money enough by writing so that he need not return to the bakery or to some other dead-end job. It seemed it might be possible. He was just beginning to sell fiction. His first published story, “The Wolcott Case,” came out in International Detective Magazine late in 1933. It was nothing special, the story of a kidnaping with heavy vigilante overtones. He would afterward shrug it off as a piece of “Fascist crap.” Nevertheless, he was concentrating on fiction, still sure that this was the kind of writing he wanted to do—that he was really meant to be a novelist. He now also had an outline for a new novel, one in which he might make use of his Grand Junction material. This would be less personal—not really autobiographical at all—but it would provide a focus on the town as a social entity, an approach that interested him more and more. And so he felt it was important to him to keep writing, to continue to think of himself as a writer, and not give in and once more become a slavey at the bakery.

  The immediate solution to his problem came from an unexpected source. He came in contact with an Austrian nobleman living in Hollywood, one Baron Friedrich von Reichenberg, who was much in need of “editorial assistance” in the preparation of a biography of Metternich. Trumbo became the Baron’s ghost writer. There was no doubt the man was an authority on the leading statesman of the Hapsburg dynasty; von Reichenberg simply could not organize the mountain of material he had collected and present it in comprehensible English prose; that, it turned out, was to be the job of his young editorial assistant.

  “I didn’t know it then” said Trumbo, “but I had found my way into a real nest of Nazis. One or two of the Baron’s friends, who used to visit him at his apartment on Fountain Avenue just below Sunset Boulevard, were indicted later on. Hitler had just come into power. The Baron himself didn’t like Hitler too much—there was a certain aristocratic squeamishness involved there and also the fact that he was an Austrian. But his friends loved Hitler—anti-Semites all. I stayed in contact with the Baron for quite some time after the book was finished. As anti-German sentiment grew, he became de Reichenberg instead of von. And during the war, as I recall, he was interned up in Canada. That was actually the last I ever heard of him.”

  Trumbo finished the book in six weeks’ time. Eventually, it was published in England as Metternich in Love and War. In his preface, Friedrich von Reichenberg thanked his young friend James Dalton Trumbo for “editorial assistance,” a formula which should be familiar to anyone who has done any ghost writing. Trumbo was paid in full by the Baron and that was the end of that. By the middle of 1934, he badly needed another job.

  It was the Depression, after all. The economic pressures on the Trumbo family, as on everyone else in those grim days, were real, brutal, and relentless. And for him, especially, having now had a glimpse of that world of “rhinestone-studded swimming pools” that George Jean Nathan had satirized so scathingly, the thought of joining the breadlines must have seemed a most bitter prospect. Through his work on the Hollywood Spectator and the contacts he had made in the film world, he knew there was money to be made there—money, in fact, was being made by young men far less talented and less prepossessing than he. The better he came to know the ins and outs of Hollywood (a surprising number of his early pieces for the Spectator deal specifically with the economics of the movie industry), the more his taste for luxury must have grown, and the more keenly aware he must have become that a comparative fortune awaited him. There were riches in the midst of overwhelming poverty; he had now seen both at first hand. And he must have been torn somewhat between indignation at this state of affairs and an eager desire to dip in for his share.

  Things were still hard at home for the Trumbo family. They had by then moved from the alley house off 55th Street to a duplex on Cahuenga, a step up of sorts. But ever since Dalton had left the bakery, money had been coming in less regularly than before, while at the same time family expenses were spiraling up and up. Elizabeth was in high school, and Catherine was in junior college. Maud Trumbo continued as a seamstress, working for various Hollywood dressmakers and doing special jobs (ruffles were her specialty) for movie actresses, Norma Talmadge and Constance Bennett among them. But again, the major financial burden fell on Dalton. When they needed money, it was up to him to get it any way he could—and somehow he always came through, though at times the means he used were rather irregular. His sister Catherine remembered a time, for instance, when she badly needed ten dollars to buy a new dress for a dance. She went to him, and he said he would get it for her. He went out and came back a little over an hour later with that amount and a bit more. She asked rather fearfully how he had come by it, and he assured her it was all right: he had found a crap game, come in lucky, and got out quickly.

  Perhaps Tolstoy was only half-right. Not only are happy families all alike, but members of one unhappy family also seem to strain and rub against one another in just about the same way as do those in the next. Dalton and Maud Trumbo, his mother, had often fought across the generations over politics. Just as Maud had crossed over and become a Republican when Orus Trumbo went for Woodrow Wilson and became a Democrat (in order—she made no secret of it—to cancel out her husband’s vote), so Dalton had followed his father’s lead and voted Democrat in the first presidential election after reaching his majority. As it happened, that ballot went for Al Smith in 1928, the “happy warrior,” the first Catholic ever to run for president. And didn’t their Christian Scientist household rock during that campaign! Trumbo admitted it took quite an act of will for him to cast that ballot, for he had, he says, held on to his “populist anti-Catholicism many years too long.” (For that matter, Maud Trumbo eventually came around: she voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, unable to bring herself to vote for a man who sat on the congressional committee that had sent her son to prison.) Theirs was an intensely political household. The Trumbos not only exercised their franchise in every election—national, state, county, and municipal—but all of them argued the issues and were called upon to defend their choices. Things reached a pitch with the coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the advent of the New Deal. Families all over America split along generational lines and took opposing positions. As the Depression deepened, so did the rifts between parents and children over “that man in the White House.” The Trumbos were no different from others in this.

  They all remembered the fights. I talked to Dalton’s two sisters on the same summer evening and found them both regretful that the rancor and contentiousness were what they recalled from that time. Everybody, after all, wants to believe his was a happy home. Elizabeth Baskerville and Catherine Baldwin lived within a few miles of one another on the same long hill, in Altadena and Pasadena, respectively. I visited them separately in their homes and found them quite different, each more like Dalton than like one another. But because they lived so close, the two sisters saw a good deal of each other and got along quite well. They saw Dalton less often but stayed in close communication by telephone, calling back and forth at least once a week, more often should the occasion arise. They were still very much a family. The mutual claim t
hey shared existed between them, almost unnoticed and never referred to. All the same, you sensed it was there.

  Elizabeth resembles Dalton physically, both of them favoring their mother. She is a small, pretty woman in her late fifties—the baby of the family, as the rest reckon it. Coming back to California, as she did, at the age of eight, her memories of Grand Junction are rather dim. She grew up in Los Angeles and considers it home: “We have two grown daughters living out of the state, up in Oregon and Washington,” she tells me. “And criminy, I don’t know, it’s beautiful up there, but I’d hate to leave California. It’s so interesting politically and socially. I wouldn’t like being where everyone who lived around me was alike, the way they are up there.”

  Settled in the comfortable living room of the hilltop house where she lives with her husband in Altadena, I ask Elizabeth about Dalton’s position in the family following the death of their father.

  “Well, it was hard on him, of course,” she replies. “It was hard on all of us. But there was no doubt when I was growing up that he was the dominant force in the family—not by giving orders or giving us advice or any of that—but just because it was always assumed he was going to be somebody important. We were quiet during the day because it was understood Dalton had to get his sleep while he was working in the bakery. And when he got up, we would clean his room for him.”

  “This must have come from your mother, somehow,” I suggest.

  “Yes, she knew she had a special child in him, and I suppose she communicated that to us. Catherine and I were there to be educated and cared for. Dalton was different, though—he had a special talent. He had to do his thing. That was what Mother got across to us, though we recognized it, too.”

  “Still, your mother didn’t exactly bow to his will, did she? There were fights, weren’t there?”

  “Oh, there were fights between them, all right. Believe me, there were. It seemed for a while as though there would never be an end to them. I think Mother thought he was drinking—and he was. And she didn’t like the girls he ran around with, either.

  “I don’t know. When you look back, you ask yourself what the cause of all of it was, and there were so many things involved. Things were hard then for all of us. Money was such a problem for a long, long while. We were dependent on him and must have been an awful burden. But he did take care of us all. He took his responsibilities very seriously back then—and still does. He sent me to UCLA a couple of years, but then I got impatient and cut out and went to business school at Woodbury, here in Los Angeles. I went out and got a job then, and so I was off his back. I continued to live with Mother, but I wasn’t dependent on him any longer. Then of course I got married when I was twenty-four.”

  It is funny. As I sit listening to her, watching her, that youngest Trumbo daughter, the kid sister, is somehow there before me in the living room—more real, more tangible than the woman, nearly sixty, who is telling me about her. So often we are frozen in the roles in which our families cast us. Elizabeth Baskerville is a kid sister still, quiet, retiring, like Dalton physically yet much less assertive than he. It is remarkable. Her brother must have seemed an almost overwhelming personality to her then.

  “You said Dalton was the dominant force in the family,” I begin.

  “That’s right,” she agrees.

  “Well, did he wield any direct influence on you? What did he talk about? Did he give orders?”

  “He certainly never ordered us around, Catherine and me. He would never have done that, never even have tried. But I think, especially with me, he tried to open up our minds. Dalton talked ideas at home. For instance, now they talk about women’s lib, but that was old stuff to us. I was not raised in a household where I felt discriminated against because I was a girl. We talked all that through. He was for equality. No, we knew discrimination of any sort was wrong—so wrong that we didn’t even know who was discriminated against, how they were different. Why, I was fairly old before I even knew what a Jew was.

  “I’d say these feelings and this atmosphere came from Mother, too. She was always fair. She really believed in justice. That was why that Hollywood Ten business was so hard on her. We sort of drew together as a family. I think if you talk to Catherine about all this she’ll tell you just about the same thing. She’s got her own viewpoint, though.”

  “What’s she like?” I ask.

  “Catherine? She’s a feistier person than I am. She made waves, too, when she was young, just like Dalton did. She was going out with boys Mother didn’t approve of. And of course she was much closer to Dalton’s age and would talk back to both of them.”

  “Feisty” was Elizabeth’s word for her sister, and I must say it seemed appropriate, for you don’t talk to Catherine Baldwin for very long before you perceive in her a certain tough, scrappy quality. Physically she is quite unlike her brother. There is an angular quality to her appearance, just as there is to her personality. In this—a certain undercurrent of contentiousness in her conversation, a certain tartness in her expression—she resembles Dalton most. Seven years his junior, she was nevertheless old enough to come into conflict with him sharply and often over the years they were growing up together. Things never settled down completely between them. There was always that tension, the slight charge to their relationship that is so often there between the first and second child in any family. Until fairly recently, their tempers had occasionally flared at one another. I caught hints of prolonged trouble between Dalton and Catherine back sometime in the early sixties. But they are on good terms when we meet.

  Her house, down the hill from her younger sister’s, on a quiet Pasadena side street, is furnished with a certain bold flair. Catherine seems to be a woman who knows her own mind. Elizabeth had offered me a soft drink; Catherine gives me a tall, dangerously brimming glass of Scotch.

  “… You’ve got to remember that drinking, smoking, anything like that was a terribly immoral thing at our house because of the Christian Science thing. This conflict between Dalton and Mother went way back to Grand Junction. I can remember when we lived back there, Mother came in and found crumbs of tobacco in the pockets of his pants. Then she and Dad had a long, very concerned conversation about it. A kid came up to me there one day and said that Dalton smoked. I said that that was a lie, then one day I saw him out on the street with a cigarette in his mouth, and I was horrified.”

  Catherine is puffing all the while on a cigarette herself and sipping at a drink as she continues on Dalton’s conflicts with his mother: “Their battles about his drinking continued until Dalton moved out. I remember when we were living in the house on 55th Street. One night Dalton came weaving and stumbling up the stairs, and I ran out to him to keep Mother away from him. I got him into his room, but Mother was in hot pursuit, and she was there before I could shut the door. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ I told her. And just to prove it was so, Dalton stood up to pull off a sock and fell flat on his face.”

  That was how it went between Dalton and his mother. The two of them never resolved that particular issue; they simply managed, after years had gone by and events separated them, to ignore it. In her personal conduct, Maud Trumbo was quite conservative, the very picture of a lady. Catherine can remember only one friend of her mother’s there in Los Angeles who ever called her by her first name, a woman named Hattie Bell. The two were Daughters of the Confederacy together. (Remember that the Tillerys were from Missouri; Maud Trumbo herself had been born in St. Joseph and her grandfather had ridden with Morgan.)

  “I guess you could say that Dalton and Mother maintained a sort of love-hate relationship for years and years,” Catherine comments. “She was so proud of him because actually all the things he was doing—the writing and all—she had wanted to do herself. All of us believed he would write and write successfully, and of course that’s just what happened.

  “All this will give you some idea why we were so furious at what happened in 1947—the hearings and the blacklist and all. It was an
awful shock for us, those damned trials back in Washington—we listened to them on the radio. We were so infuriated at how it was handled. You know, I lost one job because of it. I was at Republic, a dialogue director and a script girl, but when the blacklist started, just being Dalton Trumbo’s sister was enough to lose me my job. The name itself was poison around town for a long time. Frankly, I’m glad to be out of the studios, though I loved working in movies while I was at it. I loved working on the set.”

  I ask her about her relationship with Dalton as she was growing up. “Back on 55th Street, you mean? Oh, up and down, you know. Something I never forgave Dalton for, though, was that he was a terrible tease. Whenever he thought I was getting too carried away with my romances, he’d sit down at the piano and he’d play ‘King for a Day’ very soulfully. Real soap opera music. And in particular situations he’d hum the tune just to needle me. Oh, I hated it. I remember once I had a date with a lieutenant or a captain in the army. I can’t even remember much about him now, but I was terribly impressed then. We were sitting down in his car beneath Dalton’s bedroom, and we were necking. Dalton made as if to call Mother, then he leaned out the window with this fake gun we had around the house—it was a prop for a play or something, I forget. Anyway, Dalton leaned out the window with it and said, ‘If you don’t come in this minute, Catherine, I’ll shoot!’ Well, the captain wasted no time getting away then, and I never saw him again. He believed Dalton!”

  I laugh. She laughs. It is funny. But she ends with a sigh and a shake of her head. “I guess I did my share of teasing, too,” she concedes. “The first time I realized how difficult it was to write and how hard it was to take criticism was once when I came upon him when he was typing up a story to send out to a magazine. I grabbed it up and started reading it, and I didn’t like the beginning of it at all. I began acting it out, making fun of it, burlesquing it, and I told him what I thought was wrong with it. It made him just livid. He rushed out of the house in a rage. Next day I happened to check his typewriter, and I found there was a note to me on it. ‘For your information,’ he wrote, ‘your criticism of the story was right, and I have rewritten accordingly. Now please go to hell.’”