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  The Brave Bulls, a good film produced in 1951, was John Bright’s last credited job as a screenwriter. That was the year he was blacklisted. When he was named in testimony by a number of “friendly” witnesses before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, his career (which was even then rather shaky) came to a sudden stop. Although, as he mentions, he did work on the black market and had kept busy since then at various writing projects of one kind or another, his career had never really gotten started again. He worked for a while in the sixties as a kind of combination reader–story editor and literary advisor for Campbell-Silver-Cosby, Bill Cosby’s production company.

  “That’s right,” Bright tells me, “one of my first acts as functionary there was to recommend Johnny Got His Gun as a project. That’s what eventually led to the production of the movie. You know Bruce Campbell? He produced the picture, of course, and Dalton directed. I was the one who told him he ought to do that—that he was the only one who should direct that movie, who could direct it. Various other people wanted to do it—Luis Buñuel, for one. But Dalton was the one to do it. I told him that. I told him.”

  Dalton Trumbo worked less than a year of his seven-year contract with Warner Bros. His work was certainly satisfactory—two pictures in so short a space of time was a very good beginning for a writer on the B unit. What happened? The answer to that takes us back to 1933 and the founding of the Screen Writers Guild. It was formed with no defined political goals and only to establish the role of the screenwriter more firmly and boost his prestige in Hollywood. John Howard Lawson was the first president of the Guild and was elected by acclamation.

  Lawson, who had enjoyed some success in New York with avant-garde productions of his Expressionist dramas, was one of the first playwrights to come to Hollywood when the movies began to talk at the end of the twenties. When he returned in the early thirties, with productions by the Group Theatre and on Broadway behind him, he was committed to the aesthetics of social realism. He was a convinced radical when he was elected president of the Screen Writers Guild in April 1933. In November 1934, he announced in an article in the left-wing theater organ New Theatre that he had become a member of the Communist Party. As president of the Screen Writers Guild, Lawson appeared at a hearing of the House Patents Committee in April 1936. He called for copyright legislation that would assure screenwriters greater control over their material. He said that producers were responsible for the quality and content of motion pictures, not writers; they were to blame if movies were bad.

  John Howard Lawson’s testimony angered not only the movie producers and studio executives but the whole right wing of the Screen Writers Guild as well. A split of some sort had been in the offing ever since the formation of the Guild. Many members resented Lawson’s outspoken radicalism and felt, probably with some reason, that he might be using the Guild as an instrument to achieve political ends. This was the occasion they had anticipated. Under a banner of “loyalty to the industry,” Rupert Hughes and James K. McGuinness withdrew from the Screen Writers Guild and formed a rival group, the Screen Playwrights. It was embraced immediately by the studio executives as their approved bargaining agent, for they frankly feared the potential power of the Screen Writers Guild. In effect, the Screen Playwrights was from birth nothing but a company union.

  Dalton Trumbo’s own experience underlines this. He had joined the Screen Writers Guild at the first opportunity, glad to be a member. He was subsequently surprised when the same man who had recruited him for the Screen Writers Guild came by one day with a form for resignation from the Guild which had been prepared and mimeographed right there at Warner Bros. The idea was that he was to resign from the Guild and join the Screen Playwrights. Trumbo remembered: “I refused to resign from the Guild, and they said, ‘You will go on your six-weeks layoff, and then at the end of your six-weeks option period, if you haven’t changed your mind, we will drop your option.’ So I said, ‘Well, why don’t I get out now?’ And they said, ‘Fine.’”

  So that was it. He was out of work. That seven-year contract with Warner Bros. that had seemed to assure him such a comfortable living for years to come was now terminated by mutual agreement: “I left Warner Bros., and I’ve never been back, a little over thirty years. They never have allowed me to darken their door, nor have I wanted to particularly.”

  This marked the beginning of Trumbo’s long involvement in the leadership of the Screen Writers Guild. He held on to his membership, though writers all around Hollywood dropped out and joined the new Screen Playwrights, as they had more or less been ordered to do by their studios. The Guild’s roster of members dropped in a few months’ time from several hundred to about fifty. Because they suddenly felt themselves in need of official support of some sort, the remaining members voted to affiliate with the Authors Guild of America. They went underground. In order to survive, it became necessary to meet in secret and to keep confidential the names of those who stayed on.

  This brought charges from the Screen Playwrights and from studio executives that the Screen Writers Guild constituted a conspiracy—and a Communist conspiracy, at that, for such was John Howard Lawson’s reputation even then. Were there any grounds to such charges? “It was secret,” Trumbo conceded, “as secret as we could keep it, because if it were known, you would lose your job. It was that simple. Communists participated in it. Though I wasn’t a Communist at the time, I knew people who were. Still, it was not a Communist activity per se—it was a union activity.”

  This was how it remained for a little over one year, during which time the Screen Playwrights did virtually nothing for the benefit of its membership but rather gave away the few benefits the Guild had gained for writers in Hollywood. However, in 1937 the National Labor Relations Board was founded to deal with just such situations as this. Trumbo was one of those to testify before the NLRB when the Guild moved to challenge the Screen Playwrights—which it did successfully in an open election in 1937. And although they were now no more than a minority group of right-wing activists, the Screen Playwrights managed to hang on to their contract with the studios until 1940, when the Guild took over rightfully and completely from them. By then, Dalton Trumbo was on the board of directors of the Screen Writers Guild. In this jurisdictional dispute with its political overtones are to be found the seeds of conflict from which the blacklist grew. For in 1944, James K. McGuinness and Rupert Hughes, who had led the Screen Playwrights, banded with other like-minded members of the Hollywood establishment to found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. This was the vigilante organization that provided the House Committee on Un-American Activities with most of its “friendly” witnesses and went on to maintain and police the blacklist that emerged from the HUAC hearings.

  Although fired from Warner Bros., Dalton Trumbo may have felt he had reason to be optimistic, for he was expecting great things of Washington Jitters, his satirical novel of New Deal politics. He had completed it in November 1935 and sent the last ten thousand words of it off to Elsie McKeogh then. He had hoped to see it serialized in a magazine, probably the Post, but Mrs. McKeogh had another idea. Without informing him of her intention, she simply followed her hunch and sent it out. And so he was quite unprepared when, on January 30, 1936, he received a wire from her that informed him tersely:

  MOSS HART WILL DRAMATIZE WASHINGTON JITTERS STOP CONTRACT WILL FOLLOW STOP THIRTY DAYS SECRECY INSOFAR AS HOLLYWOOD CONCERNED AND PUBLICATION OF NOVEL TO FOLLOW THIRTY DAYS AFTER OPENING STOP

  Trumbo could not help but be wildly elated by the news. Moss Hart was then well established as George S. Kaufman’s new collaborator. The two had done Once in a Lifetime and Merrily We Roll Along, although their superhits You Can’t Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner were then still ahead of them. If Hart—and presumably Kaufman, too—wanted to dramatize Trumbo’s new novel, it looked like money in the bank to him—and a lot of it at that.

  A few days later a letter from Elsie McKeogh told him that Alf
red Knopf would publish Washington Jitters in conjunction with the production of the play. In fact, as it turned out, Knopf reserved the option not to publish the novel at all if there were no play production—or even if it should be produced and prove a flop. The publisher also declined to offer an advance. But neither Trumbo, nor (unfortunately) his agent, were inclined to read the fine print, for at that point both were excited by the possibility of production by Kaufman and Hart.

  For reasons known apparently only to Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, the playwrights declined finally to do a dramatic adaptation of the novel. This left Trumbo high and dry, thinking at first he might do a dramatization; but that proved impossible, for he had had no experience writing for the stage, and even if he had done an acceptable job it would have been difficult to find backing on short notice for a play by an unknown. So there would be no production whatever prior to publication, and for a brief, miserable period it looked as though Knopf might decide because of this not to issue the book at all. But it came out after all in an attractive edition in September 1936, and by the end of the month Trumbo had written to Elsie McKeogh venting his anger at Knopf for “sneaking the book out on the Coast.” He told her he had taken matters into his own hands and was publicizing it himself. In fact, he had hired a local publicist to help him do the job. “Nobody knows better than I that Jitters has absolutely no literary merit,” he wrote her. “Nor am I particularly fond of personal publicity. But the book came out of headlines, and it can be sold only through headlines. I don’t know whether Knopf gives a darn whether or not he gets another book out of me (I fancy he doesn’t) but I do know that this is the last time I’ll undertake to write a book and sell it too.” Not much could be done for it, however, for the last word on Washington Jitters from Knopf indicated that returns exceeded sales of the novel by ninety-four copies.

  Its hero, Henry Hogg, is the plain man whom everyone is sure could clean up that mess in Washington if he were only given half a chance. Fate provides that half in a rather far-fetched instance of mistaken identity: A signpainter by trade, he is sent to paint the name of the new coordinator of the ASP (Agricultural Survey Program) on an office door in Washington. It develops that there really is no new ASP coordinator, but Harvey Upp, who writes the popular newspaper column “Washington Jitters,” doesn’t know this. He bursts into the office, finds Henry Hogg there, and interviews him under the impression that Henry is the new coordinator. The columnist is overwhelmed by Hogg’s plain speaking; he spreads his name across newspapers all over the country, boosting him as the one man in the New Deal who is talking good sense. One thing leads to another, absurdity follows absurdity, and before he knows it, Henry Hogg really is the new coordinator of the ASP administration, and he is being hailed around the country as the man most likely to lead America out of the wilderness. In the end, Henry mourns his lost innocence: “I’m not a signpainter any more,” he says. “I’m not even a man. I’m nothing but a politician.”

  Washington Jitters’ satire may strike us today as rather obvious, its targets sitting ducks. It is not that it is a bad book, but rather that it is a slick and inconsequential one, and this is what is distressing. For Trumbo to follow a book of real quality and great promise like Eclipse with one such as Washington Jitters seems an abuse of his talent. Even in the writing of fiction he could not resolve the conflict he felt between the literary impulse on the one hand, and on the other, the desire to influence, to be part of his time—essentially, a political impulse—and to be commercially successful into the bargain. He himself was quite conscious of it. In fact, at about the time Washington Jitters came out, he wrote to Elsie McKeogh, telling her:

  Right now I am in somewhat of a literary quandary. I have for years projected a long, serious novel on the bakery in which I spent almost a decade. Then again I have a much shorter novel idea—shorter, perhaps than Jitters—satirizing the conflict between the left and the right through the problems of a Henry Hoggish sort of Liberal who eventually encompasses his complete destruction by reason of the fact that he can’t decide on which side of the fence to jump. I think it can be very amusing.

  There is no record of her response. And for that matter, he never wrote either novel—unless Johnny Got His Gun, which opens with Joe Bonham in the bakery, grew out of the “long, serious novel” he wanted to write. In any case, these problems, which are granted only to those who possess both immense writing facility and an artistic conscience, would continue to plague Trumbo for years to come.

  By the time he wrote this to his agent—the letter is dated September 14, 1936—the problem was no longer quite so immediate, for he was already under contract again to another studio. His rebellion at Warners in behalf of the Screen Writers Guild actually cost him only some weeks of employment. More or less out of the blue, Harry Cohn of Columbia called him. Arthur Landau, Trumbo’s agent, had put in a good word for him and subsequently arranged a meeting between his client and the head of Columbia Pictures.

  Living up to his reputation, Cohn was quite direct when they met. “You’re blacklisted,”* he informed him—this was because of Trumbo’s refusal to sign an application of membership to the Screen Playwrights.

  Trumbo had come to suspect this and said that it was probably so.

  “But,” Cohn said, “I don’t care about blacklists. I’m going to hire you anyway.” And he did, in the grand style, raising him from the one hundred dollars per week he had made at Warner Bros. to two hundred and fifty dollars a week at Columbia.

  Trumbo did only a couple of films there. The first was the extravagantly titled Tugboat Princess, released late in 1936, for which he did not do the screenplay but shared credit for the original story with Isador Bernstein. The second was something called Devil’s Playground, on which he was listed as collaborator on the screenplay with the Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty and the playwright Jerome Chodorov. In most cases, a shared credit on a motion picture does not mean that active collaboration between two or three writers has actually taken place. It means, rather, that two or three writers have had a crack at a particularly troublesome script before it was judged ready for the cameras.

  Occasionally, though, studio executives would place two writers in one room and hand them a single assignment, hoping that that miracle of spontaneous generation known as true collaboration would actually take place. They tried this at Columbia with Dalton Trumbo and William Saroyan. And while it did not accomplish quite what Columbia had intended—no picture was ever produced from the script that was brought forth—still, it proved a memorable experience for Trumbo.

  The two of them agreed on one thing right from the start: they would not write about one another. Trumbo told Saroyan that he had noticed that sooner or later Saroyan seemed to write about just about everyone he knew. And, Trumbo admitted, he had written about a few he had known himself. So he proposed a contract: he wouldn’t write about Saroyan if Saroyan would agree not to write about Trumbo. That seemed fair enough, and they shook hands on it.

  They sat around the next few days swapping stories and avoiding discussion of the job at hand. Finally, it was Trumbo again who took it upon himself to mention the unmentionable. “You know, Bill,” he said, “why don’t we decide which one of us is going to write this screenplay? Because together we’re never going to get it done. Do you want to write or do you want me to write it? I don’t give a goddamn.” Saroyan thought it over and decided that he would really rather be out at Santa Anita watching the horses run and placing an occasional bet. That was okay with Trumbo—“a perfectly good arrangement, for he was an extraordinary man”—and he covered for his supposed collaborator and wrote the script on his own.

  During the course of this alleged collaboration Saroyan showed up one night at Trumbo’s home, the house on Hollycrest Drive up in the Hollywood Hills where he was living with his mother, his grandmother, and his sister Elizabeth. It seemed that somebody had sent Saroyan a baby alligator from Florida and it had arrived in rather sickly condit
ion. Could he keep it in Trumbo’s bathtub for a day or two until it got better? They put it in a few inches of water, and although the creature was still moving, it sank immediately. Trumbo decided he had better provide something more for the alligator, or it would surely drown. He put in an upturned pan and placed the alligator up on it where he could breathe. It didn’t help much, though, for the next day he got up and checked the bathtub, and there was no sign of life there at all. Not only that, but the alligator smelled suspicious to Trumbo. He got on the phone to Saroyan, who said he would be right over. They looked into the bathtub, sniffed the air together, consulted, and concurred: this was one dead alligator that would have to be buried—and quickly. They wrapped it up and drove to a hill overlooking the Hollywood Freeway, and there they buried it behind are advertising billboard. Finally when they were finished and about to go, Saroyan said they just couldn’t leave like that—somebody really ought to say a few words over the grave. And so William Saroyan extemporized a eulogy over that dead alligator, going on at length about the beauty of life in the best style of My Heart’s in the Highlands and The Beautiful People. It was done only half in fun and was finally, Trumbo remembers, rather moving.

  Not long after that Dalton Trumbo moved on to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he met a girl who worked in the story department named Katherine Trosper. As it happened, she had known both of his sisters in high school. She had learned from them that his family came from Colorado. Well, hers hailed from Wyoming. They must have felt a sort of kinship, rugged, no-nonsense Westerners together, congratulating one another that they weren’t really part and parcel of this circus called Hollywood. At any rate, she and Trumbo got on well and began going out together.