TRUMBO Read online

  “Dalton was a very gallant young man, not sophisticated but very generous. He always did things on the grand scale—he’d take me to Musso & Frank’s, the Brown Derby, all the big places. But he wasn’t pompous or phony about it because actually he was a lot of fun. He’s always had a good sense of humor and has been known as a good storyteller—in a town of good storytellers. There was a great sense of fun to him and to our relationship. It was no great romance. The only thing was, I think it always embarrassed him that I was taller than he.”

  Her name is Katherine Popper now. She lives in New York City and is married to Martin Popper, an attorney who was part of the team of lawyers who served as counsel to the Hollywood Ten in 1947 and subsequently handled their defense and appeal on the contempt of Congress citation each was handed. This is less of a coincidence than it might at first appear. The two moved in the same social circles long after she and Dalton had stopped seeing one another and he had married. Even after she had moved to New York, going there with the Orson Welles company when he had completed Citizen Kane, there were mutual friends, a kind of Hollywood East colony made up of theater people and writers who commuted back and forth between the two coasts. Through these associations she met her husband.

  One important factor in her relationship with Dalton was that Katherine had known his sisters earlier in high school. She was in that sense a friend of the family and was welcome at the Trumbo home. The hard years had left a mark on them all. The Trumbos had withdrawn somewhat. Maud Trumbo, especially, seemed to regard outsiders with suspicion and perhaps a little hostility. But Katherine Trosper was different. She had known the girls when times were hard. She was practically one of them.

  One of the funniest evenings she remembers with Dalton, in fact, was not a night out on the town but one spent with the family in which they were all busily engaged in an important enterprise: “Dalton had one of those contracts where he was practically under bondage to the studio. Anything he wrote belonged to them. The only exceptions made were stories that he had written earlier, and I guess a novel that he had begun that developed into Johnny. He had just written an original screen story—there was a big market for them then—and he was sure he could sell it if he could just pass it off as one of those stories he had supposedly written long ago.

  “That was the problem. Here was this sheaf of bond pages, about twenty or thirty of them anyway, obviously right out of the typewriter. How could we make it look like something old, something that had been sitting around in a trunk for years? As I remember, the whole family was there, and we did everything to those pages. We sat on them, we burned holes with cigarettes into them, we applied heat with irons to yellow them. Everything. And I want to tell you it worked—perfectly! Not only did it look old enough to fool even Dalton’s agent, but the story actually sold. But don’t ask me what it was or to who because that was thirty-five years ago, and I just don’t remember.”

  He was always working, as Katherine Popper recalls. “During this period he was very much taken up with supporting his family. He really felt the responsibility. And the way he took care of it was just to write and write and write. He was doing screen stories and magazine stories and working on a novel, plus pulling down his regular salary as a screenwriter. That was about three hundred and fifty dollars a week, the way I remember. Not a grand sum, but back then, toward the end of the Depression, that much money went a long way.

  “And as I say, he liked to do things in the grand style. It wasn’t just that we went to all the best places—and we did—but he dressed to the teeth, too, always very dapper. If he could have gotten away with it, I think he would have carried a gold-handled cane. And then there was that car of his. Was it a Chrysler? And he hired a chauffeur.”

  A chauffeur? I am taken somewhat aback. I guess I must have asked her if she were really certain about that.

  “Oh, yes,” she assures me. “I remember him very well. He used to drive us everywhere and then just be right outside to pick us up. I had reason to remember him because of what happened one night. I had been out with somebody else and got home about two A.M., and I don’t know, it looked to me like there was some sort of shadowy figure disappearing around the corner of the house. My date didn’t see it, and maybe I was imagining things, but I was all alone there—my father and my brother were both away, someplace, for some reason—and I was scared. My father had been a railroad cop, and he had two billy clubs around the house, all the protection I had. Well, I remember I went to bed that night with one of them in each hand, just rigid with fright. Then, of course, I woke up an hour or two later thinking I had heard a noise, and all I could think of was I just had to get out of there, so I called Dalton and told him I was surrounded. He sent his chauffeur over for me with the car, and I want to tell you I was glad to see his face at my door when he came and got me. I stayed with Dalton and his mother and sisters for a couple of weeks—until my father and brother got back.”

  Her brother was Guy Trosper, then a story editor at Goldwyn Studios, who would himself later become a successful screenwriter with important films to his credit such as Birdman of Alcatraz and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold before he died in 1963. “My brother,” she declares, “was a real maverick. He wanted nothing to do with Hollywood, except to do the work and get paid. My brother and Dalton didn’t really like each other, but Guy respected Dalton’s craftsmanship all through his life. He used to say, ‘They’re not paying him all that money for his personality.’”

  “What did he mean by that?” I want to know. “What sort of personality did Trumbo have?”

  “You’ve got to keep in mind,” she says at last, “that there are many people who dislike Dalton violently. He could be vicious. After all, he is well known for his sharp tongue. There was that famous encounter of his with Howard Fast where he was just so devastating.”

  I ask her to tell me about it.

  “Well, the way I remember it, it was at a party here in New York that was given for Howard Fast right after he had come out of jail for serving three months on a contempt charge, and maybe he was carrying on a little about the hardship of it all. Anyway, that’s what Dalton, who was there at the party, seemed to think. This was during the blacklist. He began to cut him up verbally, just slice him to ribbons. ‘A three-monther?’ he said to him. ‘You call that a sentence?’ Oh, the scorn, the contempt! I must say it was done with class and was just devastatingly funny.”

  Eventually, Trumbo’s newfound taste for luxury proved his undoing. The bill for that chauffeur-driven Chrysler and all those nights out on the town came due with a vengeance when he woke up one morning in the latter part of 1937 and found himself about ten thousand dollars in debt on a salary of no more than three hundred and fifty dollars per week. He was in trouble, and he knew it. He would have to sue for bankruptcy. The course he undertook, however, was one usually reserved for corporations, whereby they are permitted to stave off their creditors on a short-term basis until they can reorganize and pay off their debts. He then had his regular weekly M-G-M paychecks sent into the court. But if he had depended on them alone to settle the debt, he would have been paying on it for months and have had nothing in the meantime for himself and his family to live on. That was clearly out of the question. Instead, he did what he would do again in ten years’ time when he was next threatened with economic extinction: he went to his typewriter and wrote his way out of trouble. He produced original screen stories and discharged the debt in record time. The judge who had presided over the case told him then that Trumbo’s was the only instance in his jurisdiction in which this course, once undertaken, had ever been completed by an individual. Trumbo’s comment on the entire affair seems characteristic: “You don’t learn the value of a dollar by being poor. You learn the value of a dollar by being rich. The Rockefellers understand the value of a dollar far better than I ever will.” He was without money for a very long time, and then suddenly he found himself quite dramatically with it—and he went on a spendi
ng spree. Never again was he forced into bankruptcy, although we shall see that on one later occasion, he came close. Still, his attitude toward money had not materially altered since that near-disaster. He would probably have agreed that he had not yet learned the value of money, except that he had become profoundly convinced that it was good to have a lot of it. As much as possible, in fact.

  In any case, he was in rather shaky financial shape when, toward the end of 1936, he met Cleo Fincher and began the unusual, dramatic, and nearly violent chain of events that culminated in their wedding many months later. Katherine Popper recalls very well the sudden change in him: “One time we had a date, and he called me up and said he’d like to see me and talk. It turned out that he wanted to break the date. He told me that he had met this extraordinary woman who worked in a drive-in, and he didn’t think he wanted to see anyone else again. This was Cleo, of course, and as far as I know, this—his love for her—has been his one fidelity through it all.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CLEO AND JOHNNY

  Enter Cleo. I don’t know quite what I expected Trumbo’s wife to be, but still, I was surprised when she first appeared at the gate to let me in. That time and every time afterward she was preceded by a great commotion of dogs. There were two miniature schnauzers, mother and son, I found out, always yapping; and a slower, deeper-voiced, and terribly earnest Irish setter. First would come the noise of the dogs, followed then by Cleo—smiling, quiet, contained—opening first the door and then the gate to admit me.

  If, at first, she was somewhat restrained in her greeting, well, it was understandable. I was entering into their home at a time when Trumbo seemed to be in almost immediate danger of death. Following his pneumonectomy and heart attack, during the time when it was difficult for him to talk and even hard to breathe, it must have been a kind of victory for them all when he woke up each morning. And then I came with my tape recorder. I probably seemed to them during that first visit to be robbing him of the little strength he still possessed.

  And so she would show me in, and down the stairs to his room below, along the way accepting my assurances that I would not stay too long, that at the first sign of his weakening, I would switch off the tape recorder and be on my way. Accepting them, perhaps with a grain of salt, for she had seen that eager look in my eye and knew the nature of writers who appear with tape recorders in their hands: they stalk as predators and attach themselves as parasites. But once, in fact, I did leave early, and that seemed to establish my credit with her. I am on her side, and I want her to know it.

  For a woman now living in such comfortable circumstances, Cleo Trumbo has had her share of hard times, and not all of them came to her by courtesy of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. By the time of that particular ordeal, she was used, not to say inured, to trouble. A native Californian, she was born Cleo Fincher in Fresno on July 17, 1916. The Finchers, an old family in that territory, once owned the land on which Friant Dam, outside Fresno, was built. They were prosperous, middle-class people, but her parents were divorced when she was quite young. Her mother, Elizabeth MacElliott Fincher, kept the children, and looking for some sort of independence, coached them into a kind of kid vaudeville act. Brother Dick played the violin as his sisters, Georgia and Cleo, did tap and ballet numbers, and then a song by Georgia and an acrobatic solo dance by Cleo. It went over pretty well. They played the local movie houses (in the twenties, almost all theaters ran a few vaudeville acts in before the feature), and others in small and middle-sized cities in the same general area—Madera and Tulare among them, as well as clubs and lodges, such as the Elks and the Shriners. They were going great guns, in fact, up until the child labor laws were passed in 1927, and the Fincher kids were thus put out of show business. Cleo’s stage career ended then and there at the age of eleven, but her brother and sister went right back to work at it as soon as the law allowed—Georgia in a song-and-dance act that eventually won her work as a dancer in the M-G-M musicals of the thirties and forties; and Dick into music, in which he worked in and around Fresno, until his untimely death in an automobile accident in 1943.

  Following the act’s forced retirement, Mrs. Fincher took the children and moved from Fresno to Los Angeles in order to be near her brother, who was operating a laundry in Pasadena. Cleo went to school there, quite independent, more or less bringing herself up: her mother was working, and by the time Cleo started Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles, both her older brother and sister were out pursuing their own careers as teenagers. It was while she was in high school, at the age of sixteen, that she went swimming in the ocean off Santa Monica Beach and nearly drowned. The undertow got her, and when at last she was pulled out, her lungs were filled with water. As a direct result, she developed empyema, an accumulation of fluid in the chest cavity which led to surgery, the collapse of her left lung, and a six-month stay in Los Angeles General Hospital. The whole experience left quite an impression on her: it wasn’t just the scare she got when she came so close to drowning; it was also the painful recuperation and the long, depressing stay in the hospital. She remembered in particular how, in the open ward, they would place screens around a bed, and that would mean its occupant was dying. When they did that, a pall descended over the place as they waited for the screens to be removed and the corpse to be carried off: it was just a matter of time.

  Those six months that Cleo Fincher spent in Los Angeles General Hospital were in 1932. That was Trumbo’s last full year at the Davis Perfection Bakery at 2nd and Beaudry, only blocks from the hospital. She returned to high school, still in some pain and carrying drainage tubes in her back to keep her left lung clear. All in all, she lost nearly a year in the episode and graduated from high school in 1933, the year Trumbo left the bakery. And so the two came out into the world more or less at the same time, at the very bottom of the Depression: he to try to earn his living for the first time as a writer, and she as a waitress at a small drive-in out in the San Fernando Valley. The drive-in was operated by two sisters, friends of Cleo’s who were not much older, Lucille and Wilma Thompson. The girls made a valiant struggle of it, but the Valley was comparatively empty in those days, and after not much more than a year the stand failed. The three of them went to work then at McDonnell’s Drive-In at Cahuenga and Yucca. That was where she was working when Trumbo met her.

  During my second series of visits to Trumbo, months later, I found him much improved. He was working again, doing a screenplay—an adaptation of whatever for whomever. And with that, he had gone back to the bathtub, spending long hours as he had for a long time past in a tepid soak, writing in longhand on a tablet propped on a writing stand balanced across the tub. When he wasn’t working, he spent a lot of time in bed, for he was still recuperating, had a long way to go, and knew it.

  Cleo was consequently more relaxed and open when she met me at the gate, her smile a little broader, her voice a little surer. Was it that time she wore tennis clothes? It was then, or a day or two later—during that second visit anyway. When I saw that she was on her way to or from the courts down at the bottom of the hill, I knew that Trumbo was much, much better. That made it official.

  He seemed so, too. I remember I talked to him in the bedroom. His voice was stronger. He seemed to be much more in control of his breathing; there were none of those distressing pauses as he would sit for a moment or two, waiting to catch his breath before resuming. The talk flowed on smoothly for an hour or two. Miscellaneous stuff, mostly—questions I had brought back with me from Grand Junction, points I wanted cleared up after further reading through his correspondence and papers which were on file at the University of Wisconsin. We covered the waterfront.

  Finally, toward the end of the session, when we had already agreed we were about through for the day, he said, after a long moment’s pause, “Now, there’s one area that you haven’t touched upon, the only area on which I would place a compulsory approval by my wife—namely, the story of our courtship and marriage. I don’t think you
know anything about it.”

  “I know a little about it,” I said. I had heard sketchy details from a few of his friends, people I had interviewed already.

  “Well, if you know a little,” Trumbo replied, “you should know all. But since it does deal with her, I think she ought to be able to read it.”

  “I think that’s fair,” I said. We had decided between us that there would be no manuscript approval by him. Accuracy would be my responsibility. Better a few errors of fact than to write a book intended first to please its subject. This proviso on the material dealing with Cleo and their courtship was, then, the only exception he made to our original agreement. And, as I said to him then, it seemed only fair.

  Irving Thalberg had told the head of his story department, Samuel Marx, to go out and get him the best writers there were, and Marx had taken him at his word. That was how it happened that during the mid-thirties, the time they refer to at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as the Thalberg era, some of the brightest and wittiest people in America came to work at the studio. Seated at the writers’ tables in the M-G-M commissary on any given afternoon back then, you might find the likes of Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, S. N. Behrman, George S. Kaufman—and perhaps in one corner, a little in awe of the rest, Dalton Trumbo and his friend Earl Felton.

  That, at least, was where the two were one day in the spring of 1936 when they had a conversation that changed Trumbo’s life, eventually for the better—though for a while the issue was in doubt. At that time he was living in the house in the Hollywood Hills with his mother and his sister Elizabeth, who then was having her brief fling as a student at UCLA. Trumbo was ill at ease, discontent, still waiting, at thirty-two, for his life to begin. He was drinking too much, and he knew it. And as it happened, he did a good deal of that drinking with Earl Felton, a fellow B-movie writer there at Metro who was physically handicapped and possessed of a fierce wit that was as often as not turned against himself. On dismal, drunken occasions, Trumbo had poured out his discontents to Felton and had confided that what he really wanted most was to get married.