TRUMBO Read online

  That was where they stood when, that day in the commissary, Felton asked him if he were still sure that he wanted to get married.

  Trumbo said he was, and then began to hold forth once again on the many advantages in it he saw for himself.

  But Felton cut him short. “Never mind that now. I think I’ve found the girl for you.”

  Involuntarily Trumbo glanced around the commissary, as though he half-expected to have her pointed out to him from where they sat. “Who is she?” he asked. “Where?”

  Felton frowned. “Never mind. Trust me. We’ll go out tonight—drinks and dinner—and then I’ll take you to her and introduce you.”

  That was it then. Trumbo knew enough not to press his friend. The night proceeded just about as Earl Felton had outlined it until, after dinner, they set out to meet the young lady Felton had picked out for him. Much to Trumbo’s surprise they drove to the McDonnell’s Drive-In, then at the corner of Cahuenga and Yucca.

  “Here?” Trumbo asked.

  “Here,” Felton said firmly.

  In 1936, the drive-in restaurant—complete with carhops, curbside service, and short-order menu—was a fairly recent innovation. There were not all that many of them, even in Hollywood, and the McDonnell’s at Cahuenga and Yucca, part of a small but successful Los Angeles chain, was one of the few all-night stands open in town. It drew heavily from the surrounding area where there were film studios and low-rent court apartments in which extras, bit players, technical people, film people of all kinds were living. And so McDonnell’s was a lively place with a lively regular clientele. It may not have been Musso & Frank’s, but it drew its share of famous names and faces, especially late at night as they trailed in for the coffees and hamburgers which they hoped would sober them up. It had become a favorite last stop for Earl Felton.

  He knew his way around it. He waved a greeting to a couple in another car as he pulled in. Then he flashed his lights for service. A carhop two or three cars away called over that she would be right there. Felton pointed her out to Trumbo as she walked quickly away in the direction of the service counter. “See her?” he asked. “That’s the girl for you.”

  It was Cleo Fincher, of course. When she came over to take their order Trumbo saw that she was really a remarkable girl. Good-looking, yes, young, trim, and pretty—but something more. She knew how to handle herself. Trumbo joked with her when Felton introduced them. Cleo came back with retorts that showed she was bright enough to parry with the best of her customers, and she had been given plenty of practice. She was the favorite there at McDonnell’s Drive-In. Working nights—from six to two or eight to four—she attracted the attention of the men, who usually said they might be able to give a pretty girl like her a big break in the movies. They buzzed around her like flies around the sugar bowl. A well-known cinematographer seriously offered to arrange a screen test for her. A slightly sinister movie stunt man frightened her by making a habit of trailing her home. She was propositioned almost nightly.

  But not all the attention directed her way was of that sort. Cleo was—and was still when I met her—a very likable person. The late director Frank Tuttle and his wife, Tanya, for example, were frequent visitors to McDonnell’s. They came to know and like this nineteen-year-old carhop well enough to invite her to dinner at their home on one of her Mondays off. Cleo had told Tanya Tuttle, who happened to be a Russian-born dancer, that she herself had done some dancing when she was younger. The Tuttles were intrigued and invited Paul Draper, the dancer, to the same dinner, to see how the two would hit it off. In effect, they were matchmaking. But it didn’t take. Cleo was much less sure of herself than she seemed at the drive-in, her turf. She was slightly intimidated by Draper and the Tuttles.

  And so with all the attention she had been receiving at the drive-in Cleo Fincher was used to glib and impetuous plays for her. Even so, Trumbo surprised her, even astonished her, when he asked her to marry him at the end of that first night’s visit as she came to collect the door tray from Earl Felton’s car.

  Marry him? What was with this guy, anyway? Nice enough looking and well dressed. He didn’t look drunk. It didn’t seem like a joke; he seemed absolutely serious about it. Cleo could only conclude that this guy who had been introduced as Dalton Trumbo was crazy. Literally that.

  Trumbo did not do much during their courtship to persuade her otherwise. He began showing up every night at the drive-in in that chauffeur-driven Chrysler Imperial of his. And the more he persisted, the more certain she became that he was insane. Every night he appeared he put the question to her again.

  “Why don’t you at least give it some serious thought?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “You’re not married now, are you?”

  “No. I told you I wasn’t.”

  “Then marry me.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am being serious. Can’t you tell? Look, at least let me take you out next Monday night.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got a boyfriend. I told you that. I’m going out with him.”

  It was true enough. She did have a boyfriend. Nevertheless she had told herself in the beginning to pay no attention to Trumbo no matter how persistent he might become, no matter how he protested his love, and no matter how ardently he declared his wish to marry her. She refused to believe any of it. She was sure he was crazy.

  Lucille and Wilma Thompson, her friends from that early independent effort at a drive-in in the Valley, were a good deal less certain than Cleo that Trumbo was mad. They kind of liked the guy. He was, in any case, a lot nicer than that brash bartender-restaurant manager Cleo had been going out with. They advised her to look more favorably upon Trumbo. Maybe he really did want to marry her. Maybe he wasn’t as crazy as she thought. The Thompson sisters became Cleo’s advocates there at McDonnell’s Drive-In. They encouraged him, passed on to him information about his rival, and kept him up to date on the progress of his own petition. And to Cleo they argued in his behalf.

  Just like the cameraman who had preceded him at McDonnell’s, Trumbo became convinced that Cleo had a future in motion pictures; that if she were only given a screen test and her special quality captured on film, then a studio—M-G-M, as he imagined it—would certainly see her potential and sign her to a contract. He told her this. She told him to forget it; she’d heard that one before. But he persisted, and she kept turning him down. In all, he must have brought it up to her a dozen times and just as many times she turned him down. Finally, in utter exasperation, she agreed to meet him for the proposed screen test. She was never serious about it because she was sure he wasn’t serious about it. But he was! He lined up a cameraman and, on the appointed date, had him come to the home of a married couple whom they both knew, because he didn’t want the test to seem to Cleo “a prelude to seduction.” The big night came. Trumbo had worked up a scene for her. The cameraman was ready. They waited. She never came.

  Anybody else might have been discouraged by this—but not Trumbo. He redoubled his efforts. He wanted to win her away from this “boyfriend” of hers, whoever he was, and if possible, to get her to leave the drive-in and work someplace else—practically anyplace else where she wouldn’t be so completely available to others. As long as she was there at McDonnell’s, anybody in Hollywood could talk to her for the price of a hamburger. What if Clark Gable should happen in and turn on the charm? What chance would Trumbo stand against him? He had to get her out of there somehow.

  One night he put it up to her. “Look,” he said, “have you ever thought of leaving here? Taking some other kind of job?”

  “Leave the drive-in? But I like it here.”

  “Well, I know, but you don’t expect to work here all your life, do you?”

  “No, maybe not. But where else would I work? I don’t know how to do anything, really, except what I’m doing here.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Trumbo said. “How would you like to go to secretarial school?”

  Not very much at
all, as it turned out. He urged it upon her, offered to pay the tuition, told her she ought to think about making some sort of future for herself. Again, she turned him down time after time. But again, too, Trumbo persisted. He kept insisting soberly that she think of her future, that she take the long view (when all the while what he was most interested in was getting her away from all those hungry wolves at the drive-in). In the end, she had to admit that it was probably practical to get job training of some sort, and secretarial seemed as good as any. So she gave in at last and agreed to go.

  It was a disaster. In a way, it could hardly have been otherwise, for to work at all, it meant that Cleo had to get by on three or four hours’ sleep each night—up at seven to be at the school by eight; there until twelve; perhaps a nap in the afternoon; and then, depending on her shift, in to work at McDonnell’s Drive-In at four or six P.M. to work until two or four A.M. She told Trumbo she got “sleepy.” Not surprising. What is surprising is that she managed to stick out the schedule for two weeks before deciding she really didn’t want to be a secretary, anyway, and paying him back the money he had invested in her future.

  The screen test was one bit of difficulty; the secretarial school was still another; but the biggest difficulty of all for Trumbo—and for Cleo, too—was Hal. Call him that. It is as good a name as any for her boyfriend, the front-runner, the suitor who was there long before Trumbo appeared on the scene. He had established prior rights—had staked out his claim on Cleo. Just as Trumbo did, Hal wanted to marry her. Lucille and Wilma Thompson quite frankly did not like him. They were suspicious of him from the start. He seemed to be not quite what he said he was. He had declared he wanted to marry Cleo but then delayed, saying he was waiting for his divorce to become final. Then, however, when he learned about Trumbo as a competitor, he was suddenly eager to marry her; the time was suddenly just right.

  Unwittingly, Trumbo forced the issue. At this point he had been courting in his crazy fashion, receiving little or no encouragement, for better than a year. He had never even had a date with her. He kept pressing her to go out with him. Cleo, feeling she had let him down on the secretarial course and growing fonder of him as she got used to him, agreed at last. They would meet at the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for the show and go out to dinner afterward. Given even this much encouragement, Trumbo was suddenly certain that he could win her. But somehow Hal got wind of the upcoming date and, feeling the pressure from his rival, he told Cleo that he had just gotten word that his divorce decree had come through and the way was now clear for them to marry. He wanted to take her away immediately. This was what they had been waiting for, wasn’t it? Well, yes, but now Cleo was a little less certain about wanting to marry Hal than she had been before. Still, she allowed herself to be persuaded, cajoled, and finally pushed into it—she was only nineteen, after all—and the two drove off to Reno to get married. That was the day of Trumbo’s date with her at the Pantages. He waited for her for an hour and a half in front of the theater and finally went to McDonnell’s to find out what had happened. Then he heard the bad news: Cleo had gone off with Hal. Trumbo later realized that if he had not made that date with her, she would probably not have been stampeded into marrying his rival.

  Cleo came back, already a little less than ecstatic about her newlywed state; she feared, and had begun to suspect, that she had done the wrong thing. Perceiving this, Lucille Thompson called Trumbo aside one night at the drive-in and confided her own misgivings: “You know,” she told him, “that divorce of his certainly came through at just the right time for him. I’ve got a suspicion that he either didn’t need to wait for the divorce in the first place and was just stringing her along. Or, when he heard about you, he got scared and told her the decree was final just to get her married to him, which would mean they got married early, and it’s not really legal.”

  “Thanks,” said Trumbo. “I’ll look into it.”

  He did. He hired a private detective who did some checking back in Michigan—Hal was from Detroit—and when the report came through, it confirmed what Trumbo had suspected: the divorce was not yet final, and so Cleo’s marriage was invalid. In the meantime, Trumbo did a little detective work on his own. Although the two rivals knew something about one another, they had never met, never even seen each other. Trumbo took advantage of that, and began hanging out at the small bar and grill that Hal managed in Hollywood. Inevitably, the two fell into conversation. Soon they were having long, convivial, philosophical talks that Trumbo managed to steer in the direction of marriage and domestic life.

  “You’re not married?” Hal asked him one evening. “I don’t know but what you’re better off. I’ve been married twice—I’m married right now—and I’ll tell you something, you just can’t keep them happy.” He went on in that vein, unburdening himself to this sympathetic stranger, making plain what Lucille had hinted to Trumbo: that Cleo was not happy with her marriage. In the course of their talk, Hal also let slip where the newlywed couple was then living (information Trumbo was tempted to use but never did).

  From there, Trumbo would return to McDonnell’s and compare notes with Lucille and Wilma on Cleo’s emotional state, for she would never complain to him. Finally, knowing all that he did about her feelings and armed with the information he had received from Michigan on the divorce, he brought Cleo around to the back of the drive-in one evening and told her what he had learned. “Now look,” he said, “this guy may be fine, but you are not legally married to him. He married you three months before he should have—and if you stay with him, you’re going to be stuck with him. From what I hear, you’re not so happy with him. You should be stuck with me.”

  He was persuasive. He was eloquent. His frank intention was to separate them, to woo her away from her supposed husband, and so he suggested to her a cooling-off period. He proposed that he would rent an apartment for her, for which she alone would have the key, and there, at least theoretically free from emotional pressures, she might coolly and wisely decide with whom she preferred to spend the rest of her life. Trumbo was betting that it would be with him. Cleo agreed to try it. She left her would-be husband without notice, quit her job, and moved secretly into the apartment Trumbo had provided.

  The next day he telephoned her there repeatedly but got no answer. Finally, he went to the drive-in and asked her friends if they had any idea what had become of her. With that, Lucille took him aside and upbraided him for what he had done—or rather, for what he had not: “You fool!” she said. “You shouldn’t have left her alone like that. Don’t you understand anything about women? The girl was lonely, confused. She got up in the middle of the night, got dressed, and walked back home to Hal. What the hell did you expect her to do?”

  “You’re right, of course,” he sighed. “I can see that now. But what am I going to do?”

  “Well, whatever you do, don’t give up. You don’t think she would have agreed to that apartment idea in the first place, do you, if you weren’t winning her over? Of course not! Keep after her!”

  Christmas was coming—Christmas 1937—and it seemed to Trumbo that he had to win her away from Hal by then, or his cause would be lost absolutely and finally. Cleo’s fault in this was her virtue: she was intensely loyal. She knew by now that she wasn’t legally married to Hal; she had also come to realize that she didn’t even like the guy much; but she felt that since she had made her commitment to him, it was up to her to honor it. Trumbo understood all this, and he was afraid that if she spent Christmas with Hal it would put a “sentimental seal” on their relationship. The two could then repair the marriage at their leisure and go through the ceremony again, and that would be the end of Trumbo as far as Cleo was concerned. He felt it was now or never.

  And so with Cleo once more back at McDonnell’s, he mounted his final campaign, choosing a day on which she reported at six P.M. to work until two in the morning. He put Lucille and Wilma Thompson on notice and asked them to let him know as soon as she showed signs of weakening. E
very half an hour that day Cleo got a telegram pleading his case, accompanied by a gift—“not sumptuous or lavish but something chosen to please her.” Each time a telegram came, it was brought directly to her by a kid from Western Union on a bike; business was slow at the drive-in, and as the night wore on and the telegrams piled up, Cleo found herself going broke tipping the messenger boys. In the meantime, Trumbo had gone to the house of a friend, Morton Grant, who lived in the Valley, determined to wait it out. There, about ten-thirty that night, he got a call from Lucille Thompson, telling him to come right away—not to waste a minute, for Cleo at last saw things his way. He ran out and jumped into his car (on such a personal mission as this one he was driving the Chrysler himself and had given his chauffeur the night off) and roared off into the night—in the wrong direction. He was in Burbank before he discovered his error, then had to backtrack to Cahuenga, then down to Yucca, where he arrived at the drive-in many minutes late.

  Wilma was motioning him to park his car at the rear in a dark area of the lot. Then she ran into the women’s rest room, and they emerged, Lucille and Wilma, one on each side, bringing a weeping Cleo across the parking lot to his car. That was that. She had given in completely. Distraught, confused, hoping for the best, she surrendered to him.

  This did not mean, however, that there were not trials to come. That very night, after driving and talking for hours in the car, Cleo and Dalton went to Wilma Thompson’s for a late supper, then left for a little while to buy some things at an all-night market. They returned to Wilma’s with groceries to learn that Hal had been there in their absence, brandishing a pistol, demanding to know where Cleo was. He had gone through every closet, looked under the beds, and left, promising to return. He was a very angry man—not without some cause.