TRUMBO Page 16

  Cleo had no clothes, no bags, nothing but the brief, military-cut uniform she had worn that day to work. In it, she went with Trumbo late that night, and they took rooms in a Hollywood hotel. He could hardly take her home to his mother, and he was not about to leave her alone again. She had to have something to wear, of course, and so the next morning Trumbo called his business manager, filled him in on what had happened, and had him buy and bring a couple of dresses so that she would have something, at least, to wear out of the hotel. He took her out in one of them and bought her a wedding ring, demonstrating that his intentions, at least, were honorable. Then on to a department store to buy a wardrobe for her. There—perhaps she was growing ill with flu, or more likely it was just the emotional strain of the events of the past twenty-four hours—Cleo fainted. Trumbo took her back to the hotel and nursed her back to health as best he could over the next few days, running into M-G-M from time to time to convince them he still worked there.

  That was where he was one afternoon when the guard phoned him from the gate to tell him that there was a guy patrolling the area, asking for Dalton Trumbo. The guard had asked the guy—it was Hal, of course—what he wanted with Trumbo. “I’m going to kill him,” Hal told the guard.

  “What do you want me to do, Mr. Trumbo?” the gate guard asked. “Shall I call the cops?”

  “Uh, well, no. See if you can get rid of him. Tell him I’m not here today or something.”

  That day it worked. Hal left. Trumbo knew that next time it might not. The only thing to do, it seemed, was to get out of town until Hal cooled off. (He was a deputy sheriff of Los Angeles County and entitled to carry that gun wherever he went.) And so they left, the three of them: Trumbo thought, under the circumstances, it would be best if his chauffeur, Harvey, accompanied them; Harvey thought, under the circumstances, it would be best if he took along a gun, which he did. Only a .22 rifle, but it rode next to him on the front seat all the way on the drive down to La Jolla, just in case Hal should show up with his gun. On their first night in La Jolla one of the bus boys at the hotel where they were staying developed a sudden crush on Trumbo’s Chrysler and decided to take it out on a joyride. In the process, he wrecked it. They chose not to press charges. After all, the bus boy was not much more than a child, and besides, Cleo and Trumbo were feeling so guilty by that time that they hadn’t the heart to prosecute anyone. While they waited for the Chrysler to be repaired, Trumbo took her to visit his sister Catherine, who was living in San Diego with her then-husband, William Baldwin. She was the first member of the family to meet Cleo, and the two of them hit it off marvelously well.

  About a week elapsed before the car was ready. That, they felt, was just about right for their return. They drove back to Long Beach and registered at a beach hotel. There they continued the long, hard process of meeting and winning over the family, one by one. It was about that time that they took Cleo’s mother out to dinner and provided her with her first glimpse of the man who had turned her daughter’s life upside down; Trumbo passed muster. The not-quite-newlyweds spent Christmas with friends—among them, Earl Felton, the man who had started it all—at a little apartment they had taken in Hollywood. And finally, after Christmas, they made ready for their severest test: meeting Dalton’s mother.

  Maud Trumbo had known, or strongly suspected, for quite some time that there was a Cleo in her son’s life. He had confided nothing, but there were hints and clues that only one less acute than she would have missed. There were, first of all, a year and a half of evenings spent at McDonnell’s Drive-In. She must have been aware, if only from Dalton’s desperation during the latter months, that there was something important happening in his life. And then that sudden departure and the trip to San Diego—that must have made her curious. If all this weren’t enough, upon their return, Dalton had been unwise enough to call for service from the same laundry his mother used. Inevitably, there was a mixup, and some of Cleo’s things showed up in Maud’s bundle.

  So when the invitation came to her from Dalton to come to his apartment for dinner “to meet someone,” she was well primed to expect something. Nevertheless Cleo surprised her. Although rather straitlaced, Maud Trumbo knew quality when she saw it. The dinner went beautifully. Dalton explained their situation and made sure his mother understood the reasons behind it—Hal, the invalid marriage, all of it. She understood, all right. Toward the end of the evening, with Cleo out of earshot, Maud took her son aside and said severely, “You have disgraced this wonderful girl, and now you must marry her.” Dalton assured her that nothing would suit him better, and that as soon as they could get the legalities of the matter ironed out, he would do just that.

  It took a while. And in the meantime, there were further developments: circumstances conjoined to bring them even closer. First of all, Trumbo lost his job at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His single-minded pursuit of Cleo during the two years he was there had played hell with his screenwriting career. Although he had worked on a number of projects, he had not a single credit to show for his time at Metro. When he had left with Cleo to escape Hal, Trumbo’s friend, the producer Sam Zimbalist, had covered for him as long as he could. Finally, there was no help for it—Trumbo was fired. Zimbalist had taken the news to the couple just after Christmas. Trumbo, unemployed, had just $1,200 left to his name. He put it in a box and assured her they would get more somehow. And of course they did. Money was not their worry.

  He managed to sell an original screen story, later the basis for the film The Kid from Kokomo, to his old studio, Warner Bros. His friend Frank Daugherty, the man who had gotten him his first movie job there in the story department, was the person Trumbo dealt with. Daugherty happened to mention to him in the course of things that he knew of an absolutely terrific buy in a ranch far up in the mountains of Ventura County. It was a 320-acre spread with a cabin and ranch buildings on it for only $7,500—and just $750 down. Trumbo told Daugherty he wanted it sight unseen; it seemed just the place he had in mind for Cleo and himself to settle down in and start their lives together. He borrowed the money for the down payment and bought the ranch. Next weekend he and Cleo drove up to look it over. It was primitive, all right—there was no telephone (he never had one installed), the only light was provided by individual kerosene lamps, although there was indoor plumbing. But it was remote from Hollywood and isolated from the outside world, and that suited him just fine.

  Cleo had filed for an annulment on grounds that Hal had not been legally free to marry when the ceremony was performed. The facts were all on her side, but because three states were involved—she and Hal were residents of California who had married in Nevada; and Hal’s divorce had been filed in Michigan—it took a little time putting the case together. At last the judgment came, the marriage was annulled, and she and Trumbo were free to wed. The ceremony took place at Maud Trumbo’s apartment on March 13, 1938. Presiding, appropriately enough, was Ben B. Lindsay, the controversial judge of the Los Angeles County Courts who had gained national notoriety for advocating “companionate marriage.”

  Cleo presented Trumbo with a dowry of sorts. Quite unknown to him, she had carefully kept all the tips he had given her after their first night at McDonnell’s Drive-In. She had saved them apart from the rest. Why? Had she suspected from the start, in spite of her repeated rejections, that the two of them would wind up together? Probably. In any case, she handed Trumbo back his tips, over one hundred dollars. She called it her dowry.

  Cleo had read an earlier version of the preceding account, and Trumbo told me she seemed a little uneasy about it for reasons he couldn’t exactly define—though he did say she let him know the information he had given me about the affair was both inaccurate and insufficient.

  And so when next I saw her, I asked her to read through the earlier version with me present. Trumbo was there, too. This way I hoped to get at what it was, besides facts and dates, that troubled her. She turned the pages, one by one, frowning and shaking her head.

  I looked over at Tr
umbo and shrugged. “What’s wrong?” he asked her.

  “It doesn’t make it clear here that if you were an ordinary man, things wouldn’t have been nearly so difficult for you.” She kept reading—and kept frowning. Finally with a sigh she finished.

  “Well?”

  “You don’t get the feeling out of this of how glad I am I married this crazy man instead of some dull son of a bitch.”

  Later, I talked to her alone and asked her about that.

  “Well, it’s true!” she protested. “He is just not an ordinary man. He goes at everything like a sort of dynamo. Imagine how he seemed to a kid like me. He’d be there, night after night, maybe he would have been drinking and maybe not. It didn’t matter. Either way he was so intense, so single-minded in his courting—if you want to call it that. He goes at anything this way. He’ll do anything to get what he wants. That was how he was; he acted crazy. Eventually, of course, this crazy quality of his—and I do mean slightly nuts—which had frightened me at first actually began to attract me. He just isn’t like other men. The better look I had at the rest of them, the more I thought that was really in his favor.”

  “And what about Hal?”

  “Well, what can I say? I’d been going with the man for a year and a half. And in that time I’d discovered so many things I didn’t like about him. I was in that old dilemma of being in love with a man I didn’t like a lot. Basically, I didn’t want to be married. But of course Hal pushed me into that when he felt me getting interested in Trumbo. He made his move the very night we were going out on our first date, you know.”

  I nodded. I knew.

  “And then, well, Trumbo convinced me I’d made a mistake. It didn’t take all that much convincing. Hal and I must have been married—together, anyway—all of two weeks.”

  “What was life with Trumbo like?” I asked.

  “After Hal? Mostly Trumbo was different from what I expected, though I can’t imagine now what that could have been. I had to get used to a few things. You may not know it, but he used to spend days in the bathtub, soaking, writing, talking on the telephone. The telephone was like his best friend. He’d spend hours on it, it seemed. When we got to the ranch, I was so happy because there was no telephone. I would never have guessed that he could have gotten along without it.”

  No episode in Dalton Trumbo’s life is more revealing of the man than this story of his courtship and marriage. The way that he went after Cleo, apparently impetuously but with a sustained and almost obsessive concentration, foreshadowed the intensity with which, in twenty years’ time, he would be working to break the blacklist.

  Dalton Trumbo was a romantic, and the shade of Jay Gatsby, so casually summoned up a couple of chapters back to suggest Trumbo’s pining after Sylvia Shore, seems to fit him better and perhaps more specifically than I had realized. It is not just that Gatsby, too, was a romantic—the romantic hero of American literature—but that there was a fabulous quality to his life, a sense of making it up like a story as he went along, which seems to fit Trumbo perfectly. The life Trumbo wrote for himself rivals, and really surpasses, any literary work he undertook. You get the feeling, looking back over it, that nothing he did, no decision he made, should ever be taken at face value, for all of it had immense significance, mythic and moral, to him. His courtship of Cleo Fincher is such a fascinating story because in a very real sense it is a story—that is how Trumbo must have experienced it, with himself as hero and she as heroine. How else could he have seen it through as he did to its successful completion? He believed passionately and profoundly in happy endings.

  All this goes a long way toward explaining his affinity for film-writing. It was his métier, perhaps the kind of work that suited his deeper nature best. And so it shouldn’t be surprising, nor even too disappointing, that he returned to movie work at the earliest opportunity. The invitation came from RKO Radio Pictures in April 1938. His agent, Arthur Landau, worked out a contract for him there which contained an important proviso: it stipulated he had the right to work at home—in this case eighty-five miles away at the Lazy-T—as he called his new ranch up in Ventura County.

  At RKO Trumbo was once again installed as a writer in the B-picture unit. There, as at Warners, the accent was on quantity; speed and craftsmanship were the qualities that mattered. Movie production was up all over Hollywood. In the midst of the Depression every studio in town had started cranking movies out as fast as they could make them. The reason was that at that time the studios owned nearly all of the movie theaters, vast chains of them, all around the country. They had to keep them filled, and to do that they had to keep new films flowing through them constantly. The double feature was born during the Depression as just another means of pulling audiences in. And with the double feature came the B picture, second feature, the “bottom of the bill.” As a result, the studios were forced to keep movie production very high, even though they were losing millions in the proposition. Only those who were actually involved in the making of films were doing well at all. Salaries—even salaries for writers on the B unit—were high and getting higher. Everybody in Hollywood seemed to be getting fat in the midst of the Great Depression.

  His first assignment at RKO, a routine B production titled Fugitives for a Night, was discharged in short order. It was shot, released, and passed into extinction quite without notice—the fate of most such films. His next, however, was somewhat different. A Man to Remember was a remake of a 1933 film, One Man’s Journey, and both were based on a published story (not an original for the screen) by Katharine Havilland-Taylor, “Failure.” Working up at the ranch, Trumbo did the screenplay in two weeks, and Garson Kanin, in his first directorial assignment, shot the film in just fifteen days. They actually came in under budget at $108,000 and so were able to argue a musical score at $8,000 (originally unbudgeted) out of the studio.

  It was a good film, one that stood head and shoulders above the usual B product. Starring Edward Ellis, Anne Shirley, and Lee Bowman, it told the story of a small-town doctor (Ellis), a supposed failure who has died in debt as the film begins. The events of his life, related in a series of flashbacks, demonstrate that no matter what the merchants who are pressing their claims against his estate may have thought, he was no failure but a man who brought life and hope to the entire town, one to remember.

  Obviously, this was material with which Dalton Trumbo could identify personally. The small-town setting, the theme questioning the nature of failure and success—these he had treated at length in his novel Eclipse, and would give incidental treatment to again in Johnny Got His Gun. He put his stamp on the film. The atmosphere, the general feeling of it, is what might have come from a movie adaptation of Eclipse, and the small-town doctor is so much like the protagonist of Trumbo’s novel that as a kind of final gesture of authorship Trumbo gave him the same name; the protagonist of A Man to Remember is Dr. John Abbott.

  It was the first film with which Trumbo was involved to gain any sort of special attention. He was singled out for praise by, among others, the New York Times critic, Frank S. Nugent, who noted in passing that it was “one of the most uncolossal pictures of the year.” He categorized it as a good little movie and put it on his ten-best list that year. It appeared on a number of others. And while the job Trumbo did on A Man to Remember didn’t immediately change his status as a screenwriter—he continued on the RKO B unit—he took pride in the film for years to come.

  During that first year at RKO, a production of Washington Jitters was eventually brought to Broadway. As it finally happened, though, Kaufman and Hart had nothing to do with it. The team had had some success the year before with their own political satire, I’d Rather Be Right, and perhaps by the time John Boruff and Walter Hart got their adaptation of Jitters untracked, the vein had been temporarily exhausted. At any rate, when the Theatre Guild produced it in association with the Actors Repertory Company in 1938, the play ran only twenty-four performances in spite of reviews that were, on balance, favorable.
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br />   Trumbo, of course, had nothing to do with the adaptation of Washington Jitters. His only participation in the enterprise, as original author of the work, was the receipt of a box-office statement and a modest check during each of the few weeks it ran. But that doesn’t mean he had been doing no writing of his own. In the course of that long period he spent in pursuit of Cleo, he had begun a novel, one as different as could be from Washington Jitters. It was certainly the most serious and—as it would turn out—also the best work of any kind he had ever undertaken.

  The move out to the ranch was undertaken partly* to give him a chance to finish this new novel, which was to become Johnny Got His Gun. He wanted to insulate himself from Hollywood, perhaps to avoid social occasions that (with the Spanish Civil War in 1936–1939, and the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 followed by the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany) had grown increasingly political as war seemed more imminent. He was personally convinced that America should stay out of a European war that now seemed inevitable. His reasons had their roots in his experience as a boy, seeing the young veterans he had known returning from World War I—some maimed, blind, and broken—to Grand Junction. But it was more than sentiment that swayed him. His was also certainly an intellectual position. He held to it firmly because he thought any other was then quite unreasonable.

  Never one to avoid an argument, he must frequently have found himself in bitter debate at that time with people he had always felt in fundamental agreement with before. Nothing is so ruinous to the writing of a novel as to find oneself arguing the intellectual point of it night after night. It was for this reason, to avoid such occasions, that he removed himself from Hollywood to the Lazy-T during the writing of Johnny Got His Gun. The important thing was to get the novel written and let that stand as his statement against the war, rather than dithering it away in a hundred separate wrangles.