TRUMBO Read online

  I met with them in the apartment of Ring Lardner, Jr. Also present were Frances Lardner and Ian’s wife, Alice Goldberg Hunter, who has known Trumbo longest of them all—since the days the two worked together in the Warner Bros. story department. With all of them—the two men especially—I sensed a certain reticence born of propriety, as though it bothered them a little to speak of something as personal as their friendship with Trumbo. But they did speak freely and quite personally, almost out of a sense of duty. More than from anyone else I talked to (with the exception of Trumbo himself), I got the feeling from Ring Lardner, Jr., and from Ian McLellan Hunter that they were consciously and carefully speaking for the record.

  “We were all writers at M-G-M,” Lardner remembered. “It must have been about 1937.” He looked to Hunter for confirmation and then nodded. “Yes, 1937. We looked up to him because he was very much our senior, the old pro. Remember by this time he’d published a couple of novels and many stories and had a number of movie credits, too.”

  “My first memory of Trumbo?” Hunter echoed my question. “Well, that would have to be him in his big black Chrysler. I saw him in it before I actually knew him. He was in a hut down the road from where I worked, which was in a location hut near Metro’s Tarzan jungle. But as for when we actually met, I guess that was at a party. He came up to me and congratulated me for a script I didn’t write, an Andy Hardy, as I recall. He was embarrassed by his mistake but then we got that sorted out and became friends.”

  Alice Hunter remembered the Chrysler, too: “I recall going out with him once before Cleo sort of exploded into his life. He invited me to the Philharmonic Hall for some event, and in the course of getting there, I did something terrible to the Chrysler. As I recall I must have opened up the car door extra wide and chipped paint off his car. Anyway, he was just princely in the way he handled it—so gallant. He neither cut me off his list for all time or said one word of reproach. We simply went off and saw the concert.”

  I asked her what he was like then. “Physically? You mean what did he look like? Well, he was sandy-haired and had a mustache off and on. He was slight but strong, kind of wiry.”

  “We’ve got a picture of him someplace on a yachting trip,” Ring Lardner put in.

  Alice Hunter nodded and remembered, “And we have a picture of the three of you wrestling.”

  “That wrestling got to be a big thing with us,” Lardner mused. “I don’t know why exactly. We’d all gang up on one—say, Trumbo, Ian, and me against Hugo—then suddenly switch sides and start in on another. We called it the treachery system.”

  “The way Trumbo was,” said Alice Hunter, “he challenged all comers. This was how his son, Chris, grew up, arm wrestling his father practically every day. Meanwhile the kid was getting stronger and stronger, and finally, when he was in high school, he took Trumbo and took him with a vengeance. Trumbo put all he had into it, but Chris forced him down. Finally, Trumbo strained so that he tore the muscle in his arm, just detached the bicep completely. Couldn’t use that arm for weeks. And that ended the Indian wrestling.”

  They talked about Cleo and how right she was for him. During Trumbo’s relentless courtship, his friends had gradually become aware of her and finally had gone to the drive-in to see for themselves, “Who is this girl everyone’s raving about?” Hunter summed up: “With us, she was from another world, you might say. But she immediately sized us up and her assessment of us and our relationship with Trumbo was always correct.”

  (Sometime before, I had talked with Jean Butler,* Hugo Butler’s widow, in Hollywood, and the subject of Cleo had come up with her, too. “I remember Trumbo bringing her to dinner for the first time,” Jean Butler had told me. “She was coltish, lovely—a shy, awkward girl. I don’t think she said a word all night long, just gave us that big grin of hers and charmed us all.”)

  “It was funny with him,” said Lardner. “When I first got to know him he was going through bankruptcy, chauffeur-driven Chrysler and all. And he no sooner got through that crisis than he was into another. It seemed that little time ever elapsed between one set of money problems and another. He would get out and then overextend himself again. Buying the ranch was part of that routine—or not so much just buying it as what he did to it afterward. When we first went up there to visit them, it was just a little shack, way the hell and gone up into Ventura County. But that shack grew and grew. Before you knew it the shack itself had become the kitchen and there were two additional rooms.”

  “And then the landscaping,” prompted Alice Hunter. “He put in a big lake and all.”

  “What a place that was!” exclaimed Ian Hunter. “When they were finished adding onto it, it had a marble floor and a bar, a formal bar in an elaborate room. And off that was an enormous dining room done in some high-class Philippine wood, the kind of paneling job that would be just prohibitive today.

  “But it was always a working ranch. There were farm animals, and at its height there were a lot of horses. Cleo wasn’t a bad rider but Trumbo himself could hardly stay in the saddle. I remember once in the winter a couple visiting them had headed down in a car to the little crossroads general store when it started to snow, a real blizzard, very suddenly. We were quite rightly worried and headed out on foot to look for them. Dalton disappeared. We went out and found the car stalled in the snow some distance away. There was a kid in the car, I remember, and I was carrying the kid back with the house already in sight through the heavy snow when Trumbo suddenly came galloping out of the barn and up to us on a horse to join the search party. He had taken all that time just trying to get the horse saddled. He was no cowboy.”

  Ring Lardner, Jr., nodded. “The place was so remote and inaccessible that you were really at the mercy of the weather. No Hollywood producer could conceive of a place so inaccessible. The telephone process was just horrendous—to get a call through they had to get hold of the store at the crossroads and convince somebody there that the call was important enough for them to drive twenty miles to get Trumbo, which wasn’t easy, and then have Trumbo drive twenty miles back to the store to take the call. In most cases, the producer would be reduced to driving up to the ranch. And producers didn’t really like to do that. You’d take 101 north along what they called the ridge route—it had a fearsome reputation, that stretch of road. Trucks’ brakes would give out all the time. In fact, Cleo’s brother and his family were killed by a truck that went out of control along there. At the crest of the ridge was this little crossroads town of Lebec. You turned due west there and went up this crappy little road twenty miles to his ranch. If all this was a barrier between Trumbo and the producers, as he intended, it also made difficulties for him.

  “We used to drive up there on the weekends. I remember one Friday we left about ten-thirty at night. And on an impulse we turned off to visit Hugo Butler in the valley. We got there and found the house dark but the door unlocked. The Butlers were asleep. We tiptoed inside and had a couple of drinks at the bar and got to thinking what a great joke it would be on Hugo and Jean if we were to rearrange their furniture and then leave. So that’s what we were doing, and in the course of it making some pretty big bumps and scrapes, when we heard this very tough, ‘Don’t move!’ We looked around to find Hugo standing in the doorway with a shotgun. We dropped down behind the bar and called out that we were friends. So we all had a big laugh and more drinks, and Trumbo and I slept on the living room floor and left the next morning.”

  (Jean Butler had remarked earlier to me of that time in their lives, “That was early, 1939, when the Katzenjammer period began. All this wrestling and the pranks they’d play—it was crazy. I don’t know how the other wives felt, but to me we seemed superfluous—the husbands were absolutely self-winding. They had a life of their own. In that movie of his, Husbands, John Cassavetes touches on it a little. It was like that.”)

  “With all these elaborate jokes and with the expeditions we used to go on,” said Alice Hunter, “Trumbo was sort of an instigator, a regular
Clausewitz. He got a lot of enjoyment out of planning strategy, putting together moves, like a general.”

  (Jean Butler: “It was a little like having Dickens or Twain as your buddy. Even in this foursome, Trumbo was very much in the lead. It was the impact of his personality on all of us, the speed of his wit. He had the theatrical qualities of a Twain or a Dickens, too. It was just the way the room sorted itself out. You listened to him. Everybody else tended to take second place in the relationship.”)

  “Occasionally, however,” said Ring Lardner, Jr., “we were serious. About writing, for instance.”

  “That’s right,” said Hunter, “but the general philosophy was, don’t bother your friends with your work problems if everything’s going basically okay. To this day Ring will only know in general what I’m working on without the nitty-gritty details. The idea was always that we consult each other when we have soluble problems with alternatives and are past the blockage. There was never any shoptalk as such, however.”

  “But,” said Lardner, “about specific story problems, yes, we might ask for help and you’d read perhaps half the script and have a conference of several hours in which you’d get everybody’s best ideas. It was truly a free interchange. That happened.”

  “Then there was his idea book,” said Ian McLellan Hunter. “Like most writers Trumbo had more ideas than he could execute, so he would put them down for future use. If he wrote it and sold it, he would check it off in his book. But if one of us was in trouble—‘between assignments,’ as the euphemism goes—he would be invited to ransack the idea book. My screenplay The Day It Rained Money was sort of a collaboration of this kind.”

  “Look,” said Alice Hunter, summing up, “in many ways it was an enormously meaningful relationship for all four of them, Hugo included. The blacklist brought tremendous closeness to them. When Ring and Trumbo got out of prison, Hugo split what he had in the bank with them. Anybody who got a check would share it with the other guys. The type of banter they engaged in could only come out of a deep and close relationship. In no way could any of the kidding they did—and they did a lot of it—be taken as a threat, an attack, or an insult. Even today, if we were in serious trouble, we would turn to each other, which may be why we still keep in close touch.”

  Silence hung over them for a moment. Ring Lardner, Jr., started to speak, then hesitated. He was a pensive, careful man, as laconic as his famous father. He chose his words well and thought out his statements before he made them. He was the first of the Hollywood Ten (with the exception of Edward Dmytryk, whose motive was self-serving) to reveal that in fact he had at one time been a member of the Communist Party and was one when called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. He wrote about his membership in the Party in the Saturday Evening Post in 1961, when he surely might still have been considered blacklisted. He spoke plainly and directly on this point that would certainly have troubled the readers of the Post. With that same spirit of directness, of putting his cards on the table, he brought up what we had all carefully avoided to that point.

  “You’ll want to know about the political part of it,” he said.

  I agreed that I certainly would.

  “Well, this is more or less how it went. I was the first of this group to declare myself a Communist. I kind of involved Ian not long afterward. But Dalton, because of his pacifism, was reluctant to take this sort of position. This was during the period when American Communists were supporting the front against Hitler. During the Pact period when Communists were against the war, our points of view were very much in agreement, of course, and we worked together on the American Peace Mobilization. In June 1941, when the Nazis attacked Russia, he found it very difficult to support the war. But Hugo, who had been quite nonpolitical, then said he saw things our way. Gradually Dalton, too, became increasingly less pacifist in his approach, and by the time of Pearl Harbor, America’s entry into the war had changed his mind. We didn’t see as much of one another during the war, but I remember that he and I did happen to get together in Washington when he was in to do research for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. I remember how he put it then. He said, ‘Well, I’ve joined the Red Cross.’ I knew what he meant, of course.”

  I glanced around at the others seated there in Lardner’s living room. There was general agreement. His statement seemed to satisfy them all.

  As America’s entry into World War II grew nearer and seemed more and more certain, the political atmosphere in Hollywood became warmer and more turbulent. What began with organizing activities for the various guilds and craft unions led to radical-chic benefits for Spanish Republicans and subsequently to aid for the Spanish refugees. During the Pact period pacifist sentiment was instantly mobilized, then just as quickly, with the invasion of Russia by Germany on June 22, 1941, rallies were organized urging America to make a quick entry into the war and stem the tide of fascism that was sweeping over the world. It was not the finest hour of the American left. Such sudden reversals of position were clearly dictated by the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy.

  The American right had noticed and was carefully taking the measure of the “Hollywood Reds”: they looked vulnerable, and they were. A chapter of the Order of the White Camelias, a Klan-like organization, had been founded in Hollywood to combat what was seen as the Red Menace there. A member of the White Camelias, director Sam Wood, invited the first House Committee on Un-American Activities, under the chairmanship of Texas congressman Martin Dies, to come out to Hollywood to investigate Communist infiltration of the movie industry. In fact, the Dies Committee did come to Hollywood in August 1940 and held what promised to be a sort of dress rehearsal for the Hollywood Ten hearings in Washington seven years later. A few of the same names were named—director Herbert Biberman and his wife, actress Gale Sondergaard, and writer Samuel Ornitz, for example—but the Committee left, Dies promising to return and see to the job of exposing individual Reds in the movie industry. World War II intervened, however, with the consequent alliance of the United States and the Soviet Union.

  Anyone could see that the day of reckoning had only been postponed. When the opportunity presented itself, the right would strike, and Hollywood—because of its prominence and because of the movie industry’s vulnerable dependence on good publicity—was certain to be a prime target. A more prudent man would have avoided political activities of any kind during the years that followed, but of course prudence had never been a virtue cultivated by Dalton Trumbo.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE WAR YEARS

  Johnny Got His Gun was the first of Dalton Trumbo’s books to be widely and well reviewed. It caused quite a stir, coming out as it did the week the war began. In fact, it won the American Booksellers Award for him in 1940 as the “most original novel of the year” (which it certainly must have been). He had then with Johnny what he had really never had before, the beginning of a literary reputation.

  As an almost inevitable consequence of this, Trumbo suddenly felt an urge to be free of the movies, to end his state of contract dependency. It seemed evident that if he worked less for films he would have more time to work for himself, to write the kind of novels he was then sure he could write. Something of the sort was in his mind when he was approached by RKO to work on Kitty Foyle, a screen adaptation of the best-selling Christopher Morley novel. By that time, he had done eight films for the RKO B unit, including A Man to Remember. He had also received screen credit on five other films produced by various other studios during this same period; these were original screen stories, for the most part—everything from the popular The Kid from Kokomo (Warner Bros.) to the forgotten Half a Sinner (Universal)—all sold by the usual slightly devious means. By then, he had earned a reputation as an excellent craftsman, and so he seemed the logical man to turn to when trouble developed on Kitty Foyle.

  Donald Ogden Stewart, who happened to be a friend of Trumbo’s, had turned in a script on Kitty Foyle that had a lot to recommend it but was judged unshootable by stud
io executives. Dalton Trumbo seemed a likely man to save the project; he could work quickly and could, if his recent work were any indication, be counted on to come up with a well-crafted, cinematically sound screenplay that would, at the very least, be ready for the cameras when he had finished it. And so RKO put it up to him: if he did Kitty Foyle for them, did a good job and on time, he would be through with the B unit; he could expect from then on to work on nothing but A productions.

  But Trumbo wanted out. “I had some time to serve on my contract,” he remembered. “So I agreed to do Kitty Foyle if they would cancel my contract, which they did. So I did the screenplay, which received an Academy nomination for me and won an Oscar for Ginger Rogers. They got what they wanted. So did I.” He was free for the time being. Eventually he would return to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but not before he had written another book—almost by accident.