TRUMBO Page 19
Kitty Foyle was released in December 1940. By then, he was at work on a novel that had been pre-sold to the movies. Or was it merely a movie for which he agreed to write a screen treatment of novel length? “The General Came to Stay,” as the project was first known, was begun in spring 1940, after a deal had been made with Paramount on the strength of a brief story outline. He was to receive $20,000 on signing, $7,500 on publication of the novel by a reputable house, and $2,500 if and when it were given magazine publication. (All this was money from Paramount; he could expect something, in addition, from the book and magazine publishers.) Further, Paramount guaranteed him $1,000 a week to do the screenplay from his own novel—if he were available. On the face of it, this looked like a pretty good deal. “But,” as Trumbo later commented ruefully, “I found out a novel should be written for itself alone.”
He was right. The Remarkable Andrew, the novel written to order for Paramount Pictures, effectively ended his career as a novelist. He had misgivings from the start: “I am going to try to get some time off from the studio immediately and go to work on the book,” he wrote Elsie McKeogh at the end of his tenure at RKO. “It will be the first time I have ever had a chance to work uninterruptedly on a single job and I am going to do my absolute best to try to make ‘The General’ as good a book in its fluffy way as ‘Johnny’ was. I dread any critical comparison of the two but I’ll just have to make the best of the situation.”
It would have been hard to follow Johnny Got His Gun with any novel. In it, he had achieved something unique, real, and lasting. But to turn from that to The Remarkable Andrew, promising to make the latter “as good a book in its fluffy way,” was to emphasize craftsmanship and professionalism out of all measure. The Remarkable Andrew represents an almost criminal abuse by Trumbo of his recently proven talent as a novelist. It is not merely puzzling that he should have written it when he did, but revealing and deeply unsettling as well. It indicates that he had somehow ceased to value his talent as worth something in itself. Perhaps he never really did.
The Remarkable Andrew starts promisingly in Shale City, Colorado, the thinly disguised Grand Junction in which Eclipse and much of Johnny Got His Gun are set. Young Andrew Long is a bookkeeper in the Shale City government who, upon close examination of the city’s account books, discovers evidence that the mayor and a couple of his cronies have been embezzling considerable sums. When they learn of his suspicions, they manage to shift the blame from themselves to him. An investigation of young Andrew—his reading, his stated opinions, even his thoughts—is undertaken by a committee of concerned citizens with the same sort of vigilante passion that Trumbo remembered from the activities of the Loyalty League back in Grand Junction during World War I. The onus is shifted to Andrew Long: he is presumed guilty, unless (worse luck) he should manage to prove his innocence.
So far so good. Some of the details of small-town life are done well in the opening chapters. And if Trumbo draws his characters rather broadly, they are at least recognizable as small-town types. And finally, the situation in which Andrew Long finds himself, while uncomfortable for him, is one rich with plot possibilities.
Rather than treat any of them, however, Trumbo summons up the specter of President Andrew Jackson—visible, of course, only to his young namesake. Except for the last chapter or two in which Andrew successfully defends himself before the townspeople, the rest of The Remarkable Andrew, nearly two hundred pages of it, is a kind of extended seminar conducted by Old Hickory on true American values. These turn out to be, for the most part, populist (certainly consistent with the historical Jackson) and antiwar in his international position (can this be the Jackson we remember as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans?). It may seem remarkable that the issue of war or peace should have come up at all in their extended colloquy. But remember that Trumbo was writing in 1940, and the burning issue of the moment was whether or not America should enter World War II as a gesture of solidarity with Great Britain in her darkest hour. Jackson, of course, was simply the mouthpiece for Trumbo. As it comes from Andrew Jackson, it sounds like old-fashioned isolationism.
There is eloquence in The Remarkable Andrew, but it is rhetorical eloquence, essentially political oratory. It has nothing to do with the art of fiction. And if The Remarkable Andrew was unsuccessful as a novel, it was not much better as a motion picture. Trumbo did the screenplay, and not even he could sustain it after the first shock of Brian Donlevy’s unexpected appearance as Andrew Jackson (in full regalia, of course) and the first round of discussion had taken place with William Holden as Andrew Long. The deficiencies of a story in which very little actually happens become quite glaring when translated to the screen.
Early in the filming of The Remarkable Andrew, during the summer of 1941, Donlevy and Holden together came into serious disagreement with the director of the picture. Both were sure they would get along better with Trumbo, and so they came to him and asked him to direct the film; they would, they said, force the issue by threatening to quit if he were not substituted. Trumbo refused—“You just don’t do that,” although in fact other screenwriters have become directors under similar circumstances. “I never regretted it, since I never envied a director that much. I always felt I had a lot more freedom than directors. My occupation, the steady hours, and the fact that I worked in an office, all quite different from directing—freer.”
He stayed on at Paramount because he had become involved with Preston Sturges and the French director René Clair in the adaptation of a bit of Thorne Smith nonsense titled I Married a Witch. Eventually, of course, it was produced with Paramount’s new blonde bombshell Veronica Lake in the starring role, but without Dalton Trumbo’s name among the credits. He remembered the project, for the most part, as a series of uproarious and bibulous lunches at which the three of them kept reminding one another that they really had to get down to work sometime soon. Eventually they did, and what developed there were differences between Sturges and Trumbo on the interpretation of the material. The last of these, on which Trumbo finally bowed out altogether, took place on a Sunday for some reason. Trumbo remembers coming away from it, not discouraged but hungry, wanting to eat the breakfast he had missed. He stopped off at a place on Sunset, and while he was there eating he heard the news: the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
It was war, of course. Trumbo must have expected it, for he had thought it out beforehand. What would be his response, he must have asked himself, when the war that seemed so inevitable finally came? This is how he had put it beforehand in The Remarkable Andrew, speaking here in the person of Andrew Long:
Now a lot has been said about my being a pacifist, although I haven’t said a thing about it. I want to point out that this is a lie. I suppose if this country went to war, I would go to war too—even if it was a bad war—because once you’re in it there doesn’t seem anything to do but fight your way out of it. But I also think it is my right, if I want to, to oppose this country going to war, even if the war is a good one. Because the people of a country should have something to say about whom they will fight, and when, and where, and how. I don’t think it’s pacifism to be against war. I think it’s just being decent.
If that does not, in itself, constitute a change of position, then it certainly prepares the way for a change. Of course Trumbo was never a doctrinaire pacifist—perhaps not a real pacifist, at all. The radical final chapter of Johnny Got His Gun (“Remember this well you people who plan for war.…”) shows that although he was emotionally—passionately—opposed to war, he drew the line well short of unconditional surrender. At any rate, he had no real choice now: he deferred his doubts and resolved his difficulties; and he threw himself as completely as a 4-F could into the war effort.
He did one more original screenplay during this free-lance period, one that came back to haunt him at the Hollywood Ten hearings. Very early in 1942—the war had just begun—he approached RKO with a project that not only seemed right to them, but also seemed right in particula
r for Ginger Rogers. And the idea of pairing Trumbo and Rogers, an Oscar-winning combination in 1941, was irresistible to them: they had him proceed with Tender Comrade. The film that resulted from this collaboration was a prime wartime tearjerker and certainly not a good film. Released in 1943, at a time when girls all over America were saying goodbye to their men, it told of Ginger’s brief affair with soldier Robert Ryan on the eve of his departure for duty overseas. They marry and have one night together before he must leave. He is killed in action, and in the last scene she goes to their baby, holds up Ryan’s picture to him, and says, “Little guy, you two aren’t ever going to meet. He went and died so you could have a better break when you grow up than he ever had. Don’t ever let anybody say he died for nothing, Chris boy.”
Now, there are plenty of reasons to object to a movie like that, but it is hard to see how anyone could find fault with it on ideological grounds. However, during the 1947 hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities before Trumbo or any of the other “unfriendly” witnesses were called, Lela Rogers, the mother of Ginger Rogers, appeared, and in her testimony cited Tender Comrade as a specific example of a movie in which her daughter had been given lines that contained Communist propaganda. And it was, of course, Dalton Trumbo she blamed. What annoyed her most, it turned out, was the fact that in the movie, after Robert Ryan ships out, Ginger persuades three female coworkers to pool their resources and move into a big apartment together where they can live “just like a democracy.” Of just such flimsy stuff was the case against the “infiltrators of the motion picture industry” made.
By the time Tender Comrade was released, Trumbo was safe under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had gone back to the studio which he had left in 1938 to marry Cleo. And in the latter part of 1942 he returned to Culver City, happy to renew his friendship with Sam Zimbalist and others there. What was the attraction that M-G-M held for Trumbo? “It was immensely the best studio,” he declared, “in all respects. If you were going to work for a studio, that was the one you wanted to work for.” And that was it, of course. Trumbo, who wanted to be the best at all cost, could only see himself working at the best studio in town. He had—no more than temporarily, he would have said then—stopped thinking of himself as a novelist. So there was no reason not to work at M-G-M.
They knew how to use him there. The first full-blown project they put him to work on was A Guy Named Joe. By the time Trumbo got hold of it, it had been through a couple of versions, the latest by the old western writer Frederick Hazlitt Brennan. The production was scheduled. Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne were set for it. All Trumbo had to do was come up with a shootable script.
It was to be a big picture. Not only were Tracy and Dunne set for it, but so also were Van Johnson and Ward Bond. The project brought him together with one of the studio’s top directors, Victor Fleming (Captains Courageous, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind), a macho right-winger with whom Trumbo might not have been expected to get along. Yet he found Fleming tough, direct, and honest in his personal dealings, and the two grew to like one another quite well. This is worth mentioning because it underlines the fact that in the pre-blacklist days, film people of very different political persuasions usually got along on the professional level. Their business was making movies. Too bad, in this case, the movie they made was not a better one. A Guy Named Joe is a far-fetched, at times almost fatuous, story of an Air Corps pilot who is killed in combat but comes back as a benign ghost to look after the woman he loves, who is also a pilot. Enough said. Still, as a star vehicle for Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne it was quite successful. When it was released in 1943, audiences flocked to it and laughed, thrilled, and applauded at all the right places. Dalton Trumbo’s future at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer seemed assured.
Late in December 1943 he joined the Communist Party. Why? How? Remember that it was wartime. The United States and the Soviet Union were allies. Under the leadership of Earl Browder, the Party line at that time was in strong support of America and the war effort. Browder, Kansas-born with a Russian wife, softened the Party’s customary stand on such bread-and-butter issues as race and trade-union militancy in order to flow with mainstream opinion and to make Marxism more widely acceptable. In a way, Browder was successful; for in May of 1944, approximately six months after Trumbo joined, the membership increased to its all-time high of eighty thousand. And the following year, 1945, Communists registered some success in local elections—principally in New York City, where two candidates running openly as Communists were elected to the city council. Browder even changed the name of the Party slightly, to the Communist Political Association.
That’s the background—not the excuse. Trumbo made no excuses for having joined the Communist Party. He may have gone to jail once rather than discuss it, but on this day in his study, he is more than willing to talk. I had probably been a little too discreet to suit him earlier. In my questions over the past few days I had skirted the question of his membership a couple of times, as though it were an embarrassment between us. Pussyfooting, you might call it. But the embarrassment was all on my side. He brought the matter up himself:
“Now,” he says, “there is one area we haven’t gone into yet that I think we must.”
I clear my throat. “What’s that?” I ask.
“That’s my membership in the Communist Party.”
“Yes. You joined during the war, didn’t you?”
“It was in 1943.”
“Did that have a lot to do with it? The war and all?”
“No, not much. You see, I had worked with Communists, friends who said they were Communists, from the time the Screen Writers Guild began to reform itself in 1936. In the organization of Hollywood labor—the talent guilds, and in particular the Readers Guild—I had been very active, and working along with me were men who were Communists and men who were not Communists. The Readers Guild came above ground—of course it had to be secret during the period it was organizing—at my house on Hollyridge Drive, where I was living with my mother just before I was married. And the principal speaker to greet them was Dashiell Hammett. I was delighted because I had been a reader myself and had helped out at the beginning of the Readers Guild. You see, I had been a part of every such movement, and some of my very best friends were Communists. And no one had pressed me to join. There was really no reason to. I came to trust them, to admire them, to like them. And when the war came, I worked with Communists during the war—Communists and others—until it seemed to me that I was traveling under false colors.
“I hope this doesn’t sound as some might interpret it, but the growing reaction against Communism—and in Hollywood the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—convinced me that there was going to be trouble. And I thought I wanted to be a part of it if there were. I didn’t want to have the advantage of those years of friendship and then to escape the penalties. Now that may sound odd. I don’t think it’s odd at all. That was part of my motive. If they hadn’t been my friends, I wouldn’t have joined. Someone asked me to an open meeting, and I went, knowing full well what that meant. And then someone said, ‘Would you like to join?’ And I said, ‘Well, look, I wouldn’t have come to the meeting if I hadn’t decided to join.’ And I was a member. To me it was not a matter of great consequence. It represented no significant change in my thought or in my life. As a matter of fact, I had a Party card that I put in my shirt pocket, and I left my shirt at my mother’s house for laundry because we were at the ranch part of the time, and I used to leave my laundry there. So that was where I left my Party card, and that was the last I saw of the Party card. So that it was just casual. It wasn’t a traumatic moment in my life. I would not remember the year or the exact time, as I would remember the year of my marriage. It was literally no change. I might as well have been a Communist ten years earlier. But I’ve never regretted it. As a matter of fact it’s possible to say I would have regretted not having done it because, I don’t know, bu
t to me it was an essential part of being alive and part of the time at a very significant period in history, probably the most significant period of this century, certainly the most catastrophic.”
There is nothing, as he talks, of the bantering manner of the raconteur that he sometimes adopts. He is talking directly, and (I’m convinced) frankly, setting the record straight. “What kind of people did you find in the Party?” I ask him.
“Well,” says Trumbo, “you must remember that about a million people passed through the Communist Party in the period between 1935 and 1945. Very few intellectuals were not influenced in one way or another by the Communist Party. And, you know, there were some pretty nice people among them. With all the damnation we’ve heard directed against the Communists since the forties, I’ve never seen it set forth just what kind of people we had in the Party. There were self-seekers, self-servers, there were neurotics, et cetera, as there are in any group, anywhere. But the people who joined the Communist Party didn’t join it in order to become popular. They didn’t join it because they thought it would make them rich. As a matter of fact, they knew that if their membership was known, they would probably lose their jobs. There are very few selfish reasons why anyone would join the Communist Party. They didn’t join it because they expected a revolution to reward their efforts because as far as I know there was no expectation in the Communist Party of a revolution in the United States, except in some remote future. So that reward was not there. They knew that they would be watched by the FBI. They knew that at the first moment of trouble, in the pattern that had already been established by the old Palmer raids, they would be the first to go to jail.”
“All right,” I say, “why did they join then?”
“Well, they joined for very good, humane reasons, in my view, most of them. In a time that began with the Depression and the total collapse of the American economy, with fourteen million unemployed, and soon spread throughout the world. In a world that had fascism in Germany, and Spain, and Italy, and an era that culminated in the forties in a war that killed fifty or one hundred million people—and saw the fires, not only of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the fires of Auschwitz and Treblinka—in such a world and such a time, it was not madness to hope for the possibility of making a better sort of world. And that, I think, is what most of those who joined wanted to do.”