TRUMBO Read online

  Then we received orders to turn back. The crew are disappointed. It means a flight under combat conditions, but no credit for mission. They brighten at the thought of Tanega Shima. Perhaps there. But Tanega is completely overcast. Kikai Shima is the last chance. The weather begins to clear. Far below a yellow stain shows up on the sea—the dye spot from a fallen Corsair. Later we spot another. Kikai Shima is clear as a bell. We come down to 6500 feet for the bombing run, plant our whole load on Wan airstrip and scoot for home.

  The bombardier-navigator comes back to check figures with the pilot. The co-pilot leans toward him, and the three of them shout soundlessly to each other. The gunner and I watch, trying to make out what they’re saying. Then it comes over the intercom. The hour and twenty minutes over Kyushu has consumed too much gas. Prepare to jump if the engines conk out. Calculations give us less than enough fuel to make it back to Kadena.

  They did make it back, however, and discovered upon landing that there were just fifteen gallons left in each tank.

  The account from which I have just quoted appears in a long article, “Notes on a Summer Vacation,” which Trumbo published in the Screen Writer* upon his return. It is a fine piece of first-person journalism, graphic and precisely detailed, brought to life with the sights, the sounds, and even the smells of war.

  How did Trumbo find time for such extracurricular activities? He had done war work for the Writers Mobilization; gone to San Francisco to write a speech for the secretary of state; made an extended tour of the Pacific combat zone; and had even managed to edit a magazine on the side. While all the while he was supposed to be working as a screenwriter at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The truth was that he did very little work for M-G-M during the war, for the terms of his contract there were so favorable that they made it possible for him to work in almost a part-time capacity while on (very) full salary.

  “The result was I really didn’t do very many pictures there,” said Trumbo. In a way, it is remarkable that those he did were as good as they were. But quality was what Louis B. Mayer was paying for. He knew it, and he knew he could get it from Trumbo. And if, objectively, A Guy Named Joe was a rather dismal beginning, from M-G-M’s point of view, at least, it couldn’t have been much better, for it was a solid box-office success. Trumbo’s next film for the studio was probably the best of all his pre-blacklist screenplays—Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). It was based on the memoir by Captain Ted Lawson of the bombing raid early in the war (1942) on Tokyo, led by then Colonel James Doolittle. The raid itself had been almost in the nature of a publicity stunt and of no appreciable military value. Just to be able to tell the folks on the home front they had really bombed Tokyo, it was necessary to send out a small flight of B-25 medium bombers from the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet with no expectation of returning. Their fuel range permitted them only to make their bomb run over Tokyo and continue on for crash landings on the Chinese mainland. This was officially Japanese-occupied territory but was effectively controlled by bands of Chinese guerrillas; many, though certainly not all, of the crewmen from the Tokyo raid were thus rescued by the Chinese and smuggled through Japanese lines into northern China, whence they were able to return to America.

  This was the story told by Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. The film dwelt upon the rigorous training of the airmen for the mission, including dangerous takeoffs from a flight deck never intended to accommodate planes so large. It built nicely to the natural climax provided by the raid on Tokyo, about two-thirds of the way through the picture. There was, unfortunately, no way to prevent the remaining third from turning into a protracted anticlimax. It was simply inherent in the material—especially so since the protagonist Ted Lawson, played by Van Johnson, was injured in the crash landing in China and had to be carried out hundreds of miles in a litter. Robert Mitchum starred as Lieutenant Bob Gray, and Spencer Tracy received star billing for what amounted to a supporting role as Colonel Doolittle. As for Trumbo’s contribution, it came chiefly in the form of exercising restraint. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is blessedly free of the phony heroics and unreal wisecracks that mar just about every other war movie made during World War II. There is a certain grit to its dialogue and a careful attention to detail that makes it believable and enjoyable today. It stands the test of time. And if Trumbo failed to solve the problem of the film’s anticlimatic final third, at least he did not try to inject suspense and plot interest into it artificially with old B-movie tricks. He was true to his material. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is an authentic and in some ways an austere film. It is certainly the best that Mervyn LeRoy, who directed it, ever made.

  As for the final picture Trumbo did at Metro, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes is, like Thirty Seconds, the kind of movie that can be viewed today without consternation or discomfort. Although it starred Margaret O’Brien, her lugubrious displays in the film were kept to the absolute permissible minimum. In fact, Trumbo’s screenplay manages to save the film from the sort of cloying sentimentality that marked most of her other films. For good reason, he was extremely fond of Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. “That turned out to be a lovely picture, I thought. It wasn’t wildly successful, but it was a very sweet, honest, decent picture of farm life, and that’s because it came from a lovely novel.”

  This is probably another instance of Trumbo doing his better work when he found something personal in the original material with which to identify, as was the case, for instance, with A Man to Remember. And for him, the personal element in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes must have been its rural setting. He continued to think of himself as a landowner, a rancher, a man of the soil. Even though trips out to the Lazy-T were restricted because of wartime gas rationing, the ranch continued to be important to him as an expression of something in him, something in his conception of himself. The place continued to have great symbolic importance to him, even when it became necessary to buy another house in town, a rather palatial one on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills (which was a dead ringer for the manse David O. Selznick used as his trademark). They only held on to it through the war, and then they sold it. It was all right: Trumbo could afford it.

  Shortly after Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, he had his contract renegotiated. The new one was at that time the best that any writer in the motion picture industry had ever held: three thousand dollars per week or seventy-five thousand dollars per picture, as he preferred; no layoffs for the period of the contract; and no morality clause. Why was he worth all this? Because he had written three hits in a row. And, as Louis B. Mayer told Trumbo, the studio had faith in him to write more. Negotiations had been prickly, but they had come to terms quite favorable to Trumbo. Mayer summoned him to his office, and Trumbo came, prepared to hear almost anything. Still, he was surprised when Mayer sat him down on the couch and came around in his sockfeet to talk in his most haimish manner. “Look, I know your record,” he said. “And I’ll tell you this. You sign this contract. You make the first picture, and if it fails, you won’t hear a word from anybody. Make another picture, and it’s a failure, and nobody will say anything to you. You make another picture, and it fails—not a word! Because the fourth picture will not fail, and that one will make up for the first three.” Mayer knew his averages, and he knew his writers, and he knew that Trumbo was batting at the top of the league.

  It was at that house on Beverly Drive that the Trumbos spent most of the war, with occasional trips to the Lazy-T, just to prove to themselves that it was still up there waiting for them. They were living in Beverly Hills when the youngest of their three children, Melissa (Mitzi), was born October 4, 1945. These were quite important years for them. For better or for worse, Trumbo was now deeply committed politically. He gave his time and energy unstintingly to what were essentially political causes, including war work of one kind or another. It was a time—as indeed most times were for him—when Trumbo was tremendously busy. Yet it was also a time of waiting, of marking time, for they could sense the crisis that lay ahead.

  On the bottom of t
he first page of his account of his tour of the Pacific war zone, “Notes on a Summer Vacation,” published in the Screen Writer, there is a note that in retrospect seems almost sad: “Dalton Trumbo submits notes on a recent Pacific trip. Since he is using them as the basis for a novel, he requests no re-publication or quotes without written consent.” Yes, he did intend to write such a novel. Considering the period in Trumbo’s life during which he planned it, it is not surprising that this one was to be a political novel. Trumbo knew that he had had an unusual look at the top and bottom of the war in the period of a month, going from the UN Conference in San Francisco to the war in the South Pacific. Trumbo wanted to write the kind of novel that would use and encompass such experience, one perhaps necessarily with a strong political point of view. But the more he thought about it, the more the project expanded in his mind. At one point, late in 1945 or early 1946, he wrote to Elsie McKeogh that he saw it as a cycle of six novels, in which he would borrow heavily from his own experiences, beginning with his vivid memories of life in the bakery and concluding with the postwar years which he saw then only as a question mark. He took notes, drew up a list of 161 characters, and did a first chapter; but nothing more was done on it for a few years. Ironically—or perhaps inevitably—the only one of these novels on which he actually did much work was started and half-finished during the only period in the coming years that he would have any time for extended writing projects of this sort. That is, during the time he spent in jail.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE TEN

  I find Jean Butler, the widow of Hugo Butler and a writer herself, to be a likable woman. Along with her husband, she passed through the Communist Party during World War II, the Browder period: “You have to remember that at the time we joined, it was very easy to agree with the Browder interpretation and just be what you’d always been before—a good liberal.

  “What was life in the Party like? Well, I can only tell you what it was like for us, and the way I remember it, there was the most rigid caste system in the formation of the Party’s small groups—what people outside the Party seemed to call ‘cells.’ I never heard the word inside myself. And the funny thing was, the Party’s caste system was based on money. The high-salaried writers were in one group—that was Dalton—and the low-salaried writers were in another—that was Hugo. Again, it was funny to discover that the wives were in separate groups entirely. I found, frankly, that the Communist Party was just as male-chauvinist in its orientation as any group, even the American Legion, I suppose. I was in this study group with all the other wives, but I’m afraid I didn’t go after the first few meetings because I got bored by all the economics we had to read.

  “Hugo was a little different, maybe a little more serious about it all than I was. At a certain point he found that all his friends were in the Party, but as it turned out, none of them—Trumbo or Ring or Ian—recruited him. Somebody else did that. In part, I think he joined out of a feeling of friendship and solidarity with his friends who were in. In part, I think he felt a kind of dare to do it. And in part, too, I think, he may have joined because of his stepfather.”

  “His stepfather? Was he a Communist?”

  She laughs. “No, nothing like that. He was just a guy who had worked most of his life at a United Cigar Store. He was making thirty-four dollars a week when the Depression hit, and his boss wanted to cut his salary to fourteen dollars a week. When Hugo’s stepfather protested, he was fired. His boss told him he had a boy lined up who would do the same job for ten dollars a week. Hugo used to say there’s something wrong with a system that permits that kind of abuse, that kind of cruelty.”

  And for her? What was her motive?

  “Oh, I went along. You know. But once I was in, I found I developed a sense of fellowship with these people that was very real.… You’d go into a drawing room at a party and see people there who belonged to the Party, just as you did, and you’d have that thrill of fellowship. That was my feeling.

  “All this was fairly early in the war, during the Browder period. And things were different then. I remember, for instance, when it came time for Hugo to go into the army, they put him on a leave of absence from the Party because they wanted no feeling of divided loyalty. This was late 1942, as I remember. Then just after the war, when he came out of the army, he went back in. I didn’t. I was advised not to by him. I guess he sensed what was coming and wanted to spare me what he could. I think we all knew that it was going to be different after the war. For one thing, the openness of the Browder period was coming to an end—the honeymoon was over. And then came the Duclos letter, and the arguing began inside the Party. I remember one practically all-night session between Trumbo and Hugo. I finally went to bed, but they got so loud that I woke up to hear Trumbo saying, ‘It comes down to this, if Lenin was right, then Browder was wrong—and vice versa. I prefer to believe that Lenin was right.’ That was Trumbo. He knew how to argue. I thought, ‘Oh, dear,’ and rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, knowing we were really in for it.”

  The Duclos letter Jean Butler referred to was a contribution by Jacques Duclos, a French Communist Party official of international importance, to the Party’s publication in France, Cahiers du Communisme, which was published in April 1945. It was an attack on Browderism, and the line of patriotic cooperation during wartime. Duclos was especially bitter about the dissolution of the American Communist Party in favor of the Communist Political Association, and the renunciation of revolutionary goals which this implied. He praised the right-thinking of Browder’s hard-line opponent in the Party, William Z. Foster, and in effect marked Earl Browder himself to be purged. Although it was a month before the Duclos letter appeared in the Daily Worker, the effect it had on the American Party leadership was immediate and devastating. While they had received no prior notice of Stalin’s displeasure, it was understood by Browder, Foster, and the rest that such strong criticism from so high a source had to have been ordered by the chief himself. Browder had no appeal. Within a few months, the Communist Political Association was the Communist Party once more, Browder was ejected from it in February 1946, and the much tougher William Z. Foster was firmly in charge.

  Inevitably this shakeup and the sudden change of direction it signaled had an unsettling effect on the rank-and-file membership of the Communist Party—and nowhere more than in Hollywood, where the patriotic line of Browder had attracted many members to the Party who were only a little left of liberal. If Earl Browder could be disposed of so quickly, and the philosophy he represented bumped so unceremoniously, then, they reasoned, the Communist Party was not the liberal body they had been told it was. Many wartime recruits left the Party about this time—many in Hollywood who were subsequently blacklisted; the question, after all, was, “Are you now, or have you ever been…?”

  A few chose instead to bring the debate out into the open. One of them was Albert Maltz, who would, in a little more than a year’s time, be identified as one of the Hollywood Ten. More than most Hollywood writers, Maltz had an established literary reputation at the time. He had by then written four novels but had come west from New York on the strength of the work he had done as a playwright for the Theatre Union during the thirties. He arrived in Hollywood in 1941 and worked successively at Paramount and Warner Bros. on a number of big productions. This Gun for Hire was his first screenwriting credit, and he subsequently worked on such important films as Destination Tokyo, Pride of the Marines, Cloak and Dagger, and The Naked City. He was as well established as any writer in the Party when, in February 1946, he published in New Masses a fairly short essay, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” in which he explored quite logically the discrepancy between the writer’s obligation to himself and to the Party. The difficulty, he strongly suggested, lay not so much in the idea of art as a weapon but finally in the refusal of Party intellectuals to place on art any value except that “I have come to believe that the accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide, but a strait-jacket,”
he wrote. It was now understood “that unless art is a weapon like a leaflet, serving immediate political ends, necessities and programs, it is worthless or escapist or vicious.”

  The storm that broke over the Maltz essay filled the pages of New Masses for the next couple of issues. It should be noted, by the way, that Maltz’s protest against the intellectual and aesthetic restrictions imposed by the Communist Party was published in the Party organ, and that it had appeared even after William Z. Foster had assumed much tighter control. Does this mean that Foster and the new leadership were actually more liberal than supposed? Not at all. It was well known to them that independent notions such as Maltz expressed were quite popular among young Party intellectuals at the time, a legacy from the more liberal Browder era. It must have seemed to them that the best way to deal with these heresies was to get them out into the open—so that they could be denounced as heresies. That way, there could be no doubt where the Party stood on such matters, nor what was the proper line for the loyal Party member to follow. Accordingly, New Masses published attacks on Maltz and his views by the magazine’s editor, Samuel Sillen, by novelists Howard Fast and Mike Gold, and by William Z. Foster himself, among others.

  Maltz, the Browder surrogate, was, in fact, given treatment rougher than Browder himself had gotten in the magazine. But it was nothing to what he received face-to-face from his comrades in Hollywood. A meeting was called to discuss the issues Maltz had raised which became, in effect, a trial for deviationism. After that evening, as described by Murray Kempton in his book Part of Our Time:

  The face of the Party had hardened and never again would the innocent and the uncommitted feel comfortable before it. The recollections of that period for repentant Hollywood Communists are of repetitive plunges into a cesspool. They have forgotten the abstractions of doctrine; they remember only Alvah Bessie “morosely clawing” at Lester Cole, Dalton Trumbo “ripping at” Cole, and Cole “tearing at” Lawson. They were walking toward a common grave, hating one another.