TRUMBO Read online

  Since there is no indication here, or anywhere else, what Trumbo was saying as he ripped at Lester Cole, his memories of the affair are the only record of his feelings at the time. “I was asked to write an article for the New Masses, as a number of others did, on the issue, attacking the Maltz position,” said Trumbo. “I refused to do it. It was not an act of great courage, but I figured, what the hell. Though I didn’t much like [the Maltz article], some of the criticisms of it were so vicious, and you found in them personal differences, or jealousies, or quarrels being translated into ideological principles, which always happens. And this made it the worst of all the episodes at the time. It wasn’t the worst that he recanted. It was a measure of himself, a sign of belief, a sign of loyalty, and there is a virtue in that. However, I think he was essentially right in his original article and wrong in his recantation. But he will to this day defend his recantation and will not defend his original article.”

  Later, when I conveyed what Trumbo had said to Albert Maltz, Maltz looked at me severely and asked, “Did he say that? Did he indicate that he hadn’t had much to say at the time?” That, I said, was correct. “Well,” Maltz said, with a shake of the head that conveyed paragraphs of rebuttal, “I suppose I’ll have to let that stand then.”

  These events—the Duclos letter and the consequent deposing of Earl Browder as head of the Communist Party, together with the Maltz affair which followed—all transpired against a background of labor unrest in Hollywood which itself had a profound and far-reaching effect on the situation that led to the blacklist. All during the war, there was a series of jurisdictional disputes and actions between the two major craft union bodies in Hollywood, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees & Motion Picture Machine Operators (IATSE), on the one hand, and the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), on the other. Herb Sorrell, the leader of the CSU, though not a Communist himself, had been sympathetic to the Communists and had gotten to his position of power there in Hollywood at least partly through their help. On the other side was Roy Brewer, an AFL leader who had had a job with the War Labor Board before coming out to the West Coast to take charge of the union during the war. A strike finally resulted. It was called by Sorrell on March 12, 1945.

  The Communist-dominated unions and individual Communists throughout the industry all eventually threw their support to Sorrell. Roy Brewer, the head of the rival IATSE, was aghast at this. Brewer saw the whole thing as a concerted campaign by the Communists to take over the motion picture industry through the convenient agency of Sorrell’s Conference of Studio Unions. He had no trouble selling this conspiracy theory to the producers and studio heads, thus making his position and his unions’ even more solid with them than before. It was a nasty strike, unusually long for wartime. It climaxed on October 5, 1945, just after the war had ended, of course, in front of the gates of the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank. As newsreel cameras ground away and flashbulbs popped, police used tear gas and hoses to clear away the pickets, then waded in with their nightsticks to finish the job.

  Dalton Trumbo took an active part in all this. As a member of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, he delivered a speech on October 13, 1945, at the Olympic Auditorium that was in essence an attack on the IATSE. He spoke longest and most eloquently about the union’s racketeer past—there was no getting around that, after all, because Willie Bioff and George Browne had been sent to jail for shaking down the IATSE rank and file, as well as the studios. And although he never mentioned Roy Brewer’s name, he certainly did what he could to sully his reputation in the speech: “After the imprisonment of Browne and Bioff, the public generally assumed that the IA had been cleaned up. But this was not necessarily true. The underlings appointed by Browne and Bioff simply moved up a notch in their absence. The same people in the IA are still doing business at the same old stand.”

  Whatever else could be said of Roy Brewer, he was not a crook of the Willie Bioff stripe; Brewer had, in fact, been installed as head of the IATSE to bring reform to a union whose membership had been made victim of the worst sort of labor racketeering and he had been making progress in that direction when Trumbo’s attack was delivered. Naturally he was angry; the speech was intended to provoke anger. Brewer wrote a letter to Trumbo five days later that was not so much a defense of his own reputation or that of his union as it was a counterattack on Trumbo as the spokesman for forces whose evil intentions Brewer clearly understood. We know who you are, Brewer seems to be saying, and we know what your support of the CSU in this strike really means. The underlying assumption is that Trumbo is a Communist (which was true) and that the Communists are, through actions such as the CSU strike, engaged in a conspiracy to take over the motion picture industry (which was not true). There was a heavy emphasis throughout Brewer’s long, three-page letter on the Americanism of the IATSE, and there was a pledge to fight foreign—that is to say, un-American—influence in the motion picture industry.

  During this time, Dalton Trumbo had also been making trouble in the pages of the Screen Writer. In the very first issue of the publication, Trumbo had written an article attacking producer-director Sam Wood and the Motion Picture Association for statements Wood had made against the Screen Writers Guild and its executive board. Wood was a violently reactionary man who was, ironically, best known for directing one of the few movies ever made in Hollywood in which Communists were treated sympathetically, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Although he answered Trumbo with a counter-blast in the trade papers, the matter certainly did not end there. He was Dalton Trumbo’s enemy for life.

  Under his editorship, the Screen Writer was strongly weighted to the left (for that matter, what union or guild publication did not, at least in its basic stance, face off in that direction?). But Trumbo’s political sympathies were known or suspected by many. The fact that the preponderance of articles in the Screen Writer reflected liberal and radical views on all subjects was automatically attributed to Trumbo’s influence. Yet he insisted, perhaps a little disingenuously, that his only standards were literary quality, general relevance, and respect for the Guild and its policies and objectives. Richard Macaulay, a screenwriter of conservative leanings and a vigorous anti-Communist, put him to the test with an article, “Who Censors What?” on movie content which was in rebuttal to an earlier piece by Alvah Bessie. As editor, Trumbo rejected Macaulay’s article, taking the same shaky position that Herbert Marcuse would two decades later, as he argued, “It is difficult to support your belief in the ‘inalienable right’ of man’s mind to be exposed to any thought whatever, however intolerable that thought might be to ‘anyone else.’ Frequently such a right encroaches upon the right of others to their lives. It was this ‘inalienable right’ in Fascist countries which directly resulted in the slaughter of five million Jews.” Macaulay was incensed. He wrote back accusing Trumbo of rejecting his article simply because it did not follow the editorial line that Trumbo himself had established, one that the Screen Writer had in common, Macaulay declared, with PM, New Masses, and the Daily Worker. Clearly, Trumbo had made another enemy.

  One of the many “letterhead organizations”* operating in Los Angeles at the time was the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. Reformed and expanded from the Hollywood Democratic Committee in June 1945—an organization which Tenney also claimed to be a Communist front—HICCASP, as it was known (believe it or not), seemed designed as an umbrella big and shapeless enough so that individuals of all shades and persuasions, from Ronald Reagan to John Howard Lawson, might stand together under it in relative comfort.

  If the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions were a Communist front organization, then as such it would have been an utter failure, for in 1946 a strong faction within the organization began a movement to transform it into a militant anti-Communist unit. In this group were Reagan, the embryonic politician; Dore Schary, then production head of RKO; film composer
Johnny Green; actress Olivia de Havilland; and screenwriter Ernest Pascal. And apparently it was none other than Dalton Trumbo who was responsible for the situation that converted them into aggressive anti-Communists. It all turned on a speech Trumbo wrote for Olivia de Havilland, as an official of HICCASP (she was listed as vice-chairman of the organization), for delivery at a function in Seattle in June 1946. In fact, she never gave the speech that he wrote for her, which he learned only some weeks later. He wrote her a testy note on June 24, 1946, citing what had happened and asking for the return of his work. She sent back two speeches then, the one he had written and the one she had given, explaining that she had wanted to speak more in her own person and that a friend had helped her to prepare the remarks she had made in Seattle. That friend turned out to be screenwriter Ernest Pascal. Pascal had not merely rewritten Trumbo’s fiery and very partisan radical oration, he had practically turned it inside out and provided her with a speech which contained “an attack on and a repudiation of Communism”—as Trumbo described it—“which consumed exactly one-fifth of the entire speech.” Trumbo was furious at Pascal, or he must have been to use such rhetorical overkill in denouncing him in the letter he wrote: “I think I understand your motives, Ernest; and to understand is, in some degree, to forgive. But don’t you occasionally wonder, alone and late at night, who butchered the women of Europe and buried their living children and burned their men?”

  By 1947 it began to look as though the movie capital were divided completely between two camps: the Communist and the anti-Communist. That, anyhow, is the way the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals wanted it to look. The word was out: you’re either with them or with us. What and who was the Motion Picture Alliance? It was the anti-Communist body that had been formed by the Motion Picture Association to fight those elements in the movie industry that the producers were unable to control. Roy Brewer, whom Trumbo had offended, joined the Alliance because it seemed to him a potentially effective force in fighting what he now saw as the Communist conspiracy to take over the industry. Sam Wood, of course, was a member already, one of the most outspoken and bitter opponents of communism—and of Dalton Trumbo. Richard Macaulay was soon also to be a member of the Alliance, along with most of the other young conservatives among the members of the Screen Writers Guild, as well as all Trumbo’s old opponents from the Guild’s battle with the Screen Playwrights—men like Morrie Ryskind, James Kevin McGuinness, and Rupert Hughes. And finally, the anti-Communist contingent from the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions joined forces with arch-conservatives from the Screen Actors Guild, such as Adolphe Menjou, adding to the enterprise a sprinkle of the glitter that only movie actors and actresses can provide. In a way, Dalton Trumbo made a very special contribution to the creation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals: he had made personal enemies of all its most prominent members.

  It is possible, even likely, that the Hollywood Communists could have achieved a sort of peaceful coexistence with the reactionary elements in the motion picture industry had they maintained the Browder line of cooperation and accommodation, and there would have been no blacklist. If the Communist Party had actually worked out a design by which to take over the movie industry by infiltration, wouldn’t it have been in the Party’s best interest to proceed about the job as quietly and inconspicuously as possible? Instead, the Hollywood Communists organized mass rallies for various causes, mounted the podium, and made themselves visible and audible. They took out ads in the trade papers to which they signed their names. They contributed articles to “dangerous” publications, such as People’s World, New Masses, and the Daily Worker. Was that any way to subvert the movie industry? They did their fighting as much in the open as Party discipline permitted. Of them all, none fought harder and more openly than Dalton Trumbo. He plunged into the 1946 Democratic campaign of Will Rogers, Jr., for the United States Senate. When he was about to give a speech to the HICCASP membership urging them to endorse Rogers, he wrote to Carey McWilliams, the campaign manager, urging the candidate to go on the attack. It was especially important, he declared, because of the “developing situation”—the impending pressure from the House Committee on Un-American Activities: “Rankin is one of the most unpopular men in America, and an attack upon his committee by Rogers can also be tied in with the Negroes, anti-Semitism, FEPC and a whole host of liberal issues. Rogers must understand that an attack… is not an act of political magnanimity on his part, but a political necessity to destroy the effect of an investigation which is aimed to destroy all liberal forces which support him; and which, if successful, will result in his own defeat.” Trumbo was a shrewd strategist. Rogers declined his advice, and William F. Knowland beat the Democrat handily. The House Committee on Un-American Activities directed its attention to Hollywood, just as Trumbo predicted it would, though not until 1947.

  Carey McWilliams, the liberal California lawyer, watched it happen just as Trumbo predicted it would: “The more I was exposed to it, the more concerned I became.” He wrote the first book on the ensuing persecution. Witch Hunt was published in 1950, just as the blacklist and the McCarthy era were getting under way. “I must say that in retrospect some rather silly books have been written about the period. People forget how desperate the situation became for thousands of people. It’s all been reduced, more or less, to a pile of yellowing clips. People would be stunned at the suicides from the period, and just incredible things that happened then. It wasn’t merely some Walter Mitty aberration, as, for instance, Richard Rovere wanted us to think it was.”

  A few months after the book was published, Carey McWilliams was invited to New York to edit “How Free Is Free?,” a special civil liberties issue of the Nation, the liberal weekly for which he had often written. They liked him so well they asked him to stay, and he was there as editor of the magazine until he retired in September 1975. That was where I found him the afternoon I came to call—there in the magazine’s offices in the West Village, just below Sheridan Square.

  He greets me, sits me down, and talks to me with his chair swiveled back and his hands clasped behind his head. It is somehow an editor’s posture, and, ex officio, Carey McWilliams talks to me first about his editorial relations with Trumbo.

  “He is an astonishing writer,” says McWilliams. “A polemicist! If that talent had really been harnessed, there’s no telling what he could have done with it. He could write other things, too, of course, but I can’t help but feel it’s a great shame he couldn’t have done more with it, turned himself loose on a whole range of situations and people.”

  During the latter years of the blacklist, Carey McWilliams provided Dalton Trumbo with his most direct line to the embattled liberal community in America. Trumbo did a mini-series of essays on social topics—everything from the movie black market to the quiz show scandals. At one time, the writer was contemplating doing enough such pieces to collect them into a book, a personal sort of message on the state of the union. “The fact of the matter is,” says McWilliams, “I needled him to do far more than he actually did for us. If he did five I must have asked him to do twenty-five.”

  He sighs and fidgets for a moment with a pile of papers on his desk. “You touch here on a subject that is close to me and one about which I have come to have mixed feelings.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, there are so many of the very talented out there who get caught up in motion picture writing to the neglect of all else. Trumbo is one of them. John Fante is another—a wonderful writer whose books were all done in a few years before he began working in motion pictures. The industry was the undoing of both of them as writers. Once they’ve begun making money, they think they’ll find time to do another book, but they never quite find it. There are scores of them. It’s a pattern.

  “With Trumbo it’s especially frustrating because he was such a keen observer of the scene—and I don’t mean just his journalis
m. Just think what a fantastic collection of potential novels the man lived! Imagine a good novel about the Hollywood Ten with that showdown at the Guild with Dore Schary. Or imagine a novel about IATSE and the Hollywood labor battles of the thirties and forties—it would take somebody with Dalton’s appreciation to capture that crook Willie Bioff as a character.”

  “Was that how you came to meet Trumbo?” I ask. “During the labor troubles?”

  He looks away, frowning in concentration, for a moment. “I met him before the IATSE business, but we were both caught up in it, so that’s how we really got to know one another. The reality is this. He and I were never close personal friends. I was in his home often for meetings and we’d get together for lunches and so on. But at the same time we were good friends. I worked well with him. It was an intellectual friendship—political and, oh, I guess social in its basis. I personally admired the man’s style very much. I’ll never forget the Christmas card he sent out one year during the blacklist. The greeting on it was, ‘Fight mental health!’” Carey McWilliams breaks off and cackles in appreciation.

  “When you look back at the McCarthy era,” I say to him, “and remember what passed for sanity then, that slogan makes a lot of sense.”

  “Exactly! The man played all kinds of wonderful fandangles like that. He kept his sense of humor through it all. But he was political, too—in the best sense. Altogether, I thought he was a fine influence in Hollywood. It was a very difficult situation, and he behaved very well. The whole left political movement in Hollywood was a good thing, if you ask me. You know, they talked a lot at the time about swimming pool Communists. But the thrust goes the other way. These people were not idiots. They knew they were taking chances, and some of the things they were doing and saying did not endear them to the moguls, even in the period when there was no overt blacklist. There was nothing silly about leftism in Hollywood. They saw the danger—real danger—to the people in the industry posed by the labor practices of the period. And they knew the Nazis were not playing make-believe. I think they deserve some credit for the stand they took.”