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  This was the only real warning Trumbo received prior to the Waldorf Agreement. Not that knowing in advance would have helped much. There was only one hope for the Ten, and that was that the talent guilds might be persuaded to fight the blacklist—to stand up, as unions should, and protect their membership. A meeting of the Screen Writers Guild was called. Dore Schary, who was, ironically, one of Hollywood’s most vocal liberals, came as the producers’ representative and made an appeal for the Guild’s cooperation. Trumbo had been chosen by those of the Ten who were members of the SWG (which was most of them) to speak for them at the same open meeting. He did so, savagely attacking the producers and the Waldorf Agreement and predicting quite accurately what lay ahead if the Guild cooperated. He also made an appeal for the support of the Guild membership. All to no avail. The Screen Writers Guild cooperated with the producers in the implementation of the Waldorf Agreement.

  Had they held out, the producers might have been forced to reconsider and alter their position. In fact, it would probably be accurate to say that the blacklist could not have been instituted, nor could it have been enforced, without the assistance of the Screen Writers Guild and the other Hollywood talent guilds.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE BLACKLIST BEGINS

  The day Trumbo returned from the hearings in Washington, he was contacted by a man named Frank King who asked him if he would like to write a movie for him. “There was no big deal to it,” said King when I interviewed him. “We just had a short budget to make a picture and saw this as an opportunity to get a fine writer to work for us whom we could not otherwise afford.”

  The King brothers—there were three of them: Maurice, Frank, and Herman (born Kozinski)—were known to Trumbo and to the rest of Hollywood as independent producers. Very independent. They eventually found a place for themselves in film history and attained almost legendary status as among the last masters of B-movie production. And they did so very largely on films written for them by Dalton Trumbo.

  Trumbo got to know them very well over the course of the next decade, and he grew to like them quite well. He found, perhaps to his surprise, that he had a lot in common with them. During the years he was struggling to become a writer, and at the same time support his mother and two sisters, the King brothers were struggling, too: “Maury, the oldest one, fought as a pug,” said Trumbo. “And that enabled Frank to get through Franklin High School in Highland Park. Hymie was the youngest, and he got through high school, too. The father had died, and they were supporting their mother. The boys had to make it on their own, and they did it bootlegging and in the rackets.” Trumbo, of course, had done some bootlegging, too.

  With the end of Prohibition, the King brothers got into motion picture production—first for PRC during the late thirties and subsequently for Monogram. In 1945, at Monogram, they made the very successful Dillinger. Budgeted at $193,000, with Lawrence Tierney, Edmund Lowe, and Anne Jeffreys, and directed by Max Nosseck, Dillinger brought in over $4 million worldwide. With that hit under their belt, they decided to go independent. Their first film was The Gangster, released in 1947; it featured Barry Sullivan and Akim Tamiroff, and while the movie had its moments, it failed to make money for them. The King brothers were in the market for a new script when the craziness in Washington caught their eye. The brothers noted the quality of talent that had been hauled before the Committee, heard with interest the talk among producers that was circulating during the hearings about a political blacklist, and drew some shrewd conclusions. Frank King put in a call to Trumbo.

  “Politics didn’t enter into it at all,” said King, some slight annoyance evident in his voice. “What a man’s politics were didn’t concern us one way or the other. I guess he spoke his mind before Congress, and that was all right with us. But we never discussed that at all. We were just interested in making pictures.”

  For his part, Trumbo realized that he was probably as of that moment unemployable as far as the major studios were concerned, and that he would have to fight for every cent that remained to be paid to him on his lucrative M-G-M contract. He owed $40,000 in short-term debts for improvements on the ranch. He faced terrific legal expenses for the appeal of the contempt of Congress citation that he had received. And he was financially responsible not only for his wife and three children, but also for the support of his own mother. The modest deal offered him by King Brothers Productions—$3,750 to be paid over the period of a year and a half—looked good to him then. They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. They shook hands on the deal, and he started to work on Gun Crazy the next day.

  As Trumbo told me, he wanted it understood that he did not feel he was taken advantage of by Maury, Frank, and Herman King, or by the others who employed him at cut rates on the movie black market. The King brothers paid him what they could afford. “A lot of independents never paid more than that,” he said. “When I and others plummeted in value, we naturally found ourselves in this new market, and naturally these independent producers availed themselves of our services because they felt that for this money they could get better work. So there wasn’t really this brutal exploitation of black market writers that has sometimes been referred to.”

  Trumbo and the King brothers agreed that some other name besides his own would appear on the script and on the screen (Millard Kaufman offered the use of his), thus beginning a practice for many over the years to come. At that point, however, it was as important to Trumbo as it was to the King brothers that his name be kept out of it because he had begun legal action through his personal attorney, Martin Gang, to force Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to reinstate him or to make settlement on his contract. Obviously he could not himself be found in violation of that contract by working for another producer, so a “front” writer offered the best solution.

  Following the Waldorf Agreement he was put on suspension by the studio—and not fired. That may have been because the studio’s lawyers themselves were uncertain how Trumbo’s contempt of Congress trial and inevitable appeal would turn out. Or, with good reason, they may have felt on shaky ground in taking any punitive action against him within the limits of his contract because he was the only writer at the studio, perhaps the only one in Hollywood, who had managed to get the standard morals clause excluded. (His position in negotiating the contract had been, “When Louis B. Mayer signs a morals clause, I’ll sign a morals clause.”) So the question for the lawyers was, of course, on what grounds could Trumbo even be suspended? Barring disclosure of his little job for the King brothers, it seemed to Trumbo and Martin Gang, the only legitimate grounds M-G-M would have to take action against him would be his failure to fulfill his obligation under the contract—which was simply to do the work that had been assigned him by the studio. That being the case, Trumbo saw to it that that exit was closed to them: he took down from the shelf his half-finished first-draft screenplay of Angel’s Flight, the project on which he had worked with Sam Zimbalist, and he completed it. On December 15, 1947, Martin Gang submitted it to Loew’s Incorporated, then the parent company for M-G-M, with a letter pointing out that Trumbo was hereby fulfilling the terms of his contract by completing the assignment and was now awaiting his next from the studio. Loeb and Loeb, Loew’s Incorporated’s Los Angeles attorneys, returned the script in the next mail, insisting rather vaguely that “Mr. Trumbo’s employment and the payment of compensation to him have been suspended pending the occurrence of certain events.” Thus the way was clear for the lawsuit that would follow.

  Partly because of the situation with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and also partly because he was then sincere in wanting to break out of motion picture writing, Trumbo decided that it was time for him to try his hand at writing a play. Sometime in late December 1947, he wrote Elsie McKeogh of his intention, and she got busy on his behalf. In the first week of 1948, she wired him that producer Lee Sabinson was willing to pay Trumbo an advance on any play he was working on, topic unspecified and sight unseen. As it turned out, the offer was a fairly substantial on
e under the circumstances: one thousand dollars down and one thousand dollars upon agreement to make whatever revisions were deemed necessary. Trumbo wrote his acceptance to Elsie McKeogh and asked her to pass on to Sabinson a little information about the play, which he expected to have in first draft by the middle of March of that year. The title, he told her, was Aching Rivers (in production it subsequently became The Emerald Staircase and finally The Biggest Thief in Town); it had three acts, one set, and eleven characters (twelve in its produced version). He went on then to add a note of reassurance for Sabinson: “In the sense that no thoughtful work can escape having social point, it will have a certain import in line with my convictions. But it will contain no exhortations, no social declamations, no obvious political demands.… I see nothing in the theme and its treatment which would place the play outside the main stream of general serious drama and into the specifically radical category.”

  The idea for the play had its genesis in Trumbo’s experiences as a cub reporter on the Grand Junction Sentinel, when he had been assigned to the “mortuary run.” It proved quite an education for him: “I saw many prominent citizens without their clothes on, as well as other alarming things.” He never quite got over his experiences in Grand Junction’s funeral parlors, and he became convinced that a play could be written set solely in a mortuary. Eventually that play was written, and it was The Biggest Thief in Town. It turns on the theft of the body of the richest man in town, a Citizen Kane-like character who lives in a castle overlooking Shale City. Bert Hutchins, the town’s philosophical undertaker, learns of the death and claims the body, thinking to turn a handsome profit on the funeral before the cadaver can be shipped off for far more expensive burial in Denver. As it turns out, however, John Troybalt, the tycoon, is not even dead. In the play’s funniest scene—and it has a number that are very funny indeed—Troybalt is prayed back to life by supposed mourners whose intention is to send him off in the opposite direction.

  Trumbo has commented that the essential difficulty with this play is that it was really two plays in one—a serious piece and a comedy. In rewriting before production and while out on the road prior to its Broadway opening, the serious play within it was somehow irretrievably lost. Only the comedy survived. In the final text—that is, the one that was performed on Broadway—you can see vestiges of the original play in undertaker Bert Hutchins’s ruminations on his responsibilities as a parent. He has a daughter, Laurie, who is a dancer (remember Trumbo’s old flame, Sylvia Longshore?), and he is trying to arrange her future.

  As for the moral of all this, if indeed the play that survived does have a moral, it would seem to be contained in Bert’s justification for one last bit of wheeling-and-dealing that stops a good deal short of the body-snatching with which the night’s enterprise began. In the last lines before the final curtain he declares, “I’m just like anybody else. I only steal what I absolutely have to have—and then I work for the rest.”

  A complication developed with regard to Trumbo’s situation on the Metro contract. It seemed that the terms of the contract stipulated that he was able to write plays while on a leave of absence but not while on suspension. This meant that when it came time to submit the play to Sabinson, at the end of March 1948, the secrecy he had stipulated earlier had to be maintained more vigilantly than before. It was not until August 1948 that this difficulty was ironed out and he was able to sign with Lee Sabinson. By that time, however, plans were well under way for production. Herman Shumlin had been engaged as director, and discussions had been begun on casting.

  By that time, too, Dalton Trumbo had gone to Washington to stand trial for contempt of Congress. He had been convicted and sentenced to a year in jail. The process of appeal had begun.

  “I remember that trip to Washington” says Lester Cole when I interview him. “He and I went back together to stand trial for contempt. All the way across the country by train, the way it used to be done. We shared a compartment, and we drank a lot of whiskey. We managed just to float across the country in a state of euphoria and fine spirits.”

  The look on Cole’s face as he remembers is interesting to see. A rueful smile. Or call it amused indulgence toward that younger self who could carry on in such circumstances.

  “He and I are alike in some ways,” he continues. “We’re both raucous and boisterous guys, especially with a couple of drinks in us. We’re about the same age, too. Actually, I’m a year older than he is.”

  This comes as a surprise, for Lester Cole looks nearly ten years younger than Dalton Trumbo. He is balding, but the hair he has left is close-cropped, giving him an almost military appearance. A man of medium height, he is stocky and deep-chested and appears physically strong. Both Cole and Alvah Bessie, who left Hollywood for San Francisco, seemed younger than their years when I met them. Trumbo, who had worked continuously in the movie industry since 1933, looked every year of his age and then some.

  “It’s true, really,” Cole assures me. “I think one of the things that’s kept me young is getting out of that rat race in Hollywood. There has always been this carnivorous attitude there. I found that to some extent it was restrained among us—among people who had common political goals. We were under the same pressures, of course, but there was the feeling we had that there was something beyond the next big payday. Let’s say it alleviated the competitiveness and envy among us a little. It wielded a kind of humanizing influence.”

  Lester Cole and Dalton Trumbo were thrown together frequently during the period between the hearings and their imprisonment. There was that trip to Washington, and there was also the civil case against Loew’s Incorporated, their suit on their contracts. They were the only two of the Ten who worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at the time the Waldorf Agreement was announced and the blacklist begun. Cole had started in films in 1932 and had actually tallied more screen credits than Trumbo at the time of the hearings, though most were done for the B units at various studios. He had begun working at Metro just after the war and was there from late 1945 to 1947. While there, he did three films—The Romance of Rosy Ridge, an Esther Williams vehicle called Fiesta, and High Wall. Oddly enough, however, he worked picture to picture on a free-lance basis during this period. Not so unusual in itself, but what is curious is that Lester Cole was not offered a contract at M-G-M until after he was under subpoena to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as an “unfriendly” witness.

  “You see,” Cole explains, “the contract had already been drawn up and was to be offered when the subpoena came. When it did, they didn’t dare not go through with it until they knew which way the wind would blow. They may have struck a pose at the Waldorf, but they were anything but hard-liners. Listen, the last thing I worked on at Metro was a film biography of Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary. Eddie Mannix, who was Mayer’s right-hand man, was skeptical about the project at first. But then he was shocked to find out that the Mexican government was so anxious to have the film made that they were offering one and a half million dollars in services and cooperation to M-G-M and wanted to make it the first Mexican-American coproduction under their big producer Gabriel Figueroa. When Mannix heard about the deal, all his doubts were resolved. He said, ‘What the hell, Jesus Christ was a revolutionary, too.’ For a couple of million he was willing to compare Zapata with Christ! And he was a Catholic!” It was about this time that they shoved the contract under Lester Cole’s nose and he signed on the dotted line. The Zapata picture was never produced by M-G-M. The studio sold the entire project to Twentieth Century-Fox, where it became Viva Zapata!

  To give you the homely details of this conversation between us, Lester Cole and I are having lunch at a restaurant on the fringe of Chinatown. A nice restaurant. Secretaries from the financial district have strayed over. He glances appreciatively at them once or twice as they file past us. It is easy to imagine him in Hollywood and hard, in a way, to imagine him away from it.

  It took some time for him to cut the cord. He had put in his
years on the black market, too—had even begun, as Trumbo did, by working for the King brothers. Although he has no idea whether or not Trumbo recommended him to them, he was made to feel welcome by them. He sold a story under an assumed name to them sometime between 1947 and 1950.

  “Then I worked for a major studio with another writer fronting for me. That was how I was involved until I went to jail. To Warner Bros. I sold a couple of story ideas under a pseudonym—Every Man for Himself and Chain Lightning, that Bogart picture. When I came out of jail I went to New York and remained associated with the radical movement. I put on shows, wrote TV shows under another name, and even worked for a while as a cook in a restaurant. Then in 1956 I left New York for Hollywood, where I continued to do some television work, a little on the film black market, and saw Trumbo, of course, from time to time. Then, in 1960, that was the year he broke the blacklist—it was kind of a mania all those years with him—I went to London and worked there for five years. What did I do there? Let’s see. Well, I wrote the screenplay to Born Free under an assumed name. Other things. But when I came back from there, the idea of returning to Hollywood just wasn’t attractive to me, so I came here, to San Francisco.”