TRUMBO Page 26
I ask Lester Cole if he continued to think of himself as a radical, if his political attitudes had remained fundamentally the same.
He nods. “Oh yes. I’ve never taken a political position that would have eased my personal position in any way. Some did, of course. Some informed and others altered their stand in more subtle ways to make themselves acceptable. I never did. The Ten was a pretty disparate group before they became the Ten, you know. They stuck together in the crisis. Conflicts and differences were submerged. But when that need was gone, the men followed their original feelings and related to world events as they had before they restrained themselves and their feelings and became the Ten.
“But no. No, I don’t think my own position has altered at all. I’ve always written from what I believed in, too. I got into a debate once with the original author of The Romance of Rosy Ridge.* He claimed I had destroyed the film by politicizing it when I adapted it. Well, it’s true I altered it. The original had the soldier just sort of wandering through after the Civil War. I gave him some purpose to come back. I don’t think I destroyed it, but I do think it gave the story a more distinct viewpoint.
“Sure, I suppose we did seek to bring our own convictions into the films we wrote. But were they subversive, as the Committee claimed they were? There was nothing subversive about The Romance of Rosy Ridge. For myself, if I had it to do over again, I would do just the same. Some who testified claimed to have been betrayed by their political beliefs, by the times, by who knows what else. I don’t feel I was betrayed, or misled, or bamboozled. I knew just what I was doing, and I don’t regret any of it.”
As the appeal process ground on, the Hollywood Ten and their attorneys became increasingly aware of just how important it was that the public know about their case and that opinion be marshaled in their favor. In 1948 it may have seemed just possible to win mass support for their cause. That was the year of Henry A. Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign for the presidency. Dalton Trumbo’s personal involvement in the Wallace campaign was minimal. He made a speech or two and wrote a letter in support of Wallace to be reprinted in advertisements along with statements from others of the Ten. There was an effort to identify the cause of the Hollywood Ten with that of Henry Wallace—and vice versa. When Wallace lost so decisively, it must have discouraged them and their supporters.
And 1948 was also the year Trumbo left the Communist Party: “We were living at the ranch, and it was an eighty-five-mile drive into town. I was hopelessly engaged in the Ten’s problems and so forth. And I just drifted away. I changed no beliefs. I just quit going to meetings and never went back—with no more feeling of separation than I had before I started with the Communist Party.”
The next year, 1949, brought further discouragements to the Ten, for that was the year that Supreme Court justices Frank Murphy and Wiley B. Rutledge died, in succession, thus reducing the chances of having the contempt convictions heard on appeal before the Court from fifty-fifty to about thirty-seventy. Something had to be done. And so Trumbo sat down and wrote a pamphlet, “The Time of the Toad,” which, even allowing for its strongly partisan viewpoint, is still the most lucid discussion of the issues in the case.
He devotes the first half of “The Time of the Toad” (which derives its odd title from a rhetorical conceit employed by Zola in his pamphleteering on behalf of Dreyfus) to an exposition of the events leading up to and through the contempt citations before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In the second half of the pamphlet, Trumbo deals at length with the larger issues raised by the Hollywood Ten case. He establishes it—and he may well have been the first to do this—as a domestic manifestation of the Cold War that was only then just developing: “We are against the Soviet Union in our foreign policy abroad, and we are against anything partaking of socialism or Communism in our internal affairs. This quality of opposition has become the keystone of our national existence.” He then focuses on that species which would soon become the most avid of all the Cold Warriors—the New Liberal, the champion of the anti-Communist left. His chief target here was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who had already made statements during a panel discussion that in principle denied academic freedom to university teachers who were or had been members of the Communist Party. (Schlesinger subsequently attacked the Hollywood Ten directly in an article published in the Saturday Review of Literature, “The Life of the Party.” He became a particular enemy; it would not be overstating to say that Trumbo despised the man.)
In “The Time of the Toad,” Dalton Trumbo attempted to sound a general alarm, tying the plight of the Ten to the threats posed to free speech and intellectual freedom which were, after all, at the heart of the position he and the rest had taken before the Committee. They took the show out on the road in an attempt to stir up popular support during the final appeal period. Speaking around the country, appearing at rallies and meetings, they would sound this note again and again. They packed Carnegie Hall at a rally for the Ten at which Trumbo spoke, but the message was brought out to Middle America as well. He remembered going to Duluth, Minnesota, on a winter night and finding that thirty-five or forty people had braved the cold to hear what he had to say about the Hollywood Ten and freedom of speech down at the local union hall.
“Adrian [Scott] and I went to speak at the University of New Hampshire,” he remembered. “We got off the train and found the Liberal Club, which was the sponsoring organization, had a guard on hand for us. And I suppose it was a good thing, too, because there were some rocks and eggs being thrown at us there at the depot—feelings ran high, you see. Rather than take us to a hotel where we would be available, they took us quite secretly to a rooming house, an immaculately kept place with two beds in a single room. Well, before night the university revoked our permit to speak on the campus, and so the Congregational Church threw its doors open for us, and we spoke there. But sitting in the front row were six members of the football team wearing blazing red sweaters—the opposition, you see. They glowered at us the entire evening and did their best to intimidate us.
“I remember Ring and I met during this time in Chicago. We went to the Pump Room of the Ambassador at noon. Now, the Pump Room in those days had enormous martinis, and we began to drink martinis. We stayed, and stayed, the two of us, and we were there at dinner time, and we had dinner. And we continued drinking, until about twelve-thirty, Artie Shaw came in, having just finished an appearance with his dance band. He sat down and we drank a little bit with him. A fantastic thing—and we were able to get up and get to our hotel! We just spent the whole day drinking those God-damn martinis and talking. We were young and healthy then and could get away with it.
“What did we talk about? Well, I know it wasn’t politics because, God, politics was running out of our ears by this time. Oh, we might have been critical of the job we had been sent out to do. You know it was rather embarrassing because one of the problems of the Ten was that they were known to have been very highly paid. And it was embarrassing to go into a union hall in Chicago and make a speech, then somebody would make a pitch and a collection would be taken. You might get thirty dollars or maybe more. There was something fundamentally wrong with this, it seemed, yet the people wanted us at the union hall and wanted to contribute. But publicly there is no way you can allow much indignation for people who are making only ten thousand dollars instead of the hundred thousand they made before. We had some personal difficulties over that, and that may have been about the closest we came to discussing politics.”
Part of the time during which Dalton Trumbo was touring for the Ten was also taken up with his involvement in the production of his play. He had kept his work on the black market to a minimum then and was betting boldly on its success. But there were problems with it right from the start. Director Herman Shumlin was calling for rewrites even before rehearsals began. There were problems in casting, too: for instance, Thomas Mitchell, who was not their first choice for Bert, never completely satisfied Trumbo, Shumlin, or Lee Sa
binson. But he was a name, and the play badly needed whatever prestige he could lend it. The biggest problem, however, was the very fundamental one of just what sort of play this was going to be. Rewriting furiously on the road, Trumbo altered the play completely in Boston and Philadelphia; the name was changed a couple of times before it became The Biggest Thief in Town; and one character was totally eliminated in the rewriting. As Trumbo put it to Sam Zolotow of the New York Times in a brief interview published on March 30, 1949, the day it opened: “The play started out as a drama of frustration. Then the audience and other factors changed it into what it is today. We hope it’s a comedy.”
There seems little doubt he succeeded in making people laugh. William Pomerance, Trumbo’s friend from the Screen Writers Guild, who by that time had moved back to New York and started a television production company, remembers the play as “one of the funniest I’ve ever seen. I heard they had to carry two people out from laughing in Boston.” And even Brooks Atkinson’s negative review in the Times allowed that the opening night audience had certainly enjoyed itself: “To enjoy ‘The Biggest Thief in Town’… you have to do Dalton Trumbo one favor. You have to agree that an undertaker’s parlor is a comic place and that body snatching is hilarious. To judge by the laughter in the theater last evening, many people have no difficulty in agreeing with Mr. Trumbo’s ghoulish point of view.”
Although The Biggest Thief in Town would eventually have a run of nearly a year in England, the play was finished in America. The project on which he had spent so much time and on which he had counted so to rescue him financially had come to nothing—or next to nothing. Immediately after it closed, there was some brave talk between Trumbo and producer Lee Sabinson about another play. Sabinson went as far as to offer him another thousand-dollar advance, which Trumbo declined. He wanted to write another play, all right, if only to put Brooks Atkinson in his place; but he knew very well now that at least for the time being, his only real salvation lay in screenwriting. He took a deep, desperate plunge into the black market.
To do it, he had first to find an agent willing to represent him, one who would do so on a completely confidential basis. His agency-of-record had been Berg-Allenberg, the high-powered outfit that had negotiated his surpassingly favorable Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract. Because the agency wanted primarily to stay in the good graces of the studios, it was certainly not going to do much—if anything—on Trumbo’s behalf. One of the principals of the agency, Philip Berg, had angered Trumbo during an interview in April 1948, when he took it upon himself to lecture him for “making long speeches” while he was before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Berg then went on to suggest seriously to Trumbo that he and the other nine might throw themselves on the mercy of columnist Westbrook Pegler, a friend of the agent’s, and thus gain forgiveness (along with their old jobs, presumably) by cooperating fully and telling him whatever he wished to know about their allegiances and associations. Finally, Berg refused to make him the loan of ten thousand dollars he asked for, or even to take a ten-thousand-dollar trust deed on the Lazy-T—and Trumbo had always maintained that an agent’s primary function was to loan his clients money. All these and other complaints are detailed in a long letter he wrote on December 17, 1948, to his contact there, a letter that becomes ironically amusing when we note that it was addressed to Meta Reis (now Meta Reis Rosenberg) at that agency. She appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on April 13, 1951, and cooperated fully, admitting her former membership in the Communist Party and giving the names of twenty men and women known to her to have also been members.
Dalton Trumbo’s name was not among them, but the name of George Willner was. He was the agent, a principal of Goldstone-Willner, who said he would be willing to take Trumbo on as a secret client and help him find work in the black market. Trumbo had written to him first on July 17, 1948, asking if Willner could get him some work—a polish job or a shooting script to be written from a story already set. Nothing developed for a while, for Trumbo was traveling for the Ten and was involved with the play, though Willner did help him collect money that was owed him by the King brothers for his Gun Crazy script. However, when Trumbo floated back from New York, clinging to a spar from the shipwreck of The Biggest Thief in Town, he sent a Mayday to Willner. The agent responded with a job, an original story, Fairview, U.S.A., for the comedian Danny Kaye. Not long afterward (June 1949), Willner lined Trumbo up with independent producer Sam Spiegel to do a screenplay on a “fairly commercial yarn, somewhat similar in theme to Double Indemnity.” What resulted was The Prowler, a thriller that after starts and stops, and many demands for payment from Trumbo, was brought before the cameras the next year only a little before he went off to jail (more about this one later). And then George Willner pulled off a real coup. He sold one of a couple of original screen stories Trumbo had written the year before, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend. The purchaser was Twentieth Century-Fox. It carried the name of Trumbo’s friend Earl Felton, and it brought them both some money. “Whatever he got,” says Trumbo, “he deserved every penny of it because if it was discovered, it could have been his career. Earl was a friend.” Felton subsequently did the screenplay for Preston Sturges, who made the picture. It failed disastrously, however, and did neither of them any good.
In the midst of all this occurred an incident that was silly enough in itself but had some negative effect on the image of injured propriety that the Hollywood Ten had sought to project. It all came about when Trumbo made one of his rare trips into town from the Lazy-T. He had errands to run and shopping to do and wound up going out to dinner with Ian and Alice Hunter. He and Ian drank a little before dinner and quite a bit afterward—so much that he decided he had better spend the night. In the course of it, he felt a powerful urge to urinate, and, finding the bathroom occupied, Trumbo marched out the front door to the curb and cheerfully urinated in the gutter. Just as he was finishing, a car turned the corner and bore down upon him, illuminating him in its headlights. It was a Beverly Hills police prowl car, and Trumbo had been caught in the act. The police took him into the station, as he insisted all the while he was not drunk and demanded a sobriety test. They refused to give him one, but rather, realizing who he was, invited reporters down for the story. Once the press had been satisfied, Trumbo was allowed to pay twenty dollars bail and leave the station. He went immediately to the home of a doctor he knew, woke him up, and asked to be given the sobriety test the police had refused him. He took it and passed.
By the time the case came up, Robert Kenny had represented his client’s case informally to the judge who would try it. “I called him up before things got tense,” Kenny recalled. “It was all very easy. We’d been in Stanford together, and I simply told him what happened, and the judge himself said that things had come to a hell of a pass when a man hasn’t got the same rights as a horse. ‘That’s right,’ I told the judge, ‘it’s a constitutional question.’” It may not have been an artful argument, but considering that Trumbo had passed a sobriety test within the required time and could prove it, it was enough to persuade the police not to prosecute.
There was no need to. The newspapers had already done that job. The story was splashed through them all. If the object had been to ridicule the Hollywood Ten, that band of “swimming pool Communists,” then they succeeded. But if the intention was to cause Trumbo himself personal embarrassment, they failed. He took it all with equanimity. His only real concern was the effect the publicity might have on his mother. She had always opposed his drinking when he was a young man; as he grew older, she tolerated it. He was afraid that she would assume from the lurid accounts of the incident in the papers that the pressures under which he was now operating had made a drunk of him. And so he wrote Maud Trumbo, assuring her that reports of his depravity were greatly exaggerated. He ended the letter with two paragraphs that illuminate the rough sort of bargain mother and son had struck during a time that must have been hard for both of them:
> When I look back on my own convictions and rebellion, I find nothing remarkable in it. For I am reminded that at a younger age than I my mother too, rebelled, left her church, joined an unpopular and ridiculed faith, insisted upon the immunity of her children from supervision of medical authorities; and that the church she joined was fighting for its life before various legislatures, and that was in the newspapers, falsely and outrageously, and fought them off to the end. How, then, could a rebellious mother produce anything but a rebellious son?
Disagreeing as we do and have, we have finally struck a relationship which I am sure pleases us both—one of mutual respect. I love you very much, but I respect you even more, and that is what I hope to earn from my own children, after suitable conflicts and disagreements. Instead of regrets for my present plight, I have only renewed confidence, and a joy in writing that five years ago I thought would never come to me.
Time was growing short, and Trumbo knew it. When he wrote that letter to his mother he and his nine co-defendants were sweating it out, waiting to see whether the Supreme Court would hear their case. Their petition of certiorari was turned down on November 14, 1949. They knew then that delay was possible, but jail was inevitable.
He chose to spend the few months he had left to him hard at work. If he was to be lost to his family for a year, then—he told himself—he would have to earn enough in the time remaining to take them through that year. He managed to do just that. This was remarkable enough in itself, considering the legal expenses he had incurred, the debts and running expenses attached to the Lazy-T, and the number of people who were financially dependent upon him; but even more impressive was the quality of work he did during this time. Working under the gun, falling back on Dexedrine and Benzedrine to keep him at the typewriter and Seconal to bring him down and put him to sleep, Trumbo somehow managed to pull off some of the best work he had done in years.