TRUMBO Page 27

  The Prowler was one of the two jobs lined up for Trumbo by George Willner immediately following his return from New York. He completed rewrites called for by Sam Spiegel late in 1949, and the production, directed by Joseph Losey, was brought before the cameras the following year. Although Trumbo never set foot on the set, of course, he and Losey did work closely together on this one, and the movie that resulted from their collaboration can be presumed to be very close to his original conception. It is a “little” movie, essentially a good B picture, a sleazy morality in which an all-night disc jockey (whom we never clearly see) is cuckolded by the cop on the beat when the wife calls in a complaint about a prowler. The details of the film are sharp and accurate, and the leading roles are good, strong characterizations that are well played—by Van Heflin and Evelyn Keyes. Trumbo himself completed the triangle: since the husband is really present only in voice, Losey thought it would be a great joke for Trumbo to be heard throughout the film as the disc jockey. And so he took him to a recording studio, and Trumbo dubbed the all-night deejay’s patter which he himself had written. The Prowler was released while he was in jail and Trumbo forgot about it completely—so completely that when, years after the blacklist, he caught it on the late-late show, he was astonished to hear his own voice suddenly issuing from the set. It was only then that he remembered that he indeed had recorded it, a ghost come back to haunt himself.

  Cowboy was an anti-western, the first of that sub-genre which includes most of Sam Peckinpah’s pictures, as well as such other good films as Tom Gries’s Will Penny and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Trumbo adapted it from Frank Harris’s My Reminiscences as a Cowboy for Sam Spiegel, and John Huston was originally supposed to direct it. Production was delayed, however, and Delmer Daves finally made the picture in 1957, featuring Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford. Hugo Butler lent his name to Trumbo for this one, as he did for the other two written just before jail. By the time Cowboy was released, however, the Writers Guild had entered into an agreement with the producers whereby the name of any political undesirable could be summarily removed from the credits. By that time, too, Butler himself had been blacklisted, and so Edmund North, who had done some rewriting on the script just before it went into production, was given sole credit on Cowboy. “North is a pleasant enough man with good feelings,” said Trumbo. “He later and privately expressed to Hugo his repugnance at receiving sole screenplay credit in this fashion.… This credit was a good one because the reviews were good. And this is an excellent example of why no record of credits between 1947 and 1960 can be considered even remotely accurate.”

  He Ran All the Way was a tightly written melodrama, the quintessential John Garfield movie—and sadly enough, also Garfield’s last. He played a criminal on the lam, forced to hide out with a family of strangers whom he holds hostage. Shelley Winters, the daughter, falls in love with him in spite of herself—as the song says, ladies love outlaws—and he is gunned down at movie’s end with only her to mourn for him. Not a new story, certainly, but Trumbo breathes life into it with the perfect sense of fitness he achieves in writing for the Garfield persona: the part suits Garfield like a bespoke coat; the lines are his completely. John Berry directed it, the last movie he did before he himself was blacklisted, and achieves in it a feeling of sustained tension that is perfect for the material. Hugo Butler did some rewriting on He Ran All the Way while Trumbo was in prison and received sole credit for the picture.

  Trumbo worked on so-called original screen stories during the last weeks before he was to report to serve his prison sentence. At that time there was still a market for these extended narrative treatments, and George Willner had had good luck with one of them earlier. Trumbo wrote three such stories in about three weeks, each of them ninety to one hundred pages in length. Only one of them sold, but the deal was made before Trumbo left for jail. It was The Butcher Bird, a thriller that was never produced but brought him and his family forty thousand dollars when they most needed it.

  The family was holding up rather well. It helped, of course, that Dalton, Cleo, Nikola, Christopher, and Mitzi were there almost isolated during the last winter together on the Lazy-T. Trumbo had bought a Jeep station wagon with which he drove the children to school through even the worst of the mountain snows. But with spring coming apace, they stayed just as close as they had during the high-country winter. They were bundling, not against the cold but against the future. What did it hold for them? The children could not help but be confused by what lay ahead, for they had been told that it wouldn’t be long before their father would be going off to jail. Dalton and Cleo carefully explained why this was so and made it clear that he had done nothing that he—or they—should be ashamed of. Still, it worried the children, as Cleo found out when she overheard Christopher (then nine) ask Nikola if, when a father was sent to jail, it meant his son would have to go to reform school.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TEN MONTHS IN KENTUCKY

  On June 7, 1950, Trumbo left Los Angeles for New York City. His ultimate destination was Washington, D.C., where he was to surrender himself to serve his sentence of one year for contempt of Congress. There was a small crowd at the airport to see him off. Cleo was there, of course, as were the children. After saying their goodbyes, Trumbo’s family fell back with the group of demonstrators and, surprising him, unfurled a banner that read: “Dalton Trumbo is going to jail. Free the Hollywood Ten.” When the remaining eight left some time later (John Howard Lawson had gone on ahead of Trumbo; they were to meet in New York), there was a much larger crowd at the airport to see them off. Cleo gave a speech then on Dalton’s behalf to the three thousand who had assembled there, a rarity for this woman, who was a rather shy person. Trumbo was proud when he heard about this and said he wished he could have been there, but the memory he carried of the three children and Cleo standing under that crudely lettered sign was the one he took with him to jail, and that seemed to suffice.

  He arrived in New York the next day and was met by Lawson, some New York friends, reporters, and photographers. There was a farewell dinner given for him by Lee Sabinson, the producer of The Biggest Thief in Town; and before leaving, he attended a party given in their honor by left-wing socialite Leila Hadley. And then at last to Penn Station, where they found that over a thousand people had gathered to cheer him and Lawson on their way to jail. The two were picked up and borne bodily to the train gate on the shoulders of the crowd; afterward, Trumbo called it a “rather grotesque experience.” In Washington, D.C., the next morning—June 10—they held a press conference, making a last call for support and once again explaining the issues. Then they went off to the District of Columbia Jail and surrendered themselves.

  Exhausted from months of overwork as he prepared for prison and emotionally drained by the excitement of the last few days, Dalton Trumbo came as close to enjoying his first few days in jail as any man could. It provided him with a needed opportunity to sleep, to rest, to eat, and to trouble himself no more than to reassure Cleo and the children that all was well. He and John Howard Lawson knew they would be sent from the D.C. jail to one of the federal prisons. The two were hoping they would be assigned to the federal institution at Danbury, Connecticut, because of its nearness to New York. As it happened, they were not, but Lester Cole and Ring Lardner, Jr., were sent to Danbury, where, by some comic twist of fate, they found themselves in jail with the man who had put them there, J. Parnell Thomas, former congressman from New Jersey and former chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1948 Thomas had been indicted by the Justice Department for payroll padding; and even though he pleaded the Fifth Amendment, he was convicted the following year and was there at Danbury when Lardner and Cole arrived. “He had lost a good deal of weight,” Ring Lardner, Jr., later wrote of his encounter with Thomas, in the prison yard, “and his face, round and scarlet at our last encounter, was deeply lined and sallow. I recognized him, however, and he recognized me, but we did not speak.”

  The p
rison assignments, when they were made, spread the Hollywood Ten around the entire federal prison system. In addition to Cole and Lardner, Herbert Biberman and Alvah Bessie were sent to the Texarkana, Texas, Federal Prison; Edward Dmytryk and Albert Maltz went to the Millpoint, West Virginia, Prison Camp; Samuel Ornitz, even then ill with cancer (he was the first of the Ten to die), served his entire sentence at the Springfield, Massachusetts, Federal Prison Hospital. Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson were sent to the federal prison at Ashland, Kentucky, where a few weeks later they were joined by Adrian Scott.

  Trumbo arrived there June 21, 1950. Once he was settled, he was able not only to write letters, as he had done faithfully from the jail in Washington, but to receive them as well. By this time, of course, he was a man ravenous for news from home. The letters Trumbo wrote from prison are remarkable in their way. He was at other times so taken up with public concerns, so deeply involved with large issues, that it is easy to forget that he was essentially a family man—and remained so all his life. The fact that he was then in jail satisfied even him that he had done so much as he could for the cause of the Hollywood Ten; he had given all any man could for the First Amendment. There were no more speeches to be made, no more pamphlets to be written, just a period of time ahead to be gotten through. His only responsibility now, and perhaps for a good long time to come, was to Cleo and the children.

  All this can be sensed in the prison letters, especially in those written early in his term. There is in them, in the beginning, a kind of feverish inquiry after the family’s welfare—asking for details, giving explicit instructions. He was particularly concerned that the money keep coming in as he had arranged. There was an amount remaining to be paid to him for the screenplay he had done for John Garfield, He Ran All the Way. He kept urging Cleo to keep after the film’s producer, Bob Roberts, who was also a friend, for this sum. And money was long overdue from Sam Spiegel for The Prowler; it took months more to collect even part of that. But along with this dogged desire to get what was coming to him was an apparently equally strong wish—remarkable under the circumstances—to begin paying back money he had borrowed from friends before going into prison. You come across a list of small checks which he asks to be written to Earl Felton, Edward G. Robinson, Sam Zimbalist, E. Y. Harburg, and John Garfield—if the big check arrives from Sam Spiegel, as promised.

  It is in such scrupulous attention as this to what he owes and is owed, the old religion of debit and credit, that Trumbo seems most peculiarly and certainly that sort of nineteenth-century American they were still breeding out in Colorado during the early part of the twentieth century—rare enough qualities even now. Trumbo never lost his respect for money and its obligations, no matter what his politics may have been.

  His concern for Earl Felton, a very old friend and the one who had introduced him to Cleo, went well beyond his financial obligation. Felton, who was physically deformed, had had a run of the most depressing sort of bad luck. He had been jilted and was so deeply affected emotionally that his work as a writer began to suffer during one of Hollywood’s periodic postwar slumps. He had had no work for a time and could well have used the money Trumbo owed him. Trumbo knew that, of course. He also knew that Felton needed far more the sort of personal support that he could have provided if only he had been around. He wrote urging Cleo to see him as soon as possible, and then to Bob Roberts, who was in town (as Cleo was not), asking him to do what he could for Earl. Eventually, Felton pulled himself together and returned to work as a screenwriter, although one or two of his subsequent credits were actually stories by Trumbo to which he allowed his name to be attached. Although never blacklisted, he eventually found himself again unemployable.

  As for what Cleo and the children were doing during this period, they were really only waiting for Trumbo to come back. Life went on at the Lazy-T much as before, except that there was only silence from the detached study behind the ranch house where the typewriter had constantly sounded before. Hugo Butler and Jean Butler came up with their children on July 3, 1950, and stayed the summer, easing things considerably for Cleo. There was always plenty for her to do—frequent trips into Los Angeles on family and financial matters—and there were, of course, many visits to their lawyers.

  Although Trumbo’s participation in them was strictly limited, the legal actions in his behalf continued, even with him in prison. There were, first of all, those to do with getting him out as soon as possible. There was an odd inequality in the way the Ten were sentenced that might, it was felt, be worked to the advantage of the majority. Two of them—Herbert Biberman and Edward Dmytryk—had received disproportionately short sentences (six months each rather than the year the rest had been given) simply because they were sentenced by a different judge than the others. Robert Kenny, who was chief of the team of attorneys who had taken the Ten up before the Committee, was appealing Trumbo’s sentence along with those of the rest and asking that it be reduced to conform with the lighter sentences given Biberman and Dmytryk. The appeal was ultimately denied.

  That left parole. Although in such short sentences as his parole was unusual, contempt of Congress itself was a rare sort of offense (talk about your white-collar crime), and the parole board might well look with favor on the petitions of men who had really done no more than refuse to cooperate in their own pillorying. Trumbo was eligible for parole on October 8, 1950, and for a while he was hopeful. In August 1950, in his letters to Cleo, he began to outline the steps required. He would need a parole advisor and a parole employer, as well as a number of letters from responsible citizens testifying to the high quality of his character. Would she write them? And would she try to find an advisor and an employer for him as well? Of course she would. She lined up the nuclear physicist Linus Pauling (Trumbo’s suggestion: they had met at a fund-raising party given for the Ten), who enthusiastically agreed. The parole employer was a much more difficult problem. Naturally it was Trumbo’s intention to return to his status as a self-employed writer. No studio would rehire him because of the blacklist and he could hardly go back to the bakery and start all over again. It seems, however, that the Los Angeles parole board made no provision for the self-employed; they wanted not only the guarantee he would provide for himself and his family that a full-time job represented, but also a number to call to keep check on him, a bit of leverage for use should he get out of line. Trumbo, seeing that he was caught in a bureaucratic web, sought to extricate himself by having Lee Sabinson (who had declared his wish to stage any new play Trumbo might write) and Bertram Lippincott (the publisher who had options on his next two novels) designated as his employers. Lippincott declined, refusing to write the parole board claiming any such relationship between himself and Trumbo. It would probably have done no good anyway, for there simply was no category in which a free-lance writer might conveniently fit for purposes of parole. Afterward, Trumbo declared it was “a flat policy of no parole for political prisoners,” but it was at once much simpler and more brutal than that: he was, like many a convict before him, just a victim of the system.

  The disposition of his civil suit against Loew’s Incorporated, the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was still unsettled when Trumbo went to jail. Ironically enough, one difficulty had to do with the fact, advantageous as it seemed at first, that his contract contained no morality clause. Clearly, the fact that it had none put him in a much stronger position than the rest of the Ten, all of whom were suing their employers. Membership in the Communist Party and/or the refusal to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities was looked upon at the time as a moral question, nothing more or less. The fact that Trumbo’s claim upon M-G-M was so much more clear-cut than that of the rest of the Ten on their respective employers became a sort of legal embarrassment to the other nine. Their lawyers felt, with good reason, that they, too, were entitled to a settlement. If Trumbo’s claim had been settled first on the basis of the excluded morals clause, the rest could have been denied on the basis that
their contracts contained such a clause and they had violated it. It was up to him then to throw in his lot with the rest, which he did. Negotiations on an out-of-court settlement for the Ten stretched on interminably, long after the last of them had left prison. But while Dalton Trumbo was serving his term in Ashland, he thought often and hard on the money that would be coming his way eventually. His letters to Cleo are filled with thoughts on this and instructions that she was to pass on to his attorney on the matter, Martin Gang, with an occasional exclamation such as this: “My—but I would love to take Metro for a thumping sum! Get everybody paid off, the lad* first of all, and be rich again.” In the event, of course, the settlement, when at last it came, certainly did not make him or anyone else rich. Negotiating together, the studios settled with the blacklistees out of court for $259,000. While the Ten did not share equally in this, they may as well have; Trumbo’s share of it, which on paper amounted to $75,000, brought him only $28,000 after legal fees had been paid and other expenses shared.

  He and John Howard Lawson were together at Ashland from first to last, their cots only twenty-four inches apart in the dormitory where they slept. It wasn’t long before they were joined by Adrian Scott. The three had much to discuss. The Korean War started only days after Trumbo and Lawson had surrendered themselves at the District of Columbia Jail, and with it, on the home front, began the concerted campaign of vilification, threat, and propaganda that is now referred to as the McCarthy era. Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Republican junior senator from Wisconsin, had nothing officially to do with the House Committee on Un-American Activities; unofficially, however, he admired their methods greatly, learned from them, and applied them rigorously in conducting the affairs of his own Senate Anti-Subversive Subcommittee. The House Committee on Un-American Activities got busy again during the period the Ten were in jail and turned their attention once more to Hollywood. From the Committee’s point of view, the hearings that took place then were all they could have hoped for. With the Hollywood Ten in jail and the blacklist in force, it was apparent to all who testified in 1951 that the choice was either to admit their membership in the Communist Party and give names of others they knew to be Communists, or to get out of the movie industry. Only the writers could follow Trumbo’s example and attempt to work in the black market: an actor was known by his face and voice; a director or producer worked in collaboration with others and had to work at a studio. As a matter of fact, a few days before Trumbo and Lawson were released from Ashland at the end of their term, Larry Parks, who was one of the original “unfriendly” nineteen, gave in to pressure and testified before the Committee, giving a few names to them, John Howard Lawson’s among them.