TRUMBO Read online

  But even though things were coming to a boil in Washington, D.C., and in Los Angeles; and even though the United States was engaged in a war in which the powers and ideologies were so counterposed as to make Trumbo and the rest seem renegades; nevertheless, the days in prison were quiet and without political stress. Nobody cared much what he was in for or what his politics were. It was simply a matter of getting through each day and “building time” (which was the phrase used at Ashland) which he needed to leave. In the beginning, Trumbo almost welcomed the period that stretched out before him. During the first few days there at Ashland, he wrote to Cleo:

  Life here is something like life in a sanitarium. The place is airy, immaculate and most attractive, with wide expanse of lawns, and views of green country-side in every direction. The food is good, the attitude is friendly, and the restrictions are not onerous. The regularity of food, sleep—and later, I hope—work is most relaxing. Looking at myself in the mirror, I am persuaded that the wrinkles of work and tension are vanishing, and that I appear much younger than I did two weeks ago. After some twenty-five years of the most intensive work, the sudden shucking off of all responsibility gives one a sense of almost exhilarating relief—a total resignation of personal responsibility and a peaceful acceptance of the regulations and requirements of the institution, none of which I have thus far found to be unreasonable.

  But a few months later, he would begin another letter to Cleo:

  Things are so dry at the FCI [Federal Correctional Institute] that I’m ashamed to put pen to paper. There is absolutely no news. Today it rained. Yesterday it didn’t. My cold persists. I read. I work. I eat. Time passes more rapidly than it really should. I am not even too badly bored. But there is simply no news.

  He subscribed to a good many magazines and newspapers, and even though imprisoned, he was not isolated. He kept the same keen interest in what was going on in the world, though he seldom discussed such matters in his letters to Cleo or to his other correspondents. This was partly because the letters were censored—and he knew it. But only partly, because at last his attentions and his energies were diverted from the daily alarms and threats brought in the pages of the newspaper. There was nothing he could do anyway—no article to write, no speech to make—and so he focused his attention beyond immediate events and considered history, history in the form of a novel.

  In the beginning, he had half-expected to continue inside with the sort of work he had been doing just before going off to prison. He would write another original screen story or two, perhaps do a screenplay that he might try to peddle on the black market upon his release. But somehow that didn’t work. He tried to get started on a number of things during his first few weeks there at Ashland. “Then I concluded,” he wrote Cleo, “that precisely because of the conditions and interruptions, a serious work was the only project that could possibly engross my attention so completely that I wouldn’t notice either the conditions or the interruptions.” He had done a good deal of reading in those first months in jail: Huckleberry Finn, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, A Passage to India, and The Forsyte Saga, among others. But the work that set him going was War and Peace. It persuaded him that it might be possible once again to take up the war novel he had hoped to write upon his return from the Pacific. He was especially intrigued by the idea of integrating passages of history into the book, as Tolstoy had done. As for length, he intended nothing on so grand a scale; but this could be just one of a whole cycle of novels to deal with his time, the piece of history he knew best.

  He began it in August 1950, after two months of imprisonment. At first it went very well indeed—a chapter a week for four weeks—but then, as the possible date for his parole drew nearer, his attention was diverted from the novel; he found it impossible to concentrate on it, and so he put it aside. With the parole date past and that avenue closed to him, he took the novel up again—this was at the beginning of 1951—and worked steadily at it until his release, at which time he had about 150 pages of typescript. He was optimistic about the project. He felt, while he was working in the last months of his term, that he had after all managed to do something in prison. Perhaps it hadn’t all been wasted time. And with these feelings came again the recurrent yearning to be a novelist, what he still thought of as a real writer. He wrote to Cleo:

  More and more I realize that when I emerge from this place I must at last make the choice of whether I want to live at the rate of $25,000 a year as we always have, or whether I want truly to become a writer. I think it would be better for all of us if the latter course were taken, although it would entail certain sacrifices, including (unless we won a whopping law suit) the ranch.

  The ranch was sacrificed, but they continued to live at the rate of twenty-five thousand dollars a year and a good deal more. What was worse, however, was that the choice was never really made. The novel was never finished.

  I feel that what I have given so far is an altogether incorrect impression of Dalton Trumbo’s life in prison. Was it merely an interruption? A chance to read and rest? An opportunity to try his hand again at writing fiction? No, it was time taken out of his life, months—nearly a year—that could never be reclaimed. If he was physically well treated, and he was, nevertheless there was the intense emotional pain he felt at being separated from his wife and children at a time when all of them most needed each other. There was nearly a year spent in meaningless busywork by a man who had learned to work hard and economically at a very specialized craft, one who had developed his powers of concentration on a given project to an astonishing degree. And for what? If there had been an element of real punishment to this deprivation of time and freedom, then it might have been easier for him to take. But he felt no guilt for what he had done. In his own mind he was certain he had behaved honorably in refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Had he shown contempt for Congress? Not for the institution; he respected it still. But yes, his attitude before the Committee had clearly reflected what he felt for those men and their attitudes that were, after all, truly contemptible. But none of this helped him in prison. All that helped him while inside were the men he got to know there:

  “They had in that jail, I should say a third who were young men, or not so young, convicted on the Dyer Act, which is transporting a car across a state border. Many of them were from Washington, D.C., where all you do is leave the city and you’ve crossed a state line. About a third of them there were bootleggers, moonshiners. And a pretty high quality of men they were. They were largely illiterate. In the Kentucky hills, in that area, and in Appalachia, the moonshiners can’t understand why they can’t plant their seven acres to corn and make their corn into whiskey. To tell you the truth, I can’t understand it either. But there were the distilleries, the federal licenses, and so on. But it is so much a part of their lives, and their fathers’, and their forefathers’, that it’s useless to try to dissuade them. And they’re right! Some of them, I’m told, make very good whiskey—if they have a chance.

  “I wrote letters for a man whose first name was Cecil—from Appalachia—a moonshiner. This was his second conviction. They only gave him eighteen months and he would be out in six months, because nobody, not even the guards, felt that he was criminal. They were just somehow paying for their license with an eighteen-month sentence, and in six months they would be paroled. Now, Cecil could neither read nor write, so I wrote letters to his wife. His wife could neither read nor write, but a younger daughter could, so she wrote letters for the mother. And reading her letters to Cecil, you saw the hardship of the lives these people were living—four or five children, one of them always sick. There was the problem of getting in firewood. And always the work that went on, the planting and tending and harvesting, just nothing but hard work.

  “His wife’s teeth were very bad, and she’d been to the county two or three times about her teeth. And finally, there came a letter from her that said that although she didn’t want them to do it and be
gged them not to, the county took out all her teeth. She said, ‘I haven’t got any teeth. All I’ve got is gums, and they don’t know when they’re going to be able to give me teeth. They’ve talked about a date, but my gums are too sore now. It’s going to be a long time, maybe a year before I have any teeth. And all I’ve got is gums now, and my mouth is all scrunched up. And when you see me you’re not going to love me anymore because I am so ugly.’ In other words, this woman was just heartbroken. She must have been about forty-five, and she probably looked sixty-five by now. She was warning her husband.

  “Well, often I would invent letters for Cecil and read them to him and if he liked them, fine, and make corrections, because he didn’t know what to say, except when he had specific information to convey. So I wrote a letter in which Cecil said she wasn’t to worry about her teeth, that she would be pretty without her teeth, that as a matter of fact when he first saw her and married her, he never even thought about her teeth and didn’t remember whether she had any teeth or not—he didn’t give a God-damn about her teeth. She would always be as beautiful as she was because it wasn’t her teeth he loved anyhow. The letter came back written by the daughter for the mother. It was a love letter. I can’t describe it. Just a complete, total love letter. It was very moving just to read it, to have been part of it.”

  What happened to Cecil? “He got out on parole before I was released. He’s probably dead by now—bad health, malnutrition, the life they lead in those hills is what kills them. I never heard from him again.”

  But Trumbo did hear from a few. “Yes, I heard from White, the counterfeiter. He was a Marine in the war and had a 90 percent disability. I wrote letters to the parole board for a lot of people, but I would write the God-damndest things for White. He was a convinced counterfeiter, a devout one. He limped because his thighs were full of shrapnel, and he was missing two fingers on one hand. He was from Tennessee and had the wasted, emaciated face of early malnutrition. I liked him. He was first-rate. One frosty morning he went out to the loading dock and was guiding a truck in right up to the dock. The truck gave a lurch, his hand was caught, and he lost three more fingers. He came into the storeroom office then, holding what was left of his hand, and said, ‘You know, I think I ought to go to the hospital and get this God-damn thing sewed up!’ He went up, and he was back again within an hour. Well, there’s some quality there.

  “We had a man named Brooks. Brooks was black, about six feet two and two hundred and five or two hundred ten pounds, as magnificent a man as you would hope to see. Now, military sentences are savage, but they are swiftly cut down. Brooks, however, had had an unusual experience with military justice. It happened in France where he was an MP during the war guarding a motor pool. And according to Brooks, a white soldier was trying to get away with a truck, and Brooks shot him and killed him. Well, he was court-martialed and, I think, sentenced to death. It was reviewed, and the whole thing was commuted—in other words, he was acquitted. He was transferred to Saipan. He and a friend were walking along a road, and a white sergeant in a jeep drove up beside them. There was an altercation, and Brooks killed the sergeant. Well, Christ, that was too much—he pulled seventy-five years! I’m sure there were mitigating circumstances in both instances. If he hadn’t been black he probably wouldn’t have gotten into much trouble, because his term had been knocked down, and by 1950 or ’51, he was in Ashland, which is primarily for short-termers. Well, Brooks, for reasons that I don’t know, took charge of me. While I was working unloading the trucks he wouldn’t let me carry a side of beef or a hundred-pound sack of salt. He was constantly helping me. And we would sit and talk quite a bit together. Brooks said to me, ‘You know, when I came into this God-damned place there was no sumbitch said hello to me. When I get out of this motherfucker, bet I ain’t going to say goodbye to no sumbitch either. Fuck ’em!’ He was as good as his word. The time came for his parole, and I watched him pack at the other end of the dormitory, all by himself, and when he was through, he simply left, walked out behind me, without saying goodbye to anyone. And I watched him through the window, crossing the yard, and he didn’t take one look back. Not one.”

  Trumbo had been assigned to work in the shipping room there at Ashland Federal Correctional Institute. Everything that came into the prison came in through there. At first he worked with the gangs that unloaded the trucks that came through; but out of deference to his age and because he could type, he was soon given a physically easier job as shipping room clerk. Most of the shipments they handled were to or from other federal institutions, usually prisons. They would get canned goods from one prison, uniforms made in another, and in exchange they would send out packages of cigarettes from tobacco grown in the fields at Ashland, cured, wrapped, rolled, and packaged there. It involved elaborate bookkeeping with profit and loss figures and was intended to make the federal prison system as nearly self-supporting as possible—on paper.

  One day they got in a miscellaneous shipment from Leavenworth Federal Prison. Among the items unloaded by the shipping dock gang—with Trumbo, the clerk, looking on and more or less in charge—was a large cardboard box containing nuts, bolts, gears, machine parts, for which there was little use there at Ashland. Trumbo was checking them off as they were unpacked and carted off to the proper bins in the huge prison storeroom. Finally, when they reached the bottom of the box, what did they find there but six hacksaws.

  “Well,” said Trumbo, “I had a problem. What the hell were we going to do with these hacksaws? They were hot, obviously. It was my job to report them to the prison boss, who would report back to Leavenworth. There would be an investigation and somebody would catch holy hell. All the people who had been in charge of packing that box would be in some question, and somebody was going to get hurt. Now, we had no use for hacksaws because it was too easy to escape from our jail. All you had to do was get on the farm crew and run, if you wanted to, but you’d always get caught. So here we are, about six of us looking down at these hacksaws at the bottom of the box, and I finally said, ‘Look, we won’t say a word about these to anyone. They’re not listed here on the invoice, naturally. Let’s select a bin that we all know and tape the hacksaws to the bottom of it.’ Well, that’s what we did. In the event we needed them, we all knew where they were. Nobody else ever knew, and that was the way we solved that problem.”

  His boss there in the shipping room was a man named Brogan, who was the prison storekeeper. Brogan took a personal interest in him. The two worked together most of the time and filled long stretches with talk. “Brogan was a very nice man,” Trumbo remembered. “He was, I should say, about sixty. He began as a storekeeper in the military and finally worked his way into the prison system.”

  What did they find to talk about? “Well, never about politics. He would tell me stories about his experiences there and in the military—the army, I believe it was. And he would ask me about all kinds of things. He asked about Hollywood, and my work, and my children. He let me write—I could do writing on the side, which I did. But he just never asked about or wanted to discuss politics. And of course he would have known what I was in for. Everybody knew about everybody else in prison. The records were fairly accessible through convict clerks and so on. But that was just something that didn’t come up between us.

  “Brogan had supported his mother all his life, and lived with her, and his mother had died the year before I got there. And he had immediately gotten married. There was a personal feeling between us. He liked me, and I liked him, and he trusted me completely. He wanted to see pictures of my family, and I brought them to him, and he admired them. And he said, ‘You know, I would like to meet your wife, and I would like you to meet mine.’ There was a procedure, you see, whereby if you were picked up at the prison, you could get out at midnight on the date of your release. Otherwise you had to wait six or eight hours and be dressed out in the morning. Cleo was to come for me. Brogan knew this and wanted to see us off where we would be leaving on the Baltimore and Ohio train
for New York. I told him I would like that very much, but I said I didn’t think it was wise for him to be so very public about it, so why didn’t he park his car in the railroad station parking lot, and we would sit there in the car and talk while we waited for the train to come. He said this was a good idea, so we agreed on it. The time came, and I was released. Cleo was there to meet me. We took a cab to the railroad station, and we looked for Brogan’s yellow Dodge—that’s what he said he had—and we found it, but there was nobody inside. Of course we walked into the station. It must have been about twelve-forty-five. And there he was with his wife, waiting for us. We met her, and we sat down and talked, and we were there together about a half hour before the train came.”