TRUMBO Read online

  It was a very human way to end that ten-month ordeal—a year’s sentence, less two months for good behavior. That time out of his life was done now. He would go back, pick up the broken ends, and try to twist them together.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “ENGAGED IN SELLING”

  During his term of ten months at Ashland, Trumbo learned to obey the sound of a whistle. When he or any other prisoner heard it, that meant he was to stop whatever he was doing and “stand for a count”—remain where he was, rigidly motionless at attention, while the guard came through, took his count, and made his inspection. The whistle was sounded at any time of escape, to restore order, or just to satisfy a guard’s curiosity. Whenever he heard it, though, Trumbo had been taught to stay rooted where he stood.

  “When I got out,” he remembers, “the first New York traffic policeman who blew a whistle within earshot, well, I stopped immediately. I was conditioned.”

  It took him years to unlearn prison. In some unexpected ways he was changed permanently. He had, for instance, always been a night worker before—a legacy of his years at the bakery. Prison changed that. He came out a confirmed daylight worker and remained so. But the time stayed with him in more important ways: “What I have never regretted is the experience of it. It’s one a hell of a lot of people don’t have, a very valuable one. And as you see, I remember it, and I don’t remember it as I remember the bakery, with a sense of horror. No, not that at all.”

  What prison did not do was subdue or intimidate him. After visiting for a few days with friends in New York City, he and Cleo returned to Los Angeles. On the trip back they had a long time to talk things over and to think about what might be done. It was the same old problem, really, and that was money. They could cut their expenses, but there was only one source of income open to him, and that was the movie black market. Consequently, upon arriving in Los Angeles and before returning to the Lazy-T, he got in touch with the King brothers and declared himself ready to work. And again, Frank, Maury, and Hymie came through. On April 28, 1951, they sent him three original stories which they felt had movie potential, as well as a novel they thought was right. He did quite a lot of work on one of the projects, an original called The Syndicate, which he rewrote extensively and so successfully that the King brothers later turned down an offer for one hundred thousand dollars on the script, still intending to do it themselves. Only one of the originals was produced, Carnival Story, which the King brothers produced in Germany and released in 1954. Trumbo did the screenplay for the picture, Steve Cochran and Anne Baxter were featured in it, and Kurt Neumann directed. The King brothers, whose genius was getting a lot of movie out of a little money, worked their magic again on this one. It is quite a respectable B picture, not least because of the literate script Trumbo provided.

  As for cutting expenses, Dalton and Cleo knew that the Lazy-T represented the biggest and most constant drain on their resources. The ranch was also clearly their most negotiable piece of property. And so they decided to sell it. This wasn’t quite the heartrending decision it might have been, for their daughter Nikola was ready in the fall to go to high school, and the nearest was so far away that commuting was out of the question; they did not want to send her to a boarding school because it seemed especially important to them to keep the family together. After making private inquiries and the necessary arrangements, they put the house and surrounding property—the entire Lazy-T—up for sale in July 1951.

  As Trumbo was making plans to sell the Lazy-T, he received a pointed letter from Herbert Biberman regarding a subject the two had discussed earlier in Los Angeles. Since his release from prison, Biberman had been working hard to put together an independent motion picture production company in which the key personnel would be blacklistees like himself. Biberman, who was one of the leaders of the Hollywood Ten’s defense, had a flair for organization and was eventually able not only to bring together such a group, but also (and far more difficult) to find modest financing for their first production. That turned out to be Salt of the Earth, and it was the only film Independent Productions Company ever made.* Right from the start, Biberman had declared his intention to make socially conscious, politically engaging motion pictures, the kind that could no longer be made in Hollywood.

  In his letter, Herbert Biberman appealed to Dalton Trumbo for help. He was soliciting Trumbo’s services as a screenwriter for a small payment to be deferred against possible profits. Trumbo, who had initially indicated his willingness, was forced to decline; his reply to Biberman is worth quoting because in it he set forth the principles that would guide him in his dealings during the next nine years—or until the blacklist was broken:

  I sired these kids of mine, and I’ve got to support them, and even the noblest intention to write a screenplay with social content cannot excuse me for not having present the money to buy their badly needed clothes for the new school term. That is a primary obligation, and, in accepting the assignment for reasons which were perfectly decent, I made it secondary. That was wrong. Since the problem is exclusively mine, I am the only one I know of who can solve it, and the first step to solution is clear.

  I am, from today on and for some time in the future, not interested in pamphlets, speeches, or progressive motion pictures. I have got to earn money—a considerable sum of it—very quickly. I cannot and will not hypothecate two or three months, or even a month, for any project that doesn’t contain the possibility of an immediate and substantial sum. Once I have earned the money, once I have sold the ranch, once I am in a position where the slightest mishap no longer places me in peril, I shall again function as I should like to. But this is well in the future.

  No screenplay with social content, no pamphlets, and no speeches. He was adamant—because no matter where his political sympathies might lie, his obligations to his family lay that much deeper. This was surely the gospel according to George Horace Lorimer, a frontier conception of masculine responsibility. But as we shall see, Trumbo was as good as his word: he provided.

  Money came to him at last when he most needed it, for an original that was one of his best and certainly his most charming: Roman Holiday, the Paramount picture released in 1953 that shot Audrey Hepburn to stardom and gave the Lincolnesque Gregory Peck his only successful light role. The original deal on this was to have been made for Trumbo by George Willner, just before Willner himself was named in testimony before the Committee and barred from the studios. But Ian McLellan Hunter agreed to front for his friend on this one. Lending his name and dealing through his own agent, Hunter got his established price of forty thousand dollars from Paramount on it for Trumbo. Frank Capra was originally to have been the director of Roman Holiday, but he and Paramount had a falling out. Trumbo recalls that in the meantime Hunter had done considerable rewriting on it for the studio: “At Paramount he greatly improved the script, but ran into many subsidiary difficulties, the principal one being that he himself had fallen under the shadow of the blacklist. The end of his employment with Paramount was also the end of his employment in Hollywood.”

  In the midst of all this scrambling after money came some unexpected good news that unfortunately had little effect on the Trumbos’ financial situation. Elsie McKeogh, his literary agent, wrote him from New York of English producer Peter Cotes’s desire to stage The Biggest Thief in Town in London. The plan was to do the play in a small theater production later that year. If it went over well, the production would be moved, as was the custom, to a big West End theater. And that was just what happened. When the production moved to the Duchess Theatre in the West End on August 14, 1951, Trumbo received an advance in anticipation of a long run there. The play had gone over well and would have had that long run had it not been for the sad death of J. Edward Bromberg in the leading role in January 1952. Trumbo had recommended the American character actor, who was himself blacklisted, and Bromberg had had a great success in London—always gratifying for an American actor. But then he died, and with him died the production.


  By that time, Trumbo, Cleo, and the children were down in Mexico. Quite a colony had been established there. John Bright, Trumbo’s friend from the old days at Warners, remembered this gathering of fugitives: “I was the first person to land in Mexico City. At the time I got there only Gordon Kahn was around, and he was in Cuernavaca. I registered in the Imperial Hotel down there, and one by one, they all came, and everybody on the blacklist, I swear, passed through the Imperial Hotel. Why, at one time, fourteen of the sixteen apartments in the place were occupied by blacklistees. I remember the English-language paper down there, the Mexico City News, got wind that we were there and ran a story on us, who we were, and so on. So when the news broke, the clerk at the Imperial found out all his tenants, who he thought were Hollywood big shots, were just lepers in disguise. He was one disappointed hotel clerk, let me tell you. Let’s see, John Wexley was there, Maltz—until he moved to Cuernavaca—Ring Lardner, Trumbo—until he moved to something grand—Ian Hunter, later, and, well, just all of them. You can imagine the bull sessions we had down there as they arrived one by one.”

  As it happened, the Trumbos didn’t arrive alone, however, but in caravan with the Butlers. Hugo Butler and his family had been down in Ensenada in Baja California for most of 1951. He was there, literally hiding out from a subpoena by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Shortly after his release from prison, Trumbo had taken the family down for a visit and had heard Hugo talk in glowing terms of the prospects for blacklisted writers in Mexico; there was work for them all in the Mexican film industry, Hugo told him. He himself had done a job for a Mexican producer who had assured him there would be more. The Butlers proposed that the Trumbos move with them down to Mexico City, where expenses would be only a fraction of what they were in California. It was an attractive proposal. Not long afterward, it looked as though they had a buyer for the Lazy-T: a rancher who owned property next to theirs wanted to annex the Trumbo spread and make his home in their luxurious ranch house. When the deal was apparently clinched, they decided to move south and began making preparations. And when as suddenly it fell through—the prospective buyer was unable to raise sufficient cash to swing the purchase—they decided to go anyway. The Lazy-T could and would be sold without them present to show the property. Any doubts they had were resolved when word came from the attorneys handling the civil suit of the Hollywood Ten against the studios that had terminated their contracts—this included Trumbo’s action against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. They said settlement was in sight, the studios were negotiating seriously, and there would soon be money coming to all. That settled it. The Trumbos sent word to the Butlers that they were ready to go. They left for Mexico in November 1951.

  The Hollywood apartment just off Franklin where Jean Butler lives with her two youngest children is a bit crowded with furniture when I visit her there. There are some well-worn, handsome pieces that look as though they may have traveled with the Butler family from California to Mexico, where they sat out the blacklist, to Italy, where the family lived in the sixties, and then back with them to California. One whole wall of the rather small apartment is filled with books from floor to ceiling. I admire the handsome Oxford University Press set of Dickens, all with the original illustrations, and Jean Butler tells me they were bought in Mexico and went with them everywhere—“practically in our suitcases.” There seem to be mementoes and reminders of their former life everywhere. Not just the furniture and books but articles and keepsakes as well. And photographs: in many, or most of them, her late husband smiles out almost shyly next to Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., or Ian McLellan Hunter. And photos of the children in all manner of exotic settings. It’s a family with some mileage on it.

  “I guess you know we had already refugeed out of Los Angeles to Ensenada about the time Trumbo got out of jail,” she begins. “There was a subpoena out for Hugo so that made it fairly urgent we stay out of sight. And so there we sat, two hours below Tijuana, just trying to wait the Committee out. Well, we didn’t have too many illusions about that—they were running things, and we knew it, so we just wanted to stay out of their way.

  “Anyway, eventually we decided to go down to Mexico City and managed to convince the Trumbos this was the thing to do. But we stayed down in Ensenada, making plans to go, until November 1 that year. We set out together—or actually, we had some kind of rendezvous point worked out with the Trumbos, and that was San Diego, as I remember. Then we traveled in three cars and had seven kids between us—our four and their three—and the adults of course, and lots and lots of luggage. All this we had distributed between three cars—our ten-year-old Cadillac limousine, the Trumbos’ new Packard, and their jeep pulling a trailer, which had most of the luggage.”

  “Were you worried coming back into the United States with the subpoena out for Hugo?” I ask.

  “Certainly! When we crossed the border into California to meet the Trumbos we were filled with fear and trembling, expecting to have the paper served on us right there on the spot or something. We were all kind of paranoid about it by that time, you see.”

  They proceeded by stages across Arizona and New Mexico, traveling in caravan, and then crossed the border at Juárez into Mexico. Besides the children, the Trumbos and Butlers had an English sheepdog and a Siamese cat between them, and the pets managed to complicate their journey considerably. Still, they continued to see something of the country, pretending—if only for the children—that it was really an awful lot of fun. And part of the time it was.

  “But every stop we made one of the kids came down with strep throat. The first was in Gila Bend, Arizona—Nikola—next was Christopher, who came down with it in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and then Michael, our son, got it in El Paso. Each time we lost a few days. The last one was finally in Guadalajara. The mothers and the kids stayed there. It just didn’t seem practical to push on because all the young ones got sick there. So we just waited in a hotel while Trumbo and Hugo went on ahead by plane to Mexico City to rent houses for us. Which they did. Ours was big, but Trumbo’s was a small marble mansion, hideously inconvenient, with a yard and a patio in it the size of a small park. And a full staff of servants, of course.”

  Their status in the country was a matter of some concern to them. They had come to stay, not knowing how hot the political climate in America would become: the Korean War was in its second year, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was just then getting up a full head of steam, so it didn’t look good. Ironically, Trumbo had earlier explored the possibility of transferring the necessary cash to Mexican banks and entering the country officially in the “capitalist” category (he was willing to go to any lengths, apparently). This would evidently have made it easier to secure “immigrant” status in Mexico, should that have proven necessary. In the end, both Trumbo and Hugo Butler settled for “tourist” status, even though it indicated only temporary residence in the country. This could be extended more or less indefinitely, however, by making trips up to the border every six months and re-declaring themselves as tourists. They were able to do this without bringing up their families because George Pepper had found a man at the border who would give out renewals of the tourist status for the usual mordito (the customary bribe they called the “little bite”).

  George Pepper was a Los Angeles businessman who had been executive secretary of the Hollywood Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions and was named as a Communist Party member in testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Pepper came down to Mexico City and in no time at all was a real presence on the scene, an entrepreneur for all the Un-Americans. For example, Hugo Butler had spent the long days of unemployment in Ensenada at work on a screenplay adaptation of Robinson Crusoe. He had brought it with him down to Mexico City, of course. George Pepper took a look at it, and told him that he had friends he thought might want to invest in such a production. It wasn’t just talk. Pepper found the money, and eventually the Butler screenplay was realized in a production by the great Spanish director Luis Bu�
�uel, which featured the Irish actor Dan O’Herlihy in the title role.

  If Trumbo was willing to enter Mexico as a “capitalist,” then he was more than willing to play whatever games were necessary in order to maintain his status there. That was one of the reasons he rented that huge house and hired all those servants. It was important, he supposed, to keep up a good front—and if that was what it took, then the “marble mansion” should certainly do the job. He had to have a “coyote,” too. That was the Mexican colloquialism (and how apt it was!) for an ambulance chaser, a lawyer who could fix anything for you. Trumbo, characteristically, had hired the best, the most high-powered operator available. He advised Trumbo to have a party in that big palacio of a house and to invite all the politicos.

  “I remember that party very well,” says Jean Butler, “and it was wild! Trumbo hired a mariachi band, and there was lots of music and dancing. The Mexican women were so peppy that they were dancing at two or three A.M. As it turned out, all the American men present brought their wives and the Mexican men brought their mistresses. That was why the party was so lively. The lights failed once, and the toilet blocked once. It was one of those parties. Jeepers, I found myself dancing with a fellow named Iturbide, or something like that, who said he was a descendant of the first emperor of Mexico. He was irritated that I didn’t know who he was. Well, of course I explained that we had just arrived and none of us spoke Spanish. Which was, unfortunately, true enough.”

  Their politicking in Mexico was limited to just such practical ventures as that party. They were guests; it was important for them to stay on good terms with their hosts. As for what was happening north of the border, all Trumbo and the rest could do was shake their heads in dismay and reassure one another they were lucky to be where they were. “Trumbo enjoyed himself down there,” says Jean Butler, “but only as long as it seemed an adventure to him. Politically neutralized the way he was, and without the immediate pressure of work, he became almost uncomfortable. He’s the sort who has to have an adversary, or be behind the eight-ball in some way. He just has to have those windmills to tilt.”