TRUMBO Read online

  But is a screenwriter a writer like any other? All the best of them can do is to provide the director with a good, comprehensive plan for a film. Even Trumbo considered his screenwriting craftsman’s work. So we are left, as you can see, with the problem of evaluating an immensely talented writer, a very able and prolific writer, who has demonstrated tellingly on a number of occasions that he was capable of real art; yet at the same time one who has not much more than a single novel and a handful of screenplays to point to as the artistic achievement of his lifetime.

  Trumbo didn’t plan it that way. He started out, as young writers did in the twenties and thirties, to be a novelist. He backed into screenwriting thinking of it as temporary. Would he even have found his way into the motion picture industry if it were not for the fact that he was right there on the spot in Los Angeles? Probably not. But at a time in his life when he might have given up writing for films and concentrated on fiction, history intervened. Whether he wished it or not, Dalton Trumbo became deeply involved in politics. I suspect, frankly, that he did wish it—that being a political figure was almost as attractive to him as being known as a novelist. For once on stage he played his role with such relish and style that it is clear that the man did have a talent for politics. Dig into his background, and you see that he showed it as early as high school. He was by nature combative and thrived on controversy. Had he undertaken a political career in the usual way, under the conventional labels—Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative—he would probably have been immensely successful.

  But he was a radical and had been more or less consistent in that since he had found out, as a young man, what it was like to be poor. He came out of Colorado in the twenties a vague sort of populist. His outlook was altered by personal experience. As the Depression deepened, he broke into movies and his personal fortunes took a turn for the better. But he did not cultivate that peculiar functional myopia that made it possible for so many there to ignore the awful poverty that lay just outside the studio gates. He indulged himself, “went Hollywood” as they say, but he never forgot who he was or what he had been. The looming prospect of war disturbed him profoundly. And when war came, he saw his choices limited, and became a Communist.

  There was a whole generation of them in Hollywood—writers, directors, actors, and even a few producers, who, like Trumbo, followed their commitment as far left as it would lead them. They were, of course, infamously well off—“swimming pool Communists,” they would later be called—but this was so because the group included some of the best and most talented people in motion pictures and the only real recognition Hollywood can give excellence is expressed in dollar signs, numbers, commas, and decimals. What is remarkable is not that so many were radical but that the overwhelming majority of them, the hundreds who were subsequently blacklisted, were willing to give up those swimming pools rather than inform on the rest. It would have been easy for them to keep what they had; a few names was all the House Committee on Un-American Activities was asking, a gesture to the Committee of good will, of cooperation. But only a few of them did cooperate, and to be fair, not all of those did so out of some base desire to keep what they had. There were as many reasons for giving names to the Committee as there were men who gave them. But for those who refused, who had everything to lose and only their self-respect to retain, there was only one justification and that was a moral one.

  I drove up the coast to talk to one who had refused, Michael Wilson. He was one of the most accomplished writers in motion pictures, a winner of Academy Awards, a writer for the big projects, a savior of lost screenplays, one of the few they talked about in the same breath with Trumbo. On September 20, 1951, he appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as an “unfriendly” witness, and when asked if he were then or ever had been a member of the Communist Party, he took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer on the grounds that to do so might incriminate him. In the years that followed he survived—even thrived—working on the black market, just as Trumbo did. And he had the pleasure, as Trumbo also had, of seeing one of the films he had written under another name during the blacklist win an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.* Wilson was tough, a survivor, one who had the strength and intelligence that enabled him to take a moral stance, back it up, and hold it to the end.

  Michael Wilson is living in Ojai at the time of our interview, a kind of artsy-craftsy spot about midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara and in the hills twenty miles or so from the coast. “When we moved to this country from Europe,” he told me later, “we wanted to live someplace that was kind of out of the way but still close enough to that big money tit down in Hollywood so we could suck when we got hungry. This turned out to be just about ideal for us.” And it looks ideal, too, as you drive through it, the sort of small-town atmosphere—it’s not a suburb of any place—that is fairly rare in California. Following Wilson’s directions, you turn off the highway and down a winding road, almost dark in mid-afternoon because it is so thickly shaded along the way with oak and pepper trees. Turn in the driveway then, and you see a modest enough ranch house with a separate building in front, Wilson’s office, almost hidden in a grove of trees. It is from there he emerges and waves me over. I notice that he moves with some difficulty, lame from an auto accident in 1970. When he speaks, there is a slight thickness to his speech—the result, I later hear, of an operation of a couple of years back for cancer of the tongue.

  “I guess I’ve actually known Dalton Trumbo since 1940. I was trying to break into the film business then but hadn’t yet gotten my first job. We had mutual friends—Ring and Ian and Hugo—so it was sort of inevitable. But it wasn’t until about the time of the Hollywood Ten that I got to know him well.”

  “There are certain similarities in your background, aren’t there?” I put in. “I mean, yours and Trumbo’s.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, for instance, you’re both from the West, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. I was born in Oklahoma, and he was born… where?”

  “In Colorado,” I prompt him.

  “In Colorado,” he agrees. “But I was raised right here in California. And you want to remember, too, that we’re very different, personally different, in many ways. You must have seen how pert and frisky he still is—you’ve noticed that, I’m sure. When he’s not working he’s a very sociable and gregarious guy. But I am not, to put it simply. I tend to be reclusive and not social. Trumbo has had a way of bringing me out and getting me to socialize more than I was wont to do.”

  “You’ve worked together, though, haven’t you?” I ask. “You actually collaborated on The Sandpiper—and didn’t just share credit.”

  “Well, yes, but that was a pretty unusual sort of collaboration. I was in Paris and he was in Rome. We just sent the stuff back and forth in the mail, and we didn’t really see each other until we got back to America the following year.

  “We knew we could work that way,” he continues, “because we did some scripts together during the blacklist. We decided we couldn’t work together in the same room. Not many can. And it had to be done very fast, so we decided that we’d rely on what we called the ‘pony express’ method. I did an extended treatment which I sent off to him a few pages at a time. When he had knocked out about twenty or thirty pages of screenplay from those pages of treatment he would mail them to me, so that we were mailing stuff back and forth every day. We did three westerns that way in a matter of a few weeks, all for very little money, about three thousand dollars a script, which we had to split, of course. But that was the black market back then. That was how it worked.”

  “What were the titles, anyway?” I ask. (You never can tell who really wrote your favorite movies from the 1950s. Perhaps I had seen one of the three.)

  “Oh, I don’t think any of them were ever produced. Well, maybe one of them was. We wrote it as The Target, and then some Germans bought it. I told Trumbo that the title had been changed to Crotch on de
r Saddle Horn.”

  Of all the screenwriters who continued to work on the movie black market during the blacklist period, Trumbo and Michael Wilson were by far the most successful. Without ever seeing their names up on the screen, they managed, by their industry, to earn more than many well-known screenwriters who had not been blacklisted; their success drove the Writers Guild crazy. Not only that, but along with a lot of routine hack work (such as those three westerns they wrote together) both of them did work they could be proud of during that time. Why? Why had they succeeded when other very good writers had not done nearly so well?

  Michael Wilson considers a moment, then shrugs. “Well, the fact that we were both so well established certainly had a lot to do with it. I know it was a factor in my case.” The year Wilson was blacklisted he received the Academy Award for the screenplay he did for A Place in the Sun.

  “I don’t think, though, you can conclude from any of this that we two are birds of a feather.” He adds this after a long moment’s hesitation, and that said, he pushes on: “Trumbo was a more cunning and aggressive fellow in his hardship than I would have been. I didn’t go to jail, of course. I took the Fifth. But Trumbo when he got out showed a truly remarkable tenacity and aggressiveness in fighting for jobs that helped see him through. I don’t know that I’m as tough as he.

  “And there’s another difference between us. Trumbo almost to this day never turned down a job. Certainly never during the blacklist. He would always take on more work than he could do. That would really bother me. I couldn’t do it. I would get psychologically overwhelmed, or something, if I took on two jobs at once. It would be mentally impossible for me to work from one to the other that way.”

  “Why do you think that is?” I ask him. “Why is it Trumbo can’t say no?”

  “He remembers the hungry days,” Wilson replies. “And I don’t mean just the time on the blacklist. It goes further back than that for him. In that sense I had an easier boyhood and young manhood than he did. And in that sense, too, I think I had less drive and had more… oh, creative indolence, I guess you’d call it. This has had a profound effect on his writing. He’s got a novel going, you know.”

  “Yes,” I say, “I know that.”

  “He sent me over a hundred pages of it a few months ago—it was February, as I remember—and asked me what I thought. Well, what I thought was it was very good, and it seemed to me that this habit of his of taking every damned screenwriting job he could find was getting in the way of finishing it, and that was a great pity. And so I wrote him, addressing him as we always address one another, ‘Dear Old Boy,’ and what I did was suggest that he give up screenwriting for Lent. It was the season, you see. That way he would have six uninterrupted weeks in which to work on that novel, and the way he works that would finish it up. Well, you can imagine how much good that did.”

  “Yes,” I tell him, “I can imagine.”

  He pauses, thinking, pondering, ruminating, and looks up at last: “What can I tell you? I really love the man, and I think he loves me.”

  It seems like the end of the interview, and so I flip my notebook shut and stand up, intending to take my leave. But Michael Wilson has other ideas: “There’s somebody here I think you ought to talk to,” he tells me.

  “Oh? Who’s that?”

  “John Berry, the director. He’s a house guest. He’s known Trumbo nearly as long as I have.”

  “They even worked together, more or less, on a picture, didn’t they?”

  “That’s right. More or less was it, all right, because it was during the blacklist, and Trumbo couldn’t show his face on the set at all. But come on back to the house and meet him. He knows you’re here.”

  Michael Wilson leads me out of his office and toward what he calls the “main house.” On the way, it occurs to me that since this meeting was unplanned, it is fortunate that I have seen Claudine, Berry’s recent film, and liked it. And not only did I like it, I wrote a very favorable review of the picture. I know, from experience, how it works. A favorable review of a director’s film cannot assure a good interview, but an unfavorable review guarantees a bad one. Just before going inside the house, we are hailed and joined at the door by John Berry.

  Inside, we sit down across from one another, and Michael Wilson trudges off to find something to do in another part of the house. We sit there, not knowing quite where to begin. Finally, I ask him about the movie he and Trumbo worked on together during the blacklist.

  “Yes, that was He Ran All the Way, John Garfield’s last film. It was actually released after Garfield’s death. Dalton did the first draft of the screenplay, and he didn’t even get credit on it because the blacklist was just beginning then. It was made, as I remember, while Dalton was in prison.”

  “Was that when you met?” I ask.

  “Oh no. I’ve known Dalton a long time. And through the years I’ve continued to see him all the time. When he was in Europe—that was when I was blacklisted—we used to visit back and forth quite a lot. I’ve always had this deep and abiding affection and admiration for the man. He’s an enormous character. I spent the afternoon with them just the beginning of this week. It was one of the memorable days of my existence.

  “I remember he described to me in detail his physical condition. At his age, he’s got a good chance of beating the actuary charts even if he stays alive a matter of months. Then he quoted me the survival statistics on his operation, which aren’t too favorable, as I’m sure you know. And then he said that he hoped it didn’t embarrass me hearing him speaking about his own death. And about that time he stopped speaking for a moment, and he explained, ‘I’ve got to wait to get my breath back so I can talk.’ And then I said something like, ‘Well, it’s the first time I’ve ever known you to slow down.’ Whatever it was—the kind of thing you’d say in a situation like that. And he said, panting, ‘Wait. I’ll talk. I’d rather hear my own voice than listen to your bullshit.’ And then he started talking again.”

  We both laugh at that. It wasn’t just a funny story, though. It said a lot about Trumbo—his rough humor, his toughness, and his scorn for the sort of easy expressions of concern we are all conditioned to give.

  “What quality seems to characterize him?” I ask, neither expecting nor hoping for an answer in a single word.

  Berry obliges: “Oh God, I don’t know. Many, many qualities. He’s a very complex man, after all. But there’s something about him of the boulevardier—but of course he never goes out, so he’s kind of a boulevardier of the living room. Great talker. But much stronger than that is the feeling that I get whenever I’m with him that I’m in the presence of aristocracy. There is a charm, a theatricality to the man that makes seeing him an event to which I always look forward. I don’t understand how it is that a Bronx Jew and a Colorado Wasp hit it off so well, but we do. We do.”

  John Berry pauses. I have the feeling, though, that he isn’t waiting for a question but is simply concentrating on what he wants to say about Trumbo.

  “He’s really a remarkable man,” he resumes at last. “He has this determination and ability to commit his entire nature to the achievement of a goal he has set for himself. He’s fierce, and not a sentimental man. Well, let’s say that he has real sentiment but also has the ability to grasp reality in terms of an existing situation that just eliminates any kind of self-deception or phoniness. And… well… what can I say? He’s a mean fuckin’ mother to have on the other side.”

  John Berry was blacklisted on the basis of testimony given by director Edward Dmytryk before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on April 25, 1951. (Dmytryk was, ironically, one of the original Hollywood Ten who went to jail for contempt of Congress along with Trumbo.) Berry, like a few other blacklisted directors, was lucky enough to get away to Europe and there squeeze out a living in films during the blacklist period. Only now, with movies like Claudine, was he beginning to take up his career where it had been broken off. One of the many.

  Berry is Dal
ton Trumbo’s junior by twelve years. Not just his story, but his attitude toward Trumbo, as well, seems fairly typical of those of his generation who were blacklisted. They kept in contact with him. Trumbo’s voluminous correspondence from the blacklist period (boxes and boxes and boxes of it at the University of Wisconsin) contains innumerable letters back and forth, to and from Trumbo and others on the blacklist—in Europe, New York, Mexico, all over—who kept in contact with Hollywood through him. But he was more to them than the big brother who kept the home fires burning. He handed out practical advice when it was asked for, which was often; he encouraged, goaded, and inspired them not to despair; and in emergencies, he loaned them money when he himself could ill afford to do so. Breaking the blacklist became a kind of monomania with him. He saw to it that as much movie work as possible was directed to writers who were, like himself, working on the black market. Trumbo did an enormous amount of work during this period, but he passed nearly as much of it on to others. He was determined that so many scripts be written by those on the blacklist under pseudonyms, behind front names, or however, that the blacklist itself would become a kind of joke. And that, of course, was exactly what happened. It wasn’t just because Trumbo’s name was the first to appear on the screen again, thus ending the whole sorry affair, that he is widely known as the man who broke the blacklist. No, he actively led the fight against it, setting strategy, serving as unofficial spokesman for the entire group, writing articles and letters. It didn’t just happen. It was a campaign, brilliantly planned and daringly executed, and Trumbo was the general.

  For this, he understandably became a figure of immense importance to those, like Berry, who suffered through the period. If he was a hero to them, it was not just because he was the man who broke the blacklist. He was admired for his personal qualities—his strength, his wit, his style, and not least certainly for his success.