TRUMBO Read online

  But there were no windmills to tilt in Mexico City—nor, contrary to their expectations, was there very much movie work to be had there. Trumbo was given long stretches of time with nothing to do. Others worked on novels: Albert Maltz wrote A Long Day in a Short Life in Mexico; and Ring Lardner, Jr., began his satirical novel, The Ecstasy of Owen Muir, down there. Trumbo left prison with a 150-page start on his war novel, yet he did nothing more on that one in Mexico. Why? Were money worries so troublesome that he could think of nothing else? A few months after he arrived in Mexico City, the settlement on his M-G-M contract came through, and though it was not nearly as much as he had expected, it might have held him long enough to finish his own novel if he had budgeted it a little more carefully—or budgeted it at all. No, Trumbo was as profligate with his cash as he was with his time; he squandered a good deal of both down there. For some writers, once it is endured and bested, pressure becomes addictive, a kind of necessary elixir that must be drunk if one is to have the power to produce. Trumbo, I think, was one of these. He was evidently as unable to work without the constant, nagging demands of time and money on him as are many newspapermen who can write only to deadline. Whatever the explanation, he wrote no further on the novel in Mexico City. He looked only for some chance to do movie work. And the longer he looked, the more certain it seemed to him that his only real hope was to do an original of some sort. But what sort of story was there in Mexico for him to tell?

  Jean Butler remembers: “Hugo was very interested in bullfighting and got Trumbo interested in it, too, more or less by stages. There was a great but modest little restaurant near the bullring that he would take Trumbo to during the day sometimes, then persuade him to come over and watch them working out in the ring during the week. That was how he got Trumbo into it. Hugo told him that he couldn’t defend it on moral grounds but that he still thought it was something beautiful. And Trumbo had to admit there was something to that all right, although when they started actually going to fights on Sunday afternoons, he and Cleo were very pro-bull. The first time they went, I think, they saw a bad kill and that almost sent them away for good; but Hugo—and I guess I was along, too—got them to come back a couple more times, and then it was fairly soon they got to see the indulto, which is pretty rare. We had read about it but hadn’t seen one ourselves. And that, of course, made quite an impression on Trumbo.”

  Those visits to the bullfights, and in particular the one at which he witnessed an indulto, were what gave Trumbo the idea for an original screenplay, on which he soon began taking notes. The indulto (literally, a “pardon”) is a verdict of clemency pronounced by the crowd at the bullfight upon a bull that has fought with a particular show of bravery. The members of the crowd signal to the matador that the bull’s life is to be spared by taking out their handkerchiefs and waving them vigorously. It is quite a sight, and Trumbo knew when he saw it and found out what was going on that it would make a marvelous climactic scene for a motion picture. He began researching the project with the sort of thoroughness he usually showed, reading whatever books he could find in English on the subject, and asking questions and more questions of those who knew something about bullfighting and the raising of fighting bulls.

  Before long he was ready to talk about the project. He went—where else could he go with it?—to the King brothers, flying from Mexico City to Los Angeles on May 10, 1952. He was there for a week, attending to various matters that had to do mostly with payments due the Internal Revenue Service and the hoped-for sale of the Lazy-T. While he was there, he visited the King brothers’ offices, sat down with Maury and Frank, and outlined the story he had in mind of the bull that comports himself so well in the ring that he is granted a reprieve from the usual death sentence in the form of an indulto. The bull is almost a pet of a young Mexican boy on the ranch where the animal was raised—hence the title under which it was offered to the King brothers, “The Boy and the Bull.”

  Maury, Frank, and Hymie knew a good thing when they heard it. Frank King, then head of the company, said, “Sure, he wrote the story while he was living in Mexico City. He came up and outlined it to us, and the story he told us had his forte of heart to it, so we told him to go ahead. He was calling it ‘The Boy and the Bull’ then. What he did was to give his particular and very special feelings to the script. We gave him some money to go ahead with it and kept telling him we needed this one pretty fast because it looked like a sure thing.” It was a sure thing, of course. When it was produced as The Brave One, the film did very well financially for the King brothers. And it eventually won Trumbo an Academy Award.

  The period in Mexico City was the last in which Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., Ian McLellan Hunter, and Hugo Butler lived and worked close to one another. They never planned it that way, but after Mexico they all simply drifted in different directions, Lardner and Hunter moving up to New York to work there on the television black market, Trumbo returning to Hollywood, and Hugo Butler hanging on a bit longer than the rest in Mexico and then heading for Europe. All four left for fundamentally the same reason: there simply wasn’t work for them there in Mexico City, nor was there likelihood of getting much from the States as long as they stayed there. And living in Mexico—at least at the level they wished—proved far more costly than they had expected.

  “When we all went down there,” Ian McLellan Hunter remembered, “we discovered that rents were not that cheap. We rented a little house in San Angel for a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. Hugo got a bigger house because he had more kids. I guess we all had live-in maids—well, because all the houses had provisions for them, a room and whatnot. You just had to pay her a hundred pesos and give her every other Sunday off, though with our turn of mind we all offered a little more money. And then, before you knew it, you had added a cook and a laundress, and a gardener because from the Mexican point of view you represented some kind of rich character.”

  “That’s right,” his wife, Alice Hunter, agreed. “You doubled the salaries and it was still embarrassing because it was so little, and pretty soon you were supporting the whole native population. You had attracted a crowd of beggars outside of your house just like it was one of the rich places. Which, believe me, ours wasn’t. But that’s how we got into that situation—at least partly out of concern for the people there. Trumbo attracted the biggest crowd of all of us—not surprising because his was the biggest house.”

  “Yes, that’s an important thing in understanding Trumbo,” said Ian Hunter. “He always did things on a bigger scale than anybody else. In an odd way, he always seemed to be in competition with everybody on practically everything.”

  Alice Hunter: “For instance, the way he competed with George Pepper on this whole thing of pre-Columbian art. Now, George was a collector in every sense of the term, and he had taken an interest in pre-Columbian art, mainly through his wife, Jeanette, who convinced him there really was something in those little clay figures. The workmen were pulling them out, one after another, from a brick quarry. They would turn up the stuff and sell it for a few cents to George or Jeanette Pepper right on the spot. For a while Trumbo was disdainful of this. He came, he looked, and at first he simply wasn’t interested. Then finally, he got hooked on it through Cleo’s friendship for Jeanette Pepper. Anything that interested Cleo was of vital interest to Trumbo—and she got interested in George and Jeanette’s collection of the stuff. And when Trumbo got interested, then everything—the whole market, if you want to call it that—changed immediately.

  “You see, the men who dug in this brick quarry lived right out there by the site. You went out there and looked around, and it was pretty bad, just hovels around you and kids running around naked with starvation bellies on them. The man who ran everything there was the one they called the Butcher. Why, I don’t know. Well, when Trumbo got interested in buying pre-Columbian figures, he and the Butcher soon developed their own relationship. They would sit down and deal in this stuff, and it would be pretty heavy. Soon the prices went up
, and the Butcher’s standard of living was noticeably better. He made improvements on his house, painted it—all thanks to Trumbo. I swear, when Trumbo left Mexico the whole economy must have collapsed.”

  “Anyway,” Ian Hunter summed up, “that was Trumbo, the collector. He began in the clay pits with the rest of us who were buying these pieces just because we liked them as funny knickknacks. But pretty soon he was making deals with other collectors, making arrangements and deals with the Mexican government for taking the stuff out of the country and everything. He was out of our league and dealing on a different level entirely. Now, of course, he has a very good and valuable collection to show for it. That’s how he goes at things.”

  For the rest of the Trumbos, life went on somehow—though Mexico City was, in a way, as hard for Cleo and the children as it was for Dalton. They had lived up at the Lazy-T ever since his name had first appeared in headlines. There the children had experienced no change in attitude from the neighbors or from other children in school; things were as they had always been for them. “In Mexico City it was different,” Cleo remembered. “We were more ostracized there because we were not part of the regular community.”

  The children went to the American School in Mexico City. “Basically,” said Christopher Trumbo, “it was a place for sons and daughters of the resident imperialists, some of whom had been there through the second and third generation—these and a few Mexicans whose parents wanted them to be like us. It was a curious mix.” Once the Mexico City News ran its story on the blacklist colony there, suddenly it was all over the school who the Trumbo children were. “We had a pretty distinctive last name, so we weren’t able to hide behind something like Smith or Jones. We were the only Trumbos in the school. The effect was pretty immediate. We didn’t make many friends there.

  “In a way, we were a lot better prepared than some of the other kids of parents who were blacklisted. In 1947, my parents took us aside and very clearly explained what the whole situation was, whether they were or were not Communists, why they said and did the things they did. Some kids’ parents didn’t level with the children along that line, and it had a bad effect on them. It made it seem like it was coming out of the blue, like there was no sense to it at all. And that’s a bad feeling to have.”

  Christopher Trumbo learned to play baseball down there in Mexico City, taught by his mother in the big yard of the house on Llomas de Chapultepec. “I believe in exercise and Trumbo doesn’t. Chris wanted to learn, and I was the logical one to do the teaching.” Even with the big house, the servants and all, the children still missed home, and for Cleo, Mexico City was just “not all that great for living. After a while we all wanted to come back.”

  Trumbo, of course, was well aware of this. But his chief problem was, and continued to be, finding work and getting money. They had gone rather quickly through the settlement on the M-G-M contract. The sale of the Lazy-T had fallen through once, and a new buyer had not yet been found. The Internal Revenue Service was demanding quarterly payments on his back income taxes—payments Trumbo was finding it harder and harder to meet. The longer they stayed in Mexico, the deeper they were stuck in their dilemma. It seemed certain that he would have to resettle himself and his family in the Los Angeles area if he was to find regular work in the movie black market. Yet as they stayed on, it came to seem less and less possible to put together the kind of sum it would take to get them moved up to Los Angeles and into a house there. In December 1952, they moved to less grand and less expensive quarters in Mexico City. In January 1953, the Trumbos were in such straits that when the Mexican import duties were due on the Packard automobile in which the family had driven to Mexico, they simply didn’t have the money to pay them, and so Trumbo drove the car up to Brownsville, Texas, and put it in storage there.

  He crossed the border January 10, 1953, and flew on from there to Los Angeles. His mission was twofold: first of all, he hoped to clear up matters with the King brothers on “The Boy and the Bull.” He badly needed the money that was owed to him on the script. They, however, were in bad financial shape at the time and prevailed upon him to take a loan to alleviate his immediate financial problems. This he agreed to do, and they arranged it for him with a business associate of theirs, thus making it possible to have an IRS lien lifted on the deed of the Lazy-T.

  He also went to Los Angeles to see his friend and “collaborator,” Ray Murphy. This meeting of theirs in Los Angeles was an important chapter in a long and bizarre story that had begun years before, during Trumbo’s tour of the Pacific theater of operations during the summer of 1945. He met Murphy there then, one of the group of correspondents on the war junket. His first impression of him, written in a letter to Cleo, was not at all favorable: “Murphy is an impossible young ass who thinks Huxley and Beerbohm the greatest writers of this century. He is completely tactless and behaves exactly like a young Noel Coward, minus only the wit and brains which Coward must certainly have had at such an age.” But if Trumbo thought ill of him, the others in the group thought far worse. The writers, most of whom fancied themselves tough-guy writers, loathed Murphy’s prep school accent, his manners and assurance, because of the wealth and social position they implied. He was young—only twenty-two—and a bit pompous, and he had clearly been included in the group through political connections of some sort, because he was the only one of them all who was not an established writer; for these reasons, he became a figure of derision and the butt of every sarcastic remark and cruel joke that passed among them.

  That was enough for Trumbo. He took Ray Murphy under his wing. The two saw action and were under fire together on Balikpapan, and they grew fairly close after that. Close enough, at any rate, that when the tour of the Pacific had ended, young Murphy broke off from the group which was returning to New York and went with Trumbo to spend two weeks with him and his family in Beverly Hills. He mystified Nikola and Christopher Trumbo (Cleo was pregnant with Mitzi at the time). They had never seen—or heard—anything quite like him. Trumbo remembered: “He spoke—whatever the accent is—so eloquently that my kids couldn’t understand him at all. It was just hopeless. They would just stare at him.” The two were friends, as close as the years, miles, and social differences between them permitted. Murphy returned to the East, to Yale, from which he had graduated. He became curator of rare books at the Yale Library, and wrote and published a biography of Lord Mountbatten, The Last Viceroy, though he never tried his hand at fiction, as he had told Trumbo he would. They kept in contact by letter during the next few years, and Murphy expressed outrage and shock at Trumbo’s treatment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and at his subsequent imprisonment for contempt. They differed politically, but Murphy—young, fair-minded, even idealistic—was totally opposed to the blacklist and found it impossible to reconcile the treatment Trumbo had received from the Committee with his notion of a democratic society.

  The two did not actually meet again until the summer of 1951, when Murphy visited Los Angeles. Trumbo had him up to the Lazy-T. And Murphy, giving way to curiosity, asked how he managed to survive financially. Trumbo told him about his work on the black market and that, for the most part, he had managed to survive because other writers had been brave enough to lend him their names—but that they had also been rewarded for this. Murphy declared that Trumbo could use his name anytime and that he need not pay him a cent for the privilege. Trumbo, who was not likely to turn a deaf ear to an offer of this kind, told him to go home and reconsider and that if Murphy really meant it, they might indeed get together on a project. Trumbo, however, insisted that he must pay for the use of the young man’s name; there was, after all, some risk to him.

  Ray Murphy wrote to Trumbo after he had returned to the East, assuring him that he was quite serious about the offer he had made and asking when they might get together on something. By this time perhaps Murphy had come to look upon such a “collaboration” as a possible entry into film writing for himself. Trumbo delayed. The move to Mexico
intervened. Finally, after he had finished “The Boy and the Bull,” he came up with an idea that he thought might be done as an original screen story and submitted to the studios under Murphy’s name. He finished it and mailed it to him on October 4, 1952—ninety-five pages of typescript, bearing the title, “The Fair Young Maiden.” The William Morris Agency agreed to handle it. This and other details were communicated to him through an elaborate medical code in which Trumbo was to be addressed as “Dr. John Abbott.”* By January, a few changes had been made in the story, but the Morris agent was asking for more. Ray Murphy had traveled to Los Angeles. Trumbo went there to find out, through Murphy, what the difficulty was.

  They met on a couple of occasions during that January 1953 trip of Trumbo’s to Hollywood, discussing this story and others in the planning stage and the problem of the agent. The latter problem was cleared up when Jules Goldstone, the Hollywood representative of Murphy’s New York literary agent (and also, incidentally, George Willner’s old partner), agreed to take on the original screen story, which in its revised form bore the title “The Love Maniac.” Trumbo left it at that and returned to Mexico City on January 27, 1953, Murphy remaining on in Hollywood to be accessible as the author of the story, should it be sold immediately.

  And then… nothing. Trumbo waited for a month and a half without word from young Murphy. But then in the middle of March, a friend brought by a stack of the Hollywood trades from the past few weeks, and browsing through them, Trumbo came across an item headlined “20th Buys ‘Love Maniac.’” Evidently it was true, and the paper—it was the Hollywood Reporter—was almost three weeks old. Trumbo wrote Ray Murphy, got no reply, and saw an item a few days later in Louella Parsons’s column, which was carried irregularly in the Mexico City News: “I am sorry if my item about ‘The Love Maniac’ gave the impression that Ray Murphy, a fine young man, is still alive. He did write the story, but he died about a month ago.” Trumbo was shocked. Had he missed the earlier item, or had that column simply been dropped by the News? He ran to a library to search through the New York Times obituaries, reasoning accurately that the curator of rare books at Yale would rate a notice there. It was there, all right—a report that Ray Murphy had died on January 29, 1953. With the sparse information he gathered from the short item, he wired Elsie McKeogh up in New York, where Murphy’s mother lived, and said it was urgent he be put in touch with her. Wires flew back and forth during the next few days. Finally Trumbo heard from Ray Murphy’s brother, Dr. James Murphy, who, writing on his own initiative and addressing him as Dr. John Abbott, informed him that Ray had died “following an attack of the flu.” Dr. Murphy was executor of young Murphy’s will, which left his entire estate to the Yale Library. However, he understood that the screenplay had been a collaboration of some sort and was willing and anxious to make the right sort of settlement.