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  Trumbo wrote him back a very long letter, revealing himself as Dr. John Abbott and explaining the one-sided nature of his collaboration with Ray Murphy. He enclosed documentation to prove his claim and appealed to Dr. Murphy for an immediate payment of three thousand dollars in advance of settlement so that he might make that quarterly payment on his income tax; once again, the Internal Revenue Service had put a lien against his deed on the Lazy-T. Toward the end of the twenty-five-page letter, Trumbo had this to say about his own situation and the help Ray Murphy had extended him:

  In writing this letter to you, I do not feel that I have in any way dishonored Ray’s memory. On the contrary, I have revealed to you that his last professional act was a profoundly generous and noble one. To help a friend and fellow-writer who had been rendered mute by circumstances, he placed his name, his reputation and his career in jeopardy. If the facts of my authorship of the story had ever been disclosed he would have been blacklisted throughout the motion picture industry. Ever since my unhappy profession first was practiced, writers have been at loggerheads with constituted authority, any efforts to suppress them or stave them off are as old as the history of government itself. There are many examples in past literature of one writer lending his name in order that another, temporarily out of favor, might continue to write. This is what Ray did. He did not consider it dishonorable, nor did I: it was, on the contrary, an act involving the essence of honor, and the moral courage it required in these troubled times is very considerable.

  Dr. Murphy offered not the slightest resistance to Trumbo’s claim; in fact, he rushed him the three thousand dollars needed to pay off the tax lien. It arrived just in the nick of time: the Lazy-T was saved once more.

  And a good thing, too, for not long after that the ranch was finally sold. Had it gone in auction for taxes, the Trumbos would not even have had the money they needed to make their return to Los Angeles. And by the fall of 1953, they were making plans to do just that.

  Before they left, however, they received money that was unexpected—though not unhoped-for, of course. It came from McCall’s magazine. Trumbo had written a short story based on something that had happened to friends there in Mexico City. Their three-year-old daughter had misbehaved, and so the father had given the child a smart whack at the usual place. But the child put her hand behind her to protect herself, and somehow he had caught her little finger with his hand and had broken it. As Trumbo told it: “He and his wife felt like animals, and they rushed her off to the doctor to get that poor little finger taken care of, which was crooked. And of course the child was well aware of her power. They got to the doctor, and the doctor asked how it happened. And the parents didn’t say anything, and the child said she fell on it.”

  Published as “The Child Beater,” it was a charming story that captured perfectly the father’s feelings of embarrassment and shame before the doctor, his wife, and his child. Trumbo had written it and submitted it under the name Cleo Fincher. Betty Parsons Ragsdale, fiction editor of McCall’s, had picked it out of the slush pile—what are the odds against that?—and written her acceptance to Cleo along with a check for $850, asking for a little information about the author. Trumbo wrote back as Cleo Fincher, telling her when Cleo was born, the number of children she had, and so on. He added: “My husband is engaged in selling,” and later commented, “A truer line was never written.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BREAKING THE BLACKLIST

  Others managed to stick out the blacklist in Mexico and a few even thrived there. Why not Trumbo? Because, as he explained in a letter to Michael Wilson, “We are living out an old truism: ‘The first time you see Mexico you are struck by the horrible poverty; within a year you discover it’s infectious.’ I am broke as a bankrupt’s bastard.” He had caught the disease of poverty down there, and to hear him tell it, he was wasting away fast. He had to get himself and his family out before it proved financially fatal. And it looked as though Hollywood, which for the sake of economy they had forsaken a little more than two years before, was the only place that a cure might be effected.

  But understand, they were relatively poor. The mere taste of poverty he had had in Mexico City was nothing like the stomach full of it he got as a young man working at the bakery and living on 55th Street in Los Angeles. Trumbo and his family were certainly not surviving in the style to which they had been earlier accustomed. He could—and did in that letter to Wilson—recite a long list of items of value they had been forced to dispose of in the pawnshop with the grand name, run by the Mexican government, Monte de Piedad (Mount of Pity). Nevertheless, when the time came at last, in January 1954, for the family to depart, they left in reasonably good style. Cleo flew ahead with their youngest, Mitzi, who was judged not up to the journey, and Trumbo took the other two in the Jeep wagon which they had kept in storage. His biggest problem on the trip back was getting the valuable collection of pre-Columbian art he had acquired while in Mexico through Mexican customs at Matamoros (he never did; in the end he went through the motions of returning the ceramics to Mexico City, where Hugo Butler got them to him in Los Angeles by trans-shipping through a friend in Ensenada). Upon their arrival, the Trumbos borrowed enough to get their furniture out of storage and got a second car, a Nash Rambler. They installed themselves in an ancient old Spanish fortress of a house—literally that: it had been used in the days of old California as an outpost against the coast Indians—which they rented for two hundred dollars a month. There Trumbo set up shop; he had resolved to write his way back to financial health.

  His immediate problem was finding an agent; George Willner, who had represented him in the early years of the blacklist, was now blacklisted himself. Trumbo wrote letters to a number of independent Hollywood agents explaining his situation and asking if they would care to discuss the matter further. Some of them did, and in the next few years (until he settled on an unusual arrangement with Eugene Frenke) he used more than one at a time—among them, Arthur Landau, his first Hollywood agent. It seemed ethical enough, and occasionally an outright necessity, to be represented by more than one agent, for using all the pseudonyms that he did and working with a number of different writers who would “front” for him, Trumbo was himself some several different writers all at the same time.

  As he later explained his situation and strategy in a letter to Hugo Butler, “I started from scratch, without any contacts, and operated on the theory that every satisfied customer was a future customer for steady work at rising rates.… The black market is like the old one on a much smaller scale: that is, you enter it virgin and new and unknown (I haven’t had a screen credit for ten years—styles change—writers fade). Therefore I decided I had to prove myself as a newcomer.”

  He started somewhere near the bottom. He had worked for the King brothers, and now he would work for their competitors. With the control of the major studios over the movie industry rapidly weakening under the pressure of television, there was increasing activity in independent production. Quite naturally, in the beginning, most of it was of the low-budget, B-picture sort. It was here that Trumbo concentrated most of his efforts during the next few years, working for producers such as Walter Seltzer. The first bona fide job given him following his return from Mexico came from Seltzer, who approached Trumbo with a sheaf of clippings and other research material on a gangland murder in Kansas City and asked him if he thought he could do an original screenplay from it. It was worth $7,500, not a bad price in that market. And Trumbo gave him his money’s worth and more. The movie made from his script (screenwriter Ben Perry allowed his name to be put on it) was a tough, fast-moving little genre picture, called The Boss, released in 1956. It featured John Payne and was directed by Byron Haskin, a B-picture veteran.

  As Trumbo intended, Walter Seltzer returned, a satisfied customer. Trumbo did another script for him, Bullwhip, which was never produced. And a few years later, 1957, he did an unscheduled rewrite of the screenplay for another Seltzer film, Terror in a Texas Tow
n. How Trumbo came to do it tells a good deal about the way he operated on the Hollywood black market and why he came to be so successful at it. He had long made it a practice to guarantee his own work: rewrites were included in the price agreed upon. He would keep making changes—not always happily and not without argument—as long as the producer or director kept asking for them. He also made it a practice to do all he could to see that work he couldn’t take on himself was passed on to other blacklisted writers. That was how he happened to get involved in Terror in a Texas Town. He had been offered the job by Seltzer but because he was too busy with other projects to take it on, he had recommended John Howard Lawson, one of the original Hollywood Ten, and Mitch Lindemann, also blacklisted, for the job. Trumbo went as far as to offer his personal guarantee that their work would be satisfactory. Well, ten days before Terror was to begin shooting, Seltzer was notified by the film’s backers that they were unhappy with the script; if they were, of course, then he was, too. And so he went to Trumbo with their objections, and Trumbo, having offered his guarantee, sat down and rewrote the script in four days. Walter Seltzer came up with one thousand dollars for the job.

  Most of the jobs that producers came to him with were rewrites of one kind or another. This was hard work, usually done under pressure, which offered Trumbo the dubious pleasure of knowing he had been sought out as the last resort. But it kept him busy. He remarked of his script-doctoring—again in a letter to Hugo Butler: “Of course I always come in on the tail end, generally following four complete drafts by writers whose names would surprise you, all drafts desperately bad. It is really an eye-opener, and makes, for anyone who can rescue one of these dreadful wrecks, a continuing market in the future.” Trumbo’s reputation as a doctor specializing in such “last aid” was one he retained.

  When jobs were not immediately forthcoming he managed not to pine away but to get to work on some original screenplay or screen story. This was how he came to write Furia, bought by Hal Wallis for Anna Magnani, which was made as Wild Is the Wind in 1957. There were others. Trumbo wrote a science fiction original which he sold to Benedict Bogeaus, who produced it in 1958 under the title From the Earth to the Moon. Then there was a sort of original, one at least that he initiated and completed on his own with no buyer in sight—and that was his adaptation of the Herman Melville novel Typee (in public domain, of course). Ben Bogeaus bought that one, too, though he never produced it. Trumbo began early on to acquire an underground reputation in Hollywood, not only for his abilities as a script doctor but also as one who could work with producers and write originals to given specifications.

  It was the latter which brought Gladys Sylvio, one of the most formidable of all movie mothers, around to Trumbo one day. If that name doesn’t exactly ring a bell, her first husband was named O’Brien, and she was the mother of Margaret. She telephoned and told Trumbo she had been trying to get in touch with him for years. She wanted him to write a movie for Margaret O’Brien. A director named David Butler was interested in doing a film with the former child star, who was now eighteen. She was sure that Trumbo was the man to do the script because he had written her daughter’s last successful film, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. It turned out that there was another reason she thought Trumbo was the man for the job: she wanted him to write another Roman Holiday for her.

  “That might be difficult,” he told her.

  “It shouldn’t be difficult at all. You wrote Roman Holiday, didn’t you? That’s the kind of script she needs.”

  “Well, these rumors do get around about a lot of pictures. Most of them are untrue, but I make it a point never to deny them. Why don’t you go to the guy whose name is on it?” Meaning Ian McLellan Hunter, who fronted for Trumbo on the picture and did some rewriting on it as well. He was in New York by that time, blacklisted, and writing under cover for TV. Trumbo wasn’t sure he wanted this job.

  “No, no,” said Margaret’s mother, “I want you!”

  In the end, although she waged quite a campaign, she never got him; nor, though she also waged quite a campaign, did Margaret O’Brien ever make that successful comeback her mother had planned for her.

  Of course Trumbo continued to work for the King brothers, as well. Exasperating as they often were, and hard as it had been to get from them the money he was owed for “The Boy and the Bull” (The Brave One), he nevertheless liked all three of them and knew they were trustworthy enough—just spread a little thin in their enterprise. Following his return from Mexico he did two scripts for them: another gangster movie, The Syndicate, which turned out rather well but was never made; and Mr. Adam, an adaptation of the Pat Frank novel about the last fertile man left on earth, which at the time was considered too hot to handle. One of the between-job originals that he wrote, Heaven with a Gun, was also sold to the Kings with the name of Robert Presnell, Jr., on it. They held on to it for years, and in the meantime Trumbo had broken the blacklist and had once more become an eminent screenwriter and not the éminence grise he was when he wrote the thing. In 1966 they announced production plans for Heaven with a Gun and, without checking with Trumbo first, announced that it was actually an original screenplay by Robert Presnell, Jr., and Dalton Trumbo. Presnell promptly set the record straight on that count, leaving Trumbo as sole author. But Trumbo was reluctant to have his own name appear on the film, reasoning they had bought it for production under a pseudonym and that was the way it ought to be produced.*

  But that was business. Maury, Hymie, and Frank wanted Trumbo to know that he was their friend—he could count on them. And it was true enough: he could. They had even made it possible, through Lionel Sternberger, a stockholder in King Brothers Productions, for Trumbo to buy a house within six months of his arrival from Mexico with no cash at all in hand. Sternberger was a well-to-do restaurant owner in Highland Park, who was putting his house up for sale. It was a big place, built in 1905, surrounded by six separate lots so that it had the look of an estate. There was a swimming pool. And the house itself had been beautifully remodeled so that it was like new inside and out. It was actually much too grand a place for the neighborhood, which was lower middle class, but Sternberger had lived there for years and loved it, and now he wanted to make sure it got the right sort of owner. For a number of reasons he was convinced Dalton Trumbo was just the man.

  “Lon Sternberger was a crazy, charming man,” Trumbo remembered. “He was a health nut, though he was very fat. He had gotten in trouble with the law for prescribing to people—foods, diets, even drugs—and they had his phone tapped in the process. He wasn’t trying to take anyone, just a fanatic believer in these health foods and so on. But he had gotten into this difficulty with the law, and as a result he hated cops and people who listened in on telephones. When he heard that I had been in trouble with the law, and he met me and took a liking to me, why, he offered me the house for what was very little money even then. But we didn’t put any money down, and Lon even lent me $2,400 to get the rest of the furniture out of storage. We just literally got the house for nothing.”

  That house on Annan Trail in Highland Park came to mean something special to those who continued to see the Trumbos through the blacklist. There weren’t so many of them, and most were blacklisted themselves. A lot of people in the industry, even those who did business with him, were afraid to be seen with Trumbo in town. “They were bad days in Hollywood,” said his attorney, Aubrey Finn, “for him and for the whole town.” But in a way that seemed to bring the outsiders closer together. They went to Trumbo’s as to a manor house, a kind of castle where they were all safe from that crazy society outside that had hounded them out of their jobs.

  Trumbo seemed to think of it that way, too—or perhaps, remembering the old Spanish house in La Cañada, as a kind of redoubt. “Look at this location,” he told Al Leavitt, “up on the hill with all this territory around me. I bought this house so they couldn’t outflank me. We’re in a true command position here.”

  Al Leavitt, blacklisted in 1951, had kno
wn him since 1941, during that brief period when Trumbo worked on The Remarkable Andrew at Paramount. Much his junior and much in awe of him, Leavitt told me that he practically learned the craft of screenwriting by taking to heart the advice and criticism handed him by Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson. “My wife and I are the only blacklisted writers who never left this community,” he said. He became a commercial photographer and moonlighted on the side in the television black market, and he kept in contact with most of the rest going to those parties at Trumbo’s.