TRUMBO Page 32
“They were marvelous parties there. I remember a Sunday afternoon around the pool. There were a great many writers and directors—he was cracking through at this time and had become somewhat more acceptable to those not on the blacklist. And who should be there but Linus Pauling, his wife, and his daughter. I recognized him from his pictures, but of course Trumbo actually knew the man. People there were kind of intimidated by Pauling—understandably—and he was sitting alone a great deal of the time. That was how my kid found him. My son, then fourteen, went up and engaged him in conversation. Afterward, as soon as we got him in the car, we said to my son, ‘Let’s have it—that conversation you had with Linus Pauling—what was it all about?’ ‘You mean that was Linus Pauling?’ my son said. ‘I thought he was a high school chemistry teacher, and so that was what we talked about, my high school chemistry.’ But that was it, you see, that was the kind of gathering we had there at the time. Trumbo kept us together but helped us remember there was a world outside by bringing people like Linus Pauling around.”
Aubrey Finn remembered the house and the Trumbos’ situation there much less amiably: “Well, it was a very unusual area to have motion picture people living in it,” he said. “Here it was a working-class neighborhood, and he’s got the biggest house in the neighborhood and a swimming pool to boot. His children were shunned in school. It was a bad place and a bad time for them. The neighbors used to throw stuff in his pool, garbage, dead things, anything. And there was once—but I suppose you know about this—when Dalton was beaten up there in front of his house.”
I did know. Over the years, of course, Dalton Trumbo took his share and more of abuse in print. Through the mail, he received a trickle of hate letters that had not stopped even in the last few years before I first interviewed him.* But only once was he attacked physically because of his politics, and that took place, as Aubrey Finn said, right in front of Trumbo’s home in Highland Park. It happened during the latter part of the blacklist period, after the Robert Rich Affair, when he was being interviewed often on television and radio, and his politics became widely known in the neighborhood.
Trumbo remembered: “We came home late in Highland Park. In front of our house was our own parking lot, paved and with a stone fence around it. It was about twelve-thirty or one o’clock, and there were two boys and a girl standing in front of the house as we drove in and parked. They were singing something about ‘get rid of the Commie bastard’ or something of the sort. So I went over to them and told them to get the hell out. Well, I was knocked down, jumped on, and I could see the girl’s heel smashing my glasses on the pavement. They were kicking me, but finally I caught one of them by the feet, and then there was total panic because they were trying to get me loose of him. And I was hanging on through a portion of the fence where I couldn’t be moved, and I had him—though I don’t know what I was going to do with him. Finally, of course, they broke away and ran down the hill. We let them go. The last thing we needed was to have the police chase them. I didn’t go out for two weeks until the black eyes went away.”
So there was no love lost between Trumbo and the community he lived in. But it was characteristic of him that he refused to be intimidated by his neighbors—not when they sent a deputation to him demanding he move out, and even less when they sent their delinquent children on that dark night to enforce their demands. He had made up his mind: by God, the Trumbos were there in Highland Park to stay. If they did move, it would be when he decided they should and not a minute before. (And that, for the record, is the way it was.)
He had a friend, an artist who had come from Chicago by way of Paris, named Charles White. White had not been in Los Angeles long when he happened to mention to Trumbo at one of those Sunday afternoon gatherings on Annan Trail that he and his wife were looking for someplace to build a house. Now, this was more of a problem for Charles White than it might have been for another man, for he was a black man married to a white woman, and this was 1957. Finding a lot for sale in a good location mattered less than finding a man who would sell it to him. Trumbo knew this, of course. That was why, when White told him, Trumbo gestured casually toward a corner of the hilltop just below the house and said, “How about over there?”
“You mean there? On your land?”
“It wouldn’t be mine,” Trumbo explained. “I’d sell it to you, of course. There are six separate lots here besides the one the house is on. I could sell you one of them.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Certainly I’m sure. The reason I wanted all this property in the first place was so I could decide who would live beside me. And I can tell you, Charlie, I’d sooner have you beside me than anyone I’ve seen in Highland Park.”
So that was that, more or less. Of course Trumbo explained what kind of neighborhood it was and warned that Mr. and Mrs. Charles White might find life difficult there,* but then in a few days’ time the papers were drawn up (Trumbo sold the lot for precisely what he paid for it and on easy terms) and the transfer was made. Charles White and Dalton Trumbo were neighbors. They came to know one another very well.
When I think of Charles White I find myself continually reminded of photographer–writer–movie director Gordon Parks. Except for the deep mahogany color of their skins and the fact that both men wore mustaches, there was little in the way of physical resemblance between them—or perhaps one other thing: both had a quality of encompassing directness in their eyes which came from having trained themselves, photographer and painter, to see more than other men. But beyond the physical impressions, there was a sense of presence, an emanation of authority, that was, in a way, the most prominent thing about them. White was a quicker, lighter, less reserved man, but that quality of personal strength was just as surely there in him.
Charles White was a painter. His love of his art and the sense of identity it gave him is apparent in the quality of light and the strong colors of his canvases; his is a very positive style. Through his teaching at the school of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art he managed to make a very comfortable living indirectly from his painting, one that gave him time and opportunity to keep at it directly. He was at the school the day I met him. I found him in his office, and together we walked over to a Mexican restaurant directly behind the Museum building. I could tell from the way he was greeted at the door that he was a regular there. I could also tell by the time we were through the gazpacho that this was a talk I was going to enjoy.
“Well, I’ve known him for years,” he began, “just as soon as I got here, I think. Europe ruined New York for me, so when I came back it seemed natural to head out here—and just as natural to get to know Trumbo. We had many mutual friends, writers, film people, theater people. It was easy to get to know him. And once I did, well, I just took to him. For one thing, his humor—very attractive. Sometimes it is sardonic and biting and at other times light. He has a way of using it as a weapon that can be quite devastating.
“How? Well, let’s just say that he knows his own weaknesses and strengths and is very intolerant of stupidity. He doesn’t use sarcasm in a malicious way, understand. It’s just there as a weapon to be used, so don’t cross him.”
I cleared my throat and must have frowned a little, for White gave me a little smile of sympathy. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Nobody talk much about that?”
“Well…”
“He is very much king of his household. There is a point he doesn’t allow anyone to infringe upon, a line nobody can cross. I remember there was a large gathering of people at his house. Some of the Hollywood Ten were there and some old friends—people like that. There was, I recall, a discussion of some book, and he was challenged on the use of a word. It was done humorously and jovially, of course, but Dalton defended his use of it, and this led to a general discussion of words and how to use them. Which should have ended it gracefully. But the people there persisted, brought him back to a discussion of his use of that particular word, and they began to gan
g up on him and insist that he was wrong. He became angry and began sticking the needle in them in return. They were putting him down, and he was furious. Finally, he took it as long as he could until he reminded them that they were guests in his house, then he pointed at somebody present—I can’t remember who—and he said, ‘Okay, I’m appointing you the host. I’m leaving.’ He walked out on them, and that was that. Everyone left.”
“And you?” I asked. “Have you ever found yourself on the wrong side of him?”
“A couple of times, yes, I guess I stepped out of line—but it was out of affection for him. I really love the man, you see.”
There was such directness and earnestness in Charles White’s manner just then that I had the feeling I was hearing some of the same things he must have said on an occasion or two to Trumbo. (His was the old attitude of one who enjoys the immunity of friendship: This may hurt, but… )
“If you disagree openly with Dalton, he will respect you more than if you bow to him. If you do that, he loses a little respect for you. I like to argue, and I like to do it vehemently. We’ve had our little run-ins, but with me, the real difficulty I have in the relationship is that I’m in awe of him. Oh yes. And people I’m in awe of I have difficulty talking to. So much of the time during the last years I’ve spent observing him—his response to people he comes in contact with and their response to him. And there is one thing that has become clear to me from this.”
He paused portentously, his fork in the air, and a frown on his face. (It may well have been then that I first noted the likeness to Gordon Parks. It was there somehow in the way he leaned forward and fixed me with his look. That intensity.)
“What’s that?” I asked. “What’s become clear?”
“There are only two ways to relate to Dalton. You either love him or you hate him. Picasso is like that. Chaplin is, too. There are people in Hollywood, a lot of them, who hate Dalton.”
We lapsed into less charged discussion. It was then he told me the story of how he happened to become Trumbo’s next-door neighbor. And he also told me a little about his own background—growing up in Chicago, the years before the war when he was struggling to get an education of some sort in art, and of his own friendship then and there with Richard Wright—“I’ve always seemed to have more writers than painters as friends.” Finally, he approached rather gingerly a subject that until then both of us had skirted. It came up just about the time the waiter came by with our coffee. It had to do somehow with Trumbo’s work on behalf of the Angela Davis defense: “… a party in that mansion he lives in now,” Charles White was saying. “Some were fearful to commit themselves for her defense.…” He trailed off, then added almost as an afterthought, “His relationship with blacks has been mostly with intellectual blacks—artists like myself, or with Carlton Moss, the director. At times I have felt he never had an astute knowledge of black life. It seemed reasonable to me once to demand that whites have as much knowledge and intimacy of my people as I have of theirs. But they never have had the entree to black life that I have had to white. Anyway, they should have more knowledge than what I can tell them. If you use me to pick my brains, then your knowledge will be limited. That’s simply all there is to it. I don’t know what the answer is, though. Whites cannot automatically establish contact with poor blacks and ghetto street life. But Trumbo had his humanism. He relied on that for his knowledge of black life, and maybe that was enough most of the time. It’s just too bad there aren’t greater opportunities for real acquaintance, real knowledge.”
Trumbo kept hard at work. The jobs he did on the black market—twelve scripts in his first eighteen months back from Mexico—had restored some sort of financial equilibrium to his life. But as long as he was forced to work for independent producers of low-budget B pictures, he would have to continue working at just such a furious pace or pitch dangerously down into destitution. As it was, he was sufficiently well off by the middle of 1956 that he could repay money to those he had borrowed from in Mexico. Albert Maltz, for one, had loaned him three thousand dollars, which Trumbo had begun paying back to the tune of fifty dollars a month until the sum was entirely repaid. At Trumbo’s instigation, Maltz began to do movie work by mail for the King brothers and other independents.
Trumbo was in close communication with blacklistees who had remained in the Los Angeles area or, like him, had returned. By the time he moved to Highland Park, he had become a kind of one-man clearinghouse for information and writing jobs, passing on to others work he couldn’t handle, keeping everyone in contact. One job came to him through this network he had set up. Early in 1956, Adrian Scott, one of the original Hollywood Ten, brought to Trumbo a young lady named Sally Stubblefield who wanted to be a producer. She was working as an editor in the Warner Bros. story department and had been in the business long enough to know that her best shot at producing—perhaps her only one—was to approach her studio as the owner of a filmable script. To get one she had borrowed three thousand dollars from the bank and gone out with Adrian Scott to talk to Trumbo. She herself had an idea for the film: it seemed that a few years ago she had worked at a home for delinquent girls in the Los Angeles area, and she was sure they would find a good story among the many at such a place. Why not go out there and talk to the girls? Sally Stubblefield was right; they went to the home for delinquent girls where she had worked, and after a couple of trips Trumbo had his story. The movie from his script was made by Warner Bros. in 1957 as The Green-Eyed Blonde. As they had agreed, Sally took credit for the screenplay and in that way got that associate-producer credit she was really after. It did not, however, lead to the career in production that she had hoped for. “She was someone,” said Trumbo, “who, if she had been a man, would have had no difficulty in doing whatever she wanted to do in film production.”
Before being blacklisted, Adrian Scott had been a producer himself, and before that a screenwriter. Now, on the black market, he was working as a writer again, but only eking out a living in television. Scott had worked out a permanent partnership with a young woman whose name went on all his scripts. One of the television shows Scott did in this way was developed from incidents during World War II that had to do with a group of Italian nuns who smuggled Jewish children out of Germany and Italy and on to Israel. He was sure there was enough there for a full-length film, and so he went to Trumbo about it. Trumbo thought so, too, and wrote the screenplay on speculation. Robert Presnell, Jr., offered the use of his name, and the script was sold for English production. Both Dalton Trumbo and Adrian Scott made some money from the deal, and that might have been the happy ending to this short story—except that there was a slight twist. The movie made from Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay, Conspiracy of Hearts, was released in 1960 and did very well with critics and audiences alike. Catholics were especially keen on it; the picture even got an award of merit from the Legion of Decency. Yet just down the street from Conspiracy of Hearts in many cities that year the Catholic War Veterans were picketing Exodus and Spartacus because Trumbo’s name was on them.
The most constant and perplexing problem for any writer on the black market was not so much getting work as it was getting paid for it. Producers would often hold the blacklisted writer at arm’s length while they settled with other creditors. A few of the more unscrupulous burned their writers for all or part of the script fee (this didn’t happen often, and never to Trumbo); in such cases the writer had no appeal. And sometimes even the mechanics of payment became horrendously complex. Pseudonyms were necessary not just to get a name up on the screen, but also to get checks past prying bank officials. The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the vigilante group that enforced the blacklist within the movie community, had a network of spies and informers that even went into the major banks in and around Hollywood. If a company drew a check to a name that had appeared on the blacklist, then the word would be passed to the Alliance and pressure would be brought upon the offending company. Independent production compan
ies were not really independent at all, for they relied upon the major studios for the use of facilities, for film distribution, and at that time often for talent as well. Threatened with the loss of any or all of these, the producer would have no choice but to promise to sin no more. As a result of all this, a writer working on the black market would have to maintain at least one bank account under a fictitious name—Trumbo had several: John Abbott, Sam Jackson, C. F. Demaine, and Peter Finch, to mention just a few he used over the years. Now, any lawyer will tell you that it is very tricky to try to do business under a name not your own, for even if channels for payment are worked out, the Internal Revenue Service is sure to assume that your motive for using another name is not just ulterior but illegal. Add to this the special interest taken by the Los Angeles office of the IRS in the tax returns of anyone who had been mentioned in testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and you will have some idea of the dangers that lurked each year after April 15 for every black marketeer. Because he was determined not to let the IRS do to him what the Committee had done, Trumbo kept meticulous financial records, ready at a moment’s notice to go before the examiner. This was quite uncharacteristic of a man with an attitude toward money such as his; he was simply being realistic.
One way to avoid the bank trap without resorting to a pseudonym was to ask for payment in cash, but in that there were also obvious pitfalls awaiting the unwary and the unlucky. Early in the blacklist period, for instance, even before Trumbo went to jail, George Willner had sold a story for him, the one that eventually was made by Preston Sturges as The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend. Earl Felton had let Trumbo use his name on the story and had offered to deliver the money up to him at the Lazy-T. Trumbo had asked for the money—all twenty-six thousand dollars of it—in cash, and Willner got it for him, put it in an envelope, and handed it over to his son, asking him to deliver it to Earl Felton without telling him what was inside. Willner’s son drove over to Earl Felton’s house late on a Friday afternoon with instructions to hand it over to him. But unknown to them all, Felton had left for the weekend. Not finding him at home, and thinking no more about it, the young man simply left it there in the space between the front door and the screen door. There it stayed until eleven o’clock Monday morning, when Earl Felton returned, opened up the envelope, and found the twenty-six thousand dollars that had been lying out in the open all the time he was gone.