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  On another similar occasion, Christopher Trumbo, then in high school, was sent to Ben Bogeaus to pick up payment from him. In this case, Bogeaus opened up the envelope and showed the ten thousand dollars in big bills inside to Chris, who had come prepared. A friend had come along to “ride shotgun” on the trip back. Chris drove home very slowly, determined not to have an accident while carrying that kind of money.

  Television proved a salvation for many blacklisted writers. It was a new medium, ravenous for material but unable then to pay enough to attract top Hollywood writing talent. It was a field left comparatively open; all a talented blacklisted writer needed to work the black market in television was another writer willing to front for him, or a producer eager enough for material to play along in the complicated arrangements necessary for payoff. In West Coast television, the blacklist pressure was not quite so severe as in the East. The organizations that enforced the television blacklist—Aware, Inc., and the newsletter Red Channels—were located in New York City, where they put the squeeze directly on the networks through advertising agencies and corporations.

  Even with all this, Dalton Trumbo did little in television himself, and that little proved to be almost too much. An independent producer he knew named Dink Templeton was interested in getting started in the medium and asked Trumbo to write a pilot for him. Trumbo agreed and signed to do it before he had a firm idea of just what the proposed series, Citizen Soldier, was to deal with. He discovered then, too late to back out, that the subject was military intelligence in the Cold War and its hero was an intrepid 007 stationed in Germany. He was appalled at that, then downright frightened to find out that Templeton had been given classified documents by the army and the Department of State to use as background material for the series. “I read the necessary documents in a state of shuddering panic,” Trumbo remembered, “gave them back to Mr. Templeton and insisted that he never bring them under my roof again, did the assignment as quickly as possible, and, happily, have heard nothing of it since. One slip and I dare say I’d have been arrested as a spy.”

  Amazingly enough, he even managed to do some writing intended for the theater during this period. It continued to interest him. The Biggest Thief in Town may not have been a success, but on the other hand, it had not been a total failure. The English production had rescued the enterprise and restored his confidence in himself as a playwright. Moreover, there was life in the old show yet. It turned out that Peter Cotes, his English producer, was a half-brother of John and Roy Boulting, the English film producers. The Boultings took an interest in the play and optioned it for movie production in 1955. In fact no film adaptation was ever done, but it did give Trumbo a little money and reason to take heart.

  Writing for the theater would have tempted him in any case, for it was the only medium during that entire bleak period that resisted the pressure of the Committee. The blacklist remained relatively ineffective there: even actors unable to work in films and television found employment on the stage—though not always on Broadway. He had made it once to Broadway and believed he would again with something called Morgana, a kind of farce treatment of the Strange Interlude theme that just never came right for him. He was eventually offered a production on the play in 1962 but declined because he himself was dissatisfied with it. And as he tinkered with Morgana, he corresponded fitfully with his friend E. Y. Harburg, back in New York, over a plan to do Orpheus as a musical, an idea that seemed a natural but never really worked as a project. All in all, Trumbo’s playwriting activities during this period were less remarkable in themselves than in the fact that they were undertaken at all. Perhaps, perversely, he could only have tried at all when under extreme financial pressures and while at work on as many as eight movie jobs at once.

  As any writer will, he assured himself for quite some time that he had deserted none of these projects, simply postponed them. In a way, the death of his literary agent, Elsie McKeogh, on October 29, 1955, must have made it terribly difficult for him to continue with the work he considered his “serious writing.” Through the years he had come to depend on her as his artistic conscience (an unusual role for an agent), the voice of the New York literary world, who from time to time urged him ever so gently to get back to work on his novel. He welcomed her urgings, and came to depend on them, so much that he eventually accepted the invitation of another agent, Jacques Chambrun, to represent him in New York, even though he had little prospect of completing the war novel, which he was then calling Babylon Descendant; he must have half-hoped Chambrun would nag him into finishing the job. But Jacques Chambrun was not Elsie McKeogh; eventually, the association inevitably withered.

  During this period, against all apparent reason, Trumbo once more became politically involved. A more careful man would have maintained a low profile; Trumbo became so incensed at the conviction of fourteen officials of the California Communist Party under the Smith Act (the Alien Registration Act of 1940) that he threw himself headlong into their defense and wrote a pamphlet, “The Devil in the Book,” attacking the decision. A more cautious man would have avoided his old associations at all cost; Trumbo rejoined the Communist Party briefly as a protest against its persecution and as a gesture of solidarity with his old comrades. “I could see no hope for the Communists,” he said, “no hope at all, no future. But I… just felt that I wanted to join and get back in, in a sense, to clean up the mess and help me find a way to put a period to that part of my life.”

  Dorothy Healy had been a Communist most of her life when I met with her. She had recently felt the curb of Party discipline when remarks of hers made over the Los Angeles Pacifica station, KPFK, having to do with the harshness of Soviet policy in Czechoslovakia, brought her up before the Party leadership. Whatever her personal position, she had now made a break with the Party over the question of censorship and discipline. She was in that sense, then, still a Communist, though one without a Party.

  She lived her religion. There was nothing of the near-bourgeois Party functionary about her and even less of the drawing room Communist. She owned a house, a small one in which she and her college-age son lived, the only whites in a black neighborhood not far from the area around 55th Street where Trumbo lived first in Los Angeles. Physically, she was a small, attractive woman, more conventionally pretty than I would have expected. She had been a Communist since she was fourteen and joined the Young Communist League. She stayed in, too, working in the labor movement through the CIO. And that was in the thirties. “That’s where my background is,” she says. “It was an enormously important period. No one who lived through it was unmoved by it. The toughness of it, the sharpness of the struggle, the clarity of the issues—this was what shaped my whole generation.”

  It was not yet two months since her very public departure from the Communist Party of Los Angeles County, of which she was once chairman. Newspaper articles had been written, television commentaries made, and by now she had had it up to here with interviewers. That was why she was reluctant when I called and asked to talk to her. I explained that it was specifically about Dalton Trumbo I wanted to speak and she said that in that case she’d think it over. Afterward, when I had called back and we had made our appointment, she explained that her son had insisted she see me since it was about Trumbo. “Trumbo is typical of those who are able to be responsive to the new and can communicate with the young. My own son is critical of me because he feels I haven’t done things quite as I should. In a way, Trumbo belongs to my son’s generation. He is theirs. When my son heard what this was about, he said, ‘This is one interview you must do!’”

  So here we are. I have just settled in, and the subject is Dalton Trumbo. “I don’t know,” says Dorothy Healy, “when I think about him, well, he and the period [when] we worked so closely together are so intertwined that just mentioning him brings it all back together again. He is a very special person in my memory because of the fifties. They were hard times for me, for us all. Others weren’t there, but he was. He was always a
vailable to help. There was nothing he wouldn’t do in a public fight. Which included his writing, of course, which was just unique. That pamphlet he did really helped materially in what was the first defeat of the Smith Act. And all this was done by him at a point of such enormous pressure in his own life.”

  “When did you first meet him?” I ask.

  “Oh, that would have been 1946. I first remember him from then. As a matter of fact, I remember the first time I was at his home in Beverly Hills. A bunch of us rode out there on the bus, and we had a walk of about a block. We were looking at these houses and trying to imagine what they were like inside and what Trumbo’s would be like. And we were jesting among ourselves about how ineffective as fighters against the status quo any of these people who lived out here would be.

  “That’s a lesson I’ve learned, you see. If there is integrity and an informed consciousness, then the superficial trappings a person surrounds himself with don’t matter. You don’t have to sacrifice the trappings to live the kind of life that matters. You know, there was an important lesson for us to learn from the way that those attacks came first on the cultural figures on the left—on the Hollywood Ten and all the rest who were blacklisted. The question we had to ask ourselves was Why? Why did the reactionaries go after these people first? Actually, I think they showed more perspicacity than we in the Party did about the importance of culture in the struggle. I am not a devotee of the conspiracy theory of history, but I do think that some planning went into this—the idea was to get the cultural leaders first and then the rest could be whipped into line. In their own way, in a significant way, the writers and artists represented a threat to those who were then setting about to enforce Nixonian standards on the rest of the country. Now, twenty-odd years later, we see the result of that campaign in Watergate. What we had said in the forties was going to happen, actually happened in the seventies. We tried to tell them, ‘It’s not us Communists or radicals that they’re after—it’s you.’ And it was. It was you, the rest of the country.

  “The way they talk, the way they act, the reactionaries try to convey that they represent the American tradition. Well, they don’t—not all of it by a long shot. Actually there are two American traditions that have existed side by side for as long as this country has been here. There has been the democratic tradition and the Tory or reactionary tradition right from the beginning. I think it’s terribly important not to allow them the ownership of the American tradition. The young people see this, and they have such disdain for the way the American tradition has been used that they say, ‘The hell with it.’ They shouldn’t. The American tradition belongs to us, to them, too. But always those in the democratic tradition seem to be on the defensive. The abolitionists had to keep their identities secret, too—just as we sometimes have had to.”

  “Has such secrecy really been necessary?” I ask her. “A lot of people have been put off by it. I’m sure you know the argument. They take silence as an admission of some sort of guilt.”

  “Well, there’s been a lot of pressure on everybody for a long time—the Un-American Activities Committee, the Smith Act, the McCarran Act. And all through this period I have been publicly known as a Communist, made no attempt to hide it whatever. And there’s no doubt in my mind that my life has been easier for this because they couldn’t do anything to me. They couldn’t take anything away from me. And I think those who had a great deal to lose—their jobs, of course—were quite justified in keeping their associations secret. Besides, many wanted to say, ‘Yeah, I am a this, a that, or a whatever,’ but there was always the concern that they would be forced to talk about others. Once they had opened the door to that one question, they had validated the right of the investigators to ask any question on anything or anybody. And in fact, the government has no right to ask these questions—about you or anyone else. It was kind of a ridiculous exercise, anyway, because when they started asking you questions, you knew that the FBI knew who everybody was and what they belonged to, anyway. That was simply the way it was.

  “I don’t know, though. I do think in retrospect that it would have been better for—what? morale or solidarity, I guess—if individuals who had been put on the spot had identified themselves politically. Maybe they should have. Trumbo, of course, did identify himself at a very crucial time when he dove into that Smith Act fight. That marked him. With that he said publicly what his politics were. And I couldn’t help but admire him for it then, and I still do now.”

  Oscar night, 1957. Deborah Kerr takes the card from the opened envelope and announces in a loud, clear voice that the winner “for the Best Motion Picture Story is… Robert Rich!”

  The sacred moment. Applause! Jesse Lasky, Jr., Cecil B. DeMille’s favorite screenwriter and then the vice president of the Screen Writers Guild, jumps up and bustles down the aisle to the stage. He accepts the award on behalf of Rich, whom he refers to as “my good friend,” because Rich was at his wife’s bedside, and she was about to give birth to their first baby. More applause, and he strides off the stage, statuette in hand.

  Lasky later admitted in his account of the episode in his book Whatever Happened to Hollywood? that he really had no idea who Robert Rich was. But the name sounded familiar, and it seemed to him that an officer of the Guild really ought to know the members, so… Lasky’s good friend he was. And as far as Rich being at his wife’s bedside, that was what Lasky had been told. It all seemed quite routine to him at the time.

  The next day, however, when they had had the chance to check the Guild files, it was found that there was no Robert Rich listed in them. He was not a member and never had been. Nobody really had any idea who he was or how he could be reached, not even the King brothers, who had produced The Brave One, the film for which Robert Rich had just won the Academy Award. Had he really been at a hospital waiting for his wife to give birth? Somebody had called the afternoon of the ceremony and had said so. Just on the outside chance they might locate him that way, they put a team to work telephoning the obstetrics wards of every hospital in Los Angeles County to inquire if there was a Mrs. Robert Rich registered. No luck.

  It wasn’t long before the news magazines picked up the story and reported this rather sticky situation. Then they did a follow-up when rumors began to fly around Hollywood that Robert Rich was really just a pseudonym used by Dalton Trumbo. And Trumbo? Well, he denied nothing: “It was that Robert Rich thing that gave me the key. You see, all the press came to me, and I dealt with them in such a way that they knew bloody well I had written it. But I would suggest that maybe it was Mike Wilson, and they would call Mike and ask him, and he would say no, it wasn’t him. And they would come back to me, and I’d suggest they try somebody else—another blacklisted writer like myself who was working on the black market. I had a whole list of them because we kept in close touch. It went on and on and on. I just wanted the press to understand what an extensive thing this movie black market was. And in the midst of this, I suddenly realized that all the journalists—or most of them—were sympathetic to me, and how eager they were to have the blacklist exploded. There had been a certain change in atmosphere, and then it became possible.”

  By the time of the “Robert Rich Affair,” as it eventually came to be known in the news magazines, the black market in screenplays was not just a thriving enterprise, it was also an open secret in the movie industry whose very existence made a joke of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and of the blacklist enforced by the Committee’s Hollywood supporters. Trumbo was not the first blacklisted writer to have won the Academy Award. That honor went to Michael Wilson, who was awarded an Oscar the year that he was blacklisted (1951) for A Place in the Sun, written, produced, and released before he was named in testimony before the Committee. As a direct result of that, the Producers Association* ruled that no blacklisted writer was to receive screen credit—even for work done earlier. And so when Wilson’s pre-blacklist script for Friendly Persuasion was produced a few years later, his name was simply
excised from the credits; no writer’s name at all appeared on the screen. Then, when the film won the Writers Guild Award and it looked as though Friendly Persuasion was a shoo-in for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, credited or uncredited, the Motion Picture Academy ruled that under no circumstances could a blacklisted writer be awarded an Oscar. The Academy had, however, overlooked the possibility of a writer winning under a pseudonym; and Trumbo was the first to do that with The Brave One.

  The Robert Rich award thus marked the beginning of the end of the blacklist. The next year the French novelist Pierre Boulle won the Academy Award for the marvelous job he had done adapting his own novel The Bridge on the River Kwai for the screen. Among insiders the award provoked knowing looks and wry smiles, for the truth was that Boulle hardly spoke, much less wrote, English (and, incidentally, did not “write” for films before or after). The script was actually the work of two blacklisted writers: Carl Foreman and, again, Michael Wilson. A year after that, the award for Best Story and Screenplay went to the team of Nathan E. Douglas and Harold Jacob Smith for The Defiant Ones. And while, true enough, there really was a Harold Jacob Smith—it turned out that Nathan E. Douglas was the blacklisted actor-turned-writer Nedrick Young.

  In the meantime, Dalton Trumbo had begun a coordinated and deliberate personal campaign in the media against the blacklist. It was a crusade, a vendetta. It became almost an obsession with the man. As a result of that first round of statements to the press and interviews with local Los Angeles television reporters, he had not only made the public aware of the existence of the black market but had also managed to cast doubt on the authenticity of practically every screenplay produced in Hollywood. Producer-writer Jerry Wald, always outspoken, was so incensed at this tactic of Trumbo’s that he himself complained to the press that “by innuendo Dalton Trumbo has been insulting the whole Screen Writers Guild.… In essence, he’s been saying to the public, ‘No matter who you vote for [for the Oscar], I’m writing the scripts.’ Trumbo… has done a tremendous injustice to the screenwriters of Hollywood.” Putting it mildly, this did not distress Trumbo greatly, for he felt that he and every other blacklisted writer in Hollywood had been betrayed by the Guild.