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  He continued on the attack, writing his own account of the so-called Robert Rich Affair and attendant details of the movie black market for the Nation (“Blacklist Black Market”). Trumbo’s old friend from postwar liberal campaigns in California, Carey McWilliams, was now the editor there. McWilliams welcomed him as a contributor and kept him busy for some years more. “Mencken was his master,” Carey McWilliams recalled. “He had a fierce style and could have been an important social critic if he had kept at it. When Trumbo broke the blacklist we lost a first-rate commentator on the American scene. Too bad, but of course I’m not complaining.”

  He was then invited to New York to appear on the John Wingate Night Beat show on September 19, 1957. Wingate, a sort of lesser Mike Wallace, had earned a reputation for himself as a mercilessly tough television interviewer whose staff researched his victims in such detail that they were utterly powerless before him. Well, Trumbo took the trouble to research Wingate and, in a modest sort of way, turned the tables on him. It should not be surprising, after all, that he was able to hold his own in an exercise as fundamentally like formal debate as adversary interview. He had had a lot of experience in that line, and unlike most of those who appeared on the show, Trumbo had long before thought out his position on every point Wingate questioned. It gave him an advantage that few enjoyed, and Variety, the only major publication to review the performance, declared that Trumbo had won in a walk.

  He became a kind of media consultant to others who had, because of the blacklist, been thrust into the public eye—to the King brothers, for instance, who later, in 1959, were forced to concede that what had been bruited was true: Dalton Trumbo was indeed Robert Rich, the author of The Brave One. Because they had, for far too long, remained resolutely vague on the identity of Rich, they had been hit by a number of lawsuits which alleged that this yahoo or that was the real Robert Rich. To answer them, Frank King appeared on KABC television, interviewed by reporter Lou Irwin, while at the same time Trumbo was confirming the story elsewhere. King, who had been coached in his responses by Dalton Trumbo, acquitted himself admirably, disposing of the facts of the case in short order. He was then brought up short by the question—fair enough in context—“Did you ever ask Trumbo whether he was a Communist?” Frank King replied:

  Of course not. I’m not interested in his politics or his religion or his color. I was interested in his work. It was good work. It was the story of a little Catholic boy and his pet. Is there anything Communistic in that? I’ll show you reviews from practically every country in the world that proves exactly the opposite. What this business needs is better writers and fewer politicians.

  King excused his earlier statements regarding Robert Rich as “what Wendell Willkie said of his campaign speeches that weren’t exactly accurate. He said that was just ‘campaign oratory.’” And the producer concluded the television interview by affirming, “I’ll continue to buy the best material I can get regardless of a man’s politics. I’m not hiring their politics, I’m hiring their writing talent.”

  So there it was, a year before the blacklist was actually broken, a declaration of defiance from an independent Hollywood producer in good standing in the industry. Cracks were thus appearing in the rampart with routine regularity. But Trumbo kept pounding away at it, determined to breach it at any price. He sent word out to his contacts among producers who were dealing on the black market that he would be willing to do a screenplay without any sort of financial payment at all—literally for nothing—if they would publicly announce him as their writer and put his name up on the screen. In simple dollars and cents, this was quite an offer he was making, for he promised his best work, and by that time—1958—he was getting up to seventy-five thousand dollars a picture, even on the black market. As it happened, he had no takers, but the offer stood until he had later accomplished just what he had intended without resorting to measures so drastic and so alien to his nature.

  And finally, early in 1959, he kept the kettle bubbling with his announcement, complete with television interviews, of the founding of Robert Rich Productions, Inc. Adrian Scott was president of the new company, and Anne Revere, the blacklisted actress, was named as secretary-treasurer. Trumbo, who named himself as vice president, was chief spokesman. Although the name, Robert Rich Productions, was undoubtedly chosen as a kind of red flag to the Committee and to the entire motion picture industry, the founding of the company was certainly not just a publicity stunt to show blacklistees fighting back. By this time, after all, the climate was changing. They had every expectation of taking the two story projects they had initiated right through into production. And so they incorporated and made ready to do business. However, though they might not have intended it so, the end of the blacklist brought an end to Robert Rich Productions as well. Scott went off to England to work, and Trumbo found himself even more in demand than when on the black market. Anne Revere, one of the finest actresses in American films during the forties, never made a comeback in the sixties.

  But these episodes I have been recounting were merely the more spectacular moments in a sustained, one-man media blitz which demonstrated a kind of natural genius on Trumbo’s part for handling the press. If he had not been a screenwriter he could have made a fortune as a public relations man, or might have made his mark in history as a presidential press secretary. He made himself available always to members of the press. Even to newspaper articles and television features in which he did not figure directly he contributed information tips, sometimes the news pegs on which the pieces were hung: he worked behind the scenes as well as in front of the cameras. And he was responsive to the problems of reporters; he did not simply work them for what he could get out of them. The two Los Angeles television newsmen with whom he worked most often and most closely were Bill Stout of KNXT and Lou Irwin of KABC. He realized the two were in competition, but he also knew that he owed a debt to them both for the coverage they had given his cause. When Trumbo himself conceded that he was Robert Rich in a filmed interview with Stout in January 1959, he knew that this would put Irwin at an awful disadvantage. And so, having explained the situation to Stout, he arranged for the same story to be given to Irwin on KABC by Frank King, producer of The Brave One (this was the context of the King interview quoted earlier).

  All in all, as a media manipulator, he proved more than a match for the Producers Association and the Motion Picture Academy, against whose members he was most often pitted. He wisely avoided direct confrontation with them, trying to make retreat as attractive as possible from the pro-blacklist position they had held for years. At the time of the Robert Rich revelations, when The Defiant Ones debacle was bubbling on the back burner ready to come to full boil at Oscar time, director George Stevens, who was then president of the Motion Picture Academy, issued a statement directed against Trumbo personally, and beyond him at other writers who were working on the black market. At Trumbo’s urging, producer George Seaton prevailed upon Stevens and persuaded him to withdraw the statement, which appeared only in the early edition of the Los Angeles Times. Trumbo recognized in Seaton a reasonable man, and so he wrote to him then asking that Stevens be persuaded not to make any more such statements in print or on the air, for if he did, Trumbo would be forced to answer him directly, and “there must be no showdown in the press between George Stevens and me.” He went on to explain in this letter, the tone of which is quite conciliatory, “[Stevens] should also be made to understand that I am no longer in a position where men can throw mud at me with impunity—particularly men toward whom I feel no ill will and whom I have never injured in any way. The working press are on my side, not only the wire services, but local and New York staffs, and TV commentators as well.”

  He was dealing from a position of strength, and he knew it.

  When a television camera crew unpacked and began to set up in a neighborhood like the one the Trumbos were living in on Annan Trail in Highland Park, it drew attention of the wrong sort from blocks around. And in places like
that, when your name appeared in the newspaper identified (however tenuously) with the Communist Party, then you could expect trouble. Well, the whole family found trouble, all right, though not all of it of the sharp, violent sort that left Trumbo bleeding with blackened eyes and broken glasses in his driveway. There was really only one such incident. But the other members of the family—Cleo, Mitzi, Chris, and Nikola—were systematically snubbed and subjected to petty indignities through most of the years they lived there.

  For a while, when Cleo went to PTA meetings, she sat by herself. Nobody would sit down beside her, and people would move away when she took a place too close. At the height of their difficulties, the principal of the grade school her daughter Mitzi attended refused even to speak to Cleo. All this was during and following a rather grim episode that centered on Trumbo but directly involved both Cleo and Mitzi as well. “Mitzi had such a hard time as a kid in that school,” said Cleo, “because she didn’t know, really, what was wrong. She assumed, as kids will, that if there was trouble, then she must have been to blame. We didn’t know how much trouble she was having, though, until the PTA business.”

  That all began with trouble in the school-sponsored Campfire Girls troop. Mitzi had been a member of the younger Bluebirds, and Cleo had performed the usual chores of chauffeuring girls around and playing hostess for her daughter at meetings—all this before her husband became suddenly prominent in the news. About the time he did, Mitzi was up to join the Campfire Girls. Some of the mothers questioned whether Cleo, because of her husband’s political background, was fit to play the same role with the Campfire Girls that she had been playing with the Bluebirds: perhaps she would defend the purge trials or extol the new Five Year Plan as she baked brownies with the girls. An angry letter from Trumbo over Cleo’s signature, in which he threatened legal action, put an end to the overt opposition. However, much hostility remained, and it was made suddenly and unmistakably manifest during the rehearsal of a Campfire Girls program for presentation at a PTA meeting. Cleo was flagrantly snubbed by all, including the principal, in front of her ten-year-old daughter. Afterward, it developed in conversations with Mitzi that the girl had been receiving just such treatment herself at school and at the Campfire Girls meetings. For three months the child had been given the silent treatment by her classmates, only yelled at occasionally in ridicule. None of her friends had stuck by her during this ordeal, and she was called a “traitor” by the rest. Upon hearing this, the Trumbos realized that Mitzi had been “sick” a great deal of the time lately, just not quite up to going to school one or two days each week; suddenly they understood why. Now Mitzi declared miserably that she never wanted to go back to Highland Park School again. Well, with the aid of the sympathetic school nurse and Trumbo’s friend and former attorney, Robert Kenny, it was arranged that she would not have to. The nurse recommended that Mitzi stay home during the two weeks remaining in the school term, and Kenny quietly arranged a transfer to nearby Eagle Rock School. She had little trouble of any sort there.

  Christopher Trumbo was a bit wary right from the start. His experiences in Mexico City had taught him to be careful in choosing his friends there at Franklin High School in Highland Park. “I was an outsider,” he remembered. “They knew what my father did, though not really who he was in the beginning, so I tended not to make friends where that might be a problem. I had only two close friends in high school. Not that I had such an abnormal time there. What I did mostly in high school was play trumpet at dances and stuff.”

  He was college-bound, if his father had any say in the matter—and Trumbo did, eloquently and at great length in a letter to the director of admissions for Williams College, which was Chris’s first choice. In the end, however, Chris chose Columbia because when taken to lunch by a Los Angeles businessman who was an alumnus of Williams, he had been assured that he would like Williams since there weren’t a lot of Jews there. Unwittingly, the man had touched upon the one issue that moved the boy profoundly in high school. Chris’s two friends were Jews. Through them and because of them, he had even managed to join AZA, B’nai B’rith’s boys’ organization. Once, with his friends from AZA, Chris had gone to hear a lecture by Gerald K. Smith, to protest his appearance at Hollywood High. It gave him his first opportunity to hear how a real anti-Semite sounded. He came back visibly shaken, almost unable to believe he had heard what he had heard—and from the stage of Hollywood High School’s auditorium!

  Columbia (which he entered in 1958) was, in many ways, a relief to him. Even though he did not distinguish himself as a student, he got on well there. “I remember about 1961 there,” says Chris, “people would come up to me and say, ‘Are you related to Dalton Trumbo?’ Only it was different than it was at Highland Park High. They meant good things by that, instead of, ‘Are you related to that Commie rat?’ I don’t know, though, growing up the way I did does give you a different perspective on life. If you’re on the outside instead of the inside, then that’s the way you stay, basically, your whole life. That’s not necessarily bad, though. If there were no blacklist I might have grown up a perfect Hollywood brat.”

  Nikola, the oldest of the Trumbo children, had troubles of one kind or another on the way to the University of Colorado. She finished high school in Highland Park a couple of years before her father was thrust into the limelight. She wasn’t likely, however, to have permitted herself to be intimidated by her classmates. As early as 1955, Nikola’s senior year in high school, she was so deeply involved in causes that her grades suffered. Trumbo wrote of her to Ian and Alice Hunter, “She is so far left that she terrifies me and occasionally reprimands me for backward habits.” Between high school and college she put in a year in Europe, most of it with the Michael Wilsons. After a couple of years at Los Angeles City College, during which she buckled down admirably, Nikola transferred to Colorado. Trumbo’s only visits back to the state came during her time at Boulder.

  Cleo: “We’re a tight-knit family, all right. Yes, I guess you could say we’re very close. He’s always worked at home and he’s always wanted to know what was going on—more, I think, than most fathers, even when he was younger.

  “Have we triumphed over the blacklist? We, as a family? Not completely. The reticence, socially—that stays with us. We keep to ourselves a great deal. Nikki seems to be reaching out more—but she’s defensive, so I doubt that she ever got over it. The whole period made a mark on us, I’m sure of that. I remember that Chris’s wife, Sherry, had no idea what we were really like as a family until after they were married. Then she saw. She couldn’t understand why he wasn’t out more, why he wasn’t more social, and so on. And of course Chris talked to her about the blacklist period, and how it had affected us as a family, and so she began to understand why we were the way we were—or rather, are.”

  A sure sign that the end of the blacklist was near could be seen in the increasing size of Trumbo’s checks. He was dealing more openly with producers and directors and had become involved in some big-budget pictures. Still, there were difficulties, evasions, and silly games to be played—and he was obliged to play them as long as there was a blacklist. Occasionally, even he had to laugh at the results. There was, for example, the work he did on an adaptation of a novel by Richard Powell, entitled The Philadelphian. It was eventually produced as The Young Philadelphians and starred Paul Newman—though not before it had gone through a number of rewrites. That was how Trumbo got involved in the project. Producer Alec March came to him with a version of the script that he was not really happy with and asked if he would be available to do a rewrite. Trumbo was not likely to turn this one down, for it was a major studio production and would be one of the biggest films he had been involved in since his days at M-G-M. There remained, however, the sticky problem of a front man—not just a matter of borrowing a name, in this case, because March needed someone to bring into story conferences with him, nod understandingly, and take notes. They persuaded screenwriter Ben Perry to fill in for Trumbo. He went onto the
Warner Bros. payroll at a salary of one thousand dollars a week, showed up each morning for work, and attended every conference with March. What Perry did in his studio office was his own business, for Trumbo was at home writing the script. The arrangement worked quite satisfactorily for all concerned for about twelve weeks, when Alec March was suddenly fired from the picture, and Perry/Trumbo naturally had to go, too. The kicker to the story came, however, a few months later. Because Trumbo had so successfully covered up his tracks on The Philadelphian, he was visited by Paul Newman and the director of the film, which was then just about to go into production. They were unhappy with the script they had and, not knowing he was the one who had written it, told Trumbo they were sure he was the only one who could repair it. He managed to keep a straight face in declining their offer. He told them he had other work to do—which was, by then, true enough.