TRUMBO Page 35

Eugene Frenke played a major role in the greening of Dalton Trumbo’s bank account. This independent producer took the place for Trumbo of the agent that the writer so badly needed to legitimately offer his illegitimate services, sub rosa, on the movie black market. Frenke simply made Trumbo an employee of his own Springfield Productions; he went out and got work for him, made the deals, and maintained him on a minimum salary in slack times. It was, of course, a very profitable arrangement for Frenke, for some of the original screenplays Trumbo wrote on speculation during those slack times eventually sold for very fancy figures. Two of his best were never produced. Montezuma,* which posed the Aztec king against his captor, Cortés, and explored their curious friendship, was sold to Bryna Productions and Universal Pictures for $150,000. Another, Will Adams, based on the adventures of the sixteenth-century seafarer who was the first Englishman to set foot in Japan, was optioned, reoptioned, sold, and sold again, so that through a succession of deals over a period of a dozen years or more, the screenplay brought $300,000 to Springfield Productions. Trumbo himself considered Montezuma and Will Adams to be among the best he had done.

  Bryna Productions, which bought Montezuma with Universal’s backing, was Kirk Douglas’s production company. Toward the end of the blacklist period, Trumbo worked for Bryna on one project after another, a fruitful association for both, which led to the production of Spartacus and reached its artistic culmination in Lonely Are the Brave. Along the way, Trumbo wrote, or at least worked on, a number of other scripts for Bryna pictures which were, both commercially and artistically, less successful than those two, such as The Last Sunset and Town Without Pity. There were a couple of others (besides Montezuma) that were written for Douglas but, for one reason or another, never produced.

  The man responsible for Trumbo’s association with the company was not Douglas, but a partner in Bryna, Edward Lewis. “I was struggling to become a producer back then,” Lewis remembers, “and we bought a novel with Douglas in mind, The Brave Cowboy, by Edward Abbey. We just looked around then, and Trumbo was the one and only screenwriter who was right for that novel—what it said, the western background, all of it. It didn’t matter that he was blacklisted. His relationship to the material was what made him right for the project.”

  They signed him as “Sam Jackson,” a writer on loan from Frenke’s Springfield Productions. (The pseudonym became a nickname: Kirk Douglas gave Trumbo a watch at the end of Spartacus with an inscription to Sam Jackson; and Trumbo continued to sign his letters to the actor as Sam.) He began work on the screenplay—which ultimately turned out to be one of his best—only to have Lewis ask him to put it aside. Something more urgent had come up. Lewis: “I had optioned Howard Fast’s Spartacus and had made an arrangement with Universal that would make us producers of the picture. There was some steam on the deal because there was a competing project, Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators, covering the same Roman slave rebellion, which Anthony Quinn was preparing for production. We had engaged Howard Fast to do a first-draft script of his own novel. Well, he simply couldn’t work quickly enough to do the job for us. We had to go to an experienced professional, and there was no more experienced professional around than Dalton Trumbo. He was and is the most skillful and the quickest writer in the business.”

  Lewis did have some misgivings about bringing Trumbo in on Spartacus; he knew he had long disliked Fast personally and had been deeply annoyed at the novelist’s noisy leavetaking from the Communist Party.* When Lewis mentioned this, however, Trumbo told him he had no objections at all to working on the adaptation of the novel, for if he were to turn down material on the basis of a writer’s politics, then he would be guilty of practice of the sort that had kept him blacklisted for the past twelve years. And so in May 1959, he signed—as Sam Jackson—to do a complete rewrite of the screenplay of Spartacus. The wheels were grinding inexorably now. The chain of events which would lead to the end of the blacklist had begun winding tighter and shorter. It wouldn’t be long now, though not even Trumbo could be sure of that at the time.

  The rewrite presented no special problems; Trumbo finished it in fairly short order, altering freely and adding much of his own. The difficulties with Spartacus arose afterward, during production. The director hired by Douglas was Anthony Mann, a good journeyman with an impressive list of recent credits behind him. Mann knew the identity of Sam Jackson and quite reasonably wanted to discuss the script with him in order to clear up a few matters in planning the production. Trumbo had no objection, and when Mann telephoned and asked if he might also bring Peter Ustinov with him to discuss his role in the film, he told them both to come right over. Trumbo assumed that the two had come with the knowledge and permission of Kirk Douglas and Edward Lewis, though as it turned out, they had not. It was a cordial and quite routine meeting. The director and the actor finished up their business in about four hours and left. It might not have mattered at all, except that when shooting began a week later, Douglas and Mann argued violently over the first rushes, and Douglas fired Mann from the picture. Stanley Kubrick, who had similarly quarreled with Marlon Brando over One-Eyed Jacks and had been fired, was immediately hired by Douglas for Spartacus.

  Mann, who was miffed at Douglas, began talking quite freely around town about just who Sam Jackson really was. Eventually, even the gossip columnists picked it up. The rest of the cast found out from Ustinov that Trumbo had written the script, and they felt that if Douglas and Ustinov had had access to the writer, then they should, too. And so, first Laurence Olivier and then Charles Laughton arranged to see him. This was the first time that Trumbo’s security precautions had broken down completely. He had always managed to preserve his anonymity before, at least through the production of a picture. With Trumbo so openly discussed as the author of the Spartacus screenplay, there was considerable pressure on Universal either to announce the fact openly, or (as the American Legion urged) to abandon the production altogether. Douglas had hoped from the start to give screen credit to Trumbo but considered it unlikely because of the keen sensitivity of Universal to outside pressures. The giant talent agency, Music Corporation of America, had just bought the studio, and the new management was proceeding very cautiously.

  In the midst of all this, with shooting of Spartacus virtually completed, Trumbo was smuggled onto the Universal lot to view the assembled footage in rough cut. He didn’t like what he saw and said so in an eighty-page memo to Lewis and Douglas which he wrote overnight and through the next day and sent to them by messenger the next afternoon. As far as the cast and crew were concerned, the picture was completed. They were toasting the occasion in champagne and exchanging gifts when the memo arrived from Sam Jackson. Douglas retired to his dressing room to read it and came back wearing a glum expression.

  “Well,” Stanley Kubrick asked brightly, “how did he like it?”

  “He didn’t like it,” Douglas said, waving the sheaf of typescript, “and he’s right!”

  His criticisms were detailed and wide-ranging, but they centered on Kubrick’s handling of the aftermath of the picture’s most expensive sequence—its spectacular climax on the battlefield. That, he convinced Douglas, had to be completely reshot—and other scenes, as well. Neither Douglas, Kubrick (in particular), nor any of the rest of those involved in the production were very pleased at the prospect. But Trumbo was persuasive; he prevailed.

  Meanwhile, he returned to the western he was writing for Douglas, The Last Sunset, which the actor was to go into after Spartacus. That one, which pops up now and again on the late-late show, seems uncharacteristically haphazard in conception and execution, as though it were thrown together all at once—which, in fact, it was. It didn’t get the rewriting that it deserved because by that time Trumbo was involved in another important project. Or, as Kirk Douglas told the story: “It was a curious morality those guys on the blacklist developed. We were pushing him on this project [The Last Sunset], and Trumbo turned to me and said, ‘Look, you know while I was doing Spartacus I was screwing Otto
Preminger. Now it’s your turn to get screwed.’ You had to admire him and take that from him because he was so direct. There was absolutely no bullshit from him.”

  Screwing Otto Preminger? Perhaps. But there was a legion of sadder, wiser men who would tell you that was not easily done—and Dalton Trumbo did not happen to be one of their number. The director and the writer were on very cordial terms. What these two, whose personal styles were so different, seemed to have most in common was their feeling for their work. For both, it seemed to be the driving force in their lives.

  Trumbo and Preminger had earlier been involved in two projects, and as Kirk Douglas had it, it was at about the same time that Trumbo was working on Spartacus. They were adaptations of two novels—Pierre Boulle’s The Other Side of the Coin and Ugo Pirro’s The Camp Followers. And as for Trumbo giving his best to Preminger, The Other Side of the Coin, at least, was shelved because of the guerrilla situation in Malaysia, where it was to be shot. He thought enough of the script that he later tried to buy it back with an eye toward reselling it, or making it himself.

  By that time, Preminger was living in New York. The two, who had never met during the studio years in Hollywood, were brought together by Otto’s brother, Ingo Preminger, who after the blacklist became Trumbo’s agent. The director thought a good deal of Trumbo’s work, especially of his now-renowned ability to work quickly under pressure. And so, quite naturally, it was Trumbo to whom he turned when he found himself in a very difficult situation with regard to his upcoming production of Exodus. It was the beginning of December 1959. Contracts with the actors had been signed, and the film was set to begin production in April. The trouble was, of course, that Preminger simply didn’t have a usable—shootable—script. It had been through a number of drafts by two different writers: the first was the writer of the novel, Leon Uris; the second was another blacklisted writer, Albert Maltz, who had engaged in vast historical researches of his own and had finally delivered a screenplay of some 400 pages in length (the average script then ran no more than 150 or 160 pages). This, then, was his predicament when he telephoned Trumbo from New York and told him to get a copy of the novel from his brother, Ingo, and read it that night (it is a book of over a thousand pages in length); he would be in Los Angeles the next day and Trumbo would then begin the job of adaptation.

  The fundamental mistake made by the two previous writers was that they had both tried to adapt the whole novel to the screen, that is, to go back to Old Testament times and follow the Jews through the centuries of the Diaspora and the horror of the Holocaust, and then bring them back at last to Palestine for the climax in the creation of the modern state of Israel. In the novel, this epic approach worked, within Uris’s limitations as a writer, well enough. However, to try to translate it directly to the screen would have been to show a profound misunderstanding of the uses to which the medium could be put. Trumbo realized this, and he was not about to make that mistake himself. When Otto Preminger arrived the next afternoon, Trumbo actually had read the novel. He sat him down in his study and told him that it was impossible to do the novel as it was written—there were far too many stories in it. He asked him which one he wanted to tell in the picture. And when Preminger said, as he had anticipated he would, that of course he wanted to show the birth of Israel, Trumbo said, “Fine. Let’s get to it.”

  They worked intensively and in close cooperation on the script. Preminger would arrive each morning at Trumbo’s house in Highland Park at seven o’clock. The two would go over the pages that Trumbo had completed and handed over to Preminger the night before. Then they would discuss the scenes he would write that day. Preminger would leave, and Trumbo would get to work, first rewriting last night’s work according to Preminger’s suggestions, then writing the new material for the director to take away with him that night. They would get together at the dinner hour, have a martini together, and Preminger would leave with that day’s pages. The process was repeated day after day for more than thirty days. They worked through Christmas and New Year’s Day, 1960, Trumbo taking an hour off on Christmas morning to open gifts with his family. Preminger was present and waiting, a Teutonic Scrooge. When they had finished, the two adjourned immediately to the study and continued on schedule. But the pace paid off. When Preminger left Los Angeles for New York in the middle of January he had the completed screenplay of Exodus under his arm.

  As the script began to work into shape and the task that had once loomed so large before them now began to seem at least possible, Otto Preminger permitted himself to joke a little. He began to tell Trumbo that if the picture came out badly he would make sure Trumbo got the blame. With that between them, the call that came from New York on January 19 was not a complete surprise. It was Preminger. “Your name is on the front page of the New York Times tonight,” he said. “I’ve announced you as the writer of Exodus.”

  “How did it happen? That’s easy. I went to lunch with Arthur Krim of United Artists at the St. Regis when I came back with the script, and I said it was absolutely a crime what was done to these men. They had served time, and if that was what they wanted from them, then that was what they had given. They should be permitted to earn their living in an open way. He agreed, and so I made the announcement.

  “Now, I personally was never told about any blacklist. But there was, of course, a silent agreement never to use writers implicated in the Joe McCarthy witch hunt. Some exploited these men, but I always paid Dalton a decent salary. There was no discussion of him receiving a credit on this script or the others he did for me until I made the announcement to the Times.”

  Otto Preminger punctuated his pronouncements with a nod. His manner, notoriously punctilious and autocratic, made him an ideal subject for interview. He spoke directly and to the point, and when he had finished, he let you know with that little nod of his head that he was ready for the next question.

  It is a Saturday morning in the fall, and I am sitting in his living room. An air of quiet hangs over the place—not so much a pall of silence as a kind of insulated stillness. A dim, subliminal awareness persists that there must be some noise out there in Manhattan, even on this quiet street in the East Sixties on which his townhouse faces, but it is clear that disturbances of any sort will not—cannot—penetrate the elegance of this large, simple room in brown. Preminger seems as much at ease sitting at his desk here as he would be anywhere, neither more nor less. A contained, direct, and forceful man, he is the sort who could defy any pressure group and simply do what he chose to do.

  “There were threats of actions. Yes, of course. Threats of all kinds, but in the end, there were only a few picket lines in Boston, and a few other places. Nothing major, however. This famous opposition just wasn’t there when they said it would be. It was an illusion.”

  “So the blacklist was maintained for years on an illusion of retaliation?” An interesting point. Preminger was in a position to know.

  “Yes,” he says, “and when it disappeared, it opened for Dalton a whole legitimate career. He is very successful, you know.”

  It was my turn to nod. Yes, I knew.

  “And he deserves it all. I find him personally an enchanting man. He has a sense of humor, and just as with Ben Hecht, he is never pompous or pretentious. He is a man who loves his children. I have seen this in him. He cares very much for his family. This is dull for you, perhaps, but I have never seen bad traits in Trumbo.”

  “You mentioned Ben Hecht,” I prompt him. “You seemed to be comparing the two.”

  “Yes, I always think of the two of them as very similar talents. Dalton is able to write anything. He has great facility. People might criticize him even for that, but I find it very good. There is only one other writer I have known in my long experience who had a similar facility, and this was, of course, Ben Hecht. I did seven scripts with him. But with both of them, too, I have the feeling that if pictures had not used the talent of these people, then they would have become greater writers. They got used to a higher life
style, and they were spoiled for higher ambitions as writers. In pictures, you know, a writer can never be as important as he is in writing novels and plays, and so on. I’m thinking of them in this, what they could have done. On the other hand, we film people should be grateful that such talents will write for us.

  “Still, with Dalton, there was his novel, Johnny. He came to me, you know, with the film he made from it. And I liked the film very much. I had some suggestions on editing, but I thought he directed it well. But that novel—well, he’s a very talented writer, and without films and the lure of easy money, he might have written more books like Johnny, you know. He would have had time to go into deeper writing.

  “In all this, you see, he is like Ben Hecht. Both of them could have been, should have been, more.”

  Whether or not Universal would have permitted Kirk Douglas to give screen credit to Dalton Trumbo for Spartacus without the impetus that Preminger provided is, of course, open to doubt. In any case, he did get acknowledgment for Spartacus, as well as for Exodus. Does Preminger deserve all the credit, then? Was it simply a grand personal gesture on his part that ended the blacklist for Trumbo, and eventually for others as well? Yes and no. For without detracting in the least from the moral courage he showed in the matter, it should also be pointed out that Otto Preminger might never have made the announcement if it had not become common knowledge that Trumbo had written Spartacus, too. It had, after all, been so reported in the gossip columns and in the trades, and there existed the possibility, at least, that Universal would sniff the wind and decide that the time was ripe for such a revelation. If there was a risk of blame attached, there was certainly also praise; Preminger was willing to risk the former to reap the latter. He was, in spite of his authoritarian personal style, solidly liberal in his outlook. He was acting on principle—but in a most circumspect manner. Perhaps Arthur Krim and the management of United Artists deserve more credit in this than they have been given. They, after all, had more to lose and less to gain in the matter than Preminger. And they backed him up all the way.