TRUMBO Page 36

  But they, too, were businessmen, and they must also have engaged in a bit of wind-sniffing. If they did, they knew the wind was blowing in a favorable direction. All this happened, remember, during an election year. And not just any election year, but 1960, a watershed year in American politics. What may have been a calculated risk for all concerned paid off with the nomination and election of John F. Kennedy.

  Kennedy himself played a part in the breaking of the blacklist. For both Spartacus and Exodus were picketed in a few cities, and among the most active in the campaign against them was a group who called themselves the Catholic War Veterans. A gesture from him in support of them could well have turned the tide against Trumbo and in effect would have reinstated the blacklist. Instead, John F. Kennedy threw his weight to the other side. The president-elect shortly after his election made a public visit to a Washington, D.C., theater with his brother, soon to be attorney general, where they crossed the picket lines and saw Spartacus. They asked him afterward what he thought of it, and he said simply that he had enjoyed it, that it was a good film. And if anyone doubted it, or wished to argue the point, that mild endorsement put an effective end to resistance from the Catholic War Veterans, or the American Legion, or the Motion Picture Committee for the Preservation of American Ideals, or the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The blacklist had been breached.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

  So Trumbo, at last, was no longer a ghost. But others who had been blacklisted, bleak specters who had also been haunting the movie black market in Hollywood or who had perhaps drifted off to New York or to Europe, found the arduous process of materialization eased only somewhat for them by his success. He showed it could be done—and how. To win back their names, their identities, and their incomes, they would have to make themselves valuable to producers and directors, as Trumbo had done—so valuable that credit would be offered as a consequence of having proven their worth on the market. They would, in other words, have to work their way back. This they did, one by one, emerging from the shadows, blinking in the sunlight, suddenly, substantially there for the world to see.

  Not that it was ever easy for those who struggled back. Not that the process went smoothly or predictably. For instance, the same year that Preminger announced Trumbo as the author of the Exodus screenplay, Frank Sinatra stepped forth boldly and declared that he had chosen Albert Maltz to write the screenplay for his forthcoming production of The Execution of Private Slovik. This caused an even greater furor than the one that followed Preminger’s explosive report. The American Legion threatened—and in the end, Sinatra gave in. As it happened, his association with the Kennedy family may well have been the factor that put an end to these plans. He was known as a friend of the senator, who was by then the Democratic candidate for president. It was feared by those associated with the Kennedy campaign that Sinatra’s action might appear too “radical” and would reflect badly on the candidate. Therefore, a few weeks after his original announcement, Sinatra withdrew, saying: “In view of the reaction of my family, my friends and the American public, I have instructed my attorneys to make a settlement with Mr. Maltz and to inform him that he will not write the screenplay for The Execution of Private Slovik. I had thought that the major consideration was whether or not the resulting script would be in the best interests of the United States.… But the American public has indicated it feels the morality of hiring Albert Maltz is the more crucial matter and I will have to accept this majority opinion.” There was, of course, no “majority opinion.” Sinatra simply gave in to the personal pressures that were brought to bear on him. Years later, Maltz said of the episode and of Sinatra’s conduct in it, “I hold him in high regard. I think he was very sincere in all this. Something just happened that he couldn’t withstand. It all had the unfortunate effect of making me a hotter potato than ever.” Maltz did not get his name back on the screen until 1967 with Two Mules for Sister Sara.

  In spite of the Oscars he had won during his very active blacklist career, Michael Wilson was denied credit in North America for Lawrence of Arabia (playwright Robert Bolt’s name was the only one that appeared on the screen) when it was released in 1962. Everywhere else in the world, however, he was acknowledged as co-author of the screenplay. Even Kirk Douglas withheld Trumbo’s name from Town Without Pity when it was released in 1961—evidently because he felt the writer’s name had been identified with too many of his films, and he didn’t wish to seem dependent upon him. As late as 1966, screenwriter Lester Cole’s name was deleted from the credits for Born Free. That was the year after Ring Lardner, Jr., made his comeback with The Cincinnati Kid. Writers as able and well established as Abraham Polonsky and Waldo Salt did not see their names on screen until 1967 (Madigan) and 1969 (Midnight Cowboy), respectively.

  These are just a few examples—enough, I hope, to show there was neither pattern nor consistency to the lifting of the blacklist; that it became a matter between individual employer and employee, one usually with economic rather than political or moral implications. In general, the writers made it back before the directors (Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, John Berry), and the directors made it back before the actors (Lionel Stander, Howard Da Silva, Zero Mostel, Jeff Corey). Some, as noted earlier, never made it back at all. And still others—in many ways, these were the saddest cases of all—almost made it back from the blacklist without ever quite recovering from the mess it had made of their lives.

  Adrian Scott was one of these. At the time he was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he was a producer at RKO, the brightest, hottest young producer on the lot with hits like Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire to his credit. He was married to a star, actress Anne Shirley, and he had the respect of his coworkers because he had paid his dues as a writer (The Parson of Panamint, Mr. Lucky) before becoming a producer. He had, in short, everything going for him, every reason to cooperate with the Committee, to tell them whatever they wanted to know and get on with his career. But that he would not do. He kept faith with the rest, followed the game plan, and pleaded the First Amendment. And like the rest he went to jail.

  He was one of the most decent men I have ever met. There was nothing sanctimonious about him, nothing of the professional victim. His chin was up. He talked of his plans for the future. He was still going to show them what he could do.

  A young man of thirty-four at the time of the hearings, he was himself almost movie-star handsome then, resembling the French actor Jean Marais a little in some of the photographs of the Ten. But the man who presented himself when we met for lunch in Beverly Hills was an aged caricature of that younger self. He was fifty-eight, and he looked older. His face was heavily lined, his skin somewhat yellowed, and his tall, angular frame barely filled out the dungarees and chambray shirt he wore that day. He seemed, well, sort of unhealthy. He was.

  Scott asked, as we sat down, if I didn’t think that people were a little tired of this subject of the blacklist by now—indicating, to me at least, that he was tired of talking about it. When I told him I didn’t think so, he allowed that I was probably right because I was the third person in as many months who had come around to talk. “I’m amazed,” he said, “at the knowledge of the period you people show and your interest in it.”

  He carefully banged out the corncob pipe he had been puffing on and dug out the dottle at the bottom of the bowl—all done neatly into the ashtray. “It’s me, I guess,” he resumed. “I’d just as soon blot the whole experience from my memory. It complicated my life terribly. We assumed the blacklist wouldn’t last permanently, and frankly we didn’t think it would last as long as it did. That it ended at all was due to the work of Dalton Trumbo. You have to give him credit—the Robert Rich episode followed by his credits for Exodus and Spartacus, well, it was just too much for them. The blacklist had been broken by one man. That showed it could be broken by all.”

  “When did it end for you?” I asked him.

  “The blac
klist? That’s a little hard to say. In 1961, we went to England, and I began to do some work there, but I didn’t begin functioning openly even there until 1963. You see, a little while after the hearings in 1947, I went to Europe with an eye toward doing some work there then—things were starting to open up there in pictures at the time. But I went on some kind of temporary five-month passport, which was not to be renewed without a decision by the State Department. I was in the process of setting up a picture when they refused to renew. I had friends in England and France who said I was foolish to go back then, because I knew by this time I was going back to stand trial for contempt of Congress, you see. They said they’d hide me out and then fix it up with the government. I was tempted. It could have been arranged. But nine of us couldn’t go to court with the tenth on the lam. That would have made it impossible for the rest who were left.

  “So by the time I could leave the country, which was 1958, I was interested in going abroad because of the possibilities I had seen in Europe right after the war. But I didn’t get the opportunity to go until 1961 when I was hired as executive assistant to the head of M-G-M’s English operation. I can’t account for it. He just hired me. Nothing was said about my past or what I had been doing the last dozen years or so. He knew, of course, but he just hired me, and told Metro later. I was kept more or less under wraps, though, for the first two years. And so, from 1961 to 1968, I was in England, and there was no problem whatever with the blacklist. Sometime during that period, I guess, you could say that was when the blacklist ended for me.”

  “And what had you been doing before?” I asked. “During that last dozen years or so?”

  “During the fifties, you mean? What saved me was TV. It was a matter of feeding the monster. I worked under the table on television from 1954 to 1961—totally as a writer. To be a producer, of course, there has to be a body to appear at conferences and so on. And my body just wasn’t acceptable.”

  Adrian Scott made contact with a young lady named Joan LaCour who wanted to write for television. She had no experience, but she did have ideas, energy, and a name to offer. They formed a partnership, these two. In the beginning, she merely fronted for him, proposing his ideas, delivering material he had written, and sitting in on rewrite conferences with story editors and producers. The credits and 50 percent of the money they earned went to her. But as time went on, she began to take a more active part in the enterprise, and it became something more in the nature of a true collaboration—ideas tossed back and forth, lines written and rewritten between them. The split of the take remained the same, though, for the two eventually married. Then came England and what were very good years for them. But Adrian Scott wanted to return. There were a couple of projects he wanted to mount, personal projects, things he believed in. With the new climate in Hollywood—it was 1968, after all—he thought he might be able to function once again as a writer-producer.

  “I left Metro in England,” he continued, “and came back here and free-lanced for a while—television again. But what I was really trying to do was get back into producing feature films. I almost pulled it off. I got up to the starting line a number of times with projects, only to see them fall apart. It happens all the time. It had nothing to do with being on the blacklist. Finally, I did get one through, and I think it turned out pretty well—The Great Man’s Whiskers. It was a two-hour television children’s feature that I did at Universal. It was from a play I had done—oh, let’s see, years before, even before the blacklist. Did you happen to see that?”

  “About Lincoln before he became president?”

  Scott nodded.

  “Yes, I did. I liked it. Good production and a good script.”

  He looked at me a moment and must have decided I really meant it, for he smiled then, and went on: “I’ve got another script about my prison experiences—not really autobiographical but about prison and prison reform. I was afraid that because it’s basically a polemic, people would say it’s not entertainment. But it’s funny in a kind of Rabelaisian way and pretty human, and I’ve gotten a pretty good reception around town with it. I’d love to produce it, as well, and if I do a good job on it, I have a reasonable expectation of being sought after. That’s the way this town operates. If you have something they want, then that’s it. You’re back on top. And I really think this prison picture is going to be made.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  He shrugged. “Television. Ironside, The Bold Ones, what have you.”

  “So much of this just happened to you,” I said to him. “You couldn’t choose not to be blacklisted. You couldn’t choose not to be called up before the Committee. In the limited area that choice was open to you, would you have done things any differently from the way you did them?”

  “I think you’re asking me in a gentle, roundabout sort of way if I might give names if I had it to do over again.”

  “Maybe that’s what I’m asking.”

  “Well, if that’s the question, then the answer is no. I would still not cooperate—even if I were hauled before the Committee tomorrow. Because I sincerely believe that if there is an American fascism, then the House Un-American Activities Committee is an agency of it.”

  He paused, sighed, and then continued: “But let’s see. Would I do anything differently? Well, I made a number of speeches in the heat of the moment back then that today seem oversimplistic to me in what they said. If I had it to do over again, I would write them better and make fewer of them. And also, I would take the Fifth Amendment and not the First. We knew we were taking a chance, and it seemed worth it at the time, but now I see it was just so much lost time, going to jail. It did no good. The only good thing that happened to me there was that Dalton Trumbo and I became good friends. We were in Ashland together, and that was where we really got to know one another. He’s been a friend, a real one, ever since.”

  We talked on through that lunch. In the course of it, he revealed that his second marriage (to Anne Shirley) had broken up as a result of his refusal to cooperate with the Committee, and he also told me that on and off afterward, his health “hadn’t been good.” As for the blacklist, his final word on that was that there had been complications to it—“social complications, financial complications, every kind you can think of—that just couldn’t be imagined, hardly even described. But why try?” he added. “It’s over now, anyway, I guess.”

  As we finished, standing in the lobby of the place, saying our goodbyes, I felt called upon to say something to him, anything, in commiseration. Finally, I put out my hand and said, “Mr. Scott, I don’t know what to say. I think you’ve had more than your fair share of trouble heaped on you in your lifetime. I just want you to know I’m sorry.”

  He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I guess I have. I appreciate your saying so.” He left then, and that was the last I saw of him. He died a year and some months later of cancer.

  There were other deaths. The years following Trumbo’s return from the blacklist, which were by and large happy ones for him and his family, were punctuated at intervals by incidents of death and episodes of dying. Hugo Butler, Trumbo’s junior by a decade, was the first to go. It was a grim, sad story, marked by a sudden personality change which Jean Butler took at first for a nervous breakdown. He separated from his family and went for a while to live with the Trumbos while he got psychiatric help, which was really no help at all, for it was discovered at UCLA Hospital five weeks before he died in 1968 that his problem was physiological—Alzheimer’s disease. “Trumbo helped pay the money to get treatment for him,” Jean Butler told me. “Then, for a while, he and Ingo Preminger and Bob Aldrich were kicking in each month to support the kids and me. This went on until we could sell the big house we had with a swimming pool and all. For a while there we were living in poverty—but we had a swimming pool. Now I’ve been getting some writing jobs myself, and we’re getting back on our feet.”

  One of the Hollywood Ten, director Herbert Biberman, who was not perhaps a friend but a c
omrade of Trumbo’s and a friendly adversary, died in 1971. Cancer again. Biberman had been the driving force in the making of the all-blacklist feature, Salt of the Earth. After repeated attempts to get back into films as a director during the sixties, he succeeded at last in 1969 when he got a chance to direct the Theatre Guild’s feature, Slaves. Neither critically successful, nor especially successful with the black audiences at which it was aimed, the picture put him back more or less where he had started, scrambling to put together another feature. That was where he was when he died—another, like Adrian Scott, who almost made it back from the blacklist.

  Earl Felton, completely apolitical and one of Trumbo’s oldest and best friends, committed suicide in 1972. It had been Felton, of course, who picked out Cleo for Trumbo and introduced them. And he had also been among the first to offer to front for Trumbo on the black market. An unhappy man, crippled and physically deformed from birth, he sustained himself for years only with his wit and energy and his passion for friendship. It was only his energy that failed him, but when it did, he gave in at last and shot himself. Afterward, his friends—a disparate group that included Trumbo, Richard Fleischer, Edward Anhalt, and Stanley Kramer—gathered to scatter his ashes out on the Pacific and toast his memory at a nearby bar.

  Maud Trumbo died. Dalton’s mother was eighty-three. She was weak and had been in generally failing health for years. Whatever difficulties had arisen between mother and son through the years had long before been resolved. They were friends. Trumbo had a big birthday party for her on her eightieth birthday. The Trumbos, all of them, remembered it as a grand family occasion, full of fun and laughter at the old stories. A family reunion. Maud came in an ambulance, had a high old time with her children and grandchildren, and when the time came to leave, she didn’t want to go home. She kept sticking her head out of the back door of the ambulance to add one more comment and poke one more bit of fun. They liked to remember that as the way she left them—and not the long period in the hospital room.