TRUMBO Read online

  They got the money for the picture together in March 1970. The thirteen-week shooting schedule began on July 2, 1970, and concluded in September. Alvah Bessie, Jerry Zinnamon, and “the dead Bavarian” figured in that schedule somewhere around the middle. Zinnamon was a writer whom Bessie had known in San Francisco. He had subsequently moved down to Los Angeles to try to break into movies as a screenwriter. He had some experience as an actor, though not much, and when Johnny Got His Gun was to begin production he was encouraged to try for a part in the picture by Bessie, who put in a word for him. There wasn’t much of a part for Zinnamon, but since he was a friend of Alvah’s, they decided he could play the dead Bavarian, that very prominent corpse who is festooned festering on the barbed wire just in front of Joe Bonham’s trench. The image of the dead Bavarian recurs through the novel, and though it was naturally not a speaking part, it was at least prominent in the picture. So this was Jerry Zinnamon’s role. It required three days of shooting. He came, he did his bit, and he left. Nothing at all out of the ordinary happened during that time. Zinnamon came, went through costume and makeup, did an uncomfortable three days on the wire due to the intense August heat in which the picture was being shot—and then he went home. It was what happened afterward that made Trumbo furious, and with some justification. Zinnamon sent a long letter (seven typewritten pages) to Alvah Bessie in which he described in humorous, though not terribly accurate, detail what had happened during those three days. He embroidered, he exaggerated, he even told a few funny lies, probably without malicious intent. But when Bessie received it, he thought it was all so funny that he sent it on to Esquire. The magazine accepted it for publication, and it appeared in the December 1970 issue under the title “Letter from a Dead Bavarian.” Trumbo did not take kindly to the joke, nor especially did he care for the untruths in the piece. He was then engaged in a life-or-death struggle to get his picture edited and in the hands of a distributor, and he was simply unwilling to laugh it all off. He wrote an angry letter to Bessie and talked to Zinnamon on the telephone, with the result that Zinnamon wrote a letter to Don Erickson admitting that many of the statements in the piece were “blatantly false,” especially those about disharmony on the set. Too late, of course. The damage had been done—though Trumbo may well have overestimated the extent of it.

  Bessie wrote his apologies to Trumbo and to Cleo and the younger Trumbos in two separate letters, insisting that he had not sent it to Esquire expecting that it would be published—or if so, that it would be published as it stood (in fact, some changes were made, though obviously not enough to prevent offense). Esquire had earlier that year published a humorously acrimonious exchange of letters between Trumbo and Steve Allen, which they titled “The Happy Jack Fish Hatchery Papers,” and in another issue that year they published a selection of the blacklist letters which appeared in Trumbo’s collection Additional Dialogue. Bessie declared that he had expected the magazine to honor “its friendship” with Trumbo by showing him the letter before publishing it. In any case, he was truly sorry and on a number of occasions afterward he sought to make public amends for his part in the affair.

  It might all have been forgotten if things had gone a little better for Johnny. During post-production on the film, money began running low. With nowhere else to go for it, Trumbo dug into his own bank account and put up the twenty-five thousand dollars they needed to finish dubbing and looping. What followed was, as he later called it, “a series of small calamities.” Twentieth Century-Fox had offered the syndicate of Johnny’s backers eight hundred thousand dollars for all distribution rights, but the company insisted on total control on the release of the film. Trumbo opposed the sale to Fox. Why? “I knew that this was not going to be an immensely popular picture. An honest truck driver is not going to take his wife and children and spend twelve to fifteen dollars to see Johnny. It isn’t what they want to see. It did have an audience out there for it, however, and I thought that if we let it go for an eight hundred thousand advance, then that was all we would ever see from the picture. I’d seen it happen again and again. The picture would have to start out well, or there would be nothing done with it by a big major distributor.” Trumbo argued persuasively that it would be wise to pass up the offer and hold out for a distributor that had experience handling pictures for special audiences. And in fact Donald Rugoff, whose Cinema 5 was doing extremely well just then with Z, was quite interested in Johnny Got His Gun.

  “We took the film to Cannes,” said Trumbo. “Cannes is a place where you sell.” But by the time he arrived there with Johnny Got His Gun, he had so ruffled his investors by taking the stand he did against Fox that they withheld from him authorization to deal for the syndicate there on his own; he would have to convey offers to them and have them voted on before accepting or rejecting. (Rugoff had backed out between votes during the second or third go-round with the syndicate—that was how they lost him.) And so Trumbo was going to Cannes to show his film and attract offers that he was not free to accept. None of this would have mattered much, except that Johnny turned out to be a sensation of the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. It not only received the Prix Spécial du Jury, it also brought Trumbo the International Critics Award. He and Johnny were on top of the world that night.

  But what good did it do them? “When you win, as we did at Cannes, you should open in Paris within two weeks. And you should sell, sell, sell right then because that is the hottest you’ll ever be. [The investors] didn’t get around to selling the European rights until after our American opening, which was not good.”

  No, the American opening was not good. The important reviews from the younger reviewers who might have saved the film all ran against it. To what extent were they reviewing the film and to what extent were they reviewing Trumbo? A curious reaction set in against him, especially among these same younger critics who seemed so determined not to be intimidated by his reputation that they approached every picture with which his name was associated with a sort of hypercritical, show-me attitude, so much so that the gang seemed almost to be lying in wait for Johnny, the only picture ever to bear his auteur signature.* And the job they did on it was something more than criticism and something less than a mugging.

  But never mind that. What about the movie itself? Trumbo had bet everything on Johnny Got His Gun; not just money (though he was to lose plenty on the picture), but more than that, much more. For one thing, when a man undertakes to direct his first feature at the age of sixty-five, he is putting physical demands on himself that perhaps he should not. And in insisting that he could and should direct it, Trumbo was laying his reputation as a screenwriter on the line. It was not just any film he was directing, but his film, an adaptation of his own novel. It added up to this: there could be no further appeal; Trumbo was asking, demanding, to be judged, telling everybody the buck stops here.

  He was perhaps too close to the entire project to see that the fundamental difficulty with Johnny as a film lay with Johnny as a book. The action of the novel takes place inside the head of Joe Bonham. He is not only a prisoner of his hospital room, he is a prisoner of his senses, a man forced to dwell completely within his memories, fantasies, and hallucinations. In his novel, Trumbo managed to sustain this brilliantly with the strength of his prose and by using devices borrowed from screenwriting (but because they have been once borrowed does not mean, simply, that they can be returned). Since film is a visual medium, Trumbo had to establish two realities: the objective one, in which Joe is situated in the hospital room with the nurse coming and going; but more important and difficult, the subjective reality that tells us in images what is going on inside his head. And what is more, Trumbo had to move from one to the other without disorienting his audience and thus losing it. This was a problem, all right, and by and large Trumbo solved it by technical means. The hospital sequences are in black and white, and the rest is in color. Moving from sequence to sequence and scene to scene, action flows rather slowly because Trumbo made much heavier use of dissolv
es and fade-outs than is usual today—there are no jump cuts in Johnny. In fact, as Trumbo pointed out to me, “there is not a swift action in the whole movie.” (This is not necessarily a good thing.) He also “opened up” the action quite successfully, mixing Joe’s memories and fantasies and giving a free-ranging sense of movement to the entire film.

  Trumbo achieved some remarkable things in Johnny Got His Gun. There are moments of extreme tenderness that translate beautifully from the novel: a number between Joe and his father which Timothy Bottoms and Jason Robards realize perfectly; and scenes with Kareen (played by Kathy Fields) that work perhaps a little better than in the book. Joe’s Morse code breakthrough to the outside world is, just as it should be, tremendously exciting and moving. Let me underline that: whatever its flaws, Johnny is an immensely moving film. And its flaws are of the kind—bizarre imagery, occasional didacticism, and an almost relentless emotional intensity—that were forced upon the film by the novel. In fact, to do the novel at all as a film was to run the risk of alienating the audience, or a large part of it, through emotional overload—simply giving more than most people can take. Trumbo ran that risk, knowing perfectly well that he would lose some of the audience in the bargain (“the honest truck driver” and his family); yet the film never had a chance to find the audience for which it was intended.

  In any case, it failed commercially. The North American distributor on which at last they settled, Cinemation, was probably the wrong one for it. Johnny actually did better in other countries—in Japan and France, for example, where it played successfully for weeks and weeks—than it did in America. “You really can’t blame anyone for it,” said Trumbo, “except that the investors should have understood these things a little better when they went into the film. When you make an investment, you make a gamble.”

  Trumbo had gambled. He bet his time—a year and a half of it—on the film. During that period, he drew a salary of ten thousand dollars and nothing more: “The result of all those months and months of no income is worse than no income. It becomes debt. The whole thing was quite a disaster for me financially.”

  Trumbo leased his share in the picture at a fraction of what he himself had invested in cash. Late in 1971, he called up George Litto, his agent, who had succeeded Ingo Preminger when the latter retired.

  “You know I’m not used to calling agents, George,” Trumbo said to him.

  “I know that,” said Litto.

  “But I’ll tell you, I’m really busted. All the money I’ve got in the world is in my art collection. Can you get me a television show to write?”

  “Dalton, if you do that, you’ll never live it down.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right. How about lending me some money then? That’s what agents are for.”

  George Litto did lend him some money. He also sent some business his way. In 1972, Trumbo wrote Executive Action for Edward Lewis, which David Miller directed the following year. Litto brought him The Osterman Weekend, which Trumbo adapted from the novel by Robert Ludlum. And then, toward the end of the year, he came to him with a deal for good money which required Trumbo to do a running rewrite of a script right on location. The movie, of course, was Papillon.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HEROES AND VILLAINS?

  On March 13, 1970, at the time when Trumbo was poised to plunge into the production of Johnny Got His Gun, he was honored by the Writers Guild with its Laurel Award. It is conferred annually on “that member of the Guild who has advanced the literature of the motion picture through the years and who has made outstanding contributions to the profession of the screenwriter.” It proved to be an almost historic occasion, which was as the Guild had intended. The circumstances were such that the Laurel Award that year was extended as a conciliatory gesture—or more, as a symbolic request by the membership for forgiveness from one of the scores of writers whom the Guild had wronged in the blacklist. The Screen Writers Guild did not originate the blacklist but it did cooperate in it willingly and completely; otherwise it could not have been made to work.

  Trumbo, of course, was alive to every nuance and vibration of the moment. He came prepared, not just to receive the award, which under the circumstances would have been enough, but also to address the moral issues raised by his presence there that night. Not that he held the membership responsible—more than half there were far too young even to have the facts of the matter firmly in mind. He knew this, of course, and in his short acceptance speech, he addressed them directly:

  I presume that over half of our members have no memory of that blacklist because they were children when it began, or not yet born. To them I would say only this: that the blacklist was a time of evil, and that no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides; and almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities in his own person, in his own acts.

  When you who are in your forties or younger look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us—right, left, or center—emerged from that long nightmare without sin.

  It was not merely a statement appropriate to the occasion. It went well beyond that. Trumbo was eloquent, generous, forgiving. He had, in that instance, been extended the powers of a priest, and as a priest he had granted absolution.

  Some, even one quite close to him, felt he had gone beyond the mark. It so happened that the Laurel Award dinner coincided with the thirty-second wedding anniversary of Dalton and Cleo Trumbo. His attorney, Aubrey Finn, and Pauline Finn, both of them longtime friends of the Trumbos, attended the dinner with them. “When he made that speech we all heard it for the first time,” said Finn. “There was no prior notice as to what he was going to say. I remember that in the car afterward, Cleo didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. She felt he had been entirely too generous.”

  And others, including some of the original Hollywood Ten, objected to what he had said. Lester Cole, for one: “I didn’t agree with that ‘only victims’ speech of Trumbo’s. It really came as a shock. It was like Ford pardoning Nixon, if you ask me.”

  Alvah Bessie: “Well, I thought there were villains and heroes. And it seems to me he used to think so, too. There were villains, all right, and if there were heroes, Trumbo was one of them.”

  But of them all, Albert Maltz was the most intransigent and outspoken in his opposition to Trumbo’s Laurel Award speech. Oddly enough, although the two lived only a few blocks from one another and were in reasonably close communication, Maltz did not express himself fully on the matter to Trumbo for well over two years—and then not until he had given a public statement criticizing the speech to Victor Navasky of the New York Times. Navasky was preparing an article on the blacklist which subsequently appeared in the New York Times Magazine. What Maltz said, in part, was this:

  There is currently a thesis pronounced first by Dalton Trumbo which declares that everyone during the years of blacklist was equally a victim. This is factual nonsense and represents a bewildering moral position.

  To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.…

  [Trumbo] did not advance this do
ctrine in private or public during the years in which he was blacklisted, or at the time he wrote his magnificent pamphlet, “The Time of the Toad.” How he can in the same period republish “The Time of the Toad” and present the doctrine that there were “only victims,” I cannot say—but he does not speak for me or many others. Let it be noted, however, that his ethic of “equal victims” has been ecstatically embraced by all who cooperated with the Committee on Un-American Activities when there were penalties for not doing so.

  Navasky, in turn, showed Maltz’s statement to Trumbo and asked him to comment. Trumbo made a very mild statement, refraining even from pointing out that nowhere in his Laurel speech had he said that “everyone… was equally a victim.” He told Navasky that he didn’t want to get into a public dispute with Maltz. But that certainly didn’t prevent the two from getting into a private one. Long before the article appeared in which they were actually quoted, Maltz and Trumbo had entered into a correspondence that grew increasingly angry and more personal in tone with each letter.

  Maltz taxed him bitterly for having altered his position, implying (without actually saying so) that Trumbo had sold out to the enemy, and pointing out that at the very least he had handed them a ready justification for their acts of treachery. But Trumbo stood firm: “In a country which, after a reasonable period of punishment returns murderers and rapists to society on the humane theory that it is still possible for them to become decent and valuable citizens, I have no intention of fanning hatred which burned so brightly twenty-five years ago.”