TRUMBO Page 4

  That’s right—success. None of his other fine qualities would have mattered a damn if he had not beaten the producers and studio executives at their own game, for they were, after all, the ones who were responsible for enforcing the blacklist. He proved to them that it was no longer in their interest to continue enforcing it, and he did this by addressing them eloquently and persuasively in the language they understood best, which was money. For one who could lay fair claim to thinking and acting like a radical for most of his adult life, Trumbo always maintained rather ambiguous relations toward money: he had a healthy liking for it; he was good at getting it; and the movies he wrote had better than average chances of earning it for other people. This last, of course, was what assured his ultimate triumph over the blacklist.

  Money. If ever there was an instinctive capitalist, it was Dalton Trumbo. His competitive sense was so keenly developed that, at least in his younger days, there was hardly an activity he pursued that he did not feel driven to excel in. He was a believer in achievement, one imbued early with faith in the work ethic. (“I’ve never been without a job in my life,” he told me, “even during the Depression, even during the blacklist.”) And during the last years of his life, he seemed profoundly convinced that he could overcome any obstacle, any disadvantage, if he just tried a little harder. When he was put to the test during the blacklist period, he acted on this conviction and proved that it was so (at least for him). Because Trumbo worked in an industry in which achievement was measured in dollars and cents, he made a great deal of money.

  But Dalton Trumbo was not merely a figure to the motion picture industry alone; he was remarkably well known to the nation at large, especially to that two-thirds of it under the age of thirty. He was known to them, first of all, as the author of Johnny Got His Gun, the novel that spoke more directly than any other to the Vietnam generation. He was known to a somewhat lesser but more deeply committed number of that generation as one who took his role as radical seriously enough to go to jail for it, one who looked on his commitment as essentially a moral one. It was characteristic of him and goes a long way, I think, toward explaining his personal appeal to the young of that time that he always tended to see his conflicts, no matter how abstract their basis, in personal terms. It mattered to him greatly that he was a better man than any who persecuted him, than any who opposed him. And again and again, he felt called upon to demonstrate that to any who may have needed convincing.

  He was the sort—one becoming all too rare in America and never as numerous as they told us in the high school history books—who thrived on competition, as though it were an added element required by his nature for continued survival. I hesitate to use the phrase “rugged individualist” to describe him, for it has been misused and overused to the point that it now seems to have only satirical value. Instead, I’ll call Dalton Trumbo a “champion,” with specific reference to Norman Mailer’s dictum: “Champions are prodigies of the will.”

  Trumbo was that, certainly: a prodigy of the will. He hung in there—survived, prevailed, even triumphed on a couple of occasions. Ultimately, that is why he is worth our attention. Not primarily as a literary figure, nor because he ever really accomplished so very much politically (what, after all, do you prove by going to jail?), but rather because he was a man of moral stature. It may not even be too much to nominate him as an exemplar of a certain set of American virtues—toughness, independence, persistence—that are becoming fairly rare today.

  He lives about halfway up a hill overlooking upper Sunset when I begin interviewing him. I have no idea who his neighbors are and never got around to asking, but it’s a street of big houses that are, like his, deceptively small when viewed from street level. Enter through the Moorish gate and on past the door, and you find yourself in the top floor of three, well above part of Los Angeles and all of Beverly Hills. The woman at the door is Cleo Trumbo, Dalton’s wife. In the days that follow, I will meet his three children on different occasions, as they trail in and out of the house on errands, more often on visits, just to find out how he’s doing. It’s a quiet house, except for dogs that bark at every bell. The people in it are quiet. They speak in low voices, never raising them much above a murmur. This isn’t Trumbo’s style, but rather it is Cleo’s. She is calm, still, contained—quite a beautiful woman, complete in herself, one who seems to feel little need to be emphatic. She makes her presence felt in subtler ways.

  (“The kind of relationship that that man has with that woman,” John Berry had said to me, “it’s just remarkable to see. To think that there is this kind of closeness between two people here in this… in this Babylon. Well, to see it in terms of this modern society, it’s just a throwback to another era, and it’s great.”)

  They have been married now closer to forty years than thirty. They have not grown in the least “like” one another, as people are said to who live together through long periods of time. They are different. And it is precisely their differences that seem to have sustained them in their marriage, adding dimension to the character of both. Trumbo, of course, is especially dependent upon her now, at this time and in his condition, and Cleo is watchful, guarding his time and strength, meting it out carefully to me and to others who come by simply to wish him a speedy recovery. It’s agreed between us that I won’t wear him out. Informally, we have set a time limit for this first day’s session.

  I wait in the den. It is a grand room, one whole wall of which is lined with books and the others crowded with pictures of all kinds—Cleo’s photographs, drawings and cartoons by diverse hands, and a few paintings as well.

  “I descend in my chariot!”

  It is Trumbo, of course, seated upon the stair lift, wrapped in his robe, as he is conveyed slowly downward in my direction. The sound made by the machine, a sustained buzz, though not loud, seems to fill the room and preclude the possibility of discussion of any sort for the moment.

  But I am standing now, ready to shake hands and greet him as soon as he dismounts. He does that well enough, steady on his feet, grasping my hand firmly, taking the place that I have arranged for him with the microphone and tape recorder ready and waiting. It is only then, when he is seated, that the exertion caused him by the trip downstairs becomes apparent.

  He was having difficulty breathing. “I’d better get my breath back.” He sat for a moment, speechless—alternately panting and wheezing. “The tricky business is learning to breathe on one lung,” he said at last.

  “It’s physically different, then?”

  “Quite different. But you see I’m going through the cobalt thing, which is about five or six minutes of cobalt every day. And you really can’t adjust until you get through with it because it affects you in so many ways. It affects each person differently. Me, it’s made—well, I once had to go back to the hospital. There was pain and I was breathing so shallowly that I couldn’t get enough air in. Sometimes the appetite goes. Sometimes you become anemic because it destroys your red blood cells. And on and on and on. So as soon as the cobalt is over in two or three weeks, then these handicaps will vanish, I hope, and I’ll begin to be able to live a normal life. And part of this will be learning to breathe with one lung. You see, I was lucky in that it was the right lung that was saved, which normally handles 55 percent of your breathing capacity—the other 45 percent for the left lung being accounted for by the presence of the heart on that side.

  “The problem, of course, after an operation like this for cancer of the lung, is metastasis—whether it will spread. This had gone into one of the lymph glands.” Trumbo pauses at this point and becomes suddenly very professorial: “The lymph glands, I discovered after research into the matter, are there for one purpose only, and that’s for spreading cancer through the body.” He delivers the line straight-faced, but he wheezes out a laugh at it himself in the right sort of spirit. “Happily,” he proceeds, “the cells in the lymph glands were not nearly of the degree of malignancy as those in the lung. So… well, they took everythin
g down there under the arm.”

  He gestures, pointing up into his armpit. I am familiar with the operation. A good friend of mine, many years Trumbo’s junior, has just had the lymph glands and nodes removed from each side. I nod, mumbling my understanding, and Trumbo continues:

  “If they succeeded and it was a clean operation, the chances are fairly good. If it wasn’t, chances are in a year it will come back again—and that’s the end, which doesn’t greatly disturb me, to tell you the truth. I’d prefer that weren’t the case, but, well, a curious thing: I was going through first the pneumectomy, then three days later the heart attack, well, you suddenly get to the point where you don’t give a shit.” He laughs. It is really a chuckle. “It didn’t matter one way or the other to me, which is rather a pleasant thing to know.

  “And so I can discuss and consider quite rationally arranging the time ahead. If, for example, it seems that this operation is not a success, therefore my life shall be quite limited. Therefore, if somebody comes along and offers me a substantial sum for a screenplay, I will take that job, because it will provide more money for my wife and because that’s the thing to do. If, on the other hand, the operation appears to be a success, I’m going to finish a novel for which I contracted. That will take six to eight months. I’ll do that and then take a job. But you see how you calculate these things because I never saved much money, never been interested in that. There’ll be enough for my wife. But having, for thirty-five years, lived with her in a certain state of comfort, I want there to be enough for her to continue in that state. Which there barely will be—and that’s fine. But if it were just a matter of six more months—bang!—the man who comes here with a script has got himself a customer.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  COLORADO

  Trumbo settles into his chair. His attention flags, and he looks for a moment as though he were thinking of something else. Is he tired? He says he is not. Would he like me to call it quits for today and come back tomorrow? No.

  “I’m just trying to decide where to begin this damned story,” he explains.

  “Tell me about your family.”

  “Well, all right. Now, this is information I got not firsthand but from a remote cousin. You see, when my name first appeared in Who’s Who—I think it was in 1938 or ’40—there was another Trumbo there. He wrote me at once. He was a banker in Oklahoma and had spent some money and had traced the Trumbo name to Switzerland. There’s a waterfall there called Trummelbach, and the family apparently had taken its name from the falls, and they were van Trummelbachs. They then became Trumbach. They then apparently moved east into Alsace-Lorraine or around in there, and they became Trumbeau. They then went to England and became Trumbo. And in 1736 the first of them came into the United States, and they settled in Virginia. And when I was in jail in Kentucky, I took the Louisville Courier-Journal, whatever the newspaper is, and the local one, and I found both Trumbos and Tillerys—my mother’s family name—much more common there. They spread through Virginia and West Virginia and Kentucky.

  “My grandfather Tillery, I think, was born in Missouri. His father fought under Morgan’s command for the South in the guerrilla raids. And in a raid into Indiana or Ohio, he was wounded and left behind and died. That was my great-grandfather. But then my grandfather married my grandmother in Missouri and came to Colorado. He built a log cabin and became a populist and then a Bryan Democrat. I remember once at the county fair I was with my grandfather Tillery, and I saw a man I thought looked like President Taft, although Taft at that time I don’t think was president. The man was making a speech. And I said to my grandfather, ‘Is that President Taft?’ My grandfather said, ‘No, that’s just some God-damned Republican trying to get himself elected to office.’”

  His father, Orus Trumbo, was born in Albion, Indiana, not all that far from those Virginia and Kentucky Trumbos, in the year 1874. Orus was the son of James and Elizabeth Bonham Trumbo. James Trumbo was an angry man, given to awful fits of temper and bouts of excessive drinking—eventually he died of Bright’s disease, though not before the better part of the relationship between father and son had been destroyed in the course of bitter arguments between them. Orus left home more or less at the first opportunity. He had completed a “normal school” education (two years of college and a teacher’s certificate) and had done some teaching when he volunteered for army service in the Spanish-American War. The war ended when he was on the train on his way to camp. He had no special wish to continue teaching, and a friend persuaded him to come out West and take part in a venture in commercial beekeeping. That was how he happened to come to Colorado. Orus Trumbo’s career as a beekeeper proved to be brief and unsuccessful, his failure in that line foreshadowing a pattern that continued all through his life. He worked subsequently as a farmhand, and then as a grocery clerk in Montrose, Colorado, a mountain town on the western slope of the Rockies. And that was where he met Maud Tillery, eight years his junior, who was the daughter of the sheriff of Montrose County.

  Millard Tillery was a real six-gun-toting frontier sheriff, one whose life and exploits matched the most potent myths of the Old West. He had operated a cattle ranch since the mid-1880s in a place just east of Montrose called Cimarron. He continued to ranch during the terms he served as sheriff. Ranching alone kept him pretty busy, but when the law needed enforcing he was always ready to go out and do whatever needed to be done. Sheriff Tillery earned a reputation as a good tracker, and he had to be that, for when men broke the law in Montrose County, they would invariably head out for the mountain wilderness that stood high around them on three sides. With Tillery in pursuit, the fugitives never got far—a hundred miles or so at the most—and he would bring them back alive, usually hitting his log-timbered ranch house just in time to overnight there before proceeding on to the jail in Montrose city. The lawbreaker might be a robber, a horse thief, or even a murderer, but he would be given the run of the house, unshackled and unchained, since it had already been demonstrated to him that there was no place in the surrounding territory for him to hide. A bluff? But it worked, all right—Sheriff Tillery lost no prisoners. His wife, however, objected strenuously to the practice. She felt that a house with murderers roaming around in it was no fit place to raise children.

  Nevertheless, that was the way that Maud Tillery, Dalton’s mother, grew up. Hers was an interesting mixture of qualities. She was tough and durable—as she would prove herself later on, when she raised her children on her own—but at the same time there was in this daughter of a profane, rough-and-ready frontier sheriff a great yearning for gentility. It must have been this that attracted her to that grocery clerk, Orus Trumbo. He was from the “East” (Indiana), had had a college education of sorts, but more important, he was an upright young man who read books and talked with her seriously about them. On the day of their marriage (December 4, 1904), in fact, he bought a set of Shakespeare, declaring that no home should be without Shakespeare and the Bible. Then the two moved into their room above the Montrose town library.

  James Dalton Trumbo was born there December 5, 1905. There had already been a miscarriage early in the year, and Maud Trumbo, a small woman, had had a difficult pregnancy. The birth was a long and difficult one, too. As a result, Dalton Trumbo had forceps scars and an unevenly shaped head through his first year. He also carried a slight congenital defect that ran in the family—a drooping left eyelid that he had learned to disguise by arching his brow.

  It was easy to get a sense of the sort of watchful, hopeful mother Maud Trumbo had been by looking at Dalton Trumbo’s “Baby Book.” It was, in a couple of ways, a remarkable document. For one thing, it told us far more about the mother who kept the record than it did about the child. Except for the scars he bore from his birth, he seemed to have been a normal baby in every way—perhaps a little above average in size and in his response to the world around him. But Maud Trumbo’s comments in the Baby Book made it clear she thought him superior in every way:

  First sentence w
as “See Mamma’s baby.” While walking in front of the mirror he saw himself in the glass, and after stopping and looking for several seconds he uttered his first sentence.

  At 2½ years. Remarks: While at his Grandfather’s one day he couldn’t understand why he was called papa. He said “Grandpa are you a papa,” his answer was yes. Dalton said after studying a moment, “Well, my papa is not a grandpa.” After being told to stop asking for fruit from the vegetable man he said all right and the next wagon with fruit which passed he said “Are you got any pears in your wagon?” When he came in with the pear, I asked him if he had begged it of the man, he said “no mama I just asked if he had any and he did give me one.”

  And on and on. A nice little boy, to be sure—although there was no hint in the record of the fierce, wailing, head-pounding temper he had. What came through most plainly in these entries was that James Dalton Trumbo was a child on whom the hopes, expectations, and even the ambitions of his parents had been pinned: he had to achieve great things. Why? Because he was their son. For their part, Orus and Maud Trumbo would do everything within their means to see that he be given every opportunity to succeed.

  The tragedy was—and within the limits of his parents’ lives it was a genuine tragedy—that their means to assure his success in life were sorely, almost pitifully, limited. Orus Trumbo tried hard. He worked at a succession of jobs, sometimes two at a time, both in Montrose and during the years that followed in Grand Junction, Colorado; but he was never able to do much more than scratch out a living for himself and his family. He was an intelligent and sensitive man, and an educated man who kept up with world events and had independent opinions, one who read widely for pleasure and to keep himself informed. Yet time after time, in venture after venture, his plans came to nothing. Dalton Trumbo remembered his father as “a very gentle man, a terribly hardworking man, who was just born not to succeed—financially. One would say that my father was weak, but that is not an apt or a correct description. He simply was not modeled for competitive success. My mother was.”