TRUMBO Page 41

  There is no use pretending that the money Trumbo had made working in motion pictures did not play an important part in the direction his life took. But his attitude toward money was as complex and apparently contradictory as everything else about this man. He liked it, liked what it bought him, liked the life it gave him. He also took pride in the price he commanded in a craft where achievement is both measured and rewarded in great sums. Probably because he knew real poverty in his early life, he suffered few of those pangs of guilt regarding money that are supposed to torture most of the gifted people in Hollywood. Probably because of his early life, too, he had a kind of casualness toward the stuff that bordered on contempt. He spent it, borrowed it, loaned it, even gave it away without much real regard for it. His lawyer, Aubrey Finn, told me that on more than one occasion Trumbo had torn up a contract and returned a small fortune just for the grand pleasure of telling a producer to shove it. The idea, as far as Trumbo was concerned, was always to earn so much money that he could do whatever he wanted with it. In our society, money is freedom—and that is what it always meant to him. If our society were different, then his attitude might also have been different.

  For if the facts of Trumbo’s life tell us anything at all about the man, they tell us that he was shaped, as all of us are, for better or for worse, by the conditions of his time and situation. If he was an odd sort of Communist, and he would have been the first to concede that this was so, then he was the sort of Communist that would necessarily emerge from the childhood and youth he spent in Grand Junction and the Davis Perfection Bakery. That is, a peculiarly American sort: materialistic, professionally ambitious, and half-drunk on the romanticism he poured into his motion picture scripts.

  I’m not, certainly not, suggesting that some simple social determinism has defined Trumbo precisely. No, what was most remarkable about him was not the extent to which he was shaped by his time, but rather the extraordinary way that he himself—by himself—shaped it. He proved at a time it badly needed proving that what one man does can matter. Even here, he made his point not by giving speeches, circulating petitions, or organizing demonstrations—as he had tried earlier—but by keeping his silence when it counted and working at his craft as best he could.

  “Sometimes,” Trumbo said to me once, “I think what a terrible state we’re in when a man can be considered honorable simply because he isn’t a shit.” Earlier, I offered Trumbo as a kind of exemplar—one who so incarnated certain qualities worthy of emulation. But is this then all that Trumbo has to offer? That he wasn’t a sheep? That he wasn’t a shit? No, there is more to be said for the man than that. For even in a time like our own, one practically inured to the power of myth, a life like Trumbo’s takes on something of a fabulous quality. His was a fabulous life—a tale told, an old-fashioned story that illustrates the virtues of hard work, of keeping faith with oneself and one’s ideals, a quintessentially American story that he could, with only a few important details altered, have written himself for the Saturday Evening Post back in the thirties. But no: he didn’t write it; he lived it—improvising it from the days and hours he was given, making it up as he went along. Let him be remembered by that story, and his place is assured.

  Bryan Cranston (as Dalton Trumbo, left) and director Jay Roach (right) prepare for a take on the set of TRUMBO. (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle)

  Diane Lane (as Cleo Trumbo) juggling during a scene for TRUMBO. (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle)

  A movie extra has alterations done to her dress on the set of TRUMBO. (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle)

  Christian Berkel (playing Otto Preminger) and director Jay Roach discuss a scene on the set of TRUMBO. (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle)

  The crew sets up a difficult interior crane shot for the Spartacus premiere scene. (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle)

  A cameraman films a scene with Bryan Cranston (Dalton Trumbo). (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle)

  A movie extra and cinematographer Jim Denault (center) checking his light meter on the set of TRUMBO. (Merie Weismiller Wallace)

  Michael Stuhlbarg (as Edward G. Robinson, left) and director Jay Roach (right) on the set of TRUMBO. (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle)

  James Dumont (J. Parnell Thomas) performs for the camera on the set of TRUMBO. (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle)

  The crew rehearses a dolly shot for a prison scene. (Hilary Bronwyn Gayle)

  Director Jay Roach (left) and Bryan Cranston (Dalton Trumbo, right) on the set of TRUMBO. (Merie Weismiller Wallace)

  POSTSCRIPT

  Dissolve. Here we are, years earlier in Trumbo’s office, my first visit to his home. Look around. It is a magnificent room. There are in it caricatures by Peter Ustinov and drawings by John Huston; photographs by Cleo; a library of about a thousand books; copies of every screenplay he is proud enough to keep; a glorious litter of memorabilia and souvenirs from a lifetime; but nowhere, look as you will, can you see any sign of that Oscar awarded to Robert Rich for The Brave One.

  “Where is it?” I ask.

  “Where is what?”

  “The Oscar. The one you won with the phony name.”

  “I don’t have it,” he says. “It was never given to me.”

  “Well, couldn’t you just claim it?” I ask. “Everybody knows it’s yours.”

  “What everybody knows isn’t good enough,” he says. “You don’t claim an Oscar. It’s given to you. And so far they haven’t seen fit to give that one to me.”

  But at last they did. In a kind of collective and symbolic act of contrition, the officers and board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on May 5, 1975, awarded replica number 1665 of the “copyrighted statuette, commonly known as ‘Oscar,’ as an Award for the Motion Picture Story—The Brave One (1956).”

  It has Dalton Trumbo’s name on it. That made it official: the blacklist, now acknowledged, was behind them all. Trumbo had done his job. He died a little over a year later on September 10, 1976.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  This book was written for the most part from primary sources—interviews, letters, private memoranda, etc. The chief source, of course, was Dalton Trumbo himself. He gave me interview time at a period in his life when he simply had no idea how much time he himself had left. He also gave me complete access to his correspondence and personal papers pertaining to his life through 1962, which are stored at the Wisconsin Centre for Theatre Research, University of Wisconsin. He allowed me to roam at will through his personal files at home in which he had those documents covering the years that followed. All this he did in an act of pure, blind faith, for with the exception of one brief section (as noted in the text), no manuscript approval was asked for and none was offered.

  In addition, however, I was granted interviews by many who have known Trumbo over the years and by others who had specific or general information to impart. Not all of them who were helpful were quoted in the text. One of those quoted in the text was not helpful. Those to whom I talked were: Jacoba Atlas, Catherine Baldwin, Elizabeth Baskerville, Harry Benge, John Berry, Alvah Bessie, John Bright, Jean Butler, Lester Cole, Kirk Douglas, Jerry Fielding, Thomas K. Finletter, Aubrey Finn, Pauline Finn, Hubert Gallagher, Dorothy Healy, Alice Hunter, Ian MacLellan Hunter, Robert W. Kenny, Frank King, Frances Lardner, Ring Lardner, Jr., Al Leavitt, Edward Lewis, George Litto, George MacKinnon, Albert Maltz, Carey McWilliams, David Miller, William Pomerance, Katherine Popper, Martin Popper, Otto Preminger, Franklin Schaffner, Adrian Scott, Roy Silver, Christopher Trumbo, Cleo Trumbo, Mitzi Trumbo, Ed Whalley, Mary Teresa Whalley, Charles White, and Michael Wilson.

  As any writer will, however, I made use of whatever I could lay my hands on in the way of published materials in the preparation of this book. And while my debts to certain authors are paid in passing in the text, circumstances did not always permit proper acknowledgment to be made where it was pertinent, and so I take this last opportunity to do so.

  Finally, special thanks to Mitzi Trumbo and the Trumbo family.

  BOOKS BY DALTON TRUMBO

  Eclipse
(Dickson, 1935)

  Washington Jitters (Knopf, 1936)

  Johnny Got His Gun (Lippincott, 1939)

  The Remarkable Andrew (Lippincott, 1940)

  The Biggest Thief in Town (Dramatists Play Service, 1949)

  Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942–1962 , edited by Helen Manfull (Evans, 1970)

  The Time of the Toad (Harper & Row, 1972)

  This book is dedicated to the producer Kevin Brown, who met Bruce Cook at Dutton’s bookstore in North Hollywood. And fifteen years later, that led to John McNamara, and then to Michael London, and then to Jay Roach, and to Bryan Cranston, and here we are today, with this great film, and all because Bruce happened to be standing behind Kevin in a bookstore.

  BOOKS BY BRUCE COOK

  NON-FICTION

  The Beat Generation (Scribners, 1971; Morrow, 1994)

  Listen to the Blues (Scribners, 1973; Da Capo, 1995)

  Dalton Trumbo (Scribners, 1977)

  Brecht in Exile (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983)

  The Town that Country Built (Avon, 1993)

  FICTION

  Sex Life (Evans, 1979; Dell, 1980)

  Mexican Standoff (Watts, 1988)

  Rough Cut (St. Martin’s, 1990)

  Death as a Career Move (St. Martin’s, 1992)

  The Sidewalk Hilton (St. Martin’s, 1994)

  The Judgement, by William Coughlin (uncredited by publisher) (St. Martin’s, 1997)

  Young Will: The Confessions of William Shakespeare (Truman Talley Books / St. Martin’s, 2004; Griffin, 2005)

  BY BRUCE ALEXANDER (PSEUDONYM)

  Blind Justice (Putnam, 1994; Berkley, 1995, 2009)

  Murder in Grub Street (Putnam, 1995; Berkley, 1996, 2010)

  Watery Grave (Putnam, 1996; Berkley, 1996)

  Person or Persons Unknown (Putnam, 1997; Berkley 1998)

  Jack, Knave and Fool (Putnam, 1998; Berkley, 1999)

  Death of a Colonial (Putnam, 1999; Berkley, 2000)

  The Color of Death (Putnam, 2000; Berkley, 2001)

  Smuggler’s Moon (Putnam, 2001; Berkley, 2002)

  An Experiment in Treason (Putnam, 2002; Berkley, 2003)

  The Price of Murder (Putnam, 2003; Berkley, 2004)

  Rules of Engagement (Putnam, 2005; Berkley, 2006)

  * That was The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).

  * In the beginning, it seems, the Ku Klux Klan even held some fascination for Dalton Trumbo. He was attracted by the military nature of the organization and wanted to wear the uniform. He nagged his father for the nineteen dollars it would cost to join. Finally, his father said that he could have it if he wanted, but that no Ku Klux Klansman had need of an education, so he could just forget about going to college. He made his point: Dalton gave up his ambition to be a Klansman.

  * The same Jim Latimer who was so reluctant to talk to me in Grand Junction.

  * The Film Spectator became the Hollywood Spectator in 1932.

  * The unsigned review in the Times Literary Supplement had this to say about Eclipse: “In ‘Eclipse’ Mr. Dalton Trumbo has done more than write a well-constructed, interesting novel of modern life. He has by the implications of his story criticized the ethics, social and commercial, of the average American city. John Abbott, in his later days calls for our pity; but he received none—with a single exception—from the many people he had benefited. Once his prestige began to fail, the men and women he had so unselfishly helped turned against him. And in his treatment of that desertion lies the substance of Trumbo’s attack. It is true one of his minor characters, Hermann Vogel, is used to give voice to what are presumably the author’s own opinions, but his analyses are less effective than the inevitable development of the story. Mr. Trumbo is evidently an admirer of Sinclair Lewis’s novels and may possibly qualify, one day, to succeed him.”

  * The studios’ blacklist in support of the Screen Playwrights lasted only about six or seven months, by Trumbo’s estimate. But the company union continued to receive favored treatment: “There was no method of adjudication. A young writer would come in, write an excellent script for $200 a week, leave, having made $1,200. A distinguished Screen Playwright would then come on, polish it, fix it up, get $50,000 and total credit.”

  * But only partly. The remote and primitive quality of the Lazy-T made it especially desirable, for in that lay its mythic appeal to him. Living at the ranch, in circumstances not much different from those his grandfather Tillery had known in Colorado, must have seemed to him an act of loyalty to his western past. In fact, he brought his uncle Tom Tillery up to run the place and turn it into a working ranch. Cleo remembers Trumbo going out and kicking the dirt in front of the house and saying, “That’s mine.” And on more than one occasion he took the day to walk the boundaries of the ranch. Nikola and Christopher Trumbo were born during the time they were living there—in 1939 and 1940, respectively.

  * Jean Butler also goes by Jean Rouverol.

  * Dalton Trumbo not only wrote for the Screen Writer, he was also its founding editor (1945).

  * So-called by California State Senator Jack Tenney in his yearly red-bound reports, Un-American Activities in California.

  * In his book Inquisition in Eden.

  * They were, in alphabetical order: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and of course, Dalton Trumbo.

  * The novelist MacKinlay Kantor.

  * Earl Felton.

  * Biberman tells the fascinating story of the harassment and hostility experienced in the making of it in Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film. The book also includes Michael Wilson’s original screenplay for the picture.

  * A name Trumbo was fond of. He used it for the protagonist of Eclipse and again in A Man to Remember.

  * The problem came up another time when an original screenplay Trumbo had written during the blacklist period, The Cavern, finally went into production in 1965. The director of the picture, Edgar Ulmer, let it out during shooting that Dalton Trumbo was the author of the script. Acting on the same principle, Trumbo had advised Ulmer that his name was not to be associated with the picture.

  * His favorite, because it says a lot about the kind of people who write such letters, was one he received while in jail. It was anonymous, signed only with the sender’s feces.

  * As it happened, the Whites had no trouble in Highland Park during the years they lived there.

  * The Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP).

  * John Huston, who was set to direct the film, once told me in an interview unrelated to this book that of all the movies he had almost made (and in any major director’s career there are a score of them), Montezuma was the one he most regretted having fallen through. “It was a beautiful script,” Huston said. “It would have made a beautiful picture.”

  * When asked by Carey McWilliams to review Howard Fast’s personal testament, The Naked God, for the Nation, Trumbo declared that the novelist’s ultimate disaffection was inevitable because of his mystical attachment to the Party: “He not only believed; he committed his last artistic resource to the service of belief.” Interestingly, however, Trumbo declined to review the book since he would have been forced to deal with his own scruples regarding the Party at a time when he felt it important to maintain solidarity because “people are still in jail or threatened by it.”

  * As with every screenwriter, the number he wrote exceeded the number actually produced. He was involved in several projects during the sixties which, for one reason or another, were never done. Among them: Sylva, an adaptation of the novel by the French writer Vercors; The Dark Angel, on the siege of Constantinople; and Bunny Lake Is Missing, which Otto Preminger eventually produced though not from the Trumbo script.

  * The author and chief promoter of this counter- auteur theory, a young critic named Richard Corliss, had surprisingly little good to say of Dalton Trumbo. In fact, he attacked him in his book Talking Picture
s. In the normal course of things, this would be the proper occasion for me to defend Trumbo against Corliss and to refute whatever charges the critic has brought. This, however, is not so easily done—not because they are irrefutable but because they are not easily understood. That Corliss finds Trumbo unsatisfactory as a screenwriter is obvious from a casual reading of the essay, but he is maddeningly unspecific as to just why. He makes only two direct but practically unsupported statements about Trumbo’s work: (1) that he wrote “predictable, simple-minded scripts”; and (2) that “Trumbo’s most characteristic films are thinly disguised tracts.” (I shall be just as arbitrary: both statements are false.) The rest of the essay is all innuendo and disparagement-by-tone—a put-down masquerading as criticism.

  * On January 11, 2011, Roman Holiday was submitted to the Guild by Tim Hunter on behalf of Christopher Trumbo, who passed away three days before. The Guild did indeed restore the credits for Roman Holiday as follows: Story by Dalton Trumbo; Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton.