TRUMBO Read online

  “It was the oldest fraternity on campus and certainly one of the best, if not the best. Anyway, it had the most substantial alumni around the state, and that seemed important to Dalton at the time.”

  That’s George E. MacKinnon talking, who became a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. He was the man most responsible for Dalton Trumbo pledging Delta Tau Delta. Graduating a year ahead of him from Grand Junction High School, MacKinnon (who was known universally as “Dizzy,” in recognition of his shambling, loose-jointed walk) had gone to the university the fall before, and when Trumbo’s name had come up in the spring among next semester’s prospective freshmen, he had backed him all the way: “I told them he doesn’t have a lot of money, but he’s a good bet to have some. I said he had great writing talent, and I recommended that they pledge him.”

  Although MacKinnon had supported Trumbo for the fraternity, the two spent no time together at the Colorado University chapter. MacKinnon returned to Minnesota, where his family was originally from, and transferred to the university there. It was as a Minnesotan that he was known in Washington: he had a successful career as a lawyer in Minneapolis which led to four terms in the Minnesota legislature, and one in the U.S. House of Representatives; his brief career as a congressman brought him an appointment as a federal judge. Then he rose to a judgeship in the second-highest court in the land.

  We talked about his memories of Trumbo in Grand Junction, which were few, but then MacKinnon went on to say that he had kept contact with him after a fashion during the years that followed.

  “Well, for one thing,” he said, “I was a field agent for the fraternity national. Whenever I’d meet the Delta Tau Delta man from Boulder, I’d say, ‘How’s Trumbo coming?’ Between what I heard from him and other fellows at the chapter, I gathered Trumbo had quite a successful time on campus but had a hard time financially. Then I looked him up when I was out in Los Angeles in 1932 for the Olympics. That was the last time I saw him personally.”

  Trumbo had gone off to the university on a shoestring. He had saved a little; he would work there and help pay his own way; his father would supply what he could. To send a son to college on a shoe clerk’s salary may have seemed to some in Grand Junction an act of hubris. If it was, then the fall suffered by Orus Trumbo for his presumption was as swift and awful as any wished by the gods on some Greek hero, and it was certainly tragic in its consequences.

  Hubert Gallagher, a year Trumbo’s junior, worked at Benge’s Shoe Store as a sweeper and stock boy alongside Orus Trumbo: “Dalton’s father was sort of my mentor at Benge’s. He was always helpful and considerate toward me, and others there weren’t—although in general Benge’s was a happy place to work.” However, the store fell on hard times in 1924, during one of the economic tremors that foreshadowed the earthquake of 1929. Harry Benge announced that he would have to retrench. He looked around at his staff, and…

  “In many ways, Mr. Trumbo seemed like a loser, a real loser,” Hubert Gallagher remembered. “His health failed that last year—I thought he had TB. But still, he didn’t take much from people. He wasn’t the type to put up with fools. Some women would come into that shop and spend half an hour just trying on one pair of shoes after another. But not with O.B.—that’s what he was called. They’d try that on him and he’d get up and say, ‘Well, that’s it. Take it or leave it.’”

  Perhaps he did that once too often in George Benge’s presence. Or perhaps it was, as Benge would later insist, a case where somebody had to go and preference was given to another clerk, Fred Gilbert, because he was a World War I veteran. Whatever the justification, or rationalization, the results were the same for Orus Trumbo. He was notified on Thanksgiving eve, 1924, that he would no longer be needed after the first of the year.

  Dalton Trumbo heard about it while he was at the university in Boulder, without quite realizing what it would mean to him—though that was made clear soon enough. It wasn’t until much, much later that he realized what losing that job meant to his father: “Actually this loss was the thing which killed him. It uprooted him and completely upset the rest of his life’s plans.”

  There was no other job for Orus Trumbo in Grand Junction. He took his wife, and his two daughters, Catherine and Elizabeth, and with Dalton still at the University of Colorado, moved to Los Angeles early that spring on nothing more than the promise of a job.

  Dalton’s freshman year at the University of Colorado was a successful one and would have been exactly the sort of good beginning he had hoped to make—had there only been other years to follow. As it was, except for odd credits picked up in fits and starts over the next few years at the University of Southern California, that year (1924–25) at Colorado proved to be roughly the extent of his college education. His time was taken up with the ordinary things of college life in the twenties. He was anxious to get to know people on campus, and to be known by them. He went to classes and studied for them more seriously than he had back in Grand Junction. He began writing for the school paper. Even misadventures, when they occurred, were of the ordinary rah-rah sort: one day a group of upperclassmen came upon him when he was not wearing the green beanie, which was mandatory for freshmen, whereupon they picked him up and tossed him in a nearby lake.

  His best friend at the university was his roommate at the Delta Tau Delta house. Llewellyn Thompson, also a freshman, from Colorado. The two kept in contact through the years and once, years later, had occasion to work together again. Llewellyn Thompson, now deceased; he was, of course, ambassador to Russia from 1966 to 1969, when he retired from the Foreign Service.

  Trumbo apparently loved fraternity life. The only conflict that arose between him and the chapter—and it was sharp and bitter while it lasted—had to do with exclusions of which he had apparently not even been aware. When a young man named Mike Loeffler came to Boulder to look over the campus, Trumbo had him out to the fraternity house for dinner. Loeffler was the son of one of the two Jewish merchants back in Grand Junction; he had been a friend in high school, and Trumbo invited him, thinking nothing more of it. Well, when Loeffler left that night, the fraternity’s policy on Jews was made clear to Dalton. He was surprised and angry, and he moved out of the house that very night, telling them he didn’t think he wanted to be a member of an organization that had such rules. In the end, however, they persuaded him to come back.

  It was a busy year for him. He became involved in a number of extracurricular activities, all of which had to do with writing in one way or another. In addition to the University of Colorado’s newspaper, Silver and Gold, he helped edit the college yearbook, and he was invited to submit pieces to do with college life to the Colorado Dodo, the campus humor magazine, so as to be eligible for appointment to its staff. He was also chosen to be a member of Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalism honorary fraternity. All this may seem quite a lot of work for a young man in his freshman year of college—and it certainly was—but few came to the university with the wealth of practical experience that Trumbo had gained as a cub reporter on the Grand Junction Sentinel. He was already a journalist when he arrived. When money became a particular problem to him, in the second semester of his freshman year, he was even able to get a job with the local paper, the Boulder Daily Camera.

  Most of the letters he wrote home were appeals for funds: “I never had any idea how tough things really were and was very demanding.” As best they could, the Trumbos met those demands. Money was sent from time to time, but it was never enough. In their new situation, there never would be enough to keep him at college; by the end of his freshman year there, he had grasped that and had made his plans to withdraw and join his family in Los Angeles. When the time came, he signed up to ferry a Ford over the Rockies to Grand Junction. The trip, made on Colorado roads in 1925, put plenty of wear and tear on the cars, but once at their destination, they were sold as new. That was how he arrived back home. Once there, he borrowed money to continue on to Los Angeles. He took a train fr
om Grand Junction sometime in July of 1925. Dalton Trumbo never returned there.

  He left the town; but, as we shall see, he went back again and again in his writing. So much of what he would write in the years that followed—practically anything that mattered more to him than a routine screen assignment—represented an effort to come to terms through art with the events and feelings of the first eighteen years of his life. Three of his four novels and his only play are set, at least in part, in Shale City, Colorado, the putative Grand Junction. More important, though, his best work has dealt with such themes as his father’s apparent failure and his own sense of exile, of dispossession.

  Colorado, his memories of his years there and the fantasies they may have inspired, seems to have contributed something to some of his movie work, too. He had a tendency to sentimentalize his feelings for the land and for the rural childhood that he really never had. He may well have drawn upon them when he did one of his scripts for M-G-M, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. Just because these feelings were sentimental and based, to some extent, on fantasy doesn’t mean they were lightly held: that screenplay, and all the other work he did for M-G-M, was written up on a remote ranch in the wilds of Ventura County that he had been moved to buy for just about the same sentimental reasons. Family tales of Grandpa Tillery, the frontier lawman, may have helped a little in the writing of the half a dozen or so westerns Trumbo turned out while on the blacklist, although as a character his grandfather seems to appear only in Lonely Are the Brave, as the relentless but sympathetic sheriff, played in the film by Walter Matthau.

  From this point forward, and for many years to come, it would be Trumbo’s intention to show them back there in Grand Junction that he could amount to something. To take his revenge upon them for what the town had done to his father, to have the success his father had been denied. How else to account for the furious energy with which Trumbo attacked life in the next few years? What more could he have felt, to touch a specific point, but a kind of Gatsby-like yearning in the years to come, for Sylvia Shore, the girl whom he was sure was meant just for him? He had to show her. He had to show them all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE DAVIS PERFECTION BAKERY

  It was the sort of odd couple you used to see fairly often in cities not so long ago—a man and his daughter. (Less so today; why is that?) The two of them would go out walking every day along the bright, palm-lined side streets of southwest Los Angeles. And each day the route varied just a little. The two of them, obviously not well acquainted with the neighborhood, were out exploring, finding out all they could about their part of it—identifying the trees, pointing out the birds to one another, even spying a lizard every now and then, dead-still in somebody’s garden. Each day the route varied, but somehow there was one point the father and the daughter always seemed to pass in their stroll through the neighborhood. You couldn’t call it a park exactly—just a lot on a corner among some others along their way, though this was one claimed by the city. There were a few extra trees here, a little grass, a couple of benches, and a peanut man. They regularly stopped there at the peanut man’s cart—one of the old-fashioned kind with glass sides and a steam whistle poking up through the top—and every day the man bought a bag of peanuts for his daughter. The game was that they shared them, only of course they didn’t really share them at all. All that “sharing” really meant was that he cracked them open for her as they walked along and popped a couple in his mouth at the start just to get her going. That was usually all the encouragement she needed; she would eat them as fast as he could shell them. But, of course, whenever she said, “Daddy, you have some, too,” he would break the next peanut and toss its contents into his own mouth. He didn’t have to do that very often, though, for the girl was just eleven, and she loved peanuts.

  The two of them would take such a walk every day toward the latter part of the afternoon, talking back and forth and laughing, too. But it was odd—every day they seemed to laugh a little less. And something peculiar: each time they took that walk, it seemed to take a little longer. The little girl adjusted her pace to his. Unconsciously, she used her energy in little side trips along the way, kicking at things in the gutter, peeking inside cars parked along the curb, running ahead to look at flowers in the next garden, giving her father time to catch up. Each day he moved a little more slowly. Each day he seemed less well, until each day he began to seem more sick.

  Finally, they stopped one afternoon and bought peanuts from the peanut man, and the father said the things he usually said to him, observing that it was certainly a bright, sunshiny day, and asking if the peanuts were fresh. And the peanut man—swarthy, mustached, collar buttoned up without a tie—said, as he always did, “Oh, nice and hot, nice and hot.” It was never really clear whether he meant the weather or the peanuts, but that seemed to satisfy them both. The price was paid. The big bag—you did get more for your money in those days—then changed hands, and the little girl looked at it expectantly.

  But this day something was terribly wrong. The man moved especially slowly. He seemed in great pain. He carefully opened up the bag of peanuts and looked inside. The little girl stopped and watched him.

  “What is it, Daddy?”

  “Here, Catherine,” he said, handing the bag of peanuts over to her, “you’ll have to crack them. I just don’t have the strength to do it.”

  “Sure, Daddy,” she said, frowning. “I’ll do it for both of us.”

  That was Orus Trumbo’s condition only weeks after Dalton left the University of Colorado and joined the family in Los Angeles. By then he had lost the only job he held there—driving a motorcycle truck for a downtown Harley-Davidson agency—and he was reduced to looking after the girls while Maud Trumbo went out and earned what she could for them working in the office of a Pierce-Arrow auto agency.

  Things were very much worse than Dalton had realized. It was clear to him he would have to find work somewhere, in spite of his announced intention to live at home and continue his studies at the University of Southern California. And so, in July 1925, he went out and got a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery at 2nd and Beaudry Streets in downtown Los Angeles. “But it was temporary, always temporary. I kept saying that for three or four or five years until it began to sound foolish even to me.”

  He started there as a wrapper, which meant, in this commercial bakery’s conveyor-belt, assembly-line operation, that he was simply the operator of an automatic wrapping machine. It wasn’t long, however, before he had been promoted to checker—a kind of glorified shipping clerk. From the main plant where he worked a fleet of trucks went out each morning to cover two hundred separate retail and wholesale routes. Working through the night as bread and other baked goods came out of the ovens, the checkers would make the rounds of the bins in one of which the order for each truck route was filled. And then at five o’clock in the morning, the trucks would arrive. They would check the morning’s load, get it on the truck, and go home.

  Trumbo later referred to this period at the bakery as “eight rather unbelievable years. Kind of a period of horror.” He grew to hate the job, going off each night to work as a condemned man, with a sense of almost physical loathing for what he knew was waiting for him. “Yet the quality of play is always there.” Shaking his head, baffled, remembering. “We hated the management of the bakery. But the checkers, the group I worked with, would organize races to fill order sheets just to see how quickly it could be done. Kids making a game of it, just racing up and down those aisles, tossing bread in the bins. What did this do? Well, it helped the bosses. But somehow that was secondary to the play of it all.”

  As this indicates, a fundamental change was worked in his thinking during those years in the bakery, and it was evident to him after he had been there barely a few months. He began to split the world in two: them and us. On the other side were “the bosses,” whom he soon grew to hate; and on his side were the boys at the bakery, with whom he competed in that crazy bread-race game. So imbue
d had he been with the principles of rugged individualism that a year or two before, orating at Grand Junction High, or arguing in fraternity bull sessions at the University of Colorado, he would have automatically identified his own interests (had he thought about it at all) with those of the bosses.

  This change in him, bubbling quite near the surface, was due partly to the example provided him by his father: look what love of the bosses had gotten him. Orus Trumbo was fifty-one, practically penniless, and lying on his deathbed. The family had by then moved to a place on 55th Street in Los Angeles—or just off it, really, for the Trumbos were in a little apartment above a garage that faced onto an alley. There Orus Trumbo lay all day long, unable to take walks with Catherine, as he had done before, only rising occasionally to sit with the family at supper—and this he did less often as he grew weaker. His condition deteriorated. Weakness and increasing pain soon made it impossible for him to get out of bed at all.

  The pain would sometimes become altogether unbearable for Orus Trumbo. Elizabeth Baskerville, Dalton’s sister, who was then just a little girl, recalled the terror she felt at her father’s suffering: “When my father was sick in bed I can remember times when he was in such great pain that he would pound on the wall and groan. It put me in an utter panic.” It is easy to imagine. Suppertime. Maud Trumbo, Dalton, Catherine, and Elizabeth seated around the table. The groaning begins and reaches a climax at something near a shout, accompanied by thumps punctuating his agony like so many exclamation marks. Maud would get up, telling the children to continue eating, and then go over to the sickbed. The place was so small that they ate in the same room where their father lay, and they could hear Maud’s voice in soothing tones, trying to comfort him, as the groaning started again. They couldn’t eat. The three children would just sit, silently exchanging looks, and wait for him to stop. “Afterwards,” Elizabeth remembered, “when the pain had subsided a little, we’d look in on him and Papa would say, ‘I’m sorry for having made all that noise and frightened you.’”