TRUMBO Read online

  During the long period of Orus Trumbo’s illness there was, of course, no doctor called in. Maud Trumbo was a practicing Christian Scientist and would remain so the rest of her life; she attended church every Sunday and believed profoundly that prayer would cure every ill. Did her husband believe, as well? Dalton said no—that Orus merely accompanied her to church. According to Elizabeth, though, he may have believed, after a fashion, in Christian Science, but only “because she wanted him to, and if Mother had wanted him with two heads, he would have grown another.”

  And since no physician had been in to see Orus Trumbo, the family was ignorant of the cause of his suffering. At the very end, however, when it was clear that his father couldn’t last much longer, Dalton prevailed upon his mother to allow him at least to bring a doctor in. This was only to fix in advance the cause of death (otherwise an autopsy would have been ordered), so she consented. The doctor’s diagnosis was pernicious anemia; Orus Trumbo’s mother had died of it at the age of fifty, and an aunt had died of it, too. The prognosis was as they had guessed: he was terminally ill. It was only a matter of time—and a very short time, at that, for Orus Trumbo died the day after the doctor’s visit. “It was nice to know,” Dalton said almost wistfully, “that there was nothing we could do for him in any event. This was a couple of years before the liver extract cure for pernicious anemia had become known.”

  Nice to know perhaps, but still the episode left scars on the three Trumbo children. Catherine, then fourteen, recalled: “It disturbed me for years when Daddy died. I think it really hurt my relationship with Mother because she had kept saying he would get well. Well, he didn’t get well. He died. Obviously somebody was lying.”

  What did Dalton Trumbo feel at the time? Relief? Shock? Grief? Did he feel intimidated as he looked to the future and saw himself as the chief support of his mother and two sisters? Did he feel an impulse to run away from such overwhelming responsibility? Since no record of his immediate response exists—he kept no diary—the best evidence is perhaps provided by a passage from Johnny Got His Gun. Here, Joe Bonham, Trumbo’s spiritual alter ego, had been called from his job at the bakery with news that his father had just died:

  He looked down at a tired face that was only fifty-one years old. He looked down and thought dad I feel lots older than you. I was sorry for you dad. Things weren’t going well and they never would have gone well for you and it’s just as good you’re dead. People’ve got to be quicker and harder these days than you were dad. Goodnight and gooddreams. I won’t forget you and I’m not as sorry for you today as I was yesterday. I loved you dad goodnight.

  His father’s death left him in the role that he had unofficially assumed eleven months before: he was more or less head of the family now. His mother worked when, and as much as, she could. She continued in her job as bookkeeper in the Pierce-Arrow agency; later, she would give that up but continue to work at home as a seamstress. The money Dalton brought home from the bakery was what the family depended on during the years that followed. Brought up, as he had been, on the work ethic, he had always placed immense value on money as a measure of material success: a wealthy man was a successful man. Well, the years of deprivation that followed—years during which the Trumbos would sink very close to real poverty—did nothing to convince him that there was some other, better and truer, measure of success. Years without money did nothing to diminish it in his esteem. On the contrary, it must have seemed to him by the time things got their worst—they climaxed at the bank holiday in 1933—that there was no problem that money couldn’t solve.

  He did well enough at the bakery, while he continued to assure everyone who asked that he was there only temporarily and would be going back to college soon. Eventually, they made him an estimator, a break for him because the hours were shorter, and this eventually made it possible for him to pick up odd credits at the University of Southern California. The bakery produced over a hundred different kinds of goods. When the drivers came in at the end of the day, they would check in with the estimator to let him know what they had sold. On the basis of this, he had to estimate production orders for the night shift which had just come on and the day shift for the coming day. Other factors, as well, had to be taken into account in estimating orders: the weather, the day of the week, whether or not a holiday would fall on that particular day, and so on. Obviously, it was a position of considerable responsibility, and it shows that no matter what Dalton Trumbo may have thought of them, the bosses put a good deal of trust in him when they made him an estimator. It was the sort of job where danger and even potential disaster threatened with the slip of his pencil.

  One day the pencil did slip. The item in question was vanilla cream pies. Trumbo put in a routine order for two hundred of them, only to return the next day to find the place unexpectedly piled high with vanilla cream pies. He protested that he had only asked for two hundred of them. But then they took him aside and showed him his order from the day before: the base of his “2” followed the line on the order form so exactly that anyone who looked at the number as he had written it would say that he had written a “7.” The situation was further complicated by the fact that it was summer, and the vanilla cream pies would literally turn poisonous in just fifteen hours.

  Trumbo: “Well, I figured it was my job. But we had an interesting salesman there at the bakery, a man who used to hawk at the drivers as they left on their routes, getting them to take on this item or that. I reported to him that I had made a mistake and we had an extra five hundred pies. And this guy, who was a genius as a pitchman, got the orders from the drivers for over four hundred extra pies so that we only had to consign about seventy-five pies. Well, I figured I was the heavy until the next day the manager of the bakery came up to the salesman and myself and said, ‘What the hell have you people been doing? There’s obviously a market for between six hundred and fifty and seven hundred vanilla cream pies and you bastards have been selling only two hundred! Now get on it!’”

  He began at the University of Southern California as a full-time day school student and took sixteen hours that first semester. In order to do it, though, he had to take on a second job. He went to work for his uncle at the Harley-Davidson agency—the same uncle his father had worked for there in Los Angeles as long as he had been able to work. The purpose of it all was to learn to be a writer. He emphasized, he was learning the craft: “I was bright as a kid and a young man, tolerably bright, but I don’t think that I had any real talent for writing, because talent should develop faster. It took me years to learn to write. There is a kind of talent that can’t be denied. You see it and you recognize it. But I had to learn.”

  The learning process had begun back in Grand Junction, when he had written his first short stories. The single surviving example, “The Return,” which must have been written sometime in 1924, is remarkably good work for a boy of about high school age. There is a sure use of language in it that shows the benefit to him of his experience on the Sentinel. It is worth mentioning that the story tells of the return of Jim Norton to the town of Plainville as he approaches middle age. Jim had left for Chicago twenty years before with high hopes, but there found himself just “one among many human ants.” But now he is back in his hometown, deeply ashamed that he had not achieved the success that he had hoped to: “Yes, that was the heartbreaking part of his vacation trip to his home city. They had all expected so much—predicted so freely, and here he was. Probably poorer than the majority of his friends, without family or success in any tangible form.” His best friend had prospered, his high school sweetheart had married happily. Jim, in an agony of chagrin, buys a can of gasoline, walks to the outskirts of town, and immolates himself, a burnt offering to the bitch goddess success. Remarkable, this fear of failure, even when Dalton Trumbo had barely begun.

  Ever since those days back in Grand Junction, then, he had been teaching himself to write. Going to the University of Southern California was just part of the process. During that year he atte
nded the university full-time, he took as many writing courses as he could, received encouragement from instructors, and kept right on writing, writing, writing. Besides short stories, sketches, and papers done for courses at USC, Trumbo wrote just about six unpublished novels during those years at the bakery. If “just about” seems imprecise, it is because although he completed six separate manuscripts, material from one can be found, somewhat revised, in another. Basically, there are only two stories that he is telling in them: that of the events in Grand Junction, his father’s troubles, and his own high hopes in growing up there; and that much grimmer story of the life in the bakery which he was living as he was writing it. Nothing illustrates the extent of his desperation during this time quite so well as a note found scribbled on the last manuscript page of “Bleak Street, or, American Sonata,” a last attempt at a bakery novel:

  Completed, Wed-8-28-29 at 2:12 AM

  If this is published, I make a promise to myself

  that 1/10 of the net proceeds accruing to me will

  be expended for the education of youth.

  —James Dalton Trumbo

  It wasn’t published, of course, and so he was never put to the test. But it is clear from this high-minded vow that he sorely missed the opportunity for the college education he had been denied, and that he now saw success as a writer as the only practical way out of his situation. He was right, but his escape was four years off.

  Why did he feel trapped? Why was he so desperate? There was, first of all, Sylvia Longshore—or Sylvia Shore, as she was then known professionally. The two still saw one another and wrote back and forth faithfully whenever she was on tour. She was doing quite well. Trumbo’s high school friend Hubert Gallagher remembered that while he was an undergraduate at Stanford he saw her in the San Francisco company of Sunny. She was still seeing Trumbo then. Imagine Trumbo as Gatsby without the fortune. How much more impossible his yearnings for Daisy would have seemed to him had he been no more than an estimator at a commercial bakery in Queens. He must have wondered if he would ever be able to marry Sylvia Shore. Would he ever reach that green light across the water?

  And there were Trumbo’s responsibilities at home. His position was ambiguous: although he was the family’s chief breadwinner, he was also Maud Trumbo’s son. The two fought, if not constantly, at least regularly. Dalton’s drinking was usually the issue. Money was always a worry, too. They were never totally without food at home, but often the four of them would dine on nothing more than beans and day-old bread and some fancy cake that Dalton had lifted from the bakery. His sister, Catherine Baldwin, remembered: “Those were rough, rough days. But we had a lot of fun on 55th Street. We were really a crazy family. We laughed a lot, even with all the trouble we had.”

  The fundamental source of their conflict was probably that Maud and Dalton Trumbo were very much alike. The two shared a quick wit and were both fierce opponents. He may have lacked his father’s grace and gentlemanly style, but at the same time his was not in the least a submissive nature: he was a fighter.

  What was Maud Trumbo like? Dalton’s sister, Elizabeth: “I think of her as something like Helen Hayes in age and size and general appearance. She was very short and very feminine and pretty. Oh, but strong—she could certainly be ornery and was no saint. Mother was a remarkable woman—intelligent and very capable. Much of Dalton’s strength, I think, comes from her.”

  She was thirty-nine when her husband died, and she lived forty-four more years.

  Driving the freeways in Los Angeles, you seem to travel over the city rather than through it. The houses on either side have no identifiable shape or order as they flash by, and the people, if visible, lack real identity. The blocks the freeway intersects have about the same sort of reality as those green and brown patches of Ohio farmland that reel by beneath the wing of a jet. What was Los Angeles like before the freeways? There is no telling now, of course. Streetcars clanged through the streets, hauling their passengers through one neighborhood after another. Before the freeways were built, there were neighborhoods there to travel through.

  It is only when you take the exit ramp and merge with the local traffic that the streets surrounding the freeway take on some degree of reality. Trumbo’s old neighborhood has become a black area. It is not the faces of the pedestrians that tell you this—how many pedestrians are there likely to be on any street in Los Angeles?—but the faces on the models in the billboard photographs, selling American dreams. Glamour? Afro-Sheen products. Happy families? Contemporary African-American families enjoy a breakfast of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes together.

  So it’s black now. The area where Trumbo lived those eight years of his life when he worked at the bakery has, in the parlance of northern cities, “changed over.” Here we are on the sprawling south side of Los Angeles. It is placid enough now, however, as you turn up West 55th Street from Budlong. There is something of the small-town neighborhood about the street. It is a sleepy, palm-lined drive that looks much the same as it must have in 1933 when the Trumbos lived there last. There is a little gabled house over the garage in back, almost in the Swiss style, with its red-brick chimney and single gable overhanging the garage door. That’s where the Trumbos lived, in three rooms—mother and daughters in the big bedroom and Dalton in the small one, with one room left in which to cook, eat, sew, and sit. It seemed tight to them then, just as it probably does to the people who live there now. Poverty in Los Angeles is masked by sunlight, hidden behind palm trees and blooming blossoms. And though it is not nearly as evident as it is on, say, the south side of Chicago, it is there all the same. The Trumbos were well acquainted with poverty when they lived here on 55th Street. The present residents probably know it even more intimately.

  I had seen the inside of the place in Trumbo’s movie, Johnny Got His Gun. He took the company on location and filmed right here where he and the family had lived all those years. No, there was nothing more to be seen here, and there were no questions to be asked. I started the car and headed back for the Harbor Freeway which would take me toward downtown Los Angeles. Emerging from the underpass, with the sound of cars blowing by above me, I come upon the site which my street map tells me is an important one to this narrative. But it doesn’t look quite as it should. Pulling up to the curb at the northwest corner, I get out and check the street sign. Yes, 2nd and Beaudry. This is where the Davis Perfection Bakery was located during the years when Dalton Trumbo worked there. But there is no bakery here. A chain-link fence surrounds the entire area, and a sign affixed to it says that the complex is a facility of the Los Angeles Water and Power Company. The large factory-like building closest to the corner is the one in which the bakery was located. It seems to be used today as an equipment warehouse.

  Satisfied, I climb back into the car and head toward Hollywood, deciding to drive through town rather than resort to the freeway. The neighborhood surrounding 2nd and Beaudry is desolate today and utterly crummy. In the years when Trumbo was here, it was a lot worse.

  “The atmosphere at the bakery was remarkable. This was during Prohibition, and there was a very corrupt police force. Cops used to constantly come in there, and we’d give them bread and cakes to keep them happy and they gave us whiskey. And it was quite customary for cops to have girls. The girl would be on probation, and as a matter of fact a cop would set her up and trap her, and would put her in a hotel room to do business for him. That way the cops—a lot of them—had strings of girls, and there was no way to get away. If a girl tried, bang! the cop has her for prostitution—and she would be back in for another one hundred and eighty days, plus ninety on probation—and back again at the mercy of the cop who had arrested her. One of the policemen used to pass out cards, entitling the bearer to a complimentary lay with one of his girls. He would offer this around, you know, as you would treat somebody to a drink.

  “The despair of that particular area—honky-tonks, whorehouses, everyone scrounging, scrambling—well, it was just beyond belief. There was real Depressi
on there. We would give away our hard, two-day-old bread. Two or three men would stand on the ramp, handing the stuff out, and there would be a line three wide—for a block and a half. Kind of a hopeless state.”

  It was quite an education for Trumbo. If we remember the young man who had won the Western Slope Rhetorical Meet only a few years earlier with a high-minded oration entitled “Service,” and imagine him thrust into the sort of environment he has just described, it is not surprising that what emerged from it all was a radical. The first overt indication he gave of the direction he was headed in came when he led a successful strike of key employees in the shipping department for better pay. As he sized the situation up, there was no way an ordinary strike would work. If they began negotiations and gave notice beforehand of their intention to strike, they would all simply be fired and replaced—so they would have to arrange it so they couldn’t be replaced. They chose their night, and at fifteen-minute intervals, one of four of them went into the office and quit—walked out, leaving word that they would be over at a nearby coffee shop if the night manager wished to discuss the matter further. Well, they had him where they wanted him: he was simply not going to get out those perishable baked goods without their help, and they knew it. So he came over to the coffee shop and agreed to hire the four back at a substantial increase in pay. It was an “elite strike,” Trumbo admitted, one that really only benefited the four key employees in the shipping department. But, as it turned out, it was a beginning.

  Years after he had left it, he used to go back to the bakery—partly to renew old acquaintances, and partly, too, to bring friends there (as he would do five, six, and seven years after he had left) and show them what he had come from. The bakery was his bona fides, the only credentials he need show to prove who he was and why he was.