TRUMBO Read online

  “There was a fellow named Red who worked there, who was primarily evil—but imaginative. I don’t know where he came from. And we had a young man who came in to work, and the first mistake he made was to brag about how beautiful his wife was. Naturally, for a night shift worker, that’s a stupid thing, because ultimately somebody tested him out about his wife. He didn’t know that, though. Then his mother-in-law got arrested for vag-lewd [lewd-vagrant—soliciting], and that required fifty dollars’ bail. This was a hell of a problem for him, and we were all interested in that problem. And Red, the fellow I mentioned, finally said, ‘Well, we might be able to raise ten bucks of it.’ The idea was, he had a little game for the young man, if he were foolish enough to play—that he could masturbate and come in three minutes or something of the sort. They got a pot of money together. They got two cops to act as judges, and they went up into the locker room—and he made it. His name was Larry, and after that he was called Larrupin’ Larry. Well, he was still short of money to get his poor mother-in-law out of the vag-lewd charge, and Red came up with another idea that Blackie, an ex-lumberjack who worked at the bakery, would cornhole him. They could get thirty bucks for that. That would do the job. Well, Larry said it was all right with him, so Red went to Blackie and offered to pay him out of the pot, but Blackie said, ‘Hell, I’ll do it for nothing. Certainly.’ They went to the cops, and the cops themselves were putting up money by this time. Word got upstairs, and before that contest was held, Larrupin’ Larry was fired. Hence, the whole enterprise fell through.

  “This, you see, was the time, the place, the period, the thing. Amazing. How can I account for it? At least this was something interesting to get us through the day—like the bread races we used to have. And then, of course, there was the drinking, which was really heavy drinking—wild, sodden, mad drinking on a night off. There wasn’t an excuse for that. It was just… the way it was then.”

  It was all this that he sought to escape through his writing. The act of writing itself gave him an outlet for the very real pressures of resentment and frustration that welled up inside him. And it was only by achieving some degree of success with his writing that he thought it possible to escape this trap that had closed around him: “Sometimes I would walk to the bakery full of sheer horror, feeling, ‘Well, here I am. This is the way it will always be.’ By this time, you see, I was approaching thirty. And I was full of just a frantic determination to get out.”

  His sense of desperation, fed by the atmosphere of wild lawlessness inside the bakery and in the squalid area around it, led him to try things, crazy things, he would not otherwise have done. There was the heavy drinking, of course—but that was the least of it: “Almost everything you did was criminal one way or another. I was part of the crime. Not only were you yourself stealing bread and cakes, but you were also passing them out to the cops because it was the bakery’s policy. The company had two hundred trucks on the streets, and they didn’t want to have to put up with tickets, so they wanted to keep the cops happy, no matter what it took. So we were all involved with crime in one way or another. And that brings me to what I think was the most horrifying part of my life.”

  He began kiting checks. It all started, as such episodes do, in a modest enough way. He had an immediate need one day for about fifty dollars, and so, even though he knew he didn’t have sufficient funds to cover it in his Bank of America account, he wrote a check for that amount and cashed it at the cashier’s window of the bakery. At that time it would take from three to four days for a check to clear, and he must have felt that he would have money enough from some source or other in the interim to cover the check. But at the end of three days no money had come in, and so he was forced to cash another check for fifty dollars at the bakery and deposit the money from that one in the bank in order to cover the first check. And then he continued to do it again and again, week after week, keeping the same fictitious fifty dollars floating between the bakery and the bank. It wasn’t easy. The bakery cashier, who did all his business with drivers checking in at the end of the day, didn’t open his window until two o’clock in the afternoon, and the bank, located near Trumbo’s home on 55th Street, closed at three. On days when he had to cover a check—two or three times a week—he would have to take the streetcar in to the bakery, cash a check as soon as the cashier opened for business, and take the streetcar back to the bank to make his deposit within the hour. Then he would return to the bakery to start work as an estimator. Of course on such a schedule as this, there was always the lurking terror: What if the streetcar broke down? What if he failed to make it from the bakery to the bank within the hour? But somehow such threats failed to deter him. Not only that, but human nature being what it is, and a man’s reach inevitably exceeding his grasp, that floating fifty dollars was soon eighty dollars, and up and up, and before he quite knew what had happened, it was two hundred fifty dollars he was keeping in the air. Quite a sum in the Depression.

  It went on that way for about three years. The episode began sometime in 1930, and it ended, with a bang, in 1933. The bang was provided quite unexpectedly by President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he declared the bank holiday on March 6, 1933, and stopped the machinery of banking. That meant, as Trumbo well knew, “that every check would come home to rest at its final destination.” He was certain to be discovered and was desperate.

  There was, as he saw it, only one hope. The parents of one of his high school friends, Jim Latimer,* from whom he had borrowed money in the past, happened to be vacationing in the Los Angeles area. They were quite well-to-do, and, he felt, might take pity on him. As long as the bank holiday held, he knew he would be all right. The trouble would begin when the checks had returned—and he knew that if they caught up with him, it would be very bad for the cashier at the bakery, too. And so, since there was only one chance, he took it: on March 10 he traveled on the Inter-Urban streetcar line out to where the Latimers were staying. He talked to the two of them, telling the whole story. Mr. Latimer really didn’t believe it; he thought Trumbo might have made the whole story up. But Mrs. Latimer did believe him and loaned him the money.

  Trumbo remembered boarding the Inter-Urban Railway and starting back to the city in kind of a daze: he wouldn’t go to jail; it was as simple as that. He remembered looking out the window, as the streetcar pulled past a tall building on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and as he watched it, the building began to disintegrate before his eyes. It was only moments after that that he felt the first shocks of the Long Beach earthquake of March 10, 1933.

  “First the banks closed,” he remembered, “and then there was the earthquake. And people said, ‘Well, the banks are open at last,’ because the windows were all broken. It was interesting the way the people took the bank closing. There was a feeling almost of relief: ‘Now nobody has any money!’ You see, if you have a hundred thousand dollars and I haven’t got anything, then I’m not comfortable about you; I need some of that. But if nobody has anything, then there is that feeling of relief, of equality. Well, nobody had any money. I know Studs Terkel and that was a fine book of interviews on the Depression he did, Hard Times. But there was one aspect of the Depression experience that none of the people in his book commented on, which was that you were no longer ashamed of not having any money. It was a very nice thing. You know, we lived on the alley on 55th, and in front of us lived a man with his wife and two or three children, and they were on the government support. They got salt pork, and some ham, and a lot of beans. Well, I would bring home bread and rolls, cakes and pies from the bakery. We would exchange without the slightest feeling of embarrassment. And I would swipe these goods from the bakery without the slightest feeling of being a thief. I always honored the biblical injunction that he who labored in the vineyard was entitled to the fruits thereof, or some proportion.”

  The check-kiting episode, though it may have caused him the greatest terror, was not his only venture on the wrong side of the law, nor was it probably the most dangerous to him. He
became a bootlegger, as well. Whiskey was sold then from five-gallon cans and doled out from them. Going on the rounds, one speakeasy might be a two-gallon stop and the next a three-gallon stop. Trumbo’s bootlegging kit included, in addition to the whiskey, a hydrometer, for testing the whiskey, and a fifty-dollar bail bond if worse should come to worst. He worked for “a man at the drugstore” who worked, indirectly, for one of the big guys.

  Trumbo would go to a speakeasy and order whiskey, sample it, and say loudly, “This stuff is no good.” He would then pull out his own bottle, and, with a lot of people around, he would say even louder, “Taste this.” The owner would taste it, and would admit it was better—because what he was offering was better stuff. Trumbo would take out the hydrometer, which he always carried with him as an important part of his sales kit, and on the spot he would make a comparison test on alcoholic content, his brand versus the house brand. That would make quite an impression on the customers. In this way, in certain places, he could get them to switch to what he was selling because the customers who were present and had watched his pitch would demand that the owner give Trumbo’s booze a try. It wasn’t often he was able to effect this because, as he said, “there were other, more lethal ways of preventing a switch.” But he could occasionally pull it off, and when he did he was able to get five dollars per week per can on what he sold. At one time he was making up to sixty dollars per week on his bootlegging efforts alone.

  He was doing well for himself. Things were looking up. It began to seem for a while as though bootlegging might provide a way out of the bakery—that is, it seemed so until one night when he visited the drugstore that kept him supplied and paid him off, and he found out what had happened that day on Aliso Street, just four blocks from the bakery. There was a unique setup there. Cars would line up at a grilled manhole cover. Pulling up beside it, the driver would open the door, put two dollars down through the grill opening, and in return have a pint of whiskey pushed up at him. That morning, however, a car door had swung open, and instead of two dollars, six bullets had been pumped through the manhole cover. “Louie and the other guy,” the two who ran the operation, were both dead. Competition had suddenly gotten very tough, and the druggist was scared. He opted out of the business—and that ended Trumbo’s career as a bootlegger.

  It proved to be the beginning of his career as a writer. He used his experience as a bootlegger as the basis for an article that he did for Vanity Fair. The piece, which appeared in June 1932, while he was still working at the bakery, is not by any means the sort of raw, slice-of-life account you might expect from someone writing from firsthand experience of the racket. That, for one thing, was not the style or tone Vanity Fair had established as its own—which was as sophisticated and above-it-all as it was possible for a magazine to be in that bottom year of the Depression. And Trumbo’s article—“Bootlegging for Junior,” as it was called—conformed perfectly to the magazine’s established style. It is in the nature of a travesty, a learned discourse on the economics and techniques of bootlegging written in prose so ornate, highfalutin, and grandiloquent that it satirizes not just the subject at hand, but in the end, itself as well. The keenest touch of irony in it, however, was not the disproportion of style to subject, but rather the fact that it was written by Trumbo in so decorous a manner between squalorous stretches in the bakery, and under the daily threat of disclosure for his check-kiting activities.

  Vanity Fair was delighted with the piece. After it had been accepted, Trumbo received a letter from Frank Crowninshield, the editor, telling him that an associate editor, Clare Boothe Brokaw, would be coming to Los Angeles soon, and if he would supply his phone number, she would contact him when she arrived. Crowninshield said Mrs. Brokaw would then have an opportunity to discuss other article possibilities with him. That, of course, Trumbo did, but then promptly forgot about it, probably supposing she would never really call. But she did. One morning not long afterward, a call came when he was sound asleep, having just come off the night shift at the bakery. He was called to the telephone by his mother, and the woman at the other end of the line, identifying herself as Clare Boothe Brokaw, invited him to lunch at a downtown hotel. He groggily accepted.

  Clare Boothe Brokaw, of course, was to become Clare Boothe Luce. She would eventually blossom forth as syndicated columnist, Broadway playwright, the queen of a media empire, congresswoman and politician, and finally an ambassador. At that time, although only a hard-driving and relentlessly climbing editor on Vanity Fair, she was already beginning to make her mark. By all accounts, she was a remarkable woman—clever, quick, beautiful, and with an aura of charm about her that men found simply irresistible. Trumbo responded to that charm and beauty. To him, she seemed the very epitome of glamour. “She was,” he recalled, “the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.”

  He in turn looked to her like the sort of contributor they needed out in Los Angeles, one who could write about Hollywood from the inside: “They assumed I knew something about movies, and I had never been inside a studio. I knew nothing about motion pictures. To fake it for an hour and a half, as I did, with Clare Boothe Brokaw was not easy. It was an appalling task. But somehow I pulled it off, or I tried, because it meant to me that I might do more articles for them.”

  As it happened, though, he did no other pieces for Vanity Fair. What that meeting did for him, however, was to bring home to him the possibilities inherent in motion pictures as a field of immense potential for a writer. When he had thought of himself in that way before, it had always been as a writer of books, of novels, of stories. But here was a whole field that needed writing about, that needed writing pure and simple. His interest in movies before had been only as a member of the audience. Now he began thinking otherwise.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BEGINNING AS A WRITER

  Originally, Dalton Trumbo had come to the attention of Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield as the author of an article that was at least ostensibly about the movies, which was why Clare Boothe Brokaw quite reasonably assumed some knowledge on his part. George Jean Nathan had earlier published a piece in the magazine that was really no more than his standard highbrow jeer at the movies and the garish culture they had spawned in Hollywood (“rhinestone-studded swimming pools,” etc.). Trumbo had bravely taken him on and had written a rebuttal which he submitted to a little magazine published in Los Angeles, The Film Spectator. It was accepted. Except for newspaper articles in Colorado, “An Appeal to George Jean,” as it was titled when it appeared in January 1931, was Trumbo’s first published work. It is a bit of fluff, bantering and facetious in tone, no more a serious defense of the movies than Nathan’s attack was to be taken seriously. What it demonstrated most convincingly was that James Dalton Trumbo, as he signed the article, was a young man who had great resources of wit and a way with language. Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair took notice when Trumbo sent a copy of the article to him. So, too, certainly, did Welford Beaton, editor of The Film Spectator. Trumbo looked to him like a good prospect as a steady contributor.

  Beaton, a bouncy, enthusiastic movie critic of considerable erudition, ran what was then the only film journal on the West Coast. He took an immediate liking to Trumbo and made it clear he wanted him to do as much writing for the magazine as his work at the bakery would permit. In subsequent issues under the byline of James Dalton Trumbo appeared an appreciation of Charlie Chaplin and reviews of a number of films. Having caught the drift from Clare Booth Brokaw—this was what they were interested in—Trumbo resolved to learn as much as he could as quickly as he could about the movies. Welford Beaton, an intelligent and enthusiastic critic, proved an apt schoolmaster.

  Beaton came to count on him as a reviewer more and more and soon had his young protégé doing the sort of odd-job editorial work that he himself never seemed to have time for. Finally, in 1933, right after the successful solution of his check-kiting problems, Trumbo was asked by Beaton if he would like to come on full-time at the Spectator. “I’ll car
ry you on the books at fifty dollars a week,” Beaton told him. “How does that sound to you?”

  How did it sound? It sounded like something he had waited eight years to hear. It meant he would be able to leave the bakery at last. He would be making enough to contribute the major share to the support of the family, as he had been doing right along while working at the bakery. And best of all, he would be earning that money as a writer.

  And so Dalton Trumbo at last quit the bakery and took the job as associate editor of the Hollywood Spectator.* It was only then that he found out just what shaky financial condition the magazine was in. “The first week passed,” he remembered, “and I got my first paycheck—but it was only for thirty-five dollars. I went to Beaton and said, ‘Look, you said you’d pay me fifty dollars—what about this?’ And I waved the check at him.

  “‘Now wait a minute,’ Beaton replied just as cheerfully as you please, ‘I said I’d put you on the books for fifty. All I’ve got for you this week is thirty-five.’”

  And it was true! He sat down with Trumbo, showed him the figures, and had no difficulty convincing him that that amount was all that was available for his paycheck. Perhaps next week—maybe it would go better then. Or the week after that.

  Sometimes there was enough left over from the magazine’s absolutely necessary expenses for Trumbo to be paid his full salary, and sometimes there wasn’t. It was as simple as that. However, this did not keep Welford Beaton from thinking big. He decided his associate editor should have a car in order to get around to screenings and interviews and make trips to the printer. And so once when he hit a good week, Beaton scraped together one hundred dollars for a down payment and put it on a car for Trumbo. The young associate editor used it for a while, came to depend on it, then walked out of the house one morning to find the car gone from where he had parked it the night before. It had been repossessed.