Out of the Shadow

A man and his wife, one evening last week, left their home in a working-class neighborhood of East Los Angeles, crossed town and stepped into the glare of a Hollywood premiere. After 13 years of a shadow career filled with aliases and under-the-desk assignments, Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was also stepping into the open. He had written the picture, Exodus, under his own name; and on the blacklist that had featured him for so long, the print was quickly fading.

Most renowned of the Hollywood Ten --writers cited in 1947 for contempt of Congress after refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee if they had ever been Communists--Trumbo also wrote the recent, $12-million Spartacus, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will have to strain to avoid awarding him an Oscar next spring. In both Spartacus and Exodus, Trumbo turned rambling, middle-grade raw material into tight and excellent scripts, lightened with humor and touched with irony.

Trumbo is one of the hottest potatoes ever baked in Hollywood. He is hated by many. He is also adulated by some as a political martyr. As moods and attitudes have shifted around him, the man who wrote such memorable films as Kitty Foyle and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo has been shuttled in and out of the money, in and out of anonymity, in and out of jail.

Atmosphere of Dissent. At 55, the once-flaming Trumbo appears quiet, gentle and humorous. But peering through black-rimmed glasses and speaking through a thickly tufted white mustache, he rarely answers questions except with a speech, and anything will set him off. "I have looked at many American faces," he improvised for an interviewer last week. "I've seen them as flak burst around them 9,000 ft. over Japan and in a slit trench on Okinawa watching the night sky to see where the next bomb would fall. I have seen American faces in a Congregational Church in New Hampshire and in a miners' union hall in Duluth on a night when the wind off the lake blew the snow in killingly. I have seen American faces as I delivered newspapers, peddled vegetables, clerked in stores, waited on tables, washed automobiles, picked fruit, hosed down infected cadavers, shoveled sugar beets, iced refrigerator cars, laid rails with a section gang . . ." And so on and on, through the outline of a remarkable career.

James Dalton Trumbo was born in Montrose, Colo.; his father was variously a shoe salesman and a beekeeper, his mother a Christian Scientist who did constant battle with the school board to make sure that no one vaccinated her son. "I was surrounded with the atmosphere of dissent," he remembers, with the air of a man who has used the story before to point his moral. "My Southern grandmother, burning with hateful memories of the Yankee invasion, dissented from the Union until she died. My grandfather joined with the dissent of the Populists, then with the dissent of Bryan, and finally with the constantly dissenting La Follette." Once, on a wild impulse, carrying dissent further, young Dalton asked his father for $18 so he could join the Ku Klux Klan. ("There was only one Negro in town and I was his friend, but it was a movement everyone was terribly interested in joining.") His father talked him out of it.

Some Reason. After Trumbo's freshman year at the University of Colorado, his father died, and the family moved to Los Angeles, where Trumbo went to work, putting in nine years as a bread wrapper at the Davis Perfection Bakery. He moonlighted with a typewriter, sold a piece to Vanity Fair urging colleges to offer courses in bootlegging. Eventually he drifted into Hollywood, after some failures wrote his first good film, RKO's A Man to Remember, and his novel, Johnny Got His Gun, an angry, pacifist story about a limbless, sightless World War I veteran that won him the American Book sellers award in 1939.

He was also connected with numerous Communist fronts, ranging from the American Youth for Democracy (nee the Young Communists League) to the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee committee, the Los Angeles Chapter of the Civil Rights Congress, and something called the Sleepy Lagoon Defense committee, an auxiliary of the legal wing of the Communist Party. He contributed to the New Masses and other Communist magazines. Then in 1947 he was summoned to Capitol Hill. When the congressional committee asked him if he had ever been a Communist, he delivered a line that at this distance seems the funniest of his career ''You must have some reason," he said, "for asking that."

Robert Rich. Soon after Trumbo's congressional appearance, the leading Hollywood producers blacklisted the "unfriendly ten" and all others who might refuse to talk straight to Congress. The list soon grew to about 250 names. Trumbo and others became faceless talents, selling their scripts on the black market. Actors and directors were unlucky, he wrote bitterly in 1957, but all a writer needed was "paper, a pencil, and a nice clean cell."

Trumbo got the cell in 1950, spent ten months at the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Ky. for contempt of Congress. He took pleasure in sharing the exercise yard with ex-Congressman Andy May (defense bribes) and even more pleasure in the news that at the Danbury, Conn, pen the Hollywood Ten's Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr. were fellow inmates of ex-Congressman J. Parnell Thomas (padded office payroll), chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee during those 1947 hearings. "Almost every jail in the country during that curious time," wrote Trumbo later, "found Congressman and contemptee standing cheek by jowl in the chow line, all their old malignities dissolved in common hunger for a few more of them there beans."

In jail and out, in Hollywood and during a self-imposed exile in Mexico, Dalton Trumbo wrote some 30 movies under assorted pseudonyms. He refuses to say what they were, but during the 1957 Academy Award ceremonies, Robert Rich was announced as the writer of the year's best original screen play, The Brave One. No Robert Rich came forward to accept the award; eventually, Trumbo was identified as the writer. He is now so fond of the name that, for nostalgia's sake, he plans to use it again from time to time.

Fantastical Ingenuity. As McCarthyism receded, the blacklist began to lose force; and Director Otto Preminger did it in when he openly signed Trumbo for Exodus. Living in unfashionable surroundings by his own choice, Dalton Trumbo swears he will never move back to the posh Angeleno hills, although he is making as much as $100,000 a picture. Father of three children, two of whom are in college, another in high school, Trumbo has become a sort of half-mellow Polonius who writes notes of advice:

P:On European sexual characteristics (for a teen-age daughter about to tour Europe): "The only interesting thing that can happen in a Swiss bedroom is suffocation by feather mattress ... In Britain, occasionally some young man, mistaking you for a horse, may leap at you."

P:On stealing: "Never steal more than you actually need, for the possession of surplus money leads to extravagance, foppish attire, frivolous thought."

P:On lying: "Let the lie be delivered full-face, eye to eye, and without scratching of the scalp, but let it, for all its simplicity, contain one fantastical element of creative ingenuity."

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