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 premiére. 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.