Post Gushes over Top Red
Screenwriter
My introduction to Dalton Trumbo didn’t come
until 1989 when I repeatedly saw the music video, One, on MTV
performed by Metallica. The video
cuts back and forth between the band and scenes from Trumbo’s 1971 anti-war
movie Johnny Got His Gun, about a barely surviving
World War I soldier, limbless, faceless, and without the ability to see, hear,
or speak, who communicates his desire to be euthanized through head movements
in Morse code. The movie,
which was released while the Vietnam War was still raging, was written and
directed by Trumbo, and it was based upon his 1939 novel by the same name.
Although I had heard nothing of the
little-publicized 1971 movie, as a founding member of the North Carolina
Veterans for Peace on the campus of the University of North Carolina at the
time, I’m sure that I would have been favorably disposed toward it. Discovering some time after 1989 that
Trumbo had been one of the Hollywood Ten, imprisoned and then
blacklisted for refusing in 1947 to name fellow Communists before the House
Un-American Activities Committee, did nothing to diminish my generally positive
feeling toward Trumbo, on account of his anti-war efforts. My real education was to come later.
Had I confined my education to the reading of
mainstream information organs like The
Washington Post my misapprehension of Trumbo would have continued. Last week one of their movie reviewers,
Michael Dirda, wrote what might be called an unpaid advertisement* for an upcoming movie about
Trumbo’s life. Here’s a sample of Dirda’s gushing prose, as he talks about Trumbo, the 1977 biography by the late
Bruce Cook upon which the movie is based:
In the late 1940s, screenwriters
(as well as other movie professionals) who were or had been members of the
Communist Party became the targets of the House Un-American Activities
Committee. While insisting on their First Amendment right to free speech,
Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr. and others refused to answer questions about their
politics or to incriminate friends. Consequently, the Hollywood Ten were
sentenced to six months to a year in prison for contempt of Congress. Their
bosses then fired them and pledged to keep these pinkos
out of the motion picture industry.
---
…by the time of
his death from lung cancer in 1976, Trumbo already seemed half-legend,
half-saint: To Cook, he wasn’t just the Oscar-winner who broke the blacklist,
he was a man who, no matter what, kept faith with himself, his friends and his
ideals.
Let me end by again stressing how
wonderful this book is. If you have any interest in Hollywood history, the
postwar communist witch hunts, screenwriting or the
art of biography, you should grab this new paperback of “Trumbo.” Or, if you
prefer, listen to the fine Highbridge audiobook read
by Luke Daniels. You might even want to see the movie.
Dirda tells us that screenwriter
John McNamara says he read Cook’s book ten times while putting the script
together. I confess that I have not
read it even once, but from what I know about Trumbo from other reading,
McNamara would have written a screenplay that was closer to the truth had be
broadened his own reading a bit.
See what the customer, T. Berner,
had to say about Cook’s book at Amazon.com:
As a biographer, Mr. Cook is far too
gullible. He relies too heavily on Trumbo's own version of events, instead of
on the facts. For instance, he states improbably that it was just a coincidence
that Trumbo's anti-war, isolationist classic Johnny Got His Gun was published
during the Nazi-Soviet Pact and even more improbably that it was his publisher,
J B Lippincott, who arranged for the book to be published in The Daily Worker.
There is also no mention that when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Trumbo
tried to suppress his own book. Nor were the Communist screenwriters without
sin themselves. It has been well documented, but not here, that Communists in
the screenwriters guilds blacklisted non-Communist screenwriters throughout the
30's and the 40's. And, although [Matt?] Hanson, who thinks more highly of
Trumbo than most film critics, documents that the goal of Trumbo, along with
other Communist screenwriters, was to insert pro-Communist lines of dialogue in
the movies they wrote, you won't find a discussion of that in here either.
That said,
if you treat this book as an autobiography, instead of a biography, where the
standards of truth are less rigid, there is much on offer here. It is within
the bounds of autobiography for the author to defend his life. Nixon's version
of Watergate is a far cry from Woodstein's and Bill
Clinton didn't mention the charges of the FBI, well reported by The New York
Times, that he sold military secrets to China in exchange for campaign funds.
As autobiography, this book succeeds admirably. Trumbo makes the case for
himself as a fearless true believer and a likable one at that.
Don't
read this book if you're looking for an honest account of the Hollywood Ten,
but do read it as a defense of a fairly good screenwriter (even if Thirty
Seconds Over Tokyo and Exodus are hardly Citizen Kane or Vertigo in the
pantheon of Hollywood cinema).
It sounds like a good title for a proper review
of Cook’s book would be similar to mine for David Roll’s about another one of
Joseph Stalin’s minions in America, “A Lawyer’s Case for Harry Hopkins,” or perhaps “Trumbo’s Case
for Trumbo.”
The Post’s agenda is obvious from Dirda’s characterization of the House investigations as
“witch hunts” and the likes of Trumbo as just “pinkos,”
implying that Soviet Communist infiltration of the government and key
organizations like labor unions was harmless or imaginary and that committed
Communists like Trumbo were merely left of center in their politics.
Hollywood’s Red Propaganda Factory
Make no mistake about it; Trumbo was no minor
misguided liberal. He was at the
heart of Communist subversion in Hollywood that strongly influenced American
public opinion toward the Soviet Union. This long passage from pp. 88-89 of
Diana West’s American Betrayal explains well how it worked:
How did our process of literary
selection, which certainly wasn’t always natural, take shape? [Hollywood
Party author Kenneth Lloyd] Billingsley points, for example, to the
efforts of one John Weber, a Marxist labor organizer whose party work in
Hollywood included the organizing of the Screen Story Analysts Guild, a
Communist-dominated group that read—i.e., vetted or nixed—movie
scripts. Just for good measure the
vice president of the guild was another Communist Party member, Lillian Bergquist, who also served as the chief script analyst for
the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP), the Hollywood branch of the
Communist-dominated Office of War Information (OWI).
Incredibly, disastrously, Weber went
on to head the literary department of the William Morris Agency, then the
preeminent talent agency in town, another choke point from which to monitor the
flow of work and workers (writers).
Such control was a point of strategy, but it was also a point of pride,
prompting the odd indiscreet revelation—and thank goodness. One prize gaffe came from Oscar-winning
screenwriter and Communist Dalton Trumbo, later a poster boy for Hollywood
martyrdom during what we think of as the Hollywood Blacklist days, the period
in the 1950s during which studios and producers officially “blacklisted”
Hollywood Communists conspiring with Moscow to overthrow the U.S. government.
But…isn’t that treason?
Trumbo’s statement, made in 1946 in The Worker (petted Hollywood
screenwriters are “workers,” too!), brags about a de facto anti-Communist blacklist that effectively prevented stories told
from the anti-Communist perspective from getting to the silver screen. There might be a dearth of “progressive”
movies on screen, Trumbo admits, “but neither has Hollywood produced anything
so untrue or reactionary as The Yogi and the Commissar, Out of the Night, Report on the Russians, There Shall Be No Night, or Adventures of a
Young Man.” He goes on to tick off a few more significant anti-Communist
manifestos, gloating over their never-to-be-exploited commercial value. “Nor does Hollywood’s forthcoming
schedule include such tempting items as James T. Farrell’s Bernard Clare, Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom, or the so-called biography of Stalin by Leon Trotsky.”
Clearly there existed a Hollywood
blacklist before there existed the Hollywood
Blacklist. Trumbo’s statement
breaks down to a basic message: Even if “progressive” (read: Stalinist) movies
are tough to put over, take heart, comrade; every “untrue,” “reactionary,”
“Trotskyist” hot property that comes along and gets rejected is a victory for
Mother Russia. Some of those titles,
it’s important to note, preceded the U.S. wartime alliance with the USSR
(1941-1945), coming along during the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact
(1939-41). This is something to
keep in mind the next time tears are ordered up for a Hollywood Blacklist pity
party. The fact is, Dalton Trumbo,
martyr of the 1950s “Red Scare,” hero to the 1960s Berkeley Free Speech Movement,
was himself “a blacklister before he was himself
blacklisted.”
Heavy Hitter Trumbo
An important lesson we get from
Billingsley is that before the political winds changed in the late 1940s it was
actually a career asset in Hollywood
to be a Communist and many joined the Party for just that reason—not out
of idealism—but then got caught up in the Moscow-controlled tentacles of
the organization. Who knows what
his ultimate motivations were, but Trumbo was very much a part of the sinister
team promoting the goals of the Soviet Union. This is from pp. 117-119 of Billingsley:
When Party leader William Z. Foster
came to Hollywood, the locals threw a party for him at Trumbo’s mansion on
Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. The
elite of the studio section had been expecting some enlightenment from the new
Party boss, who, it turned out, was a great fan of cowboy movies and was hoping
to meet some western stars at the Trumbo gala. He was disappointed to find that none
showed up.
The host, who never slandered wealth
in his personal life, found himself taking a more active role under the new
Party line. Trumbo said that films
such as Sahara and Action in the North Atlantic were
examples of films that “went over to the offensive,” as opposed to simply
keeping anti-Communist material out.
In 1946 Trumbo wrote that these “offensive” films had occurred “under
the impact of one historical phase of the
war against fascism” and “there is no reason to believe that it cannot
develop and deepen in the succeeding
phase of the same war.” (Billingsley emphases added) Thus, the United States, in the
Communist mind-set, was a fascist regime and the successor to Nazi
Germany. About this time, the
creative Trumbo had pulled duty outside of Hollywood.
When the United Nations was being
formed, Stalin’s foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, suggested Alger Hiss as the
organization’s first Secretary General, the first and only time a Soviet
official has suggested an American for an international post. French intelligence had warned the
United States of Hiss’s Communist ties, and he had even been fingered by a
Czech official. Secretary of State
Edward Stettinius, who had been under the wing of Alger Hiss and Harry Hopkins,
delivered a speech to the U.N. written by Dalton Trumbo. It has been reported that Hiss was
responsible for bringing Trumbo to the opening U.N. conference in May and June
of 1945. Trumbo admitted that he
“ghosted” Stettinius’s speech, and on October 26, 1959, he explained to the
leftist historian Carey McWilliams that during the course of the events, he had
stayed at the Fairmont Hotel “unregistered on the blotter” in a room between
those of Harold Stassen and Foster Dulles.
Not only did he write the speech for Stettinius, but
he said he “worked most closely with Thomas Finletter,”
Truman’s secretary of the air force and later ambassador to NATO.
Interestingly, when Trumbo’s
biographer, Bruce Cook, interviewed Finletter during
the 1970s, he refused to talk about Trumbo. In fact, Finletter
acted as if he had never met the famous writer, which was clearly false. Cook was baffled by the silence and was
certain that Finletter was being deliberately
evasive. As for Stettinius, he as
so pleased with Trumbo’s script that he presented the writer with an
autographed picture of himself. But
later Stettinius also denied that he had ever known Trumbo.
Speaking of that new Party boss
Foster, he had recently replaced longtime American Communist Party head Earl
Browder after Browder had been denounced in April of 1945 by French Communist
Party official Jacques Duclos for his “belief in
post-war Soviet-American cooperation as ‘erroneous conclusions in no wise
flowing from a Marxist analysis of the situation’ and a ‘notorious revision of
Marxism.’ Duclos
also quoted a secret anti-Browder letter Party rivals sent only to Moscow, and
the American Party concluded that the charge was a message to them direct from
Stalin. They were right.”
(Billingsley, p. 116)
Many Communists in Hollywood had regarded
Browder as a hero, “particularly those who had joined during the heyday of
American-Soviet cooperation, which they thought would outlast the war and bring
in a happy ending. When Browder was
ousted, some Party members wept.”
A certain important screenwriter,
though, didn’t allow such sentiments to get the best of him. “In one argument over the Duclos letter, Dalton Trumbo said: ‘It comes down to this,
if Lenin was right, then Browder was wrong—and vice versa. I prefer to believe that Lenin was right.’
” (Billingsley, p. 117)
Trumbo certainly had the right stuff
to be a good Communist of the Stalinist stripe, as indicated by what he wrote in a letter published in 1970, part of which is
quoted by Billingsley on page 248:
The
art of lying is the art of the practical. It ought never be indulged in for the
pure pleasure of the thing, since over-usage dulls the instrument, corrodes the
character and despoils the spirit. The important thing about a lie is not that
it be interesting, fanciful, graceful or even pleasant but that it be believed. Curb, therefore, your
imagination. Let the lie be delivered full-face, eye to eye, and without
scratching of the scalp. Let it be blunt and forthright and so simple that you
can repeat it in detail and under oath ten years hence. But let it, for all its
simplicity, contain one fantastical element of creative ingenuity - one and no
more - designed to capture the attention of the listener and to convince him
that, since no one would dare to invent the improbability you have inserted,
its mere existence places the stamp of truth upon everything that you have
said. If you cannot tell a believable lie, cling then to truth
which is always our secret succor in times of need, and manfully accept
the consequences.
There
we see the “ideals” on full display with which the “half-legend, half-saint” of
Post writer Dirda’s
imagination, Dalton Trumbo, “kept faith.”
Touted
as it is by The Washington Post, one
can expect the upcoming movie to adhere more closely to Trumbo’s prescription
for lying than it does to the truth about his life. Hollywood, after all, still uses its
opinion molding power to attack the anti-Communists of the era and, like The Post, to wax romantic about the Communists.
* I
can’t say for sure that it was unpaid.
Maybe this is how Jeff Bezos plans to turn around the newspaper’s bottom
line. Otherwise, the only change
that I can see at The Post since he removed
this money-losing albatross from around the Graham family neck is that they now
continue to charge me for home delivery when I go traveling and suspend
delivery, reminding me on their telephone recording that I will still have online
access to their rare and wonderful product on the road.
David Martin
October 8, 2015
Home Page Column Column 5 Archive Contact