Dalton Trumbo: A Life of Struggle and Triumph
“Mr. Rich is right now at the hospital, waiting for his wife to give birth,”
claimed Jesse Lasky, the Vice President of the Writers Guild when a
previously unknown writer by the name of Robert Rich was awarded the
1956 Oscar for best screenplay of the film
The Brave One. And everyone
would have continued to believe it, were it not for one hungry young
journalist who set out in search of a quote from the winner. After checking
with every maternity ward in the Los Angeles area, he was left asking the
question, “Who and where was Robert Rich?”
Perhaps he should have been asking the studios, who knew very well there
was no Robert Rich. Mr. Rich was, in fact, a pseudonym for the infamously
blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo may have won the Oscar
that year, but it never reached his hands. Instead, it stayed locked in the
Academy basement because they refused to acknowledge they had given
the statue to a man that the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) had labeled a criminal.
When the Committee called Trumbo to testify on October 28, 1947, he
stood before them with spirit and gusto. He stalwartly refused to answer
their questions, securing his place among the original Hollywood Ten, as
well as on the blacklist. He was convicted of contempt and sentenced to
six to twelve months behind bars.
After serving ten months in prison, Trumbo, unable to work in Hollywood,
moved to Mexico along with many of the other blacklistees. Trumbo
assembled a group of sympathetic allies who served as couriers, ferrying
scripts to producers willing to look the other way. When not writing under
a pseudonym, Trumbo utilized loyal friends who acted as fronts for his
scripts, listing their names instead of his, and secretly forwarding the
profits to the exiled writer. At a fraction of the cost of a legitimate
Trumbo script, producers jumped at the chance to get their hands on the
contraband. It was during this period that Trumbo, posing as Robert Rich,
wrote the screenplay for
The Brave One.
Amazingly, Trumbo finally struggled free of the blacklist, becoming
the first of those banned writers to see his name appear in the credits.
He accomplished this monumental task with the aid of Kirk Douglas,
star of
Spartacus, and Otto Preminger, director of
Exodus, both of whom
detested the blacklist, and insisted on properly listing Dalton Trumbo as
the screenwriter for both films.
In 1970 Trumbo received the Writers Guild award for career achievement.
In his acceptance speech he declared, “The blacklist was a time of evil.
No one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. . . .
It will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because
there were none; there were only victims.”
Trumbo died of a heart attack on September 10, 1976. When his friend, the
director John Berry, came to visit shortly before his death, Trumbo greeted
him in a manner Berry never expected. Instead of a feeble old man, bed
ridden, and dying of cancer, Berry found Trumbo “bursting with energy,”
and yelling, “How are ya, you old shit?”
- M. Bevin O'Gara