Show Business is Murder

“So you must be a reporter.”

“No, I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I’m a private detective.” I showed him my I.D.

He glanced at it. “From New York. Well, we’re honored,” he replied. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his inside jacket pocket and offered me one. I shook my head.

He lit up, coughed, and went on. “We get lots of FBI and police and HUAC investigators and reporters but very few private eyes,” he said. “I think the city reserves this parking place for people staking out my house. It’s a courtesy, like the green for fifteen minutes, yellow for deliveries, and this spot for watching Dalton Trumbo.”

Oh. So that’s who he was.

“So what were you doing following my son home from the drug store?”

I guess I’d failed at clouding his son’s mind to make myself invisible to him.

“Trying to figure out what was in the envelope he picked up there. It looked like a bribe.”

“Why did it look like a bribe? Why didn’t it just look like an envelope?”

“Well, you’ve got a point there,” I admitted. “It was the context that made it look like a bribe, Mr. Friendly.”

“Ahh. I thought your voice was familiar. You really get around, Naomi. Would you like to come up for some tea?” I agreed, but I decided if we passed any transfer files on the way I’d make a run for it.

While it was 1957 outside Mr. Trumbo’s house, inside it was 1940. He explained he’d stored all his old furniture when he moved to Mexico to try to make a living after he got out of prison, and reclaimed it all when that plan didn’t work out. This was the furniture he’d bought back when he was the highest paid-and biggest spending-writer in Hollywood. I met his wife-she wasn’t big or domineering but slender, younger, and pretty. He showed me some of her prize-winning photographs.

We had tea on the veranda overlooking the tree-filled valley and the San Gabriel Mountains beyond. “Who are you working for, Naomi?” asked Mr. Trumbo as he poured me a cup, catching the loose tea in a tiny strainer.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” I said, feeling stupid considering I was hoping I could get him to answer that very question.

“Then answer this. What is it they want to know?”

“Whether you wrote The Brave One,” I replied. I saw no reason to be cozy about that.

“Ah. Of course.”

My heart raced. “Of course you wrote it?” I asked.

He laughed. “No, no. Of course, that’s what they would want to know. It’s the question of the moment.” He picked up a pipe, fiddled with it but never lit it.

“So. Did you?”

“Well, I can’t confirm that,” he said. “But then I can’t deny it either.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, if I did write it, then the King Brothers must have hired me-or bought the story from me-despite the blacklist. Of course, the movie industry insists there is no blacklist. But on the other hand, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences passed a new rule this year excluding blacklisted writers from winning Oscars. So if there were no blacklist, there’d be no reason for that rule. Of course, they did it only because my friend Michael Wilson was about to be nominated for writing Friendly Persuasion and Michael had already had the audacity to embarrass the Academy by winning the Oscar for A Place in the Sun, which he wrote before he was blacklisted.”

“Have you won any Oscars since you’ve been blacklisted?” I asked.

He smiled. “I’ve been nominated once or twice, but I can’t say if I’ve won. That would be telling. It’s common practice for Hollywood companies, big and small, to hire blacklisted writers on the black market. It’s an open secret that’s received the blessings of the industry while at the same time the Academy is acting as policeman, beating up on weak victims, independent producers like the Kings. If The Brave One had been made by a major studio, I promise you the Academy would be looking the other way.”

I asked, “Do you know who wrote The Brave One?”

He nodded. “I’d guess Michael Wilson. But what I know mostly is that it has no murders in it, no dope addiction, no gunfights, and no seduction of innocent girls. So now that I think about it, I don’t know how it got onto the screen.”

It hit me. The manila envelope probably contained script pages. He was writing another movie for the King Brothers. The money was for that. I tried my new theory on him.

He smiled and said, “Blacklist or no, it’s impossible to stop a writer from writing. They murdered Thucydides, and beheaded Sir Thomas More, but all of the other writers who were thrown in jail continued to write, and so have I. Why just today I was writing a letter to the phone company. In fact, I was on my way to mail it when I stopped by to see you.”

He pulled the envelope from his pocket. “They’d written me a very clever and charming missive about why they couldn’t seem to make my phone lines work properly. Personally, I believe it has something to do with all the juice that’s being drained off by the FBI tap, but they didn’t mention that. They did say they had more pressing things to do than make the phones of a Communist work. So this is my reply.”

He tore open the stamped envelope so that I could read his tome. It said in part, “When we Reds come into power we are going to shoot merchants in the following order: 1. those who are greedy, and 2. those who are witty. Since you fall into both categories it will be a sad story when we finally lay hands on it.”

I looked up at him as he drained his tea. “You don’t take this very seriously, do you?”

He put down the cup. “The Hollywood, or so-called Unfriendly Ten, including myself have had the worst press since Bruno Hauptman. I lost my livelihood, my house in the hills, my ranch in Ventura County, and all my savings. Well, I never had any savings. I didn’t know I’d need them. I was imprisoned for a year. My passport was revoked. I’ve been audited chronically by the IRS. Since we moved here, my daughter was driven out of her elementary school by tormenting classmates, and tormenting parents of classmates. We had to put her into a different school where the parents are a little less red-blooded American. I have borrowed from all my friends and associates, not to mention lawyers, and struggle to pay them back. I will pay, every cent. I used to earn three thousand dollars a week. When I got out of prison, I was lucky to get three thousand for an entire script. I take it seriously.” He shrugged his eyebrows and shoulders. I got the idea.

“How do you feel about the people who talked,” I asked, “who named names to save their careers?”

“I used to look for villains, but I’m beginning to think there were no villains, or heroes or saints or devils; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some of us grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims.”

He poured us both more tea. “Try Michael Wilson,” he said again. “Maybe he’ll tell you he wrote it.”

I stopped at a payphone and called Michael Wilson at the San Fernando Valley number Mr. Trumbo had given me. He said he’d be happy to see me, especially after I told him who I’d just had tea with. We made an appointment for that evening at his house at 11662 Sunshine Terrace at nine. He asked me to give him a phone number to reach me just in case, and I did, both the motel’s and David’s.

David listened intently as I filled him in on my day over burgers at the Sunset Strip Hamburger Hamlet. It had a Southern plantation motif carried through to the point that the waitresses were all black and the customers were all white. I felt like Scarlet O’Hara sipping mint juleps with David Horvitz. Well, he didn’t look much like Rhett.

David was a TV writer, working for a writer-producer named Roy Huggins on a new Western series at Warner Brothers that was supposed to premiere in the fall on ABC. He told me it was called “Maverick” and starred a guy named James Garner who David thought was going to be a big star. And, he said, the lead character wasn’t a gunfighter, like on all the other Westerns, but a card sharp and confidence man who was basically a coward and ran from danger.

I laughed, thinking he was joking. When he made me realize he wasn’t, I said the American public would never stand for it. It didn’t have a chance to succeed. He thanked me for my encouragement.

“But what would possess somebody to think up a hero who was a coward?” I persisted.

David said, “I have the feeling at some level, conscious or not, Roy patterned the Maverick character after himself.”

I looked up, puzzled. He went on, “Roy named names to HUAC and saved his career. He says he’s regretted it ever since.”