BRUCE COOK’S “DALTON TRUMBO”

“A book of clarity, probing intelligence, and considerable grace,” wrote Nat Hentoff in praise of Bruce Cook’s DALTON TRUMBO. “Trumbo was a true original. His life has the chronicler it merits.” DALTON TRUMBO is a lively biography of the man who broke the Hollywood blacklist. It was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons on January 31, 1977. One of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood history (his credits include Kitty Foyle, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, The Fixer and Papillon), Dalton Trumbo was also the author of JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever published. He epitomized the spirit of American capitalism yet he went to jail for refusing to talk about his membership in the Communist party. An extraordinarily complex and interesting man, he was, as Bruce Cook shows, “an exemplar of a certain set of American virtues-- toughness, independence,persistence.”

From Colorado where Trumbo was born in 1905 into a working-class family and where his writing career began as a cub reporter for the Grand Junction Sentinel to California and eight hard years at the Davis Perfection Bakery where he organized a strike, kited checks to survive and bootlegged --- Cook recounts the early struggles. Out of the bootlegging experience came an article for Vanity Fair, an interview with Clare Booth Brokaw and by 1935 a career--he signed a contract with Warner Brothers and was soon among the leaders of the Screen Writers Guild. Here, too, is Trumbo’s courtship of Cleo--he patronized McConnell’s Drive-In where she was a waitress where she was every night until she finally agreed to marry him. Cook tells the full story of the blacklist days, and provides for the first time the complete list of the films Trumbo wrote during that period. Along with many Grade-B movies were Roman Holiday and The Brave One, for which the non-existent “Robert Rich” received an Oscar in 1957. Trumbo was just one among the first of several hundred who were deprived of the opportunity to work in the motion picture industry from 1947 to 1960. Yet he was the first to see his name on the screen again. When that happened, it was Spartacus, one of the year’s biggest movies.

DALTON TRUMBO is based on extensive interviews with Trumbo and those who knew him. Trumbo, who died on September 10, 1976, knew he had cancer and he talked freely to Cook and gave him complete access to his correspondence and personal papers. The result, as Publishers Weekly wrote, is a “gossipy, anecdotal narrative that is fascinating reading.” And Ring Lardner, Jr., himself a member of the Hollywood Ten, commented: “Bruce Cook has captured the wit, intelligence and unpredictability that made him one of the truly original people of our time.” As Bruce Cook wrote-- “Dalton Trumbo rescued Hollywood from its worst nightmare. He made certain that its biggest story had a happy ending. For of all the colorful characters who have passed through the short history of the movie industry, there have been very few heroes. Dalton Trumbo was one. You might say that he made the movies safe for democracy.”