I was away for a while, out of internet, TV, and newspaper range, and didn't see the news on Oct. 18 that Cleo Trumbo, wife of blacklisted author Dalton Trumbo, had died at 93. I searched Daily Kos and found nothing, so I added a comment tonight in OND. But then I thought, hell, that deserves more than a comment, even if it's 2:30 AM out West and few people will see this.
I'm sure a whole lot of people here know Dalton Trumbo's story, or at least some of it: there was the play and movie documentary called Trumbo written by his son, Christopher; PBS aired the movie on American Masters; and of course a lot of us read Johnny Got His Gun in college, and maybe saw the pretty bad movie version of it. He's the anti-Kazan, the man who would not name names to McCarthy's goons, and paid for it - jail, lost work, his family ostracized for years. And Cleo stood by him for more than three decades until his death in 1976.
In addition to Johnny Got His Gun, before and especially after the Blacklist there were the movie screenplays: The Brave One, which received the 1956 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, but which Trumbo could not accept because, being still barred from Hollywood, he used a front (he received the award in 1975, a year before he died). Other notables included Roman Holiday (also fronted), Lonely Are the Brave, Exodus, Spartacus, and Papillon - among dozens of others. If you haven't seen them in a while, or if you didn't know the Trumbo story when you first saw them, go back and Netflix them again, and you'll see Dalton flipping the bird to the House Un-American Activities Committee in many of them. The most famous, of course, is the "I am Spartacus" scene, where his fellow prisoners refuse to rat on Kirk Douglas. That loyalty among innocent prisoners is also on display between Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in Papillon, and Trumbo is at his anti-authoritarian best in Lonely Are the Brave, a grossly under-appreciated movie also starring Kirk Douglas based on the novel of another iconoclast, Edward Abbey (the book is The Brave Cowboy). I saw an interview with Douglas where he said it's one of his favorite roles.
Dalton married the gorgeous Cleo in 1938, and shortly thereafter he achieved success with the raging anti-war book Johnny Got His Gun (1939), followed by a number of award-winning Hollywood scripts. In 1947, however, Trumbo, a former Communist Party member, refused to name names to HUAC, telling the Committee the next step was concentration camps for writers. That didn't go over too well with the McCarthy boys, who found him and the rest of the "Hollywood 10" in contempt of Congress. Dalton later said there was never a truer verdict, as he had tremendous contempt for them.
Cleo accompanied him to the hearings, supported his constitutional rights to believe what he wanted and keep his mouth shut, and kept the family together (they had 3 children) during his 10 months in prison. After his release, the family moved to Mexico with a number of other writers, including Ring Lardner, Jr., who also served time, but found little success writing under the table. And where Dalton once commanded $75,000 per script, he accepted as little as $1,000 and pounded them out one after another.
It wasn't just money problems. "We were broke, and we weren't invited anywhere. People dropped away," Cleo told People Magazine in 1993. After moving back to the States, their children were shunned at school, and when neighbors discovered they were living in the community, it was almost as if a child molester was next door. Dalton kept writing under pseudonyms, and it was not until Otto Preminger put "Dalton Trumbo" on Exodus in 1960 that he had his name back. Others on the Blacklist, of course, were not as lucky: suicides, failed marriages, financial ruin. Christopher Trumbo said of his mother's loyalty to Dalton and the Constitution: "She hated bullies, and that's what she saw this as. And she was right."
RIP Cleo. Here's a short YouTube of a letter Dalton wrote to Cleo from prison, with a few home movies spliced in. It provides a sense of what a remarkable person she must've been.