Dalton Trumbo

Dalton Trumbo, the Colorado-born screenwriter who became the most famous of the Hollywood Ten, died of a heart attack at his home on Beverly Glen Boulevard in Los Angeles on September 10, 1976. He was seventy. His wife, Cleo, and their children were with him. Born James Dalton Trumbo in Montrose, Colorado, on December 9, 1905, and raised partly in Grand Junction, he wrote his way from studio contract work into the front rank of American screenwriters — and then into the blacklist. In 1947 he refused to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee about Communist Party membership. Contempt of Congress, prison, and years of fronted or pseudonymous scripts followed. Roman Holiday and The Brave One won Oscars that could not carry his name at the time; Spartacus and Exodus later broke the silence when producers put Trumbo on the credits in 1960. He had already written the antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, which he later adapted and directed for the screen. Papillon and other late credits returned him to a public career that looked, from the outside, like vindication and, from the inside, like unfinished business. He kept a bathtub desk myth and a sharper truth: the blacklist stole years, and he stole some of them back by working anyway. He died in Los Angeles on September 10, 1976. The credits restored after the fact cannot restore the time; they do mark the end of an industry's willingness to pretend he had never written a word.