Cleo Trumbo, wife of blacklisted writer
LOS ANGELES - Cleo Trumbo - the widow of Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted for more than a decade as a member of the Hollywood Ten - died of age-related causes Oct. 9 at home in Los Altos, Calif. She was 93.
“She wasn’t a person to be in the limelight at all,’’ Mitzi Trumbo said of her mother. “She really devoted herself to . . . keeping the family together.’’
Dalton and Cleo Trumbo’s son Christopher, also a writer, said of the blacklist and the Red Scare years: “She hated bullies, and that’s what she saw this as. And she was right.’’
The year after they were married, in 1938, Dalton Trumbo’s acclaimed antiwar novel “Johnny Got His Gun’’ was published. He went on to receive an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for the 1940 movie “Kitty Foyle.’’
But in 1947, Trumbo was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee as part of its investigation into “Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry.’’
Cleo Trumbo joined her husband at the hearings in Washington, D.C., where Dalton and nine other men refused to cooperate with the committee by challenging its right to ask questions about their political beliefs.
Dubbed the Hollywood Ten, they were blacklisted by the studio owners and later indicted for contempt of Congress, tried, convicted and sentenced to prison.
After being blacklisted, Trumbo continued writing under assumed names. But he saw his income drop dramatically.
The year before Dalton Trumbo died in 1976 at 70, he belatedly accepted the Oscar for best motion picture story for the 1956 film “The Brave One,’’ which he had written under the pseudonym Robert Rich.
In 1993, Cleo Trumbo accepted an Oscar on behalf of her late husband for best motion picture story for the 1953 film “Roman Holiday,’’ which he wrote under the name of a friend, screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter.
In her speech to an audience at the Academy theater, she observed that the time of the blacklist had passed.
“But,’’ she said, “if we are not wise enough to learn the lessons of the blacklist, I am afraid that at some future time another generation will be faced with the same circumstance. Once again men and women will find themselves compelled to risk everything in a fight they did not choose and stand up for the principles so eloquently stated in our Constitution.’’