Cleo Trumbo, wife of blacklisted writer
By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times / October 20, 2009

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.

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