Contents
Introduction
One: In the Hot Seat
Two: “I’m God, I think”
Three: The Family Curse
Four: “This is Mrs. Norman Maine”
Five: “He’ll cut you down to size”
Photos
Six: “None of Their Business”
Seven: Counter-Offensive
Eight: “Humoring you cost us twenty thousand dollars.”
Nine: “Grow old with me, The best is yet to be”
Ten: Sole Survivor
“The last living member of the Hollywood Ten, until his death in October [2000], articulates the cultural history of his own time as a screenwriter, Communist, and martyr to the blacklist.”
–New York Times
“Lardner’s breezy, engaging memoir [is] a story filled with enchanting details.”
–Time
“[A] new generation of film buffs will be charmed by Lardner’s wit and unpretentiousness.”
–Publishers Weekly
“Bracing prose, [and a] wealth of cinematic lore and insights into the screenwriting trade.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Lardner’s invaluable memoir bravely illuminates the realities of the movie business before and after the blacklist without a moment of self-pity or righteous indignation.”
–Entertainment Weekly
“Fascinating.”
–Carolyn See, Washington Post
“Irresistibly readable.”
–The New Yorker
“One of the shining talents of Hollywood screenwriting . . . Lardner covers those dark days in a deft, readable style . . . without rancor or rage.”
–Hollywood Reporter
My thanks to Amanda Urban. I also want to express my gratitude to Tom Engelhardt for his superior editing; to my daughter Kate, for moral and other support when I became ill and had difficulty working on the book; and to my son Jim, who under the same circumstances made an invaluable contribution to its final form and content.
–Ring Lardner, Jr.
Frances Chaney, Ring Lardner, Jr.’s actress-wife, doesn’t believe in speaking to informers. So one day in the mid-60s when Ring’s old Hollywood chum, the writer Budd Schulberg, encountered the Lardners at Sardi’s restaurant, he had to be nonplussed. While Frances turned her back on him, Ring, whom Budd recruited into the Communist Party in the 1930s, and named as a Communist before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (popularly known as HUAC) in the 1950s, put out his hand and gave a friendly hello.
When I asked Lardner about this some years later he simply said, “I don’t believe in blacklisting.” He is, one might say, recrimination-challenged and this lack of bitterness or score-settling adds to the air of authenticity which permeates this memoir of a modest man.
Ring Lardner, Jr., along with the late Dalton Trumbo, is probably the most famous member of the original Hollywood Ten, also known as the “unfriendly ten,” who went to prison for contempt of Congress when they refused to answer what was then known as the $64,000 question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” He is famous because of his eponymous father, the great American sportswriter and humorist, and for his films, two of which won Academy Awards for best screenplay—the Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy vehicle Woman of the Year in 1942, and in 1970, after fifteen years on the blacklist, M*A*S*H, the hilarious noir comedy about life among the medics during the Korean War.
But among the political cognoscenti he was famous for the line which gives this book its title. One never knows what one would do if given the choice by an inquisitorial investigating Committee of either betraying one’s beliefs and (former) comrades or losing one’s livelihood. Lardner’s response, for my money, met the Hemingway definition of courage, grace under pressure. As he told Committee Chair J. Parnell Thomas, “I could answer your question sir, but I would hate myself in the morning.” Not since Ring Lardner, Sr.’s “Shut up, he explained” has there been a better line.
The Hollywood Ten collectively are important because they resisted McCarthyism at an historically critical moment before the Senator himself came on the scene. Their hearing was in 1947 and McCarthy made his famous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech about Communists in the State Department in 1951. Trumbo and Lardner also showed that it is possible to resist and prevail. At the time, of course, their action sent a very different message—that in the overheated context of the domestic cold war, imprisonment could be the price one paid for exercising First Amendment rights. (The Ten declined to answer HUAC’s questions on First Amendment grounds, but most subsequent non-cooperating witnesses before HUAC and other congressional interrogators, learning from the Ten’s example, invoked the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination and stayed out of jail, but not off the blacklist.)
Lardner calls his last chapter “Sole Survivor.” And he is indeed the last of a family of four boys and a famous father; the last surviving member of the Hollywood Ten; and if not the “sole,” he seems to be one of a handful of the survivors of an era in which people willing to go to prison for their beliefs were largely wiped out of social, cultural and political life—and so, in a sense, of our history. Much has been written of the Hemingway/Fitzgerald cohort who went to Europe in the 1920s as a “lost generation,” but Lardner’s memoir should remind us that he and his peers, not just the directors, screenwriters and other movie workers in Hollywood, but the librarians, teachers, scientists, defense workers, diplomats, union organizers, and all those who lost out in the great red purge of the 1940s and 1950s were our real “lost generation.”
The cultural costs of McCarthyism have never been, perhaps cannot be, computed. How do you count, no less put a political, cultural or even commercial value on plays and screenplays unwritten, careers not undertaken or cut off at birth, families and psyches smashed from the pressures of uncertainty compounded by the realities of unemployment? How to quantify the cost of inventions not invented, ideas not explored, hypotheses untested. Television itself was born, shaped and came of age in the context of McCarthy era assumptions, when a crazed grocer in Syracuse, who maintained a list of suspected Reds, held sway over prime-time employment decisions. Who is to say what contribution the great red scare made to the bland and timid television culture which prevails to this day?
Though these may not be the questions that preoccupy Ring Lardner, Jr., in this memoir, through it he offers us a very personal way to consider them anew. At the time he appeared in front of HUAC, he