{Hal's Note: While many of our classmates may not feel "solidarity" with the politics of The Hollywood Ten and while I urge those of you who don't know who they were to find out, their collective forced absence and that of dozens of others, from Hollywood and Broadway, due to the "Blacklist" severely affected the kinds of stories that we saw portrayed in the movies, on stage or on television when we were growing up. Content became politicized in a one sided way with their absense. Historians have used some of the following verbs "Drab" "Boring" "White" to describe the decade of our formative youth. Ever wonder why? Read on, please.}
Ring Lardner Jr., Wry Screenwriter and Last of the Hollywood 10, Dies at 85
By RICHARD SEVERO/The New York Times
Ring Lardner Jr., whose satirical screenplays twice won the Academy Award but
whose career collapsed in 1947 after he refused to tell Congress if he had
ever been a Communist, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
Mr. Lardner was the last surviving son of Ring Lardner, the baseball writer,
humorist and short-story author. He was also the last surviving member of the
Hollywood 10, the blacklisted group of writers, directors and producers who
were sent to Federal prison in 1950 for terms ranging from five months to a
year because they all refused to tell the House Un-American Activities
Committee if they were or ever had been members of the Communist Party or if
they knew of any Hollywood colleagues who were.
Ring Lardner Jr. shared an Academy Award for best original screenplay with
Michael Kanin in 1942 for "Woman of the Year," a comedy that marked the first
teaming of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. In 1970 he forcefully
re-established himself with an Oscar for best screenplay for "M*A*S*H," which
was based on Richard Hooker's novel about an irreverent Army medical unit
during the Korean war. These two movies were at either end of a lengthy
period between 1947 and the early 1960's when Mr. Lardner found it difficult
to get work in Hollywood under his own name.
In 1947 Mr. Lardner was an unrepentant and fiercely outspoken witness when he
was interrogated by the committee's chairman, the famously aggressive J.
Parnell Thomas, Republican of New Jersey. Mr. Lardner was, in fact, a
Communist, but he refused to answer Thomas because he felt that his political
leanings were none of the government's business.
'I'd Hate Myself
In the Morning' At one point Thomas demanded to know if Mr. Lardner was or
ever had been a Communist. Mr. Lardner started to reply, then hesitated.
"It is a very simple question," the congressman said sharply. "Anybody would
be proud to answer it ⤲ any real American would be proud to answer the
question, `Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?' "
"I could answer the question exactly the way you want," Mr. Lardner replied,
"but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning." An angry Thomas had him
removed from the witness stand.
In late 1947, 20th Century-Fox, which had been paying Mr. Lardner $2,000 a
week, announced that "his employment with the company has been terminated."
Two weeks after that, Mr. Lardner and the nine others who refused to answer
were indicted and subsequently convicted of contempt of Congress.
Lawyers for the Hollywood 10 succeeded in getting the court to agree to
procedural delays, but all their ploys were unsuccessful in protecting their
clients, who, in addition to Mr. Lardner, were Albert Maltz, Dalton Trumbo,
Samuel Ornitz, John Howard Lawson, Herbert Biberman, Adrian Scott, Lester
Cole, Alvah Bessie and Edward Dmytryk. There were many others in Hollywood
who also ran afoul of the committee, and they were blacklisted, too. Of the
Hollywood 10, only Mr. Dmytryk, after serving his jail term, named names. Mr.
Dmytryk, deciding he was making a martyr of himself for an ideology in which
he no longer believed, went on to cooperate with the committee, salvaging his
directing career.
Mr. Lardner was sentenced to a year in the federal prison at Danbury, Conn.
As the time approached when he had to turn himself in, he put his house in
Santa Monica, Calif., up for sale and attracted buyers with an advertisement
that carried the caption "Owner Going to Jail." He said he took a $9,000 loss
on the house, which was purchased by a physician.
But by the time he began to serve what turned out to be a little more than
nine months in 1950, he learned that Congressman Thomas was also imprisoned
in Danbury after his conviction on defrauding the Government by putting
fictitious workers on his Congressional payroll. They "became reacquainted,"
he wrote later.
After Mr. Lardner left prison, he accepted his forced unemployment with
laconic wit. As a nonworking writer, he said, "My tennis game improved, my
wife conceived and bore another child, making five for whose rearing and
education I was financially responsible." Some of his less fortunate former
colleagues, he said, went into carpentry, selling women's clothes,
bartending, driving a school bus and waiting on tables. He did none of these
things, searched for writing assignments and thought the whole thing "would
blow over like other periodic tempests in the movie business."
But it did not blow over and Mr. Lardner found himself working briefly in
Mexico, in New York and in London, writing television series in the late
1950's and early 60's, the best known of which was "The Adventures of Robin
Hood," starring Richard Greene. The show was produced in London and sold to
American networks.
During this period, Mr. Lardner used several pen names to conceal his
identity, including that of Oliver Skene. On one occasion, in 1958, he used
the name Philip Rush as the credit on a movie he wrote for Sidney Poitier
called "Virgin Island," and was quite chagrined when a British historian of
the same name turned up and sent a tart letter to The Times of London, saying
that he had absolutely nothing to do with the movie.
Some people in Hollywood tried to help Mr. Lardner. In the early 1960's, the
producer and director Otto Preminger was criticized by the American Legion
and other groups after he hired Mr. Lardner to adapt "Genius," a novel by
Patrick Dennis, for the screen. The project was ultimately shelved.
During the same time period Mr. Lardner collaborated with Ian Hunter on
several projects, including "Foxy," a Bert Lahr musical that failed on
Broadway. Mr. Lardner did have some success, however, as the author, with
Terry Southern, of the 1965 movie "The Cincinnati Kid," which starred Steve
McQueen and Edward G. Robinson.
Among Mr. Lardner's other screen projects, either as author or co-author,
were "Meet Dr. Christian" (1939); "Courageous Dr. Christian" (1940); "The
Cross of Lorraine" (1943); "Tomorrow the World" (1944); "Cloak and Dagger"
(1946) and "Forever Amber" (1947). Among the screenplays he either wrote or
contributed to under pseudonyms were "The Forbidden Street" (1949) and "Four
Days Leave" (1950). One of the other screenplays he wrote after the blacklist
was "The Greatest" (1977), starring Muhammad Ali.
Ringgold Wilmer Lardner Jr. was born in Chicago on Aug. 15, 1915, one of four
sons born to Ring Lardner and the former Ellis Abbott. The other three sons,
James, David and John, also became writers but died relatively young. James,
24, fought and died in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer with the Lincoln
Brigade. David, 25, was killed by a land mine in Germany while covering the
World War II battleground for The New Yorker. John, 47, a critic and
journalist, died of a heart attack in 1960.
Mr. Lardner's first byline appeared in 1919, when he was just 4 years old. It
was a travel story called "The Young Immigrunts" but it was really written by
his father and described the family angst of a cross-country trip by
automobile.
Introduced to David O. Selznick
When Mr. Lardner was about 6, his family moved to Greenwich, Conn., and then
to Great Neck, on Long Island, where neighbors or regular visitors included
the journalists Herbert Bayard Swope, Grantland Rice and Heywood Broun, the
authors H. L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woolcott and the composer
and critic Deems Taylor. Mr. Lardner was naturally a left-handed person, but
his parents instructed him to write and eat with his right hand. He thought
this probably caused him to develop a stutter as a child.
He graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and went to Princeton,
where he joined the Socialist Club. After his sophomore year, he sailed to
Hamburg, where he caught a train to the Soviet Union and enrolled at the
Anglo-American Institute of the University of Moscow, a center established to
encourage young Americans to support the Soviet system. Young Lardner was won
over. He returned to New York and in 1935 got a job working for Stanley
Walker, then editor of The Daily Mirror. He did not remain there long. His
roommate at Princeton had been Herbert Bayard Swope Jr., whose father, a
former executive editor of The New York World, introduced him to David O.
Selznick, who was then in the process of starting his own movie company.
At first, Mr. Lardner was assigned to work with Mr. Selznick's publicity
director. But after a year or so passed, Mr. Selznick asked Mr. Lardner and a
co-worker, Budd Schulberg, a reader in the story department, to rewrite some
scenes for a new movie featuring Fredric March and Janet Gaynor. It was
called "A Star Is Born" and it already had four writers assigned to it
full-time. The pair is credited with the famous line at the end of the film,
"This is Mrs. Norman Maine speaking." Mr. Selznick liked their work and said
that the two should consider themselves scriptwriters.
Not all Mr. Lardner's judgments were wise ones, however. Mr. Selznick asked
his secretary, Sylvia Schulman, and Mr. Lardner, who was dating Miss Schulman
(and later married her ) if they would read Margaret Mitchell 's novel "Gone
With the Wind.' and tell him if they thought it was good enough to be made
into a movie. Miss Schulman gave it an enthusiastic "yes," but Mr. Lardner
thought that "Gone With the Wind" had no future as a movie.
By 1937 Mr. Lardner, he would later recall, had been recruited by the
Communist Party in Hollywood and was attending a Marxist study group and
similar meetings four nights a week. In time he became a member of such
groups as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Citizens Committee for the
Defense of Mexican-American Youth, the Hollywood Writers Mobilization Against
the War (in Vietnam - Hal). He also served on the board of the Screen Writers Guild.
In 1941 he got an important boost to his career when the writer Garson Kanin
gave Miss Hepburn a story called "Woman of the Year," which Mr. Kanin's
brother, Michael, had written with Mr. Lardner. Miss Hepburn liked it so much
that she went to Louis B. Mayer at MGM, and said she wanted to play the title
role, a world famous political commentator who gets such a comeuppance from a
sportswriter (played by Spencer Tracy) that she marries him. Miss Hepburn
demanded $200,000 for the story, took $100,000 for herself, and gave the rest
to Mr. Kanin and Mr. Lardner. Their script received an Academy Award in 1942;
since then "Woman of the Year" has been turned into a successful Broadway
musical and another film in 1976.
During World War II, Mr. Lardner served in the Army Signal Corps and was sent
not into battle but to Astoria, Queens, where he spent most of his military
career writing the script for a training film.
Credit, of Course, for M*A*S*H
Mr. Lardner felt that for him, if not for all the other members of the
Hollywood 10, the blacklist ended at some point in the 1960's and there was
no question about his receiving credit for the work he did on "M*A*S*H."
After "M*A*S*H" proved to be a big moneymaker, he was asked if he thought it
could be adapted for television. He said that "M*A*S*H" had no future as a
television show. (It became one of television's most successful series, from
1972-83.)
In 1981 Mr. Lardner turned from screenwriting to concentrate on books. In
addition to "The Lardners: My Family Remembered," he was the author of two
novels, "The Ecstasy of Owen Muir" and "All For Love." His final book, "I'd
Hate Myself in the Morning" (Nation Books), a memoir, is scheduled for
publication in January.
Mr. Lardner's marriage to Miss Schulman ended in divorce. He is survived by
his wife, Frances Chaney, his brother David's widow, whom he married in 1946.
Also surviving are three sons, Peter, of St. Augustine, Fla., James, of New
York, and Joseph, of Los Angeles; two daughters, Ann Waswo of Oxford,
England, and Katharine, of New York; seven grandchildren and five great-
grandchildren. Joseph and Katharine were Ms. Chaney's children from her
marriage to David Lardner.
Although Mr. Lardner allowed his Communist Party membership to lapse in the
1950's, he returned to Moscow in 1987 and told Philip Taubman of The New York
Times, "I've never regretted my association with Communism. I still think
that some form of socialism is a more rational way to organize a society, but
I recognize it hasn't worked anywhere yet." Mr. Lardner wrote in his final
book that he never wanted the United States to be remodeled along Soviet
lines and always believed in the democratic process.
The House inquiry into suspected disloyalty in Hollywood left some of its
victims bitter and angry that some of their colleagues, like the writer Budd
Schulberg, co- operated with the committee.
One day, Mr. Lardner, accompanied by his wife, Miss Chaney, encountered Mr.
Schulberg in a restaurant. Mrs. Lardner looked the other way because she did
not want to talk to an informer. But Mr. Lardner took the hand of his old
friend and co-worker and shook it. "I shake hands with anybody," he said. "I
don't believe in blacklisting."
Blacklisted in Hollywood for Contempt of Congress
Besides Ring Lardner Jr., these are the members of the Hollywood 10 who were
jailed and fined in 1950 for contempt of Congress:
JOHN HOWARD LAWSON A co-founder and the first president of the Screen Writers
Guild. Among the movies for which he was not credited was the script for "Cry
the Beloved Country," which described the oppression of blacks in South
Africa. He died in 1977.
ALVAH BESSIE Wrote or contributed to the screenplays for "Hotel Berlin,"
"Objective Burma," "The Very Thought of You" and "Northern Pursuit." He died
in 1985.
DALTON TRUMBO Won an Oscar for the script of "The Brave One," which he
received in 1975, some 18 years after it was given to "Robert Rich," his
pseudonym. He died in 1976.
SAMUEL ORNITZ Wrote 25 movies, most of them not well known, between 1929 and
1949, when he was blacklisted. He died in 1985.
LESTER COLE Wrote or contributed to the films "Objective Burma," "The Romance
of Rosy Ridge," "High Wall" and "The House of the Seven Gables." He published
a memoir called "Hollywood Red" and became a stage actor and playwright,
changing his name to Lester Copley. He died in 1985 at age 81.
ALBERT MALTZ Went to Mexico and wrote for the movies under pseudonyms. after
his blacklisting. He returned to Hollywood in the 1970's and wrote "Two Mules
for Sister Sara" and "The Beguiled." His earlier films included "Broken
Arrow" and the Technicolor epic about the first years of Christianity, "The
Robe." He died in 1985.
HERBERT BIBERMAN Helped found the Screen Directors Guild. Before his
blacklisting, he directed "One Way Ticket," "Meet Nero Wolfe" and "The Master
Race." He died in 1971.
ADRIAN SCOTT Produced "Murder My Sweet" and "So Well Remembered" but was
blacklisted after being named as a communist by Edward Dmytryk. He died in
1973.
EDWARD DMYTRYK Directed "The Caine Mutiny," "Cornered," "Raintree County," "A
Walk on the Wild Side" and "The Young Lions." He died in 1999.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
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{Furthur Notes From Hal: Edward Dmytryk received a Special Oscar several years ago that was hotly debated. It was generally agreed that he was given the prestigious award because he eventually cooperated and "talked." (i.e. gave names.)
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