{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
---------- {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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