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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 was gaveled down by J. Parnell Thomas before he could finish his statement. The full statement, printed in this book, is eloquent, but the book itself, this tale of life as a Hollywood communist offers the real answer to the Committee’s question. That is the red meat, as it were, of a thoroughly unapologetic memoir by a man without many illusions.

Lardner makes clear that far from being glamorous, life as a Hollywood comrade was often time-consuming, boring and repetitious. Only occasionally did ideology enter the picture. Thus Lardner recommended to David O. Selznick that he not acquire Gone With the Wind “because I objected on political grounds to the glorification of slave owners and the Ku Klux Klan.” Given the shortage of US Communists today, what is truly weird about this account of life just before, during and after the anti-Communist hysteria which dominated the political culture in the 1940s and 1950s, is its contemporary resonance. It is almost as if confronted with the absence of a 21st century Red Menace, a new generation of post–cold war would-be red baiters decided to rehabilitate the old one. These anti-anti-anti-communists—citing both a cache of recently released cables between Moscow and its agents in this country that were intercepted during World War II; and also selectively leaked documents from KGB archives— seem to argue that, in effect, McCarthy & Co. were right all along: That the new documents reveal that American did indeed suffer from an internal red menace, that Washington was a nest of spies, that those, like the late editor of The Nation, Carey McWilliams, who called the old congressional investigations a witchhunt, were either fools or knaves deploying a misleading or misinformed metaphor. There were no witches in Salem but there were indeed Communists in Washington.

No matter that there are a host of real, unresolved questions surrounding the new cache of cables (as deciphered they are incomplete, fragmentary, include false identifications, chronological discrepancies, internal inconsistencies, fail to distinguish witting from unwitting sources, to mention only some of the problems); no matter that the spin accompanying many of the newly “released” KGB documents turns out to be an updated version of the old McCarthy era equation: to be a liberal is to be a pinko is to be a communist is to be a spy; no matter that any fair reading of the new evidence suggests that it cuts more than one way and that the jury is still out on the role of the US Communist Party vis-à-vis Soviet espionage; no matter that although there were indeed live Communists on the American scene only an infinitesimal number of them may have deserved the demonized traitor/spy label. (Lardner, by the way, makes clear that there was undoubtedly espionage on both sides; indeed, he tried to serve in the OSS and wrote the script for a wartime movie starring Gary Cooper as an OSS agent.) The unseemly and ahistorical rush to reconvict the American left based on half-baked evidence, suggests the weakness of the new post–cold war red baiter’s case, and reminds one of the political hysteria that is supposed to be part of our so-distant-as-to-seem-antique past.

Eventually HUAC was brought down by history, with a little help from the Yippies, building on the Lardner-Trumbo tradition of what Mark Twain once called the “assault of laughter.” Jerry Rubin appeared before HUAC in a red Santa Claus suit. And Abbie Hoffman showed up for his testimony in a red, white, and blue T-shirt, duly ripped by unruly souvenir-hunting demonstrators and/or the cops. Asked by the judge if he would like to make a statement on his own behalf, he replied, “Yes, your honor. I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.” By that time, 1968, it was possible to laugh HUAC and its roadshow out of town.

In this tragicomic memoir, full of fabulous Hollywood charm as well as political sadness, Lardner reports that he is often asked “Can it happen again?” His answer is, “Yes, but not in the same way.” I would agree, and one of the reasons it can’t happen in the same way is that Lardner, his buddy Trumbo, and a small platoon of other resisters over the years, made it so.

–Victor Navasky

October, 2000