Ring Lardner, Jr.: I’d Hate Myself in the Morning. A Memoir. Introduction by Victor Navasky. NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press / Nation Books, 2000. 198 pp. Ill., no index.
I’d Hate Myself in the Morning is the memoir of a highly talented yet modest man, one who insists from the start: “We weren’t as heroic as people make us out to be.” (pg. 13) In telling of his life as one of the earliest communist party members in Hollywood, Ring Lardner, Jr., portrays himself as someone who simply wanted a more just world, not one who wanted the US remade along Soviet lines.
He begins with his 1947 appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), whose chair, J. Parnell Thomas, would not allow him to present his prepared remarks, which included the sentence, “We are already subject in Hollywood to a censorship that makes most pictures empty and childish.” Incidentally, the title of this book is taken from the brief statement he was able to give. Addressing the committee, he said he could theoretically answer their questions, “but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.” (pg. 9)
For Lardner, movie-making was a way to bring about social change, not primarily a means of personal enrichment. His career as a screenwriter went hand in hand with his political agenda. “Many of us had entered our professions with hopes, which we still harbored in varying degrees, that the great new medium of motion pictures would be a force for change, not in the crude way that such a thing might have been conceived in the Soviet world, but in the sense of allowing us to portray some of the not so beautiful realities of modern life and to gently illuminate areas of possible improvement.” (pg. 7)
After the dramatic curtain raiser of the hearings, he takes us back to his childhood and youth. Among the highlights: As a student at Andover in 1932, he won first place in the categories Most Original, Wittiest, and Biggest Bluffer in the Classroom. At daily chapel service, he once hid an alarm clock in the drawer of the lectern, timed to ring twenty minutes into the sermon. When it went off, he was highly amused when the drawer got stuck and the alarm continued to ring on and on as the clergyman kept speaking, until finally it ran down.
Like many young people at the time, he was fascinated by the Soviet Union as an experiment in creating a more just society. Among his more unfashionable opinions is his defense of New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who painted a generally favorable picture of life there, notoriously downplaying reports of starvation in the Ukraine and other parts of the USSR. In retrospect, Lardner engages in some self-criticism for lending credence to the Moscow show trials, calling himself “woefully naïve.”
Soon enough he was able to acquire first-hand experience of life under socialism. The USSR he visited in 1934 still had something of a revolutionary spark about it. Back then, when one could swim in the Moscow River without getting a lethal dose of chemicals, he notes: “The waterfront was segregated into four separate, fenced-off beaches: male nude, female nude, mixed in bathing suits, and mixed nude.” (pg. 46)
He had come to Russia as a student, enrolling at the Anglo-American Institute of the University of Moscow, “a center established to encourage young Americans to support the Soviet system,” according to his long NY Times obituary. One day, after he put up a satirical wall newspaper, the authorities called him to account. Lardner provides an amusing take on the hearing, from which, however, some important details are missing.
He identifies his chief inquisitor as the humorless “Professor Pinkevich.” This is likely Albert Petrovich Pinkevich, who – according to Wikipedia – was the rector of Moscow State Pedagogical Univ., “an important educationist and author of The New Education in the Soviet Republic, who became a victim of Stalin’s Great Purge, ‘disappearing’ in 1937 to a Gulag labour camp.” If Lardner had known of his fate, perhaps he would have accorded him somewhat more respectful treatment.
Lardner was imbued with a spirit of defiance from a young age, and this is what drew him to Marxism, though at the time he believed it purely the result of rigorous intellectual inquiry. Looking back, he confesses to some anxiety about developments in the USSR after the war: “We also expected that under Marxist socialism, Russia would become more, rather than less, democratic, and the failure of that to happen was beginning to stir doubts among some of us even as we faced the committee [HUAC].”
Eventually he was convicted of the crime of not answering the usual questions (“Are you now, or have you ever been…?”) to the committee’s satisfaction. When he was taken to prison in Danbury, Conn., Lardner had to act as guide to the US Marshals escorting him; they were unfamiliar with the train stations, so he led them to the proper platforms. Ever the helpful sort, he would later get 15 days off his sentence as a reward for improving the English of the Federal Correction materials it was his job to type up – thus proving that a command of style can be both practical and profitable. By the way, one of his fellow inmates proved to be none other than former Representative J. Parnell Thomas himself, serving nine months on a conviction for corruption. The righteous communist-hunter from New Jersey had put non-existent workers on the payroll and collected their salaries himself.
Personally, Thomas’s end comes as little surprise – HUAC members never struck me as a reputable bunch. When I was a college student, I spent fall semester of my junior year (1972) in Washington. I was casting around for a research project, and ended up talking to a member of the committee’s staff in his Capitol Hill office. HUAC was by that time a soon-to-be-extinct dinosaur – it would finally be abolished in 1975, though its moribund status was already clear. At this remove, the details of the meeting are a little sketchy in my mind. I must have made an appointment with one of the counsels, very likely on the Republican side. I recall talking with a sweaty, overweight guy, at a time when obesity was less common that it is today. In his uncomfortably tight polyester jacket, he looked like someone whose job required him to wear clothes he hated. Naturally he defended the work of the committee, which was to protect American from communist infiltration. Overall I had the impression of a man who had sold his soul to purchase a passage on a vessel that was doomed. I hadn’t yet read Catcher in the Rye, but when I did, I recognized him – he was what Holden Caulfield memorably termed “a phony.” In the end, I chose a different topic for my research.
Lardner wrote these memoirs in his 80s, so naturally the reader expects some words of wisdom. Here’s what he has to say on growing old: “Time, plus a competent doctor and the right medicine, heals most wounds and temporary ailments. But then comes age and a series of afflictions that are qualitatively different in that there are no cures, no roads back to full health. What you look for instead in a treatment is a way to alleviate the symptoms and slow the process of degeneration. The best you can hope for is essentially a stay of execution.” (pg. 179)
He offers some observations on the human need for religion: “Its enduring power … can be largely attributed to the urge – as strong in modern as in ancient times, evidently – to believe that we are somehow exempt from the cycle of birth, growth, decline, and death that governs every other form of life.” “Believers in a God who can solve everything” are not, he says, “completely rational people.” (pp. 184, 188)
Earlier in the volume he offers first-hand reflections on the drinking life. “There has been a lot of speculation about what makes writers become drinkers (or the other way around). Life has put me in a position to discuss this topic with some authority, and I can lend my support to a few of the standard theories: the stress of deadlines, the search for answers to difficult creative problems, the need to face internal demons on a regular professional basis. Another explanation, easily overlooked, is opportunity. If you work in a public place, as most people do, it’s difficult to go off on a bat; practical considerations force you to postpone your drinking until the working day has ended. Writers, who set their own hours of labor and diversion from labor, have an easier time sustaining a career and an addiction – for a while.… My prolonged empirical research into the same disease leads me to conclude that drinking is more apt to increase depression than relieve it.” Being practical by nature, he preferred vodka, “the drink with the least detectable smell and the incidental benefit of being available at low prices.” (pp. 43-44, 58)
Born in 1915, Lardner died in 2000, shortly before the publication of this memoir. His obituary lists two Oscars, one for best original screenplay (Woman of the Year), the other for best screenplay adapted from another medium (M*A*S*H*). The NY Times hailed him as a “wry screenwriter and last of the Hollywood 10.” To phrase it the way he himself would have preferred, he was the last survivor of the original group who never cooperated with the authorities.
Two drawbacks: He does not say much on something he obviously knew a lot about, the art of script writing. And the lack of an index is especially lamentable, as he mentions well over 200 individuals, some famous (Dalton Trumbo), others largely forgotten.
Update (October 2017)
I have just gotten around to watching Trumbo on DVD, starring Bryan Cranston. One scene in particular stood out for me. At the Academy Awards ceremony honoring Trumbo near the end, he is introduced as follows:
Occasionally, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest, who so subordinates his own ego to the concerns of others, who lives in such harmony with all the standards of the community that he is revered and loved by everyone. Such a man Dalton Trumbo is not.
Compare this to the opening paragraph of chapter seven of I’d Hate Myself in the Morning (pg. 143):
At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not.
Lardner also suggests that it was Trumbo’s idea to set Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger in competition with each other to see who would be the first to break the blacklist – another idea taken over by the movie. (pg. 151)
According to the closing credits, the movie was based on the biography Trumbo, written by Bruce Cook with the subject’s full cooperation. The book first came out in 1977, shortly after Dalton Trumbo’s death, and was reissued in 2015 around the same time as the movie was released. If I ever get around to examining Cook’s biography, I will provide a further update. For the moment, it seems that either Lardner quoted from Cook, or the movie quoted from Lardner. In either case, the quotation took place without attribution.
Since there appears to be some interest, I attach the index I have compiled; it includes some members of the Hollywood Ten not mentioned by Lardner.
Adventures of Robin Hood 141
Altman, Robert 160ff, 171
Arkansas Judge, based on False Witness 91
Astor, Mary 96
Auslander, Jacob 130
“Battle Hymn of the Republicans” 198
Berkeley, Martin 99
Bernstein, Walter – blacklisted 1950 (later wrote “The Front” and “House on Carroll Street”) 168
Bessie, Alvah – One of the Hollywood 10. Wrote or contributed to the
screenplays for Hotel Berlin, Objective Burma, The Very Thought
of You and Northern Pursuit. He died in 1985. Not mentioned in this book.
Biberman, Herbert — One of the Hollywood 10. 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. 192, 194, 195
Birdwell, Russell 73
Boleslavsky, Richard, Acting: The First Six Lessons 77
Breath of Scandal, dir. Michael Curtiz 149
Brecht, Bert 118, 122
Bridge on the River Kwai, Pierre Boule 148
Broun, Heywood 37
Browder, Earl 53
Brown, Kay 76
Butler, Hugo 103, 137, 197
Cagney, Jimmy 66
Cameron, Angus, and Kahn 136
Capra, Frank 178
The Cardinal 154
Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund: Inquisition in Hollywood 154
Chayevsky, Paddy 139
Chevalier, Haakon 122f
Cincinnati Kid, w. Steve McQueen 158
Cloak and Dagger, dir. Fritz Lang 111
Coe, Fred 139
Cole, Lester — One of the Hollywood 10. 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. Not mentioned
in this book.
Collins, Richard 133f
Counterattack, published by Aware, Inc. 193
Crick, Francis 183
Cross of Lorraine 61, 97f, 196
Cukor, George 71
Daily Mirror, Hearst 52
Daily Worker 103
Danbury, Conn. 9, 129
Dassin, Jules 192
Davies, Joseph, US ambassador 51
Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker 183
Death Row Brothers 177
Defiant Ones, w. Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier 148
Dietrich, Marlene – see Garden of Allah
Dmytryk, Edward — One of the Hollywood 10. Directed The Caine
Mutiny, Cornered, Raintree County, A Walk on the Wild Side and
The Young Lions. He died in 1999. 129, 133, 137, 197
Dodd, Martha Through Embassy Eyes 106
Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov 32
Dumas, Alexander, Count of Monte Cristo, Vicomte de
Bragelonne 32
Dunne, Philip 117, 125
Duranty, Walter, New York Times 50f
Eclipse, novel by Dalton Trumbo 103
Ecstasy of Owen Muir, novel by Ring Lardner 135f
Engelhardt, Tom – dedication
Exodus 151, 153
Fadiman, William 90
Farrago’s Retreat 175f
Feldmann, Frau, family nurse, Prussian 29f
Ferrer, Jose 44
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, and Zelda 37, 38, 79, 103, 134
Fleming, Victor 71
Forbidden Street 126
Ford, John 94, 118
Foreman, Carl 148
Forever Amber 5, 116, 151f
Foster, William Z. 112
Four Days Leave, with Cornel Wilde 126
Foxy (adaptation of Volpone) 154
Foy, Bryan 88
Freeman, Y. Frank 150
Friendly Persuasion (no writing credit) 146
Garbo, Greta 79
Garden of Allah, w. Marlene Dietrich, Charles Boyer 77f
Gavin, John 150
Gaynor, Janet 80
Gentleman’s Agreement 110
Goldberg, Alice 102
Goldwyn, Samuel and Frances 107f
Gone With the Wind ix
The Greatest, with Muhammad Ali 173
Gries, Tom 173
Hangmen Also Die 111
Harlow, Jean 158
Hawking, Stephen 184
Hecht, Ben 72, 81
Hellman, Lillian, Scoundrel Time 11, 12, 80
Hello Dolly 156
Hepburn, Kate Philadelphia Story 91f, 132, 158
Hersholt, Jean 90
Hill, Russell 65
Hindus, Maurice 50
Hitler Youth 45
How Green Was My Valley 117
HUAC vii-viii, 1f, 118ff, 193 and passim
Hughes, Howard 94
Humoresque, written by Clifford Odets 120
Hunter, Ian McLellan 54, 90, 105, 140, 198
Huston, John 89
I Lost my Girlish Laughter 88
Jarrico, Paul 55, 194, 198
Jerome, V.J. 103
Jewison, Norman 159
Johnston, Eric 121, 124
Jones, Jennifer 87
Kahn, Gordon52
Kanin, Garson (from Rochester!) 91
Kaplan, Sol 198
Karloff, Boris 140
Kaye, Danny 6
Kazan, Eliah 134
Kennedy, John F. and Robert F. 153f
Kenny, Robert 119
Kirov assassination 50
Lahr, Bert 157
Lang, Fritz 196 (see also Cloak and Dagger)
Lasky, Jesse, Jr. 147
Laura, w. Clifton Webb 107, 117
Lawrence of Arabia 154
Lawson, John Howard — One of the Hollywood 10. 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. 103, 127
Lewton, Val 75
Lincoln Brigade 64
Lindtberg, Leopold 127
Lombard, Carole, Nothing Sacred 73ff, 174
Lonely Are the Brave 151
Loren, Sophia 149
Losey, Joseph, Big Night 137, 192
Mahin, John Lee 96
Maltz, Albert — One of the Hollywood 10. 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. 128, 153f
M*A*S*H* 28, 159ff, 169
Masur, Richard 195
Mayer, Louis B. 93, 96, 121
McKenney, Ruth: My Sister Eileen 110
McNulty, John 52
Mercer, Johnny 154f
Mission to Moscow 105
Molnar, Ferenc 149
Moon is Blue 152
Morris, Errol 184
Moscow 46-52
Mostel, Zero 140, 193, 197
Murphy, Ray 145
Mussolini, Vittorio 89
Mutiny on the Bounty 172f
Navasky, Victor viii-x, 134
Nazi-Soviet Pact 101
New Masses 53
New Milford, Conn. 60, 66
North Star 108
Nothing Sacred 81
Oppenheimer, George 81
Ornitz, Samuel — One of the Hollywood 10. Wrote 25 movies, most
of them not well known, between 1929 and 1949, when he was
blacklisted. He died in 1985. Not mentioned in this book.
O’Shea, Daniel 82
Parker, Dorothy 79, 100
Paine, Tom 182, 188
Pearson, Frank 177f
Petrie, Daniel, Jr. 195
Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. 34
Piel, Eleanor Jackson 177
Pinkevich, Prof., Director of Anglo-American Institute at
“University of Moscow” (Wikipedia: From 1924 to 1930, the
[Moscow State Pedagogical] University’s rector was Albert
Petrovich Pinkevich, an important educationist and author of
The New Education in the Soviet Republic, who became a victim
of Stalin’s Great Purge, “disappearing” in 1937 to a Gulag labour
camp) 46f
Polonsky, Abraham 140, 154
Ponti, Carlo 149
Preminger, Otto 106, 116, 151, 153, 154, 169
Princeton Univ. 39, 44
Prisoner of Zenda 69
Rand, Ayn 120
Rankin, John, Senator from Mississippi 5f, 113
Rapf, Maurice 46, 103
Red River, written by Borden Chase 173
Rice, Grantland 34f
Riskin, Robert 178
Ritchie, Michael 168
Robinson, Edward G. 6, 114, 159
Roman Holiday, w. Gregory Peck 140
Rose, Billy 156f
Ross, Herbert 165
Rush, Philip 168
Russell, Louis 122
Salt, Waldo 55, 122, 172, 191
Salt of the Earth 194
Schildkraut, Joseph 78
Schulberg, Budd vii, 46, 103, 134
—–, P.B., his father 68
Scott, Adrian– One of the Hollywood 10. Produced Murder My
Sweet and So Well Remembered but was blacklisted after being
named as a communist by Edward Dmytryk. He died in 1973.
Not mentioned in this book.
Scottsboro Boys 48
Selznick, David 46, 67-73, 83f
—–, Irene 87
Semi-Tough, by Dan Jenkins 168
Shea, Joseph 69
Sheean, Vincent 63
Shipley, Ruth 126f
Signoret, Simone 127
Sinatra, Frank 153
Skene, Oliver (Lardner’s pen name)
Snope, H. B. 38, 67
Sondergaard, Gail 192
Song of Russia 5, 105
Spartacus, w. Kirk Douglas 151, 153
Star is Born 79f, 98
Stark, Ray 165
Stead, Christina The Man Who Loved Children 175, 192
Stevens, George 94f, 96
Stuart, Donald 44
Syracuse, NY, supermarket owner (appears as “Hubert Jackson” in “The Front”) 193
Taylor, Robert 192
Tender Comrade 121
Thalberg, Irving 172
Thomas, J. Parnell 131 (see also HUAC)
Thomas, Norman 37
Thompson, Dorothy 91
Trumbo, Dalton — One of the Hollywood 10. 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.
vii, 55, 66, 101f, 119, 121, 125, 127, 140, 143f, 147f, 151, 174, 197
Tomorrow the World 8, 107, 110, 196
Tone, Franchot 126
Tory Anarchism 51
Tracy, Spencer 94, 158
Turner, Lana Marriage is a Private Affair 97
Vidal, Gore 154f, 186
Virgin Island, dir. John Cassavetes 167
The Volunteer 178, 192
Vorhaus, Bernard 90
Walker, Stanley, NY Herald Tribune 52
Warner, Jack 889, 120
Wechsler, Lazar 126
Weinstein, Hannah 140, 176
Welles, Orson 88
Wellman, William 74, 79
Wexley, John 111
What Makes Sammy Run? 103
Whitney, John Hay 68, 76
Wilson, Mike 146, 148, 154, 194, 197
Wilson, Woodrow 107
Wolfert, Ira 174
Wolff, Milton 64
Woman of the Year vii, 8, 95f, 104, 108, 166, 196, 198
Woollcott, Alexander 39
Yearling, with Gregory Peck 94
Young, Nedrick 148f
Zanuck, Darryl 84f, 107, 117, 124, 163, 166
—–, Richard 161
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