anonymous visitors had violated the shrine. If the perpetrators of a stunt like that had been discovered, we would have been placed on probation. I was also involved several times in offenses that could have resulted in instant expulsion. The Prohibition Amendment was in force at the time and speakeasies, being illegal, naturally didn’t require proof of age. I was one of a small group of venturesome boys who would sneak out of our dormitories on a Saturday night, board a bus to the nearby industrial town of Lawrence, and spend an hour or two drinking bootleg beer.
The most memorable event of my years at Andover was my four-story fall from a dormitory window ledge. I was standing on that narrow ledge holding onto a shutter because I intended to enter by window the locked room of a boy who had refused to share a box of goodies from home. I had my advance foot on his ledge when the shutter came loose, and I lost my grip, falling to a patch of lawn and fracturing my shoulder and pelvis. (My head missed a cement block by about six inches.) I spent the next six weeks in the school infirmary and a Boston hospital. Despite all this activity and inactivity, I managed to function as editor of the school literary magazine and to graduate with a decent academic record while garnering prizes for writing and speaking at commencement, where I also served as class historian.
The first political stand I can remember taking was to declare myself a Democrat in the early stages of the Great Depression, partly because I found the image of President Herbert Hoover displeasing and partly to annoy my parents, who were nominal Republicans, although they rarely bothered to vote. I had not yet turned sixteen when, at a bus stop between Boston and New York in June of 1931, I climbed onto the roof of the vehicle in which Jim and I were traveling home from Andover, and—at no one’s urging but my own—delivered an impromptu speech in support of New York Governor and presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But by November, had I been eligible to vote for him, I would not have done so. I was spending my weekends touring the state of New Jersey as a member of the Socialist Club of Princeton University, and mounting soap-boxes to further the candidacy of Norman Thomas, Class of 1905, who returned to the campus twice a year to preach at a Sunday chapel service and meet in the evening with his political disciples in the student body. I can’t recall all the factors that led me to this conversion; certainly, one was the congressional candidacy of the Socialist ticket in Connecticut of Heywood Broun, a friend of my father’s who always gave us boys something to think about and laugh at. But he wouldn’t have had such an influence on me, I’m sure, if not for the bigger factor in my leftward migration: the growing severity of the Depression and what I assessed as the failure of both major parties to come to grips with it in their platforms.
The idea of going to Princeton originated with another family friend, Scott Fitzgerald, who described its virtues to me when I was about eight. My brothers and I liked Scott, who told us stories and performed card tricks for us. But it was Zelda, his wife, who made the greater impression on me at that age. I have never seen a photograph that conveyed the beauty I saw in her, or known another adult who seemed to say whatever came into her head without any discernible exercise of judgment.
Scott and Zelda moved to France after only a year and a half as neighbors of ours. During the Great Neck period, the friendship that developed between Dad and Scott was based in part on their joint fondness for alcohol. They were nearly twelve years apart in age and drastically different in ambitions and opinions, but they so enjoyed each other (and the whiskey) that they sometimes talked all night and needed a day or more to sleep it off before they could get back to work. Scott was a great conversationalist in those days, vain but charming, full of ambition and concern about his literary reputation. Dad was also captivated by Zelda, whose symptoms of mental illness were not yet manifest. “Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist,” he once wrote, “and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.”
Four years later, in 1937, I met a far different Scott at Dorothy Parker’s house in Hollywood, and saw him intermittently until his death in December 1940. In the intervening period, as described in his book The Crack-up, he had undergone a drastic personality transformation. He spoke little and without visible emotion, and he was able to stay on the wagon for longer stretches of time. But when he went off it, recovery was a much harder struggle. He was pessimistic about the movie work he was doing and about what had happened to his standing as a writer. He had to face the fact that his books were no longer selling, while his former protégée, Ernest Hemingway, had a smash hit in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Scott died without finishing his final novel, The Last Tycoon, and without any grounds for anticipating that he would be regarded as a literary pioneer and one of the great American writers of the century.
A classmate who became a close friend and my roommate my sophomore year was Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr., whose family had also lived nearby in Great Neck. Swope, Sr., had been editor of the highly regarded New York World, and I spent a good deal of weekend time at their family homes in Manhattan and Sands Point, Long Island, which were known as gathering places for the cream of New York literary society. One of the people I met through the Swopes was Alexander Woollcott, the dramatic and literary critic, essayist and radio star-to-be, who engineered my first professional writing assignment at the age of seventeen.
Launching a new magazine called Esquire in the spring of 1933, the editor Arnold Gingrich decided to commission an article from a representative of the college generation. Woollcott recommended me, having read my work in Princeton’s literary and humor magazines, and I eagerly accepted. It didn’t occur to them or me that it might be inappropriate, even arrogant, for a freshman with less than six months of campus experience to undertake such an assignment. (“Good God,” my father said when he saw my “Princeton Panorama” in the inaugural issue of the magazine. “Isn’t any one of you going to turn out to be anything but a writer?”) My story was advertised on the cover alongside the work of Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, John Dos Passos, and Erskine Caldwell. I was the only one of these luminaries, in fact, to receive a full-page photographic portrait. In the piece itself, I maintained that college was more important as a social experience— a place to make “contacts” and join in “bull sessions”—than for any knowledge to be acquired by the conventional academic means. I described Princeton as “one of the oldest and most refined gentlemen’s finishing schools in the country” and noted that “the curriculum is one of the best furnished in an American college, and is adequate for any gentleman.” A number of people commented favorably on my contribution, and I scarcely noticed that none of them was a Princeton upperclassman. After all, I hardly knew any Princeton upperclassmen.
I was about to leave East Hampton for my sophomore year at Princeton when Mother asked me to wait a while. She was worried about Dad’s condition, and I was the only other family member at home. David had departed for Andover and Jim for Harvard. John, after a year at Harvard and a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, was living in the city and working as a reporter for the Herald Tribune.
The last couple of years had not been good ones for my father. He had developed tuberculosis and a mounting inability to go on the wagon without confining himself to a hospital. The immediate cause of his death, at age forty-eight, was a heart attack. It was not until John died of the same cause at forty-seven that I had my first cholesterol test with its alarming count in the 400s and learned that the gene for super-high accumulations of the stuff was in the Lardner DNA. John’s son, one of my sons and a grandson were all later found to have dangerously high counts. The four of us have been surviving ever since on strong medication.
Alcohol had also played a significant part in Dad’s decline, and he had been conscious of its ill effects for years. Prior to the enactment of Prohibition, he had even briefly entertained the hope that such a law, regardless of its general soundness and consequences, might be a help to him personally in kicking the habit. In the event, however, he and his friends Grantland
