there was no legal penalty for that. Just unemployment.
Within weeks of the first set of hearings, the heads of the movie studios met in New York and announced that none of us would work for any of them again until we had cleared ourselves with the Committee. Back in Hollywood, people went out of their way for us—a few to express their support, the majority to avoid our company. The talent guilds we had helped organize declined to support us, and soon passed new rules that made the blacklist easier to enforce. As it continued and expanded, some of us managed to work undercover at greatly reduced compensation; others had to find new occupations entirely; a few lost their lives in despair.
Nowhere else in the world, except possibly in the Kremlin, had there been a group of Communists with a higher standard of living or greater community acceptance than the writers who belonged to the party in Hollywood. One of the unwritten rules of membership, however, had been a polite understanding with our employers that we wouldn’t advertise it. Now my colleagues and I—soon to be known as “The Hollywood Ten”—were a hot story, and the studio bosses could no longer engage in what today might be called a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Making my discomfort worse was my inability to simply refuse to answer the committee’s questions and assert that my membership, in either the Communist Party or the Screen Writers Guild, was none of their business. But our lawyers, in an exercise of logic that seemed persuasive at the time, had insisted that such a stance could leave us vulnerable in court at a later date. We were instead supposed to maintain that we were making an attempt, in our own way, to answer the questions we felt the committee had no right to ask.
In recent decades, feelings in Hollywood, among other domains of American culture, have turned sharply in our favor. As the sole survivor of the Ten, I have been in a position lately to receive many expressions of respect and admiration from actors, actresses, and other denizens of the New Hollywood who sometimes have only a sketchy idea of what really happened to us. Since I enjoy a little adulation as much as the next man, I don’t always make a point of filling in the gaps in their knowledge or correcting the points of confusion. But from time to time I try to suggest that we weren’t as heroic as people make us out to be. It would be more analytically precise, it seems to me, to say that we did the only thing we could do under the circumstances, short of behaving like complete shits.
It’s hard in the year 2000 to recall my thoughts as I sat on the witness stand. Like the others who testified with me, I couldn’t yet know just how much liberty and property and comfort I was going to lose and for how long. None of the very tangible and personal consequences were clear to me as I leaned into the microphone, hoping only to be heard over the hubbub and to make a few telling points before the chairman cut me off. But I could begin to sense what has become more obvious with the years: The triumph of reason was going to take a little longer than I had imagined.
The story of how I came to be a political prisoner goes back to my earliest years, when I displayed a compelling urge to shock people with unorthodox opinions, extravagant boasts, and wild exaggerations. At the breakfast table one morning when I was three, I threatened to commit mass murder. “If you say one more word to me,” I announced, addressing my next older brother, Jim, “I’ll kill you, Mr. Jimmie, and Mr. John [my eldest brother] and Mr. Daddy and Mr. Baby Brother.”
To which Jim responded, “Oh, nobody could kill baby brother bees he’s too little.”
“I’ll kill him because I’ll bake him in the oven and kill him,” I continued. “That’s what I think I’ll do.”
Those were our exact words as set down by our father in his Chicago Tribune column, “In the Wake of the News,” where he frequently described the family conversations at our house in Evanston and then, as we prepared to relocate to New York in the spring of 1919, in our apartment on Buena Avenue. We were moving east so that Dad, already known nationally for his You Know Me Al stories in The Saturday Evening Post, could write a syndicated column that would run in a hundred and fifty newspapers and make his one of the best-known names in America.
A skillful pianist and amateur songwriter, he was blessed with perfect pitch and an astonishing ability to render the way semiliterate Americans spoke and wrote. The combination of that remarkable ear and plentiful opportunities to listen to baseball players and other athletes as a sportswriter had produced a literary style all his own: “And he give her a look that you could pour on a waffle,” says the cigar-salesman narrator of “The Big Town” about the man who has fallen for his sister-in-law. Elsewhere in the same collection of stories (which were, along with You Know Me Al, as close as my father came to writing a novel), we learn about a pricey hotel on Long Island where “They even got a barber and a valet, but you can’t get a shave while he’s pressing your clothes, so it’s pretty near impossible for a man to look their best at the same time.”
My father didn’t want me named Ring and used his column to apologize for it:
When you are nicknamed Ringworm by the humorists and wits,
When people put about you till they drive you into fits.
When funny folk say, “Ring, ring off,” until they make you ill,
Remember that your poor old Dad tried hard to name you Bill.
Having his name made me particularly aware of how well known it was. During his lifetime (he died in 1933 at the age of forty-eight) and for a considerable time afterward, the response I got when introduced was either, “You’re related to the writer?” or “You’re the writer?” But by the nineteen-forties and fifties, the recognition was beginning to fade, and eventually people started saying, “Ring? What kind of a name is that?”
An impressive-looking man, he had high cheekbones and deep-set eyes and stood two inches over six feet tall, which was unusual in his generation. He didn’t talk a lot and almost never raised his voice, but what he had to say was always worth listening to and sometimes very funny—the more so because he didn’t laugh as he was saying it. H.L. Mencken, Virginia Woolf, and Edmund Wilson, among others, saw him as a literary pioneer; nevertheless, Dad thought of himself primarily as a newspaperman, and it was his standards of journalism that he sought to pass on to his sons. With four New York papers delivered to the house every day, mealtime conversation was often about which one had handled a particular story best. Only my brother John had actually begun work as a reporter before Dad died, but the rest of us also got our first jobs on New York papers, and we all benefited from his instruction.
His continued insistence on identifying himself with journalism was part of a general refusal to take himself or his writing too seriously. “Are you a humorist?” I remember asking him when I was a child, based on something I had read.
“If I said ‘yes’ to that,” he answered, “it would be like if somebody asked a ballplayer what position he played and he said ‘I’m a great third baseman.’”
In 1924, when F. Scott Fitzgerald sold Max Perkins of Charles Scribner’s Sons on the idea of a collection of Ring Lardner short stories, Dad had no copies of most of them and couldn’t remember where some had been published. After they had been dug out of various libraries and assembled, he accepted Scott’s title, How to Write Short Stories. Instead of a serious introduction, though, he wrote: “A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. Personally I have found it a good scheme to not even sign my name to the story, and when I have got
