I'd Hate Myself in the Morning
A Memoir
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Publisher Description
Ring Lardner, Jr.’s memoir is a pilgrimage through the American century. The son of an immensely popular and influential American writer, Lardner grew up swaddled in material and cultural privilege. After a memorable visit to Moscow in 1934, he worked as a reporter in New York before leaving for Hollywood where he served a bizarre apprenticeship with David O. Selznick, and won, at the age of 28, an Academy Award for the classic film, Woman of the Year, the first on-screen pairing of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.
In “irresistibly readable” pages (New Yorker), peopled by a cast including Carole Lombard, Louis B. Mayer, Dalton Trumbo, Marlene Dietrich, Otto Preminger, Darryl F. Zanuck, Bertolt Brecht, Bert Lahr, Robert Altman, and Muhammad Ali, Lardner recalls the strange existence of a contract screenwriter in the vanished age of the studio system—an existence made stranger by membership in the Hollywood branch of the American Communist Party.
Lardner retraces the path that led him to a memorable confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee and thence to Federal prison and life on the Hollywood blacklist. One of the lucky few who were able to resume their careers, Lardner won his second Oscar for the screenplay to M.A.S.H. in 1970.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An Oscar-winning screenwriter and the last surviving member of the Hollywood Ten, LardnerDwho passed away only 13 days ago takes the title for his slender memoir from his famous reply to the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. "I could answer," he said when asked if he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, "but if I did I would hate myself in the morning." Responding with humor when others would be indignant is one of Lardner's most appealing characteristics, along with his refusal to exaggerate the importance of the Hollywood blacklist. While quietly elucidating the professional harm and personal suffering experienced by screenwriters, directors and actors denied employment for more than a decade, the author also comments, "My nine months in prison is hardly to be compared to, say, the punishment endured by Andrei Sakharov or Nelson Mandela"Dnot even, he adds, to the struggles of civil rights activists. This levelheaded perspective is also notable in passages on the physical indignities of old age where Lardner, 85, remarks of treatment for his many ailments, "The best you can hope for is essentially a stay of execution." In addition to his political life, the author sketches his screenwriting career, whose highlights include Woman of the Year in 1942 and M*A*S*H in 1970, and briefly profiles his famous father, Ring Lardner Sr., his mother and three brothers. Most of this material will not be new to readers of his previous book, The Lardners (1976)Dindeed, some of it is word for word the sameDbut a new generation of film buffs and others interested in the McCarthy era will probably be just as charmed by Lardner's wit and unpretentiousness as their parents were.
