Brass ring

Memories of the Hollywood Ten martyr

By Gerald Peary

OSCAR NIGHT 1971: Ring Lardner Jr. accepts the statuette from Eva Marie Saint for his M*A*S*H screenplay.

How’s this for lm-festival excitement? Jim Hoberman, critic of the Village Voice, recently told me the Paul Bunyanesque tale of how, one year at the closing night party of the Havana Film Festival, he Stood Tall Against Fidel. Earlier in the week, Hoberman had attended a Cuban major-league game, and now, after several drinks, he was proclaiming his disillusionment with the neo-Marxist version of el béisbol. “They use the designated-hitter rule!” a horri ed Hoberman complained.

Within seconds, Mr. Castro was ushered over, and he peered into the face of the Ugly American who had found fault with his country. The crowd hushed as Hoberman dared repeat, “Why in Cuba do you use a designated hitter?”

Patiently, El Presidente explained to the misguided New Yorker, “In Cuba, we follow the international rules of sports!”

Wrong! “That’s not the international rule,” Hoberman corrected him. “That’s only the American League rule!”

Silence in the ballroom! What would Fidel do? Concede before the important gathered that a brazen American lm critic was right? Of course not. Castro went instead into rhetoric drive, delivering an abstract, rambling, of cious talk about workers and the revolution, or something off the subject like that, and then moved on.

Debate over!

We can assume that Castro has long buried those few tense minutes, but not Hoberman, who has mulled them over through the ensuing years. Although many on the Cuban trip congratulated him for a (liquor-forti ed) display of balls, he still kicks himself for not squeezing in the nal word.

“Fidel is a pitcher,” Hoberman reminded me. “I should have asked him, ‘What happens when it’s your turn to bat? Do you step aside for a designated hitter?’ ”

Nothing so eventful happened when I attended the Havana Fest. Castro was a no-show at the closing party, but I was satis ed anyway. I had a conversation, and my photograph taken, with Cuba’s nest lmmaker, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment). And I met and spent time with one of my left-wing culture heroes, screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr.

A soft-spoken, preppyish man with horn-rimmed glasses and a hearing aid, he made his way gamely on long bus trips to rural Cuba despite advancing arthritis. At one faraway beach, Lardner showed me how to scuba-dive. I wish I could remember his take on Fidel and Communist Cuba. The long-time Hollywood pinko obviously remained some kind of softened Stalinist or he wouldn’t, in his mid 60s, have been there. Still, there’s no mention of his time at the Havana Fest, only his pride at receiving a Writer’s Tribute Award at the 1998 Nantucket Film Festival, in the new posthumous autobiography I’d Hate Myself in the Morning (Nation Books, $22.95).

Son of Ring Lardner, the great American ction writer, Lardner Jr. was the Hollywood screenwriter of, among many distinguished lms, Woman of the Year, M*A*S*H, and the underrated, self-starring Muhammad Ali bio, The Greatest . He was a founding member of the Writers Guild, a Hollywood activist in the 1930s against the Fascists in Spain and Germany. Most important: he was one of the martyr-like Hollywood Ten of screenwriters and directors who, in 1947, took a stand in Washington against the cretinous House Committee on Un-American Activities. They went to federal jail for refusing to answer congressional questions about their political beliefs.

Here’s the famous exchange with right-wing committee head Parnell Thomas that provided the book’s title:

Thomas: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”

Lardner: “I could answer . . . , but if I did, I’d hate myself in the morning.”

A Communist Lardner was, which meant, he admitted, that he attended lots of intensely boring political meetings during his Hollywood stretch. How could he remain true to his convictions while making piles of studio money and writing compromised screenplays? De nitely a problem. When not union organizing, he drank a lot: a revelation of this book is how rampant alcoholism was among Hollywood’s leftist community. He picketed the hand that fed him famously, as when Warner’s gates were opened in friendship to the son of Mussolini. Occasionally he stood up to studio moguls against the reactionary pap being readied for the screen — as when he tried to persuade David O. Selznick not to make Gone with the Wind because the book was pro-KKK!

Lardner’s autobiography is as modest and straightforward as the self-effacing man I met in Cuba. He admitted that he’d come to enjoy the adulation of being the last survivor of the Hollywood Ten, and that he didn’t always correct people who didn’t know precisely why they honored him. “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 . . . to say we did the only thing we could . . . short of behaving like complete shits.”

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.