Shut Up He Explained: A Memoir of Growing Up on the Blacklist - Hardcover

Lardner, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345455142 ISBN 13: 9780345455147

Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

When Kate was not yet two, her father, David, was killed while on assignment for The New Yorker in war-torn Germany. Two years later her mother, the actress Frances Chaney, married David's brother, Ring Lardner Jr. - a marriage that endured for more than fifty years. Ring was already a successful screenwriter, having won an Oscar for cowriting the Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy hit Woman of the Year. (In 1971 he collected another on for M*A*S*H.)
Shortly after they were married, Ring was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Asked about his membership to Hollywood's Communist Party, Lardner said: "I could answer...but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning." This much-publicized declaration of silence sent Lardner to prison. Subsequently neither he nor Frances could get work, which marked the beginning of Kate's blacklist childhood - and took the family from Mexico City to rural Connecticut to Manhattan.
Kate Lardner presents a behind-the-scenes look at the personal and family costs of weathering this ruthless and absurd period in history. She writes: "I wanted to tell my story of the events I had inherited. A therapist once told me she had the dirty job of ushering me into the real world. And now that I am more or less there, I've decided the time has come."

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<b>Kate Lardner</b> is the third generation of one of America’s most distinguished families of writers. Her grandfather Ring Lardner Sr. was a celebrated sports writer and short story master, and her father and his three brothers were all writers too. Lardner lives in New York City with her daughter Maude. This is her first book.

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Chapter 1

Santa Monica Memories

A couple of years after my real father died, we took the train from New York to California to marry his brother. "Going to Canyonfornia to marry Uncle Bill" is how my mother said we kids put it, and this rings a bell. My mother was used to calling her brother-in-law Bill-not Ring, which he preferred-because that's what the family always called him. But my brother Joe, who was two, and I, Wfteen months older, weren't used to calling him anything because we hardly knew him. My mother said she hardly knew him, either. He was her husband's brother and she wanted us to have a father in the worst way and it had to be the right kind of father. She said she couldn't marry somebody just for her. It had to be somebody for her and for me and Joe, and she didn't think anybody else was right. She assumed that if he was David's brother and his name was Lardner he had to be okay.

Also there was a letter that had gotten my mother's attention. It was a turning point in a bicoastal correspondence that went on for a year and a half in which Ring said he wanted very much to see her.

Dear Lass, it began. I want very much to see you even though I am at a loss to know what good could come of it. I suppose the notion in back of our minds is that we might get married someday but when I think about it that concretely it doesn't seem a very likely prospect. I don't think you're in love with me and I'm pretty sure I'm not in love with anyone, and whatever element of sober self-interest there is in my nature would certainly mitigate against falling for any doll with two children. On the other hand, I want to see you which must have some signiWcance. . . . But to get down to one concrete fact, I would like to kiss you. Signed "Ring."

My mother thought that was pretty nice. In addition, they were both Communists, and I'm told there was a certain rapprochement between them because of it.

Ring had been very impressed by the Soviet Union when he was there in the summer of 1934 and very much antagonized by what he saw in Germany immediately after that. He had stayed in the house of an architect in Munich whose son belonged to Hitler Youth, and just talking to him and seeing the marching in the streets made him feel very worried about what was happening there.

He joined the Party in 1936. With the U.S. recognition of

the Soviet Union in 1933, Communist Party membership had jumped dramatically, attracting creative artists, students, and

direct-action unionists as well as the disaVected and deprived. In the depths of the Depression (with a quarter of the workforce unemployed) they really had a lot of doubt about whether

the system of private industry and capitalism could survive.

The Communist Party seemed the most visible force for social change. It was never a question of Communism versus democracy, said Ring. Those who inclined toward Communism or who became members of the Party in Hollywood (as he did) were thinking of trying to institute a new economic system. It seemed as if capitalism had come to an end. It seemed that the whole system had broken down and was not going to be Wxed-that it needed a change. Ring assumed that in America, socialism would be achieved by democratic means.

My mother was an actress, and her loose connection with Communism began with her Wrst Broadway job in 1936 in a play called Marching Song by John Howard Lawson-a play about a sit-down strike in a factory. The cast included several left-wing actors whom she admired. She didn't actually join the party until sometime in the late thirties, but when the Spanish civil war broke out in July 1936, the actors in the company got involved in working for the Spanish loyalist cause, mostly raising money for medical assistance and ambulances. (The nonintervention policy of the United States didn't permit material aid for either side.)

David had been left of center, though politics just didn't play an important part in his life. But when he died, my mother felt strongly that his death must not be in vain.

Ring and Frances Wrst met in November 1941. Ring had come to New York from California with his wife, Silvia, after the shooting was complete on Woman of the Year-the Wrst movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Ring and Michael Kanin had written the script, for which they received a hundred thousand dollars-the highest price paid for an original screenplay at that time. This all happened a couple of months before my mother and David's marriage. The four of them went to the '21' Club to celebrate. My mother and Ring saw each other just a handful of times after that before our move west.

Polly, who came to take care of us three months after David was killed, went on the train to California with us. She was leaving behind, according to my mother, "an unfortunate life" because she'd been having an aVair with her sister's husband (her sister was my mother's housekeeper). So presumably Polly welcomed the move. As for my mother, she didn't give it much thought. She just said we'll go, and we did.

I remember lots of people turning up at Pennsylvania Station to say good-bye: my maternal grandmother, Marie; good old friends and actors my mother worked with in radio. (A radio magazine in the early forties called her one of the country's ten top radio actresses. And E. J. Kahn Jr. wrote a piece for The New Yorker about taking out a girl who looked like a movie star, inspired by one night with my mother as his date when they went to nightclubs and everyone thought she was Constance Bennett. Her hair was long and blond then and hung down over her face.)

They were all well-wishers at the station with wine or champagne or little presents for us kids. And then we took oV on the 20th Century Limited and switched to the Superchief in Chicago.

The four of us shared a drawing room. The trip was very pleasant, I had always thought. Then one day, years later, my mom piped up and a mix-up of my memory of it ensued.

I had recently begun interviewing my parents extensively because I wanted to know where the hell they were while I was growing up. I also wanted to know where I was. And I wanted to tell my story of the events I had inherited. A therapist once told me she had the dirty job of ushering me into the real world. And now that I was more or less there, I had decided the time had come.

"It was Wne except I got my hand caught in the fan it seems to me," my mother said.

"It's funny, I thought it was I who got my hand caught in the fan," I replied.

"No, I got my hand caught. Not you. It wasn't bad . . ."

"But that's my one memory of the trip."

"Well, I got caught . . ."

"It's interesting I can't remember . . ."

"Yeah, I know, but you make these mistakes from time to time. I don't know that it got caught badly. It was just a small accident. But we were all very excited. It was an exciting thing to be doing."



Our trip took two nights and three days; and, by what can only partially be construed as a coincidence, Ring's ex-wife, his two children (my cousins/soon-to-become-stepsiblings), and their maid (as they were then called) were leaving Los Angeles at roughly the same time. It was estimated that we'd pass one another in the vicinity of Kansas City.

When we reached our destination, my mother, Polly, Joe, and I moved into a stone Basque house on a hillside in Coldwater Canyon, which Ring had been sharing with his best friends Alice and Ian Hunter and a very large housekeeper, Margaret. The Hunters moved out to make way for us, while fat Margaret stayed put. I shared a room with my brother Joe. Then, after a six-day acclimation period, so designated by our elders, Ring and my mother Frances took...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ballantine Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0345455142
• ISBN 13: 9780345455147
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar