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 Rice and Rube Goldberg, who happened to be in Toledo, Ohio, to see Jess Willard fight Jack Dempsey when the reform took effect, were quick to investigate the new phenomenon of illegal liquor, and happy to learn that it wasn’t so very different, biochemically, from the legal kind. Later he expressed his considered view of the great experiment in “Prohibition Blues,” a song that became the standout hit of a feminist musical called Ladies First, starring the popular Nora Bayes.
I’ve had news that’s bad news about my best pal
His name is Old Man Alcohol but I call him Al . . .
Like many alcoholics, his efforts to stop drinking never lasted long. In at least one important respect, though, his case was peculiar. Others sought and found in liquor a release from their inhibitions about using rough language or making sexual advances. Not Dad. He had an idealized concept of marriage that made his drinking habits seem incompatible with wedded bliss. His courtship letters took it for granted that he would not drink after marriage. In practice, he switched from a pattern of regular daily drinking to alternating daily periods of abstinence and indulgence, with the latter growing steadily more intense and long-lasting as the years passed.
Mother had realized for some time that he was a dying man and that there wasn’t much she could do about it. Still, she applied all her strength and endurance to the effort, and her grief when it failed was overwhelming because he had become her main purpose in life. She was just beginning to revive her other ties to the world when, five years later, Jim was killed in the Spanish Civil War.
While no more than one in ten Americans is an alcoholic, among twentieth-century writers the proportion rises to something like one in three. Without much effort, I can summon the names of Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, John O’Hara, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Robert Benchley, Dashiell Hammett, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and—the first two drunks I knew and could identify as such—Sinclair Lewis and Scott Fitzgerald. Each of them in the course of an evening at our house would become, visibly and volubly, a far less attractive person. As a child, I was not aware of any similar alteration in my father’s behavior; he was noted for maintaining physical control despite considerable consumption of alcohol, and he was particularly careful in the presence of his sons. For most of his binges, he went into New York and stayed at a hotel or club. Since this was also his practice when meeting a story deadline, we had no way of distinguishing between the two. I was well into my teens before I realized that he was an alcoholic, and by that time the episodes were occurring less and less often in the face of debilitating disease and hospitalization.
There has been a lot of speculation about what makes writers become drinkers (or the other way around). Life has put me in a position to discuss this topic with some authority, and I can lend my support to a few of the standard theories: the stress of deadlines, the search for answers to difficult creative problems, the need to face internal demons on a regular professional basis. Another explanation, easily overlooked, is opportunity. If you work in a public place, as most people do, it’s difficult to go off on a bat; practical considerations force you to postpone your drinking until the working day has ended. Writers, who set their own hours of labor and diversion from labor, have an easier time sustaining a career and an addiction—for a while.
Literary critics and others have wondered about the roots of the despair that presumably provoked my father to start drinking again despite his awareness of the addiction. My prolonged empirical research into the same disease leads me to conclude that drinking is more apt to increase depression than relieve it. The alcoholic is distressed by his failure to conquer the addiction; hoping to ease his distress, he turns to drinking, which has an effect opposite to the one intended. This vicious cycle was aggravated in my father’s case by a puritanical conscience.
Watching his death happen was the first major emotional event that I can recall. But it didn’t take the form of a sudden shock. There was no surprise, just the realization that a highly-prized and dearly-loved element of my life had been taken away. After completing the cremation arrangements and taking stock of a tremendous volume of mail and cables from all over the world, we moved Mother into New York, where John would be nearby, and I headed back to college.
Catching up with my studies was far from my first priority, however. The big question confronting me on my arrival, a week late, was whether I felt up to working on Princeton’s annual Triangle Club show. In a competition held the previous spring, I had been chosen to collaborate on the script with a senior; I would be the first sophomore so honored. Without hesitation, either on family or academic grounds, I declared my readiness to proceed, although I knew I would have to put most of my energy into writing and rehearsing in order to put the show on in Princeton and New York before Christmas.
It was 1933, well before the era of co-education, and our chorus “girls” were female impersonators. Otherwise, the production attained a fairly high amateur level. The previous year’s star, Jose Ferrer—now a graduate student of architecture—dropped in to share his insights with the director, Dr. Donald Stuart, a middle-aged professor of French. “Joe, do you think that’s dirty?” Dr. Stuart asked worriedly, about a scene underway onstage. “No,” the younger man replied, “but I’ll show you how you can make it dirty.”
I completed my sophomore year in June of 1934, a few months shy of my nineteenth birthday. Besides the Triangle show, I had written a monthly column for the Princeton Tiger called “Under the Table with Ring Lardner, Jr.,” and I had represented the university on bridge and debating teams. The fact that I had made some kind of mark, at least socially, was indicated two years later in the yearbook of the graduating Class of 1936. Amid photographs and membership lists of all the standard extracurricular organizations was a page with a photo of several of my classmates and the unexplained initials “L.O.L.A.” Unknown probably to anyone but them and me, the letters stood for “Loyal Order of Lardner Admirers.”
What I clearly had not yet achieved was any record of academic accomplishment or any other benefits sufficient, by my reckoning, to justify the drain on Mother’s reduced income as a result of Dad’s death. John and Jim had already dropped out of Harvard. Now she acceded reluctantly to my decision as she had to theirs (and would later to David’s to leave Yale). In my case, she squeezed five hundred dollars out of her budget for a summer in Europe before I embarked on a career. I arranged cheap steamer passage on the Hamburg-Amerika Line, which many people were boycotting because of Hitler’s accession to power, and a tour of the Soviet Union at the lowest Intourist rate of five dollars a day, which was to cover travel, hotel, and meals.
A few days in Hamburg and Berlin and, on my way back from Russia, three weeks in Munich left me with a highly unfavorable impression of the New Germany. In Munich, I stayed with an architect’s family, getting into a number of debates with one of the young men of the household, who was a member of the Hitler Youth Corps. “We really have nothing against the Jews,” he assured me. Nothing, he went on to say, except their disproportionate representation in the ranks of lawyers and doctors. A fairly polished and cerebral spokesman for the new order, he gave the Jews credit for intelligence and hard work, and lamented that many Germans were not as industrious. But the bottom line of his analysis—the point that struck me, anyway—was his relentless need to distinguish between Germans and Jews. That the one could not also be the other seemed to go without saying.
My reaction to Soviet Russia, on the other hand, was enthusiastic. My own country was paralyzed by unemployment, want, and fear. Western Europe was stricken by the same miseries. In Russia, I saw construction everywhere and planning for the future on a grand scale. Despite the language barrier, the feeling I got, even from people seriously deprived by American standards, was one of hope and optimism at a time when most of the world seemed to be bogged down in stagnation and gloom or, like Germany, marching ardently backward toward barbarism.
It may come as a surprise to modern readers that in those days Socialism and Communism were associated with new, radical trends in social behavior, sexual relations, and art. This had begun to change under Stalin, and in the two subsequent decades of his dictatorship, would wither into the moral and social rigidity that lasted right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But one manifestation of the revolutionary spirit that still survived in 1934 (and was certain to strike an eighteen-year-old American boy as radical indeed) involved swimming along the Moscow River. The waterfront was segmented into four separate, fenced-off beaches: male nude, female nude, mixed in bathing suits, and mixed nude.
In a matter of months after America’s belated recognition of the Soviet Union, the University of Moscow had established an Anglo-American Institute for English-speaking students. One of them was the former president of the Socialist Club at Princeton. I called on him the day I reached Moscow. The next day, I canceled the rest of my program with Intourist, moved into a dormitory at the university and enrolled myself in Sociology II or “Crime and Punishment in the Soviet Union.”
The Americans at the Institute had gone to Russia, for the most part, under the aegis of the decidedly left-wing National Students Union. Two members of the Dartmouth delegation were to be among my closest friends in Hollywood, Budd Schulberg and Maurice Rapf, both sons of important movie executives. Two and a half year later, Budd and I were a writing team for David Selznick. Maurice went on to teach film at Dartmouth, where, as a student in the early thirties, he was a founder of the film society.
Of the three of us, Budd was the most ideologically committed. I was viewed, by contrast, as something of a rightwinger. I nearly got thrown out of the country, in fact, for a frivolous deed that I committed in cahoots with a Canadian student named Mark. A group of our peers had put up a “wall newspaper” whose leaden seriousness prompted the two of us to post one of our own. Our comic intent was, we believed, unmistakable, so we were ill-prepared for the reaction of one Professor Pinkevich, a robust scholar with bushy eyebrows who had been selected to run the Institute despite his flimsy command of English. Summoned to a meeting called for the purpose of critiquing our work, we found that he had provided himself with an interpreter in order to prevent misunderstanding. As Mark and I entered the room, Pinkevich rose and greeted us formally. Then he sat down again while the interpreter opened the proceedings:
“Gentlemen, this is a very serious matter. The professor desires me to inform you that it was he who removed your wall newspaper from the bulletin board. He did so in his official capacity as director of the Institute. He did so for the reason that, in any Russian institution there can be only one wall newspaper, and that is the one that is sanctioned by the authorities. Secondly, and the professor believes this is more important, you have made fun of certain people and certain institutions, which it does not seem proper that you as guests of the Soviet Union should do.”
“It is not proper that guests of the Soviet Union should do this,” the professor put in.
“May I speak?” Mark asked.
“What?” said the professor.
The interpreter repeated the question in Russian.
“Da, Da, most certainly. That is what we are here for.”
“We had no idea that it was a crime—”
“No, no, not a crime,” the interpreter said hastily.
“Certainly not,” said the professor.
“Well, we had no idea it was against the rules to put out an independent newspaper. You see, I come from Canada, and he comes from the United States, where we have freedom of the press.”
“Freedom of the press?” said the professor. He spoke with the interpreter in Russian.
“The professor wishes me to say that in no country in the world is there more freedom of the press than there is in Russia. Here the press belongs to the people.”
“But everything must be permitted by the official,” the professor added.
“As you say,” I put in, “the main point is whether we have ridiculed things which you hold sacred. It seems to me you must have misunderstood what we wrote. We certainly didn’t mean anything counterrevolutionary.”
“Counterrevolutionary? Oh, no,” said the interpreter.
“Certainly not,” said the professor.
“If you would point out the passages to which you object,” I suggested.
After they had consulted for a few minutes, the professor produced an article torn from our short-lived effort. The interpreter glanced through it. “This is not the only thing the professor objects to, but it will serve as an example. It is apparently a formal petition addressed to the authorities here—so it starts out. Then it says that double whiskey-and-sodas be served to each student in his bed before breakfast because the menace to student health in having to walk to the dining room on an empty stomach is appalling. And here again at the end: That double whiskey-and-sodas be served to each student in his bed before retiring because the menace to student health in having to go to bed sober is appalling. The professor wishes to say that these are very presumptuous demands.”
“And this about the Scottsboro Boys,” said the professor with considerable effort and even more emotion.
(We had referred to an outstanding civil rights case in America at that time.)
“Oh, yes,” said the interpreter. “The professor feels very strongly about that. You have here in your petition: That the Scottsboro Boys be set free immediately.”
Mark and I looked at each other; it was going to be difficult.
He began, “Our petition was not serious. In fact, nothing in the whole paper was meant to be serious.”
“How could we free them here in Russia?” the professor asked. “It is important case and we talk about it much here. But we can do nothing.”
“We didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “You know the petition that the student executive committee presented last week? Well, our petition was by way of being a parody of that.”
“A parody?” said the interpreter, baffled for the first time. “What is a parody?”
“Well, if someone writes something and you write an imitation of it that’s funny or exaggerated—” Mark began.
“I thought your word for that was ‘satire,’” the interpreter said.
“They’re not quite the same thing. A satire has a purpose. It’s trying to prove or correct something, while a parody is just humor for the sake of humor.”
“Humor for the sake of humor?” The professor digested the words as he repeated them. “We do not have such in the Soviet Union.” And so ended our disciplinary session.
Besides lectures in varying calibers of English, the course I took featured visits to courtrooms and penal institutions in the Moscow area. We were taught, among other things, that all punishments were designed for re-education and rehabilitation; and in keeping with this principle of Soviet jurisprudence, the maximum prison sentence was ten years, even for murder. The death penalty was reserved for “crimes against the state.” Thievery and prostitution, we were told, still existed as hangovers from the old regime, but they were on their way out as their practitioners learned new trades in a society free of unemployment. According to our instructors, there were no political prisoners in any of the institutions we visited, and I don’t think any of us asked any questions about that phrase “crimes against the state.” It was not until after the assassination of the Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov the following winter that the infamous “purges” became a matter of world attention.
What seemed truly revolutionary to our accepting ears was a society already practicing what only the most advanced criminologists in the West were even proposing: an emphasis on curing criminal behavior instead of just punishing it. A group of us were crossing the yard of the largest prison in Moscow when an inmate in his late thirties accosted me in very American English. He wanted to know if I was familiar with New York City. When I admitted as much, he asked if I knew of “the Tombs,” as the main jail in Manhattan was then called. I responded affirmatively, and, in answer to a follow-up inquiry, acknowledged an awareness of Sing Sing prison in Westchester County. “Well, let me tell you,” he said, “I’ve been in the Tombs and I’ve been in Sing Sing, and this is the best goddamn jail I’ve ever been in!” His enthusiasm seemed quite genuine.
I didn’t delude myself that a couple of months in the country made me an expert. I had, however, read a number of books about the Soviet Union before I went there, and it seemed reasonable to trust the ones that checked out on the points I was able to confirm firsthand. By the same logic, I could disregard authors who made statements that were contradicted by my personal experience. The best-known hostile accounts of the Soviet Union described the suffering and misery of the Russian people under the Communist regime; even during that bleak time in Moscow, however, I found far more faith and positive thinking than in Western Europe and America. So the books that presented a different picture were not to be trusted, I concluded. On the other hand, a fairly sympathetic volume by Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, and a quite partisan one by Maurice Hindus seemed to bear out my observations.
An evening I spent in Moscow with Duranty himself did much to fortify this attitude. Later portrayed by Times colleagues and superiors as a sort of journalistic apparatchik, Duranty was charming and erudite, and when I told him about our wall newspaper he took a special interest in a comic political proclamation that I had written entitled “The Tory Anarchist Manifesto.”
“Where did you hear about tory anarchism?” he asked. When I told him I had made up the phrase, he assured me that there was a “movement” of the same name already in existence, also conceived as a parody of standard political doctrines. He was one of the three members of the elite group, he confided. The others were Franklin Roosevelt and his ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt.
In retrospect, my credibility test—rejecting everything negative that I found in books or articles containing anything I considered unfair—was less than rigorous, and it led me to dismiss almost any criticism of the Soviet Union, whatever the source. In the years that followed, I was troubled by the glorification of Stalin and the startling number of Bolsheviks confessing to conspiracies against the party and the state. Yet no less an authority than Joseph Davies, who succeeded Bullitt as U.S. ambassador, attended the show trials and attested to their legitimacy, and I chose to accept that woefully naïve verdict. For the next ten or fifteen years, I treated every piece of antagonistic writing about the Soviet regime with the automatic skepticism that I might have applied to an argument in favor of the Inquisition or reincarnation.
Much later on, I had to admit to myself that part of the reason I found life in Moscow so pleasant for others was the quite pleasant life I personally was living. There was one particularly attractive young woman among my fellow students and another in a group from Sarah Lawrence College with whom I had shared a train compartment from Leningrad to Moscow. My budget, which had seemed fairly austere when I embarked, turned out to be quite sufficient to cover the creature comforts that mattered most: a group of us could linger over a heaping plate of caviar and a carafe of vodka for a total cost of less than fifty cents.
On returning to America, I followed John’s and Jim’s examples by making an appointment with Stanley Walker, the city editor of the nation’s most literate newspaper, the New York Herald-Tribune, where Jim was now a reporter and which John had just left to launch his own syndicated sports column. Jobs were in very short supply in those depression years, but the family name was a valuable asset, and Walker was a fan of Dad’s. With an air of mystery, he spoke of a job that he would be in a position to offer in a couple of months at an unexpected location. It turned out to be the Hearst tabloid, the Daily Mirror, best known for the much-read, much-feared gossip column by Walter Winchell. Walker had accepted the job of managing editor there in the misguided hope of transforming the Mirror into his idea of a newspaper for ordinary New Yorkers. It took no more than a couple of months for him to learn that only William Randolph Hearst was allowed to have ideas on that subject. But while Walker soon resigned and went to work for The New Yorker, I stayed on as a reporter for almost all of the year 1935.
On a typical working day, I covered half a dozen stories in farflung parts of the city, phoning in my reports to the rewrite men, who composed the actual stories that appeared in the paper. (With two of them, Gordon Kahn and John McNulty, friendships began that would grow during their later careers in Hollywood and on The New Yorker, respectively.) As the newest and youngest member of the city staff, I was assigned mostly to stories of lesser import: suicides, accidents, minor murders, burglaries, and (equally inconsequential in the Mirror’s view of life) strikes. Actually, that year was an important one for the labor movement; it saw the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the first big undertaking of the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration. My job brought me into contact with pivotal figures in the newly-aroused working class. These encounters, along with the reading of Marxist works I had begun after my trip to Russia, served to strengthen my already radical inclinations. But no amount of reading or discussion could have equaled the impact of just seeing and hearing and feeling what was going on around me in America’s largest city at the lowest point in our economic history.
Writing at the height of the Clinton boom, it takes a certain effort to summon to mind the misery and desperation of those years. Unemployment, homelessness, and hunger had reached such proportions that it hardly seemed a stretch of the imagination to believe that the whole system had collapsed for good—that it was time for capitalism, with all its injustices and its cultivation of avarice, to be replaced by a more rational and equitable social order. Like most of my friends, I sympathized with many of the early New Deal reforms but didn’t expect them to solve the country’s deep-seated economic problems. As it turned out, I wasn’t wrong. It took a world war to significantly relieve the distress of the Depression.
An equally strong reason for regarding the Communist Party favorably was its unequivocal stand against fascism right up to and, some of us believed, even after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. As a consequence of my observations and my reading of radical publications, especially the Communist weekly, The New Masses, I cast my first presidential vote, in November 1936, not for Roosevelt, Alf Landon, or even Norman Thomas but for Earl Browder on the Communist ticket. By then, I was already settled in Southern California, and it may have been that first exercise of the franchise that triggered the FBI surveillance of me that would last for decades. I had assumed, of course, that I was enjoying the vaunted American privilege of the secret ballot. On a wall outside my polling place on Wilshire Boulevard, however, was a compilation of the district’s registered voters: Democrats, a long list of names; Republicans, a somewhat lesser number; and “Declines to State,” one, “Ring W. Lardner, Jr.” The day after the election, alongside those lists were posted the results: Roosevelt, so many; Landon, so many; Browder, one.
Marx appealed not only to my sense of justice but to a taste for rationality that my parents had helped instill in me. I had arrived at my political allegiance, I believed at the time, purely through rigorous intellectual inquiry and analysis. Later, when I began to realize how much I had deceived myself about what really went on in those regions where communism was supposedly being put into practice, and how the reality reflected on the theory, I started to wonder whether there wasn’t an emotional factor at work. In addition to those other motivations, I came to believe, I had been fulfilling the same old defiant impulse embedded deeply in my childhood.
The most important relationship I had developed on the Mirror was with Ian McLellan Hunter, a British sea captain’s son who, after coming to this country with his family as a teenager, had proceeded directly from an American prep school to a reporter’s job. Only nineteen when he first showed up (that was also my age), he then decided to enroll at Princeton, arriving there the fall after I left. His college career lasted only a year, though, and when he returned to the paper, we began a friendship that continued and deepened until his death in 1991. In New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, and New York again, Ian and I were neighbors and collaborators, working on six screenplays (the first and last about forty years apart), and during the Hollywood blacklist, pseudonymously, on more than a hundred TV episodes, including five pilots that became series. There was a meeting of minds between us that allowed for a harmony that we never experienced in other writing partnerships. After six years of uninterrupted collaboration in the blacklist era, we continued to consult each other on our work, and as I began to lose my brothers one by one, we spent ever more nonworking time together, playing poker and tennis and cross-checking answers on crossword puzzles and acrostics, an endeavor in which Ian excelled.
Ian, too, had an alcohol problem—one that, unlike mine, increased in severity to the point of debilitation. During the period when we had to come up with an episode for a half-hour television program every week, there were times when I had to perform the task by myself. On occasion, he would pull himself together and make a big effort to match what I had done single-handed. Eventually, though, he came to the conclusion that he would have to give up drinking for good. And he proceeded to do just that, first by enlisting in Alcoholics Anonymous as he went cold turkey, then, to fortify his abstinence, by substituting marijuana for alcohol. It happened that a friend of ours, the blacklisted writer Waldo Salt, had made the same medicinal switchover. Since Ian and Waldo also shared a love of drawing, they could pool the cost of a model and spend an evening indulging in pot and art. Neither of them drank again, as far as I know.
Some years earlier, when the film community was still disproportionally Jewish, my good friend Paul Jarrico announced a discovery. He had been wondering why a small group of his fellow screenwriters—Ian, Dalton Trumbo, Hugo Butler, Michael Wilson, and I—were such a close, cozy group. What bound us together, Paul reported, was the fact that we were all gentiles. “Nonsense,” Ian declared when I passed this on to him. “It’s that we’re all drunks.” Instantly, I knew he was right. It was by far the stronger bond.
We worked hard and drank hard. Our main form of relaxation was to gather not in a public place but in one of our Hollywood living rooms (usually Trumbo’s, because he always bought or rented large houses), have a few drinks, eat a little something, and have a few more drinks. Some or all of our wives might also be on the scene, but as the liquid consumption added up, they tended to re-assemble by themselves or go home one by one, leaving behind a group and mood that became progressively more masculine.
I became fond of alcoholic beverages when I was fourteen and in my second year at Andover. The longest I have ever gone without them was my nine and a half months in Federal confinement. I’ve tried my hand at voluntary abstention, too, but it’s never lasted more than a month or two, and from the age of forty-five to about sixty, my pattern was pretty much that of the traditional alcoholic. As of this writing, I have made it through a quarter century binge-free, steadily consuming the equivalent of one or two drinks a night.
But this is an impossibility or close to it, according to the official doctrine of Alcoholics Anonymous. AA acknowledges the existence of a species known as the “controlled drunk” who, because of fixed working hours or other obligations, only begins when his daily responsibilities have been met; and the “periodic drunk,” who leads a more or less normal existence for weeks or months at a time before finding release in sustained periods of indulgence. Once an alcoholic has reached the stage where he or she has to be forcibly prevented from continuing to drink, however, the only solution—the only chance of regaining one’s health, according to AA doctrine—is to go on the wagon. In the end, however many times he may fail, a drunk has to face the fact that he can never drink normally, that the one and only way out is to give it up permanently. Even ten or twenty years later, if he deludes himself into thinking he can finally handle social drinking, he will soon find himself back in the old pattern.
That is what is supposed to happen, but it didn’t happen to me. I resolved to retain the pleasures of alcohol, especially its value as a sedative, without the pains of acute alcoholism. To accomplish this, I had to convert myself from an uncontrolled drunk into a controlled one. What made this improbable or even impossible according to orthodox thinking was my forty-five-year history of increasingly unrestrained indulgence.
During my first year at Princeton, the destination was a speakeasy in Trenton; by the next fall, 3.2 percent beer had been legalized, and the Nassau Tavern re-opened its bar after fifteen years to serve it. (Dad wrote a song a few months before he died: “They’ll never have six percent singing on three and two-tenths per cent beer.”) And then, on January 1, 1934, the whole Prohibition farce ended, and we began learning to appreciate the merits of imported, properly aged whiskey. When the working day ended at the Daily Mirror on East 45th Street neat First Avenue, a few of us would adjourn to Tim Costello’s Bar and Grill on Third Avenue and 44th, decorated with original murals by James Thurber. One or two nights a week, I would be careful to remain sober enough to make drinking money at nearby bridge club, sometimes in partnership with my brother Jim, who was writing the bridge column for the New York Herald-Tribune. I couldn’t have gotten by without that supplement: My salary was twenty-five dollars a week, and a first-class scotch-and-soda cost twenty-five cents.
I believe it was while working for Selznick International in Culver City that I began occasionally to have a couple of cocktails before lunch, but there were many days when I didn’t drink at all because of work or, after I joined the Communist Party, political commitments. For the next couple of decades, there were short periods of abstinence plus the enforced one in prison, and, in between, intervals when I was more likely to end up drunk and a disgrace to my wife and children. Then came 1960.
There were three deaths at the beginning of that year in which I became a daily drinker: a dear friend in January, my mother in February, my brother John in March. After that, I had to get quite drunk most nights simply to go to sleep. Except for brief, abortive efforts to stop, this pattern continued until 1976. It was hell for my family, but didn’t stop me from doing good work on The Cincinnati Kid and M*A*S*H, and on a book about my parents and brothers. On two occasions, desperate to lick the problem, I committed myself to strenuous detoxification programs only to find myself unable to maintain the permanent sobriety they were after. Then I tried to stop drinking on my own. On the second day of this attempt, I was having lunch with a publishing executive when I blacked out. When I came to, I found myself strapped to a bed in a hospital alcoholism unit. Again I went through the detox process and to the Alcoholics Anonymous sessions until I was judged ready to continue my recovery on my own.
This time I think it lasted close to two months before my thirst reasserted itself. I decided then to try a whole new approach. Getting to sleep had been a major problem. I would lie in bed thinking about how effective strong drink had always been as a sedative; so I hit on the idea of using alcohol only at night for the double purpose of getting to sleep and satisfying my craving for the stuff. A necessary part of my program was secrecy, especially from Frances, my wife, who believed implicitly in AA’s ideas, which she had first absorbed in meetings of its spinoff group, Alanon. I knew she would take my proposed experiment as just another rationalization in the service of a fatal habit.
Concealing from your wife that you are consuming eight or more ounces of booze a day requires a certain amount of covert enterprise. You have to find hiding places for your liquor—in my case, almost exclusively vodka, the drink the least detectable smell and the incidental benefit of being available at low prices, so that the monetary expense, at least, was not a serious drain on the household. Nevertheless, on perhaps six occasions over twenty-some years, either by taking a sip for herself of what she assumed to be a soft drink, or by deliberately deciding to check up on me, Frances has found that I am still drinking. In each case I have confessed to a temporary lapse, and she has insisted that it must never happen again or she will leave me forthwith. I have made the pledge each time, and, after a brief attempt to live up to it, returned to solitary, late-night imbibing.
The situation became more complicated a few years ago, when our primary care physician, Dr. Edgar Leifer, prescribed coumadin for my atrial fibrillation, adding a stern warning about the danger of mixing this medication with alcohol. But I went on mixing them: 2.5 mg. of coumadin in the morning and half a pint of vodka in the evening. Perhaps separating the two as much as possible has had a mitigating effect; or perhaps doctors issue that kind of warning on minimal evidence, especially when they know, as Dr. Leifer has long known, that the patient has an alcohol problem; or perhaps there is a real danger, as he says, but it’s a cumulative one. Even if there was a way of knowing the precise effect on my physical decline, I’m not sure I would regret my drinking. I don’t think I could have finished this book (and a great many other writing projects) without it.
One of the benefits of working in the city in 1934 was the opportunity to see a lot of my brother Jim. A couple of times, our respective papers assigned us to the same story, and after he took over the bridge column on the Herald-Tribune and I became the bridge specialist at the Mirror, we often found ourselves covering the same tournament. In one case, there was a separate tournament for the newspapermen in attendance. We entered as a team, reaching the semifinals.
My social life was largely confined to two newly legitimized speakeasies, Tim Costello’s and, alongside the rear entrance to the Herald-Tribune on West Fortieth Street, an establishment informally known as Bleeck’s after its proprietor. When Prohibition was repealed, a sign appeared identifying it as the “Artist and Writers Restaurant, formerly Club.” (My brother John said that Jack Bleeck knew a number of writers but only one artist. John subsequently organized a group he called the Formerly Club.)
Time spent in either establishment was devoted about eighty percent to drinking and twenty percent to eating, and all of it to man-talk at various levels of intoxication. Bleeck’s, from which women had been barred during Prohibition, retained that policy for the first couple of years after repeal; and any place like Tim’s that was more bar than restaurant was sure to have a much greater male than female clientele. “Respectable” women in those days would not go into such an establishment without (or sometimes even with) a male escort.
After Dad’s death, Mother moved to an isolated farm in New Milford, Connecticut, and we brothers spent most of our vacations from college and days off from work there in surroundings free of the presence of young females. The result (and perhaps also the cause) of this stag social life was that the three of us lagged behind in the normal teenage drive for sexual experience and a love life. Our youngest brother David was less inhibited. Before he was three years old, he had added an imaginary sister to our ménage. Her name was Alice Heinzie Blue.
John Lardner was already known for his byline stories in the Herald-Tribune when, at the age of twenty-one, a matter of weeks after our father’s death, he began his own nationally-syndicated sports column. Jim was not yet twenty when he, too, went to work for the Herald-Tribune in 1934, and he moved on to its Paris edition about three years later. I had my first national magazine piece published when I was eighteen and had finished my first Academy Award-winning screenplay before my twenty-sixth birthday. There were indications before David’s death at twenty-five that he might have turned out to be the most versatile writer of us all. At twenty, he began doing pieces for The New Yorker’s “The Talk of the Town” section; during the next few years, he took on “Tables for Two,” the nightclub column, a new feature called “Notes on Sports” and (when the magazine’s movie critic died) “The Current Cinema.” Because the New Yorker had a policy against having the same byline appear more than once an issue, his three columns were signed, respectively, “D.E.L.,” “D.L.” and “David Lardner.”
One of his early assignments as a movie critic was The Cross of Lorraine, on which I was one of six official writers, three associated with the script, and three with the story. In his review, which was lukewarm on the subject of the picture’s overall merits, David dealt with this morass of credits by stating that there were just too many writers involved to warrant mentioning them individually.
Of course, one reason we brothers could imagine the possibility of becoming writers and our father couldn’t, was that we had his example to follow. We also had the benefit of his observations on language and the finer points of journalism. There had been no one in his immediate environment making a living as a writer, and he had originally been more interested in writing songs than prose. What changed all that was a stroke of fortune. The writer of the Chicago Tribune’s most popular column, “In the Wake of the News,” died and Dad was asked to take over. For the first time, his professional work incorporated the mixture of poetry, parody, nonsense and ungrammatical English that he had played around with in his letters. It was for the column that he wrote a series of verses that were collected into his first book, Bib Ballads, in 1915. Addressed to his son John, they dealt light-heartedly with the universal emotions of first-time parenthood:
One thing that’s yours, my little child
Your poor old Dad is simply wild
To own. It’s not a book or toy;
It’s your imagination, boy.
If I possessed it, what a time
I’d have, nor need to spend a dime
I wish that I could get astride
A broom, and have a horse to ride;
Or climb into the swing, and be
A sailor on the deep blue sea.
Or b’lieve a chair a choo-choo train
Bound anywhere and back again.
Jim and David died too young for anyone to know what they might have accomplished, but I think it’s safe to say that neither John’s best writing achievements nor mine approached Dad’s level of distinction. On the other hand, it is also true that we were more advanced in our different branches of the craft than he was at the age of, say, twenty-five.
John was the most like Dad in size and speech, devotion to sports (even as he, too, wrote about many other subjects), and the respect he drew from colleagues, especially journalists. His health, too, began to decline at about age forty due to a severe, long-neglected case of tuberculosis followed by a series of heart attacks, and, in John’s case, multiple sclerosis. That diagnosis, he told me, was the final blow, making him reject an offer to become theater critic for The New Yorker. He was afraid his symptoms would show as he walked down the aisle.
His fatal heart attack occurred just six weeks after we had stood at Mother’s bedside and jointly advised her doctor not to take extreme measures to keep her alive as a hopeless invalid. The shock of his death retrospectively strengthened me in our decision about Mother. Extending her life would only have brought her the opportunity to learn that the fourth of the five men in her life was gone.
Jim had been the second, almost five years to the day after Dad. Spain had abandoned its medieval regime for a modern democracy, the last country in Western Europe to do so, in 1931. The elections of 1936 brought a popular, left-leaning government to power, and the defeated right-wing forces—led by “five insurgent generals” with Francisco Franco at their head—launched a military revolt. Soon Mussolini and Hitler joined the rebels, supplying troops, tanks, and planes. In response, volunteers from around the world—including Italian and German exiles—formed an International Brigade to assist the undermanned, underequipped government forces.
My own ardent partisanship for the Loyalists, as the democratic forces were known, was intensified when Jim, at twenty-four, went to Spain to cover the war for the Herald-Tribune. He had been discouraged by some of his Tribune duties, which included translating, rewriting, and waiting outside a chateau in southern France to hear whether Wallis Simpson would be married on Wednesday or Friday. Still, though he evidently spoke of enlisting before he left Paris at the end of March 1938, I believe he had concluded that he could do more for democracy in Spain as a journalist than as a soldier. He changed his mind after covering a battle between the Internationals and Italian Fascist regular troops, and sending a long, detailed account back to his editors. His story wound up being cut to a couple of negligible paragraphs in favor of a lead piece by Vincent Sheean, a best-selling author who, ironically, had become Jim’s closest friend in Spain. To Jim’s marvelously logical mind, reality had proven his earlier assessment wrong. Against the urgings of both Sheean and Ernest Hemingway, with whom he had shared a train compartment from Paris to Barcelona, Jim volunteered for the Lincoln Brigade, as the American battalion was called. And when his superiors, afraid of adverse publicity if he were killed, assigned him to a behind-the-lines unit for misfits, he deserted to the front. In a letter to Mother, he cited his main reasons for volunteering:
“Because I believe that fascism is wrong and must be exterminated.
“Because my joining the I.B. might have an effect on the amendment of the neutrality act in the United States.
“Because after the war is over I shall be a more effective anti-fascist.
“Because in my ambitious quest for knowledge in all fields, I cannot afford in this age to overlook war.
“Because I think it will be good for my soul.”
He was wounded in his first combat action and spent six weeks convalescing before he returned to combat duty. As a corporal in charge of a scouting patrol, he told his men to wait while he investigated some sounds on a hill ahead. His men heard a shout in Spanish and Jim’s voice challenging in the same language. The enemy on the hill then replied with enough machine-gun fire and hand grenades to repel a full-scale attack. He was killed, it turned out, on the night before all the Internationals were withdrawn from the Loyalist side in the war.
“In the short time he was with us,” Milton Wolff, commander of the Lincoln Battalion, said later, “and despite his extreme natural shyness, he won the friendship and respect of everyone in the battalion. He was looked up to both as a man and as a soldier and he won his rank of corporal quickly by hard work and courage.
“What he did was an unusually courageous thing—going ahead alone in no-man’s land in the middle of the night and leaving his two men behind because he did not want to risk the safety of anyone but himself.”
Mother, who had opposed America’s entry into World War I on pacifist grounds, attributed his death to a noble delusion. For me, it was the most shattering of all the family deaths. We had always been close—so close as children that when people inquired about our whereabouts, we became a unit known as Jim-and-Bill or Bill-and-Jim Along with the terrible loss, I felt an irrational sense of guilt that I hadn’t been the one to join up instead of staying home and tasting the joys of first fatherhood. And remembering the many conversations in which we had talked domestic and global politics, I wondered how much of an influence I might have had on the thinking (not that he couldn’t think for himself) that led him to such an early end.
It was hard to be a journalist in those years without feeling the urge to cover the struggle against fascism. Disqualified for military service by his eyesight, David finagled his way to London under the auspices of the Office of War Information in July 1944, and then, in September 1944, somehow managed to get the press credentials he needed to move on to France, where he began reporting for The New Yorker. The magazine published his first article from overseas—a “Letter from Luxemburg”—in mid-October. A few days later, David and a fellow correspondent, Russell Hill, went by jeep to Aachen, Germany, which had just been captured by the Allies. Returning with blackout lights on a dark night, the jeep drove off the road and hit a pile of mines. Hill survived; the driver was killed almost instantly; David died in a hospital without regaining consciousness. In the next issue, an obituary signed “The Editors” concluded with the words: “We liked and admired him as much as any man we have known, and we have never printed a paragraph with deeper sorrow than we print this one.”
John had heard the news first through the magazine they both worked for. He went to the hotel where Mother was staying while doing volunteer war work as a nurse’s aid. We got a message to David’s wife Frances, a radio actress, asking her to come to their apartment as soon as she was through with her day’s work. John tracked me down at Dalton Trumbo’s house in Beverly Hills and urged me to get to New York if I possibly could, to help out. Wartime travel was strictly limited by military priorities, but I was on a plane the next day through the influence of James Cagney, with whom I was working on a movie (never made, alas,) about George Armstrong Custer.
The children, Katharine and Joseph, were twenty-one months and six months old, much too young even to be told what had happened. Frances, who had leading roles on Topper and Terry and the Pirates, resolved to continue with both, not just for the money but in order to maintain a household routine. For Mother, though friends and relatives swiftly appeared from all over, the force of this third blow was beyond fathoming. More than a month passed before she was able to resume her nurse’s aid work with terminal cancer patients. After the war, she spent most of her time in New Milford, reading, knitting, doing crossword puzzles and cryptograms, and tending her flower garden. That quiet routine lasted until the early fifties, when, in one of the unpredictable repercussions of the blacklist, my family descended on her en masse.