The Last of the Hollywood Ten.

• Author: Buhle, Paul

Ring Lardner Jr., who died on October 31 at eighty-five, was the last of the Hollywood Ten, the group of screenwriters who were persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and ended up in prison for their politics--or for their unwillingness to name names.

When asked by the chairman of HUAC in 1947 if he belonged to the Communist Party, Lardner responded with the best line of the notorious hearings: "I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but I'd hate myself in the morning."

HUAC and McCarthyism ruined thousands of careers, set back the opposition to the arms race for a generation, slowed down racial integration, and turned the labor movement from a crusade into a special interest. But these were not its only crimes. As anti-Communist liberal screenwriter Philip Dunne said, "If there is one thing about the blacklist that angers me more than any other, it is that we were all deprived of the movies Ring Lardner ... [was] not allowed to make."

A fabulously witty, Oscar-winning co-writer of Katharine Hepburn's gutsiest film, Woman of the Year, Lardner was also a pioneer in the unionization of Hollywood and a Red to boot.

I first met Lardner in his barely winterized Connecticut country place ten years ago. As a historian, I was grappling with the Hollywood story and the various complications of the blacklist, but he immediately put me at ease. And as I began to ask him questions, I suddenly heard the television theme song of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-1958) ringing in my ears: "Feared by the Bad/Loved by the Good/Robin Hood." Lardner was a writer for that British television series, the first successful one in America, and it served as my childhood introduction to the idea of plundering the rich and the corrupt for the sake of the ordinary folk (not to mention protecting Maid Marian from the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham). Lardner listened to my questions with patience, and he discussed his role with modesty. At one point, frustrated at the whistling sound of his hearing aid, he yanked it out of his ear, threw it across the sofa, and then politely apologized for the outburst.

Lardner could cite every nick and cut that had been made on nearly all of his screenplays to tone them down, dilute the biting satire, and blunt the implications. But he accepted it all philosophically, as the way the movie business and capitalism at large operated: misusing good ideas for the pure sake of profit.

Here's another encounter I had with Lardner, and it embarrasses me to tell it. I asked him to write an entry on Lillian Hellman for the Encyclopedia of the American Left (Garland, 1990), which I was editing. He knew her...