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Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid
With a wicked sense of humor and a born writer’s perfect timing, Kate Lardner conjures up the Hollywood of the McCarthy era. In a kaleidoscopic and irresistible memoir, Lardner brings to life her jumbled childhood in a household of artistically talented, larger-than-life grown-ups.
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—a marriage that endured for more than fifty years. Ring was already a successful screenwriter, having won an Oscar for cowriting the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy hit Woman of the Year; in 1971 he collected another one for M*A*S*H.
Shortly thereafter, Ring was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Asked about his membership in 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 vivid, 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 have decided the time has come.”
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—a marriage that endured for more than fifty years. Ring was already a successful screenwriter, having won an Oscar for cowriting the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy hit Woman of the Year; in 1971 he collected another one for M*A*S*H.
Shortly thereafter, Ring was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Asked about his membership in 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 vivid, 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 have decided the time has come.”
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 4, 2019
Well, that was a waste of money. It was recommended when I was looking for a Lardner anthology. It's all over the place: she's three, then she's nineteen, then she's married, then she's ten...Should have just printed all the letters back and forth from prison, with notations as needed, and left it at that. Would have been a much shorter book, but it would have made sense.
August 13, 2020
2004 review: Poor writing and poor editing. What could have been enlightening and touching was scattered and uninteresting. Lardner keeps an emotional distance throughout that is not very pleasant.
2020 review: About halfway through this book, I realized I had read it before—not because I recognized the material but because I found little thumbnail indentions indicating where I’d stopped a reading session. My first “review,” sketched in 2004, was rather short and not very positive: (see above).
In a way, I still feel the same. The writing is fine enough; it just doesn’t go far enough. Perhaps that is the point where a better editor might have helped the author. Much of the book is really about Kate Lardner’s father, Ring Lardner, Jr., a distinguished screenwriter who is blacklisted in the 1950s because he refuses to answer the question at a hearing whether he is or ever has been a communist. He spends twelve months in prison simply for attempting to practice his First (or Fifth) Amendment right to speak (or not). And, of course, such an event does have harmful effects on a burgeoning family: A wife, herself a working actor, who stops getting parts because she is related to Ring; a daughter and two sons who need him to balance out an impatient mother who, though loving, is also bound and determined to have her own career. What is most troubling, I think, is the pacing. Of ten chapters, “The Penal Interlude,” is the longest at 120 pages. Conclusions that the author could draw about the effects on her as a “blacklisted kid” are missing or shortchanged. At the end of the book, Lardner gives a hurried account of her college years, her stumbling around to find out what she wishes to do with her life, thumbnail sketches of her two marriages, and boom, we’re done. Either the book should focus more on her father, or she should have a book longer than 272 pages, in order to discuss how being a blacklisted kid has affected her entire life (she’s about sixty at the time she writes the book). This time around I don’t notice the “emotional distance” as much as I do in 2004, but there exists rather a flippant tone that seems to reduce the import of what she is saying about one of the most destructive periods in US political history and its ramifications for her family.
2020 review: About halfway through this book, I realized I had read it before—not because I recognized the material but because I found little thumbnail indentions indicating where I’d stopped a reading session. My first “review,” sketched in 2004, was rather short and not very positive: (see above).
In a way, I still feel the same. The writing is fine enough; it just doesn’t go far enough. Perhaps that is the point where a better editor might have helped the author. Much of the book is really about Kate Lardner’s father, Ring Lardner, Jr., a distinguished screenwriter who is blacklisted in the 1950s because he refuses to answer the question at a hearing whether he is or ever has been a communist. He spends twelve months in prison simply for attempting to practice his First (or Fifth) Amendment right to speak (or not). And, of course, such an event does have harmful effects on a burgeoning family: A wife, herself a working actor, who stops getting parts because she is related to Ring; a daughter and two sons who need him to balance out an impatient mother who, though loving, is also bound and determined to have her own career. What is most troubling, I think, is the pacing. Of ten chapters, “The Penal Interlude,” is the longest at 120 pages. Conclusions that the author could draw about the effects on her as a “blacklisted kid” are missing or shortchanged. At the end of the book, Lardner gives a hurried account of her college years, her stumbling around to find out what she wishes to do with her life, thumbnail sketches of her two marriages, and boom, we’re done. Either the book should focus more on her father, or she should have a book longer than 272 pages, in order to discuss how being a blacklisted kid has affected her entire life (she’s about sixty at the time she writes the book). This time around I don’t notice the “emotional distance” as much as I do in 2004, but there exists rather a flippant tone that seems to reduce the import of what she is saying about one of the most destructive periods in US political history and its ramifications for her family.
May 2, 2016
This was the most boring book I've picked up in a long time. There are hardly any adjectives, no emotional descriptions or even hints of them. It is bland bland bland. I wondered why it was even published and then I saw that she comes from a family of authors. Connections must be why because it certainly didn't stand up on its own.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews