Lardner, Kate

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LARDNER, Kate

PERSONAL: Daughter of David Lardner (a writer) and Frances Chaney (an actor); married Tommy Lee Jones (an actor), 1971 (divorced, 1978); two children.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Writer. Apprentice sound editor on film Making Mr. Right, 1987.

WRITINGS:

Shut up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Writer Kate Lardner comes from a family with a long history of literary talent. Her grandfather, Ring Lardner, was a celebrated short story and sports writer, a frequent contributor to the Saturday Evening Post. Her father, David Lardner, was a writer for the New Yorker. While on assignment in Germany during World War II, he was killed. Two years later, four-year-old Kate's mother, actress Frances Chaney, married David's brother Ring Lardner, Jr. Lardner, Jr. was a successful screenwriter, winning Academy Awards for the motion pictures Woman of the Year and M*A*S*H.

In 1950, while Kate Lardner was a child, her stepfather was asked to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. This committee sought out information from certain entertainment-industry leaders on their involvement with the Communist Party at a time when association with that political party could hurt one's career and result in scrutiny from the government. Lardner, Jr. declared that, "I could answer … but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning." The committee subsequently sent him to prison for one year. His and his wife's careers after that testimony suffered for many years, as the family moved from Mexico City to Connecticut to Manhattan in search of work.

In 2004, Kate Lardner published her first book, Shut up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid, which tells the story of her childhood and adolescence spent with her talented yet victimized family. Using a combination of reproduced letters and vignettes from her memories, Lardner recalls the difficult year her stepfather spent in prison, the years afterward while he and her mother were blacklisted—unable to secure work because of their political views—and the ways in which her parents coped with this crisis. She tells of routine childhood activities, financial hardships, her stepfather's drinking problem, and her parents' enduring love for each other throughout. Later in the memoir, Lardner relates these difficulties to her transition into an adulthood plagued with alcohol, drugs, troubled marriages, and a strained relationship with her mother.

Although much has been written about the McCarthy era—Senator Joseph McCarthy led the campaign during the early 1950s against alleged Communist infiltrators in the U.S. government—and the blacklisted Hollywood community, critics welcomed Lardner's memoir as a different take on the subject. "This addition to the literature provides the unique perspective of the second generation," wrote M. C. Duhig in the Library Journal. Indeed, while a lot of attention has been paid to those persecuted during this time, little study has been done to examine the effects on the families and children of those victims. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented, "Lardner descends from several generations of literary forebears and has inherited their talent by nature or nurture or both…. This is Lardner's first book, but hopefully not her last."