I'd Hate Myself in the Morning. Lardner Ring
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however, attend Niles High School for four years, and more significantly, after he became a sportswriter almost by accident, spent a decade in daily association with baseball players and other coarse creatures of the sporting world. Yet to a remarkable degree, he remained unaffected by these influences. As late as 1922, my brother Jim and I had our allowances canceled for a month for introducing the following sidesplitter at the dinner table:
Q: What was the longest slide in the Bible?
A: When Joshua went from Jericho to Jerusalem on his ass.
His old-fashioned values endured through the years that followed World War I, when styles of dress and speech as well as relationships between men and women altered so drastically. It didn’t matter that the two fields with which he was most closely associated were sports and the Broadway theater, or that a favorite friend was Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote stories about the Jazz Age and dedicated a book of them (All the Sad Young Men) to Ring and Ellis, my parents.
Two decades earlier, they had conducted a long courtship mainly by correspondence. They didn’t see much of each other because he was traveling most of the time with the Chicago White Sox or to other sporting events, while my mother, then Ellis Abbott, was an honor student at Smith College. After their formal engagement, she took a job teaching some of the faculty offspring at a military academy in Indiana, and he accepted one in St. Louis as editor of The Sporting News. His involved a raise from thirty-five to fifty dollars a week, but the main selling point he cited to Ellis and her family was that it would keep him in one place. After he quit that job, having discovered that his employer was a crook, he tried to sell Mr. Abbott on an offer he had received to become business manager of a minor-league baseball team in Louisville, Kentucky. But Ellis’s father, she reported in one of her letters, “thinks a ‘sporting man’ is a ‘sporting man’ and can’t change his sports, and that his daughters are delicate and rare things. And that they must not come in contact with that ‘damned sporting crowd.’” Dad responded by addressing Mr. Abbott directly, promising him that “Ellis won’t ever have to see a ballplayer or a ball game.”
Then came a surprising twist. The Boston American offered him forty-five dollars a week to cover baseball there, and his future father-in-law raised no objection. To the Abbotts of Andover, evidently, an association with Boston made anything, even ballplayers, more refined. Interestingly, Dad never advanced as an argument in his favor the possibility that he might sell stories to magazines and so become a professional writer, maybe because he hadn’t considered it. He was twenty-six when they were finally married in June 1911, and another three years passed before he wrote and sold his first piece of fiction to cover the expenses created by the arrival of his second son.
My mother was wise and charming as well as strikingly attractive, and we all derived as much from her as we did from our father. Besides the environmental influence, we got half our genes from the Abbott lineage. In all the important areas of parenthood, Mother and Dad shaped our attitudes. What they thought about books, art, music, theater, politics, people, and social behavior was what we responded to, usually affirmatively. With our father’s encouragement, we followed the big sports events and the Broadway hits, while Mother inspired us to read Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, her favorite authors.
Raised in a Presbyterian household in Goshen, Indiana, where the rules of speech and conduct were pretty much the same as the Lardners’s in Niles, Michigan, she was nonetheless better able to adjust to a changing environment. In her later years (she died in 1960), she could tolerate if not approve the idea of an unmarried couple living together. In his far shorter life, Dad never yielded ground at all. Confined to a hospital most of the two years before he died (with his attitudes hardened, perhaps, by ill health), he listened to the radio and wrote reports on the new medium for The New Yorker, focusing on the sexually suggestive lyrics of popular songs. In his day as in ours, most writers were trying to break the bounds of censorship. By contrast, Dad was calling on the network censors to come out of hiding and cleanse the airwaves of such provocative lyrics as “As you desire me, So shall I come to you . . . Let come what may.” Just on the borderline of acceptability, he wrote, was “Let’s put out the lights and go to sleep.” (Rumor had it, he told his readers, that “in the original lyric, the last word was not ‘sleep.’”)
His inflexible thinking about such things gave me a pretty accurate notion of turn-of-the-century standards in polite society. Now, at this new turn-of-the-century, when I note how those standards have altered, I find the change quite as drastic as the other great developments of the past hundred years. Each generation, of course, remarks on how much more freedom there is in speech, books, magazines, theater, and on other media, and each generation seems convinced that permissiveness has gone about as far as it can go. Just a few years after my father’s death, Cole Porter jokingly compared the “olden days,” when “a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking,” with the licentiousness of 1936, when, “Heaven knows, Anything goes.”
How would my father have reacted, I wonder, to the movies of the 1990s, with male and female frontal nudity, their almost obligatory intercourse scenes and, in dialogue, the forbidden word “fucking” as a leading modifier? Or to the recognition of gay and lesbian behavior as acceptable variations of sexual expression? During my early years in the movie business, the long list of words forbidden by the motion picture production code included floozie, trollop, tart, and at least a dozen other ways of describing a loose woman. There were also a large number of restrictions on what could be shown visually. These fell for the most part in two areas: first, explicit treatment of sex and certain designated parts of the human body; second, criminal acts or acts considered sinful unless the perpetrators were duly punished for them, usually by death. The cause of death, incidentally, could be completely unrelated to the offense. It was okay for a character to get away with robbery, murder, or adultery—with almost any offense imaginable, in fast, as long as you tacked on a scene later in the story in which he met a terrible end in an earthquake or some other chance disaster.
These days, characters are no longer required to do penance for their misdeeds, and there is no word that cannot be spoken on the screen. M*A*S*H, in 1970, was the first major American movie in which the word “fuck” was spoken. Although the script was mine, it was Bob Altman, the director, who added the expletive. After the picture received an “X” rating from the censors, the studio executives decided to fight it. In the end, they succeeded in winning an upgrade (or downgrade, depending on your perspective) to an “R.” Things have grown even more permissive between then and now, and you might be tempted to conclude, on the basis of recent releases, that there is nothing that cannot be shown on the screen today. Based on the record of the twentieth century, however, it is probably safer not to predict what will be allowed in the twenty-first.
Fame and its rewards affected us profoundly. The house we moved into in the East was a large one on a hill in Great Neck, Long Island. There was a series of terraces in front and artificial levels behind that dropped gracefully toward the waters of Manhasset Bay. The first of these, our mother’s territory, was a more or less formal flower garden with a circular lawn and a goldfish pool. The next contained a three-car garage, stables, and a vegetable garden. Then came a tennis court, which on a few choice winter nights could be flooded and converted into a hockey rink, and finally the largest level of all, accommodating a full-scale playground with an elaborate set of gymnastic equipment and a baseball diamond big enough for Little League play.
Two strong forces encouraged us to use these facilities to their fullest. There was Dad, a firm believer in the interdependence of a healthy mind and healthy body; and there was Miss Feldman, our Prussian-born, uniformed, trained nurse, who was even more partisan on the subject. Added to the familial entourage after my youngest brother David’s birth in 1919, she had come home from the hospital with Mother. Her then-comfortable live-in salary was seven dollars a day for as much time as she was needed, which turned out to be ten of the next twelve years.
Most employees try to limit the scope of their responsibilities; Miss Feldman only strove to increase hers. Her supervision became an increasingly dominant factor in our lives, more so than our parents realized because it was in her nature to move inexorably into any vacuum. Such vacuums were created in the main by two strong drives of Mother’s. One was to be with other people—to entertain and be entertained, to keep