The Press: Ring’s Boy

“The new theatrical season,” wrote the New York Star’s new drama critic last week, “got tangled in the starting gate Tuesday night, and all bets are temporarily off.” That sounded more like a sport-writer than a play reviewer—and it was, sure enough. The reviewer, who got off to a somewhat better start than Sundown Beach (see THEATER), was John Lardner, 36, chipperest off the old block of all the late great Humorist Ringgold Wilmer Lardner’s four sons.

He had cubbed for his new job on the Star by pinch-hitting for ailing Wolcott Gibbs in the New Yorker last season. But Lardner’s friends wondered how he would find time to cover his new beat. Although he considers himself a free-lance writer, at least four employers consider that they hold a proprietary interest in him. He is a staff contributor (of a sport column) to Newsweek, a staff writer on the New Yorker, a contributor on the new National Guardian (see above), and a veteran, but infrequent, sport columnist for North American Newspaper Alliance. (Newsweek felt a little queasy about his new left-liberal connections, but apparently hoped that its readers would not notice.)

In His Steps. Strapping John Lardner was born on Chicago’s South Side while his father was a sportwriter on the old Chicago Examiner. Of the Lardner boys,* only John has followed in his father’s sport steps. He also seems to have inherited his father’s ear for speech and tongue for humor. After a year at Harvard, he went to work on the Paris Herald, then spent three years on its parent paper in Manhattan, under City Editor Stanley Walker. He married the boss’s secretary, Hazel Cannan, and became a sportwriter, and later war correspondent, for N.A.N.A. and Newsweek.

Percentage Player. The John Lardners and their three children winter in Greenwich Village, summer on Fire Island, two hours away. A good drinking companion and quiet, deadpan humorist, Lardner is a cautious horse player, a brilliant poker player, and master of the “match game” at Jack Bleeck’s newspaper saloon.

Last week, introducing his friend to Star readers, Broadway Pressagent Richard Maney wrote: “Lardner will introduce at least one revolutionary note into dramatic criticism. He’ll back his opinions with cash. Do you think that Boston has more people than Baltimore . . . that Bill Terry never hit .400? If you do it will cost you money to talk to Lardner. It’s neither ballast nor diaries which bulge his jerkin. They’re loose-leaf ledgers tabulating his daily speculations.”

*James was killed fighting for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. David was killed while a New Yorker correspondent in World War II.