A Comradely Comrade

...And his screenwriting continued, it seems, despite the blacklist...

...Though he did not desert the Communists he resisted their pressure to drop Vincent Sheehan from the collected speeches of the 1939 writers' congress, Fighting Words, because Sheehan had subsequently denounced Stalin...

...His Horatio Alger dreams came true when, after earning his meals waiting on tables through Exeter and Yale, he was tapped for Skull and Bones...

...nevertheless, it looks today what it once was, the residence of a prime minister...

...His political debut must have been even more satisfying...

...Its walls are lined with art treasures, and its garden—benefiting from Katie Hepburn's loving touch—graces some of the highest priced real estate in England...

...He has had a vast range of friends, not all so spectacular as Charlie Chaplin, who breakfasted with the Stewarts before going to Buckingham Palace to be knighted...

...But in those days it was only a game for the delight of his drinking companions...

...Philip Barry wrote roles for him in two plays, giving him the famous speech in Holiday ending with magic irrelevance, "And that, my dears, is how I met your grandmother...

...old resentments and drilled-in loyalties make it hard to face them fully...

...He could "belong" in earnest now, to a cause that released all the boyhood idealism he had mocked...

...Not to speak of the relief of guilt for which he had good reasons, some frankly detailed here...

...one said he had found his true metier in writing the book for Joe Cook's Fine and Dandy...

...Because he had risen so far, he risked a great fall...

...I have been cursed from childhood with an almost obsessive need to be liked by others," Stewart says...

...He now became the life of the Party with a capital P. His talents as after-dinner speaker were more than ever in demand, and his audiences went wild...

...He has big questions to answer...

...The name Donald Ogden Stewart hardly rings a bell now with most readers, yet in a single year it was on the marquees of five different Broadway theaters...

...Through Fitzgerald a few years later—following a happy stretch as a World War I naval cadet—he walked into the Vanity Fair office looking for a job selling advertising space just as his future friends Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Robert Sherwood quit...

...The Depression only increased the demand for his kind of witty, "civilized" screenplays, starting with a film propitiously called Laughter...

...Deeply disappointed by the failure of Aunt Polly's Story of Mankind, he turned to his ''crazy humor," a disjunctive, semisurrealist style full of cliches from the books of his youth, with an echo of Ring Lardner...

...Can one ask for more...

...Distrusting himself he was afraid, he says, of finding an easy ideological way out of his commitment...

...Throughout, though, Stewart does try to understand and reveal himself...

...Stewart presents his London house in its down-at-heels phase...

...Actually the Times and Herald Tribune critics applauded its social content, only reluctantly pointing out its defects as drama...

...Most critics agree that Stewart's chief influence was Lincoln Steffens' widow, and only recently one suggested that she had pushed him beyond his depth...

...But Stewart covers this period with discreet gallantry, and not until his first wife is safely remarried (to Count Tolstoi, a Soviet defector) does he bring Ella Winter, his second, to center stage...

...Luck did catch up with Stewart in St...

...It seemed "there was a class war, and I had got on the wrong side," he writes...

...And few have ever been liked so fondly...

...One exception: Max Eastman was not amused...

...Stewart's long career as life of the party, begun very early, was based on the same self-mockery that made his books sell...

...Stewart was elected president of the League of American Writers, whose call for its 1937 Congress reads like an honor roll: Van Wyck Brooks, Carl Van Doren, William Carlos Williams, Alfred Kreym-bourg, Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke, and on and on...

...Stewart chose England...

...It was put on the letterhead of dozens of anti-Fascist organizations in which, he freely admits, Communists did all the work...

...Each night he read aloud the day's pages at Gerald and Sara Murphy's apartment to an audience that might include John Dos Passos, the Hemingways, Archibald MacLeish, and Gilbert Seldes (who told Tristan Tzara that Stewart's humor was "the American equivalent of Dada...

...In Theatre Guild magazine that same year, Djuna Barnes interviewed Stewart while he waited to go on in his own play, Rebound...

...or testifying, naming names...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza' "This remarkable man was one of the great wits of the late '20s, '30s and '40s," says Katharine Hepburn in a brief, ecstatic foreword to her friend's autobiography, "the creator of laughter and delight in movies, plays, books and high society...

...But for those who had made enough money there was a fourth option...

...Stewart's story is fascinating because it was special and extreme...

...Paul...

...Katharine Hepburn notes that Stewart "laughed his way to the top of the heap and looked down...

...He explains that "It was like asking a man who had just recovered his sight to put on blinkers.' Yet he "closed his eyes" to anti-Stalinist arguments...

...If, therefore, some man or woman became my friend, I accepted that blessing so gratefully that it never occurred to me to attempt any analysis of his character...

...Saw the bottom of the heap and thought, 'this is not fair.'" But Stewart never really had to make the descent...

...Yet one day when Stewart was preparing to write a play with a minor character based on Corliss Lamont, he dipped into a book by John Strachey and was never the same again...

...He studied etiquette books (that he later parodied) and "gravely learned which fork to use for partridge.' He looks back and sees false values, naive assumptions and compromises with "truth" even before the choices were entangled in politics...

...Hemingway showed Stewart dispensing his zany cheer as Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises...

...He brought to the "movement" a glamor, charm and humor that was rare on the Left...

...But the sight of an awesome classmate...

...Only one of the plays he wrote in this period reached Broadway...

...George Jean Nathan blamed his 15 years in Hollywood for his failure to develop...

...He admits that he "discredited too readily the reports of the terror in Russia during and after the trials of the mid-'30s.' The Hitler-Stalin pact cost him friends on both sides...

...When Germany declared war on the Soviet Union he wept for joy...

...Ruth McKen-ney, for instance, went to live in Belgium...

...Some were less kind...

...But he found the same difficulties in putting serious ideas into comic form that were to frustrate him later as a Leftist...

...Professors at Yale and Harvard were reading to their classes from his Parody Outline of History...

...Stewart tried against odds to express his social conscience in his screenplays, and he was able to give the part he had in Holiday more liberal strength...

...The experience inspired him to conceive a savage satire that would expose the hypocrisies of "the last war" and the dangers of being fooled again...

...By his own amusing account Stewart has not had to give up champagne...

...He was both a member of the "Algonquin Vicious Circle" and an intimate of Whitneys and Vanderbilts...

...developed by James Thurber (an Ohio contemporary who interviewed Stewart for a Columbus paper on his triumphal return to his hometown), by Perelman, Pynchon and Barthelme...

...When his first book became a best seller, Stewart took his mother to Europe in the summer of 1923...

...However it was acquired, Stewart's name was a great plum for the Popular Front...

...Blithely responding to her rather bitter questions, he said his success was all due to luck...

...War became the number-one enemy which I must fight with my gift of humor," he says...

...A few were troubled when Earl Browder took the podium, but not Stewart...

...In the final 60 pages —all he gives to his part in the Popular Front, his bruising personal problems during the wartime twists of the Communist line, his blacklisting and exile—the tone shifts uneasily...

...He confesses to having been a social climber at age eight, with an overpowering desire to "belong...

...Stewart's first literary use of the style was for Mr...

...Haddock Abroad, written in one idyllic Paris month of 1924...

...Nothing that happened to him after 1930—and a lot did—seems to have changed his view...

...How I Wonder, warning against the atomic bomb, was marvelously produced in 1947, with Raymond Mas-sey heading a fine cast...

...He met an unknown Princetonian who asked him to read a penciled manuscript titled This Side of Paradise...

...For most people called by a congressional anti-American activities committee there were only three options: refusing to testify and going to jail...

...Stewart suggests that the reason for its failure was a fear of a Communist message...

...Deems Taylor wrote warning him against the Communists...

...It was exciting to be treated as an important 'catch,'" Stewart writes of an early call to Hollywood...

...The Murphys were Stewart's first rich friends but not the last...

...Visiting Verdun with Edna Ferbcr and Alexander Woollcott, he saw a line of bayonet tips sticking up from the earth where a row of poilus had been buried by an exploding shell...

...The magazine was short of comedy, Frank Crowninshield suggested a try at humor, Stewart wrote a parody, an assistant editor named Edmund Wilson laughed, and the meteor was off...

...If this volume had the index it needs, however, the roster would be dazzling...

...Later it would be...

...A few years later he and his wife were living on the Payne Whitney estate and sailing on Jock Whitney's yacht, the beneficiaries of substantial favors from James Forrestal, Bob Lovett and Pierpont Hamilton...

...Dean Acheson, added High Culture to his dream of High Society, and he started going to opera...

...Stewart's scornful jokes about "brave little Finland" when it was invaded by Russia caused general discomfort...

...He scraped up 50 cents a week for piano lessons during the next grim years in provincial boarding houses as a friendless trainee for AT&T...

...He was able to keep his place in his Ohio "bunch" through an adolescence so full of family tragedy that one suspects he learned then the art of dancing over an abyss...

...Stewart's disarming style makes his ascent (to a salary of $5,000 a week, some say) a feat of comic inadvertence...

...and Mrs...

...Amazingly, he repeats the same phrase here, in the same spirit...

...Whether his book will bring him a new public may depend on how curious people are about the great swing Leftward of the '30s that landed so many bright people in a political trap with no good way out...

...My life has been a successful one," he concludes, "and in many ways a happy one...

...But he takes most delight in his work on Keeper of the Flame, showing that the wife (Katharine Hepburn) was right to murder her husband because he was a Fascist danger to the country...

...The crash came, but Stewart's bank balance rose...

...taking the Fifth Amendment, implying criminal acts and losing one's livelihood...