Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  “You broke every rule,” Sheldon wrote to Wilder after the reading:

  There is no suspense, no relationship between the acts, no progress; but every seven minutes—no, every five minutes—you’ve supplied a new thing—some novelty—in the proceedings, which is at once a pleasure in the experience, and, at the same time, a contribution to the content of the play. Most plays progress in time, but here is a progression in depth. Let us know this town more and more!21

  Wilder had followed Sheldon’s advice, reporting to him from Zurich that summer of 1937 that before Emily Gibbs appeared in act 3 “in the Elysian Fields on the hill above Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire,” the whole second act of the play was devoted to her wedding and the events leading up to it.22 Furthermore, Wilder said, he thought the audience would love Emily.23

  Wilder quickly learned that in Jed Harris he had to confront a nearly invincible adversary. Constitutionally averse to conflict, Wilder fought for the integrity of his script but internalized much of his anger and frustration. By mid-January he told Harris he had a “whole set of Nature’s Warnings = twitches, and stutterings and head aches.” He was going to have to “retire” from the production for a while, to sleep and rest and regain his “fresh eye” for the play. His perspective, he said, had “become so jaundiced that I can no longer catch what’s good or bad.”24

  At noon on January 22, 1938—before the opening of the Princeton tryout that evening—a deeply worried Wilder recorded his concerns about Harris’s production and sealed them in an envelope that was not opened until 1944, when Isabel Wilder took out her brother’s notes and read them at the time of Our Town’s first revival in New York. That snowy day in Princeton in 1938 Wilder wrote that he was very much afraid certain of Harris’s production elements would “harm and perhaps shipwreck” the play’s effectiveness. He feared that the play was “in danger of falling into trivial episodes,” that Harris had not “vigorously directed” some of his actors, that he had an “astonishingly weak sense of visual reconstruction,” that his interpolations in the text robbed it of “its nervous compression.”25

  The play opened January 22 in Princeton’s McCarter Theatre—the theater where Wilder had seen so many tryouts during his years in New Jersey. He wrote the details to Dana, calling the performance “an undoubted success,” and noting that there was standing room only in the theater, with a box office “take” of nineteen hundred dollars. He observed much laughter, some “astonishment,” and “lots of tears” and applause from his audience.26 One critic, writing in Variety, was not so kind, however, finding the performance “not only disappointing but hopelessly slow. . . . It will probably go down as the season’s most extravagant waste of fine talent.” The play “should never have left the campus,” the reviewer charged, “for once the novelty has been worn thin, the play lacks the sturdy qualities necessary to carry it on its own.”27

  But Wilder’s worries about the Princeton performance and his director’s decisions were abruptly overshadowed by a tragedy that would haunt the play, the cast, and its director. Jed Harris, the classic brooding bad boy, magnetically attracted women. By 1937, at the age of thirty-seven, he was long divorced from his first wife, Anita Greenbaum (the person who, years earlier, had suggested that he change his given name, Jacob Horowitz, to something else), and he had begun a relationship with the actress Louise Platt, who would later become his second wife and the mother of his daughter. His long relationship with Ruth Gordon, the mother of his son, had been transmuted from a turbulent romance to a civil friendship and professional relationship. His current romantic interest, in addition to Louise Platt, was Rosamond Pinchot, whom he had met at a Hollywood party in 1935. The glamorous society matron, mother, and movie star, separated from her husband, was very much in evidence at rehearsals for Our Town. Harris set her to work backstage with the few props and sound effects the production required, and she may have designed Emily’s wedding dress. Jed and Rosamond apparently boosted their energy during the final grueling days of rehearsal by taking Benzedrine.28 According to Harris’s principal biographer and to interviews Isabel Wilder gave decades later, Harris often treated Pinchot rudely in the presence of his cast and crew. Also according to Isabel, she and Thornton overheard Jed’s side of a telephone quarrel with Rosamond on January 22, after the Princeton performance.29

  By Monday, January 24, Wilder, Isabel, Jed, and the cast of Our Town were in Boston for the play’s tryout there—and Rosamond Pinchot was dead. Sometime before dawn on January 24 she parked her car in the garage of her rented Long Island estate and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Her suicide “fell like a bomb into the middle of everything,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott. “She had loved the play and was at rehearsals.”30 Her death was sensationalized front-page news in Boston and elsewhere. The January 25 edition of the Boston Post bore the headline “LINK SUICIDE TO NEW SHOW HERE. Rosamond Pinchot Said to Have Been Brooding Over Failure to Win Part in ‘Our Town.’ ”

  A distraught Jed Harris was the first to publicly deny the alleged cause of Rosamond’s suicide. The New York Daily News quoted him as saying, “Any report that Miss Pinchot wanted to get into Our Town is fantastic. She attended a rehearsal in New York, along with about fifty other persons. But she hadn’t asked for a part, and there wasn’t a part—not even a small one—for which she could be considered.” But not only did he understate her involvement behind the scenes of the play; his general manager, Sidney Hirsch, reportedly denied that there was any romance between Harris and Rosamond Pinchot, calling her instead “one of Mr. Harris’s many friends.”31

  Although there is no evidence that Pinchot wanted or sought a role in Wilder’s play—and ample evidence of the complicated challenges she faced in her personal life—the link to Our Town stuck, giving the play a sad notoriety just as it opened in Boston, a link poignantly heightened by reports that one of Pinchot’s suicide notes quoted Emily’s farewell speech in Our Town.32

  Despite the pall, however, the show went on. Some members of the cast and crew thought Harris drove the cast too hard in those days after Rosamond’s death, and that he even exploited her death to heighten the emotional response of his actors. To the contrary, Wilder wrote, “Jed has been kind and controlled to all the actors, except in overtiring them with interminable rehearsals, delays and all night work.” Wilder escaped when he could and lost himself in work on The Merchant of Yonkers, breaking to take long walks to clear his head. But he kept fighting with Jed over the script for Our Town, telling Woollcott that he’d rather “have it die on the road than come into New York as an aimless series of little jokes, with a painful last act.”33

  Woollcott sent Wilder a letter of support January 26: “I have an abiding faith in this play of yours and others that you are going to write.”34 In a letter to Woollcott, Wilder poured out his anguish over what was happening to his play in Jed’s hands. “Success is accorded to a work of art when the central intention is felt in every part of it, and intention and execution are good,” he wrote. “Jed lost courage about my central intention and moved the production over to a different set of emphases. The result is that the vestiges of my central attention that remain stick out as timid and awkward excrescences.”35

  Woollcott answered immediately, urging Wilder to stick to his guns, and to “trust that hard core you have—rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun—upon which the Jed Harrises and the Frank Cravens and the haute noblesse of Boston will break like spray.”36 Woollcott had used the popular podium of his weekly radio broadcast to give A Doll’s House “the effect of adrenalin [sic],” and he would do the same for Our Town.37

  In the audience at the Boston opening of the play sat forty-one citizens from the small New Hampshire towns surrounding Mount Monadnock and Peterborough, the home of the MacDowell Colony—the village equivalents of Wilder’s mythical Grover’s Corners. After the performance their spokesman, A. Erland Goyette, presented a cherry-wood gavel to Wilder, along with “an eternal membership” in the Mount Monad
nock Region Association of New Hampshire. The Boston Evening Transcript reported that the inscribed gavel was “made of native wood grown at the MacDowell Colony,” noting that Wilder had spent six summers at MacDowell and that “that association with life in a small New Hampshire town” was “responsible for” Our Town.38 Wilder was moved by the pleasure these people had taken in seeing a play that was “about something they knew.”39

  To his lawyer Wilder wrote, “Boston reviews cautious but not unfavorable. . . . Business in Boston very bad; but even so better than [Orson Welles’s production of] Julius Caesar which had rave reviews.”40 But there were encouraging signs amid the turbulence in Boston: Edmund Wilson, who just happened to be in Boston, saw the play and called the last act “the most terrific thing” he had ever seen in the theater, and playwright Marc Connelly, summoned to Boston on Thursday by a worried Harris, found the play “magnificent.”41

  “So with all those plus and minus marks,” Wilder reported to Dwight Dana, “Jed cancelled the second week in Boston (losing, he says, $2500 on the two weeks) and opens at the Henry Miller’s Theater in New York on Thursday.”42 Although Our Town, with its dearth of scenery, might look cheap, it was actually very expensive to produce, Wilder noted: “45 actors; and not two but five electric switchboards.”43

  Marc Connelly, Jed Harris’s longtime friend and sometime champion, and an occasional investor in his productions, hurried to Boston to see the Thursday-night performance at Harris’s urging. Eavesdropping on the audience in the lobby between acts, Connelly heard people say they liked the veteran actor Frank Craven, who had come out of retirement to play the Stage Manager. They found Martha Scott, making her debut, “lovely and talented.” But the consensus seemed to be displeasure that the play jumped about in time, and had very little plot and scenery, so there was “nothing to see except the theater’s steam pipes on the back wall of the stage.” Nevertheless Connelly “found the play utterly delightful.”44 When Wilder’s play moved to the Henry Miller’s Theatre in New York on February 4, Connelly wrote, “The day after Our Town opened, without a word changed, the accolades from all the critics made it suddenly desirable to every theater owner in New York with a faltering tenant.”45

  WILDER TOOK time out just before the Broadway opening to see the first television production of one of his plays. On October 19, 1937, the British producer, director, and librettist Eric Crozier’s television film of The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden was broadcast in England. Wilder first saw the telecast in New York on February 1, 1938, and found problems with the acting and the production. He wrote to his mother, “I don’t think television will ever make good theatre.”46

  He was in New Haven when he got the good news about Our Town’s Broadway debut. “Funny thing’s happened,” he wrote to Dwight Dana:

  Ruth phoned down it’s already broken a house record.

  In spite of the mixed reviews when the box office opened Saturday morning there were 26 people in line; the line continued all day, and the police had to close it for ten minutes so the audience could get into the matinée; and that $6,500 was taken in on that day—the two performances and the advance sale.

  Imagine that!

  Friday night both Sam Goldwyn and Bea Lillie were seen to be weeping. Honest!

  It was very expensive being a dramatist.

  Three opening-nights—telegrams to some of the actors, bouquets to leading ladies; a humidor to Frank Craven; gift of seats to a few friends; hotel expenses at Princeton & Boston (the contract says Jed should have paid.) . . . Isn’t it astonishing, and fun, and exhausting!47

  The morning after opening night Wilder and Isabel had taken the train back to Connecticut. They had promised each other that if the reviews were great they would splurge and take a taxi from the New Haven station to their house in Hamden. If not, they would take the trolley. The reviews were mixed, however, and accustomed as they were from childhood to being very frugal, they rode the trolley home.48

  FROM THE outset Our Town enchanted some theatergoers and bored or baffled others. Eleanor Roosevelt, then the outspoken, influential first lady of the United States, found the play “interesting” and “original,” but she was “moved and depressed beyond words,” she wrote in her popular, nationally syndicated newspaper column, My Day. While she was glad she saw it, she “did not have a pleasant evening.”49 The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, a champion of Wilder’s play, gently took Mrs. Roosevelt to task for her “Standards in Drama Criticism,” writing, “I fear that Mrs. Roosevelt has done less than justice to a distinguished work of art.”50

  By mid-February, despite the excitement of two hits on Broadway, Wilder was “broken by a Cold, and by a long tug-of-war with Jed Harris, and crammed with subjects for new plays,” he wrote his old friend Harry Luce, who had sent congratulations for the success of Our Town. Luce had especially liked the hymns sung in the choir rehearsal in Wilder’s play—hymns that reminded both men of their boyhood days at Chefoo School. “I’m about to go to Arizona for two months,” Wilder continued. “Long walks among the tumbleweeds & rattlesnake nests, liquor, and more work.”51 But before he departed for the desert, he deposited the first batch of Gertrude Stein’s papers in the library at Yale University—notebooks and manuscripts he had hand-carried from France, in part to honor her literary legacy and in part because he was concerned about the safety of the papers if Stein remained in Europe during the war. He wrote to Stein and Toklas in late February to tell them the deed was done, adding, “Oh, oh,—I wish I could a long Tale unfold: Jed Harris. You diagnosed him to a T.”52

  Together, through their contentious collaboration, Thornton Wilder and Jed Harris, the idealistic Broadway neophyte and the hardened Broadway veteran, brought Our Town to vivid life on Broadway, first at the Henry Miller’s Theatre, and then at the Morosco, where it would run more than ten months, closing November 19, 1938, after 336 performances. The Wilder-Harris friendship did not survive the play, however, and while their estrangement was par for the course for Harris, this was the most turbulent, conflicted professional relationship of Wilder’s life. The weeks after the play opened in New York found Wilder bitter and disillusioned—and bound for Arizona, where he planned to hide away; recover the balance of work, rest, and exercise that had served him so well in Zurich; and make headway on his new plays. He was writing Stein and Toklas “the flurried letters of a crazy man,” he apologized, “but when I get to Arizona, I’ll be myself again. The whole blame of my state rests at Jed Harris’s door.”53

  Wilder expressed his strongest, most critical assessment of Harris to Ernest Hemingway, who was in discussions with Harris about producing Hemingway’s play, The Fifth Column. Harris did not like the play but had been persuaded by Hemingway’s agent to fly to Key West and discuss the project anyway. Wilder wrote an adamant warning to Hemingway on March 1:

  You’ve seen him now, and know that extraordinary bundle of lightning flash intuitions into the organization of a play; vivid psychological realism; and intelligence, devious intelligence.

  But maybe you don’t know the rest: tormented, jealous egotism; latent hatred of all engaged in creative work; and so on.

  Use him for his great gifts—one play at a time only. But don’t presuppose a long happy collaboration.

  My distrust of him is bad enough, but others go far farther than I do and insist on a malignant daemonic force to destruction in him. Anyway, his professional career is one long series of repeated patterns: trampling on the friendship, gifts and love of anybody who’s been associated with him.

  I feel something like a piker to write such a letter as this. Because he has done, in many places, a fine job on my work. But the friendship’s over all right. He’s the best in N. Y., Ernest, but after this I’m ready to work with duller managers, if only I can get reliability, truthfulness, old-fashioned character, and coöperation at the same time.54

  As Wilder was trying to come to closure on his unhappy relationship with Harris, he was just beginn
ing the association with the great director Max Reinhardt that had been his dream since boyhood. He had sent Reinhardt the script of The Merchant of Yonkers, and had just about given up on hearing from him when a “thunderbolt” of good news came in a telegram from Hollywood. Reinhardt was “truly delighted” with what he had read, awaited the rest of the script with “the greatest suspense,” and “eagerly” wished to “put it on the stage.” Reinhardt, of course, knew the Nestroy play that had given rise to Wilder’s farce, and so he recognized that Dolly Levi was Wilder’s creation. Reinhardt found her to be a “precious addition to the play.”55

  Our Town settled in at the Morosco, receiving mixed but mostly favorable notices, and drawing largely enthusiastic crowds. All the Wilders celebrated, and Thornton probably never saw one of the most affirming “reviews” of his play—the letter about Our Town written to Amos by their sister Charlotte. “The Play is the Thing,” she commented.

  It is doubtless selling like wildfire—sometimes I walk by just to see, and there are always people getting tickets; it stays in my imagination as magically graphic, touching, original, and powerful, in its few mordant spots—the umbrellas of the funeral; the young husband flung on the ground; and the fascination of that exquisite expressive keenness, in humor, and nostalgic reference. Thornton’s genius, as I see it, besides the wealth of his imaginative evocation, his verbal virtuosity, is for perfect taste in relation to form.56

  Thornton’s income from Our Town would set him free to write more plays, even though royalty payments lagged behind the reviews and the box-office receipts. Amos and Janet were not dependent on Thornton for financial support, and Charlotte, struggling to stay afloat on her paltry earnings in New York, was too proud and stubborn to accept her brother’s offers of help. But Thornton’s income from Our Town would provide additional security for his mother and Isabel—and Charlotte, if she would allow it. Frugal Isabella celebrated by indulging in a new hat and a “black cotton lace dress with bolero” that fitted perfectly, and she could have bought more: Wilder’s income jumped from a net of $4,854.23 in 1937 to a net of $29,768.16 in 1938, and $37,154.80 in 1939 (the estimated equivalent of more than $720,000 in 2010 purchasing power). Slightly more than two-thirds of the 1939 income came from the publication of The Bridge of San Luis Rey as one of the first ten books in the new Pocket Books series.57