“Honest, Ruth, the picture is good,” Wilder wrote to Ruth Gordon after he had finished his work with Hitchcock. “At the end we descend to a little fee-fo-fi-fum, but for the most part it’s honest suspense and poignancy and terror.”40 After Wilder’s departure from Hollywood, Hitchcock’s wife and collaborator, the actress and writer Alma Reville, and screenwriter and short-story author Sally Benson (Meet Me in Saint Louis and Junior Miss) added dialogue to the script, under Hitchcock’s supervision. Wilder was not happy to discover this later on when he first saw the film in a movie theater.
Shadow of a Doubt was released in 1943 to rave reviews, and was frequently reported to be Hitchcock’s favorite production. One of Hitchcock’s biographers later observed that the Wilder-Hitchcock collaboration was “one of the most harmonious” of Hitchcock’s career.41 Wilder received screenwriting credit and a special acknowledgment for his contributions to the film. Credits also went to Reville and Benson, and Gordon McDonell received an Academy Award nomination for Writing—Original Motion Picture Story. Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten starred as Charlie and Uncle Charlie, with a strong supporting cast including MacDonald Carey, Hume Cronyn, and Patricia Collinge. In 1943 Wilder wrote to Sol Lesser about the film, noting that the text was about 80 percent his, and suggesting that he and Lesser do a film after the war—provided Lesser thought, on the basis of Shadow of a Doubt, that Wilder could “write movie-telling.”42
“IT SEEMS both diplomatic and army-air intelligence needs Thornton’s type,” Isabella Niven Wilder wrote to her son Amos on May 13, 1942. She was already worried that Thornton would be sent to “dreadfully far, dangerous posts.”43
Capt. T. N. Wilder, 0908587, age forty-five, was sworn in on June 16, 1942, and received orders to begin six weeks of training in “basic soldiery” June 27 in Miami, Florida, and then to report to Army Air Intelligence Officers Training School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.44 In Miami six thousand officer candidates were being trained, and a smaller number of “re-treads,” or veterans of World War I, were undergoing “refresher training.”45 In the tropical heat and humidity Captain Wilder kept up with the best of the younger men, with “unflagging vitality.” Men in uniform often collapsed in the summer heat, to be carried off the parade ground. But Wilder, his khakis and his overseas cap soaked with sweat, actually appeared to enjoy the exercise. At forty-five he was in better shape than he had been at twenty, when he had difficulty passing the physical examination for service in World War I.46
After one sweltering daily parade in Miami, Wilder met the writer Paul Horgan, who was traveling as an official “Expert Consultant to the Secretary of War” to inspect officers’ candidate training programs across the United States, and then to write a script for an army training film with Maj. Frank Capra. Horgan and Wilder had corresponded occasionally but had never met until that particular July afternoon. Horgan asked Wilder about his next assignment. “In a few weeks I go to the Air Corps Intelligence School at Harrisburg [Pennsylvania],” Wilder said. And what would he be doing after that? Horgan wanted to know. Writing training manuals or historical records of the air services? “Never!” Wilder answered “in a subdued sort of shout,” Horgan wrote. “He kept his smile but it became severe and his heavy brows seemed to bristle. ‘Never: I shall not write for my country!’ ”47
Wilder had taken this same position with Archie MacLeish, insisting that he did not want to serve in the relative safety of Washington or Hollywood, using his skills as a writer to turn out propaganda and training films. MacLeish promised to help him find an interesting assignment, perhaps in Army Air Force Intelligence, where there was a need for people with analytical prowess and fluency in foreign languages. Wilder was determined to serve overseas: “The dream of most of our lives is to become that Intelligence Officer in the Combat Zones,” he wrote to his family.48
For the most part Wilder would have his wish. He was “still healthy, hot, hardworked and happy” in Miami in July. He complied with requests from the Bureau of Public Relations to do broadcasts and lectures, and to meet the press with the popular actors Capt. Clark Gable and Capt. Don Ameche, but he found the most satisfaction in the achievements of Squadron M, to which he belonged. They won the pennant for best marching and got the highest marks ever recorded by the training program for a test on judgment. Captain Wilder made a score of 400 out of a possible 400 points in “Company Administration.”49 He was excelling mentally and physically in his work, sleeping well, even enjoying reveille, and feeling “the War coming nearer and nearer—a huge concrete thing that diminishes everything one has ever known except friendship, love of places, and the few occasions one has known of good hard work.”50
From Miami he was dispatched to Harrisburg, and from this point on letters with explicit details of his whereabouts and his duties gradually diminished, in accord with army policy. “It’s supposed to be a secret: where we are and what we do and who we are,” he explained to Woollcott in August 1942. He could say only that he was in “the most exclusive school in the world,” and that he and his compatriots were “being trained and polished to very specialized and very responsible duties.”51 He was being schooled to be an Army Air Force Intelligence officer—“a new kind of officer at the interrogators’ table” where Allied pilots were debriefed. Young pilots were “emotionally immature,” Wilder wrote. “Returning from raids where they have killed, or where their friends behind them, gunners, etc., have been killed, they approach the Interrogators Table in inner turmoil. They do not wish to speak to a human being for 24 hours. They fantasize or worst of all develop mutism.”52 As for the officers doing the interrogating, “it’s not enough to know maps, read photographs and compute ballistics. There must be a psychologist, etc. He must know with which pilots he must be hard as nails, with which he must be patient and indirect. Yes, all War is ugly, not less so when it tries to be humane.”53
Still he was thriving. “Say, we come of good stock,” he wrote Amos that summer, looking back on his training in Miami. “Those Hebridean parsons; those Maine farmers . . . your kid brother never missed an appointment, a roll-call, a class, a drill. . . . My colleagues were fainting on the drill field, or getting excused from this or that . . . but Brotherboy was up at 5:15 and enjoying it.”54 At Harrisburg he underwent training in “map reading; aerial photography; codes; celestial navigation (!); structure of planes, etc.—so that we can at least talk adequately to the young flyers whom we interrogate and whose lives, meals, payrolls, service records we must direct.”55
Civilian life intruded now and then: Myerberg and Kazan traveled to Harrisburg to meet with Wilder about the script for The Skin of Our Teeth. He was able to get leave in late August to go to New York to confer with them about the play, and he looked forward to meeting Montgomery Clift and having dinner with Isabel, Tallulah Bankhead, and Clift at Sardi’s. He was able to spend nearly twenty-four hours with his family at Deepwood Drive.56 By mid-September, Wilder had done all he could do for the time being with the script and was ready to put it aside. “I reckon that I believe that a text counts 95% of a show,” he told Isabel, “and I let all the rest go hang. . . . Anyway, now the text’s established and I don’t have to think one more iota about that part of it.”57
In early fall Wilder reported to the 328th Fighter Group headquarters at Hamilton Field, Novato, California, near San Francisco. In addition to his training classes he performed various administrative duties, including drafting a history of the 328th, noting that the general order activating this fighter group was originally secret, and that many of the “most interesting facts about the beginning of the Group” could not be disclosed until after the war. Hamilton Field was “a post widely envied for its beauty, its handsome and comfortable original buildings and its proximity to San Francisco,” he wrote.58 Pilots of the 328th trained in P-39 Airacobras, small fighter planes that possessed sufficient speed and power at altitudes under fifteen thousand feet but were vulnerable and virtually useless above that range, and consequently
were not suited for the high-altitude combat in the skies over Western Europe.
Wilder was also assigned as investigating officer in a court-martial case involving “A little 18-year old Mississippi scrub farmer’s son who hitchhiked home for a month to help his father with the harvest.” Wilder helped get the desertion charge reduced to AWOL.59
His daily routine provided free time most evenings—time he had habitually used for reading and writing. He picked up his “several-times attempted and discarded” play, The Alcestiad, which had already accompanied him on so many journeys.60 “I write only about 10 speeches an evening,” he wrote to his mother. “If I find that it moves into the center of my interest, or keeps me awake at night, I’ll have to give it up. But so far it contributes its fragments tranquilly every night. And on Sundays I can do a larger portion.—As I see it now it’s very Helen Hayes.”61 But, he warned, that was a secret.
Civilian life encroached more frequently as the time grew near for the opening of The Skin of Our Teeth in New Haven. Then the show would go on the road for six weeks, “being licked into shape” for New York. Isabel was serving as her brother’s proxy and his eyes and ears at rehearsals. Wilder shared Isabel’s report with Sibyl Colefax:
Rehearsals have gone swimmingly as far as the text is concerned, though there have been many clashes of personalities. Tallulah has tried to show all the other actresses how to do their job and when they have not taken her advice she has flounced off to her hotel and resigned. So far she has returned almost penitently each time. She loves her rôle (Sabina) as well she might, and is very acute about the whole play when the demon is not possessing her. The text is almost established. My last week at Harrisburg I wrote them a new close to Act II and some crowning motto lines for Mr. Antrobus in Act III. Last Sunday from San Francisco I sent them a new treatment of a middle portion of Act I . . . heightening the atmosphere of impending cold and danger.62
His third act, Wilder said, had at its core “the conflict of Father and Son and the statement of War as the anguish of the ‘emptinesses.’ ”63 Whether the battle between George Antrobus and his son, Henry, is seen as mirroring the universal father-son relationship, or the particular Amos Parker Wilder–Thornton Niven Wilder relationship, or both, it is intense, bitter, and complex. Henry returns from war sullen and angry. He has risen through the military ranks from corporal to general. He has spent seven years, he tells Sabina, “trying to find him; the others I killed were just substitutes.” He wants to burn his father’s old books because “it’s the ideas he gets out of those old books that . . . that makes the whole world so you can’t live in it.”
Sabina intervenes to save the books, and scolds Henry for suggesting that his family doesn’t care about him. “There’s that old whine again,” she chides. “All you people think you’re not loved enough, nobody loves you. Well, you start being lovable and we’ll love you.” Outraged, Henry replies, “I don’t want anybody to love me. . . . I want everybody to hate me.”
Face-to-face, father and son battle over the past and the future. “I’m not going to be a part of any peacetime of yours,” Henry swears. “I’m going a long way from here and make my own world that’s fit for a man to live in. Where a man can be free, and have a chance, and do what he wants to do in his own way.”
“How can you make a world for people to live in, unless you’ve first put order in yourself?” George Antrobus counters. Before there is violence, Sabina intervenes: “Stop! Stop! Don’t play this scene. You know what happened last night. Stop the play.”64 Father and son come to a kind of truce, perhaps too swiftly for credibility—but this is, after all, a play meant to seduce an audience into a willing suspension of disbelief.
Wilder would also rework the ending of the drama. As he explained to Amy Wertheimer in 1943:
I’ve always assumed a very slow curve of civilization. But I always affirm too that my “toleration” of humanity’s failings is more affirmative than most “opportunists.” When I first wrote Skin of Our Teeth it lacked [the] motto-humanity-climbing-upward speeches of Mr. Antrobus at the end. I assumed that they were omnipresent in the play and didn’t have to be stated. I assumed that they were self-evident,—that’s how highly I believe in mankind. But more and more of the early readers found the play “defeatist.” So I wrote in the moral and crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s.65
The Skin of Our Teeth was now on tour in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington after its world premiere at the Shubert Theater in New Haven on October 15. Myerberg had hired the legendary press agent Richard Maney to manage publicity for the play and, according to Maney, on opening night, after fifteen people left the theater before the play was over, Myerberg directed him to write a synopsis of the plot for a program note. Perhaps if the audience knew something about the plot ahead of time, Myerberg reasoned, they’d stay put for the entire show. Maney complied, overnight producing words Wilder later approved, and they were added to the playbill and have been part of the play’s acting edition ever since.66 Even so, word got around that taxis hovered outside the Shubert Theater like getaway cars to collect unhappy patrons who gave up on the play after the first act, or the second. Variety reported that although ten or fifteen patrons stalked out during every performance, the play was “thriving on controversy, holding to much bigger grosses than expected.”67
“Wreathed in controversy, The Skin of Our Teeth was an immediate hit,” Maney confirmed later. He did his part in “raising a din” over the play, pleased when its “champions hailed it as a comic masterpiece,” as well as when “motion-picture actors and other dolts denounced it as gibberish.” He recalled that this “medley of cheers and jeers was music to my ears. Furtively I prodded both camps to further excesses.”68
AT HAMILTON FIELD, Wilder found that it was simpler to coordinate pilots and fighter squadrons than it was to persuade feuding producers and actors to work together congenially. As the pre-Broadway tour progressed, there was near-mutiny from the cast. Hearing from Tallulah Bankhead and Florence Reed that Michael Myerberg had dismissed three actors and was undermining the play, Wilder tried to untangle events from his vantage point on a California military base. Isabel confirmed that Myerberg, prone to an arrogant disregard for others, and Bankhead, prone to an excessive confidence in her own talent and power, often clashed. Bankhead did not get along with other members of the cast, especially Florence Eldridge. Wilder was bombarded with letters of complaint about Myerberg. He urged Myerberg by mail to “do everything to establish so fine a company into the harmonious working unit they have a right to be.”69 He pointed out that the stars of the play had “almost a right to such agitations—being artists going through the throes of bringing to birth.”70
Wilder was eager, as always, for Woollcott’s opinion of the production of his play. Before he had seen the play himself, Woollcott reported to Sibyl Colefax that Edward Sheldon had called The Skin of Our Teeth “a work of indisputable genius and Helen Hayes thinks of it as the finest script she ever read.”71 After he saw the play in previews in early November, Woollcott wrote Wilder his frank opinion:
Having seen “By the Skin of Our Teeth” [sic] and thought about it and read it, I know what I think about it. I think no American play has ever come anywhere near it. I think it might have been written by Plato and Lewis Carroll in collaboration, or better still by any noble pedagogue with a little poltergeist blood in him. I had not foreseen that you could write a play that would be both topical and timeless, though I might have remembered from “The Trojan Women” [by Euripides] that it could be done.72
However, Woollcott wrote, “Tallulah does not know how to play Sabina and cannot be taught to. She has some assets as an actress, but she is without comic gift. . . . . Tallulah is not a comedienne and thinks she’s a wonderful one.” Woollcott told Wilder that Sabina’s every scene and every line “aches for Ruth Gordon.”73
Backstage feuds continued long after the play opened on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre on November 18, but r
eviews were strongly positive, and Talullah Bankhead and Fredric March had the marquee appeal to draw crowds. The play was a critical as well as a box-office hit, playing to nearly full houses night after night, with a box-office take approaching twenty thousand dollars a week.74
Wilder saw his play onstage for the first time in November, just before its New York opening. With the play’s successful debut, he hoped he could be free of civilian distractions and concentrate on his military duties, which had grown more and more demanding. That fall Wilder was assigned sixty days of “Detached Service” to travel the country visiting airfields as part of a committee preparing an Air Force document. From Spokane, Washington, on November 24, he mailed notes on The Skin of Our Teeth to Harold Freedman, his dramatic agent, asking him to pass them along to his producer and director, as well as to Isabel. He was “overwhelmingly grateful” for the “fine things about the performance,” Wilder wrote. The only flaw he perceived in the performance was the “hurry-hurry-hurry”—the “lack of variation in pace” in act 1.75
By December 1942 Captain Wilder, part-time playwright, had been assigned to the Pentagon in Washington and, to his astonishment, found himself under siege from the Saturday Review of Literature. The December 19 issue of the magazine carried “The Skin of Whose Teeth?—The Strange Case of Mr. Wilder’s New Play and Finnegans Wake,” the first half of a two-part article by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson challenging the originality of The Skin of Our Teeth, and charging that Wilder’s play was “an Americanized re-creation, thinly disguised, of James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ ”76 The second installment, “The Skin of Whose Teeth? Part II: The Intention Behind the Deed,” appeared in the February 13, 1943, issue. Campbell, a thirty-eight-year-old teacher of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, was at that time working with Swami Nikhilananda on a new translation of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, published in 1942, and A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake with Henry Morton Robinson, which would be published in 1944. Robinson, forty-four, had taught English at Columbia University, was a senior editor at Reader’s Digest, and would make his fortune as the author of a popular novel, The Cardinal, a bestseller in 1950 and 1951, made into a movie by Otto Preminger in 1963. Campbell would become an award-winning teacher, editor, and popularizer of mythology and folklore.
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