Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  Then suddenly, I thought back to the play, The Member of the Wedding, of which I had made a first beginning draft, and now I worked at it with total commitment. I made several minor changes, as one makes changes in transferring a novel to a play, but on the whole it was absolutely faithful to the novel.

  My good friend, William Mayer, found a psychiatric nurse who helped me with the manuscript, and by the time I was able to go home I found a secretary to type up the script.

  This was grand fun—the only trouble was the secretary had no sense of humor and when I was laughing I had to laugh alone, which is a bit ghostly I must say.

  “Don’t you think it’s funny?” I would say to her occasionally.

  “No,” she would answer.

  I kept on laughing alone.

  Finally, my agent found two producers, Robert Whitehead and Stanley Martineau, who saw the beauty of the manuscript, and were ready to go into production. One day a friend of mine, Bessie Breuer, brought a young girl to see me. She looked like Frankie, although she had never cut her hair, I could see her plainly in the part.

  “What experience have you had as an actress?” I asked.

  “The Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland and a part in Sundown Beach.”

  Meanwhile we talked about the garden and I did not mention Member, and she didn’t either.

  It was my first meeting with Julie Harris and soon as she left, I got on the telephone and called Miss Audrey Wood. Julie also had called her asking if there was any chance for her to play Frankie. So the producers approached Julie and officially signed her for the part.

  Bob Whitehead went to Chicago, in person, to find Miss Ethel Waters. She was on her knees in her hotel room when Bob came in.

  “I’m just praying that God will give me a good booking,” she said. She had read the play and had turned it down, so it was up to Bob to convince her that Member was a good booking.

  “To tell you the truth, I would never work for one of them little fancy men.”

  “Mrs. McCullers is not a little fancy man. She’s a very distinguished writer,” Bob went on.

  “But that girl Frankie swears and uses bad language.”

  It was the director, Harold Clurman, who was able to interpret the part of Frankie to Miss Waters. The laughter of the audience made Ethel realize that certain passages were very funny, and thanks to Harold she did an excellent job as Berenice.

  Brandon de Wilde is another story. Our casting director was having dinner with some actor friends when she saw a little boy of seven or eight playing on the floor.

  “Have you ever wanted to be an actor like your mother and daddy?” she asked.

  Plainly Brandon had never thought about it, but with his parents’ permission, he tried out for the part. Of all the actors he was the first to learn his lines, and he was the liveliest; playing ghost with Julie in the dressing rooms. He had never set foot on the stage before, and the orchestra on opening night upset him because he was not prepared for it, so that he began to cry. Then after a few minutes he was master of his part, and the play as it was, a three-part fugue, sang in the hands of this young genius.

  Before opening, the producers wanted the opinions of various people, among them the man who had already signed the contract for the Empire Theatre. They asked what he thought of the play. He looked at Bob and Stan pityingly and said, “This will be the worst disaster ever to hit this theatre or any other theatre. God help us all.”

  I had a funny feeling, a continual nausea all during the Philadelphia try-outs. Of course, I put it down to nerves and went about my business of going to rehearsal every morning and listening to the last night’s conferences that Reeves would report to me, as I felt too sick to attend them myself. The Philadelphia press was good, but by no means ecstatic. I made one major twenty-minute cut in the play that very likely saved its life.

  But when the play finally opened at the Empire on January 5, 1950, it was an immediate and stunning success.

  I was too scared to go to opening night, so I spent the evening eating lobster Newburg with Florence Martineau. After supper we waited in the apartment. We waited and waited. Surely the play was over by now, we thought. Later we found that the audience rose, threw programs in the air and yelled and whistled with delight. Julie had to take thirteen curtain calls, and goodness knows how many Brandon and Ethel took. I would have loved to have been there that first night, and it served me right for being so cowardly. Member finally closed after five hundred and one performances, on March 17, 1951, after receiving many awards, including the Critics’ Circle Award.

  The day after opening night I went home to Nyack immediately with my mother, who had been at the opening. She commented that I looked peaked.

  “I feel like hell,” I said.

  “Don’t use bad language, darling.”

  “But I do,” I said.

  So she called the doctor. He examined me, and after some tests at the hospital he told Mother that I was pregnant.

  “But she can’t be,” Mother said.

  I was surprised but pleased. However, I fixed my attention on the scene between the doctor and my mother.

  “This is God’s way of making up to her because of her ruined health,” the doctor said.

  Mother’s scorn was loud and voluble. “You don’t know what it is to have a baby,” she said. “It will kill my child.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to be a grandmother?”

  “A grandmother while my child is dead? No! Besides I have a perfectly good grandson in Florida. I won’t let Carson have this baby.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” the doctor asked.

  “I’ll do something,” she screamed, “something. I know what it is to have babies and you don’t.”

  The doctor who had delivered about five hundred babies let that pass.

  “I’ll do something,” she said again, “in the meantime you’re fired!”

  Mother quickly called Dr. Mayer, my psychiatrist, and he was as horrified as she was.

  “Get her ready to go to the hospital immediately. I will make the arrangements.”

  That was on a Friday, and we had to wait until Monday for a room. The quarrel between Mamma and the doctor had upset me so, that I miscarried then and there. The miscarriage was not easy. Mother who had some outlandish fear that either they might put the baby back or do something that would kill me in the end, would not call another doctor. So I suffered until Monday, when a taxi took me to New York. The blood was all over the car by the time I got there, and Dr. Van Etten, the chief gynecologist at the Neurological Institute, said to Reeves, “Why have you waited till now? Your wife is dying.”

  Meanwhile he was giving me transfusions. Then I was rushed to Flower Hospital and William Mayer, who was always with me, was again with me holding my hand.

  “So there was a member of the wedding,” I said, “that I hadn’t counted on.”

  After I was over the hump, William sent me to a marvelous hospital, where with the excellent food and care I quickly regained my strength.

  Now it thrills me to know that Mary Rodgers, the musician, and Marshall Barer, the lyricist, have joined with me, as the author of the musical book, to do a musical or opera of Member of the Wedding.

  Mary said on the telephone, “I know opera is a dirty word but I’m afraid this work is turning into an opera.”

  “Don’t make it too filthy,” I said.

  Mary is one of the few people I can really discuss things with on the telephone. I mean by that that she is never in a hurry.

  At the moment she has five or six songs and is writing rapidly. Both Marshall and I have finished our work, and we are planning an opening for the first of the year. We have not started casting and I’m just hoping that one of these days I will again see somebody on the back porch and be so excited that I will call my agent, who, by the way, is Robbie Lantz. After years of dissatisfaction, I have found him to be a marvelous agent and friend. He has sold all of my books to the films a
nd has taken wonderful care of me for many years.

  Although I’ve been bedridden for the last three years, my life is not without excitement. In June, of 1967, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter will be filmed. Joseph Strick who so brilliantly directed Ulysses will direct it. In September of this year I’m expecting to see the first showing of Reflections in a Golden Eye. Meanwhile I’m waiting eagerly to hear Mary and Marshall’s work on Member of the Wedding.

  When John Huston invited me to go to Ireland this year I joyfully accepted, and the visit was one of the happiest times of my life. John was the first person I told about the leg operation and he was the first to advise my following the doctor’s orders in respect to the amputation.

  “You’ll move about so much easier,” he said, “and it will be a blessing to be rid of all that useless pain.”

  I work hard every morning and read in the afternoon when I have the time, since friends are always dropping in. I usually go to the Plaza once or twice a year where I can meet with my business friends and give interviews. I simply love the menu there, and so does Ida, who of course, is always with me.

  I have little cocktail parties specializing in Beluga caviar with the proper onion, lemon, and egg. Friends are forever sending me goodies. Christmas is always a great time in my life as I always have a big party. Last year I had a beautiful one featuring André Girard’s “Painting in Movement,” to the wonder and delight of all my guests. André has perfected a new way of showing his drawings in motion. He is a great artist and his pictures are superb and living on the screen. He has a new repertoire of pictures which he has promised to show to me very soon. He never minds my inviting guests to share them with me.

  In 1954 I began to write a disaster not on purpose, God knows, but day by day, inch by inch I was falling into chaos. It is easy to blame Saint Subber, but I won’t. He was the one who insisted I write The Square Root of Wonderful. But how could I know, because Saint is certainly one of the very finest of musical producers? How could I know a light comedy was just not his meat? But he was the most insistent and persevering man I’d ever known in my professional life. Every day he would come to 131 South Broadway, Nyack. I could see him with a whip in his hand all ready to shove me on. The play was about a writer who had married a foolish woman, and since my mother was failing in health and I wanted to preserve and recognize her most charming foolishnesses, which is fine in real life, but deadly on the stage, I had tried to capture her innocence. But the innocence turned out to be just dumbness and the unsuccessful writer was an extension of all my own fears of fallowness and failure. I was particularly hard on him as I sometimes get very hard on myself. He combined all the most unloving traits that were in me. My selfishness, my tending to gloom and suicide. In fact, he was a thoroughly bad actor. Why I wrote this crap is hard to realize; of course, I had no idea it was so bad. Not until the horrifying first night of the tryout in Philadelphia. Then like an angry hen defending its young I tried fiendishly to do something about it. Saint Subber was trying too, so that we had a change of six directors in all, one worse than the other. Nobody seemed to realize it was just a bad play and so all the frenzied hiring and firing went on. It went on till the opening in New York.

  As I don’t go to openings, I certainly made no exception with this one. I skulked around the theatre waiting fearfully for news. I was wearing my beautiful two thousand year old, this is the truth, Chinese robe, and as I passed the theatre I did not even have the nerve to pray.

  A couple who had walked out on the show said, “I wonder if she’s a member of the play?”

  When we went to the party given by the co-producer it was so painful I forget his name, Saint cried, the co-producer cried, and when the reviews were read from the New York Times, they all cried double.

  But me, I just sat there stony and crying inwardly, but never with a sob or a tear. At the risk of seeming to defend this utter failure, I must say the play read better than it acted. Finally after forty-five performances the play painfully expired on December 7, 1957.

  As if this fiasco was not enough for me to bear, my dear friend John La Touche died suddenly of a heart attack at his summer home in Vermont. After I heard this news I had a letter from him postmarked two days before. I remember John’s own courage when he had written a play called The Vamp and it had closed in similar circumstances. His equanimity was superb. I was at that time staying with him and his mother, and I wondered at his grace in the face of misfortune.

  After John’s death and the death of Square Root of Wonderful I felt that God had turned his back on me.

  I had slept with my mother in twin beds for all the years that she had been delicate, but one day I was invited by my friends, Hilda and Robert Marks, to spend the night with them. Mother insisted that I should not call Ida and she said she’d be perfectly all right. With misgiving I acquiesced to her, and Ida, of course, would be there first thing in the morning.

  “You’ve been confined to the house so long, darling,” she said. “Go out and enjoy yourself.”

  I still worried about her in the evening and called and she said she was fine. Then early next day my cousin came. He embraced me tenderly and said, “I have some bad news for you, darling.”

  My sister had been in the hospital with an appendicitis operation and my first thought was to her. “Rita?” I asked.

  “No, darling, not Rita, it’s your mother.”

  I said, “Is she dead?”

  My cousin patted my hand and embraced me again.

  I could only say, “What can I do?” But even as I heard my own voice, I knew the question was a foolish one. I called Ida at the house, and although she was crying she did say firmly, “Come home immediately, the funeral people are already arriving.”

  Ida had come to work very early and told Mother she would bring her breakfast immediately.

  “I’m hungry,” my mother said, “and cold.”

  “Wait just a jiffy,” Ida said, “while the stove heats up.”

  She came in with my mother while she was waiting and suddenly, very suddenly Mother began to vomit blood. She died in Ida’s arms.

  Mother was only able to gasp, “Thank goodness Sister isn’t here,” and with her last breath she added, “It would be too much for her.”

  It was too much, almost too much. But my sorrow led to the happiest and most rewarding experience of my life, which was my meeting with and love for Dr. Mary Mercer.

  My cousin Boots is a very remote cousin indeed. We claim kinship just out of love although there is a distant family relationship. My mother adored him and adored his father. His father was one of the wittiest men imbued with a homespun, tall-tale humor that I have ever known, and Boots has inherited this same genius. He has one of the most beautiful apartments I have ever seen, filled with family possessions as well as his own “objects d’art.” Whenever I want to give a special present to a friend I call on Boots and he always buys it for me. I can absolutely trust his taste. I used to love to spend the week-end with Boots, stay in his apartment and enjoy his fabulous collection of books and records. He has, I believe, fifteen thousand records and any worthwhile book you can name. I would go into the kitchen with him while he cooked supper. He is a topflight cook and open to my curious advice.

  I remember one night he invited a very obese and extremely well-known Wagnerian opera singer to dinner. He enjoys late meals and is not very prompt in serving them, so he had beautiful hors d’oeuvres which the singer looked at quizzically and asked, “What’s this?”

  “Just a little something to nibble on before dinner’s ready.”

  The opera singer was eyeing the dining room, she was not going to spoil her dinner by those tidbits, and so she waited and waited and waited. Finally, about eleven o’clock, Boots announced dinner and escorted her to the table. That night he was serving eggs benedict, but by the time he had seated her and gone around to his own place at the head of the table, he looked up and with horror he realized that the great singer had bolte
d the entire meal.

  I love twice-told and thrice-told stories, and so when Boots and I are together he tells me Marshallville stories or more serious ones such as his friendship with Margaret Mitchell, and the tragedy that such a modest and retiring woman could have been hounded by publicity hunters as she was, after writing Gone with the Wind.

  Even as a grown woman I was haunted always by homesickness. My family always took precedence over everything except my own work. Especially I missed my parents and I clung somewhat limpet-like to the family. When I was living in Brooklyn Heights there was a family feeling that was dear to me. Mother would come and visit me occasionally. She and W. H. Auden, a Southerner and an Englishman, found it very hard to understand each other. Mother, bless her heart, would shout at Wystan as though there was something wrong with his hearing instead of the language barrier. Wystan is very kind and very understanding. I was once horrified though when he and George Davis took me to the Bowery. The debasement of those derelicts sent a shiver through my soul, so that I ran from the Bowery to Chinatown and got a taxi back to Brooklyn. There I sat on the steps, cold and miserable, until they came home. I remember this story because I just read in the papers that Dorothy Day, who does social work in the Bowery, was surprised when a man came to her with a check. She thought, she said in the press, that it was some small donation from a former bum who was trying to repay her for her past kindnesses. As she rode on the subway she unfolded the check and, to her great surprise, it was from W. H. Auden with a note of congratulations for her notable contribution to social outcasts in the Bowery.

  I had fled in the face of all that misery, but Wystan had stayed and done something about it.