Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  As the play progresses, though, Crane finds that even in his paradise, there are plenty of disagreeable characters. Some, like Mae Jermyn (the real-life Blanche Pastorfield), are wacky. Others, like Molly Burden (Polly Adler), are disreputable. And a couple of specimens are downright dangerous. At one point, as the cracks in her marriage to George become painfully apparent, Emily is almost snatched away by John Colgate, a Pulitzer-winning “journalist and dipsomaniac” modeled on O’Hara.§

  The most problematic serpent in Crane’s Eden is Horace William Dodd, his editor, patterned to the life after Ross. Dodd is not about to let one of his best writers go without a fight and lights out to Fire Island to retrieve him. Gibbs gave Dodd some of his play’s best lines. “Say, this is quite a community you got,” Dodd tells Crane. “No telephones, no taxis, I wouldn’t be surprised no interior plumbing.” When he reads aloud Crane’s earnest despair over the rootlessness of New Yorkers, he croaks, “Water! Water!” Dodd’s only concern is getting Crane back to Manhattan; it matters little to him that his writer’s marriage is on the verge of breaking down after years of alcohol, cynicism, and mutual disaffection.

  Things come to a head when Emily learns of a budding extramarital affair between George and Deedy Barton (the Leonore Lemmon character from “The Cat on the Roof”), and she prepares to leave him. Things get so bad that Crane falls off the wagon and picks up the bottle again. At this moment, Gibbs writes, Crane comes to life: “It is an amazing metamorphosis. This is probably the first time we’ve seen the fundamental George.” In short order his imbibing is back, and he is singing with sodden self-pity, “Nobody loves me, I wonder why?” Coming from someone as reticent as Gibbs, it is an extraordinary self-revelation.

  To get Season off the ground, Gibbs turned to his old friend Burgess Meredith, who took the script to the flamboyant producer Courtney Burr. “He tottered between being either dead broke or dead rich,” said Meredith, who also recalled that Burr “went to many bizarre places to find investors, including two famous whorehouses, where the madams were friends of his.” The filthy lucre of sporting houses, however, couldn’t cover all the costs, so Burr brought in Malcolm Pearson, the producer of Clare Boothe Luce’s ill-fated Abide with Me. Meredith staged the production, his first major directing job. And Burr found a confidante in Elinor. “She spent a lot of time in his ear,” said Burr’s friend Joan Castle Sitwell, “crying on his shoulder.”

  Production of Season proceeded more or less smoothly through the spring of 1950. Richard Whorf, who had played opposite Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy, was Crane. Nancy Kelly was his wife, Emily; she would go on to win a Tony Award for The Bad Seed and replace Uta Hagen in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Anthony Ross (no relation to Harold Ross) took the Dodd role. Seven years before he had been Jim O’Connor, the bright, enthusiastic gentleman caller, in the original Glass Menagerie.

  The cast and crew were perversely perfect for a Gibbs play. “Almost everybody connected with that show was an alcoholic,” said George Ives, who played one of two minor gay characters. “Nancy Kelly was. I was. Courtney was. Malcolm was.” So were Anthony Ross, such supporting members as Charlie Thompson and Grace Valentine, and the star. “Dicky was drinking at that period, which at first made a lot of us nervous,” said Meredith, “but he never let us down.”

  Not all of the choices worked out. Ives recalled that his onstage partner—a homosexual in real life—somehow couldn’t impart his orientation to the public. Finally “[t]hey had to let him go because he couldn’t do it the way they wanted.” By far the most compelling member of the company was Joan Diener as Deedy Barton. “Joan was amazing,” Meredith recalled. “Her acting wasn’t great but she was beautiful and had the most astonishingly large breasts in proportion to her body that Broadway had ever seen.” To Deedy falls the task of offering Crane a possible way out of his travails. Consumed with latching on to a sugar daddy, she dangles the prospect of a house in Bucks County so he can write his magnum opus in peace, strongly hinting that she will be available to reassure him of his worth.

  The resolution, however, is never in doubt. When Emily gets wind of a drunken offstage fling between Crane and Deedy, her husband crawls back to her. In the process, Crane—channeling Gibbs—realizes he is running from his own fears while pretending to merely be fleeing the company he keeps.

  EMILY: I know they’re awful. Molly runs a hook-shop, in your own happy phrase, and Johnny drinks too much, and Mrs. Jermyn has what you might call a rather carefree outlook on life. But they’re people. They’re funny and they’re alive. I’m only guessing, but I think you’re afraid of them.

  GEORGE (turning to her): Afraid of them?

  EMILY: Yes. Because they’re real, and this damn world you’ve made up, this absurd little boy’s world—can’t exist with real people in it.

  Later, Dodd tells Crane essentially the same thing—that by trying to hole himself up and create a work of art, he is pursuing an illusion. So Crane literally rips his book in half and returns not only to his family but to the familiar, if unchallenging, world of his magazine.

  That summer some of the crew trekked to Ocean Beach to soak up the atmosphere and develop their characters. Their raucous presence didn’t sit well with Gibbs’s neighbors; some even picketed his house in protest. On August 27, Arthur Gelb visited with Gibbs to convey the brewing conflict for The New York Times. He found the novice playwright dressed in a bathing suit and a wrinkled white linen shirt, a two-day-old growth of stubble on his face. “He holds a colorless martini and idly depresses and releases the shift lock of his typewriter with his big toe,” Gelb wrote. The interview included this exchange:

  VISITOR: Are you aware of the resentment against you for bringing the island publicity via your writings?

  GIBBS: Yes, but I don’t think it’s too widespread. When Boris Aronson wandered around the island looking inside houses to get ideas for the set, he was welcomed very cordially by everyone.

  VISITOR: Who is going to review your play for the New Yorker?

  GIBBS: Don’t know yet. If it’s a quick flop, I might review it myself.

  Thurber dropped by the rehearsals and, drawing on his memories of The Male Animal ten years before, predicted various agonies. “During rehearsal you discover that your prettiest lines do not cross the footlights, because they are too pretty, or an actor can’t say them, or an actress doesn’t know what they mean,” he wrote Gibbs. “There comes the horrible realization that phrases like ‘Yes, you were’ or ‘No I won’t’ are better and more effective than the ones you slaved over. . . . On the thirteenth day of rehearsal, the play suddenly makes no sense to you and does not seem to be written in English.”

  By Gibbs’s estimate, he rewrote Season in the Sun thirteen times. “Cut out any sentence in the play that needs a comma,” he told himself. “A semi-colon is disastrous. In fact, the best play has no punctuation whatsoever.” If he was hard on himself, he had considerable respect for the cast. “How do they manage to rehearse for so many hours?” he asked. The going was tough. “When we opened in Boston, we got panned,” said Ives. “We really thought we were going to get killed in town [Manhattan] as well.”

  The problem was a basic lack of coherent narrative and novelty. For all of Gibbs’s rewriting, Season remained a series of largely random run-ins with his Fire Island neighbors and detractors. Among the skeptics was Ross. “He told me it was a funny play,” Gibbs informed Thurber, “but that the central dilemma (whether a man ought to write paragraphs or a novel) struck him as practically nonexistent.” Gibbs’s indirection wasn’t lost on Elinor Hughes of the Boston Herald. While praising Season’s “sharp, witty dialogue and the cruelly comic characters,” she was not happy about Gibbs’s “indifference to plot construction and his conventional triangle story.” Overall she found herself “amused” but signed off,

  With a New York opening just around the corner, I think Mr. Gibbs had better take a few more pains with the relationship between the husband and the wif
e, who have a way of behaving as discontentedly as the rest of the characters while purporting to be normal people. . . . [B]efore this particular vessel is launched on the Broadway sea, it should have all its seams caulked and its rigging taut, for there’ll be a strong wind blowing.

  The New York premiere took place on September 28, 1950. As he had for the play’s eponymous book four years before, the ever-faithful Charles Addams supplied the cover illustration for the Playbill—in this case, a little boy pulling an express wagon laden with a buxom blonde in a bikini past an apprehensive Crane. On opening night, Gibbs was fidgety. As the zero hour approached, he swore off his ringside seat and retreated with Elinor to stand at the rear of the theater.

  “I thought my colleagues, some of whom dislike me intensely, were going to be rough,” he said. “If the reviews had been very bad, I guess I would have quit The New Yorker and perhaps even the country.” Perhaps still in search of retribution for the Luce Profile, Life dispatched the photographer Leonard McCombe to shoot Gibbs during opening night as he fretted. “I don’t think I spoke a word to him,” said McCombe more than fifty years later. “I was just hoping that something would come out—I’d never shot like that. So I was nervous.”

  In the end, all of Gibbs’s anxiety was for nothing. “The opening night,” said Ives, “we got laughs from the minute the curtain went up.”

  The triumphant assemblage retreated to the Q Club to await the reviews. At about one in the morning, Gibbs dialed the Times to get a preview of Brooks Atkinson’s all-important column. Much to the novice playwright’s annoyance, McCombe clicked away madly as he listened to the playback over the pay phone. “The photographer kept telling me to bite my nails. I told him I had caps on my teeth and couldn’t,” he complained. As the night went on, the news came back reassuringly. Atkinson called the play “vastly amusing” and praised its “wit, drollery and humor.” William Hawkins of the World-Telegram and Sun thought it “a sophisticated uproar,” Howard Barnes in the Herald Tribune declared it “a glittering comedy of manners,” and John Chapman of the Daily News raved, “I nearly busted myself trying to keep from laughing.” In the final photo of McCombe’s Life spread, Gibbs and Meredith can be seen poring over a copy of Chapman’s review, Meredith looking pleased and Gibbs grimly vindicated.¶

  Though he didn’t get to bed until after four, Gibbs showed up at The New Yorker that Friday. Ross greeted him curtly: “I suppose you’re going to quit the magazine, now you’re a millionaire.” Gibbs spent the rest of that day receiving plaudits. “At each fresh assurance,” wrote Arthur Gelb in the Times, “he scratched his head in bewilderment.” After a day of being pelted with praise, he fled for Fire Island, where he spent four days fishing and losing $1.60 at poker.

  The reactions of Gibbs’s New Yorker colleagues varied. In the magazine, John Lardner—a tough customer—found Season to be “gaily, sharply, and consistently satirical,” enacted by a “cheerful and competent” cast. Ross’s assistant William Walden, who saw Season with his wife, Tippy, was astonished that so slim a piece had garnered such accolades; he suspected that the critics had simply closed ranks around one of their own. By his estimate, there wasn’t a single laugh for the play’s first twenty-six minutes.# “It was not a great play,” agreed Mary D. Kierstead. “It was perfectly agreeable, but no great shakes.” Janet Flanner reported, “Office very happy at his success but no one understands jocularity of play as subject very bad, and only one good comedy character in it.” As for Ross, he swore he wouldn’t see the play until he was satisfied that no one in the audience would recognize him. He ended up seeing it not once, but twice.

  The play brought Gibbs a substantial two thousand dollars a week. His plans for the extra income were modest; he wanted only to build two dormers atop the Fire Island house and buy Tony a new boat motor. But if Season did not affect Gibbs that much, it did put Fire Island on the map. As Gelb predicted, the small number of curious onlookers and visitors who had been drawn there during the run-up descended in droves in the summer of 1951. “To think that I wrote my play with the express intention of discouraging people from coming here!” Gibbs wailed.

  Season settled down to a healthy run, and at the 1951 Tony Awards Boris Aronson came away with the prize for Best Scenic Design. Eventually Victor Jory, best known as the brutal overseer Jonas Wilkerson in Gone with the Wind, replaced Whorf as George Crane. Walter Matthau took over from Anthony Ross as Horace Dodd and spent much time with Gibbs, slightly sozzled and talking baseball. By then the cast had grown restless and mischievous; they began engaging in no-holds-barred water-pistol fights out of sight, lying in wait around corners as victims approached. Dressed only in a towel, Jack Weston—who eventually filled the role of Ives’s gay partner—ran around backstage screaming and firing madly. The curtain came down for the last time on August 11, 1951. There was talk of exporting Season to London, but when Gibbs learned that he would have to spend any of his consequent profits in England, he balked. Besides, he couldn’t bear to fly across the Atlantic.

  Considering how long Gibbs had worked to bring his creation to life, he had surprisingly little affection for it in the years to come. He disparaged Season as “a bunch of vaudeville routines hooked together by some crap about whether a guy writes a novel or paragraphs, a non-existent dilemma if ever I heard one.” He even bet Meredith a hundred dollars—and lost—that the production would not still be running by Independence Day. He could have afforded to let up on himself, having set out to accomplish what he wanted and, in the process, discovering a hard-won appreciation of the playwright’s craft.

  “Now that I’ve found it isn’t as simple getting a play into production as I thought,” he said, “I will probably become a more benign critic.”

  * This was not quite accurate; the “Goings On About Town” listings ran as usual.

  † Liebling admitted he was jealous that Ross had extended this generosity to Gibbs: “That was white of him, I thought, but he had never said that to me. It was a true sibling emotion.”

  ‡ Repaying the compliment, Thurber later wrote a spoof of Gibbs’s “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.” He titled it “The Theory and Practice of Criticizing the Criticism of the Editing of New Yorker Articles” and dedicated it to Gibbs “with a lighted candle.”

  § Brendan Gill thought Colgate was based on the New York Herald Tribune sportswriter Don Skene, “whose invariable modest boast in his cups was that he was a descendant of the man who discovered Skene’s glands, which lubricate the female genitalia.” But Gibbs specifically stated that O’Hara inspired the character.

  ¶ Although some critics were lukewarm about Season, Claudia Cassidy of the Chicago Tribune actively dumped on it when it opened in Chicago, calling it “a turkey if ever you saw one.” A little more than two years later, Gibbs got revenge by declining to review Cassidy’s book Europe on the Aisle. He told the editor who had solicited him that he was not enamored of such phrases as “Rivers swirled into silver dragons,” “Blurred pastel bouquets of a lyric come to life,” and “capacious maw.”

  # Less than a year before, Gibbs had slammed Metropole, Walden’s own Broadway effort, about New Yorker types. However, Walden was never particularly embittered by the review because every other critic in town savaged him as well. Despite being directed by George S. Kaufman, Metropole closed after two performances.

  CHAPTER 13

  “A LOT OF SUICIDAL ENTERPRISES”

  In February 1950 The New Yorker celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. If it had been up to Ross, the occasion would have passed quietly. But on the night of March 18, he found himself in the grand ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton presiding over a mammoth black-tie affair for contributors, friends, and associates. Among the seven hundred attendees were plenty of old-timers who had been with the magazine from its rocky founding a quarter of a century before. “It ran until about 4 in the morning,” reported Gus Lobrano, “and seems generally to be regarded as a success, despite the fact that nob
ody got insulted, nobody fell down stairs, and there were no fist fights. In fact the key-notes seemed to be good-will and good-humor.” The man who had made it all possible was appalled by the crush. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to see more of you at the party,” Harold Ross told a friend. “The whole thing was like a movie run off five times too fast.” To Jay Hormel, of the meatpacking dynasty, he wrote, “I never got pulled and hauled so in my life.” So heavy with history was the atmosphere that Gibbs quipped, “That party proved one thing. It proved that lady writers don’t die. I danced with Harriet Beecher Stowe twice.”

  Coupled with his onstage immortalization in Season several months hence, Ross was marking a signal year. It was also his penultimate one. He was dying.

  Ross had been ill for some time, his slouching and loping becoming ever more pronounced. For a while, he blamed his ulcers. He was so convinced of their baleful effects that he contributed—with an uncharacteristic byline—an introduction to the healthful-living cookbook Good Food for Bad Stomachs. “I write as a duodenum-scarred veteran of many years of guerrilla service in the Hydrochloric War,” he declared. But it was not his duodenum that was killing him. At a preliminary diagnosis at the Lahey Clinic in Boston in April 1951—and in an echo of Gibbs’s condition—pleurisy was suspected. Then, as they continued to prod their patient, Ross’s physicians determined that he was suffering from cancer of the windpipe, almost certainly the result of years of heavy smoking. Without knowing quite what was happening, his friends worried accordingly.