by Marc Eliot
If films were his only relief, they also proved a costly distraction. In the summer of 1929, Jimmy had to attend remedial classes on campus due to his dangerously low grade-point average caused by his poor performance in math. Among other things, this prevented him from returning to his beloved Indiana, which turned out not to be a disappointment. He had, after nearly a year at university, finally begun to enjoy his newfound sense of freedom.
By the start of fall classes, he had managed to avoid academic catastrophe and, at least for the time being, happily looked forward to his second year at Princeton.
Jimmy and Brown benefited from their sophomore status by being granted far better living accommodations at Brown Hall. Once they settled in, Jimmy went about putting together his schedule of extracurricular activities. Having failed at sports, he decided to join the Glee Club as a second tenor. Within weeks, he felt confident enough to audition for The Golden Dog, an original musical production being put on by Princeton’s esteemed musical dramatic society, the Triangle Club.
Part of his motivation for auditioning was obvious. Although the all-male Triangle Club rarely had the opportunity to use women in its productions, there seemed to be no shortage of them around when the group took their shows out on the road to nearby towns, which they always did.3 By now, twenty-one-year-old Jimmy was desperate to meet just one.
He worked up an audition piece he thought would show off his talents. For weeks he practiced a single tune, “So Beats My Heart for You,” accompanying himself on the accordion. Traditionally, every production featured a live, specialty accordion number—why, no one really knew except that it was “tradition.” Jimmy was all too well aware that his singing voice was only adequate and that he could barely carry a tune. If he had any hope of making it as a Triangle player, it would be through the one talent they could really use—his ability on the accordion.
The Golden Dog was an original show written by Al Wade, a senior, and his musical production partner, a talented if moody junior by the name of Josh Logan, who was also president of the Triangle Club. They first noticed Jimmy when he auditioned for the show’s faculty director and supervisor, Dr. Donald Clive Stuart. Years later, Dr. Stuart would remember Jimmy’s audition this way: “It wasn’t Jim, it was his accordion. I had made a solemn resolve to ban accordion specialties forever. Every Triangle Club show for years had had one. The 1929–30 production of The Golden Dog was, as far as I was concerned, going to struggle along without one.”
At the audition, Robert Perry, another accordion player and a friend of Jimmy’s from Mercersburg, went out for the same part. Jimmy’s audition, however, completely charmed Logan, whose attention had been caught by the boy’s thin, pretty face and small-town demeanor. He thought him perfect for one of the roles, and convinced Wade to take on both Stewart and Perry, who Dr. Stuart strongly preferred, although his impression of the latter was neutral, at best. Logan’s desire not to butt heads with Dr. Stuart was the real reason he kept Perry in the show.4
Over Dr. Stuart’s objections, Logan cast both boys in the play to perform the obligatory accordion number, “Blue Hell.” Throughout rehearsals, Dr. Stuart was at a loss as to why Logan had insisted on keeping Jimmy and the number in the show, with the way he bent over the accordion, the serious look on his face, and the protruding lower lip that, according to Dr. Stuart, “stuck out like a balcony.” Not only that, Stuart insisted that when the boy spoke, it was difficult to hear him, as he had no idea how to project his naturally soft voice. Logan worked with Jimmy to teach him how to play without bending over so low, and to try to keep his lip in check so as not to distract the audience from the rest of what was happening on stage. And when he did so, Logan noticed he wasn’t half bad.
During rehearsals one day, Logan approached Jimmy and asked if he had any ideas about becoming a professional actor. According to Logan, Jimmy’s response was to pull back, as if in surprise, before automatically saying, in a low, deliberate drawl, “Good Gawd, no. I’m going to be an architect.”
“He walked away as if I had slandered him,” Logan recalled.
To be sure, Logan’s awareness of what he later described as Jimmy’s “attractive personality” was a loaded one. Born in Texas in 1908 four and a half months before Jimmy (he was a year ahead at Princeton because of Jimmy’s makeup year at Mercersburg), Josh Logan was raised in Mansfield, Louisiana. From the day his lumberjack father had committed suicide when little Josh was only three, tragedy seemed to follow Logan everywhere he went. Not long after, his mother remarried, and the boy was brought up by an abusive stepfather who nicknamed him “Sissy” because of his feminine manner. By the age of twenty, Logan had swanned into an extremely good-looking young man interested in two things—the theater and other men (with the former the perfect venue for finding the latter). He found a comfortable niche for his sexual proclivities in Princeton’s theatrical activities, the one place on campus where nobody seemed to care if anyone was gay. In fact, to the other clubs and especially the teams, it was a good place to park them. The director Logan was more than likely attracted to Jimmy for reasons other than just his ordinary-at-best acting or musical abilities displayed in The Golden Dog. As for Jimmy, just getting through the ordeal without major embarrassment was an accomplishment he ranked high on his list of achievements at Princeton. He considered it at once a triumphant debut and a fitting farewell to his career in the theater.
The following fall, Jimmy, now a junior, moved into his own room at Foulke Hall, the just-built, highly sought-after housing unit strictly reserved for upperclassmen. In an attempt to boost his grade point average for acceptance into graduate school, he added more drawing classes and declared architecture his pre-major, which was allowed at the junior level under the auspices of the Department of Art and Archaeology. Each candidate was then personally supervised by students in the Graduate School of Architecture. The curriculum was, according to the Princeton catalog, mostly liberal arts courses augmented with Ancient Architecture, Elements of Drafting, Introduction to Design, Principles of Drawing and Painting, Ancient Art, Renaissance Sculpture, Oriental Art, and Modern Architecture. These classes proved easy for Jimmy, whose natural ability to draw helped him make the honor roll that year.
He also joined one of Princeton’s eighteen “eating” clubs. The Charter Club, founded in 1909, was a place where upperclassmen could gather for evening meals in jackets and ties and discuss their individual progress as well as their plans for the future. Accepting the Charter Club’s invitation was a big deal for Jimmy, especially since his father had belonged to the Cottage Club, one of the oldest “eaters” at the school and, traditionally, where any member’s son was automatically accepted. For some reason, the Cottage had ignored Jimmy, possibly because his theatrical activities and association with the flamboyant Logan had led some members to believe he might himself be gay, and gay members were not welcome at the Cottage.
A friendly competition arose among the eating clubs as to who could throw the best weekend parties. With his accordion, Jimmy quickly became one of the most popular of the Charters. He soon discovered what most young musicians do—playing an instrument is a great way to attract girls. Many young women attended the parties, some hopeful to snag a Princeton boy for a future well-to-do husband, some just looking for a good time. Jimmy, always wary of anyone who wanted to get too close, nevertheless was unable to get any of the party girls who swarmed around him when he played to go out with him after. For some reason, by the end of the evening he’d find himself home alone, frustrated and confused, his squeeze-box dangling lifelessly from one of his long arms.
That December, Logan asked Jimmy to try out for the Triangle Club’s 1930 presentation, one that Logan had written with several other students called The Tiger Smiles. Although Logan was committed to what was his senior and therefore final production for the Triangle Club, he already had much loftier goals in his sights.
Two years earlier, in the winter of 1928, Logan had been invited, as p
resident of the club, to attend a Manhattan cocktail party honoring Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre. Nemirovich-Danchenko was in America to spread the word of the new phenomenon that was sweeping the stages and classrooms of Russia, the Method acting of the great Konstantin Stanislavsky.
In truth, Nemirovich-Danchenko, like the rest of the theatrical Muscovites in America that year, was less interested in spreading the word to the working people than in the moneyed benefactors of their free society. They successfully courted those who were financially able to support them, inviting the wealthiest as well as the most promising college students to a tony bash hosted by wannabe New York directors Bretaigne Windust, the president of Princeton’s other theatrical group, the nonmusical Intime, and Charles Crane Leatherbee, the president of the Harvard Dramatic Society.
The party had had an electrifying effect on Logan. After drinks at a nearby hotel bar with Windust and Norris Houghton, a set designer from Cape Cod who had worked with Leatherbee at Harvard, Logan vowed to start an acting company of his own, dedicated to maintaining the highest standards of classical theater.
That night, with raised glasses and solemn voices, they toasted their own future as the University Players.
The main character of The Tiger Smiles, a satire about Princeton sports teams (the Tigers), is Bruce Pelham, an athlete who suffers a blow to the head and imagines what life will be like a hundred years in the future. Logan insisted that Jimmy play Pelham, the leading role (not telling him that he, Logan, had written the part with Jimmy in mind), and Jimmy accepted the offer. He had a total of six musical numbers in the show, both with and without the accordion, among them “On a Sunday Evening,” a performance Logan later described lovingly as “gangling and hilarious.”5
The play opened on December 17 and ran two nights at Princeton. Then Logan took it out on a regional tour that was reviewed by Time magazine, which in its brief notice praised Logan for his originality and the show’s “excellence [that] easily equals anything the [Triangle] Club has done since it was founded.” The article was accompanied by a photo of Jimmy in full costume regalia. The tour traveled during the Christmas school break and played in Philadelphia; Columbus, Ohio; Chicago; Milwaukee; Cleveland; and Baltimore. As Logan later remembered, “As president of the Triangle Club I was charged about seeing writers, lyricists, musicians, scenic artists, choreographers. But [after The Tiger Smiles] closed, I suddenly stopped and seemed misty-eyed and vague. My head was not up in the clouds. It was in Moscow…the juvenile lead for The Tiger Smiles was written for James Stewart, with his droll Pennsylvania drawl in mind. He spoke in a stately pavane even then. He still felt he was going to be an architect. This stage ‘monkey business’ was just fun. But he was so good I knew deep down he loved acting but was too embarrassed to admit it.”
When the tour ended, there were only a few days left before spring classes began. Logan and Leatherbee, who had since become lovers, decided to use the time to make a pilgrimmage to Moscow. They arrived the first week of 1931 and were warmly received by the Moscow Art Theatre in a somewhat exaggerated fashion as the toasts of New York’s burgeoning show business intelligentsia. While there, they took in as much theater as they could and happily caroused with the actors in the various companies. On their way back to America, they stopped to pay their respects to the great Max Reinhardt in Vienna. By the time they returned home, Logan’s heart was already miles away from Princeton. It was in Cape Cod, to be exact, where Leatherbee’s mother had generously donated part of her expansive home to serve as the new living quarters for the University Players.6
That spring of 1931, upon graduation, Logan, Leatherbee, and Houghton moved their company to the Cape and began in earnest to pursue their grand theatrical dream of running an annual summer theater of national prominence that they absolutely believed would change the course and direction of modern American theater.
Back at Princeton, meanwhile, Jimmy, finishing up his junior year, found that he missed the excitement of belonging to and performing with the Triangle Club. It wasn’t so much the plays themselves he missed as the camaraderie that he had developed with Logan.
In his senior year, Jimmy appeared in the Logan-less Triangle production of Spanish Blades, in which, accordion strapped as ever around his narrow shoulders, he played a small role that offered two solos on the squeeze-box. He was disappointed by the experience, finding nothing of the excitement or professionalism that he experienced when Logan had been in charge of things.
The show, nevertheless, would mark a key turning point in Jimmy’s life. In the audience for its single campus performance was Billy Grady, a rosy-cheeked, bulb-nosed former talent agent who bore an uncanny resemblance to W. C. Fields, and who had been hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as an East Coast talent scout for the Culver City–based studio. That afternoon, while driving down to Atlantic City to see a pre-Broadway tryout of his friend George M. Cohan’s latest show, Grady had stopped for lunch at a roadside diner and checked in with his office. When he found out that that evening’s performance had been postponed due to technical reasons, “in order not to waste the rest of the day I decided to attend the annual Princeton University Triangle show opening that evening. Princeton shows were always interesting; this one was no exception. It got off to a good start with a line of thirty-two male undergraduates in female chorus garb, trying to emu-late Broadway showgirl ensemble routines. They were a motley group, and like all amateurs, accentuated their ridiculous appearance with excessive mugging and gestures. All but the skinny guy on the end. He was six-foot-four [sic], towered over all the others, and looked uncomfortable as hell. While the others hammed it up, the thin one played it straight and was a standout. Later in the show the thin one did a specialty, singing a song to his own accompaniment on an accordion. He could not seem to coordinate the lyrics and the instrument…the audience thought it was a comedy routine and rewarded him with loud applause.”
Grady had enjoyed Jimmy’s performance so much that he went backstage to introduce himself. In his notebook, Grady wrote that Jimmy had “an ingratiating personality” but, unfortunately, was a type that would be “of no particular interest” to the studio.
As it turned out, Grady was not the only talent scout in the audience that night. Max Arnow, of Warner Bros., also caught the show and also went backstage to see Jimmy. He gave him his card and asked him to call his Manhattan office sometime. Jimmy thanked him, put the card down somewhere in his dressing room, and quickly forgot about it.
Two weeks before Jimmy’s spring 1932 graduation, Josh Logan paid him a visit at school. Over a cup of coffee in the student lounge, he pointed his finger at Jimmy and said, “You’re my new leading man!”
Logan ignored Jimmy’s dropped jaw as he made him an extraordinary invitation, to come to Cape Cod and be the leading man for the 1932 summer season of the University Players. Jimmy, stunned by the offer, profusely thanked him but reluctantly said no, because he was planning to return home to Indiana to spend the summer with his folks before beginning classes at Princeton’s graduate School of Architecture.
But Logan wouldn’t take no for an answer. For the next three hours he tried to convince Jimmy to change his mind, which he finally did by using his ace-in-the-hole. Having exhausted all other arguments, Logan played his Sullavan hand. He told Jimmy he had hired Margaret Sullavan to be the company’s leading lady.
Logan had first used her in his sophomore year, after Leatherbee had cast her in a Harvard Dramatic Society show and had recommended her to Logan for the Triangle production of The Devil in the Cheese, in which Jimmy had served as stage manager. As Logan later recalled, “Returning to Princeton for my sophomore year I made a token appearance in enough classes to avoid expulsion and the loss of the Triangle Club…. When Charlie recommended Sullavan for The Devil in the Cheese she was nineteen, from Virginia…. I learned one thing at rehearsals. This new girl Margaret Sullavan was all Charlie had promised. She had a pulsing and husky voice
that could suddenly switch, in emotional moments, to a high choir boy soprano. Her beauty was not obvious or even standard. It showed as she tilted her head, as she walked, as she laughed, and she was breathtakingly beautiful as she ran. One of my girlfriends complained that I talked too much about Sullavan and she was right. We were all in love with her.”
But not like Charles Leatherbee. He was not only crazy about Sullavan but also sleeping with her every night. And not like Jimmy, who, knowing nothing about her relationship with Leatherbee, had formed an intense crush on the actress, and had tortured himself all during the production over whether or not to ask Sullavan to be his escort at one of the Charter Club functions. He finally did, she happily accepted, and they went together, but before Jimmy could even think about taking things any further, she was picked up almost immediately by the Shubert Organization and whisked to New York City to make her Broadway debut. The last he had heard of her was that she was performing in a play called, ironically enough, A Modern Virgin.
As Logan was well aware, Jimmy had not been able to get her out of his mind. Not even when the news had come down that she had married a young actor by the name of Henry Fonda. The headline Logan delivered that day, that they had divorced after only two months, and that Fonda had quit the company as well, caused Jimmy’s eyes to widen. It was the promise from Logan that he might actually get to act with Sullavan that prompted Jimmy to agree to join the University Players.
There was, however, one condition; Logan had to help him get Alexander to agree to let him do it. Even though he was by now nearly twenty-four years of age, Jimmy was still too afraid to ask Alexander himself, fearing his father would actually explode at the mere suggestion his son waste his summer acting in a stock company for the unprincely sum of $10 a week, plus room and board, which meant a built-in bed on the Leatherbee yacht (the women were given a small house complete with chaperone in nearby Quisset). Logan laughed and told him not to worry, that he would talk to Alexander himself. Fine, Jimmy said, and if you can get him to let me come, I’ll be there. Logan patted him on the shoulder and told him to relax and leave everything to him.
