Collecting Himself

by Michael J. Rosen

  I see I’ve left out of my list of gimmicks, the fake impostor, or self-impersonator. This character turned up a few seasons ago in a New York mystery play called The Visitor and most of us first-night bloodhounds had him spotted by five-minutes after nine o’clock. At this point the late Robert Benchley dozed off in his seat, to be awakened by a ringing phone upon which the second act curtain rose. It rang for twenty-seconds on an empty stage, or about five-minutes as theatre time goes, and a restive audience was exhilarated when Mr. Benchley woke and was heard to say: “Why doesn’t someone answer that? I think it’s for me.” This got into the reviews next day as perhaps the brightest moment of the evening, but the producer of The Visitor was not pleased. He turned in dismay to his press agent, the fabulous Richard Maney, and said that Bob Benchley’s performance had not helped the play. To this, Mr. Maney replied, promptly and astutely: “Benchley is not what’s the matter with The Visitor.”

  When this critique—if that’s what it is—appears, I shall be in Scotland under an assumed name, and it will be no use trying to find me. It would take an English bloodhound to do that, and the English Police, I have discovered to my surprise and sorrow, do not employ bloodhounds.

  Producers Never Think Twice

  Readers of the Broadway gossip columns in the newspapers must have come across the recent announcement that Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone would like to act the leading roles in a dramatization of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, that stark, passionate, and earthy story of lust and murder at a hot-dog stand in California. The announcement of the strange desire of these wistful, romantic screen lovers was brief and not very explicit. It was hard to make out—from the paragraphs / read, anyway—whether Joan and Franchot want to do The Postman on the stage or in the movies or both. Both, I daresay. It is, however, the visualization of the charming twain in a movie version of the tough, knockabout novel which has engrossed my imagination since I read the disturbing little item. I have even gone so far as to outline the action and dialogue of the first reel of the movie, which I have given the working title of “Love Lasts Forever.”

  The first scene is the interior of an elegant and handsomely appointed hot-dog stand and filling station on a highway in California. (The set will be so arranged that when the action gets too dull, W. C. Fields can enter from the left, or from anywhere else, with an armful of cigar boxes, a golf club, or a kadoola-kadoola.) Tables are tastefully arranged here and there, covered with fine napery and lighted by pale-yellow candles in gleaming silver candlesticks. The whole place looks rather more like the drawing-room of a Long Island country estate than a hot-dog stand. This is because the Greek who runs the joint has made a great deal of money out of hot dogs and gasoline, and Miss Crawford, as his wife, has persuaded him, by God only knows what bitter surrenders of her delicate person, to allow her to fix the place up a little.

  Miss Crawford (and I shall hereinafter call her Joan, and Mr. Tone Franchot, because I have forgotten the names of the characters in the book) is discovered daintily clearing up a table at which some garage hand has just been eating a couple of hamburgers. Joan would keep such riffraff out of the place if she could, but her husband, the Greek, is just a dumb, materialistic hot-dog-stand proprietor and will not listen to her. She is clad in a green tweed suit with a fetching irregular jacket hem and a collar of breit-schwanz, the whole topped by a modernized Directoire bonnet.

  Enter the Greek in a shiny blue-serge suit, yellow shoes, and a silk shirt with an old-fashioned detachable celluloid collar into which he has loosely knotted a yellow, flowered tie. He is a crude fellow, with a kind of senseless amiability and none of the finer sensibilities at all.

  GREEK: Whatsa matta?

  JOAN: Won’t you please refrain from addressing me always as Whatsa Matta? One would think, if one thought about it, that I were a servant of some sort, a menial—but one never thinks about it. No one ever thinks of me save you, and then in terms of either gross attention or neglect.

  GREEK: Kissa you, huh? [He comes toward her and she shrinks away.] JOAN: Does your mind never dwell on anything higher? GREEK: [still amiable, but a little puzzled]: I go buy a new neon sign. Dat’s higha. Good-a-bye. [He exits, singing.]

  Joan goes into a pantomime of staring out a window and indicating that she is lonely, misunderstood, frustrated, unhappily married to a Greek hot-dog-stand proprietor, love-starved, and on the verge of a kind of pensive desperation. She exits to her boudoir, and W. C. Fields comes on with an armful of cigar boxes. He is dressed in an unpressed, rusty-black ensemble, with old plug hat to match, and he does his cigar-box-juggling acts and exits. Joan comes back on wearing a black moiré bagheera gown with Medici ruff and train, her neck and wrists encircled by Mauboussin jewels. She stands at the door looking wistfully up the road. It is growing dark, but she apparently discerns an approaching figure, and hastily retires to her boudoir again.

  Enter Franchot, the wanderer, who has just been playfully thrown from a Rolls-Royce by a party of madcap millionaire playboys and their débutante friends. He is dressed in a handsome and well-fitting riding habit, silver spurs, jodhpurs, elegant silver-tipped riding crop, etc. He sits down at a table. Joan comes back into the room dressed in a black faille taffeta evening gown, the skirt sophisticatedly sheathed to the knees, from where it flares out charmingly toward the hemline; she wears gold-and-black evening sandals.

  JOAN: I had not seen you until now.

  FRANCHOT: Nor I you. Yet I somehow felt your presence here. It was as if I had come into a room where but lately had lingered the fragrance of some curious and disturbing exotic flower.

  JOAN: [pensively]: Yes. That was I. Won’t you sit down? If you wish to dine, I—I am desolated to tell you that we have only les francfortois, le jambon, and, les steaks Hambourg; avec, of course, café—either nature or à la crème.

  FRANCHOT: You are too wonderful for this place. Really, you know, I am not hungry—that is, for anything so material as food. I could feast upon your beauty.

  JOAN: You must not say such things, although I, too, God knows, feel this strange desire—this desire to have my beauty feasted upon by you. [Franchot makes a slight, graceful movement toward her, but she eludes him.]

  JOAN: [laughing, but rather sadly]: I will get you a hot—a chien chaud. It will be better that way. [She exits to kitchen.]

  FRANCHOT: [reverently, moving slowly after her]: She makes me feel as though I were in an extremely soigné gambling casino at midnight, possibly the casino at Monte Carlo. [He exits to the washroom.]

  Joan returns in an enchanting bon-bon-pink chiffon dress with a silver yoke on the cape. She rushes to the door as if she feared the wanderer had departed, but hearing a step behind her she turns and confronts Franchot, who has reentered, dressed in a dashing polo outfit, stick and all. They approach each other slowly, their eyes deeply entangled, and suddenly without a word they go into a slow waltz. They stop, breathless, and stare at each other.

  FRANCHOT: For me all the stars in the sky have flowered and until the day I die I shall be yours and you mine.

  JOAN: I love you as a child loves its first snowfall, a soft white dreamy love that will never vanish. Let us waltz again, for I am insatiate. [They waltz again.]

  FRANCHOT: We must leave this horrible place immediately, never to return, forever to be together.

  JOAN: I would go to the ends of the earth with you, but—you see, there is my husband.

  FRANCHOT: What infamous cur would dare espouse one so young, so innocent, so well educated, and so ineffable as you!

  JOAN: I was espoused when but a child by a Greek hot-dog-stand proprietor. At first it was glamorous, strange, wonderful—and then—then I knew. [Franchot turns away for a moment.] He is a beast whose attentions to me consist almost altogether of slapping me heavily on the back as if I were a fellow hot-dog-stand proprietor—which as God is my witness I am in name only—and saying, “Whatsa matta?” Whatsa matta, whatsa matta, whatsa matta!—day and night unti
l I think sometimes I shall go mad! Whatsa matta? Everything’s the matta, everything!. [She ends up sobbing, and Franchot takes her in his arms, delicately.]

  FRANCHOT: I wish Fate had so arranged it that you and I had met before you met him. Then we could have had each other.

  JOAN [fiercely]: There is one way still!

  FRANCHOT: You mean—?

  JOAN: [hoarsely]: Come with me and I will explain. [She leads him to the boudoir and, as the strains of waltz music come faintly from offstage, W. C. Fields enters, wearing the same ensemble he was wearing before and carrying a golf club. He goes through his golfing act.]

  That is as far as I have got with the scenario. You can go on with it if you want to.

  Roaming in the Gloaming

  Science has not yet discovered why a man who has a good stomach, a great many things to do, and enough to live on should suddenly decide to write a play. Science has zipped the atom open in a dozen places, it can read the scrawlings on the Rosetta stone as glibly as a literary critic explains Hart Crane, but it doesn’t know anything about playwrights. It is only fair to say that neither do I.

  “Well, why did you write a play, Mr. T.?” (There will be voices coming into this at intervals.)

  All I can say is that the idea came to me one day in October 1938, while I was standing on top of a garage. Whether the idea was there and I walked into it or whether I unconsciously took the idea there, I do not know; no one knows. Sometimes I think I had the basic idea eight years ago; sometimes I say it was ten. And then, at other times, I think it came to me on top of this garage. The play, as it happens, has nothing to do with garages. This is one of the soundest things about it. It doesn’t even have anything to do with typewriters, although at one time that’s all there was in it. You see, there was this pretty wife who could fix her husband’s typewriter when it began to act that funny way. You sort of began with that: the husband all tied up in a typewriter ribbon, like the Corticelli kitten.

  EDITOR’S NOTE: During the long run of The Male Animal, Thurber wrote several times about his experiences in the theatre with his collaborator Elliott Nugent.

  “You’ll have to cut that out—nobody knows what the Corticelli kitten is.”

  “Well, let’s just say ‘tied up in a typewriter ribbon.’”

  “That isn’t funny.”

  “Cuts out four words and we’re long now.”

  “Let’s cut out the whole typewriter scene. We aren’t going anywhere with it.”

  It is very hard for a man who has never had anywhere to go to begin going somewhere. That is, it is very hard for a man who has always just sort of started to write pieces and begun to make scrawls on paper, wondering what they were going to turn into, to encounter what is known as the three-act play. The three-act play has sharp, concrete edges, rigid spacings, a complete dependence on time, and more than eleven hundred rules, all basic. “You can’t run a first act fifty minutes”; “you can’t have people just sitting and talking”; “you can’t play comedy in a dim light”; “you can’t keep people in the theatre after 11:07 o’clock”; “anybody can write a first act”; “if you have trouble with your third act there is something the matter with your first act”; “vision is lost in revision”; “where there is no revision the playwrights perish.”

  These rules you learn from doormen, ushers, actors’ cousins, stagehands, property men, and the little old woman in the shawl who wanders into rehearsal under the impression that she is in Schrafft’s or Lord & Taylor’s.

  The little old woman in the shawl bends over you, heavy with suggestions, as you sit in the dark auditorium listening to actors repeat lines which, after you have heard them 186 times, seem to have no bearing whatsoever on the English language. They all sound like this: “If you had not semestered the spoons, we could have silvered this up.” “If I had not semestered the spoons! The decided ash is all I have to revolve, personally!” The little old lady at this point whispers: “He should say, ‘Snows are the wear of Lester’s Lear.’”

  For a writer in his middle years, who has learned to write slowly and not too often, who sometimes puts a piece by for a year or two because he doesn’t have the slightest idea what to say on page 3, and has no desire to say it even if he could think of it, it is not the easiest thing in the world to have someone whirl around and say, “Give me a new line for Joe right here.” “Hm?” says the middle-aged writer. “You don’t mean today, do you?” “I mean right now!”

  In this familiar theatrical crisis a curious psychological thing happens to me. The only lines I can think of are lines from other plays: “Please God, make me a good actor, goodbye Mr. Chips! Hey, Flagg, wait for baby! Aren’t we all? The rest is silence. It only seems like never.” It is needless to say that these lines do not get you anywhere; but, as I said before, I never was really going anywhere.

  There was this pretty girl fixing the typewriter, and because it was early on a lovely October day, and I felt cheerful, I wrote Elliott Nugent as follows: “You and I are going to write a play together.” His reply was prompt and to the point: “No, we’re not.” So I went out to Hollywood and showed him the typewriter scene, and he sighed and sat down, and began cutting it out. The collaboration was on.

  After you have worked on nothing but dialogue for five months, you wonder if you can ever learn to write straight English prose again, the kind that comes in paragraphs and looks so nice. At first you are scared to try it, but finally you realize you have to, so you sit down, and, for practice, just to get back into the swing of the thing, you try to set down Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. What comes out is this:

  Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth …

  Your fathers! Always your fathers!

  I said ours.

  You meant yours!

  … on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty …

  I know! I know! And delegated to the proposition …

  Not delegated! Dedicated!

  … that all men are created equal.

  ELLEN [bitterly]: All men are created equal! That sounds fine coming from you!

  Enter JOE

  “What’s the matter with that tall thin man at the typewriter, mamma?”

  “Hush, child, he’s going crazy.”

  Thurber Reports His Own Play, The Male Animal, with His Own Cartoons

  This Thurber cartoon shows no particular scene but gives general idea of the prevailing bedlam. Dazed man at right is producer Herman Shumlin.

  EDITOR’S NOTE: Life magazine asked Thurber for these seven illustrations for their January 29, 1940, issue. Written with Elliott Nugent, who also starred as the Midwestern English teacher in this canonical battle of the sexes, The Male Animal enjoyed an enormous success on Broadway, playing for 243 performances in the 1939-1940 season.

  Husband is deeply hurt when he comes downstairs to see his wife dancing with an ex-football hero who once made love to her. He accuses them of dancing “like angels,” says she never danced so blissfully with him.

  Wife bolts upstairs sobbing and screaming at her husband’s accusation. The two men confront each other angrily, then both begin to feel scared at the wife’s outburst and wonder who should go upstairs to soothe her.

  Husband gets drunk at home while wife goes to football game with ex-football hero. Here with his friend he resolves to fight for his wife like all the other male animals which he pictures in the cloud above him.

  The big fight, drawn in Thurber’s best madhouse style, begins when the drunken husband socks the ex-football player on the nose. The male animals scuffle ineffectively while the females scream with excitement.

  After the fight, wife stands between her two warriors and announces dramatically she is going to live in sin with the ex-football player. He is horrified by this news because he wants to go back to his own wife.

  Husband dances with wife in this final scene of reconciliation, as the ex-football player gladly ducks out, and the ubiquitous Thurber dog, who was not
in the play, casts a baleful eye over the happy ending.

  The Quality of Mirth

  In the American theatre, or what is left of it, the quality of mirth is strained through many divergent judgments, each of them handed down with the air and tone of final authority that we Americans assume so easily.

  “Who knows what’s funny?” W. C. Fields used to say, meaning that all those around him were positive they knew, but intimating the real truth, that Fields was the final authority. When a producer or a director or a supervisor once came to him in Hollywood, laughing like crazy, and told him about a wonderful gagerino on a switcheroo, again he said, grimly, “Who knows what’s funny?” Their idea had been that Fields would be rowing this boat—see—and suddenly the oars break in two. “The oars don’t break,” the great man said. “The oars bend.” And in the movie they did bend, like leaden spoons, for Fields had been able to convince the multiple experts on comedy that he was right.

  Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre. I have been mixed up in it (and I use that verb deliberately) off and on for quite a while. Long enough, anyway, to appreciate Jimmy Durante’s “Everybody wants to get into the act.”

  There are those who are arrogant about their profound knowledge of comic effects and their long study and practice of the art of laughter, but for the most part people genuinely want to help, and are earnest in their efforts to “save the show” or “fix up that snapper at the end” or tell you what to take out or put in. Some of these specialists in humor were not even born the year I went to work for The New Yorker, but, at 65, I have learned that it is a good idea to listen. In the first place, at least one out of every twelve suggestions is sound and, in the second place, the suggesters have increased my knowledge of the nature of the American male and female in our time.