by Kerr, Jean;
That was.some time ago. Since then we’ve learned quite a few things. We’ve learned about the master bedroom, for instance. To get to it, you climb a short flight of stairs, then a longer flight of stairs, take a detour through a balcony, and then muster your strength for the last upward pull. To get down, you reverse the process. Nowadays whenever we come down in the morning and discover we’ve forgotten something, we either do without it or go out and buy a new one.
We’ve learned what happens to young boys. Everybody warned us that we could expect a lot of broken bones the moment the lads started to clamber over the balcony and out among the gargoyles. As it happened, we weren’t in the house a week when Johnny broke his arm. It didn’t happen here, though—it happened in nursery school. A four-and-a-half-year-old blonde named Cleo had had her eye on Johnny. On Monday she gave him a penny. On Tuesday she gave him a Davy Crockett button. On Wednesday she pushed him into a box and broke his arm in two places. Clearly this girl means business, and I think Johnny should keep the hell away from her. I asked him recently what ever happened to Cleo and he replied solemnly, “ I don’t know, but I hear she’s going to have to sit in a corner for the rest of her life.” And good enough for her, too.
Other things have happened. Two dogwood trees and one lilac bush that we didn’t even know were there have bloomed and faded. The squirrels in the bell tower have had more squirrels. Sometimes I think the carpenters have had more carpenters. There were three or four to start with and today there are six.
But the roof is finally on, the garage has been restored, and most of the charred timber has been carted away—much to the dismay of the children, who used to make forts with it and emerge after ten minutes looking like Welsh coal miners. Oh, things are progressing. Even Gilbert notices it. This morning he pointed at the peacocks on the new wallpaper in the breakfast room and murmured, “Nice doggies, nice doggies.”
Of course the playroom isn’t finished and the den isn’t even begun and all the bricking and painting remain to be done. By my own private calculations (I multiply the number of carpenters by the number of days in a week and divide by the cost of one panel of wallboard) I figure that the workmen will be here for seven years, give or take a few quarantines. On the one hand, I do get just a shade weary of seeing old tarpaulins over all the floors all the time, not to mention little piles of sand in the pantry and big piles of lumber under the piano. On the other hand, when I consider what gentle, personable people carpenters are, and what splendid companions they will be for the children as they are growing up, I begin to see a plan and a purpose in it all.
The care and feeding of producers
I don’t think there’s been a single book written in the last five days on how to write a play or how not to write a play. To me this is symptomatic. Word is getting around and soon we’ll all have to face the fact: everybody knows how to write a play. At least, everybody I know is writing a play, including several people who have families to support. Our milkman, for instance, is writing a play about the time that he and his wife and his mother-in-law were snowed in for the whole winter in a small cabin on the upper Delaware. Nobody came in, nobody went out, and they lived on dry fruitcake and melted snow. Oh, what a year that was! The author himself put it rather neatly when he said, “We had a million laughs.”
But, in the face of such universal application, why are there so few successful playwrights? Well, for one thing, there are dozens of books which explain to the uninitiated the value of characterization, the importance of climax, the necessity for double-spacing the script—but where is a young playwright going to learn the really basic things, the important things, like how to have lunch with a producer?
At first glance, it would seem that lunching with a producer should be a simple enough business. Actually, it is a delicate ritual, as deliberate and formalized in its way as a pavane.
To begin with, the unproduced playwright should always order a drink. The producer will expect to have one and it irritates him to drink alone. Having ordered the drink, however, you must be careful not to touch it. Otherwise, he will assume that you are an alcoholic, and while he bears no grudge against alcoholics personally—some of his best friends are alcoholics—he nevertheless has poignant memories of that author who disappeared into Kaysey’s bar at ten after eleven on opening night in New Haven and never was heard of more.
Somewhere between the appetizer and the main course, the producer will endeavor to put you at your ease by making general conversation about the current season, with special reference to the biggest hits. Here is where you should be on your guard. If he wishes to reveal his rare magnanimity of spirit by saying a few kind words about My Fair Lady, let him—but on no account agree with him. Remember that no matter what he says (and what he says is, “Hits are good for the theatre, we can’t have too many hits”) he still regards any success not his as an affront to him personally, an attack on everything he stands for, a scourge, a plague, and very possibly, Communist-inspired.
It’s not that he doesn’t grasp that, in the logic of things, other managers will have a hit from time to time; in his frame of reference, this is a prospect as inevitable as death and taxes, and just about as appetizing. The rule, then, is if you can’t say anything bad about a current hit, say nothing at all. This helpful principle also applies to a variety of other subjects, including drama critics, stagehands, Joshua Logan, child actors, eight-o’clock curtains, and Variety’s practice of printing weekly box-office reports.
If you wish to inch your way into his regard, you might say, “I know people rave about My Fair Lady, but personally I got more kick out of that arena production of Alcestis done with masks in the original Greek.” Everybody else within earshot will think you’ve gone off your rocker, but the producer will recognize instantly that you are an independent spirit worth cultivating.
Now, as a mark of his growing confidence in you, he may be willing to explain why his last show got bad notices. If he seems in any way reluctant to launch into this topic closest to his heart, prod him a little. If necessary, take your finger out of that dike and ask him point-blank, “Mr. Spellbound, I saw your production of Peanut Butter and Crackers. The audience adored it. Why do you suppose the Boys were so tough on it?” This should provide you with at least an hour of uninterrupted listening pleasure.
To the secular mind, it seems clear enough that a play gets bad notices for any one of the three reasons: (1) the script was bad; (2) the production was bad; (3) the critics are idiots. The producer has a different theory altogether. He grants, heaven knows, that there isn’t a critic alive with an I.Q. higher than 78, but nevertheless he doesn’t blame the reviewers. He blames all his troubles; past and present, on “that opening-night audience.”
He feels that his show, which looked like a million dollars on Saturday night in Philadelphia, turned up on Forty-fourth Street looking like change for a nickel because “half of those people had seen the show three times, for Heaven’s sake, and knew all the jokes, and the rest of those zombies haven’t laughed publicly since 1938, and how the hell can an actor give a good performance under those conditions?” If you should happen to detect the one tiny flaw in this theory (that precisely the same chic, enameled people, give or take a couple of actors’ agents, were in attendance on the opening night of Separate Tables or Auntie Mame), just keep it locked in your heart.
Eventually, or a minute or two before your nerves give out, the conversation will get around to your play. At this point, the producer will adopt an intimate, even cuddly tone. “Dear boy,” he will say, “do you know why I like this play?” (Many producers address all playwrights as “dear boy,” a practice which is disconcerting only if you happen to be a girl.) You probably won’t be able to resist asking, “No, why?” but be warned that the answer may scare you. If you have written what you think of as a light comedy, he is apt to tell you, “Because, dear boy, it has honest guts, plenty of raw meat—it hit me right here” (indicating an area somewhere
south of the pancreas). On the other hand, if it’s a melodrama, he will unnerve you by remarking, “I figure it this way, if it makes me laugh, it’ll make everybody laugh.”
With this, and almost before you can say Long Day’s Journey into Night, you will be deep into the always touchy subject of revisions. Keep in mind—in all justice to the producer—that he’s not necessarily being picky if he wants the script reworked. There are very few plays that couldn’t be improved by some cuts and changes. Therefore, if he says, “Look, the first act is impossible, the second act is poor, but the scene at the end of the third act is swell,” that’s reasonable. You agree on something. But suppose the dialogue goes like this:
HIM: You’ve got a great story here, but I hate those Civil War costumes. Why does it have to be in 1860?
YOU: Because it’s about Mary Todd Lincoln.
HIM: Very well—if you don’t want criticism. Listen, you’ve got a great story here, but the characters are ridiculous and I tell you frankly—those Civil War costumes are death at the box office.
YOU: But you can’t separate the story from the character of Mary Lincoln. This is based on actual fact and—
HIM: Dear boy, let me tell you something. If a story has universality, it can be set in any period. How about 1901?
YOU: What happened then?
HIM: McKinley was shot. And his wife was a hell of an interesting character.
In this circumstance it is probably prudent to assume that you two aren’t meant for each other.
Since it is evident that not all producers possess the necessary amount of shrewdness, technical know-how, and locked-in goodness, how do you know when you’ve got the right one? There are producers who can get a two-year run out of what was formerly a television script. There are producers who can open a musical in June without an advance, without stars, without theatre parties, and without Cole Porter—and two days later scalpers will be getting $50 for a pair of seats next January. Then, of course, there is the producer who will have to close a show out of town that employs the combined talents of Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, and Menasha Skulnik.
How do you recognize the richer, milder, longer-lasting type?
First of all, a producer shouldn’t be too young or too old. If, in discussing the script, your producer-to-be announces reverently, “This part would be perfect for Maude,” he’s too old. If, lamentably, you are already contractually tied to this Voice of the Past, be careful not to make any flat statements of fact—like, “You don’t mean Maude Adams, good heavens, she’s dead!” The best procedure is to lead him upward and onward to 1958 by a process of gentle questioning like “Do you mean, sir, the Maude Adams of The Little Minister or the Maude Adams of Peter Pan?”
Of course, a really advanced case will never come farther than November 1925, when Grace George was so delicious in She Had to Know. A playwright of my acquaintance made the mistake of suggesting to his man that they hire Shelley Winters for his new melodrama and was rather disconcerted when the producer asked politely, “What are shelley winters?”
Then again, a producer can be too young. I myself had a producer, a charming redhead, who was so young that she contracted mumps from one of the child actors and missed the out-of-town opening.
Any male producer under thirty-five is probably a genius and should be avoided like a traffic summons. Your true “genius” was frightened at an early age by Moss Hart and has subsequently nursed a deep distrust for the commercial theatre. (By the commercial theatre we mean anything that is successful and pays off.) He is full of random schemes for taking the best of André Gide and turning it into a musical. He is also fiercely dedicated to the proposition that Shakespeare could be sold to the tired businessman if only it were imaginatively produced—“Jackie Gleason, there’s your King Lear!” In fact, come to think of it, if he likes your play there must be something the matter with it.
Speaking for myself, I am wary of producers who come in pairs. (And any number greater than two is absolutely unthinkable; in this case you have a pride of producers, like a pride of lions, with roughly the same inherent hazards.) It is extremely difficult to keep your bearings when you are dealing with two men. You’ve been informed that one of them is lovable and the other one is very tough (but shrewd).
The difficulties begin when you try to figure out which is which. Just when you think you know, the lovable one informs you that Abe Burrows has been reworking your dialogue and will have to be listed as co-author and the shrewd one tells you his favorite evening in the theatre was spent at “Shangri-La.”
And what if you get the perfect producer, a gentleman of consummate artistry and matchless taste who is, in addition, loyal, helpful, courteous, brave, clean, and reverent? He buys your script. He persuades Charles Boyer and Rosalind Russell to play the leads. He hires Jo Mielziner to design the sets and Elia Kazan to direct. He then has a big, whopping flop. There you are, all alone on the grim morning after, with no handy alibis, forced to face the cold, implacable truth—that little play of yours was a dog.
One half of two on the aisle
In my short and merry life in the theatre, I have discovered that there are two sharply contrasting opinions about the place of the drama critic. While in some quarters it is felt that the critic is just a necessary evil, most serious-minded, decent, talented theatre people agree that the critic is an unnecessary evil. However, if there is some room for argument about the value of the critic, there is none whatever about the value of the critic’s wife. To the producer, in particular, it is painful enough that the reviewer must bring his own glum presence to the theatre, but the thought that he will also bring his wife and that she, too, will occupy a free seat is enough to cool the cockles of his heart and send him back on a soft diet. “What if a doctor had to bring his wife along when he performed an operation?” he will ask you. “Can’t you see her sitting there murmuring, ‘Here’s a nice suture, dear, and why don’t you try this clamp?’”
In their innermost souls, the producer and the press agent are convinced that the wife has a bad effect on the critic and consequently a bad effect on the notice. Of course, not all critics have wives; some of them habitually attend the theatre in the company of pretty actresses, a practice which is thought to be not only suitable but even, on occasion, inspiring.
It isn’t that anyone believes a wife’s influence is direct or intentional. Presumably no one has suggested that it is her practice to tuck her spouse into a cab at eleven o’clock with the stern admonition, “Now you hurry right back to that little office and say what a bad play this was, hear?” No, the whole thing is much more intangible than that, and I’m afraid it boils down to the sobering fact that the producer feels that the mere physical presence of a wife depresses the critic, lowers his spirits, clogs his areas of good will, and leaves his head rattling with phrases like “witless,” “tasteless,” and “below the level of the professional theatre.”
On the other hand, just let some wife absent herself from the happy revelers at an opening and you will see consternation settle like a fine dew upon producer and press agent alike. Souls are searched. Old wounds are probed. Is the jig up? Have runners been coming in from Philadelphia with the bad word? Have those preview audiences been squealing? Clearly somebody talked. The lady has had fair warning and is at home with a good book.
It is my impression that my own attendance record is rather higher than the average. This can be explained by the fact that I have those four small children and naturally have to get out a lot. When my husband first went on a newspaper, and for several years thereafter, I brought my lark-like disposition and gooey good will to every single solitary show that opened. Lately, however, I’ve begun to develop a small, cowardly instinct for self-preservation, and I find that there are two kinds of plays I can bear not to see: plays about troubled adolescents who can’t find themselves, and plays about the Merchant of Venice.
During this past summer we paid a visit to Stratford, England, and saw a number
of plays not including The Merchant of Venice. It seemed to make the whole trip worth while. I have friends, old-time theatregoers who have seen every Hamlet since Forbes-Robertson, and they love to sit around and reminisce about the way Leslie Howard played the ghost scene and how Gielgud read the speech to the players. Now, I hope to spend my twilight years reminiscing about the Shylocks I haven’t seen. Donald Wolfit; Luther Adler, Clarence Derwent—oh, it’s a splendid gallery already and I expect to add to it before I’m through.
As everyone knows, one of the chief problems of going to the theatre with a critic is getting out of there a split second after the curtain comes down or, if the show is a very long one, a split second before. Lately I’ve become very adept at judging the precise line of dialogue on which to start pulling the sleeves of my coat out from under the lady next to me. This might be when an actress says, “In future years, when you speak of me, be kind,” or when an actor says, “Now that I’ve got you, darling, I’ll never let you go,” although I have known shows in which he let her go for another ten minutes after that.
Then follows a wild scramble down a dark and crowded aisle. I used to forge stolidly ahead, having developed a technique for this sort of thing in Ohrbach’s basement, but one night, when I felt I had Walter firmly by the hand and was propelling him out into the traffic, I heard a plaintive voice muttering, “Hey, lady, gee, lady, please!” I looked up to discover that I had Farley Granger firmly by the hand. It’s things like that that make one pause and reconsider.
