expected, even though we knew there were some people out there who
bought books and wrote heartwarming letters. Phone calls began coming
into the studio by the hundreds, letters by the thousands. One late
afternoon, Red called me and said, “I knew you were good, but not that
good. I just got a call from the asylum at Manteno protesting your
cancellation. Even the madmen like you.” We both laughed but we were
touched, too.
Letters, telegrams, and even long distance phone calls began to plague
the chairman of the board in New York City. Letters by the score were
sent to Mr. Minow in Washington. But the most beautiful letters were
those directed to Hope and me, on every kind of paper, written in every
kind of hand, some even in foreign languages. Until this has happened to
you, it is impossible to imagine the feeling. The meaning of a mass
medium strikes you and all at once it seems worthwhile to cope with the
whole shabby machinery if you are able to serve through it.
Hope and I sat reading every bit of mail late into the night. She said:
“Do you remember telling me what F. Scott Fitzgerald said?” I looked
puzzled. “He said that America is a willingness of the heart,” she
prompted.
I have indicated that Red Quinlan is a man who knows his business and
his way around in it, and that he is also a man deeply enamored of the
world of letters. He was even less ready than I to call it quits. He
invited me to lunch one day, and after pointing out that, anyway, for
the sake of my health the five-day-a-week grind was too much of a strain
to be continued, he asked, “But how about once a week at a good hour
with a sponsor?”
I hesitated. The columnists had broken the story of my demise at WBKB.
Another station had shown interest and we had had preliminary talks. But
the fact was, I couldn’t have asked for better treatment than WBKB had
given me. Nobody ever told me what to do or how to slant my program. The
crew on the set could not have been more helpful. I felt at home there.
And while Hope had at first been concerned about the possibility of our
lives being wrecked by the awful demands television exacted, she was now
beginning to worry about the people who wrote in, telling about the
needs that my show somehow ministered to. When Red sold the show on a
weekly basis to Magikist, a leading rug cleaning establishment, there
was really no doubt about my decision. When I met Mr. Gage, the
president of the corporation, he said, “If my ten year old daughter
likes you and my wife likes you, that’s enough for me. I’m sure
everybody will like you. And we’ll try very hard to help you, too.” If
you can just get that kind of sponsor, things become a good deal easier.
But somehow, I do not think the woods are full of them.
Quinlan’s interest in conveying through television some of the
excitement of the world of books and ideas also resulted in an
interesting experimental program called “Sounding Board,” in which I was
invited to moderate a panel of literary Chicagoans in a monthly two-hour
late-evening discussion on arts and letters. Our regular panel consisted
of Augie Spectorsky, editor of _Playboy Magazine_; Van Allen Bradley,
literary editor of the _Daily News_; Fannie Butcher, literary editor of
the Chicago _Tribune_; Hoke Norris, literary editor of the Chicago
_Sun-Times_; Paul Carroll, then editor of the experimental literary
magazine, _Big Table_; Hugh Duncan, author, and Dr. Daniel Boorstin,
professor of American history at the University of Chicago. They were
fine discussions and we kept them up for six months, but nobody would
pick up the tab.
My approach to television performance, being untutored, is probably
quite unorthodox. I do not work from notes. In preparation, I first read
the book, then think about it, seeking connective links and related
meanings. In the actual review of the book, I quite often stray into
asides that assume greater importance than the review itself.
I never say to myself: this is the theme, this is the middle, this the
end. I say: get into the heart of the book and let your mind distill it,
and, as often happens, enlightening relationships with other books and
ideas may develop.
I cannot perform in a state of lassitude. Before the cameras, I always
find myself tightening up until the floor manager signals that I’m ON.
For a moment, I am all tenseness, realizing that people are watching me,
but in a few minutes I have forgotten this and am thinking about nothing
but the book and the ideas I am talking about. Now I am carried by the
mood and direction of thought. If I want to stand, I stand; if I want to
sit, I sit; if I want to grimace, I grimace. Nothing is rehearsed or
calculated in advance. All I can do is unfold a train of thought
springing from the study that has preceded performance, and the toll is
heavy. Sometimes after the show, I can barely straighten up, or I may be
utterly dejected over my inability to say all I should have said. Then I
leave the studio, moody and silent.
I never talk to anyone before a show except my director. He understands
me and knows how easily I’m thrown. It can be a slight movement from the
boom man or a variation in the countdown signal from the floor manager,
something unexpected in the action of a camera man or a slight noise
somewhere in the studio, and I react as though someone threw a glass of
water in my face. Then I am off the track, floundering like a ship
without a rudder. Sometimes I can right myself before the show is ended,
sometimes not. Hence the frequent depression, for I feel that every show
must be the best show possible, that “off” days are not permitted, and
that I can never indulge myself in the attitude of, “Oh well, better one
next time.” When people are watching and listening, you must perform,
and perform your best.
Often my grammar goes haywire. I know better, but I can become helpless
against the monster known as time. I have to fight time. I cannot
hesitate or make erasures. So I plunge on, hoping that some one
significant thought may emerge clearly—some thought perhaps as vital as
that which animates the pages of _The Phenomena of Man_, calling on us
to recognize the eternal core of faith and courage: Courage to rebel and
faith in the realization of our own being. Courage that takes the self
seriously; faith that is grounded in activity.
I hesitate to make any predictions about the future of television, as a
means of communication or as a business. As a business, it must be run
for profit. The argument is not about this point, but about the level of
operation from which such profit shall be sought. From personal
experience, I can say that TV does not have to constitute a blow to life
itself. Perhaps many of us are “mindless in motion” and now sit
“mindlessly motionless” in front of our TV sets. But I take heart in the
certain knowledge that many men and women are not so much concerned with
the camera eye as they are in finding a way back to the inward eye.
12
Life in the Theatre
There are even odder ways of life than sitting alone behind a desk in a
little room lined with books waiting for someone to come in and talk
with you, or delivering sermons on literature to the beady red eyes of a
television camera. One of them is the theatre.
You may recall the scene in Kafka’s _The Trial_ in which K meets the
Court Painter and goes to this innocuous madman’s room, ostensibly to
learn more about the Judge who is to sit at the trial. The room is so
tiny, K has to stand on the bed while the Painter pulls picture after
picture from beneath this lone article of furniture, blows the dust off
them into K’s face, and sells several to him. Although the reader
recognizes from the beginning that it is all a tissue of lies and
deception, K leaves feeling satisfied that at last he has someone on his
side who will put in a “right” word for him. It is evident to what ends
K will now go to bribe, cheat, blackmail, be made a total fool of, in
the hope of getting someone to intervene in his fate. In addition to its
comment upon a culture that would rather surrender identity than face up
to its guilt, the scene is terribly funny, as well as terribly
humiliating.
It is this scene that always comes to mind when I think of the nightmare
of nonsense I lived through in the course of three weeks in the theatre.
It happened one summer a few years ago when Hope and I had come down
from Bark Point to check on the shop. I was answering a pile of letters
when the phone rang. It was a man I had met sometime before who turned
out to be business manager of a summer stock theatre operating in a
suburb northwest of Chicago. He wondered if I would like to play a lead
opposite Linda Darnell in the Kaufmann and Hart comedy, _The Royal
Family_. The role was that of the theatrical agent, Oscar Wolfe, who
theoretically functioned as a sane balance to a family of zany,
childish, totally mischievous grown-ups (roughly modeled on the
Barrymore clan).
Hope, who had grown up in Westchester society, admitted that when she
was a girl attending summer theatre it had always been her secret wish
to be a part of it. She thought it might be good fun, even though I had
never acted in my life. So the business manager came over and I signed
the contract, calling for a week of rehearsal and two weeks of
performance.
Summer theatre around Chicago cannot be classified as an amateur
undertaking, although part of its economics is based on utilizing large
numbers of young people who want the “training” and generally avoiding
the high costs involved in regular theatrical production. But top stars
and personalities are booked, the shows are promoted to the public as
professional offerings and are reviewed as such by the theatrical
critics, and the whole enterprise is regarded as essential to the
vitality of a “living theatre.” The outfit I signed up with was an
established enterprise and, as a matter of fact, is still going. I was
not entirely confident that I could deliver, but I had no doubt that I
was associating myself with people who could.
The theatre itself was not a refashioned barn or circus tent set-up, but
an actual theatre building, restored from previous incarnations as a
movie and vaudeville house. I arrived on a lovely August morning but
inside the theatre was in total darkness except for some lights on the
stage. I made my way timidly down front where a number of people were
sitting. Several nodded to me, and I nodded back. Presently a tall man
got up on the stage and announced that he was going to direct the play.
He said, however, that Miss Darnell had not yet arrived and, also, that
there were not enough scripts to go around. We would begin with those
who had their parts.
For the next three days, I sat in the darkness from nine in the morning
until five in the afternoon. No one asked me to read, no one asked me to
rehearse, practically no one talked to me at all. I managed a few words
with Miss Darnell, who was gracious and charming, but I was beginning to
wonder when I would be asked to act. Hope had been working with me on my
lines, but it is one thing to know lines sitting down and quite another
to remember them while trying to act and give them meaning before an
audience.
I began to suspect that something was haywire. A friend who taught drama
at a nearby college and often took character roles in stock confirmed my
fears by assuring me that this play would never get off the ground. “It
will never open,” he said.
We were to open on a Monday. It was already Friday and I had been on
stage exactly once and nobody yet knew his part—I least of all. In
addition to my fears, I was beginning to feel slighted. I wondered what
I was doing in this dark, dank place, and what the rest thought they
were doing, including the innumerable young men and women between
sixteen and twenty years of age who were ostensibly developing their
knowledge of the theatre through odd jobs such as wardrobe manager,
program manager, etc. There didn’t seem much to manage and I wasn’t sure
it was really a very healthy environment. By this time, a fair number of
the cast had taken to screaming, which is something I am not used to
among grown-ups for any extended period. I also had my doubts about a
young man who spent most of his offstage moments sweet-talking a
bulldog. I wondered if acting necessarily precluded any kind of
emotional responsibility.
Saturday night the play preceding us closed. We rehearsed all that
night. Sunday the theatre would be dark, and Monday _The Royal Family_
was to go on. The Saturday night rehearsal was initially delayed because
one of the principals could not be found. Finally he was located, dead
drunk, in a local tavern. It was now almost one a.m. and not even a
walk-through with script in hand had yet been attempted. Instead the
company was engaged in a welter of screeching, shouting, confusion, and
recriminations. This was sheer, silly nonsense I decided, and went to
see the business manager. I told him I’d be pleased to quit and offered
to pay double my salary to any experienced actor he could get to replace
me. I was at once threatened with a lawsuit.
At two in the morning, everyone was called on stage by the director, who
made a little speech saying that he was just no longer able to direct
the play, he couldn’t pull it together! At this, Miss Darnell walked off
the stage, saying, “This play will not open on Monday or Tuesday or
ever, unless something is done immediately.” After all, she had a
reputation to uphold.
Thereupon, the director returned with a further announcement. It so
happened, he said, that a brilliantly gifted young New York director was
“visiting here between important plays” and he had consented to pull the
play together for us! Our gift of Providence then stepped forward and we
began to rehearse.
When my cue came and I offered my lines, the new director said: “The
Oscar Wolfe part is really just an afterthought. The show will play just
as well without the Wolfe character appearing at all.”
“Fine,” I said, but pandemonium had already broken loose as the former
director and some of the actors took issue with this new twist. We were
already missing one actor and now this new director wanted to sack me.
Well, I had asked for it, but Miss Darnell and the others persuaded me
to stick with it. The rehearsal continued.
At five a.m. a halt was called and the treasurer of the theatre asked to
say a few words. Under Equity rules, he reminded us, we were entitled to
overtime for extra rehearsal. He asked us to waive this for the sake of
the play. I waited silently to see what the general reaction would be.
It didn’t take long to find out: Nothing doing, play or no play! I went
along with them on that. What I couldn’t understand was why they put up
with all they did: the filthy little cubicles that served as dressing
rooms, the rats and cockroaches that scudded across the floor, the lack
of any backstage source of drinking water—the whole atmosphere seemed
deliberately designed to make an actor’s life completely insupportable.
And now the management was sulking because the actors didn’t have enough
“love for the theatre” to forgo their pay for overtime.
At six a.m. it was decided that rehearsal would resume at one o’clock in
the afternoon. As we were about to leave, too tired to care any longer
about anything, the director came up and said he was sure I must have
misunderstood him. He would indeed be sorry if I left the show or if he
had hurt my feelings. What he had really meant to say was that the Oscar
Wolfe part lends credence to the movement and meaning of the play. I was
glad to leave it at that.
The following afternoon, before evening rehearsals, Hope and I stopped
at a drugstore a few steps from the theatre. There we found Miss Darnell
sitting in a booth sipping a coke. She motioned us over.
“The play won’t open Monday,” she said. “I’ve made my decision.”
We agreed wholeheartedly.
“But have you heard the latest?”
“No,” we said.
“The play that follows us in is falling apart, too. An old-time actor in
it, pretty well known for his paranoia, slugged a young actress for a
remark she made and someone else jumped in and put him in the hospital.”
“What’s next with our show?” I said. “Has a replacement been found for
our drunken friend?”
“Yes. He’s busy now rehearsing his lines.”
“This is a world such as I’ve never been in,” I said. “I’ve never seen
anything like it.”
“Neither have I. Not like this one,” said Linda Darnell.
On stage, we again worked all night. It was a mess. The director was in
a rage. He scowled, threatened, exhorted. Everybody was going to pieces.
No one talked to anyone.
On Monday morning, we started at ten, planning to rehearse up to curtain
time. But at five in the afternoon, Miss Darnell told the management she
would not appear, and under her contract they could do nothing but
accept her decision. We went back to work that night and rehearsed until
five in the morning.
Came Tuesday afternoon and we were back again in our black hole of
Calcutta. By now we were all more than a little hysterical and the
language would have been coarse for a smoker party. Some of the players
were so exhausted they slept standing up. But now the play was finally
getting under way. Zero hour was approaching. The curtain went up and
the show began.
Opening night was incredible. In scene after scene, lines were dropped,
cues forgotten, and ad libs interjected to a point that it was almost
impossible to stay in character. The actress who claimed she had played
her part as an ancient dowager for the last twenty years (“Everywhere—I
even played it in Australia”) forgot her lines and was utterly beside
herself. She said never had she been subjected to such humiliation. One
actor tripped over her long morning coat and fell on his face. A bit of
a nut anyway, he got up gracefully, muttered some inanities, and tickled
the old dowager under the chin. She reared back, nostrils flaring. All
this time, I was sitting at a piano observing the scene, feeling like a
somnambulist.
But the play went on, and although it certainly improved during its run,
the relations of the cast did not. Every evening we came in, put on our
make-up, and dressed for our parts without saying a word. One night I
lost a shirt. Another night an actress had her purse stolen. On another
occasion a fist fight broke out between an actor and an actress.
Backstage life went on either in utter silence or in bursts of yelling,
screaming, and hair-pulling. The atmosphere was thick with hostility.
But on stage it was as though nothing outside the world of the play had
ever happened, unless you were close enough to hear names still being
called under the breath. It was crazy.
Many of us in the cast were asked to appear on television interviews to
promote the show. A good friend of mine, Marty Faye, who has had one of
the longest continuous runs on Chicago TV, asked me to appear on his
late evening broadcast. Since the gossip columnists in the city were
already having a field day over the strife at this well-known summer
playhouse, I told Marty (and his viewing audience) my reaction to the
affair and to what I had seen of the theatre in general. I had no idea I
was exploding such a bombshell. From right and left, I was attacked by
everyone (including the lady who had had such a horrible experience
playing the dowager) as a traitor to the theatre and its great
traditions. By everyone, that is, except Miss Darnell and her leading
man, who agreed that something might be done for actors if the public
knew of the conditions under which they so often work and of the
wretched, tragic life they so frequently have to lead. What a terrible
waste this amounts to! No wonder you have to be virtually insane to
pursue a career in the theatre!
Herb Lyons, the _Tribune_ columnist, couldn’t stop laughing over lunch
the day I told him my experiences. Irv Kupcinet, the _Sun-Times_
columnist, however, whose talented daughter was among our struggling
players, failed to see any humor in the situation. But the real payoff
came when checks were distributed after the first week of our
engagement. For the week of rehearsals, I had received the munificent
sum of thirty-five dollars, but my salary for actual performance was to
be two hundred and fifty dollars per week. My check for the first week’s
work was $18.53! What happened to the rest of the money? Well, in the
first place, I had to join the union and pay six months dues. Then I had
to pay the full price for any seats I reserved for friends or relatives
and even for a seat for Hope. Then I paid for the daily pressing of my
suit and the laundering of my shirts and even a hidden fee for the use
of the dressing room. Finally, there was the usual social security and
withholding tax deduction.
But the whole Kafka nightmare was well worth it. In spite of acquiring
at least one enemy for life and no monetary profit at all, I gained some
friends who take the theatre seriously and in a treacherous business,
are determinedly making headway. In addition, Linda Darnell, a person of
great sweetness, has become a cherished acquaintance. It is not often
one comes out of a nightmare so well.
13
Writing and Publishing
I knew she was crazy the moment she entered the room. It was a miserable
November day, snowing and blowing, when a woman with a round face, rosy
from the bitter cold, wearing a long raincoat and a hat trimmed with big
bright cherries burst into the old Seven Stairs and almost ran me into
the fireplace.
“Are you Mr. Brent?” she cried. She was fat and dumpy and she now took a
deep breath and stood on tiptoe, running the tip of her tongue across
her lips.
“I am,” I said, backing away behind the desk.
“Oh, Mr. Brent, a friend of yours sent me. I teach her children at the
Lab school, and she thinks you’re a wonderful man. And now, seeing you,
I think so, too!” She breathed deeply again. “I have a wonderful book, a
divine book, that will change everything ever written for children. You
must be the first to see it. I’ve brought it along.”
With this, she removed the long raincoat and began peeling off one
sweater after another. I remained behind the desk watching the sweaters
pile up and thinking, if she attacks me I’ll make a break for the stairs
and yell for help.
Finally she started to undo a safety pin at one shoulder, then at the
other, and then she unbuttoned a belt about her fat waist. These
apparently related to some kind of suspension system beneath her dress,
for she now pulled forth, with the air of a lunatic conjurer, a package
wrapped in silk which she deposited on my desk and began to unwrap ever
so delicately. She did have lovely long fingers.
As the unwrapping proceeded, her mood changed from hysterical exuberance
to one of command. “Take this cover and hold it,” she directed, her
lower lip thrust out aggressively. I held the cover while she backed off
and unfolded the book, her eyes fixed upon me with a wicked gleam.
“This book shows something no other book has ever dared to do,” she
said. “It shows the true Christmas Spirit. Look carefully and you’ll see
the new twist. Instead of showing Santa Claus coming down the chimney, I
have shown Santa coming _up_ the chimney! Furthermore I’m prepared to
make you my agent. I’ll work with you day and night. Are you married?
No? I thought not. My dear boy, we’ll make ecstasy together and be
rich!”
It was a delicate situation. I told her I did not think she should let
the manuscript out of her hands, but in the meantime I would think of
some publisher who might be interested in a new twist about Santa Claus.
Without another word, she wrapped up the book, pinned it back to her
stomach, strapped the belt about her, piled one sweater on after the
other, put on her hat and raincoat, and backed away like a retreating
animal until she hit the door. Then, still staring at me, she slowly
turned the knob, flung open the door, and fled into the cold November
morning. Her poor soul haunted me for days.
Long before I was known to anyone else, I began to be sought out by
people who wanted to write, or had written and wanted to publish, or had
even gone to the futile expense of private publication. There was an
October night when I was nearly frightened out of my wits, while sitting
before the fire at the Seven Stairs, by the sudden appearance of a tall
young man with a black hat pulled far down over one eye and a nervous
tenseness that warned me immediately of a stick-up. His opening remark,
“You’re open rather late,” didn’t help any, either.