Sunday, January 08, 2012
Centennial Tributes: José Ferrer
By Edward Copeland
CYRANO: You may go. Or tell me, why are you staring at my nose?
THE MEDDLER: No!
CYRANO: It disgusts you, then? Does its color appear to you unwholesome? Or its form obscene?
THE MEDDLER: But I've been careful not to look!
CYRANO: And why not if you please? Possibly you find it just a trifle large!
José Ferrer played many roles throughout his lengthy career on stage, screen, television and even radio, but none loomed larger than Cyrano de Bergerac, who actually was a 17th century dramatist and swordsman but gained famed only in other authors' works loosely based on his life, most notably the 1897 play by Edmond Rostand. Without a doubt, Cyrano became Ferrer's signature role from the moment he placed the fake proboscis on his face and stepped onto the stage of The Alvin Theatre on Oct. 8, 1946 (Though on Nov. 18 of that year, the production moved to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre). His Roxane happened to be the late Frances Reid, best known for her 44-year-run as Alice Horton on the soap Days of Our Lives. I'll get back to Ferrer and Cyrano later in this tribute to the Oscar- and Tony-winning actor, Emmy and Directors Guild nominee and first actor to receive the U.S. National Medal of Arts, who was born 100 years ago today as José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón in the Santurce district of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Ferrer's father was a respected attorney and writer in San Juan. His parents sent José to the prestigious Swiss boarding school Institut Le Rosey, which was founded in 1880 and has educated children of royalty from all parts of the world. After his attendance there, Ferrer went to Princeton University, where he graduated either in 1933 or 1934 (depends which source you read at the time). While at Princeton, he was a member of its famous Princeton Triangle Club, the oldest collegiate musical-comedy theater troupe in the U.S. which was founded in 1891. Since its creation, the club has counted as members Booth Tarkington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joshua Logan, James Stewart, Wayne Rogers, David E. Kelley and Brooke Shields. Regardless of whether he graduated in '33 or '34, it didn't take Ferrer long to make his Broadway debut, even if it were merely the role of Second Policeman in the comedy A Slight Case of Murder. Written by Damon Runyon and Howard Lindsay, the play opened Sept. 11, 1935, and played for 69 performances at The 48th Street Theatre, a theater that
hasn't been renamed but was destroyed when a water tower collapsed on Aug. 24, 1955. When A Slight Case of Murder closed, Ferrer moved almost directly into another comedy, Stick-in-the-Mud by Frederick Hazlitt Brennan which starred Thomas Mitchell, who also directed. Ferrer was cast as the chauffeur. The play's run was a brief one — it lasted only nine performances at the same 48th Street Theatre. It would be eight months before Ferrer would appear on The Great White Way again. When Ferrer tread the Broadway boards again in August 1936 in the Philip Barry comedy Spring Dance, another quick closer, lasting only 24 performances at The Empire Theatre, which was demolished in 1953 so an office tower could be built. His next Broadway role changed everything. The play was a huge hit and Ferrer got his largest part yet. The production was the comedy Brother Rat by John Monks Jr. and Fred F. Finklehoffe and was produced and directed by the legendary George Abbott, who was a spry 49 years old then (He was 107 when he died in 1995, outliving Ferrer by three years). The plot revolved around three senior cadets at the Virginia Military Institute where one is secretly married and about to be a father. Ferrer played Dan Crawford, one of the three, opposite Eddie Albert as Bing Edwards, the dad-to-be, and Frank Albertson as Billy Randolph. The show ran 577 performances at The Biltmore Theatre (now The Samuel J. Friedman Theatre) through May 1938. By October 1938, a movie version of Brother Rat had hit movie theaters, though only Albert re-created his stage role. Ferrer's part in the film went to Ronald Reagan, who met Jane Wyman on the film's production. It's unclear when
Ferrer exited the Broadway production, but he appeared in two other Broadway plays while Brother Rat still was running. A very significant event occurred in Ferrer's life in 1938, the year Brother Rat did close though — he wed Uta Hagen, who would go on to become an esteemed actress herself and an even more legendary acting teacher. The next notable Broadway production in which Ferrer appeared was the debut of Maxwell Anderson's Key Largo on Nov. 27, 1939. Based on the Brooks Atkinson review of the play in The New York Times archives and the fact that none of the characters has the same names as the characters in John Huston's famous 1948 film version, it's difficult to tell who played what part. Paul Muni was the star of the Broadway production in what would seem to be the equivalent of the Humphrey Bogart role, though Ferrer plays a character named Frank (and received Atkinson's praise) as Bogie did in the film, though with a different last name. Hagen played Ferrer's Victor's sister. I can't be positive who plays the Johnny Rocco equivalent, but the play also featured Karl Malden as Hunk and James Gregory in his Broadway debut as Jerry. In October 1940, Ferrer received his first undisputed lead role in a smash as he starred in a revival of the drag farce Charley's Aunt under Joshua Logan's direction. The revival ran for 233 performances at The Cort Theatre, which still bears that name today.
Two days before Charley's Aunt opened on Oct. 17, 1940, Ferrer and Hagen premiered another collaboration: daughter Leticia Thyra. Ferrer stayed with Charley's Aunt through May 3, 1941. On Sept. 22, 1942, S.M. Herzig's Vickie debuted on Broadway, marking Ferrer's Broadway directing debut. He also played the husband of the title character, whose role was filled by Hagen. Also in the cast were Red Buttons and Mildred Dunnock. The comedy only played at The Plymouth Theatre (now The Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre) for 48 performances. Sometime in February 1943, Ferrer replaced Danny Kaye for the final month of performances of the hit musical Let's Face It! with songs by Cole Porter and a book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields.
Ferrer's next Broadway engagement turned out to be a landmark in the history of that strip of Manhattan theater. Ferrer played Iago and Hagen played Desdemona opposite Paul Robeson in the title role as Shakespeare's Othello. The revival of the famous tragedy opened at The Shubert Theatre on Oct. 19, 1943 and ran 296 performances before taking a break to take the play on tour. The trio returned in May 22, 1945 for 24 more performances, this time at The City Center. To this date, it is the longest running Shakespeare production in Broadway history. While Ferrer was playing Iago, Billy Wilder pursued him because he wanted the actor to play the lead in The Lost Weekend, however Paramount refused to let Wilder hire him, insisting he cast a name. They pursued Cary Grant, who passed but finally got Ray Milland who won an Oscar for the role, despite his initial reluctance to take the part. On a personal level, Othello would leave to an unhappy side effect for Ferrer. Robeson and Hagen had an affair, leading the Ferrers to divorce in 1948. Before their split, Ferrer kept himself busy. On radio, he had a successful series playing detective Philo Vance in 1945. On Nov. 29, 1945, Lillian Smith's play Strange Fruit opened at The Royale Theatre (now the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre). Ferrer produced and directed the production which starred a different though unrelated Ferrer — actor Mel Ferrer, still going by his full first name Melchor. Also in the cast were Murray Hamilton and Ralph Meeker. It ran 60 performances. The two Ferrers would swap roles in José's next Broadway production, though José would produce it while Melchor directed and José starred in the Oct. 8, 1946, premiere of Cyrano de Bergerac. Meeker also was part of the cast as was the actress Phyllis Hill, who would become Ferrer's second wife in 1948 soon after his divorce from Uta Hagen.
"José Ferrer has administered a lively draft of tonic to this season by staging Cyrano de Bergerac as though he meant it. Acting the part of the braggart romantic, he is appearing at the Alvin in a pulsating performance that makes full use of the modern theatre. Although Cyrano is no longer a modern play, it is still one of the most dashing ever written, particularly in the Brian Hooker version that preserves the bravura of the Rostand text in light verse of a modern idiom." That's how Brooks Atkinson began his review in The New York Times on Oct. 9, 1946. Atkinson heaped praise upon practically all aspects of the production — even giving a shout-out to the stage hands for moving the scenery, The critic closes by writing, "Mr. Ferrer has done Cyrano in the grand manner,
like a man who gets fun as well as a living out of the theatre." Another notable name composed the incidental music for the production: the renaissance man Paul Bowles. Ferrer's revival ran 193 performances through March 22, 1947 and its run coincided with the inaugural year of the Antoinette Perry Awards, better known by its shorthand name, the Tony, presented by The American Theatre Wing. The Tonys were presented for the first time on April 6, 1947 at the Waldorf Astoria. The American Theatre Wing handed out 11 Tonys in seven categories that first evening. Ferrer's performance in Cyrano was honored for dramatic actor alongside Fredric March in Years Ago. Four others won for acting that first year, including Ingrid Bergman in Maxwell Anderson's Joan of Lorraine and Helen Hayes in Happy Birthday, both for dramatic actress. Shortly before Cyrano ended its run, Ferrer produced and directed a five-performance run of As We Forgive Our Debtors for the American National Theatre and Academy after originally being staged by The Experimental Theatre Inc. When the play closed, Ferrer finally prepared to leave New York, ironically in the film version of the play that won Ingrid Bergman her Tony. Retitled Joan of Arc, the Victor Fleming film premiered in 1948 with Ferrer portraying the Dauphin. He earned a supporting actor Oscar nomination for his film debut. It's been a long time since I've seen the film, but I remember him being the best thing in it other than the vibrant Technicolor cinematography. 
Once Ferrer returned from California and making his first feature film, he started bouncing between the media of stage, screen and television. Between January 1948 and May 1949, Ferrer either starred, directed, produced, co-adapted or some combination of those in five Broadway shows. In January 1949, he appeared on The Philco Television Playhouse and reprised his role in a televised version of Cyrano de Bergerac. He returned to the same showcase in April to play Sammy Glick in Paddy Chayefsky's adaptation of Budd Schulberg's novel What Makes Sammy Run? In November 1949, he appeared in his second feature role, playing the manipulative hypnotist in Otto Preminger's thriller Whirlpool. Another fabled story has it that Ferrer was the first choice to play Addison De Witt in All About Eve, but the role went to George Sanders, who of course won the 1950 best supporting actor Oscar for the part. This time period wasn't an easy one for artists and like so many in his field, Ferrer found himself caught up in the Communist witchhunts of the time. Former co-star and friend Paul Robeson had his own problems above and beyond the run-of-the mill ones associated with others who ended up on HUAC-inspired blacklists when in March 1950, at the last minute, NBC canceled his planned appearance on Eleanor Roosevelt's program and banned him from its network while the U.S. State Department lifted his passport, effectively confining the Soviet-friendly artist from leaving the country. Red Channels, an anti-Communist pamphlet by the right-wing magazine Counterattack published on June 22, 1950, a list of 151 artists it claimed had Communist ties — including Ferrer and his ex-wife, Uta Hagen. It affected Hagen immediately and she never did much outside theater, but Ferrer held off repercussions for a bit as he had two films coming out in 1950.
A couple of weeks after his name appeared on the Red Channels list, the movie Crisis opened. Written and directed by Richard Brooks, Crisis starred Cary Grant as a brain surgeon on vacation with his wife in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country where Ferrer played its dictator, who happens to have a life-threatening tumor. Grant's doctor must decide whether he should keep his oath to save lives or let the tyrant die and give the country a chance at freedom. Later in 1950, Ferrer put on the big nose again in Michael Gordon's film version
of Cyrano de Bergerac. Ferrer would win the best actor Oscar (so he and Sanders won in the same year) becoming the first Hispanic actor and first Puerto Rican actor to win an Academy Award. Ferrer is one of only nine performers to win both Oscars and Tonys for playing the same role, sharing that distinction with Jack Albertson (The Subject Was Roses). Anne Bancroft (The Miracle Worker), Shirley Booth (Come Back, Little Sheba), Yul Brynner (The King and I), Joel Grey (Cabaret), Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady). Lila Kedrova (Zorba the Greek/Zorba) and Paul Scofield (A Man for All Seasons). To honor his Puerto Rican roots, Ferrer donated his Oscar to the University of Puerto Rico. Ferrer played Cyrano in a television production again on Oct. 17, 1955, on Producers' Showcase and received an Emmy nomination for best actor — single performance. Because the Emmys always have been screwed up, Ferrer also was nominated as best actor in 1951, though even their official database doesn't know for what and the only TV credits IMDb shows prior to 1951 were those two appearances mentioned earlier. At any rate, Ferrer remains the only actor in history to be nominated for an Emmy, an Oscar and a Tony for playing the same role. He also returned to the Cyrano role in a 1953 production he directed at City Center in New York (the year his marriage to Phyllis Hill ended). In a March 1956 episode of the Burns and Allen show, he played Cyrano again, but only as a voice. Abel Gance directed him as Cyrano in French in the 1964 film Cyrano et d'Artagnan. He did Cyrano's voice again in a March 1974 ABC Afterschool Special. On a 1980s Tony telecast, Ferrer recited from the play a final time and then hung up the nose for good.When Cyrano de Bergerac opened and throughout the time of his nomination and Oscar win, Ferrer had returned to New York where he produced, directed and starred in a revival of the comedy Twentieth Century opposite another 1950 Oscar nominee — Sunset Blvd.'s Norma Desmond herself, Gloria Swanson. In the 1951-52 Broadway season, Ferrer directed three big plays. In addition to directing, he produced the premiere of Stalag 17, staged the key Hume Cronyn-Jessica Tandy teaming in The Fourposter and directed, produced and starred in The Shrike. When the 1952 Tonys came out, Ferrer won best actor in a play for The Shrike as well as best director for all three plays. In Hollywood, he had two films come out. The first was the comedy Anything Can Happen. The second and far more important film was John Huston's
Moulin Rouge where Ferrer played the famed painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as well as The Comte de Toulouse-Lautrec, the painter's father. When Ferrer received an Oscar nomination, it was the first instance of a performer being nominated for portraying two distinct characters in the same film. Before that happened though, that Red Channels list controversy finally hit. As William O'Neill wrote in his chapter on The Blacklist in his book A Better World: Stalin and the American Intellectuals: On Dec. 27, 1952, the American Legion announced that it disapproved of…Moulin Rouge, starring José Ferrer, who used to be no more progressive than hundreds of other actors and had already been grilled by HUAC.…Nine members of the Legion had picketed it anyway, giving rise to the controversy. By this time, people were not taking any chances. Ferrer immediately wired the Legion's national commander that he would be glad to join the veterans in their "fight against communism." A few days later, Ferrer denounced Paul Robeson for accepting the Stalin Peace Prize. On Jan. 2, Leonard Lyons a columnist, wrote that the Legion opposed any further picketing of Moulin Rouge. Victor Lasky, another red-baiting columnist, was said to have withdrawn an article on Ferrer he had written for the Legion's magazine. On the 16th, Lyons reported the Ferrer had ironed out all his problems with Legion officials over lunch.
As I mentioned earlier, 1953 was the year when Ferrer and Phyllis Hill ended their marriage. It also was the year that Ferrer married his third wife, singer and actress Rosemary Clooney. The couple had three sons and two daughters. Their marriage ended eight years later in 1961, though they tried again and remarried in 1964 only
to divorce again in 1967. Their first child, born in 1955, was son Miguel, who would become an actor in his own right, always will be treasured by Twin Peaks fans for his role as FBI Agent Albert Rosenfeld. The resemblance between father and son shows through clearly when you compare the b&w photo of José from Whirlpool three paragraphs above to the photo of Miguel as Albert in this paragraph. The marriage of José and Rosemary connected to branches of many entertainment families. It made José the uncle of George Clooney. Their son Gabriel married Debby Boone, who sang the 1977 pop hit "You Light Up My Life," which made Ferrer and Clooney the in-laws of Pat and Shirley Boone. While Ferrer only made one feature film with Rosemary Clooney (1954's Deep in My Heart), the spouses appeared on many entertainment TV shows together as well as The Ed Sullivan Show and an appearance on Person to Person with Edward R. Murrow. In 1964, competed against each other on an episode of the game show Password All-Stars. Even before he married Clooney though, Ferrer was somewhat of a regular fixture on all sorts of TV shows as himself as early as 1949 including The Milton Berle Show, Penthouse Party hosted by Betty Furness and three appearances on Your Show of Shows. Without his new bride, he appeared on shows including Tonight! when Steve Allen was host, two episodes of The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show and the game shows What's My Line? and I've Got a Secret.For the most part, though Ferrer kept working nearly continuously until his death, the decade of the 1950s marked his heyday across all media. "The truth is I made a few good movies in the '50s, then went into freefall," Ferrer was quoted as saying, but his stage and television work didn't bring the acclaim they once did either. The Oscar nomination he received for Moulin Rouge was his third and final one, though I believe he should have been a contender for supporting actor for his role as Lt. Barney Greenwald, lawyer for the accused
mutineers in 1954's The Caine Mutiny. The British Academy of Film nominated Ferrer as best foreign actor for his part, mainly for his superb drunken dressing down of his clients after he has cleared them and exposed Humphrey Bogart's Captain Queeg as a nutcase on the stand. Edward Dmytryk, the sole member of The Hollywood Ten who turned friendly HUAC witness after serving jail time, directed the film. The Oscars deservingly nominated Bogart as lead but from a supporting cast that also included fine work from Van Johnson and Fred MacMurray, instead nominated the milquetoast Tom Tully. In 1955, he made his film directing debut as he re-created his Tony-winning role The Shrike. He directed six feature films in total: The Cockleshell Heroes (1956); The Great Man (1957), which earned him a Directors Guild of America nomination alongside 16 other contenders though the prize went to David Lean for The Bridge on the River Kwai; I Accuse! (1958) where Ferrer played Capt. Dreyfuss in a screenplay by Gore Vidal; and The High Cost of Living (1958). The final two films Ferrer helmed didn't star him: 1961's Return to Peyton Place and the 1962 remake of State Fair starring future in-law Pat Boone. Other notable films in which Ferrer would appear throughout his life included Lawrence of Arabia, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Ship of Fools, the hilarious 1976 disaster spoof The Big Bus where Ferrer plays the villain who spends the film in an iron lung, Voyage of the Damned, finally got to work with Billy WIlder on Wilder's penultimate film, Fedora, made a disaster movie that meant to be serious — The Swarm, Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, the remake of To Be or Not to Be and David Lynch's Dune.
Ferrer's theater career in New York for the remainder of the 1950s resembled reruns. Three days after Ferrer finished the 1953 revival of Cyrano he directed himself in at City Center, Ferrer did the same at City Center with The Shrike. Three days after The Shrike closed at the location, Ferrer acted there in the title role of Shakespeare's Richard III for The New York City Theatre Company with a cast that included Vincent Price and Maureen Stapleton. Two days after The Bard's work ended its run, Ferrer reached into his past again, starring and directing a revival of Charley's Aunt at City Center. One year and a day after the curtain fell on that revival, Ferrer directed Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy at City Center in a revival of The Fourposter. It took three years for Ferrer to return to work on something in New York theater. The project was the original musical comedy Oh Captain!, based on the 1953 comedy The Captain's Paradise starring Alec Guinness. Ferrer directed the musical and co-wrote the book with Al Morgan. Music and lyrics were by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans and Tony Randall played the Guinness
role in the musical. The show received six Tony nominations, including the last Ferrer would ever receive for co-writing the book. Ferrer would direct three more shows in the 1950s, only one of which he would act in (Edwin Booth), the second which was the third director to work on a troubled musical (Juno) and the last was the play The Andersonville Trial where he butted heads with star George C. Scott. When he returned to Broadway in December 1963, it was in the original Noel Coward musical The Girl Who Came to Supper co-starring Florence Henderson. Ferrer briefly replaced Richard Kiley in the lead role of the gigantic hit Man of La Mancha in May 1966 and did well enough to lead the first national touring company of the musical. He wouldn't do any Broadway work again for 13 years, though he did some off-Broadway productions. In 1972, he directed The Web and the Rock. He succeeded Ellis Rabb in the role of Robert in the Gerald Gutierrez-directed production of David Mamet's A Life in the Theatre at some point in its run from Oct. 20, 1977-July 9, 1978. Finally, he produced and starred in White Pelicans, written and directed by Jay Broad, which ran for 14 performances beginning Oct. 19, 1978, at Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre). Ferrer's last work on Broadway was his direction of the new musical Carmelina with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner (My Fair Lady, Camelot, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Brigadoon), music by Burton Lane (Finian's Rainbow, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever) and book by Lerner and Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof, Zorba). It only ran 17 performances and received a single Tony nomination best original score. Ferrer was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 1981. The hall's inductees' names get inscribed in gold lettering on the walls of the upper levels of the Gershwin Theatre, one of Broadway's largest houses. 
From the 1960s on, the bulk of Ferrer's work came on television. In 1964, he was the uncredited narrator of the first three episodes of Bewitched, explaining the story of Samantha admitting to
Darrin that she's a witch before they wed. Rumor has it that the producers of the TV series Batman pursued Ferrer first to play The Joker. He also provided the voice of Ben Haramed, the man who kidnaps Aaron to put in his act in the Rankin/Bass animated version of The Little Drummer Boy in 1968. His presence became a common one on episodic television such as The Name of the Game, The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the movie that served as the pilot for Kojak, the "Mind Over Mayhem" episode of Columbo, Banyon, Starsky and Hutch, Magnum, P.I., Quincy, M.E., Murder, She Wrote, Hotel, Matlock and the requisite appearances on The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. Ferrer took roles in many television movies
and miniseries including A Case of Libel, The Rhinemann Exchange, Gideon's Trumpet, Evita Peron, Peter and Paul, Blood Feud, Samson and Delilah, George Washington, Hitler's S.S.: Portrait in Evil, Strange Interlude for PBS' American Playhouse. He also appeared on Sesame Street in 1988 as Tio Jose' to attend the wedding of Luis and Maria. Between 1985-87, he guest-starred eight times on Newhart as Arthur Vanderkellen, the father of spoiled maid/heiress Stephanie (Julia Duffy). Between 1989-91, he appeared on the soap opera Another World four times as Reuben Marino, an attorney involved in a custody suit. Ferrer's final work on film came out posthumously and only opened in Hong Kong. It's an action film called Lam Gong juen ji fan fei jo fung wan or Attack the Restless and starred Leslie Cheung. Ferrer was married for the fifth and final time to Stella Daphne Magee in 1977, a marriage that lasted until his death. In 1985, he was the first actor to receive the National Medal of Arts alongside the other honorees for that year composer Elliott Carter Jr., arts patron Dorothy Chandler, writer Ralph Ellison, dancer/choreographer Martha Graham, corporate arts patron Hallmark Cards, arts patron Lincoln Kirstein, arts patron Paul Mellon, sculptor Louise Nevelson, painter, Georgia O'Keeffe, soprano Leonytne Pryce and arts patron Alice Tully.
Ferrer passed away on Jan. 26, 1992, in Coral Gables, Fla., following a brief battle with colon cancer at 82. He is interred in Santa Maria Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery in Old San Juan in his native Puerto Rico.
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Labels: blacklist, Chayefsky, Cole Porter, Cronyn, Fitzgerald, George C. Scott, Gloria Swanson, Huston, Ingrid Bergman, Lynch, Mamet, Morgan Freeman, Preminger, R. Brooks, T. Mitchell, Tandy, Tony Randall, Vidal, Wilder, Woody
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Saturday, September 10, 2011
How did you like the tribute to Garry's show?
By Edward Copeland
What's fascinating about diving into your past via episodes of a television series you remember fondly but have had no contact with in decades is knowing that you've changed, but the show hasn't. The moments of "It's Garry Shandling's Show." that I've treasured the most tend to retain what I liked originally, but watching the entire series in a compressed period of time really exposes its flaws. Hearing so many of the creative people echo my thoughts in commentary tracks that sometimes are brutal in their honesty made me feel that this particular side of a look back at the show required a separate post. If you missed the first part, where I discussed the show's ingenuity and my favorite episodes of season one, click here. For my favorite moments in season two, click here.
Before getting into the creative slide of "It's Garry Shandling's Show.", I thought it would be worthwhile to remember what scripted series on pay cable looked like when this show premiered 25 years ago today. At the time, it was Showtime's second original sitcom following Brothers, which premiered in 1984 and ran through 1989, and starred Robert Walden (Rossi on Lou Grant) as the owner of a bar trying to deal with the fact that his youngest brother (Paul Regina) has come out of the closet. Though HBO would eventually become the pay cable channel most associated with original series, their only sitcom venture to this point was the football comedy 1st & Ten, which also debuted in 1984, and ran for seven seasons with many incarnations and cast changes, including some seasons starring O.J. Simpson. Still, in the beginning, it was little more than an excuse to add nude women to the channel much like its thriller anthology The Hitchhiker, since its debut in 1983, was more about sex scenes than stories. Prior to those shows, both networks tended only to attempt scripted series of the sketch variety such as HBO's Not Necessarily the News and Showtime's Bizarre hosted by John Byner and co-created by Bob Einstein (best known now as the hilarious Marty Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasm), which introduced Einstein's Super Dave Osborne character.
Now that I've watched or re-watched all 72 episodes of this series, I'm even more certain than I was in this tribute's first part that, not only has it been decades since I've seen the episodes I recall most fondly, but that many of the episodes, particularly in the mess that is the fourth season (something some of the show's writers openly acknowledge on commentary tracks), I never saw at all, since I was in college by that time, and I bet I'd given up on "It's Garry Shandling's
Show." by then. My memory probably had chosen to block this out and only remember the show's early days of brilliance and innovation, forgetting when the series' nose-dive began. Plus, my memory of the six seasons of greatness that Shandling came up with soon after on The Larry Sanders Show made even the best of "It's Garry Shandling's Show." resemble an amusing trifle by comparison. I have to be honest: When I looked back at my notes on some episodes I watched just within the past few weeks, neither the titles nor my words registered details that reminded me what happened in that show. However, the series' importance can't be ignored even if it didn't maintain its initial level of excellence. That's because in many ways "It's Garry Shandling's Show." serves as a bridge between television's past, present (as in the mid- to late '80s) and future, not only in form but behind-the-scenes personnel as well. Between creators Garry Shandling and Alan Zweibel, Shandling actually had more experience when it came to writing situation comedies since that's how he started before he decided to become a standup comic, penning episodes of Sanford & Son and Welcome Back Kotter. In a way, "It's Garry Shandling's Show." resembled a half-hour sitcom version of an hour-long network series that premiered the year before — Moonlighting, which similarly broke the fourth wall and could change its format from week to week. I've already mentioned its link back to Burns and Allen, but in some respects it foretold the coming of Seinfeld. Two of its writers and later producers, Tom Gammill and Max Pross, who came from writing for Late Night With David Letterman, would go on to be writers and producers on Seinfeld, but even the premise of "It's Garry Shandling's Show." bears some resemblance to the later megahit. Garry Shandling plays a fictionalized version of himself, a standup comic, on a show that truly could be said to be about "nothing" and, as in the early days of Seinfeld, Shandling opened and closed each episode with a monologue, only instead of it being in a comedy club setting, he'd perform it for the audience in the "living room of his condo" in Sherman Oaks, California.Others who worked on the show at one time or another who spanned generations of television comedy included veteran director Alan Rafkin, who directed every episode of the first three seasons of "It's Garry Shandling's Show." except for the last three episodes of the third season, and whose credits included work on The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Get Smart, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show and many, many more, including an Emmy win for One Day at a Time. The legendary writer Sam Denoff, who died in July, served as a supervising producer in the second season. Actor-comedian-writer Jack Burns, who early in his career was part of a comedy act with George Carlin, and wrote The Muppet Movie, served as executive story supervisor in the first season and wrote its first really great episode, the fourth installment, "Foul Ball." In the final season, Albert Brooks' frequent writing partner Monica Johnson, who died last year, was a creative consultant and wrote two episodes. Merrill Markoe, David Letterman's one-time longtime girlfriend and a writer on both of his NBC shows as well as the attempt to revive Laugh-In in 1977, penned the "It's Garry Shandling's Christmas Show" episode that aired Dec. 17, 1987, which included a gag where Garry had to turn his living room upside down to search for a missing watch that was very reminiscent of Letterman's "360 Degree Rotation Show" from the NBC Late Night show on Dec. 8, 1986, though Markoe had left the Late Night staff by August 1986.
Of the younger crop of writers on the show or those who passed through and went on to bigger success later, in addition to the aforementioned team of Gammill & Pross, the show also welcomed the team of Al Jean & Michael Reiss, who had previously written for the short-lived cult fave Sledge Hammer! In a funny story on a commentary track, they tell how, while they worked on that show but before they were on staff at "It's Garry Shandling's Show.", Shandling was running himself ragged by being one of two regular guest hosts for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show while working long hours on the sitcom. As a result, he often didn't have time to stay fresh on the news, so Jean & Reiss would sneak jokes to him at his real Sherman Oaks condo in the wee hours of the morning, scared to death that their Sledge Hammer! boss Alan Spencer would find out and fire
them. Later they leaned that Spencer was doing the same thing. (One thing I learned that I didn't realize was the set for Shandling's condo was for the most part designed as an exact replica of the real place where he lived in Sherman Oaks at the time.) During the summer hiatus between the third and fourth seasons of "It's Garry Shandling's Show.", Reiss & Jean got work on a new upstart animated series called The Simpsons and they stayed with it through 2001. Gammill & Pross also would work as producers on The Simpsons, though they didn't come on board until 1999. One of Jean & Reiss' bosses at The Simpsons, co-creator and executive producer Sam Simon, passed through "It's Garry Shandling's Show." as a creative consultant and co-writer of three episodes in the second season, though Simon could hardly be called a newcomer since his TV sitcom credits stretched back to Cheers, Taxi and even episodes of Barney Miller and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Another of the main writers, Ed Solomon, came with his main credit being the screenplay for Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and he later wrote Men in Black. Many of the writers mocked writer-producer Jeff Franklin (previously a writer-producer on Laverne & Shirley and Bosom Buddies) for choosing to leave early in the second season to head a new family-oriented comedy for ABC, but Full House probably made him richer than all of them except Sam Simon. Of course, many episodes were written by Zweibel and Shandling, who had final call on the scripts no matter who wrote them. One person who didn't write any episodes but appeared as a whacked out character in the fourth season was none other than Paul Feig. On the show, he appears three times as the loony Chester, half-brother of the girlfriend (and later wife), Phoebe (Jessica Harper), that Garry gets that season. Feig still acts, but his writing is really what we treasure. He created the irreplaceable Freaks & Geeks and has directed episodes of many other TV series including Mad Men, Undeclared, The Office and Arrested Development. Earlier this year, he helmed the feature film Bridesmaids. The series was executive produced by Shandling, the late Bernie Brillstein and Brad Grey. Though Shandling and Grey later had legal fights, Grey also produced The Larry Sanders Show and The Sopranos.
In one of the interviews on the DVDs with Zweibel and Shandling, Shandling admits that the wacky tone of the show sort of grew organically. There hadn't been a grand plan to toss in crazy plot devices such as the way they played with time, like having Garry sit on his couch and suddenly be struck by a pile of rolled up newspapers, after which he'd say, "Two weeks have passed." The idea for Garry to have a tiny car came about when Zweibel just said at one point, "What if Garry had a small car that he drove from set to set?" These things added to the hilarity
in the beginning as long as there was an underlying story that worked, but by the fourth season when Garry suddenly had a fly hat that turned him into the size of the insect so he could literally be "a fly on the wall," it just seemed to be an act of desperation because the episode's story wasn't working. In one of the commentary tracks, Ed Solomon admits that many of the writers "were ashamed" when they had to resort to devices and liked it better without the gimmicks. The freedom to do just about anything, Shandling says, meant that each week it felt as if they were re-inventing the wheel. Those out-of-nowhere moments in the first couple of seasons really added to what made the show so much fun. The car always worked and the way they accounted for time lapses were clever in the beginning, but by the time Garry had a "Flying Clock" (get it? "Time flies") to move things along in a fourth season episode, instead of laughing you were more likely to roll your eyes.While the fourth season was more or less a complete loss, the show truly started losing steam in the latter part of the third season after two nearly peerless seasons. There were the inexplicable problems in the two really good years that seem to come with a lot of series, such as airing episodes out of order for no apparent reason. Now, in the case of "It's Garry Shandling's Show.", continuity wasn't really a concern the way it was when a series such as Homicide: Life on the Street did that and characters would be referred to as dead before the episode aired telling the audience they died. However, viewers could still tell as Scott Nemes, who played young
Grant Schumaker, injured himself and had to use crutches, which would appear in some episodes, disappear, then reappear again, much like the year on The Larry Sanders Show when Janeane Garofalo's hair bounced back and forth between blonde and brunette. Zweibel and Shandling agreed during the third season that the show seemed to be in a rut and decided that in the fourth season, Garry needed to get a girlfriend who eventually would become his wife. On one of their commentary tracks, Al Jean and Michael Reiss are quite open about how they and most of the other writers on staff thought it was a bad idea, taking a certain pride that 20 years later (from the end of the series until they taped the commentary), they turned out to be right. I got confused whether it was Jean's voice or Reiss' who says it, but he describes it as looking like "a hack move by a conventional show." That's how the decision was made to add the talented Jessica Harper as interior decorator Phoebe Bass. Again, I can't be sure if it's Jean or Reiss who said this, but he describes Harper as always looking sad and unhappy to be there between takes. It probably didn't help that inside jokes started being sneaked into the show referring to the fact that in real life Harper was married to top Fox executive Tom Rothman. In the most blatant example, they had taken actor Richard Fancy (Mr. Lippman at Pendant Publishing on Seinfeld), who had been the all-purpose boss or bureaucrat (at the DMV or a travel agency), and turned him into the network president Mr. Stravely. In the fourth season episode where Phoebe's half-brother Chester (Paul Feig) talks him into giving him a TV show, Stravely insists that he work in a role for his new wife Edie Adams. (In another Stravely moment from the first episode of the fourth season that coincidentally foresees a Seinfeld storyline, Stravely objects to the idea of Garry getting a girlfriend and suggests that he add a butler character instead.)Jean and Reiss also blame the show's eventual airing on Fox as well as Showtime as part of what ultimately doomed the series. It showed first as reruns in 1988, but eventually to the point that Fox caught up, though the network killed it in March 1990 and Showtime continued to air some new episodes after that. Prior to that, the creative team behind "It's Garry Shandling's Show." didn't worry about ratings or where commercials would go. In that same commentary track, they recall Zweibel coming to the set one day lamenting that in the Nielsen ratings the show ranked 99 out of 100 shows. You could even tell by the way Garry the character
spoke to the camera that he had regrets about the way things had gone, saying things such as "If you've been keeping up with the show and I assume that you haven't," or during another fourth season episode, declaring in a scene, "People are at home switching the channel right now." In fact, in some episodes it could hardly be called Garry Shandling's Show because he seemed to make sure to have as little to do with it as possible, making brief appearances at the beginning and end of two episodes when he was supposed to be opening for Guns 'N' Roses, and in the second-to-last episode appearing at the opening in a hot tub and shutting a TV off, not to reappear until after the final credit had rolled and he switched it back on, realizing he missed the entire episode. (Stravely complains when he goes off with Guns 'N' Roses, saying he has a show to do, and that the network was nice enough to let him off to perform Gypsy but they never bought the maternity leave story.) Zweibel does commentary on the fourth season episode "Family Man," which is the only thing he's ever directed, and the episode that contains that flying clock that allows Garry to speed up time, though it's accidentally set for years instead of minutes. The premise is that Garry wants to speed up the time it takes to get the results of Phoebe's home pregnancy test but instead he goes far into the future where they have teenage children. Zweibel admits that all the tricks they did at this point were no longer a novelty and complains that they didn't really put their own twist on the time travel idea, making it appear like just another sitcom. The funniest part of the commentary is that the storyline has Garry and Phoebe's future son really depressed and thinking his life is worthless, so Garry brings him back to witness the day they found out Phoebe was pregnant with him so he can see how excited they were. Garry goes inside to celebrate with Phoebe and the future son waves from outside (with the flying clock in his hand), and Zweibel on the commentary obsesses about what happened to him, wondering how he get back to his own time. That episode does have one of the funniest fourth season lines, since it was clear by then that it would be the last season, when Garry says the first thing he's going to do when the show ends is put that fourth wall back up.Of the 19 episodes in the fourth season, there were two episodes that almost worked: the 17th episode, "The Last Show," which was intended to be just what its title suggests, and the final episode, "Driving Miss Garry," which simply was a broad spoof of the movie Driving Miss Daisy with Garry taking the Jessica Tandy role. First though, two photos that are worth showing from other fourth season episodes. The first: When Garry mentions private things about Phoebe on a morning talk show, she becomes publicly humiliated and gets asked personal questions by a woman played by Linda Doucett (Shandling's real-life girlfriend then and for several years, including when she played Darlene on The Larry Sanders Show), who says she would "never date a comedian." The second: To try to stop a fight between Phoebe and his mom over wedding plans, Garry reads them a fable about a time when a man named Howard brought peace to Happy Pilgrim Estates, and it's none other than Howard Sprague (Jack Dodson) from The Andy Griffith Show.
Apparently, what messed up "The Last Show" was that the actor originally hired to play the condo complex's new gardener, Lucas Death, turned out to be nothing but trouble and had to be replaced at the last minute by Stuart Pankin, the same actor who in an earlier episode had played Garry's brain. Also, the episode's director,
Shandling's revered acting coach Roy London, had never directed a sitcom before, creating more problems. Otherwise, for such a meta-series, this would have been a great ending. At a meeting of the condo homeowners association, the homeowners vote to change the name of Happy Pilgrim Estates to Nelson Mandela Estates. Leonard then introduces the new gardener who isn't just named Death, he IS Death and he's come to collect Garry since the show is ending. Garry doesn't believe him, wondering if he's there for his mom since she's older, but no, he says it's Garry. Garry phones Bob Newhart, who shows up in split screen from his Newhart set. At first, Newhart does one of his phone routines until Garry reminds him that he's on the other end of the line so he doesn't have to do that, but Newhart confirms that he knows about Lucas Death because Newhart is also ending, and he's
toast as well. Death finally convinces Garry as he shows him his body on the floor. They have his funeral which includes Dabney Coleman and Tony Danza, who breaks down because he kept blowing Garry off about making an appearance on the show. Coleman tries to talk to Garry's manager Brad (a recurring character the late Bruno Kirby had been playing) about taking him on as a client. After the funeral ends, it shows Garry back on the couch telling the audience that he's not really dead but he just thought that would be a good way to end the show, when an angry Mr. Stravely comes in, complaining about him leaving the coffin after they'd arranged for those guest stars. He tells Garry that now he owes the network two more episodes. Garry says he's out of ideas, but Stravely tells him to do a talent show or a movie spoof. He doesn't care. (The next episode, "The Talent Show," might be the absolute worst episode they ever did.)
What ended up being the final episode, "Driving Miss Garry," almost seems to have nothing to do with "It's Garry Shandling's Show." since it doesn't even have that 41 second theme song we've come to know and love. Instead, just a few months after winning the Oscar for best picture, they were able to license Hans Zimmer's actual score for Driving Miss Daisy. The episode begins much like the movie — only Garry drives his little car in reverse when he meant to go forward, destroying his kitchen. Then, in an even more amazing casting coup, mere months after his Oscar nomination for supporting actor, Dan Aykroyd shows up as Boolie, who is supposed to be Garry's brother, and brings with him a driver named Hoke (the late Paul Winfield). (Hoke's best comment as he drives around town: "Don't any of you folks have walls on your houses?") It pretty much follows the Daisy template,
but sadly the regulars get left on the sidelines. The spoof does make some changes, such as having Hoke, once Garry teaches him to read, pick up The Autobiography of Malcolm X and become more assertive. When Boolie visits again, Hoke says he deserves a raise above $80 a week (apparently Billy Crystal's family has made a nice offer) and gets Boolie to give him a salary of $200,000 a year. Boolie tells Hoke not to let anyone know how much he makes. "I only pay Pete fifty thousand a year to be Garry's best friend," Boolie says. They age Hoke and Garry (complete with white wig) and Hoke feeds him. The ending is sad because the regular Garry thanks everyone for watching then rides by all the sets in his car waving at all the cast members. That's how the series ends.What presented the biggest problem to the series in terms of being able to sustain itself over the long haul is something that Shandling, Zweibel and all the writers who contribute commentaries to the DVD set admit, even when discussing the classic episodes. While they had a talented cast of performers from the beginning in Molly Cheek as Nancy, Michael Tucci, Bernadette Birkett and Scott Nemes as the Schumakers, Barbara Cason as Garry's mom Ruth, Paul Willson as Leonard Smith and a good addition in the third season with Ian Buchanan as
Ian, not to mention Shandling himself, with the quirky nature of the show, character development wasn't going to happen so the only character who showed any growth during the four-year run would be Nemes' Grant, and that was thanks to puberty, not writing. It's another reason that the fourth season threw everything so off-kilter. A show with crazy objects, minicars and which had a premise where it was a TV show in which everyone realized they lived in a TV show wasn't built to suddenly transform into a relationship comedy. It also did a disservice to the characters who'd been there since season one. Trying to build Phoebe from girlfriend to wife in a compressed amount of time left the other characters on the sidelines during most of the fourth season. On the infamous commentary track I keep referring to, either Jean or Reiss said that as outlandish as the show could be, most of the ideas were inspired by things that really happened to Shandling, but by the third season, his life was the show, so those stories didn't come as easily. As one of the writing team members said, "No wonder it took 20 years to reach DVD. It just wasn't that good." I wouldn't go that far. Those early episodes mostly hold up. There is one conversation in a fourth season episode, where Garry goes to meet Phoebe's family and talks with her father, Gil (Edward Penn), that I thought was sort of telling.GIL: Tell me about your show.
GARRY: It's about my life.
GIL: You must have an interesting life.
GARRY: I really don't — it's been a stumbling block for the whole series.
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Labels: 80s, Albert Brooks, Animation, Aykroyd, Carlin, Carson, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Dabney Coleman, HBO, Homicide, Larry Sanders, Letterman, Oscars, Seinfeld, Shandling, Tandy, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, TV Tribute
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Monday, July 18, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Hume Cronyn Part I
By Edward Copeland
When I planned to do a tribute to Hume Cronyn on what would be his 100th birthday, I never imagined that I'd have to break it into two parts, but the more I delved into his history, the more I realized the piece would be a long one because Cronyn's career was not only a long one, it was multifaceted. Believe it or not, I'm omitting a lot of what he did, just to make this salute as short as it is. In fairness, this tribute to the actor-screenwriter-playwright-author-director-producer-lyricist
should ideally have led with a solo photo of the man, but his life and career was so inexorably linked with that of his second wife Jessica Tandy, it would be just as wrong not to include her since she figures so prominently in his story. Cronyn and Tandy met in 1940, wed in 1942 and stayed together until her death in 1994. In that time, the two of them collaborated in their first film together in 1944 and would go on to make a total of nine feature films, one feature documentary, appear in 10 plays shown on TV in the 1950s (one of which he directed), co-star in a short-lived 1954 sitcom (which he produced and began life as a radio show they did together), make five TV movies together, appear on countless talk shows and TV specials as a couple and, of course, teamed on the same Broadway productions 14 times, earning them the title of The First Couple of the American Theater. Cronyn did do plenty on his own though, not just as an actor, but as I mentioned earlier as a writer, not only of plays but of TV movies as well as two screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock, who directed Cronyn in his film debut in 1943, as well as his autobiography.While Hume Cronyn, born on this date in 1911 in London, Ontario, Canada, certainly left his imprint on all entertainment mediums and in most of the possible roles associated with that industry, that almost wasn't going to be the course of his life's career. His father, also named Hume, was a banker and prominent member of the Canadian Parliament in Ontario and insisted his son go to law school so Cronyn studied law at McGill University in Montreal even though young Hume already had his sights set on a career in the theater. While at McGill, he also took an interest in boxing and developed skills good enough that he nearly landed a spot on Canada's 1932 Olympic boxing team as a featherweight, except he dropped out of McGill after the 1930-31 term and headed over the border to the United States. He made his professional stage debut in 1931 in the play Up Pops the Devil
at The National Theatre in Washington. He played a paperboy for a salary of $15 a week. Cronyn began attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts under Max Reinhardt where he graduated in 1934. He took acting jobs wherever he could find them, including working with The Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Va., outside Richmond. The city of Richmond reprints an article about the theater which still exists, from the Richmond Times-Dispatch about their production of a play called Mountain Ivy in summer 1934 as well as their unusual experiment where patrons could swap pigs, chickens, jellies and other assorted foods in exchange for a seat during the hard economic times. The article lists Cronyn as both a member of the cast and its production designer. He made his Broadway debut later that same year in the play Hippers' Holiday in the role of a janitor where he also served as understudy in the comedy whose cast also included Burgess Meredith. The next year, he replaced Garson Kanin (who would gain more fame later in his career as a writer) in the role of Green in George Abbott's production of the comedy Boy Meets Girl whose cast also included Everett Sloane, probably best known as Bernstein in Citizen Kane. Sometime in this time period, Cronyn wed for the first time, but no two sites agree on either the beginning or end dates of his marriage to Emily Woodruff or provides much information about her. They were either married in 1934 or 1935 and divorced in 1936 or 1941, the year after he met Jessica Tandy, but I was having no luck finding a definitive answer until I discovered that Cronyn and Tandy donated a treasure trove of their personal papers to The Library of Congress along with copies of divorce decrees, marriage licenses, etc. So I'll take their words as the final authority and Cronyn wed Emily Woodruff wed in 1934 and were divorced in 1936. Tandy, who actually was two years older than Cronyn and English born, ended her first marriage to the actor Jack Hawkins in 1942 after 10 years of marriage.In January 1937, Cronyn landed the role of Elkus in the original production of Maxwell Anderson's fantasy High Tor, which won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for show and whose cast included Meredith again as well as Peggy Ashcroft. He continued making Broadway appearances but 1939 became notable for two reasons. One: Cronyn made his first appearance on the fledgling medium of television on a program called Her Master's Voice. In October 1939, he made his biggest impression on The Great White Way to date in the role
of Andrei Prozorov in a production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. He continued working regularly on Broadway though 1940 proved more significant as the year he met Jessica Tandy. They wed two years later, though they didn't collaborate on the stage until six years later. In fact, Cronyn and Tandy shared the screen together first. When Cronyn and Tandy did make their first trip to Hollywood, it wasn't long before film roles came their way, especially for Cronyn who lucked out with his film debut. Though only 32 at the time, Cronyn was cast as the much older Herbie Hawkins, neighbor friend of Henry Travers in Alfred Hitchcock's great 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt starring Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright. Travers played Wright's father and he and Cronyn's characters were obsessed with mysteries and scenarios for the perfect murder while completely unaware that Cotten's Uncle Charlie who is staying with Travers actually is a notorious serial killer. Cronyn and Travers' scenes are a hoot. The same year, Cronyn landed a small role in Claude Rains' rendering of The Phantom of the Opera and the war drama The Cross of Lorraine starring Jean-Pierre Aumont and Gene Kelly. Cronyn and Tandy also welcomed the birth of their first child, a son, Christopher. Cronyn also kept busy during those war years by staging and performing in many USO productions to entertain the troops.His first working relationship with Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt would begin a professional relationship between the two that would persist and in many areas. The director cast Cronyn again as part of the ensemble in his next full-length feature, 1944's Lifeboat, for which YouTube provides a clip.
The same year also placed him in his first film with his wife, The Seventh Cross directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Spencer Tracy. This war-time drama, which I've never managed to see, tells of seven men who
escape a Nazi concentration camp. The camp's commandant orders that as each escapee is recaptured by the Gestapo, he be returned to the camp and put to death on one of the seven crosses he's erected. Tracy's character is the last of the seven still on the run, trying to flee to Holland. Cronyn and Tandy play a married couple who take Tracy in, unaware of who he is at first, though their own son is in the SS and Cronyn's character is tempted by a large reward. It earned Cronyn his first and only Oscar nomination as best supporting actor. It was the first film Tandy made in Hollywood. In 1945, Cronyn's major films took a lighter and, in one instance, a more domestic turn, as did he and Tandy's life with the birth of their second child, daughter Tandy. Filmwise, he co-starred with Robert Walker and June Allyson in The Sailor Takes a Wife and appeared in the all-star cast that included Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly and many, many more in the mix of music and comedy skits in Ziegfeld Follies. Cronyn acted in the sketch "Sweepstakes Ticket" with William Frawley and Fanny Brice. Again, YouTube actually has the clip and how often do you get to see the real Fanny Brice? The year 1946 proved especially busy for Cronyn on several fronts. In Los Angeles, he directed his wife for the first time on stage in a production of Tennessee Williams' Portrait of a Madonna at the Actors' Laboratory Theatre. Cronyn also was named a director of the Screen Actors Guild. He worked with director Jules Dassin for the first time in A Letter for Evie, teamed with his wife on screen for the second time in The Green
Years, did uncredited voice work in The Secret Heart and co-starred as the smarmy defense attorney representing Lana Turner (or is he?) in the murder of Turner's husband in the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice. Finally, on a personal note, Cronyn adopted Tandy's daughter, Susan, (from Tandy's marriage to Jack Hawkins) on the girl's 12th birthday and Susan changed her last name to Cronyn. In 1947, Cronyn became the first person to portray scientist Robert Oppenheimer in a film about the making of the atomic bomb The Beginning or the End. Tandy was making a mark on the East Coast creating one of the landmark characters in theatrical history — Blanche Du Bois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. In movies, Cronyn gave what may be the best performance I've ever seen him give — the tyrannical leader of the prison guards, Captain Munsey, locked in a battle of wills with Burt Lancaster in Dassin's Brute Force. This clip doesn't show Munsey at his cruelest or most terrifying and it has foreign subtitles, but you'll get the idea.With 1948, Cronyn definitely indulged in the multi-faceted nature of his work in the arts. He only acted in one film that year: the comedy The Bride Goes Wild co-starring Van Johnson and June Allyson. Before he headed back east, he took his first crack at screenwriting. With Hitchcock's uncredited help, the two wrote
the adaptation of Arthur Laurents' screenplay for Hitchcock's gem Rope, which was based on the play Rope's End by Patrick Hamilton. Rope not only was notable for the way Hitchcock filmed it in long takes that ran until the camera ran out of film, it also was the director's first film made in color. Cronyn then went back to New York where Jessica Tandy continued to play Blanche on Broadway. Cronyn returned to the stage for the first time in seven years in The Survivors whose cast included Louis Calhern, E.G. Marshall, Kevin McCarthy and Ray Walston. He also became a producer on the New York-based theater TV show that started on the fledgling ABC network called Actor's Studio, renamed The Play's the Thing in its final season when, by then, it aired on CBS. He directed an installment that broadcast Portrait of a Madonna and Tandy was even able on a night off to re-create the role she played in the L.A. production in which Cronyn directed her. The series attracted lots of big names and introduced viewers to many great works but sadly no copies of the program exist, including Marlon Brando's first appearance in a role on television in 1949, something he wouldn't do again until 1979.As the 1940s ended, Cronyn was all over the map — literally. He only acted in one feature film — and it was a musical. Cronyn put on a brogue to play the assistant to an Irish town's police sergeant (Barry Fitzgerald) who calls on a singing insurance investigator from America (Bing Crosby) to help solve the mystery of the whereabouts of their missing Blarney Stone. That was the least of Cronyn's accomplishments that year. He still served as a producer on the series Actor's Studio, though he didn't have time to appear or direct on that program because he was so busy on other TV series. He worked again with Burgess Meredith as well as Pat Harrington Jr. in the "One Sunday Afternoon" installment of The Ford Theatre Hour in May; acted opposite Fay Bainter in "The Uncertain Hour" on The Chevrolet Tele-Theatre a week later; and played the title character in "Dr. Violet" on Suspense, a series that presented live plays with characters in dangerous situations. Cronyn would repeat the role in two more installments the following year.
He also found time to play the title role in a national tour of Shakespeare's Hamlet put on by The American National Theatre and Academy. Cronyn also repeated the job he had on Hitchcock's Rope on Hitch's next project Under Capricorn, the only movie by the director I couldn't even finish. It wasn't his usual suspenser, but a big costume drama set in 1831 Australia and starring Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten. I'm far from alone in my criticism of it — Hitchcock himself regretted making it in the book-length interview he did with Francois Truffaut. Cronyn had a helluva task. First, it was a novel, then a play, then a screenplay and then he got his hands on it to try to turn it into something worth watching. Hitchcock admitted he only took the movie for the chance to work with Bergman and to return to England — and the big paycheck didn't hurt either. He also admitted that Cronyn was out of his element. "I wanted (Cronyn) because he's a very articulate man who knows how to voice his ideas, but as a scriptwriter he hadn't really sufficient experience," Hitchcock told Truffaut while taking the ultimate blame.
SOURCES: Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy: A Register of Their Papers in the Library of Congress, Fandango, biography.com, film reference.com, Encyclopedia of World Biography, Internet Accuracy Project, Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut, Wikipedia, The Internet Broadway Database and the Internet Movie Database.
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Labels: Burgess Meredith, Dassin, E.G. Marshall, Garland, Gene Kelly, Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Lancaster, Rains, Tandy, Tennessee Williams, Tracy, Truffaut, Zinnemann
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Saturday, March 26, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Tennessee Williams
By Sheila O'Malley
An interviewer once asked Tennessee Williams, “What is the definition of happiness?” Williams thought a bit and then replied, “Insensitivity, I guess.”
The great female characters of the Williams canon — Laura and Amanda Wingfield (Glass Menagerie), Blanche DuBois (Streetcar Named Desire), Alma Winemiller (Summer and Smoke), Maggie the Cat (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Catherine Holly (Suddenly, Last Summer), to name just a few — are the “sensitives” of the world, predisposed to unhappy lives because of their sensitivity, but in Williams’ view, the sensitives are the strongest of all of us. This psychological standpoint is still his most radical contribution. The more obviously hearty people will not understand, and would wish Blanche to “buck up” a little bit, or Alma to stop mooning around about John Buchanan…but to wish that is to wish away Williams’ drama, of course, and to wish away the best part of ourselves, which is our vulnerability. Williams spoke to that vulnerability and gave it a voice in a way no other 20th century playwright did. His only rival was Eugene O’Neill. In a 1948 essay in The New York Times, Williams wrote about the questions that people would ask him about his plays and his characters:
On this particular occasion the question that floored me was, “Why do you always write about frustrated women?”
To say that floored me is to put it mildly, because I would say that frustrated is almost exactly what the women I write about are not. What was frustrated about Amanda Wingfield? Circumstances, yes! But spirit? See Helen Hayes in London’s Glass Menagerie if you still think Amanda was a frustrated spirit! No, there is nothing interesting about frustration, per se. I could not write a line about it for the simple reason that I can’t write a line about anything that bores me. Was Blanche of A Streetcar Named Desire frustrated? About as frustrated as a beast of the jungle! And Alma Winemiller? What is frustrated about loving with such white hot intensity that it alters the whole direction of your life, and removes you from the parlor of the Episcopal rectory to a secret room above Moon Lake Casino?
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Miss., to parents Cornelius and Edwina Williams. He had a brother, Dakin, and a sister, Rose. He was very close to his maternal grandfather, Walter Dakin, an Episcopal priest who, later in life, traveled extensively with his grandson, and set up house with him in Key West on occasion. Cornelius Williams was often absent due to his job as a traveling salesman (Tennessee would utilize this experience in his first hit play, Glass Menagerie, where Mr. Wingfield, never seen in the play, was described as “a telephone man — who fell in love with long-distance!”), and so the three children were raised primarily by Edwina. His father thought “Tom” was effeminate and gave him a hard time about it.
The family moved to St. Louis, where Tennessee attended high school and began writing in earnest. He tried his hand at poetry, short stories, essays. His interest in drama would come a bit later.
In 1937, he was accepted into the University of Iowa (after dabbling in journalism at the University of Missouri). He transferred eventually to Washington University in St. Louis where we start to see the playwright Tennessee Williams being born. He worked on the campus literary journal, whose members are pictured here (Williams is second from the left). He became involved with a local theater group called the Mummers of St.
Louis, who produced one of his earliest known plays. He looked back very fondly on that company and even as an old man said that the productions of the Mummers represented to him the best that theater had to offer: the sheer joy in the process, the collaboration, and the sense of a supportive cohesive community. This was the 1930s and Clifford Odets was the biggest star in American playwriting, his socially conscious and politically left-leaning plays taking Broadway by storm in the productions of the short-lived Group Theatre. Williams loved Odets, and his earliest plays (some of which will be published for the first time this April in a collection called The Magic Tower show that influence, an influence he would quickly shed. (The new book can be found on Amazon here.) While his successful plays are some of the most socially conscious plays ever written, in terms of their constant reminders to us that we need to be KIND to one another, he was not explicitly political, and the left-wing bandwagon was not for him. Odets’ mantle fit awkwardly on Williams’ shoulders. It was around this time in Williams’ life that his beloved sister Rose began her long descent into madness.Tom’s sister Rose was always thought to be neurotic, too “nervous,” and once she hit her teenage years and became boy-crazy (like most teenage girls), the cracks in her psyche began to open. A failed “debut” seems to have been particularly traumatic, and Rose had a series of breakdowns (one psychiatrist told her that her problem was that she needed to get married), was hospitalized, given insulin treatments, shock treatments, and finally, in 1943, a prefrontal lobotomy. By that point, Williams had left town and was living in New York, struggling to get by on writing grants and odd jobs. On March 24, 1943, he wrote in his journal, after receiving a letter from his mother about Rose’s “operation”:
1000 miles away.
Rose.
Her head cut open. A knife thrust in her brain.
Me. Here. Smoking.
This was the defining event in his life, even more so than being a gay man in the 1930s and '40s, even more so than being a writer from the South. Rose’s inability to either heal the cracks within her, or live with those cracks, haunted Tennessee Williams to his dying day, and play after play deals with madness, fear of madness, and also, in one case specifically (Suddenly, Last Summer) lobotomies. There is a danger in assigning too much autobiographical meaning to Williams’ works, as though there should be a literal A to B correlation. To read the plays as glorified journal entries is a huge disservice to the universality of his work (the recent failed production of Glass Menagerie at The Long Wharf, reviewed here by John Lahr, is evidence of that.) Williams turned what had happened to his sister Rose into art. As Tom Wingfield says, in his final monologue in The Glass Menagerie:
I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass. Perhaps I am walking along a street at night, in some strange city, before I have found companions. I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura — and so goodbye...
In 1939, Williams moved to New Orleans, and it was there that he began to emerge as an individual voice. It also was when he formally changed his name to “Tennessee,” the state where his father was born. In his journals and letters, it is apparent that during this fertile time in his life he already was percolating the ideas that would become Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named Desire: There are early one-acts that are rehearsals for those later plays. His first major full-length play was Battle of Angels (1940), about a virile young drifter named Val who strolls into a dressmaker’s shop in a small town after his car breaks down, looking for help. The dressmaker’s shop is run by a woman named Myra who is trapped in a loveless marriage. Battle of Angels would eventually be rewritten by Williams in 1957 as Orpheus Descending. Battle of Angels was produced in Boston and was a resounding flop. It would be his first (but not his last) experience of controversy and calls for censorship, due to the explicit sexual subtexts in his plays. Although Battle of Angels was not a success, it brought him into contact with powerful people, producers and agents (Margo Jones, Audrey Wood and others), who would become lifelong supporters of Williams and his work. Around this time, he wrote in his journal:
My next play will be simple, direct and terrible — a picture of my own heart — there will be no artifice in it — I will speak truth as I see it — distort as I see distortion — be wild as I am wild — tender as I am tender — mad as I am mad — passionate as I am passionate — It will be myself without concealment or evasion and with a fearless unashamed frontal assault upon life that will leave no room for trepidation. I believe that the way to write a good play is to convince yourself that it is easy to do — then go ahead and do it with ease. Don’t maul, don’t suffer, don’t groan — till the first draft is finished. Then Calvary — but not till then. Doubt — and be lost — until the first draft is finished.
It was out of this attitude that The Glass Menagerie was born. Williams had written a short story called “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (1943) and began to turn it into a play (he often worked this way, backing into the play format). Margo Jones, one of the pioneers of the American regional theater movement, had hitched herself to Tennessee Williams early on, and was tireless in promoting him. She and Eddie Dowling produced The Glass Menagerie (Dowling also directed and played Tom Wingfield) and a production was planned to open in Chicago in 1944. Casting was a challenge and getting the once-great and now-washed-up Laurette Taylor (who had been a star of vaudeville) to play Amanda Wingfield was a big coup. Taylor had been famous as a young actress, but now was known mainly for her drinking problem. Rehearsals for Glass Menagerie were difficult sometimes. Lyle Leverich wrote in Tom, his magnificent biography of Tennessee Williams:
Tennessee remembered that Laurette appeared to know only a fraction of her lines, and these she was delivering in “a Southern accent which she had acquired from some long-ago black domestic.” He was even more disconcerted when she said she was modeling her accent after his! Tom wrote to Donald Windham, complaining that Laurette was ad-libbing many of her speeches and that the play was beginning to sound more like the Aunt Jemima Pancake hour.
To him, Laurette’s “bright-eyed attentiveness to the other performances seemed a symptom of lunacy, and so did the rapturous manner of dear Julie.” He was witnessing a characteristic of many of the theater’s great actors who were quick studies but painfully deliberate in their approach to a role. As Laurette’s daughter explained, “She seemed blandly unconscious of the discomfort of the others…Amanda [the role] fascinated her. She could see whole facets of the woman’s life before the action of the play and after it was over.” This is what her husband had taught her was the test of a good part. “The outer aspect of this inner search concerned her not at all.”
Paul Bowles, a friend of Williams who composed the music that played throughout the play, came to Chicago for the dress rehearsal, and described the atmosphere:
“I flew out to Chicago [and] arrived in a terrible blizzard, I remember. It was horrible. A traumatic experience. And the auditorium was cold. Laurette Taylor was on the bottle, unfortunately. Back on it, really. She had got off it with the first part of the rehearsals but suddenly the dress rehearsal coming up was too much. [Laurette was discovered] unconscious, down behind the furnace in the basement. And there was gloom, I can tell you, all over the theater because no one thought she would be able to go on the next night.”
But she did go on, and by all accounts it was one of the greatest performances ever given by an American actress in the history of our theatrical tradition. The praise runs far and wide, and while Williams’ play, with its delicate heartbreak, and keening sense of loss and memory, was definitely something “new” (nobody was writing like he was at the time), it was Laurette Taylor’s magnificent performance that helped launch Williams into the stratosphere. His life would never be the same again. Leverich wrote:
Laurette Taylor never lost an opportunity to divert the praise that was being heaped upon her to that “nice little guy,” Tennessee Williams. She was always quick to remind her admirers that it was he, not she, who had written the lines that gave The Glass Menagerie its special power and beauty. And she told Tennessee, “It’s a beautiful — a wonderful — a great play!”
For his part, Tennessee Williams always said that, as much as he regarded Laurette Taylor a personal friend, he never ceased to be in awe of her. “She had such a creative mind,” he once remarked. “Something magical happened with Laurette. I used to stand backstage. There was a little peephole in the scenery, and I could be just about three feet from her, and when the lights hit her face, suddenly twenty years would drop off. An incandescent thing would happen in her face; it was really supernatural.”
The Glass Menagerie moved to Broadway in 1945, and was a smash hit, Laurette Taylor becoming the toast of the town once again (she would die in 1946), and Williams becoming a star. In 1947, Williams wrote a letter to his friend (poet and publisher Jay Laughlin):
I have done a lot of work, finished two long plays. One of them, laid in New Orleans, A STREETCAR CALLED DESIRE, turned out quite well. It is a strong play, closer to Battle of Angels than any of my other work, but is not what critics call “pleasant.” In fact it is pretty unpleasant.
This “unpleasant” play would bring him into contact for the first time with one of his most important collaborators, Elia Kazan. It may seem like an odd combination: the lyrical openly gay Southern writer paired up with the virile manipulative ambitious Greek immigrant, but it turned out to be a perfect fit. Kazan’s genius with theatrical language, with turning “psychology into behavior” (his definition of good acting), his strong basis in production values and practical matters (there was a reason why his nickname was “Gadg” — short for “Gadget”, a fix-it man) helped ground Williams’ work in a living-and-breathing reality. If a “lyrical” director had taken Williams’ plays on, it could have been disastrous, but Kazan’s gritty sense of truth often saved Williams from himself. Williams recognized this, recognized what Kazan provided. It was an intense, combative (at times) and very fruitful working relationship, and Kazan would go on to direct some of Williams’ biggest successes. A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois and a young relatively unknown Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, opened on Broadway in 1947. Glass Menagerie had launched him, A Streetcar Named Desire solidified his position. It also made Marlon Brando a star. Brando described, years later, his experience of that time:
You can’t always be a failure. Not and survive. Van Gogh! There’s an example of what can happen when a person never receives any recognition. You stop relating: it puts you outside. But I guess success does that, too. You know, it took me a long time before I was aware that that’s what I was — a big success. I was so absorbed in myself, my own problems, I never looked around, took account. I used to walk in New York, miles and miles, walk in the streets late at night, and never see anything. I was never sure about acting, whether that was what I really wanted to do; I’m still not. Then, when I was in Streetcar, and it had been running a couple of months, one night — dimly, dimly — I began to hear this roar.
On opening night, Williams sent Brando a telegram:
RIDE OUT BOY AND SEND IT SOLID. FROM THE GREASY POLACK YOU WILL SOME DAY ARRIVE AT THE GLOOMY DANE FOR YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT MAKES THE THEATRE A WORLD OF GREAT POSSIBILITIES.
Streetcar won the Pulitzer Prize. Williams, now financially successful and famous, traveled, moved about (New Orleans, to Key West, to Provincetown, to Italy, and back), worked on the screenplay adaptations for
Menagerie and Streetcar, and kept writing plays. Over the next decade, Broadway saw the following Tennessee Williams productions: Summer and Smoke. (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) (which earned him a second Pulitzer Prize for drama), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), an extraordinary run no matter which way you slice it. Not all of these plays were successful (and Camino Real was a huge flop, although I believe that time will vindicate that play someday — it’s brilliant, and decades ahead of its time), and Williams had that problem that only very successful people have: How do you keep topping yourself? How do you continue to work when you sense that everyone and their mother just wants you to write Streetcar again? Williams attempted something different with Camino Real, and critics and audiences alike let him know in no uncertain terms that this is not what we want from you. It broke his heart, but he never gave up. His work ethic was extraordinary. The film versions of Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof upped his profile even more, making him one of the most important voices of the 1950s. The 1960s were rough on Williams. His audience disappeared. His new plays were not successful, although Streetcar, Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and all the others were now staples in repertory companies across the nation. And yet he kept on. Some of those “lesser” plays from later on, in the '60s and '70s, glow with a kind of eerie fire, and I still wait for some of them to be revived properly. It is a mind-boggling body of work when looked at it as a whole, and it continues to grow in stature, making the more commercial playwrights of the same era look trite.
And the later plays? The ones that were flop after flop after flop? At the time, they suffered by comparison to Williams’ earlier successes and most people gave up on him. He no longer found a home on Broadway and the experimental downtown scene that was burgeoning in New York was also not available to him. His plays were orphans, but now, with perspective and distance, they don't suffer at all in comparison to Menagerie or Streetcar. They stand on their own as excellent plays, difficult, challenging, moving, and recognizably Williams. Plays such as The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Kingdom of Earth, Small Craft Warnings are worthy of serious reconsideration. I wouldn't call these "major" plays, but saying that feels ungenerous to a great and enduring talent. If a playwright could write just ONE play as great as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams considered it his best), then that should be enough for one lifetime, but Williams was in it for the long haul, as heartbreaking as that was for him. He had guts.
He wrote in his published memoirs:
Work!! — the loveliest of all four-letter words, surpassing even the importance of love, most times.
In 1981, the influential Jean Cocteau Repertory Company (they are still around) in New York did a production of what would be Williams’ last full-length play, Something Cloudy Something Clear. Williams was present at rehearsals, showing up with rewrites, coming up onstage to “act out” how a moment should be played. Something Cloudy Something Clear is his most blatantly autobiographical play: An elderly playwright looks back on an important love affair he had in 1940 during a summer in Provincetown. The boundary between the past and the present is porous and people from the playwright’s earlier years stroll through the action, unbidden memories rising up from out of the unconscious. It’s a beautiful play. Of course, it was not a success. Williams was interviewed at the time, and he said:
I’m very conscious of my decline in popularity, but I don’t permit it to stop me because I have the example of so many playwrights before me. I know the dreadful notices Ibsen got. And O’Neill — he had to die to make Moon successful. And to me it has been providential to be an artist, a great act of providence that I was able to turn my borderline psychosis into creativity — my sister Rose did not manage this. So I keep writing. I am sometimes pleased with what I do — for me, that’s enough.
It’s enough for me, too. For all of us.
Tennessee Williams died in 1983.
Sheila O'Malley writes about actors and film for Capital New York and Fandor, as well as contributing occasional pieces to The House Next Door and Noir of the Week. Her personal blog is The Sheila Variations where she gets to be as obsessive as she wants about everything.
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Labels: Books, Brando, Kazan, Nonfiction, O'Neill, Tandy, Tennessee Williams, Theater
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