Underfoot In Show Business (7 page)

So of course I bet him one or the other would happen.

Bela Blau held the curtain till nine, but the star was still too drunk to walk straight or talk distinctly, and it was impossible to keep the audience waiting longer. At nine, Reta and I closed the box office and hurried into the theatre and hung over the back rail and watched in suspense as the curtain rose and the two minor characters who opened the play began their ten-minute scene, at the end of which the star was to make his entrance.

Five minutes after the play began, there was a reverberating clap of thunder followed by a torrent of rain on the pine roof and walls and the play came to an abrupt halt. The curtain fell, the houselights went up and the audience settled good-naturedly to wait out the storm.

At a little after ten, the rain stopped—by which time the star had been
dragged
out into the rain and forced to swallow a vat of black coffee, and when the curtain rose again he was thoroughly sober.

The play proceeded without a hitch and I’ve believed in Flanagan’s Law ever since.

IT BEGAN IN DECEMBER of 1942, the morning after the opening of a Guild flop called
The Russian People.
Despite the fact that we’d waited up till 4 A.M. for the notices, Joe and I were at work at 10 A.M. as usual, composing ads that would fool the public into thinking the show was a hit. Joe was the Theatre Guild press agent. I was his assistant.

We’d only had four hours’ sleep but we were both wide awake. You couldn’t possibly get drowsy in the Theatre Guild press department, not in December. Our top-floor offices got whatever heat was left over from the casting department on the floor below, the executive offices on the floor below that, and the theatre itself, which was on the ground floor.

The Russian People
was a ponderous bore about the Nazis and the Russian front. But Joe, like the good press agent he was, had persuaded himself by opening night that it was the greatest thing since
Hamlet
and he took the notices hard. So we weren’t talking much that morning. We just glumly pulled quotes for the ads.

Pulling quotes worked like this. If Brooks Atkinson, the
Times
drama critic, wrote: “For the fourth time this season, the Theatre Guild has wasted a superb production on a dull and empty play,” you pulled out the two good words and printed at the top of your ad:

This sort of thing takes practice, but by the time
The Russian People
opened, we’d had a lot of practice. Not to beat about the bush,
The Russian People
was the Guild’s sixteenth straight flop. It was only the eighth for me; I’d only worked there a year and a half.

I’d got the job when I came back from Deertrees. My agent phoned me one day and said Miss Helburn had read my new play and wanted to see me and the next afternoon I went to Terry’s office.

“Dear,” she said, “I don’t like this play much. But I wanted to find out how you’re getting on.”

I told her I was out of work and starving to death and Terry asked what jobs I’d had. When I mentioned Oscar Serlin’s press department and the press agent I’d worked for the season before she nodded.

“Joe Heidt, our press agent, needs an assistant,” she said. “He’s on the fourth floor. Run up and tell him I said you need the job and you’re very bright.”

So I took the elevator up to the fourth-floor attic and went down the hall past the auditor’s office to the press department. Lois, Joe’s secretary, was sitting in the outer office, surrounded by the usual press-department litter of newspapers, posters, glossy photos of stars and albums of press clippings. I asked if I might see Mr. Heidt and she told me to go on into the inner office.

Joe was sitting with his feet up on the desk reading a newspaper. He had a round Irish face which peered at me above the newspaper inquiringly.

“Miss Helburn sent me up,” I said. “She said you need an assistant.”

I stopped, being too shy to sell myself, and waited for him to ask where I’d worked before and whether I knew how to interview stars and write publicity stories for newspapers. I didn’t realize the weight of the simple “Miss Helburn sent me up.”

“Well, all right,” said Joe resignedly. “You want to put your typewriter over there?”

And he peered into the outer office and pointed to a spot near Lois’s desk. Lois and I got the former assistant’s typewriter from the floor of a closet and put it over there, and I was assistant to the Theatre Guild press agent.

Part of my job was to go to all Guild openings to help Joe with the Critics’ Seating List. And at my first Theatre Guild opening it was heaven to be standing between Joe and Johnny, the casting director, all of us leaning our elbows on the broad, plush-covered railing behind the last row of seats as the last glittering couples in evening gowns and dinner jackets followed an usher down the center aisle.

Our eyes swept the packed rows of first-night celebrities, a sea of carefully groomed heads that rolled away to the stage. Then the houselights dimmed and went out and in the black theatre the footlights gleamed like a golden ribbon along the edge of the dark stage and as the curtain slowly rose I think I stopped breathing.

This heady excitement returned with each of the next three openings. Then it wore off. You couldn’t possibly assist at the string of disasters the Guild produced that season and the next, and retain your starry-eyed enthusiasm for opening nights.

The first show I worked on was
Hope for a Harvest
, which flopped so badly that the stars, Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, took an ad in the newspapers the next day with a cartoon of a trapeze artist missing connections with his partner in mid-air and a caption reading, “Oops! Sorry!”

Subsequent accidents included
Papa Is All
, which was Pennsylvania Dutch;
Mr. Sycamore
, in which Stuart Erwin became a tree in the second act (that is not a misprint and you did not misread it); and
Yesterday’s Magic,
in which Paul Muni, as an alcoholic actor, threw himself out the window in the last scene. Add a couple of ill-fated revivals of classics, a limp comedy called
Without Love,
which not even Katharine Hepburn had been able to prop up for long, and finally, on this morning in December,
The Russian People
.

Looming up ahead, according to the brochure we’d sent to Guild subscribers in nineteen subscription cities, was a new American Folk Opera. Like
Porgy and Bess
, we assured everybody. It was to be based on an old Guild flop, and in true operatic tradition it was to have a murder committed onstage and a bona fide operatic ballet.

Considering our track record on even the most standard fare, this projected opera had given everybody the jimjams. But it was to be the Guild’s most expensive venture in years, and the rumor that reached us that morning put an end to our worries about the Folk Opera. The rumor was that after sixteen flops, the Guild was bankrupt. Word spread from floor to floor that Terry and Lawrence were planning to sell the Guild Theatre and the Guild building to pay their debts. When the sale was complete, the Theatre Guild would cease to exist.

People from the other departments wandered morosely up to our offices that day, to indulge in the usual morning-after castigation of the management. Our attic was ideal for this, since it was the one place in which Terry and Lawrence could be counted on not to set foot, especially in December. All day long, the wage slaves from casting, subscription, auditing, playreading came in to sing the usual litany freely and with feeling. This would not have happened (the litany began)

—if Terry didn’t sit over at the hairdresser’s letting some floozy pick her plays for her;

—if Lawrence didn’t lie on the casting conch plucking lofty, expensive ideas out of that goddamn mustache, with a vast unconcern for what the public would pay to see;

—if, when the lofty ideas flopped, the two of them didn’t embark on monster economy drives which consisted of cutting down the number of towels rented weekly for each office and threatening to take the water cooler out of the casting department because (said Lawrence) too many strangers were drinking our water;

—and if, year after year, they didn’t insist on selling season tickets in nineteen subscription cities for “six forthcoming Guild productions” when they had only four plays under option and disagreed violently about three of them.

And so on and so forth. It was an old refrain with lots and lots of verses. But on this December day the tone was particularly bitter. Not just because December was a very cold month in which to be thrown out of work, but because for all their talk nobody who worked there was eager to see the Theatre Guild close down. Most of them had been there for years. They remembered the great days of the Lunts, the Shaw openings and the five-hour O’Neill drama which the stage doorman was said to have referred to innocently throughout its run as “Strange Intercourse.”

Joe and I finished making up the ads, and then he went down to get Lawrence’s O.K. on them, and I went down to get Terry’s.

She was in her office in an armchair, having tea. Her fluffy white hair was rinsed a deep, cerulean blue that season; her blunt nose and blunt chin were as cheerfully pugnacious as ever.

“Well, dear!” she said when I came in. “We seem to be having a run of bad luck!”

I gave her the ads and she read them carefully, glancing at the reviews to check each quote, then running her eye over all the reviews and murmuring:

“I don’t know what the boys want!”

Then she said the ads were fine and handed them back to me, and I started for the door. As I reached it she said, patting her hair casually:

“I notice Lawrence was first on the program again. That’s twice in a row, isn’t it?”

If the program for one show read “Produced by Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn,” the program for the next show had to read “Produced by Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner.”

I said I was sure Mr. Langner hadn’t been first twice in a row because Joe was always careful to check the last program before we made up the new one.

“All right,” she said agreeably. “Just remind Joe: I’m first on the new one.”

My gloom evaporated.
The Russian People
hadn’t been the one-flop-too-many after all. We were going to do another one.

We read about it the next day in one of the gossip columns. Joe came in with the afternoon dailies and said resignedly:

“Terry scooped her own press department again.”

She was always scooping us. She never told us anything about a new production for fear we’d tell somebody. (In the theatre, everything is a secret.) Then she’d go and confide in some columnist. It appeared that between acts of
The Russian People
on opening night, she’d told a columnist—in strictest confidence—that the composer and librettist had finished the new Guild opera and that it was to be called
Away We Go.

Down the hall in his cage, Jack, the auditor, floating on a sea of unpaid bills, shouted at anybody who went past:

“What do they think they’re producing an opera with? What’re they using for money?”

and the question was indeed pertinent. During the next few weeks we heard they were holding backers’ auditions, and that they had the promise of a third of the money needed, from Broadway’s biggest single backer, though there were several ifs attached to his promise.

The New Year set in,
The Russian People
closed and the management plunged on with
Away We Go
. By the end of January, Joe and I had all the names connected with it.

It wasn’t your normal operatic cast. The male lead was to be sung by a young man who’d played the juvenile in
Yesterday’s Magic
and the singing comedienne was the ingénue from
Papa Is All.
Both were unknown, of course. The leading comic was very well known in the Yiddish Art Theatre but hadn’t done much in English.

The score had been composed by the leftover halves of two teams: an operetta lyricist whose composer partner had just died, and a musical-comedy composer whose lyricist partner had died. Add a Russian ballerina and an Armenian director from Hollywood, and our American Folk Opera was all set.

During February, people from other floors drifted into our office with progress reports. This was, they informed us, the damnedest musical anybody’d ever hatched for a sophisticated Broadway audience. It was so pure you could stage it at a church social. It opened with a middle-aged farm woman sitting alone on a bare stage churning butter, and from then on it got cleaner. They did not feel a long sequence of arty dancing was likely to improve matters on the farm.

The purity complained of was obvious on the day of the dress parade. As the girls walked across the stage in their period farm dresses, not an ankle or an upper arm was visible. I don’t even remember seeing a neck. As I left the theatre, I heard Lawrence suggest to the costumer that the dresses might be cut a little lower here and there without spoiling the authenticity.

The show was to open in New Haven early in March and Joe went up a few days before the opening to “beat the drum” for it. He was very worried. Not about the show. Joe admitted frankly that there was still some work to be done on it, but he believed that by the time it opened in New York it would be the greatest show since
Hamlet.
What worried him was that some drama editor, or some columnist’s assistant like Winchell’s Rose, would sneak up to New Haven and see the show before it was Ready. As of now, Joe did not feel it was Ready.

(It was always a producer’s worry that somebody in a newspaper’s drama department would sneak out of town to a pre-Broadway try-out and write a report that would kill the show before it ever opened. But no drama department editor scared them half as much as Winchell’s Rose. Walter Winchell’s column appeared in cities across the country, including all the Guild’s subscription cities, and was immensely influential. If Winchell’s Rose—she must have had a last name but I never heard her called anything but Winchell’s Rose—snuck out of town to see the try-out, the effect might be devastating.)

Away We Go
opened in New Haven to mild but approving notices. Pleasant, pretty musical, they said; which cheered us. But about mid-afternoon, a newspaper reporter phoned and left word for Joe to call him as soon as he got back from New Haven. He said he had an important item for Joe; he didn’t sound as if it were anything pleasant.