I Hated to Do It: Stories of a Life (9 page)

So Jose starts talking and he goes on and on and on and on and finally, after twenty-five minutes, he starts heading toward the floor, sliding down the microphone stand. He goes down, down, down, and passes out at the base of the mike. Jose tells me that the balance of the story was told to him since he was out.

The next speaker was Red Buttons, who took the stand and said, “Now that Jose has given us long day’s journey into night.” Riotous laughter ensued. Timing is everything in our business.

Adaptations of Kurt’s Work

I have always had a number of requests to adapt Kurt’s works for the stage and for film. As Kurt’s representative and now as the trustee of Kurt’s copyright trust, it is all so tricky. Most of the requests come from students or not-for-profit theatre groups that have little money. I want to see Kurt’s works adapted as much as possible, and I have always tried to grant these rights. There has to be a difference in granting rights to do a stage adaptation and to do an adaptation for a film or TV production.

It was my common practice, with Kurt’s approval, to make his books available for adapting for the stage on most reasonable terms.

Our Old Stone House Built in 1650

Carole Shelley starred in
Wicked
and a lot of other Broadway plays, but we first met her when she came over from England and played in Neil Simon’s
The Odd Couple
as one of the Pigeon sisters. We became quite friendly with her and with the other Pigeon sister, Monica Evans. Monica went back to England and, we have been told, got married and had children and pursued a normal life. Carole continued her acting career here in the States.

A few years later, we attended an opening night of the play
The Astrakhan Coat
which starred Carole and Brian Bedford. It was less than a success, and opening night at Sardi’s there was not a huge crowd cheering the stars of the show. My wife, Annie, came down the staircase at Sardi’s, and Brian, who had been drinking, grabbed her, kissed her, and said, “Darling, I have missed you, how are you? What have you been doing?” We had never met Brian and he was obviously being friendly with the help of a few drinks.

So nine years go by without us ever seeing Brian Bedford, and we make our annual trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. We attend a play at the Avon Theatre and go backstage to see John Mountain, whose father, Bob Mountain, was a past mayor of Stratford and a good friend of ours. Since Bob and Lois Mountain were away, we met John and decided to have a drink with him at the bar above the Avon Theatre.

As we chatted with John, since he was Brian Bedford’s dresser, we told him how Brian had kissed Annie by mistake nine years earlier. He said he had to tell Brian and ran over to Brian, who was leaning against the bar. Brian waved us to come over, and we were talking about two minutes when Brian said, “Hey, why don’t you buy my house?” I said, “Brian, I don’t know whether I will like your house,” and he replied, “You will like my house.”

This encounter in Stratford happened in July, nine years after he kissed Annie by mistake. We returned to our apartment in New York City, and in August phoned Brian to tell him we would like to see this house, since we would be traveling upstate to look at an apartment our daughter Pat would be living in when she attended Bard College. Brian told us to come early because it had been sold and the buyer was coming in the afternoon.

We came to see the house. It was a totally isolated old stone house built in 1650 with four bedrooms and five acres with nineteen apple trees in the front yard. The yard was a mess but the house was furnished with elegant French provincial furniture and we loved it, even though it lacked a swimming pool. But we were told it was sold.

Being the lucky people that we are, we did something we have not done since or before that year: we went back that year to Stratford for a second time. This second trip, occasioned by a client’s involvement in a play at Stratford, we went backstage, this time to see Brian. He opened the dressing room door, looked at us, and said: “You didn’t like my house.” I said that we loved the house but we were told it was sold. Brian said the deal fell through and we should make him an offer.

Since we met Brian nine years after he kissed Ann by mistake, and since we went to Stratford twice that year, and since Aunt Naomi, Ann’s aunt, had died and left us some money, we bought this wonderful old stone house.

After we bought the house we were so proud of it that we went a bit crazy. We had guests almost every weekend, many of whom were theatre folk, clients and such. Estelle Parsons, Casey Childs, Ted Snowdon, and a host of other entertainers. Estelle bought a house up here after visiting us.

One of our frequent visitors was Larry Luckinbill, who had performed in the original
The Boys in the Band
and in
The Shadowbox
and a number of other Off-Broadway and Broadway hits. I handled his divorce from his first wife, Robin Strasser, and he started coming up with Lucie Arnaz. We had some fun times together.

Lucie was marvelous. You can only imagine the luxury that she had growing up, but in our house, at the end of the dinner meal, she was the first one in the kitchen at the sink, washing the pots and pans. She was an ideal visitor.

And then one day I’m upstate minding my own business when Larry Luckinbill rings me to tell me that he and Lucie want to get married next weekend in Paris, will I arrange it. I said, “Larry, you have to be kidding. I’m a lawyer, not a magician.” He said, “OK, then your house is next.” So plans were made for Lucie and Larry to get married at our house.

I scurried around to help with the license and found a judge in the neighborhood who would marry them. Mom and Dad, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, arranged to be there and made provision for a bus to bring their many friends, some from Hollywood and some from other places in the US. The bus brought Tommy Tune, Desi Jr., Larry’s agent, Lucie’s agent, Desi’s then-present wife, Lucy’s then-present husband, and some Hollywood types, some of whom I had heard of, some I had never heard of.

It all went off splendidly. The ceremony was right in our front yard of the old stone house, and then they spread plastic sheets on the ground and sat on them eating a prepared lunch. We furnished a lot of wine, and it was not all consumed because after everyone had their fill and parted, there was still a lot of champagne left. We were not anxious to waste champagne, so guess what, we drank a lot that night before going to bed. It was all so exciting.

The next weekend our daughter Patty got married. It rained so hard that the wooden dance floor inside the huge tent actually floated.

We have had lots of parties and lots of celebrities at our house, but Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz provided a lot of fodder for the newspapers and magazines when they came with their entourage to the little, and I mean little, town of Mount Marion between Kingston and Saugerties in New York State. Parking was a problem, but we managed.

Kurt the Volunteer Fireman

Kurt was big on volunteer fire departments, and as we know,
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
featured a volunteer fire department in the story. Sometime in the eighties Kurt was invited to a small suburb north of Albany, New York, to get an award as an honorary volunteer fire chief. We drove up there with Kurt, and it was all so much fun, especially our carrying on with our plastic fire department hats. The firefighters all showed due respect for Kurt.

We had for some time been planning to take Kurt to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada, and had arranged for him to be a guest speaker when he was there. It seemed the smart thing to go to Canada from there, and we combined the trips into one. The only problem was that the plane we could get to Toronto from the airport nearest to this small suburb was a tiny, tiny plane that carried eight passengers. What we didn’t know was not only was the plane tiny, but the leg space was totally inadequate for someone as tall as six feet, three inches, which Kurt was. He would not complain and was squished into the plane. The trip to Stratford turned out to be a huge success, and in Canada Kurt enjoyed the same welcome he would receive in all other parts of the world.

The Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada

The Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, is theatre that is as good as it gets. For years, stars like Maggie Smith and Christopher Plummer worked there for an entire summer getting paid a small pittance compared to what they would earn working for a short time on a movie. The festival was the brainchild of Tom Patterson, who was a veteran of World War II and a journalist writing for
Maclean’s
magazine in 1953. From the time that he was a teenager, he had thought that his hometown of Stratford, Ontario, should be home to performances of Shakespeare’s plays.

Patterson, with no experience in the theatre, came up with the idea of a theatre festival and enticed the well-known Shakespearean director Tyrone Guthrie to get it going. Alec Guinness was persuaded to perform the first year. The Festival Theatre, what is now the important main stage, began in 1953 as a tent standing over a wooden thrust stage, which was surrounded on three sides by the audience. Such a stage had not been seen by theatregoers for centuries. Designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch to specifications proposed by Guthrie, this stage has subsequently influenced the design of over a dozen other theatre buildings throughout the world.

With the overwhelming success of the festival’s first season, plans were made for a permanent structure. Designed by architect Robert Fairfield, the award-winning building opened in 1957.

I have a load of reasons for liking Canada. It all started for me when, after my first book was published in 1968, I was invited to teach a weekend class at York University in Toronto to the top theatre people of Canada. My students were not only the persons who ran the Shakespeare Festival, but also the persons who ran the National Ballet of Canada and the Canadian orchestra. It was fun, and the York people liked it so much they invited me back to teach a course spread out over thirteen consecutive weeks, which meant I would have to fly to Toronto and back thirteen times.

I was scared of flying. I was petrified. Think about it: Amelia Earhart had flown off into the wild blue yonder and never was heard of again. Wiley Post, the first pilot to fly solo around the world, and Will Rogers crashed in Alaska and were killed. During the forties there were hundreds of people killed in crashes. We had an emergency landing on my first flight.

Before this generous offer to fly to Toronto and back to New York City thirteen times, we were flying back from Nebraska to New York, and after we were in the air for about twenty minutes, the captain came on the intercom to tell us that we would be making an emergency landing in Chicago. He tried to tell us not to worry, that it was simply the hydraulics that were not functioning, and though the hydraulics lowered the landing gear with the landing wheels, they could crank them down manually. Me, I got to thinking, “Yeah, the landing gear, but on a car it’s the hydraulics that assist the steering, the brakes, and probably a bunch of other things. What else do the hydraulics do on this plane?”

We landed in Chicago, frightened. The ambulance and fire truck driving beside us as we landed did not help a lot. Of course, we all clapped when we discovered that the landing gear was down, and it turned out to be a safe landing.

But my wife, my daughter, and I were scared. I was scared because only movie stars who had to fly and some rich, daring folks who had to get somewhere or visit a sick or dying relative would fly. Actually, flying had become much safer, but I took the job because I knew I would have to learn to fly or forget about flying. I learned.

After teaching the one-and-a-half-hour session thirteen times, I was not anxious to be gone for thirteen weeks when they asked me to return and teach it again, so I flew to Toronto every other week and taught a two-hour course each time. Then, being gone too often, I flew to Toronto once a month for four months and, believe it or not, taught a course for four consecutive hours.

I told you that I grew up in Nebraska, and believe me, I knew how to drive in deep snow. Toronto was snowed in almost every time I landed there. During the thirteen-week run, I never got stuck in the snow, but, the fifth week there, I came down from my guest suite and was in my rented car, and the wheels started spinning. Without saying a word, five young male students simply picked my car up, put it on the road, waved, and went off. Is it any wonder that I am big on Canada?

In my class for the weekend with the top theatre people were Bill Wylie, the general manager of Stratford, and Bruce Swerdfager, the comptroller of Stratford. Shortly after the course, Bill called to ask me if I would represent the festival. Of course I said yes and since then have continued to do work for them, mostly acquiring rights to perform plays there that are other than Shakespeare’s and are under copyright.

You have to understand, and I do, that Stratford in Ontario, Canada, is a pretty provincial place. So it was no great surprise, when Bill Wylie announced to the Stratford board of directors that they were engaging a New York lawyer, that there were a lot of reservations. When asked bluntly why the festival needed a New York lawyer, Bill answered candidly, “We need Don Farber because he knows a lot of things about theatre that we don’t know.” The question was never raised again, although I will never know if some of those board members may have harbored reservations, although we always drank together at the parties at their houses after the performances when we were attending all the openings.

Geraldo Rivera

As my practice in theatre was developing, we got involved with and saw a lot of Geraldo Rivera. Geraldo gained fame and notoriety when he kept breaking into Willowbrook State School with his ABC television crew and filming the abysmal conditions of the inmates who were treated like prisoners. By 1965, Willowbrook housed over six thousand mentally disabled children, despite having a maximum capacity of four thousand. Senator Robert Kennedy toured the institution in 1965 and proclaimed that individuals in the overcrowded facility were “living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo.” The school’s reputation was that of a warehouse for New York City’s mentally disabled children, many of whom were presumably abandoned there by their families, foster care agencies, or other systems designed to care for them.