Thornton Wilder (61 page)

The play opened January 22 in Princeton's McCarter Theatre—the theater where Wilder had seen so many tryouts during his years in New Jersey. He wrote the details to Dana, calling the performance “an undoubted success,” and noting that there was standing room only in the theater, with a box office “take” of nineteen hundred dollars. He observed much laughter, some “astonishment,” and “lots of tears” and applause from his audience.
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One critic, writing in
Variety,
was not so kind, however, finding the performance “not only disappointing but hopelessly slow. . . . It will probably go down as the season's most extravagant waste of fine talent.” The play “should never have left the campus,” the reviewer charged, “for once the novelty has been worn thin, the play lacks the sturdy qualities necessary to carry it on its own.”
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But Wilder's worries about the Princeton performance and his director's decisions were abruptly overshadowed by a tragedy that would haunt the play, the cast, and its director. Jed Harris, the classic brooding bad boy, magnetically attracted women. By 1937, at the age of thirty-seven, he was long divorced from his first wife, Anita Greenbaum (the person who, years earlier, had suggested that he change his given name, Jacob Horowitz, to something else), and he had begun a relationship with the actress Louise Platt, who would later become his second wife and the mother of his daughter. His long relationship with Ruth Gordon, the mother of his son, had been transmuted from a turbulent romance to a civil friendship and professional relationship. His current romantic interest, in addition to Louise Platt, was Rosamond Pinchot, whom he had met at a Hollywood party in 1935. The glamorous society matron, mother, and movie star, separated from her husband, was very much in evidence at rehearsals for
Our Town.
Harris set her to work backstage with the few props and sound effects the production required, and she may have designed Emily's wedding dress. Jed and Rosamond apparently boosted their energy during the final grueling days of rehearsal by taking Benzedrine.
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According to Harris's principal biographer and to interviews Isabel Wilder gave decades later, Harris often treated Pinchot rudely in the presence of his cast and crew. Also according to Isabel, she and Thornton overheard Jed's side of a telephone quarrel with Rosamond on January 22, after the Princeton performance.
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By Monday, January 24, Wilder, Isabel, Jed, and the cast of
Our Town
were in Boston for the play's tryout there—and Rosamond Pinchot was dead. Sometime before dawn on January 24 she parked her car in the garage of her rented Long Island estate and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Her suicide “fell like a bomb into the middle of everything,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott. “She had loved the play and was at rehearsals.”
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Her death was sensationalized front-page news in Boston and elsewhere. The January 25 edition of the
Boston Post
bore the headline “
LINK SUICIDE TO NEW SHOW HERE
. Rosamond Pinchot Said to Have Been Brooding Over Failure to Win Part in ‘Our Town.' ”

A distraught Jed Harris was the first to publicly deny the alleged cause of Rosamond's suicide. The
New York Daily News
quoted him as saying, “Any report that Miss Pinchot wanted to get into
Our Town
is fantastic. She attended a rehearsal in New York, along with about fifty other persons. But she hadn't asked for a part, and there wasn't a part—not even a small one—for which she could be considered.” But not only did he understate her involvement behind the scenes of the play; his general manager, Sidney Hirsch, reportedly denied that there was any romance between Harris and Rosamond Pinchot, calling her instead “one of Mr. Harris's many friends.”
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Although there is no evidence that Pinchot wanted or sought a role in Wilder's play—and ample evidence of the complicated challenges she faced in her personal life—the link to
Our Town
stuck, giving the play a sad notoriety just as it opened in Boston, a link poignantly heightened by reports that one of Pinchot's suicide notes quoted Emily's farewell speech in
Our Town.
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Despite the pall, however, the show went on. Some members of the cast and crew thought Harris drove the cast too hard in those days after Rosamond's death, and that he even exploited her death to heighten the emotional response of his actors. To the contrary, Wilder wrote, “Jed has been kind and controlled to all the actors, except in overtiring them with interminable rehearsals, delays and all night work.” Wilder escaped when he could and lost himself in work on
The Merchant of Yonkers,
breaking to take long walks to clear his head. But he kept fighting with Jed over the script for
Our Town
, telling Woollcott that he'd rather “have it die on the road than come into New York as an aimless series of little jokes, with a painful last act.”
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Woollcott sent Wilder a letter of support January 26: “I have an abiding faith in this play of yours and others that you are going to write.”
³⁴
In a letter to Woollcott, Wilder poured out his anguish over what was happening to his play in Jed's hands. “Success is accorded to a work of art when the central intention is felt in every part of it, and intention and execution are good,” he wrote. “Jed lost courage about my central intention and moved the production over to a different set of emphases. The result is that the vestiges of my central attention that remain stick out as timid and awkward excrescences.”
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Woollcott answered immediately, urging Wilder to stick to his guns, and to “trust that hard core you have—rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun—upon which the Jed Harrises and the Frank Cravens and the
haute noblesse
of Boston will break like spray.”
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Woollcott had used the popular podium of his weekly radio broadcast to give
A Doll's House
“the effect of adrenalin [
sic
],” and he would do the same for
Our Town.
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In the audience at the Boston opening of the play sat forty-one citizens from the small New Hampshire towns surrounding Mount Monadnock and Peterborough, the home of the MacDowell Colony—the village equivalents of Wilder's mythical Grover's Corners. After the performance their spokesman, A. Erland Goyette, presented a cherry-wood gavel to Wilder, along with “an eternal membership” in the Mount Monadnock Region Association of New Hampshire. The
Boston Evening Transcript
reported that the inscribed gavel was “made of native wood grown at the MacDowell Colony,” noting that Wilder had spent six summers at MacDowell and that “that association with life in a small New Hampshire town” was “responsible for”
Our Town.
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Wilder was moved by the pleasure these people had taken in seeing a play that was “about something they knew.”
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To his lawyer Wilder wrote, “Boston reviews cautious but not unfavorable. . . . Business in Boston very bad; but even so better than [Orson Welles's production of] Julius Caesar which had rave reviews.”
⁴⁰
But there were encouraging signs amid the turbulence in Boston: Edmund Wilson, who just happened to be in Boston, saw the play and called the last act “the most terrific thing” he had ever seen in the theater, and playwright Marc Connelly, summoned to Boston on Thursday by a worried Harris, found the play “magnificent.”
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“So with all those plus and minus marks,” Wilder reported to Dwight Dana, “Jed cancelled the second week in Boston (losing, he says, $2500 on the two weeks) and opens at the Henry Miller's Theater in New York on Thursday.”
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Although
Our Town,
with its dearth of scenery, might look cheap, it was actually very expensive to produce, Wilder noted: “45 actors; and not two but five electric switchboards.”
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Marc Connelly, Jed Harris's longtime friend and sometime champion, and an occasional investor in his productions, hurried to Boston to see the Thursday-night performance at Harris's urging. Eavesdropping on the audience in the lobby between acts, Connelly heard people say they liked the veteran actor Frank Craven, who had come out of retirement to play the Stage Manager. They found Martha Scott, making her debut, “lovely and talented.” But the consensus seemed to be displeasure that the play jumped about in time, and had very little plot and scenery, so there was “nothing to see except the theater's steam pipes on the back wall of the stage.” Nevertheless Connelly “found the play utterly delightful.”
⁴⁴
When Wilder's play moved to the Henry Miller's Theatre in New York on February 4, Connelly wrote, “The day after
Our Town
opened, without a word changed, the accolades from all the critics made it suddenly desirable to every theater owner in New York with a faltering tenant.”
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WILDER TOOK
time out just before the Broadway opening to see the first television production of one of his plays. On October 19, 1937, the British producer, director, and librettist Eric Crozier's television film of
The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
was broadcast in England. Wilder first saw the telecast in New York on February 1, 1938, and found problems with the acting and the production. He wrote to his mother, “I don't think television will ever make good theatre.”
⁴⁶

He was in New Haven when he got the good news about
Our Town
's Broadway debut. “Funny thing's happened,” he wrote to Dwight Dana:

 

Ruth phoned down it's already broken a house record.

In spite of the mixed reviews when the box office opened Saturday morning there were 26 people in line; the line continued all day, and the police had to close it for ten minutes so the audience could get into the matinée; and that $6,500 was taken in on that day—the two performances and the advance sale.

Imagine that!

Friday night both Sam Goldwyn and Bea Lillie were seen to be weeping. Honest!

It was very expensive being a dramatist.

Three opening-nights—telegrams to some of the actors, bouquets to leading ladies; a humidor to Frank Craven; gift of seats to a few friends; hotel expenses at Princeton & Boston (the contract says Jed should have paid.) . . . Isn't it astonishing, and fun, and exhausting!
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The morning after opening night Wilder and Isabel had taken the train back to Connecticut. They had promised each other that if the reviews were great they would splurge and take a taxi from the New Haven station to their house in Hamden. If not, they would take the trolley. The reviews were mixed, however, and accustomed as they were from childhood to being very frugal, they rode the trolley home.
⁴⁸

 

FROM THE
outset
Our Town
enchanted some theatergoers and bored or baffled others. Eleanor Roosevelt, then the outspoken, influential first lady of the United States, found the play “interesting” and “original,” but she was “moved and depressed beyond words,” she wrote in her popular, nationally syndicated newspaper column, My Day. While she was glad she saw it, she “did not have a pleasant evening.”
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The
New York Times
critic Brooks Atkinson, a champion of Wilder's play, gently took Mrs. Roosevelt to task for her “Standards in Drama Criticism,” writing, “I fear that Mrs. Roosevelt has done less than justice to a distinguished work of art.”
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By mid-February, despite the excitement of two hits on Broadway, Wilder was “broken by a Cold, and by a long tug-of-war with Jed Harris, and crammed with subjects for new plays,” he wrote his old friend Harry Luce, who had sent congratulations for the success of
Our Town.
Luce had especially liked the hymns sung in the choir rehearsal in Wilder's play—hymns that reminded both men of their boyhood days at Chefoo School. “I'm about to go to Arizona for two months,” Wilder continued. “Long walks among the tumbleweeds & rattlesnake nests, liquor, and more work.”
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But before he departed for the desert, he deposited the first batch of Gertrude Stein's papers in the library at Yale University—notebooks and manuscripts he had hand-carried from France, in part to honor her literary legacy and in part because he was concerned about the safety of the papers if Stein remained in Europe during the war. He wrote to Stein and Toklas in late February to tell them the deed was done, adding, “Oh, oh,—I wish I could a long Tale unfold: Jed Harris. You diagnosed him to a T.”
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Together, through their contentious collaboration, Thornton Wilder and Jed Harris, the idealistic Broadway neophyte and the hardened Broadway veteran, brought
Our Town
to vivid life on Broadway, first at the Henry Miller's Theatre, and then at the Morosco, where it would run more than ten months, closing November 19, 1938, after 336 performances. The Wilder-Harris friendship did not survive the play, however, and while their estrangement was par for the course for Harris, this was the most turbulent, conflicted professional relationship of Wilder's life. The weeks after the play opened in New York found Wilder bitter and disillusioned—and bound for Arizona, where he planned to hide away; recover the balance of work, rest, and exercise that had served him so well in Zurich; and make headway on his new plays. He was writing Stein and Toklas “the flurried letters of a crazy man,” he apologized, “but when I get to Arizona, I'll be myself again. The whole blame of my state rests at Jed Harris's door.”
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