Thornton Wilder (63 page)

In addition to the ever-growing public interest in
Our Town,
Wilder now found himself and his earlier works much in demand. Many of his one-act plays were being widely done, and there was interest in England for a production of
Lucrece
starring Laurence Olivier, whom Wilder called “the best new actor of all.”
⁷⁷
Amateur and stock theaters all over the map were eager to produce
Our Town
—from Burlington, Vermont, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the Honolulu Community Theatre in Hawaii. But for the time being, writing
The Merchant of Yonkers
absorbed all Wilder's creative energy, especially when the words spun across the page “like silk off a spool.”
⁷⁸

Since the star-struck days of his boyhood, when Thornton began poring over reviews and reports of German and Austrian theatrical productions, it had been “the height” of his ambition to write a play Max Reinhardt would be interested in directing. After the encouragement Reinhardt had given him, Wilder believed
The Merchant of Yonkers
would be that play. Reinhardt was now a distinguished member of the fast-growing community of European artists, directors, writers, and other intellectuals who sought refuge—and work—in Hollywood and New York. When Hitler ascended to power, the Nazis had begun to take over Reinhardt's theaters in Germany. He fled to the United States in 1934, forced by circumstances to start his life over at age sixty-one. By 1938 the Nazis had also taken over Reinhardt's beloved home near Salzburg—Schloss Leopoldskron, the Baroque palace he had spent years and a fortune restoring. He and his wife were now permanently exiled from Hitler's Germany and Austria.

Before Wilder left the East Coast to work with Reinhardt, he went to Philadelphia to see Ruth Gordon in the closing performance of
A Doll's House
, and escorted “dead-tired but adorable Ruthie home.”
⁷⁹
Since Rosamond Pinchot's death, Jed Harris had turned to Ruth again for friendship. Wilder admired her performance in his adaptation of Ibsen's play, and his enduring affection for Ruth inevitably intensified his growing animosity toward Harris. Wilder lent her his practical support whenever he could, checking on young Jones Harris when Ruth asked him to. “Jones has no fever,” he wrote to her while she was visiting Woollcott in Vermont. “A little coughing in the a. m. but wears off later in the day. Sends his love and divers kissing noises to you and Mr. Wo'cot. . . . Boy's lungs in good condition, seems like.”
⁸⁰

On June 11 Wilder accompanied Gordon to Hoboken, New Jersey, to see her off on a voyage to Europe. Harris was not on hand to say good-bye because Gordon's ten o'clock departure was too early in the morning for him. “As for me I loathe him,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott from aboard the Santa Fe Chief, en route to Hollywood. “And if the train weren't rocking so I'd tell you some more stories about him, each more tiresome than the other.”
⁸¹

Wilder headed to Hollywood in June fully expecting to get right to work with Reinhardt on his proposed lavish productions of
Faust
and
The Blue Bird,
as well as the more modest production of
The Merchant of Yonkers,
all three planned for the California Festival. Reinhardt was famous worldwide for his colossal theatrical productions, magnificently staged and splendidly costumed. As a young director in 1905 he had orchestrated
A Midsummer Night's Dream
on a revolving stage decorated with a magical forest. In 1934, by then a theatrical legend, he made a two-million-dollar movie of the play. His stage productions of
The Miracle
, a religious epic, were international sensations—two thousand cast members in London, accompanied by a two-hundred-piece orchestra. The show ran for 298 performances on Broadway in 1924, and then, with a smaller cast, toured the United States for five years. On Broadway and during part of the tour, the Nun, one of the lead roles, had been played by the beautiful young Rosamond Pinchot, the socialite with no acting experience, whom Reinhardt had “discovered” aboard ship during a voyage to the United States in 1923. In 1938 Reinhardt was fresh from his 1937 Broadway success with
The Eternal Road,
depicting the history of the Jews, with a cast of 350 actors, a wardrobe of seventeen hundred costumes, and the Manhattan Opera House on West Thirty-fourth Street renovated to accommodate a set that was an acre in expanse and four stories tall. The mammoth theater, which seated about 3,100 people, had been built by Oscar Hammerstein I in 1906, and by 1927 was being leased by Warner Bros. as a sound stage.

Reinhardt had staged Goethe's
Faust
many times at the Salzburg Festival he cofounded, and he was determined to do it again at the California Festival in 1938, but even for an international impresario, funding was almost impossible to find in that difficult Depression year.
⁸²
Reinhardt was so overwhelmed with efforts to raise money and mount his festival that he had very little time that summer for Wilder and his play. But for the maestro, Wilder would wait.

Isabel joined Wilder in Hollywood, where they shared an apartment in the Villa Carlotta, a charming residential hotel on Franklin Avenue, built in 1927 and, at one time or another during the 1930s, housing such Hollywood folk as George Cukor, David O. Selznick, Edward G. Robinson, Louella Parsons, and Marion Davies. While Wilder waited for Reinhardt to summon him, he revised the first two acts of
The Merchant of Yonkers
, making some minor cuts, some changes in characterization, and a name change for one of the leads: Mr. Geyermacher became Mr. Vanderguildern and then Mr. Vandergelder—to evoke the “background of the Hudson River Dutch.”
⁸³
Wilder read the finished script of his play to Reinhardt and his second wife, the actress, Helene Thimig, whose “wonderful face and exquisite voice” Wilder admired.
⁸⁴

They loved the play, and he was growing very fond of them. “They've lost everything, live frugally,” he wrote of the Reinhardts. “Obstacles arrive every day. The Chamber of Commerce has just vetoed the Blue Bird in Hollywood Bowl, and may cancel the Faust. Only my play will be left. . . . Think of what their daily mail must bring them as news of Vienna every day. Think of what they once knew, the palace on the Tiergarten in Berlin. But they never wince or sigh or allude to all that. I simply love them.”
⁸⁵

Reinhardt made some helpful suggestions, which Wilder incorporated into the script of
The Merchant of Yonkers,
and he praised Dolly Levi's new monologue in act 4. Was it too earnest? Wilder asked nervously. Reinhardt assured Wilder that he was a poet, and that “in a comedy—near the end—there should always be one moment of complete seriousness and by that the audience can see that also the comedy parts are not just pastime.”
⁸⁶

 

AS WILDER
waited for Reinhardt in Hollywood, he contemplated the ruins of the summer. He could have been in New Hampshire, Maine, or Europe. But he understood Reinhardt's delays and his frustrations about money. In the end able to raise only a hundred thousand dollars, Reinhardt realized he could mount just one production for the California Festival, and chose to invest all his resources in
Faust,
which would open on August 23 in the outdoor Pilgrimage Theatre in Hollywood.
⁸⁷
Because carpenters worked in the theater all day building the elaborate set—an entire village—Reinhardt held rehearsals at night. Wilder attended every rehearsal, marveling at the great director's stamina, drive, and attention to detail. During the days Wilder polished
The Merchant of Yonkers
and worked on a new play that had been fermenting in his imagination for some time—an ambitious drama based on the story of Alcestis. His imagination was crowded that August with seemingly disparate images. His own exuberant, often irreverent Dolly Levi and now the regal, tragic Alcestis mingled with Reinhardt's visions of Goethe's
Faust, Part One
—all these figures weaving into and out of Wilder's restless mind in the illusory light and shadows of Hollywood.

His
Merchant
had “improved immensely” under Reinhardt's “discrete suggestions,” to the point, Wilder believed, that “a stone would love it.
⁸⁸
But the theater world was one of “postponements, uncertainties and deferred hopes,” he was learning, and more and more, it appeared that
The Merchant of Yonkers
would open not, as he had hoped, in Los Angeles in the summer, but in New York as late as December.
⁸⁹

 

BY SUMMER'S
end Wilder was caught up in a new adventure. “You shall be the first to know,” he wrote to Woollcott. “I'm going on the stage.” With very short notice Jed Harris asked him to replace Frank Craven as the Stage Manager in
Our Town
for two weeks so Craven could rest. “That is to say: I'm memorizing the lines. I'm insisting on two days' rehearsal with the Stage-manager before Jed sees me. (You can imagine how even the most shy and considerate suggestion from Jed would dry up my hypothetical art).” Wilder also confided in Woollcott that he had a “far better and more experienced and congenial coach” lined up to “encourage and guide” him. He was Dr. Otto Ludwig Preminger, who grew up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, joined Max Reinhardt's acting company when he was seventeen, became a successful director, and arrived in Hollywood in 1935 to direct films for Twentieth Century-Fox. In 1937 Preminger had a disagreement with producer Darryl Zanuck over the script of
Kidnapped,
which Zanuck had written and assigned Preminger to direct. The conflict cost Preminger his job, and he was turning back to theater when he and Wilder met. Wilder hoped that with Preminger's help, he could “transfer the best of the lecturing experience” to acting—if he could only memorize the words he himself had written. “The memory hazards are
immense
,” he wrote to Woollcott. He was afraid that he would make his play “spineless and boring,” but he depended on Preminger—“honest as the day”—to tell him if he did.
⁹⁰

“All that memorization!” Wilder wrote to his mother. “On the train, in hotel rooms, etc. Jed only rehearsed me the last afternoon. The other days I worked with the Stage Manager. The day before the opening I was in despair. I thought I'd disgrace everybody, but ‘opening night' was all right. And it's getting better every time.”
⁹¹
Still he found that memorizing lines—even lines he had written himself—was “like walking a tight-rope of danger.”
⁹²

What a year it had been. After his long apprenticeship in the theater, he had in the space of a single year achieved two successes on Broadway, and another Pulitzer Prize.
Our Town
had been runner-up to John Steinbeck's
Of Mice and Men
for the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best American play of the 1937–38 season.
⁹³
The Merchant of Yonkers
awaited its Broadway opening. He had stepped onstage into the role he had written for others to play, and survived without too much embarrassment. He wrote to Woollcott, “Anyway: what's life if it isn't risk, venture, taxes on the will-power, diversity, and fun?”
⁹⁴

27

“PERSEVERANCE”

Working perseverance: These two years of taking up subjects and dropping them, of desultory reading as an evasion from writing, of mixed activities have undermined what little collection-to-work I used to have.

—THORNTON WILDER,

journal entry 36, November 1, 1940

 

The United States and Europe (1938–1940)

B
rought up to be a citizen of the world, Wilder was increasingly disturbed in 1938 by what he called the “new Ugliness abroad among the Children of Men who hate one another.”
¹
Sadly Wilder read in the newspapers about “Freud, 82, standing by calming his family while the [Nazi] Troopers ransacked his house.”
²
What would become of the Freuds? What would happen to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas if they stayed in France in wartime, and how would Sibyl Colefax fare in England? There were countless other friends and acquaintances who lived in Europe—and others, such as Max and Helene Thimig Reinhardt, who had already taken refuge in the United States. President Roosevelt was struggling with Congress for authority to strengthen U.S. Army and Navy forces. Germany had taken over Wilder's beloved Austria. Maps were being fractured and reconfigured: Part of Czechoslovakia was ceded to Germany; Mussolini annexed Libya as part of Italy; Hungary wrested Slovakia from Czechoslovakia; and so it went.

Amid all the commotion in 1938, Wilder's personal and professional worlds seemed, at least temporarily, to be stable, harmonious, and full of promise. He had successfully translated and slightly adapted
A Doll's House
into a fresh English version of the play, which was promoted as a new acting edition.
³
Heartened by the Broadway success of
Our Town,
he was still waiting confidently for Max Reinhardt to turn his attention to a production of
The Merchant of Yonkers,
the new play Wilder described as “a broad farce with social implications,” in a letter to Albert Einstein, who had written expressing his admiration for
Our Town.
⁴

The Merchant of Yonkers
is an amalgam of stories and scenes from Johann Nestroy (who borrowed from English playwright John Oxenford's 1835 comedy,
A Day Well Spent
) and a passage from act 2, scene 5 of Molière's satirical
L'Avare (The Miser,
1688), mingled with Wilder's long fascination with farce and a sampling of ideas about the psychology of money that Wilder and Gertrude Stein had discussed. These disparate elements coalesced in Wilder's imagination, and led to his invention of Dolly Levi, one of the strongest, savviest, most exuberant of the long line of remarkable women he created in drama or fiction.

When Wilder sat down for an interview with John Hobart of the
San Francisco Chronicle
in September 1938
,
he said, “Everything I have written has been a preparation for writing for the stage—my novels, my two volumes of one-act plays, my adaptations of Obey's
Lucrèce
and Ibsen's
A Doll's House.
I like to think of all that as an apprenticeship. For the drama, it seems to me, is the most satisfying of all art-forms.”
⁵
His apprenticeship in writing drama actually gave way in 1938 and 1939 to a tough apprenticeship in getting his plays produced. At age forty-one he had achieved the remarkable feat of having two successful plays running simultaneously on Broadway—one translation/adaptation and one highly original drama, both directed by Jed Harris. In the contentious process of mounting
Our Town
, the Wilder-Harris friendship dissolved, with recriminations on both sides, but out of their bitter conflict the two achieved a stellar success and launched an American classic. Wilder had gladly entrusted his four-act farce to Max Reinhardt, the iconic director he had idolized since he was a teenager. He was convinced that Reinhardt would do his play masterfully. But if Wilder now regarded Harris with too much skepticism, he regarded Reinhardt with too much awe.

 

IN MID-SEPTEMBER
in Hamden, still waiting for Reinhardt, Wilder the playwright and actor was supplanted by Wilder the son and brother. His mother and Janet were in Scotland when Isabel had to be hospitalized in New Haven for “a considerable operation,” and the house and grounds on Deepwood Drive were badly damaged by the great New England hurricane of 1938 that struck Long Island and New England on September 21—the deadliest natural catastrophe to hit Connecticut since the great hurricane of 1815.
⁶
Wilder was playing the Stage Manager in
Our Town
the night the storm hit. Throughout New England an estimated six hundred to eight hundred people died and more than sixty thousand structures were demolished by the massive storm, which leveled forests and wiped out bridges, telephone service, and electricity. By the end of September, Wilder had dealt as best he could with the storm damage at home. Isabel was recuperating well from her surgery, and he was preparing to meet his mother and Janet at the boat and “break the news” of Isabel's operation and “the hurricane-torn house and grounds.”
⁷

Soon he was in New York, working full-time with Reinhardt at last on the production of
Merchant of Yonkers,
set to open in December.
⁸
“Rightly or wrongly I am being leaned upon,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott as his days were crammed full—listening to readings as the play was cast, inspecting stage designs, and polishing the script.
⁹
At first he was thrilled. There were ‘glorious uproarious times going on at the Windsor Theatre,” he reported to Woollcott. “Reinhardt a great great man; his comic invention is dazzling; the actors adore him.”
¹⁰

Reinhardt and his producer, Herman Shumlin, conferred with Wilder on all major production matters, especially cast and set design. There were “casting agonies,” Wilder confided to Bobsy Goodspeed.
¹¹
He lobbied aggressively for Ruth Gordon to play Dolly Levi. Shumlin believed that she was too short, that she “might not satisfy us at the close of the play”—but Wilder knew that “she would be very funny, very brilliant, and carry all before her in the first three acts” because he had seen her “prodigious success” in London in the “low broad farce,” William Wycherley's Restoration comedy
The Country Wife.
Wilder persuaded Shumlin, but when Gordon was approached about the role she did not commit to it. “She said that she liked the play and she knew that she would be good in the part,” Wilder reported. “Perhaps she has some other production in mind; perhaps Jed Harris has prejudiced her against me.”
¹²
He hoped they could persuade her, but in the end she wouldn't agree because, Wilder said, she distrusted Reinhardt as a director.
¹³

The role ultimately went to Jane Cowl, although Wilder feared—correctly, as it turned out—that she was too much of a “tragedy-queen.”
¹⁴
At first Cowl declined to take direction from Reinhardt, but soon she progressed, Wilder said, “from offended Bernhardt to adoring slave. Now it's all ‘Professor, will you please read that line for me,' and ‘I never worked under a great director before.' ”
¹⁵

Wilder was also asked his opinion of noted Russian painter and set designer Nicolai Remisoff's drawings for the sets—and he objected to them emphatically. “They are very attractive and skillful and full of wonderfully caught accuracy in details of architecture and furniture,” Wilder wrote. “But they are very different from what I imagined for the play” because they were “thick, solid, heavy, actual and over-rich in detail and idea.” He wanted the actors to have “the full attention of the audience—of painted canvas, none too fresh, just enough for suggestion of time and place.” As
Our Town
had demonstrated, Wilder the playwright was convinced that the audience should put its imagination to work on the stage settings, and the set should not “weaken” the “vitality of gesture and word.” Wilder asked for and got another designer, Boris Aronson, who designed for the Group Theatre during the thirties.
¹⁶

Reinhardt had his heart set on music for the play—singing as well as dancing and some instrumental background. Wilder resisted, however, afraid that music would “introduce an operetta unreality into the action,” would “upset the characterization of the persons on stage,” and, most of all, would “upset the American audience's attitude. Dance and . . . song does not, for them, mix well with real story-telling and real activity,” Wilder explained.
¹⁷
Reinhardt won out in the end, and Wilder admitted that he liked the Vandergelder Recreational and Burial Society band, the Harmonia Gardens Restaurant waltzes. “But best of all,” he said, “is the veiled pathos and sweetness of 15 lovable people out for a holiday.”
¹⁸
(Reinhardt's determination to mix Dolly Levi and company with music and dance was vindicated with the metamorphosis of
Merchant
into
The Matchmaker
in 1955 and then into
Hello, Dolly!
in 1964.)

Wilder quickly found himself involved in every aspect of the production, as well as with ongoing revisions of the script in the mornings, and then sitting in on eight-hour-long rehearsals. “This afternoon the Professor, for the first time, ran through the Fourth Act,” Wilder wrote Reinhardt's wife at midnight on November 20. “Even in a first reading like that what one saw was dazzling virtuosity in direction. Wonderful! As each character and situation developed all of us involved—including the Professor—would be shaken with laughter.”
¹⁹
Wilder just hoped that everyone involved in the production, from producer Shumlin to the actor with the smallest role, would realize “the aspects of comic abandon and joy of life in the play.”
²⁰
His enthusiasm during rehearsals waned as time approached for the Boston tryout at the Colonial Theatre, beginning December 12. With a little more than two weeks to go until the December 28 opening, Wilder was increasingly distressed by what he saw onstage. Reinhardt's propensity for pageantry and high drama led to a heavy-handed, sometimes stiff and awkward production. The play was not coming to life as Wilder had envisioned it.

Woollcott spent one evening in Boston “helping the sorely beset Wilder get tight at the Copley-Plaza,” he wrote to their friend Bob Hutchins.
²¹
After Woollcott saw the Boston tryout, he predicted that the production would fail, and he was right. He immediately discerned the major problem: Because Reinhardt inevitably infused the play with his European expectations of farce, there was a disconnect with the American audience and its affinity for broader, less stylized, more slapstick comedy. Jane Cowl as Dolly was ill at ease with farce, and openly nervous, with “near explosions daily.”
²²
Wilder believed that Percy Waram was miscast as the male lead.

The play opened in New York at the Guild Theatre December 28, 1938, starring Jane Cowl as Dolly Levi, Percy Waram as Horace Vandergelder, and the young Tom Ewell as Cornelius Hackl. Reviews were mixed but largely negative, box-office business was bad, and the play closed in January 1939, after only thirty-nine performances, and probably would have closed sooner but for the subscription tickets already sold to Theatre Guild members.

 

A FAILED
play, like a successful one, is an equation of many parts—script, director, producer, actors, audience, the events that transpire onstage, and those that swirl around offstage and on the larger world stage. Wilder wrote a terse recapitulation to Stein and Toklas: “Suffice to say that that play which had taken from July to December to get produced, was damned by the critics and withdrawn.”
²³
He wrote to Sibyl Colefax that he hoped Woollcott was right to predict that
Merchant
would have a revival after a few years “in the American idiom, and declare and justify itself.”
²⁴

He had learned “a great deal from the association with Reinhardt,” Wilder wrote to a friend in January 1939, looking to the future. “I shall continue to write more and all I ask is that the public attend them sufficiently to subsidy the expense of my long apprenticeship. I recommend my plays ten years from now.”
²⁵
He told the Reinhardts that “no words could express the richness of such a privilege as watching the Professor work on a text of one's own, and all the stimulation of the personal association as well.”
²⁶
Harper & Brothers published the reading edition of the play on April 13, 1939, with Wilder's dedication to Reinhardt. Later Wilder called
Merchant
his “Ugly Duckling,” and reiterated his hope that someday it would come into its own.
²⁷

He was discouraged and disillusioned in 1939, not only because of the failure of his play and his disappointment in himself—and in his hero, Max Reinhardt—but also because of “an unbroken succession of skullduggeries” perpetrated by Jed Harris.
Our Town
was still doing “good business,” but was “withdrawn by Jed Harris in a paroxysm of spite against the leading actor and against me,” Wilder said.
²⁸
Harris was reportedly unhappy when he discovered that Frank Craven was earning more money each week than he was. Wilder wrote to the Reinhardts about Harris's action: “Jed Harris, in a fever of self-destruction, has closed the run of ‘Our Town' in Chicago, although it was doing good business. Yes, something's the matter with a theatre where both my plays were closed, though they were doing better than $9,000 a week.” He began to think that the American theater needed cheaper seats, and scripts and stages that fostered a “closer relation between the actor and the audience.”
²⁹