Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Worried about Isabel, who was still grieving over her broken romance, Wilder used some of his income to try to hasten her “convalescence” by providing “a complete change of place and tempo.” He invited her to travel with him to help him with various matters surrounding the production of the play.58 He also funded a trip for her to spend April in London, believing that she needed “a rest and change very much; that ‘heart’ trouble slow a-healing.”59

  BY MARCH 8, 1938, free of teaching, lecturing, and Broadway duties, Wilder was at the Arizona Inn in Tucson, and by March 16 he was comfortably settled in a “tiny apartment” at 732 North Sixth Avenue, surrounded by desert air, Arizona sunlight, and at night, the “wild magic” of the moon. He found himself to be the lone walker in the town. “Everybody else drives dusty cars, or stands leaning against store-fronts with half-closed eyes,” he said. “But I still walk right smartly.”60 “The desert’s wonderful,” he exulted in a letter to Stein and Toklas. “I just returned from spending the day at a ranch sixty miles away,—between 20 and 30 thousand acres, the cows browsing among the cacti and rattlesnakes. I climbed the nearest hill and looked out over a tremendous prospect of mountains, plain, clouds and mesquite.”61 After the prolonged stress in New York, the desert retreat was just what he needed for rest, rejuvenation and work. He was thriving in his new daily regimen of “baking sunlight, long walks and hard work.”62 He fixed simple, “primitive, but good” meals for himself, and took time to enjoy “Wonderful piercing hot days” and the flowering of the cactus.63 He was living a monastic life, he wrote his family. “Haven’t spoken to a soul; walked and saw sunset from Sentinel Mountain! And spent the mornings on the play.” The Merchant of Yonkers had its ups and downs, he said. “Some mornings fancies run down my forearm like ants, and other days I just copy the status quo. Writing’s a damnable profession. But rain or shine, I write.”64

  The new play was growing, so much so that one evening he read portions of it aloud to friends at a nearby ranch. “Some of it’s very funny—sly deep deep records of ‘human nature’ getting itself into frightful predicaments. Max Reinhardt wrote that he was very pleased with the first two acts I sent him and as soon as I can I’ll be in Hollywood showing him the rest.”65 By March 21 he had finished the fourth act, but the third was giving him trouble. “The Fourth Act’s developed fine,” he reported to his mother and Isabel.

  I who never could finish a novel correctly seem to have the knack of Last Acts.

  But the Third Act has been terrifying me.

  Ever since I got here I’ve been in a cold sweat about it. It wouldn’t come right.

  I had thoughts of laying the play aside and telling Reinhardt that maybe I’d be a year or two at it.

  And then last night I got the Key. The direction.

  All my plots—count ’em—and idea-themes all come to a head at the right moment, with Mrs. Levi ruling the Roost.

  Rejoice with me. Now it’ll go very fast.66

  Physically and mentally restored in the “wonderful desert air and penetrating sun light,” Wilder could turn his attention to the mountain of mail generated by Our Town.67

  After his Oberlin professor Charles Wager read the Coward-McCann 1938 readers’ edition of the play, the first publication of Our Town, he pronounced it the finest work Wilder had ever done. Wilder was still perplexed, however, to discover the contradictory conclusions the play provoked: Some people found it sentimental, while others saw in the play an “embittered pessimism” about human nature and its “being in the dark.”68 He recognized that “for every person that thinks the last act is easy, sentimental and soft, there’s always another person who thinks it hard, embittered and cruel.”69

  Another letter caught Wilder’s attention, and elicited a detailed response about the sources for the play. It came from Christina Hopkinson Baker, the widow of George Pierce Baker, one of the founders of the drama program at Yale, and the mentor and teacher of numerous playwrights. In answer to her question about the influences in the third act, Wilder responded at length. “Lordy. I’d built my house with those ideas so long they seemed to have the character of simple self evidence,” he wrote:

  I suppose that I got it from Dante. I had to teach the Inferno And the first half of the Purgatorio at Chicago. I had in mind especially the Valley of the repentant Kings in about the 8th Canto of the Purgatorio. Same patience, waiting; same muted pain; same oblique side-glances back to earth. Dante has an angel descend nightly and after slaying a serpent who tries to enter the Valley every evening, stands guard the rest of the night. Most commentators agree that the allegory means: from now on the Dead must be guarded from memories of their earthly existence and from irruptions of the old human nature associations . . .

  At all events I do not mind from critics the charge of immaturity, confusion and even pretentiousness. It’s a first play; it’s a first sally into deep waters. I hope to do many more—and better—and even more pretentious. I write as I choose; and I learn as I go; and I’m very happy when the public pays the bills.70

  “THE PULITZER announcement is to be Monday,” Wilder’s proud mother wrote on April 29, 1938. “How can I wait?”71 She had just entertained twenty-five friends at tea, and found it difficult to keep the secret that Thornton was about to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Our Town, becoming the first writer to win the award for both fiction and drama.

  Isabella Niven Wilder had lived many years of her own life through her children—her literary ambitions materializing in their achievements, her disappointing marriage more than offset by the devotion and affection lavished on her by her sons and daughters. Those were especially gratifying years—the last years of the thirties—when her children were flourishing and, except for Isabel’s disappointment in love, happy, as far as a mother’s eye and instinct could tell. Isabella was proud of all her children, hovering over them in person or through long, chatty letters; avidly following their projects; bolstering their spirits during hard times; and, as she had done all their lives, cheering their aspirations and achievements.

  Although Isabel was on the brink of giving up her career as a novelist, Charlotte was working relentlessly hard as a poet. Coward-McCann had just accepted Charlotte’s new book of poetry, Mortal Sequence, to be published in 1939. “I never had a moment’s doubt that Mr. Coward would accept the book,” Isabella wrote to her daughter:

  Your “Moon” [Phases of the Moon, published in 1936] was a “distinguished book of verse,” as Thornton phrased it and you know he is a very good and a very exacting critic—none better—and this book has the further joy & distinction of lyric qualities external as well as internal.

  Isabella predicted that Charlotte would “wake up some day to being judged in your own field as a dominant figure—unique and distinguished and justified in all the decisions you have made.”72

  Like Thornton, Isabella kept up with New York theater and Hollywood movies. “Hollywood is in a big depression,” she wrote in 1938 as Thornton and Max Reinhardt began serious talks about the production of The Merchant of Yonkers. She predicted that the Pulitzer Prize would help attract backers to her son’s new play.73 The Pulitzer award no doubt boosted ticket sales for Our Town, and the play would run until November 19, 1938, when Harris closed the show and inaugurated the national tour. Almost immediately there was extraordinary national demand from amateur and stock companies for rights to perform the play. Coward-McCann had published a hardcover reading edition of the play in March 1938, and collaborated with Samuel French on the production of the first acting edition, published in 1939. The first amateur production rights for Our Town were granted on April 5, 1939, to a theater group in Salt Lake City, and next came Tucson on April 8, 1939. Over the next twenty months Our Town was produced in at least 658 communities across the United States and in Hawaii and Canada.

  With the success of the plays, Wilder’s whole view of life had changed, he said. “Now I make no plans—I’m a theatre-gypsy,” he wrote to Sam Steward. “Come and go, w
ithout home, address, or citizenship.”74 His life in Tucson was a daily calibration of “desert, sun, walks, and work. Some days work goes fine; other days nil; writing’s an awful business, punctuated by ecstasies.”75 For now, he focused all his attention on The Merchant of Yonkers, which he described to another friend as a “broad low comedy, based upon a Viennese classic of 1845, into which is inserted that wonderful scene in Molière’s L’Avare where Louise, the marriage-broker, tries to interest Harpagon in a young girl. This time I’m out for trenchant, not to say, cutting laughter.”76

  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