A more unlikely training for a Broadway producer-director it is hard to imagine, but George Abbott maintained (rarely, and then only to an intimate friend) that what he picked up in the West and never lost was a habit of staying with any job he started and keeping one eye cocked over his shoulder for the man behind who—as the immortal old ballplayer said—”might be gaining on you.” All he got out of the military school was, he said, a cure for his chronic stoop.
When he was seventeen, the family moved back east and settled in a small town near Buffalo, New York. He went off to college at Rochester, played a lot of football but on a sudden and never-explained impulse he became hopelessly stagestruck, joined the university dramatic club and spent every penny he earned attending the local theater. After graduation, he had only one aim: to get to Harvard, the only university in the East that had started a course in playwriting. He stayed there until, at the age of twenty-five, he won the prize for his first play, The Man in the Manhole. Within the year, he was bound for Broadway and the certain conviction that he would storm the place. But, like many another dazzling amateur, he had a lean time of it for many years, doing every sort of job, slowly rising from office boy to prompter to stage manager, casting director, somebody called “assistant playwright,” who was really an apprentice play doctor. Not until he was thirty-six did he find a role that helped him to a steady living. It was that of Tex, a cowboy! But soon after that he wrote and directed his first great hit, called appropriately Broadway. Ever afterwards, he could have his choice of scripts. And once he began to pick and choose, he responded to an itch that was never cured: an irresistible desire to doctor scenes, dialogue, even whole plays. He pounced on an original script as raw meat for his butchering. No script satisfied him until he had revised it, rewritten it, dolled it up or dressed it down: an occupation that made him unpopular with some famous playwrights.
So, for the next sixty-three years, from 1926 to 1989, he directed or produced or was somehow involved in over a hundred and twenty productions. When he was ninety-nine, he sent off to a secretary, to retype, two plays he’d written in between rounds of golf. Holidays, by the way, he didn’t believe in, he looked on them as a form of defeat. The great thing was to keep on doing what you do best and draw a breath in between shows.
He held no doctrines about how to live, but he was, for a deep-dyed theater man, an oddity. He took three meals a day at regular intervals. He never smoked. He sipped a little wine. He went home early to bed, to read a play, to fiddle with a play, to sleep, to get up and start again. Night life he thought was “a dandy way to get a nervous breakdown.” He admitted to certain unchanging prejudices. He liked unknown actors. He had little time for the tantrums of established stars, though the roster of young people spotted by him and then established as stars—from Leonard Bernstein to Shirley MacLaine and Barbra Streisand—is formidable.
He had few theories about stage direction and was willing to listen, for a time. Like Winston Churchill, he believed in reasonable discussion “provided it ended in compliance with my wishes.” He couldn’t abide the so-called Method actors, who were spawned in the late 1940s, flourished through the 1950s and 1960s and still haunt the more strenuous “psychological” scripts. Mr. Abbott’s objection to the school was that a man strained and sweated to imagine himself as an old spinster or, perhaps, an old armchair, but all the while, Mr. Abbott complained, “he can’t pronounce his final Ys.” One actor, wrestling over the inner meaning of his part, asked “What is my motivation?” ‘Your job,” said Mr. Abbott.
He lost his second wife in 1951 and for thirty-two years he was mostly alone. But twelve years ago, when he was ninety-six, he decided to marry again, a youngster in her early fifties. Last year he came into New York from his house up the river and pattered down the aisle at a revival of his Damn Yankees, just to be sure they were pronouncing their final t’s. Last week, he was busy at this favorite occupation, tinkering with, rewriting and revising a revival of Pajama Game. This week, he died in his sleep at a hundred and seven.
A dozen years ago, he had to have a pacemaker. He had a lifelong suspicion of doctors and their wizardry, and he wanted to know if there was “any snag to this thing.” Only, replied the doctor with well-rehearsed facetiousness, “that you’ll have to have a new battery after ten years.” “Hot damn!” said Mr. Abbott. Ten years later, when he was a hundred and five, sure enough he had to have a new battery. “Hot damn!” said Mr. Abbott, his chronic suspicion of doctors confirmed yet again.
One day, in his late nineties, he was playing golf with his wife and for the first time, and who knows, perhaps the last, fell down on the fairway. In alarm his wife ran over to him, saw the long lean figure still prostrate and shouted: “George! George! Get up, please. Don’t just lay there.” He opened an eye. “Lie there!” he said.
20
Scotty Reston:
The Maestro from Glasgow
(1995)
James Barrett Reston, who came to be called, and rightly, the most influential American journalist of his generation, was at his birth the unlikeliest candidate for influence of any kind in the great world outside Scotland’s Clydebank and its sprawling shipyards, where his father worked as a machinist.
Life in the first decade of the twentieth century held out few pleasant prospects for the people who in those honest days were classified in the official census as “the laboring poor,” not as “the economically challenged.” Yet from across the Atlantic the word from a friend already emigrated suggested that the promise of American life was, at worst, less bleak.
The young Reston was no more than a baby when his parents decided, like the impoverished Andrew Carnegie (often cited by disheartened Scots as a model), to seek the good life in the American Midwest. They pooled their precious small savings, booked the steerage passage, Mrs. Reston and her sister sewed the gold sovereigns into their corsets, and they sailed away. But during the voyage, the sister fell ill, and when they landed at Ellis Island was taken aside to be looked over by one of the doctors, the instant diagnosticians who inscribed fatal chalk marks on sick arrivals (H for suspected heart disease, ? for tuberculosis). Whatever the sister’s affliction, it was serious enough to have the family denied entry and be forced to make the long journey home. Again they started to put aside sovereigns, but any hopes they had of using them were blasted for four years at least by “the guns of August” and the coming of the so-called Great War.
They stayed home in Clydebank in what young Reston, no sentimentalist, was later to admit could be fairly called “dire” poverty, until the war was over. In 1919, they tried again. This time they were all, including Mrs. Reston’s sister, in visibly good health. They passed through Ellis Island and settled in Dayton, Ohio, where Reston senior went to work in an automobile factory.
The mere mention of Dayton recalls for me a remarkable newspaper photograph I saw years ago and have longed for ever since. It was almost certainly a presidential campaign picture (the year was 1920) and showed two tall, affable men, one of them remarkably handsome in a rather lofty, upper-crust way. They were standing on the first tee, drivers in hand, about to celebrate the opening of a new country club (not a chosen event that would endear them to voters today). They were the nominees of the Democratic party for the presidential race: Governor Cox of Ohio and his running mate, a former undersecretary of the navy, one Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (I hear a murmur of doubt: Roosevelt playing golf? It would be a year later, up in the family’s summer place in Canada, that Roosevelt contracted the dread disease which everyone feared in those summer days, poliomyelitis, and which paralyzed him for life).
What made this photograph forever poignant and comical at the same time was the presence, alongside the strapping young Roosevelt, of an urchin of a caddie hefting a bag the size of himself. He was a twelve-year-old who thereafter would be known everywhere as “Scotty” Reston. It was an early omen, a reflection of his love of the game. In an immigrant of any other nation, this would have
been a very odd affection, and I imagine a lot of the neighbors in Dayton must have thought so. At the time, golf was considered, and in the United States it most certainly was, a rich man’s pastime. But— what is still news to most Americans—for about four centuries, golf in Scotland has been the pastime of all classes, from Mary, Queen of Scots to her groom, from the loitering heirs of the shipbuilders to the sons of their laboring poor. In fact, the poor started it and it worked its way up.
It was a proud day for his mother when the Clydebank worker’s son went off to college, but a scandalous day when, four years later, young Scotty, having made no better than a mediocre mark in everything but “sportswriting,” announced that he was going to become a professional golfer. He had picked up money caddying and twice won the Ohio public links championship. However, he reconciled his mother’s opposition and his own inclination by becoming a sports journalist. He soon developed a natural gift for a canny, forthright prose and he hopped quickly up the ladder of Associated Press talent. After five years in New York covering every sport, he was sent to London as their chief man to cover Wimbledon and the British Open golf championship. When these events were over, he was asked to stay on and—astonishingly—cover the Foreign Office! It was the late 1930s, a nervous time, with Mussolini having taken over Ethiopia and Hitler gone into Austria and dismembered Czechoslovakia. Somebody must have had extraordinary confidence in this sturdy thirty-year-old, to whom politics at that point in his career was another, possibly more complicated, game. In any case, Reston was quite unfazed by the assignment and the confidence in him was justified.
It quickly appeared that he had a kind of inquisitiveness that is a good reporter’s best endowment: not to pretend to know more than you do but to ask the questions a child would ask. The effect on the people who are in charge of things can be remarkable and often remarkably hurtful. The questioner appears not as a recording machine but as an interrogator who wants to hear the home truths that, in the interests of diplomacy or party policy, are better fudged or left for events to reveal. Reston’s strength in his early days covering British policy was that he was an innocent. The questions that occurred to him were indeed childlike, and it was an unpleasant experience for the Foreign Office press spokesmen. “They seemed to think,” he told me years later, “that reporters were there not to find out the news but to copy it out from the Foreign Office releases. In fact, that’s what they did think.” Reston might be frustrated by this convention but it did not put him off his new assignment; on the contrary, it made him all the more inquisitive and, eventually, absorbed in the whole business of politics. Within the year, he quit the Associated Press and joined the New York Times’s London bureau, on the first of September 1939, the day Hitler went into Poland or—as Reston was careful to report Hitler’s version—the day the Nazis felt compelled to respond to the sneaky and murderous Polish invasions of German territory.
After that, sports would seldom come into his writing, though for many years he would play a mean caddie’s game of golf. From then on, he had two preoccupations: American foreign policy; and the shifts and audacities whereby a man became president of the United States and how, and how effectively, he wielded power.
For the last quarter century of his life he was a columnist, having chosen at the age of sixty to ease up on the reporter’s demanding neutral code and relax into his preferences and prejudices. But his great and inimitable days were his years as a reporter, a craft all the more admirable since its rather palpable decline across the Atlantic. This country still, in the dozen or so serious city newspapers, maintains the tradition that struck me the first weeks I lived here: the strict separation, in substance and tone, of the reporting pages from the editorial, the leader, page. My first mentor, H. L. Mencken, made it plain to me when, in 1937, I became a correspondent here: “Since there is no such thing as ideological truth, it follows that to the extent a reporter is a liberal reporter or a conservative reporter, or a Democratic or Communist or Republican reporter, he is no reporter at all.” My own test was, and is, a simple one: you should not know from a good reporter’s work how he votes. Apply this to the newspapers of France and Britain, and you may share my fear that they are declining into journals of opinion.
This quality of maintained neutrality, of seeking out the facts and letting them fall where they may was taken for granted in all the good reporters I knew, as distinct from the columnists and commentators, who knowingly mix analysis and advocacy What made Reston supreme at his craft was his unflagging hard labor on a job, his tapping never less than three or four sources (some contradictory), his capacity to tunnel for undiscovered facts while the rest of us tended to describe the landscape over the tunnel. Most of all was his enviable gift of wheedling out of officials—not public relations officers or deputy undersecretaries but prime ministers and field marshals and dictators and tycoons and holy men—confessions of things, both pleasant and unpleasant, that had happened. This ready access was due, I think, to his remarkable international prestige but, more likely, to his reputation for not identifying his sources.
He had a marvelous cocky streak which was so amiably, almost jokingly, expressed that it caused no offense to notice but rather a belch of laughter. Once, I recall, we were mulling over the plight of NATO a day or two after de Gaulle pulled France out of it. Scotty sighed, tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth and said a little wearily, “I think I’d better call on the general.” Which, without more fuss than a minute or two over the telephone, he proceeded to arrange. I have no doubt that a couple of days later he would be flying off to Paris, and while he was over there might just as well drop in on the new Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson.
There was a mythical story, which if not true ought to be, about the king of England’s saying, after Britain went off the gold standard, “I shouldn’t be surprised if Scotty Reston wasn’t behind this whole thing.” Certainly, Scotty was one day ahead of our (the Guardian’s) financial expert, then in Washington, in reporting that the retreat from gold was going to happen. Days before any other paper, the New York Times published under Reston’s byline the details of the Dumbarton Oaks conference (no reporters present), which laid out, to the astonishment of the men who had been there, the blueprint of the oncoming United Nations.
Most risibly, I remember a Bermuda conference between Macmillan and President Kennedy. Absolutely nothing was coming out of the press officers of either side, and the parties of the first part could not be reached. The day wore on and out, as several hundred of us, seeing no hope of transmitting the communiqué, drifted and sifted and boozed into the night. Scotty was nowhere in sight. Just after eleven, he came in, jaunty with his bosun’s roll, a little flushed, a puff of smoke preceding a large grin. He got me off in a corner. I asked him how the canary tasted. He chuckled till he had to wipe away the tears. He took a long happy draw on the pipe. On a promise that I would write nothing till the morrow, he told me what had gone on at the conference, who said what to whom, what the communiqué would say, better—something communiqués are designed to hide—what the communiqué meant. Unlike the stories of most journalists who have just scored a coup, his bore no hint of self-congratulation. It was plain, informative, exactly right, letter perfect. Where’d you get all this from, I asked. He wiped another tear: “I was under the carpet,” he said.
He was always under the carpet. This genial, Scots-shrewd, bulky but compact figure, ready for Moscow, Downing Street or the Pentagon, affable, unfooled, gave a special glow to the title reporter. After a bad bout with the grimmest of diseases, he died in 1995, during the anniversary week of Pearl Harbor, full of years and sly, quiet wisdom to the end.
21
Erma Bombeck:
A Rare Bird
(1996)
A beloved woman has just died. I choose the word carefully. The cause of her being loved was a talent, much akin to the genius of Mark Twain, for writing about the daily life of ordinary people without sentimentality, facetiousness
or mock tragedy but with a wry sort of candor that called from her audience the response—sometimes delighted, sometimes abashed— “She’s right, but that’s me!”
In a word, she was something very rare: a woman humorist. If that sounds cavalier or bullying, in a macho way, I’d better say that that was not a flip remark. It is the outcome of years of brain-crunching thought which, in another age, might well have led to the discovery of the law of gravity. As it was, it led me to a simple distinction between wit and humor that has been confirmed every time somebody points out to me yet another funny woman writer. They always turn out to be wits, which goes at once to my theory that whereas wits have a target that is somebody outside themselves, the target of a humorist is himself. At his best he says blankly stupid things with the air of being specially wise, or he confesses a flaw in his character which we at once recognize as one of our own. To put it simply, wits make fun of other people, humorists make fun of themselves.
The most celebrated wit of her time, which was the time of the 1920s and 1930s, was Dorothy Parker. Reviewing Katharine Hepburn’s debut as a leading lady on Broadway, she noticed—or pretended to notice—that whenever an old, famous actress, one Blanche Bates, came on stage, Katharine Hepburn retreated into the farthest corner. “Could it be,” mused Miss Parker, “that Miss Hepburn was afraid of catching acting from Miss Bates?” We all hoot over such a wounding shaft (Brendan Gill, another wit, called Dorothy Parker’s wit “a surgical enterprise”) but are greatly relieved not to be the object of it.
Memories of The Great and The Good Page 13