by Bibi Gaston
Opening night was, as expected, triumphant. Five-story sets extended over an acre of indoor space, twenty-six miles of wiring strung about the theater, with thousands of custom lights; the production used 1,772 costumes and had an indoor mountain that rose from twelve feet below the orchestra pit to thirty feet above. Bel Geddes and Reinhardt had even thrown the forgotten synagogue into the orchestra pit at the last minute. The production lasted more than five hours, during which Rosamond and the huge cast performed flawlessly. Kurt Weill’s musical score, the critics said, sent “shudders of eternity down the spine.” Critics applauded Reinhardt’s brute force, his artistry, the sets and costumes.
The Eternal Road hummed along for six months, but audiences had tired of Reinhardtian spectacles, and some suggested it closed because the message was markedly political. Not everyone in New York was enthralled with ancient stories of the Bible, or perhaps, for the ticket price, audiences didn’t want to be reminded for five hours of what the Nazis might do to the Jews.
Amos Pinchot, for one, was quite uncertain about what the Nazis might do. Amos had won a reputation as a staunch pacifist, believing that America should not go ranging around the globe inserting itself in foreign wars. More concerned with internal enemies of the United States, Amos railed against monopolies and big business, insisting that they were the true enemy of the common man. Gifford, however, was vocal in his support of the Jewish people, and in 1933, he dispatched Cornelia to rallies and gatherings in New York to declare that Nazi oppression of the Jews would not be tolerated by the American public.
Ever the crusader, Amos had helped Rosamond escape Morris Gest but then she had fallen into the hands of Beelzebub. That marriage hadn’t ended in disaster; it was a disaster that simply hadn’t ended. Now she had a new man that most people found abominable but abominably successful, Harris, and there wasn’t one thing anyone could do about it. When Rosamond went to the Pinchots with her plans to marry Harris, the Pinchots gave her their cautious nod. What could they say? She’d finally found a man to replace Big Bill, a man who was “man enough.” Amos had put on the gloves with Gest and kept his distance with Beelzebub, but by 1937, Amos was busy fighting Franklin Roosevelt in full-page letters in the New York Times, opposing FDR’s plans to reorganize the government, and the arms profiteers who would take a country to war.
After The Eternal Road closed in the summer of 1937, Rosamond spent the next spring in Tucson with her mother. Little Billy, eight years old by then, dressed as a cowboy and rode in a rodeo for the first time while the boys’ big white poodle, Miss Panella, won every ribbon a good-looking dog could win from the Tucson Kennel Club. But now, Rosamond was uncertain about buying the arroyo property because Jed had found the play he’d been waiting for and needed her help for an opening that winter.
Panella, Little Billy, and James, Tucson, 1937
In August, Rosamond and Harpo Marx were guests of the theater critic Alexander Woollcott at his island in Vermont. She swam and read, and after many years away from photography, she picked up a camera, taking candids of Harpo strumming a harp and Woollcott basking and sunning his rotund corpus on his long wooden dock. It had been thirteen years since Woollcott had written his glowing reviews of The Miracle, but he knew all the formidable directors who had influenced Rosamond’s career in the meantime: Reinhardt and Cukor and Selznick and Harris and Zoe Akins. Woollcott admitted having little interest in riches, but for “fame, glamorously achieved, glamorously lost, or glamorously maintained, he had an undying fondness.” That didn’t apply, however, to one playwright Rosamond had worked with, Clare Boothe Brokaw. It was easy to dislike Clare. Off the record, Woollcott told Rosamond that “the seriousness with which Clare takes herself is convulsive.” When it came to Zoe Akins, Woollcott wasn’t any more complimentary, writing that Akins was “a strange mixture of a dramatic poet and a romantical nursemaid.” That was before she won her Pulitzer.
Given the ease of their friendship, it would have been natural for Woollcott and Harpo to lie around the dock, as they did that afternoon, kvetching and counseling Rosamond on what she should do next. Naturally, Rosamond had already made up her mind, having planned to spend the fall and winter helping Jed on two projects he was working on with the Pulitzer-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder.
In the fall of 1937, with the loveliest woman in America on his arm, Jed was indeed poised for a comeback. He had found just the right play. In December of 1937, Harris met Wilder in Paris where he sealed a deal with the playwright for Our Town, a play in three acts.
That fall, Rosamond had returned to New York and rented Ballybrook, the estate of Mr. J. H. Alexandre on Valentine’s Lane in Old Brookville, Long Island. Set in a serene neighborhood of old mansions and beautiful trees on the North Shore’s Gold Coast, Ballybrook was within an easy drive of New York City. It was also just down the street from the exclusive Green Vale School where she would enroll the boys. Finally, it seemed, she would settle down in a beautiful farmhouse. She had her love for Harris, friends and family close at hand, and, at last, a position behind the scenes in technical production, something she had longed for.
Jed Harris and Thornton Wilder had crossed paths before. At Yale, Jed thought Thornton was a god. Wilder was sure-footed, curious, and cosmopolitan, spending part of his youth in China where his father had been a consular official. Conversely, Jed, from the Jewish neighborhoods of Newark, thought Yale was a horrific waste of time yet he stayed. Modest and lonely at Yale, he would sometimes reach out to finger Wilder’s coat as the two passed in the crowded halls of their dormitory, wanting to soak in what someday he might become. Jacob Horowitz knew there’d come a day when he would become someone else.
In high school, Thornton kept tabs on French-and German-language theater, and in particular, the work of Max Reinhardt. After graduating from Yale in 1920, he took one year at the American Academy in Rome, then returned to teach French for three years at the Lawrenceville Academy where his students affectionately named him “The Dictionary.” After receiving his master’s degree in French from Princeton, he took a year off to write, and in early 1928, while returning on a train trip to Florida, a man approached him and said, “Aren’t you Thornton Wilder?” It was Jed Harris. Before the two men got off the train that day, Jed had successfully turned on the charm, and the two animated giants discovered an extraordinary rapport. They would thrust and parry, adding this or that odd fact or interpretation to the other’s superb knowledge of French novels or philosophy. Both were fully alive, passionate, and energetic; and although Jed was more quarrelsome than Thornton, and far less scholarly, his agile mind was finely tuned to the subtleties of casting and scripts. Jed could be deferential when he wanted something. In 1928, The Bridge of San Luis Rey won Thornton Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, making Wilder a celebrity novelist, and by the fall of 1937, Thornton had something Jed wanted—badly.
In the winter of 1937, Thornton returned from Europe to complete Our Town. It was difficult to find solitude, but one day, Jed announced that he had found Thornton the perfect, quiet place to write, an apartment over a garage in a rural neighborhood in Old Brookville, Long Island. At first Thornton thought Jed was trying to be helpful and agreed to the arrangement; but no sooner had he moved to Long Island than he discovered that without a car or public transportation, he couldn’t even get out to lunch. He was completely at the mercy of Jed, who, for some reason, was frequently in the neighborhood and would come by to hover, which he hated. Thornton called the arrangement his prison and had no idea why he had been exiled to a neighborhood in the middle of nowhere until one day in the late fall, Harris and Wilder were driving around Old Brookville after lunch, when Thornton noticed the name on a mailbox a few doors down. The name read GASTON. Wilder knew he had been duped and sent to a suburban gulag for Jed’s convenience. He didn’t say anything to Jed but told his sister Isabel that he was furious with Jed for treating people like chess pieces. Shortly after noticing Rosamond’s name on the mailbox, Wilder
staged a revolt and returned to New York City, where Harris wouldn’t bother him.
Note from Sinclair Lewis
Someone else was infatuated with Rosamond at the time, the author Sinclair Lewis, who was twenty years her senior and married, with a child. With a Pulitzer he’d rejected and a Nobel he’d accepted, he was gunning for the much-coveted role as Stage Manager in Our Town. In the summer of 1937, Lewis began pestering Jed Harris for the part. Meanwhile, in late October, Rosamond received scintillating love notes from a not-so-scintillating part of the world where Lewis was lecturing in what he termed the “very red state” of Oklahoma and the lackluster hinterlands around Kansas City. Two years before, Lewis had written It Can’t Happen Here, a novel about how fascism comes to America, “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” so his notes to Rosamond were laced with references to fundamentalism and fascism. In Tulsa, the newspapers found Lewis “stimulating and even witty.” But he didn’t find Kansas City stimulating at all. He wrote Rosamond that it “is entirely composed of chop suey joints and the $500,000 homes of ex-oil millionaires who are now washing dishes in the chop suey joints and the very handsome stone monuments of lecturers who were shot by bored audiences.” According to Gloria Braggiotti, Lewis was in love with Rosamond. At the end of one of his notes, he wrote, “this is what I call a love letter.” Whatever he called it, he’d missed his chance. Not only was he married, he’d somehow forgotten to mention her at all.
Later that fall, Rosamond received more charitable communication from Gloria Braggiotti and Alfred de Liagre, who were both troubled by her relationship with Jed Harris. De Liagre had befriended Rosamond’s brother, Gifford, when Gifford had reduced his diet to nothing but oysters while training for the Yale crew. Like Horton Foote, de Liagre felt protective of Rosamond, knew Harris, and, like most people, had nothing good to say about him. Harris had once crept into a rehearsal of de Liagre’s production Three-Cornered Moon to watch Harris’s then girlfriend Ruth Gordon, and when de Liagre saw Harris skulking around, he tossed him out on his ear. So when he discovered that Rosamond was having an affair with Harris, de Liagre wasn’t one to hold back, saying, “My God, Rosamond, what are you doing with that dreadful man?” Rosamond shrugged him off, “Oh, you’re just jealous of him.” “No, it’s not a question of jealousy at all. I think he’s just a very evil, sinister fellow. I have heard a great many reports about him from other actresses. He is cruel, ruthless and sadistic, and is very much disliked.” De Liagre told her that Harris made his actresses repeat a scene two dozen times to their breaking point. But Rosamond defended Jed, “Oh, Delly, you don’t understand. He’s a really remarkable man—enormously talented.” De Liagre had heard the defense before from Harris’s lover Margaret Sullavan, who’d also said he was an extraordinary man. De Liagre concluded that the women who were attracted to Jed Harris must have a masochistic streak.
When Wilder was writing the script for Our Town in the summer of 1937, Harris was ecstatic. He told others that it was the best manuscript he had ever read. A one-night opening of the world premiere of Our Town was scheduled for the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, for Saturday, January 22, 1938. On Monday, January 24, it was to start a two-week engagement at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre. Jed announced magnanimously, “If anything goes wrong with it, it will be my fault, not Wilder’s.”
Rehearsals in New York began shortly after Christmas 1937. Although Harris had approved the script, nothing stopped him from dabbling and shifting scenes around. Isabel Wilder, Thornton’s sister and closest confidante, had only been to two rehearsals, but that was enough to see that the two men were warring and behaving like children. Skirmishes erupted, settled down, and then erupted again. Wilder was so put off by Jed’s maneuvers that he concluded that Jed wanted to consume him and claim Our Town as his own. When Harris characteristically demanded he be named co writer, Wilder threatened to quit, and Isabel stepped in to calm the situation, knowing that both men were indispensable to Our Town. But, she said, Jed, if forced, would destroy everything for not having written it.
While the two warring titans skirmished, Rosamond dutifully drove back and forth in her Chrysler on Long Island’s burgeoning thoroughfares and over the shiny new Triborough Bridge. She was involved in productions in New York until all hours of the day and night while her boys spent their days down the street at the Green Vale Academy in Old Brookville and their evenings with Miss Tuck, their devoted nurse. There were no acting parts in Our Town for a tall, thirty-three-year-old leading lady, but Jed wanted Rosamond around, so he gave her the official title of “prop manager,” if only to move chairs, buy umbrellas, and turn pages of the script. To the cast it was evident that she’d fallen deeply for Jed, who behaved like a man reborn.
When Thornton Wilder met Rosamond on the set of Our Town, he knew from Jed’s shenanigans in Old Brookville that Rosamond was far more than the prop manager. Since there were virtually no props, there wasn’t much for Rosamond to do, so she also took on sound effects, including train whistles, birdcalls, the ringing of the town clock, and the clomping of horses and bells. She was reported to have designed Emily’s wedding dress, a simple white frock for a rural New Hampshire celebration in the early 1900s. Seeing Rosamond at rehearsals, Thornton and Isabel were reminded that Thornton had privately hoped Reinhardt would direct Our Town, but the play didn’t rely on sets. Indeed, Our Town’s first four words, “No curtain, no scenery,” warned audiences that they had left the land of Reinhardtian spectacles. Wilder wrote, “Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind, not in scenery.” And speaking of despair, Thornton said he thought that Rosamond was being shortchanged. Others thought her role as prop girl was a deliberately demeaning move on Harris’s part. Hers wasn’t a hard job but it was a symbolic one, as was the design of the wedding dress. Rumor had it, Jed and she planned to marry.
The night of Friday, January 21, 1938, was wet and snowy in Princeton. The cast arrived slipping and sliding down the sidewalks in front of McCarter Theatre, having trudged all the way out from New York. Adding misery to the miserable, a mistake in scheduling had occurred. That night McCarter Theatre was booked for a piano recital, so Jed directed the cast to reappear at 11:00 P.M. that night. When everyone sauntered back in, the cast learned that the lighting would require eight hours to set up, so once again, Jed told everyone to set their clocks, go back to bed, and return the next morning. Isabel Wilder described that night as the worst of all possible conditions and a drama within a drama. Much of the cast was making only $35 a week and had to find not only a place to stay but food when almost all the shops and restaurants in Princeton were closed. Everyone’s nerves were stretched beyond breaking. Jed was high-strung and frantic.
Finally, at 11 o’clock on the morning of January 22, rehearsal went into full swing. The cast was exhausted, but Rosamond and Jed were ebullient and full of extraordinary energy. Jed spent the morning shouting directions, while Rosamond, positioned in the center aisle, took notes. At one point that morning, one of the actors leaned over to ask Rosamond how she managed to look so alive given their lack of sleep. She whispered that she and Jed had taken Benzedrine, an upper. They hadn’t had a minute of sleep.
A single performance of Our Town opened on the night of January 22 to a full house. Despite the chaos of the two previous days, the production went remarkably well. The audience was largely made up of Princetonians, whom Wilder described as a “fashionable villa colony; academic bourgeoisie; and students.” The program described the play as “The record of a tiny New Hampshire village as created by the lives of its most humble inhabitants.” In one of the play’s most memorable scenes, Martha Scott as Emily stood in her white wedding dress against a backdrop of black umbrellas. Emily married, had children, died in childbirth, and was given a chance to come back to relive just one day of her life. She chose a day, an average day, when she was twelve years old, before her life had officially begun. “Live people don’t understand do they?” she called out. “They’re sort
of shut up in little boxes.”
After the final curtain, Harris turned to Wilder on the stairs above the dressing room and asked, “What did you think?” To Jed’s surprise, Thornton agreed that it had gone well and praised Jed for his work but also said he thought some aspect of the last scene had not worked. “There was that one point you never understood,” said Wilder. It was the last thing a director wanted to hear. The comment struck Harris in the chest. He flew into a rage, uttering a mouthful of foul words. He hadn’t heard what was good.
Jed usually managed to seduce everyone, but that night he hadn’t seduced Thornton Wilder. Jed made a quick exit from the theater while Thornton and Isabel wandered the deserted streets of Princeton looking for something to eat; they finally discovered a small one-window smoke shop on Nassau Street that sold newspapers and had a small soda fountain in the back. The owner was just closing up for the night but agreed to make them a sandwich. Isabel and Thornton went in, ordered, and as they were waiting for their food, they heard a voice coming from a phone booth at the back of the store, sounding like a man pleading for his life. It was Jed: “But Rosamond, no darling. Of course I love you but I can’t, don’t you see, I can’t spend the night with you. Yes, I love you, it has nothing to do with not loving you.”
Overhearing Jed’s impassioned plea, Isabel sympathized with him, pleading as he was with a woman who was being impossible. Isabel thought Rosamond didn’t understand what the director and producer were going through, what ghastly nights everyone had had. Rosamond, she thought, had no sense of these mens’ responsibility. Listening to their phone call, Thornton felt differently. Thornton had seen both sides of the Jed Harris equation. He felt sorry for Rosamond, as he would have for anyone who found themselves in the clutches of Jed Harris.