Despite Wilder’s position as one of America’s preeminent men of letters, The Skin of Our Teeth was pronounced too risky by every established producer on Broadway. Michael Myerberg was an impresario who had managed the conductor Leopold Stokowski for five years, and would now be making his debut as a Broadway producer.
Tallulah loved the play but was afraid it might baffle a Broadway audience. She gave it to Winwood and then to Cole to read, and both of them urged her to do it. The part of Sabina had originally been offered to Helen Hayes, who wanted to accept until playwright Edward Sheldon advised her that the part rightly belonged only to Tallulah. Hayes regretfully returned the script and relayed Sheldon’s words to Wilder.
Hayes was pleased when Tallulah called: “They have sent me this script and they’ve told me that Thornton wanted you but that you had suggested me. Well, darling, I’m going to do it. I don’t care who wants me or doesn’t want me, or how low I’m in the line. I love this play and this part and I’m going to do it.”
A phone call from Wilder made Tallulah feel wanted. From New Canaan she cabled Wilder on August 17 at the camp in Harrisburg, Penn-sylvania, where he was in training to enter Air Force Intelligence.
DEAR THORNTON IT WAS SO SWEET OF YOU TO PHONE ME I WAS SO PROUD TO BE IN YOUR WONDERFUL PLAY AND SO HAPPY THAT YOU SEEM PLEASED ABOUT IT AND HOW I HOPE THAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO BE WITH US DURING REHEARSALS TO GUIDE US LOVE TALLULAH
Tallulah surely knew that Wilder could not actively participate in rehearsals, and was probably alerting him to her anxiety about the fact that both Myerberg and the director he’d chosen, Elia Kazan, were neophytes.
Kazan, a young actor, a mover and shaker of the Group Theatre, had recently made two Hollywood films. But his directing experience was not extensive.
Fredric March was to play Mr. Antrobus, patriarch of an archetypal American family living in suburban New Jersey, beset in act 1 by talking dinosaurs and the onset of the Ice Age. Lily Sabina had been one of the mythological Sabine women, abducted by Antrobus and brought home, to his wife’s chagrin.
March insisted that his own wife, Florence Eldridge, be hired to play Mrs. Antrobus, the timeless voice of domestic rationality. Both March and Eldridge had been signed months before Tallulah. She agreed to share co-star above-the-title billing with them—which she hadn’t done with anyone since Grace George in The Circle four years earlier—provided she receive the left-ward position, which is considered optimum. Eldridge and March agreed.
Wilder’s sister Isabel was going to be his eyes and ears at rehearsals.
Tallulah had “a rather maternal approach to me,” she recalled in 1992.
“ ‘Little Isabel,’ I was called, and she was going to make fun for little Isabel and do this and that. She seemed to think I needed to be given treats and things.” Was she putting on a show for her? Isabel wondered. Was she trying “to be a great lady and take me into society?” It seemed to Isabel as though Tallulah were constructing a definite characterization on her behalf.
“I’ve never had the experience before of someone who felt that she had to take over, that ‘little Isabel’ needed looking after. I was a very quiet, I would say modest, person. On the other hand I had to perform pretty big things. I never thought that I was important in the sense of showing off, but I was important as the job I had of being Thornton’s sister.”
Isabel’s life was very much spent in her brother’s shadow, not due to a lack of her own ability—in 1928, she had received a master’s in playwriting at the Yale Drama School—and perhaps not without some resentment on her part. Isabel never married, and she claimed to Wilder’s biographer Richard Goldstone that her brother had sabotaged her relationship with the one serious beau she’d entertained as a young woman.
Tallulah told Cole, whom she had installed as assistant stage manager, that she wanted to make clear the differences in each manifestation of the eternal seductress/muse she impersonated. Despite the havoc that Lily Sabina threatens to wreak throughout the play, Tallulah was determined that the audience would find her in the end sympathetic. In the third act, Wilder had given her some of the most somber and poignant reflections in the play, and there were tears in the audience when Tallulah spoke them.
Mrs. Antrobus, too, offered both riotous and somber opportunities. Eldridge was an excellent dramatic actress, but was not the comedienne Tallulah was. Cole felt that Mrs. Antrobus was the part Hayes should have been playing, and she did just that, twelve years later, in a revival produced by Robert Whitehead. Whitehead recalled in 1993 that Hayes’s performance demonstrated to him how much “mileage” the original production had “lost” with Eldridge. Hayes mined the role for laughs that Eldridge had never uncovered.
Tallulah quickly found Eldridge odious. Kazan writes in his 1988memoirs, A Life, that Eldridge was “the perfect patsy for Tallulah,” thanks to Eldridge’s “rather artificial manners, society laugh, and inflated big-star posture.” Kazan found her a “decent, honest, sincere, reliable woman, but how tedious those virtues can become when they’re not leavened by doubt, self-deprecation, and openheartedness.”
Eldridge warned Kazan repeatedly to be on his guard against “that bitch,” and during rehearsals asked him on a nearly daily basis, “When are you going to do something about Tallulah?” Kazan felt she was terrified about sharing the stage with Tallulah, but says he “couldn’t help . . . liking”Tallulah’s work at rehearsals.
Yet Tallulah was the epitome of everything Kazan, born in 1909 to traditional Turkish parents, had been taught to revile in a woman. Lee J. Cobb said that Kazan “was always trying to get somewhere, and it seemed to many of us in the Group that he would do anything, really, anything to get there.” But Tallulah’s drive to dominate was as strong as his. “They were beyond stubborn and each had to be on top,” Isabel Wilder said.
A lifelong resident of New Haven, Isabel had known Kazan when he attended the Yale Drama School for two years in the early 1930s. As a director, Kazan seemed promising, she recalled, but was untried, and no one knew he had as much talent as his subsequent career demonstrated. She was bewildered when he was hired and attributed it to the producers’ concern for the bottom line; Kazan would not be expensive. “He did a very good job for such a young man but he was too new to have such a big show.” She described him as “crude and cocky, a young man who didn’t know how to conduct himself. He didn’t take anything from anybody, and he was horrid to Tallulah.” There was a chemical animosity between them:
“She didn’t go out to provoke him. Just the way she was provoked him. He hated her.”
Kazan’s account of The Skin of Our Teeth in interviews over the years and in A Life has been accepted unconditionally, in part because Tallulah has become a reductive caricature in the public eye, and in part because the public has usually been willing to accept the word of aggressive, celebrated men over that of aggressive, celebrated women. But Kazan’s book and his account of Tallulah veritably glow with the strong streak of macho posturing and even misogyny that was prevalent among many of the mach-ers of the Group Theatre and the Method.
The actresses they seem to have valued most were those who projected helplessness, like Marilyn Monroe, or who were dedicated to the point of masochism, like Vivien Leigh, of whom Kazan writes approvingly that she would have “crawled over broken glass if she thought it would help her performance” in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Reviewers of A Life largely ignored the way Tallulah assumes in his recollection an allegorical importance within a larger sexual-psychic dynamic.
But Eric Bentley, reviewing Kazan’s A Life in The Nation, was disturbed by Kazan’s insistence that the only two people in his life he’d ever hated were Tallulah and Lillian Hellman. Bentley identified the way Kazan opposed these two putative harridans with a flock of female angels, principally his first wife, who suffered through his numerous infidelities and died young of a stroke.
Oddly, despite the doorstopper size of his memoirs, Kazan says not a word
in A Life about The Strings, My Lord, Are False, which he had directed on Broadway six months before The Skin of Our Teeth. It is as if he has nominated The Skin of Our Teeth to absorb a collective burden of maturation and experience. But this play, too, seems to have been difficult for him. Cast member Joan Shepard, who later played Tallulah’s daughter in Philip Barry’s Foolish Notion, remembered that “he was terribly at sea.”
During previews in New York, one of the producers, Alexander Kirkland, came to Shepard’s dressing room and enjoined her, “Don’t pay any attention to anything that Mr. Kazan says to you.”
After Kazan was hired for The Skin of Our Teeth, Ruth Gordon, who had starred in The Strings, My Lord, Are False, wrote Wilder that Kazan did not have what was necessary to direct his play. She reminded Wilder that he himself had said that the great Jed Harris—who also happened to be her boyfriend—was the only suitable candidate. In his memoirs, Kazan admits that he was surprised he’d been chosen.
Cole saw Kazan’s relationship with Tallulah differently. “They weren’t the greatest pals in the world,” he said, “but in the theater they got along beautifully. There may have been one or two blowups if something didn’t go well, but she thought he was a wonderful director.” And Cole agreed with her: “Gadge [short for “Gadget,” Kazan’s nickname]knew exactly—he’d done all his homework.”
“It was a collaborative effort,” said Frances Heflin, who was cast as the Antrobuses’ daughter Gladys. “There were certain scenes with Freddy March where they didn’t quite agree,” she recalled in 1983. “It didn’t involve me, but Gadge prevailed. If he thought Tallulah was right he gave in.They always seemed in total agreement about her playing.”
Kazan reports that on occasion Tallulah would simply walk out of rehearsals after a dispute, and on Myerberg’s instructions, he would substitute her understudy. Tallulah’s contract stipulated, however, that she would not have an understudy. Myerberg, however, had chosen Eve Scott, a twenty-year-old second-generation Slovakian who had a walk-on in the second act, and appointed her to be just that. Myerberg was reportedly sleeping with her at the time; a couple of years later she went to Hollywood and won fame as Lizabeth Scott.
Isabel Wilder had expected from the first that Tallulah would be trouble. “Great actresses always manage the whole show; that’s what a star is.”
At one time or another, Wilder recalled, Tallulah “tried to have everybody fired. She tried to run everything. It wasn’t nastiness, it was just the way she lived.” They, too, had their disagreements. “I didn’t fight with her out-right. But when she came to a rehearsal and suddenly began to do it another way, or decided she thought they ought to come in the other door, I was going to get up there in time to hold her down.”
But Isabel said that neither Myerberg nor Kazan was sufficiently prepared for the challenge of The Skin of Our Teeth, and that without Tallulah the show would never have reached New York. “She knew what she was doing. She was brighter than any of them. Things that weren’t going right in the play she knew long before anybody else did.”
The Skin of Our Teeth was to receive its world premiere in New Haven on October 15, 1942. As the show prepared to ship out of New York,
“Everybody was getting along quite splendidly,” Heflin recalled. “Tallulah was a terrible hypochondriac, as were all the actors in the show. Tallulah, Freddy, and Florence got together and decided who would find the various doctors in every town for the various ailments they might have: throat doctor, internist, chiropractor, masseuse.” Despite the apparent camaraderie, however, tensions escalated.
It was in New Haven, Kazan recounted, that Tallulah “made a director of me,” by provoking him to take off the gloves. He describes her complaining bitterly about the set all through the dress rehearsal. When it was over at 3:00 A.M., Tallulah was leaving the theater, saw Kazan, and “was on me like a tiger, cursing me at the top of her voice for not standing by her”objections to the set. Kazan replied by telling her “at the top of my voice and in the crudest language how shamefully she’d behaved. I told her that I despised her and that everybody else did, too.”
In Kazan’s telling, the event reads as a tribal initiation rite, right down to an enveloping circle of approval-conferring mullahs, personified by the stage crew. He screamed Tallulah out of the theater and then, he recalls, “I walked into the center of that circle and looked at them all, acknowledging their endorsement. I’d made the grade.”
“It was a terrifying part in the beginning,” Tallulah recalled in 1963, “because I had to talk to the audience, and I’d never done such a thing; it was like being in vaudeville.” She was disconcerted when her fellow cast members had stopped laughing at her asides after the first days of rehearsals. “I got a bleak feeling in my heart that I was very unfunny,” she later recalled.
Wilder had written her: “It’s necessary for the play that each of your changes of mood and especially the ‘break-throughs’ to the audience come with such spontaneous inner reality that they don’t seem to the audience to be author’s contrivances, but pure SABINA-NATURE. . . .”
Audience asides like these are taboo in the naturalistic aesthetic, where the “fourth wall” separating audience from actors is inviolate, but they have a hallowed place in theatrical tradition. “It’s really the old Chinese technique,” Tallulah recalled in 1949. Sharing with the audience the illusion-making infrastructure of the play is a staple of Eastern theater, which doesn’t adhere to the same need to convince an audience to part with its disbelief. Wilder had adopted the same practice in Our Town four years earlier.
In Elizabethan, Restoration, and Romantic-era European drama, an actor often delivered asides to the audience in the guise of the character he or she was playing. In the twentieth century playwrights began exploring the technique of allowing the actor to simulate the intrusion of his own
“self” into a parallel relationship with the character being enacted. This was a technique, as Tallulah noted, commonly employed in popular entertainment, music halls, and vaudeville. The most simple and direct means of communicating to the audience was also, at this point on Broadway, the most esoteric.
“It was a novel thing to an American audience, who’s used to a certain tradition,” Tallulah recalled in 1949. She found that some of her most recep-
tive audiences were servicemen from the American hinterland, many of whom had never seen a play before. “To them, who weren’t cluttered up with conventions of the theater, they loved it because it wasn’t unusual to them.”
Tallulah opened the play alone, with a monologue, addressing the audience for perhaps as long, she recalled in 1949, as ten minutes, but “it may not have been ten minutes, it may have been six, you know a minute in the theater is longer than when an egg is boiling. Every night, until that went well, I couldn’t quite relax because it was such a new experience for me.”
Before the curtain went up, she mouthed the words to herself and vented some panic on Rose Riley, her theater maid. “She’d start shrieking to Rose, ‘Get me this, get me that,’ ” Heflin recalled. “She didn’t have the right bag, the stockings were hooked wrong, everything was wrong, it was going to be terrible, and it was all Rose’s fault!”
“Shut up, Tallulah,” Riley would say, standing by quietly. “Ssshhh . . .Behave yourself. . . . All right, Tallulah, you know if you keep on going like this you’re going to wet your pants, and I’ll have to change them for you.”
The Skin of Our Teeth endured a rocky out-of-town reception. At the fall of the first-act curtain, audience members heckled up at the stage,
“What’s this all about? Give me my money back!” During one performance out of town, “We went up for the second act and most people had left,” remembered Dick Van Patten who played a telegraph boy. Tallulah was un-fazed, hurling newspapers bearing negative reviews across the room: “They don’t know what they’re seeing! They don’t realize!” But there were mutinous feelings among the rank-and-file actors, who were “all moaning
and saying that this is a turkey,” Van Patten recalled, wondering how they’d gotten into this mess and if Myerberg didn’t realize what a fiasco it was. “Eight out of ten agreed with the critics.”
“They were all guilty,” Isabel Wilder said about the star egos flaring across The Skin of Our Teeth, “especially Myerberg. I disliked him thoroughly.” She objected to liberties he tried to take, including surreptitious attempts to alter the script. “He was a novice taking on this big thing, and so all the time he was shaking, shaking, shaking, and making quarrels, quarrels, quarrels.”
“I don’t know how many rules he broke,” Heflin said, “but they were sufficient to cause arbitration before Equity. We all testified against Myerberg—to a man.”
In Baltimore, Tallulah sent Kazan a letter: “Gadget! It is 4 A.M. I have been awakened from my troubled sleep like from a nightmare. . . .” She complained that March and Eldridge were “passionless and conventional and have given up the ghost.” Kazan says he was “shocked for the first time into some kind of respect for Bankhead.” It was only then that he realized“that she did care passionately about the play.”
From Baltimore on October 18, Tallulah cabled Wilder that“THE TWO FLORENCES FREDDIE KAZAN AND I ARE ALL IN TUNE LOVING EACH OTHER AND THE PLAY,”but Myerberg was“BEHAVING LIKE A MADMAN.”
They had arrived in Baltimore cheered by a bonanza advance sale, but bad notices dampened the grosses. Myerberg, who had put up 70 percent of the backing himself, was now trying to cut costs every way he could. He fired three actors playing small parts. Tallulah implored Wilder, who was now stationed in Hamilton Field, California, to come to Baltimore to mediate. She knew that such a request would not be looked upon kindly by his military superiors.“BUT YOUR PLAY IS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN THE WAR EFFORT.”She quoted from a speech by Mr. Antrobus in act 3:“I KNOW THAT EVERY GOOD AND EXCELLENT THING IN THE WORLD STANDS MOMENT BY MOMENT ON THE RAZOR EDGEOF DANGER AND MUST BE FOUGHT FOR WHETHER IT’S A FIELD OR A HOME OR A COUNTRY,”and added—“OR A PLAY.”
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