SUNDAY, JULY 31: Wonderful day of rest. I sit in the garden and read Jung, putter with flowers and invite my soul. In the evening, play Glenn Gould records and chat. A day like this takes the ache out of weeks of fidget. I am at the time of life when, as Jung says, I must meet my “opposites” but I must not be superficial in identifying them, if I am to do this alone.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 13: Only to note that David Hays is to be the designer, and I have sent him two colour slides of the Kingston skyline. The title is now Love and Libel, which I do not like, but the Guild and Tony like it greatly.
Rob and Brenda went for a holiday in Arlington, Vermont, as Lulie Westfeldt, their Alexander teacher, was at her country home near there and had invited them for a week of lessons.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 14: Away at 10 and drive to Ivy Lea Bridge at 1. Wonderful drive through the Adirondacks, renew knowledge of the dinginess of Tupper Lake, stop at Saranac, and have a good dinner at a German restaurant. First holiday in some time, for last year’s was demanding work, though delightful. I do not like vacations alone: hope for real rest this week before the autumn change of gears.
MONDAY, AUGUST 15: Away by 9, in rain, wonderful mountain scenery. See Fort Ticonderoga, a good reconstruction, and to Arlington about 3; rest, and to Lulie at 4:30 for a good lesson. We both respond at once to her ministrations. Staying at the Candlelight Motel.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, ARLINGTON: Lesson in a.m.; dizziness improves. Picnic again, read, and walk. In the evening to drive-in movie theatre at Bennington, my first, and see two good films, but four and a half hours long! It is Arthur’s fifty-seventh birthday and I wire him from a Western Union branch in a funeral home!
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, ARLINGTON: H.t.d. on waking. Leave at 10 and drive through mountains, picnic lunch, cross Ivy Lea Bridge, and home in heavy rain at 6:15. Many messages and news await us. First true holiday in some time and greatly refreshing, marred only by dizziness which I think is sun. An admirable week’s work with Lulie Westfeldt and my spirit and body are really refreshed; now—to hold on to some of that!
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24: Alexander Technique makes me less mealy-mouthed: yesterday I clouted a boy in the street who jeered at me; today I blew up a Moral Re-Armament pest. Gordon Roper comes to dinner and outlines my Trinity work, which sounds fascinating: look forward to being a don.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 28: I am forty-seven. I was given a handsome attaché case from Brenda, and an Edwin Booth playbill; a nightshirt from Mrs. Newbold and bottle of rum from Miranda and Rosamond. We had a fine picnic at the cottage, a special dinner in the evening, and then to the film Oliver Twist. A happy day. Nearing fifty and not a bad record, but Love and Libel is a break into a larger world and I hope Voice may gain some reputation. I am no genius, but I think I am better than I have yet been esteemed.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6: Tom Patterson writes that Canadian Theatre Exchange Ltd. are co-producing Love and Libel. This seems to mean they are trying to raise some of the money. May he approach WRD? I say no.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11: I dream (in colour) that I return to Oxford. It is all very delightful, and I can smell it. But a fine set of rooms has been assigned to me, and then taken from me by the porter, and I have to arrange to have all my things taken to an inferior set, and no one will help me. I am having oppressive, apprehensive dreams of late. Am also melancholy at the end of summer, and the girls going away. The gnawing beast of Angst is never appeased: hope this fit will soon pass.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19: To Toronto to see Tony, who has cast Love and Libel, all but Pearl and Molly. He hopes Charmion King may change from Kitten to the latter. We see Corinne Conley for the former, at a coffee shop on College Street, where she and Tony become matey over coffee and toasted Danish. I think she would do very well. Also saw designs for the front-curtain and the drop, both much to my taste, and very stylish and up-to-the-minute. Tony’s description of his plan of production is exciting—the sort of complexity within simplicity in which he excels. He suggests some further touching up of the script to which I agree; I am getting a strong taste for tinkering: it will bring up the theme of provincialism.
By this time the play had been cast.
Corinne Conley Pearl Vambrace
John Milligan Solomon Bridgetower
Laurence Hardy Professor Vambrace
Madeleine Christie Mrs. Louisa Hansen Bridgetower
Robert Christie Gloster Ridley
Dennis King Humphrey Cobbler
Charmion King Molly Cobbler
Gene Saks Norman Yarrow
Roberta Kinnon Dutchy Yarrow
James Edmond Dean Jevon Knapp
Amelia Hall Edith Little
Barbara Hamilton Kitten Morphew
Leo Leyden Bevill Higgin
Bruce Swerdfager George Morphew
Tony van Bridge Swithin Shillito
Grania Mortimer Townspeople of Salterton
Edward K. Holmes
Cynthia Bebout
Kay Hawtrey
Ken Pauli
Paul Robin
David Hays Scenic and Lighting Design
Grania Mortimer Prompter, Production Assistant
John Cook Musical Advisor
Marie Day Costume Design
Jack Hutt Stage Manager
Nat Dorfman General Press Representative
Irvin Dorfman Press Representative
Lee Martinec Business Manager
Jack Merigold Assistant to Tyrone Guthrie
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22: Revised a love-scene, wrote a new scene for Cobbler and Mrs. Bridgetower, and revamped the last scene. A full day and kept me at it till 9:30. Brenda is unwell, and missing Rosamond. I heard Rossini’s The Turk in Italy. Did all this and had plenty of energy: Alexander Technique, diet, or both?
SATURDAY TO MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24–26: The Guthries spend the weekend with us. Tony is pleased with my new scene in the cathedral, which enlarges Cobbler’s part, and my tightened and heightened last act. We read the play Saturday night and I read Mrs. Bridgetower rather well, and was amazed how good the Yarrow-Vambrace scene is. (In the night I dream my mother comes to strangle me—what of that?) Corinne Conley is not in the bag—haggling about money: she wants $500, the Guild came up from $200 to $300. Tony says the Guild are very mean about paying the actors. He also warns me of the distress of the pre–New York tour, but is realistic and says the tinkering not always the author’s, but the director’s. On Monday the Guild’s notion of a poster comes—a winking Cupid bearing a newspaper clipping, done in whorehouse pink. We agree that I shall return it with a polite but firm refusal to allow it, and this I do in the afternoon. I have a fit of revulsion against the title and suggest Ill Wind, which Tony likes, but later I have cold feet: it sounds unlucky, and Willis Wing says it doesn’t sound like a play people go easily to see. Miranda now accepted for next season at Stratford.29
TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27–28: Willis Wing says there is “great pride of authorship” at the Guild about the name Love and Libel. How people love the names they concoct! Tony phones to suggest Social and Personal, The Engagement Is Announced, Joking Apart, Sweet Bells Jangled, Tangled Web, Kettle of Fish, Solly and Pearl, or The Organ Voluntary, A Biter Bit, or She Who Laughs Last—all of which fill me with dismay. When, in turn, I suggest Love Is Libel he is cold toward it, and is right, I now think.
On September 28, Davies began his classes at Trinity College with one on the nature of tragedy. He continued to lecture twice a week until the production of Love and Libel left Toronto for Detroit. This in addition to his Star column, the Examiner, and the continual revising of the play.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29: John Cook phones to ask me where to find the music used in the play, which I would have thought he would have known. Am astonished at the amount of music very able musicians do not know.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30: Busy day but enjoyable: write editorials in the morning and in the afternoon a Star column on The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth. In the evening read La Belle Bête by
Marie-Claire Blais and think it extraordinary to make such a fuss about it. Then read Shaw’s Man and Superman. It is read, read, all the time, but a pleasant change.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1: Brenda and I motored to Toronto for the great opening of the O’Keefe Centre with the Loewe and Lerner musical Camelot. An audience of thirty-two hundred, of whom not more than fifty on the ground floor were not in evening dress. The lieutenant governor was there, so we had six bars of “The Queen” and the whole of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” that pompous, windy tune. Moss Hart, the director, appeared to warn us that it would be long, and it was—8:40 to 12:25. The piece is said to be founded on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, but all his wit, fantasy, knowledge of chivalry, and love of Malory were missing. Instead, American “manlydom,” mockery of Lancelot (Robert Goulet) for his purity, and a prissy Guenevere (Julie Andrews) and an Arthur who is an idealistic cuckold (Richard Burton). Tons of handsome, rather too garish scenery by Oliver Smith, and costumes which, rich as they were, did not suggest anything. Everything heavy, slow-moving, and repetitious; Hart’s production uninventive. Music commonplace: not one tune remains. Must see this in New York to see what changes have been made. But where is Malory? Where is White? Is the Arthurian legend impossible on stage? Shakespeare would have given us an Othello on this theme—Arthur’s love for Lancelot at war with his love for Guenevere. This could still be done, by a master. As it was, we got Arthur being shy with Guenevere and left at the end with a small boy—Tom Malory. Unintentional but symptomatic of what was wrong with this costly, vulgar, wrong-headed piece.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2: We drove home to Peterborough after the show finished at 12:25, which was a mistake, and we arrived very weary. Woke at 11:30 feeling rotten and with swollen gum; lay about all day, wrote a notice of Camelot for the Examiner,30 read some Malory to sweeten my imagination, and listened to music. Have not been so low in a long time.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9: To Toronto on the 8 a.m. ’bus and take up flat at 88 Charles Street.31 Thus begins a new phase in my life: truly professional theatre writing. Whatever the upshot it is exciting now and immensely educative.
Tony has already put a shape on Act I, but thinks the play should be in three acts instead of two. What interests me is the way in which a good actor can convey two or three lines of text with a look, making a cut possible. Not cutting amusing or characteristic lines, but simply those which say what is better acted. Dennis King as Cobbler resists cuts, the others not. Too early to say who is good and who is not, but Charmion King as Molly Cobbler is disappointing—edgy and small.
After rehearsal Tony and I returned to his flat and made some cuts; I am not at all difficult about this, and indeed I see their great value; my good lines are closer together when the unwanted ones are taken out.
Tony rates me for my notice in the Examiner of Camelot. It was useless to say that the Examiner is not the paper in which to launch crusades against New York theatre customs.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 10, TORONTO, THANKSGIVING DAY: Rehearse at 10. Tony has now covered the whole play except for Yarrow’s scenes, a remarkable feat of drive. Dennis King fussed and sulked because he has so little in the last scene and Tony was very firm with him. King gave me a great tale about what would be expected of him in New York, and asked for five good jokes, but I shall do nothing without Tony’s express command. The rest of the cast behave in exemplary fashion and some of them—Laurence Hardy, Leo Leyden, Barbara Hamilton—begin to give a taste of their quality. I like Laurence Hardy, a fellow enthusiast for the Italic hand. We do some cutting and I am delighted with the way the company seem to like the play and abandon themselves to its spirit. A business manager, Lee Martinec, arrives from New York.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, TORONTO: Rehearse at 10 a.m. Tony has so quickly laid out the play in rough that already we reach that dull stage where the actors are trying to do without their books, which means that for my carefully composed lines they substitute vulgarities and illiteracies of their own, especially John Milligan and Corinne Conley, who think their native wood-notes32 the normal speech of educated Canadians. Grania Mortimer, who is on the book, is a first-rate prompter and checks this sharply, so I have hopes of a decent text in the end. Dennis King in a much more accommodating mood today.
Lunch at the Club and to Trinity and give a lecture on Dryden and Restoration tragedy. I did well, I think. Then to the flat and work on lectures for Wednesday and Thursday, then sleep. We dine at La Chaumière restaurant and go to a silly film, School for Scoundrels.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12, TORONTO: Several of the actors want to tinker their parts—not seriously, only what Tony calls “tucks” and “tuckettes,” and in general the effect is good. But Dennis King hounds me for new material, a speech to the young people at the end, all to enhance the wonderful character I have created: insists he is quite selfless in this. I weary of him. He cannot sing “The Light of the Moon,” as I thought might be the case, but I think “The Magpie’s Nest” may serve. Tony Guthrie at the dentist’s this afternoon, and I had to cope with Ernest Rawley,33 Irvin Dorfman, the Guild’s publicity man, and a reporter and photographer from the Star—the latter seeking that dreary jejune shot, me “looking over” the script. How barren of fancy most journalists are! More bustle and nervous excitement today than before.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, TORONTO: Morning rehearsal complicated by photographers and Irvin Dorfman, who wants me to go on the air with Nathan Cohen.34 At first I refuse, then agree, as it is foolish to harbour so much animosity against a critic, fat, pretentious cad though he be. Dennis King nags on about the finale, and Brenda says this is pitiful, but I do not pity him; such naked egotism repels me. This is what the stage can do to a man if he lets it. We brought Madeleine Christie and Laurence Hardy home to the flat in our car, and they were laughing at Dennis King’s foolishness. Tonight worked on rewriting, fattening King’s part and (more fun) fattening Tony van Bridge’s part as Shillito. The Guthries came in to see what I had done, and liked it. Tony says he thinks the verse chorus must go, and I agree, for though good in itself, it is somewhat outside the play. The worry is that Charmion King is not good, and I ask Tony, very seriously, to have a talk with her, as I am sure she can do better. Rob Christie as Gloster Ridley is very nervous and Tony bullies him.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, TORONTO: Equity says if we have a choirboy record nine bars of “Hear My Prayer” the boy must become an Equity member, and must have two and a half weeks’ salary for recording, and $10 a week for the run—about $500 altogether. So it looks as if Madeleine Christie would tape it, faking the voice. Cast paid today; I get nothing but of course when the run begins I get royalties and $30 per diem living costs on tour, and transportation. We do a lot of cutting as Tony wants fifteen minutes out of the script, and I write a folk song lyric of a mildly scurrilous sort for the first cathedral scene. The actors like the play, or it may be they merely like Tony’s direction, but in any case rehearsals go spankingly. I am impressed by the way in which some slow starters, like Leo Leyden and John Milligan, show worth now.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, TORONTO: Arrive at rehearsal to be greeted by Tony with the news that he had had “great weeps” from Dennis King about his part, and he wants the finale rewritten to give him an “entrance.” This makes me angry, but he is a good comic, and the star (though not so noticeably as he probably thinks), so I shall do it, though I pretty well dislike him as a person, dyed hair and all. John Cook comes and rehearses the music, making splendid difference to the singing. Further (a triumph for me), he introduces the jive element into it I had wanted and Tony shrank from, and now Tony loves it. I must busy myself on Sunday reshaping the finale. The interview with me in the Star contains much, in direct quotation marks, that I have never said or written, and says my library is forty thousand books!35 I know why people hate newspapers. Made an estimate of the running-time: 131 minutes plus two intervals = 151 minutes—as Tony says, “square on the pig’s back,” the result of early cutting.
SU
NDAY, OCTOBER 16, TORONTO: Work from 3 p.m. to 11, with an hour for tea, completely reshaping finale, with an “entrance” for Dennis King, and some rather good stuff for the others. But I resent this, for I sense Tony will want to mess it about, and King will not be satisfied unless everything centres upon him. Why can’t I have my way? The answer is plain: Tony has “the weight” and King shameless sulks: but I shall dig in my heels tomorrow.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 17, TORONTO: Gene Saks arrives this morning to play Yarrow, which he will obviously do very well. A witty, subtle actor and he makes Yarrow’s folly most engaging. In the afternoon, we rehearse and tape music at St. Paul’s. John Cook again shows great command, but Dennis King cannot do quite simple things, though he worked for years on the musical stage. It emerges that Lee Martinec worked to be an orchestral conductor and enjoyed the music greatly; he talks enthusiastically of the effect of the organ music in a theatre. Madeleine Christie records the choirboy sequences very well, for which she is to have an extra $10 weekly. Then Tony returns to our flat and we discuss the new finale. As I foresaw, he cut two of my best jokes, but liked it on the whole, and says Dennis King must accept this or quit, and we agree that in the latter event Rob Christie could make a good fist of Cobbler. Says also that we shall have a good notion after the first night whether the piece is likely to do in New York or not—a fearsome thought.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, TORONTO: Tony had a bad night with his teeth. Today some signs of acting together began to appear, which is very helpful to such as Charmion King and Jim Edmond, whose parts do not stand alone. The love-scenes—at which Tony works very hard, to my surprise—are coming nicely. He says he does not much like Dennis King—thinks him a nuisance and no “draw”—but he likes King’s rather Old Actor effects. Some of these began to show today through the snorting, harrumphing, gobbling, and snarling at the prompter. I am sticky about one or two minor changes Tony wants, which I do not think good for the play, but work this evening on a new end for the first Morphew scene, which now concludes Act 1.
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