by Lillian Ross
1949
ON FIRE — Lillian Ross
JOSHUA LOGAN, co-author, co-producer, and director of “South Pacific,” was busy last week, but we contrived to get a double handful of superficial data on him by wangling an invitation to sit in one of his two aisle seats during the first act of Wednesday evening’s preview, the audience for which seemed to be made up mostly of war veterans and friends of the cast. He’s a big man, with big, sad eyes and a ragged mustache, and when we sat down, he said despondently, “I never saw Dick Rodgers so happy. I hope I remember to breathe tonight. I’m always forgetting to breathe on a night like this. Other times, too. Oscar Hammerstein had to keep reminding me to breathe when we were writing the show. I took a Dictaphone to his place in Bucks County, and with that we were able to replay the lines and act them out. A great help. But every so often Oscar would see me going purple from lack of breath and have to drag me back to life.” Logan jumped up from his seat, stared wildly behind him, punched himself in the small of his back, and told us that he had suddenly developed a crick there. He then sat down, holding his head in his hands. “Fifteen minutes to go,” he said, and drew a really deep breath.
We managed to take Logan’s mind off the show by posing a few questions, beginning with a query as to where he was born. “In Texarkana,” he said, slowly and reluctantly exhaling. “On the Texas, or paved, side of the street. In 1908, that was. My father died when I was three.” In 1917, Logan’s mother married an Army colonel. “A Yankee,” Logan said, raising his head, frowning at the stage, and sinking low in his seat. “He taught at Culver Military Academy, so I went to Culver for five years. I was a fat little kid, but I marched, boxed, played football, wrote for the magazine, and got into dramatics. I hated Culver while I was there—all that discipline. But I liked Culver the moment I left it.” Logan entered Princeton in 1927. In his senior year there, he was elected president of the Triangle Club. Two other members of the Triangle that year were James Stewart and Myron McCormick, who is in the “South Pacific” cast. Logan won a scholarship entitling him to broaden his outlook by travel, and chose to go to Russia and study at the Moscow Art Theatre. He arranged with Princeton to leave before commencement and come back and graduate later. He never has gone through that formality. “In Moscow,” Logan said, “I listened to Stanislavski—for my benefit, he repeated everything in French—for six months. I owe a good deal of what I’ve done in ‘South Pacific’ to Stanislavski. I saw him make singers sing as actors, and I saw him use the orchestra to suggest the emotion of a scene. Until then, all I’d ever seen in opera were dull, flabby people whose dramatic expression signified only that they thought their own voices were beautiful. I watched a man in ‘Boris Godunov’ sing while jumping backward over a bed. I was twenty-one then. My God! It set me on fire!”
On returning from Russia, Logan joined the University Players, a group that hoped to be the Moscow Art Theatre of America. “We went broke and disbanded in ’33,” he told us. “After that, I tried a lot of things, including summer theatre and directing a couple of Triangle shows.” He went to Hollywood for a term, formed a close friendship with Charles Boyer, developed a powerful physique, came back East, and in 1938 directed his first hit, “On Borrowed Time.” Two weeks after it opened, Dwight Wiman commissioned him to direct “I Married an Angel,” and that, too, was successful. “Things had changed very fast for me,” he said. “I suddenly had two hits. So I got on a boat and went down to South America for nine months, sailed all around the continent, and learned Spanish.” He had just finished directing “By Jupiter,” in 1942, when he was drafted into the Army. A week later, he was assigned to help direct “This Is the Army.” After that, he tried to get into combat photography. In this, as in practically everything else, Logan and the Army failed to see eye to eye. At one point, finding himself about to become an A.A.F. mechanic, he applied for Officer Candidate School and was rejected, on the ground that his I.Q. was too low. When he took his intelligence test, he didn’t realize that a time limit was involved. He managed to get tested again and got a high score. By V-E Day, he was a captain in the A.A.F., assigned to the 405th Fighter Group as public-relations and intelligence officer. “I like to think that ‘Mister Roberts’ and ‘South Pacific’ are my way of getting even with the Army,” Logan said. “High Army, I mean. I liked those crazy kids. I kept my ears open all the time and they gave me some wonderful lines.”
Throughout the act, we jumped up when Logan jumped up, and we reminded him to breathe from time to time. “I always try to feel like the audience,” he told us in a loud whisper, “but I’m so conscious of the audience that I distract it. I make everyone within fifteen feet of me conscious only of me.” After the first-act curtain, we followed Logan into the lobby, where he tapped a man on the shoulder. The man leaped straight into the air.
“Leland Hayward,” Logan said. “He’s nervous.”
“I thought you were Jake Shubert,” Hayward said.
We were joined by Richard Rodgers, who was carrying a small notebook. “Josh,” he said, “Jake Shubert says it’s bringing tears to his eyes.”
“Tell Oscar,” said Logan.
“Oscar told me,” Rodgers said. “Listen, Josh, I’m worried about the way our ocean looks.”
“Dick,” Logan said, “have you noticed that the audience is suppressing coughs?”
“They’re hypnotized,” Hayward said, “truly hypnotized.”
“We’ve got to get the wrinkles out of that ocean,” Rodgers said, studying his notebook.
Oscar Hammerstein appeared and said, “Jake Shubert’s laughing.”
“I don’t dare trust my own senses,” Logan said. He took a deep breath and held it, his face slowly darkening.
1949
1950s
SUCCESS — Rex Lardner
ON learning that Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ second baseman, is spending Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings each week as a television-set salesman in the Sunset Appliance Store in Rego Park, Queens, we hurried over to the place to see how he is making out. From a talk we had with Joseph Rudnick, president of Sunset, just before Robinson appeared, we learned that he is making out fine. Rudnick, a small, alert-looking man, graying at the temples, whom we found in an office on a balcony at the rear of the store, informed us that the accomplished young man had been working there, on a salary-and-commission basis, for five weeks, and that if he liked, he could work there forever, the year around. “Business booming like wildfire since Jackie came,” Rudnick told us, looking down at a throng milling about among television sets, washing machines, and refrigerators. “Sports fans flocking in here,” he said with satisfaction. “Young persons, curious about the National League’s Most Valuable Player and one of the best base-stealers since Max Carey. Jackie signs baseballs for them and explains about the double steal. Since he’s been here, he’s sold sets to Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, among others. The newsreel people shot him selling a set to a customer. He’s a natural salesman, with a natural modesty that appeals to buyers. The salesman wrapped up in himself makes a very small package. Campanella, Hodges, and Barney dropped by to wish him luck. Campanella’s his roomy. There’s Jackie now! With his business agent.” Robinson and a bigger, more strapping man with a florid face were making their way along the floor, the big man in the lead. “He’ll be right up,” Rudnick said. “Hangs his coat here. One other thing we do,” he went on, “when a bar buys a television set, we send Gene Stanlee over to the bar—the wrestler. Mr. America.”
Robinson and his manager for radio and television appearances came up, and we were introduced, learning that the latter’s name is Harry Solow. “Jackie don’t have to lay awake nights worrying about his condition, bucking that mob three times a week,” Solow said. Rudnick told us that Solow also manages Joe Franklin and Symphony Sid, and Solow explained that they are radio personalities. “Jackie’s all lined up for his own radio program,” he continued. “He’s mostly interested in boys’ work, though.
Spends all his spare time at the Harlem Y.M.C.A.” “How I keep in shape is playing games with kids,” Robinson said in a well-modulated voice. “When I quit baseball, I intend to give it full time.” We learned that the Robinsons have a television set with a sixteen-inch screen and that their only child, three-year-old Jackie, Jr., likes Howdy Doody, Mr. I. Magination, and Farmer Gray better than anything else on video. As Robinson was about to go down to the main floor, it occurred to us to ask him if he’d developed any special sales technique. He looked surprised and replied that he didn’t think so. “If a customer is going to buy a set, he’s going to buy it,” he said philosophically. “You can’t twist his arm.” “On the other hand,” Rudnick observed, “the right angle for a salesman is the try-angle.”
We bade Rudnick and Solow good-bye and followed Robinson downstairs. A short man in a heavy overcoat got him first. He wanted to see a twelve-inch set. “There’s a bunch of them in the basement,” Robinson told him. “All playing at once.” He led the man down to the basement. We followed. It was quite dark there, but we could make out rows and rows of sets and see customers being herded from one model to another by spirited salesmen. Robinson conducted his man to a twelve-inch set, turned it on, adjusted the picture, and in rather a shout, to get his voice above the hubbub of the amplifiers, named the price and outlined the guarantee. “I like it!” the man hollered. “Could my wife work it— all those knobs?” “A child could work it,” said Robinson, and it was a deal.
1950
ELIOT AND GUINNESS — John McCarten
WE’VE had a talk with Alec Guinness, the mystical psychiatrist in “The Cocktail Party,” and, being one of those who had an occasional feeling during the performance of the play that they couldn’t exactly put their finger on what T. S. Eliot was getting at, asked him for enlightenment. “I’m only an actor, for God’s sake,” said Mr. Guinness, “and hardly up to interpreting a man like Eliot, but I can tell you what he said. He said those scenes mean whatever they mean to you.” So that’s that.
We switched topics, taking up Mr. Guinness himself, who is in the opinion of more than one critic on each side of the Atlantic the greatest actor on earth. Mr. Guinness is thirty-five, middle-sized, bald, slightly prognathic, rather shy, completely ingratiating, completely unrelated to the brewers of stout, and much impressed by Mr. Eliot’s approach to the theatre. “After all,” he said, “Eliot had done only two other plays, but he had a tremendously professional attitude. If one suggested that two or three lines might help things along here and there, he set to writing them straightway. No niggling, in the fashion of a lesser man. And he was equally helpful in blue-penciling passages that appeared repetitious. Aside from reading a few lines from my part to indicate how his verse should be read, he didn’t obtrude on the production at all. The play, as you know, is written in verses that contain three stresses and one caesura, the accent falling naturally on the words that are to be emphasized.” Mr. Guinness went on to inform us that poetic drama has been his meat for years, ever since he took on his first big role, a modern-dress Hamlet, when he was twenty-four. Educated at Roborough School, in Eastbourne, where, he assured us, he learned nothing whatever, he went into the advertising business at eighteen, preparing copy in behalf of lime juice, radios, valves, and clocks. “I am singularly knowledgeable about lime juice,” he said. “Used to put together booklets for housewives, giving them all the medical facts about the stuff. My career in advertising ended when I mistakenly ordered a four-foot halftone engraving instead of a four-inch one, as I was supposed to.” Mr. Guinness had shown a flair for amateur theatricals when he was a boy, and after abandoning advertising, he attended the Fay Compton Dramatic School, in which he won a scholarship. He presently turned up in a play called “Libel!,” in which, for twelve shillings a week, he understudied an actor who had a five-line part, and also did a walk-on as a lawyer. In 1934, he played Osric in Gielgud’s “Hamlet,” and in 1936, after a few other engagements, he joined the Old Vic company, with whom he did, notably, Hamlet in modern dress a couple of years later.
In addition to acting in numerous plays and movies in England, Mr. Guinness has made dramatizations of two famous novels. The first of these was “Great Expectations,” in which he appeared with Martita Hunt in 1939, and the second was “The Brothers Karamazov,” which he worked on toward the end of the war and appeared in in 1946. “I thought a good deal about Dostoevski after the war started,” he told us, “and the result was this play, which was what might be called an artistic success, although it was nothing much commercially.” Mr. Guinness was in the Royal Navy from 1941 until 1946, starting in as an ordinary seaman and winding up as a lieutenant. “I was in charge of transforming the Berkeley-Carteret Hotel, in Asbury Park, into barracks for British personnel—hardly an outstanding contribution to the war effort—and then I knocked about the Mediterranean for quite a spell,” he said. “My nautical methods were by guess and by God, and I was certainly glad to return to the theatre.”
Mr. Guinness is married to a former actress named Merula Salaman, who took to writing and illustrating children’s books a few years ago and has turned out a couple of best-sellers. “I suppose I wasn’t as enthusiastic about my wife’s career in the theatre as I might have been,” said Mr. Guinness, “but if she were in a play and I were doing a film, we shouldn’t see each other at all. Fortunately, she is happy with her writing and her painting.” We asked him why “The Cocktail Party” was brought over here before being staged in London. “That was because of the Christmas season in England,” he said. “All the small, smart theatres, the kind this play requires, were occupied. We did try out in Brighton and Edinburgh, though, and at the time I thought I should never play again to such an appreciative audience. The American audience, however, has been even more remarkable. I think Mr. Eliot regrets now that he didn’t come over with his play. He’s a director of a publishing house, you know, and he’s headed for a holiday in South Africa, after ten years without a vacation. I very much doubt that South Africa will give him the pleasure he might have had here.”
1950
UNFRAMED SPACE — Berton Rouche
WE improved a shining weekend on eastern Long Island by paying a call on Jackson Pollock—an uncommonly abstract abstractionist and one of seven American painters whose work was tapped for inclusion in the Twenty-fifth International Biennial Exhibition of Figurative Arts, now triumphantly under way in Venice—at his home, a big, gaunt, white clapboard, Ulysses S. Grant–period structure in the fishing hamlet of The Springs. Pollock, a bald, rugged, somewhat puzzled-looking man of thirty-eight, received us in the kitchen, where he was breakfasting on a cigarette and a cup of coffee and drowsily watching his wife, the former Lee Krasner, a slim, auburn-haired young woman who also is an artist, as she bent over a hot stove, making currant jelly. Waving us to a chair in the shade of a huge potted palm, he remarked with satisfaction that he had been up and about for almost half an hour. It was then around 11:30 A.M. “I’ve got the old Eighth Street habit of sleeping all day and working all night pretty well licked,” he said. “So has Lee. We had to, or lose the respect of the neighbors. I can’t deny, though, that it’s taken a little while. When’d we come out here, Lee?” Mrs. Pollock laughed merrily. “Just a little while ago,” she replied. “In the fall of 1945.”
“It’s marvellous the way Lee’s adjusted herself,” Pollock said. “She’s a native New Yorker, but she’s turned into a hell of a good gardener, and she’s always up by nine. Ten at the latest. I’m way behind her in orientation. And the funny thing is I grew up in the country. Real country—Wyoming, Arizona, northern and southern California. I was born in Wyoming. My father had a farm near Cody. By the time I was fourteen, I was milking a dozen cows twice a day.” “Jackson’s work is full of the West,” Mrs. Pollock said. “That’s what gives it that feeling of spaciousness. It’s what makes it so American.” Pollock confirmed this with a reflective scowl, and went on to say that at seventeen, an aptitude for painting ha
ving suddenly revealed itself to him in a Los Angeles high school, he at once wound up his academic affairs there and headed East. “I spent two years at the Art Students League,” he said. “Tom Benton was teaching there then, and he did a lot for me. He gave me the only formal instruction I ever had, he introduced me to Renaissance art, and he got me a job in the League cafeteria. I’m damn grateful to Tom. He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into non-objective painting. I’m also grateful to the W.P.A., for keeping me alive during the thirties, and to Peggy Guggenheim. Peggy gave me my first show, in 1943. She gave me two more, and then she took off for Europe, and Lee and I came out here. We wanted to get away from the wear and tear. Besides, I had an underneath confidence that I could begin to live on my painting. I’d had some wonderful notices. Also, somebody had bought one of my pictures. We lived a year on that picture, and a few clams I dug out of the bay with my toes. Since then things have been a little easier.” Mrs. Pollock smiled. “Quite a little,” she said. “Jackson showed thirty pictures last fall and sold all but five. And his collectors are nibbling at those.” Pollock grunted. “Be nice if it lasts,” he said.