THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 15, Number 3
Editor: Vera Mowry Roberts
Co-Editor: Jane Bowers
Managing Editor: Ken Nielsen
Editorial Assistant: Amy E. Hughes
Circulation Manager: Jill Stevenson
Circulation Assistant: Serap Erincin
Daniel Gerould, Executive Director
James Patrick, Director
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Fall 2003
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
Editorial Board
Ruby Cohn
Margaret Wilkerson
Robert Vorlicky
Bruce A. McConachie
Don B. Wilmeth
William W. Demastes
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions.
Our aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and
theatre, and to encourage a more enlightened understanding of our
literary and theatrical heritage. Manuscripts should be prepared in
conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes (rather
than endnotes). Hard copies should be submitted in duplicate. We
request that articles be submitted on disk as well (3.5" floppy), using
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not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope. Please allow three to four months for a decision. Our
distinguished Editorial Board will constitute the jury of selection.
Address editorial inquiries and manuscript submissions to the Editors,
JA077Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth
Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309. Our e-mail address is:
mestc@gc.cuny .edu.
Please visit our web site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center publications are
supported by generous grants from the Lucille
Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn
Chair in Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in
Theatre at the City University of New York.
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Copyright 2003
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1044-937X) is a
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THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 15, Number 3
Fall 2003
Contents
EDITOR's NoTE rv
A TRIBUTE m VERA MOWRY ROBERTS v
MILLY 5. BARRANGER, 1
Broadway's Women on Trial:
The McCarthy Years
JON TUTILE, 38
Strange Faces, Other Minds: Sartre, Miller and Clara
GLENDA E. GILL, 47
"Nothing But a Man": Leonard de Paur's Legacy
of Subtle Activism in Theatre and Music
ROBERT C. VAN HORN, 78
Theatrical Rescue in Harlem:
Richard Harding Davis and John Drew at the Harlem
Opera House, 1895
JAY MALARCHER, 87
"A Wallow in Slime":
The attempt to Censor Tobacco Road in New Orleans
KATIE N . .bHNSON, 101
Rachel Crothers's Ourselves:
Feminist Drmaturgy in Brothel Drama
CONTRIBUTORS 121
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 15, no. 3 (Fall 2003)
EDITOR'S NOTE
With this issue, I voluntarily step down as Editor of JADT, and
turn it over to a younger colleague, David Savran, whose name you
will all recognize.
It was fifteen years ago that I conceived the idea of a scholarly
journal devoted to American theatre and published by the Center for
Advanced Studies in Theatre Arts (CASTA), affiliated with the Ph.D.
program in Theatre at the Graduate School of the City University of
New York. I persuaded renowned scholar Walter J. Meserve (then a
member of the Ph.D. faculty) to join me, and the first issue appeared
in spring 1989.
CASTA metamorphosed into the Martin E. Segal Theatre
Center, and Walter Meserve was followed briefly by Judith Milhous and
Jill Dolan, then, for a longer period, by Jane Bowers. My deep thanks
to each of them, as well as to the Editorial Board which (with two
changes) has been of great assistance.
I am also indebted to the many graduate students in the Ph.D.
program in Theatre who have served as Managing Editors, Editorial
Assistants, Publication Managers, etc. My volunteer labor as Editor has
been lightened and made pleasurable by the dedication and expertise
of all of these colleagues and I thank them.
Several years ago, the American Theatre and Drama Society
made a subscription to JADT a benefit of membership in that society.
For the past two years ATDS has guest-edited the spring issue of JADT.
This arrangement is expected to continue.
It may be of some interest to note that, according to my
faithful log, something approaching a thousand articles have been
submitted. We have published about five hundred of these. A few
contributors have had more than one article published over the years
but most are one-time contributors. I am deeply gratified by the
expanding interest in American theatre.
With the Winter, 2004 issue (Vol. 16, no 1) David Savran
becomes Editor. He is, as you know, a respected scholar of American
theatre, and will bring new interest and a new perspective to JADT,
which has been so much a part of my life for so long. I wish him all
good fortune. I shall, of course, remain a loyal subscriber and avid
reader.
Vera Mowry Roberts
v
A TRIBUTE TO VERA MOWRY ROBERTS
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre began
publication in the spring of 1989. It was the creation of Vera Mowry
Roberts, who has been its editor since its inception. Vera is one of the
most important figures of 20th century American theatre, and now of
the 21st. I started to say she is one of the great ladies of the American
theatre, but that would be too limiting, because Vera, as much as
anyone else, has worked tirelessly to eliminate all traces of gender
considerations where achievement is concerned. From the beginning
she has championed the cause of women in the theatre and in society,
and has fought, often successfully, for women to have a place at the
table: to have the respect, the consideration, the admiration they
deserve.
Vera has many enviable legacies: the books she has written,
the literally thousands of students she has nurtured and inspired, the
many honors she has been accorded, and her work with the Journal of
American Drama and Theatre. From the beginning she brought her
creativity, her rigorous standards, her dedication to the Journal, and it
has benefited throughout her tenure from her unfailing energy and
intelligence.
The Martin E. Segal Center has been proud to publish the
JADT, and looks forward to continuing this treasure begun and fostered
by Vera. She will be sorely missed as our editor, but we take comfort
from the fact that she has promised to continue to give us her wise
counsel and her invaluable support. In the meantime, we offer her our
deepest gratitude for all she has done, and wish her Godspeed in the
journey that has been and continues to be her remarkable life.
Ed Wilson
Chairman, Advisory Board
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 15, no. 3 (Fall 2003)
BROADWAY'S WOMEN ON TRIAL:
THE MCCARTHY YEARS
MILLY S. BARRANGER
. .. I believe that performers and writers are frequently more accurate
seismographs of their era than politicians and statesmen.t
Stefan Kanfer
The Journal of the Plague Years
Taking its name from the United States Senator, McCarthyism
was a period of wide-spread political repression against the threat of
Communism in the United States. Antedating the four years of Joseph
R. McCarthy's reign in the U.S. Senate (1950-1954), the American anti-
communist crusade in the name of national security began in the
1930s. Interrupted by the Second World War, the campaign renewed
its momentum in the late forties fueled by increased fears of the
Communist threat during the Cold War. By the early fifties, fears,
rumors, FBI investigations, and public hearings brought McCarthyism
to the center of American politics.
Under the banner of McCarthyism, investigative spotlights
were turned on the entertainment industry, educational institutions,
and the U.S. information agencies and libraries abroad. Artists,
teachers, writers, longshoreman, housewives, public officials, and
private citizens were showcased by investigative committees, namely
the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate
investigative subcommittees. Many witnesses, ranging from Lillian
Hellman to J. Robert Oppenheimer, had star status. The desired effect
was to generate headlines so dear to the congressional committees
and to their constituencies made up of ultra-conservatives, ambitious
politicians, right-wing journalists and activists.
The House Un-American Activities Committee's star-search
began in Hollywood and proceeded to Broadway. The entertainment
industry quickly became a goldmine of familiar faces from America's
movie screens and theatre marquees to exploit the contention that
Communists had infiltrated American life and culture.
The various congressional committees were aided and abetted
1 Stefan Kanfer, The Journal of the Plague Years (New York:
Simon and Schuster Publishers, 1973), 9.
2 BARRANGER
in identifying celebrities in the entertainment industry by the
publication of Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in
Radio and Television. Compiled by former FBI agents, Red Channels
was published in 1950 by Counterattack, an American Business
Consultants' newsletter that highlighted alleged Communist
connections of entertainers, union leaders, and others.2 By that time
the Hollywood Ten were serving one-year prison sentences and the
product sponsors and the advertising agencies had thoroughly
intimidated network and Hollywood producers to the degree that a
blacklist was in effect for "controversial" artists throughout Hollywood
studios and the broadcast networks.3
In May of 1951, Variety announced that HUAC was turning its
attention to Broadway where the investigative spotlights shown upon
Broadway's actors, directors, choreographers, designers, playwrights,
and unions.4 The majority of listees in Red Channels were men but 39
women (many associated with Broadway) were among the 151 names
listed in the red-covered pamphlet emboldened with a left hand
ominously grasping a microphone.
Drawn from the 39 names, five women of Broadway serve
here to showcase the manner in which congressional forces
transformed lives and careers in the name of national security. The
committees significantly altered or destroyed careers of major artists
by means of FBI investigations, congressional hearings, blacklisting,
graylisting, innuendo, and guilt by association in a national climate of
paranoia and persecution that dated backwards to the Salem witch
trials of the 1690s and forward to talk-show host John Henry Faulk's
2 Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in
America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 218. See
American Business Consultants, Red Channels (New York: American
Business Consultants, 1950).
3 The Hollywood Ten, made up of directors and screenwriters
who defied HUAC in 1947 and were fired by the studios and later
given one-year prison sentences, were: Alvah Bessie, Herbert
Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John
Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and
Dalton Trumbo.
4 Herman A. Lowe, "Un-Am Activities Group Under Way with
Red Probe Into Radio, TV, Legit, Variety (May 30, 1951): 2, 20.
WOMEN ON T RIAL 3
libel case against his blacklisters that he won in 1962.
It has been said that biography creates its own kind of trace
evidence in the creation of the truth of an historical moment. s The
cautionary tales of five Broadway women provide the evidence of
personal experience whereby to measure the larger frissons and truths
of an era in U.S. politics where art and government collided in the
arena of civil liberties.
SEISMOGRAPHS OF AN ERA
The first woman to appear in a congressional showcase was neither a
member of the Red Channels group nor a Broadway artist. Hallie
Flanagan Davis, director of Vassar College's experimental theatre, was
appointed national director of the Federal Theatre Project by the
Roosevelt administration. In 1938, she volunteered to appear before
the first House Un-American Activities Committee (then called the
Martin Dies Committee) that was authorized by Congress to mount a
seven-month investigation of un-American propaganda.6 Flanagan set
out to dispute the allegations that the Federal Theatre Project was
employing Communists and producing Communistic plays. At issue
was renewal of funding by the U.S. Congress for the Federal Theater
Project and its continuation as an employer of 10,000 workers in 40
states.
A small, dark-haired woman of fashionable conservative dress
who had been recruited to head the theatre wing of the Works
Progress Administration's Theatre and Writers Project, Hallie Flanagan
remained stalwart in her answers to charges that practically every play
produced by the Federal Theatre was "unadulterated Communist
propaganda" in the guise of humanitarianism and relief for the needy. 7
Tarred with the same congressional brush were the Living Newspaper
docudramas, Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, Paul Green's The
House of Connelly, Eugene O'Neill's The Long Voyage Home, and
Susan Glaspell's The Inheritors.
s Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography
and Autobiography (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002),
21.
6 Schrecker, 91. HUAC became a permanent committee of
the U.S. House of Representatives in 1945.
7 Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre.
(New York: Benjamin Blom, 1940), 337. Also see, Martin Dies, The
Trojan Horse in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1940).
4 BARRANGER
Hallie Flanagan called her experience a "badly staged court
scene."s Despite her arguments that the Works Progress
Administration was a great bulwark of democracy and the Federal
Theatre a small part of that larger pattern, the committee remained
convinced that a large number of employees on the Federal Theatre
Project were either members of the Communist Party or were
sympathizers. Six months later, the House Appropriations Committee
refused to vote funding to the Federal Theater and the government
arts experiment that had employed approximately 10,000 workers and
involved as many of 63,728 performances witnessed by over 30 million
people came to an end.
As national director of the Federal Theatre, Hallie Flanagan
was the first featured player in a political showcase that was a preview
of what was to come for accomplished artists working in the
entertainment industry. Unlike many of her successors, the Vassar
college professor was not a witness overwhelmed with
embarrassment, and fear. During her testimony, there were no
dodgings and weavings with the First and Fifth Amendments.
Moreover, Hallie Flanagan had no personal repercussions, such as
unemployment and/or ill-health. Within a decade, this was all to
change.
Many showpeople who played unwanted roles on the national
political stages sponsored by the congressional committees have
written of their experiences. Elia Kazan wrote an apologia in A Life to
explain his "friendly witness" performance before HUAC and Arthur
Miller recorded in Time-Bends his near-jail experience for challenging
the Committee's legitimacy along with his refusal to name names. In
the pitch of the moment, he wrote The Crucible in 1953 and excoriated
in the thinly disguised historical framework of the Salem witch trials
the modern ones. Playwright Lillian Hellman provided her own version
of her appearance before the House Un-American Activities
Committee, chaired by JohnS. Wood. In Scoundrel Time, she reprised
her role in what she called "this sad, comic miserable time of our
history. "9 Director Margaret Webster published an imperfectly
remembered account of her experience before McCarthy's investigative
subcommittee in Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage. Nonetheless,
the voices of Broadway's women were manifestly silenced by the
ordeal. Many dwindled into diminished careers or passed into other
kinds of employment-as teachers, housewives, clerks, songwriters,
and even exiles. Although the women of Broadway form a nexus of the
s Flanagan, 345.
9 Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time(Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1976), 25.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 5
experience and its aftermath, they have been largely neglected in the
writings on McCarthyism.
Five women of Broadway have been selected here as ciphers
of a political era. With the exception of Mady Christians, who did not
survive her FBI investigation, Judy Holliday, Anne Revere, Lillian
Hellman, and Margaret Webster were brought before various
congressional tribunals: the House Un-American Activities Committee,
the Senate Internal Securities Subcommittee (better known as the
McCarran Committee), and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations (known famously as the McCarthy Committee). Their
testimony was their common ground. Otherwise, they represented a
variety of familial and religious roots. Mady Christians was foreign
born; Judy Holliday was a second generation American born into an
East European immigrant family; Anne Revere was a descendent of
American revolutionaries Paul Revere and John Adams; Lillian
Hellman's Jewish ancestors were Southern merchants; and Margaret
Webster, whose mother was an adherent of Christian Science, was
born into a distinguished British theatrical family. As a group, they
were well-educated, middle-class, career professionals, and civil
libertarians. In the late forties, they were in the prime of their
Broadway careers as actors, directors, and playwrights. By 1950, they
shared in common their distinction as listees in Red Channels and their
experience with blacklisting from employment in film, radio, and
television, investigations by FBI agents, and subpoenas from
congressional committees. By 1951, they were classified as
"controversial" artists and found their livelihoods on Broadway
jeopardized by their unlooked-for status.
It has long been argued that blacklisting was not pervasive on
Broadway because the theatrical producers were individuals allied with
backers and angels, not corporate sponsors. Anthony Slide went so far
as to argue that the New York stage " remained relatively untouched by
the antics of the House Un-American Activities Committee." 10 Theatre
critic for the New York Times Brooks Atkinson explained the
phenomenon of the commercial theatre of the day by saying that
Broadway's economic anarchy created localized situations that evaded
the witch-hunters. He continued,
It is not financed or managed by corporate institutions as
Hollywood and TV are. Broadway consists of individual
producers. Every production is a new and separate
adventure, financed by individual theatre buffs or
10 Anthony Slide, Actors on Red Alert: Career Interviews
with Five Actors and Actresses Affected by the Blacklist (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999), 7.
6
BARRANGER
speculators. Occasionally TV or Hollywood corporations
invest in Broadway productions which they think they
might make use of some day. But Broadway is not
susceptible to domination by rational businessmen.
Broadway showmanship is a local foible rather than a
national exploit.
Atkinson delighted in saying that Broadway and McCarthyism were
incompatible: "Hoodlums like McCarthy can never find out who's in
charge of Broadway or where the center of power lies."ll
Although a formal blacklist never dominated the Broadway
theatre as it did Hollywood, subtleties of blacklisting (and the
graylisting of the "duped'') were in evidence. "Not everyone was
protected," Atkinson explained. "Not every producer had to hire every
actor, and actors who seemed to be more political than theatrical were
not likely to be called to many auditions. Although no one was
blacklisted, some were shunned."lz In point of fact, Atkinson admitted,
McCarthyism made life difficult for many people on Broadway. The
independent producers, casting an eye to the bottom line, were wary
of controversial stars who could potentially bring picket lines in front
of the theatres and reduce box office grosses with adverse publicity.
Those affected were men and women-Mady Christians and Zero
Mostel, Margaret Webster and Jack Gilford, and so on.
Broadway's women found their experiences more personal
and subtle than the public rejections by the Hollywood studios and the
forthright censorship by the broadcast networks where work
diminished for those deemed "controversial," a policy originally
established by the networks to prohibit employment of artists allegedly
linked to pro-Communist groups. Many Broadway artists found that
they were not called as frequently for auditions or the job went to
another actor or director untouched by the controversiality label.
Writing ostensibly about radio and television networks Jack
Gould pointed out that by 1951 there was a new type of displaced
person on the cultural scene: artists, writers, announcers, and
directors who without a hearing, without publicity, and without much
public interest effectively were deprived of their opportunity to make a
living.B Mady Christians, Margaret Webster, Anne Revere, Uta Hagen,
and Kim Hunter found themselves quietly displaced on Broadway's
stages. Others did not go meekly into their diminished careers.
11 Brooks Atkinson, Broadway, Revised Edition (New York:
Macmillan, 1974), 434.
12 Ibid.
n Jack Gould, "Of Silence," New York Times, 22 April 1951, 9.
WOMEN ON TRIAL
7
Dressed to the nines for their congressional hearings, Judy Holliday
and Lillian Hellman challenged the committees' men with calculated
performances and well-crafted arguments.
Broadway audiences eventually proved more accommodating
than television and film audiences. "A good performance solves all
problems in a naughty world," Atkinson surmised. Blacklisted in
Hollywood, Fredric March and Florence Eldridge returned to Broadway
to give magnificent performances in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's
Journey into Night; playwright Lillian Hellman returned with a
triumphant revival of The Children's Hour. Nonetheless, many were
unable to regain their former glory. Margaret Webster, the celebrated
director of Shakespeare on Broadway and a highly successful character
actress herself, was unable to restore her Broadway career to its
former luster after being listed as a show-business subversive in Red
Channels and a headl iner before McCarthy's subcommittee. Atkinson
summed up Webster's plight and that of many artists that make up this
story of Broadway and politics at mid-twentieth century: "She never
again could work with the scope and exuberance of her early years on
Broadway." 14
Beginning in 1951, Broadway's women (and men) were placed
on trial within the congressional committees immune from the
measures of due process required by courts of law. The committees
could hold hearings in public or private, choose to hear witnesses or
not, cite for contempt witnesses who failed to respond to subpoenas
or to name names, and were not compelled to hear people who
demanded to testify. In truth, Congressional committees operated as
quasi-judicial bodies that were a law unto themselves.
FBI INVESTIGATIONS
By 1951, the congressional political stage was set to showcase
Communism on Broadway. The experiences of Mady Christians, Judy
Holliday, Anne Revere, Lillian Hellman, and Margaret Webster are
representative of the many societal and cultural fractures created by
McCarthyism for performing artists in America. In headlines, they were
called fellow travelers, Pinkos, and dupes. They were investigated by
the FBI, and, with the exception of Mady Christians, questioned by
congressional committees with various agendas. Joseph McCarthy's
subcommittee subpoenaed Margaret Webster to strengthen his case
against a powerful Senator. Mady Christians and Judy Holliday were
investigated as internal security matters, and, in Holliday's case, as
further evidentiary proof of Jewish subversion in the entertainment
14 Atkinson, Broadway, 435.
8 BARRANGER
industry. Anne Revere and Lillian Hellman were placed on trial by
Chairman John S. Wood's House Un-American Activities Committee but
refused to answer the sixty-four dollar question ("Are you now or have
you ever been a member of the Communist Party?") with different
outcomes. The cautionary tales of these women of Broadway, like
Hamlet's players, serve as brief chronicles of the times.
* * *
Writing of Mady Christians, the Broadway star of I Remember
Mama and Watch on the Rhine, Stefan Kanfer said that the "secular
blacklisters ... made her the classic figure of their century, the exile."1S
The Viennese-born Mady Christians (1900-1951) came to the
United States with her parents in 1912 when her father, an actor-
manager, joined the Irving Place Theatre company, located south of
Gramercy Park in New York City. She made her stage debut at 15 in an
operetta at Irving Place and returned to Berlin in 1917 to study acting
with Max Reinhardt. As Reinhardt's protegee, the five-foot, seven-inch
tall Christians with blonde hair and a melodic soprano voice rose to
stardom on European stages and in films.
In 1931, she toured the United States in Marching By and
returned to Berlin to marry Sven Mueller, a highly placed government
official (they divorced in 1939). In Berlin, she observed Gestapo
tactics of the Hitler regime as they "cleansed" the Berlin theatre of
unacceptable artists, including Max Reinhardt and Elisabeth Bergner.
She recalled that many artists never regained the standing they had in
the theatre. "You can't put your finger on the reason. Directors don't
happen to have parts for them; you know how easily that can be
done," she told an American journalist.16
Under contract to return to the United States in The Divine
Drudge, Christians left Berlin in 1933 and established a major career
on Broadway that culminated in her celebrated role as the Norwegian
mother in John Van Druten's stage adaptation of I Remember Mama.
Like most Broadway actors of the day, she had a bicoastal career in
Hollywood films and on New York stages, appearing in Broadway
productions of Hamlet and Watch on the Rhine and in the films of All
My Sons and Letter from an Unknown Woman.
With memories of the "cleansing" of artists by the Nazis, she
was outspoken against HUAC's investigations of Hollywood and
became a target of investigation herself. During the Second World War,
1s Kanfer, 155.
16 Helen Ormsbee, "Mady Christians Recalls How Nazis
'Cleansed' the Theaters," New York Herald Tribune, 13 July 1941,
sec. 6, p. 2.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 9
she had supported causes on behalf of foreign refugees and exiled
writers and worked for the protection of foreigners/ Russian war relief
1
and democratic political action committees. Many of these war-time
committees were defunct by the time HUAC declared them
Communist-front organizations.
The FBI opened a file on Mady Christians in 1941 when an
informant identified her as a "concealed Communist"-meaning one
who does not hold herself out as a Communist and who
1
if asked
1
would deny membership in the Party. By 1950
1
she was established in
the public eye as a "pinko.// Even though she was a naturalized citizen/
she was vulnerable. She was not born in the United States
1
she had
supported liberal causes/ she worked with many of the Red Channels
listees. Moreover/ she had friends among the Hollywood community of
German emigres/ including Fritz Lang/ Walter Sleazak
1
Max Reinhardt
1
Hanns Eisler
1
and Lion Feuchtwanger. By 1950
1
the FBI designated her
an internal security matter and she became part of a secular blacklist
that adversely affected her film and stage career.
After appearing in I Remember Mama for over two years/
Christians found work hard to come by in the late forties. She gave
two final performances on Broadway between 1947 and 1950. She
appeared in James Parish's Message for Margaret with Miriam Hopkins
and then in a revival of August Strindberg's The Father with Raymond
Massey and Grace Kelly.
Throughout the months of declining work/ she was frustrated
by the fact that she had little direct evidence that she was being
investigated. There was no subpoena/ no press releases
1
no out-right
accusations of Communist activities by government officials to
confront and refute. Jobs did not materialize and a signed contract for
a role in a CBS Maugham Television Theatre series was withdrawnP
Her earlier remark to Helen Ormsbee ("You can't put your finger on the
reason.") when she described the unemployment of artists in Germany
in the thirties now applied to herself. 18
Behind the scenes in January of 1951
1
the New York office of
the FBI prepared a 21-page memorandum in support of their
recommendation that Christians's name be place on the Security
17 Max Sien
1
"The Ordeal and Martyrdom of Mady Christians/'
The Compass/ 18 November 1951
1
13.
18 Ormsbee/ sec. 6
1
2.
10
BARRANGER
Index, a list of politically suspect individuals to be rounded up for
detention during a national emergency.19 In April, agents
recommended that a Security Index card be prepared in Christians's
name as a designated "Communist." The director denied the
recommendation but suggested that agents interview the subject to
determine her "present sympathies and potential dangerousness."20
On the afternoon of September 15, two agents arrived at
Christians' New York apartment. They subsequently reported that she
had been well-prepared with denials of Communist Party membership
and other pro-Communist activities. She acknowledged support
between 1941 and 1945 of two "subversive" organizations: the
committee for Russian War Relief and the Independent Citizens
Committee of the Arts, Science, and Professions. Following the
interview, the agents concluded, "In view of the lack of reported
Communist activity on the part of the subject since 1945, this case is
being placed in a closed status unless advised to the contrary by the
Bureau." 2
1
Mady Christians joined the tour of George Brandt's Broadway-
bound production of Black Chiffon where she became ill during
rehearsals and returned to her Connecticut home and collapsed. She
died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Norwalk General Hospital on October
28, 1951, and the FBI closed their file on Mady Christians two days
later.
Her close friends were outspoken out about the true cause of
her death. Elmer Rice, John Van Druten, and Margaret Webster
believed that the memories of persecutions in Nazi Germany and the
ubiquitous blacklist threatening unemployment, financial ruin, and
public humiliation brought on her medical condition and destroyed her
life. Elmer Rice wrote a vehement letter to The New York Times:
"Mady Christians is dead. A great actress bred in a great tradition, a
fine, vital, liberal, warm-hearted human being, her career was brought
19 Originally called the "Custodial Detention List" until U.S.
Attorney General Francis Biddle ordered an end to the program. FBI
Director J. Edward Hoover ignored the order, changed the name to
Security Index, and failed to inform the Justice Department of the
transformation. See Schrecker, 106-7.
2o See FBI File Number 100-99584 (Subject: Mady
Christians), FBI memos dated 4 April 1951 and 5 June 1951.
21 Office memorandum, dated 14 November 1951, from FBI
Assistant Director Louis B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover's
second in command.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 11
to an untimely end by the relentless, sadistic persecution to which she
was subjected."22
Mady Christians came to the United States to escape Nazi
Germany and to pursue a theatrical career in the freedoms of
American democracy. Despite her successful career, she failed to
escape the forces of the American political right and died at age 51.
THE McCARRAN COMMffiEE
The premature death of Mady Christians circumvented the inevitable
subpoena from the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS),
chaired by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada. Subsequently, the best-
known Broadway and Hollywood celebrity called before McCarran's
subcommittee in 1952 was Judy Holliday (1921-1965) .
In addition to chairing the SISS, Pat McCarran was author of
the McCarran Internal Security Act that required the registration of all
Communists and Communist front organizations with the United States
government. The McCarran Act further established the Subversive
Activities Board to oversee "internal security emergencies" and the
"detention of subversives." McCarran's chief aim was to expose
Communist infiltration of the military and the State Department and to
create headlines.
Prior to 1951, McCarran had made few incursions into what he
considered the "minor" field of show business. Within the year, he
lowered his sights and looked toward Hollywood and Broadway to
ensure the passage of his new legislation-a bill limiting the
immigration of Eastern Europeans into the United States. In order to
gather support for his legislation, McCarran set about establishing that
entertainers of Middle European background were susceptible to
Communism.
Listed in Red Channels with 10 citations, Judy Holliday
consolidated McCarran's twin aims: her celebrity status on Broadway
and in Hollywood guaranteed headlines, and, she was a descendent of
East European Jewish immigrants.
Born Judith Tuvim in New York City in 1921, Holliday's
American-born mother, Helen Gollomb, was of Russian-Jewish descent
whose father was a manufacturer of epaulets and military braid for the
Czar's guards in St. Petersburg. In 1888, there were rumors that a
series of pograms were to be enacted and the family joined the mass
22 Elmer Rice, "A Note on the Death of An Actress-Views,"
New York Times, 4 November 1951, N, 3.
12 BAR RANGER
migration of Russian Jews to Ellis Island and eventually to New York
City's Lower East Side.
23
Abe Tuvimr Holliday's father
1
was also
American-born and became a successful fundraiser for Jewish
organizations and executive director of the American Zionist Council.
Holliday grew up in Queens in a family that revered culture/ music
1
and
theatre.
During her schooldays in Queens, Holliday scored an
impressive 172 on the Otis IQ testr placing her in the genius category.
She was a voracious reader and displayed a phenomenal memory. At
Julia Richman High School in Manhattan, she decided that she wanted
a career in theatre as a writer or a director. Although she had no
ambitions to become an actress, her march toward celebrity as an
actress/comedienne began with a night-club act, called the Revuersr
initiated by Adolph Green with Betty Comdenr Alvin Hammer, and John
Frank. A desultory period with the Revuers followed in Hollywood
during which Holliday was placed under contract to Twentieth Century
Fox and "made-over" for Hollywood stardom with new makeup, a
more flattering hair style, and a new name. Judith Tuvim was
redubbed Holliday
1
the latter being a translation of her Hebraic family
name. Toyvim is the most common transliteral spelling of the Hebrew
word for holidays. The actress added the second "I" to avoid confusion
with Billie Holiday. 24
Nonetheless/ Hollywood became a disappointment for Holliday
and she returned to New York in 1944 where Adolph Green introduced
her to Herman Shumlin, the highly regarded Broadway director and
producer/ who cast her in Kiss Them for Me as the good-hearted dumb
blond and sometime prostitute with all the clever lines. Holliday had
never worked on the legitimate stage and had no training for building
a role or projecting her voice but she worked hard in rehearsals and
was a triumph as the stereotypical tart with "a heart of gold." 25 Then,
veteran Broadway producer Max Gordon cast her as a last-minute
replacement for Jean Arthur in Garson Kanin's new play Born
Yesterday. As Billie Dawn, the ex-showgirl and "tough cookie" who
transforms into a smart and attractive woman in a variation of Shaw's
Pygmalion, Judy Holliday became a Broadway star and attractive once
again to Hollywood where she played in Adam's Rib with Katharine
Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and in the film version of Born Yesterday
23 Gary Carey, Judy Holliday: An Intimate Life Story (London:
Robson Books, Ltd., 1983), 5.
24 Ibid., 130.
25 Ibid., 68-9.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 13
with Broderick Crawford and William Holden.
In the late forties, Holliday was actively engaged in social
causes that took her to peace marches, rallies against censorship, and
gatherings in support of civil rights that became part of her left-wing
political profile. In a letter dated June 14, 1950, following the
publication of Red Channels, the FBI instructed its Los Angeles office
to determine whether or not actress Judy Holliday was a member of
the Communist Party, and, if warranted, assign her a Security Index
card. No positive evidence of membership was found and no
recommendation was made for creating the Index card. 26
By 1951, the year the Hollywood witch-hunts were reaching
their peak, Holliday had been under attack by the American Legion,
the conservative press and columnists, namely Hedda Hopper and
Louella Parsons, for over two years. That same year, she was
subpoenaed to appear before McCarran's subcommittee investigating
"subversive infiltration of radio, television, and the entertainment
industry." Holliday knew that the subpoena would be cause enough for
Columbia Pictures to cancel her contract because the studios had
evolved a blacklist policy, called the "Waldorf Statement," to counter
the charges of the Hearst-owned newspapers that the film industry
was "a hotbed of communist propaganda."
In 1947, Hollywood producers met at the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel in New York City and issued a statement to the effect: "We will
not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of the party or group
which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United
States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means." The
document protected the studios from blame if they hired in ignorance.
Moreover, they promised to take action against any proven Communist
but, unlike the television networks, they gave no indication that they
were prepared to investigate the political affiliations of their
employees.
On March 26, 1952, Judy Holliday (nee Judith Tuvim)
appeared as a witness before the McCarran Committee in a private,
executive session (a closed hearing without television or newspaper
coverage that was the first rung on the ladder of evidentiary proof to
be used in a public hearing). Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah
presided and was assisted by counsel Richard Arens.27 Holliday faced
the dilemma of all witnesses testifying before congressional
26 William Holtzman, Judy Holliday (New York: Putnam,
1982), 142-3, 154
27 The McCarran subcommittee subpoenaed four entertainers
in March, April, and May of 1952. Three of the four were Jewish.
They were Burl Ives (singer), Sam Levenson (actor), Philip Loeb
(actor), and Judy Holliday (actress).
14 BARRANGER
committees. She could truthfully answer that she was not now and
had never been a Communist. However, if she waived the protection
of the Fifth Amendment in order to talk about herself, she could then
be compelled to answer questions about the political beliefs of her
family and friends; if she refused, she could be cited for contempt.28
Since the McCarran subcommittee was primarily interested in
documenting the family history of entertainers, it seemed likely that
her uncle Joseph Gollomb, an author and journalist who had been
employed by The Daily Worker, and even her socialist mother would
come under scrutiny. The only way to protect her family was to refuse
to answer any questions and to plead the protection of the Fifth
Amendment, which was generally held to be a confession of guilt and
a certain road to blacklisting in Hollywood.
Holliday received unlocked-for help from Columbia Pictures.
Angered by the witch-hunts that had embroiled other studio
employees, producer Harry Cohn, motivated more so by business
acumen than by political conviction, determined that his star of Born
Yesterday would not be the next victim. He put the Columbia legal
team to work on preparing her case. One writer said that this was one
of the few instances (and possibly the only instance) of a Hollywood
studio coming to the support of a "red suspected star or player."29
Columbia Pictures hired the distinguished lawyer and former
United States district judge Simon H. Rifkind as Holliday's legal
counsel. Rifkind, in turn, hired former FBI investigator Kenneth Bierly
who had worked for the anti-communist publication Counterattack to
identify any damaging evidence that could be used against the actress.
Rifkind convinced Holliday she must demonstrate humble cooperation
but her public relations agent, Robert L. Green, proposed the optimum
strategy. Judy Holliday would appear before the subcommittee as the
very non-political Billie Dawn, the dumb blonde from Born Yesterday.
And so, Judy Holliday gave the performance of her career in a
Washington, D.C., senate hearing room.
Dressed in a black decollete dress with a small veiled black hat
and white gloves, Rachel Gollomb's granddaughter raised her right
hand and swore to tell the truth. Mindful of McCarran's pending
2s Daniel H. Pollitt, "The Fifth Amendment Plea before
Congressional Committees Investigating Subversion: Motives and
Justifiable Presumptions-a Survey of 120 Witnesses," University of
Pennsylvania Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1958): 1117-37. See
also, Daniel H. Pollitt, "Pleading the Fifth Amendment before a
Congressional Committee: A Study and Explanation, Notre Dame
Lawyer 32 (1956): 43-84.
29 Carey, 141.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 15
legislation, Richard Arens who had helped draft the McCarran
legislation on deportation of subversives, maneuvered at the outset to
identify Holliday as a Jewish entertainer. When asked about her name,
she answered that she was Judy Holliday and also Judith Tuvim and
Mrs. David Oppenheim.
In addition to her family name, the committee was interested
in her employment activities, her union memberships, her political
activities, and her associations with communist-front organizations. Far
from the last, and certainly not the least, was her uncle Joseph
Gollumb. Typical of all the hearings, the committee's overriding intent
was to get the witness to name names, especially Jewish names in this
instance, in order to test the witness's cooperation and break with her
subversive past.30
Impatient with her vagueness and naivete, Senator Watkins at
one point interrupted and asked, "Do you have any difficulty with your
memory?" Holliday, noted for her gift of eidetic memory, answered:
"Now I'm getting one, but I didn't know then that I needed one." She
added, "Now I am so careful that I don't side on anything and I don't
answer anything. I have answering-services saying that I am not in. I
didn't know I would have to have that kind of memory." 31
Holliday continued to deflect the Senator's questions. When
Watkins asked if she and her husband (a musician and record
producer) ever discussed politics, Judy answered, "Only lately. And,
boy, we talk about nothing else now .... " Watkins pressed his point:
"Did you not have some friends who were members of the Communist
Party that were talking along the lines of Communists?" To avoid
names, Holliday took the opportunity to educate the Senator on the
ways of show business people.
HOLLIDAY. My husband's friends talked either music or
records, and my friends talked show business and who
was getting where and what you had to do to get a job
and what kind of notices Variety gave this out of town. If
you are among actors there is no limit to how much they
30
Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names, 3d ed. (New York: Hill
and Wang, 2003), 318.
31. See Testimony of Judy Holliday (26 March 1952),
Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration
of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the
Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate, Eighty-Second
Congress, Second Session on Subversive Infiltration of Radio,
Television, and the Entertainment Industry (Washington, D.C. : United
States Government Printing Office, 1952), 141-86.
16 BARRANGER
can talk and gossip about that kind of thing . . ..
She avoided naming names.
Arens introduced the subject of her uncle Joseph Gollomb who
died two years earlier. Gollomb more so than his niece had the
potential for proving the McCarran committee's case against Eastern
European immigrants as tainting the American way of life with
Communistic propaganda and subversive writings. Nonetheless,
Holliday was prepared for this centerpiece of her testimony. She stated
that her uncle had been a "radical Communist" but she did not know
if he was a member of the Communist Party. Arens was stunned: "He
was employed by the Daily Worker, was he not?" "Yes, he was,"
Holliday answered. "Then he had a change of heart and became a
rabid anti-Communist .. .. He was an ardent Democrat as a matter of
fact. "
Arens cited Gollomb's books but Holliday argued that her
uncle's books were " never in defense of Communist principles."
ARENS. He was employed by the Daily Worker, was he
not?
HOLLIDAY. Yes.
ARENS. The Daily Worker is a Communist publication, is
it not?
HOLLIDAY. That is right. The books were not. His books
were novels about school life for young people, and also
they were spy stories and detective stories.
Arens's line of inquiry has not borne fruit.
Toward the end of the hearing, Arens learned much to his
disbelief that Holliday had hired people to investigate her " because she
had gotten into a lot of trouble. " Arens wanted to know if anyone has
tried to prosecute her?
HOLLIDAY. Yes.
ARENS. Who?
HOLLIDAY. Prosecute? No; I thought you meant
persecute.
The farcical moment goes to the comedienne who is an expert
crossword puzzler and can complete the New York Times crossword in
less time than it would take Richard Arens to tie his shoe laces.32
In her defense, Holliday asserted that she didn't know the
subversive character of any of the committees, rallies, and marches
that she participated in. She climaxed her point by demonstrating the
32 Holtzman, 13.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 17
lesson that she has learned about responding to solicitations from
organizations.
HOLLIDAY. I don't say "Yes" to anything now except
cancer, polio, and cerebral palsy, and things like that.
Arens turned to the political activities of Holliday's friends-the
Revuers. "Did you not have any friends who were Communists?" he
asked and cited Alvin Hammer, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden.
Holliday denied knowledge of any Communist-front activities on the
part of her friends. Watkins challenged her assertion, "Are you sure of
that?" She answered, "I am as sure of that as I can be of anybody that
isn't me." According to Holliday, they had discussed only their work,
not politics.
Near the end of the hearing, Arens asked, "What is it that you
abhor about Communism?"
Speaking with the heart and mind of her Russian emigre
heritage that abhorred the loss of civil liberties, Holiday responded in
language that addressed her present ordeal:
I hate the idea that you are dictated to in what should be
the freedom of your own life; that you are told how to
think and what to think and that you are policed in your
thoughts. I hate the idea that they try to make
everybody like everybody else and that the state comes
first and that the individual doesn't matter for anything.
After two hours and 40 minutes, Judy Holliday was dismissed. Behind
the well-dressed, dumb blond f ~ d e of Billie Dawn, Holliday had
spoken her own mind on civil liberties, on worthwhile causes, on the
plight of the falsely accused, on censorship, religious persecution, on
the plight of society's "underdogs," on individual freedoms, and on her
love for her country and its democratic traditions. Moreover, she had
not named names and had made great efforts to protect her family
and friends. Clifford Odets, Sterling Hayden, Larry Parks, Edward G.
Robinson, Jose Ferrer, and Elia Kazan had not done as well.
In addition, she had shielded Helen Tuvim from the sinister
glare of the McCarran subcommittee's scrutiny. William Holtzman
suggested that Holliday might have perjured herself by withholding
one bit of crucial information throughout the investigation. According
to Holtzman, Holliday had permitted her mother to act as her personal
secretary and it was likely that Helen Tuvim talked with many of the
telephone solicitors and made the small cash contributions in her
daughter's name to the "front" organizations.33
33 Ibid., 156.
18 BARRANGER
Nonetheless, Holliday was defensive about her performance
because she had not challenged the subcommittee. To a friend who
might have found her "Billie Dawn" performance shameful, she said,
"You think you're going to be brave and noble. Then you walk in there
and there are microphones, and all those senators looking at you . . . .
But I'm not ashamed of myself because I didn't name names. That
much I preserved."34
Following her testimony, Holliday received a considerable
amount of hate mail and anonymous telephone calls, and, once her
testimony was released in September by the subcommittee, she
received vehement denunciations from the right-wing press. Now
graylisted (the euphemism for those who were not Communists but
had supported Communist front organizations), Holiday had to hire a
researcher to clear her name of damaging past associations.3s
Judy Holliday survived the civil harassment of the United
States government and kept her promise to Senator Watkins to remain
silent about her liberal political views and to withhold endorsements
from everything except medical research. In the aftermath, she
seemed to recover her career. She made another film for Columbia
Pictures (It Should Happen to You with screenplay by Garson Kanin
and Ruth Gordon) that opened to enthusiastic reviews and officially
ended her Hollywood blacklisting. She was one of the first Red
Channels performers to end the television blacklist when she appeared
on the "Show of Shows" series, starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.
In 1956, she had a Broadway triumph in George S. Kaufman's The
Solid Gold Cadillac followed by Comden and Green's musical Bells are
Ringing (for which she won a second Antoinette Perry "Tony" Award as
best actress). The torpid musical Hot Spot in 1963 was Holliday's final
Broadway appearance.
Following her congressional appearance, Holliday's personal
life took a serious turn. Having survived the McCarran subcommittee
and the blacklist to work again, her marriage to David Oppenheim was
over, the Internal Revenue Service was demanding payment of back
taxes accumulated through her accountant's oversights, and she was
diagnosed with breast cancer. By 1965, her advanced cancer was no
longer a show business secret. When she died at age 44, she was
writing song lyrics and reading scripts in search of her next project.
One part of the Judy Holliday legacy is that of a woman of
considerable grit and courage who survived the Red-hunting of the
early fifties. Garson Kanin best expressed her true accomplishment on
34 Quoted in Holtzman, 24.
3s Lee Israel, "Judy Holliday," MS, December 1976, 72-4, 90-6.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 19
that day in March of 1952. "Of all those who were harassed in the ugly
days of Red Channels and blacklisting, no one was more steadfast or
less craven than Judy. Her behavior under pressure was a poem of
grace."36
THE HOUSE UN-AMERI CAN AcnvmES COMMITIEE
Six months prior to Mady Christians's death, actor Larry Parks,
celebrated film star of The Jolson Story, named stage and film actress
Anne Revere (1903-1990) as part of a Communist Party cell in Los
Angeles during his testimony before the House Un-American Activities
Committee. Subsequently commanded to appear on the congressional
stage in Washington, D.C., Revere's experience replicated the now-
familiar pattern of investigation, subpoena, public hearing, testimony,
newspaper headlines, blacklisting, and unemployment.
Ellen Schrecker wrote in her excellent book on McCarthyism,
Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, that the operation of
the Hollywood blacklist was well-known by the early fifties.37
Following the "Waldorf Statement," all unfriendly or uncooperative
witnesses- those who refused to answer questions and took the
protections of the First or Fifth Amendments-were unemployable in
Hollywood. So, too, were those named as Communists during
congressional hearings. Anne Revere's Hollywood career was
essentially over when Larry Parks named her in March of 1951.
As a Red Channels listee and one of 65 signatories to a Los
Angeles Times advertisement protesting censorship of the Actors'
Laboratory by Jack Tenney's California committee (a HUAC clone),
Revere was subpoenaed to testify before HUAC in Washington, D.C.,
on April 17, 1951. Nine questions into the hearing, the committee's
counsel Frank S. Tavenner asked if, while in Hollywood, she had been
affiliated with the Actors' Laboratory, a non-profit theatrical school run
by actors Roman Bohnen, Morris Carnovsky, and Howard DaSilva. She
took the Fifth and delivered a prepared statement that addressed the
committee's "un-American" procedures:
... this would seem to me ... to be the first in a
possible series of questions which would attempt in some
manner to link me with subversive organizations; and as
the Communist Party is a political party-legal political
party-in the country today, and as I consider any
questioning regarding one's political views or religious
36 Quoted in Carey, 138.
37 Schrecker, 327, 330.
20 BARRANGER
views as a violation of the rights of a citizen under our
Constitution . . . . 38
Anne Revere's muted challenge to HUAC's violation of the
Constitution's protections of the civil rights of American citizens to exist
in the freedoms of speech and religion went unreported and unheard.
All witnesses were tutored by their lawyers in the subtleties of
the Fifth Amendment that protected against self-incrimination but not
against incriminating others.
Revere had prepared for questions about her actor-training
with the late Russian teachers and Moscow Art Theatre associates,
Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, who founded the
American Laboratory Theatre in New York City where she studied for
two years in the late twenties. Nonetheless, it was another studio
altogether that was of interest to the committee. Revere had not been
a part of the loose association of some 250 members, called the
Actors' Laboratory founded in 1941, who volunteered as professionals
to pass along their training and experience to younger artists and later
to returning veterans under the G. I. bill. Nonetheless, she signed an
advertisement in Daily Variety protesting the censorship and
intimidation tactics of the Tenney Committee who considered the
Actors' Lab the center of Communism in Hollywood and had uncovered
"evidence" that the Lab produced plays by a Russian named Anton
Chekhov. (The plays in evidence were Chekhov's The Bear and The
Evils of Tobacco.)39
Anne Revere took the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering
questions about the 64 signatories and about those artists involved
with the Actors' Lab, including at least four people with whom she had
worked in films: Roman Bohnen, Morris Carnovsky, Lee J. Cobb, and
John Garfield.40 Frank Tavenner, however, was not to be denied his
pursuit. He produced a Communist Party registration card, allegedly in
38 Testimony of Anne Revere (17 April 17 1951), Hearings
before the Committee on Un-American Activities House of
Representatives, Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion-Picture
Industry, Eighty-First Congress, Second Session (Washington, D.C.:
United States Government Printing Office, 1951), 318-21.
39 Daily Variety, 18 February 1948. In 1948, the IRS revoked
the tax-exempt status of the Actors' Lab; the following year, the Lab
was forced to end its involvement in the veterans' training program
and closed that same year following the death of Roman Bohnen.
40 See Roman Bohnen Papers, Series VI, The New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 21
her name, for the year 1945 and reiterated that the committee had
sworn testimony (from Larry Parks) that she was a member of the
Communist Party. She continued to assert her Fifth Amendment rights
and was dismissed. Headlines blared the next day: "Anne Revere, 2
Writers Refuse Red Query Reply." 41
The reserved New Yorker whose stern "Yankee" face was
familiar to filmgoers in National e l v e ~ The Song of Bernadette, Body
and Soul, Gentleman's Agreement, and A Place in the Sun was
effectively shut out of work in Hollywood. Made "controversial" by her
listing in Red Channels, she was also denied work in radio and
television. Revere returned to New York, the scene of her Broadway
triumph in Lillian Hellman's first play, The Children's Hour, and
struggled for nine years to reclaim her stage career. In 1960, she
appeared as Anna Berniers in Hellman's Toys in the Attic and received
the Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for best supporting actress.
By 1960, several television sponsors, but not all, had begun to
discard the blacklist. When television director Joseph Hardy invited
Revere to join the cast of ABC's A Time for Us, her agent suggested
that he might find it difficult to employ her for a recurring role in a
television series.42 It was learned that, at her agent's suggestion when
she was being considered for a role on another network, she had
previously prepared a sworn affidavit detailing her political history. Her
statement addressed her brief war-time membership in the Communist
Party: "Perhaps I was caught up in that immense surge of feeling that
the Soviet Union was a strong ally in the mortal struggle against
Nazism . ... At any rate my role as a member of the Communist Party
was primarily that of a well-wisher. It was a rather loose association
which I terminated voluntarily in 1945 or 1946, as soon as the war was
over." She concluded, " . .. I am proud to account myself a descendent
of a long line of revolutionary forebears who staked their lives in
hammering out the freedoms which make this country unique .. . . "43
As a young artist, Anne Revere had believed that the theatre
should "represent the people-the life and social problems of the
time."
44
She carried this philosophy into her major contributions to
films about anti-Semitism (Gentlemen's Agreement) and capital
punishment (A Place in the Sun), and into Hellman's plays about such
universal issues as discrimination, mendacity, and betrayal. In her
41 New York Daily News, 18 April 1951.
42 Author interview with Joseph Hardy, 12 May 2002.
43 Unpublished and undated typescript, c. 1965.
44 New York Herald Tribune, 24 November 1929, 35.
22 BAR RANGER
personal life, Revere was caught up in the great social and political
ideals of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, her luminous career in
character parts in film and on stage was stymied by the politics of the
era.
Within a year of Revere's testimony, Lillian Hellman followed
the actress before the House Un-American Activities Committee but
Hellman accomplished what Anne Revere did not. The playwright
created triumphant headlines and brought home to the Committeemen
the fact that women presented a unique problem for the congressional
hearings. Whereas HUAC could castigate the Hollywood Ten and send
the men to prison for contempt of Congress, to treat women in a
heavy-handed and cavalier manner in the early fifties and to threaten
them with imprisonment for citing their rights under the Constitution
posed the likelihood of a public outcry. To avoid unfavorable headlines
with their female witnesses, the committees were satisfied to identify
the women as Communists or as fellow travelers without issuing
citations for contempt.
* * *
Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) called the political decade of the witch-
hunting fifties scoundrel time. In 1952, she stood before Chairman
Wood's committee in Washington and swore to truthfulness. "Truth
made you a traitor," she later wrote, "as it often does in a time of
scoundrels."4s
The Southerner, originally from New Orleans, appeared before
the committee in her black Balmain "testifying dress" with white kid
gloves and hat purchased for the occasion. Despite the fact that she
was the leading woman playwright of the time, she was an unlikely
heroine. A blend of rebellious kid and Southern lady, she stood before
HUAC in the knowledge that she would not name names and would
most likely be sent to prison for contempt. Determined to take a moral
stand, she would not be dissuaded from her righteous path. She was
one tough lady and the committee knew it.
Hellman had been approaching this political moment for over
40 years. Her liberal politics began in New Orleans where she grew
up in a family of Southern Jewish forebears. While her mother's family
(the Marxes and the Newhouses) was wealthy and acquisitive, her
father's (emigres from Germany) was intermittently poor and always
eccentric. She claimed to have revolted early from her mother's
wealthy Alabama family and followed the spirit of her father's who
exhibited a generosity of spirit as well as an independence of thought
that proved attractive to a rebellious child. Moreover, Hellman claimed
45 Scoundrel Time, 73.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 23
to receive from her black childhood nurse, Sophronia, the gift of anger
for the miseries of the poor (black and white)-"an uncomfortable,
dangerous, and useful gift"-that shaped her politics in the thirties and
forties.4G
The early years of Hellman's career in New York and
Hollywood are well-documented. She left New Orleans to pursue a
career in New York publishing and became an editorial assistant to
Horace Liveright, a theatrical press agent, and shortly became a play-
reader. She married the well-connected writer Arthur Kober, and, in
1930, went to Hollywood as a script-reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
were she met Dashiell Hammett who became her companion until his
death in 1961. Hellman made her reputation on Broadway in 1934 with
The Children's Hour that shocked and fascinated audiences with its
story of the evil machinations of a young student who destroys her
teachers with whispers about their "unnatural" relationship. Critics
labeled Hellman "the second Ibsen" and "the American Strindberg ."
With The Little Foxes in 1939, Hellman established her dramaturgical
trademark with melodramatic situations, vigorous confrontations, and
explosive endings.
Beginning in the thirties, Hellman spent three to five months
of each year in Hollywood writing film scripts, including film treatments
of her Broadway plays-The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes, and
Watch on the Rhine. Unlike Mady Christians and Anne Revere, she
was not yet on the Hollywood blacklist in 1947 but the climate changed
in 1950. Hellman was listed in Red Channels with 28 citations, ranging
from birthday greetings to the Moscow Art Theatre to political activities
on behalf of the 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign of
former vice president Henry Wallace, membership in "subversive"
organizations for Russian war relief and European refugees, and
signatory to petitions to discontinue the Martin Dies Committee and to
abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. The years in
question were 1937 to 1949 and the principal sources were citations
found in the Daily Worker and appendices from other HUAC
proceedings.
Commentators on the times have said that 1952 was the most
virulent phase of the country's witch-hunting mood.47 Blacklisted in
Hollywood and investigated by the Internal Revenue Service for non-
payment of taxes, Hellman was handed a subpoena in February of
1952 to appear before HUAC. At this point, she turned to Abe Fortas
(later a Supreme Court Justice) of the Washington law firm of Arnold,
46 Ibid., 33-4.
47 William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 245.
24 BARRANGER
Fortas and Porter.
According to Hellman's account, Fortas came to her New York
apartment and advised her to take a "moral position" before the
committee and not depend upon the legalities of the Fifth Amendment
that were not playing well with the Committee or with the American
public. He recommended that Hellman testify about herself, answer all
questions about her life, but not give names or information about
anyone else. He then introduced her to Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., a member
of his firm who would represent her.
Faced with a client who was not prepared to be a friendly
witness or spend time in jail, Joseph Rauh tried to negotiate a middle
position for Hellman but the committee insisted that there no way to
avoid naming other people.4B Hellman then wrote her famous letter to
Chairman Wood, dated May 19, 1952, in which she respectfully offered
to waive " the privilege against self-incrimination and to tell you
everything you wish to know about my views or actions if your
committee will agree to refrain from asking me to name other people .
. . . " The following day Wood wrote a terse reply in which he advised
her that " the committee cannot enter into negotiations with witnesses
to set forth terms under which they will testify."
Hellman's public hearing convened on May 21. When she
appeared before HUAC, she was a celebrated playwright, eloquent,
stylish, defiant, and prepared to create a political drama with herself
as the central figure.
With Chairman Wood presiding, a second committee member,
Senator Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, counsel Frank S. Tavenner,
Jr., and five staff members were present. Hellman answered the
perfunctory questions about her place of birth, current place of
residence, formal education, and occupation. Tavenner, who was
asking the initial questions, was more interested in her work in
Hollywood than in New York. She explained that she had first worked
at MGM as a reader and translator in 1930 and returned in 1935 to
write her first screen play called Dead End. For the years 1937 and
1938 she was unclear about dates. Tavenner dropped the name of
screenwriter Martin Berkeley. " In the course of your visits to
Holllywood, did you become acquainted with Martin Berkeley?" he
asked. Hellman refused to answer "on the ground that it might
incriminate me."
Ignoring her refusal, Tavenner recycled his questions about
1937. As she equivocated, he exploded:
48 Scoundrel Time, 76-7.
WOMEN ON TRIAL
Miss Hellman, during the course of the hearing in
California in September 1951, Mr. Martin Berkeley
testified regarding the holding of a meeting of members
of the communist Party in June of 1937 in his home .... 49
25
Tavenner proceeded to read into the record portions of Berkeley's
testimony that named, among others, Dorothy Parker, Allen Campbell,
Dashiell Hammett, and "the very excellent playwright" Lillian Hellman.
He then asked if Berkeley's statement was true?
If Hellman admitted knowing Martin Berkeley, it might be
construed as an admission that she had been a Party member. She
would then be compelled to talk about others not already known to the
committee.
Hellman counter-punched with her prepared letter. "I would
very much like to discuss this with you, Mr. Tavenner, and I would like
at this point to refer you to my letter . .. " For the first time, Chairman
Wood entered the proceedings. He suggested that the correspondence
between the witness and himself be put into the record. Joseph Rauh
leaped to his feet and handed out copies of Hellman's letter to the
press seated on one side of the room.
Realizing that he had made a procedural error, Wood tried to
salvage the situation and had Tavenner read aloud Hellman's letter and
the chairman's reply. Having done so, Tavenner returned to his
question about Martin Berkeley and Hellman countered with a refusal
to answer "on the ground that it might incriminate me." Hellman had
taken the Fifth, but her moral victory was contained in her letter that
was now part of the committee's permanent record:
. .. My counsel tells me that if I answer questions about
myself, I will have waived my rights under the fifth
amendment and could be forced legally to answer
questions about others. This is very difficult for a layman
to understand. But there is one principle that I do
understand: I am not willing, now or in the future, to
bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association
with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any
action that was disloyal or subversive. I do not like
subversion or disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen
any I would have considered it my duty to have reported
it to the proper authorities. But to hurt innocent people
whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is,
49 Testimony of Lillian Hellman (21 May 1952), Hearings
Before the Committee on Un-American Activities House of
Representatives, Communist Infiltration of the Hollywood Motion-
Picture Industry-Part Eight, Eighty-Second Congress, Second
Session (Washington, D. C.: United States Government Printing
Office, 1952), 3541-9.
26 BAR RANGER
to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot
and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions,
even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was
not a political person and could have no comfortable
place in any political group ...
Despite the prominence of the feisty and unpredictable Southerner,
Tavenner persisted. He asked the sixty-four dollar question and
Hellman refused to answer.
TAVENNER. Are you now a member of the Communist
Party?
HELLMAN. No, sir.
TAVENNER. Were you ever a member of the Communist
Party?
HELLMAN. I refuse to answer, Mr. Tavenner, on the same
grounds.
The splitting of hairs over the various years in question has
always been a troublesome part of Hellman's testimony. Dashiell
Hammett was certainly a member in 1937 or 1938. Hellman wrote in
Scoundrel Time that she did not join the Party, although the former CP
leader Earl Browder and chief theorist V. J. Jerome made overtures to
her. 50 Her principal biographer said that the logic of her political
postures and silences can best be argued as "perhaps the strongest
evidence of her longtime Party allegiance. "51 It would certainly explain
the selected silences on certain dates within her testimony. On the
other hand, Joseph Rauh, an anti-communist liberal widely known for
his refusal to represent Party members, was quoted as saying that
Hellman had told him that she was not a Party member, and that he
believed her. By having Rauh as her counsel, Hellman also sent a
message that she was not a member of the Communist Party and
achieved a tactical advantage over her inquisitors.52 Hellman was
clear-sighted about the matter and understood full well, as she wrote
in Soundrel Time, "that in refusing to answer questions about
membership in the Party I had, of course, trapped myself into the
seeming admission that I once had been."53
Nonetheless, the facts are muddled. Wright argued that
Hellman's reasons for not wanting to admit to Party membership at the
time of her testimony may have been what she claimed: an
unwillingness to name names and an unwillingness to go to jail. Under
50 Scoundrel Time, 31.
51 Wright, 363.
52 Ibid., 29.
53 Scoundrel Time, 96-7.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 27
the law, admission of Party membership followed by a refusal to name
names assured a contempt citation and possibly a jail sentence.
Therefore, Hellman chose to take the Fifth for those three years in the
late forties (1947-1949) where some proof might have surfaced to
contradict her assertions and subsequently deny her the protection of
the Fifth. She was also frankly concerned about her future ability to
generate income as a playwright.
Hellman's testimony ended in frustration for the committee.
She had articulated in a public hearing her moral repugnance at
forcing witnesses to denounce friends and colleagues with greater
eloquence and restrained dignity than any previous witness. However,
the national press was not restrained and the committee suffered its
most severe and long-remembered public relations defeat with the
headline: "LILLIAN HELLMAN BALKS HOUSE UNIT." 54
Hellman returned to New York City consumed by the need to
re-establish herself on Broadway to generate much-needed income
and to repair her reputation tarnished by HUAC's disloyalty brush. Her
income had dwindled since her blacklisting from $140,000 a year to
around $10,000. There was no remedy for the IRS except to endure
the repayments. Dashiell Hammett's health and income would never
be restored. Kermit Bloomgarden stood by her and revived The
Children's Hour, a play about the destructive power of false
accusations. As both writer and director of the revival, Hellman
focused now on the culpability of bystanders and the harm that they
bring to others in their failure to thwart evil. The shift of emphasis
resonated with audiences and reviewers who recognized the play's
renewed power and relevance in 1952.
Following her successful return to Broadway, she recovered
her career and income as quickly as many of the friendly witnesses.
Nonetheless, she had not written a play since The Autumn Garden in
1951 and was fearful that she had dried up as a playwright.55 Her first
post-HUAC effort to write for the theatre dealt, not surprisingly, with
themes about an individual's coercion by the state to testify to things
that she was unwilling to say. Hellman's adaptation of Jean Anouilh's
play about Joan of Arc, The Lark, was a notable hit in 1955. Then,
Hammett gave her the idea for Toys in the Attic that opened seven
years following HUAC, and, in a fine point of irony, featured Anne
Revere in her final role on Broadway in Hellman's last original play.
It is difficult to know what Hellman concluded about her future
as a playwright following the political maelstrom of the fifties. What is
54 New York Times, 22 May 1952, 15.1.
55 Wright, 274.
28 BARRANGER
known is that Hellman, who had another 20 years of a productive
creative life, never wrote another original play, or another serious play.
During Toys in the Attic, according to her biographer, "She seemed to
be a woman trying to get out of the theatre but unable to find an exit. "56
In the late sixties, Hellman made her exit from the theatre
with her celebrated semi-autobiographical writings: An Unfinished
Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973), and Scoundrel Time (1976) .
Hellman's bitter memories of her persecution by HUAC and her anger
at those she held accountable for abandoning liberal ideals had not
receded with the intervening years. At 71, the feisty Hellman set the
liberal establishment aflame with the slim 121-page volume that
focused squarely upon the anticommunist crusaders of the fifties and
recalled the abuses of McCarthyism and the failures of American
liberalism.
The outrage against Scoundrel Time centered around two
sections. In the first, Hellman accused liberals of "joining" McCarthy;
in the second, she accused American intellectuals of failing to speak
out against McCarthyism. Her barebones discourse was
Hammettesque in style: "None of them, as far as I know, has yet
found it a part of conscience to admit their Cold War anti-Communism
was perverted, possibly against their wishes, into the Vietnam War and
then into the reign of Nixon, their unwanted but inevitable leader. "57
By the fall of 1976, the hounds of the liberal press were
running full-out chasing after their wily, contentious fox. Hellman was
cited for historical fraud, del i berate obfuscation, and literary
meanness. 5s To the astonishment of her friends and detractors, she
maintained an imperious silence throughout the furor. Her public
response was to appear in a full -page advertisement in national
magazines wrapped in a Black-glama mink coat identified not by name
but by the caption, "What becomes a legend most?" It was an elegant
checkmate in the gamesmanship of American political discourse.
56 Ibid., 282.
57 Scoundrel Time, 74.
58 Hilton Kramer, New York Times, 3 October 1976; Alfred
Kazin, "Legend of Lillian Hellman," Esquire 88 (August 1977): 28.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 29
THE McCARTHY COMMmEE
Lillian Hellman and Margaret Webster (1905-1972) shared common
ground in Broadway's politics at mid-century. More so than Mady
Christians, Judy Holliday, and Anne Revere, Hellman (the playwright
and sometime director) and Webster (the stage and opera director)
were women competing in a man's world where there were only a
small number of professional women playwrights and a smaller
number of women directors. Both women were targeted in Red
Channels and made unemployable in films and television. They also
shared contiguous subpoenas and congressional hearings in
Washington, D.C. Webster appeared before McCarthy's investigative
subcommittee exactly one year and one day following Hellman's
appearance before HUAC. Moreover, guided by attorney Louis Nizer's
associate, Sidney M. Davis, Webster planned a legal strategy based
upon what was now called the "diminished Fifth," attributable to
Hellman.
Dressed in a somber tailored suit and wearing sensible shoes,
Margaret Webster walked down the corridor of the Senate Office
Building noisy with reporters who had appeared in response to a
Walter Winchell tip that the well-known theatre director had been
called as a witness. She took her place on McCarthy's stage in a private
hearing on May 25, 1953.
Nineteen years later, she wrote about her decade of
blacklisting, including the inquiries by FBI agents, passport difficulties,
persecuted friends, and chilling subpoenas, Webster said that it all
began with Actor's Equity. In fact, it all began in London where she
grew up. During the First World War, her mother, actress Dame May
Whitty, took up the "good causes" and instilled in her daughter an
appreciation for charitable endeavors that supported the marginalized,
the economically deprived, and the plight of people, especially women
and children, displaced by wartime events. Similar causes and
committees during the Second World War evolved into fodder for anti-
communist agendas in the United States at the beginning of the Cold
War.
Webster was born in the proverbial theatre trunk in 1905 when
her actor-father, accompanied by her mother, appeared in New York
City in a British touring production of The Prince Consort. Her birth was
announced from the stage of the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd
Street when a fellow actor, whose part called for him to announce the
birth of the Prince's son, said, "I'm afraid tonight it's a giri!"S9
sg Margaret Webster, The Same Only Different: Rve Generations of a
Great Theatre Family (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 209.
30 8ARRANGER
Thirty-two years later, Webster arrived on Broadway to stage
a revival of Richard II with Maurice Evans in the title role and stayed
for the next 40 years to direct a number of classical and modern plays
and Verdi operas that dealt with individuals in mortal struggle with
tyranny. She became an ardent supporter of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and the New Deal and an advocate for civil rights on all
issues of individual freedoms. In 1943, she challenged the Broadway
establishment with a production of Othello with African American
actor-singer Paul Robeson in the title role. The multiracial cast included
Robeson, Jose Ferrer, Uta Hagen, and Webster herself as Emilia. At
the time, the production was a landmark of theatrical and social
history. During the war years on Broadway, Webster directed nine
plays, acted in two, and wrote a seminal book called Shakespeare
Without Tears. She also channeled her civic energies toward war relief
agencies, charities, and the actors' union. Two of the relief agencies
and Actors' Equity were to cause their supporters a great deal of grief
in the fifties.
Margaret Webster had been a member of British Equity's first
council in London and became a member of American Equity when she
played Masha in Chekhov's The Seagull with Alfred Lunt and Lynn
Fontanne in 1939. She was invited to run as a candidate for the
governing council of American Equity but the election committee
refused two names and a firestorm ensued. Mady Christians was
rejected "because she was foreign born" and Alan Hewitt "because he
had been accused of Communism."6o An independent ticket was
formed and both groups were elected but not without resignations and
charges that the "Reds" had taken over Actors' Equity. Webster
remained on the Equity Council for 10 years and resigned only in 1951
when the national political climate suggested that her presence on the
Council was detrimental to the work of the union. As she described the
dispute among Equity's members in response to the Red Scare, she
remarked that "if any of my fellow members were, in fact,
Communists, I can only say that as actors they were brilliant, and as
minions of the U.S.S.R. totally and utterly useless."61
In truth, the anti-Red tide was rising on Broadway in the
forties as evidenced by the turmoil- charges and counter-charges-
among members of Actors' Equity. As Webster observed of those
turbulent days: "The years of disgrace were upon us, of reckless
60 Margaret Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage
(Nw York: Alfred A. Knopf), 244.
61 Ibid., 245.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 31
accusations, of endless 'smear campaigns,' of innuendoes, of that most
insidious of weapons, guilt by association."62
Identified in Red Channels as "Author, Director, Producer," her
name appeared along with 11 committees, organizations, and
meetings where she had served as sponsor, speaker, member, or
participant between 1941 and 1949. Moreover, in 1949, she had signed
an open letter to the members of the Eighty-First Congress urging the
abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee, sponsored
appeals on behalf of the Spanish Refugee Appeal and the Council on
African Affairs, and supported the Citizens Committee for the Re-
Election of Benjamin Davis, Jr., an African American who had been first
elected to the New York City Council on the Communist ticket in 1943
and received the Democratic Party's endorsement as a candidate for
re-election in 1945.
As a Red Channelslistee, Webster was branded a "Pinko" and
fellow traveler. She received letters addressed to her at Actors' Equity
excoriating her for her affiliations "with 19 communist front
organizations" along with threats to boycott any play in which her
name appeared. Concerned that she would remain in a kind of
"suspicious limbo" for the remainder of her career, she wrote a
prophetic letter to attorney Louis Nizer: "If the Un-American
Committee get to thinking the 'theatre,' apart from Radio and
Hollywood, important enough to investigate, I shall surely be on their
list. . . . My guess is that things will get worse, not better during the
coming years."63 The letter was dated April 22, 1951. Unknown to her,
the FBI had begun compiling a file in her name as a security matter 13
days earlier. 64
Also unknown to Margaret Webster was the fact that her name
had been read into the proceedings of the House Un-American
Activities Committee on three occasions. First, in 1947, Walter S.
Steele, who published his own anti-Communist newsletter and had
been indexing names for decades, named her as "active in Red Front
circles for some years." In the early fifties, actors Edward G. Robinson
and Jose Ferrer appeared voluntarily before HUAC to clear their names
of false accusations in order to return to work in Hollywood. As non-
Communists, they had no Communist Party members to name and,
therefore, had to reach into "front" organizations. In 1950, Edward G.
62 Ibid., 247-8.
63 Ibid., 254.
64 FBI File No. 100-99747 (Subject: Margaret Webster) was
initiated as a security matter by an order, dated 2 March 1951, from
the Director to SAC New York City.
32 BARRANGER
Robinson listed Webster among 64 sponsors of a 1943 dinner
celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Soviet army; in 1951, Jose
Ferrer, who played Iago in Webster's production of Othello, cited her,
first, as the person who asked him to send a congratulatory telegram
on the 50th anniversary of the Moscow Art Theatre, and, then, as the
organizer who invited him to speak at a luncheon on behalf of the Joint
Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee organized in 1941 to help refugees
from Spain who had fled to France during the Spanish Civil War. 65
After much self-abnegation both actors returned to their Hollywood
careers.
When she read the newspaper reports of Ferrer's testimony,
Webster observed, "I knew it wouldn't be long now."66
The lull before the storm of McCarthyism that swept over
Margaret Webster's career lasted two years. She worked continuously
in 1951. She staged Aida at the Metropolitan Opera House for general
manager Rudolf Bing; she directed revivals of Richard II and The
Taming of the Shrewfor producer Jean Dalrymple at the New York City
Center for Drama; she staged Saint Joan with Uta Hagen for the
Theatre Guild; and she played in Herman Shumlin's Broadway
production of The High Ground. As the Nun-Detective in Charlotte
Hastings's undistinguished thriller, Brooks Atkinson called her "the
ablest woman in our theatre in or out of a nun's robe. " 67
Toward the end of 1951, Mady Christians died, and, in her
grief over her friend's death, Webster grew uneasy with what she
called the "shadowboxing" with innuendo, anonymous threats, and
mysterious investigators. In 1952, she had no employment. In the late
spring, the inevitable telegram signed by Joseph R. McCarthy
6s See Testimony of WalterS. Steele (21 July 1947) regarding
Communist activities in the United States, Hearing before the Committee on
Un-American Activities House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, Arst
Session (Washington, D. C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1947),
110; Testimony of Edward G. Robinson (27 October 1950), Hearing before the
Committee on Un-American Activities House of Representatives, Eighty-Arst
Congress, Second Session(Washington, D. C.: United States Government
Printing Office, 1951), 3325; Testimony of Jose Ferrer (22 May and 25 May
1951), Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities House of
Representatives, Communist Infiltraton of Hollywood Motion-Picture
Industiy-Part 3, Bghty-Second Congress, Arst Session (Washington, D. C. :
Government Printing Office, 1951), 573, 653, 654.
66 Daughter on the t a g ~ 257.
67 Brooks Atkinson, "Theatre Review of The High Ground;' New York
Times, 21 February 1951, 31.2.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 33
summoned her to appear for a "private" hearing before the Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on
Government Operations in Washington, D.C., on May 25, 1953.
In Louis Nizer's office, she reviewed the testimony of several
witnesses. Like most witnesses, she had few alternatives when under
oath. She could refuse to answer questions and become liable for
contempt of Congress. She could give names to the committee and
be dismissed as a cooperative witness with faint hope of re-
employment. She could plead the Fifth, tantamount to an admission
of guilt, and face severe economic and social consequences. Or, she
could try Hellman's "diminished Fifth." Since names were the crux of
the matter, she observed, "This was morally OK but legally dubious."68
Webster was in a quandary. She had nothing to tell or refuse to tell.
She insisted that the only Communist she knew was the self-
proclaimed Paul Robeson. Finally, she decided to use the
circumlocutions of the "diminished" Fifth and "pray for the best."
Sidney Davis warned her never to say "No." He encouraged
her to use such phrases as "I cannot remember doing so"; "Not so far
as I can recall"; or, "To the best of my recollection, no." Davis argued
that it was important never to take a hard stand since the tactic of
the subcommittee's chief legal counsel, Roy M. Cohn, was to produce
witnesses (or informers) to contradict unequivocal statements and
subject the witness to a charge of perjury. 69
At Nizer's suggestion, Webster drew up a two-and-a-half
page statement to deposit with the subcommittee. It contained a list
of 46 "blameless" charities and organizations to which she had
subscribed or worked, including the United Jewish Appeal and the
America Red Cross. She began her statement with an apology for
underrating the extent and power of the Communist movement in the
United States. "I viewed the American Communists as a small set of
'lunatic fringe' cranks," she wrote, "who were completely ineffectual
and worthy of nothing but contempt." She reiterated her tireless
support of the U.S. war effort, her work for relief efforts for children
and refugees, her devotion to world peace, and her lifetime of service
to the American theatre and its charities. Although she would later
feel degraded at having written the self-effacing statement, she,
nevertheless, concluded with a heartfelt repudiation of Communism?O
68 Daughter on the Stage, 263.
69 Ibid., 263-4.
70 Unpublished typescript by Margaret Webster, entitled "For
Senate Sub-Committee on Investigations," undated, The Library of
Congress.
34
BARRANGER
Armed with her statement, the diminished Fifth, and a prayer
from Isaiah, Margaret Webster walked into the hearing room where
she passed "a small, rather shabby battered couple" leaving. Dr.
Napthali Lewis, a professor at Brooklyn College who had been
awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Italy, and his wife Helen
E. Lewis had been summoned to McCarthy's chambers as suspected
Communists. Webster made no connection between herself and the
Lewises.71 She was unaware that the McCarthy subcommittee's
agenda was the investigation of the U.S. Educational Exchange Award
Program for travel and study abroad under the Fulbright Act, named
for Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat from Arkansas, who
pioneered the program. Moreover, her subpoena was unrelated to
Paul Robeson, earlier testimonies of Ferrer and others, Communist
front groups, or contributions to the good causes. McCarthy's target
was J. William Fulbright and Margaret Webster had been called to
establish evidentiary proof to be used against the powerful chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.72
At the start of the hearing, Roy Cohn dispensed with the
preliminary questions (place of birth, education, career) to address
the subcommittee's agenda: "Miss Webster, do you have any
connection with the teacher-student exchange program of the State
Depa rtment?'?J
71 On June 20, 1953, Joseph McCarthy announced that the Fulbright
Award to Dr. Naphtali Lewis, a professor of classical languages at Brooklyn
College, to study in Italy had been rescinded. He refused to testify against his
wife Helen E. Lewis who refused to say if she had been a member of the
Communist Party; she invoked the Fifth Amendment. This was the "battered"
couple that Margaret Webster described in the corridor of the Senate building.
See Frederick Graham, "Professor Loses Fulbright Award After Wife Balks at
Red Inquiry," New York Ttmes, 20 June 1953, 1.
n In 1953, Democratic Senators were moving toward a party-wide
confrontation with Joseph McCarthy on a number of issues not the least of
which were McCarthy's preemptory invasions of the jurisdictions of other
Senate committees, including the Internal Security Subcommittee and the
Foreign Relations Committee. Moreover, the authorization for the Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations was scheduled to expire on January 31,
1954, unless McCarthy agreed to make concessions. See Robert Griffith, The
Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCiJrthy and the Senate, 2d ed. (Amherst: The
University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 238.
73 Testimony of Margaret Webster (25 May 1953), Executive Sessions
of the United States Senate, Pennanent Subcommittee on Investigations of
the Committee on Government Operations, Eighty-Third Congress, Second
Session (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 2003), 1245-66.
WOMEN ON TRIAL
35
Seated at the table with Senators John L. McClellan of
Arkansas, Henry M. ("Scoop") Jackson of Washington, and Stuart
Symington of Missouri, she explained her work as both consultant and
adjudicator for the theatre area of the Fulbright Scholarship Division
of the International Institute of Education. The senators were
singularly interested in whether or not she had made final decisions
on the theatre applicants and if she had been asked to approve
teachers. "No, sir," she responded, "All that we have ever been asked
to do," she said, "is rate the candidates [in acting auditions] according
to our view of their ability and to turn this material and our
recommendations back to the institute." She further stated that she
"had nothing to do with the selection process of candidates" and was
never officially informed of the final decisions by the Institute's central
committee that governed the selection process.
Finding this line of questioning unproductive, Cohn turned to
the anticipated questions about her connections with Communist
front organizations, her support of the re-election of Benjamin Davis,
and her greetings to the "actors of Moscow." She took refuge in the
language of the well-rehearsed witness and in the confusion of titles
used by the Senators. She had "never been a member," had no
"recollection of the organization," or had "no recollection" of an event
or date. Symington then asked the sixty-four dollar question: "Have
you ever been a Communist?" She answered forthrightly, "No, sir, at
no time nor am I now."
Most witnesses were advised by their lawyers to give the
committee something. She volunteered her connection with two
organizations between 1943 and 1947-the National Council of
American-Soviet Friendship of which she was on record as the
chairman of the Theatre Division and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee
Committee for which she had made public appeals for charitable
purposes. Moreover, she confirmed that upon receiving a letter from
the Spanish Refugee Appeal that was political, not humanitarian, in
character, she asked that her name as a sponsor be stricken from
their letterhead. It was her testimony that she had never given the
organization permission to use her name.
As the hearing was winding down, Senator McClellan inquired
again if she had passed on or approved applicants, especially
teachers, for the Fulbright Scholarships. Webster's answer was a
definitive "No, sir." Senator Jackson revisited her sympathies for
Communists. Again, she was unequivocal: "I have always been
opposed to the Communist philosophy, its practices. It is a horror to
me. In such a society I wouldn't last a week." This witness had
produced no evidence to use against the "subversive" activities of the
State Department's Teacher-Student Exchange Program. Nonetheless,
Roy Cohn was not to be denied a final thrust. "Did you object to the
36
BARRANGER
Subversive Control Act?" he asked.
WEBSTER. Which was the Subversive Control Act? There
were so many of them.
"That is all, Miss Webster," Cohn concluded and the hearing was
adjourned. Writing about the episode 19 years later, Webster
remembered few specifics. In the absence of a transcript of the
hearing, she re-created dialogue among herself, the senators, and
Roy Cohn in a drama where she portrayed herself as a minor
character-actor in a political tragedy of national scope. She reported,
"McCarthy shot a question or two" and told her at the end that she
was "an OK American after all."74 In fact, it was unlikely that McCarthy
was present at the " private" hearing of a minor witness since he was
already engaged in preparations for the Army-Mccarthy hearings, as
they were later called. The transcript does not reveal his presence at
any time. Perhaps McCarthy entered the room after Webster's hearing
was adjourned and assured her that she was an "OK American."
Nonetheless, those two words were lodged in her memory.
Webster's version, published in 1972, remained the public
record until the release in 2003 of the sealed testimony of the
McCarthy hearings. Despite the inaccuracies of her account, her
screen memory of the larger experience did not fail her. She
reconstructed the emotional truth of the months and years of fear,
outrage, disgrace, mistrust, and humiliation that the victims of the
witch-hunts experienced. "To be afraid is a very humiliating
experience," she wrote. " .. . But to be afraid in spite of your mind,
your reason, your convictions, despising what you fear, despising
yourself for fearing it. .. that is a very evil thing."7s
Webster's chapter, entitled "Of Witch-Hunting," captured the
roiling clouds of McCarthyism over Broadway in the early fifties. She
detailed Equity's role in the Red Scare, the public humiliation of
witnesses, the loss of employment, and the untimely deaths of artists
like Mady Christians, Philip Loeb, J. Edward Bromberg, John Garfield,
and Canada Lee. In effect, Webster described the runaway train of
fear and paranoia that carried Broadway's artists away from vital
careers and productive lives as "a miserable business from first to
last."76
Margaret Webster considered her career in 1953
"undermined, if not ostensibly broken."n Her friend and admirer
74 Daughter on the Stage, 269.
75 Ibid., 268.
76 Ibid., 273.
n Ibid.
WOMEN ON TRIAL 37
Brooks Atkinson agreed with her assessment that her Broadway
career was "permanently tarnished."78 She returned to London and
never again maintained a permanent residence in the United States
with the exception of a cottage on Martha's Vineyard. She worked
sporadically for another 16 years in England and the United States but
her American career was ostensibly broken by the years of
blacklisting, by her self-imposed exile, and by changing styles in the
commercial theatre.
*
*
*
Anne Revere said that it didn't matter whether you answered
the Committee's questions or not, cooperated or not, you were still
declared 'dead in the business.' "79 The truth of her statement lies in
the fact that the congressional hearings made people controversial,
and, in the 1950s, controversy was almost as damaging as those
branded as Communists.
For a few years in the mid-fifties, Broadway producers
appeared cautious in their use of controversial artists but their caution
evaporated faster than in Hollywood. Actors, writers, and directors
returned to work sooner on the legitimate stage but many never
reclaimed their earlier exuberance or the salaries that they earned
before their enforced absences. Although blacklisted in Hollywood
and by television sponsors, Lillian Hellman could get Toys in the Attic
produced and Judy Holliday could sing-out joyously in Bells Are
Ringing. There was work for controversial artists on Broadway,
although that work in the fifties was not as plentiful for some as in
previous seasons. Moreover, some were too disheartened by the
decade of controversy to reclaim their reputations and found
consolation in other endeavors or were claimed by ill-health and lost
to the theatre altogether.
The careers of Mady Christians, Judy Holliday, Anne Revere,
Lillian Hellman, and Margaret Webster serve as cautionary tales about
the vulnerability of artists and culture to the unchecked political
agendas of governments, politicians, and neoconservative groups.
Their experiences of fear, humiliation, financial loss, and even fatal
illness colored a dark chapter in the long political debacle that
touched so many artistic lives at mid-twentieth century. As viewed
against millennia! America, their individual histories are further
nuanced by expanding neoconservative agendas and abridgements of
civil liberties in the name, once again, of national security.
78 Atkinson, Broadway, 435.
79 Rex Reeq, "Anne Revere: Beyond the Blacklist," Sunday
News, 27 April 197::>, 5.
38 Journal of American Drama and Theatre 15, no. 3 (Fall 2003)
STRANGE FACES, OTHER MINDS:
SARTRE, MILLER AND CLARA
JON TUTILE
Morality is only possible if everyone is moral.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I take my epigraph from one of Sartre's unpublished
notebooks, written the same year (1947) that it was powerfully
demonstrated in Arthur Miller's All My Sons, the play that launched
Miller's career as America's pre-eminent moral theatrician and, as
Ronald Hayman put it, "the most Sartrean contemporary playwright."!
Through The Price in 1968, most of Miller's plays can be boiled down
to this same simple premise. Thereafter, Miller lapsed into a relative
stage silence of some 23 years, writing few plays, or at least few good
ones, having grown deaf, as he says in his autobiography, to "the
tempo of the time."2
It was during this period that he dabbled briefly and without
much notice in the one-act, producing among several others his two
Danger: Memory! plays, I Can't Remember Anything and Clara
(1986). These plays deal primarily with the problem of self-definition
given the limits of recollection, and ought probably be labeled
psychodramas, having less in common with Ibsen or Odets, as did his
earlier plays, than with Pinter or Beckett. Too, they suggest that, as
he approached his 75th birthday, Miller's attention turned temporarily
to the psychopathology of aging: the vocabulary is more condensed,
the vision shorter and narrower, the distinctions between real and
unreal hazier, and the crises perhaps more personal than social.
Commercially, they may represent the nadir of Miller's "blue period."
That having been said, it can also be argued that both
Danger: Memory! plays, but particularly Clara, reveal that besides
experimenting with form, Miller was consciously re-attuning his ear
before embarking on those later works that would signal his
triumphant return to Broadway in 1991 with The Ride Down Mt.
Morgan and later with Broken Glass (1994) . Joining a choir of critics
(Esther Jackson, C. W E. Bigsby, Lawrence Lowenstein, V. Rajakrishnan,
Robert A. Martin) who have rendered similar readings of Miller's
1 Ronald Hayman, Arthur Miller (New York: Frederick Unger,
1972), 113.
2 Arthur Miller, Timebends (New York: Grove, 1987), 445.
STRANGE FACES 39
earlier plays, Steven Centola has demonstrated that the strength of
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan resides in its debt to or consanguinity with
Sartre:
[Miller] links social problems to psychological issues and
metaphysical concerns and thereby creates a drama that
shows why certain attributes inherent in the human
constitution inevitably give rise to the battle of wills that
characterizes the nature of relations between the
individual and the Other. Like Sartre, Miller shows that,
while such a condition is fundamental to human
existence, the difficulty it creates may be ameliorated if
the individual accepts the freedom to choose responsible
acts and consciously behaves in a way that demonstrates
one's personal commitments to others.3
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan insists on those commitments in terms
almost identical to All My Sons. As Joe Keller was reminded by his
son Chris, so is Lyman Felt by his daughter Bessie: "There are other
people."4 Clara finds Miller once again exploring the problem of "the
Other" (a term Sartre borrowed from John Stuart Mill) but is, at least
at first glance, a philosophical negative of his other plays. Miller
seems, as Blake said of Milton, to be of the devil's party without
knowing it.
Owing to its relative obscurity, a summary of Clara is probably
in order. It consists of an interview between Albert Kroll, whose
daughter Clara has been savagely murdered (her decapitated body is
in the next room), and Lew Fine, a police detective who plies him for
information-specifically the name of the Puerto Rican ex-con his
daughter had begun seeing romantically and who is now the primary
suspect. Clara, says her father, "never knew what fear was"s and
"love[d] everybody"6 so much that she had devoted her life to
prisoner rehabilitation. Through the course of the play, however, Kroll
registers guilt over having allowed her to trust too much, to emulate
3 Stephen Centola, "'How to Contain the Impulse of
Betrayal': A Sartrean Reading of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan/'
American Drama 6.1 (fall 1996): 15-16.
4 Arthur Miller, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (New York:
Penguin, 1992), 138.
s Arthur Miller, Clara, in Danger: Memory! (New York: Grove,
1986), 38.
6 Ibid., 45.
40 TUTILE
an altruism she perceived in him but that he did not in fact actually
practice. "I guess I am a little ashamed of one thing," he says. "I
didn't tell Clara how strongly I felt about this man,"
7
who, besides
being "Hispanic," had also murdered his previous girlfriend.
The unsettling implication is that a healthy dose of racism
might have saved Clara's life. The crux of the play-the speech that
leads directly to the climax-is a long monologue in which Kroll recalls
saving the lives of several black soldiers facing a lynching in Biloxi by
firing his .45 into the air and spiriting them out of town. During the
monologue, as at various points throughout the play, the past and
present meld, and to the memory of his daughter's approving sighs
he protests, "No, honey ... I just didn't have time to think! It was
nothing!"B And as she vanishes into death, the name of her assailant
finally returns to him.
To Miller, what returns also is Kroll's "youthful hopes for
himself and his faith in people." Miller writes that the central question
in the play is, faced with his daughter's violent death, must Kroll
disown his faith, and "suffer guilt and remorse for having misled his
child? Or, despite everything, confirm the validity of the ideal and his
former trust in mankind?" Miller's answer is that the play "ends on
affirmation; in her catastrophe, [Kroll] has rediscovered himself and
glimpsed the tragic collapse of values that he finally cannot bring
himself to renounce."9
But that affirmation is debatable, owing to the fact that in the
play the concept of the Other expands to include even Kroll's
perception (Sarte would say "projection") of himself and his
recognition of the latent racist within him. Of the first murder her
boyfriend committed, Clara explains that "It was his illusion that he
was defending his life."to The throughline of Clara is in fact Kroll's
defense of his own life, and notwithstanding Miller's insistence on
affirmation, that defense is also revealed as an illusion.
Formally, the play itself is an illusory hall-of-mirrors. Miller
writes that he had in mind "a kind of imploding of time-moments
7 Ibid., 56.
B Ibid., 67.
9 Miller, Timebends, 591.
to Miller, Clara, 55.
STRANGE FACES 41
when a buried layer of experience suddenly surges upward to become
the new surface of one's attention and flashes news from below."ll
Indeed, the melding of flashbacks with the continuous action and the
way that photographic images keep flashing before Kroll's eyes cast
the play in a dream-dimension: Kroll himself, who begins the play
sprawled out "on the floor with one arm resting over his eyes,"
1
2 notes
that "I keep feeling I'm falling asleep," 13 which begs the possibility
that all of the action is played out in Kroll's shock-disturbed
unconscious-into which step many Others.
The idea of the Other to Miller and those who followed
transcends simply acknowledging the "difference" between
individuals or groups. Emmanuel Levinas pointed out that the utility
of the Other is to challenge our self assurance and open the question
of ethics. To other mid-century European philosophers, the Other
included the unconscious, madness, and death itself, all of which can
be said to factor into the play, and all of which present the same
challenge: that something perceived of as "Other" cannot be
understood without reducing its alterity, or "Otherness," in that
understanding implies some degree of "Sameness" or identification.
By the end of his interrogation with Fine, Kroll recognizes in himself-
or we recognize in him-an Other with whom he must finally identify.
Fine is to be understood on several levels: first as a police
detective, but then, gradually, as a conflation of himself and Bert
Fine-one of Kroll's former business associates-and finally as a
projection of Kroll's subconscious-Kroll's alter ego, his devil's
advocate. As a detective, Lew Fine begins the interrogation by asking
the very question that becomes at issue in the play: "Did you kill your
daughter, Mister Kroll?"14 He then prods Kroll to remember the name
of the suspect, noting along the way that "we block things we're
ashamed to remember[ ... ]. Things that make us feel guilty."1S He
reinforces the idea of Otherness in Kroll's mind by reminding him
11 Miller, Timebends, 590.
12 Miller, Clara, 33.
13
Ibid., 58.
14Ibid., 41.
1s Ibid., 49.
42 TUTTLE
twice that "there are just so many human types,"
16
and unearthing
Kroll's apprehensions that his daughter might once have been
involved in a lesbian relationship. In this much, the play is similar to
another one-act Miller had written about the same time, Some Kind
of Love Story(1983), in which a police detective interviews a mentally
disturbed woman. "What's eatin' you alive," he tells her, "is not
schizophrenia, kid, it's your conscience."
17
The similarities between Lew and Bert Fine reside in, among
other things, the surprising coincidence that both lost toes on their
left feet to "the War" and their sons to suicide. These similarities,
augmented by the instinctual familiarity that Kroll and Lew Fine seem
to have with one another, call up what Centola has pointed out as the
central problem in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan: "How to contain the
impulse of betrayal." Having summarily cancelled a strong friendship
of ten years, Bert comes to represent to Kroll the realization that "you
can't ever let yourself rely on anything staying the way it is."1B And
here an equation begins to form: Bert is betrayal, Lew is Bert, and
Kroll, ultimately, is Lew.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre posited that identity is
dictated by a "fundamental project" which is itself a product of choice;
man is free to choose that personal moral construct which is to be his
Self. Also-and as Miller demonstrated in such plays as Incident at
Vichy (1964)-when one makes this choice, one chooses for all
mankind. But this project and hence identity are subject to assault
and nullification from without. When, for example, in Sartre's novel
Nausea Roquentin confronts the banality of his existence and the
futility of what constitutes his project, he remarks,
Now when I say 'I,' it seems hollow to me[ . . . ]. Antoine
Roquentin exists for no one[ ... ]. And just what is
Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of
myself wavers in my consciousness [ ... ] and suddenly
the 'I' pales, pales and fades out.1
9
16
Ibid., 41.
17 Arthur Miller, Some Kind of Love Story (New York:
Dramatists Play Service, 1983), 12.
1s Miller, Clara, 36.
19 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New
York: New Directions, 1964), 170.
STRANGE FACES 43
When, for further example, in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, from
which I take my title, Sir Bedivere confronts the end of his project as
a dying Arthur sails away to Avalon, he calls out,
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolved
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.2o
Fine is the "other mind" within Kroll, and also, as his
inquisitor, that component of Kroll's psyche that distinguishes and
therefore distrusts Others. More than just an exercise in
psychomachia-a Platonic dialogue between the "good" and "evil"
sides of one personality-the play illustrates the function and process
of consciousness. To Kroll's protests that he was no bigot-he cites
his volunteering to command a company of black soldiers and recalls
telling his daughter, "I'm always ready to believe the best of
anybody"21-Fine reminds him of "that secret little tingle you get
when your own kind comes out ahead. The black for the black, and
the white for the white."22 Fine succeeds in eliciting from Kroll
admissions that, given his experience with blacks, "every once in a
while I just about give up on those people,"
23
and also that, as chair
of the zoning board, Kroll is torn over measures meant to exclude less
affluent (read: minority) home buyers. Crucially, in terms that
elucidate Kroll's guilt over his daughter's death, Fine blames himself
for his own son's suicide: "I failed him; I failed to simplify the way it
was simplified for me."
24
The interrogation culminates in Fine's
bottom-line accusation: "it's your lies you can't let go of. It's ten,
20 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King (Chicago: Lyons
and Carnahan), 293.
21 Miller, Clara, 55.
22 Ibid., 62.
23 Ibid., 51.
24 Ibid., 63.
44 TUTILE
twenty years of shit you told your daughter, to the point where she
sacrificed her life, for what?-To uphold what you don't believe in
yourself."2S
The central conflict in identity formation, to Sartre, was
between being-for-itself and being-for-others. The two conditions co-
exist, albeit tenuously: while one may attempt to assert one's
subjectivity, projecting one's chosen self upon or into the world, one
becomes aware of an alienated aspect of himself that requires
recognition from-a sameness with-others. Lyman Felt articulates
one extreme-"A man can be faithful to himself or to other people-
but not to both. At least not happily''26-and Peter Stockmann, in
Miller's adaptation of An Enemy of the People (1951), the other: "We
live or die on what the outside world thinks of us."27 Kroll's "crime,"
as far as his daughter is concerned, is that he had chosen to live in
an object state; he had been "for her." He suspects that by allowing
her (and indeed himself) to believe the myths she had created about
him, he made himself powerless to subvert the fundamental project
which defined her identity even at the expense of her life
Significantly, Clara ends at the moment Fine gets the name
he's been digging for. Contained in Kroll's blurting out "Hernandez" is
an implicit capitulation to Fine's accusations and with it, because of it,
an exorcism of his inquisitor: Fine "instantly rushes out." 28 Outwardly,
there is some irony in this moment, for as in such Miller plays as The
Crucible (1953), After the Fall (1964) and A View From the Bridge
(1956), naming names is tantamount to betrayal; here, however, by
naming the name of the Other, Kroll is able finally to admit his denial
of his own nature, his betrayal of himself.
It is difficult, given this reading, to fully appreciate Miller's
sense of affirmation; Kroll's gripping farewell to the spectre of his
daughter as she recedes into darkness, "Oh, my wonderful Clara. I
am so proud of you! .. . Clara!,"29 is hardly enough to countervail the
weight of the indictment leading up to it. Still, it is important to point
out that in Clara Miller is not suddenly advocating racism, segregation
2s Ibid., 61.
26 Ibid., 25.
27 Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, trans. Arthur Miller
(New York: Viking, 1951), 90.
28 Miller, Clara, 68.
29 Ibid., 67.
STRANGE FACES 45
and the abandonment of prisoner rehabilitation. For Kroll is guilty not
(or not only) of racism or bigotry, but of refusing for too long to admit
to it, and this is a theme that echoes down the corridors of Miller's
oeuvre, from The Crucible through Broken Glass. Indeed, the retort
to Kroll's complaint to Fine, "I would have thought, being Jewish, that
you'd have more understanding,"3o had already been supplied by
Leduc in Incident at Vichy: "Jew is only the name we give to that
stranger, that agony we cannot feel, that death we look at like a cold
abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other." 31
Which brings us back at last to Bedivere, standing on the
shore. As Arthur instructed him, so would Arthur Miller, through Kroll,
implore of us:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within himself make pure! 32
30 Ibid., 53.
31 Arthur Miller, Incident at Vichy, in Arthur Miller's Collected
Plays (New York: Viking, 1981), vol. 2, 288.
32 Tennyson, 293-4.
46
1951-52 Program cover of The de Paur Infantry
Chorus. Courtesy of Luther Saxon.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 15, no. 3 (Fall 2003) 47
"NOTHING BUT A MAN":
LEONARD DE PAUR'S LEGACY OF SUBTLE ACTIVISM IN
THEATRE AND MUSIC
GLENDA E. GILL
What I wanted to be was a man, nothing but a man.
Frantz Fanonl
I happen to be a theatre person; I started in this crazy
business in the theatre-and I'm very sensitive to and
conscious of theatrical values.
Leonard de Paur2
Arranger/composer Leonard de Paur was an enormously
articulate, extremely diplomatic, yet fiercely stubborn man whose art
was his weapon. However, he was not an activist in the sense of
psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, or playwrights Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and
Luis Valdez. Mr. de Paur did not march in the streets. He carried no
placards. His style was never "in your face." He was always a cordial
gentleman, and an inveterate, smooth letter writer. His style was
much more of the ilk of Marian Anderson. The "sting" was there,
although few knew they had been stung. He knew how to negotiate
the waters. His widow, Norma, says, "When you look at a concert
program, there is a message." The message was that those who
endured the chain gang, incarceration, segregation, and other forms
of oppression could be men. Unlike Fanon, de Paur never advocated
violence. But his theatre, his music and his activism, to many,
represented a strong call for freedom, equality and justice.
While de Paur was a man of passion and message, he was
also very disciplined in his art, well-trained, highly respected, and a
compassionate human being. He was, equally, a man of enormous
versatility. Mr. de Paur composed, arranged, conducted, and served as
an impresario. His genres included opera, other classical music,
popular songs, military songs, African music, Chinese music, sea
chanties, scores for musicals, songs of devotion, Negro spirituals, folk
1 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam
Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), 113.
2 Leonard de Paur, quoted by Frank Hains in Jackson Daily
News, 14 November 1974, n.p. (courtesy of Judith Anne Still) .
48 GILL
songs/ art songs/ work songs/ songs of World War 11
1
Shakespearean
music and a wide variety of other categories. He is best known as the
leader of the de Paur Infantry Chorus of World War II.
One of the gifted soloists in that group, Luther Saxon, a
native of South Carolina, remembered de Paur's subtle activism:
Leonard and the group did more for the racial divide
than anyone else of that era. We sang in some places
where people had never seen blacks-the Midwest/ the
Mountain States. Leonard and I were in Bluefield, West
Virginia, and Leonard had gotten [the group] together at
the time Truman had signed his Executive Order of 1948,
integrating the military, and met with black leaders,
asking them to integrate the audience. The curtain
opened. Leonard looked out in the audience and blacks
were sitting in one section. We did the first section of the
program and Leonard said
1
"Don't leave the stage. How
many of you brought your jackets? Put on your jackets
and go sit in the audience." He was livid and proceeded
to integrate the audience with members of the chorus. 3
This strong action delivered a message of resistance and equality. Not
only was de Paur quietly determined to improve human relations in
this manner, but he had enormous courage in the works he chose for
his group to sing. One of Saxon's favorites was "Gue/ Gue solingaie,"
an Afro-Creole lullaby arranged and adapted by Leonard de Paur with
guitars. The words are in dialect.4 For Saxon and de Paur, this
selection had strong racial identification.
Another who remembers de Paur's subtle activism is Frank W.
Hale, Jr./ Ph.D., Vice-Provost and Professor Emeritus at The Ohio
State University:
I saw Leonard de Paur when I was 14 years old at the
Municipal Auditorium in Topeka, Kansas. His Infantry
Chorus was in Eisenhower military-type jackets. He
directed with such passion. The drama would remind you
of the Don Cossack groups. That was unusual. Those
were the days when we lived within walls as black
3 Luther Saxon, personal interview with author, 23
September 2002.
4
Music Catalog of the Library of Congress.
LEONARD DE PAUR
people-restaurant walls, hotel walls, public parks walls,
theatre walls, school walls, hospital and even cemetery
walls. It was unusual that we could drink from the
substance of black artists. We did not have a lot to cheer
about, so we sat mesmerized. 5
49
Dr. Hale found solace in de Paur's music-solace from a totally
segregated world of the 1940s. This was a world where many African
Americans could not eat in restaurants, except perhaps take food out
of the back door. It was one where many hotels barred African
Americans. Public parks were white or black. Theatres sometimes
reserved the balcony for "colored" patrons. Schools were almost
entirely segregated. Hospitals were either white or black and virtually
all cemeteries were racially divided. When the 32-member, all-black
de Paur Infantry Chorus appeared, audiences of all races were
welcome. This, alone, was a significant change in the social fabric.
The late Charles Freeney, a Chicago-based librarian, also
relayed to me a story about de Paur's subtle activism:
Approximately 1953-1955, when I was at Heston College
in Heston, Kansas (30 miles from Wichita), it was
announced that the de Paur Infantry Chorus would
appear at the auditorium. I was not impressed with this
announcement. The group came in red Eisenhower
jackets with black pants-a regulation Army uniform,
dyed those very theatrical colors. The three of us who
were black in this sea of white faces in the audience
were very excited that the chorus was black. That night,
we sat very close to the front, which we rarely did. One
of the first songs was "Tal', my Captain." The lines went,
"If I'd had a weighted line, I'd a whipped that Captain
stone blind." It was ironic. They sang war songs about a
German prostitute who waited at the gate ["Lili
Marlene'l The performance was out of the ordinary.
They sang freedom songs long before the 1960s. I think
that was one of the most moving experiences of my life.6
Hale and Freeney's recall of the de Paur Infantry Chorus is
representative of music giant Leonard de Paur's impact.
While Leonard de Paur is, arguably, best known for his de
5
Frank W. Hale, Jr., telephone conversation with author, 7
October 2002.
6
Personal interview with author, 4 July 1982.
50 GILL
Paur Infantry Chorus, which had its theatrical dimensions, he made
significant contributions to the theatre and helped remove racial
barriers. Born in Summit, New Jersey, on November 18, 1914, de
Paur grew up in a family that encouraged his musical gifts. He had a
professorial bearing and smoked a pipe. His serious study as a
musician began when he was very young in his apprenticeship with
the distinguished arranger/composer, Hall Johnson, the African
American musician best known for conducting the choir which sang in
the movie Green Pastures, written by white playwright Marc Connelly.
Green Pastures, a white playwright's concept of a black heaven, had
also appeared on the stage with Richard B. Harrison as de Lawd. It
was one of the most popular works on stage and screen in the first
half of the twentieth century. I saw a revival of Green Pastures at the
Fort Bragg Officers' Club in North Carolina in the 1980s, as a guest of
Earl and Rhoda Wynn. The spirit was infectious for whites and blacks
in the audience, as well as for the all black cast and white director,
Lee Yopp. The music was particularly lively and moving. But it was
Hall Johnson who first created the music.
Henry Bradford, Jr., Ed.D. and former Head of Music at
Alabama A. and M. College, Normal, said to me of Hall Johnson:
Hall Johnson was a composer who was very energetic
and committed to unearthing Negro spirituals that were
created by the slaves as real folk songs. He arranged
many of these spirituals for solo voice and choral
aggregations. He was a respected conductor of choral
music. Prior to Hall Johnson, spirituals were most often
sung in groups. Mr. Johnson made it acceptable for
soloists to render them, as well. 7
While Hall Johnson was not an activist, his serving as an exemplar for
the young de Paur was crucial in de Paur's development. (In later
years, de Paur studied with Pierre Monteux, a name he credits, as
well, with his development as a master musician.)
In a personal interview with me before his death, de Paur
said to me:
I sang in the Hall Johnson choir ... that's how one starts
in this business ... I got kicked out of high school and
ended up singing in vaudeville and that led me to Hall
7 Telephone conversation with author, 16 October 2002.
LEONARD DE PAUR
Johnson and Hall Johnson took me by the ears and made
me shape up. He was a classmate of my mother's in
college, as it turned out. ... He taught me himself. I lived
with him. I was an apprentice in the old European
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sense. I did
everything. I cooked; I cleaned house; I fetched and
carried. I did the copying, and finally, one night he said
that there will be some men in here to rehearse and I
don't have time; you rehearse them. So you become an
assistant conductor. That's how you learn your craft ...
He was the one that made me go back to schooLS
51
The maestro's need to "shape up" was generated by a young spirit that
defied being unequal and disrespectful treatment. He was actually
" kicked out of high school" for insisting that another young student
pay him a loan. He absolutely insisted on repayment and took a
musical instrument of the other student as collateral. When school
officials demanded that de Paur return the instrument, he chose to
leave school rather than comply.
One of de Paur's initial forays into theatre was as a witness to
the well-known Run, Little Chillun, which Hall Johnson wrote and first
mounted in 1933. De Paur said to me of the production:
A very powerful play in terms of its music. Two
magnificent scenes with well over a hundred people on
the stage. I am told that the night they opened the thing
on Broadway they had almost 200 people on the stage.9
Run, Little Chillun was a didactic musical about a black
adulteress, Sulamai, who, at the end, is struck down by lightning for
pursuing the preacher's married son, Jim. The play was taken seriously
by the black community.
Reminding me of the frightening economic times of 1933,
when the banks in America closed for three days, de Paur said from
his desk at Lincoln Center:
It [Run, Little Chillun] got itself on and it got itself on just
in time for the bank holiday, which was one heck of a
stroke .. . The bank holiday was a major, major impactful
s Personal interview with author, 29 March 1982.
9 Ibid.
52
experience for our generation and time. It not only froze
the banks and gave them a chance to re-organize to a
degree the flow of legal tender, but its psychological
impact was more important than anything else ... I think
at that point, every living soul in this country who was
capable of thought was aware that a really dire situation
existed .to
GILL
Certainly Leonard de Paur was politically aware, and much of his
political savvy he learned from the hard times of the Great Depression
when 75% of African Americans were unemployed.
Early in April of 1936, the still 21-year-old de Paur signed up
for the controversial Federal Theatre Project, a national relief program
under the aegis of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FOR) administration.
Among FOR's numerous Works Project Administration (WPA) efforts to
relieve unemployment, the Federal Theatre put 12,000 Americans to
work, 851 of them black. This was clearly an activist project, mainly
under white control, with a $46,000,000 grant from the federal
government. Of its impact on him, de Paur said to me:
Well, on my generation, it was total. Regardless of race,
most of us who were involved with Federal Projects got
our education there ... My goodness, I had opportunities
to do things in the Federal Theatre that I couldn't have
hoped to do in the commercial theatre-even had I been
lucky enough to gain the contacts and the opportunity.ll
The Federal Theatre was an all-too-brief golden era, the only
time in the annals of the American theater that the government served
as a producer. The federal government set up 16 "Negro units." (Some
sources say 22.) From New York to Birmingham, Seattle to Los
Angeles, and Peoria to Chicago, they performed in vaudeville, classics,
contemporary drama, dance, and children's theatre. There was also a
"Living Newspaper" which recorded contemporary concerns, such as
poor housing, in such newsreel-like productions as One Third of a
Nation. This was activist theatre personified.
Eventually, through Hall Johnson, who recommended him, de
Paur became musical director for the New York City Negro Unit of the
Federal Theatre of 1935-1939. Mr. de Paur said to me:
The first public performance I did with the Hall Johnson
Choir was a summer concert in Philadelphia, "Robin Hood
1o Ibid.
11 Ibid.
LEONARD DE PAUR
Dell." That was 1937-38, actually, and in 1939, I did the
American Lyric Theatre with the Hall Johnson Choir, and
opened the World's Fair. In 1939, in the fall, we put into
rehearsal the Paul Robeson production of John Henry.
That was an assignment I took under my own name, not
under Hall Johnson's-that marked the end of my
connection with the Hall Johnson Choir. 12
53
John Henry was a work about a black hero, a "steel-driving man," in
an era when both Hollywood and Broadway emphasized the male
stereotypes of the Uncle Tom, the Brute, and the Samba. This choice
of de Paur showed that the seeds of activism were growing.
Leonard de Paur's early development as a subtle activist was
cultivated by Hall Johnson, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still (whom
de Paur secretly watched when he was an adolescent), and the Federal
Theatre Project. Mr. de Paur was 19 years old when Franklin D.
Roosevelt became President of the United States in 1933. The
musician had his first opportunity in the Federal Theatre as choral
director of the April 1936 all-black voodoo adaptation Orson Welles did
of Shakespeare's Macbeth. An overflow crowd spilled onto the
sidewalks outside Harlem's Lafayette Theatre to see this version of
Shakespeare's tragedy. Police had to come to quell the excited mob.
This was one of the first times in the history of the American theatre
that African-American actors had played non-traditional roles. It was
an audacious move.
De Paur said to me:
Actually, I did the choral music. We used a lot of African
chants, voodoo chants. There was an orchestral score
which Virgil Thomson did. That's when I met Virgil. That's
how he called me to put the Four Saints [in Three Acts]
to work. He was just back from Paris, and there was this
ballroom scene in Macbeth which had to have some
waltzes, and Virgil wrote that. Other than that, we used
some creative music. We used a thing called "Yamacraw"
for the overture. If you look at the program, you'll see Joe
Jordan conducted the orchestra for us on that. We did
"Yamacraw," which was a stylistic work by James Johnson
... But, the chorus was not a proper singing chorus. We
had to supplement the witches, and in the scenes where
there was need for voodoo, we provided a good deal of
the voodoo effect. We did some African chants; we had
African drums. It was a highly stylized production of
Macbeth.t3
12
Ibid.
13 Ibid.
54
Leonard de Paur conducting Opera/South, circa 197 4.
Photograph by Eugene Cook. Courtesy of Norma de
Paur
GILL
LEONARD DE PAUR 55
This use of African chants and the "Yamacraw" stylistic work
significantly changed the original Macbeth, putting great emphasis on
Africa and Haiti. While Orson Welles actually wrote the voodoo
adaptation, de Paur arranged and composed the music, using genuine
voodoo drummers and a genuine witch doctor. Legend has it that so
incensed were they by a bad review written by white critic Percy
Hammond in the New York Herald Tribune, that in three days of
deliberate, loud drumming in the basement of Harlem's Lafayette
Theatre, the Africans killed Hammond, using voodoo. The newspapers
cited pneumonia as the cause of death. Hammond, in a scathing
review, sneered at the actors, called the play a "deluxe boondoggle"
and questioned whether the government had made a wise investment
in 100 theatre practitioners. The money, the actors, the directors, the
musical staff, and the contacts with John Houseman and Orson Welles
gave Leonard de Paur a seminal opportunity, one that he used to
promote his activism.
Not all activism is successful, but activists must take risks. M-.
de Paur's next work in the WPA Federal Theatre was in Eugene O'Neill's
One Act Plays of the Sea in 1937, a production de Paur considered a
failure. Brooks Atkinson, drama critic for the New York Times, wrote
that the Negro actors, who had put on a "bizarre" Macbeth two
seasons ago, "cannot light the proper fire under the melting pot of Mr.
O'Neill's British tramp steamer." 1
4
Mr. de Paur agreed, saying,
The other aspects of the thing were so totally alien to
black performers. That was one of the things that we
should not have done-except to show that we could
remember the O'Neill lines . . . I felt particularly bad
about the failure of these plays, in my estimation,
because the man who I believe adapted them and who
directed them for us was a fine actor by the name of
William Chalee, who had been a member of the Group
Theatre, and who was a very sensitive man in terms of
the blacks and their opportunities or lack of them in the
theatre . . . With the best of intentions, I'm afraid Bill
failed.1S
St. Clair Bourne, critic for the New York Amsterdam News, disagreed
with Atkinson and de Paur, observing that:
14 Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, 30 October 1937, 23:2.
1s Personal interview with author, 29 March 1982.
56
The O'Neill characters in the particular four plays being
presented are just about the most difficult types to
portray. Difficult even for players acquainted with the
types, they constitute a towering obstacle to the basically
different Negro actor, but the WPAers manage to
surmount them quite credibly and still retain their dignity
while doing so.16
GILL
Mixed reviews of S. S. Glencairn prevailed. Leonard de Paur's participation
in the O'Neill tetralogy was subtle activism to the extent that black
actors again played non-traditional roles in the theatre, an act that
O'Neill, himself, questioned. Also, in 1937, very, very few black actors
played roles traditionally designed for whites.
Another successful activist endeavor in which de Paur
participated was a Federal Theatre production of William DuBois's
Haiti, which opened on March 2, 1938. One of the more favorably
received of the Federal Theatre plays, Haiti starred Rex Ingram as the
militant and headstrong Christophe, leader of the Haitians who were
involved in the 1802 struggle against French colonialism. Time
reported on March 14, 1938: "Last week, Harlem stole some of
Broadway's thunder. The Federal Theatre offered Haiti there with a
half-white, half-Negro cast, and a half-white, half-Negro audience
united in applauding it ... Haiti becomes two hours' worth of good
old-fashioned theatre."17 Haiti showcased militant heroes. It was
clearly a work advocating revolt. The Martin Dies Committee, which
began in 1938 its investigations that closed the Federal Theatre in
1939, cited Haiti as a play with Communist leanings. Completing its
Harlem run on June 28, 1938, Haiti broke attendance records. It gave
103 performances, surpassing any production ever staged at the
Lafayette Theatre, including the Federal Theatre's Macbeth. Haiti was
seen by 72,174 persons.1s
Mr. de Paur's Federal Theatre work was interwoven with his
other employment. Virgil Thomson, whose Four Saints in Three Acts
(with Gertude Stein) had first crossed the boards in 1934, telephoned
Leonard de Paur in 1938. Mr. de Paur remembered:
Virgil Thomson called me up one afternoon around one
o'clock and explained that he had to put the Four Saints
16 St. Clair Bourne, New York Amsterdam News, n.d., n.p.
17 Time, 14 March 1938, 31, 34, 36.
1s Flyer from the Department of Information for the WPA
Federal Theatre Project for New York City, 17 June 1938.
LEONARD DE PAUR
in rehearsal for a concert, and he couldn't find Miss [Eva]
Jessye who had been the original conductor, choral
director, for the Four Saints when it was done in 1934.
And would I please help him out ... I said, "Virgil, of
course," in my stupidity. He said, "Well, I'll leave the
scores at the desk and you can come down and pick them
up. We're rehearsing tonight, and he told me where and
when. So, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, I went
down and picked up the scores. I got home, sat down at
my desk, opened the scores, and I collapsed. I hadn't
seen or heard the thing before, and I looked at the first
line of words and my head began to do one of those
things. I was dealing with Gertrude Stein at three o'clock
to put into rehearsal at seven o'clock with the people who
had done the original production. And believe me, I was
really not prepared for that rehearsal. I mean, just to look
at those unreasonable words, "Let Lucy, Lilly, Lilly, Lucy,
Lilly, Lilly, let." The music was attractive enough. And, I
tell you, I almost went out of the window.19
57
Ever resourceful, de Paur walked into a room with 30 people
who had done the original production. They knew it. "I was the only
one in the room who didn't know it. "2o Determined not to be
embarrassed or to appear incompetent, he "fell back on the oldest gag
in the business- they never got off the first page. They got lectures on
breathing. They got lectures on voice production and they got all the
things that a chorus must do for a good performance. Then I sat up
all night and studied the next three pages and went back the next
night with those." 21 One reason de Paur managed his subtle activism
so effectively was that he was so much of a perfectionist. He had
respect everywhere he was known.
Mr. de Paur's involvement with Four Saints was a daring act,
since this was one of the first times in the history of opera that an all-
black cast sang, specifically at the request of Virgil Thomson who
wrote the music. For much of the nineteenth century and the first 30
years of the twentieth very few black opera singers had a chance to
perform on a major stage in the United States.
A third work where de Paur served as musical director for
Harlem's Lafayette Unit in the Federal Theatre was one that got rave
19 Personal interview with author, 29 March 1982.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
58 GILL
reviews from critics and audiences, a Negro version of George Bernard
Shaw's fable Androcles and the Lion, which opened as a major hit in
December 1938, with Dooley Wilson (Sam in the 1940 film,
Casablanca) as Androcles and Add Bates, the dancer, as the lion. The
Shavian lines remained, but the drama was a Negro version in that it
was cast with black players. Substituting "I'm Bound for the Promised
Land" for "Onward Christian Soldiers," the players, under de Paur's
musical direction, marched to a Negro spiritual rather than a song that
lacked racial identification. Androc/es and the Lion was third in
popularity among the Negro units and their audiences. Again, black
actors played roles traditionally reserved for whites.
The New York Amsterdam News reported:
Despite the controversy which has arisen as to whether
or not the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre
Project should interpret the Shavian fable play, "Androcles
and the Lion," rather than a play with a racial or social
angle, it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt last
Friday that the group housed at the Lafayette has again
reached an artistic high.22
The quality of art was a form of social activism, a thought that always
consumed perfectionist de Paur.
The Federal Theatre was short-lived. Its performers made
$23.86 a week, regardless of the size of the role or the level of
participation, thus making it a democratic enterprise. Communism was
also a charge leveled against the Federal Theatre, based on some of
the controversial dramas which black, white and integrated units
produced. One example is Paul Green's Hymn to the Rising Sun, which
bemoaned the chain gang. The Mayor of Chicago even shut down the
play. Another example was Theodore Ward's Big White Fog, which
emphasized Communism, Garveyism, and materialism.
Many Broadway producers were also threatened by this
"welfare" theatre where, on Relief Night, some audience members
could come for as little as five cents. So, in spite of the large audiences
and favorable critical reception, six months after Androc/es, Congress
closed the Federal Theatre in August of 1939, and ordered the records
destroyed. Add Bates, the dancer who played the lion, said to me of
the financial struggle that existed during the Great Depression:
22 Amsterdam News, 24 December 1938, n.p.
LEONARD DE PAUR
The pay of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was relative.
You could eat well. Rent was nothing like it is today. For
$1.00, you could eat all you could put down. Today, it's
triple, if not more . . . I made my money as an artist's
model before the FTP. After the FTP, mainly, I designed
and made furniture.23
59
De Paur, Bates, and others lived in lean times. Soup lines were long.
Seventy-five percent of African Americans were unemployed.
Dick Campbell, an African-American director and administrator
for the Federal Theatre, said:
The killing of the FTP by an act of Congress was a
collective murder by bigots and bums, aided by a
Broadway crowd of producers who feared that FTP might
lead the ticket buyers away from Broadway shows to the
free theatre of the neighborhoods . .. People who never
saw a play in their lives were frequenting the workshops
of the FTP and enjoying art that they always felt was only
for the Broadway crowd who could pay for it, not for
recipients of "welfare." And what a pity! The stupid
Broadway producers never had the intelligence to realize
the FTP was developing an audience for the commercial
theatre that would one day pay off. 24
Campbell's legitimate rage echoes the thought of many, probably
including de Paur.
In 1938, Martin Dies, Congressman from Beaumont, Texas,
began a series of hearings in the theatre in search of Communists
under every flat. Although the hearings contained hearsay, half-truths
and untruths, the investigation brought to heel a large number of
people and projects in the Federal Theatre. De Paur himself was not
under suspicion. He related to me how relieved he was not to find
himself in the Red Channels, a magazine listing those thought to be
Communists. Of the hearings, de Paur said to me:
I didn't witness any; I didn't attend them. I didn't want to
even think about them because I was so worried about
the possibility of having to appear as the featured
23 Add Bates, personal interview with author, 22 March 1981.
24 Personal letter to author, 5 January 1978.
60
performer for one of them myself. It's still something of a
surprise to me that I wasn't, because everyone with
whom I'd ever been associated-a number of my
friends-like Josh White, Langston Hughes, and others,
were made the target of the HUAC [House Un-American
Activities Committee]. I have been told, and I cannot
prove this, that the reason that I was able to skid by as I
did was because I was liked by a very respected old black
actor, who was the chief informer for the HUAC
committee. Everybody described him as the man who
went down and recorded acres of tape describing the
activities of many of the black performers ... 25
GILL
Skid by he did from controversy, and also from financial ruin. It is
significant that not only did de Paur and others survive, but, the
Federal Theatre Project of 1935-39 was the first time in this country
that 851 black performers could work on a sustained basis under
skilled directors such as John Houseman or Orson Welles. The closing
of the Federal Theatre was a tragedy. While a number of older
Americans are aware of Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American
Activities Committee, not as many are aware of the hysteria that
surrounded the closing of the project. It was drenched in fear and
ignorance and de Paur was an astute witness. He wisely sought other
employment.
In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was assigned to the
Army Air Corps, where initially he was in charge of an official show for
the Air Force, "Winged Victory." With the exception of one Asian, all the
men were white; de Paur was the only African American. Mr. de Paur
worked with the 1939 World's Fair, the same year he met Luther
Saxon, a fine tenor. Mr. Saxon, who regarded de Paur like a brother,
created the role of Joe in the Bizet-Hammerstein Carmen Jones of
1943, a work de Paur used much later with his de Paur Gala group.
Saxon and de Paur were slated to do great things together but the war
interfered. Mr. de Paur recalled with rich humor in his interview with
me: "There was a thing called World War II, and I was in it ... I found
myself ... being the music director for the Air Force's show that had
not one black soul in it." 26
After the Air Force lost its priority, de Paur had to go back to
Infantry. Later, he found himself with an outfit getting ready to go
back overseas, the 372nd Infantry, Massachusetts National Guard,
with elements from New Jersey and Ohio. DePaur continued:
25 Personal interview with author, 29 March 1982.
26 Ibid.
LEONARD DE PAUR
Having been a National Guard unit, it had, between wars,
been a kind of gentlemen's dub. Among its avocational
pursuits was a glee club. How long this had existed, I
don't know, but before I got there, they had had a
professional musician, USO [United Service Organization]
man of great experience and reputation named Wendell
Talbert, who had been conductor of the thing while the
regiment was stationed here in New York.27
61
The regiment then moved to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, further than
Talbert could go and it was at that point that de Paur appeared on the
scene.
Energetic and passionate, the young musician whipped the
glee club into shape and got them on "The Army Hour," a worldwide
radio broadcast which was being produced by the same people who
had produced "The Firestone Hour," on which de Paur had worked
before going into the service. He was connected, which very much
pleased his colonel. Overseas, de Paur ran into Maurice Evans, the
Shakespearean actor, who was Special Services Officer for Mid-Pac, the
area of the Pacific where the 372nd was stationed. At this point, the
Infantry Chorus, which had actually begun in 1942 without de Paur,
was not organized. All of the men 'in it had other official duties.
Seeking Evans's help with having access to the men, de Paur stated,
"I told him that if he gave me the proper support so that I could
separate the men from their normal jobs and put them all in one place
for a couple of weeks and rehearse the hell out of them, I could get
them into shape, and that's what I did!"28 This was 1944, two years
after the glee club had formed without official sanction. The authorities
were highly pleased that these men could provide good entertainment
the same as "a plane-load of starlets from Hollywood."29
With his natural savvy, de Paur got cannoneers, truck drivers
and riflemen detached from the Infantry duties and assigned the
formal mission of entertaining. With the relish of his boyish reserve, he
almost licked his lips in announcing, "Being the Army, no union rules
or anything, you could rehearse around the clock, and happily,
because it was a darn sight easier than some of the things you could
have been doing."
30
They traveled all over the world doing 150-190
concerts a year between 1944 and 1956.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
62 GILL
In 1949, de Paur's group, still all black, sang at the Phoenix
Union High School Auditorium in Phoenix, Arizona, sharing the history
of the African-American experience. Yet, his selections were also
global. In most instances, de Paur wrote program notes to explain
what the songs were about. For example, under "Honor, Honor,"
arranged by Hall Johnson, de Paur wrote: "One of the many spirituals
that the arranger's maternal grandmother, a slave until her 30th year,
taught him as a child."3t Under " Water Boy, " which de Paur arranged,
he wrote "best known of the chain gang songs."32 The explanation
underneath the song "Tol' My Cap'n" states, "A contemporary lament,
painting a bitter picture of chain-gang brutality."33
Chain-gang brutality was rampant in the United States in the
1940s, especially against black men, although not exclusively. Leonard
de Paur's subtle activism affected this program in an era when Jackie
Robinson had only two years earlier broken the color barrier in
baseball. While the country had not yet become as embroiled in race
as it was to in the 1950s and 1960s, segregation was the order of the
day, except in the military, which was only beginning to change.
Some audiences believed de Paur to be a " Freedom Fighter in
Disguise." He strongly disagreed:
Regarding the Infantry Chorus repertoire, I never thought
of myself as a Freedom Fighter, in any sense. This was a
term one applied to other people. A fighter for things that
might characterize freedom, yes. The repertoire of the
Infantry Chorus reflected the statement I had to make
about the world's condition, generally . . . . 34
Had he admitted, point blank, that he was a freedom fighter, he might
have ended his career, as Paul Robeson and Canada Lee had done. As
to his quiet rebellion in selecting music, Mr. de Paur also shared with
me:
There was a broad sense of involvement with our Allies,
and so we sang their music. Later on, when I carried this
repertoire into civilian life, I found that people, not my
group, were being criticized for singing this very material
31 Program of de Paur's Infantry Chorus, 26 February 1949
(courtesy of Norma de Paur) .
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Personal interview with author, 29 March 1982.
LEONARD DE PAUR 63
.. . I also sang a Chinese song called "Ch'i Lai," which had
become the Chinese national anthem. That is, the
Chinese, Red, national anthem . . . and no one ever
questioned us . . . I had no reluctance to express
whatever I felt in programming the concert attractions
that I had, and I never thought of them as freedom
fighter weapons ... I just thought of them as music that
reflected the world in which we lived.3S
One might suggest that Mr. de Paur had considerable skill with the
spoken as well as the sung word. His subtle activism was obvious, as
well as his political savvy, even when this interview occurred in 1982.
What, then, was the critical reception of the de Paur Infantry
Chorus and its impact on world conditions? It appears as if he changed
minds and hearts. As early as 1947, The New Yorker noted the debut
of the group on Columbia Records: "The chorus is a splendid
aggregation of 36 voices .. . it is estimated that they gave over two
thousand concerts on various fronts in the Pacific Theatre."36 In 1948,
the New York Post observed:" ... No other GI singing group ever has
developed into a career chorus as sensationally as this one has."37
Negro Digest did a feature story on the group.3B By 1950, the chorus
had attracted the attention of Newsweek, since it gave a January
concert in Carnegie Hall to begin the second leg of its 1949-50 season.
Newsweek wrote:
An outstanding Army and USO entertainment unit, which
sang from Iwo Jima to Bad Nauheim, the chorus under de
Paur held together after the end of hostilities and began
a civilian career. Last season the chorus broke all existing
records in the concert business with 180 dates [ ... ] In
light tan battle jackets and black dress trousers, the
chorus makes an outstanding visual impression. Vocally, it
is even more impressive, for de Paur has trained his men
brilliantly, and they sing as if they like to sing-straight
out and with distinctive tonal quality . . . Two of the
numbers never fail to bring down the house: "Ugly
Woman," de Paur's arrangement of a Calypso ballad from
35 Follow-up tape to 29 March 1982 interview with author.
36 "A Fine Chorus," The New Yorker, 13 December 1947, n.p.
37 Henry Beckett, "Iwo Jima to Concert Stage," New York
Post, 25 February 1948, n.p.
38 Beckett, "G I Harmony Pays Off," Negro Digest, June 1948,
77-9.
64
Trinidad, and "Rodger Young," de Paur's arrangement of
Frank Loesser's war song.39
GILL
For those not familiar with the very popular "Ugly Woman," the
lyrics ran, "If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, make an
ugly woman your wife. An ugly woman will get your meals on time."
When he and his group sang this, the world was not as sensitive to
women as it is today. The piece, perhaps now offensive to some, was
a whimsical, lighthearted one. Humor was another effective strategy in
de Paur's activism. Capitalizing on their sartorial splendor, by late
January 1950, the de Paur Infantry Chorus, a civilian group now,
changed their battle jackets to a "snappy gray gabardine" for a trip to
St. Louis. Again, "Rodger Young" captured the attention of the critic
Charles Menees of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, who wrote: "One of the
crowd-pleasers was 'Rodger Young,' the Frank Loesser song dedicated
to a G. I. killed in Pacific fighting ... A capacity audience at Howard
Hall ... was more than pleased, judging from applause."4o
The Boston Globewas not nearly as pleased. On April 2, 1950,
less than three months after the first Carnegie Hall and St. Louis
appearances, the de Paur Infantry Chorus made its first appearance in
Boston in Symphony Hall. The Globe declared:
One might observe that the stage deportment of the
founder and conductor, Leonard De Paur, and his group is
"rather stiff and formal." They look military to be sure but
they also look uncomfortable and likewise make their
audience feel the same. But that in no way affects the
freedom of their singing, which is first rate. The choral
tone is firm, solid and expressive, and the half dozen
soloists who stepped out of ranks were uniformly good.
4
1
One might well ask why this viewer was really uncomfortable. Was it
the words that touched his conscience? Few people in a viewing
audience are uncomfortable with formality. Formality is expected in
formal concerts. Elinor Hughes of the Boston Herald noted:
39 "GI Chorus," Newsweek, 23 January 1950, n.p.
40 Charles Menees, "Infantry Chorus Makes Debut Here," St.
Louis Post Dispatch, 1 January 1950, n.p.
41 "John William Riley, "De Paur Infantry Chorus Makes First
Boston Appearance," Boston Globe, 3 April 1950, n.p.
LEONARD DE PAUR
Among the many virtues of the Leonard De Paur Infantry
chorus, which gave its first Boston concert yesterday
afternoon at Symphony Hall, is its intelligent disregard of
conventional program making. This fine organization ...
doesn't follow the easy path of singing nothing but
spirituals and a few sentimental ballads but offers instead
a varied and unexpected group of selections ... and most
of them were unfamiliar. For a group which . . . must
depend on an audience which comes to listen to songs
they know, this takes courage which ... was rewarded
by the presence of a large and honestly enthusiastic
audience. New to me were "Tol' My Cap'n," a bitter
contemporary lament of the chain gangs, and "Jerry," the
song of a driver, his mule and his cruel captain.42
65
Miss Hughes also believed the chorus, its soloists and its conductor to
be first-rate.
An unidentified clipping noted: "Only six members of De Paur's
army were professional singers before the war. The others came from
steel-mill pits; from the professions, even the ministry."43 In the 1950s,
only 1% of African Americans were enrolled in college and most of
those in the 110 historically black ones. It was almost certain that
many black men in the chorus, even those in the professions, were
undergoing major financial struggle. One member of the chorus who
wishes to remain anonymous said: "The pay left a great deal to be
desired." Mr. de Paur did not dwell on hardships, but forged ahead,
balancing his subtle activism and his laments with humor. Major critics
were impressed.
The group continued to get favorable notices from both the
black and white press. The New York Herald Tribune, on October 28,
1951, cited them in a historical overview. In its December 1951 issue,
Ebony featured the chorus and alluded to what almost became a law
suit over The Duckworth Chant:
The record almost led to a court suit when the publisher
of the song threatened to sue, claiming that he had
unearthed the World War II writer of the chant and had
42 Elinor Hughes, "De Paur's Infantry Chorus," Boston Herald,
3 April 1950, n.p.
4
3 Herbert Kupferberg, "Sing You Soldiers," unidentified
clipping, 28 October 1950, n.p.
66
signed him to a contract. Actually the chant is an old-
timer sung by Negro troops (often in unprintable
versions) throughout the army. 44
GILL
The article indicated that de Paur laughed at the "thought of any
modern-day soldier claiming authorship of The Duckworth Chant"4S
Beyond lawsuit possibilities, there were high moments. The
New York Times cited Luther Saxon's solo work: "There was distinction
in the simple but touching solos of the tenor, Luther Saxon."46 Saxon
remembered that in both Carnegie Hall appearances, "the house was
sold out!"47 The tenor did a moving solo in the 1951-52 season at
Carnegie Hall, "Sweet Little Jesus Boy," written by Robert MacGimsey
and arranged by de Paur. 48 Poignant words in the song are:
Sweet Little Jesus Boy.
They made you be born in a manger.
Sweet little holy child. We didn't know who you was.
The world treats you mean, Lord, treats me mean, too.
But that's how things is down here, Lord.
We don't know who you is.
Historically, during slavery, the Negro spiritual served as a warning,
often, to those on the Underground Railroad, especially such songs as
" Steal Away." Again, inclusion of such songs in the chorus's program is
an example of de Paur's subtle activism.
By 1954, de Paur, knowing that the now professional, non-
infantry chorus could not last forever, wisely, continued to take on
other projects. He again conducted Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in
Three Acts, the work the composer had cast solely with African
Americans. Thomson, a major music critic and a major composer
wrote de Paur from the Hotel Sacher in Vienna:
Dear Leonard: Thanks for the letter ... I have complete
confidence in your choice for the replacements needed in
44 "De Paur Infantry Choir," Ebony, December 1951, 42-8.
45 Ibid.
46 "Infantry Chorus At Carnegie Hall," New York Times, 14
January 1952, n.p.
47 Luther Saxon, telephone conversation with author, 18
October 2002.
48 Printed program of the 1951-52 season for the de Paur
Infantry Chorus at Carnegie Hall (courtesy of Luther Saxon).
LEONARD DE PAUR
my 4 Saints cast. I had hoped to use as many as possible
of my 1952 people simply because they know the work
and should take less rehearsal time than new ones. But
the important thing is to have the best voices available.
So just use your own judgment ... I shall arrive in New
York on July 15 . . . I'll kiss Paris for you with pleasure.
Am loving Vienna which I've never seen before. Ever
yours, Virgil T. 49
67
Thomson gave de Paur carte blanche to do virtually anything he
wished, from auditioning singers, to the accompanist, to his idea of
"what is the best concert ending." so It was, indeed, rare that a black
man in 1954 had this kind of power and creative license.
It was in the next year that Rosa Parks, a seamstress, was
arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for not giving up her bus seat to a
white man. African Americans in many places, in and out of the South,
were second-class citizens. But Thomson, according to many people of
color in the theatre, was unusually respectful of black talent. Mr. de
Paur said to me of Virgil Thomson:
He's really interested in them [African Americans] not as
objects, separate and apart, but as creators of a very
significant thread in the mosaic of American music, and
musical expression; he had great respect for black
musicians-in what they contributed of a significant
nature, and that's why he chose blacks for Four Saints in
Three Acts. He said he didn't know of anybody on earth
who could deliver those lines of Gertrude Stein's and his
funny little tunes with the absolute belief and conviction
that blacks could, nor deliver it with the style and with the
dignity of those people who represented the Saints. And
he was sincere. And I don't mean that he gave you any
advantages. He would come down on you like a ton of
bricks if he thought you deserved it, friend or foe. I can
remember once or twice when he chewed me out for
things that I did. I deserved being chewed.s1
49 Virgil Thomson, letter to Leonard de Paur, 17 June 1954
(courtesy of Norma de Paur).
so Ibid.
s1 Personal interview with author, 28 March 1986.
68
Leonard de Paur with mime at Lincoln Center Out of Doors.
Summer, 1979. Photo by Bill Anderson.
GILL
LEONARD DE PAUR 69
In the midst of all this, by 1956, with the ensuing racial crisis over
integration of Central High School brewing in Little Rock, Arkansas, the
de Paur Infantry Chorus was coming to an end.
The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, noted:
The DePaur Infantry Chorus, which has been a unit since
World War II, will disband at the end of this season [ ... ]
A new program will be instituted under the title, "De Paur
Opera Gala." This will utilize a mixed chorus of twenty-
five, an orchestra of the same number and five soloists.
It will present condensations of three Broadway shows
which starred Negro singers, Thompson's [sic] Four
Saints in Three Acts, the Hammerstein-Bizet Carmen
Jones and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The new group will
begin a coast to coast tour of one-nighters in January,
1957.52
Mr. de Paur also started work on Broadway and in Hollywood, a clear
recognition of his growing stature. The De Paur Opera Gala program
also featured the three best known works which featured black
singers. Mr. de Paur created and conducted concerts with over 2,300
performances in the United States, South America, the Caribbean,
Japan, Europe and Africa from 1947 to 1968 with the de Paur Infantry
Chorus, the de Paur Opera Gala, the de Paur Gala and the de Paur
Chorus.53 Twelve albums feature the de Paur Chorus. In 1963, under
a special grant, Harry Belafonte and Leonard de Paur recorded an
album of African-American music. Mr. de Paur allied himself with a
much less subtle activist in the person of Belafonte. (In 2002,
Belafonte denounced General Colin Powell as a "house slave.") Also in
1963, de Paur arranged and conducted for RCA a recording of
Leontyne Price and William Warfield in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.
In 1966, the 27-member de Paur Chorus was selected for a
tour of 14 countries. They began their tour in Paris. Three months
later, they went to Africa. Leonard and Norma de Paur tra'leled there
where they were received by Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. "It
was exquisite," Mr. de Paur's widow relates.54 The group, according to
a report to the U.S. Congress, found that "any such undertaking must
52
Pittsburgh Courier, 28 January 1956, 26.
53
Biographical data sheet supplied by Leonard de Paur.
54
Conversation with author, 23 September 2002.
70 GILL
come to grips with transportation difficulties, indequate housing and
staging facilities."55 Such was not new for black men, especially in the
1960s, a decade that saw the assassination of Medgar Evers, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Arguably, the 1960s were the most tempestuous of the
twentieth century. The struggle was for voting rights, access to public
accommodations, access to quality schools, access to better jobs, and
the right to human dignity. One need only look at photos to witness
the Birmingham, Alabama, police putting their knees in the neck of a
black woman during the 1963 protests for human dignity led by Martin
Luther King, Jr. It was that same year that America witnessed Alabama
governor George Wallace declare "Segregation now and segregation
forever" as he stood in the door of the University of Alabama to bar
Vivian Malone and James Hood. Mr. de Paur had to be keenly aware
that times were extremely volatile, perhaps a major reason that he
radically changed his direction in musical offerings as well as his
venues, spending considerable time abroad, focusing on opera and
African music, making considerable social contributions abroad.
The New York Times reported a cultural triumph for the De
Paur Chorus which sang in Cairo in a very distinguished venue ...
"The DePaur chorus, making a 12-nation tour of Africa under the
auspices of the State Department's cultural program, sang Friday and
Saturday nights in Cairo and Alexandria. More than 2,000 heard them.
In Alexandria, women sat in the aisles and in Cairo chauffeurs crept
inside the opera house to listen."56 The group began with marching
songs, some light-hearted tunes, and then quickly moved into hand-
clapping and drum-thumping songs. Mr. de Paur led them through an
Ashanti tribal song, a Nigerian work song, and one that Baluba women
in the Congo sing while brewing beer. The audience joined the
traditional chant. The Cultural Attache of the American Embassy called
it a highlight of the cultural programs sponsored by the State
Department. Cairo critics raved. It was activism at its finest! The group
toured back in America in the late 1960s, singing these African "Songs
for a New Nation," which William Arthur Gill (my brother) heard at
Tennessee State University and still remembers.
In April 1966 in Dakar, Senegal, de Paur was among 2,000
55 Cultural Presentations USA, 1965-1966, A Report to the
Congress and the Public/ 10 (courtesy of Norma de Paur) .
56 Hedrick Smith
1
"Egypt Cheers an American Chorus/' New
York Times, February 1 1966
1
n.p. (courtesy of Norma de Paur).
LEONARD DE PAUR 71
people who came together to celebrate and debate the renaissance of
black culture in the twentieth century. "Among the dignitaries who
attended the month-long event were such world-renowned figures as
President Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Emperor Haile Selassie of
Ethiopia."57 Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and Alvin Ailey also
came from America.
Meanwhile, Mr. de Paur served as conductor for the Broadway
play Hallelujah Baby {1967) by Arthur Laurents and others for the
National Company. "It attempted to provide the history of the civil
rights movement from the turn of the century to the present .. . " 58 For
Broadway and the national tour, de Paur served as guest conductor for
Purlie (1970). James Wilson of Amissville, Virginia, went four times
when the musical appeared in Washington, D. . The critics were
equally enthusiastic, but Ossie Davis, on whose play, Purlie Victorious,
the musical was based, was not. The musical showed how southern
blacks in Georgia could outwit the 01' Cap'n; de Paur arranged the
music for 10 Broadway musicals.
In 1970, as America was in the midst of the Vietnam War, and
African Americans were demanding jobs other than those of the
menial, Leonard de Paur became Associate Director of Community
Relations at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Believing that
Lincoln Center had an image of being an elite institution that catered
to the carriage trade, de Paur began Lincoln Center Out of Doors.
According to Jenneth Webster, now director of Lincoln Center Out of
Doors, as a showcase for the street theatre project.59 In October of
1971, he announced: "We want to take Lincoln Center to communities
in a form of greater importance than before, as well as to bring them
to Lincoln Center .. . We have to try to dissipate the resentment some
people still have against Lincoln Center as a place only for the well-to-
do." 60 Mical Whitaker recalls: "About 1970-1971, with Geraldine
Fitzgerald and Brother Jonathan OSF, I co-founded the Street Theatre
Festival at Lincoln Center. From 1971-1977, under the direction of
57 Flyer of The FirstWorld Festival of Negro Arts (courtesy of
Norma de Paur).
58 Allen Woll. Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to
Dreamgirls (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1989),
246.
59 Jenneth Webster, personal email, 10 September 2002.
60 Quoted by Raymond Ericson in "Changing Lincoln Center's
Image/' New York Times, 10 October 1971, n.p. (courtesy of Norma
de Paur).
72 GiLL
Leonard, Hazel Bryant and I coordinated the annual event." 61
By 1972, de Paur was 53 years old. None of his powers had
diminished. A source wishing to remain anonymous said that his mind
was like lightning. Mel Gussow attended a street festival under the
aegis of de Paur's administration and witnessed the Inwood People's
Performing Company Street Theater Workshop. He remarked: "Unlike
some street theater, this is a real play, one of a trilogy that Mr. [Peter]
Copani is writing about drugs . . . Mr. Copani pictures death by
overdose as well as the addicted."62 These offerings were clearly
designated for the masses. Edward Hudson, also of the New York
Times, observed that in August of 1972, Mr. de Paur was responsible
for opening 30 shows in two weeks, with a $53,000 budget.63 That
same month, on August 25, The Harlem Historical Landmarks
Foundation hosted Black Renaissance '72, saluted de Paur and other
"black artists of yesterday and today," and followed with a midnight
benefit performance at the Apollo Theatre.
64
In 1976, de Paur became Director of Community Relations at
Lincoln Center. The events were varied and phenomenal, attracting
millions of people. Mr. de Paur's major worry, perhaps, was that each
group struggled for a piece of the financial pie. Money was not
plentiful, but de Paur sought and won some corporate support. On
August 10, 1981, 8,000 people attended a concert of Count Basie and
his orchestra; 5,000 attended the opening ceremony at Fountain
Plaza.
65
The Riverside Shakespeare Company put on Two Gentlemen
of Verona; there was Youseff Yancy's Music for Children, and Jazz at
Noon; the David "Fathead" Newman Quintet, and the Salt and Pepper
Mime Company. The Eleo Polmare Dance company appeared, along
with "Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope." The total attendance between
1974 and 1982 was 1,321,400 people, with 608 performances in that
same time-frame.66
Returning to opera while still administrator at Lincoln Center,
2002.
61 Mical Whitaker, written statement to author, 23 October
62 Mel Gussow, "Theater: Rock vs. Junk," New York Times,
24 August 1972, 52.
63 Edward Hudson, "Festival Leader Is Really Its 'Juggler',"
New York Times, 24 August 1972, 52.
64 Program, courtesy of Mical Whitaker.
65 Statistical records at Lincoln Center for the Performing
Arts, Inc.
66 Ibid.
LEONARD DE PAUR 73
de Paur traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1974 to conduct black
classical composer William Grant Still's long-delayed Bayou Legend,
based on the Peer Gynt myth and written in 194l.The sponsoring
group was Opera/South, a precursor to Opera Ebony, both initiatives
that provided opportunities for black opera singers and classical
musicians that they might not otherwise have had. As a young
adolescent, de Paur recalled: "I lived near Mr. Still, and I used to walk
out of my way down his block, just hoping to see him come out ... I
remember once going to WOR radio station where he was working,
writing for one of the attractions (probably the Deep River hour) and
just hanging around outside the studio, peeping through the glass and
watching him work ... "67
Bayou Legend came back to Jackson two years later for a
revival, and in 1981, PBS aired it. Leonard de Paur wrote to Mrs. Verna
Still, widow of Bayou Legend's composer: "M/E-TV has sent me a
contract covering the release of Bayou Legend to television markets all
over the world."68 Of the 1981 television production of Bayou Legend,
Richard F. Shepard wrote: "The cast of black performers is an
exceptionally ... talented one, and under the musical direction of
Leonard de Paur, the singers bring heart and soul to their
performances .. . Bayou Legend is a curious piece of Americana, ...
matured in the European manner."69 The New York Amsterdam News
was not as cautious:
Ironically, Mississippi, the state that has attempted to
trample on so many Black souls and dreams, is apparently
responsible for this excellent production. Still was born in
Woodville, Mississippi, and the Mississippi Center of
Educational Television and Opera/South prepared his
work for television ... With Leonard de Paur directing the
superb cast of performers, William Grant Still's music
soars. I wonder if William Grant Still had seen it in a
tremendous production like this-Mississippi or not-that
showed millions of Americans a little of his superlative
talents.?O
67 De Paur quoted in Hains, 14 November 1974, n.p.
(courtesy of Judith Anne Still).
6s Leonard de Paur, letter to Mrs. Verna Still, 14 November
1980 (courtesy of Judith Anne Still).
69 "TV: Still's Opera of the Southland, 'A Bayou Legend,"'
New York Times, 15 June 1981, n.p. (courtesy of Norma de Paur) .
70 Ali Stanton, 20 June 1981, n.p. (courtesy of Norma de
Paur).
74 GILL
Always conscious of dress, de Paur conducted Still's opera in tails. In
1982, Morehouse College in Atlanta (alma mater of Martin Luther King,
Jr.) gave Mr. de Paur an honorary doctorate, something de Paur told
me was a highlight of his career. In 1983, de Paur became president
of the West Side Chamber of Commerce in New York City, building
good will in the community.
Continuing to work with Lincoln Center Out of Doors, in 1987
de Paur suffered a paralyzing stroke from which he never recovered.
He continued to serve as a consultant to Lincoln Center from his
wheelchair. He died on November 7, 1998. His legacy of activism and
professionalism continues. Jenneth Webster took over as Director of
Lincoln Center Out of Doors in 1988. Andrea Bradford, an opera singer
and corporate vice-president, wrote:
Lincoln Center Out of Doors, from a consumer's
perspective, is a powerful concept. Although I did not
know Leonard de Paur personally, the impact of
taking/bringing a traditionally exclusive arts medium to
the community is thoughtful, generous and visionary. This
summer, the Lincoln Center Out of Doors "Convergence
Project" was especially exciting. Not only did it bring
many musics to the people simultaneously, it also
demonstrated the broad concept of diversity through
styles, instrument configurations and traditions. In
observing the random audience, wonder, amazement,
excitement and sheer pleasure were the emotions
consistently expressed. 71
A host of people in the media and other walks of life have also
expressed their appreciation of de Paur's rich legacy, from Jennifer
Dunning and Valerie Gladstone of the New York Times to Andrew
Young and Mical Whitaker. Lincoln Center, through the good offices of
Jenneth Webster, placed a plaque in Mr. de Paur's memory on the
Lincoln Center Mall, just beyond the State Theater and just outside
the Metropolitan Opera.
Two strong tributes have come from de Paur's brother-in-law,
Andrew Young, and the former co-founder of the street theatre, Mical
Whitaker, now Assistant Professor of Theatre at Georgia Southern
University. Andrew Young declared:
71 Andrea Bradford, personal email, 30 September 2002.
LEONARD DE PAUR
Leonard brought the American idiom, jazz and spirituals,
to classical music, which was then largely European.
Without him, there would be no Wynton Marsalis. In a
sense, he was to classical music what Jackie Robinson
was to baseball, except in baseball it was about color. In
classical music, segregation went deeper, depriving us of
a world of diverse rhythms and harmonies. At Lincoln
Center, he broadened the audience for all the arts.72
Mical Whitaker who said de Paur was like a father to him wrote:
When I think of Leonard, words like statesman, diplomat,
soldier, and gentleman come to mind . . . He was always
well-spoken, words carefully chosen and mellifluously
delivered [ ... ] His acts of kindness and genuine concern
were evident to me as early as 1971. That was the year
when America's Street Theatre Movement was in the
national spotlight; even Newsweek magazine featured an
article about the re-emergence of this ancient theatrical
form. My name did not appear in the article. It was
Leonard who, in a spirited letter to the editor, insisted that
my contribution as co-founder and coordinator of the
Street Theatre Festival at Lincoln Center be noted [ ... )
As the planning committee prepared for the 1971
opening-day ceremonies of the First Annual Street
Theatre Festival at Lincoln Center, it was Leonard who,
like a benevolent general caring for his troops, insisted
that free box lunches be made available to the 800+
performers from the various street-theatre companies.
Such was the heart and soul of the Gentleman.73
75
While Whitaker focused on de Paur's compassion and fairness,
what, then, is Leonard de Paur's most significant legacy? He integrated
audiences at his concerts, even if he had to send men from the chorus
to sit next to whites. He continued Marian Anderson's pioneering work
of integrating opera. He brought people from all walks of life to Lincoln
Center for the Performing Arts, a venue long considered one that
catered to the carriage trade. He devoted his life to excellence in all
his performances. Hollywood and Broadway used his talents. In his 83
years, Leonard de Paur, through his work in music and theatre, caused
people to feel the plight of the black prisoner, the segregated soldier,
n Quoted by Valerie Gladstone in "Celebrating an Impresario
of the Outdoors," New York Times, 1 August 1999, sec. 2, col. 1, 30.
73 Mical Whitaker, written statement to author, 23 October
2002.
76
GILL
and those under the heels of oppression. His humor was also effective
and leavened the bitter bread of racism. Through his own
magnanimous achievements in a century of race riots, assassinations,
and injustice, Leonard de Paur left a legacy of activism, passion, racial
pride, impeccably performed music, and a sense of compassion and
fairness in his dealings with others. He wanted to be a man, nothing
but a man.
* * *
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is exceedingly difficult to acknowledge all who have helped with this article
which has been over 20 years in the making. First of all, I give thanks to God,
first and always. Perhaps next, I owe thanks to Lorraine Brown of George
Mason University who introduced me to Leonard de Paur in 1982, when I was
an Assistant Professor of English at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. I had
completed my Ph.D. three months prior to our meeting, having done a
doctoral dissertation on the Federal Theatre Project. I thank Leonard de Paur,
himself, for his splendid cooperation and generosity in admitting me to his
office at Lincoln Center twice, his several letters, and his coming to Tuskegee
Institute in November of 1982 to appear on a program celebrating survivors of
the Federal Theatre when I chaired the Department of English and Foreign
Languages there.
Secondly, I owe profound thanks to Jenneth Webster, now Director
of Lincoln Center Out of Doors, who, in 1982, was Mr. de Paur's assistant. It
was she who helped me immeasurably both in 1982 and 1986, and after his
stroke in 1987, when she called me and gave me his unlisted home phone
numbers. In 2002, she facilitated my all day meeting with Judith Johnson at
Lincoln Center, one of the most caring and professional directors of information
I have been fortunate to meet.
I am very indebted to Mr. de Paur's wife, Norma, who has been most
generous and gracious with her time and material, and to his son, Leonard
Childs de Paur, who invited me into his home for dinner in 2000, and to Lynn,
the de Paurs' daughter, who received me so well in San Diego in 2001, and
even mentioned that her mother had her father's archives as we returned from
sitting by the magnificent Pacific Ocean. I am grateful to Luther Saxon who
gave me an impromptu interview over lunch hosted by Norma de Paur. I also
thank Luther for sending me a very rare photo and a Carnegie Hall program
of the de Paur Infantry Chorus.
At Michigan Technological University, I am deeply indebted to the
Faculty Scholarship Committee and David Reed, Ph.D., Vice-President of
Research in the Graduate School who provided me with generous financial aid
to travel to New York City during the 2002 calendar year. Carol Johnson and
Joanne Polzien deserve thanks. I am especially grateful to my readers, Nancy
Grimm, Ph.D., and Sylvia Matthews. I am indebted to Robert Johnson, Ph.D.,
Chair of Humanities, and others, including the sabbatical committee, that gave
me released time to do this. Bill Tembreull, Manager of Design and
Publications, Diane Keranen, Manager of Design Services; and Joe Pykkonen,
photographer, assisted with enhancing photos through their extraordinary skill
with computers. The Accounting Office of our university was also helpful.
LEONARD DE PAUR 77
Mica I Whitaker provided me with the excellent photo of the de Paurs
at a 1972 Harlem event that celebrated Leonard's achievements. Thanks,
Mica!. And he wrote a powerful memory of Leonard which I have included.
Marilyn Hoyt of Tuskegee Institute transcribed the first personal interview I
conducted with Mr. de Paur, and Karen Pearson of Milwaukee reviewed both
the 1982 and 1986 tapes in 2002 for possible omissions/deletions. Thanks,
Karen. My friend of many years, Judith Anne Still, daughter of black classical
composer, William Grant Still, provided me the letters Mr. de Paur wrote to her
father and mother, Verna Arvey, along with other valuable materials.
Ms. Sharon Howard, Reference Librarian at The Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, and Cynthia Rollins of the same
Center deserve my gratitude. I thank Jim Hatch and Camille Billops of The
Hatch-Billops Studio for access to their collection which housed two interviews
with Leonard de Paur. JoEIIen Elbashir of Howard University's Moorland-
Spingarn Collection was, as always, very helpful.
78
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 15, no. 3 (Fall 2003)
THEATRICAL RESCUE IN HARLEM:
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS AND JOHN DREW AT
THE HARLEM OPERA HOUSE, 1895
ROBERT C. VAN HORN
The last sentence of the final telegram stated, " Do not become
discouraged."
A total of four telegrams were sent to John Drew on that April
day in 1895. The mysterious telegrams indicated that a "Relief
Expeditionary Force" was advancing to "rescue" Drew from his location
at the Harlem Opera House located on West 125th Street, New York
City.
Philadelphia-born John Drew, a well-known and popular actor,
was in suburban Harlem performing The Butterflies, a play written by
Henry Guy Carleton. In this three-act comedy John Drew plays
Frederick Ossian, "an American gentleman, young, reckless with his
money, and careless of the future, but noble hearted, witty, and a
sterling good fellow. He is spending his own fortune as fast as he can,
and is near the point where he may imperil his mother's fortune, when
he rescues a charming young girl from drowning, and, of course, they
fall in love. But there is another suitor for her hand, who is in favor
with the girl's mother, and this complicates matters. Frederick,
however, wins over the mother by a bit of self-sacrifice, and all ends
happily."l
The play first opened in New York City on February 5, 1894, at
Palmer's 30th Street Theatre to good reviews. The New York Times
reported, "There are no superfluous passages in the play; its action is
swift and direct; its side issues are all well-contrived, and its
performance involves a large number of cleverly contrived scenes that
leave pleasing pictures in the memory. Mr. Drew's part is congenial,
and Maude Adams, as his vis-a-vis, . . . plays with charming
intelligence and restraint."2
1 "New Bills of the Week, " New York Times, 4 February 1894,
10.
2 "John Drew is Home Again, " New York Times, 6 February
1894, 2. Maude Adams's real life mother, Annie Adams (1848-1916;
real name: Asenath Ann Adams Kiskadden), was a member of the
cast and performed the role of John Drew's mother, Mrs. Ossian.
THEATRICAL RESCUE 79
John Drew described this play in his autobiography when he
wrote, "The second play in which I appeared as a star was Butterflies
by Henry Guy Carleton, who was the first editor of Life. In this I played
Frederick Ossian, a heedless young man who is much in love and much
in debt. Finally Frederick tries the expedient of going to work, and his
love is rewarded. In this play, .. . Maude Adams as Miriam made
another hit and Olive May as Suzanne-Elise scored greatly. Suzanne
was a broad-comedy part, one of the first of the modern slangy young
girls and a contrast to the heroine, the delicate Miriam. Carlton's play
was as great a success as The Masked Ball, and we played it for many
months."J
After a successful three-month run at Palmer's, the play was
included in the company's 1894 summer repertoire and was taken on
the road where it was performed in several cities from Boston to San
Francisco. John Drew described part of this trip when he wrote, "The
year after the World's Fair [1892-93 Columbian Exposition, Chicago,
IL] we were going to California with Butterflies. When we got near
Chicago there was a great glare in the sky and we were told that the
World's Fair buildings were burning.
"At Hammond [Indiana], which is some miles out of Chicago,
we were compelled to get out of our Pullman [railroad car], as there
was a strike at the Pullman works. [The strike lasted from May to July
1894.] There was a sympathetic strike of the people working on the
various [rail] roads led by Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway
Union, and Pullman cars were not allowed to go into Chicago.
"We rode into Chicago by trolley. We were going straight to
the Coast and not playing Chicago this trip. After we got off the trolley
we had to take an elevated to get us to a place where we could get
carriages to get us across to the Northwestern station.
"In getting on the elevated Maude Adams and the women of
the company were nearly crushed to death. Great throngs of people
were going to the fire and taking the trains right back again. The
congestion was shocking. We were so much delayed that we missed
our train and had to stay over a whole day until the same time next
night.
"The strikers were beginning to riot, and troops were brought
down from Fort Sheridan [located just north of Chicago] and camped
out on the Lake Front. I knew some of the officers and spent most of
the day at this temporary camp. On our way West we were held up at
different places by the striking people and those who sympathized with
3 John Drew, My Years on the Stage (New York: E.P. Dutton
& Co., 1922), 177.
80 VAN HORN
them, but they did not take our Pullman car off. We had to stop at
night wherever we were, usually at some station we were passing
through. It was very hot and we arrived at San Francisco two days
late."
4
Upon returning to New York City, Charles Frohman, who
managed John Drew and the rest of the cast, scheduled the play's final
performances for the week of April 22-27, 1895, at the Harlem Opera
House.
In the 1600s, Harlem was as a small Dutch farming community
located on the north end of Manhattan Island. It wasn't incorporated
into New York City proper until 1873. Shortly after this incorporation,
Oscar Hammerstein I (1846-1919) and others such as Henry
Morgenthau (1856-1946) and August Belmont (1853-1924) speculated
on the future of Harlem and made money buying, developing, and
selling land north of 125th Street.
5
Everything from tenements, single-
family row houses, and luxury apartments to commercial, religious,
and educational buildings were quickly constructed. Hammerstein's
famous Harlem Opera House was completed in 1888.
Though physically on Manhattan Island, the Harlem Opera
House, located on 125th Street, was 95 blocks away from the city's
bustling midtown theatrical center. In 1895, the theatre district was
centered in the area around the intersection of Broadway and 30th
Street. 6 This part of Manhattan is the area that became known as the
4 Ibid., 178-9.
s Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New
York: Harper & Row, 1963), 76. Osofsky points out on page 93 that
over-development of the area led to excessive vacancies with the
subsequent loss of investment value. Black realtors such as Philip A
Payton, Jr., saw an opportunity and came forward to match the glut
of available apartments with the needs of New York City's growing
Black population.
6 Mary C. Henderson, The City and The Theatre (Clifton, NJ:
James T. White & Company, 1973), 182.
THEATRICAL RESCUE 81
"Tenderloin District."?
Lloyd Griscom describes the remoteness of Harlem when he
writes in his autobiography that, "Harlem in the [Eighteen] Nineties
was another world; only a few pioneers lived as far north as Seventy-
second Street. "8
On Saturday, April 27, 1895, Richard Davis penned a letter to
his brother Charles giving him an outline of what would be an
elaborate scheme to play a practical joke on John Drew. Davis wrote,
"I read in the paper the other morning that John Drew was in Harlem,
so I sent him a telegram saying that I was organizing a relief
expedition, and would bring him out of the wilderness in safety."9
Richard Harding Davis was an up-and-coming editor, author,
and adventurer, who had just returned from a trip to Central and South
America. Lloyd Griscom writes, "Dick's friends really comprised a
remarkable group. Each was an artist in his own field, but more than
that each had his individual sense of humor, from the buoyant,
rollicking high spirits of Stanford White to the whimsical Peter Pan-
ishness of Maude Adams."lo Charles Belmont Davis, Richard's brother,
wrote, "None of this little circle [of friends] was married at the time,
7 Henry Collins Brown, ed., Valentine's Manual of Old New
York (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Valentine's Manual Inc., 1927), 23.
Note that Brown attributes the name "Tenderloin" to one Police
Captain Williams who was transferred from downtown Manhattan to
the Thirtieth Street Police Station. Brown wrote, "All the great hotels,
the big gambling houses, the theatres, dance halls, etc., etc., were
included within its boundaries. The captain had hitherto been
stationed downtown, where after six o'clock he did nothing but read
bedtime stories. The pickings were lean. When promotion took him
uptown, the practical captain remarked, 'Ah! No more chuck steak
for me; now I'll get a little of the Tenderloin."' Osofsky, page 14,
indicates that it was the availability of "underworld graft" that made
it possible for a policeman in that area to be able to afford the price
of tenderloin steaks.
8 Lloyd C. Griscom, Diplomatically Speaking (New York: The
Literary Guild of America, Inc., 1940), 97.
9 Richard Harding Davis to Charles Belmont Davis, 27 April
1895, Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis, ed. Charles
Belmont Davis (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917), 166.
10 Griscom, 96.
82
VAN HORN
its various members were seldom apart, and they extracted an
enormous amount of fun out of life."ll The aspects of humor and
adventure associated with the idea of organizing and carrying out a
"rescue" certainly would have appealed tremendously to Davis and his
friends.
When the first telegram was delivered to John Drew it must
have caught him by surprise. Usually a telegram sent to a performer
expresses support and good wishes and congratulations for a
successful artistic interpretation in a particular role. This strange
telegram referred to a "relief expedition" and "rescue" from the
"wilderness." Drew undoubtedly wondered what kind of scheme his
good friend Richard Davis was planning. After all, Davis was known for
"pranks, wagers, and impersonations."12
Davis was up to something and it was pretty outrageous.
Davis adopted the 1871 African expedition of Sir Henry Stanley (1841-
1904) as his theme for this adventure.13 Stanley, a famous journalist,
was sent by the New York Herald to find the Scottish missionary and
explorer Dr. David Livingstone (1813-73). On November 10, 1871,
Stanley finally met Livingstone on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in
central Africa and addressed him with the now well-known phrase, "Dr.
Livingstone, I presume?"
14
Richard Davis recruited two of his buddies, Lloyd Griscom and
Robert Russell, to help plan and carry out this elaborate prank. When
Griscom and Russell arrived at Davis's home they gladly joined in the
excitement. Griscom writes, "Even had Dick not already committed
me, I would not have missed the fun for anything."
15
These three
friends had all the necessary resources and enthusiasm needed to
spontaneously drop whatever it was they were doing so that they
might do something exciting together.
To prepare for their "Expedition" Russell and Griscom went
through Davis's closets looking for clothes and other items that would
be appropriate to wear. They utilized many of the items that Davis had
brought back with him from his world travels.
16
11 Davis, 59.
12 Arthur Lubow, The Reporter Who Would Be King (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992), 112.
13
Griscom, 97.
1
4
"Stanley, Sir. Henry Morton". and "Livingstone, David."
Encyclopedia.com. Onl1ne. Internet [c1ted 18 November 2002].
1s Griscom, 97.
16 Ibid.
THEATRICAL RESCUE 83
Davis described in detail the outfits that he and his friends
used in the letter to his brother. Davis writes, "I wore my sombrero and
riding breeches, gauntlets and riding boots, with cartridge belts full of
bum cartridges over my shoulder and around the waist. Russell had my
pith helmet and a suit of khaki and leggings. Griscom was in one of my
coats with many pockets, a helmet and boots. We all carried revolvers,
canteens and rifles."17 Lloyd Griscom writes, "We three got ourselves
up as explorers with sun helmets, high boots, long gauntlets, and
bandoleers of cartridges over our shoulders."18 These three had to be
the best-dressed group of safari-men ever seen on Manhattan Island
at that time.
To add to the size and presence of their "force," the group
enlisted George, who was Robert Russell's servant, and another black
man and gave them the accoutrements "to transform them into full-
fledged African warriors."19 These men were dressed "with assegai
daggers and robes of gold and high turbans and sashes stuck full of
swords."2o (An assegai dagger is a slender spear tipped with an iron
point similar in appearance to the modern javelin.)
About noon the second of the mysterious telegrams was
delivered to John Drew at the Harlem Opera House. The telegram
stated, "Natives from interior of Harlem report having seen Davis Relief
Expeditionary Force crossing Central Park, all well." This message
indicated the sender was "Robert Howard Russell."21
Two hours later the third telegram arrived. It continued the
drama with the words: "Relief reached Eighty-fifth Street; natives
peacefully inclined, awaiting rear column, led by Griscom, save your
ammunition and provisions."22
17 Davis, 166.
ta Griscom, 97.
19 Ibid.
20 Davis, 166.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
84
VAN HORN
With the delivery of the second and third telegrams, John
Drew knew that two more of his friends, namely Robert Russell and
Lloyd Griscom, were involved with Richard Davis and were members
of the "Davis Relief Expeditionary Force." In those few moments when
Drew was not on stage he must have conjured up all kinds of strange
scenarios as he wondered what kind of mischief his friends were
planning.
What a sight this five-man "Expeditionary Force" presented to
the public when they left Davis's home on East 28th Street. Lloyd
Griscom, the major chronicler of this event, described the scene;
"Waiving his assagai [sic], George hailed an astounded cabby, and we
piled in, shouting and brandishing our guns and revolvers."23
New York City cab drivers, then and now, have seen a lot of
strange things in their time but one has to wonder what this cabbie
was thinking when the five armed "explorers" entered his horse-drawn
cab and told him to take them to 125th Street. The driver probably just
shook his head in bewilderment and hoped for a big tip as he headed
his cab up-town.
Griscom writes in his autobiography, "On the way north we
stormed a telegraph station to transmit a final message of hope to
John Drew. The telegram stated, 'If you can hold the audience at bay
for another hour we guarantee to rescue yourself and company and
bring you back to the coast in safety. Do not become discouraged."24
At this point, John Drew was probably more apprehensive than he was
discouraged as he continued to wonder what kind of joke his friends
were about to play on him.
Shortly after 10 p.m. the cab reached 125th Street and pulled
up in front of the Harlem Opera House. The men got out of the cab
and attempted to enter the theatre through the stage door. Lloyd
Griscom again describes what must have been a tumultuous scene
when he writes, "The attendant thought we were lunatics and forbade
us entrance with our weapons."2S The attendant controlled who went
in and out of the theatre through the stage door and he was not about
to let this crew, dressed and armed as they were, into the Opera
House while a John Drew performance was in progress. Doing so
would probably have cost him his job.
After a period of negotiation, the attendant agreed to let
23 Griscom, 97.
24 I bid. Davis, on page 166 of his book, states that the
telegram's last sentence was "Do not become disheartened."
2s Ibid.
THEATRICAL RESCUE 85
George enter the theatre by himself so that he might give a note to
Drew.
When George entered the theatre the actors and stagehands,
who were waiting or working backstage, saw him all dressed up in a
golden robe and a turban. They went over to him and asked many
questions. George told some of them why he was there dressed as he
was and indicated that the remaining members of the Davis "Relief
Expeditionary Force" were waiting outside the theatre's stage door
entrance. The actors and crew then went quickly to the stage door
where they found the team waiting outside. The "relief team" was
immediately brought into the theatre and taken to the backstage
area.26
John Drew was waiting in the wings and was about to go on
stage for his final scene in The Butterflies when he heard the
commotion. Drew looked up and saw his good friend Richard Davis
and the others approaching him. The two men greeted each other with
a hug and then when Drew heard his cue he automatically walked out
onto the stage.27 What happened next is the recurring nightmare of all
performers. With his mind full of images of five armed men dressed as
if they were on an African safari, Drew was dumbfounded and could
not focus on his part. This meticulous and esteemed professional actor,
the scion of a long line of professional actors, could only stand silently
before the audience.
After several agonizing moments it became apparent that
Drew was not going to be able to continue his role. He "was so
overcome by amusement that the could not speak his lines."2s The
stage manager had no choice but to bring down the final curtain
"leaving the audience to decide for itself how the play was to end." 29
Drew was no doubt very relieved when the curtain went down
and he could leave the stage. With Maude Adams by his side he
greeted the rescue team.3o Davis writes, "When John came off [the
26 Davis, 167.
27 Griscom, 97.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Fairfax Downey, Richard Harding Davis & His Day (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933), 116.
86 VAN HORN
stage] I walked up to him, followed by the other four and the entire
company, and said, 'Mr. Drew, I presume,' and he said: ' Mr. Davis, I
believe, I am saved!"'31 The rest of the actors and stagehands enjoyed
the joke immensely. John Drew would have laughed harder and
enjoyed the joke more if he had been really certain that the "force"
was not going to go on stage or take seats in the audience.32
When the "Davis relief expeditionary force" left the theatre
they went to Robert Russell's apartment. John Drew and his wife
Josephine Baker Drew were there, along with Ethel Barrymore and
Helen Benedict, all of who were backstage at the theatre that night,
and Maude Adams soon joined them at Russell's for a late supper. 33
Certainly during the meal and for the remaining evening, they all
laughed about the "relief expedition" and enjoyed each other's
company as they discussed and relived the events of the day.
The "Davis relief expeditionary force" of April 1895 and its
attempt to "rescue" John Drew at the Harlem Opera House rates only
the smallest of footnotes in the overall history of New York theatre.
Neither John Drew nor Ethel Barrymore felt this event significant
enough to include the incident in their respective autobiographies.34
But the people who were involved, either directly or indirectly, in this
prank went on to achieve significant individual accomplishments. They
achieved greatness and nationwide prominence in their respective
fields of journalism, diplomacy, publishing, and theatre.
31 Davis, 167.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 John Drew, My Years on the Stage (New York: E.F. Dutton
& Co., 1922) and Ethel Barrymore, Memories (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1955).
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 15, no. 3 (Fall 2003)
"A WALLOW IN SLIME":
THE ATIEMPT TO CENSOR TOBACCO ROAD
IN NEW ORLEANS
JAY MALARCHER
87
Erskine Caldwell, in his essay, "My Twenty-five Years of
Censorship," established himself as perhaps America's most censored
author. His two most famous works, Tobacco Road (1931) and God's
Little Acre (1933), each experienced critical scrutiny and opposition,
but never dismissal. After a slow start, New York audiences began to
attend the dramatized version in numbers sufficient to keep the
fledgling Tobacco Road afloat. In late January 1934 the show moved
to the 48th Street Theatre, prompting new and much more positive (if
still bewildered) reviews. Caldwell noted in a letter to a friend in the
middle of February that of the 26 plays that opened in December,
Tobacco Road was the only one still running.t Its continued success
year after year in the 1930s prompted Caldwell at one point to muse
that the original nay-saying critics would certainly be nonplussed, but
he stated it much more colorfully: "That play is going to give Walter
Winchell piles yet!''2
In November 1937, Jack Kirkland's adaptation of Tobacco
Road was about to begin its fifth year on Broadway. The national tours
capitalized on the notoriety of the New York production's success, and
Dan Miller observes in his biography of Caldwell that the tours of the
show crisscrossed America several times, prompting extended runs in
several major cities, and that by 1939 "every state of the Union save
seven had hosted Tobacco Road."3
t Quoted in Dan B. Miller, Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from
Tobacco Road (New York: Knopf, 1995), 196.
2 Harvey L. Klevar, Erskine Caldwell: A Biography (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 147.
3 Miller, 199. According to the obituary of John Barton, the
actor played Jeeter in 47 states, Rhode Island the only holdout as of
1946. ("John Barton, 74, Dies; Veteran Jeeter Lester," Obit. Herald
Tribune [New York], 24 December 1946). Finally, in 1953, Rhode
Island saw its first performance of the much-restrained Tobacco Road,
but according to a report in the New York Times of that year, critics
said the performance "contained none of the passages of the original
that had been challenged in other communities" ("Producer Arrested
over 'Tobacco Road,"' New York Times, 10 January 1953, 19).
88 MALARCHER
Despite their success at drawing crowds, the tour productions
also drew scrutiny and opposition in several cities-especially in the
South or in predominantly Catholic cities.4 This article, therefore,
centers on New Orleans primarily because of its combined Southern
and Roman Catholic identities, and also because of the immense press
coverage the episode received.
The censure of a play that enjoyed such success on Broadway
seems hard to imagine, yet during the Great Depression, many
communities felt isolated and even suspicious of the lifestyles of
others. Certainly New Yorkers could feel a bit better about their
economic hardships when they were able to compare their lives with
the Crackers' desolation depicted in Tobacco Road. Southern
journalists, according to Miller, took the New York audiences to task for
"shedding tears for the denizens of Tobacco Road," which served as "a
convenient distraction from the grinding urban poverty in one's own
backyard." 5
The year 1937 marked the eve of the end of the Depression,
and many in America adopted postures that would ensure their
(continued) power once the worst was over. These individuals publicly
denounced visions of the country that chafed the sensibilities of their
constituencies or congregations. Despite the examples of dictatorial
censorship provided by the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese (whose
war with China was well underway by this time), some Americans
attempted to " protect" their own by railing against the perceived
threats of, for example, socialist critiques of this country.
By 1937, New Orleans had not yet been visited by one of the
three record-breaking national tours, but city officials attempted to
prohibit public performances of what would soon become New York's
most successful play ever. Accounts from local newspapers of the
period provide many facts about the events surrounding the
censorship of Tobacco Road in New Orleans. These newspaper articles
4
Known for its historically prudish attitude, the Catholic and
Puritan city of Boston never banned Tobacco Road (albeit with
performances reportedly expurgated). In fact, by 1942, four quite
successful and " prosperous" productions had played the city. The
Boston Post reported, however, that the performances had ceased to
be the tragic affairs they once were; instead, "the laughs were so
timed that the audience had few moments to reflect that the novel by
Erskine Clakwell was considered to be photographic of a hunk of
Southern life" ("'Tobacco Road' Back in Boston," The Post [Boston], 10
March 1942).
5 Miller, 200.
"A WALLOW IN SLIME"
89
impart a sense of veracity to this chapter in the legend of Tobacco
Road, a legend which, by its very Broadway longevity (1933-41) and
the dearth of historical criticism about it, seems today to be fast
becoming a collection of curious anecdotes. Evidence of the ease with
which legends of this sort grow may be found in the November 22,
1937, Times-Picayune, which reported that "not before in its long
history has [Tobacco Road] enjoyed such publicity as it has been
receiving in New Orleans, and that even before the company's
scheduled arrivai." G Since dramatic history runs the risk of accepting
legend when little else is available, this article, therefore, will assemble
the "facts" of the 1937 attempt to censor Kirkland's adaptation in New
Orleans by examining local newspaper accounts of the period and
reports from other cities that attempted to stifle the show, especially
in Atlanta.
Everything seemed in order for a two-week engagement of
the play at the St. Charles theatre in New Orleans until a brief notice
at the bottom of the front page of the Times-Picayune of November
11, 1937, announced that the city's Safety Commissioner, Frank R.
Gomila, had "instructed Police Superintendent George Reyer to
prevent the presentation of 'Tobacco Road,"' and that Gomila's actions
were the result of "numerous protests against the play from clergymen
of the city."? Evidently, within a few hours, the newsworthiness of the
prohibition against Tobacco Road escalated. In the afternoon edition
of the New Orleans States that same day, a front-page, 60-point,
above-the-fold headline read,"WYNHOVEN STOPS SHOW," naming the
principal agent of the "numerous protests" by clergymen alluded to in
the Times-Picayune announcement, Msgr. Peter M. H. Wynhoven. The
States reporter, Meigs 0. Frost, interviewed Wynhoven that same
morning of November 11 in the rectory of the priest's parish, Our Lady
of Lourdes, on the corner of Napoleon Avenue and LaSalle Street in
uptown New Orleans. s Wynhoven's opposition to Tobacco Road was
revealed in Frost's interview to be an ongoing cause of the pastor's
from the time he attended a performance of the play in Chicago two
years earlier. He had been visiting friends, and the children of the
6 "Contested Play Will Go on Stage or in City Cells," Times-
Picayune (New Orleans), 22 November 1937, 3.
7 "Gomila Puts Bar on 'Tobacco Road' Rendition in City," Times-
Picayune (New Orleans), 11 November 1937, 1.
s Meigs 0 . Frost "Wynhoven Stops Show," New Orleans
States, 11 November 193;, 1.
90 MALARCHER
family suggested that taking the priest to see Tobacco Road would be
"an education for Father Wynhoven on what is going on on the
American stage today." Wynhoven, who stayed "to the bitter end" of
the Chicago performance only because walking out would have been
"too conspicuous a slap at my hosts," recalled that the play was
"undiluted blasphemy and obscenity. It was a wallow in slime."9
Wynhoven also claimed to have been the catalyst for the
closing of Tobacco Road after a seven-week run in Chicago. He
encountered the mayor of Chicago, Edward Kelly, the day after he saw
the play and reportedly asked whether Kelly
endorsed the showing of such obscenity and blasphemy
and degeneracy for the youth of your city, for the
audience held a heavy proportion of young girls and
young men the night I saw it.1o
Kelly, an Irish-Catholic himself, did not see the production in question
until seven weeks into the run (perhaps due to Wynhoven's vocal
concerns). He "stalked out in the middle of the show," according to one
account, and ordered it closed.l1 Having done so, he roundly
denounced Tobacco Road, calling the production neither "interesting
nor artistic ... just a mess of filth and degeneracy without any plot,
rhyme or reason for producing it except filth." He might also have
echoed Wynhoven's concern for " women and impressionable young
people."12
Kelly closed the show after fighting court injunctions, which
Wynhoven claims that Kelly won, but, according to a report in the New
York Sunday News of September 29, 1940, "that Chicago fight is still
going on. It has, up to this point, cost $70,000."13 Adaptor Kirkland
9 Frost, "Wynhoven," 7.
10 Quoted in Frost, "Wynhoven," 7.
u Sidney M. Shalett, "Infinity via 'Tobacco Road," New York
Times (1857-current file), 10 March 1940, 152.
12 '"Tobacco Road' Runs into Chicago Mayor," Herald-Tribune
(New York), 21 October 1935, 15. Since the two men seemed locked
into such similar observations, one cannot be certain today whether
Kelly's remarks to newspapers were aided by Wynhoven's diatribe
against the play, or whether Wynhoven's memory a few years later was
aided by the published remarks of Kelly when the Chicago controversy
erupted.
13
Ruth Reynolds, "'Tobacco Road' Survives Purges," New York
Sunday News, 29 September 1940, 68.
"A WALLOW IN SLIME" 91
and touring company co-producer Harry H. Osrin would appeal all the
way to the Supreme Court, according to the same article. Caldwell
himself appeared in the midst of the Chicago melee and his summation
of the experience boiled down to the pithy, "Fighting the Catholic
Church is like sticking your head in a cannon."14 It seems that no
national tour of Tobacco Road ever did return to Chicago.
After Chicago, Detroit refused, in 1935, to allow a performance
of the play, but later relented in 1940 with no apparent difficulties. The
road companies ran into trouble in other cities before the New Orleans
controversy: an "ouster" in St. Paul, Minnesota (but audiences could
cross the Mississippi River and see a performance in Minneapolis); in
Utica, where the local police tried to shut down the show and the state
troopers prevented them from doing so;1s and in Raleigh, North
Carolina, where the mayor's unpopular handling of the play may have
contributed to his re-election loss.16
Wynhoven, meanwhile, returned to New Orleans and resumed
his usual duties until he saw an advertisement for Tobacco Road and
"immediately" met with Archbishop Joseph Rummel, who approved a
motion to city officials to cancel the play. According to Wynhoven him-
self, the monsignor pleaded his case to Mayor Robert Sidney Maestri
and an unnamed representative of the producers, recalling dialogue he
heard in Chicago two years before that he considered offensive. The
accounts and interviews of Wynhoven do not indicate whether the
monsignor re-read the play to refresh his memory, or whether he had
ever read the play. He explained to the interviewer that he denied
"sociological value in this play," but granted that
there can be found share-croppers and poor tenants who
are moronic, and obsessed with sex and liquor and whose
conversation is slimy with profanity, in which blasphemy
and obscenity are mingled.17
14 Miller, 201.
1s Shalett, 152.
16 Reynolds, 68.
17 Frost, "Wynhoven," 7.
92 MALARCHER
Wynhoven concluded by characterizing the play as "the lesson of
hopelessness. It is the lesson of the triumph of slimy, grimy evil over
every decent impulse in life .. . it is not the true picture of life." This
final assertion, that Tobacco Road is not a true picture of the plight of
poor whites in the South, became a battle cry of those who believed
the moral arguments might fall upon deaf ears. The debate about the
accuracy of Caldwell/Kirkland's depiction of rural poor reached
Louisiana State University classrooms in Baton Rouge, according to an
article in the State Times. One student alluded to Caldwell's You Have
Seen Their Faces: "They are not typical of the South." 18 Another
student, who accepted the truth of the life reflected in Tobacco Road,
said, "Preachers are more interested in the struggles of the children of
Israel than they are in the struggles of the Southern farmer today."19
The representatives of the theatre and the producers issued a
statement of their own, published, in part, on the front page of the
Times-Picayune the next morning. In it, the La Charles Corporation
stated that "No apology is offered in presenting Tobacco Road-none
is needed" and that they did not intend "to give offense nor to take
offense." They characterized the controversy as "between forces which
see evil in the spoken drama and those with a more liberal attitude."20
Clearly, the aim of the producers was to deflate Wynhoven's specific
concerns by painting his objections as those of one who despises all
drama, and the remainder of the article turned Wynhoven's seemingly
proud reiteration of the Chicago episode into proof that the priest was
indeed anti-theatre.
Wynhoven's charges echoed the Detroit judge, Guy A. Miller,
who two years earlier successfully kept Tobacco Road out of Detroit.
Wynhoven argued that "there is no constructive thought," no
suggestions for improvement, and no evidence that "such a show as
'Tobacco Road' or the book from which it is written, has remedied one
18 You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a collection of
photography by Margaret Bourke-White with narrative supplied by
Caldwell, exposes the poor in the rural south of the Great Depression;
as such, it is considered a classic of the documentary photography
genre and serves as a natural companion to Tobacco Road.
19 Fred Greer, "'Tobacco Road' in Big Demand in Baton Rouge,"
State Times (Baton Rouge), 23 November 1937, 7.
20 "Plan to Present Play Unsettled, Says Statement," Times-
Picayune (New Orleans), 12 November 1937, 1.
"A WALLOW IN SLIME" 93
case of such conditions as it depicts."21 Miller described the play as
"devoid of merit, stupid, profane, obscene, and degrading," and these
remarks reminded an anonymous critic in the November 20, 1935,
Nation of critic William Winter's assessment of another writer, whose
plays
neither impart nor enforce helpful significance as to the
social themes they present: they suggest no
improvement. ... A reformer who asks you to crawl with
him in a sewer, merely to see and breathe its feculence.22
The playwright abhorred by Winter for his sociological realism was
none other than Henrik Ibsen. Judge Miller responded via a letter to
the editor printed in the December 25, 1935, Nation. He refused to
retract or qualify any of his harsh criticism of the play, and even added
the insult that "At least manure is used as fertilizer to produce food,
and nothing in 'Tobacco Road' suggests any such useful purpose."23
After the initial meeting in New Orleans between the Catholic
priest, the theatre management, and city officials, editorials in two
daily newspapers warned the city fathers that their suppression of
Tobacco Road treaded dangerously close to dictatorial measures. In its
November 13, 1937, editorial, the Times-Picayune pointed out that
"we set up a republic to escape such things, and fought a great war to
'make the world safe for democracy."'24 The writer further stated that
the charges of obscenity and immorality depicted in Tobacco Road
"also may be made regarding 'Hamlet' and 'Macbeth.'" The illogic of
banning a play based on a book that continues to sit on public library
shelves also puzzled the editors. An editorial appearing in the New
Orleans Item two days later voiced similar warnings, and declared that
the comfort level of a "jury of average Orleanians"-if it were possible
to ascertain such a thing-was really immaterial compared to the
larger issue of police censorship before the fact. Punish the actors and
authors once a law is broken, the editors contend, but not in advance
21 Frost, "Wynhoven," 7.
22 "A Long Road," Nation 141 (20 November 1935): 582.
23 Guy A. Miller, "Judicial Calm," Nation 141 (25 December
1935): 741.
24 "'Tobacco Road,"' Editorial, Times-Picayune (New Orleans),
13 November 1937, 5.
94 MALARCHER
and at the expense of "every citizen's Constitutional privilege to speak,
write, and publish whatever he pleases."
25
The position of the La Charles Corporation, the St. Charles
theatre management, was, according to its president, N. L. Carter, to
produce the play only if the ban were lifted and to refuse to take sides.
The Tobacco Road publicity crew, headed by Carlton Miles, was not in
any such position and reminded the press (and thus the public) that
the play had been produced in 32 states and the District of Columbia,
that the play had been running on Broadway continuously for four
years, and that his organization had "a contract to present 'Tobacco
Road' at the St. Charles."
26
Miles refused to state whether his company
would pursue legal action if the contract were not honored; in point of
fact, the owners of the play, Tobacco Road, Inc., of New York, were
preparing to secure an injunction from a federal court to safeguard the
presentation of Tobacco Road from police interference.
27
The suit was eventually heard by United States Judge Wayne
G. Borah on Friday afternoon, November 19, 1937 (three days before
the scheduled opening), and was argued by the Tobacco Road, Inc.,
attorney, Eberhard P. Deutsch, who closed with an appeal not to " bring
seventeenth-century censorship back to New Orleans."
2
8 Also,
according to the news report, he provided the court with affidavits
from local writers, teachers and others. In opposition, Henry B. Curtis,
assistant city attorney, offered affidavits of his own from "members of
the clergy and others." Curtis posited that the court would not see fit
to countermand city officials-Maestri, Gomila, Rever, et al.-who had
already decided that Tobacco Road was "an obscene and indecent
2s "Suppression is Wrong," Editorial, New Orleans Item, 15
November 1937, 4.
26 "Theatre on ' Tobacco Road, "' Times-Picayune (New
Orleans), 12 November 1937, 8.
27 A news report about a 1939 attempt to ban Tobacco Road
in Nashville (a year after it had already toured there without incident)
noted that the tour producers had won 31 of 34 lawsuits ("Would End
Censor Board," New York Times, 22 November 1939, 17).
2s "Borah Hears Ban on 'Tobacco Road' Assailed, Backed, "
Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 20 November 1937, 1.
"A WALLOW IN SLIME"
95
play."29 As with Wynhoven, no mention is made in the press reports as
to whether the city officials had read the play or if they merely took
the monsignor's word for its obscene content. In any case, Curtis
argued that the police frequently closed "the old Dauphine theatre
when the burlesque shows became too offensive,"30 so the precedent
for police jurisdiction in the matter was there; Curtis further asserted
that "the plaintiffs are seeking to enjoin the enforcement of police
power in the city." An important consideration for the judge, and a
clear admonition present in the two newspaper editorials already
mentioned, must have been whether police power applied before the
fact. To this argument, therefore, the Chicago federal court case must
have been discussed, and Curtis "maintained that the same questions
were involved."31
The next day, Saturday, Borah delivered his opinion,
reproduced in full on the front page of the November 21 Times-
Picayune/ New Orleans States. Borah denied the request for injunction,
citing "the intention of the city officials to enforce the provisions of the
city ordinance prohibiting immoral or indecent shows and
entertainments."32
Not all of the city's clergy, however, sided with Wynhoven. On
Friday night, as Judge Borah was deciding the fate of Tobacco Road,
the Rev. Norman A. Maunz, pastor of the First Evangelical Church,
recommended the play as "a sociological study" to a committee of the
Federation of Protestant Church Women of New Orleans. Maunz stated
that the play was maligned by those "who have missed the point and
stressed obscenity."33 It is perhaps unfair to pass this off as
Protestant/Catholic antagonism, and yet the Catholic forces seemed
consistently behind Rummel and Wynhoven, and historically New
Orleans has, like Chicago, been a very Roman Catholic city.
29
Ibid.
3o Ibid., 2.
31 Ibid.
32 "'Tobacco Road' to Go on as Slated, Producers Aver," New
Orleans States, 21 November 1937, 1.
33 "Pastor Suggests Barred Play for Group of Women," Times-
Picayune (New Orleans), 19 November 1937, 6.
96 MALARCHER
The response of the theatre management and road company
to Borah's decision implied a modification in the city's position. The
play's producers appear to have realized that they were confronting
merely "a threatened action which the municipal authorities might not
take."
34
Therefore, the possibility existed that the police would not
close the show and arrest the actors and others involved. Tickets were
sold and reportedly sold very well. By the afternoon of that same day,
the New Orleans Item reported that a preview performance for city
officials and clergy was scheduled for 2:00 PM, with the possibility of
opening the show as scheduled at 8:30 PM that evening.
35
The press
agent, Carlton Miles, promised that the preview would show Tobacco
Road to be "as smooth as this morning's cream of last night's milking."
Wynhoven retorted that when he saw it in Chicago, the play was
"rougher than a country back road then, and a dirty dirt road at that."36
The monsignor also reiterated that he was instrumental in closing the
show in Chicago. Two other priests attended, as well as Police
Superintendent Reyer and Assistant City Attorney Henry Curtis; on the
opposing side, Miles and representatives of the theatre and its lawyers
would attend. Mayor Maestri did not attend, according to the Monday
article.
With the production now in town, the opinions of cast
members soon became part of the mix. John Barton, who played
Jeeter Lester in the road company, tried to diffuse the tension by
noting that "[Jeeter] does like turnips; he does steal a few, but I can't
see how that should constitute an objection."
37
John Barton was the
uncle of Broadway's then-current Jeeter, James Barton. The cast
prevaricated to the reporter that "the only city in which they have hit
snags was in Chicago."38
34 "Contested Play Will Go on Stage or in City Cells," Times-
Picayune (New Orleans), 22 November 1937, 6.
35 Meigs 0 . Frost, "Priests Will Attend Preview of Tobacco Road
This Afternoon," New Orleans States, 22 November 1937, 1.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 3. John Barton played Jeeter more than 3,000 times
on Broadway and on the road into the thirteenth year of the
dramatized version's existence. He died a week after collapsing during
curtain calls of a performance of Tobacco Road on December 14, 1946,
at the Lyric Theatre in Allentown, PA. ("John Barton" obit.)
38 Ibid.
"A WALLOW IN SLIME" 97
An article published Monday afternoon on the front page of
the New Orleans States charted the situation as follows:
"Advertisements . . . announced that the curtain will rise at 8:30.
Superintendent of Police Reyer replied that it would fall immediately
afterward." By the day of the opening, the perceived dividing lines
between Protestants and Catholics and between city officials and local
authors and artists were more pronounced than ever. Both sides,
according to the report, would be on hand that night to cheer or jeer
the performance. By the time the afternoon papers went to press, the
police orders still stood to halt the performance scheduled for that
evening. The only hope for the Tobacco Road cast rested in its ability
to reassure public officials that afternoon.
The preview took place in room 770 of the St. Charles Hotel.
Nearly 20 people attended the closed performance and several in at-
tendance left the hotel at the finish and reported immediately to Mayor
Maestri-Reyer, Curtis, and Wynhoven among them. No newspaper
reporters or photographers were allowed at the rehearsal, according
to the report the next day in the Times-Picayune.
39
The press was
barred by the show's producers because they "didn't want the press to
know how much of the original show we were cutting out," according
to Wynhoven's account of the producer's explanation. Wynhoven,
however, appeared glad to announce to reporters that the removal of
several "bits of action" that the priest witnessed in Chicago "changed
the whole character of the play-for the better." Barton, the actor
whose lines would presumably be expurgated the most, asserted that
the performance given to officials was '"word for word, action for
action,' the version given throughout the current tour." The actress
who played the Grandmother, Lillian Ardell, spoke to the newspaper
reporters and admitted that only "the name of the Deity" was removed
from the performance text. If Ardell is to be believed, then Jeeter's "By
God and by Jesus!" would disappear from the performance in New
Orleans, as would Lov's frequent use of "By God" and the less-frequent
"Goddamn." Wynhoven's memory of Tobacco Road must have been
much dirtier than the actual show he witnessed two years earlier, if the
39 "Cast Earns Right of Presenting 'Tobacco Road' at Rehearsal
Here," Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 23 November 1937, 14.
98
MALARCHER
paring of swear words constituted the only expurgations.4o
For the actual performance that evening, the New Orleans
States sent not one but four reviewers: the Rev. Harold Gaudin, S.J.,
president of Loyola University; the Rev. William H. Wallace, Jr., pastor
of the First Methodist Episcopal Church; Dr. David Fichman, a local
rabbi; and the newspaper's regular drama critic, Thomas Ewing
Dabney. The four portraits that graced the front page of the November
23, 1937, States emphasized just how controversial Tobacco Road
remained even after the approval granted by the city. As one might
expect, the Catholic and Protestant viewpoints clashed, Gaudin
emphasizing the hopelessness by which the Lesters live41 and Wallace
stressing that "we [in Louisiana] have this road" as well.42 The rabbi
and the critic seemed at odds as well over the literary merit of the
piece: the rabbi liked the production and noted that King Lear contains
scenes of cruelty and Oedipus Rex scenes of incest that would be
deemed immoral as well, if such details constituted the only criteria for
artistic merit; Dabney despised the play and hinted that its only appeal
must be the "cheap and bestial and unnecessary filth that has been
ladled into it in the fake claim of realism."43
The other newspapers on hand to review the controversial
offering at the St. Charles did not plaster the front page with reports
on Tobacco Road. Instead, the Times-Picayune and the Item buried
their reviews on the fourteenth and tenth pages, respectively. The
40 An interesting sidebar to the discussion of profane language
was the New York World Telegraph's sardonic report:
James Barton, who played that blankety-blanking Jeeter Lester
for four years in that blankety-blanking 'Tobacco Road,' the
oath-full drama by Jack Kirkland, was baffled today by the
formal charge filed with the Council of Actors' Equity that he
used abusive language backstage ("Tobacco Road's Genteel
Front Hides Sordid Folk Who Cuss," World Telegraph [New
York], 8 March 1939).
The charges were brought by two members of the 1939-era Broadway
cast against the outgoing Jeeter. "Imagine an actor in a Jack Kirkland
show being charged with bad language," Barton remarked ("James
Barton Charged with Bad Language," Herald Tribune [New York], 8
March 1939).
41 "Opinions on 'Tobacco Road' Clash as Production is
Presented Here," New Orleans States, 23 November 1937, 1.
42 Ibid., 3.
43 Ibid.
"A WALLOW IN SLIME" 99
Times-Picayune critic, Charles P. Jones (who claimed to have read both
the novel and the play), appreciated the performance of the actors,
but heaped his greatest praise on the production's press agents who
"would make P. T. Barnum turn over in his grave with envy" with their
handling of the censorship controversy. The Item critic, K. T. Knoblock,
seemed in spirit closest to Rev. Wallace of the States, by noting in his
review that the citizens of New Orleans should "go back and ... look
at the set," then,
some beautiful Sunday . .. take a ride on the Baton
Rouge road or any damn road in Louisiana and look at the
cabins beside the road that watch the world go by-and
they're just like this cabin the Lesters lived in. Maybe so
the people inside are like the Lesters, excepting they're
mostly black, huh?44
After the initial performance, the New Orleans press seems to have
dropped the story of Tobacco Road, for several hundred inches of
newspaper copy had been produced on a censure that didn't happen.
The controversial use of social criticism by religious leaders had lost its
gloss; the debate erupted before Tobacco Road reached New Orleans
and would certainly exist after it finished its two weeks there.
On December 4, 1937, the Broadway production celebrated
the start of its fifth year; not much press was given the play otherwise
by this time, and certainly the road tour mattered little until its next
threat of censorship, a year later in Atlanta. Since the Atlanta event is
not the focus of the present essay, a summary of it will suffice as
conclusion to the subject of Tobacco Roads censorship controversy.
Atlanta attempted to circumvent the morality question by
quickly passing a law stating that any performance of a stage play in
that city must pass a board, not unlike the Production Code of the
Hays Office, which had to approve any film shown in Atlanta.
4
s The
road company played Augusta, Georgia, on November 17, 1938, four
days before the Atlanta engagement was to begin. The cast took ad-
vantage of the proximity to the actual Tobacco Road for photographs
and conversation with the local inhabitants.
46
The performances in
Augusta were enthusiastically receivedY
44 Ibid., 10.
45 "Censors Threaten Tobacco Roaders, " Atlanta Constitution,
20 November 1938, 4.
46 "Actors Visit Georgia's Real Tobacco Road, " Atlanta
Constitution, 20 November 1938, 4.
47 '"Tobacco Road' Lauded in Augusta Despite Protests of
Women's Club," Atlanta Constitution, 18 November 1938, 9.
100 MALARCHER
When the cast reached Atlanta, a preview performance almost
identical to the one in New Orleans was held, and again, permission
was grudgingly granted to perform, but with one pronounced
difference: the request for an injunction to prevent the police from
interfering with performances was approved by the courts in Georgia,
so any changes in the script could remain at the cast's discretion. Even
Eleanor Roosevelt, in town for Thanksgiving with FDR, expressed her
opinion that "I never agree to censor anything of an artistic nature."4B
What did Erskine Caldwell, creator of Jeeter Lester and
Tobacco Road, think about the censorship troubles? He, too, was in
Atlanta for Thanksgiving in 1938, and told reporters that coming up
against censorship is in some respects a good thing, for "it shows
people that the drama is not the immoral and awful thing they've been
lead to believe it is."49 Perhaps today one might not dismiss the
censure of artistic expression as quickly, in light of the 1990s
controversies surrounding Brad Fraser's play Poor Super Man in
Cincinnati (already notorious for its handling of the photography of
Robert Mapplethorpe), and Terence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth
Apart in a suburb of Atlanta, or the attempts to protest his Corpus
Christi off the Manhattan Theatre Club stage. Nearly 65 years after the
Tobacco Road arguments, America is still grappling with theatre's
social criticism.
48
"'Tobacco Road' Plays Under Court Permit; Mrs. Roosevelt,
Clergy Flay Censorship," Atlanta Constitution, 22 November 1938, 1.
4
9 Lee Fuhrman, "Censorship a Good Thing for Play, 'Tobacco
Road' Author Declares," Atlanta Constitution, 25 November 1938, 14.
Journal of American Drama and Theatre 15, no. 3 (Fall 2003) 101
RACHEL CROTHERS'S OURSELVES:
FEMINIST DRAMATURGY IN THE BROTHEL DRAMA
KATIE N. JOHNSON
"The tireless Rachel Crothers," as fellow playwright Djuna
Barnes called her, was writer, director, actress, and producer of dozens
of American plays in the first half of the twentieth century. 1 Recently
recovered by theatre historians, Crothers was, according to Brenda
Murphy, "the most significant woman playwright the United Sates
produced in the early twentieth century." 2 While these scholarly
treatments of Crothers have demonstrated her importance to the
theatrical canon, I would like to offer a different contribution. In this
essay, I hope to show that in addition to crafting memorable plays,
Crothers's feminist dramaturgy was an important contribution to
American modernist theatre, especially to the long-since forgotten
genre of the brothel play popular during the 1910s.
I turn to the brothel drama genre as the focus of my essay not
only because so little has been written about Crothers's contribution to
this area, but also because prostitution is a prism through which we
can study the cultural stakes in representations of sexuality. What is
notable about the discursive explosion regarding prostitution is that
virtually all brothel plays were penned by men. Rachel Crothers, with
her unpublished play Ourselves,3 is the only female playwright whose
brothel play was produced during the early 1910s.4 Reconstructing the
performance history of Ourselves within the web of what I call brothel
1 Djuna Barnes, "The Tireless Rachel Crothers," Theatre Guild
MagazineS (May 1931): 17-18.
2 Brenda Murphy, "Feminism and the Marketplace: The Career
of Rachel Crothers," The Cambridge Companion to American Women
Playwrights, ed. Brenda Murphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 82.
3 The citations in this essay refer to a manuscript copy of
Ourselves that can be found at the Annen berg Rare Book & manuscript
Library at the University of Pennsylvania. Another copy exists at the
Shubert Archive.
4 Other women playwrights who wrote about prostitution
during the 1913 season are Elizabeth Robbins, with My Little Sister
(1913, which was never produced); and Rachel Marshal, who co-wrote
The Traffic (1913).
102 JOHNSON
performativity, I hope to demonstrate how the play's difficult reception
was at odds with hegemonic notions of gender and sex, and
dramaturgy. While Ourselves is a better play than those by her male
contemporaries of the period-even by the critics' own admission-it
was destined to failure not only because Crothers offered what the
press called "a feminine perspective," or because sexism reared its
ugly head, but also because Crothers subverted the predictable brothel
drama formula. Drawing on Marvin Carlson's notion of "ghosting,"
where "the identical thing" is "encountered before, although now in a
somewhat different context," I shall argue that Crothers's diversion
from the prevailing brothel dramaturgy haunted her chances for
success.s Indeed, the cultural memories of prostitution-both on the
New York stage and in Progressive Era antiprostitution reform efforts-
had cemented the "semiotic building blocks," to use Carlson's words,
in a codified, though unacknowledged, masculinist dramaturgy.
BROTHEL PLAY GENRE
The year 1913 was the season of brothel plays. Just as the
white slave scare reached its apex, there were so many plays about
brothels on the New York stage this season that theatre critics
regularly complained about their frequency. 6 As one article reported,
"a wave of sex hysteria and sex discussion seems to have invaded this
country."? It had struck "sex o'clock" in America. As prevalent as the
brothel play was, however, the 1913 season was marked by
contradictions as perhaps no other. Just as the Mann Act and the Page
Law of 1910 regulated trafficking in women and venereal disease, so
the conflicted performance histories of brothel plays demonstrated
s Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: the Theatre as Memory
Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 7.
6 The white slave plays performed during the 1913-14 season
in New York City include: Any i g h ~ by Edward Ellis; The Fight, by
Bayard Veiller; The Lure, by George Scarborough; House of Bondage,
adapted by Joseph Byron Totten; Tiger, by Witter Bynner; The Traffic,
by Rachel Marshall & Oliver Bailey; and Little Lost Sister, adapted by
Arthur James Pegler & Edward Rose. For an overview of white slavery
plays and their impact on the regulation of female sexuality, see Sarah
J. Blackstone and M. Joan McDermott, "White Slavery Plays of the
1910s: Fear of Victimization and the Social Control of Sexuality,"
Theatre History Studies 16 (June 1996): 141-155.
7 "Sex O'Clock in America," Current Opinion 55, no. 2 (August
1913): 113-14.
RACHEL CROTHERS 103
that prostitution needed to be discursively surveyed and contained. s In
September 1913, two brothel plays, The Lure and The Fight, were shut
down by the New York police and became embroiled in high profile
obscenity cases. Given this tumult, everyone was watching Ourselves
when it premiered on November 13, "to decide which way the winds
of popular favor were blowing."9 It was felt that Ourselves would
determine the future of the brothel genre. Astonishingly, Ourselves
escaped censorship. But perhaps more inexplicably, in spite of reviews
that praised its writing, the Drama League refused to endorse it, and
the show closed after just 29 performances.to What are we to make of
this failure given the popularity of this genre?
Most critics of the period suggested that Ourselves had poor
timing. As Everybody's Magazine reported in 1913, "It is too bad it did
not come early in the season, before the public's stomach turned
against the whole sex morality as a play problem.''ll But was the failure
s The Page Law of 1910 (and, later, the America Plan)
incarcerated large numbers of allegedly infected prostitutes in medical
prisons "until cured"-which, according to Ruth Rosen, was 365 days
on average. The Page Law was declared unconstitutional by Justice
Bischoff of the New York Court of Appeals in June 1911. See Rosen,
The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1982), 35. The Mann Act, Timothy Gilfoyle notes,
"made the transportation of women across state lines for such
purposes [as prostitution] illegal." See Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York
City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New
York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), 308.
9 "The Process of Dry-Cleaning," Munsey's Magazine 51
(February 1914): 124.
10 Burns Mantle and Garrison P. Sherwood list November 12 as
the opening date of Ourselves, whereas Colette and James Lindroth
list November 13. I take Lindroth's date because it is corroborated by
an article that states that the production was put off 24 hours from its
announced premiere. See Mantle and Sherwood, The Best Plays of
1909-1919 (New York: Mead and Company, 1943), 514; and Colette
Lindroth and James Lindroth, eds., Rachel Crothers: A Research and
Production Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 26.
See also "Ourselves as Seen by a Woman," Morning Sun, 14 November
1913, n.p.
11 Review of Ourselves by Rachel Crothers as performed on 12
November 1913 at the Lyric Theatre, Everbody's Magazine 30
(February 1914): 264. And Norman Hapgood wrote, "If Ourselves had
been produced last season or even in September, if would have
attracted much more attention." See Norman Hapgood, "Stage Notes,"
Harpers Weekly 58 (6 December 1913): 12-13.
104
JOHNSON
of Ourselves merely a matter of poor timing, or were there other
factors to consider? I think it is insufficient to conclude that "the public
had tired of the ' ugly, but vital' stories" of the brothel, for stories about
prostitution would resurface again and again on the New York stage,
in silent film, and in current Hollywood blockbusters. In order to
explicate what doomed Crothers's play, I turn to my first point:
Ourselves was, as the New York Herald put it, "a discussion of the
problem from a feminine viewpoint," a play that was researched and
constructed under the rubric of feminist dramaturgy.12
FEMI NIST DRAMATURGY
From its very inception, Ourselves was written with a female
audience in mind. Crothers was under contract with actress Grace
Ellison in December 1912 to write a play about "the subject of
prostitution, with a leading part suitable" for herB This date is
important to note because it demonstrates that Crothers had begun
her play well before the popular swell of white slave plays that hit
Broadway in 1913. How Crothers approached the task is noteworthy:
while some of her male colleagues capitalized on the popular trend
and churned out their brothel plays rather quickly (George
Scarborough claimed he produced The Lure in just eight days), she
took nearly a year to research, revise, and write Ourselves.
In addition, Crothers turned toward a women-centered
institution as her source: the Bedford State Reformatory for Women,
which she visited several times while researching and writing the
play. t 4 Such pseudo ethnographic research was not uncommon in the
writing of social problem plays: both Mr. & Mrs. Fiske interviewed and
photographed people from the Lower East Side for Salvation Nell
(1908, though they were quickly chased away), Mrs. Leslie Carter
interviewed Parisian courtesans for Zaza (1898), and former reporter
George Scarborough walked the red light district of Chicago for The
12 Review of Ourselves by Rachel Crothers as performed on 13
November 1913 at the Lyric Theatre, "Another Drama of Social
Problem," New York Herald, 14 November 1913, n.p.
n Crothers was to deliver the script by March 1, 1913.
However, the contract was amended in April, and again in September
1913, suggesting that there were revisions made. Contract Files,
Group II, #317.E, Shubert Archive, 18 December 1912.
14 " Reformatory Girls See Morals Drama," New York City
Tribune, 3 December 1913, n.p.
RACHEL CROTHERS 105
Lure (1913) . What strikes me as different about Crothers was that she
was the first playwright who used so extensively a girls' reformatory as
a source for writing a play about prostitution (taking, perhaps, her
impulse from George Kneeland's recently released Prostitution in New
York [1913], which interviewed prostitutes at Blackwell's Island) .IS
Moreover, in privileging prostitutes' own testimonies about
sexuality, economics, and possibilities for reform (as opposed to the
usual testimonies about the so-called sexual fall or the popular white
slave captivity narratives), she shifted the discursive focus from
sensational portraits of the sexual underworld to a practical reform
agenda. In addition, Crothers had transgressed a dramaturgical line,
which, taking its impulse from naturalism, dictated that there should
be distance and objectivity to view, as Jacob Riis's study famously put
it, How the Other Half Lives.l6 It was acceptable to report about
prostitution as a social evil, as did the Committee of Fifteen, but to
portray the prostitute's perspective sympathetically was not in keeping
with brothel dramaturgy. This sentiment was expressed in the
Louisville Courier. " Rachel Crothers social worker has rather obtruded
on Rachel Crothers, dramatist."17 In fact, the social investment with
which Crothers created this project was not unlike what we would now
call community-based theatre. We might be able to view Ourselves,
therefore, as an early precursor to the work of prison theatre, or other
community-based theatre. In a later section of this essay, I will say
more about how a special performance at Bedford emphasized that
the play was targeted toward a female audience.
A second aspect of Crothers's feminist dramaturgy is her title.
Ourselves suggests a subjective story, told from a female insider about
themselves (ourselves), calling into question the identity of the
spectator (who might not be included in the appellation "ourselves").
Tracing the trajectory of the title's development, we can see that
Crothers moved from a typical pseudo-scientific approach, which
dominated the day, to a more subjective-and, I would suggest,
1s George J. Kneeland, Commercialized Prostitution in New
York City (1913. Reprint; Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1969).
16 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the
Tenements of New York (1890. Reprint; New York: Dover Publications,
1971).
17 "Dramatic Outlook in New York Brighter," Louisville Courier,
23 November 1913, n.p.
106 JOHNSON
feminist-one. The working title for Ourselves was The Social Evil,
according to a contract agreement with the Shuberts, who produced
the show. 1s During this time period, prostitution was commonly
referred to as "the social evil," a term that was popularized by The
Committee of Fifteen's 1902 report on prostitution in New York City,
The Social Evi1.19 Perhaps wanting to distance herself from this kind of
regulatory discourse, Crothers dispensed with the working title. Just a
month before its premiere, J. J. Shubert had asked Crothers to
consider changing the title, writing her, "What do you think of The
Unwelcome Guest as a title?"2o While truer to the plot of her play and
less entrenched in antiprostitution discourse, this title demonstrates
that Shubert had missed one of Crothers's central points: the guest to
which he refers (a reformed prostitute working in an upper-class
home) was not unwelcome. Crothers disregarded Shubert's
suggestion, but changed the title nonetheless: in early November, the
play was produced in Albany and Providence as When It Strikes
Home.21 While this title reflected how prostitution affects middle-class
families, it was at odds with another point in the script: rather than
suggesting that prostitution is our problem, When It Strikes Home
connotes an anxious perspective, the fear that middle- and upper-class
families might be hit by a kind of first-launch (sexual) assault. I
suspect the title was also ghosted by the recently successful play
Damaged Goods, the first play on the New York stage that explicitly
portrayed venereal disease striking an upper-class family.22 With all of
18
See Contract Files, Group II, #317.E, Shubert Archive.
19 Committee of Fifteen, The Social Evil (New York: G.P.
Putnam's Sons, 1902).
2o See J. J. Shubert to Rachel Crothers, 13 October 1913,
Shubert Archive, Correspondence File 1208 (Rachel Crothers) .
21 See "A Triumph for Rachel Crothers," Bulletin, 17 November
1913, n.p. And a letter from Crothers also shows it played at the
Providence Opera House as When It Strikes Home on 3 November
1913. See Rachel Crothers to Manager of Providence Opera House, 15
November 1913, Shubert Archive, Correspondence File 1208 (Rachel
Crothers).
22
Damaged Goods was first staged privately under the
auspices of the Sociological Fund of the Medical Review of Reviews on
March 14 & 17, 1913, at the Fulton Theatre.
RACHEL CROTHERS 107
this haunting, to use Carlson's words, ra1smg false expectations,
Crothers changed the title to Ourselves just 10 days later, when the
play moved to New York City's Lyric Theatre. Ourselves therefore
distinguished itself from the titles of other brothel plays, which
suggested either a critical distance between the writer and object of
study (Damaged Goods), capitalized on prurient interest in the sexual
underworld (House of Bondage), or blamed women for their sexual fall
(The Easiest Way). Crothers's feminist emphasis seems to have
confused at least one reviewer who ended his/her review with:
"Ourselves has a grip. But where and why the name?''23 We might say
that the title engendered a threatening rhetorical hailing of sorts, as
this review revealed: "To see ourselves as Miss Crothers sees us is no
Christmas gift."24 Ourselves "hit them, as the saying goes, where they
live," according to the Bulletin, which continued, "It is well named
Ourselves.'7. s Crothers's title, then, was an intervention in both
objectivity and objectification-a feminist intervention in the male-
controlled discourse about prostitution and the regulation of sexuality.
A third aspect of Crothers's dramaturgy is that her brothel play
featured no brothel. Most white slave dramas featured a brothel
interior, the site of the inevitable, and highly melodramatic, rescue
scene. As one review noted, in Ourselves "the white slave is shown
once removed from the stage brothel, which was her accepted
rendezvous of the early season."26 It is possible that Crothers's choice
to remove everything objectionable was motivated by the high-profile
obscenity cases regarding The Lure and The Fight in September (the
resolution of those cases were dependent upon the omission of the
brothel scenes). After all, the Shuberts had produced The Lure, and
Lee Shubert himself was arrested in that case. It is possible that he
instructed Crothers to refrain from portraying such an inflammatory
scene in Ourselves. However, no such notes exist in the
correspondence file at the Shubert Archive, and the Shuberts were
known for keeping meticulous records.
n "Ourselves Deals with That Old Dual Morality," otherwise
unidentified clipping.
2
4
"White Slave Still a Theatrical Asset," otherwise unidentified
clipping. Shubert Clipping file.
2s "A Triumph for Rachel Crothers," Bulletin, 17 November
1913, n.p.
26 "White Slave Still a Theatrical Asset," otherwise unidentified
clipping. From the Normal Illinois Library.
108 JOHNSON
While it is impossible to solve this conundrum, what interests
me are the choices that Crothers made by eliminating the brothel.
Switching from a site of sexual encounter or abduction to one of
reform, Ourselves privileges a female-centered space, focusing not on
the problem, but rather the solution. By taking the whore out of the
brothel, Crothers short-circuits the voyeuristic interest in the sexual
underworld. In comparing Crothers's approach with the two recently
censored brothel plays (The Lure and The Fight), a reporter from the
Morning Sun wrote, "The first act of the play contained no scene of the
kind which the police have already interrupted in two notable cases. It
was a revelation of this same milieu carried a power higher. There was
no parlor. But there was the sitting room of a 'reform home' for girls."27
One review remarked that Crothers's switch in emphasis served her
well : "The reform home itself, with its inmates, is put on the stage with
all the terse vividness with which it might be described by a good
police reporter and all the deeper understanding which would be
supplied from the experience of a Miss Maude Miner [sic) or a Jane
Addams."28 This change in focus allowed Crothers to circumvent
melodramatic formulas and dwell on the realities of prostitution-told
from a woman's perspective.
At least three elements, therefore, characterize Crothers's
feminist dramaturgy: a female-centered plot written for a female
audience; a subjective, feminist approach visible in the title; and a shift
of focus from brothel to reform. Turning from the conditions under
which the play was written, let me now turn to a second reason
popular culture was dissatisfied with Ourselves: Crothers's
unprecedented use of female bonding in the brothel drama.
THE VIEW:
FEMALE BONDING & A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF PROSffiUTION
In 1974, feminist film critic Molly Haskell wrote about "the old
romance in a new bottle" to describe the intense relationships between
men on film, epitomized by Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.29 While we are quite used to
recognizing this "buddy bond," or what Sharon Willis has identified as
27 Review of Ourselves by Rachel Crothers as performed on 13
November 1913 at the Lyric Theatre, "Ourselves As Seen By a
Woman," Morning Sun, 14 November 1913, n.p.
28 Unidentified clipping, from Shubert Archive.
29 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of
Women in the Movies (New York: Penguin, 1974), 187.
RACHEL CROTHERS 109
"homoerotics embedded in the male adversaries' struggle" in American
film, I'd like to use this term to examine early twentieth-century
American theatre. 3o As I have argued elsewhere, many brothel dramas
of the period (such as Anna Christie or The Easiest Way) relied upon
an intense rivalry or bonding of two male characters, which often
jettisoned female bonding or eliminated female characters altogether.
By contrast, Ourselves centers on women's relationships,
telling the story of prostitution from a female perspective-
conversations not " between men," to borrow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's
famous formation, but between women.31 Indeed, the first act, which
is set in a reform house for prostitutes, features only women. And as
such, it brings to the table a new perspective in the already dense
landscape of representing prostitution on the New York stage.
Reminiscent of Cecily Hamilton's Diana of Dobson's,32 act one reveals
the women of the reform house interacting with one another, not
conscious of the male gaze. To paraphrase one review, "they are
allowed among themselves to ... bore themselves in other ways
inevitable when there was no masculine society present." 33 Indeed, the
girls' behavior only changes when they are either conscious of men
watching them (the chauffeur outside, whom we never see), or when
they are discussing how to appeal to men once they leave the home.
Otherwise, we see the women as themselves (ourselves?), attending
to their daily chores, arguing about certain privileges, or entertaining
themselves with song and dance.
3D Sharon Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in
Contemporary Hollywood Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997),
57.
31 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature
and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985).
32 Diana of Dobson's played just 17 performances when it
opened in New York on September 5, 1908. It was produced by
Charles Frohman and played at the Savoy Theatre. See Mantle and
Sherwood, 567.
33 "Ourselves as Seen by a Woman," Morning Sun, 14
November 1913, n.p.
110 JOHNSON
Run by the efficient and liberally minded Miss Carew, the "hen
coop," as it is called by one of the girls, can be seen as a feminist
space. The home is visited by Beatrice Barrington, an upper-class
woman interested in reform efforts. Here she encounters Molly, a fine-
spirited girl who was lured into prostitution, and whom Beatrice
convinces to work in her home. The reform house trains them with job
skills and provides day care for those women who have children. As
Miss Carew explains to Beatrice: "We've got work for the mother now.
She isn't here-but we keep the baby for her in the day time. The girls
love it" (1.11). Ourselves is the only play about prostitution of which I
am aware that actually proposes a solution to the inevitable problem
of pregnancy within prostitution. Crothers's inclusion of a female-
operated day care center is both radical and visionary, if not utopian.
Other than Mrs. Warren's Profession, I can think of no other
play from this period that devotes so much dramaturgical space to
women discussing the problem of prostitution.34 In most prostitute
dramas, debates about prostitution were left to men of action (Burke
of Anna Christie or Madison from The Easiest Way), and, increasingly,
to experts in medical and juridical domains (as with the doctor and
senator in Damaged Goods). It is quite right that, as the Womans
Journal put it, Crothers "showed women grappling as a group for the
first time with an age-old problem which they had hitherto avoided as
something too dreadful for discussion."3s Act one therefore establishes
that women can be engaged discursively in the topic of prostitution-
and not merely as objects in the study, but as enlightened subjects
themselves.
In addition to the female-centered first act, another instance
of female bonding occurs between Molly and Wilson, the head
housekeeper of the Barrington home. Molly has promised that she will
try to work honestly at Barrington's for one month and not see her
pimp/lover, Leever, who seeks to lure her back to the old life with false
promises. After one month, Leever visits the Barrington home, but his
courtly fa<;;ade turns violent. He steals Molly's wages, accuses her of
hooking on the side, and threatens to kill Molly if she doesn't return to
him. Just as things escalate toward physical violence, Wilson
34 Though, tellingly, most publicity photos that appeared in the
popular press featured pictures of the heterosexual couple whose
marriage is on the line (Irene and Bob), not the two women.
35 "Rachel Crothers: Taken from the Woman's Journal May
1931," otherwise unidentified clipping from Shubert Archive.
RACHEL CROTHERS 11 1
intervenes. Here Crothers does not resort to typical white-slave fare
and offer a melodramatic rescue scene. Rather, Wilson simply picks up
a bell and rings it; her presence and the threat of back-up is enough
to halt Leever's abuse. He "slinks out," leaving Molly heartbroken
(3. 19). At this time of devastation, Molly turns not to her upper-class
patron, but to Wilson for comfort. In Molly's words: "Oh, I know, I
know. It's a big house and she's an angel. But what's going to become
of me? I'd a' run away long ago if it hadn't been for you, Mrs. Wilson;
she is good-but you're human. You kinda know" (3.19). Wilson
replies: "Know? I ain't worked with my two hands since I was ten years
old, without knowin ."
This scene between working-class women is particularly
noteworthy because it demonstrates that Molly and Wilson have
different perspectives-and indeed, bodies of knowledge-from their
upper-class employer. It also shows that Molly is no dupe; she is
skeptical of Miss Barrington's friendship. Crothers was critically
evaluating the trend by wealthy white women to become involved in
reform efforts. As social historian Ruth Rosen has noted, "organized
womanhood had always figured prominently in antiprostitution
movements."36 Yet, while they were helping prostitutes, "middle-class
women's attempts to employ the power of the state produced further
oppression of their working-class sisters." 37 As Miss Carew says to
Beatrice in the first act: "We have a lot of dabblers who do more harm
than good, you know" (1.4). It was not uncommon for upper-class
women to publish accounts about their reform work with prostitutes.
As Rosen notes in the introduction to The Maimie Papers, they were
often "written as moralistic tracts by 'purity crusaders' who wished to
advance their anti-prostitution movement." (The Maimie Papers, a
collection of correspondence between reformer Fanny Quincy Howe
and prostitute Maimie Pinzer from 1900 to 1922, are an exception to
that sensational literature.3B) Though Crothers is careful not to idealize
the relationship between Molly and Beatrice Barrington, she
36 Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America,
1900-1918 (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1982), 51.
37 Ibid., 68.
38 Ruth Rosen and Sue Davidson, eds., The Maimie Papers
(Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press), xiv.
112 JOHNSON
nonetheless believed in forming an auxiliary board patterned on the
Big Sisters' program: "Every girl who is released from the institution
should have an interested sympathetic woman to look out for her. It
would do the woman just as much good as the girl, too." 39 Crothers
therefore proposes a relationship that mutually benefits both parties,
instead of the prevailing view that the upperclasses must "rescue"
women from the lower depths.
Crothers continues this analysis in the final act of the play,
when Molly and Beatrice resolve their differences. What's unusual
about the final act is that instead of blaming Molly for breaking up her
brother's marriage, Beatrice realizes her own complicity in the problem
(the "our" in ourselves includes both classes). In response to her
brother's reproach that she had caused the whole problem with her
"confounded [reform] ideas," Beatrice replies,
BEATRICE. There's only one thing to blame me for-and
that's for ... not defending her before you all-and telling
her then that I did not hold her responsible for all that's
happened -but you entirely. (4.10)
Ourselves therefore ends uncharacteristically with female bonding.
And it is not sentimental bonding either, as can be seen in Molly's next
line:
MOLLY. That means more than all you ever said to me put
together. I never thought I was a real human being to you
before. I always thought you was just experimenting on
me. (4.10)
With a realistic look at the uneven power balance between these
women, Ourselves ends with women supporting other women, even
across class lines. 40
Yet, Crothers's focus on female bonding was precisely one of
the problems with the show being successful. Writing in Harper's
Weekly, Norman Hapgood was displeased with how negatively the part
of Bob was portrayed: "he exhibits masculine nature with a harshness
39 "Girls Need 'Big Sisters,m New York Tribune, 17 November
1913, n.p.
40 It is worth noting that the one female that Beatrice does not
connect with is Irene, her sister-in-law, who is irate at her for having
brought Molly into the home.
RACHEL CROTHERS 113
and cruelty unfamiliar to me." 41 Alan Dale noted the dearth of male
parts: "In the cast of twenty-one persons there were only four men."42.
And the New York Dramatic Mirror delivered an uncharacteristically
acerbic review, also mourning the absence of men:
And the men! Ah the men! That Thurlow Bergen scarce
had room enough to be heavy, as the despicable
villainous artist, and Stanley Dark was able only to be
extremely light and colorless as the model lover of Miss
Barrington, is not altogether to their discredit. It would be
unfair to criticize men when they're down.43
Unfair? According to whose dramaturgy? In the male-dominated
theatre of the day, much like current Hollywood films, female
characters were routinely under-developed, or missing altogether. One
need only look at Road to Perdition, K-19, or Gladiator to find that
women occupy a few minutes-or even seconds-of screen time in
today's popular cinema. Like buddy films, buddy drama relies upon
homosocial bonding, even while it disavows that bonding. When
Crothers subverted this paradigm, she was attacked for breaking not
only unwritten dramaturgical rules, but also for challenging the very
foundational premises of patriarchal logic, offering instead what the
press repeatedly called "the feminine view."
DEBUNKING THE DOUBLE STANDARD
Not only did Ourselves privilege female bonding; it also
advocated feminist ideas about sexual responsibility and legislation.
For example, when discussing the lopsided policy of incarcerating
prostitutes, Miss Carew states:
44
13.
41 Norman Hapggod, Harper's Weekly 58 (6 December 1913):
42 Alan Dale, "Ourselves A Feminine View of White Slavery,
Says Dale," otherwise unidentified clipping from Normal Illinois library.
43 Review of Ourselves by Rachel Crothers as performed on 13
November 1913 at the Lyric Theatre, New York Dramatic Mirror, 19
November 1913, 7.
44 According to the play manuscript, Miss Carew says this line.
However, a review in the New York City Tribune attributes this line to
Molly, suggesting that Crothers may have changed the script. See
"Reformatory Girls See Morals Drama," New York City Tribune, 3
December 1913, n.p.
114 JOHNSON
MISS CAREW. What's the use shutting up a few hundred
girls a year, while the men are running around loose
looking for more? Once we take to locking up man-we'll
get somewhere, not before. ( 1.17)
This line produced enthusiastic response, as Alan Dale noted in an
otherwise negative review: "Why not lock up the men? This feminine
view appeared to be rather pleasing, and sympathetic hands
applauded it."45 When Miss Carew delivered this line at the Bedford
State Reformatory for Women, "such a wild storm of applause burst
forth that the whole cast was temporarily disabled. One of the women
was unable to speak her lines, Molly turned her back and wiped her
eyes, and another [actress] ... had to retire precipitately from the
stage ... " 46 As the New York City Tribune reported, "The Bedford girls
got the point, " suggesting that the play resonated with them far more
successfully than it did in New York. 47
While "locking up men" was a provocative statement, Crothers
did not lay the blame solely at men's feet, even though several critics
believed otherwise. Rather, Crothers argued that women should take
responsibility for the double standard. As Beatrice pleads in act two,
"So long as we accept immorality in men, do you suppose they're
going to change?" (2.3) . While other playwrights had tackled this issue
before, though limitedly, what Crothers introduces is the idea that
women have agency. Beatrice continues:
BEATRICE. " [N]ow that I understand the horrors of what
we call the social evil, I know that good women are
terribly to blame for it all-because of their indifference
towards the whole thing. It's we-we ourselves who are
responsible for conditions-ourselves. If we don't care-
if we don't demand the highest morality in our own
men, how are we going to get it? Or do anything for
anybody else? (2.4)
45 Dale, n.p.
46 "Reformatory Girls See Morals Drama," New York City
Tribune, 3 December 1913, n.p.
47 Ibid.
RACHEL CROTHERS 115
Molly underscores Beatrice's point at the powerful climax to act three,
asking her:
MOLLY. Are you blind as bats? Don't you live in this world?
Don't you know what's going on? If you feel like this
about it, why don't you stop it? If this is the worst thing
your men can do why do you let 'em? Why do you stand
for it and-and there wouldn't be any of us. (3.19)
Molly's words are an important inclusion in the sexuality debates,
which were often dominated by the upper-class. Molly's speech also
argues that women should take an active stance, a point Crothers
echoed in an interview in the New York Tribune: "the thing women
must do to help is to insist on high standards of morality in the men
they know. Women can no longer be indifferent to this thing."4B
While early in Ourselves Crothers argues that women should
uphold high morals, she does not resort to familiar platitudes by
portraying women as morally superior, and sexually repressed. She
rather combines the critique of male sporting with an assertion of
female heterosexual desire. Once in Beatrice's home, Molly is seduced
and falsely promised love by Beatrice's own brother, Bob. When
confronted by his wife, Irene, Bob callously defends his "animal
nature," as the Morning Telegraph called it:49
BOB. We're not to blame for how we're made. Do you
think for a minute if you had the same amount of animal
passion in your make-up that I have-you'd blame me
so-for this? You don't know. Your pulses beat evenly and
slowly. ( 4.8)
Irene "denies the theory of women's natural chastity," to use Lois
Gottlieb's words, with this vivid response:so
48 "Girls Need 'Big Sisters"' New York Tribune, 17 November
1913, n.p.
49 Bide Dudley, "Ourselves Based on Sex Question," Morning
Telegraph, 14 November 1913, n.p.
so Lois Gotlieb, Rachel Crothers (Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1979), 67.
116 JOHNSON
IRENE. Don't count so much on the slow, even pulses of
a woman-don't be so sure of the cool blood in her veins.
I've kept myself for you-because I married you. I've
made you the one man-not because no one else has
ever stirred me-not because I'm not just as strong and
healthy an animal as you are-but because of you-you.
(4.8)
Crothers portrayed not only upper-class female sexual desire
through Irene's speech, but also Molly's sexual cravings. One of the
new points that Ourselves makes is that some women turn to having
sex outside of marriage for pleasure (thus, often leading them to
prostitution once they are "ruined" on the marriage market). Crothers
made the unpopular point that "the girl problem," as it became known,
had as much to do with acknowledging sexual desire and thirst for
entertainment as it did with economic hardship or moral weakness.51
As Crothers put it in an interview, "Poverty is only indirectly the cause
. . . Every girl craves affection."52 These thoughts echo in Miss Carew's
lines from act one:
MISS CAREW. [A] girl born on Fifth Avenue has a better
chance of keeping straight than the one on Avenue A
because she has everything to protect her-and the other
everything to pull her down. Wretched homes-ignorant
parents-all that enters into it-but the reason, back of it
all, is that the sex attraction is the strongest thing in the
world and if people aren't taught what to do with it,
they'll go wrong . ... Why these girls aren't all naturally
bad by any means. But they want to live. They've got to
love somebody-and if they don't get it the right way they
will the other. That's all . Records show that almost every
first fall comes because a girl's been fooled and
deceived-then she drifts and then she keeps on-
because it's too hard to get out-once they're in it. (1.13)
Molly, described in one review as "a vital healthy, active bundle of
51 See Ruth M. Alexander, The "Girl Problem": Female Sexual
Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1995).
52 "Girls Need Big Sisters," New York Tribune, 17 November
1913, n.p.
RACHEL CROTHERS
animal spirits," echoes this view in act three:s3
MOLLY. I give up my fella. I don't want him, but I want
somebody. What am I gain' to do? What am I gain' to do?
Stay here and dry up in this straight-jacket of a dress-
watchin' the good people dancin' and makin' love for the
rest of my life? What am I gain' to do? I'm lonely. (3.19)
117
While this articulation of female desire was not entirely new to modern
theatre, in the context of white slave plays, which tended to idealize
upper-class women's sexual purity, this scene brought a "clarity that
was quite unusual on the American stage in the teens," according to
Murphy.s4
In order to understand Crothers's radical gesture here, we
need to understand the nature of typical brothel dramaturgy. Typically,
the prostitute is saved (either by reform, God, or a man) and then
renounces "the life" forever (The Lure, Salvation Nell, and Anna
Christie, respectively). Mrs. Warren's Profession is one of the few
prostitute plays in which the prostitute never repents for her
profession (which is precisely why it was censored in 1905). In fact,
Mrs. Warren is proud of her career as a thriving brothel madam. Yet,
Mrs. Warren's success comes at the price of effacing her sexuality. In
Ourselves, by contrast, though Molly is reformed, she still wants to
have sex-in all likelihood not for money-but sex just the same.
Because the two ideas were incompatible in the Progressive
imagination, Ourselves defied conventional brothel performativity. But
not until we examine the critical reception can we fully grasp why so
much was at stake for this production.
CRITICAL RECEPTION: A WOMAN's SHow
While brothel plays of the 1913 season had varied receptions,
Crothers was the only writer who was derided for her gender in the
press. Recent scholarship about Rachel Crothers, however, has not
fully explored the ways in which Crothers was attacked for her feminist
dramaturgy or even the failure of the play itself. For example, Colette
and James Lindroth's Rachel Crothers Production Sourcebook
summarizes the critical response to Ourselves as "generally positive."
53 Vanderheyden Fyels, "Dramatic Outlook in New York
Brighter," Louisville Courier Journal, 23 November 1913, n.p.
54 Murphy, 88.
118
JOHNSON
In her influential book on Rachel Crothers, Lois Gottlieb writes, "Most
critics applauded the play's straightforward expression of the
problem."55
I want to suggest, however, that the critical reception revealed
a distinct gender bias, even when reviews acknowledged that Crothers
wrote a good play. For example, the New York Dramatic Mirror wrote,
"Womanlike, Rachel Crothers has tried to have the last word on that
much press-agented subject, the white slave. Note that she has only
tried. The final word remains to be spoken."56 The New York Herald
suggested that "To have called the play The Woman's Point of View
might better have fitted the text," lamenting that "when the final
curtain dropped the voting half of the species had all the worst of it."57
"It is a woman's show," declared the reviewer of the Telegram, "One
had only to watch the part of the audience which voiced its white
gloved approval to decide the theme would not be a popular one with
the men folk."5B Alan Dale gave his usual dig at his disfavored
playwright or actress of the moment (usually female), calling Crothers
"a spinster" and declaring, "she errs in her reasoning, and ... the
feminine view-if this be it-is absurd."59 And perhaps the most
anxious review was the following: "Any man who takes his wife to that
play will never again be able to convince her he is on the square."Go
The Morning Telegraph agreed: "Some of those in the audience last
55 Gotlieb, 69.
56 Review of Ourselves by Rachel Crothers as performed on 13
November 1913 at the Lyric Theatre, New York Dramatic Mirror, 19
November 1913, 6.
57 Review of Ourselves by Rachel Crothers as performed on 13
November 1913 at the Lyric Theatre, "Another Drama of Social
Problem," New York Herald, 14 November 1913, n.p.
58 Review of Ourselves by Rachel Crothers as performed on 13
November 1913 at the Lyric Theatre, "Ourselves Deals with That Old
Dual Morality," Telegram, 14 November 1913, n.p.
59 Alan Dale, Ourselves: A Feminine View of White Slavery,
Says Dale," n.s., 14 November 1913, n.p. Shubert Archive Clipping file
on Ourselves
Go Ibid.
RACHEL CROTHERS 119
night wondered if the producers hadn't staged The Guilty Man under
a new name."61 As Doris Abramson has shown in her research of
Crothers, "standards of excellence were inevitably masculine." 62
While much of the press offered the same view of Crothers's
"peculiarly feminine play,"63 as one review put it, the New York Times
defended it, claiming, "The spectator may not share these ideals; he
may object that the play is special pleading, but he cannot escape the
fact that here is work of unusual distinction."6
4
I find the New York City
Review's observation quite relevant:
The criticisms of Ourselves have been so amusingly
transparent. Said they: 'It's a woman's standpoint.' ...
And ... why not? There isn't a reason in the world why
the woman's standpoint should not be propounded as
well as the man's . .. Heaven knows the man's standpoint
is idiotic enough standing alone.6s
Perhaps the most revealing comment was made in the Baltimore
News:
If Rachel Crothers had produced her latest play,
Ourselves, under a man's name or even anonymously, it
would have had very different treatment at the hands of
the critics, and might have proved a success.66
I'd have to agree. In spite of Crothers's other successes, the
brothel drama could only go so far in the hands of a woman. As
Munsey's Magazine put it bluntly, "it failed."67
61 Review of Ourselves by Rachel Crothers as performed on 13
November 1913 at the Lyric Theatre, "Ourselves Based on Sex
Question/' Morning Telegraph, 14 November 1913, n.p.
62 Dorris Abramson, "Rachel Crothers: Broadway Feminist," in
Modern American Drama: The Female ed. June Schlueter
(Madison: Associated University Press, 1990), St.
63 Charles Darnton, 'Ourselves a Play That Goes Wrong,"
otherwise unidentified clipping from Shubert Archive.
64 A.R., "What is the Drama League Driving At?" New York City
Tribune, 6 December 1913, n.p.
65 New York City Review, 6 December 1913, n.p.
66 Unidentified clipping in Baltimore News, 10 December 1913,
n.p.
67 Process of Drycleaning," Munsey's Magazine 51
(February 1914): 124.
120 JOHNSON
THE BEDFORD CONNECTION
If Ourselves failed in Broadway venues, it excelled in
alternative performances that were devoted to raising women's
consciousness.6s In true community-based theatre spirit, throughout
the production process Crothers continued her relationship with
Bedford and its chief administrator, Dr. Katherine Davis, a major figure
in Progressive Era prostitution discourse. As Timothy Gilfoyle has
shown, Davis "wrote some of the first studies of female sexual
behavior in the early twentieth century," rejecting "behavioral models
that assumed the existence of a criminal female personality."69
According to Crothers, having Ourselves at the Bedford State
Reformatory for Girls in December 1913 was "a very daring
experiment" by Davis, "but Dr. Davis has long ago proved that her
advanced methods of reform are an education to the whole world."70
As the private performance at Bedford showed, Ourselves resonated
with female audiences, especially with prostitutes and girl delinquents.
As Crothers described it, "To watch the agony and shame in the 360
faces, and to know that every one of them had lived through some of
the very same experiences as Molly ... meant more to me than any
approval from the outside world possibly could. " 71 Indeed, this
performance, Crothers continued, was one of the highlights of her
career:
The most impressive thing I have ever seen, without any
exception, was the effect the play produced upon the girls
when it was given for them in the little hall at Bedford,
and without hesitation, I say that the way in which they
received the play filled me with more gratitude than all
the response which has come from all the rest of my work
put together. n
68 See ''Ourselves at Bradford," New York City Tribune, 7
December 1913, n.p. The author erroneously calls Bedford "Bradford."
69 Timothy Gil.foyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution,
and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company), 276.
7o " Ourselves at Bradford," n.p.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
RACHEL CROTHERS 121
The assembled group of women, according to Crothers, were diverse
racially, "but all lifted toward the stage with that same tense hunger,
drinking in what the actors said as if it meant life or death."73 Grace
Elliston, who played Molly, responded to the "tears and tornadoes of
applause" by saying, "If I could get this response on Broadway I'd be
the greatest actress in the world."74
Many of the Bedford girls conflated the part of Molly with
Elliston, shouting out "Molly" to her repeatedly. After the performance
had ended, Elliston shook each woman's hand as they left the
performance space. According to one newspaper report, one woman
said to Elliston, "Good-bye, Molly, them things you said was true all
right." Elliston responded, "Did you get it, really? . . . Keep it going
then." As Elliston left, the women waved to her as far as they could
see, crying, "Come again, Molly!" "Sure, I'm coming soon!" Elliston
replied.75 While Elliston, Crothers and company never made it back to
Bedford for another performance, they did present Ourselves on 9
December "as a benefit performance to raise money for a new and
valuable line of rescue work for women, under the auspices of a
special committee of the Woman's Civic Federation."76 These two
instances of Ourselves being used as a vehicle of consciousness-raising
for women reveal how distinctly gendered prostitution discourse was.
Its success in these two venues parallels, and clarifies, its failure at the
Lyric.
* * *
While Ourselves would not be censored for its racy brothel
scenes, it also had little to offer mainstream audiences that were not
invested in feminist politics. As the private showing at the Bedford
State Reformatory for Girls showed, Ourselves would resonate with
female audiences. But as for the Drama League, the male critics, and
the Shuberts, who eventually closed the show, Ourselves would
remain a woman's story, too feminist in its portrayal, and too bitterly
close to home.
73 Ibid.
74 "Reformatory Girls See Morals Drama," New York City
Tribune, 3 December 1913, n.p.
75 Ibid.
76 "Ourselves at Bradford," n.p.
122
CONTRIBUTORS
MILLY S. BARRANGER is Alumni Distinguished Emerita at The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of numerous
books and articles on theatre and drama including Theatre: A Way of
Seeing, Understanding Plays: As Texts for Performance, and the
forthcoming Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater. This article on
Broadway's women is part of a work-in-progress entitled Women on
the Left: Broadway and Politics at Mid-Twentieth Century.
GLENDA E. GILL is Professor of Drama at Michigan Technological
University, and is the author of No Surrender! African American
Pioneer Performances of Twentieth Century American Theatre,
published by St. Martins Press.
KATIE N. JOHNSON is Assistant Professor in English at Miami
University of Ohio, where she specializes in theatre, film, and gender
studies. Her work has appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey,
American Drama and other journals. Her first book, Sisters in Sin: The
Prostitute on the New York Stage (1898-1922), for which she received
a National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Stipend, is currently
being reviewed for publication.
JAY MALARCHER is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at West Virginia
University. His publications have ranged from Aristotle's view of the
actor to Woyzeck. His bookThe Classically American Comedy of Larry
Gelbart was published by Scarecrow Press in 2003.
ROBERT C. VAN HORN
Robert C Van Horn (BA, Adelphi 1967) recently retired from the Federal
Government after 36 years of service and is living with his wife Elena
in Pennsylvania where he is researching the life of Maude Adams.
JON TUTILE
John Tuttle is professor of English at Francis Marion University and
Literary Manager at the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, SC.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
THE HEI._RS OF
MOLIERE
POUR I'RfNCH COMfDif S 01' THf
17tH AND l&tH CfNTURlfS
@ ~ D..AI-t...MJ.cledLn-
@ Ilootoac'-n..c-tecl Cow.t
@ La. a......-Tlae I'...Lloaahle Pnojwllce
@ Lo.lJO! Thel'rlnci ol the I..aw.
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
MARVIN CARLSON
The Heirs of
Moliere
Translated and Edited by:
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four
representative French comedies of
the period from the death of Moliere
to the French Revolution: Regnard's
The Absent-Minded Lover,
Destouches's The Conceited Count,
La Chaussee's The Fashionable
Prejudice, and Laya's The Friend of
the Laws.
Translated in a poetic form that
seeks to capture the wit and spirit of
the originals, these four plays
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highly popular sentimental comedy
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comedy that employs the Moliere
tradition for more contemporary
political ends.
In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that
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politics through the turbulent century that ended in the revolutions that gave birth to
the modern era.
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ALICE
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Tt<E R L N ~ Of BAIIYLON
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