The following interview transcript with Sidney
Kingsley has been carefully broken down into
segments involving a variety of topics. Below
each segment is a link to the corresponding
video clip. Please attribute research sources to
Mike Wood, Interviewer and the William
Inge Center for the Arts.
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Writing Movies
at RKO |
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RKO was considered
one of the minor studios. There were the four
great studios, the big ones: MGM, Paramount,
Warner Brothers, and I think Universal was
considered the other big one. Then there were
the smaller studios: Columbia and RKO. So we
didn’t have the number of contract players that
say, MGM had. I think at the height of its
activity RKO might have had forty or fifty
contract players, whereas MGM had over 200.
That wasn’t always a boon, because once a studio
had that many players under regular contract it
caused some pressure in casting, because they
never wanted you to go off the lot. They said,
“Well we got 200 contract players; find what you
need in the pool.” And that wasn’t always
possible. And yet you were virtually forced to
do it. We didn’t have so many contract players
at RKO so we could go outside and bring people
onto the lot. Frequently I brought them from
New York because that was where I had worked,
and I knew most of the people in the theater.
Many of them had never been in films, and so
that was good for our side, because it gave us a
fresh note and some new excitement and new faces
in the film each time.
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Thornton
Wilder as a Mentor |
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I think Thornton
Wilder…certainly the most important man in my
life…the most important person outside of my
immediate family. I met Thornton when I was
still an actor, and I was in a play by Robert
Ardrey, who had been a student of his at the
University of Chicago, and Thornton came to New
York over a weekend to see some rehearsals of a
play. And I met him then, and he became a
friend and a mentor. He was shocked when he
heard that I had never been to college. He asked
me what my major was in college and I said,
“Well I never went to college.” Well, he was
astonished. I don’t think he’d ever met a young
person who’d never been to college. And he
said, “But, well how are you going to get on?”
He said, “Well what did you do right after you
left high school?” I said, “Well I didn’t go to
high school.” He said, “What do you mean you
didn’t go to high school?” I said, “Well I got
out of grammar school and I started to go to
high school, but I only went for about four or
five months, and then I left high school and
then I didn’t go anymore.” Well, I’ve never
seen a man quite so shocked. And he was not
only shocked, but he seemed terrified…”Well,
what’s going to happen to you?” And he even
scared me, so I thought maybe I ought to stop
what I’m doing and go back to school. But I
didn’t. I couldn’t, so I didn’t. And he took
me in hand, and for the next 33 years, from that
point until his death, he was my everything: he
was my teacher, he was my university, he was my
friend, he was the one who encouraged me to
write in the first instance. He was very tough
on me. He never really liked anything I wrote.
He never read either a novel or a story or a
play that he said he thought was good or
worthy. Some of it was promising; some of it
was better than what had come before. I never
had any praise from him for writing. But I had
encouragement from him always. And he was a
great friend—not only to me but to Ruth. And we
were very, very close. On many occasions we
would go off somewhere for three or four
weeks—just take a trip together so we were able
to talk and think and consider together. And
his death, of course, was a great blow to me. I
lost a whole contact with a fountain of wisdom
and inspiration and brilliance. I hope to write
about him someday. Of course my journals are
loaded with Thornton verbatim. Someday if I can
bear it, I’ll probably write about him sometime.
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Ruth Gordon:
Marriage |
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I was in the first
draft, which was in 1941, well before we had
gotten into the War. It was selective service,
and if you were under 28, you were asked to
serve for, I think it was 18 months. But, that
I did go into the Army, and while I was in the
Army they changed the game and said, no, they
wanted younger men. So anyone who was nearly
28, which I was then, was released. But by that
time I’d been in Washington for several months,
and one felt that our entrance into the War was
imminent, and I thought, “Well I’ll be in it
anyway. What’s the point of going back to
Hollywood, maybe getting immersed in a movie
that I won’t be able to finish—and so I may as
well stay here. So I stayed in Washington, and
I volunteered my services to the O.E.M. – the
Office for Emergency Management – and I began to
make some films, some short films and propaganda
films and of course, sure enough, by the end of
that year we were in the War, and I went back
into the Army. And it was shortly after that, I
was still in Washington, and Ruth came to
Washington in a great famous production of
Chekhov’s play The Three Sisters, and that was
with Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson, Dennis
King, Edmund Gwenn, Ruth Gordon, and it was an
enormously successful revival of Three Sisters,
the Chekhov play. And, I don’t know, I thought
there was something curiously prophetic about
that, that I should be in Washington…quite
accidentally in Washington having been serving
in Texas, but I was suddenly sent to Washington
and assigned to the O.S.S. And here comes Ruth
turning up in the play there. So, I thought
there was some force of circumstance was
speaking, and we decided that we’d get married,
so we did, uh, in late December of 1941.
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Ruth Gordon: A Writing Collaboration |
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And after A Double
Life, I think that’s when we did Adam’s Rib.
And then in between there I think came a picture
called The Marrying Kind that we did at Columbia
for Judy Holliday and then Pat and Mike. I
think that was the order of the four films that
we did together, and there were only those four
that we did together. Because we had a very
successful marriage, which lasted for forty-four
years. And we seldom quarreled, we didn’t have
any fights, except when we were writing
together, and then it was ghastly—it was simply
horrible, because we argued and battled all the
time. And we hated it, we didn’t like it. And
yet, we were sort of trapped into this situation
where our collaboration was very successful from
a commercial point of view. But eventually we
simply took the bull by the horns and said we
were not going to do it again, we were not going
to do it anymore, and we didn’t. We just
stopped. And Ruth went on and did her own work,
and I did my own work, and they lived happily
ever after. But there was a certain tension,
because Ruth was an extremely individual,
dramatic intelligence. She had a style all her
own in writing as she did in acting. And, for
better or worse, I have my curious ways, and
they didn’t always mesh, you see, and that
caused the problem. I would suggest a line or a
scene or an idea, and she would hate it. Or she
would suggest something, and I would say, “Well,
why is that funny?” Well, she was usually
right, but I couldn’t see it at the time. So,
we lived through some pretty tough times—a great
strain in that collaboration. I suppose there
is in all collaboration. I don’t do it
anymore. I haven’t collaborated with anybody on
anything in many, many, many years, and I can’t
foresee the time when I would ever fall into
that trap again. I would never do it. I
wouldn’t want to do it.
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Woman of the Year |
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In a sense, Woman
of the Year was really written as a kind of an
homage to Tracy and Hepburn who were two great
friends of mine, and I worked on that original
story, and then Ring Lardner, Jr. came in and my
brother Michael, and the three of us, with Kate
to write in the room practically with us all the
time, because we were under the gun for timing.
And we managed to finish that screenplay, and
then when it was finished, then Kate took it in
to MGM and made a deal for it.
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The True Glory;
Part I |
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I was, as I say,
in the O.S.S., the Office of Strategic Services,
and I was eventually sent overseas, and I did
all sorts of jobs there. And then there came an
idea that someone should make a film report of
the upcoming invasion known as Operation
Overlord, not for historical records or for Army
records, but a film should be made for public
exhibition, so that the public at large, not
only and American public but the world public,
would know something about what went into this
particular military operation called Operation
Overlord. I was sent for, and I discussed the
idea. It wasn’t my idea, it was presented to
me, and they wanted to know what I thought of
it, and so I began to talk about some of the
practical aspects of it. And then in a few days
later they sent for me again, and they
introduced me to Carol Reed. And he was a man I
had admired enormously. I just adored his
pictures. I thought he was just marvelous. So
we met, and we talked over the project, and
eventually it was underway with both of us
co-directing – him more or less on the British
side and myself on the American side. We also
had a French representative, we had a
Scandinavian Representative. We had many, many
representatives of various members of the Allied
Forces. We then were taken to see General
Eisenhower, and he explained the sort of thing
that he wanted. And he, in fact, was the
producer of that film. He kept his eye on it.
We had to come back and show him sections of it
from time to time. He was very kind and
extremely creative and knowledgeable and
friendly. So we were able to work—it took about
a year and four months. And it was timed so
that it could be finished at the time of the
victory, so that we were able to prepare all the
material leading up to the preparations of the
invasion, and then the invasion itself, and then
all of the various battles, and finally the
victory. So it was not long after VE day that
we had a finished film to show. It was a very
difficult job of work, and yet extremely
rewarding. We had a single message: a very
small piece of paper about that big. It simply
asked whoever read that letter to cooperate with
Carol Reed and myself in the making of this
picture, and it was signed Dwight D.
Eisenhower. Well that’s all we had. We just
had that one little piece of paper. But that
little piece of paper got us 800 men, a
building, Grosvenor Square, a staff of about
150 people—we could just have anything we
wanted: travel arrangements, planes and cars,
and men in the field, and cameras and
equipment—just because we had that one little
piece of paper that was signed by Dwight D.
Eisenhower. It was on that basis that we were
able to work for a year and a half and finally
finish The True Glory.
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The True
Glory: Part II |
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We did very, very
little shooting. That was…one of the things
that had disturbed both Carol and me was that a
lot of the war documentaries were phony. By
phony I mean they were staged. They had some
things that were staged. And we decided we
would stage nothing. We would simply use
whatever film was available. And we would send
men out into the field to cover certain
movements and certain battles and certain
strategies, and then we would just screen this
stuff endlessly—millions of feet of film. I
don’t mean that Carol and I saw every single
foot. Of course we didn’t. We had five or six
men doing that alone and collating all the film
that was coming in and then using it and editing
it very carefully. So, it was a complex job.
And yet, we were so clear in our minds about
what we wanted to do that it was put together…
we shot very, very little. The only thing we
shot were some things near the opening of the
various soldiers of the various countries in the
streets of London. I think we shot some of that
because we couldn’t find exactly what we
wanted. But all the battle stuff was
authentic. Nothing was staged.
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The True
Glory: Part III |
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It takes a long
time to digest an experience of that sort ‘cause
while it’s going on you don’t really understand
what’s happening. I remember talking to endless
numbers of soldiers we interviewed in the field
and in hospitals. And some of them, when they
came back or while we would be out in the field,
and it was amazing to me how little the soldiers
who were actually in the battles knew about the
battle itself, because they were seeing one
little area of a few hundred yards where the
battle itself was going on over a space of three
or four square miles. I remember we were
looking for some material on air cover – some of
the battles and how they were fought and how the
air cover worked, and we had wonderful footage
that we found of the air coverage. And then we
would interview some of the soldiers in those
same battles and they would say, “Well, where
the hell were the goddamn air cover? We didn’t
have any air cover at all.” Because we knew
that there were maybe 800 planes, but they
didn’t happen to see them. And so from their
point of historic perspective they could
honestly say, “We fought that battle with no air
cover at all.” But the history will show that
there were 800 planes; they just didn’t happen
to see them. So, it’s a complicated business.
Modern war is extremely complex.
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Born
Yesterday: Born in the Army |
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Well, it came
about because I was in the Army. I’d been in
the Army for 4 ½ years and of course, separated
from work and creativity, it was a drag. It was
not a happy time at all in my life, nor was it
in anyone else’s I suppose. And one of the
things I missed terribly was expression, was
creativity, was doing something. And it was
beginning to be the end of the year, and again I
was commiserating with myself about what a
terrible situation it was, and then I thought,
well wait a minute, I can do something, there’s
time, I’m still alive, and I had been thinking
for a long time about a movie, roughly on this
subject, roughly on the subject of Washington,
wartime Washington especially where I spent a
lot of time. So I began writing a movie, but
the deeper I got into it, the more I realized
that I was writing a movie that would probably
never be produced. It would be highly
censorable—remember we’re talking about many,
many years ago—and at that time the idea of
having an unmarried couple on the screen was
anathema. You simply couldn’t even dream of
it. The Hays Office would have dropped that out
in the first reading. So I thought, well as
long as it cannot be done as a movie, maybe I’ll
switch around; maybe I’ll try to write it as a
play. Well, this represented a problem because,
I had never written a play before—however I had
directed plays, I had been in plays, I knew
quite a lot about theater—so I just thought I’d
take a chance and write it, but I had no idea in
mind of writing a comedy. That was the farthest
thing from my mind because the subject was so
explosive, was so dramatic, was so tense that
what I was really after was to write a
blistering expose of wartime Washington—that’s
what I had in mind. But as I wrote it, it wrote
itself and it simply changed key. As I was
writing it, the girl took over and was funny and
sassy and adorable, and it turned into a
comedy. That happens frequently I think in the
work of any professional playwright or novelist
– that you don’t always know exactly where
you’re going when you begin. You might start in
one direction, and the story itself, the
characters themselves, lead you into another
direction. And that’s what happened in the case
of Born Yesterday. Then it was finished quite
swiftly. It didn’t take long to write in the
first instance. I sent it to my wife, and she
wrote back and said what she liked about it and
what she didn’t like about it, and then I simply
put it away…nothing to be done. I was in the
Army and had some time still to go, and so it
lay there, and once in a while I’d pick it up
and read it and make a few little changes or add
a joke or two or make some cuts, and it was sort
of a friend, it was a…relieved loneliness on
certain occasions.
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Born Yesterday: Casting Judy Holliday |
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That was my first
job after I got out of the Army was to direct
the Robert E. Sherwood play with Spencer Tracy
called The Rugged Path, and when that was
finished, by that time we did get underway with
Born Yesterday. And it had a very, very stormy
time. Difficult to cast, but eventually I did
achieve what we all thought was a brilliant
choice in Jean Arthur who was a wonderful
actress and a delicious personality. But what I
didn’t know was that Jean Arthur was not
completely well, and her ailment was of a
nervous nature. It wasn’t so much physical as
it was distress. But we rehearsed, and we
opened in Boston, and it wasn’t very promising.
It started well but then sort of ran down. And
she was in a poor state. And then we moved from
there to Philadelphia. And we were ready to
open, and the night before we were to open I was
told by her manager that she would not be able
to open at all. So there we sat in Wash…in uh,
Philadelphia, the whole cast, the set sitting
there, theater—some tickets sold, and nobody to
play the leading role. So of course it was
nothing to do but close. But Max Gordon who was
the producer of the play…was a wonderful
old-style, old-time, brilliant, practical
Broadway producer, and he said, “No, dog-gone
it, we’re not going to close the show. We’re
going to get somebody to play it.” And a lot of
ideas were suggested, and actresses were coming
down, and we were interviewing people and
talking, and most of the ones we wanted turned
it down. And then I remembered having seen an
act called The Revuers, and I remember this
girl. I thought she was simply marvelous, and I
didn’t think she was right for the part because,
it really should be… I was thinking of someone
who looks say, like Marilyn Monroe—a very, very
striking beautiful blonde. Well Judy wasn’t
anything like that. I thought she was lovely
looking, but no one would single her out as
being a great beauty. But yet, that was the
only thing we could do at that moment, and Max
had a lot of courage and he said, “Well, let’s
take a chance. If it goes it goes, if it
doesn’t we can always put it away.” So she came
down, and she hadn’t even heard about the play;
she didn’t know anything about it. But she came
down with her beau at the time, and I gave her a
copy of the script. She went upstairs and read
it, a couple hours. Then she came downstairs,
and I said, “Well what do you think?” And she
said “Well I like it, I think it’s very good.”
And I said, “Well do you think you can play
it?” She said, “Yes I think I could.” And I
said, “Well let’s go to work.” So we went over
to the theater got the company together and we
began. And this was, as I recall it, it was on
a Thursday morning, sort of lunchtime Thursday,
and she began to rehearse, and I thought she
seemed fine. And then Max Gordon came to me,
and he said, “You know we gotta open this thing
Saturday night.” And I said, “Max it’s only
Thursday now.” And he said, “Well she’s a young
girl, she can do it.” I said, “I don’t see the
possibility.” He said, “She can do it. See
everybody else knows their parts, it’s all
staged. All she has to do is just learn the
words. If she just has the words she can do
it.” So I sat and chatted with her for a little
while, and I said, “You’re gonna be great in
this.” And she said, “Well I need time, you
know.” And I said, “Well the only trouble is
there isn’t an awful lot of time.” And she
said, “Well how much time?” And I said, “We’re
going to open Saturday night.” And I thought
the poor girl was going to drop dead on the
spot. And she said, “I couldn’t do it. I
couldn’t possibly do it.” And I said, “Don’t
say now, let’s just keep going and let’s see how
you feel by Saturday.” Well, by Saturday she
knew the part perfectly. Of course she hadn’t
refined it, and there was all the technical
stuff about getting her hair dyed and the
wardrobe being adjusted for her and so on, but
somehow we never left the theater. We just
stayed in the theater, and we took naps, and we
had food sent in, and we just stayed there and
the company was of course glorious and
cooperative in any way. And the fact of the
matter is that we did open on that very Saturday
night, and from that moment on everything was
clear sailing. It was obviously a great success
from that moment on.
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Born Yesterday: Advise from George S. Kaufman |
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One of the
pleasurable things was that when we announced
that Jean Arthur was not going to be in the play
there was a big queue at the box office, but it
was people turning in their tickets and getting
their money back, and it was a terrible
nightmarish sight to stand in front of the
theater and see the money going the wrong
direction. Instead of the money going into the
box office it was going out of the box office.
And of course by Sunday, after the reports of
the play had been around and they had opened the
box office, there was the queue again and the
reverse had happened still again. And it was a
very exciting time. We spent the three weeks
playing it in Philadelphia. I continued to work
on the play of course. Max Gordon was the
producer, and his partners at that time were
George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and they came
down, and they were simply stalwart and helped
in every possible way and made suggestions and…I
had a lot of support from them and from my
wonderful wife, and in time when we got into
about the middle of the third week, George
Kaufman came to me and he said, “Now there’s
something I want to ask you to do.” And I
thought, “Oh God, again. What?” “Don’t touch
it. Just leave it alone. Let it play out the
last four or five performances. Don’t touch it,
even if you get a good idea, don’t put the good
idea in. Just let it find its own rhythm, let
it find its own life. Let the actors be very
relaxed and comfortable." So I followed his
advice, and we went to New York. I think we
played two or three previews, and we opened very
well.
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Born
Yesterday; The Movie |
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It was the first
Broadway play ever to achieve a price of a
million dollars for the movie rights. That had
never happened before. And with that
investment, Harry Cohen, the head of Columbia,
was not about to just do it with unknowns. And
the Paul Douglas part that Paul Douglas had made
an enormous success—as Brock—but Columbia had
Broderick Crawford on a contract, and he had
just won an Academy Award for All the King’s
Men, so there wasn’t any question that he was
going to get that part. And then as far as the
girl was concerned, they thought of all sorts of
girls, but Judy wasn’t really considered. And
we were trying to plot out how the Hell could we
get that part for her. I suggested her, but
Cohen wouldn’t listen, but as it happened we
were making a movie at that time that my wife
Ruth Gordon and I had written for Spencer Tracy
and Katharine Hepburn—a movie called Adam’s
Rib. And there was a small part in it, and we
all sat around and thought, God if that part
could just be built up a little bit, (phone
rings) it would be so arresting, it would be
such a good part, and if Judy played it she
might make a real hit in it, and if she did, it
might help get her the part in Born Yesterday.
And that’s exactly what happened. That was the
scenario. We wrote the part for her and built
it up. And Kate Hepburn was more generous than
she had ever been in her life, and she is
probably the most generous actress in the
world. If you’ve seen the film you know that
there’s an important introductory scene where
she is interviewing Judy, and Judy reveals the
nature of the crime and so on. And when George
Cukor, the director, finished the scene shooting
Judy over Kate, he said, "Alright now we’ll do
the reverse shot," and Kate said, “No don’t make
a reverse shot.” And he said, “Well I have
to.” She said, “Don’t make a reverse shot
‘cause if you make a reverse shot you’ll
probably use it, and I think this should just be
on Judy and let her have the whole scene." So
if you’ve seen the film you know that there it
is. The whole scene is played on Judy Holliday
and there’s never a single cut around to
Katherine Hepburn, who was/is a great, great
star. But that was her homage to a new player,
a new star. So the scenario worked perfectly.
She made a very big hit in Adam’s Rib, and as a
result of that, Cohen relented and indeed let
her play the part in the film for which she won
the Academy Award. Fairy stories, you see; the
world is not devoid of fairy tales still.
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Fledermaus |
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The libretto of an
opera or an operetta is what we call the “book”
in terms of a musical show—the spoken dialogue,
the play, as it were. No, the lyrics were
happily and magically created by Howard Dietz
and probably the best set of lyrics in English
for any opera or operetta that’s ever been
achieved. I was asked by Rudolph Bing, in his
very first year as the Director General of the
Metropolitan Opera, to do a production of
Fledermaus, and I wasn’t too keen on it, because
when I heard the strictures under which one
worked at the Met—the very, very small number of
rehearsals that one could have—and the
difficulty of getting the stage for rehearsal
and so on, it was not a very attractive
prospect. But, Bing, an astonishing impresario,
he could get a lot of people to do things they
didn’t want to do. And he finally talked me
into it, and then I went to Howard Dietz,
because I thought he would be good for the job
of writing the lyrics. And we worked together
for many months, and then I had written the book
and he had written the lyrics, and then I
directed it at the Met. And it ran there for 21
years. It was in the repertoire for exactly 21
years. And for most of those years it was the
New Years Eve attraction, among other things. A
very happy assignment all around. We enjoyed it
very much.
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Pat and Mike |
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I knew that Kate
was a tennis champion when she was sixteen,
seventeen years old. She won all sorts of
tournaments. And someone who knows about such
things once told me that if she had really
wanted to, she probably could have gone on to be
the great champion in the game of tennis,
because she was so able, and started playing
when she was about four years old. And the same
was true of golf. She was a wonderful golfer,
one of the best. And she could do anything in
the line of athletics. I remember once we were
just—Ruth and she and I were taking a walk out
on the beach out at Malibu--and the kids had
just started surfing on their surfboards in
those days. And Kate looked at it and said,
“You know I could do that.” And I said, “I
would advise you not to try, Kate, because
that’s very, very dangerous, and you could hurt
yourself.” And she said, “No, I think I could
do that.” And a few days later she came out and
met some fellow and got on the surfboard, and he
told her a few of the principles and, sure
enough, she went out, got on that surfboard, and
spent days just riding the surf. She could do
that. She’s a natural athlete. She’s a born
athlete. So, we saw her in action, and we
thought, isn’t it extraordinary that she can do
all these things, and yet it’s never been
captured on film? It’s never been part of any
performance. No one has ever seen her do this
marvelous stuff—fascinating and rhythmic and
graceful and interesting. So we began talking
about how it could be integrated, and the
contrast of Spencer as a mug sports promoter,
and it all worked itself out, and we eventually
made the picture.
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It Should Happen to You and Jack Lemon |
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I went to see a
play in New York, a revival of Room Service, and
I was very interested in it because I had worked
with George Abbott on the original production of
Room Service—I had something to do with that.
And I just wanted to see the revival. And this
young man came on, and he was terrific. And I
suddenly remembered that Helen Hayes had
introduced him to Ruth and me some years before
up in a summer theater where she was playing,
and we came up to see her, and she pointed him
out, and she said how good he was. Well that
was the advantage of his name. If a man’s name
is Jack Lemmon, you’re not likely to forget his
name. If his name is Jack Smith or Jack Jones
or Jack Miller, it might slip your mind, but
Jack Lemmon you wouldn’t forget, and I didn’t.
And then I remembered him, and I thought he was
simply smashing. So I went back to see him. He
didn’t remember me at all, but I remembered
him. And I asked him what he was going to do,
and he said, well he didn’t have anything on the
horizon. The play was not particularly
successful in its revival, so I immediately got
in touch with the Coast and I said, "I think I
found the man to play opposite Judy." I told
them about Jack Lemmon, and they said well
they’d arrange to make a test of him, and they
did. They liked the test, but Judy didn’t like
the idea, because she said he was too young for
her. So Ruth and I had to get on the phone and
convince Judy Holliday not to put the kibosh on
Jack Lemmon. We pointed out to her how
wonderful Kate had been to her when she was
starting, and I said, “You can’t just shut the
door on somebody if the studio wants him, and
Cukor, who was going to direct, wants him and we
want him, you mustn’t stand in the way.” And
she said, “Well I suppose you’re right.” So,
Jack Lemmon went out, and that was his first
picture, was the picture that I had written
under the title of A Name for Herself, but they
changed the title—brilliance and sagacity—they
changed it to It Should Happen to You. I didn’t
even know that they were changing the title.
They didn’t tell me, but they did. However, he
was extraordinarily good in that film, and it
led to many, many others, and I think he’s about
as good as we’ve ever had on the American
screen. He’s a remarkable fellow, brilliant
actor, tasteful, energetic, ambitious,
high-standard of excellence. He’s a national
treasure.
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The
Diary of Anne Frank: Research |
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I was
living in London with Ruth who was playing in
The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder there; and a
friend of mine named Kermit Bloomgarden—who was
a very, very fine Broadway theatrical
producer—phoned me and said that he had acquired
a new play based on The Diary of Anne Frank, and
would I like to read it? Well, I said yes, but
mainly I said yes because I was curious. I had
read the publication of the Anne Frank diaries—I
couldn’t for the life of me imagine how anyone
could have turned that into a play. So, it was
mainly curiosity that led me to say yes, and he
sent me the play, and I read it, and it simply
bowled me over. And I called him back and said,
“Yes I’d like to do it.” A few days later
Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who were
the adaptors of the play, flew over, and
together we made our way to Amsterdam to meet
Mr. Otto Frank, and indeed all of the other
characters still surviving who knew the story
and knew about the play. We went to the actual
apartment, we went to the home, we went to the
building. We went to their original home. We
retraced the steps of the day when they went
into hiding, how they got there, and how they
walked there, and how they carried what they
carried. And Mr. Frank turned out to be a
remarkable, dear, dear man. And extremely
helpful he was, too. And we stayed in Amsterdam
for a while. Then the Hacketts had to leave.
They went back, but I stayed on, and I just got
to know everyone connected with the story and
got to know the background. And then with the
permission of the producer, I engaged a
photographer, a young woman, who did most of
Life Magazine’s photography there, and I engaged
her, and we went around, and we made 800
photographs of everything that could possibly
have had any bearing on that story. We went
first to the apartment, and we took 50 or 60
photographs there. We photographed the
doorknobs, we photographed windows, the
casements, everything you could see out of doors
in every possible light. We spent a couple days
doing that. Then I had copies of all these
photographs made, and I sent them to New York to
Boris Aronson, who was going to design the play,
so that he could get the right texture and the
feeling of the space. And eventually we got
back to New York and began casting, and we put
the cast together, went into rehearsal. And it
was not so much a theatrical production as it
was a religious experience for everyone
involved. No one thought of it in terms of a
commercial Broadway enterprise. It was
something far, far beyond that. I think in time
that somehow showed when the performance was
given in the theater. It was a…an incomparable
experience to be connected with that play. , and taught for
many years after that. So I had a very special
feeling about him.
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The
Diary of Anne Frank: The Set |
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Moreover, I made a
number of contributions to that play, and one of
them was that I convinced the Hacketts that
instead of it being a play done in multiple
sets, that we should just have a unit set, one
set, the whole apartment: one, two, three, four,
five rooms, but at no time would any of the
rooms be dead. That is to say the lights
wouldn’t dim on all the rooms except the one
that was in action. All the lights were the way
they would be in those rooms, and all the
action/activity was planned so as not to
distract from the dialogue scenes that were
going on in whatever part of the house. So it
was intricate and difficult, and the Hacketts at
first didn’t always approve. They were afraid
the attention of the audience was going to be
distracted, but eventually they got the idea and
helped me very much with the invention of what
could be done. Of all the theater activity
that’s gone on in my life I think the production
of The Diary of Anne Frank is the one of which I
am most proud.
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Do Re Mi |
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Yeah, Do Re Mi
came as a result of my reading a little article
in Variety which told the story of how certain
little gangs of organized mugs were moving into
the record business—the music business—and that
suggested something interesting to me, so I
began to explore it. And eventually I wrote a
very, very long story which was published in The
Atlantic Monthly, of all places, as an important
cover story. And from that was picked up by a
publisher who wanted to do it as a hardcover
book with illustrations by Al Hirschfeld, and
that sold very, very well, and that was around
for a while. And then someone bought the film
rights, but never actually made a film of it.
And somehow it then came to the attention of
Jule Styne, the composer, and he came to me and
said, “Why don’t we do this as a musical?” And
I said, “Well, can we get the rights back from
20th?” And we put some agents to work on that,
and they did. And it was slowly put together,
and then we acquired Phil Silvers and Nancy
Walker and a remarkable company, and it was for
me an extremely happy occasion. I was delighted
with the show. I loved it, all the way.
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A Gift of Time |
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A Gift of Time
began as a book called Death of a Man written by
Lael Wertenbaker, who was the widow of Charles
Wertenbaker, the head of Time magazine in
Europe. And it was called to my attention by my
sister—my sister Ruth is a very bright, literary
type—and she read this book, and she called it
to my attention and said she thought it would
make a play. And I read it a few times, but I
couldn’t quite see how it could be made into a
play. But she kept urging me to think about it
more, and I talked it over with Ruth and
eventually began to get a feeling of a pattern
that it might take. And to help me achieve the
end, we went to France, and I went to see Bohr
which is where it all took place. And we stayed
there for about a month. And I just went down
into that town every day and went to the house
where it all took place and absorbed the
atmosphere and talked to his children. And then
of course I got to know Lael very well. And
then I began to write the play, and by the time
it was finished, I was all caught up in it, and
I responded to it on every level: intellectual
and spiritual and emotional. Then the first
actor I sent it to was Henry Fonda, and he
responded in 24 hours and said yes he very much
wanted to do it. And then I sent it to Olivia
de Havilland to play the wife, and she
accepted. So we were underway. We put it on,
tried it out, out of town. It went very well.
It was not as big a commercial success as I had
hoped, because, I believe, it was a little bit
ahead of its time – just a little. The whole
idea of discussing a man dying of cancer as a
theatrical venture was just a little avant-garde
for that time. So, it was very, very well
reviewed, very respectfully reviewed, but it
didn’t have the commercial success that I had
hoped it would have, which is why I think these
days, I’m thinking of maybe converting it into a
film now and doing it as a film. I think if we
got the right people, it would be extremely
effective and valuable, a valuable project to
undertake.
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Funny Girl:
Directing |
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Oh, indeed, I did
know Fanny Brice. In fact I was one of the few
people connected with the production who did
know Fanny Brice. Her daughter was around of
course, and the producer Ray Stark was her
son-in-law, so he knew her. But hardly anyone
else knew her. In fact I think it’s fair to say
that even Barbra Streisand, who played the lead,
the fact is I don’t think she’d ever heard of
Fanny Brice, let alone having met her or seen
her. Oh I knew Fanny Brice very well. She was
a great pal of mine and of Ruth. But that
wasn’t the point. When one does a play or a
film based on a real person, it’s different from
writing an authentic biography. I think you use
the person as a take off point for the telling
of a life story or the description of a
personality. I don’t think it’s incumbent upon
the people to be absolutely authentic anymore
than it was absolutely necessary for Shakespeare
to be historically accurate about the various
kings he was writing about. They didn’t say all
those things. Shakespeare invented them. But
he invented them based on what he knew of the
historical background of these men and women.
So, the fact that it was a real person, the fact
that Fanny Brice was a real person, I think that
was peripheral. She was the inspiration for the
show, but I don’t think it was incumbent upon
the writer or the producer or the director to
reproduce her exactly as she was or say what she
actually said. It was just a take off. It was
a very enjoyable show on the whole and had the
excitement of a brand new big, big star in the
person of Barbra Streisand, who of course was
born to play that part and played it brilliantly
and inventively and very, very well.
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Funny Girl: Casting Barbara Streisand |
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She had scored a
little hit in a play called I Can Get It For You
Wholesale in which she came on and she just did
one number, but she was so arresting and so
exciting and so marvelous that anyone who saw
that one number performed by her was struck.
And when the idea of doing the show about Fanny
Brice came up, it was quite obvious that she was
really the one that should do it. The original
producers were supposed to be David Merrick and
Ray Stark, but somehow they had a falling out
along the way, and it remained for Ray Stark
alone to do it. He, like most producers, was
hoping to get a big star. So it was offered to
many, many big stars, and for one reason or
another each one in turn rejected it. And so
finally it came down to—if you want to take a
chance with this unknown girl. And I thought
she was so remarkable that I certainly was on
her side. I voted for her. I wanted her. And
that’s how she got the part - really in a way by
default, because had any of the other stars
accepted the offer, she never would have gotten
to play it. But that hardly matters—if she
hadn’t gotten that, she would have gotten
something else. There’s no stopping that
talent, she’s just so good.
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Remembering
Mr. Maugham |
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Well, Remembering
Mr. Maugham is a book which came about almost
accidentally. I’m an inveterate journal
keeper. I write journals all the time, almost
daily. And in those times when I used to see
something of Somerset Maugham, a lot of him when
he was in New York or I used to meet with him in
London—Ruth and I would go and stay with him in
his house in the south of France. Well
obviously when he talked, it was of great
interest to me, and of course I wrote down
everything he said. So as the years went by, I
had quite an accumulation. And the editor of
The Atlantic, Ed Weeks, asked me once if I would
care to do a piece about Maugham, and I said,
“Well let me see what I have,” so I went to my
files and started to pull out all the Maugham
stuff, and I found that I had about 300,000
words on the subject of Maugham. And so instead
of just a magazine article, which I gave him
anyway, I thought it seems a waste, and so I
thought I would turn it into a book, which I
did, and it was published with some considerable
success and then went into paperback, and it’s
still around. People send it to me from time to
time to be autographed, and it’s a sentimental
book of which I’m very fond, yeah.
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Tracy and Hepburn |
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Both Kate Hepburn
and Spencer Tracy were and are my beloved
friends. Ruth and I and Kate and Spencer spent
a lot of time together here in California, also
in New York, also in London, also in Paris, also
in various parts of the world. And we got along
famously, and we had a fine time. We were sort
of a family in a way. And we loved writing for
them. Everything we did for them was successful
which was…sort of helps buoy it up. Then to
write about them just as a memoir, especially
after Spencer’s death, I wanted to make sure
that that sense of collaboration, that sense of
artistic collaboration and friendship and the
joy of creation wasn’t completely lost. So I
decided to put it into the form of a memoir
about Tracy and Hepburn, and yes, the result was
quite a happy event.
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It Takes a Long Time to Become Young: Age
Discrimination |
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It’s a subject
that’s very near to my heart. I think what is
happening in our country and in our economy and
in our life is absolutely disgraceful. When you
think that men are being asked to retire at the
age of 50 or 48 or 52; it used to be that people
were asked to retire at 60 or 62 or 65 and the
number keeps going down all the time and we
don’t know when it’s going to get to be—God
knows when it’ll get to be 35. Someone pointed
out not long ago, if you were a man who had
spent 25 years or 20 years in an advertising
agency, suppose you’re a copywriter or a
designer of advertising, a creative advertising
person. And suppose you get to be 44 years old,
and the company’s reorganized. And they say to
you, “Sorry old fella, but we’re reorganizing
and we’re not going to be able to use your
services anymore.” So you go out into the
streets of New York, and you’re 44 years old.
You do know, of course, your chances of getting
a new job are minimal. And they’re minimal not
because of your looks or because of your ability
or because of your past record but simply
because of your age. If you’re 44 years old,
you’re considered in many, many mercantile
establishments somewhat over-the-hill. Well
this seems to me not only nonsense but very
dangerous--losing the talent and the abilities
that we have. Here we have a President of the
United States who has just celebrated his 78th
birthday, is it?
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It Takes a Long Time to Become Young: Genesis of
the Title |
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And the title, I
think as you probably know, came from a time
when Ruth and I were living in France, and we
were in the South of France, and we went to see
a Picasso show. And, the day that we went there
was on some special charity showing. Picasso
was there himself. And he was walking around
looking at his own pictures with great interest,
and they were hung chronologically: very early
pictures and then later, later, later, later,
later and then up to present day. And a woman
was talking to Picasso and she said “You know
maître, it’s very curious – the early pictures
look so organized and so staid and so perfect,
and the later pictures all seem very careless
and wild. It almost seems as though they ought
to go the other way about.” And he said to her,
“Ah Madam, but you don’t understand. It takes a
long time to become young.” So, when I overheard
him say that, it made a deep impression upon
me. I made a note of it. And when I began
writing the book, I used that as the title for
the book. It’s really a quote from Picasso.
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George Abbott at
100 |
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I’m going out in a
few weeks to the Midwest to be present at a
celebration honoring my old boss George Abbott
who’s going to have his 100th birthday there.
Well that isn’t so remarkable! There are
hundreds of people, I think thousands now in the
United States, who are in their hundredth year
or over 100. That’s not so remarkable. What is
remarkable is that George Abbott is going to be
directing a revival of On Your Toes, which is a
show that he did originally, and he’s going to
be directing it at this festival. And they are
also going to be staging some of his plays, like
Broadway and several others. And he’ll be there
and he’ll be in full swing, and Hal Prince and I
and many of his other former assistants and
co-workers are going to be there to celebrate.
He’s 100 years old. He has an attractive young
wife and lives a very jolly life, so far as I
can see. I see him around all the time. He’s
enjoying life. He’s lost a little hearing, but
he wears a little hearing aid so he’s alright
about that.
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Advise to
Writers: Do It! |
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I think that the
result of the writing, whether it’s affirmative
or negative in its reception – that’s another
step. The main step is the doing, the
self-expression, the craft, the polishing the
craft, the learning how to do it, the competing
with oneself, the digging inside oneself.
Thornton used to say, “The most exciting thing
about writing is that you never now what’s going
to run down your sleeve.” And that’s about it.
When I sit down to write every day I don’t know
exactly what I’m going to write. I’m frequently
surprised at what I write. I’m simply
astonished at what I write. And that’s the
excitement of it. Yes, I’ve heard fellow
writers say how difficult it is, how painful it
is, how they can hardly bear it. I tell them to
stop writing. I think if you don’t find writing
a complete joy, a release, an excitement, an
adventure—why do it?
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Advise
to Writers: Discipline |
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On the other hand
I’m frequently offended by people who say to me,
“Gosh, I wish I had time to write a book.” I
feel like saying to them, “Well, honey, it takes
more than time. It takes a lot more than time.
It takes concentration and it takes imagination
and it takes self-discipline.” See, I write
every day. I didn’t always write every day. It
was hard to learn. Thornton Wilder had to whip
that into me. He had to teach me not only about
writing, but he had to teach me about the
discipline of writing. It isn’t going to write
itself. The great Trollope said that the most
important piece of equipment for a writer was a
piece of sealing wax to put between his
posterior and his seat. Well, I know what he
means. If you’re a writer you’ve got to follow
the discipline of writing. You’ve got to get to
it every day and do it. If you wait for
inspiration you’re going to wait a long, long
time. You’re not going to be able to make a
living.
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Advise to
Writers: Live! |
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The one thing many
young writers do not understand—I sympathize and
I try to teach them—writing is not an activity
in itself. Writing is only a reflection of the
life you have lived, so that if you don’t live,
you have nothing to write about. It’s important
to live, to love, to travel, to experience, to
do, to do, to stay active and experience life
and to deal with your fellow man and woman.
Then eventually you’ll have some observations,
you’ll have some ideas, you’ll have something to
write about. You can’t lock yourself into a
room and be a writer—not a good writer. You can
develop splendid penmanship I suppose, but you
can’t be a real writer, because writing isn’t a
thing of itself. Writing is only an expression
of feeling, of emotion, of experience, of
recollection, memory, craft- -all that goes into
it, so that living is the most important part of
writing.
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