Thornton Wilder (72 page)

Wilder was in Hamden for the Christmas holidays, although there was little to celebrate: More bad news came in a letter from one of Charlotte's doctors: “I have to report that your sister fails to hold the improvement which followed her last electric shock therapy course. She has again become withdrawn, restless and delusional.” He advised that the family postpone further visits to Charlotte until she was “again improved.”
⁶⁷

Amid travel and turmoil, surrounded by global and family upheaval, Wilder spent New Year's Day 1942 in the house on Deepwood Drive. He lost himself in his work, writing the last lines of a draft of the final act
The Skin of Our Teeth,
believing his war play to be more relevant now than ever before.

30

“THE CLOSING OF THE DOOR”

The closing of the Door—that to Civilian Life—is almost pure joy and the anticipation of what's ahead: being pure instrument, however moderately, in a movement-wave that's so important to me . . .

—THORNTON WILDER TO ROBERT M. HUTCHINS,

June 15, 1942

 

The United States (1940s)

W
ilder finished
The Skin of Our Teeth
at “three o'clock on New Year's Day,” he reported to Alexander Woollcott. “It shows how that fine American family, Mr. and Mrs. George Antrobus, their children, Henry and Gladys, and their girl, Sabina, of Excelsior, New Jersey, go through the Ice Age, the Flood and a War, with a lot of screaming, absurdity and a few shreds of dignity.”
¹
The play represented, he told Sibyl Colefax, his “thoughts about endurance and fortitude in War.”
²

He spent the first months of 1942 revising the text of
The Skin of Our Teeth
and working on production plans—hoping to secure the best director, the best producer, the best actors—and hurrying to finish
The Alcestiad.
Charlotte's illness and his upcoming military service prompted a new urgency to make money—an imperative that would override his earlier resolve never to write for money, and that would drive many of his personal and professional decisions from that time on. “I have two dependents—a 69 year-old mother (mighty alive still) and a sister—Charlotte—who has been a whole year in a hospital for mental diseases,” he wrote to Stein and Toklas in March. “These two play-subjects are all that I have in my knapsack and when they are written I temporarily close the door on the whole matter of writing and turn to other things”—chiefly military service.
³
He fervently hoped that both plays would make it to Broadway and “sustain” his family in his absence.
⁴

At Archie MacLeish's request, Wilder wrote scripts for two military-training films—
Manuelito Becomes an Air Cadet
and
Your Community and the War Effort,
both for the Office of War Information. There were other overtures: “Now the Government's asked me to do—and really plan—a large movie ‘like Our Town'—how a small community collects itself to live under War condition,” he told Woollcott, but the project did not come to pass.
⁵
Wilder marveled at the swift mobilization of personnel and factories in the United States now that the country was at war. The “basic American” was “swinging into view,” he said, appreciating “the miraculous conducted as though it were the matter-of-course. Old America.”
⁶

He raced against the clock during the first three months of 1942, trying to finish
The Skin of Our Teeth,
get it into production, and get himself into uniform. He wrote to Woollcott in February, “I sign up for conscription soon. I'm within two months of the Limit. I feel somehow as though I were in better condition to face a board now than I was 25 years ago.”
⁷
He found himself mired in decisions to be made about the play, and certain key decisions were thwarted by tentative acceptances, long silences, rejection. After weeks of delay, Jed Harris—“the Ideal Director and the Atrocious Manager,” as Wilder called him—turned down Wilder's invitation to direct the play, ostensibly because he saw problems with acts 2 and 3, which Wilder himself recognized.
⁸

He began to see that the play needed serious revisions. “Lately, my eyes have been opened with a shock to one aspect of it,” he wrote to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne on February 5, 1942:

 

It's struck some people as “defeatist.” I have only read it to a few friends, mostly our academic group in New Haven. One distinguished doctor said that it haunted him for days but that “the government ought to prevent its being shown”; others variously said it was “anti-war” or “pacifistic.” And I suddenly remember that Sibyl, who heard the first two acts in London, said that the second Act was “so cruel.”
⁹

 

Now Wilder said, “I could see with amazement that I had given so wrong an impression of what I meant.” He blamed himself for his “New England shame-facedness and shyness of the didactic, the dread of moralizing, the assumption that the aspirational side of life can be taken for granted.” He recognized that he needed to weave in a scene of “conjugal love and trust between Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus,” and to give “open voice” to their “confidence, through discouragement, in the unshakable sense that work and home and society move on towards great good things.” He was mortified to see that “the Second Act—vindication of the unit of the family—exhibits only the exasperating side of children and the ‘nagging' side of Mrs. Antrobus,” and he recognized now that “the positive affirmative elements of Act Three are muted and evaded to the point of spiritual thinness.” Wilder decided to revise the play with the chief purpose of infusing it with “the tone of warmth and courage and confidence about the human adventure” he had “too much ‘taken for granted.' ”
¹⁰

As Wilder revised
The Skin of Our Teeth
, he also had to change his expectations about a director and actors. He turned to two new colleagues to bring the play to life in the theater: the producer Michael Myerberg, manager of Leopold Stokowski's recent tour of South America with the American Youth Orchestra, and the director Elia Kazan, whose work Wilder knew through the Group Theatre. Wilder had met Myerberg with Stokowski at Mabel Dodge Luhan's house a few years earlier. Myerberg was young—about thirty-eight—but Cordell Hull had recommended him highly, on the basis of his work in South America. Wilder thought Myerberg would be good at “dickering, middleman, promotion”—managing all the behind-the-scenes logistics that were essential to a play's success on Broadway.
¹¹
Furthermore he was “honest” and “very effective and capable,” Wilder told Dwight Dana—and “very enthusiastic about the play.” While Wilder would have preferred Jed Harris at the helm, and after him, Orson Welles, Jed had said no, and Welles was “deeply engaged in a new movie.”
¹²

“I think Kazan is the director I've been hunting for,” Wilder decided in February. “Fine comedy; superb stage movement; and dry economy in emotion.” In addition Kazan was also “very enthusiastic about the play.”
¹³
Fredric March, who had a distinguished career in Hollywood (he had won an Academy Award in 1932 for his role in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
) and on Broadway, was eager to play Mr. Antrobus, and Wilder said he would “settle” for Mrs. March—Florence Eldridge—as Mrs. Antrobus “with the proviso that she and ourselves might find her unsuited as rehearsals advance.”
¹⁴
But Kazan and March were tied up with other projects until late spring, and if the production had to be postponed until fall, Wilder thought they might have to “begin from scratch and try for Orson [Welles] who is an old friend of mine and never forgets that I ‘discovered' him.”
¹⁵

It was difficult to cast the crucial role of Sabina. Myerberg considered the comedienne Fanny Brice, and Wilder thought she would be a good choice, but nothing came of that. Although many people assumed Wilder had Ruth Gordon in mind when he created Sabina, the record is not clear, and in any case Gordon was tied up with another show. “So about Sabina,” Wilder wrote to Gordon on June 11, 1942, implying that she was on his mind when he created the role:

 

You were Sabina in Quebec; just as you were Mrs. Levi in Tucson. I roared at you. I knelt before you. I carried home your flowers after the first performance. Never have I been so happy in the theatre.

I feel quite calm in the fact that you will one day be Mrs. Levi and Sabina in the future. . . . Besides, it looks as though you were going to insinuate yourself into my future plays, too
.
¹⁶

 

Myerberg was determined to persuade a big star to play Sabina—and, although he did not think she was “a big theatre personality,” he sent the script to the flamboyant, controversial Tallulah Bankhead, who was reportedly suggested for the role by Ned Sheldon.
¹⁷
Bankhead was almost as notorious for her spicy vocabulary and her myriad love affairs as she was lauded for her film and stage career. Although she had a Paramount Pictures contract beginning in 1931, during the thirties she did most of her best work onstage in New York (
Dark Victory, Rain, Something Gay, Reflected Glory, The Little Foxes
) and most of her notable film work in the 1940s (Alfred Hitchcock's
Lifeboat
in 1944; Otto Preminger's
A Royal Scandal
in 1948). The glamorous woman with the deep voice had a reputation as a diva—and, as it turned out, the name recognition and celebrity to pull people into the theater. However, she could and would be capricious and uncontrollable as “the obstreperous daughter of nature, Sabina,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott. “She not only loves the part, but knows every corner of the play. Already she's asking that such-and-such a line be transferred to her rôle. That's right. Sabina's greedy—to thrust herself forward, and she can scream and protest and interfere and raise hell as much as she wants.”
¹⁸
Wilder remembered years later that Bankhead as Sabina was “a wonderful being, but she never gave the same performance twice.”
¹⁹

Florence Reed, a skilled character actress who had first appeared onstage in 1902, would be hired to play the Fortune Teller. The handsome young Montgomery Clift joined the cast as Henry Antrobus. In the spring of 1942, with rehearsals for
The Skin of Our Teeth
set to begin in the fall, Wilder had done all he could do about the production except revise his play. He turned his focus to other work, especially
The Alcestiad,
sending Woollcott a list of his “Various plans” for the upcoming months: First on the list was “Removing Charlotte to a less expensive but equally conscientious hospital.” Next he was thinking about renting out the house on Deepwood Drive and persuading his mother and Isabel to move into a “bungalow in some college town farther South—Chapel Hill or Winter Park.” The last item on the list was the preparation of the text of the reading edition of
The Skin of Our Teeth,
to be published by Harper & Brothers on December 18, 1942, just a month after the show opened.
²⁰

For all the delays and detours with the play, Wilder was not “downcast” except about one thing, he told Harold Freedman, his theater agent: “I'm always forgetting that I'm the head of a household and am presumed to be earning my living by my pen. Jed used to foster that notion that I'm a gentleman of vast private means; I'm damned if I'll fall in with that rôle forever.”
²¹

 

“I JUST
got a thousand-word telegram,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott on May 12, 1942. “Mr. Hitchcock of the Thriller movies wants me to come out to California for six weeks and write the screen treatment of a movie. He recounts the plot. It's about American small-town life and [a] big-city murderer. I'm a consultant on small-town life to the tune of fifteen thousand dollars and murder has no secrets for him.”
²²
Because of his admiration for
Our Town,
Hitchcock wanted Wilder to write the script for
Shadow of a Doubt.
This would only be Hitchcock's sixth movie to be made in the United States, although he had been working on motion pictures in his native England as a crew member, actor, or director since 1921, when he was twenty-two.

Wilder inherited a scenario called “Uncle Charlie,” which Hitchcock had purchased from the writer Gordon McDonell, who based his story idea on a newspaper article reporting on a serial killer who had strangled several women, and had been discovered and arrested while he was visiting his family in Hanford, a small California town.
²³
True crime aside, Wilder thought the plot as Hitchcock outlined it was “corny,” and doubted whether he could “supply one convincing small-town speech.” Besides that, he didn't have six weeks free, for he was tentatively scheduled to begin his army training July 1. But he was determined to find a compromise “with time, art and money.” Perhaps he could go for five weeks for ten thousand dollars.
²⁴
His agent, Rosalie Stewart, worked out a favorable contract that accommodated his schedule and still secured the fifteen-thousand-dollar fee.

“My dependents are much on my mind,” Wilder wrote. “Charlotte is not getting better and must be moved to a less expensive institution. If my play should fail—or be unproduceable because of a bombing in New York—I should be supporting my kith-and-kin from capital. If the War should be very long my family would be living in a Florida cracker's house on a captain's pay. . . . So I'll go to California.”
²⁵
He said good-bye to family and friends on the East Coast, and after an exuberant weekend in New York on May 16 and 17, Wilder found himself with a “diffused hang-over,” he wrote Woollcott, “and God knows what I will be saying next. I am on the verge of the beautiful inane, spent my youth there, but never again.”
²⁶