[Kirk’s
newest contribution to Rick On Theater is a profile of George Abbott, the prolific (and all-around) stage-and-film eminence who lived—and worked—until the age of 107. He was
born only a little more than twenty years after the American Civil War and died
on the cusp of the 21st century. His
professional theater début occurred three years before my father was even born
(and 30 years before I was); he appeared in his first film, which he also
wrote, in the earliest days of the silent era.
And yet, he lived so long that some of my earliest theater experiences
were at George Abbott’s hand.
[Kirk
has included a brief list of some of the musicals Abbott staged, and from that list, Fiorello! was the first Broadway show I saw on Broadway—that is to say, in New York City
as distinguished from my hometown of Washington, D.C.. (See my ROT post “A Broadway Baby,” 22 September 2010.) It (and Tom Bosley, who played the title role)
has always held a special place in my memory. I saw A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
the Forum, but on its pre-Broadway stop
in Washington (the National Theatre). Do
any of you remember when they used to do out-of-town try-outs instead of
previews in New York? I saw Once
Upon a Mattress also, but later, when
Imogene Coca (remember her—from Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows?) had replaced Carol Burnett; it must have
been a post-Broadway tour stop in D.C., but I no longer remember. (I got to see Buster Keaton as King Sextimus,
though!)]
I
wish I had the capability to write a full-scale biography of George Abbott, the
director, playwright, script doctor, screenwriter and movie director, producer,
and actor who lived from 1887 to 1995. There doesn’t appear to be one, and this
is puzzling, because although I’m not sure how familiar his name is to people
today, he is one of the great characters of the Broadway theater.
He
was also one of its greatest successes, over most of his very long life. It is
almost absurd to consider how many shows, hits or not, he was involved with.
Here, as a sample, is a list of some of the stage musicals he was associated
with in one capacity or another. Remember, working on musicals was only a part
of his career:
Jumbo (director), 1935
On Your Toes (book), 1936
The Boys From
Syracuse
(book, director, producer), 1938
Pal Joey (director,
producer), 1940
On the Town (director), 1944
High Button Shoes (director), 1947
Where’s Charley? (book, director),
1948
Call Me Madam (director), 1950
Wonderful Town (director), 1953
Me and Juliet (director), 1953
The Pajama Game (book, director),
1954
Damn Yankees (book, director),
1955
New Girl in Town (book, director),
1957
Once Upon a Mattress (director), 1959
Fiorello! (book, director),
1959
A Funny Thing
Happened on the Way to the Forum (director), 1962
Damn Yankees (revival)
(consultant, book revisions), 1994
A
quick look at that list shows that he worked with the composers and lyricists
Richard Rodgers and Larry Hart; Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein; Frank
Loesser; Irving Berlin; Betty Comden,
Adolph Green, and Leonard Bernstein; Mary Rodgers; Jerry Bock and Sheldon
Harnick; Richard Adler and Jerry
Ross; Jule Styne; Cole Porter; and Stephen Sondheim. That’s virtually a Who’s
Who of songwriters in the “golden age” of the American musical theater. About
the only major composer-lyricist team missing from the list are Alan Jay Lerner
and Frederick Loewe.
There’s
also a Pulitzer Prize in that list (for Fiorello!),
four Tony Awards, four additional Tony Award nominations, two “special” Tony
Awards, and an Academy Award nomination, plus awards from the Writers Guild of
America and the Directors Guild of
America for his work on the film version of Damn Yankees (1958).
There
is an extensive two-part interview with Abbott on YouTube recorded in 1991,
when Abbott was 103 years old. He looks quite severe, but almost immediately
one starts to see a glint in his eye. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--FEkt0mMUE)
He
was known for his candor – his frankness. For example, Abbott was asked in the
interview: how was [the actor] Zero Mostel to work with? “He was a bastard,” he
replies. “He was unruly. He was a genius, but he didn’t care about the other
actors one bit. . . . He was a very selfish actor.” Abbott recalls that he said
to Mostel, “You don’t listen,” and Mostel replied, “That’s what my wife says!”
Abbott’s
answers are succinct and, like the man himself, they don’t waste time. I say
that about him based on one of the best pieces written about Abbott that I’ve
found, in William Goldman’s superlative book about Broadway The Season (1969). I would recommend the
chapter on Abbott to anyone wanting to direct; Goldman’s description of
Abbott’s process is fascinating [see Kirk’s “William Goldman’s The Season” on Rick On Theater,
30 April 2013].
Goldman
stresses how Abbott as a director simply loathed any waste of time; there was
too much work to be done on a show for a director to allow precious rehearsal
hours to be frittered away.
The
chapter on Abbott is titled, “How Are Things in the Teachers’ Room Tonight?”
The title is a line in a musical Abbott directed [The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (1968), based on the stories
by Leo Rosten with music by Paul Nassau and Oscar Brand, lyrics by Brand and
Nassau, and book by Benjamin Bernard Zavin], spoken at the end of a scene
change, and Goldman points out what a characteristic Abbott line it is: the
audience immediately knows exactly where and when the new scene is taking
place.
I
would quote Goldman’s entire chapter on George Abbott if I could, but instead I
will comment on Abbott’s autobiography, “Mister
Abbott,” published by Random House in 1963, when Abbott was a mere seventy-six
years old, and now apparently out of print.
Abbott
was born to a low-income family in New York State, and he spent a fair part of
his youth as a cowboy – literally – “farmed out” to a ranch where among other
things he learned to ride a horse with abandon, a skill that came in
surprisingly usefully now and then in later life. He developed an interesting
attitude toward the inequalities of society:
. . . the rich boys always have an edge over
the poor boys. For many years this obvious injustice made me unreasonably
prejudiced against the rich, but when I became rich myself, the prejudice
somewhat abated. I have now become very tolerant about people’s undeserved
wealth or indeed any other attractive quality which may fall to them. Some
people are born rich, some with good looks, some with brains, some with
personality, and some with humor; and whatever these qualities happen to be, it
is foolish to quibble or to worry about the injustices of the world. It’s part
of the man; what he does with it is another matter. To carry the thought a
little further: if in later years you are liked or admired because you are
successful in your profession, it is foolish to speculate how people would feel
about you if you were a ditch digger. It is much more practical to accept your
assets without cavil and to enjoy them, and to grant the people who happen to
have been born rich or handsome the same privilege.
He
developed some of what we might think of as “cowboy traits.” He was direct and
candid – “. . . how pleasant indeed is just plain honesty,” he writes in “Mister Abbott”, and the preface to the
book is spent telling how the publisher made him use the title and he didn’t
like it. (Nearly everyone called him “Mister Abbott” through most of his
career. The Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, known as the SDCF,
in 1985 instituted the “Mr. Abbott” Award.)
Throughout
his long life he enjoyed the outdoors and sports, including golf (particularly
in his later years) and croquet, a favorite game with the Algonquin Round Table
set, the group of wits including Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy
Parker, and others that regularly met for lunch and talk at the Algonquin Hotel
in New York City during the 1920’s, and one that its members played avidly:
After the opening night [of Room Service] Neysa thought I would want
to stay in the city until the reviews came out, but I told her that I was sure
it was a success and that we might as well drive straight to the country,
because we had an important croquet game in the morning.
“Neysa,”
incidentally, is Neysa McMein (1889-1949), an artist and a fascinating
character. Abbott devotes as many pages in his book to her as he does to
anything else, and it seems clear that he was in love with her and, some
assume, had “an affair” with her. (She and her husband had an “open marriage.”)
In any case he makes no secret that he was devoted to her. In all Abbott was
married three times; he outlived one wife and divorced one, and one outlived
him.
The
book picks up its pace when Abbott begins to work in the theater. He first
worked in theater as an actor, and he continued in that trade sporadically even
after he had become a noted director, and after he began producing his own
shows and those of others. He knew he was entering a difficult field of work:
There is gold in them there Broadway hills,
but those who come to seek fame and fortune face hardships and danger. The weak
are trampled on ruthlessly and the foolish die by the wayside. I don’t mean to
imply that only the good guys get there – many devious and untrustworthy
characters reach the goal. But if the bad guy succeeds, he does it by keeping a
level head and knowing his own limitations; he does not forget that in this
cruel wilderness he is going to need someone else to guide him. The unmarked
graves and the whitened bones along Broadway belong to men who suffered
delusions of grandeur, who thought that they did it alone when they only
watched it being done.
In
his book Abbott makes it clear that many of the shows he worked on were flops.
He accepts this as part of the job and doesn’t worry too much about it:
How does a fellow feel when he has had a
series of failures? I don’t remember being too depressed. I felt that it was
obvious that life was made up of both success and failure, of the smooth and
rough, and I didn’t think that I had lost my ability – though I realized that
if any of my associates were interested to discuss the matter, they might be of
the opinion that I was slipping. I have always been a strong believer in
Emerson’s law of compensation. Out of every bad comes some good; out of the
mistakes we make, we profit thereby. Contrarily, from success there is left a
residue of conceit – a cockiness and an over-confidence which handicaps our
next effort. The course of a man’s achievement goes up and down like the graph
of a stock market: not regularly, not predictably, but inevitably.
He
has a perspective on himself and his work, but I doubt that anyone would label
that perspective “neurotic,” although he says:
All authors are neurotic. I’ll go even
further: everybody in the creative side of the theater is neurotic. . . .
Generally, however, the neuroses are under control and a certain objectivity is
in command until the production is launched.
He
comes across as a person of talent and skill, clearheaded about both. For
example:
I believed that the mistakes I had made were
in choice of subject matter and perhaps in writing, but not in direction. It
seemed to me that my direction of these failures was just as conscientious and
just as good as it had been with the big successes. I have always been very
sure of myself as a director – perhaps even conceited. I have felt that I have
directed my shows better than anyone else could have done; what’s more, and
this is a very silly thing to admit, I have usually felt when seeing other
people’s direction I could improve on it.
As
a director he was known as a fast worker (he tells William Goldman that he
probably did less preparatory work than other directors do), a sure hand, someone
who knew what he wanted. He makes a comment about his reputation that says a
lot about him, because he makes a joke about a particular kind of obsessiveness
but doesn’t back away from it:
“Exactly what is the Abbott touch?” an
interviewer asked me the other day. “I make them say their final syllables,” I
answered. A joke, but with much sense to it.
Perhaps
his style of directing is as much a matter of “feel” as anything else, a sort
of sixth sense of how a play ought to work:
Many good plays are diffuse plays, but the
big hits have unity. The difference between the passable success and the smash
hit is that the latter never lets down – that in it each scene leads to the
next with interest, so that when it is over there is a feeling of wanting more,
a feeling that no matter how long the show is it has been a short evening.
It
seems clear that one of his major strengths as a director was that he could
write. I suspect that to at least some extent he looked at a play he directed
in the same way he might look at a play he wrote, with the same eye toward its
strengths and weaknesses. He was an anonymous “play doctor” for many
productions. He knew the kind of writer he was:
There are playwrights I know who, given a set
of characters and ideas, will start writing without knowing exactly where their
plot is going, but my whole training and experience makes me place
construction, or story line, first, and words second. A playwright seems to me
like an architect – he must know what the whole building is like before he
begins, and he must put up the iron girders first and then after the unadorned
frame is standing begin to add the things that show. A novelist can afford to
wander, but just let a playwright bring in a new set of unrelated characters in
the middle of Act Two and see what happens to him.
His
writing may also have helped him direct because, as a writer, he was a born
collaborator with others, as he knows:
Looking back dispassionately, I can admit
that the theatre was not robbed of any jewels by the blindness of playreaders.
They all told me the same thing: “You have good dialogue and good construction,
but the idea itself isn’t interesting.” That, I fear, is the story of my
writing life. I was not a successful playwright until I took parasitical
advantage of some other people’s ideas. All my success has been either in
rewriting some piece which was created by another author, or in adaptations for
a musical book of such standard works as Charley’s
Aunt or A Comedy of Errors.
He
is proud of “discovering” numerous previously unknown and talented theater
workers, including but not limited to actors – Harold Prince (b. 1928), the
celebrated producer and director, was one of Abbott’s protégés. Of course he
worked with stars too. For example, after an argument over a line with Eugenia
Leontovich (1900? – 1993), a noted émigré actress,
I blew my top. I railed. I told her what I
thought of her phony pretensions on art, which didn’t mean a thing when it came
down to cases – she was just a selfish little ham trying to steal a scene from
another actor. I got up and stormed out to the street. She followed. I slammed
the car door and was waiting for the explosion. But instead of anger I heard a
rather calm voice, “You know, it is quite interesting to see a man of your
temperament get angry.” No wonder we don’t understand the Russians.
He
is always willing to give others credit – as a good collaborator ought – but he
was certainly no pushover. I thought his comment on reviewers was particularly
interesting:
. . . in general, critics are honest in doing
their very best, sitting through a dozen tedious plays to see one exciting one;
trying to inform you about what is good and what they think its value is. . . .
There is one type of critic, however, who should be eliminated: the drunk. It
seems as though we always have one with us, and it is not fair to us in the theatre
to be judged by a man who is only half there.
Thinking
about his parents, Abbott writes:
It seems to me natural that old people
die. Indeed, sometimes it seems a shame
that they don’t die sooner. By this I mean only that senescence and second-childhood
is an unattractive age and that it would be better if all of us could be
spared. My parents had not reached that stage. I believe that they were happier
than they had ever been, and I had helped them to reach that happiness.
He
wrote that when he was seventy-six, and, conceivably to his own surprise, he lived
another thirty two years after that – a very long, very productive life. He
continued to work when he could, and when he wasn’t in demand, he continued to
dance and play golf. When he died he was working on revisions on the book of a
musical he had written. He had character, and he was one.
[I
spoke to “Mr. Abbott” once on the phone, sometime back in the mid-1980s (when
he’d have been a mere stripling in his
late 90’s). I was editing Directors
Notes, the in-house newsletter of the
American Directors Institute, and Geoff Shlaes, the organization’s artistic
director, asked me to call Abbott’s office and invite him to give the keynote
at one of ADI’s programs. I don’t
remember what program it was, and I don’t know why Shlaes asked me to make the
call (beside Shlaes, ADI’s secretary was also present at the time; I wasn’t an
officer of the organization). Abbott
turned down the invitation, but what’s significant in my memory is that he
answered the phone himself, which I never expected. It wasn’t that I didn’t think he’d deign to pick
up the phone—Kirk said, “It was just like him to answer his own phone”—but I
figured it was his office in the middle of the workday and he’d be busy so he’d
have someone answering and routing his incoming calls—a secretary or an assistant. I was taken unawares and didn’t handle it
with aplomb. I was so flustered, I
bobbled the invitation, and when I explained why I’d gotten all tongue-tied, I
think he said something like, “Who did you expect?” Indeed.]
No comments:
Post a Comment