[As a tribute to actress Pat Carroll, who died last month, I’m presenting a hybrid post in two parts. The first part will cover her obituary and a more detailed biography, focusing on her career. Part 1 will conclude with a history of the play and Off-Broadway production Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein which I saw in 1980 and, which you’ll read, has stuck in my memory ever since.
[Part 2 of “Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute” will be a “recovery” of the report I might have written for GS3. As with my real-time play reports, this one will end with a survey of the critical response to the production. Part 2 will be published on Wednesday, 17 August.]
Comedic actress Pat Carroll, who had a seven-decade acting career on television, stage, and film, died at 95 on Saturday, 30 July, at her home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The cause was pneumonia, for which she was being treated at her death.
Carroll began on the stage, making her professional début at the Brattle Theatre Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a 1947 summer stock production of Harold J. Kennedy’s A Goose for the Gander with Gloria Swanson. She parlayed that into a long period as a game-show contestant and member of the casts of the popular variety shows on TV, then films (she débuted in 1948’s Hometown Girl) and the comedies, dramas, and musicals of TV’s “golden age.”
By then she was a stage and screen mainstay, returning to the theater in what became her iconic performance as the title figure in the 1979 monodrama Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein by Marty Martin.
The success of GS3 made her not just a respected actor, but a sought-after performer and she made an artistic home in Washington, D.C., especially at the Shakespeare Theatre where she won three Helen Hayes Awards for her work.
The Hayes Awards, recognizing excellence in professional theater in the Washington, D.C., area, were for her performances in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. Carroll was also nominated for a Tony Award in her Broadway début in 1955, Catch A Star!
Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein brought Carroll 1980’s Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Performance in an Off Broadway Play.
Carroll won an Emmy Award in 1957 for Caesar’s Hour, NBC’s live, hour-long television sketch-comedy program starring Sid Caesar. The recording of GS3 won the 1981 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word, Documentary or Drama. In 1991, Carroll received the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Siena College in Albany, New York.
In 2000, Carroll was part of the cast of Songcatcher that won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for their outstanding ensemble performance; Carroll was also nominated for the Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female in the same film.
Carroll became beloved as an actress when she fulfilled a lifelong dream of doing a Disney movie by voicing the character of Ursula, the sea witch, in The Little Mermaid in 1989. If Gertrude Stein was Carroll’s most emblematic role, Ursula was her best known—especially among young audiences.
Patricia Ann “Pat” Carroll was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on 5 May 1927. Her family moved to Los Angeles when Pat was five, and there she began performing in local stage productions. She graduated from Hollywood’s Immaculate Heart High School and then attended the associated Immaculate Heart College (closed in 1981). After hiring on with the United States Army as a “Civilian Actress Technician” in the mid-’40s, Carroll transferred to the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
After graduating from Catholic University with a bachelor’s degree in 1949, Carroll began performing comedy in nightclubs and gained early experience with appearances at vacation resorts. Her 1947 theatrical début with Swanson led to more than 250 stage productions.
The budding character actress married Lee Karsian (1925-91), a William Morris agent, in 1955, but the marriage ended in a divorce in 1976. Carrol and her husband had three children: son Sean Karsian (1956-2009), and daughters Kerry Karsian (b. ca. 1958), a casting director, and Tara Karsian (b. 1965), an actress, screenwriter, and producer.
She made her off-Broadway début in the revue Come What May (Weidman Studio Theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea) in 1950. A talented singer, Carroll earned a 1956 Tony nomination for Catch a Star!, another revue, and then appeared in a number of regional and stock productions of such musicals as On the Town, Once Upon a Mattress, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
Then the new entertainment medium of television discovered Carroll’s talents. First came the variety shows like The Red Buttons Show (1953), The Saturday Night Revue (1954), and Caesar’s Hour (1954-57), which brought her Emmy Awards in 1957 and ’58. Carroll also earned good reviews (and lasting renown) in the recurring part of Bunny Halper (1961-64), the wife of Danny Thomas’s nightclub manager, Charlie Halper (Sid Melton), on the sitcom The Danny Thomas Show.
Carroll’s TV trademark was her distinctive, infectious laugh, which made her a popular panelist on game shows like To Tell the Truth (1961), Password (1961-64), You Don't Say (1963-69), and I've Got a Secret (1972-73). One description of that laugh is:
Pat Carroll’s laugh starts deep in her ample body, knocks her head back, and explodes joyously into the air.
In 1965, Carroll co-starred as Prunella, one of the wicked stepsisters, in the first TV remake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella starring Lesley Ann Warren in the title role. (On 25 April 2013, I posted “Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)” about the première production of the endearing TV musical.)
When her television shows, the early ones of which were broadcast live, were on hiatus Carroll returned to the stage to recharge her batteries, as she put it. Though live TV had some of the performer-spectator relationship, as well as the immediacy, of stage work, Carroll believed that theater was the only place where an actor had a connection to the audience.
In 1979, the actress’s career got a big boost with the monodrama Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, which garnered her multiple awards and excellent reviews. Carroll commissioned the play and co-produced it (under the corporate name Sea-Ker Inc., named for her two oldest children) with the Circle Repertory Company, an Off-Broadway troupe in New York City. (I’ll be writing in detail about this performance later in the post.)
Later, Carroll had recurring and regular roles on the last season of The Ted Knight Show (1986-87; retitled from Too Close for Comfort in its final season) and the Suzanne Somers sitcom She’s the Sheriff (1987-89).
Carroll had only limited success in film, including supporting roles in the slight comedies With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), her second big-screen appearance and Doris Day’s last, and The Brothers O’Toole (1973) with John Astin. Late in her life, Carroll’s film work included Outside Sales (2006), Freedom Writers (2007), Nancy Drew (2007), Bridesmaids (2011), and BFFs (2014).
In the late 1980s, she became a popular choice for voice work on a number of animated films, largely for Disney. The villainous Ursula in The Little Mermaid came in 1989 and Carroll’s rendition of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s “Poor Unfortunate Souls” became something of cult hit among the very young. She did other voices in A Goofy Movie (1995) and following the turn of the millennium, Carroll gave voice to many Disney-related characters on screen, in video games, and on special projects.
The actress then returned to Broadway after 30 years to appear in the short-lived Dancing in the End Zone (1985; 15 previews and 28 regular performances). That was followed by a revival of 1924’s The Show Off (1992; 26 previews and 45 regular performances) and Sophocles’ (by way of London’s Donmar Warehouse and Princeton, New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre) Electra (December 1998-March 1999; 15 previews and 116 regular performances) in which she played the Chorus.
Carroll surprised her fans by taking on Shakespearean roles, earning consistent critical praise. She won Helen Hayes awards for her interpretations of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet (1 November-23 December 1986; Outstanding Supporting Actress, Resident Production), a production I saw as it happens, and Sir John Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (24 April-17 June 1990; Outstanding Lead Actress, Resident Production) for Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger (precursor to today’s Shakespeare Theatre Company).
Carroll won another Helen Hayes award for the title role in Brecht’s Mother Courage, also for the renamed Shakespeare Theatre (1994 Outstanding Lead Actress, Resident Play). A life member of The Actors Studio, other challenging stage roles over the years have included the title role in Ben Jonson’s Volpone (Shakespeare Theatre; 1996) and the Stage Manager in Our Town (Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland; 2001).
Still interested in comedy on occasion, the actress played the Reverend Mother in a number of adaptations of the wacky musical comedy Nunsense. Branching out once again, Carroll took on directing, staging a musical version of Alice in Wonderland for Washington’s Kennedy Center’s children’s theater program in 1993—sort of “Carroll Doing Carroll” (though the Washington Post was quick to point out that there was “no relation, one assumes”). Carroll remounted the show for a cross-country tour in 1994.
Carroll helmed productions of Noel Coward’s Private Lives for the Interact Theatre Company at the Folger Theatre in Washington (1995) and George Furth’s The Supporting Cast (1995) for the Cape Playhouse (Dennis, Massachusetts), the Ogunquit Playhouse (Ogunquit, Maine), and the Westport Country Playhouse (Westport, Connecticut), as well.
Sometime in the early ’90s, Carroll moved to Cape Cod. She was active in the Cape community, lending her talent to entertainments and fundraisers in towns all around mid-Cape, where she apparently had her home. Oddly—though typically for the Cape—there was no obituary for her in the Cape Times at the time of this writing.
(There’s an old quip about the slowness of Cape Codders to adopt as one of their own someone not born in Barnstable County. An old man who originally came to the Cape from Boston as a small boy died after a very long life. The headline of his obituary read: “Boston Man Dies.”)
Forty-three years ago, when she was still performing GS3, Carroll said:
So, by the end of a career, I can look back and say, “I’ve done everything.” That’s marvelous to say about life, for heaven’s sakes, much less a career. Whether you’ve done it poorly or well, I think it’s the fact that you’ve done it that’s the most exciting thing. I will have been fortunate enough to have done everything that I’ve wanted. So any time the great producer in the sky wants to take me up for bigger casting, I’m ready to go.
Well, Carroll didn’t quite do everything in the entertainment field she wanted. At the time of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, she said she’d never done a soap opera. She didn’t want to return to TV, but she voiced the wish to someday do a soap. She never got to.
Carroll had started on the idea that became Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein in 1975 when, recuperating from knee surgery, she began looking around for a woman she’d like to play in a one-woman show. She eventually hit on Stein (1874-1946) and began reading her writings.
(A word about the typography of the play’s title: in many publications—reviews and other coverage—it’s written with commas and, at least in one instance, with slashes. The way Marty Martin composed it, and the way it’s printed on the program cover, on the cover and title page of the published text, on the record album cover, and in advertisements is without any punctuation marks at all.
(I’m sure most readers will recognize that the repetitions of the name in the title is an invocation of Stein’s habit of doing that for emphasis, as in her famous line, “a rose is a rose is a rose.” But Stein also had another habit in her writing: she eschewed punctuation—an occasional period, but few commas or question marks, or much of anything else. Martin replicated that Steinian quirk in the title of his play—and I’ve respected that.)
After considerable reading and research—Carroll read not only Stein’s own works, but everything she could find by others who wrote about her—the actress was very engaged by the American expatriate writer and poet—but not for her writing. Carroll had read some of her work in college and it hadn’t interested her much. But now she read biographies of Stein and the famous woman’s personality, her life, fascinated Carroll.
Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny (now part of Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, on 3 February 1874 to wealthy German-Jewish immigrants. She was the fifth of five children; her brother Leo (1872-1947) was the next youngest. When Stein was three, her family moved to Vienna and then to Paris.
When Stein was 14, her mother died; three years later, her father died as well. Stein’s eldest brother, Michael (1865-1938), moved his four siblings to San Francisco and in 1892 arranged for Gertrude and another sister, Bertha (1870-1924), to live with their mother’s family in Baltimore.
Stein attended Radcliffe College, the women’s college of Harvard University, from 1893 to 1897, where she studied psychology with philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910). After leaving Radcliffe with a bachelor of arts degree magna cum laude, she enrolled at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, where she studied medicine for four years, leaving in 1901. Failing two courses, Stein didn’t complete the medical degree.
In 1903, Stein moved to Paris with Leo, an art critic and painter. Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967) arrived in Paris from San Francisco in 1907, met Stein the day after she landed, and the two would remain partners throughout Stein’s life. The brother and sister Stein took an apartment on the bohemian Left Bank at 27 Rue de Fleurus—Toklas moved in permanently in 1910—which soon became a gathering spot for many young artists and writers, the titans of modern Western culture.
By 1913, Stein’s championship of Cubist painters and her increasingly avant-garde writing caused a split with Leo, who reverted to conventionalism and moved to Florence, Italy. Her writing was profoundly affected by modern painting. In her prose, images and phrases came together in surprising ways—similar to Cubist painting.
Stein’s writing, characterized by its use of words for their associations and sounds rather than their meanings, received considerable interest from other artists and writers, but didn’t find a wide audience. Until, that is, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which was a best-seller.
The next year, Stein and Toklas returned to the States for the first time since they moved to Paris, for a lecture and reading tour of college campuses. The young audiences—Stein was 60 by this time—was absorbed with this odd, new figure. (This became a model for Pat Carroll’s performances in GS3.)
Gertrude Stein died of cancer at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 27 July 1946. She was 72. Alice B. Toklas lived another 20 years, dying in Paris at 89 on 7 March 1967. She died in poverty and poor health and was buried next to Stein. Her longtime partner had willed most of her estate to Toklas, including the art collection, but because their relationship had no legal standing, Stein’s family wrested the art from Toklas’s home when she was away.
Another enticement for Carroll, she’s acknowledged, was a fascination with the period of the ’20s in Paris. Aside from the many Americans who were living there in those years, Carroll saw that it was a time of cross-fertilization of the arts.
Painters, sculptors, writers, composers, musicians, and dancers all knew one another and socialized together, sharing their creative discoveries and experiments, Carroll felt. GS3 is a kind of a look back at the old practices being displaced by modern ones, of the 19th century being overrun by the true beginning of the 20th in art and literature.
Stein, herself, responded to what the Cubists were doing in painting and sculpture—the fragmentation, the stripping away of the conventional structure, and the use of a part to stand for the whole—and tried to employ the same impulse to writing. “Strip the object so only the idea remains, that’s what I did with my writing,” says Stein in the play. “Do with words what they are doing with painting.”
Carroll tried writing the script herself, then she decided she needed someone to do the playwriting. She’d read two of Marty Martin’s bioplays, not yet professionally produced, and in 1976, hired the 26-year-old Texan to write the script.
As it happened, Martin was working on a Stein play—but it had a full cast . . . and was four hours long. (Martin’s scripts tended to be very long, which may be why he hadn’t had a professional production yet.) Carroll convinced him to rewrite his play for a single actor and shorten it to 90 minutes.
The actress and the dramatist were collaborators, working by phone, tape, and letter to exchange ideas, but both she and he affirm that Martin wrote all the words, while Carroll advised on the dramatic direction and the format (to which director Milton Moss also contributed during development).
Living at the time on a farm in High Falls, near New Paltz in upstate-New York, she turned the barn into the “salon” of the Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Company. It was filled with books by and about Stein, copies of doctoral theses, literary journals, and other odds and ends about the best-known salon‐keeper in literary history.
The text isn’t made up of Stein’s writings—aside from not especially caring for them, Carroll didn’t want to have to pay large sums in royalties for Stein’s words—but is drawn largely from her autobiography, deceptively titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and colorful anecdotes about her and her Paris salon told by her illustrious friends like Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Henri Matisse, Marie Laurencin, James Joyce, Ambroise Vollard, Henri Rousseau, Isadora and Raymond Duncan—and, of course, Toklas, herself, Stein’s friend, cook, confidante, lover, muse, secretary, editor, and critic. Most reviewers later declared that Martin and Carroll had captured Stein’s style and personality even without using quotations from her writing.
(A note about the Duncans: in the play, Stein remarks that the sandals she’s wearing were made by Isadora and Raymond Duncan. Raymond [1874-1966] and his Greek wife used to dress in “classical” garb, including tunics and sandals. Their son, Menalkas [1905-69], was required to do so, too, until he rebelled.
(He apparently liked the sandals, though, and started making them to sell. He opened the Duncan Sandal Shop in Provincetown, Cape Cod, which outlived him at least into the 1970s. Duncan sandals, both real ones and knock-offs, were available all over the Cape.)
In the end, GS3 isn’t a scholarly or literary work, but a dramatic one. It isn’t a reading of a writer’s works, but a theatrical presentation. It’s also not a documentary or a role-play—Carroll doesn’t try to imitate Stein’s voice—but an actor’s (and playwright’s) impression of a character who happens to have been a real person.
The actress referred to the character she played as “my Gertrude,” not in the sense of ownership, but as the particular version of the writer’s persona Carroll and her collaborators created. As playwright Martin declared, “You can’t recreate Gertrude Stein anyway. All you can do is try to share the sense of what she has done to you.”
Another revealing comment is by someone who knew Stein: actress, novelist, and playwright Anita Loos (1888-1981), who came backstage and admonished Carroll that in reality, “Gertrude Stein was a bitch.” Then she added, “Anyway, you’re probably doing the Gertrude Stein she would like to have been.”
(Carroll may not have mimicked Stein’s voice, and she said she deliberately didn’t listen to any recordings of Stein or watch a recent documentary film, but reviewers of the production as well as the Caedmon recording attest that the actress caught the expatriate writer’s resonances nonetheless.)
The first draft of the pay, which was entitled Goodbye 27 Rue de Fleurus (a reference to Stein’s Paris apartment for 35 years and the setting for the play), was three hours long. Martin and director Moss helped trim it to 90 minutes. An early version of the play, which is performed in two acts, went on a small try-out tour in July 1977 to the University of Texas College of Fine Arts in Martin’s hometown of Austin.
On 4 and 5 May 1978, the play was tried out again at Pennsylvania State University in State College. Then in February of ’79, the little troupe took the play to Seattle shortly before the New York première. In Carroll’s initial conception, the Stein play was meant for university stages and concert performances, but it outgrew its intent—a sort of theatrical mission-creep.
[This
concludes Part 1 of “Pat Carroll
Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute.”
Part 2 is ready to go and, as I said in my foreword, I’ll be posting it
on 17 August. I hope ROTters will return to this blog for the conclusion
of my tribute to a wonderful actress.]
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