Broadway Babylon (27 page)

W
HEN IT COMES TO THE TITLE
of Broadway’s most-hated individual, there’s no contest. Producer-director Jed Harris (1900–1979) proudly asserted, “If there is one word in the English language I hate, it’s the word cooperation.” After postwar play production costs ballooned and he had to yield his complete control, Harris became extremely unhappy. No co-producers or limited partnerships for him. He directed but did not produce Arthur Miller’s epochal
The Crucible
in 1953, which was the usual grim experience for all involved, but this time also for Harris.

He refused to continue directing for other people, no matter how esteemed or successful the play. Ego was all, even though Harris often claimed
that he loved the theater but had no interest at all in “show biz.” By the ’50s he’d alienated almost everyone whose path he’d crossed. Associates and relatives alike dropped him. “Friends, he never had,” said playwright George S. Kaufman, who wouldn’t speak to him for forty years. When a mutual acquaintance declared that Jed Harris was his own worst enemy, Kaufman famously responded, “Not while I’m alive!” Kaufman noted, “Some people have a talent for friendship. Harris has a talent for making enemies.”

Ironically, Harris’s hatefulness made him all the more famous. Laurence Olivier based the look and mannerisms of his Richard III, captured on film, upon Harris. The Englishman and his then-more-famous wife Jill Esmond experienced Harris while costarring on Broadway in 1933 in the gay-themed
The Green Bay Tree
. The gleefully homophobic producer-director alluded more than once to that closeted pair’s bisexuality. Playwright Ben Hecht penned a nasty
roman à clef
about his former colleague, and Walt Disney’s Big Bad Wolf was also based on Jed Harris, who claimed he was the first theatrical personality to make
Time
magazine’s cover, in 1928.

In 1926, Harris had shot to fame via the huge hit
Broadway
. He also had hit plays with
The Royal Family, The Front Page
, and
Coquette
(it starred Lillian Gish, who actually showed up at Harris’s memorial service; the 1929 film version won Mary Pickford her Oscar). Between 1930 and 1947 Harris was active in ten theatrical seasons, directing and producing such hits as
A Doll’s House, Our Town
, and
The Heiress
. But despite the successes, fewer and fewer people were willing to work with him.

“He was a bully,” said stage actress Beatrice Straight, later best known for her brief but Oscar-winning turn as William Holden’s cuckolded wife in
Network
. “He made a contest of everything. Nothing could be on the level … [and] he always tried to position things so that one person, preferably him, won and the other lost. Life was entirely adversarial for him.”

Harris’s brilliant early career was doomed. He himself predicted that he would part prematurely with success. Biographer Martin Gottfried offered, “Arrogance, egoism, cruelty, and Machiavellianism kept his talent from being spent, and that was his greatest tragedy.”

Finally, Harris not only fell from the Broadway scene, he landed into poverty. He sometimes borrowed, then refused to pay—and other times utright stole—from his few friends, whose hospitality he typically abused, especially women’s, since they generally put up with more from him.

Not long before his death, Harris was tapped to appear on Dick Cavett’s TV talk show. The stage-struck host, who repeatedly called his guest a legend, had him on for an unprecedented five nights—they aired posthumously. Many people were surprised to learn that Jed Harris had still been alive. Actor-director Jose Ferrer explained, “Jed was embarrassed by his financial status,
yet he didn’t let on. He kept a low profile and traveled the country. Whenever he met up with people he knew, he acted as if they should feel honored that he’d turned up.”

The Cavett show performance was unforgettable. Harris characterized himself as a patient if not a tolerant man: “Well, most people in the theater are idiots, fools of one kind or another.” He spoke of actress Ruth Gordon, whom he said lacked beauty but had made a go of
A Doll’s House
via her talent. Harris had fathered a son named Jones via the unlovely Gordon. He admitted, “I don’t like my children better than anybody else’s.” Cavett reverently asked if he kept in touch with his son?

“As rarely as possible. I don’t particularly like him.” The man added that the child’s birth was something Ruth Gordon “did willfully. It was part of being an actress, having an illegitimate child by a famous director. It had nothing to do with me.”

Harris was paid $500 for his TV guest spot. After cashing the check, he pretended not to have received it and demanded that another be sent, right away.

Harris’s New York City memorial service, in May 1980, was attended by his ten-year-old granddaughter, even though he’d never bothered to meet her. Jones Harris showed up. Jed Harris’s two living ex-wives did not; one had scissored all his photos out of her albums. His younger brother didn’t attend. Nor did most of his relatives or associates, New York–based or otherwise. The granddaughter came with her great-aunt. Her mother, Harris’s daughter, didn’t go, explaining later, “I don’t believe there is a person walking the face of the Earth who would have a good word to say for my father.”

That included the senior nurse at the hospital where he died: “He was in the worst possible condition you could be in and still be alive.” His congestive heart failure was exacerbated by severe complications. Blistered and oozing, he was rude and defiant to the end, and his bed curtains were drawn for the sake of the staff. The nurse added, “If you’re going to do what I do, you can’t be superstitious or religious. But if there’s anything to the idea of being punished in the way you die for the way you lived your life, I’ll tell you this: the only other patient we ever had who suffered the way Mr. Harris did was Giuseppe Gambino. You know, the Mafia don.”

The same year he died, Harris published “a unique memoir of the theatre” titled
A Dance on the High Wire
. It told little of the Jed Harris story. Jose Ferrer felt, “It’s mostly hyperbole, with a rather jarring mix of fiction and self-promotion.… Jed didn’t leave out the hurtful things in order not to hurt. He simply left out what didn’t matter to him. He’d have been quite willing to admit that he told his own son, ‘You’re nothing, and you always will be nothing.’ Jed would have just shrugged as if to say, ‘I said it, so what?’ ”

The “unique memoir” naturally contained photos of its subject, but not one of his parents, purported loves, offspring, colleagues, or any other human being beside Jed Harris.

“S
hockingly often, the producer is an enemy of the stage,” ventured producer Richard Barr (
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sweeney Todd
). That he didn’t become a household name as Broadway producers go was likely due to his integrity and focusing on the play. Broadway historian Andrew B. Harris noted, “Barr was one of those extraordinary producers who felt that the playwright, not the star or the director, was of central importance in the theatre.”

Frederick Combs, costar of Mart Crowley’s
The Boys in the Band
, produced by Barr (see
Chapter 16
, “The Curse of
The Boys in the Band
”), said, “A producer, or showman, like David Merrick was first and foremost for himself … with or without taste or interest in productions of social significance and quality. Richard’s for the actor, for the theatre, and the play comes first.”

Perhaps because he was gay, Barr (1917—1989) was strongly pro-underdog. Though he knew Broadway was chiefly money oriented, he believed theater should have a higher calling than just profits. “Light comedies and run-of-the-mill musicals have their place,” he felt, “and I even enjoy them now and then, but that’s not what I want to do for a—for want of a better word—living. I have to be loving what I do for a living.”

Barr, who’d trained as a director, developed a professional relationship with playwright William Inge, who sought to present his native Midwest in a more realistic, enlightening way. But by the mid-1950s, Broadway’s financial
demands often quashed pioneering, experimental, or “radical” material. More and more playwrights were affected and inhibited. Inge broke through with
Picnic
but advised Barr, “I have a major hit on Broadway. I am going to be very rich. And I am miserably unhappy.”

Inge, who eventually committed suicide after his gilt-edged run of hit plays ended, was depressed that director Joshua Logan had joined with management to demand that Inge rewrite
Picnic
’s final act as “less sad and less frightening”—else no production. For the sake of a wider audience, the playwright reluctantly gave in. He felt betrayed by Logan, whom he knew to be gay though very deeply closeted. Revue producer Ben Bagley has stated, “Logan was dedicated to the buck and snaring the biggest audience going.

“Of course,” Bagley said, “he featured beefcake when he got the opportunity, clothing it in diaphanous heterosexuality,” a famous example being the mostly topless sailors in
South Pacific
singing “There Is Nothing Like a Dame.” Broadway gays were basically divided into the Logans, often very commercially successful and usually with-wife, and the Barrs, Inges, and—soon to come—Albees.

Appalled by what was expected of and extracted from William Inge, Richard Barr aimed his energies at Off-Broadway, where the financial stakes were lower and a playwright-supportive theater was still possible. In 1960, at forty-two, Barr broke through as a producer after optioning newcomer Edward Albee’s one-acter
The Zoo Story
and presenting it Off-Broadway. (It had premiered the year before in Berlin—deemed too offbeat and intense for United States audiences.) The ultimately acclaimed work didn’t proceed without problems, partly because of television, which co-opted so many theatrical performers. Actor George Maharis,
Zoo Story
’s Jerry, found out he couldn’t be on stage for long, as a TV pilot he’d filmed,
Route 66
, had been picked up. (He later left the hit series for a movie career that fizzled, then eventually became
Playgirl
’s first celebrity nude, well-enough endowed to prompt TV host Johnny Carson to note that when he’d viewed the centerfold in which Maharis posed next to a horse, Carson felt sorry for the horse.)

During rehearsals there were clashes between Maharis and director Milton Katselas. Producer Barr sided with his star. Sal Mineo, who later rehearsed
PS. Your Cat Is Dead!
with Katselas in Los Angeles, declared, “Milton is a star in his own mind. Some directors are failed actors, some are would-be stars. A lot of them, out here, become temperamental and egotistic. I like Milt, but … let’s just say that beside himself is one of his favorite positions.”

Barr requested that Katselas exit the production, but playwright Albee objected. A compromise ensued whereby Katselas received directorial credit in the program although Barr took over final rehearsals, using his early directorial skills.

R
ICHARD
B
ARR’S COMPANY
, Theatre 1960, was able to reach wider audiences via Albee’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
in 1962. The adopted grandson of vaudeville impresario E.F. Albee, Edward (born in 1928) grew estranged from his ultra-conservative adoptive parents. His latter success,
Three Tall Women
, was based on his severely bigoted mother. Edward arrived on the theater scene when its Big Three playwrights, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and heterosexual Arthur Miller were on the decline. Few could have predicted Albee would inherit their dramatic crown.