TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW with EMMET LAVERY by Mae Mallory Krulak and John O' Connor for the RESEARCH CENTER FOR THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia 22030 January 5, 1976 Encino, California Revised and Corrected by interviewee

Transcribed by Madge Nickelhoff December, 1977

EL: ... Literally went through the cart and put down every play. . . I don't think I could do it. But, he was a real researcher, and he just went through the whole thing, project by project, page by page, and that's how we reconstructed the production “record from the scrapbooks."

JO: That's an impressive book.

MK: I have my copy of Arena right with me today. When I went to see Mrs. Lawson, she said, ''Won't you leave this with me? I can't find my copy of Arena." And I said, "No, it's my Bible, I don't . . . "

(Laugh)

EL: I know.

MK: "don't know what's going on, unless I check. . .”

EL: I have one copy, and I don't loan it out to anybody. You know, what's insurance, if it got lost? (pause) Well, my. Is this for me, or is. . .

JO: No, we have to have it. (Laugh) We do have duplicate photographs of the productions, and I must have left them back there, but I'll send those to you, if you'd like. There are some of these photos in here that ...

EL: I don 't know whether I ever mentioned what a beautiful production. Most imaginative that the Federal Theatre did of Monsignor' s Hour on the New Orleans project. Monsignor's Hour, which was very successful in Europe, isn't done very often here. It's the story of an Irish Monsignor, the extension, really, of the character in The First Legion, who, on a visit to the Vatican galleries, meets and to the Pope, and gets talking to him and tells him mat he, the

Monsignor, would do about world peace, if he were Pope. So, he would play out this masquerade. Well, the project in New Orleans had the fascinating concept of putting an extra frame in the proscenium so that we, the audience, were the painting that the Pope and the Monsignor were looking at. And it gave a lovely reverse spin in physical dimension to the play, but that was...

JO: That's a good idea.

EL: That was really most imaginative. (pause) Well, I don't know that I have the answers to your questions, but . . .

JO: Well -- eh -- you've already answered so much just by the manuscript and also the answers to the other letters. What I guess I 'd like to go over, first of all, is a number of things, I think but one of them is, if you can explain again, probably just in more detail, the relationship between the National Service Bureau and the regional offices the National Service Bureau would send out play lists and the regional bureaus would ask for the scripts...?

EL: Yes, but it was a two-way relationship, and I think toward the end of the project, between, let's see, '37 and '39, when I came in, due to the fine groundwork laid by the people who were there before me, the whole relationship was really smoothed out so that National Service Bureau didn't tell them what they should do. Oh, except in rare instances -- for instance, when it still was a common decision, when Hallie thought it would be a great thing to open those simultaneous productions of It Can't Happen Here. That's what you might call, perhaps, what -- a national directive or a national hope, and the regions responded like a man. The regions were free to nominate a play of their choice, but by the time I joined the project, it had well been established that before they attempted -- well, no contracts could be made in the Service - but they could dig up many plays that National Service Bureau had not necessarily found on its own initiative. And then when it was sent in to the National Service Bureau, we checked, Mrs. Flanagan and I ---. I think in our time the Service Bureau had taken over the functions of what was previously called National Policy Board, which was broadly represented in the regions. Generally speaking, the regions indicated what they'd like to do, and we found out. Was it contractually available? And did it match the prevailing standards of Federal Theatre? And actually, it seemed to me in my time there, our relationships with the regions were very good. It balanced out nicely. It didn't have as many administrative difficulties as you might think.

JO: Spirochete would be a case in point of a play that came from a region and was approved by the National --

EL: Yes. And, -- oh, I'm sure that so many wonderful things on the Project didn't originate ~ se in National Service Bureau. I always thought that one of the delightful ones was the Swing Mikado from Chicago. I'm sure that must have been Harry Minturn's inventive use of the Negro company -- and a most graceful use. I 'd seen other Negro versions, not Project productions, of Mikado. They didn't compare with the

Swing Mikado. The Swing Mikado had elegance and grace. It wasn't just a stunt. It was done with real class. And, of course, the New York project, particularly in the days of Orson and John Houseman, oh, originated all kinds of ideas.

However, I think National Service Bureau represents an interesting illustration of how any kind of national enterprise has to work. It seemed to me that as time evolved, it was the research facilities at National Service Bureau -- even the legal research facilities -- the playreading, the library, the exchange of actors on loan, which was managed through the Bureau -. It's true. We had our experimental contacts with many of the projects, and sometimes had a friendly hand in the development of than, but I'm sure that nobody in National Service Bureau ever told Halsted Welles that he had to produce Murder in the Cathedral. That was a dividend that came to the project because Hallie knew Eliot so well. And apparently somewhere along the line she had done quite some of Eliot's productions at Vassar, and he had said, “You can have one of my next plays," and so when Murder in the Cathedral came along, she said, "All right. Let's have this one. " But I think a lot of the good things in the project happened that way. For instance. I didn't know anything about Monsignor's Hour down in New Orleans, until after I joined the project. There I was, just a playwright whose play they liked, and whose play they did. And there was a lot of this in the regions.

However, as I have indicated somewhere -- I think in this last memo on "1697 Broadway" the whole project was not as imaginative as Hallie herself. Well, how could it be? Basically, this was a work relief project, and that was its great justification. The development of the Living Newspaper obviously was related to the fact that it was a simple way to employ large numbers of people, and when Hallie first took over the project, at the suggestion of Harry Hopkins, of course, who was her old classmate at Grinnell, she said to me the problem was how to employ enough actors quickly enough. You know, from the WPA point of view, these were people who deserved to be employed and who weren't. But, unlike carpenters and bricklayers, how do you find plays to employ thousands of actors? In the era of the well-made play or the intimate musical, a few actors---but WPA was saying, "We're in business to employ actors and writers at some kind of survival wage,” and the Living Newspaper with casts of hundreds- You know, no Broadway producer could afford a Living Newspaper even today. But Federal Theatre was rich in manpower, and I think that accounted for the success of Orson and John's productions, like the Negro Macbeth. You could set them up with a flair, because you had the people.

But - what I was going to say was the regions were not always as inventive as Hallie. After all, who were these people who were unemployed and who deserved another chance at their chosen profession? They were people who had done a lot of the old plays in the old-fashioned ways and taking the line of least resistance, they would go for what you and I would call stock productions. The ones that they had done before. And I said somewhere before that we used to wonder, on the project, what would have happened, if there had been a work rule from the beginning that said, "You have to do either all new plays or at least 80 per cent of the productions have to be new plays" It would have been an interesting concept. It could have been a different theatre.

I think that under all the circumstances, and I don't mean this as a justification for the project per se, it came out rather well, unexpectedly, remembering that basically it was a work enterprise, and there was only a ten per cent variation for supervisory personnel. And, really, whether it was playreading or play production, the resulting program could only be as good as the supervisor. If the supervisor was

no good, nothing was going to come out of the rest of it. You had to have a nice balance between the supervisory personnel and the producing personnel. And as I've said many times, in the National Service Bureau, to give the playwrights, who were not writing for the project a break, we had to employ them as playreaders. They read five plays a week for approximately $22.77 a week, and they only had to check in once. But I used to say to Hallie, once prompted by a psychiatrist friend, “What makes you think a disappointed young playwright makes a good playreader?” And she laughed and said, “I know, but how else can we reasonably employ them?”

You see, if you were able to take a few of them and assign them directly to project enterprises, then what they did became the property of the government, or at least vanished into the field of public domain. And yet, in a humane way, wanting to do something to set unemployed playwrights on their feet, you had to give them a chance to earn a living without necessarily encumbering their own literary endeavors. And so, it was a -- well, it worked, but I don't think most of our playreaders did too much for themselves or too much for the project. And I really think Converse Tyler would agree with me on this. Converse was a very able executive in that bureau and knew it intimately and long before I did.

JO: How about the playwrights that were writing plays -- people like Norman Rosten, Abe Hill --

EL: Well, of course,

MK: Sundgaard did.

JO: Sundgaard -

EL: Oh, well, in that way we did have some wonderful and honorable exceptions. In quality. And I do mean Norman Rosten and Sundgaard. And, of course, the people who worked with Arthur Arent on the Living Newspaper. Oh, we had our share of. . . After all, I don't mean to be too hard on the project, as I look back at it. There's a leveling off, even in Hollywood. There are people who do well and work loyally for what they're employed for. And there are a lot of floaters. So -- human nature is human nature, and we had our share of those, but the good ones, like the old story about the little girl who when she was good she was good, but when she was bad, she was horrid -- our good ones were very good, very good, and of course Rosten and Sundgaard were two of the best.

JO: How were those topics selected that they would write about? Would they choose, or were they assigned --

EL: Now, I don't have any special notes on that. I imagine that this must have been a matter of, oh, mutual agreement and perhaps high-level conferences with Hallie. Knowing the quality of the individual, the desirable thing was to put him to work on something that was compatible. I didn't happen to be part of those original negotiations, I think. But I can remember on some other assignments, where a playwright would be working for and with the project on project time that it was a matter of conference. I remember we had the rights to the biography of a great labor priest, Father McGlynn. Oh, this goes back to the 1890 's, perhaps. It's a very extraordinary story, and we were not able to develop a play satisfactory to all concerned of it, but we did negotiate with one of the playwrights, and said, “Would you like to do this one?" He said, "Yes." And he worked on it for several months. He just happened not to be the fellow who could have developed that particular property. But I think that it was not altogether a matter of outright assignment. It was assignment plus conference. That is, you wouldn't assign a thing to somebody who hated it.

MK: So that it was this mutual thing of Sundgaard interested in doing that history of -- EL: And I do think that when you had people follow the - the ideal objective was to do something he wanted to do. Well, this is still true here. What's the use of hiring people for substantial sums of money, if they hate the thing they’re hired for? That's no good. Of course, that used to happen in the old Hollywood all the time. Not so much anymore. It's a little more selective. But, in the old days, well, that's something else.

You know, I always thought that one of the fascinating implications from the project is the place of government in the arts. If ever again we were ever to have anything approaching what is called a national theatre, eh, how would it all work out? And I suspect that it would be all quite different from Federal Theatre. But I think that there are some aspects of Federal Theatre that would set a pattern that could well be followed. Hallie and Mrs. Roosevelt, as you know, had a plan toward the end of the project -- there was never enough time to develop it - how one might, perhaps, have separated the work relief side of the project from those who were truly professional actors and writers, and designers, and create what might be called a national theatre, but which also would be regional in scope, with a balance between research and experimentation at the center, perhaps, and four or five great regional theatres interchanging their work with each other and in time with the center in Washington. And

I think that some of the lessons we learned in the Federal Theatre days would be helpful. I think government does have a place in the arts, but I think the range is not as great, perhaps, as it was in Federal Theatre. We were very lucky in Federal Theatre. You know, when you look back you think, "How did Hallie ever get One-Third of a Nation, and Power, and a few things like that on?" Considering that there was a big minority of congressmen and senators, who didn't agree with those social concepts at all. And who were in effect saying, backstage, Look, you're taking our tax dollars and dramatizing the administration's point of view, but it's a point of view we don't agree with." And I always thought that that attitude of mind had a great deal to do with the ultimate and too early liquidation of the project. The Communist issue was nothing ... Well, I shouldn't say it was nothing, but it was a phony issue. I think it was the resentment of ultraconservatives, in the House, particularly, and in the Senate, at the pleasant parallelism between the administration's point of view and some of the great successes of the project.

JO: Yes.

EL: I didn't say I could prove that, but this is my feeling. And, when you stop to think of it, wasn't it almost inevitable that there were some difficulties with Ethiopia, for instance? In the early days, the Living Newspaper was literally what its name implied. They used to have makeovers and re-writes, just like a regular newspaper. It was like a stage March of Time. Well - but when you get as close to contemporary events as they were in Ethiopia -- here you have the State Department, even a friendly State Department, in one perspective regarding Ethiopia, and here you have news editor playwrights getting in there -- not necessarily distorting it -- but giving it full coverage. And I think there will always be that difficulty, and one could learn from it. I don't think it means that you can't have a national theatre, because you can't have a full-swinging, social expression philosophy -- in the theatre. But, as I say, I think it's a lesson for the future. I don't think you can have a successful national theatre without the research and experimentation which appropriately goes with the center of things. But I think that Hallie and Mrs. Roosevelt were absolutely right, men they thought that the real vitality in production had to come from regional theatres and the exchange of the regional theatre, and with the national, and I will say, looking back on the project, that indispensable as a clearing house and a center of research and experimentation is, a lot of good ideas come from the field. You know, drawing board planners often remain drawing board planners. It's easy to dream up ideas and programs and whatnot at a center of things, but I'm a great believer in the regional aspect, and I've often wondered, if, as the years go by, this gradual extension of -- have you noticed libraries going into theatre production? the art museums into theatre production? And, of course, the fantastic emergence of the college and university plants. There, I think though is a kind of lesson for our time.

You know, as you look at the college and university setups oh, here in Los Angeles, just for one, and right straight across the country, at the fabulous plants to work with. Both in the theatre and films. And I think this is all well and good, but I don't think the achievement (with some exceptions) creatively is the equal of the physical plant. And perhaps, this will always - - for instance, if some genius in Washington said, "Now, look, we can have a good American approach to national theatre, and let's start with what we have already. Look at those wonderful bases. already in existence. The museums, the libraries, the colleges and the university theatres." Somehow or other, with a little -- what? -- postgraduate addition of professionals, as in the University of Michigan's great professional college setup, we'd be on our way. Well, this is true. If you had enough imagination in those regions, comparable to what Hallie had when she was at Vassar -- you know, Hallie literally had nothing to work with at Vassar -- oh – she had human beings to work with, and her own imagination, but Avery Hall (where I used to act in her productions, when I audited her classes for seven years) was just an assembly hall that seated four hundred people and the stage was literally nothing to brag about. And I'm sure that the reason Hallie never had a curtain for her theatre, nor standard sets, was the stage wouldn't take it. She was conditioned by the lack of the usual things that made a theatre to experiment with light and shadow, and the kind of form that actors give in themselves to a play. Well, that could become very imaginative theatre, and I think that is the one quality that we' re still looking for. I think that that the National Endowment for the Arts has been doing -- it's a modest, Heaven knows, but I think Hallie would be pleased to see that whether one had in name a continuing national theatre, the National Endowment for the Arts, every year, does make grants here and there around the country to some good groups. It doesn't seem to be any boondoggling enterprise.

Oh, I notice the Senate questions every once in a while the larger grants, like the one to the American Film Institute, but they seem to be quite tolerant of what I call modest grants around. And I think that's sowing a good seed. But I really feel that, somehow or other, what's needed to create a truly national regional theatre is creative imagination in the regions. A subsidy won't do it. Now, I've talked too long about that.

JO: No. What were some of the strong regions in the Federal Theatre? What some of the imaginative--

EL: Well, of course, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and at certain times, New Orleans. And of course, the New York City project. And as I said before, I really think that considering the proper limitations of a work relief enterprise, the creative achievements were rather exciting. Even in the professional theatre, where nobody's worrying about work relief. You're just trying to do a show. And that's always been the Hollywood thing, too. I think if one traced it through on the laws of averages, Federal Theatre's average of fine achievement, in relation to the mass of people involved, was as good or better than the Hollywood average, or the New York average. I really think, when we talk about national theatre, though, we should think a little bit about the European experience. I'm not an expert on that, but you know, it does seem to be my general impression that in England, in France, a little bit in Germany, you became classical repertory. Well, that's not too bad, if it's very good classical repertory, as represented in the national theatre, as in the group in Stratford, and Comedie Francais, but what's interesting about the French, they've been at it longer than we have. I believe that most candidates accepted into Comedie Francais have to be plays that have been around for at least thirty or forty years. Now, I don't think that would be altogether too bad in America. We have a lot of wonderful things that have developed in our land in the last forty or fifty years in the theatre that are well worth preserving and restaging. But I think that a lot of people that look back with affectionate memories of the exciting days of the Project think, “Wouldn't that be wonderful to have that again." And I think the European experience doesn't indicate that a national theatre per se is that electrifying place where the new, the daring and the different is done. And I don't mean to knock the national theatre as you see it developed in England and in France. I really think that if we were to have a national theatre again, with regional emphasis, we would be very smart to take a leaf from the book of Justice Brandeis. In one of Brandeis' essays-I don't know if it's "Other People's Money" or one of his other essays—he indicates his philosophy of government participation in the field of economics. Not to do everything, but to do what he called -- to pick up the slack. To do that which other people can't do or won't do. And I think if we applied that to the relationship of a possible national theatre and in relation to its own government, that it was not trying to compete with private enterprise, but it was trying to pick up the slack, and do that which private enterprise was not free or interested in doing at the moment -- and you know, Hallie and Mrs. Roosevelt got fairly along the way with their idea about how to finance their notion of a national plus regional, and the Schuberts and others who had enjoyed the experience of renting their theatres to the Project liked the idea that Hallie and Mrs. Roosevelt had, that perhaps we could earmark some of the theatre tax money for use in a national theatre the way the gas tax goes back to the road construction.

Well, the Shuberts and others thought that was all right. Maybe you could sit still for the theatre tax, if you thought that in some form the government was going to share a little bit of that with you, and on the theory that the more good theatre there is, the more good theatre there is for everybody. The Shuberts and others caught that from New York. I used to have a great old friend, Bert Lytell, who was in First legion, who said, “Emmet, the best thing that could happen is that everybody should have a hit. Then everybody goes to the theatre and sees all the plays." And I think the Shuberts had that feeling about the theatre, after their experience with Hallie, that the kind of theatre that she was doing kept people going to the theatre. The more people that went to the theatre, the better it was for everybody. But I do think that as you look at the success of the European national theatres, I don't think it has, or could you expect it to have, full-scale exploration of social drama or social issues, particularly the ones that are immediately sensitive to reigning administrations. But I don't think that defeats us. If we can have the national galleries, as in Washington, preserving the best, and not merely American, but of world art, well, so too can the theatre. But I have the feeling that someday somebody can find the subsidy--but where are you going to find the people like Hallie? Now, the hope is that they will come up. (Pause) I've talked too long. Shall we take a break and give you coffee?

EL: Have you caught up with Hallie's children? They're not her children, but she's their mother, and they are her children. Joanne and Helen in New York, and Jack, who's a Doctor of Philosophy somewhere in the midwest. That's quite a family.

MMK: Well, Mr. Ferguson gave us all of the addresses, but I haven't gone to see them or talked to them yet, because what I would like to do is see everybody who was already a grownup then, and needs to be seen first, before you get to people who are going to be around for longer than. . .

EL: That's very wise . . .

MMK: So it isn't overlooking them -

EL: Very sensible.

MMK: But if someone is eighty-nine, I would rather be sure to talk to that person than--

EL: And of course, another source ... well, he might talk--Eric Bentley, who is certainly one of the most knowledgeable critics- -prodigious scholar is Hallie's son-in-law. And he liked her very much. And she approved of Eric very much. I think there's either a separation or-

MMK: I think they're divorced--

EL: Divorced. But I hear from Joanne, occasionally. She's a wonderful person, and so is her sister, Helen. And as I said many times about Hallie, she was not merely a public person, she was also a private person. You know, sometimes one's impression of a career woman isn't fair. People say, "Well, how can they give so much time to a career, and be a good wife or a good mother." Hallie was a wonderful wife and a very good mother. Hallie, when I knew her--I first knew her at Vassar---had with her Frederick, a son, a grown boy, a charmer at times. She had lost her first husband a few years before. And in the early years at Vassar, Phil Davis had lost his wife-I think her name was Helen--shortly after childbirth. The twins, Joanne and Helen. Helen is younger. And the marriage of Hallie and Phil Davis was really a wonderful wedding of the humanities and the theatre.

MMK: Well, how did he woo and win her? She didn't have her mind on getting married again, did she?

EL: They were... neighbors--faculty neighbors, and--oh, I guess if I went back and checked it out, I imagine it came about this way that as an almost-bachelor father with three children in a campus that was really very family-oriented - You know, people have their different notions about Vassar, but Vassar in those days, I think, was very close.

There was a nice, warm relationship in the faculty, and Phil didn't live too far from Kendrick House, where Hallie lived, and I'm sure that many times she must have called on him for-well, as a matter of fact, he acted in her plays, just as I did. MMK: Did he have-

EL: ...If that was the one where they all used masks. I think he

Taught the girls Greek phonetically. And, after that production, which was typical of Hallie's, was really she and the college at the time were not running a trade school. There was no major in Drama. You could major in English, and if you were lucky, you could get Hallie's classes. And the function of theatre was, hopefully, to enlarge the human horizon and develop better human beings. It was not to plan somebody for Broadway, although several of Hallie's girls, in time, were well-known on Broadway--Mollie Day Thatcher, married to Gadge Kazan, Lovey Phelps, etc.

MMK: Well, I saw her recently, and she sends her regards to you. Lovey Phelps? She was a very fine person, and a hard worker in the theatre. Well, it's a way of saying that Hallie and Dr. McCracken, who was one of her favorite actors, and Phil, had the feeling that the purpose of theatre was to involve more and more people, extend the horizon line. Hallie always thought that the research that the girls did in preparing for one of these productions was as important as the play itself. And I had a charming letter years ago from a Vassar aluma of mature years now, in Florida, saying--after I did that piece for the Vassar alumni magazine--she said, "I want you to know the most exciting month I ever had in my four years of college was being one of the chorus in Hippolytus." She said, "I wasn't a drama student. I never could have gotten into one of those productions. But when they were filling out the chorus in it, they thought it would help (laugh) if there was someone who knew a little Greek, apart from the phonetics that were being taught to those who were not Greek scholars.” Well, she said, "I had another life. It was just wonderful." Well, that was the approach that Phil and Hallie and Dr. McCracken had to theatre, and anyway, in that atmosphere, I'm not surprised that Phil and Hallie, oh, found each other so attractive. But it was a wonderful marriage, because that household, that merging household, fitted together so beautifully. And you know, this is as romantic as a Burton movie. I believe the honeymoon of Hallie and Phil was spent on the Island of Delos.

Phil was such a quiet, quizzical person-not cold, not restrained, but not pushy. Just delightfully natural. I'11 never forget calling on him and Hallie in downtown Poughkeepsie. After they married, they bought a wonderful house in downtown Poughkeepsie, where in years gone by the college faculty lived. When I knew Hallie, she lived in

Kendrick House, which was a faculty residence, but Phil and Hallie bought a house downtown--a beautiful house, which we knew very well, and that was where the family lived.

One night we were going over there for dinner, and as Phil stood in this charming drawing room, and twilight was falling, he started to pull the curtains . . . and said, as he drew them, “You know,” he says, “Hallie has no aversion to curtains. It's just that she doesn't use them in the theatre.” (Laughter) But they really were wonderful people to know, and I think that between them, they were able to translate, transpose, the classics with zest. Not that they distorted them. But they had a warm and imaginative approach to the use of them in the theatre. And they could communicate this to other people. Of course, you already know my feeling about so many of Hallie's theories in theatre. With most of which I agreed. Of course, she was very patient with me. It isn't every teacher who has a student who audits her classes and then goes back and writes a sometimes critical review for the newspaper of a play in which he was a part. But (laugh) we hit it off very well.

MMK: I remember your review of the Auden play. I think you sort of tore that one apart.

EL: Yes. The audience was a little puzzled. I think it was Auden.

MMK: It was The Dance of Death, which was really Came Out Into the Sun.

EL: Oh, that's the one. That' s the one. And I think it was her assistant, Lester Lang, who came out that afternoon-I caught it that night—and said, sensing the audience's puzzlement--he said, "It's rather a short play. I think we have time to run it once again." (Laugh) And I wrote that it was a poor joke that had to be told twice. (Laugh) It's a wonderer that Hallie ever forgave me for that. But, you know, she was so sound, I think, in her theatre judgments. I suppose at long range she'd sound like, oh, a rampant experimenter, who wasn't going to consider anything that didn't make a headline or, you know . .

EL: ... or turn the world upside down, or something. She was a woman of many tastes.

MMK: Was that a virtue? (laugh)

EL: I think so. For instance, she used to say about plays, in spite of her affection for what we call the free stage, the open stage, that not every play was meant to be done that way, that there were so-called well-made plays that deserved the conventional proscenium approach and the box set. She said, “Each play deserves its own style." Also, I thought she had a wide-angle approach to what was theatre. All that Hallie asked was that it be a good play I that it was something that could play. It could be Greek drama. It could be Irish drama. It could be medieval liturgical plays--anything that was playable. And one of her devastating things in rehearsals was that occasionally she would say, “Well, there's a lot of talk in this play. I don't know whether the talk will hold up or not." She says, "Suppose we run through it without the dialogue.” Oh, that was the brutal test. Because for a beginning playwright they think that if they could get the story together in words, they've done something. And a lot of plays didn't show up in pantomime. But Hallie said, “Well, go back and work it over, and see if you can't invent actable situations to go with this dialogue." And I thought, well, years later, "That's what you get in Marcel Marceau." There's not a line. But, oh my, there's a story. And so, she was full of these--she said, "the theatre's pragmatic." She said, "Actually, at its best, it is an ongoing virtue. All it asks that for the two hours that you're there, you go along with the company in what it's doing."

And she said, "Always remember that there are a few hundred plays going on at the same time. That's what makes the theatre work." Of course, this also was a thought of Pirandello's, that it seems much more peculiar to theatre than to films, that the inclination of the audience to improvise and develop in company with the people on stage explains why the same play can say so many different things to so many people at the same moment.

And, of course, to prove that point, Hallie did one of the Pirandello plays-I forget now, the title--! was in it--

MMK: That was Tonight We Improvise, but-

EL: Where they interchange the audience with the stage--of course, the actors are planted in the audience, and at a certain point the actors on the stage go into the audience, and the audience goes up on the stage and continue with the play.

MMK: And was it authentic audience members, not- EL: Oh, no, these were plants--

MMK: They were plants, weren't they.

EL: Plants, sure. I was one of the plants. (Laugh) But by comparison with Hallie, I think that a lot of the experimenting people and the innovators today run a too tight ship. Now, you can't expect a producer to do a play he isn't interested in, but Hallie was always on the alert not to limit her choices necessarily to only that which would have initially her complete personal enthusiasm. That is, she was convinced that the world of the theatre was a great, big, wide world, and as I say, I think the record across the country--we have some fine experimental theatres--but if you look over their programs, year after year, it is a taste or style that's agreeable to the producers and the directors, but it's their style. Another kind of play has got to seek out the producer that has intuitively his style .... As I say, it had to be a good play; but Hallie was one of those who realized that social drama was not merely a discussion of workmen's compensation, or the right to strike. She had a wide view of the human values, and I've often thought, in my own case, I saw that particularly in the German theatre.

When the war was over and the American army of occupation moved into Germany, it found itself in the theatre business without intending to because, as you know, the Germans had a wide range of municipal state theatres. And in trying to get business going again, in Germany, the army discovered that there were people in Germany who felt about culture the way people in America still feel about the Dodgers. It was a necessity of life. So, whether or not the army was prepared to reopen theatres and opera houses, set up symphonies again--there were unemployed musicians, actors, directors. The army did a pretty good job of putting that thing together, and I had this play, First legion, that had done very well in Vienna before the war, had never been allowed in Germany during Hitler's time, but when the army was putting things together, it discovered First legion and thought, well, this should be all right for the Germans, considering that the Austrians liked it, and that Hitler wouldn't allow it in Germany. You know, I think that in six to eight weeks we had five hundred performances spread out over, oh, probably twenty theatres at least. The army was very good, too, about collecting the royalties. And that was my introduction to the German theatre, and I discovered that they had the wide-angle approach. They had so many theatres. They searched the world for plays. Japanese plays, Chinese plays--if it was a good play, it was something they were--and I 've noticed this since. My German is only high-school German, but I can manage to read a program or a royalty sheet, and when I read what they' re-doing in Munich, Berlin, whatnot, this is the wide approach.

There was a man here in this town that had that same approach years ago. A good friend of Hallie's. Gilmore Brown, who ran the Pasadena Playhouse in the days of its glory. He searched the world over for plays. He never wanted the Playhouse to be typed prematurely as a theatre for only one kind of a play. Oh, he did his share of classics and the popular plays, but his curiosity was really Universal, and that's what I think we need.

Now, could I fill you up some more coffee?

MMK: No, I'm just fine.

EL: What else-oh, I don't know whether I made this point previously, just jumping back to the project, per se, for a second--one of the ironies to me about the closing of Federal Theatre in the spring of '39 was that it was--well, it wasn't the whole WPA that was closed out.

MMK: It was that one project.

EL: It was that one project. And that one project could not have come into existence originally except that Harry Hopkins had the imagination to say to Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt, "Actors get hungry, and Hallie's just the person who can do something about this.” Okay. Harry Hopkins must have known, although I've tried to check this out in the Sherwood Memoirs, that, as of June, 1939, there was a prospect of war in Europe in the fall of '39.

Because when I went to Paris in June, '39, to catch the 200th performance of Legion, friends of mine in Paris said, "There'll be war in September, when the Krauts are ready. That's the way it goes." Well, if Federal Theatre could have survived for six months more, the second emergency, the actuality of war in Europe, and always the wonder about American involvement, would have perhaps extended the base of the first theatre operation. Remember, when the project was closed out, there was about $2,000,000 of theatre equipment apart from all those records that was just put somewhere in a warehouse.

MMK: Do you know where that is? We heard something about the Navy getting some equipment.

EL: Well, maybe in time they'll parcel some of it out to the emerging military camps--remember the training camps before we got in in '41, when the boys were writing, "over the hills in October" on the walls and things, and the USO shows were being organized to go out and entertain the boys in the training camps--but with no reference whatever to the Federal Theatre experiences. It was as if it had never happened. I suspect that eventually some of that equipment may have found itself back into the training camps. But there was no program. The theatre, as such, was whatever USO could get to be brought in from the outside. Some self-recreation developed, but my point is that Harry Hopkins, who had the imagination in '35 to dream up this project, didn't have either the strength or the desire or the imagination to say, “Let's hold on to this.” This start on theatre, which was justified by the first emergency, the necessity of feeding hungry actors, could be held together on a better basis more limited, perhaps, but a very professional basis as a necessary arm of entertainment, with the army. And if that had happened, we would have the national theatre.

MMK: It would have survived, wouldn't it?

EL: It would have survived, because Hallie and Mrs. Roosevelt could have stepped forward with what would have been the sequel to Federal Theatre, saying, "Well, alright, we've done as much as could be done with the theatre on a work-relief basis. Now, if not with a national emergency, a certain national uncertainty concerned with the state of affairs and the morale of people in camps, and the old things--art is good for the people, it's necessary and indispensable, and now we know how to do it, and to be part of the military appropriations--"

MMK: And it would have worked perfectly.

EL: It would have clinched it. Now, I do think it's interesting that in time there seems to be reasonable support for the National Endowment for the Arts, that art per se, and even the theatre as part of it, has not become a bad word. . .

- still, the idea that art and the theatre as an art form is something to which the government might give attention. I think we're coming back to it by degrees. MMK: Well, from Kate Drain Lawson, who left Federal Theatre at the time you came, was really harping on the Workers' Alliance, the things she saw killing it. Where, in your "1697 Broadway," you talk about standing firm against them... But I think she thought Hallie was naive, that Hallie couldn't say no to these people, that type of thing.

EL: Well, now, perhaps I was a little more rugged than Hallie, but I don't think Hallie was a pushover.

MMK: Yes.

EL: And I do think that the Workers' Alliance, at certain times, didn't help. That is, it was a kind of activity that seemed to make us vulnerable at times to attack by some congressmen and senators. But as I said in "1697 Broadway," the preposterous claims of Workers' Alliance to the domination of the project didn't necessarily make it so. But they were a vocal group.

They really were. I find myself repeating myself. I think what hurt the project in the end was an honorable hurt. There were people in the House and Senate who, I think, never forgave the project for being so eloquent in the field of--

MMK: New Deal policies? That type of thing?

EL: New Deal policies. That is, the other side said, “We pay taxes too, and we choose not to have you do plays that we don't agree with."

JO: Do you think there were any either implicit or explicit pressures, or was it coincidence that some of the social plays, particularly Living Newspapers, were parallel to New Deal policies?

EL: I always thought that this was a natural extension of Hallie's enthusiasms. You know, when you stop to think that she and Harry Hopkins grew up in Grinnell, not that that necessarily makes people completely simpatico, but I'm sure that the reason Harry suggested Hallie to Mrs. Roosevelt originally was that he was familiar with Hallie's style and method of thinking. And in a lot of the plays that Hallie did at Vassar, well, what you would call the social range--

MMK: When she did Can You Hear Their Voices?

EL: That's exactly what I was thinking of. And this feeling of Hallie's, that exciting plays are rm.de out of social things-- theirs was a time when people would have said, “Well, you don't have to worry about that. Nobody writes plays about things like that. And nobody would pay money to see them." But I think this was a natural affinity. I don't know whether I told you, speaking of natural affinities--that's just a poor pun--the year with Hallie at Vassar was delightful. This was my hometown. I had friends all over the campus. This was old home week. And she always thought I was a bitter-ender where Harry Hopkins was concerned. Well, I wrote that article, "Who Killed Federal Theatre?" And yet she did remember, and she referred to it only slightly in Arena, that when Harry Hopkins was up for confirmation as Secretary of Commerce, I don't think she could even get him on the telephone.

MMK: He suddenly was inaccessible, wasn't he?

EL: I don't think that he ever changed his mind about Hallie. But Hopkins was a real politician, and he probably thought, "This wonderful project that I dreamed up is at times a liability tone personally, and if the cheering section doesn't have to move into the front row (laugh) too many of my old friends in Federal Theatre, that would be a little bit better." Well, Hallie used to tease ne, and she said, "Oh, you're a bitter Irishman, you're a bitter-ender where Hopkins is concerned.” Well, I said, “I don't know—"

MMK: You were a realist. (laugh)

EL: A friend stands with a friend. Well, anyway, there is a sequel to this. When the book was finished, and in the hands of the publishers, who were very happy with it, we were rather relaxed, and, you know, putting things together, and looking forward to the eventual liquidation of our project, the door opens one day, and who comes in but Harry Hopkins. Up in the neighborhood, visiting. So, it was not that he needed an appointment. Out he came to Vassar. We were all there in the library of the project, and I can remember his words of greeting. He said, “Hello, Hallie, how's the book? Are you going to kick the hell out of me?" (laugh) I said to Hallie after he left, "Well, now, he said the first word, and what did he say? 'Are you going to kick the hell out of me?'” So--

MMK: He knew what he deserved to have done. (laugh)

EL: Later that afternoon one of Hallie's secretaries said tone, "You'll have to excuse ne. I have to go out and get some things for tea. Harry's going to have tea at Hallie's place in Garfield Place (that lovely house) and I have to put a few things together for it." And she says, “Don't you think it's wonderful, two old friends getting together after the war's over?" I said, "I'm still a bitter-ender as regards Harry." I said, "I think we would have been a lot better off, if the two old friends had gotten together a little sooner. “However, Hallie couldn't carry a grudge. You know, she may have thought there may have been some virtue in my criticism, but if Hopkins wanted anything-- Hopkins had style and grace. That was a nice opening line. Well.

MMK: It was perfect. JO: How was that year, writing that book? Was that book therapeutic in the way of working out some of the bitterness?

MMK: Yes, purging that bitterness?

EL: Well, you know, that could be. It was fun to work on. We didn't have a large staff, but we had a hard-working staff, and-

MMK: Did Phil Davis die during that year?

EL: He did. I was trying to recall when, and the book was not finished when he died. Oh, I can recall that time very well. But Hallie was this kind of a woman. I don't think it would have ever occurred to her not to continue with the book.

MMK: She didn't take to her bed, and go into a decline.

EL: No. Hallie had great drive. You know, she was a very personable and stylish person. And I suppose would have fitted on a page in Vogue as gracefully as anybody else. But there was great strength of character. . .

MMK: Was she at all bitter that she had spent those years with the Federal Theatre and then Phil died six months later, that type of thing?

EL: I don't think so. That wasn't my impression. You see, Phil was wholeheartedly for Hallie being part of the Federal Theatre, and as a matter of fact, she got home a great deal. She was on the road a great deal. But Poughkeepsie was only seventy-five miles from New York, and just the way I used to commute, at least on weekends to Poughkeepsie, she saw a lot of her children though and Phil, and I think that even through the demise of Federal Theatre was a disappointment wasn't the catastrophic thing that it might have been to another person. Hallie had a pretty good sense of history. I don't say she could have necessarily predicted what the limited span of years for the project was going to be, but there was more to Hallie than just a pretty woman. Great drive. Great drive. That's why I don't think, really, she was stampeded by the Workers' Alliance. I think Hallie was smart in her labor relations in the project.

She had other people who could wrestle with the Workers' Alliance, if that was necessary, including myself, but I admired her for her imagination, her courage, integrity, and her drive. But you know, this will sound like male chauvinism, I said to my wife, the other day, "You know, I discovered with shock, looking back at these other years...

Well isn't it strange? But perhaps this is how people always think about faculty, if they don't happen to be faculty themselves, at a particular time. You know, it's up there (pointing to head). Well, maybe it was also the fact that--well, let's see, when I first I met Hallie, my lawyer son was a young baby. He was about two. And Genevieve and I used to take him to classes occasionally. And of course my whole introduction to Vassar was wonderful. . .

EL: Hallie was imaginative when it came to the development of playwriting class, but the president of the college, Dr. McCracken, was a real theatre buff. And, as I say, if I had thought that Hallie was almost my own age, I oould probably have been a little self-conscious about going out and ringing the doorbell at Kendrick and saying, "I'm a newspaper editor from downtown, and married a Vassar wife and has a Vassar child, and could like to know something about playwriting." She took it up with Dr. McCracken-

MMK: She took it at face value, didn't she?

EL: Oh, yes, yes. She took it up with Dr. McCracken and in no time at all, he took it up with the dean, wonderful woman, C. Mildred Thompson, a great Wilson scholar, and they said, “Oh, by all means, yes, indeed,” and there was only one difficulty, they said to Hallie: no tuition fee could be charged Mr. Lavery.

What a hardship. I had seven--(laugh)--seven years of auditing Hallie's classes, and could not pay them any tuition. Think of what it would have done to my own family life, if, in order to pursue the study of theatre, I had gone to Harvard or Yale, if I could get in. What it'd have-

MMK: The absence of Hallie.

EL: What it could have done to my family life-all I had to do was travel to Vassar a couple of days a week, and sit in Hallie's classes and have the best of everything.

MMK: Because did she really help you develop as a playwright?

EL: Oh, yes! Incidentally, First Legion was actually written while I was part of her playwriting classes. But Hallie had a very interesting theory of development of playwrights. It wasn't only in the writing. She insisted in her classes that everybody had to do something in her theatre that was also removed from playwriting. You could choose, but she said, “you can't work in the theatre and just do it with a pencil or typewriter.'' You had to be a living, working part of the enterprise. So she said, “you can be an actor, or you can be a light specialist. You could be a stage manager; and being a real ham, I said, "All right, (laugh) I'll be an actor." And that was the way it worked out. She had wonderful approaches to play production. She was one of the few directors I ever knew, the college directors, certainly, that insisted that there would be no playscript available for anybody during the presentation of a play, except perhaps whoever was in master control of lights. She said, "There's no use looking to a prompter for the prompt line. There isn't going to be a prompter." She said, "You'll know the whole play, or you won't know it." And, you know, it gave everybody great confidence. You weren't depending on the book. And then I think Hallie would have made a good field marshal on a football team---we used to sit in the green room, and she'd say, “We'll run it through here, without a book." And then she'd say, "Now be prepared for the fact there are going to be a few lines that are fluffed here, because I've already painted it. This is not going to be the perfect run-through. But what I want to see is what you do when without warning somebody really skips five lines or a whole page.”

"Now," she said, "The art is to make the blend to the nearest point. Don’t tell me that you were able to continue, somehow or other. The art is in the blending, so that it's as close to the first miss as possible." Why, everybody took to it like a game!

. . . A production of Cradle Song which I liked very much, and I discovered in the researches on that, so far as I knew, there was nothing then available comparable to Cradle Song, which was practically all female. There was one male role in it. And Hallie, who so far as I remember, was not the conventional church-goer at all, had a lively, poetic feeling for matters of the spirit in literature. That explained her easy friendship, instant friendship with Eliot, and her regard for Murder in the

Cathedral. The light, the choir, the movement, the pattern, appealed. So when I said to her that vaguely I had an idea for a play that would have no women in it (laugh), and I thought it would be fun to work on, she said, "Why not?" Of course, at least a play about faith, the mysteries of faith, and the realities of miracles appealed to her very much. So at one point it wasn't completely all male. In the last act I had a little girl came in the wheelchair. You know, this was a play about mature men. The general staff really caught up with first, in a miracle that they all questioned very much, but the word got outside of the town that there was a miracle, and suddenly the place was invaded, and here they were in the middle of all these things, and so--the house doctor, a layman, had gone to confession, and he confessed that the whole beginning was a hoax. He knew that it wasn't a miracle, but had let the impression continue. He wanted to see how they would all behave, running around in the presence of a miracle. And he says, "Now, I'm telling you, it isn't a miracle, but you can't tell anybody else, because of the seal of confession." So that's that! The little girl in the wheelchair comes in, expecting the miracle to happen, and the priest who is leaving, the one who has heard the confession, and who can't stand the burden any longer, thinks, "Well, at least I'll preside honorably and get out of here." And the little girl accepts the blessing. So Hallie liked the play very much. In fact she went down to the opening night and wrote a nice review of it for my hometown paper. But . . . said one day, "I don't want to tinker with your play, but I have a casting suggestion." She said, "If you thought it would be just as true in character to have a boy in the wheelchair, instead of the girl," she said, "I think you'd find it added to your technical advantage." She said, "You know, while there are not all male plays in a church background in the theatre, there are all male plays, including Journey's End, which have an honorable tradition," and she said, “You know, the strange thing--you wouldn't want to write plays 'all male' or 'all female', but there is in some stories a great solidarity that comes through," and she said, "My hunch is that the boy in the wheelchair would be better than a girl in the wheelchair." So I did it, and that's the way we played it in New York, with a wonderful boy actor, Fromkie Thomas, in that role. Well, you dissolve out a good many years, and we’re doing the film here with Boyer in the leading role. Nice cast of characters. And we wind up with a girl in the wheelchair--Barbara Rush. Beautiful girl, still a fine actress. And the reason was almost a reverse spin on Hallie's logic. The company, or the director here, and the producer, felt that it was a great gamble to attempt an all-male play on the religious scene and film. Would it break my heart to consider the possibility of a girl in the wheelchair? (laugh) I said that was how we practically began. But you know, to this day, with all due regard for Barbara Rush, who is a fine actress, and it was very sensitively played, I think Hallie was right. there was more strength to the all-masculine solidarity, and--

MMK: Didn't that little built-in sentimentality of a little girl, maybe--

EL: And in Europe it's always been played . . . It's interesting how different repertory theatres cast plays differently. Here in this country the lead role has usually been the Bert Lytell role, the priest who heard the confession. In Europe, it varies. Often, it's the Father Rector, who's the star. Particularly, if you have an Albert Basserman played Father Rector. In other places the star is the heavy. Well, practically the star. The doctor, who initiated the hoax. But as I say, it's one of those plays that has good roles for everybody. So depending on the stature of the particular actor, it takes its tone accordingly.

MMK: Here's a thing about Hallie I've been wondering - she wrote some plays herself, but I really don't think they show her up as a very fine writer. Do you think she would have liked to be a playwright? Arena and Dynamo and Shifting Scenes are wonderful books, but I don't think her plays show any great talent.

EL: Well, you know, I think, to be fromk, the authorship of a book is one level of writing, and it might well be that with Hallie, as with many writers, the narrative sense is stronger than the dramatic sense, at least in terms of writing. Now, there are many fine directors in the theatre who couldn't possibly write a play, and I do think that Hallie's talent in the theatre was that of directing. I've often thought it was a pity that being a good administrator and a busy administrator on the project, she never had the time to direct a play herself. I think she was a better director than any on the project, and we had some fine directors.

MMK: Even Houseman and people like that.

EL: Yes. I like John. I worked with John here a few years ago, and I knew him years back. Hallie was a top director, and I do think again, not every director per se is a playwright. And, perhaps, it's the fact that many of them are not a playwright that gives than a certain perspective -- they stand just far enough away from the material -- so they can see imaginatively what should be done with the material. Well, this is not a story about Hallie, but it will explain my point. Do you remember the wonderful story about Gadge Kazan and Arthur Miller, when they were on location in Arizona, with the film that I think involved

Marilyn Miller ... Misfits. Yes. The story goes that one day Miller, sitting on the side, looks up and sees his friend, Kazan, with the shooting script and a pencil, you know, and he only had to look the question, and Kazan said simply, "I was going to show it to you! I wasn't going to go out and shoot it without showing it to you!" (Laugh) And Miller said, “Where the hell were you when the page was blank?" Now, well, it sounds like an anti-Kazan story. I think Kazan is a person that almost illustrates what we're talking about Hallie. Kazan is an extraordinary director in the theatre. And there are some people to this day that think that Streetcar Named Desire would not have came off as well as it did, without Kazan's hand on it. Firm hand. But that doesn't mean necessarily that Gadge would

MMK: But that makes sense, because he's written some terrible books. You know, he's written those novels -- (Laugh)

EL: But as a director, he's good. And I think Hallie was at her best as a director, and also I think in the narrative sense, I thought that Shifting Scenes was a very good book. And I liked Dynamo, and I thought Arena was top-flight. Incidentally, I --

MMK: It can make you cry when you read those --

EL: Oh, yes. Now, as an illustration of Hallie's imaginative technique, not always followed by her closest admirers in the theatre, one of the great intervals in Federal Theatre, I think, was, let's see, the summer of 1937, when I was --

JO: I was going to ask you about that.

EL: -- coming home from Hollywood, and, that's how I came to be involved with Federal Theatre. I had gone out to speak at some of the summer classes, the re-training thing of Hallie's - and they were about to put into production I think the first half of One-Third of a Nation. And there again, Hallie, who didn't direct the enterprise but who was the supervising producer of of the enterprise insisted that everybody had to do something he hadn't done before. Well, I wasn't in that cast, but I was there many days watching them work on it, and it was fun to see regional directors who hadn't acted in a long time up there, acting on the stage. Everybody was doing something different, you see. And I thought the production, which the concept of which I'm sure was Hallie's, was far superior to the famous and successful production of the play in New York. Now, this was really a miniature version. I think the people assembled could have been no more than two dozen at the outside. They must have had a cast of one hundred and twenty, at least, in New York. And in New York, it was a Belasco-type production. Oh, you know, the realistic, tremendous tenement front and real smoke or whatever coming out the windows, you know.

MMK: (Laugh) Real garbage.

EL: Yes. Now, at the Experimental Theatre at Vassar, their stage -- it was a cyclorama -- appropriately lit - and suspended backstage were a half dozen or a dozen garbage cans, broken pipes, the symbolic suggestion of the tenement. That play had a smash and a power at Vassar that I never caught in New York. And again, an illustration of the imaginative approach -- everything about the New York thing was realistic. Well, I guess that's all right, if you're committed to the realistic design. It would be fatal to go too wild with your imagination on costuming, but up at Vassar, where under Hallie's supervision, it was all on the - what would you call it -- the free stage, the imaginative approach, eh, the casting of the church wardens of Trinity

Church, when they came to collect the ground rent, was very interesting. Now, in New York, they were played in full wigs, rough whatever – and looked just the way actors often look, when they're not at home in costume roles, you know. At Vassar, the four church wardens wore a kind of tuxedo outfit. Not the jacket. A flowing white shirt ... A hat. A touch of the times, to remind you that even though they were a little anachronistic, these were church wardens from another day. So -- they had the hat, they had the flowing white silk shirt, black trousers, black shoes, and one glove – just one -- ornamental glove from another day. And when they put out their hand for the church rent, you had a scene. Well, I'm sure that that came to Hallie like that! That was the kind of style that she used there. But Hallie did have, what do they call it - the imaginative sense. What Robert Edmond Jones called, the dramatic imagination. She had it. And I'm sure that if she had directed on the project, that would have been the kind of thing she would have chosen to do. I didn't see – years later, she did her own production of Murder In The Cathedral at Vassar. There's a picture of it in Dynano. I hear it was very good. I knew people who were in that.

MK: Well, did you see her directorial touch ever coming through in Federal Theatre things? It was always filtered through papers - is that what --?

EL: Well, I think except as people who worked with Hallie knew her ideas, and liked than, and wouldn't hesitate to appropriate them, I don't think she ever had the time, much, in Federal Theatre to stand in back of anybody and say, "Why don't you do it this way?"

MK: She'd send out those memos and she'd say, "Stop painting sceneries - simplify."

EL: Oh, yes. Yes, yes. And I think she was absolutely right on that. And I think -- well, you know, when you think how many old hands were being employed, how natural it was in many of the outlying regions for old stock hands to do old stock plays with old painted sets -- you know, I think It Can't Happen Here illustrates Hallie's imagination and flexibility. When you attempt that many productions almost simultaneously, you take the gamble that some of them are not going to be as good as others, and I believe - I haven't seen the production book on that in a long time -- that most of this came out a little bit on the realistic side. I think if Hallie were directing it, it would have been very interesting. It would have been like -- oh -- one of the imaginative European films, not too much definition as to specific time and place but the problem of lighting, the opportunities of lighting. But she did bring it off. And somewhere - I guess it's in Arena -- there is some of the correspondence she had with Sinclair Lewis, one of which I thought was very funny. He said, "Why do you always keep sending me these little flimsy memos, which I can't make out?" (laughter) But, she did have the notion that to open, what was it -- seventeen productions of that play, nearly simultaneously, would make a little theatre history, and it did.

MK: That reminds me of -- John and I went to see Paul Green down in Chapel Hill?

EL: Aheh.

MK: And I asked him about some memos I'd seen of a production he was working on of A Common Glory with Kurt Weill.

EL: Yes.

MK: And he said that that was going to be a simultaneous opening and be in even in more cities, and then that the Project closed, and nothing ever came of that, and he wrote a completely different play and gave it the title of The Common Glory, and that's what's at Williamsburg now. Did you know if that -- if there was some plans for a simultaneous --

EL: I don't know for sure, but -- well, it could have been. Hallie admired Paul Green very much·, and he admired Hallie. They were two sympatico people. That could well have been.

Incidentally, the project -- must have been in New York -- did a very fine production of the Paul Green-Kurt Weill Johnny Johnson. That's a good play. MK: That's a good play. I would think that today it could play very well.

EL: Oh, yes. You know, when I was talking about what National Theatre can do by way of preserving a rich past without being static about it, Johnny Johnson is an illustration of a play that deserves to be done again. Eh –

JO: North Carolina is doing it in the Bicentennial plays held on the Chapel Hill campus.

EL: Somebody pointed out the other day, in relation to Thornton Wilder – a dear friend of mine, who passed away

MK: Just now has died --

EL: -- that when Thornton came along in, I think, it was about 1938, when Our Town was first done in New York, the American theatre didn't have a rich heritage in back of it. Some critic, I say -- I think -- in praising Thornton's work -- said that memorable plays -- plays worth remembering – you went back for maybe a period of twenty years before 1938. There was theatre, but -- and I was thinking, "That critic was right." I was trying to remember what plays did I see in 1918, when I was sixteen years of age? And I went to a lot of theatre at the time. And, you know, that critic was right. I remember a lot of musicals like Choo Chin Chow and some of the early George M. Cohan, and whatnot. But it was rather a shock for me to discover by reading the article on Thornton that the maturity of the American theatre was maybe about twenty years by the time Thornton came along.

MK: And so that can lead into, don't you think that the Federal Theatre had a very big impact on increasing maturity in American theatre. EL: Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. In connection with Thornton, there are some very interesting things in this rather scholarly biography of him, reporting on the early production adventure with Jed Harris. Some hilarious stories about their conflicts. And Harris was not always wrong. I think there was a man that had imagination. I never worked with him. I never wished I had. But he had qualities. He and Thornton didn't hit it off too well, but Harris was right about some things. But one note that caught my eye on Our Town, it took them seventy-two hours to light the first production. Well, you know, we say, "Well, isn't it wonderful and restful and exciting – bare stage." The lighting - - I don't know whether it was Jean Rosenthal who did that or not -- but when you look back, you think, “Well, seventy-two hours is not an unusual amount of time. It's more than some producers and directors will give to it." But you think, "Our Town looks so deceptively simple. All you do is some bare stage and work light." There was a lot more to it than that.

MK: How about some memories of when you went and joined Hallie at Smith and had that semester there? Was she happy? Unhappy? Doing a lot --

JO: I've a question. Why did she move to Smith?

(inaudible portion follows, about 2 minutes)

MK: ... Before we get to the end, is she was such an enthusiast, and I want you to go into whether she actively promoted regionalism, Negro drama, those different things. How they reflected Hallie. We could do that now, or Smith. Either one.

EL: Well. (laugh) Well, I think Hallie had a lot to do with sparking the enthusiasms in the region for materials indigenous to the region, or of their own choosing. Somehow or other, she had intuitive knowledge from the beginning that you couldn't create a national theatre just by having a national office in Washington. That on the other hand, I'm sure she saw the inevitable necessity of a planning unit, a central relating force. But the vitality came from regions. And I think she was particularly interested in regions that never had seen any theatre before. She encouraged very greatly the early touring in states -- the rural areas of states, which had never seen a theatre before. That was one thing that she really was intensely with, personally. And, of course, her long and pleasant association with Paul Green at Chapel Hill, had made her aware of the contributions that could be made regionally. Not that everybody was going to be as brilliant as Paul Green. But it showed where materials could be discovered. And thinking of Paul reminds me also, Hallie's sense of regionalism I think was also developed through the National Theatre Conference, of which she and Paul and Gilmor Brown were founding members, her respect for what--and Mabie in Iowa—what these people had achieved in their own college and university and community. This was a constant reminder to her of where the vitality and the imagination was. So I think it was a natural extension of those early interests and ne enthusiasms shared with Mabie and Paul Green and Gilmor that flowered in the regionalism thing in Federal Theatre. Incidentally, one of Hallie's great friends, I guess I mentioned this before, is living at La Jolla, David Stevens, who was the head of the humanities section of the Rockefeller Foundation for many years. Was one of the people who was always in Hallie's corner. He always had a lively interest in Federal

Theatre, and it was he who made possible the grant for Hallie and myself at Vassar. And it was David who also made possible the grant for me at Smith. He had great confidence in Hallie and it was through Hallie that I came to know David. But - MK: And he's still a lively, alert person I think isn't he?

EL: Oh, yes, yes, very much so. And if anybody felt like calling him or visiting, he would be glad to talk with anybody. Very interesting character because his range of interests is so widespread. I think he must have headed up the humanities there for at least fifteen or twenty years. And he had time to judge a lot of people and a lot of personalities, particularly in the theatre, not just in Federal Theatre. And he always thought that Hallie was tops ...

MK: I better get on the road down to La Jolla before ... (laugh).

EL: Well, you can't touch all bases. But he is a modest person, and a very knowledgeable one, and has been a friend of what Hallie would call the tributary theatre oh, for many, many many years. We were talking about how did Hallie come to go to Smith MK: Why she would leave Vassar.

EL: .. From Vassar. Now let me see.

MK: I once heard this as a possible reason, that they said if you'll come, we'll build a theatre for you. That that was a lure.

EL: Well, that might have been. Now I'm trying to reconstruct in memory, Dr. McCracken was still alive, wasn't he, when she left Vassar for Smith? Well, I know she remained a friend of the prexy all her life. Now, there might have been something to the theatre thing; course, the interesting thing at Smith was she was to be dean. And there may have been qualities about that office that appealed. I don't think Hallie ever wanted to be dean at Vassar particularly; but it may have been that after her administrative experience in Federal Theatre, and she was a good administrator, that -- let's see, was it 1940 we went up -- or '41 we went up to Smith? But Smith seemed like a challenging enterprise and I don't remember now what the contract was. Maybe it was more than a sabbatical, maybe she could have returned to Vassar if she wanted to. But I do think that to be dean at Smith obviously had a legitimate appeal. I had the easier part of the assignment. This was no teaching grant. It was just a grant. All

I had to do was go and live there. And if invited to go and speak at the seminar class, do it. Hallie had the hard work. And as it turned out, I didn't even finish out the full academic year at Smith. It was wartime. I had done one war film already for RKO, Hitler's Children, which we previewed at Smith and went very well, and they wanted me to come back to do a Japanese film, Behind the Rising Sun. Which I did. And some people said, "Oh, Smith and David Stevens will never forgive you." Quite the opposite. I think I was one of the few holders of a grant that ever returned money to the Rockefeller Foundation (laugh).

MK: Did you say, “I 've gotta leave, here's . . .”

EL: I said, "Save it, I'm sorry." I loved Smith. Oh, we had a wonderful winter there. They had a great president. Name was Davis, no relation to Hallie Davis, Hallie Flanagan Davis. And he said to her the first week she amived up there, he said, “Now, Hallie," he said, "you have to understand, I'm not in the same league with Dr. McCracken. I do not appear in plays." You know at Vassar she only had to call up McCracken and say "we're stuck, we need somebody."

MK: "We need a big imposing person."

EL: You know, my wife's--jumping back to Vassar--my wife's long and pleasant associations with the McCrackens went back to her freshman year at Vassar. That must have been 1918. And in those days Vassar had the pleasant custom of sending as a substitute teacher to any class somebody in on the faculty who was a ranking scholar. The substitute that was sent over was not the junior member' of the department, usually the best. So one day when--forget. who the customary prof was not there--over comes Dr. McCracken. And what has he chosen to do? Gonna make it easy for the students that day and for himself. He's going to read from Pygmalion with Dr. McCracken doing the professor. Well, going back to Smith, it was true Dr. Davis was not Dr. McCracken. But he was a wonderful friend and neighbor. And in the president's house there on Smith campus--oh, he must have had a half a dozen children from England, refugees, perhaps members of families he had known, but they were living with the Davises. And our red-headed daughter, who was then--forget, but- -couldn't have been more than 9 or 10--said, "How do I get to be a refugee and go over and live in the basement of Dr. Davis' house?" Well, you know, she thought where the children were were where the action was. As an illustration--well, I’ll tell you about our wonderful relations with the Smith faculty. But Hallie brought a great deal of imagination to that campus, although in all honesty, I don't think one can say that she was a popular dean. I think there were some divisions on campus, as there are in many faculties. Long before she arrived. And a new dean -- that isn't easy to resolve. But -- she had some wonderful concepts on that campus. She wanted to celebrate Christmas in a different way. She said, "How are we going to do it?" Smith had a nice theatre, but at the time, it was even smaller than the one at Vassar. And Hallie had a feeling for largeness sometimes, as well as intimate theatre, but, you know, the way Living Newspaper opened up the scene a little bit; she said, "How can we do it?" We chewed this over for a few days, and then between us, we came up with, I think, a fairly original idea of it. I think, to give Hallie credit, she had a large part in the development of it. We decided that the way to celebrate Christmas was to go back to the traditions that used to be called the Stations in the Miracles or the Moralities in the Christmas plays. That is, that in each department, you would have a celebration that was not a play but which was related to the traditions of the particular seasons. Philosophy, no problem. Mathematics, a natural. Astronomy, simple. And, needless to say, the whole campus was a series of open houses in which each department presented the particular traditions of the course as they might have applied to the particular season.

“Well,” she said to me one day, “we've taken care of everything except the non-believers." “Well," I said, "You weren't going to convert anybody to Christmas. You were just going to make some pleasant and unusual associations with the feast." "Well," she said, "there are a lot of people that might not go for this, even though you and I and a lot of the faculty think it's pretty good."

"Well," I said, "I have a suggestion." I said, “We haven't yet gotten around to incorporating the library into this celebration." "Well," she said, "what can we do in the library that would. . .

. . .not going to denounce Christmas, just give other people a chance to be heard." So, when Hallie and I were agreed that the concluding session might properly be a seminar in the library called "The Case Against Christmas," she said, "But whom are we going to get to preside over this so that the tone remains amiable?” "Well," I said, "there's a new friend of mine here in Philosophy." I think it was Dr. Will Orton. "Oh," she said, "that would be great, and we would be sure of a very peaceful but spirited. seminar. But, who would ask him?" "Well," I said, "is there any reason people shouldn't ask him?" "Well," she said, "you know, he's a very distinguished scholar and charming man, but for a time they thought he was associated with America First or something."

And I said, "He's a scholar. He's a member of the community. And I think he had lost a son . . . "Well," she said, "if you'll ask him, okay." So I went and asked him, and he said yes and that was the rapprochement between Will Orton and the college community. He had -

MK: That brought him back into the community.

EL: It was an advance token of Christmas. Well - but Hallie had that lively community sense, and what you could do with theatre in different forms, not the traditional fans of theatre. But it was a wonderful faculty. Smith was a much bigger college than Vassar. But the faculty was a distinguished faculty, and particularly some of the younger faculty. The younger faculty had some wonderful wives, all who happened to be great cooks. And they were known on campus as the bitter wives of Smith. (Laughter) Well, the bitter wives of Smith took us to their hearts, and we enjoyed many rare evenings with all of them. Well, let's see. There was Professor Larkin, whose son, Peter, is the great designer, in the arts now, was one of our friends there. And there were musicians, composers, philosophers, and in particular a friend and neighbor, Mary Ellen Chase. . . who was a writer of rather classic New England novels and whose courses on the Bible as literature were so popular at Smith that they literally eclipsed the traditional classes in the department of religion. However, the feelings between both departments were amiable, and she had that gift, that knack of seeing the human story and the literary story and bringing it to life, and people that would never have taken a course in Religion ... (interruption)

JO: You were talking about Mary Ellen Chase . . .

EL: Ellen Chase. Well. She really had that quality, the human touch, and one day she wanted to know, would I speak in Little Chapel, which I considered a great honor, although I wasn't sure I was the one. They had voluntary chapel in what was truly a little chapel every morning, and I thought "Yes, I will!" I said, "Is it all right, if I come over and speak on Fenelon?”

And she said, "Indeed!" "Well, I was no expert on Fenelon, but that was a theme that I had been alerted to by Thornton Wilder, when I was working on the play on Cardinal Newman. Thornton had said to me one day, "If you're so interested in Newman, why don't you do a play on Fenelon." And I said, ”Who's Fenelon?"

He said, "Shame on you." But Thornton could say "Shame on you" without hurting you, you know. And the result was I spent a lot of time pursuing it.

MK: Will you spell that name?

EL: F - e - n - e - l - o - n.

MK: Fenelon.

EL: He was the -- well -- he was the Newman of the court of Louis the Fourteenth. The Archbishop of Cambrai, the tutor of the Dauphin, who, in effect, said to the Dauphin, "Your grandfather is no good, you know. We must bring you up to be everything that Louis the Fourteenth is not." And, of course, when Louis discovered what was going on, he exiled Fenelon to Cambrai But the boy remembered his tutor, and in time the tutor and the boy got together, and I think that with Louis not yet gone plotted a new and a better France. A whole reform of the tax system spread of individual conscience and authority, none of the oppressive measures of Louis the Fourteenth -- oh, it was quite a document. And then, just at the moment when you think there should be a happy ending I forgot just now what the malady was that wiped out the Dauphin, his wife and one of his two children, and so the great reform of France did not go through. But, there is a happy ending. An extraordinary one. In the early years of the French Revolution, when religionists were still being carried away to the guillotine, along with other people, there was a special adjournment of the National Assembly one day, when a delegate said they should take the adjournment in honor of the first Republican of France, the Archbishop of Cambrai, the Republican before there was a Republic. And I said to my wife, "That's being canonized by the opposition." (MK laugh) And when we got back to France in '54, we walked by the Pantheon, and I said, "Look." There was the stone with Fenelon's name between Voltaire on one side and Rousseau on the other.

MK. Aheh.

JO: That must have matched. (Laughter)

EL: Well, it's a kind of Cyranesque story, and as a matter of fact, this was--oh, Calhern could have played this role. This was a great scholar and a great gentleman, who in his youth had been a Gaston cadet, and Fenelon's own uncle had been one of the greatest duelists in France. There was that noblesse oblige thing -- he came of a family that could look Louis the

Fourteenth in the eye, and say, “Not for me." Well, anyway.

Mary Ellen Chase knew about my enthusiasm for Fenelon, and I made a short talk in chapel, which was—-well--well-received. But I was up there only a few months, but we made some wonderful friendships. MK: Had Hallie started having her tremors and her Parkinson's disease at Smith?

EL: No. I don't think so. I don't think so. I caught up with her years later. She came back to live in Poughkeepsie, of course, for a while, and she had a little house quite close to Vassar campus, and I was back in town one day for the dedication of a high school, and we had made arrangements to see each other. And I was only a little tentative about it, because, well, I knew what proper pride Hallie took in her appearance, you know.

And I didn't want to embarrass her. So -- this was in the early stages. I went over to have tea with Hallie, and it was fine. And she was fine. But I would rather imagine from advanced reports that I had had that this was a moment of great control and that it was like a scene in a play. Testing herself as to whether she could pour the tea, and everything. Well, everything really went beautifully. And the only thing was, as we walked to the door, and said goodbye (pause) you see, she said, “You know,

I don't play this role very well." (Pause)

MK: And, eh, did -- did she have some younger friends that she preferred to come and stay -- do you know Muriel Rukeyser -

EL: Oh, yes. I just got an insight -- yes.

MK: Would you -- I don't know that -- I know she had the connection, but I can't find out anything written down about it.

EL: I don't have her address, but I'm sure in the Vassar alumni books –

MK: I think I can find her, because I think she's even in Who's Who.

EL: Oh, sure. I 'm sure she must be. I think she saw more of Hallie in the last year, or years, than anybody else. Muriel had been in Hallie's classes -- well, during the period that I was there. Of course, I knew nearly everybody, because I lingered longer. (Laughter)

MK: You went through several graduations at Vassar.

EL: But she was there in the period when I was there, and we had a wonderful meeting together in New York, when the memorial was held for Hallie at the fine center there uptown.

MK: The Lincoln Center?

EL: The Lincoln Center. And she really was very close to Hallie, and would be an excellent person to contact. Interesting thing about that memorial to Hallie -- one of the most pleasant memorials that I 've ever been to. Planned largely by Eric Bentley. There were only a few of us that spoke. There was Brooks Atkinson, and Joe Cotten, who had been in Federal Theatre in the days of Orson and John Houseman, and Muriel Rukeyser, myself, and I think one other -- oh, Eric Bentley. And the whole thing had been nicely balanced out the night before between Eric and myself. Nobody repeated anybody. The styles were different, the memories were different, and it was followed by a lunch at Joanne's place. Beautiful apartment on Riverside Drive, where about 50 or 70 old friends, all of whom--everybody knew everybody. They had one thing in common, they had Hallie and most of us knew everybody else. And I said to my wife, now this was some months after the funeral itself, and I think wisely chosen, I think the memorial was planned for a time when everybody would be back in town. It was almost as if you expected Hallie to walk in the door. I kept referring to it at home as "Hallie's party." One of the most cheerful gatherings I'd been to. Didn't seem like a wake at all. I think the distance in time, perhaps, had a little to do with that. But the affection, the gaiety, the warmth. MK: I wonder if anyone tape recorded what you all said that day. You all didn't record it, did you?

EL: I don't know, but Eric Bentley would know.

MK: Since he organized it.

EL: He organized it. And I think his reaction would be cordial. He was very fond of Hallie.

MK: I just am a little worried about his whole domestic situation and if he's now cut all ties type of thing.

EL: You know, I'm trying to remember if there hadn't been some separation even at that time, because -- we met at Joanne's. Maybe I'm wrong, but I had the impression that Eric was living someplace else. But I don't think-well, I have the feeling it's this kind of a family, that you could approach either Joanne or Eric without either being annoyed at you for doing it.

MK: That they're civilized.

EL: Oh, yes, and that Hallie is really, I think is well- regarded, nearly treasured memory for Eric as well as for Joanne. Oh, I had a note from Joanne Christmas-time, which says that her boy, who must be a teenager now had a summer job in one of the off-Broadway theatres and was just enchanted.

MK: Uh-oh. (Laugh)

EL: She said "wouldn't Hallie have been fascinated." So I think that you'd get a cordial... Joanne might be a first try.

MK: I'll try her and then Eric Bentley.

EL: She would--because I've had some correspondence with Joanne recently, but I haven't heard from Eric in some time. And Joanne's sister Helen is a most personal and knowledgeable --

MK: I think I have her address and it's maybe an Illinois address, something. EL: Yeah, well it's up--it isn't across the river, but is it in the – just before you go over the bridge -- in any event, the girls are a good source references on that.

MK: This is one more little thing I was thinking about Hallie Flanagan. Did you ever feel like that she was a phenomenon, did she ever wonder and muse to you about here she'd been Murray Flanagan's wife, just a housewife and then suddenly leaping in and zooming ahead.

EL: I don't know.

MK: I mean, it had to help make her what she was.

JC: Self-conscious of her historical moment.

EL: Well, put it this way. There might be what, a sense of expectancy of great moments. Well, I think lots of us, whether we state it that strongly, those of us who are optimists have it. And I think that there was recognition that Hallie-early on, the first book, Shifting Scenes, I think that obviously (I forget who), maybe that was a Rockefeller grant, too.

MMK: Well, but I think Rockefeller gave her the money to write the book. Guggenheim gave her the time to go to Europe, but then Rockefeller I’m almost sure gave her--

EL: Well, in that book, I think you do have a sense of a person who feels that she's on the way. And I certainly had that feeling. That is, simply as an auditor when I first met her, I don't know what her own private feelings about herself were at the time, but you know, when I went out and said, ”Can I audit your classes?” I thought she had something. And when I saw some of her early productions at Vassar I was sure. She did the three manners of Chekhov there. Well, that really had it. To do the same story in three styles? And the last one was real Flanagan. In the bare stage of Avery Hall, with just two swings you played the big scene. It was a knockout. Of course there's a whole section of Hallie's life that I wasn't familiar with, but I think was-must have been a pleasant episode, when she worked with ...

MMK: George Pierce Baker.

EL: George Pierce Baker. And probably that contributed a great deal to her confidence as a teacher. I always heard her talk of Baker with great affection, great affection.

MMK: I would think he catalyzed her, probably. . .

EL: Oh, yes, and apparently Baker had that quality for quite a few people in those early classes. There are some people who turn out to be good catalysts as teachers and others not. Even if they know, they don't seem to be able to communicate it or put it into other people. In that field of catalytics, it does seem Baker and Phil Barry, for instance, had a certain rapport. That Barry did well in Baker. There's a playwright that I think is often neglected and if we had a national theatre with regional affiliates, some of the plays of Phil Barry are still worth a second thought. We did a lot of lip service to O'Neill, but the truth of the matter is a lot of O'Neil’s plays are nearly unplayable. The most playable play of all of O’Neill's, it seems to me, is Ah, Wilderness! But I always claimed about Barry somewhat like Wilder, though they weren’t really too alike, that Barry could write about virtue and make it attractive. You know there's some people who can write about virtue as a counterpoint to sin, well, like Graham Greene, or some of the French novelists who from the dark side of the moon can bring up that which is good, the true and the beautiful. But Barry could sit down and write about amiable, virtuous people and make them dramatic and exciting. That's not easy to do. And he did it, oh, in Paris Bound, and Philadelphia Story, and Holiday, and then he had one play that just missed being great- Here Come the Clowns. But a lot of the critics couldn't accept Barry as a serious playwright. They thought he had to be the polished writer of successful comedies. And in Here Come the Clowns he came across a really tough idea: if God’s in his heaven, why is there evil in the world? A night in the corner saloon and a fella trying to solve that problem. And some people say, "Well, Barry didn't really solve it.tr Well, who did? (laugh) But he came close.

MMK: (laugh) Who has?

EL: When I've heard people be critical of Hallie Flanagan, it’s because they've said things like she was collegiate in her outlook. In other words, she was an enthusiast and she supported these amateur efforts, and if you want to be a true professional, and you have to be tough and cut people off, she didn't do that. Well, don't you think that was a changing attitude, that that was the healthy way to do it? Well, also I think that the Vassar spirit of her time, which I still think is the better one, in spite of Hallie's regard for the professional theatre, and I think she was aware of the limitations of college theatre, although she liked college theatre, but she didn't look down her nose on Broadway, or the achievement that was appropriate on Broadway. But she didn't feel, nor did Vassar, that drama for undergraduates should become a trade school. And I think it was that reasonable sense of limitation that made Hallie popular with Vassar faculty at a time when, you know, the traditional departments were not inclined to rush over and embrace the experimental theatre, because like all good theatres it attracted the enthusiasm and the knockout devotion of those who were involved in it. But what saved Hallie from academic hostility was her scrupulous regard for drama as a department of English. Now there are quite a few girls, as I say, like Lovey Phelps and Rukeyser and Mollie Day Thatcher who went on to interesting careers in the theatre and I think that what they learned with Hallie was of great help. But Hallie didn't think of herself as a casting agent for Broadway. On the other hand, in the professional theatre, working, dealing with Sinclair Lewis and O'Neill and Eliot, Hallie was as at hone with them as she was at Vassar. I think that she had a scrupulous regard--she would have made a good lawyer, I think. A scrupulous regard for the jurisdictional sense. That there are meets and bounds appropriate to every enterprise, and I think-if she hadn't had that approach at Vassar, maybe her theatre wouldn't have lasted as long there. Because everybody felt that it was an extension of the college experience, a broadening of it, and, I have a feeling out here--I'll not mention the schools, successful as they are, that--to have all this terrific equipment, of television and theatre and film, available for undergraduates, it's much too soon, in my opinion. I think the important thing, to be a good playwright, is to come well-equipped, to have as much exposure to music, English, philosophy, languages, travel, the things that make the world go 'round, and not mingle too quickly with the tools of the craft. For instance, there's a wonderful theatre named for Hallie at Vassar now.

MMK: What do you think of it?

EL: Well, I haven't seen it, only photographs, but I said to Genevieve, I wondered how soon the students will be able to manipulate it. It's got everything to work with from the lighting and sound point of view. But Robert Jones would say, "All right, so now you got it. (laugh) What are you going to do with it, eh?” Hallie would know exactly what to do with it.

And I've often thought that in most of the professions, it's not an accident that it takes, what, six or seven years to really qualify yourself. Now, you can't say this too often to the young. You wouldn't want to discourage them. And I don't mean just playwrights. But if it takes seven or ten years before the young, emerging lawyer or doctor or architect really feels that he's in his profession and says, ”Well, I made the right choice. I know how to do it and people know and they have confidence in me, as I have confidence in myself.” I think five or seven years from now the graduates of Vassar and graduates here would know what to do with these great things. I think

Hallie would know. It isn’t that they shouldn't have it, but I think, oh, really, if a theatre is to have a standing with the greater disciplines, it should be your graduate study. I figure that I should hardly speak, I, who never went to college, except auditing the years at Vassar (I'll tell you about that afterwards), but, I figured out that in four years, at any first-rate college, there are hardly enough hours to take with enjoyment all the courses that you could like to have. When you think that the proper amount of math, the proper amount of languages, proper amount of philosophy, history, music and drama, in proportion, those are four busy years! And that, unless one is to look on theatre as an effete, part-time thing, shouldn't you give it the same respectful, long-range attention that medicine and law give to their people? When I said that I hadn't been to college, my wife says, "No, but you had seven great years at Vassar." (laugh) This was after the fact. In the primitive days, back in 1918, one could go to law school in those days without being a college graduate. . . And now I don't think it's the best way to go to law school, but I had no choice, and as a young reporter at 18, I decided to go to Fordham Law School, which I liked very much. I commuted 150 miles a day to Fordham Law; commuted in order to maintain a good newspaper job in Poughkeepsie. And it was a fine experience. I liked Fordham Law very much. And in those days three years in law school, plus a year of clerkship, which was a very good requirement, because that was very much like the tutorial approach or the Inns at Court in London, where the old fashioned and good theory was that the way to learn law was to work with a lawyer. So I took the bar examination and passed it, and had my LL. B. So you (inaudible). . . one night I'm at dinner with some people, years and years ago, very pleasant, black tie dinner or something, and a lady said, ”Why, dear Mr. Lavery, what was your college?” I said I had no college. Pause. Then to make it easy for her, I said, "Well, there's a story told about Israel Zangwill, at a London dinner, where a lady looking at the place cards said, "Oh, dear Mr. Zangwill, what is your Christian name?" (laugh) Well, I suppose I speak admiringly of the opportunities of those who can have four years at Vassar, on the way to whatever they are to become, because it seems to me the more baggage the better, and not to specialize too soon.

MMK: That's why it was perfect to have that bare stage at Vassar, wasn't it?

EL: And it was a challenge to the imagination. You see, the fact that in a material way, Hallie had so little to work with there compelled all concerned to use their imaginations, and of course as years went by I became more and more a convert to Hallie's sense of form in the theatre. I think, given choices, she would always prefer to work with a new form rather than an old one. But at the time when I first joined Hallie's classes, I was only interested in writing a well-made play that would make a lot of money. (laugh) Well, as time rolled by, I began to see the wisdom of Hallie's ideas. And in some of my teaching experiences out here, I use some of her techniques, of course. Over at Immaculate Heart College in the old days, we were doing a play that needed background projections, because the stage, like Hallie's, didn't offer much, unless you did it imaginatively. So I said to the director there, who was a friend of mine, “Well,” I said, "We ought to get some background projections." He said, “Where would you get those?" Well, I said, "If you were Hallie Flanagan, you'd make them." So he said, “How do you make background projections?" Well, I said, "I understand you go to the library and you look up Linnebach lantern, or you send the girls in your class and give them credit for it, and then you experiment with whatever they improvise--" and you know, they did very well. And if they were just a little bit, what-shaggy or fringy, considering we were doing a rather non-realistic play, the atmospheric quality of the projections, the not-too-finished, not-too polished, just made it right. These girls had never worked with a Linnebach lantern before, and I thought that's part of education. That's what Hallie would have done. She said, "Well, go and teach yourself how to make a Linnebach lantern." Which I always thought was the extra value of the theatre. As Hallie said, the research you do putting on a play--that' s what really counts. Or is it Williamsburg? You carry home twice as much as you had room for the first time.

JO: Let me ask you about some of the productions in New York. I assume that you went to most of them. And for instance the Living Newspapers. I think you wrote us once that you thought, with all due respect to Power, that Ole-Third of a Nation was the high point.

MMK: Yes, but you know, that's purely a personal preference. Actually, I don't think I ever saw Power. But One-Third of a Nation I did see and liked. I think those who had seen Power might have preferred it over One-Third. I've read both scripts. But Norman Lloyd in Power was a big thing in New York. That happened just a little before I arrived.

JO: Oh, you didn't see, then, the earlier ones. Injunction Granted, or Triple-A Plowed Under.

EL: No. You see, I came into the project literally as of, oh, September, 1937. So--and I didn't see Ethiopia, and that whole evolution of the Living Newspaper from what was literally a stage newspaper. . . into what is another form of playwriting, really. I think in Arena, Hallie's very interesting when she's asked about the origins of Living Newspaper. Arthur Arent rather implied in a quote in Arena that, well, it was a thing that just happened, and Hallie said, "Well, it happened before," in medieval miracle plays, the voice of God; the Volksbuhne, and I suppose some of the cabaret theatres, but as Hallie said, it didn't matter too much where it came from, except that it was a natural form for audiences to enjoy, that it had been used before. And as I said in some letter, I think to Professor Brown, we used it at Fordham. Even in a fictional form. We were doing a play with Robert Speaight, way back in 1940 on Edmund Campion, historical drama, the daring Jesuit martyr in the days of Elizabeth, I think, in London. And as in many historical dramas, there is a lot of exposition to handle. And Hallie often said that's the thing that mires down most plays, you know, how are you going to clear that exposition and then leave the stage where you can really get at the playable scenes. . .

. . .And then as soon as you could play a scene, you’d play a scene. MMK: How about-was there a little argument the other day about whether the March of Time came after the Living Newspaper or not? EL: I think it was before.

MMK: See, someone said that, and someone else said, “Oh, I didn't realize that, I thought the Living Newspaper was the prototype."

EL: Well, I have a feeling, and you know I can't prove it, that probably March of Time comes ahead.

JO: Did you see Medicine Show, which was in rehearsal for Federal Theatre and then went on to be done ..

EL: No, no, didn't see that either. You see, I was out here, I came out as a screenwriter in the fall of 1935 and stayed here until oh, about June of 1937 and then went back home to Poughkeepsie and saw that summer session out at Vassar and then joined Federal Theatre in the fall.

MMK: You mentioned something about John McGee inviting you to join-

EL: I think actually that's the way it happened. I had not known John before, but he was very much a part of that summer retraining session at Vassar. And I forget now what it was I talked on when I went out there, but he and I hit it off very well.

MMK: Have you kept up with him?

EL: No.

MMK: He's someone that we don't quite have it tied up; is he around, is he gone?

EL: I don't either. I haven't seen him in years and years and years.

(JO and EL cross-talking.) JO: The play I think you refer to as Horse Opera, though it's also referred to as Scenario at times, and some places as Colossal.

(JO and MMK cross-talking.)

EL: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Nothing ever happened there.

JO: Is that collaborative with McGee?

EL: Yes. I got working on that when we shared offices-not shared; we had offices in the same building, 1697 Broadway.

MMK: Maybe it says "LAM," Lavery and McGee. Could that be? (laugh)

That's how we have it signed.

EL: Both names are on that script. That was a show, well, it would take a project like Federal Theatre to do it. You know, this following motion picture fans through the years, and in terms of the effect that the films had or did not have on them was the kind of show that Federal Theatre could do well. But I don't think that with conventional private enterprise McGee and I would have stood a chance. Too expensive. Much too expensive. But it was fun to work on. I haven't seen John since, well, literally, I guess, or heard from him, since the end of Federal Theatre. I don't think I saw him or heard from him, when we were working on the book at Vassar, but he must have known Hallie back in Iowa. Don Farran made a funny remark on the telephone the other day. He said, "I’m surprised you didn't come from Iowa. . . Everybody else did." (laugh) I think he said that

McGee was from Iowa.

MMK: I know we were surprised to discover that Phil Barber was from Iowa. EL: Well, then, that puts it all together. On the other hand-and yes, Phil was a big wheel on the New York City project. Of course, my wife often says about Hollywood and the evolution of Hollywood, how many friends turn up with friends. "Well," I said, "You wouldn’t expect than to hire their enemies." (laugh) We look back on it, and we think, "Well, if they are people of talent-“ Of course, Hollywood sometimes made the mistake of hiring friends that didn't have talent. But if the person involved is a person of obvious talent, it seems to me quite understandable that a friend should employ than, or should re-employ them. It's more fun to work with people you know than people you don't know.

JO: In this Vassar collection of inventory of Living Newspapers, Horse Opera or Scenario is listed as one of the Living Newspapers-

EL: Oh, that I didn't realize. I wouldn't really consider the Living Newspaper, but I certainly would say that it was done in Living Newspaper style.

MMK: That's what I thought. I was reading it last night, and I hadn't read that it was classed as a Living Newspaper.

JO: Yeah. I think that in the back of this little newsletter, there's a list of Living Newspapers, which is being very broadly defined as coming from that Vassar list.

EL: Well, I can see how it might wander, you know?

JO: Because of the use of the Loudspeaker and people coming up, representative of the typical couple-

EL: Oh, yes. This is true.

MMK: How about Liberty Deferred? EL: You know, I only have a vague recollection of that, and I recognize it as a title in the National Service Bureau, but offhand now I couldn't tell you what it was about.

JO: It's again another play in the Living Newspaper technique. I think it was written as one of the project scripts like Norman Rosten's, or like Arnold Sundgaard's. It was on the history of Negro slavery.

MMK: It was Abram Hill and John Silvera-were those the two?

EL: That's a familiar name. Now there was sone-is that one of the titles that I associate with-well, to produce or not to produce? Was there some question of whether they went through with it?

JO: Right. There's files of letters from Ben Russak to you, reporting what plays are in stages, how they're developing, and that goes on from the time you arrived to the end. And Liberty Deferred is mentioned along with a number of others through most of '38. And then it suddenly drops out in the start of '39, and there is in the National Archives a few-paged document called "The Negro Brief." It's Negro artists of various sorts, such as designers, actors, playwrights, arguing that they have been discriminated against. And Liberty Deferred is a case in point.

MMK: It seemed to be going along so optimistically. There would be a production conference, and the word would be, "We have the script. It's getting very close to a final form, and we'll have it in next spring's productions," or something like that.

EL: Well, you know, oftentimes in a project like that, the ultimate decision to produce or not to produce isn't necessarily a matter of discrimination, but I can see how playwrights, who were properly hopeful, would find it hard to believe that if everything had been going well, then suddenly it wasn't going well. But I think in the theatre particularly--well, in films also-there are so many questions of taste and style involved that the ultimate acceptance or rejection of a script may have nothing to do with the personality of the author, or even the worth of the enterprise. So many peripheral factors. I always thought in Federal Theatre that in the areas of Negro drama, children's theatre, what we would say are special fields, Hallie and the project did as much as anyone could have hoped for, because we were rich in manpower, until the cuts. That cut in '36 I think hurt. But for a while there, Federal Theatre was rich in manpower. As I said, they could afford to do Living Newspapers. They had the actors they could put to work.

JO: This may be a leading question. There seemed to be a number of things happening in late '38, early '39, and that play may be a case in point. But also Don Farran was saying the other day there was a number of plays that he would send to New York for approval and you and Hallie Flanagan would say, "No. Not now. It's too politically sensitive. It can't be done now." And that George Kondolf became the director of the New York City Project. Was there an attempt by the Federal Theatre to prepare for congressional criticism, in the Dies Committee, particularly?

EL: My first impression would be no. But the project always had its critics. In other words, from perhaps even the early days of its successful productions--and I do think it was always aware that there could be even legitimate, relative criticism, not crackpot criticism. But I don't think there was a conscious approach of self defense until, well, Martin Dies really began to level on the project. From time to time, with newspapers that didn't see this or that or the other, there might have been replies, but I don't think that as of that period, there was a conscious Campaign strategy.

JO: Someone's written that-and I can't remember who it is-I hope you remember. That George Kondolf replaced Phil Barber, because Kondolf was Catholic, and would be--

MMK: Soft.

EL: I don't know whether that's true. I do know that George was a pretty good director for the project.

MMK: He had done well in the midwest, hadn't he?

EL: Yes. And in the Chicago area, I think. But I think George had a good reputation in the theatre before he joined the project. As I say, in my own case, I don't think I was invited to join the project because I was a Catholic. I think it was really because I happened to hit it off with McGee. And I'm sure that the initial conversation at Vassar was with McGee, not Hallie. Although John was not one to keep a secret from Hallie. But I think that George had done very well in the Chicago area, and I don't know what the situation of time was with Phil Barber in New York. But they thought he'd be a good man for New York.

JO: Do you know where George Kondolf is now?

EL: No. George I haven't heard from in years and years. He liked a play of mine that went through various forms. As you know from the files, I wrote a play called Ex-President, or-it had many titles.

JO: I read it as Ex-President.

EL: And George liked it, but we never did it on the project, and I think I wrote Professor Brown about that. I wouldn't say that the decision not to do it was censorship at all. As a matter of fact, I think I improved the play as years went by. I forget now what the plot line was about, but it dealt with a social situation involving an ex-president in times not unlike the times the project was going through. Very melodramatic in form. And I forget now the exact circumstances in which that was removed to the back burner, but it didn’t bother me at the time at all. And as a matter of fact, years afterwards, I did much better by it under another title, and it was done both in Germany and at Pasadena Playhouse, and the title was The Indispensable Man. And at one time it had another title, Hail to the Chief, and when the opportunity to have it done--I think it was at Stuttgart-came up, a German friend, translator of the play, said (and they were scrupulous, I must say)--"Oh, if they were going to do your play, they'd do your play." He said, "I think you'd do better with another title; Hail to the Chief doesn't sound good in Germany. (laugh) So I said, "Well, what would your suggestion be?" He said, “Der Unentbehrliche," which I guess means "The Indispensable." And so I tailored the play a little bit more. I tried to do it, not consciously, but if you can imagine, John Van Druten writing a play about an ex- president, who goes hare to a little town like Northampton, which never voted for him for a local office, you know-a little bit like Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park-never carried Hyde Park, and what happens to the handsome young ex-president, prematurely retired from politics, and his handsome wife, when they sit down in the little town to start a new life together. I don't know that it'll have any great future here, but the evolution of that play from a big, full-scale full-blown melodrama into a comedy of characters, but with some vital points along the way-. In the second act I had a very interesting scene in the revised play, when they are really hitting it off in the small town. They' re seeing much more of each other than they ever saw in the White House. And he says, "What I found out about you today!" She says, “What?" He says, ”You never told me that you were investigated by the FBI.” Well, you can imagine you could do a pretty good scene on that. And I'll tell you where I got the idea for that. Some years back I met a wonderful young Navy lieutenant, who was doing some service supplementing FBI in personnel checks in the industry. And we got to talking one day. We hit if off very well. And I said something about unclassified files, and if it was only a personnel check, you know, there they were in the files forever, or something. "Oh," he said, "Don't worry about that. You ought to see what they got on Mrs. Roosevelt."

(laugh) So, years after I thought, "Oh, I'll take that and put it in." But it was a strange evolution of a play.

JO: You 're justly proud of First Legion. What other plays are you particularly--

EL: Well, there are lots without question better known abroad than here. There was Monsignor's Hour with Bassennan in the lead. Then let's see, Brother Petroc's Return, a very good English novel, I thought, that I adapted from the work of an anonymous nun, whom I later met. A very fine novelist. Kind of a Berkeley Square type of story about a young monk who died hundreds of years ago, but he didn't die really. He comes back in this time, and his adjustment out of the Age of Faith into the Age of Reason. Well, Germans liked that one. I suppose the Germans like my plays because they have more theatres. After First Legion you could usually find a friendly response.

MMK: Where has Kamiano been produced?

EL: Belgium. Under strange circumstances (laugh). It was produced by a very good company. I don't usually tell this to most people. It was stolen by one of my translators (laugh). However, that was the only misadventure I ever had with a translator in European experiences. A French version of the play was produced in Belgium, and I recognized it as soon as I saw the program. At that time, what was it--one of the international things in the U.N. or something was publishing a monthly calendar of productions around the world, so I recognized it. It was a man to whom I loaned money to. But afterwards I thought, “Well, what difference does it make?" There wasn't a wide market for that. That would have been good for Federal Theatre. That had a big cast. I think we would have done well by Kamiano in Federal Theatre.

MMK: It was never produced in Federal Theatre?

EL: No.

MMK: Because we have a script in the collection.

EL: Oh. Then in Europe, I had a play that I was very fond of, which was the subject of a big arbitration, which I won, but thereby became part owner of an opera. (laugh) It's a rather complicated story. I had the rights to a beautiful story called Song of the Scaffold by Baroness Gertrud von le Fort. It was the story of nuns in the French Revolution, and a very young nun who had gone into the cloister, seeking protection from the world, and discovers that there's no protection in the cloister.

And when the day came, she too would. be in danger. And I did this in a form that Hallie would have liked. This was the one the girls did background projections for, up in Immaculate Heart. A rather modern approach without being freaky about it. Well, as sometimes happens, the rights were sold twice. I don't know whether the Baroness, who was a great novelist in her own right, realized that she was disposing of rights that she had once disposed of. But somewhere or other, the heirs of George Bernanos came up with a version, now known as Dialogues des Carmelites, and made a very successful production of it in Paris. Well, you can imagine my Irish reactions. I beat the drums and yelled, and they made an offer that perhaps I should have accepted. At one time they said if I would waive my rights, which I claimed were antecedent to theirs, I could have half the royalties. I was mad and said, “No.” I had a lawyer friend who spoke French and was residing in Paris, and so we went to arbitration in the Society of Authors, to establish that Song of the Scaffold was the title in that it belonged to me and that they were intruders. Well, believe it or not, we won the arbitration, but it was a typical--not French verdict, but Scotch verdict. (laugh) The arbiters said unanimously that all the rights were in my favor, that the representatives of the Bernanos heirs had proceeded without cause, but since they had proceeded without cause, but in good faith, let them keep the royalties they had already earned and let Lavery keep the title.

I didn't think that was substantive justice (laugh), but there's still a sequel to that story which explains how I became part owner of an opera. In '54, when Dialogues was still playing, just after I'd won the arbitration, and I was in Paris briefly, I caught up with Poulenc, who was then, as always, a distinguished composer but not in good health. He had been halfway through the second version of Dialogue des Carmelites when he heard of the arbitration. He said, "I assure you, in all honor, if I had ever known that there was a question as to title, and it was in arbitration," he said, "I would never have continued with work on the score. But, I'm halfway through it. If you say I can't do it, you have all the rights. You can stop it.” And I thought, well, we had some friends in common, one of whom had been in First legion years before, at the Vieux Columbier. And I thought, "Well, I have no row with Poulenc.” We each were deceived. So I made a separate agreement with Poulenc, under which he could proceed with the rest of the score, and on every program I would be credited as a kind of co-sponsor of the opera, and I would also participate financially in the royalties. And you know, that is an agreement that has been kept scrupulously. Poulenc has been dead now quite a few years, but his executors and his agents forward regularly the royalties that are due. They are not always large, but his work is still popular around the world, and I get copies of the program and -- regularly, the name appears on the program, and the royalty checks are forwarded. And I thought, well, it was a happy ending to a rather difficult situation.

MMK: Yes. I think that we' re going to have to say goodbye.

(brief exchange) [END OF INTERVIEW]