Genesis of an American Playwright

Genesis of an American Playwright

Genesis of an

American Playwright By Horton Foote Edited and with an Introduction by Dr. Marion Castleberry

Baylor University Press Waco, Texas USA

This volume is the forty-fifth published by the Markham Press Fund of Baylor University Press, established in memory of Dr. L. N. and Princess Finch Markham of Longview, Texas, by their daughters, Mrs. R. Matt Dawson of Waco, Texas, and Mrs. B. Reid Clanton of Longview, Texas. Cover design by Pamela Poll Cover photo of Horton Foote @ Keith Carter. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Division 101 Independence Ave., S.E. Washington, D.C. 20540-4320

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foote, Horton. Genesis of an American playright / by Horton Foote ; edited and with an introduction by Marion Castleberry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-918954-91-6 (alk. paper) 1. Foote, Horton—Childhood and youth. 2. Foote, Horton—Homes and haunts—Texas—Wharton. 3. Dramatists, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Screenwriters—United States—Biography. 5. Texas—Social life and customs. 6. Wharton (Tex)—Biography. I. Castleberry, Marion. II. Title. PS3511.O344Z469 2004 812′.54—dc22 2003019617 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Lillian

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Chronology

xi

Introduction

1

1

2

3

Genesis of a Playwright

17

Seeing and Imagining

17

Pasadena and Beyond

33

Learning to Write

46

On Being a Southern Writer

61

Wharton, Then and Now

61

What It Means to be a Southern Writer

66

The Trip to Paradise

75

The Artist as Mythmaker

79

Things Have Ends and Beginnings

86

Writing for the Stage

97

Dance and Broadway

97

Harrison, USA

100

Sometimes the One-Act Play Says It All

102

vii

viii

4

5

Contents Advice to Young Playwrights

104

Herbert Berghof

113

The Orphans’ Home Cycle Lecture

115

How To and How Not To

136

Introduction to The Young Man from Atlanta

152

Writing for the Screen

155

The Little Box

155

On First Dramatizing Faulkner

157

The McDermott Lecture

169

Writing for Film

180

Willa Cather

195

Thoughts on the American Theater

203

The New York Theater (1930–1940)

203

The Changing of the Guard

215

The Vanishing World and Renewals

229

Appendix: Cast Lists and Production Information

235

Bibliography of Published and Produced Works (1939–2003)

263

Works Cited

269

Index

273

Acknowledgments This book was made possible in part by a grant from The Institute for Oral History at Baylor University and by a Faculty Travel Assistance stipend from Baylor University Research. At Baylor, Dr. Robert Sloan, University President, Dr. David Lyle Jeffrey, Provost, and Dr. Wallace Daniel, Dean of Arts and Sciences, continually supported this project, as did Stan Denman, Kelly Russell, Steven Day, Diane Smith, DeAnna Toten Beard, and especially Carey C. Newman, who offered expert advice and suggestions on publishing. I appreciate the assistance of Russell Martin II, director and curator of the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University, and the other members of the library staff who were most helpful when I studied the Horton Foote Papers in the summer of 2002. A special appreciation is extended to Kelly Kline Vance, Horton Foote’s assistant and my phone buddy, for her invaluable help and inspiration during this project and to my graduate student Chris Day for her tireless efforts in research and proofreading. This book could not have been completed without the two of them. I am especially indebted to Horton Foote who believed in this book and trusted me to edit his writing. He generously read and responded to every essay and lecture in the collection as well as to my introduction. His kind words of encouragement inspired me throughout this project. Most of all, I want to express my affection and respect for him and my appreciation for his continued friendship over the last twenty years. Finally, I want to thank my wife and best friend, Terri, for her unconditional love. Her respect for Horton Foote is equal to mine and, consequently, she supported this project with her patience, her understanding, and her prayers. Marion Castleberry

ix

Chronology 1916

Born on March 14, 1916, in Wharton, Texas, to Albert Horton and Harriet Gautier Brooks Foote

1932

Graduated from Wharton High School

1933–1935

Studied acting at Pasadena Playhouse in California

1936–1942

Worked as an actor in New York; trained with Tamara Daykarhanova, Andrius Jilinsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Vera Soloviova (1937–1939) Joined the American Actors Company (1939)

1940

Wharton Dance produced by American Actors Company

1941

Texas Town produced by American Actors Company

1942

Out of My House produced by American Actors Company Only the Heart produced by American Actors Company at the Provincetown Playhouse, New York

1944

Only the Heart produced on Broadway by American Actors Company; starring Mildred Dunnock and June Walker Wrote briefly for Warner Brothers in Hollywood, California Daisy Lee, a dance play, choreographed and performed by Valerie Bettis Miss Lou, In My Beginning, The Lonely choreographed by Martha Graham; and Goodbye to Richmond produced at the Neighborhood Playhouse

xi

xii

Genesis of an American Playwright

1945

Married Lillian Vallish on June 4, 1945

1945–1949

Moved to Washington, DC; taught at King-Smith School; wrote Homecoming, People in the Show, Themes and Variations, and The Chase

1949

Returned from Washington, DC, to New York City

1950–1951

Barbara Hallie Foote born March 31, 1950 Celebration produced by ANTA (American National Theatre and Academy), New York (1950) Wrote for The Gabby Hayes Show (also called The Quaker Oats Show) Ludie Brooks presented on NBC’s Lamp Unto My Feet (1951)

1952

The Chase produced on Broadway by José Ferrer; starring John Hodiak, Kim Hunter, and Kim Stanley Albert Horton Foote III born November 7, 1952

1952–1964

Television plays presented by Philco-Goodyear Playhouse, Studio One, Gulf Playhouse, Playhouse 90, DuPont Play of the Month, and U.S. Steel Hour include The Travelers (1952), Expectant Relations (1953), The Old Beginning (1953), The Trip to Bountiful (1953), The Death of the Old Man (1953), The Tears of My Sister (1953), The Dancers (1954), The Oil Well (1953), A Young Lady of Property (1953), John Turner Davis (1953), The Midnight Caller (1953), The Dancers (1954), The Shadow of Willie Greer (1954), The Roads to Home (1955), Flight (1956), Drugstore, Sunday Noon (1956), A Member of the Family (1957), Old Man (1960), Tomorrow (1960), The Shape of the River (1960), The Night of the Storm (1961), and The Gambling Heart (1964).

1953

The Trip to Bountiful produced on Broadway by the Theater Guild; starring Lillian Gish, Jo Van Fleet, and Eva Marie Saint

1954

The Traveling Lady produced on Broadway by the Playwrights Producing Company and Roger Stevens; starring Kim Stanley and Lonny Chapman

1955

Walter Vallish Foote born December 4, 1955

1956

Harrison, Texas: Eight Television Plays published by Harcourt Brace

Chronology

xiii

The Midnight Caller and John Turner Davis produced by Sheridan Square Playhouse, New York City Worked on first screenplay Storm Fear for United Artists The Chase, a novel, published by Rinehart and Company Moved from New York City to Nyack, New York 1959

Daisy Brooks Foote born July 3, 1959

1962

To Kill a Mockingbird produced by Alan Pakula and Universal Studios; Foote received an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and the Writers Guild of America Screen Award for his adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel The Trip to Bountiful produced by Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City

1965–1966

Baby, the Rain Must Fall, screenplay based on Foote’s original play The Traveling Lady, produced by Alan Pakula for Columbia Pictures; starring Steve McQueen and Lee Remick

1965

The Chase, screenplay by Lillian Hellman based on novel and original play by Horton Foote; produced by Sam Spiegel and starring Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Angie Dickinson, and Robert Duvall Hurry Sundown, commissioned adaptation of K. G. Glidden’s novel, directed by Otto Preminger Moved from Nyack, New York, to New Hampshire

1968

The Stalking Moon, commissioned screenplay, produced by Warner Brothers Tomorrow, adapted from a short story by William Faulkner, produced by HB Playwrights Foundation, featuring Robert Duvall

1973–1974

Musical adaptation of Gone with the Wind performed in London and Los Angeles Tomorrow, film adaptation, produced by Paul Roebling and Gilbert Pearlman; featuring Robert Duvall and Olga Bellin (1973–1974)

1974–1977

Father, Albert Horton Foote passed away (1974) Mother, Hallie Brooks Foote passed away (1975)

xiv

Genesis of an American Playwright Wrote The Orphans’ Home Cycle, including Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, Courtship, Valentine’s Day, 1918, Cousins, and The Death of Papa A Young Lady of Property produced by HB Playwrights Foundation, New York City (1976) Night Seasons produced by HB Playwrights Foundation, New York City (1977)

1977–1981

Adapted Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person (1977) and William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1980) for the American Short Story series on PBS television Courtship produced by HB Playwrights Foundation (1978) 1918 produced by HB Playwrights Foundation (1979) Valentine’s Day produced by HB Playwrights Foundation (1980) In a Coffin in Egypt produced by HB Playwrights Foundation, starring Sandy Dennis (1980) Became member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre; currently serves on the Executive Board

1982

The Roads to Home, three one-act plays: A Nightingale, The Dearest of Friends, and Spring Dance, presented at Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, New York City The Old Friends produced by HB Playwrights Foundation The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees and Blind Date performed at Loft Theatre, Los Angeles, California

1983

Tender Mercies, starring Robert Duvall and directed by Bruce Beresford, garnered an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, a Writers Guild of America Award, and a Christopher Award for Horton Foote as well as an Academy Award for Best Actor for Robert Duvall Cousins produced by Loft Theatre, Los Angeles Keeping On: A Drama of Life in a Mill Town, teleplay produced for PBS’s American Playhouse

1984

Courtship produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville

1985

Beginning of independent film production

Chronology

xv

1918, original screenplay based on The Orphans’ Home Cycle, released starring Hallie Foote, William Converse-Roberts, and Matthew Broderick; film shown at the Taormina Festival in Italy The Trip to Bountiful, screenplay based on Foote’s play, released, starring Geraldine Page who won the Academy Award for Best Actress; Foote and Page both won Independent Film Awards; Foote nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and an award from the Writers Guild of America The Road to the Graveyard, a one-act play, produced by the Ensemble Studio Theatre Blind Date, The One-Armed Man, and The Prisoner’s Song produced by HB Playwrights Foundation Received Ensemble Studio Theatre Founders Award for contributions to the American Theatre 1986

On Valentine’s Day, original screenplay based on The Orphans’ Home Cycle play, released starring Hallie Foote, Matthew Broderick, and William Converse-Roberts; official American entry in the Venice Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, and the U.S. Film Festival Courtship, screenplay based on The Orphans’ Home Cycle play, released starring Hallie Foote, William Converse-Roberts, and Amanda Plummer Blind Date presented at Ensemble Studio Theatre; included in The Best Short Plays of 1988–89 The Widow Claire presented off Broadway at Circle in the Square Theatre, New York; included in The Best Plays of 1986–87 Lily Dale presented off Broadway at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, New York The Trip to Bountiful shown at the Edinburgh Festival in August

1987

The Story of a Marriage, a five-part series based on Courtship, Valentine’s Day, and 1918, produced by PBS television for American Playhouse Foote received Compostela Award, Brooklyn, New York Foote’s films honored at the Galveston Film Festival, Galveston, Texas (1987–1988) Courtship, Valentine’s Day, and 1918, three plays in The Orphans’ Home Cycle, published

xvi 1988

Genesis of an American Playwright The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees produced by Ensemble Studio Theatre The Habitation of Dragons premiered at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre, directed by Horton Foote and featuring Marco St. John and Hallie Foote Foote elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, and The Widow Claire, all part of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, published

1989

Dividing the Estate presented at McCarter Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey Foote received the William Inge Lifetime Achievement Award, Independence, Kansas Received the Evelyn Burkey Award by Writers Guild of America East Received the Dickinson College Arts Award The complete The Orphans’ Home Cycle published by Grove Press Screenplays, Tender Mercies, The Trip to Bountiful, and To Kill a Mockingbird, published by Grove Press in a single volume Selected One-Act Plays of Horton Foote published by Southern Methodist University Press, edited by Gerald C. Wood

1990

Convicts, screenplay based on The Orphans’ Home Cycle play, produced starring Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones Talking Pictures premiered at the Asolo Performing Arts Center in Sarasota, Florida (performed at Stages Theatre in Houston, Texas in 1991) A celebration of Horton Foote’s works for theater, film, and television held, including a production of Dividing the Estate, at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival The Trip to Bountiful performed by A.D. Players, Houston, Texas and Zachary Scott Theatre, Austin, Texas The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees published in The Best American Short Plays and presented at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, starring Lois Smith and Horton Foote, Jr.

1991

Of Mice and Men, film adaptation of novel by John Steinbeck, is released starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich

Chronology

xvii

The Trip to Bountiful presented by Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky, and New Harmony Theatre, Indiana Talking Pictures presented by Stages Theatre, Houston, Texas Dividing the Estate presented at Roger Stevens Theatre, Winston Salem, North Carolina Received the Alley Theatre Award, Houston, Texas Received Headliner’s Club Award, Austin, Texas 1992

Habitation of Dragons, TNT teleplay for Steven Spielberg Productions The Roads to Home produced by Lambs Theatre, New York The Trip to Bountiful presented at a theater festival in Perth, Australia. Convicts, Courtship, and 1918 presented by A.C.T. Theatre (San Francisco) as part of “A Great Day with Horton Foote” Celebration Torch of Hope Award, Barbara Barondess Theatre Lab Alliance, New York Lillian Vallish Foote passed away in August

1993

Night Seasons produced by American Stage Company, Teaneck, New Jersey The Trip to Bountiful presented at TheatreFest, Upper Montclair, New Jersey and The Phoenix Theatre Company, Purchase, New York Three Trips to Bountiful, edited by Barbara Moore and David G. Yellin, published by Southern Methodist University Press Four New Plays, including Habitation of Dragons, Night Seasons, Dividing the Estate, and Talking Pictures, published by Smith and Kraus Laurel Award, Writers Guild of America West, Beverly Hills, California The Widow Claire included in The Best American Plays of 1983–92

1994–1995

Talking Pictures (September 1994), Night Seasons (November 1994), The Young Man from Atlanta (January 1995), and Laura Dennis (March 1995) were produced by Signature Theatre, New York

xviii

Genesis of an American Playwright Brigham Young University Horton Foote Festival of films and plays, Provo, Utah (Spring 1995) Received Lontinkle Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, Dallas, Texas (1995) Received Lucille Lortel Award, New York (1995) Received Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Young Man from Atlanta (1995) The Young Man from Atlanta produced by Huntington Theatre, Boston, and Alley Theatre, Houston, directed by Peter Masterson, starring Ralph Waite and Carlin Glynn (1995) Received Academy Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters (May 17, 1995) Received Outer Critics Circle Special Achievement Award for Signature Theatre plays (May 26, 1995) Received Lifetime Achievement Award at the Heartland Film Festival, Indianapolis, Indiana Tender Mercies published in The Best American Screenplays of 1994–95 The Young Man from Atlanta published in The Best Plays of 1994–95

1996

Lily Dale, film version of The Orphans’ Home Cycle play, presented on Showtime on June 9 starring Mary Stuart Masterson, Sam Shepard, and Stockard Channing Inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame (January 22, 1996) Collected Plays, Volume II, including The Trip to Bountiful, The Chase, The Traveling Lady, and The Roads to Home, published by Smith and Kraus

1997

The Young Man from Atlanta restaged in January by Robert Falls, with Shirley Knight and Rip Torn, for Goodman Theatre, Chicago, and in March at the Longacre Theatre, New York The Death of Papa produced by Playmakers Repertory Theatre, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; directed by Michael Wilson, and starring Ellen Burstyn, Matthew Broderick, Polly Holliday, and Hallie Foote Alone, original teleplay, presented on Showtime, and starring Hume Cronyn, James Earl Jones, Piper Laurie, Frederick Forest, Shelly Duvall, and Hallie Foote

Chronology

xix

Old Man, adaptation of William Faulkner’s short story, produced by CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame; starring Jeanne Tripplehorn and Arliss Howard Vernon Early, radio broadcast for Chicago Theatre on the Air, starring Mary Beth Fisher, Frederick Forrest, and Hallie Foote Foote received the Dallas/Ft.Worth Film Critics Association Lone Star Film and Best Teleplay Award for Lily Dale Received Humanitas Award for adaptation of Old Man (July 9, 1997) Telluride Film Festival, Telluride, Colorado Received Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries or a Special and the Christopher Award for adaptation of William Faulkner’s Old Man 1998

A Coffin in Egypt produced by Bay Street Theater Festival, Sag Harbor, New York; directed by Leonard Foglia, starring Glynis Johns Vernon Early produced by Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Montgomery, Alabama; directed by Charles Towers and starring Jill Tanner and Philip Pleasants Collected Works, Volume III, including The Day Emily Married, Tomorrow, A Coffin in Egypt, Laura Dennis, Vernon Early, and Getting Frankie Married–And Afterwards, published by Smith and Kraus Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member in the department of Literature Received the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his body of work Received the RCA Crystal Heart, Career Achievement Award, Heartland Film Festival

1999

The Death of Papa produced by Hartford Stage, Hartford, Connecticut; directed by Michael Wilson, starring Jean Stapleton, Dana Ivey, Andrew McCarthy, Frankie Munis, Hallie Foote, and Devon Abner Received the Ian McLellan Hunter Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Writers Guild of America, East Farewell—A Memoir of a Texas Childhood published by Scribners Press (June) Received the Bookend Award from the Texas Book Festival for lifetime contribution to Texas Letters, Austin, Texas (November)

xx 2000

Genesis of an American Playwright The Last of the Thorntons produced by Signature Theatre, New York, starring Hallie Foote, Estelle Parsons, Jen Jones, Mason Adams, and Michael Hadge Awarded doctoral degree of letters from the University of Hartford Received the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama to a Master American Dramatist (May) Received the Last Frontier Playwrights Award from the Eighth Annual Edward Albee Theatre Conference, Valdez, Alaska (June) Received New York State Governor’s Arts Award, New York State Council of the Arts (November) Received National Medal of Arts Award given by President Bill Clinton in Washington, DC (December) Three Screenplays by Horton Foote, including The Trip to Bountiful, Tender Mercies, and To Kill a Mockingbird, published by Grove Press

2001

The Carpetbagger’s Children produced by the Alley Theatre, Houston, Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, and Hartford Stage, starring Hallie Foote, Jean Stapleton, and Roberta Maxwell Beginnings: A Memoir published by Scribners Press (November) Foote received Texas Medal of Literary Arts Award given by the Texas Cultural Trust Council (Austin) Foote received the Michaela O’Harra Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Theater by New Dramatists Alumni

2002

The Actor produced at the Royal National Theatre, London, England The Carpetbagger’s Children presented at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, Lincoln Center Theatre, starring Hallie Foote, Jean Stapleton, and Roberta Maxwell Getting Frankie Married—And Afterwards produced by South Coast Repertory Theatre; directed by Martin Benson; starring Nan Martin and Juliana Donald The Prisoner’s Song presented at the Ensemble Studio Theatre; directed by Harris Yulin, the production starred Mary Catherine Garrison, Tim Guinee, Marceline Hugot, and Michael Moran Received Special Achievement in Screenplay Writing Award presented by the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration (March)

Chronology

xxi

Received American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award for The Carpetbagger’s Children; presented by the American Theatre Critics Association (April) Named “Visiting Distinguished Dramatist” by Baylor University, Waco, Texas and joined Theater Arts faculty (October) 2003

The Actor presented at the ACT Conservatory, San Francisco The 50th Anniversary Production of The Trip to Bountiful presented by Hartford Stage and Alley Theatre; directed by Michael Wilson and starring Dee Maaske, Hallie Foote, and Devon Abner Received The Texas Film Hall of Fame Award given by the Austin Film Society, Austin, Texas (March 7) Received Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Southern Methodist University, Dallas (May 17); Mr. Foote has also received Honorary Doctorate degrees from Drew University, Austin College, The American Film Institute, Spalding University, and University of the South Awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers (May) Named Moderator of the Playwrights Directors Unit at the Actors Studio, New York (September)

Introduction Believe it or not, the great writer Horton Foote got his education at Wharton— but not at the Business School. He grew up in the small town of Wharton, Texas. His work is rooted in the tales, the troubles, the heartbreak, and the hopes of all he heard and saw there. As a young man, he left Wharton to become an actor and soon discovered the easiest way to get good roles was to write the plays yourself. He has not stopped since. Among other things, he did a magnificent job of adapting Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird for the silver screen and of writing his wonderful The Trip to Bountiful and so many other tales of family, community, and the triumph of the human spirit . . . Today, we honor him for his lifetime of artistic achievement and excellence. President Clinton, December 20, 2000

On December 20, 2000, President Bill Clinton conferred the National Medal of Arts on Texas dramatist Horton Foote. In his speech, Clinton enumerated Foote’s many honors, including two Academy Awards, an Emmy, a Pulitzer Prize, the William Inge Lifetime Achievement Award, the Screen Laurel Award from the Writers Guild of America, and his induction into both the Theater Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The president declared that Horton Foote’s six-decade-long, award-winning career established him as an unquestioned master of American drama. Indeed, Horton Foote has enjoyed a remarkable career. Since 1939, when he penned his first play Wharton Dance, he has been writing what he calls “personal dramas,” timeless tales of family, home, and the mysterious resilience of the human spirit. Foote has written more than one hundred works for theater, television, and film, and he has been equally successful in all three mediums—a record of variety and productivity unmatched by any other American writer. The list of his plays and screenplays is staggering and includes such notable works as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Trip to Bountiful, The Chase, The Traveling Lady, Tender Mercies, The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Talking Pictures, The Road to the Graveyard, The Roads to Home, The Habitation of Dragons, Tomorrow, Alone, Night Seasons, Laura Dennis, Dividing the Estate, Vernon Early, and The Young Man from Atlanta, for which he won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. These and numerous other works are illustrative of the prestigious career that President Clinton chose to honor in 2000, and 1

2

Genesis of an American Playwright

Foote has not stopped writing since receiving the National Medal of Arts. In January 2001, his play The Last of the Thorntons received its world premiere at New York’s Signature Theatre, and The Carpetbagger’s Children premiered at Houston’s Alley Theatre before traveling to the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the Hartford Stage in Connecticut, and the Lincoln Center in New York. In 2002, Foote’s Getting Frankie Married—and Afterwards premiered at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in California, and his one-act play The Actor premiered at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco before being performed at the Royal National Theatre in London. In 2003, the Hartford Stage and the Alley Theatre presented the fiftieth anniversary production of The Trip to Bountiful. Undeniably, Horton Foote has enriched and continues to enrich American culture with his truthful examinations of the human condition. Although his reputation will forever rest on his significant achievements as a dramatist, he has also produced an extraordinary body of nonfiction prose, including two fascinating memoirs: Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood (1999) and Beginnings (2001). He has also written more than twenty-five essays, dating from 1944 to the present. Like his memoirs, this collection of essays and lectures offers both a rare glimpse of the private man behind the renowned public figure and a vibrant picture of an artist who has been called a “national treasure” and “America’s greatest playwright.” Few American dramatists have written so extensively about their life and work as Horton Foote, and none have done so with such honesty and skill. In this collection of Mr. Foote’s writings, he provides a look back at his Texas childhood during the Depression and recalls significant events within his sixty-year career. He reflects upon his many influences (both personal and literary), upon what it means to be a Southern writer, and upon his own creative process. He sheds light upon the rewards of independent filmmaking, the difficulties of adaptation, and the joys and frustrations of writing for stage and screen. He speaks candidly about the changing roles of directors, actors, and playwrights and the evolution of contemporary theater and film. Collectively, these essays represent the single most important statement on the writer’s moral and social convictions, his dramatic craftsmanship, and his ideas about the future of the American theater. While preserving the memories of our nation’s most beloved dramatist, this collection chronicles the history of the American theater as seen through the eyes of a remarkable artist and offers a unique look at the making of an American playwright. Horton Foote and I have collaborated to select and assemble this collection. Several of the essays and lectures included in the collection, “Dance and Broadway,” “On First Dramatizing Faulkner,” “Writing for Film,” “The Trip to Paradise,” “Sometimes The One-Act Play Says It All,” and “Introduction

Introduction

3

to The Young Man From Atlanta,” have been previously published in studies dealing with a particular aspect of Foote’s work or in a newspaper or magazine. Foote personally contributed three previously unpublished essays, “Things Have Ends and Beginnings,” “Willa Cather,” and “How To and How Not To: Some Lessons Learned along the Way,” for this collection. The remainder of the essays and lectures in this book, also previously unpublished, are housed in the Horton Foote Collection at the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University. Because of the scattered locations of this material, it has been difficult for anyone to see it as a sustained and comprehensive commentary on Foote’s work and career. Therefore, it seemed imperative that someone bring together these essays and lectures under a single cover with a mind toward familiarizing Foote scholars and enthusiasts with the work. As editor, I have tried to remain as faithful as possible to the author’s original writing. At Foote’s request, I have removed from the essays as many repetitive comments as possible, trying hard not to affect reader comprehension or the spirit of the original text. I have also titled a previously unnamed lecture “Advice to Young Playwrights,” and I have changed the title of “Richmond, USA.” to “Harrison, USA,” because the playwright felt that the original title might confuse readers who are not familiar with the mythic town of Harrison. I have divided the essays and lectures into five chapters: “Genesis of a Playwright,” “On Being a Southern Writer,” “Writing for the Stage,” “Writing for the Screen,” and “Thoughts on the American Theater,” because each section represents to me a unique and important aspect of Foote’s career and art. With few exceptions, the essays and lectures are arranged chronologically within each chapter. Because so much of Foote’s artistry has been shaped by his formative years, it seemed logical that the book should begin with three autobiographical essays that trace his childhood in Texas, his years as an actor in California and New York, and his apprenticeship with the American Actors Company. These three essays, “Seeing and Imagining,” “Pasadena and Beyond,” and “Learning to Write,” are precursors of Foote’s published memoirs; and so, in effect, this book takes up where Farewell and Beginnings left off. The title of the book, Genesis of an American Playwright, also reflects the name the playwright gave these three essays when he first presented them as lectures at Louisiana State University in the spring of 1989. Reading Horton Foote’s essays and lectures with an eye toward selecting those that best represent the writer’s remarkable career, I have been struck time and again by his devotion to family and home, by the intensity and clarity of his dramatic vision, and by his commitment to the American theater. In the first two chapters of this collection, Foote turns to the actual people, community, and events that lie behind his plays. Born in 1916, in the small Gulf Coast town of Wharton, Texas, Horton Foote grew up surrounded

4

Genesis of an American Playwright

by a large and loving family of gifted storytellers. At a very young age, he was fascinated by their tales of the past, of bravery and loss, individual courage, undaunted family devotion, and of relatives and friends who displayed extraordinary determination or sacrifice. From his family, especially his mother and father, Foote learned about the importance of place, about the sense of belonging to a noble tradition, and about the virtues by which to live—respect, loyalty, and dignity. Foote remembers that most of the stories were about friends and ancestors who had lived before his time, and yet, these people and events became as real to him as if he had lived among them. He admits in “Seeing and Imagining” that as a child he was spared nothing: “I was never told to leave the room no matter how gruesome or unhappy the tale and so, early on I learned to accept the tragic events as part of life.” The spirit of his ancestors has haunted him throughout his life, and their stories have provided the foundation for his artistry. In Wharton, Foote also witnessed the harsh realities of alcoholism, poverty, racism, injustice, and depression that have provided much of the background for his plays and films. He heard the “found music,” the ballads and hymns, that weave a tapestry through his dramas, and he discovered the simple, sparse, and unadorned Texas speech that is the basis for his authentic dialogue. He also saw the cotton fields, the pecan trees, the cemeteries, and the courthouse square—the images of his youth that move poignantly through his work. Some of Foote’s most vivid memories are of riding with his grandfather to check on his cotton farms. In his essay, “The Trip to Paradise,” Foote recalls that to get to the farms they would pass tiny dwindling towns, which had once bustled with the sounds of community life but were, by then, only deserted landscapes with no sign of buildings or houses. Here in this lovely agricultural region, were picturesque scenes and country people who later, in fictional representation, were to become the symbols of the memories of Foote’s childhood surroundings. In remembering this fertile community, he would find the original towns of Columbus, Richmond, Egypt, and other places of his plays. In his essay, “Wharton, Then and Now,” Foote admits that much has changed in his hometown over the years. The town of his youth has vanished, but it remains very much alive in Foote’s memory. Today, some seventy years after leaving his hometown to pursue a career in the theater, Horton Foote still clings to Wharton as a sacred place of creativity and renewal. He returns as often as possible to the house in which he grew up and which he now owns. Horton Foote has been called America’s Chekhov and his work has often been compared to that of other Southerners such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams because of its emphasis on the past, its attachment to place and family, and its awareness of the impact of religion

Introduction

5

and spirituality upon society. Gerald Wood has pointed out that much like fellow Texan Katherine Anne Porter, Horton Foote writes “real fiction,” works that consist of “thousands of things that did happen to living human beings in a certain part of the country at a certain time . . . things that are still remembered by others as single incidents.” However, while Foote’s work depends upon the people, voices, and incidents of a particular place and time, he is not merely a local colorist nor is he sentimental about life in a small town. In his essay, “The Artist as Mythmaker,” Foote declares that an artist must be “a truth searcher,” and that to arrive at that truth he must fashion the history and stories of his region into plays with both personal and universal resonance. Gerald Wood explains that Foote “uses his Wharton materials to create the Harrison, Texas, of his imagination.” In order to meet the demands of his fictional place, Wood adds, Foote “redesigns real stories so that they take the shape and nature of myth. He crafts them into tales of going away and coming home, grief and rebirth, despair and healing.” In her book, Orphans’ Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote, Laurin Porter states that Foote’s stories tap into what Flannery O’Connor calls “mythic dimensions,” a story “which belongs to everybody, in which everybody is able to recognize the hand of God and its descent.” Porter goes on to say that “Foote’s voice is that not just of the South, but of America at large. In the tradition of American writers before him, he explores the contradictions of self-reliance and mutual dependency, but with a twentieth-century understanding of alienation and loss of faith, of uncertainty and despair.” Social commentator Marian Burkhart declares that “Foote has assessed American character, American myth, and American ambiance more accurately than just about any other figure in the American theater,” and director Robert Ellermann concludes: “Horton Foote is an artist of the rarest form of theater. He is a dramatic poet: each play is the experience which formed it . . . Horton Foote is our mystic in the theater.” This is extremely high praise for a man who began his career without any thought of becoming a playwright. Foote explains in “Seeing and Imagining” that when he was eleven years old he got a call to become an actor: “Now, as far as I know, there had never been any actors in that town, and certainly not in my family. Nor had I ever known an actor, except for seeing some once a year when the tent show came to town and the actors came to trade in my father’s store. I had just awakened one day with the sure knowledge that I wanted to be an actor, furthermore, that I was going to be an actor. Of that, I had not the slightest doubt.” Shortly thereafter, Foote announced his call to his startled parents and he expressed his desire to attend professional acting school in New York. However, his parents were reluctant to let him take such a step. They decided that

6

Genesis of an American Playwright

he would attend the Pasadena Playhouse in California, not because the school offered superior training but because Pasadena was “a more wholesome atmosphere for a young man away from his family for the first time.” In “Pasadena and Beyond,” Foote recalls the fear and excitement he felt leaving home for the first time at age sixteen. He remembers his experiences at the Pasadena Playhouse, the friends he made there, and the many classes he took at the school, classes in acting, scene design, and stage speech to cure himself of his embarrassing Southern dialect. Foote also recalls seeing Eva LeGallienne in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles. This was Foote’s first encounter with modern theatrical Realism, and he admits that he was so moved by her performance that afterwards he was compelled to seek his fortune in New York City: “I have seen many plays and many fine productions since, but none have made the kind of lasting impression on me that these first Ibsen plays did.” In New York, Foote sought acting jobs and enrolled at the School for the Stage where he worked with Tamara Daykarhanova, Vera Soloviova, and Andrius Jilinsky from 1937–1939. He was unaware of it at the time but these Russian masters, all trained by Constantine Stanislavsky, taught him his first lessons about playwriting. Foote recalls that their approach to acting was “unconventional, more deeply felt, more psychologically detailed, and more emotional” than anything he had ever experienced. Foote learned the elements of play structure and how to recognize the given circumstances of characters, their wants, and the through-line of a play. Most importantly, his training at the school gave him a deep respect for playwrights and an understanding of the collaborative nature of the theater. He developed a special confidence in the impact that good acting can have on drama, a sense that continues to influence his writing. Foote’s ear for authentic language and his ability to create fully developed characters has endeared him to many of America’s most distinguished actors such as Kim Stanley, Robert Duvall, Geraldine Page, and the late Gregory Peck. Horton Foote is an actor’s writer; he gives his art over to the actor and then trusts the actor’s ability to connect with the character and with the author’s sense of truth. Reynolds Price has called Foote the “supreme musician among our great American playwrights.” “More even than Tennessee Williams,” Price declares, “Foote’s method (and his dilemma) is that of the composer. His words are black notes on a white page—all but abstract signals to the minds of actors and audience.” In “Learning to Write,” Foote recounts his association with the American Actors Company, his collaboration with such legendary artists as Mary Hunter, Tennessee Williams, Agnes DeMille, Martha Graham, and Valerie Bettis, and how he finally came to recognize his true vocation. Foote wrote his first play, Wharton Dance, in 1939 at age twenty-three, soon after joining the

Introduction

7

American Actors Company, an ensemble company devoted to producing plays by American playwrights. In “How To and How Not To: Some Lessons Learned along the Way,” Foote explains that the members of the American Actors Company were from different regions of America, and they “attempted through a series of improvisations to show each other something of the particular sections from which [they] came.” Foote performed several improvisations about his life in Texas. Agnes DeMille saw his performance and suggested that he use some of the material he had created in a play. Following her suggestion, Foote wrote a one-act play, Wharton Dance, with a lead role for himself. In 1940, the American Actors Company produced the work along with one-acts by Paul Green and Thornton Wilder. Robert Coleman, a critic for The New York Mirror, came to see the play and praised the production. Suddenly, Foote found himself being hailed as a “promising new playwright” even though he knew little or nothing about writing plays. He had not admitted to himself that he wanted to be a writer; but when the American Actors Company requested that he write a three-act play, he accepted the challenge. Later, he revealed that he began to feel “a certain security” about accomplishing the task before him, a security he had never felt as an actor. Mysteriously, he had found his true calling. His maturity as a playwright would require years of practice, but his association with the American Actors Company provided a good portion of the necessary apprenticeship for the writer. Foote’s second play, Texas Town, was performed at the Humphrey Weidman Studio Theater in 1940. There, Foote met Doris Humphrey and they became friends. Later, he met and worked with other choreographers and musicians such as Pearl Primus, Valerie Bettis, Bernardo Segall, Louis Horst, and the great Martha Graham. Foote became fascinated by the seriousness of dance as an art form; and for a while, he followed Bettis’s advice to concentrate on writing plays for a nonrealistic, lyric theater that boldly used the elements of dance, words, and music. In 1944, Louis Horst asked Foote to write a series of commentaries on the state of modern dance in New York for his magazine Dance Observer. At age twenty-eight, Foote wrote “Dance and Broadway” at a time when he was experimenting with dramatic form and searching for a distinctly personal writing style that would convey the stories of his family and the world of his youth. In the essay, Foote reveals himself as a young, confident critic of musical theater and a writer with a deep respect for dancers and their storytelling talents. During the forties, Foote wrote several more dramas including Out of My House (1941) and Only the Heart, first performed by the American Actors Company in 1942 and later produced on Broadway in 1944. He also wrote a series of dance plays: Daisy Lee (choreographed and danced by Valerie Bettis

8

Genesis of an American Playwright

in 1944), The Lonely (1944), and Goodbye to Richmond (1944), both choreographed by Martha Graham. Then, in 1945, he and his wife Lillian joined Bettis and director Vincent Donehue in forming a new theater company called Production Incorporated at the King-Smith School in Washington, DC. There, Foote was able to escape the commercial pressures of New York and to write plays that incorporated what he had learned from his dancer friends. From 1945 to 1949, he wrote no less than four new plays, including Homecoming, People in the Show, The Return, and Themes and Variations. The years spent at the King-Smith School were extremely productive; but by 1949, Foote realized that he had given enough time and energy to experimentation. He decided to rid his work of all the theatrical trappings, the score, and choreography with which he had surrounded his most recent plays. He wanted to develop a simpler, more realistic style of writing. However, it was not until he began to study the works of Texas writer Katherine Anne Porter that he started to develop that style. Before leaving New York for Washington, DC, Foote had been introduced to Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. After reading the story, Foote was intrigued by the writer’s ability to transform the memories of her past into a remarkable lyrical but realistic prose form. He immediately recognized the similarities between himself and Porter and was influenced not only by her technique but also by the territory in which she worked. Like Porter, Foote was drawn to the kind of poetic but true-to-life language and symbolic imagery of his native region, and he was interested, as was Porter, in depicting the mysterious realities of the human experience. In “Things Have Ends and Beginnings,” Foote admits that Porter helped him find a way “to use the particulars of time and place without being trapped in the quaintness of regionalism.” “For good or bad,” he admits, “that is the path I have chosen to explore ever since.” Although there are marked differences between the two artists’ work, Katherine Anne Porter continues to influence Horton Foote. In his writings, Foote often refers to her work when trying to explain some aspect of his own creative process. Horton Foote returned to New York in 1949, only to discover that Broadway was experiencing an economic decline. Audiences were dwindling, theaters were closing, the price of tickets was climbing, and Foote found himself struggling to find a place to perform his plays. Then in 1952, his career took an unexpected turn when producer Fred Coe hired him to write original dramas for NBC ’s Television Playhouse. His acceptance of Coe’s offer began one of the most productive periods in the writer’s career. Before the year ended, two of his plays The Travelers and The Old Beginning aired on NBC. By 1954, Foote had contributed ten new teleplays, and by the early sixties, twenty of Foote’s original plays and adaptations had been broadcast. His original works include The Trip to Bountiful, A Young Lady of Property, The Oil

Introduction

9

Well, Expectant Relations, The Death of the Old Man, John Turner Davis, The Tears of My Sister, The Midnight Caller, The Dancers, The Shadow of Willie Greer, The Roads to Home, Flight, Drugstore, Sunday Noon, A Member of the Family, The Night of the Storm, and The Gambling Heart. Foote’s productivity during this period is remarkable, but surprisingly, he never wrote his plays specifically for television. In his 1952 essay, “The Little Box,” Foote admits that television was indeed an exciting and challenging new form with which to work. The camera offered a greater mobility and freedom than the theater, yet there were more limitations of time and setting for television writers, actors, and directors than for theater artists. According to the playwright, however, “all this [did] not really matter because it [was] the content” that made this new technology worthwhile. For Foote, television was simply one more place where he could perform his one-act plays, a form to which he has always been attracted. “As a writer for the theater,” Foote stated, “I often felt that I had to waste a good deal of material that interested me simply because the material did not warrant a fuller treatment for the stage. Now, in the hour-long play, the writer has the opportunity to use just such material, and in a medium that presents this material with great honesty and emotional power” (“Sometimes the One-Act Play Says It All”). Foote’s contributions during the “Golden Age of Television” helped bring about a great respect for television drama. Along with Paddy Chayefsky, Tad Mosel, Gore Vidal, and N. Richard Nash, Horton Foote was recognized as one of the medium’s finest writers, and his work was considered among the very best of the era. His success in television spawned Broadway productions of three of his plays, The Chase (1952), The Trip To Bountiful (1953), and The Traveling Lady (1954), and earned him a reputation as a gifted playwright and adapter of Southern literature. By the time he wrote his essay, “Harrison, Texas,” in 1952, Foote had begun to develop his distinctive writing style and to clarify his dramatic vision: I like to think of my play as a moral and social history of Harrison. I try to choose for my characters problems which are specific to their particular section and yet will have some meaning for the outer world. In my writing of the past, I have concentrated mainly on the problems of the upper and middle classes and the old land-holding aristocracy. Actually, aristocracy as it is known in the rest of the South is just memory kept alive by the great aunts and the old men in Harrison. It did exist and the tradition is kept alive through tales of the past.

During the early sixties, Foote wrote a few more original plays for television but most of his work consisted of adaptations, including two short stories

10

Genesis of an American Playwright

by William Faulkner, Old Man (1958) and Tomorrow (1960). Foote explains in his essay “On First Dramatizing Faulkner” that he felt a strong connection to Faulkner’s world. He was so touched by the writer’s depiction of the inexhaustibility of the human spirit that he decided to forge ahead with the two projects. His decision resulted in two of the most stunning adaptations of Faulkner’s work ever to appear on television. After seeing Tomorrow on television, Faulkner offered to share the copyright with Foote, an unheard-ofgesture within the competitive world of television and film. Foote scholar Rebecca Briley has pointed out that Foote’s strength as an adaptor is his ability to recreate “authentic Southern voices” without denying his own distinctive style and themes. “This Southern accent,” she proclaims, “regional in tone and universal in implication, is one of Horton Foote’s many contributions to the history of American filmmaking.” Foote’s talent as a translator of other writers’ work soon caught the attention of Hollywood, and during the sixties he became an active and successful screenwriter. In 1962, Foote’s screenplay of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was rewarded with both the Writer’s Guild Award for Best American Drama and the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Today, more than forty years later, the film is considered one of Foote’s finest literary achievements and is recognized as a classic of American cinema. Robert Mulligan’s sensitive direction and a host of impressive performances, including Gregory Peck’s remarkable portrayal of Atticus Finch, Mary Badham’s highly acclaimed performance as Scout, and Robert Duvall’s stirring film debut as Boo Radley, contributed in large part to the success of the picture. But it was Horton Foote’s ability to transform the disparate elements of Harper Lee’s story into a coherent and remarkably poignant script that elevated To Kill a Mockingbird to an exceptional level of artistic achievement. The success of To Kill a Mockingbird thrust Foote into the Hollywood spotlight, stimulated interest in his own works as potential movies, and established his reputation as a major screenwriter for the rest of the decade. During the next ten years, he worked on all or part of five motion pictures. When the work in film expressed his vision or he felt a kinship to the material, as was the case with To Kill a Mockingbird, Tomorrow, and Baby, the Rain Must Fall, Foote felt inspired and pleased; however, when he accepted commissioned work, such as Hurry Sundown or The Stalking Moon, he found the writing too formulaic and very unrewarding. Foote admits in “Writing for Film” that he grew to hate the term “writer for hire,” and after a disappointing experience with the movie The Chase (adapted to the screen by Lillian Hellman), he decided never again to sell his work to a Hollywood studio and never to work on a screenplay other than his own.

Introduction

11

To make matters worse, from the mid-sixties to the late seventies Foote’s true love, the theater, was not interested in his style of drama. During that time of political and racial unrest, realistic family plays gave way to new forms of theatrical expression such as absurdism, guerrilla theater, nudity, and rhetorical protest against the war in Vietnam. Although Foote was interested in these changes, he did not feel that he really belonged in this environment. So, Foote moved his family to the New Hampshire woods where from 1974 to 1977, following the death of his parents, he began writing the nine plays that would become his personal masterpiece The Orphans’ Home Cycle: Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, Courtship, The Widow Claire, Valentine’s Day, 1918, Cousins, and The Death of Papa. Based on the lives of his mother and father, these plays form a moral and social history of Gulf Coast Texas from 1902 to 1928. In his essay, “The Orphans’ Home Cycle Lecture,” Foote reconstructs an exact history of the cycle’s creation and discusses the inspiration behind the work that, in the words of Reynolds Price, stands “near the center of our largest American dramatic achievements.” Foote explains that The Orphans’ Home Cycle was inspired in large part by the early life experiences of his father: the death of his father, abandonment by his mother, and his subsequent search for a family and home. According to Foote, he took the title The Orphans’ Home Cycle from a poem by Marianne Moore, “In Distrust of Merits.” He explains that he adopted the phrase “orphans’ home,” because it “seemed very apt that this young man, who in a sense is looking for a home and looking for roots, always felt an orphan and always felt abandoned by his mother.” The cycle, Foote adds “is about change, unexpected, unasked for, unwanted but to be faced and dealt with or else we sink into despair or a hopeless longing for a life that is gone.” Above all else, The Orphans’ Home is an evocative and imaginative record of a place and time that unfortunately has vanished from the American consciousness. In writing the plays, Foote has preserved for us a vivid portrait of life in small town America while reminding us of the importance of family, community, and religious faith in our turbulent and chaotic world. Foote’s compassionate depiction of small-town family relationships is his unique terrain and his greatest contribution to American drama. By the late nineteen-seventies and eighties, Horton Foote had written more dramas than any time since the early fifties, when he was a writer of television scripts. He adapted two short stories for PBS: Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person (1977) and William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1980). He also penned more than ten new plays, In a Coffin in Egypt, The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees, Blind Date, The Roads to Home, The One-Armed Man, The Prisoner’s Song, Night Seasons, Pilgrims, The Old Friends, and The

12

Genesis of an American Playwright

Habitation of Dragons, which were later produced by such professional groups as the Loft Theatre, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Alley Theatre. Foote eventually returned to the New York stage in 1978 to direct Courtship, 1918, and Valentine’s Day at Herbert Berghof ’s Playwrights Foundation on Bank Street. Berghof ’s support during this time was significant in sparking a revival of interest in Foote’s work. In his memorial tribute to Herbert Berghof, Foote explains: “I worked closely with Herbert for a number of years at The Playwrights Foundation. He directed four of my plays there and produced a number of others. He gave me a theatre home and rekindled my faith in theater.” Berghof directed A Young Lady of Property (1976), Night Seasons (1977), In a Coffin in Egypt (1980), and The Old Friends (1982), but his most important contribution to Foote’s career was a 1968 landmark production of Tomorrow, which inspired a film version featuring Olga Bellin and Robert Duvall. Produced in 1973 by Paul Roebling and Gilbert Pearlman and shot on location in Tupelo, Mississippi, Tomorrow is the most authentic translation of a Faulkner work to have ever appeared on screen. When asked about his faithful rendition of Faulkner’s work, Foote said: “I think Hollywood has so often failed with Faulkner because they insisted on improving him, for whatever reasons: trying to make him more palatable, more popular, more commercial. I think it would be well for any dramatist to give up this approach. Faulkner can be dramatized. He can’t be improved” (“On First Dramatizing Faulkner”). Foote had a wonderful time filming Tomorrow; he helped with casting, and he was on the set and in the editing room constantly. Because of his experience, Foote felt inspired once again by collaborative film work. In 1979, Foote began writing Tender Mercies, an original screenplay about a down-and-out country western singer and his efforts to piece his life back together following the death of his daughter. The film, which starred Robert Duvall, Tess Harper, Betty Buckley, Wilford Brimley, Ellen Barkin, and Allan Hubbard, garnered Foote his second Academy Award in 1983 and catapulted him into the most active period of his professional life at age sixty-seven. He followed Tender Mercies with The Trip to Bountiful in 1985, a motion picture in which Geraldine Page became the third actor to win an Oscar in a Foote screenplay. After his success with Tender Mercies and The Trip to Bountiful, for which he received his third Academy Award nomination, Foote and his wife Lillian decided to test the waters of independent filmmaking. In 1984, they formed their own production company for the purpose of bringing to the screen The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Foote’s nine play collection. Foote explains in “The McDermott Lecture” that they raised a modest budget of $1.8 million, and began filming in Waxahachie, Texas, a small town near Dallas.

Introduction

13

Although he has not yet reached his goal of filming all nine plays, his vision remains unwavering. To date, Foote has filmed five of the plays, Convicts, Lily Dale, 1918, Valentine’s Day, and Courtship, and he has recently begun plans to film his sixth play, The Widow Claire, which legendary filmmaker Robert Altman plans to direct. Horton Foote’s commitment to independent filmmaking not only inspired other filmmakers during the 1980s, but his authentic, character-based movies have continued to serve as viable alternatives to the cinematic flash and fast-paced action of many Hollywood films. During the 1990s, the tempo of Horton Foote’s career quickened once more with a steady succession of television adaptations, screenplays, and award-winning dramas. His adaptation of Old Man for CBS’s Hallmark Hall of Fame earned him an Emmy Award in 1997, thirty-seven years after his initial adaptation of the short story had garnered a similar nomination. Foote also wrote and adapted other works for television such as The Story of a Marriage (1987), The Habitation of Dragons (1992), and Alone (1997). These productions proved that television can still provide a unique arena for Foote’s skillfully crafted plays. Horton Foote’s most significant achievement during the 1990s was The Young Man from Atlanta, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play, which tells the story of a middle-aged couple faced with the suicide of their only son, premiered at the Signature Theatre, an off-Broadway company founded by James Houghton and dedicated to presenting a season of plays by a single playwright. Directed by Peter Masterson and starring Carlin Glynn and Ralph Waite, the play ran for twenty-six performances before moving on to the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and ultimately, to Broadway. The Signature Theatre season consisted of The Young Man from Atlanta, Talking Pictures, Laura Dennis, and Night Seasons, which was directed by the playwright. In his “Introduction to The Young Man from Atlanta,” Foote admits that this was a busy and happy time for him “because [he] was encouraged to be present at all casting sessions, to go to rehearsals, and to attend as many performances as [he] could.” “I’ve never seen months go by quite so fast,” he concludes. Although the nineties were very productive years for Foote, they also included moments of loss and immense grief. In August 1992, Lillian Foote passed away in Princeton, New Jersey, and was buried in Wharton, Texas, the town she had come to call home. Lillian’s death was a devastating blow to Foote, who for almost fifty years had depended upon her unwavering love and devotion. In a recent interview, Foote admitted to me that Lillian’s passing was a “tremendous loss, one that is still difficult to accept.” In recent years, Horton Foote has been busy traveling the country, lecturing, appearing at the many film and drama festivals dedicated to his work, supporting young writers and artists, receiving numerous honors and awards,

14

Genesis of an American Playwright

and, of course, writing and producing new plays of his own such as The Last of the Thorntons (2001), The Carpetbagger’s Children (2001), and The Actor (2002). In spite of career frustrations, personal misfortunes, and grief, Foote, like so many of his characters, has managed to persevere somehow and prosper. He has succeeded in a competitive business that seldom rewards honesty and integrity; and through it all, he has remained the very model of kindness and generosity. Those who have worked with him admire him as both a writer of immense talent and a sensitive and loyal friend. He is a true master of American drama and a generous man who is both loved and revered. For more than sixty years, Horton Foote has remained true to his quest: to depict by poetic means the particular reality and the universal meaningfulness of a small Southern town and its people. Now at eighty-seven years of age, with more than thirty-seven teleplays, thirty-eight screenplays, and sixty dramas to his credit, Foote continues to explore the roots of courage in the face of devastating loss and misfortune. In The Actor, the writer’s most autobiographical play to date, Foote has written a poignant love poem to his family that suggests the sources of his remarkably resilient career. As young Horace, Jr. prepares to leave his family to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, he speaks directly to the audience: Daddy gave me my bus ticket and told me to be careful of pickpockets, and I said I would. He gave me a twenty dollar bill then, which he said I should save in case of an emergency of some kind came up. I thanked him and mother began crying then and said they were going to miss me. I said I would miss them too. Daddy said they were both very proud of me and felt I would have a wonderful success, but to always remember that if things didn’t work out in California or any other place, I could always come back to my home and be welcomed and there would be a place for me to work in his store. I thanked him for telling me that. I never did go back during their lifetime except on visits, though, many a time when I was lonely and discouraged I wanted to. But then I remembered about my call and kept on going somehow.

Horton Foote is still very much a man in motion, constantly writing new works and exploring new ideas about life in his hometown of Wharton, Texas. As a final note, this collection of essays and lectures has been prepared with the belief that Horton Foote’s commentaries on writing, film, and theater should be more accessible to interested readers than they have been in the past. As a continuing expression of the life and career of a major American dramatist, they represent a significant contribution to the literature of our time. The collection is of great historical significance to the citizens of Texas,

Introduction

15

to the American theater community, and to anyone interested in television or cinema, from the most casual viewers to the more serious teachers and scholars of literature and drama. It should also be obvious that in spite of his established position as a master of American drama, Horton Foote continues to be fully engaged and committed to the highest standards of his art and craft. As he admits in Chapter 5, “Thoughts on the American Theater,” the future of his art looks bright: “I think the here and now is great with promise.” “There is hope,” he declares, “because in spite of all the obstacles, and there are many, new writers, new directors, new actors, using all kinds of forms, are emerging. Theater, all kinds of theater, is finding its way and I am sure will continue to make its way all over America.” Currently, Foote is writing a new play, The Tax Assessor, based on the life of his great-grandfather, and he is adapting his play The Widow Claire for the screen. Plans are also underway at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, for the inauguration of The Horton Foote American Playwrights Festival, a yearly celebration that honors distinguished achievements in playwriting by recognized masters and fosters new voices in the American theater. Coincidentally, in 1845 Foote’s great-great-grandfather and namesake, Albert Clinton Horton, gave five thousand dollars to found Baylor University, while serving as acting governor of Texas. In many ways, the Foote family story has come full circle. As I reflect upon Horton Foote’s career and writings, I am reminded of a passage from William Humphrey’s The Ordways. The past “lives in that book of books,” Humphrey writes, “that collection transmitted orally from father to son of proverbs and prophesies, legends, laws, traditions of the origins, and tales of the wanderings of his own tribe. For it is this . . . feeling of identity with his dead which characterizes and explains the Southerner. In his time, he is priest of the tribal scripture, to forget any part would be sacrilege. He treasures the sayings of his kin . . . If he forgets them he will be forgotten. If he remembers, he will be remembered, will take the place reserved and predestined for him in the company of his kin, in the realm of myth, outside of time.” Horton Foote remembers, he always has, and his writing testifies to the beauty, brutality, and mystery of life. Marion Castleberry

Chapter One

Genesis of a Playwright These are my people and my stories, and the plays I want to write, the only ones I know how to write. “Learning to Write”

Seeing and Imagining I am sitting on the back porch of my house in Wharton as I begin to write this, thinking how is it possible that I got from this house in this quiet, selfcontained, provincial town to New York City to become a writer? I was brought to this house when I was not quite a year old. My first memory of this porch, it faces directly west, is as a place of extreme heat in the summer and cold in the winter. It was screened in so flies and mosquitoes could not get in, and it was tolerable in the milder days of Fall and Spring. At night, except for sweltering July and August evenings, it was pleasant enough, but never so pleasant as our front porch, which faced east and south, and where there was nearly always a breeze from the Gulf, my parents always said. From the Gulf, too, came the large white clouds that often scurried across the sky night and day. The back porch is glass-enclosed now: heated for winter and airconditioned for summer. My wife and I spend a great deal of time here reading and writing, or just looking out at our backyard with its seven native pecan trees and through to the backyard of what was once my grandparents’ house. From here, too, we can hear the occasional traffic noise from the paved road in front of my grandparents’ house, a road that was gravel when I was a boy. It has been a mild winter, and today, the day after Christmas, it is in the low eighties. The confederate rose bush has blossoms, another rose bush has 17

18

Genesis of an American Playwright

two lovely coral roses, and the chrysanthemums are heavy with flower. A huge sycamore tree in a neighboring yard still has its leaves. The pecan trees have no leaves left, but pecans are everywhere on the ground. When I was a boy, our backyard was fenced in and we had a chicken house and a yard full of chickens. There was only one pecan tree then, and there were three fig trees and two chinaberry trees. My grandparents owned fifteen acres around their house. Out of that, they took a half-acre for our house and yard and gave it to my parents. To the left of our yard was my grandfather’s barn. When I was a very young boy, he kept a horse and a cow there. At the far end of their lot is a giant pecan tree, at least two hundred years old. I spent much time climbing this tree. I had to nail boards to the trunk to make a kind of ladder to help me reach its branches. To the right of our yard and across the street were cotton fields belonging to my grandfather, and beyond them were cotton fields belonging to my great-great-uncle. These cotton fields went right up to the back edge of the town itself, to the livery stable and a section known as the “Flats” that had black restaurants and a black barber shop and pool hall. There are houses on either side of my house now, and in front, where there once had been a dirt road, there is now a paved one. Across the street where there once were cotton fields is now the back of the huge complex that is part of the First Baptist Church. And to the side of that is a very small frame building that houses the Christian Science Society. When I was a child, the dirt road in front of our house was unnamed but the street in front of my grandparents’ house was called Richmond Road. Some of the most elegant houses in town were on that road. The two houses directly across from my grandparents had large acreages around them. In one of these houses lived a boy my age who became my best friend. His parents had come from Mississippi, and his father managed the cotton gin and oil mill. The land behind their house went down to the gin and my friend and I often played there, climbing up on the platforms where the bales of cotton were kept, racing each other across them. During cotton season, the gins were the busiest places in town. We had three in those days, and my friend’s father managed the most prosperous one. Often during cotton season as many as sixty wagons would be lined up on the dirt road fronting the gin, waiting to get into the gin yard. Also during cotton season and late into the fall and early winter the smell of cottonseed cake coming from the oil mill permeated our part of town. To me, it was always a very pleasant smell. I was turned loose to roam as I chose, through the land belonging to my grandparents and my friend’s parents. I wonder now what my parents were thinking; they were usually so protective and strict about where I went. I had

Genesis of a Playwright

19

no secrets from them and they knew we spent a great deal of time in my friend’s back pastures, which were crossed by Caney Creek, dry most of the year. Here we spent hours with older boys endlessly digging tunnels and caves deep enough for us to stand in. I do not remember when I first read or had read to me Tom Sawyer, but I do know that early on I envied Tom’s adventures in the caves around Hannibal. I don’t know if our inspiration for forming endless clubs and secret societies was inspired by Tom or whether we thought of it ourselves, but we dug caves, built clubhouses, climbed trees, and built tree houses. These pastures belonging to my grandparents and my friend’s parents were, in these early years, my contained world, my garden, my Eden, as it were. And when not in school, I spent most of my early waking days roaming its confines. When I did leave this world, it was to go visiting with my mother in the afternoons and occasionally at night, or on Sunday afternoons with my mother and father. Occasionally these visits would be to my mother’s girlhood friends, but usually they would be to my maternal grandparents or my father’s aunts. It was there I learned to listen, a habit, of course, that is very valuable to a writer, especially a playwright. At my great aunts there was much talk of their past and of the rest of the Horton family. At my grandparents, I would hear about the Brooks and Speeds families and about our neighbors’ and friends’ failures and accomplishments. I was spared nothing; I was never told to leave the room no matter how gruesome or unhappy the tale. And so early on, I learned to accept the most tragic events as part of life. I heard in lurid detail of hurt feelings, suicide, jealousies, passions, and scoundrels of all descriptions. I am not sure what my young mind made of it all, but I am sure I never got tired of listening. One of my favorite tales, told by both my aunts and grandparents, was of poor Henry Lowell who lived alone with his mother and was allegedly having an affair with their black cook. The Ku Klux Klan decided to make an example of what they considered his immorality and grabbed him in broad daylight, tarred and feathered him, and turned him loose on the courthouse square. Covered with the tar and feathers, he ran two blocks to his home. Everyone had his own version of the story; and long after the poor man’s death, the story was still told again as if it had happened the day before. When I was older and went to the picture show alone at night, I had to pass his house. I would see him sitting alone on his gallery, and I would try to imagine what it was like being tarred and feathered and set loose on the courthouse square. There were few streetlights in those days and I, imagining his house was haunted, would run by it as fast as I could. Most nights after supper my father and mother would sit on our front porch, which faced my bedroom. I would go to sleep listening to them talk in

20

Genesis of an American Playwright

endless detail of what happened to them during the day, or of past friends and family who had died or moved away, or of the dances my father had attended as a younger man. (My mother, whose family was strictly Methodist, was not allowed to dance.) These were mostly tales of men and women I never knew. Sooner or later, my father would get around to talking about Willie Roseberry, his closest friend as a boy, and my father would wonder where Willie was now. He would tell my mother, as if she hadn’t already heard it a million times, what he and Willie did together as boys and what his friendship had meant to him. I never tired of hearing about Willie Roseberry; and years later, when I was allowed to sit up with them, I would ask him to tell me a story about his friend. Another character I never tired of hearing about was Aubrey Newsome, who died a young man. They said the lining of his stomach was eaten out from drinking too many Coca-Colas. “He was a coke fiend,” my father would pronounce solemnly each time he told his story. Father said Aubrey drank them first thing in the morning when he got out of bed and he continued drinking them all day. There were many drunkards I heard about, both men and women, and one lady who was a paregoric addict, but Aubrey Newsome was the only coke fiend. There were other men and women with less lurid histories than the alcoholics and coke fiends, long ago friends of my parents who I never knew but who are as real to me in some ways as the men and women I did know as a boy. There was music, too, of a kind, certainly hymns aplenty. My mother was a pianist and, later, organist for the Methodist church. At an early age I was taken to Sunday school where I learned to sing many of the hymns. For awhile my mother taught piano and tried to teach me, but I refused to practice. Besides the hymns, the songs I remember most were sentimental popular songs that she would play some evenings while my father sang. He had collected sheet music for popular songs since he was a young man, and he brought them all with him when he married my mother. She would play and he would sing “Goodnight Mr. Elephant,” “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon,” “After the Ball,” and “Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven.” After singing the latter, he would tell how he had heard Chauncey Alcott sing that song at the Wharton Opera House and he always added, “When he finished, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.” In my maternal grandparents’ house, a house then of great style and elegance, were two pictures. One was of the Natural Bridge of Virginia. This picture was long and narrow, a kind of collage really, composed partly with the materials taken from or around the real bridge.The other was a photograph of a large, white, two-storied house, with a wide front and upper gallery and a circle of oaks in the front yard. It was called Seven Oaks, and on the gallery were two women surrounded by a group of children of various ages. From the

Genesis of a Playwright

21

look of the children’s dress, I would guess that the picture was taken in the 1880s. This house was the home of my maternal grandfather, built by his father for his bride on the banks of the Brazos River in the town of East Columbia, a thriving river town in the 1850s. There was a family legend of why the house was wood instead of brick. It seems that my great-grandmother, before meeting my great-grandfather, was told by a fortune-teller that a man would come to her across the water and ask her to marry him, and that he would want to build them a brick house. The fortune-teller said that she was not to permit it, for if she did it would be a house of great sorrow. My great-grandfather came by boat from Virginia to Texas, met my great-grandmother, and after what I presume was a suitable courtship, asked her to marry him. She accepted his proposal. But when he said that he was building a brick house for them, she remembered that the fortune-teller had said that if he built a brick house, she was not to marry him. So, my great-grandfather built the frame house in the picture instead. I remember, too, relatives visiting my grandmother identifying the children in the picture. They were various older cousins of my mother. She wasn’t born when the picture was taken. Some of them were dead by the time I was a child. Others I knew, but to me then, they seemed to be old men and women. And I heard the story told many times of how poor the family in the picture became after the war and of the death of my great-grandfather. I heard how my great-grandmother and her two daughters, one widowed and one unmarried, lived there with the children of the widow until my grandmother died. Then, the two daughters and the children went to live in Galveston, leaving the house and its once handsome furnishings deserted. I was also told how various relatives living in the town came into the house and took what they wanted to grace their own homes. One item in particular that was taken by one of these relatives was a pair of elegant hurricane lamps. Whenever we visited a certain relative in East Columbia, a cousin would point out the lamps to me as being rightfully ours. In time, the house was torn down. My grandparents eventually copied the picture of the house and gave it to each of their children. This was the first abandoned house I was ever aware of, and it seized my childish imagination. I asked my mother endless questions about the house and the life in it. It seemed from the photograph to be so substantial, a house built to last forever, and yet all that was left of it was this photograph on my grandmother’s wall. My mother made me a copy of the photograph, and it now hangs on the wall of my house. The graves of my family are scattered all over the Texas Gulf Coast in East Columbia, Peach Point, Matagorda, on the banks of Caney Creek, and in the town of Wharton. The most illustrious, Governor Albert Clinton Horton, is

22

Genesis of an American Playwright

buried in Matagorda, now a deserted coastal town. My wife and I spent one whole hot August afternoon in search of his grave, trudging through Johnson grass and Buffalo grass and darting around red ant beds in the unkempt, treeless Matagorda cemetery. So much of his life, except for the public occasions and events, remain a mystery to me. He died in 1865, at the close of the Civil War, in Matagorda, where he had a summer house. Through the years I have learned a great deal about his public life, but as a boy all that I knew of the governor and his part of my family came from my Aunt Louisiana Texas Patience Horton; I called her Aunt Loula. She was not a pretty woman, not even a handsome one. She was tall, held herself very erect, and was surrounded by her sisters who were beauties. But, she was loved by her family. She had a good personality and was a lively conversationalist, and I was told by my father that she never lacked for beaux. She was a graceful dancer, had a sweet singing voice, played the piano by ear with great authority and liveliness, and also played the guitar and mandolin. She was loyal beyond measure to anyone with “a drop of Horton blood in their veins” (her phrase), and she was the one that kept the family stories alive, not always with great accuracy, but with imagination, vividness, and gusto. Hers was a world of absolutes. The Hortons, particularly her immediate branch, were aristocrats, betrayed and cheated out of their birthright, but undaunted. They were all virtuous, even though they were surrounded by a world of knaves and thieves. When she told her tales, which grew more lurid through the years, she would cock her head to one side, close her eyes slightly, and her voice would take on a heightened chant-like quality as she recounted the history of her family. She never grew tired of telling it to any of the nieces and nephews who would listen. Her own child, Mary, would never listen and would deliberately leave the room whenever she began. I listened. I would spend entire afternoons at her white Victorian cottage built high off the ground to keep the frequent floodwater from entering the house. When I was eleven, I began to work in my father’s store. I worked most afternoons after school, all day Saturday, and all day everyday during the summer months. Business was usually slow, except on Saturdays. And even on Saturdays, once the Depression started and cotton was down to ten cents a pound, there were long stretches without customers. The store was a men’s clothing store. We sold men’s hats, shirts, underwear, socks, suits (both ready-made and tailor-made), and various accessories. Our customers were mostly male blacks and their wives and girlfriends. We had, however, many white visitors during the day, relatives or friends of my father’s, lawyers, fellow merchants, and planters who lived in town and visited their farms once or twice a week to see that the tenants weren’t cheating them. The store was mostly a male world and, unlike my great-aunts’ stories, I felt sometimes the men’s stories and the lan-

Genesis of a Playwright

23

guage they used were modified because of my presence. They talked of weather, of the crops and the prospects of the crops. They got into political arguments. They were all Democrats, but they disagreed about individual Democratic policies and politicians. When they talked of the past, it was often using unfamiliar names never mentioned by my aunts and grandparents. One day, a descendant of our ancestor who, according to my great-aunt, had stolen our house and lands, came into my father’s store. My father greeted him by calling him Cousin. The man bought a hat, and they talked together for awhile about the weather and the crops. When the man left, my father told me who he was and that he lived on the Horton plantation. I said hotly, “How could you talk to him, cousin or not?” My father said, “Don’t fill your head with all that. That’s done. Forget it.” “Have you forgotten it?” I asked. “Yes, I have,” he said, “That and a lot more. You have to if you don’t want to be swallowed up in bitterness.” Even on the busiest Saturdays, I had time to listen to the black and occasional white farmers who wanted my father to wait on them. I stood by to wrap packages or to get change for my father, listening to their country speech and their stories of weather and crops, of illnesses or hard times their friends were undergoing, or their personal tragedies. There was laughter, too, teasing and jokes. I learned to love these country people, their voices and accents so different from my family’s. Saturdays were long days, particularly during cotton season. We usually opened the store at seven-thirty in the morning, and we didn’t closed until the last wagon and car had left for the country, which was often as late as eleveno’clock at night. It was my job to sweep out the store. Some nights after closing, my father would take me to the Manhattan or Ray’s Cafe and we would order fried oysters and talk over the day’s events. I would question him about the different customers, black and white. And he would tell me their stories, where they farmed, whether they were industrious or trifling, drinkers or gamblers, who had been in the penitentiary, and who had not. There was one handsome, light-skinned black man who wore expensive clothes and had lots of money to spend. My father called him “Red” and always seemed glad to see the man whenever he came into the store. My father told me he was a gambler, a very successful one. And although he couldn’t read or write, he could buy and sell most people in town; but, as my father put it, “He always knew his place.” He had a gambling joint across the tracks in the black section, but there were some white men who traded at my father’s store and went to Red’s place to gamble. My father often described to me the horrors of gambling and what happened to friends of his that became victims of it. He would explain how his uncle, who had been a promising merchant, lost several businesses and all his money from gambling.

24

Genesis of an American Playwright

Somewhere along the way, I became addicted to reading. My first favorite book was Miss Minerva and William Greenhill, which was the story of a spinster lady who had been left a nephew to raise. I read all the books I could get my hands on about Tom Swift and the Motor Boys and the Rover Boys. Then there was Treasure Island, David Copperfield, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, and above all else, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I read and re-read these two books constantly. I had no guidance in my reading, not from my teachers or my parents. I read whatever interested me. In my early teens, I joined the Literary Guild and the Book of the Month Club. I read popular novels like Grand Hotel, The Forsythe Saga, The Old Wives Tales, and The Jalna Stories. Willa Cather’s novels also began to interest me a great deal at this time, and I still have a Literary Guild copy of Candide, which I didn’t read then. A friend of my mother’s who also belonged to the Guild warned my mother that she felt this book was unwholesome and I shouldn’t be allowed to own it. My mother told me of her friend’s objections but she didn’t try to stop my belonging to the Guild or reading the book. Until I was nine, death had no reality for me. I was aware that my father’s father was dead and that his mother had married again, to a man none of us liked very much, especially my father. But how or when his father died I was never told, nor was I ever told what had happened to his father’s people. The Footes were all vague blurs to me. Miss Lilly Outlar, who lived in the house across from grandmother’s, called me into her parlor one day and said, “I just want you to know that the Footes were a very distinguished, aristocratic family.” I knew, too, that my mother often spoke of her Grandmother Brooks, (hers was the house in the picture), but never spoke of her grandfather. When I questioned her about this she said, “I never knew him. He died when your grandfather was only twelve.” That worried me. My father’s father died when he was twelve, and my grandfather’s father died when he was twelve. I often wondered if my own father would die when I was twelve. John and Jenny Speed were the names of my Grandmother Brooks’s parents. They were dead before I was born. Grandpa Speed, as my mother called him, came to live with my grandparents until his death. My mother used to tell me how her Grandmother Speed, a few years dead, had come to her in her sleep and said, “Hallie go see to your grandfather.” My mother woke up and went to her grandfather’s room to find him dead. Then, too, there was a lady in white who appeared at various times to my father’s relatives at Louisiana Texas Patience Horton’s house. When she appeared she would always comb her long blond hair. My great-aunt said the lady resembled her sister Mary who died of tuberculosis in West Texas. There were various other theories about her appearances. One theory was that she was trying to tell the family that there was buried treasure under the house, another that oil might be in the ground

Genesis of a Playwright

25

there. I never spent the night at my great-aunt’s house for fear the lady would appear to me; and sometimes in my own house, I was afraid to go to sleep for fear someone dead might appear and tell me one of my living grandparents had died. I sometimes tried to imagine what death or dying was like, but I soon tired of it. Then in mid-March of my ninth year, I came home from school one day and went all through our house looking for my mother. When I couldn’t find her, I went next door to a neighbor who met me in her yard and said, “I think you’d better go over to your grandmother’s.” I went back through our silent house, through our backyard, and slowly into my grandparents’ backyard. My grandparents’ cook, Eliza, and her sister, Sarah, were there. I went up to them as Eliza was saying, “I knew someone in that house would die today when I saw a dove, a mourning dove, land on the roof of the house.” I stood looking at them until they noticed me, and Eliza said, “Go in and look in the house. Your Mama is in there.” I started slowly toward the house. When my mother appeared at the back door, she saw me and came out to me. She was crying, and she put her arms around me and asked if I wanted to see my grandmother. Still not knowing what had happened, I said I did. She led me into the house, which was filled with men and women dressed like it was Sunday, all standing about and talking in low voices. Mother led me through the people to my grandparents’ bedroom. The door was closed. She opened it, and we went inside the room. I saw my grandfather, his eyes closed, lying on a couch, and my grandmother sitting beside him. My mother said, “Little Horton’s here Mama,” and my grandmother turned to me. I saw she was crying. She held out her arms to me, and I went over to her, and as she held me, she began to sob. When I looked at my grandfather, I realized that he was dead. I did not learn how he died until the day of the funeral, which I was not allowed to attend. I was kept at home with my baby brother, watched over by my father’s mother (whom I called Big Mama), and one of her sisters, my Great-aunt Lida. We could see the funeral procession from our porch and, as we watched the slow movement of the hearse and the cars that followed, they told me that my grandfather had been seized by a heart attack in town, collapsed on one of the main streets, and had died before a doctor could reach him. My Grandmother Brooks visited his grave every day, often taking me with her. She would stay for an hour or so tending flowers on the grave or just sitting. The only other two graves in the plot were those of two little girls, Jenny and Daisy. I had never heard their names mentioned, and I asked my mother endless questions about them. They were her sisters. Jenny was born a year after my mother, and Daisy was the sixth of my grandmother’s eight children. Jenny died before reaching a year, and Daisy was only two years old at the time of her death. My grandfather was very religious. He had attended

26

Genesis of an American Playwright

church regularly and supported it generously with his money; but for some reason he had never become a member. Mother said that when Daisy died, one of the neighbors came to him and asked, “Mr. Brooks, did it ever occur to you that the death of this child is God’s judgment on you for not joining the church?” His face, my mother said, flushed. But he answered very simply, “No, Mrs. Davidson, it never did.” Unless I asked about the two little girls, they were never mentioned, and there were no pictures of them anywhere. This puzzled me greatly. Often when I was with my grandmother at the graveyard, I would wander among the other graves to see how many other children had died in infancy. Or I would find the names of people my family often spoke about or relatives of our living friends. My grandmother was always too grieved for me to question her about what I had seen there, but when I got home I would question my mother and father and they would patiently tell me the history of each one and how they died. I began to be curious about the deaths of everyone then. I began to question my father about the death of his own father, but he wouldn’t say much except that it was a sad time. His mother and father were separated, and his father, only thirty-six at the time of his death, was considered a brilliant lawyer. He told me that his father’s best friend took him in his lap on the day of the funeral and told him that his father was a fine man and that he should always be proud of him. My mother, however, told me that my grandfather had died of dissipation. Later, my father’s sister, who was very bitter toward her father and his family, said he was a drunkard and a cigarette fiend. I spent many days over the years trying to imagine what he was like. Gradually, and through various sources, I learned that his family had moved to Galveston from Virginia before the War Between the States, and that they were left destitute at the collapse of the Confederacy. The older children were all formally educated. One in particular, Robedeaux Foote, was a Latin and Greek scholar. The younger children, born during or soon after the War, were more practically educated as lawyers and doctors. For some reason, my grandfather, who was a lawyer, was the sole supporter of his family, and when he married my grandmother she moved in with his mother and brothers and sisters still at home. There were quarrels between mother and daughter-in-law. My grandfather began to drink, and soon after the birth of their second child, a girl, my grandmother moved two blocks away to live with her own mother and father. When my Grandfather Foote died there was not enough money to buy a tombstone for his grave. It was unmarked until my father took his first savings and bought the tombstone for his father’s grave. At that time, my father was twenty-seven, married, and with a child of his own.

Genesis of a Playwright

27

I remember taking walks in the evening with my parents when I was a very young boy, and we would pass the house of a Mr. Armstrong, a distinguished, white-haired gentleman, who would often be sitting on his porch as we would pass the house. After greeting him, my parents would always whisper, “That’s Mr. Armstrong. He had a call in the cotton fields of Mississippi to go to Texas and preach.” Now, Mr. Armstrong was a Baptist, and at that time we were Methodists and Episcopalians, so I imagined the call had come to Mr. Armstrong because he was a Baptist. But my mother explained that she had heard of such things happening to Methodists too, and even to Presbyterians and Episcopalians, which at the time were the only denominations in our little town of three thousand. I was full of questions about what “getting a call” meant, but my mother was rather evasive in her answers, so I sensed she didn’t really know. I often wanted to ask Mr. Armstrong what it was like, but never got the courage to do so. As it turned out, some years later, when I was ten, I got a call. But it wasn’t to preach; it was to become an actor. Now, as far as I know, there had never been any actors in that town, and certainly not in my family. Nor had I ever known an actor, except for seeing some once a year when the tent show came to town and the actors came to trade in my father’s store. I had just awakened one day with the sure knowledge that I wanted to be an actor; furthermore, that I was going to be an actor. Of that, I had not the slightest doubt. In time, I announced my calling to my startled family; and from then on, I was determined to be an actor. It was fortunate for me that at that same time a young woman came to teach speech and dramatics in our high school. She was very sympathetic to my ambitions. She cast me in all the high school plays—about three a year. In one of the one-act plays, I played a college student who, during the course of the play, confesses to his college roommates that he is addicted to drugs. With much excitement, we entered the play in our state’s one-act play contest. After the performance, the judges took my director/teacher aside and asked if I was afflicted or was that acting. She said, “It was acting,” and the judges said, “In that case, we are going to give him the Best Actor award.” I also acted every chance I got with the local Little Theater. Talking pictures, as we called them then, arrived in Wharton during this time, and I began to go to the “talkies” as often as I was allowed to by my parents. My uncles and grandmother even drove us into Houston to see Al Jolson in The Singing Fool. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember watching my father, overcome by emotion, sobbing as Jolson sang “Sonny Boy” to his dying child. I remember, too, my father saying afterwards, “There ought to be a law against showing pictures like that and upsetting people.” I also remember the Queen, our local movie house, being closed for a week so

28

Genesis of an American Playwright

its sound system could be installed. The theater was packed the night it reopened. I believe the name of the film played that night was Drag, and its theme song was “Weary River.” Richard Barthelmess and Lila Lee were in the picture, but I remember nothing of the story, only that the theater had been redone inside to accommodate the talkies and that the lady who played the piano for the silent pictures was gone. I knew that piano-playing lady and her son, and many years later I wrote a play in part based on my memory of her called Talking Pictures. Then radio invaded our homes and became a real competition against the movies. Except for Amos n’ Andy, I never listened to the serials, but I did listen to the comedians and all the popular singers. I knew all the songs of Little Jack Little, Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith, Bing Crosby, and Russ Columbo, particular favorites of mine. When I was fourteen, I read in the Houston papers about a Hollywood scout coming to look for acting talent. I talked my parents into letting me go meet him, and my grandmother and one of her sons drove me in for an appointment. I don’t know what I expected from all this, but there was little talk of a screen test when I had my interview, only of lessons, including, as I remember, tap dancing. I had rather conventional ideas of what a Hollywood scout should look like, and the young man who interviewed me looked very un-Hollywood to me. Instead he looked like one of my uncles and talked as if he had never been out of Houston, Texas. What real use all of this was to me I was unaware of at the time, but the experience, given to a young girl eager to go to Hollywood, was used in one of my early one-act plays A Young Lady of Property. I graduated from high school in the early summer of 1932, when I had just turned sixteen. My high school Speech teacher had given me a list of drama schools I might attend, but when I broached the subject with my parents, I found them very reluctant to let me take such a step. As I think now, they very sensibly argued that I was too young to choose such a drastic way of life and that I should first go to college for at least two years. I refused, and so we compromised. They promised to send me to drama school if I waited a year and took a job. Around that time, my grandmother decided in the late summer of the year of my graduation to move to Dallas to make a home for two of my uncles, and I was invited to go with them. Speed, her middle son, had failed in the cleaning and pressing business she had bought for him in Wharton and was going to Dallas to look for work, work that he never found and, as I remember, for which he never looked. Billy, her youngest son, had failed at the University of Texas and was enrolling in a night law school there. In Dallas, I studied drama (really elocution) with a Miss Woodward and ushered at the Majestic Theatre, the kind of large, handsome movie palace so

Genesis of a Playwright

29

prevalent in all major cities in those days. The movies usually played for a week; and because on week days there was little business, I was able to watch the current movie over and over. It seems strange to me now that the only one I remember with any kind of clarity was Philip Barry’s The Animal Kingdom, with Leslie Howard and Ann Harding. Although I remember the general outline and thrust of the story, I have forgotten all the dialogue except for one line, “Who but you, Daisy, and strangers are honest with me ever?” My grandfather, when he had a grocery store, was asked how he kept his clerks from eating all of his profits. He said it was very simple: When they first came to work, he invited them to eat anything in the store. After the first few days of stuffing themselves, they got so sick of the food they never went near it again. One might think after watching so many movies over and over, that I might, like my grandfather’s clerks, get sick of the whole business. However, I didn’t. I was more determined than ever to become an actor. At the end of Billy’s school term, my grandmother closed the Dallas house and we all went back to Wharton. I went to work for the summer in my father’s store in order to make money for my trip to California in the early Fall. 1932 was the height of our most serious and devastating Depression. Banks were failing, the stock market plummeted, the savings of many were wiped out, and homes and farms were being foreclosed on in Wharton and all over America. But all I could think of that summer of 1932 was going to California and, I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind, getting into the movies. It seemed to mean nothing to me that at the end of most weekdays the cash register in my father’s store registered as little as two dollars, and that he had to go to the bank to renew a loan he had taken out several years before. I could hear by the conversation of the men who continued to come into the store that they were worried about economic conditions, but they had always been worried about such matters, generally summing up all their talk by saying, “There is nothing that a good cotton crop won’t fix.” One day I heard my father announce in the store that the price being paid for cotton was so low that even a good crop wouldn’t help. There were arguments, too, about President Roosevelt. My father, ever a loyal Democrat and a passionate defender of Roosevelt, quarreled so bitterly with two of his friends, one a cousin, that they never came back to the store. It never occurred to me that there was danger of my father not being able to come up with the money for my drama school tuition, the cost of my board and room, plus a weekly allowance, and my bus fare to and from Los Angeles. I was aware that during this time he sold a house, the only real estate he ever owned, for three thousand dollars, but I was not aware until many years later that he did it so he would be sure to have the money for my two years of schooling. I learned, too, that the day he sold the rent house a friend came to him and asked if he’d like to invest in an oil

30

Genesis of an American Playwright

pool with the amount he had received for the house. He declined, giving me the money for my schooling instead. The oil pool was a successful one and made all of its participants wealthy, but if my father ever had regrets, he never burdened me with them. Many years later, I heard him say that during this period he would often come home from the store and see me and my two brothers sitting at the dining room table waiting for supper to be served and thinking how little he had taken in at the store that day; he would want to turn around, go back uptown, and open the store to try and take in a few more dollars. My father tried, in a negative way, to teach me the value of money, always stressing to me how hard it was to make a dollar and reminding me that “someday I would appreciate the effort it took just to put food on the table.” As I think back now, I’m sure his preoccupation with the difficulty of making a living grew out of not only the realities of the Depression, but also the fear of my going into an unknown, and from all accounts, most precarious profession. I am sure he worried, too, that because our grandmother was rich and indulging, we would get the idea that one could get by without working diligently. At sixteen, I found all of this tiresome and I pretended that my life would surely be different and unmarked by such realities. But I wasn’t as oblivious to all the ravages of the Depression as I pretended. Later, in writing my plays, I often went back to that time and tried to find, not in any agitprop way, a truthful sense of people trying to make their way and being faced with what seemed like overwhelming financial obstacles. My parents were true to their word, and when the year ended, they sent me to study at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. I am afraid that my parents did not choose the Pasadena Playhouse because of its superior methods of teaching, for, of course, my parents were very provincial about such things and didn’t realize there were many different approaches to acting. It was chosen, I’m sure, for my safety and protection. Pasadena, they felt, would be a more wholesome atmosphere for a young man away from his family for the first time. It was agreed that my mother and I would be driven to Houston in my grandmother’s car where I would take the bus to California. I remember the day, early in September, as a day of brilliant sunshine. I don’t remember telling my father or my brothers goodbye. My brothers, of course, were in school, and my father had gone down to the store long before my departure. However, I do remember my Grandmother Brooks standing in her front yard crying as she waved goodbye to me. There was an even more depressing scene at the Houston bus station. Here Aunt Lily and Big Mama, my father’s sister and my paternal grandmother, were waiting to see me off on the bus. My Big Mama cried openly as if I were leaving to be executed. She sobbed so loudly

Genesis of a Playwright

31

that her daughter had to lead her away for a spell to comfort her. My mother kept her emotions under control until after I boarded the bus and we were pulling out of the station. I turned to wave goodbye, and I saw her crying, too, as she waved farewell. The trip to California took three days and two nights and I rode straight through. My Aunt Laura, who was then married and living in Dallas, came to meet the bus when we stopped there for twenty minutes or so. I had never been out of the state of Texas and never farther away from my home than Houston, except for the period I lived with my grandmother in Dallas. When we left Dallas, I was in a most unfamiliar part of the state; the faces and the voices around me seemed familiar, but what I saw outside the bus window seemed strange. As the people starting the journey from Houston began to leave the bus and new passengers arrived, even the voices and faces told me I was leaving my familiar world far behind. When we crossed the border into New Mexico, I realized there was no going back, and I momentarily felt sad and very homesick. That mood was shattered by my first sight of hills, and then mountains, neither of which I had ever seen before. I was excited by the sight of them, of course, and I wrote my first postcard home describing my reaction to my parents. My father had never seen a mountain either, and my mother had seen one only once while visiting her sister in school in Virginia. Bus travel can be exhausting, even for the very young and eager, and by the end of the second day, we were hot and dirty. We never stopped long enough to really wash. I even got tired of the mountains and of talking to my fellow passengers, who were nearly all by now as tired and dirty as I was. There was one girl, though, who continued talking even when I half-listened. She had joined the bus in Dallas and had learned early on that I was on my way to California to study acting. She told me that she was the sister of James Hall, a well-known actor in films. Since she was the first person I had ever known who knew a movie actor, much less was the sister of one, I was thrilled. I began asking all kinds of questions about Hollywood, the movies, her brother, and the actors and actresses he had appeared with. All through West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, she kept chattering on about Hollywood and the movie stars she knew, but as the stories became more and more colorful, I became suspicious. She was a plainly dressed girl. What, I began to reason, would movie star James Hall’s sister be doing riding on a bus? My spirits began to revive when we crossed the California border. I began again to watch the sights out the bus window. My most lasting memory was of the orange groves that seemed to be everywhere. I remember, too, when I later took the train, or the Interurban, from Los Angeles to Pasadena, the acres and acres of orange groves. They’re all gone now, swallowed up by urban sprawl, and though my time in California was after the years Randall Jarrell

32

Genesis of an American Playwright

spent there as a young boy, I am reminded when I read his lovely poem “Thinking of the Lost World” of what it was once like and what it has finally become: Back in Los Angeles, we missed Los Angeles. The sunshine of the Land Of Sunshine is a gray mist now, the atmosphere Of some factory planet: when you stand and look You see a block or two, and your eyes water. The orange groves are all cut down . . . My bow Is lost, all my arrows are lost or broken, My knife is sunk in the eucalyptus tree Too far for even Pop to get it out, And the tree’s sawed down. It and the stair-sticks And the planks of the tree house are all firewood Burned long ago; its gray smoke smells of Vicks.

I was to be met at the Los Angeles bus station by my Great-aunt Mag, my Grandmother Brooks’s sister, and her husband Walt. I had met them when they came to Texas on a visit one summer. I was assured they would take me to their apartment for the weekend (I was arriving on a Friday, and school registration didn’t begin until early the next week). I had, however, a room reserved for me at the Pasadena YMCA until I could find a permanent place to stay. My great-aunt and great-uncle were waiting as the bus arrived and seemed genuinely glad to see me. They were warm and friendly souls devoted to their Texas kin. They drove me around a bit in downtown Los Angeles, which I could quickly see was bigger than even Houston or Dallas, and then took me to a cafeteria for supper, the largest cafeteria I had ever seen. After supper, they drove me down the Miracle Mile of Wilshire Boulevard, past the original Brown Derby, which any reader of movie magazines knew about, and then past the Coconut Grove Ambassador Hotel, also mentioned by those same movie magazines. All the time my great-aunt and great-uncle were asking me about our Texas family. I was talking away, giving them all the news of home, when they announced it was time to drive me to the Y in Pasadena. I was very disappointed as I had fully expected to spend the weekend with them. I had mentally made a list of places I would ask to see: Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the handprints of movie stars, the movie studios, and the houses of movie stars. Later, when I did visit them for a weekend, I think I understood why they hadn’t asked me to stay. Uncle Walt was out of work and they were living, temporarily they assured me, in a very modest tourist court.

Genesis of a Playwright

33

This happened frequently because of his drinking, and I suspect they were ashamed for me to see them in such circumstances, not wanting me to tell my Texas family how they were forced to live. I spent the next two days alone, the first time I had ever been alone in my life. I wrote optimistic letters to my parents, walked five blocks to look at the Pasadena Playhouse, and took a swimming lesson at the YMCA. And I had much time to think. In spite of my optimistic letters, I was, in truth, lonely and scared. There were palm trees and flowers aplenty in Pasadena, a small, provincial city in those days, but it all seemed aloof and uninviting to me. I longed in my heart for the dusty cotton fields of Texas. On Saturday night as I sat in my small room at the Y, I thought of my father’s store, always busy even in Depression times. I thought of the black and white farmers who would be coming into the store, always cheerful even when there was little money. It was also the time when cotton pickers and their families flooded the county and swelled the always crowded Saturday night streets. But, lonely or not, I knew somehow I would never fully go back to that life again.*

Pasadena and Beyond The Pasadena Playhouse, at 39 South El Molino, was just half a block off Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena’s main thoroughfare. The building was twostoried, of Neo-Spanish architecture, with a large patio, which we crossed to get to the theater proper. A side wing on the patio floor had shops and a restaurant; above this wing, reached by open stairs, was a small second theater called the Recital Hall. The larger theater was called the Main Stage. Also in the building were a vast wardrobe department and a shop for building scenery. There were two houses near the Playhouse that had been turned into classrooms for theater students. It meant nothing to me at the time, but the school advertised the practicality of its training, saying “Training is not confined to theory. Students learn by doing! Assistant direction, costuming, stage managing, scene designing, even the actual construction and painting of settings, and the work of stage crews.” Advertising in national magazines, the school listed former students who had gone off to be in movies against the background of a palm tree, klieg lights, stars, a section of the patio, and the theater building itself. In 1933, the Main Stage had been operating for nine years but the theater had been in Pasadena for seventeen years. This unique institution was an outgrowth of the enthusiasm for amateur theater that swept across America in the 1920s. Many of these amateur or “little” theaters built handsome homes for

*Lecture presented at Louisiana State University on April 19, 1989

34

Genesis of an American Playwright

themselves and had large subscription audiences. Their desperate earnestness was satirized in a popular George Kelly play of the time, The Torchbearers. The Pasadena Playhouse called itself a community theater, but by the time I arrived, it was that in name only. Occasionally, it did use nonprofessional or semiprofessional actors, but most often brought in professional actors from Los Angeles and Hollywood. Gilmor Brown was the artistic director of the theater. He had been an actor in minor stock companies around the West and, seeing the vitality of the “little theater” movement, had come to Pasadena to start one. By the time I arrived, Pasadena Playhouse had the Main Stage, the Recital Hall (used by the senior students), the Play Box (as far as I know, the first theater-in-the-round in America), and the Padua Playhouse (run in a nearby town by students who returned for post-graduate work). During my time there, I saw many interesting productions on the main stage of the Playhouse. I saw Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Sidney Howard’s Alien Corn, and Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. I saw an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov and several adaptations of Dickens’s novels. I saw Victor Jory in Lynn Riggs’s Road Side and Lee J. Cobb, then a very young actor, in Oscar Wilde’s Salome directed by Benjamin Zemach of the Habimah Theater. I also saw Walter Hampden, then our leading Shakespearean actor, in a play by Martin Flavin. He played a zookeeper in black face. Additionally, there were many Shakespeare productions. In fact, by my second year the Pasadena Playhouse claimed to have produced more Shakespeare (thirty-two productions) than any other theater in the world except for Stratford-upon-Avon. Our classes started at nine in the morning and continued until five. We had classes in fencing, eurythmics, diction, costume design, makeup, theater literature, styles of acting, and scene design. We also had play rehearsals. Once a week, Gilmor Brown met with us, mostly giving inspirational talks about what a rewarding life the theater could be if one had the proper dedication. For our first play productions, we were divided into two groups. One group was assigned the play Shakuntula, a classic East Indian drama. My group was assigned a Roman comedy. The directors were two of the five staff directors at the Playhouse. At that time, I had read very few plays and was completely unfamiliar with Roman comedies. The rest of the students were just as ignorant of the material and the period as I was. Our director was bored with the play and with us. Not knowing how in the world to approach the material and afraid to admit that he didn’t understand a word of it, he put us on our feet the first day and watched wearily as we stumbled about the stage. To make matters worse, I discovered I had a Southern accent that was difficult to understand. The rehearsals lasted six weeks and then, without props, scenery, or costumes, we presented our play on the main stage for our fellow students.

Genesis of a Playwright

35

Classes were not a happy time for me, either. I had no talent for drawing, so I got nowhere with costume and stage design. Diction class was torture. All I heard was that to be an actor, any kind of an actor, I had to get rid of my accent. However, the one class I enjoyed from the start was the theater literature class. Our teacher was passionate about plays as literature and very knowledgeable about Greek, Roman, Elizabethan, Noh, Chinese theater, and the theater of Molière. During class breaks, I would go to him and we would talk about literature of all sorts—plays, novels, poetry, essays, and short stories. One day in mid-November, my speech teacher told me that she felt I needed special help. She said she knew a wonderful private coach named Blanche Townsend who agreed to coach me for an hour each week. To pay for my lessons I went without lunch. In our first lesson, she assigned Browning’s “Last Duchess.” Although I did not agree with her methods of teaching, it was at least a system. She had her rules, and she was able to explain them. She based everything on phonetics, and I had to agree to write out all my acting roles phonetically before learning them. She was a great fan of George Bernard Shaw and, of course, thought Pygmalion a masterpiece. She was encouraging, and at that stage in my life, encouragement was something I badly needed. There was a young man in one of my classes, John Forsht, from Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. He had been to college for two years and had done quite a bit of college acting. He wasn’t interested in movies. He wanted to go on the New York stage; his ambition was to play Hamlet. He told me of all the great Hamlets he had heard about: Alexander Moissi, Edwin Booth, John Barrymore, and Henry Irving. I began to study Hamlet too, and I started to memorize the soliloquies. I asked Miss Townsend for help. She would only hear me do “Speak the speech, I pray you . . .” and I had to say “trippingly on the tongue” over and over until it almost ruined Shakespeare for me forever. Soon we had two camps in our class: those who wanted to be New York actors and those who wanted to be in pictures. We were all sure, as we argued amongst ourselves, that we would get what we wanted. Few of us ever did. My Grandmother Brooks came to California to visit two of her sisters. She thought the boarding house I was living in was unsuitable, so she took rooms for us in Orange Grove, a very expensive part of the city. There was a lovely garden behind the house, and I used to go out there after dinner and practice my diction exercises. One night a man from next door called out in the dark, “Are you ill?” “No sir,” I said. “I’m just practicing my diction exercises.” “Well,” he said, “Cut that out. This is a respectable neighborhood.” That winter, Eva LeGallienne announced that she was bringing three Ibsen plays to the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles. John Forsht and my knowledgeable professional theater friends were all excited about the event. I

36

Genesis of an American Playwright

had never heard of her or the Civic Repertory she had founded in New York City, but I pretended I had, and I listened to all they had to say about her. I asked my grandmother if she would take me for my birthday. We took the Interurban into Los Angeles for the Saturday matinee performance of Hedda Gabler. They set the play in the late twenties, and I will never forget LeGallienne’s entrance, her hair bobbed, wearing a short skirt and smoking a cigarette. I thought she was extraordinary in the part, and the play made a very deep and lasting impression on me. My grandmother sensed this I am sure, and she asked if I would like to see the evening performance of The Master Builder. I did, of course, and that night I saw my second Ibsen play with LeGallienne again in the lead. Though I have seen many plays and many fine productions since, none have made the kind of impression on me that these first Ibsen plays did. Eva LeGallienne was thirty-three at this time. She had been a star on Broadway in her early twenties, and she was said to have been exquisite in the two Molnar plays, Liliom and The Swan. She could have continued in the commercial theater but she felt an actress could only reach her potential by playing parts in great plays, classic and modern, and in repertory. Still in her twenties, she found backers and bought a run-down theater on 14th Street in New York City. She gathered a company of actors around her and for a number of years she performed Chekhov, Ibsen, Shakespeare, and modern European classics. She acted, directed, and produced. Her productions of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan were legendary. She worked tirelessly and unselfishly, and though it was difficult and expensive to keep so many actors and technicians employed, she was able to find patrons to make up all deficits, until the Depression. Then she lost her backers and patrons, and she was forced to close her theater just before she began her California tour. My grandmother bought her book At 33 for me. In this book, LeGallienne tells the story about the founding and the running of her company. At the close of the book, I felt she was determined to start her theater again one day. She did try two more times, once in New York and once on the road. Both times, she failed, or really, I think the theater failed her. She continued acting, directing, and producing, always preaching the gospel of a repertory theater that produced serious and important plays. In the late spring, my grandmother went back to Texas and I was cast in our final production at the school, a one-act play. I liked the play and felt comfortable performing my role. Consequently, I took the bus back to Texas for summer vacation feeling much better about my talent and determined to speak properly and phonetically. I later learned it was this summer my

Genesis of a Playwright

37

brother, Tom Brooks, began charging his friends money to come hear me talk in this new strange way. For our senior year, we were put in charge of the Recital Hall Theater. We had Janet Scott as the director for all our productions, and we were each cast in four plays. The rest of the time we were assigned to stage crew work. We built our own sets, painted them, found our props, stage-managed the shows, were the stagehands, and found or made the costumes. First, I was cast as Earnest in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I went from that to building and painting scenery, to stage managing, and assisting Miss Scott in her directing. I worked all night some nights. I do not know how good we were at any of it, but most of us tried very hard and we were certainly better carpenters, stage managers, and prop men at the end than when we started. There was grumbling, of course. Some people felt they had come to study acting, which meant they wanted to act all the time, not build scenery or stage manage or work props. Miss Scott took a liking to me, and she urged me to learn all the technical skills I could. She said she had gone to New York to be an actress (She had a small part and had understudied for the Theater Guild when LeGallienne did Liliom). She said I needed all the skills I could get to survive. Miss Townsend taught during the summer in a school connected with the Rice Players, a summer stock company on Martha’s Vineyard. This year, she was taking three boys from Pasadena with her to do scenes with the girls who had signed up for the school. They would get room and board and a few dollars a week for spending money. Besides doing scenes with her paying students, they were expected to work backstage at night at the Playhouse, and they might be cast in small parts. She invited John Forsht and me to go. That summer John came with me to Texas before we took off for Martha’s Vineyard. We took the bus together, and my family made us welcome; all my relatives had us over for meals. The day we were to leave for our work my father took me aside and said, “Here’s fifty dollars. When this is gone, don’t ask for any more, because I won’t give it to you.” I took the money and thanked him, and for good or bad, I believed him. I think now if I had ever really needed anything he would have helped, but I chose at the time to believe he would not, and so I never asked, even when I was hungry, and I went hungry many times in my first days in New York City. Anyway, I knew that John, whose father had died when he was an infant, had no one to give him even fifty dollars. At that time, stock companies were all over America. A company of actors, including a leading lady, an ingénue, a juvenile, a leading man, a character man, and a character woman, was hired for a season and they would

38

Genesis of an American Playwright

perform in the popular plays of the day, usually advertised as “Broadway hits.” When talking pictures arrived, these theaters began to fail and they gradually disappeared. Then in the thirties, they reappeared in the country, usually in or near towns where people went for their summer vacations. Miss Townsend decided to do two one-act plays with the students, and we presented them on a free afternoon at the Playhouse. One of the plays, No ’Count Boy by Paul Green, is a southern variation of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. All the characters in this play are black, and I played the lead. Today we would find it strange to cast a play about blacks with an all-white cast; but in those days, there could be no alternative. Black actors and white actors simply did not work together, eat together in restaurants, or sit together in the audience. This role was one I did not need to write out phonetically. I had been around provincial blacks all my life and felt very secure in how they spoke and acted. We had a small triumph. The theater was packed, and I am sure not many in our audience had ever seen a play about blacks, and certainly not one about provincial blacks. I haven’t read No ‘Count Boy in a long time and I don’t know what I’d think about it today; but then, for the audience and me, it was a welcome relief from the usual summer stock Broadway play with its unreal situations and characters. The third actor Miss Townsend brought from Pasadena was Joseph Anthony. He had been a post graduate student when John and I were seniors. He also had some professional experience acting on the main stage in Pasadena and in Los Angeles with Helen Gahagan in Maxwell Anderson’s Mary of Scotland. In time, he was to become one of our foremost Broadway directors and had a distinguished career as an actor and a teacher of acting. The three of us decided to try New York together. I had twenty-seven dollars left of my fifty after buying boat fare to New York, and Joe and John had nothing. A wealthy friend had taken an apartment for us for a week, so we had a place to go, and Joe borrowed a few dollars from some place. The apartment rented by our friend was too expensive to keep, so we spent the first days looking for one we could afford. We found it on MacDougal Street across from the Provincetown Playhouse over a small, dingy nightclub called the Welcome Inn. The actors in the company at Martha’s Vineyard taught us how to look for work in the New York theater and how to make the rounds. In time, “making the rounds” became a very familiar phrase to me as it was to all actors of that period. It meant arriving in the Broadway district at around ten in the morning when the agents’ and producers’ offices were beginning to open, going up and down Broadway and the side streets from 39th Street to 57th Street, and asking the receptionists of the agents and producers if any casting was being done that day. If the answer was yes, then came the next question:

Genesis of a Playwright

39

Is there a part for me? If the answer was no, you went on to the next office. If the answer was maybe, you took a seat and waited, sometimes as long as five hours, for someone higher up to come look you over. Then you would find out if the receptionist’s response had been the right one or whether you would hear the curt “not right.” Sometimes there would be no comment at all, just a negative shake of the head. If you were lucky, they would say, “Come back and see Mr. So-and-So tomorrow,” or luckier still, “Wait here and I’ll give you a script to read.” I got up faithfully every morning, put my nickel in the subway slot, headed for uptown, and made the rounds in winter cold and summer heat. The quality of the theater was probably no better or worse than that of today, but there were many more theaters and active producers, and though I’m not sure it ever did any good, the assistants were usually accessible to your question: “Any casting today?” When I got to New York, I religiously called on the offices of Arthur Hopkins, Guthrie McClintic, Crosby Gaige, Oscar Serlin, Max Gordon, Sam Harris, John Golden, Herman Shumlin, the Theater Guild, William Brady, the Shuberts, Brock Pemberton, Alfred DeLiagre—the list goes on and on. Each of them did, or tried to do, one or more plays a year. Each of them had an office staff that was usually polite and considerate to the actors who asked the same question repeatedly: “Anything for me today?” By the time I arrived, the legendary Frohman, Belasco, and Winthrop Ames were gone. However, their theaters, the Belasco, the Empire, the Lyceum, and the Little Theater, were still in place. And the legends about their lives, their productions, and their stars were repeated again whenever actors gathered. It was also the custom then to call on the agents, as one did the managers and producers, and ask the question: “Anything today?” I got my first job in this way. I had been making the rounds all day and I was cold and exhausted, but I had promised to meet John Forsht at three and had a half-hour to kill. I decided to try one more office, and the agent said no to my question, but as I was walking out, he said, “Wait a minute.” He made a phone call and handed me a slip of paper with an address on West 55th Street. It was Fox Pictures’ New York studio. I met John at three, explained why I could not go back to the apartment, and headed for the Studio, my hands wet with perspiration. They gave me a scene to look over and then called me in for a reading. It was the part of a waif, a scissors grinder in the fourteenth century, in an industrial film. No matter, it was three days work, and the pay was fifty dollars a day. I read for the director and he said they would be making a decision before seven that night, and if they wanted me, they would call. Our apartment was on the first floor, and the phone for all the tenants was on the fifth floor. Seven o’clock came, no call. Seven-thirty came, still no call. I was extremely discouraged; then I heard a phone ring and someone with

40

Genesis of an American Playwright

an Italian accent call “Foote.” I ran up the five flights of stairs and grabbed the phone. I was told to be at the studio at seven in the morning for costume and makeup. My next job was as prop boy for a revue being performed at the Provincetown Playhouse across the street from our apartment. I was paid fifteen dollars a week. I worked at Provincetown at night and made the rounds faithfully every weekday. The renowned producer, Arthur Hopkins, had a small office in the Plymouth Theater building on 44th Street. There were only two rooms to his office, an outer room where his receptionist usually sat and an adjoining room that was his. I discovered early on that when the receptionist was out of the office, the door between her office and his was often left open. Mr. Hopkins could always be found reading the manuscript of a play, wearing a hat. He seldom looked up when anyone entered the office and asked the question “Anything today?” but he would shake his head and keep on reading. Still, I thought, he might look up one day, and there might be a part. He never did. Some years later when I had my first play on Broadway, June Walker, who was the star, invited him to a run-through before our opening. I got to meet him at last. He was very kind and supportive, but the kind of theater he had been part of had fallen on difficult times by then, and he seldom produced plays. I was going to the theater as much as my time and very limited budget would allow. I remember seeing The Old Maid with Helen Menken and Judith Anderson at the lovely Empire Theater (now torn down). I also saw Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour at the Maxine Elliott Theater (also now torn down). I always bought the second balcony seats, which cost fifty-five cents. I soon learned to look about the house for empty seats in the more expensive sections, and at intermission, if the seats were still vacant, I would claim one of them as my own. From my fellow actors, I learned that when I was completely broke I could wait outside until the first intermission, mingle with the audience who had come out for a smoke or a breath of fresh air, walk nonchalantly in with them when the intermission was over, stand in the back until the lights went down, and then scurry to an empty seat. It was in January of 1936 that I went to see Pauline Lord in Ethan Frome with Raymond Massey and Ruth Gordon. I do not remember what good fortune enabled me to buy an orchestra seat for this play, but I do remember sitting there from the beginning. From the moment the fragile but overpowering figure of Miss Lord appeared on the stage, I was transformed. From then on, I was dissatisfied with much of the acting in the American theater. By what magic she accomplished what she did, I am still not sure, but I felt that the life she brought to the stage that day, and the truth and beauty of it, made most other acting trivial. For all the excitement of New York, Wharton, Texas, was never far from my mind. My mother was an inexhaustible and excellent letter writer, every

Genesis of a Playwright

41

day writing long chronicles of my family and friends and their activities. She wrote as if I had just left the day before, never, however, punishing me or making me feel guilty about obviously enjoying my new life. I have kept many of these letters. They are all witty, compassionate, and insightful. In my lonely times, and there were many—even in busy, bustling New York—I would read them over and over. She also had a penchant for describing all their meals in great detail, and since food was always excellently prepared in our house and in the houses of all our relatives, her descriptions of their meals made me ravenously hungry. I had to write and ask her to stop those descriptions, as I often had little enough money for food and the food available after reading her descriptions seemed almost inedible. In the winter of 1936, I ran into Rosamond Pinchot, whom I had known at the Playhouse. She was one of the great beauties of her day, from a rich and distinguished New York-Pennsylvania family. She had starred some years before in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle. I had met her somehow at the Playhouse when she was doing a play about John Brown. She told me that she was studying with Tamara Daykarhanova at her School for the Stage and that she needed a scene partner. She said that if I were interested in working with her, she would pay for the lessons. For the next three years, I spent a great part of each day at this school located at 29 West 59th Street on the sixth floor of a long, narrow building. What I learned there was to influence my writing greatly. There were three acting teachers at the school: Tamara Daykarhanova, Vera Soloviova, and Andrius Jilinsky. Daykarhanova had been the leading lady in Balieff ’s Chauve-Souries that had been produced first in Russia and had had great success in subsequent American and European tours. The company had disbanded some years before and Daykarhanova and her husband, Sergei Vassiliev, stayed on in America. She had been associated with Maria Ouspenskaya in her school, and when Ouspenskaya left New York for Hollywood, she began her own acting studio, asking Jilinsky and Soloviova to join her. Jilinsky and Soloviova were married and had been members of the Moscow Art Theater. Soloviova had replaced the original Nina in The Seagull and had performed it many times at the Art Theater. She had also originated the part of the blind girl in Stanislavsky’s production of Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth. Jilinsky, too, had played roles at the Art Theater. However, the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution had interrupted his career. On his return, they were both members of the Second Studio. After their marriage, the Lithuanian government invited Jilinsky to head their State Theater, and he and Soloviova did so for several years. In the meantime, Michael Chekhov, one of the world’s great actors and Anton’s nephew, had left Russia and started a theater in Paris. He asked Jilinsky and Soloviova to join him, and they toured with Chekhov across Europe and finally in America. The company disbanded here, and Jilinsky and Soloviova both decided to remain in New York and work with Daykarhanova.

42

Genesis of an American Playwright

They had classes in scene study, acting technique, makeup, voice, diction, and fencing. Rosamond was in the scene study class, and I began to work with her. Madame Soloviova and Daykarhanova were in charge of this class. Our first scene was from Candida. After we finished our scene, they conferred for several minutes in Russian and then Daykarhanova, who spoke the clearer English, began the criticism. They began by asking me a number of questions: where I had trained before, what parts had I played, etc. I told them as best I could how I had trained, and they shook their heads and looked doleful. My heart sank. Then they said that I was not without talent, but I had the wrong kind of training. If I continued working as I did, they assured me that I would develop very bad acting patterns that would take years to overcome. They suggested I take technique classes with Jilinsky; but in the meantime, I could continue in the scene class and they would help me as much as they could. They then gave us specific criticism about the scene. I heard the strange words “beats” and “colors” for the first time. I went away thoroughly confused, but I sensed this was a place I could learn something of value. Rosamond and I rehearsed our scene two more times, but before we could bring it back to class, she got a job in Hollywood. I continued in the scene class with other partners and began Acting Technique with Jilinsky in the mornings. To pay for my extra classes, I took turns with the regular elevator man running the elevator and helped the schools’ business manager in the office. Jilinsky was a tall, vital, handsome man of great energy and enthusiasm. He was a thorough and rigid taskmaster and he based his technique partly on his study with Stanislavsky, partly from Vakhtangov and the Second Studio, and partly from his work with Michael Chekhov. I worked every day with him from nine to eleven. Many of the concepts of his teaching have become commonplace, either through his students, Boleslavsky’s students, Ouspenskaya’s students, or the teaching members of the Group Theatre who trained with Ouspenskaya and Boleslavsky at the Actor’s Lab. Part of these exercises in concentration, relaxation, sensory work, and improvisation are now in some form used by many acting teachers. Now even those that totally oppose the so-called “System” are forced to deal with it and to explain why they ignore it. Back then, it was revolutionary and much resented by many theater professionals. It was a time of revolt in the American theater and in American Society, and those of us who became dedicated to this way of work felt we were turning our backs on the past system. When I heard Jilinsky say that all good actors know instinctively what he was trying to teach us, and that Pauline Lord, Laurette Taylor, and Walter Huston, whether they were aware of it or not, worked this way, I was willing to make any sacrifice to try and learn, too. In a letter he wrote to playwright Lynn Riggs, Jilinsky explains his way of working:

Genesis of a Playwright

43

The Moscow Art Theater was one of the stepping-stones of my life, and in many ways sacred to me. The acting there is in Russian and the interpretations are Russian. For instance, if O’Neill is performed, the actors will interpret him as Russians and not as Americans. But here is one important aspect of this theater that makes it different from all the best theaters in the world. For while the psychology is Russian, the means of acting are international— that is to say, fundamental—for they are based on the universal elements of truth. Our director, Stanislavsky, used Salvini and Duse as the best examples of acting—and neither of these artists was Russian. There is a quality in their creativeness, which convinced and fascinated him and led him to seek out the principles of their art so that other actors might act with the same truth. Thus, it was that Stanislavsky created a so-called “system.” Here in America you call his system the “Technique of Acting,” “Stanislavsky method,” etc. First of all, it does not teach you how to act, but how to work—how to train yourself and to organize your creative apparatus—that is all. There is only one way to act: act well.

I don’t remember now whether Daykarhanova or Jilinsky actually asked those of us in the technique classes not to look for acting work until the first semester of training was finished, or whether those of us in the class decided on our own not to work professionally. There was little time to look for acting jobs in any case as I was busy all day in either the technique or scene class. I spent my spare moments preparing for class work. However, I needed some kind of job to support myself. I found a job ushering at night at a movie house on 42nd Street, where I also doubled as a barker marching up and down in front of the marquee telling the pedestrians the name of our movie. In Jilinsky’s class, we were still working on exercises; we improvised any language we used. However, I continued working on scenes from plays in the Daykarhanova/Soloviova class. I was kind of the in-house juvenile. I did scenes from Ah, Wilderness, Come of Age, Candida, Cherokee Nights, and The Seagull. Burgess Meredith was a great success in Winterset the season before. I had seen him in the play twice and thought he was electrifying. I began to attend every play that he did. I saw The Star Wagon with Lillian Gish and Russell Collins (one of the Group actors). It was the first time I saw Lillian on stage. Then I saw Burgess in High Tor and he became my idol. I immediately wanted to work on all his parts, but the Russians would not permit it. I went back to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer, but their method of working was so different from what I was being taught at Daykarhanova’s, that I was in constant inner conflict. I soon found an excuse to get back to New York before summer was over. When I arrived, I was told that Warner Brothers was starting to do Broadway plays and one of their scouts, who had seen

44

Genesis of an American Playwright

me at Daykarhanova’s in a scene from No ’Count Boy, wanted to talk to me about a part. I went for an interview, and I was cast in a small part in a play called Swing Your Lady. It was my first real taste of Broadway, and it was not a pleasant one. My part was only in one scene, so I wasn’t called to rehearsal until the day my scene was to be rehearsed. I arrived not knowing any of the actors, nor anything about the play. I was called on stage and was told when and where to move and that was all. I panicked as I had in those first weeks in Pasadena; I froze. I couldn’t remember lines; I couldn’t hear cues. In those days, Actors’ Equity allowed a management to rehearse an actor five days for free. If, at the end of that period, the management wanted you to continue, your contract went into effect and you went on salary. At the end of the fourth day the stage manager called me aside and said, “You are going to be replaced.” I was humiliated. Not only would I have to go back to tell my teachers I had been fired from a job they didn’t want me to take in the first place, I also had to write my family and tell them of my failure. I had the regrettable habit of writing extremely optimistic letters to my parents back in Wharton. I was so eager to reassure them that I was about to achieve success and financial security. This letter was a difficult letter to write; I still feel the pain of it as I recall it. As it turned out, I would have only gotten rehearsal pay and one week’s work from the play anyway because it closed the night after it opened. I was soon busy again at Daykarhanova’s and supporting myself by ushering. Benjamin Zemach, who had directed Salome in Pasadena and whose wife now studied with Jilinsky, came to the studio looking for actors to use in the ensemble and dance scenes in The Eternal Road, which he was choreographing. He asked permission of Jilinsky and Daykarhanova to take some of us for these scenes. There had to be much skillful pantomime done, but we would have no lines to say. They agreed that it would be a good experience for us, and I was one of the actors hired. The Eternal Road was a gigantic spectacle of the history of the Jewish people told through Biblical stories. It had been written by Franz Werfel; Max Reinhardt was directing, Norman Bel Geddes was designing the sets, Kurt Weill writing the score, and his wife, Lotte Lenya, was acting in it, along with a number of actors from Reinhardt’s theater in Germany as well as several prominent American actors, including Rosamond Pinchot. Zemach had a company of trained dancers, in addition to those of us whom he had brought from Daykarhanova’s school. Although we had no lines, we appeared in many scenes with many changes of costumes. It was an enormous production, the kind of spectacle for which Reinhardt was famous. The dress rehearsals, coordinating the set, lights, cast, cues, dancers, and actors, were long and arduous. I remember one lasting until four in the morning. Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya were unknown names to me then. I think back now and realize that I was rehearsing with three major influences of Ger-

Genesis of a Playwright

45

man and European Theater, and I regret that I did not spend time listening and watching them work. I looked upon it merely as a job that fed me and left my days free to work at Daykarhanova’s. The Eternal Road did not have the critical success it needed to ensure enough ticket sales to keep so expensive a production going, and it closed after four months. In the summer of 1937, I was hired for eight plays at the Maverick Theater in Woodstock, New York, where I at last played Mio, the Burgess Meredith role in Winterset. That fall, I was cast as a lead in two one-act plays, The Coggerers (by Paul Vincent Carroll) and The Red Velvet Goat (by Josephina Nigli). Both productions were for the One-Act Repertory Theater, and performed at the Hudson Theater. Studying with me at Daykarhanova’s was Mary Hunter, a remarkable woman, older than most of the students at the school and ten years my senior. In California she had become friends with Agnes DeMille, and in New Mexico with the playwright Lynn Riggs, whose play Green Grow the Lilacs, had had a successful production by the Theater Guild with Franchot Tone, June Walker, Helen Westley, and Lee Strasberg. Later, in Chicago, she had become active with an experimental theater group and had become friends with the novelist James T. Farrell and the great black dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham. She was hired in Chicago for a part in what turned out to be a very successful radio program at the time, Easy Aces. When NBC decided to bring Easy Aces to New York, Mary came along and began studying theater, first with Ouspenskaya and later with Daykarhanova. At first, she was interested in directing, but because the commercial theater rarely hired women directors, she realized her chance for Broadway employment was dim. At Daykarhanova’s, we were indoctrinated with the ideal of group acting. They taught us to believe that Broadway, with its dependence upon stars, ruined real creativity. The Group Theatre was about to disband; but at our studio, we felt that the group ideal was the correct one and that the failure of the Group was only a result of Broadway economics. The following spring a number of us were asked if we would like to be a part of a permanent company. It was to be called the American Actors Company, and we were to go away for the summer and work on a play and exercises that would help strengthen us as a group. In her preface to my play, Only the Heart, Mary Hunter described the company by saying: “The American Actors Company was founded by a group of young theater people for the kind of experimental development that the creative artist in every field must have, and that is most difficult to achieve in the theater as none of its arts can be practiced in solitude.” I was not involved in any artistic decisions concerning the company at its beginnings, and so I don’t know why our first play was not an American play but was instead Edith Hamilton’s translation of The Trojan Women. It was

46

Genesis of an American Playwright

performed in the fall of 1938, with Mildred Dunnock as Hecuba. The New York critics savaged the production. In the meantime, we rented a space over a garage on West 69th Street, built a stage of sorts, and brought in platforms for seating. We began rehearsing Lynn Riggs’s Sumpin’ Like Wings and four one-act plays by E. P. Conkle and Paul Green. Our primary intention was to share our cultural roots, and because the members of the company represented almost a regional survey of the United States, the sources were rich and varied. Mary Hunter felt it important that the members of the company show their regional backgrounds through improvisation. She asked every member to do an improvisation bearing on some specifics of their part of America. I found all this very exciting and did an improvisation based on a family during a Texas Gulf Coast hurricane. Agnes DeMille had come down to watch us work, as she and Mary were planning a future company production of American Legend. After my improvisation she said quite casually, “You seem to be in touch with some interesting theatrical material. Did you ever think of writing a play?” I hadn’t, of course, but somehow the suggestion took root, and I wrote a one-act play, Wharton Dance, with a lead role for myself. I no longer have a copy of the play, but my memory of it is that it, too, was very improvisatory in form, based on a real situation, and used the names of the boys and girls in what we knew back in high school as “our crowd.” The company produced the play along with one-act plays by Paul Green and Thornton Wilder. Robert Coleman, a drama critic for The New York Mirror, came to see the production and wrote very favorably of the evening, particularly of my play and my acting. I did want to act and I am sure I thought that one way to get good parts was to write them for myself. Whatever my motives, I decided to go to Texas and work on a three-act play. I got a job for the summer working in a pageant called “Railroads on Parade” at the New York World’s Fair. I saved my money and when the Fair closed for the winter, I took the money I had saved and went home to Wharton to write my play. Even though I knew little or nothing about playwriting, had not even admitted to myself that I wanted to be a playwright, I felt a certain security about accomplishing the task before me, a security that I had never felt in all my years as an actor.*

Learning to Write I had already made one visit back to my home in Texas, directing and acting in a production of No ’Count Boy for the local Little Theater. It was on my second visit that I realized my brothers, Tom Brooks and John Speed, were no *Lecture presented at Louisiana State University, April 20, 1989

Genesis of a Playwright

47

longer little boys but young men. I was five when Tom Brooks was born and seven when John Speed arrived. Both my brothers and I were born at home, but I have no memory of either event. How could I not be aware of it? I had been enrolled in school at five; Tom Brooks was born in November and John Speed in October, so I was off at school when their births took place. But I can’t account for my having no memory of the preparation for their births: the baby beds, the baby clothes, the arrival of the doctor and midwife. Nor do I have any memory of being called to my mother’s bedside and being shown a new brother. I have some vague memories of Tom Brooks as a baby but none of John Speed. I heard in later years that my mother was momentarily disappointed that, after having two sons, John Speed was not a girl, but she never said that to me. I did often hear her say, however, that Tom Brooks was very demanding of her time as a young child, and she felt she had neglected John Speed as a baby. I think maybe I shut both of them out of my early consciousness because for five years I had been not only my parents’ only child, but also the only grandchild and the first nephew and great-nephew in our family. I felt the love and devotion of all these good, kind people, and I’m sure that I simply didn’t care to share it. I was closer to Tom Brooks growing up because we were nearer in age, and he later followed me to New York to study acting. He was drafted early on in World War II, became a radio pilot, and was killed flying over Germany sometime in 1944. His body was not identified until after the war. John Speed was never interested, as I was, in the stories of our family’s past. He loved and still loves country-western music. As a young boy and man, he would sit by the radio for hours listening to his favorite country singers and instrumentalists, tapping his foot and pretending to play one of the band instruments as he listened—a guitar, a violin, or a banjo. Later, his son, named Tom Brooks after our dead brother, inherited his father’s love of this music and, along with the now-famous George Strait, started a countrywestern band in college. It was their early touring experiences as a band that started me thinking about Tender Mercies. My Grandmother Brooks was living permanently in Houston when I returned home and was renting her house in Wharton. It seemed strange not to be able to wander into her yard and house anytime day or night that I wanted. The two servants’ houses were also empty, and my uncles and aunts had all moved away. At a suitable age I had been given roller skates and a bicycle, but the real joy of my young life was a horse, given to me when I was twelve for Christmas by my Uncle Tom. The whole family knew of the gift in advance, and early Christmas morning my mother, father, grandmother, uncles and aunts, grandmother’s cook Idella, and her daughter Katie Belle, gathered in our

48

Genesis of an American Playwright

backyard to watch as my Uncle Brother led the horse into the yard. I got on her at once and rode her around the yard. My brothers wanted turns riding, and they were lifted onto the saddle one at a time and led carefully around the yard. We then asked Katie Belle if she had ever ridden a horse. Idella, her mother, said proudly, “Many times,” so she was helped onto the saddle. And before anyone could take the reins to lead her around the yard, the horse took off. Idella screamed in terror but Katie Belle held on somehow as the horse galloped down the dirt road in front of our house, finally, mercifully coming to a stop in one of my great uncle’s cotton fields. I named my horse Minnie, after the heroine of the popular song of the day “Minnie the Moocher.” I would come home many afternoons after school, saddle Minnie, and take off. My idea of riding was racing down unpaved country roads as fast as I could. The river of our town, the Colorado, was mistakenly named. Colorado means “red” in Spanish, but our river had not a trace of redness. The Brazos, some thirty miles away, is red and was originally called “Colorado” by the Native Americans and the Spaniards, while our river they named the Brazos. But some early American settler got them mixed up and called ours the Colorado and the other the Brazos. They are so named now on all the maps. When I was a boy, the Colorado would flood at least every two years, covering the town. The water often came up to the porch of our house, but never got inside because the house was built high off the ground. At those times, we had to use rowboats to get to town and back. The floods were very destructive, ruining the cotton crop and causing great property damage. But to the children it was an exciting time riding around in boats, wading waist deep in the water in our yards. My father had been raised only a block from the river and, like my uncles, had fished and swum in it a great deal when he was a boy. Later, there had been a number of drownings in the river and now my father considered it a dangerous place, forbidding me to go near it. Other boys my age were also forbidden, but they defied their parents and went to the river to swim anyway. I never did, not even to fish. I wonder now if his fear of the river was a fear of my drowning or a fear of what I might learn from the older boys about drinking, gambling, and whoring. So many men of his generation had ended up as tragic victims of their vices, and there was always the example of my uncles before us. I think perhaps he thought that if he could keep me occupied and within eyesight he might spare me the consequences of all that. Of course, a few years later he had to let me go my way, but while I lived in Wharton he always kept a very tight rein. Change had come, too, to my other grandmother living in Houston. She had never seemed to be in good health, but now I was told that she hadn’t long to live. I had taken off from the store several summers to visit her in Houston.

Genesis of a Playwright

49

She had remarried years before, and I called her new husband Uncle Pete. He worked for the railroad and was up and gone from the house by five in the morning, so I rarely saw him except for brief visits at suppertime. I was fond of my Houston grandmother and enjoyed my visits with her, and she seemed fond of me. I liked, too, riding the streetcars of Houston and going to the large department stores and picture shows. Once a year, she would come to Wharton for a week’s visit with her sisters. One of these days was always spent at our house visiting with my mother. She always arrived after my father had gone to his store and would leave before his return home at night. “How was Mama?” he would ask on his return home, opening the evening paper and beginning to read before my mother could call out in her cheery voice, “Just fine.” My father was never close to his mother. After his father died at thirty-six and she remarried, he was not allowed to live with them. He was raised by his grandparents until their deaths, and then by his aunt, Louisiana Texas Patience Horton. I don’t know if his mother was aware of the resentment he felt toward her and her husband, but I sensed it, and my mother was certainly aware of it. It seems to me now that my father spent much of his early life searching for a home and family. The Orphans’ Home Cycle, my cycle of nine plays, is based on this search. My mother was always very close to her family and, in time, my father felt close to them as well. My Grandmother and Grandfather Brooks had eight children. Besides Jenny and Daisy, who didn’t survive infancy, there was my mother (the oldest), Laura, Rosa, Tom (called Brother), Speed, and Billy. Billy was only six when I was born and fifteen when his father died. Growing up, my uncles were always kind and attentive to me and I was fond of all three of them, especially Speed, who was considered the wit of the family. My Grandfather Brooks was enterprising, gifted, very successful, and always a generous man to his friends and to anyone less fortunate. The town invariably turned to him in times of crisis. He was genuinely loved and respected in town, and when he died he left a considerable estate for 1925: farms, rent houses, a brick building, and a great deal of cash. Everyone expected my grandmother, who knew nothing of business, to be helpless in dealing with the complexities of such an estate. At first, she let two of her children manage her affairs; but realizing they were unable or uninterested in doing so, she took over. With the help of my father, who managed the farms, she soon increased the estate’s value. She continued to do so until her death many years later. Her sons, always gracious and amiable, had no interest in business at all. From an early age, they drank and gambled a great deal and failed at whatever business or profession they attempted. Brother Tom was the first to be asked

50

Genesis of an American Playwright

to manage the estate, and my grandmother deeded one of the farms to him to give him an extra incentive. In less than a year he had mortgaged it, and she had to pay off the mortgage to get the farm back. He left Wharton not long after, wandered around the world as a merchant seaman, picked fruit on an Arizona ranch, and died a drunken derelict at fifty. For Speed, the witty one, she bought a cleaning and pressing shop in Wharton. My father sent all his store’s suit and pant alterations to his shop, and it was my job on Saturdays or after school to take the clothes to be altered. There was Prohibition then, but usually there would be men with him in the back of the shop gambling and drinking bootleg whiskey. When he would see me watching, he would give a wink as if to say, “I know you won’t tell on me.” The business soon failed and he left Wharton, too. Many years later, he was arrested for selling drugs in California and sent to San Quentin. He was in his late fifties when he was finally paroled and returned to Houston. When he died, he was living in a room at the Milby Hotel in Houston, supported by the income from his share of the estate left in trust by his mother. Billy, the youngest, died a few years later in the same hotel. He had been sent to the University of Texas where he flunked out the first year. He then went to a night law school in Dallas, got a degree, and came back to Wharton to open a law office. After two months, he started drinking and never went back to his office. He never thought of law or any kind of work ever again. Their sisters, my mother and aunts, were remarkable women who were loyal to each other and to their brothers all of their lives. Whenever they got together, one of them would inevitably ask, “What do you think went wrong with the boys?” The earliest settlers arrived in the present vicinity of Wharton in the 1830s to start their plantations, but the settlement didn’t become a town until 1845. When I was a boy, many of the settlers’ descendants still owned the farms and the lands surrounding the town, and many of these families had sons as lost and defeated as my uncles. Among them were murderers, drunkards, and suicides. Their mothers, sisters, and wives were mostly genteel and led orderly lives, playing bridge, going to church, and raising their children. As a child and a young man I was puzzled by all this. I remembered the order and stability that seemed so much a part of my grandfather’s life, yet here were my uncles and their friends riding around town, nearly always with the smell of whiskey on their breath. Often my uncles would come home drunk, and my grandmother would cry and take to her bed. Even as a young boy I could sense the futility of their lives and began asking, like my mother and aunts, “What went wrong?” I had no answer then; I have none now. I still ask myself the question, and I often attempt to explore it in many of my plays. When I got back to Wharton, I noticed that everyone’s life continued to revolve around the cotton crop. The town had settled into the Depression.

Genesis of a Playwright

51

W. Lee (Pappy) O’Daniels was either governor or running for governor. He came to Wharton with his string band courting the voters by singing on the courthouse lawn his country-western songs, including “Beautiful Texas.” In our busy house with two active teenage brothers and their friends trooping in and out and relatives coming by unannounced at all hours for a visit, I don’t know how I found time to write a three-act play, but I did. I called it Texas Town, and in the late Fall I returned with it to New York City. I had set my play in a small-town drugstore. Two brothers, vastly different in temperament, were in love with the same girl. One of the brothers wanted to stay in the town and lead the most conventional life possible, while the other found life there stifling and wanted badly to leave. There were a number of other stories involving minor characters that were explored as a counterpart to the central story. The American Actors Company agreed to produce the play in the spring of 1941. Mary Hunter directed, and I again played one of the leads. We began rehearsals in our studio on 69th Street, but our subscription audience was growing so large that for my play and American Legend, which we were doing with Agnes DeMille, we moved down to 16th Street and shared the larger studio belonging to Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. In spite of our growing subscription, our budget was still very small. The male members of the Company designed and built the scenery, lit the show, changed the sets between scenes, and ran the light board. Texas Town only had one set, so it needed only a prop man to make changes between the acts, but American Legend had a number of sets and all the male actors had to double as stagehands. All of our subscription money went for theater rental, sets, costumes, props, and advertising. No one got paid, not the actors, administrators, nor the director. Texas Town opened in early spring. Beulah Weil, who played my mother in the production, says that she had such stage fright on opening night that she thought she was going to faint on her first entrance and surely would have if she hadn’t first seen the terror in my eyes as I waited onstage for her to speak. My nervousness rallied her in some way, and she was able to play the scene. In the audience that night were Lee and Paula Strasberg, Clifford Odets and his sister Florence, and Brooks Atkinson, who was the dean of the New York Drama Critics. Florence Odets was a friend of the company and afterwards, she came backstage to tell us that her brother and the Strasbergs had liked the play and the actors. She didn’t know, of course, what Atkinson thought. Atkinson reviewed for The New York Times, and everyone respected him as a critic. In those days, the edition with the review didn’t appear on the newsstands until three in the morning. Most theater people involved in a production waited up for his review. A group of us from the Company went to a

52

Genesis of an American Playwright

bar after the performance. Promptly at a quarter of three, my brother Tom Brooks, who by then had joined me in New York to study acting, went to Times Square where the first copies of the Times appeared. He came back in great excitement to read us the review. It said in part: Texas Town is an engrossing portrait of small town life. Mr. Foote’s quiet play is an able evocation of a part of life in America. It is something to walk in out of Sixteenth Street into the waiting and idle atmosphere of a small town in Texas. Mr. Foote and the American Actors Company have performed that feat of magic.

There was no off-Broadway or off-off-Broadway in the structure of the New York theater of that day. No play, even if well received, had any kind of lasting performance life away from the commercial theaters. The Humphrey Weidman Studio Theater was only available to us for a limited time, and part of that time had to be shared with American Legend. Commercial producers came down to see the production and Edward Choate, on behalf of the Brothers Shubert, took an option on the play. I went to visit him in his office in the Shubert Theater after I signed the option. To my disappointment, our talk was not about the play or the productions of the American Actors Company, but a pep talk about the monetary rewards of the Broadway Theater and how best to reach a vast audience. In order to do that, he let me know that my play would have to be greatly changed. He was very blunt and straightforward and said he was treating me like a professional Broadway writer. Today, I would be equally blunt and ask why he was interested in the play at all; but then, I was in awe of that world of commercial power and nodded my head as if I agreed with all he was saying. In my heart, I didn’t, and later when I tried to execute a few of his suggestions, I realized it was no road for me to travel as a writer. As little as I knew then about the writing of plays, I had some primitive instinct that would never let me indulge in using formulas or pandering to an audience, a producer, or a director. That summer, the American Actors Company contracted with the Montowese Playhouse in Connecticut to do a season of plays. We had guest stars, mostly young movie actors like Anita Louise and Eric Linden. I was cast as the lead in a number of the plays, and I began to think about writing another play for the Company. It was then that I lost my interest in acting and began to think of myself as a playwright. By the next Spring, I had completed four one-act plays, which the Company presented under the title Out of My House. This time, because of Atkinson’s interest in Texas Town, all nine of the daily reviewers came to the opening. Many were respectful, but none as enthusiastic as Atkinson’s review

Genesis of a Playwright

53

had been for Texas Town. He, however, felt the last of the plays was the best writing I had done. When Agnes DeMille joined us for American Legend, she brought with her a group of dancers that included Jerome Robbins, Katherine Litz, and Sibyl Shearer. I became interested in their rehearsals and their way of working. I found my interest in dance growing as I got to know Doris Humphrey and began to attend the rehearsals and performances of her company. Doris Humphrey was a strong lyric dancer and a master choreographer. Her dances were sometimes abstract, but more often had a strong narrative line. She told her stories precisely and movingly. Humphrey’s contemporary, Martha Graham, was an equally gifted choreographer, and perhaps even a greater dancer and performer. Often in her dances, Graham presented a dark world of anguish and conflict. Humphrey’s world was brighter, more lyrical, and its tragedies somehow more immediately understandable. Both dancers, in their own way, were great storytellers. Humphrey, at that time, was more epic, less subjective in her approach. Martha’s greatest period of creativity was still ahead of her, and it continued even into her nineties. It was my privilege to get to know both of these remarkable women and to watch them at work. Three years after Texas Town, I was to work directly with Graham on a production of my play, The Lonely, commissioned by the Neighborhood Playhouse. By then, because of all I had absorbed from watching Humphrey’s rehearsals and performances, and by the generosity with which she answered my many questions about her approach to dance, I had some knowledge of dance and choreography. My work with DeMille had been of great value, too, as was my later association with Valerie Bettis. At the time, I also became friends with Jerome Robbins and through him began to learn about ballet and to respect the work of another great choreographer, Anthony Tudor. Certainly during this period, there were no playwrights being produced that could equal the seriousness of purpose and the storytelling talents of Graham, Humphrey, and Tudor. I was also very influenced by the use of music in the work of these choreographers, and later I tried to incorporate it in my more experimental plays. Modern dance, in all its early purity, was everywhere in New York in these days. Young dancers frequently hired a hall for one night and gave a solo concert. These solos were often danced to narrated poems. I narrated a Carl Sandberg poem for a solo by a young Humphrey dancer, the poem “Strange Fruit” by the black dancer Pearl Primus, and John Brinnin’s poem, “The Desperate Heart,” for Valerie Bettis. Valerie and I began our rehearsals together in her studio, and from the first day we found working together exciting and challenging. Our association and friendship was to continue for many years. She was twenty-four at the

54

Genesis of an American Playwright

time and at the height of her beauty and power as a dancer and performer. “The Desperate Heart” received an ovation at its first performance, and we repeated it many times over the next few years in dance recitals around the city. Valerie was very much against what she considered “the realistic theater” and she wanted to see a theater created that more boldly used the elements of dance, words, and music. I began to spend more and more time with her and the composer Bernardo Segall, who later became her husband, and we would talk and argue our theories of dance and theater way into the night. Many of the avant-garde artists of the day were in the Village where I also lived: Merce Cunningham, John Cage (he was often at Valerie’s and composed a score for one of her early dances), Martha Graham, Louis Horst, Tamiris, Hanya Holm, Sibyl Shearer, and Harry Holtzman (Mondrian’s disciple and controller of his estate). Everyone had opinions about new concepts of art and how to make radical changes in the art of our time. I listened. I observed. And once in a while I expressed an opinion. With Valerie and Bernardo, however, I was much more assured, and we would sometimes argue until three or four in the morning. I spent the summer of 1943 working on a new play, Mamie Borden. In order to support myself while writing, I took a job as an elevator operator in a Park Avenue apartment building. I had the night shift and because most of the tenants were home by eleven, I had all night free to write. Oscar Serlin, producer of Life with Father, was one of our tenants and he soon found out what I was up to and made daily inquiries about the play’s progress. I finished the play by the autumn of 1943. Mary Hunter was enthusiastic about it, and she began looking for an actress to play the leading role of Mamie Borden. Hilda Vaughn, who had been working in Hollywood but was now in New York wanting to do a play, was suggested to us. She read the play and agreed to do it, but she wanted the title changed. She felt that Mamie Borden would be confused with Lizzie Borden and suggested Only the Heart, a phrase from a Heine poem. I thought it was much too flowery and had nothing to do with my play, but since I could think of nothing better and wanted her for the part, I finally agreed to her suggestion. The American Actors Company was beginning its fourth season. The United States had entered World War II, and although I had been exempt from the draft because of an injury, many of the men in the Company (including Joseph Anthony) had been drafted. The members that remained were finding it increasingly difficult to support themselves with outside jobs and still do all the work the Company required. We had much critical support for the idea of the Company, as well as for our productions, but we were still unable to pay salaries and we all had to find other means to support our-

Genesis of a Playwright

55

selves. I still have the brochure we put out to prospective subscribers. It says: “A full membership ($6.00) entitles you to four $1.65 seats. Tickets are also available at $1.65, $1.10, and $.85.” We raised enough money to rent the Provincetown Playhouse for a two-week run, so you see, the engagement was not calculated to make anyone rich. For the first time we discussed the possibility, if our play succeeded, of moving it to Broadway, where there would at least be a chance for the members to earn a living of some kind. Once again, Only the Heart was a critical success and again the managers and producers came down to look it over. Luther Green was one of them. An adventurous producer in his day, he was married (or soon to be married) to the actress Judith Anderson. He was very taken with my play and wanted to move it uptown to Broadway in a new production that he would direct and recast with Pauline Lord in the leading role. He had brought Miss Lord to see the play and wanted me to meet with her. I had seen every play she had appeared in since Ethan Frome, and I thought she was our greatest actress. She was very gracious to me and praised my play, but she felt the part was not right for her. Luther Green had known this before the meeting, but he felt I might be able to change her mind. I can’t remember if I tried to or not. I think not, as I was too much in awe of her to try. I only saw her perform twice after that, both times in The Glass Menagerie in Washington, DC, in 1946. I can see her still as Amanda, trying to bring order and meaning into the Wingfield lives. Miss Lord died soon after. Jacques Therie, who introduced himself as the George Kaufman of Paris, came to see the play and asked to talk to Mary Hunter and me. He was very enthusiastic about the production but felt the play needed further work. Somehow he convinced us that by my working with him on the play, we would have a great Broadway success. After four years of financial struggle, all of us in the Company were ready for that kind of change. Jacques and I went to his house in Hollywood to work the play. We made extensive changes, but he was unable to raise the money for a production, so I returned to New York with the new version of the play. I pretended I thought it was an improvement, but in my heart I wasn’t so sure. Helen Thompson, who had worked as a fundraiser for the Group Theatre, began to work in the same capacity for our company, and soon found the backing for a production on Broadway. June Walker was cast as Mamie, and Mildred Dunnock was cast as her sister. The critics didn’t like the production, and although we were able to run for six weeks through the generosity of one of our backers, I had to agree to take no royalties. I was asked by Sanford Meisner to take over his second-year students and rehearse them in a play whenever he had to leave the Neighborhood Playhouse

56

Genesis of an American Playwright

Theater School for an acting or directing job. I did two of my new one-act plays there, but the work didn’t pay me enough to live on so I had to find other income. I had read somewhere that Faulkner once worked in a New York bookstore to support himself while writing, so I decided to try and find a job selling books. I wanted to have my days free, so I went to work on the night shift at the Doubleday Book Store in Pennsylvania Station. I first met Tennessee Williams when he brought his play You Touched Me to the American Actors Company to produce, and I had seen him again in California where he was under a writer’s contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After I had returned to New York, he had written me that he had a new play, which he felt was uncommercial, but had a part for me. I was no longer interested in acting, but I read the play, then called “The Gentleman Caller” and was very taken with it. I asked if I could do the Gentleman Caller scene from the play in a production at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and he agreed. Two days before the scene was to be performed, a friend, who had seen the rehearsals, met Tennessee and told him how pleased he was with what he had seen. He said Tennessee had a stricken look on his face and said, “I’ve just sold the play to Eddie Dowling.” However, he let me continue with our production, and so I directed the first production of a scene from the play that would be known as The Glass Menagerie. The Neighborhood Playhouse commissioned me to write a one-act play to be performed by the graduating students that would incorporate the different disciplines taught at the school: dance, acting, and music. I was to direct, Martha Graham was to choreograph, and Louis Horst was to write a score. Earlier, I had written a one-act play, Daisy Lee, that Valerie Bettis had performed and for which Bernardo Segall had written a score. It required performers who were both actors and dancers. I was anxious to go even further in my experimentation with dramatic form so that the acting and the dancing were never separated, but continuous. Martha Graham had by now created Letter to the World and Every Soul Is a Circus, both theater pieces of great power. Letter to the World had a dancernarrator reciting Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and Every Soul Is a Circus, was structured like a play but without text. I have worked with many gifted, creative people, but none quite like Martha. She came to our rehearsals bringing the kind of creative energy she would bring to work on one of her major ballets. She was never overbearing, always interested in my ideas, always inspiring everyone in the company to work at their fullest. We both lived in the Village, and after rehearsals we would often take a Fifth Avenue bus together to our apartments. We talked a great deal about theater and dance, and although I have no specific memory of what was said, I know that I always left her inspired and anxious to work harder than ever at my writing.

Genesis of a Playwright

57

It was while working at Doubledays that I met my wife Lillian. She was in college and had taken a semester off to come to New York to work. By then, I was the night manager at the bookstore and I hired her as a clerk. She loved writing and books, and we soon became inseparable. If Martha inspired me to make any sacrifice to achieve my best work, the New York theater counseled me to be practical, to stop writing about smalltown Texas, to stop experimenting with dancers and new play forms, and to turn my attention to writing successful Broadway plays. These people meant to be kind and helpful, but I was only depressed by what they had to say. In addition to the discouraging advice I was getting from theater professionals in New York, the American Actors Company decided it was best to disband, and I was left without a theater to do my plays. It was a lonely feeling. Then one day Howard Lindsay, a most successful director, producer, and playwright, called and asked to see me. I went down to his townhouse in the Village. He said he loved the theater and that the theater needed playwrights badly. He thought I had great promise and he wanted to share with me two things that had been of help to him as a playwright. The first was never to write a play about a character you wouldn’t care to entertain in your own living room, and the second, never watch the actors when you take a play out of town for a tryout. Instead, watch the audience to see when they got bored or restless. Lillian and I married in the summer of 1945 and she joined Valerie, Bernardo, and me in our talks about theater and its future. Valerie and Bernardo were concentrating entirely on works for a lyric theater, a totally non-realistic theater. I finished a play that Valerie was to do called In My Beginning. I heard Darius Milhaud was in town, and I called and asked if he would read the play. He read it, liked it, and agreed to do a score. We found a producer who took an option for a hundred dollars a month while he tried to raise money for a production. The Neighborhood Playhouse asked me to write another one-act play for their graduating students, again using all three disciplines. I did, and this time Mary Hunter was engaged to direct it. The war ended and the actors, directors, and writers who had been in the army began to return to New York. Through the Partisan Review and other literary magazines, we began to hear of the vitality of the European theater, especially the modern French theater. Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, and Anouilh began having their productions reviewed and their plays translated. In contrast, the New York theater seemed grim and uninspired. Valerie Bettis had been offered a job with her husband teaching at the King-Smith School in Washington, DC. She asked me to go, too, and I said I would if I could have the use of a theater to do plays. They agreed to find me space, and so with Lillian and a director friend, Vincent Donehue, we

58

Genesis of an American Playwright

decided to go to Washington with Valerie and Bernardo. Valerie would come to teach once a week, but my wife and I, with Donehue, were to be in charge of running the school and forming the theater. We stayed there for four years. I was allowed to write my plays and to produce them, as well as direct productions of Lorca, Sartre, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Gertrude Stein. It was a fruitful time for me. I was able to experiment with many forms of theater far away from the commercial pressures of New York. By 1949, after four years in DC, I decided to go back to New York. I had enjoyed my years there, but I felt the duties of teaching, directing, and running a theater were leaving me little time for writing. By this time, I had been writing for ten years. I had written ten one-act plays and eight full-length plays. Most had been given productions of some kind. I had experimented a great deal with various theatrical forms, but I now felt that was over. In all the plays, no matter how experimental, I had returned again and again to the people and themes of the world in which I grew up. Just before leaving New York in 1945, I read Katherine Anne Porter’s three short novels in her collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider. These short novels had a profound and lasting effect on me. Here, it seemed to me, was a supreme prose stylist, yet with no trace of artifice. Porter was no local colorist, nor was she sentimental about the past. Yet, she drew from her past and region of her birth to create her imagined world. My wife and I went away to her family home in the Pennsylvania countryside. I was working on my play The Chase, and I had a great deal of time to think and reflect. I needed this quiet time. I had learned much these past years from my Russian acting teachers, from the great dancers and choreographers Graham, Bettis, DeMille, Humphrey, Tudor, from the many writers I admired, and from the productions of my plays. I was tired, too. I felt that instead of having a steady goal, I had an improvised one. I had been constantly learning on the job, as it were. I had learned from many rich, varied and unexpected sources. Now, it seemed to me, it was time to be quiet, to assimilate, and to make sense of what I had learned. The first questions I asked myself were: Why did I have no desire to write topical plays about the many social issues of the day? Why was I uninterested in finding a formula for a successful, well-made Broadway play? Why was I now tired of constantly searching for new theatrical forms? I welcomed all the experiences of the past, felt that each had played an important part in my development, and was certain that a great deal of it would remain with me always, informing in some vital way whatever I wrote.

Genesis of a Playwright

59

I felt that I had not chosen the characters and the stories of my plays so much as they had chosen me. These are my people and my stories, and the plays I want to write—the only ones I know how to write. I rarely give advice of any kind to young writers, but if pressed I will say, “Find out what you have to write and write it.”*

*Lecture presented at Louisiana State University, April 21, 1989

Chapter Two

On Being a Southern Writer As a writer, a playwright, and screenwriter, my goal is always to establish a true sense of place in my work. “What It Means to Be a Southern Writer”

Wharton, Then and Now In returning to Wharton in late January of this year, I found that the frost had been light and had browned only small patches of the grass in the yards, and the narcissuses, the first of the Spring flowers, were in bloom all over town. The pecan trees are still leafless, their gray branches stark and serene against the gentle, January day. I return to this place to stay in the house to which I was brought before my first birthday. Since my parents’ death, it has become my permanent Texas home, a home I retreat to whenever I can. I have been here ten days now, the temperature mostly in the upper seventies. My house and yard have changed little through the years, but the neighborhood surrounding it and the town itself have changed a great deal, so there are always two worlds with me, the one that was, or my memory of it, and the one I see around me now. My house was built on part of a fifteen-acre plot belonging to my mother’s parents. My grandparents bought the plot in the late 1890s. The land was originally part of the Kincheloe plantation that was granted to William Kincheloe, one of Texas’s first settlers, by the Mexican government in the 1830s. My grandfather grew cotton on part of the acreage, as well as some corn and sugar cane. A large barn was behind their house and behind the barn a pasture, where horses and cows were kept. The first intimation I 61

62

Genesis of an American Playwright

had of the changes to come was when my grandfather sold the horses and cows, dismantled the barn, and built a garage for his car. In 1916, my grandparents gave my mother and father half an acre directly behind their house, between the pasture (for the cows and horses) and one of the cotton fields. They built my parents a house of pine and cypress, and it has withstood innumerable floods and hurricanes. In the front yard of this house, there are two pecan trees that my father planted in 1916. In all these years, they have rarely failed to produce an abundant crop of pecans. Today the backyard of the house still faces the backyard of the house that belonged to my grandparents. When I was growing up, part of our backyard was fenced in so my father could raise chickens, and another section was fenced so he could have a vegetable garden. The dirt road in front of our house had been given to the town by my grandparents. It ran through their cotton field, across Alabama Street, through the cotton fields belonging to a great uncle, across Caney Creek, and ended finally at Milam Street, which runs parallel to the court house square. The house and land across the road from my grandparents’ house belonged to the Wilsons, the family of a childhood friend of mine. The Wilson’s boy and I were allowed to run wild on this land. We dug caves, built treehouses in the tallest pecan trees, and strung wires from tree to tree, placing a piece of iron pipe over the wire so we could slide from branch to branch. At the back of the Wilson’s land was a cotton gin and an oil mill, which Mr. Wilson managed. When the cotton season was over we were allowed to go there and play on the cotton bales that were stored on an open platform or jump in the wagon filled with cottonseed in the late summer and early Fall. During cotton season, the cotton gin and the oil mill ran night and day. The oil mill made cottonseed cakes, and the pleasant odor from the cakes permeated our part of town. Wharton was first settled in 1828, and from then until its incorporation as a town, it had only a few crude stores surrounded by plantations. Produce and goods were shipped up the river from the Gulf port of Matagorda some forty miles away, and boats carried the cotton, sugar cane, and corn back down to the river to ships waiting at the Gulf. Wharton is the county seat of Wharton County, fifty-nine miles from Houston and forty-five miles from the Gulf of Mexico. The Texas Colorado River, which is the southern boundary of the town, comes south from Austin to the Gulf of Mexico, passing through Wharton on its way. It looks serene and placid today, but when I was growing up it was often unpredictable and dangerous. Floods were frequent; sometimes the floodwaters would reach our porch and we had to use rowboats to get out of the house. My father was raised in a house only a block away from the river, and he learned to swim in it at an early age. Sometimes, he made his spending money

On Being a Southern Writer

63

by selling the fish he caught there. I was never allowed to go to the river, and I was often told of its terrors: suck holes, swift and unexpected currents, alligators, snakes, cottonmouths and water moccasins. These fears were reinforced by the occasional wail of the fire siren telling us that some poor soul had drowned there. When I was a child, Wharton had an estimated population of three thousand; at least half of it was black. The blacks lived mostly in two sections. The larger of the two sections was known as the Quarters, and it was located across the railroad tracks outside the city limits. The other section, within the city limits, was called Freedman’s Town. The white section of town began near the banks of the river and continued east and west for a number of blocks. Around the court house square, continuing west on Milam and Burleson Streets, were a number of dry goods stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, two “racket” stores (our term for today’s dollar store), a picture show, three drugstores, two white restaurants, a black restaurant, and three hotels. Two of the drugstores had doctors’ offices on their second floor; and when they were not busy, the doctors would sit or stand in front of their respective drugstores and talk among themselves. They would talk to the other men of the town, most of whom owned land worked by tenants. These men had ample time to visit, swap stories, remember the past, and play practical jokes. Most merchants and store workers made frequent trips to the drugstore for cokes or coffee. Mail was delivered three times a day and there was no home delivery, so the post office was a busy place. Many people went to the depot every day to meet the train, whether they were expecting someone or not. At least two of the hotels would have cars there waiting to take the drummers with their wares back to the hotels. In 1925, streets were still unpaved. The main streets were graveled, the rest were dirt. Horses, mules, buggies, and wagons were still in great use among the country people, and torrential rain often made the roads impassable. On Saturdays, the horses and buggies could be seen everywhere. The little sleepy town came alive on Saturdays! Stores were open by seven in the morning and most merchants, my father certainly, stayed open until eleven at night, sometimes as late as twelve. My father owned a men’s store. He sold dress and work shirts, dress and work pants, overalls, coveralls, ties, collars, handkerchiefs, cuff links, tie clasps, collar buttons, hats, and ready-made and tailor-made suits. I began working Saturdays in my father’s store when I was eleven years old. He had mostly black customers, from both the town and the country. The town blacks usually were not finished with their jobs until midor-late afternoon. The country blacks began arriving somewhat earlier, and by eleven or twelve, joined by the country whites, the sidewalks and streets were crowded and noisy and the stores filled with customers. The crowds continued until eight or nine at night, when the country people took their children

64

Genesis of an American Playwright

and their purchases, got their buggies, wagons, and cars, and left until the next Saturday. Saturdays were exhausting, punishing days for my father. I was the only clerk he had and many of the blacks did not want me to wait on them, so he often was trying to help five or six customers at a time. On the busiest Saturdays, there would sometimes be a line of fifteen or so country people standing, waiting patiently for him. After the last straggler had left the streets, my father would close the door and the two of us would attempt to straighten up a bit. Then he would check the cash register, put the money in his safe, lock the store, and we would go to one of the two restaurants in town and order a dozen or more fried oysters. He didn’t own a car until much later, so after finishing our oysters we would walk home through the cotton fields to our house, talking over the day’s activities. My father was born in 1890 and when he was a boy, practically all the businesses were in wooden buildings. Wooden rails and hitching posts were set up in front of the stores for riders on horseback and those that came to town in buggies. There were no sidewalks, and occasional planks were set over mud holes. Fires occurred frequently, and in 1902, a fire virtually wiped out the west side of the Square. There was no stock law until 1916 and until then, cows, sheep, goats, and pigs often roamed the town. The Depression was particularly difficult on towns that depended on cotton, as we did. There were fewer country people in town on Saturdays then, and those that came had little money to spend. My father loved to talk. He was born in Wharton, and except for a brief period when he went to business school in Houston and spent a year on the road as a traveling salesman, he had lived here just as his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had before him. He was aware of the changes in the town through the years and often vividly described them to me. So early on, I realized that Wharton had not always looked as it did now, and consequently, I was not surprised when I began to notice changes myself. The cotton fields around my house have long since disappeared, and there are houses on both sides now. My dirt road was paved some years ago and named North Houston Street and across the street is part of the evergrowing Baptist church complex. My wife and I often get in our car and drive down Houston Street to the square and drive around it. Over half the stores in town are now empty, only one drugstore and one dry goods store owned by a merchant family from the thirties remain on the square. There is only one grocery store left in the old part of town, and the second stories of the brick buildings that housed the offices of the doctors and lawyers are now empty. There is no movie house. The hotels are closed. Tractors and cotton-picking machines have replaced the

On Being a Southern Writer

65

tenants on the farms, so Saturday in town is like any other day now, only quieter, and the stores are all closed by six. What is new? There is a shopping center a block off the Houston Highway, which has a supermarket, a restaurant, and various other stores; and at the other end of town, there is an even smaller shopping center. There is a growing and impressive junior college that provides educational opportunities for young men and women from all over our part of southeast Texas, and there is a brand new hospital/clinic complex on the outskirts of town. Near it is our only factory, owned by a gentleman from Taiwan, where plastics are made. The town’s characteristic architecture grew out of the needs of its time and place. The summers were long and severe, the winters relatively mild. The buildings built after the fire occurred were brick, two-storied, with high ceilings and porches out from their second stories providing shade from the relentless summer sun. As the stores put in air conditioning and the second stories became tenantless, the fronts of the buildings were “modernized” and the porches torn down; the stores now have a strange hybrid look, not of this time certainly, and no longer of the 1890s or early 1900s. My grandparents’ house used to face Richmond Road, which was first dirt, then gravel, and finally paved. When Richmond Road became part of the Houston Highway, its lovely old homes were gradually abandoned. Now, it is littered with used car lots, drive-ins, and filling stations. A new superhighway now bypasses the town, and Richmond Road is only a shoddy, ugly, alternative route. Driving past the abandoned Santa Fe Railroad depot, I can see that there is only one cotton gin left where once there were three. Across the railroad tracks in the black section, the streets are now paved, but little else has changed. In the country, just outside the town, is the new hospital, and near it are two brand-new motels: The Inns of Texas and the Home Place Inn. Near the hotels, off the new Houston Highway 59, is Hinze’s Barbeque Restaurant, where my wife and I often go to eat. Sausage, pork ribs, beef, black-eyed pea salad, baked beans, cole slaw, and regular black-eyed peas are all part of the fare; also wonderful homemade pies are served daily including pecan, chocolate, and coconut. Recently, a couple from New York City called Hinze’s and wanted to know if it was going to be open on a certain day, as the two were coming to Houston and had heard so much about the barbecue that they didn’t want to miss it. The town I knew is gone, but there are remnants of it everywhere in the altered and empty buildings. Many of my friends and relatives and their children and grandchildren still live here. Some have abandoned the houses they

66

Genesis of an American Playwright

grew up in, and have built houses in the new additions. Their abandoned houses have been torn down or converted into beauty parlors, flower shops, or boutiques. That is the nature of things, I suppose. I am sure my great-greatgrandfather, who came here in 1835 and established his plantation, would have found the town I grew up in strange and unfamiliar. When I get home I sit on our back porch and watch the birds circling in the sky, and I can hear an occasional car on the now old Houston highway. From my front porch, I can see the Baptists filling their parking lot for a meeting of some sort. I look toward the town, sit on the porch rail, and think of those sights and sounds of an earlier time: the music from a jukebox in a black restaurant, or a waltz from a faraway Mexican dance, or children calling to each other in the night as they begin their after-supper games. There are no children in the neighborhood now, and the town population, now over ten thousand, has spread in all directions, filling up the surrounding cotton fields with new houses of all sizes and descriptions.*

What It Means to Be a Southern Writer I have just come from a visit to my house in New Hampshire where I lived for twelve years with my wife and four children. I had not been there for more than a year. The house, a modified saltbox built in 1760, has been virtually untouched through the years, except for the addition of a few conveniences. There are fields surrounding the house that are separated by stone walls, wonderful to behold. I arrived in early May, May 5th to be exact. When I arrived, it was cold and rainy. I had a fire in the enormous fireplace, which warmed the room enough so that I could sit to read and write. Outside, only a few trees had timidly begun to leaf and only the forsythia had begun to bud. This was slightly disconcerting to me, because by early May, my house in Texas had gone through these same beginnings of Spring, only there the temperature was in the seventies and early eighties and had been so for most of the Winter. By early February, the hyacinths in Texas had already bloomed and faded. The years I lived in New Hampshire were unbroken except by trips to visit my parents in Texas, three months in Mississippi making my film, Tomorrow, and occasional brief trips to California for conferences about film work. Because of my children, I was active in the local schools. I went to town meetings dutifully; eventually I could drive in the snow with the best of them. It was a quiet, peaceful time. Then, our house was on a dirt road and our nearest neighbors were a quarter of a mile away. I did a great deal of writing, and *Written in 1987 for Conde Mast Traveler magazine

On Being a Southern Writer

67

I enjoyed being with my family and the few friends I had made. Yet, the whole time, something in me was profoundly restless, thinking of another place, another time. I never once felt it was or could be my home. And so it is with New York. I have lived there off and on for a great deal of my adult life. I love the city and I am happy there, but I never feel it is home. I own my family home now in Wharton, Texas, forty miles from the Gulf as the crow flies. I was brought to this house when I was not quite a year old, grew up in it, and now I frequently return to it with my wife. My great-great-grandfather came to Wharton from Alabama in the early 1830s. Born in Georgia, he had moved to Alabama as a young man, married, and then went out to Texas and settled on the coast. Out of that coastal wilderness, he carved two houses, one on the coast and one in the middle of a large plantation. He died at sixty-five, the year the Confederate army surrendered. My mother’s people came to Texas from Virginia at about the same time. They settled in East Columbia on the Brazos River, which is twenty-five miles from Wharton. Other families from all parts of the South joined these two families in East Columbia. Families from Georgia, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky made this part of Texas their home. A number of the families were mixed, by which I mean that a mother might be from Tennessee and a father from South Carolina or the father from Kentucky and the mother from Louisiana. I have written all this personal history in an attempt to explore the answer to the question “What does it mean to be a Southern writer?” I suppose the easiest answer to that question is that it means to be born in the South and to write about the Southern. That answer includes all Southern writers, good and bad. I am sure it is no secret that there are bad Southern writers. Therefore, in my vanity, I have taken the question to ask what it means to be a good Southern writer, or at least a Southern writer who takes writing seriously. I think the answer to that is easy, too, because that means the writer must have talent and be willing to work at his craft with great diligence and seriousness of purpose. But, of course, that definition would also apply to Chicago, New England, or mid-western writers. I suspect if you put in a room twelve different writers from the South, you might get twelve quite different answers to that question. I certainly can only speculate about the subject with no assurance of a definitive answer. To many, the South is just one vast undistinguishable region; but what could be more different in its particulars from Reynolds Price’s North Carolina, or Peter Taylor’s Tennessee, or Elizabeth Spencer’s Mississippi? The Georgia of Flannery O’Connor is vastly unlike the Georgia of Carson

68

Genesis of an American Playwright

McCullers. Peter Taylor expertly instructs us on how each story’s particular town or county is different from any other town or county in Tennessee. And many differences can be noted in the Mississippi of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty or the Texas of J. Frank Dobie and Katherine Anne Porter. Each of these authors has a unique style and vision and a vivid sense of his or her particular region. Each of them has a keen sense of place in their stories, plays, and novels. Just as non-Southerners often characterize the South geographically as one vast region, so do they with its speech. Try as one might to make them understand that Virginia and Tennessee speech can be quite different matters (even within the regions of Tennessee there are differences), they insist on lumping it all together. When I was starting out as an actor, most theater artists were horrified of Southern speech of any kind. So violent was their antipathy that I literally cursed my fate for being born in the South. The first comment I heard when I arrived at the Pasadena Playhouse was “Get rid of your speech. You are forever limited with those abominable sounds.” The speech I was then hearing in the streets and the shops of Pasadena, California, was not my speech, and so I timidly and half-heartedly asked if I was to learn that speech? Again, I was greeted with a thunderous reply of “Certainly not!” When I persisted in finding out how I was to talk in order to be an actor, I was informed it was to be stage English with strongly pronounced consonants and lovely vowel sounds, something like a modified English accent. In order to acquire this, I had to study phonetics. Much like Eliza Doolittle, I had to write out all my lines phonetically. The purpose of this, I soon discovered, was to make me sound as much like every other actor as possible and to prepare me for parts in the plays of that period, which had no sense of place at all and were mainly concerned with unbelievable characters in made-up situations. Later, when I got to New York, I joined up with an off-Broadway company called the American Actors Company. It consisted of people from all over America and the director, Mary Hunter, was certainly not interested in anyone talking stage English. She wanted American plays by Paul Green, Lynn Riggs, Thornton Wilder, and E. P. Conkle, and she wanted us to use the kind of speech native to these plays. Agnes DeMille came to do a show with us, and she felt that because we all came from different sections of the country, it might be useful to help each other get to know our different backgrounds through improvisation. All my improvisations were about Texas. One day Agnes came to me and said, “You have a very dramatic sense. Have you ever tried writing?” And so I wrote a one-act play with the lead for myself. I called it Wharton Dance. It was reviewed favorably, and I went back to Texas to write a full-length play called Texas Town. My passion for acting left me, and my passion for writing began.

On Being a Southern Writer

69

Most of my plays and screenplays are set in Texas and I am usually classified as a Southern writer, although recently I heard a television reporter saying with great authority that I wrote tales of the Old West. However, as a writer, a playwright, and screenwriter, my goal is always to establish a true sense of place in my work. The town in which I most often set my plays and screenplays is forty miles from the Gulf of Mexico (as the crow flies) in what, when I was a boy, was sugar cane, rice, and cotton country. Now, the sugar mill is closed and dismantled, and no more sugar cane is planted. Where there were three cotton gins, there is now only one; and cotton is giving way to the planting of soybeans and maize. The cultivation of rice is still flourishing, which is one thing my country seems still to do better than the Japanese; however, the sole manufacturing plant where they make plastics of some sort is owned by a Taiwanese company. My plays and screenplays are often set in a much earlier time than now. For example, I have been involved recently in writing and producing, on stage and in films, a cycle of plays I call The Orphans’ Home Cycle that begins in 1902 and ends in 1928. I write all of my plays out of my own experiences and observations. In the beginning, my desire was to be as truthful as I could of the people and places that I chose to write about. Although now looking back, I don’t think I chose what I wrote about so much as it chose me, and so it continues even today. Fortunately, I had guidance and advice from Mary Hunter, my first director. She made me understand that relying on a sense of place was not enough. Writers must not be content with quaintness and parochialism, so I studied Synge, Yeats, and Joyce in order to understand what lifted them above the merely quaint and regional Irish writers. It was a difficult task then and it is a difficult task now. How is it possible that certain writers are trapped by the place they are writing about so that they finally become tiresome and superficial, while other writers can use the same material as a basis for universal myths and truths that transcend all local barriers? Is it genius perhaps? It takes a particular kind of talent certainly, because merely being born in Mississippi or Louisiana or the Carolinas is no guarantee that one has the ability to write about them. Katherine Anne Porter attempted to analyze how the writing of her short story, “Noon Wine,” came about. This story has been a great inspiration to many writers, Southern and non-Southern. I was making notes on stories—stories of my own place, my South—for my part of Texas was peopled almost entirely by Southerners from Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Kentucky, where different branches of my own family were settled, and I was almost instinctively living in a sustained state of mind

70

Genesis of an American Playwright and feeling, quietly and secretly, comparing one thing with another, always remembering; and all sorts of things were falling into their proper places, taking on their natural shapes and sizes, and going back and back clearly into right perspective—right for me as an artist, I simply mean to say; and it was like breathing—I did not have consciously to urge myself to think about it. This short novel, “Noon Wine,” exists so fully and wholly in its own right in my mind, that when I attempt to trace its growth from the beginning to follow all the clues to their sources in my memory, I am dismayed; because I am confronted with my own life, the whole society in which I was born and brought up, and the facts of it. My aim is to find the truth in it, and to this end my imagination works and reworks its recollections in a constant search for meanings. Yet in this endless remembering which surely must be the main occupation of the writer, events are changed, reshaped, interpreted again and again in different ways, and this is right and natural because it is the intention of the writer to write fiction, after all—real fiction, not a roman à clef, or a thinly disguised personal confession which better belongs to the psychoanalyst’s séance. By the time I wrote “Noon Wine,” it had become “real” to me almost in the sense that I felt not as if I had made that story out of my own memory and real events and imagined consequences, but as if I were quite simply reporting events I had heard or witnessed. This is not in the least true: the story is fiction, but it is made up of thousands of things that did happen to living human beings in a certain part of the country, at a certain time of my life, things that are still remembered by others are single incidents; not as I remembered them, floating and moving with their separate life and reality, meeting and parting and mingling in my thoughts until they established their relationship and meaning to me.

I did not know it at the time, but my early call to be an actor was really leading me to be a playwright. Considering my training and experience, from any conventional point of view, I was woefully unprepared to be a writer. A conventional preparation would have been college and then perhaps graduate school at a university like Yale where I would have studied all the current forms of playwriting of that period. There were certainly sound craftsmen of that time that I could have studied, but to my way of thinking now, few of them had a particular style of their own, no sense of place. When I first began to write, the writers I was most interested in—Green, Conkle, and Riggs—had all left for teaching positions in universities, and the New York theater dismissed them as provincial. I began to read the Southern novelists, poets and short story writers, and began to study them, not so much for style or form, but to try and understand what made certain ones transcend their regionalism without being untrue to the place and people about whom

On Being a Southern Writer

71

they wrote. There was a great wealth of material to study: Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Stark Young, Mark Twain, and later, Flannery O’Connor, Peter Taylor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price, and Tennessee Williams. There is great continuing vitality in Southern writing. Every few years or so a learned critic, usually from the East, will write an essay on the demise of the region as a source for writers—yet Southern writing continues. I have just named a few of its writers and could easily add as many more. No other region in this country has given us so many talented writers, black and white, for such a sustained period. Reynolds Price wrote to me recently, “Horton, I continue to be amazed— and moved—by how nearly you and I work the same patches. And I’d worry, if I didn’t know that the patches are in fact vast rich prairies, endlessly fertile fields, with plenty of room for the two of us and a horde of others.” And what is the patch that all Southern writers, black or white, rich or poor, have in common? For one thing, we were, by virtue of Southern custom, different from the rest of America and for a while, for good or bad, we were a separate nation that fought to remain separate. We lost the war, we were then reconstructed, and until the days of the Civil Rights struggles, we continued to practice segregation openly. Since then, we have been asked to go through many changes—some willingly, some unwillingly—and although this experience has been different for all the states that were part of the old Confederacy, as a region the South’s problems were unlike those of other sections of the country. Young Southern writers today, black and white, are not growing up with the same experience that I grew up with, or my father or grandfather. The South is being homogenized like the rest of America. Our houses are like all suburban houses. East or west, north or south, our fast food chains give us all the same food. Our television sets all have announcers with the same blandness of speech. Yet, when I go home and the television sets are turned off, we still begin recounting the stories of our past and present. Only, the storytellers are different now. Instead of my mother and father, and my great-aunts and great-uncles, or my grandparents, I am telling the stories to my nieces and nephews, and my great-nieces and great-nephews. There is still an oral tradition here in the South, and I think surely that is one of the continuing strengths of its writers. As a writer, I am most interested in exploring the possibilities of language. The language given to me is not abstract, but made up of imagined and remembered particulars. Now, in my writing, I do not try to reproduce literally these individual sounds, but I do use the color, phrases, and rhythms of the speech. Of course, I filter these through my own sensibilities, attempting

72

Genesis of an American Playwright

to be as accurate as possible. So, when actors come to me and ask how these long-ago people sound when they talk, I try to explain to them the curious mix that has formed the speech of these characters, always pointing out there is no one Harrison accent, just as there is no one Texas accent, or Georgia, or Mississippi accent. Lately, in the last five years, I have begun taping the voices of local people so actors can hear for themselves the variety of accents available to them to use as their own. Actors often listen diligently, but what finally comes out is an entirely different variation of the real speech. The only actor I know who is totally demanding about the particular sound of his character is Robert Duvall. When he was preparing for Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies, he went all over Texas listening for the accent he thought best suited his character. He found it in a small town in East Texas. The man whose accent he used would record all of Bob’s scenes on tape and send them back to him during the shooting of the film. Now, I have never heard those tapes, but I am sure Bob did not literally copy what he heard. Instead, he used it in his own way to illuminate his character. To help actors establish a sense of place, you have to be sure to communicate the social mores and customs to the actors, always making sure that what you give the actor will stimulate his creativity and not stifle it with too many details. How best to do this? When the author is living and with the actors, he can share his knowledge of place with them. As I mentioned, one of the first questions the actors ask me is how the characters talk. That is a difficult question, because the speech of Harrison at the time The Orphans’ Home Cycle takes place, for instance, was polyglot. Blacks, mostly ex-slaves and descendants of slaves, were a majority and most of the whites had come directly from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, or Kentucky. Now, you mix all these accents up and something very special and entirely its own is bound to occur. That is why, to be truthful, the characters in my plays should sound quite different from other sections of Texas. The actress who most naturally found this speech was Kim Stanley. She and her mother were both born in Texas, but her grandmother came from Alabama or Mississippi. Now those early accents and their variations are disappearing, and children who have descended, let’s say, from one parent from North Carolina and one parent from Georgia have each made interesting variations of what they heard at home. Language is not the only aspect of the Southern culture that actors need help in understanding. Fred Coe, with Lillian Gish as Carrie Watts, first produced my play, The Trip to Bountiful, in 1953. The play is set in the late forties and when it was first produced, all references to popular songs (singer Johnny Ray was the rage at the time), movies, economic conditions, and such were easily understood by the actors. When it was produced years later as a

On Being a Southern Writer

73

film, all these references had to be explained to the younger members of the cast. However, the central ideas of the play, the displacement of human beings and the search for some kind of stability, was more easily understood. Geraldine Page, who played the lead in the film, strives for a deep connection with the world of her characters and searches always to clarify the particulars of this world. Another reason it is essential that the actors understand the world of the play is that in our modern theater the sense of place can be defined visually only in a limited way, usually because of economics. The scenic extravaganzas of Belasco’s day are no longer economically possible for us, even if we wanted to make use of them. Today the most effective visual theater seems to be the abstract, subjective world of Robert Wilson (a Southerner). His work is hailed by some people as the guiding light of a new theater and condemned by others as decadent nonsense, costing God knows how much to produce. More often our modern theater is, of necessity, as austere in its scenic effects as Shakespeare’s Globe. Like Shakespeare, the modern dramatists must increasingly use language to establish a sense of place. In the production of my play Lily Dale, performed on the tiny stage of the Samuel Beckett Theatre, a small section of a train car opened and closed the play, but most of the action took place in a living room. The set they used was successful and was certainly appropriate for the action of the play. However, the exterior that was supposed to be seen from a door and a window, which would show Houston in 1909, was not even attempted. In a situation like this, the actors must assume much of the burden of establishing the viable particulars of place. Films, of course, have none of the physical limitations that might prevent a director from placing the story in the actual place where it occurred. With film we can go anywhere, in or out-of-doors, that our budget allows. There is a moment in On Valentine’s Day that might help us to understand the advantage of film. An emotionally disturbed character, George Tyler, runs away to the river bottoms. In the play, the event must be told to us by another character that had seen him down by the river. In the film, we could go with Mr. George to the river and witness his deeply troubled behavior ourselves. This stunning moment added greatly to the texture of the film as a whole. When the play is performed in the theater we are just as involved in this moment, but we are involved in a different way because rather than witnessing it ourselves, it is reported to us by another character. I had been involved in a similar search for authenticity during the making of To Kill a Mockingbird. Alan Pakula, the producer, and Robert Mulligan, the director, were determined to make the film in Harper Lee’s hometown in Alabama. They called me soon after visiting the town and said in despair, “It

74

Genesis of an American Playwright

has all changed and looks nothing like the town Harper describes in the novel.” In those days, studios were much against location filming, and the studio persuaded Alan and Robert to make the film on the back lot of Universal. Now, I had a strong sense of the house, yard, and town of Harper Lee’s novel. It was not unlike the town and the house in which I grew up. In my ignorance, I thought everyone knew what such places looked like. However, to my horror, when I saw the designer’s sketch of the house they were going to build, I found myself looking at the drawing of a Southern mansion that would outrival Scarlet’s Tara. I went to Alan and Bob and told them how wrong it was, and they stopped the plans at once. The house that was finally used in the film was found in an older section of Pasadena and was about to be taken down to make way for a highway. Universal had the entire house moved to the studio’s back lot, and although the yard was much too small and the tree in the yard was like nothing I’d ever seen in Alabama, it served Atticus and his children quite well. I was not so fortunate with The Chase, a film based on my play and adapted to the screen by Lillian Hellman. Sam Speigel, the producer, asked me to come on the set the first day of shooting to check everything for authenticity. The set for that day was in a drugstore and it seemed adequate, but I saw an Indian squaw sitting in the drugstore. I went running back to Sam’s office and said, “What is an Indian squaw doing in a drugstore in Harrison?” He had no idea and called the scenic designer, who said the squaw was in the drugstore because he had seen a picture in a book with an Indian squaw in a Texas drugstore. The drugstore in the picture turned out to be one in faraway West Texas. In the meantime, the scene had been filmed, squaw and all, and Sam said it would cost fifty thousand dollars to redo it. To this day, that scene in the film has a squaw sitting in the drugstore. Pete Masterson felt a field of bluebonnets would establish a sense of the Texas he wanted to show in The Trip to Bountiful. In the spring, he sent a crew to Texas to film the bluebonnets (since when we arrived in late June to film, the bluebonnets would be gone). Similarly, Bruce Beresford wanted to establish a sense of the barrenness of Texas in Tender Mercies, so he waited two weeks for the loveliest field of cotton you have ever seen to be picked and plowed under to get his barrenness. As you can see, achieving a proper sense of time and place in theater and film is no easy matter. Unlike poetry or fiction, plays and screenplays are a collaborative art; during production, the author is often literally at the mercy and talent of the designer, director, and actors. The playwright hopes his play or screenplay will guide everyone to the vision of his reality, to the truth of the place about which he wrote. However, he always knows, if he is wise, that given the acknowledged, even welcomed, limitations of theater and film, his

On Being a Southern Writer

75

reality will finally have to make peace with a reality true to a collective vision. However, when I am alone, writing, imagining the world, as I want it to be, I remember Yeats’s words. How very unlike Ireland this whole place is. I only felt at home once, when I came to a steep lane with a stream in the middle. The rest one notices with a foreign eye, picking out the stranger and not, as in one’s own country, the familiar things of interest— the fault, but the way, of all poetry about countries not the writer’s own.*

The Trip to Paradise and Other Texas Towns Just This Side of Make-Believe One of the pleasures of making Texas films is riding around the state with the director and the art director, looking for towns that can help establish a sense of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Texas towns like Waxahachie, Palmer, and Ennis. Venus, in North Texas, is a particular favorite. We used it in filming 1918 and On Valentine’s Day. Venus’s Main Street has a number of brick buildings, half of them in use, the rest abandoned. On one corner is a brick building that used to be the local bank. It was used as one of the banks that was held up in Bonnie and Clyde. Venus once was a prosperous cotton town, but cotton has moved on and so have the people. You can find Venus’s counterparts all over rural Texas, abandoned or halfabandoned main streets with buildings that were once useful and handsome but have now been left to decay. Thinking of those houses and towns, I am reminded of these lines from Robert Frost’s poem “Directive”: There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town.

Last spring I was in Galveston to attend a festival of my films. At a party, I met a man named Keith Carter who asked me to write an introduction for a book of his photographs of rural Texas. He had the photographs with him, and I was very taken with them. According to his wife, Pat, on the eve of their tenth wedding anniversary, Keith suggested an interesting way to celebrate the event. “What about a trip all around Texas,” he proposed, “leaving the highways, the *Lecture delivered to the Southern Educational Communication Authority in Winston Salem, North Carolina, May 19, 1987

76

Genesis of an American Playwright

Interstate 10s or Interstate 35s, and messing around the back roads and taking pictures?” That suited her fine, so they got out maps and found towns to visit with names that intrigued them. A moving company’s master list of Texas towns proved useful, and friends gave the Carters a sesquicentennial set of maps for all the counties in Texas, showing all the churches, byroads, and cemeteries. And so, they began their year-long anniversary celebration of visiting those towns and taking pictures of what interested them. They did much of the traveling over a summer, with other trips on weekends and holidays. They traveled many miles, with Keith taking pictures and Pat making penetrating notes and observations of the people and places he photographed. She wrote of Looneyville, in Nacogdoches County, “On the counter at the Looneyville store they keep an open spiral notebook which serves as the town newspaper. Every day they write the date at the top of a fresh page. Anyone who has news comes by and writes it in the book.” Of Dialville, in Cherokee County, she wrote: Wanna buy a town? This one is abandoned but intact. Two-story brick building was the bank, the adjoining one-story brick units housed grocery, drugstore, and post office. Red dirt road runs up the hill alongside the bank. Iron plate on step bears the date 1894. It’s a monochromatic scene. More than ninety years of red dust has settled and turned everything the same color. As we drove into town, I noticed an old man sitting on the porch of a once grand house. Same man now has circled us twice, driving by slowly in his car. On the third pass, I try a wave and a smile and he pulls up beside me under the big sycamore tree in front of the bank. He is Clarence Moore, born in that big house more than seventy years ago. His father was the town doctor. He just happens to have with him a book—A History of Dialville, written by his brother, Jim Moore . . . Book says the town was settled in 1835, and was named for John Dial, who served in the Confederate Army and was appointed first Postmaster in 1885. Clarence’s car, inside and out, is the same rich red color as everything else here. Clarence, himself, wears the stain on his hands and fingernails. He stands quietly and leafs through the book and then begins to speak to me about the town as he knew it in his childhood and youth. There is no attempt in his narrative to entertain or amuse, and our conversation has a peculiar, stately rhythm with long moments of silence. I feel a great solemnity. If I am to understand, I must listen to his pace. It is a melancholy and dignified grief. Clarence is keeping a deathwatch for this town.

A persistent and pleasant memory from my boyhood in the twenties is of riding around with my grandmother and grandfather in their Studebaker to

On Being a Southern Writer

77

check on their farms scattered over Wharton County in Southeast Texas. The roads then were dirt or gravel, and it was difficult to visit all the farms in one afternoon or even one day, especially because every farm visited meant getting out of the car and talking with the tenant farmers, inquiring about their health and the health of their wives and children, and walking a ways into the fields to inspect the present state of the cotton or corn crops. To get to those farms (seven in all), we would pass tiny, dwindling towns with names like Iago, Burr, Glen Flora, Lane City, Egypt, and Hungerford, and one completely deserted area with no sign of a store, building, or house. My grandfather always said that somewhere in this vicinity (he was never exactly sure just where), there had been a town called Preston. Somehow it had vanished completely; how it had was a mystery to him, and I was never able to find anyone who knew. Leaving the highway at West Columbia to take the back road to East Columbia, we would pass a deserted store surrounded by weeds and with its roof falling in. My grandfather said he once clerked in it as a young man. Next, we would see an empty lot with live oaks, and he would say, “This is where our house used to be, and if it had remained standing, the Brazos River would have gotten it because it has taken half of the yard it once stood on.” And he would always add, “This was a thriving river town once, East Columbia. Boats went from here up the river. Once . . .” “Once” was a word I heard often—once this was so, and once that was so. In riding around with my grandfather and grandmother and passing these dying and forgotten towns, or towns that never were more than a store or two, “Why” was added to my vocabulary. Why did this town never prosper? Why was it never more than a church, a grocery store, and one or two houses? Why did the people leave this town and go to another place? Why? My grandfather would patiently explain how towns came to be and for what purpose, how circumstances changed so that towns were abandoned, how some towns (like Egypt) were never meant to be more than a store or two, serving the tenant farmers and the one or two families who owned the surrounding farmland. He said that originally the railroad almost went through Glen Flora instead of Wharton, and if that had happened why . . . Then he would pause, and we would all contemplate what that would have meant for Wharton in those days. God knows it was no metropolis, but it was the county seat; it had the courthouse, a respectable Main Street, and two railroad stations. If Glen Flora had gotten the railroad station instead of Wharton, it would have had the main street, the courthouse, and the two depots, instead of a handful of stores that dwindle year after year. Katherine Anne Porter takes us to an earlier Texas in her story “Noon Wine.” She tells us in her notes about writing that story:

78

Genesis of an American Playwright This summer country of my childhood, this place of memory, is filled with landscapes shimmering in light and color, moving with sounds and shapes I hardly ever describe, or put in my stories, in so many words; they form only the living background of what I am trying to tell, so familiar to my characters they would hardly notice them.

Yet, because of her selection and her choices, “Noon Wine” became one of the great short novels in American literature. Like Katherine Anne Porter, Keith Carter has the gift of taking things we have seen all our lives—a watermelon stand, a black country church, a yard, a clothesline with chickens beneath, a country store—and giving them another dimension, a beauty that can’t easily be forgotten. Some of the names that graced these towns—Omen, Ding Dong, Hoard, Art, Sweet Home, Circle Back, Rosebud, Noonday, Poetry, Fairy, Elysian Fields, Grit, Dime Box, Pluck, Sublime, Industry, Cost, Bessmay, Call, Uncertain, Looneyville—no writer would dare invent for his fictional towns. There is often much wit and playfulness in what Keith Carter chooses to show us. Do I have favorites? I look often at Climax, where we see a background of overpowering trees, and in front of the trees are small tombstones leaning in all directions. And I think of the man in the town of Art who looks like the Marlboro man gone to seed, sad beyond belief. And I’m intrigued by the irony implied by the photo of the field in Mount Calm with bales of hay stacked upon each other, and on the hay is a large paper target of a deer, riddled with holes. Circle Back also intrigues me, with its stretch of huge pipe held up by metal trestles, one end pointing toward the sky, the opposite end on the ground and disappearing beyond the camera’s range. And so it goes—houses, clouds, people, buildings, fields—things I have seen countless times and paid no attention to in all the Texas towns I have ever known or been in. And here comes Keith Carter, with his lack of sentimentality, with not a trace of condescension or superiority, but with humor and a deep and honest respect and affection for what he has observed. He comes with his ever-discerning eye, a poet’s eye really, and makes us see these familiar things in a fresh way. He has fixed all of this with an exactness that not only defies time but also seems to welcome it, the way that Walker Evans did with his photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It has been many months now since I first saw Keith Carter’s photographs. I have had my own copies of them with me in New York City. Barely a day has passed that I have not looked at them, and they are as moving to me now as when I first saw them in Galveston. They bring vividly to me here in the midst of this city, so far away and so different from the world of the pic-

On Being a Southern Writer

79

tures, a happy reminder of that Texas so little known in these parts, a Texas unlike the crude stereotypes so often paraded before us here in the Northeast. I hope the towns and places in these photographs will be with us for a long time, giving us some sense of what our past was like. But even if all of that vanishes, we’re fortunate indeed to have this sensitive and powerful evocation as a record of what these towns, and life in these towns, were like.*

The Artist as Mythmaker When the title of this lecture was suggested to me, I was in the middle of rehearsals for a play of mine that I was directing at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and at that moment I was not thinking clearly about anything else. Several days later, when I glanced at the suggested lecture title, I almost called back to say that I would prefer talking about something else, as this seemed much too intimidating and abstract a subject for me. As a writer I felt then, as I do now, that if I sat down at my desk with the intent of making myths, I would probably not write another word. Soon after, I received the proofs of an introduction to my collection of one-act plays and I came upon this comment by Gerald Wood: Foote does not write local color. And he is not sentimental about the past. Instead, he uses his Wharton material to create the Harrison, Texas of his imagination. In order to meet the demands of this fictional world, he redesigns real stories so that they take the shape of myth. He crafts them into tales of going away and coming home, grief and rebirth, despair and healing—tales for all places and times. His love of order leads Foote to create patterning, feeling, and experience, which connect one person with another, one place with another. In the process, his place gives birth to stories that are both from their place and beyond it. They are the artist’s gift to a broken, chaotic world.

Not long after reading that, when I was going over some early correspondence, I found the following letter, which had been sent long ago to Lillian Gish. At the time, she was appearing on Broadway in The Trip to Bountiful, and she forwarded a copy to me. It reads in part: As a graduate student of Temple University, Philadelphia, I am writing a thesis on Mr. Horton Foote’s plays. My interest is rather selfish as I grew up *Published in Texas Monthly magazine, December 1987

80

Genesis of an American Playwright in a small town in Texas, as he did, and identify intensely with his plays. As far as I can tell, he is the only dramatist who has destroyed the Texas myth and brought reality to the common people found there.

So you see, one person calls me a mythmaker and another says I am a destroyer of myths. Anyway, I became intrigued with the word, and I went to my dictionary and found: Myth—a traditional story or tale dealing with ancestors, heroes, supernatural events, etc. having no proven factual basis, but attempting to explain beliefs, practices, or rational phenomena—the myth that told how mankind was given the gift of fire by the gods.

Of course, we are all familiar with the Greek myths that attempt to do this. I would say that Joyce’s Ulysses is the most famous modern attempt to use such myths in the novel, but I think, too, of the Cantos of Pound, and Eliot’s The Waste Land. Couldn’t we say that the Biblical account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is an attempt to explain creation and the beginning of evil in Man’s experience? Could not one say the story of the Tower of Babel is an attempt to explain why there are so many diverse languages in the world? Or, to go to one of our great modern writers, aren’t Flannery O’Connor’s stories—her myths if you will—often an attempt to explain the grotesque in life? Aren’t they also an attempt to explain the mystery of grace and redemption in the most unlikely places? Another dictionary definition of “myth” reads: Any real or fictional story, recurring theme or character type that appeals to the consciousness of a people by embodying its cultural ideals, or by giving expression to deep or commonly felt emotions (Oedipal myth—the myth of Horatio Alger).

Given these two examples of Oedipus and Horatio Alger, we might conclude that myth can have literary and artistic value, or it can have none whatsoever. Certainly, from 1914 through the 1950s, the greatest purveyors of the modern American myths were films. The recent book by Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, tells in fascinating detail how the Mayers, the Cohns, and the Warners helped to form the myths that became, in great part, the world’s perception of America. Mr. Gabler writes: The most striking similarity among the Hollywood Jews was their Eastern European origins. What united them in deep spiritual kinship was their utter and absolute rejection of their past, and their equally absolute devo-

On Being a Southern Writer

81

tion to their new country. For immigrant Jews to want to assimilate, particularly when they had been victimized in their home countries, was nothing exceptional, but something drove the young Hollywood Jews to a ferocious, even pathological, embrace of America . . . By making a “Shadow America,” one that idealized every old glorifying bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas—so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination. Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies Jews made . . . the Jews re-invented the country in the image of their fiction.

Whether or not Mr. Gabler’s theories are correct, America and the world were inundated with myths from the Hollywood studios: the myths of the Old West, the gangster, maidenly innocence and virtue, the flaming youth, and the Andy Hardy American family. Rarely was virtue left unrewarded and evil left unpunished. These films were often a simplistic and unrealistic view of life—a fantasy world. One of our chief Hollywood mythmakers was the director Frank Capra, an Italian immigrant. Mr. Gabler writes of Capra’s film It Happened One Night: The film’s theme, which bridged class divisions during the Depression, suggested that the rich had a good deal to learn from those in the trenches. It was a theme that Capra would sound again and again throughout the repression in a string of successes: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe. In all of these Capra, a lapsed Catholic, popularized what one could call a theology of comedy—a secularized displacement of Christ’s tale in which a commonman hero, blessed with goodness and sense, overcomes obstacles, temptations, and even betrayals to redeem his own life and triumph. If he was occasionally sentimental, and over-idealized the virtues of small town Americans, Capra also created a powerful myth for the nation—one that would help sustain and, define Americans for decades . . . .

One of my favorite films, Dodsworth, with a startling performance by Walter Huston, certainly attempts to explain in mythic terms the innocent American finding his own worth and value in a decadent Europe. It will be interesting to see what happens now that Sam Shepard is writing and directing his own films. In his later plays, he takes one of Hollywood’s favorite themes, the myth of the West, and imbues it with his own vision, a vision that I am sure would bewilder and horrify the cinematic pioneers. In the theater, his West may not be one that exists outside of his personal vision, but it is a compelling, if sometimes horrifying, landscape full of surprises and

82

Genesis of an American Playwright

abounding in startling theatrical imagery. So far, I feel film directors have not translated this mythical West of Shepard’s successfully to the screen. To me, what is troubling, mysterious, and poetic in the theater flattens out and becomes obvious on film. It will be interesting to see what Shepard, the director, does with his screenplays. Joseph Campbell, who spent his adult life gathering and comparing the myths of cultures from all ages, all over the earth, concludes that myths constantly reinvent themselves from one age to another, from one culture to another. As I think back on my early plays and my beginning as a writer, I feel I was attempting to redefine the Texas myth for myself. I did this, whether consciously or not, by being as exactly true as I could to a particular place and time. That is why when I am asked where I am from I don’t say “Texas” or “the South” or “Southwest.” I say, “Wharton, Texas.” Now, my friends and relatives at home think I do this out of pride for my hometown. I do like my hometown, but that is not really why I do it. I think I do it to emphasize that Texas is not just one large myth. We do not all descend from cowboys who lived for cattle drives and fought Indians, or from rich, greedy, vulgar cattlemen building impossible empires and mansions on the vast plains. Ironically, these myths have been handled most successfully, at least in commercial terms, by non-Texans like Edna Ferber and James Michener. Even when the southwestern myths and legends are dealt with sensitively by writers like J. Frank Dobie, I read them as if they were about another culture, another world. I suppose instinctively a writer seeks out another writer who will be helpful to him in clarifying the vision he is trying to share. The Texas writer I return to repeatedly is Katherine Anne Porter. When I first read “Noon Wine,” “Old Mortality,” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” I thought, “Now, this is something I hope I will someday learn to do.” “Old Mortality” is a collision of myth and reality, perhaps finally creating a new myth: the artist as truth-searcher. It is a story told from many points of view. A young girl who has been brought up on tales of the idealized past is told a very different version of the same events by a kinsman she meets on a train taking them bo