The Books: “Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988″ (John Houseman)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988, by John Houseman

One of the best memoirs ever written.

John Houseman’s career beggars belief … you look at it as a whole and think: “Excuse me?” And not only that, but he knows how to write. His book is, at times, painfully revealing (his tortured relationship with Orson Welles being the main theme) – and then, at other times, funny, invigorating, interesting … His career spans the entire 20th century, practically – and there is no one story – there are many many stories here. He is one for the history books. His partnership with Orson Welles was legendary. Just that would be enough to make him famous forever. But after the split with Welles, he went on to produce many notable films – as well as acting in many films – as well as winning an Oscar for his work in 1973’s The Paper Chase. HE won an Oscar as an actor – NOT Orson Welles! (Welles got an Honorary Oscar – you know, the Academy’s way of saying, “Sorry, dude, we fucked up back then!” – and he also won an Oscar for the screenplay of Citizen Kane which he shared with Herman Mankiewicz – but no Oscar for an actual performance. Houseman won one.)

The rift between the friends was never really healed. So all of that is certainly enough for one life – but no – Houseman went on to teach at Juilliard, in one of the many shake-ups at that institution. Juilliard re-vamped its curriculum, updating it, and hired Houseman to head up the new acting department. One of his “things” in life was to help train American actors to be able to compete with the British, in terms of technique, vocal craft, meticulous character-building … His students, many of them, have become Oscar winners in their own right. And Tony winners (Ms. Lupone!). He taught everyone. He was feared, and also admired. Houseman was also responsible for forming “The Acting Company” – made up of Juilliard grads – who tour the country in repertory (and still do).

Houseman, in his memoir, comes off as rather sad … a lonely man, perhaps overshadowed a bit at first by his admiration for Orson Welles’ young brash brilliance. The two took New York by storm. It’s hard to even list what they did – because it starts to sound ridiculous … When did they ever sleep? First: they were both employed by the Federal Theatre Project, one of the many aspects of the New Deal, to keep actors/stagehands/directors/costume designers – working during the economic downturn. Orson was like a kid in a candy store. He was a prodigy – and was in his late teens when he started working in New York. His “voodoo Macbeth” was the first production he headed up – an ambitious controversial (as always) project – using non-professional actors (all black) – setting Shakespeare’s Scottish play in Haiti. There are clips from that performance in existence – and while a lot of it seems to be smoke and mirrors (lots of loud crazy music, lighting effects, a crowded stage) – Welles made his name with that play. He became the wunderkind of New York theatre. How do you make non-professional Negro actors say the words of Shakespeare? How is it possible? Welles believed anything was possible. Shakespeare was not for the elites. It was for everyone. The voodoo Macbeth was a giant hit – and, in an unprecedented way, a cross-over hit – pulling in a diverse audience. Unheard of at that time. Blacks and whites poured into the theatre in Harlem, sitting together in the house, cheering and clapping. The show was a “phenom”. It turned Welles, overnight, into a huge playah. John Houseman, too, was employed by the Federal Theatre Project – and he and Welles found a kinship in one another … the idea that theatre should be relevant, in-your-face, exciting, and immediate. I may be getting the chronology messed up here, so forgive me – but they partnered up on many productions, under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project. One was a modern-day dress of Julius Caesar – which directly commented on the situation brewing in Europe at that time – Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin – It’s one of those productions I would give anything to go back in time to see.

Houseman and Welles were partners – Houseman was older, more experienced (he was also an immigrant, with a much harsher background than Welles) – but there are times, in his book, when Houseman comes off as almost completely under some sort of spell. Welles was willful, strong, and hypnotic – everyone agrees.

The breakthru (or the first breakthru) for the two of them came with the fabled production of Marc Blitzstein’s musical The Cradle Will Rock. The story of that play has been told time and time again – and Tim Robbins’ movie of the same name is a very nice evocation of that entire event … but suffice it to say that the play itself was controversial (in true 1930s Clifford Odets style – it was about everyday Americans struggling against the crushing power of the state – it was a celebration of unions, and labor organization – and it reads as a cunning and sometimes witty piece of agitprop. Certainly not up to Odets’ level – but above a lot of the other pamphleteering masked as theatre that was going on at that time). It’s a musical – almost no dialogue – it feels like an opera, at times, mixed with vaudeville. The characters are broad – with names like Reverend Salvation and Mr. Mister … symbols, archetypes … and it’s a story of corruption, corporate greed, and the “little guy” standing up for himself. The story of The Cradle Will Rock (I mean, the story of the first production of it) is one of the great moments in American theatrical history. I would put it up there with the first time Waiting for Lefty was performed – when the audience all started to yell STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE with the actors … and Laurette Taylor’s performance in The Glass Menagerie when it opened in freezing Chicago. Moments when the theater became not just entertainment – but something larger – something community-driven … the barrier between actor and audience completely dissolved. (I chose the excerpt having to do with The Cradle Will Rock from Houseman’s book – so the full story can be read there. Goosebump time. Oh, for a time machine).

Heres’ Marc Blitzstein – author and composer of The Cradle Will Rock – in rehearsal for the show that would become so notorious:

But The Cradle Will Rock was just the beginning for Houseman and Welles. The notoriety they received, the press – was too good to be true – so they decided to forge out on their own, seize the day, and form their own theater company. The Mercury Theatre was the result.

And yeah, you know that whole War of the Worlds brou-haha? That came the following year. I mean, seriously guys, how can you keep topping each stunt?

The War of the Worlds mania translated then into Hollywood – with the entire Mercury Theatre company being put under contract – and Welles being given an unprecedented “anything you want” deal at RKO – which royally pissed the entire Hollywood community off. Who the hell is this Orson Welles? Who is this guy who comes from New York with not a film credit to his name and suddenly gets final cut on his picture? Orson Welles never really ingratiated himself with Hollywood – and much of it can be traced back to that first deal with RKO, which seemed so unfair to the rest of the industry. Well, and of course, the result of that deal was eventually Citizen Kane. The mind boggles. BUT it is important to go back in time and realize just how badly that film went over. It basically took on William Randolph Hearst – and you just didn’t do that. Not if you were in the film industry. You toadied up to him. You flattered him. He was one of the most powerful men in America – his newspapers could make or break you … so he set out to break Orson Welles. And he pretty much did. The film was blacklisted, and never really even officially released – not in wide distribution anyway.

RKO didn’t feel they could risk being blacklisted by William Randolph Hearst.

Anyway, the stories just go on and on.

Houseman’s book is full of gems, and full of insight … It’s a great theatre person’s book – because it’s honest, it’s about the work, and it’s about the loneliness that can come with this kind of career. The sort of let-down … the feeling that maybe you didn’t “show up’ to the best of your ability … and Houseman’s relationship to Orson Welles incapsulates all that. The irony is that Orson Welles was meant to work alone … and Houseman was meant to work in a collective. It just took them a while to figure that out. Houseman was always looking for a family … a group … and Orson did not do well (to put it mildly) in groups.

The story of their relationship is a sad one. You wish they would patch things up. But oh well – both of them have other fish to fry. And their careers were really FORMED together. There would be no Orson Welles without John Houseman (although Welles might disagree). Houseman was the producer. Houseman was the one who made Welles’ zaniness possible because he provided a stable backdrop. Houseman solved problems. He had the thankless job of putting it all together – behind the scenes … Welles needed him. Houseman got off on being needed, obviously. Many of the passages here read like a love story, a man thwarted. That very well may have been the case.

Their relationship is one of the all-time great American partnerships. It still just blows me away what they were able to accomplish, as a team.

Houseman’s book is indispensable – not just for the electric 1930s years – but for his later years, working, and acting, and directing … looking for a life that, ultimately, makes sense. I am particularly partial to his heartbreaking performance as Gena Rowlands’ cold ungiving father in Woody Allen’s Another Woman. To see him play a scene with my favorite actress – to watch his age-spotted face – and to know that his career spans the 20th century … it’s just really moving to me.

Below, is a giant excerpt about what happened with The Cradle Will Rock. An “epoch” in New York theatre history, and an important moment in the cultural history of America at large. Amazing. God, i wish I had been there.

Oh, and how much do I love Jean Rosenthal’s journey below??? Seriously, I love that woman. The picture of her circling the block in the back of a truck, perched on top of a piano she bought for 10 dollars, waiting for the word that “the show will go on” … I just love her.

Many people who were there that historic night said it was the most exciting theatrical production they had ever experienced in their lives.

EXCERPT FROM Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988, by John Houseman

The next day, June 15, a dozen uniformed WPA guards took over the building in force. Project members arriving to sign in found their theater sealed and dark. The Cossacks, as they came to be known, guarded the front of the house and the box office; they hovered in the alley outside the dressing rooms with orders to see that no government property was used or removed. This included scenery, equipment, props and costumes: Howard da Silva, who attempted to retrieve his toupee (purchased with federal funds) had it snatched from his head at the stage door and confiscated. But there was one place in the building from which the Cossacks were excluded – the pink powder room in the basement, which now became headquarters in the fight to save The Cradle. Here we lived for the next thirty-six hours, sustained by food and drink brought in by well-wishers from the outside, for we were afraid to leave the theater lest the Cossacks prevent us from returning. Our telephones had not been cut off and we made the most of them.

The authorities had notified the organizations which had bought our previews that these were cancelled. We called them back and urged them to show up in full force. They needed no urging, for most of our advance sales were to organized theater parties of the Left – young and generous and eager to participate in the excitement which the stage alone seemed to offer them in those uncertain times. We were determined to keep the faith with them and the authorities were determined that we should not.

In fact, Orson and I had been so busy asserting our integrity that we hadn’t given much thought to the problems of performance. Members of our orchestra had already been notified by their union that, if they wished to perform under the management of Houseman and Welles, they must sign new contracts at full union scale for rehearsal with a two-week guarantee of performance. Since neither Welles nor I had five cents to our names, this was out of the question. The next morning Actors’ Equity, in a special meeting of its board, reached a similar decision. Our actors were forbidden to appear for us on stage unless they too were paid in full for three weeks of rehearsal.

We felt betrayed and defeated. We could give a show without scenery and costumes and, if need be, without an orchestra – but not without actors. Marc’s despair at this point was ghastly to behold. He who had come within a day of seeing his work presented by the director, the conductor and performers of his choice, amid elegant setting, in a Broadway theater, with a cast of sixty and an orchestra of twenty-eight, had seen these gifts snatched from him one by one, until, now, he was back where he had started a year ago. And the unkindest cut of all came with the realization that the final, fatal blows had been dealt him by those very unions in whose defense the piece had been written.

On June 6, the temperature in New York was in the upper 80s. Midday found us in the powder room, still blithely announcing the opening of The Cradle. We summoned an agent – a small, seedy man in a black felt hat who specialized in distressed theaters. He had a long list of available houses. Five hours later, their number had shrunk to zero. It was mid-summer and not one was available. Every half-hour or so he would look up from the phone we had put at his disposal at our secretary’s desk under the lavender mannequin and announce that we had a theater. And each time, a few minutes later, it would turn out not to be so. Once, early in the afternoon, we closed a deal for a house only to discover, as we were about to take possession, that its management was deep in a dispute with the Stagehands’ Union and that we would have to cross a picket line to get in. After that the man in the black hat was ordered from the powder room in disgrace. He stayed on, unnoticed, making futile calls and, occasionally, trying to attract our attention.

By midafternoon the press had begun to collect in our powder room. They were invited to wait while we held an emergency meeting in the ladies’ toilet next door. Jean Rosenthal (back on the Project after her tour with Leslie Howard) had been sent out with a $10 bill and instructions to acquire a piano. She called to say that she had got one (a battered upright) and what should she do with it? We told her to hire a truck, load the piano onto it, then call for further instructions. After that we turned to face the press – Orson radiating confidence, I looking worried and Marc, recovered from his state of shock, looking pale but determined and eager for martyrdom. We told them that The Cradle Will Rock would be presented that night, as announced, even if Marc had to perform it alone on a piano and sing all the parts. When they inquired where this tour de force would take place we suggested they stay around and find out. Then we went up to talk to the actors who were still waiting, sitting and lying around in the darkened auditorium under the disapproving glare of the Cossacks. I told them of our decision and explained the fine legal point we had evolved in the ladies’ toilet: that while they were forbidden by their union to appear on stage, there seemed to be no interdiction against their playing their parts from any other position in the theater. “There is nothing to prevent you from entering whatever theater we find, then getting up from your seats, as U.S. citizens, and speaking your piece when your cue comes,” we told them.

Their reaction was mixed. The stalwarts, Will Geer, Howard da Silva and the rest of the non-relief 10-percenters, were enthusiastic. Others – especially our older members and the predominantly Negro chorus – were understandably reluctant to risk the loss of the small weekly income that alone kept them and their dependents from total indigence through a quixotic gesture for a cause which they did not really understand or altogether approve. On these (on the chorus especially) we were careful to exert no pressure or moral suasion. Each had his own personal problems and each must do what seemed sensible or right, regardless of collective or personal loyalty. Amid applause and tears we returned to the powder room, where Archibald MacLeish in a white linen suit had now appeared. The man in the black hat was still in his corner, looking glum and intimidated, and Jean Rosenthal was on the phone again. She reported success: after standing on the corner of Broadway and 37th Street, in the heart of the garment district, for forty minutes, propositioning New Jersey trucks headed home across the river, she had found one, hired it by the hour with its driver and loader and hoisted the piano aboard. Now, what should she do? “Keep riding around,” I said, “and call in every fifteen minutes for orders.”

Around seven Orson and I came out through the stage door and gave our personal assurance that the show would go on – “Somewhere! Somehow!” By now, sensing excitement, a considerable crowd had assembled on 39th Street; they formed little indignant knots, between which members of the City Projects Council circulated, distributing handbills:

At 7:20, as the swelling crowd began to get restless, several of our actors appeared on the sidewalk and offered a brief preview of the show to come. With their shadows lengthening in the early summer twilight, Hiram Sherman sang “I Wanna Go ter Honolulu” and Will Geer (veteran of many a union picnic and hootenanny) enacted one of Mr. Mister’s more repulsive scenes.

Meanwhile, inside the theater, the gloom deepened. In the pink powder room a hopeless silence had fallen, broken only by the uneven whir of a single fan that barely stirred the stale air of the overcrowded basement. It was 7:30 – a half-hour from curtain time; our piano, with Jean Rosenthal on top of it, had been circling the block for almost two hours and the driver was threatening to quit. Clearly, this was the end. After all our big talk, for lack of a theater, The Cradle would not be performed – on this or any other night.

It was then that the miracle occurred. The man in the black felt hat, the down-at-heel theatrical real-estate agent, rose from his corner and moved towards the stair. In the doorway he paused, turned and spoke. It was an exit speech, uttered in a weak, despondent tone. No one, later, could remember exactly what he said, but the gist of it seemed to be that since there was nothing more he could do, he might as well go home. Only he still didn’t understand what was wrong with the Venice Theater. With a sigh he turned and started up the stairs. He was already halfway up when he was seized, turned, dragged down, shaken, and howled at. What was he talking about? What Venice Theater? He then explained in a flat, aggrieved voice that for three hours he had been offering us a theater that was open, empty, available, reasonable, unpicketed and in every way suitable to our requirements – but that none had listened to him. He held a rusty key in his hand which, he assured us, would admit us to the Venice Theater on Seventh Avenue at 58th Street at the cost of $100 for the night. The key was snatched from him and he was paid with money borrowed from members of the press.

Within seconds, Abe Feder, our lighting director, was in a cab, headed uptown. Jean Rosenthal, reporting for orders for the fourth time, was told to route her truck at full speed up Seventh Avenue. She got there first and four firemen from the hook-and-ladder station next door helped her to break into the abandoned theater and hoist the piano up onto its deserted stage. Meantime Orson and I went upstairs where our cast was patiently sitting in the auditorium under the disapproving glare of the Cossacks. We told them we had found a theater and invited them to accompany us uptown.

We went out into 39th Street, informed the audience of our move and, since our adopted theater was three times larger than our own, suggested they each invite one or more friends. On the way uptown – a distance of twenty-one city blocks – our audience trebled. They arrived by cab, by bus, by subway and on foot – 2500 of them, including Mrs. Flanagan. A few of our own people stayed behind in the theater, signed out and went quietly to their homes. Others who remained in doubt were willing to risk the voyage; they entered the Venice Theater and took their seats, not knowing whether they would take part in the performance as spectators or performers. Howard da Silva made a final attempt to recapture his government toupee, failed, rushed home to get his own, could not find it, and still managed to be one of the first to arrive on 58th Street. Lehman Engel, our conductor, was among the last to evacuate the Maxine Elliott. Two of the Cossacks, sweating gently in the early summer heat, must have been surprised to see him leaving the buiding in a large overcoat, but failed to search him. If they had, they would have found, clasped against his stomach, the piano and vocal score of The Cradle Will Rock.

By 7:50 the Maxine Elliott was dark. Only a few guards and workmen remained to patrol its emptiness. Orson and I left with Archie MacLeish in someone’s white Nash roadster with never a look back at the building in which we had prepared three shows together and opened two. Driving up Broadway through the light summer traffic, MacLeish seemed troubled; he was afraid we were going too far in our insubordination, yet he was reluctant to abandon us. Besides, there was a strong smell of history in the air which he was unwilling to miss.

There were no ticket-takers that night, no ushers and no program. We had changed our curtain-time to 9 p.m. but by 8:40 there was not an empty seat in the house; in defiance of the Fire Department, standees were beginning to clog the back of the theater and the side aisles.

At 9:01, like partners in a vaudeville act, Orson and I made our entrance “in one” in front of a shabby curtain that depicted Mount Vesuvius smoking above the Bay of Naples. We thanked our audience for making the long voyage uptown and related the full history of The Cradle Will Rock. We were not subversives, we insisted, but artists fulfilling a commitment. We told them how the show would have looked and sounded and described the characters they would not be seeing. In conclusion, “We now have the honor to present – with the composer at the piano – The Cradle Will Rock.” As we left the stage, the curtain rose on Marc Blitzstein sitting pale, tense but calm at our eviscerated piano.

The Cradle starts cold, without an overture. Behind us, as we dashed into the house, we could hear Marc’s voice, setting the scene:

followed by a short vamp that sounded harsh and tinny on our untuned upright.

Then an amazing thing happened. Within a few seconds Marc became aware that he was not singing alone. To his strained tenor voice, a faint, wavering soprano, had been added. It took Feder’s hand-held spotlight a few seconds to locate the source of the second voice: it came to rest on the lower stage-right box in which a frail girl in a green dress with red-dyed hair was standing glassy-eyed, stiff with fear, only half-audible at first in that huge theater but gathering strength with every note. It is almost impossible, at this distance in time, to convey the throat-catching, sickeningly exciting quality of that moment or to describe the emotions of gratitude and love with which we saw and heard that slim green figure. Her name was Olive Stanton; she had been cast as “the Moll” almost by default and I knew that she was entirely dependent on the weekly check she was receiving from the WPA.

Years later Hiram Sherman wrote to me: “If Olive had not risen on cue in that box I doubt if the rest of us would have had the nerve to stand up and carry on.” But she did – and they did.

The next character to appear was a bit-actor known as “the Gent”. Once again Marc was preparing to speak his lines and once again they were taken out of his mouth by a young man with a long nose who rose from his seat somewhere in the front section of the orchestra and addressed the girl in the stage box.

So a scene which, three nights before, had been played in atmospheric blue light, under a prop lamppost, downstage right, was now played in the middle of a half-lit auditorium, by two frightened relief workers standing 30 feet apart. From then on it was a breeze.

Nothing surprised the audience or Marc or any of us after that, as scenes and numbers followed each other in fantastic sequence from one part of the house to another. Blitzstein played half a dozen roles that night, to cover for those who “had not wished to take their lives or, rather, their living wage, into their hands.” Other replacements were made spontaneously, on the spot: Hiram Sherman, word-perfect, took over for the Reverend Salvation, whose unctuous part he had never rehearsed, and later repeated this achievement, from an upper box, in the role of Professor Scoot, “an academic prostitute”. Scenes were played, at first, wherever the actors happened to be sitting so that the audience found itself turning, as at a tennis match, from one character to another and from one part of the house to the other. Then, as the act progressed and their confidence grew, the actors began to move around, selecting their own locations, improvising their actions, while instinctively communicating with each other from a distance. No one later remembered all that happened. But I do recall that Mr. Mister, Editor Daily and the Mister children sang and danced “I Wanna Go ter Honolulu” in the same center aisle in which Mr. Mister and his stooges later played their big bribery scene. Mrs. Mister did her big scene upstairs in a balcony loge from which she wafted down imaginary “donations” to the Reverend Salvation, who stood in the orchestra floor at the head of the aisle with his back to the stage facing the audience, as did Ella Hammer later for her “Joe Worker” number. Our black chorus – all twenty-eight of them – sat clustered in the third or fourth rows, surrounding Lehman Engel, where they presently provided another of that evening’s memorable moments.

Just before leaving 39th Street I had made a last round of the theater, thanked the members of the chorus for their loyalty and urged them not to take any unnecessary chances. It was all the more startling, therefore, in Scene Three, to hear the Reverend Salvation’s booming pieties:

answered by an “Amen” reverently intoned by two dozen rich Negro voices. Without rising, taking their beat from Lehman Engel, they sang like angels. Melting into the half-darkness of the crowd, they were not individually indistinguishable, and this gave their responses a particularly moving quality.

Another surprise came when Marc suddenly became aware that, instrumentally, he was no longer performing alone. Of the twenty-eight members of Musicians’ local 802, not one was to be seen that night at the Venice – but one was clearly heard. Somewhere, high up in the balcony, Rudy, the accordionist, sat hidden among the audience with his instrument open on his knees, playing along with his composer in passages where he felt it would help.

During the intermission the crowd milling around the jammed lobby and spilling out onto Seventh Avenue was agitated and happy but not overexcited. They kept meeting friends and inquiring how they got there and telling each other how splendid it all was. It took a long time to get them back inside – which was just as well, for Marc was limp with exhaustion.

The second act went like a house afire. The “inflammatory” scenes of The Cradle Will Rock occur cumulatively, towards the end. And then, finally, the showdown: Larry Foreman confronting Mr. Mister and his Liberty Committee in the crowded night court. Only this night they were all on their feet, singing and shouting from all over the theater as they built to their final, triumphal release:

When you can’t climb down, and you can’t sit still;
That’s a storm that’s going to last until
The final wind blows … and when the wind blows …
The Cradle Will Rock!

There were no “bugles, drums and fifes” that night – only Marc’s pounding of an untuned piano before a wrinkled backdrop of the Bay of Naples. As the curtain fell and the actors started to go back to their seats, there was a second’s silence – then all hell broke loose.

It was a glamorous evening and the cheering and applause lasted so long that the stagehands demanded an hour’s overtime – which we gladly paid. We made the front page of every newspaper in the city and ran for eleven performances at the Venice Theater to packed houses. Then the entire cast returned to the Maxine Elliott where, under WPA regulations that limited absences to twelve days, the Federal Theater had to take them back.