Curtain Up (40 page)

When the play transferred to the Ambassadors, the programme featured a full-page advertisement for all of Tennents' current productions.
⁵²
The commercial wing of the organisation, H.M. Tennent Ltd, was presenting four plays in the West End including John Mills in
Figure of Fun
at the Aldwych, Robert Morley in
The Little Hut
at the Lyric and Gladys Cooper in Noël Coward's
Relative Values
at the Savoy. Meanwhile, the non-profit distributing Tennent Productions Ltd was offering a further four productions, including Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens at the Criterion, Edith Evans and Sybil Thorndike in N.C. Hunter's
Waters of the Moon
at the Haymarket and John Gielgud in
The Winter's Tale
at the Phoenix, as well as the latest attractions at the Lyric, Hammersmith. No doubt the advertisement, which appeared
on the page opposite the cast list, had the desired effect of reminding Peter Saunders who was boss.

Crucial to the operation of Saunders' enterprise was his long-serving general manager, Verity Hudson. Born in 1923 in Lahore, she had started her theatrical career as an assistant stage manager at the Theatre Royal, Windsor in 1946, joining Saunders as a stage manager two years later. She appears in Saunders' programmes under various titles including ‘stage director' (senior stage manager) and ‘business manager', and in 1969 she was to become an executive director of the Saunders companies. In 1975 she was the first woman to join the Executive Council of the Society of West End Theatre, going on to become its first woman president in 1986 and dying, aged sixty-four, during her second year in office.

Peter Saunders' business papers give us a delightful insight into the daily operation of the production. Beryl Baxter, playing Henrietta Angkatell, complains to Hudson about her dressing room on tour, eliciting the response from Saunders, ‘Can't you see, you silly girl, that billing which the whole world (I hope) will see, is vastly more important than dressing rooms, that is known only to the cast.'
⁵³
Baxter writes back to him immediately to apologise, with an endearing ‘PS: Thank you for being so sweet.' During the London run, a clearly frustrated dressmaker refunds £28 paid for making Jeanne de Casalis a new dress and asks for the dress to be returned, declaring, ‘I really am at a loss to know what to do but I do feel that after making a second one, without success, it is quite evident that we cannot please her . . . suggest that you try someone else, who I only hope will prove more successful with her.'
⁵⁴
On 6 February 1952, King George VI died, necessitating the closure of all theatres for one night as a mark of respect. In settling the accounts for that week, the management of the Ambassadors Theatre offer to cover the costs of their own staff for the cancelled performance rather than recharging them to Saunders as they normally would. Saunders thanks them for their ‘most kindly gesture' which he accepts ‘in the very nice spirit in which it is offered'.
⁵⁵

Saunders' archive contains a full set of production accounts for
The Hollow
, as well as records of his dealings with his investors. He misleadingly maintains in his book that he ‘discarded the idea' of taking ‘outside backers' for his productions, but it is certainly true that he did not take many. Those he did raise finance from were a close circle of family members and business associates, and he himself would usually retain a substantial financial stake in his productions. In the case of
The Hollow
, £4,000 was raised to cover the production's set-up costs and provide a float to underwrite its weekly running expenses. There are records of four investors having subscribed £500 each and one contributing £1,000, meaning that Saunders himself retained a 25 per cent investor stake in the production. Saunders advised investors that he estimated that ‘about £900 will have been spent when the curtain goes up'.
⁵⁶
In the event, the first pre-London tour cost £979 to mount, and the eventual move into London (including all those ladies' dresses) a further £767. Weekly income would have been applied in the first instance to covering the running costs. The show cost £1,158 to run (including £239 theatre rent and £352 in artists' salaries) in a sample week at the Ambassadors (week ending 24 November 1951), and on the week in question made a healthy £1,360 at the box office (after the deduction of entertainment tax) to cover those costs and generate an operating profit for the week of just over £200.
⁵⁷

From the artists' contracts and weekly payroll we see that Jeanne de Casalis was significantly better paid than her colleagues, earning £75 per week plus 5 per cent of box office income over £1,250. George Thorpe, playing Henry Angkatell, took home £30 per week, Colin Douglas (Edward Angkatell) earned £25 and Beryl Baxter £20. The lowest paid cast member, Patricia Jones (Doris), earned £8 per week.
⁵⁸
In our ‘sample' week Agatha Christie earned £77 in royalties (although 10 per cent of that would have gone to Hughes Massie). Peter Saunders received a ‘management fee' of £25 (as compared with the £40 per week charged by Tennents to their productions).

At the end of October 1951 Saunders wrote to his investors
repaying their initial stake and announcing that ‘I can safely promise you a very substantial profit by the time we have finished the production.'
⁵⁹
Final accounts show that the two pre-London tours and the West End run between them generated a profit of £4,737.
⁶⁰
The thirty-second West End performance triggered Saunders' financial participation in a menu of residual rights, and over the licence period of seven years following the final West End performance these generated a further £2,211 for him in royalties from sub-let UK tours and licences issued in the USA, South Africa, Australia and East Africa. A substantial £2,567 from Saunders' share of UK repertory rights brought the total profits for his production to an impressive £9,515. An investor of £500 was entitled to 8 per cent of all profits (including residual income), so as well as receiving back their initial stake would have received a further £761 by the end of the seven-year licence period. On this basis Saunders himself would have walked away with £3,425 of profits, plus a further £1,522 resulting from his own financial stake in the project. That would make his own share of profits over £100,000 in today's money. He must have been one very happy producer.

Rather than attempting to compete with ‘Binkie' Beaumont on his own territory, Saunders was to build an empire of his own by deliberately cultivating a style of work that Tennents rejected. Saunders also took on the leases of a number of West End theatre buildings shunned by the Group, and at various times would find himself running the Duchess, the Vaudeville, the Duke of York's, the Ambassadors and the St Martin's. By deliberately promoting and eloquently advocating populist and ‘unfashionable' theatre, he was to build himself a position of respect within the industry (he was twice President of the Society of West End Theatre) and a not inconsiderable personal fortune. His perspicacity, business acumen and integrity enabled him to carve out something more than a niche, based on a variety of work including that of Christie and William Douglas-Home. And Cork was to find an enthusiastic fellow-traveller in Saunders when it came to his methodical exploitation of
subsidiary rights. Christie's partnership with Saunders would ensure the systematic promotion of her work for the stage over the following decade, creating a highly lucrative global market for her work, and ensuring her position as the most successful female playwright of all time. The only sadness was that Madge Watts, the first of the Miller sisters to have a play produced in the West End, died in 1950 and was not there to enjoy Agatha's theatrical breakthrough with her.

In Saunders, Christie had at last found a producer on whom she could rely, who appreciated her value and who treated her with respect. In her introduction to his autobiography, Christie writes:

How I came into Sir Peter Saunders' life and he into mine is a matter of vague recollection. Dates and places and times are all such indefinite things – but he certainly came to stay. He is one of my most appreciated friends; he has influenced me in many ways. I have enjoyed his friendship and his good company – his ready humour, the knowledge of the stage he has imparted to me, and I have a deep respect for the things he has made me do that I said I couldn't and didn't want to do . . . I have always been a shy person – but with Peter I never felt shy. He has a natural friendliness and kindness.
⁶¹

Saunders – unlike Edmund Cork, who appears never to have visited – was to become a regular guest at Greenway. Here he played cricket with Agatha's cherished grandson and devised theatrical projects with the delighted playwright. Commentators tend to remark on the fact that after the war Christie's output as a novelist slowed down; the official website even goes so far as to head this section of her life ‘autumn'. But this is to ignore the fact that she was finally coming into her own as a playwright. She was happily dividing her time between archaeological digs and theatre, and dutifully producing a book a year to keep her publisher and her fans happy. For Agatha Christie, playwright, the 1950s were high summer.

But, as her success grew, so would the dilemma at the centre
of her work. Agatha Christie was the writer of such remarkable dramas as
The Lie
,
The Stranger
and
A Daughter's a Daughter
but theatrical success, which had arrived late in life, was seductive to her. Should she continue to write ‘plays' or should she bow to popular demand and fulfil the expectations of her audiences (and her producer) by writing whodunits? The creative but often chaotic days of Bertie Meyer, Francis L. Sullivan, Basil Dean, Alec Rea, Irene Hentschel, Andre van Gyseghem, Barbara Toy and the People's Entertainment Society were behind her and ‘Christie on stage' was destined to become part of a well-oiled and carefully branded production machine that existed outside both the mainstream theatre of the day and its well-documented counter-culture in the new Arts Council-funded subsidised sector. It was, in effect, the alliance with fellow maverick Peter Saunders that would ultimately result in Christie, like him, being written out of the theatrical history books.

The establishment that Saunders fought, in the form of H.M. Tennent Ltd and their associated companies, was effectively able to operate a monopoly through the complex inter-linking of a number of nominally independent concerns, but the Shuberts' control of the American theatre industry was more immediately obvious. Consequently, in 1950, the US government filed a suit charging the Shuberts and their United Booking Office with creating a monopoly in violation of the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act and, following a case that rumbled on for six years, the company was eventually ordered to divest itself of a quantity of its holdings, including a number of the buildings under its control.

In the meantime, Lee Shubert, now aged eighty, had not given up on the idea of finding a successor to
Ten Little Indians
, despite the Broadway failure of
Hidden Horizon
and his belief that Christie's version of
Towards Zero
was not ready for production. In June 1951 the Shuberts therefore paid a substantial £1,000 (the deal was done in sterling) for a one-year option on the American and Canadian rights to
The Hollow
,
⁶²
with a
further payment subsequently extending the production date to the end of October 1952. They were no longer working in conjunction with Albert de Courville, although they entered a co-production deal for the project with film producer Sherman S. Krellberg,
⁶³
who was backing a successful comedy at one of the Shuberts' theatres at the time. As the producer of the play in the West End, Saunders had exercised his own American option and was thus a party to the agreement with the Shuberts.

To the horror of Harold Ober, the deal with Lee Shubert was done directly by Edmund Cork, apparently during a visit to London by Shubert, without involving Ober and his lawyer Howard Reinheimer. On 2 August Ober wrote to Cork listing a number of serious shortcomings in the agreement, not least that Shubert had evidently persuaded Cork not to use the Dramatists Guild standard ‘Minimum Basic Agreement':

I don't know whether you remember the trouble we had with Lee Shubert over Ten Little Indians. I imagine that he persuaded you to close the deal for The Hollow in London so that he could escape us and our lawyers! I assume from your letter that the contract has been signed and that there is nothing we can do about it unless the Dramatists Guild can force him or shame him into conforming with the Minimum Basic Agreement. I am enclosing a memorandum . . . and a copy of a letter from Howard Reinheimer. Probably the only use these will be to you will be to warn you so that you will know what to do if some other American producer tries the same tactics sometime in the future.
⁶⁴

As Reinheimer pointed out in the accompanying correspondence, the Minimum Basic Agreement was still universally adopted for Broadway productions, although it had recently been the subject of a ‘restraint of trade' court case as a result of which it was now styled a ‘recommended' rather than an obligatory form of author's contract. ‘This business about the Shuberts telling Mr Cork that the MBA is “out” and that Lee Shubert would be a monkey for signing it is just ridiculous,'
declares Reinheimer. ‘The MBA
is
the standard form and
is being signed by everybody on Broadway today
.'
⁶⁵
In fairness to Ober, he seemed unconcerned by the loss of his own commission on the deal, and genuinely worried about the contract that Cork had supplied. Unfortunately he was to be proved right.

Initially there was talk of
The Hollow
's English cast going to New York in the autumn of 1951, but the production's transfer to the Ambassadors, where it ran until May the following year, meant that this idea lost impetus. Saunders reminded Shubert of this idea when he eventually announced the end of the West End run,
⁶⁶
and Cork later did so as well,
⁶⁷
with the extension of the Shuberts' option to October 1952 (after a bit of haggling) theoretically making it possible.
⁶⁸
But in the end the idea was not pursued. Whether there would have been a happier outcome had the English cast played the piece in America we will never know.