Curtain Up (41 page)

One actor wasn't taking ‘no' for an answer, though. Joan Newell, who had played Gerda in the London production, sent a telegram to Lee Shubert, ‘WOULD LIKE TO PLAY HOLLOW ON BROADWAY AND REPEAT LONDON SUCCESS AS GERDA CRISTOW'. Her agent followed this up a week later with ‘WOULD LIKE AGAIN SUGGEST JOAN NEWELL', eliciting the classic Shubert response ‘CABLE LOWEST SALARY NEWELL'.
⁶⁹
A deal was done and Newell was flown out to America, where she was contracted for $300 per week, having earned £18 per week in London. Her dream of playing Gerda on Broadway was not to materialise, though.

Rehearsals started on 15 September 1952, and the following day Shubert cabled Cork, ‘IS IT AGREEABLE CHANGE TITLE HOLLOW TO SUSPECTS. PLEASE CABLE'. Having received no answer, he wrote to Cork a week later, ‘I must impress upon you the importance of an immediate reply . . . we have discussed this change with a number of people and they feel that SUSPECTS is a very strong title in relation to the play . . . we will, as you suggest in your letter make suitable reference to the fact that the play refers to the London stage success The Hollow.' Cork, who had previously been asked if the title could
be changed to
The House Guest
, responded, ‘PROPRIETORS LIKE SUSPECTS EVEN LESS THAN HOUSEGUEST BUT LEAVE DECISION TO YOU PROVIDED PUBLICITY CONNECTS WITH HOLLOW'.
⁷⁰

The programme's title page does indeed state ‘THE SUSPECTS (From the London success “The Hollow”) by Agatha Christie',
⁷¹
although one might legitimately question the use of the word ‘from' in this context, implying that it was based on the original rather than simply being a retitled version. As it turns out, though, the title was not the only change made to the play by the Shuberts. As Harold Ober had pointed out in his condemnation of the deal with the Shuberts, there was nothing to stop them from making alterations to the play, and according to press reports it was indeed being ‘rewritten' (although, it seems, on an uncredited basis) by ‘former Dramatists Guild member' Russell Medcraft,
⁷²
a screenwriter with a couple of Broadway shows to his credit.

Although there is a copy of the original play in the Shubert archive there is no copy of
The Suspects
, so we will probably never know what exactly American audiences were watching in the belief that it was written by Agatha Christie. Amongst the alterations we can discern were its emendation from a three-act to a two-act structure, which Christie had agreed to, although in the process of achieving this the timeframe of the action appears to have been radically condensed.
The Hollow
is a three-act, five-scene play spanning a period from Friday to Monday. According to the programme for
The Suspects
, Act One takes place on Saturday (two scenes) and Act Two on Sunday (two scenes), with the interval occurring in the middle of Act Two. Amongst other things, this presumably means that a number of the characters cannot go off to attend an inquest as they do in the final scene of
The Hollow
. The character of Doris the maid also appears to have been cut, which would have involved the removal of Christie's carefully placed subtext about the changing status of servants in contemporary England. Granted, an American audience would probably have had no idea what Gudgeon and Doris were talking about, but this again
begs the question as to the advisability of staging the play in America in the first place, and particularly to an audience who had been led to believe that it was a follow-up to
Ten Little Indians
. The playwright herself, of course, had insisted from the start that it was not a ‘thriller'.

The progress of
The Suspects
out of town was monitored closely by American showbiz columnists. On 10 October the
New York Times
reported that the show was to open that night in Princeton, playing two nights only, and was due to tour before its Broadway opening on 10 November. ‘Just where it will open has not yet been decided. The contract is said to call for the Booth but Beatrice Lillie is playing to capacity business at that house and Lee Shubert is not exactly eager to move her. As it does so often at this time of the year, the Broadway booking will probably depend upon how well the play looks out of town.' Since, a few days previously, the
New York Times
had announced
The Suspects
as due to open at the Booth, this was presumably by way of a clarification at the Shuberts' request, so as not to affect Lillie's box office. She had just opened in ‘an evening with Beatrice Lillie' on Sunday 12 October and would, as it turns out, continue to perform at the Booth until the end of May the following year. Sunday 12 October, prior to the opening in Philadelphia the following week, the
New York Times
ran a photograph of
The Suspects
' cast members Anna Karen (Veronica Craye) and Jeff Morrow (John Cristow) ‘in the Agatha Christie mystery play which is scheduled to arrive on Broadway the week of Nov 10'.

The
Boston Herald
trailed the 27 October opening of the tour in the city, announcing, ‘Ever since
Ten Little Indians
terrified and excited audiences, Broadway producers have been looking around for another play which would produce the same effect. The Messrs Shubert and Krellberg believe they have found it in
The Suspects
, which was written by the same brilliant writer of thrillers, who wrote the first-mentioned play, Agatha Christie.'
⁷³
We are even told to expect ‘the most sinister police inspector ever to find his way to any stage'. With this kind of misguided publicity, the Shuberts were inevitably setting
the play up for a fall, and the
Boston Post
's review is typical of its reception:

Since there are not many of them available any more, it is necessary to have a little patience with such mystery melodramas as we get to see . . . Nine little Indians out of a possible ten littered the stage in her ‘Ten Little Indians' with clues all over the place . . . Here, in
The Suspects
, there is nothing but talk for the entire first act, and some of it dreary talk. And there is one lone victim of a mysterious shot . . . although there are one or two stout parts most of the actors aren't helping
The Suspects
very much so far. This play needs restaging and I am afraid, some recasting, also a good deal of speeding up. Else it will run into trouble in New York.'
⁷⁴

A week later the
New York Times
duly reported, ‘
The Suspects
Agatha Christie's murder melodrama will be withdrawn for repairs after tomorrow night's performance in Boston. Lee Shubert and S.S. Krellberg, the producers, feel that more rewriting and some recasting are in order before they bring the play to Broadway. Accordingly the premiere at the Lyceum [no longer the Booth] has been postponed until Late November or December.'
⁷⁵

One wonders what Agatha would have made of her play being described as a ‘murder melodrama'. One also wonders what the actors thought of their producers sharing this information with the press in quite so much detail while they still had a performance to give – and, indeed, to what extent the success of Beatrice Lillie dictated the failure of
The Suspects
to arrive on Broadway on schedule. It does indeed look as if the Shuberts could have engineered an end-of-year opening at the Lyceum had they wanted to (the short-lived show running there eventually closed on Christmas Day), but it was not to be; and this may well have had something to do with the fact that Frederick Knott's
Dial M for Murder
started its long and hugely successful Broadway run on 30 October – at the
Shuberts' Plymouth Theatre, which had briefly been the home of
Hidden Horizon
.

A short time afterwards, Ober sent Cork a
New York Times
article dated 7 November:

Edward Chodorov is the new director of
The Suspects
. Withdrawn in Boston last week for major repairs, the Agatha Christie mystery play is slated to resume practicing at the end of the month in anticipation of a late December arrival here. Who will appear in what may be a completely revised line-up is not definite. The management is thinking of such performers as Victor Jory, Lueen McGrath, Francis Sullivan and Jo Van Fleet. Despite the wholesale revamping, confidence in the script hasn't diminished, especially in the eyes of Marcella Swanson, whose judgment is highly respected by Lee Shubert, one of the sponsors.

Playwright and screenwriter Edward Chodorov had been a protégé of Broadway producer Jed Harris, for whom he made revisions in the script of
The Fatal Alibi
. The following year he would fall foul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities after being identified as a member of the Communist Party by choreographer Jerome Robbins.
⁷⁶
Former showgirl Marcella Swanson had the distinction of being Mrs Lee Shubert (twice).

‘All of these people are good and this sounds encouraging,' said Ober in his covering note.
⁷⁷
But it seems unlikely that the project could have been successfully revived at this point, having been so publicly branded a failure.

There was an unfortunate postscript to the curtailment of the American version of
The Hollow
. The small print of the contract that Cork had signed with Shubert did not actually require the Shuberts to present the play in New York in order to secure the American rights on an ongoing basis.
⁷⁸
The production had opened on 10 October 1952, within the extended 31 October deadline, and had played twenty-seven performances in Princeton, Philadelphia and Boston, closing on 1
November. During any three-year period after the end of the ‘season' in which the first run took place, the contract allowed the Shuberts to present two hundred performances in order to retain the rights, enabling them, in effect, to do so in perpetuity. It was not specified how long the first run that triggered this arrangement needed to be. The end of 1952–3 ‘season' (in which the twenty-seven performances were presented) was 31 May 1953, so the Shuberts could for instance retain the stage rights until 31 May 1959 simply by presenting two hundred further performances before 31 May 1956.

Furthermore, the contract with the Shuberts stated that their subsidiary rights participation (30 per cent of film and 50 per cent of stock) would be triggered as a result of three weeks in New York or fifty consecutive performances in any other first-class city in the USA. It wasn't clear whether this applied to the initial run only, or whether they could now qualify for subsidiaries simply by presenting a second tour of at least fifty performances before 1 June 1956. In normal circumstances, only a three-week run on Broadway would have triggered their ability to participate in subsidiary rights, and then only if they took up the option to do so within a very specific and limited timeframe. But the wording in this case was ambiguous.

All of this was deeply frustrating for Saunders, who in any case only benefited to the extent of a fifth of the author's 10 per cent royalty income from the American stage production itself (instead of the usual one-third). His original 25 per cent share of the sale of film rights would have been increased to 50 per cent in the event that the Shuberts exercised their own option to participate in the film sale, enabling him to pass on the 30 per cent required by them and leaving him with 20 per cent.
⁷⁹
If they didn't exercise their option, he would receive his original 25 per cent. Saunders was keen to pursue the idea of a film, but now he had no idea whether or not the Shuberts would at some point become entitled to be a party to the negotiations for the sale of film rights.

The deal had been badly botched, and became the subject of endless correspondence between Cork, Ober, Reinheimer, the
Shuberts, Saunders and Saunders' lawyers. In fairness, internal correspondence seems to indicate that Lee Shubert himself found the contract as confusing as its English signatories did, and although the situation as it stood at the end of 1952 appeared to play into the Shuberts' hands, it does not seem to have done so as the result of any premeditated strategy on their part. They could, after all, have secured their subsidiary participation simply by ensuring that the original tour had lasted for fifty performances, rather than the twenty-seven that it did.

Eventually, in January 1953, Cork wrote to Shubert telling him that his licence on the play ‘has, of course, expired'
⁸⁰
and asking whether he wished to renew it as there was other American interest. If the intention of this was to provoke a response then that is what he got. Shubert wrote straight back, ‘I cannot agree with you that my “option on the play has expired” . . . My present intentions are to produce the play again and I am still very much interested in the property. Under these circumstances it would neither be fair or proper for you to negotiate the contract with any other producer.'
⁸¹

Lee Shubert died at the end of 1953, aged eighty-two. The following year, in response to a continuing barrage of correspondence from parties representing Saunders and Christie, the company's new vice-president, J.J.'s son John, displaying his father's penchant for brevity, sent the following note to Ober: ‘Regarding “The Hollow” this office will not make another production of this show, nor have we any enquiries from any amateur or stock companies.'
⁸²

Perhaps not surprisingly, Saunders did not take this as the confirmation that he needed that he was free to trade in the film rights, and his lawyers advised him that he should obtain a more definite undertaking from the Shuberts that they had no intention of engineering an option for themselves to participate in the film deal. Ober's lawyers, however, felt that this would simply antagonise the Shuberts, and that John Shubert's note would stand up in court as an undertaking that in any event they would not be presenting performances that might be regarded as triggering their participation in film rights. The
resulting correspondence is quite colourful, with Ober's team pulling no punches as regards their views on the firm engaged by Saunders.