Steinbeck (62 page)

I'm starting a new book and it is fun. They are all painful fun while I am doing them. I have a show in rehearsal too. It is a musical and I love to see them put it together. It's a mystery to me how they do it. The dancers and the singers and the actors. I am very much the spectator in this one. Such pretty people—such pretty girls. We have some show girls who are perfectly exquisite. I'm not afraid of pretty girls as I once was and these kids are real warm and pleasant.

I know my life seems restless and nervous to you and maybe it is. But you were never lazy and I am so lazy that I have to work very hard. Our social life is very easy. Now and then we have people to dinner and we go to dinner now and then. We have a television but never turn it on. Now and then we go to the theatre or to a concert but mostly we have conversation and reading and it's not a bad life and it's going by awfully fast.

It's been a long time since I have been west. Funny that it seems strange and a little foreign to me now. It's a kind of a sad thing to me that I don't much want to go back. You get tied to where you are I guess. And instead of the Grove cottage I have the Sag Harbor cottage. But I've never seen a national convention so next year I'm going to cover both of them—probably for the Louisville Courier-Journal—and I'll hope to see you then. We kind of plan to drive around some and see relatives and friends. I'm having fun doing some little pieces for Punch—real crazy ones but the English seem to like them and I like doing them.

Must stop and do some work. It was so good to get your letter. Do it more often—won't you?

love
John

 

[Marginal note] That eminence stuff is a bunch of crap.

New York
September 27, 1955

Dear Dick:

Good reports of you from Oscar and Jerry White [Rodgers and Hammerstein Production Manager]. They say the wickedness goes on behind the bandages, business as usual. I wish I could think of something to make the time go quicker for you.

We talked to your beautiful wife and to your burgeoning daughter and there is a good sign in their voices, which is better than a good report.

You will be glad to know that Elaine is doing a really adequate job in your place in Piece Pipe. She has changed some of the songs around and re-written a few lyrics, but I am sure you will approve. She had to fire three actors but she replaced them with her friends—good ambitious kids who can learn probably. Also, she has changed the ending. It takes place in a submarine putting out into the sunset with the anthem “Atoms Away, My Lads, Atoms Away.” But just rest easy. Everything is being done that can be done.

Yesterday I had lunch with Helen Traubel [star of
Pipe Dream
] who, as you know, is one helluva woman. She wanted to know more about Fauna. I queried Oscar and he said it would be a good thing to do, so I dredged up some old memories, posture, voice, clothes, gestures, anecdotes, etc., and I remembered some stories about Fauna's archrival in Salinas, who was universally known and loved, by the name of Fartin' Jenny.

When I knew her she was an old woman with a patch over her left eye. She smoked black cigars and drank a mixture of whiskey and ether and late at night she would get to crying over her dead husband, Jerry, but through her tears her one eye never left the bedroom doors. Some of those girls weren't honest. Anyway, when Fartin' Jenny was a young girl, she was a cook in a whore house beside the Southern Pacific tracks in Salinas. Jerry was a gay and debonair fireman on a switch engine, and as he went by the house, it was his habit to throw coal at Jenny's cat. This she took as a declaration of love. They met eventually and married and while Jerry moved up the rungs to engineer, Fartin' Jenny prospered and bought the house and her name went into song and story.

The marriage was not all enchiladas and beans. In fact, the fighting was fairly constant and usually bloody. This love fest went on for twenty-five years. Jerry died peacefully in his bed of an old ball bat wound and as so often happens, Fartin' Jenny was bereft without him; life had lost its perfume. She wanted to do something spectacular for Jerry's memory and she remembered that he had wanted to go to sea. Actually, he had said, “I'd rather be in the bottom of the Goddamn ocean than here with this bull bitch.”

She decided to have him cremated and his ashes consigned to the deep. Well, she took the can of ashes and went to Monterey and rented a purse-seiner. Fartin' Jenny, accompanied by the gallant and beautiful and elite of the red-light districts of both Monterey and Salinas, together with an honor guard from the railroad brotherhoods, put out to sea. She climbed up forward, opened the can and got a handful of Jerry. She cried, “Jerry, mavourneen, I consign thee to the watery elements,” and she let fly with a handful of ashes. Well, the wind caught it and brought it right back in her face. Jenny went into her famous crouch and she yelled, “You black-hearted son-of-a-bitch, I might of known you'd try to get the last word.” There is a moral here somewhere.

We love you
John

[Boston]
[October 1955]

Dear Oscar:

The day after we opened in New Haven I wrote a kind of a report for you, but it wasn't the proper time. You were heavily preoccupied with getting the show open at all. Now it does seem to me to be the proper time. If changes are to be made, they must be in the works.

There are many very excellent things in Pipe Dream. If I do not dwell on them it is because you hear them everywhere and this letter purports to be a working document and not either a criticism or a flattery. I do not think this is a time to spare feelings nor to mince words. Compliments for the good things have sunk many works including my own late lamented play which you will remember with a certain horror [
Burning Bright
]. Good people came to me after it had closed and told me what should have been done, and working on it by myself I only discovered completely what was wrong a year and a half later. And the crazy thing was that audiences were telling us all the time. And audiences are telling us now. We should listen! Your face is very well known so it may be that conversations stop when you are near. But mine isn't. They don't stop talking when I go by.

Norton [Eliot Norton, Boston critic] used the word
conventional
to describe his uneasiness. I have heard others describe the same thing as sweetness, loss of toughness, lack of definition, whatever people say when they feel they are being let down. And believe me, Oscar, this is the way audiences feel. What emerges now is an old fashioned love story. And that is not good enough to people who have looked forward to this show based on you and me and Dick. When Oklahoma came out it violated every conventional rule of Musical Comedy. You were out on a limb. They loved it and were for you. South Pacific made a great jump. And even more you were ordered to go ahead. But Oscar, time has moved. The form has moved. You can't stand still. That's the price you have to pay for being Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The only thing this story has, besides some curious characters, is the almost tragic situation that a man of high mind and background and culture takes to his breast an ignorant, ill-tempered little hooker who isn't even very good at that. He has to take her, knowing that a great part of it is going to be misery, and she has to take him knowing she will have to live the loneliness of not even knowing what he is talking about if the subject gets above the belt, and yet each of them knows that the worse hell is the penalty of separation.

I have suggestions for changing every one of the things attacked in this letter, Oscar. I think they are important or I would not go out on a limb for them. Will you think about them and then perhaps submit them to some outside person who is not too close to the show, someone like Josh [Joshua Logan] or maybe Lillian Hellman, or maybe Norton, anyone who knows theatre, whom you respect and whose word you can trust. I hope you will do this. I think we are in danger, not of failure but of pale and half-assed success which to me would be worse than failure. In a word we are in grave danger of mediocrity.

Should I run for the hills now?

yours in the faith
John

New York
Dear Gadg: December 3, 1955

Dear Gadg:

Well, thank God that is over. We didn't get murdered but we got nibbled pretty badly. I guess that was the coldest-assed audience I ever saw. They dared us and we lost. Then the notices said just exactly what I have been yelling about for six weeks and I think were completely just. R. and H. thought they could get away with it. And do you know, for the first time in their history, they are going to make some cuts and changes. The crazy thing is that I have written all the changes weeks ago and have turned them in. I don't know whether they will ever look at them, but they are there.

What really is the trouble is that R. and H. seem to be attracted to my kind of writing and they are temperamentally incapable of doing it. The burden of most of the reviews was that they had left the book.

Tickets are still being bought and so far there are no returns. I don't understand this but it's true. I think the thing will run for a while. Another crazy thing is that this is a better show than most of the musicals running now. It just isn't good enough for R. and H. I told them this in writing in New Haven. Even told them the story of Pickles Moffett in the fifth grade. He was a nice but illiterate little boy and my best friend. When we got the assignment to write a four line poem he went into shock and out of kindness I wrote two instead of one and gave one of them to Pickles to save his sanity. Well he got an A and I got a B. This outraged me because the verses were of about equal quality so I went to the teacher and asked her why. She said, and I remember her words very well, “What Pickles did was remarkable for Pickles, but what you did was inferior for you.”

We're going to the country on Monday for about three days. I want to get the reek out of my nose. I could do with some solitude. And I could do with some good solid work of my own kind. There are too damned many personalities and egos involved in theatre. I guess I am really tired. And disappointed actors—the poor things. I feel so sorry for them. They can't work unless we do something. It is the worst of crafts, I guess. Hell, I could take a nail and go out and scratch words on a limestone cliff and have some kind of fun, but actors can't. I'm going shopping with my kids this afternoon down to a war surplus store. They want tents and sleeping bags and I understand the impulse very well. They want to run away and hide too and that is their symbol.

We go out to the country this afternoon. I guess I had better stop this now. Hope the picture goes well,

love to all there
john