Thornton Wilder (89 page)

The international tour of
The Skin of Our Teeth
starred June Havoc as Sabina and Helen Hayes as Mrs. Antrobus. Wilder was pleased that his play was part of the tour, and had great confidence in the producer Lawrence Langner and the Theatre Guild American Repertory Company, who would do the play in English. He was surprised that they wished to take abroad such a large cast and all the “specialized machinery” necessary for staging
Skin
. This very successful State Department–sponsored production traveled to theaters in Germany, Italy, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Israel, Turkey, and then South America, with Hayes and Havoc joined by Leif Erickson as Mr. Antrobus.
⁵⁹
The show was a hit almost everywhere, with packed houses and glitzy receptions and parties in one city after another.
⁶⁰

Wilder did not go around the world with his play in 1961, but he soon set off on another long journey into a “remote territory”—the desert of Arizona this time—where he could escape, rest, and do his work: as it turned out, some of the best of his life. But it took some time to get there. First he had to take care of other commitments with certain collaborators. There was the actor and playwright Jerome Kilty, who was adapting
The Ides of March
for the stage, with Wilder's approval and assistance. The two men met at Harvard in 1950, and Wilder admired Kilty's successful play
Dear Liar
(1960), based on the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Wilder was also collaborating with the composer Paul Hindemith—adapting
The Long Christmas Dinner
so that Hindemith could stage it as an opera. “Of all my plays it is the one that has found the widest variety of receptions,” Wilder wrote to Gertrude Hindemith, the composer's wife.
⁶¹
Hindemith's opera was success, but even with John Gielgud and Irene Worth on board, Kilty's
The Ides of March
was not well received when it opened in London in 1963. “I wrote some new scenes for it,” Wilder told his New Haven friend Catherine Coffin; “then my will-power broke down. It's tedious work to rewarm yesterday's porridge.”
⁶²

In addition to these collaborations, Wilder was a mentor to a number of gifted people over many years—former students and new friends and acquaintances alike. He encouraged Timothy Findley when he showed Wilder one of his plays and ask for comments. Findley never forgot the night Wilder summoned him to the Savoy Hotel in London to render his verdict. First he fed the nervous young writer—shrimp cocktail, filet mignon, roast potatoes, and broccoli, accompanied by a bottle of wine—because, Wilder told him, writers had to eat. “
You
are your
body's
servant. Feed it.
Eat!
” Wilder commanded. Then Wilder proceeded to talk to Findley, writer to writer. Pacing, smoking, and drinking Scotch and water, Wilder gave Findley a compressed graduate seminar on writing—and a good deal of encouragement. “He was all great teachers in one,” Findley remembered. “In writing—the craft is all,” Wilder told him. He encouraged Findley to start something new—and to keep on writing. Put the pages of his play away in a drawer, Wilder said. “Ordinarily, I say the wastepaper basket is a writer's best friend—but keep these pages as a reminder of how intentions go awry.”
⁶³

After the young Edward Albee gave Wilder a sheaf of his poems to read, and then sent Wilder a play, Wilder encouraged Albee to concentrate on drama. He urged Albee not to read “too much contemporary prose and poetry,” but to read “some of the great writing of the past” for a short time each day—Baudelaire or Rimbaud or Mallarmé. “And,” Wilder wrote, “remember: don't only
write
poetry;
be
a poet.”
⁶⁴
When Albee sent Wilder
The Zoo Story
in 1958, Wilder commended his content and criticized his form. “The trouble is that your content is real, inner, and your own, and your form is tired old grandpa's.” He asked Albee the very question he was asking himself during that time: “Why does your sense of form, your vision of the
how
lag so far behind your vision of the
what
? It's as tho you were frozen very young into the American ‘little theatre' movement.” At present, Wilder said, Albee had no style, but he had “much to say.” Wilder urged him to “write much, write many things. Only that way will your [imagination] teach you to make your mode as original as expressive as your thought.”
⁶⁵

Wilder stood at the center of an ever-expanding circle of friends, collaborators, and protégés who enriched his life as he did theirs. But beyond the circumference of these personal relationships were the incessant demands of the public—the strangers or friends of friends who wanted him to read manuscripts, give talks, perform, and write prefaces, introductions, or letters of reference; and the stream of supplicants who sought permission to produce, publish, or adapt his work. He knew himself to be too obliging and, as he had been for a lifetime, he was too eager to please. He suffered from a “stern parent-to-child complex,” he reflected in the late sixties. “I was obsequious and servile . . . even when I was a Colonel in the Army I had an aim-to-be-adequate tension. I hated it in myself, but that's the way I am.”
⁶⁶
But he had finally recognized that his life was finite—that there were only so many years left; only so much more time for living, for writing; only so many unwritten words left in him; only so much breath and energy left to empower and express them. He wanted peace and privacy to write. He wanted to retire from every other endeavor. He wanted to get away. He decided to be a hermit in Arizona.

But there were rivers to cross, he wrote, before he could drive into the desert, and one of them led to the Circle in the Square, the pioneering off-Broadway theater founded in 1951 by the producer and artistic director Ted Mann and the director José Quintero (later joined by the producing director Paul Libin). First located on Sheridan Square, Circle in the Square moved to Bleecker Street, also in Greenwich Village. By then Mann and Quintero had led the way in establishing off-Broadway theater as a robust force in the theater world, producing a variety of experimental new plays, as well as revivals of classics and standards. A few plays, including some of Wilder's new one-acts, were written expressly for production in Circle in the Square.

One night in 1959 Wilder had slipped into the audience at Circle in the Square to see a production of
Our Town,
directed by Quintero. Ted Mann spotted Wilder in the audience that night, appearing to enjoy the play. Afterward Mann introduced himself to Wilder, who was indeed pleased with what he had seen.
⁶⁷
The Circle in the Square production of
Our Town
was adapted for a television performance that aired on November 13, 1959, with the Stage Manager played by the popular television actor Art Carney, famous as Jackie Gleason's sidekick on
The Honeymooners
and other formats of Gleason's television shows.
⁶⁸
Wilder's
Our Town
was such an American icon that there were two television presentations of the play in the fifties. The 1959 production, with its off-Broadway roots, was preceded by a ninety-minute musical
Producers' Showcase
version, broadcast on September 19, 1955. Delbert Mann directed, with Eva Marie Saint as Emily and the young Paul Newman as George Gibbs. Frank Sinatra starred—and, of course, sang—as the Stage Manager. A number of Sinatra's hit songs were written by Sammy Cahn, one of the most successful lyricists in American movies and theater, and it was Sinatra who had connected Cahn with composer James Van Heusen in 1955 and who brought them on board to compose the music for
Our Town
—including the hit song “Love and Marriage.”
⁶⁹
So it was that Wilder found himself, by association, on the national hit parade in 1955, although it was Dinah Shore, not Sinatra, whose cover made the list.

About a year and a half after the
Our Town
production at Circle in the Square, Mann recalled, Wilder wrote to him about his new one-act-play cycles and asked if Mann and Quintero would be interested in seeing them. Wilder sent them
Infancy, Someone from Assisi,
and
Childhood
. They were “honored and thrilled” when Wilder named them “Plays for Bleecker Street,” and the three one-acts opened on January 11, 1962, to mixed reviews.
⁷⁰
Wilder and Mann hoped to stage the remaining eleven plays in Wilder's two cycles, but they were never finished to Wilder's satisfaction. Quintero did go on to direct a well-received production of Wilder's
Pullman Car Hiawatha
in December 1962.
⁷¹

Also in 1962—a year jam-packed with projects—Wilder and Talma finished their opera. He had worked closely with Talma, who for six years had poured herself heart and soul into
The Alcestiad.
He was with her for the opera's premiere in German translation at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Germany, on March 2, 1962, with the great soprano Inge Borkh singing the title role. Afterward there was an “unprecedented ovation . . . curtain calls for 19 minutes.”
⁷²
Talma's elation gave way to dismay, however, when the reviews came in, many of them attacking her music. “These things don't affect me (an old battered ship),” Wilder wrote, “but it is especially hard for Louise with her first large work and coming after that undoubted appreciation by the audience.”
⁷³

“With our opera we had the damndest experience,” Wilder wrote to Irene Worth afterward. They had a full house, wonderful singers, “a noble conductor” (Harry Buckwitz), countless rehearsals of the “devilishly difficult” twelve-tone score, and a superb performance followed by forty curtain calls. Then the negative reviews appeared, partly because the composer was an American, and a woman at that, the director thought. The opera still played to full houses but, “damn it,” Wilder wrote, “those reviews have so far prevented other opera houses from picking it up and a Publishing House from adopting it. Damn, damn, double damn. Anyway it
is
beautiful music and in time it
will
be rediscovered.”
⁷⁴

At the State Department auditorium in Washington on April 30, 1962, a black-tie audience gathered for “An Evening with Thornton Wilder,” part of a cultural series sponsored by President John F. Kennedy's cabinet. Wilder appeared onstage that night in a “baggy old suit and a lumpy felt hat,” his costume for reading lines as the Stage Manager for
Our Town.
⁷⁵
In press interviews for the event, he announced his plans for a two-and-a-half-year sabbatical in the desert of Arizona. He also shared the news with friends. “I shall soon be far away. Farewell, O world. Arizona desert—2 ½ years. A bum. Loaf, read, learn Russian, polish up my Greek . . . and finally start some writing of my own,” he wrote Irene Worth on March 18, 1962. “Go for weeks without saying a word (oh blessing) except buying avocado pears and helping to close bars at 2:00 a.m.”
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He wrote to Glenway Wescott that he was going to Arizona to be a “hermit—without shoe-laces necktie or telephone.”
⁷⁷

On May 11 Wilder was one of 162 guests at a White House dinner, where he stood in line between the Robert Penn Warrens and Tennessee Williams to shake hands with the president, who thanked him for his State Department program. He was seated at Vice President Johnson's table with Anne Morrow Lindbergh and the poet Robert Lowell. The food was perfect, he said, and the first lady was “glorious in a white and pale raspberry Dior.” After dinner Isaac Stern, Leonard Rose, and Eugene Istomin played Schubert. “I finished the evening at the Francis Biddles with the Edmund Wilsons, the Saul Bellows, Balanchine, and Lowell,” Wilder wrote. The following Friday he visited Charlotte at Amityville, and on Sunday, May 20, 1962, with his Thunderbird convertible packed full of baggage and books, Wilder set out on his way to be a hermit in the desert, “Don Quixote following his mission.”
⁷⁸

 

HE WAS
driving across the country for the sixth time, loving “the gas stations, the motels–the fried egg sandwich joints”—and the Road itself.
⁷⁹
(He enjoyed the motels the way he had loved Pullman upper berths when he was a boy, he had written to Charlotte in 1960 when he was driving to New Orleans. When people asked him if he would be lonesome on such a journey, he replied, “I hope so.”)
⁸⁰
He was fed up with “academic and cultured society,” with people asking him what he thought of T. S. Eliot, with public demands, with the fettering burden of correspondence and obligations that wore him down.
⁸¹
Arizona might not be paradise, but it would be freedom. With each passing mile his weariness diminished. He was a sixty-five-year-old vagabond, adventure bound.

When he and his siblings were children and forbidden to swear, they never said, “Go to hell.” Instead, thinking of the region in South America, they said, “Go to Patagonia.”
⁸²
Wilder had looked at a map of Arizona and announced that he would go to the town called Patagonia. When that word had gotten out in the press he was inundated with real-estate offers, and soon decided Patagonia would not provide the anonymity he longed for. He would simply head west to Arizona and see what happened. Just as he reached the crest of a hill where a sign welcomed him to Arizona, the T-Bird began to sputter and stall. He made it to the bottom of the hill and saw another sign: Douglas, Arizona.