Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater

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CHRONOLOGY 1905: Born March 15 in New York City at 260 West Fifty-ninth Street, only child of British actors Benjamin Nottingham Webster III and Mary Louise (May) Whitty. In June, the family returns to London from the United States and lives at 31 Bedford Street in the Strand. 1911: Enrolls in the Burlington School for Girls and makes amateur acting debut at Albert Hall in a Pageant of the Stage. 1914: Enrolls in Bradley Wood House, a Christian Science school in Devonshire. 1917: Attends Queen Anne’s School in Reading. 1922: Appears in The Shoe, written and directed by Edith Craig, with Ellen Terry and May Whitty, Palace Theatre. 1923: Graduates from Queen Anne’s and begins formal training for the stage at the Etlinger Dramatic School. 1924: Makes professional debut as a chorus member in Euripides’ The Trojan Women with Sybil Thorndike and Lewis T. Casson, New Theatre. 1925: Plays a gentlewoman in John Barrymore’s Hamlet, Haymarket Theatre, appears in the Chorus of Euripides’ Hippolytus, Regent Theatre, and understudies Sybil Thorndike in a tour of Shaw’s Saint Joan. 1926: Appears in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII with Sybil Thorndike, Lewis T. Casson, and Laurence Olivier, Empire Theatre, tours with the Charles Macdona Players in plays by George Bernard Shaw, and plays the Gentlewoman in Macbeth, Prince’s Theatre. 1927: Tours with J. B. Fagan’s Oxford Players. 1928: Joins the Ben Greet Players, touring plays by Shakespeare in outdoor productions, and appears opposite John Gielgud in The Lady from Alfaqueque, Court Theatre. 1929: Plays Fanny Willoughby in James M. Barrie’s Quality Street with Hilda Trevelyan, Haymarket Theatre; plays Chorus Leader in Euripides’ Medea, Wyndham’s Theatre; joins the Old Vic Company, playing Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, Nerissa in The MerchantPage xiv → of Venice, Toinette in Moliére’s The Imaginary Invalid, the duchess of York in Richard II, and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 1930: At the Old Vic plays Audrey in As You Like It and Megaera in Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion; at the Old Vic and Queen’s Theatre plays Lady Macduff in Macbeth and the Second Player in Hamlet; at the Savoy Theatre plays Judith Anderson in Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple with Martin Harvey. 1931: Appears in Gilbert Wakefield’s Etienne with Emlyn Williams, St.James’s Theatre, tours in Williams’s A Murder Has Been Arranged and with Maurice Evans in After All; elected council member of British Equity. 1932: Plays Mary Preston in Musical Chairs with John Gielgud, Criterion Theatre, countess of Derby in Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux with John Gielgud and Gwen Ffrangcon Davies, New Theatre, and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth with Alastair Sim, Anthony Quayle, and George Devine, Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells Theatre. 1933: Appears in Richard of Bordeaux with John Gielgud and Gwen Ffrangcon Davies, 463 performances, New Theatre. 1934: Appears in Emlyn Williams’s Spring 1600, Shaftesbury Theatre, Lesley Storm’s Dark Horizon, Daly’s Theatre, and H. T. Wood’s Royal Baggage, Little Theatre; makes directing debut with Shakespeare’s Henry VIII

for the British National Federation of Women’s Institutes, Kent; plays Mary Beaton in Queen of Scots, New Theatre. 1935: Directs Martha Steinitz’s Tarakin, Kingsway Theatre, Walter Hudd’s Snow in Winter, Whitehall Theatre, Philip Stuart’s Love of Women, Phoenix Theatre and Arts Theatre, and Sarah Millin’s No Longer Mourn, Gate Theatre; appears with Paul Robeson and Coral Brown in Peter Garland’s Basalik, Arts Theatre; plays Abigail Hill in Norman Ginsbury’s Viceroy Sarah, Phoenix Theatre, and tours in Viceroy Sarah; appointed actor-delegate to the London Theatre Council; attends the Moscow Theatre Festival; writes article on the working conditions in the Soviet Union for British Equity. 1936: Directs Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, The Playhouse, Louis Verneuil’s Heads I Win, Embassy Theatre, Sewell Stokes’s The Four Partners and Daisy Fisher’s A Ship Comes Home, Q Theatre, Phillip Leaver’s The Three Set Out, Hull Repertory Theatre, and F. C. Davison and John Mitchell’s Family Hold Back, Aldwych Theatre; adapts and plays Nurse Lisa in Ferenc Molnár’s Girl Unknown, New Theatre; plays Anna Steele in Elsie T. Schauffler’s Parnell, New Theatre.Page xv → 1937: Makes Broadway directing debut with Maurice Evans in Richard II, St. James Theatre; also directs Gladys Hurlbut’s Lovers’ Meeting and Phillip Leaver’s The Three Set Out, with Constance Cummings and Michael Redgrave, Embassy Theatre, Keith Winter’s Old Music with Greer Garson, St. James’s Theatre, and Elswyth Thane’s Young Mr. Disraeli, Fulton Theatre. 1938: Plays Masha in the Theatre Guild production of The Seagull with Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Sydney Greenstreet, and Uta Hagen, Shubert Theatre; directs Maurice Evans in Hamlet with Mady Christians, St. James Theatre. 1939: Directs Maurice Evans as Falstaff in 1 Henry IV, with Wesley Addy and Mady Christians, St. James Theatre; directs, and plays Mary of Magdala in, Leonore and William Cowen’s Family Portrait, Morosco Theatre; directs abridged versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, and As You Like It, World’s Fair, Flushing, N.Y.; directs tryout production of Sidney Howard’s Madam, Will You Walk with George M. Cohan and Keenan Wynn, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. 1940: Signs director’s contract with Paramount Pictures and moves to Hollywood; directs an all-star benefit of Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8:30 for the British War Relief Fund, Hollywood; directs Maurice Evans and Helen Hayes in Twelfth Night, St. James Theatre, and Tennessee Williams’s Battle of Angels with Miriam Hopkins, Wilbur Theatre. 1941: Writes chapter on directing Shakespeare for Producing the Play by John Gassner; directs and plays Andromache in The Trojan Women, Cort Theatre; directs Macbeth, National Theatre. 1942: Publishes Shakespeare without Tears; gives first lecture tour on Shakespeare; broadcasts readings of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for WABC radio, Boston; directs and plays Emilia in Othello with Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and José Ferrer, Brattle Theatre and McCarter Theatre; directs Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path with Alec Guinness and Nancy Kelly, Henry Miller’s Theatre. 1943: Directs Janet and Philip Stevenson’s Counterattack, Windsor Theatre; restages Othello for Theatre Guild tryout production in New Haven, Boston, and Philadelphia; directs and plays Emilia in Othello with Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and José Ferrer, Shubert Theatre. 1944: Codirects The Cherry Orchard with Eva Le Gallienne, National Theatre; delivers the Helen Kenyon Lecture at Vassar College, published as Shakespeare and the Modern Theatre. 1945: Directs The Tempest, Alvin Theatre, and Thomas Job’s Therese,Page xvi → Biltmore Theatre; receives Achievement Award from Women’s National Press Club, Washington, D.C.; restages The Tempest, Broadway Theatre and New York City Center; restages Othello with Robeson, Ferrer, and Hagen for New York City Center.

1946: Cofounds the American Repertory Theatre with Eva Le Gallienne and Cheryl Crawford; directs musical revue sketches for Nancy Hamilton’s Three to Make Ready with Arthur Godfrey and Gordon MacRae, Adelphi Theatre and Broadhurst Theatre; directs Henry VIII (and plays the Old Lady), James M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows, George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, and Sean O’Casey’s Pound on Demand (and plays the Woman) for the American Repertory Theatre; plays Mrs. Borkman in Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman for the American Repertory Theatre. 1947: Plays the Red Queen in an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass for the American Repertory Theatre; receives an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. 1948: Prepares an English adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s As You Desire Me for Italian actress Marta Abba; directs Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and supervises production of Hedda Gabler for the American Repertory Theatre; records an original cast album of Alice in Wonderland; founds the Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company (Marweb) with impressario Sol Hurok; directs Hamlet and Macbeth for Marweb tours. 1949: Prepares an English adaptation of Felix Salten’s play Royal Highness, Lyric Theatre; directs Julius Caesar and The Taming of the Shrew for a second U.S. Marweb tour; broadcasts Emma Lazarus for NBC radio. 1950: Directs George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, New York City Center and restages it at Royale Theatre; broadcasts The Patrician for the NBC Theatre of the Air; in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters plays Olga at Brattle Theatre and Masha at Woodstock Theatre; stages Verdi’s Don Carlo, Metropolitan Opera Company, New York City; listed in Red Channels: Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television and blacklisted from employment in film, and network radio and television. 1951: Directs Richard II and The Taming of the Shrew, New York City Center, and Shaw’s Saint Joan, Cort Theatre; plays the nun-detective in Charlotte Hastings’s The High Ground, Forty-eighth Street Theatre; appears as Mistress of Ceremonies in ANTA Album, with Tallulah Bankhead, Hedda Hopper, and Faye Emerson, Ziegfield Theatre;Page xvii → directs Aida, Metropolitan Opera; named by José Ferrer in testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. 1952: Narrates a recording of Hedda Gabler for Theatre Masterworks; directs and performs An Evening with Will Shakespeare, opening at New Parsons Theatre and then touring. 1953: Records An Evening with Will Shakespeare and directs and narrates a recording of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest for Theatre Masterworks; performs An Evening with Will Shakespeare, National Theatre, Washington, D.C.; broadcasts The Genius of Shakespeare for WNYC-Radio; directs Fritz Hochwalder’s The Strong Are Lonely, Broadhurst Theatre, and Richard III with José Ferrer, New York City Center; appears before McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. 1954: Tours with lectures and solo performances of Shakespeare to U.S. colleges and universities. 1955: Publishes revised edition of Shakespeare without Tears; directs William Walton’s opera Troilus and Cressida, New York City Center, and The Strong Are Lonely, Piccadilly Theatre; performs readings of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for BBC Radio. 1956: Restages The Strong Are Lonely at the Haymarket Theatre; directs The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon. 1957: Publishes a revised edition of Shakespeare without Tears under the title Shakespeare Today; directs Verdi’s Macbetto, New York City Center and Measure for Measure, Old Vic, London. 1958: Directs Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, Ambassador Theatre, and Vittorio Gianni’s opera The Taming of the Shrew and Richard Strauss’s opera The Silent Woman, New York City Center.

1959: Writes article on classical acting for Theatre Arts. 1960: Directs Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, Metropolitan Opera, Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, tryout production of Noël Coward’s Waiting in the Wings, Olympia Theatre, Dublin, and premiere of Noël Coward’s Waiting in the Wings, Duke of York’s Theatre. 1961: Represents the American Specialists Program of the U.S. State Department in South Africa and directs Eugene O’Neill’s Touch of a Poet, National Theatre, Johannesburg. 1962: Elected to the Board of Directors of the American National Theatre and Academy; directs Michael Redgrave’s adaptation of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, The Playhouse, a dramatization of Pamela Frankau’s novel Ask Me No More, Royal Theatre, Windsor,Page xviii → and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Civic Theatre, Johannesburg. 1963: Adapts and gives solo performances of The Brontës: A Dramatic Portrait of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë; named Regents Professor at University of California, Berkeley; directs Antony and Cleopatra, Hearst Theatre, Berkeley. 1964: Performs The Brontës, New Arts Theatre, London; directs Measure for Measure, Boston University; directs Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, Queen’s Theatre, and restages it at Lyric Theatre. 1965: Records The Brontës: A Dramatic Reading for Vanguard Records and Your Mr. Shakespeare for J. Norton Publishers; directs National Repertory Theatre touring productions of Jean Giraudoux’s The Mad Woman of Chaillot and Euripides’ The Trojan Women. 1966 Stages Julius Caesar for the American Shakespeare Theatre; gives solo performances of The Seven Ages of Bernard Shaw, Theatre de Lys, New York City. 1968: Directs Graham Greene’s Carving a Statue, Gramercy Arts Theatre. 1969: Publishes family memoir The Same Only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family; appointed artist-in-residence, Department of Speech, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and directs Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. 1970: Directs Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, England. 1972: Publishes autobiography, Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage; dies of cancer in Sydenham, England, November 13. 1979: Named to the Theatre Hall of Fame, New York City.

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INTRODUCTION This is a biography of Margaret Webster, who initially wanted to be a leading actor in the manner of her parents, Ben Webster and Dame May Whitty, but instead became the leading director of Shakespearean plays on Broadway. A single telephone call from actor-manager Maurice Evans catapulted her from a secondary character actress to a stage director in control of the production process. To trace Webster’s life in the theater is to follow the stepping-stones of an actor’s career from amateur performances to professional work in the premier repertory companies of the day. As a director, Webster set about staging the playwright’s text in the style of her mentors—Harley Granville Barker, Lewis T. Casson, and Harcourt Williams. By the late 1930s, she was in demand as a director but also found time to become a distinguished actress in character roles. She played Masha in The Seagull with the Lunts, the Red Chess Queen in Alice in Wonderland with Eva Le Gallienne, and Emilia in Othello. Brooks Atkinson bemoaned the fact that as “the ablest woman in our theatre” she did not appear more frequently on the Broadway stage. She made friendships among a lesbian subculture within the New York theater community. She formed liaisons with celebrated actresses and writers, including Mady Christians and Eva Le Gallienne. Her personal happiness was nearly always linked to her work in the theater, until toward the end of her life she met British novelist Pamela Frankau. In this period in the 1960s, the theater became more frequently a director’s theater, with the playwright’s text serving as vehicle for the theatrical event conceived by the director as chief creator. Webster’s work fell out of fashion with the changing vogue for selective realism and conceptual staging. While her approach was in fashion, she worked side by side in theatrical seasons with Broadway’s most notable commercial directors, namely, Guthrie McClintic, Herman Shumlin, Alfred Lunt, and George S. Kaufman,Page 2 → and with the managements of the Theatre Guild, Gilbert Miller, Eddie Dowling, and Cheryl Crawford. She did so as a singular woman in control of the production in the commercial theater of the day. Margaret Webster’s achievements cannot be overestimated in a profession that continues to favor men as producers, directors, and managers. Her productions of Richard II and Hamlet made William Shakespeare a commercial commodity on Broadway; her production of Othello with Paul Robeson was a theatrical and political milestone; and her stagings of Verdi’s operas at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera were the first by a woman director. In addition, her dedication to noncommercial theater in the form of the short-lived American Repertory Theatre changed the face of the theatrical landscape in regional America. From an early age, the theater was Margaret Webster’s life. It was her occupation, her hobby, her obsession, and her joy. She was not happy unless working as an actor or a director, and she sought out theatrical projects to engage herself, her parents, and friends. Even while dying of cancer in London at the age of sixty-seven she was planning a new series of dramatic recordings for a production company in New York City. Webster’s energy, enthusiasm, talent, and intellect resulted in an extraordinary body of work in the American and British theater. Over a period of fifty-three years, beginning as a child actor, she played more than ninety-three roles and directed eighty-four shows in more than 177 productions. She played in four radio dramatic series on CBS and NBC, gave lecture tours, and made dramatic recordings. She published four editions of her popular book Shakespeare without Tears, adapted three plays for the stage, and wrote two family memoirs along with countless articles and essays on theatrical production. In addition, she was an energetic belletrist who wrote daily to her parents until their deaths in the late 1940s, in entertaining letters filled with theater gossip and details of her life in the theatrical world. She is best remembered as a stage director and a pioneering woman in the commercial and nonprofit theater. She began a full-blown career in London in the 1920s as an actor at the Old Vic and in the West End. She became a

notable director and authority on Shakespearean production in the United States in the late 1930s and shattered stage traditions in the Broadway theater by casting an African American actor in the role of Othello. Having removed political and cultural barriers, she cast the black actor Canada Lee as Caliban in The Tempest on Broadway and toured through thirty-three American states in the late 1940s with the multiracial Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company. She had a lifelong passion for classical repertory and worked with Eva Le Gallienne and Cheryl Crawford to create a stunning experiment called thePage 3 → American Repertory Theatre. Although a financial failure, ART set the stage for the regional theater movement to evolve beyond the boundaries of New York City. Despite all of her accomplishments in the Broadway and West End theater, Margaret Webster was her severest critic. She consistently downplayed or underrated her achievements both as an actor and as a director. This was not false modesty, but the result of high standards. Her keen intelligence, combined with low self-esteem that followed her from childhood, frequently resulted in self-criticisms that were unwarranted and often severe. Nonetheless, critics St. John Irvine, Brooks Atkinson, John Mason Brown, Lewis Nichols, and Rosamund Gilder were her champions. Margaret Webster’s story is that of a remarkable theatrical life. She worked side by side with the major players of the day on both sides of the Atlantic and in principal theaters in London and New York City. Her career is a veritable mirror of the British and American theaters in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The players, designers, producers, and theater companies that shaped modern theatrical history are names woven like bright threads through the story of her life. However, perhaps the finest accomplishment of this exceptionally talented and tenacious woman is a professional success that no woman stage director had achieved before or has achieved since. If Margaret Webster were to read this book today, she would likely find her successes overstated, and protest with good humor and amused skepticism that perhaps she could have done a better job if she had worked harder or had had just a little more time. Page 4 →

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ACT ONE 1905–1936 Page 6 →

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CHAPTER 1 AN ITINERANT CHILDHOOD My parents objected to a stage career with the usual insincerity of theatrical parents. —MARGARET WEBSTER Margaret Webster’s life in the theater began in earnest in London at age twelve when she appeared in a benefit called The Women’s Tribute. A company of “star” actresses was rehearsing the benefit performance, written for the occasion by Louis N. Parker, when the “Youth” in the allegory took sick. May Whitty knocked on her daughter’s bedroom door and asked if Peggy (as she was called) wanted to learn thirty lines overnight and perform the next day. With greasepaint on her face, dressed in a too large tunic, and carrying a wreath of artificial flowers, Peggy made her entrance on the stage of the Empire Theatre in Cheswick. She was entranced. “I still remember how the footlights seemed to glare up at me,” she wrote years later, “and the auditorium beyond was like a limitless black cavern, stretching away to infinity.” Even more amazing, the critic for The Stage remarked that she was “a brilliant young lady of undoubted histrionic gifts.”1 Peggy was bedazzled by the excitement, the greasepaint, the costumes, and the pageantry. Moreover, she had appeared on stage with her celebrated mother, May Whitty, with Marion Terry as Peace and Lilian Braithwaite as Britannia. Peggy Webster had been in and around the theater during her entire life, for her parents were professional actors. Now she herself had appearedPage 8 → before the footlights and breathed in the enchanting world of the theater, and for the rest of her life its mystery and magic would enrapture her. Peggy’s mother had always planned for her only child to follow in the family’s theatrical footsteps. Mary Louise Whitty (celebrated in later years as Dame May Whitty) was the third daughter of Alfred Whitty and Mary Ashton. The family fell on hard times when her father died of pneumonia at thirty-eight. At sixteen, May decided to help her mother and sisters by going on the stage. Following a letter of introduction to the acting duo Madge and William Hunter Kendal, the petite, doe-eyed Irish beauty appeared in the chorus of an operetta called The Mountain Sylph. Her stage career was effectively launched on London’s West End, and she soon progressed to the prestigious St. James’s Theatre, where she was understudy to an ingenue whose family name was Webster. Unlike the Whittys from Wexford, Ireland, the Webster family had a long and illustrious British ancestry and stage history, beginning with a dancing master and progressing to Benjamin Nottingham Webster I who became the distinguished actor-manager of the Haymarket Theatre in the mid-1800s. He was Peggy’s great-grandfather. May Whitty met the handsome Benjamin Nottingham Webster III, a golden-haired, blue-eyed young man, outside the stage door of the St. James, where he had come to meet his actress-sisters, Annie and Eliza. Ben Webster was studying for the bar at King’s College with little enthusiasm for a career as a barrister. He delighted in acting with the Irving Amateur Club and singing in concerts. Once he graduated from the Inner Temple and before his admission to the bar in 1885, Ben made his professional debut under the name Mr. B. Nottingham in A Scrap of Paper, a comedy by Victorien Sardou. The chance encounter with May Whitty eventually determined the direction of Ben Webster’s career. In 1887, he made his stage debut in the West End with the Kendals as Lord Woodstock in Lady Clancarty, a historical drama by Tom Taylor. Ben and May were married five years later and remained professional actors for the remainder of their lives.

Margaret Webster was born in the proverbial theatrical trunk on March 15, 1905, in an apartment at 260 West Fifty-ninth Street in New York City, when her father was on tour with Ellis Jeffreys’s Company and appearing in The Prince Consort. Peggy made her earliest debut when her birth was announced from the stage of the New Amsterdam Theatre on West Forty-second Street, where her father was appearing as the prince consort. A grinning fellow actor whose part called for him to announce the birth of the prince’s son said, “I’m afraid tonight it’s a girl!”2 A newspaper account got itPage 9 → partially right: “Margaret Webster was born in New York City while her mother was touring the United States.”3 Despite young Peggy’s artistic surroundings, she had an ordered upbringing, although an itinerant one. In the summer of 1906, the family sailed back to England, where she was baptized on October 29, 1907, in St. Paul’s Church (known as the “Actors’ Church”) in Covent Garden, just a few steps from their home at 31 Bedford Street in the Strand. The Websters lived in an upstairs flat in a multistory, redbrick Victorian building. When she was two years old, Peggy, her parents, and Mrs. Beck, her elderly Irish nurse, returned to the United States with Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s company. Vilified by friends and critics as “the Royal Tigerine,” Mrs. Campbell was an actress of great beauty and magnetism and a friend of George Bernard Shaw. She tempted Ben from England with superior roles in Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and Hofmannsthal’s Electra. The Webster family sailed again to America in November 1907 and settled in New York City. Peggy’s earliest memories were of a large shedlike building vaguely resembling a railroad station, a friendly steward supplying tiny jam sandwiches on a huge steamship, her mother seated at a sewing machine in a hotel room, gigantic squirrels in Central Park, and her parents writing picture postcards to their London friends.4 When the family returned to London a year later, they settled again into the flat on Bedford Street, and Peggy grew up among the noises and smells of the market at Covent Garden. Her playground was an enclosed area of grass and trees bordered on one side by St. Paul’s Church and shielded by adjacent redbrick houses on the other. These were happy times. There were picnics with Mrs. Beck in various green parks and long summer holidays with her parents at Woolacombe, a small seaside village on the North Devon coast, or at the William Faversham summer home in Chiddingfold in Surrey among artists, writers, and their children from the London and New York theater world. (Here, at Chiddingfold, Webster met the London born Eva Le Gallienne, six years her senior.) Le Gallienne remembered her younger friend as a “very small, rather plump child, her brown hair worn in two tight little plaits, her big blue eyes made rounder by large round-lensed glasses.”5 Peggy’s impaired eyesight was the singular cloud on her parents’ bright horizon. She was an intelligent, perceptive, and shy child, but May worried that her daughter was “short-sighted.” “She sees and knows people and things at a distance,” May wrote to Ben in 1908, when Peggy was three years old.6 An early illness had left Peggy with a weakness in the muscles of herPage 10 → right eye. She called it her “crooked eye.” She appeared in early family photographs as a smallish child with blond curls and large eyeglasses, staring myopically into the camera with the right eye turned slightly inward. May consulted a number of doctors, but their diagnoses were conflicting and she turned to Christian Science, then in the early stages of its growth as a religion, and she remained a devout Christian Scientist until her death. Before she was of an age to go to school, Peggy was acquiring a theatrical education. The Websters lived in easy reach of the West End theaters, then dominated by such actor-managers as George Alexander at the St. James’s, John Martin-Harvey at the Lyceum, Herbert Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s, and Gerald du Maurier at Wyndham’s. She was not quite four years old when she saw Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Pinkie and the Fairies with Edward Terry (Ellen Terry’s brother and John Gielgud’s great-uncle), followed by Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt and Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird (with Ben’s sister Lizzie Webster Brough). The prize of them all was James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan with Hilda Trevelyan as Wendy. When Peggy was five, she was taken to Harley Granville Barker’s revival of Trelawny of the Wells, directed by Dion Boucicault, with her mother playing the desiccated Aunt Trafalgar. In her childlike way, she called it “trilling and wonderful.”7 At eight, Peggy sat in the presence of Barker’s newest production at the St. James’s Theatre, the premiere of Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, with her father as the “handsome Captain.” From the start, the theater enraptured Peggy Webster. She thrilled to the glow of the footlights, the sound of music

rising from the orchestra pit, and the red plush curtain rising to reveal elaborate pastoral settings, some with real rabbits, sheep, and even a camel. By the age of six, she was wholly stage struck. She went to see Peter Pan year after year at its Christmas revival with Hilda Trevelyan as its perennial Wendy. Time after time, she was suspended in a haze of rapture as she heard Peter and Wendy speak their final lines and all the fairy lamps began to twinkle, the music soared, and the curtain came swooshing down. She was permanently seduced by the wonder and magic of the theater. When she was six, Peggy made her amateur acting debut at Albert Hall, as an angel with a “wobbly halo” in a Pageant of the Stage, organized by May Whitty and Edith Craig, daughter of Ellen Terry and sister to designer Edward Gordon Craig. Christened Edith Ailsa Geraldine Craig (for the isolated Scottish island Ailsa Craig), Edith Craig was a designer, a director, and an early exponent of feminist theater. She lived on the ground floor at 31 Bedford Street with her partner Christopher St. John (born Christabel Marshall), where they entertained and provided refuge for ardent “suffragettes” like themselves.8 Peggy frequented their downstairs flat and sometimesPage 11 → saw Ellen Terry there and recalled the actress’s resonant voice that floated through the air and filled the room. Ellen Terry, the greatest actress of her age, appeared in the all-star Pageant staged by her daughter. Despite failing eyesight, she was still a striking beauty with a deep husky voice and a commanding stage presence. As Peggy watched from the wings, she was awestruck by her first stage appearance with celebrities and the opportunity to watch the redoubtable Ellen Terry. For nearly a quarter of a century, Ellen Terry was Henry Irving’s leading lady at the Lyceum, a partnership that galvanized the English theater in the late Victorian years. A brilliant, joyous actress, she was celebrated for the vitality and freshness of her Shakespearean heroines and admired for her “natural” and spontaneous style of acting. A sweet-natured, intelligent woman, she was adored by the public and by such notables as the great actor Johnston Forbes-Robertson and the playwright George Bernard Shaw with whom she had a famous correspondence. She was also impulsive and reckless in her private life and scandalized the more respectable members of the Terry family. She had three husbands and was almost certainly Irving’s lover for many years. She had two illegitimate children, Edith and Edward Gordon, from a long liaison with architect Edward Godwin. While her daughter remained in her shadow, Edward Gordon Craig became one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century theater as a designer and a theoretician. At the time Peggy appeared in the pageant, she was already caught up in the powerful effect of the make-believe of the theater and the thrill of standing behind the proscenium arch and looking into the dark cavern beyond the footlights filled with expectant faces. Like many children of theatrical parents, Peggy did not make an official professional debut. “I rather seem to have attained professional status,” she recalled, “in a few peculiar jumps and a series of slithers.”9 In the early years of the First World War, Peggy took part in a masque in the gardens of the Inner Temple in a scene from Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, again with the aging Ellen Terry as Beatrice. “I can still see the stooping, golden figure dip and glide onto the green lawn as swiftly as a bird in flight,” she recalled in admiration of the great actress.10 Peggy’s education was similar to that of other children, especially daughters, of professional parents who were not terribly interested in an elitist education for their children since they were destined to be actors anyway. In 1911, Peggy was enrolled in the Burlington School for Girls in Old Burlington Street, where she remained until the zeppelin raids over LondonPage 12 → prompted her parents to send her to a small Christian Science school, Bradley Wood House, in Devonshire. Until she went to boarding school, Peggy helped her mother and a growing number of surrogate “aunts” from her parents’ theatrical world who were absorbed in organizing benefits and charitable work for the “good causes” related to England’s war effort. Outside of school, Peggy helped by selling homemade flags and red paper poppies made by the many committees and women volunteers organized by May Whitty. To occupy herself during her

after-school hours, Peggy often attended rehearsals for matinees featuring the most celebrated actors of the day and staged as charitable benefits for war victims. Ben Webster tried in vain to get into a branch of the army, but he was over fifty. He was ashamed of playing in films during the war, but the new medium was more lucrative than the theater. A handsome matinee idol who excelled in romantic comedies such as Pinero’s Trelawny of the Wells and Milne’s Mr. Pim Passes By, he was fully aware that he could not support a family by taking time away from the commercial theater to work in serious plays produced by theatrical societies or clubs. Years earlier, following his success as Hippolytus in Gilbert Murray’s new translation of Euripides’ play, he wrote to May: “It’s a bad thing to be an ancient Greek. It limits one’s chances of employment.”11 Nonetheless, his newfound work in silent films compounded his dilemma, as he appeared in Liberty Hall, A Garret in Bohemia, Cynthia in the Wilderness, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Gay Lord Quex, and Because between 1914 and 1918. During the first year of the war, London had seemed inviolable—until June 1915, when the Zeppelin raids began. In August, the bombings continued in London’s East End, where the streets blazed. The Oxford-Cambridge boat races and cricket matches were suspended; the British Library, the Tate Gallery, and much of the Victoria and Albert Museum were closed. The West End theaters were also affected as German planes approached London along the line of the Thames and dropped their bombs near the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Charing Cross, Covent Garden, and the theater district in the Strand. To safeguard the audiences, the London fire department required every stage to be partially roofed with glass so that fires caused by incendiary devices would be deflected away from the auditorium and thus save many lives. The actors on stage were in danger of upward-roaring flames and falling glass. Ben and May, who were playing together in a revival of Trelawny of the Wells at Dion Boucicault’s New Theatre, developed a strategy. When he was playing a scene without May, she would stand in thePage 13 → wings to share in his danger. In contrast, the stage crews sensibly retired to the stone staircase below ground level. Peggy was aware of the peril to herself and her parents during this phase of the war. If she was not in school, her parents took her to the theater with them. When the war entered its third year, they decided to send her away from London for her safety. Learning that she was being sent to boarding school, Peggy exhibited a childlike fury, protesting her “exile” in Devonshire.12 In truth, separation from her mother and father and their bustling, glamorous world was a bitter experience for the preadolescent girl. Peggy wrote plaintive letters to “Mamie” describing her tearful feelings of homesickness. She was constantly fearful that May Whitty would forget to send parcels and clothing, but her greatest fear was that her mother would forget her birthday. Shy and insecure, Peggy wrote frequently to remind her mother: “Only twelve days to my birthday!” Holidays were another time of stress for the lonely exile. She needed to be reassured that she would spend her vacations at home with her parents when all the other girls left Bradley Wood House to be with their families. Nonetheless, Peggy was always careful to apologize for making the inquiries. “Please don’t think this is a hint,” she wrote to May, “because it is not.”13 May Whitty was a curious phenomenon as a parent. Either she did not concern herself with her daughter’s anxieties, or, immersed in her many wartime committees and her new social status as a civic organizer, she found it convenient to ignore Peggy’s pleas. May’s emotional neglect of her daughter cannot be ignored nor fully explained. Granted, Peggy was out of sight and safe from the German bombs, and May was preoccupied with her civic endeavors. For her part, Peggy frequently sublimated her plaintive longings for her mother’s attention in a flurry of school theatricals. She would throw herself into a frenzy of theatrical activity, thereby redirecting her concentration and energy away from her insecurities and into a renewed sense of personal worth, accomplishment, and fellowship. Peggy was unaware at the time that she was devising a lifetime strategy by which she would shield herself from feelings of loneliness and rejection. The staging of scenes from The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s play about an outsider, was the first of many sorties into the skin of the theatrical world that wrapped and protected Peggy from uncertainty and self-doubt. Her

elevated self-esteem lasted only the length of the production and was followed by plaintive letters to her parents bemoaning her exile. Peggy organized a “star turn” for herself as Portia in the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice in a preChristmas pageant. She was also electedPage 14 → stage manager (the director’s role today) and found herself with double responsibilities. To get the show on, Peggy took the route of all children with parents connected to the theater. She asked May to send makeup and costumes for the production. Combining her efforts to get the show on with her concerns about the holidays, she wrote, The Merchant itself progresses very favourable. I have sent you drawings of the dresses…. We have got a long red cloak for the “Duke” but otherwise he remains an unsolvable problem! Can you suggest anything? We suggest clubbing together and with this common fund buying some scarlet satin for Bassanio’s breeches, possibly some stuff for Gratiano’s same, and one or two things. But if you could possibly think of anything that would do we should be muchly pleased and grateful. What should I do in the Christmas holidays? Shall I be able to be in London with you, or shall we go away? I am so hanged if I could stand spending Christmas here, and I don’t think you would like it either would you!14 May Whitty made a replica of the red barrister robe that Ellen Terry had worn famously as Portia. When she received the parcel, Peggy was doubly elated with her costume and with her mother’s rare attention. The day following the last performance of The Merchant of Venice, Peggy and all the girls went home for the holidays. The air raids continued, forcing Londoners to take refuge in improvised shelters and to entertain themselves through the long hours of waiting for the all-clear signal. At 31 Bedford Street, the Websters, neighbors, and friends played parlor games to while away the hours in a temporary air-raid shelter in a first-floor office. On one such evening, Edith Craig and her bohemian companions clad in a colorful assortment of turbans, sandals, and Chinese robes delighted Peggy with improvisations of elephants and other animals. The first child of Ellen Terry was a tall, graceful woman with brown hair, wide-set eyes, and a remarkable voice that Bernard Shaw described as “quite her own, unlike anyone else’s.”15 Edith Craig had attended the Royal Academy of Music in London with the intention of becoming a concert pianist but had to abandon her training when she developed chronic rheumatism. She turned to the theater and was forever overshadowed by her mother’s extraordinary talents. She formed the Pioneer Players with her lover Christopher St. John and they presented some 150 plays, many directed and designed by Craig herself. Edith Craig became an important figure in Peggy’s adolescence. She was the first woman stage director that Peggy Webster knew. Craig’s gender andPage 15 → her outspoken, aggressive personality quickly earned her a reputation as a troublemaker to be avoided. Nonetheless, Harcourt Williams, who worked with her as an actor before joining the Old Vic as artistic director under Lilian Baylis’s management, had only praise for Edith Craig as a director. Her flair for costume and colour was inimitable. Her stage craft, always sound, frequently touched brilliance. Her criticisms were trenchant and often brusque, but she was so vital and finally goodhumoured that none but a fool or a coxcomb could resent them. Her outbursts at rehearsal came and went like summer storms and left no trace of malice or aftermath of ill-temper.16 In spite of her sharp tongue and headstrong ways, Edith Craig earned Peggy’s admiration because she was kind and patient with children, had a lively sense of humor, and loved games and improvisations. As a career woman, she was unique in the theater of her day. In truth, Edith Craig was probably the first bisexual feminist and female stage director of Peggy’s early acquaintance. Peggy learned from her example that there were avenues other than acting for women in her parents’ profession. She also came to understand that women directors in the first quarter of the twentieth century were relegated to secondary theaters, staging pageants and charity matinees. In addition, Edith Craig’s alternative lifestyle at 31 Bedford Street would play a large role in Peggy’s developing sexuality

over the next decade. The year 1918 was a watershed for the Websters and for England. On the first of January, May Whitty Webster was awarded the Order of the British Empire for her work on behalf of “many good causes” during the war. Actresses Genevieve Ward and Ellen Terry would also receive the OBE and the honorary title of “Dame Commander.” May now stood shoulder to shoulder with these celebrated actresses of great fame and artistic accomplishment. Then, in the fall of 1918, Ben and May sent their daughter to the prestigious Queen Anne’s School in Caversham (Reading), a small public school dedicated to the education of young women. Peggy’s next four years at Queen Anne’s would find her torn between her parents’ choice of an acting career for their daughter and her teachers’ choice of a university education that might have better prepared her for the stage career she would eventually attain. “I cannot say that I went ‘willingly to school,’ ” Peggy wrote of her school years at Queen Anne’s.17 As she boarded the train at Victoria Station in September 1918, she once again felt apprehension and loss as she said a tearful good-bye to her parents. Some 250 students, girls ranging in agesPage 16 → from thirteen to eighteen, attended Queen Anne’s in those years. For the most part, they were daughters of professional people—doctors, teachers, and government officials. Recent studies of British boarding school life for women examine topics of service, authority, control, and selfdiscipline as preparations for entering the business world. At school, the young women experienced greater autonomy and individuality than their families usually encouraged. Then, too, the discipline and camaraderie required by organized sports were recognized as one means of preparing young women for careers in public service. Akin to athletic games were school theatricals, likewise thought to develop leadership skills, talent, and confidence. Looking back on Queen Anne’s, Webster praised the education that she received. In addition to history, literature, and languages, she engaged in sports and theatrical productions. In the classroom, she studied Latin and Greek, with French as her special subject. Peggy’s poor eyesight and talents as organizer usually placed her in the manager’s position on school teams. From sports she learned discipline and the proper exercise of authority, two lessons of value in her work in the theater. In school plays at Queen Anne’s Peggy played every possible role, from Puck and Aladdin to Abraham Lincoln. She complained that her fellow actors “just read their parts and don’t act at all,” and that her teachers had no “earthly idea of managing a play.” May replied brusquely that “this routine was precisely what she would encounter in the professional theatre, and she had better get used to it.”18 Peggy’s letters, assiduously saved by her parents, were not remarkably different from her earlier ones written from Bradley Wood House. They detailed her “misery,” her “loneliness,” and her “worries” about her eyesight. They also reveal her considerable anxiety over her mother’s erratic attentions. During her first months at Queen Anne’s, Peggy compared the new school unfavorably to the old (“the girls don’t get their ‘meat’ ration”). In another letter, she described a desperately homesick girl who set fire to her bed in order to be expelled and sent home. Carefully weighing the consequences of this act, Peggy concluded that the girl “probably regretted it as soon as she’d done it.”19 Peggy never set fire to her bed, but her letters revealed a lonely child seeking attention in ways most likely to galvanize her parents. She begged her mother to come see her perform in Aladdin. (She did not attend.) Again, Peggy was torn between wanting to be stoical and pleading the case of the “abandoned” child. When May told her that she must stay at school during the summer of 1919, she tried to demonstrate that she was stoical about the matter: “I’m really quite happy and I haven’t shed a tear! But I’m sort of lonely.”20 Page 17 → Her name became another issue, as it would later in her stage career. When the school authorities posted the

“Head Girl” list, she was listed as “Margaret Webster.” She took swift action to change the entry to “Peggy Webster.” She wrote to May, “I couldn’t bear to go down to posterity as ‘Margaret’ Webster.” Indeed, she used “Peggy” as her professional name until the celebrated critic St. John Irvine convinced her that “Margaret” had a more distinguished sound for an actress working on the West End. Peggy excelled at Queen Anne’s. Her teachers encouraged her to consider studying classics at Oxford or Cambridge. “But Fate kept slithering me toward the professional theatre all the same,” she wrote sometime later, “and then Edy Craig gave me a fatal gift.” Peggy’s fate was unconsciously sealed by her parents, Edith Craig, Ellen Terry, and an all-star matinee. In 1919, Edith Craig produced an all-star matinee in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, one of London’s first experimental theaters. The climactic scene was to be the appearance (and a farewell performance) of Ellen Terry as Portia in the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice. Peggy was invited to come down from Queen Anne’s and play Puck in a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that appeared earlier in the performance. The school granted permission. According to Peggy’s schoolgirl account, Ellen Terry, at age seventy-two and with failing eyesight, was a lesson in true theatrical greatness. In rehearsals, the small flat stage and lack of footlights were disconcerting. She had trouble hearing her cues and remembering her lines. She asked the prompter for lines she had spoken a thousand times. On the day of the performance, Peggy played her own scene, left the stage, and started toward her dressing room, then heard her mother say to Edith Craig, “I want Peggy to be able to say that she has been on the same stage with Ellen Terry. Will you let her go on at the back of the crowd in the trial scene?”21 Craig whisked Peggy off to wardrobe and dressed her in a few rags, whereupon she reappeared as a member of the Venetian populace. Craig, also costumed as a Venetian citizen, then took her by the hand and led her to the front row of the crowd in full view of the audience. From her vantage point, the fourteen-year-old watched Ellen Terry’s entrance. The celebrated actress had to be guided to her place of entrance in the wings. She then removed her thick glasses, leaned her cane against the stage wall, and “in a flame of scarlet” (the famous barrister’s robe that May Whitty had only recently copied) swept onto the stage.22 The astonished Peggy recalled the scene vividly: You would have sworn that this was a young woman in her twenties and that the hair beneath the cap was gold. Her first words were quiet, authoritative. She took her place at once by the advocate’s stand. No time wasPage 18 → wasted on trivialities, on pretending to be Portia pretending to be a man pretending to be nervous or “putting on an act.” She cut directly to the heart of the situation and took control of it.23 Portia questioned Antonio and Shylock about the bond. “Do you confess the bond?” Antonio says, “I do.” “Then must the Jew be merciful.” Shylock quickly replies, “On what compulsion must I? tell me that.” There was a slight pause and then Portia’s famous answer came, perfectly simple and somehow completely surprising: “The quality of mercy is not strain’d. / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest …” The astonished Peggy marveled that there was no vocalizing or trick phrasing. “The lines seemed to come of themselves, as if they had never been read or spoken before. I never once thought of how she was saying them, just of what she was saying: ‘we do pray for mercy; / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy.’ ”24 That night when Peggy went to bed, she knew that her “destiny” was determined. Nonetheless, at the close of her Queen Anne’s School days in April 1923, she would be required to make a more formal decision. Edith Craig was a formidable influence in Peggy’s adolescent years. Thirty-six years older than her young admirer, Craig was an accomplished, professional woman whose influence on the impressionable Peggy rivaled May Whitty’s. In later years, Webster described Edith Craig as “brusque and trenchant,” “always galvanic,” and often “unexpected and profound.” The older woman whose colorful flair for living an independent and

unconventional life, whose protective possessiveness of her aging mother, and whose professional career was thwarted by gender and temperament, became the love of Peggy’s adolescent years. There is no evidence that Peggy Webster experienced homoerotic friendships with girls of her own age or with her teachers at Queen Anne’s. Nor did she form lifetime friendships with other girls during her boarding school years. Perhaps her idealized love for an older woman, typical within the boarding school world, was fixed entirely on Edith Craig. She loved and admired Craig from afar, engaged in her projects when invited, and unconsciously emulated her dual career as actress and director, but with far greater success. In the early twenties in postwar England, social and economic conditions underwent a sea change. Women now voted, taxes skyrocketed, and strikes and unemployment were commonplace. In the theater, the actor-managers were replaced by managers who were most often theater owners running aPage 19 → speculative business. Working conditions deteriorated and actors experienced high unemployment. May and Ben now spent more weeks out of work than they did on stage. They found themselves both out of work and out of fashion with the new managers who were producing serious dramas by John Galsworthy and Somerset Maugham and fashionable modern comedies of contemporary manners by Frederick Lonsdale. A subtle realism in acting and scene design replaced the bravura of the romantic costume dramas that were Ben Webster’s specialty. Peggy’s schooldays at Queen Anne’s were also drawing to a close. In 1923, she passed the necessary examinations for admission to Oxford or Cambridge with a certificate in French and history. When school authorities encouraged her to try for a scholarship to Oxford, May Whitty was opposed. Her opposition did not originate in the family’s finances, but rather her own ambitions for her daughter’s career. May raised the dark specter of spending three critical years learning things of no direct value at a university and then deciding to become an actress. Twenty-one, in May’s opinion, would be an advanced age to launch a stage career. “I wonder,” May proposed, “whether you might not like to leave school at Easter and spend three months in Paris?”25 In May Whitty’s defense, we should remember that she had spent a lifetime in the theater. She knew no other profession or lifestyle. She had been sporadically educated by her mother until necessity forced her at age sixteen to go to work as an actress to help support the family. The theater was all that May Whitty knew, with the possible exception of unpaid volunteer work—an occupation not unlike staging amateur theatricals. Moreover, her daughter had grown up as part of the theater world, and, with the exception of her boarding school days, had never been apart from it. The combination of Peggy’s need for her mother’s approval and May’s intent to control her daughter’s future (Margaret Webster was potentially the last member of the Webster clan) far outweighed the advice of the authorities at Queen Anne’s. Torn between the privilege of being one of the few women at Oxford in the early twenties and the offer of three months in Paris as prelude to a stage career, Peggy chose Paris and the stage. When questioned about this choice in later years, she observed that she had never seen reason to think that the decision she made in 1923 was the wrong one, or to think that she would not make the same decision again. “The theatre,” she argued, “is a very educative medium if you want to get educated. It is also one of the few fields …where nobody cares whether you have a degree or not, but only what you’ve done, what you look like (often meaning how young you are), and whether you have any talent.”26 Page 20 → Hindsight—the great “what if”—is that tool whereby we measure the validity of human choice. Those stage directors who were eventually to supplant Margaret Webster were university-educated men. Peter Brook, Peter Hall, and Trevor Nunn, who spent their university years at Oxford and Cambridge, were to change the artistic direction of the British and American theater at midcentury, especially the staging of Shakespeare. Webster was never to acquire their educational advantages. For very complicated and even unconscious reasons, Webster turned her back on a university education. It may be that her only thought in 1923 was to follow in her parents’ footsteps. Although May’s argument against beginning

an acting career at twenty-one was spurious, John Gielgud, who was a year older than Webster, made the same argument to his parents when he turned down the opportunity to try for a scholarship to Oxford. He told his parents that three years at university would be a waste of his time and their money; he wanted to be an actor.27 His idol was his great-aunt Ellen Terry, and he applied for a scholarship at a small drama school run by Constance Benson in Kensington. Eventually, he would apply for admission to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), founded in 1904 at His Majesty’s Theatre by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and run for many years on its present site in Gower Street. Webster’s formal training as an actor would not be as prestigious. The cold facts about Webster’s immediate future as an actress were these: She was not an ingenue and three years would not change the roles for which she was physically suitable. The Etlinger School where she eventually received her training was a second-class institution and did not compare favorably to RADA. Finally, in being denied a university education, Webster would never discover the difference that higher learning might have made in her emotional and intellectual resources, and, finally, in her artistic sensibilities. In April 1923, Paris was a test for the overprotected eighteen-year-old. Webster traveled to France accompanied by Julie Le Gallienne (Eva’s mother and known to Peggy from the Chiddingfold summers) and stayed in the home of Mademoiselle de Butter at 4 Rue de Sevres for three months. Despite her reticence, she was discerning about her theatergoing experiences. She was put off by the declamatory style of acting at the prestigious ComédieFrançaise, France’s oldest national theater. She complained in one of her many letters to May Whitty that “there was far too much ‘tirade’ accompanied by beatings of the breast, frenzied protestations of love, enraged vindications of honour, and general declamation and gesticulating. It was about as unreal as the modern acting is real.”28 Page 21 → To her credit, she was thunderstruck by Georges Pitoëff’s production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the first time the landmark play had been performed outside of Italy. It is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen: the story is that in the middle of a rehearsal six people in black arrive and ask for an author; they are six characters created by an author and left unfinished. Bit by Bit they tell their story—which is by the way particularly sordid and painful—and the director consents to write the play. During the interval there is no curtain and you see scene-shifters and stage hands walk across the stage and altogether you get that you are watching the real rehearsal; that the thing is really happening. The second act drops a bit,—I mean you lose the mystery and uncanny air of the six people; it is a sort of struggle between these people, to whom the story is palpitatingly real, and the actors who in reproducing it from the bits done by the six people, make it hopelessly false; but by this time you really don’t know, whether they are real live people or fictitious characters. In the end the small boy shoots himself and the actors see a real wound and real blood. As they talk about it, the lights go out and you see the lift at the back going up with the six people in it, silent and ghostly with their faces and black dresses. Realité? Realité? Illusion? And the play ends. It is a most queer work. She concluded her observations with, “I suppose it has an aim—it is to show the impossibility of disentangling the so-called real from the so-called unreal. And the story of the six people is a very outspoken story of the horror of prostitution—not a bad thing that it should be played here. It was very well acted by the two leading people, M. & Mme. Pitoëff, two Russians.”29 While her moralizing was naive, Webster’s detailed assessment of Pirandello’s extraordinary play was a mature critical appreciation of this metaphysical play-within-the-play long before it was considered a modern classic. Following three months in Paris—and much to May’s horror—Webster had gained considerable weight. Her mother had not taken seriously her daughter’s warnings that she was “getting so fat!!!” “My face is quite square,” she wrote, “and I have five chins.”30 For the next five or six years, Webster struggled with “loathsome, ruthless,

and abominable diets” of apples and coffee, egg and tomato, and iodine in milk administered by May until quite mysteriously the extra pounds disappeared. Nonetheless, her weight problems lasted long enough to handicap any possible career as a “fashionable flat-chested ingénue,” or so Webster told herself. It is doubtful that the weight gain was entirely to blame for her failure to appear the pert, adorable, and fashionable ingenue.31 Page 22 → In addition to her sojourn in Paris, the Websters spent three weeks in Venice that year with writer Harrison Rhodes, who rented the penthouse apartment in the Grand Hotel and invited them to stay with him. This was Webster’s introduction as a young adult to the theatre monde. Among the contingent were actor Lionel Barrymore, Emily Hapgood (wife of Harper’s editor Norman Hapgood), playwright Sidney Howard and his actress-wife, the stylish Clare Eames, and designer Robert Edmond Jones. Webster described Jones as a “tall, bony young man with a straggling beard.” Within twenty years, they would work together as director and designer in New York on the history-making production of Othello with Paul Robeson. In Venice among the glamorous people, Webster practiced her Italian and suffered severe anxieties over her unstylish appearance and lack of social skills. She felt childish, ignorant, and overweight. Nonetheless, the Howards were outgoing with their young friend and convinced her that she could accomplish whatever she set her mind to. Along the Grand Canal with water lapping against the sides of gondolas, “attainable mountains became visible” for the eighteen-year-old starting her apprenticeship as an actress.32 There were few schools for training actors in London in the early 1920s. Webster’s options included the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and the Central School for Speech Training and Dramatic Art, founded in 1906 by the eminent speech therapist and voice coach Elsie Fogerty, mainly for the teaching of poetic speech. In addition, there were a handful of smaller schools, usually run by actors, including the Italia Conti for stage children, Constance Benson’s school in Kensington, and the Etlinger Dramatic School run by May Whitty. May had taken over the management of the Etlinger in 1921, which had a reputation as a training ground for singers. May was employed to manage the school and to introduce new courses for training actors. There is no evidence that Peggy Webster was given a choice in her formal training. May Whitty enrolled her in the Etlinger where she studied dancing, singing, speech, and drama classes with Ben, May, and Kate Rorke. Teaching did not come easily to May Whitty. Her own training had been largely as an understudy to other ingenues, and she had no knowledge of improvisations and sense-memory exercises. She taught by rehearsing students in individual parts or in group scenes. In effect, she taught what she knew best: the interpretation of the playwright’s meaning through the lines the character spoke, and, according to Webster, she was a “stickler for the accurate speaking” of the lines. May stressed sincerity, sensibility, truth, andPage 23 → imagination with her students.33 As teachers, she and Kate Rorke were well paired. May had a horror of the old elocutionary style of speaking and taught the use of the voice in action. Rorke’s dictum was “Take care of the consonants and the vowels will take care of themselves.”34 May painstakingly warned her daughter against falling in love with her “beautiful voice” at the expense of inner truth. “Whenever you hear your beautiful voice making a beautiful noise,” she told her, “change it.”35 On one remarkably fortuitous day, a young actor by the name of Maurice Evans appeared to rent the Etlinger hall for an amateur society production of Shaw’s Major Barbara. He was four years older than Webster and working at the time for a music publisher. Once he struck a deal with May Whitty to rent the hall, he invited Webster to play Lady Britomart, the dowager in Major Barbara, thus launching her in a series of dowager parts opposite ingenues and juveniles twice her age. Evans’s version of his negotiations with May Whitty was somewhat different. May Whitty agreed to rent the hall to his group, the actor recalled, if he cast her daughter in the production.36 In any event, Maurice Evans got both the hall and a Lady Britomart in the same day, and a collaboration that

lasted almost forty years began that afternoon at the Etlinger. Evans featured himself as Cusins in the production, and Webster admired his performance as “crisp, cool, humorous, with the instinctive sense of timing which is born but almost never made.”37 Lady Britomart was a watershed role for Webster. While her age was appropriate, physically she was not the thin, fashionable ingenue who popped on stage and babbled winsomely through French windows. Moreover, the “slight cast in one eye” was clearly a handicap to her career as an actor. Given the fact that her parents were determined that she would have a stage career, it is difficult to understand why they had ignored for so long the cosmetic and physical handicap of their daughter’s myopia. May’s Christian Science belief in self-healing was one factor. Another factor was that as Webster began to perform in semiprofessional productions and charity concerts about London, her distorted eye was a noticeable handicap. At nineteen, she had the first of two successful operations and almost immediately got her “first, real, genuine, professional job,” as an ancient Greek, no less!38 The husband-and-wife team of Sybil Thorndike and Lewis T. Casson was appearing at the New Theatre in the London premiere of Saint Joan, a part that George Bernard Shaw had written for Thorndike. The Cassons invited the Websters to the dress rehearsal of a production that Webster ranked “as second in excitement only to her Peter Pan adventure.”39 Once again, the beauty and magic captivated her—the trumpets, the haunting lyricism ofPage 24 → the single oboe, and the curtain rising to reveal Charles Ricketts’s painted drops and the Shavian version of Joan of Arc. As the production settled into a long run, the Cassons announced that they would perform several special matinees of Euripides’ The Trojan Women with Sybil Thorndike in the role of Hecuba for which she was already celebrated. With corrected vision and newfound self-esteem, Webster wrote to Lewis Casson asking to audition for the chorus. He invited her to read for him in his dressing room between scenes for Saint Joan. Webster’s normal stage fright was intensified by Casson’s appearance in robes, wig, and tonsure the size of a dinner plate. Self-conscious about her weight, she wondered whether it was “essential that a Trojan woman be very starvedlooking, and whether I should tell him I would live on apples and coffee till the end of the run.” Webster auditioned with one of Phaedra’s speeches from Euripides’ Hippolytus that she had been rehearsing at the Etlinger; Casson declared that she had a “useful voice” and hired her at one guinea a performance—her first wage.40 The Casson-Thorndike company became Webster’s second training ground in her apprenticeship. Like Harley Granville Barker, with whom he had worked at the Royal Court Theatre, Lewis Casson was greatly influenced by English director William Poel’s work for the Elizabethan Stage Society between 1894 and 1905. Poel’s theories had an enormous influence on the modern staging of Shakespeare; he called for open stages, the unbroken playing of scenes, and the speaking of the texts unencumbered by the scenic effects so much in vogue at the turn of the century. He had also rebelled against the tradition of speaking verse in a slow, ponderous, and emphatic way. Instead, the text should be spoken rapidly with few heavy stresses, sometimes creating confusion for the audience. Casson followed Poel’s methods but with his own unerring sense of vocal pressure, tempo, and pitch, which resulted in clear and subtly expressive stage speech. On October 3, 1924, Webster appeared in Euripides’ The Trojan Women at the New Theatre as a chorus member with Sybil Thorndike as Hecuba and with Lewis Casson directing and playing both Poseidon and Talthybius. Observing Sybil Thorndike from the vantage point of the chorus, Webster expressed sorrow in later years over the loss of Thorndike’s magnificent performances as Saint Joan and Queen Hecuba as soon as the curtain came down. “Sometimes it seems to me like a dreadfully wasteful and wasted business, this acting of ours,” she reflected, “when performances like that go by forever. But this memory of them is the more precious.”41 After The Trojan Women closed following the two matinee performances, Webster returned to the Etlinger, but she also enrolled in history and economics classes at the University of London—the last instance of her formalPage 25 → education. Two months later, she got two jobs at once. The first was as a court lady in John Barrymore’s production of Hamlet at the Haymarket Theatre, coupled with a return engagement with the Cassons in Euripides’ Hippolytus at the Regent Theatre.

John Barrymore, a longtime friend of the Websters, arrived in London in January to present his acclaimed New York production of Hamlet. He was the uncontested star of the American theater, with Hamlet considered his greatest role. For the West End production, he retained Robert Edmond Jones’s scenery and costumes but cast British actors Constance Collier, Fay Compton, and Herbert Waring as Gertrude, Ophelia, and Claudius. Upon his arrival, Barrymore telephoned the Websters, and May invited him to dinner in their Bedford flat. Early in the evening he remarked to an embarrassed Margaret Webster that he had heard she had a good voice and could act. Over soup, he asked, “Would you like to be a Court lady in Hamlet ?” In the middle of the fish course, he added with a smile, “There are some lines too.”42 Webster did not believe that the great Barrymore was making a serious offer. His suggestion was probably an impulsive gesture to charm his hostess. Nonetheless, the next day Barrymore’s manager presented her with a letter of contract: This is to confirm that we have the pleasure in engaging you to “walk on” and play the part of “The Gentlewoman” in Hamlet at a salary of £3 (Three Pounds) a week of eight performances. In the event of more than eight performances being played in any one week you will receive for each additional performance one eighth of your weekly salary. If you will be good enough to confirm this, the interchange of letters will constitute a contract.43 She signed with Barrymore and the next day received a message from the Cassons asking her to play the leader of the chorus in Hippolytus. The two openings were less than a week apart. Webster was in a quandary. With great trepidation, she approached both managements in an effort to resolve the conflict. Each readily agreed that she could manage the simultaneous roles. Barrymore’s Hamlet, according to Webster’s eyewitness account, was by no means Horatio’s “sweet prince,” but glittering, lithe, and demonic like flashing steel. “He made all other Hamlets,” she said, “seem stodgy by comparison.”44 During rehearsals, Barrymore was courteous and charming, but after opening night he needed to fortify himself with champagne to get through eight performances a week. He drank steadily through each performancePage 26 → with his dresser waiting in the wings, glass in hand, whenever the actor made an exit. By the dueling scene, he was a menace. The several actors who successively played Laertes took to wearing hockey pads under their costumes to protect themselves from unrehearsed and unexpected feints and stabs. Despite Barrymore’s excesses, he was one of the great Hamlets. According to his youthful eyewitness, he brought to the part a tragic yearning, a terrible sense of waste and despair, and a great tenderness, especially in the scenes with Ophelia.45 Webster’s four and a half lines came in the fourth act. On opening night, she stood with Constance Collier and George Relph (as Horatio) waiting for the curtain to rise in blackness followed by a slow fade-in of lights. As Queen Gertrude, Collier said the first line of the scene, “I will not speak with her.” Webster started to respond—and the lights went out again. Collier whispered for Webster to wait. They stood in the dark for a few seconds, although it seemed to the young actress like ten minutes. “I will not speak with her,” Collier repeated, as though nothing had happened, and Webster spoke two of her four lines, beginning with, “She is importunate, indeed distract: / Her mood will needs be pitied.” “What would she have?” Collier asked, and Webster gave her abbreviated reply on Ophelia’s condition.46 Five days later, Webster was on another stage leading the chorus of Troezen women in their tribulations over the fates of Phaedra and Hippolytus. “By now,” she said, “I was not just a professional, I was a veteran.”47 Nonetheless, two minor parts do not make a notable stage career, no matter how celebrated the other performers. For the next ten years, Margaret Webster, the actress, would be molded in the crucible of the English repertory system.

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CHAPTER 2 SERIOUS BEGINNINGS Sometimes I think it is essential to begin by acting good plays badly in order to learn how to act bad plays well. —MARGARET WEBSTER Young actors, like Margaret Webster, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and Ralph Richardson who were just starting out in the London theater in the 1920s, usually found work in the stage societies and theatrical membership clubs that flourished as fringe groups along side London’s commercial theaters. The best known were the Incorporated Stage Society, the Fellowship of Players, the Phoenix Society, and the Play Actors. Almost any play of merit could receive some kind of trial production under the auspices of an independent theatrical group. They usually took place on the stages of West End theaters when they were dark, often in the middle of the set for a long-running play. New writers unable to get their plays staged commercially found opportunities among the theatrical clubs. Many well-known actors who wanted to act in unusual plays appeared in them. Young actors played nonpaying roles, or received one guinea for an appearance. In one instance, Webster played opposite the twenty-five-year-old Ralph Richardson in At Number Fifteen by Alma Brosnan at the Garrick Theatre for one performance. In present-day terms, these productions were largely nonpaying showcases for untried actors and new playwrights and staged as single performances on Sunday nights, sometimes adding a second performance on Monday afternoons. Miraculously, first-string London critics attended the club plays, and successful productions sometimes transferred to another West End theater.Page 28 → Several membership groups, like the Arts Theatre Club and the Gate Theatre, had their own theaters. It was not always easy to work in the theatrical clubs because they were cliqueridden, but the Webster/Whitty names opened doors for Webster, and she was not opposed to working without pay or for a minimal fee. In one season, Webster appeared in five showcase productions. Following the Barrymore Hamlet and the Casson-Thorndike Hippolytus, Webster filled her days by working with the Cassons in special matinees and giving public poetry readings. May Whitty broke a long hiatus by performing in a West End production of Frederick Lonsdale’s The Last of Mrs. Cheyney with Gladys Cooper and Gerald du Maurier at the St. James’s Theatre. A strikingly handsome actor with compelling power and charm, du Maurier had become the matinee idol of the day and was father to Daphne du Maurier, who in 1937 wrote the popular novel Rebecca. Du Maurier was often at May’s fashionable gatherings on Bedford Street. He became one of Webster’s favorite “uncles.” Meanwhile, Webster was vacillating between extreme shyness and iron determination to become Sybil Thorndike’s understudy in a touring production of Saint Joan. She auditioned for the Cassons, and, after several “interminable” weeks, a handwritten letter arrived from Sybil Thorndike. “Dear Peggy,” it began, “ AT LAST! You are engaged to understudy for St. Joan at £5 a week.” 1 Shaw himself attended rehearsals, and the tour opened in early September 1925 in Manchester. This was Webster’s first experience with a touring company. Little had changed in living and travel conditions since her parents’ days in the United States. In England’s northern industrial towns, the boardinghouses were located on shabby back streets, a streetcar or tram ride from the theater. Accommodations consisted of iron bedsteads with lumpy mattresses, little hot water or even indoor plumbing. Sitting rooms were filled with horsehair sofas and upholstered armchairs with broken springs. Landladies varied from the miserly who considered “chicken” too good for actors to the motherly whose nurturing was fondly remembered. The Saint Joan tour proceeded from Manchester to Edinburgh to Liverpool and Glasgow. Webster took her understudy position seriously, although she knew that no under study had ever gone on stage for Sybil Thorndike.

Nonetheless, she watched, learned, and loved Saint Joan with a passion. Until the Casson-Thorndike tour, Shaw’s play had not been outside of London, and provincial audiences adored it. One Birmingham critic summed up the event: “The greatest play of our greatest playwright with our greatest actress in her greatest part.”2 As the tour was ending, the Cassons were already planning a productionPage 29 → of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII to open in London at Christmas. Webster longed to play Anne Boleyn but was understudy to the small part of Patience. She accepted the assignment but not without disappointment and wounded pride.3 This time, she went on as Patience and played the show for several performances. As was the custom of the day, understudies filled in as court ladies and swelled crowd scenes, in this instance, Queen Katharine’s entourage. One of Webster’s costumes, designed by Charles Ricketts, was of dark brown cloth, very full and trimmed in black with a starched muslin collar and cap. “Like an old French wet-nurse,” Ricketts wrote on the costume sketch. Seeing his notation, Webster cringed: “I was twenty and it depressed me.”4 There were livelier and happier times with the Cassons as well. One of the newcomers to the company was a handsome young man with thick black curly hair, bright eyes, and heavy eyebrows. Laurence Olivier (soon to rival John Gielgud as one of the new rising young actors to watch) was also an understudy with a few lines in the baptism scene. He and Webster went to the Chelsea Arts Ball together, and he came to her twenty-first birthday party at the Bedford Street flat, where he met Jill Esmond, the actress Eva Moore’s daughter, whom he later married. To celebrate her twenty-first birthday, Ben and May gave Webster a limited edition of Saint Joan with color plates of Charles Ricketts’s designs. The actors signed the sketches, and the playwright signed the title page with, Mamie and Daddy are only the authors of your being; but I—ha ha!—am the author of your book. So I put your name in it, lest posterity should make any mistake, and also my own: thus—G. Bernard Shaw5 In mid-December, Webster appeared as a Page in the Old English Nativity Play staged at Daly’s Theatre by the Pioneer Players. Edith Craig created the troupe in 1911 to put on plays of ideas—political, social, feminist—that were banned from public performance by the Theatres Act of 1843, which empowered the lord chamberlain to trim or ban plays “whenever he shall be of the opinion that it is fitting for the Preservation of Good Manners, Decorum, or of the Public Peace.” Out of loyalty to Edith Craig, Webster appeared in the nativity play with Fay Compton as Mary, Viola Tree as Third Angel, John Gielgud as Second Shepherd, and Raymond Massey as Third Soldier. Children and assorted animals created mayhem, and Edith Craig and her lesbian friends Christopher St. John and Clare (Tony) Atwood, disguised as monks, tried to create a semblance of order onstage. Gielgud, Edith Craig’s cousin, found the experience “the worst kind of bungled school production.”6 Page 30 → Nineteen twenty-six was a decisive year for Margaret Webster. Having just turned twenty-one—May Whitty’s magical year for the start of a career—Webster perceived “time’s winged chariot” hovering over her career. As dearly as she loved the Cassons, she determined that she required some “real, hard work.” She had played in Henry VIII for 127 performances and had appeared as an extra for one performance in a showcase of Pericles on the West End. She made up her mind that a change was in order. Webster proceeded to write to a number of managers and finally got an interview with Charles Macdona, who managed a semipermanent touring company (the Macdona Players) that played in true repertory, alternating plays from performance to performance. Moreover, he held the touring rights to almost all of George Bernard Shaw’s plays. Webster had wanted hard work and she got it as a repertory actress in Macdona’s company. The idea of repertory

was relatively new in Britain, having been pioneered by Harley Granville Barker during his celebrated 1904–7 seasons at the Court Theatre. Reacting against the lack of intellectually challenging work for actors, Barker and Vedrenne presented a variety of new plays by Ibsen, Galsworthy, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, and Shaw for a few matinees. If successful, these “noncommercial” plays then moved to the evening repertoire, where they alternated with others. Inspired by Barker’s work, Annie Horniman opened the first regional repertory theater in 1908 in Manchester. Others soon followed in Liverpool, Glasgow, and Birmingham, where Barry Jackson built the first playhouse in 1913 to house the Birmingham Repertory Company. These theaters alternated plays in programs that included poetic drama, European plays, and unusual Shakespeare productions. These cities with established reputations for welcoming repertory theater were favorite stops on the routes of touring repertory companies, such as the Macdona Players. Macdona’s company began by performing six plays, but by the time the nine-month tour ended, the company was performing eighteen. In a single week early in the tour, the company performed Man and Superman, Pygmalion, The Doctor’s Dilemma, You Never Can Tell, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession. To enlarge the repertoire, Macdona added Arms and the Man, Candida, Major Barbara, The Devil’s Disciple, The Philanderer, Widowers’ Houses, John Bull’s Other Island, and even The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Macdona always adjusted the order of preference to the popularity of the plays at the box office. Webster wryly observed that Charles Macdona was not a man to let anything come between him and the box office.7 Webster herself played thirteen roles (some of them leads) and under studied twenty others. Specializing in dowager parts (she was convincedPage 31 → that Macdona hired her at the outset to play Lady Britomart), she described her transformations with “nose-putty and other delights.” “The local critic thinks I ‘made a capital show, ’ but Stanislavsky and I know better,” she said. “My performance was NOT conspicuous by its artistic truth, being, in fact, a desperate bluff that would have taken in nobody but a dramatic critic.”8 In her letters to May and Ben describing her touring experiences, Webster’s chronic self-criticism shines through: “ John Bull went quite well last night. I wasn’t very good—I’ve rehearsed much better,” or “I think I can improve 100% on last night’s performance.” On Louka in Arms and the Man she complained, “I still can’t get the walk I want”; Violet in Man and Super man is still “too heavy”; Blanche in Widowers’ Houses is “frightfully difficult—I can’t see myself in it at all”; and as Julia in The Philanderer she was “simply dreadful.”9 In addition to her sense of inadequacy, costumes were another recurring sore spot. Most stock companies performed in modern dress supplied by the management, in the case of the Macdona Players, with little attention to fashion, style, or appropriateness. Webster reported to May that “Mac’s things are the most awful junk. How he could imagine such terrible eye-sores could be worn on stage, I don’t know.”10 Moreover, all of Webster’s characters seemed to wear hats. She eventually discarded Macdona’s and bought her own hats without any hope that she would be reimbursed or that her salary would be raised to compensate her. She was correct. The general strike of 1926 that swept England and lasted for nine days in May stranded the Macdona Players in the middle of the industrial north. They were in Huddersfield, a town located between Manchester and Leeds. The strike started with the coal-miners and quickly spread to all forms of transportation, heavy industry, the building and printing trades, and the gas and electrical workers. During the strike there was no public transportation and no newspapers, banks were closed, and electricity was problematic. Since the company was stranded anyway, they decided to perform. They had little hope that anyone would come to the theater in the middle of the turmoil. They were surprised when the striking mill hands thronged to the theater to see a four-hour uncut performance of Man and Superman complete with the Hell scene. Webster described the theater as “jammed to the rafters with the best audience we had ever played to.”11 By the time the company was ready to leave Huddersfield, the strike had ended in failure, the power of the unions temporarily broken by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

The Macdona tour finally ended in a suburban theater in London with little critical notice. Webster rallied her spirits and put the best face possiblePage 32 → on the nine-month experience that had ended with the disappointing reception. Rationalizing the merits of her undertaking, she reflected, “The speaking of Shaw’s prose is an education in itself.” It is really difficult for an actor with any ear for language to misplace a word, or even a comma; the adjectives are so unerringly chosen, the rhythm so exact and cohesive that any inaccuracy jolts a whole speech, like a missing cog in a precision machine.12 The greater task was making flesh and blood out of Shaw’s women, many of whom were little more than mouthpieces for the playwright and “fiendishly unreal,” in Webster’s estimation. Speaking of her craft, Webster remarked that it was essential to find the heart and blood of those characters. “It is the kind of complementary task,” she said, “which the actor must perform out of his own imagination and humanity.”13 The lead actor and director of the Macdona Players, Esmé Percy, known for his versatility and brilliance in Shavian comedy, helped her in this task. A friend of George Bernard Shaw, Percy was a recognized authority on the playwright’s work. Webster credited Esmé Percy with teaching her how to play Shavian comedy. She observed him twist and juggle Shaw’s enormously long speeches with brilliant accuracy and speed and with crystal-clear enunciation, all the while retaining the thought within the lines. Under his tutelage, Webster learned the art of translating mannerisms into her own truth. “Sometimes I think it is essential,” she concluded, “to begin by acting good plays badly in order to learn how to act bad plays well.”14 From the Macdona Players she returned, like the perennial homing pigeon, to London and to the Cassons to play the gentlewoman in Macbeth for seventy-four performances at the Prince’s Theatre. Though the production was undistinguished and plagued by the disasters traditionally attendant upon “The Scottish Play” (the superstition is that if you pronounce the true title of the play in the theater, bad things will happen to the production), she received her first press notices in a major London newspaper for the small part of the gentlewoman. She had been using “Peggy Webster” as her stage name, but a letter from St. John Ervine, the Irish playwright and distinguished critic for the London Observer, convinced her to change it. This is a matter which I meant to write you about before. I want you to consider it very seriously. Please don’t call yourself PEGGY Webster on playbills. Margaret Webster, please, there. This really is important and you can make the change now, but if you leave it for a year or two you won’t be able to change it: you’ll be too well known by it…. The choicePage 33 → of a name for an actor or actress is extremely important, and it must be one which, while easy to say and remember, is also distinctive. It must not suggest diminutiveness or flippancy or a lighter atmosphere than the one in which you are going to shine …I’m not trying to be funny or clever about this. I thought your Gentlewoman in Macbeth was a fine one. You have got character and personality and brains—and I do not want you to handicap yourself unnecessarily by using a name—a very nice name—which is not quite suitable to the sort of career in the theatre that you are now beginning.15 It is curious that neither her parents nor their friends in the profession discussed a professional name with the young actress. Although the careers of Peggy Ashcroft and Maggie Smith were to disapprove Ervine’s contention, it was not possible for a fledgling actress to ignore the suggestion of a distinguished critic. Henceforth, the name of Peggy Webster disappeared from the playbills and the more formal “Margaret Webster” took its place. Under her new name, Webster appeared with the Oxford Players, a repertory company founded by J. B. Fagan as part of the second wave of repertory theaters. Born in Northern Ireland, James Bernard Fagan, a large, gentle man, made his reputation in London as an actor, playwright, manager, and producer. Under his management of the Court Theatre on Sloane Square, he staged the first production of Shaw’s Heartbreak House in 1918 and a pioneering series of Shakespearean productions. He founded the Oxford Playhouse in 1923 in a late Victorian redbrick building in north Oxford (now the Oxford Language Centre), where, between 1923 and 1931, he produced an ambitious repertoire of plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, John Millington Synge, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. The main audience was comprised of devoted undergraduates and

townspeople. The aspiring playwright Emlyn Williams, an undergraduate at the time, rejoiced in the education that the “three-year Fagan course in Drama, three shillings at a time” offered undergraduates.16 Webster appeared with the Oxford Players in 1927. At the time she joined the repertory company, Fagan was known as a kindly, lovable, and cultured gentleman who fostered many young actors of promise, notably John Gielgud, Flora Robson, Glen Byam Shaw, Reginald Denham, and Tyrone Guthrie. The schedule was grueling. The company presented a new play every Monday, gave seven performances a week, and rehearsed during the day. Often the productions were raw and unpolished on the first night, but they made up for their deficiencies with vitality and gusto. Fagan provided Webster with her first role in a play by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. She played the lovelorn Sonya in Uncle Vanya andPage 34 → cheerfully admitted that for the privilege of playing Sonya for one week she would have agreed to “carry a spear for six months.”17 Anton Chekhov was essentially a new playwright for British audiences. His plays had been introduced to the reading public in the Constance Garnett translations, but had not found acceptance on stage until Fagan staged The Cherry Orchard at Hammersmith’s Lyric Theatre with an augmented Oxford Players company in 1925. Webster saw this production and found it a touching mix of laughter and tears, but essentially more “Irish than Russian.”18 The theatrical scene in London’s suburbs in the mid-1920s was vastly different from the West End. Such pioneers as Nigel Playfair, Theodore Komissarjevsky, and Peter Godfrey, despairing of the West End’s commercialism, opened small, newly converted theaters in the suburbs. They staged little-produced modern works by O’Casey, Pirandello, O’Neill, Joyce, Kaiser, and Cocteau, along with lesser-known Russian plays by Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky. There were also a number of revivals of Restoration and eighteenth-century plays, including Nigel Playfair’s production of The Beggar’s Opera at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith that ran for 1,463 performances. These theaters were all converted spaces. The Lyric had been a furniture store, the small Barnes Theatre in Church Road was a former cinema, and the Everyman in Hampstead was a former drill hall. Enthusiastic audiences packed these small theaters and mainstream critics came to assess the work. Theodore Komisarjevsky came to Chekhov’s plays (and to England) with remarkable credentials. His father had worked with Stanislavski and published The Creative Actor and the Stanislavsky Theory in 1916. His half sister, Vera Komisarjevsky, created the role of Nina in the disastrous first production of Chekhov’s The Seagull in St. Petersburg. Later, she started a theater there and appointed Vsevelod Meyerhold and then Komisarjevsky as artistic directors. Much admired as a producer of plays and operas, Komisarjevsky eventually became director of the prestigious State and Imperial Theatres in Moscow. Arriving in England in 1919, he soon made his mark as the foremost interpreter of Chekhov’s plays. In 1921, he staged Uncle Vanya at the Court for Fagan, followed by Ivanov for the Stage Society, and the first English production of The Three Sisters at the 250-seat Barnes Theatre with John Gielgud as Baron Tusenbach and with Mary Sheridan, Margaret Swallow, and Beatrix Thomson as the sisters longing to return to Moscow. These productions were revelations of tenderness and humor for the twenty-year-old Margaret Webster. The minimal production values, enforced by limited budgets and small stages, were new and startling. ThePage 35 → use of a single pool of light and deep shadows with the orchestrated sounds and silences of the Chekhov text were effects unknown to London audiences. The actors performed as an ensemble, achieving a selflessness and unity unknown to the stock companies of the day. “I have seen—and done—much Chekhov since,” Webster said of The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, “but little that excelled his.”19 The production standards of the Oxford Player’s Uncle Vanya were another matter. In the cast with Webster were newcomers Alan Webb and Glen Byam Shaw, but Fagan gave the production only perfunctory attention. There was an overwhelming tendency toward “gloom” since the actors did not understand Chekhov’s humor nor how to combine it with his humanity. “We were all abysmally sorry for ourselves, which is a fatal sin in the theatre, and

especially with young audiences,” Webster remarked.20 The Oxford undergraduates jeered at Fagan’s caricature of Russian gloom played at a funereal pace. Following the opening, Webster denigrated her work as Sonya: I was very fed up with myself. It’s so delicate. You either just get it or just miss it—”the little less and what worlds away.” I didn’t play that last speech for its full value—chiefly because I was overanxious I think.21 It would be twelve years before Webster would again have the opportunity to find the humanity and humor within another Chekhov character; this next time, she would give a triumphant performance as Masha in The Seagull opposite Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, America’s most celebrated theatrical couple. At Oxford, Fagan’s company also performed plays by James M. Barrie, August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw, and a new play by former Oxford undergraduate Emlyn Williams. The usual repertory conditions prevailed: limited rehearsals on an unheated stage with actors in states of chronic fatigue. In the middle of the season, as was customary, the Oxford Players exchanged stages with the rival Cambridge Festival Theatre. During the changeover, Webster encountered Maurice Evans, who was performing with the Cambridge troupe. He warned his friend that she would be playing in an “extraordinary” theater. Macdona’s company found themselves playing Uncle Vanya in renovated space formerly occupied by the Salvation Army. Over the stage door hung a lantern with the inscription “Jesus Only.” Inside, Terence Gray, who established the Cambridge troupe in 1926, had redesigned the space for avant-garde productions. He eliminated the proscenium arch, curtain, and orchestra pit in imitation of Jacques Copeau’s innovationPage 36 → at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris. He installed a semicircular plaster cyclorama, sunken footlights, stairs curving from the stage to the orchestra floor, and various arches, columns, and pillars. His avowed policy was to undermine realistic acting and production elements in the British theater. Toward this end, his company performed Romeo and Juliet in flamenco style costumes and Twelfth Night with actors on roller skates. Fagan’s efforts were a study in contrast, as his aim at the Oxford Playhouse was to present plays suited to the stage (rather than to study them) and to provide scope for the art of acting.22 Nonetheless, Fagan’s three walls of makeshift scenery for Uncle Vanya appeared ridiculous in the Cambridge Festival Theatre. As a result, the company performed abominably and the undergraduates duly roasted them. The company languished and finally returned to London at the close of the season. While in Oxford, Fagan produced a new play by Emlyn Williams, Full Moon. It was overly poetic, and the underrehearsed company did not perform the verse well, but they did launch the Welsh playwright who would write A Murder Has Been Arranged (1930), The Late Christopher Bean (1933), and Night Must Fall (1935) in which May Whitty starred on stage in London and New York and in the Hollywood film. His best and most popular play, The Corn Is Green, written in 1938, a sentimental story of an English schoolteacher whose faith lifts a Welsh boy from the coal mines into Oxford, became a vehicle for Sybil Thorndike as Miss Moffat with Emlyn Williams as the young Welsh miner. Ethel Barrymore played the role on Broadway in 1940 to auspicious reviews, and Eva Le Gallienne would again make Miss Moffat a triumphant role during the late 1940s. The confluences of Webster’s life as a result of these serious theatrical beginnings in the late 1920s—namely, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, John Barrymore, Lewis Casson, Sybil Thorndike, Charles Macdona, J. B. Fagan, Emlyn Williams, and Maurice Evans—were as yet unknown to her as she returned to London to take up her wellestablished routine. The rhythms of Webster’s life as she left the Bedford flat each morning seemed fixed. Intense rehearsing and performing preceded a period of inactivity relieved only by Sunday or Monday showcases and weekly auditions. This period of unemployment lasted almost a year, and she despaired that her career was finished. Her gloom was somewhat mitigated by Ben and May’s purchase of a car, which they parked on the brick paving at the front door to their building. Webster had lusted after a car and was cheered by the prospect of driving about London on

various errands. In one sense, she was experiencing the plight of many children of famous parents. Few such children would agree that it is a great help and wonderfulPage 37 → shortcut to be the child (and only daughter) of famous parents. The fact that parents and child were in the same profession was a double-edged sword. While doors opened that might otherwise have remained closed, interviews and auditions were often perfunctory, ending with a dismissive, “Give my love to your mother and father.” Moreover, some employers were reluctant to take a chance on the child of well-known parents because she might have to be fired, creating professional and personal conflicts with those parents. Many managers took the easy way out and wrote a polite note to the applicant saying that the part had already been cast. No parental influence was exerted when in 1928 Webster joined the Ben Greet Shakespeare Company for its “pastoral tour” of English towns, villages, and playing fields. On a single afternoon Webster jumped from languid inactivity into Viola in Twelfth Night for a matinee performance and Portia in The Merchant of Venice that same evening. Forty years earlier May Whitty had worked for Ben Greet, known to his coworkers as “B. G.,” and Sybil Thorndike had begun her career in his company. Best known for his open-air performances, he toured Shakespeare’s plays in rural England and in the United States before the First World War; pioneered Shakespeare as a director at the Old Vic, where, between 1915 and 1918, he produced twenty-four plays by Shakespeare; and managed some of the early summer festivals at Stratford-on-Avon. He was knighted in 1929. When Webster joined the pastoral tour, Greet was an elderly man of benevolent appearance with white hair and blue eyes and of cantankerous disposition. He was still playing Shylock, Malvolio, Prospero, and Touchstone, but his latter-day talents were as a manager, not as an actor. Greet’s pastoral tour was a six-week affair. He had produced the plays for so long that he now assumed a laissezfaire attitude, not toward Shakespeare’s texts, but toward the actors and the productions. He assumed that the actors would get the shows on under any conditions. The company performed outdoors (hence, “pastoral”), adapting to local conditions. The company played in rose gardens and on soccer fields; they made entrances down fire escapes, across walls, through rose beds and rain-drenched pastures. They improvised according to the weather. A Merry Wives of Windsor scheduled for the lawns of Lady Warwick’s house in Essex would wind up on a rainy day in the village hall in front of a backdrop depicting the Bay of Naples. Of Shakespeare’s plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and The Tempest (advertised by the town crier as The Tempter) worked best al fresco, but even The Tempest could not survive a rainstorm in the middle of a soccer field. The rain-soaked goddesses, with Webster as Ceres, made their way across uncut grass to the stage area, yelling their linesPage 38 → as violent gusts blew away the pianist’s sheet music. Having finished their song of blessing, the goddesses staggered away, accompanied by a rain soaked Ferdinand and Miranda. Despite the mud and muddle, Webster enjoyed every minute of the six weeks. Webster returned to London in the borrowed family car with her makeup still intact from a matinee performance in Bath. Dirty, disheveled, and tired, she rang the front door bell at 31 Bedford Street and was greeted by Sir Gerald du Maurier replete in white tie and tails. May was giving one of her many parties for the theatre monde. The following year Webster played only occasionally for Ben Greet, most often indoors and for school audiences. As had become his custom, Greet never notified an actor until two days before the performance and was disgruntled if someone had another commitment. With her customary resiliency, Webster had learned valuable lessons from Greet. “Shakespeare was bread, breathing, and a cup of tea” to him. He had no time for “fancy theories, farfetched analogies, scholarly discussions or gimmickry.” Shakespeare had written the plays and he played them; it was as simple as that. He was unaffected by “revolutions” in stage production or design because of the peculiar conditions of his own.23 Moreover, he insisted on performances without affectation. Actors were given a single instruction: to reach

audiences, to make contact and hold it. “Sometimes they did it by fair means and sometimes by foul,” Webster recalled, “but they did it and they did it with and through the lines alone.”24 The greatest reward of Webster’s apprenticeship with Ben Greet was his emphasis on trusting Shakespeare’s verse. However, she concluded that to stay with the company would be artistically dangerous. In the open air, actors took shortcuts to get out of the sun or the rain, shouted to be heard in gales, and relied upon mechanical stage business. Nevertheless, her praise for her apprenticeship with England’s last actor-manager was unqualified: “But for learning the basic rules and the basic values, for strengthening the muscles with sheer slam-bang honest exercise it was tremendous.”25 Each of these fledgling experiences was another building block in her career. Through Ben Greet, Webster met John Wyse, a handsome and gifted juvenile leading actor in the company, who had many ambitions and schemes to advance his career. Webster became his frequent and overworked partner in numerous enterprises. Together, they set out to found a theater in London for poetic drama and to produce the works of Sophocles, John Milton, Paul Claudel, and others. With no money or memberships forPage 39 → a theatrical club, they rented an antique shop and enlisted two remarkable people—Dame Ninette de Valois, a choreographer for the Old Vic’s ballet company who had studied with Sergei Diaghilev’s company, and Esmé Church, the Old Vic’s leading actress who, in Webster’s estimation, was a greatly underrated director. Wyse’s energetic endeavors afforded Webster the opportunity to engage in all aspects of running a small, unprofitable theater. She learned the business of marketing; selling tickets; writing press releases; and meeting the myriad backstage demands for suitable costumes, furniture, and properties. Most important, she played a saucy maid’s role in one of Wyse’s productions that led to the Haymarket Theatre and the Old Vic. In this period of varied activity, Webster also played the small part of Alberta in a double bill of two Spanish plays, The Lady from Alfaqueque and Fortunato, by the Quintero brothers, Serafín and Joaquín Alvarez, for thirtytwo performances at the Court Theatre. This engagement brought her into contact with the handsome young actor John Gielgud and with Harley Granville Barker, the renowned actor, director, and Shakespearean scholar who had translated the Quintero plays into English. Webster had grown up with the mystique of Barker’s name in the Webster household, but her keen anticipation of working with the celebrated director quickly diminished when she realized that Barker in the role of translator only paid “lofty visits” to occasional rehearsals. Harley Granville Barker had made stage history as an actor, director, and playwright. In 1904, his partnership with J. E. Vedrenne at the Court Theatre introduced plays by Euripides, Maeterlinck, Schnitzler, Hauptmann, Galsworthy, Ibsen, Shaw, and his own Voysey Inheritance to British audiences. A few years later, he was responsible for epoch-making productions of The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Savoy Theatre. His approach to staging Shakespeare was, like Lewis T. Casson’s, influenced by his experiences working with William Poel, the guiding spirit of the Elizabethan Stage Society at the turn of the century. Poel’s simplified staging, ensemble productions, and methods of speaking the text with swiftness and intelligence, as emulated by Barker, Casson, and Harcourt Williams, likewise influenced a later generation of directors, including John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Tyrone Guthrie, and Margaret Webster. At the height of his career, Harley Granville Barker was persuaded by his second wife, the American writer Helen Huntington, to withdraw from the theater and concentrate on writing. The theater world was shocked by what many saw as desertion and betrayal. Nonetheless, the result was the celebrated five-volume Prefaces to Shakespeare with their brilliant mix of scholarshipPage 40 → and practical theatrical knowledge that influenced generations of actors and directors, including Webster in Shakespeare without Tears some twenty years later. In addition to the Prefaces, Barker and his wife turned to translating the plays of Martínez Sierra and the Quintero brothers, whose farces and gentle comedies enjoyed a brief vogue in England as a result. By the time Webster crossed paths with Barker in The Lady from Alfaqueque, a play about an elderly provincial woman living in exile in Madrid who consoled herself by making cakes and candies from authentic Alfaquequean recipes, he was legendary but no longer actively staging plays. Nonetheless, he retained his considerable magnetism, charm, and

prodigious intellect. Webster provided a firsthand account of Barker’s arrival at rehearsals, including the paralyzing sense of awe that descended on the rehearsal in his presence. He behaved as though he were on the lecture circuit, delivering pontifical lectures on the history of the drama, on psychology, on Spanish literature, customs, and architecture. Afterward, he would disappear for a week or more, leaving the play in the hands of director and designer James Whale, who had put together a company that included John Gielgud, Anthony Ireland, Virginia Isham, and Margaret Webster. Barker concentrated on small sections of the plays, which he rehearsed again and again, leaving the major scenes untouched. Webster’s disappointment was keen. The legendary man worked with her on one of her entrances, “whose only purpose was to build up Gielgud’s entrance.” Barker told her that her entrance was “right” and needed no more “force,” but that it should have “treble the amount of intention.” Then, according to Webster, he would repeat the story of the play, the antecedent lives of the characters, and all the relevant circumstances. She readily admitted that she did not know what more she could possibly “intend,” and, she never learned from Barker why she was deficient in “intention.” Out of the experience, she concluded, “I have thought, then and since, that it should have been part of the director’s business to tell me.”26 Webster’s description of Barker at work is one of the few eyewitness accounts from actors of the period. In a letter to May Whitty, who was on tour, Webster wrote, He has succeeded in breaking up all the old stuff but not in supplying a new version except in the patches he’s taken in detail. Everyone is playing their parts as about six different people—all very convinced that what Barker says must be good and right, but thoroughly upset as to quite what they’re meant to be doing, and all holding their heads and calling on thePage 41 → Almighty. To me there is an awfully disjointed feeling as if none of the characters have quite come alive. This is fatal …as the play depends entirely on its tenderness and humanity.27 In contrast to Webster’s youthful skepticism, John Gielgud found Barker a revelation during his fleeting visits: “He rehearsed us for about two hours,” Gielgud said, “changed nearly every move and arrangement of the stage, acted, criticized, advised, in an easy flow of practical efficiency, never stopping for a moment.” Though his rapidfire suggestions were “obviously and irrefutably right,” the actors had no opportunity to rehearse them.28 Nonetheless, Gielgud, like Webster, was making mental notes on the director’s craft. Barker taught Webster a valuable lesson: “it is no good being a fine director in bits or too late. Never, I thought, be a last-minute Johnny.”29 Webster would work with two other congenial and hardworking directors—the established Auriol Lee and the less experienced John Wyse—before experiencing the fine directorial hand of Harcourt Williams in a full season at the Old Vic. Webster’s varied stage experiences were leading her toward the premier repertory company of the day—the Old Vic on Waterloo Road. Through the stage societies and independent theaters, she appeared in unpaid performances of The Wandering Jew, The Price, The Warden, At Fifteen, Maya, and The Scarlet Pimpernel with some of London’s most distinguished actors, including Edith Evans, Gerald du Maurier, Frank Vosper, Cedric Hard wicke, Fay Compton, and Ben Webster. It was an “unsalaried” production of an eighteenth-century comedy, The Clandestine Marriage by George Colman and David Garrick, that drew Webster one step closer to employment with the Old Vic. Since Webster’s uncle Tom Wise had died that year in the United States, her aunt Gretchen Wise, who had played opposite John Barrymore in Richard III, was now living in the family flat on Bedford Street while Ben and May were on tour in South Africa. Gretchen had known the British director Auriol Lee for many years, and Lee offered her friend a part in a revival she was staging. One of the few women directors of the day, Auriol Lee, best remembered for her direction of the early John Van Druten plays, cast Gretchen and then Webster in the revival of The Clandestine Marriage at the Arts Theatre for six performances. Unlike Harley Granville Barker, Auriol Lee

was neither remote nor pontifical but animated, vivid, bawdy, and democratic. She called everyone “Ducks.” The Clandestine Marriage was Webster’s first attempt at playing eighteenth-century comedy, “that most difficult of all acting techniques.” ShePage 42 → played the pert young Betty, caught up in the intrigues of the elderly Sir John Ogleby, who leers at the young women in this satire on human vanity. Webster reported that the acting styles varied to an alarming degree, the sets were too genteel, and the period music was provided by an “erudite elderly spinster and her ladylike group of relatives performing on assorted stringed instruments.”30 Gretchen Wise and Webster emerged from this experience of mismatched acting styles, missed cues, and misplaced music to plunge into two performances of another ill-fated revival of John Vanbrugh’s eighteenthcentury comedy The Confederacy. Gretchen played an elderly “female dragon,” and Webster played the plot’s “Miss Fix-it,” an irrepressibly talkative character. Flippanta became Webster’s entrée into the most important job of her early career. The overoptimistic John Wyse, who staged The Confederacy for two performances, calculated production expenses at fifty pounds; the hall had 120 seats, so all would be well. This was not the case. Expenses trebled, and Webster pledged her savings from the Ben Greet tour, thereby establishing a fiscal pattern that she was often to repeat. In their naive optimism, they neglected to take into account the unsuitable costumes and wigs from the costume-rental firm. Wyse had the women’s costumes remade. They begged and borrowed furniture, draperies, and properties. Webster prepared press releases, manned the box office, and invited managers and agents. When the stage electrician could not work the lights, Webster made a mental note to “learn about lights.” With the exception of the redoubtable Lilian Baylis, manager of the Old Vic, few managers or directors attended the performances. Much to Webster’s dismay, Baylis came backstage and exclaimed in her famously idiosyncratic style of speaking: “Hulloh, dear—long part, dear—lot’s to do—where’s dear Nell Carter?—such a good actress—hasn’t got enough.” Webster assumed that the Old Vic manager had dismissed her efforts and fell into agonies of remorse over her “terrible” performance. “It’s no good,” she wailed, “ I KNOW. It was a long way the most difficult comedy part I’ve ever played and I fear definitely beyond me.”31 Not even a paid role in a revival of James M. Barrie’s Quality Street at the Haymarket Theatre consoled her. Webster played the small part of the genteel Miss Fanny Willoughby and understudied Hilda Trevelyan—her adored Wendy of twenty-five years earlier—who played the servant Patty. As Trevelyan’s understudy, Webster despaired that bouncing maids were “evidently her destiny.”32 At the Haymarket, formerly managed by her great-grandfather, all was order and civility. The actors were treated as guests, and the theater’s housekeeperPage 43 → served them tea from a silver teapot on a Chippendale table in the greenroom. The stage was completely set with furniture and properties for rehearsals. The playwright sat in the orchestra stalls smoking his pipe with hat pulled down to his nose and his muffler up to his ears. With the close of Quality Street after seventy performances, Webster made the customary rounds of agents’ offices seeking work. She filled her days by giving her first lecture on Shakespeare to a women’s group in a Hampshire village and tutoring the two Casson daughters, Mary and Ann, in French and mathematics. Lewis Casson urged her to play the chorus leader for several weeks in Euripides’ Medea that he and Sybil Thorndike were performing as a double bill with Jane Clegg, written by critic St. John Ervine. Once again, Webster put on the robes of an ancient Greek and joined the chorus. Then the miracle happened. Lilian Baylis and Harcourt Williams offered a place in the Old Vic Company for the 1929–30 season. Webster would play Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice, Audrey in As You Like It, the duchess of York in Richard II, Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Toinette in Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid. In a roundabout way, the bouncing maid Flippanta in The Confederacy was Webster’s entrée into the Old Vic. Harcourt Williams, who had toured with Ellen Terry and Henry Irving and been in plays by Ibsen, Shaw, and Barker, was now director at the Old Vic. He was having difficulty finding an actress to play Toinette, Molière’s

saucy maid. Stage directors are reputed to have long memories for an actor’s bits and business, and he remembered Webster’s performance in The Confederacy. Indeed, the theater’s maxim, “There are no small parts,” held true. Assisted by the role of Flippanta, Webster emerged from the chaotic obscurity of provincial touring and makeshift showcases onto the stage of the prestigious Old Vic. The year was 1929 and she was twenty-four.

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CHAPTER 3 THE OLD VIC AND THE WEST END Never mind, dear. You’ll be back. —LILIAN BAYLIS With the exception of new plays by George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, and J. B. Priestley, British commercial theater of the 1920s was strangely insulated from the social changes taking place in the postwar years. An industrial-technological society was advancing toward new benefits of wealth, transportation, and communication, while at the same time evolving a subculture of unemployment, poverty, crime, and substance abuse. Yet the commercial theater mirrored a familiar Victorian world. Margaret Webster’s life also remained apart from her postwar generation and the changing times. During the turbulent 1920s, Webster continued to live with her parents and associate with their friends and other residents on Bedford Street. She had few friends her own age other than the enterprising John Wyse and actors appearing with her in the club plays. In contrast to the bright, sophisticated set of young people with their interminable parties, jazz, and nightclubs memorialized in novels and plays by Evelyn Waugh and Noël Coward, Webster remained a child of her parents’ Victorian world. She did not engage in the sexual experimentations and other indulgences of her postwar generation. Moreover, she continued to be caught up in the liquid days of a theater content to offer revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and old plays by James M. Barrie (Quality Street), J. Hartley Manners (Peg O’My Heart), and A. A. Milne (Mr. Pim Passes By), along with other prewar writers,Page 45 → including George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, and Somerset Maugham. Lilian Baylis’s invitation to work at the Old Vic with the leading young actors of her generation miraculously interrupted Webster’s stolid career of maid’s roles, dowager parts, and ancient Greeks. She was thrust into performing Shakespeare’s plays in repertory under the capable direction of Harcourt Williams. Baylis’s devotion to Shakespeare’s plays proved fortuitous for the Old Vic on Waterloo Road. Unlike most of the popular West End dramatists, Shakespeare touched the modern world from the distance of language, historical background, and subjects of earlier political cataclysms. Audiences were enthralled, as they are today, by the familiar tenor of Shakespeare’s time, and the Old Vic in 1929 was a theatrical haven dominated by twin pillars: Lilian Baylis and William Shakespeare. The London-born Lilian Baylis had interrupted a musical career in South Africa in 1897 to return to England and assist her aunt, Emma Cons, in the management of a temperance hall called the Royal Victoria Coffee and Music Hall in the old Royal Victoria Theatre (originally the Royal Coburg) on Waterloo Road. Between them, aunt and niece managed the theater for sixty years. Without consciously seeking to do so, Emma Cons and Lilian Baylis used the Old Vic as the foundation stone on which the nation’s noncommercial opera, ballet, and theater companies were eventually built.1 Upon Emma Cons’s death in 1912, Lilian Baylis, at age twenty-five, became the sole manager and lessee of the Old Vic. By 1923, she had firmly established the theater as a home for opera on Thursdays and Saturdays, and for Shakespeare on Wednesdays, Fridays, and matinee days. Also by that year, she had produced all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays for what was then a largely working-class audience of Shakespearean enthusiasts. Some have viewed Lilian Baylis’s strength as that of a deeply religious Victorian spinster (she was a devout Anglican) who found an outlet for her urges to do good for the underprivileged in cultural fields, whereas likeminded ladies got their fulfillment in the soup kitchens of the Salvation Army. Others have found answers in the relationship between aunt and niece, as independent women with strong moral convictions and a love of music. There was also a strong bond between them as women managing their own lives and careers in the face of male

prejudice. Emma Cons had suffered persecution and humiliation from her male coworkers in her earlier efforts to work as a graphic artist. During her rule at the Royal Victoria Coffee and Music Hall, she changed the role of women within the four walls. Lilian Baylis was five feet, four inches tall, somewhat thickset, with brown hair and eyes, and a crooked smile. She wore round spectacles,Page 46 → walked with the light movement of a trained dancer, and had an individual turn of phrase. She reigned in a stuffy little office where she sat entrenched behind a large rolltop desk surrounded by photographs, vases of flowers, numerous cups of tea, and two small dogs, long tangled-haired creatures resembling shapeless mops. Her obstinacy, penny-pinching, and succinct quips were legendary. Webster said that it was impossible to “exaggerate Lilian.”2 She once received a visit from Queen Mary and pointed out the portrait of Emma Cons that hung in the foyer. Turning to the smaller portrait of King George V, she explained, “That’s your dear husband, and that’s Aunt Emma. She’s larger, but then she did more for the Old Vic.”3 Baylis’s frugality was as legendary as her idiosyncratic speech. Salaries were miniscule at the Old Vic; scenery and costumes, recycled from past productions, were cheap, worn, and scruffy. Baylis allotted twenty pounds to mount each production. She often conveniently forgot to return items borrowed from other managements. Opera remained the prime source of income for the Old Vic, but the winds of change were blowing through the theater in the 1920s. Webster told a friend that next to God, “Lilian’s Second Commandment was ‘her’ audience.”4 According to many accounts, Baylis did not know very much about acting, nor even very much about Shakespeare, but she was devoted to his “lovely words.” “Can the actor say his lovely words?”5 she asked when an actor was recommended to her. She once informed John Gielgud, “We’d love to have you, dear, but we can’t afford stars here.”6 By 1929, the year of Webster’s debut, Old Vic audiences had become vociferous and critical, and if the actor “dried up,” they knew the lines. “You knew you were on trial by comparison with a dozen others who had played that particular part before you,” Webster said.7 Baylis, hawklike, watched her audiences to see how they liked what they saw. She sat in her box at the back of the auditorium, with a red curtain drawn across the front during performances, writing letters, addressing brochures, and preparing accounts. If anything interrupted the rhythm of sound from the stage, she would poke her head through the curtain to see what the matter was. If she sensed a crisis, she arrived backstage with astonishing speed. Once when Maurice Evans was playing Iago in Othello, a cat appeared on stage during the jealousy scene. Two seconds later, Baylis’s voice was heard from the wings calling, “Pussy, Pussy, pretty Pussy.” She made alluring, smacking noises; she even tried poking the cat with a broom. When all else failed, she reached onto the stage in full view of the audience, seized the animal by the tail, and yanked it off. It was a typical Baylis technique, Webster remarked, that she applied to all problems: cajoling, direct, and efficient.8 By the start of Webster’s first season with the company, the Old Vic hadPage 47 → become a theatrical fashion. First-string critics attended opening nights, successful young actors wanted to work there, and enthusiastic audiences came in increasing numbers from the West End. Nonetheless, the Old Vic remained a people’s theater with a unique flavor of loyalty, intimacy, mutual friendship, casual dress, and low-priced tickets. With a certain proprietary pride, the audience “liked to make their own stars, and when it made them, they stayed made.”9 Among the many changes in 1929, Baylis appointed a new stage director, Harcourt Williams, an actor of wide experience and accomplishment. In his first season, Williams put together a fresh, young company including a few identifiably Shakespearean actors, among them Brember Wills, Donald Wolfit, and Margaret Webster. He also made surprising departures from traditional casting. Williams disliked the practice of engaging a number of actors of proven ability, casting them to type, and then leaving them to give predictable performances. As a break with tradition, he persuaded newcomers John Gielgud and Martita Hunt to lead his first company. Although Gielgud had earlier walked on in parts at the Old Vic, his artistic successes had been largely in Chekhov’s plays under the direction of Theodore Komisarjevsky. Argentinean-born Martita Hunt, a tall, slim, high-spirited woman with a certain Parisian elegance, who had trained with Sarah Bern hardt, was known for her “modern” Ibsen heroines.

Others in Williams’s first company, including Richard Ainley and Adele Dixon, were relatively untried. Webster joined the Old Vic at a historic moment. The 1929–30 season marked the end of the ancien régime and the start of a new classical repertory theater. Baylis’s original plans had been to alternate an opera company and a Shakespearean company. This proved impracticable, and a new plan was settled upon that, for financial reasons, was not realized until 1931. Under the new plan, opera, ballet, and drama would alternate between the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Islington. When this arrangement became too cumbersome, Shakespeare was confined to the Old Vic on Waterloo Road; opera and ballet to Sadler’s Wells. Until all of this took place, the Old Vic was a crowded, bustling place. In August, the new company arrived for the first rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet and the start of the Old Vic’s sixteenth season. Lilian Baylis made her “opening of term” speech while the company stood around like school children, clutching their volumes of Shakespeare and sizing one another up.10 Soon Gielgud, Martita Hunt, and Webster—as Romeo, the nurse, and Lady Capulet—became supporters of Harcourt Williams, who was determined to change the traditional “business” and tempo of Shakespeare. It was a tradition inherited from Ben Greet and Robert Atkins and beforePage 48 → them from Garrick, Kean, Irving, and Tree. “I want pace—pace—and pace,” Williams told his actors.11 He also wanted new ideas, swift and simple changes of scene, and inviolate adherence to the text. Williams told the actors to read Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare and, above all, to avoid the labored speaking of verse. Although the Old Vic’s scenery and costumes still had an inherited look about them as a result of Baylis’s frugality, Williams was determined that the acting would be notably different from past seasons. Webster said that he wanted “truth with music in it.”12 Williams’s sense of clean, fast-paced action was influenced by William Poel; his sense of verse speaking by Ellen Terry and Margaret Charrington, who had coached John Barrymore in Hamlet; and his sense of design by Edward Gordon Craig. His staging reflected Harley Granville Barker’s innovative ideas on Shakespeare. To these influences Williams added his personal directorial stamp. He gave the actors a great deal of freedom in rehearsals, encouraged their inventiveness, and prodded them toward a more psychological interpretation of character.13 In the 1929–30 season, the Old Vic company performed nine different productions. They rehearsed each play for three weeks, and performed it thirteen times, sometimes alternating with another production. The schedule was grueling. The actors rehearsed one play during the day and performed another in the evening. The youthful company thrived on intense work and the speed of the staging. Gielgud called it “a marvelous training ground.”14 During the initial four months of Webster’s first season, the company opened with Romeo and Juliet, followed by The Merchant of Venice, The Imaginary Invalid, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Webster played Lady Capulet, Nerissa, Toinette, the duchess of York, and Hermia. In the spring, she played Megaera in Androcles and the Lion, Lady Macduff in Macbeth, the second player (called the player queen) in Hamlet (both cut and uncut versions), and transferred with the cut version of Hamlet to the Queen’s Theatre in the West End. Webster always displayed a warm appreciation for the skilled craftsmen and technicians working behind the scenes. She befriended Orlando Whitehead, the Old Vic’s wardrobe master, who stood behind his clothes counter in a white apron looking “like a magnificent grocer.” He was one of those backstage characters whom Webster loved all of her life. Whitehead viewed with amusement the collisions between the newcomers with “fancy ideas” and the “rocklike” Miss Baylis. He appreciated Webster’s ability to wear a cloak with grace and efficiency, unaware that she had dragged similar garments over walls in Canterbury or through the rain-drenched soccerPage 49 → fields of Warwick. He once gave her a bolt of cloth for a costume but told her that she had to pin it on herself. “Doan’t y’go cutting it naow,” he said, “we’ll ave to use it fer the opera.”15 The first two productions of the season were not critically well received. The critics charged Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice with “gabbled speaking” and “indecent haste.” On the opening night of Romeo and Juliet, one reviewer wrote, “England won another world’s speed record on Saturday night, when, at the Old Vic,

Shakespearean blank verse was spoken faster than ever before.”16 John Gielgud and Adele Dixon played the starcrossed lovers; Donald Wolfit appeared as Tybalt, Martita Hunt as the nurse, and Webster as Lady Capulet. Gielgud won high critical praise for various, delicate, and fresh speaking of the poetry. One month later, The Merchant of Venice opened with Gielgud as Antonio, Hunt as Portia, Wolfit as Lorenzo, Dixon as Jessica, and Webster as Nerissa. Brember Wills played Shylock. With the exception of Hunt’s Portia, which shown “like a solitary candle in a dark world,” the Times critic again charged that the company’s breakneck gallop left them no control over the rhythm of the verse and rendered stretches of dialogue “almost unintelligible.” Nonetheless, the Old Vic regulars were enthusiastic; many suspended judgment while waiting for the newcomers to prove their worth. Distressed over the critical response and anonymous poisonous letters, Williams offered to resign. Baylis raged at his cowardice, refused to accept his resignation, and became his stoutest ally. In the course of the season, press and public came to appreciate the modified style of playing Shakespeare, Gielgud became a star, and Hamlet became the first Old Vic production to transfer to the West End. Lilian Baylis purred with satisfaction over the artistic and financial success of Hamlet: “It’s like a crowning, isn’t it—after all the struggles.”17 Before that happened, The Imaginary Invalid opened at the end of October. The Old Vic traditionally staged an occasional non-Shakespearean production, oftentimes a popular play by Sheridan or Goldsmith. Williams chose Molière’s playful satire on hypochondria and the medical profession. Brember Wills played the title role with John Gielgud as Cléante, Martita Hunt as Béline, Adele Dixon as the malade’s daughter, and Webster as the maid Toinette. The company won praise for entering into the spirit of Molière’s comedy, and the minor characters (Webster’s Toinette included) were “neatly played.”18 Three months into the season, Richard II became the first unqualified success of the new regime. Beginning with the deposed king, John Gielgud emerged as the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation. His Richard was moving, his Macbeth was gaunt and hunted, and his Hamlet youthfulPage 50 → and spontaneous “like sweet bells, jangled, out of tune and harsh.” Nonetheless, the company was not without its tensions. A somewhat dissatisfied Webster was relegated to the duchess of York, Lady Macduff, and the Second Player. Donald Wolfit, two years older than Gielgud, had to settle for Lorenzo, Demetrius, and Claudius. Wolfit rarely concealed his resentments. He had been a scholarship boy from a working-class background and had struggled for nine years to establish himself as a classical actor. He was jealous of Gielgud’s swift rise to star status. From Wolfit’s viewpoint, Gielgud seemed to have it all: middle-class background, public school education, and family connections with the famous Terrys. In addition, their physical differences also incited Wolfit’s envy. Gielgud was thinly elegant; Wolfit was coarse-featured. In styles of acting, they were likewise studies in contrast: Wolfit’s old style of acting in the grand manner contrasted unfavorably with Gielgud’s delicate lyricism. It was inevitable that their styles and ambitions clashed. Wolfit was destined to be the loser.19 Between November and April, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Androcles and the Lion and The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (the first Shaw play to be staged at the Old Vic), and Macbeth preceded the uncut Hamlet. Webster appeared in Julius Caesar as the leader of the student players in the crowd scenes, but her playing of the country maid in nose putty and flaxen wig in As You Like It with Gielgud as Orlando, Martita Hunt as Rosalind, and Donald Wolfit as Touchstone was her greatest success in that stellar season. What is surprising, therefore, was her refusal at the season’s close to renew her contract with the Old Vic. “Never mind, dear,” Lilian Baylis assured Webster upon learning of her decision. “You’ll be back.”20 As for others in the company, Gielgud, determined to “make a corner in Shakespeare one day,” signed on for a second season and was joined by Ralph Richardson and Dorothy Green.21 Martita Hunt signed for a play on the West End and left the company; Adele Dixon, Gyles Isham, Brember Wills, and Donald Wolfit were not asked back. In contrast to these four, there was never a question about the value of Webster’s work at the Old Vic. Harcourt Williams had praised the charm and comic adroitness of her Toinette, her calm grace as the duchess of York in Richard II, and “never tired of watching her” as Mrs. Androcles.22 Jean Sterling Mackinlay, Williams’s actress-wife, who staged children’s theater, said that Webster had a special gift for making you feel “that she has already been carrying on a long conversation when she starts a scene…. It’s a very uncommon gift.”23

Why then did Webster leave this most prestigious company after onlyPage 51 → one season? In truth, she considered her parts not good enough. At the time, her decision may have appeared wrongheaded. Yet she had been a minor player, and playing second fiddle to Martita Hunt and Adele Dixon had irked her. Williams admitted that she “was by no means used to the height of her capacity.”24 She may have allied herself with Donald Wolfit’s resentments, which tainted her view of her own position. Uppermost in her mind was the fact that with this company of meteoric young stars, she would not progress beyond the minor player queen in tragedy and the country maid in comedy. The absence of reviews for her work confirmed her belief. Nowhere in the many columns of newsprint about this Old Vic season is there a mention of Margaret Webster. It may be that she had not yet confronted the hard truth that she was not a leading lady and that she was best in character parts. Webster returned to the old, comfortable pattern of playing in nonpaying matinees around the West End and engaging with John Wyse and Esmé Church (then director of the Old Vic’s Dramatic School) in projects to bring “concert readings” of Shakespeare to schools and colleges. At least, Webster had temporarily changed her residence. She was living at the time with her aunt Gretchen, who had taken a cottage at Maidenhead near the river. Seemingly, little else had changed. Webster had hopes of rising to a featured role instead of languishing in supporting roles. Conforming to her parents’ expectations, she was seemingly unaware that there was another avenue for her theatrical talents. Then, as unexpectedly as she had left the Old Vic, she was offered a major role in a West End production. Sir John Martin Harvey, an actor manager of the old school, announced a revival of Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple with an unusual codicil to the role of Judith Anderson. His wife, Angelita Helena de Silva (known as Nina), had played the leading ladies in his productions for many years. Neither the passage of time nor audiences had been kind to her in the roles of the dewy young heroines that she favored. When Webster first met her, Lady Harvey was sixtyone. The Harveys had an unusual plan for the leading female role in The Devil’s Disciple. They resolved to cast another actress as Judith Anderson, permit the newcomer to receive the impact of a critical press, and then have her retire gracefully in favor of Lady Harvey. No established actress was likely to accept these conditions. However, before the scheme was known, Webster asked to understudy Lady Harvey in The Devil’s Disciple. An extraordinary audition ensued at the Harvey home. The couple asked Webster to stand up, and they circled around her in silent appraisal. She was embarrassed because the Harveys were both “unusually small.” Lady Harvey askedPage 52 → if she could “nestle,” meaning bend her knees and appear shorter. When Webster understood what was wanted, she buckled at the knees, folded slightly at the hips, put her arms around Sir John, and gazed fondly up into his eyes. She got the job forthwith. The Devil’s Disciple became Webster’s first (and only) leading ingenue role in the West End. The play ran for fifty-one performances at the Savoy Theatre with Martin Harvey as Richard Dudgeon. She received good reviews (“Miss Margaret Webster, to whom Mr. Shaw has not given an easy task, skillfully covers the weaknesses of her part and brings to its strength a genuine feeling and insight”).25 The playwright thought it a “splendid performance,” although “not the least like the character.”26 Declaring that the run was not long enough to warrant her entering the play, Lady Harvey retired gracefully, and Webster moved to the star’s dressing room. Unfortunately, Webster’s West End success and new ingenue status led nowhere. Eighteen months of inactivity and frustration—as Webster saw them—were broken by a two-month tour in an Emlyn Williams’s thriller, A Murder Has Been Arranged. Although she thought of these months as a period of inactivity, she actually performed in twenty-two plays, including school readings, membership clubs, and tryout performances at the Arts Theatre. She played opposite Emlyn Williams, Donald Wolfit, Jessica Tandy, Jack Hawkins, Margaret Rutherford, Gwen Ffrangcon Davies, Ben Webster, and John Gielgud, and worked with directors Edith Craig, Theodore Komisarjevsky, and Gielgud, who was beginning a new phase of his remarkable career.

During this period, Webster placed an advertisement in a theatrical trade paper with her name and the following notice: Has played every Sunday for the past six months. Has no religious scruples about playing on weekdays.27 Eventually, four performances in Musical Chairs at the Arts Theatre under the management of Bronson Albery and Howard Wyndham paid off. In the hiatus between Old Vic seasons, Gielgud had been searching for new and interesting plays. He received a script written by Ronald MacKenzie, a young, impoverished Scotsman who had become an assistant stage manager at Wyndham’s Theatre, and took it to Bronson Albery, a businessman of vision and taste who owned several theaters. Musical Chairs (originally called The Discontents) brought Webster onstage as Mary Preston with John Gielgud, Jessica Tandy, Frank Vosper, Roger Livesey, and Finlay Currie. Written very much in the manner of Chekhov, the play was about the arrival of a young American woman into a family living in the oilfields ofPage 53 → Poland. Gielgud recruited Komisarjevsky to direct the showcase production. Almost at once, Webster noted the contrasting directing styles of Komisarjevsky and John Martin Harvey. An actor-director with vast experience of the popular English tradition of costume melodramas, Harvey was inclined to be rigid, precise, and mechanical. Webster said that he imposed precise gestures and exact vocal inflections on the actors. In contrast, the Russian director guided the actors: [H]e allowed the subtle relationships between the characters to develop gradually, with a hint here and a comment there, until we had absorbed the play into our blood, into our skins. It grew together organically. We all trusted him and each other and the script. There was a good deal of progress by “feeling it out,” but not by chopping and changing, which is a very different thing.28 At the time, Webster had no ambitions to be a director and, unlike John Gielgud, was not consciously training herself to become one. She thought of herself merely as a keen and knowledgeable observer of the director’s craft. Had at least one of her parents pursued directing, then she probably would have thought more seriously about this aspect of a stage career for herself, but Edith Craig’s troubled career and her parents’ unwavering goals led Webster to concentrate on acting. Audiences and reviewers heartily approved of the tryout performances of Musical Chairs. Four months later, the original cast, now with Gielgud directing, took up residence for a commercial production in the West End’s Criterion Theatre. Critics praised Webster’s Mary Preston as “well drawn and well cast,” and the long-running show spelled the end of her apprenticeship years.29 Webster was now an established West End actress with two long-running shows to her credit. Playing a good part in a successful play, she mused that she had reached the end of act 1 of her own life’s drama: “The rest of the play might turn out to be dreadful, but the first part had been exciting and rewarding.”30 During the run of Musical Chairs, Webster again followed Gielgud’s guiding light into tryout performances of a new play, Richard of Bordeaux, by Gordon Daviot, a pseudonym for Scotswoman Elizabeth Mackintosh, who wrote successful thrillers under the pen name of Josephine Tey. After seeing Richard II at the Old Vic with Gielgud in the title role, she wrote a modern idiomatic version of Richard’s story, tracing the king’s progress from youthful idealist to disillusioned cynic. She sent the script to Gielgud who was not only looking for another West End leading role for himself but for another opportunity to direct there. Page 54 → Bronson Albery controlled not just the Criterion, New, and Wyndham’s theaters, but was also director of the small Arts Theatre. He offered it for two matinee performances of Richard of Bordeaux. Hesitant to play the exacting part of the king and also direct, Gielgud persuaded Harcourt Williams to codirect with him. They gathered a tryout cast of Gwen Ffrangcon Davies to play Anne of Bohemia and hired Robert Harris, Roger Livesey, and Anthony Quayle. Webster played Mary Bohun, countess of Derby, a role small enough to be described as “a cough and a spit.”31

What became tryout performances took place at the larger New Theatre in the summer of 1932. Afterward, the play was reworked by its author and put into production with Gielgud, as sole director, continuing to play the part of the king, and with many from the original cast, including Gwen Ffrangcon Davies and Webster. New to the cast were Richard Ainley, Donald Wolfit, Francis Lister, Frederick Lloyd, and Ben Webster as John of Gaunt. The Motleys (a trio of sisters, Elizabeth Montgomery and Margaret and Sophie Harris), who had taken their collective name from Jacques’s line in As You Like It—”Motley’s the only wear”—were recruited to design the settings and costumes. They had set up shop in a third-floor studio in Garrick Yard situated off St. Martin’s Lane and near the New Theatre. They worked so successfully with Gielgud, providing the simple settings and beautiful, understated costumes for Richard of Bordeaux, that they established themselves as a formidable creative design team and worked in England and the United States for the next forty years. They were to reappear in Webster’s life again in the United States when she herself was in charge of staging productions. This was Gielgud’s first West End success as a director, since he had earlier only restaged Musical Chairs. In February, audiences received the play with what W. A. Darlington called “a glorious full-throated roar such as the West End seldom hears in these sophisticated days.”32 The play ran for 472 performances at the New Theatre, followed by an eight-week tour. Webster was now working full-time in the commercial theater, and work was plentiful. Nonetheless, she kept up her contacts at the Old Vic with Lilian Baylis, who regarded Webster as one of her standbys. Webster continued to assist with Baylis’s pet causes (a leper colony in Essex, for example) by performing for fund-raisers and helping with parties for children. Following her West End successes in The Devil’s Disciple and Musical Chairs, Webster agreed to return to the Old Vic for the 1932–33 season, in fulfillment of Lilian Baylis’s prophecy. However, Musical Chairs had such a long run that Baylis released her from her contract, but not without persuading producer Bronson Albery to give Webster a leave of absence forPage 55 → three weeks to play Lady Macbeth opposite Malcolm Keen as Macbeth and Alastair Sim as Banquo. Webster believed that her inner experiences had not yet prepared her to play Lady Macbeth, although she had acquired the necessary “technical equipment.” Edith Craig loaned her Ellen Terry’s prompt copy, and Webster absorbed Terry’s notations on gesture, pauses, and breath marks, which she found “enormously revealing.” There were practical comments—she was to “get sleeves out of the way” when she reached out her bloodstained hand to Macbeth following the murder—and notations for a full stop after the controversial line “We fail.”33 In mid-November 1932 Webster was on stage as “Lady M.” with her own deeply felt shortcomings. When she left the stage following the sleepwalking scene, she experienced only a “bleak heart.” Walking down a long, narrow corridor, she encountered Lilian Baylis, who commiserated with her: “Yes, dear. Just like giving birth, isn’t it?” Webster was grateful for Baylis’s kindness, but she could not understand how either of them could know anything about giving birth.34 Despite Webster’s misgivings, the Times critic extolled her performance: The Lady Macbeth of Miss Margaret Webster is extremely acute in its perception, and she does not make the mistake of playing the many-sided woman in one key. Terrible as she is in her invocation for the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, pathetic as she is in the sleep-walking scene, her performance reaches, perhaps, its true climax in the few words she says to Macbeth when they are alone after he has seen Banquo’s ghost, and it takes a considerable actress to make a seemingly unimportant sentence or two illuminate all that has gone before and is to come.35 On this occasion, the famous curse attending the play resulted in Lady Macbeth’s having four husbands within three weeks. Malcolm Keen strained his back and couldn’t go on, Alastair Sim developed a throat infection, and Marius Goring was a mere boy and was replaced. John Laurie completed the final week as the Scottish king. May Whitty had continued to stay in touch with Maurice Evans not only because he was a talented young actor but also because she probably had thoughts that she could make a match between him and Webster. One evening,

she introduced him to Lilian Baylis during a revival of Harley Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance for the benefit of the Sadler’s Wells Endowment Fund in which May was playing the part of Mrs. Voysey. Baylis was complaining that she could not find a leading man for the next season: “Can’t find a leading man for next year, dear, simply can’t—don’t know where they’ve all gone to!”36 May told her that there was one in the theater that veryPage 56 → evening and his name was Maurice Evans. Embarrassed, Evans protested that he had never played Shakespeare. Nonetheless, May Whitty persisted, Evans was persuaded, and Baylis offered him a contract. He played a variety of parts that season, including Iago in Othello, Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, the king in Richard II, and the prince in Hamlet (again, in its entirety). Evans then departed London for New York and a career opposite Katharine Cornell on Broadway and the Shakespeare productions that were eventually to involve Margaret Webster. Following her triumph as Lady Macbeth, Webster gave her first performance as an Ibsen heroine with Donald Wolfit’s new repertory company. She played Hilde Wangel, opposite Donald Wolfit as Halvard Solness and Margaret Rutherford as Aline Solness in The Master Builder at Westminster Theatre. In the meantime, John Gielgud agreed to direct Gordon Daviot’s new play, Queen of Scots, which the author had written for Gwen Ffrangcon Davies to play the doomed Mary Stuart. The cast included the dashing Laurence Olivier, who had replaced Ralph Richardson in rehearsals as Both well. Olivier was now twenty-seven and had scored successes in Beau Geste and Private Lives, but his voice was considered too light for a classical actor. Glen Byam Shaw, Felix Aylmer, Frederick Lloyd, a young James Mason, and Webster (as the loyal Mary Beaton) rounded out the cast for another 106 performances on the West End. Webster extolled the Queen of Scots cast as the most talented and amicable that she had ever been associated with, concluding, “There is no such thing as having too many good actors.”37 During the 1933–34 season, while playing in the long-running Richard of Bordeaux and then in Queen of Scots, Webster worked steadily in a variety of showcases for one and two performances. Her stamina was remarkable. She joined Gwen Ffrangcon Davies and Donald Wolfit in The Lady of Belmont, Jessica Tandy and Jack Hawkins in Iron Flowers, and John Gielgud and Angela Baddeley in A Kiss for Cinderella. While he was playing the king in Richard of Bordeaux, Gielgud produced and directed Spring 1600, a play by the now successful Emlyn Williams in which a young woman dresses as a boy, joins Shakespeare’s company, and falls in love with the actor Richard Burbage. Webster played Burbage’s wife with “cool rhetoric and the clear waters of common sense,” according to one critic.38 The play was overly long and the reviews generally devastating, but it lasted for twentyone performances at the Shaftesbury Theatre. With the exceptions of Spring 1600 and Dark Horizon by Lesley Storm for eighteen performances at Daly’s Theatre, Webster’s performances were limitedPage 57 → and woven among the long runs of Richard of Bordeaux and Queen of Scots. Then came Viceroy Sarah, a play by Norman Ginsbury about the intrigues of the duchess of Marlborough in the court of Queen Anne, at the Whitehall Theatre. Newcomer Tyrone Guthrie, who would become director and manager of the Old Vic in 1937, cast Harcourt Williams as the prince of Denmark and Irene Vanbrugh as the duchess of Marlborough. Webster succeeded actress Olga Lindo as Abigail Hill. She transferred with the play, under John Gielgud’s direction, to the Phoenix Theatre on the West End and played there for 157 performances. The Times reviewer called her performance “exquisitely still and feline.”39 During the long run of Viceroy Sarah, Webster appeared in three matinee performances of Basalik, by Peter Garland (pseudonym of Norma Leslie Monroe), at the Arts Theatre. At the time, the production seemed inconsequential for her career. She played Mrs. Chepstow opposite Coral Brown as Lady Amerdine and Paul Robeson as Balu, the noble African king, in a part written for him. This was the second time Webster had crossed Robeson’s path. In 1930, she had seen him as Othello at the Savoy Theatre opposite Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona with Maurice Browne as Iago, Ralph Richardson as Roderigo, and Sybil Thorndike as Emilia. Despite his beautiful singing voice, Robeson had little training in speaking blank verse, and Ashcroft’s lively and moving performance could not save the production from failure. Nonetheless, his charisma and strength in the role

remained etched in Webster’s memory. Basalik was another effort to make use of Robeson’s enormous talent. With little fanfare, Webster made her directing debut during the fifteen-month run of Richard of Bordeaux. In 1934, she was engaged to stage an outdoor production of Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII with eight hundred performers for the British National Federation of Women’s Institutes in Kent. The same actors played the principal roles throughout, but the crowd scenes were allocated to separate villages. Webster offered up silent prayers of gratitude to Ben Greet. With no more than four or five rehearsals with the women of Kent on the actual site, she managed to bring together in some semblance of order eight hundred women for the baptism scene. Over the next two years, Webster began to direct more frequently while playing in the long-running Queen of Scots, Viceroy Sarah, and Bronson Albery’s production of Parnell. She directed eleven new plays in tryout theaters and stage societies, often with Gwen Ffrangcon Davies in the cast, and a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea with Flora Robson as Ellida Wangel. Webster must have realized that she was following in the footstepsPage 58 → of Edith Craig and Clare Eames, who had never progressed beyond the staging of matinees, pageants, and benefits. In contrast to the women of the time, John Gielgud directed his first West End production at age twenty-eight. Webster did not receive a similar invitation from the London theatrical establishment until 1937, when she was thirty-two and already had a resounding success on Broadway as a director. In addition to directing and performing, Webster began to assist the theatrical profession as a member of its service organizations. In 1931, British Equity was born after many invigorating discussions around the Webster’s dining room table in their Bedford Street flat. Webster was elected to the first council of British Equity and named chairman of the editorial board that produced its first magazine. As the youngest member of the executive committee, Webster went into action to recruit members and devise regulations and contracts for the membership. She was not just being a dutiful daughter drawn into her parents’ campaign “where a cause was just,” there was an instinctive and passionate response from Webster.40 In January 1935, she was elected as the only woman actor-delegate to the first London Theatre Council, a group of twenty managers and actors under the chairmanship of Lord Esher established to mediate disputes between theater managers and Equity actors. In September, she attended the Moscow Theatre Festival in the Soviet Union as a member of the British Drama League delegation led by Lewis Casson. Over ten days, the group saw fifteen plays and operas in Moscow and St. Petersburg, met Soviet actors and producers, and visited museums, state factories, and collective farms. Webster kept a diary of her experiences of the Soviet productions and people and wrote to her mother, recounting her impressions of Soviet politics and culture. May Whitty preserved these letters, which were to resur face under ominous circumstances in the early fifties. Then, too, Webster tried her hand at playwriting. She adapted Ferenc Molnár’s play Girl Unknown and played in it with Marius Goring for twelve performances at the New Theatre under Bronson Albery’s management. In 1935 there were changes in the Bedford Street household. Gretchen Wise had died four years before, and Webster had closed up the cottage on Maidenhead and moved back to Bedford Street. Webster now had only three remaining relatives: her parents and her cousin, Jean Webster Brough, daughter of Lizzie Webster and Sidney Brough. Six years older than Webster, Brough was also an actress and a member of Ivor Novello’s company that performed his comedies and musicals for many years at Drury Lane. That same year, May Whitty leaped at a part of “an old beast in a wheel chair” in a new Emlyn Williams thriller, Night Must Fall, that ran for a yearPage 59 → in London, transferred to Broadway, and was made into a Hollywood film with Robert Montgomery, Rosalind Russell, and Dame May Whitty.41 During the Broadway production of Night Must Fall, Whitty saw a great deal of Maurice Evans, who expressed interest in doing a “series of classic revivals” in New York. One evening, a wealthy American backer by the name of Joseph Verner Reed left an envelope at the theater for him containing a check for the extraordinary sum of thirty-five thousand dollars. Evans announced to May Whitty, “We’ll do some Shakespeare and get old Peg out here too.”42 Unaware of Maurice Evans’s good fortune and grandiose plans, Webster arrived at the New Theatre for a

performance as the unsympathetic Irish cousin in Albery’s Parnell, written by Elsie T. Schauffler. The stage doorman informed her that she had a transatlantic telephone call: “Personal call. Mr. Maurice Evans from New York.”43 This may possibly have been the most important telephone call of her entire life. Evans explained his plan for a series of classical revivals that would begin in the new year with Richard II. Since England’s King Edward VIII’s abdication for love of Mrs. Wally Simpson was the talk and headlines of two continents, Evans proposed to begin his Broadway series with Shakespeare’s play about another deposed king. He would play the king. He had already engaged David Ffolkes to design scenery and costumes; moreover, he wanted Webster to play the duchess of York. Then came the heart-stopping question: Would she direct the play? Other more mundane questions followed: Could she give two weeks’ notice and leave the cast of Parnell ? Would she accept Evans’s terms? Would she confer by mail with the designer? Would she sail on December 21 for New York on the Berengaria ? With thirty seconds left on the transatlantic call, Webster said “yes” to everything. Thereafter, her life and career underwent a sea change. As the tugboats escorted the Berengaria to its berth in New York harbor, Webster saw Maurice Evans waiting for her on the dock below. She walked down the gangway into the shedlike building that she dimly remembered from twenty-eight years earlier as a railway station and realized that it was the Cunard Line pier. The same shipping line that had taken her as a child to England now serendipitously returned her to the United States to begin a career that would place her at the forefront of American stage history for the next thirty years. Page 60 →

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ACT TWO 1937–1949 Page 62 →

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CHAPTER 4 BROADWAY NIGHTS In one sense I was born to Shakespeare, but in another I had him thrust upon me. —MARGARET WEBSTER Once she arrived in the United States in early January, Webster had exactly five weeks to prepare Richard II for a Broadway opening. The legendary Great White Way proved a shock to her. While Broadway had glittered in her imagination like a “necklace of diamonds,” the reality was a jolt.1 In 1937, New York’s commercial theater district was drab and dirty. It extended along the thoroughfare between Fortieth and Sixtieth Streets and teemed with traffic noise, jostling crowds, garish cinema marquees, and enormous billboards. The number of Broadway productions had been shrinking for several seasons because of the depression and the burgeoning film industry. The 1937–38 theater season was a low point with fewer than one hundred new productions. Upon her arrival, Webster stayed in the Hotel Windsor on West Fifty-eighth Street, little more than a block from where she was born. She flung her suitcases into her hotel room and proceeded to Maurice Evans’s apartment for dinner and one of many conferences with Evans and the designer from the Old Vic, David Ffolkes. In New York Webster quickly encountered many familiar faces. John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft were playing on Broadway. Gielgud’s Hamlet, imported from the West End, was setting a box office record. Ashcroft was playing in Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor opposite Burgess Meredith. Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward were together in Tonight at 8.30. Although reduced, it was a stellar Broadway season. In addition to Webster’sPage 64 → British compatriots, Ruth Gordon was starring in a revival of The Country Wife, Margaret Sullavan in Stage Door by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, Katharine Cornell in The Wingless Victory by Maxwell Anderson, and Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina by Laurence Housman. Other theater marquees announced The Women by Clare Booth, You Can’t Take It with You by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, and Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell. Maurice Evans had come to the United States in 1935 to replace Basil Rathbone in the Guthrie McClintic production of Romeo and Juliet. Since his first meeting with May Whitty at the Etlinger School when he rented the hall for an amateur production of Major Barbara and also got Webster as Lady Britomart, Evans had been in the habit of dropping by the Webster flat on Bedford Street. On one such occasion, May welcomed him with the news that she was going into rehearsal in a revival of a play by Harley Granville Barker, entitled The Voysey Inheritance, which, she reported, still had an available part for a young man. The role of the son Edward Voysey, along with May Whitty’s perseverance, opened the door for Evans to join the Old Vic for the 1934–35 season, where American producer-director Guthrie McClintic saw him in Hamlet. At the time, Webster was playing in the long-running Queen of Scots and Viceroy Sarah. Once in New York City, Evans played Romeo to Katharine Cornell’s Juliet and the Dauphin to her Saint Joan. It was during the run of St. Helena by R. C. Sherriff and Jeanne de Casalis that Evans made the acquaintance of financier Joseph Verner Reed, whose income derived from inherited holdings in copper mines. A tall, slender, elegant gentleman who was deeply dedicated to the arts, Reed had indulged a whim in the early 1930s to finance and manage his own repertory company on Broadway, starring actress Jane Cowl. His book The Curtain Falls describes his frustrations with the impractical venture. Reed saw St. Helena at the Lyceum Theatre and was impressed with the thirty-six-year-old British actor playing Napoleon. Following several telegrams and a face-toface interview, he bought into Evans’s idea to produce Richard II as part of a new repertory company on Broadway, and gave Evans a check for thirty-five thousand dollars.

Evans moved quickly. In the old style of the English actor-manager, he contacted British designer David Ffolkes for scenery and costumes and cast about for other producers, finally landing, at Reed’s suggestion, a family friend, Robinson Smith, who was an avid theatergoer but not a commercial producer. Smith had valuable contacts with the Astor Estate, which owned the St. James Theatre on Forty-fourth Street, one of the few large playhouses not closed by the depression. The theater had been leased to producer Eddie Dowling, who had made an early career on Broadway as a musicalPage 65 → comedy performer and then moved into serious plays. His partner was a Russian named Boris Said, an importer of furs and other sundry items. Reed’s identity as a silent partner remained confidential, and Said become the second not-so-silent partner. Webster called these four, including her friend Maurice Evans, the “Incorporated Incompatibles.” “One was young, gentle, smiling,” she said, “one an intimidating Russian businessman who knew nothing of Shakespeare and cared less; one a professional Irish trouper…. The fourth [was] the enthusiastic, generous, elusive, imponderable Joseph Verner Reed.”2 Among this group, Evans was the axle spinning the Ferris wheel, and Webster was the linchpin turning the theatrical machinery. Boris Said made stringent demands for his participation in the venture: 30 percent of the box office receipts and 30 percent of the profits. Said put up no money but understood that if money ran out during preproduction, he would stake the company in order to get the curtain up on opening night. In addition, he demanded that Eddie Dowling be listed as a co-producer along with Robinson Smith. Once he had the financing in place, Evans made the telephone call to Webster. “Although I knew exactly how I wished the play to look and be performed,” he admitted, “it would be a serious mistake to occupy the director’s post myself besides playing the leading role.” Many questions surround Evans’s invitation. Why did he choose Webster for his new American enterprise? She had no comparable experience in the West End, nor had she contemplated directing as a full-time career. On the practical side, Evans faced a very realistic dilemma. There were no directors with a Shakespearean background in New York City (nor in the United States for that matter). Alan Wheatley, who had been a member of the St. Helena cast, came up with the idea to contact Webster. “He reminded me,” Evans said, “that our mutual friend, Margaret Webster, was a Shakespearean authority, having played in Ben Greet’s outdoor touring company on almost every English football field.” Webster also had experience playing Shakespeare with Harcourt Williams at the Old Vic, and with Donald Wolfit’s touring company, where she appeared in Twelfth Night in repertory. She had also played in the West End with John Gielgud in two historical dramas about English kings and queens —Richard of Bordeaux and again in Queen of Scots. How much pressure did May Whitty exert on Evans to bring her daughter to New York in a featured role? Evans was aware that Webster’s career was mired in minor roles in largely undistinguished plays and that her personal life was unencumbered. “This was partly,” he remarked in his memoir, “because her mother …wouldn’t let her plough her own furrow.”3 Evans’s statement implies that not only was Webster’s professional life not her own, Page 66 → but neither were her friendships and sexual companions. She had moved out of the Bedford Street flat when she began to work on the West End, but little is known about her move to Hampstead or her companions there. What is known is that Hampstead, long an area of choice for writers and artists in northern London, is a long subway ride from Bedford Street. What independence Webster achieved, she achieved at great effort and by way of long distances. Evans was also aware that if he were to engage one of the rising young male British directors, such as Tyrone Guthrie, John Gielgud, or Michael Redgrave, he risked losing control of the production, and possibly even the leading roles. Most persistent was Evans’s conviction that he could influence Webster’s artistic choices and control the production from center stage. In the bargain, he gained an actress to play the duchess of York, and a director who would not demand unreasonable remuneration for her services. Out of gratitude, she would not quarrel over the billing: “Maurice Evans Presents …” On Webster’s part, she gained an entirely new career as a professional director, a rejuvenated acting career, and an entrée into the Broadway theater world. With these considerations in mind, Evans placed his call to Webster, inviting her to direct him in a repertory season of four plays, beginning with a “ready-made production” of Richard II, a play not seen on Broadway since 1878. “I was delighted when she said ‘yes,’ ” Evans remarked, “and even more delighted when she arrived and

showed herself to be so knowledgeable and easy to get along with.”4 With a sense of wonder and dismay, Webster arrived to cast Richard II at the St. James Theatre, where Evans’s production company had its offices on the top floor. With no prior management experience, Webster and Evans were babes in the woods when it came to casting a Broadway show. Little had changed in the American theater for six decades, and they were astonished by the impersonality of the system. Producers had their secretaries send out audition cards to twenty-five actors to appear at the theater, all at the same time. Other actors heard about the audition and also showed up. Producers, director, star, and hangers-on then assembled in a dark auditorium to audition actors and cast the play. The stage manager gave the actors a book and thrust them onstage, sometimes forgetting to announce their names. Then the stage manager mumbled their cues and the hapless actors read as best they could. Several lines later, someone out front would say, “Thank you—that will do,” and the actor walked away.5 After several hours, the producers would call a lunch break with martinis and, as Webster described the conversations, they would discuss “the boy in the red tie,” “the blond with talent,” and the “wonderful actor” who hadPage 67 → been so good a few seasons ago but whose name no one could remember. After lunch the producers disappeared and did not return for the afternoon auditions. Webster and Evans changed the system of Broadway casting. They saw 120 actors, one at a time, in the first two days. They made polite inquiries about the actor’s previous experiences, and, if he seemed to have potential, gave him a book, explained the part, and asked him to come back and read later. When word got out about this system, the New York theater world was dumbstruck. By the end of her first day as a Broadway director, Webster had interviewed dozens of actors, staring at them on a stage lit only by the naked two-thousand-watt work light. She confessed, “I felt as if my skull were being pulled off my head, in the effort to make room inside for all the unfamiliar names, faces and voices.”6 Her casting efforts were difficult for other reasons as well. She and Evans wanted actors with good international speech to balance the company and the star, but the young American actors auditioning had little experience in speaking Shakespeare and had seldom seen a production. As Webster rejected one inarticulate actor (“the Dook hath broke his staff, ruhsigned his stooardship”) after the next, she felt “pedantic and baffled.” One distinguished character actor refused to read for John of Gaunt because he would not be “subjected to the whims of a woman director.” Another, who was asked to read Northumberland, had been in the play with Edwin Booth and insisted there was no such part. In the Booth version, Northumberland had been cut. Webster and Evans finally decided upon Ian Keith as Bolingbroke, William Post as Mowbray, Charles Dalton as Northumberland, and Augustin Duncan, dancer Isadora Duncan’s brother, as John of Gaunt. The women’s roles were played by Olive Deering (Richard’s queen) and Irene Tedrow (duchess of Gloucester). There were a total of thirty-six actors, actresses, and understudies. The role of the duchess of York was the final hurdle in the casting sessions. It had been Evans’s original costsaving strategy to have Webster play the part. However, in her research Webster determined that the York scenes were not in Shakespeare’s original script. She kept the duke’s famous speech describing Richard’s entry into London but cut the remainder of the York scenes, thereby reducing the duchess’s role, which was played by Betty Jenckes. With designer David Ffolkes, who had trained as an architect and worked as art director and designer at the Old Vic, she and Evans evolved a production scheme that used a basic set of solid pillars and gothic arches.Page 68 → Ffolkes covered the orchestra pit with an apron stage that enabled Evans, when seated there during the “death of kings” soliloquy, to lower his voice almost to a whisper and still be heard.7 The playing areas were flexible, allowing space for crowd scenes. In contrast to the heavier scenery then in use in Broadway theaters, the stage was an innovation in serviceable design.

Since money was tight, Evans proposed they use costumes from the New York production of Richard of Bordeaux, duplicates of the originals in the London production. The costumes gave Webster a sense of déjà vu; she, John Gielgud, and Gwen Ffrangcon Davies had been swathed in them for fifteen months on London’s West End. Ffolkes would still design the king’s costumes. He put Evans in silk tights, bejeweled robes, and rakish hats for the early scenes and retained the king in elegant robes until the drab garment worn in the final prison scene. With the addition of a saintlike beard, the designer emphasized to the bitter end that the dethroned king was still acting a part in life and dressing accordingly. By the time rehearsals began in early January, Webster had moved into an apartment at 1 Fifth Avenue, sharing it with Peggy Ashcroft. By now, Webster had a wide circle of friends that included her British acquaintances playing in New York. One of these renewed friendships was with Eva Le Gallienne, her girlhood friend from the summers at the Favershams’ home in Chiddingfold. She recalled Le Gallienne in her crisp Girl Guide uniform climbing trees where she would sit and read her books undisturbed. Le Gallienne was now a celebrated actress and the sole creator of the influential Civic Repertory Theatre on Fourteenth Street. In the December of Webster’s arrival in New York, Le Gallienne was on Broadway in Prelude to Exile, a play about the loves and tantrums of Richard Wagner, written by William J. McNally. Webster and Le Gallienne found that they had a great deal in common, especially their views of serious theater. In a few years, Le Gallienne would bring enduring friendship and a lover’s passion to Webster’s life. During rehearsals for Richard II, May Whitty and Ben Webster arrived from England en route to Hollywood. When Webster escorted her parents to Grand Central Station to put them on a train to Los Angeles, she thought her father looked wistful and a little lost. May, on the other hand, displayed the courage of a lioness, setting off at age seventy-one for Hollywood. When she reflected on her undertaking, Webster was frightened by the audacity of directing Shakespeare for Broadway. Having observed Harcourt Williams’s insecurities in his first season at the Old Vic, she knew that a director could not afford doubt, which penetrates to the far corners of the stage, infecting actors and staff alike. Screwing up her courage, she tried to appear authoritative and calm and to understand her actors. “To know hisPage 69 → actors is the first thing a director needs to learn,” she said, “and here was I, confronted with thirtysix large Americans, all total strangers to me.”8 In the manner of Williams, Webster created a free and easy atmosphere that encouraged actors to experiment; she grew stern only when an interpretation or line reading was off. The result was a thoroughly gutsy production. In Evans’s view, this redounded to Webster’s credit because observers found it hard to believe that a young woman could “conjure up such virility from her actors.”9 Webster was a phenomenon in the Broadway theater of 1937. The American theater had its share of notable actresses, actress-managers, dancers, singers, and variety performers. Nonetheless, a woman director hired for a Broadway production, and a Shakespeare play to boot, was a closely scrutinized phenomenon. The public’s general consternation was contained in a remark overheard in Sardi’s restaurant, where Webster frequently ate lunch: “One woman and all those men—she must be fierce.”10 Webster had grown up in a household and in a professional world with equality among wage earners. In fact, her father and mother had taken turns over the years as the household’s chief source of support. With May Whitty’s ascendancy as a Hollywood star, she was earning a phenomenal salary, while Ben was languishing in desultory employment by a theater world that had passed him by. Having grown up in a household of working parents, Webster had not been indoctrinated by the Edwardian sense that a woman’s place was in the home. In addition, her friendship with Edith Craig had introduced her to a lesbian subculture where women had cast off conventional dress and discarded other social codes.11 Because of her experiences, Webster did not willingly tolerate differences of gender, salary, and social convention. It did not occur to her that either society or the profession prohibited her from becoming a stage director. Her insecurities were of a deeper kind. Since boarding-school days she had written several times a week to her parents. While in New York, she continued to write almost daily to them in Los Angeles or in London.

Following their deaths in the late forties, Webster found many of these letters in a storage locker in London. They are records of Webster’s extraordinary devotion to her parents, her need to please them, and her strong desire to excel in their profession in order to garner their attention, respect, and love. Remarking on Webster’s stymied acting career in the late thirties, Maurice Evans put it in a frankly sexist way when he said that her mother wouldn’t let her “plough her own furrow.”12 After transforming the ways of American auditions, Webster learned a second lesson in the fundamental differences between American and EnglishPage 70 → actors. She found that the Americans worked harder and were more concentrated, although they were more self-conscious. For English actors, tossing Shakespeare’s verse around was all in a day’s work, but it awed Americans. In Webster’s estimation, the essential difference was that Americans approached the characters as people, not as “mouthpieces.” “They had less gloss than their English counterparts,” she observed, “but more reality and more guts.”13 Webster was learning other lessons regarding the commercial theater. No one had told her that lighting equipment was not a part of an American theater’s permanent installation, nor that strict union rules governed responsibilities of electricians, carpenters, and so on. Only an electrician could move a lamp standard during a scene shift, not the person standing closest to it. Still, as was her habit from her repertory days, Webster established a comradeship with her production crews—carpenters, electricians, property masters, and wardrobe people. All of this stood her in good stead as she blindly felt her way through union regulations. Five days before Richard II opened, Webster gave an interview to Lucius Beebe of the New York Herald Tribune. Dressed in a double-breasted military-style greatcoat, a scarf of many colors about her throat, and a tall, steeplecrowned green felt hat, Webster impressed Beebe as a pleasant conversationalist, “neither over-British nor affectedly American” in speech, and a patently busy executive who carried a briefcase and chain-smoked. She called Richard II a “thoroughly Old Vic production,” meaning that she wanted the audience and the actors in close proximity, as in the original Globe Theatre staging. Thus the small apron had been built over the orchestra pit for intimate scenes. Echoing Harcourt Williams, Webster encouraged speed and variety of speech as well as a fluid performance that would make the play cohere through eighteen scenes. The greatest danger in Shakespearean productions was allowing “actors to talk to the audience in a manner which lends the plays a literary or rhetorical quality instead of vitality and the suggestion of real drama.”14 She pointed to elements of vitality and drama in Richard II: pageantry, historical authenticity, personal characterization, drama, and fine writing. On the evening of February 5, 1937, Webster went to her first opening night as a Broadway director. Like many a director in the history of Western theater, Webster wrote on the suffering the occasion entailed. There is nothing I have experienced to compare with the agony of a director on the opening night of a big and complex production. You anticipate in imagination every possible flaw, every hypothetical disaster. As soon as you have sweated past one of them in safety, you start oozingPage 71 → blood in preparation for the next. To begin with, you never know until you have seen him what sort of an “opening-nighter” an actor will turn out to be…. you can count on only one thing: that almost everyone will give a performance you have never seen before.15 Maurice Evans was no exception to the rule. In the plays Webster directed, Evans had unsuspected reserves in performance—as he proved playing the opening night of Richard II with an abscessed tooth. Webster herself suffered through all the director’s opening-night jitters, caused by the delayed curtain, actors’ nerves, late arrivals and coughing in the audience, slow scene changes, missed light cues, and missing props. She held her breath as the audience applauded the “death of kings” speech, stopping the play for almost a minute. As the final curtain came down, Webster’s astonishment was genuine —Richard II was a smash hit. Webster was blithely ignorant about opening nights on Broadway, the tradition of waiting for the midnight radio comments and reports of the morning newspaper notices. She had a drink at Sardi’s with the stage manager and his wife and then went home. With her second cup of coffee the next morning, she picked up the New York Times that showed underneath her door and turned to Brooks Atkinson’s column, where she read that William

Shakespeare, Maurice Evans, and Margaret Webster were superb. He praised Webster’s direction, Evans’s king, and the production as a whole: “When the final curtain descended last evening everyone realized that a play had been honestly acted by one of the finest actors of our time…. Margaret Webster has directed it with brilliance and versatility, and it sweeps across the stage with the stormy heart and power of Shakespearean verse.” Atkinson’s praise for Webster’s staging was unqualified: “The supple staging, the musical flourishing, the imaginative costuming, the unobtrusive scenery have all been gathered up in Miss Webster’s fresh-minded direction and thrust across the footlights in a vibrant performance of a stirring play.”16 Other critics were also enthusiastic. Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote, “Not only is Mr. Evans’s portrayal a masterpiece of distinguished and intelligent acting, but the production is one of the fine achievements of modern Shakespearean staging. Just as the star’s performance kept a perfect balance between the poetic and the realistic in acting, so does Miss Margaret Webster’s direction maintain an admirable equilibrium between colorful pageantry and human values.” John Anderson’s piece in the Evening Journal added, “It is a brilliant spectacle, handsomely turned, deeply moving, richly imagined, superbly executed. It is blinding to confront a Shakespeare play as if it had never been played, for that is how ‘King Richard II’ must stand.”17 Page 72 → Since the British press rarely mentioned a stage director in reviews, Webster was taken back by the compliments paid to her. Stark Young called the evening “literate and gutsy,” noting the director’s hand: “The last moment, with Richard brought in dead, and placed at the foot of the throne, with Bolingbroke looking on him, the silent court around, is a superb stage motif on the part of Miss Margaret Webster in her directing.”18 The opening night critics agreed that her staging achieved with brilliance and versatility the pageantry, history, and personal drama of the king’s story. As she stood with coffee cup in hand reading the praise, Webster burst into tears. She sent her parents a telegram to report modestly, “It looks like a hit.”19 She was unprepared for the banner headlines, personal interviews, luncheons and dinners, and lines at the box office that followed the triumphant opening. The unqualified success of Richard II meant that Evans had to abandon his plans for a series of revivals played in repertory. The play would run until the summer, when the theaters, which were not air-conditioned, closed. It would be revived in the fall and then tour. Webster would stage the tour, but during the summer she had no income or employment. This was another bitter lesson. Without an agent, she had negotiated her contract for a flat fee. Unaware that American directors received weekly royalties, she had not negotiated a percentage of the box office for herself. Having eliminated herself from the play as the duchess of York, she was without income from a production that would run a record-breaking 171 performances. As a consolation, Webster booked passage to England with some thought that, having proved herself on Broadway, she might be more successful in London. Before sailing, she visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, experienced the top of the Empire State Building, repaid the hospitality of friends, and saw other Broadway shows, including High Tor with her roommate Peggy Ashcroft and Tonight at 8:30 with compatriots Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward. Toward midnight on the eve of sailing, Webster hosted a party in her ship’s cabin with flowers, champagne, and telegrams. Before she left New York, Eddie Dowling handed her a script to consider as a possible next project. She read Shadow and Substance during the voyage and was enthusiastic about directing it, although she secretly hoped that someone in London would offer her an acting job. As theater careers go, Webster’s success had come somewhat late. She was thirty-two. Upon reflection, she called it an “oddly oblique fulfillment.”20 She had dreamed (and continued to dream) of becoming a star actress on the London stage. She had become, instead, an acclaimedPage 73 → Broadway director, if only for one production. She had crossed not merely an ocean, but a professional divide. Back in London, Webster reopened her place in Hampstead and visited the Bedford Street flat, although her

parents were still in Hollywood, where everyone prophesied a great success for Night Must Fall. In fact, May Whitty received an Oscar nomination and offers of several more films. Despite Webster’s celebrity as a Shakespearean director on Broadway, nothing had changed for her in London. It was almost as though she had never left. In the old tradition of relegating women directors to the outlying theaters, she was offered two tryout productions at the Embassy Theatre: Lovers Meeting by Gladys Hurlbut and Three Set Out by Phillip Leaver with rising young stars Michael Redgrave and Constance Cummings. No producer came forward to transfer either to the West End. Still tentative about crossing the divide between acting and directing, Webster continued to hope that someone in London would offer her an acting job. No one did. One of the new scripts that had been pressed upon her in New York belonged to producer Eddie Dowling, who asked Webster to make a trip to Dublin to see the Abbey Theatre production of Shadow and Substance by Paul Vincent Carroll and negotiate with the English star, Sir Cedric Hard-wicke, for the leading part in New York. As circumstances developed, Webster was not available to direct the Broadway production, which received the Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play in the 1937–38 season. In this disappointing interval in London, she received an offer from producer Gilbert Miller to direct a West End play—a drawing-room comedy entitled Old Music by Keith Winter, starring Greer Garson, Hugh Williams, and Celia Johnston—in the revered St. James’s Theatre where Webster had played in Gilbert Wakefield’s Etienne six years earlier. Miller was away during the rehearsal period, and, upon his return, Webster was forced to make a significant political and directorial decision. As she passed by the executive offices in the theater on one occasion, she heard the production stage manager explaining that Webster was doing everything that “Gilbert hates most.” She discovered that Gilbert objected to letting actors settle gradually into their roles and wanted her to dictate the surface style of the production. Webster had two options: become a drill sergeant and present Miller with a slick product in rehearsal, or continue in her own way of making the foundations solid and relying on the last week to refine the actors’ performances. “I decided to trust my own convictions,” she said, “and Miller’s eyesight.”21 Contrary to expectations, Miller saw what remained to be done and did not interfere. Page 74 → Old Music opened on August 18, 1937, and ran for eighty-four performances. The Times reviewer commented on the “vitality and balance” of Webster’s staging.22 She disagreed. Her distrust of the traditions of drawing-room comedy, with its fashionable costumes, splendid furnishings, and smart dialogue, led to a handsome production that was “completely authentic without, somehow, being real.”23 Repeatedly, her distrust of “smart” plays shaped her choices as a director and drew her back to Shakespeare and to less brittle modern plays. Although Webster was optimistic that other directing jobs in London would follow, eighteen years passed before she received another offer of employment in England. The prospects of directing Shadow and Substance for Broadway and the imminent tour of Richard II drew Webster for a second time in her adult life to book passage for New York. She paid a last visit to Bedford Street, saluted Ellen Terry’s tablet on the wall of the church next door, and sailed for New York. A week later, she greeted the Cunard pier as an old friend. Webster returned in the sweltering heat of a New York August to restage Richard II for a four-week run in the St. James Theatre and to recast and rehearse the touring company that would begin a thirty-five-week tour in October. Blistering heat emanated from the sidewalks and was intensified in the airless rehearsal rooms. While the storm clouds of war were gathering on the European horizon, the new Broadway season of 1937–38 was promising. It included Maxwell Anderson’s The Star-Wagon with Lillian Gish and Burgess Meredith, Rachel Crothers’s Susan and God with Gertrude Lawrence, and Jean Giraudoux’s new Parisian hit Amphitryon 38 with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. In addition, Paul Osborn’s On Borrowed Time, Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy,

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men made up the Broadway season. Webster’s success with Richard II brought offers of other work in New York. While in London, she had agreed to direct Shadow and Substance as soon as producer Eddie Dowling set an opening date. She was also offered the direction of a version of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra starring Tallulah Bankhead. She declined because of what she called the “blood-curdling ineptitude” of the adaptation. It ran for five nights and gave rise to John Mason Brown’s famous comment that “Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra—and sank.” With some satisfaction Webster quipped that this remark was unfair since “there was no barge.”24 While Webster waited for the Shadow and Substance rehearsals, her parents stopped in New York City en route to London. May Whitty accepted aPage 75 → part in a sentimental comedy, Your Obedient Husband, at the Broadhurst Theatre. With nothing to do and without London’s Garrick Club for a “spot of bridge” to while away the afternoons, Ben Webster languished. He had been a matinee idol of the London stage and a star in early silent films, but he never made the transition to the talkies. At age seventy-three, he was too old for romantic leads and, as his daughter would have it, too romantic for character parts.25 Distressed over her father’s inactivity, Webster set about generating work for him—and for herself as well. She directed him in a modern British drama, Young Mr. Disraeli, in which he had had a minor success in London. Ben Webster played the father to Derrick de Marney’s Benjamin Disraeli in a play about the future British prime minister before his marriage at age thirtythree. David Ffolkes designed the scenery and costumes, while Alex Yokel produced. It opened in New York City at the Fulton Theatre on November 10, 1937, in competition with the opening night of Tallulah Bankhead’s Antony and Cleopatra. Critics attended the final dress rehearsal and printed devastating reviews on the morning of its opening. Brooks Atkinson commented on the tedium of the writing about a man whose life was filled with activity, brilliance, and tempestuousness. “The actors played with enormous gallantry and spirit, having already seen their death sentences,” Webster remarked.26 The play closed at the end of its first week. Shortly thereafter, while Webster was wrestling with tryout performances in Baltimore with the Richard II touring company, Evans proposed as their next project 1 Henry IV, with himself as Falstaff. Webster asked, “Are you fat and lusty?” “I can act,” he assured her.27 Evans wanted to follow Richard II with another Shakespearean play, saving production costs by using the same cast, scenery, and costumes (except for his own). Preliminary rehearsals of 1 Henry IV were held in New York before the thirty-five-week tour of Richard II began in October. In November, Evans proposed giving two matinee performances of Henry IV at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia. He rehearsed Falstaff by day and played Richard at night, a grueling schedule. Evans gave over preparation for the new production to Webster and attended only the rehearsals that involved Falstaff. When he put on heavy padding, wig, and putty nose and played the first matinee performance of Henry IV, he became dehydrated and was almost unable to play Richard that evening. Evans rethought his plan and decided to concentrate on the tour of Richard II. He was also troubled about his next professional step. Which was it to be: the fat knight or the noble prince of Denmark? Evans concluded that Henry IV invited invidious comparisons to Richard II, and he wanted another auspicious Broadway opening. After some research, he and WebsterPage 76 → determined that the entire text of Hamlet had never been seen in New York, and so plans were set in motion for a production in October 1938 of Hamlet—in its entirety. As Webster struggled to make two armies out of eight actors in Henry IV, Eddie Dowling decided to put Shadow and Substance into rehearsal for a January opening at the John Golden Theatre with Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Julie Haydon, and Henry Southern. It became one of the successes of the Broadway season, but without Webster as the director. Once again, her lack of business acumen got in her way. Despite the work she had already done on the play and the trip to Dublin, she had failed to negotiate a contract with Dowling, depending instead upon a “gentlemen’s agreement.” Since she was engaged with the touring company rehearsals for Richard II, Dowling hired Peter Godfrey to direct the highly successful production about the gallantry of the Irish spirit in conflict with repressive religious and political forces.

Having neglected to negotiate favorable contracts with the Richard II producers and now with Dowling, Webster obviously needed an agent or manager to advise her on contractual and financial matters. She was not in the least astute regarding contracts, agreements, and percentages, completely trusting of the “words of gentlemen, or honor among thieves.”28 Webster’s inattention to personal finances afflicted her throughout her American career. An incident at a party in New York demonstrated her lack of business acumen. The British actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, long time friend of Webster’s parents, expressed delight over the money Webster was making as a Broadway director. Webster confided that she was not being paid a percentage of the box office. In high dudgeon Mrs. Campbell turned to Maurice Evans and asked him why. He laughed and said, “Because I’m too mean!”29 It is clear that Evans thought of himself as a managing partner in his dealings with Webster. Where finances were concerned, he withheld advice when it suited his purposes and pocketbook. While Richard II was touring, Shadow and Substance rehearsing without her, and Young Mr. Disraeli a flop, Webster had time on her hands. Old habits die hard. When she learned that Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were planning a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, Webster wrote them to ask if she might read for the role of Masha. She still had dreams of becoming a leading actress. “But the fates had decided I was to act only rarely and was to be a director in New York,” Webster reflected in later years.30 Individually, Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne were great, stylish actors, but as a team they were unequalled, especially in high comedy. Lunt was called the greatest actor of the American stage since John Barrymore. ByPage 77 → 1938 when Webster wrote to them, the Lunts’ company in association with the Theatre Guild had given successful performances of The Taming of the Shrew, Idiot’s Delight, and Amphitryon 38. They wanted an additional play to round out their repertoire for a tour and felt it should be one that offered a marked contrast to the others. With bravura they announced The Seagull, one of the most difficult plays to perform satisfactorily within the time and money constraints of American commercial theater. Thinking only of acting again, and in the much-prized role of Chekhov’s Masha, Webster was nevertheless solidifying her relationships with actors, designers, and producers. Uta Hagen, Robert Edmond Jones, and the Theatre Guild would reappear as significant creative forces in Webster’s future endeavors. In the late thirties, the Theatre Guild was one of New York’s most prestigious producing organizations. Formed in 1918 by members of the defunct Washington Square Players, the Theatre Guild presented plays of merit not likely to interest commercial managers. It offered a number of plays each year to an audience of subscribers in New York. In 1928, it began a subscription series in other cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The Guild was governed by a board of directors and for a time maintained a core company of actors. By the 1930s, under the leadership of Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn, the Guild had become a commercial producer investing in long-run hits. The Guild offered the Lunts, and eventually Webster, an organization firmly in control of the mechanisms of production—casting, selection of directors and designers, financing, subscribers, touring, and so on. In 1937, critics unanimously cheered the reunion of the Lunts with the Theatre Guild. Brooks Atkinson said it best: “The Theatre Guild and the Lunts have always been at their best together.”31 As an instance of serendipity, the Theatre Guild opened S. N. Behrman’s version of Amphitryon 38 by Jean Giraudoux with the Lunts at the Shubert Theatre in November, eight days before the disastrous Young Mr. Disraeli. Brooks Atkinson called Amphitryon 38 “the most distinguished piece of theatre the Guild has had the pleasure of presenting to the subscribers in some time.”32 Amphitryon 38 ran for 153 performances, while Young Mr. Disraeli closed after eight. May Whitty’s show also closed early, prompting Webster to say of the 1937–38 season that it included “a couple of crashing flops in which all three Websters, by a feat of extraordinary dexterity, managed to get themselves included.”33 It was around this time that Webster learned that the Lunts were consideringPage 78 → The Seagull. Dissatisfied with the readily available Constance Garnett translation, the Lunts recruited critic Stark Young to make a new translation for their production. Robert Edmond Jones asked to design the scenery and costumes. He had first come to prominence in 1915 when

he designed the scenery for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife. He was said to have sounded the note that began the American revolution in stage scenery by creating poetic images to convey the mood and import of a play. The Tower of London dominated his designs for Richard III, the brooding austerity of the New England farmhouse in Desire under the Elms, and the portico of the Greek revival house in Mourning Becomes Electra. Eager to use the talents of one of America’s foremost designers, the Lunts readily agreed to his participation. The Lunts then turned to Robert Milton to direct the play, having worked with him a number of times in The Country Cousin, Banco, and Outward Bound. Milton, who was Russian by birth, was reputed to be an expert on Russian drama. The Theatre Guild agreed to sponsor the presentation for a limited run. It was billed as “The Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne Production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. “ The Lunts did not expect The Seagull to become a commercial success. Chekhov’s plays, with their ambiguity, seeming lack of structure, and peculiar mixture of comedy and pathos, had never been popular with Broadway audiences. The first professional American production of The Seagull was presented by the Washington Square Players, with Roland Young, Mary Morris, and Frank Conroy in the cast and Helen Westley as Arkadina. Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre production in 1929 featured Merle Maddern as Arkadina, the great Yiddish actor Jacob Ben-Ami as Trigorin, Josephine Hutchinson as Nina, and Le Gallienne herself as Masha. More recently, Komisarjevsky had directed The Seagull in London’s West End, with Gielgud as Trigorin and Edith Evans as Arkadina. Webster had unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Masha. She was heartbroken at this rejection and went so far as to suggest that it “impelled her toward the United States.” Nonetheless, in 1936, she had few thoughts of taking up residence in New York City.34 In a way, her rejection was fortuitous. It is doubtful that Webster would have been willing to extricate herself had she been playing Masha at the time of Maurice Evans’s invitation to come to New York. Forging ahead with their plans for The Seagull, the Lunts conducted readings of the play on an irregular basis. As late as January 17, several new actors were added, including Webster in the role of the lovelorn spinster. She said that she read “abominably,” but the Lunts hired her anyway.35 ThisPage 79 → would be Webster’s first appearance on Broadway as an actress and another milestone in her American career. No production of The Seagull can succeed without a transcendent Nina, and the Lunts were determined to find exactly the right actress. The seventeen-year-old Uta Hagen auditioned for the Lunts at the Shubert Theatre on the set of Amphitryon 38. Having performed one of Nina’s scenes, she began to walk off the stage when the assistant called to her from the auditorium: “Miss Fontanne says to wait.” A moment later Lynn Fontanne rushed on stage, closely followed by Alfred Lunt. They praised Hagen’s scene and offered suggestions to improve it. Finally, Lunt and Fontanne asked her to come to the next rehearsal. That next evening after the reading, Hagen learned that the role was hers.36 The Lunts rehearsed three weeks before Robert Milton arrived on February 15. Actors’ Equity limited Broadway rehearsals to four weeks with a director, but there was no prohibition on unofficial rehearsals. As Alan Hewitt said, “The Lunts were …violating every conceivable Equity rule, even assuming that Equity then had such rules. Nobody had a contract. Nobody was being paid. But nobody complained. A great venture was aborning. That was what mattered.”37 Milton’s contribution was thought significant by some, but was minimized by others. Harold Clurman said Milton’s “only qualification for the assignment was that he happened to be the son of a famous Russian actor.”38By then an established director herself and a close observer of the techniques of others, Webster concluded that Milton’s methods were essentially external. He paid a great deal of attention to movement and gesture, but almost none to characterization and motivation. Webster found it difficult to respond to Milton’s approach and was surprised that the Lunts seemed satisfied. We rehearsed all Sunday afternoon and evening. He [Milton] fussed and worried over the first act till

I thought I should go mad—took five days over it—tries every detail of movement or business over and over again till it has been elaborated in every possible variety of ways. And yet he leaves you curiously free “inside.” To me it is cart-before-the-horse directing and it took me a little while to adjust myself; but it’s not without value, since his sense of detail is perceptive and often illuminating. It is as if he made all the icing and then left you to fill in your own cake from underneath.39

Trained by Harcourt Williams, Webster felt that the Lunts also “took a curiously outside-to-inside path” to their roles. Yet their command of technicalPage 80 → resources, their ability to create “extraordinary jets of emotional feeling” by technical means, was overwhelming. Lynn Fontanne one day talked to Webster about the scene when Masha suddenly breaks down and pours out all the bottled-up anguish of her heart to Dr. Dorn: “I think,” said Lynn, “it should start like this …” and she gave a cry of agony, like an animal in unbearable pain. I was taken entirely by surprise. It wasn’t my cry of my pain; it wasn’t anything I should ever have dreamed of for myself; it was grotesque, uninhibited, revealing, wholly right. I went home and worked very hard. I made it into my own pain and wrung from it my own cry—I mean, of course, Masha’s cry. Afterwards, I found it frighteningly difficult to bring myself, at every performance, to the pitch where the cry broke from me irrepressibly, inevitably, not fore-thought or manufactured. Webster concluded that “craft and discipline” must come into creating that moment—”commodities which the Lunts had in abundance.”40 Webster was a keen observer of other artists as well. She watched the Lunts rehearsing Trigorin’s and Arkadina’s first entrance. They were dissatisfied with the progress of the scene and baffled as to how to play it for greatest effect. “Lynn and Alfred tried it sitting, standing, walking, crossing, lighting a cigarette, picking up a glass, sitting on a chair, with innumerable permutations and combinations of these things,” Webster said. “Bob Milton suggested everything under the sun,” but nothing seemed to work. Finally, they asked Webster for ideas. “Very gingerly I ventured the notion that it all depended …on what had been going on at the dinner table from which we had all just come and consequently on the precise state of mind in which we all arrived in view of the audience.”41 This was the woman who had been praised at the Old Vic for entering the stage as though she had been carrying on a long conversation.42 Webster’s suggestion was received with courtesy but effectively ignored. The Lunts returned to the vexing question of how far Fontanne should walk and where she should stop. In this and other scenes, they became increasingly frustrated by their inability to find the key to the material. They never doubted that the play was a great one or that it could be magnificently performed. Despite her own frustrations, Webster admired Lunt and Fontanne as “a law unto themselves and in their presence one could do nothing but rejoice.”43 Since Masha has a great deal of time offstage, Webster watched the rehearsals as unobtrusively as possible from the back of the auditorium,Page 81 → believing fervently that “the privacy of actors in the process of creation should be absolute.”44 One day, however, Lunt sought her out in the darkness. He said, “Lynn is sure you must be thinking how much better Edith Evans was [in the Gielgud production].” Webster had indeed been contrasting in her mind the English and American approaches. Gielgud’s production, directed by another Russian, was “more balanced, smoother, more polished, more exact, much more polite, rather more beautiful and not nearly so alive.” Of the one before her, she said, “I think this will be cruder, rougher, not nearly so right in detail, but much more flexible, with dashes of the grotesque comedy and some splashes of real, harsh ugliness that may well be nearer to the ‘all-out-ness’ of the Russian.”45 At one of the last rehearsals before the company traveled to Baltimore for the first tryout performance, critic Alexander Woollcott watched a run-through on the bare stage of the Shubert Theatre. Most of the actors, including the Lunts, felt the rehearsals had not been going particularly well, and they feared Woollcott’s reaction. After the run-through, the actors gathered so that Woollcott, nattily attired in a long black cape, could address

them. He announced that the performance had moved him beyond description. The production was like a beacon in the darkness, “a sanctuary for the spirit of man amid the bloody violence of a marching world.” The actors wept, and the morale of the company rose perceptibly.46 “I saw a single rehearsal of it,” Woollcott later wrote, “the first complete run-through of the play. I have never seen anything better anywhere. [The Lunts] have never done anything so good. It can never be so good again, I expect, as it was in that stripped, unadorned, hair-trigger performance.”47 Morale remained high in Baltimore. The Seagull opened there at Ford’s Theatre on March 16, “with the audience demanding twenty-eight curtain calls and then going home only by request.” The day after the Baltimore opening, the Lunts called a rehearsal that lasted almost until it was time to get into makeup and costume for the second performance. “With these people it never stops until they fall into their graves,” Uta Hagen wrote to her parents.48 After a week in Baltimore, The Seagull played a week in Boston at the Colonial Theatre to equally enthusiastic, although not as demonstrative, audiences. Opening night was a triumphant occasion by almost any standard, and the critical response was overwhelmingly favorable. Elinor Hughes wrote in the Boston Globe that the play “requires and in this case has received the best possible acting and direction.” Webster, as Masha, who “drags her life behind her like an endless train,” contributed “a masterpiece in little, a beautifully spoken performance, aptly mingling the tragic and thePage 82 → ludicrous.” One disgruntled critic for the Boston Daily Record said, “ The Sea Gull is a good vehicle for so competent a company, but as a diversion it is no dish of bonbons.”49 Still, Alfred Lunt was not satisfied. There were rehearsals each afternoon and sometimes following the evening performance as well. All the rehearsals in the world could not quell his fear that the company had just begun to penetrate the surface of Chekhov’s play. In an interview published in the New York Journal and American the day before the Broadway opening, he said, “I don’t see how actors can ever exhaust or reach the bottom of its [the play’s] subtleties, its complex meanings, its unspoken emotions. The longer we rehearse, the more amazing things we find in it. It is the most difficult and wonderful play I have ever read; it is tender and human and profound, and ah, so difficult to play! The values are all there, but so elusively, so delicately expressed.”50 The Seagull opened on March 28, 1938, at the Shubert Theatre with Lynn Fontanne as Madama Arkadina, Alfred Lunt as Trigorin, Richard Whorf as Treplev, Sydney Greenstreet as Sorin, Uta Hagen as Nina, Alan Hewitt as Yakov, Edith King as Paulina, John Barclay as Dr. Dorn, Harold Moffet as Shamreyeff, O. Z. Whitehead as Medvedenko, Thomas Gomez as the cook, and Margaret Webster as Masha. As Lunt feared, the Broadway premiere was not universally acclaimed. Usually there was a clear critical agreement regarding the artistic success or failure of the Lunts’ productions. This time, there was no consensus. Some critics, like Woollcott, fell under the production’s spell. Richard Watts Jr. of the Tribune expressed the view of several others who came down on the side of success: “That fascinating cascade of melancholia and soulprobing that is Chekhov’s The Sea Gull comes to a bitter, brooding life in the splendid production …beautifully acted by Miss Fontanne, Mr. Lunt and an excellent company …and capably directed by Robert Milton.”51 Others remained untouched. John Mason Brown, responding chiefly to the red wig worn by Lynn Fontanne, called her Arkadina a “totally external creation; noisy blatant road company Queen Bess.” Brooks Atkinson complained that “Mr. Lunt and especially Miss Fontanne remain brightly on the surface of an introspective play.” His chief kudos went to Webster’s Masha as the only member of the cast playing with “perception of the evanescent life that is hovering under and around the written skeleton of the drama.” A week later Atkinson again called attention to Webster’s “evocative and wide-visioned playing” of Masha and to Sidney Greenstreet’s fine acting, but he chided the Lunts for conveying little of Chekhov’s understanding and compassion.52 The two chief discoveries in The Seagull were Webster and Uta Hagen.Page 83 → Webster played with compassion, humor, and understanding of the fragile, evanescent life of the Chekhov character. Hagen thoroughly captivated the New York critics, who found her “beguiling,” “forceful,” “magnetic,” “lovely, sensitive,

impressionable,” and “something to cherish.” “Her eager listening to Trigorin’s words,” Robert Benchley wrote, “as he holds forth for her benefit marks her as an actress who needs no lines for herself, but when she does have them, she makes them sing.” He also praised Webster and Greenstreet: “Margaret Webster also comes off with considerable triumph as Masha, especially in the drinking scene, and Sydney Greenstreet, from his chair, gives full value to some of the meatier lines of the play.”53 Whatever the reasons for the failure of The Seagull to achieve the near universal accolades of most other LuntFontanne productions, it was not because it was a “dull play,” as Sidney B. Whipple said in the World-Telegram. Lawrence Langner touched upon the heart of the matter when he said that the individual cast members had been brilliant but that no sense of ensemble playing had developed. He concluded that “no-one, including director Robert Milton, approached it as Chekhov must be approached—with the awareness that the subtext, rather than the text, is the heart of the drama.” Webster agreed that some of “the play’s quality came through brilliantly; but there was a lack of rhythm, of wholeness, possibly of a kind of trust.” Harold Clurman placed most of the blame on Robert Milton, who had been “unable to bridge the gap” between talented American actors and a Russian playwright of genius.54 Few who saw the Lunts perform could deny the magic they created, no matter how they arrived at it. Nonetheless, the arguments continued for years: were they essentially actors who created a gallery of diverse characters, or were they performers who distorted the roles they played until the characters came to resemble themselves? Even Jared Brown in The Fabulous Lunts does not fully answer the question. Uta Hagen regarded both as great artists who were unjustly held to be capable only of light comedy. Webster added her praise: “Their playing together was flawlessly, invisibly synchronized. It was like watching two beautiful tennis players, two beautiful dancers; like listening to piano and violin perfectly answering each other.”55 Webster had mixed feelings about her experience. She admired Lunt and Fontanne as great actors, but she was unhappy and frustrated in rehearsals by a feeling of “no-relation to anybody or anything else in the play” as the Lunts and Robert Milton picked away at every external detail of movement and business. Over the weeks of the run, Webster observed that the cast finally worked themselves into a team, but “we never let ourselves be carried along by the flowing current of the play.”56 Webster concluded that the Lunts were not entirely happy playingPage 84 → Chekhov. Acknowledging that The Seagull is a difficult play, she said that the Lunts could “neither free themselves in their own ways nor yield to the author and trust him to do the work in his.”57 In her own directing, conversely, Webster was most happy working with a text where she could completely trust the playwright, for example, Shakespeare or Shaw. By this time, Webster had a wide circle of British and American friends in New York City. She had renewed her girlhood friendship with Eva Le Gallienne, who shared her Weston, Connecticut, home with Marion (called “Gunnar”) Evensen Westlake, an actress who had worked with Le Gallienne during the Civic Repertory Theatre days. Le Gallienne had seen The Sea Gull and defended Fontanne’s use of the red wig that had so horrified John Mason Brown, as just the sort of color a woman like Arkadina would achieve when she dyed her hair. (Nonetheless, when the Lunts consulted Webster about matters concerning the tour, she recommended that Fontanne discard the red wig as a distraction. Fontanne did so.) The two women lunched together occasionally in New York, sharing stories about the theater in general and gossiping about the inadequacy of actors in particular. Webster was invited several times to Le Gallienne’s home in Weston. Le Gallienne confided in her diary that Webster had “a lot of her mother’s wit without her wickedness. It’s a kindly wit, not a destructive one …and then she has such a clear, level, honest brain…. Her success has improved her looks, her whole personality in fact.”58 Although their careers crossed paths in New York, there were, as yet, no personal entanglements between the two women. Le Gallienne’s mother was living in Paris, and, for the moment, Webster’s parents had returned to London. That summer, both women traveled separately to and from Europe, even though war was on the horizon. At the close of The Seagull, Peggy joined the Lunts, who were opening Amphitryon 38 in London, on board the Normandie (that soon-to-be-doomed ship) en route to visit her parents and to begin preparations with Maurice Evans for Hamlet in its entirety.

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CHAPTER 5 GIANTS AND PYGMIES Shakespeare’s Hamlet in its entirety. Eight minutes shorter than Gone With The Wind. —MARGARET WEBSTER With a reprieve from performances for four months, Webster traveled through Europe, observing from London to Paris to Genoa the impending catastrophe of a world slouching toward war. Hitler’s armies were poised to overrun Czechoslovakia and Poland, precipitating Britain’s declaration of war. It was the summer of 1938. Against this backdrop, Maurice Evans decided to take as his next professional step an uncut version of Hamlet, and Webster faced a truly immense task as the director. First, she had to discover Shakespeare’s “uncut text” and then determine how to stage it so that Broadway audiences could endure a four-hour performance exclusive of intermissions. With characteristic wit, Webster suggested to her friend that they should advertise the uncut Hamlet as “Eight minutes shorter than Gone With The Wind. “1 Webster had seen at least a dozen Hamlets in her time and performed in two of them. She had appeared as a gentlewoman with John Barrymore in London in 1925 and later played with John Gielgud, Martita Hunt, and Donald Wolfit in the 1930 Old Vic production that transferred to the West End. As she worked on an acting text, her self-confidence, tenacity, and good sense prevailed over the twin pitfalls: conflicting scholarly interpretations and the various stage traditions that Hamlet had spawned over the years. In an illuminating remark Webster said, “If the play is really as difficult as they [the scholars] seem to believe, Maurice can’t act it, I can’tPage 86 → direct it, nobody can understand it and we better not do it. So I shut the books and went back to the text.”2 Despite the many scholarly words written about the play, Hamlet is a play of the theater. This was Webster’s guidepost throughout. She set herself the task of making decisive directorial choices, dealing with interpretation, period, scenery, and costumes. In consultation with designer David Ffolkes, Webster and Evans decided to set the play in the Elizabethan period—the ruffs, farthingales, and doublets of Shakespeare’s time. The stage itself would be kept open by covering over the orchestra pit, creating the apron that had worked so successfully in Richard II. Webster began the search for an acting text with the First Folio, the Second Quarto, and even the First or “Bad” Quarto. She said of her research, “I soon found myself in the midst of a kind of bibliographical thriller-mystery with a number of villains, a labyrinth of clues, and two protagonists, in the shape of ‘F 1’ and ‘Q 2’ who soon became almost as vivid to me as Hamlet himself.” She also consulted John Dover Wilson’s The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As she revealed in her own writings on the play, she applied an actor’s knowledge of stage practice to the arguable points. Her actor’s sensibility committed her inevitably to the First Folio (checked against the First Quarto and “theatrical need”) as the more authentic text, because it seemed to be “the playhouse version for playhouse reasons.”3 More simply put, the First Folio was most likely printed from the original stage manager’s prompt copy at the Globe and represented what the company had played. Before leaving New York for the summer months, Webster and Evans agreed upon a cast, with the exception of the king and queen, who had eluded them in auditions. The day before she sailed to London on the Normandie in the company of the Lunts, she went to a matinee of Orson Welles’s production of Heartbreak House at the Mercury Theatre and found Queen Gertrude—the Viennese-born Mady Christians. She was playing Hesione Hushabye with a “radiant sensibility” opposite Orson Welles as Captain Shotover and Geraldine Fitzgerald as Ellie Dunn.4 It turned out that Webster and Christians had a great deal in common, including theatrical parents and growing up abroad. Born in Vienna into a theatrical family, Mady Christians (née Marguerita Maria Christians) had studied acting with Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Like Webster, she had traveled as a child with her parents in and out of New

York City. Her father, Rudolph Christians, like Ben Webster, was also a well-known actor. He joined the German repertory company at the Irving Place Theatre, near Gramercy Park in lower Manhattan in 1912, and a year later became its manager. Mady Christians appeared there in operettas as a child performer. When German-language theater proved unpopular in New York City duringPage 87 → the First World War, mother (opera and concert singer Bertha Klein Christians) and daughter returned to Berlin, and she subsequently enrolled in Reinhardt’s acting school. Her father went to Hollywood to act in films and died there of pneumonia in 1921. Mady Christians made her professional debut at the Deutsches Theater under Reinhardt’s management and rose to stardom in Europe in classical plays, musical comedies, and in films. In 1931, she toured the United States in a production of Marching By and returned to Berlin with a contract to appear again on Broadway in The Divine Drudge two years later. In October 1933, Mady Christians began a full-fledged American stage and film career and appeared on Broadway in five productions, including Save Me the Waltz, before appearing in Orson Welles’s Heartbreak House. Five years older than Margaret Webster, Christians was tall (about five feet, seven inches), voluptuous, and blond with gray-blue eyes. She was always smartly tailored and carried herself with “regal bearing.” Webster described Christians as “blonde, distinguished, opulent” with a slight German accent that, to the director’s mind, would be appropriate to the Danish king’s foreign princess.5 Webster’s professional relationship with Christians soon evolved into a deeper friendship. It is likely that they had a love affair that began during rehearsals for Hamlet. In 1938, society was not self-consciously exploring the moral and legal ramifications of relationships between individuals of the same gender. It was “something unspoken” and ignored. Moreover, the theater community, often ostracized from polite society except as celebrity on display, has always been tolerant of all manner of relationships and excessive behavior, as long as nothing intruded on the work or created adverse publicity. Asked about her private life during an interview on “theatre directing as a new vocation for women,” Webster answered, “No, I’m not married—or anything.” It was the only information she volunteered about her personal life.6 Following Edith Craig’s presence, three women entered Webster’s adult life as longtime partners: Mady Christians, Eva Le Gallienne, and Pamela Frankau. Although they did not share an apartment (Christians lived then at 42 East Fifty-second Street), Webster and Christians frequently vacationed together on Martha’s Vineyard when their professional commitments permitted. On one of these occasions, they rented a cottage at Menemsha and fell in love with the island. In 1940, for twelve hundred dollars Webster bought a small house that commanded a magnificent hilltop view of the ocean at Gay Head. The women spent weekends and summers together in the cottage, where they gardened, swam, and sunbathed. In all of the writings about Margaret Webster during her three decades ofPage 88 → work in the American theater, there are no overt references to what the time considered the forbidden topic of lesbianism. Webster’s autobiography mentions only friendship and admiration for her friend of thirteen years, along with her shock and horror over Christians’s death at age fifty-one, precipitated, in large part, by the FBI investigations into the lives of those who were foreign-born and potential threats to national security. In her letters to her mother, Webster wrote a great deal about Christians, especially during and after the preparations for Hamlet. “Mady Christians has been a tower of strength both on and off the stage—she’s a grand woman—we feel as one over almost everything connected with the theatre,” Webster said, “and a lot quite unconnected with it, e.g. ‘the crisis!’”—that is, Hitler’s annexation of Christians’s native Austria. Webster also viewed her friend with a director’s eye, remarking that “she really does play the Queen as I’ve hoped to see it played. It’s hard for me to tell just how far our ideas have got over, but I think they have, for she’s made a great success, and many other ex-Queens have been loud in their praise of her, and of my handling of the part.”7 While casting Hamlet in 1938, Webster worked against the time-honored types for the king and queen: no sinister,

unattractive Claudius, and no devious, lustful Gertrude. Webster argued that Gertrude would never have known of the “horrid murder” and would have been “distressed” by her son’s inexplicable dislike of his new stepfather.8 British actor Henry Edwards was cast as Claudius, an individual capable of ruling a kingdom and handsome enough for a woman to fall in love with him. With the drums of war beating in the background, Webster and Maurice Evans did the preliminary work on Hamlet in a villa leased by Evans overlooking Portofino harbor in Italy. Concerned over his stamina and paying backstage crews, Evans worried over the length of the uncut performance. Producer Boris Said had already declared that no one in his right mind would sit through four hours of Hamlet; a compromise was reached to perform two shorter versions each week, alternating with the “Entirety.”9 In late summer, Webster returned to London from Portofino. She completed her director’s prompt copy—the Hamlet text laid out with parallel notes opposite the printed page denoting stage business, music cues, property lists, scene plans, lighting plots, and special effects. Fearing the encroaching war for England and not wanting to be separated by an ocean from her parents, she tried to persuade May and Ben to return with her to the United States. Her mother complained that she had no job in the United States, while her father avoided the issue by exiting the Bedford Street house to play bridge at the Garrick Club. Page 89 → Webster’s preparations for Hamlet paralleled Europe’s preparations for war. Webster and Evans set their production machinery into gear in New York City as Hitler assembled his vast war machine on the borders of Czechoslovakia. Webster had a run-through of act 1 at the St. James Theatre on the day Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to negotiate with Hitler. With growing concern, Webster again urged her parents to come to America. However, both were now working. Ben Webster had taken the role of Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Vic, and May Whitty was working in a television show of Parnell, the play Webster had left to come to New York to direct Richard II. Webster argued with her mother without success: “I cannot see that any good purpose would be served by your staying in London and adding some other medal to your D. B. E.”10 Nonetheless, May and Ben were working and prepared to endure another war from Bedford Street. With all the alarums and uncertainties in Europe, the Hamlet production attained a new significance, and many lines addressed the encroaching world war: “If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” Although the rumors and sounds of war were an ocean and continent away, the Hamlet company was, in part, a European colony and directly affected. Webster and Evans had families in London; the wife of Rhys Williams (the player king) was from Czechoslovakia; George Graham (Polonius) had two brothers in the British army; Henry Edwards (Claudius) had a child in a Belgian convent; and Mady Christians (Gertrude) was torn between her antiHitler sentiments and her love for her native Austria. Immersed in production plans, Webster put the war out of her head by concentrating on the human values lodged within Shakespeare’s text. I wanted the play not to seem abstruse or obscure; to speak directly to its listeners in human terms. I wanted the characters to live, not only Hamlet and Ophelia but the small parts which the uncut text reveals with such brilliant clarity: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras and Osric, even the tiny ones which vanish in the usual cut versions—Reynaldo, Voltemand, “a Sailor.” I wanted them to be recognizable. I wanted to make it clear that there were bedrooms and kitchens at Elsinore as well as battlements.11 On board the Paris during her return voyage, Webster worked on her promptbook and contemplated writing a book about her family that would eventually become The Same Only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family. Once in New York, she settled into the Barbizon Plaza HotelPage 90 → before renting an apartment at 21 West Tenth Street that overlooked trees, small gardens, and balconies on the neighboring street.12

As the production machinery for Hamlet shifted into high gear, Webster induced Lehman Engel to write the musical score. Webster had met him at a party given by Orson Welles during the run of Heartbreak House, and they liked each other at once. Engel found her “bright and witty, precise and kind, warm and outgoing” and had only the warmest memories of his experience working with her on the production. He admired the fact that she knew the play from memory, which gave her a freedom and certainty about everything she did. “Always,” he said, “she worked from the inside of the play out.” Of the descriptions of Webster written by her coworkers, Engel’s is one of the most memorable. Physically, she was a “thing” to behold. Generally, she wore slacks. Her short hair fell in strips across her face. A cigarette always hung precariously out of the corner of her mouth, the smoke menacing her eyes and provoking violent fits of coughing. She was everywhere in the theater at once and never accepted any nonsense from anyone. She was the first to laugh raucously at a joke, but her work was concentrated, and it proceeded without interruption from the first day of rehearsal to the last.13 Webster and Engel became fast friends during Hamlet and worked together on eleven productions. Webster eventually wrote the foreword to his book called Music for Classical Tragedy. During rehearsals in early September everyone in the company heard the alarums of a larger, immediate war in the soldier’s martial noises about Fort inbras’s rumored conquest of Poland: Hamlet. Goes it against the main of Poland, sir, Or for some frontier? Captain….We go to gain a little patch of ground That hath in it no profit but the name. To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it; Nor will it yield to Norway or the pole A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee. Hamlet. When, then, the Polack never will defend it. Captain. Yes, it is already garrison’d. In the lull before the world entered into war, Hamlet was poised for unqualified success. Webster worked fourteen-hour days. During previewsPage 91 → she installed an intercom system at the back of the orchestra seats where she sat to communicate with the electricians about lighting cues. One evening, Walter Slezak, who was playing across the street in I Married an Angel, a musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, looked in for the first part of the preview and went backstage at intermission to see Mady Christians. He reported that there was a strange woman at the back of the orchestra sitting on the floor and swearing. He thought the woman was drunk.14 It was Webster communicating with her electricians. Though never an “impassioned Hamlet fan,” Webster by the time the show opened considered “ Hamlet…the most priceless piece of literature in the human heritage.” Moreover, she thought Maurice Evans’s Hamlet better than his Richard, “of great technical accomplishment and a sustained level of rhetoric and sense.”15 On October 12, 1938, audiences and critics agreed with her assessment that Hamlet was the most all-round satisfying show they had ever seen.16 Because of the performance’s length, her director’s opening-night agonies were unusually prolonged. This time, she stayed for the celebration at Sardi’s and the early reviews. Webster recorded her sense of that evening: The first act is over an hour and a half, and no shuffling or coughing, rapt attention throughout. They go out for the dinner break; they come back on time and don’t talk in the aisles …The second intermission—no snags yet …There is the heavy thunder of guns, the crash of the last chords, the four captains lift Hamlet high above their heads, the curtain slides down to the floor and it is over.17 Hamlet became the talk of New York. Brooks Atkinson extolled it: “no one has really seen Hamlet until he has sat enthralled before the uncut version.” He praised Evans’s angst-free prince—a Hamlet of modern sensibilities

“who does not love words for their own sake but for their active meaning.”18 Unlike Richard II, which had not been seen in New York for sixty years, Evans’s Hamlet could not escape comparisons. New Yorkers had seen John Barrymore, Leslie Howard, and, in the previous season, John Gielgud play the prince. By downplaying the “melancholic Dane” and portraying a Hamlet of quick intellect, alertness, and frankness, Evans set himself apart from modern traditions. John Mason Brown made a point of this difference in the New York Post: “Unlike most recent Hamlets, Mr. Evans is not a neurotic princeling with a pale visage who strikes despairing poses under the spotlights. He is the first entirely masculine Hamlet of our time…. Mr. Evans’ Dane is, in other words, not the introvert Mr. Gielgud disclosed so brilliantly. He has a consistency Mr. Gielgud’s Hamlet never dreamed ofPage 92 → achieving, and a brilliance of his own which is no less rewarding…. Mr. Evans proves himself to be the finest actor of our day in a production which is by all odds the most satisfying, and most moving Hamlet has received within not-so-recent memory.”19 Rosamund Gilder, the editor of Theatre Arts, described Evans’s Hamlet as vigorous, free, remarkably expert with beautiful, harmonious readings that avoided excessive subtleties. “There is no sense of lacerating inner conflict in his Hamlet,” she wrote. “His prince is capable of noble anger, of overwhelming depression, of violent grief.” However, according to Gilder, “the profounder depths of the part are left unexplored…. The flashes of insight, the devastating moments when often, without speaking a word, John Gielgud revealed Hamlet’s naked, tortured soul are not in this picture. It is, deliberately, the portrait of a young man ‘most generous and free from all contriving.’ ”20 Others in the cast were also singled out for praise. Atkinson admired Mady Christians, who acted “a queen of shallow mind and nervous apprehension.” Brown called her Gertrude a “triumph of acting.” Stark Young was remarkably unreserved in his appreciation: Miss Mady Christians gave to the role of the Queen an air of court breeding and style that contributed to the impression of allure and delicate lushness that she achieved and that helped convince us of the passionate bond between her and the King. It is the first time I ever saw this motif in the play when it was made to count to its full dramatic value.21 On the staging, Atkinson praised Webster’s courage “to sacrifice show to action and to give the players room enough to swing a speech around their heads”: “the design of the performance and the swift tempo keep the story speeding down the corridors of dramatic doom.” Young likewise praised “Miss Webster’s direction [that] spread the many scenes of the play into a singularly comprehensive pattern, flexible, never banal and often eloquent. The unobtrusive distribution of her stage movement was remarkable, as was the way in which she managed to leave certain of the obscene passages intact and yet cover them enough with stage business to prevent their sticking out beyond Shakespeare’s purpose and thus distracting attention from the true effect.”22 Others praised her “originality,” “inventiveness,” “pictorial loveliness,” “melodramatic excitement,” and “profound comprehension” of the text.23 Webster’s “comprehension of the text” was the chief strength of her staging. She fervently believed that the director’s function was interpretive, whether the material was a musical revue or an all-star revival of King Lear.Page 93 → She acknowledged that Shakespeare’s texts, nonetheless, offered leeway for a wide margin of interpretation. As she explained in a chapter that she wrote for John Gassner’s Producing the Play, published three years later, There have always been and always will be twenty different ways of producing Hamlet, each of them faithful to a different valuation of the text, and to a varying concept of how best to make it vivid to a contemporary audience in terms of theatre. There is no right or wrong in the choice, other than the answer to the question: which of them, in effect, presents to the audience to which it is played the best theatre and the most vital illustration of the play Shakespeare wrote?24 Webster wrote this piece after she had staged Richard II, Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, and Twelfth Night. It best captures

her thoughts on the director’s preliminary work in staging the Shakespearean text. Her process was intelligent, considered, and born from seventeen years’ experience, which began with Lewis Casson’s staging of another classical text —The Trojan Women. All of her professional life, Webster believed that the theater belonged primarily to the playwright because, she argued, “after the tumult and the shouting, only the play remains.”25 She warned of two pitfalls in the director’s process: the overeager search for novelty at any price and the too great reverence for the traditions. She argued for a middle ground between the liberty of unlimited textual alterations and the scholarly view that regards the Shakespearean canon as Holy Writ. Because Shakespeare was an expert craftsman, the modern director should alter or cut only with good reason—“the theatre reason.” A director should never make a cut or a transposition without weighing the possible loss of speed, meaning, impact, or clarity. Moreover, Webster warned against inserting a prolonged and extraneous piece of business without considering the same factors. “Any actor who has played both the cut version and the entire version of Hamlet will tell you that the latter is far less tiring,” she concluded.26 Webster’s credo was the “imaginative flexibility of the text”—whether Shakespearean or modern. She resisted “stunts” with settings, arguing that the setting should “interpret and illuminate the spirit of the play, and not obscure it, nor triumph over it.” Designers David Ffolkes, Robert Edmond Jones, Ben Edwards, and the Motleys responded to Webster’s aversion to conceptual stunts and provided flexible settings for Richard II, Hamlet, Henry IV, Othello, The Tempest, Henry VIII, and The Taming of the Shrew. Webster adhered to Lilian Baylis’s blunt assessment of an actor’s value for performing Shakespeare’s verse. Baylis asked of Charles Laughton before hiring him at the Old Vic, “Can you say his lovely words?” A director’sPage 94 → obligation was to pay careful attention to the phrasing and presentation of a line, or series of lines, so that the key words were clear. Nonetheless, the director’s central problem, Webster observed, lay with both the individual actor and the orchestration of voices. “The great scenes of the tragedies, and many of the comedies too,” she wrote, “are like a symphonic score in which the individual voices serve as instruments, conflicting, modulating, and combining both in tempo and in melodic line. The director must hear the full score, steadily and whole.”27 She also held the view that the director’s hardest work comes before the first rehearsal, and she worked long hours in preparation for that first meeting with the actors. Through long experience first as an actor and then as a director, she concluded that the director must know at the outset what she is setting out to do, what characterization she wants, what tempo, climaxes, and movements, and also how the mechanics would be handled. Nonetheless, the director must remain flexible to allow the actors’ personalities and inventiveness to add their own vital contribution to the production. Echoing her observations of Harcourt Williams’s process, she wrote: The director must make his actors trust him and feel both easy and safe in his hands. He must stimulate their creative faculties, controlling and, in the most exact sense of the word, “directing” them, but never riding rough-shod over them. On opening night the show is in the hands of the actors, and the happier they feel, the better they will play.28 Webster once used a bricklayer’s analogy to demonstrate the limitless possibilities of Shakespeare’s texts: Many modern plays present the director with very little straw out of which to contrive a play full of bricks. But here [in Shakespeare’s text] the straw is unlimited and you can make as many bricks as your imagination and energy allow you, and still have straw to spare…. Shakespeare will stand up to almost anything except pomposity and boredom.29 After the first rush of excitement and congratulations, Webster, as expected, was less euphoric about the production. Four days after the opening of Hamlet, she wrote to her mother, pointing out the show’s “defects”: Maurice gives a grand performance…with the emphasis on human-ness, colour, and truth. He lacks the final greatness, I think; is scared stiff of “To Be or not to Be,” and makes nothing of it in

consequence; misses his earlier ghost scene too. But such sweep, such power, such reality, honesty, Page 95 → integrity, and, in all but the higher spiritual flights, understanding, that it’s in a different class from his Richard. But so, in my opinion, is the whole show.30

She ends her critique having regressed to that plaintiff child back in Bradley Wood House writing to her absent parent: “I do so WISH you could see it! Really for the first time I’ve done something I would be proud for you to see. Or maybe I AM crazy!”31 Years later, in revisiting the Hamlet success story for her autobiography, Webster recognized that she had felt the need at the time to denigrate her extraordinary accomplishment. In terms of staging, she thought later, there was far too much scenery, too many props, too much “business.” But it was exciting, it did succeed in freeing the play from a lot of stuffy and statuesque conventions and it did speak directly…in living terms to listeners. Above all, it succeeded in this without the slightest attempt at artificial analogies and spurious “relevance.” It proved, I think, that you don’t have to translate Shakespeare; you just have to let him be heard.32 Webster’s accomplishments with Richard II and now with Hamlet were momentous despite Evans’s tendency to take all the credit for the two successes. Hamlet was billed as MAURICE EVANS

Presents For the First Time in New York HAMLET In Its Entirety Directed by Margaret Webster The production company was still called Maurice Evans Productions. Nonetheless, Webster had made her own singular contributions. In the Ben Greet tradition, she had spurned artificial concepts that provided “relevances” to modern times. She encouraged the actors to speak Shakespeare’s words swiftly with understanding and humanity, presenting audiences with a living, unaffected story. She was part of a successful creative team that included actor-producer Evans, designer Ffolkes, and musical composer and conductor Engel, whom she had added. Brooks Atkinson never failed to point out that Webster was the “driving intelligence” and the chief source of the “extraordinary animation” in the company’s work. John MasonPage 96 → Brown insisted that “too much cannot be said in praise of Miss Webster’s direction.”33 In addition to being a significant actor of his day, Maurice Evans was also a shrewd manager. He refused to be dazzled by the extraordinary success story of the uncut Hamlet and calculated that the show would run about four months. There were precedents. John Barrymore’s Hamlet had played one hundred continuous performances; Evans’s Richard II played five more and his Hamlet four less than Barrymore’s. Despite the future efforts of Katharine Hepburn in As You Like It (in 1950), Richard Burton in Hamlet (in 1964), and Peter Brook’s remarkable A Midsummer Night’s Dream (in 1971), only Margaret Webster’s Othello with Paul Robeson was a Shakespeare revival that played a full season on Broadway. Hamlet closed on January 21, 1939, after ninety-six performances—four more than Gielgud’s Hamlet. Nine days later at the St. James Theatre, Maurice Evans opened as Falstaff in 1 Henry IV, with most of the same company, including Mady Christians as Lady Percy and Henry Edwards as King Henry. Edmond O’Brien played the Prince of Wales, Wesley Addy the impetuous Hotspur, and Irene Tedrow the lively Mistress Quickly. Henry IV had not been performed in New York since a performance at the Players Club on Gramercy Park in 1926. The curtain rose on act 1 to reveal Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV, enthroned in the same surroundings seen at the close of Richard II. (The original scenery used in Richard II had miraculously reappeared and been repositioned.) Evans as Falstaff, buried under a mountainous, begrimed costume with a clumsy gait, white of hair,

and a bulbous red nose, walked incongruously into the courtly scene. Critics called his Falstaff “exuberant,” “marvelous,” “rambunctious,” and “an engaging rogue with convivial humor and a bar-fly’s wit.”34 All the reviewers agreed that Evans seasoned Falstaff’s coarse clownishness with a common humanity that confirmed the character as one of the great creations of dramatic literature. Evans had often proved that he could play comedy and was offered the role of Sheridan Whiteside in the new George S. Kaufman–Moss Hart comedy, The Man Who Came to Dinner. Yet he remained convinced that audiences wanted to see him in “black silk tights” and in the nobler roles.35 Had he taken the part of Sheridan Whiteside, a role that made Monty Woolley famous in America and Robert Morley throughout the rest of the world, Evans would probably have changed the direction of his career. Critics praised the Evans-Webster team for treating Shakespeare as aPage 97 → popular dramatist in three successful productions and for adding the robustious Falstaff to Evans’s gallery of Shakespearean portraits. Webster and Evans continued to hope to establish a permanent repertory theater for both classic and modern plays, if not at the St. James Theatre, at least elsewhere in New York City. Henry IV closed after nine weeks, and the uncut Hamlet went on tour during the spring and the following season, finally totaling 151 performances in New York City and on tour. Webster’s American career was now settling into a predictable pattern. Once the successful Shakespearean production went on tour and she was ostensibly out of work, she filled the interlude with a revival of a modern play. She explained to her mother that she knew that she should be making money and “cashing in on this remarkable and spurious reputation,” but she didn’t seem to care as long as she was earning enough to live on. “I can’t seem to get excited, unless it’s over something, like Family Portrait, which in itself excites me.”36 Evans’s production offices were located in the St. James Theatre along with other theatrical offices and agencies. Producer Cheryl Crawford, one of the moving spirits behind the Group Theatre along with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg in the 1930s, also had offices in the building. Webster and Crawford got to know one another at the time of the planning and rehearsals for Hamlet. At age thirty-seven, Crawford had three flops behind her and now proposed to produce for Broadway Family Portrait, a serious play by the husband-and-wife team of Leonore Coffee Cowen and William Joyce Cowen, about Mary, the mother of Jesus. (Biblical stories were not “box office” until Cecil B. DeMille made them so in the 1970s in the film extravaganza The Ten Commandments.) She put together the financing with two young producers, Day Tuttle and Richard Skinner, and engaged Webster to direct. Webster believed that the new play had something serious to say about faith and belief. Webster and Crawford shared a great deal. They were singular women in a profession inimical to women directors, producers, designers, and playwrights, women working in a man’s world. They shared ambition, courage, independence, and theatrical ideals. Once Crawford put together the financing and hired Webster to direct, then the question arose: who would play the role of Mary? Contacts were made with Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell, and Laurette Taylor. According to Webster, Hayes was afraid to follow Queen Victoria (in VictoriaPage 98 → Regina) with Mary, mother of God; Cornell did not want to do a show without her husband, Guthrie McClintic; and Laurette Taylor remembered that she was a Catholic and begged off.37 To everyone’s astonishment, the glamorous Judith Anderson agreed to play Mary and taught the American theater a lesson against typecasting. First-nighters saw a small, soft-spoken, mousy woman in peasant dress walk onstage, not the sexy starlet of As You Desire Me. Having learned her lesson regarding director’s fees and contracts, Webster cast herself in the small role of Mary Magdalene and dyed her hair “auburn” for the part. Family Portrait taught Webster three important lessons about the commercial theater. Working with Judith

Anderson, she learned, first, that fine acting defies labels. You cannot “pigeonhole fine acting within the rules of orthodoxy.”38 Second, when the playwright (a husband-wife team in this instance) and the star don’t see eye to eye, the director is at a loss to negotiate between them.39 One issue in this case was Anderson’s steadfast refusal to say the final line as originally written. In the final scene, the child has been born and there is a discussion of what to call him. The authors wrote Mary’s final line as, “I’d like him not to be forgotten.” Anderson, with Webster and Crawford in agreement, found the words pedantic and artificial. She wanted to say, “I wouldn’t like him to be forgotten.” The authors disagreed, a bitter stalemate resulted, and Webster’s efforts to reconcile the parties were useless. At one point she threw her fur coat on the stage floor and stamped up and down on it in helpless rage. Crawford called it an extraordinary example of “primal therapy,” remarking, “Why her fur coat should have substituted for the bodies of the writers, I never knew.”40 Anderson literally had the last word. On opening night she brought the curtain down with “I wouldn’t like him to be forgotten,” and continued to do so throughout the run. The authors got their revenge by refusing to sign a contract for the show to tour. The production’s third lesson reminded Webster of her first opening night in New York, when no one had communicated the Broadway tradition of staying up for the reviews. With Family Portrait, the cast went to composer Lehman Engel’s apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street to celebrate a successful first night. At around two o’clock, the press agent telephoned Crawford. The reviews were lukewarm. As Webster put it: “They were magnificent for Judith, pretty good for the production and death to the box office on the familiar principle of damning with faint praise.”41 The cast received the news with shock and disappointment, as though doused with a bucket of ice water. They drifted away into the night, leaving behind an air of desolation and the smell of stale sandwiches and dirty ashtrays. Webster took an oath never again to follow tradition by waiting up for reviews, “anPage 99 → absurd system from which there seems to be no escape.”42 The theater world now agrees with her, for the power of the New York Times critic has not diminished. The names and bylines change, but the life-anddeath power of the newspaper over Broadway remains undiminished. The critics considered Family Portrait an undistinguished play, “an intoxicating dramatic idea” with a “noble bit of acting.”43 Brooks Atkinson found the Cowens inadequate to the task of telling the story of Christ through the family’s eyes. Judith Anderson’s performance was singled out as “superb,” “sublime,” “inspired,” “luminous,” “unforgettable.” Webster’s cameo was acted with “respect, grace and sincerity.”44 Crawford’s private take on Webster’s performance was quite different, however. She felt that a more sensual and vulnerable actress would have been far more interesting. Had Webster ever been “given a part where the passion in her, mostly concealed, could have an opportunity really to explode, she would have surprised us and herself.”45 Four years later, as Emilia in Othello, she uncovered this emotional life in a stunning performance. Family Portrait opened at the Morosco Theatre on March 8, 1939, and closed after 111 performances, not enough to make it a commercial success, according to its producer. Atkinson had faulted the authors for cluttering the play with too many details of commonplace family life. Crawford, however, faulted the director for a lack of inventiveness and attention to ordinary village life. “I felt this production was somewhat bloodless, lacking unusual details that would prick an audience into unexpected recognition,” she said. Crawford placed the blame firmly at the director’s feet. “Peggy was one of the most intelligent women I ever knew,” she said. “She was a no nonsense director, a ‘get on with it’ director trained in the English repertory system, a facile and adroit craftsman with great technical knowledge. But she was not innovative.”46 There was little time, however, for recriminations or disappointment, although Crawford’s criticism of Webster’s lack of innovation would surface again. As Webster insisted, she was a director who interpreted the playwright’s text. The director’s job was to see that “what the author has to say is said most cogently and dramatically in terms of the theatre, that its theatrical values are clearly established, and that there is neither confusion, waste, nor underexpression.” Shortly before Family Portrait opened, she added to her credo: “The director handling a modern play is actually handling an author…the final arbiter of values in the script.”47 In the case of Family Portrait, Crawford and Webster failed in early rehearsals to persuade the authors to accommodate the needs of the production for local color and realistic detail. Moreover, producer and director also failed to anticipate and defuse the hostility that developed between thePage 100 → playwrights and the leading

actress. This last failure eventually stymied the future of the production. Shades of Ben Greet! While playing eight performances a week in Family Portrait, Webster agreed to prepare forty-minute versions of Shakespearean comedies and to direct the streamlined plays for the New York World’s Fair, opening in May 1939. The World’s Fair sported a small replica of the Globe Theatre in the “Merrie England Village” in Flushing Meadow. Webster created abridged versions of As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and used the Thomas Wood Stevens’s version of The Comedy of Errors. For these forty-minute adaptations of Shakespeare’s texts, known to the company as the “pygmy classics,” she recruited David Ffolkes and Lehman Engel for scenery, costumes, and music along with twenty-eight actors, including Eugenia Rawls, who had played Alexandra in the touring company of The Little Foxes. For eleven weeks, beginning in May, they played continuous performances throughout afternoons and evenings, in all kinds of weather, and even in circus conditions to audiences attending the “Merrie England” concession. A shortage of funds, poor planning, and bad weather plagued the fair and all of its concessions. Promises were made but not kept by the producers. Webster found herself operating “on a shoe-string” with young actors who had three weeks to rehearse four plays. Ffolkes made costumes out of mattress ticking, and Engel orchestrated music for one recorder and a spinet. Webster described the melee as “a conglomeration of thieving, gangsterism, graft, white-wash, phooey, ingenuity and criminality; it might indeed serve as an Exhibition to the World.”48 Another drawback, audiences had a halfhour’s walk from the nearest subway station to the site of the fair. Webster lamented that her staging of the comedies was uninspired. The celebrated replica of the Elizabethan stage—”the most inflexible, unadaptable damned thing you ever met!”—confounded her. Staging the action was an “almost insoluble problem.” Draw curtains, comedy scene in front of, while bench and stool, sit behind; pull back curtain, actors come on sit on bench and stool, say lines, go off; pull back inner stage curtains, actors already sitting on bench and stool, say lines, draw curtains! I can’t make out what the hell to do with any of it! Webster spent the final Sunday morning hammering nails, painting props, and sweeping the stage. The stage lacked lighting equipment, the curtainsPage 101 → lacked tracks, the theater lacked water and toilets—and ticket buyers. Webster subtitled the entire affair “No Time for Comedy.”49 Despite the rain and general unreadiness, Webster’s “get on with it” repertory training prevailed. The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream opened on May 8, 1939, followed on two consecutive evenings by The Comedy of Errors and As You Like It. Located between Billy Rose’s Aquacade and the fireworks at the Lagoon of Nations, the Shakespeare actors competed with loudspeakers and fireworks. At midperformance of As You Like It the barkers located next door announced, “Girls! Girls! Five hundred gorgeous Girls!” Then the fireworks would explode over the lagoon. “The fireworks won out over Shakespeare,” Webster quipped.50 The critics confounded Webster’s assessments. Reviewers found a hearty banquet of clowning filled with all the “hokum out of a jester’s book.”51 They tolerated the surgical cuttings and appreciated the “rough-and-ready” stories. Webster looked back upon the undertaking as an extravagantly comic experience. She finally admitted that The Taming of the Shrew had “zest,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream was “light,” and The Comedy of Errors was “really inventive”—As You Like It, however, she judged extremely “dull” and lacking in ideas. Despite her assessment, it proved the most successful with audiences. Webster’s parents were playing Mr. and Mrs. Hesketh in Grand Slam at the “Q” Theatre in London when Hitler’s armies invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939. With war imminent, Webster finally convinced them to return to the United States. She knew that they would never leave London without the promise of work. MGM miraculously cooperated with a contract for Whitty, and Webster put together a summer-stock package in Maine

for both of her parents. A few weeks of work in July and August would give them a chance to look around while deciding whether to stay in the United States until the European situation became clearer.52 Webster staged Viceroy Sarah, by Norman Ginsbury, with May Whitty, Ben Webster, and Mady Christians at the Deertrees Theatre in Harrison, Maine. Webster knew the play well, having played in 157 performances of it in 1935. In September, Ben and May returned to Hollywood for a second time. May Whitty made twenty-two more Hollywood films before her death in 1948, including Bill of Divorcement, Mrs. Miniver, Stage Door Canteen, Madame Curie, The White Cliffs of Dover, Gaslight, and Green Dolphin Street. Webster thought that her performance in Mrs. Miniver as the “ferocious old dowager with a heart of gold” was her finest work. May and Ben finally acted together for the first time in films in the memorable Lassie Come Home in 1943. Working again (and receiving praise for his work) restored Ben’s spirits.Page 102 → He became a familiar neighborhood figure in Hollywood, dressed in his English-tailored suit with jaunty felt hat and cane, as he walked to the supermarket to shop or take care of other errands. “People loved him,” his daughter explained, “for his gentleness, courtesy, and unexpectedly shrewd wit.”53 Nonetheless, he felt underused, even bored, in his later years. Although she complained about the tediousness of filmmaking and the remoteness of Hollywood from London and New York, May Whitty thrived on her new professional status. She entertained, as she had done at Bedford Street, and became known for her dinner parties and afternoon teas. The couple celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 1942 and received many accolades in a town not known for lasting marriages. Both relished their newfound popularity and financial security, though separated from their true home by a continent and a world war. On a valedictory note, Webster wrote of her parents, “All in all, the Hollywood years brought them tranquility, financial security and a great deal of loving-kindness; but fulfillment only to May.”54 With her penchant for causes, Margaret Webster always sought out projects that improved the lot of artists and contributed to the cultural scene. After the World’s Fair, she allied herself with the Playwrights’ Company, a producing group formed in 1938 by playwrights Maxwell Anderson, Robert E. Sherwood, Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, and S. N. Behrman to present their own works and efforts of nonmembers as well. Howard was to have directed his new play, Madam, Will You Walk, but shortly after he finished a first draft, he was killed in an accident on his farm in Massachusetts. Webster felt a deep personal grief for the loss of the playwright whom she had met many years previously during the family’s trip to Venice.55 Webster was asked to step in and stage the fantasy-comedy about a woman who tries to return the fortune of her father, a corrupt Tammany Hall politician, to the city. It already had Robert Edmond Jones as the designer and a cast. George M. Cohan, who got his start in vaudeville and made a success in Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! in 1933, had been recruited to play the leading role of the free spirit Dr. Brightlee; also in the cast were Peggy Conklin, Arthur Kennedy, and Keenan Wynn. Robert Sherwood volunteered to provide rewrites, but Howard’s widow refused any alterations to her late husband’s manuscript. It was Webster’s first and only experience of working with Cohan, who, according to his director, made no effort to understand the play or to learn his lines. He was highly critical of the play and had difficulties working with a woman director, whom he insisted upon calling “Maggie” (he was the only person ever to do so). Though she had no great faith in the popular slogan,Page 103 → she reminded herself that “there were no rules for great actors.” Sherwood kept saying that it would be all right on opening night, but Webster disagreed: “Something which is basically wrong, doesn’t become suddenly right in a mystic moment when the lights go up.”56 Cohan gave his notice on the second night and made his last exit dancing and waving a small American flag. With and without Cohan, the production received dispirited reviews during tryouts in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and was withdrawn from future bookings. Webster was again without work. In the climate of war in early 1940 and a confusion of emotions about the direction of her career, Webster turned westward to join her parents in Los Angeles. Although she had refused offers from Hollywood studios in the past, the situation was somewhat different now. She had brought her parents to America, thus eliminating a compelling

reason to return to England in the near future. Richard Halliday, then head of Paramount’s Story Department, now persuaded her to accept a contract from Paramount Pictures. Moreover, friends in the theater who also had major careers in Hollywood, including Mady Christians, Laurence Olivier, and Judith Anderson, reminded her of the tremendous possibilities of film and its vast potential audiences. Webster considered the pros and cons of her decision: I knew perfectly well that no woman director had ever “made it” in Hollywood. I didn’t really want to direct pictures; I’d rather have acted in them; I wasn’t greedy for the money. Certainly I was keenly aware of the challenge and intrigued by it.57 In March she signed a contract with Paramount that included a clause allowing her three months off each year to work on Broadway. A month later she drove westward, catching up with her parents for two days in San Francisco; they were touring as the nurse and Lord Montague in Romeo and Juliet with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh before opening on Broadway. In New York Romeo and Juliet was an abysmal failure, attributed largely to Olivier’s attempt to be both director and leading man. This failure paled before wartime events. The German blitzkrieg invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9. Belgium and the Netherlands fell to German forces in May, and France was all but lost. With the British retreat from the beaches of Dunkirk between May 26 and June 4 and the Battle of Britain for air superiority over the English Channel from July to September, the German invasion of Britain seemed assured. Page 104 → During this time of discouraging turmoil in world history, Webster spent a personally discouraging six months under contract to Paramount, having no specific assignment other than to learn about filmmaking. Variety’s report that she was to be a “femme Orson Welles” did not hearten her.58 She resided at the Andalusia Apartments on North Havenhurst Drive in Hollywood and worked in the script department, run by Richard Halliday. She wrote story treatments, worked in the editing department, and attended the daily rushes from all the pictures being made on the Paramount lot. She lunched with Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, also of the Story Department, and laughed at stories drawn from their encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the film business. She spent weeks on the preparations for and the shooting of Victory, directed by John Cromwell, with Fredric March, Betty Field, and Cedric Hardwicke. In Cromwell’s absence, she directed retakes. During the filming of Victory Germany invaded France, culminating in the escape from Dunkirk. Webster and Cedric Hardwicke listened to the radio broadcasts, huddled behind a clump of fake bamboo in a corner of the soundstage.59 It was a painful time for both British patriots. Webster determined to leave Hollywood and join a Red Cross unit in France (she could “drive well and speak near-perfect French”), but the fall of France ended her plans. Moreover, May Whitty begged Webster not to try to go to England. With her parents’ extended tenure in Los Angeles, they gave up the Bedford Street flat. Soon after, their revered Mrs. Beck died at her home in Brixton. With a renewed sense of endings, Webster concluded wistfully that America was where she would reside until the end of her days. Webster’s career as a film director never developed beyond the initial contract, some minor script work, and scene rehearsals, although she sat at the “riding-booted feet” of Cecil B. DeMille for several weeks while he directed Gary Cooper, Paulette Goddard, and Madeleine Carroll in North West Mounted Police. In truth, she reflected, “I didn’t really want to direct pictures; I’d rather have acted in them.”60 When the six-month trial period was up, Paramount wanted to implement a permanent contract, but Webster declined the opportunity. Weighing the chances of a woman director “making it” in Hollywood in the 1940s against her lifelong training for the stage, she made the irrevocable decision to let her option with the studio lapse. She told May, “I don’t believe I should ever be more than a scrape-through director in Hollywood …but at least it has taught me to fuss in slower tempo than before.”61 Moreover, she could not imagine giving up all opportunity to work in the theater. Garson Kanin, Herman Shumlin, and others bridged the two worlds, but Webster could not

envision herself doing so. Page 105 → Webster returned via the Santa Fe Super Chief to New York, Boston, and Martha’s Vineyard, where she had purchased her beloved cottage and spent weekends there with Mady Christians and other friends. In August, she linked arms with the Theatre Guild to direct their next play, Twelfth Night. This would be Webster’s first Shakespeare production on Broadway without Maurice Evans—or so she thought at the time. The 1940–41 Broadway season had a number of stellar new plays: Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois and There Shall Be No Night, Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine with Mady Christians, William Saroyan’s The Beautiful People and The Time of Your Life, and a new musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart called Pal Joey. Many more successes also lit up the Broadway marquees: Charley’s Aunt, The Philadelphia Story, My Sister Eileen, Arsenic and Old Lace, Angel Street, The Corn Is Green, Blithe Spirit, and the eternal holdover Life with Father. Into this “sweet smell of success,” the Theatre Guild, now fully managed by Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn (with the increasing presence of Armina Marshall, Langner’s wife), decided to introduce a comedy by William Shakespeare. Although she agreed to direct it, Webster felt that Twelfth Night, “filled with impermanence, fragile, and impondable,” was one of the most difficult plays in Shakespeare’s entire canon to stage really well.62 Webster came to the Theatre Guild when its reputation was at its highest. She considered its record unassailable and its management distinguished. Its record of high ideals, extensive knowledge, fine taste, and vision made it preeminent in American stage history.63 Nonetheless, by 1940, there was significant competition on Broadway from other managements. Webster was also aware of the Guild’s reputation for bursts of economy, miscasting, rewriting, indecision, and antagonisms. Nonetheless, she entered the Guild’s employment with high hopes, recalling much later Robert Louis Stevenson’s line, “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.”64 The Guild’s management had many parts of the production in motion when they hired Webster. Gilbert Miller was a silent partner, and Helen Hayes was cast as Viola, Ruth Gordon as Olivia, and June Walker as Maria. Sheldon Cheney was contracted to design the scenery, Karinska of Russian ballet fame for the costumes, and Paul Bowles to compose the music. Maurice Evans as Malvolio came into this mix shortly before Webster reached Martha’s Vineyard on her eastward trip from Los Angeles. Even though Evans spent the summer months in the Adirondacks on a small island on Upper Saranac Lake, he learned that the Theatre Guild was planning a fall production of Twelfth Night. He called Langner and proposed himself as Malvolio. Evans might be called up for military service, but if the Guild was willing to take the risk, he would play Shakespeare’s “crossgartered”Page 106 → servant. “What Peggy thought I don’t know,” he said, “but I strongly suspect she lacked enthusiasm about finding herself once more under my shadow.” “She didn’t have to worry, however,” he added, “because, apart from my own interpretation of Malvolio, I had nothing to say about the production, and was resolved to keep my mouth shut.”65 If Webster was distressed about working again in Evans’s shadow, she said nothing. It is unlikely that Evans was true to his word because Malvolio became the centerpiece of the reviews. His Malvolio was a commoner of humble beginnings desperately trying to be more genteel than his masters. Webster had nothing but praise for Evans’s performance. She wrote to May, “He read like a dream—is pompous, with a slight touch of genteel Cockney, very much in earnest, very endearing and funny.”66 Brooks Atkinson praised Evans for demonstrating the “disdain, the fastidiousness, the vanity and alarm of a fatuous underling.” John Mason Brown saw a “pathetic, quiet, entirely human being who is more ridiculous inside than out.”67 Following last-minute changes of scenery and a first dress rehearsal in New Haven, Twelfth Night opened on November 19, 1940, at the St. James Theatre. Although it ran for 129 performances and played seventeen weeks on tour, reviews were mixed. The critics celebrated Helen Hayes’s Viola, “an entrancing creation,” “incomparable,” “charming,” “sparkling and gay,” “captivating and jaunty.” Atkinson was in the minority; he

watched “a performance of mixed blessings,” “lackluster,” and vocally “flat.”68 Langner thought the performance of the comedy charming, and Hayes the most “natural, lovable and effortless” actress he had ever known.69 The leading lady and her director remained uncomfortable with one another. Hayes had not been happy with the prospect of working with a woman director, while Webster doubted Hayes’s ability to speak the verse or to act the part. “Her damask cheek was not one,” Webster commented, “on which the worm of concealment would readily feed.”70 After Atkinson’s mixed review, Webster confided her reservations to the critic. Atkinson responded, Now, don’t go taking the blame for Helen Hayes’ conspicuous shortcomings for Shakespeare…. She plays like a school-girl and spoke up like a milk-maid. Unless a director is supposed to give a whole course on acting in five weeks in addition to staging the play, you can’t take the responsibility for Helen’s personal and artistic limitations.71 Despite the strong reviews for Webster’s staging (“vigorous, fresh-minded, and amusing”),72 she took herself to task for missing something in the difficult comedy. “It was gay, decorative, witty in a slightly sophisticatedPage 107 → way, but seldom funny from the heart; charming and even occasionally touching, but lacking in shadows or in depth.” She had missed the human element as she worked to blend the lovelorn picture-book world of Olivia and Orsino with the disparate elements of earthly comedy.73 Webster’s final verdict was directed at her own abilities: “I had done an expert piece of figure-skating over thin ice …a job I shall never look back on with pleasure or pride.”74 As Twelfth Night settled down for the long run in New York and a tour that lasted until June 1941, Webster, for once, had a new assignment. Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn offered her a new play by a promising young playwright with the improbable name of Tennessee Williams. It was prophetically called Battle of Angels.

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CHAPTER 6 BATTLE OF ANGELS All of them put together, plus a hundred dedicated firebugs, couldn’t have won that battle of angels. —MARGARET WEBSTER During the first five years of the new decade, the world was at war. Despite Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, theatrical life in the United States proceeded with amazing equanimity. In the 1940–41 season, the Theatre Guild’s Twelfth Night, with Webster directing, opened on Broadway, joining such popular successes as Charley’s Aunt with José Ferrer, DuBarry Was a Lady with Bert Lahr, Panama Hattie with Ethel Merman, The Man Who Came to Dinner with Monty Woolley, Cabin in the Sky with Ethel Waters, and Hold on to Your Hats with Al Jolson and Martha Raye. Films seemed more in tune with the times than did the commercial theater. Charlie Chaplin was playing in The Great Dictator, Norma Shearer and Robert Taylor in Escape, Marlene Dietrich in Seven Sinners, and Gary Cooper and Madeleine Carroll in North West Mounted Police, with the earlier assistance of the apprentice hand of Margaret Webster. Webster’s skirmishes with the Theatre Guild began in earnest when she was given Battle of Angels, a new script by an unknown playwright. Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn had agreed to produce it and had signed film star Miriam Hopkins to play the leading role of Myra Torrance. They had also contracted with designer Cleon Throckmorton, who had emerged in the 1920s as an American working in the style of the new European stagecraft. His expressionistic settings, especially for Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, transformedPage 109 → the stage into a highly distorted, subjective view of the inner life of the characters. The new stage design would also influence his work on Battle of Angels. With the playwright, star, and designer in hand, the Guild’s producers contracted with Webster to direct the play. They were prepared to begin rehearsals as soon as Twelfth Night opened. At the outset, Webster had reservations about the project and the Guild’s choice of director: Why they [the Guild] should have thought of engaging a young, English woman director who had never been further south than Washington to direct this work, I cannot imagine. Perhaps it was because they thought (and so did I) that its emotional, almost mystic quality was more important than the local color and that the poetic prose in which it was written called for a director who was at ease in the medium of poetry. More probably it was just because I happened to be on the spot. I read the play, and thought that it wasn’t, and never would be, a very good one, but that there was power in it and some splendid, multicolored words, and I believed the author would one day live up to his obvious potential talent and write a real dazzler. I also thought the Theatre Guild very brave to do it. So did they.1 Though George Jean Nathan called her “the best director of the plays of Shakespeare that we have,” her track record with modern plays was not exemplary. When Lawrence Langner first read the script, he was enthusiastic and hoped that “some rewriting would straighten out its defects.” He and Theresa Helburn agreed that Tennessee Williams was “the most promising young playwright” that they had come across in years.2 In fact, everyone involved with Battle of Angels underestimated the difficulties with the script and overestimated the inexperienced writer’s capacity to fix them. Reflecting upon the ensuing debacle, Webster said that everyone was “deceived by the maturity of the play into misjudging the immaturity of the author.”3 Once he finished “improving” the script that summer, Tennessee Williams traveled throughout the Northeast and then to Mexico. He returned to St. Louis only to read in the New York Times that the Guild was putting Battle of

Angels into rehearsal with Margaret Webster directing and Miriam Hopkins starring. (Both Tallulah Bankhead and Joan Crawford declined the role of Myra Torrance.4) For ten days, Williams was thrown into a “panic of inactivity.” He realized that he lacked the technical expertise to rewrite on demand for a commercial production bound for Broadway. Four years later, in the preface to the published edition of Battle of Angels,Page 110 → he confessed that “no man has ever written for the theatre with less foreknowledge of it.”5 I had never been backstage. I had not seen more than two or three professional productions: touring companies that passed through the South and Middle West. My conversion to the theatre arrived as mysteriously as those impulses that enter the flesh at puberty. Suddenly I found that I had a stage inside me: actors appeared out of nowhere; shaggy, undisciplined mummers trooped out of the shadowy wings and took the stage over. This cry of players had a gift for improvisation…. They could not wait for the lines to be set down.6 An inexperienced playwright was thrown into the machinery of a Broadway production set in motion for a December 1940 opening in Boston. As soon as Twelfth Night opened in November, the Guild’s producers arranged for director, star, and playwright to meet in Miriam Hopkins’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel, where, for the first time, Webster met both the playwright and the leading actress. Miriam Hopkins, whose film career was in limbo, was at age thirty-eight returning to the theater. She had appeared in fifteen shows on Broadway and in London before going to Hollywood in the 1930s. The volatile role of Myra Torrance appealed to her, and her willingness to invest her own money in the show appealed to the Guild. She was a southerner, born in Georgia, and never quite lost her accent. She was also an incendiary actress who often taxed her coworkers with incessant chatter, antic energy, and unpredictable outbursts.7 In her first encounter with the star and the playwright, Webster found Hopkins “lively, restless, stimulating.” Williams she described as “a short, sturdy young man with crew-cut hair, pebble-thick glasses and an even thicker Southern accent, dressed in a shabby corduroy jacket and muddy riding boots.” He greeted us amiably; Miriam said she hoped he had enjoyed his ride; he replied that he never went riding but that he liked boots. He then sat down on the spotless yellow satin chaise-lounge and put them up on it. We started to talk about the play; he didn’t seem much interested; once, when Miriam became a little vehement, he prefaced his reply with “As far as I can gather from all this hysteria …” Confronted with a classic put-down from a southern gentleman from Mississippi directed at a southern lady from Georgia, Hopkins was speechless. This was not an auspicious beginning with a new playwright’s key collaborators.Page 111 → It became apparent soon enough, however, that what was taken as haughtiness and incivility on his part was, in fact, sheer terror. “We should have realized,” Webster admitted, “that he was, in fact, stupefied by the maelstrom of the Broadway theatre into which he had been flung quite suddenly and unexpectedly.”8 Before the interview was over, Hopkins and Williams had reached a respectful understanding of one another’s personalities, and they remained good friends until her death in 1972.9 Webster and the playwright undertook a two-day tour of the Mississippi Delta, the setting for the play. A play so distinctly of the American South was a formidable assignment for a British director whose reputation rested chiefly on her direction of Shakespeare. Webster’s experience of the United States was limited to metropolitan centers, along with Martha’s Vineyard and Weston, Connecticut. During their whirlwind trip, they visited country stores and talked to the local people between Memphis, Tennessee, and Clarksdale, Mississippi. Williams described Webster as looking “a little punch-drunk, seeing just enough of this extraordinary country and its people to make them more mysterious than they were before.”10 By the conclusion of the trip, Webster “had grown very fond of this strange young man.” “I had also acquired a perceptible Southern accent,” she quipped.11 When they returned to New York, Webster expressed dismay over her experiences of the Mississippi Delta. She

returned with recordings of birds’ cries, the humming of cotton mills, the noises of sawmills, the street cries of hucksters, the rattling of wheelbarrows, and the accents of southerners. She was exhausted from her efforts to absorb impressions of the region, the people, and their accents. Those with whom she had talked had assumed that Williams’s script would deal with racial issues and present sympathetic portraits of themselves. The play did neither. Williams thought of his play as a mixture of “intense religiosity and hysterical sexuality.”12 Valentine Xavier, a wild, free, and alien spirit who enters the small southern town carrying a guitar, wearing a snakeskin jacket, and exuding sexual magnetism, personified the play’s thematic conflict: living as a passionate celebration of life versus societal forces that deny sex and art as expressions of the soul. “You an’ me,” says Cassandra Whiteside to the hapless drifter, “we belong to the fugitive kind. We live on motion…. Nothing but motion, motion, mile after mile, keeping up with the wind, or even faster.”13 As he enters the scene, Val Xavier creates emotional havoc among the townspeople. Myra Torrance, trapped in a loveless marriage to an older, dying man, succumbs to the virile, itinerant poet who has taken a job in her husband’s dry-goods store. In addition to Myra, Val has become involvedPage 112 → with the sexually obsessed Cassandra Whiteside and the repressed hysteric Vee Talbott, a painter and religious eccentric, also the wife of the local sheriff. Val and Myra become lovers, she becomes pregnant, and her husband plots vengeance. Multiple acts of violence end the play: Jabe Torrance shoots Myra, Val is hanged and his body set afire by the sheriff’s posse, and the store burns down in an apocalyptic blaze of sacrifice and retribution. Despite the immaturity of the writing, Battle of Angels contained a dramatic method that Webster recognized and appreciated: naturalistic dialogue penetrated with poetic diction, the clashing of impassioned central characters, a pervasive sense of humor, and remarkable technical innovations. Of immediate concern to the producers, director, designer, and cast were the mammoth technical demands of the script, including a fire to consume the entire stage setting. The stage directions called for “endless sound effects, drums, guns, lightning and thunder, offstage pinball machines, wind, rain, guitars, songs, ‘hound-dawgs,’ and musical noises.” Williams’s play, Webster remarked, called for “the resources of MGM, Wagner’s fire music, and Bernhardt to play the second lead.”14 Webster entered the project in 1940 in the full knowledge that her work was cut out for her. With Miriam Hopkins under contract, Webster turned to casting the remaining roles. Casting took the first of many unfortunate turns. It seemed impossible to find an actor to play opposite Hopkins. She wanted Raymond Massey, but he had other commitments; eventually, Robert Allen played the snakeskin-jacketed intruder. A complete cast was finally assembled, with Doris Dudley (as the sexually repressed Cassandra Whiteside), Katherine Raht (Vee Talbott), Charles McClelland (Sheriff Talbott), Edith King (Beulah Cartwright), Marshall Bradford (Jabe Torrance), Dorothy Peterson (Dolly Bland), Helen Carewe (Blanche Temple), Hazel Hanna (Eve Temple), along with Clarence Washington, Bertram Holmes, Ivan Lewis, and Robert Emhardt. Within five years Williams was to be called the new Eugene O’Neill, but early in rehearsals Webster’s frustrations with him, as well as with producers and cast, intensified. So there we were, the classic Broadway setup: author, director, producers, star, all unknown quantities to each other, a delicate, intricate, physically complex play: a not very satisfactory cast; and no time flat in which to blend these elements together.15 Moreover Webster was confounded by her Broadway experience. Thus far, she had directed four plays by Shakespeare and three by modern writers.Page 113 → With the exception of Twelfth Night, produced by the Theatre Guild, in the Shakespeare productions Maurice Evans had exercised controlling influence as both leading actor and producer. In the modern plays, Webster’s experiences with producers, production teams, and audiences were less successful. For a third time, she was a part of the Theatre Guild’s machinery, which she had experienced from a distance in The Seagull and up close with Twelfth Night. Not only was Battle of Angels not a tried and true dramatic masterpiece, there was no buffer between the producers and the production in the ensuing debacle. As the director, Webster felt that she was a slender reed blowing in the wind.

Rehearsals began in mid-November with John Haggott as production stage manager. Lacking confidence in the Guild’s early decisions, Webster clearly missed the influential hand of a like-minded Maurice Evans and even the opinionated decisiveness of financier-producer Boris Said. The Guild’s producers were “masters of miscasting,” Webster commented, and “their collective indecision made auditions a nightmare for director and actors alike.”16 The producers complicated matters by shifting tryouts from New Haven to Boston, a disastrous choice as the testing ground for a controversial new play about sex and religion. Audiences there were known for their intellectual snobbism and prudery. Williams warned that he had written “a sex play with cosmic overtones,” but the producers ignored his warnings.17 As the production moved to Boston, Webster’s frustrations reached new heights. She was dealing with a mercurial star. Ten days before the Boston opening, Hopkins demanded a change of leading man. Webster suggested Wesley Addy, who was already under contract to the Guild. He was playing Orsino in Twelfth Night and had worked with Webster in Hamlet and Henry IV as well. She knew that he could learn the role quickly and perform it with minimal rehearsal time. (This solved one problem but created another—now Webster had to find and rehearse Addy’s replacement in Twelfth Night.) Now true hysteria began to emanate from Hopkins, who had invested in the show in order to secure her return to Broadway. She became increasingly uncertain about the merits of the script and about her ability to play Myra Torrance. Webster noted the outward signs of the actress’s insecurities. She darted about the “General Store,” picking up rehearsal properties, waving them about, and then putting them down in wrong places, Webster observed. She moaned that the ending would never work and that the “other girl’s” (Doris Dudley as Cassandra Whiteside) long speech must be cut. With only a few rehearsals left, Wesley Addy worried solely about learning his lines. The stage technicians and director worried about thePage 114 → conflagration in the final act. Meanwhile, the playwright worried about his draft status. Williams kept losing his draft card; the janitors kept retrieving it from beneath the seats. Webster thought his concern a “wasted worry,” for “his eyesight was such that he couldn’t have told an enemy soldier from a friendly tank.”18 Williams confessed to Webster that if he had had time to get away from the “dervish frenzy” of rehearsals and from Hopkins’s hysterical pleas—”Do something!”—he could have rewritten the script. Now it was too late. He said, “I can’t do anything more! If I could get away from all of you for a month, I could return with a new script. But that’s not possible, so you will just have to take what there is and do what you can with it!”19 Despite Webster’s fiery temperament, great technical knowledge, and no-nonsense directorial style, she was soothingly maternal with her “new cub.” Although she was worried herself, she told Williams to stop worrying: “The last speech would work, the store would burn down, and all manner of things would be well.”20 Meanwhile, the director, playwright, and leading actress were growing increasingly dissatisfied with the “arty” musical score composed by Colin McPhee. In technical rehearsals Hopkins cried out, “How can I dance to that music ?”21 Webster wondered as well, and she substituted makeshift pre-recorded selections. The day before the Boston opening, Williams wrote a new last scene, but it was too late to incorporate the changes. In the final run-through, the general store refused to “catch fire”—an ominous prelude, Webster thought, to the play’s reception the next night. At one point she jumped off the stage, caught her ankle in a folding chair, and cried out. Hearing Webster, Hopkins herself screamed as if the sky had fallen. The jangled nerves were prelude to the emotional trauma of opening night. Battle of Angels opened on December 30, 1940, at the Wilbur Theatre for a two-week tryout. It closed thirteen days later. From her dressing room filled with flowers and congratulatory telegrams, Miriam Hopkins wired her playwright a conciliatory message: “dear tenn, so deeply hope for your sake you will be as happy after the performance as the day you sold the script. fondly, miriam.” It was not to be. The Theatre Guild subscribers who made up the opening-night audience were a “faithful body of supporters heartily detested by the entire theatrical profession for their stuffy sit-on-your-hands superiority.” They shrieked with laughter whenever Hopkins, whose

dying husband was confined to his bed in the apartment above the store, said to her lover, “Meet me in the back room.”22 As the visionary portrait of Jesus Christ with the face of Val Xavier, painted by Vee Talbott, came to the audience’s attention, they began to talk among themselvesPage 115 → in sibilant whispers punctuated by the banging of seats and the swish of silk garments hurrying up the aisle. In Webster’s view, the audience got their just desserts that evening. “Several minutes before the final curtain,” Webster confided, “wisps of evil-smelling smoke began to drift onto the stage.” The audience started to “whisper, shuffle and cough.” The culprits were backstage with smoke pots. Unable to create a convincing fire during the final dress rehearsal, the stage-hands sent billows of black smoke rolling onto the stage and coiling over the footlights. “It was like the burning of Rome,” Williams recalled.23 The disaster of a panicked audience was averted by a “sudden outburst of red spotlights” on stage, accompanied by crashing breakaway beams and billows of sulfurous fumes. “The first six rows were asphyxiated, the rest fainted or fled,” Webster reported.24 The critics were tepid. For the Boston Post Elliot Norton wrote, “Although New Year’s Eve was still some twenty-four hours away, many in the audience wondered if the happenings on the stage were not the aftermath of the glorious celebration in the imaginative brain of a genius who celebrated gaily but a little too well and removed for quiet to the famous ward at the Bellevue Hospital.” Alexander Williams called the play “astonishing …one of the strangest mixtures of poetry, realism, melodrama, comedy, whimsy and eroticism that it has ever been our privilege to see upon the boards.” The critic for the Daily Globe suspected the audience had the “sensation of being dunked in mire.” The Variety reviewer found the play “sordid and amateurish” and chided the Guild for deciding “to dig up a little dirt down along the Mississippi Delta to see how it would pan out.”25 Only Elliot Norton was fully persuaded of the writer’s merits. In a second article, called “ Battle of Angels a Defeat but No Disaster,” published a week following the opening, he wrote: Mr. Tennessee Williams need not consider his lost battle as a decisive defeat. It is true that he was guilty of errors in craftsmanship and was also guilty of errors of taste…. If he can learn more of the practical side of playwriting, can keep his heart in the right place and his head clear of rubbish; if he can learn to walk with the theatre’s craftsmen, he may find himself riding the clouds with the theatre’s dramatists. His talent is most interesting.26 While the Boston critics were not encouraging, they were politeness itself in comparison to the Boston City Council, which condemned the play as immoral and threatened to close it forthwith. There are several versions of the next day’s happenings. Williams’s Page 116 → account is less sanguine than others. Summoned to the Guild’s suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Williams and his agent, Audrey Wood, had breakfast together and studied the reviews. As they walked across the Common on the way to their meeting, they came upon a small boy with a cap pistol. At the sudden popping sound from the toy gun, they clutched each other, and Williams gleefully shouted: “It’s the Guild. They’re after me!”27 Wood recalled the scene: “We both rocked with laughter because we knew in a few minutes it was all about to begin and there wasn’t time for anything other than laughter.”28 It was the Guild’s habit after the first performance to bring the company together to get the director’s notes and discuss the production. Present at the meeting were Langner, Theresa Helburn, Williams, Wood, Webster, and the principal actors. The discussion went on for a long time. When Williams heard that the play was closing after its Boston run, he cried out, “Oh, but you can’t do that! Why, I put my heart in this play.” After an embarrassed pause, Webster gave him some Shakespearean advice: “You must not wear your heart on your sleeve for daws to peck at.”29 The sight of subscribers furiously leaving the theater had stunned Langner and Helburn. “We felt that a continuation of the production with the people involved would merely produce further hysteria without solving problems,” they said. Langner added, “We also felt that the play needed some recasting as well as rewriting, so we reluctantly withdrew it, but I sent the scenery to Westport [Connecticut] where it was stored at my Playhouse

pending Tennessee’s revisions.”30 The producers wrote a letter to their Boston subscribers expressing regret at the play’s failure and the unfortunate publicity, but defending the playwright’s “genuine poetic gifts” and insights into a “particular American scene.” Moreover, they argued, Williams’s treatment of Vee Talbott’s religious obsession was “a sincere and honest attempt to present a true psychological picture” and not deserving of the outcries of the Boston censors. They asked for their subscribers’ indulgence of their efforts to bring new authors into the American theater. They concluded, “Who knows whether the next one by the same author may not prove a success?”31 Had the producers known that the next play would be The Glass Menagerie, followed by A Streetcar Named Desire, they might have kept their playwright under contract. Though Eddie Dowling produced The Glass Menagerie and played the role of Tom Wingfield, Webster was not offered the play. She never directed a Tennessee Williams work again. Webster said that no one involved with Battle of Angels had anticipated the virulent public response—the outraged Puritan morality—of the Boston Page 117 → audience and city officials. Williams himself was taken by surprise and thoroughly shaken. He elaborated in an interview that “if Battle of Angels was nothing else, it was certainly clean, it was certainly idealistic.” I knew, of course, that I had written a play that touched upon human longings, about the sometimes conflicting desires of the flesh and spirit. This struggle was thematic; implicit in the title of the play. Why had I never dreamed that such struggles could strike many people as filthy and seem to them unfit for articulation? …The very experience of writing it was like taking a bath in snow.32 Even as the playwright protested, the members of Boston’s City Council denounced the play as “putrid,” “dirty,” and “a crime.” Outraged at the suggestion that she was performing in a “dirty play,” Hopkins held a press conference and said, “That’s an insult to the fine young man who wrote it. It’s not a dirty play. I wouldn’t be in it if it were a dirty play. I haven’t got to the point where I have to appear in dirty plays.” She recommended that the city council be flung into the Boston harbor like their “historic tea.”33 The members of the city council who had seen the play noted only that a middle-aged female religious hysteric had painted a picture of Jesus Christ with the face of the actor playing Val Xavier, and heard only Hopkins’s lines spoken to him, “I can feel the weight of your body bearing me backwards.” In the imaginations of Boston’s city fathers, words became deeds explicitly depicted in their theater. Next, the tirade of a minor Boston publication led the police commissioner to call in the city censor, but he was out of town at a Sugar Bowl football game in New Orleans. Finally, an assistant from his office attended the performance on January 7 and reported to the police commissioners that there were a few offensive lines in the play. The Guild was contacted. In order to quell the sound and fury, they agreed to take out the few “objectionable lines” from the next evening’s performance.34 As the debacle swirled around them, Webster was not alone in her opinion of the Guild’s unwise decision to open the play in Boston. Looking back on the calamity that befell her client, Wood commented, “The Theatre Guild’s plan to open such a play in Boston seems, in retrospect, to have been a manifestation of a deep collective death wish. Philadelphia, Washington, New Haven—perhaps such towns might have appreciated the onslaught of Tennessee’s first drama. But Boston?” “Banned in Boston,” she remarked, “has since come to mean censorship. In the case of Battle of Angels, that saying was quickly altered to bombed in Boston.”35 Page 118 → With remarkable tenacity in the face of a theatrical flop, Williams stuck to the theater and to writing plays for the next forty-three years of his life. To her credit, Wood never lost faith in her client’s future success. At the play’s closing, Webster was chiefly concerned for the playwright’s future, and she brooded over the

possible loss of a talented writer to the theater. “Nothing whatever in this whole experience would have encouraged the author to go on writing for the stage; and it was that which troubled me most,” she said. “But Tennessee loved this play and he had too much guts to abandon it.”36 In an effort to ameliorate the potential personal and creative damage to the young writer, she contributed a note to the published edition of Battle of Angels. She wrote, “The American professional theatre is a hard racket. Some are born to it, some achieve it, and some young poets from Mississippi have it thrust upon them.” It is surely a sign of health that so many people, the most unexpected people too, were united in their feeling that Battle of Angels should be seen on the American stage: a commercial management, a film star ready to leave the lotuses of Hollywood, a number of distinguished actors with a living to earn and much easier ways of earning it available. Looking back I think we made a mess of it between us, and that it was nobody’s fault and everybody’s fault. We did not capture the rainbow and translate it into the exacting terms of physical stage production…. We had not made the alchemist’s elusive formula work, the ingredients were not right, or were not rightly blended. I hope this does not matter. I believe it would only matter if any of us were deterred from trying again.37 In private, Webster concluded that the play, in its original version, could not have been saved. “The talent comes winging through—the hallmarks we all later came to know so well are there,” she said, “but the weaknesses are too great and the ending has an almost endearing absurdity.” Webster concluded that “all of them put together, plus a hundred dedicated firebugs, couldn’t have won the battle of angels.”38 The closing of the final curtain on Battle of Angels at the Wilbur Theatre was not the end of the ill-fated story. Warren Munsell, the Theatre Guild’s business manager, suggested that, in view of the closing in Boston, which made it unnecessary for Webster to work on the Broadway opening, she should forgo the final payment of her director’s fee for five hundred dollars. Webster replied with an unqualified refusal. She pointed out that she had attempted in the early stages of her contract negotiations to persuade Theresa Helburn to agree to a smaller director’s fee and a larger percentage of the box office gross, which would have been a more favorable arrangement Page 119 → for the Guild were the play to have a Broadway run. Helburn had declined. Nonetheless, Webster modified her position by suggesting to Munsell that she forgo the percentages due her on the two weeks of the Boston run. Webster was adamant for reasons other than financial ones. From her perspective, the Guild’s producers abandoned the show in Boston once the disappointing reviews came out. Webster, who had a previous commitment to give a lecture in Minneapolis, had returned to Boston to find there was no one from the Guild to deal with the emerging censorship crisis and with the clamoring press. Outraged, she told Warren Munsell that, for the sake of the show’s people, someone in authority should have been present at the play’s demise.39 Theresa Helburn’s answer ended the battle. She maintained that the Guild’s desire to reduce Webster’s fee was based on special considerations, among them, the reduction of the amount of time that Webster had originally planned to spend on the production. She also justified the producers’ behavior during the censorship crisis. Since the Guild had experienced censorship in Boston before, they believed that the less was said to the press, the less time the repercussions lasted.40 Finally, Helburn instructed Munsell not to accept Webster’s offer to refund her earnings on the two-week Boston run, and, this seemed to be the end of the affair, although not quite. Helburn’s autobiography, A Wayward Quest, nowhere mentions Margaret Webster, who directed the Guild’s production of the first full-length play by Tennessee Williams, their acclaimed Twelfth Night and Saint Joan, and their internationally renowned production of Othello. Lawrence Langner was not quite so negligent. In his autobiography, he briefly wrote that Webster “was engaged to direct the play [Battle of Angels]. As her knowledge of the South of England was far superior to her knowledge of the South of the United States, we sent her on a visit to Tennessee …and she returned brimming over with local color.” In the season following Battle of Angels, the Guild ignored Webster and engaged Eva Le Gallienne to direct revivals of two older plays, “there being no particularly good new plays on the horizon,” Langner observed.41

Hopkins, one of the angels who survived the battle, took over the roles of Sabina in the Skin of Our Teeth and Eliza Gant in Look Homeward, Angel on Broadway, and toured as Catherine Sloper in The Heiress. In Hollywood between 1942 and 1970, she made thirteen films, three of them with William Wyler in which she played Lavinia Penniman in The Heiress, Julia Hatswood in Carrie, and Mrs. Lily Mortar in The Children’s Hour. She and Margaret Webster died the same year. Years later when, for her memoir, Webster revisited the battle of angels Page 120 → over Williams’s first fulllength play, she concluded that it had brought out the best and the worst in those associated with the production. The Boston city fathers condemned the play sight unseen, Hopkins vilified the city fathers to the press, and the Guild proved both practical and mercenary, cutting their losses in Boston. Webster, for her part, had directed a failed play and was outraged when her employers abandoned the production without defending it before the enraged Boston public and city fathers. Webster’s tendency for moral outrage often set her upon a collision course with producers that she later regretted. Nonetheless, in the instance of Battle of Angels and its highly vulnerable author, Webster was in good company. She joined with Audrey Wood and Elliot Norton to defend Tennessee Williams’s talent and his future possibilities. Their belief in the playwright was swiftly vindicated with The Glass Menagerie and the magical Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield, followed by A Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando—the actor born to play Val Xavier. Although Elliot Norton criticized Webster’s staging of Battle of Angels as “altogether too arty and consequently confused,” another British director proved her instincts correct.42 Forty-nine years later, Sir Peter Hall staged Orpheus Descending (the revised Battle of Angels) using surrealistic lighting, hallucinatory settings, a cloudstreaked azure sky-drop, erotic choreography, and the arias of lyrical dialogue spoken directly to the audience. The critic Frank Rich rejoiced in the “hothouse imagery” of the play set in a “southern Gothic Hades belonging to a corrupt America ‘sick with neon.’”43 With deepest regret, Webster never again crossed paths with the young playwright from Mississippi named Tennessee. In the early 1940s, Webster was nearing the apex of her career as America’s foremost woman director. After the Boston fiasco, she traveled along familiar paths. At the Cort Theatre on West Forty-eighth Street, she directed her mother, herself, and friends in several performances of Euripides’ The Trojan Women for the Experimental Theatre. Then she moved to the summer-stock circuit to direct Ladies in Retirement and played the role of Ellen Creed at the County Theatre in Suffern, New York, before staging another Evans-Webster production of Macbeth with Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson as the Scottish king and queen. Webster spent her years during the Second World War on Broadway. She vacillated between wildly triumphant Shakespearean productions, uneasy truces with the Theatre Guild, and eccentric and even sentimental choices of classical plays and undistinguished new scripts to provide work Page 121 → for herself, her parents, and close friends. These efforts did not enhance her career in the commercial theater, but they made time for her personal life. In her private life, Webster gravitated toward a lesbian subculture of theater artists that included Mady Christians and Eva Le Gallienne. Christians, who appeared in Hamlet, Henry IV, and Viceroy Sarah, was one of several women whom Webster admired and loved but eventually lost to long distances, to other relationships, or to untimely deaths. As Webster floundered with two difficult productions for the Theatre Guild, she and Christians grew apart. First, their work intervened to separate them and then Eva Le Gallienne appeared on the scene. As Webster concluded her battles with the angels, Christians’s Broadway career was in the ascendancy with Lillian Hellman’s powerful drama Watch on the Rhine in which she played the American-born wife of a German anti-Fascist. She then left New York for Hollywood, where she appeared in several films, including Address

Unknown, opposite Paul Lukas, and Tender Comrade, starring Ginger Rogers. She made a triumphant return to Broadway in 1944 as the mother in John Van Druten’s I Remember Mama. By then, Webster and Eva Le Gallienne were deeply engaged in discussions for creating their own repertory theater, and their professional friendship had deepened into a love affair. This new relationship began during the summer of 1941 when Webster attended rehearsals of Le Gallienne’s Hedda Gabler in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and gave support and advice to her oldest friend. Le Gallienne took joy in a companion who was her intellectual equal and shared her dreams of a repertory theater. Le Gallienne kept her domestic situation with Marion Evensen unchanged. Although their physical relationship had ended years earlier, Le Gallienne was tied to Evensen by their personal history. Nonetheless, Le Gallienne was not opposed to creating a threesome with another woman with whom she shared so much. Because Webster and Mady Christians did not live together, Webster was less encumbered than Le Gallienne. Evensen was immediately jealous of Webster’s increasing presence in Weston. That summer, Webster became Le Gallienne’s lover and gave her the famous nickname, “Le G,” used afterward by friends and colleagues. Webster’s relationships, like Le Gallienne’s, were always secondary to her work, which for long periods took precedence over personal relationships, which were reserved for weekends in Weston or on Martha’s Vineyard. Nonetheless, the bond between Margaret Webster and Eva Le Gallienne was solidified by shared thoughts about their work and their feelings and perceptions about the theater.44 Page 122 → During the fall, Webster and Le Gallienne were both working in New York City, and Le Gallienne began staying at Webster’s Tenth Street apartment during the periods when she was working in the city. Le Gallienne was directing Ah, Wilderness! for the Theatre Guild, and Webster was preparing a November production of Macbeth. For the next twelve years, they shared living arrangements in New York and in Weston whenever their schedules and travels permitted. The lifestyle continued until McCarthyism created an irreparable rift in their relationship, although they would remain friends for the remainder of Webster’s life. In April 1941 Webster took on a project designed to serve two needs: to create work in the United States for her parents and to advance the cause of nonprofit theater in New York City. The endeavor was The Trojan Women, the first production of the new Experimental Theatre. Having seen the fate of Tennessee Williams’s first Broadway play, and having experienced London’s Sunday matinee performances, Webster worried over the fate of young playwrights with imperfect scripts. In 1941, there was no off-Broadway for showcases or minimal productions. Nor was there a network of regional theaters between Boston and Seattle to provide avenues for new work by new artists. From time to time, Webster proselytized on the need for experimental theaters to give playwrights, actors, and directors the freedom to work, and even to fail. In a lengthy article for the New York Times, she pointed to a hollowness at the industry’s artistic foundations: “We have a childlike faith that the theatre goose, starved though it may be, will somehow or other continue to yield golden eggs and not just lay eggs.”45 She argued for a cooperative approach, the licensing of experimental theaters, not to make money but to provide playwrights, directors, actors, designers, and even producers the opportunity to learn their jobs. She urged the Equity Council to recognize this need, and in time, Equity appointed an Experimental Theatre Committee to consider an experimental wing. Webster, an inveterate committee woman and volunteer, was a member. The committee met over champagne at the home of Antoinette Perry, the organizing genius of the American Theatre Wing and the Stage Door Canteen (and for whom the “Tony” Awards were named), to argue the merits of the new enterprise. Actors’ Equity was concerned that the licensing of experimental theaters would weaken the position of the union and asked for cooperation from the Dramatists’ Guild. Following permissions and concessions wrung from the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE, the stage-hands’ union), and from producers for

rehearsal space and theaters, Actors’ Page 123 → Equity agreed to a joint sponsorship with the Dramatists’ Guild. Toward the end of 1940, the Experimental Theatre was born, with Perry as its first president. All agreed its purpose was to nurture new talent. Webster launched the first of its productions. Incongruously, she began with Euripides’ The Trojan Women. Despite its ancient lineage, against the backdrop of world events Euripides’ play assumed a bitter contemporary significance, conjuring antiwar sentiments of both ancients and moderns. It was a timely spectacle for American audiences learning of disasters for the Allied forces in the Balkans, Yugoslavia, Greece, and in the Atlantic shipping routes. By early December, the United States was drawn into the struggle, and the European war was converted into a world war. The fact that the Experimental Theatre’s first play was not a new play underscored misunderstandings and conflicts within the Experimental Theatre Committee. “It was never our intention to do only plays by unproduced authors,” Webster claimed, “with unknown actors and apprentice directors and all the inherent dangers of the blind leading the blind.”46 The Dramatists’ Guild was not of the same opinion. To emphasize the play’s continuing relevance and to placate the Guild, Webster commissioned a one-act prologue by Robert Turney. Webster also set the production on a road in northern France, cluttered with refugees. “It ended,” she wrote, “with smoke and the crash of bombs and Poseidon’s voice rising through them and pronouncing the gods’ curse on the victors.”47 The Experimental Theatre’s charter mysteriously precluded expenditures on scenery or costumes. The production was, therefore, styled in modern dress. In the contemporary prologue, Walter Slezak as Menelaus wore a borrowed military uniform and Tamara Geva as Helen of Troy wore her own mink coat. For the women of Troy, Webster borrowed some of the nonperiod clothes from the Family Portrait wardrobe, including the black woolen robe that she had worn as Mary Magdalene. Webster cast herself as Andromache. In hindsight, this proved to be one of many mistakes. Some forty actors were recruited from hundreds at auditions, but there was no Hecuba among them. A dozen stars were approached, among them Jane Cowl, Margaret Anglin, and Judith Anderson, but all of them had other commitments. Now May Whitty offered to do the part, pay her own airfare to the East Coast, and bear the expense of a three-week rehearsal in New York City. May Whitty’s presence made waves at Actors’ Equity. She was a British actress (and therefore an “alien”) and the director’s mother to boot. As Webster explained, “Apparently I am the subject of much bitter criticism from young actors and authors who think I am robbing them of their Page 124 → chances to ‘experiment’ and doing myself some sort of favour and them some sort of harm.”48 Perry’s intervention with the Equity Council was needed to gain permission for May Whitty to play Hecuba. Three months of sound and fury were prelude to an afternoon’s performance for an invited audience and two performances on two consecutive Sunday evenings for the benefit of the Stage Relief and Actors’ Funds. The performances took place at the Cort Theatre on the set of Charley’s Aunt with borrowed black velours concealing Charley’s posh apartment. The choice of the classical play, the Victorian-rhymed Gilbert Murray translation, the British actress, the modernization, and the Cort Theatre doomed the production. Webster remembered that “the critics condemned the approach, the direction, the translation, and most of the acting.” They also did us the honor of treating the production as if it had been a full-fledged, fully financed Broadway show. They couldn’t have been accused of trying to give the Experimental Theatre a break, but they provided controversy, which was nearly as good.49 The problem was an obvious one. The public (and the industry) had understood that the Experimental Theatre was licensed to give “actors and playwrights an opportunity to practice their respective arts and exhibit their wares”

and “to create activity which might stimulate production.” Why, then, did Webster ignore the charter and re-create her postadolescent days on London’s stages? She was obviously blindsided by her experience of the opportunities presented by the London Sunday societies, her comfort in Sybil Thorndike’s success in the play, her desire to have her mother (who said she could do no more than “scuff about in Sybil Thorndike’s shoes”)50 again in New York and onstage, and her unconscious conviction following Battle of Angels that there was safety in the classics. She failed to take into account the viewpoints of Actors’ Equity and the Dramatists’ Guild. Euripides was certainly not a new playwright; May Whitty, Walter Slezak, and Margaret Webster were not struggling actors; and a wordy prologue written by Robert Turney was not substantial new writing. Moreover, the Cort Theatre was a Broadway house, placing the production squarely in a commercial context and in the venue of the Broadway critics. What began as a nonprofit experiment for actors and playwrights turned into another Broadway revival of an old play, with three stars, no producers, and no money. Despite its disappointments, there was an upside to the theatrical experiment. Audiences experienced the immediate significance of the victims of war in the ruins of Troy. Then, too, Webster’s reputation as an actress rose.Page 125 → Brooks Atkinson set aside his reservations about the production to say, “Fortunately, the part of Andromache is played with great reserve, and yet, somehow, with deep passion by Miss Webster, who would be known as an actress of eminence if she did not devote most of her energies to directing. Her acting is the most notable event in the production.”51 When the smoke cleared over Troy and the Cort Theatre, the Experimental Theatre produced two new plays in its next season. While many people contributed their time and talents to sustain the organization, the necessity of earning a living frequently compromised the efforts of well meaning volunteers like Webster and Slezak. The arrival of Maurice Evans in October with a new Shakespeare project that required Webster’s full attention was one such instance. The first phase of the Experimental Theatre was abandoned at the end of 1941 because of the war and did not resume until 1947, when the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), a nonprofit organization, became its sponsor. By the late 1940s, Webster was a member of the Equity Council (she was elected in 1942 and served for ten years), the ANTA board, and the Experimental Theatre Committee. With the cooperation of four organizations—the Theatre Guild, Theatre, Inc., the American Repertory Theatre, and the Playwright’s Company—five experimental productions with five performances each were offered to subscribers at the small Princess Theatre on West Thirty-ninth Street. This time, the new plays were by relatively unknown playwrights: The Wanhope Building by John Finch, O’Daniel by Glendon Swarthout and John Saracool, As We Forgive Our Debtors by Tillman Breiseth, The Great Campaign by Arnold Sundgaard, and Virginia Reel by John and Harriet Weaver. In its second phase, the Experimental Theatre had a remarkable record. It included not only promising new plays but also the first performance in the United States of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht with Charles Laughton as the astronomer, Jan de Hartog’s Skipper Next to God with John Garfield, and John Latouche’s pioneering musical Ballet Ballads. Some of these productions were successful enough to transfer to Broadway. Finally, production costs, “transfer” fever, and an organization run by volunteers took its toll, “effectively eliminating,” as Brooks Atkinson wrote, “the threat of high-mindedness on Broadway.”52 The Experimental Theatre permanently faded away in the 1948–49 season. Despite its demise, Webster’s good work as a member of the Equity Council and the ANTA board had helped lay the groundwork for nonprofit (or, at least low-cost) theater in New York City. Her efforts helped spawn the ANTA Theatre Series, which produced ten productions in five months for special performances, and the Equity Library Theatre, dedicated to the Page 126 → unknown actor but forbidden by its charter to do new plays. Most importantly, she helped prepare the way for the off-Broadway theaters (299 seats or less), and their off-offBroadway offspring in the 1960s, including nonprofit regional professional theaters. Because of her many elected offices and volunteer committees, Webster was central to the fight to enfranchise off-

Broadway and to persuade the unions to devise regulations that permitted small professional theaters to function and survive. The emergence of television, which unexpectedly expanded and redistributed employment in the industry, turned the attentions of the unions to this more lucrative new wing of the entertainment industry. The pressures to prevent the emergence of the small theaters beyond Broadway subsided, and off-Broadway was born. In one sense, the Evans-Webster production of Macbeth was born in a Chicago movie-house. During the long national tour of Twelfth Night that lasted until June 1941, he tried to take his mind off his worries about his parents’ welfare in England by going to the movies once a week. At the time he saw Judith Anderson in Lady Scarface, he had been toying with the idea of starring in Macbeth but had not settled upon an actress to play opposite him. There, on the screen, he saw Lady Macbeth. He called Anderson in Hollywood. She was receptive to joining him in Macbeth and erasing the darkly sinister images of Mrs. Danvers (in Rebecca with Laurence Olivier) and Lady Scarface. She had not appeared on Broadway since her success in Family Portrait in 1939. Productions of Macbeth have been interrupted by political riots and arson, even by attempted murder. Actors have been severely wounded in the fight scenes and actresses shot on stage by lovers. Scores of minor mishaps have fed the play’s legend of jinx. Anderson had played Lady Macbeth, opposite Laurence Olivier, at the Old Vic in 1937, a production that was afflicted with misfortunes. Olivier barely escaped injury backstage from a falling sandbag, and Lilian Baylis was sent into a state of depression by the death of her favorite dog. Olivier developed a cold and lost his voice so that the opening had to be postponed for four days. The day before the opening, Baylis suffered a heart attack and died suddenly at her home in Stockwell. Her last expressed wish was that her illness should not interfere with the opening of Macbeth. Together with John Haggott, Evans financed the production and enlisted Webster as director, Samuel Leve as scenic designer, Lemuel Ayers as costume designer, and Lehman Engel as musical composer. Evans adopted Lord Acton’s famous aphorism, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” as the basis for his interpretation, to Page 127 → remind audiences that the mood and lessons of Shakespeare’s tragedy were suited to the times. Webster agreed: the play was about the power of evil, and its ultimate defeat. “I saw darkness and black magic in it,” she said. “I would still approach it rather as if I were defusing a bomb.”53 Webster worked on plans for the production during the summer on Martha’s Vineyard. She directed a summer stock production of Ladies in Retirement at the County Theatre in Suffern, New York, before joining Evans at his island on Upper Saranac Lake to finalize their production plans. Upon their return to New York in the fall, they felt the material shortages imposed by the war. Upholstery fabrics had to be substituted for heavy woolen cloth; corners were cut with scenic materials. The pair attended meticulously to costs. In Helene Pons’s costume house with designer Lemuel Ayers, Webster was overheard asking, “Very nice, but does he wear a hat, and, if so, how much?”54 Webster and Evans agreed upon certain liberties with the text. They cut the Hecate scene and disposed of the fight between Macbeth and the shadowy character of Young Siward. They also disposed of Shakespeare’s stage direction in the finale, “Enter Macduff, with Macbeth’s head,” and ended with the fight between Macbeth and Macduff followed by Malcolm’s invitation “to see us crowned at Scone.” Seeing no modern equivalents for the witches, they played them as instruments of darkness. Webster also exercised diplomacy to dissuade Judith Anderson from her determination to be seen in bed with Macbeth. Webster pulled together a cast of stalwarts, including Harry Irvine as Duncan, Staats Cotsworth as Banquo, Herbert Rudley as Macduff, and John Ireland and John Straub as the murderers. To Webster’s great relief, tryouts in New Haven and Boston won good reviews and solid attendance. Macbeth opened in New York at the National Theatre on November 11, 1941, for 131 performances, with a total of 225 by the close of the national tour. Reviewers were mixed for Evans’s king but jubilant over the passion of the production and Anderson’s performance. Brooks Atkinson hailed Anderson’s most distinguished work in the American theater. John Mason Brown remarked, “Mr. Evans may not resemble a general as Macbeth; but he is a capable major.” Atkinson added

that “Mr. Evans lacks the physical power of a warrior king.” Richard Watts Jr. summarized the critical response in this way: Although this is not one of Mr. Evans’ most completely satisfying portrayals nor Miss Webster’s most brilliant staging, the current presentation has the great and beautiful virtue of being alive, vigorous and eloquent. Page 128 → Atkinson, usually her adoring fan, detected Webster’s transparent efforts to dispense with the unwieldy sensationalism of the occult and the onstage battles. “Sometimes the rush of warriors is hollow motion, and short scenes essential to the narrative are not always vital parts of the drama.”55 Nonetheless, theatergoers rarely had an opportunity to see Macbeth (it was previously seen in New York in 1928), and audiences streamed into the National Theatre. Webster was unhappy with the final product, which she thought encumbered by heavy scenery and, although well spoken, lacking in mystery. The opening scene was the exception, with its bagpipes and drums (real, live music!), Duncan’s army filing across the front of the stage; behind them a translucent backdrop of stormy sky, the clouds reforming into the shadows of the three witches, their couplets of doom (over an echo mike) whispering through the martial music, fading out as King Duncan spoke the opening line and the blood-spattered soldier reeled onto the stage and fell at his feet.56 The play lived up to its unlucky reputation. In tryouts, the stage manager collapsed from the burden of the physical production, which required rapid changes of heavy scenery, live music in the orchestra pit, recorded “echo” music and sound effects, and complicated lighting with projections. Webster was afflicted with bronchitis, then the flu, and finally had surgery to remove her appendix. Finally, the power of evil was transcendent on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered into war. Evans had become a naturalized citizen the previous August and was summoned by his draft board, along with the show’s master electrician. Evans persuaded a friend in the Army Special Services Branch that men and women in the service needed entertainment. During the Macbeth tour, he organized three performances for GIs at Fort Meade, Maryland. They were well received by the enlisted men and brass alike. Rather than wait to be drafted, Evans enlisted at the rank of captain in the Army Specialist Corps. Despite the war, this was Webster’s New York decade. She had directed thirteen plays on Broadway, six of them by Shakespeare plus the four abbreviated World’s Fair productions. National magazines dubbed her “The Bard’s Girl Friend.” The New Yorker published a lengthy profile that, while celebrating her extraordinary accomplishments as a woman in the industry, was critical of Webster’s proprietary air over Shakespeare’s texts. She would Page 129 → solidify her reputation with Shakespeare as she applied her considerable experience to a book called Shakespeare without Tears. The distinguished critic John Mason Brown provided an introduction. As he pointed out, “Although Miss Webster is a scholar and a critic, what keeps her knowledge alive and her perceptions creative is that she is a theatre person.”57 The book was well received by Shakespearean scholars and theater practitioners alike. One of the latter called it “an excellent, down-to-grease-paint book about Shakespeare.”58 Macbeth was the valedictory production in Webster’s collaboration with Evans on Shakespeare’s canon. It had lasted four years. They would work together again at New York City Center Theatre as director and star on The Devil’s Disciple and on another revival of Richard II. Their final collaboration occurred in 1962 with a production of The Aspern Papers, adapted by Michael Redgrave from Henry James’s story. Maurice Evans would never achieve the theatrical reputation (or knighthood) of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud,

and Ralph Richardson. The war years interrupted his enormous public success in America, and he never regained his status. In the postwar period, the Broadway theater changed, and there was no place for the independent actormanager. Production costs became prohibitive, and the Bloomgardens and Saint-Subbers of Broadway formed limited partnerships to assume the huge risks. Shortly before her death, Webster reflected upon Evans’s reputation as an actor, lesser than that of Olivier and Gielgud. His acting, she said, “was not the breath of life. This may have been one of the reasons why he never, in my judgment, touched the heights or plumbed the depths of Hamlet or Macbeth. He was always, from his youngest amateur days, a brilliant character actor, one of the finest I have ever seen.” As a Shavian actor he was brilliant. “His clarity of thought and virtuosity of speech are admirably suited to Shaw’s sparkling prose, which makes more demands on the intelligence than on the emotions. There was no reason whatever why he should not have gone on playing the finest available character parts as and when he chose.”59 Evans’s need to be his own boss and his point of honor—that a show should make a profit and backers be repaid—set him apart from commercial theater practitioners in the United States at midcentury. He did not turn consistently to films and television to supplement his income, and the options on Broadway were limited. In England, the national theaters made it possible for a star actor to do television, films, and even commercial plays and to return to the large classical roles on the stages of the Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Royal National Theatre. “It is possible Page 130 → to have your theatre cake and eat it in the other media,” Webster observed.60 Webster would shortly weigh in with the most daring Shakespearean production to reach Broadway and would do so without Evans, who declined to play Iago opposite Paul Robeson’s Othello. In his absence, Webster marshaled energy, talent, and intellect to create a production, two years in the making, that became a splendid page in the annals of American stage history.

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CHAPTER 7 THE MAKING OF OTHELLO There is no such thing as having too many good actors. —MARGARET WEBSTER The long road to a Broadway production with Paul Robeson as Othello began in 1939, when he asked Webster to direct him in the title role.1 He had seen her production of Hamlet on Broadway, and he in turn was not unknown to her. She had seen him as Othello in London in 1930; five years later, she had appeared on the West End with him for three performances in Peter Garland’s melodrama Basalik. (One reviewer said that Robeson played an African king “with the mind of a child and the shoulders of a gladiator,” finally dismissing his performance as a “noble silhouette.”)2 Robeson had received mixed reviews playing opposite Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona and Maurice Brown as Iago. His “dignity, simplicity, and true passion” won praise. For the Times reviewer, he played “thrillingly upon the nerves” with “a tranquil dignity and a melancholy infinitely sad.” A dissonant critic observed that Robeson delivered his speeches with “sonorous monotony” and was apt to “falter upon a vowel sound.”3 Webster recalled his London performance as seriously flawed: “Robeson was never a born player and he had not acquired much acting skill.”4 When Robeson approached Webster about a new production, he said that he had not been very good in London, “but now he had studied and restudied the role and he thought he was ready to play it.”5 Robeson also believed that Broadway audiences were ready for a black actor in the role.Page 132 → Webster agreed, and together, they tried to enlist Maurice Evans as Iago. He refused, saying that the public “would never go for it,” meaning seeing him in a supporting role.6 Others agreed that stars would refuse to play Iago or Desdemona. Though Peggy Ashcroft had done so, “she was English and that was London.”7 Moreover, producers were wary of the public’s reaction to a black actor as Othello on Broadway. For a century and a half after the play’s first presentation, actors used “soot” black to portray the Moor. Edmund Kean broke with this tradition when he offered Drury Lane a coffee-colored Othello—one hailed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a most “pleasing probability.” From the middle of the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century in the United States, Othello had been popularly performed as an animated lecture (or a “Moral Dialogue”) on the sin of jealousy, the evils of drink, or the perils of lust. Famed white actors had offered the role in a host of hues.8 At least once notably before Robeson, a black actor had played Othello. The great Ira Aldridge first opened in the role in 1826 in London and then in Belfast, with Charles Kean as his Iago. They appeared together at Covent Garden in 1833. For four decades thereafter, Aldridge toured Othello to acclaim throughout Britain, Russia, and the Continent. Nonetheless, Aldridge never played the role in the United States. Most people assumed Robeson was the first black actor to do so, and Webster said as much in the New York Times.9 Contrary to this legend, a number of African American actors had appeared as Othello in professional productions in New York City dating to the 1880s, including the Lafayette Players in 1916.10 However, none had appeared on Broadway. Producers in the early forties did not trust the American public to tolerate a story that required a black man to love, marry, and murder a white woman, even though the play was four hundred years old. “Everybody was scared,” Webster recalled. “A few fell back on the scholastic arguments …that Othello was a Moor, not a Negro, or expressed doubts as to Robeson’s technical equipment as an actor. But mostly they were just plain scared of the issues which the production would raise.”11 Undaunted, Webster and Robeson told friends that they would do Othello on a street corner if necessary. They

waited two years because of Webster’s commitments to direct Twelfth Night and Battle of Angels for the Theatre Guild, and Macbeth for Maurice Evans. Finally, in the spring of 1942, Webster was free to attack the problems facing the production. They had decided to finance the production themselves since the usual sources would not back a controversial production. Preliminary to mounting a tryout, Webster and Robeson canvassed summer-stock theaters in the Northeast but came up empty-handed. The Page 133 → year 1942 was the height of the country’s draft and the rationing of gasoline. Many fine actors were engaged elsewhere by the U.S. Army, and rationing deprived theaters of audiences who could not spare gasoline for entertainment purposes. In this climate, many theaters had gone out of business, and the surviving managers were reluctant to involve themselves in controversy. At last, John Huntington of the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the management team of Day Tuttle and Richard Skinner of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton (the town where Robeson had been born) agreed to open their theaters. The locations were ideal. The Brattle Theatre was located on the campus of Harvard, not among the commercial theaters. The McCarter Theatre was on the Princeton campus, close enough by train to New York City that first-string critics could see the production. Both theaters had dependable and enthusiastic university audiences. Tickets for the weeklong run in Cambridge sold out within hours of the first advertisement. The early contracts for Othello called for an opening at the Brattle Theatre followed by a brief run at the McCarter. Limited financing mandated a short period of rehearsals. Two weeks were allotted: one week in New York for the principals, the second in Cambridge, where the Brattle Theatre’s own company would play minor roles.12 Confident that the logistics had been resolved, Webster started to assemble a cast. Evans having refused to play Iago, Webster sought actors for the three key roles—Iago, Desdemona, and Emilia. At the urging of Eva Le Gallienne, she filled the roles of Iago and Desdemona with the husband-and-wife team of José Ferrer and Uta Hagen. Both had had recent Broadway successes, Ferrer in Charley’s Aunt and Hagen in the Lunts’ production of The Seagull. Although they were rising stars, Ferrer had never played Shakespeare, and Hagen, still in her early twenties, was comparatively inexperienced. Robeson seconded Webster’s decision to cast them.13 That left the role of Emilia, Iago’s wife. Again, Le Gallienne pointed the way. To simplify a tight rehearsal schedule and ensure some remuneration during the run of the show, Webster cast herself as Emilia. Again, Robeson concurred. Though more common in those days than now, taking on the dual function of actress and director was not without risks. Having played small parts in Family Portrait and The Trojan Women, Webster did not think her work as a director would suffer from the double responsibility. Nonetheless, she was concerned about performing in a key role in Othello. “I find it very difficult to close my directorial eyes and ears and to become subjective, immersed, spontaneous,” she confessed.14 Page 134 → Elaine Anderson, who had worked as assistant stage manager on Battle of Angels and had joined the Othello company, described Webster’s way of organizing her dual responsibilities. During rehearsals, she used an under study to set Emilia in a scene. At the end of each rehearsal period, she established her routine of getting onstage and playing the scene.15 This method worked reasonably well until the cast arrived in Cambridge with one week to integrate the actors from the Brattle company. Webster was hard-pressed to cover all of her jobs as producer, director, and actress. To prepare for the Brattle opening, the company worked ten hours a day. With three principal actors of varied backgrounds, Webster entered into a collaboration fraught with hope, peril, and internecine controversy. She was accustomed to the highly skilled Shakespearean actor Evans and now confronted the limitations and inexperience of her three leading players.

According to some, Ferrer did not know the play very well prior to rehearsals. Nonetheless, Webster found him amenable and quick to take direction.16 One day she suggested that his rehearsing in tennis shoes and shorts, with his hands in his pockets, was going to do him no good when he had to wear a doublet and boots. The next day he appeared in boots and kept his hands free for gestures. Ferrer worked hard and gave a brilliant, stimulating performance that betrayed a fierce magnetism. His Iago was a “theatre ape,” according to Webster, dancing like a matador around the handsome, heavy, and stately Robeson, “flourishing the scarlet cloak, the sword-blade wicked and gleaming but too quick for the victim’s eye.”17 Webster was satisfied. Shakespeare had imagined an evil man, and Iago’s “motiveless malignity” was easier to accept on the stage than in print. In Shakespeare without Tears, Webster asserted that Iago unequivocally voices the play’s initial premise when he says, “I have told thee often, and I re-tell thee again and again, I hate the Moor.” “The pure venom of this chills the blood,” she said. “It also compels us to belief as it compels Roderigo, to whom it is spoken. In the theatre we do not stop to fuss for the reasons. We accept the terrifying fact.”18 Ferrer’s taunting quickness made his performance highly persuasive as a “half dancing, half strutting Mephistopheles who takes pleasure in his villainy.”19 Webster also liked the strength and classical training that the young Uta Hagen brought to the role of Desdemona. “No dewy-eyed lamb-to-the-slaughter for Uta,” she said. Hagen’s performance was simple, direct, and personal from the first day of rehearsal to the Broadway opening two years later.20 Throughout stage history Iagos have stolen the play from Othello, a somber and far more difficult part. Laurence Olivier called the role “pretty well unplayable.”21 Nonetheless, Webster and Robeson made great efforts Page 135 → to weight the play toward Othello. Robeson’s physical stature, overpowering personality, baritone voice, and imposing ethnicity greatly assisted the balancing act. Paul Robeson, born in 1898 to a former slave who became a Methodist clergyman, had graduated from Rutgers College as valedictorian and an All-American football player, one of the first black athletes to achieve this distinction. He had taken a degree from Columbia University Law School and received international acclaim as a concert artist, recording star, and stage and film actor. He was highly regarded as an interpreter of plays by America’s foremost playwright, Eugene O’Neill, appearing on Broadway in The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings. He had performed in the musicals Porgy and Bess and Show Boat. As a concert singer he sold out halls throughout Europe. Nonetheless, he was not a trained classical actor, and, despite his appreciation of poetry, he had not mastered speaking verse (especially Shakespearean verse) for the stage. Webster was fully aware of potential problems with her star. She was also aware that he was the ideal Othello at that historic moment in the American theater. At forty-four, Paul Robeson understood the demands of the role and brought a commanding presence to the part.22 Robeson had “improved in technical command and freedom” since his work opposite Peggy Ashcroft, but Webster found him “difficult to direct.” Early in rehearsals she discovered that Robeson lacked an actor’s basic emotional resources, including the “quality of real rage” the play demanded for the murder of Desdemona. “He worked hard at feeling it,” Webster said, “but it never rose and engulfed him.”23 Certain that Robeson had experienced injustice and fury, Webster asked him to draw upon his personal experiences. Robeson told her that a football player had once yelled at him, “You black bastard!” At this personal violation, Robeson said, “I smashed his face into the ground.”24 Although the incident had made a deep impression, he could not recapture his rage for the stage. He was used to controlling his emotions and unable to release them at will in rehearsal. Webster faulted herself for not being a Method director, to help Robeson release feelings into the role. This was probably an impossible task during a two-week rehearsal period. Even so, Webster knew that she was not the director to effect this release of long-repressed emotions. Uta Hagen, who in later years would become one of America’s foremost teachers of acting, thought Webster was incapable of helping actors. “Margaret Webster was a brilliant woman,” but she “belonged in a university.”25 Robeson made progress during the early readings of the play, seizing upon an idea like lightning and making it

blossom like a flower. Webster credited Page 136 → his energy and intelligence rather than his craft. “Not only has he no technique,” she wrote to her mother, “which he knows, but no conception of ‘impersonation.’ …Fortunately his tremendous vocal resources protect him.”26 Webster found Robeson “enormously exciting to work with.” In the heat and thunderstorms of New York City in July, her worries about his acting abated. She wrote to her mother that he “ought to be magnificent, if only Iago turns out good enough to handle his end.”27 Webster used what she called “tricks” to solve some of Robeson’s limitations. “Speed above everything” was her watchword. “If he slowed down, he was lost,” she remarked. She masked his heaviness of movement by having him remain very still at center stage while the others, especially Ferrer, moved around him. The strategy worked, but Robeson was not consistent.28 He can only do it if he can get a kind of electric motor going inside himself and this has to be started by some feeling…. my job is to jockey him into some approximation of Othello, and make a kind of frame round him which will hold the play together. It’s very difficult—like pushing a truck uphill—yet sometimes when he catches fire (from me) he goes careening off at eighty miles an hour and leaves all the rest of us standing. But he’s so undependable.29 The sporadic way Robeson worked, along with his lack of craft, created immense variations in his performances. “Sometimes they are filled with his own personal quality,” Webster said, “sometimes they are an empty house with nobody home.”30 Despite Webster’s almost total immersion in the Othello saga for a year and a half, her personal life had its own frissons. As Webster rehearsed Othello in Cambridge, she was getting up every morning to read Jane Eyre for a 9:15 A. M. radio show. She complained of fatigue and a cough. In late August, Webster moved into a larger apartment at 50 West Twelfth Street,31 shared with Eva Le Gallienne. Le Gallienne was appearing in the longrunning play Uncle Harry and needed to stop the daily commute to and from Weston because of the severe gasoline rationing. While not thrilled with the commercialism of a murder mystery about a man who commits a perfect crime, Le Gallienne was interested in the role of a woman with a secret inner life and agreed to play opposite Joseph Schildkraut if he, in turn, would play opposite her in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Le Gallienne’s best-laid plans were put on hold by the success of the Victorian thriller, which opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in May 1942. Webster mentioned the new apartment obliquely to her mother: Page 137 → I am thinking of moving to one with an extra bedroom. Eva would pay the increased rent, in order to have a “ventre a terre” as the lady said, in N.Y. I have seen an enchanting one on Twelfth Street—this same block—which would do admirably—has a kind of tiny separate suite which she could use.32 Webster explained that Le Gallienne was “not really sharing” the new apartment but had a bedroom, telephone, and so on. She paid a consideration to “board” when she had to stay in New York. Webster took great pride in the new apartment, which had a terrace-balcony overlooking gardens below. They fixed it up with easy chairs, sun umbrellas, and window boxes, “so that it will be quite charming.”33 The great themes of their relationship were being articulated: art, work, love, companionship, possession, and caution. In her adult life Webster had never created a home with another person. The cottage on Martha’s Vineyard was a retreat shared by many vacationing friends, including Mady Christians. The apartment with Le Gallienne created friction between Webster and Christians, whose film career had taken her to Hollywood that year. The “Le Gallienne thing” was “none of her business,” Christians wrote to Webster, putting an end to discussion of the new arrangements.34 During the final dress rehearsal in Cambridge, Webster learned a critical actor’s lesson: for lack of a prop, a great play can come to a standstill. In the famous scene, Desdemona offers Othello her handkerchief. He knocks it from

her hand, and it is left lying on the stage. Emilia picks it up and eventually gives it to Iago. In rehearsal, Uta Hagen dropped the handkerchief close to her feet. When she walked offstage, her dress dragged it with her. Webster as Emilia stood in the middle of the stage with nothing to pick up. The whole plot-sequence flashed through her head: “I couldn’t give it to Iago, he couldn’t plant it on Cassio, Othello couldn’t see Cassio give it to Bianca, Iago couldn’t use that to prove Desdemona’s guilt—the whole play fell to pieces like a house of cards.”35 Webster never played the scene thereafter without an extra handkerchief concealed in her sleeve, prepared to duck behind a chair and “pick up” the vital prop. Othello premiered on August 10, 1942. By most accounts, Robeson was a magnificent Othello, a remarkable performance enhanced by the skills and strategies of his director and the other actors. It was the hottest evening in memory, and sweating humanity packed the theater to its corrugated-iron roof. The actors sweated even more from nerves than from their velvet gowns, heavy cloaks, leather thigh boots, and jerkins. When the final curtain Page 138 → fell, the audience cheered and clapped and roared. The Harvard undergraduates stamped their feet in a steady rhythm and yelled wave after wave of “Bravo!” “What’s that?” Webster asked one of the local actors standing beside her for the curtain call. “Boy!” he said, “that’s Harvard! That’s the best you could get!”36 The storm of enthusiasm was quelled only after the entire company joined the audience in singing the national anthem. Elliot Norton vividly recalled the event: Only two American managers had had the courage in that year to put on this production with Robeson. The whole Broadway community was hiding in closets when the subject was brought up. Nobody knew what would happen when the first black actor in American history walked on stage to play Othello…. I remember when Paul Robeson bent down for the first time to kiss his Desdemona, there was a thrill of excitement in the theatre. No black actor, believe it or not, had even kissed a white actress on the American stage before that time…. I remember when the innocent, vulnerable Desdemona prepared for bed, that magnificent scene, the tension was enormous; and when he strangled her, it was pretty close to unbearable. At the end, there was a moment of absolute silence, unlike almost anything I’ve ever seen or heard in the theatre. And then absolute pandemonium by that first audience in Cambridge, overwhelming acceptance, an historic occasion. Both the New York Times and Variety critics covered the premiere. The Times called Robeson’s performance “heroic and convincing,” and Variety said that “no white man should ever dare presume” to play the role again.37 Some found Robeson’s performance “uneven”; others complained about Webster’s telescoping the play into two acts and four scenes. Louis Kronenberger expressed hope that “after further polishing,” the production would “come to Broadway this winter.”38 Within twenty-four hours New York producers were asking for “a piece of the show.” Webster was ecstatic but mindful that they had an unusual theatrical property. She cautiously secured backing for the Broadway opening. She talked with her old employers, Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn, about the Guild’s co-producing the Broadway production and the national tour. All watched with keen interest the next stop in Princeton, where Othello played for two weeks, again to exceptional praise. Webster waited another week before agreeing to terms with the Theatre Guild, then wrote proudly to her mother with the news: Page 139 → I shall be part of the production out-fit with a percentage on the profits apart from my directorial contract. I’m inclined to think that I shan’t play Emilia; with anyone so inexperienced as Paul—and Uta too—I found it maddening not to be able to see the show from the front—and Emilia isn’t that good a part! There’s an awful lot of waiting around to it.39

Despite the Guild’s financial presence, there was a hiatus of fourteen months while Robeson fulfilled a preplanned schedule of concerts and political appearances. In September 1942, Webster returned to her new quarters on Twelfth Street to begin preparations for the Broadway opening. Before she revisited Othello, she and Le Gallienne planned productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Tempest, and Webster directed two war plays for Broadway: Flare Path, Terrence Rattigan’s play about the Royal Air Force, and Counterattack, an adaptation of a Russian play about the heroics of the Soviet army. The shortage of male actors in wartime made the casting of Flare Path and Counterattack difficult. Webster managed to find the six men and four women for Flare Path, among them Nancy Kelly, Alexander Ivo, and young Alec Guinness, whom they borrowed from the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He happened to be in New York City awaiting his naval assignment aboard a ship being built at the Cincinnati naval yards. The playwright, who was himself an officer in the RAF, managed to divert his assignment to North Africa by way of New York City. He oversaw the authenticity of the scenes in which the inhabitants wait to learn the fate of the planes and crews flying sorties over Germany. Thinking that both had been popular in their respective countries, Webster and producers Gilbert Miller and Lee Sabinson failed to take into account the fact that Broadway audiences were not interested in “other people’s soldiers.”40 The ordinariness of the characters’ lives and the lack of wartime heroics, such as the public was seeing in patriotic films, meant the play had little appeal. It opened two day before Christmas at the Henry Miller Theatre and was dubbed “sentimental, slow, and confused” by the New York Times reviewer, Lewis Nichols.41 Nonetheless, Webster was happy with her work on Rattigan’s play; May Whitty liked the production as well.42 On opening night Alec Guinness endeared himself by giving Webster a letter in which he wrote, “I have always found you a constant source of help, resourcefulness, patience, tact, appreciation …in fact the very humble possessor of all the theatre’s greatest qualities.”43 She, in turn, gave him a curved, metal liquor flask to wear in his breast pocket. They never had anPage 140 → opportunity to work together again, but Webster remembered with great fondness the fledgling British officer who would become one of England’s greatest actors. Counterattack was another undistinguished war play that Webster directed the following year. Written by Soviet playwrights Ilya Vershinin and Mikhail Ruderman and adapted by Janet and Philip Stevenson, it concerned the Soviet defense against German invaders. Despite the fact that Webster needed a cast of sixteen men, she gathered a stellar group, including Richard Basehart, Karl Malden, John Ireland, Morris Carnovsky, and Sam Wanamaker. The play took place in the cellar of a bombed-out building where two Russian soldiers were guarding a group of German prisoners. Tensions and political discussions mounted as the days and supplies passed away and the Germans tried various means to overcome their weary guards. Webster had little rapport with the company, who, from her viewpoint had their eyes on the clock and ears open for slights and effronteries. The basement setting, designed by John Root, was dimly lighted with a small number of concealed “baby” spotlights. The cast did not endear themselves to their director as they maneuvered to stand in the downlight: “The bitchery which goes on between seven entombed Nazi’s fighting for the baby spots, would put Jane Cowl and her ilk to shame!”44 Counterattack opened on February 3, 1943, at the Windsor Theatre on Forty-eighth Street. Lewis Nichols declared Webster the heroine of the production for making a tense melodrama out of a not very good play.45 In August, Webster’s hiatus between productions of Othello ended when Paul Robeson became available to begin rehearsals for the Broadway opening in October. What had been a successful out-of-town production now entered upon a bumpy road toward an unprecedented opening night. Langner and Helburn decided to present Othello to open the Guild’s twenty-sixth season. They would finance and control the front-of-the-house matters, which meant arranging rehearsal space, renting a Broadway theater and equipment, contracting with artists, preparing tryout schedules, and marketing the show. The production itself remained in the hands of Webster, Robeson, and their production stage manager, John Haggott. Robert Edmond

Jones designed the sets, costumes, and lighting. He and Robeson had known each other since their days at the Provincetown Playhouse in the 1920s, when they worked together on The Emperor Jones. Webster retained her staging ideas from the Brattle production, and Jones designed sets that were simple and swift to change. Moreover, he took infinite pains to choose fabrics and colors for Robeson that would set him apart from the Venetians. Page 141 → Just prior to the start of rehearsals, the Guild’s producers made an unexpected casting decision to replace José Ferrer and Uta Hagen. Their objections were Ferrer’s uncertain draft status, his weak reviews during tryouts, and, perhaps most important, his unfamiliarity to Broadway audiences. He was not “box office.” Ferrer was also insisting on star billing, with substantial salaries for himself and his wife. Robeson, arguing that their talents warranted their demands, supported the Ferrers.46 Webster was caught between two implacable forces: the Theatre Guild on one side, and Robeson and the Ferrers on the other. She disagreed with the Guild on the quality of Ferrer’s performance, arguing that he simply needed more rehearsal time. Two weeks had not been enough, even for Webster, the most experienced actor of the lot. Nonetheless, the Guild producers hired Stefan Schnabel for Iago and Virginia Gilmore for Desdemona.47 Webster was not unhappy with the choice of Schnabel, the son of pianist Artur Schnabel and an actor at the Old Vic with Maurice Evans. She assumed that Robeson—”who, as usual, was not to be found for several days while everything hung in mid-air”48—would be happy with him as well. She was mistaken. Robeson complained over the changes, fearing that without the Ferrers, onstage magic would be lost. He declared that he would not continue unless they were rehired.49 Webster was furious with Robeson for endangering the production: “Against his inarticulate but immoveable resolve,” she fumed, “pleas, arguments, threats, reason broke in vain.” “No Ferrers, no Robeson, no Robeson no show,” she wrote, “and I, as usual, left to straighten it out.”50 She negotiated a buyout of Schnabel’s contract; Robeson paid half of the four thousand dollars.51 Although she wanted to pitch the Ferrers off “the balcony into Fifty-Second Street,” she persuaded them to forgo equal billing with Robeson, in exchange for being “prominently featured in all display advertising.” Their salary demands were fully met. Webster’s nightly letters to her mother now took on the quality of a pressure-release valve. Writing down words of frustration, she expressed thoughts and feelings that would have been damaging in public. Describing the resolution to the Ferrers’ demands, she noted that she finalized the negotiations in order to continue with the production: “But anyhow I did it; and now I have to make myself like it.” She signed the letter, “In haste—your depleted Peg.”52 Webster was, in part, angry with herself, having gravely misjudged Robeson’s temperament. “This sweet, unassuming, dear, big bear of a man could crush us all,” she wrote.53 With the leisure of a six-week rehearsal period prior to tryouts and Broadway, Robeson grew in confidence. At the same time, he and his director Page 142 → again confronted his lack of classical training. Robeson had cultivated the image of the “natural” actor without technical training. Moreover, he had spoken fervently of the need for African Americans to keep their cultural heritage unsullied by the contaminating influences of the West.54 Previous directors had accepted him as a natural talent whose instinctual performance should not be tampered with. Having grown up in the oratorical tradition of the African American church, Robeson turned to declamation when in doubt. Speaking Shakespeare’s verse, he sounded “sonorous and preachy.” In rehearsals he concentrated on bringing more fluidity to his physical movements and to his extraordinary baritone voice. He tried to modulate his voice so that he would not sing his lines, but “speak them musically.”55 He worked to overcome a tendency “to be too loud, too big.” Everyone agreed that he was best in the “gentle passages” and wooed Desdemona “with tenderness and loving humor.” On the other hand, he “never matched at all,” in Webster’s estimation, the frenzy and passion the role called for in the later scenes. As a survival tactic, he had learned too well to keep his anger

carefully concealed and controlled.56 Preparing to appear on Broadway in one of the great roles of Western dramatic literature, Robeson turned to Webster for help. Here his limitations ran up against hers. Her strong points, a fellow director once said, “were picturing, pacing and energizing a show.”57 She conceived of the craft of directing as the process of shaping outer form. Having worked with classically trained actors for the greater part of her professional life, Webster approached a scene by arranging the actors and concentrating on the speaking of the language and the clarity of interpretation. This was a common directorial process, especially for British directors trained in the manner of Harley Granville Barker and Harcourt Williams. Exploring the actor’s emotional life and relating feelings and experiences to character and language were not her strengths.58 All agreed that Webster’s directorial methods, which encouraged an external process, were antithetical to Robeson’s need to move away from vocalization and outer effects. Although she could assist him with vocal production and interpretation, she was not capable of motivating him to draw upon his life experiences and repressed emotions. Deep in her heart, Webster knew that she was inadequate to help him. If Webster was not the director to answer Robeson’s needs, no one else could answer them in the American theater in 1943. Even Uta Hagen, who was deeply critical of Webster, knew there was no other director to turn to. Most American actors learned their craft as adolescents in stock companies. Prior to the founding of the Actors Studio in the late forties, training usually meant the American Academy of Dramatic Arts or one of the English Page 143 → schools. The merits of these institutions were hotly debated. A performer, once “recognized,” almost never sought further training.59 Certainly, an established actor did not wait until he was cast in one of the great Shakespearean roles—say Othello—to learn his craft. Where Webster and her star agreed was the “unambiguous racial identity” of Othello. Given the social, political, and stage history that was background to the 1943 production, Webster took great pains to defend her understanding of the identity of Shakespeare’s Moor. In Shakespeare without Tears, first published in 1942, she wrote that Othello was the “most human” of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies: “The play is an astounding extension of normal humanity to the level of high, poetic tragedy.” This question of racial division is of paramount importance to the play, to its credibility and to the validity of every character in it. There has been much controversy as to Shakespeare’s precise intention with regard to Othello’s race. It is improbable that he troubled himself greatly with ethnological exactness. The Moor, to an Elizabethan, was a blackamoor, an African, an Ethiopian.60 Twice more, during the Broadway production of Othello, Webster wrote in support of her interpretation of the play. In race and appearance, Robeson was the ideal Othello. Webster described the actor’s extraordinary stage presence: When Paul Robeson stepped onto the stage for the very first time, when he spoke his very first line, he immediately, by his very presence, brought an incalculable sense of reality to the entire play.61 Only with a great man playing the role, “a man of simplicity and strength [who] also was a black man,” could an audience believe he could command Venice’s armies while remaining a stranger to its society. Only then did the “values of the play fall miraculously into place.” One could measure the extent of Desdemona’s courage in daring a marriage that the ladies of polite society would universally condemn. So, too, Iago’s devilish skill in manipulating the weaknesses of another human being became comprehensible. To see Othello as part of a “tribal world” is to understand how he could believe that Desdemona was unfaithful. In that tribal world, the man whose wife betrays him is himself “tainted and dishonored…. The shedding of her blood is not revenge or murder. It is a terrible sacrifice offered by the Priest-King to the primal gods, ordained and ineluctable.”62 Despite the debates that raged for weeks over and around the production, Page 144 → Margaret Webster and Paul Robeson had, in tandem, effectively banished from the American stage the “coffee-colored” Othello performed by white actors.63

The Theatre Guild scheduled a three-city tryout tour for four and a half weeks prior to the Broadway opening. Webster was on the road again as both director and actress. In New Haven for one week beginning September 11, 1943, the company then proceeded to Boston for two weeks, and to Philadelphia for a week and a half. Along the route, the Guild recorded exceptionally high box office grosses, but the out-of-town critics mixed enthusiasm with reservations. In Boston, the respected critics Elinor Hughes and Elliot Norton turned in sharply divergent verdicts.64 Norton suggested that when Robeson could call upon his own experiences, he “walks with the great men of the stage”; where he could not, he fell back on “vocalizing and declaiming to artificial effect.” Hughes, by contrast, lauded Robeson’s “tremendous magnetism, splendid size and bearing, rich voice and powerful emotional conviction.” The critical verdicts remained divided in the three tryout cities. The Guild’s and the company’s anxieties grew as they settled into the Shubert Theatre in New York. Ten days before the opening of Othello, Webster took a break between rehearsals and went to a matinee of her parents’ new film, Lassie Come Home. The line to buy tickets was so long that she missed the opening scenes, but she emerged as a proud child who wanted to announce to everyone in the movie-house that they had just seen her parents. “I was in plenty of time to see you and Daddy,” she wrote to May, “whom I thought charming—simple and natural and very touching—both of you, I mean. How sweet Daddy looks, and what an entrancing smile! You made me cry when the dog went away. I was very proud and wanted to tell everyone on the Third Mezzanine about you being my parents!”65 Then it was October 19, opening night. The uniqueness of the production compounded Webster’s nerves. “I have never been so paralytic with fright,” she admitted. “For the first time in the United States a Negro was playing one of the greatest parts ever written …and [the occasion] was trying to prove something other than itself.”66 Webster’s vulnerability must not be underestimated. As one of the producers, she was responsible for putting a controversial production before the public; as the director, she was responsible for its artistic quality; in the part of Emilia, she was responsible for performing one of the principal roles. She confessed to experiencing twin anxieties as the curtain went up, “director’s nerves” and “actor’s nerves,” which include the two minutes of pure agony Page 145 → just before walking on stage. Standing in the wings of the Shubert Theatre, she did not listen to the opening scenes. “I tried to blot out everything but Emilia. Jauntily, I landed with Uta [Hagen] at Cyprus. I hadn’t been on the stage two minutes before I knew for certain that it was going to be all right.”67 During Emilia’s death scene she lay, her back to the audience, with tears running down her face. “Someone has rightly said that it isn’t losing the race which makes you cry, it’s winning it,” she concluded.68 When the curtain came down, the audience erupted into cries of bravo and applauded for twenty-two minutes. Asked to say a few words at the curtain call, Webster said that she and Paul Robeson had dreamed for many months of such a night. She expressed pride in the cast and singled out Robeson for exceptional praise.69 Burton Rascoe got to the heart of Webster’s accomplishments when he wrote the next day, “Never in my life have I seen an audience sit so still, so tense, so under the spell of what was taking place on the stage as did the audience at the Shubert last night. And few times in my life have I witnessed so spontaneous a release of feelings in applause as that which occurred when the tragedy was ended.”70 Webster described the extraordinary scene to her parents. I still find myself crying when I think back on last night! I am also still dazed and feel as if my head had no top to it—I have never been so agonized with terror as I was yesterday and the nervous reaction to so much intensive work, so many hopes and so long a struggle, has flattened me for the moment. We’ve had some pretty exciting openings before—the first “Richard” and the full-length “Hamlet,” but nothing, it seems to me, like last night. They yelled at us through a long succession of calls and fairly screamed at Paul and finally I had to make a speech to finish it up…. and then they cheered the roof off again. The notices are better than we are—it was just one of those nights. Magic happened—not so much to the performance which, as far as I could judge, was very good but not more so than it had been before [in tryouts], but to the audience who just got drunk.71

Robert Edmond Jones added his own description of that electrifying opening, saying, “If a cat had walked across the footlights it would have been electrocuted.”72 The next day Webster posted a note of congratulations on the call board backstage: “We have set ourselves a terrific standard …but …there’s nothing about it we cannot retain and surpass.”73 Among the opening-night critics, praise for the production was Page 146 → unqualified. Webster was hailed for satisfying the needs of the modern stage with blazing, melodramatic theatricality. Lewis Nichols called the staging “excellently done both in the production and in the acting …one of Margaret Webster’s best.” All of the first-string critics agreed that Robeson’s performance was “memorable,” “towering,” “unbelievably magnificent,” and “consummate genius.” There were reservations about his “deep organ tones” becoming “a trifle monotonous,” his “anguish” coming out as strained declaration or as song. The trade papers, Variety and Billboard, had comparable reactions, both lauding Robeson (“a great Othello,” “a tremendous performance”), and both expressing reservations about his occasional tendency “to concentrate more on vocal tones than on acting” and “to expostulate rather ponderously in a monotone.”74 The weekly critics—Louis Kronenberger and Stark Young—weighed in with less glowing accounts. Robeson confused “solemnity with grandeur” and lacked “tragic style.” George Jean Nathan in a later column reached a high in acerbity when he declared: “One of the very few virtues of Margaret Webster’s production of Othello is that it contains no ballet.”75 Nathan was in a lonely minority. In contrast to the major New York critics, the accounts in the black press unfailingly stressed the racial issue. Writing for Harlem’s People’s Voice, Fredi Washington lauded Paul Robeson for having taken “onto the stage his ideals, beliefs, and hopes,” and for having created “a great social document.”76 In addition to praise for her staging, Webster was extolled as a memorable Emilia. Not since her performance as Masha in The Seagull had she received such attention as an actress. Friends claimed never to have seen Emilia played with better humor and force.77 Stark Young, though, did not agree. He damned her performance with faint praise: “Miss Webster …plays as usual very competently and with real intelligence,” but “Emilia should be more bawdy …and in the death scene she should be more noisy and frantic.”78 Almost lost in the adulation was the courage of Webster’s initial decision to produce the play. Despite dire warnings from Maurice Evans and other close friends, she chose to fly in the face of stage tradition in the United States, to cast an African American actor as Othello, and to engage and direct an interracial cast for Broadway. No matter how expert her performance as Emilia, her true accomplishment was larger and more lasting for the future of the American theater. Amid all the familiar backstage sounds of actors and friends congratulating one another on opening night, Webster detected a jarring note amid the Page 147 → general excitement. There was an unusual silence from Paul Robeson himself. In her first quiet moment, Webster reflected upon the oddity that he had failed to congratulate her or to thank her for her work. She explained Robeson’s unusual behavior to May Whitty in this way: “he’s a funny, funny fellow! Has never said one word to me, of good wishes, congratulations, or thanks—and never will! It frightens me when I look back on the razor-edge between triumph and disaster along which I have propelled my Trilby!”79 May Whitty herself was the source of Webster’s second note of discord. Within weeks of the opening, she arrived from the West Coast to see the production. After the performance, she went backstage to congratulate the actors. The principals were standing together, and, first, she congratulated Paul Robeson on his performance; then praised José Ferrer as the greatest Iago she had ever seen; and told Uta Hagen that not since Ellen Terry had she seen a better Desdemona. She paused there. Whereupon Uta Hagen gestured to Webster standing nearby in her Emilia costume and said, “Don’t you think your daughter great also?” Her answer proved far unkinder than Robeson’s silence. “Perhaps one day she will learn,” May said. Webster turned purple with humiliation.80 What Hagen described as May Whitty’s “bestial cruelty” brought Webster’s lifelong efforts to please her parents,

especially her mother, into sharp focus. Through the years, Webster had done everything she could to garner her parents’ attention and approval. Backstage at the Shubert Theatre, her mother cruelly dismissed a moment of triumph. Not only did May Whitty humiliate her daughter, she unwittingly set the stage for conflicts among the three principals and their director during the planning for the national tour. Little in the theater ever ends with opening night. Othello was no exception. During that first week after the opening, Webster took notes on the production from the audience, with her understudy on stage. One matinee, a gentleman sitting behind her made fatuous comments to his companion about the woman with a notebook and pencil sitting in front of him. He guessed that she was probably a “drama student” or some “little teacher” from Hunter College. Whereupon Webster took a blank sheet of paper and scrawled across it, “Yours sincerely, Margaret Webster,” and passed it back. She never looked around, but “there was a silence that could be felt.”81 Given the tremendous success of Othello, the Theatre Guild planned a thirty-six week national tour from coast to coast. It had to be carefully arranged to avoid discrimination against the cast or against the audiences. As preparations were being made, tensions developed between the Theatre Guild and Webster on the one hand, and Robeson and the Ferrers on the Page 148 → other. Again, the issue was the Ferrers’ billing in advertising and playbills. “Paul is insisting on starring the Ferrers in smaller type than his own name, but in a star position above the title,” Webster’s own billing as a member of the company likewise became an issue. She wrote to May Whitty in February and said that she was “fairly enraged at being asked, as an actress,” to receive billing unequal to the Ferrers. I’m very fed up and depressed by the revelation of his [Robeson’s] attitude towards me—he said that I had “got” plenty out of it as the producer director, and in effect took the attitude that if I didn’t want to be billed below Uta but would prefer to leave the cast, that was all right too!!82 It is difficult to know if Webster was frustrated over Robeson’s failure to understand the protocols of the commercial theater (actors in secondary roles do not receive the same billing as the star), or by his suggestion that Webster should be billed as a supporting actress to newcomers Uta Hagen and José Ferrer. More than likely, she responded to a mix of both. From management’s viewpoint, the Ferrers still did not represent “drawing power” at the box office, and, therefore, should not have their names above the play’s title. As Robeson insisted, the issues grew personal. Webster raged that “by no stretch of the imagination” could Uta Hagen be called a star.83 Nonetheless, the national tour was placed in jeopardy by the internecine quarreling. As was his habit, Robeson refused to sign a contract unless he got his way. Having experienced all of this before, Webster was resigned: I suppose we’ll have to give way as he won’t sign his contract for next season till we do, but I’m very fed up and depressed by the revelation of his attitude towards me.84 The Guild stood firm with Webster on what they considered appropriate billing for their star and cast. Two days later, in one of a series of crisis conferences held in the Guild offices, Robeson stated bluntly that he would cancel the tour unless the Ferrers’ new billing was agreed upon. Webster reported her reaction to May: I have told him very plainly and fully that I thought he was behaving like a Fascist! and that I could not and would not be dictated to like that. But he just says “Ugh” and all stays as it is! So I think it very probable I shall leave the show soon. “There is a world elsewhere,” as Coriolanus remarked! Or, I might even have my tonsils out!85 Page 149 → Three days later, Webster made up her mind to leave the cast. She was adamant: “No one can control Paul, by moral force, legal contract, or anything else, once he gets these wild and stubborn fits, and God knows what sort of shape the show’ll be in after a few weeks. Probably so bad that I’d be ashamed of having my name on top of it.”86

Webster experienced painfully conflicting emotions over the matter. She had produced, directed, and appeared in the theatrical and political event of the decade. Now she was afraid that she would lose artistic control of the production once the tour began. What was unspoken in the bitter negotiations among all the parties sitting round the conference table in the Guild’s offices was what they all knew: Paul Robeson and Uta Hagen were having an affair to which José Ferrer seemed “indifferent.”87 The Guild finally conceded to Robeson’s demands, reasoning that they had already scheduled the tour and sold subscriptions. To lessen the impact of their concessions to Robeson and the Ferrers, they redrafted Webster’s contract with the proviso that she would not be in the cast and could take her name off the show if the production “deteriorated” on the road. Nonetheless, Robeson did not let the matter rest there. He insisted that the Guild prepare two press releases. The first announced that Margaret Webster was leaving the cast and that her replacement was Edith King, the company’s Bianca. That announcement was made on February 26, and was followed by the second announcement of the national tour with the Ferrers’ new billing above the title.88 Webster left the Broadway cast two weeks later but returned in the fall to rehearse the touring production as part of her contract. Again, she encountered unforeseen difficulties fostered by Robeson (quite frequently on behalf of the Ferrers). If Robeson wanted something done, or not done, he threatened not to play the following performance. He ignored pleas from friends, advice from his lawyers, the wishes of the Theatre Guild, or the existence of a written contract. When Webster returned to rehearse the touring production, she discovered that Robeson, without consultation, had ordered new costumes for himself, designed by a friend of the Ferrers. A flurry of telephone calls followed among Robert Edmond Jones, the Guild, Webster, and the designer. The project was hastily abandoned when the new designer learned that without Jones’s consent she would be liable for suspension from the designers’ union. When Webster confronted Robeson at rehearsal, he seemed amiably baffled by the disturbance. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t think you’d mind.”89 Adding insult to this latest injury, Webster and the Guild learned that Robeson and the Ferrers had contracted with a recording company to make a recording of the show. They found out about the recording when John Page 150 → Haggott, the production stage manager, warned Webster that Edith King could not attend a rehearsal because she had some rerecording to do. Webster and the Guild’s producers decided not to contest the recording, which would not be an “original” cast recording without the original Emilia. No one wanted to imperil the tour by fighting with Robeson again. All agreed in later years that the recording was not a very good one, and they regretted its representing the production for posterity. Othello set an all-time Broadway record for a Shakespearean production with 296 performances. Following a twomonth vacation for the company, the show embarked on a thirty-six-week coast-to-coast tour. It began in September 1944 and ultimately took the company to forty-five cities in seventeen states and three Canadian provinces. The company did not play in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, because of laws discriminating against African Americans in theaters. Webster had hoped that President Roosevelt would invite the company to play a command performance at the White House, but his mind was engaged with larger issues in Europe and the Far East. The tour proved a professional as well as a political milestone. It generated exceptional box office grosses and overcame racial barriers in theaters, restaurants, and hotels. The tour ended in May 1945, followed by Webster’s restaging of the show for a three-week revival at New York’s City Center. Lewis Nichols covered the revival and wrote only superlatives for the maturing of the company’s work: “Mr. Robeson …seems to have grown bigger; his voice is deeper, and he has developed the part more fully.” The critic viewed Ferrer’s Iago as a “more sinister schemer” than he had been. Uta Hagen was a “beautiful Desdemona, if a somewhat cool one.”90 In one sense, the critics vindicated Webster’s long-ago argument with Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn that, given more rehearsal time, the three actors would mature in their roles. The Othello story ended on June 3. Paul Robeson returned to concert work but within the month was embroiled in postwar politics. Always out-spoken against racial discrimination, he embraced leftist causes worldwide. His

Communist sympathies eventually led to professional ostracism and the withdrawal of his passport by the United States government. In failing health in the 1960s, he retired from public life, and died in 1976. Actors’ Equity Association honored him with an annual award given in his name “to those committed to the struggle for justice, equality, and the principles to which he stood steadfast with devotion.” The 1943–44 Broadway season saw the premieres of Agnes De Mille’s ballet and Alfred Drake as Curly in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein Page 151 → II’s Oklahoma, Katharine Cornell and Raymond Massey in Lovers and Friends, Mary Martin in One Touch of Venus, Margaret Sullavan and Elliot Nugent in The Voice of the Turtle, and Frank Fay, Ethel Waters, and Bert Wheeler in the revue Laugh Time. To this stellar season, Peggy Webster and Paul Robeson added a landmark production of Othello that had an enormous impact on the careers of African American actors in the American commercial theater, on the beginnings of multiracial casting in companies, and on the perception of William Shakespeare as a “box office” playwright. Once Eva Le Gallienne concluded her engagement in Uncle Harry, in late 1943, she enlisted Webster in her plans to direct and star in a new translation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard on Broadway. Le Gallienne’s invitation added a new dimension to their relationship. This would be the first time the two women had worked together, and they both felt thoroughly gratified by what Webster called “a fascinating labor of love.”91 Webster wore many hats during the production of The Cherry Orchard and did a “little bit of everything.”92 She raised money, managed the production with Carly Wharton, and negotiated with the musicians’ unions, who wanted to call the show a musical because of the four-member orchestra in the third act. She worked on the light plot, prepared audiotapes of the many Chekhovian offstage sounds, and took over the stage direction as the rehearsals progressed. “I could be eyes for her [Le Gallienne], a judge of balance and result,” Webster said.93 When the production opened, critics commented on the “Webster touch.” Webster had set the tone by beginning with two servant girls running across the stage carrying a wicker hamper. The taller and clumsier of the girls (played by Madeleine L’Engle) suddenly tripped and fell flat. This bit of farcical business announced that this was not the somber, dreary classic traditionally associated with Chekhov and Russian literature.94 Webster talked with a number of people about financing and engaged John Haggott as general manager. Monica McCall, her agent, wanted Webster to raise the money and produce the show herself, but as she wrote her mother, “I hadn’t enough confidence in my own power to do that.”95 Le Gallienne was a reluctant fund-raiser, but one weekend she came into New York City to read the play to a group of potential backers. One gentleman, when told of the play’s title, solemnly replied, “I’m not interested in fruit.” Le Gallienne replied just as solemnly, “It’s not about fruit, it’s about realestate!”96 Money was hard to raise; a Chekhov play on Broadway, even if it was about real estate, did not sound like a gold mine to potential backers. Page 152 → Though “every good production proves that [Chekhov] is …gay and even farcical, tragic and ridiculous in a breath,”97 Webster found that the expectation of a gloomy writer died hard. The Cherry Orchard opened on January 24, 1944, at the National Theatre, and was a hit. It ran for ninety-six performances on Broadway and then toured from September 1944 to January 1945. The cast included Le Gallienne as Madame Ranevskaya, Joseph (“Pepi”) Schildkraut as Gaev, Leonora Roberts as Charlotta, Stefan Schnabel as Lopakhin, and the eighty-six-year-old A. G. Andrews as Firs. The Motleys designed the production. Webster was billed as one of the producers, along with Wharton, and as one of the directors, along with Le Gallienne. Lewis Nichols praised Webster and Le Gallienne for understanding that Chekhov was writing about “real” people and for playing with taste and style.98 Two days before the play opened, Webster published an “Open Letter to Anton Pavlovitch Chekhov” in the New York Times.99 Beginning “Dear Mr. Chekhov (or, rather, Dear Anton Pavlovich),” she mused: “In our country

every one of the revivals on record has been greeted with cries of astonishment because it has emerged so clearly that your plays are not gray and gloomy …but volatile, and gay and even farcical—heartbreaking, too, because human life is like that: tragic and ridiculous in a breath.” A few weeks later came an unexpected reply from Moscow signed by Olga Knipper-Chekhova, the deceased playwright’s actress-wife, who created the role of Madame Ranevskaya at the Moscow Art Theatre. Dear Margaret Webster, It was with the greatest interest that I read your imaginary letter to Anton Chekhov, and I felt I would like to send you my friendliest greetings. It gave me sincere pleasure to see you address Chekhov as a contemporary, and deepened my conviction that the creative work of the Russian writer of genius is deathless, not only for his fellow-countrymen but also for you who speak and think in another language. Evidently Chekhov’s stories and plays can be understood and can move the American reader and theatre-goer…. It was very truly remarked by you that the principal content of the plays is the author’s belief in man and in the better future which will dawn for mankind no matter what sufferings and deprivations some generations have to endure on their way to happiness for all…. I send my sincere wishes for your success in your production of Anton Chekhov’s plays and will be delighted to be present at them when the fighting alliance of [our] great countries is crowned with victory over Hitlerite barbarity and when cooperation and friendly relations betweenPage 153 → our peoples are still further strengthened and flourish in the soil of culture and creative work. Let us believe, as Chekhov believed, that the brighter day of triumph for democratic mankind is not far off. A hearty hand-shake. Olga Knipper-Chekhova100 In April, Le Gallienne had surgery for a benign tumor, and Webster took over the part of Ranevskaya for several weeks. She found Chekhov’s heroine “one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do.”101 Le Gallienne’s subtle and stylish approach to the role was stamped onto the production. “To put your personal truth into somebody else’s pattern is a testing thing,”102 Webster said of the experience. When Le Gallienne returned to the show, Webster undertook her first lecture tour around the country and published one of the lectures as Shakespeare and the Modern Theatre. She began modestly by saying to the Vassar College audience that she made no pretense to Shakespearean scholarship, or to the right to lay down the law in the theatrical world. She then quoted John Mason Brown’s definition of the good director as “a critic in action, a critic turned creator, a reviewer whose responses and perceptions are stated before, not after, a production is made; in short, a midwife with opinions.” Before she reprised her directing career for the audience, Webster refined her thoughts on the director’s need to get down to practicalities and to resolve in her own mind what the “pattern of interpretation” was to be. In putting ideals into “concrete practical forms in the theatre,” she said, “a director becomes a diplomatist, a financier, a pedagogue, a top sergeant, a wet nurse, and a martyr, the kind of martyr who used to be torn into pieces by wild horses galloping in all directions at once.”103 Webster rounded out her presentation by reviewing the practical problems that she encountered and resolved as the director of Richard II, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and Othello. She concluded that her concern was primarily “with the people in the play, the people who will act the play, and the people who will watch it, its raison d’être, its audience.” Webster’s characteristic approach as an interpretive servant of the playwright’s text was substantially reinforced in this published lecture. Within the month, she also received the second of seven honorary degrees bestowed upon her in her lifetime. She was awarded an honorary doctor of letters by Russell Sage College in Troy, New York. In early August, Billy Rose, the flamboyant entrepreneur of nightclubs, music halls, Broadway shows, and the

aquacades at the New York World’s Fair, invited Webster to talk with him about a production of Much Ado Page 154 → about Nothing to feature actress Jane Cowl. Webster considered Rose’s invitation tantamount to a command from the “Empress of China.” Arriving at his palatial home on Beekman Place, she puzzled over the notion that Shakespeare’s Beatrice was an ideal part for Jane Cowl’s return to Broadway. The actress was now over fifty, having made her New York stage debut in 1903. Webster respected her as a fine actress and as a beautiful, despotic star of the era of stars. However, she was too old to play Beatrice.104 To handle the incongruity gracefully, Webster suggested Cowl be featured in Henry VIII, in a “splendiferous production needing lots of dough.”105 This would be a showcase for a lavish impresario with a fine part for a mature actress. However, this was not what Jane Cowl had in mind for her return to Broadway, and she withdrew. Nonetheless, Rose persevered through the hot month of August, and Webster enlisted Robert Edmond Jones, who made large-scale, watercolor sketches for the sets. Webster was impressed by Rose’s extraordinary originality as they talked about casting and by his refusal to be daunted by costs. For Henry VIII he suggested Charles Laughton, who turned them down, and for Cardinal Wolsey, Basil Rathbone, who toyed briefly with the idea. Webster suggested perhaps twenty Katherines of Aragon, all rejected by the impresario. Webster emphasized the need for a really fine actress who could convey Anne’s moment of triumph as the crown was placed on her head. Rose was nonplussed by this need, since Anne had virtually no lines. The project ground to a halt when Rose decided that they could not get an actor good enough to play Henry VIII. When Webster asked, “For instance?” he answered, “Monty Woolley,” and Webster lost heart.106 What might easily have been another spectacular production of her “Shakespeare decade” never happened, and Webster retreated to Martha’s Vineyard. Within two years, she would direct a production of Henry VIII in another context, without Billy Rose’s resources. In their shared life together, Webster and Le Gallienne continually developed schemes for a repertory theater. With The Cherry Orchard as a test case for such a theater, and with plans underway for a Broadway production of The Tempest, the stage was now set for the most difficult undertaking in the theatrical lives of Margaret Webster, Eva Le Gallienne, and a third woman, Cheryl Crawford. It was called the American Repertory Theatre.

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CHAPTER 8 THE AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATRE What did I have to get me here? A ton of nerve and the same philosophy a gambler has. —CHERYL CRAWFORD Nineteen forty-five began on a high note for Margaret Webster. Despite the frissons among the players, Othello was a landmark production in American theatrical and racial history. Webster had previously been recognized with two honorary degrees, the first, from Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, and the second from Russell Sage College in Troy, New York. That year, Smith College in North Hampton, Massachusetts, awarded her an honorary doctor of humanities degree. She also received an award from the Interracial Councils of New Jersey for her contribution to interracial understanding. The Women’s National Press Club in Washington, D.C., gave her its annual achievement award for 1945, and, a year later, the Women’s National Press Club of America named Margaret Webster one of “Ten Outstanding Women of the Year.” A candid profile of Webster in the New Yorker the previous year had caused some consternation among her friends. She was described as oddly contradictory in appearance, resembling “a high-school teacher who has dipped herself giddily into a pot of mascara…. although her clothes are dowdy, her shoes are sensible, and her haircut is mannish, her voice—full, resonant, and glossy—is as theatrical as her eyelashes.” This is one of several portraits of Webster as the knowledgeable, no-nonsense, opinionated, cigarette-smoking doyenne of modern Shakespearean production: “Pacing Page 156 → moodily back and forth, her hair tangled, her cheeks smudged, a cigarette slanting from her lips, she will brood over the meaning of a line.” Her outbursts, reported by a deeply impressed stagehand, take on seismic proportions. “She drips that cigarette and smoke comes out of one eye just like she was a volcano,” he reports. Despite the cavils, Webster emerged as the preeminent interpreter of Shakespeare: “Whatever her methods, the critical consensus has been that no other director in America has so successfully brought Shakespeare’s plays to life for present-day theatergoers.”1 A great deal has been written about the American Repertory Theatre by historians, by biographers, and by the principal women themselves. Despite financial failure, their work in a for-profit theater in the late 1940s prepared the way for the nonprofit regional theater movement in the United States. A decade later, women emerged as producers and artistic directors at many of the new theaters. The successes and failures of Margaret Webster, Eva Le Gallienne, and Cheryl Crawford served as guideposts for those who followed. The ART had its inception in Le Gallienne’s successful Civic Repertory Theatre, a nonprofit theater in lower Manhattan in the late 1920s, and in Webster’s experiences with the Old Vic about the same time. Both the Civic Repertory Theatre and the Old Vic were not-for-profit theaters with serious repertoires, performing in true repertory, with a resident company of actors, directors, and designers. Having emerged from the English system, Webster believed in the value of playing the classics in this way. Perhaps the most idealistic of the three women, she argued that both actors and audiences benefited. The appearance of the Old Vic company, directed by John Burrell and Michel Saint Denis with Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, and Margaret Leighton as leading actors, on Broadway in 1945 also impassioned Crawford, by then a commercial producer. “Their visit had convinced me that only a repertory organization could take the theatre and actors out of mere ‘show biz,’ ” she said, “and put them into the cultural haven they deserved. With plays rotating, the actors could stay fresh and develop their talents in a variety of roles.” To watch Olivier play Hotspur and Justice Shallow (in Henry IV), Dr. Astrov (in Uncle Vanya), and a double bill as Oedipus and Mr. Puff (in Oedipus and The Critic) was “a revelation of the actor’s art to me.”2 Audiences and critics received the company with such enthusiasm that Crawford fervently desired a similar American company. If England could have an Old Vic, why not the United States?

During late-night discussions, Webster and Le Gallienne drew up complex plans for the American Repertory Theatre as a touring circuit to three Page 157 → theaters located in the Southeast, Midwest, and on the West Coast. After playing several weeks in the home city, the three companies would ideally rotate into one of the other theaters. The objective was to give the company year-round employment and audiences outside of New York City year round entertainment. Reponses from the targeted cities to their proposal were lukewarm at best. In Chicago, they received a promise of five hundred dollars. They quickly withdrew their proposals and determined to rethink the project. Webster and Crawford talked almost daily about the current Broadway theater. They shared offices in the same building on West Forty-fifth Street and knew one another from their earlier collaboration on Family Portrait. Crawford was now a successful producer who had been an executive assistant to Theresa Helburn at the Theatre Guild in the late 1920s and then cofounder with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg of the Group Theatre in 1931. She vacillated between idealistic projects and commercial hits or flops. A wry, poker-faced midwesterner with short-cropped brown hair, Crawford had hired Webster to direct Family Portrait. Over the summer, Webster had discussed her interest in directing The Tempest as her next Broadway show. Crawford, who had a huge success with the musical One Touch of Venus, was looking for another project. She said that she was “fascinated by difficulty, teased by challenge, hungry for something estimable.” “I kept thinking of Shakespeare,” she said. “I had never seen a production of King Lear or The Tempest. “3 She and Webster agreed to combine forces to bring The Tempest to Broadway. Webster insisted that the delicate fabric of The Tempest had to be handled with the “lightest and most sensitive touch …there is in it as much music as dream.” The grand themes of transcendent and timeless importance centered upon the use and abuse of power, the search for freedom that involved personal responsibility, and the longing for peace and reconciliation. The ordinary characters can never be underestimated, for they reflect how commonplace people feel about the mysterious island. They put into perspective the progress toward the “freeing of the spirit” in the loveliest of Shakespeare’s plays.4 Despite Shakespeare’s symbolism and allegory, Webster was always mindful that he was a showman and an experienced man of the theater. The difficulties of re-creating Shakespeare’s enchanted island with a ship at sea, a wild storm, Caliban’s cave, and Prospero’s cell were solved with a scheme devised by Le Gallienne. She built a scale model of a set placed on a large turntable with precipices and caves where Ariel and Caliban could make magical appearances. As the turntable revolved, the audience could Page 158 → see different aspects of the magic island. Presented with this solution, Crawford said, “I was sold. I signed on as producer.”5 Since Le Gallienne was not a member of the United Scenic Artists union, she could not work on Broadway in a design capacity. Crawford persuaded the Motleys, the design team of Elizabeth Montgomery and Margaret Harris, to execute Le Gallienne’s model and design the costumes based on the drawings of Viennese court designer Ludovico Burnacini—another Le Gallienne suggestion.6 The casting of the principal roles presented its own challenges. Arnold Moss was chosen to play Prospero, the magician, and Frances Heflin, his daughter Miranda. Ariel was filled by ballet dancer-singer Vera Zorina, whose “pale ethereal beauty” gave an effective otherworldliness to Shakespeare’s strange sprite. Canada Lee, the famous African American actor who gave up a boxing career following an eye injury, played Caliban. He had appeared as Banquo in the Orson Welles’s Macbeth and as the lead in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Webster was determined not to neglect the Robeson precedent, and Canada Lee became the second African American actor to play in a classic play on Broadway. The clowns Trinculo and Stephano were played by a team of famous Czech comedians, George Voskovec and Jan Werich, alias “V and W,” who wrote and performed political revues in Prague and escaped the Holocaust to spend several years as performers in Cleveland. Their inspired inventions resulted in one of the most memorable clown scenes in all of modern stage business in a Shakespearean play. They created the four-legged monster with its “forward and backward voice” with a large piece of green cloth with a hook at one end to go around Caliban’s neck like a large cape and with two large pockets at the other end for Voskovec to crouch under with his hands flat

in the pockets on either corner of the cloth. When fully extended, the long green monster had Caliban’s head at one end and a flat tail that could flap and shout at the other. Webster rearranged the play’s ending by eliminating the masque and transposing Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech to the play’s closing moments. As Moss spoke the famous lines, the lights slowly dimmed and the actors vanished in the darkness, leaving Prospero in his royal red robe outlined against a darkening sky, saying, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life / is rounded with a sleep.” Then, he, too, vanishes. The audience was spellbound; Webster’s magic had worked. Tryouts at Boston’s Colonial Theatre were not without incident. Webster wanted Ariel to make a theatrical exit by flying off stage when Prospero gives him his freedom. As it so happened, the Schutz family of “flying Page 159 → experts” was not available. The Schutzes had flown Maude Adams in the original Peter Pan and, again, at the Civic Repertory Theatre when Le Gallienne inaugurated the famous “audience fly.” When she played Peter Pan there in 1928, she flew over the heads of the audience in the orchestra seats, up to the first balcony, and back to the stage. Audiences of all ages were speechless with delight. There were few people in the country who knew how to fly actors. Webster asked Le Gallienne to help fly Ariel. She put on Vera Zorina’s leotards and the flying harness and worked with the stagehands, who struggled unsuccessfully with ropes, pulleys, and a large sandbag. After heated altercations, precarious ascents, and hard landings, all agreed that Ariel must be content with a “bounding” exit.7 The Tempest opened at the Alvin Theatre on January 25, 1945, billed as Cheryl Crawford presents “The Margaret Webster Production,” based on a production idea by Eva Le Gallienne, with scenery and costumes by Motley and music by David Diamond. It ran for a record-breaking one hundred performances, toured in the fall, and returned to reopen at City Center in November for another twenty-five performances. Crawford declared the experience “a gratifying success.”8 Le Gallienne said that this Tempest “was the loveliest thing I have ever seen in the theatre…. As the huge turntable moved and the different facets of the magical island of Shakespeare’s dream came successively into view, with no drop of the curtain to break the sustained mood of the fairy tale, I was filled with pleasure at seeing my crude little model transformed into this living reality.”9 Stark Young praised the altered ending as “most effective …more lyric and moody, and thus more modern.”10 The acerbic George Jean Nathan objected to the revolving stage as a “mechanical contraption,” resembling a merry-go-round, and chided the director for imposing noisy stage devices on the “sweet airs” of the poetry.11 Lewis Nichols praised Webster for meeting the “challenge in every way.” He approved of the boisterous comic scenes, and, once again, praised Webster for taking Shakespeare out of the library and putting him on stage. “Miss Webster,” he said, “is not one to deny the theatre its flash of fire when Prospero chooses to exert his magic, and she knows the place for brief and casual dances. Whether The Tempest shows Shakespeare as a tired man or shows him at the height of his genius probably does not matter. As currently produced it is a good modern play.” John Mason Brown echoed these sentiments: “In both Shakespeare’s and Prospero’s fashion Miss Webster is a magician. No director of our time has done as much in this country to open Page 160 → the doors of the library for Shakespeare and release him on the stage.” He concluded by saying, “Miss Webster has come near to doing the undoable.”12 Nonetheless, there were problems with the unions that foreshadowed things to come for the American Repertory Theatre. The musician’s union declared The Tempest a “play with music.” David Diamond’s haunting score required twelve musicians but the union mandated sixteen men at union scale as the minimum. At the end of negotiations, Cheryl Crawford was told: “If you don’t abide by the ruling, we close the show.”13 Projected expenses for the music doubled, but the show was a success at the box office and expenses were easily met. During preparations for The Tempest, Webster and Cheryl Crawford had a comfortable and mutually respectful relationship as director and producer. Webster admired Crawford’s taste and ability to mount a show with minimal

fuss. Crawford respected Webster’s record with Shakespeare’s plays and acknowledged that she “had been directing every successful production of the Bard” in past Broadway seasons.14 Although Le Gallienne knew Crawford only by her professional reputation as the successful producer of Family Portrait, Porgy and Bess, and One Touch of Venus, she was impressed with her handling of The Tempest. “Not only did she prove herself a shrewd businesswoman, but her calm and her consistent good humor, her firmness in the face of trials that would have made most managers lose faith and abandon the struggle, had been invaluable in preserving the high morale of the company and guiding the venture to its ultimate success.”15 Webster had been encouraging the addition of Crawford as a co-producer in their planning for the new repertory theater, and Le Gallienne now agreed. In addition to her business acumen and connections, Crawford’s theatrical background and alternative lifestyle avoided issues of personal revelations and ingrained prejudices against women spearheading the creation of a theatrical institution. Crawford’s lesbian friendships were commonly known among her professional associates in the Group Theatre and in the commercial theater as well. She collaborated with gay and lesbian artists throughout her professional career and sustained a relationship with Ruth Norman, a cookbook author and restaurant owner. At the outset of the ART, Crawford welcomed the opportunity to work with Webster and Le Gallienne—she called them “two such towers”—who shared her lifestyle and artistic values.16 As a successful New York producer, Crawford brought the business acumen to the table that Webster and Le Gallienne Page 161 → lacked. Her experience was of the New York commercial theater, and she steered the ART project toward Broadway and away from a nonprofit status. This was not altogether wrongheaded, for Webster had directed seven profitable Shakespeare plays on Broadway, and the most recent had run for one hundred performances. Nonetheless, Crawford’s involvement as the third member of the undertaking was not entirely fortuitous. The three women now entered into long conferences to plan their new repertory theater. From Crawford’s viewpoint, there were two main points to settle: the cost of mounting six productions and the recruitment of “name actors” who would attract audiences. Considerable guesswork went into calculating the operating budget, but Crawford firmly believed that the unions would cooperate with the promise of a full season’s work. In September 1945, the three producers announced the American Repertory Theatre, to begin in the fall of the 1946–47 season. A twelve-page brochure accompanied the announcement, describing goals and plans for a permanent company employed for six plays over a forty-week season. The plan was high-minded and unrealistic. A company of twenty-five to thirty professional actors headed by at least four stars Six plays performed in rotating repertory in New York City between September 1946 and June 1947 Plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, other classics, and a new play The same company to tour in 1947–48 while preparing new productions Solicitation of $300,000 to ensure the financial stability of the first season in New York City and on tour The producers subordinating their usual earnings for a flat salary plus a small percentage of the net above costs17 As described in the brochure, the ART was a permanent repertory theater organized to give the American public the “finest dramatic creations” in a variety of productions. The theater would be a self-supporting business enterprise, returning to its backers interest on their investment. The women set up a corporation capitalized at three hundred thousand dollars; stock in the corporation was offered at five hundred dollars a share. Although the

founders took the advice of legal advisors, elder statesmen, and financial experts, this error in judgment can be laid squarely at Cheryl Crawford’s feet. She had the business know-how in the commercial theater but failed to exercise it in this instance. She envisioned the popularity and grosses of The Page 162 → Tempest, apparently unaware of the plays that Le Gallienne and Webster intended to produce. Moreover, she miscalculated the willingness of the trade unions to make concessions. Whereas the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) was chartered in 1935 as a tax-exempt, nonprofit producing organization, the ART producers appeared confused about the “for-profit” status of their enterprise. The brochure described ART as “a cultural and educational enterprise as well as a commercial one.” We need a theatre that would be for the drama what a Library is for Literature or a Symphony orchestra for music. This will be a theatre conducted by those who love the theatre for its own sake; who believe in it as an instrument for giving, not merely a machinery for getting. We have proved that the public will support at the Box Office fine plays, if they are finely done. …since this is a cultural and educational enterprise as well as a commercial one. We plan to set up a profit-making corporation which best insures flexibility of undertaking and the possibility of future expansion.18 The producers formed a seventeen-member advisory board, including the prestigious names of Leonard Bernstein, Katharine Cornell, George Cukor, Samuel Goldwyn, Helen Hayes, Robert Edmond Jones, Jo Mielziner, Tyrone Power, and Efrem Zimbalist. The wealth and the fund-raising acumen of this group were considerable, but they seem to have been primarily window dressing. Mysteriously, the board was never asked for assistance in raising money. That fall, the three women worked tirelessly to raise funds, but only small increments came out of countless luncheons, club meetings, radio appeals, and letters of solicitation. Early on, they began to despair. Cheryl wrote to Webster: “I find I’m tired, not physically, but my spiritual bin is empty from money-raising, money-cutting, glad-handing, and the grinding repetition of our aims.”19 Then, in November, over lunch at Voisin’s, Joseph Verner Reed offered Webster one hundred thousand dollars. They also received approximately fifty-five thousand dollars from several board members and other publicspirited individuals, including William Paley, Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn, Mrs. Efrem Zimbalist, Katharine Cornell, Helen Hayes, Peggy Wood, Carl Van Doren, Fredric March, Peggy Wood, Robert Edmond Jones, Jo Mielziner, Page 163 → and the Wertheim Fund. They sold three hundred thousand dollars in stock to more than 142 people and five thousand subscriptions at six dollars each. ART was now in business.20 The three producers settled upon the International Theatre (formerly the Park Theatre), with eleven hundred seats as the theater’s home. They expressed two overriding reasons for this choice. The theater had a stage large enough for the efficient changeover of sets required by a repertory schedule. In addition, it was located on Columbus Circle at Broadway and Fifty-ninth Street, where three subway lines converged and where parking lots for cars and buses were nearby. Unfortunately, audiences were not in the habit of coming to Columbus Circle, which was “regrettably far from Broadway, where all theatrical activity centered.”21 Location, then, was one of the contributing causes of the failure of the ART. Although they had not yet picked plays, the producers auditioned hundreds of actors. (They chose well, but one of their favorites got away. After much wooing in Webster’s apartment on Twelfth Street, Marlon Brando turned them down.) Webster insisted that they needed a star like Laurence Olivier, who only a short time ago thrust the

Old Vic into prominence. At different times, they invited thirty-seven “stars” to join the company, but none did. The three women had not yet confronted the fact that American actors with training, skill, and experience in the playing of repertory were rare. Those with experience (Maurice Evans, Helen Hayes, Arnold Moss, Basil Rathbone, and José Ferrer) were already engaged on Broadway. Victor Jory, called “a tower of loyalty, faith, and intrigue,” made a commitment to join them at the outset. Le Gallienne said that he was “immensely enthusiastic …and wholeheartedly agreed to join our company.”22 Although a fine actor, Jory did not have the star power of a Laurence Olivier. Finally, the three producers selected Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, June Duprez, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., William Windom, and later Alfred Ryder, Bambi Linn, and Julie Harris, who played the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. They rounded out the company with such stalwarts as Ernest Truex, Richard Waring, Eugene Stuckmann, John Straub, Philip Bourneuf, and Marion Gunnar Evensen. The ART ended up as a “team” company, starring middle-aged actors. There was little possibility of producing Romeo and Juliet or As You Like It. With high-minded determination, the founders proposed that “it was not their business to do the best-known plays,” but lesser works of William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen. This high-mindedness resulted in a season of compromise. Le Gallienne compromised with Cheryl Crawford on ticket prices (scaled to Broadway prices); Webster compromised with her co-producers on Henry VIII as the Page 164 → play by Shakespeare. Le Gallienne wanted The Merchant of Venice (with Lee J. Cobb as Shylock), but Crawford considered the play anti-Semitic and therefore controversial.23 Crawford, meanwhile, compromised on the season’s new play, two of which she brought to her co-producers. Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, not yet seen in the United States, was available. There was also a first play (called The Sign of the Archer) by an unknown playwright named Arthur Miller. Webster and Le Gallienne turned down both. The Sign of the Archer was subsequently renamed All My Sons, produced on Broadway in January 1947, and directed by Elia Kazan. It ran for 328 performances. What impelled these three experienced women to reject rich new material? According to Webster, they turned down the two new scripts because “we didn’t think we could cast them well enough.”24 The truth of the matter seemed to lie elsewhere. In fact, the plays chosen featured Le Gallienne in leading roles and Webster in secondary roles. Perhaps Le Gallienne did not see herself as the middle-class wife of a small wartime industrialist in Miller’s play, or as the proletarian Mother Courage selling goods in thirteenth-century Germany. Webster eventually admitted that they had completely misread the latter role. When she saw the great German actress Helene Weigel play Mother Courage with the Berliner Ensemble, she realized that Le Gallienne could have done the role magnificently. Finally, the women announced their first season: Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, James M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows, Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman to star Eva Le Gallienne, and a double bill of Sean O’Casey’s Pound on Demand and George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, to recruit the much-loved star comedian Ernest Truex. They had tried and failed to entice Katharine Hepburn to play Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal and Mary Martin to play Cleopatra in Caesar and Cleopatra. In lieu of a new play, they revived Sidney Howard’s Yellow Jack, about the events that led to the conquest of yellow fever. It was first produced on Broadway in 1934. This choice symbolized the wrongheadedness of decisions by three individuals with some fifty years of professional experience among them. Yellow Jack was undistinguished (a “reasonably interesting documentary”25 was one response) and performed without distinction. Audiences did not want to see it, and backers did not want to invest money in it. The American Repertory Theatre faced competition from a formidable Broadway season in 1946–47. Among the new plays were The Iceman Cometh with E. G. Marshall and Dudley Digges, Joan of Lorraine with Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Wiseman, Another Part of the Forest with Patricia Neal and Leo Genn, the ART-rejected All My Sons with Ed Begley and Arthur Page 165 → Kennedy, Born Yesterday with Judy Holliday and Paul Douglas, and the musical Finian’s Rainbow with Anita Alvarez and David Wayne. Long runs continued to brighten the

season: Life with Father, Oklahoma, Harvey, and Annie Get Your Gun. Revivals were in abundance as well: Cyrano de Bergerac with José Ferrer, King Lear with Donald Wolfit, and The Importance of Being Earnest with John Gielgud and Margaret Rutherford. In 1945, Webster seemed to be in a revival mood. While preparing for the ART season, Webster directed part of her team in an adaptation of Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin. The play was called Therese. This production would tide Webster, Le Gallienne, and Victor Jory over until they started drawing income from the ART. There were two other parts to this agenda. Therese had a role for May Whitty, and Webster would direct Le Gallienne for a second time. Crawford was busy in another venue, producing a new Lerner and Loewe musical with the unlikely title Brigadoon. Therese was adapted by Thomas Job, who had written the commercially successful Uncle Harry, in which Le Gallienne had played for a year and a half. The cast included Le Gallienne as Therese; Victor Jory as her lover, the painter Laurent; and May Whitty as her mother-in-law, Madame Raquin. It was old-fashioned melodrama, in which the wife murders her husband to be with her lover. The second half shows the effects of the murder on the lovers and their apprehension by the law. In Le Gallienne’s opinion, Job had fashioned a “grim melodrama out of Zola’s powerful book, but it was not really a good play.”26 Therese, produced by Victor Payne Jennings, opened at the Biltmore Theatre on October 9, 1945, and May Whitty stole the show from Le Gallienne and Victor Jory. She played the final scene seated, supposedly paralyzed, in a wheelchair, incapable of speech or movement and communicating only with her “accusing eyes.” Le Gallienne assessed May Whitty’s performance in this way: Jory and I did all the hard work, but she reaped the benefit of it; he and I often looked at each other ruefully and decided that “wheel-chair parts” were hard to compete with, especially when the wheel chair was occupied by a bundle of concentrated will.27 To a friend Le Gallienne confided that Dame May Whitty, with whom she was working for the first time, was a “dreadful actress.”28 Le Gallienne paused in her account of the Therese production to compliment Margaret Webster’s direction: “I was impressed”—as most players were who worked for Webster—”by her clean, precise theatrecraft, her honesty Page 166 → , her rare understanding of the actor’s problems, and her unfailing kindness and good nature.”29 This accolade coming from one of the most accomplished actresses of the time stands in marked contrast to the criticism levied at Webster by the principal actors in Othello two years before. Lewis Nichols called Therese “old-fashioned and leisurely.” John Mason Brown said it was “false, old-fashioned, and slow.” Webster tried to bring life to the static moments, but the aimless dialogue hampered her. Brown was less than kind to Jory and Le Gallienne. Jory had played the murderer “under the mistaken notion that a French artist, when excited, is a cross between a windmill and a calliope.” Le Gallienne, “who has a lovely if monotonous voice in its lower registers, proves vocally unable to rise to the shrieking climaxes demanded of her Therese.”30 Despite the critical reservations, Therese played for ninety-six performances. Following the opening of Therese, The Tempest returned from its national tour and played at the New York City Center for three weeks in November. At that time, there were changes in the cast. The Czech comedians George Voskovec and Jan Warich left, and Webster replaced them with Wallace Acton as Trinculo and Benny Baker as Stephano. The New York Times complained that the broad, inventive comedy was better played in Webster’s original production.31 Preliminary rehearsals for the ART’s first three plays began with the principal actors in Weston in early August. This brought together Victory Jory, Walter Hampden, Richard Waring, and June Duprez, along with Webster, Le Gallienne, and Marion Evensen. Webster was inspired by her work on Henry VIII and What Every Woman Knows and by her playing of Mrs. Borkman in the Ibsen play that Le Gallienne was directing.

The entire ART company assembled in late August for their first meeting and rehearsal at the International Theatre on Columbus Circle. Cheryl Crawford made a welcoming speech, and Webster read Henry VIII with the company. Rehearsals went smoothly except for the few days when Webster decided to give up smoking and became, according to Le Gallienne, “violently disagreeable.”32 Le Gallienne very much disliked Webster’s smoking in public and especially the photographs of her with a cigarette dangling from her mouth published in the New York Times and elsewhere. Despite the flares of temper, however, the two women were happily working together and sharing their dream. At the close of rehearsals, the three producers were satisfied with the company’s work and walked calmly into the lion’s den of tryouts and openings. Webster recruited a stellar production team. Old friends included David Ffolkes, who had survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp, composer Lehman Engel, and stage managers Thelma Chandler and Emery Battis. Page 167 → Le Gallienne and Crawford quarreled over the pricing of tickets. Le Gallienne wanted a group of “cheap” seats to ensure a “people’s theatre.” She was still thinking of the Civic Repertory Theatre on Fourteenth Street and had not confronted the realities of the New York theater in 1946. She was convinced that the essential idea of the ART must be service to the public. Crawford argued for the same scale as other Broadway theaters ($7.20 top for opening night, $4.20 top for weeknights) in an effort to cover operating costs. Webster noted later that there was no overwhelming demand for the lower priced tickets. Indeed, Le Gallienne’s old Civic Repertory Theatre audience, which had responded with fervor, barely existed in the “new New York.”33 In the meantime, costs were escalating for sets and costumes. Crawford had projected weekly operating costs at $16,000. They were averaging $18,500. By way of explanation, Webster cited a 20 percent across-the-board increase in union costs after Crawford had established the budget. Two overriding difficulties surfaced with the unions. First, there were, as yet, no established policies within the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) governing the playing of repertory, or, to be more exact, the changeover from one production to another. Second, in the planning stage, the ART’s liabilities were undefined. After weeks of exhausting negotiations, the stagehands’ union offered small concessions on the changeover from one show to the next. The union would not bend on the number of stagehands, and twenty-eight were employed throughout the season. The musicians’ union (American Federation of Musicians New York) was no more forgiving. Henry VIII, scored for eight musicians, was determined to be a “drama with music.” Androcles also fell into this category. The union required that the eight musicians (with one standby) needed for Henry VIII appear on the payroll for the other shows as well. Crawford’s account of the ultimatum from the stagehands’ and musicians’ unions parallels Webster’s: It was not until we were almost ready to open that Local No. 1 laid down their onerous conditions: they had decided that twenty-eight stagehands must be hired for Henry VIII, our largest production, and kept on permanently and idly for the much less elaborate productions. The musicians’ union insisted that whatever number of men were needed in any play which used music, they too should be kept on for the plays that required none. All this played hell with my operating estimate.34 Actors’ Equity was the exception among the unions, providing concessions for rehearsal weeks and trying to assist in other ways as well. The fact that women were engaged in these negotiations may have been a factor in the late forties. Le Gallienne reported that after one negotiating Page 168 → session with the stagehands’ union, a “gentleman” slapped her on the back and exclaimed, “If we want you to have your little theatre, you’ll have it, and if we don’t want you to, you won’t, see?”35 If Norris Houghton’s article written for Theatre Arts is any measure of the male chauvinism at work in the

American theater of the late 1940s, then the ingrained prejudice against women was a serious factor and one apparently never carefully considered by the three producers. As a producer-director-designer, Houghton had written the influential Moscow Rehearsals in 1936 celebrating the accomplishments of the Moscow Art Theatre. In January 1947, he published a misogynous piece called “It’s a Woman’s World,” calling attention to the contributions of women to the present-day American theater. Beginning with “our theatre is veritably a woman’s world” and citing the many notable women—actresses, directors, designers, and producers—working in the present-day theater, he then quickly reversed his viewpoint and called for the stage to “reacquire its masculinity.” He observed that the influx of war veterans into the drama schools throughout the country was the bright beginning of the new “masculine presence” to reclaim key posts usurped by women during the war years. Houghton unwittingly highlighted a problem that affected the future outcome of the ART when he cited by name women holding key managerial posts in the theater of the day. “Cheryl Crawford, Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster run the new American Repertory Theatre,” he wrote, “with no man to guide them.”36 It is difficult to know how to interpret Houghton’s statement. Were the women to be praised for their bravado, or condemned to failure? Following tryouts in Princeton, Philadelphia, and Boston, the ART’s first season began on November 6, 1946, with Henry VIII, followed two days later with Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows, and on November 12 with Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. A double bill of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion and Sean O’Casey’s Pound on Demand followed in mid-December. The four productions closed between February 15 and February 22, 1947. The double bill by O’Casey and Shaw played forty performances, one more than Henry VIII. The anonymous gentleman’s point in the earlier trade union discussions proved prophetic when the ART closed in the spring of 1948. However, the debacle cannot be laid entirely at the feet of the trade unions, nor, despite Houghton, at the chauvinism of the male theatrical establishment. Audiences stayed away, and critics correctly diagnosed the weaknesses of the productions and the repertoire. Disarmed by favorable quotes (“high-minded, heartening, and ambitious”; “hailed by drama lovers and drama critics alike”) provided by critics Page 169 → for the ART’s introductory brochure, the producers were lulled into thinking that the New York press would look upon the ART as a special, noncommercial case and appreciate the uniqueness of a repertory theater within a country where none existed. This was not to be. Brooks Atkinson called Henry VIII an “indifferent” play fashioned into a “notable” production. Le Gallienne, Walter Hampden, and Victor Jory led the cast, and Webster directed and played a supporting “old lady.” Always one of Webster’s admirers, Atkinson praised her creation of “some pith and considerable moment out of the languid scenes of this routine script.”37 Nonetheless, the reviewers found Henry VIII an “inauspicious start” for a first production of a new theater. What Every Woman Knows, directed by Webster with Le Gallienne as the comtesse, was also tepidly received as “pleasant” entertainment, ably acted by a “sociable” company. The idea that a repertory company was presenting a variety of classics drew little attention. John Gabriel Borkman, translated and directed by Le Gallienne, was the artistic success of the first half of the season, but there was no audience for this vengeful dance of death. Atkinson called the performance a “masterpiece.” Le Gallienne played Ella Rentheim and Webster the frigid Mrs. Borkman. Atkinson found Webster “superb” and regretted that her success as a director had cost the theater a “splendid actress.”38 Victor Jory’s performance as the fanatical Borkman drew mixed reviews. Many critics were unenthusiastic. George Jean Nathan called the production “a Scandinavian paraphrase of something like ‘Madame X.’ ” Mary McCarthy wrote that the work might seem more substantial if “Miss Webster and Miss Le Gallienne …dropped the airs of Cassandra, the antiphonal responses, the glare of prophecy, and asked themselves, for a single instant, what a Norwegian housewife was like.”39 Webster wrote to Louis Kronenberger following his tepid review of John Gabriel Borkman, arguing that he

should consider the future of the theater in the body of the ART’s work. “If we fail, as we easily may,” she wrote, “I would like it to be a failure which may lead others to do the same thing only better, and not a failure which will stifle any such enterprise for the next 10 to 20 years.”40 The fourth play—Androcles and the Lion, directed by Margaret Webster with music by Marc Blitzstein and masks by the famous Italian commedia mask-maker Remo Bufano—was a success. Critics called Androcles “incomparable” and “admirably performed.” They withheld praise for the second half of the double bill, the revival of Sean O’Casey’s Pound on Demand, directed by Victor Jory with Cavada Humphrey, Philip Bourneuf, Ernest Truex, Eugene Stuckmann, and Webster in the cast. Page 170 → Brooks Atkinson, who had returned to the New York Times from his overseas assignment with Pulitzer Prize in hand for his reports on the Soviet Union, was so taken with Androcles that he followed his review the next week with a lengthy discussion of Shaw’s iconoclasm in 1912 and a reminder that Androcles was “the wittiest play in town.” From every point of view it is the happiest choice the American Repertory has made. It is not only intelligent and amusing, which is a rare combination in the theatre; and under Margaret Webster’s bright-minded direction the repertory players are acting it well.41 By any measure of financial stability, Androcles and the Lion came too late. The first three productions of the season lost more than three hundred thousand dollars, a huge sum in 1947. Donations by unions slightly reduced this debt. Actors’ Equity made a gift of five thousand dollars to ANTA, which, in turn, under its tax-exempt charter, made a gift in the same amount to the ART. This became a point of controversy among some Equity members as a violation of the by-laws. Le Gallienne received mail threatening her with investigation by the FBI if she did not return the money.42 The dissenters voted a resolution to censure the Equity Council for its actions, but they were defeated in the final vote. The United Scenic Artists union contributed three thousand dollars. Finally, producer Rita Hassan stepped forward with ninety thousand dollars to produce Alice in Wonderland. The press noticed that the American Repertory Theatre was in dire financial straits. In February, Brooks Atkinson wrote an article citing three reasons for its difficulties. First, the ART was a commercial company, and unions had no policies in place for working repertory. In effect, the ART had to maintain crews and musicians required for its largest production (Henry VIII) throughout its season. Next, middle-aged actors dominated the acting company. Finally, the plays chosen were insufficiently popular. He wrote, “Unless a repertory company is going to be merely a superior stock company it needs actors who can endow it with youthful and exultant spirit that promises real achievement in the future. A.R.T. is not stimulating in its own right as a company. Nor has the choice of plays been sufficiently popular for an institution dependent upon public support. The public did not want to see John Gabriel Borkman.” He concluded, “Of all the arts, the theatre is the most in need of the common touch.”43 For fifteen months Webster had had no life apart from the American Repertory Theatre. She was exhausted, perplexed, and disappointed that their idealism and energetic work had been so roundly scrutinized and Page 171 → rejected. Wounded to the quick by Brooks Atkinson’s reference to “middle-aged actors,” Webster wrote a fivepage letter to her friend taking issue with his observations.44 Atkinson responded with a handwritten note, saying, “I never thought of you as middle-aged.” He concluded, “My general impression of the Repertory Company is that it is dull. It is worthy, it is high-minded, it is respectable, it is cultured, but in my opinion, it is not really stimulating and exciting, and apparently, that is also the opinion of the public.”45 Despite astute advice from other professionals, Webster and Le Gallienne made only one change to shore up the failing ART. They abandoned the repertory schedule, and, on February 27, 1947, opened the second half of the season with the revival of Yellow Jack, directed by Martin Ritt. He was meant to provide “a change from Le Gallienne and Webster.”46 Those actors—Hampden, Truex, and Duprez—not playing in Yellow Jack terminated

their contracts to ease the financial situation. Yellow Jack closed on March 15 after twenty performances. Crawford summed up the situation: “For all our efforts and ideals, we were without audiences and without money. The situation was desperate.”47 Nightmares about money afflicted Crawford, whose energies had also been consumed by the ART. “In my sleep I clutched for greenbacks which turned before my eyes into endless bills for stagehands, musicians, costumes and scenery, through which I tried to push, flailing my arms for escape,” she wrote in her autobiography. “There would never be enough money…. And in the end there wasn’t.”48 As audiences came in numbers insufficient to meet costs, Crawford’s nightmares continued. She sought a distraction in the American National Theatre and Academy’s plans for creating another experimental theater. “For once,” she said, “the financial responsibility was not mine, and that freedom made work seem like play.”49 On February 9, 1947, during rehearsals for Yellow Jack, ANTA presented five new plays for five performances at the Princess Theatre. This was an early form of the present-day showcase to help new authors and actors gain experience and visibility. ANTA’s effort won the Sidney Howard award as the season’s most important development in the theater. Meanwhile, at Columbus Circle no one wanted to see the revival of Howard’s play Yellow Jack. Shortly before the opening of Yellow Jack, Ben Webster was taken ill in Los Angeles and died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on February 25, 1947, at age seventy-three. Learning of Ben’s illness and anticipated surgery, Webster asked her cousin Jean Webster Brough to travel from London to Los Angeles to be with her parents. Webster would not leave the theater in crisis and did not anticipate her father’s death. She was devastated by the news and flew to the West Coast to be with her mother and cousin. Page 172 → Alice in Wonderland was the hit of the ART’s first season, though too little and too late. It opened on April 5, 1947, with a top ticket price of $4.80, and moved to the Majestic Theatre on May 28 for ninety-seven performances. The Lewis Carroll stories were adapted by Le Gallienne and Florida Friebus. The production was credited as “devised and directed” by Le Gallienne and based on her production fifteen years earlier at the Civic Repertory Theatre. The designs were re-creations of the Tenniel drawings by Robert Paddock, with masks and marionettes by Remo Bufano. Bambi Linn played Alice, Richard Waring the Mad Hatter, Le Gallienne the White Queen, and Webster the Red Queen. William Windom and Julie Harris alternated as the White Rabbit. There were thirty-seven actors in the company. Variety called the production “auspicious” and “magnificent.” Brooks Atkinson called it the “crowning achievement” of the American Repertory Theatre. “O frabjous day!” he wrote, “Miss Le Gallienne’s jabberwock is authentic and delightful.”50 As Le Gallienne and Webster planned the next season, Crawford resigned. She had joined the partnership in July, 1946. At the time, Crawford had written to Webster with happy anticipation of their future endeavors: “I haven’t felt this way,” she said “since I started in the theatre when everything was glittering.”51 Her resignation, written eleven months later, was a mixture of regret for her loss of faith in the enterprise given the harsh fiscal realities, and a hardheaded certainty that they must dissolve the corporation, transfer assets, and regroup as a nonprofit institution. There were also deep dissatisfactions with her producer’s role. Neither artistically nor managerially am I functioning in a way that satisfies me. My position on both sides is that of advisor, suggestor, consultant, but in no way final in any decisions. And that is very unsatisfying to me. If I have to be responsible for a result, I want to feel responsible for what caused that result, good or bad. This is in no way a criticism of you. You have both earned the right to pick the plays you wish to do, to cast them and produce them according to your own conceptions. In fact, I see no other way in which you could work satisfactorily, but I have very little part in this and don’t even believe that a person in my position should have. Only I don’t want that person to be me. In the purely business end, which is not my sole interest, I feel a similar lack of authority. My profound admiration and respect for both of you may keep me from asserting myself even to a degree that you

could accept but I never could be a fighter against you because I feel your own artistic integrity and knowledge too strongly and besides, I am never sure that I am solely right. It occurs to Page 173 → me that perhaps I am not strong enough to work with partners, that I can only be decisive and properly executive when I have to make up my mind alone and stand or fall by that decision. And I don’t see how the greatest good will or best intentions can overcome this.

Crawford ended with, I know that I have not been the dream partner, able to accomplish all the things I hoped for and dreamed of doing for the A.R.T. so that I have many regrets about my past two years’ activities, but I don’t want to develop any resentments. One thing I have learned is that you are great women.52 Crawford continued to assert her respect and admiration for her former partners, and her career continued for another thirty years. She was at the center of another vital enterprise that same year as cofounder with Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis of the Actors Studio. She also continued to pursue her commercial career as an independent producer. Her biggest commercial successes were to come, including the musicals Brigadoon (1947) and Paint Your Wagon (1950), and four plays by Tennessee Williams, including The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and Period of Adjustment (1960). The collaboration had been an unequal one. The dominant personality was Le Gallienne, whose vision of reestablishing a new Civic Repertory Theatre, a people’s theater, as she called it, played in true repertory, was blind to the realities of for-profit theater in the late 1940s. Webster’s feelings of inferiority around her friend and partner—“Everyone calls her Miss Le Gallienne; and they call me Peggy”53—prevented her from relying fully on Crawford, who knew the commercial theater. Le Gallienne knew the commercial theater only as an actress. On the other hand, Webster and Crawford had successes on that playing field and with serious drama, but neither had been involved with repertory on Broadway. Crawford miscalculated the unions’ demands and the finances. Then, too, she was effectively shut out of her coproducers’ deliberations that resulted in the dubious choices of plays in that first season. When she began preparing the budget, she was thinking about the popular success of The Tempest and even the commercially viable Family Portrait. The fact that Androcles and the Lion and Alice in Wonderland were the hits of the ART season suggests how wrongheaded the choices of Henry VIII from Shakespeare’s canon and John Gabriel Borkman from Ibsen’s were. For some reason, Page 174 → Crawford let finances get away from her (David Ffolkes’s scenery was lavish—a backdrop cost three thousand dollars—and costumes for Henry VIII cost forty thousand dollars). Perhaps her two partners made decisions without consulting her, or perhaps she could not win arguments with them. So her resignation letter suggests. During the ART’s short life, Crawford’s attentions were very much divided. In the late summer of 1946, she had signed on as producer for Brigadoon and held auditions for investors. Then, too, she donated time to the resurgent American National Theatre and Academy, which had been inactive for ten years. During the 1945–46 season, ANTA came to life again as a “nonprofit group, independently financed,” and dedicated to extending “the living theatre to every state in the Union.” As a vice president on the ANTA board of directors made up of theater and entertainment industry leaders, Crawford supervised their new Experimental Theatre’s limited engagements at the Princess Theatre and then at the ANTA Playhouse, formerly the Guild Theatre. ANTA’s nonprofit productions ended, also for want of money, in 1951. With deep regret Crawford wrote, “Two organizations for which I had had the highest hopes had failed. Ever since the Group days I had truly wanted to be involved in theatre that had a core and continuity, theatre that enriched the theatre itself.”54 From the outset, conflicting goals and loyalties pulled the women. Le Gallienne pursued a people’s theater that no longer had an audience in the late forties.55 Webster was baffled by the critical response and steadfast in her belief that young actors must see great plays and have the opportunity to play in them. Crawford was exhausted from fund-raising, trying to pay the bills, and by her inability to exercise authority over the finances and the artistic

choices. She had little influence on the artistic choices within and the union decisions without. Years later, as she reviewed the ART debacle, Webster said of Crawford’s decision to resign, “She may well have contributed more by cutting her losses with the A.R.T. than Eva and I did by trying to keep it alive. But we couldn’t help it.”56 Burdened with feelings of responsibility to those who had come forward in the end (Actors’ Equity, ANTA, the American Theatre Wing, the Theatre Guild, and Rita Hassan), they felt an obligation to continue in the face of hopeless odds. In October, newspapers reported that Cheryl Crawford had withdrawn from the ART and that Webster and Le Gallienne were “carrying on.”57 The press offered various theories to explain the dire financial straits in which the ART found itself. Jack O’Brien, writing for the Waterford Republican in Connecticut, described the sad financial aspects of this major theatrical debacle as by no means the result of efforts by a group of hopeful amateurs, Page 175 → yet “it failed to attract enough popular attention to keep it going.”58 British critic Eric Capon described the situation as an “American tragedy” and reprised the problems within the company: the plays were an odd choice for a public unused to repertory, the women actors were superior to the men, and a company with “female dominance” starts with a handicap. He said, “It is not enough to present good revivals adequately performed when storming the citadels of commercial theatre.” Using an ancient military metaphor, he concluded that the ART should have pitched its “tent” outside the walls and waited until they were strong enough to march in boldly.59 At the end of the ART’s first season, the future was dim. Alice in Wonderland, their biggest box office success, reported a profit of $1.22. Le Gallienne and Webster struggled to continue a second season. Webster said that she felt “desperately responsible,” and Le Gallienne “was just plain determined.”60 Rita Hassan proposed to finance a coast-to-coast tour of Alice, which opened in September in Boston’s Opera House to good reviews but lost thirtyfive hundred dollars in the first week. Hassan canceled the tour forthwith. Late in November, entrepreneur and investment banker Louis J. Singer proposed to Webster and Le Gallienne that he would like to present, in conjunction with the American Repertory Theatre, a spring season of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and Hedda Gabler in repertory. They were suspicious of Singer’s inadequate knowledge of theater, but they grabbed hold of this last opportunity to save the American Repertory Theatre. Both women were financially drained—Le Gallienne in particular needed money—and physically and emotionally exhausted. At the time, neither was capable of strategic thinking. Consequently, they continued to replicate their earlier mistakes in the familiar territory of Ibsen’s plays and heroines. They agreed to play a four-week run in New York and to tour afterward. Le Gallienne would direct her own translation of Hedda Gabler, and Webster would direct Le Gallienne’s new translation of Ghosts. Le Gallienne would appear as Mrs. Alving in Ghosts and in the title role of Hedda Gabler. As Webster worked on the lighting plots, her habit since the Richard II days, she was also preparing As You Desire Me, an adaptation of a play by Luigi Pirandello. Audrey Wood negotiated the commission for an Englishlanguage version with the notable Italian actress and Pirandello’s leading lady for many years, Marta Abba. For As You Desire Me, Webster worked from an English translation by Samuel Putnam, who had not created a satisfactory stage version. Many of the speeches, Webster said, were “a mouthful.”61 As Webster worked on the adaptation, there was debate over who should be credited with the new version. Webster was reluctant to place her name Page 176 → on the script. She argued that “no translator should be credited at all.” She even went so far as to suggest that if the Dramatists’ Guild insisted on a translator’s name, they might use a made-up one, or her grandmother’s maiden name, Mary Ashton, which Webster admitted using to cover her tracks on previous adaptations. Webster was eventually paid one thousand dollars for the rights to her work, but her English version of As You Desire Me did not appear either in print or in production. In early January, the Ibsen tour began in Buffalo and proceeded to Detroit. The reviews were good. Backstage, the actor playing Oswald raised concerns, and he was replaced by Alfred Ryder, lately of Yellow Jack. During daytime rehearsals the theater in Detroit was without heat. “I wear woolen drawers and socks, slacks, shirt, sweater, jacket, muffler, fur coat and boots! I undress to go out!” Webster wrote to her mother.62

Even though production expenses were under thirty thousand dollars for the two shows, Louis J. Singer complained and wanted to cut costs on electricity. Webster pointed out to him that Le Gallienne had given her translator’s royalty fee to the production and both of them had contributed their directors’ fees. In addition, they contributed personal items, including costumes, jewelry, wigs, shoes, furniture, and even props. At the end of the New York run, Singer was still quarreling about expenses. He filed a formal complaint with Actors’ Equity for the return of “his property.” When contacted by the union, Le Gallienne agreed to return the candles from her candelabra that had been used on stage.63 The out-of-town reviews were good, especially for Hedda Gabler. Webster thought that Le Gallienne’s Hedda was “much the best thing I’ve ever seen her do.”64 Nonetheless, the two women were not prepared for the New York critics. Ghosts opened at the Cort Theatre on February 16, 1948, for eight performances with Herbert Berghof as Pastor Manders, Eva Le Gallienne as Mrs. Alving, Alfred Ryder as Oswald Alving, and Jean Hagen and Robert Emhardt as Regina and Jacob Engstrand. Although she had translated the play, Le Gallienne had not had time to work out the nuances of Mrs. Alving’s character. One critic sidestepped the issue of Le Gallienne’s performance by writing of the various actresses who had played Mrs. Alving, including Alla Nazimova and Mrs. Fiske. Others found the work dull, stale, and weak. George Jean Nathan observed, “Like truth and pine needles, Eva Le Gallienne crushed to earth will rise again.”65 Webster blamed Herbert Berghof for playing Pastor Manders “dishonestly,” thereby robbing the first act of “all guts and conflict.” Altogether, the two Ibsen plays were faulted by critics and audiences alike. Webster admitted to May Whitty, “The ones who liked Ibsen loathed us, and the ones who didn’t mind us loathed Ibsen.”66 Page 177 → Hedda Gabler, which opened on February 24 for fifteen performances, was only slightly more successful. Herbert Berghof played Judge Brack with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Eilert Lovborg, Emily McNair as Mrs. Elvsted, and Robert Emhardt as George Tesman. Marion Evensen reprised her Civic Repertory Theatre role as Miss Juliana Tesman, and Merle Maddern, one of Le Gallienne’s first friends in America, played Berta. By now, the critics were thoroughly bored with Ibsen, Mrs. Alving, Hedda Gabler, and the American Repertory Theatre. One argued that Le Gallienne could not carry the play by herself and blamed the supporting actors and the director, who was Le Gallienne in this instance, for an uneven, dull, and unmoving production. Brooks Atkinson called the pace “annoyingly slow and the players …uneven.” George Jean Nathan, never a fan of Le Gallienne’s, was the most vicious. Contemptuous of her “frigid personality,” he said that her performance was so cold that the spectator was surprised that a “frosty mist does not issue from her mouth when she opens it to speak her lines…. Even in roles themselves intrinsically cold, like Hedda, Miss Le Gallienne carries ice to Newfoundland.”67 Webster and Le Gallienne were now at an end. Their dream of creating a repertory theater for American audiences had vanished—their insubstantial pageant melted into thin air. The disappointment was excruciating for both. They had been at work for two years, but it seemed a lifetime. Webster and Le Gallienne, along with Marion Evensen, returned to Weston to bind up their wounds and examine the causes of their failure. In the fall of 1945, the time seemed ripe for their ideal theater. It was not. The postwar times were not propitious, funding proved inadequate, union contracts burdensome, and audiences unresponsive. The trio launched the ART at an inauspicious moment in American economic history. The boom years of wartime America were over. The big money available to marginal New York shows was drying up. There was as yet no system of federal subsidy, state arts councils, or foundations to assist nonprofit theaters. Moreover, Broadway audiences, many of them outof-towners, wanted entertainment, not a diet of serious classics. Shakespeare in the thirties and forties had turned a profit, but in his first season Maurice Evans had abandoned his earlier plan to bring true repertory to Broadway. The popular, commercial success of Richard II forced him to treat the production as a single entity and perform it until the New York audience was depleted. Then the production toured to find other audiences. The Lunts had used the same scheme. Webster was aware of all of their reasoned choices. A weak choice of plays, driven by a desire for roles for themselves, was a critical mistake. They lacked stars, but

even without the star power of a Laurence Page 178 → Olivier, Webster and Le Gallienne could have cast, for example, As You Like It and A Doll’s House by recruiting young American actors. They successfully recruited Eli Wallach, Julie Harris, June Duprez, Anne Jackson, William Windom, and Bambi Linn in the first season. However, there would have been no “star” roles for Le Gallienne and Webster until they appeared as the White and Red Queens of Alice in Wonderland. They would have been “supporting” actresses to Julie Harris and Anne Jackson. Frankly, they would not have taken kindly to the situation. Without doubt, hubris was at work. Apparently, the three producers did not realize that audiences would not come out to see Le Gallienne in starring roles, regardless of the play. In Le Gallienne’s assessment, “Our choice of plays was perhaps unfortunate, our prices were certainly too high, and it may be that as actors we were none of us sufficiently exciting.”68 Le Gallienne meditated on the troubling realization that the American Repertory Theatre had also been doomed by its acronym—ART. “It was by pure accident that the letters of its title boiled down to this unpopular word,” she wrote, “and the unfortunate coincidence had, stupidly enough, escaped us all.”69 The label appeared in all press releases, publicity, and reviews, and smacked of “art-theatre.” The press and the public assumed that the ART was a high-minded attempt to establish an art theater. Webster and Le Gallienne blamed the critics, the unions, and the absence of subsidy from foundations. Nowhere in their assessment did they conclude that the type of theater they loved had gone out of fashion. Nor did they note that three career women who challenged the male establishment of theater owners, producers, and critics were vulnerable to derision for their aggressiveness and for their sexual orientation. Insidious rumors and charges of communism thrown at Webster and Cheryl Crawford in the midforties grew in sound and fury as the decade ended. Even though Le Gallienne had no interest in politics, her association with Webster and Crawford suggested to the red-baiters and lunatic fringe that she was not the innocent she professed to be. The American Repertory Theatre was formally dissolved in May 1948. The “aura of failure” had proved too much to carry.70 Webster wrote at the time: “It is the inability to survive for a minority audience which is the root of the matter. This, basically, is why the A.R.T. is now a dismal past instead of a hopeful future.” She concluded, “What is too often ignored is the immense importance of the minority.”71 Playwrights, critics, directors, and producers have often repeated this sentiment. One of the most notable examples was critic Kenneth Tynan’s impassioned plea for Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, whose appeal in 1956 was to a sizable “minority” of an under-forty generation. Page 179 → Writing twenty-five years later about the rise and fall of the ART, Webster found the experiment still painful to recollect. The enterprise was praiseworthy; the mistakes were colossal. The ART, with its admirable objectives, was “wrong from beginning to end.”72 Her scars “bled a little” whenever she reflected upon the failed enterprise.73 With the clarity of twenty-twenty hindsight, Webster observed, “The A.R.T. sandwiched itself neatly in a vacuum between two theatre worlds.”74 One was the for-profit, commercial theater world of Broadway, and the other was the resident nonprofit professional theater outside of New York City. The one featured commercial plays by America’s best and brightest: Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Lillian Hellman. The other was shortly to be born as professional nonprofit theaters outside of New York City, or situated in lower Manhattan: Margo Jones’s Theatre 47 (Dallas) and Nina Vance’s Alley Theatre (Houston) in 1947; Edward Mangum and Zelda Fichandler’s Arena Stage (Washington, D.C.) in 1950; José Quintero and Theodore Mann’s Circle in the Square (off-Broadway) in 1951; Jules Irving and Herbert Blau’s Actors’ Workshop (San Francisco) in 1952; and Norris Houghton and T. Edward Hambleton’s Phoenix Theatre (off-Broadway) in 1953. The 1960s saw the establishment of nonprofit professional theaters in Minneapolis, Baltimore, Seattle, Dallas, Sarasota, Salt Lake City, Louisville, Kansas City, Hartford, San Francisco, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Berkeley. The American Repertory Theatre appeared on the threshold of the resident professional theater movement in America and left a legacy, even in failure, showing what that movement could achieve despite the pitfalls. Webster and her cohorts were five years ahead of the resident theater movement.

This was a time of unhappy endings for Webster. She learned that her mother, who was still living in Los Angeles, was dying of cancer. Webster traveled to the West Coast to be with her. On May 29, Webster wrote to Jean Brough in London from her parents’ home on De Longre Avenue describing May Whitty’s “rapid decline” and death with “little pain.”75 She died three weeks before her eighty-third birthday. Close friends gathered at the mortuary where she was cremated. They included Edmund Gwenn, Herbert Marshal, Boris Karloff, Brian Aherne, Alexander Knox, and John Van Druten, who read passages from the Bible. Dame Sybil Thorndike and British Equity arranged a memorial service in London on June 10, 1948, at St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden a few steps from the front door of the Websters’ former home. Because May Whitty was a lifelong Christian Scientist, the church arranged a “service of devotion.” Two lessons were read by actors Godfrey Tearle and Leslie Page 180 → Banks. John Gielgud gave a reading. Lewis Casson broadcast a tribute to May Whitty, and, Roddy McDowall, who appeared in Lassie Come Home, wrote of the actress: “To work with her was an honor; to know her was an unforgettable privilege.”76 A memorial plaque inscribed to May Whitty and Ben Webster was placed on the east wall of St. Paul’s Church: They were lovely and pleasant in their lives And in their deaths they were not divided. In November 1947, following the collapse of the Alice in Wonderland tour, Webster took refuge in another insubstantial dream. She began to make plans to create her own touring company, which she eventually called the Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company, shortened to Marweb. In one sense, she was taking refuge in familiar territory, harkening back to the hard work and companionship of her Ben Greet and Donald Wolfit days touring English towns and villages. Following the official demise of the ART, Webster signed contracts with ballet and concert tour impresario Sol Hurok to tour “the gymnasium circuit” of schools and colleges with a bus and truck company of professional actors prepared to play Hamlet and Macbeth. In an amazing instance of circular thinking, Webster wanted Le Gallienne to play Hamlet and Lady Macbeth. Perhaps Webster wanted to reassure her partner that she was not unwanted despite the rejection of her work by critics and audiences. Le Gallienne’s companion Marion Evensen stepped in and argued that to act with a “raw, young company” would harm Le Gallienne’s prestige. More than likely, there were other dimensions to her argument as well. A tour would take Le Gallienne away from Weston, throw Webster and Le Gallienne together for several months, and further complicate the ménage à trois that was tenuous at best. Le Gallienne said no to the tour.77 Born atop the grave of the American Repertory Theatre, Marweb’s fate would not be significantly different. Commenting on this new undertaking, Cheryl Crawford called Webster a “crusader …who matched Don Quixote fighting many more windmills: the cities and towns of forty-eight states.”78 Joseph Verner Reed provided a loan and helped Webster set up the company as a nonprofit corporation. Webster won concessions from Actors’ Equity and the stagehands’ union. While she had learned from the mistakes made with the establishment of the ART, she now made other contractual mistakes. The Hurok contract stipulated flat fees from the schools and colleges and minimum weekly guarantees to the company. “What looked foolproof on paper proved impossible in practice,” Webster reflected.79 Webster gathered familiar faces around her, including Edward Choate as Page 181 → managing director, Wolfgang Rolf as designer, Lehman Engel as composer, and Thelma Chandler as production stage manager. Webster devised the lighting plot for the two shows, borrowed Macbeth costumes from Maurice Evans, chartered a bus, bought a truck, and accepted the loan of a new station wagon from Joseph Verner Reed. Many of the twenty-two actors came from the ranks of the ART, including Alfred Ryder (of Yellow Jack and Ghosts) and John Straub (of Henry VIII, Androcles and the Lion, and Alice in Wonderland). The Marweb tour began at the Erlanger Theatre in Buffalo, New York, on September 28, 1948. Almost immediately, the blight of touring companies descended upon them in the form of poor acoustics in large convention halls, ill-mannered schoolchildren, car and road repairs, drafty hotel rooms, ill-lighted dressing rooms,

stages so small that the Macbeths’ banquet had to take place in the wings, and stages so large that properties did not arrive before scenes ended. The Hurok bookings proved arduous, frustrating, and humanly impossible. In the first weeks, the company drove five hundred miles north to Buffalo and then six hundred miles south to New London, Connecticut. Three days later, they drove four hundred miles north again to within twenty miles of Buffalo. It is strange that Webster, a master at scheduling auditions, rehearsals, and productions in repertory, failed to scrutinize the logistics of the Hurok schedule. It is a fact that all of this came too soon upon the debacle of the repertory theater and jarring deaths of her father and mother. She was in a state of denial over the rejection of their efforts to create a new American repertory theater and sobered by the prospect of finding work in the Broadway theater after the resounding rejection of the Ibsen productions. Webster’s instinct was to fill the vacuum with work and hope that something new and rejuvenating would come of her efforts. Webster spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in Weston with Le Gallienne and Marion Evensen, who was frequently drunk, especially when Webster was present in the house. Le Gallienne and Webster pondered the situation and took comfort in the fact that “they had each other.”80 Nonetheless, whenever Le Gallienne had to choose between Evensen’s needs and Webster’s wishes, she turned to her companion of fifteen years. Le Gallienne was Evensen’s caretaker and sole support, and she refused to abandon her. Despite tensions between Evensen and Webster, that Christmas season in Weston was idyllic. The three women shopped, entertained dinner guests, filled the house with flowers, and decorated the Christmas tree with handmade ornaments and wax candles in their special Danish holders. Following dinner on Christmas Eve, they opened presents in Le Gallienne’s Page 182 → Blue Room, where they toasted one another with champagne. There were no drunken scenes nor arguments, and it was the best Christmas Le Gallienne had had in the company of her two friends.81 In January, Webster and Le Gallienne engaged in separate tours. Webster rejoined the Marweb company, and Le Gallienne began a two-month recital tour. Marweb was playing Los Angeles when Le Gallienne arrived there, and Webster and Le Gallienne shared a hotel suite. Here Webster was cast in the role of go-between for Le Gallienne and Jo Hutchinson. Hutchinson, an actress during the Civic Repertory Theatre days, and Le Gallienne had been lovers. Later, Hutchinson became a film actress in Hollywood, married, and was now forbidden by her husband to see Le Gallienne. Webster arranged for the two women to meet and spend a few hours together. Then, Webster and Le Gallienne left Los Angeles to take up the touring life once again. After twenty-nine weeks in thirty-three states, 107 cities and towns, and three Canadian provinces, Marweb’s first season closed in Philadelphia on April 26, 1949. The reviews and audiences had been good for Hamlet with Alfred Ryder in the title role and for Macbeth with Joseph Holland as the Scottish king. Like the American Repertory Theatre, Marweb was a company without stars. The first season ended with a small profit but not sufficient to repay their loans and finance a second season. In the absence of Joseph Verner Reed’s financial assistance (his loan was never repaid), Webster and Edward Choate personally underwrote new loans and planned a season of Julius Caesar and The Taming of the Shrew to begin in Woodstock, New York, on October 6, 1949. Ben Edwards, soon to become one of the most notable American designers, created light, ingenious scenery. The costumes were rented. John Straub, Frederick Rolf, and Dion Allen stayed with the company for a second season and were joined by Larry Gates, Kendall Clark, and Louisa Horton. Webster included two African American actors in the cast, Edmund Cambridge and Austin Briggs Hall. She wanted to establish the precedent of having African American actors who were not stars in a road company traveling coast to coast. She enlisted the help of the NAACP in matters of housing and restaurants. Everything went smoothly until February, when the company neared Natchitoches, Louisiana, where they were scheduled to play at Northwestern State College (today, Northwestern State University of Louisiana). A month earlier, when Webster was in New York preparing a revival of The Devil’s Disciple with Maurice Evans and Victor Jory for the stage at the City Center of Music and Drama, she received a letter from Dr. Sherrod

Towns, head of Northwestern State College’s music department, who was Page 183 → in charge of Marweb’s arrangements on campus. Towns noted that accommodations for the “two Negro members in your troupe” had been arranged by a local member of the NAACP. Then the other shoe dropped. “Unfortunately, we feel that we are entirely too far in the Deep South to have them appear on the stage.” He continued, “Negroes have not appeared in our auditorium (in companies of their own, much less in mixed groups), and we frankly feel that the time to begin the practice in this area has not yet arrived.”82 Webster consulted her attorney, Louis Nizer, and wrote the college official that she had cast the two actors “for the sole reason that I thought they were the best possible actors for the particular parts they play and without regard to their race.”83 Webster refused to make cast changes. Actors’ Equity and the NAACP supported her decision. Recognizing that the company could hardly play the date “by main force,” she determined that Marweb would bypass Natchitoches. Once this decision was made, she released the story to the press. The following headline appeared in the Natchitoches newspaper: “Southern College Hurls Jim Crow at Shakespeare.” Webster released a statement. My sole interest in this matter has been an artistic one. I have brought to the colleges and to the people of the country Shakespeare’s great works. We have encountered no difficulty in many Southern cities which have welcomed this cultural enterprise. It was shocking to me therefore to find the ugly issue of the race problem raised in this matter. My attorney and I sought to avoid this controversy by every means, but we could not surrender the principle involved. She concluded, “The college authorities have imposed their prejudices upon the students rather than vice versa.” She added, “I do not think the good citizens of the South will approve the action of the college, for they know that there is only one thing more expensive than education and that is ignorance.”84 Reflecting upon this occurrence, Webster said that she had hoped in the early fifties to open avenues for “the more general employment of black actors.” Writing in the days before the theater community adopted nontraditional casting policies, she stressed that she never cast African Americans in roles which “they could not legitimately play without distorting or violating the original intentions of the author.”85 Under Webster’s artistic oversight, a number of racial barriers came down both in the Broadway theater and on the professional touring circuits. On Broadway and on tour, Paul Robeson played Othello and Canada Lee Page 184 → appeared as Caliban. In the Marweb company, Edmund Cambridge toured in repertory as the Soothsayer and Pindarus in Julius Caesar and as a servant and haberdasher in The Taming of the Shrew; Austin Briggs Hall appeared as Lucius in Julius Caesar and as Biondello in The Taming of the Shrew. They were young, unknown actors, who in tandem with Webster moved barriers aside for other artists of their day. In other towns and cities, the productions were well received by audiences, and the local press was excellent. Nonetheless, the second tour ended in New Haven on April 29 with a larger deficit than the previous one. Webster blamed the Hurok office for scheduling that increased travel expenses. Even though they faced a dire balance sheet, Webster and Choate discussed a third season. They calculated that if they rehearsed and built scenery and costumes out of New York City, they would greatly reduce production costs. Then, the manager of a small theater in Woodstock, New York, offered them a partnership for the following season, promising to underwrite operating losses. Marweb was “to contribute the productions and share in the expenses of the other summer productions.”86 The same pattern of ill-considered decisions, including the expense of a large number of productions with large casts and a serious repertoire as entertainment for vacationers, that led to the foundering of the American Repertory Company now afflicted the Woodstock project. For summer audiences escaping the heat of New York City and seeking entertainment, Webster and Choate programmed what she called a “season of great distinction.”87 They opened with the first American performance of Jean Giraudoux’s The Apollo of Bellac, followed by the pretour productions of The Taming of the Shrew and Saint Joan. Then, they persuaded Le Gallienne to add two productions that she had recently toured: Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and Emlyn

Williams’s The Corn Is Green. Webster played Masha in The Three Sisters, directed by Le Gallienne, and directed three of the five shows herself. Webster and Eddie Choate had planned for the Woodstock season to finance Marweb’s third tour. This was not to be the case. The Three Sisters and Saint Joan were their most popular shows at the box office. Audiences did not come in large enough numbers to see the five shows, and they lost money. Webster said that the “dazzling Woodstock season” irretrievably wrecked Marweb’s third tour.88 Webster paid off the Equity bond (she had inherited from May Whitty) and Choate cleared the debts. The Hurok office allowed Webster to give lectures in order to repay the money it had loaned to finance the company. Personal decisions were at issue as well during this period. Le Gallienne complained that she wished Webster could find time among her “directing Page 185 → and organizations” to live with her for an extended period of time.89 In June 1949, following the end of the second Marweb tour, Webster agreed to live with Le Gallienne (and Marion Evensen) in Weston. Webster repainted the mailbox and Le Gallienne added Webster’s name to hers and Marion’s. Webster kept her Twelfth Street apartment and stayed there on weekdays when she was rehearsing in New York. She spent most weekends in Weston. As Webster moved into the house in Weston, tensions rose with Evensen, who was jealous of Webster and prone to binges of drinking. Le Gallienne wondered if “it [the arrangement] will last at all.”90 Le Gallienne was not entirely faithful to Webster. Le Gallienne and Darthy Hinkley, a petite actress who had played in Ethel Barrymore’s production of The Corn Is Green and then in Le Gallienne’s production at City Center spent a weekend together in Weston in early February. At the time, Marion Evensen was absent and Webster was in New York. The relationship was serious enough for Webster to be concerned. Webster had dinner with Hinkley when the younger woman returned to New York; afterwards, both women telephoned Le Gallienne. No one knows the details of either conversation, but, as a result, Hinkley planned to go on vacation to Haiti with her husband and Le Gallienne determined to give up this “intimacy.” The two women continued for a few months to meet occasionally for lunches and dinners but gradually they stopped seeing each other altogether.91 Unlike Le Gallienne, Webster formed close attachments with only a few women in her lifetime and remained steadfastly devoted until her partners found other lovers, died prematurely, or treated her so egregiously that she chose to put some distance between herself and the loved one. Then in 1950 Margaret Webster had another Broadway success with Maurice Evans. The revival of The Devil’s Disciple opened on January 25, 1950, to rave reviews and transferred in February to the Royale Theatre on Broadway for 108 performances. Brooks Atkinson said that “in a droll mood” Margaret Webster had “made a good deal of the military pageantry that supplies a witty contrast to the wry grimaces of the dialogue.”92 Despite her financial difficulties with the Marweb company, Webster was riding high in familiar terrain. She was back on Broadway with old friends Maurice Evans as Dick Dudgeon and Victor Jory as Anthony Anderson. Nonetheless, her euphoria was short-lived. The appearance of her name in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television in June would soon have effects. Following the opening of The Devil’s Disciple, Webster collapsed with the flu, and Le Gallienne came to New York to nurse her for several days. Afterward, Page 186 → Webster rejoined Marweb and Le Gallienne returned to Weston and unemployment. In the early fifties, Webster and Le Gallienne frequently found themselves unemployed. In these times, they engaged in other enterprises, such as writing and recording, to keep busy and to generate income. They formed Theatre Masterworks, a corporation to sell recordings of classic plays. Their purpose was twofold: to increase their incomes and to lend permanency to their work. Three albums (Hedda Gabler, The Importance of Being Earnest, and An Evening with Will Shakespeare) were released in September 1953. Critics considered Hedda Gabler, a full-length presentation with Le Gallienne reading the title role, the most significant of the three. Webster provided the narration to tie together the four acts and read the stage directions to fill in visual effects.

David Lewis appeared as George Tesman, Andrew Cruickshank as Judge Brack, Richard Waring as Eilert Lovborg, and Carmen Mathews as Mrs. Elvsted. Webster both directed and narrated the recording of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest with Maurice Evans, Lucile Watson, Mildred Natwick, and John Mervale. The Shakespeare album also benefited the Shakespeare Festival theater in Connecticut. It was based on the performance of An Evening with Will Shakespeare given at Parsons Theatre in Hartford in early December 1952. Webster served as director, narrator, and actress in a minor role. Staats Cotsworth spoke the prologue from Henry V, Le Gallienne recited Hamlet’s speech to the players, and Arnold Moss read Jaques’s speech on the “seven ages of man” from As You Like It. In this interlude, Le Gallienne also began to work on her autobiography, eventually titled With a Quiet Heart, and planned a biography of Eleonora Duse, the remarkable Italian actress greatly admired by George Bernard Shaw. In her autobiography, Le Gallienne wrote honestly but without detail about her companion for sixteen years, Marion Evensen, but failed to mention Jo Hutchinson for fear of harming her marriage. She discussed only her professional relationship with Margaret Webster, praising her abilities as a director. Webster, in turn, wrote only of her professional relationships with Mady Christians and Eva Le Gallienne in Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, published shortly before her death. She came closest to personal revelations as she commented upon her partner in the fifties and sixties, British novelist Pamela Frankau, who gave her “fourteen years of total happiness.”93 Webster and Le Gallienne cannot be faulted for writing incomplete autobiographies that centered on their public roles in the theater. Theirs was not a generation of women to celebrate details of their private lives or their sexual preference in print. Their diaries and private letters record Page 187 → details about their feelings, passions, hopes, and fears experienced in a subterranean world of gays and lesbians in America at midcentury. Their choice to live quiet, closeted, unobtrusive private lives had its purpose. It shielded them against prejudice in social, political, and professional circles, at the same time allowing them to sustain the legend that the theater was their entire life. In the meantime, they continuously negotiated the boundaries between the personal and the professional, the private and the public, omitting a self-identity that did not conform to their place in stage history. Nonetheless, there were always unanticipated ruptures that exposed the fault lines between the “secret” life and the public legend. In a short time, Webster’s liberal politics, not her personal living arrangements as feared, exposed her to a national scrutiny of immense and relentless proportions. Webster’s life on the gymnasium circuit ended in April 1950. She had wanted her nonprofit touring company to pioneer a “new road” for the professional theater. Writing in Theatre Arts, she argued that the “new road” would be nothing less than the revitalization of a theater-conscious audience. The creation of touring companies would serve this audience with productions of the first rank.94 Webster believed that the habit of theater going must be kept active for the young. Marweb was her answer to sustaining audiences for theater in America. In its failure, Webster again faced questions about her career in her middle years. She was now forty-five. She had no doubts about her decision to create and sponsor the bus and truck company. From time to time, she regretted other choices, but never this one. Despite hard work, long hours, inadequate theaters, and disappointing revenues, Webster maintained that Marweb, not the ART, “was the most valuable contribution I ever made to theatre in America.”95 Webster’s prophecy for the road was soon realized in resident theaters and touring companies of musicals to civic centers. The “road” was revitalized in the 1980s by commercial producers sending out companies of Broadway musicals to perform in major American cities where the grosses were guaranteed and the civic theaters reasonably well equipped. Not-for-profit touring companies proved too expensive to gain in popularity and dwindled to a handful with limited circuits, usually to schools and colleges and within state borders. The nonprofit resident theaters established from Seattle to Boston eventually reversed Webster’s version of the “road.” These permanent theaters dotted the American landscape and audiences came through their doors to see a variety of works. No touring company was necessary. In their outreach programs, they joined hands with schools to bus students of all

ages into the resident theaters for matinee performances. Page 188 → Margaret Webster was sometimes a pioneer by design, oftentimes by wrongheadedness. Webster’s dwindling career was resuscitated by another unexpected telephone call. This time, it was not Maurice Evans speaking on a transatlantic call from another continent, but impresario Rudolf Bing calling from a few blocks away. As the newly appointed general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, Rudolf Bing needed a director to stage his Shakespearean opera, Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlo. His invitation created an unlooked for opportunity for Margaret Webster at the most prestigious opera house in the world.

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ACT THREE 1950–1972 Page 190 →

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CHAPTER 9 LIFE AT THE OPERA I am, by profession, a maker of delicate instruments, not a traffic cop. —MARGARET WEBSTER As the Marweb bus roared across middle America, Webster was in New York working on the production of The Devil’s Disciple that was transferring from the City Center to Broadway. The City Center, with the drama wing under the general direction of Jean Dalrymple, had become a congenial place for showcasing productions that transferred to Broadway or for staging serious plays unlikely to attract commercial producers. Between 1945 and 1953, Margaret Webster staged six productions at City Center for three-week runs: Othello (with the original cast) played there following its Broadway production and national tour; The Tempest (with Arnold Moss) transferred from Broadway; The Devil’s Disciple (with Maurice Evans) transferred to Broadway; and Richard II (with Maurice Evans reprising his role as the king), The Taming of the Shrew (with Claire Luce as Katharina), and Richard III (with José Ferrer as the king) were new productions. By the spring of 1950 Webster and Eva Le Gallienne had settled comfortably into a routine of living in Webster’s apartment when they needed to be in New York and sharing Le Gallienne’s house in Weston with Marion Evensen whenever their work permitted. Despite her devotion to Webster, Le Gallienne felt an obligation to support and care for her companion of sixteen years, who cooked, helped in the garden, and took care of the house and animals while Le Gallienne was on tour. Le Gallienne was determined that the house in Weston was Marion’s to share as long as she wanted to live there. Whenever the three women were together in Weston, Marion Page 192 → chaffed under the arrangement and was often abusive and drunk. When Le Gallienne was on tour and alone in strange places, she begged Webster to join her. Nonetheless, absorbed in her many projects and secure in her relationship with Le Gallienne, Webster spent the majority of her weekdays in New York City. Webster was in New York rehearsing the Marweb company and remounting The Devil’s Disciple when early one morning the telephone rang in her apartment and she heard the “firm, cultivated, delicately accented” voice of the new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, Rudolf Bing. Bing, who had been appointed to succeed Edward Johnson, was planning his opening season, and he wanted to talk with Webster that very afternoon in his office. Webster told him that she was not available because Maurice Evans was ill following the opening night of The Devil’s Disciple and she needed to rehearse the understudy for the matinee. “I suppose,” Bing said, “your matinee will be over by about five o’clock?” Webster remembered saying in a faint voice, “I suppose so.” “Very well,” Bing replied, “shall we say 5:15?”1 Rudolf Bing was born in Vienna and began his operatic career at the Städtische Opera in Berlin in the early 1930s. He emigrated to England in 1934, began assisting at the Glyndebourne Opera Company, and became general manager there for ten years. In the late forties, he became founding artistic director of the Edinburgh Music Festival before taking over as general manager of the Met. Noted for his aloof temperament, caustic wit, elegant sartorial style, and Old World manners, he had a keen eye for artistic talent and backstage know-how. He had already determined that stage direction would be the key difference between the productions he managed and those of previous managements at the Met. He was convinced that staging was more important than “most people connected with opera had ever believed.”2 He said that his guiding rule was to “run the Metropolitan unmoved by promises or threats—on principles of quality only.”3 He could have added, “with first-class directors,” such as Margaret Webster. In 1950, the Metropolitan Opera House was still located on Broadway between Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets. On the afternoon of Bing’s phone call, Webster with trepidation entered his office—a small, dusty space hidden

away in an annex built onto the northeast corner of the opera house—and at 5:16 P. M. met the aristocratic Bing. He appeared altogether too imposing for his cramped surroundings. Webster remarked that he was very tall, seeming to look at people with his head tilted downward and slightly to one side. In fact, she thought that Bing, dressed in a dark blue suit, looked like a bishop. She tried to grasp the “fantastic idea” that Mr. Page 193 → Bing was inviting her to stage an opera for him; and not merely any opera, but “ the opening opera of his opening season”—Don Carlo.4 Webster thought he must be mad to talk with her about directing an opera, especially in such a prestigious opera house. Her qualifications were minimal: she could read a score, had sung contralto in the Queen Anne’s choir, and had experienced a youthful devotion to Richard Wagner’s Ring. Sitting in the impresario’s office, she protested her total inadequacy. “No, no. I know nothing about opera. I couldn’t possibly,” she said.5 Bing invited her to see the next evening’s performance of Simon Boccanegra and struck a deal. If, after seeing the performance, she thought she could not do a better job, then he would accept her refusal. She walked out of his office clutching a libretto of Don Carlo. Two days later she was in the apartment of conductor Fritz Stiedry, sipping cups of tea with the general manager while a pianist played a sampling of the score. Stiedry hovered over him, singing, humming, turning pages, and sometimes supplying obbligatos on the upper reaches of the keyboard. At one point, a young man burst through the door. He was the Swiss designer Rolf Gérard, well known among European opera companies. As Webster described the meeting, Stiedry was “never still, Bing never moving, Rolf effervescing, and Mrs. Stiedry ministering to us.” Once they had listened to the score, Bing asked in a voice “admirably compounded of courtesy and iron determination” whether she would like a little time, say twenty-four hours, to think over his offer. She replied, “That won’t be necessary. I’ll do it.”6 Apparently she had concluded that she could surpass the staging of Simon Boccanegra. Months later, when Webster asked Bing why he picked her to direct his first opera at the Met, he mentioned her British background, matching his in Glyndebourne and Edinburgh, and her handling of crowd scenes in Shakespeare.7 With gentlemanly finesse, he neglected to tell her that she had not been his first choice. That had been Tyrone Guthrie, who, it turned out, was engaged in England that season. (Guthrie would stage Bizet’s Carmen in Bing’s second season.) Bing explained in his memoir, “I believe it was he who recommended Margaret Webster, who was at first extremely reluctant to try something so foreign to her experience as opera.” He assured her that “the effects we wanted were essentially Shakespearean—the opera was set in what were the English Elizabethan times, and both Schiller (on whose play the libretto was based) and Verdi had been firm Shakespeareans. What we had to offer her, unfortunately, was nothing but an exciting opportunity.”8 Webster’s total fee for directing Don Carlo, including expenses, was twenty-five hundred dollars. Page 194 → The enormity of what she had said yes to descended upon her as she rode in a taxi from Bing’s office to her apartment: “The first production of a new regime, by which it would hoist its first standard; my first opera; and the first time a woman had ever directed at the Met.”9 Bing was also courageous in his choice, for these same reasons. Nonetheless, he realized that Webster had more experience and success directing Shakespeare than anyone except Guthrie (who was five years older). Bing had found the Metropolitan Opera decrepit in every way: financial management, physical conditions, and artistic values, with staff lacking professionalism. Bing’s aim was to “revitalize the staging at the Metropolitan” and bring it “abreast of the Broadway theatre at its best.”10 To accomplish his purpose, in his first two seasons he hired four stage directors in addition to recognized opera directors: Webster for Don Carlo, Garson Kanin for Die Fledermaus, Alfred Lunt for Cosí Fan Tutte, and Tyrone Guthrie for Carmen. Bing also brought the Met into the twentieth century by pairing directors with designers: Webster with Rolf Gérard, Guthrie with Oliver Smith, Lunt with Cecil Beaton, and later Cyril Ritchard with Oliver Messell.11 In spring of 1950 Webster began work on Don Carlo. To prepare for this new assignment, Webster studied the life

of Giuseppe Verdi, King Philip, and the history of Spain, and brushed up on the Risorgimento. What she could not study in advance were the opera house’s intricacies, rehearsal practices, and its personalities. These she confronted during rehearsals that began in October. When Webster asked Fritz Stiedry what she should do in opera differently from her previous stage experience, he replied, “Oh, whatever you want—whatever you would do in a play.” His only requirement was that the staging “must sound.“12 Thus began her education as an opera director. She quickly learned that she could not move the principal soloists about the stage, as she would move actors playing in Hamlet or Macbeth. A lead voice in the ensemble must be downstage, closer to the orchestra. A conductor like Stiedry wanted singers to keep their eyes on his baton at all times. “You must not think of singers as musicians,” he told her. “God gives larynxes to stable boys.”13 Perhaps Webster’s most congenial and productive collaboration was with designer Rolf Gérard, who was also making his Met debut. He believed the scenery should say something about the opera and asked Webster what meaning she wanted to convey. They worked together to interpret the opera, for no recordings of Don Carlo existed apart from select arias, and no prompt copies were stored at the Met from the production of Don Carlo twenty-seven years earlier. Unlike Webster, Gérard was at ease in the opera world, and his knowledge Page 195 → both reassured her and made her a bit envious. They worked in his Thirty-fourth Street studio, crammed with sketches, set models, photographs, books, easels, and paints. A model of the Met stage was the centerpiece of the cramped space. Gérard’s proposal was to open up the Met’s proscenium frame by thrusting it upward to avoid a flat picturepostcard look. In 1950, the Met was peculiarly lacking in professional amenities and backstage personnel. Bing himself observed that behind the proscenium and its imposing golden curtain, the backstage was “cramped and dirty and poor.”14 There were no side stages, no rear stages, no revolving stages, as found in European houses. The backstage crews were haphazard, dressing rooms inadequate, and rehearsal space limited to a single roof stage. Webster’s immediate dilemma was the absence of prompt copies of previous operas, copies invariably kept by theater companies. The company employed no stage manager. Nor was anyone in charge of the various departments for stage rehearsals and performances. The music maestros coached the soloists and positioned themselves around the stage during performances to remind singers of their entrance cues. A super-maestro, an opera director from the old school, appeared at performances, attired in evening dress, and gave the curtain cues. “It was not considered part of his function to have the least idea of what stage action was supposed to be going on and he did not attend rehearsals other than those requiring the front-of-house curtain to rise or fall.”15 The backstage staff was cooperative with the exception of the chief stage electrician, who, according to legend, had presided over the installation of the first electronic switchboard installed on Broadway. In the judgment of Webster, who frequently prepared her own lighting plots, he “dictated the lighting on the most primitive lines.” Although he had experience with smoke pots and explosions, he was not skilled at subtle mood effects or lighting the singers without spilling light all over the scenery. Moreover, he was opposed to altering his methods for the sake of “a lot of Broadwayites with fancy ideas.”16 Even had the master stage electrician been willing, the lighting equipment was inadequate to do much more than provide minimal illumination. There were no instruments in front of the proscenium arch, with the exception of a couple of enormous “bulls” high up in the roof. This was just one of the surprises directors encountered in the opera house’s antiquated equipment. Webster and Garson Kanin, who was also in rehearsal, launched a campaign and employed a stage manager for the first time in the Met’s illustrious history, along with new lighting instruments mounted outside the proscenium arch so that “the hot spot was not always on top of the singer’s wig.”17 They were not so successful with the head of the properties department. Page 196 → Webster solved one

particularly irritating lacunae with scissors, paste, and a picture postal card. “The entire last act of Don Carlo,“ she said, “hangs on King Philip’s discovery of the portrait of Carlos in Elizabeth’s jewel box—presumably, a miniature in a gold or jeweled frame.” During rehearsals, Webster asked for the “ritratto di Carlo” that Gérard had designed but the props staff had failed to produce. Finally, she cut out a head from a postal card of an Elizabethan miniature, found a small frame of her own, bought some ribbon, and donated the result to the Met: “it was hardly what I expected to be doing at the Great House,” she remarked.18 Despite the antiquated backstage conditions, Webster expressed only admiration for Rudolf Bing’s executive staff. “They were courteous and efficient in six languages,” she offered. She worked closely with Bing in the planning stages of Don Carlo and during the next several years. “I got to know him,” she said, “in an affectionate but impersonal kind of way.” “He always called me ‘Peggy,’ as does almost everybody I work with, and I generally reciprocate” with a first name, she said. Nonetheless, she called him “Misterbing,” never “Rudi,” in her ten-year relationship with the impresario.19 At the Met, design deadlines were set six months in advance of the opera’s opening. Just as soon as the designs were approved and turned over to the shops, Bing, Stiedry, and Gérard departed for Europe. Webster left for Woodstock, New York, to join the Marweb company and Le Gallienne, who was in residence there with productions of The Corn Is Green and The Three Sisters. Webster staged Marweb’s pretour productions of The Taming of the Shrew and Saint Joan and played Masha in The Three Sisters. Between stirring sessions with Katharina and Petruchio, Saint Joan and the Inquisitor, and the “three sisters,” Webster worked on the ground plans for Don Carlo. Rehearsals began for Don Carlo in October. Casting, which in opera was entirely outside the province of the stage director, had long been completed. Rudolf Bing announced Jussi Bjoerling as Carlo, Robert Merrill as Rodrigo, Jerome Hines as the Inquisitor, Boris Christoff, the great Bulgarian bass, as Philip, and two women new to the Met—the Argentine soprano Delia Rigal in the role of the queen and Italian mezzo-soprano Fedora Barbieri as her lady-in-waiting. Shortly before rehearsals began, the entire schedule was thrown into disarray. Christoff was refused admission to the United States under the McCarran Act, which prohibited entry to anyone who had been associated with a totalitarian political party. Investigative committees in Congress were increasing their vigilance against Communist endeavors against the Page 197 → government. Christoff’s Bulgarian passport was sufficient to bring him under scrutiny. At the last minute, Bing hired the Italian bass Cesare Siepi, who spoke only Italian. As director, Webster depended on a rich “vocabulary of persuasion.” Now she had a problem. She spoke Italian for tourist purposes only and had to enrich her vocabulary with operatic phrases. She spoke English to Jussi Bjoerling and French to Fedora Barbieri, who answered in Italian with many gestures back and forth between speaker and listener. “We understood each other perfectly,” Webster quipped.20 Delia Rigal and Webster communicated in French. “We even spoke French in the intermission of the live telecast for the opening of Don Carlo,“ Rigal said. She called Webster a “marvelous person” and praised her work with singers.21 (The diva’s final performance at the Met in April 1957 was also as Elisabetta in Don Carlo with Webster’s original staging.) At this point, Webster blessed the choice of Don Carlo for her operatic debut. Verdi’s libretto was a straightforward rendition of Schiller’s play. The sense of the storyline with its powerful contemporary themes of individual freedoms, romance, and political manipulations was easily recognizable. In addition, Don Carlo was not performed often in modern opera circles; consequently, few of the singers had preconceived notions about what to do, and did not disdain Webster’s help. “Within the range of the Met repertoire,” Webster learned, “this is a rarity beyond price.”22 Webster constantly qualified her experiences at the Met with “If only there were time …” The three-week rehearsal schedule, prepared by Kurt Adler (chorus master) and Frank Paola (Adler’s assistant and “the greatest genius since Houdini”), translated into about thirty hours of stage time, mostly with the chorus.23 In fact, her stage rehearsal time came down to some eighteen hours—the equivalent of two and a half days of rehearsal on a stage

play. Webster described herself as an unsuspecting Little Red Ridinghood during early rehearsals. To her astonishment, the first two days were spent putting up instruments and lighting the stage. In theater practice, lighting is done during the final week of rehearsals. The remainder of the first week was given over to musical rehearsals with the conductor and soloists. Toward the end of the week, Webster was given the chorus to rehearse on the roof rehearsal stage. Some fourteen days remained before opening night. When Bing’s chief assistant, artistic administrator Max Rudolf, asked Webster, “Now, what do you wish to do on Monday week, on October 23?” Quoting Alice in Wonderland, she murmured, “To begin at the beginning, go on till you get to the end and then stop.” Rudolf met her comment with a pitying smile.24 He explained the facts of operatic life to her. The sets would Page 198 → be onstage, and crew time was a prime consideration. Since the first and final acts of the opera took place in the same set, these scenes must always be rehearsed together. Orchestra and dress rehearsals on stage were the province of the conductor alone. Rehearsals with the chorus were another matter. All schedules bowed before “the primal, torturing, horrific, ineluctable Deity” called chorus time, and the chorus was rehearsing a half dozen operas at once. All the while, they were dashing about the building from one rehearsal area to the next, and occasionally eating or resting. Their union had justifiably drawn up protective rules, including the “rest five”—the mandatory five minutes out of every rehearsal hour. As Webster worked through the score, she realized that Stiedry’s advice to do “whatever you usually do” in the theater was “totally misleading.”25 The differences between working with actors and working with singers were starkly drawn, and in an interview with Opera News, Webster argued the essential differences. She began with the obvious: “Opera is less realistic than the theatre, and it is governed by the music.” “In a more subtle way,” she explained, “an aria differs from a soliloquy.” In a play, every speech advances from line to line, and regardless of poetic elaboration, the thought progresses. In an aria, on the other hand, it is the music that progresses, guiding the unfolding of emotions, and shading the repetition of words with different feelings.26 Whenever an actor speaks a line of dialogue, he or she makes a point and moves on to the next line. A singer may repeat the same words a dozen times, the emotional shading varying with the music, the thought progressing only in terms of sound. An actor says “Good-bye” and makes an exit. The tenor sings “Addio” for sixteen bars or so; the progression is entirely aural. Webster learned that it was better to leave the choice to “sound” rather than invent something to do. In opera, she quipped, “the Method is left stranded” at every turn.27 Webster was also concerned about the artificial stances adopted by the singers for reasons of breath control, and the stately, “semaphore-like” gestures that had to do with the raised diaphragm. She schemed to eliminate the worst of the posturing and planned how to fill the rest bars, the musical measure of silence. The big “concertante” set pieces, which Verdi loved to write, were comparably easy. “I knew that I only had to get everyone into the right places before the first downbeat, tell them to face the conductor …, and leave them to sing their lungs out. I would then heave a huge sigh of relief, relax and enjoy myself.”28 She hoped for an opportunity to work with the soloists in nonstage time, Page 199 → but their unscheduled hours were spent with musical coaches. Unlike the theater, the Met did not rehearse in the evenings until the season opened. In effect, Webster never had an opportunity to talk to the soloists about Don Carlo. Whereas Webster had stretched Macbeth’s eight guests into a royal banquet, she found herself overwhelmed with ninety-eight chorus members, plus principals, extras, and a “stage band” for the auto-da-fé. At every moment all had to see the conductor. Given the limitations with rehearsal and stage time, Webster knew that there would be no opportunity to be wrong or time to make significant adjustments in her staging. She asked a friend in Paris to send her boxes of toy soldiers, and she drew up ground plans of the stage and the scenery on which she maneuvered the soldiers, as principals and chorus. She encountered other unexpected problems. The conductor told her that she could not mingle the sopranos, altos,

tenors, and basses. Sopranos could only sing among sopranos, and so on. “Later, I learned that this was not altogether true,” she said, but for the moment she did her best to achieve “natural-looking, mixed-up crowds and not to segregate the sexes more strictly than was absolutely necessary.”29 Webster soon developed total admiration for the Met’s chorus. They were “magnificent,” each member capable of “hanging onto his or her vocal line in the teeth of three competing Pop groups.”30 Webster dared to ask Kurt Adler if she might take ten minutes of his rehearsal time to talk to the chorus. He looked startled, but acceded to her request. On the appointed day, she went to the rehearsal room and waited for the “take five” break to end. There she made a director’s speech. She explained what the chorus contributed to the opera and what the opera was about. In effect, Don Carlo was about power: the lives of the two lovers were smashed between the state and the church, which were waging a death struggle over power. It was about the effects of power on the individual who wields it, King Philip of Spain, who was also the slave of power. The opera was also about freedom—the freedom of Flanders from Spain (by which, Verdi meant the freedom of Italy from Austria). No one had ever talked to the chorus, except musically and in the mechanics of “enter-exit-raise-your-right-armon-the-last-note.” Webster won over their loyalty and tolerance in her concern for their understanding the meaning of the opera and their part in it. She observed that “they love what they’re doing …and I do too, so we got on.”31 In addition to the principals and the chorus, there were the extras. Heretofore, the Met’s extras had been a haphazard affair. They wandered in through the Fortieth Street stage entrance, were given a too-large helmet, Page 200 → an ill-fitting tunic, a push on cue, and told to follow the others onstage. Webster and Rolf Gérard were determined to do something about this haphazard approach, “to eliminate this mindless mob of misfits.”32 Director and designer registered a group of music students and serious singers who would be called upon regularly, cast to type, and wear costumes properly fitted. Bing even raised the walk-on fee from one to two dollars. By the first “full dress” rehearsal, Webster had adapted to the Met’s schedule. That is, she now thought in terms of chorus overtime, crew overtime, orchestra overtime, availability of space, and the needs of the conductors and coaches. Yet she had lost something important—herself as a “creative artist.” Everyone has been extremely cooperative and kind to me, and hopeful that I might do the very things which I cannot, in the circumstances, attempt. I shall do everything pretty well, except the thing Mr. Bing hired me for—that is, to produce a performance as well acted as it is well sung.33 The “full dress” rehearsal brought some two hundred people on stage: principals, choruses, extras, and onstage musicians. During the auto-da-fé scene, Webster had the “whole mob” together at one time for precisely ten minutes of rehearsal time. Afterward, she wrote a memo to Gérard and his assistant:

Don Carlo ACT TWO SCENE TWO In your third move, after you have raised the Banners, please move a shade earlier. The Herald does his recitative, then the Chorus sings and you are to move right on the end of the chorus’ piece. You have been doing it as I directed you to—this is an alteration. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my personal appreciation to you for your wonderful co-operation and courtesy to me. I do indeed hope you will both have happy and successful careers. Cordially, Margaret Webster 34 The répétition généralearrived with orchestra seats filled with friends, public, and press, followed by a total shutdown after the Saturday afternoon performance until the opening on Monday night, November 6. It was the

beginning of the Met’s sixty-sixth season. On that fateful Monday, Webster felt “lonely, lost, a ghost,” as she observed the musical rehearsals and openingnight preparations. As she roamed the foyers of the opera house, she remembered an interview in Page 201 → which she had summarized the special difficulties that confronted an operatic régisseur, or stage director. She had to handle a hundred principals, chorus members, and extras in a believable fashion while serving their need to see the conductor and remain segregated by vocal range. Performers who had learned their parts in a frozen way were not inclined to be malleable.35 Finally, Webster went back to her apartment, climbed into a new evening dress, and arrived at the sparkling opening night with Eva Le Gallienne. In the foyer, friends and acquaintances greeted Webster warmly. Le Gallienne was taken aback by the crowd of “over-dined & over-wined & over-dressed & over-jeweled” firstnighters.36 Nonetheless, the actress cheered up when she discovered that she liked the opera and thought Webster’s staging “amazingly good.” Webster had little recollection of what happened around her until she found herself with Rudolf Bing, Fritz Stiedry, and the singers in front of the famous gold curtain, gazing out at one of the most thrilling sights in the world. She described the sights and sounds of the great house: The great, red-and-gold horseshoe of the old Metropolitan Opera House, filled to the aisles, flashing and dazzling, the men in the orchestra pit smiling up, and everyone waving programs, clapping, screaming “Bravo”; Bing very quiet but unmistakably happy, and all of us bowing out front and then to each other and not knowing who was supposed to get off first and getting entangled clumsily in “no, no, after you,” and the whole thing over again.37 The reviews were ecstatic. The music critic for the New York Herald Tribune said that “the results of last night’s performance gave us reason to believe that the ‘new’ Metropolitan is united to produce a real musical theatre in which all forces are directed toward a synthesis of sight and sound.” The reviewer for the New York JournalAmerican said that Don Carlo scored “a success both as a production and as a performance.” Opera News praised Bing’s new era of triumphant accomplishments and observed that the stage settings and director of Don Carlo were on a “level rarely attained” in recent years at the Met.38 Writing for Musical America, Cecil Smith pointed to Webster’s supreme accomplishment: “Few if any of her celebrated Shakespeare productions have reflected more unqualified credit upon her gifts and her analytic intelligence than this staging of Don Carlo.“39 The following afternoon, Webster and Le Gallienne met one-half of the Woodstock company at the Brattle Theatre to restage Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. During the train ride to Boston with her partner, Webster was reflective. At forty-seven, she was at the peak of an illustrious career. She Page 202 → was going to the theater where she had first produced and directed Othello seven years earlier, a watershed experience for her as a theatrical director—in fact, the most important stage production of her career—and universally recognized as a landmark in American theater practice and racial politics. She had just left behind an operatic triumph with its glamorous evening in high society, a clamoring press, and several television offers. Don Carlo brought her international recognition as a singular woman and artist in the opera world—another landmark in American operatic practice and in gender politics. Now she was setting out with Le Gallienne, bound again for a summer stock production. Why was she returning to the old lifestyle, dominated by Le Gallienne’s artistic choices and personal needs, when she had just won acclaim on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House? Webster was depressed by the familiar pattern and bewildered by her choice to leave so much behind. “I sat in the train feeling very peculiar,” she recalled.40 Webster’s successes seemingly touched some deep chord within her companion. For the first time, Webster’s success was in a field where Le Gallienne had no competing fame. In 1950, Le Gallienne’s dissatisfaction with her personal life exacerbated her professional unhappiness.41 Marion Evensen was drinking heavily but refusing to seek treatment. In May, Le Gallienne had had too much to drink herself, missed the turnoff into her road, and crashed her car into a neighbor’s house. She was also lonely and depressed. Echoing Irina in The Three Sisters,

she longed for “a real one” to share her life. Margaret Webster was Le Gallienne’s chosen partner. It is difficult to know if Le Gallienne acted consciously or unconsciously as she arranged the summer stock production of Chekhov’s pining sisters, but the strategy of taking Webster away from New York appears obvious. In general, she structured engagements in which Webster would have a professional involvement. Le Gallienne knew that her younger friend could not say no. Webster performed in The Three Sisters for very little money, but not as Masha, her “love of a lifetime” role. Discussions with Le Gallienne over who would play Masha were of the “No, no, after you” kind. Webster was the pragmatist. Masha was one of Le Gallienne’s most famous roles at the Civic Repertory Theatre, and Webster bowed to the inevitable. “It seemed to me absurd,” she wrote, “for her not to play it again; eventually it was so decided. But I wasn’t feeling enthusiastic, that day on the train.”42 As it turned out, Webster was satisfied that she was “far better” in the role of Olga than she would ever have been as Masha. The Three Sisters, with Le Gallienne translating and directing, opened on November 23 at the Brattle Theatre with Sylvia Farnham as Irina, Darthy Hinkley as Natasha, and George Roy Hill as Baron Tusenbach. With some justification, the Page 203 → reviewer for the Boston Globe focused on Webster’s work as a director at the Met and gave little attention to the production at the Brattle Theatre. With respect to her decision to leave New York City and join Le Gallienne’s company in Boston, Webster’s equanimity and good-humor shone through: “I enjoyed the play more than ever and was quite happy to let the Metropolitan tumult die away in the distance.”43 Nonetheless, when Rudolf Bing proposed a series of “Margaret Webster Verdi Operas” and asked her to open the following season with a new revival of Aida, she said “yes.” “I was old enough to know better,” she reflected years later. “To accept the challenge of Don Carlo had a certain bravado; but to tangle with Aida was plain lunacy.”44 Throughout Rudolf Bing’s first season, Webster returned periodically to the Metropolitan Opera House to rehearse principals who were taking over roles. She came to terms with the Met’s routines, with its large repertoire and rapid changes of cast. Newcomers never got onto the stage or heard the orchestra, and generally did not meet their fellow singers. “Everyone took this for granted,” she said, “and (miraculously) got away with it.”45 Despite facing many crises within the large company, Rudolf Bing retained his imperturbable humor. He worked a fifteen-hour day, often staying in his office in the evening with dinner sent up on a tray. Then at night he came to the auditorium and, concealed at the back of his box, listened to part of the performance. Webster tells the story of one public relations crisis. Bing and his top aides were gathered in his office around a New York newspaper whose headline revealed a “top secret” story at the Met. There was much clamor among them to confirm, deny, or refuse comment. Bing remained silent, intensely studying another small item at the bottom of the front page. His voice cut through the clamor: “Baby,” he read in a fascinated tone. “Baby eighteen months old bites snake. Snake dies.”46 Everyone laughed and quickly reached a solution. As rehearsals began for Aida in October 1951, Webster noted that “all the old problems” remained at the great opera house. Added to them was a new problem of gigantic proportions. Unlike Don Carlo, about which few of the singers had preconceived ideas, all had sung Aida hundreds of times. Soprano Zinka Milanov, an almost sacred institution at the Met, was singing Aida. Tenor Mario Del Monaco, the darling of La Scala who spoke no English, was making his Met debut as Radames. Americans George London and Jerome Hines were singing Amonasro and Ramfis. Aida is encrusted with traditional business—”international currency” throughout the operatic world. Both Bing and conductor Fausto Cleva urged Webster to ignore Page 204 → it, but the leading singers did not want to change how they had performed Aida in the past. Webster was determined not to be intimidated by the principals this time. She would speak to them, whether they liked it or not. She summoned the cast for a reading, not a musical rehearsal. She asked the Met staff for copies of the libretto and got ill-printed and poorly translated pamphlets sold in the foyer “with a cover design dating from 1900.”47 Just as she had instructed the chorus in the meaning of Don Carlo, she now dug for themes to counteract

the “high-flown romantic nonsense” of Aida. She enumerated themes of liberty, nobility, power of the priesthood, character conflicts, and “lo-o-ve.” In the first reading, Del Monaco read in a flat monotone, Jerome Hines read enthusiastically, and Zinka Milanov read her first aria as though it were incomprehensible, fumbling in her handbag for her glasses. She snatched them off after a few more words, saying, “Wrong glasses.” “I know when I’m licked,” Webster lamented.48 One Saturday Webster arrived to rehearse the extras who made up the armed forces. They rehearsed on Saturday because the extras had other jobs during the week, the Met did not work at night until the season opened, and she refused to waste her precious stage hours on a marching army. Only a third of the extras showed up. There were no union men in the building, no piano, and only the lobby for rehearsal space. All summer long she had paced out the width of the Met stage on her cottage porch, calculating how long it would take the extras, divided into four squads, to march to the front of Pharaoh’s throne, salute, turn, and march to their onstage position. The maneuver had to be precise. She drilled the army with “Enter, Stop, Go, Salute, first squad Turn, second squad On” to the point of exhaustion. In this production, Rolf Gérard’s scenery and costumes created problems. He had designed two of the sets in his best manner, with fifteen-foot-high white and gold towers with clean, unadorned lines; the huge statue of Ftha, in two-dimensional black silhouette, stood downstage center, back to the audience, so that the priests could pray to the god and face the conductor at the same time. Other scenery proved difficult for the performers, and Webster failed to “solve their problems” to her satisfaction. She carried on in rehearsals and led a terrorized stage band, carrying their eyeglasses and music, up the soaring towers.49 Mario Del Monaco challenged Gérard’s costumes. The tenor brought from Europe his own bejeweled costumes, which did not in the least resemble the designer’s austere and hieratic Egyptian style. It took all the combined forces of the Met, including Webster, Gérard, and Bing, to get Del Monaco into the designer’s costumes. They had to concede his pair of sky-blue earrings. Page 205 → To transform “the beautiful but stately” Zinka Milanov into an African slave girl was another insurmountable problem. One morning during rehearsal of the second-act scene with Aida, Amonastro, and Radames, Bing asked Webster to try to persuade Milanov to seem more agitated. Webster told him that she had already tried, but it was no good. “La donn’ è immobile,” she quipped.50 Bing conceded that neither “Miss Milanov in the title role nor Mario Del Monaco as Radames had the temperament or sheer body control to profit by Miss Webster’s acting lessons.”51 The Metropolitan’s sixty-seventh season opened with Aida on November 13, 1951. Webster found the singing tremendous and the ballet exciting. The audience did not care what Zinka Milanov did as long as she “sounded,” and everyone found her singing exceptionally fine. For Bing, the significant debut and the dramatic triumph of that opening night was the bass-baritone George London. Because Webster was no longer a new commodity at the Met, the critics took aim at her staging. They noted where she failed to alter the traditional operatic business. They pounced upon uninventive staging that could be found in almost any opera house. One reviewer called Webster’s Aida a throwback to nineteenth-century conventions.52 She knew that her work had been constricted by inadequate rehearsal time and by habits the soprano and tenor had learned in Europe. She had bowed to the force of tradition, and she despaired that in the next production she might do no better. Bing viewed the results in a different light. He wrote in his memoir that “neither Miss Webster nor Gérard had been able to grasp the antique-Egyptian of Verdi’s opera for Cairo with the same strength of purpose they had found for the exotic-Spanish of Verdi’s opera for Paris.”53 Matters only got worse with the frequent changes of principals during the run of Aida. Webster now experienced, not the “actor’s nightmare” of forgetting lines on stage, but the opera director’s nightmare of new singers, whose

numbers grew and grew as replacements during the production. Every boat, train and plane that arrived in New York brought a new soprano, tenor, baritone, bass, who rushed to the Met and sprang onstage in Aida. They brought their own old ideas and their own old clothes. Amonasro brought his own chains and refused to go on when he was told, “She says no chains.” They tried to make their entrances wherever they had been used to making them and were only stopped by pieces of scenery placed in their path. Amneris couldn’t throw pearls to the slaves because there weren’t any pearls; Radames couldn’t come wobbling on in a horse-drawn chariot because I had forbidden four-footed beasts. But in the big ensembles, they would calmly walk across the stage to their own accustomed Page 206 → positions, mixing up the whole stage movement for the rest of the scene, and a lot of other undesirable bits and pieces began creeping in, dating back to the Nile itself.54 After seeing one of the later performances, Webster asked Bing to take her name off the program. He refused. Don Carlo remained in the Met’s repertoire, and Bing paid Webster to supervise two revivals. Changes in the staging were impossible. There was time only to search for pieces of scenery whose existence was denied by the stage crew until Webster produced the original blueprints. The previous master electrician had departed, but the new man was just as obstinate. The second revival of Don Carlo, conducted by George Solti, raised Webster’s flagging operatic spirits. She loved working with him and wished passionately to mount a new production with Solti as conductor. He insisted that the singers act, or try to. Nonetheless, Webster found revivals “unmitigated torture” and frequently a waste of the director’s creative energies. Despite her grumblings about staging opera, Webster’s career was already offtrack in the theater world. Her name had appeared in Red Channels the year that she directed Don Carlo. Although she continued to work on Broadway in 1951 as director for Saint Joan and as an actor in The High Ground and then as a director for revivals of Richard II and The Taming of the Shrew at City Center, she was feeling the hot winds of McCarthyism blowing in her direction. Mady Christians died that same year; friends blamed her death on pressure from federal investigators. Rudolf Bing did not seem to be concerned about the controversy surrounding the publication of Red Channels and the subsequent blacklisting of artists in the entertainment industry. Unlike the situation in Hollywood and on Broadway, the House Committee on Un-American Activities had not gotten a firm grip on the international world of opera except through the McCarran Act, which interfered with European artists’ travel. Despite pleas on his behalf, Boris Christoff was not allowed to enter the United States, Fedora Barbieri was briefly detained by the immigration authorities when she arrived, and Cesare Siepi missed the first rehearsals for Don Carlo before his visa could be cleared. The Broadway actor Jack Gilford’s presence in the nonsinging role of Frosch, the jailer, in Fledermaus had repercussions for the Met. Gilford, along with Garson Kanin and Webster, had been listed in Red Channels in 1950. Counterattack, published by the same right-wing group, asserted that the three had supported Communists “by lending their names to at least a dozen party fronts and causes.” The Met season and tour of Fledermaus took Page 207 → place with sign-carrying protesters against the “red invasion” marching in front of theaters. Bulletins in Counterattack questioned Rudolf Bing’s judgment and indirectly his loyalty: “Don’t you think that those who have supported the Communists are just as bad as those who supported the Nazis?”55 The writers were challenging Bing’s earlier oblique comment, “I wouldn’t dream of hiring a singer who had supported the Nazis.”56 Where he could avoid it, he steadfastly refused to involve himself or the Met in the politics of the day. For the next several years, Bing and Webster continued to discuss her return to the Met. Bing suggested Ernani; Webster responded, “It makes the book of Aida seem like Shakespeare.” Webster talked of Mozart or Falstaff or Otello, if it had to be Verdi. She would finally return when, despite her restrictions and grumblings, Bing invited

her to direct Simon Boccanegra for the 1959–60 season. During the nine-year hiatus between engagements at the Met, Julius Rudel, general manager of the New York City Opera Company, approached Webster to direct a series of literary-based operas: William Walton’s Troilus and Cressida (based on Chaucer’s version), Verdi’s Macbetto and Vittorio Giannini’s The Taming of the Shrew (based on Shakespeare’s plays), and Richard Strauss’s The Silent Woman (based on Ben Jonson’s comedy). Viennese by birth, Julius Rudel studied at the Vienna Academy and emigrated to the United States in 1938. He joined the New York City Opera first as a piano accompanist, then as conductor, and as general manager for twenty years, from 1959 to 1979. Under his management, the City Center Opera Company built a vigorous ensemble and explored a venturesome repertoire, almost always sung in English by American singers. While consistently underfunded, the company developed a large popular audience who paid popular prices for tickets. Webster affectionately called the opera company a “poor relation.” “In my day,” she said, “the Met was lofty and disparaging about the City Opera, and the poor relation was spiteful, envious and resentful about that old richbitch downtown.”57 Today, the two opera companies confront each other across the grand plaza at Lincoln Center from equally imposing palaces. There remain, however, distinctions of funding, repertoire, and audiences. Webster knew all too well the old Masonic Temple (affectionately called the “Mecca Temple”) on West Fifty-fifth Street. This was where she had directed Maurice Evans in Richard II, The Devil’s Disciple, and The Taming of the Shrew and José Ferrer in Othello and Richard III in the drama season managed by Jean Dalrymple. The city had taken over the Masonic Temple for nonpayment of taxes, and, in the 1950s the City Center, as it was called, Page 208 → housed three groups: George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet Company, the New York City Opera Company, and the New York City Drama Company. With the move of the companies to Lincoln Center in the 1960s, City Center then became the home of the nonprofit Manhattan Theatre Club and various dance companies. Webster knew City Center’s restrictions for opera, with its limited rehearsal space and lethal pressures, but she found it somehow a great deal more fun than the Met. “Perhaps it was because nobody expected so much,” she said, “and they were always being agreeably surprised.”58 Since she had worked there on several occasions with Dalrymple’s theater company, she knew that the stage had a reasonable depth but no wing space on the sides; the auditorium was difficult to sing or speak in and lacked charm; but the electrical equipment, salvaged from “Noah and Sons,” was less complicated than the Met’s and “far more imaginatively used.”59 Between 1955 and 1958, Webster directed four operas, generally to favorable reviews. The first was William Walton’s Troilus and Cressida, which Webster had not seen in the original production at Covent Garden when it opened in December 1954.60 There were no recordings, and no one was assigned to play the score so that she could record it, as she had done with Don Carlo several years earlier. Webster was living in London with Pamela Frankau, who knew the author of the libretto, Christopher Hassall. Through him, Webster met William Walton. Together, they got permission for Webster to sit closeted in a small room and listen to the BBC’s recording of the Covent Garden performance. (In England, unauthorized taperecording was a punishable crime.) Following Aida, Webster was wary of nineteenth-century opera with popular staging traditions. She was doubly delighted with what she heard: “Lots of chorus again, and extras and costumes and complicated scenery, but glorious music and all in English and all new to everybody.”61 Webster was greatly encouraged by the fact that the composer and librettist for Troilus and Cressida were theaterminded people and the opera was an entirely new work. “Hassall was an actor and a playwright as well as a distinguished poet; Walton loved words as much as he did notes,” she recalled. “To one who is no great musical technician, it comes as a joyful surprise to hear the composer identifying one of his climactic effects as ‘a big bang in the orchestra.’” Then, too, Troilus and Cressida promised the adventure and advantage of “newness.” Because it was an entirely new opera, the absence of rigid operatic conventions and orthodox “set pieces”—the prefabricated, secondhand “traditional” interpretations—promised to give her greater flexibility and freedom in

her work with the soloists and chorus.62 Webster Page 209 → seemed to have the best of all worlds, and the recent emotional scars from Aida quickly faded. The singers were all American: soprano Phyllis Curtain and tenor Jon Crain supported by Chinese American bass Yi-Kwei Sze and African American baritone Norman Kelly. Joseph Rosenstock conducted and John Boyt designed sets and costumes. As always with Webster’s experience of opera companies, the chorus became her favorites. They were “full of effort and good will” even though they were rehearsing six different productions simultaneously.63 The City Center Opera Company existed without subsidy and ran on miniscule budgets gleaned from ticket sales and funds raised from opera lovers. “The vague aura of public service which clung to it,” Webster observed, “only meant that everyone was desperately underpaid. It was always in a chronic state of deficit.” The designer’s choices were restricted by a budget that was “stretched dreadfully thin.”64 On one “terrible day,” she discovered that the designer had dressed the chorus in a wide assortment of clothing for the last act. The costumes bore no relation to socioeconomic status or to vocal range. Cook’s sons and duke’s sons jostled each other without distinction—or belts, which City Center could not afford. The conductor refused to allow Webster to mix the voices, and the costumes could not be changed because the budget had been spent. Working all night, Webster sorted out the worst costume problems in time for the next day’s rehearsal, “at the expense of a couple of extra pairs of tights.”65 Webster was not the only one working hard. She remarked on the “peculiar yellowish-grey pallor” that tinged the staff. What was most remarkable in Webster’s experience with Troilus and Cressida was having a living composer arrive and conduct one orchestra rehearsal. “It was odd to have a real, live composer around,” she said, “odder still to hear him refer to the tenor’s most tenorish aria as ‘that beastly little tune.’ ”66 The opera opened for five performances on October 21, 1955. The reviews were fine, the libretto praised, and Webster’s staging called “less imaginative than assured.”67 During the opening-night performance there had been a crisis with a key scarf. The plot centered on the crimson scarf given by Troilus to Cressida in act 1, and in turn given by her to Diomede in act 2, and fought over by the two men in act 3. It was essential for Cressida to have the crimson scarf in her hands for her final aria in order to hide the sword with which she kills herself. Despite warnings from the director, the scarf was dragged off with Troilus’s body on opening night. Watching this mishap, Webster and Julius Rudel, in “a swift, silent evacuation of the Page 210 → auditorium,” dashed backstage and managed to push the scarf back in view. “Somehow Cressida saw it, retrieved it, sang about it, killed herself with élan,” Webster reported. Webster recalled that she “aged several years.”68 Following the opening, Webster returned to London and to the house that she and Pamela Frankau bought together at 55 Christchurch Hill in Hampstead. Her relationship with Le Gallienne had deteriorated in the politics of the McCarthy years, and she had found a new companion in Frankau. They spent the summer of 1957 in La Colle sur Loup in the south of France. They traveled into Italy and Greece, where Webster conferred with the “charming and gifted” designer Andreas Nomikos on her next City Center project, Verdi’s Macbetto with an Italian libretto, conductor, and tenor. Once again, Webster went in search of a recording and found a cut-down rendering of an earlier version sung in German by a Viennese company. As a departure for City Center Opera, Macbetto was to be sung in Italian with conductor Arturo Basile and Irene Jordan, William Chapman, Norman Treigle, and Giuseppe Gismondo as the principals. Webster’s Verdian Italian had improved so much so that she and Arturo Basile communicated without difficulty. The only complication lay with the management’s inability to decide which of two sopranos would sing Lady Macbeth. The delayed decision kept the company in “agonies of uncertainty, disrupted schedules, and destroyed morale.”69 On opening night, Irene Jordan made her debut and sang “an agile, rich-voiced” Lady Macbeth.70 Webster knew Shakespeare’s play intimately. She had played a gentlewoman in the Casson-Thorndike production in London, acted Lady Macbeth with the Old Vic Company, directed Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson as the

king and queen on Broadway, and directed the play a second time for Marweb. “The opera,” she said, “is swifter, bolder and very much cruder” than Shakespeare’s play. In Francesco Piave’s libretto, Melodramatic events fall over each other pell-mell. Psychology is not in evidence, emotion well to the fore. Lady Macbeth is far more dominating, even stealing some of Macbeth’s best lines for her own superb aria “La luce langue.” …But my chief problem was with what the opera calls “le sorelle vagabonde”—the dear old Witches.71 Increased from Shakespeare’s three, the witches required a female chorus of thirty members who had to vanish in half a musical bar. The chorus was also unused to singing in Italian. The “harassed, dreadfully overworked” chorus master came to Webster at the first rehearsal and apologized: “I’m terribly sorry, but I haven’t had time to tell them the story.”72 Page 211 → Taking matters in hand, Webster borrowed a copy of the chorus’s score from one of the baritones. It consisted of a blank stave marked for twenty bars’ rest; then the notes of “Che parli?” Another fifteen bars of rest followed, and then the notes for “Orror, orror!” And so on. Webster then established a “Witch-of-the-Month-Club” award for whoever best mastered the complications of the cauldron scene. Once again, she and the chorus became great friends. Macbetto brought strong praise from both Variety and the New York Times when it opened in October 1957. Howard Taubman lauded the conducting and the staging. Variety called it a “stunning production, full of macabre tension, dynamic urgency in the pit, and suggestive of phantasy on stage.” Opera News praised the “stunning premiere”: “Margaret Webster seconded the virility of the score with spare, taut staging, and the sets and costumes by Andreas Nomikos, the new art director of the company, were fittingly bold and simple.”73 In her oblique way, Webster called the production “respectable”: “I was not proud of Macbetto as an artistic achievement, though I thought it a good acrobatic feat.”74 With the splendid reviews in hand, Webster thought she had escaped the curse of “The Scottish Play.” But once again, the tradition held true. Webster broke her ankle the morning following the opening. She returned to London on crutches and hobbled into the first rehearsal of Measure for Measure at the Old Vic, where the cast was unimpressed by an unfamiliar and now lame director. Webster was now criss-crossing the Atlantic several times a year. She returned to New York from London to direct Shaw’s Back to Methuselah with Tyrone Power, Faye Emerson, and Arnold Moss first on tour and then at the Ambassador Theatre. Almost immediately thereafter, Webster went into rehearsal for Vittorio Giannini’s The Taming of the Shrew, which opened in early April 1958 at City Center. Peter Herman Adler conducted, Andreas Nomikos designed the production, and Phyllis Curtin and Walter Cassell sang Katharina and Petruchio. The opera’s story with additional material from Romeo and Juliet is basically Shakespeare’s, in which Petruchio, by an amusing stratagem, drives his wife Katharina to distraction and thereby cures her of her terrible temper tantrums and obstinacy. The Taming of the Shrew was a “rest cure” for Webster by comparison to Macbetto. On the plus side of the equation, she was working with a living composer who resided in New York City; American singers, most notably Phyllis Curtin; no chorus to maneuver about; and an opera recognizably based on a familiar Shakespeare play. Opera News praised the director who “kept things moving with an animation that approached slapstick.”75 Page 212 → Richard Strauss’s The Silent Woman, sung in English, opened six months later. Webster was euphoric: “I thought it the nearest I had come to doing what I wanted to do, handled the singers well as actors, and made their rapport with the conductor [Peter Herman Adler] satisfactory to both him and them.”76 Opera News heralded a “renaissance” at City Center and praised Julius Rudel’s efforts to stage operas with audience appeal in his first

season and with “rediscovered” titles in his second. “The production by Andreas Nomikos looked appropriately motley,” the writer said, “and Margaret Webster underlined each of Strauss’s over-statements.” In contrast, Variety called the American premiere of The Silent Woman a “rollicking occasion” whose performers showed a “comic flair” and whose visual production was infused with “vigor, style and feeling.”77 Despite the extreme limitations imposed by time and funding, Webster felt at home at City Center. The audience, for once, was a factor. The large “popular price” audience was warmly disposed to Rudel’s program of opera sung in English by mostly American singers. This was the same audience that the American Repertory Theatre had failed to reach with its unadventuresome (and non-American) repertoire of Henrik Ibsen and James M. Barrie. The second factor in Webster’s satisfaction with City Center was her congenial and stimulating experience as a director of opera. The City Center conductors, Arturo Basile and Peter Herman Adler, were predisposed to working with a stage director, and she was able to hone newly learned skills. Although she was not a devotee of translating libretti into English, she did find an advantage to talking with singers in English because it led them to a deeper grasp of the meanings they were singing. She explained, “I can rarely, as an audience, understand the words, but I understand them better if they fit the notes.” Matching words to music meant better comprehension regardless of the language. She told the story of having heard a performance of Richard Wagner’s Valkyrie in which the whole cast sang in English except Wotan, who sang in German. “He was the only one I understood,” she recalled.78 At City Center, she spoke both with choruses and principals about the meanings of their operas and the phrases they were singing, all the while remembering “music’s power to convey emotion beyond the scope of action and words…. One has to keep one’s ears open for the moments when neither word nor action, but the music itself, is doing the work of drama. To lose these moments is to blur the whole image of opera.”79 Webster had also mellowed and seemingly come to terms with the time limitations of opera repertory. She even coined a new watchword: “The difficult thing we do at once: the impossible must be done a bit faster.”80Page 213 → Unknown to Webster at the time, personal and professional circumstances were carrying her further away from the New York opera world. Although she would direct one final opera for Rudolf Bing, she would not return to City Center again. Bing’s 1959–60 season brought Webster back to the Metropolitan Opera House for a final time and a last Verdi opera. “Another Verdi, another monster Chorus, a libretto sillier than ever and some more glorious music, in short, Simon Boccanegra, “ Webster explained.81 The opportunity appealed to her because she wanted to work with conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos and baritone Leonard Warren, who was to sing the doge. But there was perhaps a more serious issue. Webster’s last theater work had been Back to Methuselah in March 1958, and she had been without any work for almost a year, her last operatic staging being The Silent Woman in October 1958. Warren was reputed to be impossible to work with, but Webster discovered that he was a “perfectionist” who cared passionately that everything be just so. The fact that he was often justified in his observations did not always endear him to his colleagues. At first, he bent “a beetling brow” on Webster. Nonetheless, as soon as he concluded that she knew what she was doing, “we got on famously,” she said, “not always without argument, but trusting each other.”82 Mitropoulos, for his part, was reputed to be reticent to involve himself beyond the strictly musical field of interpretation. Webster first met him and Warren in the conductor’s apartment on Fifty-fifth Street, with the orchestra score spread over a high, steeply tilted desk. Mitropoulos wore a monk like robe, “his beautiful ivory head bent over the score in the light of a single lamp.” He reminded Webster of Jan van Eyck’s painting Saint Jerome in His Study. “All he needed,” she said, “was a tame lion.” Leonard Warren with his barrel-like chest, dark, shabby pullover, and old beret pulled down on his head could easily have served as “the not-so-tame-lion.”83 All preliminary work on the opera had to be finished in June 1959 for a March opening the following year. Webster met with designers Frederick Fox for the sets and Elizabeth Montgomery (the American-based Motley)

for the costumes. Webster had met the Motleys in 1934 when she had performed in Emlyn Williams’s Spring 1600 directed by John Gielgud on the West End. Elizabeth Montgomery designed costumes and sets for Eva Le Gallienne’s The Cherry Orchard, codirected by Le Gallienne and Webster in 1944. Webster and Cheryl Crawford hired her to design sets and costumes for The Tempest a year later. Communication did not go smoothly among the three. Webster returned to London and wrote to “Freddy” Fox in an effort to rethink the libretto’s historical setting, which was early fourteenth century. The more Webster Page 214 → thought about the highly individual stylization of the Italian painter Giotto and his followers, the more she began, paradoxically, to hear Mozart rather than Verdi. She wrote to Fox: Verdi very often seems to me most difficult to translate pictorially for a modern audience in terms which are true to the nature of the music plus the supposed period and content of the libretto. The “plots” are often idiotic and the characters highly-coloured cardboard. In Boccanegra noone but Simon himself is more than two inches deep. Add to this the somewhat statuesque, to put it mildly, style of the Met singers—and you must get a certain stylization, bolder, larger, and simpler than life…. I think you must pass it through your 1959 mind and stylize it for the contemporary spectator in terms which will give the simplified, melodramatic aspect of the story—”love,” “honour,” “revenge,” “power” and the rest of it, terms which are strong enough to carry through, with audacity, all the claptrap about missing daughters and poisoned goblets and stuff and stuff! More than this, there is, of course, the music itself which is sheer nineteenth-century romanticism, having nothing to do with the mid–fourteenth century, except that in pure musical sound it transcends both and reaches basic emotions common to both. The richness of the sound means, I think, rich colour and texture—but economically distributed if you see what I mean, or we’ll all get indigestion. Giotto and kindred stuff …the garden scene is an exception. It should be very far from the frenzies and violence of Genoa—all Amelia, and her music which opens the act. I think, too, that Simon should have left the mark of his own austerity and truth of spirit on the “Doge’s apartments.” The Council scene must, of course, be wealthy and arrogant, magnificent Genoa; the first scene ominous and “charged.” By the way, remember we only see it at night …always very hard to light dramatically without getting too much bounce from background scenery …be careful of colours.84 Webster’s letter to Fox covered the totality of the opera’s values, ranging from plot, themes, musical values, lighting, colors, to contrasting locations within the opera’s story. Moreover, it delineated her directorial understanding of the austere visual style versus the romanticism of Verdi’s music. Her insights captured the contrasts of color, light, and sound in the melodramatic story of the Genovese doge. Webster’s directorial approach to preplanning the staging of Simon Boccanegra with candy markers was unique. The chorus for Boccanegra was Page 215 → extremely large, and Webster was separated by the Atlantic Ocean from the toy soldiers she had used to work out the staging for Don Carlo and Aida. On this occasion, she substituted different-colored candies and throat pastilles, moving them about on the ground plans as chorus, principals, and extras. At one point, the grouping on one side puzzled her. It seemed a bit thin. Then she realized that she had “eaten the altos.”85 Communications bedeviled the design team not just because Webster was in London. The two designers lived in New York City and in New Jersey and did not seem to be able to get together for design conferences. Problems with the designs soon followed. Fox designed rostrums for the council scene that were too small, and Montgomery created robes for the councilors that were too large. The Met’s budget managers decreed that the leading councilors could have new robes while the less fortunate would wear robes from stock. “That way, everyone could get on the platforms.” As a less sensible cost-cutting measure, the numbers-crunchers refused to purchase four rosaries for the walk-on Franciscan friars. Not to be defeated by the props department, Webster herself bought the rosaries, recalling her handiwork constructing the “ritratto di Carlo.”

Webster encountered new complexities with the schedule for Simon Boccanegra. Unlike Don Carlo and Aida, the opera was to open in the middle of the Met’s season rather than at the start. This meant that rehearsals had to be fitted together within the complex jigsaw puzzle of matinee and evening performances and rehearsals for other operas as well. By midseason, the Met’s production budgets had lost any flexibility they might have possessed, and the managers were given to last-minute bursts of unreason. Nonetheless, as a curious result of the opening late in the season, Webster had more rehearsal time to work alone with the soloists. As rehearsals began in February, Webster had the impression that the great opera house had changed. Gone was the orchestra manager, and in his place there was an assistant stage manager, Robert Herman, responsible for the physical production. In addition, Herman E. Krawitz supervised the backstage organization in the capacity of a production stage manager. Rehearsal time was further shortened by the presence of a BBC crew making a television documentary on Rudolf Bing, who appeared “tired, harassed and with his old sense of humor worn down.” Everyone seemed distracted by the planning for the new Metropolitan Opera House to be built at Lincoln Center. Only the chorus remained unchanged and welcoming. Webster said, “I had a love fest with the Chorus again.”86 Since Webster was now a veteran, having directed two operas with the Met and four with the New York City Opera Company, she found virtues again in a seldom-sung opera. It occurred to her that the less experienced Page 216 → chorus members might be inclined to learn only the Italian they were required to sing, happily ignoring what everyone else was singing around them. To circumvent that possibility, she retranslated the doge’s aria in the council scene, “disregarding the official monstrosity,” and passed out mimeographed copies of the new version to the chorus. In the rehearsal roof stage, she read the aria to them, emphasizing that everyone on stage, especially the chorus, must understand Simon’s words and listen with total concentration. As the choristers and Webster descended in the elevator after rehearsal, a young man said to her, “I have been telling the world that you should stage all twenty-five of the season’s operas because then we would know what we were doing.” Flattered and deeply touched by his remarks, Webster wryly observed, “I thought to myself that it would not be an easy death!”87 Now that she had additional rehearsal time with the soloists, she had difficulty deciding what to do with it. The “dazzling” lineup of singers was in itself intimidating. In addition to Leonard Warren, there was Richard Tucker, “a very wise and humorous man,” singing gloriously. And there was the accomplished Giorgio Tozzi, to whom Webster said, “There are two sorts of singers: one, like yourself, to whom it is unnecessary to say anything, and the other to whom it is useless.” Among the women, the great soprano Renata Tebaldi announced that she could not arrive until the second performance, leaving Mary Curtis-Verna to sing opening night. Webster praised her for “carrying through with willingness and gallantry.”88 The soloists did not object to “acting” as much as they were able. Webster realized once again that when their music starts, vocalists think of absolutely nothing but singing “their throats out,” and neither does the audience. “The director is swept aside along with everything else; and I supposed that was all right too.”89 Webster resigned herself to these constrictions and remarked, “I found myself wearying of the stock situations, the stock emotions, the ineffably silly plots, and trying to imitate Stanislavsky—in the Opera Club anteroom.”90 The bright light in the familiar difficulties of directing singers was Webster’s enormous admiration for Leonard Warren. She respected his great fund of knowledge, demonstrated while rehearsing the last scene before the doge’s death. In a prodigious performance of great directorial skill, Webster had maneuvered the soloists into the right places for the right moment, leaving Warren in what she thought was a key spot for his final aria. “There,” she said triumphantly, “it’s all yours!” He looked at the spot and announced, “I can’t sing it from there.” “Why not?” she wanted to know. “It’s a dead spot on this stage. I can sing it from there,” he said, and pointed to an area not more than a foot away. “There are a dozen dead spots on this Page 217 → stage. I know them all,” Warren insisted. Not for a single moment did Webster question the accuracy of his assertion; she knew that he would be right.91 Disagreements between the scene designer and the master electrician were among the most difficult moments.

One crisis surrounded a white sky-drop, which Bing had approved months earlier against the designer’s advice, but which now could not be lighted to look the deep Mediterranean blue that Frederick Fox desired. The new electrician was just as obstinate and unobliging as his predecessor. When the sky-drop had to be repainted at the cost of labor, time, and the staff’s general fury, Webster volunteered to negotiate the lighting problems under certain conditions: “I said I would mediate the lighting and take it over myself if everybody else would ‘shut up, take notes quietly, tell me afterwards and not talk to the electrician while he is working on a cue.’ ”92 The ultimatum worked to everyone’s satisfaction. The sky-drop was repainted, and the new lighting produced a deep Mediterranean blue. Amid the chaos and the politics, there were many good days for Webster in the old opera house. On one such occasion, she wrote to a friend describing the daily rehearsal scene with its disorder and miraculous achievements. It is one of those priceless firsthand descriptions rarely provided by the main participants. Webster was on stage with the chorus and extras. The principals had not been rehearsed, and she had only half-blocked the movements of the chorus. “At first,” she wrote, “it looked black …the costumes couldn’t be got onto the rostrums.” Leonard Warren arrived “soused in gloom and disapproval …and then the Chorus swarmed in and I thought chaos would come again; and I yelled a bit and soothed a bit …and mixed high-minded exhortations with jovial jokes.” Half an hour before the scheduled end, she said, Let’s run it once straight through and see what we’ve got—and we had an entire scene in perfectly good working shape and no chaos and everybody amazed and delighted and not the least me. Department of taking pains; and me so very grateful.93 Simon Boccanegra did not reach “final dress” without a contretemps, however. Webster recalled a “fantastic episode” between Warren and the orchestra. A discussion developed onstage between Dimitri Mitropoulos and others about the conductor’s wish to put the second-cast singers onstage for the second half of the orchestra’s “semidress” rehearsal. From the sidelines, Webster thought this was “pretty silly,” since so few of them had rehearsed. Bing and his staff, for various reasons, thought the idea impractical. Webster was upstage giving hurried notes to the chorus while Bing was Page 218 → downstage talking to the maestro in the pit about who would sing during the remainder of the rehearsal. The orchestra was still in the pit, waiting for their break. Webster left the stage, returned to the auditorium, and stood by the orchestra rail. Leonard Warren, who wanted to sing the rehearsal, came on stage. In Webster’s account, Warren was getting heated and pompous and finally said something silly and offensive to the musicians. She paraphrased the baritone’s words: “Well, after all, Maestro, we are the singers and we have to give the performance.” A roar of derisive laughter sounded from the orchestra pit. Warren swung round on the musicians and said, “Well, and you didn’t play so good either! “ Another uproar followed and Webster heard “an appreciable number of four-letter and combination-four-letter words” hurled at the baritone. Peacemakers intervened and the orchestra took a break for twenty minutes. After twenty minutes, the musicians did not return. They sent for their union delegate and refused to play again until Warren apologized. Finally, their delegate, a “square, belligerent type,” appeared by the orchestra rail. Mitropoulos appeared and told him that Warren had apologized to the conductor and through him to the orchestra. Bing told the delegate that Warren had apologized through him to the maestro and to the orchestra. A musician in the second violins stood up and said that they had a right to an apology in person. As the delegate repeated this demand, Bing hesitated and disappeared backstage. Finally, the gold curtains parted and Warren appeared, “bulllike and agonized.” He apologized. Just as it appeared Warren would insult the orchestra again, Bing intervened and steered him through the gold curtains and off stage. Webster was appalled by the episode. Since she had heard the four-letter words that Warren had been called, she told Bing that he could have called the union delegate and required the orchestra to apologize themselves to Warren. Bing demanded that the musicians’ union cover the Met’s cost of eleven and a half minutes of wasted orchestra time, but Webster knew that this would never happen. She called the entire episode a “humiliating and desperate exhibition if ever I saw one.”94

Despite the sound and fury, the final dress rehearsal came and went with wonderful singing, passable acting, the chorus onstage in time, and Webster and the master electrician friends once again. Nonetheless, Webster was exhausted. No longer the “starry-eyed novice” of eight years earlier, she blamed her fatigue on the changes in the opera company. “The workings of what had always been a tightrope-walking system were much less smooth and far more tiresome.”95 She felt that Rudolf Bing was no longer fully in control of his own house. Once Webster had admired him for his infinite Page 219 → capacity for making lightning decisions on unrelated matters while diving in and out of rehearsals. Now, she was aware of more Sturm und Drang with a perpetual running to and fro of the general manager and his staff. Many disparate issues were left unsettled. Webster found Bing’s ghostly fatigue and gloomy demeanor disquieting as he juggled the ongoing repertoire and the soon-to-be new opera house. Opening night arrived on March 1, 1960, and the reviews were extraordinary for Tucker, Warren, and Tozzi and for Webster’s staging. Howard Taubman, writing for the New York Times, praised the grandeur of the new production, especially the council chamber scene. Citing the director’s “affinity for subjects in the grand manner,” he noted that Webster had staged the piece with “simplicity and grandeur.” Louis Biancolli in the World Telegram and Sun wrote that the confrontation of Boccanegra and his secret enemy Paolo in the council chamber “was one of the greatest moments of the Metropolitan season last night—the swirling agitation of the mob, the clashing factions, the cringing schemer and the majestic wrath of Leonard Warren as Boccanegra.”96 Webster’s personal critique echoed their remarks: “The performances” were “wholly respectable and at no point shaming and it was even quite well lit. I didn’t think the audience was especially enthusiastic, though I sensed that it had ‘given satisfaction.’ ”97 Bing was not so reserved as he reflected upon the triumph: “Peggy Webster gave us again for Boccanegra the sweep and high drama she had uncovered in Don Carlo.“98 There were the usual applause and bravos, the gold curtain rising and falling, Bing and Mitropoulos center stage, roses presented to Webster from the “supers,” and a splendid party at Leonard Warren’s. For a brief moment Webster had a twinge of regret: “I grieved that this particular group of singers would never sing the opera together again.”99 Soprano Renata Tebaldi was scheduled to arrive and sing the role of Amelia, Boccanegra’s daughter, the next evening. From the outset, Webster had surmised the changes that had occurred during her eight-year absence from the Met. Little did anyone on that opening night suspect that even greater changes were in the wind. Three days later, Webster returned to her apartment in the evening from a performance of Jean Genet’s The Balcony to find an urgent message from the stage manager to call the Met immediately. She learned that Leonard Warren had collapsed and died onstage that night during the second act of La Forza del Destino. Warren sang “Oh, gioia,” Bing recalled, “and then pitched forward like an oak felled by a woodsman’s ax.”100 The loss of one of its greatest performers under shocking circumstances stunned the opera world. Webster was devastated. She had developed a special Page 220 → relationship with the baritone. “I did get on his wave-length, ” she said, “and I loved him—I really did, the old dinosaur—and he knew it.” He had telephoned her the day of his death to discuss the reviews for Simon Boccanegra. “We did all right by Verdi, didn’t we,” she told him, “and that’s the main point isn’t it?” He allowed that they had done all right. She assured him that the glorious reviews came about because they had “cared terribly” about the production and didn’t regard Simon Boccanegra as just another opera. Webster took some comfort in having helped to give Leonard Warren “a happy and triumphant last experience” in a beloved opera.101 In Webster’s estimation, Bing handled the difficult situation with courage, simplicity, and elegance with Mrs. Warren, the audience, and the press. While the company was in a state of shock with few knowing what to say to each other, Mitropoulos and Webster rehearsed soprano Renata Tebaldi and baritone Frank Guarrera. Webster found the rehearsal “macabre and hideous.” “I don’t know how the hell they’ll sing the end of Boccanegra, “ she said, “since it ends with his on-stage death, of which Leonard was inordinately proud and told me numberless child-like stories of how doctors had rushed round to find out if he really was dead.”102 Not without some satisfaction, Webster also wondered what the musicians thought of their own behavior toward Warren in his last

days. Webster admired the capacity of the Metropolitan Opera Company “to weather a Force 8 gale.”103 With Warren’s death, Bing exhausted, and Mitropoulos fatally ill, Webster now questioned her ability to do excellent work at the Met or in any opera. Just as she had reached the peak of her skill in directing opera, she had lost the desire and energy to do so. “The work can only get done well by a series of lucky accidents,” she despaired, “and even then it is destroyed, except for the most primitive elements, as soon as it is accomplished.”104 Webster was also worn down and depressed over Warren’s death and Bing’s failing energies. At one point she admitted, “It is wearing and dispiriting to direct opera.”105 Paraphrasing the playwright Samuel Beckett, she said that since she had “kicked against so many pricks” at the old Met, and made no secret of her frustrations, she probably would not be invited to work at the new Met. She effectively wrote her operatic epitaph when she added, To me opera has always been a huge challenge, involving moments of incomparable reward, but perishable, fragile, dust between the fingers. She concluded, “I am, by profession, a maker of delicate instruments, not a traffic cop.”106 Page 221 → In 1966, the Metropolitan Opera Company moved into its new home at Lincoln Center. Many were nostalgic about the fate of the old building (“a beautiful house, rich, civilized, lovely, living”) that had become hopelessly inadequate for its purposes and was scheduled for demolition. Webster called the destruction of the old Met “a betrayal for which no economics can compensate, a vandalism which nothing can excuse.”107 Shortly before she left the old building for the last time, Webster walked late one afternoon across the railed wooden “catwalk” that was located beneath the roof, some sixty feet above the stage, and running along the back wall from the Thirtyninth Street roof stage to Fortieth Street. It was dark; there were just the small, bare lamps over the paint frame and up above the grid, and a lone pilot light far below by the orchestra pit. The ropes lay coiled on the fly galleries, running up into blackness. Looking down you could glimpse the dimness of the empty stage, between the bulk of backdrops and hanging battens. There was the inimitable smell of “theatre.” I stood still and listened. The air was vibrant, thronged. The silence beat against your ears, charged with sound—not sound remembered, but alive and present.108 She continued her walk across the grid, walked down, and then away. Margaret Webster remained devoted to Rudolf Bing and he, in turn, remained devoted to Don Carlo. He had opened his first season with the opera’s revival and closed his final season in 1972 with a new staging of the Verdi opera. Webster was far away in London and in ill health by then. Within less than a month before Bing’s new production of her “first opera brain child,” Webster died. Writing of her experiences at the Met, Webster offered a remarkable portrait of Sir Rudolf Bing, who was knighted in 1971. “As the Bing regime draws to a close,” she wrote, “a fair amount of criticism is hurled, inevitably, at the departing General Manager; it is a miracle, to me, that he has contrived to stay alive at all.”109 She recalled his fatigue during the rehearsals of Simon Boccanegra. On one occasion Bing stood in the background during a rehearsal looking “glum.” When Webster remarked on his demeanor, he said that he was “expressing enthusiasm.” Webster retorted, “In that case, show me despair.”110 Webster had entered the operatic world with enthusiasm and trepidation. Bing’s invitation to direct Don Carlo had energized her at a time when her Marweb Shakespeare company was going bankrupt on the road and she was experiencing political and legal tremors after seeing her name published Page 222 → in Red Channels. Bing’s invitation, she remarked, had uplifted her, while her “truck” had demolished her.

In the back of her mind Webster always retained thereafter her awareness of the differences between opera and legitimate theater. She summed up the dilemma of the stage director working in both worlds: Most directors would agree that one of the lures of our profession is its difficulty, not the least of this difficulty lying in the problem of “creating” a new opera within the time limitations of opera repertory. We would never dream of doing a new play—on the whole a far easier job—so quickly.111 As she walked across the catwalk at the Met for a final time on that late afternoon in early March 1960, she was walking toward a career in London in the legitimate theater—her first love, in her first home. Webster’s operatic career had taken place against the stormy backdrop of American politics at midcentury. The individual freedoms heralded by Schiller and Verdi in Don Carlo were challenged in 1950 by powerful conservative forces in the United States Congress. Margaret Webster became a small cog in that hugely powerful wheel known to all as McCarthyism.

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CHAPTER 10 MCCARTHY Say as little as you can, never elaborate, never, never say “No.” —SIDNEY M. DAVIS, LEGAL COUNSEL TO MARGARET WEBSTER At the same time that Margaret Webster was engaged by the two principal opera companies in New York City, she was experiencing the Sturm und Drang of America’s political scene at midcentury. As she staged bitter operatic stories about the complications of governmental authority opposed to individual freedoms and lovers separated forever by totalitarian regimes, she was herself caught up in a national effort to root out and destroy individuals suspected of subversive efforts against the United States government. As with many persons in the entertainment industry, congressional investigations converted her innocent choices during the war years into sinister, if not criminal, behavior reputed to undermine the sovereignty of the government of the United States. Those in the entertainment industries during the early forties who were not already in the military, like Maurice Evans, were involved in the many charities and organizations designed to help with war relief. During wartime the “good causes” multiplied. May Whitty, Maurice Evans, Nigel Bruce, Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, and Margaret Webster responded to the chairman of the British Actors’ Orphanage, helping to evacuate children to the United States following the explosion of a German bomb on the grounds of the orphanage in London. Webster channeled her energies to assist the United Service Organizations (the USO), the Stage Page 224 → Door Canteen, Treasury bond drives, Red Cross drives, British war relief, Russian war relief, and many other war-engendered charities and causes. Among these, two were destined to bring grief to their supporters within a few short years. One was the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, an organization to promote goodwill with people of a principal ally. It concerned itself, in part, with the arts and enlisted people to establish contacts in the fields of theater, music, and film, furthering cultural exchanges in the postwar years. The second group was the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, formed to help Spanish refugees interned in French refugee camps and largely forgotten in the more urgent demands of the global war. Pablo Picasso was its international president. Webster never served on committees or on boards for these two organizations. However, she did serve as a sponsor and fund-raiser and attended public functions. In other words, she was a visible supporter. Webster’s volunteer work with the “wrong” committees was compounded by her decision to direct a play clearly sympathetic to the Soviet cause. In the 1942–43 Broadway season, she directed two war-related plays. First, there was Flare Path, written by British playwright Terence Rattigan and produced by Gilbert Miller as an import from London’s West End. Flare Path was one of several war plays produced on Broadway during the 1940s, including A Bell for Adano by Paul Osborn, The Voice of the Turtle by John Van Druten, Common Ground by Edward Chodorov, and The Hasty Heart by John Patrick. Although the scene was wartime Britain, the ordinariness of the characters’ lives and the lack of sentimental wartime heroics had little appeal for American audiences and critics of the day. The production was most notable for the American debut of Alec Guinness, on leave from the British navy. Counterattack, written in a spirit of patriotism for the cause of an ally’s army, namely the Soviets, followed in February at the Windsor Theatre on Forty-eighth Street. Written by two Russian playwrights, Ilya Vershnin and Mikhail Ruderman, and adapted by Janet and Philip Stevenson, the play dealt with the Russian people’s defense of their homeland against German invaders. As days pass and supplies diminish in the basement of a bombed-out building, personal and political tensions mount and the German prisoners try various means to overwhelm their weary Russian guards, played by Morris Carnovsky and Sam Wanamaker.

Critics called Webster the heroine of Counterattack for making a tense melodrama out of an undistinguished play. On the plus side of this ill-fated venture, she developed professional associations with actors Carnovsky and Wanamaker, as well as Karl Malden, John Ireland, and Richard Basehart. Her election as a council member of that so-called red organization the Page 225 → Actors’ Equity Association compounded Webster’s “sins” in the 1940s. She also employed and directed the known Communist Paul Robeson, and assisted as a fund-raiser with two highly suspicious aid organizations for Soviet-American friendship and Spanish refugees. In the first months of 1949, the Cold War was at its peak. The Soviet blockade of West Berlin in June 1948 had brought the two superpowers close to war and resulted in the airlift of supplies into the city. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a response to growing evidence of Soviet expansion, was at the point of ratification and would unite the United States and West European nations in a military alliance against the Soviet Union. In the Far East, the Chinese Communists were winning the civil war, and the People’s Republic of China was declared in October 1949. The war between North and South Korea, which would embroil the United States, was also visible on the horizon. On the home front, the American public was still in shock from the accusations of Whittaker Chambers that Alger Hiss, while a high-ranking U.S. State Department officer, had been a Communist spy. In January 1949, the leaders of the American Communist Party were tried under the Smith Act for seeking to overthrow the government by force, a trial that lasted a year and resulted in convictions. After a succession of failed appeals, they went to jail. The path was now clear for a decade of FBI investigations, congressional committees, Senate investigative subcommittees, and right-wing groups seeking to identify Communists and root them out of American society. The American public was alarmed about the Communist threat. Few people regarded communism as just another, if extreme, political system, and many were coming to see it as an insidious conspiracy aimed at destroying the American way of life. The spreading alarm gave impetus to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (infamously known as HUAC), created in 1938 to combat un-American propaganda and authorized in 1945 to investigate subversive activities. In 1950, Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican senator from Wisconsin, took the national stage and remained there until 1954 as chair of the Senate’s Committee on Government Operations and grand inquisitor of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.1 In comparison to Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Judy Holliday, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, John Howard Lawson, Ring Lardner, Jr., and other writers and artists in the entertainment industry, Margaret Webster was a minor player in the events taking place in the late 1940s and during much of the 1950s. Nonetheless, her personal and professional losses in the first years of the fifties were cataclysmic. Her fear, anger, paranoia, embarrassment, Page 226 → and loss of employment mirrored the larger contagion that swept the industry from coast to coast. Many have asked why writers, actors, directors, and producers working in film, theater, radio, and television were objects of the government’s hunt for subversives. The common bond shared by all artists and writers who were investigated by the FBI and appeared before HUAC and the various Senate investigative subcommittees was their visibility. They labored in the crucible of the public eye. Margaret Webster traced her journey into the witness chair before Joseph R. McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee on May 25, 1953, to its beginnings with Actors’ Equity Association and the many “good causes” in the forties. “It all began with Equity,” she said.2 Webster had been one of the early members of British Actors’ Equity Association formed in 1929 out of a proposal put forth by her father during a meeting of actors held at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London. Webster served on the first Council of British Equity and on its first executive committee. In September 1935, she attended the Moscow Theatre Festival as a member of the delegation of the British Drama League. Webster’s letters to her mother written from shipboard and from Moscow and St. Petersburg described the audiences and productions. The group saw the work of the leading Soviet artists of the day, including Nikolai Okhlopkov’s Aristocrats, Alexander Tairov’s Egyptian Nights, and Alexander Ostrovski’s The Storm, staged by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Vladimir Sokolov.

Webster’s diary of those ten days in September records her complaints about the Intourist Bureau, the mail service, and the food with the exception of the caviar and vodka. At the diary’s end, she waxes philosophical about the future of Russia and the world: “If we wait for a War to shake people up, it may prove the end of our civilization. And rightly so, if we can’t make a better job of it than this. Russia is most likely to survive, I think. She might lead to a Wellsian Utopia, or crash at the peak of the greatest materialist monstrosity the world has ever known. I think there are seeds of that. We’re sitting at the end of a time-fuse, we do nothing. We’re terribly responsible.”3 When Webster arrived in the United States two years later to direct Richard II, she acted as an unofficial liaison between British and American Equity. The outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939 severed active connections between the two unions. As a professional actor, Webster became a member of American Equity in 1938 when she played Masha in The Seagull and remained an active member through her last role in the American theater Page 227 →—a solo performance in The Seven Ages of Bernard Shaw for the ANTA matinee series three decades later. In 1941, the nominating committee of the Council for American Actors’ Equity invited Webster to stand for election as a council member along with E. John Kennedy and Ethel Waters. Afterward, she and others discovered that the nominating committee had rejected two names. One was Mady Christians, who had played Gertrude in Webster’s Hamlet, because she was foreign-born; the other was Alan Hewitt, an actor in the Lunts’ Seagull, accused of being a Communist. An independent ticket was subsequently elected that included the names of Christians and Hewitt. Winifred Lenihan, who had played a notable Saint Joan in her career, resigned from the council, telling the press that the newly elected members “plus the professional bleeding hearts on the Council now gives the Communists seventeen votes.”4 Her vacant position was filled and Actors’ Equity continued on its charted course of supporting such good causes as actors’ salaries, terms of employment, and working conditions. Webster remained on the council for ten years, resigning in October 1951 shortly after Mady Christians’s death and in recognition of her own investigation. Webster remarked that “if any of my fellow members were, in fact, Communists, I can only say that as actors they were brilliant, and as minions of the U.S.S.R. totally and utterly useless.”5 Actor and manager Frank Fay ignited the explosion that rocked Actors’ Equity and harmed many people for many years. Best remembered as Elwood P. Dowd in Mary Chase’s Harvey, Fay in tandem with Howard Rushmore of the New York Journal-American called for “full investigations” of five actors who appeared at a “Red meeting that condemned religion.” This fund-raising meeting was held on September 24, 1945, at Madison Square Garden in support of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Toward the end of the meeting, a radio speech by Harold Laski, British Labor Party economist, was broadcast from London. In his remarks, he referred critically to the politics of the Roman Catholic Church of Spain. The five actors filed charges against Frank Fay with Equity under the association’s by-laws, which covered conduct prejudicial to the welfare of the association or its members. They testified that they had been “physically assaulted, insulted, threatened with violence to themselves and their families, picketed and informed that not only their present plays but any plays, motion pictures, or radio broadcasts in which they might appear from now on would be boycotted.”6 Charges and countercharges passed back and forth between the two sides. Equity received more than sixteen hundred letters and telegrams from Page 228 → individuals and organizations blaming Equity for accepting charges against Frank Fay and accusing it of attacks on religion. The Equity Council unanimously passed a resolution sustaining the charges brought by the five actors and ordering that Frank Fay be “reprimanded and censured.” This was not the end of the dispute. Fay took his case to an Equity general membership meeting, but the membership backed the council’s resolution. Actors’ Equity Association was henceforward labeled a “red” organization by conservative newspapers and rightwing groups. Many actors were branded as “pinkos” and “fellow travelers” for their liberal views. Webster captured the tenor of the moment and the turbulent days to come.

The years of disgrace were upon us, of reckless accusations, of endless “smear campaigns,” or innuendoes, of that most insidious of weapons, guilt by association.7 By 1950, HUAC had been aggressively in business for three years. At first Hollywood received the brunt of the attention, and Hollywood producers joined the patriotic effort to root out Communists in the film industry. Writers and directors were the first to have their contracts dropped and to find themselves blacklisted. Radio and television followed. Dashiell Hammett, creator of detective Sam Spade, who lent his name to the Civil Rights’ Congress (a group dedicated to protecting the voting rights, including those of Communists), was subpoenaed to appear in federal court on July 9, 1951. As one of the trustees of the bail fund for the eleven Communists convicted under the Smith Act, he was held to account for those who had jumped bail. Although Hammett had no information on the Civil Rights’ Congress and its activities, he believed that the court had no right to question him.8 He pled the Fifth Amendment as protection against self-incrimination to all relevant questions, was ruled in contempt, and was sentenced to six months in jail. Much has been written about this ugly saga in American politics, which Lillian Hellman called “this sad, comic, miserable time of our history,” a story that remains unparalleled for its persecution, denial of civil rights, destructive innuendo, hysteria, paranoia, and cruelty.9 Never have so many American artists given up so many of their civil liberties, their personal well-being, and their professional careers as in this period of red-baiting and witch-hunting generated by the United States Congress, the right-wing press, and conservative groups. Though she was unaware of it at the time, Webster’s name had been read into the hearings before the J. Parnell Thomas committee as early as July 1947. During the testimony of Walter S. Steele, managing editor of the Page 229 → National Republic magazine, Margaret Webster was cited along with Helen Gahagan Douglas, John Hersey, Lillian Hellman, Dean Dixon, Serge Koussevitsky, and Aaron Copland as speakers at the AmericanSoviet Cultural Conference sponsored in November 1945 by the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. Steele also cited Webster as a charter member of the People’s Radio Foundation, along with Charlie Chaplin, Langston Hughes, Rockwell Kent, and twenty-three others. Hughes was described as a “notorious Negro with some eighty-two Communist affiliations,” while Webster was named as an individual “active in Red front circles for some years.”10 Steele also cited one of Webster’s “good causes” the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, as a suspect organization (founded by “all openly Communist Party leaders”) that reached into many fields through its affiliates dedicated to science, medicine, education, religion, industry, and the arts. The names of Agnes de Mille as the chairman of the dance committee and Margaret Webster as chairman of the theater committee were read into the Congressional Record.11 Then, in October 1950, actor Edward G. Robinson appeared before John S. Wood’s committee to testify about his participation in “Communist front” organizations. Webster’s name emerged again among the sponsors of a dinner celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army (held in New York City on George Washington’s birthday in February 1943). Among the sixty-four sponsors were Pearl S. Buck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Eugene O’Neill, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Paul Robeson, Edward G. Robinson, and Margaret Webster.12 Webster’s active persecution began with the publication of Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television in June 1950, by American Business Consultants, also publishers of Counterattack: The Newsletter of Facts to Combat Communism. The booklet, with its iconic “red” cover with a large left hand grasping a microphone, targeted suspected persons working in radio and television. Some 50 pages listed organizations, with another 150 pages listing the names of 151 people (49 were women) who had been associated with them. The publishers of Red Channels made no effort to check the accuracy of the information or to give accused persons an opportunity to offer their version of events or refute the implications. Campaigns were waged by assorted groups when an actor, writer, or director listed in Red Channels was announced for a forthcoming program on a national radio or television network. That individual was instantly labeled “controversial” and was no longer hired for a new program, or a contract was not renewed. This was known in the industry as the “controversiality” policy, meaning the practice of nonhiring. It circumvented all traditional safeguards of due process. Page 230 →Webster’s name appeared on page 154 as “Author, Director, Producer,” along with those eleven committees, organizations, and meetings in which she had served as sponsor, speaker, member, or meeting

participant. Other infractions were also cited. She had signed an open letter to the members of the Eighty-first Congress urging the abolition of HUAC; she had sponsored leaflets on behalf of the Spanish Refugee Appeal and the Council on African Affairs; and she had participated in the Citizens Committee for the Re-election of Benjamin Davis, Jr., a Democratic candidate running for reelection to the New York City Council and a reputed Communist. Webster began to receive letters addressed to her at Actors’ Equity. In one, the writer opened by wishing her “the best and warmest wishes for the coming year” and continued, I would like to mention that I am really perturbed and amazed to note that you are “very sympathetic to the cause of the left wing” meaning the Communists, it is the more unbelievable since you are the daughter of such a dignified old Lady Dame Whitty. Another letter addressed to her attention began, Gentlemen: It is with regret that I have read recently in the press that you are “affiliated with 19 communist front organizations.” Your play Therese I have seen and I have enjoyed the good acting therein by Dame Mae [sic] Whitty, Eva Le Gallienne …but in view of the press statements I am inclined to boycott any other play in which your name appears or in which you are connected.13 Alarmed by the growing climate of hostility, Webster went to see her lawyer, Louis Nizer, who had guided her bus and truck company safely through the political and rodent-infested swamps of Natchitoches, Louisiana, in January. She was concerned that she would remain in a kind of “suspicious limbo” for the remainder of her life; in other words, forever blacklisted from employment in Hollywood and on radio/television. “My guess,” she wrote to Nizer, “is that things will get worse, not better during the coming years.”14 The first hint that she had become a “disenfranchised” citizen was an incident with the U.S. Passport Office. An American contingent was being organized to attend a UNESCO conference in Paris. It would include one delegate to represent the theatrical unions, and Webster was chosen. The Page 231 → criteria required a nationally known name in the field and a working knowledge of theatrical unions of all types. Webster was eminently qualified, for she spoke several languages and had an international reputation. Webster’s name was sent forward to the U.S. State Department by William Green of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Green received a guarded reply: the FBI needed to approve clearance before the Passport Division could issue a passport in her name, and the bureau might not be able to provide clearance in time for the conference. No other information was forthcoming. Webster was depressed by the obstacle thrown in the way of performing a public service for the theater community. Rather than embarrass those involved, she withdrew her name. As a precautionary measure, Webster retrieved her expired British passport and inquired of the British authorities if, by virtue of her dual nationality (she had not given up her British citizenship and never did so), she could get another British passport. It was issued forthwith. Unlike many U.S. citizens whose passports were revoked, including Paul Robeson and Arthur Miller, Webster as a British citizen had a means of traveling abroad without seeking permission from U.S. authorities. In May 1951 Variety announced that HUAC was “getting ready to switch its emphasis from Hollywood to Broadway.” Unlike many of her American peers in the theater business, Webster had not been in New York in the early 1930s and was, therefore, not counted among those young artists and workers who joined causes against their capitalist bosses. Beginning in 1935, the Federal Theatre Project, established under the Works Progress

Administration (WPA) by an act of the United States Congress and placed under the direction of Hallie Flanagan Davis, demonstrated how theater could serve as a social and artistic institution to create jobs for out-of-work theater professionals. In The Cradle Will Rock, developed within the Federal Theatre Project, composer-librettist Marc Blitzstein reminded audiences in 1937 (the year Webster arrived in New York City) that theater could be a powerful social and political force. Another project, the Group Theatre led by Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford, was devoted to the work of the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski and produced Clifford Odets’s plays of social conscience. Although the Group Theatre disbanded in 1941, their years of glory acquired sinister overtones a decade later. Those among the Group Theatre eventually called to account before HUAC were Odets, Elia Kazan, Morris Carnovsky, J. Edward Bromberg, and John Garfield. Webster’s sympathies were clear: Page 232 → Many of them had probably attended a Party meeting or two, some had even, briefly, “carried a card”; it was extremely hard for any of them to prove they had never had coffee with a Communist twenty years before the investigation.15 By mid-May, Webster felt the hot winds of accusation blowing again in her direction. HUAC summoned three witnesses: Budd Schulberg and Frank Tuttle from Hollywood, and José Ferrer from Hollywood and Broadway. Schulberg and Tuttle admitted being “ex-Reds,” according to Variety, and provided lists of persons known to them in the Communist Party.16 They were thanked for their cooperation. José Ferrer provided little information at first and was sent away to refresh his memory. Three days later he returned with four names. The first was Margaret Webster, whom he had named previously in his May 22, 1951, testimony in connection with questions about who asked him to send a congratulatory telegram on the occasion of the Moscow Art Theatre’s fiftieth anniversary. It was Ferrer’s testimony that Webster had asked him to send the telegram. The second was Broadway theatrical manager Edward Choate, who had been secretary-treasurer of the “Stop Censorship” committee and had signed a letter inviting artists to an anticensorship meeting at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. This meeting resulted in the petition to abolish HUAC on which Webster’s signature appeared. At first Webster had no idea why Ferrer chose her and “Eddie” Choate, who had been her general manager for the Margaret Webster Shakespeare Touring Company. She credited her former “Iago” with some awareness that the naming of Edward Choate was ridiculous since he had merely signed a letter protesting literary censorship. Webster, on the other hand, had invited Ferrer and her mother to speak at a refugee committee luncheon—one of her fund-raising efforts for war refugees. Both José Ferrer and Dame May Whitty appeared and spoke to the guests. Once Webster studied Ferrer’s testimony, she understood. “We were in almost identically the same leaky old boat. The things of which he was supposedly ‘guilty’ almost all applied to me too.”17 Webster and José Ferrer shared such offenses as receiving good notices (and bad ones) in the Daily Worker; supporting the reelection of Benjamin Davis; contributing to or supporting now suspect organizations; signing protests against the Wood-Rankin Committee and the Mundt-Nixon bill; employing and working with the known Communist Paul Robeson; and membership in Actors’ Equity Association. After divulging the four names, including Front supporters Helen Bryan and Adele Jerome, the committee dismissed Ferrer Page 233 → with a severe caution. He returned immediately to Hollywood to complete the film Moulin Rouge. Ferrer continued his film and stage career and became the first actor to receive the National Medal of Arts. The year 1951 began quietly enough, the lull before the storm of McCarthyism that swept Webster up as mere flotsam. She staged a revival of Maurice Evans’s Richard II at City Center in January, and returned to Broadway as an actor in Herman Shumlin’s production of The High Ground in February. In this undistinguished play by Charlotte Hastings, Webster appeared for the fourth and final time on Broadway as an actress. In the leading role of the nun-detective, she reminded audiences that she was “the ablest woman in our theatre in or out of a nun’s robe,” as Brooks Atkinson said. “Miss Webster,” he added, “looking a little more spiritual than usual, plays with the clarity, force and insight that make her invaluable in the theatre.”18

Among Webster’s supporting cast was Marian Seldes, playing the young villainness, Nurse Phillips, in the mystery-melodrama. Webster had previously offered the twenty-three-year-old actress a job in the Marweb company, but Seldes had already accepted a role in Medea. Seldes had other connections with Webster as well. She had played in summer stock with May Whitty and admired Webster’s production of Othello and called the entire production “breathtaking.” Commenting upon her experience in The High Ground, Seldes recalled that Webster made the undistinguished play “seem important.” Her stage presence gave immense authority to the role of the mother superior, and her seriousness and dedication was of the kind displayed by all great actors. “She had a natural authority in her bearing and in her voice,” Seldes said. A close observer, Seldes was fascinated to watch a director (Webster) watching a director (Shumlin). At all times, Webster was the consummate professional, but “sometimes there was a thoughtful, observant look in her eye during rehearsals,” Seldes remarked.19 As soon as The High Ground closed in early March, Webster restaged The Taming of the Shrew with Maurice Evans and Claire Luce at City Center and agreed to direct Shaw’s Saint Joan for the Theatre Guild with Uta Hagen in the title role. Hagen was also listed in Red Channels. When the Guild notified their subscribers of the forthcoming production, some expressed alarm over the Guild’s employing such “controversial” artists as Margaret Webster and Uta Hagen. Reacting to the protests of a small number of subscribers, Lawrence Langner expressed his concerns to Webster. She responded with an impassioned letter: Page 234 → You are not buying from me my race (which happens to be Irish, Jewish and Anglo-Saxon), my religion (which happens to be a daily and active faith in God not attached to an organized Church), my voting affiliations (which have crossed the Republican and Democratic party lines in what used to be a system of “secret” ballot), my opinions of Hindemith, Saroyan or Picasso, nor my predilections as between the Giants and the Dodgers. You, and your subscribers, are buying my ability to direct St. Joan. They have no right whatever to make further enquiry and you have no right to require any further answer of me. She concluded with, You hired me to direct St. Joan. This happens to be a play about God. I happen to believe in God. If I didn’t I couldn’t direct the play. I further believe in what Shaw states as the theme of the play: “the protest of the individual soul against the interference of anyone …between the private man and his God.” If you don’t believe in this, don’t do the play. If you do, don’t ask me to excuse myself to half a dozen Theatre Guild subscribers. You can’t have it both ways.20 The revival of Saint Joan, produced in the Theatre Guild’s thirty-fourth season, opened at the Cort Theatre on October 4, 1951, approximately twenty months before Webster appeared before McCarthy’s subcommittee. Though Webster expressed disappointment in the production and Uta Hagen called it “ghastly,” Brooks Atkinson described Hagen’s performance as “radiant simplicity” and stated that Webster’s “brilliant” directing restored to the theater “its eminence as one of the public arts.”21 Then, the reversals began in earnest. Mady Christians was in New York rehearsing for a tour of Black Chiffon, a play by George Brandt. She became ill and was treated at Flower Hospital and then released. She went to her country home in New Canaan, Connecticut, to recuperate and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage there. She died three hours later at Norwalk General Hospital. Because she was one of the Red Channels listees, her name came to the attention of government agencies, whose investigators interviewed her in her apartment a month before her death. Friends and colleagues were convinced that persecution by FBI agents caused her ill health and death. The fact that she was blacklisted from radio and television held dark memories for her of Berlin in 1933. She was very much aware of how distinguished actors in Germany in the thirties vanished from cast lists without explanation,

never to work again.22 An outspoken antifascist and refugee from Hitler’s Germany, Christians Page 235 → became a U.S. citizen in 1939. That same year, she became the first theatrical star to make recordings, called “Talking Books,” for the sight-impaired and distributed by the Library of Congress. When she appeared in the leading role of the American-born wife of a German antifascist in Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine on Broadway in 1941, Brooks Atkinson wrote prophetically of her performance as “full of womanly affection and a crusader’s resignation to realities.”23 Christians earned her true distinction in John Van Druten’s I Remember Mama, in which she played the gentle, wise matriarch of a Norwegian-American family. The Drama League of New York cited her for the most distinguished performance of the 1944–45 season. The play ran for 720 performances (Christians did not miss a single performance), toured America, and traveled to London. She also appeared in films, including a film of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, worked in radio, and took part in a television broadcast entitled Ode to Liberty. Her final Broadway appearance was in 1949 as the wife in Strindberg’s The Father opposite Raymond Massey and Grace Kelly. Christians was named in Red Channels for activities that took place between 1941 and 1945. She was a guest of honor at a dinner sponsored by the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born and vice-chairman of the Women’s Division of the National Citizens Political Action Committee; signed an advertisement for Russian war relief published in the New York Times; and entertained at a meeting of the American Friends of the Chinese People. In addition, she had sponsored dinners for the Exiled Writers Committee of the League of American Writers, the American Committee to Save Refugees, and the United American Spanish Aid Committee. Following the publication of her name, offers of television shows were withdrawn. Christians faced unemployment and financial ruin. Her health declined, and she died within sixteen months of the booklet’s publication. Playwright Elmer Rice described the close of her life as “brought to an untimely end by the relentless, sadistic persecution to which she was subjected.” “No one who knew her,” he continued, “or who saw her during the last tortured months of her life can doubt that her death was hastened, if not actually caused, by small-souled witch-hunters who make a fine art of character assassination.”24 John Van Druten also expressed his outrage: “The persecution to which she was subjected, and which greatly speeded her death, was known to some extent within the theatre. I wonder whether the public who knew and loved her as a stage figure had any idea of it?”25 Actors’ Equity Association passed a unanimous resolution on behalf of Page 236 → their deceased council member (she served concurrently with Webster, from 1941 to 1951), recognizing “with sorrow and a sense of personal bereavement, the irreparable loss which the theatre has suffered in the death of Mady Christians.”26 Margaret Webster delivered the eulogy at a memorial service held on October 31 in the chapel of a funeral home on Madison Avenue and attended by some three hundred people, including Raymond Massey (Equity’s official representative), Eva Le Gallienne, John Van Druten, Elmer Rice, Wesley Addy, Sam Jaffe, Charlotte Greenwood, Willard Swire, and others. She followed it with a letter to the New York Times published on November 25, under the title “One More Word.” Mady Christians was always in her life a preventer of strife, never the cause of it. I do not think she would have wanted the position to be reversed now. Her death was unquestionably precipitated by the horrible fear of being denied the means of earning her living and by the shock consequent upon the recent and brutal evidences of this which she had suffered. She was never accused of anything. Those responsible never, I am sure, thought about her as a person. She was “on a list” and that was enough; she was accordingly refused employment. Whether or not this is a defensible procedure is a question which every man must settle with his own conscience and his own sense of God. Upon each answer, the pattern of our society depends.27

The death of Mady Christians was followed in May 1952 by the death at age thirty-nine of John Garfield, who had been called before HUAC and subjected to threats of indictment for perjury. Concerned about Webster’s future, friends advised her to go over her bookshelves and get rid of such incriminating books as John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, and to burn her diary along with letters written to her parents from the Soviet Union. Although Webster did not take the advice of her well-meaning friends to destroy these documents, she did remove the small, rust-colored folder, saved by her mother, containing her diary, letters, playbills, photographs, scenic postal cards, and newspaper clippings from the Moscow Daily News from her New York apartment. She placed the folder along with other possessions and memorabilia in Eva Le Gallienne’s garage in Weston. She wrote in pencil across the outside, “Russia/Destroy,” but the folder remained safely sequestered until it was found after Le Gallienne’s death in 1991. Page 237 → During 1952, Webster had no employment on Broadway. She filled her time lecturing and staging benefits. She and Le Gallienne had now lived together off and on for three years. Le Gallienne continued to complain that Webster was often absent from Weston, working on projects, and involved with her many coworkers and service organizations. In February 1952, their schedules finally permitted the two women to sail together to France for a six-month working vacation. They had planned and postponed the trip many times for various reasons, including their work commitments or Le Gallienne’s lack of money. Webster wanted to explore opportunities for work in London since there was little employment for her now in the United States. She also wanted to look for a place in England or France where they could retire together. Then, too, Webster was escaping the pain of her grief and bitterness over the death of Mady Christians and her anxieties over what the future held for her in the political climate of the day. Webster’s anxieties were exacerbated when she learned that the FBI had interviewed Le Gallienne’s neighbors in Weston, in an effort to investigate Webster’s subversive activities. Field agents in April 1951 noted that a “reliable” informant stated that Margaret Webster had been a supporter of the Communist Party in 1945. As concrete evidence of her subversion, the report further stated that she had directed productions of Richard II and an antiauthoritarian opera called Don Carlo.28 In France, Le Gallienne’s friend Alice De Lamar, an heiress whose father struck it rich in gold and copper mining, loaned them her Paris apartment and a stone cottage near Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France. In Paris, they explored the streets and bookshops. Webster bought a copy of a play by Viennese playwright Fritz Hochwalder, called Das Heilige Experiment, which had been translated into French as Sur la Terre comme au Ciel. Webster had a fondness for didactic writers who had something to say about faith, God, and the “dangers of having public opinion act in the place of law” to circumscribe an individual’s life and deprive him or her of a livelihood.29 Hochwalder, who was Jewish, had escaped from Hitler’s forces in his native Vienna in 1938 and settled in Switzerland. From there, he wrote plays with historical backgrounds that addressed strong moral issues applicable to present times. With the thought that she would approach Walter P. Chrysler Jr. as producer once they were back in New York, Webster encouraged Le Gallienne to prepare an English translation. Little is known about Webster’s seemingly offhand purchase of the play in a Parisian bookshop. Nonetheless, it appears that the recent fate of Vienna-born Mady Christians persisted in Webster’s grief-stricken thoughts. The choice of the Viennese Page 238 → playwright, his didactic play about the actions of wrongheaded authority, and a provocative English title (Le Gallienne’s translation was called The Strong Are Lonely) suggestive of the plight of the “strong” in unequal political contests, attest to the emotional and moral impact of Christians’s death. From Paris they traveled to the south of France. Webster’s troubles seemed far away in the cottage that looked out upon a neglected garden of roses and oleanders and overlooked olive groves and vineyards in the distance. As Webster and Le Gallienne explored the narrow streets of Saint-Paul, the artichoke fields, and the vineyards, they fell in love with the place and contemplated retiring there. Before leaving, Webster negotiated to buy a tiny stone cottage at La Colle-sur-Loup across the valley from Saint-Paul that served as a temporary haven in later months.

Le Gallienne relished the solitude of Saint-Paul, but Webster eventually grew restless and proposed a short trip to London, where she had friends and business appointments. They spent several weeks in London, but Le Gallienne grew tired of the round of dinner parties, sightseeing, and playgoing, and returned to De Lamar’s cottage to work on her new translation of Hochwalder’s play. When they sailed for home in July, Webster and Le Gallienne had been romantic partners for eleven years. They were like-minded in their appreciation of theater, literature, and music, but their political differences were cause for heated disagreements. Webster once described Le Gallienne as “just about the most nonpolitical creature I have ever known.” In fact, Webster often joked that her friend “had never wanted to vote for anyone but Napoleon.”30 Webster, on the other hand, was a Rooseveltian Democrat and subscribed to a variety of social and liberal causes. Their temperaments and needs were starkly different as well. Le Gallienne longed for a solitude and a companion with whom to share intellectual pursuits, but not one who paid her expenses. She did not want to be “kept” by Webster. Webster, on the other hand, needed to be surrounded by people and bustling activity, to be engaged in projects. During their extended vacation in France, each had discovered the limitations in their partnership. Le Gallienne expressed it best in her diary, fearing that she and Webster were “developing along different lines.”31 Her fears were soon to be realized. During the next two years, Webster and Le Gallienne staged benefits for the newly formed American Shakespeare Festival and Academy in Connecticut. Founded in 1951 by Lawrence Langner as a nonprofit, educational corporation, the Shakespeare theater and school were conceived as a summer Page 239 → theater with a touring company to be housed in a new theater patterned after Shakespeare’s Globe with approximately sixteen hundred seats. Langner, who lived in Westport, regarded Stratford, Connecticut, as the appropriate spot for the American equivalent of England’s Stratford-upon-Avon. He formed a prestigious board of trustees for the festival that included Lincoln Kirstein, founder of the New York City Ballet, and Joseph Verner Reed, longtime supporter of the performing arts and patron to both Webster and Maurice Evans. With a three-hundred-thousand-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in hand, the trustees set about raising an equal sum from other sources. They involved Webster and Eva Le Gallienne in their fund-raising efforts. Reed and Langner enlisted Webster and Le Gallienne to head a touring program of Shakespeare scenes to raise money for the proposed theater. To obtain the women’s full support, they suggested that the project would lead to important work for both at the new theater. Webster arranged the script, directed the scenes, and served as narrator and “general mortar between the bricks.” Le Gallienne headed the acting company. The first performance of An Evening with Will Shakespeare took place in December 1952 at the Parsons Theatre in Hartford with Le Gallienne, Claude Rains, Arnold Moss, Wesley Addy, Faye Emerson, Nina Foch, and Richard Dyer-Bennett in the cast. A cast recording was made, a version that was then repeated, again as a benefit, at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., with Webster (as narrator) and with Eva Le Gallienne, Basil Rathbone, Faye Emerson, and Viveca Lindfors. Although Reed and Langner sought advice from Webster and Le Gallienne, they were never invited to direct at the new American Shakespeare Theatre. Webster was asked in an emergency to “take over” rehearsals for Julius Caesar, which she did as a favor for Joseph Verner Reed. Otherwise, they were ignored. The day before she was to arrive in the nation’s capitol to perform An Evening with Will Shakespeare, Webster received the unwelcome news. For a second time, her application to renew her U.S. passport had been refused. Planning to return to La Colle-sur-Loup that summer, she had applied for a new one, and the State Department tentatively disapproved her application on April 23. She was profoundly shocked and found it strange to be on stage at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., exuding confidence and charm, appealing to a distinguished audience to support a national “cultural” project, knowing all the time that her government had branded her an “undesirable.” She fantasized that she should harangue the audience with, “Don’t listen to me, ladies and gentlemen. I’m a dangerous character. Page 240 →I’m not allowed out. I’m un-American.”32 Instead, she turned to Faye Emerson for help.

The actress had been married to Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, and knew the Washington political scene. She suggested that Webster contact Ruth B. Shipley, head of the Passport Division for the State Department. Webster’s attorney, Louis Nizer, advised her to answer any questions put to her by the passport officials. Upon request, she wrote out a statement summarizing her life story as she sat in the Passport Office in May. She got her passport renewed but not before the dour Mrs. Shipley chastised Webster for her infractions.33 Webster was given a loyalty oath to sign. She did so without hesitation because, as she said, “I am by nature a truth teller.”34 When Webster returned to New York City following the performance in Washington, D.C., she was served with a subpoena, signed by Joseph R. McCarthy, summoning her to appear at a private hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the Senate Office Building on May 25, 1953, at 2:30 P. M. The following morning, Webster went to Louis Nizer’s office and met Sidney Davis, who would be her attorney in the matter. She reviewed the testimony of several other witnesses, including the incriminating statements made by José Ferrer two years earlier. She was counseled about testifying. She could refuse to answer questions and become liable for contempt of Congress. She could give names to the committee and be dismissed as a cooperative witness with the faint hope of reemployment. She told Davis that neither alternative was open to her since she had “nothing to tell or refuse to tell.”35 She could plead the Fifth Amendment, which was widely viewed as an admission of guilt. Or she could plead a “diminished Fifth,” by which the witness answered questions concerning herself but not those concerning other people. This strategy had worked for Lillian Hellman but not for others. Webster believed that the “diminished Fifth” was morally acceptable but legally dubious, because “the names were the crux of the matter.”36 In general, the American public did not understand the dilemma of the witnesses. Once you answered a question that could be considered incriminating, you waived your right to plead the Fifth Amendment on lesser matters relating to this admission. If you admitted to having been a Communist, which was a crime, you could not plead the Fifth when asked the names of other Communists you might have known. The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, not against incriminating others. Lillian Hellman, who appeared before HUAC on May 21, 1952 (twelve months before Webster’s appearance), wrote to Chairman John S. Wood, Democrat from Georgia, with her now-famous statement reprinted in full Page 241 → in her personal account of her experience, called Scoundrel Time, declaring, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashion.”37 With great eloquence, she expressed the moral repugnance of forcing denunciations of friends and colleagues. She respectfully offered to answer any and all questions about herself but only if she was not required to answer questions about others. If the committee would not agree to these conditions, she would take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. The committee refused to enter into negotiations about what Hellman’s testimony would or would not be. She took the Fifth on questions regarding her membership in the Communist Party in the period between 1937 and 1949. Under the law, admission of Party membership followed by a refusal to name names assured a contempt citation and probably a prison sentence. The committee suffered one of its most severe and long-remembered public relations defeats at the hands of Hellman. Her moral victory came through her letter to Chairman Wood, which a committee member inexplicably moved to enter into the record. Hellman’s lawyer leaped to his feet and handed out copies of the letter to the press, infuriating the chairman. After an hour and ten minutes, Hellman was excused from further testimony before the committee. The next day’s headline in the New York Times read, “Lillian Hellman Balks House Unit.”38 Webster must have read in the newspapers about Hellman’s victory. She might have taken courage from the fact that the most famous woman playwright and director of the day, a far more controversial figure than Webster, had survived the ordeal. Nonetheless, fear overwhelmed her. If she answered questions about herself, she could be forced to answer questions about others. If she mentioned names, innocent people might suffer serious personal damage. What names could she produce with the least harm? Paul Robeson was certainly one possibility, since he had publicized his politics long ago. Webster chose the “diminished Fifth” and prayed for the best. In New York, Sidney Davis rehearsed her testimony with her. His ultimate warning was, never, never say “No.” Should she be asked, “Did you attend a certain meeting?” the answer must be, “I cannot remember doing so,” or

“Not so far as I can recall,” or “To the best of my recollection, no.”39 Vagueness was essential because the McCarthy committee’s chief legal counsel, Roy M. Cohn, would produce witnesses to contradict unequivocal statements and subject the individual to a charge of perjury. Louis Nizer asked Webster to draw up a verifiable statement about her life’s history, such as the one she had written for the Passport Office, and deposit it with the committee. In this statement she included thirty-one charities, including the United Jewish Appeal, the Salvation Army, the American Red Cross, Page 242 → the YWCA, and the American Civil Liberties Union, to which she had subscribed, and fifteen organizations for which she had worked. She left off the organizations already listed in Red Channels. Webster’s two-and-a-half-page statement begins with an apology for underrating the extent and power of the Communist movement in the United States. “I viewed the American Communists,” she wrote, “as a small set of ‘lunatic fringe’ cranks, who were completely ineffectual and worthy of nothing but contempt.” After reiterating her tireless support of the war effort, the Western allies, her work for allied war relief efforts, her devotion to world peace, and her service to the American theater “as a servant and exponent of all that is best in the American way of life,” she concluded, I can only say that I am a person who can only exist in the climate of freedom; that I have a most profound faith in the workings of democracy, especially among the American people, who, I do not for one moment think, can ever be seriously infected with any poisonous virus so alien to their whole way of life as Communism. I am quite sure that under any totalitarian regime I, personally, should be liquidated within a week. Regimentation, thought-control, physical cruelty, intimidation—every one of the processes of Communism are deeply and profoundly abhorrent to me and always have been. I would fight them with my life. Perhaps this must be apparent to everyone who had known me or worked with me; and that is why no-one has ever approached me with any attempt to convert me to the Communist faith. If there have been Communists among those with whom I have come in contact, they must always have been particularly careful to conceal the fact from me. I re-iterate hereby statements that I have already made and sworn to: I have never been a Communist of any kind or adherence or knowing affiliation in any shape or form.40 Webster and Davis arrived at the Senate Office Building for the 2:30 P. M. appointment on May 25 to be told that the hearing had been moved to the Senate Building so that the senators would be available to vote on a bill before Congress. It was a busy congressional day. Broadcast journalist Walter Winchell had reported that composer Aaron Copeland and director Margaret Webster were to appear before McCarthy’s subcommittee, and the corridor was lined with reporters. Webster and Davis waited for an hour and a half while the subcommittee questioned another witness. Webster recalled that “a small, rather shabby and very battered-looking couple emerged from the ‘office,’ ” and she and Davis were ushered inside.41 Webster had focused entirely on the several “suspect” organizations that Page 243 → had appeared beneath her name in Red Channels and on José Ferrer’s incriminating testimony. Ferrer had been queried about the many organizations, meetings, and individuals that were part of their shared past. It was logical for her to look at her wartime causes as the source of her present dilemma. Nonetheless, the reason she appeared before McCarthy’s subcommittee in May 1953 lay elsewhere. One of McCarthy’s favorite targets in 1953 was the U.S. State Department. At first, he embarked on a whirlwind investigation of the loyalty and security files held in the State Department. In mid-February, he turned his attention to the department’s information programs—first, the Voice of America, and, second, the overseas information program in general and its libraries in particular. The Voice of America had been under close congressional scrutiny since the 1940s for employing “suspect” persons. Powerful Republican leaders were convinced it was filled with “Communists, left wingers, New Dealers, radicals and pinkos.”42 Then McCarthy and his aides turned their attention to the State Department’s overseas information libraries. McCarthy envisioned the presence of books by “Communists, fellow-travelers, et cetera” in American libraries abroad.43

What followed in April was a whirlwind tour of American Information Centers by Roy Cohn and his friend G. David Schine. When they returned, McCarthy called before the subcommittee a long list of writers whose books and articles were found in the overseas libraries. Some were or had been Communists; others had no affiliations whatsoever. The Fulbright programs, named for Senator J. William Fulbright, which sent American artists and scholars abroad came under McCarthy’s scrutiny. It had become established practice, as it is today, for the Fulbright theater committee to invite experts to review the applications and to advise them on the merits of the applicants. Margaret Webster had been one of these experts. Like dozens before and after her, Webster was asked to review applications and auditions of Fulbright candidates for acting scholarships to study and travel abroad. Her association with the U.S. State Department and the Fulbright committee brought her to McCarthy’s attention. There is no doubt that the publication of her name in Red Channels and José Ferrer’s use of her name before HUAC resulted in McCarthy’s flagging Webster as a “suspect” individual to support his case against the Fulbright committee and its teacher-student exchange programs. On the day of her testimony, Dr. Napthali Lewis, a professor of classical languages at Brooklyn College, had preceded her into the witness chair. It was he and his wife, Helen B. Lewis, whom Webster had observed emerging from their hearing. Lewis had at one time been a translator for the former War Department, and his wife had once held a teaching position at Brooklyn College. He was a Page 244 → new recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to study ancient manuscripts at the University of Florence. The couple was suspected of being Communists, although Dr. Lewis denied in sworn testimony that he was a member of the Party. When asked about her Party membership, Helen Lewis took the Fifth Amendment. Unlike Webster, they were recalled to testify in public hearings on June 10 and 19, 1953. Thereafter, Lewis’s Fulbright award was rescinded by the State Department, as Senator McCarthy announced to the press, telling reporters that he thought the cancellation “an excellent idea.”44 Webster was, in fact, subpoenaed to help build McCarthy’s case against Fulbright and his powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As she was drawn into McCarthy’s vendetta, Webster apparently never realized the full truth underlying her ordeal on May 23.45 When she described her appearance before McCarthy’s committee in her autobiography, she showed no glimmer of understanding of the importance of her associations with the Fulbright committee. Her fears focused elsewhere. The Senate investigative subcommittee was composed of Republicans Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin (presiding), Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota, and Charles E. Potter of Michigan, and Democrats Henry M. (“Scoop”) Jackson of Washington, John L. McClellan of Arkansas, and Stuart Symington of Missouri. Webster’s hearing took place in the office of the Secretary of the Senate located at the end of a corridor that runs behind the Senate Chamber. The senators with the witness and her counsel sat around a long mahogany table in the woodpaneled room. Chairman McCarthy began the hearing with pro forma instructions about procedures but did not remain for the entire hearing. Roy Cohn took charge of the inquiry. Webster observed that Cohn and McCarthy looked “type-cast.”46 Dispensing with preliminary questions (place of birth, education, career facts), Cohn tackled the subcommittee’s agenda: “Miss Webster, do you have any connection with the exchange program of the State Department?”47 Writing about her experience nineteen years later, Webster did not recall Cohn’s opening volley, which revealed the reason she was seated at the table. According to her testimony, which was sealed for fifty years, she explained her work as both consultant and adjudicator for the theater area of the Fulbright Scholarship Division of the International Institute of Education over the previous four or five years. The committee was interested in whether or not she had made final decisions on the theater applicants (she had not), and if she had been asked to pass on “teachers.” (Napthali and Helen B. Lewis were the teachers referred to by Cohn.) “No, sir,” she Page 245 → responded to Senator McClellan. “All that we have ever been asked to do,” she said, “is rate the candidates [in acting auditions] according to our view of their ability and turn this material and our recommendations back to the institute.” “In fact, as I remember, I have not been officially informed of what their final decisions were. I have in instances grown to know that. I don’t think officially information has been returned to the jurors.” Finding this line of questioning unproductive, Cohn turned to Webster’s security status. He took up her connections with the committees listed in Red Channels.

MR. COHN. Miss Webster, have you belonged to a considerable number of Communist-front organizations? MISS WEBSTER. I have never belonged to any organization which I knew to be influenced or dominated by Communists. I would be very glad to answer any questions. Cohn ignored the offer and moved to ask about her sponsorship of the Committee for the Re-election of Benjamin Davis. “I have no recollection of it,” Webster answered. She spoke about Davis’s support of a scheme to create new types of theaters for New York City, a plan she favored. “What we want to ascertain,” Cohn interjected, “is whether or not you were a sponsor of this committee?” Webster’s Irish temper flared briefly: MISS WEBSTER. May I finish, sir? My recollection is that Mr. Davis came out for municipal support for a theatre in New York and that scheme was endorsed by a number of people in the theatre field, including myself. I have no further recollection than that. Cohn insisted that she had sponsored a Communist Party candidate for reelection. There were several points of clarification among the senators about Davis’s candidacy before Symington intervened to ask the anticipated question: “Have you ever been a Communist?” MISS WEBSTER. No, sir, at no time nor am I now. Cohn turned to what he described as a subversive organization, the People’s Radio Foundation, in which Webster was a stockholder. Webster recollected that she had supported the objectives of the radio station as a public service program for trade unions, radio, and so on, and that she had agreed to take a share of stock (which she never received) and that she had declined to serve on the board of directors of the foundation. Page 246 → Cohn’s roll call of “subversive” committees included the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, the American [sic] Council of American-Soviet Friendship, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Spanish Refugee Relief Committee, and the American Committee to Save Refugees. Although several of these committees had long since dissolved in the chilly climate of the Cold War, Webster was steadfast. In response to queries about them, she insisted she had “never been a member,” had no “recollection of the organization,” or had “no recollection” of an event or date. Moreover, she took refuge in the confusion of titles for the various committees and subcommittees. Asked if she had been connected with the American Committee to Save Refugees, she replied that she did not “recognize that title at all.” MR. COHN. Were you a sponsor of the National Conference of Civil Rights held in Chicago November 21 to November 23, 1947, as reported in the Daily Peoples World on November 28th? MISS WEBSTER. I have no recollection of that. If you want me to amplify any connections I may have had I think one time I made a donation to it, possibly more, for specific cases for which it didn’t appear to me to have any connections with communism, nor did I know that it was Communist infiltrated or influenced. The answer that I made to that appeal were for specific cases, which appeared to me to be laudable and in no way blameworthy. I think that I must also say that I was insufficiently familiar with the workings of the organization and for a long time I confused it completely with the American Civil Liberties Union. Sometime in the beginning of 1948 they wrote to me and asked me to become a member of their board of directors, which I refused to do. At that time I think the Communistic tendencies were becoming apparent. Cohn returned to a speech that she was reported by the Daily Worker to have delivered before the American Committee to Save Refugees. “Do you recall that?” Cohn asked. MISS WEBSTER. You asked me that before. That is about a specific speech. I have no recollection of that

organization, sir. Then, as lawyers advised most witnesses to do, she gave the committee something. She volunteered her connections with two of the organizations—the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, for which she was chairman of the Theatre Committee, and the Joint Anti-Fascist Page 247 → Refugee Committee, for which she had made appeals for funds for charitable purposes on several occasions during 1943 to 1947. Although she insisted that she had never served on boards for these committees, she had been a “sponsor” and had attended public events sponsored by the groups. She offered to elaborate her reasons for support of these organizations, but the senators were not interested. She proceeded to make a statement ostensibly for the record: MISS WEBSTER. I would like to state now that I, myself, did none of those things through any influence on me of Communists or Communism and that to my knowledge, as far as I am aware, those organizations were not at the time dominated or used for Communist purposes and the reasons for which I was connected with them was not for Communistic purposes. Weary of the litany of front organizations, Senator McClellan returned to the purpose of the proceeding: “As I gather from your testimony, it was not part of your regular duties to pass on and approve applicants for this Exchange Student Service for the Fulbright Scholarship?” MISS WEBSTER. No, sir. My understanding is that the relevant committee—the International Institute of Education—invites experts in the different fields to pass on the qualifications of applicants in the different fields. I could give you some of the names of the people who have been associated with me. SENATOR McCLELLAN. Primarily you were only called in the theatre field, is that right? MISS WEBSTER. That is correct. SENATOR McCLELLAN. You have not had responsibility for or an assignment to pass upon student applicants other than in that area? MISS WEBSTER. No, sir. SENATOR McCLELLAN. You would not be asked to pass on teachers? MISS WEBSTER. No, sir. McClellan continued to press the issue of decision-making responsibilities. “Then in your position you haven’t had the final decision to make as to whether applicants are accepted or rejected?” MISS WEBSTER. No, sir. SENATOR McCLELLAN. That has not been your responsibility at any time—only to act in an observing capacity and submit recommendations? MISS WEBSTER. Yes, sir. Page 248 → Weary of McClellan’s point of attack, Senator Jackson returned to her associations with Communists and pressed her again on her sympathies. She replied, “I have always been opposed to the Communist philosophy, its practices. It is a horror to me. In such a society I wouldn’t last a week.”

Senators Jackson and McClellan decided that Webster had been forthright in her responses, a loyal American, not knowingly associated with Communists, although perhaps she had been taken in by some groups. “I couldn’t deny that possibility,” she said. The senators were winding down an investigation that had produced nothing of interest and certainly no witness to be used against the Fulbright program. Nonetheless, Cohn was not to be denied two final points. MR. COHN. Did I ask you about the Civil Rights Congress? MISS WEBSTER. I refused to join the board. I did make one or two contributions. When they asked me to join them, I refused to. MR. COHN. Did you sign a letter prepared by the Civil Rights Congress attacking the Subversive Control Act of 1948, which letter was published with your signature in the Daily Worker ? MISS WEBSTER. I would think that extremely doubtful. MR. COHN. Did you object to the Subversive Control Act? MISS WEBSTER. Which was the Subversive Control Act? There was [sic] so many of them. “That is all, Miss Webster,” Cohn said and the hearing was adjourned. To her everlasting relief, Webster was not called back for a public hearing. Writing her autobiography, Don’t Put Your Daughter on Stage, nineteen years later, Webster related very few specifics of the hearing. The records of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations were sealed for fifty years. In the absence of a transcript of her testimony, she essentially rewrote the script of her ordeal. Her autobiography recalled her preparations for the hearing. Those rehearsals required her to confront the requirement to name names before the committee and the certainty that there would be questions about her associations with the reelection of Benjamin Davis and with the self-proclaimed Communist sympathizer Paul Robeson. These preparations—the actor’s rehearsals—remained lodged in memory and shaped the retelling of her experience. As a creative individual who had adapted a number of scripts for the stage, Webster was now telling the story of one of the most crucial momentsPage 249 → of her life. Without the verbatim testimony before her, she re-created dialogue between herself and the other players in a drama where she was a minor character in a tragedy of national scope. Writing with a sense of the dramatic, Webster attributed to Roy Cohn probing questions about names. The first concerned the Spanish Refugee Appeal dinner in 1945 with speakers José Ferrer and Dame May Whitty. Had she been present at the dinner? Yes, along with three hundred other people. Had she been present at a cultural conference sponsored by the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship? In response to this question, Webster recalled naming the recently deceased orchestral conductor Serge Koussevitsky. In actual fact, when Cohn asked her if she had ever been a member of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, she named her one and only name. She confirmed that she had been chairman of the Theatre Committee at the time when Koussevitsky was chairman of the Music Committee—his name was already a matter of public record. In Webster’s script, the stenographer asked her to spell the name of the famous conductor and she did so with aplomb. Webster recollected Roy Cohn’s manner as abrupt and slightly abusive, but she incorrectly recalled Cohn’s question about her sponsorship of a dinner for the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born in New York City on April 17, 1943. (She had answered under oath, “I have no recollection of that.”) As she reprised her responses in 1971, she fabricated the dialogue: Had she attended the dinner held by the National

Council of American-Soviet Friendship group? Who was there? Yes, she attended and sat between Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko and Thomas J. Watson, president of IBM. What had been said? “I hoped,” Webster reported saying, “we could send an American theatre company to play in Moscow after the war situation had settled; Mr. Gromyko had replied that he hoped so too.”48 There is an endearing mix in the memoir between fact and dramatic license. In the arena of dramatic license, Webster reported that “McCarthy shot a question or two.” In fact, it was unlikely that McCarthy remained for the entire “private” hearing of a minor witness since he was already engaged in preparations for the Army-McCarthy hearings, as they were later called. The transcript reveals the chairman’s presence only at the beginning of Webster’s testimony, not during the proceedings or at the end. She accurately recalled Cohn’s questions to her about voting for Benjamin Davis but recorded that he also asked her about Paul Robeson—the “no-evasion name.” “I believe you were the director of a production of Othello in 1944 with Paul Robeson?” “Yes,” she replied. At this point in herPage 250 → autobiographical version, John McCelland, growing tired of the pointless testimony and Cohn’s brusque manner, moved to adjourn the hearing. As everyone began to leave, Joe McCarthy told her that she was “an OK American after all.”49 “McCarthy held out his hand. To my eternal regret, I took it.” Her version of the hearing, the accuracy or inaccuracy of these crucial moments of her personal history, could not be challenged until the unsealing of the committee testimony. Her account, published in 1972 shortly before her death, could not have been precisely reconstructed without viewing the transcript of the hearing. Her chapter “Of Witch-Hunting” takes its place beside other documents written by participant-witnesses that described the roiling storm clouds of McCarthyism over Broadway in the early 1950s. Despite her exercise of authorial license, Webster captured the truth of the emotional stresses, along with the fear, outrage, disgrace, mistrust, and humiliations that the victims of the witch-hunt experienced. She detailed the role of Actors’ Equity in the Red scare, the loss of employment, and the untimely deaths of artists like Mady Christians, Philip Loeb, and John Garfield. Lillian Hellman called the McCarthy era “scoundrel time,” Stefan Kanfer referred to it as the “plague years,” and Webster described the runaway train of fear and paranoia that carried Broadway artists away from vital careers and productive lives as “a miserable business from first to last.”50 Although she was writing in the last year of her life under the effects of strong painkillers and was deprived of the verbatim testimony, Webster’s screen memory of the larger experience did not fail her. With a profound sense of personal regret and a cognizance of history (she prefaces the chapter with a quotation from Edmund Burke’s 1770 “Cause of the Present Discontents”), she framed the story of her personal crisis with concern for the future welfare of individual liberties: The story that I shall try to tell …is personal and small; it took place only on the periphery of the main events; it is not a story of which I am proud. But I think it needs to be told, partly because it now seems so utterly incredible, but even more because we need to be reminded that, incredible or no, it could happen again; not in the same framework or with the same weapons, but under the same pressures of insecurity, ambition, hatred, and above all—fear; always, and on both sides, fear.51 Webster’s fear lingered as she returned, alone, from Washington, D.C., to her New York apartment. The threat of indictment for perjury chilled her toPage 251 → the marrow. It was not just fear of inadvertently saying “no.” It was anxiety over public humiliation and much more. Grief-stricken by Mady Christians’s early death and afraid of imprisonment for the “good causes” she had supported, Webster also feared public exposure of her sexual orientation. The witch-hunts of the 1950s conflated alleged forms of political and personal degeneracy, namely Communism and homosexuality. It is not unrealistic to think that Webster risked standing before the Senate subcommittee not only branded as a traitor and subversive but also as a “sexual pervert.” “To be afraid is a very humiliating experience,” she later wrote. “But to be afraid in spite of your mind, your reason, your convictions, despising what you fear, despising yourself for fearing it …that is a very evil thing.”52

As she replayed her statements in her mind on the return trip to New York, she wondered if she had given an interview to the reporter with the Daily Worker, or if she had, indeed, been a sponsor for the Committee for the Re-election of Benjamin Davis. Would a perjury charge follow after all? The actor’s training in her kicked in and she observed herself in the moment: “I noted that one was cold, and one’s nostrils stiffened, that the marrow of one’s bone really did feel curiously soft.”53 The objective observer within told her that she would be “OK” after all, but not quite. Webster wrote in her autobiography that “no one touched the blacklist, witch-hunt pitch, without being lessened and to some degree defiled.” She considered her career “undermined, if not ostensibly broken.”54 Her friend and admirer Brooks Atkinson summed up her situation by saying that “her Broadway career was permanently tarnished. She never again could work with the scope and exuberance of her early years on Broadway.”55 No small part of Webster’s depression and heartbreak was the failure of Eva Le Gallienne to appear at the Twelfth Street apartment when she returned from the hearing. Nor did Webster see her friend for two days and then only when Le Gallienne came to the city to keep other appointments. Nonetheless, they talked by telephone. Le Gallienne had been impatient with the paranoia and hysteria generated by the congressional hearings in general and with Webster’s clamorous fear in particular. She advised Webster to calm down and trust that her “integrity was so shining that no harm could come to her.”56 The women had often quarreled over Le Gallienne’s detached politics. Nevertheless, when Webster returned from her ordeal, she needed not a rehashing of politics but loving support from her partner and closest friend. Le Gallienne was neither physically nor emotionally present, and that “broke her heart.”57 From Le Gallienne’s viewpoint, Webster was being melodramatic about the seriousness of the McCarthy hearings. Le Gallienne wrote in her diary: “I think she [Webster] was annoyed with me because I couldn’t seem to feelPage 252 → it was all sinister and totalitarian-statist as she believes it to be…. I feel she thinks I’m a vague selfish ostrich hiding my head in the sand & refusing to see reality. Maybe she’s right.” Webster, in turn, found her friend “cold & self-centered and stupidly unaware of the danger.”58 Le Gallienne offered to take her exhausted friend to Weston, but Webster decided as a temporary measure to leave the country that had unfairly persecuted her. Webster, who had inherited from May Whitty and was financially comfortable, asked Le Gallienne to go to England with her, but she refused, saying that she couldn’t afford the trip. Webster offered to pay their expenses in London and Europe, but Le Gallienne refused her generosity. On June 6, 1953, the week following her dismissal by McCarthy’s subcommittee, Webster sailed alone to England. Her friend composer Lehman Engel (they had worked consistently together since Hamlet, and she had written the foreword to his book Music for Classical Tragedy) also lived on Twelfth Street and took her in a taxi to the ship. Engel saw her off on the Constitution, a ship whose name held great irony for a passenger who hoped the great ship would lend her more personal protection than its namesake had done for an entire year. Webster planned to spend the summer in her stone cottage at La Collesur-Loup. To occupy her time, she wrote an article about Rudolf Bing and worked on the New York production of The Strong Are Lonely. Her cousin Jean Webster Brough came to stay with her, and they drove through France and Brittany before returning to London. Hurt by Le Gallienne’s lack of empathy, she realized they would not build a life together. The McCarthy hearing had been the catalyst to force this realization, although there had been other manifestations of their physical and emotional estrangement in recent years. Other people and events were to intervene shortly. Upon her return to New York, Webster directed Le Gallienne’s translation of Hochwalder’s The Strong Are Lonely for Broadway. With designs by Rolf Gérard and music by Lehman Engel, the play went into rehearsal for a September 29 opening at the Broadhurst Theatre and closed after seven performances. Despite an excellent cast that featured Wesley Addy, Paul Ballantyne, Victor Francen, and Dennis King, the drama was found to be without “dramatic substance”; others found it pedestrian despite the “lucid strength” that Webster brought to the staging.59 During rehearsals, Webster was subjected to an FBI interview. She had been investigated as a security matter in 1951 as a “concealed communist” and became the subject of multiple FBI files in the Washington and New York

offices. Moreover, the New York office proceeded to draft a memorandumPage 253 → recommending that a Security Index card be prepared in her name. An index card cataloging her as a security risk to be rounded up for detention during a national emergency was filed on June 5, 1951.60 During an orchestra rehearsal on the day of the opening, Webster and Lehman Engel were in the basement of the Broadhurst Theatre. The musicians had just taken a break when she heard footsteps on the stairs. Two “heavily disguised, instantly recognizable types” appeared. Webster recalled, They stood silently. I went over and asked what they wanted. The badge-showing took place. They had to talk to me. Not just now, I said; after the opening night. Obligingly, they said I might come to their office on Broadway. We made a date.61 Webster’s version combines two interviews with the FBI into a single encounter. She had two sessions with agents, the first in the Broadhurst Theatre on September 29 and the second on December 16 in the FBI’s New York office. When questioned, she explained her participation in the Communist front organizations as charitable endeavors for humanitarian purposes and swore that she ended any affiliation once she became aware of their “Communist domination.” Moreover, she reminded the agents that she had submitted a statement to McCarthy’s subcommittee in which she denied any affiliation with the Communist Party. When Webster asked if they had reviewed the file containing her testimony, they alleged that they had not. She handed them a copy of the statement saying, “You’re supposed to know everything and be the guardians of our liberties.” Webster recalled lecturing the agents: “Go take a look and I’ll be happy to fill in the missing bits; but don’t let’s play the same script over again.”62 In an effort to solicit names, the agents mentioned Aline Bernstein, the distinguished set and costume designer who had worked with Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre and the Theatre Guild and with Herman Shumlim on Lillian Hellman’s plays in the thirties, including The Children’s Hour and The Little Foxes. They called her “Alice Berkstine.” Webster asked them if “they knew she was partially paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair and, possibly, close to death.” They accepted the fact that she was “probably not very dangerous.”63 Aline Bernstein died two years later. Following the two interviews, the bureau recommended that Margaret Webster’s name be removed from the Security Index, and she was told that her file was closed.64 Asked to confirm that fact in writing for any future employer, they said that they could not provide such a letter because “it was classified information.”65 Page 254 → Despite the “closed” investigation that she had endured the previous May, Webster learned in July that she was blacklisted from employment in film. Her New York agent Charles Green told her that she had an offer from Twentieth Century Fox to direct the Shakespearean scenes in a film about Edwin Booth, called Prince of Players, starring Richard Burton. Then the film company learned that Webster was “still active in associations that are on the Attorney General’s subversive list.”66 The offer was rescinded, with apologies assuring her of “the fullest admiration.” Webster recommended Le Gallienne for the job. She became the consultant and eventually played Gertrude to Richard Burton’s Hamlet. Webster, who now held memberships only in Actors’ Equity Association, the Blue Cross Insurance Company, and the Martha’s Vineyard Community Service organization, consulted her lawyers. They advised that she do nothing because the FBI never gave clearance, “since its sole purpose was investigative and it must refrain from appraising, evaluating or basing conclusions upon the evidence obtained by it.” Paul Martinson, writing on behalf of the law firm, suggested that she not write to the FBI office in New York City where her file was located because a “general inquiry would produce no results and be of no help.”67 There being no other commercial employment on the horizon, Webster agreed to direct a production of Richard III for producer Jean Dalrymple with City Center. Dalrymple began as an actress in vaudeville, then worked with

producer John Golden, and eventually formed her own publicity agency in the late forties. By 1953, she had become general director of the City Center Drama Company, a position she would hold for the next fifteen years. José Ferrer, Webster’s Iago from both Othello and the congressional hearings, was set to play another villain—King Richard. Webster fleshed out a remarkable cast with Vincent Price, Paul Ballantyne, Maureen Stapleton, Florence Reed, John Straub, Staats Cotsworth, and Margaret Wycherly. The production opened on December 9, 1953, and, like the opera productions at City Center, was afflicted with limitations on production budgets and rehearsal time. Although he had kind words for Webster’s “intelligent” staging, Brooks Atkinson found the production uneven and Ferrer’s performance inferior to his celebrated, Tony Award–winning performance as Cyrano de Bergerac a decade earlier. Webster closed the year by directing Richard III with José Ferrer, who had named her to HUAC as a “communist sympathizer,” playing Shakespeare’s arch villain. In her writings, Webster never dwelled upon his treachery, mentioning only in passing that she directed Richard III for next to nothing. It is true that Webster was desperate to continue working. In this instance, to direct Richard III at City Center was to direct Ferrer, who was withoutPage 255 → commercial employment in the 1953–54 season and had signed a contract with Dalrymple’s company to appear in four plays: Cyrano de Bergerac, The Shrike, Richard III, and Charley’s Aunt. Webster and Ferrer were working together in a play about the perfidy of ambition and the allies of tyranny—”the men who always make tyranny possible,” according to Webster. When she wrote Shakespeare without Tears, she described Richard as “every sort of villain and we know it; but we cannot resist him.” In the play Shakespeare [has] given us an amazing gallery of portraits, the men who make dictatorship possible. We ourselves have seen all of these people. We have seen the dictators who climbed on their shoulders to the summits of absolute power.68 In 1942, Webster was writing with Adolf Hitler in mind. In 1953, she had in mind a different gallery of rogues, featuring a leading actor who had laid waste to her peaceable kingdom, or at least helped to do so. Following her treatment at the hands of McCarthy’s subcommittee and the industry’s persistent blacklisting, Webster wrote her own valedictory: “Professionally, I have no doubt that my so-called ‘career’ was undermined…. All in all, my life did, very profoundly, change after those years, and in part as a result of them.”69 There is more to Webster’s story in the midfifties than McCarthyism, blacklisting, professional isolation, and personal loss. The American theater was changing in its players, subjects, finances, and real estate. Broadway theater in the fifties ranged from musicals (Guys and Dolls, The King and I) to thrillers (Dial M. for Murder, Witness for the Prosecution) to realistic dramas (Picnic, A View from the Bridge, The Diary of Anne Frank, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) to stylish comedies (Gigi, The Four Poster, The Seven Year Itch). All the new directors were men: Garson Kanin, Frank Cosaro, Martin Ritt, José Quintero, Herbert Berghof, Alan Schneider, and others. Shakespearean productions were imported from London’s West End or the Old Vic and featured Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, John Neville, and Lawrence Harvey. The Theatre Guild with its subscription audiences and national tours was winding down as a major theatrical force. Meanwhile, Actors’ Equity Association formally recognized off-Broadway in 1950. By working with the unions, they set regulations for theaters with less than three hundred seats and located outside the official theater district. (As a member of the Equity Council, Webster had worked hard to create this second tier of professional theaters in New York City.) People whoPage 256 → worked off-Broadway were interested in an alternative kind of theater and viewed the opportunity to do serious theater as more important than large salaries. The kind of classical repertory theater that Webster knew and loved was financially impossible in New York City, as she, Le Gallienne, and Cheryl Crawford had found out in the late forties. The new entrepreneurs had gravitated to the nonprofit arena, the majority of them far from New York critics and trade unions. Margo Jones and Nina Vance pioneered the nonprofit regional movement in Dallas and Houston in 1947. Zelda Fichandler and others

opened Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 1950; and fellow Briton Tyrone Guthrie established his successful repertory theater, the Guthrie Theatre, in Minneapolis in 1963. By the 1970s other professional nonprofit theaters had spread from Boston to Seattle and onto university campuses. Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival was the exception. Founded in 1954 as the Shakespeare Workshop, his vision of presenting “free” theater with multiracial casts to diverse audiences found a permanent home in 1962 at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. He called this new organization the New York Shakespeare Festival. In retrospect, those few years of turmoil and loss profoundly changed Webster’s life. Her cousin Jean Webster Brough died in London in April 1954. Webster arrived in London just in time to say good-bye to the last of her Webster relatives and to the final member of the famous Brough theater clan. Webster’s health was also deteriorating. Increasingly, she was afflicted with bronchitis and flulike symptoms to the degree that her doctors recommended that she stop smoking. She had tried earlier but found the longtime habit difficult to escape. The year 1953 had been a devastating one for Webster, but at its close she grew fortunate in the currents of her personal life. As her professional bonds with Eva Le Gallienne loosened and her romantic bonds gave way, a new friendship grew stronger. The shifting sands of this new relationship took her to London and to fourteen years of “total happiness” with Pamela Frankau.70

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CHAPTER 11 UNFINISHED BUSINESS What is necessary to succeed in this profession? The courage of a lion, the strength of an elephant, and the hide of a rhinoceros. —DAME MADGE KENDALL Following her experiences with the FBI, the U.S. Passport Office, and McCarthy’s subcommittee, Webster sought refuge in the late fifties from the blacklist and from a changing Broadway in England’s repertory companies and with City Center’s theater and opera companies. Commuting between London and New York with work on both continents, she was never again to think of herself as a permanent resident of the United States, although she was a U.S. citizen and owned property on Martha’s Vineyard. Following her ordeal in 1953, Webster was angry and depressed about her future. She was not alone. There was celebration among the witnesses when the U.S. Senate censured Joseph R. McCarthy in 1954. Nonetheless, his cause was taken up by an organization called AWARE, formed by Vincent Harnett, one of the compilers of Red Channels. AWARE issued a periodic report on “suspect” individuals and maintained a “subversives” list. Their target was the television industry. Laurence Johnson, a supermarket magnate from Syracuse, New York, joined with Harnett’s forces to intimidate television sponsors by threatening to exclude their products from his supermarket chains if “subversive” actors appeared on their programs. The networks were intimidated to the degree that all individuals had to be “cleared” before they could work with or appear on the network.1 Page 258 → As late as 1958, Joseph Papp, then a stage manager for CBS, was subpoenaed to appear before Congressman Morgan M. Moulder’s subcommittee for the Committee on Un-American Activities at the U.S. Courthouse in downtown Manhattan. Although encouraged to name names, he answered questions only about himself. Once excused by the subcommittee, he was told by CBS that he was fired. Papp appealed to his union, the New York chapter of the Radio and Television Directors Guild, who challenged CBS on his behalf. After much legal maneuvering, he was reinstated. Echoing many of those who had gone before, Papp recalled, “The worst thing about it was the fear. Once you were linked with HUAC, people were afraid to talk to you. It was as though you had a contagious disease.”2 The power of the blacklist was not destroyed until 1962 when John Henry Faulk brought a suit for libel and conspiracy and won over three million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages. The revelations during the Faulk case of the power and persuasiveness of blacklisting were at last made evident to the press and public alike. Stefan Kanfer in A Journal of the Plague Years noted that the blacklist had at last proved unprofitable.3 It was too late to restore the former brilliance of Margaret Webster’s career. Her age and gender, her declining health, and the perception of her staging as old-fashioned worked against her reentry into the Broadway world with the same exuberance as before. With a deep sense of loss, Webster was resigned: “I was sure, anyway, that Broadway was never again going to be a place where I could earn a living doing the kind of thing I wanted to do.”4 At first, Webster filled the vacuum with lecture and recital tours to town halls and college campuses from Philadelphia and San Francisco to Milledgeville, Georgia, and Chickasha, Oklahoma. These lectures were, in fact, solo performances (called recitals in those days) given in gymnasiums, chapels, ballrooms, and even basketball arenas. Her lectures on Shakespeare developed into a solo performance called His Infinite Variety. She developed

two more recital performances from the plays, letters, and prefaces of George Bernard Shaw and from the novels and lives of the Brontë sisters. Eventually, she was to play The Brontës in theaters in London and New York and on television. Webster’s recital tours took place over ten to twelve weeks. Since her first lecture tour in 1940, many things about the road had changed. Air travel had superseded trains and motels had taken the place of boardinghouses, but the food, audiences, and auditoriums had changed very little. Webster had transformed her “talks” about Shakespeare’s plays into solo performances that could be stretched to two hours or compressed to forty minutes. She added the George Bernard Shaw performance (“more tiringPage 259 → than Shakespeare”) to give herself more variety and flexibility in dealing with different kinds of audiences, from schoolchildren to women’s clubs. “I felt increasingly that I accomplished more by illustration than by precept,” she said. Moreover, she enjoyed it a lot more.5 In her writings on the “business” of the solo performer, Webster fore-shadowed the work of such successors as Hal Holbrook, Julie Harris, Spalding Gray, and Pat Sweeney. “The temptation,” she said, “is to show and not be.”6 “You don’t have to look the part or wear costumes (a basic garment is required and a scarf, hat, or prop alters the picture).” Her technique was formal. She described her solo work as somewhat “old-time magic-lantern” lecturer. Explaining her process, she said: “Here is Katherine of Aragon explain, briefly and then go into the speech. The first bit is objective, the second is subjective and …inside Katherine’s head.” The solo performer must also know where the other characters in the play are standing or sitting on stage. “As Charlotte Brontë, I am always aware of Emily, sitting in that chair on the other side of the table,” she explained. The actor’s total concentration is an absolute despite the scraping of chairs, ringing of school bells, clicking of cameras, and the blinding of fluorescent lighting: “The degree of concentration required to sustain a one-man show is total; break it, and you are lost.”7 Webster found many rewards in her solo work, especially among the schoolchildren and college-age audiences, but few were monetary. She complained to her New York agent about her minimal fees and the tour expenses that she paid out of pocket. Then, too, she worried about the impact of solo performance on her craft. “Too much of this one-man-show business is not, I think, very good for the actor. He tends to become a puppeteer…. Besides,” she confessed, “the nervous concentration of this lonely performing is enormously tiring.”8 It was not the constant traveling, the bad food, the difficult hosts, the awkward spaces, or oftentimes desultory audiences that she found disagreeable and even discouraging. The gregarious Webster needed companionship both on and off stage. The lack of fellowship left her depressed, and she eventually concluded, “The life of an itinerant lecturer is not a happy one.”9 When pressed to explain why she persisted with the touring, she gave an idealistic answer: “To keep language a live and beautiful thing …is important. People are still moved and astonished by the power and music of fine words set in order.” She avoided the obvious explanations: Webster’s solo performances provided work during a meager period in her career and were affordable, low-budget efforts. They also kept Webster the actress at center stage and in control of the production values. Page 260 → In the late spring of 1954, Webster began what a friend called her “Transatlantic Schizophrenia.”10 Following her ordeal with McCarthy’s subcommittee, she spent the summer of 1953 recuperating in the stone cottage in La Colle sur Vence near Saint-Paul in the south of France. She returned to New York in August to prepare The Strong Are Lonely for its Broadway opening in September. During this period, Webster and Le Gallienne patched up their disagreements and Le Gallienne welcomed her back into her Weston home with a bouquet of flowers and a year’s supply of Eau de Verveine perfume. Le Gallienne even purchased a new bed for Webster and placed it opposite her own. During Webster’s two-month absence, they had exchanged letters several times a week. Their correspondence was to continue for the remainder of Webster’s life. She now wrote long, chatty letters to Le

Gallienne, just as she had written to her mother beginning with those faraway boarding school days. Le Gallienne saved Webster’s letters over the remaining eighteen years of Webster’s life. Nonetheless, their relationship had lost much of its romantic intensity and unqualified trust. Although Webster staged The Strong Are Lonely and Richard III following her experience with the Senate subcommittee, she remained blacklisted and was unable to work in television and film. She was restless, and some time during 1953 she met novelist Pamela Frankau in the United States following the death of Ethel Harriman, Frankau’s partner for many years.11 Frankau became the true love of Webster’s middle years. When Webster learned that her cousin Jean Webster Brough was dying of cancer, she returned to London to be with her last relative on both sides of the family. Brough died on April 30, 1954, at age fifty-three. Daughter of Lizzie Webster and Sydney Brough, she had been an actress, like her parents, and, during the 1940s worked in the Ensa office at Drury Lane Theatre with Lilian Braithwaite and Sybil Thorndike. Like Webster, she wrote a family memoir, called Prompt Copy, largely about her Brough relatives. It was published two years before her death. Distracted by her cousin’s death, Webster had an automobile accident in London but was not injured. She made plans to return to the cottage in France where she had often retreated from life’s severities. This time was different. She wrote to Le Gallienne that she was taking her new friend Pamela with her to France. Le Gallienne noted in her diary that Frankau’s name was appearing more frequently in Webster’s letters with greater and greater details about their travels together. In July, Webster wrote to Le Gallienne that she and Pamela had decided to make a “brief dash” to Venice. “Pamela insisted that her winnings at the Casino …will pay our joint fares.”12 Le Gallienne became concerned. In Webster’s absence she now realized how much she missed her ebullient and knowledgeable friend. Page 261 → “Perhaps I’m imagining things,” she confided to her diary, “but I have a sort of hunch—could be wrong though.”13 At forty-six, Pamela Frankau was an attractive woman of medium height with dark, graying hair who, as a popular writer of over thirty novels, exuded warmth and charm. She was noted for her entertaining wit, her good nature, and steadfast devotion to friends. She was the daughter of the well-known novelist Gilbert Frankau, and sister to Ursula, whose pen name was Mary Nicholson. She was educated at Burgess Hill School, Sussex, and lived with her mother and sister in Windsor after her parents’ marriage broke up. Declining a place at Cambridge, she worked as a journalist with the Amalgamated Press, as subeditor on Woman’s Journal, and published her first novel Marriage of Harlequin in 1927 when she was nineteen. Her equilibrium was shattered when her lover of nine years, the poet Humbert Wolfe, died suddenly from heart failure in 1940. During the Second World War, Frankau served with the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service and fell in love with a female officer. She was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1942 and married a U.S. naval intelligence officer, Marshall Dill Jr., of San Francisco, in 1945. Their one child died in infancy. The marriage collapsed, but there was no divorce because of Frankau’s Roman Catholicism. Friends said that she often appeared capricious and careless, especially with her financial affairs. She loved to gamble (she herself admitted a “congenital gambling instinct”) and was inordinately generous to friends.14 When Webster first met her, Frankau had recently published her most acclaimed novel, The Willow Cabin, about a woman who abandons her brilliant stage career to become the mistress of a distinguished, older surgeon. The novel drew upon her life with Humbert Wolfe. Although she was a popular novelist and frequent Book Society choice, there was a fundamental seriousness underlying her work. Her mystery thrillers and Galsworthian portraits of people and society were underscored by moral overtones and satirical asides. Upon their return to London, Webster lived with Frankau in her flat at 137 Grove End Gardens in St. John’s Woods. In 1957, they bought a two-story Victorian house at 55 Christchurch Hill, a short walk from Hampstead Heath and near the large flat belonging to Frankau’s cousin, Diana Raymond, at The Pryors on East Hampstead

Road. Number 55 stands on the corner of the Christchurch Hill and New End. The spire of Christchurch soars above it, and the church clock chimes the hours. Receiving a telegram addressed to “No. 55 Christ/Churchill,” Frankau remarked, “With those two characters on our side, how can I lose?”15 With the exception of their frequent travels to the United States, where Webster worked off and on andPage 262 → Frankau wrote, the two women lived at Christchurch Hill until Frankau’s death. Frankau was bisexual with a marriage, and love affairs with men and women, as part of her life experience. Webster is not known to have been sexually interested in men. Her emotional connections were always with women, and her deeply involved relationships were always with accomplished, older women. According to friend and novelist Rebecca West in a letter of condolence written to Webster at the time of Frankau’s death, these were the most serene years of Frankau’s turbulent life. As Webster said many times of their relationship, “We were very good for each other.”16 The element of competition in the relationship between the older Le Gallienne and the younger Webster was not repeated in her relationship with Frankau.17 For one thing, Le Gallienne was beautiful, a celebrated actress, author of books and translations, and acknowledged as an accomplished producer and director. From Webster’s viewpoint, she was always “second fiddle” in the presence of her glamorous friend—a mind-set that was formed in those early childhood summers at Chiddingfold. With Frankau, Webster was at ease and learned, as she herself said, about true sharing between two loving people. Webster said in her memoir, “We laughed a lot. It was not just frivolous laughter; it involved perception, self-criticism, irony, a sense of proportion—and, on occasion, guts. I think it may well be the most precious thing that two people can share with each other.”18 In the face of Webster’s shifting affection, Eva Le Gallienne behaved badly. It was Le Gallienne who had first rejected Webster, and now her pride was hurt. She had never expected to give over so completely her lifelong friend and lover to another relationship. She confided to her diary that she was in a state of shock because she had “believed so completely in the lasting reality of this relationship.”19 She removed Webster’s bed from her bedroom and stored it in the barn at Weston. She bought a new mailbox for the Connecticut house, saying, “There’ll be only two names now,” referring to herself and Marion Evensen. Le Gallienne also moved all of her belongings out of the apartment on Twelfth Street, blocked out her name on the entrance bell, and left her keys, labeled “For Pamela Frankau.”20 During 1955, Webster and Frankau divided their time between London and New York. In April, when Webster and Frankau were staying at the Twelfth Street apartment, Webster drove to Weston to see Le Gallienne, who at first had not answered her letters. Webster was determined to hold on to their friendship. Le Gallienne took a job for three weeks at a theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to play Mrs. Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts. Most importantly, Page 263 → it took her away from her unwanted visitor, who had been her closest confidante and intellectual equal. While in New York, Webster revised Shakespeare without Tears for a paperback edition with an introduction by John Mason Brown. She also prepared a British edition, published two years later as Shakespeare Today. This was the period during which she staged the first of five operas for City Center. Once Troilus and Cressida opened in October, she and Frankau returned to London, where Webster set about finding producers for a production of The Strong Are Lonely. Webster had become the transatlantic traveler now so typical of international directors who work in both London and New York. When Webster returned to London in the fall, the theater marquees were ablaze with productions that included many of her old friends. Ralph Richardson was appearing in the title role in Timon of Athens at the Old Vic, Lewis Casson in The Doctor’s Dilemma at the Saville, and Tyrone Power and Zena Walker in The Devil’s Disciple at the Winter Garden. Webster sought out the powerful head of the H. M. Tennent producing organization, Hugh (“Binkie”) Beaumont and showed him the script of The Strong Are Lonely. He liked it but was only interested in producing Hochwalder’s play if a certain star was available. The star was not. Webster then showed the script to Donald

Wolfit, with whom she had appeared at the Old Vic in 1930. He envisioned a role for himself as the defiant Father Provincial and agreed to present the play under his own management. Donald Wolfit was the last of the old-time actor-managers in the tradition of Henry Irving. He established a reputation in England as a Shakespearean actor with the Old Vic and at Stratford-upon-Avon in the late 1920s and 1930s. He formed his own Shakespearean touring company in 1937 and gave memorable performances in the title roles in Macbeth, King Lear, and Volpone and as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. During the war years, he mounted a popular lunchtime series of scenes from Shakespeare, which were so successful that he was knighted. He also offered striking interpretations of such modern plays as Ibsen’s Ghosts and John Gabriel Borkman and appeared in films and television. Wolfit was born out of his time. According to Webster, Wolfit could be a “ham” in one performance and deliver a magnificent King Lear in another. Whereas John Gielgud invariably surrounded himself with actors of the highest caliber, Wolfit, to save money, created an underpaid and often mediocre company appearing in poorly mounted productions. (It is true that producers Bronson Albery and Binkie Beaumont placed resources at Gielgud’s disposal that Wolfit never acquired.) By 1955, his stage glory and the West End had passed him by. He held a deep resentment against thePage 264 → “West End clique” of Albery-Beaumont-Gielgud, convinced that they conspired to keep him out of London. Webster had not seen Donald Wolfit for a number of years, and as she talked with important actors for the leading parts in The Strong Are Lonely, she was “disagreeably surprised.” They were all reluctant to play with Donald Wolfit. One complained, “All he wants you to do is to stand downstage and throw him cues.”21 Having investigated these claims, Webster concluded that none of the actors, in fact, had appeared in Wolfit’s company. In the time-honored tradition of actors, they were repeating hearsay. She invited Ernest Milton, a former Shakespearean star, to perform with Wolfit. When he demurred, Webster asked, “Ernest, have you ever played with Donald?” “No,” came the answer, “but he’s played with me.” Finally, Milton accepted the part of the Father General of the Jesuits who orders the Father Provincial (Donald Wolfit) to destroy his life’s work. True to the old style of grand acting, Wolfit and Milton struggled to upstage one another. Critic Kenneth Tynan commented that he would “long recall these two expert players stealthily upstaging each other ‘to the greater glory of God’!”22 The production opened at the Piccadilly Theatre in the West End on November 15, 1955, with Rolf Gérard’s set designs from Webster’s New York production. It played there for four weeks before transferring to the Haymarket, temporarily on loan from Binkie Beaumont pending the arrival of his newest production. One wry critic observed, “This strange play seems determined to get itself liked.”23 Despite his antagonism toward the producer, Donald Wolfit was childlike in his delight to be occupying the star dressing room at the famous old theater. Webster gave him a playbill of Charles Macready’s farewell performance more than a hundred years earlier at the Haymarket when her great-grandfather was the actor-manager there. Wolfit was touchingly moved by the theatrical succession represented by the gift—the distinguished theater, himself, and the great granddaughter of Old Ben Webster. Then both the Old Vic and Stratford-upon-Avon telephoned Webster. The first call came from Glen Byam Shaw, inviting her to direct The Merchant of Venice, the opening production of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre’s new season in the spring. The theater at Stratford opened in 1879, was destroyed by fire in 1926, and reopened in the present building in 1932. The transformation from a seasonal festival theater to a “national” theater is credited to several factors, but chiefly to the appointment in 1945 of Sir Barry Jackson, former owner and head of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. He introduced such young directors and actors as Peter Brook and PaulPage 265 → Scofield to Stratford. Moreover, he revolutionized the theater’s repertory system by hiring different directors and designers for each play, thereby allowing adequate rehearsal time. His management was followed by Anthony Quayle’s, who in 1955 established the Stratford theater as the home of Shakespearean productions. The invitation to Margaret Webster was part of the theater’s “new” mission. Shaw, who was Quayle’s associate,

knew that she had considerable experience directing Shakespeare in the United States. By this time, Webster had directed twenty-one professional productions of Shakespeare. Moreover, she was in London and available. Webster expressed some reluctance to undertake the project. She was convinced, and did not hesitate to say, that the British did not like women directors or artists who had made their reputations in America. Moreover, The Merchant of Venice was frequently produced and invited so many comparisons that she was buying trouble if she accepted. “But I couldn’t run away from it,” she concluded.24 Besides, she and Frankau could tour the Cotswold countryside, which they both loved, and Frankau could work on her new novel, Ask Me No More, in Stratford. Perhaps most important was Webster’s awareness that work at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre would bring her home again as a serious professional artist in a way that the commercial production of The Strong Are Lonely had not. She did not cast The Merchant of Venice. The theater had already secured the stars (Emlyn Williams as Shylock and Margaret Johnston as Portia); the company of forty-one actors included Anthony Nichols and Prunella Scales, who played Antonio and Nerissa. Most of the actors were young, talented, and, like Webster, new to Stratford. Webster remembered the Stratford period as one of her happiest times. She and Frankau shared their work and lives together with laughter and a sense of proportion. Webster spilled out her rehearsal problems, and Frankau read aloud to Webster from the pages she had written during the day. As they talked about the similarities between the craft of the novelist and the stage director, Frankau’s projected book on the writer’s craft began to take shape. Webster recalled their conclusions: “The writer must interpret the men and women of his own imagining on paper; the director has to translate the creations of other writers in terms of flesh and blood.”25 It was a productive period for both. Frankau published Ask Me No More in 1958, and her thoughts on the writer’s craft, Pen to Paper: A Writer’s Notebook, three years later. Webster, for the first time since she had staged Henry VIII for the Women’s Institutes of Kent in 1934, was directing a Shakespeare play in England. Page 266 → Webster had written at length about The Merchant of Venice in Shakespeare without Tears and wanted to stage Portia’s trial scene in a way she had never seen it done. Her history with the play dated back to her Bradley Wood House schooldays and to her amateur debut in London where, standing in the wings, she watched Ellen Terry play Portia’s trial scene. Webster had also played Nerissa opposite John Gielgud and Martita Hunt in Harcourt Williams’s production at the Old Vic. She was convinced that the trial scene had lost its impact for modern audiences. Since they know it so well, they wait for Portia to ferret out the contract—”this bond doth give thee no drop of blood.” The key to Webster’s proposed new staging was the fact that neither Portia nor Bellario had seen the contract before the moment they were presented with it in the courtroom. Webster’s take on the scene was the following, It is legitimate to suppose that, although forearmed with the legalities of punishment, she had to find the flaw in the bond for herself. Shylock blocks off all avenues of escape or evasion on which she had counted; she herself grows increasingly desperate as it dawns on her that she may not be able to save Antonio at all; only at the very last moment does the solution leap out at her— “Tarry a little! There is something else….” The focus, for the audience, is shifted from the known answer to the excitement of watching her find it.26 Before signing her contract, Webster discussed with Glen Byam Shaw her view of the play’s most famous scene. He had no objection; nor did Emlyn Williams or Margaret Johnston. All was well until the week before rehearsals began when Shaw telephoned Webster to say that his Portia had decided that she could not play the trial scene the way Webster wanted it. She offered to give up the part. Since Johnston was under contract to play the leading women’s parts throughout the season, Webster called it a toothless threat and plowed ahead, thinking that in rehearsals she could persuade her leading lady to try the scene her way. But Johnston would not be persuaded, and Webster resigned herself to the director’s eternal dilemma: “If

I couldn’t have convinced Maggie that the scene should be played ‘my way,’ she certainly wouldn’t have convinced the audience. Comes the opening night, the actors have to do it. The director can’t.”27 She staged the opening and closing scenes without objection from Anthony Nicholls, beginning the play with the lonely figure of Antonio as an observer, standing apart from the noise and bustle of the Venetian scene,Page 267 → and closing with him, still alone, as the happy lovers dance away in Belmont’s early dawn. She had described Shylock earlier as a character illuminated by Shakespeare’s “brilliant light.” The playwright realized, in Webster’s analysis, what the pressure of the Venetian world could do to a man of Shylock’s race and trade. Shakespeare did not soft-pedal the issue of a man caught up by the circumstances of his work in the demonic powers of the “passion of possession” and driving heat of “revenge.”28 Billed as “Miss Margaret Webster’s Production of The Merchant of Venice, “ the play opened on April 17, 1956. The reviewer for the Times praised the inventiveness of Webster’s staging, Emlyn Williams’s genuinely moving performance, and Margaret Johnston’s Portia as a “distinguished beginning” for a relative newcomer.29 Nonetheless, Webster was forever disappointed that she never got to stage the trial scene as she envisioned it. Webster was now working in England, her beloved second home, and living in a comfortable setting in Hampstead. The Old Vic’s invitation to direct Measure for Measure in the next season followed on the heels of her success at Stratford. Michael Benthall, the Old Vic’s artistic director, enlisted Webster in his five-year plan to present plays from Shakespeare’s First Folio. Webster was scheduled to return to New York in the fall to direct Verdi’s Macbetto for Julius Rudel, but she set about preparing Measure for Measure while she was still in London. This play promised to be a new experience for her. She had seen it performed, but had not acted or directed it. The text perplexed her; she was not sure she knew what the play was about. Critics and commentators were no help with the staging. “I went back to the text, as one should, and just soaked in it, mindlessly,” she said. “It began to take shape.”30 What emerged was a three-part interpretation. First, a cosmic frame—a heaven-earth-hell pattern—probably related to the mystery and morality plays familiar to Elizabethan England. Second, an ancient and modern statement on the use and abuse of power that ranged from the duke to the lowly constable. Finally, the psychological concern with “triple identity”: “every man is three people—the man he would like to appear, his public image; the man he himself likes to think he is; and the man he really is.” As she had done in earlier productions, she transposed scenes to prevent the duke’s long absence from the second half of the play. With designer Barry Kay she agreed upon a unit set to demonstrate the cosmic frame of heaven, earth, and hell, and costumes to visualize the triple identity theory. Angelo, for example, moved from a scholar’s black gown to his robes of office to the “unadorned man” stripped of his vestments. With the initial work done, Webster and Frankau departed for NewYork,Page 268 → where she persuaded Lehman Engel to compose the music for Measure for Measure, staged Macbetto at City Center, and broke her ankle shortly before she returned to London for rehearsals. In October, she appeared on crutches at the Old Vic to confront a company of strangers already assigned their parts, as was the theater’s custom. It was a remarkable company: Anthony Nicholls (from The Merchant of Venice) as the duke, John Neville as Angelo, Margaret Courtenay as Mistress Overdone, Barbara Jefford as Isabella, and the future Dame Judi Dench, then twenty-three, as Juliet. The actors were not sanguine about Webster, regarding her as an “unsympathetic” director. According to John Miller, Dench’s biographer, Webster was tactless with the actors during rehearsals, failed to learn the names of the walk-ons, and was generally rude to the designer and the company.31 If Webster was short-tempered and brusque, it could not be attributed to her work on the text or to her ability to stage the production. She had spared no effort to understand Shakespeare’s text about men and women in the grip of strong, difficult emotions. She also avoided superimposing fancy theories and gimmicks on the material. In truth, her emotional and intellectual energies were depleted by the effort of directing plays and operas on two continents. Within three years, she had directed six plays and two operas. In addition, her health was also on the decline. Her broken ankle was but the outward

manifestation of diagnoses of bronchial asthma, flu, and female complaints that were pointing toward a more major illness. Measure for Measure opened on November 19, 1957. Despite the disaffected acting company, Webster was hailed by the London critics as “one of those creative directors by whom actors are inspired to do their best.”32 She was forthright about her debt to the actors, who finally accepted the newcomer into their club when she knocked one of her crutches into the orchestra pit and let fly a four-letter word that was broadcast all over the theater through the live sound system. Webster confirmed, The lesson I learned from this Old Vic experience …was how much a fine play …reveals itself when, and only when, the actors bring it alive.33 The day following the opening of Measure for Measure, Webster shed the cast on her ankle and returned to New York without Frankau to work on the touring production of a play by George Bernard Shaw. Arnold Moss had condensed Back to Methuselah into a single evening with himself in the role of George Bernard Shaw, the narrator, and persuaded the Theatre Guild to produce a three-month national tour and the Broadway production. Moss turned to Webster, who had directed him to great acclaim as Prospero in The Tempest thirteen years earlier. Webster saw the cast of five as a director’sPage 269 → dream: Tyrone Power, Faye Emerson, Valerie Bettis, Richard Easton, and Arthur Treacher. Webster was engaged in the touring life once again. The bus and truck tour began in Orlando, Florida, and developed the familiar stresses and strains, ranging from changeable weather, to vast auditoriums, a long and difficult show, and travel fatigue. At one juncture, the assistant stage manager, William (“Bill”) Ball, decided to quit. Webster advised him to stick around and “gain inestimably valuable experience in what not to do and how not to do it.” Ball stayed with the show, demonstrating the true grit and charisma that prompted him to found the American Conservatory Theatre in Pittsburgh in 1965, and then relocate the theater to San Francisco two years later, where it remains a major nonprofit resident theater today. In Webster’s estimation, Tyrone (“Ty”) Power was the saving grace of the tour. Power was from a family of actors, originally from Ireland, who made their careers in the United States. His great-grandfather, also Tyrone Power, had acted “stage Irishmen” in London under the management of Webster’s great-grandfather. He immigrated to America in 1840, and later drowned at sea on a transatlantic crossing. Both of his sons were actors, and his grandson became a leading member of Augustin Daly’s company. His great-grandson was best known as a film actor in the 1950s but had a substantial reputation on the stage, appearing with Katharine Cornell in Romeo and Juliet, Saint Joan, and The Dark Is Light Enough. After he became a film star, he returned to the theater to appear in John Brown’s Body and Back to Methuselah. With their similar theatrical lineages, Webster and Power worked well together. As a film star, Power had talent, charm, and exceptional good looks. In addition, he was kind and courteous. Webster described him as gentle, considerate, shrewd, humorous, and humble—especially about his contribution to the show. “He was one of the best people I have ever known,” she said.34 Webster had never worked with an actor whose public appearances drew mobs of fans. Complicated arrangements were needed to get him in and out of hotels and restaurants, and police passes were necessary for the actors to get through the stage door. The show arrived in New York with scenery by Marvin Reiss and costumes by Patricia Zipprodt, opening on March 26, 1958, at the Ambassador Theatre. Arnold Moss’s version reduced Shaw’s ninety thousand words, telling the story of humankind from the Garden of Eden into the future, to thirty thousand words. In this shortened version, the actors played many parts: Power played Adam, Faye Emerson, Eve. Arnold Moss, in Norfolk jacket, knickers, and white beard, narrated as the playwright. As sometimes happens, the successful touring production was not well received in NewPage 270 → York. Brooks Atkinson found the play disappointingly prosy. “The thoughts fly up, the words remain below,” he remarked, calling Webster’s staging “unhappily earthbound.”35 Webster considered the production a moderate success. Eight months later Tyrone Power was dead of a heart attack at age forty-five.

Webster now remarked on an odd pattern about her transatlantic journeys to and from the United States. She was always doing a play or an opera and falling ill.36 Colds turned to flu and bronchial asthma. She had been tracing these physical problems since the fall of 1954, when she wrote to Le Gallienne describing a “female complaint common to ladies of my age” (which she identified as mastitis) that her doctor said had to be watched.37 In truth, Webster had taken little personal time from work to nurture her health. She had always been a workaholic and had pursued one project after the next. She was not driven by money or fame but by a great need to remain engaged with people in the making of theater. Within a year following Back to Methuselah, Webster directed two more operas with the City Center Opera Company and a third, Simon Boccanegra, with the Metropolitan Opera. While working on Simon Boccanegra, she received an offer from England to direct The School for Scandal for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Under Barry Jackson’s ownership and artistic direction from 1913 to 1935, the theater had become notable for modern-dress productions of Shakespeare, for its successful London seasons (with Abraham Lincoln by John Drinkwater and The Barretts of Wimpole Street by Rudolf Besler), and for launching such remarkable actors as Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, and Albert Finney. In 1935, Jackson transferred ownership of the building to the city and it became England’s first civic theater. By the time Webster arrived, the Birmingham theater was no longer a true repertory theater but produced a series of old and new plays in succession for three weeks with a permanent company of actors and visiting directors.38 Webster returned to her home in Hampstead, and she and Frankau then migrated northward from London and took up residence in the Queen’s Hotel above the railway tracks of Birmingham’s main station. Frankau worked on Pen to Paper while Webster was across the way at the theater. Webster was infinitely happy in a relationship where there was a great deal of laughter, shared perceptions, warm companionship, and dialogue about their respective crafts. During her stay in Birmingham, Webster contrasted in her mind the differences between the nonexistent repertory companies in the United States and the many companies that had emerged in Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge, Coventry, Sheffield, and Stoke-on-Trent between 1910 and the 1960s. These were resident companies of actors whoPage 271 → had settled in the various towns and were content to have continuous employment in good roles in good plays. The School for Scandal was one example. In Birmingham, Webster worked with the resident designer Paul Shelving, who provided a series of light, charming sets, and with admirable actors. Elizabeth Sprigg, Robert Marsden, and John Carlin played Lady Sneerwell, Sir Peter Teazle, and Joseph Surface. Webster’s production, which opened on April 13, 1960, was praised for the “rhythm of the raillery” that in lesser hands can sound like “anxious badinage.”39 Webster substituted a modern-day prologue, which clearly revealed Frankau’s rhyming hand, for David Garrick’s original. Mrs. Snide, a modern socialite selling secrets to a gossip columnist, says in doggerel verse: She must have lost her mind. Is that the booze? Or did she never have a mind to lose? Critics were not amused and called the prologue “inept.” “Presumably Miss Webster wants us to know that things are what they used to be,” wrote the critic for the Birmingham Mail.40 Intermingled with the frenzies of staging opera, working with an old-style actor-manager, and surviving flu, house repairs, and provincial repertory, Webster began a project that was to bring her great joy and a pleasant sense of having come full circle. While Webster was in New York in January 1960 preparing to stage Simon Boccanegra, producers Michael Redgrave and Fred Sadoff (an American actor and producer) sent her a new play by Noël Coward called Waiting in the Wings. Webster remarked that it was not the “usual Coward.” It was about “The Wings,” a home for retired actresses. “I thought it was compassionate and touching—with a quota of ‘pastiche’ Coward songs thrown in for good measure at a Christmas party scene,” Webster said.41 Coward had suggested Webster direct the production, saying, “This, I think, is a very, very good idea and I am most sanguine about it.”42

Upon advice from her New York doctors, Webster had given up smoking once again. When she returned to London to direct The School for Scandal, she went to see Coward in a “weak, cigaretteless and distinctly nervous” state. Webster had known Coward in the casual, semisocial way that theater people have of “knowing” one another, meaning the plays they have written, the parts they have played, their public comments, bits about their private lives, and sightings in restaurants and at parties. To Webster’s advantage, she and Frankau had met Coward during a party in the south of France in July 1957. Webster had not worked with Coward, but she had auditionedPage 272 → for him for a part in Cavalcade. “I had never been so courteously treated,” she remembered. “I left the theatre feeling taller even though I was certain I wouldn’t get the part.”43 She didn’t. As a renowned playwright, actor, director, composer, lyricist, cabaret star, pianist, and poet, Coward wrote a series of witty drawing-room comedies along with plays that dealt with serious social issues of English society. He was even more celebrated as a man of style, wit, and clever aphorisms. Webster remarked that the speed of his witty comments dazzled the listener because they were instantaneous and hit the middle of their target. By the time Webster met with him to talk about his new play, he had already discussed the project with Binkie Beaumont and was displeased that Beaumont asked for extensive rewriting. To Coward’s disappointment, the Tennent organization declined to produce Waiting in the Wings. With this knowledge in hand, Webster determined to “tiptoe on eggshells” around the subject of rewrites. After reading the script, Webster was most concerned about the way the play led up to a small fire in the drawing room near the end of the first act and then started another chain of circumstances after the scene break. To deal with her concerns in the most delicate way possible, she and Frankau invited the famous playwright to dinner. During the evening Webster gently touched upon her concern, asking Coward to explain something that puzzled her. He had set up a whole chain of circumstances leading up to the outbreak of a fire in the “Home”—quite a small, manageable one, not a conflagration; then there was a scene break, and a whole other chain of circumstances leading away from it again. I said I knew that he must have had some very strong and valid reasons for not carrying straight through the scene itself, which obviously he must have considered, but, please, I should love to know what they were? His eyebrows rose very high, his eyes opened very wide; I trembled. He said, “Darling, I never thought of it.”44 That night, he rewrote the scene, recalling in his diary that Webster had given him some constructive criticism. “It means a little rewriting and transposing and one short extra scene,” he wrote, “but I know it will improve the play enormously.”45 Decisions about casting had to be made quickly before Coward outstayed his status with the British Inland Revenue Department as a “nonresident” and returned to Switzerland. He proposed to return again for final cast approval, for the last days of rehearsal, and for the openings in Dublin and London. On his trip in May, they needed to settle upon the stars. Both Page 273 → agreed upon Webster’s old friends Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson. They never played without each other, and, at the ages of seventy-eight and eighty-five, they were unlikely to break with family tradition. Thorndike would have the lead of Lotta Bainbridge, but the role of Osgood Meeker, the faithful beau who brings violets every week to his sweetheart, was a small one. There was some concern that Casson might reject it. Webster had started her professional life with the Cassons. Now, she couldn’t get used to the idea that she would be directing them. Of course, Lewis Casson had to agree to the part first. Coward had originally written the play with Gladys Cooper in mind for Lotta Bainbridge, and Sybil Thorndike for May Davenport. Binkie Beaumont told him that Cooper had turned down the role without comment, so Coward and Webster cast Thorndike as Lotta and Marie Löhr as May. One night at the opening of another show, Gladys Cooper asked Coward why he had not offered her a part in his play about retired actresses. He explained that he had written the leading role for her but had been told by Beaumont that she had declined the role. Learning the truth, Coward was shocked at Beaumont’s “black lie,” and their professional relationship was never to be the same again.46

Webster was directing The School for Scandal when Fred Sadoff called: “Yes, the Cassons would do the play.” The next morning, Webster received a handwritten note from Sybil Thorndike: “Darling, it will be so wonderful to be working with you again.” Webster’s emotions overcame her and she couldn’t find the right words for a reply.47 Most of the casting took place in the “amicable surroundings” of Michael Redgrave’s London flat in Knightsbridge. When she was three years old, Webster had seen Marie Löhr in Pinkie and the Fairies at His Majesty’s Theatre. Now Webster was to direct her as May Davenport. Norah Blaney, a “top-liner” in the old music hall days and a pianist of concert quality, was chosen to play the piano as Maudie Melrose. Mary Clare, who had starred in Cavalcade in 1931, now appeared “vague, gracious and beautiful with snow white hair.” She agreed to play Almina Clare, another resident at “The Wings.” Canadian actor William Hurt, unknown to Webster at the time, would play Thorndike’s son. Casting the remainder of the “retired” ladies (eventually, Maidie Andrews, Una Venning, Edith Day, Maureen Delany, and Nora Nicholson) led to lengthy discussions about distinguished actresses who had been stars in their day. Often when Webster asked if someone was available, Coward would shake his head and announce mournfully, “Feathered Choir.”48 There were concerns about whether the actress could learn the lines, and, after pleasant exchanges of memories and songs, the necessity to write thePage 274 → dreaded rejection letter the following day. When it was necessary to hear an actress read, Webster would read along, “trying to kind of nudge [her] into the right mood or tempo.” Coward was always charming and polite. He and Webster only disagreed on the actress to play the young newspaper reporter who intrudes into the retirement home in search of a story. Webster urged a young Australian, Zoe Caldwell, who in time would have an extraordinary career in Canada and America. According to Webster, Coward rejected her without explanation. The producers hired Margaret Harris (one of the Motleys) to design sets and costumes. Since Webster had worn Motley costumes as long ago as Richard of Bordeaux, she looked forward to working with her longtime acquaintance again on the West End. The whole action of Coward’s play took place in the drawing room of the retirement home. Because it was the place where the retired actresses gathered, the setting required a great deal of furniture (sofas, armchairs, tables, a grand piano), a staircase to the upper floor of bedrooms, an entrance hallway, two doors to a kitchen and dining room, a fireplace, and a bay window that led to a visible solarium outside. Taking into consideration the age and frailty of the cast—many referred to her as “May and Ben’s little girl”—Webster wanted everything worked out early and carefully. She did not want “to muddle” anyone about the placement of furniture. She was also very much aware of the rehearsal needs of English actors, as opposed to Americans. English actors tend to want to know where they’re going before they can really figure what they’re thinking about…. in this case I realized that the learning of lines becomes much more difficult as one grows older (I know now from personal experience) and that one needs the assurance of knowing them. Marie Löhr and Sybil [Thorndike] had both devoted weeks to learning; I didn’t want to complicate anything. I got it all set as smoothly as oil.49 Webster later provided an astounding portrait of Thorndike, who was celebrated for her roles in plays by Euripides and George Bernard Shaw. “She was very quiet, very simple. At the first walking rehearsal she came into the ‘room’ and paused for a second, looking round. The expression on her face was so totally revealing that pages of dialogue could have said no more…. I found that in this whole play all I had to do was to place things (furniture and people) where they wouldn’t get in her way.”50 Even the rehearsals were out of the ordinary. Stage management provided baskets of props for the actresses. The final week, the producers hiredPage 275 → an empty theater and put the complete setup on stage, but not without a grand row between playwright and director on one side and the two producers on the other. Coward had arrived in London in late June and met with Webster in his Chelsea flat. They went over last-minute rehearsal details before the Dublin opening. As they reviewed the production schedule, they discovered that the company was to fly to Dublin on a Sunday and open the following Monday evening, with no rehearsal with

scenery either in Dublin or in London. Later, they adjourned to the Brompton Grill, a well-known restaurant of the day in Knightsbridge, where Redgrave and Sadoff joined them. Frankau was also a member of the party. Determined to cut costs, Redgrave refused to understand the elderly cast’s need for an added rehearsal. A “blazing row” followed. There were two results of the episode: the set for Wings was put up in London for several days, and Pamela Frankau wrote a satirical “epic” poem called “The Ballad of Brompton Grill.” One stanza of the scathing rhymed account of the theatrical “battle” reads as follows: It’s Coward blazing and Webster too— Another volley you’d think would do it— But Redgrave holds like a pinkish suet, Stolidly, sludgily sitting through it.51 Coward found the entire matter tiresome and unnecessary and longed for the efficient organization of H. M. Tennent.52 Webster claimed never to have learned if the producers’ generosity was due to the eminence of the author or to the realization that a distinguished, but elderly, cast would find it difficult to adjust to staircases, entrances, and the hazards of the fire scene. By the time opening night arrived at the Olympic Theatre in Dublin, the actors had started to live in their surroundings instead of “glaring at them in horrified astonishment.” For Webster, it was a “beneficent miracle.”53 Coward returned again for rehearsals a few days before they left for Dublin. Despite the terror that Webster and others felt in his presence, he was pleased and constructive in his suggestions. “I wished he could give lessons to all managers, producers, authors, directors, backers …who charge into productions late in the proceedings and recklessly destroy what is not yet made.”54 In his diary entry for July 31, he complimented Webster for “a fine and tactful job.”55 Opening night at the Olympia Theatre produced a packed house and cheers at the end of each act. At the play’s end the cast took ten curtain calls, with Thorndike, Casson, and Löhr receiving the greatest appreciation. Page 276 → Noël Coward, who was sitting at the back of the stalls, came on stage to praise the cast, saying that he had seldom seen such a galaxy of stars in one play.56 Wings played two triumphant weeks to packed houses and enthusiastic audiences in Dublin. The production proceeded to theaters in Liverpool and Manchester and, finally, to the stage of the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End on September 7. The London run began unhappily with Marie Löhr breaking her arm on the morning of the opening. She had gone to the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields to say a prayer; as she came down the steps, she fell. She played that night and for many weeks with her arm in a sling, but the spell of good fortune had been broken. Waiting in the Wings was moderately well received by the critics, although some accused the playwright of tastelessness, vulgarity, and sentimentality.57 Coward fumed, “I have never read such abuse in my life.”58 The Times reviewer called it “the most sentimental piece” ever written by the playwright, effectively consigning it to the theatrical dustbin until December 1999 (the year of the Noël Coward centennial) when the play was dusted off by Alexander H. Cohen and produced on Broadway with Lauren Bacall, Rosemary Harris, Helen Stenborg, and Barnard Hughes to stellar reviews. Webster’s admiration for Coward remained undiminished. Soon after the show opened in London they were both away for several weeks and, by chance, returned to see the production on the same evening. She called him the next day, suggesting a brush-up rehearsal. He agreed. At the rehearsal she asked him to speak to the company, and he surprised them all by emphasizing the truth of feeling, simplicity, reality, as opposed to the tricks of the trade used to press for laughs. “Anything phony he was onto like a knife,” Webster recalled.59

Waiting in the Wings played for six months and closed in February. Coward was deeply angry over the damage done by the critics to the play, the production, and the audiences. He remarked, “I am sad, sad, sad about Wings. So many people loved it…. there is quite an accumulation of bitterness in my heart for those mean, ungenerous, envious, ignorant little critics.”60 Waiting in the Wings was a watershed experience for Webster. When she wrote her autobiography, she dedicated it to Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, taking Noël Coward’s famous lyrics for her title: Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington, Don’t put your daughter on the stage. The profession is overcrowded, the struggle is pretty tough And admitting the fact Page 277 → That she’s burning to act, That isn’t quite enough. Pamela Frankau had had serious health problems that made walking difficult when she vacationed with Webster in France and Italy in 1954. In a letter written to Le Gallienne from Venice, Webster noted that Frankau “has a bad leg and can’t walk too much.”61 Returning to New York on the Mauretania in August of that year, Webster again described her concerns for her new friend’s health problems: “She has about four different and more or less continuous ailments, and though she makes no fuss about it, she is, I think, almost never out of pain.” Webster attributed the central problem to a shrinking of the spinal discs due to an old injury in a car accident. “But the others should be curable,” she said, “and none of the London specialists appear to be able even to diagnose them properly.”62 Frankau herself described her various maladies as “neuralgia, rheumatism, arthritis, and fibrositis.”63 Despite Frankau’s failing health, their shared life continued in the same steady, familiar pattern. Inspired by Webster’s diligence and workaholism, Frankau wrote feverishly. She published The Road through the Woods in 1960 and Pen to Paper in 1961. She began work on her trilogy of the Westons, a saga that followed the family from the 1920s to the end of the Second World War, under the general title of Clothes of a King’s Son. The three novels, called Sing for Your Supper, Slaves of the Lamp, and Over the Mountains, were published separately over the next six years. Webster, for her part, accepted an invitation from the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Exchange Program to travel to South Africa to direct an American classic in Johannesburg and to tour her solo performances of Shakespeare and Shaw. Frankau remained in London. When the invitation arrived, Webster quipped that her previous blacklisting “had apparently been cleansed with hyssop and some other detergent.”64 Aware of the stringent apartheid policies enforced in South Africa in the sixties, Webster selected Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, which required an all-white cast, to be recruited locally. It opened at the National Theatre of Johannesburg in early August. One local reviewer called the production a kind of “miracle” and encouraged the National Theatre to continue making regular contracts with the “finest directors” in the world.65 Webster returned to South Africa the following year, again at the invitation of the State Department, to direct Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons at the new Civic Theatre, also in Johannesburg. British actor William Roderick played Sir Thomas More. The new theater was afflicted with poorPage 278 → acoustics, a gigantic stage, and inexperienced stage technicians. The production opened on September 26, and audiences complained throughout the run (shortened from four to three weeks) that they could not hear the actors. Webster quipped, “In a long career, in which all sorts of things have happened, this is the first time that a production of mine has been killed by a theatre.”66 Michael Redgrave, having apparently forgotten the row at the Brompton Grill, approached Webster again in 1962 to direct his adaptation of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers in New York at the Playhouse on West Forty-eighth Street. Together with producer David Black, they brought together a fine cast of British actors and old friends, with Wendy Hiller, Françoise Rosay, and Maurice Evans in the principal roles of Miss Tina, Miss Bordereau, and “H. J.” Ben Edwards was recruited to design the scenery and lighting, Alvin Colt the costumes. The Aspern Papers was Webster’s final production on Broadway. Opening on February 7, 1962, it was well

received by the critics and ran for ninety-three performances. Howard Taubman, reviewing for the New York Times, found the show a literate performance that developed into a literary mystery and an evening blessed with the splendid acting of Maurice Evans and Wendy Hiller. He praised the director’s staging for capturing the genteel mood of the 1890s as it develops the story with tension and illuminates character.67 Webster returned to England to direct the dramatization of Frankau’s successful novel Ask Me No More at the Theatre Royal in Windsor. Richard Edson Malloy originally created a stage adaptation of the novel, whose publication had led to antagonisms between Frankau and the distinguished novelist Rebecca West. Webster tried her hand at improving the stage-worthiness of the script, which dealt with Frankau’s experiences with the poet Humbert Wolfe. Wolfe’s less admirable qualities were embodied in the play’s central character of Geoffrey Bliss, a playwright of many foibles and love affairs.68 The play opened at the Theatre Royal on May 28 for two weeks with Margaret Rawlings, Eileen Peel, John Arnott, and Peter Myers. Webster was busy with many projects during the next year, including her adaptation of The Brontës, which she performed in London and New York. She and Frankau spent time in New York City, on Martha’s Vineyard, and then in California when Webster was appointed Regents Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. At the invitation of Travis Bogard, chairman of the Department of Drama, she directed Antony and Cleopatra for the Shakespeare Quadricentennial in the Hearst Greek Theatre. Having toured the Bay Area a year earlier, Webster knew the amphitheater, calling it a “formidable monument.” She described the view down Page 279 → toward the space where Shakespeare’s Roman and Egyptian armies would soon clash by night, the rising tiers of the amphitheater, the stone seats, the lawns and trees beyond, and the flat, pillared stage, about “three times as wide as the Metropolitan Opera House.”69 She looked up expecting to read the name of Shakespeare or Sophocles graven on the stone wall. Instead, she read “William Randolph Hearst.” Antony and Cleopatra was part of a nationwide quadricentennial celebration. The cast was local, an assembly of professionals, graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, and nonprofessionals. Webster was challenged by the semi-Greek arena and set about breaking up the vast playing space with platforms, pillars, and area lighting. She used the stone steps plunging down into the arena for pageantry and onrushing battles. The intimate scenes between Antony and Cleopatra were played on the forward thrust of the platforms. She remarked that the two principals belonged to the genre of Noël Coward’s Private Lives rather than to antique tragedy. She described the intimate scenes between Antony and Cleopatra as “comedy, irony, satire, deadly political cut-and-thrust.”70 In Webster’s view, the play soars into tragedy only at the end because we know that the “hero and heroine” are doomed. Webster spent most of her rehearsal time climbing up and down the stone steps and the ascending platforms to demonstrate where the actors were to go or how they were to get into position. Finally, the day of the opening performance came along with a rainstorm—”lowering, full-bellied clouds” that drifted over the bay and the amphitheater. They watched the weather throughout the afternoon; finally, at seven o’clock on September 12, 1963, Travis Bogard signaled the armada to make ready to sail. Audiences appeared out of the mists with rugs and Thermos flasks as though they were attending a football game. Webster was satisfied that the fog and mist created a mysterious presence for the eighty or ninety actors. As the immense armies came into view, they took the stage and then vanished. Cleopatra also magically appeared, bringing Egypt with her, as Rome was swallowed up in darkness. Even the weather played a part in the tribute to Shakespeare. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, like her Ben Greet and now Berkeley players, had been subject to the vagaries of the weather. Webster reveled in the four hundred years of theater. “It may not always be gloriously successful,” she mused, “but it is very seldom dull and never twice the same.”71 Bogard remembered the long, happy summer with Webster and Frankau. On their last night in Berkeley, he and Webster wound up after dinner sitting on the curb with their feet in the gutter arguing loudly about the “virtues

and defects” of student actors. “It didn’t matter to her that she hadPage 280 → on a long dress,” he said. They remained good friends after their curbside debate.72 That summer in Berkeley, Frankau became suddenly and gravely ill with a form of meningitis that caused great pain and some paralysis. Webster wrote Le Gallienne that Frankau was very ill. Webster and Frankau had been together almost nine years, and Le Gallienne’s earlier animosity had all but disappeared. Le Gallienne inscribed in her diary that she dreaded “to think what Peg would do if anything went wrong there—and Pamela is such a dear—I’ve become very fond of her.”73 Frankau had experienced some facial paralysis. When she was well enough to travel, she returned to London and entered a clinic. Friends showered her with flowers, messages, and letters. Before she was stricken, she had finished the first book of her trilogy and a rough draft of the second. She eventually finished the second volume, Slaves of the Lamp, in Webster’s small house on Martha’s Vineyard. Consumed with worry about her partner’s health, Webster had difficulty concentrating on her work, but her peregrinations continued. From California to London, she gave solo performances and received honors and awards. In January, she presented The Brontës at the Arts Theatre in London and staged Measure for Measure again at Boston University in April. She received honorary doctorates from Fairfield University (Connecticut), Boston University, Beloit College (Wisconsin), and a citation from the Yale University School of Drama. She was elected to the Board of Directors of the American National Theatre and Academy. She received the First Annual Shakespeare Festival Award from the University of Santa Clara in California, and the Drama Teachers Association of Southern California citation for services to Shakespeare. Webster’s work brought them back to London in the spring of 1964. Webster was hired to direct Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men in the West End. This would be her last West End production and her most successful with British critics and audiences. The cast was led by Leo Genn and included Barry Lowe, Robert Urquhart, and Walter Fitzgerald. The Times reviewer said, “Miss Margaret Webster’s production triumphs over the problem of keeping twelve men together in a single room …for apparently mundane and naturalistic reasons but always at the dictates of the argument.”74 In contrast to her difficult experience with the all-male cast of Counterattack, Webster obliquely praised the actors in Twelve Angry Men: “the only thoroughly bitchy cast I have ever directed was composed, all but one, of men.”75 The production opened at the Queen’s Theatre on July 9,Page 281 → 1964, and transferred to the Lyric Theatre. It was a triumph with audiences and critics alike. That year, Frankau’s health was again threatened. Her London doctor found a malignant growth in her breast; she had a mastectomy at Middlesex Hospital followed by cobalt treatments. To bolster her companion’s deteriorating health, Webster organized a trip to the West Indies to give Frankau a change of scenery and an opportunity to recuperate in the sun. Webster soon had a number of commitments in the United States. She and Frankau closed up the house on Christchurch Hill for an indefinite period of time. Two years later, they returned to London to face the end of Pamela Frankau’s life.

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CHAPTER 12 LOSING BATTLES It is rare for a woman to succeed in this difficult field. She must be quite exceptionally talented to overcome the ingrained prejudices, the skepticism and distrust that stand in her way. —EVA LE GALLIENNE The National Repertory Theatre in the early sixties brought Margaret Webster and Eva Le Gallienne together professionally for a final time. Despite the unhappy demise of the American Repertory Theatre and the Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company, the women continued to believe fervently in the value of repertory theater for artists and audiences. Webster’s life with Pamela Frankau had taken her to London, where the repertory system was sustained in federally subsidized theaters. For her part, Le Gallienne had never abandoned her idea of establishing a repertory theater. Her next adventure into repertory theater would engage Webster in the staging of two classics. In March 1959, Le Gallienne signed a contract with the Phoenix Theatre’s touring company (called the National Repertory Theatre) to perform as Queen Elizabeth in Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart in a production originally created by Tyrone Guthrie for the Phoenix. In charge of the tour were twenty-eight-year-old Yale School of Drama graduate Michael Dewell and coworker Frances Anne Dougherty. The thirty-five-week tour to thirty-two cities inspired Le Gallienne to try once again to present classical plays to national audiences. Webster saw Mary Stuart in Princeton when she was in New York conferring on the production of Simon Boccanegra to be producedPage 283 → the following year at the Met. She was enthusiastic about her friend’s magnificent performance and the entire production. After the tour closed, Le Gallienne and Marion Evensen motored through Scotland and England, where they visited Webster and Frankau in Hampstead. Whenever Webster and Le Gallienne were together, their conversations turned to theater and to their hopes and dreams for repertory theater in America. That summer, with Webster still in London living a comfortable, unpressured life with Pamela Frankau, Le Gallienne played with a stock company in Massachusetts. In the company were director Jack Sydow, designers Tharon Musser and Alvin Colt, and Michael Dewell. Following long discussions about the need for a repertory theater, Dewell convinced Le Gallienne that they should join with Dougherty, a member of the North Carolina Cannon Mills family, to establish a company. Dougherty had connections with the Kennedy family, and it was rumored that she was to marry John F. Kennedy, but she eventually married the writer John Hersey. After they were divorced, she married industrial designer Frazer Dougherty and eventually cofounded a second National Repertory Theatre and later Musical Theatre Works, a development center for new musicals in lower Manhattan. Michael Dewell and Frances Anne Dougherty were tireless fund-raisers and skilled administrators. They proposed the new touring company, to begin with Mary Stuart performed in repertory with Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen with Le Gallienne in the role of Queen Elizabeth in both plays. They would continue to call the company the National Repertory Theatre. Le Gallienne agreed to what she knew was a “risky choice.”1 Many wanted to believe that a new political and cultural era had begun in the United States with the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Robert Frost read a poem he had written for the occasion, and all listeners felt that a more civilized time had arrived and one receptive to the arts. It was a time of hope and optimism. Le Gallienne now devoted herself to creating a nonprofit repertory theater. In this receptive climate, the first season of the new National Repertory Theatre began with a tour calculated to take the company to sixty cities in thirty states. Paul Ballantyne, Faye Emerson, and Eva Le Gallienne anchored the acting company directed by Jack Sydow. Mary Stuart and Elizabeth the Queen opened in Boston in October

1961 and closed seven months later. With fourteen-hour days, traveling by bus between engagements, and Elizabeth’s eight gowns weighing over sixty pounds each, the tour was exhausting for Le Gallienne. Dressed in a dark red wig, her Queen Elizabeth was a personal triumph. “To this rather hollow piece,” Webster observed as she saw the show en route to California to accept an award fromPage 284 → the Drama Teachers Association of Southern California, “Le Gallienne’s performance lent extraordinary magnificence.”2 After a year of organizing, the producers launched a season of three plays. Dewell and Dougherty hoped that the 1963–64 season would solidify the NRT position as America’s only touring nonprofit repertory theater with the mission of presenting classical plays to a national audience. They approached Jack Sydow and Le Gallienne again. Le Gallienne agreed to direct and play Arkadina in her own translation of Chekhov’s The Seagull and Madame Desmermortes in Jean Anouilh’s Ring round the Moon. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was the third play. Hollywood film actor Farley Granger was recruited for the company along with Anne Meacham and Denholm Elliott. ANTA sponsored the productions of The Seagull and The Crucible to open at the Belasco Theatre in New York. The tour opened on April 5 and 6, 1964, for a limited engagement of thirty-two performances. Ring round the Moon opened in October on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, thus beginning the NRT connection with university campuses as convenient places to prepare and launch their national tours. Webster was not yet involved with the NRT. In the early sixties, she was directing her last opera for the Met and two plays in Johannesburg, staging Shakespearean plays on university campuses in Berkeley and Boston, performing The Brontës in New York and London, and staging her greatest West End success—Twelve Angry Men. Frankau traveled with her whenever she worked in the United States, and they vacationed in Webster’s cottage on Martha’s Vineyard whenever schedules and the weather permitted. As Dewell planned the 1965–66 NRT season, he asked Webster to direct two of the three productions, The Madwoman of Chaillot and The Trojan Women, with Le Gallienne playing Countess Aurelia and Queen Hecuba. Jack Sydow directed The Rivals, with Sylvia Sidney as Mrs. Malaprop, which opened as the second of the three productions. By this time, Webster had been working in the theater for forty-one years and Le Gallienne for fifty.3 Webster had mixed feeling about the enterprise. Preparing these classical plays for touring the country conjured her failed dreams for the American Repertory Theatre. Moreover, Webster had learned with Marweb how economically difficult touring with a large company had become in the United States. She was aware that Dewell and Dougherty had had great difficulty raising the amount of money needed to sustain the NRT. The fact that the NRT had no home base cast it in the difficult category of “nobody’s child.”4 Even the new liaison with two universities would not prove sufficient to offset the initial expenses of rehearsing and building sets and costumes in New York City. Page 285 → Webster flew from London to New York for early rehearsals and then traveled with the company in late September 1965 to Greensboro, North Carolina, to finalize rehearsals with the thirty actors in The Madwoman of Chaillot and The Trojan Women. The company was unusually strong with Eva Le Gallienne, Sylvia Sidney, Sloane Shelton, Leora Dana, John Straub, Alan Oppenheimer, and John Garfield, Jr. in principal roles. To design sets, costumes, and lighting, the producers had assembled Will Steven Armstrong, Edith Lutyens Bel Geddes, Alvin Colt, and Tharon Musser. Actress Gina Shields, who had been recruited by Dewell to be NRT’s casting director and company manager, had risen in a few short years to assistant producer. The company was now ready to open its three-play national tour from university campuses, including the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, where Herman Middleton, chairman of the Department of Drama and Speech, sponsored the company’s residency, along with Ohio State University in Columbus. Webster and Jack Sydow readied The Madwoman of Chaillot and The Rivals, which opened in Greensboro in the Aycock Auditorium. The third play, The Trojan Women, rehearsed in Greensboro but opened at the Hartman Theatre, once a favorite touring house in downtown Columbus.

Webster was caught up in rehearsals for The Madwoman of Chaillot and The Trojan Women when she learned that Frankau, who had stayed behind in London, had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Consumed with worry about Frankau’s condition, she had difficulty focusing on the NRT’s demands. She and Le Gallienne had not worked together in over ten years—not since His Infinite Variety in the early fifties. At first, the women were tentative and awkward with one another. Webster would explain something to the cast and Le Gallienne would interpret or overrule what Webster had just said.5 Nonetheless, they appeared to sort out their difficulties by the beginning of rehearsals for The Trojan Women. Euripides’ play had the war in Vietnam as its current political landscape. The bitter contemporary context made for a production very different from the one in which Webster had made her first professional appearance as a member of the chorus in Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike’s company in 1924. Since then, all Hecubas had been measured in Webster’s mind against the greatness of Sybil Thorndike. This time, however, the impact of the play was more immediate, contemporary, and pointed. Set against the overwhelming irony of the Vietnam War, Webster reflected upon “the waste, the unalloyed wickedness of war, the totality of loss, for the ‘victor’ as well as for the vanquished.”6 The production of The Trojan Women was probably their finest collaboration in the many years Webster and Le Gallienne had worked together. LePage 286 → Gallienne was challenged by one of the great tragic roles, by a strong company, and by a director she trusted. Webster’s emotions ran high with Euripides’ material. Her liberal politics were set once more against the actions of the United States government for waging, in her opinion, an “unjust and disastrous” war. On the side of the play’s depiction of a national tragedy, Webster said: “I had never before been so aware of what the play’s author must have felt—that the Trojan War was not only the tragedy of Troy, but an even greater one for Greece.”7 Moreover, Webster was overwhelmed by her own grief over the imminent loss of a loved one. Alvin Colt’s costumes for the women, the victims of war, resembled the clothing of Vietnamese peasants. Composer Dean Fuller evolved a musical theme that was light, percussive, and sinister—what the cast called “the Greeks will not make it” sound. As Webster staged the play’s ending, Hecuba and the women, with their loved ones dead, go off into exile and slavery; the Greek soldiers stand with lowered spears in the thickening smoke and darkness. In the gateway of the burning city the shadow of Poseidon loomed once more where he had earlier prophesied: “How are ye blind, ye treadersdown of cities …yourselves so soon to die.”8 By Webster’s account, Le Gallienne’s Hecuba was “perhaps her finest performance …quite different from Sybil Thorndike’s.” Although smaller in scale, Le Gallienne’s was “finer in grain, very austere, very piercing.” Wearing little makeup and with short graying hair brushed back from her face, Le Gallienne, dressed in a long, unadorned sheathlike black gown with flowing gray cloak, never left the stage in a production played without intermission. “When Talthybius came on bearing the body of the dead child,” Webster recalled, “she looked at him, perfectly still. I used to wonder how he could endure to stand there, confronting those terrible, annihilating eyes.”9 Webster handled the chorus of nine actresses as simply as possible. Many lines were spoken by a single voice, or by a group of two or three; only rarely did the chorus chant in unison. Despite her personal unhappiness and emotional fatigue, Webster, without her usual qualifications, pronounced that she was “proud of the production.” On the night of the “ragged” first technical run-through, Ohio State University officials saw the show but said not a word afterward. On the following night, “magic” occurred on stage, and Webster said that she “cried like a fool.” Again, in Webster’s account, the university officials said nothing. Webster and the company were alternately furious and depressed. It transpired that the campus officials had not spoken to the company because they were incapable of saying anything, having wept themselves.10 Page 287 → The tour officially opened with The Madwoman of Chaillot in Greensboro on November 8, 1965. “The Greensboro connection,” Webster said, was “a mixed blessing.” The university had paid the NRT a fee and had provided rehearsal and performance space for the final week of rehearsals, for the previews and the opening

performances of the repertoire. In return, the actors were made available for class discussions and seminars, several rehearsals were open to students, and some performances were free to local patrons and public. As a producer herself, Webster noted that the arrangement did not “lift a great deal of the financial load off the NRT’s back.”11 Nonetheless, it did help to reduce the cost of rehearsals in New York and allowed the actors to concentrate on their work without other distractions and without the early scrutiny of the New York critics. Despite the many theories of the benefits of the campus connection, there were distractions. Webster’s rehearsal schedule was disrupted by actors going off to address classes. Le Gallienne refused to talk with the students. “Eva plainly said she could not do it,” Webster recalled. Webster supported her position: “the creation of two parts like Hecuba and Comtesse Aurelie was more than a full-time job.” Le Gallienne also opposed allowing student audiences into any but the final dress rehearsal. Webster agreed with her, recalling George Bernard Shaw’s dictum: “No strangers must ever be admitted to rehearsals.” Based upon her wide experience as a director, Webster knew that actors were self-conscious and easily thrown off by premature observation. “They are reluctant to try things out for fear of making fools of themselves in public,” she said. “The director is generally less subjective and sometimes is not averse to showing off to the only audience he will ever get.”12 Like the majority of directors, Webster preferred to make any delicate or probing comments to an actor out of the hearing of others. She also preferred to talk with the company as a whole by speaking quietly to the group without extraneous listeners. Conducting rehearsals publicly was little more than a classroom exercise or demonstration. “What you shout aloud from the auditorium is the least important part of what you do,” she remarked.13 Moreover, Webster knew that when attempting to prepare a show for public performance in a minimal length of time, there was no leisure for personal demonstrations of prowess or cleverness. Despite the demands of campus life, Webster worked well with the entire company, including administrative and technical staffs. Since only Jack Sydow and Eva Le Gallienne had directed NRT shows in earlier seasons, the company found a third director refreshing. A newcomer performing with the NRT company for the first time, Sloane Shelton, who played Josephine in The Madwoman of Chaillot and Cassandra in The TrojanPage 288 → Women, recalled an inspired bit of directing from Webster. To help with one of Cassandra’s difficult speeches, she suggested that Shelton draw upon a memory of a beloved childhood home with the afternoon sunlight coming through the windows.14 Gina Shields summed up Webster’s qualities as a coworker: “She was intelligent, considerate, brilliant, and funny.”15 If she became irritated with or spoke harshly to a member of the company, she sent a written apology and flowers the next day. At no time during rehearsals did she convey her personal distress and heartbreak over the news of Frankau’s illness. Throughout the company’s tour of ten cities, Webster’s work, especially in The Trojan Women, was praised for its intense theatricality, its imaginative splendor, and for characters that emerged as human and immediate.16 In later years, when Webster reflected upon the “Greensboro experiment” as a cooperative effort between a university and a professional theater company, she concluded that it was a “fruitful experiment” for both sides. From her perspective, students received an object lesson in theater discipline, observed the concentrated labor of theater professionals, and glimpsed the discipline, customs, and terminology of the profession. As soon as her two shows opened, Webster returned to London to be with her companion of over ten years. By then, she had learned that Frankau’s life was not immediately threatened. The National Repertory Theatre lasted two more seasons. The company received excellent reviews, played to more than 140,000 people, and lost money everywhere. Touring was expensive, and playing in repertory with a large company was more so. By the time reviews came out and word-of-mouth started to have a positive effect on ticket sales, the NRT was already in another city. When asked to reflect upon her years with the company, Gina Shields said that the “theatre was overall a very fine success.” “The productions were well-received across the country,” she added, “and the classroom programs with

students and professionals working together were exciting for all.”17 Without success, Dewell and Dougherty tried to establish a home base for the resident company in the newly renovated Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Forces were arrayed against them in this venue. Those affiliated with the NRT were not Washington insiders, and Michael Dewell, now married to actress Nina Foch, had shifted his interests to the West Coast. He no longer had the determination to overcome issues of leadership along with those individuals who wanted Ford’s Theatre for other purposes. Frances Anne Dougherty, who had been for the most part the sole financialPage 289 → support of the company through her personal wealth and a family philanthropic foundation, found her financial advisers opposing further use of the foundation’s funds. Without the promise of another patron, a permanent resident theater, and a fresh wave of artistic energy, Michael Dewell resigned, and the NRT folded its tents forever. Hugh Southern, who was the NRT’s general manager in 1965, greatly admired Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster as seasoned troupers with an admirable sense of craft. The women were “enchanting,” “idealistic,” “burning with sincerity” about their work, and just plain “fun” to be around. “They were pioneers and not easily discouraged,” he recalled, “but, in an admirable way, they were unbusiness-like.”18 From Southern’s perspective, the two women existed between two theatrical worlds. They had come along at a time when the panoply of contemporary fund-raising for arts institutions was nonexistent. Between them, they had tried to run theaters on box office receipts. Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre was followed by the American Repertory Theatre and the Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company. Nonetheless, in their wide experience of the professional theater world, Webster and Le Gallienne had no tradition of subsidy and fund-raising. Joseph Verner Reed’s philanthropy, letters of appeal, and personal appearances before ladies’ luncheons comprised their combined fund-raising efforts for the American Repertory Theatre. “Only their sense of quality and idealism sustained them,” Southern concluded. Southern summed up his impressions of the two artists in this way: They were fundamentally unworldly people; they had always left it to business people to figure out the resources. Naïve, indeed, about repertory and box office and subsidy.19 So it was that after seven remarkable years, the NRT closed on May 18, 1968, in Washington, D.C. Despite the idealism, the craftsmanship, and the audiences, the National Repertory Theatre was unable to find resources and a home base to continue at a time when the resident theater movement was flourishing in major cities across the country. “It was a loss,” Webster said, “for it should have filled a genuine, and serious, gap in the reach and scope of theatre in the United States.”20 The following season, Eva Le Gallienne joined Ellis Rabb’s Association of Producing Artists (APA) for a repertory season at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City. Webster remained in London, where she confronted the declining health of Pamela Frankau and faced the possibility of a bleak future without her partner. Page 290 → Diagnosed with a second cancer, Frankau underwent surgery in a London hospital. She had finished the third volume of her trilogy, Over the Mountains, and had begun work on her thirty-first novel, a mystery thriller called Colonel Blessington. When she was strong enough to travel, Webster and Frankau returned to Martha’s Vineyard. At this time, Joseph Verner Reed turned to Webster to take over the direction of Julius Caesar at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, when he fired Allen Fletcher. He knew that she had directed the play with her Marweb company and could step into the middle of rehearsals without difficulty. Webster came to the rescue of her longtime friend and patron but refused to take credit in the playbill for a production that included scenery by Will Steven Armstrong, lighting by Tharon Musser, and a remarkable acting company with Alan Howard, John Cunningham, Patrick Hines, Jerome Kilty, Nancy Marchand, Jan Miner, and Joseph Wiseman. In November, she gave a solo performance of The Seven Ages of Bernard Shaw for the ANTA matinee series at

the Theatre de Lys, and then she and Frankau returned to London. Frankau had been in physical distress for months with pain in her neck and spine and underwent tests at Guy’s Hospital. The diagnosis was bone cancer. Determined to finish Colonel Blessington, she refused further surgery. She died at their home on Christchurch Hill on June 8, 1967, at age fifty-nine. Webster and Frankau’s sister Ursula d’Arch Smith were with her at the end. Following a requiem Mass at St. Mary’s Church in Holly Place, Hampstead, attended by a small gathering of family and friends, Frankau was buried in the Hampstead cemetery. Webster wore a “blazing red scarf” on her dark clothes in celebration of her friend’s shining brilliance, which had illuminated her world and life for fourteen years. Webster’s hand is evident in the obituary published in the New York Times. Frankau’s religious faith and her “friend’s devotion” are cited as sustaining her through the long illness: “She made the task of the devoted friend who looked after her through her long illness easier by remaining true to her religion and her wit up to her last hour.”21 Diana Raymond also remembered her cousin with great fondness: She had the rare quality of being able, simply by her presence, to make you feel gayer, stronger, more able to cope with the difficulty at hand. Without her, life has lost much of its shine and colour.22 A memorial service was held at the Farm Street Church, Mayfair, on June 15, 1967, attended by Noël Coward, Rebecca West, and other friends from the literary and theatrical worlds. Almost a year later, Webster broadcast a tribute on BBC radio’s Woman’sPage 291 → Hour, a series that had frequently featured the novelist. The broadcast ended with Webster saying, “She loved life. She enriched and enhanced it. This seems to me the most important thing that anyone can do. In her books Pamela is still doing it.”23 In early September, Webster closed up the Hampstead house, set plans in motion to sell or store the furnishings, and placed the property with an agent to be sold. At Le Gallienne’s invitation she went to stay in Weston just until “she could pick up her life again.” In her grief and sadness, her life seemed empty and meaningless. Le Gallienne reported that Webster drank heavily in the early period of her grief.24 Eventually, she returned to her beloved cottage on Martha’s Vineyard and gathered friends around her. At first, Webster took Le Gallienne’s advice to heart, picked up the threads of her life again, and sought work to distract her from her grief. In early February, she was staying at the Royalton Hotel on Forty-fourth Street, beginning preparations for the New York revival of Graham Greene’s Carving a Statue, when she learned that the Christchurch Hill house had been burglarized shortly before its contents were to be removed. With tongue in cheek, she observed that the burglars seemed to have been furnishing a house themselves. They took bed linens, bath towels, blankets, tablecloths, napkins, and entire place settings of china and silver. In her distress over the violation by strangers, Webster became obsessed with locating a fourteen-inch-high terra-cotta statuette of the Virgin and Child. This gift from Frankau Webster had kept in her bedroom. Was it stolen, or was it in storage? The statue was only of “sentimental value” to her, but “she should hate to lose it.”25 Webster spent over a month writing letters to her London solicitors, the insurers, and to Frankau’s sister and nephew. She quarreled about everything, including fees charged by the storage company and the auction house. She was angry, hurt, and reminded once again that if Frankau had been alive, none of this would have happened. With Pamela around, she would not have been so aggrieved over something “really so unimportant” as the lost statue. “I don’t know why it threw me so off-balance,” she later confided.26 At Frankau’s death, Colonel Blessington, which contained a “brilliant acid-drop sketch” of the BBC’s Woman’s Hour program, was still unfinished. Working from notes and earlier conversations with Frankau, Diana Raymond completed the novel, which was published in England and America the following year. At Webster’s urging, the Bodley Head Press invited Dame Rebecca West to write a foreword to the British edition. The famous novelist

agreed, “most sweetly and promptly,” according to Webster.27 However, just as Webster began rehearsals in March for Carving a Statue, a controversy over West’s foreword shattered her peace of mind. Page 292 → Frankau had had a turbulent history with the distinguished novelist. She spent summers in the late 1920s with West and her son Anthony on the French Riviera. According to friends, Pamela both worshipped and feared West and became her son’s confidante. In 1934, West wrote “The Addict,” a short story that depicted Frankau’s liaison with Humbert Wolfe, during which she bankrupted herself giving him money.28 Frankau retaliated in her own novel The Devil We Know, and the friendship between Frankau and West was interrupted for a number of years. In her foreword to Colonel Blessington, West assessed Frankau’s literary talents and her “genius” for personal relationships with men and women. She also commented upon Frankau’s appearance toward the end of her life. As a young girl she was “beautiful in the manner of Disney’s Bambi, and so she remained, until middle life, when ill-health made her a diagram of suffering, still beautiful but painfully so.” Though she is no male impersonator, no butch, as she grew older she suffered a hormonic change which invaded her with a tinge of masculinity, and she came to resemble the ghost of [a] handsome and courageous man.29 Frankau’s nephew called the foreword “waspish.”30 Learning of the matter while lecturing in Australia during September, Webster was horrified and assumed the blame for asking West to contribute the foreword. She surmised that West was avenging not just an old slight of thirty years ago, but a fairly recent one. In Pen to Paper, Frankau had referred obliquely to the turbulent relationship that had developed between the two writers. “The whole piece might have been written in 1939 after Humbert’s death,” Webster said, “and would have been inaccurate and misleading even then. It is not only a dreadfully false picture of Pamela, but would be extremely damaging to any future publication of her work in the U.S. (e.g., paperbacks of the trilogy)…. If there’s a payment to be made to her [West], I’ll make it myself. But by golly! If that gets into print I’ll go and shoot her!!”31 Webster marshaled her rage to stop publication of the foreword. The letter that Webster wrote to West was both an apology and a defense. She was “first astonished and bewildered and then, quite frankly, horrified. I felt—and feel—that the portrait which emerges is of someone whom I, for one, knew nothing whatever about—a fantasy—Pamela; an emotionally unstable and totally humourless young woman who might just conceivably have existed before 1939 …but certainly hasn’t since…. I believed—and believe—that the publication of the Foreword would do her a profound disservice.” She continued, Page 293 → Only one thing more. I cannot, of course, quarrel with your literary judgment of Pamela’s second-rate ability as a writer or of its nature and derivation, tho’ I can and do disagree with it.32 West withdrew the foreword, and in its place Raymond wrote a brief introduction.33 Here the matter ended. Webster’s friends continued to encourage her to immerse herself in work, and, at the invitation of producer Berenice Weiler, she had agreed to direct Graham Greene’s Carving a Statue. Weiler, who began her career in television as an assistant producer, worked for thirteen years with the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, and then formed a theatrical management firm with Marilyn S. Miller (called Weiler-Miller Associates), was producing Greene’s play along with Dina and Alexander E. Racolin at the Gramercy Arts Theatre on East Twenty-seventh Street. In her preteens, Weiler had seen Othello in New York and during her years with the Shakespeare Festival had met Webster in Connecticut. Greene’s story about an elderly sculptor who has spent the last fifteen years of his life carving a statue of God in his own likeness was Webster’s last professional production in New York. During rehearsals, she stayed at the

Royalton Hotel, having given up the Twelfth Street apartment when she returned to New York following Frankau’s death. For the American production of Greene’s play, Webster cast Larry Gates as the sculptor, Saylor Creswell as his son, and Fran Myers and Judy Allen as “first and second models.” The play opened on April 30, 1968, and ran for only twelve performances. With echoes of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, about another sculptor who sacrificed all to create the penultimate work of his career, Greene’s play dissatisfied critics and audiences. It was weighed down by “too many symbols” and too much “unmotivated theological conversation…and explication.”34 Dan Sullivan called it “so much milk-and-water” and complained that Webster had staged Greene’s metaphysical examination of the human capacity for delusion as if it were a “warm family comedy.” It was a “fatally tender misreading” of a play that needed to be staged as “toughly as it was written.”35 In retrospect, Webster’s objectivity had been seriously challenged by Greene’s play. Her emotional wounds were too raw to engage in a theatrical debate about God, humankind, and the sacrifice of loved ones by a singularly selfish artist. It is also likely that she knew this would be her final New York production. She had not directed on Broadway since The Aspern Papers six years earlier. She might well have viewed her own creative act as one in which she was carving her own final theatrical piece as both a testamentPage 294 → to her waning creative powers and the ironic thought that her life was now empty and meaningless. After opening Carving a Statue, Webster surrounded herself with friends on Martha’s Vineyard and worked on repairs to her house on Gay Head. The cottage now held all of her personal belongings with the exception of a trunk filled with papers and photographs left with Le Gallienne in Weston. In the summer of 1968, Jane Brundred, who lived on Martha’s Vineyard, entered Webster’s life to fill the emotional vacuum created by Frankau’s death. Webster wrote to Frankau’s sister and to Diana Raymond explaining that she was “extraordinarily lucky.” “The half of me that was left after Pamela died has at last begun to grow another bit.” She described her new companion at length: California-born, she was educated at Stanford University (“Pamela’s old stamping ground”). “She is kind and generous and looks after me,” she wrote. “She is tall-ish, dark-ish, long, American legs, STRONG American accent, dazzling American teeth …fifteen years younger than I am, but it doesn’t seem to bother her.”36 Brundred’s father had passed away several years before she and Webster met on the island. He left his daughter an inheritance so that she no longer had to work. After graduating from Stanford, she had worked at various jobs, including for the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, as a subeditor for Louis Untermeyer at the Heritage Press, and as an executive with several foundations. Little is known about her previous marriage. Webster invited Jane Brundred to share the cottage on Gay Head, happy to have a companion to share her life. Since Brundred was considerably younger, Webster believed they would have many years together. They shared interests in cooking, the Episcopalian Church, the theater, and literature, “though we have little poetry in common, which is always the case between the English and Americans!”37 Brundred’s kindness extended to Webster’s devotion to Frankau’s memory. When they attended the midnight service on Christmas Eve in Vineyard Haven, the altar of Grace Episcopal Church was ablaze with crimson flowers given “in loving memory of Pamela Frankau.” “I thought she wouldn’t mind coming to church with us for once,” her friend said. Webster cried like a “fool.”38 Webster’s letters to Frankau’s relatives describe her delight in her new friend, who was very different from Frankau and Eva Le Gallienne. “She can be quite bossy on occasion and knows about the stock market and tax returns, so it’s understandable!”39 Although she had written a book on Shakespeare and many articles and essays on theater, Webster had never written about her theatrical family. Page 295 →

When she returned to Martha’s Vineyard after Frankau’s death, she gathered up May Whitty’s diaries, dating from 1885 to 1938, along with notes dictated by May and Ben to a secretary in 1937, and began assembling the family history. She wrote much of The Same Only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family in the Harvard College Library, where she received assistance in obtaining materials from British sources on the early history of the Webster family. Friends also provided facts and colorful memories. Sybil Thorndike, Lewis Casson, Maurice Evans, Eva Le Gallienne, Caroline Ramsden, Diana Raymond, and J. C. Trewin came forth with stories and anecdotes about the London theater and May’s and Ben’s careers. Webster dedicated the book to Pamela Frankau, whose “example and encouragement enabled me to write it, though she did not live to read it.”40 In December 1968 she finished her book on the many generations of the Webster/Whitty theatrical families, ending with the final member on the threshold of her New York years. It was published by Alfred A. Knopf the following year to glowing reviews. In his review Brooks Atkinson noted that one word, work, characterized all of the Websters. “They worked all day and far into the night,” he wrote. “Work was the psychosis of the family. Their energy was inexhaustible—even when they had none left.” He described them as highly cultivated, generous-minded, very gay and humorous, patriotic, modest, scrupulous, and “enthusiastic about the theatre.” He quoted May Whitty as saying that the theater was “an opportunity for giving, not a machinery for getting.”41 For Saturday Review, Reginald Denham touched upon the fact that Webster’s early career as an actress was almost “a carbon copy of the early days of her famous family”: “As the title implies, it was the same only different.” Webster was admirably equipped as an actor, director, and producer for the task of writing about show business through many generations of English actors.42 During their months together, Brundred helped Webster to finalize the manuscript of The Same Only Different, proofreading the manuscript and preparing the index. By April 1969, she was dead of complications from cancer. Webster was with her at Phillips House of Massachusetts General Hospital when she died. Webster’s grief was “excruciating.” Her loss was compounded by the arrival of Brundred’s brother and two sisters, who were apparently dismissive of the relationship between Webster and their sister. Webster, who had shared Brundred’s car on Martha’s Vineyard, now learned from Brundred’s siblings that she could not legally “use her car any longer.”43 Despite her sisters and brother, Jane Brundred had accounted for herPage 296 → partner at her death, bequeathing a small fortune to Webster. Though devalued in the decline of the stock market in the early seventies, it provided a comfortable nest egg for Webster’s final years. To manage her grief and loneliness, Webster turned to a university setting. In September 1969, she accepted a one-semester appointment as the Oscar Rennebohm Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Speech and Communications Arts at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Five years earlier, she had worked as a visiting director with students at Boston University. With the encouragement of Mouzon Law, who was then head of the Theatre Department at Boston University and who was forging linkages between theater training and professional practice, Webster agreed to direct an all-student cast of Measure for Measure, again as part of the Shakespeare Quadricentennial. When she arrived in Boston, she found that Horace Armistead and Raymond Sovey, whom Webster had worked with both at the Met and on Broadway, were the professional faculty heading the technical and design divisions in the department and producing admirably trained design and technical students. Nonetheless, in order to cast Measure for Measure, Webster was required to audition dozens of students ranging from sophomores to graduate students. She was not a director who could make instant choices without undue effort, and she had always been meticulous when auditioning actors. Since acting, in her view, was an accomplishment nearly impossible to categorize except with wide and elastic margins, actors must be treated with great care by those who judged them. She tried to give every candidate her full concentration. “My eyes, ears, sensibilities became so blunted, my memory so stretched beyond reason,” she admitted, “that I end by praying for the next comer to be terrible so that I needn’t try to remember him.” She was a scribbler during auditions and wrote word-sketches beside each actor’s

name (“the blonde in the blue sweater”) to jog her recollection when she reread the resumés. Her code for oblivion was “N.D.T.—no discernible talent.”44 Altogether, Webster was pleased with her time at Boston University and with the remarkably good performances delivered by the cast of Measure for Measure. Her experience was marred only by her puzzlement over the inability of students training to be theater professionals to receive academic credit for their work in a production. “What should have been the high point of their training became an extracurricular activity,” she said. “This is widely true and patently absurd.”45 The year was 1964, and Webster was very much aware that changes were taking place in the United States as professionals, like Mouzon Law, created university programs strictly for thePage 297 → training of actors. As an artist-in-residence, Webster was making her own contribution to the training. She was one of the professionals in the early sixties effectively preparing the way for universities to accept the now widely held notion that theater professionals should be hired to enhance the training of students for the industry. Despite her salubrious experiences in Boston and Berkeley, the Madison experiment was another matter. In her four months as a member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, the wires were crossed from beginning to end. She had agreed to conduct two seminars on Shakespeare and on styles of production and to direct a mainstage production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Despite her efforts to define in advance of her visit what was expected of her as an artist-in-residence (and Webster admitted to being profoundly ignorant about the ways of the academe), she found in the Speech and Communications Arts Department in 1969 an “unbridgeable, abyss between the academic and the professional attitude of mind.”46 To prepare for her teaching experience, she talked with Lillian Hellman, a Martha’s Vineyard resident who had experience teaching at Harvard University. Hellman advised Webster to define her objectives and to prepare a questionnaire to expedite the selection process for students to be admitted to her seminars. All of her efforts to communicate with department officials landed on the wrong desks, or lay unopened. When she arrived on campus, the chairman greeted her with, “Well, now, Miss Webster, and what are your classes going to be about?”47 Unlike the departments in Berkeley and Boston, the Madison unit was largely a speech department with academic strengths in rhetoric, oral interpretation, and literature. Webster found that she had to check all of her assumptions at the door. She had assumed that she would be troubled by the much-vaunted “generation gap,” by the political disruptions of the notoriously militant campus, and by reputed drug problems among the students. By the time she left Madison, she had the overall impression that the students were “alive, questing, eager to gobble up all you had to offer them, indescribably hard-working.”48 In contrast, Webster’s assumptions about what she called “the twisting groves of Academe” hardened into outright hostility. In effect, Webster’s professional habit of mind for addressing the needs of the artist in performance stood in sharp contrast to the educator’s concerns for grades, paperwork, and theses. Webster concluded that the most successful part of her Wisconsin experiment was the production of The Three Sisters in the Wisconsin Union Theatre designed and built by Lee Simonson, the Theatre Guild’s chief designer, where the best professional companies had toured, including the Lunts and Webster’s own Marweb company. Once again, Webster faced thePage 298 → requirement that she audition “the entire campus” for the fourteen roles plus extras in The Three Sisters. Faculty helped by overseeing preliminary auditions, leaving Webster with two afternoons and evenings to select a final cast and begin rehearsals two days later. She felt handicapped by inexperienced students who worked the lighting control board and the sound equipment. Webster admitted nearly going out of her mind with the students’ “learning experiences.” Nonetheless, the student cast found the rehearsals wonderful, congenial, demanding, and often humorous. For Webster, The Three Sisters was a satisfying and beautiful show. I would back it to challenge comparison with other productions I have seen done by well-known companies. We had a wonderful time; Chekhov, again, having much to do with it. We enjoyed ourselves, we opened doors to each other and to the audience, most of whom had never seen Chekhov before; we did not, of this I am quite sure, do any dishonor to Anton Pavlovich. I felt amply rewarded,

and so did the other people concerned in the production. We all felt deprived when it was over.49

Pioneers are not always a happy lot, and Margaret Webster was no exception. She had entered the halls of academe with trepidation and ignorance and left it infuriated by what she called the “dreadful emphasis on prolixity in academic circles.”50 Nonetheless, her pioneering spirit reshaped the classroom experience for sixty Wisconsin students. She relied upon her own directorial methods of research and spent hours in the library. She taught the whole stage background of selected plays—what sort of society the author lived in, what sort of theaters he or she worked in, what the acting of the period was like, who the audiences were. When she analyzed the plays, she asked how they should be transferred from the printed page to the stage. She brought fans, swords, and snuffboxes into the classroom to demonstrate, for example, that most difficult production style—the eighteenth century School for Scandal. Sybil Robinson, who was a graduate student in 1969 enrolled in both of Webster’s seminars, described Webster’s entrance into the classroom. “I remember her first class, how lovely she looked as she came in,” she reported. We all clapped, and her first words were, “You are very kind and I am very frightened!” Needless to say both classes …were a great success. Her background experience and profound knowledge of her field meant that she didn’t teach in the conventional sense but spoke from a familiar acquaintance with the subject which was electrifying. Yet it was all soPage 299 → simply presented that the students responded with enthusiasm and followed her challenges…. She was patient, accepting, and encouraging.51 While Webster enjoyed the students and her work with them, the students acknowledged the tensions between Webster and other faculty. Robinson thought that the “troubles” stemmed from the clash between Webster’s expectations and academic presumptions. “In those days,” Robinson observed, “there was a great difference between the academic idea of theatre and the professional. There was very little integration of the two worlds.”52 A few days before she left the university, Webster revived her failing spirits by going to see the Lunts, who lived in Genesee, an hour’s drive from Madison. She said that her visit with her cherished friends “threw my whole laborious academic effort entirely into the discard and rendered all doctorates irrelevant, leaving me an old pro, just where I started.”53 Alfred Lunt, wearing a “pirate patch” over one damaged eye, prepared an elegant lunch worthy of a Cordon Bleu chef. As the three settled down to talk over dessert and coffee, Webster described her conflicting feelings about university life and her problems with The Three Sisters. Although she had played the part herself (with Le Gallienne directing), Webster was convinced that she had failed to help the young Madison actress who had played Masha, especially with her difficult scene in the last act. Lynn Fontanne said, “Remind me of it.” Webster described Chekhov’s ending for the lovers: “Enter Masha.” She has exactly one line, “looking into his face”: “Good-bye.” There is one stage direction: “a prolonged kiss.” Vershinin has two stumbling sentences and goes, taking Masha’s whole life with him. The author gives her no words—just one more stage direction: “crying bitterly.” Lynn Fontanne thought about Webster’s description for a moment and then said decisively, “I don’t think I should find that difficult.” “And, God bless her. I am sure she wouldn’t,” Webster reflected.54 Making an effort to bring order into her life, Webster returned to London seeking work. She directed a revival of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession with Susannah York as Vivie and Mary Ellis as Mrs. Warren at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, Surrey. With the help of her friend Caroline Ramsden, she rented actress Martita Hunt’s former flat at 7 Primrose Hill Studios in Chalk Farm in northern London. Webster remembered Martita Hunt fondly as John Gielgud’s leading lady at the Old Vic in 1930, where Webster had played the second ingenue to Hunt’s Portia and Rosalind. Martita Hunt died in 1969, the same year that Webster published The Same Only Different. Page 300 →

Primrose Hill Studios was one of these “tucked-away courtyards with a little garden that makes London so unexpected and charming and, unlike Christchurch Hill, not the smallest whisper of traffic.”55 Although Webster had sold the Christchurch Hill house, memory of her life with Frankau flooded her thoughts and emotions. The robbery still frustrated her: “I still don’t know what was stolen and isn’t here, and what I just can’t find and what I gave away in a lavish and reckless vein and now wish to God I hadn’t.”56 Revisiting London again also called up her grief and longing: “I find it unexpectedly difficult to make a rhythm of living in London again without Pamela; and miss her, at every turn of every road, more than I have done since I left Hampstead. But ‘this too will pass.’” Many friends gathered around her. She went to parties, plays, museums, and galleries. She was invited to Noël Coward’s “grand party” on the occasion of his knighthood, which Webster described as “not grand, not a crush and very agreeable.”57 As she rehearsed Mrs. Warren’s Profession, she confided to Le Gallienne: “I don’t know how good it will be, but all the actors will be a lot better than they would have been without me! but no one is to know that but me and God.” She was also charmed by the kindness of the actors: “They have been so nice to me that I can only suppose London must be full of perfectly awful directors under whom they had worked before.” Mary Ellis, who played the title role, “has all the skills and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.” Webster wrote with admiration of Susannah York, whose “skills are for cameras and mikes, but who has, nevertheless, a fumbling, groping, extremely obstinate and rather (no, very) selfish passion for an inner truth.” For her part, Webster was emotionally exhausted and relieved that it was a “simple show, physically, and very few light-cues!”58 The production opened on February 10, 1970, but did not transfer to the West End, as Webster had hoped, even though critic Michael Billington liked the production. He noted that, since modern audiences were no longer shocked by the subject of prostitution, Webster had shrewdly tilted the production toward comedy.59 As Webster had done so many times before to shield herself from loss, she undertook a European tour, this time for the U.S. Information Service, to Berlin, Oslo, and Copenhagen in March and April. For Le Gallienne she described her impressions of Europe, especially of East Berlin. She was “infinitely” depressed by Checkpoint Charlie (“just as sinister as you’d think”) and the thousands of identical prefab, high-rise buildings that looked like “prisons.” She went to the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Brecht’s version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus that had been in the repertory for six years. She found it “terribly old-fashioned.”60 Page 301 → Webster had not been feeling well during her travels in Europe and returned to Martha’s Vineyard in late April. Encouraged by the success of The Same Only Different, she began a second volume of her family history and was now writing her autobiography, focusing on her own career in the United States and England from 1937 to the present. In September, Webster was diagnosed with colon cancer, calling Le Gallienne from Boston General Hospital with the “terrible news.” She had surgery to remove a portion of her colon, but medication and radiation treatments did little to retard the progress of the disease. Webster now required assistance if she was to complete her book. She turned to Eloise Armen, who lived in Westport with her husband and children. Armen had been in and around the theater as an actress, stage manager, and theater manager. She had also been a good friend of actress Laurette Taylor in her last troubled years. Armen met Le Gallienne in Boston during the National Repertory Theatre tour when the actress had invited her to tea. Growing fond of the small, soft-spoken, dark-haired woman, Le Gallienne asked her to help with research for her book on Eleonora Duse. Webster first met Armen in Weston while she was assisting Le Gallienne with her book. Webster now asked if she would also help with her autobiography. Webster’s first book had been a memorial to the Webster theatrical tradition of which she was the final member. The second was part valedictory to her theatrical life and part memorial to herself. Although she had written many articles about the theater, directing, and acting, she, unlike Eva Le Gallienne, Lawrence Langner, Cheryl

Crawford, John Houseman, Tyrone Guthrie, and others, had not written books about the process of making theater nor the histories of productions and companies with which she had been associated as a creative partner. Shakespeare without Tears, a record of her interpretations and thoughts on directing Shakespeare for modern audiences, was the closest she came to doing so. She completed her autobiography, Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, on Martha’s Vineyard in December 1971 and dedicated the book to her oldest remaining friends—Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson. Webster knew that her creative life was over. The book was published by Alfred A. Knopf two months before her death. Shortly before she finished the autobiography, Webster was hospitalized again and underwent additional treatments in Boston. Le Gallienne invited Webster to come to Weston for a month-long rest. Webster frankly dreaded making the trip from Boston and encountering Le Gallienne’s grief over the death the previous month of Marion Evensen Westlake, her companion of thirty-seven years. Nonetheless, Webster put her preferences behind her and traveled to Westport. Webster’s presence gave Le Gallienne reason toPage 302 → build a fire in the fireplace, decorate a traditional Danish Christmas tree, fill the house with flowers, and return to a normal routine.61 Webster also made another contribution to Le Gallienne, whom she loved now like a sister. As a Christmas gift, she presented her friend a book that motivated Le Gallienne to return to the stage. The gift was a best-selling juvenile novel by Barbara Wersba, called The Dream Watcher. The story is about a fourteen-year-old lonely misfit, Albert Scully, who is befriended by an eccentric old woman who tells him that she was once a famous actress and assures him that all great people have been different and unusual. Webster thought it would make a charming play, and Le Gallienne was intrigued by the theme of an older actress helping a younger person. They invited the author to tea in Weston. During the afternoon, Le Gallienne asked Barbara Wersba to write a play for her. Wersba thought she meant a television script for a wide audience, but Le Gallienne assured her otherwise. Wersba had never written a play but agreed to adapt The Dream Watcher for Le Gallienne.62 Her efforts were not successful, and The Dream Watcher did not find a stage until 1975, when it was given a production at the White Barn Theatre in Westport. Webster returned to Boston to consult her doctors, telephoning Le Gallienne to tell her that the cancer treatments had not been successful and that her life was now measured in weeks. “Nothing can be done,” Webster told her. She returned to Weston and was driven by Hartney Arthur to New York to see her publisher. Arthur was a theatrical agent who lived near Weston and had represented Le Gallienne from time to time. He drove very carefully because every bump in the road brought agony to his passenger.63 In April, Webster returned to London with tentative plans to return to New York on the France in May. She put her financial affairs in order by drawing up a will with several cash bequests and turned over her royalties and copyrights to Diana Raymond. After leaving smaller amounts to various friends and charities, Webster left ten thousand dollars and the remainder of her estate to Eva Le Gallienne. Once in London, she entered the University College Hospital on Huntley Street, “almost opposite RADA.” In her letters to Le Gallienne, she referred to her destructive and painful cancer as “Percy,” presumably named for the eloquent but reckless Harry Percy (called Hotspur) in 1 Henry IV.64 This kind of ironic labeling was typical of Webster. In writing about the play many years earlier, she had said that “Hotspur is always kept alive and burning; he is no puppet warrior.”65 Doctors soon detected a second cancer, and Webster underwent further surgery. She called this one “Pluto,” for the god of Hades.66 She told six people about this latest development: Eva Le Gallienne, Ursula d’Arch Smith, Page 303 → Diana Raymond, Caroline Ramsden, Mary Payne, and Berenice Weiler, whom she described as “always staunch and helpful in time of trouble.”67 Despite the possibility of further surgery, she was still writing to Le Gallienne about her plans to return to Martha’s Vineyard in the summer. “If medical affairs mean a longer delay …I might rent the Vineyard [her cottage] and not come back until the lovely Fall months that I’ve missed for 3 years in a row.”68 Webster was by no means idle. She worked on the page proofs and index for her autobiography and approved the

layout of photographs. Her New York agent, Selma Broder, wrote continuously to her in London about making additional recordings for Masterworks. “I don’t know if or when I could get to NY to record,” she responded. “Boston, perhaps?”69 Webster had surgery again in early May, but the prognosis was not good: “It still remains to be seen whether Percy will now turn into an upright and blameless character,” she told Le Gallienne. “Also to solve the puzzle of how to keep Pluto at bay.”70 Webster tried to downplay the surgery. It “really was nothing,” she wrote, “but Percy has yet to discover a new life-style, and has not at all settled down to regular business. Also, they’re giving me a set of injections designed to relieve the pain of radiation damage on a longer basis than just pills.”71 Berenice Weiler arrived from New York bearing medicines supplied by Webster’s friends. She remained in London and helped Webster get resettled at Primrose Hill following her surgery. Webster reported to Le Gallienne that “Berenice is here—coming in to see me today, and she will telephone you and give you all the news.”72 She also reported that the injections were “doing good,” and that the doctors wanted to continue the series at twomonth intervals. But this necessitated that she remain in London. Reluctant to wait two and a half months before returning to New York, she reactivated her ticket to sail on the France for June 2. She planned to spend one day in New York seeing her lawyer, Charles Renthal, and meeting with her publishers at Knopf.73 Webster sailed to New York for a final time in early June. During June and July, Le Gallienne devoted herself to caring for her friend. They spent their days in Weston and on Martha’s Vineyard. Le Gallienne accompanied Webster to a party in New York at the Shubert Theatre to celebrate the publication of Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage. At the party Webster appeared well and full of high spirits, but she suffered constant pain that medication no longer relieved. On the occasion of the publication of her book, the New York Times carried a feature article, called “Margaret Webster Repeats Author’s Role.” Interviewed in the library of Le Gallienne’s home, Webster expressed somePage 304 → bitterness about the state of the current American theater. She was nostalgic for a theater where actors could earn a livelihood. If she had children, she would advise them against going into the theater: “There’s simply no way for them to earn a living any more. But I would never forbid them from trying if they showed talent and were determined.” Lamenting the demise of classical theater in the United States, she recalled the unhappy fate of the American Repertory Theatre. She accused “the rodent critics” of killing a “pioneering theatrical idea.” Asked if she had ever thought about becoming a critic herself, she mentioned that she had once thought of seeking the job at the New York Times in Brooks Atkinson’s absence during the Second World War, but decided that she could not do it. “I knew enough about the theatre,” she said, “to know what I didn’t know.”74 In August, Webster returned to London. She gave up the Primrose Hill flat and entered Saint Christopher’s Hospice at 51 Lawrie Park Road, Sydenham, administered by her friend Dame Albertine Winner. Webster described the hospice as “a charming place” and wrote to Le Gallienne, “I have a lovely room—garden outside and trees all around.”75 Le Gallienne made several trips across the Atlantic to visit with her oldest and dearest friend. These visits were complicated by the fact that Le Gallienne would not leave her Yorkshire terrier, Nana, at home. Since England quarantined dogs entering the country, she flew to Paris, where she and Nana stayed with Alice De Lamar. Le Gallienne then commuted daily across the channel to Saint Christopher’s Hospice, where she and Webster reminisced about old times. Webster’s last letter to Le Gallienne described a “beastly Pluto” and a “recalcitrant Percy,” but assured her that the “T.L.C. treatment begins to work.”76 During Le Gallienne’s final visit, Webster lay in a coma and died soon thereafter. It was November 13, 1972. Margaret Webster was sixty-seven.

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EPILOGUE Margaret Webster’s friends and colleagues eulogized her in memorial services in New York City and in London. At the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration (known as “The Little Church around the Corner”) on East Twenty-ninth Street, some two hundred friends and coworkers attended the service held on December 5, 1972, in New York City. Anne Jackson, who had appeared with the American Repertory Theatre in John Gabriel Borkman and Yellow Jack, read tributes from Maurice Evans, Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt, Sir John Gielgud, and Dame Sybil Thorndike. In their tributes sent from London, Maurice Evans commented upon Webster’s “indomitable courage” in the last few months of her illness and John Gielgud praised her high endeavor and sense of discipline that “influenced many hundreds of people” in the theater.1 George Voskovec, who had appeared as Trinculo in The Tempest, captured his late friend’s spirit in these words: The forever gallant Peggy who, up to the last, reminds me of a gallant British frigate with all flags snapping—and the pennant, signaling her deep sense of the ridiculous, flying the highest of all—forever with guts, style and supreme elegance. With heart, too.2 A second service was held two days later at St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, known as “The Actors’ Church,” where Webster had been baptized at the age of two. The church was decorated with white and yellow flowers, and Bach’s prelude “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” rang out as Webster’s London friends crowded into the small church. The parish priest, the Reverend John Hester, presided. Leo Genn, who had appeared in Twelve Angry Men, read “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” from Cymbeline; Gwen Ffrangon Davies, a friend since their work together in Richard of Bordeaux, read fromPage 306 → 1 Corinthians; and ninety-year-old Dame Sybil Thorndike, dressed in a flowing white robe, read passages from Teilhard de Chardin in a voice Le Gallienne described as “younger and more resonant than most voices in people of 20!”3 Webster had asked Le Gallienne to attend her memorial service in London. Aware that her departed friend would want a public demonstration of her love and affection, Eva Le Gallienne wrote a final tribute to her friend of sixtythree years and sent it to the New York Times. I knew Margaret Webster for over 60 years. She was 4 and I was 10 when we first met…. gradually, as the difference in our ages ceased to matter, we became friends—a lasting friendship for which I shall be forever grateful. Peggy had a genius for friendship and her loss will cause widespread grief. She will be sorely missed. Peggy’s true love was acting. She would “rather act than eat,” she used to say. But while she was an excellent actress, it was as a great director that she made her reputation. I use the word “great” advisedly. It is rare for a woman to succeed in this difficult field. She must be quite exceptionally talented to overcome the ingrained prejudices, the skepticism and distrust that stand in her way…. She ranked as the equal, and in many cases the superior, of the most highly considered male directors of her time. Peggy, however, was not an egocentric. She did not try to create a play in her own image. She believed a director should interpret the author, not betray him…. She made no use of tricks and gimmicks—she did not need to…. Peggy was a truly good, kind and generous human being. Of course, she had faults—many faults, she would have said—or she would not have been human. She could be violently opinionated, ferociously patient; she did not suffer fools gladly.4 As early as the summer of 1967, Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster made preparations for the end of their lives. (Le Gallienne outlived Webster by nineteen years.) Pamela Frankau’s death that year followed by Webster’s diagnosis of cancer compelled them both to consider the finality of death. Although several universities asked to receive their papers, they decided to donate their papers to the Library of Congress, believing fervently in the future of nationally subsidized institutions. They chose the Library of Congress as a symbol of what federal dollars could do for the preservation of literature, the arts, and theatrical history. Both women liked the idea of

their papers residing alongside the archives of other American women who had also been theatrical pioneers. Beginning in 1967 (and again in 1970 and 1972), Webster depositedPage 307 → with the library her correspondence with her parents, May Whitty’s diaries, family and theatrical photographs, her promptbooks for plays and operas, unpublished scripts (her adaptation of Royal Highness and The Brontës), copies of speeches, her notebooks, writings, clippings and playbills, scenery sketches and lighting diagrams. In addition, she contributed correspondence with Brooks Atkinson, Noël Coward, Eva Le Gallienne, George Bernard Shaw, Dame Sybil Thorndike, Alexander Woollcott, Cheryl Crawford, Graham Greene, and others. The collection spans a period in American theatrical history from 1905 to 1970. She also donated some of the May Whitty–Ben Webster correspondence and other family papers to the British Library and several items to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. In June 1972, five months before her death, she drew up a list of contents of files to be sent to the Library of Congress with a handwritten note to destroy Pamela Frankau’s letters. Shortly before her death, she instructed her friends on Martha’s Vineyard, Carolyn Cullen and Mary Payne, to destroy all personal correspondence that she had placed in a large suitcase and left in her house on Gay Head. According to her wishes, the letters were destroyed. As Webster put her financial house in order in July, she deposited fifteen thousand dollars in a joint account with Le Gallienne. Webster wanted Le Gallienne to use some of the money to add a bathroom off the upstairs guest room at the Weston house. Webster knew how much Le Gallienne hated sharing a bathroom with guests. Her gift was also meant to encourage Le Gallienne to invite more guests to visit her and perhaps find another companion.5 With no living relatives, Webster specified in her will bequests to Pamela’s sister, Ursula d’Arch Smith, to Ursula’s son Timothy d’Arch Smith, and to her close friend, Caroline Ramsden, who had helped her in London during her illness. She also bequeathed smaller amounts to various friends, including composer Lehman Engel. She set aside funds for cancer research and charities, the Actor’s Fund of America, the Actor’s Charitable Trust in England, the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest in London, and a sum to St. Christopher’s Hospice in memory of Pamela Frankau. Webster left the remainder of her estate and ten thousand dollars to Eva Le Gallienne. She also directed Diana Raymond, her literary executor, to make efforts to bring about paperback printings of The Same Only Different and Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage. These two books have never been reissued. Only Shakespeare without Tears has been reprinted in various paperback editions, most recently in the year 2000. During the days following her death, London and New York newspapers carried lengthy obituaries calling attention to the passing of the “last memberPage 308 → of a 150-year-old English theatrical dynasty, and one of its liveliest and most versatile members.”6 The reviewer for the Times of London went so far as to say that Webster “had had a career in some ways more distinguished than that of any member of the four previous generations of the Webster family who had contributed to English theatrical history.”7 The writer for the faraway Johannesburg newspaper said that she “left a deeper imprint on our theatre than most who have come to do a job here in the last decade or so.”8 Lord Laurence Olivier, who had known Webster since 1925 when they had both walked on in the CassonThorndike production of Henry VIII, wrote to the Times about her qualities as a friend. “She had a rare gift for friendship in that I don’t think she ever made one that did not last seemingly for ever, riding supremely over all kinds of storm-tossed times that beset almost any friendship in a profession such as ours. If you had not seen her for ten years you always picked it up as if the last meeting was the day before.” He added, She will be most dreadfully missed by all her devoted friends, no matter how seldom over the years they saw her, she had such constant being in our hearts.9 The final member of the Webster family was cremated and her ashes scattered in the memorial garden of the crematorium. She had asked that no one attend the cremation, only “the necessary technicians,” but Pamela

Frankau’s sister Ursula d’Arch Smith and her cousin Diana Raymond were in attendance.10 Nonetheless, the story of Margaret Webster did not end there. Another page in Webster’s history followed soon after her death. For about a year, her friend Dame Albertine Winner, a distinguished medical doctor and second-in-command at St. Christopher’s Hospice, founded by Dame Cicely Saunders, who instigated the hospice movement in England, worked with the Reverend John Hester of St. Paul’s Church to secure a memorial plaque for Webster to be placed on the same wall as her parents’ plaque. Lord Olivier encouraged “theatrical friends” to help meet the costs, and both Dame Winner and Eva Le Gallienne contributed. Webster had neglected to provide funds in her will for any memorial to herself. Matters slowed considerably when the church council took issue with the plaque’s design and inscription. The council required a small plaque of no more than six words.11 Finally, the officials approved the inscription (“she served God right merrily”), a variant of a quotation from Sir ThomasPage 309 → More’s writings. Webster had included this same phrase in the announcement of Pamela Frankau’s death. The plaque was installed on the east wall of the church just below her parents’ memorial and near Ellen Terry’s tablet. MARGARET WEBSTER 1905–1972 she served God right merrily Sir John Gielgud, a lifelong friend of Webster’s, spoke at the unveiling. In January, British Equity paid tribute not only to its own birth at the home of Ben Webster and May Whitty, but to Margaret Webster, who was elected to the first Equity Council and appointed one of ten permanent delegates (and the first woman) to the London Theatre Council, dedicated to the organization of artists and managers to maintain standard conditions of employment. “She was not just a dutiful daughter,” Freda Gaye wrote, “drawn into British Equity that originated in her parents’ London flat.” There was an instinctive and passionate response from Peggy Webster where a cause was just, as well as an inherited respect for the dignity of the theatre, and concern for its place and power in the community.12 The Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library also sponsored a tribute to Webster. A production of Sean O’Casey’s Pictures in the Hallway was dedicated to her memory on October 31, 1975. Stuart Vaughan, who had appeared in the New York production of The Strong Are Lonely and who had since become a major force in the nonprofit theater movement in America as artistic director of the Phoenix Theatre and the Seattle Repertory Theatre, directed the production as a tribute to his former director. Finally, Selma R. Broder of Miller-Brody Productions released the “Margaret Webster Cassette Theater,” containing His Infinite Variety: A Shakespearean Anthology, The Seven Ages of George Bernard Shaw, and No Coward Soul: A Portrait of the Brontës. (The Brontës was originally taped by Webster for WGBH radio in Boston.) Webster had corresponded with Selma Broder about this project during the final months of her life. On November 18, 1979, seven years following her death, Margaret Webster’s name was entered into the Theatre Hall of Fame in New York City. Webster had contemplated her death during the years of her last illness. For this reason, among others dealing with her declining career, an elegiac tonePage 310 → pervades Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage written during the last three years of Webster’s life. While writing her autobiography, she was nostalgic for the theater as she had known it for fifty-five years, and for her life as she had lived it for almost sixty-seven. Webster’s letter to the young, eponymous actress that framed her autobiography with its title taken from Noël Coward’s famous lyrics delineated the “unfinished business” that she had with her life in the theater. Her story began in those “happy, lost days” when it was possible with a lot of talent and a bit of luck to earn a living in the theater.13

In her advice to the young actress, she took the measure of the commercial and not-for-profit theater in the United States and those that devoted their lives and talents to them. Nor did she falter in her measure of the theater’s greatness to empower the imagination. She pinpointed language as that lasting essence of theater that endured and cited recent productions that proved her contention. Citing Peter Brook’s unorthodox production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream staged in a white box, the actors, she reminded the reader, spoke Shakespeare’s verse with “veracity, penetration and beauty.” She also remarked on the Broadway production of David Storey’s Home with Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson. In the modern play about two elderly men in an institution for the mentally ill, the actors scarcely moved. “Their means of communication,” Webster observed, “were the voice and the words.” Their theatrical art was “moving and timeless,” and compared to “great music and great painting.”14 Finally, in the closing pages of her autobiography, she spoke to the modern sensibility of Mrs. Worthington’s daughter. In doing so, she defined her own brand of directing that had sustained her over thirty years. “I don’t believe that theatre is doing your own thing,” she wrote. “On the contrary, it is doing someone else’s thing. An actor—and, even more, a director—is a medium, an interpreter, a channel of communication.”15 She believed in the director’s role as the medium through which the playwright’s intentions and voice were channeled first to actors and then to audiences. She once told a reporter bluntly that as a director she was “a maker of delicate instruments and not a traffic cop.”16 Margaret Webster’s life in the theater channeled many historical forces, especially in the American theater at midcentury. She sustained an active professional career for forty-eight years, the majority of those as a director of international distinction. She pioneered many significant “firsts” for women who were not actresses. Moreover, she along with Maurice Evans proved that Shakespeare could be a commercial success on Broadway and on tour. To great acclaim, she became the first woman director to work in one of thePage 311 → great opera houses of the world. She was also instrumental in pointing the way toward the possibilities for nonprofit resident theaters in the United States. The American Repertory Theatre shone a bright (and sometimes fractured) light on the ways and means for future regional theaters to succeed in the uphill work of sustaining themselves as viable nonprofit institutions. As proof of this heritage, many women have founded resident theaters in the United States, prompting in recent years an increasing number of women to become artistic directors. Margaret Webster also presided over interracial casting in the commercial theater in the forties in the creation of the remarkable political and theatrical event that was the Paul Robeson Othello. She participated in the early entry of professional artists onto university campuses and encouraged the linkage between the professional theater and theatrical training within educational institutions. Finally, Webster was a singular woman of her time, showing the courage of a lion and the strength of an elephant with the hide of a rhinoceros, as she took charge of directing Shakespeare on Broadway in the late thirties and worked there for three decades. To believe the heart of the matter in her letter to Miss Worthington, she was proudest of the fact that she had earned a living in the theater for over half a century. She was keenly aware of how fortunate she had been as an artist. “I have been able to do what I wanted to do, what I also thought of as ‘service,’ to devote my life to doing it as well as I know how, to enjoy it and to earn my living, a rare and staggering gift of fortune.”17 Margaret Webster was never a glamorous, stylish woman. Throughout her life, she wore sensible shoes, nondescript suits with bright scarves, and cut her hair short as a convenience. All of her life she wanted to be a leading actress, but a fateful telephone call placed her in charge of the production where she shone like a bright candle creating luminous productions of Shakespeare’s plays for the modern theater. She could have been a university don and written tomes about the literature of the theater, but her passion was for the stage not the lecture hall. As Eva Le Gallienne said, Webster would “rather act than eat.” As a director, she was not part of the midcentury movement in the American theater toward Method acting and stage realism. Nor was she part of new, stylish directorial choices that placed the text at the service of the director’s visual and thematic concepts. She excelled in the staging of Shakespeare’s texts and the speaking of his verse, believing that the director should interpret the playwright’s intentions without tricks or gimmicks and that the actor should speak the playwright’s words clearly and precisely, with imagination and truth. Margaret Webster’s legacy is her career as both actor and director, but Page 312 → more so as a director who was

in the vanguard of staging great plays and operas with the greatest performers of her day. She was not shy and retiring; she did not suffer fools gladly; and she carried her feminism (and lesbianism) as a thing of no consequence in the shaping of her career. She held a consistent vision of the theater and clear-sightedness about her contribution to the art of the theater. As she told Miss Worthington, “You cannot do the great plays without a profound imagination and understanding.”18 Both as an actress and a pioneering stage director, Margaret Webster exercised taste, imagination, understanding, and a profound belief in the relevance of the theater to contemporary life. She fervently believed with playwright Henrik Ibsen that great theater was not a nocturnal meteor to dazzle and then burst to leave no trace; rather, the theater was like a sprite that lived on in memory. Webster’s notable productions live in memory free of the “mildew and rust of age,” as she liked to say. The director’s legacy, like the theater, is often dismissed as ephemeral—as intangible form. Margaret Webster’s legacy is lodged in the accomplishment of a pioneering artist, defying time in the work of those artists, especially women, who follow knowingly or otherwise in her footprints.

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NOTES ELG: Eva Le Gallienne LC: Library of Congress MW: Margaret Webster CHAPTER 1 1. Margaret Webster, The Same Only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 264. 2. MW, The Same Only Different, 209. 3. MW, The Same Only Different, 209. 4. MW, The Same Only Different, 228. 5. Helen Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 32; also, New York Times, November 26, 1972. 6. May Whitty, letter to Ben Webster, April 13, 1908, LC. 7. MW, The Same Only Different, 240. 8. Katharine Cockin, Edith Craig (1869–1947): Dramatic Lives (London: Cassell, 1998), 124. 9. MW, The Same Only Different, 263. 10. MW, The Same Only Different, 263. 11. MW, The Same Only Different, 237. 12. MW, The Same Only Different, 269. 13. MW, letter to May Whitty, May 15, 1917, LC. 14. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 22, 1917, LC. 15. Roger Manvell, Ellen Terry (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968), 309. 16. Manvell, Ellen Terry, 309. 17. MW, The Same Only Different, 271. 18. MW, The Same Only Different, 273. 19. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 13, 1918, LC. 20. MW, letter to May Whitty, May 5, 1919, LC. 21. MW, The Same Only Different, 274. 22. MW, The Same Only Different, 275. 23. MW, The Same Only Different, 276. 24. MW, The Same Only Different, 276. 25. MW, The Same Only Different, 283. 26. MW, The Same Only Different, 283. 27. Jonathan Croall, Gielgud: A Theatrical Life (New York: Continuum International, 2001), 26. 28. MW, letter to May Whitty, May 20, 1923, LC. 29. MW, letter to May Whitty, June 7, 1923, LC. 30. MW, letter to May Whitty, May 20, 1923, LC. 31. MW, The Same Only Different, 285. 32. MW, The Same Only Different, 286–87 33. MW, The Same Only Different, 290–91. 34. MW, The Same Only Different, 292. 35. MW, The Same Only Different, 292. 36. Maurice Evans, All This …and Evans Too! (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), 10. 37. MW, The Same Only Different, 293. 38. MW, The Same Only Different, 293. 39. MW, The Same Only Different, 294.

40. MW, The Same Only Different, 294–95. 41. MW, The Same Only Different, 297. 42. MW, The Same Only Different, 298. 43. MW, The Same Only Different, 299. 44. MW, The Same Only Different, 301. 45. MW, The Same Only Different, 302. 46. MW, The Same Only Different, 302–3. 47. MW, The Same Only Different, 303. CHAPTER 2 1. MW, The Same Only Different, 307. 2. MW, The Same Only Different, 308. 3. MW, letter to May Whitty, November 25, 1925, LC. 4. MW, The Same Only Different, 309. 5. Quoted in MW, The Same Only Different, 310. 6. Quoted in Croall, Gielgud, 84. 7. MW, The Same Only Different, 311. 8. MW, The Same Only Different, 311. 9. MW, The Same Only Different, 312. 10. MW, The Same Only Different, 313. 11. MW, The Same Only Different, 314. 12. MW, The Same Only Different, 314. 13. MW, The Same Only Different, 314. 14. MW, The Same Only Different, 315. 15. St. John Ervine, letter to MW, January 21, 1927, LC. 16. Croall, Gielgud, 49. 17. MW, The Same Only Different, 316. 18. MW, The Same Only Different, 316. 19. MW, The Same Only Different, 317. 20. MW, The Same Only Different, 317–18. 21. MW, The Same Only Different, 318. 22. MW, The Same Only Different, 318–19. 23. MW, The Same Only Different, 326. 24. MW, The Same Only Different, 327. 25. MW, The Same Only Different, 327. 26. MW, The Same Only Different, 329–30. 27. MW, The Same Only Different, 330. 28. Quoted in Ronald Hayman, John Gielgud (New York: Random House, 1971), 48. 29. MW, The Same Only Different, 330. 30. MW, The Same Only Different, 332. 31. MW, The Same Only Different, 333. 32. MW, The Same Only Different, 334. CHAPTER 3 1. Peter Roberts, The Old Vic Story (London: W. H. Allen, 1976), 57. 2. MW, The Same Only Different, 337. 3. MW, The Same Only Different, 337. 4. MW, The Same Only Different, 337. 5. MW, The Same Only Different, 339. 6. Croall, Gielgud, 109. 7. MW, The Same Only Different, 338.

8. MW, The Same Only Different, 338. 9. MW, The Same Only Different, 339. 10. Croall, Gielgud, 114. 11. Croall, Gielgud, 115. 12. MW, The Same Only Different, 342. 13. Croall, Gielgud, 114–15. 14. Croall, Gielgud, 119. 15. MW, The Same Only Different, 341; also, Harcourt Williams, Four Years at the Old Vic 1929–1933 (London: Putnam, 1935) 67. 16. Times (London), reviews of Romeo and Juliet, September 18, 1929; The Merchant of Venice, October 8, 1929. 17. Croall, Gielgud, 126. 18. Times (London), review of The Imaginary Invalid, October 29, 1912; also, Williams, Four Years, 46. 19. Croall, Gielgud, 121. 20. MW, The Same Only Different, 345. 21. Croall, Gielgud, 130. 22. Williams, Four Years, 60. 23. Williams, Four Years, 25. 24. Williams, Four Years, 9. 25. Times (London), September 30, 1930. 26. MW, The Same Only Different, 349. 27. MW, The Same Only Different, 349. 28. MW, The Same Only Different, 350. 29. Times (London), November 16, 1931. 30. MW, The Same Only Different, 352. 31. MW, The Same Only Different, 366. 32. Hayman, John Gielgud, 79; also Times (London), November 22, 1932. 33. MW, The Same Only Different, 356. 34. MW, The Same Only Different, 356. 35. Times (London), February 1, 1934. 36. MW, The Same Only Different, 357. 37. MW, The Same Only Different, 367. 38. Times (London), February 1, 1934. 39. Times (London), May 28, 1935. 40. British Equity News, January 1973. 41. MW, The Same Only Different, 373. 42. MW, The Same Only Different, 374. 43. MW, The Same Only Different, 375. CHAPTER 4 1. MW, The Same Only Different, 378. 2. MW, The Same Only Different, 378. 3. Evans, All This, 110. 4. Evans, All This, 110. 5. MW, The Same Only Different, 378–79. 6. MW, The Same Only Different, 379. 7. Evans, All This, 112–13. 8. MW, The Same Only Different, 381. 9. Evans, All This, 111–12. 10. MW, The Same Only Different, 381. 11. Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 63.

12. Evans, All This, 110. 13. MW, The Same Only Different, 382. 14. Lucius Beebe, “Stage Asides: A Woman Director for Shakespeare,” New York Herald Tribune, January 31, 1937. 15. MW, The Same Only Different, 384–85. 16. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, February 6, 1937. 17. Richard Watts Jr., New York Herald Tribune, February 6, 1937; John Anderson, Evening Journal, February 6, 1937; see also Variety, February 10, 1937; New Republic, February 24, 1937; Theatre Arts 21 (April 1937). 18. Stark Young, Immortal Shadows: A Book of Dramatic Criticism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 199. 19. MW, The Same Only Different, 387. 20. MW, The Same Only Different, 389. 21. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 14. 22. The Times (London), August 19, 1937. 23. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 14. 24. John Mason Brown, New York Evening Post, November 11, 1937; MW, Daughter on the Stage, 12–13. 25. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 4. 26. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, November 10, 1937; MW, Daughter on the Stage, 17. 27. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 17. 28. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 18. 29. MW, The Same Only Different, 388. 30. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 3. 31. Jared Brown, The Fabulous Lunts: A Biography of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (New York: Atheneum, 1988), 236. 32. Brown, The Fabulous Lunts, 248. 33. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 16. 34. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 18. 35. Roy S. Waldau, Vintage Years of the Theatre Guild, 1928–1939 (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1972), 287–88; MW, Daughter on the Stage, 18. 36. See Susan Jane Spector, “Uta Hagen: The Early Years 1919–1951,” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1982. 37. Quoted in Brown, The Fabulous Lunts, 251. 38. Harold Clurman, All People Are Famous (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 75–76. 39. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 19. 40. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 21. 41. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 20–21. 42. Williams, Four Years, 68. 43. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 21. 44. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 22. 45. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 20. 46. Brown, The Fabulous Lunts, 255–56. 47. The Letters of Alexander Woollcott, ed. Beatrice Kaufman and Joseph Hennessey (New York: Viking Press, 1944), 207. 48. Brown, The Fabulous Lunts, 256. 49. Elinor Hughes, Boston Globe, March 22, 1938; the Boston Daily Record is quoted in Waldau’s Vintage Years, 295. 50. New York Journal and American, March 27, 1938. 51. Richard Watts Jr., New York Herald Tribune, March 29, 1938. 52. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, March 29 and April 3, 1938. John Mason Brown, New York Post, March 29, 1938. 53. Robert Benchley, New Yorker, April 9, 1938, 24. 54. Sidney B. Whipple, New York World-Telegram, April 23, 1938; Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain:

The Story of a Life in Two Fields, Theatre and Invention (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), 170–71; MW, Daughter on the Stage, 23; Clurman, All People Are Famous, 75–76. 55. Brown, The Fabulous Lunts, 259; MW, Daughter on the Stage, 18. 56. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 23. 57. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 21. 58. ELG, Diary, October 29, 1937, LC. CHAPTER 5 1. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 37. 2. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 25. 3. Margaret Webster, “Variorum on the Text of ‘Hamlet,’” New York Times, October 9, 1938. 4. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 26. 5. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 26. 6. Daphne Ball, “Theatre Directing—a New Vocation for Women,” Decoration, November 1939, 22–23, 39. 7. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 17, 1938, LC. 8. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 26. 9. Evans, All This, 128. 10. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 30. 11. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 28. 12. MW, letter to May Whitty, August 21, 1938, LC. 13. Lehman Engel, This Bright Day: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 90–91. 14. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 33, 24. 15. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 32. 16. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 11, 1938, LC. 17. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 33–34. 18. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, October 13, 1938. 19. John Mason Brown, Broadway in Review (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940), 47–48. 20. Rosamund Gilder, Theatre Arts 22 (December 1938): 855–57. 21. Young, Immortal Shadows, 212. 22. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, October 13 and 30, 1938; Young, Immortal Shadows, 211–12. 23. Variety (October 19, 1938); Time (October 24, 1938); Newsweek (November 28, 1938). 24. Margaret Webster, “On Directing Shakespeare,” in Producing the Play, edited by John Gassner (New York: Dryden Press, 1941), 443–44. 25. Margaret Webster, “Credo of a Director,” Theatre Arts 22 (May 1938): 348. 26. MW, “Credo of a Director,” 348. 27. MW, “On Directing Shakespeare,” 448. 28. MW, “Credo of a Director,” 347–48. 29. MW, “On Directing Shakespeare,” 449. 30. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 17, 1938, LC. 31. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 17, 1938, LC. 32. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 35. 33. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, February 5, 1939; Brown, Broadway in Review, 45. 34. New York Times, January 31, 1939; New York Herald Tribune, January 31, 1939; Times (London), February 22, 1939. 35. Evans, All This, 139–40. 36. MW, letter to May Whitty, November 23, 1938, LC. 37. MW, letter to May Whitty, September 9, 1939, LC. 38. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 38. 39. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 39. 40. Cheryl Crawford, One Naked Individual: My Fifty Years in the Theatre (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,

1977), 107. 41. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 40. 42. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 40. 43. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, March 9 and 19, 1939. 44. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, March 9, 1939. 45. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 108. 46. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 107–8. 47. MW, “Credo of a Director,” 345–46. 48. MW, letter to May Whitty, April 13, 1939, LC. 49. MW, letter to May Whitty, April 17, 1939, LC; MW, “On Directing Shakespeare,” 445. 50. Barbara Heggie, “We: A Margaret Webster Profile,” New Yorker, May 20, 1944, 35–43. 51. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, May 9, 1939. 52. MW, letter to May Whitty, May 5, 1939, LC. 53. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 10. 54. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 63. 55. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 51. 56. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 51. 57. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 52. 58. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 52. 59. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 55. 60. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 52. 61. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 56. 62. Margaret Webster, Shakespeare without Tears, rev. ed. (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1965), 152. 63. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 66. 64. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 64. 65. Evans, All This, 143. 66. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 95. 67. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, November 20, 1940; John Mason Brown, New York Post, November 20, 1940. 68. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, November 20 and 24, 1940; also, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Sun Journal American, New York World-Telegram, and PM, November 20, 1940. 69. Langner, The Magic Curtain, 330. 70. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 96. 71. Brooks Atkinson, letter to MW, undated, LC. 72. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, November 20 and 24, 1940. 73. MW, Shakespeare without Tears, 154. 74. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 98. CHAPTER 6 1. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 65–66. 2. Langner, The Magic Curtain, 331–32. 3. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 69. 4. Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: Crown, 1995), 357, 363. 5. Tennessee Williams, “The History of a Play (with Parentheses),” Pharos 1–2 (spring 1945): 110. 6. Williams, “History of a Play,” 115. 7. MW; Leverich, Tom, 385; Daughter on the Stage, 69. 8. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 69. 9. Leverich, Tom, 388. 10. Quoted in Leverich, Tom, 388. 11. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 70. 12. Cecil Brown, “Interview with Tennessee Williams,” Partisan Review 45 (1978): 279.

13. Tennessee Williams, Battle of Angels, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 97. 14. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 70. 15. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 70. 16. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 68. 17. Quoted in Leverich, Tom, 393. 18. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 71. 19. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 71. 20. Williams, “History of a Play,” 117; MW, Daughter on the Stage, 71. 21. Williams, “History of a Play,” 117. 22. Leverich, Tom, 391; MW, Daughter on the Stage, 72; Langner, The Magic Curtain, 332. 23. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 72; Williams, “History of a Play,” 120. 24. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 72. 25. Elliot Norton, Boston Post, December 31, 1940; Boston Globe, December 31, 1940; Alexander Williams, Boston Herald, December 31, 1940; Variety, December 31, 1940. 26. Elliot Norton, Boston Post, January 7 and 12, 1941. 27. Audrey Wood with Max Wilk, Represented by Audrey Wood (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 136. 28. Wood, Represented by Audrey Wood, 136. 29. Tennessee Williams, “Survival Notes: A Journal,” Esquire, September 1971, 133. 30. Langner, The Magic Curtain, 333. 31. “Margaret Webster,” Dictionary of Literary Biography: Documentary Series, vol. 4, ed. Margaret A. Van Antwerp and Sally Johns (Detroit: Gale Research, 1984), 45. The Theatre Guild’s letter to the Boston subscribers is dated January 20, 1941, in Theatre Guild Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; reported in Boston Herald, January 26, 1941. 32. Williams, “History of a Play,” 116–17. 33. “Play Must Have Lines Taken Out,” Boston Post, January 8, 1941, 8. 34. Elliot Norton, Boston Post, January 7, 1941. 35. Wood, Represented by Audrey Wood, 136. 36. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 72. 37. Margaret Webster, “A Note on ‘Battle of Angels,’ “ Pharos 1–2 (spring 1945): 122–23. 38. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 74. 39. MW, letter to Warren Munsell, n.d., in Theatre Guild Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 40. Langner, The Magic Curtain, 332. 41. Langner, The Magic Curtain, 334. 42. Elliot Norton, “ ‘Battle of Angels’ a Defeat but No Disaster,” Boston Sunday Post, January 12, 1941. 43. Frank Rich, New York Times, September 25, 1989. 44. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 260–62. 45. Margaret Webster, “The Golden Eggs: The Broadway, 1940, Grade: A Plea for Cooperation by All Parties to Advance the Theatre,” New York Times, March 17, 1940, 3. 46. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 77. 47. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 77. 48. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 79. 49. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 80. 50. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 79. 51. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, April 9, 1941. 52. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 82–83. 53. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 99. 54. Evans, All This, 150. 55. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, November 12 and 23, 1941; John Mason Brown, New York WorldTelegram, November 12, 1941; Richard Watts, Jr., New York Herald Tribune, November 12, 1941. 56. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 101. 57. John Mason Brown, introduction to MW, Shakespeare without Tears, 9.

58. Barnard Hewitt, “ Shakespeare without Tears, “ Quarterly Journal of Speech vol. 28 (December 1942): 487–88. 59. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 105. 60. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 106. CHAPTER 7 1. MW, letter to May Whitty, June 7, 1939, LC. 2. The Times (London), April 8, 1935. 3. Morning Post, May 30, 1930; The Times (London), May 30, 1930; also see J. C. Trewin, Shakespeare on the English Stage, 1900–1964 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964), 130. 4. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 106. 5. Quoted in Martin B. Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1989), 263. 6. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 107. 7. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 107. 8. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 112; Duberman, Paul Robeson, 274; see also Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). 9. New York Times, October 19, 1943. 10. Benjamin Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (New York: Duffield, 1918), 97–102. 11. Margaret Webster, “Paul Robeson and Othello,” Our Time, June 1944, 5–6. 12. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 107–8. 13. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 264. 14. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 111. 15. Elaine Anderson Steinbeck, interview by the author, June 24, 1991. 16. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 108. 17. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 108. 18. MW, Shakespeare without Tears, rev. ed., 176. 19. New York Times, October 20, 1943. 20. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 108. 21. Laurence Olivier said of Othello, “It’s a terrible study and a monstrous, monstrous, burden for the actor.” See John Cottrell, Laurence Olivier (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975), 337. 22. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 109. 23. MW, letter to May Whitty, July 30, 1942, LC. 24. Quoted in MW, Daughter on the Stage, 110. 25. Uta Hagen, interview by the author, October 12, 2000. 26. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 110. 27. MW, letter to May Whitty, July 9, 1942, LC. 28. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 110–11. 29. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 110. 30. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 111. 31. MW, letter to May Whitty, August 28, 1942, LC. 32. MW, letter to May Whitty, July 9, 1942, LC. 33. MW, letter to May Whitty, September 4, 1943, LC. 34. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 24, 1943, LC. 35. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 112. 36. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 112–13. 37. New England Theatre Conference News, November–December 1980, 13; also see Hill, Shakespeare in Sable, 126. 38. Elliott Norton, New York Times, August 16, 1942; Louis Kronenberger, PM, August 13, 1942. 39. MW, letter to May Whitty, August 28, 1942, LC. 40. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 130.

41. New York Times, December 24, 1942. 42. MW, letter to May Whitty, January 21, 1943, LC. 43. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 131. 44. MW, letter to May Whitty, January 21, 1943, LC. 45. New York Times, February 4 and 14, 1943. 46. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 268. 47. MW, letter to May Whitty, August 12, 1943, LC. 48. MW, letter to May Whitty, August 12, 1943, LC. 49. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 268. 50. MW, letter to May Whitty, August 25, 1943, LC. 51. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 269. 52. MW, letter to May Whitty, August 23, 1943, LC. 53. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 116. 54. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 270. 55. Quoted in Duberman, Paul Robeson, 271. 56. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 109–11. 57. Ely Silverman, “Margaret Webster’s Theory and Practice of Shakespearean Production in the United States (1937–1953),” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1969), 161. 58. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 270–71. 59. Helen Hayes, My Life in Three Acts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 15. 60. New York Times, October 19, 1943; Herald Tribune, October 31, 1943; MW, Shakespeare without Tears, 178. 61. MW, Shakespeare without Tears, 179. 62. MW, Shakespeare without Tears, 179–80. 63. Herald Tribune, October 31, 1943. Laurence Olivier, who had transformed himself physically and vocally into a black man, did not bring his production of Othello to the United States. 64. Elinor Hughes, Boston Herald, September 22 and 26, 1943; Elliot Norton, Boston Sunday Post, September 26, 1943. 65. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 10, 1943, LC. 66. Our Time, June 1944, 5. 67. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 113. 68. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 114. 69. New York Times, October 20, 1943. 70. Burton Roscoe, World Telegram, October 20, 1943. 71. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 20, 1943, LC. 72. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 114. 73. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 114. 74. Lewis Nichols, New York Times, October 20 and 24, 1943; Howard Barnes, Herald Tribune, October 20, 1943; John Chapman, Daily News, October 20 and 24, 1943; Ward Morehouse, Sun, October 20, 1943; Burton Rascoe, World Telegram, October 20, 1943. 75. In the weeklies, Louis Kronenberger, PM, October 20, 1943; Stark Young, New Republic, October 30, 1943; Time, November 1, 1943; George Jean Nathan, American Mercury (May 1945). 76. Fredi Washington, People’s Voice, October 23, 1943. See also Pittsburgh Courier, October 30, 1943; New York Amsterdam News, October 30, 1943; Chicago Defender, October 30, 1943. 77. Elaine Anderson Steinbeck, interview by the author, June 25, 1991; Ruth Nathan, interview by the author, June 25, 1991; Berenice Weiler, interview by the author, June 27, 1991. 78. Young, Immortal Shadows, 232. 79. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 23, 1943, LC. 80. Uta Hagen, telephone interview by the author, October 12, 2000. This unpleasant scene was also reported by Elaine Anderson Steinbeck (interview by the author, June 21, 1991), who stood backstage with the cast. 81. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 24, 1943, LC. 82. MW, letter to May Whitty, February 17, 1944, LC.

83. MW, letter to May Whitty, February 17, 1944, LC. 84. MW, letter to May Whitty, February 17, 1944, LC. 85. MW, letter to May Whitty, February 20, 1944, LC. 86. MW, letter to May Whitty, February 23, 1944, LC. 87. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 286–87. In a telephone interview with the author, Uta Hagen confirmed that Duberman’s was an accurate account of the “ Othello business” (Uta Hagen, interview by the author, October 12, 2000). 88. MW, letter to May Whitty, February 26, 1944, LC. 89. MW, letter to May Whitty, February 26, 1944, LC. 90. Lewis Nichols, New York Times, May 23, 1945. 91. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 268–69. 92. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 134; see also Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 275. 93. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 136–37. 94. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 136. 95. MW, letter to May Whitty, October 24, 1943, LC. 96. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 275. 97. MW, letter to May Whitty, November 14, 1943, LC. 98. Lewis Nichols, New York Times, January 25, 1944. 99. Margaret Webster, “A Letter to Chekhov,” New York Times, January 23, 1944. 100. Olga Knipper Chekhova, “A Letter to Margaret Webster,” New York Times, March 19, 1944. 101. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 134. 102. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 134. 103. Margaret Webster, Shakespeare and the Modern Theatre (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Vassar College, 1944), 5–24. 104. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 126. 105. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 127. 106. MW, letter to May Whitty, August 15, 1944, LC; also, MW, Daughter on the Stage, 127–29. CHAPTER 8 1. Heggie, “We,” 32–43. 2. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 150. 3. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 146. 4. MW, Shakespeare without Tears, rev. ed., 214–17. 5. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 147. 6. ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 239. 7. ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 240–42. 8. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 149–50. 9. ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 242. 10. Young, Immortal Shadows, 247. 11. American Mercury, May 1945, 588–91. 12. Lewis Nichols, New York Times, January 26, 1945; John Mason Brown, Seeing Things (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946), 187. 13. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 149. 14. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 150. 15. ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 243. 16. Jay Plum, “Cheryl Crawford: One Not So Naked Individual,” in Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History, ed. Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 254. 17. Margaret Webster, Eva Le Gallienne, and Cheryl Crawford, “Plan for the American Repertory Theatre,” 1945, LC. 18. MW, ELG, and Crawford, “Plan for American Repertory Theatre.”

19. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 152; also, MW, Daughter on the Stage, 154. 20. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 154. 21. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 151. 22. ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 248; also, MW, Daughter on the Stage, 154. 23. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 287. 24. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 157. 25. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 168. 26. ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 244. 27. ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 245. 28. Berenice Weiler, interview by the author, April 26, 2000. 29. ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 247. 30. Lewis Nichols, New York Times, October 10 and 28, 1945; Brown, Seeing Things, 179–80. 31. New York Times, November 13, 1945. 32. ELG, Diary, August 29, 1946, LC; also, Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 288–89. 33. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 164; also, ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 260. 34. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 151. 35. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 164. 36. Norris Houghton, “It’s a Woman’s World,” Theatre Arts 31 (January 1947): 31–34. 37. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, November 7, 1946. 38. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, November 13, 1946. 39. Mary T. McCarthy, Theatre Chronicles, 1937–1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963), 93. 40. MW, letter to Louis Kronenberger, December 2, 1947, LC. 41. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, December 29, 1946. 42. Unsigned postal card to ELG, undated, LC. 43. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, February 23, 1947. 44. MW, letter to Brooks Atkinson, March 3, 1947, LC. 45. Brooks Atkinson, letter to MW, March 10, 1947, LC. 46. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 168. 47. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 154. 48. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 154. 49. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 155. 50. Variety, April 9, 1947; Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, April 7 and 13, 1947. 51. Cheryl Crawford, letter to MW, July 4, 1946, LC. 52. Cheryl Crawford, letter to MW and ELG, June 10, 1947, LC. 53. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 275. 54. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 161–62. 55. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 166. 56. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 170. 57. New York Herald Tribune, October 9, 1947. 58. Jack O’Brien, Waterford Republican, June 29, 1947. 59. Eric Capon, Theatre Today, spring 1947, LC. 60. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 170. 61. MW, letter to May Whitty, January 11, 1948, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The typescript of Margaret Webster’s adaptation of As You Desire Me is also in this library. 62. MW, letter to May Whitty, January 29, 1948, LC. 63. MW, letter to May Whitty, January 20, 1948, LC. 64. MW, letter to May Whitty, January 11, 1948, LC. 65. George Jean Nathan, Theatre Book of the Year, 1947–1948 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 275; also, New York Times, February 17, 1948. 66. MW, letter to May Whitty, February 17, 1948, LC. 67. Nathan, Theatre Book, 275; also, Atkinson New York Times, February 25, 1948. 68. ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 277. 69. ELG, With a Quiet Heart, 268.

70. MW, letter to May Whitty, February 17, 1948, LC. 71. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 172. 72. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 153. 73. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 148. 74. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 149. 75. MW, letter to Jean Webster Brough, May 27, 1948, LC. 76. Roddy McDowall, letter to MW, undated, LC. 77. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 301. 78. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 157. 79. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 176. 80. ELG, Diary, September 24, 1948, LC; also, Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 301. 81. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 303. 82. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 194. 83. Natchitoches Times, February 5, 1950. 84. Natchitoches Times, February 5, 1950; see also MW, Daughter on the Stage, 195. 85. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 196. 86. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 198. 87. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 198. 88. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 198. 89. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 309. 90. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 305. 91. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 310. 92. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, January 26 and February 5, 1950. 93. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 274. 94. Margaret Webster, Theatre Arts 34 (February 1950): 54–55. 95. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 173. CHAPTER 9 1. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 202. 2. Rudolf Bing, Five Thousand Nights at the Opera: The Memoir of Sir Rudolf Bing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 148. 3. Musical America, January 13, 1950, 3. 4. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 203. 5. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 203. 6. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 203. 7. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 207. 8. Bing, Five Thousand Nights, 149. 9. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 203. 10. Bing, Five Thousand Nights, 132. 11. Rudolf Bing, A Knight at the Opera (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981), 237. 12. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 204. 13. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 204. 14. Bing, Five Thousand Nights, 138. 15. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 205. 16. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 206. 17. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 206. 18. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 207. 19. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 207. 20. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 214. 21. Opera News, December 2000, 21. 22. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 214.

23. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 210–11. 24. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 211. 25. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 208. 26. Opera News, November 6, 1950, 5. 27. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 208. 28. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 209. 29. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 207–8. 30. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 207–8. 31. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 215. 32. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 208. 33. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 215. 34. MW, memorandum to Rolf Gérard, November 2, 1950, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 35. Musical America, December 1, 1950, 4. 36. ELG, Diary, November 6, 1950, LC; also, Opera News, February 1999, 25. 37. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 216. 38. New York Herald Tribune, November 7, 1950; New York Journal-American, November 7, 1950; Opera News, February 1951, 133–34. 39. Cecil Smith, Musical America, December 1, 1950, 11. 40. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 216. 41. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 312. 42. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 216. 43. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 216–17. 44. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 219. 45. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 218. 46. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 218. 47. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 220. 48. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 220. 49. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 222. 50. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 222. 51. Quoted in Bing, Five Thousand Nights, 188. 52. Musical America, December 1, 1951, 3–4. 53. Bing, Five Thousand Nights, 188. 54. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 223. 55. Counterattack, January 25, 1952, 4. 56. Quoted in Counterattack, January 25, 1952, 4. 57. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 235. 58. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 236. 59. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 236. 60. Center 2, October 1955, 6–7; also, Daughter on the Stage, 236. 61. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 237. 62. Center 2, October 1955, 6–7. 63. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 237. 64. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 236. 65. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 237. 66. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 238. 67. Musical Courier, November 5, 1955. 68. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 238. 69. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 240. 70. Opera News, November 11, 1957. 71. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 239. 72. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 239. 73. Howard Taubman, New York Times, October 25, 1957; Variety, October 30, 1957; Opera News,

November 11, 1957. 74. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 240. 75. Opera News, October 27, 1958. 76. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 241. 77. Opera News, November 10, 1958; Variety, October 15, 1958. 78. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 241. 79. Center 2, October 1955, 7. 80. Center 2, October 1955, 7. 81. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 224. 82. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 225. 83. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 225. 84. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 226. 85. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 227. 86. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 227. 87. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 228. 88. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 228. 89. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 229. 90. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 228. 91. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 229. 92. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 229. 93. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 228. 94. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 231. 95. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 229. 96. Howard Taubman, New York Times, March 2, 1960; Louis Biancolli, World Telegram and Sun, March 2, 1960. 97. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 231. 98. Bing, Five Thousand Nights, 260. 99. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 231. 100. Bing, Five Thousand Nights, 262. 101. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 232. 102. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 232–33. 103. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 233. 104. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 233. 105. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 238. 106. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 233. 107. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 234. 108. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 234–35. 109. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 224. 110. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 227. 111. Center 2, October 1955, 7. CHAPTER 10 1. Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate, 2d ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 212. 2. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 244. 3. MW, Diary, dated Russia, 1935, LC. 4. Quoted in MW, Daughter on the Stage, 244. 5. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 245. 6. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 247. 7. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 247–48. 8. William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986),

239–40. 9. Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 37. 10. Testimony of Walter S. Steele, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 80th Cong., 1st sess., July 21, 1947, 109–10. 11. Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 80th Cong., 1st sess., July 21, 1947, 66. 12. Testimony of Edward G. Robinson, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 81st Cong., 2d sess., October 27 and December 21, 1950, 3325. 13. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 248–49. 14. MW, letter to Louis Nizer, April 23, 1951, LC; also see MW, Daughter on the Stage, 254. 15. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 256. 16. Variety, May 30, 1951. 17. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 257. 18. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, February 21, 1951. 19. Marian Seldes, interview by the author, July 24, 2001. 20. MW, letter to Lawrence Langner, June 14, 1951, LC. 21. Uta Hagen, interview by the author, October 12, 2000; Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, October 5 and 14, 1951. 22. Helen Ormsbee, “Mady Christians Recalls How Nazis ‘Cleansed’ the Theaters,” New York Herald Tribune, July 13, 1941, sec. 6, pp. 2, 5. 23. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, April 2, 1941. 24. New York Times, November 4, 1951. 25. New York Times, November 11, 1951. 26. Equity News, December 1951, 11–12. 27. New York Times, November 25, 1951. 28. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 316–17. 29. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 38, 260. 30. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 249. 31. ELG, Diary, August 2, 1952, LC; also, Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 318. 32. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 261–62. 33. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 262. 34. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 251. 35. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 263. 36. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 263. 37. Testimony of Lillian Hellman, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 82nd Cong., 2d sess., May 21, 1952, 3546; also see Hellman, Scoundrel Time, 93. 38. Wright, Lillian Hellman, 224–56; New York Times, May 22, 1952. 39. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 263–64, 265. 40. MW, typescript statement “For Senate Sub-Committee on Investigations,” undated, LC. 41. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 265. 42. Griffith, The Politics of Fear, 67n; also see New York Times, March 16, 1953. 43. Griffith, The Politics of Fear, 71n. 44. New York Times, June 20, 1953. 45. Donald Ritchie, Associate Historian, United States Senate, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., September 6, 2000. 46. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 265. 47. Testimony of Margaret Webster, State Department Teacher-Student Exchange Program, Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in Government Operations, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., vol. 2 (May 25, 1953), 1245–66. 48. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 266. 49. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 267. 50. See Hellman, Scoundrel Time; Stefan Kanfer, A Journal of the Plague Years (New York: Atheneum, 1973); MW, Daughter on the Stage, 273.

51. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 243–44. 52. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 268. 53. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 268. 54. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 273. 55. Brooks Atkinson, Broadway, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 435. 56. ELG, Diary, August 2, 1952, LC; also, Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 316. 57. Eloise Armen, interview by the author, April 10, 2000. 58. ELG, Diary, May 23 and June 2, 1953, LC; also, Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 325. 59. New York Times, September 30, 1953. 60. FBI memorandum, April 9, 1951, in FBI file 100–370937, Subject: Margaret Webster. 61. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 269. 62. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 269; see also FBI memorandums, November 3, 1953, and January 15, 1954, in FBI file 100–370937, Subject: Margaret Webster. 63. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 270. 64. FBI memorandum, February 4, 1954, in FBI file 100–370937, Subject: Margaret Webster. Margaret Webster’s FBI file remained in active status until 1966. 65. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 270. 66. Miriam Howell, letter to MW, July 2, 1954, LC. 67. Paul Martinson, letter to MW, July 26, 1954, LC. 68. MW, Shakespeare without Tears, rev. ed., 126. 69. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 273. 70. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 274. CHAPTER 11 1. Berenice Weiler, interview by the author, April 26, 2001. 2. Helen Epstein, Joe Papp: An American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), 119–33. 3. Kanfer, Journal of Plague Years, 283. 4. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 295. 5. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 276. 6. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 277–78. 7. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 277–78, 282. 8. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 278. 9. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 275. 10. Pamela Frankau, Pen to Paper: A Novelist’s Notebook (New York: Dell, 1961), 145. 11. Diana Raymond, interview by the author, October 3, 2000. 12. MW, letter to ELG, July 27, 1954, LC. 13. ELG, Diary, June 13, 1954, LC; also, Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 331. 14. Frankau, Pen to Paper, 141. 15. Diana Raymond, interview by the author, October 3, 2000. 16. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 309. 17. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 331. 18. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 309. 19. ELG, Diary, February 25, 1955, LC. 20. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 331. 21. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 297. 22. Quoted in MW, Daughter on the Stage, 297–80. 23. Times (London), November 16, 1955. 24. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 301. 25. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 308. 26. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 301. 27. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 302.

28. MW, Shakespeare without Tears, rev. ed., 146. 29. Times (London), April 18, 1956. 30. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 303. 31. John Miller, Judi Dench: With a Crack in Her Voice (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998), 33–43. 32. Times (London), November 20, 1957. 33. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 305. 34. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 307. 35. New York Times, March 27, 1958. 36. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 308. 37. MW, letter to ELG, September 25, 1954, LC. 38. J. C. Trewin, The Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 1913–1964 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1963), 175. 39. Birmingham Mail, April 14, 1960. 40. Birmingham Mail, April 14, 1960. 41. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 312. 42. The Noël Coward Diaries, ed. Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 429. 43. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 312. 44. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 312. 45. Noël Coward Diaries, 432. 46. Cole Lesley, Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noël Coward (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 403–4. 47. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 313. 48. Quoted in MW Daughter on the Stage, 314. 49. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 316. 50. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 318. 51. Pamela Frankau, “The Ballad of Brompton Grill,” unpublished typescript, provided by Timothy d’Arch Smith. 52. Noël Coward Diaries, 442. 53. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 319. 54. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 319. 55. Noël Coward Diaries, 444. 56. New York Times, August 9, 1960. Waiting in the Wings opened at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, August 8, 1960. 57. Times (London), September 8, 1960. 58. Lesley, Remembered Laughter, 404. 59. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 321. 60. Noël Coward Diaries, 462. 61. MW, letter to ELG, July 27, 1954, LC. 62. MW, letter to ELG, August 26, 1954, LC. 63. Frankau, Pen to Paper, 18. 64. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 322. 65. Johannesburg Times, August 6, 1961. 66. Johannesburg Times, September 27, 1962. 67. Howard Taubman, New York Times, February 8, 1962. 68. Diana Raymond, interview by the author, October 3, 2000. 69. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 339. 70. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 340. 71. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 343. 72. Travis Bogard, letter to author, April 16, 1989. 73. ELG, Diary, August 24, 1963, LC. 74. Times (London), July 10, 1964. 75. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 318.

CHAPTER 12 1. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 360. 2. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 348. 3. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 377. 4. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 348. 5. Sloane Shelton, interview by the author, January 9, 2003. 6. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 350. 7. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 351. 8. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 350–51. 9. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 351. 10. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 351. 11. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 349. 12. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 349. 13. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 349. 14. Sloane Shelton, interview by the author, January 9, 2003. 15. Gina Shields, interview by the author, November 6, 2000. 16. See St Louis Post Dispatch, November 11, 1965; Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), December 2, 1965; Boston Herald, December 16, 1965; Record American (Boston), December 16, 1965. 17. Gina Shields, interview by the author, November 6, 2000. 18. Hugh Southern, interview by the author, March 21, 2001. 19. Hugh Southern, interview by the author, March 21, 2001. 20. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 352. 21. New York Times, June 9, 1967. 22. Hampstead and Highgate Express, June 16, 1967. 23. MW, typescript, May 9, 1968, LC. 24. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 384–85. 25. MW, letter to Ursula d’Arch Smith, February 26, 1968. 26. MW, letter to Timothy d’Arch Smith, undated. 27. MW, letter to Timothy d’Arch Smith, February 5, 1968. 28. Selected Letters of Rebecca West, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 363. 29. Typescript of Rebecca West’s unpublished foreword to Colonel Blessington, provided by Timothy d’Arch Smith, undated. 30. Timothy d’Arch Smith, interview by the author, October 4, 2000. 31. MW, letter to Timothy d’Arch Smith, September 8, 1968. 32. MW, letter to Rebecca West, September 26, 1968. 33. Diana Raymond, letter to author, November 10, 2000. 34. New York Times, May 1, 1968. 35. Dan Sullivan, New York Times, May 1, 1968. 36. MW, letter to Ursula d’Arch Smith and Diana Raymond, January 4, 1969. 37. MW, letter to Ursula d’Arch Smith and Diana Raymond, January 4, 1969. 38. MW, letter to Ursula d’Arch Smith and Diana Raymond, January 4, 1969. 39. MW, letter to Ursula d’Arch Smith, April 5, 1969. 40. MW, The Same Only Different, viii. 41. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times Sunday Book Review, May 25, 1969. 42. Reginald Denham, “140 Years before the Footlights,” Saturday Review, May 24, 1969, 43–45. 43. MW, letter to ELG, February 6, 1970. 44. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 345. 45. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 346. 46. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 353. 47. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 353. 48. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 356.

49. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 364. 50. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 366. 51. Memorandum from Sybil Robinson to author, October 15, 1991. 52. Memorandum from Sybil Robinson to author, October 15, 1991. 53. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 368. 54. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 369. 55. MW, letter to ELG, February 6, 1970. 56. MW, letter to ELG, February 6, 1970. 57. MW, letter to ELG, February 6, 1970. 58. MW, letter to ELG, February 6, 1970. 59. Times (London), February 11, 1970. 60. MW, letter to ELG, March 14, 1970. 61. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 400. 62. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 400. 63. Hartney Arthur, interview by the author, April 24, 2000; also, Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 403. 64. MW, letters to ELG, April 19 and 22, 1972. 65. MW, Shakespeare without Tears, rev. ed., 133. 66. MW, letter to ELG, April 19, 1972. 67. MW, letter to ELG, April 22, 1972. 68. MW, letter to ELG, April 29, 1972. 69. MW, letter to Selma Broder, May 13, 1972. 70. MW, letter to ELG, May 7, 1972. 71. MW, letter to ELG, May 11, 1972. 72. MW, letter to ELG, May 11, 1972. 73. MW, letter to ELG, May 18, 1972. 74. George Gent, “Margaret Webster Repeats Author’s Role,” New York Times, August 18, 1972, 14. 75. MW, letter to ELG, July 31, 1972. 76. MW, letter to ELG, October 8, 1972. EPILOGUE 1. New York Times, December 6, 1972. 2. Quoted in Crawford, One Naked Individual, 157. 3. Quoted in Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 405. 4. Eva Le Gallienne, New York Times, November 26, 1972. 5. Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne, 403–5. 6. New York Times, November 14, 1972. 7. Times (London), November 14, 1972. 8. Star Johannesburg, November 25, 1972. 9. Laurence Olivier, letter to the Times (London), November 15, 1972. 10. Diana Raymond, interview by the author, October 3, 2000. 11. Dame Albertine Winner, letter to ELG, July 19, 1973. 12. British Equity News, January 1973. 13. MW, Daughter on the Stage, xvii–xix. 14. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 375. 15. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 375. 16. Star Johannesburg, November 25, 1972; also, MW, Daughter on the Stage, 233. 17. New York Times, August 20, 1972. 18. MW, Daughter on the Stage, 378. Page 314 → Page 315 → Page 316 → Page 317 → Page 318 → Page 319 → Page 320 → Page 321 → Page 322 → Page 323 → Page 324 → Page 325 → Page 326 → Page 327 → Page 328 → Page 329 → Page 330 → Page 331 → Page 332 → Page 333 → Page 334 → Page 335 → Page 336 →

Page 337 →

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———. Gerald du Maurier: The Last Actor-Manager. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989. Harwood, Ronald. Sir Donald Wolfit, C.B.E.: His Life and Work in the Unfashionable Theatre. Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1983. Hayes, Helen, with Katharine Hatch. My Life in Three Acts. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Hayman, Ronald. John Gielgud. New York: Random House, 1971. Page 339 → Hazzard, Robert Tombaugh. “The Development of Selected American Stage Directors from 1926 to 1960.” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1965. Henderson, Mary C. Theater in America: 200 Years of Plays, Players, and Productions. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986. Hewitt, Barnard. Theater U. S. A.: 1765–1957. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Hill, Erroll. Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Hill, Holly. Playing Joan. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987. Holden, Anthony. Laurence Olivier. New York: Atheneum, 1988. Houghton, Norris. Advance from Broadway: 19,000 Miles of American Theatre. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1941. ———. Entrances and Exits: A Life in and out of the Theatre. New York: Limelight Editions, 1991. Houseman, John. Front and Center. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. Huggett, Richard. Binkie Beaumont: Eminence Grise of the West End Theatre, 1933–1973. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989. Isaacs, Edith J. R. The Negro in the American Theatre. College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1947. Langner, Lawrence. The Magic Curtain: The Story of a Life in Two Fields, Theatre and Invention. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951. Le Gallienne, Eva. With a Quiet Heart: An Autobiography. New York: Viking Press, 1953. Leiter, Samuel L. Shakespeare around the Globe: A Guide to Notable Postwar Revivals. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Lesley, Cole. Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noël Coward. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown, 1995. McCarthy, Mary T. Theatre Chronicles, 1937–1962. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963. Melville, Joy. Ellen and Edy: A Biography of Ellen Terry and Her Daughter Edith Craig, 1847–1947. London: Pandora Press, 1987. Miller, John. Judi Dench: With a Crack in Her Voice. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998. Morley, Sheridan. John Gielgud. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001.

Nathan, George Jean. A George Jean Nathan Reader. Ed. A. L. Lazarus. Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990. ———. Theatre Book of the Year, 1946–1947. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. ———. Theatre Book of the Year, 1947–1948. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. Novick, Julius. Beyond Broadway. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968. Peters, Margot. The House of Barrymore. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. ———. Mrs. Pat: The Life of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. London: Bodley Head, 1984. Purdom, C. B. Harley Granville Barker: Man of the Theatre, Dramatist, and Scholar. London: Rockliff, 1955. Rader, Dotson. Tennessee: Cry of the Heart. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985. Redgrave, Michael. In My Mind’s Eye. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983. Rice, Elmer. The Living Theatre. New York: Harpers, 1959. Robinson, Alice M., Vera M. Roberts, and Milly S. Barranger, eds. Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. Page 340 → Roose-Evans, James. London Theatre from the Globe to the National. Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1977. Rowell, George, and Anthony Jackson. The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain. London: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Rudisill, Amanda Sue. “The Contributions of Eva Le Gallienne, Margaret Webster, Margo Jones, and Joan Littlewood to the Establishment of Repertory Theatre in the United States and Great Britain.” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1973. Schanke, Robert A. Eva Le Gallienne: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Green-wood Press, 1989. ———. Ibsen in America: A Century of Change. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press,1988. ———. Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Schanke, Robert A., and Kim Marra, eds. Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Schildkraut, Joseph. My Father and I. New York: Viking Press, 1959. Sheehy, Helen. Eva Le Gallienne: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Silverman, Ely. “Margaret Webster’s Theory and Practice of Shakespearean Production in the United States, 1937–1953.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1969. Spector, Susan Jane. “Uta Hagen: The Early Years, 1919–1951.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1982. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Sprigge, Elizabeth. Sybil Thorndike Casson. London: Victor Gollancz, 1971.

Taubman, Howard. The Making of the American Theatre. New York: Coward-McCann, 1967. Trewin, J. C. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 1913–1963. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1963. ———. Shakespeare on the English Stage: 1900–1964. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964. Vaughan, Stuart. A Possible Theatre. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. Waldau, Roy S. Vintage Years of the Theatre Guild, 1928–1939. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1972. Webster, Margaret. Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. ———. The Same Only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. ———. Shakespeare and the Modern Theatre. Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Vassar College, 1944. ———. Shakespeare without Tears. Rev. ed. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1955. Reprint, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2000. Published in England as Shakespeare Today (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1957). First ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1942. West, Rebecca. Selected Letters. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Page 341 → Williams, Dakin, and Shepherd Mead. Tennessee Williams: An Intimate Biography. New York: Arbor House, 1983. Williams, Harcourt. Four Years at the Old Vic, 1929–1933. London: Putnam, 1935. ———. Old Vic Saga. London: Winchester, 1944. Williams, Tennessee. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Ed. Albert J. Devlin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. ———. Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, 1975. ———. Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940–1965. Ed. Donald Windham. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977. Wood, Audrey, with Max Wilk. Represented by Audrey Wood. New York: Doubleday, 1981. Woollcott, Alexander. The Letters of Alexander Woollcott. Ed. Beatrice Kaufman and Joseph Hennessey. New York: Viking Press, 1944. Worsley, Robert Craig. “Margaret Webster: A Study of Her Contributions to the American Theatre.” Ph.D. diss., Wayne State University, 1972. Young, Stark. Immortal Shadows: A Book of Dramatic Criticism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948. Zeigler, Joseph W. Regional Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

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INDEX Abba, Marta, 175 Abe Lincoln in Illinois (Sherwood), 105 Abraham Lincoln (Drinkwater), 270 Acton, Wallace, 166 Actors’ Charitable Trust (U.K.), 307 Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), 79, 122, 123, 124, 150, 167, 170, 174, 176, 180, 226, 227–28, 230, 235, 236, 250, 254, 255; Council of, 122–23, 124, 125, 170, 224, 227, 228, 255; as “Red” organization, 228 Actors’ Fund of America, 307 Actors Studio, 142, 173 Actors’ Workshop (San Francisco,Calif.), 179 Adams, Maude, 159 Address Unknown (film), 121 Addy, Wesley, 96, 113, 236, 239, 252 Adler, Kurt, 197 Adler, Peter Herman, 211, 212 Aherne, Brian, 179 Ah, Wilderness! (O’Neill), 102, 122 Aida (Verdi), 203–6, 207, 208, 209, 215 Ainley, Richard, 54 Albery, Bronson, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 263, 264 Aldridge, Ira, 132 Alexander, George, 40 Alice in Wonderland (adapt. by Le Gallienne and Friebus), 163, 170, 172, 173, 175, 178, 180, 197; on Broadway, 172 Allen, Dion, 182 Allen, Judy, 293 Allen, Robert, 112 Alley Theatre (Houston, Tex.), 179

All God’s Chillun Got Wings (O’Neill),108, 135 All My Sons (A. Miller), 164, 235 Alvarez, Anita, 165 Ambassador Theatre (New York), 269 American Academy of Dramatic Arts, 142 American Business Consultants, 229 American Civil Liberties Union, 242,246 American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, 235, 246, 249 American Committee to Save Refugees, 235, 246 American Conservatory Theatre (San Francisco, Calif.), 269 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 231 American Federation of Musicians of New York, 167 American Friends of the Chinese People, 235 American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), 125, 162, 170, 171,174, 227, 280; Theatre Series of, 125 American Repertory Theatre (ART), 125, 154, 155–79, 180, 182, 184, 187, 212, 282, 284, 289, 290, 304, 305, 311; advisory board of, 162;brochure for, 161, 162, 169; failure of, 163, 168, 178, 179; first season of, 161, 164; fundraising for, 162–63; as touring company, 156–67, 176 American Shakespeare Festival and Academy (Stratford, Conn.), 238–39, 290, 293 Page 344 → American-Soviet Cultural Conference, 229 American Theatre Wing and Stage Door Canteen, 122, 174 Amphitryon 38 (Giraudoux; adapt. by Behrman), 74, 77, 84 Anderson, John, 7 Anderson, Dame Judith, 98, 103, 120, 123, 210; in Family Portrait, 98–99; in Macbeth, 126–27 Anderson, Elaine (Mrs. John Steinbeck), 134 Anderson, Maxwell, 63, 64, 74, 102, 283 Andrews, A. G., 152 Andrews, Maidie, 273 Androcles and the Lion (Shaw), 10, 48, 50, 164, 167, 168, 169, 173 Angel Street (Patrick Hamilton), 105 Anglin, Margaret, 123

Anouilh, Jean, 284 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 74, 75, 278, 279 Apollo of Bellac, The (Giraudoux), 184 Arena Stage (Washington, D.C.), 179, 256 Aristocrats (Okhlopkov), 226 Armen, Eloise, 301 Armistead, Horace, 296 Arms and the Man (Shaw), 30 Armstrong, Will Steven, 285, 290 Arnott, John, 278 Arsenic and Old Lace (Joseph Kessel-ring), 105 Arthur, Hartney, 302 Artist-in-residence, 278, 296–98 Arts Theatre (London), 52, 54, 280 Ashcroft, Peggy, 33, 57, 63, 68, 72, 131, 132, 135 Ask Me No More (Frankau), 265, 278;adapted by Webster, 278 Aspern Papers, The (adapt. by Red-grave), 129, 278, 293; on Broadway, 278 Association of Producing Artists (APA), 289 As We Forgive Our Debtors (Breiseth), 125 As You Desire Me (Pirandello, adapt. by Webster), 163, 175–76 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 37, 43, 50, 96, 98, 178, 186 Atkins, Robert, 47 Atkinson, Brooks, 95, 307; on the American Repertory Theatre, 170, 171, 233, 234, 235, 251, 254, 270, 295, 304; on Helen Hayes, 106; on Judith Anderson, 127; on Webster, 125; reviews by, 71, 75, 77, 79, 91, 92, 99, 106, 127–28, 169, 170, 172, 177, 185 At Number Fifteen (Alma Brosnan), 27 Atwood, Clare, 24 AWARE, Inc., 257 Ayers, Lemuel, 126 Aylmer, Felix, 56

Bacall, Lauren, 276 Back to Methuselah (Shaw), 211, 213, 268–70; on Broadway, 268, 269 Baker, Benny, 166 Balanchine, George, 208 Balcony, The (Genet), 219 Ball, William, 269 Ballad of Brompton Grill, The (Frankau), 275 Ballantyne, Paul, 252, 254, 283 Ballet Ballads (Latouche), 195 Banco (play), 78 Bankhead, Tallulah, 74, 75, 109 Banks, Leslie, 179–80 Barbieri, Fedora, 196, 197 Barclay, John, 82 Barker, Harley Granville, 10, 24, 30, 39–41, 48, 55, 64, 142; description of, 40–41; rehearsal techniques of, 40–41 Barretts of Wimpole Street, The (Besler), 270 Barrie, James M., 35, 41, 42, 44, 164, 168, 212 Barrymore, Ethel, 36, 185 Barrymore, John, 25, 28, 36, 41, 48, 76, 85, 91, 96; in Hamlet, 25, 28 Barrymore, Lionel, 22 Basalik (Garland), 57, 131 Page 345 → Basehart, Richard, 140, 224 Basile, Arturo, 210, 212 Battis, Emery, 166 Battle of Angels (T. Williams), 107, 108–20, 124, 132, 134; audience response to, 114–15, 116–17; technical demands of, 112 Baylis, Lilian, 15, 42, 43, 45–47, 48, 54, 55, 56, 126; background of, 45; description of, 45–46; frugality of, 48, influences on, 48; as manager, 45–48 Beaton, Cecil, 194

Beaumont, Hugh (“Binkie”), 263, 264, 272, 273 Beautiful People, The (Saroyan), 105 Beebe, Lucius, 70 Begley, Ed, 164 Behrman, S. N., 77, 102 Belasco Theatre (New York), 284 Bell for Adano, A (Osborn), 224 Ben-Ami, Jacob, 78 Benchley, Robert, 83 Ben Greet Shakespeare Company (U.K.), 37–38 Benson, Constance, 20, 22 Benthall, Michael, 267 Berghof, Herbert, 176, 177, 255 Bergman, Ingrid, 164 Berliner Ensemble (Ger.), 164, 285, 300 Bernstein, Aline, 253 Bernstein, Leonard, 162 Besler, Rudolf, 270 Bettis, Valerie, 269 Biancolli, Louis, 219 Billington, Michael, 300 Bill of Divorcement (film), 101 Biltmore Theatre (New York), 165 Bing, Sir Rudolf, 188, 194, 196, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 212, 213, 215, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 252;background of, 192; description of, 192, 221; on Webster, 219 Birmingham Repertory Company (U.K.), 30, 264, 270 Bizet, Georges, 193 Bjoerling, Jussi, 196, 197 Black, David, 278 Black Chiffon (Brandt), 234

Blacklist, 206, 228, 230, 234, 251, 254, 255, 257, 258, 260 Blau, Herbert, 179 Blithe Spirit (Coward), 105 Blitzstein, Marc, 169, 231 Bloomgarden, Kermit, 129 Blue Bird, The (Maeterlinck), 10 Bogard, Travis, 278, 279; on Webster, 279–80 Bolt, Robert, 277 Booth, Clare, 64 Booth, Edwin, 254 Born Yesterday (Kanin), 165 Boucicault, Dion, 10 Bourneuf, Philip, 163, 169 Bowles, Paul, 105 Boyt, John, 209 Brackett, Charles, 104 Bradford, Marshall, 112 Braithwaite, Lilian, 7, 260 Brando, Marlon, 120, 163 Brandt, George, 234 Brattle Theatre (Cambridge, Mass.), 133, 201, 203 Brecht, Bertolt, 64, 300 Breiseth, Tillman, 125 Brigadoon (Lerner and Loewe), 165, 173, 174 Briggs Hall, Austin, 182, 184 British Actors’ Equity Association, 58, 179, 226, 309; tribute to Webster, 309 British Actors’ Orphanage, 223 British Council, 309 British Drama League, 58, 226

British National Federation of Women’s Institute, 57 Broadhurst Theatre (New York), 75, 136, 252, 253 Broadway, 56, 58, 59, 87, 97, 98, 99, 103, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 156, 157, 158, 161, 163, 167, 173, 177, 179, 181, 183, 191, 194, 210, 231, 232, 237, 250, 251, 255, 257, 260, 276, 278, 293, 296, 310, 311; Page 346 → 1937–38 season, 63–64; 1940–41 season, 105; 1942–43 season, 224; 1943–44 season, 150–51; 1946–47 season, 164–65; postwar changes, 129. See also on Broadway under names of individual plays Broder, Selma R., 303, 309 Bromberg, J. Edward, 231 Brontës, The (adapt. by Webster), 258, 278, 280, 284, 307 Brook, Peter, 96, 264, 310 Brough, Jean Webster, 58, 171, 179, 256, 260; death of, 260; in Ivor Novello’s company, 58 Brough, Lizzie Webster, 10 Brough, Sidney, 58, 260 Brown, Coral, 57 Brown, Jared, 83 Brown, John Mason, 91, 95–96, 153; on Evans, 127; intro. to Shakespeare without Tears, 129, 263; reviews by, 74, 82, 84, 91–92, 106, 159–60, 166 Browne, Maurice, 57, 131 Bruce, Nigel, 223 Brundred, Jane, 294, 295; death of, 295–96; description of, 294 Bryan, Helen, 232 Buck, Pearl S., 229 Bufano, Remo, 169, 172 Burke, Edmund, 250 Burton, Richard, 96, 254 Burrell, John, 156 Cabin in the Sky (play), 108 Caesar and Cleopatra (Shaw), 164 Caldwell, Erskine, 64 Caldwell, Zoe, 274

Cambridge, Edmund, 182, 184 Cambridge Festival Theatre (England), 35–36 Camino Real (T. Williams), 173 Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 9, 70 Candida (Shaw), 30 Capon, Eric, 175 Carewe, Helen, 112 Carlin, John, 271 Carmen (Bizet), 193 Carnovsky, Morris, 140, 224, 231 Carrie (film), 119 Carroll, Lewis, 172 Carroll, Madeleine, 104, 108 Carroll, Paul Vincent, 73 Carving a Statue (Greene), 291, 293, 294 Cassell, Walter, 211 Casson, Sir Lewis T., 23, 24, 28, 36, 39, 43, 58, 93, 180, 210, 263, 276, 285, 295, 301, 308; as actor in:Hippolytus 28; Jane Clegg, 43; Macbeth, 32; Medea, 43; Saint Joan, 28;Waiting in the Wings, 273, 275 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (T. Williams), 255 Cavalcade (Coward), 273 Chambers, Whittaker, 225 Chandler, Thelma, 166, 181 Chaplin, Charlie, 108, 223, 229 Chapman, William, 210 Charley’s Aunt (Thomas Brandon), 105, 108, 124, 133, 255 Charrington, Margaret, 48 Chase, Mary, 227 Chekhov, Anton, 33, 34, 47, 52, 76, 136, 151–53, 184, 201, 284, 297, 299 Cheney, Sheldon, 105 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov), 34, 35, 136, 139, 151–53, 154, 213; on Broadway, 152

Children’s Hour, The (film), 119 Children’s Hour, The (Hellman), 253 Choate, Edward, 180, 182, 184, 224, 232 Christians, Bertha Klein, 87 Christians, Mady, 86, 87, 89, 91, 103, 105, 121, 186, 227, 234–36, 237, 250, 251; as actress in: All My Sons, 235; The Father, 235; Hamlet, 92; Heartbreak House, 87; 1 Henry IV, 96; I Remember Mama, 235; Watch on the Rhine, 235; death of, 88, 234; description of, 87; family background of, 86–87; FBI investigation, 234; films, 235;Page 347 → listing in Red Channels, 234; memorial service, 236; professional debut, 87; relationship with Webster, 87, 137; U.S. citizenship, 235 Christians, Rudolph, 86, 87 Christoff, Boris, 196–97, 206 Chrysler, Walter P., Jr., 237 Church, Esmé, 39, 51 Circle-in-the-Square (New York), 179 City Center Ballet Company (New York), 208 City Center of Music and Drama (New York), 150, 159, 166, 182, 185, 191, 233, 254, 257, 268, 270 City Center Opera Company (New York), 206, 207–213; audiences of, 212 Civic Repertory Theatre (New York), 68, 78, 84, 156, 159, 167, 172, 173, 177, 182, 253, 289 Civic Theatre (Johannesburg, South Africa), 277 Civil Rights’ Congress, 228 Clandestine Marriage, The (Coleman and Garrick), 41–42 Clare, Mary, 273 Clark, Kendall, 182 Cleva, Fausto, 203 Clothes of a King’s Son (Frankau), 277 Clurman, Harold, 79, 83, 97, 157, 231 Cobb, Lee J., 164 Cohan, George M., 102–3 Cohen, Alexander H., 276 Cohn, Roy M., 241, 243, 244, 245–46, 248, 249, 250 Cold War, 225, 246

Coleman, George, 41 Collier, Constance, 25, 26 Colonel Blessington (Frankau), 290, 291 Colonial Theatre (Boston, Mass.), 81, 158 Colt, Alvin, 278, 283, 286 Committee for the Re-election of Benjamin Davis, 245, 248, 251 Common Ground (Chodorov), 224 Communism, 242 Communist Party, 232, 241, 242, 245, 253; front groups of, 245, 253 Communists, 225, 242, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 251, 253 Compton, Fay, 25 Confederacy, The (J. Vanbrugh), 42, 43 Conklin, Peggy, 102 Conroy, Frank, 78 Cons, Emma, 45 Cooper, Gary, 104, 108 Cooper, Gladys, 28, 273 Copeland, Aaron, 242 Coriolanus (Brecht), 301 Cornell, Katharine, 56, 64, 97, 98, 151, 162, 269 Corn Is Green, The (E. Williams), 36, 105, 185, 196 Cort Theatre (New York), 120, 124, 125, 176, 234 Cosaro, Frank, 255 Così Fan Tutte(Mozart), 194 Cotsworth, Staats, 127, 186, 254 Council of African Affairs, 230 Counterattack (adapt. by Janet and Philip Stevenson), 139, 140, 224, 280; on Broadway, 140 Counterattack: Newsletter of Facts to Combat Communism (American Business Associates), 206, 207, 229

Country Cousin, The (Booth Tarkington), 78 Country Wife, The (William Wycherley), 63 Courtenay, Margaret, 268 Court Theatre (London), 34, 39 Covent Garden (London), 9, 132, 179, 208, 305 Coward, Sir Noël, 44, 63, 72, 223, 271–72, 273, 274, 275, 276, 279, 290, 300, 307, 310 Cowen, Leonore Coffee, 97 Cowen, William Joyce, 97 Cowl, Jane, 64, 123, 140, 154 Cradle Will Rock, The (Blitzstein), 231 Page 348 → Craig, Edith, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 29, 52, 53, 55, 58, 69, 87; as designer, 15; as director, 15, 28, 58; as feminist, 15; family background of, 14;influence on Webster, 18; sexuality of, 15 Craig, Edward Gordon, 10, 11, 48 Crain, Jon, 209 Crawford, Cheryl, 97–99, 154, 163, 166, 178, 213, 256, 300, 307; American Repertory Theatre co-produced by, 155–74; on ART, 171; background of, 157; description of, 157; Family Portrait produced by, 97–100; lesbianism of, 160; as producer, 173; resignation from ART, 172–73; The Tempest produced by, 159; on Webster, 98, 99, 180 Crawford, Joan, 109 Creswell, Saylor, 293 Critic, The (Sheridan), 156 Cromwell, John, 104 Crothers, Rachel, 74 Crucible, The (A. Miller), 284 Cukor, George, 162 Cullen, Carolyn, 307 Cummings, Constance, 73 Cunningham, John, 290 Curtain Falls, The (J. V. Reed), 64 Curtin, Phyllis, 209, 211 Curtis-Verna, Mary, 216

Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 305 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand), 255 Daily Worker, 232, 248, 251 Dalrymple, Jean, 191, 207, 254 Dalton, Charles, 67 Daly, Augustin, 269 Daly’s Theatre (London), 29 Dana, Leora, 285 D’Arch Smith, Timothy, 307 D’Arch Smith, Ursula, 290, 302, 307, 308 Dark Horizon (Storm), 56 Dark Is Light Enough, The (play), 269 Dark Lady of the Sonnets, The (Shaw), 30, 50 Daviot, Gordon (Mackintosh), 53, 56 Davis, Benjamin, Jr., 230, 232, 245, 248 Davis, Gwen Ffrangcon, 52, 54, 56, 57, 68, 305 Davis, Hallie Flanagan, 231 Davis, Sidney M., 240, 241, 242 Day, Edith, 273 De Casalis, Jeanne, 64 Deering, Olive, 67 Delacorte Theatre (New York), 256 De Lamar, Alice, 237, 238, 304 Delany, Maureen, 273 Del Monaco, Mario, 203, 204 De Marney, Derrick, 75 De Mille, Agnes, 150, 224 DeMille, Cecil B., 97, 104 Dench, Dame Judi, 268

Denham, Reginald, 33, 295 Desire under the Elms (O’Neill), 78 Deutsches Theater (Berlin, Ger.), 87 De Valois, Dame Ninette, 39 Devil’s Disciple, The (Shaw), 30, 51, 52, 54, 129, 182, 192, 263; on Broadway, 185, 191 Devil We Know, The (Frankau), 292 Dewell, Michael, 282, 283, 284, 285, 288; as NRT producer, 284–85 Dial M. for Murder (play), 255 Diamond, David, 159, 160 Diary of Anne Frank, The (play), 255 Dietrich, Marlene, 108 Digges, Dudley, 164 Divine Drudge, The (play), 87 Dixon, Adele, 47, 49, 50; in Romeo and Juliet, 49, 50 Dixon, Dean, 229 Doctor’s Dilemma, The (Shaw), 263 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 178 Don Carlo (Verdi), 158, 188, 193–201, 206, 215, 221, 222 Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage (Webster), 186, 248, 276–77, 301, 303, 307, 310; dedication to Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, 301 Dougherty, Frances Anne, 282, 283, 284, 288; as NRT producer, 284 Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 229 Page 349 → Douglas, Paul, 165 Dowling, Eddie, 64, 65, 72, 73, 74, 76, 116 Drake, Alfred, 150 Drama League of New York, 235 Dramatists’ Guild, 123, 124, 127, 175 Dream Watcher, The (Wersba), 302 Drinkwater, John, 270 Drury Lane Theatre (London), 58, 132, 260

DuBarry Was a Lady (musical), 108 Dudley, Doris, 112, 113 Duke of York’s Theatre (London), 276 Du Maurier, Gerald, 10, 28, 41 Duncan, Augustin, 67 Duprez, June, 163, 166, 171, 178 Duse, Eleonora, 186, 301 Dyer-Bennett, Richard, 239 Eames, Clare, 22, 58 Earhardt, Robert, 112 Easton, Richard, 269 Edinburgh Music Festival (U.K.), 192, 193 Edwards, Ben, 93, 182, 278 Edwards, Henry, 88, 89, 96 Egyptian Nights (Tairov), 226 Einstein, Albert, 229 Electra (Hugo von Hofmannsthal), 9 Elizabethan Stage Society, 24, 39 Elizabeth the Queen (M. Anderson), 283 Elliott, Denholm, 284 Ellis, Mary, 299, 300 Emerson, Faye, 211, 239, 240, 267, 268, 283, 285 Emhardt, Robert, 176, 177 Emperor Jones, The (O’Neill), 108, 135, 140 Engel, Lehman, 90, 95, 98, 100, 126, 181, 252, 253, 307; description of Webster, 90 Equity Library Theatre, 125–26 Ernani (Verdi), 207 Ervine, St. John, 32, 43 Etienne (Wakefield), 73

Etlinger Dramatic School, 20, 22 Euripides, 24, 25, 28, 39, 41, 43, 120, 123, 124, 125, 274 Evans, Edith, 78, 81 Evans, Maurice, 23, 35, 36, 46, 55, 59, 63–66, 75, 76, 78, 84, 85, 88, 89, 95, 113, 120, 130, 132, 133, 134, 141, 146, 163, 177, 181, 186, 188, 192, 207, 210, 223, 233, 239, 278, 295, 305, 310; as actor in: The Aspern Papers, 278; The Devil’s Disciple, 182, 185; Hamlet, 56, 91–92; 1 Henry IV, 75, 96–97;Macbeth, 126–28; Much Ado about Nothing, 56; Othello, 56; Richard II, 56, 64–72, 96, 191; The Taming of the Shrew, 56, 191; Twelfth Night, 105–6; as actor-manager, 64, 96, 129; choice of Webster as director, 65–66; at the Old Vic, 56; as Shavian actor, 129 Evening with Will Shakespeare, An (play), 186, 239 Evensen, Marion. See Westlake, Marion Evensen Exiled Writers Committee, 235 Experimental Theatre, 120, 122–26 Fabulous Lunts, The (Jared Brown), 83 Fagan, James Bernard (J. B.), 33–36;description of, 33 Falstaff (Verdi), 207 Family Portrait (L. C. and W. J.Cowen), 97, 123, 126, 133, 157, 160, 173; Anderson in, 98–99; on Broadway, 98–100 Farnham, Sylvia, 202 Father, The (Strindberg), 235 Faulk, John Henry, 258 Fay, Frank, 151, 227, 228 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 88, 170, 225, 226, 231, 234, 237, 252–53, 254, 257 Ferber, Edna, 64, Ferrer, José, 108, 133, 141, 148–49, 150, 163, 207, 232–33, 240, 243, 254; as actor in: Othello, 133–34, 141, 147, 148–50; Richard III, 191 Page 350 → Ffolkes, David, 59, 63, 64, 67–68, 75, 86, 93, 95, 100, 166, 173; design for Hamlet, 86; design for Richard II, 63, 67–68 Fichandler, Zelda, 179, 256 Field, Betty, 104 Fifth Amendment, 228, 240, 241 Finch, John, 125 Finian’s Rainbow (musical), 165

Finlay, Currie, 52 Finney, Albert, 270 First World War, Webster’s memories of, 11–13 Fiske, Mrs. (Minnie Maddern), 176 Fitzgerald, Geraldine, 86 Fitzgerald, Walter, 280 Flare Path (Rattigan), 139, 224; on Broadway, 139 Fledermaus, Die (Johann Strauss), 194, 206 Fletcher, Allen, 290 Foch, Nina, 239, 288 Fogerty, Elsie, 22 Folson, A. C., 108 Fontanne, Lynn, 35, 74, 76–84, 299, 305; in The Seagull, 76–84 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston, 11 Ford’s Theatre (Washington, D.C.), 288 Fortunato (Quinteros), 39 Forza del Destino, La (Verdi), 219 Four Poster, The (play), 255 Fox, Frederick, 213, 215, 217; design for Simon Boccanegra, 213 Francen, Victor, 252 Frankau, Pamela, 87, 186, 208, 210, 256, 260, 261, 265, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 275, 277, 279, 280, 281, 283, 284, 285, 288, 289–90, 291, 292–93, 294, 295, 300, 306, 307, 309; background of, 261; death of, 290; illness of, 285, 288, 289–90; memorial service, 290; novels by, 261, 265, 277, 278, 280, 290, 291, 292 Friebus, Florida, 172 Front organization, 253 Frost, Robert, 283 Fulbright, J. William, 243 Fulbright Exchange Student Service (program), 243, 248. See also International Institute of Education Fuller, Dean, 286 Full Moon (E. Williams), 36 Fulton Theatre (New York), 75

Galileo (Brecht), 125 Galsworthy, John, 19, 30, 39, 44, 45 Garfield, John, 125, 231, 236, 250 Garfield, John, Jr., 285 Garland, Peter (pseud. of Norma Leslie Munroe), 57, 131 Garrick, David, 41, 48, 271 Garson, Greer, 73 Gaslight (film), 101 Gassner, John, 93 Gates, Larry, 182, 293 Genet, Jean, 219 Genn, Leo, 164, 280, 305 Gérard, Rolf, 193, 194–95, 196, 200, 204, 205, 252, 264; design for Don Carlo, 195, 204 Geva, Tamara, 123 Ghosts (Ibsen), 175, 176, 262, 263; on Broadway, 176 Giannini, Vittorio, 207, 211 Gielgud, Sir John, 20, 27, 29, 33, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41, 46, 47, 49–50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 68, 78, 81, 85, 91, 96, 129, 180, 213, 253, 263, 264, 266, 299, 304, 305, 310; as actor in: Hamlet, 49–50; The Imaginary Invalid, 49; The Merchant of Venice, 49; Musical Chairs, 52; Richard of Bordeaux, 54, 56; Richard II, 49–50; Romeo and Juliet, 49; on Barker’s rehearsals, 41; as director, 54, 56, 57, 58 Gigi (play), 255 Gilder, Rosamund, 92 Gilmore, Virginia, 141 Giraudoux, Jean, 74, 77 Girl Unknown (Molnár), 58 Gish, Lillian, 74 Gismondo, Giuseppe, 210 Page 351 → Glass Menagerie, The (T. Williams), 116, 120 Glyndebourne Opera Company (U.K.), 192, 193 Goddard, Paulette, 104

Godfrey, Peter, 76 Golden, John, 254 Golden Boy (Odets), 74 Goldwyn, Samuel, 162 Goldwyn, Mrs. Samuel, 162 Gordon, Ruth, 64, 105 Goring, Marius, 55, 58 Graham, George, 89 Gramercy Arts Theatre (New York), 293 Granger, Farley, 284 Gray, Spalding, 259 Gray, Terence, 35 Great Campaign, The (Sundgaard), 125 Great Dictator, The (film), 108 Green, Charles, 254 Green, Dorothy, 50 Green, William, 231 Greene, Graham, 291, 293, 307 Greenstreet, Sydney, 82 Greenwood, Charlotte, 236 Greet, Ben (“B. G.”), 37–38, 47, 57, 65, 95, 100, 180, 279; description of, 37; as manager, 37–38 Gromyko, Andrei, 249 Group Theatre, 97, 157, 160, 231 Guarrera, Frank, 220 Guinness, Sir Alec, 139, 224; on Webster, 139 Guthrie, Sir Tyrone, 33, 39, 57, 66, 193, 194, 282, 301; as Old Vic director, 57 Guthrie Theatre (Minneapolis, Minn.), 256 Guys and Dolls (Frank Loesser), 255 Gwenn, Edmund, 179

Hagen, Jean, 176 Hagen, Uta, 79, 81, 82, 83, 148, 149, 150, 233, 234; as actress in:Othello, 133–35, 137–38, 141–42, 145; Saint Joan, 233–34; The Seagull, 82–83; listing in Red Channels, 233; on the Lunts, 81, 83; on Webster, 135 Haggott, John, 113, 126, 140, 149–50, 151 Hairy Ape, The (O’Neill), 108 Hall, Austin Briggs, 182, 184 Hall, Sir Peter, 120 Halliday, Richard, 103, 104 Hambleton, T. Edward, 179 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 28, 48, 49, 50, 63, 64, 76, 84, 85–97, 113, 121, 131, 153, 180, 182, 194, 227, 254;on Broadway, 91–92 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 150–51 Hammett, Dashiell, 225, 228 Hampden, Walter, 166, 169, 171 Hanna, Hazel, 112 Hardwicke, Sir Cedric, 41, 73, 76, 104 Harnett, Vincent, 257 Harris, Julie, 163, 172, 178, 259 Harris, Margaret, 158, 274 Harris, Robert, 54 Harris, Rosemary, 276 Hart, Lorenz, 91, 105 Hart, Moss, 64, 96 Hartman Theatre (Columbus, Ohio), 285 Hartog, Jan de, 125 Harvey (Chase), 165, 227 Harvey, Sir John Martin, 51, 52, 53 Harvey, Lawrence, 255 Hassall, Christopher, 208 Hassan, Rita, 174, 175

Hastings, Charlotte, 233 Hasty Heart, The (John Patrick), 224 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 30, 39 Hawkins, Jack, 52, 56 Haydon, Julie, 76 Hayes, Helen, 64, 97, 105, 106, 162, 163 Haymarket Theatre (London), 8, 25, 264 Hearst Theatre (Berkeley, Calif.), 278;as amphitheater, 278–79 Heartbreak House (Shaw), 33, 86, 87, 90 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 9, 175, 176; on Broadway, 177 Page 352 → Heflin, Frances, 158 Heilige Experiment, Das (Hochwalder), 237 Heiress, The (film), 119 Helburn, Theresa, 77, 105, 107, 108, 109, 116, 118–19, 138, 140, 150, 157, 165; and Theatre Guild, 77 Hellman, Lillian, 105, 121, 179, 225, 228, 229, 235, 240, 250, 253, 297 Hemingway, Ernest, 229 Henry Miller Theatre (New York), 139 Henry IV (Shakespeare), 75, 93, 113, 121, 156, 302; on Broadway, 96 – 97 Henry V (Shakespeare), 186 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 29, 57, 93, 154, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 265, 308 Hepburn, Katharine, 96, 164 Herman, Robert, 215 Hersey, John, 229, 283 Hester, Rev. John, 305, 308 Hewitt, Alan, 82, 227 High Ground, The (Hastings), 206, 233;on Broadway, 233 High Tor (M. Anderson), 63, 72 Hill, George Roy, 202

Hiller, Wendy, 278 Hines, Jerome, 196, 203, 204 Hines, Patrick, 290 Hinkley, Darthy, 185, 202 Hippolytus (Euripides), 24, 25, 28 His Infinite Variety (adapt. by Webster), 258 His Infinite Variety: A Shakespearean Anthology (recording), 309 His Majesty’s Theatre (London), 10 Hiss, Alger, 225 Hochwalder, Fritz, 237, 238, 252, 263 Holbrook, Hal, 259 Hold on to Your Hats (play), 108 Holland, Joseph, 182 Holliday, Judy, 165, 225 Hollywood, 103–4, 232 Holmes, Bertram, 112 Home (Storey), 310 Homosexuality, 251 Hopkins, Miriam, 108, 119; in Battle of Angels, 108–14, 117; films, 119 Horton, Louisa, 182 Houghton, Norris, 168, 179 Houseman, John, 301 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 206, 225, 226, 228, 230, 231, 232, 236, 240, 243, 254, 258 Housman, Laurence, 64 Howard, Alan, 290 Howard, Leslie, 91 Howard, Sidney, 22, 102, 164 Hughes, Barnard, 276 Hughes, Elinor, 81–82, 144

Hughes, Langston 229 Humphrey, Cavada, 169 Hunt, Martita, 47, 49, 50, 85, 266, 299 Huntington, John, 133 Hurlbut, Gladys, 73 Hurok, Sol, 184 Hurt, William, 273 Hutchinson, Josephine, 78, 182, 186 Ibsen, Henrik, 30, 33, 39, 56, 57, 161, 163, 164, 166, 168, 173, 175, 176, 177, 181, 212, 262, 263, 293, 312 Iceman Cometh, The (O’Neill), 164 Imaginary Invalid, The (Molière), 43, 48, 49 I Married an Angel (Rodgers and Hart), 91 Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde), 186 International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), 122, 167 International Institute of Education, 244, 247 International Theatre (New York), 163, 166 Ireland, Anthony, 40 Ireland, John, 127, 140, 224 I Remember Mama (Van Druten), 121, 235 Iron Flowers (Lewis), 56 Irvine, Harry, 127 Page 353 → Irving, Sir Henry, 48 Irving, Jules, 179 Irving Place Theatre, 86 Isham, Gyles, 50 Isham, Virginia, 40 Ivanov (Chekhov), 34 Ivo, Alexander, 139

Jackson, Anne, 163, 178, 305 Jackson, Sir Barry, 30, 264, 270 Jackson, Henry M. (“Scoop”), 244, 248 Jaffe, Sam, 236 James, Henry, 278 Jane Eyre (adapt. by Webster), 136 Jefford, Barbara, 268 Jennings, Victor Payne, 165 Jerome, Adele, 232 Joan of Lorraine (M. Anderson), 164 Job, Thomas, 151, 156, 165–66, 230 John Bull’s Other Island (Shaw), 30 John Gabriel Borkman (Ibsen), 164, 166, 168, 169, 170, 173, 263, 305 Johnson, Edward, 192 Johnson, Laurence, 257 Johnston, Celia, 73 Johnston, Margaret, 265, 266, 267 Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, 224, 227, 246–47 Jones, Margo, 179, 256 Jones, Robert Edmond, 22, 25, 78, 93, 102, 145, 149, 162; design for Henry VIII, 154; design for Othello, 140; design for The Seagull, 78 Jonson, Ben, 207 Jordan, Irene, 210 Jory, Victor, 163, 165, 182, 185 Journal of the Plague Years, A (Kanfer), 258 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 50, 182, 184, 239, 290 Kanfer, Stefan, 258 Kanin, Garson, 104, 194, 195, 206, 255 Karinska (costume designer), 105 Karloff, Boris, 179

Kaufman, George S., 64, 96 Kay, Barry, 267 Kazan, Elia, 164, 173, 225, 231 Kean, Charles, 132 Kean, Edmund, 48, 132 Keen, Malcolm, 55 Keith, Ian, 67 Kelly, Grace, 235 Kelly, Nancy, 139 Kelly, Norman, 209 Kennedy, Arthur, 102, 164–65 Kennedy, E. John, 227 Kennedy, John F., 283 Kent, Rockwell, 229 Kilty, Jerome, 290 King, Dennis, 252 King, Edith, 82, 112, 149, 150 King and I, The (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 255 King Lear (Shakespeare), 157, 263 Kirstein, Lincoln, 238 Kiss for Cinderella, A (Barrie), 56 Knipper-Chekhova, Olga, 152–53 Knox, Alexander, 179 Komisarjevsky, Theodore, 34, 47, 52, 53, 78 Komisarjevsky, Vera, 34 Koussevitsky, Serge, 229, 249 Krawitz, Herman E., 215 Kronenberger, Louis, 138, 146, 169 Ladies in Retirement (play), 127

Lady Clancarty (Tom Taylor), 8 Lady from Alfaqueque, The (Quinteros), 39 Lady from Belmont, The (Ervine), 56 Lady from the Sea, The (Ibsen), 57 Lady Scarface (film), 126 Lafayette Players, 132 Lahr, Bert, 108 Langner, Lawrence, 77, 83, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 138, 140, 150, 233–34, 239, 301; on Battle of Angels, 116; and Theatre Guild, 77; on Webster, 119 Lardner, Ring, Jr., 225 Lassie Come Home (film), 101, 144, 180 Last of Mrs. Cheyney, The (Lonsdale), 28 Late Christopher Bean, The (E.Williams), 36 Page 354 → Latouche, John, 125 Laugh Time (revue), 151 Laughton, Charles, 93, 125, 154 Laurie, John, 55 Law, Mouzon, 296 Lawrence, Gertrude, 63, 72, 74, 223 Lawson, John Howard, 225 Leaver, Philip, 73 Lee, Auriol, 41–42; description of, 41–42 Lee, Canada, 158, 183 Le Gallienne, Eva, 9, 36, 68, 78, 84, 87, 119, 121, 122, 133, 137, 139, 154, 155–79, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186, 191, 192, 196, 201, 202, 203, 209, 210, 213, 230, 236, 237, 238, 239, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 260, 262, 270, 277, 289, 291, 294, 295, 299, 300, 301, 302, 304, 306, 307, 308, 311; as actress in: Alice in Wonder-land, 172; The Cherry Orchard, 151–53; The Corn Is Green, 184;Elizabeth the Queen, 283; Ghosts, 175, 176; Hedda Gabler, 175; John Gabriel Borkman, 164; The Mad-woman of Chaillot, 284; Mary Stuart, 282, 283; Ring round the Moon, 284; The Seagull, 284; Therese, 165; The Three Sisters, 184, 202;The Trojan Women, 284, 285, 286;Uncle Harry, 136; What Every Woman Knows, 169; as ART co-producer, 155–79; on ART’s failure, 178; as director of: Hedda Gabler, 175; John Gabriel Borkman, 166; recordings by, 186; as scene designer, 157–58; on The Tempest, 159; tribute to Webster, 306; on Webster, 165–66, 311; on Whitty, 165

Le Gallienne, Julie, 20 Leigh, Vivien, 103 Leighton, Margaret, 156 L’Engle, Madeleine, 151 Lerner, Alan Jay, 165 Leve, Samuel, 126 Lewis, Helen B., 243–44 Lewis, Ivan, 112 Lewis, Napthali, 243–44 Lewis, Robert, 173 Library of Congress (Washington,D.C.), 306–7 Life with Father (play), 105, 165 Lincoln Center (New York), 208, 215, 221 Lindfors, Viveca, 239 Linn, Bambi, 163, 172, 178 Lister, Francis, 54 Little Foxes, The (Hellman), 100, 105, 253 Livesey, Roger, 52, 54 Lloyd, Frederick, 54, 56 Loeb, Philip, 250 Loewe, Frederick, 165 Löhr, Marie, 273, 274 London, George, 203 Lonsdale, Frederick, 19, 28 Look Back in Anger (Osborne), 178 Lovers and Friends (play), 151 Lover’s Meeting (Hurlbut), 73 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 37 Lowe, Barry, 280

Luce, Claire, 191, 233 Lukas, Paul, 121 Lunt, Alfred, 35, 74, 76–84, 194, 227, 297, 299, 305; in The Seagull, 76–84; and Theatre Guild, 77–78 Lyceum Theatre (London), 10, 11 Lyceum Theatre (New York), 64, 289 Lyric Theatre (Hammersmith, U.K.), 34 Lyric Theatre (London), 281 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 32, 48, 50, 120, 122, 126–28, 132, 153, 158, 181, 182, 199, 263; on Broadway, 127–28 Macbetto (Verdi), 207, 210–11, 267, 268 Mackenzie, Ronald, 52 Mackinlay, Jean Sterling, 50 Macready, William Charles, 264 Madame Curie (film), 101 Madam, Will You Walk (S. Howard), 102 Maddern, Merle, 78, 177 Page 355 → Madona, Charles, 30–31, 36; as theater manager, 30–31 Madwoman of Chaillot, The (Giraudoux), 284, 285, 287 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 30, 39 Majestic Theatre (New York), 172 Major Barbara (Shaw), 23, 30, 64 Malden, Karl, 140, 224 Malloy, Richard Edson, 278 Man and Superman (Shaw), 30 Man for All Seasons, A (Bolt), 277 Mangum, Edward, 179 Manhattan Theatre Club (New York), 208 Mann, Theodore, 179, 220 Man Who Came to Dinner, The (Kaufman and Hart), 96, 108

Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, The (play), 78 March, Fredric, 104, 162 Marchand, Nancy, 290 Marching By (play), 87 Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company (Marweb), 180–85, 186, 187, 191, 192, 196, 210, 221, 232, 233, 282, 284, 290, 297; first season, 180–82; and racial discrimination, 182–83; second season, 182–84; as touring company, 181–82 Marriage of Harlequin (Frankau), 261 Marsden, Robert, 271 Marshall, Armina (Mrs. Lawrence Langner), 105 Marshall, E. G., 164 Marshall, Herbert, 179 Martin, Mary, 151, 164 Martinson, Paul, 254 Marweb. See Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company Mary Stuart (Schiller), 282, 283 Mason, James, 56 Massey, Raymond, 29, 112, 151, 235, 236 Master Builder, The (Ibsen), 56 Maugham, Somerset, 19, 45 McCall, Monica, 151 McCarran Act, 196, 206 McCarter Theatre (Princeton, N.J.), 133 McCarthy, Joseph R., 210, 233, 225–26, 240–48, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 255, 257; Army-McCarthy hearings, 250 McCarthy, Mary, 169 McCarthy committee. See U.S. Senate, Government Operations Committee, Permanent Investigations Subcommittee McCarthyism, 122, 206, 222, 223–53, 255 McClellan, John L. 244, 245, 247–48, 250 McClelland, Charles, 112

McClintic, Guthrie, 64, 98 McDowall, Roddy, 180 McNair, Emily, 177 McNally, William J., 68 McPhee, Colin, 114 Meacham, Anne, 284 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 211, 267–68, 296 Medea (Euripides), 43 Melrose, Maudie, 273 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 48, 49, 154, 263, 264–67 Mercury Theatre, 86, 96 Meredith, Burgess, 68, 74 Merman, Ethel, 108 Merrell, Robert, 196 Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare), 37 Mervale, John, 186 Messell, Oliver, 194 Metropolitan Opera Company (New York), 188, 192, 195–96, 200–201, 202, 210–20, 221, 222, 270, 279, 283, 284, 296; 1950–51 season, 191–203; 1951–52 season, 203–6; 1959–60 season, 207, 213 Meyerhold, Vsevelod, 34 Meyers, Fran, 293 Meyers, Peter, 278 Middleton, Herman, 285 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 39, 48, 50, 82, 310 Page 356 → Mielziner, Jo, 162 Milanov, Zinka, 203, 204, 205 Miller, Arthur, 164, 225, 235, 284 Miller, Gilbert, 73, 105, 139, 224 Miller, John, 268

Miller, Marilyn S., 293 Miller-Brody Productions, 309 Milne, A. A., 12, 94 Milton, Ernest, 264 Milton, Robert, 78; The Seagull directed by, 79–83 Miner, Jan, 290 Mitropoulous, Dimitri, 213, 219 Moffet, Harold, 82 Molière, 43, 49 Molnár, Ferenc, 58 Montgomery, Elizabeth, 158, 213, 215; costume design for Simon Boccanegra, 213 Montgomery, Robert, 59 Morley, Robert, 96 Morosco Theatre (New York), 99 Morris, Mary, 78 Moscow Art Theatre (Russia), 152, 168, 232 Moscow Rehearsals (Houghton), 168 Moscow Theatre Festival (Russia), 58, 226 Moss, Arnold, 158, 163, 186, 191, 211, 239, 268, 269 Motleys, The (Elizabeth Montgomery, Margaret Harris, Sophie Harris), 54, 93, 152, 158, 159, 213, 274 Moulder, Morgan, 259; subcommittee for HUAC chaired by, 258 Moulin Rouge (film), 233 Mourning Becomes Electra (O’Neill), 78 Mr. Pim Passes By (Milne), 12 Mrs. Miniver (film), 101 Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Shaw), 30, 299, 300 Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare), 11, 153–54 Mundt, Karl E., 244

Mundt-Nixon Bill, 232 Munroe, Norma Leslie. See Garland, Peter Munsell, Warren, 118, 119 Murder Has Been Arranged, A (E. Williams), 36, 58 Murray, Gilbert, 124 Musical America, 201 Musical Chairs (Mackenzie), 52–53, 54 Musical Theatre Works (New York), 283 Music for Classical Tragedy (Engel), 90, 252 Musser, Tharon, 283, 290 My Sister Eileen (play), 105 Nathan, George Jean, 109, 146, 159, 169, 176, 177; on Webster, 109 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 182, 183 National Citizens Political Action Committee, 235 National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, 224, 229, 246, 249 National Medal of Arts, 233 National Repertory Theatre (NRT), 282–89; failure of, 289; finances of, 287, 288–89; first season of, 283; as repertory company, 284; second season of, 284; third season of, 284; as touring company, 283–84 National Theatre (Johannesburg, South Africa), 277 National Theatre (New York), 152 National Theatre (Washington, D.C.), 239 National Trust for Places of Historic Interest (U.K.), 307 Native Son (Wright), 158 Natwick, Mildred, 186 Nazimova, Alla, 176 Neal, Patricia, 164 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, 226 Neville, John, 255, 268 New Amsterdam Theatre (New York), 8 New Theatre (London), 12, 23, 24, 54, 59 Page 357 →

New York City Ballet, 239 New York Public Library, 309 New York Shakespeare Festival, 256 Nichols, Anthony, 265, 266, 268 Nichols, Lewis, 139, 140, 146, 150, 152, 159, 166 Nicholson, Nora, 273 Night Must Fall (E. Williams), 36, 58 Night Must Fall (film), 59, 73 Nizer, Louis, 183, 230, 240, 241 No Coward Soul: A Portrait of the Brontës (recording), 309 Nomikos, Andreas, 210, 211, 212 Nonprofit theater, 177, 179, 266 North West Mounted Police (film), 104, 108 Norton, Elliot, 115, 120, 138, 144 Norvello, Ivor, 58 Nugent, Elliot, 151 O’Brien, Edmond, 96 O’Brien, Jack, 174 O’Casey, Sean, 164, 168, 169, 309 O’Daniel (Swarthout and Saracool), 125 Ode to Liberty (television show), 235 Odets, Clifford, 74, 231 Oedipus (Sophocles), 156 Off-Broadway, 126, 179, 256 Off-off-Broadway, 126 Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck), 74 Ohio State University (Columbus), 285, 286 Okhlopkov, Nikolai, 226 Oklahoma (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 151, 165

Old Music (Winter), 73–74 Old Vic (London), 41, 43, 44–51, 54, 89, 93, 126, 129, 141, 156, 163, 210, 211, 263, 264, 266, 267, 299; audiences at, 46, 49; opera at, 46; as repertory company, 47; season schedule, 48 Olivier, Lord Laurence, 27, 29, 36, 39, 56, 103, 126, 129, 134, 156, 163, 177–78, 255, 270, 308; on Webster, 308 Olympic Theatre (Dublin, Ireland), 275 On Borrowed Time (Osborn), 74 O’Neill, Eugene, 102, 108, 112, 135, 179, 229, 277 One Touch of Venus (musical), 151, 157, 160 Opera News, 198, 201, 211, 212 Oppenheimer, Alan, 285 Orpheus Descending (T. Williams), 120 Osborn, Paul, 74, 224 Osborne, John, 178 Ostrovski, Alexander, 226 Otello (Verdi), 207 Othello (Shakespeare), 22, 46, 57, 93, 96, 119, 130, 131–51, 153, 155, 191, 202, 207, 233, 249, 254, 293, 311; on Broadway, 131–51; critics on, 138, 145–46, 150; national tour of, 147–50; recording of, 150; stage tradition of, 146; success of, 150 Our Town (Wilder), 74 Outward Bound (Sutton Vane), 78 Over the Mountains (Frankau), 277, 290 Oxford Players, 33–36 Oxford Playhouse, 33 Paddock, Robert, 172 Paint Your Wagon (Lerner and Loewe), 173 Paley, William, 162 Pal Joey (musical), 105 Panama Hattie (musical), 198 Paola, Frank, 197 Papp, Joseph, 256, 258 Parnell (Schauffler), 57, 59, 89

Parsons Theatre (Hartford, Conn.), 186, 239 Payne, Mary, 303, 307 Peel, Eileen, 278 Peg O’ My Heart (J. Hartley Manners), 44 Pen to Paper: A Writer’s Notebook (Frankau), 265, 270, 277, 292 People’s Radio Foundation, 229, 245 Percy, Esmé, 32 Period of Adjustment (T. Williams), 173 Page 358 → Perry, Antoinette, 122, 124 Peter Pan (Barrie), 10, 159 Peterson, Dorothy, 112 Philadelphia Story, The (Philip Barry), 105 Philanderer, The (Shaw), 30 Phoenix Theatre (London), 57 Phoenix Theatre (New York), 179, 282, 309 Piave, Francesco, 210 Picasso, Pablo, 224 Piccadilly Theatre (London), 264 Picnic (William Inge), 255 Pictures in the Hallway (O’Casey), 309 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 9, 12 Pinkie and the Fairies (H. B. Tree), 10, 273 Pioneer Players, 29 Pirandello, Luigi, 21, 175 Pitoéff, Georges, 21 Playfair, Nigel, 34 Playhouse (New York), 278 Playwrights’ Company (New York), 102, 125

Poel, William, 22, 24, 39, 48; production style of, 39 Pons, Helene, 127 Porgy and Bess (musical), 135, 160 Post, William, 67 Potter, Charles E., 244 Pound on Demand (O’Casey), 164, 168, 169 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 229 Power, Tyrone, 162, 211, 263, 269, 270; family background of, 269 Prefaces to Shakespeare (Barker), 39–40, 48 Prelude to Exile (McNally), 68 Price, Vincent, 254 Priestley, J. B., 44 Prince of Players (film), 254 Prince’s Theatre (London), 32 Princess Theatre (New York), 171, 174 Private Lives (Coward), 279 Producing the Play (Gassner), 93 Prompt Copy (J. W. Brough), 260 Provincetown Playhouse (Province-town, Mass.), 140 Putnam, Samuel, 175 Pygmalion (Shaw), 30 Quality Street (Barrie), 42–43, 44 Quayle, Anthony, 54, 265 Queen of Scots (Daviot), 56, 57, 64, 65 Quintero, José, 179, 255 Quinteros (Serafín and Joaquín Alvarez),39 Rabb, Ellis, 289 Racolin, Alexander E., 293 Racolin, Dina, 293

Radio and Television Directors Guild, 258 Raht, Katherine, 112 Rains, Claude, 239 Ramsden, Caroline, 295, 299, 303, 307 Rascoe, Burton, 145 Rathbone, Basil, 64, 154, 163, 239 Rattigan, Terence, 139, 224 Rawlings, Margaret, 278 Rawls, Eugenia, 100 Raye, Martha, 108 Raymond, Diana, 261, 290, 291, 293, 294, 302, 303, 307, 308; on Frankau, 291; intro. to Colonel Blessington, 293 Rebecca (film), 126 Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (American Business Consultants), 185, 206, 222, 229–30, 234, 235, 242, 243, 245, 257 Redgrave, Sir Michael, 66, 73, 129, 255, 271, 273, 275, 278 Reed, John, 236 Reed, Joseph Verner, 59, 64, 65, 162, 181, 182, 239, 289, 290 Regional theater, 122, 256, 311 Reinhardt, Max, 86, 87 Reiss, Marvin, 269 Renthal, Charles, 303 Repertory theater, 160, 161, 173, 177, 181, 256, 265, 282, 283, 284 Resident theater, 179, 311 Rhodes, Harrison, 22 Page 359 → Rice, Elmer, 102, 236; on Mady Christians, 235 Rich, Frank, 120 Richard of Bordeaux (Daviot), 53–54, 56, 65, 68, 274, 305 Richardson, Sir Ralph, 27, 50, 56, 57, 129, 156, 263, 270, 310 Richard II (Shakespeare), 48, 49, 50, 53, 59, 63, 64, 66–84, 86, 89, 91, 95, 96, 129, 153, 175, 177, 191, 206, 207,

226, 233, 237; on Broadway, 63–84 Richard III (Shakespeare), 41, 78, 191, 207, 254, 255, 260 Ricketts, Charles, 29 Rigal, Delia, 197; on Webster, 197 Ring of the Niebelungs, The (Wagner), 193 Ring round the Moon (Anouilh), 284 Ritchard, Cyril, 194 Ritt, Martin, 171, 255 Rivals, The (Sheridan), 284, 285 Road through the Woods, The (Frankau), 277 Roberts, Leonora, 152 Robeson, Paul, 22, 57, 96, 130, 158, 183, 225, 229, 231, 232, 241, 248, 249, 311; background of, 135; as concert singer, 135; in Othello, 22, 57, 131–51 Robinson, Edward G., 229 Robinson, Sybil, 289, 299; on Webster, 298–99 Robson, Flora, 33, 57 Roderick, William, 277 Rodgers, Richard, 91, 105, 150 Rogers, Ginger, 121 Rolf, Frederick, 182 Rolf, Wolfgang, 181 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 36, 47, 48, 49, 64, 103, 163, 211, 269 Roosevelt, Elliott, 240 Root, John, 140 Rorke, Kate, 23 Rose, Billy, 101, 153–54 Rose, Reginald, 280 Rosenstock, Joseph, 209 Rose Tattoo, The (T. Williams), 173

Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), 20, 22, 302 Royal Court Theatre (London), 24 Royale Theatre (New York), 185 Royal Highness (adapt. by Webster), 307 Royal National Theatre (London), 129 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), 129 Royal Victoria Coffee and Music Hall (London), 45 Rudel, Julius, 207, 209, 212, 267; background of, 207 Rudley, Herbert, 127 Rudolf, Max, 197 Rushmore, Howard, 227 Russell, Rosalind, 59 Rutherford, Margaret, 52, 56 Ryder, Alfred, 163, 176, 182 Sabinson, Lee, 139 Sadler’s Wells Theatre (Islington, U.K.), 47 Sadoff, Fred, 271, 273, 275 Said, Boris, 65, 88, 113 Saint Christopher’s Hospice (Sydenham, U.K.), 304, 307 Saint-Denis, Michel, 156 Saint Joan (Shaw), 23, 24, 28, 119, 184, 196, 206, 233, 269; on Broadway, 234 Saint-Subber, Arnold, 129 Same Only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family, The (Webster), 89, 295, 300, 301, 307; dedication to Pamela Frankau, 295 Saracool, John, 125 Sardou, Victorien, 8 Saroyan, William, 105 Saunders, Dame Cicely, 308 Save Me the Waltz (play), 87 Savoy Theatre (London), 52, 57

Scales, Prunella, 265 Schauffler, Elsie T., 59 Schildkraut, Joseph, 136, 152 Schiller, Friedrich, 197, 222, 282 Schine, G. David, 243 Page 360 → Schnabel, Stefan, 141, 152 Schneider, Alan, 255 Schnitzler, Arthur, 39 School for Scandal (Sheridan), 164, 270, 271, 273, 298 Schulberg, Budd, 232 Scofield, Paul, 264–65, 270 Scoundrel Time (Hellman), 241 Scrap of Paper, A (Sardou), 8 Seagull, The (Chekhov), 1, 34, 35, 76–84, 113, 133, 146, 226, 227, 284; on Broadway, 82–83 Seattle Repertory Theatre (Washington), 309 Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The (Pinero), 9 Second World War, 103–4, 304 Security index (FBI), 265 Seldes, Marian, 233; on Webster, 233 Seven Ages of Bernard Shaw, The (adapt. by Webster), 227, 233, 290, 309 Seven Sinners (film), 198 Seven Year Itch, The (George Axelrod), 255 Shadow and Substance (P. V. Carroll), 72, 73, 74, 76 Shakespeare, William, 11, 13–14, 29, 37–38, 45, 48, 50, 51, 56, 57, 59, 65, 68, 71, 73, 74, 84, 85–97, 100–101, 105–6, 111, 112, 113, 116, 120, 125, 127, 128, 129, 151, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 177, 193, 207, 210, 211, 238, 239, 254, 255, 258, 263, 265, 267, 268, 270, 278, 279, 280, 284, 294, 296, 297, 300, 310, 311. See also names of individual plays Shakespeare and the Modern Theatre (Webster), 153 Shakespeare Festival Theatre (Stratford, Conn.), 186 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (Stratford-upon-Avon, U.K.), 264, 265

Shakespeare Today (Webster), 263 Shakespeare without Tears (Webster), 40, 129, 134, 143, 255, 263, 266, 301, 307 Shakespeare Workshop (New York), 256 Shaw, George Bernard, 9, 10, 11, 23, 30, 32, 33, 35, 39, 44, 45, 50, 51, 84, 161, 164, 168, 186, 258, 268, 269, 274, 277, 287, 299, 307; description of Ellen Terry, 14; tribute to Webster, 29 Shaw, Glen Byam, 33, 35, 56, 264, 265, 266 Shearer, Norma, 108 Shelton, Sloane, 285, 287, 288; on Webster, 288 Shelving, Paul, 271 Sherriff, R. C., 64 Sherwood, Robert E., 102, 103, 105 Shields, Gina, 285, 288; on NRT, 288; on Webster, 288 Shipley, Ruth B., 240 Show Boat (musical), 135 Shrike, The (Joseph Kramm), 255 Shubert Theatre (New York), 79, 81, 82, 144, 145, 147, 303 Shumlin, Herman, 104, 233, 253 Sidney, Sylvia, 284, 285 Siepi, Cesare, 197 Sign of the Archer, The (A. Miller), 164 Silent Woman, The (Richard Strauss), 207, 212, 213 Sim, Alastair, 55 Simon Boccanegra (Verdi), 193, 207, 213–20, 221, 270, 271, 282 Simonson, Lee, 297 Singer, Louis J., 175, 176 Sing for Your Supper (Frankau), 277 Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello), 21 Skinner, Richard, 97, 133 Skin of Our Teeth, The (Wilder), 119 Skipper Next to God (Hartog), 125

Slaves of the Lamp (Frankau), 277, 284 Slezak, Walter, 91, 123, 124, 125 Smith, Cecil, 201 Smith, Oliver, 194 Smith, Robinson, 64, 65 Smith Act, 225, 228 Sokolov, Vladimir, 226 Page 361 → Solo performance, 227, 233, 258–59, 277, 278, 280, 290 Solti, George, 206 Sophocles, 279 Southern, Henry, 76 Southern, Hugh, 289; on Le Gallienne, 289; on Webster, 289 Sovey, Raymond, 290 Soviet-American Friendship Society, 249 Spanish Refugee Appeal, 231, 249 Spanish Refugee Relief, 246 Spring 1600 (E. Williams), 56, 213 Sprigg, Elizabeth, 271 Stage Door (Kaufman and Ferber), 64 Stage Door Canteen, 223–24 Stage Door Canteen (film), 101 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 231 Stapleton, Maureen, 254 Steele, Walter S., 228–29 Steinbeck, John, 74 Stenborg, Helen, 276 Stevenson, Janet, 140, 224 Stevenson, Philip, 140, 224

St. Helena (De Casalis and Sherriff), 64 Stiedry, Fritz, 193, 194, 196, 198, 201 St. James Theatre (London), 8, 10, 73 St. James Theatre (New York), 64, 66, 73, 74, 81, 96, 97, 106 St. John, Christopher (Christabel Marshall), 10, 19 Storey, David, 310 Storm, Lesley, 56 Storm, The (Ostrovski), 226 Strasberg, Lee, 97, 157, 231 Stratford-upon-Avon (U.K.), 263, 264 Straub, John, 127, 163, 182. 254, 285 Strauss, Richard, 207, 212 Streetcar Named Desire, A (T. Williams), 116, 120 Strindberg, August, 35, 235 Strong Are Lonely, The (Hochwalder), 238, 260, 263–64, 265; on Broadway, 252–53; trans. by Le Gallienne, 238; on the West End, 264 Stuckmann, Eugene, 163, 169 Subversive Control Act, 248 Sullavan, Margaret, 64, 151 Sullivan, Dan, 293 Summer stock, 120, 233 Sundgaard, Arnold, 125 Susan and God (Crothers), 74 Swarthout, Glendon, 125 Sweeney, Pat, 259 Sweet Bird of Youth (T. Williams), 173 Swire, Willard, 235 Sydow, Jack, 283, 285, 287 Symington, Stuart, 244 Synge, John Millington, 33

Tairov, Alexander, 226 Taming of the Shrew, The (Giannini), 207, 211 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare), 93, 182, 184, 191, 196, 233 Tandy, Jessica, 52, 56 Taubman, Howard, 211, 219, 278 Taylor, Laurette, 97, 98, 301 Taylor, Robert, 108 Tearle, Godfrey, 179 Tebaldi, Renata, 216, 220 Tedrow, Irene, 67, 96, 120 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 37, 93, 139, 154, 161–62, 166, 173, 191, 213, 268, 305; on Broadway, 157–60 Ten Commandments, The (film), 97 Ten Days That Shook the World (John Reed), 236 Tender Comrade (film), 121 Tennent, H. M., production company, 263, 272, 275 Terry, Ellen, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17–18, 20, 55, 74, 266, 309; as actress, 11; children of, 10; description of, 11, 17–18; memorial tablet, 74, 309 Terry, Marion, 7 Thane, Elswyth, 75 Theatre Arts, 92, 187 Theatre de Lys (New York), 290 Theatre 47 (Dallas, Tex.), 179 Theatre Guild, 77, 78, 105–6, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 157, 174, 233, 234, 253, 255, 268, 297; Battle of Angels produced by, 108–10, Page 362 →113–16; founding of, 77; Othello produced by, 138–51; The Seagull produced by, 78; Twelfth Night produced by, 105–6 Theatre Hall of Fame, 309 Theatre Masterworks, 186, 303 Theatre Royal (Windsor, U.K.), 278 Therese (adapt. by Job), 166, 230; on Broadway, 165 Thérèse Raquin (Zola), 165 There Shall Be No Night (Sherwood), 105

Thomas, J. Parnell, 228 Thorndike, Dame Sybil, 23, 24, 28, 36, 37, 57, 179, 210, 260, 273–76, 285, 286, 295, 301, 305, 306, 307, 308; actress in: Hippolytus, 28; Macbeth, 28; Othello, 57; Saint Joan, 23, 24, 28; The Trojan Women, 24; Waiting in the Wings, 273–76; description of, 274 Three Set Out (Leaver), 73 Three Sisters, The (Chekhov), 34, 35, 184, 196, 201, 202, 297–98, 299 Throckmorton, Cleon, 108 Time of Your Life, The (Saroyan), 105 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 263 Tobacco Road (E. Caldwell), 64 Tonight at 8:30 (Coward), 63, 82 Tony Awards, 122 Touch of the Poet, A (O’Neill), 277 Touring companies, 187 Tozzi, Giorgio, 216, 219 Treacher, Arthur, 269 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 10, 20, 48 Tree, Viola, 29 Treigle, Norman, 210 Trelawny of the Wells (Pinero), 10, 12 Trevelyan, Hilda, 10; in Peter Pan, 10 Trewin, J. C., 295 Troilus and Cressida (Walton), 207, 208–10, 263 Trojan Women, The (Euripides), 24, 93, 120, 133, 284, 285; Experimental Theatre production of, 122–23 Truex, Ernest, 163, 164, 169, 171 Tucker, Richard, 216, 219 Turney, Robert, 123, 124 Tuttle, Day, 97, 133 Tuttle, Frank, 232

Twelve Angry Men (R. Rose), 280–81, 284, 305 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 36, 37, 39, 65, 93, 105–7, 108, 109, 113, 119, 126, 132, 153; on Broadway, 106–7 Tynan, Kenneth, 178, 264 Uncle Harry (Job), 151, 156 Uncle Vanya (Chekhov), 33, 34, 35, 36 UNESCO, 230 Unions, 160, 162, 167, 168, 180, 230 United American Spanish Aid Committee, 235 United Scenic Artists (USA), 158, 170 United Service Organizations (USO), 223 University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 284, 285, 287, 288 Urquhart, Robert, 280 U.S. Department of State, 231, 243; Cultural Exchange Program, 277; Information Centers, 243; Information Service, 300; Passport Division, 230, 239, 240, 257 U.S. Senate: Foreign Relations Subcommittee, 244; Government Operations Committee, Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, 225, 226, 234, 240, 242–48, 252, 253, 255, 257, 260 Valkyries, The (Wagner), 212 Vanbrugh, Irene, 57 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 42 Vance, Nina, 179, 256 Van Doren, Carl, 162 Van Druten, John, 41, 121, 179, 224, 235, 236; on Mady Christians, 235 Variety, 104, 211, 212, 231 Vaughan, Stuart, 309 Vedrenne, J. E., 30, 39 Venning, Una, 273 Page 363 → Verdi, Giuseppe, 188, 193, 194, 197, 203, 207, 210, 213, 221, 222, 267 Viceroy Sarah (Norman Ginsbury), 57, 64, 101, 121 Victoria Regina (Housman), 84, 97–98

Victory (film), 104 View from the Bridge, A (A. Miller), 255 Virginia Reel (J. and H. Weaver), 125 Voice of America, 243 Voice of the Turtle, The (Van Druten), 151, 224 Volpone (Jonson), 263 Voskovec, George, 158, 166, 305 Vosper, Frank, 41, 52 Voysey Inheritance, The (Barker), 39, 55, 64 Wagner, Richard, 193, 212 Waiting in the Wings (Coward), 271–77; on Broadway, 276; rehearsals of, 274–75; on the West End, 276 Wakefield, Gilbert, 73 Walker, June, 105 Walker, Zena, 263 Wallach, Eli, 163, 178 Walton, William, 207, 208–10 Wanamaker, Sam, 140, 224 Wanhope Building, The (Finch), 125 Ward, Ellen, 15 Warich, Jan, 166 Waring, Herbert, 25 Waring, Richard, 163, 166, 172 Warren, Leonard, 213, 216–17, 218–19; death of, 219–20; description of, 213 Washington, Clarence, 112 Washington, Friedi, 146 Washington Square Players, 78 Watch on the Rhine (Hellman), 105, 121; on Broadway, 235 Waters, Ethel, 108, 151, 227 Watson, Lucile, 186

Watson, Thomas J., 249 Watts, Richard, Jr., 82; on Evans, 127 Waugh, Evelyn, 44 Wayne, David, 165 Wayward Quest, A (Helburn), 119 Weaver, Harriet, 125 Weaver, John, 125 Webb, Alan, 35 Webster, Ben (Benjamin Nottingham Webster III), 8, 12, 19, 41, 52, 54, 68, 69, 75, 86, 88, 89, 101, 102, 103, 144, 307, 309; as actor in: Androcles and the Lion, 10; Ellis Jeffrey’s company, 8; Lassie Come Home, 101–2; Mr. Pim Passes By, 12; The Prince Consort, 9; silent films, 12; Trelawny of the Wells, 12; Young Mr. Disraeli, 75; death of, 171; family background of, 8; in Hollywood, 101–2; memorial plaque, 180 Webster, Benjamin Nottingham, I (“Old Ben”), 264 Webster, Lizzie, 58, 260 Webster, Margaret actor-training, 22–23 as actress, 50, 82, 83 as actress in: Alice in Wonderland, 172; Androcles and the Lion, 48, 50; Arms and the Man, 31; As You Like It, 43, 50; At Number Fifteen, 11, 27; Basalik, 57; The Brontës, 278, 280, 284; The Clandestine Marriage, 41–42; The Confederacy, 42; Dark Horizon, 56; The Devil’s Disciple, 51–52; An Evening with Will Shakespeare, 186, 239; Family Portrait, 99–100; Full Moon, 36; Hamlet, 25–26, 48; Henry VIII, 29–30, 169; The High Ground, 206, 233; Hippolytus, 25; The Imaginary Invalid, 43, 48, 49; Iron Flowers, 56; John Bull’s Other Island, 31; Julius Caesar, 50; A Kiss for Cinderella, 56; Ladies in Retirement, 120; The Lady from Alfaqueque, 40; The Lady of Belmont, 56; Macbeth, 32, 48, 50, 55; Major Barbara, 23; Man and Superman, 31; The Master Builder, 56; Maya, 11; Medea, 43; The Merchant of Venice, 13–14, 43, 48, 49; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 17, 43, 48, 50; Much Ado about Nothing, 11; A Murder Has Page 364 → Been Arranged, 52; Musical Chairs, 52–53; Old English Nativity, 29; Othello, 133, 137; Pageant of the Stage, 10; Pericles, 30; The Philanderer, 31; Pound on Demand, 169; The Price, 11; Quality Street, 43–44; Queen of Scots, 56; Richard of Bordeaux, 54; Richard II, 43, 48, 50; Romeo and Juliet, 43, 48, 50; Saint Joan, 28; The Seagull, 78–84, 226; The Seven Ages of Bernard Shaw, 227, 235, 277, 290; Spring 1600, 56, 213; The Tempest, 37; The Three Sisters, 184, 196; The Trojan Women, 26, 123; Uncle Vanya, 33–34; The Wandering Jew, 41; The Warden, 11; Widowers’ Houses, 31; The Women’s Tribute, 7 artist-in-residence, 296–97 Atkinson on, 95 autobiography: Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, 186–87 baptism of, 9 birth of,8–9 books: Shakespeare Today, 263; Shakespeare without Tears, 40, 129, 134, 143, 225, 266

Broadway appearances, 131–51 casting of Richard II, 66–67 childhood of, 7–19 contract with Paramount Pictures, 104 description of: the Metropolitan Opera House, 201; Robert Edmond Jones, 22 death of, 304 delegate to London Theatre Council, 58 devotion to parents, 69 directing debut, 57 as director of: Androcles and the Lion, 169; Antony and Cleopatra, 278–79; The Apollo of Bellac, 184; The Aspern Papers, 278; As You Like It, 100–101; Back to Methuselah, 211, 268–70; Battle of Angels, 108–20; Carving a Statue, 293–94; The Cherry Orchard, 151–53, 213; The Comedy of Errors, 100–101; The Devil’s Disciple, 182, 185, 188, 207; An Evening with Will Shakespeare, 186, 239; Family Portrait, 97–100; Ghosts, 175; Hamlet, 85–97, 181; 1 Henry IV, 75, 96–97; Henry VIII, 57, 169; His Infinite Variety, 258; Julius Caesar, 182, 239; The Lady from the Sea, 57; Macbeth, 181, 210; Madam, Will You Walk, 102; The Mad-woman of Chaillot, 284; A Man for All Seasons, 277–78; Measure for Measure, 211, 267, 280, 296–97; The Merchant of Venice, 264–67; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 100–101; Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 299; Othello, 131–51, 207; Pound on Demand, 169; Richard II, 59, 63–72, 207; Richard III, 206, 207, 254; Saint Joan, 184, 233–34; The School for Scandal, 271; The Strong Are Lonely, 252, 263–64; The Taming of the Shrew, 100–101, 182, 184, 206, 207, 233; The Tempest, 157–60; Therese, 165; The Three Sisters, 297–98; A Touch of the Poet, 277; The Trojan Women, 124–25, 284, 285, 288; Twelfth Night, 89–97, 105–6; Twelve Angry Men, 280; Waiting in the Wings, 271–77; What Every Woman Knows, 166; Young Mr. Disraeli, 75–77 as director of operas: Aida, 203–6; Don Carlo, 188, 193–203, 206; Macbetto, 207, 210–11, 268; The Silent Woman, 207, 212; Simon Boccanegra, 213, 216–20; Taming of the Shrew, 207, 211; Troilus and Cressida, 207, 208–10 as director with: American Repertory Theatre, 164–71, 175–77; Marweb, 180–84; Metropolitan Opera Company, 191–222; Old Vic, 296–97; National Repertory Theatre Page 365 →, 285–88; Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 264–67; Theatre Guild, 83–72, 105–6, 108–20, 131–51, 233–34 early career, 27–43 education of, 11–20 essays, 93; Shakespeare and the Modern Theatre, 153, 187 faculty appointments, 278, 296–97 family memoir: The Same Only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family, 301, 303 FBI investigations of, 231, 252–53 finances of, 72, 76 first professional role, 24 in Hollywood, 103–4

honors, degrees, and awards, 153, 155, 280 influence of: Edith Craig, 67; Ellen Terry, 55; Harcourt Williams, 68–69 last illness, 301–2 Last Will and Testament, 302, 307 lecture tours by, 153, 258 legacy of, 310–12 lesbianism of, 121 letters to: Frederick Fox, 214; Lawrence Langner, 234; parents, 16, 20, 141, 144, 149, 176, 226; Rebecca West, 292–93 listing in Red Channels, 185, 206, 222, 229, 242, 243, 245 London residences: Bedford Street (Covent Garden), 9; Christchurch Hill (Hampstead), 261; Grove End Gardens (St. John’s Wood), 261; Primrose Hill Studios (Chalk Farm), 300 Macdona Players, actress with, 30–32 Marweb company of, 180–85 McCarthy subcommittee hearing, 242–48 McCarthyism and, 223–53 member of: Actors’ Equity, 226; British Drama League, 54; British Equity, 58 memorial plaque, 308–9 memorial services, 305–6 memories of First World War, 11–13 New Yorker article on, 128–29, 155–56 New York residences: West Tenth Street, 122, 127; West Twelfth Street, 136–37 operas directed by, 188, 191–222 opinions/comments on: acting, 27, 56, 133; acting Chekhov, 35, 152; acting Shavian comedy, 32; ART, 169; Bing, Rudolf, 221; Brundred, Jane, 294; The Cherry Orchard, 153; Christians, Mady, 236; Cohan, George M., 102–3; Craig, Edith, 18; Crawford, Cheryl, 160, 174; directing opera, 198–200, 207, 216–17, 220, 222; directing plays, 41, 53, 92–93, 95, 99, 142, 153, 287, 310; Evans, Maurice, 94, 129; Ferrer, José, 134; film directing, 103–4; Fontanne, Lynn, 299; Frankau, Pamela, 291; Hagen, Uta, 134, 135; Hamlet, 85–86, 93, 95; language, 310; Le Gallienne, Eva, 283–84, 286; Macbeth, 126, 128–29; Macbetto, 210; Marweb, 187, 222; Measure for Measure, 267; The Merchant of Venice, 266–67; NRT, 289; opera vs. theater, 198; parents, 102; playing eighteenth-century comedy, 41–42; Power, Tyrone, 269; race in Othello, 132, 143–44, 145; repertory theater, 282, 283, 284; Robeson, Paul, 131, 136, 141, 147; Shakespeare, 94; Simon Boccanegra, 212, 216–17; Six Characters in Search of an Author, 21; solo performance, 258–59; The Tempest, 157; Terry, Ellen, 11, 17–18; the Theatre Guild, 109; Thorndike, Sybil, 274; The Three Sisters, 202, 298; The Trojan Women, 123, 285–86, 287–88; touring, 28; Twelfth Night, 105, 106–7; the West End, 48; Williams, Tennessee, 110, 118; York, Susannah, 300 Page 366 → Webster, Margaret (continued)

parents’ nickname for, 7 performances on radio and television, 136, 290–91, 309 plays and adaptations by, 58, 175–76, 278; As You Desire Me, 163, 175–76; The Brontës, 278; Jane Eyre, 136; Royal Highness, 307; The Seven Ages of Bernard Shaw, 235 professional debut, 24 professional name, 17, 32–33 purchased cottage on Martha’s Vineyard, 137 as producer, 144, 155–79 recordings by, 136, 186, 239, 309 as Regents Professor, 278 relationships with: Eva Le Gallienne, 121, 137; Jane Brundred, 294–95; Mady Christians, 87, 137; Pamela Frankau, 256, 290–91 repertory theater and (see American Repertory Theatre; Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company; National Repertory Theatre; Old Vic) school theatricals, 13 solo performances by, 227, 233, 235, 258–59, 277, 278, 280, 284, 290, 295 stage societies, actress with, 27–28, 41 summer stock, 101, 120, 127 trips to: France, 237–38; Paris, 20–22; U.S.S.R., 58 unofficial debut, 10–11 writings by (see Webster, Margaret: autobiography; books; essays; family memoir; plays) and adaptations by) Weigel, Helene, 164 Weiler, Berenice, 293, 303 Weiler-Miller Associates, 293 Welles, Orson, 86, 87, 90, 104, 158 Werich, Jan, 158 Wersba, Barbara, 302 West, Dame Rebecca, 267, 278, 290, 291, 292; on Frankau, 292 West End (London), 12, 44, 48, 51–59, 73–74, 85, 131, 213, 224, 263, 268, 276, 280, 284, 300 Westlake, Marion Evensen, 84, 121, 163, 166, 177, 180, 181, 185, 186, 191, 202, 213, 262, 283; death of, 301

Westley, Helen, 78 Whale, James, 40 Wharton, Carly, 151 What Every Woman Knows (Barrie), 164, 166, 168, 169 Wheatley, Alan, 65 Wheeler, Bert, 151 When We Dead Awaken (Ibsen), 293 Whipple, Sidney B., 83 White Barn Theatre (Westport, Conn.), 302 White Cliffs of Dover, The (film), 101 Whitehead, O. Z., 82 Whitty, Dame May (Mary Louise), 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 23, 28, 36, 40, 58–59, 64, 65, 68, 69, 73, 74–75, 77, 88, 101, 103, 104, 139, 147, 165, 176, 184, 228, 230, 232, 233, 252, 257, 295, 307, 309; as actress in: Lassie Come Home, 101–2; The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, 28; The Mountain Sylph, 8; Night Must Fall, 58–59; Therese, 165; Trelawny of the Wells, 10, 12; The Trojan Women, 123–24; The Voysey Inheritance, 55; as Christian Scientist, 10, 179; death of, 179; family background of, 8; in films, 59; in Hollywood, 101–2; as manager of the Etlinger school, 22–23; Oscar nomination for Night Must Fall, 73; memorial plaque, 180; memorial services, 179–86; as parent, 13; professional debut, 8; recipient of OBE, 15; volunteer work, 12 Whorf, Richard, 82 Widowers’ Houses (Shaw), 30, 31 Wilbur Theatre (Boston), 114, 118 Wilde, Oscar, 33, 186 Wilder, Billy, 104 Page 367 → Wilder, Thornton, 74 Williams, Alexander, 115 Williams, Emlyn, 33, 35, 36, 52, 56, 58, 265, 266, 267 Williams, Harcourt, 15, 39, 41, 43, 47–48, 49, 50, 54, 57, 65, 68, 70, 94, 266; as director, 47–48, 68, 142 Williams, Hugh, 73 Williams, Rhys, 89 Williams, Tennessee, 107, 109, 116, 122, 124, 173, 179; on Battle of Angels, 111, 112, 117; on playwriting, 110; on the Theatre Guild, 113; on Webster, 111 Willow Cabin, The (Frankau), 261

Wills, Brember, 47, 49, 50 Wilson, John Dover, 86 Winchell, Walter, 242 Windom, William, 163, 172, 178 Windsor Theatre (New York), 140, 224 Wingless Victory, The (M. Anderson), 64 Winner, Dame Albertine, 304, 308 Winter, Keith, 73 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 39 Wise, Gretchen (Gertrude; Mrs. Tom Wise), 41, 42, 58 Wiseman, Joseph, 164, 290 With a Quiet Heart (Le Gallienne), 186 Witness for the Prosecution (play), 253 Wolfe, Humbert, 261, 278, 292 Wolfit, Sir Donald, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 65, 180, 263–64; acting style of, 50; background of, 263; as director, 56 Woman’s Hour (BBC radio), 290–91 Women, The (Booth), 64 Women’s National Press Club of America, 155 Women’s Tribute, The (pageant), 7 Wood, Audrey, 116, 117, 120, 175 Wood, John S., 229, 232, 240, 241 Wood, Peggy, 162 Woollcott, Alexander, 81, 307 Woolley, Monty, 96, 108, 154 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 231 World’s Fair (New York), 100 World War I. See First World War World War II. See Second World War Wright, Richard, 158

Wyler, William, 119 Wyndham’s Theatre (London), 10, 54 Wynn, Keenan, 102 Wyse, John, 41, 42, 51 Yellow Jack (S. Howard), 164, 171, 176, 305 Yi-Kwei Sze, 209 Yokel, Alex, 75 York, Susannah, 299, 300 You Can’t Take It with You (Kaufman and Hart), 64 You Never Can Tell (Shaw), 30 Young, Roland, 78 Young, Stark, 72, 92, 146, 159; as translator, 78 Young Mr. Disraeli (Thane), 76, 77; on Broadway, 75 Your Obedient Husband (play), 75 Yvonne Arnaud Theatre (Guildford, U.K.), 299 Zimbalist, Efrem, 162 Zimbalist, Mrs. Efrem, 162 Zimbalist, Efrem, Jr., 163 Zipprodt, Patricia, 269 Zola, Émile, 165 Zorina, Vera, 158, 159