Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater

4. Broadway Nights

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 ‹ve 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 traf‹c 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 ‹lm 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 Fiftyeighth Street, little more than a block from where she was born. She ›ung 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 of‹ce 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 Web63 ster’s 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 ‹rst 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 ›at 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 ‹nancier 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 ‹nance 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-to-face 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-‹ve 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, ‹nally 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...