A Gambler's Instinct

1. Three Brothers and a Sister

Download PDF (224.3 KB)
pp. 3-10

Every evening she went to bed in a comfortable two-story house on a pleasant Akron street lined with maples and elms. Her mother tucked her in and then moved along the hallway to look in on the younger children—Alden, Newell, and later Robert, born when Cheryl was thirteen. She dreamed of being a missionary and soothing the unconverted in far-off jungles...

2. Signs of a Calling

Download PDF (320.6 KB)
pp. 11-22

Sometimes in the night she dreamed about a golden Buddha and a mythical goddess dressed in a silver tunic with silver-painted body. She awoke to the reality that she had traveled over a thousand miles to New England and Smith College but the distance from Akron to Northampton proved far greater than mileage. It was a distance measured by personal freedom...

3. The Producer's Apprentice

Download PDF (456.7 KB)
pp. 23-39

By the time Cheryl Crawford arrived in their offices on the top floor of the building on West Fifty-second Street, the Theatre Guild had been in business for seven years. During her waning days at Smith, she had scrutinized Theatre Arts each month and learned that the Guild was starting an acting school in the fall. She thought of the school as an entr�e into the fiefdom...

4. Raising the Roof

Download PDF (429.7 KB)
pp. 40-56

Three years into the Group experiment, Cheryl Crawford sat among a stack of unread scripts in theater owner Lee Shubert’s office on West Forty-fourth Street. For weeks, she read dull plays until she came across Crisis, a medical drama by Sidney Kingsley, soon to be known for his realistic social melodramas. Crawford was already facing the fact that the idealistic Group enterprise...

5. Dizzy Spells

Download PDF (256.6 KB)
pp. 59-67

By March of 1937, Crawford was without prophets or signposts pointing her to the next open door. At thirty-five, disconnected and alone, she reassessed her tenuous foothold on a theatrical career: I had lost my religion in college. Then for seven years my religion had been my faith in the ideals and values of the Group. Now that had dissolved, and I was thrown back on myself, a solitary individual. It was...

6. No Wooden Nickels

Download PDF (399.1 KB)
pp. 68-82

The adult Cheryl Crawford in 1942 was no longer the sturdy girl of Harold Clurman’s recollection. With the Broadway success of Porgy and Bess, she was interviewed, photographed, and featured in About Town sitting languidly in an armchair dressed for the evening in white silk blouse, long black skirt, and...

7. Producers in Skirts

Download PDF (508.5 KB)
pp. 83-102

The coy label awarded by male producers to the distaff side applied to very few women in the New York theater in the forties.1 Cheryl Crawford was virtually alone as an independent producer, shortly to be joined by Margaret Webster and Eva Le Gallienne in a doomed enterprise called the American Repertory Theatre. Crawford’s collaboration with the Anglo...

Gallery of Illustrations

Download PDF (478.1 KB)
 

8. Musical Adventures

Download PDF (386.9 KB)
pp. 103-116

The year 1947 was a very good one for Cheryl Crawford. She produced another smash hit on Broadway and satisfied her zealotry for a good cause by cocreating the Actors Studio with Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis. Queried about her success in a tough profession, she told a feature writer, “I make my decision...

9. The Oyster Bed

Download PDF (357.7 KB)
pp. 117-129

The Actors Studio, or the oyster bed for cultivating pearls as Cheryl Crawford referred to the new workshop, was the third phase of her adventures in 1947. The Studio opened on October 5, 1947, in a room in the old Union Methodist Church on West Forty-eighth Street, later demolished and converted into a parking lot for Mama Leone’s restaurant. Juggling her responsibilities...

10. Four by Tenn

Download PDF (498.9 KB)
pp. 130-148

For ten years, Cheryl Crawford had a loving, rewarding, contentious, and exhausting relationship with Tennessee Williams. During the decade of the fifties when most film and stage artists were contending with the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, she produced four of his plays: The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Period of Adjustment...

11. Who's Minding the Store?

Download PDF (496.8 KB)
pp. 151-169

The year was 1962, and Cheryl Crawford was sixty years old. With the Tennessee Williams decade behind her, her immediate future lay with plans to initiate a theater under the auspices of the Actors Studio. Foster Hirsch suggested that the idea of a producing theater had been in the air since the founding of the Studio in the fall of 1947.¹ The possibility to test training in production...

12. Dreams Deferred

Download PDF (601.2 KB)
pp. 170-191

Just as writing was Tennessee Williams’s life, so producing was Cheryl Crawford’s. Following the collapse of the Actors Studio Theatre, Crawford was thrust once again into the world of the independent producer. From 1962 to 1972, she produced seven Broadway shows, with varying success, along with four Off Broadway productions that provided spiritual uplift but were...

Postscript

Download PDF (252.5 KB)
pp. 193-198

Cheryl Crawford’s story is one of improbable dreams fulfilled. In contrast to playwrights and actors, producers are not creators in the true sense of those who invent and embody stories, situations, and people who then live on in theatrical literature and world stages—Porgy and Bess, Princess Kosmonopolis, Chance Wayne, Regina Giddens, Serafina della Rosa, and Big Daddy...