A Gambler’s Instinct: The Story of Broadway Producer Cheryl Crawford

Preface

xi preface W hen I began work on this biography, I asked friends and acquaintances what they remembered about Cheryl Crawford. I expected the answers to touch upon her producing skills, her taut personality , her lesbian lifestyle, her exceptional dreams. To a person, each began with her accidental death as though the unexpected defined her progress for sixty years through one of the toughest careers in American commerce—that of an independent producer in the commercial theater. The accident that proved fatal took place on West Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan. At eighty-four, Cheryl Crawford, thinking about understudy auditions for a new Southern play, walked slowly up the stone stairs of her beloved New Dramatists. Accidents happen, but this one was without precedent in its location. Cheryl Crawford had survived failed idealistic enterprises and Broadway flops, but these seven steps would be the costliest journey of her remarkable life. Neither student nor producer expected the abrupt encounter nor the cruelty of the staircase. A student rushing from class burst through the windowless entranceway just as the elderly woman reached for the outer doorknob. The swinging door knocked her backwards and she fell onto the sidewalk below. Cheryl Crawford never fully recovered from the fall and died of complications one October day in New York City, where she had worked for over sixty years. Cheryl Crawford lived at the center of the American commercial theater as an independent producer and as a stubborn advocate of a studio system to assist professional actors explore and learn apart from the demands of the commercial theater. Her name is permanently linked with the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio, and with Broadway musicals and major plays of Tennessee Williams. She grew up in Akron, Ohio, attended Smith College, and arrived in New York City determined to open doors to a profession that she little understood then, but would master over the next sixty years. Crawford wrote an autobiography called One Naked Individual: My Fifty Years in the Theatre in 1977, in which she says that hers is the story of a Broadway producer’s life and that her private life has been mentioned only in passing. “The theatre has been my life,” she declared. This xii Preface remark sets aside her lesbianism, which she wore undisguised in her tailored clothing, her hair style, her masculine tone of voice, and her circle of women friends. Crawford’s life story presents a conundrum to contemporary biographers interested in issues of gender and sexuality . She downplayed her private existence in favor of the producer’s life wherein she records her successes and failures in a profession where, even today, few women have emerged as independent producers. Cheryl Crawford’s accomplishments are well-documented. Harold Clurman wrote about their mutual efforts with the Group Theatre, Theresa Helburn with the Theatre Guild, Elia Kazan with the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio, Margaret Webster with the American Repertory Theatre, and there are records of the over one hundred musicals and new plays by Kurt Weill, Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Paul Green, Tennessee Williams, Ketti Frings, James Baldwin, June Havoc, Edward Chodorov, Marc Connolly, Elinor Jones, Romulus Linney, James Kirkland , Harvey Schmidt, and Tom Jones found in the New York Times, Variety , Theatre World, and elsewhere. Despite the glare of public scrutiny, the private life of Cheryl Crawford was closely guarded. Unlike Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster, her associates with the American Repertory Theatre, Crawford was a taciturn individual who did not indulge in personal correspondence that revealed her innermost feelings about her companions and coworkers. Her papers, found in extensive archives in the University of Houston Libraries in Texas and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, contain business letters written to playwrights, actors, managers, and theater owners. There are no private notebooks, no daily journals, and few personal letters. Nowhere is there a single note written to close friends and her partner of many years, cookbook author and restaurateur Ruth Norman. Most likely, these personal items were lost in a mysterious fire that destroyed her Connecticut home in Norwalk in the late sixties. The theater was, indeed, Cheryl Crawford’s life, but it was the woman of poker-playing instincts and gaming skills, the individual of courage and fortitude, the legendary risk-taker and penny-pincher who mastered the art (and gamesmanship) of producing on Broadway at mid-century. It is this face beneath the “stern, rock-like expression” of...