Arthur Penn: American Director

10. The King of Broadway

99 10 The King of Broadway In 1960 Arthur Penn had the kind of year that people sell their souls for. Between February 25 and November 30 he scored five hit plays, one film, and a brush with American political history. Best of all, none of it had anything to do with Hollywood. “I didn’t have a continuing ambition in film,” he insists. “I thought it was a bizarre medium: you do these things, then somebody else puts it together, and it comes out on the bottom half of a double bill in New York. That’s where I saw The Left Handed Gun. And that was the end of it. Until the reviews began to come in from Europe.” In this period he and Peggy made their Upper West Side apartment into the city home they wanted. They dug in, raised Matt, and took full advantage of Manhattan. In July of 1958 I Bury the Living, which Peggy had filmed as The Spot on the Wall while Arthur was making The Left Handed Gun, was released to theaters. She would take only a handful of additional acting jobs before entering the New School to begin studying to practice family psychology. As for Arthur, he made no secret that he preferred theater to movies, and after winning the directing Tony for The Miracle Worker, he had his pick of projects. Toys in the Attic came to him via Kermit Bloomgarden, playwright Lillian Hellman’s perennial producer, who showed Penn the first two acts. Penn instantly committed to direct it and then worked with Hellman to shape the rest. 100 Arthur Penn Hellman was a test of patience. A New Orleans Jew warped by her family’s obsession with money, she compensated for the social ostracism she had endured as a girl with a sharp tongue and exceptional intellect. Her first marriage, to New York press agent Arthur Kober, ended in divorce, but through him she made literary contacts. She didn’t become a playwright, however, until falling under the charm, tutelage, and ultimately, the codependency of writer Dashiell Hammett. Hammett guided and goaded her through her first play, The Children’s Hour, which led to a successful screenwriting career in the 1930s. “Dash” and “Lilly” nobly weathered the Red Scare in the early 1950s, he by serving prison time,1 she by refusing to cut her conscience to fit that year’s fashions. Hammett would die, broke and broken, on January 10, 1961, during the run of Toys, but Hellman never lost her fire.2 “She was tough,” Penn appraises. “She was not always justi fied in being tough, but she was—” (he pauses thoughtfully) “—an unattractive woman who compensated for it with a good intellect and talent and a certain generosity. She said, ‘I’ll be the godmother for your daughter’ when Molly was being born during that period.3 She did generous things, but she expected generous things in return: she gave presents; she wanted presents.” The gift she gave Penn and Bloomgarden was a play about love. Yet, as she later qualified to the New York Times, “Not all kinds of love—so-called love—are noble and good, that there’s much in love that’s destructive, including the love that holds up the false notions of success, of the acquisition of money.” Equating money, power, and family had been a recurring theme in Hellman’s plays, particularly The Little Foxes (1939) and its prequel, Another Part of the Forest (1946). Toys in the Attic follows the internecine intrigues of the Berniers sisters, Carrie and Anna, when their lovable scoundrel of a younger brother, Julian, shows up with a new wife and a scheme to get rich. Things go awry when sister Carrie, for reasons tinged with incestuous feelings for Julian, meddles in the marriage and muddies the business deal, with violent results. They all live unhappily— but with their eyes open—ever after. The King of Broadway 101 Penn, Hellman, and Bloomgarden assembled a cast that included Jason Robards Jr. as Julian, Maureen Stapleton as Carrie , and Anne Revere as Anna, as well as Irene Worth, Rochelle Oliver, and Percy Rodrigues. Rehearsals began in early 1960 with the playwright at the director’s elbow and at the cast’s throats. As he had from Philco to Miracle Worker, Penn put Toys on its feet well before its cast was familiar with...