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

5. Dizzy Spells

59 5 dizzy spells The American theatre is an uncertain gamble from start to finish. —Theresa Helburn B y 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 scary. I needed some support, some guidance.1 The idealistic woman, described by Lee Strasberg as “gentile, midwestern , and nonverbal,” soon found her direction without her two Old Testament prophets.2 She made a to-do list: secure an inexpensive office, locate a resourceful assistant, find playwrights, and discover “the emotional wherewithal to go it alone.”3 She rented a two-room office in the St. James Theatre on Forty-fourth Street where the Maurice Evans-Eddie Dowling management team had a suite of offices. Next, as her assistant producer, she enlisted the Theatre Guild’s Elizabeth Hull, whose personal income paid the secretary’s salary and oftentimes fifty dollars a month for rent. She then explored the theater district in search of scripts to make her mark as a commercial producer. Playing Solitaire The commercial theater district in 1937 was drab and dirty. It extended along the thoroughfare between Fortieth and Sixtieth streets and teemed with traffic, noise, jostling crowds, garish neon marquees, and enormous 60 Doors to Everywhere, 1937–1961 billboards. The number of Broadway productions had been shrinking due to tight money during the depression and the burgeoning film industry. The 1937–38 season was a low point, with fewer than one hundred new productions controlled by male producers and investors. This was the climate in which Crawford set out to prove herself. She succeeded in presenting three failures one right after the other. The first closed after the final run-through in New York, during which the fledgling producer told her bewildered backer that “the show was hopeless and he had better cut his losses.”4 The second production, Yankee Fable by Lewis Meltzer, with blond, peaches-and-cream-complexioned Ina Claire, closed in Boston. The third, All the Living, broke the cycle of disappointing flops. Brooks Atkinson praised the “high priestess of the Group Theatre” for offering a play about mental illness as her first independent production to reach Broadway.5 All the Living, directed by Lee Strasberg, opened in March of 1938. Citing Strasberg’s versatile direction, the critic applauded as “sheer perfection in stagecraft” Hardie Albright’s medical drama about “a dark corner of modern life” that takes place in a hospital for the mentally ill. Atkinson called the production one of the foremost achievements of the season.6 Crawford modestly confessed herself proud of the production: “I think it was the first time a play was located in an insane asylum, and for the first time on stage a young catatonic was cured by the injection of a newly discovered medicine.”7 The favorable reviews brought attention to the newly minted “producer in skirts”—a euphemism for women working on Broadway in traditional male roles. A newspaper article at the time featured a photograph of a self-satisfied Crawford. The caption quoted her as saying: “A play producer takes more chances than anyone on earth and winds up with more wooden nickels. We stick to it only because it’s in our blood, I guess.” Commenting further for the reporter, she explained: “What did I have to get me here? A ton of nerve and the same philosophy a gambler has.”8 Another theater artist “in skirts” was a member of Maurice Evans’s production team. Stage director Margaret Webster had come from London in 1937 to direct Richard II with Evans in the title role. For her fourth production as an independent producer, Crawford enlisted Webster to stage Family Portrait, a serious play about the humble Judean family of Jesus of Nazareth with Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the central figure. Family Portrait succeeded in reminding Crawford about the five pitfalls a producer faces on Broadway: investors, stars, writers, directors, 61 Dizzy Spells and critics. The producer’s major task—the play’s financing and budget preparations—were daunting in the post-Depression climate. By the late...