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

2. Signs of a Calling

11 2 signs of a calling Somehow I always wanted life to be larger, more spacious, more adventurous. —Cheryl Crawford S ometimes 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, intellectual discovery, and artistic challenge. In 1921, the year Crawford enrolled at Smith, middle-class women arrived from homes all over America to attend Mount Holyoke, Vassar , Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, and Smith. The women’s colleges provided educational opportunities for ambitious young women to invent new careers and gain productive employment within a white-collar workforce as lawyers, doctors, bankers, journalists, professors, managers, and producers. In the all-women’s college environment, those who dismissed traditional roles of marriage and motherhood found congenial paths into professions and into same-sex relationships where traditional roles were exchanged for equal responsibilities, shared decision-making, and financial autonomy.1 At Smith, Crawford discovered an environment that encouraged her independence, ambitions, and same-sex lifestyle. She went so far as to set herself apart from many of her peers whom she described in conventional terms as naïve, virtuous, and dedicated to acquiring a higher education—and a husband. Although she sometimes found herself a misfit among her peers, she felt comfortable in the New England hills more so than in the valleys of Ohio. 12 Lighting the Fire, 1902–1936 Looking back on her first year at Smith, she pronounced herself “a rotten student.”2 Her newfound freedom was too heady to waste on studies, and she indulged her old habits of smoking and drinking, both forbidden by college rules. When her senior counselor asked what she intended as her major extracurricular activity, she surprised herself by answering, “Theatre.” Her response surprised her. “I hadn’t known I was going to say that. Where was the missionary of yesterday?”3 She threw herself into the activities of Smith’s Dramatic Association and appeared in various one-acts. She became a campus star as Count de Candale, costumed in white satin breeches and powdered wig, in A Marriage of Convenience. The low timbre of her voice, and the ability to ape men she learned from her brothers, won her male roles, exotic costumes, and campus stardom. Fame made her daring. She purchased a secondhand Model T touring car for one hundred dollars (two months of her father’s allowance for books and clothes) and toured the countryside with her more daring friends, where for a dollar and a half they dined on steak and baked Alaska at village inns. She rationalized that her allowance was well-used because she could borrow the books and had no interest in clothes. These adventures would get her expelled from Smith but not before she declared English as her major, discovered Plato and Nietzsche, and became entranced with drama and playwriting courses taught by Samuel A. Eliot. Sam Eliot had been a play reader and stage manager for producer Winthrop Ames, who managed the New Theatre in New York, an ambitious nonprofit repertory theater, and later the three-hundred-seat Little Theatre, where he presented plays in the style of the “new stagecraft,” as the European trends were called in the United States. Eliot later joined the Washington Square Players, also in New York, one of several theaters including the Provincetown Players that emulated European independent theaters. With Eliot as her guide, Crawford came upon “entrancing horizons” in Indian, Greek, and Japanese drama and the great European playwrights.4 From “Sam,” as she soon called him, Crawford also received the dream of the “ideal theatre”—dedicated to experiments in playwriting and simplified stagecraft—and conceived as almost a religious belief. She became his chief acolyte and plunged into reading hundreds of plays in remote corners of the library. When she published her autobiography in 1977, she still possessed the notebooks that she kept on her play readings. While at Smith, Eliot translated and adapted several volumes of littleknown Eastern plays, among them Kalidasa’s Indian classic, Shakuntala, 13 Signs of a Calling considered by historians the finest of all Sanskrit plays. It tells the story of the love of King Dushyanta for Shakuntala...