Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

weekend to see a production of the Harvard Dramatic Society and the Hasty Pudding Club. They had written a musical; they were supposed to have Radcliffe girls to dance in the chorus; but they had found a girl from Sullins College, Virginia, who was up there for some reason.” [As Mother explained it, “Pretending to go to secretarial school, but really taking dancing classes like mad and then trying to pay for them by selling books at the Harvard Coop.”] “She was one of the girls in the line.”

Another person in the cast who had nothing whatsoever to do with Harvard was Henry Fonda, who was about five years older than anybody else. He recalls:

“I was working in a repertory company in Washington, D.C., when I got a wire from a friend of mine, Bernie Hanighen, who was the president of the Harvard Dramatic Club. I used to do a little comedy character at parties, called him Little Elmer. Bernie had written Little Elmer into his musical, but he couldn’t find an undergraduate at Harvard who could play him—this show was supposed to be strictly undergraduate—so he wired me. And he had cast, among others, a girl.… She was a character even the first time I met her. This was a typical burlesque type of comedy and one of the pieces of business was: she crosses the stage while I’m going in the other direction, I do a big take, make some gesture or comment, she turns and slaps me and just keeps walking. But when this girl slapped me, every time in rehearsal and every performance, it was a solid-rock slap—you would have thought I could only say, ‘Who is this bitch? Get her out of my sight. But it didn’t work that way, see. She intrigued me.”

Josh continues:

“And I really think that’s the first time I saw Margaret Sullavan. She was darling and she had this kind of husky, breathy, Southern voice.… I met her afterwards; Charlie [Leatherbee] took me aside; he’d invited her to be a member of the company that summer—that meant bringing her down to Falmouth, Massachusetts, to be in the University Players—as our ingénue. ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ he asked, and I said, ‘She seems wonderful, but are you sure she can do all the big jobs like that?’

“The next time I saw Peggy, as we called her, and as I called her to the very end, was when we were building our new theatre at Old Silver Beach and rehearsing the opening production, a play called The Devil in the Cheese. She and Hank were the main characters. About four days before opening, Bretaigne Windust, who was directing the play—and always had a handkerchief tied around his forehead for some reason—said, ‘No more rehearsals until the theatre’s finished.’ I said, ‘We haven’t learned our lines yet.’ He said, ‘We can’t put on a play without a theatre. Go on, help work on it, we’ve got to get it finished.’ So suddenly the whole company was nailing away, building scenery, installing seats: Fonda and I were way up on the grid for 72 hours putting in the counterweight system, Fonda face down most of that time, stretched out over the beams on his stomach, while I swung below him in a boatswain’s gear with a mouthful of nails trying to thread the ropes through the sheaves; Windust was everywhere, still running around with a handkerchief around his head.

“It was a very complicated show, The Devil in the Cheese, one of the silliest and most difficult, and we had to have a lot of props. Just to give you an idea: the first act takes place in an old monastery on a Greek mountaintop and the only way to enter is to be hoisted up in a net from the earth below. Goldina Quigley, the part that Peggy played, is brought there by her mother and father on the pretext they are looking for Greek relics. The real reason is to get her away from Jimmy Chard, the boy she’s fallen in love with (who eventually arrives by airplane and makes a spectacular crash landing), played by Henry Fonda. One of the monks gives Mr. Quigley an old amphora and a piece of cheese: ‘Eat this cheese and know youth,’ says the monk, so Mr. Quigley bites into the cheese, and suddenly there’s a great green flash and out of the amphora leaps the Little God Min (some ancient Egyptian deity), who offers to take Mr. Quigley on a trip through his daughter’s head. The second act takes place in Goldina’s brain and consists of all her daydreams, enacted by Peggy and Hank: first they’re on a sailboat, and while she washes dishes and drys them in a net strung out the cabin porthole, he catches a flying fish and pops it in the kettle for dinner; then they get wrecked on a desert island where they play the same scene, only this time he’s found a turtle which she pops in the supposed dinner pot, and he brings her a monkey which they train—here there’s a little time lapse and the monkey grows up into a gorilla—to take care of their baby. And so on.

“Well, you can imagine the props we had to round up. We never had any kind of dress rehearsal. Nobody had had any sleep for four days. The audience arrived for the opening; the curtain was six feet off the ground, so people could see us desperately trying to cover these white-pine steps that were supposed to be old rocks on the side of the Greek monastery. When we finally dropped the curtain, the audience applauded. I said, ‘Windust, please go out and make a speech. Explain to them that we’re not ready; maybe they ought to go home.’ He said, ‘No, no, I’ll make a speech, but we’re going to do this show come hell or high water. I’ve brought my full-dress suit and I will not make a