Hume Cronyn

Michael Kantor: You wrote in your book when you came to New York in September of 1932, there was a depression, prohibition, apple sellers. What was Broadway like?

Hume Cronyn: By today’s standards, it was enormously busy. I remember the first professional job I ever had, which was 1931, an old character actor talking to me about Broadway, and he said, oh, my boy, you should have seen the theater when I was a youngster, which is what I was then. In the greater New York area, there were 150 legitimate theaters, all lighted, all working. Today, I may have 75. 75 legitimate theaters? I mean, what is it today? I’m talking about straight plays, of course. I’m not talking about musicals. Other forms of entertainment have come in and offered. Entertainments that are a fraction of the price of a Broadway ticket. And a lot of people just lost the habit of theater going.

Michael Kantor: That was perfect. Do you remember the first, was there one show that really made an impact on you, the first show you saw or some important?

Hume Cronyn: Oh, that would be in the late 20s. My family loved to go to the theater. They had no connection with the theater whatsoever. They couldn’t have been further afield. But they went to London quite frequently. And I would be taken along with them. And so I saw my first, I think the first theater I ever saw in New York was, oh boy, can I remember it. Not for the moment, but I think it’ll come back to me. And it was a very popular thriller. And then I went abroad. I remember the impact made on me by the performances of Sue Gerald DuMaurier. I just thought he was marvelous. And I saw Gerald Du Maurier and Gladys Cooper, I think, in the letter, Somerset Mall. And I saw a couple of musicals, one with Benny Barnes and a farce or two. Two wonderful farseers. They were a team. Again, you see, you’re going to find all through this interview that my memory fails me.

Michael Kantor: That’s fine. What about, did you ever see the Ziegfeld Follies on stage?

Hume Cronyn: Oh yes.

Michael Kantor: Tell me, what was that like?

Hume Cronyn: Marvelous. I mean, it was a big specter, a lot of wonderful, busty, bare-legged girls. My libido was more active then than it is now. I mean, I responded as you would expect most males to respond. It was a great, great show. And I tell you something that was interesting about those shows. The comedians were, I also used to go to burlesque, where you saw the girls with less on. But you saw wonderful comedians, burlesques comedians. And, uh… They were a lesson all in themselves.

Michael Kantor: What’s the difference between, for people who don’t know, the difference from burlesque and vaude?

Hume Cronyn: Well, Burlesque was generally raunchier. There were a lot of nice people who wouldn’t be seen dead at a Burlesques show. I mean, I was brought up in a very Victorian atmosphere. And a lot this was very giddy stuff, even for me. But I loved Burlesq. And I saw. Wonderful comedians there. Ed Wynn, for instance. Burlesque, not musical comedy. Burt Lahr, not music comedy. And others, I mean, most of them regrettably long gone.

Michael Kantor: What were the types of routines they would perform? What kind of routines would they do?

Hume Cronyn: Within the Ziegfeld Follies. W-Well… I don’t remember.

Michael Kantor: I’m just trying to get a sense of, weren’t there standards, certain kinds of sketches that they’d repeat a lot or?

Hume Cronyn: Yes, but there were great big, something which Burlesque could never afford. There were great, big show numbers, dance numbers, even spectacle numbers, but nothing like the spectacle you have today. It was all very glitzy and there were some marvelous composers and lyricists who wrote for musical comedies. You were asking about the musical comedy thing.

Michael Kantor: Yeah, no, absolutely. I was just curious because, you know, Fanny Brice, wasn’t she in those shows? Oh, she was a darling. Who was Fanny?

Hume Cronyn: Fanny Brice was. She was a militantly Jewish comic. And if there’s anything pejorative in that statement, it’s not meant. I mean, she had a great Jewish following and deserved it. And she had great non-Jewish following. I mean she was a wonderful comedian. And I had the privilege of playing with her in a film version of the Ziegfeld Follies. And we did a sketch together. Which was called, God, I don’t know how I remember it, but it’s called the sweepstake ticket. And it was lovely for me because I’d been brought up, almost as it were, in forest and to find myself suddenly not playing the serious dramatic roles that I had played. This is while I was at MGM. My career has led me, you know, from the theater into film, back into the theater. The theater, the television during the glorious 50s, where I, you know, it was like theater transferred to another medium. You haven’t asked me about that, but you’re getting it now, anyway. The live television of the early and middle 50s had marvelous writers. I mean, the one you probably remember best is Patty Chayefsky. But, um, uh, I-I-I… I’ve just done, oh dear, you’re gonna have to help me here. I’ve done a- No, not 12 Angry Man, but the one I did right before that, November and December of last year, alone, written by Horton Foote, a first-rate writer. I mean, one of the very best, and a noted playwright. He’s got something on Broadway right now. I did something of Horton’s called A Member of the Family. I no longer remember the date. And I did a thing called The Five Dollar Bill, which I was particularly proud of, by Tad Mosel. But the actors and the playwrights and directors who were writing at that time for television, almost all came out of the theater. And the theater, the… Productions you did, you rehearsed just like a play. You played them just like play, live. Sometimes it was two or three cameras and you had an audience and Those were great days and the quality of the stuff that was done. I mean I Did Thornton Weller’s Bridge of San Luis Rey I did? Oh dear I Did a lot of television in the 50s then I was back in the theater again for years with only a very occasional visit to a film set. More recently, just more recently, I’ve gone back to doing a lot more film.

Michael Kantor: Going to Broadway in the early 30s.

Hume Cronyn: A very broad cross-section. You know, the 30s, the early 30s were deep in depression. The very most expensive seat in the house would be $4 or $5. I mean, and the posters, which I’ve got quite a group of upstairs, there’s one poster which I can point to where the cheapest seat in a house is 90 cents. Sure, it was in the second balcony, but I mean. It was a whole different ballgame. And the theater got a much greater cross-section of the population. But again, we come back to, what are the choices now? Now you have television. You have video. Radio is still alive and kicking. And it costs pennies compared to going to the theater.

Michael Kantor: Right now in your first spoken appearance, you screwed it up.

Hume Cronyn: My first professional spoken experience. I’d had quite a lot of experience before that, but as an amateur. Well, you want to tell me to tell you how I got the job? I was a boxer and quite a good one and I boxed for the university and I learned to box as a very small boy. I remember my first, I can show you the trophies in the other room, I weighed 75 pounds and I won my weight at school at 75 pounds, 85 pounds, 95 pounds, fly weight, feather weight. I weigh right now what I boxed that when I was a featherweight, which was 127 pounds. Anyway, you see, I go off of the tangent. You didn’t ask me about my weight, but I got hurt fighting at McGill, the University of McGill. And my doctor was a great theater buff, and he knew I was theater crazy. And he had a lady love in a stock company in Washington, D.C. At the National Theater. And he said, he used to call me Mansfield. Now, nobody listening to this probably will know who the hell Mansfield was. Mansfield, was a quite famous American actor at the turn of the century. And anyway, he said come on Mansfield you can’t go back to school yet. Let’s go down to Washington. I’ll introduce you to my friend whose name was Nancy Sheridan. Dear lady, leading lady of the company. And she will introduce you to the director of the Company. Clifford Brooke, another limey, Englishman, and he’ll give you a job, ho, ho ho. He did all those things and it worked. He gave me a job. I had one line in a play called Up Pops the Devil. I played a paper boy, I think, and I came on for my very first appearance before a paying audience, and I forgot the line. I think the story you’re referring to, it’s a moss-grown old story about the theater. It’s the new young actor who steps onto the stage and he’s got only one line, which is, Hark, I hear a pistol shot. And he comes out and he says, Hark! I hear shistle pot! Apostle shit! Oh fuck! And walks off the stage. Well, it was something like that. I didn’t go off with, oh fuck, but I certainly fumbled the line, and I was hopelessly kitted about it by the leading man, it was a man named Stanley Ridges. Anyway, that was what gave me my start in the film, and then my family, who thought I was working hard in Montreal at the University of McGill, discovered I was in D.C. In a stock company, and they discovered it because I ran out of money. And I had to wire home and say, help. And I got a letter from my older brother. My father was quite ill at the time and so he was not really in charge of the family. And my other brother wrote to me and I’ve got this down. I don’t remember much, but this one is engraved on my heart. There was a line in his letter. If you have decided to make the theater your profession, you are probably wise to have seized this opportunity. But let me tell you, you’ve gone about it in the most damnably stupid fashion imaginable. And you enclosed a check for 50 bucks, which saw me through my problems. And then when I finally went home, there was a sort of family conference, not attended by my father, who as I say was ill, but my two much older brothers, my brothers were 17 and 18 years, my senior. So they were, you know, they were up in their 30s. Married and so on, and they were called for this conference with my mother, and we were a close family. I adored them all, but, of course, my two brothers didn’t know what the hell Junior was up to. And I remember the younger of my two brother was drinking tea, and he put his cup down in his saucer very deliberately and put it on the table, and said, How many years do you think you can afford to waste? And I was livid. I got up from my chair, and I walked away through the garden. And I walked out. It was a beautiful garden. And I walk down through the gardening out the back gate onto Queens Avenue, and walked and walked. And I didn’t come home for dinner. When finally I did come home, my mother’s light was still on. And she called me. My father was asleep out on a sleeping porch, just outside her room. So the whole conversation was held rather like this. And she said, don’t be angry with them. They’re only thinking of your own good. Now I’ll make a bargain with you. You go back to the university for another year. And at the end of that year, if you still want to go into the theater, I will see to it. That you go to either the American Academy of Dramatic Art or the Royal Academy in London, England. I had no idea she even knew those institutions existed because I say we had nothing to do with it, but she’d obviously been doing a little research on the side. And I just said, done, kissed her, left the room and I proceeded to go back to the university for my sophomore year, my second year. I appeared in seven different productions in Montreal, all of them amateur. Montreal Repertory Theater, the McGill Players Club, the Red and White Review. I don’t think I cracked a book, but I put in my second year, and after that, true to her word, I went off to the American Academy of Dramatic Art.

Michael Kantor: Great.

Hume Cronyn: It’s a long, long-winded story.

Michael Kantor: No, it’s a great story. When you finished that and you ended up in three farces in the thirties. Yeah. That type of production, what was a farce in the 30s? Describe that. We don’t have those anymore.

Hume Cronyn: They’re very rare. What is a farce? Oh dear. A farce is a play in which the characters are very true, very recognizable, very honest, caught in a situation which is totally ludicrous. And it’s that coming up against a situation which is hilarious but totally unbelievable with characters who are totally believable. So when there is a suspended element of disbelief on the part of the audience, and they find themselves caught up in this sort of madhouse, in which they identify with the characters, even though the situation is ridiculous. Any theater historian would tell you I’ve got it all wrong. But thanks to a man, there are two people to whom I owe eternal debt. One is George Abbott, who helped me in the theater and who died, I think, at the age of 106, just a few years ago. Marvelous man. And the other is Alfred Hitchcock in film, who took me out to Hollywood. Brought me out Hollywood. Thank you.

Michael Kantor: Let’s cut for a stab at a master of the farce.

Hume Cronyn: How was he as a person?

Michael Kantor: No, how is he a master of the farce?

Hume Cronyn: I don’t know.

Michael Kantor: You directed a lot of them and you were in them. What did you do to make them work?

Hume Cronyn: Well, he was a bug on character. I mean, he insisted on truth. He never had, you know, in what’s so-called French farce, there are always girls scantily clad jumping in and out of closets and there’s a great deal of slamming of doors and mistaken identity. George had all those things in the plays he directed, but the characters were so true. The acting was so good, if I may say so, that you suspended disbelief. You didn’t stop every few minutes and say, come on, come on. This situation’s ridiculous. And so I did three great farces with him, three man and a horse, which was the thing that really launched me. And I got that by a real fluke. Room service, boy meets girl, in two of them I played in the New York companies, but not in the original company. Three Men and a Horse I played for seven months in two cities, Boston and Philadelphia, seven months, in those two cities to stand up business and I was playing the leading role and I was a youngster. 23, 24, and George was a very, he took no nonsense. He was a really tough castmaster.

Michael Kantor: Farce, a great acting education.

Hume Cronyn: It requires great discipline. Um… Timing is all. I mean, I like to think that I have a good sense of timing, but that certainly sharpened it. And you asked me about George Abbott before. He had an uncanny accurate sense of time.

Michael Kantor: Tell me about, um, Tobacco Road, which you remembered, you know, Henry Hull’s performance, and Brooks Atkinson called it one of the grossest episodes ever put on the stage. Describe the play, and why was it so popular?

Hume Cronyn: I knew. There was what was called a horsing around scene between Henry and his I can’t remember who the girl was, a very young girl in which they snuggled up to one. I mean, today, Tobacco Road would be… I mean, considered very mild. At the time, this very sexual scene between this older man and this young girl in which they got together and rubbed up against each other, and it all was very, very sexy. I always wanted to play in Tobacco Road, but I didn’t want to play Henry Hull’s part. I wanted to play Sam Bird’s part. Alright. Uh… I did finally get an offer to do it on the road, play that part. I turned down the offer because of the money involved. They wanted me to go out on tour for $75 a week. And I said, no, I wouldn’t do that. And I remember I got absolute hell from my agent for having turned it down. But later, years later, well, not so many years later. I was playing at what was then the premier summer stock company, Skowhegan, Maine. The Lakewood Playhouse in Skowheegan, had a marvelous company. Of actors, and it was, you know, a new play every week. And Sam Bird, who had played the son in Tobacco Road, was in that company, and he was a sweet man, a dear man, and he had a building in Southern Accent. And I remember one day, we were all standing around talking, and Vincent Price was also in the company, and Sam had just done something. That was fairly disastrous. And we were talking about what, and Sam said. You know, I think I’m only good in folk plays. And Vincent said, well, Sam, you’re true to your colors. You’ve certainly folked up everything you’ve done here this year. Those are my memories of Sandberg and…

Michael Kantor: Tell me about another really long running play. What was life with father?

Hume Cronyn: Well, I was one of the backers, thank God. And it made me a lot of money. I was a very modest backer, and I was writing the coattails of Lindsay and Krause. I’d known them both. I had seen the tryout of that play at the Lakewood Theater in Skowhegan, and I thought they had a winner. So I asked if I could put a tiny amount of money in it. And it paid me back five, six, 700%. Those days are gone, too.

Michael Kantor: It was the longest running play in the history of Broadway. Why was it so popular?

Hume Cronyn: My wife of 52 years, Jessica Tandy, and I did a play in the 40s, I think, it was the 40s or the 50s, maybe the 50’s, you know, the early 50s called The Four Poster, which was also a very long running play, and was turned into a musical called I Do, I And it was one of a number of two-character plays, just the two of us. And it was a big success. And I was, earlier on when I was showing it, I saw a letter on the wall from, I think it was Richard Rogers. No, it was Oscar Hammerstein about his experience at the four-poster. It’s a wonderful letter. And.

Michael Kantor: For the life of his father.

Hume Cronyn: No, sorry, I’ll get back to Life with Father, but both players had something in common. They were in no way similar, but they both treated family, a family situation that was warm, affirmative, reassuring. And I have to use these generalities because if you ask me to tell you the plot of the four poster, let alone Life with Father, with which I was intimately connected, it opened at the old Empire Theater. I remember all that and was beautifully played and went on and on and I didn’t know it was the longest running straight play in the history of theater. What did you ask?

Michael Kantor: No, it was just the family issue.

Hume Cronyn: It was a family play. I’m jumping way ahead now, but there is a connection. When we played The gen game, my Jessica and I. We played that one. It was the longest run we ever had in anything. And we could have gone on much, much longer, but 800 performances. And we played on Broadway, on national tour, in London, in Moscow, in Leningrad, and so on. And it was a surprisingly big hit in Russia. Why? I think because it was novelty. They had very few plays. From the time of Chekhov, that had to do with intimate domesticity and a family situation in which there was no, quote, message, unquote, and no sort of propaganda and nothing being preached. Regardless of language, the situation was highly recognizable. And so it was looked on as a sort of new import. And also, it was want to seem to brag, but we got a review from, I can’t remember if it was Pravda, or one of the very principles in which… Was reviewed by the artistic director of the Moscow Art Theater. And he said something to the effect of, it takes a couple of actors from America to teach us what Stanislavski was really writing about. I think I’d like that on my gravestone. I won’t quote another review in this interview, and I rarely quote that one. It gave me enormous pleasure. But why was it popular? For the same reasons that life with father was popular.

Michael Kantor: Great, let’s cut to one section. He had a cousin before he became a director. What was he like as an actor on a stage?

Hume Cronyn: Bloody good, very good. I first saw him, and I knew him. He’s a very good friend of mine. I saw him only two weeks ago out in California. He and Carl Malden and I all had dinner together.

Michael Kantor: Tell me about back before he was, what was he like?

Hume Cronyn: He was extremely bright. He had enormous physical energy. He was personally aware, perceptive. Perceptive is the word I should have used. He was fascinated by people and what made them tick. I knew him first, as I say, as a young actor. We are contemporaries. We’re only a year and a half or two years apart in age. I’ve acted for him I think three times. The first time he was not, I was doing a play for the group theater called Retreat to Pleasure. We had a wonderful director and a man of great knowledge of the theater, a real theater student, but that makes him sound pedantic and he was not pedantic, he knew more about character as a director than almost anyone I’ve ever met. And he was a joy to work on her. However, he was not good about handling more than two or three people on the stage at once. The actors were inclined to bump into the furniture, and he wasn’t very interested. If he had a party scene, for instance, you would find that Harold, this is Harold Claireman I’m talking about, and there was a couple of scenes like that in the play that I did for the group, written by Irwin Shaw, excuse me. Called a retreat to pleasure. And when Harold finally became bored, blocked, he brought in a stage manager from the group theater, who was a young actor who sort of took over and helped with the direction.

Michael Kantor: Who was the best Hamlet you’ve ever seen on Broadway?

Hume Cronyn: John Gilgour.

Michael Kantor: And why.

Hume Cronyn: Well, the first thing I would say was his handling of the verse, and it’s not his left Louis’ voice. He just, he’d had… First of all, he’d played Hamlet numbers of times. In perhaps his most famous production of it, in 1936, Jessica had played Ophelia to his Hamlet. I didn’t see that production, but I saw him later on. And, um, Yes, it was a poetic Hamlet, but it’s a poetic piece. I played it myself. I was highly indifferent, but I played. And when years later I did a second production with Richard Burton and played Polonius, having played it before was a big help. What were you after?

Michael Kantor: Why was he great? Give me his name too just because you know to reiterate

Hume Cronyn: You ask your, John Gilgud is a friend of mine. He’s directed me twice. I’ve never had the privilege of playing with him. I was also a good friend of Larry Olivier’s. And… Olivier was a wonderful, wonderful actor, vibrant, many, many people. I don’t think many people would say John was the best Hamlet they’d seen, but I think he was the better Hamlet. And I think he’s the best actor in the English-speaking theater, in the English- speaking theater. He can do damn near anything. But he hasn’t the charisma and verve of some of the other actors who’ve played it. I don’t know what makes John, in my opinion, great, but that’s what I think he is, great.

Michael Kantor: Thank you. You wrote that you played the recording of the Barrymore Hamlet. Barrymore.

Hume Cronyn: And I saw Barrymore. Oh, he was wonderful, very bravura. He was the most marvelous looking man. He was very handsome, very dashing. He had a beautiful voice. I think his voice was probably better than John’s or Olivia’s for that matter. But playing Hamlet is not just a voice. And that’s a criticism that I think would probably be leveled at John, that it was all vocal. I didn’t feel that at all. I don’t agree with that. Again, John’s the best English-speaking actor that I’ve ever seen, in my opinion.

Michael Kantor: In the midst of World War II, you played the lead role in Mr. Big. Tell me the story of getting caught in the flies. When an actor goes too far.

Hume Cronyn: Mr. Big was a thriller in which a murder is committed on the stage in the middle of a performance. So it becomes actually the play is a play within a play. The setting is a theater and you’re playing in the theater and a murder takes place and who should be sitting in the audience but Tom Dewey and he’s brought on the stage to resolve this. And he was Mr. Big, and I played Mr. Big, directed by the great George Kaufman. I had a very fortunate career. I worked with all the best directors. And the play was hopeless, but some of it was close to farce, and in playing the district attorney who got up on the stage and was about to solve this crime. There was a scene in which something had been let down from the flies. There was great coil of rope on the flies, and I said to George, wouldn’t it be fun if Mr. Big got caught in that coil of the rope, and suddenly he was disappeared up into the flies? And George said, well, how are you going to do that? And I said, I’ll have a harness made for my ankle, and at some point I’ll step into that coil and get tangled. I’ll reach down to it and I’ll have a clip on the end of the rope and I will attach it wristwatch band. I mean, it was a broad leather harness strap. And then a little later on, suddenly it’ll go up and the district attorney will disappear, feet first, up into the aisles, up into flies. So he said, well, all right, let’s, we’d better try it. And I said, oh yes, we’ll have to try it, so I got my harness made and it had a great big on heavy duty. Then I had a clip put on the end of the rope, and I fumbled around with my feet during the action of play, and I managed to clip the rope on. And suddenly the rope went up, and I went up head first. And what I hadn’t counted on was that the rope. So I spun. The rope was twisted. And I spun going up, you know, feet first into the flies. And George came running down there and said, no, no, you can’t do that, Hume. It’ll scare them to death. You know, it’s far too dangerous. No, that’s out. You can’t that. So I said, well, I was sort of in love with this idea. Suppose I get just caught up on the rope and get my foot through a loop and the rope goes up and I have to grab onto the rope and I go up head first. He said, all right, let’s try that. So The day came when I tried that and I got my foot in and my foot started to go up and I grabbed the rope and I went up into the flies. What I hadn’t counted on was there was a light rail right behind the top of the teaser across the top the proscenium arch. The rope went up and took me with it and suddenly right across here was this light rail and it was all instinctive I didn’t I had to let go of the rope and grab the light rail my feet kept on going up so by that time the stage manager said you know stop stop stop you know and and I hung on and they had trouble deciding which line to take off the pin rail and lower me down. This was all during the rehearsal period, and whoever was on the pin rail was not very familiar with what the various ropes were. It was this number one, number three, number seven, number nine, number 11. I mean, there were all sorts of things hanging up there, flats, light rails, and so on. So here I am holding on to the rope with my feet up, and I said, get me down! Nothing happened. George said, get him down. For God’s sakes, get him down! Well, we’re trying, Mr. Rabbit. Just a minute. Try number 11. No, that’s not it. That’s not it. No. Try seven, try seven. I think maybe it’s seven. Get me down! Because my arms are becoming tired. Finally, they got me down. The business, as you can well imagine, was cut. But there I was suspended 20 feet above the stage. But I had no sense of danger. I just didn’t want to let go. George had a habit of running his hand through his hair when he got agitated, and he had a comb in his pocket. And he very often used to comb his hair. And he was very busy doing that on this occasion. I remember when the play opened, George would never be out front. He would be somewhere backstage. And this day, he was in the theater alley. It was in summer. And the play opened, and he came back into my dressing room. I had the central role. And he said, how’s it going? I said, pretty well, George. They’re with it, they’re laughing, and so on, so on. He said, good, good. I’ll come and see you after the second act. And he came after the act and he said how’s going on? I said George, not well. We’ve lost them, I’m afraid. So on, he said oh, well. I guess we’ve got a flop. Walked out of the dressing room. That was it. And it was a flop

Michael Kantor: Great, let’s cut for one sec. I wanna see how it all reads. By a broke, half-blind playwright. And your wife is cast in Portrait of an Edwina, and that leads to streetcar. How did that happen?

Hume Cronyn: In the late 30s, I think it was, I went to a play agent called Audrey Wood, wonderful literary agent, and I said, Audrey, I’d like to try my hand at producing. Have you got something that you think has promise? And she left the office, she went out and she came back with a whole group of blue-covered manuscripts. I remember the colors of them. And she said, this isn’t a play. This is a series of one act plays. By a new writer called Tennessee Williams. And I said, I’ve never heard of him. She said, no, neither has anybody else. But he’s a wonderful writer. So I took the scripts home, and I read them, and I thought they were just great. And unlike anything else I’d ever read before. Vaguely reminiscent of Chekhov. I mean, it’s interesting you should mention his name. I optioned them, and the option money was very little. And I tried to put a production together, and this tells you something about Broadway. Three one-act plays, Tennessee Williams, and I could mount them and open them for $11,000. I raised seven of it. I could never raise the other four. And finally, I just gave up. I mean, I went to people and they said, three one-act plays, ooh, kiss of death. By who? Tennessee what? That’s a name? I said, yes, it is, Tennessee Williams. Read these, they’re marvelous. Nothing, nothing happened. So I became busy acting again, or still, and I was gonna let them drop. And I went and see Audrey. Come on, Hume. Renew them for another six months, at least. You can afford it. And she was right, I could, I was working. So I renewed them, and then I met Tennessee Williams in her office. And it made no particular impression on me. Nice young man, with a sudden accent, but that’s all I knew. And I never did get them on. But at one point, I had options on nine of Tennessee Williams, one accent. Players and they almost all appeared in a volume eventually called… Wagonloads of cotton. Good for you. Marvelous. Yes, 27 wagonload of cotton I was crazy about those plays and I got under contract at MGM and I thought one of them was wonderful for Julie Garland and I knew Julie, but I sent it to the studio and said this is a vehicle for Julie garland, it was called This Property is Condemned. Let’s cut to Portrait of Madonna. All right, well, okay. One of them was a play called Portrait of Madonna. And. I got a polite note of rejection from MGM, who later put Tennessee under contract, where he wrote a script of some sort for Lana Turner. I was haunted by Portrait of a Madonna. I was under contract at MGM. Jessica was undercontract at 20th Century Fox. I got very interesting things to do at MGM. All character roles, but good, meaty character roles. She got far less. They didn’t know what to do with Jessie. And so I said, look, let’s do something in the theater on our time off, on weekends and at nights. Let’s rehearse this play. And there was an organization which I joined and which I later became a director and which was later considered fit for the blacklist called the Actors Lab. And it was a small theater behind Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. And I worked there and she worked there. And we did, we put together a bill of three one acts, all Tennessee Williams. And one was directed by a man named Man, I’ve forgotten his first name. And one directed by Julie Dassin, Monsieur Jules Dassin. And one of directed by me, and it was Portrait of a Madonna. And it was wonderfully received, just wonderfully received. I remember Chaplin coming backstage, and David Selznick coming backstage. Other than the owner is coming back. And Jesse was the, then Fox, who had a contract with Jesse, discovered that they had an actress under contract with them who was working at a local theater. And they said, what’s going on here? You know, did you get permission? No, it was our time, it’s our free time, we could do anything we liked. Or so I thought.

Michael Kantor: How do you lead to street cars?

Hume Cronyn: Eventually Kazan and Irene Selznick came to see it. They cast Jesse as Blanche. Jesse knew about the play because in one of my trips to New York I’d gone in to see Audrey, Audrey Wood. And she said, I have a script here of a new play with a strange title. It’s called A Streetcar Named Desire. See if you can suggest somebody to play Blanche Dubois. And I thought, I know who can play Blanch Dubois, my wife. However, I said that and I… You know, and she said, oh, well, interesting idea. And by that time, I mean, she was established on Broadway. We’d already done the four-poster. And she’d be in other plays, and I’d be in other play, but it was no shoe in. But I brought the play back to California, and gave it to Jesse, and said, read this. This is a wonderful part in Here for You. And it ended up being offered to her. She’d read the script before, because Audrey had given it to me. It was only later that Irene and Kazan, Gaj, saw her and cast her in that part. And then she came and they opened that in 1947.

Michael Kantor: Do you remember? When she was gone.

Hume Cronyn: God, this is all such ancient history.

Michael Kantor: Remember when she was preparing for that role, what was her biggest concern in the play?

Hume Cronyn: Getting it right? I don’t know. She thought Kazan was marvelous. She was crazy about Marlon. He used to infuriate her at times, but he was a wonderful actor. He is a wonderful actor. But that was when I first became a close friend of Karl Maldon’s. Because he was in the company too.

Michael Kantor: She didn’t come home and say, God, there’s this one scene or this one.

Hume Cronyn: She probably did, but I don’t remember.

Michael Kantor: Okay. Tell me before she came to America, Jessica had done a lot of work with Shakespeare with England’s greatest actors. How do you think that helped her work?

Hume Cronyn: If you can play the classics, you can play anything. Almost. I mean, that’s a broad generality, but that’s my opinion, and she was, I mean she lived in London. It was a working actress and a well-established one. I mean. She was established in the London Theater before she ever came to America. She came in 1940, and I met her that year, and she was married to a very good English actor, Jack Hawkins. Do you want me to go on with this piece of personal history? And the marriage was not going well at all. And I had a child, my stepdaughter, Susan Tettemer. And life was very difficult for her. The war was on in 1940. They were well in. And she got an offer to do a job in New York. And Jack was off. He was a private, I think, he wasn’t a commissioned officer, and I think he was somewhere in India. I don’t know and the marriage had been in trouble for years prior to that and she came out and She I think she was playing in a play I know she played in it, but whether this is the one she came up to play I can’t remember it was I think it was directed by Gilbert Miller, and it was called Anne of England But the production when she got here She was landed at Dallas Island. Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic when she was coming over. And she came over in convoy and they slept in their clothes. I mean, there was always the possibility of a submarine attack. And she landed on Ellis Island because the immigration rules had been changed while they were still on the ocean. And fortunately, she had a brother who was in the British consulate in New York. And he extricated her and he… She went to live with him for a while, and the play was delayed and delayed and delayed, and she was being allowed to take 10 pounds, which at that time was about $50. And that was all the strictest currency restrictions. And she had to go to work fast. So she worked as a cipher clerk for a while in the British embassy. And then she, and I remember she got a job on radio playing, I think it was the princess. Well, some very bad things happened. The advertisers, in some cases, were adamant about seeing that you weren’t employed in a television. And sometimes the major studios, too, would not employ you. I saw it happen all around me. And the atmosphere was fearful. I had been sort of gray listed. I remember Jesse and I had a series on NBC called The Marriage and it had been very successful on radio and it was not based on the four poster but a lot of people thought it was and I was persuaded by Pat Weaver who was Sigourney Weaver’s father and who was president of NBC at the time to try. It on television and I was the producer as well as one of the actors and I knew we had a certain number of scripts which I thought would be effective on television and uh… But I was very loathe to tie myself up and Jesse was even more cautious so finally we made a deal that you couldn’t make today at all, it was very unusual we said we’d do a summer replacement. To try out a television series. And we were going to do eight shows, and of the eight, I had seven scripts, radio scripts, that I knew would be. And I also had wonderful writers.

Michael Kantor: Naming names and how do you feel about it?

Hume Cronyn: And I have nothing harsh to say about him. There are many people who feel passionately opposed to this day about what Kazan did. I think Kazan was very much under the influence, first of all, I think he had a reverse conversion. He’d become a communist. His experiences within the party were very disillusioning, and he left the party and turned violently against them. His inclination was to expose everything about what he felt was the communist threat to America. A lot of people won’t buy that, but that’s what I think it was. And I think was fostered strongly by a great influence in his life, who was his wife, Molly Day Thatcher. Molly wrote a play about the intellectual who is faced with something of the same sort of problem. It was a morality play and Atkinson called it a thesis play and it was a failure. Carl Molden played the lead and I directed it. I think Kazan… The argument is, look, he was right at the top of the tree. He could do almost anything he chose to do in the theater or in film. He buckled and he betrayed people who were old friends. He did. I think it was one of those areas of judgment for which he is paid very dearly. And I have found him a true and faithful and loving friend. And I’ve never been one of his detractors. I think the ad that he took under the influence of Skouras, or was it Skank, I can’t remember, one of the big Hollywood moguls, was unfortunate. I think his naming names was unfortunate, he and everybody else who did it. Put in the same position. I don’t think I would have done it, but it’s easy enough to say now. At the time, there were huge pressures operating, and I think Gadge had more than his fair share of them. I knew him very well and still know him very. And I admire and like him, and, uh, I will not contribute to his defamation.

Michael Kantor: Great. You know, I’m going to be glad. Yeah. I’m very glad. We’ll talk about that in a minute. In 1961, now we’re jumping ahead, you wrote, the bed we’ve made on Broadway is bloody uncomfortable, and I, for one, would like to climb the hell out of it. What did you mean? What was changing then?

Hume Cronyn: 1961, 71, 81, 91, 35, 40 years ago. What did I mean? I’m sorry, I can’t give you a really coherent answer. How would you say Broadway?

Michael Kantor: From when you started.

Hume Cronyn: Well, for one thing, this is not a direct answer. I’m sorry about that, because I’m not being in any way evasive. No, that’s okay. But I don’t know how young actors really make a life in the theater anymore. When I started, and remember that when I started the old timers were saying, Oh, my boy, you should have been around when. And I could take exactly the same tack now, oh my boy, you should have been around when I started, you know, but you could learn your craft on Broadway. I mean, and how did that happen? Well, you appeared in play, after play, after play if you were any good and it’s showing any signs of talent. There was production, after production, after production and in some cases there was flop. Flop, flop. But each one of those told you something. The ratio of an actor’s successes to his failures, I don’t know what it is on average, but if you have one whacking success in a five-year period, that ain’t bad. If you survive and have a long life, and I’ve been fortunate to have both. It’s a very tough, you know, and the invitations on the other side are so attractive by comparison. You make a living. You can pay the rent. You can afford a wife and a baby and even maybe a dog. I mean, it’s, there’s no fault in it. There are just as many passionate young people. I meet them all the time. Who are going into the theater and who go to drama schools or don’t go to drama schools and who have great hopes for the future. How are they going to learn their business? You asked me not very long ago about Jesse’s background in the classics. It’s almost impossible, it was almost impossible for me and my beginnings were over half a century ago. To find opportunities to play in the classics. Today, well, if you go out to some of the regional theaters, you will find them producing classics. And Jesse and I did our share of that, and it was very enriching. I mean, our days at the Guthrie, our day at Stratford, Ontario, our things we did at the Long Wharf, Seattle, so on and so forth, were all marvelous. And we could not find an opportunity to play those things in the commercial theater. Today, what can you find to play if you don’t sing or dance, if you’re not cut out for a musical? Where do you learn your job? You go to Timbuktu and you play for equity minimum and you’re lucky to have the job. It’s a very tough racket for the actor who wants to develop as a theater actor.