no jokes and with a score by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who’d never collaborated before; a full-blown ballet by an unknown young choreographer named Agnes de Mille; and a cast of unknowns, including Celeste Holm, the ingénue from Papa Is All.
I switched off the lamp, thinking how typical it was of both this epic and the Guild that the notices would appear on the morning of April Fool’s Day. I coughed, pulled up the blankets and, as I drifted off to sleep, said a silent Good Luck to Alfred Drake, the juvenile from Yesterday’s Magic, who was at that moment strolling out onto the stage of the St. James Theatre, singing:
“ Oh, what a beautiful morning!”
8. LARGE FURNISHED REAR WITH KITCHEN PRIVILEGES
WHEN A YOUNG WRITER SETS OUT for New York to crash the theatre, she is prepared to starve in a garret for a while. She has read the solemn pronouncement of a turn-of-the-century writer named Richard Harding Davis, that “a man who can afford a hall bedroom in New York City is better off than he would be if he owned 160 acres of prairie.” She has seen La Bohéme and wept as Rodolfo gallantly tossed his poems into the fire to warm his garret on Christmas Eve. And she has seen Stage Door —both Broadway and film versions—describing life at the Rehearsal Club, a female “residence club” where young actresses bolster each other’s morale in charming dormitory rooms. She has gathered from all of these testimonials that starving in a garret is a rich, purifying experience, and she wants it. And she gets it.
And of course, after she gets it, it dawns on her that when Richard Harding Davis wrote that a New York hall bedroom was better than 160 acres of prairie he was no longer living in a New York hall bedroom, having grown rich enough to afford a town house and nostalgia; she types her play huddled in blankets and sourly informs Rodolfo he should be damn glad he’s got a fireplace to throw his poems into; and she thinks that somebody in Stage Door might have mentioned that the Rehearsal Club has a special New York electrical system known as DC—direct current—which means that the day she moves in she’s going to blow her radio, her iron, and all the building’s fuses, and that while the fuses can be fixed, her radio and iron can’t, which in turn means that till next Christmas she’s going to have to do without a radio, press her skirts under the mattress, and iron her scarves, blouses and handkerchiefs by pasting them soaking wet to a mirror.
My first garret—not counting the Rehearsal Club, which took me in temporarily as a favor to Terry and kept me just long enough to ruin my appliances—was one of those hall bedrooms Richard Harding Davis was so crazy about. This was way back in my fellowship year. I rented a hall bedroom on the fifth floor of a brownstone walk-up rooming house on West Sixty-ninth Street. The upper West Side was lined with four-and five-story brownstone houses built in the 1880s as homes for the well-to-do. Fifty or sixty years later the houses were moldering, vermin-ridden rooming houses. Ours had a cavernous entrance hall and a great, gloomy, unlit staircase, the steps adorned with dirty shreds of ancient carpeting and creaking eerily all the way up—and if you passed a dead rat on the stairs you were just very thankful he was dead.
I used to creak my way up four flights each night, grope down the musty hall to the third room on the left, unlock the door, feel for the string attached to the twenty-five-watt bulb overhead and ask myself why I’d left Philadelphia.
My room looked out on a stone wall and I couldn’t see to comb my hair, let alone type my play, so I went out and bought a seventy-five-watt bulb and climbed on a chair and several of my best books to install it. But when I came home that night, the seventy-five-watter was gone and the twenty-five-watter was back. Forced to take the landlady’s hint about saving electricity, I told myself
I switched off the lamp, thinking how typical it was of both this epic and the Guild that the notices would appear on the morning of April Fool’s Day. I coughed, pulled up the blankets and, as I drifted off to sleep, said a silent Good Luck to Alfred Drake, the juvenile from Yesterday’s Magic, who was at that moment strolling out onto the stage of the St. James Theatre, singing:
“ Oh, what a beautiful morning!”
8. LARGE FURNISHED REAR WITH KITCHEN PRIVILEGES
WHEN A YOUNG WRITER SETS OUT for New York to crash the theatre, she is prepared to starve in a garret for a while. She has read the solemn pronouncement of a turn-of-the-century writer named Richard Harding Davis, that “a man who can afford a hall bedroom in New York City is better off than he would be if he owned 160 acres of prairie.” She has seen La Bohéme and wept as Rodolfo gallantly tossed his poems into the fire to warm his garret on Christmas Eve. And she has seen Stage Door —both Broadway and film versions—describing life at the Rehearsal Club, a female “residence club” where young actresses bolster each other’s morale in charming dormitory rooms. She has gathered from all of these testimonials that starving in a garret is a rich, purifying experience, and she wants it. And she gets it.
And of course, after she gets it, it dawns on her that when Richard Harding Davis wrote that a New York hall bedroom was better than 160 acres of prairie he was no longer living in a New York hall bedroom, having grown rich enough to afford a town house and nostalgia; she types her play huddled in blankets and sourly informs Rodolfo he should be damn glad he’s got a fireplace to throw his poems into; and she thinks that somebody in Stage Door might have mentioned that the Rehearsal Club has a special New York electrical system known as DC—direct current—which means that the day she moves in she’s going to blow her radio, her iron, and all the building’s fuses, and that while the fuses can be fixed, her radio and iron can’t, which in turn means that till next Christmas she’s going to have to do without a radio, press her skirts under the mattress, and iron her scarves, blouses and handkerchiefs by pasting them soaking wet to a mirror.
My first garret—not counting the Rehearsal Club, which took me in temporarily as a favor to Terry and kept me just long enough to ruin my appliances—was one of those hall bedrooms Richard Harding Davis was so crazy about. This was way back in my fellowship year. I rented a hall bedroom on the fifth floor of a brownstone walk-up rooming house on West Sixty-ninth Street. The upper West Side was lined with four-and five-story brownstone houses built in the 1880s as homes for the well-to-do. Fifty or sixty years later the houses were moldering, vermin-ridden rooming houses. Ours had a cavernous entrance hall and a great, gloomy, unlit staircase, the steps adorned with dirty shreds of ancient carpeting and creaking eerily all the way up—and if you passed a dead rat on the stairs you were just very thankful he was dead.
I used to creak my way up four flights each night, grope down the musty hall to the third room on the left, unlock the door, feel for the string attached to the twenty-five-watt bulb overhead and ask myself why I’d left Philadelphia.
My room looked out on a stone wall and I couldn’t see to comb my hair, let alone type my play, so I went out and bought a seventy-five-watt bulb and climbed on a chair and several of my best books to install it. But when I came home that night, the seventy-five-watter was gone and the twenty-five-watter was back. Forced to take the landlady’s hint about saving electricity, I told myself
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