Anecdotal Playwright

When S. N. Behrman was an undergraduate at Harvard, he and the late Pulitzer Prize playwright Sidney Howard were members of George Pierce Baker's "47 Workshop." The big goal for young dramatists at that time was the Castle Square Prize, offered by a local Boston theatre, and both Behrman and Howard submitted plays. Neither was successful, however, with the award going to another Workshop member.

Twenty years later, Behrman encountered Howard in Hollywood and inquired after the whereabouts of the Prize-winner, whose name he had forgotten. "Oh, I saw him just last week," said Howard. "I went with Sam Goldwyn to Tijuana, and we had just entered a gambling house, when I heard a voice: 'Hello, Sidney!' It was the fellow who won the Castle Square Prize; he was the croupier."

With this story and with countless others, Sam Behrman--playwright, author and raconteur--has amused and entertained his Kirkland House hosts this past week. His Evening with S.N. Behrman ("I feel like Beatrice Lillie") in the Junior Common Room Monday night, was the highlight of a "marvelous, but exhausting" week in Cambridge--a week of pre-dinner sherry, after-dinner brandy, and constant conversation.

The great fund of Behrman anecdotes may serve to obscure, in the minds of his listeners, his own considerable accomplishments as a playwright and journalist. Although much of his time has been devoted to the stage since the production of his first play, The Second Man, in 1927, he says, "What I really love to write is prose."

The Second Man, originally a short story, was based on a quotation from Lord Leighton, a British painter: "There is another man inside me, cynical, blase, critical." Behrman dramatized the story in three weeks while unemployed and casting about desperately for ideas; produced by the Theatre Guild, it was an overnight success, and Behrman has been a playwright ever since.

At a London performance of The Second Man, Harold Laski introduced the playwright to a tremendously tall British lord ("He seemed interminable.") Sensing that the nobleman was not interested in the conversation, Laski said, "You know, Mr. Behrman wrote the play you're seeing tonight."

The lord peered down at the stubby Behrman and replied, "I don't believe you."

Behrman's other stage vehicles include Jacobowsky and the Colonel, No Time for Comedy, and the current Cold Wind and the Warm. When the motion picture version of Jacobowsky appeared last year, one New York critic commented that Nazism and anti-Semitism were not fit subjects for a humorous approach. "He was dead wrong," Behrman says, pointing out that Franz Werfel had told him the true story from which the play was taken at Max Reinhardt's Hollywood home. "Also present was the composer Arnold Schonberg; they were all refugees who had lost everything to the Nazis, but they all laughed themselves sick. The capacity to laugh is the strongest thing in people."

To prove his contention that there is no such thing as "no time for comedy," Behrman cites the story of Sigmund Freud's reaction when his apartment was looted by the Nazis. "How much did they take?" Freud asked. "$200." "That's more than I ever got for a visit," he replied.

Behrman's favorite modern playwright is the late Frenchman Jean Giraudoux; Giraudoux's characters, he says, are "human beings of acute sensibility; they are not thugs or sadists, but suffering, cultured people." He does not find much value in the angry works of John Osborne or in the experimental theatre of Samuel Beckett. "Osborne is an arresting writer; he makes you listen to him, but his characters are monsters and have no awareness that they are monsters."

As for Beckett, Behrman says, "I did wait for Godot, but I found he had nothing to offer me." Beckett, he adds, avoids a problem by never having Godot enter the scene, and "I imagine that if he did come in he would utter a platitude. I hate wisdom by implication; it smacks of intellectual chicanery." He recalls a course in Croce that he took at Harvard: "He said that you have no ideas until you have expressed them; there is no such thing as having good ideas and not being able to put them into words."

When one of Behrman's plays is a success, he goes to work for a while on the New Yorker magazine; when it's a failure, he goes out to Hollywood. He says he regrets having spent so much time in Hollywood; he should have written more plays to increase his repertory rather than running out to the West Coast for six months at a time. In connection with his Hollywood experience, he recalls once being asked by producer Sol Wurtzel to do a screenplay for Dante's Inferno. "That requires a lot of research," Behrman replied. "Oh, no," said Wurtzel, "you can see the silent film." Behrman's most recent screenplay is the new Ben Hur: "there are 126 camels and 126 writers, and they all have about the same effect on the picture."

Among Behrman's great circle of literary and artistic friends were Gabriel Pascal, Somerset Maugham and Sir Max Beerbohm, and about these people he tells some of his most entertaining anecdotes. One day, Pascal--the Hungarian producer who procured the screen rights to all of Bernard Shaw's plays--said to Behrman, "Sahm, you know I ahm illegitimate descendant Talleyrand." Two weeks later, Behrman met Pascal again and the producer said, "Sahm, did I tell you I ahm illegitimate descendant Metternich?" Recounting these incidents in an unpublished New Yorker profile of Pascal, Behrman wrote, "Whatever differences may have separated the Congress of Vienna, it was united on at least one thing: to have some share, however remote, in Pascal's paternity." Pascal's coment on reading the profile was: "There is thin line between genius and charlatan, and Sahm has put me on the wrong side."

One of Behrman's favorite stories about Maugham concerns a visit to the estate of an American sculptress. The party came upon a gleaming white block of Italian marble, and Maugham exclaimed to the hostess, "That's the best thing you've ever done!" "But," the artist protested, "I haven't even started; it just came over from Italy. What on earth did you think it was?" "The Immaculate Conception," Maugham replied.

At present, Behrman is working on a long profile of Beerbohm for the New Yorker and attempting to raise enough money for Houghton Library to obtain the 25-year correspondence between the "incomparable Max" and Frederick Turner (it was Turner who said, when the dying Oscar Wilde told him of dreaming of supping with the dead, "I'm sure, Oscar, you were the life and soul of the party."). The New Yorker series on Beerbohm is likely to grow into a book, as did The Worcester Account (on which The Cold Wind and the Warm is based) and Duveen.

Duveen, a history of the British house of art dealers, is considered one of Behrman's finest journalistic accomplishments. The Duveens, however, are not among its admirers. Lady Duveen--whom he has never met--spits, Behrman says, whenever she hears his name. "Of course," he adds, "she may have a glandular condition."