Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment (9 page)

Ironically, at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, I had just begun working in a Broadway play that had been designed precisely to encourage our entrance into the War.
The Land Is Bright
, written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edna Ferber—whose
Showboat
had so influenced my parents—and directed by George S. Kaufman, opened at the Music Box just two months before the attack.

Ferber’s play related the saga of the fictional Kincaids, a rich American dynastic family. Their enormous wealth had been accumulated in the 1800s, when family patriarch, Lacey Kincaid, through unethical financial practices, had made a fortune. Like
The American Way
,
The Land Is Bright
told the story through several generations, beginning with the original period of Lacey Kincaid’s wealth accumulation, and then moving to the profligate behavior of his children during the Roaring Twenties. One critic noted the exceptional performance of Diana Barrymore, the daughter of John and grandmother of Drew Barrymore—who was sensational as the wild and dissolute flapper who recklessly squandered her enormous wealth on booze and parties.

The final scene took place in contemporary 1941 at the family’s plush Park Avenue apartment. By this time, the new generation of Kincaids began to recognize the gravity of their past sins. I played Timothy Kincaid, the ten-year-old great grandson of Lacey Kincaid. Ferber and Kaufman used my character to help move the family toward a final commitment to the country that had given them so much.

The Land Is Bright
was certainly a nationalist play. Still, it was one recognizing that our democracy—indeed our destiny as a nation—was bound to events outside our borders. Burns Mantle of
The Daily News
wrote about the transformation among the Kincaids: “The second world war took the great grandchildren in hand and did something to them.” The contrast between the terrible realities of war and the Kincaid’s privileged lives is brought home in the final act when a broken Lacey Kincaid II, barely able to walk, returns home after spending several years in a German concentration camp—next to his tragic presence, as Brooks Atkinson, noted, “the Kincaid fortune looks like a very trivial thing.” The play ends in a kind of rebirth with the Kincaids rejecting their past and committing themselves to defending the country they had so abused and taken advantage of.

The title for
The Land Is Bright
came from the poem,
Say Not the Struggle Nauth Availeth
by the Irish Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough. The pertinent line reads: “Look Westward, The Land Is Bright.” Clough’s poem was relatively obscure until April of 1941 when it was immortalized by Winston Churchill who used it in a powerful speech pleading for the United States to enter the war on the side of the Allies.

Churchill’s advocacy of American intervention was fully supported by many Americans, including Max Gordon, the play’s producer. Gordon, one of the most successful theater producers of his time, loved the intrigue of the political world and was never shy about using his own productions to advance his political agenda. Accordingly, he placed the stanza from Clough’s poem in the play’s program so that everyone who came to the theater would understand its meaning.

Gordon also decided to test run a production in Washington where, as Kaufman biographer Malcolm Goldstein notes, Gordon “could hobnob with friends in office and pay social calls at the White House.” As it turned out, his hobnobbing paid off as we were invited to perform for the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as the Vice President of the United States, Henry Wallace.

After the performance, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a review of the play. Throughout much of her husband’s presidency, Ms. Roosevelt penned her own popular syndicated column,
My Day
in which the First Lady championed her various political and social causes. In the review, she expressed her enjoyment of the play, particularly with the depiction of the younger generation of Kincaids. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote: “In the evening a few of us were the guests of Mr. Max Gordon at his new play,
The Land Is Bright
. The play is well acted, and I came away with one great sense of satisfaction, for the youth of today are more serious and more purposeful than the youth portrayed in the first two acts of the play. The honesty of the younger generation, as it looks back on its ancestors, is like a breath of fresh air. It points the moral that the whole level of public responsibility and integrity has gone up over the period of the last 50 years.”

And so, my life path again intersected with Mrs. Roosevelt. I doubt she recognized me as the little boy with the poem about his mother at the MGM/Loew’s Screen and Voice Contest seven years earlier. But when she wrote of the “honesty of the younger generation as it looks back on its ancestors,” I like to think that she was reflecting on my character, Timothy Kincaid.

My favorite line in the play—naturally my own line—brought a great laugh toward the end of every performance. It’s set up by Timothy insisting that he doesn’t want to go to school. When questioned, he explains that the class is studying United States history. “And tomorrow we come to the Robber Barons,” he complains, “and Great Grandpa Kincaid was one of them!”

The family, of course, is properly mortified and tries to explain that it’s not true. But Timothy responds fervently: “It is so true! It’s in the history book. And a lot of the fellows won’t speak to me because it says”—here Timothy picks up the history book to read the relevant passage: “‘These despoilers of a continent were brigands who undermined the foundations of America.’ And there’s a picture of him”—meaning his great grandfather, Lacey Kincaid. The family again tells him that it’s all “ridiculous” and that he shouldn’t pay it any attention. That ends things for the moment.

But soon, everyone sits down for dinner at the dining table and conversation again turns to Lacey Kincaid. His son, Grant, now an elderly man, suddenly picks up his glass and proposes a toast to his father, “To the man who ran a pickax up into two hundred million dollars, a real American—Lacey Kincaid.” Everyone raises their glasses to toast. It’s a solemn moment of familial solidarity as they pay homage to their forebear. But, just as they all start to drink their expensive wine, I blurt out: “Great-grandpa was an old crook!”

With that, everyone choked on their drinks with a great deal of sputtering and spitting, and the audience loved it every time.

It was also the moment when I really learned about comedic timing—and I learned it from the master. During one of the dress rehearsals before taking the show to Washington, we did that scene. As usual, I could see George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber sitting together in the audience watching attentively. Usually directors don’t like the writers around, but Kaufman and Ferber had a very special rapport, and she was frequently there right at his side throughout the rehearsals and productions.

Kaufman, as always, was squinting at me through his thick horn-rimmed glasses, leaving me uncertain whether he was mad or just couldn’t see. Anyway, after I delivered the line, he stopped the action and pointed right at me. I still remember his words: “Don’t say it right away! Hold the line. Take a couple of beats. Let them start drinking and
then
say it.”

The next time I did just that—holding the line for two beats—and it was magic. The whole table started spitting up their drinks as I waited until the toast was done and they were all actually drinking before abruptly announcing that “Great Grandpa was an old crook!” Edna Ferber also loved it. Afterwards, she told me if I did it like that when we opened on Broadway, I could have anything I wanted. Without holding for any beats, I told her I wanted a pet rabbit. So on opening night at the Music Box, I hit the line just right. I waited two beats and had all of them spitting up their drinks. After the show, Miss Ferber walked up four flights to the dressing room and entered with a big brown box, which she handed to me. I opened it, and there was a beautiful white rabbit inside. I was in heaven!

By this time I had made a final transfer to New York City’s Professional Children’s School, which was designed for kids with jobs in entertainment. Throughout the years PCS has had many students from Milton Berle, Martin Landau and Joan Blondell, to more recent alumni such as Christian Slater, Macaulay Culkin and many more. PCS is still open today.

One day in the fall of 1941, a young girl named Patricia Poole showed up. The pretty young blonde with pig-tails sat right next to me in one of those adjoining desks.

Although younger than me, I immediately sized her up as a superior student, which meant that with a little tact, I could start copying her homework. At the time, this was the extent of my designs on Patricia Poole, having no idea, of course, that seventy years later we would be celebrating our fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Pat could dance before she could walk. She and her brother Robbie were the premier students of her mother, Helon Powell Poole, a true pioneer in the world of American dance. When Pat was born in 1931, Helon ran the biggest dance school in Charlotte, North Carolina, called The Poole School of Dancing and whenever the big name dancers traveled into the South, they would stop by to meet Helon.

Pat’s mother was responsible for spreading new dance crazes, not just throughout Charlotte, but all across the country. Helon was a regularly featured writer in the most important dance magazine of the first half of the twentieth-century, titled
American Dance
. According to John Hook, author of
Shagging in the Carolinas
, Helon became America’s principal spokesperson for the Big Apple, the Shag and the Swing in the 1930s. Hook, who has done remarkable research on the history of dance in the American South, marveled at Helon’s accomplishments, claiming that Helon was “doing things that no other Southern gal could, or would, do.”

He’s right. Helon was a genuine innovator. Pat recalls a time in the mid-1930s when her mom drove off on her own to Columbia, South Carolina, just because she had heard there was a new dance circulating in the Black dance halls. She went to one of the auditoriums, sat up in the balcony, and watched as they worked on a new dance called, the Big Apple. She took detailed notes, choreographing all the steps. She then went home, showed it to her students, taught the steps on Charlotte’s powerful WBT radio, and introduced it to a much larger audience in
American Dancer
magazine. Largely because of Helon’s efforts, the Big Apple caught on everywhere. According to John Hook, Pat’s mom was a key player as the Big Apple “exploded out of the South and across the nation and the Atlantic to Europe.”

In fact, the Big Apple song and dance craze of 1937 was one of a number of factors that helped popularize New York City’s moniker as the Big Apple. The nickname had been used in reference to New York City a number of times in the 1920s by sports writers, but it became far more widespread in the late 1930s. There is no doubt that Helon’s promotion of the Big Apple dance played a small, but significant, part in making the nickname stick.

Helon was also the first to explain the choreography of the Swing in
American Dancer
. People all across the nation, who took part in the great Swing movement in dance and music, could learn the steps by reading Helon’s articles. After all of his research, John Hook found it interesting that even some of Helon’s relatives were unaware of her great influence on the dance world of the 1930s and 1940s.

Her best students were her children, Pat and her brother Robbie, who was three years older. With Helon working out their routines, the kids began dancing together in the late 1930s and soon became mainstays at all the dance exhibitions. Eventually Robbie and Pat appeared in
American Dancer
, billed as “The Youngest Exhibition Ball Room Dance Team in America.”

Helon would also take her classes on the road. She brought her best students to competitions in all the big cities, including New York, Chicago and even London. She and her students did the Shag, the Big Apple and the Swing, and her teams won prizes everywhere. She also would attend the conventions for dance known as the Dance Masters of America held in different cities across the country. It was there that she first met a talented young dancer from Pittsburgh named Gene Kelly.

As a child, Pat remembers some of her mom’s local celebrity. One memory from early in her childhood is seeing her mother on the big screen at the local movie theater where they played newsreels featuring dance exhibitions before a show. She recalls being amazed at seeing her mom’s face so large up there on the screen.

In 1939, Helon brought her students to the World’s Fair in New York City. They danced and twirled batons while leading the North Carolina Day parade. Pat, who was eight years old, was selected to pin a rose on the lapel of the North Carolina Governor, Clyde Roark Hoey. She had to stand on a chair to do it. The next day, the picture was on the front page of the
New York Times
.

Helon was never satisfied in North Carolina. Like my mother, she had bigger ambitions, including the chance to be around the great dance halls of New York City. She also recognized the talent in her own children and wanted them to have the opportunity to dance on the big stages—something unlikely to happen if she stayed in Charlotte.

But Helon’s husband, Robert Poole, like my own father, was less interested in promoting the careers of his children. He wanted a stable family life and was satisfied with things in North Carolina. They were far from rich, but he made enough to support his family. Nevertheless, in 1941, Helon decided it was time to go. She packed up the kids and together with Pat’s grandmother, headed to New York City. Although she separated from Robert, they stayed married. Pat was ten years old at the time and remembers her excitement about the move.