May 2008
It was in New York in the FDR era. Things were going well for me; I was in chrysalis at CBS, with a bright sustaining audience even though my programs were on the air opposite Bob Hope, then No.1 in the national radio ratings.
Then one day an agent friend came to me with a theatrical script in hand, “Would you do me a favor?” he asked. “I have a young client, a writer who has turned up with a play titled “You Touched Me.” I have no idea whether it is any good. Would you read it and tell me what you think of it?”
I have since learned to say “Sorry, No” to most such requests, but I liked this agent; he had done me a good turn in the past, so I consented to read the play. He came around days later to pick up the script and my verdict. I told him I wished I had found something to like in “You Touched Me,” but the play struck me as tedious; I loathed every character; there was no tension, no conflict, no development – just a series of blobs leading nowhere. I said I was sorry for its author, but perhaps he should think about selling insurance or engaging in haberdashery. The agent was as aggrieved to hear my report as I was to have made it. He thanked me and we went our separate ways.
About three years after that, I picked up a Weekly Variety, and there, in a section devoted to theatrical events in the Midwest, was a smash review of a new play that had just opened in Chicago, written by the same playwright who had delivered “You Touched Me.” His name was easy to have remembered – Tennessee Williams. The play was “A Street Car Named Desire.” I was glad for Williams, but deeply disturbed about myself. How could I have failed to recognize genius, to sense a titan in the making?
I worried about my apparent incapacity to discriminate between turgidity and genius in writing. If I were ever going to teach writing, how could I propose to do so it if I couldn’t tell a dead herring from a vigorous dolphin? This miasma of self-doubt hung over me for a long while, and I even began to suspect the trustworthiness of applause that occasionally came my way for work I was doing. I kept being reminded of Williams’ mastery with each of his fresh triumphs – “Streetcar” moving to New York and winning the Pulitzer, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Night of the Iguana,” and the glorious rest. He had become the toast of the entire theatrical world, not just of Broadway
And then, after several years, I read in the theatrical page of The New York Times that a new play by Tennessee Williams titled “You Touched Me” was rehearsing in New Haven, and would be moving soon to Broadway. “Ah,” I told myself, “I will go to see it; and learn where I went wrong in my evaluation of the master’s script.” Opening night was sold out, but I bought tickets for the fourth performance. Only there was no fourth performance. There wasn’t even a second. I may be wrong, but I believe it was the only time a Williams play did not survive its opening.
I did not feel vindicated, having always abhorred the very idea of celebrating any writer`s failure. I tried to figure out what had happened, and I think I came up with a plausible scenario: Williams had hit a home run every time he came up to bat since “Street Car.” His name automatically meant rousing theater. Then he may have been tired, or ill. It is not easy to rewrite a whole script, which he would have had to do to make a silk purse out of a diseased old bladder. He may have convinced himself he could do no wrong – hell, he was the champ.
Maybe there is a pale moral to this account: Never cross out a writer, even if he or she turns in a dreadful script. Years of hard reading, hard
thinking and hard writing can beget wonders. Take Cervantes, who was broadly dismissed as a hack before Don Quixote. He put it together in his late fifties.