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Voices Offstage: A Book of Memoirs

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Voices Offstage, A Book of Memoirs, Marc Connelly; Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc. (1968)

Most notable for a description of how a charismatic non-actor, Richard Harrison - who had miraculously materialized at the age of sixty-five as an overnight theatre star in the 1930 Broadway musical Green Pastures - instinctively knew how to act like a professional:

His "inexperience as an actor proved no handicap in building his characterization & in his learning the mechanics of movements [& in no less than five weeks - from the day M.C. met him, to opening night!].

"The difference between good acting & bad [is] that a good actor `acts' about one-tenth as much as a poor one.

"Instinctively, Mr. Harrison recognized that economy of physical movement is of vital importance. Most of his line readings had exactly the right intonations & projections... Because as an elocutionist he knew the danger of the superfluous gesture, there was never any need to tell him that one of the most vital assets in an actor's performance is repose."

As for the rest of Voices, although worthwhile, I wasn't overwhelmed. The writing was quite acceptable & in limited engagements, unique & interesting. But aside from the above quote, nothing was inspirational. So if you're not a Green Pastures aficionado, be prepared for rewarding but hardly indispensable reading.

I couldn't escape the feeling that Voices would have been a much more engaging & vital memoir had Marc Connelly not been well along in years before his memoir took shape (it was published when he was 68; he lived to be 90, passing away in 1980). The book needs splashes of zest & has none. When that happens, whether you're the author or the reader, you're just marking time.

In addition, since Connelly excelled at comedic writing & personally knew many talented wits, you'd expect something truly amusing in the book to surface a lot sooner than p. 214 - Frank Sullivan's facetious "History of Benefit Performances" (written during the Great Depression when Connelly & others worked strenuously to create theatrical benefits whose gate would provide for thousands of destitute writers, actors & musicians):

"One must...recall the one given...for Andrew Carnegie early in the century. Carnegie had speculated heavily in libraries & had lost his fortune. The Benefit...staged for him...netted $235,000,000 & enabled the old financier to spend the rest of his days free from financial worry."

Rockefeller, quite advanced in age by 1929, had already dispersed his massive fortune into the accounts of his son & relatives & into charitable foundations that provided for his famous support of American libraries - none of which he could have "speculated in" (Sullivan conceiving of the wonderfully ridiculous idea that libraries are stock-issuing, for-profit corporations that can bankrupt investors).

Although Rockefeller's remaining stock holdings did take one heck of a beating in the 1930s, he was never in the position of having to make ends meet by selling miniature barrels of oil on street corners. Too bad; it would have made one heck of a funny editorial cartoon.

(We'll have to be content with the depiction of the deposed & fuming New York State governor, Eliot Spitzer, standing on a rural road in 2008 with hopeful day-laboring illegal immigrants. One of his new cohorts tries to console him: "On the bright side, Senor Spitzer, you already have a driver's license.")

One interesting feature in Voices is that in many, if not all of the reminiscences of the 1920s-30s by the writers in orbit around the New Yorker Magazine, the wildly successful artist Neysa McMein is always present. But Voices is the first book of this ilk that had an author or editor who actually went through the enormous, back-breaking trouble of including one photograph of the brilliantly photogenic McMein in the illustrations.

* * *

Voices is yet another memoir without an index, which are acts of publishing stupidity beyond comprehension.

I mention this because Connelly tells the story about how he & Robert Benchley had stood on a balcony of Delmonico's restaurant on 44th Street & 5th Avenue - refugees from a luncheon organized for a purpose that had been torpedoed even before the appetizers had been brought to the table - & Benchley, prompted by a mischievous Connelly & in "broken German," spontaneously addressed startled onlookers on the street as their "new prince" (Connelly being his "prime minister").

I think that Connelly meant to say that people below the balcony were listening to what appeared to be a German who was speaking "broken English."

Otherwise, how could the average New Yorker (probably in the 1920s; the event date wasn't provided, which is a major failing of the book throughout) on a business distinct street in New York City, not far from the site of the future Rockefeller Center, understand "broken German"?

I've read about this event elsewhere, probably in the Benchley biography by his son Nathaniel. And in that version, Benchley was perched on a Paris balcony in France, where "broken German" probably would have been understood by a lot more people than those on 5th Avenue in New York.

The Voices version of the Balcony story is on pp. 121-2. God knows where it can be found in the Benchley biography, because that's yet another - purportedly serious - book published without an index.

I'm throwing my lot in with the indexed memoir - as yet not identified - that determines beyond all doubt that the event had occurred in Istanbul, in 1865, before a crowd of Laplanders in town for their inaugural Shriners' convention. It may be wrong, but at least I'll be able to relocate & reread the goddamned story.

Broadway fans may recall Marc Connelly as a long-time member of the playwright community. He won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Green Pastures" in 1930. Connelly will always be remembered for his collaborations with George S. Kaufman. In his book, Connelly details how he went from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, to Broadway. It was a bumpy ride, but he makes a good storyteller. Connelly was an original member of the Vicious Circle and was very close to Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. The book is one yarn after another. But one thing missing is how his wife divorced him and married Robert E. Sherwood, his friend from the Round Table. A good book about old Broadway.