Spitball! Parade of Writers #1: Ruth Gordon posted by Martin

That Ruth Gordon? The divinely lethargic cadence, the smoke-microplaned rasp, the Tanas Root pusher, the young-boy despoiler, the best-actress-in-a-supporting-role Oscar winner, with her tiny opprobrium and hand flapping dismissal, of whom her husband Garson Kanin (fifteen years her junior) wrote: “Married to this versatile creature, I enjoy many of the advantages of polygamy without having to deal with its complexities.”¹ That Ruth Gordon was also a writer.

Most famously with Mr. Kanin, she penned the Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy vehicles Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, although she had a respectable run as a playwright before that. “Since the playwrights have been notoriously faithless this season,” said The New York Times in its 1944 review of her first play Over Twenty-One, “this season the actresses now are put to creating their own roles.”²

Another Times article a few days earlier talked about her process:³

She took to writing when she was stationed with Mr. Kanin in Washington D.C. while he served in the Army during the war.

“You start writing a play excitedly enough,” she confided, “but it’s seeing it through to the finish that takes will and energy.”

Perhaps it is because Miss Gordon is a New Englander, and New Englanders are notoriously husbanders of time, that “Over Twenty-One” was born in the first place.

Doing the daily shopping, tidying the rooms, and attending the cooking still somehow left her wanting something to fill the day’s schedule. She settled for writing a play…

“But what could I write about? Certainly not my childhood,” she said. “And then I thought of a play. How about getting something of Washington into it? No one could live in an immensely timely city like Washington and not be alive with its thrilling impact.”

Forthwith she busied herself on an outline. It would be a comedy, she was determined, and before long the play began to take shape. It emerged from her pad as the simple story of a man trying to get through officers’ training school with his wife helping him in his darker moments.

Despite her assertion that she couldn’t write about her childhood, she did exactly that in her autobiographical second play Years Ago. Set in Wollaston, Massachusetts in 1913, it dealt with her father, a former sea captain and plant foreman, and her fear of telling him she wanted to be an actress instead of a teacher as he desired. The play is written completely in first person:

MY MOTHER. Ruth, do you or do you not want your father to know you want to be an actress?

ME. No.

MY MOTHER. Well then, don’t go appearin’ before him in a hobble skirt with a slit! You’ll not only look like an actress, you’ll look downright fast!

ME. If it wasn’t for you and Papa, I’d go to Boston and be fast right this minute!

The notices from when the work was put up were good, especially in regards to her capturing the roll of her father.⁴

This lively free-hand sketch of a stage-struck suburbanite Bostonian derives from Miss Gordon’s passion for acting. It is a fondly amused portrait of a high-school girl in a pinched and unlovely household that is about as remote from the theatre as any environment could be.

…

As a popular comedy designed for entertainment, “Years Ago” does not plumb the soul nor utter profound observations about life. But amid its sentimental playmaking it does have a certain ethical integrity. Miss Gordon portrays candidly the environment out of which she came. It was colorless and unimaginative, hedged about and with worry about money. It was worth than genteel poverty. It was a kind of dull poverty that enclosed the family in a kind of dull, paralyzing anxiety.

…

[Frederic] March’s performance in [the roll of the father] is superb… Mr. March is contributing his personal admiration and respect for a human being who is doing the best he can in a world he cannot control. There is something more solid than popular comedy in the part and in Mr. March’s enlightened acting.

She adapted the play into a movie script titled The Actress, which it was released in 1953 staring Spencer Tracy and Jean Simmons (and the first film appearance of Anthony Perkins). It gained her a Writers Guild of America award for Best Written American Comedy.

By that time, she had penned three movies with Mr. Kanin (the two previously noted and 1947’s A Double Life), all of which were nominated for Best Writing Oscars.

That recognition came despite the collaboration being difficult:⁵

“We began to quarrel a lot,” Kanin recalls. “We rarely quarreled in our married life, but when we were writing together, we began to question each other’s tastes and humor. ‘What’s funny about that? we would say. That’s far behind us now, because we don’t collaborate any more and never will.”

…

Once, in a joint interview, Ruth said: “I just think the theater’s something where all the girls are gorgeous and all the boys are cute.” Garson said: “I think the theater ought to be a place where you learn something.”

Garson Kanin speaking:

“I don’t know very much about myself; I know more about Ruth. And looking at Ruth, it seems to me that her acting gains a good deal from her writing, and conversely her writing is stylish and lively because of her acting. For example, in her playwriting, she knows how, because she’s an actress, to write a speakable line. And because she writes, she has a sense and feeling about the written word which many actors lack.” Ruth’s stories and plays are written in 20 to 30 drafts because, she says, as an actress she is used to achieving results through repetition in rehearsal.

They chose one partnership over the other, and stayed married until Gordon’s death in 1985.

So why then, of all the writers in the world, did I choose inaugurate this series with Ruth Gordon?

Besides of my childhood memories of this strange lady and how much I loved her in every movie, she is a writer who started late. By the time her first play was produced in 1944, Gordon had over thirty years in the theater. She was forty-six years old. Not only that, I like reading about writers who collaborate, given what Mr. Beeson and I are trying to accomplish. How does collaboration work? How do different personalities fit together?

I don’t think there is any irony at all that the couple’s best known work is remembered for its battle-of-the-sexes fighting. They may have always made up, but we watch those movies to see Hepburn and Tracey snarl at each other in such a fun way. You have to wonder if what made it to the screen was slightly tweaked version of what was happening in their office.

Of that, Gordon didn’t speak too much (unlike her acting, of which she spoke a great deal). Maybe she took the advice of her husband: “When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.”

1. Marilyn Berger, “Garson Kanin, a Writer and Director of Classic Movies and Plays is Dead at 86”, The New York Times, March 14, 1999. The article also notes his love of Frank Capra, of whom he said “I’d rather be Capra than God, if there is a Capra.” ↩
2. Lewis Nichols, “Ruth Gordon as a Brisk Army Wife in a New Play, ‘Over Twenty-One,’ by Ruth Gordon,” New York Times, January 4, 1944 ↩
3. Nat N. Dorfman, “Ruth Gordon’s Career,” The New York Times, January 2, 1944 ↩
4. Brooks Atkinson, “Little Miss Jones”, The New York Times, December 15, 1946. The title refers to her full name (and the name of the protagonist), Ruth Gordon Jones. ↩
5. Susan Lydon, “The Faa-bu-lous Long Run of Gordon and Kanin,” The New York Times, October 5, 1969. Another gem from this article: “On Ruth’s daily five-mile walks, she practices her singing lessons, ‘because I hope some day I’m gonna be in a musical. I can let loose and sing at the top of my lungs, cause ya know, dear, in Beverly Hills, no one’s out walkin’ but me.’”↩

Comments (2) — Category: Parade of Writers

Look Ma, I'm Blogging posted by kza

Sorry ‘bout the lack of updates, folks — we be busy. But that’s the great thing about blogs — why bother to write something original when you can just link to something else?

Check out some really great posts by screenwriter John August, at his blog:

How To Write A Scene

and

Scribble version, final version

(Admittedly, these are, like, weeks old, but good info and advice never goes out of date.)

I’ll see if I can scare up a conversation about these posts with Burley.

Comments (0) — Category: inspiration

Air Vent Chastity posted by kza

Over at his great blog, Go and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory screenwriter John August has proposed a Screenwriter’s Vow of Air Vent Chastity:

I, John August, hereby swear that I shall never place a character inside an air duct, ventilation shaft, or any other euphemism for a building system designed to move air around.

Last time I checked, several people have “signed” the vow (or whatever it would be on the internets), and I think there have been suggestions for other types of anti-cliché vows.

Not to be a stick in the mud (especially with something as tongue-in-cheek as this), but I won’t be signing. I understand the frustration with the overuse of the air vent escape; I understand the ridiculousness of it. But in the comments section, someone brought up the counter-example of the toys in Toy Story 2, or the possibility of squirrel characters running around in the vents, and noted that for these characters, using the vents would be a natural (non-contrived) method of getting about. But for August, a cliché, even if it makes sense in context, is still a cliché.

And that’s where I part ways. I mean, why is the air vent thing an issue to begin with? Is it simply because it’s overused? Or is it because it’s overused and very unrealistic? If the answer is the latter, then the squirrel example should suffice as a good use of the air vent, and the vow shouldn’t be necessary. If it’s the former… well, what isn’t overused in mainstream screenwriting? As nice as it might seem to have action movies without explosions, romantic comedies without “meet cutes”, Westerns without shootouts… y’know, these things aren’t going anywhere, and have their place as well. And while the air vent is too often the escape hatch of the hacky screenwriter, if it’s used in an interesting fashion, I’m not going to complain. After all, a cliché is really only a cliché when no thought or imagination go into the presentation, and I’m not going to take a vow that preemptively hamstrings my ability to use either of those things.

(Yeah, it’s a slow night over here at the Spitball! — y’wanna fight about it?)

(New character bios soon.)

Comments (0) — Category: screenwriters