The Late Christopher Bean Notes

Sidney Howard was remembered after his death in 1939 by his good friend Barrett H. Clark as being “utterly alive”, a “symbol of the fundamental sanity of things”, and a comforting presence, whose plays were “born of a powerful impulse to capture living men and women and throw them alive into the theatre.” He was a man who had an “abounding love of the whole visible, tangible, exciting world…he enjoyed, heard, touched, and felt life passionately.” During his lifetime, Howard was by profession a writer, although the many different manifestations of this choice of career resulted in his work as a playwright, screenwriter, journalist, dramatic translator, and the occasional writer of short fiction. He saw 27 of his plays staged, and of those, 13 were original works. Howard considered a play to be primarily a vehicle for the actor, and the playwright’s job to provide actors with raw material from which they might create vivid and memorable characters.
Howard was born June 26, 1891, in Oakland, California, to a musician and the owner of a steamship line. He began writing at the age of nineteen when, forced into isolation at a tuberculosis sanitorium, introspection led to self-expression through journal and letter writing. He earned a BA from the University of California at Berkeley, where he wrote for their literary periodical. It was also during his years there that he saw his very first play, The Son of Spain, produced by an artist’s colony in nearby Carmel. He went on to Harvard to pursue his interest in drama and playwriting, writing his master’s thesis on the plays of John Lyly. The onset of World War I saw Howard enlist in the American Ambulance Corps and ultimately become a captain in the US Army.
Howard began his first professional writing as a journalist for Life magazine in 1919, eventually becoming its literary editor in 1922. Meanwhile, he also wrote articles for Collier’s, New Republic, and Hearst’s International. Though his later life would find him focusing much less on journalism than on dramatic writing, he would sporadically write articles about Hollywood and the motion picture industry for the New York Times.
As a screenwriter, Howard wrote more than a dozen scripts for Hollywood, but is best known for his adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind; it won him his only Academy Award, which he was honored post-humously in 1940. Though many revisions were famously made to Howard’s script by other writers, the final version was so close to Howard’s original that he was billed as the sole author.
Howard was originally attracted to Hollywood in 1927 after sound came to the movies. Producers went in wide search for the newest and best American writers; Howard, as well as playwrights like Maxwell Anderson and Lillian Hellman, were brought to California. For many, the appeal was in the many promises of wealth, but for Howard, it was the challenge of being at the forefront of this new form of dramatic writing that enticed him to go.
Howard also published one work of non-dramatic fiction, a book of four short stories called Three Flights Up. The New York Times described these stories as being “a dangerous mingling of parable and narrative and character study…some of his passages reach an unparalleled intensity, almost frenzy, of prose, without seeming forced or insincere.” Despite the praise he received for this work, Howard himself felt that his greatest passion was really for dramatic writing. Of the difference the inspiration a writer of plays feels from that of a writer of fiction, he said, “the novelist prefers writing to anything; the dramatist prefers acting to anything. The drama does not spring from a literary impulse but from a love of the brave, ephemeral, beautiful art of acting.” His greatest legacy, then, are his plays and the influence they had on the profound shift the American theatre saw itself undergoing during the years Howard himself was the most prolific.
Howard’s first professional play, Swords, a melodrama set in medieval Italy, was produced in 1921; he wrote it as a vehicle for Clare Jenness Eames, the actress who would become his wife in 1922. In 1925, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play They Knew What They Wanted; initially, however, the play itself wasn’t immediately successful. It was turned down sixteen times by different producers before it was finally picked up by the Theatre Guild and produced in 1924. It was this play and the accolades it received that really established Howard as one of the preeminent playwrights of the early 20th century.
American theatre in the 1920s and 30s was itself seeing great changes. In the early 20th century, the theatre was producing mainly large-scale melodramas that placed much more emphasis on sheer spectacle and mass entertainment than on anything else. Howard’s writing also underwent a similar transition; he began by writing melodramas and plays in verse set in romantic, far-off locations. At the suggestion of his friends, he began to write about what would contribute to the shift of American theatre’s focus away from spectacular melodramas and towards realistic plays commenting on contemporary issues of the times.
Howard’s most successful plays were those that dealt with modern questions and concerns. His Pulitzer Prize winning play, They Knew What They Wanted, focused on morality and sexual issues. In it, a husband chooses to forgive his wife’s infidelities even though she has become pregnant by another man because he realizes that he wants children and loves his wife despite her weakness. He wrote roles for women that provided actresses with more dramatic opportunities than had been previously available. Women were given the chance to portray characters that were three-dimensional instead of the mere stock caricatures and stereotypes that were rampant in the earlier melodramas. His plays celebrated sharpness of thought and a pragmatic outlook on life.
His proficiency in Spanish and French led to his translations of a series of European plays for the American stage; The Late Christopher Bean is one of these. Adapted from René Fauchois’s play Prenez garde à la peinture, Christopher Bean maintains the same general structure as the French play but is thoroughly American in its portrayal of a New England family. It was first produced in 1932 and was a commercial successful, with Pauline Lord playing the leading character of Abby. Lord, also the star of They Knew What They Wanted, was a central inspiration to Howard in the writing of the play, which he dedicated to her. The production was widely praised, and subsequently other productions of the work sprang up in theatres all over the country. It has since been described as a “deceptive comedy…as changeable as a chameleon”, with “interpretations as various as the style of the actresses playing Abby, who sets the tone of the comedy.” Pauline Lord’s interpretation was seen as having a “vague wistfulness” that “stressed the poignancy underlying the play”, drawing it away from farce. Charlotte Greenwood, who played Abby in San Francisco, was described as being “less mousey, more capable of defending herself”, and with her interpretation the play lost its serious and sentimental note and became straight comedy. Eventually, a film version was made as a vehicle for comedic star Marie Dressler; this version was not adapted by Howard, and was not very well-liked. Her performance – and the film itself – were described as “heavy handed”, so much so that it became merely “noisy burlesque [and] caricature.”
Howard’s life came to an abrupt end in 1939 when he was killed in a tractor accident on his farm in Tyringham, Massachusetts. His death came just before his newest comedy, Madame, Will You Walk?, was to go into production; it eventually played forty-two shows on Broadway. His legacy of straighforwardness of style is remembered as being “less comments on contemporary life than presentations of it.”