The
Golden
Years
The Bela Blau Years
1939 -1940
“The theatre is my life;
it would be at a standstill in
New York in the summer and
here was my chance to continue the
existence I love through the summer months.”
When Deertrees Theatre failed to open for the 1938 season, theatre founder Enrica Dillon wrote in the Bridgton News that she needed the time to think out a practical plan for her “dream-child”. The next summer she leased the property to her former colleague at the New York Theatre Guild, Bela Blau.
Bela Blau was born in Hungary in 1896 and his family lived in London before moving to New York in 1906. He was educated as a Certified Public Accountant and by the age of 21 was teaching accounting at the City College of New York. His expertise in business methods led to an involvement with a bond-selling campaign for the Theatre Guild and he was hired as a member of their business staff. During those years he developed a theatre cost system that was subsequently adopted by other theatres. Eventually he caught the theatre bug and, initiating the then novel principle of raising sufficient money to have a reserve fund to help plays through their difficult early stages, collected $105,000 in subscriptions and launched three plays during 1930 and ‘31: Austin Parker's Week-End, William Bolitho's Overture and a revival of Arthur Schnitzler's Anatol. He became best known on Broadway as co-producer, with Marc Connelly, of the successful comedy Having a Wonderful Time by Arthur Kober, which ran for over 300 shows at the Lyceum Theatre in 1937. That same year Blau went to Hollywood but returned after a brief stay, claiming, “Everything out there has to be done on such a lavish scale that the family atmosphere of a Broadway production is lost.” The next year he and Connelly produced The Two Bouquets in New York and in 1939 Blau leased Enrica Dillon’s Deertrees Theatre in Maine. In an interview with the Portland Sunday Telegram, Blau talked about Summer Theatre.
“Despite my 17 years in theatre - from actor to co-author and director - I had no experience with the summer theatre. My friends told me I was crazy to even harbor the idea. They said it was just one big headache after another with no financial or other return. They kept tossing at me a maxim current among summer theatre operators that in the business you'll lose your shirt the first year, you'll be lucky if you break even the second year; and - if you're lucky - you may show a small financial return the third year and possibly thereafter. With that the case, what's the use of killing yourself with such work they argued. But I was not to be dissuaded. The theatre is my life; it would be at a standstill in New York in the summer and here was my chance to continue the existence I love through the summer months.”
Bela Blau’s first season at Deertrees was impressive even by contemporary standards. He ambitiously advertised a nine-week drama festival with "A New Play - A New Broadway Star Every Week." This was accomplished by importing an entire Broadway cast into Harrison from New York City every week. Ethyl Barrymore, Tallulah Bankhead, Edward Everett Horton, Dame Mae Whitney, and Rudy Vallee were just a few of the stars that appeared on the Deertrees stage that year, while a young David Merrick was a jack-of-all-trades apprentice and credited on several playbills as being the associate producer. Local talent filled smaller roles as the need arose. In addition to the theatre, Blau operated a school for theatrical designers headed by Raoul Pene duBois. An account by one of Blau's New York friends, written two years later, records the reaction of those locals not directly involved in the theatre that first year.
“Up in the state of Maine is a little town called Harrison. The flavour of the town's personality can be found in the work of Grant Wood and Thomas Benton. Its population is less than three hundred. Everyone knows everyone else. Its daily life consists mostly of serving the needs of the people on the nearby farms. They don't need much, they don't ask much. Life is simple and self-sufficient. There isn't a bank in the town and they don't need one. In the winter there's some excitement and activity when skiing parties appear for a moment on their way to North Conway. In the summer traffic on the main street consists mostly of strangers on their way to the resorts in the nearby lakes and mountains. In July or August other strangers have been in the habit of arriving at the Elms Inn. For a quiet week or two they swim and fish and rock on the porches and then leave with contentment, the memory of which draws them back year after year. The townspeople nod to some of them because they've seen them about their streets in summer time for so long, but most of them are still strangers for the reason that people of that stern countryside are not given to either quick friendships or quick dislikes. The summer people, as they're called, come and go, leaving no more lasting impression than they'd done if they'd once gone through Harrison in a car and stopped at Ivory Purington's garage for gasoline.
Summer before last Harrison got a shock. A man from New York was going to come up and put on plays out at Deertrees, three quarters of a mile from town. Harrison didn't take very kindly to the idea. Talk in the drugstore and the barbershop and the post office and the one restaurant, while not unfriendly, certainly didn't promise a very warm welcome. The feeling was that if this man from Broadway was successful and brought some trade to town that would be fine. But nobody was going to have much truck with this Bela Blau or the people who came up with him.
Well, that isn't what happened, as anyone who knew Bela Blau would guess. Bela started his season and the people from the summer resorts and the children from the camps came to see the plays. Occasionally some stopped at the drugstore for ice cream cones or sunburn lotion or dropped in at the restaurant for a sandwich. But there wasn't much change in the town itself. The summer people simply passed through on their way to Deertrees, three quarters of a mile away. That three quarters of a mile was pretty bad going, for it was an old narrow road that hadn't been much to begin with and had fallen off considerably in its usefulness. Anyway, the summer people came and went - strangers. But Bela they saw every day. He came to town and went to the post office, bought supplies at the general store now and then and asked advice of this townsman and that. They found him as interested in hearing what they had to say about life in general as in the answers to his questions. Then they got in the habit of talking all sorts of things over with him. And by the time the summer was over they'd got out of the habit of looking on him as a stranger. They'd learned he was a very likeable man and went out of his way to show that he liked both Harrison and the people who lived in and near it.
Well, the summer ended and the theatre completed its season and Bela got ready to go back to New York. As he was about to leave he got one of the pleasantest surprises of his life. Representatives of the Board of Selectmen came to him and said in substance; "Mr. Blau, we like you. We like what you've done for the town. To show our appreciation and to help Harrison at the same time, we're going to see that you have a good road to the theatre when you come back to Deertrees next year. Just about everyone hereabouts has signed a paper promising to help."
Sure enough, this spring they made good their promises. Lou Galluba, the local druggist, Harley Pitts, the postmaster, Ivory Purington, who runs the garage, C.C. Robbins, the insurance agent, Ray Lamb, Kenneth Sampson, Sam Pitts, Cliff and Robert Denison, Fred Greene, owner of the general store and I don't know how many others all donated their time and labor and tractors and rollers and other necessary equipment for a full day. And the road to the theatre was built.”
Mr. Blau failed to make money during that first season and in an interview in the Portland Sunday Telegram he admitted he didn't care. A far greater reward - one that made him completely satisfied with his work - resulted, he declared. "It may seem sentimental, and it may be being egotistical," he confessed apologetically, "but when a delegation of Harrison's selectmen and leading citizens called upon me to thank me for bringing my company to Harrison - and to asks me to come again, well" - he hesitated, and added shyly, "my heart overflowed with a gladness. I felt I could ask for nothing more."
The 1940 season followed the same format - "the most varied plays, the most brilliant stars, the most professional productions" - as the previous year; with actors such as Arthur Treacher and Joe E. Brown appearing in The Hottentot and Elmer the Great. Each company performed eight times a week, providing six evening and two matinee shows. Ticket prices ranged from 55 cents to $2.20. Helene Hanff, who achieved fame when her bestseller, 82 Charing Cross Road, was made into a film, described life at Deertrees during the summer of 1940 in her book Underfoot in Show Business:
“First I took a bus to Philadelphia, having a filial urge to see my parents and borrow the fare to Maine in case something went wrong in New York. Then I took a train back to New York and lugged my suitcases into Bela Blau's office and met the Deertrees stage manager, Bill Flanagan of Flanagan's Law, and the assistant stage manager who drove us to Maine in his elderly cream-colored Ford called the “Beige Bee” because he'd bought it with money he'd earned on a radio show called "The Green Hornet."
The town of Harrison, Maine lay between two lakes with mountains rising beyond them and was as beautiful a spot as I’ve ever seen. It was a tiny town – population 200 – with three streets. We found the theatre just beyond the third street and it was as enchanting as its setting. The handsome log-cabin playhouse stood in the center of a hushed clearing circled by pine woods. As we walked around to the back of the theatre to Bela Blau’s office the ground under our feet was a thick carpet of pine needles.
Bela shook hands with me and said, beaming; “Your partner will be very glad to see you! She's a local girl and she almost quit when she thought she was going to be in there by herself. She's never worked in a box office before."
I did not say "In a where?" and I did not tell him I couldn't add. If Bela Blau wanted me looking after his finances for the summer, that was his problem. Mine was to get myself installed in a summer theatre. After a day of considerable mental anguish I was finally installed in one and I wasn't leaving.
Still, as I crawled into bed that night, in an airy bedroom in an old-fashioned frame house that let rooms to "summer people," I couldn't help feeling Bela Blau was in for a nerve-racking summer. And boy, was I right.
I met Rita Shaw, my cellmate, the next morning. Reta was a stout schoolteacher with a pretty face and the most cheerful, unruffled disposition I've ever had the privilege of working alongside. She must have caught Theatremania in that box office because the next year she gave up teaching and went to New York to crash the theatre - and did. She began turning up on Broadway as a comedienne in "Gentlemen prefer Blondes" and "Picnic" and "The Pajama Game" and so forth' she was very much in demand for years.
The two of us were on duty in the box office from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. daily, including Sunday. Salary: $17 a week. Eight of it paid the rent on the furnished room with breakfast thrown in, a dollar went for cigarettes (thirteen cents a pack in Maine that summer) and the remaining eight dollars bought seven lunches and seven dinners. The town of Harrison had one restaurant, Ken's Koffee Kup. If you didn't feel like eating there you could always starve. I have fond memories of Ken's place. The cuisine may not have been very haute but you got a lot of food there for eight dollars a week.
Deertrees ran on the package system. In successive weeks we had Tallulah Bankhead, Ethel Barrymore and Grace George, each with her touring company and her ancient hit. Grace George, who had been a reigning star when my father was a chorus boy, had long since grown old enough and rich enough to spend her summers sensibly in Europe. Instead, she was touring the summer circuit in "Kind Lady."
She arrived with her company at nine o'clock of a rainy Sunday night, having spent the day on the road from New Jersey where she'd played the week before. She announced that she would run through the play then and there, so that she and her company could accustom themselves to the new stage before the Monday night opening. But as I said, it was raining. Grace George walked into the theatre and realized there was going to be a hitch in her plans.
Deertrees was built entirely of pine logs, by somebody who didn't realize that the sound of steady rain on pine walls and a pine roof is deafening. During a heavy downpour, the players' voices were completely drowned out and the show simply stopped. When the rain let up - ten minutes or two hours later - the show resumed. So at nine o'clock that Sunday night, Grace George and her company sat down in the damp playhouse to wait out the storm. The crew and staff drifted in and we all sat listening to the racket and batting at the bugs which had hurried in out of the wet. At ten, we began to wonder when Miss George would give up and go to bed.
At a little before eleven, the rain stopped. And Grace George went up onstage with her company, and instead of walking through the play as the old lady held prisoner by two strangers and their half-witted daughter, gave a harrowing, electrifying performance that froze us to our seats. The performance ended at 1:30 A.M., after which Grace George, seventy if she was a day, sashayed serenely off to bed, looking forward to eight performances in the next six days with another traveling Sunday at the end of the week and that's what I mean by Theatremania.
Her opening night performance was fine, but no finer than the performance she'd given for the staff and crew at midnight the night before, so we toasted her at our regular opening-night gin picnic. Each week, every member of the staff and crew gave Flanagan thirty-five cents and he bought gin and pretzels with it, and after the opening we had a gin picnic on the playhouse lawn. One Monday night we drank two hundred proof hospital alcohol instead. One of the boys on the crew had a brother who was an intern at a local hospital and he filched us a bottle of hospital alcohol which we cut with Coca-Cola. You can get higher on that than you can get on Cutty Sark. You can get positively looping till after a while you can't feel your arms or legs or anything.
Rita and I had a "relatively" easy summer in the box office. We whiled away the long hours between customers by playing word games and paper-and-pencil games. Battleship and Hangman and Associations and Twenty Questions and What Is It? On non-matinee days each of us was allowed to take the box office alone for two afternoon hours while the other went swimming or rowing - or just stood outside and felt the sun and saw the sky, which all by itself was a change. Those afternoons gave us the strength to face the trauma of matinee days. The trauma was due to a crisis, which arose absolutely incessantly.
As regularly as Wednesday matinee time arrived, either (a) some camp descended on us, 200 campers and 15 counsellors strong, demanding the tickets they'd sent us a check for - only we'd thought they were coming Saturday so we'd saved 215 Saturday seats and sold today's seats to 215 other customers, and since the theatre only seated 300, there was no place to put the camp; or (b) we had 215 seats saved for the camp and the camp never showed up, having meant their check to cover 215 seats for next Wednesday.
The crisis took a lot out of us every time, not to mention what it took out of Bela Blau. He was a very kind and good-humored man and he never once lost his temper with us, but after the first three or four matinee days he began to acquire a hunted look. By the end of July all the fight went out of him, and for the rest of the summer the three of us simply resigned ourselves to a succession of traumatic Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.
Saturday was frantic altogether. Ticket sales in the morning, then the matinee crisis, then the evening ticket-sales rush, and at nine o'clock, when we closed the box office to the public, we had the entire week's receipts to tot up and balance. Including subtracting the tax on each ticket. I suppose if you had any talent for math you could have totted up our week's gross in half an hour, but it took Rita Shaw and me from nine till midnight, even with Bela helping. And when we were all through we were usually a dollar short.
At midnight on Saturday, we went into the theatre for our voluntary job of keeping the backstage crew awake and on their toes all night as they struck last week's set and mounted next week's. Rita and I made coffee and played records for them till four or five in the morning while they hauled scenery under Flanagan's supervision.
I'll tell you how he happened to explain Flanagan's Law to me. It was on a horrendous night when the male star of the show arrived in his dressing room fifteen minutes before curtain time, roaring drunk. Flanagan came charging out to the box office to tell us the news and describe the uproar backstage.
Since the play was a comedy, I said; "He may get through it, drunk as he is. The audience may think he's just playing the part very broadly. Otherwise it'll be a fiasco and we'll have to return their money."
"Neither will happen," said Flanagan, "because you predicted them. If you can predict it, it doesn't happen. In the theatre, no matter what happens to you, it's unexpected.
So of course I bet him one or the other would happen.
Bela Blau held the curtain till nine, but the star was still too drunk to walk straight or talk distinctly, and it was impossible to keep the audience waiting longer. At nine, Rita and I closed the box office and hurried into the theatre and hung over the back rail and watched in suspense as the curtain rose and the two minor characters who opened the play began their ten-minute scene, at the end of which the star was to make his entrance.
Five minutes after the play began, there was a reverberating clap of thunder followed by a torrent of rain on the pine roof and walls and the play came to an abrupt halt. The curtain fell, the house lights went up and the audience settled good-naturedly to wait out the storm.
At a little after ten, the rain stopped - by which time the star had been dragged out into the rain and forced to swallow a vat of black coffee, and when the curtain rose again he was thoroughly sober.
The play proceeded without a hitch and I've believed in Flanagan's Law ever since.
In the last playbill of the 1940 season Bela included a note to those patrons who wished to pre-book tickets for the next year. He explained that that they did not have to pay then - tickets would be held at the box office until called for - and then went on to explain his philosophy about subscriptions.
"You know why I do not want audiences on a subscription basis, for I have repeatedly urged you not to come to the theatre in the name of ‘art’ or civic responsibility or duty, having always maintained that a well-presented play will find its audience, and a production that does not deserve support will not and should not receive it. I will say no more."
Regretfully, Bela Blau had little opportunity to say more; he died from a heart attack on October 21, 1940 while in his doctor's office. Bela was only 44 years old. His former associate, Marc Connelly, wrote the eulogy to him in the New York Times:
“Last Monday Bela Blau, like a score of other young theatrical producers, was bustling about Times Square. He had finished the chores remaining from his second successful season at the Deertrees Theatre in Harrison, Maine, and was busily completing arrangements for the production of two plays, which were to come to Broadway this winter. At 4 o’clock he felt ill and stepped into a doctor’s office adjoining his own in the Sardi Building. A half-hour later Broadway was shocked to learn that he was dead.
To the casual theatergoer, a familiar name will be missing from the columns of Broadway news and theatre programs. But to his fellow-managers and to the hundreds of actors, playwrights, stagehands, scene painters and others who comprise the professional theatre, Bela Blau was almost unique. They knew him as a rare combination of talents and virtues. By some happy chemistry of temperament and training, he was both an artist and a businessman.
He came into the theatre because of his interest as a student of business and finance. When he was 21 he was an instructor in economics and related subjects at City College. I first met him when he was organizing the financial machinery by which the Theatre Guild was able to erect the theatre that bears its name. About the same time his name appeared on a prospectus of Columbia University, where he gave a series of lectures on business management in the theatre. Many young men and women in the theatrical offices of Broadway today are there because of those astute, lucid and invigorating talks.
During the ten years I had the privilege to be associated with him I learned that he was much more than an astute, lucid and invigorating colleague. He was distinguished by a personal goodness infrequently found in any field of endeavor. He had a poet’s love of beauty and an artist’s discrimination. Bela Blau believed the theatre to be something more than a factory in which to make a livelihood. He was never an opportunist. Instinctively and intellectually he had dedicated himself to a genuine service to the theatre. His enthusiasm for it was not blind. His bounding confidence in its social and cultural importance was born of knowledge and imagination. I doubt that in his modesty Bela Blau ever had an inkling that people liked and respect him as much as they did. He was too busy pouring out his own love for humanity to have time to listen to compliments. The men and women in the theatre can be grateful that such a man was among them for a little while.
In 1999 the Deertrees Theatre Festival reintroduced Bela Blau’s traditions of importing plays, complete with casts, from recent run in New York City. In honor of his everlasting contribution to theatre, subscribes to the series are designated as “The Friends of Bela Blau”
3 March 2004_crp.