Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [91]
As opening night approached, Cheever was frankly “stage struck.” He'd taken to passing his afternoons at the Lyceum Theatre with Kaufman and Gordon, watching rehearsals and “saying No thank you very much to hundreds of women with strawberry hair.” On September 1, he and Mary went to Boston for a two-week tryout at the Colonial Theatre, and once again Cheever was interviewed by the enduring Mabelle Fullerton of the Patriot Ledger (“Former Quincy Boy Courting Miracle”), who described the author as a combination of Peter Pan, Voltaire, and Bambi. Cheever remarked that all the actors in Town House were “wonderful” (“just as I realized them in the stories”), and even wrote his own puff piece for the Boston Post: “From the shelter halves of Guam [i.e., where he'd written one of the “Town House” stories] to the new, comfortable seats in the Colonial Theatre is a fairly long way for an idea to have come,” he concluded, “and I for one am very glad that it made the trip.” On opening night he and Mary checked in at the Ritz, had dinner with family and friends, then repaired en masse to the theater. The show, Cheever decided, was “a sentimental and moderately funny piece of bunk”: “Max Gordon waltzed Kay Brown around the lobby and said they were going to sell it to the pictures for a million dollars.”
Two days later, a few qualms had crept into his head, and he returned to watch another performance in sober solitude:
It seemed vulgar, mechanical, and unfunny. Going out to Quincy on the midnight bus I felt a depression that seemed to transcend that particular evening and those circumstances and to return me to a moment in my youth when perhaps I stepped into a cold and empty house. … We have lived insecurely for so many years that the thought that this trash might bring us a steady income has seduced and corrupted my judgement.
His better judgment was confirmed when the play opened on September 23 at Broadway's National Theatre. In the meantime Cheever had done his best to salvage the thing with a flurry of revisions, while Kaufman had “shine[d] it up” with “so many gags … that it sounded like a recitation from a joke book.” As for the producer, Max Gordon, he'd spent twenty-six thousand dollars on the set alone: a full-sized cutaway of an Upper East Side town house. To no avail. Don Ettlinger, who'd cringed through opening night, remembered the final product as being crammed with a lot of “terrible” gags, and the New York Times agreed (“a thin, loose, mechanical whizzbang that never explodes across the footlights”). The play closed nine days later, after only twelve performances. “I don't quite know who to blame, with the exception of myself,” Cheever wrote his in-laws. “[N]ow and then I feel sorry for myself because I had such wonderful ideas for spreading the money around, but it's a speculative business and I'm glad we confined our speculation to day-dreaming.”
In his journal Cheever wrote, “We are as poor as we ever have been. The rent is not paid, we have very little to eat. … We have many bills.” Determined to write “a story a week,” he was rejected four times in a row by The New Yorker, which meant he wouldn't be receiving a yearly bonus, either.* Faced with dire poverty, and forced into writing “lifeless and detestable” fiction, Cheever chided himself for entertaining an “unreasonable” degree of petulance (“This is a patriarchal relationship, and I certainly respond to the slings of regret, real or imaginary”). At length he dug himself out of his latest hole with an easy lampoon for the slicks titled “The Opportunity,” about a seemingly dull-witted girl who passes up a choice part in a Broadway play because (as she is not too dull-witted to notice) “it stinks;” viciously denounced for her integrity, she yet evades the “[s]corn, ridicule, abuse, and disgust” that are heaped on everyone