Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [86]
It was another terrible night of fog and rain and the temperature never climbed above forty degrees. We were out on Folly in that same little house that we paid for with the proceeds from Porgy the play and some royalties from the book as well. It’s still my favorite place I have ever lived. Anyway, we were having cocktails, martinis I think, and I sat down to the piano and began to play a little tune, just a few notes really.
And DuBose said, “Don’t be blue, little Dorothy, soon it will be summertime and we’ll be living calm and easy!”
“Humph,” I said and sang along with my few little notes. “Summertime and the living is easy!”
“Play that again,” DuBose said.
So, I did. I could just hear it in my head like someone was singing it to me. He got very excited.
“What is the matter with you, DuBose?”
“I like that, Dorothy! Summertime and the living is easy! I’m going to send it to George! Can you write down the tune?”
“Of course I can!”
“I think this could be the beginning lyrics for a great song for Porgy and Bess!” He refilled his drink and mine and took a pad and pencil from the desk. He was suddenly very animated. “Let’s see! What happens in the summer? Corn grows way up high!”
“So does cotton,” I said. “Well not so high as corn, I’ll admit, but it gets as high as it’s going to, doesn’t it?”
“Yes! Yes, it does! And what else? We go fishing!”
“Yes, when you walk down by the gullies and docks you can see all the little fish jumping in the sun!”
“Well, I suspect the poor little fellows are jumping because they’re trying to avoid being eaten by a bigger fish. But I’m writing this all down . . .”
And he wrote it all down and sent if off to George, who, along with his brother Ira turned it into one of my favorite songs in the whole play. And, lo! Guess what? They gave DuBose credit for cowriting the lyrics! Isn’t that swell? Isn’t that just the grandest thing? DuBose said oh, no no, he didn’t want the credit but they insisted. They absolutely insisted. George may have been a bit of a scene-stealer but his brother Ira was one of the finest men I have ever met and both of them had a terrific sense of fairness.
I’ll tell you this. DuBose could have been anything he wanted to—he was already a poet and a novelist of adult and children’s books and now he was going to be known as a lyricist! I was so proud of him. Oh! And he was a screenwriter, too! He wrote a script for Eugene O’Neill’s adaptation of The Emperor Jones for film, but he didn’t really enjoy the work so much. Eugene was an old classmate of mine. I introduced them to each other and I always wondered if DuBose was jealous of him.
Even though that didn’t end so well, DuBose tried screenwriting again for Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and that was kind of a disaster, too, because they had twenty other writers working on it. In the end his name didn’t even appear in the credits, which he was glad of, because he didn’t like the movie at all. Anyway, the point is that Hollywood never really valued its writers much, which if you think about it makes no sense whatsoever. You could have all the Clark Gables and Vivien Leighs in the world but if the words they spoke didn’t enthrall you, what good was the movie? No, I don’t care what any of those Hollywood fools say, you have to start with a good story and that story is nothing without good writers.
Fade to Darkness
Chapter Twenty
The Piano
The movers pulled into the yard at around three in the afternoon and began to slowly unload the truck. They were supposed to have been there at noon, but I imagined they stopped for a nice long lunch somewhere and then had a nice long nap by the side of the road and then stopped for ice cream, so three was about right. I just loved waiting around for people to show up. But actually, on that afternoon, I was preparing dinner for John and I wasn’t going to let anything ruin my good mood. What was I cooking? Roasted chicken, mashed potatoes