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REMINISCING WITH
MARC CONNELLY

At 87 this Pulitzer Prize winner has just finished another play.

The sign rests on a table in Marc Connelly's apartment. "We Do Not Lease Rooms to Theatricals," it warns. "I like it," said the playwright, "it's so contemptuous." His own response to theatricals is both reverent and Rabelaisian, censorious and sentimental. "I have lived with legends," he proclaimed.

Among them is Marcus Cook Connelly, of McKeesport, Pa. Since Feb. 26, 1930, when The Green Pastures arrived to refresh a parched land, he has frolicked in the high meadows of theatrical renown. He is a dazzling raconteur, ebulliently life-centered. At the age of 87 he has written a new comedy. But to begin with the big one, his Pulitzer Prize-winner.

[[image: black and white photo of Marc Connelly, seated with arm resting on table]]

"One day I encountered Roland Kirby, the cartoonist. He said he had just read a book I should read, Roark Bradford's Ol' Man Adam and His Chillun. I read it and it was a series of enchanting stories, the Old Testament from the Negro's point of view.

"So I got the idea of seeing the Old Testament through very simple sharecropper minds, with God the hero and man searching for the divine in himself. Theatre is nothing but man's hunt for the divine in himself, it's an eternal concept.

"Every producer, without exception, turned the play down. It was all Negro and the idea of God being a black man wasn't particularly appetizing, it terrified people.

"One night George Kaufman was playing bridge with Rowland Stebbins, a stockbroker who got out of the market about five minutes before the crash with all his bread. He wanted to go into theatre and George told him I had a play. He bought it."

The play ran five years on Broadway and the road, closing only with the death after a matinee of Richard B. Harrison, who played the Lord.

"Harrison was one of the finest human beings I ever met. He had been mellowed by life. Instead of turning sour and bitter and becoming cynical, he had matured and ripened like a good wine. He was just a wonderful, deep, philosophical, good man.

"I still have some sandwiches from the heavenly fish fry – they're triangular boards, painted to make them look like sandwiches. And I've got the 'Bible' used in the play. It's a history of Ireland with a wonderfully elaborate cover."

Nine months after the play opened Connelly married Madeline Hurlock, a tiny, dark-haired Maryland beauty who had appeared in Mack Sennett's slapstick two-reelers.

"We were married about five years. She fell in love with my best friend, Robert E. Sherwood – it's not unheard of – and they married. Bob was a fine fellow, he was very contrite about it, he felt worse than I did. Sure I was upset. After a while we were friends again and we could dine together."

Sherwood was an esteemed playwright who, at the height of 6 feet, 6 1/2 inches, towered over practically everybody. He wrote The Petrified Forest, Reunion in

by Rebecca Morehouse

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Vienna , Idiot's Delight, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, There Shall Be No Night. His widow lives in New York.

Before The Green Pastures, Connelly and George S. Kaufman wrote plays together. They were newspaperman, Kaufman with the New York Times and Connelly The Morning-Telegraph. Further, they were members of the Algonquin Round Table, a Vesuvius that erupted wits and writers.

Between 1921 and 1924 they fed into the Broadway bloodstream Dulcy (Lynn Fontanne), To the Ladies! (Helen Hayes), Merton of the Movies (Glenn Hunter) and Beggar on Horseback (Roland Young).

"We wrote sometimes at The Times and Alexander Woollcott would come in from the theatre and kick us out: 'Will you kindly get the hell out of here?' We wrote parts of Dulcy at The Times.

"Laurette Taylor and her husband, Hartley Manners, felt Lynn Fontanne wasn't getting any chance as an ingenue. They put it up to George Tyler, who was their manager. He asked us to cook up something for Lynn and we wrote Dulcy. She made an overnight success.

"That same year she married Alfred Lunt – they'd been keeping company. Alfred was a hell of an actor, a wonderful technician. He was the Ralph Richardson of America; his understatement was like Ralph's.

"We wrote To the Ladies! for Helen Hayes. She was also a Tyler star and she'd just had a flop. When we went to her house to tell her the idea, we asked her if she played piano and she said, oh, yes. The door hadn't closed when she was on the phone ordering a piano and a teacher. (Laughter.)

"Winthrop Ames engaged Roland Young to play the young musician in Beggar on Horseback. Ames had a lot of class, he was a Bostonian. He had an apartment above the Little Theatre, very posh, very elegant. He did some Gilbert & Sullivans that were the best I've ever seen produced in America."

In 1926, Connelly made his first solo flight on Broadway. "George and I decided to do a play alone. He did The Butter and Egg Man and I did The Wisdom

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