Abbott had his flops, but they were like Ted Williams swinging and missing: you knew he would drive one into the seats. Throughout Abbott’s career the seats were filled with people who came to get, in his words, “refreshment of spirit.” You could envision an Elizabethan Abbott working with that Stratford-on-Broadway pro Shakespeare. “[Shakespeare] was writing shows,” said Abbott. “He had not the slightest thought that anyone would ever read them.”
Those words are from his autobiography, “Mister Abbott,” published in 1963 when he was 76. There was no elegiac note in the book: Abbott had plenty of shows and another marriage (his third) to go after it came out. Something deeply America comes through in its pages, a kind of puritanical delectation. He confesses to having once contracted gonorrhea, adding that his sister didn’t want him to mention it. But, said Abbott, he was following a favorite writer, Montaigne, who said that “he owed the whole truth about himself to his readers.”
Abbott was born in 1887 in upstate New York. He played football at the University of Rochester before going to Harvard to study playwriting with the legendary professor George Pierce Baker. He came to New York in 1913 but admits he “was not a successful playwright until I took parasitical advantage of other people’s ideas.” Abbott became the most famous play doctor of all time, having his first big hit in 1926 when he rejiggered Philip Dunning’s play, appropriately called “Broadway.” For nearly 30 years, from 1935 to 1968, he always had at least one play running on Broadway as director or writer.
During that period he became famous as a director of farce like “Three Men on a Horse” and “Boy Meets Girl.” In his first major musical, “On Your Toes” in 1936, he directed the brilliant Ray Bolger, with dances by George Balanchine, who received the first choreographic credit for a musical. In 1940 “Pal Joey” shook up Broadway with John O’Hara’s gritty realism set to a score by Rodgers and Hart. The New York Times’s dean of critics, Brooks Atkinson, was shocked: “Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” he lamented. When it was revived in 1952 Atkinson took another swig and found it delicious.
In 1944 there was more innovation in “On the Town” with Abbott directing a team of youthful genius: Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, Adolph Green. Working with them, said Abbott, “I had an emotional reaction which I have often felt since. I felt as though I were Jewish.” Abbott was in fact accused by some of lacking emotion. The truth was that he was a classicist who abhorred emotional vagueness. A Method actor, he said, was someone who “worked so hard for inner feeling that he forgets to bring it out into the light where we can get a look at it.”
The classic Abbott image was the director, dressed like a bank president, drilling a line of scantily clad chorus girls. He never raised his voice, but as director Harold Clurman said, “You knew that there was steel there.” When the young Paul Muni had a temperamental fit, Abbott said quietly: “Don’t do that. I won’t take it.” When Muni gave a good reading, Abbott said, “I must say that’s very fine. I’ve nothing to add.” But he added a great deal to the American theater, to the genius of the popular culture. Composer Bob Merrill said, “I don’t believe in a race of supermen but I believe in individual supermen. That guy is one of those.” Actress Maureen Stapleton certainly agreed-they had an affair when Abbott was 82. “He is sensational in every way,” Stapleton told a friend. It must have been fun to be Mr. Abbott.
Some Abbott bright lights: (d = director, w = writer, c = co)
1926 Broadway (d, cw) Chicago (d) 1932 Twentieth Century (d) 1935 Three Men on a Horse (d,cw) 1986 On Your Toes (d, cw) 1987 Room Service (d) 1988 The Boys from Syracuse (d,w) 1940 Pal Joey (d) 1942 Sweet Charity (d) 1944 On the Town (d) 1947 High Button Shoes (d) 1951 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (d, cw) 1958 Wonderful Town (d) Tony Award 1954 The Pajama Game (d, cw) Tony 1955 Damn Yankees (d, cw) Tony 1959 Fiorello! (d, cw) Tony, Pulitzer 1962 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (d) Tony 1965 Flora, the Red Menace (d, cw) 1967 How Now, Dow Jones (d)
