The Streetcar Arrives

For once, even the critics agreed. Last week 17 out of 21 Broadway reviewers voted Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire the best new play of the season. Mister Roberts got two votes, Command Decision and Medea one each. The critics then picked Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy as the best foreign play to reach Broadway this season. Neither playwright was on hand to take a bow: Rattigan was home in England; Williams, whose Glass Menagerie had won the prize in 1944-45, was vacationing in Italy.

The critics' choice of Streetcar made Tennessee Williams the leading contender for the title of the nation's most gifted young playwright. The choice also heaped honors on much-honored Director Elia Kazan (recently Oscared by Hollywood for directing Gentleman's Agreement). But the prize had a more personal significance for Producer Irene Selznick : Streetcar was her first Broadway production (her Heartsong was a pre-Broadway flop). This clinched the fact that the daughter of Cinemogul L. B. Mayer who is also sister-in-law of Cinemogul William Goetz and ex-wife of Cinemogul David O. Selznick, had at last made a success in show business that she could call her own.

Stubborn old L.B., who is accustomed to getting his own way, never quite accepted the fact that Irene, his second daughter, was not a son. But L.B. saw that she had lessons in piano, violin and cooking -- as well as in golf, tennis and swimming. He routed her out of bed early every morning for an hour's horseback ride before breakfast. Even now he sometimes says to her sadly: "Just think, if you had only been a boy. Aaaah!"

Muses Irene: "L.B. thought that a woman's place was in the home. I almost never got out except with the family." When she was 19, she got out long enough to meet a bright young studio executive named Dave Selznick at a New Year's party. Three years later they were married.

For the next 15 years, Irene lived as Papa L.B. had planned. Hollywood knew her as a pleasant hostess and mother (of Jeffrey, 15, and Daniel, 11). What Hollywood did not know was that Irene had been quietly studying a variety of subjects, such as architecture, painting, medicine, psychology, sociology--and show business.

Last year, against the stern advice of L.B., Irene began looking for a play to produce. When Heartsong flopped, Hollywood smiled knowingly. But Tennessee Williams' agent, who had been popping in to rehearsals to watch Irene work, offered her the chance to produce Streetcar. Says Irene with unashamed pride: "Producers have to be cast just as carefully as actors, you know."

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