Children Run Longer Than Plays

In an emergency room of Manhattan's Roosevelt Hospital not long ago, a tall woman lay stretched out on a table, looking like a Valkyrie about to be immolated on her shield. Her youthful, pretty face was contorted. An intern was gently examining two fingers of her left hand, which had just been crushed in a car door, causing no serious damage but a great deal of pain. Trying to anesthetize the patient with small talk, he asked: "What do you do?" The patient gripped a cotton pad soaked with smelling salts. and winced as she spoke. "Oh, dear God," she said, laughing and crying simultaneously. "I'm a humorist."

A few months from now, the incident will undoubtedly appear in print, considerably embellished, and the opening sentence may well be something breezy like "There is an automobile loose on the streets of New York with two of my fingers." This will be followed by several hundred words about the professional sadism of doctors, the difficulty of opening a jar of instant coffee with one hand bandaged and the intricacies of Blue Cross ("Until now I'd always thought the term 'major medical had something to do with the armed services"). Undoubtedly there will also be a report on how at 3 a.m. the throbbing of a finger brings thoughts of gangrene, death, the need of carrying more insurance, whether one's widower will simply mourn for years in silence, or whether he will remarry (Tammy Grimes? But can she cook?). The whole thing will be light, deft, charming, and fetch $3,000 from virtually any magazine, not to mention an eventual movie sale. Almost any intern, life insurance salesman, housewife and child over five will readily recognize the style of Jean

Kerr, one of the pleasantest humorists now working, a woman who can transform the ordinary vicissitudes of life into laughter, expertly turning next-to-nothing into molehills.

Even before the piece appears in print, her friends will hear excerpts, for anyone within the range of Jean Kerr's voice is a tryout audience. When friends go to see her new hit, Mary, Mary, Broadway's brightest, wittiest play since The Moon Is Blue (Warner Bros, bought it for more than $500,000), they are not surprised to recognize some of the best lines. For Jean Kerr writes as she talks, and she talks all the time. Once, at a party, a tape recording was made of Noel Coward singing; when it was played back, all that could be heard was Jean Kerr, talking. She is perfectly willing to listen to other people; it is simply that most people would rather listen to her. As a result, she expends so much energy on talking--her blue eyes flashing, her arms semaphoring --that she has little strength left for other physical effort. She is a stand-up comedian who sits down.

Circle in the Square. Writing and talking, sitting or standing, Jean Kerr has gotten more material out of her family than anyone since Clarence Day. Her most recent collection of casual pieces, The Snake Has All the Lines, has been on every bestseller list and in nearly every hospital room in the country. Its phenomenally successful predecessor, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, has sold nearly 275,000 hard-cover copies. All of which has made Jean Kerr even more famous than her children, the five sons who apparently play she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not with their teeth. She has achieved the life a great many women dream about: successful writer, distracted mother, in charge of an organized but unstuffy suburban household, married to an intelligent and devoted husband, with time for travel and parties--in short, the best of two worlds, which for her are centered in Larchmont, N.Y., and Broadway.

If she is troubled by a problem, it may be that she is somewhat overweight (size 18). "I feel about diets the way I feel about airplanes," she says. "They are wonderful things for other people to go on." She has a life membership at Vic Tanny's, but has used it only three times, and is thinking of giving it to a deserving friend. Still, if she is ever dissatisfied with her own image, she can look at the Broadway play, Critic's Choice, which is frankly, if superficially, based on Mr. and Mrs. Kerr; there she is portrayed by Georgann Johnson, who is much slimmer than she (though Jean is easily the better actress). and her husband is impersonated by Henry Fonda, who is slightly more handsome than Walter Kerr (though Walter is easily the better critic). In the movie version of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, of course, the Kerrs were played by Doris Day and David Niven, a fate that has befallen nobody else in Larchmont.

Through all this she remains a bit of a square and a bit naive; according to her friend and neighbor, Walter Slezak. "A certain line of smut goes past her." She is still awed by some occasions. Before a television appearance,, she had the shakes so badly that Jack Paar had to wrap her in his bathrobe, like a Channel swimmer. But most of the time, she is unshakable and very much in charge of things. "If I were having a frontal lobotomy," she says, "I'd tell them how to do it, like 'try going in through the ear.' '' Possibly if Bernard Shaw had known American women better, he might have invented Jean Kerr. Like almost all Shavian heroines, she is articulate, cheerful, casually domineering, competent, simple --a bit of the Earth Mother whom Shaw was forever recreating.

Electric Shocks. There is a good deal of Jean Kerr in Mary, Mary, a play that one critic described as "five characters releasing an author." The characters inhabit an unashamedly prefabricated plot (about a divorced couple who, of course, get together again), but it is full of humor and insight. All situation comedy is clockwork; what matters is who makes the clock. Like Jean Kerr, the heroine is a compulsive wisecracker: years ago, when her husband made his first tentative pass, she told him, "Let's not start something we can't finish in a taxi on 44th Street." Like Jean Kerr, another character is a fast shuffler of cliches: his recent de parture from Hollywood, explains the aging matinee idol, was an example of "the sinking ship leaving the rats." Like Jean Kerr, a third character is full of electric shock: "A lawyer," he says, "is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, any more than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table."

But Jean Kerr's play is much more than a catalogue of one-line gags. The best laughs of Mary, Mary arise from character and substance; simple lines that are meaningless out of context ricochet around the stage and find their targets unerringly beyond the footlights. She knows how to trim her themes in light blue; but her humor is always basically decent--and universal. The man in Mary, Mary was, after all, married to the woman whose shoulder he sometimes tapped at 11p.m. saying: "Are you in the mood tonight? Because if you're not, I'm going to take a sleeping pill."

Alien Settings. From Piltdown man to Perelman, the history of humor is overwhelmingly male, and only a few representative female names present themselves for comparison with Jean Kerr. The most celebrated is Dorothy Parker, essentially a short-story writer whose glib acidities at and near the Algonquin Round Table gave her a legendary reputation. At the other, soft-boiled end of the world was the late Betty (The Egg and 1 Mac-Donald, an authentic primitive. Jean Kerr will probably never be quite up to Parker (for one thing, she is not cruel nor, perhaps, as deep), and she will never stoop to suffer from the "poultricidal tendencies" of MacDonald. She is nearer, but not completely in, the no man's land--and Everywoman's country--of such writers as Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Cornelia Otis Skinner (Nuts in May), Sally Benson (Junior Miss) and Phyllis Mc-Ginley, a Larchmont neighbor and close friend, whose light verse parallels, to some extent, the everyday materials of Jean Kerr's prose.-But Phyllis McGinley is a deeper, more sentient writer to whom humor is seldom an end in itself.

The humorist actually most closely akin to Jean Kerr, at her best, is Robert Benchley. As writers, they share the same gently shrugging quality that utterly preludes malice, the same preoccupation with the bizarre edges of the commonplace, the same disarming penchant for self-deprecation, as when the ample Mrs. Kerr compares herself to "a large bran muffin" or Benchley calls himself "Sweet Old Bob, or sometimes just the initials."

In prose pieces or plays, the best element in Jean Kerr's humor is that it often bridges traditionally alien settings, brings the muddy-carpeted world of school lunches and commuter trains into incon gruous collision with the slick panoplies of Manhattan. It works in both direc tions. Writing about a third-grade play at a Larchmont school, she notes certain uneven spots that "could have been cleaned up if they had taken the show to New Rochelle for a couple of weeks." Conversely, one of the biggest laughs in Mary, Mary comes when the movie actor prepares to take the heroine out on the town, stifles her ex-husband's objections by asking: "Should my mother have called your mother?"

Sometimes a little too cute--Walter is the children's "alternate sponsor"--Jean Kerr is also overly fond of using the language of television commercials. But she is wary of puns and uses them with care--"Idle roomers beget idle rumors"--preferring to play on people rather than words. For she is a devastating parodist, whether in a single line about "The Confessions of St. Augustine, as told to Gerold Frank," or in the full-sized parodies of Vladimir Nabokov ("To watch Lolita sit at the kitchen table and play jacks was to know what Aristotle meant by pity and terror"), or null Sagan: that timeless moment when the bored geriatric lover gets out of the bored hoyden's bed and hops up and down to get his circulation going. And like all humorists, she thrives on embellishment, taking small facts and inflating them into outrageous acts of hyperbole. When one of her boys came home with a dead horseshoe crab, she put it down the Dispose-All in fact, but in print she claimed it had been stored in the Bendix and washed with a load of sheets. "You take the thing, touch it up, improve it," she says, "and turn it the way you want it to go."

She has, to a great extent, done just that with her own life.

Childhood by Rockwell. Now 37, Jean Kerr was once Bridget Jean Collins of Scranton, Pa., the first of four children of a construction foreman who had emigrated from Ireland to find a career in the New World so that he could send back to County Cork for his sweetheart, Kitty O'Neill. Kitty, second cousin of Playwright Eugene O'Neill, is better known to readers of The Snake Has All the Lines as "My Wild Irish Mother," a woman with an unquenchable sense of humor. "After all the money I've sunk in bronchitis," she said recently, "if I die of anything else, I'll shoot myself." For years she called her daughter "Biddy Jean," until a nun at Scranton's Marywood Seminary put a stop to it on the ground that the term biddy was an insult to Irish womanhood.

Spelunkers of the writer's mind will find no dark pockets in Jean Kerr's memories of her girlhood. Norman Rockwell might have painted it, showing an oversize white clapboard house with a wide front porch, through the window an upright piano, an upright father singing in his rich baritone, an energetic mother doing the spring cleaning for the second time that day, and beside the house a tall elm tree with a tall young girl high in its branches eating an apple and reading a book.

Even as a youngster, Jean was so articulate that her father once burst out at her: "The only damn thing in this world you're good for is talking," and to that moment of encouragement she Pollyan-nishly traces her bent for writing dialogue. If she had a problem, it was her height--5 ft. ii in. To her brothers Hugh and Frank (now a Connecticut bank manager and a Philadelphia lawyer) and her sister

Eileen (who died a year and a half ago), she was literally a big sister who could beat up any bully in town, and the celebrated story is true that she was picked to be Marywood's Queen of the May because she was the only girl tall enough to crown an enormous statue of the Virgin.

Self-consciously, she developed a defensive talent for the quick rejoinder. A Marywood priest once tried to sell her a copy of the Sacred Heart Messenger. "What would you rather read?" he argued. "The Sears, Roebuck catalogue," said Jean. One teacher flunked her when, during a ponderous lecture on doctrine, she broke in to inform the class that "a man's best friend is his dogma."

Enter Wally. She was a pretty girl with' long 1941 hair and memorable blue eyes, but she seldom went out, and had an aversion to all but the tallest boys. "They had to be ready for Ringling's," she recalls. At Marywood, she dabbled in dramatics, played the mother superior in The Kingdom of God. During her sophomore year, Walter Francis Kerr came to Scranton to see a student performance of Romeo and Juliet. Jean was the stage manager. He was 5 ft. 8 in. and pushing 30, but soon she was telling her mother, with a gesture toward her eyes: "The only height that matters is from here up."

By then a drama instructor at Washington's Catholic University, Walter Kerr had come from Evanston, 111., where at 13 he was a professional movie critic. Odd as it seems, the Attila of West 44th Street was known in those days as Wally. A carpenter's son, he began college at De Paul, had to withdraw during the Depression (he finished later at Northwestern). Kerr supported himself for two years by staging, directing and writing shows "for anyone who'd give me $25--the Y.M.C.A., the American Legion, church groups, anyone." When Jean came for a Christmas visit a few years later, it was the first time he'd ever brought a girl home, and Jean, his sister remembers, "was the first person I ever saw make Walter laugh out loud."

Following Walter's suggestion, Jean meanwhile had been taking summer courses at Catholic University. Grades were merely "passes" and "high passes." and she drew them from him, at least in the classroom, but he carefully chose the word "God-awful'' to describe her first play. He liked some of her sketches better, particularly Going Whose Way?, a take-off on The Bells of St. Mary's. "My favorite lin^," she remembers, "is when this nun was in the iron lung and the priest asks her, 'Isn't this an iron lung?' and she says, 'I'd hoped you wouldn't notice.'"

Northern Sophistication. Walter and Jean were married in the summer of 1943, and soon she too joined the university faculty as an English instructor, teaching World War II veterans how to clean, load and fire a gerund. Christopher, their first son, was born two years later, and their next baby was stillborn. The difficulty was in the Rh factor, and her obstetrician told Jean she would have no more children. The outcome of his prediction is well known, and it began with twins, delivered, like the later two, by Caesarean section.

During his eleven years at Catholic University (1938-49), Walter Kerr helped build one of the most respected college drama departments in the U.S., meanwhile collaborating with Jean on various Broadway projects, most notably the 1949 revue, Touch and Go. Having decided that they needed "metropolitan sophistication," they moved north, where, after a season as drama critic on Commonweal, he moved into the vacancy left by Howard Barnes on the New York Herald Tribune. He quickly outclassed all other daily reviewers in town. Meanwhile, Jean began writing her comic essays and the comedy, King of Hearts, which had a medium run on Broadway in 1954. She often worked in the front seat of theii Chevrolet, parked away from the dis tractions of home. The "metropolitai sophistication" Walter had been looking for materialized in a growing circle o friends that now includes poets, book reviewers, critics, surgeons, directors, pro ducers, actors, and a Dy Dee diaper service man who once followed Walter int< a bathroom and argued about the theater with him while he tried to take a shower But there was only limited time for socia life as the Kerrs settled down to life 01 the emerald aisle.

Sidewalk Talk. She goes with hin to most openings on and off Broadway Producers give them two of the best seat assigned to the enemy--at one end of thi fifth-or sixth-row center, balanced by thi Times at the opposite end. The othe papers and magazines get slightly inferio angles. After the play begins, Jean Ker is death on audience whisperers, turninj fierce eyes toward them until they dis appear into the upholstery. "I wouldn' talk when the curtain is up," she says "any more than I would dump babies ou of their carriages."

At intermissions, the critics head fo the sidewalk--except for the Times, whicl traditionally stays indoors--and they obe; a gentlemen's agreement not to discus the play. Jean Kerr does most of thi talking anyway, about everything fron babies to books, and she is fast friend with nearly every man on murderers' row She even became the godmother of Georgi Jean Nathan when the late critic, at 75 was converted to Catholicism.

What, No Nudges? Over the years be fore Brooks Atkinson's retirement as thi Times's critic last spring, the Kerrs an< Atkinsons became particular friends "What Jean and Oriana thought abou the theater was often more interestm; than what we thought," said Atkinsoi last week. "They were less inhibited. The) were more slashing than we could be." Producer David Merrick, the Shubert Al ley Catiline, came to that conclusion some time ago, claiming that Jean Kerr influenced her husband during performances by a series of codelike nudges. Kerr responded in print with a riposte that made Merrick look like 44 kinds of fool, or roughly six short of the mark. "She likes me, that crazy girl," wrote Kerr. "Surely, Mr. Merrick, someone, somewhere, has liked you well enough to give you a little dig in the elbow. No? Ah, well."

When plays end, Jean would almost rather take a cab than walk even 150 feet, the distance from the Billy Rose Theater to the editorial offices of the New York Herald Tribune. In his cubicle, Walter Kerr has 50 minutes to write. Jean sits near by and reads The Hollywood Reporter, Photoplay, even the scrapbooked reviews of former critics. Only on the way home by train, Walter's carbon in hand, does she begin to discuss the play with him. The talk goes on and on, as it does nearly every night, over several bottles of beer, until 3 or 4 a.m. In fact, "I don't think we've been to bed before i o'clock more than three times since we've been married," says Jean Kerr. "We wait around for the quiet."

Saint in the House. He is up by 10 and at work in his study, getting on with his next book, The Decline of Pleasure. She, meanwhile, is upstairs disproving his title --flaked out like Perrault's princess at least until i p.m. When they were married, he fondly told her that he would bring her coffee each morning, a custom that lasted some ten or twelve minutes. "The first time I brought it, having gotten up quietly," he recalls, "I gently woke her, and nearly got blown out of the room. She told me that must never, never happen again. And it never has."

The boys--excepting 2^-year-old Gregory--are packed off to school by Mabel

Groom, the Kerrs' most important asset after their talent. "Mrs. Kerr is a real gay gal," says Mabel--but not in the early hours of her day. Then, like the heroine of Mary, Mary, she doesn't grasp things: "I hear voices all right, but I can't pick out the verbs." After an urn or two of coffee, she begins to pick them out--on a typewriter in the third-floor master bedroom. She has given up using the celebrated Chevrolet as an office, "because I ran out of places to park. People would drive past and wave." She is still engagingly casual about her work, although, as she has remarked, "I consider any writer serious who makes more than $20,000 a year."

When the boys come home--15-year-old Christopher from Fordham Prep, the middle three from St. Augustine's parochial school--they go to their mother and spill out the news of the day; but they respect their father's privacy, since his threads break on interruption, while hers do not. All the Kerrs usually have dinner together, even if there is an opening. Walter and Jean are lucky if they can get a bite in edgewise, which may go some distance toward explaining why Walter Kerr's reviews--as the New Yorker has pointed out--are stuffed with wistful, gastronomic images. He's famished.

Jean always carves, but if she does little things like that beyond the customary wifely duties, he, as a husband, is St. Walter of Larchmont. Several afternoons a month, he gets behind a shopping cart in a Post Road supermarket. Moreover, he knows all about diaper pins, he doles out the petty cash ("We never hit Mom for money," say the boys), and, above all, he types her manuscripts, which, as any writer will understand, makes him a sort of household Nathan Hale. He also criticizes her work as it progresses, sending her back to the typewriter to fill in missing gaps, propelled by such comments as "This woman hasn't spoken in eleven pages; has she died of a wasting disease?"

Natural-Born Slob. Says Jean .Kerr: "I seem to need less consolation than a lot of my friends," and one reason may be her solid religious convictions. "The most important thing about me," she says, "is that I am a Catholic. It's a superstructure within which you can work, like the sonnet. I need that. A good director tells the actors where to move exact ly; then they're free to act. I'm grateful for that discipline, and I've never had a crisis of conscience." In a recurrent dream, she dies, now in a road accident, now of disease. "I keep thinking as I'm dying, I wanted to be better, more virtuous. I think to be good it's not sufficient just not to commit adultery. I cried when Tom Dooley died because I'll never do anything good and hard like that." But. in the words of one of her brothers. Jean Kerr is no "beads-in-the-pocket type of Catholic." When Jean heard that the Vatican was going to blacklist Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, legend has it that she rushed out and bought a copy to read it before the ban became official.

She confesses that her "besetting sin is sloth. I'm a natural-born slob. I once mislaid a copy of the Reader's Digest in my purse." ("I," pronounces Walter Kerr with critical accuracy, "am a hell of a lot neater than she is.") She buys enough cosmetics to underwrite a television program, spends hours and fortunes at the hairdresser, but cares little for clothes, buying cut-rate bargains. She has been wearing the same grey-fur-collared cloth coat to Broadway openings for years, frequently with a button missing.

Backstage, the Kerrs are respected as genuine professionals, even if Jean can now and then be persuaded to change a line by an actor who calls her "sweetie." Together they have set some sort of theatrical record, he as a director and she as playwright, for seriously antagonizing almost no one, despite the frenetic, hypersensitive atmosphere of pre-Broadway rehearsals, when nearly everyone behaves--as Jean Kerr puts it--"as if they had just been rescued from burning stables." The lone, whinnying exception is Elaine Stritch, frenetic, hypersensitive star of their unfortunate 1958 musical, Goldilocks. "Jean and Walter," says Elaine, "are like the classroom mom and dad.

Once in rehearsal I got into a fight with someone, and Walter walked right down the aisle and shouted up at me: 'Elaine, go to your dressing room!' Dig that. The teacher complex. She always talks as though she'd memorized her own writing. You want to hear Jean say, 'Gee, you were great, Elaine.' Instead, you get nothing but humor 24 hours a day. They're a clean-cut couple. She drinks beer and he goes in for Cokes and Hershey bars. Jean should swing a bit with a Gibson and find herself."

Poems Every Sunday. But Jean finds herself in her family. "Children run longer than plays," she says, and the five best testimonials to her are Christopher, Colin, John, Gilbert and Gregory Kerr. Seldom have boys been so publicly caricatured by a mother and seldom have five boys picked up so much character from a mother (and father) in private. They are independent and unselfconscious, too mature to expect Christmas more than once a year but too normal to settle for a single Halloween. Every Sunday evening they recite poems--from Milton to Hopkins--that they have learned during the week; on other nights they play chess and Monopoly with their father, and hold word contests with their mother. She has retired from "therapy games," and is planning a casual piece on how to lose quickly at checkers.

When she is not amplifying their deeds in writing, their mother can talk about them with fond objectivity. "Chris is the funny one," she says. "John is serious, like his father. John has only been struck about three times in his life; Chris we hit about three times an hour. John's reflective. On election night at bedtime, John said, 'How will I know if Kennedy gets elected?" I said. 'I'll come in and kiss you.' He said, Tm a heavy sleeper. You'd better slap me.'

"All the boys are interested in what Walter and I do," she continues her assessment. "They even ask about box-office grosses. Get the picture? But they're casual, too. Colin has read only about five chapters of Please Don't Eat the Daisies. He says,. 'Maybe I'll finish it--if I have to go to the hospital or something.' As for Gilbert, he is a born conformer, and giddy. Gregory's only 2^. Even so, he's a little slow. His father asked him, 'Where is Mommy?' a couple of days ago, and he looked under the coffee table."

The Castle of Otranto. All of this goes on in something that is not to be believed. The Kerr-Hilton, as Jean Kerr calls her home, is both the sum and summary of its contents, a brick and half-timber Tudor-Spanish architectural error on the edge of Long Island Sound. Like the Kerrs, it sits squarely in the suburbs, but its outlines are in fairyland. Built by a rich automotive inventor on the original foundations of the Larchmont Shore Club stables, it looks like the Castle of Otranto, reaching high with turrets and towers and a cupola. It also looks as easy to clean as the lower Bowery, and Mrs. Kerr moans that a Cunard liner could run back and forth across the Atlantic all winter on the oil it takes to heat the place.

The front door is a' massive triptych of oak and brass with a 20-lb. knocker that sports Venus and Neptune hanging from the jowls of a metacanine beast. If you walk in hurriedly, you are instantly outdoors again in a huge courtyard, having passed through a small hall with flooring that is a mixture of Pennsylvania linoleum and Spanish tile. The courtyard is full of rosebushes, boxwoods, a grape arbor, and mirrors on an inland wall that reflect the sea. A statue of St. Francis stands in the center in a filled-in pond that once, in another era, brimmed with gallons of champagne. At one end is a playpen big enough for a growing mastiff, but it only contains one tiny Kerr.

The Bells Toll. Indoors is a dining room with a broad-beamed oak floor, no rug, and a table placed so strategically that it would take a center fielder's throw ing arm to get a porringer full of Pablum to the wall. The kitchen's casement windows are ornamented with stained glass. On a counter is a Teddy bear in an electric frying pan, and a copy of Meals for Two that hasn't been opened in 15 years.

At the other extreme of the house is Walter Kerr's study, where 16 theater seats are screwed permanently into the floor; there he shows old slapstick silent films to guests ("Walter thinks nobody should have to be adorable right after dinner," says Jean). The adjacent living room--like every other room in the house, half the niches and all the floors--is filled with books, everything from Boccaccio to Beerbohm, plus a slim volume called Per Piacere, Non Mangiate Le Margherite (Please Don't Eat the Daisies). In the room next door, a television set peers out from the interior of an enormous iron stove, symbolically lighting no fires in this particular house. High above it all, bolted to the eaves, is a functioning 28-bell carillon that, at the touch of a switch, tolls out something from Carmen, which, in the Larchmont libretto, means "Come home." Whether for dinner, discipline or to greet a visitor, the Kerr boys head in when they hear the bell; so, in fact, did their late, spectacularly lamented cat.

Jean Kerr herself stopped tintinnabu-lating once just long enough to get married. It was a wise decision, since the groom was a careful, analytical college professor who has always looked after her with extraordinary attentiveness. That and nearly everything else about her was summed up a while ago in a quick exchange while the Kerrs were crossing a Manhattan street--her swift-rising wisecracks, her devotion to her husband, the graceful way she wears her fame.

Reacting anxiously to the traffic, Walter Kerr said, "Stick with me."

"And you'll make me a star?" she asked, taking his arm.

-Author McGinley is also a fellow Catholic, devoted to heavily Catholic Larchmont. In / Know a Village, she has celebrated its charms: It looks haphazard to the shore.

Brown flickers build there. And I'd not Willing, I think, exchange it jor Arcadia or Camelot.

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