I Believe in You

The title of the smash hit musical of Broadway's new season--How to Succeed m Business Without Really Trying --is actually a bit misleading. The hero is energetic, guileful, scheming, ambitious, shrewd, sly and ruthless. In short, he really tries hard, and his swift progression from window washer to chairman of the board is accomplished with such finesse that you scarcely notice the blood on the corpses. The character, in fact, is so basically repulsive that there is probably only one Broadway actor who could turn this despicable crud into the most lovable monster since Barrie's crocodile. That actor has the part.

Robert Alan Morse is 30 years old but looks as if he were pushing 19. Small and compact, with a boyish shock of unarranged light brown hair, bright pannikin eyes and a look-ma smile, he seems to have been formed by a head-on collision between Mickey Rooney and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He is the little ploy next door, and the vast delight of How to Succeed is in watching this studiously naive charming cub cheetah knock the spots off a pack of ravenous yes-men. After each victory Morse turns to the audience with a collaborative expression on his face that somehow touches a sympathetic nerve in every expense accountable soul in the house, who recognizes both the tactic and the impulse.

Penrod & Sammy. Morse's own swift rise on Broadway has not always been so endearing. He was so irritatingly erratic during the road trials of his first play. 1953's The Matchmaker, that the rest of the nervous cast was ready to sign a petition to have him dropped; but he eventually scored a personal triumph, peeping out from under a table shouting, "We're all terribly innocent," and he was the only member of the Broadway cast who was signed to appear in the film version. During the pre-Broadway run of his next play, Say, Darling, he was cast as an overcarbonated young producer. One actress recalls. "I had to walk the streets of New Haven with Bobby every goddam night. He kept saying how awful he was. He bit his nails and cried. The cast hated him. He was stealing the show." Steal it he did, with a devastating caricature of Broadway Producer Hal Prince; but in his next appearance, as Richard Miller in Take Me Along, he failed to steal top honors from the masterful Jackie Gleason, and had to settle merely for superb notices.

In the current show, it is his enviable duty to plant long-lasting kisses on the ingenue, Bonnie Scott, but he recently turned on her with a four-letter snarl and added: "Blot your lipstick or I'll smear it all over your face." And at one final curtain, as the cast soaked up the downpour of applause, Morse turned and remarked to one and all (including 60-year old Co-Star Rudy Vallee): "Well, thev liked me."

No one smiled just then, but fellow actors generally like Bobby Morse too--when they are not working too close to him. He is more Penrod than Sammy Glick. Up and down the Rialto, he first-names doormen and kisses headwaiters in theatrical hangouts. He even kisses Producer David Merrick. He has jumped up from a restaurant table to blaze away at imaginary badmen with an imaginary six-shooter. On one memorable occasion he turned a chocolate mousse upside down on his head.

Sing Out & Sonar. By his own description, he was always the class cutup and showoff. Raised in suburban Boston, where his father ran a chain of movie theaters, he was forever going to school with phony bandages on his head, explaining that his mother had hit him with a rolling pin or, after the 1938 hurricane, that a falling oak had beaned him. Something had to be done, or so it seemed, and eventually Morse was sent off to the lower school of the Christian Scientist Principia College in Illinois. Peccadilloes there were punished as sins. When Bobby stole a dollar or so from his house mother's coin collection, he was placed in solitary confinement, and when he confessed later to a minor sexual experience with a girl classmate ( Nothing bad--we just looked at each other"), he was expelled.

Back home at Newton High School, an understanding teacher decided that if Bobby Morse wanted to show off so much he should produce, direct and star in a school production of Walter Kerr's Sing Out Sweet Land. The show was good, his grades improved noticeably, and he decided to become an actor. The decision was also a kind of revelation for young Bobby: "It explained why I was always behaving like a brat."

After four years as a sonar man in the Navy, Bobby approached Broadway. Under the wing of his brother, Actor Richard Morse, his career developed quickly, with the usual tune-ups: American Theater Wing, classes with Lee Strasberg, etc. And he has calmed down considerably now that he is a $1,750-a-week star. Last April he married Carole D'Andrea, an actress-dancer who had a supporting role in West Side Story, and their first child is due in December. With the success of How to Succeed, Morse has finally developed confidence in himself, and the brat in him may be departing forever. He stops the show with a song, delivered into a mirror, that is such a moving paean to self-love it probably makes Narcissus roll over in his grave and take another look into the pool. It is called I Believe in You. At last, Bobby Morse really seems to.

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