The Big Patron

Four months ago, Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg rushed to Manhattan to deal with a cultural crisis: it looked as if the Metropolitan, the U.S. leading opera company, was not going to have a season at all. Its 91-man orchestra was demanding a $98 increase in the basic $170 weekly minimum wage; management insisted that such a raise was financially impossible. But both sides accepted Goldberg as a peacemaker, the curtain went up, and last week Goldberg announced the result of his arbitration. He awarded a modest $10 weekly raise to the musicians, promised another $10 increase over the next two seasons. It was a clear victory for the Met's position, as expounded by Opera Association President Anthony Bliss.

But Goldberg made his decision the occasion for a general pronouncement on the state of the arts--at the suggestion, he said, of President Kennedy himself. The Metropolitan's financial plight, he declared, was "an artistic calamity . . . As we become more and more a cultural democracy, it becomes less and less appropriate for our major cultural institutions to depend on the generosity of a very few of the very wealthy." Goldberg's solution: major federal support for the arts. Said he: "We must come to accept the arts as a new community responsibility. The arts must assume their place alongside the already accepted responsibilities for health, education and welfare."

Goldberg proposed a "six-point partnership" among 1) the public, 2) patrons, 3) business corporations, 4) labor unions, 5) local government, and 6) the Federal Government. Federal subsidies should be based on the principle of matching funds. Said he: "The problems of the performing arts in America today are not the problems of decline. They are the problems of a growth so rapid, so tumultuous . . . as to be almost universally described as an explosion." The U.S. has more community theaters than it has radio and television stations, twice as many symphony orchestras as ten years ago, and seven times as many opera-producing groups as in 1946. But, said Goldberg, "the individual benefactors and patrons just aren't there, as they once were."

Goldberg further recommended a federal council on the arts to explore such helpful measures as: increased income tax deductions for contributions to culture; special tax provisions for artists themselves, whose earnings are often concentrated in a short period of years; collection of royalties by the Government on music on which copyrights have expired (to produce an estimated $6,500,000 a year).

Noting that these views were his, and "not necessarily those of my sponsor," he added pointedly: "But I hope, and will recommend, that the proposals be included in his State of the Union message."

In the six years that followed, Sarah had a go at a debutante school called Crofton Grange, made passes at other finishing schools, finally put in two useful years at Britain's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. "I might have got a scholarship," she says, "but Daddy had too much money. He designs steel mills. He designed one for Pakistan and one for Cuba. Before." In a Royal Academy production, Sarah was spotted by Hugh ("Binki") Beaumont, one of London's top managers, "who in the theater if you're in with, you've got it made." Beaumont signed her for repertory, threw her into The Reluctant Debutante, a role she was uniquely suited for, and The Moon Is Blue. Then Term's Producer Jimmy Woolf saw her in Moon, called her for a reading. Says Sarah: "When he told me I was being considered for the part with Sir Laurence, I thought: hell, thanks, goodbye--what!" Sixty girls read for the part. Says Pleased Producer Woolf: "She was easily the best."

Scars & Scrapes. Physically, Sarah is a boyish slip of a girl--5 ft. 6 in., 96 Ibs. But the flappy ears are no longer a problem, since she had them bobbed at 14, and her dark brown hair tumbles over the left of her big blue-green eyes in a fetching way.

Reporting on location in Dublin last week to start filming, Sarah was in a state of nerves at the thought of confronting the great Sir Laurence on-camera. But when someone asked about a scar on her knee, she proved that her ad libs remained as freewheeling as ever. "Oh, that," said Sarah. "The Archduke of Austria gave me a ride on his motorcycle, and I fell off. He didn't bow and scrape and click, but he said he was the archduke. And he wanted me to come home with him and meet Mother Archduchess."

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