Wonder Boy

By Christopher Porterfield

JED HARRIS: THE CURSE OF GENIUS by Martin Gottfried Little, Brown; 280 pages; $19.95

George Abbott was so affronted by his chicanery over royalties that he refused to speak to him for the rest of his life. E.E. Cummings acted out a pantomime at a party, in his presence, that compared him to a cockroach. George S.

Kaufman sardonically asked to be cremated after death so that the ashes could be flung in his face.

Jed Harris was a man of great gifts, none greater than his capacity to inspire bitter hatreds. He burst upon Broadway in the 1920s, a charismatic, rather sinister Yale dropout and former pressagent convinced that he could produce and direct plays better than anybody else. He seemed to be right. By the age of 28, Harris had four hits running in the same year, including The Royal Family and The Front Page; he was earning $40,000 a week and was acclaimed as the Wonder Boy of Broadway. "His self-belief was hypnotic," said Playwright S.N. Behrman, who got his start working for Harris.

"He simply knew he was destined for mastery." The legend, said another contemporary playwright, "threw a shadow across the theater that endured for 50 years and no one escaped it."

His eye for scripts and performers was acute, his ideas often bold and original, and his eloquence--imparted in a notorious whisper that seemed to compel attention--galvanizing. "I never heard anyone talk about the theater with the intelligence and the excitement and the interest that that man had," said Lillian Gish, who returned from Hollywood to star in Harris' 1930 staging of Uncle Vanya. He brought off such notable productions as The Green Bay Tree (1933), Our Town, in its world premiere (1938) and The Heiress (1947).

But, as Biographer Martin Gottfried writes, he also seemed driven to direct people's lives, to browbeat or seduce them, to call them in the middle of the night, commandeer their households or tear up their contracts when it suited him.

Moss Hart testified that the prayer of ev ery aspiring playwright was, "Please God, let Jed Harris do my play." Nevertheless, with playwrights from Ben Hecht to Thornton Wilder, he imposed marathon revisions and usually ended by demanding a co-author credit and half the royalties. When he directed Arthur Miller's The Crucible in 1953, he responded to an out-of-town audience's calls for the author by going onstage and taking a bow.

Moments before a nervous Laurence Olivier made his entrance in The Green Bay Tree, on opening night, Harris said to him backstage, "Goodbye, Larry. I hope I never see you again." (Olivier would later model his stage and screen characterizations of the monstrous Richard III on Harris. "I thought of the most venal person I knew," he said.) After Actress Margaret Sulla van, one of the many women in Harris' life, married Film Director William Wyler, Harris phoned their house and whispered to Wyler, "You're a weak, untalented man married to a woman who is in love with me."

Gottfried, a former drama critic for Women's Wear Daily, has his own acute eye for the revealing anecdote and the scurrilous item. Much of his book amounts to a history of the theater from the '20s through the '40s. On psychology he is less secure; Harris' compulsions are tentatively explained away as an unconscious desire for revenge on the family he loathed and as an overreaction to antiSemitism. Harris, born Jacob Horowitz, had three marriages, all of them miserable. His second produced a daughter, to whom he paid scant notice, and Actress Ruth Gordon bore him an illegitimate son, to whom he paid even less ("What are you doing," he once barked when the teen-age boy approached him in a theater lobby after a two-year separation, "following me?").

The Heiress was the director's last hit.

His friend and fellow producer Jean Dalrymple described him when he was 49 as "a man who had been Jed Harris." He lived for another 30 years, finagling deals that he had little intention of following up, personifying arrogance while bouncing checks and being kicked out of hotels.

Shortly before his death in 1979, he showed up at the California home of Judith Anderson, another old romance, characteristically proposing to move in with her and work on his "books." She sent him away, appalled by the "dirty, broken old drunk" he had become.

Noel Coward, reminiscing about Harris in 1937, admired his skills and charm but added: "I couldn't help wondering how long it would be before Jed's ego, prompted by sheer passion, ate up every scrap of him." As Gottfried's diverting, if shallow, account shows, few people were as perceptive as Coward. Most spotted the self-destruction later; Harris never did. --By Christopher Porterfield