Edna Ferber
I have always been crazy for The Algonquin Round Table, a celebrated group of NYC writers, critics, actors & wits. Members of "The Vicious Circle," as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 through 1929. The group would engage in wisecracks, wordplay & witticisms that, & then in the newspaper columns of Round Table members,they would be celebrated by the public. Later in life some of its members disparaged the group, yet its reputation has endured. I have always been fascinated by them & I have books about the group & many of the individuals including:
Franklin Pierce Adams, columnist
Robert Benchley, humorist & actor
Heywood Broun, columnist & sportswriter
Marc Connelly, playwright
George S. Kaufman, playwright & director
Dorothy Parker, critic, poet, short-story writer, & screenwriter
Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor
Robert E. Sherwood, author & playwright
Alexander Woollcott, critic & journalist
Tallulah Bankhead, actress
Harpo Marx, comedian & actor
Neysa McMein, magazine illustrator
Alice Duer Miller, writer
Donald Ogden Stewart, playwright & screenwriter
Frank Sullivan, journalist & humorist
Deems Taylor, composer
Peggy Wood, actress
& Birthday Girl- author & playwright- Edna Ferber. Ferber's novels featured strong female protagonists. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons. Ferber held a firm belief that all people are equal & possibly that the least attractive may have the best character.
Many theatrical & film productions have been made based on her work: Show Boat, Giant, Ice Palace, Saratoga Trunk, Cimarron (which won an Oscar) . 3 of these works - Show Boat, Saratoga Trunk & Giant - have been made into musicals. When composer Jerome Kern proposed turning the very serious Show Boat into a musical, Ferber was shocked, thinking it would be transformed into a light musical entertainment typical of the 1920s. It was not until Kern explained that he & Oscar Hammerstein II wanted to create a different type of musical that Ferber granted him the rights. In 1925, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel- So Big, which by coincidence, is the title of a chapter in my own memoir- Jockstraps & Vicodin (a possible Pulitzer for me?). There was a silent film made of So Big, & an early talkie movie remake in 1932, starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, & Bette Davis in a supporting role. A 1953 remake of So Big starred Jane Wyman in the Stanwyck role, it is the version most often seen today.
Edna Ferber was a big ol' golf playing, soft ball team member, dating her former therapist, Indigo Girls loving lesbian. One of her "Old Maid" characters says: "Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning ...a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling." She wrote the gay favorites: Stage Door, Dinner at Eight, & The Royal Family. Ferber was portrayed by the actress Lili Taylor in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle.
No comments:
Post a Comment