LIFE WORK

Birren #4

June 3, 2006

Theatre.

The assignment for Guided Autobiography was for life work or career: I would really have liked to turn in a paper with one word: Theatre.

I have been at various times an actor, director, producer, student, professor,

coach, stage manager, lighting designer, box office manager, "etcetera, etcetera, etcetera," to quote Yul Brenner in "The King and I."

One thing is certain, my timing was excellent: I lived and worked through what

is now called The Golden Age of Theatre: Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Loerner and Lowe, Mary Martin and Alfred Drake.

I saw Eugene O'Neill on the opening night of his penultimate play, "A Moon for

the Misbegotten", Judith Anderson on the opening night of "Medea" when Robinson Jeffers was in the audience and curtain calls lasted almost half an hour,

John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft at the opening of "King Lear" at Stratford-upon-Avon, Ingrid Bergman in "Jeanne au Bucher" (Joan of Arc at the Stake) in Paris.

After graduating from Northwestern with a Master's Degree in 1949 I went to Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, where I was the Speech and Theatre Department. I studied Shakespeare at Stratford-Upon-Avon during the summer of 1950, and returned to Drury that fall. When Mom became ill, I resigned at Drury and returned to Toledo where I was hired by WSPD-TV as a director and producer. Television was just getting started, and the old pros of radio simply did not understand the workings of this new medium.

But like far too many in the theatre, I've had to support myself all too often with

jobs that are quite varied. When in college I spent summers working in war plants and coming home covered in hot oil.

When I had my own Summer Stock company, I had perforce to learn bookkeeping, and in Los Angeles I became Comptroller of a company called Contemporary Entertainment which converted a B27 into a luxury airplane (The Starship) to fly rock stars on tours (Elton John, the Allman Brothers, John Denver, etc.), and also produced films for television. (My secretary was a former Copacabana girl who was living in Rome with Richard Burton when he first met Elizabeth Taylor.) We later had a plane to fly high rollers to Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas (Caesar's Chariot) and I had to fly to Vegas monthly where I had a suite at the hotel. On our first trip we picked up 11 men in Pittsburgh and flew them to Vegas for 4 days. The "drop" at the table was said to be 7 million dollars. Incidentally we were sworn to secrecy about the identity of our passengers, and to this day I still would not tell.

Our head flight attendant at Contemporary Entertainment, Sandra Cronin, a Miss California, and I later went into a catering business, "Party Planners".

One party we threw for Intel's Tenth Anniversary at the Cow Palace in San Francisco featured a revue with stars from Laugh-In, a discotheque with alternating DJ's and live bands, a gambling Casino, and food from all over the world. It was almost a disaster since we were expecting 7,200 people and

8,400 showed up; but we raided local fast food restaurants and supermarkets and no one was the wiser.

And for a while I was a jewelry salesman: pearls, diamonds and gold pieces. I traveled the entire country with appointments at some of the finest stores (Marshall Fields, Shreve, Crump & Lowe, Gucci), and I will never forget one trip

where I had 40 flights in 50 days. Since I had sample cases with almost a million dollars of jewelry, if anyone asked, I was a "button salesman."

Although for the past ten years or so I am retired, last Thursday I had an audition with some producers on Wilshire Blvd. for a caper movie called "Brilliant". The script was e-mailed to me the night before (all 112 pages of it) and though I

read one of the major roles (they will need some big names), I might just get

some smaller role if lucky. I'm also working with a friend who is in the Actor's Gang in Culver City (Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon's group) to produce a film for festival showing.

And, oh yes, I am vice-president of a corporation which is working on a huge fire-fighting airplane called "The Rainmaker".

rwtf