Chapter 5

The memory of that film remained in my consciousness like a religious experience, although I never knew who wrote the play or when it was written. So it was a welcome surprise to learn that this week's interview would be with the play's author, Marc Connelly.

Connelly was born in a small Pennsylvania town in 1890, the son of a pair of travelling actors. He wrote _The Green Pastures_ in 1930; it won that year's Pulitzer Prize for drama. In his 70-year career Connelly has written dozens of plays. One of the most versatile talents in the American theatre, he has excelled as an actor, director, producer, playwriting professor at Yale, and popular lecturer. He has written musicals, stage plays, movie scripts and radio plays.

He was one of the original staff members of the _New Yorker_ magazine, and became part of the famous round table at the Algonquin Hotel. One of his short stories won an O. Henry award. His first novel was published when he was 74 years old. Today, still an active playwright, he lives peacefully at Central Park West, comfortable in his role as an elder statesman of American letters.

I feel a certain freedom about repeating the comments Connelly made during our interview because the first thing he said at the door was "I never read anything about myself. ... It's not modesty; it's more terror -- for fear that some dark secret will emerge."

Yes, he said, he's very busy these days. "I've just completed a comedy which I'm waiting to have done. I'd rather not mention the title before it comes out. It's a comic fantasy."

He recently taped an appearance on the _Dick Cavett Show_, which will be aired sometime this month. And he's working on a musical version of _Farmer Takes A Wife_, a Broadway play that he co-authored in 1934. It became a successful film the next year, with Henry Fonda's screen premiere.

"They're always reviving my plays. Last summer they did _Merton of the Movies_ (which he wrote with George F. Kaufman in 1922) in that big theatre complex in Los Angeles. It was quite successful. The boy that plays John-Boy on the Waltons played Merton. It was quite good; I went to see it."

Much as Connelly dislikes certain TV shows, he thinks very highly of TV as a medium: "It's good, it's good. I like three or four shows. _Mash_ is wonderful. I like _Maude_ every now and then. And Carol Burnett. I might like _Kojak_ if it didn't run every five minutes. Three times a night is too much for any TV show."

Any anecdotes about the "Vicious Circle" of the Algonquin Hotel -- whose members included Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott and George Kaufman? "Oh, I don't want to talk about the round table," he said. "Every time you turn around there's a new book about the round table. ... I've written about George Kaufman and so have a hundred other people. It might be that he might get out of his grave and club us all for writing about him."

Although _The Green Pastures_ is considered an American classic, it is now performed only by school and amateur companies. Its depiction of plantation life has become offensive to socially conscious blacks. "There are Negro snobs," explained Connelly, "just like there are Irish snobs and Jewish snobs. As soon as people get in a position of economic power, they become sensitive about the way they are shown on the stage. It's a very human, inevitable reaction."

However, he thinks that his masterwork is as valid today as ever. "It's a statement about the fact that man has been hunting the divine in himself ever since he became a conscious animal. And this is the story of one aspect of his search for the divine in himself."

Connelly attends Broadway "when there's something I feel I want to see. I walk out on quite a few. Theatre is just as strong today. A seasonal crop may be poor, but theatre itself is healthy. It's probably the greatest social instrument man ever invented. All religions have sprung from the theatre."

A Westsider since about 1920, Marc Connelly named Schwartz's Candy Store on West 72nd as one of his favorite neighborhood businesses. "It's one of the finest candy shops in New York," he said. "You can see my portrait there. And the A&P at 68th and Broadway. There's a checkout girl there named Noreen who's one of the best checkout girls in America."

The interview came to an end when I again asked Connelly about television. Does he approve of it? "Of course," he said. "Any new public addition is going to be condemned. They used to say, 'Don't go to the movies. ... You'll go blind.' We're not blind and we still watch them."

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EASTSIDER TONY CRAIG Star of _The Edge of Night_

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Although Los Angeles has long since taken over prime-time TV programming, New York is still the headquarters for daytime drama -- also known as soap opera. Of the 13 "soaps," 10 are filmed in New York, and of these 10, five have been on the small screen since the 1950s, including _The Edge of Night_, which debuted in 1956.

The show's crime/mystery format has not changed much over the years, but one thing that has changed, of course, is the cast of characters. Tony Craig, who plays attorney Draper Scott, joined the show in November, 1975, and since then he has become one of the most popular male stars in daytime television.

Tony owes his success not only to his good looks and his acting ability, but also to his likable off-camera personality. Upon meeting Tony on the set of _The Edge of Night_ during a busy shooting session, I cannot help noticing the affection that the other cast members display toward him. His ability to get along with everyone involved with the show -- especially producer Nick Nicholson, and headwriter Henry Slesar -- has enabled Tony to develop the role of Draper Scott into one of the four leading characters.

"I was given a piece of advice when I started," says Tony. "One: keep to your business and do what you're told, and two, answer your fan mail. I answer all my fan mail with a very personal response. ... In the _National Star_, I once said I was looking for Miss Right, and I got inundated with letters. Some people sent plane ticket, asking me to come and see them."

As we sit down to talk in one of the dressing rooms, Tony puts on a tie and jacket for an upcoming bar scene, but because only his top half will be shown on camera, he does not bother to change out of his blue jeans and running shoes. Tall, athletically built and boyish in appearance, he discusses his work with an infectious enthusiasm.

"The closer I get to the character, the more I see that he and I are very much alike," says Tony in his rapid speech. "It's funny, the way I've assimilated him and he's assimilated me. It's like the dummy in _Magic_. The character has gone from a very impetuous, aggressive, almost nasty young man to a very quiet, strong, very reserved lawyer. It's changed to the point where I'm a pillar of the community. Whenever there's a problem, call Draper.

"I think I allow Tony a little more anger, a little more frustration, than Draper allows himself. ... I'm very normal, I'm very average, I'm very aggressive. Some people would say pushy. But I do what I have to."

Approximately 260 half-hour shows are filmed each year for _The Edge of Night_, and Tony appears in most of them. He starts his day by studying lines -- "we have about a week ahead to go over the script" -- and then goes to the studio on East 44th Street, where each scene gets just one run-through before the final taping. A quick learner, Tony finds that "I have plenty of time to do what I want." Last year he launched a successful musical nightclub act and performed in two stage plays by Neil Simon -- _Barefoot in the Park_ with Maureen O'Sullivan and _The Star Spangled Girl_.

Another important aspect of Tony's life is sports. When growing up in Pittsburgh, he says, "all I ever wanted was to be an athlete. My whole life was baseball. But I just wasn't good enough." Now he works out three times a week at the 21st Century Health Club on East 57th Street, jogs, plays tennis and racquetball, and is on the softball and basketball teams of both _The Edge of Night_ and the _ABC Eyewitness News_. Says Tony: "The _Eyewitness News_ team plays all over the tri-state area and gives the proceeds to charity."

Unlike his TV character, who recently brought up the ratings by marrying the beautiful April Cavanaugh (played by Terry Davis), Tony lives alone in an Upper East Side apartment. "How can I put this without sounding full of beans and self-pity?" He remarks. "I find that life is a lot more exciting when you share it with somebody. ... The girl I'm dating now is a news reporter in Baltimore, Jeanne Downey. Long distance isn't the next best thing to being there, believe me."

When Tony won the part of Draper Scott over 200 other actors, he was working part-time as a bartender at Joe Allen's in the theatre district. "I was doing commercials and a lot of modeling -- nothing significant. Before this show, I'd never made more than $1,200 a year from acting. I didn't expect to get the part, because they wanted someone in his mid 40s. They rewrote the script for a younger attorney. My agent signed me up on a lark. That just goes to show: when it happens, it happens."

Tony hates to cook -- which is fine with the restaurateurs in his area. His favorite dining spot is La Bonne Soupe (3rd Ave., 57th-58th St.): they have the prettiest waitresses and most pleasant food."

Asked about the lasting value of soap opera, he quickly replies: "I believe television has an obligation to do nothing but entertain. Everything on television, even news, is show business. If it weren't, they wouldn't have ratings and handsome newsmen."

Anyone wishing to hear from Tony should write to him at ABC, 1330 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.

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EASTSIDER RODNEY DANGERFIELD The comedian and the man

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He was 43 years old when the big break came. Jack Roy, a paint salesman from Queens who did comedy in his spare time, stood before the cameras of the _Ed Sullivan Show_ and delivered a routine that soon had the audience helpless with laughter. Whether they realized they were witnessing the birth of one of comedy's brightest stars is uncertain. But for Jack Roy -- better known as Rodney Dangerfield -- the long wait was over.

His unique brand of humor caught on immediately. Within a year he was able to quit the paint business -- "it was a colorless job" -- and give his full time to comedy. After 10 appearances with Sullivan he went on _The Tonight Show_, and established such a smooth rapport with Johnny Carson that he has so far been invited back about 60 times. With Carson acting as "straight man," Dangerfield tosses off a string of outrageous anecdotes that are in keeping with his image as a man who seems to have the whole world against him.

The afternoon I meet Rodney Dangerfield at his spacious modern East Side apartment is like a day straight out of his monologue. Coming to the door dressed in a polka dot robe and looking quite exhausted, he apologizes by saying that he has been up since 8 in the morning -- early for someone who is accustomed to working past 4 a.m. As we sit down to talk, he answers most of my questions with an unexpected seriousness. Still, the humor creeps in around the edges.

"I have an image to feed. Most comedians don't," he says with a yawn, sprawled out on the sofa like a bear prematurely woken from hibernation. "If I see something or read something that starts me thinking, I try to turn it around, and ask myself: How can it go wrong for me now? What can happen here? For example, you're watching something on television. You see Lindbergh on the screen. Your mind is on that TV. ... You get no respect at all. You see the paper flying all over the place. You say, I get no respect at all. I got arrested for littering at a ticker tape parade.

"Rickles has an image. Steve Martin has an image. But most don't. A lot of comedians buy their material. Others take someone else's material and steal it. We don't go into that, though."

Being a professional funny man, says Rodney, "is a completely total sacrifice. It's like dope: you have to do it. ... The curse is to be a perfectionist."

He writes at least 90 percent of his act. Whenever an original joke flashes into his mind, he drops whatever he's doing and jots it down. ("I get no respect. On my wedding night I got arrested for having a girl in my room.") Before a new gag can be thought worthy of _The Tonight Show_, it must be tested and retested before a live audience. This is no problem, for Rodney is constantly in demand all over the North American continent, not only as a nightclub performer but also as a lecturer at colleges. Last June he was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard. "It's a strange thing," he remarks. "Kids are into me."

One probable reason for his appeal with the young is that Rodney has two children of his own, an 18-year-old son in college and a 14-year-old daughter who lives at home. It was mainly to lighten his travel schedule and enable him to spend more time with his children that Rodney opened his own nightclub nine years ago. Known simply as Dangerfield's, it is located on First Avenue between 61st and 62nd Streets. Dangerfield's is especially popular with out-of-town visitors. Among the celebrities who have been spotted there: Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, Joe Namath, Telly Savalas and Led Zeppelin. The entertainment usually consists of both music and comedy -- Jackie Mason, singers Gene Barry and Carmen MacRae, and America's foremost political impressionist, David Frye.

But the biggest attraction, of course, is Rodney himself. He will be playing the club from January 5 until February 4, seven nights a week. There is an $8 cover charge and a $7 minimum on food and/or drink.

Rodney has lived on the East Side since 1969. Born as Jacob Cohen 57 years ago in Babylon, Long Island, he spent most of his boyhood and his early career in Queens. After graduating from Richmond Hill High School, he changed his legal name to Jack Roy "because my father used 'Roy' in vaudeville." For years he worked small nightclubs for little or no pay. Then at 28 he married. "My wife was a singer. So we decided to both quit show business and lead a normal life. That doesn't always work out."

The first "no respect" joke he ever wrote, says Rodney, was: "I played hide and seek. They wouldn't even look for me." The same basic gag has since reappeared in a thousand variations. ("My twin brother forgot my birthday.")

Rodney now earns a substantial part of his income by making commercials, the best known of which are for Mobil and Miller Lite beer. He has cut two comedy albums and written a pair of books, _I Don't Get No Respect_ and _I Couldn't Stand My Wife's Cooking So I Opened a Restaurant._

For the moment, Rodney has no plans for other books or albums. "Perhaps I'm not ambitious enough to pursue different things the way I should," he confesses."I'd rather spend my free time at the health club. The idea in life is not to see how much money you can die with."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Pr ess.

WESTSIDER JAN DE RUTH Partner of nudes and _Time_ covers

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In 1955, when Jan De Ruth's painting reached the point where he could support himself entirely by his brush and palette, he used to take singing lessons at 8 o'clock in the morning to make himself get up early. Today he gets up strictly to paint, and does so with such skill and efficiency that he maintains a reputation as one of America's foremost painters of nudes, while still managing to turn out five or six commissioned portraits a month.

At 55 and in the zenith of his career, De Ruth is a mellow, dignified Westsider whose lively eyes reflect the deep intellect within. His achievements in the past two decades are enormous. His works have graced nearly 70 one-man shows. His portraits of former First Lady Pat Nixon and other celebrity wives have appeared on the cover of _Time_ magazine. He has written two widely popular books -- _Portrait Painting_ and _Painting the Nude_. As we relax in the workroom of his West 67th Street apartment, I begin by asking how he came to specialize in nudes.

"I always knew I would paint women," he says in a soft voice shaded with tones of his native Czechoslovakia. "In 1948, when I came to the United States, I started to paint nudes."

Is his choice of subject matter motivated by something other than art's sake?" "The only person I think who may have these thoughts in mind is myself," he answers, smiling frankly, "because I always ask myself whether these reasons are purely artistic or do they come from the gut? I don't think there can be art unless it comes from the gut."

De Ruth's painting used to occupy him eight to 15 hours a day. Now he is down to about seven hours. He works very rapidly, with intense concentration. "I don't paint after the afternoon," he explains, "except sometimes sketching at night. You exhaust your juices by the time evening comes along."

One person he used to sketch after hours was actress Karen Black, who lived in West 68th Street just across from his apartment. Says De Ruth: "she would sit in the in the windowsill in her bra and slip. Then one day I called over to her, 'Would you like to get paid for this?' She rushed inside to get her glasses, and looked over at me, very surprised. She became my model for some time."

For a woman to be an ideal nude model, said De Ruth, "she should be gentle, as intelligent as possible, considerate, and somebody in the arts, or with the sensitivity of an artist. And she must be physically attractive."

How do the women who pose fully dressed for commissioned portraits compare to the professional nude models? "They work better than my models usually," says the artist, who has painted Ethel Kennedy, Eleanor McGovern, and the late Martha Mitchell for _Time_. "They're much more concerned to participate. I don't think it's necessarily something to do with vanity. It's much more curiosity. Because we never really know until the day we die what we look like. Because we vary so much from one time to another."

Ironically, Martha Mitchell -- wife of President Nixon's infamous attorney general, John Mitchell -- posed for De Ruth inside the Watergate Building during the height of her fame. "She had a certain peasant charm -- a charm of her own," he recalls.

A man who craves variety, De Ruth has for many years spent his summers at a studio in Massachusetts. This past summer he began to teach painting in New Mexico -- something he has wanted to try for a long time. A passionate skier, he travels to Austria each winter to pursue the sport that he learned as a child, then gave up until his mid-40s.

His other after-work activities? "I love to be in the company of women," says the artist with a radiant smile, adding that he prefers their company when he's not painting them.

The East Side, according to the artist, is "a city in itself. There's a sterility over there, at least for me. I just can't see myself without this mixture that the West Side is." De Ruth has been going to the same Chinese laundry for 28 years -- Jack's on Columbus Avenue. Another business he has patronized all that time is Schneider's Art Supplies at 75th Street and Columbus.

As the interview comes to a close, I ask De Ruth what advice he would give to an aspiring young artist. "Never be discouraged by anyone or anything," he says. Then, to balance his remarks, he relates an anecdote about an art student who asked Degas what he could do to help the world of art. Replied Degas: "Stop painting."

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WESTSIDER MIGNON DUNN The Met's super mezzo

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Don't look for opera posters, photographs or reviews on the walls of Mignon Dunn's Westside apartment. The Tennessee-born Metropolitan Opera star, one of the world's most sought-after mezzo-sopranos since the early 1970s, prefers to keep her two lives separate. She has no scrapbooks and saves no clippings. "I look forward to what I'm doing tomorrow," she explains.

"I don't like those stand-up-and-sing roles. I loves to play wicked women. But you have to make them just as human as possible," she continues, her gold jewelry jingling as she settles onto the sofa. Tall and attractive, with large, expressive features, Miss Dunn is hospitality personified as she talks about her life and career over a glass of wine.

This season at the Met she starred in both _Lohengrin_ and _Elektra_. In the spring she will appear in _Aida_ on the Met tour, and perform the role of Kundry in _Parsifal_ with Germany's Hamburg Opera. After that she plans some orchestral and opera concerts across the country. Long praised for her dramatic talents as well as her vocal skills, Miss Dunn has already signed contracts for performances into 1984.

Although a few noted operas, such as _Carmen_, _Samson et Dalila_, and _Joan of Arc_, have a mezzo in the title role, most operas feature the higher-voiced soprano in the lead and a mezzo in a character role. "We may not have the main roles, but we have some of the best parts in _opera_," she says in her rich Southern accent, shouting the last word as if from an overflow of energy. "Not many of the roles I get today are angelic. It's often the 'other woman,' or the woman who causes the trouble."

Married since 1972 to Kurt Klippstatter, a conductor and music director from Austria, Miss Dunn has never had any children of her own, somewhat to her regret. But she and her husband frequently have their nephews and nieces staying for extended periods. "Our niece Evi, from Austria, is living with us now. She's like a little daughter, and I adore her. She's 18, and she's going to go to nursing school." Mignon and Kurt are a very gregarious couple who enjoy throwing huge dinner parties. Mignon's cooking, like her singing, is international.

"I cook Austrian. I cook New Orleans. I cook some nice Italian and French things. I'm going to be in Paris later this year for six weeks, and I really seriously want to go to the Cordon Bleu Cooking School, and take at least a three-week course."

Around the late 1960s she was based in Germany for several years. There, says Dunn, many new operas are premiered each year, while in the U.S. they are a rarity. "It all comes back to the fact that we don't have government subsidy. We have to worry about selling tickets. Opera is an expensive thing, and until we get this government support -- which people for some reason are afraid of -- we cannot be as experimental as we would like to be."

Brought up on a cotton plantation in Memphis, she entered her first singing contest at the age of 9 and spent most Saturday afternoons in her girlhood listening with rapt attention to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on the radio. Immediately following her high school graduation, she was auditioned by Met scouts and encouraged to go to New York. There, after several years of study, she won a national competition that launched her career.

Dunn spent part of three seasons with the New York City Opera before joining the Met. It was many years, however, before her talents were fully appreciated there. "It only took me 11 auditions to get into the New York City Opera, and at least that many at the Met. So take heart, everybody," she says, laughing merrily.

She has made numerous opera recordings, including the role of Susan B. Anthony in Virgil Thompson's _The Mother of Us All_ and Maddalena in _Rigoletto_. "I don't ever listen to my recordings," she says when asked to name her favorite. "I listen to the playbacks, when I can do something about it. But I don't listen to recordings afterwards because there's nothing that I can do about it, and I know I'm going to find a million things that I don't like."