BOOK PROPOSAL – MEMOIR ABOUT MY MOVIE STAR/LAWYER FATHER (2024)

WALKING AWAY – BOOK PROPOSAL

Genre: memoir

Author: Michael Kerr

[Though Book Proposal is a good title this post is; just a book proposal. I thought so long as 47 agents have rejected it, I might as well share this common writerly failure, yet success as a son.]

SYNOPSIS

FADE IN: Hollywood, 1966.... Movie star John Kerr quit acting at age 33 and became a successful attorney. Walking away however cost him his sanity, his marriage and, nearly, his son (me) who much later walked away from him. Reflecting on my father’s New York upbringing as the damaged child of a Broadway star, then break-out stardom of his own on Broadway at age 23, Walking Away travels through five decades in a deeply plunging narrative of truth, beauty and amazing stories including Elia Kazan, Brando, Bogart & Bacall, Newman...long list of others. Memoir spans 1930’s, 40’s & 50’s New York theater glamour through 90’s Hollywood; with typical pages of (cleverly) captioned photos.

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1^ST 3 BOOK CHAPTERS:

INTRODUCTION -- Why I wrote this book....

CHAPTER 1: A Star Is Born -- NOV. 15, 1931 John Grinham Kerr

From Broadway to Harvard and back again

CHAPTER 2: GADGE DIRECTS

INTRODUCTION -- Why I wrote this book....

When my father died in 2013, his NY Times obituary trended #1 on Yahoo for an entire day. I was amazed, and even moreso when phonecalls and emails flooded in, many from people I barely knew. Apparently he’d left a real mark on the Hollywood he’d left behind; a unique and lasting impression. Thirty –five years after his very last onscreen appearance on-screen (edit. the small one: Colombo?) he still had fans all over the world, mostly older and I assumed mostly from his co-starring role in the movie South Pacific, a hit 20^th Century Fox movie in 1960, based on the hit Broadway musical. Yet here were all these people who cherished his image, some seemingly suffering a love betrayed: Whatever happened to John Kerr!? Something deep down twinged in me, that the deep down truth about what happened to my father was a much better story than the one all these people felt they knew but didn’t know at all. I needed to tell the story of my father, for them. And maybe, I needed to tell the story for my family, which he’d pushed to its brink nearly destroying my mother all those decades ago leaving a melodrama of divorce in his wake, where it had remained half-buried for a half century. But mainly, I needed to tell it for myself. I couldn’t put it aside. I just hoped the story was as good as I thought it was.

We’d grown apart for a long time since growing together briefly during my teens. He’d walked away from stardom and an acting career in Hollywood but had also walked away from fatherhood. I’d picked up the pieces at age 14 when he’d all but forced me to move in with him and I became his father, possibly saving his life. That was a long time ago, a strangely exciting time when I got to know my dad, and my young self grew up very fast. But it was a time I’d also moved on from, a long time ago, in my twenties. He and I remained semi-close throughout our lives...with his death my mind drifted down through our lives together. Workdays would begin with coffee and thoughts drifting to my father, distracting me from work. Then another twinge, pushing me out of the envelope: my dad was still a movie star in the minds of this audience...where had he gone? Why did he walk away? I never really knew. Growing up as a kid in UCLA’s Westwood neighborhood I’d only vaguely had a sense that he really was a movie star; both my parents kept us an arm’s reach from all that, if not a ten foot pole. It dawned on me that this story I’d been oblivious to, or avoiding, had just slammed down into my lap. So I decided to turn it into work and make a documentary, and call it Walking Away. I wrote up a two-page treatment and immediately had offers.

My own work in Hollywood has been as an independent writer/producer; lots of scripts sold, screenwriting jobs, book adaptations and rewrites, several having made it to the screen. Lots of development deals, Hollywood’s livelihood. I even starred in a movie once though acting’s not for me (I play guitar and occasionally perform; much more satisfying). I enjoy writing and producing documentary content and shows for TV, internet & mobile; travelling the world on all manner of passionate ideas I come up with and research. Yet nothing could match the documentary Walking Away. I’d been researching it naturally my entire life. Nothing could match this.

Except writing a book, filling in the many blanks necessarily discarded on the cutting floor from the film. It’s an endeavor I instantly absorbed with risky confidence. I don’t have an MFA and likely should’ve audited a course on memoir, but the questions I needed to ask, this writer, this self, came percolating up (Note to MFA professors: how many gals. of coffee does it take to write a memoir so you don’t fall asleep becoming bored with yourself?). How do you write memory and bring it razor close to truth? In the French, ‘memoir’ means “something elusive in the past”, which spawned existentialism. According to my mother, my father had neither a past inner life nor a philosophy of life, the Russian components for a life well lived. The temptation is to write scenes imagined, based on memories told by the principle characters. I’m the lead character, the co-star is my dad. I had to seek the whole truth and nothing but the truth with rigor, and maybe come close as might happen in a court of law. I had to seek my own truth and still love my dad, or risk hating him; knowing him as well as I did, and imagine he would agree with my perspective regardless. Referencing Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiographical Speak/Memory, in which he addresses ’the nostalgia I have cherished all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow’... I felt the same way, yet my childhood isn’t lost, and there’s always some sorrow (my favorite 10 speed bike was stolen). My childhood was way too happy, thanks to my dearest mom; its trophies are hyper; family and friends from way back then I still know and love at this writing.

During all the long, fascinating conversations I had with my dad for the 3 years I lived with him as a teenager, I had no idea how much pain he was in, immersed in it inside himself. I know I salved some of it and likely saved all of him, to the occasional detriment of my homework. He was a beautiful, brilliant man with a trapped soul, suppressed by the trained artifice of an actor and its earlier constraint by a mother who was also an actor (Broadway & film star June Walker). Stanislavsky’s method hadn’t yet hit New York. Who knew how to parent in the 1940’s? Every American kid was lucky to escape unscarred. In the 1970’s my parents divorced; we were selling my childhood home where my mom, my two older sisters, and I were still living. I was fourteen and the For Sale sign bothered me a whole lot more than the divorce: semiology that struck an unconscious chord of unknown future life destabilization. My dad had moved out; and he was acting out, to put it mildly, and not under the protection of a 1^st A.D.. He would erratically appear unannounced and drive me off to dinner; more than once I had to remind him to turn on the headlights. On one of those evenings he looked at me like he was playing a scene and said: “If you don’t come live with me I’ll kill myself”...about the worst line a dad should ever lay on his young teenage son. And this is also, even moreso, what Walking Away is about. Fortunately, “goodnight my sweet prince” was not to be; yet “to be or not to be” his walking away from fatherhood and my shouting “CUT!”, is here in this book.

I’d never seriously considered writing a book, fiction or non-fiction, much less publishing one. So many do it and have done it so well: Updike, Didion, Richard Ford, Doris Lessing, David F. Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Annie Proulx, a scant number of my favorites. Unfamiliar with book publishing, in a failed attempt at levity, I told my new agent, if you don’t sell this book I’ll kill myself. But here I am.

CHAPTER 1: A Star Is Born -- NOV. 15, 1931 John Grinham Kerr

From Broadway to Harvard and back again

[Under chapter title: June Walker publicity photo captioned]

It all started with this woman, my grandmother June Walker. A flamboyant pre-flapper Chicago girl, born on June 14, 1900. An adventurous fun-seeker, she moved to New York at age 16 quickly becoming a regularly employed chorus girl and performer in processionals, the musicals of that era. June was quite good, with a sparkle in her eyes and a spark beyond her beauty of an intensity often transformed into wildness. Her best friend Eunice Weeks, also an aspiring actress who would remain June’s lifelong friend and understudy, joined her a year later. By age 25 my grandmother was the toast of the town with a Broadway starring role of her own in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes a hit; her “defining portrayal” of Lorelei Lee provoked a string of hit reviews. Other roles quickly came and her own star began its rise; she loved every moment. Inhibition was also comfortable territory whether she’d had a few drinks or was sober. She liked to drink and no less an expert on that, Dorothy Parker, took her under her wing.

A Broadway play conceived my dad: Green Grow The Lilacs, co-starring Franchot Tone, written by the British playwright Geoffrey Kerr. Tone, with his mane of red-blonde hair, was a bigger star than my grandmother, he’d co-founded The Group Theater and was a wealthy scion of the family that had founded U.S. Steel. Though she had an offstage affair with Franchot-- to be mirrored decades later by my dad in his own Broadway play-- she fell in love and married Geoffrey Kerr. My grandfather’s pain over that perhaps never residing. A Playbill of the life my father was then born into includes: Robert Sherwood as his godfather, with Dorothy Parker drunk at the christening party. His middle name, Grinham, was applied from 1000 years of English euphemism yet with no direct ancestor. Very early in Act 1 the family broke apart. Living in a spacious apartment on E. 77^th street with a balcony and views, playwright dad and actress mom would often be out on the nighttime town, leaving John (“Johnny”)with a nanny to feed and bed him down. I imagine my 2 year old dad looking over his crib in the morning at his mom and dad, hungover at breakfast and ignoring him. And then, in his full witness at age three, in a drunken rage she threatened Geoffrey with her favorite kitchen knife. Knives were her thing, as they’d then become my father’s (more on that later). Geoffrey Kerr fled the scene of his bad marriage and abandoned his son. He moved back to England and June went back to drinking with her best friends Eunice Weeks and Dorothy Parker. She never had another child, she was one of those “stars” who could always keep appearances together as one small, happy family. Likely what be diagnosed today as a huge narcissist/fantasist only in love with herself and with what every new day might bring. And a naivist...nearly every day brought despair, and instability to her fatherless toddler son. Like a true Brit, he buried the pain and guilt and like the failed, minor playwright he became, never wrote about it.

It was big fun in 30’s NY Theater... as my neglected dad crawled around on the floor, waiting for his mom who would often return, shed her clothes and walk nude around the apartment, drinking till dawn towering incestuously over my dad. From age one thru 8 my dad grew up like this; an upper east side New York childhood not like many others.

There were no doubt plenty of bad show-biz childhoods back then, both on and off Broadway. Likely with much worse results. His was somehow darkly charmed. Something between his mother’s intense eyes and within his own brain. Decades later it would come to be called “bi-polar manic-depressive”. The bad-childhood admixture of that is often fatal, yet can create a terrific artist, rockstar or actor.

My father’s early childhood became a quick wreck before he finally shipped off to boarding schools. He visited Geoffrey in England a few times him during the summers of his childhood and adolescence. At those, it was all about maintaining coat-and-tie good manners, the son of Broadway fame smiling politely, keeping a roiling rage all bottled up. He would occasionally spend summers in England, where it’s also all about stiflingly good manners. Geoffrey’s household, where his sister was a Lady married to a Lord living in an Irish castle was of little relief, mainly yearning, for my young father-to-be, or not to be.

In June he would return to June, spending most summers with his mother, where she rehearsed her plays in summer stock, in Connecticut or Long Island, before the Broadway season. He hung around, built sets, appeared in whatever youngster roles, and began to learn the craft of theater, from building sets to acting. He liked acting, it was an escape from his half-formed often miserable self. At 12 yrs old, in 1943, he even appeared w/ the famous Lunts in “Oh Mistress Mine” in summer stock, to applause he enjoyed. During the run, in a drunken rant, his mother blurted out “Welcome to the theater!!” followed by the factoid that Franchot Tone was his real father. Whether true or not, the most confusing, hurtful statement she could’ve made to her 12 year old son. Later, when she passed out, he put her to bed as he would often do when he was home from school. On another tumultuous occasion she chased him with her latest favorite kitchen knife. But suddenly it was 1943, Hitler was sweeping Europe, Pearl Harbor exploded, and all lives changed.

40’s NY during WW2 was like a permanent post-9/11 condition—- planes weren’t bombing buildings...yet. When back in NY he often had to put her to bed when she passed out drunk. It was mostly boarding school yet he liked being with his mom in the summers, away from their dark apartment; working summer stock on his mom’s plays, occasionally acting in small parts—- it was the family business; he enjoyed playing characters and the rapport with actors; perhaps more father figures than his strict housemasters at Exeter.

In 1941 my father was spending a year in LA at the then Military Harvard school (whence I’d matriculate 35 years later). June was co-starring in a movie at 20^th Century Fox. Theater and movies shifted to escapism, my young father trying to follow the conversation. He boarded at the school yet even as his mother was 5 miles away she may as well have been 3000. California made little impression on him, his front yard the endless orange groves across the San Fernando Valley with not that much else around. Teased for his last name “Kerr”, which correctly pronounced meaning to his tormentors would be cur, as in the mongrel dog—- and interesting that he would have this mis-pronouncably vague identifier, which slight debilitation he and I have shared. He often lashed out with “punches in the nose” he once told me, his suppressed anger beginning to leak out in occasional bursts. But was mainly an obedient student and kept to himself and his schoolwork, longing for a letter from his father with an invitation for the summer. England, where he’d spent one or two memorable summers, seemed very far away from these orange trees. But the invitation never came, and the big dark studio soundstages where he’d visit his mother on her movie sets, seemed like penitentiaries where he was on display where she’d show off her beautiful boy,. They were unlike the theaters of New York he knew; The Ethyl Barrymore, The Lyceum, The Hudson were more like temples. He was aware at that time, of the disdain NY actors had for Hollywood; a stigma that would stick in his head during his own acting success. The dread of WW2 hung over even this elite LA military prep school. Thence it was back to Exeter, Philips Academy in New Hampshire, accompanied by a letter from his mother authorizing her fourteen year old son permission to smoke the Chesterfield cigarettes he loved. Such was wartime Exeter an inconsistently strict place for a maladjusted early teen. Add to this some complications: he played hockey and an errant puck broke his jaw causing five weeks with his mouth wired shut. He fell off a roof, or maybe jumped, concussed and possibly causing the brain damage he would carry for the rest of his life; a diagnosis confirmed in his early forties, though more certainly genetic. He got A’s & B’s, and spent increasingly difficult Christmases in New York. During one of them, Geoffrey Kerr visited. John was fifteen and they spent several afternoons together and “had a wonderful time, the only time in my life I ever felt what it was like to have a father”, he recounted to me late in his life, prosaically, as if speaking of someone else. That xmas he wrote a short story, “Visit From My Father”, written in the first person. He still had a copy, typewritten at age fifteen. I read it recently and couldn’t hold back tears; it was also pretty good. And then it was on to Harvard for my damaged, alienated seventeen year old dad.

In 1948 Harvard was still quaint; there were 9,418 applicants for 1,400 Freshman class positions. Cambridge, to a Harvard student and just about everyone else trudging through snow or springtime, was like a novel titled ‘Behind The Brick Walls’ (and perhaps ‘Love Story’ gestating): Young, privileged white people in love, with their own confidence. My father had none, just lonely anger under a veneer of beautiful manners. Yet unique to my dad among his classmates was his acting skill and experience. His enrollment was probably tantamount to Uma Thurman’s daughter attending, with her high school play experience and some TV parts. Harvard Yard was a campus of the sons and daughters of the myriad rich and distinguished. By then in her late forties, June Walker’s star had faded but The Brattle theater knew who he was. The 400 seat Brattle, two blocks from Harvard Yard, had been producing plays for forty years. That season it was Billy Budd, an adaptation of Herman Melville's grim allegorical tale, set in the British Navy, of good pitted against evil. June Walker’s son John would be a draw.With no audition they invited him to play Billy, the platinum blonde lead character. He accepted, including bleaching his hair.

He and the play were a hit. It got press all the way to New York via a call to Variety from his mother after she saw it. Her son playing swagger as this Melville character. But he felt the instantly ridiculous outsider walking through the Yard with bleach-blonde hair. For the first time he was being introduced to intellectual ideas, there was more to life than acting and behaving.He wanted whatever that was, his right brain drew him to literature: Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Marx, Sartre, Nietzche. He hated himself for the mistake of acting in the play but was confused—- acting was something he knew and did well; his comfort zone semi-identity. So now he was an actor again, tuck it away? It was like being the star lock-forward on the Harvard rugby team. More obscure than their football team, which consistently lost to Yale during that period (Edit verify).The drama department became his locker room, the “coaching” top flight, including the brilliant Robert Harris Chapman, who had co-authored the stage version of 'Billy Budd'. The play, sans my dad, was now en route to Broadway, where it would be applauded as 'an extraordinarily skillful play ...of size and depth as well as color and excitement.' by the critic Brooks Atkinson in a review in The New York Times. Chapman’s lively courses on George Bernard Shaw, and the Realist Drama of Ibsen, kept whatever interest my father had in acting ignited, or at least flickering. Geoffrey Kerr’s grandfather, Fred Kerr, had been Shaw’s stage manager; maybe there was connective tissue to this generations long family business after all. At this point scar tissue over open wounds and new wounds that would open. My father never blamed acting, nor his successes and failures on stage and screen, for his own alienated pain. He just always “did my best”. Under Chapman, and alongside his I’m-so-in-love-with-acting! drama student classmates he was an outlier misfit; by far the best in his class. He played Shakespeare (Hamlet), Enemy Of The People (Dr. Stockmann) and supporting roles in college plays on and off at the Brattle, and considered that, if all else failed he could fall back on acting jobs—- the reverse of the back up plan parents typically advise when their son announces “I wanna be a movie star” and they respond: “Maybe go to law school in case that fails”. Yet in his case it wasn’t unrealistic so he decided to apply himself with a practical interest in taking his possible place in the family business.

On his sophom*ore year Spring break he and a theater classmate met up in New York, with tickets to a new Broadway play. Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire”, directed by Elia Kazan, who was then the Steven Spielberg of Broadway theater. It was wowing audiences with its young leading man: Marlon Brando. Flush with his new sense of focus with his courses at Harvard going well, he settled into the familiar theater seat feeling a rare sense of balance. And then the curtain came up.

In his legendary performance Brando blew apart acting as anyone had known it, from Stanislavski to Strasberg, and for anyone who saw his acting live on that stage as Stanley Kowalski. At intermission my young father, just five years Brando’s junior, was deflated. He told his friend, “I’ll never be able to do that onstage, how does he do that?”. He recounted that story to me decades later as an early lynchpin of his own acting career. He was driven to be the best at anything he did. Returning to Harvard he put Brando out of his mind and retreated further into himself, attending classes, reading, studying; acting in the drama department workshops and plays as an escape valve. Harvard wasn’t an education brand back then, just a fine Ivy League college of brick walls and buildings. But there was something within those buildings my young father sensed as a new escape; to a life of the mind. As my mother much later said: “he found a life of the mind but he never found his philosophy of life”. I’ll confirm that; till the day he died he never did; whatever his philosophy it was always about how to get through life’s struggle and petty annoyances. Like most of us.

From the Harvard of 1951, through the Harvard of today, one standard still exists: anything can happen; from founding Facebook to meeting a beautiful bright girl, or an attractive crazy guy. The latter two happened, to my mother and father, in a Russian language classroom. Russian studies was the cool identity politics type major of that time.In his senior year he met Priscilla Smith— with her utterly un-mis-pronouncable surname, compared to his own constantly mis-pronounced one-- perhaps an identity emblem though some stumble on Priscilla. In Russian class together, he was very shy but well prepared. Priscilla was lickety-split ahead of every classmate including him; she’d skipped class at Milton Academy and landed at Radcliffe. He was smitten. One afternoon he saw her on Mass Ave and approached, he thought she was smiling at him but she was laughing at something completely different as their eyes met.

On their first date he did nothing but talk about himself; these two 20 year olds with no romantic pasts. He insisted she invite him up for tea and he stayed until 3 AM. It was very polite, very 50’s Ivy League college kids. Yet she wanted to quit him after that 1^st date for his relentless intensity. Talking about his troubled self, his mother, his absent father, his childhood...ad infinitum. It was not so much narcissism as piercing please-rescue-me-ism. And on their second date he announced he would marry her—- not a proposal just a proclamation, as if onstage: “I’m going to marry you”, alarming my future mother. I imagine my mother clutching her throat and laughing, as she did when she recounted this tale to me. Instead she likely just put a hand to her throat, listless. My father latched on to her because she was beautiful of course, but he also felt something in her, her openness and honesty and radical smarts, that he’d never known before. She told me another time she felt like he wanted her to be his savior. His mother issues, serious childhood issues, all of it; spilling from this actor son of an actor star overwhelmed her. Issues. A term not common in the emotional vocabulary at that time, and certainly not for a 19 year old girl however insightful she was.My mom’s issue was: learning Russian, studying its literature and history. She thought my dad needed help but she wasn’t about to provide it, rightfully so; that was a parent’s job! Today, at Harvard, or any university, if you’re having “issues” you can go to counseling and even get prescribed meds. At Harvard in the ‘50’s they had an infirmary that did little more than bandage scraped knees. She’d grown up in a sensible, pious Boston home, her own loving parents brilliant, progressive modernists. Now out in the world, albeit just college though her senior year, she felt pressured in an exhaustive, polarizing romance, yet magnetized. My mother couldn’t care less about Broadway show business; in his connection with my mother, it was the furthest thing from my dad’s head. His forcefulness kept them together, despite my mother’s constant polite rejections. They’d make out but never go further, neither pushing the other. Upon graduation, four months after her 20^th birthday, Priscilla Smith was, quote, “done with him”, relieved she’d likely never see him again as they wished each other well inside the brick. She’d had a wonderful college experience at Harvard /Radcliffe, made wonderful lifelong friendships and had expanded her own horizons into the troubling world of the early Cold War, and not the troubling world of John G. Kerr. Instead they both stayed in Cambridge for the summer, my dad working in a play, my mom at a desk job.

In the fall, John Kerr returned to NY where he pondered his future, standing at the new door that had opened his mind at Harvard. Priscilla Smith moved to Washington DC and a job translating Pravda for one of those 3-digit American intelligence agencies that had started cropping up in the late 40’s.

As Broadway’s Harvard prodigal son returned, all eyes were upon him; except he didn’t want to act, he wanted to get out from under his mother’s wing; maybe teach literature. Harvard, and my mother not his, had awakened him to intellectual life, a reality not staged. Yet June Walker’s star was fading, along with her bank account. She kept pushing him onstage, where he’d often get the role and a needed paycheck—- but wanted a different career, and I think he wanted a new mother. He enrolled at Columbia for an MFA in American Literature, supporting himself as an actor. He often thought of my mom, phoning her in Washington whenever he was flush for the long distance call, urging her to visit him in Manhattan, which she did. Through their connection and talks he switched to studies at Columbia’s Russian Institute and considered a career path in academia. He tried to find other work but the acting jobs naturally flowed.

New York theater was however an exciting, creatively changing place. Brando had single-handedly redefined acting; Paul Newman, James Dean were coming up out of Lee Strasberg’s and Stella Adler’s method workshops. Though not in any workship my father was well into that workflow. His first appearance on a Broadway stage was in “Bernadine”, a supporting role in a forgettable play. Regularly working in the theater and in the new live television of Playhouse 90, unlike James Dean he never had to bartend. In those days Paul Newman would bicycle up to the Playhouse 90 studios as nonchalantly as one bikes to his Starbuck’s job today. My dad had a leg up on every other young actor: good looks, years of job-experience, just enough talent, and family connections. He worked as much as any up and comer, all he lacked was interest in, and passion for, the profession, the craft. As any actor will tell you, from movie stars thru working actors, passion is the key that keeps you going to the next audition.

He wrote letters to his father in England, occasionally answered. His days mainly consisted of fixing breakfast and chatting with his perky mother, attending classes at Columbia, appearing in whatever play at night, mixed with days of work here and there in fast pace rehearse-and- shoot live TV. Often working with young directors and writers named Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, and Paddy Chayevsky. The New York of the 50’s was a fast-changing city of Pax Americana and Wall Street globalism with a fringe of leftist conviviality percolating in the coffee bars, and Cedar Bar, downtown trying to capture it all. Jackson Pollock was splattering paint in East Hampton, Salinger was writing Catcher In The Rye, Merce Cunningham was dancing....Broadway marquees advertised the plays of Williams, O’Neill, and Miller alongside West Side Story and The King and I. It was a deeply exciting period in arts and culture yet hardly anyone who was in it noticed at the time.

You would hear about something, maybe attend it, or read about it the next day. Compared to Harvard’s brick & ivy my father bridled but tolerated his return to the concrete and new noise of Manhattan. He would lay out on the Columbia lawn, stare at the sky thinking about all the things he should write about...to my mother. Who at that moment was hating being in Washington. Though engaged in the politics of the day she was a disillusioned, lonely misfit. She had to keep reminding people (read: all the men who hit on her) that she wasn’t a communist she was an anarchist. Suddenly my dad materialized. Not in a live TV show on a 12” cathode ray screen but in full 3-D color. In a not so unlikely coincidence, he’d been cast in a play...opening in Washington D.C.. They walked across the Mall and went to dinner; his Billy Budd swagger was back; he’d brought whatever this new version of that character to dinner. But this time, with some improvement, he listened to her. She was at loose ends though spoke cautiously as always, not wanting to offend anyone for her own failings. My mother, and I imagine even back then, has always been a gentle, firm soul. His firm swagger returned and he said “let’s get married and you can move back to NY”. Which was what you could say back then and mean it. So they did.

Their Boston church wedding was on a Sunday, my father’s only day off from work, a play he was appearing in. It was sparsely attended with a few of my mother’s friends and my father’s best man. A reception at my mother’s childhood home No talk of a honeymoon They took a train back to New York that night with no Honeymoon; there was never any discussion of a honeymoon My mother was 20, my dad barely 21. Prior to the small ceremony the marrying pastor looked them both in the eyes with his blessing but, as my mom recounts, she could see n eyes that he knew it woud’dn’t work. Fortunately for me, it did.

June took a smaller apartment on E. 74rth and they moved into hers on E. 77th. There was no subsidy of trust-fund wealth or family support, the new marriage needed an income as did my grandmother, her last big paycheck and success had been a road tour four years earlier in Death Of A Salesman. She took occasional parts in live television, and help from my parents when they could afford it.

If only some eyes now remained upon my dad, his mother’s certainly did. June Walker’s beautiful son/actor propelled further into the profession, with his beautiful Radcliffe wife. It all seemed perfect, at least to her, assisted with the sauce. And then it got even more perfect: within a year my mom and dad had twins, my sisters Jocelyn and Rebecca, I was still years away in the future. Another missing part was a father, he didn’t know how to be one, except to his mother. June continued to like drinking on the town with friends. One evening she and Dorothy Parker showed up at a theater where he was in rehearsals, they were a drunken disruption. Later, he put them in a cab but saw that one of them had pee’d on her seat. Welcome to the theater, he thought, gazing at the ghost light in the empty theater. He cleaned the seat and walked home. Something was missing, he had no idea how to find it. My mother often said “he had no inner life”...what is an inner life? Ask a good actor; it’s a place where you might toss a stone, hear it hit water and just echo. Or hear a thousand human voices.

June visited more regularly and rehearsed being a good grandmother and mother-in-law, as my young mother’s and father’s lives drifted apart, or more like split from something that had never really been there as they’d never been anywhere near being in love. His was a love obsession, projecting himself onto my mom; hers was the tolerance of a husband she felt some friendship with. They shared a bed, mostly inert. During the day, my father would go to whatever acting job in TV or theater, usually not returning home until late. Unlike his mother, drinking wasn’t a favored activity; he still smoked Chesterfields and returned home pungent of them. Some days and nights they’d join and blended right in to NY’s 50’s zeitgeist, but their lives were mostly separate. Priscilla Kerr’s days and evenings were spent with a stimulating group of new friends breaking ground in Early and New Music; Patsy Davenport and her husband Lanou and other interesting people she easily befriended. She would often go to the theater, or a concert, or a museum alone, embracing mind-filling Manhattan. Culture imbued her waking thoughts, which mostly pondered how to solve the world’s cold war peril, but not so much her marriage. Hungary had just fallen to the Soviets and to most young American intellectual anarchists (read humanists—another term that wouldn’t appear for twenty years) like my mother, and many in and out of academia, there was deep concern. Yet the theater was also becoming a place of social commentary and New York was ground zero. Yet, as exciting as 50’s New York was, there was no internet, the only phones were rotary dial and the cabs were very round. Life was relatively slow, the re-emerging world was still slow back then. Fake news was called by the emerging term: propaganda.

The seasons transitioned onward. Within a year they moved to Greenwich Village, a modernist apartment on Cornelia Street just far enough from his mother that she couldn’t easily walk there—- she’d injured her knee in a (drunken?) fall years earlier, which had never properly healed. Jocelyn and Rebecca (Jocie & Becky) with their strawberry blonde red hair, were each the happy New York toddler my father had never been. He made no connection of that, or discussion of that with their mother. As in, as a father you should correct the mistakes your own parents made. It was now about the baby daughters. He could make hardly any family connections at all, though he didn’t reject them through the fog of his incapable yearning to connect. His mother through her own alcoholic fog, continued to connect him, and now her grandchild twins, to her life. She died her hair strawberry-blonde.

One of those connections, through his overbearing mother, was “Gadge”, Elia Kazan. In an immensely coincidental lightning bolt of fate, the greatest director in the history of modern theater cast my father in a role perfectly written for him, in a new Broadway play: Tea and Sympathy. The rotary phone rang, my mother picked up the heavy handset. It was her mother-in-law: “Priscilla”, came her excitement, “Gadge has a new play and it’s perfect for Johnny. Tell him he can go audition!”.

During the time my dad was studying Russian literature at Columbia and imagining a future professional life with no marquees, Robert Anderson was writing a play...about a shy, lost needy prep school student. Anderson was an emerging playwright, a Harvard man who was writing about what he knew, with a twist. Elia Kazan loved it—- an affectionate dramatization of misperceptions about hom*osexuality, then an extremely taboo subject; it would be his next controversial challenge on the Broadway stage. The beautiful British film star Deborah Kerr (no family relation yet an odd symbolic coincidence) had been cast in the lead, the teenage student’s seductress. Set in a prep school ringer for Exeter, my father read the script and prepared for his audition rehearsing with his mom... a twisted incestual scene partnership if ever there was one. Though memories of Brando’s performance wracked his mind, the fit to my father’s life felt like the most natural thing he’d ever done; the character Tom Lee speaking the lines through his own heart and soul. It was a remarkable sensation he’d never felt as an actor. He would try to do his best, though was pretty certain he wouldn’t get the job. Instead he got the part, a starring role in an Elia Kazan play on Broadway. He was 23. Back on Cornelia St. He and my mom stared at each other, each feeding a redhead baby, as June Walker’s happy knock came at the door. She was over for dinner most every night, she was family. Tonight was special. Yet both my mom and dad were miles away from her Tea and Sympathy celebration (champagne not tea, of course). Hovering above them all at that dinner table, and beneath all the smiles, was a three-way tug: my father both did and didn’t want this potential failure, but what a great way to hammer the final nail into the coffin of his acting “career” and bid it farewell either way; my mother hadn’t seen this coming and wondered how it would make her husband even more distant from the family they were raising. My grandmother saw it as the perfect redemption of her motherhood, she’d created a son who was “as fine an actor as I am”. Champagne toast, baby Becky whined her grating cry, they traded babies and it seemed the entire apartment had shifted.

He signed a 1 Year contract, with unknown Tony Perkins as his understudy. Perkins would achieve fame in Hitchco*ck’s Psycho, playing a character who kills his mother and keeps loving her desiccated corpse. Though life always trumps art, or is it vice versa-- mothers continued as a theme here.

Tea And Sympathy was an instant hit with good reviews, and suddenly John Kerr the graduate student was walking the halls of Columbia, a Broadway star with books under his arm. He entered the classroom the morning after opening night, hoping he was invisible, yet displayed in the split-identity of his life. Half his classmates applauded, the other half had no idea what for.

‘Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.’ -- Oscar Wilde

At the Tony awards that year, 1954, my father brought his homework: Anna Karenina; a paper due tomorrow. At the podium, [actor from hit play] announced the award for Best New Actor: John Kerr. The smile he exchanged with his wife masked all the bewildered emptiness and conflict of his entire life up to that moment: fear. He grasped my mom’s hand and walked away, to the podium, accepting the award, his thoughts on Tolstoy...and Brando. What would typically be most people’s finest moment remained one of my young father’s worst; a stone he perhaps dragged through his entire life. When he showed the Antoinette Perry Award to his mother two days later, her eyes showed fearless pride. Despite whatever the quality of our parenting, we always have the greatest expectations for our children, yet should always understand that they’re our own expectations, and not theirs.

When I was 8 years old, my grandmother came and lived with us in Los Angeles. After faltering and ailing in NY she finally re-appeared to her now-movie star son, moving into our house for a few months. She was broke, moderately drinking, crippled and on oxygen tanks for emphysema. To eight old me she was delightful fun Grandma Junie but a strain on my parents. I instantly fell in love with her over-the-top brightness, as her perfect final audience. After my parents kicked her out she moved in with her old acting under-study best friend, Eunice Weeks. And then June Walker swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, downed it with vodka, and died. She was 66.

I remember my dad waking me up late at night, with—- “I have to go see grandma”. I never asked him for the specifics but I imagine my dad drove up there, watched the coroner roll her out; considered what fame had done to her, and never finding the real character she was, his mother, and it scared the hell out of him. Likely the darkest night in the theater of his life. He was wearing many faces in many TV shows at that point, shot on those studio soundstages, still struggling to find his own through the complacency of depression.

“To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...” -― Virginia Woolf

My father had a love for life, and at that time a wife and growing family. His mother was suddenly gone in a tragic ending, which he glimpsed could be his own end. Fortunately, he wasn’t ready to put life away; he played tennis the next day.

CHAPTER 2: GADGE DIRECTS

You’re a young actor, just cast in a potentially Tony award-nominated lead role on Broadway...and you then actually win that career-changing award. Here are some essentials you should bring to your first rehearsal:

1) The strength of your talent & acting abilities.

2) A love for either your director or co-star.

3) An inner life.

My dad had one out of three. He was 23 when he auditioned for Elia Kazan in the Broadway production of a new play by Robert Anderson, Tea and Sympathy. Deborah Kerr (no relation) was his co-star; an international, Oscar-nominated film star making her Broadway debut. She was ten years older than my father, who had already appeared on Broadway in a supporting role. And she was married, to English Lord Tony Bartley, a societal niche my father perhaps felt drawn to, his own aunt, Geoffrey Kerr’s sister, was married to a Lord. Kazan, known in the theater by his nickname “Gadge”, was at the height of his own fame and powers as a director. It was 1953, my dad was living in Greenwich Village, married w/ baby twin daughters on the way. A recent Harvard grad with movie star looks (movie stardom would soon come) he’d been handed a theater career path on a silver platter and was already an unusually well-experienced actor for his age.

But he was damaged, perhaps from birth. When you’re 2 years old, hearing the thud of your mom passing out on the floor at 11PM is pretty far off the charts of good parenting. June charted pretty bad in most other motherhood categories as well. Perhaps mercifully she’d exiled her son to boarding schools; he’d graduated from Exeter and thence on to Harvard. He was a bright, beautiful, but broken young man. Yet a pretty good actor having worked summer stock as a teenager in his mother’s plays; Billy Budd and others at the Brattle; and now a solid year of work on New York stages including a supporting role on Broadway. Everybody knew June’s son Johnny, and encouraged his stage career. Local fame in Cambridge was however a confusing slap; instead of feeding his self-confidence it put him outside himself, observing the student he preferred to be; a different, intellectual person from this rising actor he was continuing to become. Watching Brando in “Streetcar” over that spring break had struck him cold and hard that he would never be able to do what Brando could as an actor. Which made him further aware of his something-missing psyche, its absence of parenting or any sense of family. How would he fill it?

By meeting my brilliant, beautiful Radcliffe mother his senior year; on their first date he proclaimed he’d marry her. She laughed it off as actor melodrama, but he was serious. Priscilla Smith was an extremely independent early feminist/anarchist piano prodigy Russian student from a simple, solid, loving Boston family filled with music, delight, and progressive ideas. Her reaction was to instantly and repeatedly try and break up with this disturbed young man suitor who talked incessantly about his troubled upbringing and wish to escape his acting pedigree. He yearned to fill whatever his familial, parental, existential void; delusional that my 20 year old mom might possibly provide that filler. Or even be capable of...help! They married the year after college and moved to New York, three blocks from his mother’s apartment, the stage-set of his original trauma.

Young, bright and beautiful this Harvard grad with his young, bright and beautiful Radcliffe wife; a promising, handsome young actor in the Broadway glare taking up the mantle of his mother’s faded fame. Theater was a creative cultural concentration of commercialism and the new expressionism. My dad had a terrific rookie year, joining the theater ranks in two plays, including the one on Broadway, also supporting his young family with paychecks from Live TV, Playhouse 90—- perhaps the Starbucks job of 50’s New York’s serious young theater actors. Yet grating on his mind, the direct opposite of that day job every aspiring actor yearns to leave behind, was his intellectual passion awakened at Harvard, already nurtured beyond anything acting might satisfy for him. He enrolled at Columbia in American Literature graduate studies, acting to pay the rent, as fantastically convoluted as that would seem today to any Starbucks-employed actor. Another parallel might be supporting yourself as a YouTube creator while studying the macroeconomics of global warming, eyeing a career as a U.N. consultant. Things were slower back then, with those rotary phones, round-fendered cabs and TV’s with glitch 12” screens. Maybe he would teach, maybe write a novel called Walking Away; a sci-fi tale set 70 years in the future about the son of a movie star father, who writes a novel about his father walking away from acting. [edit-- lose this digression]

When he auditioned for Kazan it was a major lucky break with a role seemingly written just for him by playwright Robert Anderson. But appearing onstage at the Ethyl Barrymore theater opposite Deborah Kerr in a major Broadway production seemed like opposite sides of the same magnet; Shakespeare came to mind: ‘To be or not to be...”. Yet what 23 year old actor wouldn’t drool at the idea of co-starring with a beautiful, major Oscar-nominated film star, directed by the man who directed Brando. Their shared surnames maybe tying them closer together. Or so Gadge might’ve hoped.

He was perfect for the part, radiating sensitivity and insecurity in his handsome sweet face. Kazan was a big deal in 1954, the biggest deal. My 23 year old father was hired; smitten with his co-star from the first reading. Rehearsals began out of town in New Haven. But it wasn’t working. This risqué, now minor American classic Robert Anderson play was about both confused sexuality, and adultery. It was the story of a sensitive prep-school student who finds more than just “tea and sympathy” from the wife of his housemaster, for which young John Kerr seemed a perfect fit. But it wasn’t working. The co-stars weren’t finding the chemistry. And so, the great director...directed.

At this point my mom was pregnant with my sisters (I was still years away from my human debut) and would go up to Connecticut on weekends during rehearsals. The cast, director and writer were all staying in a hotel. On that particular weekend, the phone rang as my mom was preparing to go. It was Bob, playwright Robert Anderson, telling my mom: “It’s probably not a good idea for you to come this weekend. Gadge is trying to break open the performance”. So Priscilla stayed home, reading Chekov, listening to Debussy and hanging out with friends.

What was unfolding up in New Haven was an alternative Tea & Sympathy back at that hotel, for a private rehearsal off-script; and a certifiably horrible directing choice. By the Great Kazan. What happened, according to my father, was that Kazan told Deborah: “Seduce him”.... It wasn’t yet the free love 60’s but theater life had long been sexually flexible, if not free; a bit like high school where you might make out in the back of dad’s Chevy, or in your dressing room backstage. Any behavior acceptable, proceed at your own emotional risk though take full responsibility. Whatever happens might lead to something more, or not; with no boundaries violated. Deborah Kerr was also married, but she complied. I can imagine her saying something like: “Ok Gadge deah, I’ll give that a try...but no promises!”, then the two theater/film greats sharing an agreeing grin. Maybe later that night she thinks about her husband, and then her contract, considering whether it’s not tantamount to prostitution. She’ll do it for Gadge, and my dad is cute and sweet. Theater life, where you do things you thought you never would—- oh no, wait, that’s Hooray for Hollywood. But whether Hollywood movie or Broadway play you risk hurting people (my mother, Deborah Kerr’s husband) and harming lives (my father, his father). For Deborah, and Kazan, it was all about performance; it was an important play, tenderly yet sharply written, to get absolutely right. Also, for her, Kazan’s suggestion wasn’t a stretch, she too had feelings for her young co-star. It happened at the hotel. And only once that weekend.

When Tea & Sympathy opened on Broadway their performances were brilliant, deeply connected with raw emotion and...chemistry from here to the back of the house. My dad had fallen in love with Deborah, barely concealing it onstage, as his character was also meant to do. My mother, in the audience, had seen him act before but had never seen him deliver like this. It was a pure example of art imitating life imitating art. And it connected with audiences’ applause, with some shocked shouts of Bravo!, and became the hit play about taboo “hom*osexuality” people talked about that season. And my dad won the Tony (Best New Actor) and became a star. The play ran a year with its contracted co-stars then Deborah flew home to England, my mom & dad to Hollywood. Tea & Sympathy continued running, Tony Perkins replacing my dad.

At the end of his run in the play, my father confessed to my mother about the one night hotel affair. His admission was as nonchalant as: “Oh by the way, we’re getting the carpets cleaned on Thursday”. She forgave him, chalking it up to “that’s life in the theater” and so they moved on with their life together; including procreating me, so whatever Tea & Sympathy pain apparently healed. Though there were occasional repercussions—- John Kerr had truly fallen in love with Deborah Kerr, and vice versa. They wrote each other; there was even a proposal she leave her husband, who refused to lose his children. Collateral damage, courtesy of Gadge.

To Kazan’s credit, I don’t believe this horrible directing procedure was in the secret back pages of his dog-eared Gadge playbook. He was a brilliant director who I expect rarely, if ever, faltered with such tactics in the face of acting chemistry inertia. But when I learned of all this years later, from my dad, it really pissed me off. I felt so hurt for my mother, and angry at my father. But enraged at Elia Kazan. The theater is built on all these constructs of illusion in order to dramatize reality. The playwrights, the directors, the actors, the set-designers, lighting people; these are all professional, talented people applying their crafts together on a stage, in a theater. Everyone has a well-honed technique to hopefully bring the drama to life, rivet the audience and draw them into the story in a suspension of belief. However, if you’re a set-designer and the house is supposed to burn down, you don’t literally burn down the set. You and the lighting designer do some lighting thing with orange gels, fans and dry ice. If you’re two actors whose characters are having some complex intimate connection, and it’s not working, your director, particularly if he’s one of the all time great directors of 20^th century theater, does some directing thing. He doesn’t tell his actors to go back to the hotel and have sex.

My father was young and still a bit green; and frightened to try to do whatever Brando did in Streetcar-- how did Brando do it? Deborah Kerr, however, was a seasoned pro and intelligent, multi-dimensional actress. Yet ‘50’s American theater was in its early period of realist naturalism, on the Broadway stage or any stage. The Method hadn’t yet gotten much mileage because there were hardly any actors who could do it right off the page. There was Brando...and...that other unknown actor and...that young actress. And not many playwrights writing for it. It’s possible even Kazan didn’t have a clue, and that Brando had directed his own performance perforce.

On Tea & Sympathy Kazan took the lazy way out, at least. Like, go learn something new about your craft dude, if you can’t figure out a way to do it within the boundaries of your talent and high-technique. Go take a Lee Strasberg class, fool! You’re not shooting p*rn. You’re working with actors, who are people with lives offstage involving other people—- like my mother, my sisters, Deborah Kerr’s husband and their own kids. Whether or not it was laziness, it was borderline unethical, immoral, and certainly insensitive. Such a choice manipulated the risk of hurting people (my mother) and harming lives (my father, Geoffrey Kerr). I remain angry to this day at what a foul, desperate, exploitative directorial choice he made. Kazan directing on Broadway at the height of his career; my opinion is it was the rock-bottom of his career. But it worked and nobody jumped off the marquee closing night.

Decades later I interviewed Kazan for a piece I was writing on his political stance naming names, and his recent rejection by most of the audience at the Academy Awards who sat on their hands when he was awarded his Lifetime Achievement Award. Some hissed (the politically polite Oscar broadcast cut out the hisses). I brought up Tea and Sympathy and the private affair he’d directed offstage. “Your dad was young and blocked up, you do whatever you can do”, he responded, “It was a hit and he won the Tony”. But then he looked away.

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