At the Top of the Pile
[an origin story]
[originally published September 18, 2024]
[Today’s ’stack is an exercise in self-soothing, so I’m advising, perhaps even warning, you up front that it’s apt to meander sillily. You may, if you’re already eyeing the exit door, proceed accordingly. My feelings won’t be hurt. Also: Very little copyediting stuff today. Also also: If you’d told me five years ago that I’d ever seek inner peace by sitting down at my desk and writing for an hour or two, I’d’ve laughed in your face.1]
As I have been, perforce,2 these last few weeks, sorting through absolutely everything I own for reasons that, as you are all bright people, I imagine you can infer (but that I’m not inclined to publicly discuss3 just this moment lest I lose what little sanity I still possess4), I’ve enjoyed, or sometimes been saddened and/or moved and/or maddened by, taking fresh looks at all of my stuff, quite a lot of which I’m keeping and quite a lot of which I have largely guiltlessly discarded.5
Any old way, as piles of things—lots and lots of paper around this place, you perhaps won’t be surprised to know—rearranged themselves, one particular thing eventually showed up—as Constance Collier, the faded demi-grande dame in the movie Stage Door says of the similarly faded press clippings she carries hopefully around in her handbag—“right on top.”6 (How lucky!)
And this is it:
What you’re looking at is a lobby card for, as a dear friend recently described it, “that flop play you’re obsessed with.”7
Indeed it is, and indeed I am. That flop play, as you can see, is titled Night Watch, and its ’wright, as you can also see, is one Lucille Fletcher, best known as the author of Sorry, Wrong Number, a monstrously cunning thirty-minute 1943 radio drama that was overexpanded into an eighty-nine-minute 1948 feature film with Barbara Stanwyck.
I saw this flop play one Wednesday afternoon matinee in May 1972, toward the end of its brief Broadway run,8 and, well, it changed my life.
Now, this was simply one of a number of Wednesday afternoon matinee theatergoing school field trips my high school classmates and I made from Long Island to Broadway based on the whims of our English teachers, possessed of exceptionally lowercase-c catholic tastes, and, to be sure, the availability of discounted student tickets, and thus I attended a motley crew of productions ranging from Jim Dale in Scapino to the Andrews Sisters9 in Over Here! to Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards in A Moon for the Misbegotten. I found it all heady and enchanting, even if, as I recall, some of us, invariably upstairs in the cheap or at least cheaper rows, spent an awful lot of the first act of every show casing the joint for unoccupied orchestra seats we might usurp during the intermission.
In any event, Night Watch is a periodically ingenious thriller about a young, anxious, wealthy East Side Manhattan matron who, one night, sees—or does she?—through her sitting-room window a dead body—or is it?—seated in a wing chair in an abandoned building just across the way.10 And yet—are you sitting down?—no one believes her.
That young, anxious, wealthy East Side Manhattan matron was played by Joan Hackett,11 and ye gods I’d never experienced the like in my life, all fourteen years of it: this elegant, nervous, floor-prowling creature with traces of an unplaceable accent that I suppose I placed at the time as Early Middle Miss Porter’s With Time Off For Good Behavior In Europe, and one (or at least I) simply couldn’t take my eyes off her.
I mean, can you?
Another thing I recall: The set rotated bit by bit, scene by scene, so that the fateful sitting-room window, which at the beginning of the play was, as you can see in the photo above, at extreme stage right (thus you couldn’t see what our heroine was seeing—or purporting to see—through it), was by the fateful climax upstage dead center (so that you could). More ingeniousness!
This was for me the true start of an undying passion that soon evolved, besides encompassing the theater generally, to take in any number of elegant, nervous, floor-prowling actresses—Julie Harris! Marian Seldes! Stockard Channing!—with accents I eventually realized are not necessarily Early Middle Miss Porter’s With Time Off For Good Behavior In Europe but simply Utter Stage Diva Who Pitches Her Voice Directly Into Your Chest.
The other day, someone asked me what production, in all my years of theatergoing, I’d like to revisit, and my mind immediately went to Andrei Serban’s legendary12 1977 Lincoln Center production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which starred, speaking of Utter Stage Divas, Irene Worth, to say nothing of Raul Julia and Little Miss Meryl Streep. (That’s Worth in white as Lyubov Andreievna Ranevskaya, supported by Priscilla Smith, absolutely heart-rending as Varya, in black. And you may recognize the gentleman between Raul and Meryl as Max Wright, eventually of ALF.)
But then I had an afterthought: Of all the things I’ve ever seen onstage that I’ve deeply cherished that I’d be just as happy not to revisit, this Night Watch might be at the top of the list. I don’t fear that I’d be any less mesmerized by its leading lady now than I was when I was fourteen, and I’ll bet I’d be just as thrilled by that rotating set,13 but perhaps I’m content to leave adolescent me luxuriating in his adolescent excitement watching what my very-much-postadolescent occasional rereadings of the script over the years—plus the film version, which I’ve seen almost twice—have revealed to be passably ingenious, yes, but rickety claptrap, also yes.
Well, I was in a storytelling mood, and that—taking one’s cue from the cunning Scheherazade—is enough story for one day (or night).
Till next time,
Benjamin (newly self-soothed)
Taking Care of Taking Care of Business
Thank you for being here, thank you for following, thank you especially for subscribing. All of this substackery of mine is free and will remain that way, which means that if you have chosen to contribute to its and my upkeep,14 in larger or smaller ways, you are doing something you don’t have to do, which makes your generosity that much more resonant, and I am profoundly grateful. If you’re not yet part of that contributing crew and there’s a part of you that’s thinking “Who would have thought that apostrophes, commas, and ancient show business anecdotes could be so much fun?” and you choose to join the crew, I will be eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.
Benjamin
So far, and I’m only a few lines in, I’ve detected three potential subjects for footnoting, so in order of appearance:
• Whenever I want to type a clipped word that begins with an apostrophe, like ’stack (or, if you’re reading this a hundred years ago, ’flu, ’phone, or ’bus), my pet method is to type an x, then the apostrophe, and then the word, and then obliterate the x, which takes us from, for instance, x’stack to ’stack. What you don’t want, of course, is an open single quotation mark, as in: ‘stack. Other people have other pet methods, but mine’s easy (for me) to remember and execute. (I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating, I think.)
• Yes, sillily is a word. It’s a silly word.
• Yes, you’re allowed to write I’d’ve. Truly you’re allowed to write anything you want.
Going forward in this piece, I’ll try to be a bit more restrained in the annotation. We’ll see how it goes. (Prediction: It won’t go well.)
Oh dear, here we are again. Well, perforce is also, of course, a word, and it means of necessity or as a reflection of inevitability. It’s a word you can get away with once a year or so, if that.
Yes, we split infinitives around here. Of course we do.
We’re moving. There, I said it. Not another word.
Loath as I am to offer advice outside the narrow realm of prose, may I nonetheless suggest: Edit your life—by which I guess I mean edit your possessions—as you’re living it. Don’t just do it once every, gosh, three decades or so. Cull as you go!
At some point, as perhaps you’ve noticed from previous ’stacks of mine, sooner or later everything is a line from a play or a movie. I hope that I contextualize at least some of these so as not to leave you shaking your poor heads in bemusement, but in the immortal words of Mary Astor in Meet Me in St. Louis: “Alonzo, every telephone call isn’t for you.” Or, in the immortal words of Marjorie Main in Meet Me in St. Louis: “Cabbage has a cabbage smell.” Or, in the immortal words of Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis: “I’m the most horrible! I’m the most horrible!” Or, in the especially immortal words of Joan Carroll in Meet Me in St. Louis: “Oh, Rose, you’re so stuck up.” Whew.
He’s still a dear friend.
I know that it was toward the end of the run because, as my retained Playbill, to say nothing of my memory, indicates, leading man Len Cariou had been replaced by Edward Winter, who, the record shows, joined the company in early May, and the play, which had opened in late February, closed in mid-June.
To say nothing of the divine Ann Reinking, shown here held aloft by the stalwart John Mineo.
If this already sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s possibly because the play was filmed, soporifically, in 1973, reset to London and starring Elizabeth Taylor, who does the best she can, and Laurence Harvey, who doesn’t. The movie also features that legendary Samuel Beckett muse and interpreter Billie Whitelaw, who . . . oh, whomst am I kidding: She’s Mrs. Blaylock in The Omen.
Maybe you know her from The Group, possibly you know her from The Last of Sheila. People who know her tend to worship her. Join the club?
Is it legendary because I was there and I want it to have been legendary? Perhaps in part. But it was really something. And my first Chekhov, too! Boy, did I luck out.
“I love a set that does a little trick,” as a friend once observed.
And Sallie’s!
x'word is genius.
Such a great piece about being struck by something nobody else probably remembers with such clarity or affection. Mine was seeing Leonard Bernstein in one of the Concerts he did for children, which began my love of classical music, just as he had intended. How lucky we were to have had access to such treasures.