A ‘WOMAN’S’ JOURNAL: THE TIGER THAT ROARED

When Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey started to write what was to become her first novel--”A Woman of Independent Means”--she had modest goals. It was to be a journal for her daughters.

The story of her grandmother, Bess Steed Garner of Dallas and St. Louis, was told in the form of letters to friends and family. But when Hailey’s husband, playwright Oliver Hailey, peeked at the first dozen, he said “Bets, I think you have a tiger by the tail.”

And so she had. Published in 1978, “Woman” became a national best seller and, most recently, a one-woman show that opens Thursday at the Doolittle Theatre.

You could say “reopens,” because it won’t be the first time the piece has played here. It began in 1983 as a low-profile workshop piece at the Back Alley Theatre in Van Nuys--with Hailey, actress Barbara Rush and director Norman Cohen (all of whom have been with the show all along) whittling down seven hours of script.

“Barbara is astonishing,” Hailey said recently, settling into a couch in the glassed-in den of the Studio City ranch home she shares with husband Oliver, daughters Kendall and Brooke and other members of the Hailey family.

“She insisted on committing everything to memory before we even went into rehearsal. Then she went back and read the book, called me up and said, ‘I want to say this and this and this and we can’t leave out this.’ ”

Speaking of the novel, Hailey said, “The fun for me was that I was dealing with what was happening to me and to women at the time--in the early ‘70s. I was a young mother pretty much stuck at home, but I didn’t want to write on the nose about women’s liberation. I didn’t want to get into labels.

“By going through my grandmother, about whom I really didn’t have to invent a great deal, I was able to say things that were troubling me , using her life as a facade.

“The book is much more personal than it appears, because I didn’t know what my grandmother was thinking and feeling. I didn’t have real letters. I just had some of the diary she kept when she traveled and she was not a terribly introspective person. She was always on the go and always signed her letters to me ‘Hurriedly.’ ”

Hailey, born and reared in Dallas, started out as a journalist (on the Dallas Morning News) and claims she enjoyed reporting facts. Fiction was something she learned to do.

She also met her husband on the News. She had wanted an assignment on the city desk, but was assigned to the amusement pages. He had wanted amusements and got city. They were fated to meet.

“I offered to share my season tickets to the State Fair of Musicals in Dallas and he was hooked,” said Hailey. “I always say he proposed on the second date because he wanted the free tickets.

“I’d had no experience in the theater growing up, never acted in my life. If I read one line you’d see why,” she said, claiming she absorbed theater “by osmosis.” Is this to suggest that “Woman of Independent Means,” the play, was written by Oliver?

“Well, you’ll see that in some of the press releases it says it was co-written by my husband,” Hailey said with a laugh. “That came out of an interview in Dallas.

“Oliver was enormously helpful in showing me how to edit and make transitions. I would never have conceived of it as a play if he hadn’t seen the potential in it.”

Another help, of course, was Barbara Rush. She had met the Haileys in 1973 when she took a production of Oliver’s “Father’s Day” on the road, playing one of the parts and ending it with a successful run at the Huntington Hartford. The moment Rush laid eyes on the “Woman” stage script, she came up with ideas of her own.

“She was terribly concerned that we show enough of the character and her thought processes, whereas I had been determined to make it move swiftly and dramatically.

“I said, ‘Barbara, we’re at least two hours long,’ and she said, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’ So we put in more and took out other things--very little of what she had wanted put in. I would never have had the courage to suggest these things, but she was fearless. Very comfortable with words.”

Los Angeles critics hailed the show at the Back Alley, lavishing awards on Rush. In the midst of such acclaim, a group of producers persuaded the principals to take it to Broadway where, in May 1984, “A Woman of Independent Means” was promptly shot down.

How does Hailey explain it?

“You explain it to me,” she said. “The production was not that different. I have too many friends who only saw it in New York and loved it. Also our preview audiences were so enthusiastic. I, of course, had my eyes wide open.”

For good reason. Her husband Oliver has had a similar sour romance with Broadway.

“Oliver and I were never all that excited about going to New York, but when you have two really enthusiastic New York producers willing to put up that kind of money, it’s hard to say no for a nebulous alternative. What concerned me was how do you get it started again?”

It took a while to pick up the pieces and “go other places,” but go they did. First stop: Toronto, January, ‘85--eight months after the New York fiasco.

“We were very scared in Toronto,” Hailey said, “but the critics were wonderful. They didn’t even mention the New York reviews.”

The successful engagement led to a return in July. Dallas, home of Bess Steed Garner, followed in September. And two months ago, there was a run in Houston.

The “Woman” was reborn.

“It’s like the experience you have with a book,” Hailey said. “A book is as new as the last person who’s read it. It doesn’t get closed or disappear. And Barbara has wonderful instincts. She was over here last week, because in Dallas and Houston she met my family and heard more stories about my grandmother. So there are changes--nothing radical, but some cutting and shaping.

“Barbara’s very open about what she wants. She had loved the book and approached me about doing the play long before the rights were available, because there was a long period when the stage rights were tied up with the film rights and were under option different places.”

Hailey feels lucky that the deals “all reverted to me after a certain time.” She’s now retaining control of those rights, “because I’m determined to have this one-woman version filmed in some way. We’ve had interest from KCET and from cable. I think there’s a second life for the property, but I’m much more interested in preserving this version which is close to the book and uses its language.”

Meanwhile, Hailey has just published her third novel (“Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife,” Delacorte). The book is “as close to being autobiographical as I’ve dared come, but I’ve stalked my own marriage very cautiously.

“It’s 25 years in the history of a marriage. We married in 1960 and had our 25th anniversary last summer. I was on a panel with (book reviewer) Carolyn See who said, ‘How can you write about your husband until after the divorce?’ ”

Among the future plans is a strong possibility of taking “Woman” to London (the Haileys bought a 16th-Century house in the village of Rudgwick, south of London, last summer), but, at the moment, “It’s very much a city-by-city process.”

About the opening at the Doolittle, however, she has few qualms:

“L.A. is home. There are so many people here who didn’t get to see it the first time, and it’s a great feeling to know that so many people here are already aware of it.”