‘Born Yesterday’s’ Kanin Recalls Opening Night of ’46

In 1946, Garson Kanin’s “Born Yesterday” bows on Broadway. The omens are not good. Preview audiences have roared with laughter. Not the opening night patrons. They give it maybe six laughs, max.

Kanin and his wife, Ruth Gordon, the actress and playwright, walk home. They have a drink, sigh a bit, and repair to bed. Just before 1 a.m., the phone rings. It’s Max Gordon, the show’s producer.

“It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!” he yells. Thus does Kanin learn, in February, that his first play is a smash, a recipient of glowing reviews that assure it a long run and later a movie sale.

A revival of “Born Yesterday” will open Sunday at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.

In its Broadway debut, “Yesterday” made an overnight star of Judy Holliday. She played the dense blond mistress of a millionaire junkman portrayed by a burly, hard-drinking, free-spirited former CBS announcer, Paul Douglas, who became an overnight co-star.

But why no whoops from the audience on opening night?

It turned out, Kanin says, that most of those black-tie pilgrims were newspaper folk and Broadwayites who had already seen his comedy out of town. They knew its funny bits, and thus didn’t react as they might have if they were seeing it for the first time.

Kanin, whose stage dossier includes the musical “Do Re Mi” and co-director credit for “Funny Girl,” says his reaction to what he perceived as the opening night reaction only shows that “we are in an inexact profession.”

That inexactness is evident in the backstage dramas that have occurred in rehearsals for the Pasadena revival of “Born Yesterday.”

The production, with Rebecca de Mornay in the “dumb blond” role, is already on its third leading man and second director. Actor Ron Leibman left last month, succeeded in the Douglas role by Allen Garfield, who was then replaced by David Schramm. Don Amendolia took over the direction from Stephen Rothman.

When Rothman--who had negotiated for the rights to the play--was replaced, Pasadena Playhouse artistic director Susan Dietz and managing director Lars Hansen flew to New York for a June 10 meeting with Kanin’s representative, Martha Wilson, in order to cement Kanin’s confidence in the new regime.

Kanin has approval rights over the three leading actors and the director of any “Born Yesterday” production.

Kanin, who was interviewed and then left for a summer on Martha’s Vineyard before the dispute, said there had been a few other revivals of “Yesterday” this year, with productions done or afoot in Philadelphia, Chicago, Manchester, England, and Rome.

Kanin’s farce involves wholesale corruption in wartime Washington. For that reason, he mused, there always seems to be increased interest in it at times of political ferment.

“And shortly after Watergate,” he said, harking back to the Nixon years, “there was such an explosion . . . I think we had 20 productions just at Watergate time.”

Kanin, whose wife died in 1985, is a short, dapper man of 79, precise in speech and urbane in manner. He maintains a three-room, memorabilia-festooned office a short walk from Carnegie Hall.

A one-time Hollywood Wunderkind , his film credits include “Adam’s Rib” and “Pat and Mike.” His articles and short stories have appeared in publications as diverse as Good Housekeeping and Penthouse magazines.

Kanin became an Army captain in World War II. He was one of the nation’s earliest draftees for that war, swept up in 1941 before Pearl Harbor.

During his Army stint, he made several help-the-war-effort documentaries, one with a score by Oscar Levant. He also worked in a small unit that filmed demonstrations of new secret weapons: “We would have one screening and then burn the film.”

He was in London--by this time as part of a 200-member, 60-jeep wartime film unit--when he decided he needed funds (his wife had been sending him money).

“So what I did--some of it sub rosa, some openly--was to write movie scripts,” he said. He was about a third of the way through one when it struck him that it wouldn’t sell.

“One, it had an American political subject, which was anathema to movie makers in those days,” he said. “Also, it had a venal senator.”

He abandoned it temporarily and sent it to his wife. She thought it would make a fine play. So, at war’s end, he finished it and sent it to producer Gordon and Gordon’s partners, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman.

“And I was launched,” he said.

The launching was not without difficulty. He’d originally written the lead for film star Jean Arthur. She was unhappy in the role. In the show’s Philadelphia tryout, Arthur, on her doctor’s advice, bowed out. This made possible the debut of Judy Holliday.

Getting radio announcer Paul Douglas was a far less trying matter, although risky. He only had been on stage once, in a short-lived farce called “Double Dummy,” and he was said to stay out late and take the waters.

“He was a fascinating character,” Kanin said. “He used to come to early morning programs in a full dinner jacket. Apparently”--he smiled--”he had been up all night.”

But the announcer proved a reliable acting professional in “Yesterday.” No matter that he first thought he was being asked to invest in it and then, when asked if he could act, calmly flicked ashes off the end of his cigarette and told Kanin:

“Kid, you are looking at probably the finest actor in America.”

It did not dismay the playwright a day later when Douglas, having read the script, said he would appear in the show, then tossed the script on Kanin’s desk and said: “Needs work.”

Like many stage veterans, Kanin frets about the current state of Broadway, even though the box office is up this season, primarily due to such hits as “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables.”

“If New York theater were not one of the city’s principal tourist attractions, I think it’d be out of business,” he said.

Yet despite his gloom, Kanin is working on a new play, which he will only describe as about “life.”

“I can’t help it,” he said. “I know, it doesn’t make sense for me to write plays. I have two unproduced plays and here I am writing another one. You can look at me and quite reasonably say, ‘What’s the point?’

“I don’t know. I can’t explain it. But that’s what I do. I’m a playwright. I write plays.”