Josh Logan, Stage, Movie Director, Dies

Josh Logan, creator of many of the warmest moments in entertainment history, died Tuesday.

The producer, director and author, who brought “Mister Roberts,” “South Pacific” and “Picnic” to the Broadway stage and then remade them all as triumphant motion pictures, was 79 and died at his Manhattan home from supranuclear palsey, a debilitating disease that he had suffered from for six years, his secretary, Ethel Weinstein, said.

A consummate professional for nearly 50 years, Logan’s career was marked by a series of widely praised and commercially successful theatrical ventures in which he was surrounded by some of the brightest lights in the show business firmament. But his life was starkly accented by personal tragedy.

He was a millionaire by the time he was 40 who was alternately referred to as a boy genius and one of the “genuine SOBs in the theater.” And he was a driven man who once told an interviewer that what he really wanted was to find a way of life “that is not so turbulent and full of pressure.”

That was in the late 1940s between his first mental breakdown in 1940 and the second in 1953.

And late in life he seemed to fulfill that wish, gradually abandoning the frenetic world of stage direction and writing for a more leisurely life of lecturing and nostalgic appearances where he would discuss the genesis of some of his biggest hits--and then sing their best-known songs in a voice charitably described as “a smoker’s baritone.”

What he was essentially, he said in his 1976 autobiography, “Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life,” was a boy whose mother “fed me on beauty instead of cod-liver oil” who grew into a man whose “life and breath is the theater.”

Born in Texas

That life began in Texarkana, Tex., in 1908 when he was born to a father who sold lumber and a mother who taught him Shakespearean sonnets before he was old enough to read them himself. His father died when he was quite young and his mother, who soon was to remarry a man who became a major influence on Logan’s life, let him stage plays of his own imagination in a small room off the family living quarters.

The Army colonel that his mother married encouraged young Joshua Lockwood Logan to develop his body as well as his mind. His stepfather enrolled him in a military school in Culver, Ind., where the family had moved, and the boy began boxing and working with weights. His summers were spent in an ROTC camp near New York City and it was during his first three months there that he began a love affair with the theater that lasted his entire life.

When the teen-age cadet was through with his classes and drills during the day he would go into the city and watch Will Rogers, Fanny Brice and W. C. Fields in the Ziegfeld Follies, or Walter Huston in “Desire Under the Elms.” He saw 50 separate productions during his first summer alone.

From military school he went to Princeton where his major, he wrote in his autobiography, “was the hi-jinx of bootlegged liquor during Prohibition and all-night parties.”

But between parties he joined a new stock company called the University Players--a group of Yale, Harvard, Smith and Vassar writers and actors bent on staging productions beyond those approved by their respective schools.

Future Stars

Among his colleagues were Henry Fonda, Margaret Sullavan and, later, a lanky sophomore architectural major named Jimmy Stewart. In the fall, winter and spring he began to write plays for Princeton’s Triangle Club, but summers were reserved for his University Players, whom he served as writer, actor and finally director.

Through friends he went to Moscow to study under Constantin Stanislavsky and later said he used the Stanislavsky Method to “make singers sing as actors . . . and use the orchestra to suggest the emotion of a scene.”

Logan returned to the United States after eight months but not to finish his senior year at Princeton. Instead, he and Charles Leatherbee of Harvard, who later wed Logan’s sister, took the University Players to Baltimore for their first winter season of repertory.

By now the group included Kent Smith and Stewart and for several glorious months--at 50 cents a ticket--the young thespians staged productions ranging from “Lysistrata” to some of Logan’s own work.

But the Depression crippled that enterprise and in 1933 Logan used one of his last five nickels to call a playwright friend who found him work as sixth assistant stage manager of “She Loves Me Not,” a Broadway play starring Burgess Meredith. To pick up extra money he understudied nearly all of the male roles in the play and that, coupled with his ability to manage the complexities of the play itself, formed the basis of his reputation for versatility.

That versatility was welcomed at a time when producers were cutting costs at every turn.

Next he was asked to direct two minor productions, “The Distaff Side” and “Hell Freezes Over,” the latter starring Louis Calhern, who soon moved West to films.

Leaves for Hollywood

Logan himself was not far behind. David O. Selznick offered him a job as dialogue director on “Garden of Allah,” a 1936 movie starring Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer. He stayed to direct Boyer’s next film, “History Is Made at Night,” and a third Hollywood production, “I Met My Love Again,” which he also co-wrote.

Logan returned East where he was asked to direct “On Borrowed Time,” the Paul Osborn fantasy that ran for more than a year after its 1938 New York debut.

Based on its success, he was next asked to stage “I Married an Angel,” beginning an association with composer Richard Rodgers that was to culminate in “South Pacific.”

Concurrently he began work on the Maxwell Anderson-Kurt Weill operetta, “Knickerbocker Holiday,” and when its star, Walter Huston, complained of the one-dimensional, scoundrel aspects of his character, Logan asked that he be given a few warming moments on stage.

The result was a new melody, “September Song,” and after Huston died in 1950, Logan took it as a signature tune. He insisted upon performing it at parties and then added it to his own late-in-life revue, “A Musical Evening With Josh Logan.”

Logan’s stage success was soon offset by a flop, “Morning at Seven,” and Logan--who had fallen ill during rehearsals--believed that his absence had caused its failure.

Years later he told Life magazine that he was “driven by a frenzy” to redeem himself. He undertook the direction of two shows simultaneously--”Two for the Show” and “Higher and Higher.” The first of his manic-depressive breakdowns was the immediate result and it was two years before he was able to return to Broadway in 1942 with “By Jupiter,” the Richard Rodgers-Dwight Deere Wilman musical comedy.

Then it was the U.S. government that curtailed the revived Logan career, drafting him into the Army where he became an assistant director for Irving Berlin’s “This Is the Army.” Later he served as a public relations and information officer for air groups in Britain and France.

Broadway Production

He celebrated his return to civilian life by directing Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun” with Ethel Merman, which ran for 1,147 performances after it opened in 1946.

From the Old West of Annie Oakley, Logan moved to the Pacific of World War II with “Mister Roberts,” which he adapted and then directed from Thomas Heggen’s novel about a wayward cast of characters on a Navy cargo ship.

It reunited Henry Fonda and Logan in a success that the two young men could never have imagined in their University Players days and made Logan a valued literary figure.

He stayed nautical for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who thought that there might be a musical drama in James A. Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific.”

The result was “South Pacific,” with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, and it was a production that taxed even Logan’s talents.

After its debut in 1949, Logan told the New York Times how difficult it was to maintain the mood and story flow through the cheering and applause that followed each song.

“Our songs were to be done as scenes. . . . We tried to figure out ways of presenting the songs and immediately going on with the story without encores.”

He borrowed a technique from films and used dissolves--in which the following scene begins before the preceding one ends, minimizing the disruptions.

The New York Herald Tribune wrote that Logan’s direction gave the play “a fluency and variety that have never been matched in a song and dance show.”

It won a Pulitzer Prize and Logan took the production to London where earlier he had staged “Mister Roberts.” He also took both to films with Fonda re-creating his role while Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi subbed for Martin and Pinza.

The film successes followed the stage triumphs “Fanny” and “Picnic” where William Holden and Kim Novak barely eluded the censors’ scissors of 1966.

Postwar Triumphs

He made pictures of plays he hadn’t directed--”Camelot” for one--and continued to direct and write some of Broadway’s biggest postwar triumphs: “Wish You Were Here,” “The World of Suzie Wong,” “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright” and “Ready When You Are, CB.”

Sandwiched between all this was his second breakdown, again for a prolonged period and, as he wrote in “Josh,” were it not for lithium carbonate he might have remained a mental patient for the rest of his life.

He was hired to direct the Lerner-Lowe hit “Paint Your Wagon,” was fired and then rehired. This film and “Bus Stop” became two of the more famous Logan credits, although Logan--disenchanted over artistic differences during the shooting of “Wagon”--minimized the film.

He staged “Carmen” in Louisiana, wrote a second autobiography, “Movie Stars, Real People and Me” in 1978 and toured with his “Musical Evening” revue, which began as a cruise ship act and moved to stages across the country.

He had married for a second time, to Nedda Harrington, whose vaudevillian father, William, was the subject of the famous George M. Cohan song “H-A-Double-R-I, G-A-N Spells Harrigan.”

In 1979-80 he took two immediate flops to Broadway, “Trick” and “Horowitz and Mrs. Washington.” And in 1984 he set sail again with “Mr. Roberts,” this time as consultant for an NBC television movie. He dramatized “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” but never got it to the stage.

He never again approached the artistic victories of his earlier years. But after the breakdowns, he wrote in “Josh,” maybe that wasn’t so important.

He recalled leaving the hospital in 1954 and discovering through the mental fog that “yes, David Merrick still wants me to direct ‘Fanny’ and Harry Cohn is on the phone, eager to sign me for the film version of ‘Picnic.’

“My God, it was better than ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ I was Dr. Manette coming out of the darkness of the Bastille, blinking my rheumy eyes at the sunlight.

“Charles Dickens had been writing me all along.”