The Times from Shreveport, Louisiana • Page 62

4-F Sunday, April 21, 1963 The Shreveport Times FOR PLAYWRIGHT JEAN KERR "9 mIIJI uw Comedy Begins at Home tr. 111111 A Creaky Old Car Was, in a Way, a Chariot Which Carried Jean Kerr to Fabulous Success as a Playivright and Author, She, Still Has the Car But She Has Moved Her Writing Operations to a Bedroom Corner in a House Which Looks Like a Combination of Museum and Horror-Movie Set, Amid All, the Author of "Please BonH Eat the Daisies" Still Manages to Cope, More or Less, With Five Rambunctious Sons and a Critical Husband, 'AN i By HUGH A. MULLIGAN AP Newifeatures Writer LARCHMONT, N. Y. W) When Jean Kerr was turning out $300 magazine articles in the back seat of the 9-year-old family Chevy, parked a few blocks from her houseful of boisterous boys, she never considered herself a serious writer.

"I consider a writer serious when he makes more than $20,000 a year," was the way she put it. That was five years ago. Today, two books, two movie sales and a hit play later, Jean Kerr has had to revise her standards upward. Her royalties from the five companies of "Mary, Mary" one on Broadway (now in its third year), three on the road and one in London average $20,000 a week. And yet she still approaches her work with the same uncomplicated candor as when she heard MGM had paid $75,000 for the screen rights to her best seller, "Please Don't Eat the Daisies." "They must be out of their minds," she said.

The venerable Chevy still holds down a place of honor in the Kerr garage, alongside a newer, more expensive vehicle, but its backseat recluse has moved on to larger, more comfortable quarters. Jean Kerr now works in a corner of the bedroom amid a colossal chaos of Coke bottles, cigarette butts and disorderly mounds of manuscripts that, as the children know from past experience, constitute the rubbled construction site of a new play. "I've got it spread out all over the place up there scene by scene," said the playwright when we called on her last week and found her in the throes of composing the very last scene. "I've rewritten those same four minutes 16 times. Walter keeps saying I'd better hurry up and finish before we have a fire." CRITIC IN RESIDENCE Walter, of course, is her husband, Walter Kerr, the distinguished drama "No, I'm not afraid that success will separate me from the everyday experiences of people I write about.

A writer makes a mistake in writing to please his sophisticated friends. It wasn't too long ago we were living on a professor's salary of $3,000 a year." Jean Kerr was born Brigid Jean Collins in Scranton, the daughter of an Irish immigrant contractor who had a rich resonant baritone, and a County Cork mother of great wit and cultured background who was a second cousin of Eugene O'Neill. At 8, Jean staked out her life's ambition in a bit of verse: "Dearer to me than the evening star A Packard car A Hershey bar Or a bride in her rich adorning Dearer than any of these by far Is to lie in bed in the morning." At Scanton's Mary wood College, where a nun influenced her to drop her first name on the grounds that "only Irish washerwomen are named Biddie," Jean was convinced her height destined her for marriage to a basketball player. Then Walter showed up to witness the school's production of "Romeo and Juliet," for which Jean was stage manager. They met at the dance that weekend.

He induced her to take some summer courses at Catholic University, stay on for graduate work and eventually marry the teacher. Together and separately, the Kerrs brought a succession of plays to Broadway from Catholic University. "Song of Bernadette" ran only three performances. "Jenny Kissed Me" went to 20. But "Touch and Go" was a hit, and Walter soon found himself in New York, first as critic for Commonweal then for the Herald Tribune.

At last, Jean realized her Harry Lauder-esque ambition of sleeping-in most mornings. WIFELY NUDGES On opening nights, whether sitting in aisle seats well down toward the stage for his review of someone else's opening or holding down the last seats in the very last row for one of hers I can duck out in an alley and be sick the Kerrs project personal and professional devotion to each other. Their rapport is so exquisite as to raise hackles in some quarters. Producer David Merrick, who had suffered several of Walter's more, searing slings and arrows and yet had been captivated by his wife's between-the-acts banter, once came to the conclusion that she was feeding him the lines that were killing him at the boxoffice. In an interview with a gossip columnist, Merrick accused Jean Kerr of slyly nudging Walter in the, dark at appropriate intervals to indicate where the coup de grace should be applied.

Jean Kerr, who stares hot rivets from her soft blue eyes if anyone so much as II to him page by page and dutifully rewrites at his say-so. The habit dates back to their courtship days in Washington, D.C., when he was a drama professor and she a student at Catholic University. Their love survived the "god-awful" he wrote over her first assignment. Having a critic of Walter's eminence and withering wit in residence on a permanent consulting basis might not be every writer's idea of a balanced program of mental health. Nor would every critic relish the thought of honing his barbs on a household boxoffice bonanza who can retaliate by cutting off his bank drafts.

No such intramural jealousies ruffle the customary confusion of the Kerr household, where comics and critics abound in all shapes and sizes. Seventeen-year-old Chris, the oldest of the five Kerr boys, frequently finds himself doubting his mother's words, particularly when they are about him, and 4-year-old Gregory sometimes can be found eating them. In between, the 13-year-old twins, Colin and Johnny, and 10-year-old Gilbert manfully try to live with their disappointment at not having a basketball star for a father or a former Miss Rheingold for a mother. "I try to tell them it's not given for product consumption," Mrs. Kerr has attempted to explain away the latter failing.

THE MANSE The Kerrs reside in a pleasantly conformist Westchester County suburban town in a bizarrely baroque, garishly Gothic, tortured Tudor horror of a house that can best be described as a neo-Daphne Du-Maurier. A jumble of turrets and towers, topped off by a 32-bell carillon that bongs out a dance. duet from "Carmen," the house once belonged to Charles King, an eccentric inventor who test drove Henry Ford's first car. Before that, it was the stables for a prosperous brewer's estate. Besides a stupendous view of Long Island Sound, it has an enormous oaken front door that once belonged to a church in New Rochelle, a leering lion of a door knocker that might have belonged to Bela Lugosi, a foyer fitted out with the portholes and panelling of an old Hudson River steamboat, assorted gargoyles and heraldic plaques, and an enclosed courtyard that might be Spanish or Moorish were it not for the two barroom mirrors looking down on the goldfish pond.

The Kerrs have entered into the spirit of the house by placing a basketball backboard in the courtyard, along with a statue of St. Francis and two cracked Venetian lions, by fitting out Walter's study with 16 theater seats, so he can pursue his silent movie hobby, and by ringing the carillon as a curfew to summon the children home from play. "The neighbors don't seem to mind. Sometimes they ask us to ring it to get their kids to come home," said Mrs. Kerr.

She also tried to say a few things about her new play, but from the numerous asides, admonitions, threats and exhortations to the twins, who were thumping a basketball in the courtyard, to Gregory, who was stomping on the flower beds and to Walter, who was busy typing in the next room, it was easy to see what she meant when she said, "Mostly, I cope." The conversation went something like this: 'POOR RICHARD' "It's called 'Poor Richard' and it's about a poet who's mixed up. Colin, will you button up that jacket? I don't want you out of school again. The title is from well, you know how people say, 'Poor so-and-so, he's so talented. If only he'd straighten That's Richard. Gregory, will you get off those new shoots? "I've been working on it since January.

It doesn't pay to spend too long on a play. You lose the energy for it. Better to have it rough and with energy than smooth and lifeless. Walter, would you mind bringing us a couple of Cokes? I'd have called for a child but they all seem to be busy. AP Newsfeatures Photo Playwright Jean Kerr in Her Spanish (and Other) Style Home whispers in her vicinity of the theater, was outraged.

"Why," she fumed, "I wouldn't talk when the curtain is up anymore than I would dump babies from their carriages." But it was Walter who deftly took the measure of "The Abominable Showman," as Merrick is sometimes called, in an acidulously suave Sunday column. "She likes me, that crazy girl," he explained the nudges. "Surely, Mr. Merrick, someone, somewhere, has liked you well enough to give you a little dig in the elbow. No? Ah, well." Gallantly or perhaps cowardly, depending on how the offering fares Walter usually gives way to a substitute reviewer from his paper when, a Jean Kerr play is up for consideration.

Just the thought of him shooting down one of hers, however, has inspired both a Broadway play and a movie. For all her success in so many fields, Jean Kerr still hasn't decided whether being a novelist or a playwright is more satisfying. Plays get her out of town for welcome bouts with room service and a respite from the giddy world of the Kerr-Hilton, as they term the Larchmont manse. "But," says Jean, "books in the long run are far more comforting. The impact lasts longer.

It's wonderful to see people laugh and clap, but it's nice, too, to get letters from housewives and elderly Jesuits, saying how you saved their sanity years after you've written a piece. With a play, someone is always getting sick out in Chicago with the road company, and flops can be so heartbreaking. Even now, I don't see how I possibly can go through another opening night." The smart money in Shubert Alley says barbed wire couldn't keep her away when "Poor Richard" comes to town. critic of the New York Herald Tribune and a noted playwright himself Out Sweet along with being a veteran Broadway director, the author of several books on the theater and the co-author, with his wife, of a hit review and a disaster of a musical and a touching drama of 1 He is also living proof that a critic can be loved. "I wouldn't write a note to the milkman without showing it to him first," says his admiring wife, who reads her work SUBMARINE 'MOBY DICK' CONFESSIONS CONTINUE Notes on Books -of Note -B 0 I Dorothie Erwin Sunday Editor Boswell's Soul-Struggle Recorded In His Journal of 'Ominous Years' An illustrated history of AMUSING, I MEAN 'Accidental War Tales Reaching End of Line? THE BEDFORD INCIDENT, by Mark Rascovich.

(Atheneum, 337 As fierce and relentless as Herman Melville's Capt. Ahab of the Pequod is Mark Rascovich's Capt. Finlander of the U.S.S. Bedford, and for roughly equivalent and frankly stated reasons. Shreveport's street car system, from its beginning with three mule-drawn cars in 1870 to its demise in 1939 when trackless trolleys replaced the last of the old streetcars, is contained in a new.

book co-authored by a Shreveporter Louis C. Hennick of 2124 Fair 'I Mean, There's This Teen-Age English Girl CORONET AMONG THE WEEDS, by Charlotte Bingham. (Random House, 202 There's this teen-age English girl who comes from a titled but not very wealthy family, and she writes this book about dates Indeed, Capt. Finlander one of without losing honor. He resolves to cease drinking, to cease gambling, breaks the resolutions, and each fall from grace takes him a little lower.

UPHILL, DOWNHILL "Life is like a road," he writes, "the first part of which is a hill. A man must for a while be constantly pulling that the few military men in modern field and E. Harper Charlton of New Orleans published the volume ($7.25 at bookstores), whith also covers the street fiction who seems ever to have read a book has his prototype consciously in mind as he tracks a Russian submarine and interurban railways of other Louisiana cities. through the icy Atlantic waters New Orleans' street rdlways will be covered in a second vol off the coast of Greenland. Of Captain Ahab's missing leg ume which is now in preparation.

The 14-page volume is illu Louisiana strated with numerous photos lplace nmJ BOSWELL: THE OMINOUS YEARS 1774-1776, Edited by Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle. (McGraw-Hill, 427 $8.50.) Each volume of the Boswell journal that appears confirms one's belief, initiated with the publication of the first in 1930, that this is one of the greatest works of self revelation in the history of world literature. Pepys had more important public events to relate and Rousseau had more influence on the future course of public events, but Boswell's is one of the frankest and most disturbing confessional document that, in Leonard Bacon's words, "ever ran down the nib of a pen." One ventures, in fact, to make an observation that Boswell would have found incredible: even if Boswell had never had the great good fortune to meet Dr. Samuel Johnson, his Journal would still be regarded as one of the most fascinating and valuable documents that later generations have inherited from the 18th Century.

NUMBER This is the ninth volume in the Yale edition of Boswell's private papers, the seventh in the private journals, and not only the most absorbing since the first, the "London Journal," House pick up the red telephone in time? You, out there in the control room, are you going to wake up and reopen standard Code communication channels, or are you going to sleep with your hand on the intercom lever? Get with it, man, before the world explodes. Meanwhile, contact is fading on bearing zero-six-four. As others in the field have done, Mr. Rascovich tries hard to give his story that certain something more, over and beyond science fiction melodrama. A theme, for instance.

If skippers like Capt. Finlander vent their wrath and work off their hunting instincts in exercises like the pursuit of the submarine Moby Dick, won't they sooner or later drive the enemy to desperation and thus to war? Is it possible to keep a ship like the Bedford at fighting pitch and deny its men the release that killing provides? Is there such a thing as a half-way war? END OF THE LINE? he may get forward, and not run back. When he has got beyond the steep, and on smooth ground that is, when his character is fixed he goes on smoothly upon level ground." There is no level ground for poor Bozzie. He soars to the heights when he goes back to London; drops to the depths of depression when he is back in Edinburgh. He reads constantly, works faithfully, trying to keep his active mind alive, but the fits of melancholy, the excesses in gaming and drinking, come more frequently-lead, indeed, to scenes of violence that frighten Boswell himself.

Then back to London good advice from his good friend, Johnson: "Sir, take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dancing, or a course of anything to which you are inclined at the time. Contrive to have as many retreats for your mind as you can, as many things to which it can fly from itself." And Boswell, rapidly becoming incorrigible, notes in his Journal: "I thought of a course of concubinage, but was afraid to mention it." He goes back to a partner in an old affair, and takes a partner in a new one (with unfortunate physical results). But these entries from the Journal, which have alternated between enthusiasms and, depressions, triumphs and fail I iii of streetcars, equipment and employes on the local system. Hennick has for IS years studied and collected photos, timetables and other railroad and streetcar historical materials as an avocation. His coauthor, long-time student of the history of electric traction, has written magazine articles and two previous books on the the counterpart here is a livid scar on Capt.

Finlander's neck. The white whale that won Capt. Ahab's mad hatred has, as its latter-day image in this tale, a metal monster known as Moby Dick to Capt. Finlander and his crew. It had, after all, been a submarine that gave the captain a bad time back in World War II, wounding him grievi-ously and almost fatally.

'ACCIDENT Save for their respective final passages, this about takes care of the resemblance of "The Bedford Incident" to "Moby MONTGOMERY Montgomery, located in the extreme northwest corner of Grant Parish, is about 15 miles northwest of Colfax, the parish seat. Although the town always been within a mile of its present site, it has had and all that. Mostly it's about getting interested in finding a superman, only the boys all turn out to be weeds, drips or leeches, I mean. She gees through the motions of falling in love with this Older Man, and it's pretty miserable. Only she forgets about it when she goes over to Paris with this girl friend and acts very grown up.

In between there's this hunt ball and a deb party and all those drippy people, and In utter contrast, I mean, there's this beatnik phase with all these long sweaters and people who don't wash, and poor Herb who disappears from all the beat parties because he got run over. And finally there's this thing about learning to be a secretary and getting a job and you run into all these odd characters. Like a man who forgot to mention that he was already married. What I mean is, this book Dick" as Mr. Rascovich, whose Charlotte Bingham Routed of the picture on the book's jacket makes him appear a reasonable man, might be inclined to agree.

The literature with which "The Bedford Incident" really invites comparison is the new one known as the World War III by Accident School, its most notable exemplar probably being the current best seller entitled "Fail-Safe." I suspect that we are all soon going to be These are the good questions, but in "The Bedford Incident" they get lost, or so it seems to me, in a welter of technical detail, a profusion of more or less Bookmobiles- but even more dramatic and moving than that because of the increasing complexities in Bos-weU's soul-struggle, and the fateful signs pointing the way faceless characters, a too long drawn out narrative. There are forcefully sketched individuals, among them an ob pretty weary of this school if only because, despite the dazzling electronic wonders with which it deals, its range is a noxious IV reporter call him Ishmael and the captain himself. But even allowing for the ures, tragedies and comedies, end on a plane of high comedy, the dinner that Boswell arranged to bring together his two heroes, the Tory Johnson and the radical Wilkes, and his interview with the charming and notorious criminal adventuress, Margaret Caroline Rudd (incredibly, he wrote this as a letter that he thought might amuse his wife; prudently, he didn't send it). Maurice Dolbier bit limited. fact that technology has taken over so much of our lives, there is something gadgety and me Will the man in the White chanical about "The Bedford was finished when the author was 20, and she just makes it like conversation.

Some of this slang is pretty English for American readers, but the ideas are as universal as this girl pretending to be so sophisticated. Don't they all? It seems as though this Charlotte, with all her deadpan and dewy-eyed innocence, has made a quite droll give-away of the teen-age thing, you know. She couldn't have done it better if she'd planned it that way. Or did she? It's quite amusing, I mean. Miles A.

Smith Incident." first printed in 1866, provides a good look at the untamed West. He saw the Indians as savages, Where can the World War III three different names Creola Bluff, Montgomery, and Ma-chem and been located in three different parishes Natchitoches, Winn, and Grant. In its early days in Natchitoches Parish the town was an old ferry port and an Indian trading post, on a branch of the old San Antonio Trail leading from Natchez, into Texas. The trading post supplied settlers for a hundred miles east. The town site was laid out in 1845 by General Thomas Woodward and named Creola Bluff.

In 1851 Winn Parish was created out of the eastern part of Natchitoches Parish, and thus Creola Bluff came to be located in Winn Parish. In 1860 Creola Bluff was incorporated but the name Creola Bluff was changed to Montgomery in honor of the Rev. Montgomery Rogers, ancestor of Will Rogers, the humorist. In 1869 Grant Parish was created out of the southern part of Winn and the northern part of Rapides and Montgomery was now located in Grant Parish. No more changes occurred until the coming of the railroadthe L.

R. now Kansas City Southern about 1907. -Until the coming of the railroad Montgomery had been the chief river town between Shreveport and Alexandria. Now the town moved a mile back to the railroad station, called Machem for a family who had owned the land before Montgomery was built. This change of names confused the citizens so that "Machem" was changed to "Montgomery." And Montgomery it has since remained.

Clare D'Artois Leeper. Mark Twain wasn't the only Western traveler who distrusted, with humorous horror, the bills of fare at wayside eating places. The descriptions he wrote in "Roughing It" are reflected in two reprints by J. P. Lippincott in its Keystone Western Americana series, "Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border" by Randolph B.

Marcy, $2.75, and "Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevadas" by Clarence King, $2.50. Marcy, an army officer, provides this account of a meal ordered for a sickly friend who went West for his health. "The dishes before us consisted of fried bacon floating in grease, some corn bread in the shape of hand grenades, and a quantity of glutinous, half-baked hot biscuit, neither of which seemed calculated to tempt the appetite of the gentleman from the East, who called for toast." King, telling of a meal in California, said the food consisted of "beans swimming in fat, meats slimed with pale ropy gravy, and over everything a faint mongol odor the flavor of moral degeneracy and of a disintegrated race." He means there were Chinese codks. A U.S. geologist.

King produced his book in 1872 and tells in careful, elegant English of his mountain climbing exploits. Anyone interested in the High Sierra will find it extremely interesting. Marcy, whose son-in-law was Gen. George B. McClellan, was an expert explorer, map maker and hunter as well as a gifted writer and reporter.

His book, by Accident School go from here? I don't know, but it but as savages who were being badly mistreated by the CITY BOOKMOBILES White 4 Monday Atkins School. Garden Valley (Fernwood), Lyn-brook Boulevard, TUESDAY Riverside School, South Shreve Baptist Church, Shreve Island Shopping Center, WEDNESDAY In the office. THURSDAY Lakeshore Big Chain, 10-1; Hill Side Village (Ridge Lane Leaf Lane) Glen Drive, FRIDAY E. Wilkinson (100 block) Madison Park Shopping Center, Werner Park School, Negro MONDAY Stoner Hill School, Valencia, Carver Terrace, TUESDAY 1st Baptist Church, Zion Baptist Church, West 58th St. (1500 Block) Union Springs Church, WEDNESDAY Canaanland School, 15-11; Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, Douglas St.

(200 Block), Pickett St. THURSDAY Central School, Williamson Ela-mito Terrace, FRIDAY Ingersoll School, Hattle Perry Park, PARISH BOOKMOBILES White MONDAY South Cross Lake Trip, Western Hills Subdivision, 15; Laguna Drive, Wallace Road, Shorewood, White Pines Road, Sandra Drive, 1 -J: 15; Gorton Road. Ford Park Baptist Churrh. might just lead back to that older school in which the cap It is a shame Marcy's sense tain stood calmly on the bridge of history was not stronger. He gives only a sketchy account of his meeting with Jim Bridger, and, without pushing a button, said, "You may fire when ready, Gridley." It was simpler, but apt to be more interesting.

John K. Hutchens the famous mountain man. If to defeat and tragedy. When these entries begin, Boswell is continuing his practice as an advocate in Edinburgh, "very well established as an agreeable companion and a married man." He loves and is loved by his wife, his cousin Margaret, and he is the proud father of two daughters. But he has lived in Arcady the excitements and expectancies of Londonand the pull is strong to leave the tame North and seek his fortune in the glowing South.

He is given to drinking more than is good for him, and knows it. He is tempted to gamble more than he can afford, and knows it. His affection for his wife, though warm and proper, does not prevent his "indulging Asiatic ideas" whenever he sees one pretty woman or more. A man who has had the pleasures of the conversation of Dr. Johnson and the Club must find the talk in Edinburgh circles dull and unsatisfying.

He is still at odds with his father; he has witnessed the tragedy of a brother confined for mental illness; he undergoes the stress of a challenge to a duel and the finding of a way to avoid it Marcy had taken time, he could have provided material toward really good biography of LBest Sellers-1 GOOD BOOKS Economical Paperbacks if Classics Novels sV College Outline Series Religious Children's Activity Foreign Language it Famous Artists it Food, Sewing, Etc. -it Many, Many Mora 1253-G Shreve City On Tfie Mall Phone: 16 MOM Elsie Rountree, Proprietor FICTION Superior, Trees City, Leach's Store, Bverly'i, Newby'i, United Gas Compressor Station, Adcock's, Broad-well Road, Zeller's, Smith's Windham's, Dennison's, Negro MONDAY llerndon School Trip, Dixie, Herndon School, Gann Road, Dan White Community, Booker T. Washington Street, TUESDAY Pine Valley School Trip, Gilliam, Pine Valley School, Hosston, WEDNESDAY Carver School Trip, East 70th St. Extension, Hart's Island Road, Carver School, Casplana, Mt. Pleasant, Hood Subdivision THURSDAY Greenmoor School Longwood, Greenmoor School, Bostwlck Road, FRIDAY Bookmobile In for Bridger.

A book by J. Cecil Alter, University of Oklahoma Press, $5.95, attempts such as a biography but falls short. Alter's "Jim Bridger" waters down too much the essence of a man who was as wild as Taos Lightning whisky. It also says there was a report in 1790 of white Canadians reaching the Pacific. Alexander Mackenzie, the first man to reach the Pacific north of the Spanish settlements, didn't do that until July 22, 1793.

TUESDAY North Highlands School Trip, North Highlands School, 9-2 30; Risinger Woods, Irving Bluff, Wilton Place, WEDNESDAY Bookmobile In for servicing. THURSDAY Four Forks Trip. Blrchwood, Burson Drive, Grawood School, Bain Road, Colquitt Road, Hall's, Mt. Washington Church, Tabor's, McMullln'f Grocery, Broussett Road, Broadview, Broadacres Baptist Church, 4-4-25. FRIDAY Trees City Trip, Calumet, RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, Salinger THE SAND PEBBLES, McKenna SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, Kncbel and Bailey THE GLASS-BLOWERS, du Maurltr FAIL-SAFE, Burdick and wheeler NONFICTION TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY.

Steinbeck THE FIRE NEXT TIME, Baldwin HAPPINESS IS A WARM PUPPY, Schulr THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT, Hopper THE FALL OP THE DYNASTIES, Taylor A.