More About Artists as Teachers and Fame and One of My teachers

by John Aquino on 03/08/12

As I get older, I think about what I have accomplished and what others I have known and admired have accomplished.

I often think about Leo Brady, one of my teachers, who acquired fame of a different and lasting kind.

Brady and Walter Kerr brought national attention to Catholic University in Washington when their musical Yankee Doodle Boy, based on the life of George M. Cohan, debuted there in 1940. The play was profiled in Life Magazine and received the endorsement of Cohan himself. Kerr went on to become a celebrated drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times and husband of playwright Jean Kerr, who authored one of the longest running plays of all times, Mary, Mary, and Please Don't Eat the Daisies, which became a 1960 movie about a Walter Kerr-like drama critic and his wife. Kerr's dilemma about whether or not to review  Mary, Mary inspired the 1963 film Critic's Choice starring Bop Hope and Lucille Ball as a drama critic and his playwrighting wife. Kerr even had a Broadway theatre named after him.

Brady stayed at Catholic University and taught playwriting and other drama courses from the 1940s until his death in 1984. But he also published novels, one of which was made into a movie, had plays produced in Washington and off-Broadway, and wrote scripts for Omnibus and Studio One in the early days of television.

One way of reading Brady’s career can be as the story of early success as a young playwright and novelist followed by, shall we say, a quieter period.  In his mid-20s he published a play version of Richard Connell’s short story “Brother Orchid” which became a staple of the Samuel French catalog and inspired Hollywood to adapt the story for a 1938 Warner Bros. film of the same name starring Edward G. Robinson. But Brady received no film credit since the filmmakers just went back to the original story. Warner Bros. also took the idea for a musical based on Cohan’s life and did its own story, Yankee Doodle Dandy, which earned James Cagney the 1942 Oscar as best actor. Neither Brady nor Kerr received any film credit.

In 1949, Brady published his first novel, Edge of Doom. It concerned a troubled man who murders a priest. Brady, who was a Roman Catholic, imbued the murder plot with a subtext of Catholic guilt. It earned good reviews and strong sales, and the legendary producer Samuel Goldwyn acquired it for the movies. But what appeared to be the road to great fame did not lead there.

Edge of Doom was a troubled movie production, directed by Mark Robson (Peyton Place, Von Ryan’s Express) from a screenplay by Philip Yordan (King of Kings, El Cid), and then refashioned by director Charles Vidor (Gilda, Hans Christian Andersen) with a new prologue and ending and narration by playwright Ben Hecht (The Front Page) and screenwriter Charles Brackett (Sunset Boulevard, the 1953 Titanic) that was ordered when Goldwyn thought after the initial screening that the film was too bleak. The contributions of very talented film people produced a muddled mess that became a notorious failure. Some have listed it as one of the worst films ever made. Goldwyn, Vidor, Yordan, Hecht, and Brackett just didn’t know how to deal with the subject matter. I’ve always felt that, in this modern era of filmmaking, someone should give it another try.

Brady’s subsequent novels—Signs and Wonders, the Quiet Gun, and the Love Tap—received good reviews, and his musical The Coldest War of All was produced locally and then off-Broadway in 1969. I think his last play was titled, maybe appropriately, Old Man Time. But the great blockbuster novel or play or even the multi-award-winning novel or play just didn’t happen.

Another, and my preferred, way of looking at Leo Brady’s career is the Casey Stengel /Leo Durocher /Tommy La Sorda/Joe Torre approach I have discussed before. Major League ballplayers themselves but not superstars, these men coached and groomed legendary ball players. Six of Leo Brady’s former playwriting students—Mart Crowley (The Boys in the Band), Joseph Walker (The River Niger), Jason Miller (That Championship Season), Michael Cristofer (The Shadow Box), John Pielmeier (Agnes of God) and Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive)—won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

I was a student of Leo Brady’s at Catholic University and did not prosper as a playwright, but that’s okay. I remember his classes as like sessions with a Stengel or Durocher, only they were about playwriting and screenwriting. Like them he was shortish. Unlike them, he wore glasses and he never yelled or bullied. Like them, he simply possessed confidence and skill, his being with dialogue and plot construction. He was generally analytical and helpful, illustrating something so effortlessly that it would produce the Eureka moment in his students of, “OH, I see!” He could sometimes be concise. When I and other students would defend our approach to something we had written, saying, “Well, what I was trying to do was—“, he would often respond, “Well, just don’t.”

In 1970, he directed Helen Hayes in her last stage performance—she developed an allergy to stage dust—in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Hartke Theatre at Catholic University. In our playwriting class, he expounded on O’Neill’s craftsmanship as part of his own reckonings with the play. He was like a man exploring the human brain from the inside, walking into the ear and working his way to the frontal lobe.

He was a man who lived and breathed the theatre. He was on the committee to which my wife Deborah defended her doctoral dissertation on comedy at Catholic University. She was in the literature department. He was in the drama department. Every time Deborah described a play as a “literary construct” Brady almost writhed in pain. He admired her work and joined the others in passing her, but he told her later, “By the way, these are plays, you know.”

I wish he were still here, if only because he knew and experienced so much but was shy about talking about himself. For some reason, the name of the stage and film actor Boris Karloff, known for his horror films, came up in regard to one of the student plays we were discussing, and Brady said, “I knew him. I worked with him in radio during the war. A very decent and good man. But we had a lot of trouble because the microphone kept picking up the clicking of his false teeth.”

One of my fondest memories is being on the Catholic University campus where Deborah was teaching in 1982. He saw me from a long way off and walked toward me, painfully, since he was not well. “I read your article on John Barrymore that was published in the Washington Post. I liked it,” he said, with a perfect mixture of surprise and pride.

Leo Brady found the enduring type of success because it endures through the people he taught.

I actually have another Catholic University connection with Leo Brady. My mother Philomena, who was teaching high school in Youngstown, Ohio in 1941, had been assigned to teach drama, and came to Washington to study under Leo Brady. She met my father, and they married three months later. So I guess I owe Leo Brady that too.

Copyright  2012 by John T. Aquino.v