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from Gainesville, Florida Mhm, Yeah, mhm. Hello, I'm Mike Yanan, and this is conversation This evening. My guest is John Houseman, distinguished actor, writer, director and producer, one of the most distinguished names in the American theater and in films, a winner of the Academy Award for his 1973 portrayal of Professor King's Field in the movie The Paper Chase, a role that he duplicated in a television series.

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We'll have a conversation with John Houseman when I return in a moment. That's why I presents conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day. Your host is Dr Michael V. Gannon professor of history and ethics, an assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.

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Mr. Houseman, welcome to the University of Florida and welcome to conversation. Thank what a life and career you have had, much of it told in two volumes of memoirs and perhaps a third that is coming out shortly. Very much so. Born in Bucharest, raised in Paris, you traveled as a youth through all of Europe, going from one continental resort to another dove, Il Bill Ritz and moderates celebrated two of your first four birthdays on the Orient Express attended school in England.

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I believe Clifford College, Clifton Clifton Clifton College and, after graduating, went to Argentina for a time, then returned to England and entered the grain brokerage business. And that eventually brought you to the United States, where you were diverted into the world of theater after a while, Not not immediately, yes, you had to go through the crash of 1929 1st.

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But prior to that, uh, economic calamity, you had proved a great success in the import export business. Uh, perhaps somewhat to your own surprise. No, but I didn't really like it very much, but I it through inheritance through my father's friends. I always got good jobs in the brokerage International grand business.

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And so I remain. You fell in love with a woman named Zita Johann. Do I pronounce that correctly? That's right, Johann. Did she have a role in first Interesting Really theater? Not really. In London, a great many of my friends were in the theater, and I was always peripherally related to the theater.

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Well, you were a writer. You wrote a book The Planes, which received very favorable receptions from Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. They want wanted to publish it? Yes, at the Hogarth press. Was it ever brought out? No. No. They had no money. And they used to finance their own books.

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Virginia's books were all paid for by her, and so they offered me the same arrangement. But I didn't have the £120 that were needed. And then about that time, I went off to America. And that ended my career as a writer at that time. Well, the reason I asked about Zita is that she was an actress.

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Yes, quite a notice for Young. But you turned to playwriting as a craft was a very great man. Your first effort at playwriting. It was one of the first I've worked on two or three. The translations are one original play with friend Louis gonna tear. It was simply as far as I was concerned.

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It was a way of trying to squeeze a very parlous living out of the theater. Mm hmm. And then, quite by accident, I got into the producing and directing field. That was was that, uh, first with a group called the Group Theater. No, I I spent time with them.

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They were friends, and actually they were going to do one of the players that I translated from the jump. But no, it was an accident. And I found myself directing and producing a play rather famous opera called Four Cents in three Acts by Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein.

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And that was quite like everything else in my life. It was quite accidental, but it did determine the direction in which I went, which was producing directing rather than writing. It was a great success to, as I reserved big prestige success. Yes, four Saints and three acts.

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I read about Saint Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola. But who were the other two saints? Well, there were two ST Theresa's. So that made three. Oh, and then there were lots of them. There was There were about 35 saints altogether. And this was a work or a co worker of Gertrude Stein.

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Did you ever meet her? I met her. I didn't know her. Uh, well, Virgil was a very close friend of hers. They she wrote this for him as a libretto for an opera. I met her just I sat next to at a dinner in Chicago, but she ordered me and I didn't so much She talked.

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She is best known for the salon she had in Paris, to which repaired all the great literature. She also she had an enormous influence on writers of that period, whether they some imitated, as some didn't but everyone from having way too. Sherwood Anderson. They were all greatly influenced by there was another salon which you frequented in this country.

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They ask you salon, you call it. What was that? That was a very famous salon. Years of a joke Call it a salon. But this was actually a a man and his wife, who he was a museum director. And at the time you may remember, due to a man called sax at Harvard, there was an enormous renaissance and a whole new attitude towards running museums in this country with a great emphasis on contemporary modern art.

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And the salon was really revolved around about eight or nine of these young museum directors who are all of them, made great successes in their time. And it became for about two or three years, the most distinguished artistic gathering place in New York. It was every Sunday from 5 to 8, and musicians came architects, uh, writers.

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Some politicians it preserved very distinguished talent, uh called, as I say called that in a semi humorous fashion. But a great deal of very creative thinking and work went on on those Sundays, including a musician, a young Leonard Bernstein. As I recall, he was very young at the time.

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He was one of the frequent visitors. Virgil Thompson was actually one of the main pillars of the sound, which is why I happened to be taken there, where I happened to meet him, and the reason I became the producer director of Four Saints. I have an impression that the 19 thirties were a kind of golden era for American theater, that there were distinct all the arts.

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In a way, yes, during the Great Depression, they flourished. You sell for a very good reason. That was, the twenties had been a period of enormous prosperity and a good deal of creative life. But by the towards the end of the twenties it will become a terribly rich, plutocratic over fat society.

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Then came the crash, and suddenly all that was raised. And for the young, it was a great period because the establishment, uh, was suddenly leveled. And certainly, in my case, who entered the theater late in my thirties, I could never have climbed up through the second story window as I did.

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Uh, if the structure had been sound in, the establishment had been normal. Isn't that interesting? And in the thirties, with the Theater Guild, you had plays by O'Neal, Robert. But that was that was really the twenties. The began to get hard times in the thirties. What you had there was a much more revolutionary theater.

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You had the who had the group. You had the Mercury Theatre. But, uh, the Mercury Theatre was really a continuation. And an outcropping of the federal theater of the W P A. Which is where Austin and I first did, are producing together first up in Harlem with the Negro Theater and then downtown with project 8 91 which was a classical theater.

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Did you work on the staging of that great Black Macbeth that was stated? I was the producer of that. Norton Rose was the director. Yes, That was a tremendous triumph at the time. It was the demonstration, which actually also stemmed out of four Saints because four cents, if you remember, was done entirely by a black cast and all black cast.

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And that had been arbitrarily decided by Virgil Thompson because neither ST Ignatius nor Saint Teresa were black. But he decided that the the singing and movement, uh, capacities of black choirs, plus the fervor would be, uh, more acceptable for the performance of this play than, uh, than a white choir was entirely arbitrary decision, which turned out very well and that gave us all the or confirmed the belief we had that one of the ways to liberate the black theater was simply to treat black actors as performers and regardless of color.

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And of course, if you're going to do that, then your next thought is that you should do the classics, and that's what we decided to do. And the Macbeth was the first of the classical not to limit blocks to Oth Hello, but to give blocks the full range of Shakespearean characters.

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Exactly. And as you know, a fellow was never played by blacks until robes and played in London in the in the twenties, and then from then on, of course, it's, um, almost a must black actor has to play. In fact, I've known a company that was picketed because they had a white a fellow.

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My word. Zora Neale Hurston is a name that has become prominent in Florida in recent years. She has enjoyed a prominence that she never experienced or had the chance to enjoy in her life. The poor lady had, I'm afraid, post factor recognition. Actually, the time that I knew her was a period of comparative, not prosperity, but comparative recognition.

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She'd had a book, all I think, mules and men that had come out. And Carl Van Vechten was a great mentor and booster of hers. And she did get a certain recognition in New York in the early thirties. She was on the project that she was on relief and she did write a play for us.

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It was very interesting, actually. I loved the play, and I was very fond of her, and I thought she was a wonderful writer. What she did was write a updated version of Lysistrata in a Florida fishing community and the men who were unhappy at the wages they were paid, and the women were even more unhappy at their wages.

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And the women, uh, decided to deny them marital rights unless they went on strike and improve their lot. And it was a fascinating play, but it very curiously, it ran into great opposition. It ran into political opposition because they said it was a radical Communist play.

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It ran into moral opposition from the more state and distinguished members of the black community who thought it was a dirty play because it was a a sexy play and rather racy play. And altogether I never got it on because I encountered such opposition in the community.

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I've always regretted it because it was a very distinct, well written play, and I think it might have affected Zara's life if that play had been successfully performed as it is, you know. She lapsed back into total obscurity and a miserable living as a domestic servant for years and then fell ill and died very tragically, died in obscurity and total buried in an unmarked grave.

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Well, could that play be produced today in this new climate? Oh, from the objections I think would no longer be valid. I haven't read the plane. Certainly, I doubt if there's a manuscript in existence. Uh, I wouldn't know if the player dated or if the play could be done as is.

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It would be one I don't know it would be worth if you're interested. It would be worth your investigating through the Mason University in Washington, D. C. Who, as you know, discovered the archives of the W P. A federal theater, which had been totally lost for 30 years.

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And they were discovered in an airplane shed somewhere in Virginia. And they have it all. And I'm not even sure that they've even gone through it all. And it's just conceivable that the manuscript of Zara's play might just might be in that pile of scripts, and it would be worth checking out surely, And I I shall do that.

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You know them, don't you? The I forget the name of the lady. There's a lady and a gentleman who discovered this treasure trove by accident and as a reward, a Mason University was given the whole stuff that they've been spending years slowly filing it and clearing it up it's well worth investigating.

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It surely is. May I ask you about Orson Welles? Um, your first professional association with him was in the verse play by Archibald MacLeish. Panic. Uh, he was 19 years old at the time. You offered him the part, you had him come and read the part for MacLeish and others.

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Well, I never had any doubt because I'd seen him play tabled in Romeo and Juliet with Cornell. And I knew this was a prodigious voice, and physically it was very easy to make him up to look like a septuagenarian. But it was Archie's play, and I thought it be nice if he heard his protagonist read before we hired him.

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And I invited him to the shabby little office we had. And he was around first, and suddenly in came this kid 6 ft four boy with his very young wife. And Archie couldn't believe that this was my candidate for playing the great McCafferty, a 70 year old man, but he was very polite, but he thought it was just somebody coming in to look for a job.

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And that lasted until we sat down and Austin began to read and At that point, he knew why we were choosing. What was it that most struck you about? Wells. Was it his face with those cold black? I know the thing that struck you always outside of any two minutes conversation with him.

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You realize what a genius you are in the presence of. But it was the voice. The voice was simply incredible, with wonderful vibration and residents. An amazing voice. May I tell you my little experience with Orson Welles? I was registering at a hotel the King's end in Freeport in the Bahamas about 10 years ago, immediately after the release of a Man for all Seasons in which Wells had played the role of Cardinal Wolsey.

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That's right, And as I was signing my name on the registration card, an enormous presence came to the left of me and he this gentleman began writing to, and he turned to me in the course of it and said, Do you know what day it is?

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And I looked over and saw him and said, Why? Your Eminence, it's ST Patrick's Day and he said, Oh, yes, March 17th, and he went back down and never said a word about it and took his bags and marched on. That was my one in brief encounter with arson.

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Well, he would notes in Paris, because he spent three years in Ireland. As you know, it was a very young man. That was a great success. Panic for a first play. It's hard to imagine that was no, I'm not strictly true. The reviews were very dubious, very mixed, and we did put it on only for special performances.

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And it was roundly booed by the first night's audience, which was made up mostly of arches rich friends who thought he'd betrayed them. And the second night I forget. The third night was a new theater night, which was made up very largely, very far left audience.

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They loved the play, and they thought that Archie MacLeish had come over and was condemning the system. And he had a hard time getting out of that one, wasn't it? With Wells in Doctor Faustus that you formed the closest relationship that you had with him? Well, no.

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We worked for 5.5 years very closely. We we started, uh, professional collaboration with panic, then went on to the Federal Theater where he directed the Voodoo Macbeth for us. Then we formed our own task of theater again for the Federal Theater and did Doctor Faustus. And then we got in trouble doing a play called The Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein.

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What kind of trouble? Well, it's a long story. If you'll read, Run through, we'll find It's very exciting and wonderful story. But anyway, we got thrown off the WPA Federal Theater for that, and then we formed our own theater. This is the Mercury Theatre, and we ran that for two seasons.

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You and Wells alone form the theater? Or did you have a larger group? No, it was just us. It's the tools. But what are some of the other names that would have been associated with the Mercury Theater? Well, a lot of them have become very famous, partly through the radio shows and Citizen Kane.

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The names that come to Agnes Moorehead was part of that group. Um, George Calories, Vincent Price. Vincent Price was in one of our She was not a regular member of the group, but he joined us for Shoemaker's holiday. In fact, he got married on our stays first marriage was on our stage and, uh, made it.

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Christians was with us, ever. It's Sloan. A lot of very well. Joseph Cotten was in the shoemaker's. Cotton was was with us in all the shows. Dawson had an absolutely blind, uh, overwhelming faith in Joe Cotton as a star, and we all thought he was just a nice juvenile.

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We were very fond of him, but nobody had a very high opinion of him as an actor except us. And Austin just put him in one show after another. And finally he on one of our radio shows. He had him play opposite Katharine Hepburn in Fair World Arms, and Kate saw what Olsen was talking about.

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A year and a half later, when she did Philadelphia Story, she insisted on Joe Cotton, playing one of the two men, and the guild said, This is ridiculous. We know him. He's just a bit part actor and who you can't and she It was her money, and it was her show, and she insisted on it.

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And that is how Joe became a star. It was the Mercury group that produced Julius Caesar. The play in the theater? Yes, indeed, in the theater, and I recall the story of how you tried to introduce New York Street sounds as part of the plate because it was produced as a contemporary play in contemporary dress and New York Street sounds but modern city streets, modern city.

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And you you found at CBS Radio studios recordings of sirens and honking cars, and we were working with them on the Mercury Theatre on the air. So they were all our friends, and they worked. And so they were very eager to collaborate in this distinguished theatrical production.

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And we have these incredibly complicated sounds, but I'm a very inferior sound system, which was all we could afford in the theater. They sounded like hell and we threw them all out. That play was an hour and 49 minutes and had no intermission, which gave you some trouble because people with weak bladder control kept getting up and going downstairs to the johns, and at one point you locked the doors to the It was a very old theater, which we'd sort of rehabilitated, and unfortunately, the johns made a noise when they were flushed.

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This wouldn't have mattered in a musical or a comedy, but in the middle of a very moody piece, like Julius Caesar. It didn't do it all just before Caesar was assassinated to hear the johns being flushed in the basement. So we did lock the doors. Yes, it's a wonderful story I want to get now, if you don't mind to your most recent role, that of Professor King's field.

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Did you model that role on a real life person? But I didn't model because I never knew the real life person. Uh, the part was written by the author of the book and also a legal advisor called John Osborne. John Osborne modeled it in part to a great extent on a very famous Harvard Law School teacher called Bull Warren.

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Uh, so I did a certain amount of reading about Bull Warren. He was a legend in his own time. Also, I talked to my lawyer who had been taught by Bull Warren. I talked to people who had been in his classes, so I did a certain amount of, uh, superficial research in that.

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In that way, I couldn't model myself physically because to this day I don't even know what really what he looked like, but his behavior was certainly documented. And I took over that well, you had in that role a remarkable presence. You dominated every scene in which you appeared.

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Well, that was partly, I mean, that was called for in the pardon. Also, that's the way the picture was shot. They did in the first. For the first half hour of that film, whenever King's field appeared, he was shot in close up in great big fields, and his victims were.

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The students were shot in long shots so that, quite apart from anything, I might have done the mere fact that I was huge and they were small, established some kind of authority. Was that your first acting role in many years? It was the first ever, except for a very brief appearance.

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I made in a film called Seven Days in May, which I played a treasonous admiral. But there was just one day's work, and I didn't pay much attention to that took place 10 years earlier. Subsequently, there was a television series with many of the same characters and with you again in the role of Professor King's field.

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It lasted for how many episodes does. Yeah, it lasted. It was 21 21 and then went off the air. To the dismay of critics and people of taste who thought the dialogue and many hundreds of thousands of people who wrote letters, it made no difference. Yes, why did it make no difference, do you think?

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Because the network had decided that it was not a hide or very high rating show? And that's the way American Network Television is run. CBS was very anxious to go back to being number one, having been superseded in that position by ABC. And although the paper chase, every time it was shown, had an audience of around 18 million people that did not compare favorably with Laverne and Shirley's 35 million people, yes, so if we went and you tended to pull down the General Nielsen rating upon a single point in that rating turns a million plus dollars.

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Indeed, or more than that, of course, the series possibly could be revived on public broadcasting system. Well, it has been for two years now. It's been running on public broadcasting, but are these not repeats? These are repeats now. There's a lot of talk of it's being done for pay.

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Television negotiations have been going on for about eight months, and I'm skeptical. I'll be happy when I hear that it's all signed and sealed. I'll be glad to play in it, but in the meantime, I just would like it to happen. But I don't have too high expectations.

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Well, you have created one of the great roles in movie history and in television drama, and that comes as a wonderful and I'm sure enjoyable climax to a life devoted to the theater. Probably you always had this great skill and great talent within you. I don't think so.

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I don't think so. I think I was far too diffident, far too insecure. I don't think it's an accident at all that I came to acting at the age of 70. I think that, uh, coincided with the change in me and a new authority which came from have a successful career and many years of teaching and so on.

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I I don't think it was an accident. Well, I certainly appreciate very much. You're coming to be with me on conversation. John Houseman, actor, producer, director writer One of the major figures in American drama Thank you for being with me on conversation. Thank you, sir. Mm hmm.

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Mhm.