Cheryl Crawford, "One naked individual"

In her 1977 autobiography, producer Cheryl Crawford (1902-1986) recounts her love of the theatre and overwhelming desire to become and stay part of this of world. Theatre represented an environment where she could express herself in ways that the Akron, Ohio of her childhood prohibited and the restrictive code of behavior imposed upon Smith College students. One Naked Individual : My Fifty Years in the Theatre traces Miss Crawford's triumphs, flops and failures (she defines the latter two conditions differently) as she assailed the barriers that existed against women as theatrical producers. Over the course of her career she moved back and forth between relative security of group work (but with limits imposed by others and frequent personality conflicts) and and the freedom enjoyed by the independent producer (along with sky-high financial risk.)



As Crawford explains, this autobiography is an exploration of her life by way of a mix of chronological and thematic strands. For readers who prefer a more chronological approach, the appendix comes in handy. Most readers, if they are familiar with Crawford's work, will recognize her from the musicals she produced. These are largely described in 2 chapters: "One Touch of Venus" and "Musical Adventures." The story of how of One Touch of Venus came to be such a smash hit is one of the most delightful in the book as she traces the production from its initial inception to its London premiere. A near siege aimed at getting Marlene Dietrich to play the goddess having failed, the stage is set for Crawford's initial meeting with Mary Martin, and an important lifelong friendship. From a disastrous opening in Boston Venus went on to win accolades, awards and audiences galore.



Since 1936 Crawford and Kurt Weill had nourished a hope of collaborating on a second work. Their first resulted in Johnny Johnson, a production that had been beset by difficulties raising money (a near constant strand in the book) and personality conflicts galore. Amidst these problems and distractions Crawford and Weill found themselves in agreement about the role and prospects for musical theatre, an interest that was secondary to her fellow Group Theatre directors. Crawford along with was a member of the triumvirate that ran the Group Theater. Impressed by the work of Stanislavsky and Mayerhoff and the theater scene in the Soviet Union, Crawford, Howard Clurman and Lee Strasberg led a strong company of actors wishing to expand their acting skills by presenting plays by young and little-known American dramatists. Thematically, the Group Theater wanted to put on plays that were relevant to to situation of American audiences during the Great Depression, a striking contrast to most of the Broadway productions, not to mention Hollywood films, of this period.


Miss Crawford writes that she had the "good fortune to be identified with many of the major theatrical enterprises of my time." In addition to the The Maplewood Theater, a stock company she ran for 3 seasons until WW2 gas restrictions impeded attendance, the list is a veritable What's What of New York Theatre: the Theatre Guild, the Group Theatre (aka The Group), the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), the American Repertory Theatre (ART), and the Actors Studio


Famous individuals fly across these pages with actresses figuring larger than actors. (In Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield biographer Larry Swindell describes J.G.'s prolonged siege of Cheryl Crawford; here the effort gets a sentence.) Besides Mary Martin, Judith Anderson and Marilyn Monroe stand out from the crowd of names. But it's the playwrights who get the most attention with three dominating the later chapters of the book: "Gadg" as Elia Kazan was known (his college nickname of Gadget being shortened), Clifford Odets (whom Crawford first hired as an actor and sent out with road companies) and most movingly, Tennessee Williams or "Tenn" (whose photographic portrait suggests he was far and away the handsomest of the group.)



Speaking of photographs, there are 34 black-and-white ones reproduced with varying degrees of success on 16 glossy pages. Alas there were not more but these were carefully chosen and cover the time-frame of the autobiography from beginning to end. There's also a poem by Walt Whitman that begins "I know I am solid and sound...' quoted; Crawford describes this as her bulwark against uncertainty and attacks of the "blues."



Wistfully she explains "I had no private life to speak of, just occasional evenings with colleagues. A social life, not to mention a love life, takes time, and I had none to spare. It was a high price to pay." (p.112). Published in 1977 by Bobbs-Merrill, this 275-page autobiography is a fascinating page-turner. Chances are you'll have to look for copies at the library or o.p. dealers. I gather from a tag on a library book annotation site, Crawford is known in the lgbt community but there's no hint of serious personal attachments to anybody in One Naked Individual : My Fifty Years in the Theatre.

For researchers interested in looking at Cheryl Crawford's papers, the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has the following inventory online: http://www.nypl.org/research/manuscripts/the/thecrawford.xml