SATURDAY RUBRICS: 6/7/25

IT'S TONY WEEKEND SO I WONDERED WHO SOME OF THE TONY AWARD WINNERS WERE IN 1956, THE YEAR I WAS BORN

SOME JOY: Una Merkel

That’s Merkel with Elvis during the making of her last film, his Spinout, in 1966.

The other week, I conducted a little experiment and went looking for the theatre listings in The New York Times for the date and year of my birthday and those of my younger brother and sister. I wanted to see if I could find any everything-connects threads in my life’s narrative which took me from Mississippi at the age of 19 to New York City where I lived most of my life. I found many in those three listings and emailed them to my. brother, Kim, and sister, Karole as, well, a lark. A term that is itself a connective thread as you can see below for the listings on my birth date March 28, 1956.

On my brother’s - March 20, 1958 - Tony Perkins was starring in Look Homeward, Angel. After I left the Juilliard School’s Drama Division I appeared as Alan Strang in Equus with Tony, who portrayed Dr. Dysart. William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs was also playing, directed by Elia Kazan, and I portrayed Sammy in that play while still at Juilliard which was directed by Kazan’s protege and, I think, assistant on that 1956 production, John Stix.

On Karole’s birthday - February 2, 1960 - Jessica Tandy was starring in Five Finger Exercise. I once wrote a play I called Cadillacs in the Sky and left it at The Wyndham Hotel where I knew Miss Tandy was living at the time. I put my number on the script along with a note telling her I thought she’d be perfect for the mother in the play. One day my phone rang and it was Tandy. “Is this Mr. Sessums?” she asked. I recognized her voice immediately. She thanked me for letting her read the play. “I read the whole thing,” she said. “So there’s that. You kept me turning the pages. I am calling to tell you two things. I can’t do the role because I am so tired of these old lady parts.” We laughed together at that. “But secondly,” she said, “you are a real writer.” And then this woman who originated the role of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire told me that I reminded her of when she was first reading Tennessee Williams. It is one of my most cherished memories, that kind way she let me down by building me up.

The date of my birth was a Wednesday matinee day on Broadway in 1956. I was born around noon in Forest, Mississippi, in Lackey Memorial Hospital. As I wrote to Kim and Karole in that email: “I actually gasped when I saw that a couple of hours after I came out a blue baby not breathing and Mom [our grandmother who worked as a nurse’s aid] went running down the hall sobbing thinking I was stillborn but turned back when she finally heard the sound of my cry - that a performance of The Ponder Heart based on Eudora’s Welty's book began its performance.”

Miss Welty was and remains my North Star as a writer and a Mississippian. I write about her a bit in both my memoirs, Mississippi Sissy and I Left It on the Mountain. In the former, I tell the story about the night I met her at a cast party for A Midsummer Night’s Dream on its closing night at New Stage Theatre in Jackson at the home of Frank Hains who would come to play such an important and tragic role in my life. Toward the end of the evening, Frank asked me to drive Miss Welty home because she was a bit tipsy after one too many Maker's Marks and giving a performance for some of us by doing her Bea Lillie imitation. I had been to the gym earlier that day and my gym clothes were still on the front seat of my little white Mercury Comet with its red interior which smelled rather randy from the clothes strewn about. By the time I got Miss Welty into the passenger seat and got around to the driver’s side, I saw her picking up my jockstrap and dropping it daintily on the backseat behind us. When people ask me to describe my writing style, I always turn to that image forever embedded in my memory: Eudora Welty holding a jockstrap.

Una Merkel played the role of Edna Earle Ponder in that Broadway adaptation of Miss Welty’s The Ponder Heart. That’s Merkel next to Welty along with Jeanne Shelley and David Wayne. Merkel won the Tony for Best Supporting Actress in a Play in 1956. One of her competitors in that category was Elaine Stritch for Bus Stop. V.S. Pritchett in his review of Welty’s novel The Ponder Heart for The New York Times in 1954 described Edna Earle this way: “Welty has had the art to place her Uncle Dan in a complex position in the narrative. He is embedded in the mind of a bustling, hoydenish, bossy niece, a girl of fierce practical capacity, snooty manners and possessive temperament, who will scornfully defend the old idiot partly because she passionately loves him, partly to keep her head up among the neighbors. She is the soul of small-town pugnacity and self-conceit and has an endless tongue.”

Merkel was also nominated for an Oscar in 1962 for playing Mrs. Winemiller in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke.

It was interesting that in 1956, Ben Gazzarra who played Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof wasn’t Tony nominated for that role but for another in A Hatful of Rain. And according to a story filled with theatre news items that ran above the theatre listings, during the week of my birth the understudy for Barbara Bel Geddes, who originated the role of Maggie in Cat, had been going on in her stead but after a week-long vacation Bel Geddes was returning to the role that night. Her understudy: Patricia Neal. Lord how I would have loved to have seen Neal in that role that week.

Above: Merkel and Marlene Dietrich in their fight scene in Destry Rides Again with Jimmy Stewart doing his part.

Below: Dietrich and Merkel holding their pay cheques on the set of Destry. When they learned that by performing the famous fight scene themselves, they were depriving their two stuntwomen of a day's pay, they each demanded “stunt checks” of $35 and handed them over to their stunt doubles

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