Joseph Anthony: From Broadway to Camp Ritchie and Back
- Beverley Eddy
- 2 days ago
- 38 min read
Updated: 15 hours ago
Joseph Deuster was born in Milwaukee on May 24, 1912 to Leonard and Sophie Deuster (née Hentz). Both his parents had been born, met, and married in Germany before moving to Milwaukee in 1891. There his father opened a saloon and dabbled in local politics. Joseph was the last of seven children whom Leonard fathered; he was, apparently, as “accident” baby— 21 years younger than his oldest sibling and seven years younger than the one closest to him in age.
As a boy Joe was fascinated by the theater and, when road-shows came to town, invaded the actors’ dressing rooms to learn make-up tricks.1 At age 18 he became a member of the
Milwaukee Drama league, but he had been active before that drawing costumes and set designs. He entered the University of Wisconsin in Madison in order to pursue a journalism major, but his interest in the theater preempted his desire to follow the traditional academic route. When he applied for and won a scholarship to study acting at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, he moved to California in 1931. And he changed his name to Joseph Anthony.
Joe would later relate that, for a time there, he was virtually penniless and survived only by “living in the countryside with a stolen stage drape for shelter and eating fruit and avocados from orchards.”2 At this time he appeared in three small theater productions, in Grace Waldron’s The Unknown Factor with the Foothill Players of Altadena and a touring company of music from Green Grow the Lilacs with the Pasadena Community Playhouse. Then, in the fall of 1932, he changed his name to Joseph Anthony and, after completing his coursework, joined the Playhouse’s acting ensemble, and his financial situation improved dramatically.
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One of the courses Joe took at the Pasadena Community Playhouse was in eurythmics, an art form that was much in vogue in the 1920s and 1930s. Developed by the Swiss musician and educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, eurythmics was a system of musical education that used body movements to represent musical rhythms. In the United States this system evolved to influence modern dance and theater. It could now best be defined as “harmonious bodily movement as a form of artistic expression.”3 The first performance of “Joseph Anthony” noted in the Los Angeles newspapers was his partnering with fellow Playhouse member Kay Gross in a “poetical ballet number” titled Amor Fatalie at a social held in the home of Playhouse patron Ethel Caskey in December 1932.
From April 1934 to April 1935 the newspapers reported frequently on Joe’s active roles in the Playhouse’s stage productions: in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, G. B. Shaw’s St Joan, Maxwell Anderson’s Mary of Scotland, Ruth Price and Henry Kirk’s Cross Patterns. He garnished special praise for his performance in Cecil Reynold’s psychological mystery play The Mystery of the Broadwalk Asylum; one critic noted Joe’s “outstanding characterization” as “a boy impersonator of Shakespeare’s Juliet in the time of Charles II,” whose “finely modulated voice in the balcony scene also secured the appreciative applause of the audience.”4
Joe also began to appear in minor roles in motion pictures. He made his film debut as a reporter in the 1934 film Hat, Coat, and Gloves. And in 1935 he played an uncredited young army officer in Cecile B. DeMille’s The Crusades and had another uncredited role in She.
At the conclusion of his work at the Pasadena Community Playhouse in May 1935, Joe returned home to Milwaukee for a month to visit his mother and to offer lessons in eurythmics to the city’s little theater groups. He then went East to study at the Rice Playhouse Elocution School and to perform in its Theatre Workshop productions. The playhouse was situated on Martha’s Vineyard. Joe performed in two plays that summer: East Lynne, a Theatre Workshop melodrama where he played the captain who seduces, then deserts the tragic heroine; and a minor role in the world premiere of The More the Merrier, by May Cerf and Robert Hanna, performed by the Playhouse. Then, at the end of the summer he settled in New York, where he began to study acting with Maria Ouspenskaya
and with Tamara Daykarhanova at her School for the Stage. Both women had trained under Konstantin Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia and were avid proponents of the “Stanislavski Method.” This method focused on actor-centered techniques of psychological realism, emphasizing the “art of experiencing” over the art of representation. But it was also a method requiring a disciplined approach to ensemble acting, one that included extensive rehearsals and responsive interaction with other actors in order to achieve and maintain a play’s dynamic.5 The Stanislavski Method revolutionized American acting, particularly as developed at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, which he founded in 1951. Joe would also take lessons there.
It was during his two years of study at the Tamara Daykarhanova School for the Stage that Joe first met his future wife, aspiring stage actress Perry Wilson.
Summers provided opportunity for acting gigs in summer theater. In 1936 Joe was at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia, where he appeared in two light comedies: Mrs. Moonlight and The Eternal Ingenue.
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The following year his career really took off. In January 1937 he had joined the touring company of Sidney Kingsley’s play Dead End, a triumph of staging by Norman Bel Geddes. Joe had the minor role of “Interne”; this was one of the 29 listed character roles in a cast of 70 actors, and the cast was on the road for six months.6 But in April Joe left the tour to star as the communist son of the title character in a production of Friedrich Wolf’s play Professor Mamlock. The play was a Jewish project of the WPA Federal Theatre Program, and it had a three-month run at Daly’s 63rd Street Theatre on Broadway. In it, Joe’s character played off that of his father, a distinguished Jewish surgeon determined to maintain his medical service and humanity despite the crushing anti-Semitism that is closing in around him. Critics noted that Joe played “the hot-head son with a natural assimilation of youthful impetuosity.”7 New York now took some notice of the young actor, and the American communist paper The Daily Worker published his photo—twice— in its pages.8
Joe quickly followed this production with another WPA Federal Theatre Project production, this one of George Bernard Shaw’s political satire On the Rocks, which opened at Daly’s Theatre on June 15, 1938 for 66 performances. Again, Joe portrayed the son of the lead protagonist, this time the British Prime minister.
Joe got another career boost and a supporting community of actors when, in 1938, the theatrical performer and director Mary Hunter cofounded the American Actors Company with the Stanislavski student, Andrius Jilinsky. This early Off Broadway ensemble was devoted to developing talented regional voices and its founding members included Jerome Robbins and Agnes de Mille (choreographers), and actors Mildred Dunnock, Horton Foote, Jean Stapleton, Perry Wilson and Joseph Anthony. Joe would perform in the summer theater the group established in Brandon, Connecticut, then go on to work with all of these fellow members in the years to follow.
Mary Hunter was eager to further the careers of her company members and to push them to
take on new challenges. She in essence turned aspiring actor Horton Foote into a noted playwright, and, in 1940 the American Actors Company performed two Horton plays. Joe was encouraged to try his hand at stage design when, in 1942, Mary Hunter directed Horton Foote’s play Out of My House. The play was performed in the Doris Humphrey/Charles Weidman dance studio with Joe’s settings. This was Joe’s first public venture into set design, and a critic for The Daily Worker found them “unusually effective despite the small studio stage.”9
Already in 1938, however, Mary Hunter was pushing Joe into another new direction, when she learned that an old school friend was looking for a dance partner. Dancer/choreographer Agnes de Mille had spent six years trying to build a career in England, and had recently returned to America to restart her career in the States. She found, however, that those dancers who interested her were bound to existing groups and therefore not available, and the available ones “were not appetizing.” She decided it “would be easier to find a man and teach him to dance than to attempt to teach a dancer to look like a man.” She set her sights on Joe, whom she knew through the American Actors Company and whom she considered to be “a very handsome and able young actor.” He, she said, was not particularly interested, since she could not offer him monetary inducements—until, that is, Mary Hunter convinced Joe of the opportunity this offered him to apply the Stanislavski method to dancing. “This was not my technique at all,” De Mille admitted, “but Joseph pricked up his ears and came briskly to the first interview.” He eventually overcome his hesitation and began to enjoy the work. Agnes remarked: “He was a very cheerful help to me at this period of reconstruction. He was steady, gay, talented and courteous, not given to tantrums and quite capable of considering other people’s welfare.” Furthermore, given Joe’s past training in eurythmics, he “learned in two months to dance well enough for concert performances,” and they began performing at benefits and private parties, followed by a national tour.10 Joe remained with her through the fall of 1940, at which time he returned tothe Broadway stage, as a replacement dancer in the Moss Hart/Kurt Weill musical Lady in the Dark. He also played a minor role in Liberty Jones, a musical written by Philip Barry with songs by Paul Bowles, which had a run of only 22 performances, and joined Tamara Daykarhanova’s Summer School for the Stage as an instructor.
Joe then returned to Hollywood, where he made more of a splash in the film Shadow of the Thin Man, the fourth film in the Thin Man series featuring Nick and Nora Charles as amateur detectives. He was a heavy in this film and in another film released the following year, 1942, Joe Smith, American. A screen test for Tortilla Flat went nowhere, however, and an expected term deal at MGM also fell through.
Still, Joe was keeping busy: in February and March 1942 he embarked on a last national tour with Agnes de Mille’s dance company. Joe was now featured as her “assisting artist,” and given more critical attention. And the program now included some pantomime along with an acting scene. It opened with Agnes de Mille doing a pantomime presentation of “Stage Fright.” And Joe, a “versatile performer,” demonstrated, “besides his dancing […] great talent as an actor in his performance of ‘Hares on the Mountain.’ ” Two of his dance numbers were “Tyrolean Picnic” (with Agnes de Mille) and “Pavane” (with Lilli Mann). “Pavane,” in particular, got positive critical feedback for being “lovely in its grace and velvety smoothness.” Also, “The ‘Night Scene’ done by Mr. Anthony and Miss (Katherine) Litz was among the more spectacularly beautiful numbers of the program.” The tour was bitter sweet, since everyone in the company knew that Joe was “soon to join the United States forces.”11
And on April 4, 1942 Joe was drafted into the American Army as a private.
Joe was assigned to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The fort was a major Signal Corps training site, where much of the communication equipment used by the American Armed forces was designed and developed; this included the FM backpack radio, multichannel FM radio relay sets, and radar. It also worked with photography, produced orientation and training films, provided intelligence monitoring, and trained homing pigeons. Joe was assigned to film production, and in July 1942 even made an appearance in Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army, a Broadway musical revue intended to boost American morale. And, on August 3, 1942, he married Perry Wilson in New York’s non-denominational Church of the Strangers (Perry was a Christian Scientist), with a reception afterwards in the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center.
The marriage had taken some persuasion on Joe’s part, since Perry pointed out that he was now committed to Army service for the unforeseeable future, while she had just begun a national tour with Ethel Barrymore in the Emlyn Williams play The Corn Is Green and was headed to the West Coast. But Joe persisted, and they had a brief honeymoon in Passaic, New Jersey, where Perry was performing. They then communicated by daily letters until they could meet up for a reunion in November 1942, when Joe was given leave to go home to Milwaukee while she was performing there. They would not reunite until the following March, when Perry’s tour ended.
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Despite his work in the Signals Corps at Fort Monmouth, Joe was destined for work at Camp Ritchie. Ritchie was unique in that its commander, Charles Banfill, believed that students should learn by experience rather than by lecture. He was determined to recreate, as closely as possible, an all-German environment in which to pursue military intelligence training. This meant building a German village and German defense systems, and amassing a body of soldiers, numbering over 400, to dress in German uniforms, march and sing German war songs, demonstrate German weaponry, go out on patrols, and engage in mock battles. These activities were reinforced by the camp’s having the widest possible supply of German war vehicles; where there were none, as in the case of tanks, they were simply constructed out of plywood and mounted on Jeeps.
This was all well and good, but the teaching staff required more from these men than weapons demonstrations, mock battles, and horse parades: the men should also serve as guinea pigs for students training in prisoner interrogation.
And there was a need for actors to demonstrate to the Ritchie students proper actions to take in other specialty areas. What was needed, then, was good theater. On February 2, 1943 Joe was ordered to Camp Ritchie “immediately,” along with the Broadway and film actor Richard [Nicholas] Conte. Others called to Ritchie included Owen Davis, Jr., Don Haggerty, Larney Goodkind, Curt Conway, and Vaughn Taylor. These men would serve in the Visual Demonstration Section of the camp’s Composite School Unit, or Section IX. Conte was soon discharged because of eye trouble. The others stayed on. By March 9 Joe was serving as an instructor for Section IX. He would remain at Camp Ritchie until his release from service on October 11, 1945.
As an instructor, Joe was essentially an acting coach, who taught men of the Composite School Unit (CSU) how to perform as battlefield soldiers and as prisoners of war when they were questioned by the students in Camp Ritchie’s interrogation courses. The school wanted all types of “prisoners” for the students to practice on so that they would be prepared for the real thing when they got to Europe. This included everything from the arrogant SS officer to the frightened schoolboy, from the committed Nazi to the cautious skeptic. The CSU men—and some WACs—were not only trained to assume very specific roles and character types, but also to improvise in order to fit each situation and each interrogator. It became something of a game to fluster and confuse the interrogator—by speaking a nearly unintelligible dialect, by suddenly bursting into tears, by deliberately misunderstanding an interrogator’s question—and the men and women enjoyed their time as actors. As one CSU man put it: “What a ‘job’ I have for the next eleven days!… I play a civilian 2 times a day and I get interrogated. For this afternoon, I was assigned the role of the owner of a whore house who wants to make an arrangement with the American army. Boy, will we have fun!”12
The Section IX men also demonstrated interrogation techniques themselves, in plays performed for each of the Ritchie classes. And they wrote and mounted similar pieces for the other courses: for Photo Interpretation, for example, for Military Intelligence Interpreters, and for Battalion Command Post. All these plays were regularly rewritten to keep their messages up to date. Joe was one of the major authors of these plays.
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“Loose lips sink ships.” It was a major concern of the American Army to preserve secrecy, and it feared—correctly— that enemy spies had much too easy a time discovering planned departures of American troops and their assignments at the front. Section IX had a variety of dramas addressing this issue. In one of these, “Hitler’s Secret Weapon,” Joe assumed the role of Nazi agent. These plays frequently changed to address the various situations in which one might unknowingly reveal secret information: to a landlady, to a casual acquaintance, to a waiter in a restaurant.
And, in September 1944, Joe wrote a longer play on this subject, The M-1 American Mouth. The play’s narrator explained the title in his opening remarks by comparing the M-1 rifle with a soldier’s speech and calling the soldier’s mouth the deadliest weapon in the war. Furthermore, it was a weapon that can backfire. He called it “the United States M-1 automatic, gas-operated, lung-fed, always loaded, low calibre, semi-witted, big American MOUTH…. The greatest repeater ever invented,” noting: “The enemy has voted the M-1 American Mouth their best booby trap, and its operation doesn’t cost him a penny.”13
The play then demonstrated the various ways in which enemy spies collect evidence. But it was also startling for indicating the near impossibility of even the best-intentioned person in maintaining absolute secrecy.
And yet the soldiers were urged in the play to do their best. They should be careful not to relate anything at all about the training going on at Ritchie, and they should avoid any kind of meaningful conversation with casual acquaintances. They should be extremely careful of any romantic liaisons that might or might not prove to be genuine. They should exercise caution in making telephone calls, since the operator could be listening in and passing information on to the enemy.
The play also demonstrated that some actions were beyond an officer’s control. When he sold his car, the car dealer might notice that other officers were selling their vehicles at the same time, and this would indicate a mass departure for the front. The same held when an officer canceled his lease. To prevent the damage resulting from these action, the only thing that one could do was to wait until the very last moment before departure, so that the information might reach the enemy only after the troops were gone.
An epilogue to the play, set after a fictional battle on Formosa, revealed the damage caused by the “American mouth.” At this battle “ten times as many of our men [were] killed as figured,” and there were “more Japs ready for us than we figured.” There were “five times as many!!” because “the bastards found out we were coming.” The men wonder: “Who do you think tipped off the Japs?” and figure it “could have been any one of several people,” “or all of several million.” They continue: “Before the landings we bombed the Indo-China coast for a month. They were supposed to expect us there.” But this “safety measure to fool the Japs” had backfired. Ironically, the very men who had inadvertently released classified information earlier in the drama now want the men who’d talked tried for murder after the war. The play ends with the narrator, looking after the departing men for “a few moments deep in thought.”
When the play was performed, Joe had the role of narrator.
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In addition to this and the class demonstration playlets, the men of Section IX mounted elaborate Nazi rallies every six weeks, to remind the Ritchie Boys of the fanaticism of their enemy. These were based on the annual Nazi rallies held in the multipurpose Sport Palace in Berlin; the camp theater was adorned with Nazi flags and swastikas, German war and folk music was performed, and the Section IX performers roused the crowd with their frequent cries of “Heil Hitler.” The program was capped by speeches (harangues!) held by actors impersonating Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels. Joe assumed the role of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, who spouted vile anti-semitic falsehoods in his speeches.
Not all the performances at Ritchie were purely instructional. In February 1945 the Visual Demonstration Section put together a popular revue called Shut My Mouth to entertain both GI and civilian audiences. Despite two large backdrop posters reminding audience members to “Keep It under Your Helmet” and “She Can’t Repeat What You Don’t Tell Her,” and a couple of numbers entitled “Loose Talk” and “No Information,” most of the program provided pure entertainment with slapstick, music, and good humor. The operatic baritone William Warfield co-wrote a couple of songs for the revue, including one entitled “The MITC Blues”; WAC and dance instructor Eleanor Moffitt staged “Something for the Boys,” a number honoring the three women’s military branches of the American Armed Services. Joe wrote and staged two numbers for this revue: the comic piece “The Phenomenal Horse” (with two GIs playing the creature’s two halves), and “Slaughter in the Vogue Room,” which incorporated the orchestral number “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” from the popular Richard Rogers musical On Your Toes. The revue was performed before packed houses for four nights at Camp Ritchie in a successful effort to raise money for the war effort.
In addition to writing for the revue, Joe found the time to pen a short GI love story, “He Knew It Was Love!,” that was published in the weekend edition of The Baltimore Sun.
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However, as the war began winding down in Europe, the men of Section IX faced a new crisis. They knew that, with the German surrender, Camp Ritchie would be dropping its German training program and devoting all its resources to the war in the Pacific. In June 1945 large numbers of Nisei [Japanese American] soldiers poured into the camp, coming both from training camps throughout the United States and returning from the European theater of operations, where they had distinguished themselves for their exceptional heroism in the struggle for Allied control of Italy and in the Battle of the Bulge. At Camp Ritchie, these men were assigned to sixteen Mobile Intelligence Training Units, or MITUS, that were comprised of two sections: one to demonstrate Japanese uniforms, weapons, and fighting techniques; the other to demonstrate the proper methods of capturing and interrogating Japanese prisoners. These units would be sent out to camps throughout the United States to demonstrate Japanese battle techniques and the mindset of the Japanese soldiers even as men were being readied for a rushed departure to the Pacific. These MITU men moved into the quarters vacated by the old Composite School Unit.
The men in the Visual Demonstration Section had realized early on that they, too, might be replaced. As William Warfield put it: “If we had no military intelligence function in the Pacific war (which we all figured could continue for years to come) … every one of us could expect to be shipped out to the South Pacific as part of the invasion of Japan. It would be an oriental version of the Normandy landings, and nobody had any illusions about how fierce that fight would be.” “But,” he added,”our commanding officers were resourceful, to say the least, and developed a refinement of their original mission. And it was to the playwright Joe Anthony that they turned to work out the details—he got the commission of his life.”14
Joe and his colleagues set to work at once, rewriting the old German scripts to suit Japanese war conditions. One, probably authored by Owen Davis Jr., recast the skit “Hitler’s Secret Weapon” as “Hirohito’s Secret Weapon.” It fell to Joe to write, as quickly as possible, a new POW interrogation drama that addressed the psychology of the Japanese soldier and the importance of treating Japanese war prisoners with humanity and respect.
He had a good resource to draw from. Master Sergeant Willard Eddy, who had taught English for three years at the University of Sopporo, had been providing a series of four lectures to all the Ritchie classes, beginning with the 3rd class in November-December 1942. These lectures covered an orientation to the geography of the Pacific theater, the social basis of Japan’s military power, the religious basis of the Japanese war effort, and the performance of the Japanese as fighting men. These lectures played a crucial role as background material for Joe’s play.
And, beginning in June 1945 he had ample resources to confirm the accuracy of his script. All of America’s captured Japanese war documents were now housed at Camp Ritchie, and a large staff of soldiers, many of them Nisei, were poring over the materials and extracting valuable war information from them. Joe could also consult with the Kibei stationed at the camp; these were Japanese Americans who had spent a significant part of their early years living and studying in Japan.
The play, called Scrap of Paper, incorporated more than mere interrogation techniques: the first scene portrayed a dying old general and an ambitious young captain, in order to demonstrate two very different attitudes towards the duties of a Japanese army officer. The army is facing certain defeat on the island of Formosa [Taiwan], and the captain looks reality in the face, telling his general: “We have no reserves, we are cut off from all further supplies,
our backs are against central mountain barrier through which we cannot pass. Forgive pessimism, Hake, but it is my work to know these facts, to evaluate our situation.” The old general then rebukes him: “Would you have us cower here and starve to death? […] Having lost freedom of maneuverability, there is only one road left open… final, all out attack, to our deaths if need be. If you are Japanese soldier you will believe as I do.”15The old general commands the captain to give orders for an all-out frontal attack against the Americans, then commits harikiri [ritualistic suicide].
This scene was intended not only to show the hard-line attitude of older Japanese army officers, but also to demonstrate that a new generation might think differently and more realistically, and that they would be more receptive to American interrogation.
A young Japanese lieutenant is ordered out on an all-night mission to carry the attack orders to the various Japanese army commanders, but he is apprehended by two American GIs: a sniper and a scout. The sniper (a corporal) has a blind hatred of all Japanese people and is held back from killing the lieutenant only by the assurance of his comrade that, by taking him to headquarters, they might extract information from him that would result in many more Japanese deaths. Fearing his treachery, the two men search the young Japanese soldier by making him strip before he is led away
When they arrive at headquarters the corporal mistreats the prisoner by denying him water and them yanking him to his feet and shoving him around. When the captain arrives to interrogate him, he fears the terrified prisoner “may be completely spoiled for interrogation”; he also regrets the absence of the soldier’s uniform, since it might have been useful for identification purposes.
The drama’s “interrogation lesson” now plays out. The captain’s Nisei translator calms the prisoner’s fears, gets his wound attended to, and gives him clothes. The captain instructs a subordinate that “You can’t interrogate a Jap as you would an Italian or a German. There you impressed the prisoner with our military strictness and efficiency. Intimidation worked like magic in breaking down tough prisoners. But here our humaneness must be shown. Kindness…just…just simple kindness , that’s how you get a Jap to talk.” He tells his
subordinate a little about Japanese history, then says “The Japs have become hardened to tough times, war doesn’t mean a damn thing to them…. they’re used to it.[…] The ordinary Jap has not been allowed to think for himself and knows only to obey…. remember that! He has been led around by the nose by his leaders through the dark alleyways of a phony religion ever since he was a baby. […] You can’t measure Japanese thinking on a western yardstick.”16
During the actual interrogation the Japanese prisoner is terrified and distrustful. The captain and his Nisei interpreter ease his fears, first by assuring him that they will not report his capture to the International Red Cross, since, as the prisoner says, “it would be a great shame not only for me but for all family and friends,” and then by promising that contrary to Japanese propaganda, he will not be tortured, and finally by saying the document taken from him “tells us all we need to know” and that “your words are not necessary.”17
The actors were to demonstrate how the interrogators must never show anger, since the Japanese consider anger a sign of weakness, and how they could create rapport by saying that the Emperor is not to blame for the nation’s losses, since the “Emperor’s spirit […] is held captive by Japanese War Lords….” This idea “appeals to the prisoner,” so much so, that he tells the captain everything he wants to know.18
As he is about to be led off to a warm meal, the play takes a tragic turn when news arrives that the general who had given the prisoner his orders has died in ritualistic suicide. The prisoner now recalls the order the general had given him, to serve as the “Emperor’s messenger unto death.” He is suddenly horrified at the idea that he is about to be “rewarded by enemy for betraying Emperor,” races off stage, and is followed and shot by the Nisei translator.
Joe had developed the play as a portrayal of the psyche of a young Japanese soldier, but this ending also turned Joe’s instructive play into a human tragedy, one which, in peacetime, might evoke audience sympathy for the frightened young soldier.
Also, Joe introduced a sub-theme into the drama when he portrayed the American corporal who had made the original arrest of the prisoner as an anti-Japanese bigot unable to distinguish between the Japanese enemy and the Nisei American soldiers. His sergeant points out to him, ironically, that he, the corporal, is the son of German immigrants, just as the Nisei soldier is the son of Japanese ones. “He’s American,” the sergeant tells him, “don’t forget that.” “OK, OK,” the corporal replies, adding, “Still I wouldn’t trust any Jap…” The sergeant goes on: “You know… you’re probably more like the Japanese than [the Nisei translator] is. […] You’re prejudiced like they are […]. Over here… you know it as well as I do… we believe in giving everybody a square deal… to size up people one by one, and not to judge a group, a nation or a race by the acts of one guy… that is… if you’re an American… if you believe in democracy.”19
This sub-theme was a major concern at Camp Ritchie. With the influx of Nisei soldiers into the camp, several Ritchie officers had traveled to neighboring towns to address civic group leaders about how to interact with them. Although the East Coast was, relatively speaking, more tolerant than the rest of the country, an ugly incident did occur in Hagerstown. As reported by Ritchie Boy and faculty member Henry Singer, some of Ritchie’s Nisei veterans of the 100th Battalion “had been beaten and thrown out of an American Legion Clubroom […], because some members did not like ‘Japs’.” This episode was, fortunately, an exception. The Hawaiian Nisei stationed at Ritchie did, in fact, endear themselves to many citizens by giving impromptu concerts of Hawaiian music in the Hagerstown city park.
Originally, the members of the old Visual Demonstration Section took on all the roles in the new dramas, and used their makeup skills as actors to create the illusion that they were Japanese. But, after the arrival of the Nisei soldiers at Ritchie, casting changed and Nisei assumed the roles of Japanese soldiers. For one of these Nisei, Hiroshi Sakai, it was quite a thrill to be selected for the play. The Nisei actors “were dressed in full uniform with arms, stood at center stage, illuminated with yellow lights with the narrator saying this was a picture of what was happening in the South Pacific. […] The play was produced like a Broadway production with lights, drama and action.”20Joe appears to have gotten along well with his Japanese actors. As one of them reported, “A group of us went to New York City with Joseph Anthony who entertained us during the trip.”21
When the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in early September 1945, there was no more need for the MITUs. They were disbanded and the men were reassigned to service in the Counter Intelligence Corps at Fort Meade. Still, the play had been performed over 20 times, not only at Camp Ritchie, but also at Fort Leavenworth (Kansas), the Edgewood Arsenal, Fort Knox (Kentucky), the Carlisle Barracks, the Newton Baker VA Hospital, and West Point.
And when Joe was released from Camp Ritchie in October 1945, he returned to civilian life with two new theatrical skills: playwriting and directing.
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He immediately returned to the stage. He got a contract as resident actor for the 1946 summer stock season at Westchester Playhouse, in Mount Kisco, New York, where he appeared in major or leading roles in five plays. His reviews were overwhelmingly positive: as the young flyer Hadrian in Tennessee Williams/Donald Windham’s You Touched Me, he was deemed “handsome, vital and effective,”22 and he was “full of charm as the wise, benign, champagne drinking student of life” in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life.23 The most negative review that appeared that summer was of his performance in Ferenc Molnar’s The Play’s the Thing, where the critic wrote that “Joseph Anthony was best when he was slyly amusing himself and teasing his friend and not depending too much on his cane.”24 But audiences clearly loved him; when he played the role of Dr. Rank in Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House “in a sensitive key,” a critic noted that “Mr. Anthony, who has been pleasing Mount Kisco audiences with his varied roles this Summer, got a warm hand with his exit line, ‘Thanks for the light.’”25
During that summer, however, Joe’s attention was focused on another play—one of his own devising. He called it Some of the Sky, and it was based upon his observations of the anti-Japanese sentiments that lingered on after the war. In it a GI meets and marries a Nisei nurse and takes her back to the family farm in the Midwest. There anti-Japanese sentiment arises, and it turns particularly violent when the Nisei bride’s brother comes to help work the family farm. The play’s racial prejudice is personified by the hero’s frustrated half-brother and neurotic mother; it is contrasted with the enlightened and supportive views of his father.
Joe’s old Ritchie colleague Larney Goodkind stepped in to try to get the play accepted for stage production. The national Japanese-American newspaper, Pacific Citizen, followed Larney’s progress, noting that, as “former story editor for Universal Pictures, Mr. Goodkind knows a good script and he ha[s] faith in the possibilities of the Anthony play.”26 The lead role was offered to Sono Osato, a popular Nisei ballerina, but Larney could not get the financial backing necessary to mount it. He spent four years trying to get the play performed on Broadway, but anti-Japanese sentiments were still strong in America, and possible financiers feared that a play treating anti-Japanese prejudice would hit too close to home. As a result, the play never found financial backing.
Still, Larney did manage to get a reading performance of the play at Lucille Lortel’s White Barn Try-Out Theater in Westport, Connecticut on September 7, 1947, by eliciting the interest of the distinguished actor and director Leon Askin. Askin, who is best remembered today for his role as General Burkhalter in the TV series Hogan’s Heroes, was the founder of the Veterans Memorial Stage, a theater group for veterans. He directed Joe’s play. The young Nisei actress who starred in it, Shizu Moriya, would go on to make a career for herself in TV and on the Broadway stage in the 1950s.
Joe would continue penning stage scripts throughout his career, but to little or no avail. One, Whenever I’m Alone aired on the ABC television show, The Clock, on January 26th, 1951. Described as “a tense psychological drama,” Joe’s drama was true to this series in that he featured a clock as an important element of plot. Of the other twelve play scripts that he left behind, only one, The Best Part of the Party (1967), came close to achieving Joe’s dream of seeing a piece of his writing performed on the Broadway stage. It was described as “dealing with a husband and wife and their two children.” Leonard S. Field signed on as producer, and newly-wed actors Michele Lee and James Farentino were approached about starring in it. But the project came to nothing when Leonard Field dropped it in order to joint-produce an already proven hit instead, Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party.
We can guess that Joe had based The Best Part of the Party on his own family experiences. He and Perry had given birth to a son Peter in June 1944 and to a daughter Ellen in November 1947. Perry would confess later that it had been difficult for the children. “It really makes me just so glad that those kids turned out to be okay,” she remarked later in life, “because Joey was not home much at all, he was either acting or directing, and I took whatever came my way”(29 television plays, a Broadway play, and three movies). They finally got live-in help and moved from Jackson Heights into a house in Westchester. Peter left home at sixteen to make his own way on Cape Cod, then went to college in Vermont and, eventually, after teaching and earning a PhD, became mayor of Barre and a Vermont state representative. Ellen went on in the arts, in painting and with a puppet theater. “They are two wonderful kids” Perry told an interviewer. “And how they survived, I don’t know, because it’s very hard in the theater.”27
In January 1948 Joe returned to the New York Stage in a production of Jan de Hartog’s Skipper Next to God under the direction of Lee Strasberg. The play was staged by the Experimental Theater, a division of the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA), and film actor John Garfield, then one of Hollywood’s brightest lights, played the lead role. After an extended Off-Broadway run, Garfield rearranged his film schedule so that the play could move to the Playhouse on Broadway for an even longer two-month run.
Theater work was always an unreliable source of income, since one never knew, even if one was cast in a Broadway or Off-Broadway play, whether the play would close within a matter of days or survive for months. Perry was cast in several Broadway shows that closed after only three weeks. Joe filled in gaps in his active theater work by teaching. Summer stock provided salvation for many stage actors, and, in 1950 Joe and Perry spent an idyllic summer together as part of the Dutchess Players performing at the Cecilwood Summer Theater in Fishkill, New York. There Perry played Katharina to Joe’s Petrucchio in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Eliza Doolittle to Joe’s Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion. (Two years later, at a summer theater in Olney, Maryland, Joe would be Higgins to Carol Channing’s Eliza Doolittle.)
And, during the 1950s Joe would also appear frequently on Broadway: in three parts in Peer Gynt, and in leading roles in Flight into Egypt, Camino Real, and Anastasia.
In the 1950s Joe also began acting on television. His activity there began with the CBS dramatic anthology Danger, which premiered in September of 1950 and ran through May 1955. He was featured in seven episodes of Danger; he also performed on CBS’s You Are There, The Web, and The Defenders; on ABC’s Omnibus, on NBC’s Kraft Theater and Alcoa Hour; and on WNBT’s Television Theater.
And, as if this was not enough, Joe made a major shift in the 1950s to directing, when he achieved a breakthrough with an off-Broadway production of Leslie Stevens’ three-act play Bullfight. It was the result of a rich collaboration between a relatively unknown director and an unknown playwright. As reported in Esquire, Joe’s “first directing break came when a pupil, a hopelessly bad actor who was taking lessons from Joe Anthony at the American Theatre Wing, confessed he wasn’t actually an actor but a playwright, and asked Anthony to direct his play. ‘I’m not a director—I’m an actor,’ Anthony said, but the writer, Leslie Stevens, insisted and Joe took six weeks off to direct Bullfight. The play harvested critical raves and two promising careers were launched simultaneously.”28
Joe was not new to directing, of course. He had staged many of the playlets put on at Camp Ritchie, and, in 1948 had directed The Barretts of Wimpole Street for a little theater group in Yonkers and a series of one-acters, Six O’Clock Theater for ANTA. And in 1951 he had directed the Tennessee Williams Play A Streetcar Named Desire for the Cecilwood Summer Theater in Fishkill.
But his breakthrough came with Bullfight in January, 1954. Critics praised Leslie Stevens impressionistic style of writing—one that included music and pantomime, creating an “imaginatively designed drama packed with homely material about some vital people.” The playwright, Brooks Atkinson noted, was “aware of the fact that drama is intimately related to poetry and music.” Joe’s background in eurhythmics and dance made him sensitive to the mood of the play. While one critic said the play was crowded “with more material than it can assimilate,” he found it “a beautiful production […], because the somber, exultant music of the guitar keeps drifting through it and the village groupings are vivid, the quick glimpse of a cockfight is exciting and the ballet of the bullfight is stately and ominous.”29
Joe would direct more Leslie Stevens plays on Broadway: The Most Happy Fella (1956) , The Marriage-Go-Round (1958), and The Pink Jungle (1959).
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Joe’s own Broadway breakthrough came with his direction of N. Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker in October 1954. This “frankly manufactured tale” cemented actress Geraldine Page’s reputation as a talented comedienne, as the play’s con man makes “a warm and
attractive woman out of a drab, discouraged spinster.” As for the director: “Joseph Anthony has directed the play briskly, thank goodness. Hardly any directors think of being brisk any more.”30 Joe took this briskness to Hollywood, when he directed the film version of The Rainmaker, with Katharine Hepburn taking the role played by Geraldine Page on Broadway. The film opened in time for the Christmas market in 1956 and earned Katharine Hepburn an academy awards nomination for best actress. Joe said of her: “She’s furiously honest, an expert professional, a fervent and creative person and it was an extraordinary experience working with her.”31
The Rainmaker opened the doors for Joe both to the Broadway stage and to the Hollywood film studios, and an abundance of production projects followed closely on the heels of both. Already in May 1957 Esquire Magazine published a feature story on Joe as “Broadway’s Hottest New Director.” This article described Joe as an “actor’s director.” Joe explained his relationship to his cast this way: “Because I was an actor for so long, I have patience with their inability to grasp a part immediately—I have an identity with the actor in this respect. But the moment I am working for is that time in rehearsal when they take the play away from me and the author and make it their own.” One of these actors elaborated, saying, “We like to work for Joe because he’s a ham himself. Even though he’s supposed to come from the ultra-realistic Stanislavsk[i] school, he manages to combine reality with a wonderful showmanship that gives all his plays a special texture.” Drama critic Tom Donnelly praised another aspect of Joe’s work. “He has a feeling for fluid staging that no other director has. He composes his players beautifully and then he moves them on and off the stage deftly and gracefully. Anthony has a marvelous feeling for the plastic uses of the theatre.”32
Joe’s Broadway stage productions came on fast and furiously: The Lark (1956), A Clearing in the Woods (1957), The Marriage-Go-Round (1958), The Best Man (1960), Under the Yum-Yum Tree (1960), Rhinoceros (1961), Mary, Mary (1961), Romulus (1962), 110 in the Shade (a musical based on The Rainmaker, 1963). His Broadway production continued at a hectic pace until 1973, with the production of Jean Kerr’s play Finishing Touches. In addition, he directed two summer productions at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Connecticut: The Taming of the Shrew (1965) and Falstaff (Henry IV, Part II, 1966) and starred opposite Shelley Winters in The Country Girl at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Milburn, New Jersey.
He was nominated six times for a Tony Award as Best Director, but never won. But in 1961 he was elected president of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, with his former dance partner Agnes de Mille voted in as vice president.
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Of course a good many theatrical works never see the light of day, or close soon after—or even before—their Broadway openings. And each of these failures demands the same amount of preparation time as those that played for a year or more on Broadway. Joe and Perry were not immune to this. She described nearly all of her plays as “flops” that closed after only three weeks on Broadway. And Joe also had his share of directorial flops.
One of these flops was well documented, because Esquire featured it as a potential hit even as it was being prepared for the stage. The play was Maiden Voyage, a comedy that treated the familial relationships and love affairs of the Greek gods. Paul Osborn had penned the script; he was an established, successful writer of such Broadway plays as The Vinegar Tree (1930), Oliver Oliver (1934), Morning’s at Seven (1939) and Point of No Return (1951) and had, most recently, served as screenwriter for the Hollywood film East of Eden (1955).
But the play itself had already faced difficulties; Billy Rose originally was to serve as producer of the play and it was supposed to premiere in 1956 as “high comedy,” but casting problems caused its cancellation. Kermit Bloomgarden stepped in to pick up sponsorship, and the play now advertised the humor as a gentler take on a contemporary theme. In a pre-production notice, producer Kermit Bloomgarden stated: “There is […an] axiom which declares a producer who has gone so far as to spend almost a year of nerve-wracking time and travail preparing a play, has endowed it with a $100,000 production, has engaged a top-drawer cast, and staffed the production with first rank theater craftsmen on every level—such a producer must perforce have (to put it mildly) a modest conviction about the qualities of said play.”33 The “top-drawer cast” included tried and true actors: Melvyn Douglas as Zeus, Mildred Dunnock as Hera, Walter Matthau as Odysseus, with a promising young ingenue Bryarly Lee as Athena.
The writer who wrote about Joe for Esquire visited rehearsals for the play. “Even under stress,” he noted, “Anthony almost never raises his voice and his handling of actors is painstakingly polite. One of his oft-repeated queries after giving stage directions is, ‘Do you feel comfortable doing it that way?’” And to give the two young actresses in the cast an understanding of the Greek mindset, Joe took them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study Greek sculptures of women, noting, as he did so, “Look at the utter ease of the expression. The womanliness is unashamed…”; “No tensions of repression show about the mouth. She’s willing to be kissed”; and “These figures feel content; they love their bodies. Find the way to do that.”
When the play opened at Philadelphia’s Forrest Theater on Feb. 29, 1957, it was clear that its audience faulted the script rather than the production for its onstage failure. It appeared, one critic wrote, “that the conceit [has become] more prominent than the matter. The background does give Jo Mielziner the chance to execute some interesting and colorful settings embracing two worlds, but it also brings forth a great deal of Olympian exposition that is garrulous without particularly speeding a simple, however sympathetic plot.” He had especially kind words for Walter Matthau, though, who, “as the bedraggled Greek hero and voyager who has quite unwittingly ensnared the heart of Athene […] brings the qualities of both warmth and extremely mortal humor to the role.” He praised Bryerly Lee for bringing “a certain breathless ingenuousness to the role of Athena,” and all the other actors as “sure and expert” in their roles.34 Joe and his actors had clearly done their best with a difficult script. The play closed on March 9 and its Broadway premiere was postponed for a year so that the script could be rewritten. As a Philadelphia reporter noted: “What, on paper, seemed to be one of the season’s most promising events, in actuality turned out to be one of its worst fatalities.”35
The play never reopened.
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In addition to assuming the challenges of the stage, Joe directed five more Hollywood films. Two, The Matchmaker (1958, with Perry playing a supporting role) and All in a Night’s Work (1961), were comedies. One, Career (1959), presented the dark underbelly of the theater world, one with which Joe was intimately acquainted; Anthony Franciosa won a Golden Globe for his performance in the lead role, and the film was nominated for three Oscars. This and Joe’s final two movies were all shot in black and white.
The next movie, The Captive City (La città prigioniera) was a war movie, financed in Italy and filmed in Greece, with David Niven playing the lead role. It was released in Italy in 1962, but not in the States until 1966.
His final film, Tomorrow, was released in 1972. It was based on a William Faulkner story, with
a film script by Joe’s old friend Horton Foote. Joe brought in his daughter Ellen to serve as casting director. It was filmed on site in the area around Tupelo, Mississippi. A documentary-like quality was created by shooting the film in black and white and casting non-actor locals in many of the film’s roles. The film “has a spare no-frills look,” one film scholar wrote. “Presented without condescension, Tomorrow not only stands as a work of unquestioned authenticity, an example of a project where everybody involved worked on it because they loved it, but as that rare film that evokes Faulkner’s voice, his people, his world.”36 Cinema researcher and film buff Leslie Hamilton declared that Tomorrow was “so good you’ll wonder where the subtitles are.”37
Several critics put it on their Top 10 lists, but the film did not catch on with audiences, and it was withdrawn from theaters by the film’s spooked distributors. It would eventually be re-released in 1982.
Joe and Perry always considered Tomorrow Joe’s best film, and lead actor Robert Duvall has declared that it was his best film role. Ironically, he was not nominated for an Oscar for this film, but he did win one for another film he’d made that same year: The Godfather.
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Joe had studied—and taught— acting throughout his career, but in 1972 he made a major career break by turning to full-time teaching at the new branch of the State University of New York at Purchase. New York Governor Nelson A. Rockfeller had long dreamed of having a branch of the state’s public higher education system focus on arts education, and he was personally involved with the new university in establishing performing arts conservatories and a visual arts faculty of the highest level. He—and the school administrators— believed that aspiring artists should also be nurtured and informed through the study of science and the humanities, and as a consequence the university had a strong liberal arts component. Entry to the arts programs would be based not on tests, but on auditions, and the students would be trained and mentored by the very best working professionals.
Already in September 1971 some 170 third-year students had transferred to Purchase, even though there were not yet any classroom buildings available to them.38 But things had improved vastly by the fall of 1972: a hundred million dollars had been invested in the construction of four theaters, separate structures for dance, music, and visual arts, and a five million dollar art museum. By fall, however, only the art museum was completed. Construction delays meant that the students entering the school in the fall of 1972 had to attend classes in makeshift facilities, such as the garage, gymnasium, and the brand new museum. The student residence hall was also not completed; for several months the Purchase students were bused in to their classes from dorms at the New York State Maritime College in the Bronx. The Purchase campus was still, to a great degree, a construction site.
Norris Houghton was hired as Dean of the new Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film, and he recruited Joe to teach acting. Joe found the teaching most agreeable. One student described his teaching methods: “Joseph (‘Joe’) Anthony is the director of the company. He leads the actors into awareness through various exercises. A favorite of the company's were the hostility exercises. Try ‘having’ to hate someone sometime. The experience is quite
unique. People used to come out dazed after those classes. ‘People are like that. Yea, they are.’ We talk about our experiences as humans ( so to speak ) and use it for our work. We have done little two-people scenes from plays by such authors as Tennesse Williams and Jules Feiffer. We are presently working on scenes from 'The Sea Gull.'39
He directed his acting students in a few of the plays offered there, and he mentored the school’s directing students in other dramatic offerings of the school. Reports were that cash was flowing at Purchase, with another hundred million dollars planned by 1980. Joe was a frequent spokesperson for the drama program, and conducted on-site workshops in the area’s junior and senior high schools.
But politics intervened. In 1973 Governor Rockefeller left New York to assume the office of Vice President of the United States, and, almost immediately, funding for SUNY-Purchase was drastically curtailed. By mid-1975 newspapers were reporting on the seriousness of the problems facing the Arts School: “The first building completed on campus—the Neuberger [Art] Museum designed by Philip Johnson—has 60,000 feet of floor space but no funds for art acquisitions. The Performing Arts Center houses a stage larger than that of the Metropolitan Opera, but students are angry about the lack of voice coaching lessons.” Although the size of the incoming classes was growing rapidly, the 31 new faculty positions had been cut to six. As one of these newspapers reported: “Before a single class has been graduated, Purchase is fighting for its life.”40 The new Dean of the Theatre Arts Division, Joseph Stockdale, echoed these concerns. “We don’t have a faculty line for the Movement Program,” he lamented “There’s no directing faculty. Joe Anthony does it as overload. There’s not enough space that complies with where a play will be.”41
In spite of Joe’s enjoyment teaching young actors and directors—his students at Purchase included film and television director Steve Gomer, stage director Peter Coy, actors William Youmans, Jay O. Sanders, and Jodi Long,—he was 64 when his first class at Purchase graduated, and he was, his wife said, “worn out.” He decided not to renew his Purchase contract for another four years. Before leaving in 1976, however, he mentored a group of Purchase students in establishing the Harbor Repertory Company, a summer theater company housed in the Emelin Theater in Mamaroneck, NY. Then he and Perry resettled on Cape Cod in Truro Massachusetts, in the former home of Perry’s parents. Her father, Edward Arthur Wilson, had been a prominent American printmaker and book illustrator; Perry now took over his studio to produce her own landscape paintings. Joe rarely left the Cape for theater jobs, although he did come briefly out of retirement to direct Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the first Palm Beach Festival in Florida in 1979. There he showed that he had not lost his touch; under his direction “the play had laughter and ensemble acting so skilled that the author’s design emerged with piercing clarity.”42
Joe died in a Cape Cod nursing home on January 20, 1993. He was 80 years old.
Beverley Driver Eddy March 2025
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“Broadway’s Hottest New Director,” Esquire, May 1957, 45.
Bruce Lambert, “Joseph Anthony, 80, a Director and Stage and Film Actor, Dies,” The New York Times, 22 Jan. 1993, 17.
https://www.britannica.com/art/eurythmics
W. F. Newman, “Mystery Thriller at Pasadena Unique,” Illustrated Daily News, 14 Mar. 1935, 16.
“Konstantin Stanislavski,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Stanislavski
“‘Dead End’ to Open for Three Day Run at English Tonight,” The Indianapolis Star, 3 May 1937,10.
Burns Mantle, “Federals Stage ‘Prof. Mamlock’”, New York Daily News, 15 Apr. 1937, 49.
Daily Worker, NY, 15 Apr. 1937, 7, and 8 July, 1937, 7.
Ralph Warner, "Little Theatre Does Well in Texas Small-Town Life,” The Daily Worker 12 Jan. 1942, 7.
Agnes de Mille, Dance to the Piper, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952 [1951], 192
“De Mille ‘Theater’ Is New Approach,” The Daily Nonpareil [Council Bluffs, Iowa], 13 Mar. 1942, 1.
Nina Wolff Feld, Someday You Will Understand: My Father’s Private World War II, New York: Arcade, 2014, 104.
These and the following quotes from The M-1 American Mouth, are taken from the 27
September 1944 version of the play, which is held in the Ritchie History Museum collections.
William Warfield, with alton Miller, William Warfield: My Music & My Life, Champaign IL: Sagamore, 1991, 70.
Scrap of Paper, typescript, Ritchie History Museum, 4.
Scrap of Paper, 29.
Scrap of Paper, 38, 41.
Scrap of Paper, 44.
Scrap of Paper, 32-33.
“Hiroshi Sakai,” Discover Nikkei. http://www.discovernikkei.org.en/resources/military/1699
“Ralph Yoohachi Nishime,” Discover Nikkei. http://www.discovernikkei.org.en/resources/military/365/
E.B.M. “‘You Touched Me’ Play Opens at Mount Kisco, The Standard-Star (New Rochelle), 2 July 1946, 16.
Mary Luise Newton, “Saroyan Play Expertly Given at Mount Kisco,” Mount Vernon Argus, 21 Aug. 1946, 7.
M.L.N., “Mt. Kisco Playhouse Gives Molnar Comedy, The Standard-Star, 16 July 1946, 10.
Mary Luise Newton, “‘A Doll’s House’ Well Presented,” The Standard-Star, 30 July, 1946, 10.
Pacific Citizen, 25 Mar. 1950.
“Joyce Johnson Interviews Perry Anthony (7-14-99),” Provincetown History Preservation Project. https://provincetownhistoryproject.org/archives/5296
“Broadway’s Hottest New Director,” Esquire, May 1957, 47.
Brooks Atkinson, “Hurd Hatfield Has leading Part in Leslie Stevens’ ‘Bullfight’ Downtown,” The New York Times, 13 Jan. 1954, 25.
John Chapman, “Miss Page Is Charming and Funny in ‘Rainmaker,’ a Nice Romance,” The Daily News (NY), 30 Oct. 1954, 81.
Rebecca Franklin, “Katie Hepburn scores in ‘Rainmaker,” The Birmingham News (Alabama), 23 Dec. 1951, 13.
“Broadway’s Hottest New Director,” 46.
Kermit Bloomgarden, “Producer Filled With Hope,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 Feb. 1957, 78.
Henry T. Murdock, “‘Maiden Voyage’ Tells Tale of Love at Forrest,” The Philadelphia Enquirer, 1 Mar. 1957, 29.
Barbara L. Wilson, “Is There a Doctor in House?,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 31 Mar. 1957, 96.
Sheila O’Malley, “TCM Diary: Faulkner’s Tomorrow,” 5 Jan. 2017. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/tcm-diary-faulkners-tomorrow-
Peter M. Nichols, “Home Video,” The New York Times, 9 Aug. 1996, D-16.
Most of my information on SUNY-Purchase is taken from three newspaper articles: Roberta Hershenson, “Purchase College, the 25-Year-Old Experiment,” the New York Times, 22 Sept. 1996; William Trombley, “Cash flows for school in Westchester,” Staten Island Advance, 19 Oct. 1972; and “First Four-Year Class Graduates at Purchase,” The New York Times, 17 May, 1976.
Sue Ella Christ, “Blood in the Mud: Theatre Arts,” The Load [SUNY-Purchase student newspaper], 28 Feb. 1973, 11.
Luisa Kreisberg, “SUNY at Purchase, Alias ‘Kafka’s little Acre’,” The New York Times, 8 June, 1975, 140.
Joanne Wasserman, “Stockdale Recalls Visions of Paradise Lost,” The Load, 4. Nov. 1975, 2.
Charles Calhoun, “‘Three Sisters’ Moving, Fascinating,” The Palm Beach Post, 10 Apr. 1979, 10.