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Robert Ardrey

Life

Robert Ardrey was born on October 16, 1908 to Robert Leslie Ardrey and Marie Haswell. His father died in 1919 from pneumonia during the influenza epidemic and he was raised by his mother. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended the nearby University of Chicago, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. While in attendance, he studied creative writing with Thornton Wilder, who would become his lifelong mentor.

His first play, Star Spangled, opened on Broadway in 1935 and lasted only a few days, but resulted in the award of a Guggenheim Fellowship. The award granted Ardrey the financial independence to focus on writing plays. Several of his subsequent plays, including Casey Jones, How to Get Tough About It, and his most famous play, Thunder Rock, were subsequently produced on Broadway.

In 1938 he moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter for Metro Goldwyn Mayer. There he wrote many screenplays, including those for adaptations such as The Three Musketeers (1948, with Gene Kelly), Madame Bovary (1949),The Secret Garden (1949), and The Wonderful Country (1959, with Robert Mitchum). He also wrote original screenplays, including the screenplay for Khartoum (1966, directed by Basil Dearden, starring Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier) for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay.

During the 1950s Ardrey became increasingly disenchanted with Hollywood and what he saw as the growing role money had started to play in creative decisions. At the same time and largely by accident, he renewed his interest in human origins and human behavior, which he had studied at the University of Chicago. In the summer of 1956 he moved with his wife and two sons to Geneva. He spent the following years traveling in Southern and Eastern Africa, conducting research for what was to become his first book on the subject, African Genesis (1961), ultimately an international bestseller. Subsequently, he went on to write a total of four books in his widely read Nature of Man series, including his best known book The Territorial Imperative (1966).

In October of 1960 he moved with his second wife to Trastevere, Rome, where they lived for 17 years. In 1977 they moved to a small town just outside Cape Town, South Africa named Kalk Bay. He continued to publish influential works until his death on January 14, 1980. His ashes, along with those of his wife, are interred in the Holy Trinity Church overlooking False Bay.

Theater and Film Career

After graduating from the University of Chicago, under the continuing mentorship of Thornton Wilder, Ardrey wrote a novel, several plays, and many short stories, all of which remained unpublished. It was Wilder's rule that "A young author should not write for market until his style [has] 'crystalized'" They agreed that this moment came with the writing of the play Star Spangled.

Star Spangled opened on Broadway in 1935. It was a comedy that brought to life the classic struggles of an immigrant family living on the South Side of Chicago. It received largely negative reviews and lasted only a few days. However it did catch the attention of notable playwright Sidney Howard, whom Ardrey claims was instrumental in the resulting award of a Guggenheim fellowship for promise as a young playwright. The award allowed Ardrey the financial independence to remain in Chicago and focus on writing plays. While in Chicago Ardrey wrote two more plays. The first, Casey Jones, was a play about railroad men and their love for their machines. The second, How to Get Tough About It, Ardrey describes as "A proletarian love story of pleasant dimensions." In 1938 Guthrie McClintic presented How to Get Tough About It and Elia Kazan directed Casey Jones. The plays opened ten days apart and were massive failures. In his preface to Plays of Three Decades Ardrey writes:

No author in Broadway memory had attained two such failures on a scale quite so grand on evenings quite so close together. Had they opened six months apart, none would have noticed. Coming as they did, I became a kind of upside-down white-headed boy, a figure thundering toward literary glory in reverse gear. Hollywood, incapable of resisting the colossal, bid lavishly for my services. And Samuel Goldwyn, buyer of none but the best, bought me.

Template:TK inc. references from Chap. 4 of AutobiographyTemplate:TK - cleanup below copy Ardrey signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and moved for the first time to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. While in Los Angeles he would meet and work with Samuel Goldwyn, Clarence Brown, Pandro Berman, Garson Kanin, Gene Fowler, Lillian Hellman, Sidney Howard, and S.N. Behrman. In 1938, however, he received word that his agent, Harold Freedman, had sold the film rights to his play How to Get Tough About It. Ardrey decided to use the opportunity to take time off to write a play. He travelled to Tucson where he married Helen Johnson with famed Hollywood director Garson Kanin as his best man. Following his wedding, he sent a note to Samuel Goldwyn which read: "Dear Mr. Goldwyn. I fear that I am wasting your money, and I'm sure you are wasting my time." He moved with his new wife back to the east coast and set to work, first on a minor project which he would abandon, and then on the play that would become Thunder Rock.

Thunder Rock

Main article: Thunder Rock (play)

format TK Robert Ardrey wrote Thunder Rock during the period of escalation in Europe which would lead to World War II. Despairing of the growing isolationism among Americans, Ardrey became convinced that American involvement in the war was a moral necessity. However he did not intend to write a play about the conflict until he was struck by a moment of inspiration during a performance of Swan Lake, in which he conceived of "the play from beginning to end, complete with first, second, and third act curtains." Ardrey ca. 1980, p. 63 (quoted)</ref> In his autobiography, Ardrey gives the following summary of the play:

My story was that of a renowned journalist who having experienced the disillusionments of the 1930's had given up all hope of influencing man toward a better world. In his depths, he takes a job as keeper of a lonely lighthouse on a rock in Lake Michigan. On that rock, a century earlier, had been wrecked a ship carrying immigrants to the New World. It was a time of legitimate hope – he thought. And there – within this lighthouse, symbolically the shape of his mind – he recreated a little world populated by the hopeful immigrants to the New World. The play consists of the journalist-lightkeeper and the long-dead people of his own resurrection, his relations with characters existing only in his own mind. Yet in the probing of his own creations, his integrity catches up with him. They were as much escaping problems of their world as he was of his. In the end he returns to reality.

Thunder Rock, an anti-isolationist play, opened on Broadway in November, 1939 to an isolationist publc. It received largely negative reviews and a poor reception. In the introduction to Plays of Three Decades, Ardrey writes that it opened "to the worst reviews I have ever received. Our most eminent critic deplored a play containing so much thunder and so little rock." Template:Closed in how long? - TK expand? During the summer of 1940 Ardrey discovered, when he read a syndicated column from Britain, that unbeknownst to him Thunder Rock had been having a massively successful run in London. In the column Vincent Sheehan wrote Quote TK The British rights had been sold to Herbert Marshall, who had launched a production, starring Michael Redgrave. The play had been so successful that the British Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, arranged to have the Treasury department fund a production at the Globe Theatre in London's West End. The play deeply resonated with a British public under seige. Eminent theater critic Harold Hobson wrote of Thunder Rock:

"The theatre… did a great deal to keep the morale of the British people high. One intellectual play had an enormous effect in keeping alight a spirit of hope at a time when it was nearer to extinction than it had ever been, either before or after. This was Thunder Rock, by Robert Ardrey. What he accomplished for the British people at a moment of supreme dispair… merits their lasting grattitude. … He, more quietly but equally effectively as Churchill, urged us never to surrender."

Shortly following the war productions of Thunder Rock were launched in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and the American zone of occupied Berlin. In 1942 it was turned into a film, directed by the Boulting Brothers, also starring Michael Redgrave. (See Thunder Rock (film).) Template:Mention legacy Template:TK - Sidney Howard Memorial Award - Education 74

Hollywood

After Thunder Rock quickly closed on Broadway, Ardrey returned to Hollywood. His first official credit was the screenplay for the adaptation of Sidney Howard's Pulitzer Prize-winning play They Knew What They Wanted (1939). It was directed by Garson Kanin, starred Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton, and was shot on location in Napa Valley.

In 1946, after a series of talks with RKO, Ardrey and his new agent Harold Norling Swanson negotiated the first-ever independent contract with a major Hollywood studio for him to write the screen adaptation of the A. J. Cronin novel The Green Years. The contract stipulated that Ardrey could work at his home in Brentwood - an unprecedented studio concession - and he was not to be bothered until he completed the screenplay in around three months. Template:Also in autobio {{TK: Expand. Where can I find more about this? JA: this was the contract for The Green Years, it's in his autobiography}} In 1948, Ardrey wrote the screenplay for The Three Musketeers (film), starring Lanna Turner and Gene Kelly. This became Gene Kelly's favorite non-musical role.

Conception

The initial inspiration for Thunder Rock came in 1938 while the playwright, Robert Ardrey, on an extended honeymoon on Nantucket, was working on a different play. He writes in his autobiography of being taken by the image of the lighthouse as Siansconset and by the drama of the frequent nor'easters. At the same time, the conflict in Europe was escalating, and Ardrey took the signing of the Munich Agreement to be a certain harbinger of war. Ardrey did not have the idea for the play, however, until he returned to New York. He writes in his autobiography of the moment of inspiration during a performance of Swan Lake:

That afternoon, eyes closed, enjoying the music with moderation, I descended into a world between the Tigris and the Styx. And within the course of the performance I had beheld Thunder Rock. I had the play from beginning to end, complete with the first, second, and third act curtains. I never had the experience again, and I must wonder how many authors have gone through a similar spell.

Ardrey moved with his wife, Helen, to New Orleans, where he wrote the first draft.

New York Production

Having finished the first draft Ardrey showed it to his agent, Harold Freedman, and to his friend, the influential Broadway director and producer Elia Kazan, who had directed Casey Jones. Kazan engaged Harold Clurman to direct members of the theater collective The Group Theater, including Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, and Frances Farmer. Rehearsals were begun amidst growing tension in Europe, and the company, convinced that war would break out within weeks, resolved to open as quickly as they could. However, after the Invasion of Poland there was a period of relative quiet in Europe, leading to a belief in America that the threat had been overblown. Senator William Borah during this period famously dubbed the conflict "The Phoney War." The play, which called for American involvement in a crisis in Europe, debuted to an increasingly isolationist audience amid a growing conception that there would be no war.

Reception

Template:Copy, including as many citations as possible to "RA New York Articles" In 1940 Thunder Rock received the first ever Sidney Howard Memorial Award for young playwrights. {{TK: flesh out; probably collapse section into main body}}

London Productions

During the winter of 1939 Harold Freedman sold the British rights of Thunder Rock to the London theater director Herbert Marshall. He sent the script to then rising star Michael Redgrave, wo later wrote, "I thought it one of the most exciting plays I had ever read." He agreed to star, and they launched a production in London, also with Bernard Miles, Fredda Brilliant, and Frederik Falk, at the Neighbourhood Theatre. After the Battle of Dunkirk most London Theaters voluntarily closed, and when Thunder Rock went up, two nights before the Fall of France, it was one of only two productions in London. (For more on reception, see below) When Winston Churchill read of the play, he sent his Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, his scientific advisor, Lord Lindeman, and his wife, Clementine. Duff Cooper reported back to Churchill, who is said to have told his cabinet that "This play is the greatest contribution to British Morale there has yet been." He had Cooper arrange to have the treasury department fund it. Cooper coordinated with Michael Redgrave to launch a major production at the Globe Theatre in London's West End. The role of the government in funding the arrangement was kept secret until after the war. The production at the Globe ran during the worsening Blitz. During air-raids the play would be paused and Michael Redgrave would lead the audience in songs. The production was a massive critical and popular success. The production ran until September when the neighboring Queen's Theater was hit by a German bomb, at which point Thunder Rock was taken on the road.

Reception

Template:TK incorporate. Just collecting for now: Both the initial run at the Neighborhood Theater and the government-funded run at the Globe were major successes. Of Thunder Rock at the Neighbourhood critic James Agate wrote it was "a play infinitely superior in craftsmanship, intellectual interest, pure theater and entertainment value to anything the commercial theater can offer in these heartsearching days." The News and Chronicle described it as "A tonic to the mind, and a bath to the spirit."

Eminent theater critic Harold Hobson later reflected on the significance of Thunder Rock:

"The theatre… did a great deal to keep the morale of the British people high. One intellectual play had an enormous effect in keeping alight a spirit of hope at a time when it was nearer to extinction than it had ever been, either before or after. This was Thunder Rock, by Robert Ardrey. What he accomplished for the British people at a moment of supreme dispair… merits their lasting grattitude. … He, more quietly but equally effectively as Churchill, urged us never to surrender."

"In any case it shook its audiences with the realization of enormous, fundamental crisis, and it sent them away with the feeling that somehow the better parts of their own culture could and would survive." [{cite sources from "RA London Articles"}} -TK Cabinet ministers quote;

Subsequent Productions

When the London production closed, Thunder Rock was taken taken on the road. The cast was the same except that Alec Guiness took over for Michael Regrave. It played in British cities including Manchester and Birmingham. Withing six weeks after V-E day a production of Thunder Rock had been launched in Vienna. By the fall of 1945 the play was up in Budapest and Prague. Thunder Rock was the first play to go up in Allied-occupied Germany, except for a failed Russian production of Our Town, when the American forces staged a production in American-occupied Berlin. The American production starred Ernst Busch, a german singer and actor who had fled Germany in 1933, joined the International Brigades to fight against the Nationalists, risen to fame for his Spanish war songs, been taken prisoner in Belgium, and who had just been liberated from a P.O.W. camp at the end of the war.