Three-Star Classic

(4 of 4)

Divorced from University of California's English Professor Benjamin H. Lehman, Actress Anderson lives near Hollywood with her 80-year-old mother in a rambling white house overlooking the Pacific, gardens, rides, shuns bright lights. Though she makes movies from time to time (Rebecca, Kings Row), Hollywood spells security for her, not art. Says she: "In Hollywood, you merely do Scene 22 at nine, Scene 16 at eleven, Scene 7 at three. It's a good place to learn how not to act."

Late Returns. Hollywood almost kept Actresses Gordon and Anderson out of The Three Sisters. To begin with, Director McClintic put off starting rehearsals for weeks because the two stars were finishing a movie, The Edge of Darkness. Errol Flynn was in the movie, and also in a mess. Had Hollywood followed its first panic impulse—to reshoot a lot of scenes —it would have meant recasting The Three Sisters. As it was, Actress Gordon arrived ten days late for rehearsals, Actress Anderson two weeks.

But, with the help of three dress rehearsals that lasted most of three nights, the show was in pretty good shape for its' swish Washington premiere. The first-night audience, which included Eleanor Roosevelt, the Maxim Litvinoffs, the Harry Hopkinses, was enthusiastic if occasionally irreverent : when Actress Cornell tossed herself too quiveringly into her lover's arms, the house roared with laughter. Afterwards the bigwigs trooped backstage. Amid his congratulations, Harry Hopkins voiced a complaint: "No man would say good-by to the woman he loves wearing heavy leather gauntlets."

Next day Ivy Litvinoff reviewed the performance in the Washington Post. With an Englishwoman's casualness about travel, and Soviet-bred disdain for Chekhov's pre-revolution neurotics, she sniffed at the idea that "it should take three perfectly healthy young women, with the price of a ticket in their pockets, four acts not to get to Moscow."

Sweetness & Light. Embarking on The Three Sisters as a labor of love, its top-notch performers have accepted not only smaller roles than usual, but smaller salaries. (Yet the show, costing $12,000 a week, is Producer Cornell's costliest production.) The whole company have also displayed their very best company manners. Everyone is "thrilled" to be playing with everyone else. When Actress Gordon had a sore throat, Actress Anderson tore to the drugstore to get her a favorite remedy. For the Broadway run, the three great ladies are virtually pushing one another into the No. 1 dressing room. In Washington, no problem existed: since the dressing rooms there are lettered instead of numbered, it was simple as A, B, C.