John Lahr

John Lahr’s Arthur Miller: American Witness came out in January. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Letter
Andrew O’Hagan’s remarks about Jennifer Jones in his review of West of Eden – ‘she went to bed in full make-up and hair … just in case she was taken ill in the night and had to go to hospital’ – reminded me of going over to her East Side apartment a few times to play with her children – we went to the same Manhattan school (LRB, 3 March). In her full and colourful skirts and perfect...
Letter

Coward Studies

4 December 1980

John Lahr writes: I apologise for attributing to Coward one of the few good phrases Alexander Woollcott ever wrote. But Shaw’s letter, of which only 1½ of 20 lines refer to Coward’s imitating him, was written on 27 June 1921 (Cole Lesley, Remembered Laughter, p. 57). ‘Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans’ – as its title shows – is a cod plea; and, in fact, Sheridan Morley in his Noël...

To spend time​ with Tennessee Williams – for months on end in the case of Elia Kazan, the director who put his plays on the stage in the 1940s and 1950s; 12 years in the case of his...

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Skating Charm: Kenneth Tynan

James Wolcott, 13 December 2001

Kenneth Tynan smoked like a maestro, an aficionado of his own smooth technique. As the stripper sings in Gypsy, ‘Ya gotta have a gimmick,’ and photograph after photograph shows Tynan...

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Here to take Karl Stead to lunch

C.K. Stead, 30 January 1992

I first saw Barry Humphries on stage in the Phillip Street Theatre in Sydney in 1956 or 57, and got to know him in Auckland in the early Sixties after we had both come back from our first visits...

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The Story of Joe

Craig Raine, 4 December 1986

When Joe Orton was in Tangier, he noted down the following exchange: ‘You like to be fucked or fuck?’ he said. ‘I like to fuck, wherever possible,’ I said. He leaned...

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The Fame Game

Alan Brien, 6 September 1984

Steven Aronson’s Hype, a guide to the latest techniques of mass manipulation, may have less impact on British readers than it has had on American. The word is a recent coinage, but since...

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