Dewhurst’s Autobiography Full Of Insights, Comedy

“Colleen Dewhurst: Her Autobiography” by Colleen Dewhurst; written with and completed by Tom Viola (Scribner, 400 pp., $27.50)

Colleen Dewhurst, who died at age 67 in 1991 of cancer of the cervix, was a New York actor primarily known as Murphy Brown’s mother and for her definitive portrayal of Josie Hogan in a memorable production of Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten.” She was also a wife and mother who was married twice, turbulently, to the mercurial actor George C. Scott. (They were together for a seven- and a six-year period, with an eight-month “intermission in between.”) She raised two sons of theirs, one of whom, Campbell Scott, is now a well-known actor.

Dewhurst learned how to play tragedy from some of the best in the American theater, including the brilliantly sensitive Panamanian director Jose Quintero, whom she credits for helping her with her portrayal of Hogan. Tyrone Guthrie, Harold Clurman and Joseph Papp also gave her direction, and actor Jason Robards gave her performing wisdom.

The autobiographical pastiche “Colleen Dewhurst” might be called improvised Dew-hurst. It’s partly an unfinished autobiography. She’d been working fitfully on it for 15 years after taking advance money and then worrying that she couldn’t write it.

The book also presents insights and interviews with some 30 relatives, friends and colleagues (excluding her two former husbands). Her collaborator was her assistant when she was president of Actors’ Equity, an offstage role she was talked into playing.

The most beguiling aspects of the book are Dewhurst’s and her friends reminiscences about comedy in life and art. An important acting lesson, she writes, was that “It’s difficult to play comedy in a rage.” She sometimes learned about comedy from unexpected sources. One was an actor playing a corpse onstage in a production of O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” who snored while the scene was played around him. Another was the unexpected laughter from the audience while she was playing Kate in Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” outdoors. In her peripheral vision, she saw a little boy standing next to her onstage staring up at her. He was wearing no pants; only a T shirt.

Still another was Edward Everett Horton, the famous character comedian who’d been in hundreds of films and who appeared with Dewhurst in “Nina,” a three-character summer stock production back in the 1950s. He taught her that “it’s always line first, business second.”

Onstage, Horton began dictating a letter to her, beginning with “I …” She was to type the key for the letter “I” before he completed his thought and then she was to stare at him waiting for the next word until he spoke. “I thought the whole … business was silly, but did as I was told,” she writes. “At that moment on opening night, the audience fell over laughing. The longer we stared at each other over the typewriter, neither of us moving a muscle, the harder they laughed.” When they exited after the first act, for the first time Horton spoke to her offstage. “You’re a rock out there, aren’t you?” he said, approvingly.

What comes through in this book is the performer’s vulnerability and anxiety. There’s the initial rejection of a woman agent who would eventually represent Dewhurst for decades. There are her agonizing difficulties with cruel and abusive directors - she specifically cites Alan Schneider, who directed her in a production of Edward Albee’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’ “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” and Nikos Psacharopoulos of the Williamstown Theater in Massachusetts. Her toughest critics were her young sons. Campbell Scott recalls seeing her many times in “Moon” when he was 13 and thinking, along with his 12-year old brother Alex: “Could this boring play be any longer? All this talking and nothing happening.”

A woman who informed Dewhurst in a restaurant that one of her plays “stunk” is likened by Dewhurst to “somebody coming up and saying to you after your lover has disappeared, ‘Well, he was always so -‘ And you reply ‘Don’t! It’s all right for me to feel that way just now, but don’t you say it.’ When you’re involved, plays, like lovers, are a wonderful experience.”

Some criticism was easier to ignore. “You must never, never, ever work with this director again,” movie star Joan Crawford cautioned her about Quintero after watching Dewhurst’s performance in “Moon.” Crawford’s reasoning: Dewhurst’s costume didn’t flatter her.