File puptcrit/puptcrit.0907, message 83


Date: Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:06:26 -0500 (CDT)
From: Charles Taylor <cecetaylor-AT-verizon.net>
To: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org
Subject: [Puptcrit] =?utf-8?q?Yale_Puppeteers_didn=E2=80=99t_retire=2C_the?=


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Alan Cook mentioned the Yale Puppeteer=E2=80=99s long career and their material becoming dated. That seemed to be a consensus of many by 1954.  The Yale Puppeteers often claimed it was television that kept the audiences away from their theater forcing it=E2=80=99s closure.  What ever the reasons,  retirement was NOT something they ever considered.
 
After losing the Turnabout Theater location on La Cienega, they moved to San Francisco in a former old Coffee Dan=E2=80=99s restaurant  and then  into  a huge barn of a theater. They were not successful there. Then  they moved to La Jolla for a short stint before returning to L. A.

During my college days, I lived in their home and experienced their constant efforts toward finding a new =E2=80=9Cangel=E2=80=9D.   There were many revivals in little theaters in Hollywood at different locations. The Melrose Theater, The Circle Theater, Little Theater on Melrose and Sunset Cabaret.  They never gave up trying to reopen their theater in the next season. Roddy kept a list of Turnabout Fans known as =E2=80=9CTurnabouters=E2=80=9D.  He worked that list and arranged performances as often as possible for many years, actually for  decades.

Harry and I built Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves around 1959.  At that time Harry and Roddy shared a house with Roddy=E2=80=99s father on West Knoll just a block from  their old theater.  Roddy arranged for a show and dinner at that tiny duplex in the back yard one summer evening. Many distinguished guest attended and it was amazing to see these fans enter through the front door, cross the living room, go through the tiny kitchen, out the back door along the side of the house into the back yard and take their seats in wooden folding chairs.

I was told that the theater would reopen next fall and I had a job waiting.  I heard that story for many years. Roddy never gave up his dream of regaining what they had. Harry thought if it didn=E2=80=99t happen he would have to become a waiter.  That was the reason in 1959 I suggested we build a hand puppet show we could tour.  Forman wrote the play and lyrics.  Francis Osborne, Dorothy Neumann, Harry Burnett, Forman Brown and I did the voices. It was Howard Mitchell that brought his tape recorder to record the play.

Pretty much, it was a hand to mouth existence in those days.  Harry made small amounts of money giving puppet lessons through the guild and in a workshop that he and I created. Forman was writing for the civic light opera and making small amounts.  Their savings were depleted and all Forman had left was the money from the sale of his Brentwood house. He had an apartment a block away that he shared with his ninety four year old mother.  I paid Roddy thirty five dollars a month to live in their home as I attended L. A. City College Theater Department.

Harry Burnett told me once that it was Betty Davis that put up the money in 1941 for the Turnabout to open. They eventually found a long time friend that bought a home on El  Centro  for them. It had a raised stage in the large living room.  It was rumored that Charles Laughton once gave readings there and that a director originally built the house in 1927.   There were two front doors. The one closest to the street had a ticket window built in it.  This was where they had given many shows toward the end of their lives.  It was Roddy=E2=80=99s death that brought an end to their performing.  He was around eighty two years old.

Roddy  whose professional name was Richard Brandon was born Brandon Rhodehamel. He was the promoter and the person that kept them together.  Alan Cook and I discussed the fact that Roddy was NOT that great a manager.  But without him there would not have been the Yale Puppeteers.

Harry and Forman were first cousins. After being abandoned by Harry=E2=80=99s father, Harry=E2=80=99s mother took in borders.  Forman was sent to Ann Arbor to live with his aunt and cousin while going to the University of Michigan.  Forman was two days older than Harry and so they graduated the same year.  It was during these years that Forman wrote songs and played the piano for Harry=E2=80=99s shows.  Photos that exist reveal how crude the puppets were.  Forman=E2=80=99s talent was derived from his father, an editor of a newspaper, and his mother, a former opera singer. So Forman Brown had a background of music and clever writing. He was especially talented for writing in other musician=E2=80=99s styles.

For many years in the fifties, sixties and seventies, Edwin Lester, the great impresario that reigned over the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, would hire Forman to rewrite lyrics for revivals.  Lester once quipped that Forman was the composer for =E2=80=9Cdecomposers=E2=80=9D.  Forman wrote and received lyrics for such revivals as The Red Mill, Knickerbocker Holiday, The Chocolate Soldier, The Student Prince and The Merry Widow.  The Merry Widow royalties were very lucrative for Forman  because it was such a popular musical for high school plays.

Had Forman not stayed with the Yale Puppeteers he could have been a great lyricist in his own right.  But fate was different.  Harry went on to Yale University and there he met Brandon Rhodehamel.  Forman taught in a private girl school for that year. But in the summer he rejoined Harry and there he met Brandon. Forman was besotted and he and Brandon became life long partners.  The three of them became very protective of one another and started out to combine their talents through puppetry.  Harry's nephew Dan Bessie has written a book, Rare Bird's an American Family with one chapter dedicated to the Yale Puppeteers. Dan also made a documentary on their life that received much acclaim in the Gay community. And Formn Brown's book Better Angel is listed by an English professor at Harvard as one of the Great American Novels of the twentieth century. Forman was extremely proud of that accomplishment seventy years after it's first publication.

Another interesting detail is that Brandon was thrown out of Yale University for immoral turpitude.  Harry squeaked by receiving a letter from Dr. Baker telling him to knuckle down or he would not be allowed to continue.  Harry proudly displayed that framed letter as a rebuke of the professor after he achieved so much fame and success.

The one person, that is rarely ever connected with the Yale Puppeteers, was Bob Cressy, later to become Bob Bromley.  He graduated from Yale with honors at a very early age. When Harry conceived the idea to build the greatest puppet show in America, he hired Norman Bell Geddes for ten thousand dollars to design it.  The money was borrowed from one of his brothers which he never paid back.  When the designs were delivered, Harry could not read them. So he wrote a letter to Dr. Baker requesting a student to be recommended.  Thus comes Bob (Cressy) Bromley to the rescue. Bob built the incredible sets and became another  fourth Yale Puppeteer for a  summer season.  Bob eventually moved on to Hollywood and worked in the movies and as a director of a little theater to keep movie director=E2=80=99s wives and girlfriends busy.

Another Yale Puppeteer rarely mentioned was Elwood Fairfield who toured with them before Bob Bromley.  Elwood also worked with Harry on Remo Bufano's Broadway play  Oedipus Rex.
In the mid seventies, Elwood helped me on one of my special projects, Everyman, for my Masters Degree. He was in his seventies then and a very interesting and nice man.

After Forman Brown=E2=80=99s mother died, the Yale puppeteers managed to rent a large home on Canyon Drive in Hollywood.  The house was located next door to Yvette Mimeux=E2=80=99s parent's house. There they gave many performances in the living room always including dinner after the show. It was in that house Forman wrote the lyrics for Merry Widow and rehearsed with Bob Wright, Patrice Monsell, Gail Gordon, Jean Simmons and Sig Arno. They had many wonderful dinner parties with just as well known stars, including Marion Bell, Van Johnson, Ray Bradbury.  I was between  nineteen and twenty one  in those years. It was heady company to sit at the dinner table with such celebrities.

That house had a three car garage.  I scrounged the neighborhood and found some old discarded windows that I used to build a workshop on the side of the garage. In the winter the garage was very cold. Since a gas pipe had an outlet for a washer and dryer, Harry connected an old gas heater.  It was an  un-vented kind that sat on the floor, a real antique. The garage section was filled with hundreds of puppets from all of their shows. Harry estimated he had built over one thousand puppets by then. Harry kept and maintained them for the eventuality of reopening their theater.  It was never to be.

The old heater had an aluminum according pipe and Harry kept moving the heater back and forth from the garage to the tiny workshop trying to keep warm.  One day I noticed the smell of gas. I complained and Harry said he would test the pipe.  I tried to dissuade him but he, being forty years older claimed I didn=E2=80=99t know anything.  He took out a match, ran it along the pipe and SWOOSH! Flames shot up along the wall.  There was no turnoff valve in the garage.  I ran to the house where I knew one was. I,  hoping to get there before the garage burned down with all the puppets manged to turn it off.  Yes, I made it and the puppets survived that mishap.

After I graduated from college and became a teacher, I saw less of the Yale Puppeteers for about five years. But then we renewed our friendship and I looked in on  them for many years as a child looks in on his parents.  I would take my college puppetry class to the =E2=80=9CTurnabout House=E2=80=9D on El Centro so Harry would have a little income. They would serve light refreshments and the students would pay Harry a small fee. The students always felt pleased to see the workshop, Harry and the fascinating house filled with autographed movie star pictures and artifacts and antiques.  I would be invited to stay for lunch. Quite often someone very exciting would drop in.

They never gave up hope of reviving their shows. It became more bitter sweet as the decades passed. The audience grew older but ever so loyal. Their parties were events not to be missed.  One of the last Turnabout Birthday parties, always the middle of June, my wife and I met Bea Author arm in arm with  Charles Pierce, Michael Feinstein and Bette Middler were seen there too. Forman of course would be asked to play some of his popular songs. Harry in later years became more withdrawn and happy to just sit in his chair and knit hats. Once Roddy died, it really was over.  They didn=E2=80=99t retire as much as they just became too frail and without their =E2=80=9Cmanager=E2=80=9D there was no longer any drive.  Forman was very lonely in the end.  But then in every partnership, that is what happens to the survivor. He kept up his sense of humor to the end.

Before Forman went into a rest home, I had the temerity to ask for one thing only. I asked if I could have Harry=E2=80=99s favorite puppet, Simon Legree. Forman said that it was one of the very few puppets they had left and it was important to him that it be put in the L. A. City Library with their other memorabilia.  I have not seen it there but hope that is where it resides.

Harry had given me a puppet, one of the Olsen brothers that created the Klieg lights. It had been in one of their Olvera Street Teatro Torito productions.  Once I met the couple that bought the house on El Centro. I sent it to them to display in their living room.  I learned from Dan Bessie, Harry=E2=80=99s nephew, that in his research  the Turnabout Puppets go for about two thousand dollars each to collectors. Dan does not have one of their puppets.


Charles Taylor
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