Jed Harris


Jed Harris was an Austrian-born American theatrical producer and director. His many successful Broadway productions in the 1920s and 1930s include Broadway, Coquette, The Royal Family, The Front Page, Uncle Vanya, The Green Bay Tree and Our Town. He later directed the original Broadway productions of The Heiress and The Crucible.

Biography

Jed Harris was born Jacob Hirsch Horowitz in Vienna, Austria on February 25, 1900 to Meyer and Esther Scherz Horowitz. His family moved to the United States in 1901. He attended school in Monmouth County, New Jersey and entered Yale College at age 17. Although he was studious, he dropped out in 1920, telling a professor "I'm neither rich enough nor dull-witted enough to endure this awful place."

Career

Harris produced and directed 31 shows between 1925 and 1956. By age 28, he had produced a record four consecutive Broadway hits over the course of 18 months and was on the cover of Time magazine. Over the course of his career, his productions gained seven awards, including a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for playwright Thornton Wilder. Harris directed four actors in award-winning roles in Child of Fortune, The Crucible, The Traitor, The Heiress and Our Town.
Described by The New York Times as "a flamboyant man of intermittent charm", Harris was famous for his self-confidence, appeal to women, and sometimes outrageous and abusive behavior. Playwright and director George S. Kaufman, who worked with Harris on The Royal Family and The Front Page, reportedly hated him and once said "When I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes thrown in Jed Harris's face." Although Katharine Hepburn received scathing reviews in the New York production of The Lake — an experience she later described as "a slow walk to the gallows" — Harris insisted that she and the show go to Chicago. "My dear, the only interest I have in you is the money I can make out of you," Hepburn recalled Harris saying. She extricated herself from the contract by offering Harris all the money she had, $13,675.75; "I'll take it," he said. Laurence Olivier, whom Harris had directed on Broadway in The Green Bay Tree, called him "the most loathsome man I'd ever met." In revenge, Olivier used Harris as the basis for his makeup for his 1944 stage portrayal of Richard III.
However despised he may have been in the theatrical community, Harris directed and produced luminaries such as Leo G. Carroll, Laurence Olivier, Lillian Gish, Basil Rathbone, Elaine Stritch, Ruth Gordon, Walter Huston, Osgood Perkins and Katharine Hepburn. Moss Hart wrote that "every aspiring playwright's prayer was: 'Please God, let Jed Harris do my play!'"
In an interview shortly before his death, Harris spoke of the ephemeral nature of the theatre. "The beauty of it is that you can create a whole world in a few weeks of rehearsal. But then the whole thing disappears like a breath of air. Nothing remains after your audience has gone. All it represents is a few moments of escape."
While many of his hit plays were translated into film versions, Harris was hesitant to make the jump to working on films. His first foray into motion pictures was when Broadway, one of his theatre productions, was adapted for a 1929 film. However, starting with The Light Touch, starring George Sanders, Harris wrote the story for a trio of films continuing with Night People, starring Gregory Peck and Buddy Ebsen, and Operation Mad Ball, starring Jack Lemmon, Dick York, and Mickey Rooney.

Personal life

Harris was married three times: to Anita Green in 1925; to actress Louise Platt, with whom he had a daughter, in 1938; and to actress Bebe Allen briefly in 1957. All of the marriages ended in divorce. Platt accused him of abusing her during their marriage.
Barbara Barondess recalled her immediate attraction to Harris in her memoirs. Although she was a virgin, she willingly submitted to him, and the two began a brief affair, casual on his part but passionate on hers. She realized she was not an important part of his life when she called him at the office and overheard his talking with Ruth Gordon on the phone. Unfortunately and unknown to her at the time, she was pregnant with his child. Barondess elected to undergo an illegal abortion without telling him about the baby.
In 1929, Ruth Gordon was starring in Harris's production of Serena Blandish when she and Harris began a long romance. She became pregnant and their son, Jones Harris, was born in Paris later that year. Although they never married, Gordon and Harris provided their son with a normal upbringing, and his parentage became public knowledge as social conventions changed. In 1932, the family was living discreetly in a small, elegant New York City brownstone. Harris's other romances included Margaret Sullavan.
Harris recalled his life and career in five consecutive 30-minute episodes taped for The Dick Cavett Show, broadcast posthumously, and in an autobiography, Dance on the High Wire, published a week before his death. Harris died November 15, 1979, aged 79, at University Hospital in New York City after a long illness.

Theatre credits

Film and television credits

Accolades

Jed Harris and screenwriter Tom Reed were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story, for the 1954 film, Night People.
Harris, Arthur Carter and Blake Edwards were nominated for a 1958 Writers Guild of America Award for the screenplay for Operation Mad Ball.
Harris was posthumously inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981.

Cultural references

The central character in Ben Hecht's 1931 novel A Jew in Love is modeled in part on Harris. John Houseman wrote "Ben Hecht in A Jew in Love has described the mixture of deadly cruelty and ineffable charm of which Harris was capable; when he really wanted something or somebody — and even when he did not — no effort was too great, no means too elaborate or circuitous if it helped to satisfy his craving for personal power."
Laurence Olivier believed that the physical features of the Big Bad Wolf in Disney's 1933 animated film Three Little Pigs were based on Harris. Harold Clurman agreed: "That's Harris's face. I mean made into an animal...There was venom in the man."
One of the major characters in Ed Ifkovic's Downtown Strut: an Edna Ferber Mystery is Jed Harris, based on him as the director of the Broadway play A Royal Family .