Voices of the WPA

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HM: We are at the home of Howard J. Miller, who was the Deputy Director of the Federal Theatre Project. And we’re starting out formally enough, and I can continue this but…]

HM: Well, I used to use J. Howard.

LB: J. Howard Miller.

HM: My real name is Howard J. Miller, but when I first came to California, there was a stock company playing in Hollywood and one of the actors was Howard Miller and his wife, who was the leading lady, was named Leona Powers. And because I didn't want my talent to be confused with his, I chose J. Howard and I used it for years. I just use Howard now.

LB: We talked a moment ago about your being first with the Emergency Relief Act and then taking over and being called to Washington to talk to Hallie Flanagan about assuming a position with the Federal Theatre. Is there anything else in that whole organizational beginning that you want to talk about that it's important to get on tape?

HM: No, I don't think so. It was simply a matter that for a year or--I've forgotten dates, Lorraine--but for a year or more before WPA (Works Progress Administration)Federal Theatre came along, there was in Los Angeles -- and I think it varied by community -- a theatre-choral-music project under the State Emergency Relief Administration here. And I headed that.

LB: And I guess Hallie made three trips to California during the whole time from 1935 to 1939. At least this is what information we glean out of Arena. I don't know whether she always came to Los Angeles or whether part of those trips, you know, were to Seattle and all the way down. But I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about Hallie and your association with her and what you -- you know, there's a lot of controversy about how good an administrator she was, what were her strengths and what were her weaknesses. So if that seems to you like a good place to start, why --

HM: I can't remember how many times; I would say more often than three she visited INTERVIEW WITH J. HOWARD MILLER (Brown) 1576 First tape, side 1, page 2 the West. I met her first in Washington and then I think, as she outlines in Arena, I think her first trip West was when she met with the administrator locally who was a colonel, retired Army, and we made the deal to set up in California under a guy named Frank McLaughlin, who was a state administrator of WPA, a deal that we administered...--the Federal Theatre from Washington,directly to me, rather than through Colonel Connolly. She did more trips but I can't remember how many. We did one trip together after I went on staff, national staff and I've forgotten exactly where we went. But we went -- we covered practically everything, including Chicago truest and for quite a long trip. I would think it was over two weeks. I remember we spent a Thanksgiving, the only two people on a train between here and Denver. And we had an altercation that day and didn't speak to each other most of the day and finally had dinner together. I can't even remember what we quarreled about but we did. We had some high ups and downs in our relationship over the years but always affectionate ones.I think she was a remarkable woman. I don't think anyone at that time in the United States could have brought the concept of a Federal Theatre to Washington and weathered the storm than Hallie. I think she was unique. She was a highly talented, very intelligent woman. She wrote well, she communicated extremely well with all types of people at all levels. She was strong and fearless and she had the advantage that some of the other arts directors didn't have, put which they developed, of knowing Harry Hopkins and having his confidence, which sometimes carried her over some of the bumps in the bureaucracy that otherwise might have been difficult. She was theatrically well grounded, she was a good teacher, she had a fine sense of theatre, she was a good director. She had a very catholic knowledge of plays of all types, historical as well as modern, and she had written well. She had an established reputation. I've heard same people say that some of the productions at Vassar were as fine or finer than anything on the New York Stage at that period.

LB: Same of the Vassar plays are in with the play scripts, I think by accident, or whether it was the material she used. . . .HM? You see, Emmet Lavery was a student at Vassar and I think wrote his first play under her direction. He can confirm, but I'm pretty sure his first commercial success followed Vassar and Hallie. Because she had a playwriting course and I don't know who -- if I ever did know, I've forgotten the names of other people who were in that course.But she was an extremely competent person. She delegated authority well, she was a good administrator. She could analyze a budget very carefully. Most of my work with Hallie was administrative. While we shared a great deal of the total projections of Federal Theatre nationally, I handled most of the budgets, the payrolls, the complaints that came up regarding the administration of the Project. And I think I had relatively good relations with the state directors.

LB: You thought that she was really pretty good. How about with politicians because again this is a kind of controversial --

HM: This is a controversial thing and during that hectic period when Congress voted us out of funds, I was so concerned because as I recall, we were also taking some reductions at that time. That was always one of the most difficult things, the fluctuating dollars that we had that made us reduce staff, sometimes at very difficult times. Like Christmastime you'd have to cut some of the people off your payroll. But I did not get into -- I did not hear most of the hearings. I think I was one night in the gallery during...the hearings. They were,as you know, pretty hectic. I think that she got along well with most people. She was very direct. She was honest, she was forceful and she knew her subject very well. She made an unfortunate mistake with Starnes at the hearings and although she says, I think, in Arena, she says she didn't laugh, some of the committee laughed when she tripped him up on Marlowe. . . I mean, I don't think she didn't laugh. I think she did laugh. I think she kind of -- she was under that kind of emotional pressure where, to show him up as a dullard pleased her a little. . . I wasn't there but I know when she came back she was greatly dis¬turbed about that, as were we all, because you don't lower a Congressman's image when he's among his peers. I think she had some great strengths but I think she was -- we were all always handicapped in some way in meeting some of the issues that arose, both in communities and nationally with Congress or with other bureaucrats in the hierarchy of bureaucracy. She mentions David Niles, Lan anonymous assistant to the President, who was a pretty competent guy, but not always right and I think toward the end had Ellen Woodward, Lthe Director of Women's and Professional Projects', carry the ball in Congress for all of the arts projects.But there was an awful lot -- if you read the congressional testimony of the com-mittees and the statements of Holt and some of the others who were so out to get Federal Theatre, I think you'll find that there were also a lot of people on that committee who were friends of Hallie's and had friends in the theatre. It was...emotional -- you know, it got over into such things as Up in Mabel's Room being an immoral play. I think really for a theatre, under the auspices of the Relief Administration, we had relatively little of that type of criticism",considering the number of people we hired and the number of plays we produced. I think her relationships with people generally were very good, very good. And with Hopkins they certainly were and I think in all of the difficult times we had, I think we had great support from Hopkins on most issues.

LB: That Grinnell College group was quite a group, wasn't it?

HM: Oh, yes.

LB: I was thinking too of Phil Barber came down and spent the day with us at the Project.

HM: What's he doing now?

LB: Writing a novel.

HM: Is he a writer?

LB: Yes, he's given up plays. Well, he had a play about to go into production and then the leading lady broke her leg and that so demoralized him to get that far that he turned to writing a novel. And he says he has the body of it down; it's just going back and doing rewriting and editing and whatever. But well, we just had some kind of day at -

HM: Is George Kondolf still around?

LB: We haven't located him, He may very well be and we just haven't --

HM: Try NBC. The last I heard, which was some years ago, he was with NBC. George Kondolf would be a very interesting man for you to talk to. He has great talent.

LB: You know we have a long list of people that we, in looking at the outsides of scripts and doing research, that we haven't been able to locate, although I think we've done very well -- in finding yourself. It's a great joy to send out these letters and then, you know, get replies from people: "Oh, yes,I'm here. I'd like to talk to you." It just makes it so wonderful for us, I was thinking about California as a state and the kind of special problems that you felt you had in California. Let me try to get at what I'm driving at, I had a sense when I talked to Ralf Coleman that he felt very often under the gun, that he was being watched fairly closely just because he was close to Washington. And I get the sense from talking to people out here that perhaps California being farther away from Congress, the nerve center, that there was more freedom. But that may be not right at all. Were there special problems about the state of California or did you have a sense that people were watching what you put on? Was censorship a problem, for instance?

HM: We never had a censorship problem in California that I'm aware of anywhere. They had one in Washington State once over Lysistrata and that was one in which Hopkins took a direct action. He called Hallie and talked with her and eventually talked with me and said, "Go out there and open that play and you tell" -- a man named Abel was the state administrator -- "you tell Abel that we are running a free adult theatre. And I want you to see the play and if there's anything really objectionable in it to see that it's softened. But I want it opened." And that was quite a job.But in general, outside of Cradle Will Rock and what was the other Living Newspaper in New York? Niles always said it wasn't a matter of censorship. It was a matter of timing and selection, but in any case -- I mean, we were relatively free of it. We had very little of it. We were far enough away. Of course, I have to be prejudiced because I was there and I was the director. I think in many ways it was a much stronger project than New York. We were never as large as New York -- we never had the budget -- although we had a great many theatre people, little theatre, professional theatre, motion picture theatre people who had come from stageand screen who needed relief and needed work.And we never were able to take care of all of them and we had some problems in that respect because in order to balance youth and the older professional,we had to take on, of course, some amateurs. So every time you hired somebody 19 or 20 or 22, you had somebody 51 or 65 who wanted to get on that project and who might be making mattresses or digging ditches or whatever because they couldn't get on. I think our balance was pretty good, but we had that kind of problem.But we were rather unique. We had all of our own shops. We operated with less money for material things outside of wages, I think, than anybody. We were the first ones to charge admission. We did that on a vaudeville show. We talked about it for months with Washington and there were always problems with the WPA bureaucracy as well as with the Bureau of the Budget and often the Accounting Office or whatever.One New Year Eve (laugh) we had a vaudeville show at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and we charged 50 cents admission and I wired Hallie the next morning and said, "We took in blank dollars last night. And what the hell do I do with it?" That broke the back and we got then a procedure for charging admission. We had up until that time done everything free. But we needed that money to take care of that 10 percent for non-wage items--rent, scenery, costumes, etcetera which was very difficult to get.You see, all WPA projects, 90 percent was to go for wages and the 10 percent was to be raised locally. And that was very difficult to get because you had so many people in other fields like, if you were digging a ditch, you had to have shovels. So community moneys were going for that sort of thing and, as usual, the arts, people didn't consider that, at the beginning, quite so important. So that income was very important to us.But I think we did more experimental things. I think we didn't have the playwrights and therefore we depended on the National Play Bureau for things like the Living Newspapers and some of the other things that came out of national. But I think if you look back in both Arena or Bread and Circuses or the Matthews book and look at the variety of productions, and these were not always selected on the basis of their theatrical value. For example, if you did a Potash and Perlmutter or you did same of the old stock company things,we had groups of people who had made their living in stock in various cities in America, who had come to the West Coast, hoping to get in the movies, hadn't gotten in and were down on their uppers, who had to be taken care of and who knew nothing else. We also had an audience out here that was used to that kind of production. So some of those people ended up in that particular project under a guy named O.D. Woodward, a very fine director and able to cope with those people. We had people like Maude Fealy, who was an old actress out at Elitsch Gardens and Salt Lake and God knows where. She was not a hell of a great actress but thought she was and the people on the project who had worked with her in stock thought she was. And those people had to be placed and you couldn't place than in some of the other plays that were being done. I think our experimental theatre here was the best one in the country. I think our dance project . . . had two people at the head of it: Martha Dean, who at that time was -- she wasn't the head of the Women's Physical Education Depart-ment but Martha . . . Was thehead of dance at UCLA (through the Physical Education Department in those days; and an exceptional dancer named Myra Kinch, a very inventive choreographer. And some of those people on that project have gone on to be successes -- Bella Lewitzky, for example, whose group is appearing here this next week, was an early product of that project.We had a Jewish theatre. I think, I don't know, I can't go back with perfect recall... I used to be able to….say, We did this before they did that."And "We had a Negro theatre before somebody else." And "We had a Jewish theatre." And "We had" whatever. But I think we did a better job of balancing production based on the people who were in our employ than anybody in the country.

LB: That's a very important thing to do.

HM: Yeah, it was very important because New York, for example, part of their problems, some of the problems that grew up in New York were the result of having so many young people who came on that project, interesting, innovative, creative... Orson Welles and others came out of that opportunity for themselves. But we,I think, took more care of older professionals and we had some problems with them and eventually we had to set up a selection committee here which had audition responsibility . . Jimmy and Lucille Gleason and Edward Arnold and who was the other one? I've forgotten the third person. (Boris Karloff). But in any case, anyone who came professionally as an actor on the project went through that group. And I can remember Jimmy and Lucille, you know, an actor would say, "Well, I played some stock in Omaha in such-and-such a year."And he would say, "Who was the leading lady that year?"And they'd say, "So-and-so," And they'd call some director and say, "Hey, Jim, who was leading lady with such-and-such a company in 1926 in Omaha?" And if it was wrong, out they went. Because everybody wanted to get on that project for a number of reasons. First of all, it wasn't doing something that they had never done in their lives like digging a ditch or making a mattress or some kind of community work. And secondly . . . the hours were better, the working conditions were better, you were inside, not outside. So you had a lot of people who tried to chisel onto the project. I think on the whole we had very little trouble with that, but we did have some internal problems on hiring young people and you needed them to balance casts where older people couldn't do an acting job and everybody wanted a job.

LB: That's where your talents came in, trying to balance the two, really. .

HM: I think we did a very good job at that. I'm proud of that. I think we did a better job of balancing, taking care of people's needs, which was what the relief program was, with theatre than many other places, including New York.

LB: Hallie's idea of a very simple theatre -- in other words, when you don't have money, you can't have very complex sets. How did this go in California, this kind of simplified style?

HM: We did both. We had -- at one time, you know, in Los Angeles, I think with the exception of the Biltmore and the Music Box and the Paramount -- I'd forgotten what the name of that really was -- I think we had every other theatre in town under contract. We had the Mason, the Hollywood Playhouse, the Mayan, the Musart, just every theatre. Well, we, in the early days, I think, when we had so little money for settings and costumes and that sort of thing, we were just as innovative as we could be. But we eventually had a full department and our stuff was well set. I think if you read some of the reviews by the theatre critics, you will find, over and over they'll say, "This compares" or "This exceeds" what others were doing.LB; It wasn't just bare bones all the time, that you could really have enough money to -- HM; Oh, no. No, we always managed some way. We were great scroungers. I've always been a great scrounger. I know we had good relations with motion picture studios and we'd pick uplighting equipment and prop and I remember one of the scenic design companies out here had a bunch of stuff that was in storage that we were able to get. And we built and rebuilt and -- excuse me. (Interruption - phone)

LB: Let me give you another question. I wanted to pick up on what you said about the National Service Bureau and using their plays. In your estimation, was that a good way, was that efficient, that National Service Bureau, a good way to organize regional theatre if you're dealing with particular regions and you -- was there a better way to do it? I guess that's what I'm really asking. Or did that seem to work pretty well as a system, as a way to organize?

HM: I'm a little hazy on the background. We had our own play bureau locally with a very fine woman named Georgia Fink, who had come from -- in those days the Speech but now the Theatre Department at USC as its head. We read a lot of original things ourselves that didn't come out of National, but we also, when we got to the point where -- I'm a little hazy on some of this. I think we paid $50 royalty for plays, Samuel French things,nationally. And at that time I think when that began to come along and was organized -- Emmet Lavery could tell you better about this -- I think we cleared those plays and arranged our royalties through the National Play Bureau. That was a desirable thing. I think also in New York on the Project there were a great many people, such as the writers who did the Living Newspapers. Some of the stuff was developed on projects. We didn't do that out here, but we read a lot of plays and we circulated those plays, including through the National Bureau. I think in general that there is a marriage there. In any national theatre in the future, I would think you would have a national bureau. New York still is the fountainhead and we can't forget that. You'd have a national bureau which would make financial and other arrangements, who would look out for new plays in the major markets for the theatre in the country. But I don't think that should be at the expense of anything that might happen locally.It also, in any national theatre where you're dealing with politicians that control your purse strings, you get the lunatic fringe of people who have written a play and think it should be produced and they work on their Congressman. The National Bureau is a way to say, assuming that it's - and I think the New York Play Bureau was -- competently staffed, to get away from that sort of thing. I remember once -- I can't remember what state it was, but I had a Congressman that drove me mad with some woman's play that had never been produced. And trying to tell him that, "Hell, no, we're never gonna produce it" was very difficult and still keep his friendship.Yes, I think the pattern was good. I don't think it (The National Play Bureau)exercised censorship or control and I think you have to deal with those things sometimes regionally. I remember once Max Reinhardt thought he'd like to do a Federal Theatre production in the Hollywood Bowl of something out of the West, you see. And we Gold had a script. I've forgotten what the nameof that thing was. He had a script that had come to him some way. Well, I think you take advantage of all of that creativity on a regional basis. But I think the national thing is a necessary -- if for no other reason than to control your negotiations with playwrights on a royalty basis.

LB: You mentioned national theatre and obviously that's something that one might hope for. Are there any bright lights on the horizon or are you optimistic about the chances of maybe doing another WPA even?

HM: (Laugh) Well, there's enough unemployment in show business today that they really should spend some money on another attempt. I was not as sure that we were laying the groundwork for a "national theatre" as Hallie might have been. I thought we were awakening an audience for a people's theatre that is not in the concept of what most people talked of in those days and even today a§ a national theatre. I thought perhaps, and I still think perhaps, given another two or three years of operations, Congress wouldn't have closed us down because of the demand from the people themselves for theatre. And I still think that's a necessary thing. I think that inflation, and inflation in the theatre and high prices of tickets and the declining standards in many places because of the dollar situation, that same type of people's theatre --and I use the word "people's" as opposed to "national" -- is inevitable. I think even our own -- and they do a very good job on the whole -- theatre center around the Ahmanson and the Mark Taper and those theatres that Gordon Davidson runs is not a theatre for the people. It's county-supported but people who aren't affluent enough to afford a pair of tickets to the Ahmanson, just don't see theatre in this town any more or see very damned little of it. So I think there's a need and I think eventually we'll get to the point -- I think if John Kennedy had stayed in as President, I think that he and Jackie were close enough to the arts that perhaps there would have been some democratic approach to some kind of a theatre subsidized by the Federal Government. I don't see much chance of it under the present administration or under any Republican administration. I think it may come from the Democrats.

LB: The workers' theatre then is a concept that's still alive in your mind. And that again is something different from the charges that came out about -- we're not talking about Communism now, we're not talking about Red theatre. We're just talking about theatre that people who don't have money can afford to attend. Right?

HM:

LB: Somehow my sense of it is that all get mixed up with charges of Communism which were hysterical rather than true.

HM: Right. I often think when I think back at some of the charges of Communism,many of us were not so active politically in those days. And Communism was not the great big bugaboo threat to a lot of people that it became later under the McCarthy and Dies and other people. I know I was naive enough.I had a director -- in the early days of Federal Theatre, including my own employment, we had to have clearance, political clearance. And that shocked me. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. But in any case I had to go to a friend whose brother happened to be the state chairman of the Democratic Party in Montana and I got a letter to Senator McAdoo of California,who in turn highly recommended me for the job in Federal Theatre And in the early days we had to have that kind of clearance. And it was always kind of justified on the basis that you had to have people who believed in the things that Roosevelt and Hopkins and the Administration were trying to do for people. And therefore you didn't want a bunch of people jamming up the works. But I don't believe in that, as I say, and I didn't believe in it then.But in any case, I went to New York for a director of the experimental theatre and I wanted somebody who was creative and alert and had a good background and strong enough to really take something over and do something with it. And so I met this person and her background was good. And finally I said, "You know, I hate to ask you this question but would you mind telling me what your politics are because I'm gonna have to get you clearance if I hire you." I was at the point then of hiring her.She said, "Yes, I'm a Communist."And I said, "How are you registered?"And she said, "As a Democrat." "It doesn't matter to me." I don't know whether I was that naive but I was more interested in her theatrical ability, you know, than her politics. And she justified every bit of faith I had in her although she gave me a hell of a bad time because, as you know, the Communists were very active among the workers and the Workers' Alliance. And we didn't have one of those here but we had an organization of a similar nature. There were and bumblings of organization that you could usually trace back to her and the coterie that surrounded her. But nevertheless that was a minor irritation. She was professionally competent.

LB: And that was what was really important.

HM: That was important.

LB: What about the Federal Theatre as a place to develop new talent? And I'm think¬ing now of the Negro talent that was developed because the opportunity was there. I'm also a bit puzzled. I suppose women seemed to take administrative posts, Hallie herself again, but not necessarily -- the Project didn't develop any female playwrights. And I'm wondering what your view of LA as a kind of training ground for new talent was. Did this happen in California or as you said --

HM: We developed some, but I think we -- as I told you, the problem of need,human need, was so great that we didn't develop playwrights. We didn't hire -- I think New York did this, both in the Play Bureau and on the New York projects with Morris Watson and the Newspaper, for example. They had more writers. We had some editors who updated an old play that we were gonna do or something that may have had some obsolete dialogue or situation comedy. But we didn't develop any playwrights. I think that's unfortunate, but I think it was part of the time. When you think of an administrator of a project such as this one or New York, and your big problem was human need, your second problem was doing theatrical productions that hopefully got critical approval. With all of the problems of no money for scenery or costumes or advertising or publicity, pro-motion, whatever, we missed a few things. And I think playwrights -- I don't think we ever had any good ones -- I know Hallie and I talked with Henry Alsberg at one time about having the Writers' Project try to establish, some playwriting. You see, that was vulnerable; playwriting is vulnerable. You have a bunch of people sitting around pushing a pencil and I suppose we didn't follow it maybe out of our own, not fear so much, but all you needed was one extraneous problem like that to drive you out of your skull.

LB: You had enough just to cope, it sounds like.

HM: Yeah. I think we had a lot of playwrights who knew of us and who -- I remember Eugene O'Neill once gave us his plays and worked it on a $50 royalty basis and said it was just a hell of a deal for a playwright. And that brought in an avalanche of scripts after he had said that. You see, people who were reluctant, who were looking for the buck, all of a sudden said, "Hey, maybe I'm missing a bet.." And we had a lot of plays come in. Emmet Lavery should be able to tell you more about what they did at the national level on that than I can tell you.LB; I’m curious also about -- you've spoken a couple of times about Living Newspaper and I'd like to get into the whole matter of the kind of -- how you thought Federal Theatre affected American drama. Was it a particular genre that came through as the most important contribution to this ongoing American theatre? Or was that something quite different? Because I know you've mentioned the Living Newspaper a couple of times.

HM: Well, I did because it was an in-plant thing. Spirochete and Triple-A Plowed Under and some of those plays. I don't think I'm wrong. I think it was a new form of drama, simply staged, competently written, timely', well directed and produced and appealing to audiences that we hadn't seen on the American scene before. So I think it was a contribution. Probably as far as playwriting is concerned, probably the newspapers were the only innovative thing we did of that type. . . I think we did some experimental things in dance and in the experimental theatres that were important but I don't think they had an impact", as Hair revolutionized a lot of things. I think the Living Newspaper was a sort of revolutionary, new concept that was very important.

LB: Would you talk a little bit about the experimental theatre, too? What kind of experimentation do you think was most important? Was there a kind of carry¬over, say, from what you did in FTP in the thirties to what we might see on stage today? In other words, get a sense where a critic today will say, "Oh, this is very new" and then you go back to some of the thirties play scripts and say, "Here it was; somebody else had done it already."

HM: I wish somebody more critical than I were able to answer that for you. We used to have a hell of a good critic out here on the Herald Express named Bill Oliver. And I know Bill told me once that he had seen a professional production of Johnny Johnson three or four or two or three years before we did a production of that here in the experimental theatre. And he thought ours was so far superior because of innovations and timing and lighting and setting. . . He considered what we were doing very important. You will find as you read the critics out here, you'll find Oliver was very supportive of that sort of thing. I can't talk to you so much because when I got at national level with Hallie, my job became so administrative and I had so many problems in that field that I didn't see as many of the productions in New York. I was in Washington and there were always problems with money and travel and I didn't see as many as I wished I had. So I'm more familiar with what went on here. I think we experimented with everything, with plays, some of which we knew, with new directorial approaches,with new setting and lighting and staging. The (experimental) theatre was a very flexible theatre here. It was not in a proscenium theatre. It was in a building somewhere on the West Side; I've forgotten where it was now even.But the whole approach was to shake up, to find new ways of acting, of directing, of producing theatre. And I think they were very, very competent.

LB: I know from -- well, I went to Iowa and looked at some correspondence that Hallie had had with E. C. Mabie and there is a letter in there some place that says how much she relied on you and how much she relied on Mr. Mabie at the same time. She had obviously picked out a group of people that she felt were such strong supporters of her in all kinds of ways in the Project. And there is something that says, "If Howard Miller were to leave, I don't know what I would do. I wouldn't be able to carry on because I rely on him." And I'm asking you about experimental theatre but I realize that the kind of thing that you did was terribly important to keep the Project going and to keep her going.

HM: When it comes up, it was always with her that there was nothing new under the sun we shouldn't try and nothing old that we shouldn't try to do as well or better than it was done before. And nothing stood in our way as long as we got dreamy.

LB: It must have been a terribly exciting time.

HM: It was very exciting and it was also a frustrating time. I remember Hallie and I made a visit to the West Coast once and we went to San Francisco and saw exciting show and we saw this one night. And the next day we went for the first time -- Hallie had never been to a burlesque theatre and San Francisco still had one. And she loved burlesque; she had no concept of what it was. But that afternoon when we got home from the burlesque matinee, we had some kind of a wire from Washington, I don't remember, about cutting people off the payroll or something. And on our way down to L.A. on the train, I did a poem which said, "The United States flag flies over our plant," said Hallie Flanagan gaily"Red for the Liberals, white for the virgins and blue for the way I feel daily."

LB: That's wonderful! (Laugh)

HM: (Laugh) Well, we had a marvelous relationship and I was very fond of her. I respected her. And we had great ups and downs, differences always and she used to get damned mad at me and vice versa. But we were always in the same direction.

LB: That was so important at a time when, of course, people were dropping away always, quitting. And that kind of thing must have been very satisfying. HM: Yeah, it was.

LB: What do you see as the direction of the American theatre today? Given the long time that you've been involved in theatre and watching plays and whatever, what is your sense of -- I suppose I'm asking how does Federal Theatre fit in to the whole American scene or how do you feel about the American theatre today, any kind of comment like that? I guess I'm saying this is maybe an unwritten chapter, this thirties chapter, that we need to work on. DO you agree with that?

HM: Yeah, I think it is. I think it was a very important -- I think the total arts program was a very important innovation for the Federal Government. And the fact that it was tied to the relief of human need is really beside the point. In spite of what it did for human need in keeping people with a minimum of money able to buy a meal. And incidentally, we did all sorts of things here that many of the other projects didn't. We had a commissary and we had people who went out in the countryside and bought eggs and we got day-old bread. And we sold that at cost on the project so that they could eat.I think the American theatre's in pretty good shape, you know. The fabulous invalid is well alive and kicking, and I think there are many innovative things going on. I don't know what the history is going to provide as far as federal subsidy of some kind of the arts but I think it will come, probably under a younger and liberal Democratic president, And hopefully, it will not come tied to relief and perhaps we can get away from the kind of political interference that came toward the end of Federal Theatre. I think the pace of America is more liberal and I think the feeling of anti-censorship is very strong in America today. And I think in many ways the climate is better,You've got to remember that in those days we dealt with all sorts of things that were problems from a political standpoint. For example, black theatre, When I went to Washington, I'd gone to school at SC (Southern California) here and a young guy named Bill Houston whowas teaching theatre at Howard University. He and I had palled around a little over at SC as students and he found out same way I'd gone to Federal Theatre. On my third or fourth day in Washington and. .

BM: . . . in a federally subsidized thing. I think the more difficult thing would be to try to have federal control so that you didn't have a bunch of little local regional projects, possibly staffed by political people who had no com¬petency. I think you need a national sense of direction and competency to make an effective national theatre.

LB: Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you had thought about before I came? HM No, because I really didn't know what you were gonna hit for in taping.I talked about Hallie; I had great respect for her, I think on the whole we had a pretty good level of competence in most of the theatre projects. And that doesn't mean that somebody who didn't really go overboard in making waves theatrically didn't do a fine job. I remember a guy in Omaha where they had a little stock company type project. But many of those little local people did an extremely good job with the talent available who had been trained in the type of theatre that was disappearing in American stock and so they did good jobs. I think we had good competence. I think New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles to some extent, Seattle when Glenn Hughes was close to it, probably were the most innovative although there were some exceptions.There was a guy named Karon Tillman in Denver who did same extremely good work.But I think they were more innovative, more experimental, more alert and alive and not so lofty either to their communities or to their relief personnel than some of the other projects.(End of Interview)