Deeper than Greasepaint

LAURETTE(433 pp.)--Marguerite Courtney--Rinehart ($5).

On Easter eve 1945, a sick but triumphant actress stepped into her dressing room in Manhattan's Playhouse theater. This opening night of The Glass Menagerie had proved what many critics and theatergoers had long believed: that Laurette Taylor was one of America's great actresses. Among the flowers and the telegrams stood a bottle of Scotch, the gift of testy Critic George Jean Nathan. It was a special kind of a tribute, and Laurette understood. She wired: "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

For almost 20 years Laurette Taylor had been a desperate alcoholic. When she was suggested to young Playwright Tennessee Williams for The Glass Menagerie, he replied that he thought she was dead. And so in a way she had been. It is to her daughter's uncommon credit that she has not tried to pretty up Laurette's life in a biography that shows the pain of writing on most of its pages.

Trouble with Husbands. Marguerite Courtney's Laurette is different from most current books about theater greats. Ethel Barrymore's Memories and Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs. A. are never far from casual entertainment. Laurette re-enacts a drama that had more than its quota of despair.

She was born in New York in 1884 to a whisky-loving Irish saddlemaker who thought all theater people damned and his dressmaker wife, who had often dreamed of being an actress herself. James Cooney's answer to his daughter's games of make-believe was to whip her. His wife Elizabeth sent her to a dancing and singing teacher and sneaked with her to shows at the Harlem Opera House. She got Laurette her first stage job when she was 13, married her off to Charles Taylor, a successful writer of corny melodrama, when she was 16. After ten years Laurette divorced him, but not before she had played his bad scripts hundreds of times, been broke in scores of touring towns, and borne him two children (one, Marguerite, is the author of this book).

One of Laurette's mistakes as an actress was that she used herself up on plays written by her husbands. When she married the popular but lightweight British Playwright J. Hartley Manners, it was both a real love match and a tacit contract to become his star for life. Together they became rich and famous (Peg 0' My Heart, One Night in Rome), but it was plain that a great talent was being spent on thin theater. Laurette did not seem much to care. Peg 0' My Heart had made her a favorite of New York and London; the movie made her a household heroine to the nation. Hollywood also introduced her to Movie Idol John Gilbert, a passionate love affair, and the beginning of discontent with her husband and with her life.

Trouble with God. During the heady years of success, Laurette was as selfish as she was gay. For her, people were sharply divided into two groups, the talented and the "others." To the others she could be cruelly and unnecessarily cutting. Her children were either hidden or ignored, or exhibited in an effort to prove them exceptional. Of real affection she was sadly short.

Laurette had begun to drink and went into such rages that her daughter barricaded her door at night. From Laurette's room would come noises, "sounds which seemed to come from hell and under."

Laurette hated illness, and when Manners became ill with cancer, her answer was to drink more heavily. She took his death as a personal affront. Long after, she would say: "I could never understand why Hartley was taken away from me. I mean to speak to God about it when I see Him." Laurette fought her alcoholism by herself, and she finally conquered the ugly sides of her own character. She became kinder to others, frank with herself. It was a matter of pride with her not to give up alcohol entirely but to learn to control it. This war with her own weakness is described by her daughter with a candor that never sacrifices dignity. When Laurette Taylor shows the dimensions of her victory on the opening night of The Glass Menagerie, many a reader will want to applaud. When her death comes nearly two years later, it seems not so much a tragedy as a curtain to triumph.

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