“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Kirk Douglas.”
The rehearsals went well and Peggy Conklin and Kirk Douglas turned out to be a perfect combination. When the rehearsals were finished, we took the play out of town. Washington, D.C., was our first stop, and the reviews fully justified our optimism.
“Star in the Window shines bright.”
“Peggy Conklin plays the lieutenant with a great deal of spirit and vitality.”
“Kirk Douglas is delightful as Sergeant Steve, always assured of himself and never missing a beat in his line of patter.”
“The audience last night found Star in the Window gay and amusing and gave it an enthusiastic round of applause that kept the curtain going up.”
I was delighted. After the debacle of Dream with Music, it would be wonderful to have another hit on Broadway. Before the New York opening, the producers had decided to change the title of the play to Alice in Arms.
The play opened on Broadway January 31, 1945. Everything went smoothly. After the opening night curtain came down, we all went to Sardi’s to celebrate the reviews. The New York Times was the first one we saw: “A plague on the house. The dialogue is so wooden it could splinter.”
Daily News: “A mistake.”
Herald Tribune: “Shopworn.”
PM: “Harmless but halting.”
And these were the most positive reviews.
I locked myself in my hotel room for the next three days, refusing to answer the telephone. I kept going over the reviews in my mind, again and again. The dialogue is so wooden it could splinter . . . shopworn . . . a mistake . . .
The critics were right. I was not good enough to write for Broadway. My successes had been the result of dumb luck.
Whatever was going to happen, I knew that I could not spend the rest of my life in a hotel room feeling sorry for myself. I decided to return to Hollywood. I would write an original treatment, try to sell it, and write the screenplay. The problem was that I had no story ideas. In the past they had come easily to me, but now my mind was too distressed to concentrate. I had never tried to force an idea before, but I was desperate to come up with a project.
Early the next morning, I put a straight-back chair in the middle of my hotel room and sat down with a thick yellow pad and a pen, determined not to get up from the chair until I had a premise I liked. I discarded idea after idea until two hours later, when I came up with something that I thought could work.
I wrote a thirty-page outline and called it Suddenly It’s Spring. I was ready for Hollywood.
On my way to Los Angeles, I stopped in Chicago to visit Natalie and Marty.
Natalie greeted me at the door with a hug and a kiss. “My writer.”
I had not told her about the reviews for Alice in Arms, but somehow she knew about them. She put her finger right on the problem with the play.
“They never should have changed the title.”
I spent the next few days in Chicago, visiting my aunts Fran, Emma, and Pauline, who had come in from Denver. It was wonderful to be with them and to see their pride in me. One would have thought that Dream with Music and Alice in Arms were the biggest hits on Broadway.
Finally, it was time to say my farewells, and I was on a plane back to Hollywood.
It seemed as if I had been away forever, but it had been only two years. So much had happened in that period of time. I had learned to fly and had been discharged from the Air Corps. I had written two Broadway hits and two Broadway flops.
With the war still raging, living space was scarce, but I had been lucky. One of the actresses in Jackpot kept a small apartment in Beverly Hills and she had agreed to rent it to me. The apartment was on Palm Drive and when I got there and started to put the key in the lock, the door was opened by a young, vibrant man. He looked at the key in my hand.