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The year is 1940. Americans are beginning to feel cautiously optimistic as the unemployment rate in the country falls to 15%, a significant drop from the 25% that it had been at the peak of the Great Depression. But strikes are still breaking out across the country as well. Workers push for higher wages, shorter hours, and perhaps most important of all, respect from their employers. Meanwhile, as Germany's attacks on its European neighbors intensify, Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Britain and Franklin Roosevelt decides to run for an unprecedented third term as president here in the U.S. and in that year of 1940, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to William Saroyan's The Time of youf Life, a wistful comedy about the importance of holding on to one's dreams, no matter how improbable they may look to others. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolades. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Time of youf Life was only William Saroyan's second play, but the 31 year old had already made a name for himself with the publication of the Daring Young Men on the Flying Trapeze, a short story collection about ordinary people trying to overcome poverty, searching for connections to one another and yearning for the comforts of art, poetry and music. All things that Saroyan himself had experienced. He was born in Fresno, California on August 31, 1908, to Armanat and Taqi Soroyan, Armenian immigrants who had fled persecution by the Turks as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. He was the youngest of their four children and the only one born in the U.S. but when Willie, as they called him, was just three, Amanat died and Takui was forced to put her children in an orphanage while she worked as a live in domestic. She visited her children on Sundays when she could, but it was five years before she found a better paying job picking fruit, and her teenage daughters were old enough to work, allowing them to combine those incomes so that the family could rent a home where they could all be together again as soon as they could. Willie, now 8, and his older brother Henry, 11, worked as paper boys so that they could contribute to the household, too. According to Saroyan's biographer, John Leggett, Willie found his most reliable customers in the city's saloons and whorehouses. By the time he got to high school, Willie had moved on to delivering telegraph messages. He liked the job, but his shift ended around midnight, and he often fell asleep in class before he could graduate. He quit school when he was 18. He took whatever jobs he could find, including working in a department store and in a cemetery. He and Henry even tried to run a flower shop, but were evicted when they didn't make enough to pay the rent. A few years earlier, their mother had shown Willie notebooks in which his father had written poems and stories that he hadn't been able to publish. Deciding that he would fulfill his father's dream of becoming a professional writer, Willie started spending all of his free time at the library, reading everything he could. When he read short stories in some of the national literary magazines, he decided that he could write better ones. He published his first in a local Armenian newspaper, but he eventually found a mentor in a Stanford University professor who held Sunday sessions for young writers and who, recognizing Saroyan's talent, encouraged him to submit his stories to larger publications. In 1933, when Saroyan was 24 and now calling himself Bill instead of Willie, Story magazine, which published such authors as Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, paid him $15 for a story that he called the Daring Young man on the Flying Trapeze. It went on to win third place in that year's O. Henry Awards for the best short stories of the year. Now officially encouraged, Saroyan, a fast writer who could turn out a story within a day, began bombarding the story editors with more of his work. Unable to publish everything he sent in, they passed some of his stories on to editors at other publications, and eventually Saroyan's stories came to the attention of Bennett Cerf at Random House, who agreed to publish a collection of them. The the book of 26 stories published under the title of Saroyan's O. Henry winner. The Daring Young man on the Flying Trapeze came out in 1934, and it was a critical and commercial success. Saroyan rushed out a bunch more for a second collection, but those stories were weaker. The reviews were less effusive, and it sold less, too. Still, Saroyan always had an unwavering belief in his own talent. Pushed for a third collection, he also needed the money because he was spending everything he took in traveling, gambling, drinking and helping to support his family. When Random House refused to go ahead with the new collection and no other major publisher stepped in to do it, he turned to Hollywood. But although he was soon making up to $300 a week, or around $7,000 in today's money, Saroyan chafed under the studio system that dictated what most writers, particularly fledgling writers, could write. His agent encouraged him to try a novel, but instead Saroyan kept cranking out short stories and selling them to the Atlantic Monthly, Colliers and other publications. Finally, in 1938, he decided to try his hand at turning one of his stories about a boy growing up in California's Armenian community into a play. His agent took the comedy that Saroyan called My Heart's in the Highlands to the Group Theater, which agreed to do it. A young Sidney Lumet played the boy. The Production only ran 44 performances, but George Jean Nathan, then president of the New York Drama Critics Circle, was taken with it. And after inviting Saroyan to lunch, he was taken with its playwright, too. Nathan proposed that the Critics Circle give Saroyan a special citation as the most promising playwright of the season. And at the awards dinner, he arranged for his new protege to sit across from the influential actor and director Eddie Dowling. Dowling told Saroyan that he'd admired Highlands and he might be interested in doing Saroyan's next play. Saroyan, who didn't have a next play, went back to his hotel and started one, famously finishing it in just six days. He set the new work in a dive bar similar to one of his favorite hangouts, and he populated it with a large cast of colorful characters, including a young actress who has fallen into prostitution, a philosophical longshoreman, a disaffected cop, a tap dancing comedian, an old cowboy who calls himself Kit Carson, and a slightly mysterious rich guy named Joe, who provides financial and emotional support for all the others. The play had no real narrative and little of the kind of conflict that propels most plays. Instead, it was a patchwork of character studies stitched together with soulful speeches and the belief that all would be well if people were just kind to one another. Saroyan called the play the Time of youf Life. He sent it to both Dowling and Harold Clarman at the Group Theater. Clarman had notes which annoyed Saroyan, but Dowling liked the play as it was, and he thought the lead role of Joe would be a good one for him, even though the Group Theater had turned the play down. Dowling recruited the group's Bobby Lewis to direct the production. Lewis hired the already heavy hitters Boris Aronson to do the sets and costumes and Lehman Engel to do the music. But things quickly went downhill from there. George G. Nathan had not so subtly suggested that his girlfriend Julie Hayden play the lead female role of the young prostitute. And when Hayden didn't like the sketches for her costumes, she ripped them up right in front of Aronson. Meanwhile, Dowling thought that his ideas about how to play Joe were better than the way his director Lewis wanted him to do it. And Lawrence Langer of the Theater Guild, which was co producing the play, also had ideas about how to stage it. He even hired actors to replace some cast members before telling Lewis. So it was no surprise that the show's New Haven tryout turned out to be a disaster. Lewis quit, but Saroyan and Dowling figured they could pull the show together on their own. They threw out Engels music and Aronson's set. And they threw out a lot of the cast too, bringing in, among others, William Bendix to replace Karl Malden as the cop and Gene Kelly to replace Martin Ritt as the dancer. As you probably guessed, Julie Hayden stayed on, but The Boston tryout two weeks later flopped. 2 George G. Nathan remained a cheerleader, but it was still a real surprise to almost everyone else when the show opened at the Booth Theater on October 25, 1939 and was a hit both commercially and critically, running for a then very respectable 185 performances and winning both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer. The three person Pulitzer jury was unanimous in their choice of Saroyan's play, but they went out of their way to say that the theater season in New York has been the poorest in years. They dismissed such contenders as Life with Father, the man who Came To Dinner, and James Thurver's the Male Animal as light entertainments. And they said that Maxwell Anderson's Key Largo, Clifford Odets's Night Music and Elmer Rice's Two on an island were merely good theater that did little to advance the art form. The only show that did that, they said, was the time of your life. But despite such praise, Saroyan declined the prize and he returned the Pulitzer's $1,000 check worth a little over $23,000 today, saying that creative work shouldn't be judged by institutions tied to money or in his words, commerce has no right to patronize art. He remains to this day the only person to have turned down the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Between 1940 and 1943, Sorian had five more plays on Broadway, but only one ran more than a hundred performances, and one closed after just eight. Still, after he won the Pulitzer, Hollywood got interested in him again, and MGM hired him to write a movie. Saroyan turned in an original screenplay about a family surviving through the war that he called the Human Comedy. But the script ran 158 pages, which he not only refused to cut, but insisted that he direct himself. The studio, which owned the script under its contract with Saroyan, went ahead with the film, but without him. Mickey Rooney starred in the role of the character Saroyan had loosely based on his younger self, and the film was a big hit, earning seven Oscar nominations and winning for best original screenplay. Saroyan, who was still credited as the film's screenwriter, rejected that award, too. But before the movie was even released, he had turned his original version of the script into a novel that became a bestseller, so everyone came out a winner with that one. After World War II, however, Saroyan's work fell out of favor, with critics calling it too sentimental. But the Time of youf Life remained popular for years. In 1948, the actor James Cagney produced and starred in a movie version of the play. In 1958, the TV show Playhouse 90 featured a version with the comedian Jackie Gleason as Joe. In 1972, a touring production whose cast included Richard Dreyfus, Jane Alexander and Henry Fonda as Joe played in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and at the Kennedy center in Washington, D.C. there have also been a couple of New York revivals, including one in 1975 with Kevin Klein and Patti LuPone. Through it all, Saroyan never stopped writing, focusing increasingly in later years on memoirs. He also painted, producing abstract expressionist pieces that were shown and sold in a New York gallery. And one of his most famous works may be the song Come out of My House, a chart topper for RoseMary Clooney in 1951 that he'd co written with his cousin Ross Bagdasarian, who later changed his name to Dave Seville and created the act known as Alvin and the Chipmunks. Three years after winning the Pulitzer, Saroyan married Carol Marcus, an actress and socialite who was best friends with Una O' Neill and Gloria Vanderbilt. The couple had two children, Aram and Lucy, divorced in 1949, remarried in 1951, and then divorced a second time a year later. Marcus went on to marry the actor Walter Matthew. Saroyan never remarried and was Estranged from his children for years, reconciling with them only a few days before his death, although leaving them virtually nothing in his will. He died on May 18, 1981, shortly after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He was 72. A four hour memorial service was held for Saroyan. It was a combination of speeches, performances, and audio and visual presentations by friends and admirers, including academics, poets, singers and actors. It included a performed excerpt from the time of your life. I was delighted when Scott Satrakian, the president of the William Saroyan foundation, agreed to talk with me about this singular playwright and his most famous work. Hello, Scott Citrakian. Welcome to all the drama.
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Hi, Janice. Thanks very much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
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Before we talk about the play, I'm wondering if you could tell us a bit about what the William Saroyan Society is.
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Sure. It's actually the William Saroyan foundation, and it was founded by William Saroyan himself in 1966. And his vision was to use the foundation as a vehicle to continue to sort of express and promote his vision after he passed away. And he through the 60s and 70s. And then as a condition of his will and testament, he left his entire estate to the foundation, including most importantly, his entire literary and artistic estate. Saroyan's family came from a small town in Armenia, actually no longer in Armenia, but now in Turkey, called Beatless, as did my ancestors. And Siroyan got to know my grandfather, my great grandfather in Fresno when he was growing up, which is a bit of a lead up to the fact that Saroyan left my father in charge of his estate as both the executor and also as the original president of the William Sororian Foundation. 1981, when he passed away, my dad ran the foundation for many years and I got on the board. My dad retired from the foundation and I became his president and been running it ever since my dad passed away some years ago. The foundation has stuck with Soroyan's original vision and mission of maintaining and promoting his work around the world. We also support a number of charitable organizations that basically are committed both in Armenia and around the world to children, to education, and to literary causes.
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Wow.
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A
That a reasonable introduction.
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Yeah. You mentioned right at the beginning to maintain his values, I think. How would you summarize those?
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Saroyan's values were very much focused on the value of all humanity and the intention of facing adversity with engagement with one's own personal style, and also with a sense of humor and love. I just got back a couple months ago from a full one week program that the foundation put on in Irvine, Armenia, whose purpose was to kind of reintroduce Saroyan to a new generation. And what was especially kind of fulfilling about these series of events was just how relevant his warmth combined with his willingness to take on kind of big challenges and also, if you will, taking on the big man in the name of little people, people who have challenges in their lives but are willing to engage with both purpose and a sense of humor and love. It was great.
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That's sort of a nice segue into the play the time of your life because your family goes back so far with Saroyan. I'm wondering, do you remember your first encounter with the play and what you thought of it?
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Funny, I do. And it was actually as a young boy, I was a sports fan and baseball fan, and there was a baseball owner named Bill Beck, and he owned the Chicago White Sox, and he was a real showman. Bill Veeck built a ballpark in Chicago and installed the first exploding scoreboard in kind of U.S. ballpark history. And when interviewed, he said the inspiration for that scoreboard was the exploding pinball machine at the time of your life. And as I said, I was young. I thought, wow, I want to read that play. And that was the first inspiration or contact that I had with it.
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So what did you think of it when you read it?
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I was young when I read it the first time, and I was kind of confused by it.
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Yeah.
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But I've come to love it. It's just a sensational, really spectacular kind of explosion of creativity and interpersonal relationships. It's really amazing.
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How would you rank it among his many, many works?
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Oh, my. If you don't mind. Saroin was a member of, of a group called the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is little known, but it exists to this day. Perhaps you know about it. The Academy has very prestigious, very prestigious. There's these 300 members in architecture, art, literature and music. And to be admitted, you have to. First of all, somebody has to die. And then you are nominated and ultimately admitted by your peers that are in the. In the Academy. Recent members, for example, are Lin Manuel Miranda, Joni Mitchell. In any event, when Sororian died in 1981, there was a tribute held for him and another member, the writer Kurt Vonnegut wrote the paragraph I'm about to read to you. It was actually read at the tribute by another member, John Updike. Vonnegut wrote about Sororian. He was One of only two persons in my own time, I think, who would write plays and stories with equal facility. The other was Somerset Maugham. The moods and textures of the two men's work were wholly unlike. Mom wished to be perceived as a cultivated gentleman. Saroyan wished to be perceived as a gifted primitive. Neither man was a fake, and I leave that up because Saroyan was discovered in 1934 with a short story. There was eventually the title of a collection of short stories called the Daring Young man and the Flying Trapeze. And over the next seven or eight years, Saroyan wrote multiple best selling books or short stories. Two massive best selling novels. He wrote and received an Academy Award for the script of a big hit movie. He had. Did I say two bestselling novels. He also had multiple plays on Broadway, including the Time of youf Life, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Drama Desk Award. That period of time, and sort of Vonnegut implies it when he talks about the success that Sororian had both as a writer of prose and a writer of stagecraft, was about as successful a short amount of time as I think any writer in the history of the United States. And all of those works, works such as the Daring Young man on the Flying Trapeze, My Heart is in the Highlands, the play My Name is Aram, the novel, extraordinary novel, the human comedy, both the movie and the novelized version of it, these are all just sensational pieces of work. And to pick one of those, like pick my favorite child, right. I don't have seven, but I have three. But that body of work is really just an amazing, an amazing accomplishment.
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The Time of your Life was his second play, but I think the first full length play. And so right out of the gate he wins these big awards. What do you think made the Pulitzer Board Award this play? They were pretty snippy that year. They weren't really happy with a lot of the plays that were running, but they were unanimous on this one.
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A
Yeah. So I'm not an expert in the working of the Pulitzer committee, but I think I can put the play and Saroyan in a bit of context for the time. And it was, by the way, awarded both that and the New York Drama Desk. The only play at that point that ever won both of those awards. Sir Ryan was red hot. He was the man of the moment. As I say. Actually, this play was preceded by My Heart is in the Highlands, which is arguably a full length play, also, also extremely successful. He was being hailed by the literary community, especially in New York for his brilliant and kind of groundbreaking approach to progressive and new literature. And I think the story behind the making of the play was also pretty compelling. Perhaps you know this, that it previewed in New Haven, one performance and attended it and described it as a complete and utter disaster. He fired almost the entire cast. He fired the director and took it on himself. He and a partner directed the play, completely retooled it, and it landed on Broadway and was an immediate sensational smash. So I think the backstory of both the career that was in flight and also the way he had taken over this production and taking it from a disaster to a massive hit must have been just like catnip for the Pulitzer board. Right? That's just such a great story.
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B
So we have to come to the big point of he rejected their prize. I think he's the only person to have rejected the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
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A
You're right about that. It's an interesting. An interesting phenomenon, isn't it? So I think it's well known he rejected the prize. He rationalized that as saying something like, you know, the arts should not be controlled by commerce. And there was a cash prize that came along with the Pulitzer, which he turned down. And he then later that year did accept the New York Drama desk and sort of shrugged his shoulders and said, well, this one doesn't have any money involved, so it's okay. I've read Sororian was a very. He kept a very detailed journal of his life, and I've read a lot of it, and I. I tell you a couple of stories about this Pulitzer. I don't think that his decision to reject the Pulitzer was very well considered. I actually think, you know, he was kind of a bad boy. He was cutting his way through the literary scene. And I think it was. I think he originally did it just to kind of tweak the nose of the establishment and came up in my own view, and I would certainly accept. But it wasn't. I think that his decision to describe it as, well, you know, we can't be. We can't let the arts be controlled by commerce. I kind of think that was a little bit of an ex Post decision, not one that was actually driving the reason for it. And it's actually pretty interesting. I've seen an interview of his son, Aram Saroyan, that he made just a few years ago, and he talked about Saroyan's friendship with John Steinbeck. They were close friends and both in California, both very successful in sort of the same time period from the 1930s through the 1940s. And they both believed. Had reason to believe that they were being considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. And they were mutually sort of horrified when in 1953, the prize actually went to Winston Churchill. They thought that he wasn't as anywhere near the kind of writer that they were. Ironically, Sorone was disappointed because he wanted the Peace Prize, not the Literature prize. Nonetheless, several years later, Steinbeck won it. And the Sororion family believes that one of the considerations that the Nobel committee made was, you know, if we give it to Saroyan, he might turn us down, and we don't want that. So there was some reverberation among the Saroyan family for decades after this decision, that it may have. It may have influenced the decision for Sororian not to win the Nobel. I have no insight into the Nobel Committee. I do, however, know that it comes with a very large cash prize.
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Yes, yes. So maybe he would have. After the time of your life. He had, because he was famous for writing very fast. And so he had six more plays open on Broadway in a short period of time, but none of them ran more than 100 performances. One closed within a week. What do you think happened?
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A
I don't know. I mean, I think that they weren't very good. You know, I will absolutely confirm. He wrote extraordinarily fast. The legend is, you know, there's no real reason to speak the legend that he wrote the time of Your Life in Six Days. He famously wrote the 29 stories that are in the Daring Young man and the flying trapeze in 26 days. I've seen the raw material that he produced every single day of his life. And he wrote almost letter perfect. He just never really felt like he needed to do any corrections. He wrote extremely. He wrote extremely fast. The works to which you refer, one of them, hello Out There, was actually very well received and continues to be performed to this day. One of them, I believe, was a very spiteful play called Go Away, Old man that he wrote after the people at Metro Goldwyn Mayer refused to allow him to direct the Human Comedy, the movie for which he was awarded the Academy Award for the script. He had a. An ongoing feud with Mr. Mayor and wrote a thinly veiled, extremely vindictive and unpleasant, unfriendly, shall we say, play about him. That was one of the ones that closed. But I think that the bottom line was that. And I think this actually was played out more broadly across his literary career, especially post war. It was probably a combination of Some of the works of weren't very good. Go away, Old man being one of them. But there was also a slowly evolving sense of literary case in the United States as we quote, unquote, won World War II. The message of the philosophy we talked about earlier, you know, the dignity of poverty and the value of each and every small person in his or her fight against, you know, the machine, became much less appealing and sort of this more muscular fiction of Hemingway, who did also win me a Nobel Prize in 1954 and others. We had won the war. We were the most successful country in the world. This was a period of, you know, winning and the celebration of our, of our, that is America's leadership and the sensibility that sorority brought to some. Actually he wrote some great stuff in the 1950s was much less appreciated. Whether or not that was a piece of the theatrical disappointments, I'm not sure.
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B
Is that why? Because I don't think his name is as well known today. Or he is taught in the same way that Hemingway or Steinbeck is.
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A
No doubt about it. Yeah, that's true. So Saroyan had one very self destructive tendency and that was that he was a very addicted gambler. During this period of kind of the mid-30s through the 1940s. He was arguably making more money than almost anybody in the world and certainly anybody in the literary arts. He was making a fortune. He was also gambling astonishing amounts of money. He was betting at the racetrack in Los Angeles in the early 40s, today's equivalent of $1.2 million. A day.
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B
A day?
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A
A day. And when you are making the kind of money he was making, it was kind of a nuisance, but it wasn't, it wasn't a disaster. However, when Saroyan's writing became less popular and suddenly the benefits of having multiple bestselling novels, you know, hugely successful plays and so forth, those financial benefits started to taper down. The gambling didn't. And as he went into about 1950, his family fell apart, his finances completely disintegrated. He was drinking very heavily. And while he was writing a lot, the critical reception for the work was not good. He became fundamentally broken in the late 1950s. He made a decision to turn his life around and try to sort of rebuild his finances, especially during this period. I'm sorry, as I said, his family broke up. He became disassociated with his children. And he decided, to quote his words, I think was to write himself back into, you know, back into savings. And he started writing like crazy. He tapered down his gambling, he didn't stop, but he stopped gambling huge amounts. And from about 1958 to 1980, he wrote like crazy, and he published anywhere that would take him. And suddenly he was beginning to get kind of a critical redemption. He wrote several books that were autobiographical, that were well received, but he would write short stories. I just published a book by the way, of 22 unpublished short stories that survived this period when he would tell anybody. In those days, for a short story, the best places to sell were of course, the New Yorker, Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, and the best paying periodical by far was Playboy. But he'd write a story, he'd try to market it to those. Some would, he would sell, some he wouldn't. And if he didn't, he would then sell to the next echelon. There were a lot of magazines that were kind of copycats of the Playboy approach of, you know, focus on mental. We do some literature, we do some recipes, and we do some scantily clad women magazines like Gent and Score, Cavalier and so forth. So I think that he did not help his reputation by becoming so completely willing to sell his stuff to anybody who would take it. He did, however, achieve financial stability and was able to, you know, generally enjoy those later years of his life.
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B
I was also wondering, I just finished reading the, I guess, diary that his son Aram wrote as Saroyan was dying. And he portrays his father as a very difficult person and even in reading John Leggett's biography of sorority. And he comes across as a prickly person at times. And I'm wondering if you thought that might have affected his legacy as well.
- [39:09]
A
First of all, I think I can confirm the general outlook. I think he was very prickly and it may well have influenced his reputation. You know, it's no question about it. He was a. He was a very. He could be a very unfriendly person and very much in contrast to this sort of Sororian esque philosophy.
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B
Right.
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A
And sort of a great irony. Did that affect his reputation? It may well have. I don't know.
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B
Well, whether or not it did and whether or not he accepted it, he did win the Pulitzer Prize for drama for the time of your life. And he'll always have that honor. He'll always be known for that.
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A
You bet.
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B
So I want to thank you for taking the time to talk with us about him and about his work. It's been really, really informative. Thank you.
- [40:05]
A
It's been my pleasure. And thank you very much for. For covering William Sororian's. Fabulous play the Time of youf Life. It is an amazing piece of work.
- [40:17]
B
And thank you for listening. I hope you'll come back next time and that you'll listen to all the other Broadway radio podcasts and if you aren't already doing so, that you'll consider making a contribution to support our work, which you can do@patreon.com broadwayradio.