RECORDS: Closing the Poetry Gap

At 22, Marianne Roney discovered that she was not cut out to be an Organization Woman—at least not with Period Records, where she worked writing album notes. Unable to persuade her bosses to record some far-out releases, such as medieval music or modern U.S. poetry (“Let’s do medieval American poetry,” burbled one executive), Marianne quit and formed Caedmon* Records to produce talking records that would not talk down to their audience. Her partner: Barbara Cohen, a classmate at New York City’s Hunter College. Last week, eight years and some 200 releases later, the latest Caedmon albums were on sale: three Shakespeare dramas, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, the opening installments of an impressive recording project. Within four years, the partners hope to produce 34 other plays, all with topnotch casts, adding up to the first complete professional Shakespeare on records.

Prospectus for Bankruptcy. Rushing forward in a field where Angel et al. were treading lightly (the survival rate of new record companies is less than 1%), Marianne and Barbara compiled a catalogue of releases that, to most merchandisers, read like a prospectus for bankruptcy—W. H. Auden declaiming Auden, Sir Ralph Richardson pacing gravely along Swann’s Way, Faulkner grappling with his own syntax, an ailing Colette reading from her novels while the bed sheets rustled.

Between forays to a Washington psychiatric hospital to sign Ezra Pound (see BOOKS) or to London to snag T. S. Eliot, the partners did their own taping, cover designing, package wrapping and mailing. Most of the orders were for their initial recording, a reverberating reading by Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas, whom they approached by sending him a note after a poetry reading (“We just signed our initials,” recalls Marianne, “so he wouldn’t know we were unbusinesslike females”). After five days of hounding him, they finally got the poet’s agreement, and the six records he turned out for Caedmon before his death have to date sold 400,000 LP copies in the U.S. and abroad.

Caedmon’s original investment, a $1,500 bank loan, grew into a million-dollar annual business run by a fulltime staff of eight. The firm’s first employee—a shipping clerk who has since become one of the nation’s most literate comedians, Mike Nichols—was eventually succeeded by a team that includes one of the best recording engineers in the field: Peter Bartok, the composer’s son. The company’s dramatic director is Poet-Playwright Howard Sackler, who says of his bosses: “They let you do just about anything you set your heart on, even if it won’t pay its way for years.” One of the rare exceptions: Lolita, which Marianne vetoed.

A Streak of Business. Nowadays, Marianne (married to a Manhattan public-relations consultant, Harold Mantel!) and Barbara (married to a Baltimore hydraulic engineer, Lawrence Holdridge) visit their cluttered Manhattan office only a couple of times a week to supervise some 100 pending releases. For their Shakespeare project, Partner Mantell went to London last summer to round up talent, much of it from the Old Vic and other repertory companies. Their curtain raiser is a moving and brilliant Macbeth, starring Anthony Quayle and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies. The two-hour, two-record production was followed by Othello, with Cyril Cusack and Frank Silvera; and The Taming of the Shrew, with Margaret Leighton and Trevor Howard. Early next month: Sir John Gielgud’s The Winter’s Tale.

Orders for the new series, through a record-of-the-month sort of operation known as Shakespeare Recording Society Inc. (4,000 members so far), are “twelve times what we expected,” notes Partner Mantell. She once said: “After studying Greek, Gothic and Sanskrit, we were obviously unfitted for anything.” Now she admits: “We apparently had a streak of business sense.”

Caedmon releases, Businesswoman Mantell estimates, have reached an audience of 2,000,000—many of them “people who haven’t picked up a book of poetry since they left school. If a person is not a serious student, there is something about the printed page which separates him from poetry; recorded works bridge the gap. This is pretty reassuring at a time when so many are flagellating themselves with the failure of American culture.”

* According to the English chronicler Bede (circa A.D. 672-735), Caedmon was an illiterate herdsman who became the first English Christian poet, after receiving a divine call in a dream.