The Stage: The Moonlighter

John Houseman, 59, producer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, is paid more than $100,000 a year, but he moonlights. Often working at his other job until dawn, he drives home to his beach house in the Malibu colony, bathes, shaves, and returns to M-G-M by 9 a.m. For that sort of self-punishment he gets perhaps another $1,000 per year, but with it comes the satisfaction of shaping one of the most creative organizations in the American theater.

Love & Loathing. Houseman’s other job is artistic director of Los Angeles’ three-year-old Theater Group, which, helped by a Ford Foundation grant and run by the adult education branch of U.C.L.A., presents first-rate stage productions, drawing from an eager pool of movie and television actors. Anxious to get away from the flabby, fragmented routine of working on motion pictures or taping TV shows, the actors are willing to work for Equity minimum just to submit themselves to the sterner discipline of the stage. Robert Ryan starred in the group’s Sodom and Gomorrah, Nina Foch in U.S.A., Edie Adams and Eileen Heckart in Mother Courage. Last week Paula Prentiss and Dan O’Herlihy opened in Houseman’s superb new production of Measure for Measure, and the group’s next production will be the world premiere of a new play based on John Hersey’s The Child Buyer.

The discipline these actors seek is measured out sternly enough by Director Houseman, whose diffident and quiet manner never quite accompanies him into rehearsals. He is an acerbic, hard-riding actor-jockey, whose casts love him, loathe him, and respect him. “He slices them off at the ankles,” says one of his assistants, “especially the girls.” In a rehearsal Nina Foch once made a suggestion about the lighting, and he let her have it: “You’re not an electrician,” he told her. “You’re an actress—I think.” Then he had a real electrician play a bilious green light on Foch for an hour.

Shrewd or Safe. Much praised for hazarding a high reputation in the theater by committing himself to a university group, Houseman says: “My whole life in show business has been a risk. There are two approaches. Either you play it very shrewd and sit back safely, or you do what amuses you.” Born in Bucharest of a French father and a British mother, Houseman was educated in France and England, and worked as a London grain broker before moving to New York and his first area of amusement: Broadway.

With Orson Welles, Houseman formed the Mercury Theater group in 1937, revitalized Broadway with productions like Julius Caesar (in modern dress), and, later, Native Son. They sent the U.S. into panic in 1938 with the celebrated CBS radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds —in which Martians were reported to be landing in Grovers Mill, N.J.

He went to Hollywood, and in ten years turned out more than a dozen films; in New York he directed Mary Martin in Lute Song and Robert Ryan in Coriolanus. Trying television, he produced Playhouse go for two seasons. Most notably, however, he was artistic director of the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Conn., built it from an initial failure into a successful operation in four seasons. He quit in disgust two years ago when the trustees would not let him establish a permanent repertory company.

At M-G-M he is now producing the film version of Irwin Shaw’s novel Two Weeks in Another Town and will soon do The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But his real amusement, risky or not, is the Theater Group at U.C.L.A., which has become so popular that hundreds of people are turned away every night. When Louella Parsons demanded tickets to a recent production, she was turned down. In Hollywood, that is called mother courage.