Show Business: Heavy Star

Most heavies—the villains of stage and screen—are the forgotten men of the star system. Their names are not box office.

Even if their acting range runs far beyond the short course from sneer to leer, they live and die halfway down the marquee.

But George C. Scott is an exception, a heavy who has achieved star status. In all media, his acting has earned soaring critical acclaim. He was, for example, the superbly cynical gambler in Hollywood’s The Hustler. He was the ice-eyed police lieutenant who stalked Sir Laurence Olivier in TV’s The Power and the Glory.

He was the rasping, vicious prosecutor in Broadway’s The Andersonville Trial.

If George Scott has a sort of destructive genius on the stage, he also has a constructive dedication behind it. He is the principal force in a project ambitiously designed to do nothing less than arrest “the gradual decline of dramatic theater on Broadway.”

His notion is simple enough. He thinks the American theater should be truly national, and that Broadway would improve if its productions were to be assembled somewhere else than on Manhattan Island. This, by Scott’s description, is admittedly like ”trying to drive a camel through the eye of a needle, the eye being the Holland Tunnel.” But “the theater is strangling itself in the Broadway struggle,” he says, “Most plays are produced on a limited-partner basis. The same money is used over and over again.” And this financial centralization creates “indirect censorship”—that is, relatively few people decide what plays will be done. Different ideas, new writers and unfamiliar situations are far too risky for parochial Broadway, and “if the theater is to correct its own ills, it must start in fresh fields.”

In or Out. Scott’s fresh field is Detroit, where he has incorporated The Theater of Michigan—the first stage production company to sell stock to the public, floating 125,000 shares at $3 apiece. Scott is the president of the corporation; Off-Broadway Producer Theodore Mann is vice president. Whereas most Broadway productions are cast, built and rehearsed in New York before a brief trial fling on the road, the Theater of Michigan will cast all of its plays, build its sets, rehearse, and hold tryouts in Detroit, then bring the wrapped package to the west end of the Holland Tunnel and shove it through. “Imagine a prosperous Broadway,”* Scott expands, “supported some day by the Theater of Michigan, the Theater of Kentucky, the Theater of Kansas, and so on. Then we’ll have the Theater of the U.S.A.”

Ordeal by Fire. But before the Theater of the U.S.A. is blossoming on Broadway, Scott & Co. have certain barriers to clear. The Theater of Michigan is gambling its future on two productions this season. The first is General Seeger, a new play by Ira (No Time lor Sergeants) Levin, which opened last week at Detroit’s Shubert Theater to cheers from noisily partisan audiences. Directed by Scott, it stars William Bendix as a U.S. Army major general who discovers that the supposedly gallant death of his soldier son was actually a suicide faked as heroism by Army flacks. General Seeger will undergo the ordeal by fire when it moves to Broadway next week.

The second play. Great Day in the Morning, began rehearsals in Detroit last week, preparatory to opening in New York next month. Written by previously unproduced Playwright Alice Cannon, it is described as a comedy-drama, involving an Irish family in St. Louis in the ‘205. It will star Scott’s wife, Actress Colleen Dewhurst, who was excellent last season as the young wife in Broadway’s All the Way Home. If neither play gets good New York reviews, the Theater of Michigan will be dead. “Two bombs,” says Scott realistically, “and we’re out of business.” Up & Down. Scott gives various reasons why Detroit was chosen as the blood donor to anemic Broadway—Chicago “has had its day,” Pittsburgh is “out,” etc.

But the best reason is that Detroit is George Campbell Scott’s home town. He was actually born in Virginia in 1927, but the family moved to Detroit when George was a tot. His father, now a vice president of ExCellO Corp., lives in monied, suburban Bloomfield Hills, not far from the home of Political Rambler George Romney.

Both athlete and actor in high school. Scott spent four years in the Marine Corps, then enrolled at the University of Missouri’s excellent school of journalism. He had nearly won his degree when he decided that he really wanted to become an actor and went off to join a series of stock companies. Turning up in Manhattan, he was turned down by everybody. In 1957, he was working in a ta-pocketa-pocketa job as an IBM proof machine operator in a bank when Producer Joseph Papp cast him for the New York Shakespeare Festival’s productions of Richard III and As You Like It.

His acting talent had not been schooled, but it was in him in huge deep draughts. Laurence Olivier’s Richard III had been preserved for eternity on film, and was playing in New York movie theaters at the time. George Scott’s was better. And his Jacques, As You Like It’s melancholy philosopher, leering, dangling his feet over the edge of the stage as he reviewed the seven ages of man, was probably the best that New York will see for decades. He has not been out of work since.

Into Bed. Divorced twice before he was 30, Scott was an established alcoholic before he was an established star. When drunk he sometimes became violent, and the meandering course of his nose is the result of its having been broken and re-broken in brawls. Actress Dewhurst and Alcoholics Anonymous jointly coaxed him into sobriety. He married her in 1959; they have two children (he has three more by his earlier marriages).

Last fall, Ziv-United Artists urgently wanted him for a new TV series about a foreign correspondent (to begin in 1963). Scott signed but exacted a price. Ziv-U.A. had to buy 25,000 shares of The Theater of Michigan. Inc. and turn over all voting rights to President Scott. “They wanted me and I needed them,” Scott explains, “so we got into bed together.” The next five weeks will determine how long they stay there.

* It is difficult to imagine. Of the 36 productions that have opened in this qualitatively exceptional Broadway season, 18 have folded, 14 are apparently going to make little or no money, and only four are obvious financial successes.