George Abbott

One of the most important and admired men in the entire history of Broadway – indeed, some have said that he WAS the history of Broadway –, George Abbott ( b. Forestville, NY, 25 June 1887; d. Miami Beach, FL, 31 January 1995 ) was a theater director and producer, playwright, screenwriter, and film director and producer whose career spanned more than nine decades. He had a hand, one way or another, in the most historically and artistically significant New York productions of the twentieth century: Broadway (1926), Three Men on a Horse (1935), Brother Rat (1936), On Your Toes (1936), Room Service (1937), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Too Many Girls (1939), Pal Joey (1940), On the Town (1944), High Button Shoes (1947), Where’s Charley? (1948), Call Me Madam (1950), Wonderful Town (1953), The Pajama Game (1954), Damn Yankees (1955), Once Upon a Mattress (1959), Fiorello ! (1959), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1961), Flora the Red Menace (1965), and 103 other shows, giving a boost to the early careers of (among others) Sylvia Field, Helen Hayes, Shirley Booth, Garson Kanin, Rodgers and Hart, Ray Bolger, Eddie Albert, Jose Ferrer, Eddie Bracken, Gene Kelly, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Nancy Walker, Jerome Robbins, Allyn Ann McLerie, Harold Prince, Carol Haney, Bob Fosse, Carol Burnett, Jack Gilford, and Liza Minnelli. Abbott had 40 films to his credit as screenwriter, director, or producer, among them All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), The Fall Guy (1930), and the film adaptations of his Broadway hits; his featured screen actors included Jean Arthur, Lew Ayres, and Gene Tierney. He received over thirty prestigious honors and awards, though he set little store by them. When George Francis Abbott was a boy, his father was twice elected mayor of Salamanca, in upstate New York. The family moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, when he was eleven, and the teenaged George got jobs as a Western Union messenger and a ranch hand. He was not a promising student, and appeared to be headed toward juvenile delinquency, so he was sent to Kearney Military Academy in Nebraska, where they cured his slouching posture (he measured six feet two inches) as well as his unruly tendencies. Just after the turn of the century, the Abbotts moved back East to Hamburg, where George often took advantage of a trolley line to theaters in nearby Buffalo. Graduating from Hamburg High School in 1907, he went on to the University of Rochester for a B.A. in 1911. The University Dramatic Club performed his play Perfectly Harmless that year, and Abbott proceeded to Harvard to take a course in playwriting from George Pierce Baker. One of his plays, The Head of the Family , was performed by the Harvard Dramatic Club, and another, The Man in the Manhole , won a $100 prize from Boston’s Bijou Theatre, where he was working as an assistant stage manager. After a few more lackluster acting parts, George Abbott took on the role of “Texas,” a roistering cowboy in Zander the Great . The play didn’t last long, but Abbott (playing a character he had actually lived) was chosen one of the best performers of 1923, and his name was made. For another two years he played cowboys, until his first play was produced on Broadway, The Fall Guy , co-written with James Gleason. The next few years saw collaborations between Abbott and a variety of other playwrights, setting a pattern for him, and for Broadway production in general, of cooperation and common effort. His first big hit (at 603 performances), a joint effort with Philip Dunning who also co-directed, was Broadway (1926) with Sylvia Field. Another pattern that showed itself at this time was Abbott’s tireless activity, moving directly without a break from one project to another, whether they were successful or not. Several of his scripts ( Love ‘em and Leave ‘em , A Holy Terror , The Fall Guy ) were quickly adapted for films, and Abbott was well represented on the silver screen from 1929 through the