Harold Prince Interview (page: 4 / 8) Broadway Producer and Director	Print Interview

Tell us about your apprenticeship with George Abbott. What were you doing back then?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Harold Prince: I started out being an office boy. The water was in bottles, very heavy, and you came in in the morning and turned them over in the machine, the water cooler. You opened the windows. There was no air-conditioning. This was all in 1948. And then I did the mail, and then if there were odd deliveries, and then I hung around. And then he signed a contract. He wanted to try out television. So he signed a contract. He opened a little firm. He was married then to his second wife, and he opened a firm with some people, and they did some shows, game shows and stuff, and I sort of took the people who were on the game show to the commissary.

But then he signed a contract for an original show. This is all by 1949, and he said it would be called The Hugh Martin Show. Hugh Martin is a great composer who is still alive, and it took place in a living room, and it was a musical show. Butterfly McQueen was in it, playing the maid in those times, and Kaye Ballard was in it, and Hugh Martin and a lot of guys singing and stuff, and Abbott wrote the first show and directed it up at 104th and Riverside drive, up in the hills above the Hudson, and he hated doing it. So he hired another couple of playwrights to write the second show, and the second show came in on a Friday, and he was gone, playing golf somewhere, and I opened the second show. I thought, "He's going to hate this. This is just not what he's been doing at all." So...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Monday morning, I heard a shout from his office, and he said, "Will you come in here? I just got this script from California. Damn, I have to write a whole half-hour television show," and I said, "I wrote one over the weekend, in case you'd like to see it," and he said, "Give it to me," and I gave it to him and he said, "It's fine. Let's do it just your way, and why don't you direct it?" I said, "What are you saying?" He said, "You can direct. I've been watching you. Go direct it." So I said, "Are you going to... the actors... No one is going to listen to a 20-year-old!" and he said -- I was probably 21 by then -- he said, "No, go ahead. Direct it. I'll come on Thursday and make some comments." So the actors did look at me strangely. It bore his name, the script. So we didn't have to go over that, and I directed the show. He came in and made a nip or a tuck there or something, not much, and the show went on the air. But I was a very abrasive kid. The energy level was just too high. I was trying hard to be tactful, but I had a lot of ambition.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

One of the things I never wanted to be was a producer. So when I see myself described as a producer-director, I think, "Okay, I guess that's history." But the truth is, it's not anything I ever wanted to be.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The amount of kinetic energy I gave off, which was clearly spurred by too much ambition, drove them all a little bit nuts, and they went to Abbott and said, "You know, he's okay, and he knows what he's doing, but it's very abrasive. So please come back." He said, "No. It's him or no show," and he stood up for me, and the show went off the air.

I stayed with Abbott, and he knew what I wanted was to be backstage with the show. So the first opportunity he got, he put me as an assistant stage manager on a revue that Jean and Walter Kerr had written called Touch and Go, and it opened here in Washington, D.C., at Catholic University, where they were teaching. That's the show that first brought them to Broadway, and he brought it in because it got such good reviews.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I went backstage, and my boss was his longtime stage manager, Bobby Griffith, and he decided to show me the ropes, and he did. Then he let me run the show, and that was when it was pretty evident to me, not anyone else -- I was one step ahead of the sheriff -- that I was not made to be a stage manager. I did two more shows, but I always called the cues the way I would have liked them to be. I changed the tempo of the scene changes just slightly, because I felt like it would be better if these overlapped, it would be better if this moved more. So early on, I would catch the stagehand still moving the scenery. They'd have to fall behind a couch and hang there for the balance of the scene. But that's the way it happened.

So you were already beginning to direct.

Harold Prince: I was already beginning. Abbott sent me out on the road to look at his shows that were touring. I never knew quite why, because he sent Bobby half the time, and that was what Bobby had always done, but he sent me sometime. Years and years later, he said, "That was your audition. I kept getting reports back saying you had a good rehearsal, you pulled the show together where it was needed, and so on." So he is the first person who ever said to me, "You really can direct, and you are a director. Be a director."

But instead, your next move was to become a co-producer.

Harold Prince: When I started out, I was co-producer with Bobby. I got drafted, which is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. The Korean War started, and I was the first person drafted in Manhattan, because I had missed out on World War II, and it took me away for two years and calmed me down. It was not my game plan. It is not the way I saw it playing out. Instead, I found myself in Indianapolis with the National Guard first and then Fort Bliss, Texas, and then I got sent for my second year to Germany with the occupation forces. That was wonderful, because I had never been to Europe, and it introduced me to all of Europe. I went everywhere but England, always by train.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The war was just over. So everything was just demolished in Germany, and yet there were opera houses still functioning, ballet companies still working. There was theater. I was outside of Stuttgart, and I hung out in a little bar in Stuttgart called Maxim's, which was in a bombed-out church. And there was a little guy, an MC, with lots of makeup and eye shadow and stuff, and there were three huge Valkyrie ladies in diaphanous gowns galumphing around, and you'd have a couple of drinks and watch him try to get a small audience into it, enthusiastic, and he was very obsequious and hard-working and sweat a lot. Years later, in 1966, when we hadn't quite figured out how to do Cabaret, we'd done a version, and I thought, "It's not exciting enough." I drew on that guy and brought a friend in, Joel Grey, and introduced him to Kander and Ebb, and they wrote for him, and that was the MC.

That's an unforgettable character.

Harold Prince: It makes that whole time in Germany deductible, doesn't it?

You said it calmed you down. Did it make you less abrasive?

Harold Prince: Yeah. I was aware of that. I didn't want to dislocate the air. I didn't want to push people aside. I certainly wasn't like Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy Run? or J. Pierpont Finch in How To Succeed In Business, but...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I came back from the Army, I reminded myself of the problems that I had escaped by being drafted, and so at the top of my calendar on my desk, I wrote two words, and I wrote them for the next five years. "Watch It!" Just "Watch It!" with an exclamation point. So when I'd come in to work in the morning, I would see those two words that were saying, "Calm down," and I watched it.

You've talked a lot about the collaborative nature of theater. Perhaps that abrasive kid would not have been as successful, if you hadn't tamed him.

Harold Prince: You need to be diplomatic. I think I am diplomatic. I am also older, and when you get to be my age, you inadvertently get some reaction from people. You've been around so damn long that you don't have to work on that, but I think my stronger suit was stimulating people, because I am excitable and excited about what I do, and I think it connects with people. The whole creative process is the biggest turn-on in the world, and I like that. I like collaboration. You have to, if you want to be in the theater. You have to like to give and take.

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