Posted
1:26 PM
by Gene
I guess news hacks don't like writing obituaries because it reminds them of their own immortality. How else to explain I just learned of the death of
Jerome Lawrence? A classic limousine liberal, he and the inaptly named Robert E. Lee (who died in 1994) wrote a lecture called
Inherit the Wind (surely as profound in the fifties as P. R. MEL is today, though without the holy slashing) and a highly smug adaptation of Patrick Dennis's
Auntie Mame saved from current oblivion only by Roz Russell and the great Jerry Herman score ten years later. To my thinking their ne plus ultra was a regional flop called
Jabberwock that turned the delightful James Thurber classic "My Life and Hard Times" into a preachment with cuss words. (Seems the two were from OHIO.) But then "[e]very good playwright has to be a truth-telling reporter of his own times and of his own mind, and of the people around him." And Lawrence and Lee told THE TRUTH. Well,
a truth. RIP.