A small but attentive crowd of people gathered on a recent Saturday afternoon in an elegant anteroom of the historic Cooper Union at Astor Place. Seated in an unruly horseshoe, the crowd directed its rapt interest to an unprepossessing couple of senior citizens. The first was a small woman in a pale blue beret, fully 90 years of age; the second, seated beside her, was a dignified, but retiring man, younger by only a decade.
These were Lily Turner and Salem Ludwig, and you wouldn't know it by their names--which are not famous or notorious--but any student of the American theatre could learn volumes from them. Ludwig's 60-year career in the theatre weathered the Blacklist and is still thriving. And Turner has probably helped found more standing theatres in New York City than any showbiz professional yet living.
Ludwig and Turner were the latest subjects of the New York-based, OBIE-winning Foundry Theatre's Legacy Series, a program of informal talks based on the unoriginal but often forgotten premise that much may be learned from our elders.
Foundry Artistic Director Melanie Joseph, who moderated the panel, said she came up with the idea for the Legacy Series two years ago when trying to cast a role in a Foundry production for a woman in her 70s. The process was difficult, but along the way she met a vast array of unsung actresses with fascinating pasts. This untapped resource, she decided, could provide an edifying window into 20th-century theatre for the stage's younger generations. With a grant from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the theatre began the series late last year with the actors Gertrude Jeanette and Robert Earl Jones.
"I hope that young artists will be able to see themselves in a historical continuum," said Joseph, "and they will be able to understand that what they are doing is making history as these people have done."
Runaway Thespians
Neither Ludwig nor Turner set out to make careers in the arts. Nevertheless, both fled college to become a part of a life they found irresistibly attractive. Ludwig abandoned Brooklyn College to answer a New York Times ad for the Sara Mildred Straus Dancers ("no experience necessary")--eventually revealing his defection to his parents by taking them to a movie in which he appeared.
Bronx native Turner studied literature at Washington Square College, renting a room on Macdougal Street across from the Provincetown Playhouse for $5 a
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week. When her husband, sculptor Raymond Turner, won a Guggenheim grant in 1927, though, she abandoned her books and followed him to Paris. There, her editing of the literary magazine This Quarter included the rejection of a manuscript by Ernest Hemingway.
Turner didn't begin her theatrical career until World War II, when she became a literary agent, arranging productions for Russian playwrights.
Though a life in the theatre has always posed a challenge, both agreed that opportunities were more plentiful in the past, and easier to come by.
"In the '20s," said Ludwig, "you'd be walking down the street and a window would open and someone would yell, 'Hey, Salem, are you busy?' 'No.' 'Come on up, we've got a part for you.' "
Nor, claimed Turner, was there today's emphasis on training and method. Actors merely acted, while much class work dwelled on speech and diction. And the still irascible Turner seemed to view even those classes with some disdain.
"There'd be a teacher," she remembered, rolling her eyes. "Randolph something or other--a real ham. And he'd give us speeches we'd have to learn and we'd go up and 'elocute' them."
A One-Woman Off-Broadway
Turner's reputation is primarily as a producer and within the fabric of her career are sewn the histories of several yet-existing theatres.
Turner's postwar investment of $150 was one of 150 similar contributions by war veterans returning to the arts which helped found New Stages. The company transformed a 500-seat Italian movie house on Bleecker Street into a 299-seat theatre--a building still in operation as Circle In The Square Downtown.
At New Stages, Turner sewed costumes, painted sets, built props, and edited the company's first production from four-and-a-half hours down to two. The theatre's second production, a staging of Sartre's "The Respectful Prostitute," made the company's name, as well as theatre history, when it transferred from Downtown to Broadway in 1948.
Turner's next base was the Greenwich Mews Theatre, a multi-racial company which practiced color-blind casting in its productions of Shaw and O'Casey long before the term existed. The company later renovated an abandoned Ukrainian Church at Second Avenue and 10th Street, which would eventually become the first address of Theater for the New City.
After spending 40 years as artistic director of Greenwich Mews, Turner went on to become the founder and artistic director of Merry Enterprises Theatre. For a venue, she renovated an old Con Ed switching station on West 45th Street, a building Primary Stages now calls home.
Surviving the Blacklist
The trajectory of Salem Ludwig's long career is incontrovertibly defined by the McCarthy Era Blacklist, of which he was a victim; and the actor's story reveals how easily an artist could become ensnared in that period's anti-Communist mania.
"I attended an Equity meeting," recalled Ludwig. "A fellow named Scott McKay was running for an office, but the right wing of Equity had set up a slate of people they wanted elected. Then someone said, 'Don't vote for Scott because he believes the end justifies the means.' " By that expression, Ludwig explained, McKay's accuser meant to label the candidate as a Communist. Ludwig stood up and defended McKay against what he perceived as a reckless and unsubstantiated slander on his character. The simple act of support sealed Ludwig's fate.
The next Monday, while preparing to leave for a television acting job, Ludwig received a call from the show's producer. "He told me that [the show's sponsor], the American Tobacco Company, found me unacceptable. I knew what that meant."
Ludwig was barred from television and film after that, but managed to patch together a living in the theatre--the one performing art which did not wholly cooperate with the blacklist.
"The small capitalization of a play meant they were independent," explained Ludwig. "They weren't dependent on sponsors."
Ludwig never cooperated with the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. That, however, didn't mean that the Government was through with him.
Around the time of the Blacklisting, Ludwig's father took ill and the actor was responsible for liquidating the elder man's considerable business holdings. Ludwig soon discovered that his dad hadn't paid taxes in some years and arranged a monthly payment schedule with the IRS which, he was warned, had to be strictly heeded, lest his parent be arrested.
One day Ludwig's lawyer called him, saying federal agents had put a warrant out for the performer's arrest. Ludwig couldn't understand it, as he was certain he had sent in that month's tax payment; nevertheless, he journeyed to his performance that night with care.
Sure enough, men flashing badges awaited him at the stage door. Nervous with fright, Ludwig ignored their questions and fled inside the theatre. In the safety of his dressing room, however, he recalled their questions and realized they were agents of the FBI, not the IRS.
The bureau, he discovered, wanted his cooperation in fingering fellow artists and were holding up his IRS payment and threatening his father's freedom to gain his participation.
Ludwig never acquiesced and his lawyer later informed him that the tax payment finally reached the IRS. Though his lawyer never explicitly said so, Ludwig understood from his legal bill that a bribe of $300 had been paid to settle the matter.
Yiddish and Mercury on Deck
The next edition in the Legacy Series is scheduled for January and will feature the great theatre composer and arranger Luther Henderson. Joseph hopes to locate representatives of the Yiddish, Group, and Mercury theatres for upcoming Legacy seminars, and is searching for other worthy, under-celebrated artists. Candidates need only have led full, rich careers in the performing arts. To offer suggestions or for information about the Legacy Series, or information about the Foundry Theatre's upcoming production of "Hot Mouth," call Melanie Joseph at (212