The Theatre: Great Katharine

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There are those who would as soon miss their own weddings as a Katharine Cornell play. Her yearning, mobile face is the contemporary theatre's testament of beauty, and only Helen Hayes can challenge her as Broadway's First Lady. Having achieved her own producing company, having played Juliet—ultimate role of all English-speaking actresses—Actress Cornell offers this week, at 41, what is usually the swan song of distinguished old age: an autobiography.*

The story is in the title. Katharine acted as a child, as a schoolgirl, in art theatre groups, in stock; at length—and ever more triumphantly—on Broadway. As a neatly blown-up scrapbook of her career, I Wanted to Be an Actress is acceptable enough. But beyond that, the reader draws a blank. Either Katharine Cornell, in her devotion to her profession, has lacked time to study things and people or, having done so, she is resolved to keep mum. Dozens of names, from Greta Garbo's to Alexander Woollcott's, from David Belasco's to Orson Welles's stud the pages of her book, but none of them—not even her husband's, Director Guthrie McClintic —ever becomes a face. Toward other actors she is virtually all smiles. About nothing, about no one, is she pert, mettlesome, unexpected. Compared to the First Lady of Broadway, the First Lady of the Land is, six days a week, a purveyor of shuddersome scandals.

One of the few dislikes to which Actress Cornell owns up is a dislike for the star system. It delighted her to exchange "Katharine Cornell in—" for "Katharine Cornell Presents." All the same, after Katharine Cornell came brilliantly of age, at the end of 1924, with Candida, she reveled in mediocre plays (The Green Hat, The Age of Innocence, Dishonored Lady) with fat, showy star parts. She complains that as the heroine of the vastly overrated The Barretts of Wimpole Street she did nothing but "feed" the rest of the cast—but as Elizabeth Barrett, in one of the longest parts ever written for the stage, she reclined on the most spotlighted sofa in theatrical history.

Willy-nilly, Katharine Cornell remains the star type. She is not unversatile, and she is richly gifted: her plastic face, moving voice, vivid gestures, her taste for grandiose and romantic roles, proclaim the "star" personality. When that personality cannot be directly, physically, communicated, as in her life story, it dries up like ink on a blotter.

* I WANTED TO BE AN ACTRESS—the Autobiography of Katharine Cornell as told to Ruth Woodbury Sedgwick—Random House ($3).