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¶| Work—"I believe about work as I believe about drink: it should be used in moderation." ¶ Most modern playwrights—"[They] read and act like pulp writers crossed with
telegraph key-men."
¶ Noel Coward—"[He] has nothing to
sell but his own vast personal boredom."
CJ Clifford Odets—"He uses his characters
as cuspidors at which they in turn spit
out their lines."
¶T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party—"Bosh sprinkled with mystic cologne."
To Nathan, dedicated bachelor, man & woman do not add up to two sexes but only about one and a half. "The best woman is the inferior of the second-best man." "To enjoy women at all one must manufacture an illusion and envelop them with it; otherwise they would not be endurable." As for marriage: "[It] is based on the theory that when a man discovers a particular brand of beer exactly to his taste he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery." Nonetheless Nathan remains an incurable romantic who has sought in women what he sees in art, "a reaching out into the ugliness of the world for vagrant beauty and the imprisoning of it in a tangible dream." Dreamiest of his many dream girls: Actresses Lillian Gish and Julie Haydon.
Tea at "21." All the world's a revolving stage for Nathan, except for Manhattan's Royalton Hotel, where-he has spent 46 years, 28 of them in the same apartment. Dimly lit as if for some perpetual cocktail hour, cascading with books which spill along the floor, Nathan's quarters look like the perfect setting for an aging matinee idol. But Nathan does not really need soft lighting. Still debonair at 70, he has only a flirting acquaintance with age.
On a typical day he is up at 8. He riffles through the morning papers but skips the political news ("terrible waste of time"), opens and answers mail, takes a walk if the weather is nice. The afternoon up to 4:30 is devoted to writing (in pencil). But, Nathan insists, "I'm not one of these frantic authors who feels a day is lost if he doesn't write his 3,000 words. It's like saying you have to run three miles a day—maybe some days you have a pain in your leg." Nathan moves on for a cup of tea or a highball at "21," then to dinner and his seat on the aisle as drama watchdog for Theatre Arts and Hearst's King Features Syndicate.
10,000 First Nights. Punctual himself, he has been known to trip late first-nighters. After some 10,000 first nights, he feels he can spot a turkey in ten minutes, rarely stays to double-check ("I couldn't punish myself that way"). With the "worst season since 1932" barely behind him, Nathan has his doubts about continuing the annual theater book roundup he began in 1943, may do a general book on the theater instead.
Biggest and slowest project he has taken on is his autobiography. "It's very hard to know what will offend people. Then there are the letters, hundreds of them, from Shaw, H. G. Wells, Galsworthy, Huneker, Dreiser, Yeats, Cabell, O'Neill. Trouble is, if a man is dead, you have to struggle with the estate. Those widows—they think every letter a man ever wrote is worth $8,000,000."