At 22, Marianne Roney discovered that she was not cut out to be an Organization Woman—at least not with Period Records, where she worked writing album notes. Unable to persuade her bosses to record some far-out releases, such as medieval music or modern U.S. poetry ("Let's do medieval American poetry," burbled one executive), Marianne quit and formed Caedmon* Records to produce talking records that would not talk down to their audience. Her partner: Barbara Cohen, a classmate at New York City's Hunter College. Last week, eight years and some 200 releases later, the latest Caedmon albums were on sale: three Shakespeare dramas, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, the opening installments of an impressive recording project. Within four years, the partners hope to produce 34 other plays, all with topnotch casts, adding up to the first complete professional Shakespeare on records.
Prospectus for Bankruptcy. Rushing forward in a field where Angel et al. were treading lightly (the survival rate of new record companies is less than 1%), Marianne and Barbara compiled a catalogue of releases that, to most merchandisers, read like a prospectus for bankruptcy—W. H. Auden declaiming Auden, Sir Ralph Richardson pacing gravely along Swann's Way, Faulkner grappling with his own syntax, an ailing Colette reading from her novels while the bed sheets rustled.
Between forays to a Washington psychiatric hospital to sign Ezra Pound (see BOOKS) or to London to snag T. S. Eliot, the partners did their own taping, cover designing, package wrapping and mailing. Most of the orders were for their initial recording, a reverberating reading by Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas, whom they approached by sending him a note after a poetry reading ("We just signed our initials," recalls Marianne, "so he wouldn't know we were unbusinesslike females"). After five days of hounding him, they finally got the poet's agreement, and the six records he turned out for Caedmon before his death have to date sold 400,000 LP copies in the U.S. and abroad.
Caedmon's original investment, a $1,500 bank loan, grew into a million-dollar annual business run by a fulltime staff of eight. The firm's first employee—a shipping clerk who has since become one of the nation's most literate comedians, Mike Nichols—was eventually succeeded by a team that includes one of the best recording engineers in the field: Peter Bartok, the composer's son. The company's dramatic director is Poet-Playwright Howard Sackler, who says of his bosses: "They let you do just about anything you set your heart on, even if it won't pay its way for years." One of the rare exceptions: Lolita, which Marianne vetoed.