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Circle in the Square. Writing and talking, sitting or standing, Jean Kerr has gotten more material out of her family than anyone since Clarence Day. Her most recent collection of casual pieces, The Snake Has All the Lines, has been on every bestseller list and in nearly every hospital room in the country. Its phenomenally successful predecessor, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, has sold nearly 275,000 hard-cover copies. All of which has made Jean Kerr even more famous than her children, the five sons who apparently play she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not with their teeth. She has achieved the life a great many women dream about: successful writer, distracted mother, in charge of an organized but unstuffy suburban household, married to an intelligent and devoted husband, with time for travel and parties—in short, the best of two worlds, which for her are centered in Larchmont, N.Y., and Broadway.
If she is troubled by a problem, it may be that she is somewhat overweight (size 18). "I feel about diets the way I feel about airplanes," she says. "They are wonderful things for other people to go on." She has a life membership at Vic Tanny's, but has used it only three times, and is thinking of giving it to a deserving friend. Still, if she is ever dissatisfied with her own image, she can look at the Broadway play, Critic's Choice, which is frankly, if superficially, based on Mr. and Mrs. Kerr; there she is portrayed by Georgann Johnson, who is much slimmer than she (though Jean is easily the better actress). and her husband is impersonated by Henry Fonda, who is slightly more handsome than Walter Kerr (though Walter is easily the better critic). In the movie version of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, of course, the Kerrs were played by Doris Day and David Niven, a fate that has befallen nobody else in Larchmont.
Through all this she remains a bit of a square and a bit naive; according to her friend and neighbor, Walter Slezak. "A certain line of smut goes past her." She is still awed by some occasions. Before a television appearance,, she had the shakes so badly that Jack Paar had to wrap her in his bathrobe, like a Channel swimmer. But most of the time, she is unshakable and very much in charge of things. "If I were having a frontal lobotomy," she says, "I'd tell them how to do it, like 'try going in through the ear.' '' Possibly if Bernard Shaw had known American women better, he might have invented Jean Kerr. Like almost all Shavian heroines, she is articulate, cheerful, casually domineering, competent, simple —a bit of the Earth Mother whom Shaw was forever recreating.