(5 of 11)
Even as a youngster, Jean was so articulate that her father once burst out at her: "The only damn thing in this world you're good for is talking," and to that moment of encouragement she Pollyan-nishly traces her bent for writing dialogue. If she had a problem, it was her height—5 ft. ii in. To her brothers Hugh and Frank (now a Connecticut bank manager and a Philadelphia lawyer) and her sister
Eileen (who died a year and a half ago), she was literally a big sister who could beat up any bully in town, and the celebrated story is true that she was picked to be Marywood's Queen of the May because she was the only girl tall enough to crown an enormous statue of the Virgin.
Self-consciously, she developed a defensive talent for the quick rejoinder. A Marywood priest once tried to sell her a copy of the Sacred Heart Messenger. "What would you rather read?" he argued. "The Sears, Roebuck catalogue," said Jean. One teacher flunked her when, during a ponderous lecture on doctrine, she broke in to inform the class that "a man's best friend is his dogma."
Enter Wally. She was a pretty girl with' long 1941 hair and memorable blue eyes, but she seldom went out, and had an aversion to all but the tallest boys. "They had to be ready for Ringling's," she recalls. At Marywood, she dabbled in dramatics, played the mother superior in The Kingdom of God. During her sophomore year, Walter Francis Kerr came to Scranton to see a student performance of Romeo and Juliet. Jean was the stage manager. He was 5 ft. 8 in. and pushing 30, but soon she was telling her mother, with a gesture toward her eyes: "The only height that matters is from here up."
By then a drama instructor at Washington's Catholic University, Walter Kerr had come from Evanston, 111., where at 13 he was a professional movie critic. Odd as it seems, the Attila of West 44th Street was known in those days as Wally. A carpenter's son, he began college at De Paul, had to withdraw during the Depression (he finished later at Northwestern). Kerr supported himself for two years by staging, directing and writing shows "for anyone who'd give me $25—the Y.M.C.A., the American Legion, church groups, anyone." When Jean came for a Christmas visit a few years later, it was the first time he'd ever brought a girl home, and Jean, his sister remembers, "was the first person I ever saw make Walter laugh out loud."
Following Walter's suggestion, Jean meanwhile had been taking summer courses at Catholic University. Grades were merely "passes" and "high passes." and she drew them from him, at least in the classroom, but he carefully chose the word "God-awful'' to describe her first play. He liked some of her sketches better, particularly Going Whose Way?, a take-off on The Bells of St. Mary's. "My favorite lin^," she remembers, "is when this nun was in the iron lung and the priest asks her, 'Isn't this an iron lung?' and she says, 'I'd hoped you wouldn't notice.'"