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When the boys come home—15-year-old Christopher from Fordham Prep, the middle three from St. Augustine's parochial school—they go to their mother and spill out the news of the day; but they respect their father's privacy, since his threads break on interruption, while hers do not. All the Kerrs usually have dinner together, even if there is an opening. Walter and Jean are lucky if they can get a bite in edgewise, which may go some distance toward explaining why Walter Kerr's reviews—as the New Yorker has pointed out—are stuffed with wistful, gastronomic images. He's famished.
Jean always carves, but if she does little things like that beyond the customary wifely duties, he, as a husband, is St. Walter of Larchmont. Several afternoons a month, he gets behind a shopping cart in a Post Road supermarket. Moreover, he knows all about diaper pins, he doles out the petty cash ("We never hit Mom for money," say the boys), and, above all, he types her manuscripts, which, as any writer will understand, makes him a sort of household Nathan Hale. He also criticizes her work as it progresses, sending her back to the typewriter to fill in missing gaps, propelled by such comments as "This woman hasn't spoken in eleven pages; has she died of a wasting disease?"
Natural-Born Slob. Says Jean .Kerr: "I seem to need less consolation than a lot of my friends," and one reason may be her solid religious convictions. "The most important thing about me," she says, "is that I am a Catholic. It's a superstructure within which you can work, like the sonnet. I need that. A good director tells the actors where to move exact ly; then they're free to act. I'm grateful for that discipline, and I've never had a crisis of conscience." In a recurrent dream, she dies, now in a road accident, now of disease. "I keep thinking as I'm dying, I wanted to be better, more virtuous. I think to be good it's not sufficient just not to commit adultery. I cried when Tom Dooley died because I'll never do anything good and hard like that." But. in the words of one of her brothers. Jean Kerr is no "beads-in-the-pocket type of Catholic." When Jean heard that the Vatican was going to blacklist Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, legend has it that she rushed out and bought a copy to read it before the ban became official.
She confesses that her "besetting sin is sloth. I'm a natural-born slob. I once mislaid a copy of the Reader's Digest in my purse." ("I," pronounces Walter Kerr with critical accuracy, "am a hell of a lot neater than she is.") She buys enough cosmetics to underwrite a television program, spends hours and fortunes at the hairdresser, but cares little for clothes, buying cut-rate bargains. She has been wearing the same grey-fur-collared cloth coat to Broadway openings for years, frequently with a button missing.