Lucius Beebe Interviews the Spewacks
"Some idea of the atmosphere of cultivated calm and literary tranquility characteristic of the life of those latter-day Brownings, Sam and Bella Spewack, may be gained from the circumstance that there exists in their incorporated partnership a ten-day mutual escape clause through the agency of which either may dissolve the partnership on the presentation of formal notice in advance,” the wickedly funny Lucius Beebe wrote in his interview with the play-writing couple that ran April 14 on the first page of the entertainment section of the Sunday Herald Tribune. “So far, during the evolution, writing and tryouts in Princeton, Baltimore and Philadelphia of 'Woman Bites Dog' one or the other of them has invoked this dissolution clause no fewer than fifteen times,” he continued. “That was only up until last Thursday.”
Beebe formerly wrote the Herald Tribune’s society and nightlife column, reviewed the elite restaurants and night spots for Gourmet and was an unapologetic social snob and dandy. If not exactly daringly open about his gayness, neither did he make any effort to hide it. He caught up with the notoriously bickering Spewacks at the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia during its out-of-town tryout. Sam Spewack said that every time they wrote a play together they swore never to do it again but it was “like cocaine. Playwriting is the opium of the laughing classes.” Beebe reported that neither Spewack had any visible bruises but both “kept within handy distance of heavy blunt objects...so the reporter retained his hat in hand and stood near the door.”
“It is a miserable chore and a dreadful way to work out our sins against God,” Bella Spewack said, adding that they had been poisoned so often by bad water on the road that they carried their own "Poland water" wherever they went.
The Spewacks denied that they had any specific newspaper clan in mind in their satire about a family of competitive, politically reactionary newspaper owners, although as Beebe pointed out, so far all the out-of-town reviewers saw the McCormack-Pattersons broadly caricatured on stage. "We aren't out to reform the world or sell any bill of goods,” Spewack insisted. Bella Spewack admitted to a twinge of remorse in making her targets Republicans, since in Philadelphia “our most appreciative audiences are all Main Line Republicans, folk who dress for dinner and have good manners. We don't get half as good reactions from democratic austerity in the galleries. It seems to be only the rich and dreadful reactionaries who either can or will laugh at themselves.”
Both of the Spewacks had newspaper experience to draw upon. Lately they had been in Hollywood which, Beebe wrote, they “incline to take a very dim view of indeed.” He quotes Sam Spewack as saying “The entire energy of that great interest is directed toward suppressing the exchange of ideas by the spoken word and the propagation of the broadest sort of lascivious and suggested ideas by the wriggling of portions of the human anatomy.” The one advantage of the movies for writers was the opportunity to do a rewrite if the film did not "captivate the fancy of the dog towns where the sneak previews are held.” With the theater, the “chips were down” once the reviews were out. “You sink or swim by them and it isn't in a hound dog's age that you can float a show that has had a universally bad reaction.”
Spewack's comments proved prescient. Several reviewers found some of the dialogue witty and some of the jokes funny, but it was an almost universal opinion that the play as a whole did not work. The members of the newspaper clan were too cartoonlike, the premise too unbelievable and the romantic subplot too hackneyed. The comic energy was not sufficient for the play to work as a knockabout farce in the manner of "You Can't Take It With You."