"Some idea of the atmosphere of cultivated calm and literary tranquility characteristic of the 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,” Lucius Beebe wrote in his interview with the play-writing couple on the first page of the section.
Beebe, who had until recently chronicled the lives of the city's Cafe Society in his syndicated column "This Is New York," was one of the most entertaining of the witty writers employed by the paper at this time. “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 caught up with the notoriously bickering Spewacks at the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia. Their new play was set to arrive on Broadway that Thursday. 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.”
Beebe noted that Sam Spewack had newspaper experience to draw upon. He had been a reporter and later foreign correspondent for The New York World of “fragrant memory.” His experiences in Russia had led to his writing Clear All the Wires, which became the book for the musical “Leave It to Me.” More recently he served as press attache to Averill Harriman when Harriman was serving as Ambassador to Russia. The couple made their name with the hit Broadway comedy “Boy Meets Girl,” about Hollywood, and “Spring Song” was “one of their more serious moments with the stage.” Lately they had written a screenplay “Weekend at the Waldorf,” which, Beebe wrote, they “incline to take a very dim view of indeed.” Spewack said of Hollywood “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 rewrites if the film does 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. The critics panned “Woman Bites Dog” almost to a man and the play closed after five performances despite a cast that included a number of actors who would become well-known later including Kirk Douglas, Mercedes McCambridge (replacing Elaine Stritch), Frank Lovejoy and E.G. Marshall, as well as several stage veterans.
Beebe was the epitome of the sort of gay man who dared to make himself visible in those days, the dandified bon vivant with an enviable wardrobe of bespoke suits and handmade shoes, an encyclopedic knowledge of food and wine, a talent for witty gossip, impeccable social credentials and the habit of fawning over the oft neglected wives of very rich and important men. It was not that men like Beebe were any more broadly representative of gays then than they are now but rather that few other gays dared risk such public visibility. Beebe was a notorious snob and fairly open about his relationships. He had been born to a well-connected family and boasted that he had been kicked out of both Yale and Harvard for his boisterous antics. Winchell called him “luscious Lucius” and ridiculed his frequent mention of his partner in “This New York.” He was the target of barbs from other columnists and reporters as well but was enough of a celebrity to land a Life magazine cover in 1939. Time called him “the No. 1 mauve elegant” in its appreciative review of his 1943 book Snoot If You Must (Check out the article for more of Beebe's pranks, wit and observations). In 1946 Beebe also wrote a monthly column on New York restaurants and night spots for Gourmet magazine. He was a fanatical train buff as well and wrote several books on the subject. Some of his work is collected in The Lucius Beebe Reader.
The Spewacks had both immigrated with their families from Eastern Europe as children and been raised in New York City. They would achieve their greatest success in 1948 with the book for “Kiss Me Kate.” There is more on the Spewacks, “Woman Bites Dog” and the critical reaction to the play in the Broadway section of this website.