KERR, Jean (Collins)

Born 10 July 1923, Scranton, Pennsylvania

Daughter of Thomas J. and Kitty O'Neill Collins; married Walter Kerr, 1943

Jean Kerr earned an M.A. in theater from the Catholic University, where she met her husband, a dramatics professor who later became the New York Times theater critic. Kerr regards herself principally as a playwright and her essays as a diversion, but it is the latter that have gained vast popularity. The typical style of her plays and essays is the carefully polished imitation of easy conversation.

Kerr wrote three plays for her husband's direction at the Catholic University. The third, Jenny Kissed Me (1948), opened on Broadway, starring the famous comic actor Leo G. Carroll. Collaborating with her husband and the musician Jay Gorney, Kerr won praise for energy and intelligence in the revue, Touch and Go (1949). In the successful Broadway production John Murray Anderson's Almanac (1953), Kerr's sketch "Don Brown's Body" uses the violent, sexually suggestive style of Mickey Spillane's detective stories to lampoon orchestrated readings of Stephen Vincent Benet's Civil War poem.

In her most successful play, Mary, Mary (1961), the title character discovers her true, timid nature through a new admirer's eyes but returns to her first love just before he can divorce her for a less disarming wife. Kerr's urbane wit is not only richly decorative but integral to character: Mary antagonizes her husband not with her superior insight into his publishing business but with the hilarious sarcasm that masks her personal insecurity. Mary draws audience sympathy for her clever vulnerability, but she wins her man because she learns to demonstrate sophistication.

Kerr again reveals troubled characters through witty repartee in Poor Richard (1964), an intense romantic comedy featuring a self-doubting, wisecracking widowed poet, whose internal conflict with grief overwhelms the ubiquitous love-triangle plot. As a thin disguise for the sensitive poet's anguish, Kerr's bright clowning is less satisfying than the feeling poetry evident in Richard's best monologues.

A self-denigrating woman is the protagonist in Finishing Touches (1973), a predictable drawing-room comedy that briefly challenges middle-aged self-righteousness with modern sexual freedom. Central characters face their own smugness but end up celebrating it. Kerr's humorous, perfectly paced, comic dialogue suggests an unspoken and unresolved uneasiness over contemporary social change.

Her most successful book, Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957), collects 15 humorous sketches written for popular magazines. Intelligent literary allusion and stylish satire enliven the familiar essay form, making spirited fun of an alert woman's irritations with rambunctious sons, slick-magazine advice, and a celebrated husband. Phrasing motherly boasting as complaints, Kerr idealizes family affections. She burlesques the distressingly clichéd 1950s prescriptions for glamorous or maternal feminine behavior by opposing them with precise details. In 1965 Kerr adapted her sketches for a two-season NBC situation comedy about a suburban freelance writer, a college dramatics professor, and their four sons.

The best pieces in The Snake Has All the Lines (1960) portray Kerr less as a homemaker than as an author revising a play in a rehearsal or growing cynical over mixed critical reviews. Tributes to her determined Irish mother and her awkward Catholic school days show Kerr learning the value of her generous verbal wit.

In the best essay of her collection Penny Candy (1970), Kerr combines her two personae of a mother and a student of literature to recall her success in bringing her sons to share her love of poetry. Unfortunately, the made-to-order sketches for Family Circle and the Ladies' Home Journal, which outnumber the more original work, force Kerr to act the housewife flustered by babytalk, wilting houseplants, cocktail parties, and her weight.

In her introduction to How I Got to Be Perfect (1978), a new edition of her essays published over 20 years, Kerr confides a humorous disorientation with her problems of lengthened memories, self-acceptance, and occasional isolation of middle age. Alert to nuances in popular taste, she deftly updates her punch lines and topical references, but contemporary reviews praised the collection less for its craft in portraying common absurdities than for its momentary glimpses of poetic perceptiveness.

Humorously alert to absurd trivialities, the strong female character who dominates Kerr's essays and plays saves herself from selfish insignificance by her own generous instinct. During the 30 years of her writing career, Kerr's essays have grown loose and self-revealing while her stage comedies have faced increasingly difficult social issues within constricting dramatic unities. Wary of intimidating her readers, Kerr rarely mentions the strains her writing and successful marriage place on each other. With merry charm, in the early 1960s, she seemed to synthesize the careers of Larchmont homemaker and Broadway playwright and thus unexpectedly became an American ideal, without being forced to scrutinize the difference between the values she held and those she represented.

Other Works:

The Big Help (1947). King of Hearts (with E. Brooke, 1954; film version, That Certain Feeling, 1956). Goldilocks (with W. Kerr and L. Anderson, 1958). Lunch Hour (1982).

Bibliography:

Kearns, C., Motherland: Writings by Irish American Women About Mothers and Daughters (1999). Owens, E. S. B., "The Changing Image of Women as Seen in Plays of Jean Kerr" (thesis, 1983).

Reference works:

Best Plays of 1980-1981: The Burns Mantle Yearbook (1981). CA (1969). CB (July 1958). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995). WA.

Other references:

New York Theatre Critics Reviews (1946-73). NYT (18 Feb. 1973). Saturday Review (30 Nov. 1957). Theatre Arts (Mar. 1961). Time (14 Apr. 1961).

—GAYLE GASKILL