Kerr, Jean (1923—)

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Kerr, Jean (1923—)

American playwright and author of the bestselling Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Born Jean Collins on July 10, 1923, in Scranton, Pennsylvania; eldest of two daughters of Thomas J. Collins (a construction engineer) and Kitty (O'Neill) Collins; attended Marywood Seminary, Scranton, Pennsylvania; Marywood College, Scranton, Pennsylvania, B.A., 1943; Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., M.F.A., 1945; married Walter Kerr (a drama professor and later drama critic of the New York Herald Tribune), on August 9, 1943; children: Christopher Kerr; (twins) Colin Kerr and John Kerr; Gilbert Kerr; Gregory Kerr;Katharine Kerr .

Selected works:

(dramatized by Kerr) The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel (1944); (dramatized by Kerr) Our Hearts Were Young and Gay byCornelia Otis Skinner andEmily Kimbrough (1946); (play) Jenny Kissed Me (1948); (revue with Walter Kerr and J. Gorney) Touch and Go (1949); (play with E. Brooke) King of Hearts (1954, film version, That Certain Feeling, 1956); (essays) Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957, film version, 1960, television series, 1965–67); (musical comedy with W. Kerr and L. Anderson) Goldilocks (1958); (essays) The Snake Has All the Lines (1960); (play) Mary, Mary (1961, film version, 1963); (play) Poor Richard (1964); (essays) Penny Candy (1970); (play) Finishing Touches (1973); (essays) How I Got to Be Perfect (1978); (play) Lunch Hour (1980).

Once described by Whitney Bolton as "a Lazzeroo beauty with a brain of surgical precision and a gleaming sense of humor," playwright and author Jean Kerr was born in 1923 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and attended Marywood Seminary and Marywood College in her hometown. While working as the stage manager for a college production of Romeo and Juliet, she met Walter Kerr, who at the time was a drama professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (He later became the drama critic of the New York Herald Tribune.) The two married in 1943, shortly after Kerr graduated from college. She received her M.F.A. from Catholic University in 1945, the same year that the first of the six Kerr children arrived. Jean said she started to write because it would enable her to pay for someone to help with the children, and was also something she could do at home "among the cans of Dextri-Maltose." It was a chance compliment from her father years earlier, wrote Kerr, that centered her interest on playwriting. "'Look,' he exploded one evening over the dinner table, 'the only damn thing in this world you're good for is talk.' By talk I assumed he meant dialogue—and I was off."

Her career had a bumpy start, however. Her first play, an adaptation of Franz Werfel's novel about Bernadette of Lourdes , The Song of Bernadette (1946), written in collaboration with her husband, ran for a mere three performances, while her first solo comedy, Jenny Kissed Me (1948), fared only slightly better with 20 performances. A collaboration with Walter, the revue Touch and Go (1949), was more favorably received, as was King of Hearts (1954), a collaboration with Eleanor Brooke that Walter directed. Though most critics felt that the play was weak, Brooks Atkinson credited the collaborators with having "a sense of humor and a gift of gab," and William Hawkins noted their "breezy disdain for pomposity."

Although Kerr considered her essays a mere diversion from her true calling as a playwright, her book Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957), an autobiographical collection of comic sketches on domestic life (some of which had appeared in various magazines), was highly regarded by the critics and topped the nonfiction bestseller list for 20 weeks. "Whatever Mrs. Kerr is up to," wrote Dan Wickenden in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, "she keeps startling laughter out of us, making the minor vicissitudes of life more bearable in the process." Whitney Bolton of the New York Morning Telegraph concurred, noting that "Mrs. Kerr is the kind of woman whose writing is diverting even when turned to so prosaic a chore as a memo to the grocer." The book spawned a movie in 1960, with Doris Day , and a television series which ran for two seasons.

Of all Kerr's plays, Mary, Mary (1961) was her biggest hit and one of Broadway's longest running productions (1,572 performances). Starring Barbara Bel Geddes , for whom Kerr wrote the part, and Barry Nelson, the play examines the highs and lows of marriage, divorce, and reconciliation. (A film version was made with Debbie Reynolds in 1963.) Like all of her plays, it is a "realistic comedy," focusing on educated, affluent professionals coping with the trials of everyday life. Kerr's characters are brought to life with witty dialogue that Harold Clurman called "agile, shrewd, light and literate." Although popular with audiences, Kerr's later plays were often viewed as old-fashioned and predictable. Critics urged her to leave the 1950s and 1960s behind and tackle more substantial themes. In a Newsweek article on Finishing Touches (1973), Jack Kroll wondered if Kerr was "fighting her own intelligence." "What we see in [this] well-produced play is in fact a Lost Paradise," he wrote, "and it's the loss rather than the Paradise that would make a good theme for this writer who really knows the terrain." There were those, however, that delighted in Kerr's consistency. In reviewing her last play, Lunch Hour (1980), Frank Rich of The New York Times called it the kind of old-fashioned comedy one would expect from Kerr. "And why not?," he queried. "There's nothing wrong with the old forms when they're in loving hands. "

Subsequent collections of Kerr's essays included The Snake Has All the Lines (1960), Penny Candy (1970), and How I Got to Be Perfect (1978), a collection of some of the author's old work, as well a six new pieces. In her later essays—like her plays—Kerr harkened back to simpler times, ignoring more contemporary issues like Watergate, the women's movement, and the war in Vietnam. Phyllis Theroux , who reviewed How I Got to Be Perfect for The New York Times Book Review, wished for less nostalgia and more bite. "It is somewhat mystifying to me," she wrote, "that Mrs. Kerr is still making daisy chains when it's quite evident, from the random, dart-to-the-other-side-of-the-room allusions she allows herself now and then, that she really could play a different song if she wanted to…. Beneath her cleverness lies a sizable literary talent, equal to the heart of the writer and the matter that she never quite squares up to." On the other hand, the Washington Post's Katherine Evans referred to Kerr as an endangered species that should be protected. "It may be unreal," she wrote, "but it certainly is soothing to make your way through a contemporary book about kids and parents without reading one word about grass, speed, coke, the counter culture, abortion, live-in girlfriends or the sexual revolution."

The Kerrs raised their large family in the converted stables and coach house of a large estate in Larchmont, New York. Dubbed "the Kerr-Hilton," the property boasted a medieval courtyard and a 32-bell carillon that played the duet from Carmen every day at noon. Kerr claimed she did her writing in the family car, parked some distance from the hubbub of family activities. She was the recipient of numerous awards during her career, including honorary degrees from Northwestern and Fordham universities, the Campion Award (1971), and, with her husband, the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame (1971).