Word: herrmanns
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This was about as much personal information as Humorist Sidney Joseph Perelman ever intended to disclose. But his natural reticence went with him when he died at the age of 75 in 1979. Dorothy Herrmann, author of a previous book about American wits, With Malice Toward All, begins by calling her subject "brilliant" and ends by labeling his work "sublime." Between these terminals she presents a clothbound gossip column featuring a morose and promiscuous figure who never came to terms with his beginnings...
...newspaper reporter. She is occasionally scared by her own boldness, always quick-witted in stating her emotional needs and her findings as a self- appointed crimebuster. Indeed, it is a measure of Compromising Positions' intelligence that the big speech on malefemale relations falls to Edward Herrmann, playing her husband. Angrily but without self-pity, he makes the case of the drudge-aholic whose toil supports his spouse's self-realization but whose reward is often a diagnosis that he has an intimacy problem. Like such other New York stage stalwarts as Mary Beth Hurt and Judith Ivey, he is well...
...their work; others live in it. On the evidence of Michael Hastings' austere docudrama, Thomas Stearns Eliot--banker, publishing executive, playwright, premier poet of this century--passed his domestic life on automatic pilot, while his mind found refuge and flourished in the Waste Land. The play's Tom (Edward Herrmann) finds it "an enormous effort to be trivial" with people. He husbands his passion for the empty page. He is the hollow man, a prune and a prude with the secret sin of genius, which must not be dissipated in ordinary intercourse. This Olympian diffidence, Hastings suggests, was sufficient...
Forbidden access to Eliot's papers, and permission to quote extensively from his work, Hastings is like a surgeon forced to operate in a straitjacket. So drudgy Tom sets the play's pace and defeats the efforts of Herrmann to animate this stick--a challenge not usually above him, as he demonstrated two years ago in Plenty, playing another man of propriety married to a disturbed idealist. Covington, Tyzack and Haig (imported from the Royal Court Theater in London, where Tom and Viv was first produced last year) perform admirably in better roles, ones with a little shading, irony...
...Apparently, not well enough. The misunderstanding is rooted in Herbst's involvement in the Communist Party after 1930. As Langer regretfully relates, when party interests were at stake Herbst was an accomplished liar. On occasion she could deceive herself. In 1930 the writer and her husband John Herrmann journeyed to the U.S.S.R. at the invitation of a party official. When they came home, Herbst plunged into party activities, just short of membership. Herrmann joined up and became a courier of stolen federal documents...