Word: jeane
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Self-consciously, she developed a defensive talent for the quick rejoinder. A Marywood priest once tried to sell her a copy of the Sacred Heart Messenger. "What would you rather read?" he argued. "The Sears, Roebuck catalogue," said Jean. One teacher flunked her when, during a ponderous lecture on doctrine, she broke in to inform the class that "a man's best friend is his dogma...
...tallest boys. "They had to be ready for Ringling's," she recalls. At Marywood, she dabbled in dramatics, played the mother superior in The Kingdom of God. During her sophomore year, Walter Francis Kerr came to Scranton to see a student performance of Romeo and Juliet. Jean was the stage manager. He was 5 ft. 8 in. and pushing 30, but soon she was telling her mother, with a gesture toward her eyes: "The only height that matters is from here...
...carpenter's son, he began college at De Paul, had to withdraw during the Depression (he finished later at Northwestern). Kerr supported himself for two years by staging, directing and writing shows "for anyone who'd give me $25?the Y.M.C.A., the American Legion, church groups, anyone." When Jean came for a Christmas visit a few years later, it was the first time he'd ever brought a girl home, and Jean, his sister remembers, "was the first person I ever saw make Walter laugh out loud...
Following Walter's suggestion, Jean meanwhile had been taking summer courses at Catholic University. Grades were merely "passes" and "high passes." and she drew them from him, at least in the classroom, but he carefully chose the word "God-awful'' to describe her first play. He liked some of her sketches better, particularly Going Whose Way?, a take-off on The Bells of St. Mary's. "My favorite lin^," she remembers, "is when this nun was in the iron lung and the priest asks her, 'Isn't this an iron lung?' and she says, 'I'd hoped you wouldn...
What, No Nudges? Over the years be fore Brooks Atkinson's retirement as thi Times's critic last spring, the Kerrs an< Atkinsons became particular friends "What Jean and Oriana thought abou the theater was often more interestm; than what we thought," said Atkinsoi last week. "They were less inhibited. The) were more slashing than we could be." Producer David Merrick, the Shubert Al ley Catiline, came to that conclusion some time ago, claiming that Jean Kerr influenced her husband during performances by a series of codelike nudges. Kerr responded in print with a riposte that made Merrick look like...