Brock Pemberton was an American theatrical director-producer. He was the director and founder of the Tony Awards.
Background
Brock Pemberton was born on December 14, 1885 in Leavenworth, Leavenworth County, Kansas, United States. He was the son of Albert Pemberton and Ella (Murdock) Pemberton. His father, a shoemaker, was a native of Kentucky; his mother's family had migrated from Morgantown, West Virginia, to Kansas, where they pioneered in frontier journalism. He had a younger brother, Murdock, and an older sister, Ruth; the journalist Victor Murdock was his first cousin. Although reared in a strict Methodist household, Brock early developed a passion for the forbidden theater.
Education
After graduating from the Emporia, Kansas, Senior High School in 1902, Brock Pemberton entered the College of Emporia, but his prankish behavior forced his withdrawal in 1905. He had written for the Coffeyville (Kansas) Record and for William Allen White's Emporia Gazette during these college years. While attending the University of Pennsylvania, 1905 - 1906, he was also employed part-time on the Philadelphia Bulletin. White, who had once worked on a Murdock paper, gave him a job on the Gazette and financed his studies at the University of Kansas, where Pemberton received the B. A. degree in 1908.
Career
White employed Brock Pemberton as reporter and play reviewer on the Gazette. In 1910, again with White's encouragement, Pemberton went to New York City. He served as a drama critic on the Evening Mail, the World (assisting Louis V. DeFoe), and the Times (assisting Alexander Woollcott), before becoming press representative for directorproducer Arthur Hopkins in 1917. Three years later he abruptly left Hopkins' employ and made his advent as an independent producer with Enter Madame (1920), by Gilda Varesi and Dolly Byrne. He received financial backing, chiefly from his cousin, Marcellus Murdock; helped actress-playwright Varesi revise her script; directed it, with her in the title role; and personally provided its stage furnishings "everything in the Pemberton apartment except Mamie, the maid, " according to Woollcott. Enter Madame ran 350 performances in New York, was produced in London, perpetuated by stock and touring companies, and reportedly netted Pemberton over $150, 000. His second production, Zona Gale's Miss Lulu Bett (1920), divided the New York critics but won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Then followed a series of flops that included Sidney Howard's poetic drama Swords (1921, thirty-six performances); Maxwell Anderson's ambitious White Desert (1923, twelve performances); Zona Gale's Mr. Pitt (1924, eighty-seven performances); and Paul Osborn's Hotbed (1928, nineteen performances).
Also financial failures, although artistic successes, were the plays of Luigi Pirandello, whom Pemberton introduced to the American stage: Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922), a "fantastic comedy"; The Living Mask (Enrico IV, 1924); and Say It With Flowers (L'Uomo, la bestia e la virtu, 1926). Luigi Chiarelli's The Mask and the Face (1924) also failed. J. Frank Davis' strange reincarnation play The Ladder (1926) logged 264 performances to "papered" houses and empty seats. Ransom Rideout's controversial miscegenation drama Goin' Home (1928) marked the beginning of Pemberton's association with director Antoinette Perry, who thereafter regularly staged his productions until her death in 1948.
Although the play won the Longmans, Green Prize and was cordially received by the critics, the public avoided it. Its failure proved a turning point in Pemberton's outlook: "My policy had been to do a play if I liked it, now I wouldn't do a play unless I was convinced that it would sell to an audience. " The practical wisdom of this philosophy was soon made evident. His next production, Preston Sturges' comedy of love and adventure, Strictly Dishonorable (1929), ran for 557 performances.
Other long-run comedy successes included Lawrence Riley's Personal Appearance (1934), Clare Boothe Luce's Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938), Josephine Bentham and Herschel Williams' Janie (1942), and Mary Coyle Chase's Harvey (1944), the whimsical story of an amiable alcoholic and his friend, a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit, which ran for 1, 775 performances and won a Pulitzer Prize. (Pemberton himself briefly played Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey, notably at Phoenix, Arizona, shortly before his death. ) "Around Broadway they never give you credit for wanting to do something fine, " Pemberton complained in mid-career. "They judge you only by success. If you don't succeed you're a sap". Twenty years later, he concluded: "Critics now seem to favor a play with a message, while the trend with the public is toward the escapist type of play that makes them laugh and forget their troubles. It's hard to please both".
Brock Pemberton advanced the careers of many actors, including George Brent, Joe E. Brown, Claudette Colbert, Florence Eldridge, Frank Fay, Gladys George, Miriam Hopkins, Walter Huston, Fredric March, Robert Montgomery, Osgood Perkins, and Margaret Sullavan. uring the 1930's he opposed the 10 percent "nuisance tax" on theater tickets, successfully lobbied for NRA control of ticket speculation, demurred at the Federal Theatre's leftist aesthetic, and inveighed against the Hollywood film industry as "the arch-consumer and destroyer of talent. " He produced USO shows and managed "stagedoor canteens" during World War II: wrote periodic Broadway theater summaries for the New York Times and journals; and was a lecture-circuit celebrity during 1943 - 1944.
Brock Pemberton died of a heart attack in New York City at the age of sixty-four on March 11, 1950.
Achievements
Politics
A Republican, Brock Pemberton actively supported the successive political campaigns of Alfred Landon, Thomas E. Dewey, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Membership
Brock Pemberton was a member of the Algonquin Round Table.
Personality
Brock Pemberton was a stoutish man, with a pair of twinkling eyes and a swell, dry sense of humor.
Connections
On December 30, 1916, Brock Pemberton married Margaret McCoy, a dress designer for Saks and RKO Studios, and a teacher at the New York School of Applied Design, whose costumes were featured in his productions. They had no children.