Background

Jed Harris was born Jacob Hirsch Horowitz on February 25, 1900 in Newark, New Jersey, United States. He was one of five children of Meyer Wolf Horowitz, owner of a grocery store, and Esther Schurtz. He was brought up in a traditional Jewish environment.

Many sources report that he was born in Vienna, Austria, but that information was a bit of press-agent fakery.

Education

Harris attended public schools in Newark and entered Yale University as a member of the class of 1921, but after excessive absences and unpaid fees, he left the university without completing his studies.

Career

After a girlfriend named Anita Greenbaum introduced him to the joys of the theater, he took a job in New York City as a junior reporter for Billboard, which crystallized his desire to become a prominent part of the Broadway scene.

In 1922, Harris borrowed $5, 000 from the mother of a college friend and invested in his first venture, The Romantic Age, a play by A. A. Milne. The production was not successful enough to bear financial or professional fruits. He next worked briefly as a press agent in Chicago for a farce called Applesauce, then returned to New York, where he continued his career as a producer.

By the time the 1927-1928 Broadway season hit full stride, Harris had four hits on the boards: Broadway (1926); Coquette (1927); The Royal Family (1927); and The Front Page (1928). He gained much prestige from these shows plus a personal fortune. For example, he invested $11, 000 in Broadway and earned some $1. 3 million, and many playwrights hoped to have their plays produced by Harris.

Harris' fall from grace was almost as sudden and complete as his rise. He once had six flops in a row, particularly The Lake (1933), starring Katharine Hepburn. He recovered briefly, when he produced and directed Thornton Wilder's Our Town in 1938, but that production was clouded by the suicide of actress Rosamund Pinchot, who left behind a note quoting lines from the play, and by Wilder's insistence that Harris had ruined his prose in the play's graveyard scene.

Harris wrote in his autobiography, A Dance on the High Wire (1979), that from 1930 to 1947, a period during which he was actively engaged in the theater for ten seasons, he produced and directed only six productions that could be considered noteworthy - Uncle Vanya (1930), The Green Bay Tree (1933), A Doll's House (1937), Our Town, Dark Eyes (1943), and The Heiress (1947). After the success of The Heiress, which had been adapted from Henry James's novel Washington Square, Harris made one other important contribution to the theater, when he directed Arthur Miller's The Crucible in 1953. His final work in the theater was in 1956, when he produced and directed Child of Fortune, to no great success. He spent his final years, far from wealthy, living in the Gorham and Royalton hotels in Manhattan. He died in New York City of congestive heart failure. Among the few mourners in attendance at his funeral were theater celebrities José Ferrer, Lillian Gish, Marc Connelly, and Jean Dalrymple.

Achievements

• Jed Harris produced and directed some of the most notable Broadway plays of the 1920s and 1930s and had a reputation as a theater genius - his shows were artistic triumphs and also made lots of money. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story, for the 1954 film, Night People, and for a 1958 Writers Guild of America Award for the screenplay for Operation Mad Ball (1957). Harris was posthumously inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Operation Mad Ball

    (Eminently versatile, two-time Oscar® winner Jack Lemmon (...)

  • WHTCHMAN WHAT OF THE NIGHT

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Dance on the High Wire

    (First Edition Description: 188 p. , 2 leaves of plates : ...)

  • Patterns (1956)

    (AKA "Patterns of Power." Superb drama about a power strug...)

  • Night People
  • 'THE LIGHT TOUCH' LOBBY CARD SET 1951 GEORGE SANDERS, RICHARD BROOKS

Views

Quotations: "The beauty of theater is that you can create a whole world in a few weeks of rehearsal, " he said in an interview. "But then the whole thing disappears like a breath of air. Nothing remains after your audience has gone. All it represents is a few moments of escape. "

Personality

For his outstanding successes on Broadway, Harris's peers dubbed him "the Meteor. " Noel Coward called him "destiny's tot. "

After Harris' death the New York Times noted that he was "a flamboyant man of intermittent charm. " His boy‐wonder aura helped to attract gifted performers to his shows.

Although few would deny his theatrical wizardry, Harris' personal relationships with directors, actors, and co-producers were notoriously stormy. Harris' behavior was sometimes so outrageous that other show‐business figures, unable to top it, could respond only by understatement. For reasons that are still unclear, he once received the dramatist George S. Kaufman for a meeting while entirely in the nude. All Mr. Kaufman could find to say in parting was, "Jed, your fly is open. " But later Mr. Kaufman said tartly, "When I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes thrown in Jed Harris's face. "

Quotes from others about the person

• His own daughter Abigail once said, "I don't believe there is a person walking the face of the earth who would have a good word to say for my father. "

Connections

Harris was married to Anita Green, but embarked on an affair with Ruth Gordon, an actress. Gordon became pregnant and journeyed to Paris, where she gave birth to their son, Jones Kelly. Although Harris' marriage to Green ended in divorce in 1928, Harris and Gordon never married. Still, they provided their son with a normal upbringing and his parentage became public knowledge as social conventions changed.

His marriage to actress Louise Platt, with whom he had one child, ended in divorce in 1944. Platt accused him of abusing her during their marriage.

His marriage to Beatrice "Bebe" Allen in 1957 also ended in divorce in 1962.

Harris' other romances included Anita Greenbaum and Margaret Sullavan.

Father:

Meyer Horowitz

Mother:

Esther Schurtz Horowitz.

Spouse:

Louise Platt

Spouse:

Anita Green

Spouse:

Beatrice "Bebe" Allen

Brother:

Sheldon Horowitz

Brother:

Mildred Harris

Sister:

Silvia (Horowitz) Bernstein

Sister:

Florence Horowitz

Daughter:

Abigail Harris

Son:

Jones Kelly Harris

Partner:

Margaret Sullavan

Partner:

Anita Greenbaum

Partner:

Ruth Gordon

References

• Jed Harris, the curse of genius