By MIKE TEAL
Hallmark Hall of Fame’s TV production of The Man Who Came To Dinner was first broadcast on November 29, 1972. It starred Orson Welles as Sheridan Whiteside in Moss Hart and George S. Kauffmann’s play about a famed radio wit who terrorizes the household of a business owner after injuring himself while going to dine there.
The syndicated TV Scout columnist hailed it as “an absolute delight with a super production of the classic The Man Who Came to Dinner. The Man here is Orson Welles and what a joy he is bellowing, wheezing and cajoling and being absolutely tyrannical in the George Kaufamn – Moss Hart play updated with loving care by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff (The Dick Van Dyke Show, That Girl), who also produced.”
Kaufman and Hart wrote the play as a vehicle for their friend Alexander Woollcott, the model for the lead character Sheridan Whiteside. At the time the play was written, Woollcott was famous both as the theater critic who helped re-launch the career of the Marx Brothers and as the star of the national radio show The Town Crier. He was well liked by both Kaufman and Hart, but that did not stop him from displaying the obnoxious characteristics displayed by Whiteside in the play. Kaufman and Hart had promised a vehicle for Woollcott but had been unable to find a plot that suited them until one day Woollcott showed up, unannounced, at Hart’s Bucks County estate, and proceeded to take over the house. He slept in the master bedroom, terrorized Hart’s staff, and generally acted like Sheridan Whiteside. On his way out he wrote in Hart’s guest book, “This is to certify that I had one of the most unpleasant times I ever spent.” Hart related the story to Kaufman soon afterwards. As they were both laughing about it, Hart remarked that he was lucky that Woollcott had not broken his leg and become stuck there. Kaufman looked at Hart and the idea was born.
Woolcott helped Welles get work when he first moved to New York in 1934, including introducing him to Katherine Cornell, with whose company Welles would later make his Broadway debut. He is also credited with a famous quote to Welles after The War of the Worlds broadcast. Noting that Welles’s broadcast had finally stolen the spotlight from their main completion, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Woolcott quipped, “This only goes to show, my beamish boy, that all intelligent people were listening to the dummy, and all the dummies were listening to you.”
Wellesnet has contacted Hallmark, which owns the rights to the 1972 The Man Who Came To Dinner broadcast, but they have no immediate plans to release it on home video as they have some of their other shows.
It is available for viewing at the Paley Center for Media in New York City, which plans a screening of the production, along with several other rare Welles’ television performances in February 2015.
In addition to Welles, The Man Who Came To Dinner boasted performances by Don Knotts, Joan Collins, Lee Remick, and Marty Feldman. Michael Gough from the Hammer horror flicks is in it too, plus Mary Wickes, who was in Welles’s Too Much Johnson. Definitely a good cast for one of Welles’ most significant TV appearances of the 1970s.
Joan Collins, who previously worked with director Buzz Kulik on Warning Shot, found Welles was difficult. She recalled how the cast rehearsed for three weeks for the British shoot, but Welles insisted on reading all of his lines from large cue cards held by students from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
“Orson and I were rehearsing one scene which included a longish speech, which he had to perform to me. I was standing on my correct mark when all of a sudden he ended the speech with … ‘ I cant read the rest of the lines because Miss Collins is standing in front of the damn cue cards!’
I was mortified! ‘But I am standing where I am supposed to be!’
It was pointless arguing as Orson was the star and made sure everyone knew it, even poor Don Knotts had his best scenes cut, as not to upstage the great Welles!”
The late Don Knotts shared his memories of the production and working with Welles in a video interview with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
“We did (The Man Who Came To Dinner) in England, and that was quite an experience. The reason they did the show in England was that Welles owed so much money in taxes and he wasn’t ready to pay it yet. He didn’t want to come into the U.S. so we all went over there. They used a lot of English actors too. It was a big, wonderful cast, with Lee Remick and others. I loved Welles, he was a great storyteller, a great raconteur. He kept us laughing and was a charming man, but as we went into rehearsal, he realized that he had not done this kind of a show on TV. He’d been mostly in movies, where you had a lot of time to shoot everything. And they’d shoot big scenes here where he had a tremendous amount of dialogue, and he started to get nervous as hell. And he got cantankerous then. He’d have some wine each day, and he got to be a little rugged. But in the end it turned out to be a wonderful show, and he did a great job.”
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