I somehow seem to have written this blog for 23 years, 5 months and 14 days without mentioning the humorist-cartoonist James Thurber very much. I discovered his work when I was about twelve, which was three years after he died and by the time I was sixteen, I think I'd read everything that was then available — which was most of it. It had a significant impact on me, though so many things back then did that I didn't realize it at the time. Years later, when I would occasionally revisit some collection of his work, I'd realize that impact.
Starting as early as the 1942 Henry Fonda film The Male Animal, based on a Broadway play by Thurber and Elliott Nugent, Thurber was on the screen. I suppose the most successful screen adaptation of one of his stories was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) starring Danny Kaye. People loved that movie although Mr. Thurber reportedly did not.
The short story was adapted into radio plays, various stage productions and a 2013 movie starring Ben Stiller. There have been several stage plays and one other movie — the 1972 The War Between Men and Women starring Jack Lemmon and Jason Robards.
And then you have television. In 1960, Orson Bean — who starred in an awful lot of unsold pilots — starred in one called The Secret Life of James Thurber…
It went nowhere but then in 1969, a new version of the project became a weekly series on NBC for one year — My World and Welcome To It starring William Windom and written mainly by Mel Shavelson and Danny Arnold. I thought it was a terrific show and so did the critics and it also won Emmy Awards for Best Comedy Series and Best Actor. Here's one entire episode…
…but alas, the public didn't love it in sufficient numbers and it had just the one season. It did lead to that film with Jack Lemmon (written by Shavelson and Arnold, directed by Shavelson) and also to a play in which Mr. Windom toured for years. When he died, I wrote the following here about it…
Around 1974, I was taking some courses at Santa Monica College and it was announced that late one weekday afternoon, he would be doing one performance of a new one-man show he was developing called Thurber. It had an interesting price of admission: You had to promise to stay around after and give him a "brutal critique."
I went. He came out at the beginning and told everyone he wasn't kidding about the "brutal" part. He said, approximately, "This is a show I intend to tour with and to try and take to Broadway. The critics will not be pushovers and the bookers will be even worse. I'd rather hear what's wrong with it from young, smart people like you now than from them then. Just be honest with me. I've been an actor for years. I can take it."
He then did the show, partly from book and partly from memory. It was assembled from the writings of you-know-who and he spoke as the man. For what little my opinion is ever worth, it seemed to me it could be a great show but that he was about 60% of the way there with it. The beginning was a lot funnier than the end and the biography stuff — Thurber talking about his life — kept getting lost in the readings of his stories, some of which were suggested as more autobiographical than they probably were intended by their maker. But Mr. Windom was an absolute pro.
When it came time for Brutal Critiques, they weren't all that brutal. Mine started silly. I got up and said, "I don't like your pants and I think you need to lose ten pounds and grow a mustache." Then I gave my serious view…and this was back when I was writing Road Runner comic books, rather than material for actors to perform. I remember discussing my comments with him and wondering: If and when I did start to write for people instead of comic book characters, would every actor be as rational and mature as William Windom? He was smart, he was introspective and he really, really cared about input. In the TV shows I later worked on, I rarely encountered that kind of give-and-take and candid, constructive suggestion. But then I never got to work with William Windom.
I wish I had and I also wish I'd seen the finished play instead of just a work-in-progress. Because if I haven't made it clear here, I really, really liked James Thurber. Here's a snippet of Windom as the great writer…