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WILLIAM WINDOM |
TV wife dared William Windom
to do 'Thurber' one-man show
A television series
loosely based on James Thurber increased Windom's awareness of the
writer-essayist, and led to his one-man show. |
While doing research, he came across information about the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Pyle and decided, "Who needs fiction?" After getting
permission from the newspaper syndicate that owned the rights to Pyle's
stories, he started doing the first one-man show in 1976. He added the
second Pyle show in 1979.
"No one had ever heard of Pyle," he said, then noted somewhat
cynically, "If I get a TV series, it will sell --- anything will
sell if you have a TV series."
TELEVISION WAS NOT the first medium
Windom tried. As an actor in New York from 1946 to
1961, he appeared in 18 Broadway shows, five or six off-Broadway plays
and in summer stock.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1961 the year
Thurber died. The next year, he made his movie debut in "To Kill a
Mockingbird," which he described as "a good flick I wish my career had
gone on in the same vein, but it didn't."
In 1962 Windom also was a regular in the
TV series, "The Farmer's Daughter," which co-starred Inger Stevens.
He has appeared in more than 25 movies
and in three television series the third is "Brothers and Sisters" about
which he said, "Don't tell them about it if they don't already know."
But Windom denied ever .taking acting lessons, "at least in the sense of
having paid for the lessons."
"I never stop studying people," he
explained. "Elevators are ideal; children under 5 are ideal. They all
give lessons in acting.
"I study people in general, how they
behave, how they move their hands, their faces, how they talk, whether
they are enthusiastic, opened or closed.
"Drunks and children give you' the
straight story," he continued. "In elevators, people are totally closed.
"It's fascinating."
Windom performs. about 50 "Thurber" shows
a year. Since he started doing his four one-man shows, he's performed a
total of 500. Thirty of those were Ernie Pyle shows arid 70 were
"Thurber 2." The rest were "Thurber."
"I've got to get the other three shows up
to where the first one is," he said.
Tickets for "Thurber" at the University
of Iowa are priced at $11.50, $9, $7, $5 and $3 for non-students. U of I
students get a $2 discount. Tickets are available at Hancher box office.
 The Gazette, Cedar Rapids, IA, 03 Apr 1983,
Sun, Page 57
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By Suzanne Barnes Gazette arts editor
If
it hadn't been for his co-star on "My World and Welcome to It," actor
William Windom might not be performing his one-man show, Thurber,"
Friday at 8 p.m. in Hancher Auditorium.
'"My World and Welcome to It," a
television series loosely based on the works of the late James Thurber,
ran on NBC from 1969 to 1970. In the summer of 1972, CBS reran episodes
of the series.
Windom starred in the series as
Thurber-like writer-cartoonist John Monroe, with Joan Hotchkis as his
wife and Lisa Gerritsen as his daughter.
"It got an Emmy and so did I," he
told The Gazette during a telephone interview, "but it (the show) was
canceled after a year.
"I figured if I was ever going to
do a one-man show, that was the time and that was the man."
EVEN SO, WINDOM considered himself too
shy --- "I still am" --- to do a
one-man show, until actress Hotchkis dared him.
"Women can do that to you," Windom
noted wryly. He added that she also told him, "If you don't do it,
you'll always regret it. If you do try and fail, you can forget it, but
if you don't try, it's going to haunt you."
Windom accepted the dare and started
performing his one-man show in 1972.
He does all of his own research for
"Thurber." "It's all mine," he said, "there's no director, no writer
just me and the Thurber material."
Before "My World and Welcome to It," the
59-year-old New York City native admitted, he had no particular interest
in James Grover Thurber, whose cartoons and writings caricatured a
generation of Americans between the two world wars. Windom said he was
aware of Thurber, who wrote most of his essays during the time he worked
for New Yorker magazine, but no more so than he was aware of writers
like Sinclair Lewis or 0. Henry.
AND ALTHOUGH the TV series increased his
awareness of Thurber, there is little similarity between TVs "My World
and Welcome to It" and Windom's one-man show.
The series, he explained, was based on
the idea that women are predatory. "They (the writers) decided to sell
the show by starting out with T hate women' and taking it from there.
"It was a saleable feature, but I
don't do any of that." Windom has appeared on stage in the United States
and Europe in Thurber" and in recent years has added a second Thurber
show, Thurber 2," to his repertoire. The chief difference between the
two shows, both of which are made up of Thurber stories, reports and
fables is that Thurber 2" features 250 Thurber drawings beamed onto a
movie screen on stage.
"I figured that people would get tired of
looking at one guy on stage," he explained.
WINDOM ALSO does two
one-man shows based on World War II newspaperman Ernie Pyle.
The Pyle shows came about after Thurber 2" in 1975. Windom was
hired to do a show about "anything I wanted to do, except Thurber."
Because he served in the 508th Parachute Infantry from 1943 to
1946, he decided to do a show about something or someone connected with
the war. "Hell, World War II was the only thing I ever took seriously,"
he noted.
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