George Abbott remembered - 3 February 1995

One time, years ago, my first American mentor in journalism – an old Baltimore newspaperman – was looking over the copy coming in from the night editor, and sighing at the increasing errors he was beginning to notice, errors of fact and also of syntax, idioms that didn't sound quite right and so on. And that old journalist shook his head in the news room that night, and he said as much to himself as to anyone else: "I'm not asking for genius, the older I get the more I crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology".

I painfully share this craving. And it may be like old arthritis, a companion of advancing years, but I do wake up some mornings, read the papers, catch the television news and immediately decide to write to the New York Times. I always resist.

How about this from a lady – well pleased with herself as well she might be, she had a flock of degrees – and is just the new president of a famous eastern university. I read her inaugural speech the other day, delivered before an audience of dons and patrons and alumni, she said: "We hope to weave a seamless interface between the conceptual aspect of education and its implementation in action." Fancy that. I wrestled over this gorgeous prose for some time and discovered all she meant to say was: we hope to practice what we preach.

Well, this perhaps irascible lament for wordiness and portentousness and verbal pomp in high places, made me zoom in on that word competence the other day, when a man died, who, more than any other single figure, person, male, female, represented an American institution at its most competent. Not a genius, not an innovator, not a landmark talent, it could well be that none of his works in the years to come will ever be revived, simply a totally competent pro.

The name is George Abbott and the institution he glorified and came to represent in his own person, was Broadway. From his middle age on, he was known as Mr Broadway. Oddly, along that brassy nonchalant street, he bore no nickname, he was known to all but a tiny circle of close friends – to actors, producers, directors, designers, cast young and old – as Mr Abbot. He didn't request or expect this formality. Perhaps he would like to have been called George by one and all. Once, he said to a young protégé, "Please call me George," the young man said, "I certainly will Mr Abbott".

There was something about him, a natural dignity, that did not invite familiarity. He had a dour quizzical face – he would have made a marvellous Scrooge – six feet two inches, he stood like a Grenadier, never ever wore a sport shirt or other off-duty clothes, always a grey suit, necktie, everywhere, in the hottest weather.

The New York Times on Tuesday carried the good lead sentence: "He opened on Broadway in 1913 and didn't close for more than 80 years." Like several other famous ones who came to appear like the essence of a certain place or a kind of life, he was brought up far from it.

Remember Frederic Remington, who, in a short life, sculpted and drew and painted more horses and Indians and cowboys than anybody in history? He was born in New York and studied at Yale. And how about that shambling boy from the plains of Kansas, with the prison haircut and the prairie twang, who wore creaky yellow shoes and was the first man ever to be said to dress like an unmade bed, Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker, who brought a new note of sophistication both to American and English journalism.

Well, Mr Abbott was, to be truthful, born in a small town in upstate New York, but when he was a lad, his parents whisked him off to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and he very soon became a Western Union messenger boy when that company was about as chic and new as a CD ROM. Cheyenne was then only 20 years old, one of the new towns created by the Union Pacific Railroad, which indeed claimed the site and laid out the streets parallel to the tracks.

Cheyenne was named after a neighbouring Indian tribe by a Union general, Major General Grenville Dodge who was then chief engineer of the Union Pacific, and it soon was a hive for two types mainly: people who went west meaning to settle and those who drifted west to feed, house, exploit, the settlers – real estate, land speculators, small shopkeepers, craftsmen, gamblers and, as everywhere out west where hordes of single men came to roost, what became primly known as "ladies of the evening".

One of George Abbott's first jobs as a messenger in his early teens, was to deliver beer to the red-light district. Every summer, the lad went off to work on a ranch – of course, a working range, there were no dude ranges in those days – and it was a matter of constant marvel to Mr Abbott's friends in later life to hear genuine western stories from the only cowboy they'd ever known, George Abbott.

On the plains and out in the mountains, the Rockies, in fact, in most of the early towns out west at the end of the century, there was the little red school house for elementary education and if the parents wanted something better by way of high school, then the sons were sent off to schools that had been started usually as adjuncts or extensions of the forts that the army had built up during the Indian wars. So George Abbott was sent off to such a one, the Kearney Military Academy in Nebraska, which was the remnant of a fort abandoned once the Sioux Indians had been conquered or dispersed and the railroad had displaced the wagon train.

A less congenial training for a Broadway director producer it is hard to imagine, but George Abbott maintained, rarely and then only to an intimate friend or two, that he picked up from the West, the mountains, the cowboys and the rest, was a habit of staying hard, any job he started, and keeping one eye cocked over his shoulder for the man behind who might be gaining on you.

When he was about 17, the family moved back east and settled in small town near Buffalo in New York, and here he became hopelessly stage-struck, and spent every penny he earned getting to the local theatre. He graduated from the University of Rochester having played a lot of football, but also joined the dramatic club and he went on from there to Harvard and the only university in the east, perhaps in the whole country, that had started a play writing course. Mr Abbott took it, and at 25 years of age, won the prize for his first play, The Man in the Manhole. Within the year, he was off to Broadway, convinced he would storm the place, but for a year or two he had a very lean time and came to take any, and every, sort of theatre job: office boy, prompter, stage manager, casting director, assistant this, that, play doctor.

He was – and this is a note I haven't seen mentioned in the record of his long theatre career – he was 36 before he found a role that helped him to a steady living, it was that of a man called, wouldn't you know, Tex, a cowboy. After that, he exercised what became as much of a hobby as a trade, an irresistible habit of doctoring plays and scenes and dialogue. He was never satisfied with any script until he fiddled with it, heard it on the stage, revised, dolled it up, dressed it down, a discipline that made him very unpopular with some famous playwrights.

In 1926, he wrote and directed his first great hit called, appropriately, Broadway. And from then until 1989, when he was 102, he directed or produced or was somehow involved personally – not just as an agent or sponsor – in over 120 productions. When he was 99, he sent off to a secretary two plays he'd written between rounds of golf. Oh, holidays by the way, he didn't believe in. Holidays were a form of defeat. The great thing was to keep doing what you do best and draw a breath in between shows. He didn't have any doctrines about how to live but he was certainly, for a deep dyed theatre man, an oddity. He had always at the same time three meals a day, he sipped a little wine, he never smoked, he went home early to bed, to read a play, fiddled with the play, sleep, get up and start again.

Nightlife, he thought, was a dandy way to get a nervous breakdown, he's seen lots of them. He admitted to certain unchanging preferences. He liked unknown young actors. He didn't have time for the tantrums of established stars, though the roster of stars who were spotted young and established by him – from Leonard Bernstein to Shirley MacLaine and Barbra Streisand would take from now till Valentine's Day to recite. He had few theories about stage direction and was willing to listen for a time. Like Winston Churchill, he believed in reasonable discussion provided it ended in compliance with my wishes. He couldn't abide the so-called method actors who were spawned and flourished in the '50s and '60s. Mr Abbott's objection was that a man strained and sweated to try and imagine himself as an old armchair or perhaps an old spinster, but all the while Mr Abbott complained he can't pronounce his final "t"s.

An actor once wrestling over the inner meaning of some part asked, "What is my motivation?" "Your job," said Mr Abbott. He lost his second wife in 1951 and for 32 years he was mostly alone. Twelve years ago, he decided to marry again, she was in her early 50s, he was 96. Last week he was dictating revisions for a revival of Pyjama Game. Last year, he came to New York, and he tottered down the aisle at a revival of his Damn Yankees just to see if they pronounced their final "t"s. This week he died in his sleep at 107.

One day in his late 90s, he was playing golf with his wife, and for the first, and who knows maybe fatal time, he fell down on the fairway. His panicky wife ran over to him, saw this long lean still prostrate figure, and shouted: "George, George get up please, don't just lay there." He opened one eye, "Lie there," he said.

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