LEST WE FORGET JEAN KERR
(July 10, 1923 - January 5, 2003)

One of the funniest women of her generation

"Spelunkers of the writer's mind will find no dark pockets in Jean Kerr's memories of her childhood," wrote John McPhee (Time, April 14, 1961), "Norman Rockwell might have painted it, showing an oversized white clapboard house beside a tall elm tree with a tall young girl high in its branches eating an apple and reading a book."

She wrote in an interview with Newsday, (Feb. 4, 1979) "You can't imagine how agonizing it was to be tall in Scranton. Being witty developed partly in compensation for her height. "It was either that or....I was five-eleven, and I never got any shorter, although I did get wider."

In 1941, during her sophomore year at Marywood College in Scranton, Walter_Kerr a young drama instructor from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., attended a campus production of Romeo and Juliet of which Jean Collins was stage manager. A carpenter's son from Evanston, Illinois, he was ten years older and three inches shorter. Despite their difference in height, they were marred in 1943.  They not only produced six children but jointly and separately a stream of plays, books, essays and articles.

"I decided to write plays spurred on by a chance compliment my father had paid me years earlier. 'Look', he exploded one evening at the dinner table, 'the only damn thing in this world you're good for is talk.'  By talk he meant dialogue--and I was off."  Walter Kerr had a more direct influence. "He didn't exactly lock me in my room like Colette's husband, but just about."  He also shared the diaper duties, typed her manuscripts, and critiqued her work-in-progress.   "He was terrific!"

Her first play, written in collaboration with Walter, was an adaptation of Franz Werfel's novel The Song of Bernadette. Like her other early works, it was first produced at Catholic University, where she earned her master's degree in 1945.
Her first solo effort was Jenny Kissed Me, a comedy starring
Leo G. Carroll. that lasted 20 performances.
Undeterred, she wrote ten plays between 1949 and 1980, namely Touch and Go, written with Walter, two sketches, "My Cousin Who?" and "Don Brown's Body", Goldilocks with Walter,
King of Hearts, written with Eleanor Brooke,
Mary, Mary, Poor Richard, Finishing Touches, Lunch Hour.
Two of her plays were made into movies: King of Hearts was filmed as A Certain Smile with Bob Hope,  Mary, Mary was made into a film starring Debbie Reynolds.

By 1961 Kerr's name had become a household word. Her humorous essays appeared in Reader's Digest, Ladies' Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Harper's, and other leading periodicals; she had published two best-selling collections of humor titled Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957) and
The Snake Has All the Lines (1960).
In April 1961 her picture appeared on the cover of Time.
Two more humor collections followed: Penny Candy (1970) and How I Got To Be Perfect (1978).

As Broadway regulars on both sides of the curtain, the Kerrs reputedly served Ira Levin as prototypes for his 1960
Broadway comedy, Critic's Choice, which featured
Henry Fonda as a major drama critic faced with reviewing his playwright-wife's flop.  The Kerrs could also see themselves on screen, played by Doris Day and David Niven in the movie version of Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Later it would become a television series (1965-1967).

John McPhee (Time Magazine) felt the writer she was most akin to was Robert Benchley.  "They share the same gently shrugging quality that utterly precludes malice, the same preoccupation with the bizarre edges of the commonplace, the same disarming penchant for self-deprecation, as when the ample Mrs. Kerr compares herself to a 'large bran muffin'.

She was a wicked parodist and a mistress of the "skewed" platitude, as when an aging matinee idol in Mary, Mary describes his recent departure from Hollywood as "the sinking ship leaving the rats."

For twenty five years she served on the Council of the Dramatists Guild, was honored by the National Institute of Science, and received honorary      degrees from Fordham and Northwestern Universities.

Resource:  Notable Women in American Theatre. 1989  C. Lee Jenner