It's a long way around to writing one-act and then three-act plays and then operas, operettas and cantatas, but I finally did it. It's a 63-year journey, starting when I was 12 during tryouts for a seventh grade Christmas pageant in Tucson, Arizona. Every boy soprano in the school sang off key for the lead to be shooed off by our singing teacher who then pointed at me and said, "Get up there!"

"Don't want to," I grouched.

"Go!" she cried.

I got up and sang, a nice sweet boy-soprano song. "That's it!" my teacher cried. "You're the lead!"

And I was. Not only that, but once on stage in a shower of applause, I was hooked. It was the actor's life for me, by God!

I went to hang out at the local radio station and wound up doing sound effects and reading the Sunday funnies, broadcast to all the kiddies, playing all the parts, on Saturday nights.

Still hyperventilating, in high school, I heard there were plans for a student talent show. I showed up at tryouts with a complete script written and ready for production. The teacher in charge, stunned at my audacity if not my talent, turned the project over to me, and I was further hooked. I still have the APPLAUSE sign I waved at the audience between each number.

Out of high school and selling newspapers on a street corner while I wrote short stories that didn't sell, I saw an announcement in Louella Parsons' gossip column that Laraine Day, the beautiful young MGM actress, was forming a theatre under the aegis of the Mormon Church which, by God, was only two blocks from the apartment where I lived with my mother, father and my brother Skip.

Feverish for acceptance I went with a stack of my manuscripts to be confronted by an actress who regarded me with alarm if not disdain. My clothes were shabby, my hair uncut, my scripts criminally poor. Which caused Laraine Day to suck breath, scowl, but at last accept me in.

No sooner in, than I got a part in a musical Laraine had written which lacked a proper humor. I supplied jokes during rehearsals and wound up rewriting half the play. Laraine was disgruntled but tolerated me because my quips, while not exactly Bernard Shaw's, sewed up the seams and smoothed out the lines.

Simultaneously I wrote my own comedy drama, The Great Goldfarb, based on the life of Samuel Goldwyn, the legendary Hollywood mogul. My comedy was so terrible everyone feared to say. I abandoned the script which suffered immediate meltdown in the California sun. I did not come back to playwriting for 20 years. Meanwhile, a proper student, I ushered at the Biltmore Theatre and saw or read every American play that came under my gaze.

Curtain down—

—curtain up 13 years later.

Enter the Irish theatre and its Irish playwrights, O'Casey, Synge, Wilde and Shaw.

John Huston picked me and my family up and shipped us off to live in Dublin for half a year to write the screenplay of Moby Dick. Living in Dublin was living midstage of the Abbey or Gate Theatres. The people in the post office or on the street or in the lobby of the Royal Hibernian Hotel spoke O'Casey when they did not out-Yeats Yeats. There in January 1954 we saw Siobhan McKenna's incredible Saint Joan long before she sailed to play the role in London and New York. There the Irish lilt filled my ears to pour out my fingertips years later. Friends, writing to me that winter, asked if I might trap the Irish on paper. "No," I said, ignorant of the brogues in my ear, "I've no time to trap. I am busy, yes? with the Great White Whale!"

Back home a year later Nick, my taxi driver, who had driven me from Kilcock to Dublin for 100 nights whispered, "Remember me?" "Yes!" I said. "Well, then," said Nick, "would you mind writing me down?"

I did. And that was my first new play since The Great Goldfarb decayed in the California sun.

After that came more plays, all Irish, about Lent and the traffic of bikes and Heeber Finn's pub where as the spigots turned off the wild converse flowed. Four Irish comedies jumped forth. One day a writer friend, Sy Gomberg, said, "I hear you're writing for the stage. Are your plays good?"

"I don't know," I said, "You can't read plays. You must get them on their feet and walk them around."

"Come to my home next Thursday night," said my friend. "I'll find some actors to walk them around."

The following Thursday I arrived at my friend's to find Strother Martin and James Whitmore waiting to read. Two of the finest actors in stage and film history, by God!

They read and walked. We all fell on the floor, laughing. My plays worked, and they were amused!

I joined a little theatre group where we all worked gratis and lived the poor high life. During this time, I met Charles Laughton who asked me to adapt Fahrenheit 451 for the stage. I did so. Laughton and his producer Paul Gregory took me out to dinner one night, poured three double martinis in me and told me just how bad my drama truly was. I walked home with tears streaming down my cheeks. I had so wanted to work for Laughton after seeing his sublime production of Shaw's Don Juan in Hell.

Laughton showed up at the house with his wife Elsa Lanchester later, and suggested I write something simpler, a one-act science fiction farce about an elderly couple who buy robot duplicates of themselves as gifts for their 50th wedding anniversary. The resultant operetta was okay but the education that came with it was priceless. Laughton was a born teacher and loved to stride his hearth reciting to a one-man audience presence, me. He did scenes from Major Barbara, Lear, and Pygmalion, and he turned to my strongest virtues. "Remember," he said, "you're a poet. Let your imagination free on your tongue."

"Also, remember," he added, "a theatre doesn't need sets, lights or costumes. All you need is the free spirit of language, decent actors, and a bright director. When in doubt, come center stage and do your lines!"

Incredible advice. Because of it I wrote a clutch of not-only-Irish but near-and-far-future plays, saved my money, staged some for a few dollars, renting dark theatres for a night, and finally opened The World of Ray Bradbury in Los Angeles in October of 1963. We played six one-acts for an entire year to only excellent reviews.

Out of those plays, working for pennies, came Harold Gould, Talia Shire, and, a few years later, the winner of an Academy Award. During my Wonderful Ice Cream Suit all the actors signed the inside of one of the suits and gave it to me. Twenty years later, when a young actor was running to the stage on Oscar night, I said to my wife, "Wait here." From the closet, I pulled out the old ice cream suit and as the Oscar was placed in the young man's hands, opened the suit. There under the left armpit was the actor's name: F. Murray Abraham!

Along the way, I discovered that I was writing for young folks who rarely attended theatre. To see my science fiction dramas, entire busloads of students traveled from Northern California and Phoenix to spy the future, find it dangerous but good. I did not knowingly do this, but all these children were suddenly mine.

In recent years I have staged The Martian Chronicles at the Colony Theatre in Los Angeles, for exactly $8,000. It competed with all the multi-million dollar productions at the Ahmanson, Taper, and Huntington Hartford theatres and won all the Critics Circle Awards! Not bad for the unkempt newsboy who wrote poor stuff for Laraine Day and drove her out of her mind with my jokes only half better than hers.

So there you have all the years, ending with this tribute. If Charlie Laughton hadn't told me I had a tongue, "So use it!" I might have kept my mouth shut to stillborn my plays. God bless his dear departed soul.