Jean Kerr

Author of 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies'

Bridget Jean Collins, writer and playwright: born Scranton, Pennsylvania 10 July 1922; married 1943 Walter Kerr (died 1996; five sons, one daughter); died White Plains, New York 5 January 2003.

Jean Kerr was noted for the sharp wit she brought to her writing for the theatre, and the hilariously droll essays she composed about a Broadway-permeated life in suburbia. Her plays include Mary, Mary, one of the longest- running plays in Broadway history, but her greatest fame came with the publication of her book Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Based on her life in the country suburb of Larchmont, New York, with her theatre critic husband, four sons and assorted pets, it was an international hit that later became a successful film and a television series.

Kerr, who was frank about her dislike of cooking, housework and rising early (all traits which did not sit well with her suburban neighbours) would rise at noon then retreat to her Chevrolet, parked several blocks away, where she could write without the surrounding chaos of children and pets. "The thing about having a baby," she once said, "is that, thereafter, you have it."

Her solution was to earn some money and thus be able to afford to have someone else rise early to tend to the children (she ultimately had six). At the height of her fame, Kerr told The Los Angeles Times, "It's pretty good for a girl who tried writing to justify not doing the dishes."

Born Bridget Jean Collins to Irish immigrant parents in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1922, she was educated at Marywood Seminary and Marywood College in Scranton. A lover of theatre from an early age, she was stage manager of a college production of Romeo and Juliet when she met Walter Kerr, then a professor of drama at Catholic University in Washington. The couple were married in 1943 ("I was looking to marry a man smarter than I was," said Kerr), and the marriage lasted until Walter's death in 1996. (Walter Kerr was to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning theatre critic for the New York Herald- Tribune and The New York Times.)

Jean, who received a master's degree from Catholic University in 1945, joined her husband on the faculty, and together they wrote their first play, written for and produced by the theatre department of the university. It was an adaptation of Franz Werfel's 1941 novel Das Lied von Bernadette (translated as The Song of Bernadette, 1942), the story of a young French peasant who claims to have seen visions of the Virgin Mary in a grotto near Lourdes. The book had already been made into a successful film in 1943. Ill-advisedly, the Kerrs took their version to Broadway where, directed by Walter, it ran for three performances in 1946. The critic George Jean Nathan accused them of turning the story into a "pious Harvey", referring to the whimsical comedy about a drunk who sees an imaginary rabbit.

Jean's first solo comedy, Jenny Kissed Me (1948), also produced first at the university, fared little better on Broadway. Dismissed as "predictable and inconsequential" by Variety, it ran for 20 performances. The Catholic World's critic perceptively found it "irksome that Jean Kerr hasn't bothered to give her very funny dialogue a better story".

The Kerrs had a hit in 1949 when they wrote sketches and lyrics for a revue, Touch and Go (first produced at the university with the title Thank You, Just Looking). Directed by Walter, with considerable input from the producer George Abbott, the show was praised for its talented, little-known cast, and the wit and topicality of its sketches. These included a musical version of Hamlet in the vein of Rodgers and Hammerstein (and called "Great Dane a-Comin' "), a song parody, "Be a Mess", spoofing actresses who had won Academy Awards for performances in which they looked dowdy, and, as the show's climax, a performance of Cinderella as if written by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and directed by Elia Kazan.

Jean Kerr contributed two sketches to the revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac (1953), including an amusing scene featuring Hermione Gingold and Billy DeWolfe as two genteel ladies getting slowly inebriated drinking port. With Eleanor Brooke, she wrote a moderately successful comedy about a comic-strip artist, King of Hearts (1954), which starred Jackie Cooper and Cloris Leachman.

Her greatest success came in 1957 when her book Please Don't Eat the Daisies, compiled from articles written for a fashion magazine, was published. Recounting the hectic life of Kerr and her family when they left New York for an antiquated mansion in the country, it was a best-seller for months and made Kerr's name known throughout the United States. Doris Day and David Niven starred in the film version directed by Charles Walters in 1960, and Pat Crowley co-starred with Mark Miller in the television series (1965-67).

Kerr also wrote dozens of humorous pieces for magazines and newspapers, many of them observations about show business. Her advice on lunching with a producer: order a drink, so you look relaxed, but don't touch it lest he think you're an alcoholic.

In 1960 she produced another best-seller, The Snake Has All the Lines (1960), of which the LA Times critic wrote, "Jean Kerr has a husband, an old car, a houseful of kids, and somehow has parlayed these undistinguished materials into a laugh classic." The book's title came, like most of Kerr's inspiration, from her own home. When she congratulated one of her sons for being cast as Adam in a school play, he said, "Yeah, but the snake has all the lines." Later books included Penny Candy (1970) and How I Got To Be Perfect (1978).

Kerr and her husband joined forces once more to write a musical comedy, Goldilocks (1958), a valentine to silent movies which seemed full of promise but turned into a nightmare that the couple afterwards vowed never to mention again. The original male lead was Ben Gazzara, then sweetheart of the show's leading lady, Elaine Stritch. Gazzara, who could neither sing nor dance, was replaced by the film actor Barry Sullivan, who was then replaced by Don Ameche. When the show opened on Broadway, the two stars were not talking to one another, and the Kerrs were not talking to the choreographer, Agnes DeMille. Though Leroy Anderson's score was often delightful, the libretto failed to make the central characters warm or interesting enough and the show closed after a brief run.

In 1955 Kerr had told Theatre Arts magazine, "I have two trifling ambitions in the theatre: to make a lot of people laugh and to make a lot of money." She did both when her hit comedy Mary, Mary opened in 1961. It received mixed reviews, critics praising the wealth of laugh-lines but pointing out that the story – divorced couple hinder each other's new affairs because they really want to get back together – was hardly original, but it proved phenomenally popular, running for four years and over 1,500 performances. The positive review in the LA Times noted,

The play sparkles with the sort of wit that has made Jean Kerr famous. And the funniest lines are in the mouth of the outspoken Mary – a sort of self-portrait.

The role of Mary, created by Barbara Bel Geddes on Broadway, was played by Maggie Smith in the London production, for which she won the Variety Club Award as Best Actress of 1963.

A film version directed by Mervyn LeRoy the same year was overlong and excessively stagy, and featured a miscast Debbie Reynolds in the leading role. Reynolds wrote in her autobiography,

It was when I first went to work on the script for Mary, Mary that I came to the realisation that I was not a good actress . . . I did cute and adorable and called it acting.

Though Reynolds hired the drama coach Lillian Burns to work with her throughout the production, the result still misfired. Unusually, the film was released while the play was still doing sell-out business on Broadway and on tour.

Kerr's subsequent plays included Poor Richard (1964), Finishing Touches (1973) and Lunch Hour (1980), her last, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Sam Waterston and Gilda Radner. All three had respectable runs but were not major hits.

In 1960 Ira Levin wrote a play, Critic's Choice, about a theatre critic who has to review his wife's play. It was generally considered to have been inspired by the Kerrs, but Jean stated she welcomed the advice of her husband though she did not always enjoy it. "Does the grass appreciate the lawn mower?" she asked, while conceding that "Walter can't save me from failure, but he can save me from disgrace".

Perhaps her son Christopher was her sternest critic, when he wrote a report on Please Don't Eat the Daisies for a school exercise:

This is about a woman who lives in Larchmont with four wonderful children. While it is funny, it is exaggerated to the point of being flat lies.

Kerr said, "I'm not a natural playwright at all. I write what I know."

Tom Vallance