Who Am I? December 2025

I was born in the early years of the last century in N.Y.C. I attended grammar school on the lower West Side and later, Townsend Harris High School. I won a scholarship to Cornell and earned a B.A. there. I had a knack for writing and penned plays for the drama club there. Following college, I took several jobs as a reader, one of which was serving as a scenario reader for Columbia Pictures.

I also joined the Group Theater. I was intrigued by their left wing views and their readiness to tackle social issues. Many years later my affiliation with the Group got me blacklisted in Hollywood by H.U.A.C.

I must have been doing something right because in the mid-1930’s, at age 27, I won a Pulitzer Prize for a play I had written. That play later was made into a motion picture. It dealt with the issue of abortion which was illegal at the time. The Production Code censorship required us to ‘clean up’ the film. Despite us agreeing to those cuts the film was still condemned by the Legion of Decency! After what was left on the cutting room floor the story centered on a conflict the physician protagonist had between his family obligations and his professional duties. In an interview regarding my writing I stated, “The most important point to keep in mind was that the play must be an authentic document. To achieve this, I haunted all the hospitals, where my friends were interning. I went to medical schools, to lectures at Bellevue, to the morgue. I witnessed a few autopsies. I practically lived at five or six different hospitals, wore a white jacket, ate and slept there and kept voluminous notes all the time. One month passed in this way before I wrote a single word of the play. Then during the actual process of composing the drama, which took about three months, I checked up on each scene in the hospitals. That was just the beginning. After that, I rewrote the manuscript several times, during a period of three and one-half years.”

Two other plays of mine were also optioned and made into films. One concerned rough and tough teenage gang members raised in the slums and on the sidewalks of New York. I tried to establish the link between crime and slum living. One senator later observed that this play and movie became an impetus for slum clearance in America’s cities.

During WWII I served in the U.S. army and rose to the rank of lieutenant. After the War I wrote a police story that takes place in a single day based on the lives of the various people who compose a police detective squad. Before writing that play I spent a year and a half hanging out and observing the working day at police stations. I was a perfectionist who would spend endless hours writing and rewriting my work.

I married a lovely blonde actress who starred both on the stage and in pictures. She made early silent films in Fort Lee, N.J. but left the film industry in the late 1930’s. She continued to do some radio and TV work later on. She retired to our 18th century farmstead of over 200 acres in Oakland, New Jersey which I had bought in 1935. Our Hollywood marriage was very successful and lasted until her death some 40 years later.

I was a past president of the Dramatists Guild and served on its Awards and Assistance panels. I was also a Board member of Café La Mama and a Board Member of Martha Graham Co. I served as Chairman of New Jersey’s Motion & Television Development Commission which was charged with incentivizing film makers and producers to bring their projects to New Jersey.

You are probably more familiar with my work than you are with me. That’s me in the bottom left image in the first set of photos below. On my right is my spouse. Below us in the second set of images are movie posters/stills from two of my plays that optioned by Hollywood to be made into movies. The one on the lower left is from my Pulitzer Prize winning hospital drama and the one on the right is from a film that was nominated for 4 Academy Awards.

(1a)Who Am I? (1b) The Group Theater helped bankroll my Pulitzer Prize winning play. Who co-produced it? (2a)What was the title of my Pulitzer Prize winning play? (2b) What was the title of the play and film I wrote concerning slums and crime? (2c) How did the stage manager simulate the East River “swimming hole” on stage? The film version of that scene appears in the final image below. (3a) What was the title of my police yarn that takes place over the course of one day in NYC? (3b)What was my role at Gloria Vanderbilt’s wedding? (4a) What are my hobbies? (4b) Who was my spouse? Her picture appears alongside me directly below. (5a)What are the names of the 2 famous film actors who starred in my MGM hospital drama? They are pictured together in the second image below my spouse and I. (5b) Which two lead actors appear in my police drama film, mentioned in question (3a) and distributed by Paramount Pictures? They are pictured together in the next to last image below.