2 6                                   Erik Barnouw

I'Ontanne had a special interest in this venture. As a young girl
in England, just starring her career, she bad seen The Great Ad¬
venture in a celebrated performance starring the music-hall idol
.Mfss W ish W snnc, who must have been extraordinary. Arnold
Bennett, in his journal, called her a "genius." The event made an
indelible impression on the young Fontanne, and she had long
planned to do the play herself, some day. Now was to be the
time. Lunt «ould be the s\\x, world-renowned painter Carve, an
excellent role for him. The Theatre Guild wanted me to know
the importance of the occasion; I would have several months to
work on the script.

On reading the play, my first reaction «'as consternation: it
seemed creaky and static. On reading the no\el Buried Alive, I
felt better. It had action missing from the play and, morco\'cr, an
entirely different ending. In both versions of the story the great
painter (called Farrl in the novel) is thought to be buried amid
suitable pageantry in Westminster Abbey; actually bis valet, who
happened to have a heart attack in bis master's bedroom, is inter¬
red in the Abbey while the painter himself, fleeing the dtcaded
hubbub, is sheltered by a warm-hearted widow in Putney, who
begins to cure him of his shyness. The artist now lives in blissful
obscurity. Eventually, enterprising reporters get wind of what has
happened; in the play the scandal is successfully quashed to avoid
embarrassment to the British Empire, but in the novel it is not and
leads on to a far more amusing climax. I asked the Theatre Guild
if I could use material from the novel. The first answer was no; it
would involve a different copyright owner and new, probably
difficult negotiations. Howex'cr, I happened to notice in the copy
of Buried Alive that I drew from the Columbia library that it
catried no copyright notice. The novel bad apparently been pub¬
lished in the United States without copyright and was in the
public domain so far as the United States was concerned. Theatre
Guild counsel looked into this and finally gave me a go-ahead to
use both play and novel.

A\'bat evolved was an adaptation that used passages from the