Robert Ardrey (October 16, 1908 – January 14, 1980) was an American playwright, screenwriter and science writer, best known for his books African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966). After a Broadway and Hollywood career, he returned to his academic training in anthropology in the 1950s.
As a playwright and screenwriter Ardrey received many accolades. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1937, won the inaugural Sidney Howard Memorial Award in 1940, and in 1966 received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay for his script for Khartoum. His most famous play is Thunder Rock.
Ardrey's science writing challenged models in the social sciences of his time. African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, two of his most widely read works, increased public awareness of evolutionary science.Hunt, George P. "Provocateur in Anthropology." Time 26 August 1966: 2. Print.Wokler, Robert. "Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau's Anthropology Revisited." Daedalus Vol. 107, No. 3, Rousseau for Our Time (Summer, 1978), pp. 107-134. Print. However he was heavily criticized by scientists for having misunderstood the science and for misinterpreting the evidence.
Life Ardrey was born in Chicago, the son of Robert Leslie Ardrey, an editor and publisher, and Marie (née Haswell). His father died in 1919 from pneumonia during the influenza epidemic and he was raised by his mother.Ardrey, Robert; Ardrey, Daniel (ed.). "The Education of Robert Ardrey: An Autobiography" (unpublished manuscript ca. 1980, available through Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center) He grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended the nearby University of Chicago, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1930 as a Ph.B.Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, vol. 2, R. Reginald, 1979, pg 801The Robert Ardrey Estate Website. "About" While in attendance, he studied creative writing with Thornton Wilder, who would become his lifelong mentor.Ardrey, Robert. Plays of Three Decades, Introduction. New York: Atheneum. 1968. Print
His first play, Star Spangled, opened on Broadway in 1935 and lasted only a few days, but resulted in the award of a Guggenheim Fellowship. The award granted Ardrey the financial independence to focus on writing plays. Several of his subsequent plays, including Casey Jones, How to Get Tough About It, and his most famous play, Thunder Rock, were produced on Broadway.
In 1938 he moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he would eventually become MGM's highest paid writer.Swanson, H.N. Sprinkled with Ruby Dust: A Hollywood and Literary Memoir. 1989. New York: Warner books. Print. There he wrote many screenplays, including those for adaptations such as The Three Musketeers (1948, with Gene Kelly), Madame Bovary (1949), The Secret Garden (1949), and The Wonderful Country (1959, with Robert Mitchum; The Wonderful Country also had a cameo from famed Negro leagues pitcher Satchel PaigeFrom The Wonderful Country plot summary on iTunes). He also wrote original screenplays, including the screenplay for Khartoum (1966, directed by Basil Dearden, starring Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier) for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay.
During the 1950s Ardrey became increasingly disenchanted with Hollywood and what he saw as the growing role money had started to play in creative decisions.Ardrey, Robert. "What Happened to Hollywood?" The Reporter 24 January 1957: 19-22. PrintArdrey, Robert. "Hollywood's Fall into Virtue." The Reporter 21 February 1957: 13-7. PrintArdrey, Robert. "Hollywood: The Toll of the Frenzied Forties." The Reporter 21 March 1957: 29-33. Print At the same time and largely by accident, he renewed his interest in human origins and human behavior, which he had studied at the University of Chicago. In the summer of 1956 he moved with his wife and two sons to Geneva. He spent the following years traveling in Southern and Eastern Africa, conducting research for what was to become his first book on the subject, African Genesis (1961), ultimately an international bestseller. Subsequently, he went on to write a total of four books in his widely read Nature of Man Series, including his best known book The Territorial Imperative (1966).
In October 1960 he moved with his second wife to Trastevere, Rome, where they lived for 17 years. In 1977 they moved to a small town named Kalk Bay just outside Cape Town, South Africa. He continued to publish influential works until his death on January 14, 1980, from lung cancer. His ashes, along with those of his wife, are interred in the Holy Trinity Church overlooking False Bay.
Theater and film career After graduating from the University of Chicago, under the continuing mentorship of Thornton Wilder, Ardrey wrote a novel, several plays, and many short stories, all of which remained unpublished. It was Wilder's rule that "A young author should not write for market until his style [has] 'crystallized'". Wilder and Ardrey agreed that this moment came with the writing of the play Star Spangled.
Star Spangled opened on Broadway in 1935. It was a comedy that brought to life the classic struggles of an immigrant family living on the South Side of Chicago. It received largely negative reviews and lasted only a few days. However it did catch the attention of notable playwright Sidney Howard, whom Ardrey claims was instrumental in the resulting award of a Guggenheim fellowship for promise as a young playwright. The award allowed Ardrey the financial independence to remain in Chicago and focus on writing plays.
While in Chicago Ardrey wrote two more plays. The first, Casey Jones, was a play about railroad men and their love for their machines. The second, How to Get Tough About It, Ardrey describes as "A proletarian love story of pleasant dimensions." In 1938 Guthrie McClintic presented How to Get Tough About It and Elia Kazan directed Casey Jones.Aldgate, Anthony et al. Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War 2nd ed. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. p. 171. Print. The plays opened ten days apart and were massive failures. In his preface to Plays of Three Decades Ardrey writes:
Ardrey signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and moved for the first time to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. He worked on several projects, including Samuel Goldwyn's notorious boondoggle remake of Graustark, which was cancelled, and a western called The Cowboy and the Lady, from which he was dropped (though he later used most of the plot for his smash success Lady Takes A Chance). While in Los Angeles he would meet and work with Samuel Goldwyn, Clarence Brown, Pandro Berman, Garson Kanin, Gene Fowler, Lillian Hellman, Sidney Howard, and S.N. Behrman.
In 1938, however, he received word that his Broadway agent, Harold Freedman, had sold the film rights to his play How to Get Tough About It. Ardrey decided to use the opportunity to take time off to write a play. He travelled to Tucson where he married Helen Johnson with famed Hollywood director Garson Kanin as his best man. Following his wedding, he sent a note to Samuel Goldwyn which read: "Dear Mr. Goldwyn. I fear that I am wasting your money, and I'm sure you are wasting my time." He moved with his new wife back to the east coast and set to work, first on a minor project which he would abandon, and then on the play that would become Thunder Rock.
Thunder Rock
Robert Ardrey wrote Thunder Rock during the period of escalation in Europe which would lead to World War II. Despairing of the growing isolationism among Americans, Ardrey became convinced that American involvement in the war was a moral necessity. However he did not intend to write a play about the conflict until he was struck by a moment of inspiration during a performance of Swan Lake, in which he conceived of "the play from beginning to end, complete with first, second, and third act curtains."
In his autobiography, Ardrey gives the following summary of the play:
Thunder Rock, an anti-isolationist play, opened on Broadway in November, 1939 to isolationist critics and a public wary of war. It received largely negative reviews and a poor reception. In the introduction to Plays of Three Decades, Ardrey writes that it opened "to the worst reviews I have ever received. Our most eminent critic deplored a play containing so much thunder and so little rock." Despite the negative initial reception, later commentators have described the play as prescient. Though unpopular at the time, it presaged the collapse of American isolationism. It was also one of the few pieces of art to warn not only about the European, but also about the Asian threat. Albert Wertheim remarked, "Ardrey's play is remarkable in another way as well. It is one of the only—perhaps the only—play of the period to see the conflicts and dangers across the Pacific. All other pre-Pearl Harbor plays of note look exclusively across the Atlantic to Hitler, Mussolini, and Europe."Wertheim, Albert. Staging the War: American Drama and World War II. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2005. Pp. 352. Print.
During the summer of 1940 Ardrey discovered, when he read a syndicated column from Britain, that unbeknownst to him Thunder Rock had been having a massively successful run in London. In the column Vincent Sheehan wrote that it had become so emblematic as to be "London's Chu Chin Chow of World War II."Quoted in Anderson, John. "London's Hit May Test Tempo for Our Season" Journal American August 25, 1940. Print. The British rights had been sold to Herbert Marshall, who had launched a production starring Michael Redgrave. The play had been so successful that the British Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, arranged to have the Treasury department fund a production at the Globe Theatre in London's West End.
The play deeply resonated with a British public under siege. Eminent theater critic Harold Hobson wrote of Thunder Rock:
Following its success in London, Thunder Rock has had a lasting legacy. Later in 1940 the BBC broadcast a live radio version,BBC Genome Project. http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/2b7a2614481348ef92324ad4d6a18b70 and in 1946 they produced an adaption for television.BBC Genome Project. http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/e6f5920c71594a48ae4d497a117afece http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/e6f5920c71594a48ae4d497a117afece In 1942, Thunder Rock was turned into a film, directed by the Boulting Brothers, also starring Michael Redgrave. (See Thunder Rock (film))
Shortly following the war, productions of Thunder Rock were quickly launched in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and, most famously, in Allied-occupied Berlin where it was the first modern play to go up in the American zone. It continues to be commonly produced in American university theaters and productions have gone up all around the globe, including in Harare (formerly Salisbury), Zimbabwe, and Nairobi, Kenya.
Hollywood 1939–1946 After Thunder Rock quickly closed on Broadway, Ardrey returned to Hollywood. His first official credit was the screenplay for the adaptation of Sidney Howard's Pulitzer Prize-winning play They Knew What They Wanted (1939). It was directed by Garson Kanin, starred Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton, and was shot on location in Napa Valley. In 1946, after a series of talks with RKO, Ardrey and his new agent Harold Norling Swanson negotiated the first-ever independent contract with a major Hollywood studio for him to write the screen adaptation of the A. J. Cronin novel The Green Years. The contract stipulated that Ardrey could work at his home in Brentwood – an unprecedented studio concession – and he was not to be bothered until he completed the screenplay in around six weeks. The Green Years debuted to record profits and went on to be one of the highest-grossing films of 1946.The Eddie Mannix Ledger, Los Angeles: Margaret Herrick Library, Center for Motion Picture Study.