Sidney Howard - Career

Career

A particular admirer of the understated realism of French playwright Charles Vildrac, Howard adapted two of his plays into English, under the titles, S. S. Tenacity (1929) and Michael Auclair (1932). One of his greatest successes on Broadway was an adaptation of a French comedy by Rene Fauchois, The Late Christopher Bean. In 1921, Howard had his first Broadway production, with a neo-romantic verse drama, Swords, which failed to win approval from either audiences or critics. It was with his realistic romance, They Knew What They Wanted in 1924 that Howard found recognition. The story of a middle-aged Italian vineyard owner who woos a young woman by mail with a false snapshot of himself, married her, and then forgives her when she becomes pregnant by one of his farm hands, it was praised for its non-judgmental and unmelodramatic view of adultery, and its warm-hearted, tolerant view of all its characters. The play won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was thrice adapted into film (1928, 1930, and 1940) and later became the Broadway musical, The Most Happy Fella. Lucky Sam McCarver, a coolly observed, unsentimental account of the marriage of a New York speakeasy owner on his way up in the world with a self-destructive socialite on her way down, failed to attract audiences but won the admiration of some reviewers. The Silver Cord, a drama about a mother who is pathologically close to her sons and works to undermine their romances, was one of the most successful plays of the 1926-27 Broadway season. Yellow Jack an historical drama about the war against yellow fever was praised for its high purpose and innovative staging when it premiered in 1934.

A prolific writer, and a founding member of the Playwrights' Company, he wrote or created more than seventy plays; he also directed and produced a number of works. In 1922 he married actress Clare Eames (1896–1930) who had played the female lead in Swords. She went on to star in Howard's Lucky Sam McCarver (1925), and Ned McCobb's Daughter (1926) on Broadway, and The Silver Cord in London (1927). Clare Eames was the niece of opera singer Emma Eames on her father's side, and of the inventor Hiram Percy Maxim on her mother's side, and a granddaughter of former Maryland governor, William Thomas Hamilton. Howard and Eames had a daughter, Jennifer Howard. They separated in 1927, and Howard's anger and frustration at the disintegration of his marriage is reflected in his bitter satire of modern matrimony, Half Gods (1929). Following the unexpected death of Eames in 1930, Sidney Howard married Leopoldine (Polly) Damrosch, daughter of the conductor Walter Johannes Damrosch in 1931, with whom he had three children.

Hired by Samuel Goldwyn, Howard worked in Hollywood, writing a number of very successful screenplays. In 1932, Howard was nominated for an Academy Award for his adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel Arrowsmith, and again in 1936 for Dodsworth, which he had adapted for the stage in 1934.

Howard wrote the stage adaption of Humphrey Cobb's novel Paths of Glory which played on Broadway in 1935. The play was a flop because of its harsh anti-war scenes that alienated the audience, as a WWI veteran Howard wanted to show the horrors of war. Convinced that the novel should be filmed, Howard wrote, “It seems to me that our motion picture industry must feel something of a sacred obligation to make the picture.” In 1957 Stanley Kubrick did just that with his film Paths of Glory. Howard's screenplay for Gone with the Wind echoed, perhaps, Paths of Glory, with an unflinching look at the horrors of war.

Posthumously, he won the 1939 Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for Gone with the Wind (he was the only one honored, despite the fact that his script was revised by several other writers). This was the first time a posthumous nominee for any Oscar won the award.