Bell, Book and Candle

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John Van Druten (1901-1957)

Influential in ways most know, but have not discovered, Van Druten was a prince of Broadway in the 1940s and 50s when the comedies he wrote and staged were in demand and very successful. Not only did he pen Bell, Book and Candle (a precursor to Bewitched), but he also wrote I am a Camera, based on The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, which was eventually adapted into the famous musical, Cabaret (1966).

John Van Druten (Courtesy Douglas Ebersole)

An imaginative writer from an early age in England, Van Druten immigrated to the States after success in the West End of London. He would go to write in California, and that is where he passed away after never fully recovering from heart complications. The film version of Bell, Book and Candle came out a year later.

In the summer of 1940, Williams fled to Mexico to try to forget about a recently ended love affair and find inspiration for his writing. During his travels he visits almost all the cities and locales mentioned in this play. In addition to the date in the play being identical, there are many other autobiographical nuances Williams writes into his play. He, too, showed up with hardly any money at a hotel called the Costa Verde outside of Acapulco that had Germans swarming around, which he came to loathe. He, too, composed a poem while there which appears in the play, only slightly altered. Also while there he, too, was haunted by “blue devils”—a manifestation of Williams’ insecurities and fears about his love life and his career which continued to haunt him the rest of his life. Undoubtedly, he, too, enjoyed a rum coco.

The ingredients of that vacation would take almost twenty years to coalesce into what is roundly thought of as his last great play. The play went through different incarnations as a short story, a one-act play for the Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds, and an original title of Two Acts of Grace. On December 28, 1961, The Night of the Iguana opened in New York. The play seared its reputation into the American cultural canon by winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and by Time magazine placing Williams on its March 9, 1962 cover, proclaiming him “America’s greatest living playwright.” Perhaps more than anything that has sustained this play is the idea Williams himself revealed by saying the play is about “how to live beyond despair and still live.”

 

Dates of Interest In American Witchcraft