A theatrical life, minus the drama

HORTON FOOTE

America's Storyteller

By Wilborn Hampton

Free Press.

292 pp., $28

When the dramatist Horton Foote died this past March at 92, he left a legacy of nearly 100 works for theater, film and television, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "The Young Man From Atlanta" and the Academy Award-winning screenplays for "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Tender Mercies." And it keeps coming: Next year the off-Broadway Signature Theatre Company and the Hartford Stage Company will devote their seasons to mounting the Orphans' Home Cycle, a three-part cycle of nine plays. It would seem that Foote has become what the subtitle of this admiring biography calls him: America's storyteller. But the Hallmark-worthy sobriquet, like the book itself, doesn't do justice to the complexity that lies under the smooth surface of Foote's life and work.

Although Foote knew his share of adversity, he was blessed with loving and supportive parents, a long and happy marriage, talented and adoring children, and a calm, sunny temperament. In other words, he seems the polar opposite of his fellow bards of heartland angst, Tennessee Williams and William Inge, whose lives and plays were struggles with family tragedy, drugs, drink, repression and depression. And Wilborn Hampton, a New York Times correspondent and drama critic hand-picked by Foote to write his biography, wants to leave it at that.

So, with anecdotes and even language familiar from his subject's early-life memoir, "Farewell and Beginnings," Hampton recounts Foote's childhood in Wharton, Tex., and his fascination with the family stories of his grandparents and maiden aunts. Hampton writes of the hard times Foote endured trying to break into theater during the Depression. But he doesn't probe the source of Foote's theatrical dreams -- unlikely ones for a small-town Southern boy -- or why his parents supported and, in the beginning, subsidized them. He tells how, when success on the boards proved elusive, Foote's colleague Agnes de Mille suggested he try creating plays rather than performing in them ("Write about what you know," she told him); and he shows how the fledgling playwright transmuted the tales of his Wharton childhood into the first of a series of quiet dramas of ordinary men and women struggling to do the best they can in changing circumstances. But he doesn't question what it cost Foote to put away his acting ambitions -- or what his stage experience added to his writing for the theater. If Foote didn't tell us in his memoir, Hampton seems reluctant to ask.

He doesn't dig much deeper when he's on his own ground. His discussion of Foote's mature career covers the years spent crafting dramas for the new medium of television; Foote's on-again, off-again relationship with the film industry (studio heads were bemused by his lack of razzle-dazzle); his increasing use of his family history in his writing; the gradual acceptance of his body of theater work off Broadway and in regional houses, climaxing with his 1995 Pulitzer Prize.

But what made things start to click for Foote in the mid-1950s, when he became a person of substantial interest to Broadway and to Hollywood? Hampton describes the discipline of regular performance and the sharpness demanded by television's one-hour format, but never connects these to the focus that led Foote to write "The Trip to Bountiful" -- the 1953 teleplay that changed his career. Why, as time went on, did Foote insist on casting his plays and independently produced films with members of his extended family -- some of them excellent actors, such as his daughter Hallie, but others less so? Was he trying to replicate in these productions the family-story world of his childhood? Again, the questions that would give dimension to the story are ignored.

Finally, did this playwright -- who wrote so subtly but affectingly about loss -- have nothing to regret in his own life? Hampton tells how, in the course of a few months in 1992, Foote's beloved wife, Lillian, became ill and died in a Christian Science hospice -- of what, Hampton can't say, "though cancer seemed almost certain." Hampton apparently didn't query Foote about what killed her or look up her death certificate; but didn't he ask himself whether Foote's grief over her death was mixed with guilt, or anger, about not seeking medical intervention for her?

Elsewhere he writes of Foote's friendship with choreographer Jerome Robbins, but he seems not to know that the two lived together briefly in the early 1940s and that for Robbins, at least, their friendship had romantic overtones. When I asked Foote about this in researching my 2006 biography of Robbins, "Somewhere," he claimed to have scant memory of that time; but the poignant denouement of "The Young Man From Atlanta" makes me wonder. In that play a grieving couple comes to terms with their belief that their son, who committed suicide, may have been a closeted homosexual. "I failed him," says his father. "I never tried to understand what he was like. . . . And then he was gone." What sources fed Foote's understanding of his characters here? Hampton doesn't ask, and we will never know.

Amanda Vaill's screenplay for the PBS documentary "Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About" was recently nominated for an Emmy Award.