The Life and Times Of Avery Hopwood (1882 - 1928)
		By Thomas E. Loewe Hopwood felt a lifelong and increasing disappointment in his work. His commercial success was spectacular; his artistic aspirations spectacularly failed. So there may have been something remedial in his bequest, a way of assisting young talent to avoid the very temptations he himself perforce embraced. For the award is more than monetary; it entails a laying-on-of-hands, a kind of professional welcome to the world of words.--Nicholas Delbanco, chair of the Hopwood Awards Committee, in his new introduction to Avery Hopwood: His Life and Plays by Jack F. Sharrar. The University of Michigan Press re-released the 1989 biography in February.

When the playwright Avery Hopwood '05 paid his last visit to Ann Arbor in June 1924, he visited his young frat brothers at the old Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji) house on Oxford Street. After a happy evening of reminiscing and heavy drinking (unbridled intoxication being emblematic of the era), the besotted Hopwood stumbled outside to an awaiting taxi. He turned before entering the vehicle and shouted, "If you never see me again, remember me this way boys!"

When Hopwood died four years later, he left hundreds of thousands of dollars as a legacy to his alma mater, stipulating that the money be used to benefit student writers. Since 1930-31, the Hopwood Awards Committee has awarded roughly one-and-a-half million dollars in prizes to 2,500 students.Among the more prominent writers to win Hopwoods are Max Apple, John Ciardi, Robert Hayden, Lawrence Kasdan, Arthur Miller, Frank O'Hara, Marge Piercy and Nancy Willard.

Hopwood was the most commercially successful playwright of his era, the Neil Simon of his day. From 1910 to roughly 1927, Avery Hopwood was the toast of Broadway. His comediesÑhighly polished gems of formulaic playwrighting bearing such now forgotten titles as Up In Mabel's Room, Getting Gertie's Garter, The Harem and Naughty Cinderella--were seen by tens of thousands of Jazz Age theatergoer.s This master of the bedroom farce was so popular that he once had four plays on Broadway simultaneously. Hopwood was a staunch "Michigan Man." He first walked across the "Diag" in 1901, and was graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1905. While at U-M, he was deeply involved in frat life. He wrote for the Fiji journal, was a member of its songbook committee and was the chapter's pianist.

His connection with the Fiji's had a significant impact on his early success. When he launched his career, the Fijis would arrive in droves on opening nights to help give a boost to Hopwood's plays--especially if the play in question opened in a college town such as Syracuse, New Haven or Columbus. Once in the lobby, the local brotherhood would move en masse down the aisles of the theater, chanting in procession. Their boisterous applause and laughter would have a sure effect on the local newspaper critics, and the play would gain notoriety.

Hopwood once wrote, "I think I'd be superstitious enough to fear for the fate of the play if it didn't open with the Phi Gamma Delta boys in the audience."

A prolific writer, he wrote 35 plays and had 33 film adaptations made of his works. But even though he was the king of comedy in his day, his works are seldom performed today. One of the few occasions a Hopwood play has reached the stage in our era was the U-M production in February of the Jazz Age romp The Best of People, directed by drama professor Philip Kerr. Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that Hopwood's plays lack currency for contemporary audiences; after all, his comedies are of a period that is only faintly remembered today. America was among the victors of a bloody world war, the stock market was soaring and, in spite of Prohibition, illegal booze was cheap, plentiful and readily available.

Hopwood's world was teeming with flappers, chorus girls and gold diggers (a term, by the way, that he coined), and his characters were the habitués of chic speakeasies, movie studios and the backstage.Thecharacters in a Hopwood comedy drank champagne and listened to "hot" jazz. The things that occurred in their bedrooms were far more important than anything that happened in their living rooms.

Hopwood's farces were naughty enough for him to often run into trouble with censors. For example, in 1921 when the playwright was at the height of his career, a New York City magistrate indicted a theater owner for presenting Hopwood's The Demi-Virgin, alleging: "This play is an intentional appeal, for the profit of the box office, to the lustful and the licentious, to the morbidly erotic, to the vulgar and disorderly minds." The case went all the way to the appellate division of the Supreme Court before being overturned.

As wildly popular as his farces were, however, Hopwood's brand of humor was quickly forgotten after the '29 Crash.

Avery Hopwood's private life was a fascinating mess. He drank hard (especially in his later years), allegedly used cocaine and was a painfully closeted homosexual, which only his closest friends knew. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were trusted personal friends, as were Carl "Buddy" Van Vechten and his wife, Fania Marinoff. Van Vechten was the music critic for the New York Times and an enthusiastic promoter of the arts. It was through the Van Vechtens, who ran a remarkable salon out of their apartment on West 55th Street in New York City, that Hopwood became intimately acquainted with the foremost cultural figures of his day.

Hopwood's death has a touch of the mysterious in it. He was vacationing on the French Riviera and spent his final day drinking heavily. Later, he decided to go for a swim. He was accompanied by a young man later identified as "a soldier of the Twentieth Battalion of Chasseurs." After sharing a beer with a lifeguard, Hopwood waded into the water and began swimming. Suddenly, he let out a shriek and slipped beneath the surface. He never came up again.

The doctor on the scene suggested that there were "bluish marks" found on the body (bruises?), but concluded that Hopwood died of "cerebral congestion perhaps brought on by acute intoxication." What makes the death more mysterious was the arrival at the resort a week later of John Floyd, an alleged lover who Hopwood believed, as he stated in a letter to Gertrude Stein, was intent on murdering him.

After the playwright's death, Floyd received a sizable sum of money from the Hopwood estate. The mysterious Floyd was later confined to a psychiatric hospital in New York where he died in 1961.

Thomas E. Loewe is the promotion coordinator for University Productions, School of Music.