Queer Places:
Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002
Joseph Moncure March (July 27, 1899
New York City - February 14, 1977
Los
Angeles,
California) was an American poet and essayist, best known for his long
narrative poems
The Wild Party and
The Set-Up. According to the artist Art Spiegelman (in the
introduction to his 1994 edition),
William Burroughs claimed the narrative of
The Wild Party was “the book that made me want to become a writer.” By
no stretch can the poem be called even a gay novella, but its caricatures of
the three gays remain etched in the memories of readers. It has been loosely
adapted as a movie and has become the basis for two separate musicals. The
Merchant Ivory Productions 1975 version of
The Wild Party changes March's plot to conflate the poem with the
Fatty Arbuckle scandal, starring James Coco and Raquel Welch.
The Wild Party continues to attract new readers and adaptations. In
2000, two separate musical versions played in New York, one on
Broadway, composed by
Michael John LaChiusa, and the other
off-Broadway, composed by
Andrew Lippa, with mixed critical and popular success. The Archives &
Special Collections at Amherst College holds a substantial collection of
March's personal papers, including unpublished poems, scripts, and a memoir
entitled Hollywood Idyll.
After serving in
World
War I and graduating from
Amherst College (where he was a protégé of
Robert Frost), March was managing editor of
The New Yorker in 1925, and helped create the magazine's "Talk of the
Town" front section. He left the magazine, and wrote the first of his two
important long
Jazz Age
narrative poems,
The Wild Party. Due to its risqué content, this violent story of a
vaudeville dancer who throws a booze and sex-filled party could not find a
publisher until 1928. Once published, however, the poem was a great success
despite being
banned in
Boston. March followed with
The Set-Up, a poem about a black boxer who had just been released from
prison.
In 1929, March moved to Hollywood to provide additional dialogue for the
film
Journey's End and, more famously, to turn the silent version of
Howard Hughes' classic
Hell's Angels into a
talkie — a rewrite that brought the phrase "Excuse me while I put on
something more comfortable" into the American lexicon. March stayed with
Hughes'
Caddo Pictures studio for several years, temporarily running the office,
overseeing the release of Hell's Angels, and getting into legal trouble
after an attempt to steal the script for rival
Warner Bros.' flying picture
The Dawn Patrol.
March worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood until 1940, under contract to
MGM and Paramount and later as a freelancer for
Republic Pictures and other studios; he wrote at least 19 produced scripts
in his Hollywood career. His most prominent late script is probably the
left-leaning
John
Wayne curio
Three Faces West, a knockoff of
The Grapes of Wrath that ends with a faceoff between
Okies and
Nazis.
With his third wife, Peggy Prior (a
Pathé
screenwriter) and her two children, March returned to the East Coast in 1940.
During
World War II, he worked at a shipbuilding plant in
Groton, Connecticut, and wrote features (mostly acid assessments of the
movie business) for the
New York Times Magazine. In later years, he wrote documentaries for
the
State Department and
industrial films for
Ford Motor Company,
General Motors,
Monsanto Company,
American Airlines, and others. Several films starring industrial films
icon
Thelma "Tad" Tadlock, including
Design for Dreaming (1956) and
A Touch of Magic (1961) were made from March's rhyming scripts. March
died in 1977.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Moncure_March
- Gunn, Drewey Wayne. Gay American Novels, 1870-1970 (p.14). McFarland &
Company, Inc., Publishers. Edizione del Kindle.