LYNN RIGGS

Attracted toward the stage, Lynn Riggs hitched his wagon to Pegasus and rode into the theatre with an output of poetic and regional plays that has brought him outstanding success as a dramatist--a success secondary only to his ability as a scenarist and director.

The son of a cattleman, and of Cherokee Indian blood, Riggs was born in 1899 on a farm near Claremore, Oklahoma, during territorial days. As a boy he drove a grocery wagon and read lurid tales. Upon graduation from the Oklahoma Military Academy in 1917 he caught a freight train to Chicago where he was employed for a time by the Adams Express Company. From there he went on to New York where he swept out Wall Street offices, reported on the Wall Street Journal, and sold books at Macy's for $10 a week. For entertainment, he saw as many plays as possible.

Returning to Oklahoma in 1919, Riggs worked in Tulsa as a reporter on the Oil and Gas Journal. The poetry and the romantic death of Alan Seeger gave him the desire to write and he took up the study of modern poetry. The stage was foremost in his mind, however, and he went to Los Angeles in the fall, where he worked as an extra with such favorites as Pauline Frederick, Jack Pickford, Wallace Reid, and Hobart Bosworth. Forced into other work, he read proof on the Los Angeles Times. This paper published his first poem, but any satisfaction in seeing it in print was destroyed by the editor who, in jest, named the poem Spasm.

Lynn Riggs entered the University of Oklahoma in 1920, and taught freshmen English there in 1922-23. While there, he corresponded with John McClure, whose poetry had influenced him, and who, like himself, was a literary protege of H. L. Mencken, then editor with George Jean Nathan, of Smart Set. Riggs had been selling poetry to the better magazines since 1919, and exerted a direct influence on the group of poets then in the university.

Another writer with whom Riggs enjoyed close friendship was W. S. Campbell. They encouraged each other in their work, and later were to experience national recognition the same month of the same year.

When the poet, Witter Bynner, lectured at the University of Oklahoma in 1922, he and Riggs became friends, and the following year, upon Bynner's suggestion, Riggs moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to recover from an illness.

By 1926 Riggs was back in New York hoping to crash Broadway. In the meantime he had worked on a chicken ranch, in a glass factory, sung in a Chautauqua quartet and in a picture show, and had written poetry. The play he was offering was The Domino Parlor. He showed it to Eugene O'Neill who showed it to Zoe Akins, supervisor for the Schuberts. Miss Akins had the negotiations for purchase under way within twenty-four hours. Lionel Barrymore said it was the best play he had read in twenty years.

In all, Lynn Riggs has written some fifteen plays of which at least ten have been produced or bought for production, or published, and most of which are about Old Indian Territory.

His first play was Cuckoo, written during the Christmas holiday at the university in 1920. It was a farce with a college fraternity setting and was produced at the university in the spring of 1921, and again in the summer. Knives from Syria (1928), a one act play, was produced by the Santa Fe Players in 1925. It received a reading in Chicago through the influence of Altha Leah Bass, but was not produced. Sump'n Like Wings was scheduled for production in New York in 1926 by a theatre group backed by Otto Kahn, but the plans failed. When Big Lake (1927), Riggs's first Broadway production, opened at the American Laboratory Theatre, April 7, 1927, Burns Mantle predicted that something fine would come of the talent shown.

Riggs's next offerings were A Lantern to See By, published in 1928; Rancor, produced by a repertory theatre in Philadelphia; Domino Parlor, tried out by the Schuberts in 1928, but failed to reach Broadway; and The Lonesome West, which had a like fate.

Borned in Texas, written between Hollywood assignments, and produced by Arthur Hopkins under the title, Roadside (1930) was a failure. Just before it opened at the Dallas Little Theatre in 1936, John Rosenfield, Jr., writing in The Dallas News of June 5, 1936, said, "Borned in Texas is the original but discarded title of a play known as Roadside, which was such a thumping failure on Broadway when Arthur Hopkins produced it that the debacle lent a curious prestige to the piece." Hopkins, one of the most discriminating of Broadway producers, still calls Roadside the greatest of American dramas.

Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), produced by the Theatre Guild in New York, was rated one of the ten best plays of the year. Lynn Riggs started writing it in the Cafe De Deux Magots on the Left Bank in Paris, when he was there in 1928 on a Guggenheim Fellowship. He finished the play five months later in the south of France. It was an outstanding production at the Dallas Little Theatre during the week of March 7, 1932, and was again produced in Dallas at the Festival of Southwestern Plays, on May 10, 1935, at the Twentieth Anniversary of Southern Methodist University.

Cherokee Night, deals with the vanishing Indian tribes of the Southwest. Son of Perdition is a dramatization of James Gould Cozzens' book. More Sky was produced by Riggs at the Northwestern University Theatre during the summer of 1934.

Russet Mantle (1936), which opened in New York City, January 16, 1936, Riggs's first attempt at a contemporary subject, was a success artistically and financially. It was a satirical comedy concerned with the difficulties with which modern youth is faced. Brooks Atkinson, drama critic of the New York Times, said in his review; "It was gorgeously acted last evening at the Masque Theatre, where it ought to hang its hat for a long time. For this is a fragment of the comedie humaine--wise, fresh and incorrigibly ridiculous, and by all odds the best thing Mr. Riggs has done...The spirit is gay and the thinking is sane...It is a temptation to say that Russet Mantle is a priceless comedy, but that phrase might be misconstrued and sound like patronizing comment. Let us say merely that it is modest, light, sensible and funny. Pure comedy, in fact."

Riggs creates successfully for both screen and stage, and has spent much time in Hollywood with the Pathe Studios. The scenarios of "Garden of Allah," with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer, and "The Plainsman," with Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, both have the Riggs touch. In his scenario work he prefers to free-lance and is not under contract to any one studio.

His poetry has been collected under the title, The Iron Dish (1930). Many of the poems had appeared in The Nation, The Bookman, The New Republic, New York Herald-Tribune, Palms, American Mercury, Contemporary Verse, and The Reviewer. He is also editor of Cowboy Songs, Folk Songs and Ballads (1932).

When not in New York or Hollywood, he shares a Spanish house, at 770 Acequia Madre, Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a black German shepherd dog, Franz, the gift of Francis Lederer, and a Scottie, Baron, given to him by Joan Crawford.