Joss Whedon: The Biography Read Free Page A

Comment essays, Talk of the Town vignettes about life in the city, political commentaries, features, and short stories. John also found a bride, a woman who shared his love for skillfully crafted words and performance.
    Louise Carroll Angell had been deeply involved with the drama club at Pelham Memorial High School in Pelham, New York. In her junior year, she won a rave review from the local paper for her starring turn as Katherine in Shakespeare’s
Taming of the Shrew
. The year prior, she directed
The Silver Lining
by Constance D’Arcy Mackay, a one-act play that is set in Victorian England and follows Frances “Fanny” Burney as she wrote
Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World
. Burney’s novel was noted for its flawed female protagonist, who determines her own path in a harsh and antagonistic world. Carroll made her own way up to Vassar, one of the all-female Seven Sisters colleges of the Northeast, where she served as the editor in chief of the school’s principal student publication,
Miscellany News
, during the 1930–31 school year. On June 12, 1931, three days after her graduation, she wed John, and they settled into a Greenwich Village apartment on West Tenth Street, a few blocks from Washington Square Park.
    Thomas Avery Whedon was born just over a year later, on August 3, 1932; a daughter, Julia, came four years after. John and Carroll moved their small family out of the Village and in with John’s parents in the Jamaica Estates section of Queens, New York. The extended family lived together in a two-story home on Croydon Road. John and his father commuted into Manhattan—Burt to the law firm of Wing & Russell, his son to the
New Yorker
.
    By 1939 John had moved into radio, writing for NBC. He worked on Rudy Vallée’s variety show, as well as
The Chase and Sanborn Hour
and
Tommy Riggs and Betty Lou
, before taking a lead role writing for the popular comedy
The Great Gildersleeve
in August 1942. There, with writing partner Sam Moore, he was credited with developing more serialized storytelling for the series and expanding the supporting characters tocreate a “vivid, realistic image of wartime small-town America.” Carroll entered the radio business as well, joining CBS in 1941 as copy chief in advertising and sales promotion. After five years with
The Great Gildersleeve
, John once again brought his writing to the stage, and his musical
Texas, Lil’ Darlin
(cowritten by Moore, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) bowed on Broadway on November 25, 1949.
    Tom remembered the daily commitment his father made to his craft. “When I was a child, my father wrote at home,” he said. “He locked himself in the study, and no one was allowed in there. He worked a real nine-to-five day, and he’d break out for lunch for a half-hour. I kept hearing the typewriter going all the time. The 40 years that I was an active member of the Writers Guild, everything I wrote was on a manual typewriter. That sound was important to me.”

    In his teens, Tom attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a then-male-only private preparatory school in New Hampshire. By the time he graduated in 1951, his father had changed his media outlet to television. John started writing for
Lux Video Theatre
, a spin-off of the radio show in which Hollywood stars performed original comedy and dramatic teleplays. But his success was hindered by the witch hunt of the US House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Created in 1938, HUAC investigated people and organizations suspected of having links to Communism or other supposedly subversive ties. In October 1947, the committee held nine days of hearings interrogating over forty people about the alleged Communist propaganda and influence in the motion picture industry. More than three hundred individuals were blacklisted by the studios, with a particular focus on screenwriters who were seen as disseminating Soviet and Communist propaganda through their