Joss Whedon: The Biography Read Free Page B

scripts.
    HUAC held a second Hollywood investigation in 1951, pushing many of those under investigation to cooperate by naming others with Communist involvement. When one of them implicated a writer John had worked with on
Gildersleeve
, John himself was blacklisted as well. His agent recommended that he relocate to the West Coast full time in hopes that the blacklist wouldn’t follow him. By this time, he and Carroll were living separately; they would finalize their divorce in August 1954.
    John’s move paid off. He spent the next decade writing in Hollywood for such series as the television version of
The Great Gildersleeve, Kraft Television Theatre
(for which he received an Emmy nomination),
Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, The Andy Griffith Show
, and
The Dick Van Dyke Show
.

    Tom Whedon did not move to California with his father, as he had been accepted into Harvard University’s class of 1957. In Cambridge, Tom both showed off his athletic prowess on the lacrosse field and made a big impression on the Harvard stage. Like his father years earlier, he cowrote the book for the Hasty Pudding musical, 1953’s
Ad Man Out
. In addition to his time with Hasty Pudding Theatricals, he expanded his range through his work in the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC).
    At the time, Harvard did not admit women into its undergraduate studies program, but it was closely connected to Radcliffe, one of the Seven Sisters women’s colleges. Radcliffe was considered a school of the arts; by the early 1900s, its women had established groups to put on theatrical performances of their own. Students took on every facet of production, from writing scripts and scores to building sets and directing. As Harvard often had men playing women’s roles, Radcliffe women played heroic, dramatic, and romantic male roles. Until World War I, men were completely forbidden to perform in Radcliffe shows.
    However, in 1955, Radcliffe’s main outlet for theatrical and artistic expression, the Idler Club, was shuttered, halfway through the schooling of undergrad Lee Jeffries. An English major with a desire to be on stage, Lee wasn’t deterred—she forged ahead, taking active roles in every possible performance put on by various dramatic groups at Radcliffe’s brother school, Harvard, including the HRDC. She was soon cast in several musicals and plays, including
The Seagull
and
Alice in Wonderland
, the latter directed by Tom Whedon. Tom performed in those plays and other HRDC productions as well; he and Lee even appeared opposite each other in the club’s first musical outing,
Great to Be Back!
, scoring two of the few accolades for the performance in the Harvard school paper’s review of the production: “Lee Jeffries and Thomas Whedon were the stalwarts of the cast…. Miss Jeffries was the only reason for including atired sequence about planned amusement at the beach, and Whedon met every demand of the evening good-humoredly and ably.”
    The pairing continued offstage. “My mother … was extremely intelligent and witty,” Joss said. “I think that’s what attracted her and my father in the first place.” In May 1959, Lee and Tom were married in her home state of Kentucky. Her father, James Harvey Jeffries, a Jewel Tea salesman and another Harvard grad, was living in Louisville with his second wife, Margaret. Her mother, Anna Lee Hill Jeffries, had died in August 1954, five years before her daughter married.
    The Whedons had already relocated from Cambridge to New York City, where Lee was on the administrative staff at Finch College. Finch was a girls’ finishing school that had gotten its accreditation as a baccalaureate liberal arts college seven years before Lee joined the staff. It was founded in 1900 by Jessica Garretson Finch (later Cosgrave), a women’s rights activist who campaigned for suffrage; feeling that her undergraduate studies at Barnard left her without any practical skills, she was determined to establish a