Robert E. Lee; Co-Wrote ‘Auntie Mame’

Robert E. Lee, half of the distinguished writing team that brought the incorrigible “Auntie Mame” and the politically significant “Inherit the Wind” to theatergoers around the world, has died.

His daughter, Lucy Lee, announced over the weekend that her father had died of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Friday. He was 75.

With his collaborator of 50 years, Jerome Lawrence, Lee brought to radio and then to stage, television and film some of the brightest and enlightening productions in the entertainment world.

Among their other works is the current “Whisper in the Wind” and such long ago favorites as “Look Ma, I’m Dancin’!” The latter was conceived by Jerome Robbins, directed by George Abbott and starred Nancy Walker as a brewery heiress who tries to bridge the world of ballet. It opened on Broadway in 1948 and was the first in a string of successes that continued nearly until Lee’s death.

“He was the most remarkable, intelligent, brilliant, creative mind I have ever known in my life,” Lawrence told the Associated Press.

“Inherit the Wind” was a fictionalization of the 1925 trial of John Thomas Scopes, who advocated Darwinism in a state that required creationism be taught in schools.

The 1955 play--which originally starred Paul Muni, Ed Begley and Tony Randall--was widely praised and sold almost 2.5 million copies in printed form.

It has been translated into 34 languages, including Urdu and Russian, and seen around the world.

In it the two playwrights made Scopes a symbol of not just evolution versus divine creation but of a philosophical struggle with the education and political establishments and a person’s right to think and teach.

“It was written because we were indignant, appalled at thought control in the mid-’50s,” the McCarthy era, Lawrence said. “So we went back in history to another case where people were being told what to learn, what to think, and it did have a great effect on the country. It was combatting McCarthyism,” he said.

It was made into an award-winning film in 1960 starring Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gene Kelly and Florence Eldridge and was a “Hallmark Hall of Fame” production on TV in 1965 starring Melvyn Douglas--who had filled in temporarily for Muni on Broadway--and Begley.

“Auntie Mame” was their comedic examination of a free-spirited woman based on the writings of Patrick Dennis, which later was adapted for the big screen and n made into the musical “Mame,” for which Lee wrote the book.

At one point after its 1956 Broadway release starring Rosalind Russell (who also was featured in the film), it was being produced by five stage companies simultaneously.

Angela Lansbury was the first star of the musical “Mame” on Broadway in 1966. It ran for nearly four years.

“The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail” was a play by Lee and Lawrence of a night Henry David Thoreau was incarcerated for not paying his taxes because the United States was fighting what he believed was an unjust war with Mexico.

That too was widely produced after its first semiprofessional staging at UCLA in 1970. Lee had taught theater at the Westwood campus for the last 20 years of his life.

Born in Elvira, Ohio, Lee attended Ohio Wesleyan University and then moved to New York where he was a director of radio advertisements for Young & Rubicam. It was there he met Lawrence, and they sketched out over lunch their first collaboration, a radio production, “Inside a Kid’s Head.”

Lee helped found Armed Forces Radio after the bombing of Pearl Harbor before writing for the stage, which became his true love.

“They (Lawrence-Lee) always preferred theater because that’s where the writer is really revered,” Lucy Lee said. “In the theater there’s a kind of purity about the playwright’s role that they enjoyed.”

Their latest, “Whisper in the Wind,” was written in conjunction with Norman Cousins and produced in Arizona and Missouri.

Other plays from the Lee-Lawrence collaboration were the Cold War drama “A Call on Kuprin” and “First Monday in October,” about the first woman on the Supreme Court.

Lee had recently completed a book about Gen. Robert E. Lee, to whom he was not related. Lucy Lee said the book, which has not yet found a publisher, reflected “his lifelong and passionate fascination with the man whose name he shared.”

“It’s his most personal writing,” she added.

In addition to his daughter, Lee is survived by a son, Jonathan, and two grandchildren. He is also survived by his wife, actress Janet Waldo, whose voice first became widely known when she starred in “Meet Corliss Archer” on radio and more recently as Judy Jetson in the animated TV series “The Jetsons.”

The family asks that contributions be made to the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University.