Biography of Samuel Taylor

San Francisco Chronicle, May 27, 2000. -- Playwright Samuel Taylor, author of such Broadway hits as ``Sabrina Fair'' and ``The Pleasure of his Company,'' as well as the screenplay of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller ``Vertigo,'' died yesterday at his home in Blue Hill, Maine. Mr. Taylor, who was 87, had been in failing health for the past year. Although he considered himself primarily a playwright, in an irony he fully appreciated, he was best known for two movies he co- wrote -- ``Vertigo'' and the 1954 version of ``Sabrina,'' based on his play and later remade as a 1995 film starring Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond. Mr. Taylor was born in Chicago, and his family moved to San Francisco when he was an infant. He graduated from Lowell High School and attended the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1930s, interrupting his studies from time to time to ship out as a merchant seaman. In the mid-1930s, Mr. Taylor moved to New York to be a writer. He asked Harold Ross for a job at The New Yorker magazine, but when Ross assigned him to go out and interview people, Mr. Taylor quickly found that journalism was not his strong suit. More interested in theater, he soon found a job reading plays for an agent. When the agent found plays that looked promising but needed work he asked Mr. Taylor for his ideas. Mr. Taylor rewrote many plays, some of which were later produced. Although he received no listed credit, his reputation in the theater community grew and he got jobs as a play doctor and rewrite man. Toward the end of the 1930s, Mr. Taylor worked on Clifford Goldsmith's play ``What A Life,'' and he later wrote scripts for the radio series ``The Aldrich Family,'' based on the Goldsmith play. After marrying singer Suzanne Combes Robinson in 1940, Mr. Taylor worked in radio and the nascent television industry. While keeping his day job as a radio and TV writer, Mr. Taylor spent several years writing ``The Happy Time,'' a comedy about the foibles of a French-Canadian family in 1920s Ottawa, adapted from the Robert Fontaine novel. The play opened in 1950 to glowing reviews, and Mr. Taylor gave up writing radio comedies so he could devote full time to his own plays. ``Sabrina Fair,'' with Joseph Cotten and Margaret Sullavan, a Cinderella story about a chauffeur's daughter who falls in love with the millionaire son of the family that employs her father, opened three years later. Director Billy Wilder later made it into a movie with Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn and William Holden. Mr. Taylor then wrote ``The Pleasure of His Company'' with Cornelia Otis Skinner, who co-starred with Cyril Ritchard. The play was set in San Francisco and one critic called it ``the sort of gay and silken comedy of manners that puts everyone at ease on and off the stage.'' While working on that play, Mr. Taylor was hired by Hitchcock to try to salvage the script of ``Vertigo,'' which had already been through two writers. Mr. Taylor wrote a substantially different screenplay, adding characters and deciding to let the audience in on the film's secret two-thirds of the way through, rather than waiting until the end, as in previous versions. According to Dan Auiler's book, ``Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic,'' Mr. Taylor also reached into his childhood memory of growing up in the Bay Area to introduce bits and pieces of San Francisco color that had not been in the original script. Although most of the final movie was Mr. Taylor's work, enough of writer Alec Coppel's script remained to allow the Writers' Guild to order that both writers share the credit. Among Mr. Taylor's other movie credits were another Hitchcock picture, ``Topaz,'' as well as ``The Eddy Duchin Story, ``Goodbye Again,'' and ``Rosie.'' ``Vertigo,'' which premiered in 1958, was given a new lease on life in 1996 when a restored version of the film was released nationwide in a 70mm print. In 1998, the American Film Institute named ``Vertigo'' one of America's 100 best movies. Mr. Taylor's only foray into the world of musicals produced the 1962 Broadway play ``No Strings.'' Mr. Taylor wrote the book and Richard Rodgers provided the music and lyrics. The story of a white expatriate writer in Paris (Richard Kiley) who falls in love with a black model (Diahann Carroll) played for more than a year in New York, but plans for a movie version were scotched when producers said they feared a backlash from movie distributors in the South. At the time of his death, Mr. Taylor was working on a play set in Northern California in the mid-19th century. Mr. Taylor was a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Writers' Guild of America, the Century Association and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was a past president of the Dramatists Play Service. He is survived by his wife, Suzanne, of Blue Hill, Maine; two sons, David Taylor of Brookline, Mass., and Michael Taylor of Berkeley; a stepdaughter, Ellinor Mitchell of New York; and nine grandchildren.