Donald R. Seawell celebrated his 90th birthday in style – with a black-tie gala in the $16 million ballroom that bears his name. And why not? “By the time you’re 90, you’ve outlived most your enemies,” he joked.
Seawell, now 94, would be first to admit he has acquired and outlived many enemies during his colorful and controversial life in the spotlight. His multifaceted career included producing more than 65 Broadway plays, debating at Oxford Union against Winston Churchill, conducting World War II counterintelligence, publishing The Denver Post, and founding the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and Denver Performing Arts Complex – the world’s largest under one roof.
Seawell once said the day he retires “is the day they take me out of here in a box.” He hasn’t retired, but last week he did what many once thought unthinkable: He resigned as chairman and chief executive of the DCPA in favor of former University of Denver chancellor Daniel L. Ritchie. Seawell will remain in an emeritus position.
“We’re witnessing the passing of the torch from one great legendary figure to another,” said trustee Judi Wolf.
In 2002, Queen Elizabeth II conferred upon Seawell the honorary award of Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. In January, the two-time Tony Award winner was given the Theatre Hall of Fame’s Founder’s Award in New York. But his permanent, singular legacy will be the arts complex he built out of a ghostly part of downtown Denver.
Today the complex hosts more than 10,500 seats in 10 venues and is home to the Colorado Ballet, Opera Colorado, Colorado Symphony, Broadway tours and his own Denver Center Theatre Company.
“There was absolutely no demand for it at the time,” said former DCPA president Lester Ward. “But Don said, ‘Denver will never be a great city unless you have a great performing arts complex.’ And so he saw to it that Denver got one.”
Wellington Webb, Denver’s mayor from 1991 to 2003, called Seawell “a pioneer with a clear vision and a singular focus on the expansion of the performing arts complex.”
“Some people perceived him as a little rough along the edges in terms of getting his way,” Webb added, “but that charge can be made of all of us who are in positions of authority and have a mission to accomplish. On balance, he’s done a magnificent job.”
DCPA trustee Margot Gilbert Frank called Seawell “a visionary who put Denver on the international map.” Wolf said Seawell will go down as the most important builder of culture in Colorado history.
“He has my vote, hands down,” she said.
A diverse legacy
Seawell leaves beloved, reviled, respected and feared. Since the 1972 death of longtime Denver Post owner Helen G. Bonfils, his client and producing partner, Seawell has both enjoyed profuse praise for founding the center and weathered lingering resentment over his 1986 closing of the theater Bonfils built and ran for 40 years on East Colfax Avenue.
Seawell has counted among his friends Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Joseph Kennedy, Prince Charles, Noel Coward and a playbill full of star actors, including Tallulah Bankhead, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne and Howard Lindsay.
He considered his greatest accomplishment being married for 59 years to actress, playwright and poet Eugenia Rawls, but he also took great pride in presiding over The Post from 1966-81 and starting the DCPA. He considered his 2002 honor from the queen “the icing on the cake,” because “I have had a love affair with England since my misspent youth.”
Seawell spent a lifetime promoting the cross-pollination of British and American theater. In 1962, he became the first producer to bring the Royal Shakespeare Company to America. He directed the RSC’s “The Hollow Crown on Broadway,” and two years later, he brought “King Lear and “The Comedy of Errors” to New York to mark the 400th birthday of Shakespeare. He was the first American named to the RSC’s board of governors.
One artistic endeavor ranks above all else: In 2000, Seawell brought the 10-play epic Trojan War cycle “Tantalus” to Denver with his own money, which some reports put as high as $8 million.
“It was the largest theater project in the 2,500-year history of the theater,” Seawell said. “Nothing has come along like it, and it probably won’t ever happen again.
“It brought more attention to the Denver Center than anything else we have ever done. It brought critics from all over the world. It brought people from more than 40 countries.”
RSC artistic director Adrian Noble called “Tantalus” “an extraordinary, landmark event in world culture that would never have happened without Donald Seawell.”
After RSC founder Peter Hall failed to woo European investors for “Tantalus,” Seawell not only came forward offering the services of the Denver Center, he insisted that no money from the center be put at risk.
“I call him my deus ex-machina,” Hall said at the time. “When I had failed to raise the money we needed, Donald came along with that rare mixture of madness and shrewdness which marks all good impresarios and said, ‘I’ll do it.’ He allowed us to dream our dream.”
Prince Charles wrote to Seawell congratulating him on the queen’s honor, stating: “Personally, I could not be more grateful, as a very proud president of the Royal Shakespeare Company, for all your support for this wonderful organization. I know the company has always been impressed and delighted by your active involvement with all that they do, most recently by making possible the ‘Tantalus’ project.”
Frogs, a poet and a Kennedy
Seawell was born Aug. 1, 1912, in Jonesboro, N.C., where the young redhead developed a lifelong if inexplicable affinity for frogs. He earned his law degree from the University of North Carolina, where in 1932 he saw fellow student Rawls walking across the campus.
“I went up to her and said, ‘My name is Don Seawell, and I am going to marry you,”‘ he said. Nine years later, he did.
In a 1936 radio debate, Seawell said of Joseph Kennedy, “It takes a thief to catch a thief.” Kennedy, then head of the new Securities and Exchange Commission, was listening. He called Seawell and hired him upon graduation as an SEC staff member.
On April 5, 1941, Seawell married Rawls, whose Broadway career spanned from 1934 (“The Children’s Hour”) to 1976 (“Sweet Bird of Youth”). Over their 59 years together, Rawls wrote dozens of love poems to Seawell, each beginning with the line, “Over the hills of all the world, I would go with you.” They had two children, Brook and Brockman. Rawls died in Denver on Nov. 8, 2000.
With the outbreak of World War II, Seawell was lent to the War Department to work in counterintelligence for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower with a combined American and British team working on preparations for the invasion of Normandy.
After the war, he entered private law practice in New York and became increasingly involved in theater. His career as a Broadway and London producer included milestone productions of “Showboat,” “Our Town” and “Harvey.” He began to represent actors and writers including Bankhead, Coward, Ruth Draper and the famous married couple of Lunt and Fontanne, who often referred to Seawell as “the son they never had.” Upon their deaths they left their memorabilia to Seawell, who since has turned it over to the DCPA.
Seawell also represented Bonfils, a legendary theater figure and an heiress to the dominant newspaper in Colorado. “Miss Helen” was a tireless philanthropist and theater champion who partnered with Seawell in producing Broadway productions. Back in Denver she built the Bonfils Theatre at East Colfax Avenue and Elizabeth Street in 1953. It was Denver’s crown jewel through Bonfils’ death in June 1972.
Bonfils’ will, and the ownership of The Post, were involved in a long litigation battle that resulted in Seawell taking control of both. He opened the DCPA in 1974 with money from the Bonfils Foundation, which for years went toward operating The Post and funding Miss Helen’s many cultural philanthropic projects.
Some groused when he built the complex that Seawell was dipping into Bonfils’ money to build what was called a monument to himself. The competing Rocky Mountain News led the fight to have him stopped.
Where all those naysayers today? “All of those are now supporters,” Seawell said.
Webb’s only reservation with Seawell was his inability to keep staging community theater at the Bonfils Theatre. It was closed in 1986, just six months after Seawell renamed it for producer Henry Lowenstein.
Seawell said the Bonfils was losing $500,000 a year, but many suspected he had come to see Miss Helen’s east-side jewel as competition for his downtown Denver Center. Shuttering it was seen by some as a show of disrespect to the woman whose money built both it and the Denver Center.
Seawell admits the Denver Center was his vision.
“Helen wanted very much to have a professional theater company at the old place, and I got Tyrone Guthrie to agree to come here as artistic director (in the 1960s),” Seawell said.
“But he took one look at the old Bonfils Theatre and said it was fit only for Noel Coward drawing-room comedies – and he didn’t do those. So we were going to build another theater by the old Bonfils, and we actually acquired land for it. But then Tyrone died before we could do anything.”
An arts center is born
Seawell’s epiphany for creating the arts complex came in 1974, when he stopped at the intersection of 14th and Curtis streets. He looked at the Auditorium Arena, then an aging eyesore from 1908, surrounded by “a mass of urban decay.”
He pulled an envelope from his coat and sketched a blueprint covering four blocks and 12 acres. Before the day was out, he had secured the approval of not only Mayor Bill McNichols but the Bonfils Foundation board, whose primary asset was control of The Denver Post.
However, the creation of the Denver Center required the adherence to The Tax Reform Act of 1969, which represented a significant change in the relationship between government and philanthropy. It established that no private foundation could control any corporation, so Seawell drafted the Bonfils Amendment, which provided that if the private foundation is a satellite of a public foundation, it would not have to give up control. Seawell then created the DCPA as a public foundation and designated the Bonfils Foundation as the satellite to act as a permanent endowment for the DCPA.
The 2,700-seat Boettcher Concert Hall, (the nation’s first concert hall in the round) opened first, in 1978. By 1979 the Auditorium Theatre had been renovated. Four new theaters made up the Helen G. Bonfils Theatre Complex. The 2,880-seat Buell Theatre opened in 1991, and the Seawell Ballroom followed in 1998. The complex is also home to the National Theatre Conservatory MFA program.
Seawell oversaw every aspect of its growth, and perceptions of him gradually changed from “empire maker” to unparalleled visionary. It’s hard to imagine downtown without the Denver Center. And his Denver Center Theater Company, now 28, won a Tony Award as the nation’s best in 1998.
“When I proposed an arts complex, people kept telling me of a study that said in 1974 there weren’t 3,000 people in Colorado who had ever attended a professional theater production,” Seawell said. “Well, millions of those 3,000 people have attended the theater now.”
As chairman of the DCPA’s board of trustees, Seawell’s contract called for him to make just $1 a year, even though he routinely reported to work up to seven days a week. “But somebody has been forgetting to pay me,” he joked.
Denver Post years
Seawell became a Colorado resident in 1966, when Bonfils asked him to help her withstand a hostile takeover attempt of The Denver Post by the Newhouse newspaper chain, which owned 15 percent of Post stock. It was a 12-year battle that started in 1960 and did not end until just after her death.
Bonfils had appointed Seawell as The Post’s president and CEO, and later he became publisher.
“Nothing that I have done in my entire life was more fun than running a newspaper,” Seawell said. “I took a great deal of pride in keeping The Denver Post alive as an independent, objective voice – while still making money.”
But by 1980, the economy was sputtering and the paper was teetering on the brink of collapse. Critics accused Seawell of abandoning the paper while preoccupied with building up the Center. With the paper rife for a takeover, Seawell sold The Post to Times Mirror of California for the fire-sale price of $95 million. Proceeds went to the Bonfils Foundation, securing the financial future of the DCPA.
Times Mirror was the first out-of-state owner in the then 88-year history of The Post. The paper switched to morning delivery, and circulation soon plunged by 200,000. Though The Post survived, many blamed Seawell for disposing of Miss Helen’s treasure.
“That criticism hurt Eugenia deeply, but I was never hurt by it because the people who were expressing that opinion never understood it,” said Seawell. “I expect to make enemies because The Post was the dominant paper, and you’re a target.”
Seawell has no concern with how he is remembered, though getting Ritchie to succeed him ranks as one of his greatest accomplishments.
“I don’t care about legacy,” he said. “I’ll be gone. I set out to create the finest arts complex in the world, and there was a great need for it because downtown was dying at that time.”
Seawell has “absolutely no fear of dying,” he said. He has no religion to speak of because, he said, “organized religion has been a barrier to progress from the word ‘go.”‘
Of all his memorabilia, he considers his greatest treasures the poems his wife wrote to him.
“Over the hills of all the world, I would go with you, that we might know each crest. And later on remembering how we stood, hands clasped above the cities and the smallest towns, find that we left our love in space, over the continents and seas, and thus retained our love.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
