Jane Lancaster attended a preview showing of the Steve Martin comedy Cheaper by the Dozen with the uneasy feeling that she would be mortified by what would turn up on screen.
Not that she doesn't like Steve Martin. But if the movie turned out to be a bust, it would have grave bearings on her work of more than a decade.
Lancaster had spent all that time "off and on" researching and writing about the life of onetime Providence resident Lillian Gilbreth, an internationally known expert on time management and the mother of 12. Lillian and her husband, Frank, were the subjects of the 1949 book Cheaper by the Dozen and the popular 1950 film of the same name, in which Lillian was played by Myrna Loy and Frank by Clifton Webb.
That film, based on a book written by two of their children, was more or less faithful to the Gilbreths' story. Lancaster was concerned because she knew that any connection between the lives of the Gilbreths and the new film was glancing at best.
In the new movie, rather than being an efficiency expert with children who are trained to operate in military precision, Martin plays a sort of Mr. Mom character. He gives up his dream job as a college football coach to stay home and care for his 12 children in a chaotic household after his author wife sets off for New York to promote her new book, Cheaper by the Dozen.
Worse, this new Cheaper by the Dozen will hit video shelves next spring at about the same time Lancaster's book -- Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth -- A Life Beyond Cheaper by the Dozen is scheduled to be published.
Surprise! Lancaster liked the movie.
"I chuckled a bit and, at the end, some people actually clapped," said Lancaster, sitting on a sofa in the neat living room of her home on Providence's East Side, not far from where the Gilbreths once lived.
Lancaster came to America from England in 1987 with her husband, Tony, a professor of econometrics at Brown University, and discovered Lillian Gilbreth while participating in a summer institute on the rise of the scientific world view.
Lancaster, a cheerful woman who puts visitors immediately at ease, knew from her research work with 95-year-old Ernestine Gilbreth, a co-author of the original Cheaper by the Dozen, that the new film had been in the works (and through at least three teams of writers) for many years.
"Originally it was going to be about an Irish family," she said, "and Chris Columbus was going to direct." Columbus went on to do the first two Harry Potter movies instead.
While 20th Century Fox executives were trying to find a script that they liked for their Cheaper by the Dozen, Lancaster was busily contacting four of the five still-living Gilbreth children, who live all over the map from New Hampshire to California, and doing research at Purdue University in Indiana and Smith College in Massachusetts, where Lillian's personal letters are kept. What began as Lancaster's doctoral thesis at Brown University was growing into a book that now is scheduled for publication in late April by Northeastern University Press.
Lancaster's thesis started when Lillian was a schoolgirl "and stopped in the middle of her life. When you're writing a dissertation, it's really only proof that you can do it. So I agreed to stop it when I did. But I always wanted to get back to her."
Lillian herself had gotten a doctorate in education and psychology from Brown in 1915, "between her seventh and eighth babies," says Lancaster. Photos of Lillian from this period show a woman who looks, as one might imagine, a mite beleaguered.
Whirlwind romance
A brilliant young woman who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was the first female commencement speaker, Lillian Moller grew up in the Bay Area of northern California.
She met Frank Gilbreth briefly in Boston when he was seeing off his cousin, who was chaperoning Lillian and some other young women on a boat bound for their grand tour of Europe in the early part of the last century. Apparently Frank liked what he saw.
When Lillian returned to the United States several months later, he followed her to California and proposed . . . after having spent only a few short days with her in total.
"They were industrial engineers, which means they were efficiency engineers," explains Lancaster, "and she was a psychologist. They combined to train workers in the one best way of doing their jobs."
Their concept was called "motion study." Hired by the New England Butt Co. in Providence in 1913, the Gilbreths photographed workers on movie film as they made braiding machinery at a plant near what is now Central High School. Then they pored over the film frame by frame to chart the best ways for the workers to do those jobs with the fewest number of steps.
"Her psychology training allowed her to sweeten the pill so the workers were less resistant" to their motion study, says Lancaster. Psychology . . . and the movie screen. The workers loved seeing themselves in a movie.
The home team
The Gilbreths, who lived in Providence from 1912 to 1919, were so successful that they applied their principles to their own burgeoning brood of children, who came to see themselves "as part of a team." What's wrong with this new Cheaper by the Dozen, adds Lancaster, "is that the children are very disorganized and uncooperative."
In practical terms, however, she points out that while Lillian "liked to say that [her family] was run like a business, I like to think it was more chaotic than that." Their house was at Brown and Angell streets, so close to Brown University that "Frank joked she could go to class and be home in time to catch one of the children falling out the window."
As the Gilbreths and their theories grew in popularity, they became much in demand around the country for speaking engagements. But five years after they left Providence for Montclair, N.J., Frank died unexpectedly, in 1924.
Lancaster says Lillian was devastated by the death of her husband, with whom she shared not only a family but also a career. But, being a practical woman, and with 11 children to support (one daughter having died at age 5 of diptheria), Lillian couldn't afford to wallow in grief. In fact, Lancaster reports, "Frank died on Saturday and she went to Europe on Thursday for several conferences that Frank had organized."
The children were sent to their summer home on Nantucket with a niece while Lillian was away. The niece wound up living with the family as a sort of governess for the children for three years. After that, there was a succession of graduate students who watched over the children until the oldest daughter was able to take over.
Meanwhile, Lillian was traveling and teaching and lecturing. In 1928 she "worked for Katie Gibbs [Katharine Gibbs School] trying to get them to streamline their teaching methods and to design model classrooms." Around 1930 she designed kitchens for Narragansett Electric.
She worked for the Hoover Administration in the early years of the Great Depression "in some project to urge women to buy more. The Republicans liked to spend their way out of hard times." She went on to serve on expert committees for every president from Hoover to Johnson, for whose administration she designed kitchens for women who used wheelchairs.
"She died in 1972 at the age of 93. She worked until she was 90."
Athenaeum history
Lancaster didn't rest either. In her down time, while awaiting permission to do research in various archives to complete her book, Lancaster wrote a well-received history of the Providence Athenaeum -- Inquire Within; A Social History of the Providence Athenaeum Since 1753 -- and has just completed her third book, an annotated edition of etiquette maven Emily Post's By Motor to the Golden Gate, about her cross-country automobile adventures in 1915.
"I love doing research and I love that period," Lancaster replies when asked why much of her work is set in the early part of the 20th Century. Recently she returned from Havana, where she attended a conference "on Women on the Verge of the 21st Century . . . or something like that."
But now she's most concerned with the publication of Making Time late next April and any fallout -- good or ill -- that might come to it from Cheaper by the Dozen.
While she describes the film as "quite amusing, slapstick and a bit sentimental," she did feel that the filmmakers "missed the important message that Lillian Gilbreth and her family tried to convey: Namely, that if the family were managed efficiently, mother and father and the children could do it all."
In her long life, Lillian Gilbreth certainly tried to live up to that motto.
