All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (10 page)

James Gleason in fact became one of the exponential wisecrackers. (In a more serious vein, he delivers the famous last line of Frank Capra’s
Meet John Doe
[1941], to foiled plutocrat Edward Arnold: “There you are. The people. Try and lick that.”) Gleason and Taber wrote
Is Zat So?
because they weren’t getting anywhere as actors and needed a showcase; even so, the script kept being rejected till a Shubert scout attended a staged reading. Gleason played Broadway’s Hap (Taber headed the national tour in the part) opposite Robert Armstrong’s Chick. In Fox’s 1927
Is Zat So?
film, the prematurely grizzled Gleason was recharacterized in the matinée idol Hap of Edmund Lowe, with the Chick of the outrageously handsome Hunk of the Lot George O’Brien. The latter had been a boxing champ in the navy, so this was authentic casting. However, reducing wisecrack dramaturgy to its lettering on title cards demoralizes its adaptability, its unique reinvention by each performer who uses it. Think of how differently Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery apply the style. Both were MGM stars at the same time, but Montgomery sounds the derisive confidence of the ruling class while Gable’s blasts remind us that, if a man of Gable’s power is proletarian, society is unstable. The wisecrack is class-oriented, partly the invention of twenties assimilation culture but the weapon (as we’ll see) of thirties political culture. Like the improvisations of jazz players, wisecrack comedy cannot be read off cards, only called out and heard live.

And yet it was creeping into twenties lit, perhaps especially in Anita Loos’
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. This one had impact. Published in November of 1925, it reached its ninth printing within four months and became one of the decade’s prime artifacts. The novel was not yet a year old when Loos and her husband, John Emerson, turned it into a play. Of course, they retained the book’s title; that’s what sold the tickets. Indeed, the show went on an unusually long tryout tour: not because it needed work but because it didn’t. Audiences flocked to this saga of America’s greatest gold digger, Lorelei Lee (June Walker), and there was a film in 1928, a musical in 1949, and a movie musical in 1953, with Loreleis Ruth Taylor, Carol Channing, and Marilyn Monroe.

Because Loos’ book, subtitled “The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady,” runs on the voice of the semi-literate Lorelei, Loos pranked in irony: through what Lorelei doesn’t realize she is saying, as in “Well Dorothy and I are really on the ship sailing to Europe as anyone could tell by looking at the ocean.” The play, however, took advantage of the savvy of Dorothy, Lorelei’s sidekick, as in this snippet of their voyage:

DOROTHY:
Hope we don’t hit an iceberg. I hate ice. Unless it’s in a glass.

That is the closest we’ve yet come to the wisecrack as we use it today; I hear it in the voice of
Will & Grace
’s Megan Mullally. And just as that character more or less uses her facetiae and affronts not only to define her world but to welcome others into it, twenties wisecracking could be used as much to bond with others as to insult them.
Is Zat So?
vanished because it has no grip as a story, just that arresting voice of the contentious working-class New Yorker. But
What Price Glory?
(1924) more successfully takes that voice into an all-American setting of marines in France during World War I.

It’s a ghost of a play, if a famous one.
What Price Glory?
might even be the most famous American play that few among the living have seen, partly because its wartime setting all but dates it out of revival, but also because it is a very strange piece of work. It was written by a war veteran amputee and an anarchist who was going to make his mark bringing back the verse play—something like the duo of the “girl tuba player and a one-legged jockey” in that joke in Billy Wilder’s film
Some Like It Hot.
It’s a campy byline, a mating of uncongenial backgrounds. Nevertheless, Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson shared congruent agendas in their wish to wean the American public away from what the French call
la gloire
. They expose war as neither necessary nor heroic. It’s so stupid and evil, in fact, that the only way to take it is by jest.

What Price Glory?,
then, is serious comedy, a weird format in 1924. Famous for its bold language, the play utters nothing worse than “God dammit.” Still, the authors were adroit in creating the atmosphere of richly blaspheming men simply in their quasi-improvisational riffs on any, on all, topics. It’s not the words themselves we hear as much as the libertarian energy. How the authorities longed to close this show! But there was nothing tangible to seize on:
What Price Glory?
defines the word “suggestive.” It never teases the Index, yet it acts as if there weren’t one, encouraging playgoers to think so as well. After the final curtain, in one of the many versions of the
What Price Glory?
joke of the day, matinée matron Florence asks her seatmate Elvira if she liked the play, and Elvira says, “Cram that. Let’s get the hell over to Violet’s for her goddamn stinking birthday party.”

The rugged language supporting the war-is-hell realism was
What Price Glory?
’s second element. Its
first
element was the hate-to-love-you relationship of Captain Flagg (Louis Wohlheim) and First Sergeant Quirt (William Boyd), another of those romances in which two heteros vie for the same woman, make love to each other in the caress of verbal insult humor, and ultimately abandon the woman because they’re already married:

To each other. It’s not exactly homoerotic, though it is dick war. We really don’t have a term for the feelings that Flagg and Quirt entertain; it’s something like “asexual fuck buddies.” They dislike each other in a fascinated way, and while the play spends much time developing certain of the other marines—besides the French characters, there are twenty-three American servicemen on hand—Stallings and Anderson keep returning to the two leads and their curious rhetoric of repetition and of top-this put-down, which at times bears a hint of sextalk:

FLAGG:
You’re talking thick and wild, Quirt, thick and wild. You’d better turn in somewhere and sleep it off.

QUIRT:
Me? Sleep off a couple of drinks? I was living on cognac when all your buttons was safety pins.

FLAGG:
Yeah, well, you can’t carry it the way you used to, then. You’re getting old, Quirt. Old and feeble. Yeah, you’re getting old.

QUIRT:
Not me.
You
may be an old man, Flagg. Or an old woman if it suits you better, but not me.

Like
Is Zat So?
,
What Price Glory?
was filmed too soon for its dialogue to be spoken, by Victor McGlaglen and (again) Edmund Lowe. These two proved so appealing that they made a sequel in the first year of sound,
It’s a Cockeyed World
(1929).
1
Indeed, the Flagg and Quirt story never does end: in the play’s famous final curtain, Flagg and Quirt decide to settle the question of their girl, Charmaine, once and for all with a hand of blackjack, a gun on the table between them. The winner of the hand gets the gun; the loser takes off real quick. Quirt, the loser, flings the table over in Flagg’s face, putting out the candles, and Flagg shoots in the darkness. When a lamp is lit, Quirt is nowhere to be seen and Flagg has Charmaine. Then orders arrive for the battalion to move, and Flagg wearily kits up and shoves off.

That could have been the show’s ending: the fog of war, the fatigue, the homicidal improvisations. And, of course, the picturesque sorrow of Charmaine, once the object of a love rush and now left with nothing. It would make a fine piece of irony for the audience to look at as the curtain drops. Instead, Quirt returns, kisses the girl, and philosophizes, “What a lot of God damn fools it takes to make a war!” About to exit, he lets out the immortal line, “Hey, Flagg, wait for baby!” Quirt goes off. And
then
the curtain falls.

For all its gamy charm, this ending obscures the authors’ wish to drive the glamor of war straight off the pier of infamy; but the middle of their three acts has already done that. As Act Two nears
its
end, the runt of the outfit, Private Lewisohn, is carried in wounded, screaming for Flagg to “stop the blood.” It is as if everyone, not just Quirt, sees Flagg as a man of unnatural gifts, superhuman. While Lewisohn continually begs Flagg to save him, Flagg orders the medic to give the boy morphine. “Oh, Captain Flagg,” Lewisohn finally whimpers, clutching him, “can’t you please, sir, stop the blood?” As Flagg lowers Lewisohn to the floor, he soothes him with “You’ll be all right, boy. You’ll be all right. You’ll be all right.” The men looking on are motionless. Lewisohn dies. Nothing happens for six seconds. And the curtain falls.

The use of wisecrack comedy in a serious work helped create a form unique to the late 1920s, satiric melodrama. The “crook play” is a genre we haven’t yet considered, because it didn’t truly throw off its exhibition pieces till now:
Broadway
(1926),
Chicago
(1926), and
The Front Page
(1928). Each centers on a murder, but in the ordinary crook play good guys face off with bad guys. In these three titles, the concept of guilt is intellectually elaborated to take in not only the actual culprit but his or her media enablers as well. Where does crime end and a crime-obsessed press begin? And why is show biz suddenly so often a partner of crime? Is crime entertainment by other means?

Think, for example, of the last sequence of Warner Bros.’
Little Caesar
(1930), filmed against the backdrop of a billboard announcing the stage musical
Tipsy Topsy Turvy
. This show’s stars are the characters portrayed by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Glenda Farrell—both former cohorts of Little Caesar himself, Edward G. Robinson. It’s that wonderful Warner Bros. irony: Little Caesar is shot by machine guns while hiding behind the billboard, and this vacant show-biz tear sheet is the last thing we see. But why does this film—as do many others—find it logical that a gangster’s ex-partner (Fairbanks) and floozy (Farrell) would repent and go straight on the musical stage?

But then, wisecracking had integrated itself most comfortably into musical-comedy books, probably because the comics peppered their parts with their best vaudeville lines, and the book writers duly absorbed the style. Does
Little Caesar
then see it as logical that Fairbanks and Farrell get into a musical because the most cynical voices in American culture are musical-comedy characters and movie gangsters?

At that, why is
Broadway
made entirely of entertainers, criminals, and cops? Remember, the word “Broadway” at that time conjured up everything from Ziegfeld girls to Walter Winchell, from high-stakes gamblers to the Barrymores. There was so much there in “Broadway” that not till the 1960s did the word denote simply a bunch of theatres, mainly because the nation’s cultural action had moved to southern California.

So
Broadway
is not a backstager as we think of the form. It concerns performers rehearsing, but it takes place in the private party room of the Paradise Night Club—in the wings of show biz, so to say. Like
Chicago
and
The Front Page,
Broadway
is loaded with slang and bad grammar: with, really, colloquial urban English of the late 1920s. The wisecracks bite more tensely in
Chicago
and most so in
The Front Page,
but all three plays seem to use offensive sarcasm as the marines do in
What Price Glory?,
to affect a sense of control in an environment that threatens to engulf them. The new metropolitan America has laid aside its Frank Bacons and Mertons of the Movies for lives with more risk in faster tempo. The characters find themselves under siege, and the only defense is to seem stronger than everyone else, unconquerable.
Broadway
’s dialogue is written to be shot forth as if weaponized. Let the song-and-dance man edge out an “If you ask me,” and his boss—the usual Greek named Nick—cuts in with “Well, I don’t ask you. I don’t ask nobody.” Let the song-and-dance man tell one of the club’s showgirls that he and the ingenue are rehearsing an act, and he gets a faceful of street argot: “Aren’t you wise that she’s given you the bum’s rush?” Everything in this cosmos is “baloney,” and whether you’re a “cabaret spender,” a “gorilla,” or a “poor nut,” the dream is “the big time,” with an ad in
Variety
and everyone saying, Hey, I used to know that guy. “God,” the song-and-dance man lets out, so rhapsodic that he drops a preposition, “I used to dream about it years.”

That was Lee Tracy, who was to become, briefly, as symbolic of the new style of comedy as Lightnin’ Bill Jones was of the old.
Brash
was the attitude, getting by on guts and front, finagling with a nervous grin. Topping
Broadway
’s Roy Lane with
The Front Page
’s star reporter, Hildy Johnson, two years later, Tracy suddenly found himself sliding into second-best stunts, suggesting that the edgy twenties style in wisecrack comedy would suave down in the 1930s. Tracy co-starred above the title with Jean Harlow as a studio PR man in
Bombshell
(1933), a film whose script is a virtually unbroken series of wisecracks—but how many unromantic leading roles are there in the movies? A powerful masculine presence used the wisecrack as an element of his identification. The at best daintily phallic Tracy entirely consisted of the wisecrack; he had nothing else. So Tracy’s MGM contract took him from
Bombshell
to a one-scene bit as John Barrymore’s abused agent in
Dinner at Eight
and a supporting role in
Viva Villa!
. On location in Mexico, a drunken Tracy whizzed off a balcony on some passing soldiers. It was a definitive stunt, the wisecrack as bodily function; but MGM threw him out. Tracy was reduced to jobs like taking over from Raymond Massey Alfred Lunt’s role in the London production of
Idiot’s Delight
, though, a generation later, Tracy pulled off an “I’m still here” return from the dead in a short but telling role as a Truman-like ex-president in
The Best Man
(1960).