All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (11 page)

Broadway
’s heroine, called Billie Moore, was cast with an anybody, Sylvia Field. She’s a Sweet Kid, wildly out of place in the chorus line with slum belles Mazie and Pearl, an anticipation of the real-life Ruby Keeler, who was just about to break into stardom as a Broadway ingenue while being courted by both Al Jolson and a gangster. It’s that tango of show biz and crime again—and
Broadway
’s plot leads on to two onstage murders. The first is gangster on gangster, but the second is Pearl on gangster: the first victim was her boy friend.

It’s a tough world,
Broadway
. Chicago’s protagonist, Roxie Hart (Francine Larrimore), would fit right in, as another murderess—and one with far less motivation than Pearl. It is
Broadway
’s belief that Pearl’s vengeance is moral, so while the police detective who haunts the Paradise figures out what happened, he terms the murder a suicide. This lawman even tosses a fast heads-up to the anguished Pearl in fluent Broadway: “Pull yourself together, kid.”

Roxie’s going to get off, too. But in
Chicago,
crime isn’t simply conducted in the vicinity of show biz. Crime
is
show biz, a point made yet more securely in the musical
Chicago
(1975) because the smirk of the Bob Fosse style lifts the action into a vaudeville heaven in which the ectoplasm of Bert Williams, Helen Morgan, Eddie Cantor, and Sophie Tucker keep reminding us that crime sells newspapers the way stars sell tickets. Still, the notion is written into the original work, as when a cynical reporter—the Lee Tracy role, if he hadn’t been busy with
Broadway;
Charles Bickford played it—recalls for Roxie the Harlan murder trial:

JAKE:
She fed Lysol to her two step-children and the baby died; and the last day of the trial they had the other one run down the aisle cryin’ “Mamma! Mamma!” and the jury sent her home to her husband and the dear little one who needed her.

The Front Page
goes yet further in showing how journalism colludes with crime.
Chicago
moves from Roxie’s place to jail to courtroom, but
The Front Page
sits entirely in the press room of the Criminal Courts Building, again in Chicago, and virtually all the principals are reporters. Both plays believe that no American court deals in justice because newspapers inform the jury pool and newspapers love crime. Not the commission of it: the selling of it. The reporters in these works are in effect putting on shows starring various killers. In
The Front Page,
the murderer of the moment, a wan little anarchist, is of no interest as an individual to the press until he escapes: because this is more show biz.

Such exaggeration was comic in the 1920s but it’s serious today, when Manny Mozart, proprietor of the Fame Shop, decrees which murder cases are to be produced by the media—for instance, the one about the killing of a pregnant housewife? There’s the ironically upmarket California setting, the husband’s apparent flight in fashionably dyed hair and goatee, the infantile Other Woman, the beguilingly vapid cell-phone dialogues, the bitch lawyer with the eyes that see all men congenitally guilty of rape, the confusing barrage of circumstantial evidence that convicts the husband of capital adultery. Throughout, various relatives, intimates, glancing acquaintances, and television-crazed strangers touted as “spokesmen” assume roles right up into the eulogy at the memorial service, spoken by a pastor unknown to the victim’s family who guests on the
Today
show the next morning. In the 1920s, faith was show biz, in the Pentecostal tent shows of such as Aimee Semple McPherson. But now show biz is faith, so the “religious right”—meaning anyone whose contribution to culture consists of spotting the face of Jesus on manhole covers and in cheese sandwiches—tack onto the murder an imaginary crime, the killing of an unborn fetus. The conviction is ultimately for capital abortion.

This is another way of observing that the 1920s was a great time for satire, because one had to exaggerate to observe. Genuine satire—as opposed to spoof—is rare today, because the show biz of crime now outstrips its own implausibility. The current revival of the
Chicago
musical, far more successful than the 1975 original, is less satiric than descriptive.
Broadway,
too, went musical, but as a film (1929) only; a
Front Page
musical turned up in London, as
Windy City
(1982). Interestingly,
Broadway
has vanished in any form, buried by a back-from-the-dead revival on The Street that lasted 4 performances in 1987; and
Chicago
has been absorbed by its musical. But the
Front Page
play is still vital, as the funniest of this trio—the busiest, too, in the suspenseful evolutions of its farcical plot. Then, too, the work boasts a powerful character conflict between, in 1928, Lee Tracy’s star reporter and Osgood Perkins’ star editor, called Walter Burns and modeled on Walter C. Howey, of the
Chicago Herald & Examiner
. Cleverly, the authors create Burns through other characters’ stated views of him, and this goes on so long into the action that the first-time spectator accepts him as an offstage eminence. Finally, near the end of the second act (of three), the story reaches a shocking turn and the stage nearly empties in utter silence … and Walter Burns appears. It is as though Godot has entered.

Note that none of these three smash hits of the late middle 1920s had stars the way that
The Jest
or
Lulu Belle
did (though Roxie Hart was the role that Jeanne Eagels lost in the aforementioned episode of her druggy instability). Lee Tracy, again, was only relatively prominent and Osgood Perkins’ achievement was siring Anthony Perkins. Even the first
Front Page
film offered the capable yet mere Pat O’Brien and (replacing
What Price Glory?
’s Louis Wohlheim, stricken with cancer) Adolphe Menjou. Howard Hawks’
Front Page
remake,
His Girl Friday
(1940), paired two of Hollywood’s most enduringly popular importations from Broadway, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Now it
was
a star show, and jumping off a pun—“Hildy” is short for Hildebrand but also for Hilda—Hawks made of the play’s two leads that Hollywood stereotype the “exes who still.” But he did this without changing the Hildy-Walter dynamic in the slightest:
The Front Page
’s two male leads love to fight and fight to love. What makes the play eternally fascinating is the love plot by other means that we get in the battle between the reporter who wants out and the editor who has locked the exits. There’s nothing homoerotic in it, to be sure. Yet we do hear
What Price Glory!
’s suspiciously intimate verbal shoving match, in “You drooling saphead” and “You got the brains of a pancake” and “Listen, you bastard! I can blow better newspaper stories out of my nose than you can write!” They’re not in love, but, like Flagg and Quirt, they’re in
something,
and this, along with the dizzy runaround narrative, has made
The Front Page
one of America’s classics.

I haven’t mentioned any authors yet because, at the time, the names famous for the mounting of the this trio were: last of all,
Chicago
’s producer, Sam H. Harris, and second of all the directors involved, George Abbott of
Broadway
and
Chicago
and George S. Kaufman of
The Front Page
. First of all was the producer of
Broadway
and
The Front Page,
the most hated man in Broadway history, Jed Harris.

The reason why producers had such réclame is that the director, as such, had scarcely been invented. Remember that term “manager”? It means “producer,” but most managers also directed, starred, or at least created a style—Charles Frohman, for example. At Frohman’s Empire Theatre, at Broadway and Fortieth Street, the subject matter was decorous, the writing was classy, the house staff was spiffy, and the occasion was Ethel Barrymore. Theatregoers of a certain worldview might frequent the Empire without knowing anything about the shows they were to see: because they knew about Frohman.
2
His style was so consistent, so imitable, that others took over his concern after his death, presenting under the rubrics “Charles Frohman, Incorporated” and “The Charles Frohman Company.” (Oddly, the output included one of our padlock dramas,
The Captive,
a play the living Frohman would not have gone within six degrees of.)

So when the former publicist Jed Harris meteored over The Street as the producer of four smash hits inside of two seasons—
Broadway
,
Coquette
(which gave Helen Hayes her stardom),
The Royal Family
(on the Barrymores, incogniti), and
The Front Page
—Harris was credited with having his own Touch. Just like Frohman, Belasco, Ziegfeld; and Noël Coward dubbed him “Destiny’s tot.”

Certainly, the aura that Harris gave off was one of the very latest in the genius business: fast, smart, and no older than last Thursday. A Harris play—remember, they were neither written nor directed but only produced by him—was the very next possible thing, so
Coquette,
for instance, tells of a flapper who sleeps with her boy friend. Booth Tarkington would have found a sweet way out of it, but in the Harris version she finds herself pregnant and commits suicide. Even
The Royal Family,
with its veneration of dynastic tradition, was perceived as ultra-contemporary, less about the old grande dame than about the star of today and even her dullish daughter.

In fact, the Jed Harris Touch had less to do with putting on plays than with irritating and betraying, with behavior of such pointless, gleeful destructiveness that when theatre folk said they’d never work for him again they actually meant it. Stories about how vile Harris was fill the Broadway anecdotes file. Laurence Olivier based his Richard III on Harris, and when someone called Harris his own worst enemy, George S. Kaufman replied, “Not while I’m alive.”

But “Every playwright has to have Jed Harris once” was another of Kaufman’s remarks: “have” in the sense of a disease to be suffered and overcome for everlasting invulnerability, like the measles. Because, in the long run, exposure to Harris was a strengthening process. He had a broad education and a razory intelligence; above all, he knew theatre, hot or cold. He was supposed as well to have charm—they all said so—but as he was ugly, volatile, and treacherous it’s hard for us today to imagine where the charm fit in. George Abbott, the most imperturbable man in the business, said of Harris, “I wanted to smash him in the face.”

Abbott, of course, was the co-author of
Broadway
(and of
Coquette,
for that matter) with Philip Dunning, who wrote the original script before Abbott came on for a rewrite. Maurine Watkins wrote
Chicago,
and
The Front Page
was the work of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (whom we met as the co-author of
Lulu Belle
). None of these names controlled the fame that belonged to Harris
at the time:
by now, the credits have sorted themselves out, and we care far more about how these writers commented on contemporary urban culture than about how Harris took the credit for their insights.

The cartoon realism that energizes this trio is hardest to maintain in
Broadway,
because the tension set by the gangsters jars with the feeble talents of the nightclub’s performers. How imbued they are with those dreams of the big time! Yet when they get a chance to perform, they go into clunky routines. The dream of Making It is sacred American text—but doesn’t it belong to the fringe-on-top talent like Judy Garland or, in the 1920s, Marilyn Miller? Lee Tracy’s unfulfillable ambitions are objectified in a sight gag when he doffs his suit jacket, revealing a kind of tank top, his “shirt sleeves” being just a bit of cotton sewed into his coat cuffs. No wonder musicals have titles like
Tipsy Topsy Turvy:
they seem to have everything but content and talent.

Amid all this, the
Broadway
gangsters come off as absurdly competent in their own form of Making It, as when uptown’s “Scar” Edwards stands up to midtown’s Steve Crandall, who has been encroaching northward. Crandall’s henchman makes a grab for Edwards, who turns away from Crandall with a “Take your hands off me or I’ll bust your god-damn face!” And here’s the first of those two shootings: Crandall whips out his gun and shoots Edwards dead in the back.

Chicago
’s character content is more consistent: everyone’s a whore. Note that both
Broadway
and
Chicago
pardon their woman killers, for, like
Broadway
’s Pearl, Roxie doesn’t pay for her crime. And Earl Williams,
The Front Page
’s murderer, is reprieved from the gibbet, albeit in a work so furiously paced for comic irony that the bearer of his stay of execution very nearly doesn’t get through.
Broadway
is continually in motion, but
The Front Page
is like a Feydeau second act that runs three hours. It’s a penny-whistle pinwheel of a piece, even more confident of its realism than
Chicago
is, because its moral climate is one big wisecrack.

The morality of
Broadway
brings frontier justice to Times Square. “The last thing you see before you go,” Pearl tells the man she’s about to kill, “is Jim Edwards’ woman.” Thus the second of our two
Broadway
shootings. And the morality of
Chicago
is cynical, because justice belongs to money and power: the press. But the morality of
The Front Page
is nihilistic, because justice is tipsy topsy turvy, a shocker of a headline and a snappy opening.
Hook
the public; the rest doesn’t matter. As Walter Burns puts it, “Who the hell’s going to read the second paragraph?”