All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (18 page)

(Rudolf starts toward her, pauses, then walks around her. Elena does not move, but her eyes follow him.… He is behind her. He reaches out to touch her, but doesn’t touch her. He walks around, in front of her, stares at her, then slaps her face. He seizes her in his arms and kisses her, fiercely.)

Follows then a very long duet, not unlike that of Tristan and Isolde in
their
second act. Toward the end, she is slapping and kissing him till:

RUDOLF:
My God, Elena, there is such a thing as going too far.

ELENA:
No, there isn’t.

That’s part of their style: they went too far as a rule. The
World-Telegram
’s review of
Reunion in Vienna
called the Lunts “actors who love their job”—and that’s the other part. They were not only the deftest technicians around, but people so born to play make-believe that real life was a dress rehearsal for the stage. This is why S. N. Behrman found them relentlessly discussing the play they were in the middle of. Other actors discussed the news or fashion or other people’s plays. The Lunts had a single subject. Not themselves: their work. They never stopped going over that scene, that line, that half-turned gesture, so subtle it wouldn’t play past the fifth row. And this conversation could occur as late as the last day of the run.

It would have taken a Kenneth Tynan to describe exactly what the Lunts actually did in
Reunion in Vienna,
or another Sherwood,
Idiot’s Delight
(1936), or Chekhof’s
The Sea Gull
(1938), for critics of the 1930s weren’t apt at such analysis. They could type the traditional approaches, but the Lunts were Different in an innovative way that defied elucidation. Still, critics and public greatly enjoyed Different when the Lunts did it. And it wasn’t called Different then. It was called Sophistication.

Like the Lunts themselves, the word was loaded with meanings. It denoted “smart and worldly,” of course, and also “complex” in the sense of being made of many parts, “impure.” It also meant “liberated from bourgeois morality,” in the sense of “tolerant.” And it also meant “gay,” as when, say, Milly asks Cynara about the dating possibilities in an attractive man, and Cynara replies, “Well, he’s … sophisticated, you know.” The word implied that there were things in human nature that many people knew nothing of; but the Sophisticated knew. When a song in Rodgers and Hart’s
On Your Toes
(1936) called “Too Good For the Average Man” spoofed the craze for going into Freudian analysis with a line about a male patient “waking up to find that he’s a girl,” only a portion of the audience laughed. They were Sophisticated: they understood the world.
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Those who weren’t Sophisticated longed to be. This was an age that wanted its leadership class not only educated and intelligent but Aware. Sophistication was the condition to attain in the 1930s as surely as cool is the modern counterpart, with a defining antithesis in that the Sophisticated were curious about the world and the cool are solipsistically closed off. The Sophisticated made judgments about the relative value of things—crossword puzzles and
The New Yorker,
Father Coughlin and Walter Lippman, Debussy and swing. The cool make no judgments. Everything is equal because nothing is considered. The difference between Sophistication and cool is the difference between an age of theatregoing and an age of—no, not moviegoing, for, as we’ll see, Hollywood and Broadway were intricately intertwined in the 1930s, to their mutual benefit. It’s hard to know what the age of cool is, for while it has its roots in the beats of the 1950s and in such avatars as Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Paul Newman—as we’ll see—its present-day exponents are rather miscellaneously derived, from David Letterman to Sean Combs.

The cult of Sophistication reached its apex in the success of Cole Porter and Noël Coward, because both were not only smart, complicated, liberated, and gay, but more or less openly so. Porter entered into one of those Lunt-like no-fly-zone marriages, but it wasn’t intended to fool anyone. In Porter’s world, one did What Was Done in public and what one pleased in private; Porter married for form and money.

Coward was bolder—or was it just that beards are so much trouble to maintain? Lying drains one’s creative energy, and while Porter was prolific once he got going, Coward gushed: with comedies and dramas, yes, but also musicals as well as fiction and movie work. And he acted. Like the Lunts, he acted wherever he went; but that was a style of the time. What was that relentlessly legendary Algonquin Round Table if not a scene of posing and line-reading? The midcult audience was ever reminded—by the Round Tablers especially—that their luncheons were the height of wit. And true enough, many of the regulars, such as George S. Kaufman or Dorothy Parker, were exponents of wisecrack humor at its sharpest; it’s impossible to imagine an Algonquin Round Table populated by people like Frank Bacon, Raymond Hitchcock, or Charles Lindbergh. But then, this is another way of saying that New Broadway, Sophistication, and the melting-pot culture of post-1919 urbanized America coincided just when certain of our more apparent people introduced the concept of Playing Oneself: of making one’s life part of one’s art.

The Sophisticated styled themselves in the standard cautions of the day, but they could be strikingly honest. That, too, was part of the style. Of all the writers, Cole Porter was the nearest to a performer; he did make a few commercial recordings, and of course he was a renowned party entertainer. It was really his creation of the list song that rivaled the Lunts’ love scenes for personal revelation. Porter’s parade of the great and near great combined historical figures and people of myth with celebs of the time, all in such gossipy glee that he might be singing out the names of his sex partners. “Let’s do it,” Porter urged.

He even slipped past the euphemisms commonly used for “gay.” As far back as
Hitchy-Koo 1919,
Porter used “queens” in a context between ambiguous and explicit. And for Ethel Merman in
Anything Goes
(1934) he wrote “Kate the Great,” playing on the sexual omnibus that Catherine of Russia legendarily rode. In Porter’s version, this queen made not only the butler and the groom: “she made the maid who made the room.” Ironically, Merman, who swore like a groom, suddenly got dainty and the number was cut.

So the Sophisticated were a race apart—even from their confederates. True, Merman’s beginnings as a stenographer from Queens are so devoid of glamor myth that they constitute the most famous one-line bio in show-biz annals, as far from Porter’s wealth and Yale as one gets. But the Sophisticated really did stand apart: as teachers, snitches, exotic birds. Not one’s own kind. Part of the fun of
The Man Who Came To Dinner
—by two of the leading Sophisticates, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman
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—is the fantasy of what happens when one of the Sophisticates invades your life, your home, even your Family Secret. After all, Sophistication held power in American culture by that very apartness, by keeping its distance. It made worldly knowledge available to what we might loosely call the straight world on the understanding that straights might become smarter but never, themselves, Sophisticates. As with the sorcerer’s apprentice of Goethe’s poem, the magic is dangerous in the amateur’s hands.

Instead, the amateur is permitted to attend classes in Sophistication, such as Noël Coward’s ménage-à-trois comedy
Design For Living
(1933); the title alone is such a Sophisticated concept that Margot Peters used it for her Lunts biography. Coward could have called his show
Design For Playwriting,
for it was eleven years in the making because of The Plan. Coward himself unveils it, looking back to the days when he and the Lunts, already set to be lifelong confidants, were utterly unconnected as public figures: “Lynn and Alfred were to [become] idols of the public.… They were to act exclusively [as a duo, and] when all three of us had become stars … we would meet and act triumphantly together.”

The Plan was made in the very early 1920s, which attests to Coward’s prescience, for each of the three had by then made a start, no more. As we know, the Lunts did unite their headlines; and Coward punched out with
The Vortex, Hay Fever,
and
Easy Virtue,
West End sensations brought to New York within a few months of each other in 1925. After a few years of ever greater renown for all three, Coward got a cable from the Lunts: “Contract with the Guild up in June—we shall be free—what about it?”

“A satyr comedy” is how Brooks Atkinson described
Design For Living,
using the historical term for the fourth and final play in the ancient Greek tetralogy, the bawdy afterpiece that tops off the three tragedies and sweeps the public out in jubilation. John Mason Brown of the
Evening Post
posted an “adults only” blurb: “Cannot be warmly recommended to deaconesses.” This is because the climax of The Plan discovered Otto (Alfred), Leo (Noël), and Gilda (Lynn) in a new kind of love triangle. It is not the “eternal” one in which one of the men must step aside. Rather, it is a circular triangle, in which each of the three loves the other two. An eleven-character action allows for one other lead, Ernest, the dreary husband that Gilda at one point collects—a Walter Hampden, one might say—and John Mason Brown, flashing on Lynn’s Nina Leeds in
Strange Interlude,
observed that once again she has three men. But Ernest (Campbell Gullan) doesn’t count in a play that is essentially about a gay threesome.

Oh yes, it is; what else is Gilda saying to Ernest early in Act One?:

GILDA:
The only reasons for me to marry would be these: To have children; to have a home; to have a background for social activities, and to be provided for. Well, I don’t like children; I don’t wish for a home; I can’t bear social activities, and I have a small but adequate income of my own.

Isn’t that Gay Theory 101? And isn’t this next quotation the reasoning behind the theory, as Gilda announces her intention to be “my unadulterated self”?:

GILDA:
Myself, without hangings, without trimmings, unencumbered by the winding tendrils of other people’s demands.

And try this snippet after Gilda has wheeled about and married Ernest:

OTTO:
Ernest hasn’t got a penis.

GILDA:
Yes, he has: but only a little one, gentle and prim.

I’m a sneak, boys and girls. Here’s what Coward really wrote—but doesn’t it mean the above on the metaphorical level? That is, could Coward be remarking on the sheer sexuality of Sophistication?:

OTTO:
Ernest hasn’t got a personality.

GILDA:
Yes, he has: but only a little one, gentle and prim.

“The fluff of worldly success and the vaudeville of telephone conversations,” said Atkinson, “suit Mr. Coward’s skimming pen exactly.” However, Sophistication often looked frivolous to those not living within its state of absolute independence. Atkinson had a boss, a marriage, and a rota of social and family obligations. Coward was picturing three people who don’t—and much of Sophistication in fact consisted of these hints about how life might otherwise be lived, with the heavy dick of genuine liberty. Not just sexual liberty:
liberty,
period.

That wasn’t abundantly clear at the time, because so much of Sophistication relied on top choice in fashion, on the flaunting of wit, on the delicate shudder when anything democratically popular was mentioned. All the same, at its core Sophistication told of the isolation of the independent, and we note that thirties social drama, the very opposite of Coward in every respect—a
Waiting For Lefty
or
Dead End
—was invariably about folk whose helpless position in society compromised their independence absolutely. To the casual observer,
Design for Living
appears to be fluff because it behaves … well, yes: fluffily. But fluff is its style, not its content.

Interestingly, the show’s tryout took it from Cleveland through Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., before New York—not exactly American cultural capitals. But they were avid for the Lunts. Sophistication was something many people did not entirely approve of yet were eager to know about simply because of the charm of its exponents.
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Naturally, the New York premiere was, as Gilbert W. Gabriel wrote, “one of the storied first nights … which keen the pencils of the society editors, give the autograph hunters St. Vitus dance and lay a stair carpet of ermine from Longacre Square to Seventh Heaven.” Gabriel didn’t mention the guests at the feast—Laurette Taylor, Irving Berlin, Amelia Earhart, Philip Barry, Lillian Gish, Jerome Kern, George S. Kaufman, most of Broadway’s major producers from Guthrie McClintic to Mr. J. J. Shubert, and a special detachment of cops to handle the overflow outside.

Obviously, the Lunts
and
Noël Coward in a romp that had the town mongering report from the first day of rehearsals would tantalize to the utmost. We have to admire Coward for fearlessness in co-starmanship, sharing the stage with the monarchs of Sophistication. There was none of that Jane Cowl “Has Rollo Peters been engaged for the season yet?” stuff about Coward, even though he must have been aware that no one thought of him as a deep or brilliant actor. He was, though, a brilliant Sophisticate. Perhaps that gave him the confidence to take on Lunt,
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an amazing talent whose true range was never to be revealed because his career was married to his wife’s. Sometimes Lunt spoke of trying Macbeth; but then he would have had to have married Judith Anderson.

Note, by the way, that while Lunt was the most versatile performer of his day, Coward was the least. He could venture no further beyond his lightly truffled self-portrait than S. N. Behrman or the lightest Shaw. (Coward did their
Second Man
and
The Apple Cart,
respectively, in London.) Indeed, this limited—or, let us say, consistent with public expectation—Coward is how theatregoers seemed to like him. He was so What He Was that jesters found him an irresistible subject. Moss Hart and Cole Porter
Jubilee
’d Coward as a character called Eric Dare; they were respectful. And Hart again—now with George S. Kaufman—spoofed Coward in
The Man Who Came To Dinner,
as Beverly Carlton. Once more, the riff was fond. But some of the other Coward takeoffs were frumps with the names of pixies, as in the Beverly Waverly of the Rodgers and Hart college show
Too Many Girls
(1939). Yet didn’t Coward start it off with his
own
characters and their pixie names—Sholto Brent, Nicky Lancaster, Elyot Chase, Charles Condomine, Garry Essendine, Hugo Latymer: all written by Coward for Coward to play? And in
Design For Living,
Coward’s surname is Mercuré. Yes, with that gallant little quartering of the
accent aigu
.