All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (20 page)

In
Biography,
she is a painter commissioned to write her memoirs. This puts her in the center of a struggle between her frantically leftist publisher and her former amour, about to become a National Figure and obviously anxious about what she may say. As always in Behrman, the plot thickens because his men are always falling in love with his star. Philip Barry separates the erotic woman from the brilliant woman, with the intention of complimenting the latter. Behrman, however, combines the erotic with the brilliant. That in itself provides his content, along with the usual epigrammatic observations that typify Sophistication at its least dangerous. For example, Claire and an old European friend haven’t seen each other for many years now. Not since …

THE PUBLISHER:
Vienna!

CLAIRE:
(astonished) Yes. How did you know?

THE PUBLISHER:
It’s always since Vienna that Bohemians haven’t seen each other, isn’t it?

Behrman sometimes uses the erotic as a shocker, particularly just before the second intermission, as when the publisher suddenly drops his professional non-fraternization rule and more or less throws himself at Claire’s feet:

THE PUBLISHER:
Marion, my angel!

CLAIRE:
(infinitely compassionate, stroking his hair) Dickie—Dickie—Dickie … Why have you been afraid to love me?

It’s always about love, not politics, whereas Barry thinks it’s about independence (and, sometimes, justifying God’s ways to man). Behrman had an odd explanation for his lack of weighty subject matter. In fact, he had several.
No Time For Comedy
—the one that Laurence Olivier stole from Katharine Cornell—is ironically titled. Set in 1938, the piece argues that a dangerous age is
precisely
the time for comedy. Olivier is a playwright, drawn from his actress wife, Cornell, into the arms and under the influence of Margalo Gillmore, who wants Olivier to Rise to Tragedy. The result,
Dilemma,
is terrible—though of course Behrman wants him to fail. “We are living in an era of death” is his defense, but “Don’t spin me fantasias of death,” Cornell begs. “Imagine for me variations of life.” Of course, Behrman makes as much of the Olivier-Gillmore adultery as of Olivier’s doomed attempt to switch modes. “Sleep with him if you must,” Cornell tells her rival, Gillmore. “But don’t spoil his style.”

Another of Behrman’s apologias was more philosophical. In a symposium on “the propaganda play” in
The Stage
magazine in 1934, Behrman quoted Heywood Broun: “The drama which fails to convey a moral or to preach a sermon is generally a feeble thing.” To which Behrman replied, “From Shakespeare to Galsworthy the enduring playwrights have been neutrals.” And so, he thought, it should be: “The artist, like the scientist, should have no prejudices.”

It seems strange to liken the attitudes of two Englishmen to Americans, especially when one precedes the Depression by over three hundred years. At that, don’t some of the surviving works of the Athenian Dionysia bear strong political subtexts relating to contemporary events?

Worse, by 1934 the term “propaganda play” meant different things to different folks. Propaganda is essentially a commercial for a point of view, sometimes a dishonest marshalling of arguments and invariably representing an argument impervious to contradicting proofs. But some people lumped all plays of social inquiry into the umbrella stand of “propaganda.” By that definition,
Pygmalion
(on class),
You Can’t Take It With You
(on the work ethic), and—hold on to your hat—
Brigadoon
(on the lack of spiritual meaning in modern life) are propaganda. And if artists are to work like scientists—a risible concept to begin with—even scientists eventually draw some conclusion. Of
End of Summer,
Brooks Atkinson complained, “You scarcely know what side [Behrman] is taking.” Yes, you do: Ina Claire’s side. Or, in
Rain From Heaven
(1934), he’s on Jane Cowl’s. Presiding over an English house party, Cowl is caught between the usual Behrman twosome, here an American crypto-fascist adventurer (Ben Smith) with Charles Lindbergh’s heroic profile and a Hitler refugee (John Halliday), both Cowl admirers. Behrman makes a great deal of the refugee’s Jewish identity, though he actually has only a single Jewish great-grandfather (and will thus not be classified as Jewish even under the Nuremberg Laws of the following year).

Halliday got into trouble in Germany for writing … well, a piece of propaganda, a pamphlet called “The Last Jew,” which anticipates the Nazi annihilation of European Jewry. The very word “extermination” is used, at a time—again, this is 1934—when few outside the very highest levels of Nazi government could even have imagined what lay in store. The eponymous last Jew is about to commit suicide when “an excited deputation from the All-Highest” offer to protect the propagation of his kind. For with the Last Jew gone, “their policy is bankrupt.” The episode, as Halliday recounted it, includes a personal repudiation from a character unmistakably modeled on the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, a former liberal who accommodated the Nazis.

So Behrman is at pains to ground his piece in real-time naturalism while opening his theatre to politics. This is indeed no time for comedy, and Behrman is no one’s idea of neutral. Yet note how a powerful revelation of American anti-Semitism immediately jumps into another of those Behrman frisson curtains at the end of the second act. The Lindberghian character wants to marry Jane Cowl; it suddenly appears that she prefers the refugee and has even granted him access to her boudoir:

SMITH:
You dirty Jew!

COWL:
(horrified) Rand!

HALLIDAY:
It’s all right, Vi. This makes me feel quite at home.

SMITH’S OLDER BROTHER:
You swine! Maybe those people over there [in Germany] are right.

COWL:
Hobart, please remember—Herr Willen is not only my lover, he is also my guest. (With a smile) But we mustn’t disappoint [the help]. Let us go in to dinner.

And with the audience looking, I’d guess, rather like the one in the movie of
The Producers
during the “Springtime For Hitler” number, the curtain falls.

As if admitting that he himself had no stories to tell, Behrman took to making adaptations of foreign-language plays for much of the rest of his career. In fact, a citation of lasting Behrman titles should possibly center on
Amphitryon 38
(1937), more apparently because it was one of the Lunts’ most celebrated duets, but more truly because the text was originally set down (in 1929) by Jean Giraudoux, one of France’s most playful wits. It was Giraudoux’s impishly exaggerated contention that his was the thirty-eighth retelling of the Greek tale of yet another Olympian dalliance with a mortal; this time, the king of the gods takes the form of the lady’s husband. But Giraudoux has a twist: the all-powerful wants to be loved for himself by a willing partner—Alcmena, most faithful of wives! With their peculiar gift for making infidelity into a sort of fidelity in code, the Lunts were perfectly cast. When the god seeks admittance to Alcmena’s palace, Lynn catechized Alfred with the questions that all the women out front love to hear and that all the men find bewildering: “Are you he by whose side I wake every morning and for whom I cut from the margin of my own day an extra ten minutes of sleep?” and “Are you the one whose least footfall is so familiar to me that I can tell whether he is shaving or dressing?”

“They wrap a play around them like a costume,” said Brooks Atkinson. As we already know, the Lunts wrapped life around them like a play, especially this play. It is Behrman’s best work, which is obviously not a compliment, but at least the translation is quite stylish. “Adaptation by S. N. Behrman,” the official billing, suggests creative retooling, but Behrman stuck relatively closely to Giraudoux in a kind of freely literal rendering. When Alcmena’s predecessor Leda (Edith King) shows up to advise and consult and reveals that the god bestows no material reward, Alcmena is deflated. “Not even a little colored egg?” she asks—and we hear Giraudoux in the line. It’s whimsey
à la Franco-Française.
Then Behrman slips into what is surely his own Broadwayspeak when Alcmena sizes Leda up with “He didn’t even make an honest legend of you.” In fact, the first of these two lines is Behrman’s addition to the text, and the second, however extravagated, originates in Giraudoux.

Sophisticated writers enjoyed amplifying Americans’ sensual experience, not only in verbal but in visual teases, and Behrman rang one change on Giraudoux by moving the original work’s first dialogue scene from a terrace outside Amphitryon’s palace to the heavens. So the public’s first sight was of Jupiter and Mercury (Richard Whorf)
8
perched on a cloud looking down at the earth, heads resting on their hands, their legs thrust up behind them, their perfectly molded buttocks and Phidean thighs and calves clear to the view. The audience gasped, then realized that the physiques were built into Lee Simonson’s set of airy fleece: Lunt and Whorf were actually standing upright below the construction, all but their heads hidden under the sightline. We are told that the house continued to giggle at this coup de crypto-boylesque throughout the scene, not settling down again till the traveler curtain closed.

Of course, the Lunts were expected to be ever edging Broadway over the cliff of what was permitted, because they were lovably dangerous. No one thought of them as revolutionaries—especially because, in other parts of the forest, the Lunts’ colleagues were effecting comparable transformations, with popular success. Who could have predicted a smash run for a work 2,500 years old?—Aristophanes’
Lysistrata,
in its first local professional production in English. The bawdy look at a feminist sex strike to impose peace on the warrior gender includes a few scenes that would startle today. The recruiting of Lampito, during which Lysistrata inspects the comely tenderfoot with erotic abandon, may be the great lesbian moment in Western Theatre. The Moscow Art players had offered the piece in 1925—in Russian, of course—but not till 1930 was Broadway to hear it in the vernacular, translated by Gilbert Seldes and directed and designed by Norman Bel Geddes.

A combination of slapstick, lewd costuming, and the original’s racy jests made
Lysistrata
a surprise hit for the Philadelphia Theatre Association, and it was decided to take it to The Street. Fay Bainter, the Lysistrata, was replaced by Violet Kemble Cooper, with Miriam Hopkins and Hortense Alden as two of her subordinates, Sydney Greenstreet leading the men, and short and squishy Ernest Truex as Kinesias. (Lampito was not the rack diva one hopes for, but rather the hulking Hope Emerson, a comic monster.) The authorities were wary enough to assign cops to listening posts in the auditorium just in case; but the time when theatre could be silenced was over. Sophistication was a major reason why: because it was suggestive rather than defiant. They could close Mae West down—but the Lunts? Noël Coward? Aristophanes? Sophisticated wasn’t seditious: it was naughty.
Lysistrata
seduced—better, neutralized—even suspicious cops. Entranced by the opportunity to Get One’s Culture In while enjoying a burlesque show, the public kept
Lysistrata
running for seven months in the cavernous Forty-fourth Street Theatre at a $5.50 top, high for the day.

There was more Greek gender war in Julian Thompson’s
The Warrior’s Husband
(1932), a spoof of myth in which Hercules is a coward, Homer a kind of press agent, and the Amazons’ husbands are bearded ladies, talking fashion and cuisine. Note the title’s hazardous fun; not till one knows that the Warrior is a woman is one, so to say, free to enter. She is Hippolyta (Irby Marshall), and her husband is Sapiens (Romney Brent), with Dorothy Parker’s future second and third husband, Alan Campbell, as Achilles. However, attention was focused on the second couple, Antiope (Katharine Hepburn) and Theseus (Colin Keith-Johnston), because the others were funny but these two were beautiful. He was a natural-born hero, much admired as the nobly weary Captain Stanhope of
Journey’s End
—and she was already Katharine Hepburn. She made her entrance carrying a slain stag on her back as she vaulted down a flight of stairs, eventually kicked that Achilles right in his heel, and wooed her man with war. In their matching breastplate and greaves, Hepburn and Keith-Johnston got into what appeared to be genuine physical combat, and while Romney Brent walked off with the notices, the town was talking about that crazy girl in the armor.

As a script,
The Warrior’s Husband
is witless; Gilbert W. Gabriel thought the show should have been a musical by Jacques Offenbach. And a musical it became, though it was by Rodgers and Hart (book as well as score), with Brent’s role centering the action as a vehicle for Ray Bolger:
By Jupiter
(1942). Clearly, this material is Sophistication in its crude form. With the Lunts and Barry and Behrman, Sophistication is elegant and droll. Thompson’s play is a rough-hewn sitcom and the musical downright lewd, wartime escapism played down to servicemen and their dates. All the same, Thompson’s notion contributed to an important aspect of Sophistication: a widening of our humanistic frame of reference by turning received opinion (i.e., men are strong and women silly) on its head.

The Lunts themselves did much the same in Alfred’s staging of
The Taming of the Shrew,
in 1935. To be archival about it, we should note that Harry Wagstaff Gribble was the credited director; the Luntian byline ran “Scheme of production devised by,” and both Alfred and Lynn were thus appreciated, along with star billing larger than the title. In fact, Alfred ran the show, throwing it at the public with the coarse and crazy energy of an improvisational troupe in a medieval fairground while controlling it with the tautness of a lute string.

Granted, the
Shrew
is not the Shakespeare of lilting monologues and subtextual undertow. Still, it had never been this racy; nothing had. Despite the Lunts’ reputation—today, at least—for spending their lives in boulevard sex comedy, these two really liked to shock, and this was not your father’s
Shrew,
such as the 1887 Augustin Daly staging with John Drew and Ada Rehan. “Tumbling and revelry,” Brooks Atkinson reported, were mixed in with “a cluster of midgets, a pair of comic horses and some fine songs set to good beer-garden music.” Sydney Greenstreet was in this, too, as Baptista—“corpulent, frightened, bewildered, hopeful” was Atkinson’s impression of the portrayal—but the cast really was less portraying than dancing around like loons, treating the audience to insolent commentary, and making spectacularly timed accidents with the props look serendipitous. It was one of the decade’s outstanding stagings, something doing every moment, and its fanatically professional director tamed his entire company before the last day of the run by calling for a full-dress runthrough: because Friday night had been sloppy.