All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (21 page)

Above all, Lynn and Alfred brought out the sex in Shakespeare; they made him Sophisticated. Ironically, another of the movement’s guardians made a connection with this
Shrew
when the Lunts revived it for a tour in 1940. Arnold Saint-Subber, their stage manager, gaped in fascination at the way the roaring terror of a courtship onstage went right on when the two passed into the wings and reassumed their life roles as devoted sparring partners. Years later, as producer Saint Subber, he commissioned with partner Lemuel Ayers a musical version of that
Shrew
as
Kiss Me, Kate
(1948), which of course brings Cole Porter back into view.
9
Porter’s Sophistication is extremely paradoxical, for while he lived among the droll and elegant, he wrote of life among the rough-hewn and lewd. A Cole Porter show was a dirty show—not just risqué or suggestive, but low-down, coarse, and itchy. However, much of that was locked into the book material and the way the Porter creeps, molls, and stooges carried themselves. The Porter songs themselves found an esoteric poetry in these people; when Ethel Merman sings “I Get a Kick Out Of You” or “Down in the Depths (on the Ninetieth Floor)” or “Do I Love You (Do I?),” we momentarily forget that her characters are a notch above being actively employed in a brothel.

Another notable quality of Sophistication is its Continental or English flavor. Those European writers that the Theatre Guild made into Broadway regulars were regarded as oracular in the style—who was more Sophisticated than Ferenc Molnár? We’ve encountered him thus far in the capriciously intense Luntfun of
The Guardsman
and the doleful fantasy of
Liliom;
like Walt Whitman, Molnár contains multitudes. The language barrier that has kept Hungarian culture the Western World’s biggest secret held Molnár back from the status he deserves, leaving him as a kind of delicatessen theatre, not least because he draws on the frivolous for his subjects and mans a shell game for his conclusions.

Still, of all our Sophisticates, Molnár tells the best stories.
The Good Fairy
(1931), in Jane Hinton’s translation, presents a cinema usherette (Helen Hayes) whose exposure to the sublimating narratives of the movies leads her to become all things to as many men as possible. Molnár gives us three in particular: a lascivious businessman, a middle-aged lawyer, and a charming writer. Let Brooks Atkinson once again fix the style of the piece for us: “a matchless facility for humor, sin and fancy.” Molnár was Budapest’s chief boulevardier, and he became Broadway’s chief central European, as chic as Coward and the Lunts. Robert Garland of the
World-Telegram
noted a preponderance of “the top hat-and-ermine crowd,” at
The Good Fairy
’s premiere, and Percy Hammond emphasized a favorite theme of mine in his phrase “The First Audience.” Important playwright bylines brought out Important Theatregoers, who doubtless felt well paid for their trouble when
The Good Fairy
’s producer-director himself, Gilbert Miller, came before the curtain after the last act to introduce a change in the text. Miller could not abide Molnár’s unresolved conclusion, he explained, and he had dared to ask our Hungarian master to write an epilogue finishing off the story: which of those three men does Helen Hayes end up with? Hungarian by choice as well biologically, Molnár drew on his native culture’s love of surprise in giving Hayes to a fourth man, a minor character who was the last person one expected to see onstage at the end of the piece. The audience said, “That’s the ending?” And the curtain fell.
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We begin to notice that Sophistication favors unusual woman leads—not just Lynn Fontanne and Katharine Hepburn, but also Helen Hayes as a naive kid who emerges from male entanglements stronger and even purer. On one level, Sophistication simply recommends that one take a broad view of life with all the tolerance that society frowns on and none of the hypocrisy that it can’t seem to live without. The opposite of Molnár would be the exploitation of the Sophisticated woman in a cheap sex comedy, such as John Larkin Jr.’s short-lived
Society Girl
(1931). It’s Debutante Meets Boxer, with the novelty that the deb is aggressive, cute but tough. The role was assigned to Claire Luce, Fred Astaire’s last stage dancing partner (after Adele Astaire, Marilyn Miller, and Tilly Losch) and a prime exponent of the new thirties lady. Playing opposite Fred Astaire—at that in a Cole Porter musical,
Gay Divorce
(1932)—gave Luce a very diploma in Sophistication. But
Society Girl
had her throwing her weight around the boxer (Russell Hardie, a specialist in such roles) and pointlessly provoking the boxer’s manager (Brian Donlevy). Dealing in mean stereotype, Larkin contrived an ending rather less subtly than Molnár in
The Good Fairy
: Hardie pasted Luce one in the mouth and made her repent of her arrogant—or was it independent?—ways. In the hands of Noël Coward and especially Ferenc Molnár and most of all Philip Barry, the Sophisticated Woman sparred on equal terms with men. In a sleazy pop piece like
Society Girl,
a Sophisticated woman was too big for her britches. Not independent: spoiled.

Without question, the most extreme of the Sophisticated plays was the one about the older gay man who keeps Laurence Olivier as a boy toy, thwarts Olivier’s attempts to break away heterosexually, and is shot dead by Olivier’s father.

What? On Broadway?
Yes: but Englishman Mordaunt Shairp’s
The Green Bay Tree
(1933) is written in a code at once clear and ambiguous, so one could just as well have seen it as the tale of a pampered young man who wants to stay pampered. But why would a young man
be
pampered unless … especially if the older man doing the pampering is a certain Mr. Dulcimer, known to the young man as “Dulcie”?
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Shairp defines the pair’s relationship by not defining it. Having cut himself off from his biological father, young Julian is Mr. Dulcimer’s “son and companion” by a procedure innocent of bureaucratic seal. Of course, any spectator in the house who needed to believe that these two really are a sort of father and son could take heart in the appearance of Leonora Yale, the one character whose type the audience was already conversant with: a level-headed young woman in love.

We should pause here, for a paradox. The sensible ingenue—in Shairp’s
Green Bay
description “clean-cut, charming, strong-willed, decisive, quite free from pose”—turned up in all sorts of plays without really claiming her share of Broadway history. These are not famous or memorable roles: because important women didn’t play sensible. The stars were quixotic, mercurial, pathetically lost, or radiantly redemptive, and in any case were constantly putting the public in touch with their inner goddess. We’ve seen the Cornells and Le Galliennes at work: they play
unique
. Leonora is by profession a veterinarian—
there’s
a role for Cornell! It is no coincidence that the outstanding female portrayal of the century was—here’s that cliché once again—an old drunk doing a turn as a destructive southern mother, bound in lacy nostalgia and naggy protectiveness. Those who spent their careers in the sensible portrayals never made it to stardom—Ann Andrews, say, or Patricia Collinge, so obscurely prominent in their day, or even Margalo Gillmore, a name we’ve encountered several times thus far and who at least left a bit behind as Mrs. Darling in the television broadcasts of the Mary Martin
Peter Pan
.

Olivier’s real-life spouse before Vivien Leigh, Jill Esmond, played Leonora, as if providing Julian with an offstage beard. Esmond also gave the show its dramatic energy as the only major principal who is not a member of the tribe—for of course Mr. Dulcimer (James Dale) employs a butler, Trump (Leo G. Carroll, later television’s Topper), who gives his notice when Julian becomes engaged to Leonora. “A married establishment,” he explains, “means women servants.” Then there’s the Coward-like dialogue, as in this couplet, cued in because Julian has been helping Leonora with her veterinarian work:

JULIAN:
(ruefully) How would
you
like to give some dog an emetic?

MR. DULCIMER:
I should hate to give anyone an emetic.

Let us note as well Mr. Dulcimer’s lack of a first name, as if hiding in plain sight—the typical existence of a gay man in this era—or even his insistence on skipping the first act of
Tristan und Isolde,
on stylistic grounds. It’s the rigor of caprice.

“One may read anything one chooses, or very little,” wrote Brooks Atkinson of Mr. Dulcimer’s relationship with Julian. It sounds naive, but then
The Green Bay Tree
isn’t about sexuality. It’s about luxury. So, of course, was Sophistication in general, and part of its attraction lay in its refusal to state precisely what it was. In both London and New York,
The Green Bay Tree
ran five months on Shairp’s ability to treat a “difficult” theme in a way that presented no difficulty. Mr. Dulcimer is so exquisite that he has virtually no reality even though he is the defining figure in a play that is even more essential to the history of gay theatre than
The Captive
is. Bourdet’s play, remember, never produced its lesbian; Shairp revels in Mr. Dulcimer. This character’s power is such that he controls Julian even in death. Art was the key, music and sculpture. Mr. Dulcimer discovered Julian as a boy soprano in Wales, bought him off his biological father, and coddled him with the sensualist’s virtues of the epigram and showing up at public events later than everyone else. After his murder, Mr. Dulcimer retains stage control as a death mask hanging on the wall, and after Julian rejects Leonora and the butler retracts his resignation, the lights dim on a beaten Julian in a chair, smoking. We see only the light at the tip of his cigarette and a glow on the mask, as if the two men were communicating; and the curtain falls.

Clearly, this was an age in which gay life was, as Bourdet says, “captivity.” In Lillian Hellman’s
The Children’s Hour
(1934), a lesbian kills herself when outed, stating, shortly before her last exit, “I feel so God damned sick and dirty.” Chester Erskin’s
The Good
(1938) pictured a tyrannically self-righteous mother driving her son into an affair with a church choirmaster, as if one went gay only in despair; and we know from chronicle what happens in Leslie Sewell Stokes’
Oscar Wilde
(1938). The English Robert Morley took the title role in this English import—which, unlike
The Green Bay Tree,
played London in a private club because the Lord Chamberlain refused it a license. Was this because Wilde never thought of his sexuality as captivity? Staying in New York for 247 performances,
Oscar Wilde
was a hit, but behind the celebrity protagonist was, really, just another piece in which the homosexual comes to a bad end. What was missing from the catalogue of plays with gay characters was someone who was neither a swish nor a mess, because with Real Men in it, Sophistication becomes Corruption. Let me address this problem with another of my personal notes.

This concerns the Burns Mantle
Best Plays
annuals—probably the last place one would expect to find evidence of the gay life that was quietly and happily going on separately from the theatre’s captives, suicides, and vindictive affairs with choirmasters. As the most reliable source of Broadway data from the 1899–1900 season forward, these volumes form the foundation of one’s library, and I had been catching up on the older entries in the series in the antiquarian shops. Some of these used books carried bookplates or handwritten names. The front flyleaf of 1922–23 bore the idiosyncratic ownership claim of a fifties revue funster in a heavy ink of block letters as “SIGYN RONNY GRAHAM,” and Mantle’s first successor, John Chapman, personalized copies for friends with innocuous messages. Most interesting is the inscription in 1944–45, which I quote in full:

Christmas ’45

These [plays] we didn’t see. You did, naturally, but not I—not me. Still, they did all right and so, within limitations, did we. We probably always will, you know.

To Nelson from his favorite

naval officer—a.

There were no roles for Nelson and his buddy on Broadway in the 1930s, because sexual anomaly could be treated only through Sophistication, and Sophistication didn’t recognize ordinary people. Sophistication was worldly, funny, and smart, as we have seen; it also had its wicked side: sin as a fashion statement. Above all, however, Sophistication counted on a steamy sense of style, whether in the name of Mr. Dulcimer, in Katharine Hepburn’s wrestling with Colin Keith-Johnston, or even in the too-too diction heard in Philip Barry, where the sex drive is sublimated in conversation so tender that we wonder exactly how close Leslie Howard is to that ex-boxer butler. Sophistication included such disparate elements as a Cole Porter double meaning and a country house party in S. N. Behrman, yet on one level all of it contrived to inform and fool the public at once. It was revelation but also a pose. The notion of a gay naval officer serving his country in wartime in the next decade disrupts the affectation, cleans away the steam. At heart, Sophistication was like an evening with the Algonquin wits, so original and stimulating, so well-read, -heard, -lived. They had much to tell that you hadn’t known before, and it was all so entertaining, surprising, educational. Captivity? Call it liberation: and some of it was even true.

Six

The Celebrity of Eccentricity

Listen to the first paragraph of Damon Runyon’s story of 1929, “Romance in the Roaring Forties”:

Only a rank sucker will think of taking two peeks at Dave the Dude’s doll, because while Dave may stand for the first peek, figuring it is a mistake, it is a sure thing he will get sored up at the second peek, and Dave the Dude is certainly not a man to have sored up at you.