All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (28 page)

Considering all the parts of Broadway’s relationship with Hollywood, we note one that is scarcely ever remarked: the influence of the microphone on performing style. Introduced into the recording industry in 1925 and, obviously, the means by which the sound of talkies was channeled, the mike almost instantly brought all of show biz down from 10 to 6: from Al Jolson to Bing Crosby. We’ve heard those legends about silent-screen stars destroyed by their voices in 1929, but their problem was more usually an operatic persona, a visual grandeur too fantastical for the wisecrackling talkie.

Those working in musical forms could pursue eccentric presentations because the musical is eccentric. However, Eddie Cantor couldn’t clap and prance quite so much when his sound had to feed a mike in a fixed location. Cantor was still Cantor, but his act perforce underwent a certain physical refining; and those in the succeeding generation didn’t clap and prance at all.

Actors of the speaking stage had a different problem, for they work within a real-life mimesis that no one expects of the people whooping it up in musicals. Most important, talkie naturalism demanded a comparable naturalism in theatre: Broadway must give up its grand manner or risk alienating the growing ranks of theatregoers who went to movies. At the same time—as we’ll see in the next chapter—the Group Theatre’s experiments with Stanislafskyan honesty furthered the revolution in American acting. From the overblown style of the turn of the century (or so we believe, on limited evidence), the actor was learning intimacy. Going by the most genuine evidence we do have—film—we discern a statement on thespian evolution from the Best Actor Oscar winner of 1929–30, the sumptuous George Arliss (for
Disraeli
) to the Best Actor of 1938, Spencer Tracy (for
Boys Town
), perhaps the most compellingly prosaic actor Hollywood ever developed. Kiss takes off the makeup.

And is it possible that Hollywood’s traveling camera forced Broadway to stampede its crawling technical advances in set design—specifically, in the ease with which one location could cede the stage to the next? In the 1920s, when film was silent, the stage did not greatly fear competition, and while visionary artists like Robert Edmond Jones and Norman Bel Geddes experimented with the relationship of the visuals to the narrative, virtually no work was done, by them or others, on set change per se. Waiting in semi-darkness for the stagehands to get done with it was part of theatregoing; talk quietly among yourselves.

However, in the 1930s, movies really were stealing Broadway’s public, and
suddenly
—because now it had to—the theatre devised a host of ingenious new ways to keep a story flowing from place to place. The revolving stage, apparently invented in Japan in the seventeenth century, was introduced on Broadway in the 1920s but not exploited till the following decade. It was especially popular in the revue because the cascade of acts required speedy changes of decor;
2
but Broadway in general took up the revolve. Note, however, that there was no correlation between this relatively avant-garde technology and the avant-garde creators. The revolve was neither ambitious nor artistic: it was efficient. Whether one singles out Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, or Philip Barry, the major playwrights were comfortable in their accustomed single-set formats.

But Mae West wasn’t. Her
The Constant Sinner
(1931), from West’s own novel, called for sixteen different settings, mostly the bars and boudoirs in which West did her finest work. Thus,
The Constant Sinner
needed a revolve just to keep up with the adventures of one Babe Gordon (la West), involved with a boxer (the ever happily shirtless Russell Hardie), a Harlem gangster (George Givot, in blackface), and a millionaire (Walter Petrie). As often before, West’s milieu was the underworld. The neighborhood is veritably hanging with crooks:

BABE:
When I opened my door this morning, five of them fell in. I wouldn’t have minded, but two of them was dead.

The critics slaughtered the piece, and it lasted only two months. “Mae West’s latest personally conducted slumming party,” cried the
New York American
. It “smells of depravity and degradation.” Percy Hammond thought West “the world’s worst actress,” failing to understand that West’s gig wasn’t acting but an Act, probably the greatest nonstop ragging of authority known to the twentieth century. “As a show-woman she is crafty,” Hammond allowed, and she “knows as much about life as Balzac, Dreiser, Victor Hugo, Samuel Shipman, or Eugene O’Neill.”
3

Shows utilizing a relatively simple scene plot of, say, three or four different locations and only two per act could adopt the “jackknife” format. By this plan, each of the two sets to be employed in a given act was laid out on a platform, each platform to be swiveled on an angle into the public’s eyeline or back out of sight into the wings. While one set was in use, anchored behind the proscenium, the other was resting offstage, for example at left. Then the first set, on its platform, could be moved off at stage right and the second set hauled into view (all this, of course, behind the house curtain), in a “house lights at half” interval of a minute or so. Any other sets used in the production could await use in a later act way upstage, partly dismantled, then set onto one of the jackknife platforms in their turn during intermission.

Jackknifing was ideal for a work such as John Cecil Holm and George Abbott’s
Three Men on a Horse
(1935), which moves back and forth among a suburban living room, a hotel bar, and a hotel room. The tale of a meek greeting-card poet who, infallibly picking horse-race winners, gets involved with low lives,
Three Men On a Horse
would, just a few years before, have had to be written for one set. Thus the authors would have been forced to compromise their narration by locking the action into one place where all the characters—both middle-class and demimondain—could plausibly meet. And that’s implausible.
4

Obviously, certain plays didn’t need to travel the landscape to tell their stories.
Dead End
unveils a social problem in its contrasts of class; and the fun of
The Man Who Came To Dinner
lies partly in seeing how many crazies and patsies the authors can stuff into what we had supposed to be the most tranquil spot on earth: a midwestern living room.

But how could Clare Boothe have written
The Women
thus? The piece is not much less than a saga, with as many as five different sets per act. There was no way to play all that in jackknife style, and a revolve tends to curtail the size of the acting space, a logistical nightmare for a script with thirty-five characters. But Boothe genuinely needed a lot of “place” in her show, for one of her observations is that while the ladies of the great world have no legal or political power, they are astonishingly mobile. There’s virtually nowhere they cannot go. Boothe doesn’t take them to the opera or a Winchellian first night, however. She gives us the
rooms
of the women. Not where they are Seen: where they talk, from Manhattan parlor to the divorcée’s day room on a Nevada dude ranch. That is, the decor is not necessarily lavish—but there is a travelogue’s worth of it.

Designer Jo Mielziner’s solution to this problem was the third major possibility for multi-set shows, the two-platform system. One needs a lot of wing space for this: the playing area hosts one set (on a platform to be rolled on and off stage as needed) while stagehands ready the next set on the platform that is resting offstage. For the change, behind a lowered curtain or in blackout, the onstage platform is wheeled off and the just-prepared one wheeled on. The crew then get started striking the previous set, freeing that platform for its next burden.

With all this new freedom of action, one expects to find few one-set plays at all; on the contrary, producers were attracted to them because they were so much less trouble to capitalize. One thinks of the television mogul played by Gary Marshall in the film
Soap Dish
reminding his staff that his two favorite words are “peppy” and “cheap.” Those two adjectives would fairly describe the most unremembered comedy smash of the 1930s, a George Abbott production written by Clifford Goldsmith,
What A Life
(1938). Set entirely in the principal’s office of an Anytown, U.S.A.’s Central High,
What A Life
introduced a character who would symbolize a generation of American teens, Henry Aldrich. Ezra Stone played him on Broadway, opposite Betty Field as his girl friend and with Vaughan Glaser as the humorlessly impatient principal. (One rather expects a comically hyper principal in the manner of
Our Miss Brooks
’ Mr. Conklin.) Stone went on to a
Henry Aldrich
series on radio; then Paramount built some films around Jackie Cooper’s Henry, retaining Field and Glaser and also Eddie Bracken, promoted from a bit in the play to a featured part as Henry’s sidekick, Dizzy. Others took over the kid leads as the series went on through the war years, and in fact the movies are, however modestly pleasing, more fun than the play.

At least
What A Life
is peppy, because George Abbott was its producer-director; and the dreary set and the costume plot of ordinary people in their go-to-school clothes guaranteed cheap. A kind of teenage Good Soldier Svejk, Henry is well-intentioned but born for trouble and situation comedy. There’s not a single wisecrack in the entire script, because the grown-ups and teens of Central High aren’t undergoing any real struggle for authority and the setting doesn’t welcome the screwball. This is a series of stately entrances and exits rather than a tumble of zanies bashing into view through the traditional slamming doors of farce. In fact,
What A Life
is exceptional to the thirties comic style, that zippy chaos of know-it-alls; instead, it treats such plain old things as making excuses to irritated adults, unmasking the hypocrite who
really
stole the school band instruments, and asking Betty Field to the prom.
What A Life
is the opposite of
You Can’t Take It With You,
which is why it is now as forgot as the nation’s other plain old things, such as
Lightnin’
. Comedy without wisecracks could still play at this time, but would not outlast it.

So
What A Life
seems somewhat twenties in its derivation; much of thirties fare was similarly long established. The literary adaptation was if anything even bigger now. Edith Wharton’s
Ethan Frome
had a solid success in 1936, with Raymond Massey and the original Anna Christie, Pauline Lord, as the married couple and Ruth Gordon as the life-force that breaks them all apart. The father-and-son writing team of Owen and Donald Davis made the adaptation, and Guthrie McClintic directed, reminding us that he was far more than Katharine Cornell’s husband. George S. Kaufman directed John Steinbeck’s adaptation of his own
Of Mice and Men
the following year, so he, too, was far more than a purveyor of wisecrack wit in comedy and musical. Enjoying one of those exciting first nights that reminded some of the revelation of Jeanne Eagels in
Rain, Of Mice and Men
offered as its leads the less than legendary Wallace Ford, Broderick Crawford (as Lennie), and Claire Luce—so surely the triumph was Kaufman’s. Why did he never acquire an extramural reputation as Master Showman in the line of David Belasco, Jed Harris, and George Abbott? Yes, Kaufman was Master Jokester, one of those Algonquin
salonnards
without whom no Broadway bash was complete. But note that Belasco, Harris, and Abbott were subjects of many a tasty anecdote. Kaufman wasn’t in anecdotes: Kaufman
created
anecdotes. He even created one around Jed Harris, when Harris was producing the Atlantic City tryout of
The Front Page
and called a meeting with its authors and director—Kaufman, in his first such assignment for Broadway. For some reason, possibly to express his rage at the world by subjecting associates to a physical objectification of his own self-hatred, Harris held the conference naked. Also for some reason (here I draw a blank), the other three put up with it passively. But as they left, Kaufman said, “Jed, your fly is open.”

The chronicle play, so vast and impressive in the twenties, was getting more creative. Writer Arthur Goodman veered into what is now called the “counter-factual” in
If Booth Had Missed
(1932), a failure despite excellent reviews. Indeed, Booth’s shot is deflected (by a black servant), but the coalition of so-called fire-eaters in Lincoln’s own party work for Lincoln’s destruction, and his impeachment is defeated by a single vote (as, in real life, was that of Lincoln’s successor after the assassination, Andrew Johnson). Ironically, Lincoln is murdered all the same in Goodman’s version, by a vindictive newspaper editor.

As in the 1920s, chronicle plays came over from London—for instance
St. Helena
(1936), with Maurice Evans taking over the role that Kenneth Kent played at the Old Vic: Napoleon. But how does someone so inspiring and appalling at once—the Corsican Bandit as Emperor of Europe—reach the stage persuasively? At that, consider
St. Helena
’s strange byline, a joining of R. C. Sherriff (author of that doughty old war play
Journey’s End
) and a polyglot actress of mixed family, Jeanne de Casalis, who somehow managed to study with adepts of both Stanislafsky and the Comédie-Française.

Obviously,
St. Helena
deals with the last years of Napoleon’s life, in his second exile, this one in the South Atlantic on a barren rock so unused to communication with the known world that one had to make special arrangements to get there (such as plunging Europe into yet another absolutely unnecessary war). Adhering closely to the record, the authors made history available to ticketbuyers, not only in the touching adoration of Napoleon’s satellites but also in the almost pixieish megalomania of this second
roi soleil
. Here, General Gourgaud asks Napoleon to check over Gourgaud’s account of Waterloo: