All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (38 page)

Even the sets and costumes reflected Lunt’s vision of a place so dull that everyone spends his time getting elaborately dressed. Our old friend Estelle Winwood, already in her loony-old-bag phase as Fontanne’s mother, was outfitted to look—quoth the stage directions—“like the tails of nine peacocks,” and the view was clogged with parasols, hammocks, and a hypnotic revolving mirror. Perhaps the busy production was meant to fill out a thin plot line: Fontanne dreams of the bloodthirsty pirate Estramudo, and believes that she has found him in Lunt. She
has
found him: but not in Lunt. Estramudo, retired, is that grumpy slug of a husband.

The script is actually one of Behrman’s more adroit concoctions, devoid of sociopolitical remark but rich in Sophistication. There is a touch of Noël Coward in this exchange between Lunt and the plot’s deus ex machina, the local viceroy:

VICEROY:
With your passion for acting, I wonder you bother with piracy.

LUNT:
I am a lazy man, Excellency. Piracy is so much easier.

There are many clever touches, as when Behrman ends Act One with Lunt on a tightrope, holding his shoes and keeping his balance with one of those parasols as he sleeks his way through the air to Fontanne’s bedroom. For a quaint surprise, Behrman then starts Act Three in the bedroom just before Lunt, with the shoes and parasol, came bounding in through the window.

And yet. Doesn’t this kind of thing have to be a musical—a
real
one? The braggy hero, the company of players, the exotic locale and visual feast, and above all the yearning heroine? Lunt calls her “the most extraordinary mixture of fantasy and realism”: isn’t that a role fit for song? Isn’t musical comedy by definition a mixture of fantasy and realism?

And of course it was MGM that realized
The Pirate
’s generic completion, in 1948, retaining the Broadway title for a Gene Kelly–Judy Garland Technicolor special: songs by Cole Porter, and Vincente Minnelli directing with an eye keen for the look of the piece, just as Lunt had done. However, if on Broadway
The Pirate
was gaudy, on screen it went utterly rococo, perhaps Caribbean Sophisticated, with derbies on women and pantaloons on men. Porter is not at his best, yet that ho-hum married team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (later the adapters of
The Diary of Anne Frank
) throw Behrman to the winds to create a rather enjoyable script.

The Pirate
lost money on first release and is still no more than a cult favorite. Still, if the thin story has any validity it would be as a vehicle for the exhibitionism of Kelly and the strangely touching comic-romantic style that no one else commands as naturally as Garland. If any duo can rival the Lunts in their form, it is Kelly and Garland in theirs, for the Lunts really were too rich a brew for this cauldron. Lunt a fraud? Fontanne yearning? It’s Kelly, rather, who ham-and-eggs through life, Garland who needs. She gets a line funnier than anything in the play, when, to save the town, she must submit to the (false) pirate’s advances. All are aghast, not realizing that, just between us, Garland is fulfilling her dream of becoming The Bride of the Buccaneer. As she proceeds to her “doom,” one village girl gallantly offers to go in her place:

GARLAND:
He asked for
me
.

Clash By Night
and
The Pirate
point up something that few were willing to admit at the time: for all Broadway’s high-hat, “take the money and run” view of Hollywood, some works seemed inadequate until they were filmed, further encouraging audiences to concentrate on moviegoing.

For now, however, the war years were Broadway’s most lucrative since the late 1920s, as the well-to-do sought distraction from war news, and servicemen impressed their dates with a classy outing. A theatre crunch caused by the new long-run syndrome led to the rediscovery of the neglected auditoriums clustered around Columbus Circle, and a new genre appeared, loosely called “the war play.” The Lunts tackled Finland versus the Soviet Union in Robert E. Sherwood’s
There Shall Be No Night
(1940). Lillian Hellman advocated killing Nazis in
Watch on the Rhine
(1940). James Gow and Arnaud d’Usseau urged patience in rehabilitating a slimy Nazi kid entrusted to his American uncle in
Tomorrow the World
(1943).

The chronicle play seemed timely now. Sidney Kingsley’s
The Patriots
(1943) looked in on President George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton in the early days of the Republic, to consider America’s first principles. The show ran four and a half months and won the Drama Critics Circle Award, but its halfhearted reception disappointed Kingsley, who had worked on it for four years and seemed to regard it as more Important than
Men in White
and
Dead End
.

Howard Koch and John Huston’s
In Time to Come
(1941) did even less well. Centering on the Versailles Peace Conference, it presented Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Sonnino, but centered on Wilson (Richard Gaines). “A careful recital” was the
Christian Science Monitor
’s appraisal of Gaines’ impersonation. It’s a tribute to Gaines’ authenticity, for Wilson—cold, stubborn, and absurdly idealistic when set against European Realpolitik—was one of our most wooden politicians.

There was far livelier entertainment in Moss Hart’s
Winged Victory
(1943). It even got a cast album, actually just two twelve-inch 78s bearing the show’s entire vocal score: four choral numbers, including Yale’s “Whiffenpoof Song” (with relevant new lyrics in the verse) and “The Army Air Corps” (the one about “the wild blue yonder”). This recording leads some to think of
Winged Victory
as the Air Force’s musical, to match
This Is the Army
(1942). But the latter is a revue with an almost wholly new score (by Irving Berlin), while
Winged Victory
is a play. Note that one of our leading Sophisticates, Moss Hart, has taken on the job of ladling out patriotic corn without a single Upper West Side sarcasm.

Like
This Is the Army, Winged Victory
was an intramural effort, cast entirely with soldiers (and civilian women, including many of the actors’ real-life wives). A company of more than three hundred followed the progress of some half dozen inductees, as one fails his dream of becoming a pilot, one is wounded, one is killed, and one, at the very end, anticipates the coming of his firstborn. It took a bold Sophisticate indeed to declare himself unmoved by this very human epic, and again like
This Is the Army, Winged Victory
did sellout business till its ontological status as a national act of faith rather than a strictly Broadway attraction forced it to close up and tour. One odd note: despite the gigantic cast and technical problems (including seventeen different sets), Hart got the whole production ready for the Boston tryout in only seventeen days’ rehearsal! As he explained it, he had no actory temperaments to tame: soldiers take orders,
et plus vite comme ça
.

Perhaps the best of the war plays was Paul Osborn’s
A Bell For Adano
(1944), from John Hersey’s novel. Although it tells and approves of an officer’s insubordination, it proved extremely popular as a serious comedy with an unhappy yet inspiring ending. There is almost no plot: Major Joppolo (Fredric March), of our forces in occupied Sicily, tries to cajole, encourage, or fend off various residents of Adano, each with his own needs to be satisfied. Underlying it all is one communal need, for a replacement for the town’s seven-hundred-year-old bell, melted down for bullets by the fascists. The bell was everything to Adano—timetable, protection, history. “When it spoke,” says one of the locals, “our fathers spoke to us.”

Joppolo manages to get a new bell for Adano—from the Navy—but meanwhile an idiot general lays down a pointless order that will do great harm to life in Adano. Osborn keeps this general offstage as a screaming terror that Joppolo is heard vainly trying to reason with. Note that while Joppolo can work with even the slyest and most manipulative of the villagers, an Army general is a thing apart, a regulation rather than a human being. So Joppolo countermands the order, saving the village. For this, he is reassigned to a punishment job in Algiers. As Joppolo departs, the new bell begins to peal out. “Listen,” he cries, “it shakes the whole damn building!” Again offstage, we hear the townspeople in their excitement. Joppolo leaves, and as the bell rings out the curtain falls.

The war plays were destined to become artifacts, perhaps. Certain of the star vehicles seemed even more ephemeral, though some of the titles themselves remain vivid, if only to buffs and historians. Audiences flocked to the hideous
succès de bombe
called
My Dear Children
(1940) to see the wreckage of John Barrymore. He played the actor father of three problematic young women, wearing crazy costumes (including a Hamlet getup and an Alpine ensemble), reeling drunkenly around the stage, and tossing off ad libs aimed at latecomers and his co-star and latest wife, Elaine Barrie.

The fiery Barrie-Barrymore marriage, fanned by Barrie’s noisy mother, was part of
My Dear Children
’s PR appeal, even after Barrie left the cast during the all but phenomenal thirty-three-week Chicago run during the tryout. As with the Barrymore Hamlet, no two audiences saw the same performance, and pundits clucked over the sorry choice of vehicle for the actor’s first stage turn in almost a generation, in fact his farewell to art but for a few minor film parts. Yet the Barrymore wit was as sharp as ever, even through the alcoholic haze. During the Chicago stand, a fire engine siren was heard outside, and John cried, “Good God, my wife!” Immediately after, a truck backfired, and John grabbed for a topper: “And she’s got her mother with her!”

Mae West was by comparison almost dull in
her
sorry choice of vehicle,
Catherine Was Great
(1944), on the famous Russian monarch. West, too, was returning after a long stay in Hollywood, but unlike Barrymore’s low-rent show, West’s was Big Broadway. Her producer was Michael Todd, no Gilbert Miller but a guy willing to Spend the Money. The
World-Telegram
’s Burton Rascoe thought the
Catherine
production made
The Miracle
look like something spit out by the Federal Theatre, and a glittering first-night crowd (who had paid their admission in war bonds to the tune of four
million
dollars) cheered the costumes. There was nothing else to cheer, for that premiere hosted a series of disasters—the music amplifier failed, a nervous cast muffed cues, a curtain parted at the wrong moment to exhibit a stagehand donking away on some task as the audience whooped.

Then there was the script itself. A pair of unknowns wrote
My Dear Children,
but West was her own auteur, and she let her star down with too much Russian history. “Miss West talking about men is one thing,” wrote
PM
’s Louis Kronenberger. “Miss West talking about ‘the people’ is quite another.” True, the rapaciously amorous West persona was on hand. Robert Garland found the tsaritsa relentlessly “in the Royal Bed Chamber, talking about the Royal Bed Chamber, thinking about the Royal Bed Chamber, or on her way there.” In truth, the experience of West awaiting yet another handsome officer (one of them a young Gene Barry), hearing a knock, and crying, “Enta!” became a running gag for the audience. West included her usual bits—a song in Act Two, a swishy gay (Florian, the Royal Dress Designer). Still, like
My Dear Children,
this was another hit in spite of itself.

Stars were better served by Emlyn Williams and Philip Barry, respectively, in Ethel Barrymore’s stint in
The Corn Is Green
(1940) and Tallulah Bankhead’s in
Foolish Notion
(1945). After a long period of being miscast in flops, Barrymore secured a tremendous personal success as Williams’ English schoolmarm coaching a promising young Welshman. Even Barrymore’s entrance—pushing a bicycle in black dress, white blouse with man’s black necktie, topped by a black-banded boater—seemed so wondrous that its photograph is
the
souvenir of early-forties theatregoing.

A year’s run in New York and an even longer tour gave Barrymore the biggest commercial hit of her career;
Foolish Notion
barely broke even. But then, it wasn’t a Tallulah vehicle per se. Here was another of the screwy Barry concepts: Bankhead, her fiancé, her father, and her daughter learn that Bankhead’s husband, missing in battle and declared legally dead, is returning. Each in turn fantasizes what the reunion will be like. Poor Barry once again got roasted for straying from the conventional. “It is so smart, so brilliant, and so clever,” said Burton Rascoe, “that I haven’t the slightest idea what it was about and I was bored stiff by it.”

The classics continued to turn a brisk trade. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, with
Wuthering Heights
and
Gone with the Wind
behind each, offered a
Romeo and Juliet
(1940). It was very much a family affair, what with Olivier also producing, co-directing, and even collaborating on the music; and we note with interest the Balthasar of the twenty-three-year-old John (then Jack) Merivale, who much later became Leigh’s support when her marriage to Olivier collapsed. Actually, this
Romeo
turned out pure—in David Merrick’s pet phrase—“turkey lurkey.” However, critics really went for Eva Le Gallienne’s anything-for-a-laugh staging of Sheridan’s
The Rivals
(1942), featuring the shockingly heterogeneous cast of musical-comedy diva Helen Ford, musical-comedy zany Bobby Clark, old hambone Walter Hampden, and Mary Boland in the role she was born to play, Mrs. Malaprop. The Theatre Guild broke its purism-where-possible rule to present a frankly altered version, with a new prologue, a spate of songs, and some fresh misnomers for Boland. Burns Mantle saw in her a vision of Mrs. John Drew—virtually the mother of American theatre—but Clark stole the notices. He had appeared in a Players Club showing of Congreve’s
Love For Love
in 1940, so in fact Clark Going Classic was no novelty. (In 1946, he would play Molière’s
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
as
The Would-Be Gentleman
.) Clark abandoned his trademark cigar and painted-on glasses for Bob Acres’ expected finery, and Boland was all wig and beauty spot; still, this was a new Sheridan. Oddly, while
Romeo and Juliet
flopped and
The Rivals
seemed quite the hit, the one managed to last five weeks at the Mark Hellinger (then called the Fifty-first Street) while the other played the Shubert for only three weeks longer.