All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (5 page)

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A work such as
Aphrodite
reminds us how common European plays were along The Street—and not just from England but from Italy, France, Hungary, and the newly formed Czechoslovakia. Henri Bataille’s
Don Juan
(1921), in a translation by Lawrence Langner, was seen here for only two weeks, probably because the star, Lou Tellegen, was one of the least interesting of matinée idols. In this retelling, everyone mistakenly thinks Don Juan has died and he finds that, shorn of his reputation, he cannot get a date. A note in the Garrick Theatre program observed that while the typical
Don Juan
opus punishes the libertine with death, Bataille decided “to punish him with life.”

These Continental works were bombing in unusually high numbers. Another two-week failure was Maurice Maeterlinck’s
Pelleas and Melisande
(so billed), which Broadway had seen earlier, in 1902, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, complete with
accents aigus
as
Pelléas et Mélisande
and an orchestra playing Gabriel Fauré’s incidental score. The work did not go over, though New Yorkers had the opportunity to hear virtually the entire original Paris cast of Claude Debussy’s operatic adaptation in 1908, when Oscar Hammerstein was still playing host at the Manhattan Opera House. It’s a shy and furtive piece, spoken or sung, in English or French, but Jane Cowl thought the time was right for this second viewing of the play, in 1923. Rollo Peters co-starred and also designed the sets.

One senses the influence of the Theatre Guild in these arty endeavors, if only because Lawrence Langner (and
Don Juan
’s set designer, Lee Simonson) were Guild honchos, the Garrick was the Guild’s home till 1925, and Rollo Peters, too, was a Guild eminence. But the Guild, as we’ll see, counted on a subscription audience as a bank against fast closings, while freelance managements daring the exotic were risking all. It was Russell Janney who produced Melchior Lengyel’s
Sancho Panza
(1923), adapted by Sidney Howard, and Janney was not enriched by the show’s five-week run (though he did clean up on
The Vagabond King
two years after).
Sancho Panza
gave Otis Skinner another Spanish character, this one more age-appropriate than
Blood and Sand
’s young bullfighter. Moreover, Lengyel’s impish notion quite suited Skinner’s comic flair: what happens to Don Quixote’s assistant after Cervantes? Although the piece played the Hudson, whose tiny stage offers virtually no wing space, the critics all claimed to have seen an extremely elaborate production. Quixote appeared only in a prologue, delivering an oration on chivalry. Then Otis Skinner piped up:

SANCHO:
When do we eat?

It sounds like fun, especially because of Sancho’s donkey, impersonated by Robert Rosaire, who captivated the reviewers. In view of the capsule history of American acting that will maintain a throughline throughout this book, we should note that
Sancho Panza
’s director was Richard Boleslavsky, one of the first adepts of Stanislafsky to preach the master in the West.

It was an American who wrote the oddest of the “Continental” plays, Michael Strange.
Clair de Lune
(1921), drawn from parts of Victor Hugo’s
The Man Who Laughs,
changed the spelling of Hugo’s British anti-hero from Gwynplaine to Gwymplane, which perhaps suggests Strange’s fastidious approach in general. Apparently, she saw the European play as a place of high romance intensely poeticized. Beyond the byline, Strange was Blanche Barrymore, John’s second wife, and le tout New York believed that it was only John’s enthusiasm—and his having coerced sister Ethel into signing on for a rare joint appearance—that made
Clair de Lune
possible.

The story itself is extremely rococo: the man who laughs was so mutilated under torture that his mouth is fixed in a hideous grin, and his adventures in the play involve him mainly with a sweet-hearted blind girl and a nymphomaniacal duchess. Ethel played Queen Anne, a kind of referee in Strange’s game of crazed passions run amok. One of her speeches ran, “I hate sentimentality. It reminds me of people with colds in their heads who have lost their pocket handkerchiefs.” That has the flavor of Oscar Wilde. But too much of
Clair de Lune
has the flavor of Michael Strange, as in “The touch of your lips is like a tide rushing, sucking my wakefulness down into the depths of terrible oblivion.”

Even so, the opening brought out a mad crush of event collectors, from the great and the near great to the would-bes and the curious. Remember, in those days there were no on-site previews; shows either opened cold or tried out in other cities, almost invariably generating contradictory reports. Also, there were no “critics’ dates” just before the premiere, as today; critics attended the premiere only, lending the evening a dangerous excitement. The first night was as well a chance to catch an actor speaking not written lines but in his own style, in the star’s curtain speech. Playwrights, too, made remark if called to the stage, or at least took a bow.
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Perhaps most important, the first night was when New York officially delivered its verdict on the value of the new piece, the new performer, so many prominent people felt it necessary to defend their prominence by taking part in that process. Indeed, major openings called out a vast number of the unimportant as well; cops held them back as the arriving audience became as much a focus as the play on view. Later on in the history, a revue called
Thumbs Up!
(1934) featured a song by Vernon Duke (words as well as music) called “Autumn in New York.” Extolling and regretting the typifying matters of the timeplace, Duke’s lyric troubles to relish “the thrill of first nighting.”

So John and Ethel Barrymore in John’s wife’s demented play was reason to throng the Empire Theatre, and choice pairs of tickets were touted at the door for as much as two hundred fifty dollars. Almost no one liked the piece, but it certainly wasn’t boring: it ended with John cutting out his own heart and the duchess lapping up the spilled blood.
Clair de Lune
ran 64 performances.

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The romance of the Barrymores is one of the most enduring tropes in American celebrity culture; it is difficult to imagine early-twentieth-century show biz without them. One reason why it took the movies almost two generations to overtake the stage was simply its “illiteracy.” But the main reason was that stardom had long been established as a kind of secular Mass celebrating an individual encountered in real time, real life. Even without the opening-night curtain speech, the public enjoyed a relationship with stage players that simply could not be rivaled by the dumb show of silent film. Then, too, the theatre’s stars maintained lengthy careers, creating a bond with their public, a mutual support system. Movie fame could be bizarrely transient; we’ve already noticed that one of the greatest Hollywood reigns, that of Theda Bara, was over in five years.

The Barrymores not only sustained full-length careers but were scions of a dynasty, the Drews. This lent a comforting stability to the very business of theatre, which—especially after 1919—seemed ever crazing into novelties that divided the audience, such as Shakespeare in a unit set, or scripts that baffled genre. Ethel made headliner first, under Charles Frohman’s management, as an opera singer marrying into New York society in
Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines
(1901). It was typical Frohman: a brand-name playwright (Clyde Fitch) who knew how to focus attention on a star player while riffing mildly on social antagonisms. Thus Frohman set Ethel upon a course she seldom veered from thereafter, exploring the nuances of charm for an appreciative public, albeit in rather a variety of roles. Still, there were almost always the patented Ethel things—refinements of tone in the husky voice, the gala bearing and sheer class of a woman who wouldn’t dream of letting you know that if she isn’t among royalty she’s slumming. There were more interesting actresses, but no finer company.

The older Lionel actually spent most of his youth making movies; his stage work was so spotty that he never enjoyed an abiding relationship with any management. As anyone familiar with his talkies can attest, he was made for melodrama. His breakthrough part, as Illinois farmer Milt Shanks in Augustus Thomas’ Civil War piece
The Copperhead
(1918), was typical of both Lionel and the genre: suspected of Southern sympathies and ostracized by the community, he waits fifty years to disclose that he was working in secret for the North. The scene of revelation—made in a letter of commendation from President Lincoln—was one of those old-fashioned Big Moments that redeem the season and become officially Unforgettable.

Still it was John, the youngest, who occupied the center of the Barrymore romance; who inspired the clucking of tongues and (later) shady gossip-column items; who passed his first fifteen years in the theatre as a light-comic matinée idol only to discover a genuine dramatic gift in first-rate works mounted by top-line managers; and whose defection from the stage for drunken gambols through movieland became a favorite retelling of that great American saga of the doomed beauty.

Make no mistake: everyone was in love with John Barrymore. Lookers are plentiful in the acting trade, but a looker with wit and spirit can be unforgivably magnetic, and while John loathed long runs, he did love assuming new roles, changing his form and magnetism. Another joint Barrymore appearance took the two boys to Medici Florence, in Sem Benelli’s
La Cena delle Beffe,
adapted by John’s pal Edward Sheldon as
The Jest
(1919). Lionel played a thug and John the mouse who defeats him with guile, and the pair enjoyed a genuine triumph. But note how the
Times
’ John Corbin discerned in John “a white flame of beauty, half spiritual, half decadent.” The last word was contemporary code for “gay,” so what exactly was Corbin discerning? John’s role in
The Jest
had been played, in Italy and France, as a trouser part (i.e., by a woman in male drag), and when John left
The Jest
during the New York run, Gilda Varesi, a minor member of the company, took over for him. Is this character less that of a mouse—he does end up sleeping with the thug’s mistress—than that of a pansexual? Disciplined in his youth by a strict grandmother, the redoubtable Mrs. John Drew Sr., John would be exiled to the attic for a time-out in the dark. “You can’t hurt me!” he would call out, ascending the dreadful stairs to who knew what monstrous beings. “I have a wonderful power!”

They all did, those Barrymores: though John was more fun than Lionel and more tolerant than Ethel. He was infuriatingly undependable, but he had the gift of youthfulness: those who knew him said he never aged in spirit. Better, he kept them young. How much of that did his public sense, and how much drew them to him? Did they
know
these people on some level—or else why did they clap so very warmly when Ethel made her first entrance after the Strike, in
Déclassée
(1920)? The critics ticketed it as thanks for her leadership in the 1919 job action, her sense of responsibility to her community.

Shakespeare was another way to effect that distant intimacy with leading players, for there was always a revival going up, and theatregoers knew their Bard. John donned the mantle of America’s Most Promising Actor as Richard III in 1920, under Arthur Hopkins’ management (Hopkins not only produced but directed), a well-nigh luminous evil. Then, in 1921, Hopkins starred Lionel in a universally despised
Macbeth
that sounds fascinating, as designer Robert Edmond Jones set the action in front of giant masks in suspended pools of light and as Hopkins directed Lionel and his Lady, Julia Arthur, to create innocent beings in thrall to witchcraft. However, Broadway was not yet ready for this kind of rethinking, and Lionel never got over the humiliation of failure in Shakespeare.

Hopkins and Jones also presented Ethel in
Romeo and Juliet,
in 1922, a month before Jane Cowl and her faithful Rollo Peters (again designing as well) appeared in the same work. Ethel had the busy McKay Morris as Romeo and Basil Sydney as Mercutio (Cowl’s was Dennis King) and suffered a kind of qualified disaster. It wasn’t terrible; it just had no reason for being there. Worse, for Ethel, Cowl’s show was acclaimed. Flopping in a new play meant the playwright had let the star down. Flopping in Shakespeare was
flopping,
the actor’s real nightmare. Sheer glamor did not avail, for the most relentless Shakespearean of the day was an actor without a shred of charisma—the opposite of a Barrymore, a Jane Cowl, even, one has to say, a Rollo Peters. This was Walter Hampden, perhaps the least mentioned of all Golden Age names. Though he appeared in a few new works as well as Ibsen and Barrie, he seemed to prefer performing plays that were four hundred years old, keeping an avid public in thrall. In Cole Porter’s
Jubilee
(1935), a coterie of Noël Coward fans hails the Master’s return from a long absence by reviewing all Broadway with “And as for actors the only one,” going on to “was Walter Hampden, and that’s no fun.” As we’ll see, the glittery Porter-Coward axis would challenge plain old actors like Hampden for reign on Broadway. Tradition? Or Sophistication?

Or simply John Barrymore as Hamlet? When Hopkins and Jones got to this event, also in 1922, there was, in John Corbin’s words, “an atmosphere of historic happening.” I save the word “legendary” for mythical figures; but doesn’t John Barrymore now hold mythical status in America’s actor culture? Certainly, his Hamlet is legendary, not least for—this is Corbin again—“the hushed murmurs that swept the audience at the most unexpected moments” and “silent crowds that all evening long swarmed about the theatre entrance.” That “thrill of first nighting” that Vernon Duke sang of apparently extended even to those who couldn’t gain the auditorium. But they could say, “I was there.”

Those who actually saw John Barrymore’s Hamlet cannot tell us of it, because he gave no one Hamlet. This restless subject of everyone’s hopes experimented and improvised and even played jokes to keep from hating the 101-performance run. (This broke by one repetition Edwin Booth’s grand old turn of 1864–65 at the old Winter Garden, on Broadway above Houston Street.) Perhaps the true John Barrymore Hamlet was the one he gave the first week or so, the result of painstaking rehearsals surprising in one who so often threw entire performances away.