All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (52 page)

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Authors: Ethan Mordden

Tags: #Performing Arts, #Theater, #Broadway & Musical Revue

BOOK: All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959

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6
. A nostalgic domestic comedy about the coming of age of a romantic young man (Elisha Cook Jr.) on one very busy small-town Fourth of July,
Ah, Wilderness!
cast George M. Cohan as the protagonist’s father. It was a stunning coup; Cohan was almost inarguably the outstanding American thespian, the most famous, the biggest. Besides, the Guild didn’t work with performers like Cohan. The Guild worked with … you know, Dudley Digges or the Lunts. Actors, not national institutions. An adjustment in policy was necessary, for while Cohan could go on without makeup, as always before, and persist in his seething refusal to join Equity, the Guild could not present the greatest of headliners without name billing. The
Ah, Wilderness!
poster showed a young couple side by side in a rowboat under a full moon, and Cohan’s name was spelled out, albeit in smallish type below the title. Thereafter, the Guild retired its “no stars” policy, and important players were heralded on the Guild’s showcards, though almost invariably under the title.

7
. There is some confusion about this work’s titles. The first script was called
Chris Christophersen,
and so it was named when finally published, in 1982. However, the 1920 tryout, in Atlantic City and Philadelphia, billed the piece as
Chris
. When O’Neill revised the text, now called
The Ole Davil,
he learned that the Swedish father’s name is correctly spelled “Christophers
o
n,” and so it is spelled in the final version as well, the
Anna Christie
that finally reached Broadway. All this fuss over the father only reminds us that O’Neill’s interest in the big figure of the sailor who hates the sea led him into the blunder of writing, at first, the wrong play. Chris has no story. The action treats his daughter and her touchy relationship with the world of men. Lynn Fontanne played Anna in
Chris
.

10
.
Lady in the Dark
’s designer, Harry Horner, cut two large turntables into the deck, with a smaller turntable inside each one. At the cue for the start of each dream, the heavy real-life set broke apart during a blackout, sliding offstage as the revolves brought separate pieces of the dream locale into view. Furthering the illusion, director Hassard Short, a lighting expert, used spots to guide the public’s eye while the pieces were joined into a new set; upstage, a fifth turntable changed the background. As for Laurette Taylor, her extraordinary talent may have been hobbled by her adoring second husband, playwright and director J. Hartley Manners. He produced Taylor as a stage version of Mary Pickford: the eternal maiden with a love-me style that blew more kisses than Yasir Arafat arriving at a Hezbollah luau. Manners died in 1928, freeing Taylor to express herself, most notably as the fluttery older woman of the pathetic kind. A drinking problem made her virtually unemployable, but she pulled herself together for a 1938 revival of
Outward Bound
that gave Taylor perhaps the most ecstatic notices of the century. So Taylor did warn of her brilliance to come; one doesn’t, however, create a legend in a revival unless it’s Shakespeare, Chekhof, or Ibsen. Wasting her genius on Sutton Vane, Taylor turned to new work seven years later in Tennessee Williams’ perfect play with a perfect Taylor part; the rest, finally,
is
legend.

5. Sophisticated

5
. Further charm went into the mix when
Design for Living
was filmed, during the very year of the New York run, with Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, and even Fredric March, not all that charming but at least sturdy, or something. True, Ben Hecht gave director Ernst Lubitsch a new script substituting wisecrack humor for Coward’s more insinuatingly subversive coquetry. Note, too, that
Design for Living
was conceived for Americans’ notion of the enlightenment hiding within taboo. Coward never expected to repeat his stunt with his two co-stars in England: for there taboo was still unapproachable. The Lord Chamberlain thought it over for six years before allowing a production. German emigré Anton Walbrook and Rex Harrison boyed around with Diana Wynyard, and The Master did not even trouble to stage the piece himself, as he was in New York at exactly the same time, putting on his revue
Set To Music.

6. The Celebrity of Eccentricity

1
. Unlike Dorothy Parker, who would say anything to execute a jest (e.g., when Harold Ross asked why she hadn’t visited the
New Yorker
office to make a contribution: “Someone was using the pencil”), Kaufman’s gags were usually very seriously meant, however witty. In the mid-1950s, Kaufman was involved in
Silk Stockings,
a Cole Porter musical based on the Lubitsch-Garbo film
Ninotchka
. Kaufman, directing and co-writing the show till he was fired out of town, favorably impressed Hildegarde Knef (billed as “Neff”), in the Garbo role, and she beseeched Kaufman on behalf of a German colleague, a director. He wanted to stage one of Kaufman’s plays in Germany; the Jewish Kaufman forbade all such production. Defending the director, Knef said, “This man emigrated during the Hitler period.” “The audience didn’t,” Kaufman replied.

7. Having Wonderful Time: The Popular Stage

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