All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (8 page)

VENICE:
We must be together now. Or else we may hate each other. And, oh dearest, we
mustn’t
hate each other.

Ann Harding was Venice during
The Green Hat
’s tryout. Replaced by Margalo Gillmore, Harding left to play the lead in an Italian work called
Stolen Fruit
(1925), about a Frenchwoman searching for her long lost infant daughter’s grave who learns that the girl is still alive. It was a meaty role in Harding’s own vehicle, opposite Rollo Peters, a prima donna’s favorite for his ability to grace the stage without taking it. The first thing Jane Cowl asked after accepting a role was “Has Rollo Peters been engaged yet this season?” We’ve met up with Peters before and we’ll be seeing more of him anon.

We’ll see even more of Leslie Howard, who along with Harding was indispensable to these society plays, for this pair of quietly restless personalities embodied at once the strength of character and nonconformist individuality that obsessed playwrights in the coming years. Howard especially became the avatar of the new leading man who was not your father’s hero. He had ambivalence, Howard, but also had a glow about him: a redeemer.

*   *   *

There was a shortage of charismatic actors in comedy. Is it coincidence that John Barrymore won renown precisely when he was graduated from light-comic roles to serious ones, thence to Shakespeare? There was also the problem that, for all its popularity, comedy wasn’t very well written at this time. We find that kind of humor that ages as a pallid charm rather than as laughter, and we find it hard to imagine that anyone ever enjoyed it.

There were five types of comedy, and here are some examples, all hits. First, domestic comedy, centered on marriage or family life, as in Booth Tarkington’s
Clarence
(1919) or Frank Craven’s
The First Year
(1920). Clarence, the nerd handyman who soothes the testy wife (Mary Boland), straightens out the errant son (Glenn Hunter), and reproves the flapper daughter (Helen Hayes), was the role that launched Alfred Lunt’s stardom. It was an exhibition performance, both overstated and nuanced and capped by a solo on the saxophone (which Lunt mastered for the production).
The First Year,
which Craven wrote for himself to star in, is a shyer piece, devoid of flapper and saxophone. It is daily life unadorned: the first twelve months of a middle-class marriage. Boy marries Girl, loses Girl, gets Girl. Nothing else happens, save a second-act set-piece dinner party sabotaged by an inept black maid. “A wooer of the homely chuckle,” the
Times
dubbed Craven, which tells us why he was chosen to play the Stage Manager in
Our Town
almost a generation later. As writer or performer, the
Times
went on. Craven was strong in the “humor of recognition.”

Topical spoof, however, had the humor of novelty, as in George Kelly’s
The Torch-Bearers
(1922), on the “little theatre” movement of small professional or amateur groups dedicated to staging their own Broadway out in the regions (which included Greenwich Village). The Provincetown Players, to select the most immortal example, brought together intellectuals and artists of visionary content; Kelly’s people are the competitively pretentious small-town matrons—led here by Mary Boland and Alison Skipworth—who exploit the stage for social prominence. Kelly’s tone is contemptuous rather than loving, and it is a historian’s choice irony that
The Torch-Bearers
became a staple of amateur groups, who mistook Kelly for a sympathizer.

There were as well romantic comedies, like Arthur Richman’s
The Awful Truth
(1922), the source of the Cary Grant–Irene Dunne film, Hollywood’s classic Comedy of Remarriage. The play reunited
The Gold Diggers’
Ina Claire and Bruce McRae. There were situation comedies, like
The Whole Town’s Talking
(1923), by John Emerson and his wife, Anita Loos, in which a nerdy guy tries to impress his standoffish light of love with pictures of the great beauties he has conquered: Queen Marie of Romania, the Mona Lisa, and Julian Eltinge.
6
It’s not working, so he acquires a fourth picture, of a current movie star, inscribing it to himself in memory of their “happy, hectic Hollywood hours” together. So of course the movie star herself shows up—in Toledo, Ohio—complete with her belligerently protective director. Situation comedy was essentially farce without slamming doors.

More common than one might suspect was stereotypical ethnic comedy, the outstanding instance of course being Anne Nichols’
Abie’s Irish Rose
(1922). Setting the new record to beat at 2,327 performances,
Abie
became a national joke, because not only did no one know anyone who’d liked it: no one knew anyone who’d seen it. Writing the squibs for the theatre listings in the
New Yorker,
Robert Benchley kept jabbing at the piece, then, sometime around its fifth year, gave up with “An interesting revival of one of America’s old favorites.”

These titles have more in common with
Lightnin’
than they do with the comic shows that succeeded them in the late 1920s and after, because of a pokey and even rustic quality that permeates even the titles treating lively urban folk. A good study for us might lie in a huge hit of 1922, George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s
Merton of the Movies
. Its public attended it better prepared than we, for apparently the entire American middle class read the
Saturday Evening Post,
in which Harry Leon Wilson’s novel of the same name had been serialized. Like Booth Tarkington and George Ade, Wilson was regarded as satirist, sociologist, and joke bag all together and now is so over he can’t even be called forgot. But Wilson did latch onto something of note in the appeal of the movies. They don’t just turn cynosures into stars: they turn nobodies into fantasies.

Merton of the Movies
is a spoof of Hollywood, with its mania for making nothing but love stories. A film based on
Robinson Crusoe
gives Friday a white sister to play opposite Crusoe (“so we can get the sex into it,” says a director), and a western original called
The Little Shepherd of the Bar Z
is released as
I Want More Children
. The first act establishes Merton Gill in Simsbury, Illinois, where he clerks in Amos Gashwiler’s general store. But comedies of the day often broke into four acts, and
Merton
’s other three find the hero in California, where he seeks cowboy stardom as Clifford Armytage.

It’s a lopsided name—the “y” tilts masculinity into the precious—and Merton is a lopsided actor. He turns everything into a joke just by showing up—for instance, in his western drag, correct from Stetson to boots but for chaps made not of leather but rather of what looks like the fluff of New Zealand’s entire sheep population. Glenn Hunter (of
Clarence
) played Merton, opposite Florence Nash as his supporter, Miss Montague, who loves him even though she knows he’s a fool. For
Merton
’s real subject is not Hollywood but how easily the unequipped fancy themselves potential stars.

In fact, Merton does have potential: as a comic. Unbeknown to him, his first feature is a western
spoof,
and Clifford Armytage is the prize goofball. He learns this at the picture’s first screening, and is so crushed by the laughter that he stays out all night—a desperate act from a nice kid from Small Town, Illinois. Kaufman and Connelly were able to produce a movie studio before our eyes, with the fake little set, the lights, camera, and crew, the violinist to soothe and inspire the director. But they couldn’t show the all-important screening, leaving a typical early-twenties hole in the show: some turns of plot weren’t technically available for staging till the next decade. Instead, the authors jumped to the aftershock, in which poor Merton confronts himself. He has “a low-comedy face,” he tells Miss Montague, his dream crumpling as he speaks. Then, with no more self-esteem to lose, he throws himself at her feet and sobs in her lap. But she puts Humpty together again:

NASH:
There, there. Don’t you worry. Did he have his poor old mother going for a minute? Yes, he did. He had her going for a minute all right. But he didn’t fool her very long, not very long, because he can’t ever fool her very long. And he can bet a lot of money on that.

We are but a moment or two from the happy ending, for Merton comes to see that Hollywood stardoms are interchangeable, and a comic can be as beloved of the public as a cowpoke. In fact, Merton immediately enjoys his first star interview (by telephone), with a fan magazine. He is asked if he has a girl friend, and he suddenly realizes that he does. He is proudly smiling at Miss Montague and praising her nurturing skills as the curtain falls.

So
Merton of the Movies,
though one of the day’s outstanding comedies, is really more of a charm show than a comedy as we know the form today. It’s not gaggy: it’s sweet, with more of those homely chuckles and humor of recognition. Glenn Hunter himself made the silent, for Paramount in 1924, and the talkie Mertons were Stuart Erwin and Red Skelton. Oddly,
Merton
seems not to have gone musical, though surely somebody in the BMI workshop gave it a whirl. A singing Merton would fulfill the destiny of Wilson’s creation, for the essential quality of our music theatre is that the main characters want something badly. And nobody wants more than Merton does.

*   *   *

Sifting through the categories, we find one all-important genre missing: the straight play that avoids melodrama’s upheavals and Belasco’s self-serving naturalistic études, something that doesn’t need “society” in order to be literate or a European source for imaginative color. Something, too, without cosmetic novelty. What we’re looking for is something basic, a piece about life. Just a
play
. There were a few, more and more as the 1920s wore on, and I hope you’re sitting down because the one I want to discuss is
Rain
(1922). You know this one, about the prostitute and the reverend, with the crash-and-burn star who didn’t live out the decade and two generations of references throughout the culture. If I told you that Bette Davis once headed a musical revue and that the first-act-finale burlesque spot centered on a famous tart, wouldn’t your first guess be “Sadie Thompson”?

W. Somerset Maugham’s short story of 1921 called “Miss Thompson” (later retitled “Rain”) is really more about the reverend than about the prostitute. The setting is Pago Pago, where the missionaries Reverend and Mrs. Davidson and Dr. and Mrs. Macphail, representing the starchy propriety of civilization, come into contact with Sadie, the avatar of hedonism. Though an American, she has adopted the lifestyle of monsoon Asia, living for the sheer pleasure of it. Reverend Davidson lives “to instil into the natives a sense of sin,” and he does this by taking away all their pleasure, using his power and influence to destroy any who thwart his will. He is that singular piece of evil, the control freak using God as a front. Yet we recall the
White Cargo
theme: when Western man ventures too far East, his buttons open. The rain that ceaselessly pounds away symbolizes nature’s assault on order, just as Sadie’s irritating gramophone symbolizes her spirited independence. Davidson plans to make Sadie his great conversion—but it is nature itself, human nature, that proves to be the reverend’s ultimate challenge.

He is as colossally inflexible as John Brown, but he fails his own test, and interrupts his personal-trainer prayer vigil with Sadie for carnal exercise with her. Maugham’s story cleverly withholds this all-important twist till its final two lines. At first, all we learn is that the reverend’s body has been found with its throat cut. When Dr. Macphail tries to silence Sadie’s gramophone out of respect, Sadie—who knows nothing of the reverend’s suicide—simply shouts at him. “You men!” she cries. “You filthy, dirty pigs! You’re all the same, all of you! Pigs! Pigs!” The doctor lets out a gasp of realization. Says Maugham concisely, “He understood.”

The play lingers past this moment, to tell Sadie what happened to Davidson and confront her with his widow, who is too shattered to do anything in the old-fashioned melodramatic style. Five years before this, there might have been fireworks, but
Rain
is at the least a transitional work, looking forward to the naturalistic writing of the 1930s. As the marine sergeant who is more or less Sadie’s romantic opposite stands by her side, Sadie expresses hope for a better life in her next port of call, but the words catch in her throat as she utters them. In naturalism, there are no endings; and the curtain falls.

“Missionaries won’t like this play” was the merry observation of the
Times
’ John Corbin. He thought
Rain
a piece of “extraordinary grip and significance,” and I need to underline that last word, because today to mention this play is to conjure up the lurid antiques that tricked our grandfathers. Maugham himself thought little of his tale’s potential for the stage—but then, he thought little of any play below the level of Aeschylus or Shakespeare. Theatregoing, to Maugham, was akin to “wood-carving or dancing,” whose aim (and he meant this condescendingly) was “to afford delight.”

Maugham was an authority in this matter, however. As a playwright himself, he was very much a part of Broadway at this time, like his fellow Brits James M. Barrie and A. A. Milne. It’s a loose confederation; Barrie was a Scot and Maugham, few recall, was born in Paris of Irish family. They were agreed on one point, that social-problem plays were for writers working on other stages. Maugham in particular favored light comedies about marriage, set in drawing rooms. Adultery, in Maugham, is quite the fashion, as in
The Circle
(1921) and
The Constant Wife
(1926), another of Ethel Barrymore’s outstanding successes. There really can be too much fidelity in this world, as in Maugham’s
Home and Beauty,
produced here by A. H. Woods and retitled
Too Many Husbands
(1919), as if it were one of Woods’ sex comedies. But there isn’t any sex, because Estelle Winwood has simply remarried, thinking her first husband dead. He isn’t. Worse, the two husbands are longtime buddies faithful to each other, each of whom insists that his alternate’s vows be honored. So Estelle does the only sensible thing and runs off with a war profiteer.