All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (9 page)

Clearly, Maugham’s world was not ready for a Sadie Thompson, even if she was his invention. Note that when Maugham wrote his own South Pacific piece, in
The Letter
(1927), he was still plying such devices as adultery, murder, and blackmail. True, in telling his short story around Reverend Davidson, Maugham might not have noticed that Sadie had the makings of what Brooks Atkinson later called “one of the few bravura parts in the contemporary drama.” This brings us to the legend of the show: Jeanne Eagels in
Rain
.

Cited as often as the John Barrymore Hamlet and Laurette Taylor’s Amanda Wingfield, Eagels’ Sadie encapsulates that favorite American concept of fame, ruin, and early death (at thirty-five). Barrymore and Taylor were brand names—though he was fresh and she a has-been—when they earned their myth, but Eagels was relatively unknown when, on
Rain
’s opening night, the audience in Maxine Elliott’s Theatre gave her the ovation of the century. Here, again, is that idyll of the First Night, the reason why people made a point of attending them, fishing for the next heavy catch. In her prostitute’s business casual of black-belted white dress, lace mantilla and woolen scarf, five-and-dime beads topped by a feathery hat overlooking high-button spats, sporting an umbrella, and slipping from brusque and feisty to soothed and radiant within ten seconds, Eagels gave Sadie the dizzy magic of the drug addict. No wonder. After the New York run of 648 performances and two and a half years on the road,
Rain
closed, freeing Eagels for a show to be staged by New Top Director George Abbott. He found Eagels maddeningly unreliable, with loopy excuses, such as the “a strange man was following me, so I got on the train to Albany” kind of thing. Abbott hired someone else, and after a few silent films, an anticlimactic minor success in the play
Her Cardboard Lover
(1927) opposite Leslie Howard, and two talkies, Jeanne Eagels was dead, of substance abuse.

While she was with us, she was
Rain
and
Rain
was Jeanne Eagels, as when she danced dirty with another of the marines that Colton and Randolph added to Maugham’s scenario. (“Oh, I love that step,” she says, bending backward for him to lean over her as the two shimmy on Sunday.) Few high-octane acting parts take in such wanton fun as well, and New Yorkers got a chance to test the uniqueness of the Eagels Sadie when Maria Bazzi brought her Italian production of the piece,
Pioggia
, to the Manhattan Opera House. A classic tragedienne with a gorgeous voice, Bazzi apparently gave a grandly scaled
Rain
where the work is in fact lean and tight, a breakaway piece.
Rain
’s producer, Sam H. Harris, vainly applied for an injunction—but who wanted to see
Rain
without Jeanne Eagels? True, it was filmed without her, with Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and finally Rita Hayworth. There was even a flop Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-style musical,
Sadie Thompson
(1944). With a score by Vernon Duke and Howard Dietz and a miscast Ethel Merman (who left during rehearsals, replaced by June Havoc),
Sadie Thompson
tells how original
Rain
is by the way the musical’s authors had to reappoint and rationalize it. Their Sadie becomes a heart-of-gold whore, the kind with a Wanting Song. Davidson is a secret chaos of primitive visions. The marine sergeant is the Boy Who Meets Girl.

The play is better: plainer and truer. Sergeant O’Hara isn’t Prince Charming; he’s a lug. Davidson is the opposite of chaos: he’s Heinrich Himmler, evil in the form of absolute order. And Sadie doesn’t know what she wants well enough to sing of it in, for instance, “The Love I Long For.” She doesn’t Meet Boy. She meets boys. In the aforementioned climax of the play, when she is free of Davidson’s rage but not of the hypocrisy of men, Sadie has an odd line, “Life is a quaint present from somebody.” It’s the statement of one stuck with the worst character flaw in drama: bad luck. Yet the musical made the moment into the jaunty “Life’s a Funny Present From Someone,” as wrong as can be. The thought is not the occasion for a list song. It’s the stalling act of the butterfly aware of the pin.

Back in 1922, on
Rain
’s opening night, Davidson (Robert Kelly) got booed, and not in high spirits. The public was energized and taking sides. One of the first American plays to dwell entirely outside genre,
Rain
is a piece about life, about how some enjoy it and some try to murder it. Like Davidson using his authority to curtail others’ liberty, New York’s district attorney, Joab H. Banton, began menacing the theatre two years after
Rain
opened. Sex farces kept playing brinkmanship with the received pieties, language was growing frank, kisses were looking genuine, and the mixed-race marriage in Eugene O’Neill’s
All God’s Chillun Got Wings
defied standard cautions. In 1924, there was little more than a touch of censorship here and there—for instance deleting a scene in the O’Neill that featured the two leads as children. It hurt the presentation of O’Neill’s theme, but the play did go on.

Three years later, however, roused by the religious pulpit, various demagogues, and even New York’s governor, Alfred E. Smith, Banton arrested the producers and casts of three plays. One of these was
The Virgin Man,
a sex comedy about three women trying to seduce a Yale student. It had opened but three weeks earlier, while Jane Mast’s
Sex
had been playing for nine months, giving theatregoers their first taste of Mae West’s act: for Mast was West. She not only wrote but starred in the piece, the second on Banton’s list.
7
The third was a serious work, Arthur Hornblow Jr.’s translation of Edouard Bourdet’s
La Prisonnière,
as
The Captive
. The woman protagonist’s prison is a love affair with another woman. Helen Menken played her, opposite Basil Rathbone as the well-meaning fellow who marries Menken anyway; the marriage fails.

Surely the play did, too, one thinks: a piece on lesbianism in 1927? On the contrary,
The Captive
was selling out at the Empire and had run over four months when Banton—presumably irked by the very title of
The Virgin Man
—closed these three plays. True, even those who admired Bourdet’s piece were quick to condemn the subject matter. The very approving Brooks Atkinson peppered his review with such phrases as “twisted relationship,” “loathsome possibility,” and “revolting theme.” Perhaps Bourdet disarmed some of the homophobia by keeping The Dangerous Woman offstage. Like Bert Savoy’s Margie, she was much mentioned but never seen.

Oddly, the sensational publicity of the Banton raids and the three closings—
PADLOCK DRAMA
, the tabloids cried—did not attract customers.
The Captive
agreed to suspend further performances, and the charges were dropped.
The Virgin Man
and
Sex
took Banton on. Released on bail, their companies reopened, but business stuttered, both shows closed, and their honchos got short jail sentences, West included.

It is regrettable that the theatre community did not organize to fight this development. The state’s closing of plays—even of plays by Mae West and maybe even especially plays by Mae West—is like the state’s closing of newspapers. However, some managers and playwrights feared to bait the philistines and risk a censorship war. And the actors—so unified by the 1919 strike and a follow-up action in 1924, on the matter of the closed shop—had no power to speak on extramural issues.

Yet Banton
was
defeated. Writers of far greater power than John Colton and Clemence Randolph were moving far beyond
Rain
(if not
The Captive
) in the defiance of bourgeois proprieties. Even as Mae West went off to start her week in the workhouse, there was already too much Broadway for the authorities to control. Davidson ended a suicide; Banton simply evaporated.

One reason why was the changing ethnic makeup of American theatre—really, show biz as a whole. Two generations of European immigrants had by the 1920s produced offspring assimilated enough to communicate with the rest of the nation yet different enough in their attitudes to alter the national style. The Joab Bantons could not have been happy with the prominence of Al Jolson, for example: but what criminal charge could they hang on him? Like Mae West, Jolson was out of control. He incited his public to … what? Knowing more about the world? And isn’t knowledge perilous to the rule of the Joab Bantons?

Things were so easy for them before. American culture in the 1890s wasn’t all that different from what it had been in the 1880s. Nor did all that much happen before our entry into World War I. By the 1920s, however, a great deal was invented, revealed. The people called it “jazz.”

Three

The Rise of Wisecrack Comedy

The 1920 census was the first that found more Americans living in urban than rural territory, and the national humor changed accordingly, from what we might simply term “Mark Twain” to the wisenheimer art of the Marx Brothers and Jimmy Durante, of the snazzy know-it-all lyrics we hear in Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin, of the new gossip columns, of
Krazy Kat
. It was a mongrel art, the verbal equivalent of the jazz band, and it took hold in the 1920s.

Perhaps George M. Cohan is the theatre’s preceding transitional figure, for he was cracking wise avant la lettre; ironically, his first public was that of the middle-class towns on the touring circuit, not of the metropolis. To enlarge the paradox, by the 1920s Cohan had grown reactionarily folksy, emphasizing ideals of flag and mother where the wisecracker was irreverent about everything.

About women, for instance: as in Avery Hopwood’s aforementioned
The Gold Diggers
. Simply the concept of a woman who makes a science of exploiting men is a sacrilege fit for a decade like the 1920s, and Hopwood’s novelty phrase of a title caught on as a cliché. The culture kept the words “gold digger” in common play into the 1940s. Naturally, much of the show’s atmosphere inhered in a pack of the kind, bragging about their millionaires and the activity sheet of wearing furs, clipping on jewelry, and cheating around. In the
Tribune,
Heywood Broun wanted “to rush off to find some woman … with whom I could discuss the prose style of Walter Pater.”

In fact, Hopwood’s gold diggers were snow white next to the Warner Bros. model of a decade or so later. In the talkie of James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Lee Tracy, Glenda Farrell, Warren William, and even William Powell (between Paramount and MGM), a gold digger really knows how to use the wisecrack. Warners had filmed Hopwood’s play as a silent in 1923 and as a musical in the first year of sound, 1929, as
The Gold Diggers of Broadway
. The studio’s third try,
Gold Diggers of 1933,
offered Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell as the sweetheart couple, Warren William as his interfering uncle opposite Joan Blondell in Ina Claire’s old role, and deadpan Ned Sparks as a producer, a character not in Hopwood’s play.

Not till now had the wisecrack been perfected in all its tones. The all-purpose smart-alec retort:

SPARKS:
The show is about the Depression.

BLONDELL:
We won’t have to rehearse that!

The personal put-down, for use with enemies or, as here, a sort-of friend, as the heroines contemplate dressing up for Sparks:

GINGER ROGERS:
I look so much better in clothes than any of you. If [Sparks] saw me in clothes—

ALINE MACMAHON:
He wouldn’t recognize you!

The sarcasm, to create an air of invulnerable cynicism, as when Sparks claims he could chisel a show on for fifteen thousand dollars, if only he had it:

POWELL:
(who everyone thought was a penniless nobody) I’ll advance you fifteen.

MACMAHON:
Say, what does he use? I’ll smoke it, too.

And, most evolved, the remark of sociopolitical omniscience:

BLONDELL:
I can remember, not so long ago, a penthouse on Park Avenue … and now—stealing milk!

MACMAHON:
That’s all right. The dairy company stole it from a cow.

These samples, drawn from deep in the Depression, turn a key into the purpose of the wisecrack: to empower the powerless. This is no doubt why this uniquely American form of humor did not quite jell in the more comfortable 1920s, though it was unquestionably in the cooking stage. Guy Bolton’s comedy hit
Polly Preferred
(1923), on how Polly Brown becomes Polly Pierpont, movie star, got in some of the new tough talk within the first minutes of the opening scene, in an Automat. Polly’s fellow chorus girl Jimmie lets a waiter know that she’s up for a revue featuring Ziegfeldian nudity.

WAITER:
Say, I’ll have to see that!

JIMMIE:
Oh, sure! Gee, you men … you all know what us girls look like but you’ll pay good money just to see for sure that they ain’t started makin’ us any different.

Wisecrack comedy’s spotty twenties history fills in somewhat in James Gleason and Richard Taber’s
Is Zat So?
(1925). This one tickled audiences for eighteen months with its look at a “box fighter” and his manager, orphaned brothers in all but name who never stop sparring. Hap, the manager, is the more aggressive of the pair; Chick, the boxer, is the dumb straight man, always starting but never finishing what amounts to a title song:

CHICK:
Is zat so?

HAP:
Yes,
zat’s
so!

CHICK:
Is zat so?

HAP:
Yes, zat’s so!

They’re a “can’t live with him can’t live without him” team:

HAP:
You fight? Why, you couldn’t fight a paralyzed blind man unless they muzzled him for you. A fighter? A fighter? Yeah—a
horizontal
fighter!

The play starts with the two more or less homeless, sitting on a bench on Fifth Avenue, where a society lad takes a liking to them and provides the plot by inviting them to sign on as his butler and second man.
Is Zat So?
’s driveline is Hap and Chick’s adventure in Vanity Fair, where they do some romancing and rid their employer of his parasitical brother-in-law. However, the real purpose of the show is the exploration of Hap and Chick’s put-down tango. Note that their battles are animated by slang, bad grammar, and Hap’s Brooklyn accent. Women are “frails,” money is “jack,” and to look is “to lamp”—not to mention the irreplaceable
“G’wan!”