Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (55 page)

Earlier Lerner reported that a winter’s journey around the frigid Covent Garden had yielded the title and melody of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.” The genesis of Eliza’s first song demonstrates the team’s usual pattern: title, tune, and, after excruciating procrastination and writer’s block, a lyric.
²⁴
The lyricist details the agony of creation for “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” a process that took Loewe “one afternoon” and Lerner weeks of delay and psychological trauma before he could even produce a word. Six weeks “after a successful tour around the neighborhood with ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’” they completed Higgins’s opening pair of songs, “Why Can’t the English?” and “I’m an Ordinary Man.”
²⁵
These are the last songs that Lerner mentions before rehearsals began in January 1956.

Lerner’s chronology accounts for all but four
My Fair Lady
songs: “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “The Servants’ Chorus,” “Promenade,” and “Without
You.” All Lerner has to say about “With a Little Bit of Luck” is that it was written for Holloway sometime before rehearsals.
²⁶
But although Lerner’s autobiography provides no additional chronological information about the remaining three songs, we are not reduced to idle speculation concerning two of these. On musical evidence it is apparent that the “Introduction to Promenade” was adapted from “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” one of the earliest songs drafted for the show.
²⁷
It will also be observed shortly that the principal melody of “Without You” is partially derived from Higgins’s “I’m an Ordinary Man,” completed nearly a year before rehearsals.
²⁸
Loewe’s holograph piano-vocal score manuscripts of
My Fair Lady
songs verify Lerner’s remark that this last-mentioned song underwent “one or two false starts.”
²⁹
Harrison described one of these as “inferior Noël Coward.”
³⁰
(In other differences with the published vocal score, the holograph of “You Did It” contains a shortened introduction and a considerable amount of additional but mostly repetitive material.)
³¹

Of great importance for the peformance style of Higgins’s role was the decision to allow the professor to talk his way into a song or a new phrase of a song. In “I’m an Ordinary Man,” “A Hymn to Him,” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” audiences have long been accustomed to hear Higgins speak lines that are underscored by orchestral melody; the pitches are usually indicated in the vocal part by X’s, recalling the notation of Schoenberg’s
Sprechstimme
in
Pierrot Lunaire
. The first of many examples of this occurs at the beginning of “I’m an Ordinary Man.” This move from song to speech probably occurred during the course of rehearsals. In any event, the holograph scores almost invariably indicate that these passages were originally meant to be sung.
³²

In their most significant departure from their source Lerner and Loewe altered Shaw’s ending to allow a romantic resolution between Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. Shaw strenuously argued against this Cinderella interpretation, but he would live to regret that his original concluding lines in 1912 allow the
possibility
that Eliza, who has metamorphosed into “a tower of strength, a consort battleship,” will return to live with Higgins and Pickering as an independent woman, one of “three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.”
³³
While in his original text Shaw expresses Higgins’s confidence that Eliza will return with the requested shopping list, for the next forty years the playwright would quixotically try to establish his unwavering intention that Higgins and Eliza would never marry.
³⁴
Here are the final lines of Shaw’s play:

MRS. HIGGINS
: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I’ll buy you the tie and glove.

HIGGINS
: (
sunnily
) Oh, don’t bother. She’ll buy ’em all right enough. Goodbye.

(
They kiss
.
MRS
.
HIGGINS
runs out
.
HIGGINS
,
left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner
.)

Despite Shaw’s unequivocal interpretation—and long before Pascal’s
Pygmalion
film in 1938 or the
My Fair Lady
musical in 1956—the original Higgins, Beerbohm Tree, had already taken liberties that would distort the play beyond Shaw’s tolerance. In reporting on the 1914 London premiere to his wife Charlotte, Shaw wrote: “For the last two acts I writhed in hell…. The last thing I saw as I left the house was Higgins shoving his mother rudely out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals to buy ham for his lonely home like a bereaved Romeo.”
³⁵
Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw created the role of Eliza, urged the playwright to attend another performance “soon—or you’ll not recognize your play.”
³⁶

When he summoned enough courage to attend the hundredth performance, Shaw was appalled to discover that “in the brief interval between the end of the play and fall of the curtain, the amorous Higgins threw flowers at Eliza (and with them Shaw’s instructions far out of sight).”
³⁷
To make explicit what he had perhaps naively assumed would be understood, Shaw published a sequel to
Pygmalion
in 1916, in which he explained in detail why Eliza and Higgins could not and should not be considered as potential romantic partners.

Considering his strong ideas on the subject, it is surprising that Shaw permitted Pascal to further alter the ending (and many other parts) of Shaw’s original screenplay for the 1938
Pygmalion
film in order to create the impression that Higgins and Eliza would in fact unite. Perhaps Shaw was unaware that Pascal had actually filmed two other endings, including Shaw’s. In 1941, Penguin Books published a version of Shaw’s screenplay, which included reworked versions of five film scenes that were not part of the original play:

1. Eliza getting in a taxi and returning to her lodgings at the end of act I;

2. Higgins’s housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, giving Eliza a bath in the middle of act II;

3. Eliza’s lessons with Higgins at the end of act II;

4. The Embassy Ball at the end of act III (this scene is based on the Embassy Ball in the film—another Cinderella image—that
replaced the ambassador’s garden party, dinner, and opera that took place offstage in the play);

5. Eliza’s meeting with Freddy when she leaves Higgins’s residence at the end of act IV.

In his book on Shaw’s films,
The Serpent’s Eye
, Donald P. Costello carefully details and explains how the printed screenplay departs from the actual film.
³⁸
Perhaps not surprisingly, the most dramatic departure between what was filmed and the published screenplay occurred at the work’s conclusion. This is what filmgoers saw and heard in the film:

Eliza’s voice is heard coming out of the phonograph
:

ELIZA
’
S VOICE
: Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!! I ain’t dirty: I washed my face and hands afore I come, I did.

HIGGINS
’
s VOICE
: I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.

ELIZA
’
S VOICE
: Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo!

HIGGINS
’
S VOICE
: In six months … (
Higgins switches off the phonograph. Close-up of Higgins’s sorrowful face.) Eliza enters the room, unseen by Higgins. He hears her voice, speaking with perfect lady-like diction, soft, gentle, lovingly
.

ELIZA
: I washed my face and hands before I came.

As Higgins turns to look at Eliza, the ballroom theme begins once more. Higgins looks at Eliza tenderly. Cut to a close-up of Eliza, looking back at him. Higgins just begins to smile; then he recollects himself, and says sternly, as the camera looks only at the back of his head
:

HIGGINS
: Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?

As the ballroom theme swells into a crescendo, a fade-out from the back of Higgins’s head. The lilting music of the ballroom waltz is heard as “The End” and the cast are flashed upon the screen
.
³⁹

Before the 1941 publication of the screenplay (as altered by Pascal), however, Shaw managed to have the last word. It appeared in a letter of corrections from August 19, 1939:

MRS
.
HIGGINS
: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. I should be uneasy about you and her if she were less fond of Colonel Pickering.

HIGGINS
. P
ICKERING
! N
ONSENSE
: she’s going to marry Freddy. Ha ha! Freddy! Freddy!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! (
He roars with laughter as the play ends
.)

After submitting this final ending, Shaw parenthetically inserted the following remark: “I should like to have a dozen pulls of the corrected page to send to the acting companies.”
⁴⁰

When asked in an interview why he acquiesced to a “happy” ending in Pascal’s film, Shaw replied somewhat archly that he could not “conceive a less happy ending to the story of ‘Pygmalion’ than a love affair between the middle-aged, middle-class professor, a confirmed old bachelor with a mother-fixation, and a flower girl of 18.”
⁴¹
According to Shaw, “nothing of the kind was emphasised in my scenario, where I emphasised the escape of Eliza from the tyranny of Higgins by a quite natural love affair with Freddy.” Shaw even goes so far as to claim that Leslie Howard’s “lovelorn complexion … is too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about.” Despite Shaw’s desire to grasp at this perceived ambiguity and despite the fact that audiences of both film and musical do not actually see Eliza fetch Higgins’s slippers, most members of these audiences will probably conclude that Freddy is not a romantic alternative.

Shaw’s denial to the contrary, the romanticization of
Pygmalion
introduced by Beerbohm Tree during the initial 1914 London run of the play was complete in the 1938 film. As Costello writes: “What remains, after a great deal of omission, is the clear and simple situation of a Galatea finally being fully created by her Pygmalion, finally asserting her own individual soul, and, becoming independent, being free to choose. She chooses Higgins.”
⁴²

The stage was now set for
My Fair Lady
, where the phonetics lesson introduced in the film would be developed still further, Alfred P. Doolittle would be observed on his own Tottenham Court Road turf (and given two songs to sing there, one in each act), and a new and more colorful setting at Ascot would replace Mrs. Higgins’s home (act III of Shaw). Again following the film,
My Fair Lady
deleted many of Doolittle’s lines, especially his philosophical musing on middle-class morality.
⁴³

If Lerner and Loewe did not invent a romantic pairing between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, they succeeded in contradicting Shaw still more completely (albeit more believably), a task made difficult by Higgins’s extraordinary misogyny, rudeness, and insensitivity in Shaw’s original play. Using the Pascal film as its guide, the Broadway
Pygmalion
therefore made Higgins less misogynist and generally more likable and Eliza less crude, more attractive, and more lovable than their counterparts in Shaw’s play and screenplay and Pascal’s film. Perhaps more significantly, Lerner and Loewe prepared the eventual match of Higgins and Eliza when they created two moments in song that depict their shared triumph, “The Rain in Spain” and Eliza’s gloriously happy “I Could Have Danced All Night” that shortly follows.

Lerner and Loewe would also go beyond the film with several liberties of omission and commission to help musical audiences accept the unlikely but much-wished-for romantic liaison between the antagonistic protagonists. More important, not only did Lerner remove all references to Higgins’s “mother fixation,” but he gave Higgins compassion to match his brilliance. In order to achieve Higgins’s metamorphosis from a frog to a prince, Lerner added a speech of encouragement—a song would be overkill—not found in either the film or published screenplay. Significantly, it is this newly created speech that leads directly to Eliza’s mastery of the English language as she finally utters the magic words, “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” with impeccable and lady-like diction.
⁴⁴

In this central speech, Higgins, in contrast to the play and screen versions, demonstrates an awareness of what his subject might be feeling and suffering: “Eliza, I know you’re tired. I know your head aches. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher’s window.” After extolling the virtues of “the majesty and grandeur of the English language,” Higgins for the first time offers encouragement to his human experiment: “That’s what you’ve set yourself to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will…. Now, try it again.”
⁴⁵

After conveying Higgins’s humanity by the end of act I, Lerner and Loewe tried in their second act to make musically explicit what Shaw implies or omits in his drama. Not only does Eliza now possess the strength and independence of “a consort battleship” admired by Higgins in Shaw’s play. After the Embassy Ball in
My Fair Lady
the heroine now in fact has the psychological upper hand as well. Clearly, Lerner and Loewe romanticized, and therefore falsified, Shaw’s intentions. At the same time they managed to reveal Eliza’s metamorphosis as Higgins’s equal through lyrics and music more clearly than either Shaw’s play or screenplay and Pascal’s film. The playwright lets Higgins express his delight in Eliza’s newfound independence, but he does not show how Eliza surpasses her creator (in this case Higgins) in psychological power other than by allowing Higgins to lose his composure (“
he lays hands on her
”). Lerner and Loewe accomplish this volte-face by taking advantage of music’s power to reveal psychological change. Simply put, the Broadway team reverse the musical roles of their protagonists.