Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) (12 page)

After playing in New Haven for a week, the show moved to Philadelphia for a four-week run at the Erlanger Theatre. In preparation for Philadelphia, three numbers were cut, making the running time around fifteen minutes shorter: Higgins’s “Come to the Ball,” the “Decorating Eliza” ballet, and Eliza’s “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight.” The reaction to the show continued to be phenomenal. Joseph M. Hyman, who looked after Moss Hart’s affairs, wrote to Philip Adler to say that he thought it would be the biggest hit for twenty years.
¹⁷¹
Arnold Weissberger, Beaton’s New York lawyer, told Levin that after the adjustments being made to the show, “it now has a 50–50 chance (50 to run for five years and 50 to run for ten years).”
¹⁷²
The reviews of the opening night performance on Broadway, March 15, 1956, concurred with these early opinions: the
Daily Mirror
called it “one of the all-time great song-and-dancers”; the
World-Telegram and Sun
said that it “prance[d] into that rare class of great musicals”; and the
Herald Tribune
ordered the reader not “to
finish reading this review now. You’d better sit right down and send for those tickets to
My Fair Lady.
” But perhaps the most unexpected praise came from Lawrence Langner, who had brought the project to Lerner and Loewe on behalf of the Theatre Guild in 1952 and then been shut out of it when they recommenced in 1954. “You remember Mary of Scotland’s line—‘After I am dead you will find Calais written upon my heart’—that is the way I will always feel about
Pygmalion
. But the perfect job you have done certainly mitigates my suffering. I can only congratulate you on the superb welding of all the component parts with the original so that they seem to be conceived and executed by one master mind.”
¹⁷³
Even those with an axe to grind could not resist the charm of
My Fair Lady
, and the show went on to be Lerner and Loewe’s greatest triumph—one which they would never come close to repeating.

DEVELOPING THE SCRIPT OF
MY FAIR LADY

With
My Fair Lady
, Lerner and Loewe were taking on Shaw’s most popular and perhaps greatest comedy. Working out how to make the adaptation was undoubtedly the most difficult aspect of writing the show. In
Pygmalion
, Shaw struck a balance between promoting his socialist outlook and creating a humorous and human vehicle. He did this with an ease that even he did not always manage to equal, and his unquestionable brilliance provided an intimidating precedent for everyone who approached the property with a view to making it into a Broadway musical. No wonder so great a dramatist as Oscar Hammerstein 2nd was interested in
Pygmalion
, and no wonder he eventually gave it up. No wonder, either, that it was the English-educated and ingenious wordsmith Lerner who eventually succeeded in the task, which required someone who could assimilate Shaw’s vast, imposing, and provocative work into a musical that would be related to but independent of
Pygmalion
. This chapter explores the background to the play in brief, before referring to documentary sources that track Lerner and Loewe’s initial ideas about the format of the show. It then reveals how changes made to the text initially used in
Fair Lady
’s rehearsals resulted in a vital shift of focus in the Higgins-Eliza relationship, and finally goes on to explore the structure of the completed show.

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin on July 26, 1856—just a few months short of a century before the premiere of
My Fair Lady
—and moved to London in 1876.
¹
Though he did not quite share Eliza Doolittle’s plight in his upbringing, the fact that he left school at fifteen and relied heavily on acts of self-education—such as visiting galleries, concert halls and theaters,
and reading Shakespeare—to better himself in the world was undoubtedly a motivating factor behind many of his plays, including
Pygmalion
. Obviously, it would be unjustifiable to perceive too strong a link between the two, but Shaw was hardworking, just like Eliza; unlike her, Shaw was able to benefit from financial support from a parent (his mother, who left her husband when Shaw was a teenager). He was also, of course, a unique figure in the history of literature and had a remarkable intellect. But in spite of this difference, there is no doubt that the portrayal of Eliza’s desperate financial circumstances, and the ongoing insecurity that this creates within her, came from deep within Shaw’s heart. To climb the social ladder was a mutual ambition.

In 1884 Shaw joined the Fabian Society, which championed social reform through debate. Here he was in his element, and in the same year decided to become a playwright. His first stage work,
Widowers’ Houses
, was eventually completed and performed in 1892. Its subject matter hints that Shaw started as he meant to go on: a young couple, Harry and Blanche, are thwarted in their love by Harry’s disgust at the exploitative behavior of Blanche’s father, a slum landlord. The following year, Shaw wrote
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
, a controversial play in which he suggests that prostitution is “an economic rather than moral problem, a position that caused the play to be banned from public stages in Britain for over twenty-five years.”
²
In both these works, the oppressed and the poor are treated with sympathy, and Shaw’s defense of women’s rights in
Mrs. Warren
is particularly indicative of his stance on sexual equality. Poverty was also a theme in
Major Barbara
(1905), in which he described it as “the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes.” Another important factor is the style of these plays, which mix humor and lightness with a seriousness of purpose.

Both this technical approach and these themes recur in
Pygmalion
, which Shaw started to write in March 1912. It took three months to complete, but it is documented that the basic premise of the play was in his mind from 1897.
³
All along, Shaw envisaged using his muse, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in the role of Eliza Doolittle, but she took quite some convincing since, as Shaw himself said, she had “never appeared in a low life part.” The play received its premiere, in German, in Vienna in 1913, and was also performed in Berlin later that year, so it was not until April 1914 that it received its English-language premiere at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. (Several of Shaw’s previous works had also been given their first performances abroad, since the playwright abhorred the tastes of London’s critics and “knew [his plays] would be received more sympathetically by theatre managers and critics” in other countries.)
⁴
Unfortunately, the rehearsal
period was overshadowed by a three-way tension between Shaw, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the actor-manager who ran Her Majesty’s Theatre and had been hired to play Higgins after much debate.
⁵
It did not augur well for the work, which had long been one of Shaw’s pet projects.

Pygmalion
’s first-night reviews were sidetracked by Eliza’s line “Not bloody likely” from act 3.
⁶
The word “bloody” had rarely been used onstage before and was controversial. This inevitably became the focus of the reviews, and Shaw was unhappy that it “had become a major distraction from the more serious elements of the play.”
⁷
The first performance was also spoiled for Shaw by Tree’s divergence from the intended ending of the play. Shaw had underlined to the actors that Eliza and Higgins do not finish up together, and the original text of the scene makes this clear, too. Eliza bids a final farewell to the Professor, but quite casually he asks her to buy him a ham, some cheese, a pair of gloves, and a new tie. She retorts, “Buy them yourself.” Mrs. Higgins (who is present in the final scene, which takes place at her house in the play, rather than Higgins’s house as in
My Fair Lady
) offers to buy the tie and gloves in her place, but Higgins ends with: “Oh don’t bother. She’ll buy’em all right enough.”
⁸
However, Shaw wrote to his wife that Tree depicted Higgins “shoving his mother rudely out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals to buy a ham for his lonely home like a bereaved Romeo.”
⁹
Later in the run, this had developed further, with the actor throwing flowers to Eliza as she left the stage at the end.
¹⁰

Shaw’s reaction to this liberal treatment of his script was to amend it. To the end of the 1916 edition of the play he added a “Sequel,” in which he explained in prose what he intended by the final scene.
Pygmalion
is subtitled “A Romance,” and Shaw makes it clear in the sequel that this description refers not to a union between Higgins and Eliza but to the “transfiguration” of its heroine, a process the writer describes as “exceedingly improbable.”
¹¹
In other words, Eliza’s unlikely rise through the social ranks is the romantic element of the plot, rather than romance itself. Shaw also relates how Eliza and Freddy get married, briefly live with Higgins and Pickering, and later set up their own florist shop. Relations between the four remain positive, and Shaw says that Eliza is “immensely interested” in Higgins, and even has “secret mischievous moments” in which she wishes she could “just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man.”

But, he continues firmly, “when it comes to … the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does not like Higgins.”
¹²
Eliza’s decision to choose Freddy over Higgins is “well-considered,” says the playwright, because she knows that the Professor will always prefer his mother, Milton, and the Universal Alphabet to herself. Since she is young and gifted, she has options. “Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers?” asks Shaw, and goes on to answer that she marries Freddy.
¹³
He adds that her “instinct tells her not to marry Higgins” but “does not tell her to give him up,” and underlines that he will remain “one of the strongest personal interests in her life.”
¹⁴

Shaw frequently tried to convince performers and audiences of his point of view, but it was often in vain. For a 1920 production at the Aldwych Theatre, he changed the text of the final scene by having Higgins return to the front of the stage after Eliza’s exit and exclaim “Galatea!” supposedly signifying that “the statue has come to life at last,” but as L. W. Conolly has noted, this implies that “just as Pygmalion marries Galatea so Higgins marries Eliza.”
¹⁵
So for a projected film version in 1934, Shaw’s draft screenplay has Eliza and Freddy kissing (before getting in the car to go to Doolittle’s wedding), while Higgins shakes his fist at them.
¹⁶
Then in 1938 (when the movie was eventually made) he wrote a different ending again, with Higgins having both a flashback to Eliza in Covent Garden and a “vision of the future” in which Eliza and Freddy are seen in their shop. A policewoman asks Higgins if anything is wrong, and he answers “No: nothing wrong. A happy ending. A happy beginning.”
¹⁷
In 1939 a new edition of the play was published, in which the final lines were now changed in print. To Mrs. Higgins’s observation that “I should be uneasy about you and her if she were less fond of Colonel Pickering,” in this version Higgins answers: “Pickering! Nonsense: she’s going to marry Freddy.”
¹⁸
However, the actual ending of the 1938 film has a scene familiar from
My Fair Lady
, in which Eliza returns to Higgins’s study while he asks “Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?” apparently effecting a reconciliation and making no reference to the union of Eliza and Freddy.
¹⁹

In summary, the number of English-language versions of
Pygmalion
is large, even before we take into consideration several foreign film versions that preceded the 1938 British movie. This textual minefield clarifies one of the reasons why turning the play into a musical was so difficult: Which version should be adapted? The original play, in its five-act 1914 version, is quite simple in what it depicts. Act 1 shows Eliza in Covent Garden; she meets Higgins, who bets Colonel Pickering that in three months he could pass her off as “a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party.”
²⁰
Higgins takes pity on Eliza and
gives her a handful of change. In act 2, Eliza arrives at Higgins’s house and requests elocution lessons; Pickering asks Higgins to make good his bet, and they decide to teach her. Eliza’s dustman father arrives, demanding his rights, and “sells” her for £5. Act 3 shows a tea party at Mrs. Higgins’s house, where Eliza disgraces herself with embarrassing stories about her family. Nonetheless, Higgins decides to persevere, and at the start of act 4 we learn that Eliza’s formal debut into society (which takes place during the interval) has been a success. However, Higgins credits solely himself for this achievement and ignores Eliza while basking in Pickering’s congratulations. Higgins and Eliza quarrel, and she leaves. Act 5 brings the story to a conclusion, at Mrs. Higgins’s house. Higgins and Pickering come to report Eliza’s disappearance, only to discover she has taken refuge with Mrs. Higgins. Doolittle arrives and announces he is to be married, having been left a legacy as a result of being recommended as a lecturer by Higgins on a whim. After a final confrontation between Eliza and Higgins, Eliza sets out for the wedding with Pickering, Doolittle, Freddy, and Mrs. Higgins, leaving Higgins behind.

What’s striking about this synopsis is that there are no elocution lessons, and we are not allowed to witness Eliza’s triumph. In the original conception, Shaw’s emphases are on the role of woman in society and the way in which education could facilitate social mobility. For the 1938 film adaptation, produced by Gabriel Pascal and co-directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, Shaw made some additions and changes.
²¹
These include a scene at the end of act 1 in which Eliza hires a taxi with some of the money Higgins has given to her, to make the short journey home; a scene in act 2 in which Mrs. Pearce gives her a bath; an example of Eliza’s lessons; and a new scene between Eliza and Freddy in act 4, when the former leaves Higgins’s house in anger and hurt. The film also introduces Eliza’s return to Covent Garden after her argument with Higgins. But without Shaw’s knowledge, Pascal and the directors “secretly shot a different ending to Shaw’s screenplay,” and withheld it from him until the preview for the press “two days before the premiere, too late for him to do anything about it.”
²²
With the exception of this unauthorized ending, Shaw subsumed many of the new scenes from the film into the play script for a definitive edition in 1941, which has been the source used for most subsequent editions of the work.