Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) (39 page)

Still, the main reason why the show is so compelling is the brilliant depiction of the relationship between Higgins and Eliza. The tension between them is palpable from start to finish, yet at no point is it explicitly referred to as a signifier of love. This aspect of the piece is by far the one most often remarked upon by critics, and has been from its premiere; the disagreements as to whether the final scene represents romantic union between the two characters or mere reconciliation after a disagreement are constant. In contrast to some of the reviews such as Brooks Atkinson’s in the
New York Times
(see chap. 7), which perceived the show to depict a love story, the review in
Variety
by Hobe Morrison more cautiously referred to “the development of the romantic angle that Shaw scorned” without making it clear whether this “development” meant consummation.
²⁸
John Beaufort in the
Christian Science Monitor
gave a thorough account of how the musical’s book was adapted from the 1938 film of
Pygmalion
, complete with its “liberating revisions”: “Lerner winds up the story with a wry reunion between Eliza and Henry Higgins.”
²⁹
The resolution of the relationship can therefore be viewed in three different ways: overt romance (Atkinson), developed romance (Morrison), and “wry reunion” (Beaufort), the latter in particular the antithesis to Atkinson’s use of the word “love.”

Are Higgins and Eliza really in love, then? The fact is that Lerner and Loewe were careful to avoid discussion of the subject in the show. When
My Fair Lady
was nearing its third birthday on Broadway, Herman Levin approached various journalists with a standard letter, suggesting that they should write an editorial about the anniversary. The second paragraph of Levin’s letter in every case reads:

Though it is without kiss, embrace or tap dance, many authorities, exclusive of this partisan, think it is the best musical comedy ever produced in this country. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic have commended it for its taste, its freedom from vulgarity, and the fidelity with which is clings to the plot and dialogue of Shaw’s
Pygmalion
.
³⁰

Of course, these letters were not written for public consumption and were created for a commercial function, but Levin underlined an undeniable truth when he said that the show is without “kiss or embrace.” Their relationship is without physical or verbal confirmation of their love, surely a stumbling block for anyone who wants to read the final reunion of Eliza and Higgins as a capitulation to conventional romantic “happy endings”—whether in musical comedy, the
lieto fine
of eighteenth-century
opera buffa
, or the traditional
conclusion to Shakespearean comedy, featuring the marriage of one or more couples. Ultimately, these precedents are probably what make people want to believe the show
must
end with the main characters in love.

The theme has been taken up in all the secondary literature on the musical. Joseph Swain, for instance, writes of “the transformation of Higgins, from a self-imagined misogynist to someone who has become accustomed to love a woman.”
³¹
He then embarks on a detailed analysis of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” at one point highlighting broad similarities between the melodies of part of this song and Eliza’s “Just You Wait,” and goes on to ask: “Does this turnabout on the revenge motive imply a mutual affinity between the two protagonists, who have been portrayed so differently throughout?”
³²
He then has to admit, however, that the “relationship between Higgins and Eliza is developed with consistent subtlety—the word ‘love’ never comes between them—through the music of the play, which is, of course, the principal addition to
Pygmalion
. The tone of even their music is so understated that it demands a compromise of style: Lerner and Loewe forswear all serious devices of romantic expression that the Broadway tradition makes available to them, so that even ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’, the weightiest number of the play, is restrained in overt expression.”
³³
With good reason, Swain reads the show as subverting convention in terms of negating the need for a central romance—the word “love” never comes between them, he admits—so it is perhaps surprising that he should pursue the idea that Higgins is unambiguously in love with Eliza.

Swain is not alone in pursuing a romantic reading of the show. Geoffrey Block also assumes that the final scene represents “a romantic resolution between Higgins and Eliza” and asserts that “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.”
³⁴
With good reason, Block describes how Higgins is softened as a character in the musical, perceiving this to be a way of grooming him as a more conventional “leading man” type and paving the way through “The Rain in Spain” to romance in the final scene. Certainly, this is a valid way of reading Lerner’s epigram to the published stage script, in which he explains that he omitted Shaw’s epilogue to
Pygmalion
“because in it Shaw explains how Eliza ends not with Higgins but with Freddy and—Shaw and Heaven forgive me!—I am not certain he is right.” Yet even Block admits that “Readers of Shaw’s play know, as Shaw knew, that Higgins would “never fall in love with anyone under forty-five” [a line of Mrs. Higgins’s from
Pygmalion
]. Indeed, marrying Freddy might have its drawbacks, but marrying Higgins would be
unthinkable.”
³⁵
Block concludes by saying that the greatest achievement of
My Fair Lady
is that in it, “the unthinkable has become the probable.”

But is this happy ending really implied? What seems to confuse many writers is the odd progression of events leading to the finale. First, Eliza and Higgins meet and are poles apart in social rank and education. They unite as pupil and teacher, and the fact that Eliza takes up residence in Higgins’s house increases their level of intimacy above the norm. When she finally masters the language in the “Rain in Spain” scene, they sing and dance together, and in a song of triumph Eliza sings the lines, “I only know when he / Began to dance with me / I could have danced all night” (68). Other than this, Eliza never sings or speaks with joy about Higgins. Following the Ascot scene, the next step in their relationship is more tactile, when they are about to depart for the ball in act 1, scene 9. Eliza appears on the stairs in her evening gown, Pickering tells her she looks beautiful, and Higgins says that she is “Not bad. Not bad at all” (91). The stage directions tell us that as Higgins is at the threshold of the house, “he pauses, turns and gazes at Eliza. He returns to her and offers his arm. She takes it and they go out of the door, Pickering following after.” This represents an unprecedented gesture of respect from Higgins. He then dances with her at the ball in scene 11 (98), again taking their relationship to a new level with the act of touching.

But his self-congratulatory behavior in “You Did It” indicates that things have not significantly changed, and there is no suggestion here that Higgins might be in love with Eliza. He thanks God that the experiment is over (106); he says, “What does it matter what becomes of you?” (107); and he suggests that Eliza might get married, specifically to someone else (“I daresay my mother could find some chap or other who would do very well,” 111). On the flip side, he admits to Eliza at the height of the scene that “You have wounded me to the heart” (113) and refers to his folly in having lavished “the treasure of my regard and intimacy on a heartless guttersnipe!” (114), emotive language that shows an attachment but still does not necessarily imply romantic love.

For her part, Eliza is deeply upset by Higgins’s behavior, since he does not care what is to become of her and she does not know what to do. She feels lost and abandoned, but if her resentment is derived from unrequited love, she does not really show it. The only gesture of possible significance here is Eliza’s returning of the ring Higgins gave to her during an unseen visit to Brighton, a symbol of the dissolution of a romantic relationship. But even this is outwardly just the return of a gift given out of friendship. Both the dancing in act 1 and the ring in act 2 are examples of how Higgins and Eliza are associated with tantalizing conventional symbols of love whose meaning is subverted:
Pickering is part of their “Rain in Spain” dance, whose context is far from romantic; their Embassy Ball dance is part of their experiment; and the ring is rejected, having never been exchanged as part of the story in the first place. In each case, attraction glimmers between them but soon subsides.

After her tearful reprise of “Just You Wait,” Eliza departs the house and sings “Show Me.” Had this song been delivered to Higgins it would undeniably function as a demand for a tangible expression of love, but as Eliza sings it to Freddy it functions more generally as an articulation of her frustration with men. The exchange that really reveals the most about the Higgins-Eliza relationship takes place in act 2, scene 5, at Mrs. Higgins’s house. Here they discuss their unusual association for the first time. Higgins softens briefly and asks, “You never wondered, I suppose, whether I could get along without you” (143), later admitting “I shall miss you, Eliza. I’ve learned something from your idiotic notions. I confess that humbly and gratefully” (145). When Higgins proposes that she return to live with him, he adds that she can walk out at any point and go back to selling flowers, or perhaps marry Pickering. She responds directly: “I wouldn’t marry you if you asked me” (145). If this were not clear enough, she goes on to say that she does not want Higgins to be infatuated with her; she just wants “a little kindness. I know I’m a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I’m not dirt under your feet. … What I did was not for the dresses and the taxis: I did it because we were pleasant together and I come—came to care for you; not to want you to make love to me, and not forgetting the difference between us, but more friendly like” (146). The argument continues, and Eliza sings that she can live “Without You,” to which Higgins reacts alone with “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” But even though Eliza then returns to the house at the end of the song, it is difficult in light of the dialogue about friendship to see how this could be construed as a sign that they will marry. Indeed, the characters lay out quite explicitly the kind of terms in which they could live under the same roof together again. That is not to say, however, as Raymond Knapp has done, that Higgins must be homosexual, or that he is engaged in a sexual relationship with Pickering just because they both choose to live in a largely homosocial environment.
³⁶
As Shaw indicated in his epilogue, there must be a certain attraction between Eliza and Higgins in order for the tension to exist between them. What we don’t know is the degree to which they feel it, and
this
is at the heart of the show’s success. Nor is the fact that Higgins is a non-lyric role particularly significant in the interpretation of his sexuality: all along, Lerner and Loewe were looking for a male classical actor to carry Higgins’s huge, complex speeches, and it was to be expected that such an actor would not be a strong singer.

It is not just on the basis of the published text that the status of the Eliza-Higgins relationship can be understood as ambiguous rather than romantic. In this book chapters 1–6 show numerous examples of the writers initially going down more conventional routes with the lyrics, dialogue, music, and even the casting, and then retracing their steps. For instance, we saw in
chapter 1
that their initial idea for the show was to pursue Mary Martin to play the lead role. Lerner’s letter to Gabriel Pascal, in which he says “I’m ready to do anything short of homicide to see Mary as Liza,” suggests that the show was to be written around her talents. This in itself would have had huge implications, since Martin was the hugely popular star of quintessential Broadway shows such as
South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun
(on tour), and
One Touch of Venus
. Furthermore, not only was she American but she was also approaching her thirty-ninth birthday when the idea was first proposed and would probably have been over forty by the time the show went into production. In both these respects she was the complete antithesis of the English, twenty-year-old Julie Andrews, who eventually got the part. The two singers’ vocal ranges and timbres were also completely different, with Andrews at the lighter soprano end and Martin at the warmer, lower end, which would obviously have had an effect on the style and range of the music. Though we do not know exactly what would have happened if the show had been built around Martin, it seems almost sure that it would have had much more of an extrovert “Broadway” feel to it, and with this would probably have come a more conventionally romantic relationship between the two main protagonists.

Certainly, many of the initial attempts at writing songs for the show were in line with this. Sketches for numbers such as “What is a Woman?” and “The Undeserving Poor” suggest generic Broadway numbers, while the complete lead sheet for “Please Don’t Marry Me” shows that both the lyric and the music for this song deals with the subject of love in a more head-on way than is the case in “I’m an Ordinary Man.” Eliza’s “There’s a Thing Called Love” is similar in this respect, and the fact that the music for the number was recycled in the stage version of
Gigi
as a full-blown love song indicates that Lerner and Loewe did not want Eliza to have quite the same kind of romantic number that someone like Gigi sings; the avoidance of such a number is also shown in the removal of the sentimental “Shy” from the score late in the compositional process. Even more strikingly, Higgins refers to Eliza as becoming “my lady” in the unused song “Lady Liza,” a direct nomination of her as his consort. The removal of the long sequence in act 1 (“Come to the Ball,” the ballet, and “Say a Prayer”) was largely due to the running time of the previews in New Haven, but it also served an interpretative purpose. “Come to
the Ball” was intensely seductive and featured Higgins persuading Eliza to do his will, again in waltz-time, again with reference to himself as consort (“Come to the ball with me”), while the original lyric for “Say a Prayer” had Eliza singing such sentiments as “If I were a work of art / Would I wake his sleeping heart?” and “Say a prayer that he’ll discover / I’m his lover.” That this material did not make it into the show is no accident.