All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (16 page)

Thus spake Stanislafsky (who by the way went on to compare our opera and symphony orchestras favorably to those in Europe). So we had, indeed, the acting pool to accommodate the twenties revolutions. Stanislafsky’s appreciation of Warfield suggests that Belasco’s reputation really does need revising, and Barrymore as a “charming” Hamlet puzzles, especially because Barrymore famously overplayed on the night the Moscow Art players came by.

The blurb for Schildkraut’s Ibsen is worth investigating, however, for while considering the discoveries of twenties playmaking we should consider its outstanding stars as well. Schildkraut presents an odd case, not least because by genetic rules he should have made his career in Europe, not here. Born in Vienna, the son of the distinguished actor Rudolf Schildkraut, Joseph learned enough English to get through the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in New York. He was “discovered” by O’Neill’s collaborator Kenneth Macgowan, who took him to the Theatre Guild. They were interested in this magnetic young man, especially when Macgowan raved over the actor’s work in Vienna: the Gang of Six was contemplating its third season and thus still in its period of European infatuation. It was Schildkraut who suggested
Liliom
(and Eva Le Gallienne, whom he rather fancied) to the Guild, and in his striped tank top over checked pants and baroque socks “Pepi” Schildkraut embodied Molnár’s anti-hero, a sensual piece of real estate but a disaster in the moralities of life. The actor seems to have been another of those accidentally transitional figures, schooled in old fashion yet new wave in his lack of mannerism. He was exciting and unpredictable on stage, but casual, natural. “I start with all the tricks, props, and technical things,” he once said, “and then discard the props, discard this, discard that, more essence, more essence, more extract, until I have it.” As we’ll see, this is not unlike the approach of some adherents of The Method.

Because of his German accent, Schildkraut specialized in foreign roles. The Peer Gynt that Stanislafsky admired appeared in the Guild production already mentioned, with Helen Westley and Dudley Digges as the trolls’ royal family, Edward G. Robinson as the Button-Moulder, and Lillebil Ibsen, granddaughter of the author, dancing Anitra. Grieg’s music was used, and while the Guild broke its rule against cutting, the show still ran three and a half hours. “The American theatre’s rejoinder to the Moscow Art Theatre” is how the
Evening Mail
’s James Craig saw it, affirming Stanislafsky himself. Note, too, that Craig thought only the Theatre Guild could have mounted Ibsen’s gorgeous monster “on anything like such a scale”—and the run of 120 performances suggests a hit. Remember that the roles listed above (along with the two secondary leads, Ase and Solveig) are little more than glorified bits;
Peer Gynt
is built around its protagonist as few plays are.

So Schildkraut was either one of our important actors or extremely sharp in his timing. Breaking with the Guild for commercial management, Schildkraut tried an American play on a European subject, featuring another super-lover, Benvenuto Cellini. In Edwin Justus Mayer’s
The Firebrand
(1924), Schildkraut did all the things that guys do when they go around in tights, such as dueling and passing sarcastic remarks at aristocrats. It’s a mannered role in a mannered play, yet Schildkraut seems to have brought it off with his typical “extracted” exuberance, never giving the same performance twice.

Mayer was disappointed that Schildkraut didn’t look more like Cellini, who sported one of those Father Time beards. At the dress rehearsal before the usual in-crowd guests, Schildkraut concocted a verisimilitude of a beard in the Cellini style; and now we meet Schildkraut Sr. Young Joseph had no more than entered in his Renaissance muff than his father rose up in the Garrick Theatre orchestra with “Beard! Beard! Where are you running with my boy?”

To the thrill of the house, Rudolf actually gained the stage, tore off the bad hair, and sent his son back to his dressing room to clean off the remnants and recommence. According to Pepi, the show’s director was so offended that he departed and Rudolf took over, changing not only the title (from
The Golden Key
) but the very style of the production “into a naughty French bedroom farce.” Just like that?

While Joseph Schildkraut had a father, Richard Bennett had daughters. Three got into acting, and Constance and Joan became movie stars. Bennett père made his debut in 1891 in Chicago as Tombstone Jake in something called
The Limited Mail
and came to New York with it that same year. So Bennett was Old Broadway, on the scene early enough to play romantic leads in important titles before 1910; by the 1920s, Bennett was in his fifties and playing Heavy Fathers. Yet he had one romantic lead left in him, if only a
kind
of romantic lead, because the play was one of O’Neill’s,
Beyond the Horizon
(1920).

This was the first full-length O’Neill to play Broadway, and it was Bennett who got it on. Producer John D. Williams had optioned the piece and then got nervous, because like so much of O’Neill it is wishful and angry at once, a heady combination for theatregoers of 1920. Bennett urged Williams to spring for a few trial matinées, with Bennett and Edward Arnold as brothers who tragically trade dreams. Bennett’s is to travel, but Arnold goes seafaring while Bennett stays home to dwindle into the worst thing an O’Neill character can become: starved out of his fantasy. Bennett and the play were a smash in a regular run; the success of Eugene O’Neill was under way.

Actor and playwright both moved on to the Theatre Guild, which shows us once more how collaborative the forces of New Broadway were. In Leonid Andryeyef’s
He Who Gets Slapped
in 1922, Bennett was so perplexed by his title role that the play’s translator, Gregory Zilboorg—later famed as Broadway’s Psychiatrist To the Stars—explained the character as if to a patient on the couch. Still perplexed, Bennett sought a solution in the terminology of the stage, asking Lawrence Langner, “Is this a Bassanio part or a Mercutio part?” That is: romantic or comic?

It’s not that simple any more. Like many of O’Neill’s characters, the role of He didn’t answer to any of The Street’s traditional skills sets. Nor, for that matter, did Tony, Bennett’s role in
They Knew What They Wanted;
it’s vivaciously stolid, a combination of Bassanio and Mercutio parts. Oddly, Bennett’s later credits suggest the interesting actor rather than the great one. Though he rose to the King Learish role of the haunted judge in Maxwell Anderson’s
Winterset
(1935), Bennett was fired out of town on his last job, as Gramps in Paul Osborn’s
On Borrowed Time
(1938). For that matter, Joseph Schildkraut’s power waned with his youth (though we’ll see him again, most prominently, much later on).

Who was the outstanding Broadway actor at this time, the one taking over for John Barrymore after he moved to Hollywood? But who could? Barrymore had more than talent: that Name. Glenn Anders couldn’t compete in sheer household recognition; but producers did seem to call on Anders first of all when casting charismatic leads. Anders faced down even the redoubtable George Abbott, as opposites in a dynastic feud in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Hatcher Hughes’
Hell-Bent Fer Heaven
(1924). To make it interesting, Hughes arranged for Abbott, of the Hunt family, to love Anders’ sister, of the Lowrys. Even more interesting,
Hell-Bent Fer Heaven
disgraced the Pulitzer Prize by winning it, for the prize jury had chosen George Kelly’s domestic comedy
The Show-Off
that year. The prize’s administrator, Columbia University, overruled the jury in favor of Hughes, a Columbia professor. One of the jury alerted the media, and there was quite a noise on The Street.

Anders projected well in male ego war: later that same year, he fenced with Richard Bennett for Pauline Lord in
They Knew What They Wanted
. You remember—“dark, sloppy, beautiful, and young.” That was Anders. But he had the range and traction for O’Neill, as that wary top man in
Strange Interlude
and then the obsessed acolyte of techno-God in
Dynamo,
the latter a truly heroic role, intense and exhausting.

So Anders was far more than a matinée idol—and he could play in boulevard
9
style, too: chic, soigné, cocasse. Anders did little in Hollywood, but he was on Broadway from the age of nineteen till a City Center return engagement of
The Visit,
when Anders was seventy. Balancing those boulevard roles with more experimental work, Anders entered upon an amazing period of flops, including Philip Barry’s evening-length one-act of psychoanalytical exorcism,
Hotel Universe
(1930); one more romantic hero in Laurence Stallings’ adaptation of
A Farewell To Arms
(1930);
False Dreams, Farewell
(1934), a spectacular version of the
Titanic
tragedy with even more scenery than the later musical; and William Saroyan’s
Get Away, Old Man
(1943), as that quintessential Saroyan figure the drunken syllogist. Could Anders have been too versatile for his good? Seldom unemployed, he nevertheless failed to carve out that niche that stardom thrives in, and, like “Joseph Schildkraut” and “Richard Bennett,” his name means nothing today.

But then, it is the English who run a stable of major male actors, from the ruling triumvirate of Olivier-Gielgud-Richardson to such as Alec Guinness, Michael Redgrave, Anthony Quayle, and many another working today. Broadway was the place of the Big Lady, and this brings me to one of the personal stories with which I punctuate these volumes. After college, new in New York, I made the acquaintance of unsung former Broadwayites—usually chorus men who hit thirty-five and turned to stage managing—glad of the chance to try their anecdotes on a fresh ear. I thus learned a great deal of lore not otherwise taken down, such as exactly how
Lady in the Dark
changed décor from “real life” into dream, or how Laurette Taylor could enjoy thirty years of stardom without showing any sign of the coming brillance of her Amanda Wingfield.
10

Of course, these veterans of Broadway past had seen all the actresses who dominated The Street, and one of my informants gave me an odd précis of the one I was least acquainted with. This was Katharine Cornell: because she left the least behind, mainly ambiguous critics’ reports, two TV shows, and the of course touching cameo in the film
Stage Door Canteen
(1943), in which she plays
Romeo and Juliet
’s Balcony Scene with an infatuated young soldier.

My adviser recalled Cornell as the best actress of her day. He called her “exotic, mercurial in a slow-motion way, and stagy yet not old-fashioned.” She had, he concluded, a kind of “new-wave staginess.”

This confused me; couldn’t one say something of the like of all the divas of Cornell’s day? No, and he ticked them off: Ethel Barrymore was the very voice of aristocratic elegy. Helen Hayes was lovable, cute. Jane Cowl was daffy. Lynn Fontanne was a quibbling enigma but a superb technician. Had Kabuki allowed women, she would command the longest-lived myth in Japanese culture.

“Then what was left for Cornell to be?” I asked.

“Implausible,” he replied. “The others were marvelous, but you always knew that they came from somewhere or other. Cornell was placeless. They were actresses—she was a fantasy.”

Bizarrely beautiful and possessed of the rounded vocal tone of the finishing-school girl taking the lead in the class play, Cornell set herself apart from the stars named just above as the last of the actor-managers, often her own producer, in collaboration with her husband, director Guthrie McClintic. She was unusual, too, in having prima donna glamor without the egomania. She believed a challenge improved her game, and loved working with Laurence Olivier on S. N. Behrman’s
No Time For Comedy
(1939) even though Olivier was stealing everything but the furniture while Cornell could never seem to satisfy her ambitions for her own portrayal. It’s almost shocking to report that when Olivier bowed out of the post-Broadway tour to rejoin his lover, Vivien Leigh, in Hollywood, Cornell was heartbroken.

Yet Cornell’s theatre was Old Broadway. She loved The Entrance—even better, The Exit. When Katharine Cornell came onstage, she brought with her a somber beauty, a dedication to the text, and a rapt intimacy of character to mesmerize the entire house. And when Katharine Cornell left the stage, she took everything with her, including the grand piano.

Cornell was born in 1898, so the 1920s and Cornell’s twenties almost exactly coincided. It was a wonderful time in which to earn stardom: a time very under the spell that youth and beauty cast when talent tells the charm. As film was still silent, Cornell would not consider preserving her roles, and by the time sound came in Cornell was resolute. Thus that snippet of
Stage Door Canteen
comprises her entire Hollywood output. It was left to others to film Cornell’s stage roles. Katharine Hepburn got
A Bill of Divorcement
(on Broadway in 1921); Dorothy McGuire
The Enchanted Cottage
(1923); Garbo
The Green Hat,
filmed as
A Woman of Affairs
because the Hays Office feared the novel’s notoriety; Jeanne Eagels and, in remake, Bette Davis
The Letter
(1927). All four are of English origin, but Cornell tried as well Edith Wharton, adapted by others, in
The Age of Innocence
(1928), filmed sixty-five years later with Michelle Pfeiffer in Cornell’s part. Cornell played Shakespeare and Chekhof (though not Ibsen), but her Great Roles found her in two Shaws,
Saint Joan
and
Candida,
and Rudolph Besier’s
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
.

Cornell’s Joan became so famous a portrayal—for once the character was as implausible as the actress—that it is a theatrical factoid that Cornell created the role. No: Winifred Lenihan, the one Guild contractee at the time who was even vaguely right for it. Cornell assumed the part in a 1936 revival, putting foremost her salient quality in tragedy, an insanely deep projection of womanhood refusing to let men’s treachery distress her. Whether as Joan the Maid, as Oparre (in Maxwell Anderson’s version of Medea,
The Wingless Victory
[1936]), or as Anouilh’s Antigone, Cornell mixed a solution of equal parts of patience and divine inspiration, with a dash of the imperious. McClintic directed and Jo Mielziner designed
Saint Joan
with wit: the Gentleman of 1920, who interrupts the Epilogue to brief the principals on Joan’s twentieth-century canonization, was made up to resemble Shaw himself. Paradoxically, Cornell’s comic style had the dashing clarity of a pebble skipping across the surface of a pond. Sheer charm. She revived
Candida
many a time—and note, once again, her love of strong partnerships: one of her Marchbankses was the twenty-two-year-old Marlon Brando.