All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (17 page)

Was Cornell the outstanding actress of the group? It’s interesting to observe that there was yet another great talent who seldom makes the short list—Eva Le Gallienne. I think I know why: Le Gallienne’s more or less career-long obsession with the creation of a repertory company of classic titles is a concept that lacks glamor. Defies glamor, even. One reason why is that one somehow never gets a
Candida
with Marlon Brando that way; one gets
Rosmersholm
and
John Gabriel Borkman
. It’s not good Broadway, and that unfortunately is the point: it’s not supposed to be Broadway at all. Though Le Gallienne appeared opposite Joseph Schildkraut in that Theatre Guild
Liliom,
she nourished ambitions that would take her far from not only The Street but even the Guild, which was already off The Street. Those show shops and their browsing public! the Guild might say. That Theatre Guild and its pathetic starter kit in cultural pretension! was Le Gallienne’s response, we presume. Something like
Liliom
was worthy art, but wasn’t most of a Guild season
fill
? Weren’t those Lunts boulevardiers at heart? Of cultivated European upbringing, Le Gallienne was a princely character, noble and conservative. One of the few to regard the usual Otto Kahn contribution as a short-term loan, she astonished Maecenas by paying him back—in cash!—and she worked into the 1980s (and lived till 1991) still speaking in the old tongue. Actors were “engaged,” not hired. They didn’t act: they “played.” And the play itself was “the bill.”

But could one base a career exclusively on the most stimulating assignments? Even Alla Nazimova, eventually a member of Le Gallienne’s company, had once appeared in such show-shop ware as
That Sort
(1914) and
’Ception Shoals,
both with her husband in polyandrous union, Charles Bryant, and the latter play calling for Nazimova to make one entrance dripping wet in a bathing suit.

Husbands and bathing suits!
Le Gallienne would have none of this. Her stage must present texts of the highest literary order, combining new work with the classics. Most important, she wanted to draw her public not from the intelligentsia but from … well, the neighborhood. Though Le Gallienne was to pursue the dream of her own repertory company in the 1940s and 1960s, her memory as actor-manager rests on her Civic Repertory Theatre, which lasted from 1926 to 1933, and took “Broadway” down to the border between Chelsea and Greenwich Village. Indeed, Le Gallienne had not specifically intended to set up shop away from The Street. However, a disused playhouse at the northwest corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue
11
turned out to contain a scene dock reaching all the way back to Fifteenth Street. This would allow production décor to be stored on site as the bill changed from day to day, an economic boon considering that Le Gallienne intended to hold to a $1.50 top. It was her dream to make theatre as available as sunlight, to popularize while adhering rigidly to the highest standards in that golden trio of Shakespeare, Chekhof, and Ibsen, along with Molière, Goldoni, Rostand,
Camille
(as we popularly term
La Dame aux Caméllias
),
Peter Pan,
and Le Gallienne’s own adaptation of
Alice in Wonderland
. Le Gallienne looked forward to a day when her concept would be acculturated nationally, and in a speech first delivered in 1928 and kept in use for long afterward, she spoke of the special gift that theatregoing can present to the young especially as “the beauty that springs from knowledge.”

It is difficult to speak of Le Gallienne’s acting style, because, while praising her, critics offer little information of the precise kind, even when she gave her reading of standard roles, ones they had knowledge of. Le Gallienne was certainly the most remarkable woman of her phylum, not least in living openly as a lesbian at a time when Cornell, for instance, entered into a mariage blanc with a gay man.

As producer, director, and star, Le Gallienne made a great success of her Civic Rep, foiled at the last only by Depression economics. However, she did have a problem attracting top talent. True, Nazimova signed on, but she did little more than “her” Madame Ranyefsky (to Le Gallienne’s Varya). No one else of Le Gallienne’s standing shared the Civic stage, and she too often had to go on with makeweights. Dumpy little J. Edward Bromberg may have been fine as
Peter Pan
’s Nana, but he was an odd choice as Mercutio. Even the Romeo, Donald Cameron, only looked the role; Brooks Atkinson called him “a dull swain” in “monotonous recitation.” And Jacob Ben-Ami, the Escalus, made slush of the poetry with his European accent. When Katharine Cornell staged her
Romeo,
in 1934, Brian Aherne made a glittery Mercutio and Basil Rathbone a correct Romeo—and the Escalus, Reynolds Evans, spoke English.

Naturally, Le Gallienne was no more attracted to the movies than Cornell was. Nevertheless, Le Gallienne ended up in three, in onstage scenes in the Edwin Booth bio,
Prince of Players
(1955), as Kirk Douglas’ mother in
The Devil’s Disciple
(1959), and, getting a supporting Oscar nomination, in
Resurrection
(1980). At least Le Gallienne’s gala Fanny Cavendish in the 1975 revival of
The Royal Family
was preserved in a TV taping. Simply by default, it is now Le Gallienne’s Great Role, we can only imagine Le Gallienne as a matchlessly destructive Hedda Gabler, with the delicately feral beauty that the actress had in youth, a blond doll who could change personality as others changed gloves. But anyone today can revisit Fanny, beautifully turned out of Louisa Drew by Mrs. Fiske, archon and devotee at once. Le Gallienne knew the traditions of the stage even if she couldn’t use them in her style, which like that of her Liliom, Joseph Schildkraut, restlessly anticipated the naturalism that Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan were to unleash. And yet Le Gallienne knew also that one mustn’t frustrate all of the public’s expectations, that now and again one is less the Servant of the Art and more the Star. Helen Sheehey’s biography of Le Gallienne includes lighting designer Tharon Musser’s recollection of working for the actress’ last try at a permanent company, the National Repertory Theatre. Musser apparently seemed to be arranging far too much apparatus for Le Gallienne’s entrance into
The Seagull:
all those gels and tech for a performer who carried her apparatus with her as surely as Cornell ever did. They called it “glamor” then. “I’ll light a cigarette,” Le Gallienne told Musser. “They’ll know who it is.”

They knew who Lynn Fontanne was, too; but I’m saving her for the next chapter because her partnership with Alfred Lunt puts her into a unique category among Broadway’s divas. Note that the Lunts, too, interconnect with our three twenties innovations, for Lynn played in expressionism (in
Strange Interlude
), both played O’Neill, and the pair were Theatre Guild mainstays right to the end of the 1949–50 season. For some, the Guild
was
the Lunts: or even all Broadway was. In what the couple represented to the nation, the Lunts occupy the center of this book, and we can date precisely when “the Lunts” incorporated as a concept. It wasn’t when they met, backstage at the New Amsterdam Theatre, when Lunt came in through the street door, lost his footing on the stairs, and crashed to the floor at Fontanne’s feet. Nor was it when they married, in 1922, at New York’s City Hall, after she had closed
Dulcy
and he was supporting star Billie Burke in Booth Tarkington’s
The Intimate Strangers
.

It began, rather, when Joseph Schildkraut broke his contract with the Guild because instead of letting him play Shakespeare’s Richard II, as promised, they wanted him to do more Molnár. It was
The Guardsman
, which Schildkraut regarded as “witty” but “phony.” Who would believe that a husband, even a husband who was an actor—even a madly jealous one—would play a role in real life in order to test his wife’s fidelity? He can disguise himself so well that we think she might be fooled? By her
own husband
? And then she says she knew it was he all along? So
she’s
playacting, too? We are to accept that a married acting team never get out of the theatre—that all their world really is a stage?

Said Schildkraut, “I have never been able to stomach [
The Guardsman
’s] preposterous premise.” That’s gentler than some comments about the new material that was passing for entertainment in this decade of national change. Many were feeling what O’Neill wrote for the Senior Tyrone’s dismissal of his younger son’s library of Baudelaire, Schopenhauer, Ibsen, Wilde: “atheists, fools, and madmen!” Even “whoremongers!” Old Broadway gazes upon New Broadway, and completely misses the point.

Five

Sophisticated

The Guardsman
might have been written for the Lunts, for their world really was a stage. S. N. Behrman said, “You couldn’t
be
with the Lunts without rehearsing.” They were the ultimate theatricals: they never lit. It wasn’t so much that they were always rehearsing as that they were always performing—enjoying their trademark overlapping dialogue not only in the theatre but everywhere else in their peculiar version of real life; balancing his sulky boy with her teasing mother all the more easily because she was (secretly) five years his senior; and playing the most provocative love scenes onstage while fooling everyone about the asexual nature of their marriage. Or
were
they fooling?

At once the best known and most mysterious of the show-biz acts of the age, the Lunts distinguished themselves above all in the stupendously nuanced blend of loving and fighting, luring and rejecting, that they brought to each new work. The first thing you noticed about them was that, in each new show, she made the entrance of the most glamorous woman on Broadway while he would so alter his appearance that you’d wonder who it was. But the second thing was the way they skewed their portrayals to change all the emphases, to fight and love in some novel way. Other great duos teamed for life; the Lunts teamed only for a particular work, then broke up the act and reteamed anew, rediscovering each other in new characters. Through it all, they were always in love and always suspicious, and they presented it as the height of logic to part after making sure that neither would survive without the other.

They brought such sensation to what they did that their solo work before their definitive teaming seems a sheer waste of Lunts. And yet the piece that solemnized their decision to play as a unit is Sil-Vara’s
Caprice
(1928). This was another of the ephemeral titles turned out by the Budapest-Prague-Vienna boulevard wheel, and so was the
first
outstanding event of Luntplay,
The Guardsman,
for it gave Broadway a preview of what Alfred and Lynn were going to excell at: boulevardier masque.
1
Typical Alfred: his disguise with which to test his wife’s fidelity is not that of the erotic icon but a monster, a Slavic
thing
suggesting a blend of Rasputin and the Emperor Jones. Is it because he actually wants her to be able to pass the test or because he thinks women are crazy? Or is
he
the crazy one? Typical Lunts—they raise more questions than they answer. And now comes The Confrontation: as she reclines on a couch with a book while he throws open a costume trunk just behind her head and, inches away from her unseeing eyes, feverishly yet fastidiously makes up in a hand mirror as the Guardsman. Then he stands before her, himself the evidence of her treachery.

Billed in the program as The Actor and The Actress, the two might be in their own place on their own time, not on the stage of the Garrick Theatre, speaking lines written by Ferenc Molnár:

THE ACTRESS:
You came in at that door yesterday at exactly sixteen minutes past six. At seventeen minutes past six, I had recognized you. At eighteen minutes past six, I was wondering whether I should laugh in your face—and at nineteen minutes past six I had decided to play the comedy to the end.

Playing comedy to the end was another of the Lunts’ trademark approaches. Not merely to the end, but past it to every permutational riddle.
Had
The Actress recognized him? The Lunts also gave of their utmost in the physical sense: they did their own stunts. Not only would they never fake a fight, but they looked upon every instance of knockabout abuse as a chance to shatter theatrical precedent. Not till management had to distribute plastic protection to the folks in the front row at
The Miracle Worker
(1959)
2
did Broadway see the like of the brouhaha that Alfred and Lynn arranged for C. K. Munro’s
At Mrs. Beam’s
(1926). An English comedy about boarding-house tenants suspicious of That New Couple, the piece was a showcase for Jean Cadell, who had introduced her role of a twee busybody in London. The Lunts, however, totally took over her show with a fight scene that started with the hurling of objects and escalated into a smashing battle across the furniture and onto the floor.

Even the relatively sedate
Reunion in Vienna
(1931), a comedy in the Molnár fashion by Robert E. Sherwood, offered up the defining Lunt Moment of sex and violence in a scene carefully delayed till the second act. Former lovers, the pair were to have parted forever, she now married to a Viennese psychiatrist and he, a Hapsburg prince, driving a cab in Nice. A political exile, he has to sneak back into Austria disguised as a Tyrolean peasant. This provisions another quasi-incognito Alfred entrance, into the utterly Molnáresque setting of the sitting room of the Imperial Suite of the Hotel Lucher. “Good evening, venerable strumpet” is Alfred’s greeting of the hotelière, Frau Lucher (the indefatigable Helen Westley). “Still wearing the red flannel drawers?”

Watch how Sherwood, though a socially committed dramatist (and later one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speechwriters), slips with sheerest self-effacement into the rococo eros of Alfred and Lynn enjoying another Caprice. First, he demands like some pasha that
she
be brought to him, all but threatening the impedient Frau Lucher. The latter makes herself scarce, Alfred resentfully throws himself into a chair facing away from the door, and we wait—because of course this is the Moment. After four, maybe five, beats, Lynn enters. No: Lynn comes into the room in a backless silver-white gown with a high-waisted, pleated front and an absolutely unreadable expression on her face. Alfred stares at her in the mirror. The call is coming from inside the house; now let Sherwood take over: