All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (22 page)

Of course, the story revolves around a sucker, and he is one Waldo Winchester, “a nice-looking young guy who writes pieces about Broadway for the
Morning Item
.” Also on hand is Dave the Dude’s doll, Miss Billy Perry; and Waldo’s confidante, speakeasy proprietor Missouri Martin, who “tells everything she knows as soon as she knows it, which is very often before it happens.”

In that little dramatis personae, we read the content of what the word “Broadway” had come to mean by the 1930s: gossip. A few chapters ago, we saw “Broadway” take in nightclubs and Prohibition crime as well as theatregoing; now Broadway was the beat of the men who tattled, who created the myth of Broadway by reporting, snitching, and inventing.

Waldo Winchester is of course Walter Winchell, of the
New York Graphic
in 1929 but soon to settle in at William Randolph Heart’s more imposing
New York Mirror,
with a syndication deal that promised a readership in the millions. (Soon enough, Winchell would add radio and, later, television to his domain.) Missouri Martin is Texas Guinan of the “Hello, sucker!” with which she greeted patrons of her various clubs, and Billy Perry is any of the thousands of young women of the kind we met in
Broadway,
cuties dancing in places like Guinan’s. The successful ones were the gold diggers, the unsuccessful ones dwindled into cold-water-flat marriages back in the neighborhood, and the most famous of them was Ruby Keeler, who had to fend off the courtship of gangster Johnny “Irish” Costello to marry Al Jolson. Winchell redrafted the story into treatment for a film of 1933,
Broadway Thru a Keyhole,
with Constance Cummings, Paul Kelly (who had actually done time for murder), and Russ Columbo as the singer Cummings prefers to gangster Kelly. And here’s tattle: Jolson flew at Winchell the next time their paths crossed, at a prizefight in Los Angeles, and Jolson had to be pulled off Winchell mid-fight. Guinan got into the film, too, playing herself for authenticity of personnel. A figure based far more in the pay-no-price 1920s than in the repentant Depression, Guinan died before the end of 1933; but Winchell was essential. In all show biz, only Al Jolson was big enough to take a swing at the National Columnist who controlled the matter of Rise and Fall in the day-to-day of the entertainment world till his own downfall in the 1950s.

“Gotta get in the column!” sing Manhattan’s guys and dolls in the recent musical based on a novella and film on the world of Winchell,
Sweet Smell of Success
. A mixture of plugs and attacks, social and political opinion, and random jottings, The Column was above all a feast of scandal, Broadway thru a keyhole. And of course that “Broadway” was by now expression by synecdoche, referring less to theatregoing than first-nighting and not so much to playhouses as to high-status nightspots such as the Colony (for bluebloods) and, more famously, the Stork (where Winchell hung out) and El Morocco (less racy, and, some said, strictly for those who couldn’t get into the Stork). “We’ve been seen around New York,” runs a line of Oscar Hammerstein, “El Morocco and the Stork”—and we immediately place the voice as that of a Ranking New Yorker, on first-name terms with its arts, money, and fame.

In The Column, all three were one, as if adulterous exposé were Kaufman and Hart by different means. Didn’t
Chicago
and
The Front Page
—not to mention De Tocqueville—warn us that market-driven democracy causes everything to conduce to show biz, to ticket-selling and role-playing? Winchell was the barker of this carnival. Yet for all his scandalmongering, editorializing, and slandering any who challenged his worldview, he made the theatre—the real meaning of “Broadway”—elemental in The Column. This man was so relentlessly narcissistic that actually attending a play—that is, sitting in a dark hall with a thousand others, none of whom was paying the slightest attention to him—must have driven him crazy. Yet he never missed an important opening, and he tossed off his theatregoing recommendations as energetically as he unveiled broken romances. There were plenty of other gossip columns, but only Winchell’s could break a new performer into prominence, fill an empty club—or guarantee a weak play’s success.

Why did Winchell’s readers obey these summonses? Because his judgments were so ubiquitous in conversation that geeks in search of content wanted to see what he saw and go where he went. Thirties movies were obsessed with the word “Winchell”: it meant something, perhaps the difference between famous and Famous. Winchell’s Broadway was a freak show, but then so was the Broadway of the beloved Runyon’s guys and dolls, in his unvaryingly present-tense narration of the underworld of Hymie Banjo Eyes, Frying Pan Joe, Baseball Hattie, Mrs. Colonel Samuel B. Venus, the late Cockeyed Corrigan, or Obadiah Masterson. (Readers may place the last named in
Guys and Dolls,
as Sky Masterson. Runyon in fact refers to him only as The Sky, so called “because he goes so high when it comes to betting on any proposition whatever.”)

What inventions! And Winchell’s entire world was an invention, really. He dealt in a kind of iconoclastic idolatry, shattering the totems during the very worship service in a breathless ratatat of made-up phrases: “phfft” (the end of a relationship) and “infanticipating” (expecting a child) were perhaps the best known. It was a national joke that Winchell could predict to the day the “blessed event” (another of his terms), before even the parents had the information. In that Warner Bros. musical that helped wipe
Lightnin’
away,
42nd Street,
a honeymooning couple devotes the release of “Shuffle Off To Buffalo” to this concept. Looking forward to the purchase of baby clothes, the male admits, “We don’t know when to expect it,” closing the couplet with “But it’s a cinch Winchell knows.”

Symmetrically enough, Runyon was to become one of Winchell’s few genuine friends; a book about them, by John Mosedale, is entitled
The Men Who Invented Broadway.
What they invented was the celebrity as an eccentric, both as lawless as Runyon’s folk and as unpredictable as Winchell’s: the famous are crazy. And like Winchell—the most famous of them all because he
controlled
famous—they all spoke fluent wisecrack. One night at the Stork, someone said something about women being the profession of idle men, and Winchell began jotting it down to use in The Column. Warned that the line was a quotation of George Bernard Shaw, Winchell replied, “I’ll give it some circulation.”

That’s a wisecrack. It’s cynical and funny but, mainly, it seizes power, taking over the moment with a comeback that, like The Column, is bigger than you. We have seen wisecrack comedy enter the vernacular through its use on Broadway in the 1920s and its wider dissemination in the first talkies. Now is when we see it spread throughout American life through many models but, above all, in the New York that Winchell and Runyon claimed as their patch.

If
The Front Page
is the first of the enduring wisecrack comedies (
Chicago
endures only as a musical), the next title, at that a marginally enduring one, is Samuel and Bella Spewack’s
Boy Meets Girl
(1935). Ironically, the Spewacks wrote the piece as a look at how
The Front Page
’s authors, Hecht and MacArthur, fared in Hollywood. They were turned into Benson (Jerome Cowan) and Law (Allyn Joslyn), who spend their studio time clowning around and uttering one-liners, which are the comebacks that don’t wait for their cue, as in:

LAW:
I can’t dictate to a stenographer who won’t wear tights.

For a hobby, Benson and Law pass scornful remarks at the cowboy star (Charles McClelland) they’re supposed to be writing for and vexing their producer (Royal Beal). The latter, named C. Elliott Friday and known as C. F., is of a type we might in modern parlance call the Clueless Hetero. This character typically knows a few things about his line of work but seems to know absolutely nothing else; think of Trent Lott without the wit and sparkle. Representative of C. F.’s schemes for “the picture of the year” is “a sort of Bengal Lancer, but as Kipling would have done it.”

A great deal of
Boy Meets Girl
’s fun lies in watching Benson and Law outwit the selfish and talentless western star and the idiotic authority figure; and the rest of the fun lies in the way the Spewacks fondly develop the title’s concept (
BENSON
: Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl.) as they introduce an impoverished Brit (James MacColl) to a pregnant, unmarried commissary waitress (Joyce Arling), dash them apart, then reunite them. This subplot cuts into the driveline in that Peggy’s baby becomes the cowboy’s co-star, as Happy, “America’s Crown Prince.” By the way, the Brit turns out to be an aristocrat.

George Abbott’s customary sleek pacing and sharp advice to his players on how to land the jokes put
Boy Meets Girl
over for a run of 669 performances. But the show is more important for its use of the wisecrack as an embodiment of power. The Clueless Hetero can hire and fire and even create stardom. Yet ultimately he has no power because he has no wisecrack: that humor belongs to those with intelligence and judgment. Interestingly, the Spewacks purged the wisecrack style of the slang and bad grammar that saw it through the 1920s; now the wisecrackers might be drawn not only from the working class but from the intelligentsia as well. Rather, it is the cowboy, enemy of wisecrack, who can’t get his verbs to agree with his subjects; and for all his actory popularity he is unable to regulate his movie career because, living on the Planet Me, he has never taken notice of anything he can’t exploit and is thus floundering in a kind of all-purpose ignorance.

That is why
Boy Meets Girl
marks a significant breakaway. From now on, the wisecracker has, above all else, perspective. He has been looking at life and learning from it; this makes every wisecracker his own Walter Winchell. Not the Winchell spying thru a keyhole, but the perceived Winchell who seemed to know everything, a sage in a fedora.
This
is power: a worldly grasp of the realities of human existence and the ability to read the patterns in culture, to put names to concepts. When the cowboy star tries to marry the Girl to stabilize his career, Law exposes the cowboy’s dying box office in wisecracker terms—and note the use of the jejune in both geography and celebrity:

LAW:
Even Wilkes-Barre doesn’t want him and they’re still calling for Theda Bara.

Oddly, Damon Runyon’s presumably stage-ready rogues’ gallery did not draw him to much theatre work. With Irving Caesar he wrote the unproduced
Saratoga Chips,
which became a movie for Ethel Merman and the Ritz Brothers,
Straight Place and Show
(1938), and with Howard Lindsay he wrote
A Slight Case of Murder
(1935), a two-month flop. However, numerous minor films were made off Runyon characters, and of course after Runyon’s death, in 1946, material from two stories was combined to make
Guys and Dolls
(1950).

The director of that musical’s original production is one of this era’s most prolific creators and a central wisecracker, George S. Kaufman. He was steeped in theatre, serving as the drama editor of the
New York Times
from 1917, when its theatre coverage was vast. There was of course far more theatrical activity then than now; there was also more public interest in it. A small band of reviewers covered the openings, the featured critic to reevaluate the major titles in a longish Sunday piece. Further, out-of-town openings and European productions of American plays caught the
Times’
attention.

No one seems to have remarked a conflict of interest in a drama editor’s being as well a working playwright (on Broadway from 1918), probably because Kaufman’s integrity was famously unimpeachable. Still, one wonders how Kaufman could run his office while attending rehearsals and tryouts. For reasons apparently unknown even to his family, Kaufman kept his day job right through the 1920s, when
Dulcy, Merton of the Movies, The Butter and Egg Man
(1925; the only major title that Kaufman wrote without a collaborator),
The Royal Family,
and
June Moon
(1929), a Tin Pan Alley spoof written with Ring Lardner, had made him wealthy. Indeed, Kaufman did not leave the
Times
till just before the start of the 1930–31 season.

That was when Kaufman launched his partnership with Moss Hart, on the Hollywood satire
Once in a Lifetime
(1930). By then, Kaufman had honed his wisecracking skills on two musicals with the Marx Brothers,
The Cocoanuts
(1925) and
Animal Crackers
(1928), for Groucho and to some extent Chico speak nothing but wisecracks. (Chico’s secondary mode is lovably breezy chiseling. No sooner has he sauntered into Mrs. Rittenhouse’s A-list
Animal Crackers
house party than he utters the immortal line “Where’s the dining room?”) We presume that Kaufman (and Morrie Ryskind, his co–book writer on
Animal Crackers
only) were simply adapting to the Marxes’ style, already placed in time for their Broadway debut in the revue
I’ll Say She Is
(1924). In fact, when away from the Brothers, Kaufman seemed more in harmony with the gentle laughter of
Merton of the Movies
than with the uprising urban inflection of the wisecrack.

On the other hand, when away from the stage, Kaufman the person appeared to have wisecrack hardwired in his system; along with Dorothy Parker, he is the most quotable of the era’s sarcastic wits. We have already logged a pair of Kaufman’s Jed Harris quips; and when Groucho defended ad-libbing on a weekday afternoon during the run of
Animal Crackers
with “They laughed at Edison, didn’t they?,” Kaufman jumped in with “Not at the Wednesday matinée, they didn’t.”
1

Perhaps it was Moss Hart—fifteen years younger than Kaufman and a born lover of musical comedy while Kaufman couldn’t wait for the music to end—who rejuvenated his partner with an infusion of stage wisecrack, the signature tone of the 1930s. Certainly,
Once in a Lifetime
reverberated with it, not least when Kaufman himself took the stage as an exasperated screenwriter. But now for a paradox: the third and arguably most impressive Kaufman-Hart title,
You Can’t Take It With You
(1936), looks back to outdated tradition by setting a kind of Frank Bacon into the wisecrack format. Grandpa Vanderhof (Henry Travers) has the folksy tang of
Lightnin’
and even that character’s view of life as a condition one strolls through at leisure.