All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (23 page)

There the resemblance ends.
Lightnin’
amuses itself by pitting its star player against a bunch of dopes and cheats.
You Can’t Take It With You
has no star, but Grandpa is at least the patriarch of its family setting, and he presides over a houseful of zanies. Grandpa’s daughter (Josephine Hull) writes plays—a war play, a religious play, a sex play. Her husband (Frank Wilcox) makes fireworks. One of their daughters studies ballet to the coaching of a wild Russian expatriate and her husband’s xylophone playing. None of these is a wisecracker, however. It is rather the authors themselves who make the acerbic commentary, by juxtaposing the loony with the sensible, as when Grandpa meets a drunk actress (musical-comedy veteran Mitzi Hajos):

GRANDPA:
Have you been on the stage a long time, Miss Wellington?

GAY:
All my life. I’ve played everything. Ever see
Peg O’ My Heart
?

GRANDPA:
Yes, indeed.

GAY:
(with that fine logic for which the inebriated brain is celebrated) I saw it, too. Great show.

or by reality-testing the farcical doings with some old-fashioned common sense, when the actress passes out:

PENNY [THE PLAYWRIGHT]:
Do you think she’ll be all right?

GRANDPA:
Yes, but I wouldn’t cast her in the religious play.

or by showing us how merrily disorganized the Vanderhof household is:

ALICE:
What time is it?

PENNY [HER MOTHER]:
I don’t know. Anybody know what time it is?

PAUL [HER FATHER]:
Mr. De Pinna might know.

ED [HER BROTHER-IN-LAW]:
It was about five o’clock a couple of hours ago.

ALICE:
Oh, I ought to know better than to ask you people.

Indeed she ought to: because Alice (Margot Stevenson) is the one family member besides Grandpa who is not a screwball. She’s the Girl who Meets Boy. He’s the boss’ son Tony (Jess Barker), and of course the play’s famous set piece finds Tony’s Social Register parents spending an uncomfortable evening with the Vanderhofs.

It’s a classic setup for farce: the tycoon obsessed with money and his Haughty Lady wife facing off with picturesque wastrels. Typically, neither side comprehends the other; and the boss and his wife are snobs. However, something pointed runs through the culture-shock fun: the wastrels lead happy lives and the snobs are so locked up in behavioral codes that they’ve never noticed how miserable they are. Worse: like Philip Barry villains, they go on this way only because they think One Is Supposed To. Barry would have treated them to an uncomfortable evening with the characters of
Design For Living,
or at least Leslie Howard and his uppity butler. What Kaufman and Hart produce instead is the very opposite of Sophistication: uncultivated bohemians, hoi polloi as Algonquin stars.

That’s one reason why
You Can’t Take It With You
is more often revived than the Sophisticated titles: its language hasn’t dated. Another reason is abundance of content. There are fifteen principals and many small parts balancing an unusual number of throughlines that all tie up beautifully at the end. The writing mixes the cockeyed with the homespun—the Vanderhofs actually say grace before dinner, Grandpa extemporizing his thanks to heaven. And there’s a lovely notion behind the industrious storytelling: with but one life apiece, why not enjoy ourselves?

You Can’t Take It With You
also underscores the thirties observation that all the interesting Americans are screwballs or screwball-friendly. That is, intelligence and imagination alone are not enough: one must have independence as well, a tolerance not only of others but of oneself. Those who are Different are the referees of democratic liberty—Alexander Woollcott, for instance, or Bette Davis. Eleanor Roosevelt or Orson Welles. Fiorello La Guardia or Gypsy Rose Lee.

Or Clare Boothe. One of the last of the adventuresses, a modern Becky Sharp or Lola Montez, Boothe collected her detractors almost exclusively among women, for she was a born enchanter of men. It is said that men don’t like smart girls. No: they don’t like the smart girls who make them feel stupid. Clare Boothe made them feel exciting. Better, her ability to capitalize on and even develop her strengths made her one of the most successful women of her day, one that so limited possibilities for her gender that she was bound to turn to writing. Not the novel, though: Boothe wanted to connect with the more public world of journalism and theatre. Her magazine was
Vanity Fair,
with its love of the accomplished celebrity, the deserving famous. And her play was
The Women
(1936). Boothe wrote other plays and eventually served in Congress and as ambassador to Italy; and she made one of the most prominent marriages of the day, as we shall see. But
The Women
is why Clare Boothe is an interesting American yet today. A look at the mores of New Yorkers, the piece counts thirty-five speaking parts, not a one of them male. Though Boothe troubled to bring in a few working-class characters, all her leads belong to the rich wives’ club. One of the play’s early working titles was
Park Avenue
.

Is it a hateful play—as some said, including, for the first time, a few male Boothe detractors? More to the point, is it accurate? It is, above all, hard-boiled, a quality the 1930s loved in its art. A diverse group of principals varying from likable to despicable shares a cynical view of the world, spoiled though they are: “Practically nobody ever misses a clever woman,” for example, or “Where would any of us get if we played fair?” True, Boothe’s central woman, Mary Haines (the ever-ready Margalo Gillmore), starts out with a generally rosy worldview. But Boothe’s driveline is the Wising Up of Mary Haines, as her husband leaves her for Crystal Allen (Betty Lawford), one of those mean-streets gold diggers, and not the lovable Warner Bros. kind. Worse, one of Mary’s best friends, Sylvia Fowler (Ilka Chase), champions the intruder, forcing Mary to learn how to fight another woman for her man. In the excitement, class war wins out as Sylvia abandons Crystal to side with Mary, who, Crystal snidely remarks, is “welcome to my left-overs.” Has Mary no pride?

MARY:
No, no pride, that’s a luxury a woman in love can’t afford.

Touring the ladies’ sphere of operations, Boothe took her public from living room to bathroom (where Lawford lolled in a sudsy tub, an arresting novelty), from hospital to gym, and even to Reno. The first coup de théâtre occurs at the hairdresser’s, where a gossipy manicurist unknowingly tells Mary that her marriage has become New York’s latest phht. (Sylvia has set it up, the beast.) But the scène à faire is Mary’s confrontation with Crystal at the dressmaker’s, where a group of the women gather outside the door to eavesdrop as the audience gapes in pity and terror.

Well,
is
it hateful? Accurate? Some were unhappy at seeing third-rail issues so unapologetically contacted. Were these gleefully idle people representative of a culture, a social order, a gender? The unseen men of
The Women
seem to be nothing but stooges—accessories, mainly, like those madcap hats or that nail polish that all the girls go for, the revealingly named Jungle Red. Worse, while marriage is everything to the women, if only as a mark of caste, Reno is their Rome, the place all roads lead to. Yet this was an era in which divorced women—and not divorced men—were an oppressed minority group. Boothe’s lesson in womancraft was the harder to bear when Mary’s mother (Jessie Busley), the most sensible character in sight, strongly advised her daughter to ignore Mr. Haines’ infidelity:

MARY’S MOTHER:
Fifty years ago, when women couldn’t get divorces, they made the best of situations like this. And sometimes, out of situations like this they made very good things indeed!

The Women
was a smash, lasting 657 performances and going Hollywood in 1939 in the MGM ultra treatment (complete with a fashion show in Technicolor), starring goodwife Norma Shearer, false friend Rosalind Russell, and gold digger Joan Crawford, not to mention Mary Boland as Boothe’s most arresting novelty yet, a professional divorcée who talks exactly like an old queen. A 1956 musical remake entitled
The Opposite Sex,
with the men on site, offered June Allyson, Dolores Gray, and Joan Collins in the pivotal roles, along with Ann Miller, Ann Sheridan, Joan Blondell, and Charlotte Greenwood. The 1950s saw a proliferation of summer tours cast with has-beens and getting-theres—Kay Francis Meets Elaine Stritch—and such a congestion of colorful principal roles had to promote at least one all-star revival. In 1973, Broadway saw Kim Hunter, Alexis Smith, Dorothy Loudon, Rhonda Fleming, and (as Mary’s mother) Myrna Loy head the marquee. The gold digger was an unknown, Marie Wallace, perhaps to emphasize the social gulf between her and the others; but such moderately notable names as Mary Louise Wilson, Claudette Sutherland (the original Smitty in
How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
), Polly Rowles, Leora Dana, and Jan Miner filled out the playbill. For some reason,
The Women
baffled London, running only 66 performances. (
Boy Meets Girl
logged 65 and
You Can’t Take It With You
just 10, though that forerunner of wisecrack comedy,
Is Zat So?,
ran 234 performances in the West End, a longer stay than on Broadway.)

One might imagine
The Women
too antique to play today, at least in its subject matter. There still are such people, but nowadays they are little more than a reference point for “The Ladies Who Lunch.” However, there was a Roundabout staging in 2001; it showed how poorly today’s directors understand the mores that inform thirties social drama. In Mary’s duel with Crystal at the dresssmaker’s, director Scott Elliott froze Cynthia Nixon with her coat half off her shoulders as the fight with Jennifer Tilly began, to leave it hanging thus for the entire scene. No: the women Boothe wrote of let nothing distract them from their sense of style, and a lady never allows a homewrecker to catch her in disarray.

One odd note in all this helps characterize how wisecrack comedy was perceived at the time: some assummed that Clare Boothe hadn’t written
The Women
herself. George S. Kaufman was given credit for heavy doctoring if not wholesale creation. Remember, wisecrack comedy is how strong personalities defend themselves from fools and bullies. The wisecrack put-down is an aggressive—a phallic—act, and as no woman had ever written so well in the style before, it was logical to question the byline. Then, too, Boothe’s only previous Broadway entry,
Abide With Me
(1935), was an utter failure. Kaufman was king of wisecrack—but wasn’t Dorothy Parker its queen? If Parker could work in wisecrack, why not Boothe as well?

However, Parker had no plays to her credit at that time; Parker worked in short forms. Poems, stories, feuilletons. You know: ladies’ pieces. It was Kaufman (and his collaborators) who built wisecrack into sizable constructions. What’s more, everyone on The Street knew that Kaufman had been involved to an unknown extent in
The Women
’s Philadelphia tryout.

In fact, Boothe was simply writing ahead of the curve. Controversial by nature and as heedless of detractors as any woman has ever managed to be, Boothe was Different. It’s that simple; the play is hers. True, it was a bit vexed in Philadelphia, and both Kaufman and Hart were handy, having tinkered on their own tryout, of
You Can’t Take It With You,
for perhaps two days at the most. They found themselves with a little free time, and as both had worked, separately, for
The Women
’s producer, Max Gordon, it was doubtless Gordon who brought the boys in for help. Kaufman was happy to oblige, because like all straight men he had a thing for Clare Boothe. But he didn’t add much to the piece. There were only two problems, anyway: a dull scene in the Haines kitchen and a third act that wasn’t playing well. Kaufman thought the kitchen scene too thematically intrinsic to cut (though revivals skip it), so he apparently blessed it with a new blackout line. His and Hart’s plans for redoing the third act struck Boothe as a dizzying round of fast-food playacting that lost sight of her characters’ (which is to say her gender’s) agenda. So Boothe simply tackled the job herself. The play, again, is hers.

Boothe’s first, brief marriage was for money; her second, the lasting one, was for content, with Henry R. Luce. A Nutty Superachiever in the line of Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Ted Turner, Luce was one of the century’s most influential Americans, as a creator of, mainly,
Time
(in 1923) and, a year after his and Clare’s 1935 wedding and shortly before
The Women
opened,
Life
. In an age when the public was beginning to desert the newspaper for the magazine, Luce combined the two formats, in
Time
’s digests of stories in the dailies and
Life
’s photographic journalism. It was Luce’s Yale classmate and
Yale Daily News
colleague Briton Hadden who devised
Time
’s punchy, adjective-heavy style, but it was Luce who thought of arranging doodads of news observed from various points of view into one crisp little compilation. Thus, in historian J. C. Furnas’ words, a piece on a coal strike came off “as if by an omniscient reporter who had simultaneously been on the picket line and attended [one] meeting of President Coolidge’s cabinet and [another meeting] of John L. Lewis’ high command of the United Mine Workers.”

Eventually,
Time
accumulated its own reporters and made the subject of each weekly cover story an initiate into history, focusing yet more attention on the matter of fame and how one deserves it—and
Life
’s picture essays, covering everything from natural catastrophe to politics, reveled in human interest. What concerns us here is Luce’s emphasis on the arts in both publications, the theatre especially. It reflected the respectful attitudes of his class, but it is remarkable that, for decades, both
Life
and
Time
monitored Broadway as if insisting that America’s growing treasury of notables included, among the statesman, the athlete, and the movie star, the people of the stage. Broadway folk knew that they mattered not when their name went up in lights but when they made the cover of
Time
. And
Life
might spread its color over the emergence of a new volcano or dictator—then turn the page upon a house party in Bucks County just at the moment of bridge and croquet with Kaufman and Hart, the Lunts, Harpo Marx, Thornton Wilder, Alexander Woollcott, Lillian Hellman, and others of this great world of the accomplished.