All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (25 page)

But this team wants a really fine play, it seems, for the authors swell their scene with two abetting throughlines, either of which is a story in itself. One is a sweet little romance tucked into the uproar, between Whiteside’s secretary (Edith Atwater) and Mesalia’s newspaper editor (Theodore Newton). It’s particularly sweet because we sense that the secretary, Maggie, isn’t really enjoying her invitation to the Mad Hatter’s tea party of the famous. Whiteside knows them all, so Maggie knows them all. Yet all she wants to be is Mrs. Stephen Haines. Unable to replace this managerial gem who keeps his chaos functional, Whiteside tries to bust up the romance, and the pain and despair that she feels when he seems to be succeeding gives the Maggie of any revival something solid to bite into. Her counterpart in
You Can’t Take It With You
has no such opportunity, for she’s an ingenue with her whole life ahead of her. She can lose a boss’ son or two. Maggie, older and less adorable (“business-like-looking” is her faint praise in the authors’ stage directions), may have only this chance, and we truly worry for her.

That is, we would worry if we didn’t already know the piece, as they say, cold. What American theatregoer doesn’t? Simply to quote its exhibition lines (“Go in and read the life of Florence Nightingale and learn how unfitted you are for your chosen profession”) is to play chicken with cliché. Yet the returning veteran may be surprised to note how many Names the authors invoke to establish Whiteside’s seat at the head of the fabulous table. A partial listing: H. G. Wells, Felix Frankfurter, Jascha Heifetz, Katharine Cornell, Elsa Schiaparelli, Anthony Eden, Arturo Toscanini, Kirsten Flagstad, Sacha Guitry, Hattie Carnegie, Louella Parsons, Gertrude Stein, Aldous Huxley, Salvador Dali, Shirley Temple, Ethel Waters, and, sine qua non, the Lunts.

Thus, like
Jubilee, The Man Who Came To Dinner
spins a loopy yarn about celebs getting into mischief while its true intention is to give the public a taste of the celebrity lifestyle in “virtual” close-up. It’s not What if Alexander Woollcott got into your living room as much as What if you got into his?

This brings us to
The Man
’s second throughline, which physically produces three of the most important people in show biz, all bizarre figures in one way or another: Gertrude Lawrence, Harpo Marx, and—as we already know—Noël Coward. Of course, they are (very thinly) disguised. As stated earlier, Coward shows up in one of his “Beverly”
noms de pièce
. Gertie retains her real-life scan as Lorraine Sheldon, and Harpo becomes Banjo (with unseen brothers Wacko and Sloppo). Because the shock of a very king of wisecrack let loose in the Midwest keeps the action robust, the authors can delay the first of these guest-star visits till midway in the second act, when Lorraine (Carol Goodner) parades in to Whiteside’s “Take that skunk off and tell me everything.” Beverly (John Hoysradt) actually performs a Noël Coward number at the Stanleys’ piano, a flawlessly observed piece of pastiche called “What Am I To Do?,” by Hart’s
Jubilee
pal, Cole Porter.
2

Kaufman and Hart were prescient in their choice of à clef models, using not the ephemeral grandee but those who would prove classic. One reason why
The Man
is still vital today is that its neon twilight of star impersonations keeps alive the essential nature of the day’s nobility: their quirkiness. Imagine if Whiteside’s visitors were based on the likes of Grover Whalen or H. V. Kaltenborn. You can’t—not because these once go-everywhere names mean nothing today, but because they lack the thirties personality. We think of Clark Gable’s maverick authority, by which his behavioral code outcocks yours; or Claudette Colbert’s endless wonder at the sheer vanity of men. Or, as here, Noël Coward’s suave allegiance to the most original of sins or Gertrude Lawrence’s ability to enchant the house while cheating and slutting her way through real life. This is even to admit that Kaufman and Hart’s Harpo (David Burns) is extremely approximate. When he makes his entrance (in the
third
act!), his first good line, to Whiteside’s nurse, is pure Groucho: “Come to my room in half an hour and bring some rye bread.” And much of the rest of his part sounds like Jimmy Durante, who ended up playing it in the extremely faithful Warner Bros. version.

Banjo is nonetheless an astonishing invention, not only the shortest lead in any title in the American repertory but a mating of whirlwind and deus ex machina. The usual convoluted farce plotting has led Whiteside to use Lorraine as a siren to woo the newspaperman away from Maggie; but now Whiteside suffers a change of heart. Even a sense of guilt, possibly for the first time in his life. It is Banjo who facilitates the removal of Lorraine, in a mummy case, a Christmas present from yet another VIP, the Khedive of Egypt. (“What did you send
him
?” asks Banjo. “Grant’s Tomb?”) Note that this absurd fantasy brings all four of the à clef figures into the love plot: Woollcott and Gertrude Lawrence to menace it, Noël Coward to make the first failed attempt to save it, then a Marx Brother to succeed. In effect, the authors have
humanized
their celebs, quite an achievement, as Woollcott was one of the most improbable humans ever to walk the planet.

Then, too, the masterstroke of introducing a new principal in the last fifteen minutes of the running time renovates a form that congenitally suffers from feeble third acts. Traditional farce loads the gun in the first act, fires in the second, and has little more to do in the third than clean, oil, and store. It’s limited fun.
The Man Who Came To Dinner,
however, is an evening-length turkey shoot, a fireworks of wisecrack that almost succeeds in concealing a terrible secret: the screwball has feelings.

He has to: because the play would be unbearable without this happy ending. Perhaps we need to see, for once, the wisecracker rendered powerless by the Clueless Hetero. Mr. Stanley has a warrant for Whiteside’s eviction and two deputy sheriffs to execute it—but Whiteside has yet to get rid of Lorraine to redeem his betrayal of Maggie. This is genuinely expert plotting, because thus far
The Man Who Came To Dinner
has been little more than a charade made on the title: a Whiteside vaudeville of his baroque quibbles and hurdy-gurdy tantrums, with no more story than that unexpected romance for Maggie. Now, suddenly, the narrative is as suspenseful as that of a whodunit, all the more amusing in that Whiteside is now Lorraine’s worst enemy while she has no idea what’s going on:

STANLEY:
Five
minutes, Mr. Whiteside! (He indicates the mummy case) Including
that
. (He leaves)

LORRAINE:
Why, what was all that about? Who is that man?

WHITESIDE:
He announces the time every few minutes. I pay him a small sum.

Getting Lorraine into the mummy case is one of the funniest bits in American comedy, for she herself steps into it. Seized by the historical grandeur of the woman who once occupied this coffin—who “lived and loved, full of the same passions, fears, jealousies, hates” as Lorraine—she crosses her arms in faithful mummy style. Then, just as Whiteside and Banjo simultaneously realize that they hold the key to the show’s climax, Lorraine steps out.

Of course, by now the entire audience is involved in the plot, and no sooner is Lorraine cajoled back inside and secured therein than the authors spring a last surprise: Stanley’s loony sister, one of the many subaltern characters who have been wandering into and out of the action, turns out to be a former ax murderer. (Whiteside, an aficionado of violent crime, has finally recognized her.) With the wisecracker thus restored to power, the reconquered Stanley must serve at Whiteside’s pleasure in helping Banjo carry off mummy Lorraine; and the way is clear for the final curtain of wonder, panic, and comic despair.

The Man Who Came To Dinner
does not travel well. At least it isn’t difficult to cast, once one has the proper Whiteside.
Jubilee
calls for stars, but the Bucks County Playhouse gave
The Man
in 1941 with Kaufman as Whiteside, Hart as Beverly Carlton, and Harpo Marx as himself.
Harpo speaks!
(Edith Atwater repeated her Maggie, lending the production professional confidence.) Even with extra matinées, the Playhouse did turnaway business. Yet in 1988, England’s Royal Shakespeare Company, led by John Wood, got fewer laughs out of the show than Judith Anderson did in
Medea
. Do the English simply not get wisecrack comedy, or do they dislike its anarchy? English comedy tends to treat the pacification of disorder—
The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The School For Scandal, Blithe Spirit
. Wisecrack comedy creates disorder, which is arguably another word for classless democracy.

Gentle Philip Barry is the last writer one would associate with wisecrack; his people are more arch than sarcastic. Yet he absorbed the style, and a mild version of its disorder, in
The Philadelphia Story
(1939). One of our classic comedies, it is nonetheless vexed by chaotic plotting, and as late as the day of the New York premiere, the person around whom the whole thing revolved feared that it would be a vast flop.

That was Katharine Hepburn, arguably the epitome of the eccentric celeb that dominated American culture in the early middle of the twentieth century. Because Donald Ogden Stewart’s screenplay for MGM’s
Philadelphia Story
movie (1940) straightened out Barry’s coiled storytelling, we think of the play as a look at the heroine’s growth from an overly judgmental goddess into a compassionate human being. In fact, the play’s original premise was a look at an invasion of privacy, as reporters from
Destiny
magazine—apparently a merging of Henry Luce’s
Time, Fortune,
and
Life
—threaten to “expose” a Main Line family. Hence the play’s title: the journalist pair, a writer and a photographer, are to turn in The Philadelphia Story by getting the dope on the Lord family, newsworthy because of the remarriage of debutante Tracy Lord.

That’s the Hepburn role, and it’s worth remembering that Hepburn’s mystique drew partly on the arrogance that is Tracy Lord’s salient quality. So
The Philadelphia Story
is as much “made on” Hepburn as
The Man Who Came To Dinner
is made on Alexander Woollcott. That’s all they have in common, for
The Man
is an absolutely frivolous work. It never asks dangerous questions, such as What did Woollcott do for sex?
The Philadelphia Story,
however, scrutinizes Tracy Hepburn—at the commission of Hepburn herself. After the merry gender-punning of
The Warrior’s Husband,
not to mention such film roles as a faith healer in the Ozark Mountains, an adulterous aviatrix in a bumblebee suit, Mary of Scotland, and a boy, Hepburn apparently wanted to play what she was: fiercely appealing but difficult.

Here, as never before, we come up close to the à clef subject. The charm of Barry’s play lies largely in Hepburn’s relationship with four very different men—her former husband (Joseph Cotten), her stuffy husband-to-be (Frank Fenton), her errant father (Nicholas Joy), and the male of the two reporters (Van Heflin). These bonds are mercurial, ever shifting, as suits the heroine’s restless intensity; she is, in the best
and
the worst sense, unpredictable. For example, she ends in trading in her fiancé for her ex-husband—but Barry’s producers, the Theatre Guild, thought Hepburn better matched with the rough-edged Heflin than with the suave Cotten, and asked Barry to change the ending. He didn’t; and MGM took out love-plot-logic insurance by gentling the reporter down to James Stewart and casting irresistible Cary Grant as the ex-husband. Now Hepburn
had
to remarry her ex, who bears a name only Philip Barry could get away with: C. K. Dexter Haven.

Heflin and his reporter partner (Shirley Booth) are wisecrackers set into the usual Barry troupe of perfectly spoken aristos who are never rude by accident. If twenties wisecrack style gave the powerless some traction in his dealings with the powerful (from the cultured elite to gangsters), the more articulate thirties wisecrack reinforms the battle, which now pits the liberal against the conservative. To make it interesting, Barry tips the leftist Heflin into the same self-righteousness that afflicts Hepburn. But she melts him: because he melts her.

The mistress of the cut direct, the snub nuancé, and the rebuff
a mezzo forte
, Tracy Lord is surely the greatest role that Barry ever wrote; and this was not the first time that Hepburn inspired him. Some portion of celeb culture was created by its promoters—Winchell, Luce, Hollywood publicists. But some other portion was created in the sheer freaky charm of the celebs themselves. It’s a truism, of course—yet when Hepburn first showed up, no one got her. She seemed less special than ungainly.

It’s worth a pause to inspect the rise of Hepburn, as an introduction to the broader consideration of the Broadway-Hollywood connection coming up in the next chapter and also because much of what happened to Hepburn typifies the opportunities open to actors at this time. For instance, Hepburn’s first performing job, after work with the Bryn Mawr drama club, took her to Baltimore and one of the last of the stock companies, run by Edwin Knopf. This was 1928, and there was so much theatre going on that an attractive young woman could get an engagement simply by planting herself in a manager’s path with a letter of introduction (which, in the event, Knopf didn’t even read). This was not a fly-by-night company, or so comfortably “regional” that it lacked standards. Mary Boland’s New York hit
Women Go On Forever
(1927) had just closed, and now Boland was gracing Knopf’s marquee; Hepburn appeared with her in two titles, a superb way for an amateur to scope out star style. Kenneth MacKenna (Jo Mielziner’s brother and the original lead in
Merrily We Roll Along
) was also in the troupe, and he sent the as yet awkward Hepburn to Frances Robinson-Duff, doyenne of New York’s acting coaches.