All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (27 page)

Playwrights were discovering that, even as Hollywood treated them as contemptible subordinates, it had effected a kind of technical revolution in the presentation of plays: one filmed them. Consider
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1936), another bestseller, this time a crime thriller adapted by the novelist himself, James M. Cain. The classic setup of the hot drifter and the young wife with the problem husband—also the basis of Emile Zola’s much-adapted
Thérèse Raquin
—turns on murder by automobile crash, as the two adulterers stuff her unconscious husband into his car and, simulating an “accident,” run it off a cliff. Acquitted of murder, they are apprehended by Cain’s moralistic twist: later they have a genuine car accident. She dies; he looks guilty; they hang him for it. The postman cometh.

How is this to be staged? Jo Mielziner, always ingenious in keeping a set-heavy production in motion, took the public to nine locations along the way of the story, including the second car crash (albeit after it had occurred). Still, this is surely another staged movie, with a story so temptingly cinematic that it has been filmed four times: as
Le Dernier Tournant,
then by Luchino Visconti as
Ossessione,
and twice in Hollywood. Ironically, a movie star, Richard Barthelmess, led the Broadway cast. More frequently, Broadway sent
its
people to the coast for The Movie, as when Robert E. Sherwood’s
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
(1938) opened up beautifully around Raymond Massey’s Lincoln (with Howard Da Silva as well from the stage troupe).

Could Hollywood be seen as, in part, an archive for certain important portrayals? Jumping over to musical comedy, the number of stars who filmed at least one of their stage roles is thrillingly replete—Marilyn Miller (both Sally and Sunny), Fred Astaire, Eddie Cantor and Ethel Shutta (in an astonishingly faithful preservation of a Ziegfeld stage hit,
Whoopee
), Bert Lahr, Dennis King, Ethel Merman, Ed Wynn, Joe Cook and his stooge Dave Chasen, Irene Bordoni, Jack Haley and Zelma O’Neal (in
Follow Thru
), and June Knight among others in only the first five years of sound. True, song-and-dance talents are specialized, harder to replace. But many speaking actors as well were thought too “right” to be improved upon; who’d want to see a
Guardsman
film without the Lunts in the roles that inspired their myth? And the arguably less dazzling Otis Skinner’s unnamed Poet in
Kismet,
Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, and Walter Huston’s Dodsworth live on in film, Skinner in both silent and talkie. Even Laura Hope Crews—whose assumption of Mary Boland’s role in
Jubilee
so desolated theatregoers’ interest that the show abruptly closed—commanded prestige in Hollywood. When RKO shot
The Silver Cord,
it invited Crews to repeat her grasping mother and then kept her on as a contractee for dowager roles.

Or wait. Did RKO simply fear compromising one of its more important artists with so ghastly a part? RKO’s
Little Women
came out the same year as
The Silver Cord,
1933, with Broadway’s greatest gift to the movies, Katharine Hepburn, as tomboy Jo. But in casting
Little Women
’s mother, that walking valentine known as “Marmee,” RKO called in Spring Byington, not Laura Hope Crews.

For that matter, did RKO import young heroes Burgess Meredith and Margo and gangster Eduardo Cianelli for its version of Maxwell Anderson’s
Winterset
(1935) in 1936 because the whole show was so nutty to begin with? In other words, hire the play’s three most photogenic leads and fill out the company with character actors? The play’s fourth lead, the by then somewhat crazy Richard Bennett, appeared as, more or less, the judge of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, nagging on about his rulings like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.

It sounds Shakespearean, not least because it’s in blank verse.
Winterset
even
looks
poetic, opening and closing in a dank Hooverville cowering under the Brooklyn Bridge, so star-struck that it seems headed for Judgment instead of Manhattan. And the judge is Lear, surely, in a young-love tragedy merged with cops and robbers on a newfangled sort of blasted heath. That RKO wanted to film
Winterset
at all shows us how pertinent the prestige of The Theatre was to the movies’ self-interest—really, to the moguls’ need to strengthen their cultural profile in defense against punitive legislation or boycott by the intolerant right. And
Winterset
was a prize winner, taking the first Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.

Of course, when signing Broadway actors to repeat their stage roles, Hollywood preferred a commercial project, something no more prestigious, say, than the latest hit by Robert E. Sherwood—who took the Pulitzer Prize for
Idiot’s Delight
when
Winterset
charmed the Critics Circle. Sherwood’s cops-and-robbers show was
The Petrified Forest,
far more movie-friendly than anything by Anderson, though here again was a trio of young lovers (Leslie Howard, Peggy Conklin) and gangster (Humphrey Bogart). Warner Bros. picked up Howard and Bogart, both film veterans by then, and passed up Conklin for its own Bette Davis. Bogart used to joke that his early acting career consisted mainly of his appearing in sporting whites to call out a toothy “Tennis, anyone?” But the indelible Bogart is the gangster, and he faced off with another pair of young lovers in Joel McCrea and Sylvia Sydney in Samuel Goldwyn’s version of Sidney Kingsley’s
Dead End
(1935).

None of the three had played the show. In fact, McCrea’s role, on stage, was that of a cripple called Gimpty, in some sympathy with the heroine but no romantic foil. Kingsley isn’t interested in the Hollywood symmetry of the love plot; his
Dead End
is literally the utmost eastern yardage “of a New York street” as viewed from the river and, thematically, the crushing destiny of the urban poor. As Kingsley writes it, their code of survival comprises crime leading to incarceration, which creates a confirmed and lifelong lawbreaker.

It’s a Warner Bros. film, clearly—but Goldwyn was always trying to outdo his competition in
their
genres. Goldwyn had his Paramount Lubitsch Chevalier-MacDonald operetta (
One Heavenly Night,
directed by George Fitzmaurice and starring Evelyn Laye and John Boles), his “three fortune-hunting dames” comedy (
The Greeks Had a Word For Them
), his Classy Brit (Ronald Colman), his Garbo (Anna Sten).
Dead End
was his comic tragedy of the mean streets, in which wisecracks season the Greek doom that Kingsley lays out. For his part, the producer and set designer of the Broadway production, Norman Bel Geddes, laid out an exhibit to outdo David Belasco, at that in the Belasco Theatre, where Bel Geddes could help himself to the deep stage that The Master had ordered up for his show-off realism, with the back of a fancy apartment building overlooking wharfside tenements bestrewn with junk and laundry—“solid,” said Brooks Atkinson, “down to the ring of shoes on asphalt pavement.” The orchestra pit was the East River, where a teenage gang went swimming; Billy Halop, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, and the others shocked critics and public with the shameless naturalism of their language and behavior. It was feared that the boys might be authentic street trash, imported from the slums to be exploited; they were in fact professional children, playing their parts with unusual tang.

Goldwyn couldn’t resist, and the “
Dead End
kids” (swelled by Leo Gorcey, who was in the show in a small part) enjoyed a minor vogue, making two A features for the Warners with the likes of James Cagney and Ronald Reagan, then moving on to a series of kiddy-matinée programmers. Of all Kingsley’s huge stage cast, the only other player Goldwyn found irresistible was on stage for about ninety seconds. Yet her contribution to the whole was so acute—so definitive of the despair of those born to nothing who achieve nothing and die like nothing that led Kingsley to the work in the first place—that Goldwyn snapped this actor up. And there’s an intriguing and little known tale that goes with the matter.

Like many playwrights of this time, Kingsley staged his scripts himself, and among those who auditioned for
Dead End
was a woman who made no attempt to light up the moment with the usual “choose me!” radiance. But neither did she appear to have styled herself down for the part she was up for, that of the gangster’s mother. Unwashed, carelessly dressed, and scarcely listening to Kingsley, she was beyond reach in distraction. Any other author-director might have shrugged her off, but Kingsley was too compassionate to make no attempt to help someone so obviously in distress. Somehow or other, Kingsley traced the actress to her home and gave her the part—which, despite its brevity, holds
Dead End
’s very center. For the poverty that Kingsley investigates is not inert, not scenery of life: it is an energy of destruction, and the mother of Baby-face Martin is quite simply destroyed. Looking at her son “out of dull, horrible eyes,” cracking him across the face, calling him “Yuh stinkin’ yellow dog yuh!,” Mrs. Martin is as “dull” as she is “hostile,” to quote Kingsley’s stage directions. She’s dead in all but dictionary technicality, and one wonders if Belasco ever got as realistic a performance out of an actor as Kingsley got out of Marjorie Main. We of today can watch her in Goldwyn’s film, thinking about her dreary audition with a piece of privileged information: the death of her husband and the collapse of her career had taken a terrible bite out of her life force. She still found jobs—when she read for Kingsley she had just returned from bit work in Hollywood—but the loss of her lifemate, a psychologist who gave what we now call Motivation Lectures, was proving unbearable. The reason she was so unresponsive to Kingsley during her reading was that she had decided to commit suicide.

Main played
Dead End
’s entire nineteen-month run in New York, then relaunched a Hollywood career that would make her one of America’s best-known personalities. Paradoxically, the Main identity changed from the devastated urban slattern to a vivacious rural sassafrass, whether in apron and boots or tanktown finery for the Saturday sociable. Like the
Dead End
kids, Main got a B series, with former stage bumpkin Percy Kilbride, as Ma and Pa Kettle, but Main is most famous as a sage maid, in
The Women, Honky Tonk, Meet Me in St. Louis
.

That was a close call, though. Meanwhile, Goldwyn imported another helping of Broadway, bringing in five of the original leads in
The Little Foxes
to join Bette Davis (in Tallulah Bankhead’s role) for the film. These two Goldwyn straight-from-Broadway specials, both directed by William Wyler, are not only faithful souvenirs of commercial Broadway’s concept of social drama but together make a statement about American society. In Kingsley, too little money—that is, too little socialization—impedes the individual’s self-fulfillment. In Hellman, too much money—too much power—impedes everyone else’s self-fulfillment.

Yet what different plays.
Dead End
is rude cinematic naturalism, shoving rich right up against poor and not excluding a killing (by the Feds, of Baby-face Martin) in public.
The Little Foxes
is the well-made “society” play, and its killing is the kind that the public doesn’t see and that doesn’t even get reported: as Regina Hubbard Giddens presides over her husband’s fatal seizure, withholding from him the pills that can save him, watching his failure to survive, cheering it on as the death that she and her brothers have longed for, to clear the way for their rape of opportunity. “I’m lucky,” she tells her dying husband. “I’ve always been lucky.”
Dead End
’s shooting of Martin is a messy affair: he wounds one G-man before two others cut Martin down in a storm of lead, one of them, avenging his comrade, pumping Martin full of extra death, “literally nailing him to the ground,” Kingsley demands. But the
Little Foxes
murder is quiet, a chamber killing. The victim does shout for help, but it comes out as the tiniest sliver of a whisper, and now he’s very frightened because he knows he won’t make it. “I’ll be lucky again,” Regina predicts, already thinking of how she’ll out-Enron her brothers over who has the Power Among Thieves, as her husband dies.

This is of course the famously political 1930s with its stage militant, and although we’ll take on most of it in the following chapter, we should sample it here, for it aligns with the Broadway-Hollywood partnership. In buying up hit plays like
Dead End
and
The Little Foxes,
the movies were disseminating their sociopolitical instruction—sharing throughout the movie business what in sound’s early years seemed too often to be a Warner Bros. monopoly. Oddly, what
The Little Foxes
mainly represents today is another of those legendary performances. Too much a looker and a scandal and, some thought, a cosmetic rather than genuine talent, Bankhead had washed out at Paramount at decade’s start, and Goldwyn could not have considered her. Davis of course was known for the fascination she could bring to wayward ladies, but when she saw Bankhead’s Regina in New York she reluctantly concluded that Bankhead’s was the only possible approach: bright and hard as a diamond. The key to the role is turned in the play’s very last line, when Regina asks her daughter to stay with her that night. This young Hubbard-Giddens is one of the good guys, and she replies, “Are you afraid, Mama?” She is: but has not realized it till that moment. One could play Regina as afraid from the start, but then this merrily ruthless character makes no sense. Fear must be Regina’s discovery, her realization that in fact she isn’t as purely rapacious as her brothers. They are relentless hunter-gatherers who only take. Regina suddenly senses in herself a need to give, and Bankhead’s portrayal was preserved for us, after all: by Bette Davis, fearful at the close.
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