All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (3 page)

Why 1919 in particular? There are illustrative resonances, as in the founding of the Theatre Guild, whose output defined a strictly artistic viewpoint within a business regarded as lacking art. Some might prefer 1916, for the founding of
Theatre Arts
magazine, defining an intellectual viewpoint, with its unadorned yellow masthead cover and articles of academic and technical interest (till it went glossy and popular, in 1948). However, it would seem that, directly after World War I, everyone in the theatre embarked on an overnight revolution.

It was not, of course, an absolute one. Both Mrs. Fiske and Henry Miller were active after 1919. Then, too, Broadway’s community of theatregoers seems to have become more united in this era precisely because film and then television kept drawing away the riffraff, “purifying” the atmosphere in which writers addressed a public.

Still, American culture unmistakably lurched from one place to another place. D. W. Griffith must give way to Warner Bros., Richard Barthelmess to James Cagney. In place of Lightnin’ Bill Jones, we find the urbanized wise guy and fast talker,
real
lightning—the Lee Tracy of
Broadway
and
The Front Page,
for instance.

Still, for now,
Lightnin’
was so imposing—or, rather, its unexpected success was—that, on its last night in New York, President Harding’s secretary of labor, James J. Davis, took the stage after the middle act to read a letter of congratulation from the Commander in Chief: because
Lightnin’
had struck. The rest of the intermission was deliberately drawn out to allow players from other shows time to reach the Gaiety Theatre (some still in costume and makeup) and rush the stage in jubilation after the third curtain.
Lightnin’
went on to a modest success in London, with the well-established Horace Hodges, at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in 1925. Back home, that same year, John Ford directed the first film version, with the unknown Jay Hunt; Will Rogers led the talkie remake, in 1930. That wasn’t quite the end, for Fred Stone starred in a
Lightnin’
tour through the Northeast in 1938.

Nevertheless, America was losing
Lightnin’,
both the kind of entertainment it represented and the audience it played to. Ironically, Frank Bacon carried the seed of that destruction in his blood, for his son Lloyd drifted into movie acting and then directing. It was Lloyd Bacon who directed the first part-talking film that really had impact, Al Jolson’s
second
movie,
The Singing Fool
(1928). Jolson’s first,
The Jazz Singer
(1927), had played few theatres, for the equipment needed to project these films-with-soundtrack was not readily available. It was
The Singing Fool
that told Hollywood that Sound Had Arrived, empowering the movies to compete with theatre on theatre’s terms while doing things beyond the limited resources of the stage.

Lloyd Bacon also directed
Moby Dick
(1930), one of talking Hollywood’s first successful attempts to challenge the theatre’s cultural hegemony by setting the reigning Hamlet into an American literary classic. True, it’s an empty paradigm: John Barrymore had filmed the novel but five years earlier as
The Sea Beast,
and silent and talkie alike stray far from Melville, as Barrymore played a kind of Ishmael-Ahab, with a girl friend. However, we are talking not of authentic artistic value, but of perception, of how Hollywood appeared to most eyes to be able to rival the stage.

And it was Lloyd Bacon again who directed
42nd Street
(1933), which revived the moribund movie musical with a tense and grabby naturalism that the stage musical itself could not match. Broadway invented the musical, but here was Hollywood—here was Frank Bacon’s son—reinventing it.

Frank did not live to see it. After closing
Lightnin’
in New York, he took his company to Chicago to begin what he believed might be an even bigger triumph, for
Lightnin’
was old-fashioned and Chicago liked its theatre well broken in. But after that lifetime of striving, a heart condition caught up with Bacon early in the run, and he gasped, “I am tired out” as he died in his wife’s arms.

Two

I’ll Be All Right When I’m Acclimatized:

OLD BROADWAY

The most noticeable difference between theatregoing today and theatregoing in the first few seasons after the actors’ strike is the number of productions. Twenty-six new theatres went up along The Street during the 1920s, and to amortize the capitalization more plays had to be staged.

There was a lot of variety in the kinds of plays on offer, but there was almost nothing
but
kinds. Genre was the playwright’s muse—the “old dark house” thriller, say, or the costume romance translated from French or Italian, or society comedy, farce comedy, sex comedy, domestic (i.e., middle-class family) comedy. There were few out-of-genre one-offs, because critics and audiences alike entertained expectations, and failing to fulfill them risked baffling or even irritating one’s clientele.

The oldest of the forms was melodrama. The term has a confused lineage; at one time it referred to a passage or even a full-length work of underscored declamation. By 1919, melodrama denoted theatre in which sensational effects and implausible surprises overruled character content in driving the narrative. The noble hero, chaste heroine, “errant foster sister,” and hissable villain we see carrying on in
The Parson’s Bride
during the first act of
Show Boat
(1927) preserve the conventions in their primitive state; the kind of melodrama practiced by 1919 was a little more textured. Still, it was sentimental and intense to the point of violence, and it gave the more outgoing performers plenty of opportunities. When a stagehand told Sir Henry Irving, “I ’ave ’eard many play ’Amlet, sir, but you have raised it to the level of a mellerdramer,” he was paying a compliment.

Melodrama was also useful for the personality star, less a thespian than a celebrity making a personal appearance. When Theda Bara found that Hollywood’s vamp cycle had ended, she turned to the stage to exploit her notoriety in
The Blue Flame
(1920). Not fewer than three writers contributed to this ludicrous fantasy in which Bara played a saintly young woman, struck dead by lightning, who is “raised” by her God-scorning scientist of a boy friend. He believes his atheism to be more powerful than Creation, but ho! The heroine’s physical entity can be revived, but not her soul: and Bara awakes as the character familiar to her movie fans, the bad girl who lives to destroy and destroys to live. “Gimme a kiss” are her first words when brought back among the quick, and audiences that took the line in their stride might have gasped later, when she greeted one of her victims with “Have you brought the cocaine?” Later, Bara threatened yet another of her fools with “I’ll shake you like I shake my shimmy!” In the end, it was all a dream—and, incidentally, a kind of digest of Bara herself, a nice middle-class girl from Cincinnati who impersonated the sinner in thirty-nine silent films for five years, made a brief return in the mid-1920s, and spent the remaining thirty-five years of her life At Liberty. It was all a dream.

In 1920, at least, Bara was a draw, and the curious came to call, if only to hear what a vamp
sounded
like. Alan Dale of the
New York American
noted a “pass-me-the-salt-please” vocal delivery, though Bara had started on the stage. She had even played Broadway, in one of the two productions of Ferenc Molnár’s
The Devil
that ran simultaneously in 1908, appearing as Theodosia de Coppet.
The Blue Flame
lasted only 48 performances in New York, but it toured very well considering that Bara was a novelty whose trend was over.

The more typical melodrama was made of blood and guts, rather than
The Blue Flame
’s fantasy science. Laurence Eyre’s
Martinique
(1920) brought its public to 1842 and the world of Creoles and mulattoes, in a script rich with racist attitudes. Hero Stephane loves heroine Zabette, but is forced to marry Zabette’s snobby half sister. The usual insidious half-breed, hot for Zabette, attacks Stephane, but at least he and Zabette have produced an heir, even if Stephane dies of his wounds and Zabette enters a convent for no reason in particular. When the half-breed first made his advances to the heroine, one heard the passionate retort of “Leave this house …
negro
!” from Zabette. “It is at such great moments,” observed Alexander Woollcott in the
New York Times,
“that one misses the gallery.”
1

Martinique
lasted about as long as
The Blue Flame
and, like it, vanished forever. But when Austin Strong’s
Seventh Heaven
(1922) finished its 704 performances, it was on its way to a 1927 film version with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell that won Gaynor the first Best Actress Oscar (the movie itself got a nomination), not to mention a 1937 remake with Simone Simon and James Stewart. On Broadway, Helen Menken and George Gaul played Diane and Chico, the sewer man who takes Diane to the heights—a seventh-floor walkup. Violence or its threat was endemic to melodrama, though this title limits it to Diane’s abuse by her whip-wielding sister. But for the whipping scenes,
Seventh Heaven
might be a simple romance of life and love in Paris, for the bulk of the tale follows the arc of Diane’s love for Chico, interrupted when he goes off to fight in the Great War. Now a complication: a wealthy interloper (Frank Morgan) convinces Diane that Chico is dead, and the destroyed Diane numbly submits to him. But wait! Chico
isn’t
dead! He bursts into the room as Diane and the moneybags are embracing. Oh, no! Except Chico has seen nothing: he is blind! And true love reunited can rise above every misfortune.

Broadway got a taste of the violence that stormed through old-time melodrama when George Dibdin Pitt’s nineteenth-century blood banquet
Sweeney Todd
was put on, in 1924, in a double bill with a short afterpiece of an opera spoof called
Bombastes Furioso
. Robert Vivian played Sweeney and Raffaella Ottiano was Mrs. Lovett; he was uncelebrated, but some of my readers may remark Ottiano, who played the ballerina’s maid in
Grand Hotel
the play (1930) and movie (1932) and who lent her name (in an alteration as Ottanio) to the character in the musical (1989). For all that, note that both
Seventh Heaven
and
Sweeney Todd
also eventually became musicals. As we’ll see, a Golden Age has plenty of chances to exploit its materials, keeping the art vital by trying it in different forms.

Sweeney Todd
was apparently played straight rather than for laughs. But then, melodrama was still a vital form in the 1920s. It was never guyed—not even John Colton’s
The Shanghai Gesture
(1926). This was the most extreme example of the genre to make hit status, with its “babies switched at birth” ruse and one of those revenge plots in which the plotter patiently waits twenty years to execute the humiliation of the English lord who wronged her.

Wronged
her? He sold her into slavery! But all the torture and degradation that colonial China might visit upon an innocent girl did not impede her progress from whore to brothelkeeper—aye, to Mother Goddamn, the impassive custodian of all the government spy secrets and sex manias in China.
The Shanghai Gesture
is set entirely on the afternoon and evening of a single New Year’s Day in four different parts of Mother Goddamn’s establishment—the Gallery of Laughing Dolls, the Grand Red Hall of Lily and Lotus Roots, the Little Room of the Great Cat, and the Green Stairway of the Angry Dragon—and the slim plot slowly reaches what Mother Goddamn has waited so long to give to her betrayer of long ago. This is the sight of his own daughter (by a respectable English bride) being sold into slavery. Appealing to the tastes of one of the bidders, a certain Mr. Shu Ki, Mother Goddamn eggs him on with “Think of your hairy chest against her lovely young breasts.” So it was with the young Mother Goddamn; so now with this poor innocent. Revenge is not only sweet but symmetrical.

To add to the fun, director Guthrie McClintic and star Florence Reed worked out a characterization for Mother Goddamn in a monotone pitched between an ironic servility and a coiled-spring hatred for men. The critics found it … well, monotonous. That is, until Reed got to the role’s big set piece, the stupendous “Yet I survived!” speech. This swirling crescendo of a mad scene catalogued all the terrors of the life that Sir Guy Charteris (McKay Morris) exiled Reed to, each culminating in the frenzied spit of the three-word refrain. “Yet I survived! Yet I
survived
!” It was the talk of the town; and after Mother Goddamn’s daughter (Mary Duncan), raised by Sir Guy, came reeling out of a passion suite having debauched herself, what could Mother Goddamn do but murder her? It’s more symmetry.

One reason why this hoary genre still held the stage was the opportunity it gave the actor. When the young Brian Aherne was offered the juvenile lead in the West End staging of
White Cargo,
Aherne jumped at it, because this tale of life on a West African rubber plantation was built around the breakdown of an idealistic and energetic young chap—Aherne’s role—amid the heat and boredom, and, as well, the sensual temptation of Tondelayo, native girl. (Technically, she’s half French and half African, full-scale miscegenation being too controversial for love plots in conventional drama at this time.) The boy makes a strong entrance, all hope and vigor as he announces to the others, “I’ll be all right when I’m acclimatized.”

No, he won’t. By the play’s end, he is so depleted both physically and emotionally that he is loaded upon a boat bound for England in a comatose state, just so much “white cargo.” It’s a colorful exit, certain to pay off in the curtain calls a few minutes later.