All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (4 page)

Of course, Aherne got his shot at
White Cargo
only after Richard Stevenson originated the role, that of Allan Langford, on Broadway. True, all the white characters are English, and they speak in that stage patois of Trench War Teatime that was invented by English dramatists. (You’ll hear it the next time someone revives R. C. Sherriff’s war play
Journey’s End
[1928].)
White Cargo
’s author, Leon Gordon, both acted and wrote; this was his one great moment. He had had trouble interesting a manager in the work because of its sensual devilry, but Earl Carroll, who had recently launched his
Vanities
revues on a foundation of sensual devilry, took an option. For some reason, Carroll opened
White Cargo,
in 1923, at the Greenwich Village Theatre, at Seventh Avenue and West Fourth Street. Was it to be publicized as too hot for Broadway? It was cheaper than Broadway, at least: a popular rumor told that Carroll had spent less than one hundred dollars on the production.

Surely not; though with one cheesy little set and only nine players,
White Cargo
would have run Carroll two thousand dollars at most had he launched it on Broadway. As it was, its flash success took it uptown, at first to the thousand-seat Daly’s Sixty-third Street Theatre, where Carroll rebilled it as “a vivid play of the primitive.”
The Shanghai Gesture
lasted some ten months—a very strong showing then—but
White Cargo
ran over twice as long, because Aherne was partly right. Langford is a no-fail part, but, mainly,
White Cargo
is a no-fail play, not least because everyone likes to watch a nice boy fall for a bad girl. Carroll liked to watch bad girls, period, especially because they wore so little, at least in his plays. And Tondelayo (Annette Margules, succeeded in the move uptown by Betty Pierce) is not only bad but homicidal. After all, if this is melodrama, someone has to be.

Then, too, Gordon troubled to frame his piece with an interesting, if familiar, irony: when men of the civilization of Dante and Goethe are cut off from cultural nourishment, they degenerate. Of course, there would be a seen-it-all Doctor (Conway Wingfield; in London it would be Horace Hodges, whom we saw playing Bill Jones in the West End
Lightnin’
). He provides ironic commentary, like the doctor in
Grand Hotel
. Traditionally, there must be a subsidiary anti-hero, here a man named Witzel (A. E. Anson), who survives in this atmosphere because he has no ideals to maintain.
2
The doctor is usually a drinker (in
Grand Hotel
a drug addict), and Langford is not only clean-cut and upright but firm in his morals: so we can marvel at his decline when, in the second act, he appears messy and unshaven and vacillating. Acclimatized. Not only is Langford Tondelayo’s lover, but he marries her, which leads to further degradation. Finally, Tondelayo tires of respectability and tries to poison Langford, weakened by fever. But Witzel catches her and forces the venom—culled from the junna leaf—down her own throat.

It’s a fine, tense scene. But more: thus the “beachcomber” atones for his life of aimless exile, for only the unbeliever has the freedom to play God and kill evil to save the good. The Doctor, so busy dispensing pills and wisdoms, would be ineffectual here.

Thus neutralized, Tondelayo runs off in terror to die in the bush as Witzel packs Langford onto the boat home. To round off the play, this same boat has brought the next Langford, this one called—of course—Worthy (Harris Gilmore). He tells one and all, “I’ll be all right when I’m acclimatized.”

“God almighty!” thunders the Doctor, as the curtain falls.

Interestingly, both
The Shanghai Gesture
and
White Cargo
were filmed as late as the early 1940s; they can’t have been
that
outdated. Also,
White Cargo
tends to attract PR-building controversy wherever it goes, and controversy knows no age. During the original New York run, Ida Vera Simonton brought successful legal action against the production, claiming plagiarism of her novel
Hell’s Playground
. (MGM’s 1942
White Cargo
film had to bill Simonton and her book right below Gordon and his play as the script’s sources.) A 1961 revival took the piece back to its off-Broadway origin, meanwhile resetting it in Brazil. What can a modern-day Tondelayo (Marcia Howard) do but play at least a moment in the nude, albeit facing upstage? One night, a man reportedly leaped onto the stage in protest and had to be removed from the theatre. In fact, he had simply risen to object from his second-row seat. The man, Frank Lynn, explained that he and his wife had taken an oath to the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency to denounce all entertainment that they saw as objectionable.

Nudity in 1961! One would have expected a typhoon of ticketbuyers, but
White Cargo
simply closed. It had taken two generations to accomplish, but twenties melodrama had finally cooled off.

*   *   *

Another form popular in the early 1920s was a sort of faux theatre, works whose setting and actions stood beyond the physical potential of the stage. They needed to be movies. Describing
Aloma of the South Seas
(1925), the
Times
’ Stark Young outlined a place of “swimming, strange fruits, sea weeds and sea shells.” Moreover, “the islands themselves are plainly magical in their naive sexual allusions and loving vehemences.… They invent the most singularly disconcerting images from the love life of the animals.” What, right there on stage?

In fact, authors John B. Hymer and LeRoy Clemens shoehorned
Aloma
into playhouse proportions by leaving all the interesting parts offstage. What remained in view was a feverish melodrama with the usual East of Suez romance between native girl Aloma and a Westerner. Actually, he loves another, a white woman—married, at that. So far, so good: but trailing Aloma is a fierce suitor who keeps the courtship tidy by taking his rivals for a ride—in a canoe, to the sharks’ feeding ground. As with
White Cargo,
interracial romance must fail. So the suitor kills the supererogatory husband (he was a drunk, so he had it coming), leaving the white pair to marry and head for home.

Most typically, the “oversized” form of theatre capitalized on a popular literary work, staging it if only because the pubic wanted to
see
the account, and cinema had not yet become
embourgeoisé
. Three such examples turned up in September of 1921. Edgar Rice Burroughs’
Tarzan
had actually enjoyed some half dozen movie features and serials; nevertheless, English actor Ronald Adair, who claimed a boxing background, was imported for
Tarzan of the Apes,
which also included jungle beasts and two men in ape costumes. It lasted two weeks.
The Blue Lagoon,
previously a hit in London, lasted three. “The audience,” Alexander Woollcott reported, greeted it “with yawns, titters, and occasional murmurs of mutiny.” There was a great deal of mime and incidental music
3
to help the tale along, but how is one to re-create the book’s innocent sexuality without the geography of ocean and isle?

Neither Edgar Rice Burroughs nor H. De Vere Stacpoole is regarded as a literary eminence, but Vicente Blasco Ibañez’s novels were read around the world.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
was enjoying its first seasons of fame when the other famous Ibañez title,
Blood and Sand,
came to Broadway as the third of this set. The tale depends very strongly on the drama of the bull ring; how is one to “play” that on stage? Worse, the production starred the sixty-three-year-old Otis Skinner, though there are no sixty-three-year-old bull fighters, especially in the kinds of romances that Ibañez was known for. Another failure,
Blood and Sand
made a more appropriate transformation that same year as a film with Rudolph Valentino, a mere stripling of twenty-six; a talkie remake with Tyrone Power, near senility at twenty-eight, followed.

*   *   *

One thing that theatre could do in its own manner was the spectacle. This was playmaking that rose above the concept of a script to the marketing of an eyeful, and it derived its power precisely by defying the natural limits of the stage with colossal sets and hordes of extras. One thinks of the biblical pageants popular around the turn of the century—
Ben-Hur
(1899), complete with the galley ship and even a smidgen of chariot race with the horses on treadmills; or the two versions of
Quo Vadis
that opened on the same night in 1900. Or the Hippodrome, whose Godzilla variety shows held the very center of the meaning of “Broadway” for a generation, from its opening in 1905.

Surely, the Babylonian sequence in D. W. Griffith’s
Intolerance
(1916) indicated that here, too, Hollywood would absorb the genre—especially as the stage spectacle insisted on pagan settings and religious subjects, exactly where Griffith’s successor Cecil B. De Mille was at his liveliest. In fact, Broadway may have held on to the spectacle into the 1920s merely because New York had two gigantic theatres left over from former lives with nothing in particular to do, the Manhattan Opera House and the New Theatre. The first Oscar Hammerstein—that magnate of cigars, vaudeville, and, his favorite, opera—built the Manhattan Opera House (actually the second and grander of two Hammerstein theatres with this name, both on West Thirty-fourth Street) in 1906 to compete with the Metropolitan Opera Company. He was so good at it that the Met had to buy him out. However, no one had to bribe the troupe at the New Theatre out of competition, for this attempt to create a national repertory theatre, on Central Park West at Sixty-second Street, was a two-season disaster in 1909–11.

One of the New’s many problems was terrible acoustics. But dialogue was spectacle’s least important feature, and the music, on which spectacle strongly depended, could be heard. Renamed the Century, the former New, open to bookings generally, got first pick of the available attractions, particularly from managers F. Ray Comstock and Morris Gest. They tended to shop Europe for likely exhibits, and the sheer size of the things made them headline news.
Aphrodite
(1919) was French in origin,
Mecca
(1920) English, and
The Miracle
(1924), a Max Reinhardt production, German.
The Miracle
especially kept reporters busy. At a time when a big musical might break the fifty-thousand-dollar mark,
The Miracle
cost six hundred thousand dollars, because the set designer, Norman Bel Geddes, built a cathedral interior into the Century’s auditorium, the nave running down into what had been the New’s orchestra section. No fewer than three hundred workers built the set’s elements, and it took six weeks to put it all together. The
New York Times
ran an article on such details next to the first-night review, as if
The Miracle
’s physical entity was as newsy as the experience: but wasn’t it? There were twenty-two assistant directors during rehearsals, forty electricians, fifty stagehands, and a cast—so said the
Times
—of seven hundred.

The Miracle
’s medieval tale of a nun who forsakes her order to visit the world and finally learns that a statue of Mary has come to life to undertake her duties in her absence got some mileage out of the Virgin’s being played by Lady Diana Manners. Still, for all its war of sacred and profane,
The Miracle
was extremely chaste next to the excesses of
Aphrodite
. Both shows were hits, because there was a huge public for this kind of thing—and of course
Aphrodite
was “French” at a time when the word carried connotations of erotic brinkmanship. There was even a nude, though her skin was covered in a film of paint, which seems to have made the difference between outrage and titillation.

When Morris Gest caught
Aphrodite
at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris, it was a showcase for the diverse arts that collaborate in these huge forms. Thus, the abundant musical score was by the well-known (though now forgot) Henri Février and the choreography by the still celebrated Michel Fokine, rather overwhelming the delicate byline of dramatist Pierre Frondaie, working from the novel by the also celebrated Pierre Louÿs.

Indeed, the show’s high point was music and dance, in a bacchanalia, but then the entire piece is steamy, as one expects.
The Miracle
has its sensationalistically violent side, especially when the heroine nearly gets her head chopped off in a scene modeled on Breughel at his cruelest;
Aphrodite
has violence and sex.
Bref,
in old Alexandria the sculptor Demetrios (McKay Morris, later of
The Shanghai Gesture,
one may recall) must steal three fabulous treasures to win the love of the courtesan Chrysis (Dorothy Dalton). These are the Rhodopoid Mirror, the three-thousand-year-old ivory comb of Queen Nitocris, and the seven strings of pearls adorning Demetrios’ own statue of Aphrodite (impersonated by actress Mildred Walker). The theft of the comb involves a murder, and even to touch the pearls is sacrilege. Worse, the innocent Aphrodasia (dancer Mlle. Dazie) is crucified for allegedly taking the mirror. Aphrodite appears to Demetrios in a vision, inspiring him to repulse Chrysis, and she jumps from the Pharos Lighthouse into the sea.

The Broadway version, translated by George C. Hazelton, introduced yet more music, by Anselm Goetzl, as well as camels and horses and a cast of three hundred. Late in rehearsals, David Belasco (who was Gest’s father-in-law) took over the direction. Belasco received no billing, but he made one of his solemn bows on opening night, one of the season’s biggest at eleven dollars a seat. (Speculators were said to be getting two hundred a pair.) “Too beautiful, too sensational and too novel to be missed,” declared the unsigned review in the
Sun
. The carnal atmosphere certainly helped the 148-performance run along, though Alexander Woollcott thought the show “as pure as a Barnum & Bailey parade.” However, Alan Dale wrote a priggishly angry review, accusing
Aphrodite
of hiding sordid lubricity behind a facade of Continental art. “Evil” he called it. Worse, he repeatedly stated his horror at the mingling of black and white among the extras. The past really is another country.