All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (45 page)

At least John Kerr, the suspected homo prep-school student of Robert Anderson’s
Tea and Sympathy
(1953), was only suspected. Anderson never tells what the kid really wants, but the homophobic housemaster’s compassionate wife (Deborah Kerr) thinks she knows. Alone with the boy at the curtain, she starts unbuttoning her blouse to utter one of the most shocking lines of all time, still quoted today: “Years from now, when you talk of this … and you will … be kind.”

Some of the gay matter was encoded, as in John Van Druten’s comedy
Bell, Book and Candle
(1950). Van Druten was gay, and aren’t the witches of this work—Lilli Palmer, brother Scott McKay, and aunt Jean Adair—stand-ins for homosexuals as members of a cult? McKay’s character, Nicky Holroyd, is described as “engaging, impish, and somewhat impertinent”—pure 1950 for “gay.” Another character chimes in with “You’d be amazed what’s going on under your nose that you’d never suspect.… Some of them [flaunt it], you know. Go about dressed up so that people will recognize them.” Thus, when Palmer uses craft to ensnare bachelor Rex Harrison (Palmer’s then real-life husband), is this the gay beguiling the straight in crossover romance?

On the other hand, New York’s first sitting at a Shaw play from 1936,
The Millionairess
(1952), offered Katharine Hepburn sparring with Cyril Ritchard and Robert Helpmann, the two mintiest Australians ever known. At a time when gays were thought as evil as—even allied with—Communists, this pair was caking around the stage of the Shubert Theatre as if to arouse a federal intervention. Even more defiant of the censor’s padlock was Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s adaptation of Andre Gide,
The Immoralist
(1954), with three gay characters, two of them played by parish valentines Louis Jourdan and James Dean.

Gide directs us to the arena of French theatre, more comfortable (if still seldom commercially successful) in the early 1950s than ever before or after. André Roussin’s
Nina
(1951) and
The Little Hut
(1953), both comedies about a married couple and her lover, and Marcelle Maurette’s
Anastasia
(1954), with Viveca Lindfors as the putative last of the Romanofs, represented boulevard style. Jean Anouilh enjoyed a veritable festival, with five titles, and Jean Giraudoux enjoyed two succès d’estime, one with that favorite Broadway thing, a brand-new world-class star. Having won big in New York—not her native Europe—in Anita Loos’
Gigi
(1951),
d’après
Colette, Audrey Hepburn returned to The Street with her husband, Mel Ferrer, in
Ondine
(1954). The play itself was almost a generation old—we recall Arthur Miller attending a revival in postwar Paris a chapter ago—but only now was the French love of whimsical
causerie
in style Over Here. Giraudoux’s archetypal fairy tale, drawn from Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s story of the water nymph whose love destroys a mortal prince, demands the utmost in magical spectacle, and the Playwrights’ Company flattered Giraudoux with Total Production. Hepburn’s naiad outfit, in fishnet body stocking pocked with caution seaweed at bosom and hips, was a talk of the town, and everyone else was in Medieval Drastic such that costume designer Richard Whorf won a Tony over all the couturiers of musicals that season. But then,
Ondine
almost was a musical, sited at the 46th Street Theatre and boasting an incidental score, by Virgil Thomson. Hepburn, too, won a Tony, as did director Alfred Lunt.

After all that, it’s almost anticlimactic to record the appearance of Giraudoux’s
La Guerre de Troie N’aura Pas Lieu
(
The Trojan War Will Not Take Place
), in Christopher Fry’s version as
Tiger at the Gates
(1955).
Ondine
lasted 157 performances but could have run longer had Hepburn and Ferrer not departed for Hollywood; the show did such good business that it broke box-office records at a playhouse used to hits.
Tiger at the Gates
ran even longer: 217 performances. The production was from London, by our own Harold Clurman, and some of his West Enders came over with him, including Michael Redgrave, Walter Fitzgerald, Barbara Jefford, and, as Helen, Diane Cilento, who Kenneth Tynan thought was “fetchingly got up in what I can best describe as a Freudian slip.”

The most European of all plays on Broadway at this time was an American work,
The Diary of Anne Frank
(1955). It was not European in style, but rather in its use of domestic drama to make a quietly epic summation of a thousand years of anti-Semitic barbarism in Europe. The Franks, the Van Daans, and a dentist named Dussel create a kind of extended family in their fragile refuge where Anne writes the diary that became one of the all-time bestselling books in Western civilization. The play’s worldwide success must inevitably follow, one surely thinks.

In fact, the diary itself was not a big success at first, and U.S. publishers were inclined to turn it down. But it had a champion: writer Meyer Levin, who, while trying to arrange for theatre or film adaptation, contributed a rave review of the diary in the
New York Times
. He hadn’t informed his editors of his personal involvement, in questionable ethics but perhaps on a superior historical principle. The book’s sales skyrocketed, and Levin now seemed first in line of Anne Frank’s potential dramatists.

However, option holders Cheryl Crawford and then Kermit Bloomgarden found Levin’s script untheatrical. Carson McCullers was to start afresh on the adaptation, perhaps because of her success in adapting another plotless piece, her own
The Member of the Wedding
. In the end, the adapters were the husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, with some advice from Bloomgarden’s house playwright Lillian Hellman. That gray eminence only exacerbated what was already the crisis of Levin’s life, for he was desperate to write the
Diary
play and saw in the sulphurous Hellman a personal enemy devoted not only to the destruction of Meyer Levin but the universalizing of the Franks and their fellows from Jewish victims of Nazis to generalized victims of fascism.

In fact, Hellman’s relationship with the Hacketts, aside from her usual screaming of “What’s
this
?” when opening a Christmas present that wasn’t perfectly on target, consisted entirely of solving dramaturgical problems. Revising rather more than they were used to, the Hacketts did a fine and faithful job, keeping the diary’s universality implicit and its ethnicity fully portioned. No one could mistake these characters for Methodists. But then, Levin was one of those who surprise a conspiracy in every agenda incongruent with their own. (He was to have another Ruckus With Just About Everyone on his only other Broadway adventure, his play
Compulsion
[1957], from his novel on the Leopold and Loeb murder case.) Levin suffered a complete breakdown, turning into a combination of Ancient Mariner and Captain Ahab, sharing his woes with everyone he encountered and chasing his White Whale Hellman. For decades after—
decades!
—Levin pursued the matter in advertisements, letters to public figures, and a hysteria so dense that he developed a nervous affliction, helplessly eructating wordless laments. Levin even took Otto Frank to court. This is like suing Bambi.

At least, by that time the play had been launched. In the little era that attended Sidney Kingsley’s
Darkness At Noon
(1951), from Arthur Koestler’s anti-Stalinist novel; the Nazi POW camp comedy thriller
Stalag 17
(1951); and
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
(1954),
The Diary of Anne Frank
was the war play no one thought of as such. The other three titles presented officers and soldiers, interrogations and betrayal. Here instead were eight people and their two protectors, the very smallest possible membership in the war. Yet their saga now stands at the forefront of chronicle. This is perhaps because Anne herself is no Saint Joan, but a merry young lady who loves life and, even in her abysmal hideout, makes the most of it.

Bloomgarden’s production was standard Broadway, with an important debut that ultimately went nowhere. Garson Kanin directed in Boris Aronson’s set, Joseph Schildkraut headed the cast as Otto Frank, and Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, won great welcome as Anne. This led her to a fabulous debacle, Dumas’
The Lady of the Caméllias
as a Winter Garden spectacle directed by Franco Zeffirelli in 1963; it all but finished young Miss Strasberg off.
The Diary of Anne Frank
won the Pulitzer Prize and the top award from both the Drama Critics Circle and the Tony voters, and it ran 717 performances. Still, the piece never seemed quite “placed” till it traversed the globe, one of the rare plays to transcend national borders and speak to everyone.
2

The unusual preponderance of one-offs and foreign works suggests that Broadway was undergoing another of its periodic transformations, and we find major evidence in the musical especially. After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution of the 1940s, this formerly lightest of forms put on the weight of character development and sensible narrative direction till it could add a brand-new business transaction to American show biz: the musical adapted from a play.

New? What of all those musicals in the 1910s and ’20s based on plays? A partial list:
Very Good Eddie
(1915),
Leave It to Jane
(1917),
Going Up
(1917),
Orange Blossoms
(1922),
The Student Prince
(1924),
No, No, Nanette
(1925),
The White Eagle
(1927),
Whoopee
(1928),
Spring Is Here
(1929). However, these were all genre musicals based on genre plays. What was new in the Rodgers and Hammerstein era was the kind of play that might be musicalized: any kind. Even talky pieces like
I Am a Camera
(1951) or
The Fourposter
(1951). The early 1950s is rich in such titles. Another partial list:
The Grass Harp
(1952),
The Time of the Cuckoo
(1952),
The Teahouse of the August Moon
(1953),
Picnic
(1953),
The Rainmaker
(1954),
The Matchmaker
(1955).

There was this as well: while many Golden Age musical writers were still at work, the straight-play writers who weren’t dead were doing little more than stewing prunes and chasing kids off their lawn. There were new writers, of course. But the sense of continuity in the history is slipping.

The case of Maxwell Anderson is typical. His McCarthyism piece,
Barefoot in Athens
(1951), on the last days of Socrates, failed badly.
The Bad Seed
(1954) was a hit, but two more failures followed on, one lumbered with an ignominious off-Broadway booking.
Barefoot in Athens
did at least give work to Lotte Lenya as Socrates’ wife. Barry Jones played the philosopher, coolly insisting on drinking his hemlock even as friends come by to free him. (“I’ll converse with them over the cup,” he declares.) Alas, a plethora of endless monologues reminded many that Anderson was the guy whose verse plays might run a season without your knowing anybody who had seen one.

The Bad Seed
is an expert piece, but this study of an adorable, piano-playing eight-year-old girl who is secretly a vicious killer didn’t need a Maxwell Anderson to write it. Among Anderson’s serious plays, this work is what the French call a “UFO” (actually an “OVNI,” for “objet volant non identifié,” meaning the unit in an oeuvre that is unlike all the other units). The characteristic Anderson drama (that is, not counting the few comedies) is distinguished by poetry or politics.
The Bad Seed
is simply a thriller.

Its source was William March’s novel, treating the theory that one derives personality traits genetically. In Anderson’s adaptation, Mrs. Penmark (Nancy Kelly) realizes that daughter Rhoda (Patty McCormack) has inherited homicidal tendencies from Kelly’s pernicious mother. Kelly decides to kill her daughter and herself; we witness a drugging and hear a gun go off. But that is not the end, as Anderson offers something he never cared for before this, a plot twist. (And I especially need to reveal it here because the otherwise extremely faithful movie version alters it.) After Kelly’s double-killing scene, the lights come up not on the curtain calls that the audience expected but more play. Characters discuss the terrible event:

MONICA:
She’d shot herself and given Rhoda a deadly dose of sleeping pills. She had obviously planned that they should die together.

After forty seconds more dialogue, we suddenly hear something we were sure could not again be heard: the little girl’s piano playing.

MONICA:
(To Rhoda’s father) You have a lot to be grateful for. If we hadn’t heard the shot you’d have lost Rhoda too.

And the little darling enters, to the public’s gasps. A bit of lovahugga with her unknowing father, and the curtain falls.

In effect, Anderson simply dwindled away, as so many others did. And one symbolic lurch told the theatregoing community that a certain kind of Broadway was over. This was the closing of the Empire Theatre, in 1953, after sixty years as The Street’s most prestigious and even beloved playhouse. Located at the southeast corner of Broadway and Fortieth Street, the Empire enjoyed an entrance right on the thoroughfare, so dignified that it was designed without a marquee, just the theatre’s name over the double doors and again atop the lintel work. The situation was historically advantageous: looking back on the Old Broadway of Herald Square and the Syndicate and up toward the New Broadway of Forty-second Street and the Shuberts.

The Empire’s cultural advantage was manager Charles Frohman. As we know, he made “Empire” synonymous with glamor, elegance, and good storytelling. In a sort of anticipation of the
Follies
reunion party of Ziegfeld girls, the Empire shut its doors with a program of scenes from Empire hits, staged by Eddie Dowling and emceed by our favorite monologuist, Cornelia Otis Skinner. In the unit set of the Empire’s final tenant,
The Time of the Cuckoo
—“the garden of the Pensione Fioria”—Maureen Stapleton played Camille; Brandon de Wilde and Marian Seldes played Oliver Twist and Nancy to Clarence Derwent’s Fagin; Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney reclaimed their roles in
Life With Father;
Blanche Yurka impersonated Doris Keane in Ned Sheldon’s
The Czarina;
and, astonishingly, one of the leads from the Empire’s first attraction turned up in her original part at what may have been a genuinely biblical age: Edna Wallace Hopper in David Belasco and Franklin Fyles’
The Girl I Left Behind Me
(1893).