All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (50 page)

Another reflection of Rialto thinking was the cover of the monthly magazine
Theatre Arts,
where the next talking point would be anticipated with a photographic salute. Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer made it, for
Ondine;
Rosalind Russell previewed her Indian getup from the last scene of
Auntie Mame
. And Bert Lahr was thus honored, in his
Godot
hobo glory. But first came a
Theatre Arts
cover devoted to Julie Andrews’ Eliza Doolittle: for
Waiting For Godot
opened scarcely a month after
My Fair Lady
came in from glowing out-of-town reports to be the most talked-about show in history. What could Samuel Beckett hope for after that?

Oddly,
My Fair Lady
’s tryout began direly, at least backstage, when Rex Harrison locked himself in his dressing room at the New Haven premiere and refused to go on. Though perfectly cast as Henry Higgins, Harrison had had no prior contact with the form that he disparagingly called “musical com.” From the moment he left the security of the rehearsal piano for the netless trapeze act of performing with a pit orchestra at the dress rehearsal, Harrison was rattled. Yes, he got through it—but the music was so far
away
from him. There was so much it, too, violins and trombones and … things going every which way while he tried to stay on the melody.

Then came New Haven, and no one could dislodge Harrison from his den of fear. That is, not till the Shubert’s house manager offered to go before the most expectant public since ancient Athens had heard that Aeschylus was going to introduce the Second Actor and explain exactly why no one would see
My Fair Lady
that night. Harrison went on.

We’re not doing musicals in this book, but
My Fair Lady
’s success was so big it was larger than musicals. Yes, it reinvented the genre, with its classy Novelty Star who couldn’t sing yet had six numbers; with its generical mating of the serious musical and the fun musical; with its definitive rejection of the venerable “girls and jokes” atmosphere, such that contemporary shows with showgirl skin such as
Ankles Aweigh, Happy Hunting
(in a “swimsuit parade” number called “For Love Or Money”),
Li’l Abner,
a couple of
Ziegfeld Follies
(the more elaborate of which never came in), and the out-of-town casualty
Strip For Action
now appear as quaint even in their time.

More important,
My Fair Lady
reasserted the power of the theatre in American culture at a time when television had finally started to adopt its audience. Fredrick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner had done not that much more than spot songs into George Bernard Shaw—songs, however, that were so well conceived and executed that Lerner and Loewe found something that
Pygmalion
never knew it had: feelings. The transformation must have happened at just the right historical time, or with just the right amount of English in it, or looking so smart and elegant, for
My Fair Lady
arrived as the party one had to attend to maintain one’s identity in the culture.
Life
magazine considered this problem by running a “human interest” story on the difficulty people had in getting tickets; and The Columns were filled with odd angles on the topic. Like the emergence of David Merrick or the remergence of Eugene O’Neill,
My Fair Lady
reinvigorated that old term “Broadway.”

One thing was missing: an aggregate of new star actors to succeed the women royalty of the Katharine Cornell generation. Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley appeared to be the next in this line, and the first of the great divas to be associated with The Method at a time when Strasbergshchina had become a lightning rod for skeptics. What were they skeptical of? “Mannerisms,” mostly. But isn’t this another of those meaningless attack words? Olivier was mannered; acting generally is mannered. True, Spencer Tracy wasn’t mannered; but did anyone want to see Spencer Tracy’s Coriolanus?

For all that, would an unmannered actress succeed as, for instance, the characteristic Tennessee Williams heroine? Not straightforward Maggie the Cat, surely. But Alma Winemiller, in José Quintero’s 1952 off-Broadway
Neueinstudierung
of
Summer and Smoke,
presented Geraldine Page to the theatregoing community with a flourish. Indeed, Peter Glenville’s 1961
Summer and Smoke
film makes Alma something like Page’s Great Role, preserving her in her prime in something like a theatre performance.

For her part, Stanley must have been unusually creative in her first success,
Picnic
(1953), as Janice Rule’s little sister, for she won important notice in the merest of along-for-the-ride parts. Immediately after
Picnic,
Stanley joined Page as performers who could draw a public to at least three months of virtually anything. Viña Delmar’s dreary
Mid-Summer
(1953) and N. Richard Nash’s
The Rainmaker
(1954) each ran a little over 100 performances entirely or mainly because of Page.

Stanley opened in her first starring role, in
The Traveling Lady
(1954), one night before
The Rainmaker
and right across the street. It made an arresting visual, for those two marquees might have been staring at each other thus back in the good old days, when people sometimes attended stars rather than plays. Stanley then sought better writing, returning to Inge for
Bus Stop
’s Cherie, then introducing Maggie the Cat to London.
2

By the late 1950s, Stanley and Page held unofficial first refusal on roles of a certain type: but what type? Ethel Barrymore was a type; Stanley and Page were versatile. The former chose another major writer when O’Neill’s
A Touch of the Poet
(1958) was premiered, but she couldn’t bear working with the problematic Eric Portman and left early, replaced by Cloris Leachman. This meant that Stanley never “finished” Sara, daughter of Portman (and Helen Hayes), for Stanley famously mined her roles long after opening night, quarrying for ever greater clarity of character. Actors worthy of the name loved playing with her; it was like performing in real time.

Stanley’s next show was an odd one, Anita Loos’ adaptation of Colette,
Chéri
(1959). Barely in her thirties, Stanley was much too young to play Léa, the aging—and aging badly—cocotte who keeps a teenage lover. But then Broadway itself surely wasn’t ready for this naughty French postcard of a show. Horst Buchholz came over from Germany to play the love object, and here again was the Beautiful Male set loose in the culture by Williams, Kazan, and Brando. Stanley herself was at the top of her physical form, not least in a boudoir scene, with Buchholz topless in a cache-sex and see-through leggings, making a play for her pearls. Like all of Colette, the play was a dangerous little fribble, violating the peace of the Sabbath eight times a week—but though Robert Lewis directed, the production suffered from a lack of Europe. Loos’
Gigi,
earlier in the decade, solved that problem with Audrey Hepburn and an all-English cast.
Chéri
had only Buchholz and Lili Darvas (as a panderer) for atmosphere. One can’t do Colette in American.

Although it takes us beyond this book’s limits, we should note a
Three Sisters
put on by the Actors Studio in 1964, translated by Randall Jarrell and directed by Lee Strasberg. Stanley played Masha and Page played Olga; Irina was Shirley Knight. Barbara Baxley and Kevin McCarthy filled out the leads, and, in homage to the Group, Chebutykin was the Golden Boy, Luther Adler. Mixed reviews (but a good run of 119 performances) revealed what many already knew by 1964: that some people, especially academics and a few of the younger Broadwayites, were tired of being upstaged by history and wanted the whole Group–Method–Actors Studio thing over.

Revolt of the Beavers. It is not uncommon for the next age to assail the previous age; rock critics routinely disparage Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen when their names come up. But then, it’s hard to glory in new music when the old music keeps hanging around, reproaching the substitution of repetitious hooks for melody and a risible incompetence in rhyme. And how can young turks create new theatre when old theatre refuses to go away?

It was perhaps in that sort of atmosphere that this
Three Sisters
traveled to London with significant cast changes but too little re-rehearsal, and with the entire company bedeviled by a sharply raked stage and impulsive lighting. It was one of the West End’s most famous disasters. When the curtain went up for the full-cast call, the theatre erupted in boos and stamping, but the stage manager stubbornly kept raising the curtain again and again, as the house continued to boo and stamp. Enemies of the Group tradition reveled in it, and in the desecration of reputations. On the other hand, Kim Stanley stands vivid and unique in theatregoers’ memories, and—to put it in quite a different way—Geraldine Page got eight Oscar nominations. How desecrated do these two deserve to be?

At least the Lunts went out in style. They could be our Golden Age Couple, because they not only spanned but dominated it, reaching Broadway at just about 1919 and remaining through 1959 an objective correlative for what “Broadway” meant in talent, glamor, and Sophistication. Like Eugene O’Neill and the Theatre Guild, Katharine Cornell and the Barrymores, Clifford Odets and Kaufman and Hart, the Lunts made something of themselves that could have obtained only
in the theatre
and
at that time
. Weren’t they multi-persons, too, in all the things they managed to be in a lifetime—Cornell as Candida but also as Anouilh’s Antigone, taking on the State out of conscience; or Odets balancing a writer’s public obligations with his personal needs? They were there when it happened, but not out of luck entirely, because it could not have happened without them: they were impassioned. And when Lee Strasberg very shockingly says, “The Lunts
are
the Method,” isn’t he pacifying all of Broadway’s interior contradictions? Doesn’t he mean, We
all
were part of it?

True, some might sniff at the Lunts boulevarding their way through Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s
The Great Sebastians
(1956), about a mind-reading act. She was the English Essie and he the Czech Rudi, and they opened the show in harness, in play-within-play style, Lynn in radiant gold-trimmed white and blindfolded on stage and Alfred, in tails, working the house from the aisles: “Madame,” he calls to Lynn, “there is a gentleman at the back. He is holding up something—can you tell me what it is?” The Lunts in fact put on a genuine show, using members of the ANTA Theatre audience and a verbal code. “Quickly, Madame, quickly” signified that Lunt was holding a key.

For the play itself, the authors came up with something rather elegant and contemporary, a political snafu embroiling our two stars in the Communist takeover of Jan Masaryk’s democratic government. There was even a surprise ending, but as so often the critics carped at the humdrum quality of the writing. The public, however, was delighted, and the run of 174 performances misleads, for the theatre scaled its prices for a new straight-play top of $6.90, and the Lunts did land-office business till they closed for the summer before the fall–winter tour.

After a career like the Lunts’, how to go out—more boulevard fluff, taking the kiss canoe to Candyland? One could hardly expect the Great Sebastians to go modern and black comic all of a sudden. Yet that is what the Lunts did, in a piece about a fabulously wealthy old beldam who returns to her native Swiss village to offer it a fortune for the murder of the man who seduced and betrayed her long before. She has made the temptation extra enticing by using her millions to buy up and wreck the place over the years. Their life is no life. Of course, they immediately and adamantly refuse; that’s Act One. Then they start to think it over.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s
Der Besuch der Alten Dame
(The Old Lady’s Visit) was done as
The Visit
(1958), in Maurice Valency’s translation, under Peter Brook. The Lunts and Peter Brook? But Brook at this time was intrigued by all sorts of theatre; so were the Lunts. Remember, they played O’Neill, Chekhof, and Shakespeare.
The Visit
could be thought of as the trio’s meeting place: boulevardier modernist. And, after all, but for the old lady’s murderous intentions,
The Visit
in outline is
Reunion in Vienna
with the sexes reversed.

It was decided to play London first, but British tryout audiences
hated
the show. The Lunts reached Dublin and Edinburgh but couldn’t come in: the West End was barred to them because of the work’s brutal character. The English stage apparently wasn’t “contemporary” yet, and it underscores the adventurous nature of fifties theatregoing, as I’ve noted, that Broadway ate this show up. The first night was one of the last really great ones, not least because Charles Dillingham’s Globe Theatre had been wholly refurbished as the Lunt-Fontanne for the occasion. Once again, ticket prices went high (as they did in Dillingham’s day, which is why he built his house with that extra-large orchestra: to take advantage of six-dollar tops for Fred Stone’s musicals).

The critics were extremely appreciative even while suggesting that they had never seen the Lunts do anything important before. “Our two most gited comic actors,” said Brooks Atkinson, “look like our most gifted dramatic actors.” The problem was the old mistake of taking one’s false assumptions about a thing for the thing itself. Because it seems sensible that lighter fare calls for “lighter” talents, actors who frequent comedy are assumed to be less gifted than actors of drama. It isn’t sensible. Talent is talent; its portion is not counted by genre. Was Judi Dench less “talented” when she played Sally Bowles in the first London
Cabaret,
and then
more
“talented” when she tried Madame Ranyefsky in
The Cherry Orchard
? Are there two Judi Denches?