All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (7 page)

No question, Lulu Belle is a user and a cheat. Bizet’s heroine is admirable in her independence. She doesn’t ruin men; they ruin themselves for her. Lulu Belle, however, is a parasite. She’s attracted to George mainly for the sport of stealing him from his wife, and the more he resists the more she vamps him. His “Git away f’um me” is just so much confetti on her runway:

LULU BELLE:
It’s too late now! I’m gonna cook an’ carve and chew yo’ up and swallow yo’! [Indeed, his grip on her tightens; the script calls him “intoxicated.”] Eat me like I wuz a piece o’candy! Drink me like I wuz a glass o’ wine! Kiss me! Kiss me till I’m dead and buried!

They get into “a long, wild kiss,” and George comes gasping out of it “like a drowning man.” No point in wasting time:

LULU BELLE:
Wheah yo’ live?

Now we get a sample of the Belasco touch, albeit in a play written by others: a combination of absurdly posing showmanship and casual naturalism at once. The showmanship inheres in what we immediately sense will be the first-act curtain: grabbing George’s arm, Lulu Belle cries, “Let’s strut!,” leading the poor bewildered man off for an exhibition exit. Comes now the naturalization, for as the curtain very slowly starts to fall, two biddies who have spent the act commenting on the doings from their overhead windows reappear for a last shot. Says Mrs. Frisbie in the last seconds before the orchestra strikes up for the intermission, “She’s landed him, Mrs. Williams.”

This is the paradox of David Belasco, the faker of Big Moments even as he undercuts them with dead-on realism. Belasco played the old with the new at once, for instance in the near-documentary feeling of the first act, a tableau of West Fifty-ninth Street with apartment buildings, movie theatre, De Luxe Café and Bar, a real automobile, and over one hundred actors. This was virtuosity of mimesis: yet all the principals were whites in black makeup, as if in a minstrel show.

Similarly, the last five minutes of the evening comprised a murder out of louche melodrama—played, however, with minute care for the details of how such a murder might actually occur. It was as if Eleonora Duse had found work on a showboat, for the language was pure ten-twent’-thirt’ cautionary tale, as the discarded George catches up with Lulu Belle in Paris and tells her she’s coming with him …
or else!
“Make your choice, Lulu Belle,” he demands. “On one side’s heaven. On the other side’s Hell!”

The rhyme is distracting, but not to Lulu Belle. “Suits me,” she briskly declares. “I’ll see all mah frien’s!”

George grabs her for a kiss, but she slaps him repeatedly, even spits at him. Then she makes a curious mistake, handing him a gun so he can kill himself. But please do it in the bathroom: “I got a big ma’ble tub yo’ kin hol’ yo’ haid ovah.”

The atmosphere has changed, for it occurs to George to kill Lulu Belle instead, and suddenly the nineteenth-century posing and squawking are over. The show’s remaining moments are the kind of thing Belasco could rehearse to perfection. Belasco doesn’t want
Carmen
now. He wants what happens when a man kills his ex-lover.

Scared at last, Lulu Belle throws pillows and boxes of thing at George, and as he reaches her she actually dives into the bedclothes in sheer panic. As he hauls her up to strangle her, she’s laughing and screaming at once—hysterical—and Belasco pulls out one last crazy trick: she will take hold of whatever’s within reach and try to beat him off with it. It turns out to be a bunch of flowers; and so she dies. With the gendarmes at the door, George embraces the corpse with agonized cries of “My Lulu Belle!” as the curtain comes down.

Lulu Belle
ran 461 performances, the stay of a smash, and while Belasco died in 1931 his continued prominence on The Street in the 1920s marked one of the theatre’s most apparent connections with its primitive past. Another connection was the revival, extremely common at this time. In 1921,
Trilby
(1895) came back with its original Svengali, Wilton Lackaye (now nearly sixty), and two of his original colleagues, and five more recent successes returned that same year with the headliners of the premiere:
The Squaw Man
(1905) with William Faversham;
The Easiest Way
(1909) with Frances Starr;
The Return of Peter Grimm
(1911) with David Warfield;
Peg O’ My Heart
(1912) with Laurette Taylor; and
Romance
with Doris Keane. (We remember the last as Edward Sheldon’s great hit; in the excitement, he proposed marriage to Keane.) These really were revivals of memorable portrayals. Still, Arthur Hopkins brought back his production of
The Jest
seven years after the Barrymore brothers had stunned the town in it with, merely, Basil Sydney and Alphonz Ethier (who had in fact succeeded Lionel as Neri during the original run). Yet it ran ten weeks, impressive for such meager leftovers.

*   *   *

There were some new genres in play along with the familiar ones. The postwar attitudes toward sex, increasingly freer than before, encouraged the development of the so-called bedroom play into what we now term “boudoir farce”—that is, from the flirtatious into the sinful. In the first of the sophisticated musical revues,
The Greenwich Village Follies
(1919), a number called “I Want a Daddy Who Will Rock Me To Sleep” remarked on the growth of sex comedy by working applicable titles punningly into the song’s verse—
Up in Mabel’s Room, A Sleepless Night, Twin Beds, The Dame in Room Thirteen, Newlyweds,
and
She Walked in Her Sleep
(into the arms of married men, also outside an apartment building along the ledge of the sixteenth floor). These plays really were farces with come-hither titles; after 1919, the program got spicier. Otto Harbach’s
No More Blondes
(1920) typified the earlier form, as husband Ernest Truex and someone else’s wife Eileen Wilson got trapped together while various strangers intruded, spied, and threatened. But Avery Hopwood and Charlton Andrews’
Ladies Night
(1920) set the whole cast running in and out of rooms in a Turkish bath, the men in drag; and Hopwood’s
The Demi-Virgin
(1921)—referring to a bride who abandoned her marriage at some point during her wedding night—so toyed with the cautions of the day that the police shut down the Pittsburgh tryout and there was further legal challenge in New York.

By far the essential early-twenties sex comedy was
The Gold Diggers
(1919), because it saw the world of men and women as a war of dupes versus takers. The men are rich and the women attractive, and the problem with the game they play is that only the women know the rules. Such a typifying entry should be produced by A. H. Woods, written by Avery Hopwood, and headed by Hazel Dawn, the genre’s prime practitioners. (It was Dawn, the violin-playing heroine of the 1911 musical
The Pink Lady,
who originated the title role in the best-remembered of the sex comedies,
Getting Gertie’s Garter
[1921].) But
The Gold Diggers,
by Hopwood, was produced by David Belasco and starred his latest discovery, Ina Claire.

The Gold Diggers
wasn’t typical Belasco fare, with the same ordinary set for all three acts, a mere nineteen in the cast, and a narrative almost embarrassingly placid. Society Boy falls for Chorus Girl; his uncle disapproves; her best friend vamps the uncle. Why? Because when uncle sees what a heartless trollop the friend is, the chorus girl will seem ideal by comparison.

What twaddle, of course: but all lies in the execution. Audiences enjoyed learning what a Nice Girl the trollop really was: in the evening’s biggest laugh, uncle Bruce McRae poured vamp Ina Claire some champagne and, when he turned away, she emptied her glass onto the carpet. Gold digger? She ended up revealing her scheme and marrying the uncle. She even had a mother, right there on stage; bad girls don’t have mothers. In fact, most of this gold digging was just talk and show. A lot of the show’s wickedness lay in the dialogue assigned to a pack of these fortune hunters, bragging about the millionaires they were fleecing. But were they truly living the life or striking a pose?

There were such women, of course. Peggy Hopkins Joyce, the forerunner of today’s Pointless Celebrities such as Paris Hilton, was the gold digger of the age. But Peggy put out. Sex comedy was really about chastity only appearing to stray.

*   *   *

On the other hand, “society drama” liked its heroines disgraced. This form dealt with people who live in mansions rather than apartments, the social set later popularized by Philip Barry. Barry’s favorite question was How much independence is available in a world ruled by convention? Barry’s precursor, Zoë Akins, asked rather, How much independence is available to women in a world ruled by men?, and society drama’s typical protagonist was a woman, especially Ethel Barrymore in Akins’
Déclassée
(1919). Lady Helen Haden, English by birth and breeding—the goddaughter, indeed, of a queen of England—is simply too principled for a reckless and unscrupulous beau monde.

She is also “the last of the mad Varvicks,” but we see no madness: just nobility. Trapped by her own code, Lady Helen must reveal as a cheat someone who will take his revenge by making public her recent … indiscretion. He was the man in the case, and he has the letters to prove it. If she exposes him, he’ll expose her. Lady Helen’s reply—and the first-act finale—was Ethel at her most superb. As one always has a helping of the fashionable world waiting in the wings in plays like this one, Ethel called them in and announced, “I’ve something to tell you.” As she started in on the who, what, and where of the scandal that would destroy her, the curtain blushingly closed down the scene.

So Lady Helen is now déclassée, and Akins’ script delineates the stages of degradation till there is no way out but for a taxicab to knock the heroine down just before she is to be reunited with the very man who caused her downfall, now mature and repentant. Too late. Though her final aria, onstage, was remarkably staid for someone dying of internal injuries—Akins permitted a single tasteful convulsion—Ethel made it radiant and thrilling within her narrow range.

Interestingly, Akins’
The Varying Shore
(1921) anticipated Kaufman and Hart’s
Merrily We Roll Along
(1934) by telling its tale—of another noble and thus devastated heroine—backward. In fact, she’s dead at the start, set in 1921, and “youthens” into her forties in Act Two, her twenties in Act Three, and seventeen at last, in 1847. The critics thought the work needed a stronger actress than the journeyman Elsie Ferguson; these society shows were, after all, star vehicles. Michael Arlen’s
The Green Hat
(1925), from his novel, got Katharine Cornell, and it needed her badly. Novelist Arlen was Enjoying a Vogue at the time; it’s not clear why. His writing—his playwrighting, anyway—is overwrought and loaded with fifi philosophizing. Let’s let Brooks Atkinson describe Arlen’s characters: “restless, bored, cynical, worldly, futile.” Atkinson said this of another Arlen play that opened but three weeks after
The Green Hat, These Charming People
. This was an unproduced old script that Arlen pulled out of the drawer and blithely named after his latest novel despite there being no connection between the book and this play.

The Green Hat
—named after the heroine’s trademark accessory, a cloche number in felt—begins just after Cornell’s Iris March suffers an altogether shatteringly bogus honeymoon: her husband killed himself. Doesn’t one hate when that happens? And everybody simply raving at poor Iris, including the man she
really
loves, Napier Harpenden (Leslie Howard). Of course, one never does anything in italics in the world of Michael Arlen, even while suddenly gazing at the moon, wishing it were a pie one could cut up and eat. Then there would be no more sorrow in the world, no more contamination, only the innocence of dear playmates. (Memo to Howard: regard Cornell with a strangely turbulent fondness at this point.) Remember, my dark angel who drives decadently about Europe in a yellow Hispano-Suiza?

Actually, Arlen himself humiliates any imitation:

NAPIER:
What’s love? Do you know, Iris?

IRIS:
Love? Love is a hurricane of pain. That’s love.

NAPIER:
(intensely) Iris, you do something very strange, very—unholy to me.

One of Arlen’s stage directions runs, “They speak as in a dream.” I’ll say. But note that, while raised in England, Arlen shared the growing American disenchantment with social norms—an alienation that, developed by Philip Barry and perfected in Hollywood, would create one of America’s most vital inventions, the screwball comedy of bohemian revolt. Ultimately, Iris comes up against Napier’s father, “a magnificent exponent of caste,” Arlen warns us. “The kind of success you respect,” she tells Senior, “is like a murky sponge wiping out the lines of a man’s character.”

Then Napier, too, defies his father, going on to reveal why Iris’ husband killed himself on their wedding night: he “had picked up some beastly woman … and caught about the foulest disease a man can have.” When he told Iris and “saw the disgust and horror on her face … well, he was always an unbalanced devil, and he just chucked himself out [of the window].”

Syphilis. Note the utter callousness of this moral judgment, the eagerness to blame the victim. It reminds us why Henrik Ibsen remained for many in the preceding generation a byword for wanton immorality rather than, as we now see him, a doctor treating society’s hypocrisies: because in
Ghosts
(1882) he brought venereal disease onto the stage.

Even in 1925, this was most truly the love that dare not speak its name. Worse, by exposing the secret that Iris had been guarding, Napier has robbed her of her one selfless act. Like
Déclassée, The Green Hat
kills a noble heroine by automobile, though Iris March commits suicide, speeding that yellow Hispano-Suiza into a tree. It is left to the ingenue, Napier’s wife, to console him with a thing unknown to the play so far, unquestioning love: