Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) (40 page)

Lerner and Loewe undertook this sort of anti-romantic modification even in the songs that remained in the score at the musical’s Broadway opening. For instance, changes to “On the Street Where You Live” helped soften the impact of Freddy as a feasible suitor to Eliza, whereas the original had more actively posited him as a rival to Higgins for her affections. The removal of some of the more sadistic lines in “You Did It” helped prevent demonizing Higgins to too much of an extent, so that we understand his attitude in the number as simply not noticing Eliza, rather than being actively nasty, while Eliza’s “Without You” was similarly toned down from its original extended version. It was important not to make either character seem too actively furious at the other, since this is traditionally a signifier of people who exaggerate their hatred of each other to mask the fact that they are in love (classic Shakespearean examples being Katherine and Petruchio in
The Taming of the Shrew,
and Benedict and Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing
).

Additionally, it is notable that the songs that stayed in the show tend to avoid being too specific where they could have been overt expressions of love. For instance, “Why Can’t the English?” contains some initial addresses to Eliza but broadens out to include the crowd (and indeed people from all over the world). Eliza’s equivalent opening statement, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” talks about “Someone’s head resting on my knee” but does not refer to anyone specific, and it would certainly be difficult to register this as an allusion to Higgins. “I’m an Ordinary Man” expresses a negative attitude toward women but does not involve Eliza directly (nor does it discuss romance or matrimony, for that matter), while the more direct “Just You Wait” comes so obviously in the aftermath of Higgins’s strict treatment of her as his pupil that it would take a stretch of the imagination to receive it as an “anti-love” love song. As noted above, “Show Me” is sung not to Higgins but to Freddy, so that the brief mention of the Professor in Eliza’s opening verse (“I get words all day through / First from him, now from you”) goes by relatively unnoticed. She has sickened of the behavior of men in general, and there is little sense of Freddy acting as an object against whom Eliza can vent her anger toward Higgins in the physical absence of the latter. Similarly subtle is the brief reference to him in the line “I only know when he / Began to dance with me” from “I Could Have Danced All Night”: certainly it strikes us that
some kind of feeling has been aroused inside Eliza, but the thought is so fleeting that we cannot conclude too much from it.

Lerner and Loewe delay confrontation of the issue until the pair’s last two songs, when Eliza sings that she can live “Without You,” and Higgins admits that “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” Along with “I Could Have Danced All Night,” the latter is surely the only strong reason to infer a romantic connection between the two: lines such as “She almost makes the day begin” and “I’ve grown accustomed to the trace of something in the air” undoubtedly represent a very personal expression of feeling for Eliza on Higgins’s part. Yet
Lerner never takes either of them any farther than this. Whereas song is traditionally a conduit through which a character’s heightened emotions can flow, in
My Fair Lady
the musical numbers contribute to the grander scheme of creating a central relationship whose full implications we can never fully understand.

Julie Andrews in the final scene of
My Fair Lady
(Photofest)

In other words, the triumph of
My Fair Lady
is not its resolution of the romance between Higgins and Eliza but that Lerner and Loewe resolve the characters’ ongoing battle without defining their relationship any more explicitly than it has been earlier in the show. It is a stroke of genius: because the argument is over, the audience can enjoy the conventional satisfaction of a happy ending, but because there is no duet, no physical connection, and no verbal expression of love, the ambiguity that has been achieved during the previous three hours is maintained even at the final curtain. In that respect, and in spite of Lerner’s epigram to the script, they avoid negating Shaw’s beliefs about what the relationship means, and yet send a Broadway audience home entirely satisfied in the knowledge that the characters they care about are friends once more. Now that Eliza has gained her independence from Higgins, she can return to his company as her own woman: both her breaking away and her decision to come back are signs of Lerner’s retention of the latent feminism in Shaw’s play. Their reconciliation is clear-cut, but an uncertain note remains. When Higgins utters his final line, “Where the devil are my slippers?” Lerner tells us in the stage directions that Eliza “understands.” Exactly
what
she understands is perhaps up to the individual, and can also vary according to the director and performer. Trevor Nunn’s 2001 production, for instance, had the two characters standing up, folding their arms, and laughing, during the final bars of the show, implying that the whole thing had been a joke; the staging of the 1964 film is more poignant but still does not depict a romantic union. Since Higgins is too independent and emotionally immature to let a woman in his life, and Eliza is too strong to allow herself to become beholden to him, there can never be love between them. In an article written a few years after the show’s opening, Lerner indicated his agreement on the matter: “It was impossible for Higgins to love Eliza; for them to admit to themselves that they felt anything emotional about each other.”
³⁷
What Higgins really wanted, he said, “was a friend. He wanted Eliza, but he wanted her to behave as a friend because he didn’t understand the emotional pressure of an intimate relationship.”
³⁸
For that reason, Lerner wrote the perfect ambiguous conclusion: the “serenely independent” Higgins cannot love Eliza but is happy to admit that he has grown accustomed to her face.

Copyist

There’ll be spring every year without you.

England still will be here without you.

There’ll be fruit on the tree and a shore by the sea;

There’ll be crumpets and tea without you!

I can thrill to a play without you;

Take a bath ev’ry day without you.

I can still have a dream and it’s liable to seem

Even more like a dream without you.

I can do without you!

The world without your smiling face,

Still will be a highly agreeable place!

They can still rule the land without you;

Windsor Castle will stand without you.

And without much ado

We can all muddle through without you!

Without your pulling it, the tide comes in.

Without your twirling it, the earth can spin.

Without your pushing them, the clouds roll by.

If they can do without you, ducky, so can I!

There’ll be fog ev’ry year without you;

When it clears, it’ll clear without you.

And there still will be rain on the plain down in Spain;

Even that will remain without you!

I can laugh till it hurts without you;

Order fat’ning desserts without you!

I can prosper and thrive, and be glad I’m alive;

Be the mother of five without you.

Bennett

There’ll be spring every year without you.

England still will be here without you.

There’ll be fruit on the tree and a shore by the sea;

There’ll be crumpets and tea without you!

I can thrill to a play without you;

Take a bath ev’ry day without you.

I can still have a dream and it’s liable to seem

Even more like a dream without you.

I can do without you!

The world without your smiling face,

Still will be a highly agreeable place!

They can still rule the land without you;

Windsor Castle will stand without you.

And without much ado

We can all muddle through without you!

Without your pulling it, the tide comes in.

Without your twirling it, the earth can spin.

Without your pushing them, the clouds roll by.

If they can do without you, ducky, so can I!

There’ll be fog ev’ry year without you;

When it clears, it’ll clear without you.

And there still will be rain on the plain down in Spain;

Even that will remain without you!

I can do without you!

You, dear friend, can jolly well

Plumb go straight to Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire!

I can carve out a niche without you!

Even scratch where I itch without you.

So go back in your shell, I can do bloody well without you!

(Higgins interrupts with “By George, I really did it!”)

I can do without you!

You, dear friend, can jolly well

Plumb go straight to Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire!

I can carve out a niche without you!

Even scratch where I itch without you.

So go back in your shell, I can do bloody well without …

(Higgins interrupts with “By George, I really did it!”)

Higgins

Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters;

Condemned by ev’ry syllable she utters.

By right she should be taken out and hung

For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue!

Daily her barbaric tribe increases,

Grinding our language into pieces.

Hear them down in Soho Square,

Dropping aitches everywhere,

Speaking English any way they like.

“You, sir, did you go to school?”

Cockney

“What d’you take me fer, a fool?”

Higgins

No-one taught him “take” instead of “tike.”

Hear a Yorkshireman converse,

Cornishmen are even worse,

A national ensemble singing flat.

Chickens cackling in a barn,

Just like this one.

Eliza

Garn!

Higgins

I can see the writing on the wall.

Soon we’ll have no language left at all!

Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?

In every other nation

They stress pronunciation.

In France, mispronounce a word

And the French are fit to kill,

And frequently add it to your bill.

Rumanians learn Rumanian although why remains a riddle;

Hungarians learn Hungarian once they’ve learned to play the fiddle.

But well-spoken English you will hardly ever get!