All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (26 page)

By her own admission, Hepburn completely lacked confidence, yet, paradoxically, was shameless in putting herself forward. Here was one woman who never even considered accepting the destiny of a Mary Haines. Hepburn did marry at this time, but very obscurely, and unlike most wives she lived not through her husband’s life but through hers. (Not till later, in an unvowed liaison with Spencer Tracy, did Hepburn “wed”—at that, to one who would share but not lead her life.)

Hepburn now went through an astonishing series of upsets and victories: from understudying the lead to going on and being fired after the first performance of Knopf’s production of
The Big Pond
(1928); nonetheless impressing first-nighter Mr. J. J. Shubert but turning down his offer of a five-year contract; finally making it to Broadway in a one-week flop called
These Days
(1928); understudying Hope Williams in Philip Barry’s
Holiday
and going on but once, on the post-Broadway tour; accepting and then rejecting a lead in a Theatre Guild offering, S. N. Behrman’s
Meteor
(1929), to play the heroine of
Death Takes a Holiday
(1929), getting fired during the tryout; winning the lead in
The Animal Kingdom
and learning that, indeed, Barry had modeled the inspiringly independent Daisy Sage on Hepburn herself, then to discover that Leslie Howard didn’t like her. He, too, dealt in the rebuff
a mezzo forte:
trying to oblige the star, Hepburn asked Howard, about a line of script, “What would you like me to do here, Mr. Howard?” He replied, in an eerie anticipation of someone else’s words in
Gone With the Wind,
“I really don’t give a damn what you do, my dear.” Hepburn was fired before rehearsals had finished—fired from a role that Barry made on her!—and when she called Barry he told her, “To be brutally frank, you weren’t very good.”

Did he mean she was Different? Or was she still too raw, unable to metabolize her many warring instincts into a finished portrayal? “Spark the part” was her motto. “Strike it. Light it.” Yet it didn’t come together thus till they gave her the role she was uniquely qualified for in looks and temperament, that of the Amazon princess we met in
The Warrior’s Husband
. Hepburn was Hepburn-ready at last.

She was, even so, on the Different side, even at RKO, the Different studio in its unusually Sophisticated style. Paramount, too, was Sophisticated, but above all elegant. RKO was edgy.
3
In fact, RKO was the most New York–oriented of Hollywood outfits, most determined to dress up in the glamor of New York. Not Walter Winchell’s New York: Hepburn’s. Notice, then, how quickly this Different Hepburn got to Broadway, but also how logical it seemed that she bring Broadway to Hollywood. For when Hollywood brought together Philip Barry’s ritzy wastrels with the coarse world of the proletarian striver, wrapping them in Hepburn’s wish for freedom from authority and adding a purification process in which the rich learn to walk in the proletariat’s shoes, the result was that Great American Genre, screwball comedy.

Why didn’t Broadway’s playwrights invent it first? Because the geography wasn’t available on stage. Not till the camera could show us precisely where in real life the Maverick Newspaperman takes the Runaway Heiress—you know: Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert on a road trip in
It Happened One Night
(1934)—could the sociopolitical transaction of screwball comedy be realized. Then, to top off, doesn’t the form reach its apex in
Bringing Up Baby
(1938), with
It Happened One Night
’s gender plot reversed so that Maverick Heiress Hepburn takes Academic Plop Cary Grant into Hepburn’s wonderland version of real life? Another piece of Broadway that Hollywood utilized in formulating the screwball genre was the disguise that Sophistication doted on, and at one point Grant is detoured into a frilly peignoir. Commentators have spent three generations reckoning exactly what Grant means when he says, “I just went gay all of a sudden”; more explicitly informative are the getups that he and Hepburn don when they run around Hepburn’s aunt’s estate looking for a lost dinosaur bone. Grant is ready for the baronial hunt and Hepburn appears to have mugged Luise Rainer on the set of
The Good Earth
and stolen her clothes. Thus, Grant and Hepburn dress as the opposite of what they are: the commanding hero and the Chinese bride. On the contrary, it’s Hepburn who wears the pants in this story, a not wholly unexpected conceit from producer-director Howard Hawks but unthinkable on Broadway at the time. Isn’t
The Philadelphia Story
a kind of
Taming of the Shrew,
essentially conservative even with Van Heflin’s Maverick Newspaperman? Barry had his nonconformist side, we know; but he didn’t like to mix his classes. Screwball comedy is subversively egalitarian.

One odd note in all this is that the screwball films were largely built around movie stars—people like Grant, Gable, Colbert, Irene Dunne, and Melvyn Douglas who began in the theatre then abandoned it or, like Douglas, returned only after their film career sagged. Hepburn, perhaps the outstanding screwball because of her merrily reuthless wrecking in
Bringing Up Baby,
maintained a lifelong affair with the stage, even at the height of her reign with Tracy at MGM. She never stopped visiting Broadway: in more Barry, in Shakespeare, in boulevardier comedy, in a musical. And Hepburn herself uttered (about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) the line that, if twisted, explains the matter: Broadway gave stars class and Hollywood gave them sex.

Hepburn was short of sex. Not till
The Philadelphia Story
did she even know how her public liked her, especially the moviegoers. Hepburn’s most bizarrely mannered portrayal, in
Morning Glory
(1933), actually won her an Oscar, and her hits were as unalike as the bluestocking melodrama
Little Women
(1935) and the very nearly tragic comedy
Alice Adams
(1935). Who was she?

A return to the class of Broadway was Hepburn’s Austerlitz, because she had bought the screen rights from Barry before Hollywood could Jean Arthur it. So, as the play took off on its tryout, Hepburn was already California-bound. But she wasn’t confident even now, or especially now, for she had toured in Helen Jerome’s adaptation of
Jane Eyre,
also for the Guild, during the 1936–37 season, and though it did terrific business it didn’t dare come in.

Why? Because everyone wanted Katharine Hepburn to fail? Was she simply too Different, even too rebellious against the rule of men? Other strong women of Broadway made some obeisance to the cautions. Fontanne and Cornell married; Hepburn married but not really. She married so she wouldn’t have to marry. Remember, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the vote, was barely a generation old when Hepburn and
The Philadelphia Story
arrived in New York. Everyone got ready while she kept murmuring to herself the fantasy that this wasn’t The Street but a mere tryout town, where no one hoped you’d fail. In Baltimore and such places, they clapped when the star entered, but Tracy Lord has no star entrance. She is to be not celebrified but humbled, democratized the better to be relished for being special. To put it bluntly, she has to become a little less Different. No more
Spitfire
—come now
State of the Union, Pat and Mike, Summertime
.

So
The Philadelphia Story
’s curtain rose on the sitting room of the Lord mansion, with Hepburn in view, sitting in an armchair with a leather writing kit on her lap, turning out thank-yous for her wedding gifts. The first nighters didn’t give her a warm welcome, but after three hours of fun they were licked. The show was raved and Hepburn’s career secured. No one had wanted her to fail, after all.

Seven

Having Wonderful Time:

THE POPULAR STAGE

In the 1930s, Broadway and Hollywood enjoyed a unique cultural and economic synchronization. Earlier, film was silent and thus unacquainted with the sheer verbal communication of the stage; by the 1940s, the movies were made of forms and personnel with little or no theatrical roots. Thus, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe made their name in the 1930s on The Street; but their work on
Citizen Kane
(1941) marks an ideal demarcation point in the separation of screen from stage in the history of American narrative art. The film is not only an original—it was
conceived
so kinetically that even its key line, “Rosebud!,” is really a key shot: the child’s sole enabling innocent memory is tossed into the furnace as the man himself goes to hell.

So it is the 1930s when theatre and film share history; one cannot recount the one’s without the other’s. The first reason why is the most obvious: suddenly talking, Hollywood needed scripts to film and actors with viva voce command. Also obviously, Broadway in its Depression desperately needed Hollywood money. And note that the movie studios didn’t buy just hits: the studios bought
plays
. Sometimes it seemed as though they’d take anything that opened; a manager could actually sell a ten-thousand-dollar flop to the movies for two or three times that amount. A crime drama by the unknown Marie Baumer called
Penny Arcade
(1930) ran three weeks but had caught the eye of Al Jolson. He snapped up the movie rights for more than the production had lost and resold them to his studio, Warner Bros., for a profit, recommending that the Bros. take along two promising players from the stage cast. In the retitled
Sinner’s Holiday,
James Cagney and Joan Blondell made their screen debuts.

The second reason why the 1930s saw a fusion of theatre and film is that theatregoers who had scorned the movies were now becoming moviegoers. It took a generation for “the flickers” to emerge as an alternative art, though opinionmakers still disdained cinema as ignorant and silly. Not till James Agee in the 1940s did a respected writer take film seriously, preceding Pauline Kael in the expansion of a personal response to movies into a series of position papers on the working of the universe. In a kind of intellectuals’ back formation, various thirties movie critics have lately been reclaimed from oblivion to function as prophets; back in the day, however, they had no discernible effect on the box office.

The attraction of the movies to theatregoers in the 1930s was simply the movies themselves. Part of it was the spendthrift casting; Broadway was base camp to Hollywood’s peak. When the obscure producer Hugo W. Romberg put on the busy but unimportant Wilson Collison’s East of Suez melodrama
Red Dust
(1928) in a pitiably out-of-the-way booking at Daly’s on Sixty-third Street, the stage didn’t teem with headliners: Curtis Cooksey, Jerome Collamore, Lenore Meyrick-Sorsby, and Sydney Shields.
Red Dust
posted its casting call at the height of the biggest season in theatre history, so all the stars, journeymen, and promising newcomers were working: and not in
Red Dust
. Still, this is a penetratingly dreary quartet, and the play closed in a week.

What would have been the best cast that a neophyte manager could assemble in 1928 for a show set on a rubber plantation in French Indo-China? Positions available: the alpha male who runs the place; the new hireling from Europe; his wife, secretly in love with the alpha male; and the femme fatale who thickens the plot. Perhaps Henry Hull, Russell Hardie, Helen Gahagan, and the as yet inexperienced Barbara Stanwyck? It has the depth of ability without the height of charisma, especially when compared with MGM’s version of 1932, retaining the setting but Americanizing the characters as Clark Gable, Gene Raymond, Mary Astor, and Jean Harlow.

In supporting players as well, Hollywood cast distinctively, for instance assigning the
Boy Meets Girl
producer in the film adaptation to the amiably uninflected Ralph Bellamy. This performance brings the Clueless Hetero to a completion so absolute that Bellamy creates something never before thought possible or even necessary: the opposite of Kabuki.

We have already seen how Hollywood’s “opening up” of stagebound storylines created screwball comedy by supplying the essential thematic element of The Adventure—the “kidnapping” of the Runaway Heiress in
It Happened One Night;
or the “bringing up” of Baby the leopard; or even one Adventure that isn’t shown, the “shipwrecked on a desert island” sojourn in
My Favorite Wife
.

But in fact virtually any play could be improved on at least one level through simple landscaping—telling stories within the infinite space of film. This was not simply a matter of enacting narrative in realistic locations: that narrative could now include scenes that stage scripts surely would have included had set-change technology been more flexible. Was there really a presentation of
The Good Earth
(1932) on Broadway, in the genre of the literary adaptation, a Theatre Guild offering by the father-and-son team of Owen and Donald Davis? Pearl Buck’s sprawling tale of Chinese farming life in times of famine and revolution had been a bestseller the previous year, and many theatregoers were avid readers who would enjoy collecting Buck anew in lively form. All declared the makeup jobs on Claude Rains, Alla Nazimova, Sydney Greenstreet, Henry Travers, and the rest of a big cast were astonishingly effective, and the typical Guild team of director Philip Moeller and set designer Lee Simonson functioned well. True, the Davises did not vastly honor Buck: George Jean Nathan likened their work to making a novel out of an Earl Carroll
Vanities
revue. Then, too, Nazimova utilized that deadpan singsong we recall from Florence Reed’s Mother Goddam and, on opening night, slowed up out of nervousness and drove the critics crazy.

Anyway, how does one
stage
Buck’s sprawling story? It takes more than coolie hats: it takes a movie, which of course it got, from MGM, in 1937, a year before Buck copped her Nobel Prize. Closer to home, doesn’t Owen Davis’ southern romance
Jezebel
(1933) need a grander field of play than the Ethel Barrymore Theatre? Tallulah Bankhead rehearsed the diva lead of the usual headstrong belle, then went ailing and ceded it to Miriam Hopkins for a two-week run in a role that won Bette Davis her second Oscar
in the film version
.