All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (37 page)

SLADE:
God damn his yellow soul, if he doesn’t soon, I’ll go up and throw him off!—like a dog with its guts ripped out you’d put out of misery!

and
just
then we hear the very sound of Parritt’s leap of doom, right down to “a muffled, crunching thud.”

Everyone in the bar hears it, but only Slade knows what has happened. Having already created a transition from the horror of Hickey to the normality of life in false Hope, O’Neill is now ready for a grand finale, as everybody but Slade breaks into song—thirteen different melodies at the same time, from nineteenth-century ballad and English music hall to Irving Berlin and a French Revolutionary fight song. Singing and shouting and laughing and banging their glasses on the table, the lifelong cast of
Harry Hope’s Follies
has returned to the point at which it all began. True, the action started with almost everybody in a coma and now the cast is in full cry: but what difference does it make in the land of waiting to die? The fade-out close-up is Slade, who sees and knows all yet is no more able to improve the human condition than the rest of us. It is one of the great stage pictures in the oeuvre of a man who—once again—knew how theatre
plays
. The entire stage is in riot except for Slade, who “stares in front of him, oblivious to [the] racket.” And the curtain comes down.

“To audiences accustomed to the oily virtuosity of George Kaufman, George Abbott, Lillian Hellman, Odets, Saroyan,” wrote Mary McCarthy, reviewing the original production in
Partisan Review
in 1946, “the return of a playwright who—to be frank—cannot write is a solemn and sentimental occasion.”

Indeed,
The Iceman Cometh
did not get the kind of welcome that
Susan and God
could count on. It’s easier to pull off a play about one relatively small thing in a familiar setting in audience-friendly naturalism with a star turn. To please with an epic set in fantastical naturalism is tricky, and while
The Iceman Cometh
does have a star part, the original star was inadequate.

This was James Barton, whom we last saw playing half of
Tobacco Road
’s eight-year run and now best recalled for his Ben Rumson in Lerner and Loewe’s
Paint Your Wagon
(1951), complete with his trademark soft-shoeing and drunk act. One can see why the Theatre Guild and director Eddie Dowling wanted Barton, for he utterly embodied O’Neill’s Hickey: “about fifty, a little under medium height, with a stout roly-poly figure … He exudes a friendly, generous personality that makes everyone like him on sight.” Still, even after
Tobacco Road
Barton was more an old vaudevillian than an actor per se, and while he entered well, so to speak, he could not sustain the very size of the text, especially in that big “monologue.” Not only was Barton unable to discover a way to live within its rhythms; he simply couldn’t remember the words, and had to take prompts from the wings.
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Dowling was no doubt dying to take over the role himself, but he had all he could handle keeping the show operating at speed. Many were those who blamed Barton for the disappointing 136-performance run.

Certainly, it was the superb Hickey of Jason Robards Jr. in the 1956 Circle in the Square revival, under José Quintero, that reclaimed
The Iceman Cometh
as an American masterpiece. Tall and slim, Robards inaugurated a new line of Hickeys, less roly-poly than dapper and even glamorous. Lee Marvin is Hickey in the 1973 film; more recently, Kevin Spacey played him in London and New York. In Yvonne Shafer’s book
Performing O’Neill,
James Earl Jones—another Circle in the Square Hickey, Class of ’73—describes Robards’ Hickey as “a seducer” to Spacey’s “avenging angel.”
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O’Neill himself possibly didn’t realize that there is more than one way to play Hickey, or he might have wanted Barton replaced.

In any case, every major Hickey after Barton has demolished the notion of O’Neill as the actor’s nightmare—”a kind of triumphant catastrophe,” to refer again to Mary McCarthy. No: he’s “exhilarating to play,” Robards told Shafer. “All you had to do was learn the lines and you can’t go wrong.” And, yes, other writers who seemed so much more natural in their English such as McCarthy’s oily virtuosos are in the archives (like Saroyan), or reduced to one or two titles (like Hellman), or “commercial” (like Kaufman). O’Neill is the one most regularly put back on stage, because—this is Edmund Wilson now—”he nearly always, with whatever crudeness, is expressing some real experience, some impact directly from life.” When José Quintero and Jason Robards would cross paths, Quintero would tell him, “We’ve got to get back to the Old Man.” If it seems almost capricious to compare a play by Rachel Crothers with one by Eugene O’Neill, it’s not because O’Neill dwarfs Crothers. O’Neill dwarfs
Broadway;
nothing compares, especially when it comes to the
Iceman
. As James Earl Jones puts it, with wonderful lightness, “There I met a great play.”

Ten

Dogs Are Sticking to the Sidewalks:

THE EARLY 1940
S

The major difference between the Broadway of the 1940s and Broadway before lies in its relationship with Hollywood: so powerful in the 1930s but losing grip from now on. One reason is that after ten years of talkie the movies had reestablished their talent pool, based as much on verbal personality as on ability, and no longer needed to import actors who spoke well. True, people who were to be known exclusively as movie stars continued to invigorate their career with a Broadway launching or crank-up, even such purely celluloid developments as Jayne Mansfield and Burt Reynolds. Broadway continued to be useful to Hollywood: but less essential.

Then, too, Hollywood no longer bought up the screen rights to plays indiscriminately. Hit shows were filmed, but now few flops attracted interest as each studio sought to create low-budget series programmers built around, say, Warner Bros.’ dauntless reporter Torchy Blane (Glenda Farrell); MGM’s picaresque showgirl Maisie (Ann Sothern); or detectives such as Charlie Chan, Nancy Drew, the Falcon; or the aforementioned Henry Aldrich.

One constant of the 1930s held true: the movies’ genuine reverence for the stars and performing styles of the musical. To an extent, Hollywood ran intermittent commercials for bygone and current Broadwayites, most obviously in bios of everyone from George M. Cohan and the Dolly Sisters to Cole Porter and Jerome Kern, but also in resuscitations of the old ways, even a way as old as the minstrel show, an MGM obsession.

What most hurt Broadway in the 1940s was Hollywood’s collapsed respect for literary prestige. Nervous about the future of the talkie in 1929 and the early 1930s, the moguls hired New York wit, lingo, eloquence. But by 1940 California wanted a community of writers native to film; know-how trumped prestige. This led to a certain rivalry between the two coasts, a mild genuflection by movie writers when a New Yorker passed, an unreasonable intolerance on Broadway when a new byline was found to have logged movie experience. Some wanted it put into general belief that the stage was a place of idealism and film one of greed. Walter Winchell had some fun with this, telling how Moss Hart ran into Clifford Odets at a Hollywood party. Hart told Odets that, emulating Odets, all the writers in Hollywood were turning Communist. “You mean my plays converted them?” Odets asks. “No,” says Hart. “Your salary.”

But it wasn’t just the money: it
was
the prestige. Yet more lay in it, something so abstract that it might be reduced to the simple prejudice that New York felt about Los Angeles. Isn’t this why Arthur Miller billed his typescript for the movie
The Misfits
(1961) as “an original play for the screen”? A
play
by a
writer
. Of course, as we know, Clifford Odets is everybody’s favorite Broadway renegade, a dramatist turned Hollywood hack. Yet his play
Clash By Night
(1941) was filmed (in 1952) in a complete revision by
another
writer, Alfred Hayes. This points up another problem in Broadway’s relationship with Hollywood: in the 1930s, the movie adaptation might rival the original only supplementarily. Now, however, technical advances and the evolution in naturalistic acting empowers Hollywood to outperform Broadway in certain respects. For instance, the
Clash By Night
movie is vastly better than the play.

One reason why is the setting, the Staten Island shore in summer, when the marriage of hot Mae and dull Jerry breaks down under pressure from the fascinating Earl. A projectionist in a movie theatre, he repels but also captivates Mae with his hot-rodding small talk. Show biz has been teaching us that the erotically charged person is but a notch of civilization away from throwing off his or her clothes and scorning the Commandments on meeting another person of similar inclinations. It’s why Stanley tells Blanche, “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” when he rapes her.

So it is with Mae and Earl, but Odets’ talky script and the play’s modest views of the steamy environment give no scope to the explosive sexual attraction that the story tells of. The movie, directed by Fritz Lang, sees the tense need that Mae and Earl live in, contrasting the public spaces of saloon and beach with the clogged little privacy of her tiny home and his projection booth. Further, Hayes and Lang build the play’s second couple, Joe and Peggy, into a kind of low-rent ideal with their bickering and pawing.

Indeed, Lang can “visualize” Odets in the first sixty seconds after the credits, with establishing shots of seals and birds at liberty in a harbor, jumping to the hard life on fishing boats or in the cannery. At last Lang cuts to a long shot of Mae trudging along a mini-labyrinth of boardwalk with a suitcase, as if about to make a choice about where to go in life. A play staged on Broadway simply has no opportunity thus to conceptualize its premise in pictures. At that, Odets’ Mae is already married to Jerry, her story half over. Lang and Hayes have more to work with in bringing Mae into the beginning of the end of her voyage, teasing her with choices when she believes she has none. In a line invented by Hayes that sounds like basic Odets, Mae says, “Home is where you go when you run out of places.”

True, Lang and Hayes had an ideal movie cast, each an expert in type. Barbara Stanwyck’s Mae is the archetypal working-class broad too smart for her kind, and Paul Douglas epitomizes the good-natured cipher. Robert Ryan’s Earl is alarming: coarse and contemptuous of all life forms but himself, he nevertheless commands a Big Guy fascination that Mae can’t ignore. Opposite Keith Andes’ beautiful clod of a Joe is Marilyn Monroe, just being graduated from notable bits to movie star.

However, the stage cast was also excellent, and producer Billy Rose put on, in effect, a Group Theatre production, with sets by Boris Aronson and direction by Lee Strasberg at the Belasco, a Group haunt (of Odets’ plays especially). And the Group’s Lee J. Cobb played Jerry, opposite Tallulah Bankhead’s Mae, with Joseph Schildkraut again playing
homme fatal
as Earl. (Robert Ryan, the movie’s Earl, here played Joe, opposite Katherine Locke.)

Clash By Night
’s Broadway opening was extra-glamorous, a genuine hot ticket in the way that actual Group shows never had been. Part of this was the work of producer Rose, a master player of the PR game; part of it was Bankhead. But part of it—perhaps—was that The Street had to wait till the Group had disbanded before it could appreciate what the Group had set in motion. This proves that the Group was a success after all: nobody in America pays attention to a failure.

Bankhead got the notices. George Freedley, in the
Morning Telegraph,
declared that Tallulah was giving “the best performance of her career.” What? After
The Little Foxes,
in the role with which she is permanently associated? Yet Arthur Pollock of the
Brooklyn Eagle
concurred. “Her greatest achievement,” he called it.

True, as a Staten Island hausfrau Bankhead could not rival Stanwyck in casting genetics. Yet Bankhead apparently made it work, perhaps emphasizing the lowdown in the Slumming Aristo that was her trademark front. It was the play itself that won no favor. The sole review I can locate that liked it was in the
Daily Worker,
for once forgiving one of “their” side for failing to politicize his characters. Even this review dubbed Odets’ story “Triangle Plot No. 4111-A.” (This critic, too, thought Bankhead superb.) Interestingly, Odets ends the action with Jerry’s murder of Earl, while in the film Jerry only attempts the killing, and he and Mae reconcile. It’s fitting: the constraints of theatre make it logical that this crowded, even suffocated trio find release only in a murder in a projection booth, whereas Lang so expanded Odets’ setting with his harbor and beach scenes that the characters find a way out, room to live in. And while Lang did have some ten years’ advantage over the original play, even in the 1940s the theatregoing class was a moviegoing class as well. They were becoming used to the sheer freedom of film.

Here’s another example:
The Pirate
(1942), S. N. Behrman’s adaptation of a German play of 1911,
Der Seeräuber
(literally,
The Searobber
), by Ludwig Fulda. Here was one thing Hollywood could not rival, a Theatre Guild special for the Lunts. Moreover, Alfred gave
The Pirate
one of his stunt productions, like
The Taming Of the Shrew
. Lunt saw
The Pirate
as a kind of musical, acrobatic rather than sung and, in a nod to the Caribbean setting, on Santo Domingo, utilizing a
Porgy and Bess
ensemble, but less purely lyrical than vivacious and saucy.
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Lunt shared director’s credit with John C. Wilson, but the surprises were typically Luntian, such as his goof on the Star Entrance. Lynn got the first one, for she was onstage at the curtain up, fanning her dozing old slob of a husband—but the audience saw only her back, creating a buzz of whispers as the quicker parties in the auditorium started the applause. Alfred’s materialization was impish, for he entered without quite being seen during a crossover parade separating the first two scenes: touring players were coming to town. Lunt was their capocomico, and as a donkey cart laden with costumes and props passed by, the audience noticed Lunt’s legs hanging out from under the load.