All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (41 page)

Eleven

Olivier Versus Brando:

THE LATE 1940S

The war play cycle, which was to run sporadically into the 1950s, was very strong in the first years of peace, each playwright finding his special way into the subject. John Patrick’s
The Hasty Heart
(1945) considered the feelings of a terminally wounded soldier, Arthur Laurents’
Home of the Brave
(1945) examined anti-Semitism using a murder plot involving servicemen, Maxwell Anderson’s
Joan of Lorraine
(1946), starring Ingrid Bergman, looked in on a bare-stage rehearsal of a play about one of history’s greatest soldiers, and William Wister Haines’
Command Decision
(1947) concerned the heavy losses that democrats have to endure when defeating barbarians, centering on a martinet general sending pilots out on suicide bombing missions.

None of the above quartet visited enlisted men on the ground at the front, in the line of
What Price Glory?
. Few of the World War II plays did, earlier or later. Harry Brown’s
A Sound of Hunting
(1945) was one exception, with a cast headed by Burt Lancaster and Sam Levene and dealing in little more than an infantry squad in Italy trying (and failing) to rescue one trapped comrade. The critics were impressed with the writing, but the public may have found it bleak, for it ran three weeks. But
Mister Roberts
(1948) dared to kill off its hero—Henry Fonda, no less—at the close of what was to be called one of the funniest plays of the decade. That is: the audience was led along a path of guiltless and almost implausible fun, then kicked right in the teeth with Fonda’s death. And the show ran nearly three years.

It started as Navy veteran Thomas Heggen’s episodic novel, which then turned into Heggen’s episodic script, in collaboration with Max Shulman. The latter bowed out when Air Force veteran Joshua Logan came on as collaborator and director, with Jo Mielziner’s adroit evocation of a Navy cargo ship a form of collaboration as well. This unit set of the ship’s main deck had to be able also to show action in separate staterooms and support a practical cargo net used for comic effect when most of the crew returned from a drunken leave borne aloft and lowered into view before the audience’s eyes.

The crew’s admiration for Mister Roberts, and his selfless defiance of their sadistic captain on their behalf, are why the show played so well. Yes, it is full of gags, but genuine feelings run through it, because the captain yields to Roberts’ protection of his men at a terrible price: Roberts must stop trying to transfer onto a ship seeing real action
and
treat the captain with respect
and
not let the crew know why. Thus, the captain pulls off the ultimate sadistic stunt, destroying the crew’s trust in the only thing they truly love, Roberts’ heroism.

Fonda’s Doug Roberts became so famous a portrayal (preserved, of course, in Logan’s film version) that it’s odd to relate that David Wayne, who as Ensign Pulver had the show’s main comic role, was originally to have played Roberts. Fonda had been asked, but he was tied up with commitments in Hollywood. However, Fonda was still “theatre” enough to sit in with Wayne on one of the silliest of stage traditions, the (co-)author’s Reading of the Play. Fonda was inspired to postpone Hollywood, and Wayne discovered in Pulver the role that, after
Finian’s Rainbow
’s Og the previous year, would put his career into warp speed, leading on to Sakini in
The Teahouse of the August Moon
(1953) and various folksy eccentrics. (Amusingly, the captain was played by an actor twice related to musical-comedy royalty: he was the son of Edward Harrigan of Harrigan and Hart and Joshua Logan’s brother-in-law.)

Fonda, one of Broadway’s recurring prodigal sons, made a deceptively low-key Roberts, so tightly controlled that he could underline a dramatic statement in the same tone he used in comedy. This is no minor gift in a play that acts like a laff riot until its last ten minutes, for the crew, finally realizing what Mister Roberts gave up for them, covertly arranges for his transfer, then enjoys a letter from their friend, at last on truly useful service at the front. A second letter announces that Mister Roberts fell in action. It is up to Ensign Pulver to become the new Mister Roberts. Furiously throwing overboard the captain’s beloved pet palm tree, he shouts at the captain to come out and fight as the curtain falls: tragedy with a punch line.

The question of acting—the nature of it but also the special nature of the American style—is the theme of this chapter, as it was the theme of the late 1940s, for a number of reasons. One was the acculturation of the Group Theatre’s philosophy, so widespread in the half decade since the Group’s dissolution that the youngest players often absorbed it unknowingly simply by working with and thus learning from their elders. Even actors prominent enough to resist changing their ways could startle with unexpected naturalistic impact—Ralph Bellamy, for instance, in Sidney Kingsley’s
Detective Story
(1949). After years of those blithely under-the-top performances, Bellamy suddenly bit into the part of a self-righteous cop with a furious appetite, and while Hollywood preferred the more apparently psychotic Kirk Douglas for the movie version, it’s refreshing to meet Bellamy off his turf in the first place: in a big-cast, slice-of-life melodrama set within three hours or so in the detective squad room of a New York cop shop.

Or consider the twenty-four-year-old Julie Harris, breaking a five-year series of flops just a few days into the next decade in Carson McCullers’
The Member of the Wedding
(1950). The source was McCullers’ novel about a young girl so enchanted by her older brother’s marriage that she wishes to be not just a “member” of the ceremony but the very content of it: attended to and loved. Critics faulted the show for lack of plot. It was still a novel, they said, beautifully written but short on drive. That’s half empty. Half full is: short on drive but wonderfully enacted, especially by Ethel Waters as Berenice Sadie Brown, the maid who runs the house; Brandon de Wilde as John Henry West, the seven-year-old cousin of Harris’ Frankie Addams; and the roughneck radiance herself. Embarking on one of the last star careers to challenge the great names of the preceding pages, Harris, along with Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, and a few others, would help define the postwar woman lead as more versatile than those who came before. Harris did have something of the old school, however: charm. Who else could play Saint Joan, Sally Bowles, and Emily Dickinson in one lifetime?

Charm was the central energy of
The Member of the Wedding,
and that was plot enough:

BERENICE:
(To John Henry) Now, Candy, how come you took our playing cards and cut out the pictures?

JOHN HENRY:
Because I wanted them. They’re cute.

…

FRANKIE:
We’ll just have to put him out of the game. He’s entirely too young.

(John Henry whimpers.)

BERENICE:…
We gotta have a third to play. Besides, by the last count he owes me close to a million dollars.

Waters was then moving into the senior phase of her voyage, a kind of Bessie Smith and Canada Lee rolled into one. She was taken for granted as being utterly brilliant. Brooks Atkinson was especially impressed by de Wilde, however. “Brandon won all the hearts in the audience,” Atkinson wrote. Even that helping of sauerkraut George Jean Nathan agreed, excepting de Wilde’s diction, for “much of what he mouthed sounded [like] a modern version of
Prometheus Bound
by James Joyce.”

Ironically, Harris—today still famous for this show among many—was not yet fully appreciated. Perhaps she was so at one with the wistful yet rambunctious Frankie that too few credited her creation. Some apparently felt the same way about Judy Holliday’s Billie Dawn in Garson Kanin’s
Born Yesterday
(1946). Atkinson again: “quite wonderful,” which is possibly the understatement of the decade. Is Billie the original dumb blonde in the coming fifties meaning of the term, bubble wrap in the form of Marilyn Monroe and her many simulators? And what would such an invention tell us about how men like their women?

Holliday’s stage career takes in only two straight plays,
Kiss Them For Me
(1945) and
Born Yesterday
(and a City Center engagement of Elmer Rice’s
Dream Girl
), and two musicals,
Bells Are Ringing
(1956) and
Hot Spot
(1963). At that, the first and last of these titles are unknown; Holliday’s reputation stands entirely on the films of the two middle titles. Yet she remains one of our great comediennes, mainly because her innate warmth and intelligence made something special of Kanin’s Pygmalion fable: because Kanin likes his women challenging. His triangle of corrupt money boss and idealistic lefty circling around this same Billie demands that she grow from idiot to Great American Citizen under the lefty’s tutelage.

Oddly, when
Born Yesterday
went out of town, Jean Arthur was playing Billie Dawn. Kanin always claimed that as director of his own plays he saw his job as casting with precision and then keeping his actors from overplaying. But is Jean Arthur anyone’s idea of a dumb blonde or, for that matter, a kept dolly? Try to imagine Jean Arthur delivering these lines, during Billie’s first scene with the man who is to transform her, a writer for
The New Republic:

BILLIE:
I’m stupid and I like it.

PAUL:
You do?

BILLIE:
Sure. I’m happy. I got everything I want. Two mink coats. Everything. If there’s somethin’ I want, I ask. And if he don’t come across—I don’t come across. If you know what I mean.

Kanin may not have been the casting whiz he believed himself to be. In a Broadway story of the day, Kanin tells a friend that, for the money boss, he is seeking “someone like Paul Douglas.” And the friend replies, “Why not get Paul Douglas?”

Kanin did so, and with Gary Merrill as the New Republican and Holliday replacing a supposedly indisposed Arthur,
Born Yesterday
sailed off on a 1,642-performance run. Holliday played most of it, replaced in the fourth and final year by Jan Sterling, but who could follow Holliday’s Billie? She alone enlivened the dumb-blonde trope with a cultural learning curve: Galatea defeats systemic D.C. corruption. In her scornful treatment of Douglas, one could hear her realizing that too much money makes a goon not powerful but simply a larger goon. It’s a Group Theatre perception tucked into a commercial comedy hit.

There were few such acting triumphs in comedy in the late 1940s. Even Henry Fonda’s Doug Roberts was less a comic performance than the Fonda folk hero thrust into a farce. Helen Hayes tried comedy in Anita Loos’
Happy Birthday
(1946) as an aging and resentful lady nerd who enters a saloon and enjoys life-changing adventures. Tryout audiences were resentful, too: Loos had written Hayes too mean. Script revisions softened her and brought in a hit, but not a memorable portrayal. Nor did the Lunts add outstandingly to their portrait gallery in this era. They were still extremely popular, but could find nothing worthy, not even in the stunt roles of
I Know My Love
(1949). Once more in the mode of adapter, S. N. Behrman reworked Marcel Achard’s
Auprès de Ma Blonde
to give Lynn and Alfred the chance to make their entrance as grayhairs, trembling and cringing, thence to undergo flashback and cosmetics to Enact the Backstory. All were ravished, the box office hummed till vacation time, and the play then vanished from conversation and memory.

As for à clef comedy, American celebrity was in transition, making it difficult to write about. Didn’t Arthur Miller’s “talent and the interesting rich” sum up a loop of fame that was becoming a dead end with the passing of the 1930s? The late 1940s was not a Sophisticated time. Moss Hart’s backstager
Light Up the Sky
(1948) attempted (with moderate success) to revive à clef fun in a piece set entirely in the living room of the leading lady’s hotel suite during a Boston tryout. The play in question,
The Time Is Now,
is—to put it mildly—experimental. (It opens in the ruins of Radio City Music Hall after the Bomb has hit New York, and the star, in rags, doesn’t utter a line for the entire first act.) This accords with a traditional Broadway joke, running at least from
Me and Juliet
to
The Producers,
in which people seem to be putting on extremely strange shows. And
The Time Is Now
costs three hundred thousand dollars in 1948 money, very, very rare for a musical and unheard of for a straight play.

Note the pretentious title. It is Moss Hart’s hint that the of course unseen play isn’t very good, and that the people involved with it are fools and tyros. In fact, Hart’s à clef subjects were major people: Gertrude Lawrence; Billy Rose and his wife, Eleanor Holm; Katharine Cornell’s director husband, Guthrie McClintic, seen here as a drippy swish; and even Hart’s tart-tongued mother-in-law, though his wife, Kitty Carlisle, was spared.

Hart gave his characters a disastrous opening night, which provokes a donnybrook from everyone on stage till it turns out that the critics actually liked the show. This now provokes the hypocritical hugs and kisses that Hart wanted to expose, the ugly undertone of the Broadway Melody. A cast headed by Sam Levene and Audrey Christie as the Roses, Virginia Field as the star, Glenn Anders as the director, and Barry Nelson as a gentle young playwright who comes to think of the theatre as “Murder, Inc.” gave
Light Up the Sky
far more energy than the piece has on paper. Still, the genre of Broadway Thru a Keyhole had lost its power even as Walter Winchell himself was about to.
The New Yorker
magazine at least was still good for a spoof. Harold Ross was, anyway: he turned up in both
Metropole
(1949) and Wolcott Gibbs’ semi-confessional
Season in the Sun
(1950), played respectively by Lee Tracy and Anthony Ross, the original Gentleman Caller in
The Glass Menagerie
.