All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (47 page)

In fact, if the novel looks back, the play looks
forward,
to Stonewall. Of course, all Patrick Dennis does: but in a closeted way. The play’s Mame is all but biologically gay. That is, the glamor of Mame includes an inborn tolerance of and even attraction to those born “different,” and the private reality of Mame is made invisible by the presentation of Mame—the clothes, the parties, the dashing-downstairs entrance, the torrent of words that silences opposition. Lawrence and Lee called Mame “a symbol of [the twentieth] century,” and dubbed her a “multi-person”: “From all the recent miracles of communication and mobility, a new kind of human being has emerged.” Thus, modern culture and its flood of information, whether from
Life
magazine or a gossip column, from Hollywood or television, have created a new Sophistication in which the elite know more than such tidbits as Noël Coward is gay and the President has polio. The elite now know a great deal about a thousand topics, and can make a project of any of them, whether child-raising or writing autobiography. The multi-person.

But is Mame a multi-person or simply a drag queen at a party of the different? There’s Vera (Polly Rowles), supposedly Mame’s best friend but a treacherous egomaniac; giggly Ito (Yuki Shimoda) the houseboy; clueless hetero of southern aristo stock Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside (Robert Smith), not eccentric but rich and idiotic; loathsome tyrant of entrenched WASP privilege that finds a symbol in the Knickerbocker Bank, Mr. Babcock (Robert Allen); Mame’s eventual secretary, Agnes Gooch (Peggy Cass); Mame’s literary coach Brian O’Bannion (James Monks), a sulky boy toy. (“His eyes were turquoise blue, rimmed with thick black eyelashes,” says the nephew in the novel. “The second I saw them I thought of a Siamese tomcat.”) It’s interesting that, with all Broadway to choose from, the producers hired journeymen rather than anyone of even secondary note. Of James Monks’ Cassio in the Paul Robeson
Othello,
George Jean Nathan surmised that he “evidently once rowed on the crew in
Brown of Harvard
”; and who was Robert Smith? At least Peggy Cass sprang into fame as the living roadkill Gooch, going on to
A Thurber Carnival
(1960), more of that old-time Sophistication, and television game-show gigs.

So, in all, this play
Auntie Mame
sounds like the other rollicking fifties comedies with a peculiar central figure, just like
No Time For Sergeants
and
The Teahouse of the August Moon
. Why has it outlasted the others? Is it because Lawrence and Lee at times anticipated what would turn out to be the gay sense of humor? This strain of American show-biz jesting has by today taken over as the national style, after wisecrack comedy went through a Jewish phase in the 1960s and ’70s (best exemplified in the work of Neil Simon), and also allowing for an alternative form in the dry satirical style of
National Lampoon, Spy,
and
Saturday Night Live
.

Gay humor is harder to describe than the others, because it mixes the wisecrack with camp interests, the erotic, and above all, the uniquely gay quality of observation and categorization. As we noted in regard to Noël Coward, gays grow up imitating straights out of sheer self-protection. Thus, they learn to identify behaviors, which makes the gay “take” on things larger and smarter than that of most heteros. This is because straights grow up thinking that they’re the default setting for humanity and thus never need to develop observation skills. When, on
Will & Grace, she
offers a characteristic whine and begs him, “Be my crutch,” and
he
counters with “You are so Markie Post in every single Lifetime movie,” the joke draws on categorization (the genre of entertainment offered on Lifetime cable) and observation (of the sort of performer common to the genre). Note, too, that the gag depends on an expert knowledge of show biz, congenital to gay men.

The antecedents of this voice and worldview include Moss Hart and Sophistication in general, “talent and the interesting rich,” Cole Porter and Ethel Merman … and surely Patrick Dennis but especially what the play’s collaborators and Rosalind Russell made of Dennis’ central invention. Some might wonder how much screwball comedy added to the mix; I say it didn’t add at all. It’s a Hollywood form, cautiously coded up, whereas gay humor celebrates the smashing of codes and cautions.

So, of course, does Mame, though we don’t hear a lot of
Will & Grace
in her script. Much of it is sheer character comedy about a character from an alternate universe, as here, awakened by her nephew from a sound sleep:

AUNTIE MAME:
Now be a perfect angel and ask Ito to bring me a very light breakfast: black coffee and a sidecar.

Still, there is the odd feeling that Mame Dennis—single mother, then wife, then grandmother—is teaching fifties America what would later be known as the gay lifestyle, not least in her classic line:

AUNTIE MAME:
Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are
starving
to death!

Yet Mame herself interrupts her banquet to accommodate responsibility when it is thrust upon her. So she
does
like child-rearing: because she doesn’t renounce her destiny to raise Patrick. Patrick renounces his. This is what holds the play together as a story: the conflict erupts when Mame realizes that prep-school life has turned Patrick … well, straight. He dines at Schrafft’s and Disapproves of Live, Live, Live, especially about his aunt’s relationship with housemate O’Bannion:

PATRICK:
(primly) It looks very cozy.

AUNTIE MAME:
For a moment there you sounded exactly like somebody from the Knickerbocker Bank.

That last remark emphasizes the We Versus They of the gay perspective, and one can argue that Mame has in effect recruited for her team, just as the stoopids of the right have imagined. And now Mame must fight to keep her We from sneaking off to They. Mame isn’t only gay: she’s revolutionary.

So, in different ways, were Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. William Inge wasn’t. He takes his place in this chapter, however, not because he Knickerbocker Banked his scripts—he didn’t, in fact—but because his first four fifties plays enjoyed success enough to put him onto the A list with the other two.
Auntie Mame
ran 639 performances, closing because its high running costs needed sellout-or-near business. But Inge’s
Come Back, Little Sheba
(1950) played 190 performances, a fine showing for a truly depressing piece, and
Picnic
(1953) ran 477 performances,
Bus Stop
(1955) 478 performances, and
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
(1957) 468 performances. They were four works on one story, because Inge never wrote a UFO: a strong woman tames a big clumsy fool of a man.

Or so runs the line popular today, as if all Inge were an expansion of that
Merton of the Movies
scene in which the hero breaks down in the heroine’s lap. Sheba, the runaway dog symbolizing the vanished happiness of alcoholic Doc (Sidney Blackmer) and slatternly Lola (Shirley Booth), lends her name to the exception to this rule, for Lola tames no one. But
Picnic
’s Hal Carter (Ralph Meeker) is a sexy beast who gives up the little he has to run off with the town belle (Janice Rule),
Bus Stop
finds show-biz hopeful Cherie (Kim Stanley) cutting raucous cowboy Bo Decker (Albert Salmi) into bite-size pieces, and
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
presents perhaps the classic Inge mating in sensible, anxious housewife Cora (Teresa Wright) and wild Rubin Flood (Pat Hingle), married seventeen years yet by no means Settled In. Moreover, they have two problem children who need much stronger parenting from their reckless father and less spoiling by their mother.

In a way, Inge
was
forever telling the same story: not of woman taming man but of the hopelessness of marriage with men, because every member of the gender is so self-absorbed that he is beyond communication. They’re all wrapped up, like
Sheba
’s Doc. Or they’re cavemen with the names of underground film stars, like the other three. Cora’s sister Lottie (Eileen Heckart) envies Cora; at least Rubin’s a
man
. Lottie’s married to Morris (Frank Overton), the other kind of Inge male, the sexless doormat—most usually the Arthur O’Connell part. Heckart was also in
Picnic,
where she fell on her knees begging O’Connell to marry her, and he agreed to because he didn’t know how to say no.

On the other hand, if Inge’s alpha male can be corralled, he can’t be broken. Rubin Flood charges out of
Dark at the Top of the Stairs
’ first act after whacking Cora across the face, unable to bear her taunting over his girl friend in Ponca City. “Mavis Pruitt is waiting,” Cora tells him, helplessly goading and punishing him. However, like the cavemen’s captain, Stanley Kowalski, Rubin doesn’t take well to challenge. As Elia Kazan staged it, with a near delicacy of violence, the blow occurred offstage. The audience only heard it, then saw Cora reeling backward into view, her hand on her cheek. “T’hell with you!” Rubin shouts as he slams out of the house.

Yes, Kazan. Like Williams and Miller, Inge enjoyed collaborations with prominent directors—one reason why, in the 1950s, no one questioned his membership in a trio of playwrights that no longer has any meaning. (Taking the larger historical view, the post-O’Neill trio is now Williams, Miller, and Edward Albee.) And, remember, both Williams and Miller suffered failure in the 1950s; Inge was the one with four consecutive hits. Daniel Mann directed
Come Back, Little Sheba,
Joshua Logan
Picnic,
Harold Clurman
Bus Stop;
and Kazan’s work on
Dark
epitomized Inge. The writer’s specialty was articulating inarticulate characters, and Kazan’s Group Theatre background enabled him to draw the actors into the parts of their role that couldn’t be expressed in words.

In fact, if Mame Dennis is the multi-person, we might term the typical Inge character the “mini-person,” starving for life’s banquet in a culture with very little there to it. A key illustration is the
Bus Stop
cowboy’s complete inability to hear the European glamor in the heroine’s first name. “Cherie,” to her, is Sophistication. To him, it’s “Cherry,” not because he likes things basic but because he can’t hear the difference between the two any more than he can read Shakespeare. Everyone in Inge is like that, provincial in the sense of uneducated, incurious, intolerant.

Yet Inge finds them sympathetic; had he written
In Cold Blood
it would have been about the Clutters.
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
is set in Oklahoma City in the early 1920s. Add together the troubled Flood marriage, the two problem kids—she’s absurdly shy and he’s a sissy with a collection of movie-star photographs—and pile on Lottie and Morris’ empty mating and one has the play whole. That is, except for one dramatic episode at its center, when the daughter’s date at a country-club dance commits suicide. The apparent cause is an ethnic slur, but in fact the young man is a kind of parented orphan. Unlike the Flood kids, he’s a social whiz—but it’s all a front, because he’s utterly alone and in despair. Is
this
the story that Inge kept telling—that no one gets a banquet out of life, that the best one can hope for is a troubled union with someone who isn’t trying to understand you? Inge shows us the isolation of people in … what, the Midwest? The world? Generally, critics called
Dark
Inge’s best play, perhaps because it most fully reveals his “story”—one that, for him, ended in real life in suicide.
Dark
might also be Inge’s most basic play: he first wrote it in the 1940s, as
Farther Off From Heaven
.

However, following one of this book’s throughlines, I’d say Inge’s best play is a movie,
Splendor in the Grass
(1961), an original with screenplay (and a brief appearance, as a preacher) by Inge and direction by Kazan. The central romantic couple, Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, respect the Inge paradigm of the smart woman and the appealing but clumsy man, though their problems are less of their own than their parents’ making. And Pat Hingle is graduated from
Dark
’s errant but charming husband to Inge’s most spectacular Wayward Male as Beatty’s father, harrowingly deaf to any conversation but his own.

Auntie Mame
and
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,
while opposites in every important respect, typify fifties Broadway at its best: not so much for the chic of the Rosalind Russell star turn or the questing realism of the Kazan ensemble or even for the escapist élan of the one and the unhappy honesty of the other. They show us how well the American stage could enlighten, even as
Auntie Mame
’s “mere” entertainment or
Dark
’s bargain-basement tragedy. Intellectuals love to talk down to Broadway; Mary McCarthy’s review of
The Iceman Cometh
is not showboating but business as usual, on the assumption that anything with a middle-class audience must be meretricious. It’s a form of voguing, as with the teenager who tacks up a poster of Che Guevara.

In fact, this pair of plays sent out a powerful message far ahead of their time: that the unconventional family cell might succeed and the conventional one fail. Mame’s family consists of a nephew, a Japanese houseman, and an Irish housekeeper; when Mame finally marries, the husband is barely on the scene and quickly gone. (He dies in a comic vignette while climbing the Matterhorn, but he rather has to, as there wouldn’t be a place for him in Mame’s improvisatory household.) The Floods are father, mother, daughter, son; yet the whole darn biological thing is broken every which way. Did I mention that the Flood boy, ten years old, still creeps into his mother’s bed at night? When she suggests that he’s too old to do so any more, he says, “I was scared.” Little Patrick Dennis isn’t scared. Is it possible that, accidentally or otherwise, the authors of
Auntie Mame
and
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
were pointing out that the world of Santorum Babittry isn’t as foolproof as it thinks it is?