All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (19 page)

And that’s a paradox of Sophistication. If it was essentially precious and limited, it was necessary to the culture of theatregoing. Western Civilization would be unthinkable without Noël Coward. Worse: uneducated. Gay sensibility is honed to a sharp sense of observation at an early age, because gay adolescents have to watch The Others very carefully, to be able to imitate them and pass. It’s a form of creativity, and tells us why so many gays are artists. But it’s also why gay writers tend to favor list songs or, later on, concept musicals: because as outsiders they can place the content of culture in perspective for The Others to study. That really is what Sophistication was in the 1930s: something as basic as the title song of
Anything Goes
(1934), in which gay King Cole lists the items that make up Modern Times so the average person can catch up.

So the often explicit
Design For Living,
with Coward and his fellow travelers the Lunts, is the key show in this arena. At the time, it was simply the key hit of a disappointing season; the critics spoke of “impeccable,” “delicious,” “audacious,” as if seeing no more than the technical precision of fluff. So expert were these players that one night Alfred and Noël found themselves speaking each other’s lines during the duet drunk scene that closes Act Two. Coward’s stage directions call for the pair to get close on a couch and all but launch a mutual seduction. Were even they aware of how much Sophistication lay behind the comedy, or were they simply enjoying that technical precision? Because, midway through the scene, Otto must hiccup, and Alfred feared that this was too much tech for Noël to finesse his way through. Adroitly sliding from Leo back into his accustomed Otto, Alfred reclaimed the hiccup. Is that all the scene is about?

Among native-born American playwrights, the two prime Sophisticates were Philip Barry and S. N. Behrman. They were born three years apart in the 1890s, but Barry, the younger of the two, died in 1949 while Behrman plays were still being premiered in the 1960s, and he lived till 1973. By now, like that other brand-name playwright of the 1930s Maxwell Anderson, Barry and Behrman have lost much of their respect, though the former at least left a classic behind in
The Philadelphia Story
(1939), and the Barry name itself still denotes something among the literate. Behrman never won a space in the immortals’ parking lot, mainly because he was one of those plotless storytellers who left much of the heavy lifting to charmers such as Ina Claire, Jane Cowl, Katharine Cornell, and Edna Best. The Lunts played for him regularly. Behrman was conversation pieces, but he did have the wit that was Sophistication’s central quality. That and Behrman’s charm divas won him a following.

Barry, on the other hand, ever tested his following by surprising them. Barry’s hits were high comedy: in between, he wrote really quite strange pieces, usually with a religious or symbolic patterning and often suffering failure.
John
(1927), amazingly enough, tells of the Baptist (Jacob Ben-Ami) in the year
A.D.
30, resisting the temptings of Herodias (Constance Collier) and, at last, facing death under the inspiration of the Gospel. It was perhaps just a few years too late for this kind of thing, so successful in the spectacle format, though Barry’s set designer was that wizard of spectacle Norman Bel Geddes.

Barry’s
Tomorrow and Tomorrow
(1931) is more implictly derived. The title of course evokes
Macbeth,
but Barry drew his treatment from the fourth chapter of the Second Book of the Kings, on the tale of Elisha and the barren Shunammite Woman. Discussing the difference between facts (sheer physical data) and the truth (as a humanistic emotional understanding that defies facts), Barry found modern-day equivalents for Elisha’s ability to give life, even to a corpse, though the reviving of the young boy omitted the Bible’s picturesque resuscitation: “and the child sneezed seven times, and the child opened his eyes.”
Tomorrow and Tomorrow,
exceptionally, was a hit, at 206 performances.

More religion:
The Joyous Season
(1934) deals with a nun’s visit to her Boston relatives. Barry wrote it with Maude Adams in mind, in hopes of scoring the coup of the season by luring Peter Pan out of retirement. It was actually a genre of the day—the Booth Tarkington play that Alfred Lunt was in when he married Lynn Fontanne was another would-be Adams vehicle—but in the end Lillian Gish played Sister Christina.
7
Barry’s most spiritual piece of all might be
Here Come the Clowns
(1938), set in Ma Speedy’s Café des Artistes, an adjunct to James Concannon’s Globe Theatre. One may already pick up a taste of Barry’s symbols, and he assured us that he meant them as such. Mystified by doings even more bizarre than those in Barry’s
Hotel Universe
—more of those symbols!—the critics actually revisited
Here Come the Clowns
during its eleven-week run. Lo, the mystery remained veiled: so Barry
himself
reviewed the piece, in the
World-Telegram
. His blurb was ready: “an extremely simple play, as easy to understand and as clear in its meaning as any fable might be.”

So Barry felt most cogent when others found him obscure. Ironically, his most original work lay in those high-comedy hits that no one had any trouble understanding—original because there Barry invented a figure unique in American narrative art. We might call him the Bohemian Aristocrat, a male or female of the leadership class unwilling to live within the class rules. The most memorable example must be Johnny Case of
Holiday
(1928), who confounds his fiancée and prospective father-in-law by proposing to live in wastrel ease on the fortune that he has amassed through lawyering, though he is only thirty years old. To the girl and her father, unorthodox behavior is objectionable
because it is unorthodox
. Persistent rumors about Barry’s sexuality—though he married and raised a family—suggest that he had something in common with Noël Coward: a love of those born Different.
Holiday
’s dramatic interest lies in its typical Barry premise: the guy we like is going to wed a woman we don’t. She doesn’t appreciate the “holiday” in him, his free spirit. Moreover, New York’s favorite real-life debutante actress, Hope Williams, was on the scene—and
she
loved Johnny
because
of what he is.

Less well known than
Holiday
but even more essential Barry on the same theme is
The Animal Kingdom
(1932). Lucky for us, the original production lives on after its 183-performance run in a very faithful screen version, a record of how high comedy played in the early 1930s. The protagonist, Leslie Howard, repeats his stage role of Tom Collier, caught between two women in the usual Barry choice of the social Cecilia Henry (Lora Baxter on stage) and the Bohemian Aristocrat Daisy Sage (Frances Fuller). Note the names—the neutral yet somehow basic and noble Tom Collier. Cecilia Henry is … what? Proud and beautiful, surely. Tom calls her “C.”: “a marvelous object,” “cunningly contrived,” “artful child.” It’s Myrna Loy in the film; she has the looks and she knows the kind, manipulative and without intellect. And who but the radiant Ann Harding as Daisy Sage, too beautiful for what Barry has in mind—a pal, really—but projecting that nobility of soul that in Barry is as necessary as independence in the hero’s makeup? The “Sage” is a tell: she has the wisdom to take on life.

In
Design For Living,
the three leads are innovatively balanced, but in Barry’s world, only two may play. On the other hand,
The Animal Kingdom
isn’t the usual drawing-room thriller in which we watch to see which woman prevails. Something more important is happening: Barry says sex doesn’t matter. He makes it explicit that, after a mad affair, Tom and Daisy ceased to relate erotically while Tom’s attraction to Cecilia is droolingly physical. Indeed, Barry sees sex as the ruination of marriage. The Barry paragon must
admire
his wife; when in rut, he takes a mistress.

Stop the music!
Our classic conservative boulevardier sees adultery as an essential ingredient in a good marriage?
Yes!
And note that Barry is at his most Sophisticated here in siding with the nonconformist (Daisy) against the conventional beauty (Cecilia). Complicating the scene is of course the usual Barry Father—Tom’s—who sides with Cecilia, because they share an obsession about knowing the Right People and doing the Right Things and an utter lack of tolerance for all other people and things.

We want to strangle them—but weren’t many in the audience of 1932 sympathetic to their attitude? Wasn’t Sophistication partly an unpleasant education for the upper middle class, an imparting of revisionist values by one of their own, the “conservative” Barry? Even today, the words “Philip Barry” are a summoning term for that all but vanished American character the well-off WASP. And, yes, Barry wrote of him: but for wistfully revolutionary purposes. Listen as Father Collier reduces his humorous, quizzical, tolerant, and sex-driven son to the two most clueless sentences of the decade. It is the character who is clueless, not Barry:

THE SENIOR COLLIER:
I send him to Oxford, and he commutes from Paris. I put him in the bank and he … (sigh).

Man, you have
Leslie Howard
for a son; don’t you get it? True, men like the Barry Father always respond to power, and Barry sees nature’s best men as somewhat helpless: it’s the women who reign. One wonders what kind of sex a Barry hero and heroine would have, because Barry clearly has given it some thought. He’s not as shy as folks like to believe he is—don’t forget that ambiguous midnight swim that Katharine Hepburn and a reporter (Van Heflin on stage; James Stewart in the film) take in
The Philadelphia Story
. And listen to Daisy Sage when she thinks she has lost Tom forever, in a description that has all the comprehension and savor that Father Collier’s lacks:

DAISY:
He’s so young! All slim and brown and sandy! He’ll always be like that, even when he’s old.

It has the effect of celebrating Howard as boyish delight in tweeds, and reminds us that in Barry—as in almost all of Sophistication—the subject is sex even when it isn’t.

The other two
Animal Kingdom
stage players who made the RKO film with Howard were subsidiary yet interesting. William Gargan plays Red the butler, a former boxer who acts more like a best buddy than a servant. This helps to define Howard’s ease around eccentricity: his nonconformism. It defines Cecilia, too: when she makes Tom fire Red. But Barry twists the plot—it turns out that Red wants to quit, because Tom’s affiliation with intolerance grieves him. The scene in which Red and Tom unhappily dance around the truth while getting drunk is Barry at his best: sharply dressed and good theatrical stuff, but above all honest and touching.

Ilka Chase, the third of
The Animal Kingdom
’s three stage players thought indispensable for the film, presents that ubiquitous thirties character The Unmarried Sarcastic Woman. Here, too, Barry tweaks convention, creating a type half in Cecilia’s world and half in Tom’s. Usually, this character took sides absolutely, as in the Helen Broderick sidekick role; Ilka Chase, as Grace Macomber, is unquestionably Cecilia’s ally but cultivates a penchant for knowing the famous. That attracts her to Tom, a book publisher whose list includes prominent bylines. However, the famous were by this time tending toward independence of cultural conformity. Famous people used to be Mark Twain and William James; now they were the Marx Brothers. One feels that Barry likes Grace and wishes that she had a bit more adventure in her.

Tom will leave Cecilia for Daisy. He must: if he didn’t,
The Animal Kingdom
would be Barry’s comic tragedy. The playwright doesn’t bring his curtain down on the reconciliation, however. As in
Brigadoon
(at least, as it was originally played), we don’t have to see the Girl to know that Boy gets her. More important to Barry is the break with the wrong girl—how it comes about and what it looks like. The senior Collier has attempted to control his son with a check of such vast amount that to let us in on the exact sum would be vulgar. After a bit of drinking before sex, Tom lets Cecilia slink off to the bedchamber (which, by the way, is how she controls Tom: when he thwarts her will she locks the door). But the drinking has cleared Tom’s head. He doesn’t want sex: he wants Daisy. Endorsing the check over to wife Cecilia (who is really his “mistress” of sex), Tom offers Red a ride to town (New York, of course, the world capital of Sophistication) as Tom returns to his mistress Daisy, who of course is really his “wife.” That is, to emphasize this crazy perception, Daisy is Tom’s heroine and idol, the woman he loves rather than the woman he scores.

Now for a star exit. The show’s director (and co-producer, with Howard himself), Gilbert Miller, was so fond of this last bit that when he caught Percy Hammond slipping up the aisle to get a head start on his review, Miller sent Hammond back to his seat. As they staged it, Red leaves first, and Tom pauses to take a final look at the place of his “marriage” to an erotic fribble. Everybody smoked in those days, especially the Sophisticated, so Tom takes a heavy drag, blows out the puff, and walks out. The empty stage is haunted by the character we don’t see—not Daisy, who has her (happy) ending all set. No, it’s Cecilia, waiting in bed for Tom. The endorsed check, sitting on the mantel under a vase, is what we see; it’s what Cecilia is. The library of Tom Collier’s converted farmhouse in Connecticut sits empty for five or six seconds. And the curtain falls.

For his part, S. N. Behrman never attempted anything as meaty as
Here Come the Clowns
or even, really,
The Animal Kingdom
. Behrman’s Sophistication resides entirely in wordplay arising from a conflict of etiquettes—between a society scion and a woman from Downtown, say, or between the honest artist and the prevaricating politician. To the extent that anything of Behrman’s has lasted,
Biography
(1932) is his most lasting title. Or is it
End of Summer
(1936)? Both Theatre Guild offerings for the end-of-summer tantalizer Ina Claire, these plays observe artists and their supporters trying to survive while fascists of the left and right struggle for world control. It sounds like the work of a political writer, perhaps a Robert E. Sherwood. Indeed, it sounds exactly like Sherwood’s Lunts show
Idiot’s Delight
. But Behrman never thought of himself as a political writer. The political like politics; Behrman liked Ina Claire.