All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (24 page)

That little picture essay of leisure among the gifted was as close as the ungifted curious might get in those days, except in à clef theatre. This form was Broadway’s version of celebrity journalism, making plays out of the famous while veiling them in pseudonyms.
Revelry
(1927), by
Chicago
’s author, Maurine Watkins, dealt with the oil-land swindles that created President Warren G. Harding’s Watergate, “Teapot Dome” (after one of the grifted sites, in Wyoming; the other two were Elk Hills and Buena Vista, both in California).
Spellbound
(1927), an English play banned in England, recalled the sensational trial of a woman and her young lover, who killed her old dud of a husband; and
The Song Writer
(1928) was Irving Berlin, courting his debutante, Ellin Mackay.

There were other such titles; we have toured a few already. Though not as precisely delineated as a scandal bomb detonated in Winchell, the à clef piece functioned rather like celebrity appearances on television talk shows today. The behavior may be scripted and even wholly misleading: but it
is
contact. Certainly, the Spewacks might have written
Boy Meets Girl
as another Hollywood spoof without heaving heard of Hecht and MacArthur. But who would have conceived of
The Royal Family
if the Drews and Barrymores hadn’t already existed? That play is
made of
Drews and Barrymores.

Was it a breakthrough of some kind when boxer Jack Dempsey himself appeared in
The Big Fight
(1928)? Vaudeville had long been a stopover for notables of various kinds trying show biz, usually on their way down.
The Big Fight,
however, was Big Broadway, a David Belasco staging at the vast Majestic that climaxed with a bout at Madison Square Garden. The champ was no actor, though as pugilist “Tiger” Dillon he could not be called miscast. But what role would be right for Alexander Woollcott? None: and that didn’t stop producer-director Guthrie McClintic from putting Woollcott into S. N. Behrman’s
Brief Moment
(1931). In this typical Behrman farrago, socialite (Robert Douglas) marries nightclub singer (Francine Larrimore), provisioning a disquisition upon class as it obtains among the
gratin
of New York’s cultural scene—Arthur Miller’s “talent and the interesting rich” at its most basic.

Behrman’s script description of the Woollcott character, Harold Sigrift, specifically describes Woollcott and even says—no doubt waggishly—that Woollcott “conceivably might play him.” But it is inconceivable. Woollcott an actor? On the contrary, Behrman later called him “one of the busiest nonactors in the country,” what with his
New Yorker
column, various freelance one-offs, and his radio show as the Town Crier. Note that title, comparable to the post that Winchell held, for on one level gossip about celebrities made the national public into a sort of media village in which, instead of everyone’s knowing everyone else, everyone knew
about
everyone else. About, that is, everyone else who mattered.

Brief Moment
was another à clef piece, “suggested,” Brooks Atkinson thought, “by a recent episode in New York life” involving Otto Kahn’s son Roger Wolfe Kahn. As always with Behrman, there was something to praise and something to deplore. The same old things, really: “the subtlety of [his] intellect, the freshness of his wit” drew praise from the
Sun
’s Richard Lockridge, who went on to deplore Behrman’s “almost complete lack of any real dramatiic sense.”

In fact,
Brief Moment
squeaked into the black only because people came to see Woollcott. Not only a nonactor but a terrible one, he lolled about, waved a pudgy arm, and spoke to the audience rather than to his fellow players. Arthur Pollock thought him “a fat Greek chorus.” It didn’t matter: he was Alexander Woollcott, on display in full true—for of course Behrman knew his star well enough to unveil him just as he was. Note how closely Behrman’s Harold Sigrift anticipates Kaufman and Hart’s Sheridan Whiteside, also modeled on the real-life noise of Woollcott. Hero Roderick Deane claims to have found in his club singer an energizing force, a palliative to his round of personal failures in the field of music, aviation, fine art:

SIGRIFT:
Will the prima donna of the Hotsy Totsy change all that?

RODERICK:
I don’t say she will.… She may turn me down flat. (Sigrift just whistles) Well, she may!

SIGRIFT:
If she turns you down, my blossom—then I’m Skippy.

RODERICK:
She’s lovely.… She’s unspoiled by civilization.

SIGRIFT:
Unspoiled by it? She hasn’t encountered it yet.

Brief Moment
undoubtedly would have failed without its virtual thespian, but Behrman waited six seasons before inviting Woollcott back to the stage—this time
expecting
his guest to accept—for
Wine of Choice
(1938). Woollcott duly appeared. Such stunts rarely support sequels, however, and this time fewer ticketbuyers responded.

Anyway, the à clef piece is supposed to present copies of its subjects. It doesn’t do to have the subjects themselves breaking through the fourth wall from that Neverland they call reality. Copies are reassuring; copies can act. Better, copies don’t suddenly decide, right in the middle of the run, when director Guthrie McClintic is otherwise engaged, to emulate their dear friends the Lunts by throwing lines away to achieve the Higher Sophistication, unfortunately without the Lunts’ expertise in vocal projection.

Even if the subject has presence, isn’t the point of these charades to
game
with the truth? They’re variations on a theme. What if Walter Winchell played himself on stage—as he did in a few movies? Hollywood can handle Winchell; movies are made in Neverland. But a theatrical Winchell was far more welcome digested, dramatized, and impersonated: in
Blessed Event
(1932). This comedy told of Alvin Roberts (Roger Pryor), a gossip columnist who invents slang and foretells to the day when prominent women will give birth. “Blessed event” was a Winchell idiom, and some of the critics called him the play’s real star. One review thought Pryor made Winchell “both believable and likable,” going on to “And that, if you know your Alvin Roberts, is no mean achievement.”

The play’s two unknown authors were not presumed to have had the exposure to their model that Behrman had to Woollcott. But everyone in America knew what Winchell sounded like: a raspy voice barking out The Column. In short: Lee Tracy, show biz’s official brash newspaperman. Playing Alvin Roberts in Warner Bros.’
Blessed Event
movie, rushed out within months of the play’s closing, Tracy warns a hospital nurse, “I want the names the very minute they book the room!”

Surely the real Winchell worked through subordinates. What’s authentic about the various versions of Winchell that decorate theatre, film, and lit in the 1930s especially is the atmosphere of New York one-upmanship. Where Winchell goes, wisecrack follows, not only from the master but from all around him, for in a Winchell world everyone wants to be Winchell:

ALVIN:
Do you know how many Jews there
are
in New York?

HIS SECRETARY:
(dryly) There must be dozens.

Doesn’t that remind us exactly of the byplay between columnist John Lithgow and
his
secretary (Joanna Glushak) in the aforementioned musical
Sweet Smell of Success
—another study of Winchell?

We should note as well
Shooting Star
(1933), the life of Jeanne Eagels, though management denied it. Another pair of unknown writers told of Julie Leander (Francine Larrimore), who, inspired by Duse’s Camille, deserts husband and child and sleeps with a producer not unlike Sam H. Harris to win the role of Carrie Smith in one of those East of Suez jobs,
Port of Call
. That is: the role of Sadie Thompson in the Sam H. Harris production of
Rain
—and Larrimore’s
Port of Call
costume in a dressing-room scene re-created Eagels’
Rain
getup. The new star wows Broadway and the road in
Port of Call
for four years, just as Eagels did in
Rain
. The twisty plot veers from the Eagels saga to pair Larrimore with a
Brief Moment
esque socialite for whom she gives up the stage; but he deserts her and she dies the customary death.

Shooting Star
was something of an epic, with a huge cast, plenty of scenery, and a plot so busy that the critics generally admitted to having missed the last two or three twists to go off and write it all up, filled with misgivings. In fact, the show followed Eagels’ true tale so closely that the reviewers confidently guessed that Larrimore reached a finale of devolution on booze and drugs. Thus the title contains an unforgivably sordid pun; but there was a sunny bit in that Larrimore’s own children Tyke and Tuppence alternated in a touching cameo as Leander’s offspring.

The work that put the most celebrities on view was a musical,
Jubilee
(1935): what if the king, queen, prince, and princess of a place not unlike England ran off with, respectively, Elsa Maxwell, Johnny Weissmuller, Noël Coward, and, say, Ginger Rogers? That last character is indistinctly inscribed, but Maxwell, Weissmuller (at first in a wolfskin loincloth), and Coward are unmistakably on hand, characterized—once again, for this is crucial—by writers who partied with them.

Jubilee
was a sort of musical-comedy version of The Column, an exposé of the celebs who attend eccentrically themed balls and sleep around and conquer the dance floor during the beguine (who but a celeb even knew how to dance it?) and get into mischief on a public beach.
Jubilee
’s authors, Cole Porter and Moss Hart, agreed with Walter Winchell on one thing if no other: even celebs want to know other celebs. “I’ve
turned
on singers,” the Porter-Hart Elsa Maxwell avers, dismissing the very notion of Grace Moore. But she hasn’t, really: no celeb turns on another without some intense personal reason, because American fame is a zany heaven where the only morality is the act of what we might call celebrifying: whereby fame creates more fame, inducting new recruits and toning up the veterans. Winchell and his fellow columnists celebrified in scandal and the discovery of talent,
Life
magazine in showing the faces, and Porter in the list song. Hart celebrified by concocting stories about the joyous perquisites of fame but also about the depression that seizes those denied them. Hart’s most typical writing is carefree
Jubilee;
his most important writing is
Lady in the Dark
(1941), a musical about a magazine editor suffering a nervous breakdown who thinks her problem is a lack of glamor. It isn’t. Her problem is the only problem anyone has: one parent disdained her and the other parent enabled the disdain. The Lady’s problem is thus a lack of self-belief. But in American culture, fame
is
self-belief; one doesn’t need anything else, not even supportive parents. To be able to celebrify is power. To be celebrified is to be loved: to enter the light.

Moss Hart was perhaps even more the Town Crier than Alexander Woollcott, for it was Hart who made American art out of American celebrity. Most of his work is haunted by these characters who show us what the famous do, how they feel, and—most important—how we feel when they like us. We are celebrified, like the lady in the dark whose dream of love is marriage to a movie star. All looks and no content, this Hollywood fantasy has a fantasy name, Randy Curtis, and was originally played by Victor Mature, whom David Thomson has described as “simple, crude and heady.” Yet the era-defining celeb was usually complex, polished, and of a direct appeal—not a Hollywood fantasy but a real-life one. Someone whose restless attention spans and urgent caprices explain the superiority of being Different. One of the reason the 1930s is filled with screwballs as well as wisecrackers is that both types Get Away With It.
The Women
’s Mary Haines has to give up her pride to win back her husband; had Clare Boothe made Mary a wisecracker, she wouldn’t have lost him in the first place.

Moss Hart thus doesn’t waste our time with “normal” celebs, second of all because he only invented Randy Curtis to demonstrate the irony of the lady in the dark’s romantic longings, and first of all because there were no normal celebs. (Indeed, the lady finally realizes that the man she loves isn’t prominent or glamorous at all, but simply her irritatingly masculine managing editor, a rufftuff in a suit.) When men other than Moss Hart wrote musical revues, they homed in on human foible or the news of the day. When Moss Hart wrote
As Thousands Cheer
(1933), he filled it with notables to be impersonated by the show’s stars, Marilyn Miller, Clifton Webb, Helen Broderick, and Ethel Waters. These four (and a few featured players) presented Joan Crawford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the Rockefellers, Mahatma Gandhi, Aimee Semple McPherson, Josephine Baker, Herbert and Lou Hoover (on White House moving-out day), and even King George V and Queen Mary, who confront the Prince of Wales after reading that he’s engaged … in Walter Winchell’s column!

Americans can be defined as a people who idolize nonconformist behavior in public figures while hating it in their neighbors. We applaud, say, an Alexander Woollcott, with his la-di-da arrogance, flowery effusions, and ruthless put-downs; but we don’t want him doing it in our living room. So, muses Moss Hart, what happens when Alexander Woollcott actually
gets into your living room
? We know it was Hart’s idea because he got first billing in his and Kaufman’s
The Man Who Came To Dinner
(1939), in which Woollcott, as the great and terrible Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Woolley), terrorizes the Stanley family and various other citizens of Mesalia, Ohio. It’s a classic premise for farce, as a constant series of irruptions into the action by major and minor characters maintains a Feydeauvien energy. Any good writing team could get a play out of it, framed by Whiteside’s being cooped up with the Stanleys because he broke his hip on their icy doorstep and, in the show’s final seconds, does so again and is carried back inside amid the customary bedlam as the curtain falls.