All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (44 page)

In fact, so much attention has been paid to the more celebrity-studded episodes of “McCarthyism” that some may not know how much more broadly the theatre felt its impact. It wasn’t just subpoenas and the movie and television blacklist. Outside the northeastern megalopolis, a chill like that of
The Crucible
’s first nighters encouraged all sorts of little tyrants to revive the American tradition of anti-intellectualism. Touring shows never knew when a local bigot might condemn anything more adult than
Abie’s Irish Rose
and call for a boycott. The American Legion and certain religious organizations acted like hate groups, trying to close shows they knew nothing of, because they had “heard something.” At a road performance of
Death of a Salesman
—and this was before Miller was implicated in any way—there was just one person in the auditorium at curtain time. Thomas Mitchell, the Willy Loman and therefore unofficial capocomico, told the stage manager to call places and ring up the curtain, presumably in admiration of that lone spectator’s fortitude.

Worse, Chicago’s mayor, police commissioner, and city council unanimously banned
The Respectful Prostitute,
and made it clear they would have liked to extend the courtesy to
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
Mister Roberts
. One always thinks of Boston as the place of the Mrs. Grundys, but that was mainly because it was such a mainstay of the tryout that the occasional battle with bluenoses made news on The Street. Indeed, “Banned in Boston” was a useful marketing blurb. Chicago was more properly a tour stop, less newsworthy when it closed its gates on a show. The last time anyone in New York noticed such doings was back in the 1930s, when
Tobacco Road,
which might easily have run ten years in Chicago, was forbidden to play.

The atmosphere in the early 1950s was so poisonous that
Mister Roberts
actually was threatened in New York. This was because of a single line, when Ensign Pulver goes off to construct a firecracker, using fulminate of mercury:

ROBERTS:
That stuff’s murder. Do you suppose he means it?

DOC:
Of course not. Where could he get fulminate of mercury?

ROBERTS:
I don’t know. He’s pretty resourceful.

And here comes the terrible line:

ROBERTS:
Where did he get the clap last year?

During the run, Henry Fonda occasionally slipped the cut line back in when a special guest was in the house. Then some woman complained to the police, and they promised to shut the show down if the word “clap” was heard again.

Meanwhile, Elia Kazan felt bound to reply to Miller’s condemnation of informers. Director Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg made their rebuttal in the film
On the Waterfront
(1954), in which the protagonist informs on the leaders of a crooked labor union. Note that, either slyly or coincidentally, Kazan employed Miller’s favorite actor, Lee J. Cobb, as the head mobster, and cast as his hero Tennessee Williams’ favorite actor, Marlon Brando. The latter won an Oscar, but that was the least they could give him, for at this stage of his career Brando’s volatile genius was fixing his roles for us archetypally. He didn’t play characters; he played gods.

And now it was Miller’s turn to reply, in
A View From the Bridge
(1955). Three odd little things first: one, Miller’s continuing his boycott of Kazan by going this time with director Martin Ritt was a reply in itself; two, Van Heflin finally got to play a Stanley Kowalski role, as Eddie Carbone; and, three, this now full-length piece debuted as the longer part of a double bill, with the now forgot
A Memory of Two Mondays
.
5
In
A View From the Bridge,
the informer is not only a villain but one motivated by personal animosity: Eddie turns in two illegal aliens, brothers from Italy who have been staying with his family. One of them (Richard Davalos) has charmed Eddie’s niece (Gloria Marlowe, earlier that year an ingenue in the musical
Plain and Fancy
), for whom Eddie bears incestuous feelings. Eddie’s anonymous tip to Immigration defies parish ethics, and in retaliation Eddie is murdered by the older brother (Jack Warden).

But hadn’t Miller already
defended
the informer in his own adaptation (from a plain-English translation) of Ibsen’s
An Enemy of the People
(1950)? Fredric March played Stockmann, a lone honest man who takes on his community in publicizing findings that a lucrative local industry is a danger to public health. Isn’t Stockmann the original informer? The whistle-blower? And isn’t he not only Ibsen’s but Miller’s hero?

Robert Lewis directed, in case you were wondering; still, this is the Age of Kazan, one in which Broadway enjoyed the freedom to delve deeply, grandly, into emotional territory once thought too dangerous. The “overwrought” Kazan style was simply an honesty in treating matter heretofore written dishonestly: in euphemisms and evasions. “Decadence” was the attack word used by those unprepared for Williams’ innovative realism. Miller, too, occasioned frowns for his “preaching.”

Is that how
The Crucible
’s first-night audience put it—“preaching”?—as it icily exited the Martin Beck Theatre? Ironically,
The Crucible
is now Miller’s most popular work, a timeless classic of that old standby, good versus evil. And
A Streetcar Named Desire
is Williams’ masterpiece. The two plays point back to the most influential development in American stage, the Group Theatre, which instituted the drama of social inquiry as naturalism and taught the New Acting to stimulate playwrights to elicit from that form rich statements on how we live as a society.
Streetcar
is the work that proclaimed the acting (in an apolitical context), and
The Crucible
the work that “demonstrated” social drama (despite an underpowered acting team).

And of course “McCarthyism” overwhelmed the era; yet we might edge out of that American Dreyfus Case on a neutral note. Let us return to
Streetcar,
where the worst thing that can happen to those who are “different” is rough sex with Marlon Brando. I tell you a tale known to lore, given to me by the stage manager of one of the tours. The show was nearing its closing dates, and the leading actors were unwilling to throw away any more leisure on radio interviews for PR, and even the secondary characters like the poker players and Eunice, the hard-bitten yet wise upstairs neighbor, just wanted to finish the tour and get back to their lives in New York. At the last stop or so, everyone said no, so the actors playing the doctor and nurse who come in during the play’s last minutes were hustled off to the radio station to promote the booking.

Does anyone remember how these two are billed in the program? They are called A Strange Man and A Strange Woman, so that playgoers scouring the dramatis personae would not be tipped off to Williams’ grisly end, as Blanche is led off: because Stanley wills it, and Stella’s job description is to will what Stanley wills.

Actually, “hustled” is not the right word, for, never having had radio time before, the Doctor and Nurse were keen. The interviewer established for the listening audience the play’s title, author, and producer (who was, after all, the daughter of the third letter in MGM), and asked his guests about the subject of the play.

The man of the pair leaned eagerly toward the microphone, his Moment at hand. “Well,” he began, “it’s about this doctor…”

Thirteen

End of the Empire:

THE EARLY 1950
S

Is it possible that Tennessee Williams’ success encouraged producers to look upon unusual projects as not only viable but more commercial than conventional pieces? For an unusual number of plays in the early 1950s are as quirky, daring, and bizarre as anything that Williams had revealed.

Perhaps Mary Chase’s
Mrs. McThing
(1952) was no more than quirky, but this fantasy in which a snobby plutocrat and her son are replaced by duplicate “sticks” and sent to Shantytown to labor and learn humility was the sort of thing that producers routinely rejected as too grotesque to succeed. Surely it got on only because ANTA
1
president Helen Hayes accepted the piece for ANTA’s experimental theatre program
and
played the mother. (Not the title role: Mrs. McThing is the witch who creates the sticks.) At that, Hayes scheduled a brief limited engagement that was extended to 350 performances when good notices revealed that grotesque can be charming. Along with Brandon de Wilde as Hayes’ son, the show boasted the goofy Shantyland gang of Ernest Borgnine, Fred Gwynne, Iggie Wolfington, Irwin Corey, and mob boss Jules Munshin. (All but Borgnine made at least one major appearance in a book musical, respectively
Angel, The Music Man, Flahooley,
and
The Gay Life
.) Hayes and de Wilde enjoyed dual roles, playing their own sticks; Mrs. McThing herself called for two actresses, the first as Crone in Wicked Witch of the West kit and the second as Fairy, a beauty in pink lighting.

Williams’ own
Camino Real
(1953) was certainly bizarre, a chowder of archetypes (Casanova, Camille, Lord Byron, Kilroy, Don Quixote) served up in an unspecified sector of Latin America. Elia Kazan directed a huge cast in an exciting but incoherent evening that nevertheless lasted 60 performances, astonishing after largely blistering reviews. But then, early-fifties theatregoers at times seemed theatre-mad, supporting, if for only two months, almost anything.

For instance, they were attending one-person shows as never before—Emlyn Williams’ Dickens readings in Dickens makeup (1952, then in a program devoted to
Bleak House
in 1953);
An Evening With Beatrice Lillie
(1952); Danish pianist Victor Borge’s
Comedy in Music
(1953);
Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure
(1955), with bit players.

Let us notice one in particular,
Paris ’90
(1952). It was daring, or something: Cornelia Otis Skinner would evoke la belle époque in a pride of monologues, complete with set and costume changes, a small chorus, songs and incidental music by Kay Swift, and sizable orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett. It was, in effect, a good-sized musical with a cast of one; who would go? The monologues, written by Skinner, opened a lavish gallery that only the most protean impersonator could paint in—diseuse Yvette Guilbert in a re-creation of her Toulouse-Lautrec; a visiting Boston schoolteacher (with the Boston “r”) who suffers a terrifying contretemps with her traveling companion; a laundress; an angel statue in a niche of Notre-Dame; a Lady of Fashion in her coach, to the clopping of hooves. “She is looking so well since her suicide,” she says of one acquaintance, and “Woman’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.”

Skinner herself was a bizarre item, one who could flourish in such rarefied entertainment only in this little age; any other would call
Paris ’90
, ungratefully, self-indulgent. The daughter of the illustrious Otis Skinner, Cornelia was the Junior League with greasepaint—a lady who lunches, but with Colette. Skinner had long been a monologuist of note, but when she finally tried a real play, in
Theatre
(1941), the critics rediscovered and fell in love with her. The work of that tireless adapter Guy Bolton and Somerset Maugham, from Maugham’s novel,
Theatre
—which later provisioned the Annette Bening film
Being Julia
—is obsessed with the devastating charm of its heroine. No one less than an Annette Bening dare take the role. And the critics thought
Theatre
“as phony as the twenty-five-cent watches sidewalk pitchmen peddle” and even “frankly trash.” It can’t be easy to win valentines as the protagonist of such a piece, yet Skinner did. And
Paris ’90
actually played 87 performances. This woman must have been quite something: but her career was spotty and is now obscure. Her father is still recalled for his showpiece,
Kismet
. His daughter is recalled for her father.

Quirky, daring, and bizarre was
Mrs. Patterson
(1954). Naturalism containing fantasies, and a straight play with half a dozen songs, it was produced by Leonard Sillman as a follow-up vehicle for the most emerged of his New Faces of 1952, Eartha Kitt. Charles Sebree and Greer Johnson wrote the script, about an adolescent in Kentucky in 1920 who spends her time playing blackjack for matchsticks and weaving dreams, of both local white society and the black high life in Chicago. The fantasies actualized these dreams, as young Teddy (Kitt, of course) served tea to Mrs. Patterson (Enid Markey, Jane in the first
Tarzan
movie, in 1918) and three belles; or conjured up the devil (Avon Long) to learn of Chicago ways.

It was an unplotted atmosphere piece, very much like
The Member of the Wedding
but without Carson McCullers’ wonderful ear.
Mrs. Patterson
really brightened up only in the song spots. (Helen Dowdy, as Chicago blues mistress Bessie Bolt, got one; Kitt had the other five.) From the swinging “If I Was a Boy” through the lazy jazz of “Tea in Chicago” to the slithery shuffle of “My Daddy Is a Dandy,” composer-lyricist James Shelton gave the evening a variety of not plot numbers but specialty spots. Indeed, he didn’t even try to fit “Be Good, Be Good, Be Good” into the show proper: after the bows, Kitt changed out of her sharecropper’s cotton into cabaret red and offered the song as an encore. That
Mrs. Patterson
lasted 101 performances testifies to Kitt’s star power, but also to the prevailing love of novelty.

Most daring of all were the large number of plays dealing in part or whole with gay material. What is Herman Melville’s
Billy Budd
about—at least overtly, above the religious subtext—but the villain’s physical idolization of the hero? To make certain that everyone got the point, Louis O. Coxe and R. H. Chapman’s adaptation cast a Big Blond Boy, Charles Nolte, in the title role, first in an ANTA showcase as
Uniform of Flesh
(1949), then on Broadway as
Billy Budd
(1951). The usual Clueless Heteros could protect themselves from considering exactly how the Claggart, Torin Thatcher, viewed Billy by reminding themselves that Melville is a Classic. And Classics aren’t about the Beautiful Male. Classics are … uh, classic. But even Euripides proved troublesome, in an off-Broadway staging of Robinson Jeffers’ version of
Hippolytus
called
The Cretan Woman
(1954). This time, the hero resisted Phaedra because he preferred men; another hunk, William Andrews, bedecked in shorts, sandals with leatherman calf rigging, and a backflung cape, authenticated the sensuality.