All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (46 page)

“Broadway” itself—Broadway the idea—was losing not only real estate and artists but a percentage of its importance as The Great American Place. The dashing, dirty New York of Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, of Sophistication and the Celebrity of Eccentricity, was all but over. True, the Runyon-inspired
Guys and Dolls
flourished, and Sidney Kingsley’s hit comedy
Lunatics and Lovers
(1954), set in Runyonland’s very center, a hotel in the West Forties, presented such Runyonesque studies as the shady nickel-and-dime operator (Buddy Hackett), the amiably corrupt judge (Dennis King), the clueless stooge (Arthur O’Connell), and the usual doxies (Vicki Cummings, Sheila Bond).

On the other hand, the early 1950s saw the beginning of what we might call the war on Walter Winchell—a series of controversies in which no one saw it his way, leading up to Burt Lancaster’s portrayal of Winchell in the film
Sweet Smell of Success
(1957) as a megalomaniac goon. True, the film was not that widely seen, but the point is that, in the 1930s or ’40s, almost no one would have dared cross that line. Now it didn’t matter, and while Winchell was hated, some of this revolt against his power was cultural as well as personal. Winchell and the nation were phht, because Americans had begun to look west for their ideas: from theatre to film, from tradition to a fresh start.

One sees only hints of this in the 1950s, perhaps especially in George Axelrod’s comedy
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
(1955), because its Faustian plot casts the devil (Martin Gabel) as a Hollywood agent and the loser (Orson Bean) who pacts with him as a man in need of Hollywood power. Not long before, Bean would have sold his soul for success as a playwright or novelist, the professions associated with New York. And note that the show’s woman lead was Jayne Mansfield, a rack diva whose
Police Gazette
looks and zany charm characterized the talent that is most comfortable on a sound stage: the opposite of, say, Katharine Cornell.

Note as well that while Mansfield enjoyed playing the eccentric, she wasn’t a thirties eccentric. Another thing that Mansfield was the opposite of was Sophistication: Sophistication was over. There was still a
New Yorker
magazine. There was even
Life,
as ever obsessed with the theatre. But the celebrity of eccentricity had suddenly given way to the celebrity of cool.

Cool was an at first almost indefinably ambiguous state of nonconformity, but its classic moment of self-revelation is that much quoted exchange in the Marlon Brando biker film
The Wild One
(1954). You’ve seen it many times: a girl is dancing with a guy on the left of the frame while Brando, at right, plays air drums on a cigarette machine:

GIRL:
Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?

BRANDO:
Whaddaya got?

Brando’s unaggressive delivery is part of the meaning of cool: affectless, incurious, without a value system to protect and without content to express. Like Brando, the major avatars of Hollywood cool—James Dean, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen—launched their acting careers in New York but could explore the New Detachment of cool only in the art that Hollywood made, the drama of violence or the action adventure. Brando was exceptional among them for his versatility—Shakespeare, a musical (
Guys and Dolls
again; and he did his own singing), the wily yet ultimately wise Sakini in
The Teahouse of the August Moon
. Imagine James Dean in Shakespeare, Paul Newman in a musical, Steve McQueen’s Sakini.

In American acting, the myth of the Great Thespian Who Betrayed the Higher Culture For the Mass Market remains that of John Barrymore. He’s Don Juan, the gay divorcé, Adonis whom the boar slew—anything but an actor. Yet it might be time to transfer that myth to Brando, very like Barrymore in his pranks and irreverence. And surely Brando’s conclusive abandonment of the theatre near the very start of a thirty-year career promotes this cultural shift from New York to Los Angeles. After all, Barrymore did, in
My Dear Children,
return to Broadway for a farewell kiss. Brando never bothered.

Fourteen

My God, That Moon’s Bright:

AUNTIE MAME
AND
THE DARK AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

By the 1950s, Sophistication had devolved largely into the celebrity panelists of
To Tell the Truth,
the song stylings of Mabel Mercer … and the novels of Patrick Dennis. The writer’s career lasted into the 1970s, and his best works arrived in the early 1960s—but the Big One landed in 1955. Sitting on the
New York Times
bestseller list for two years, this book also launched a franchise in theatre and film that raised its central character into the status of national icon: Don Quixote, Peter Pan, and Auntie Mame.

However, the Mame Dennis we know isn’t exactly the one in the novel. A typical Patrick Dennis story surrounds a magnetic yet erratic figure with an assortment of cartoon types, the whole filtered through the viewpoint of a first-person narrator. In
Little Me
(1961), the narrator is the protagonist, a movie star who sleeps her way to the bottom. In
Genius
(1962), the narrator is the more characteristic Dennis onlooker, an intelligent and down-to-earth male of no personal interest to the reader, in contrast to the protagonist, a show-biz honcho down on his luck in Mexico City. In
The Joyous Season
(1964), the narrator is a small child watching his parents break up and reunite. In
Tony
(1966), the narrator is the best friend of the protagonist, an adventurer.

What made Dennis’ work outstanding in its time was his odd jumble of the things that fascinated him—old-money society but also the left-outs who try to crack it; the hustler personality and the way that looks and sexual prowess can create opportunities; the ingrained bigotry and anti-intellectualism of the American bourgeoisie; the way gay folk move freely in and out of the hetero universe unbeknown to most heteros. There is an undercurrent of war in much of this—between the Sophisticated and yahoos, especially—that organizes Dennis’ jumble.

It organizes
Auntie Mame
in particular, because the heroine becomes a crusader, battling self-righteous tyrants of the upper-middle class as she raises her orphaned nephew. He is the narrator, pleasantly vapid and less an actual person in the story than a literary device, even though he is her crusade. It is, however, an episodic one, a string of unconnected happenings.
Genius
tells a suspenseful story,
Tony
has the energy of its ambitiously phony anti-hero, and
Little Me
enjoys the wicked fun of stunt illustrations, composites made of stock shots and character studies with a guileful gay reverberation.

But
Auntie Mame
is essentially a short-story cycle—and it has almost no gay in it at all. That’s odd, because it is one of our classic gay texts. And that is because “our” Auntie Mame isn’t precisely the character Patrick Dennis conceived. When producers Robert Fryer and Lawrence Carr decided to turn the novel into a play for Rosalind Russell, they let Russell direct the transformation in a supervisory way, as any star might do. She would certainly have director approval. Russell wanted Morton da Costa, because he had staged Ira Levin’s
No Time For Sergeants
(1955), from Mac Hyman’s novel, and the result was a two-and-half-year smash. Russell saw symmetry there; now da Costa could turn Dennis’ novel into a smash. Russell may also have noticed that the hillbilly hero of
No Time For Sergeants,
Will Stockdale (Andy Griffith), sees the world in a way nobody else sees it, just like Mame, and—also like Mame—inspires allies and defeats everyone else.

In Russell’s telling, she and da Costa virtually wrote
Auntie Mame
themselves, though Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were the dramatists of credit. In fact, this team did not need any help, having enjoyed their own two-year smash the same year as
No Time For Sergeants
with
Inherit the Wind
. This was a re-creation (using fictional names) of the trial of John T. Scopes, in 1925, for teaching evolution in a public high school. Note how relevant this play of 1955, on a subject from the 1920s, remains today.
1

For Lawrence and Lee’s tintypes of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, as Henry Drummond (Paul Muni) and Matthew Harrison Brady (Ed Begley), represent respectively not merely scientific realism versus religious zealotry but the tolerant left against the book-burning right:

BRADY:
He wants to destroy everybody’s belief in the Bible, and in God!

DRUMMOND:…
I’m trying to stop you bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States! And you know it!

It’s my guess that Lawrence and Lee were hired for
Auntie Mame
precisely because they already knew what Mame is up against: bankers and country-club goons without a lick of culture or socialist compassion.

In any case,
someone
saw in Mame something her creator himself had not seen, because the play’s Mame is a bit like Russell’s Hildy Johnson (in
His Girl Friday
) set into Dennis’ milieu of money and snobs and sex and opportunists. The play’s Mame is not as crazy and angry as the novel’s Mame can be, and—also unlike the Dennis version—she’s reasonable even when she’s being unreasonable. The essential difference between novel and play is that in the former the central figure is a creature of farce, without any consistent reality. In the play, the central figure is Rosalind Russell.

Auntie Mame
was the biggest non-musical production in modern Broadway history (not counting those spectacles we saw closing out their cycle at the Century, the Manhattan Opera House, or the Center Theatre). A great deal of the capitalization covered Russell’s costumes and wigs, not by the evening’s costumer but run up for la star by her fellow Hollywoodite, Paramount’s Travis Banton. Here was probably the greatest wardrobe Broadway ever saw, not rivaled till Robert Mackintosh created a newer line for Angela Lansbury in the musical
Mame
.

As for the sets, Oliver Smith designed the main location, the living room of Mame’s Beekman Place duplex, to contain changeable parts to show the audience where Mame now was in her journey the moment the lights came up. Thus, where art had hung, bookcases now groaned with reading matter when Mame entered her literary period. The living room alternated with shallower big sets (the southern mansion, for example) and small insets at stage left and right.

The 1950s loved adaptations of bestselling novels that created “rollicking” comedies—not the
Life With Father
kind, but sexy, physical, Big Laugh shows with busy scene plots, indeed like this same
No Time For Sergeants
(which included an episode in the air as Andy Griffith and Roddy McDowall parachuted to earth) or
The Teahouse of the August Moon
(which featured the demolition and rebuilding of the eponymous teahouse right on stage). Still, with Lawrence and Lee customizing
Auntie Mame
for Russell, their piece was bound to outhit the lot. It’s odd that so many stars
unlike
Russell prospered in it—Greer Garson as Russell’s replacement; Beatrice Lillie as Garson’s replacement and then in London; Constance Bennett, Sylvia Sidney, and Eve Arden on tour; and Shirl Conway in the first summer-tent itinerary—because they were almost all wrong, too cold or too zany. Lawrence and Lee thought Conway came the closest to Russell. Yet who but Russell knew how important it is, while opening up to one’s public, to keep forty percent to oneself? We have all but
had
Katharine Hepburn or James Cagney, but we never quite collect Russell, and that makes her Mame titanic. What does this person
do
between projects, whom does she bed, what is she thinking? Where do all those crazy clothes come from—such as the evening’s first, a light gray pantsuit under a black Chinese robe intricately embroidered with gold dragons and the like? (Accessories: eighteen-inch bamboo cigarette holder and gold bracelets. Wig: a short black bob with spit-curl bangs from ear to ear. Finishing touch: green fingernail polish. Cost: about equal to ten full productions of
Awake and Sing!
.)

Yet more: why does Mame enter in that getup
dashing
downstairs—because it’s the star entrance or because Mame is always in a rush? To do
what
? She’s a wastrel till her nephew shows up, and even then he’s not unlike one of her projects till he’s (almost immediately) taken out of her hands to attend boarding school. She seems heartbroken, but did this flighty professional bohemian truly welcome the responsibilities of motherhood?

I say we don’t know Russell, but we really don’t know Mame, either, do we? To return to the play through its movie (also with Russell) is to visit a mystery. We salute Lawrence and Lee for selecting episodes from the novel that combine in a linear narrative—Ralph Devine’s progressive school; Mame’s accidental destruction of actress Vera Charles’ play in the tiny role of Lady Iris; the Macy’s job that leads to the southern foxhunt and Mame’s marriage to Beau; Mame’s autobiography and the turning out of Agnes Gooch; the Upsons. Lawrence and Lee made Mame’s “education” of Patrick the throughline that the novel lacks, and let his prep schooling corrupt him so the play would have a problem to solve.

And at the center stands this strange character who revives Sophistication’s celebrity of eccentricity without being a celebrity herself. In the novel, the narrator introduces Mame’s actress pal Vera with a blurb from his chum “Mr. Woollcott”: “‘Vera Charles is the world’s only living actress with more changes of costume than of facial expression.’” Having Alexander Woollcott review Vera Charles—that is, mating reality with fiction—is Dennis’ way of rooting his fun in the Walter Winchell–
New Yorker
magazine–Lunts’ opening-night New York that was nearly gone when
Auntie Mame
opened, on October 31, 1956. The book is an act of nostalgia, but the play makes no attempt to charleston (it begins, like the novel, in 1928) or to negotiate the list song of Names with which Dennis tells us that Mame knows everyone.