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Gays on Broadway
Gays on Broadway
ETHAN MORDDEN
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Ethan Mordden 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mordden, Ethan, 1947- author.
Title: Gays on Broadway / Ethan Mordden.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022040741 (print) | LCCN 2022040742 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190063108 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190063115 |
ISBN 9780190063122 (epub) | ISBN 9780190063139
Subjects: LCSH: Gay theater—United States—History. | American drama—20th
century—History and criticism. | Gay men in literature. |
Theater—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC PN2270. G39 M67 2023 (print) | LCC PN2270. G39 (ebook) |
DDC 792.086/640973—dc23/eng/20221121
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040741
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040742
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190063108.001.0001
Portions of the section on Company in Chapter Seven first appeared in the author’s blog,
Cultural Advantages, on August 22, 2015.
Illustrations courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, the New York Public Library For
the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations; and private collections.
Contents
This is a chronological review of both the plays and the people that
brought the world of homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals,
metrosexuals, and the sexually fluid to the American stage.
The plays—which take in a few foreign imports—treat strong gay
content (e.g., The Boys In the Band or The Killing Of Sister George),
or minor gay content (Season In the Sun, The Nervous Set), or even
a phrase in passing (as in New Faces Of 1956’s joke about Rome’s
Piazza Di Spagna, so niche that perhaps fifty people got it during the
show’s six-month run).
I have included as well plays that portray gay through dog
whistles (such as Bell, Book and Candle, in which the witches are
really gay people) and even plays whose sense of parody or outright
camp (such as Little Mary Sunshine or Johnny Guitar) are at least
gay-adjacent.
As for the people in the book—writers, actors, creatives—I have
included profiles of some who, though gay, had little interest in
portraying gay lives—Edward Albee, for example, even as his
influence not as a writer about gay but rather as a writer who is gay
was extremely broad, so conclusive that he takes pride of place at
the end of this volume. These so-to-say pre-Stonewall eminences—
actor-manager Eva Le Gallienne is another one—are as much a part
of the chronicle as such overtly gay-in-content writers as Terrence
McNally.
Consider the case of lyricist-librettist John Latouche, whose work
ranged from black folklore (in Cabin In the Sky) to Greek myth (in
The Golden Apple) to silent-era Hollywood (in The Vamp), all “sexy”
topics that never even glance at gay culture yet resound with the
colorful doings that gays in particular respond to. One could argue
that Latouche’s chromosomes enabled his very agile imagination and
love of the picturesque.
I make no attempt to include every relevant reference. Rather, I
have tried to cover every type of gay activity, even if with but one or
two examples. There isn’t room for it all. Readers who feel important
titles or people have been slighted should consider writing their own
books, as the field is still wide open and could use some company.
Live and let live.
1
The 1910s and 1920s
Shadowland
Like many great events, it all starts with drag queens. This may
seem an implausible concept for early in the twentieth century, given
the antagonism that gay men and women* have faced in their fight
for visibility and civil rights. However, the many single-gender private
schools of the day and their robust dramatic societies habituated
Americans to men playing women and women playing men. Further,
there was a popular genre of plays specifically calling for a male
character forced against his will to disguise himself as a woman.
There was even a classic in this line, a British comedy constantly
performed here especially by amateur groups, Brandon Thomas’
Charley’s Aunt (first seen on Broadway in 1893), which proved hardy
enough to turn into a hit musical, Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley?
(1948), starring Ray Bolger and running for two years.
No, it isn’t quite Drag Queen Planet. Still, that same “man
pretends to be a woman despite himself” premise was the standard
plot for America’s most prominent (of several) drag actor—or, as
they were styled then, “female impersonator”: Julian Eltinge. His
form was musical comedy (or plays with a handful of songs, a
common format around 1900), and his approach to drag delineated
the impersonation so deftly in both grooming and behavior that
some in the audience took him for a biological woman and were
startled when, in his curtain call in drag, he would tear off his wig
with a grin.
Eltinge was equally persuasive when playing male characters as
well, which is what made him so successful: his shtick, really, was
how totally he transformed from man to woman and back and forth
thus all evening, because his men were virile and his women tender.
In Charley’s Aunt, the joke is that the female impersonation is
deliberately grotesque yet fools the other characters completely.
But Julian Eltinge emphasized the illusion, even when he sang.
Starting in vaudeville, he reached Broadway in 1904, in a British
import, Mr. Wix Of Wickham. This was a major production, put on by
Edward E. Rice, one of the founding fathers of the American musical,
as composer and impresario. In fact, Rice cowrote and produced the
first American show with a full-scale and largely integrated score,
Evangeline (1874).†
Eltinge always moved in grand company. He was close with
George M. Cohan and other Broadway bigwigs, and A. H. Woods,
Eltinge’s manager (the old term for “producer,” though “agent” was
sometimes part of the job as well), was one of the powers of the
theatre industry. The original of the brash hondler who calls
everyone “sweetheart,” Woods actually built a playhouse in his star’s
honor, the Eltinge Forty-Second Street Theatre, in 1912. ‡ And after
his years as a boldface stage name, Eltinge moved to California to
go Hollywood, starring in silent films in his usual gender-bending
approach and building as Villa Capistrano a mad showplace on
Baxter Street in Silver Lake. A cross between Spanish Mission and a
fortress, it was four stories high and perched on a hill with a
CinemaScope view of the lake. Here was a very tower of fame,
though the surrounding greenery made the structure nearly invisible
from the street.
So Eltinge was big, supposedly the highest-paid actor of his
generation—yes, a drag queen. True, his public profile accented
cigars, boxing, and such. And his offstage photos revealed a chunky,
amiable, middle-class guy, perhaps an insurance broker: nothing like
the slithery, sarcastic performers famed in drag today. Open Daniel
Blum’s Great Stars Of the American Stage (1952), devoting two
pages to each subject, with a kind of yearbook precis and stills in
and out of costume, and there’s Eltinge rowing a canoe, flanked on
either side by beauties of the day in elaborate costume—belle
epoque, schoolgirl, pour le sport, matronly . . . and they’re all
Eltinge, too! (The shot was made through double exposure, the CGI
of its time.)
Ironically, none of Eltinge’s four Broadway shows ran very long on
The Street, though they did fine business on the road, making
Eltinge a truly national celebrity. After Mr. Wix Of Wickham came The
Fascinating Widow (1911), The Crinoline Girl (1914), and Cousin
Lucy (1915). The major title in the set, the Widow, found Eltinge as
two-fisted Hal Blake, forced to masquerade as a certain Mrs. Monte
in order to expose a Society Cad and win the heroine. The score
favored Eltinge’s drag ID, complete with entrance number (“The
Fascinating Widow”), a beach ditty with the chorus girls in swimming
togs (“Don’t Take Your Beau To the Seashore”), and the de rigueur
rhythm piece (“The Rag Time College Girl”), among other numbers.
Note, again, a collaboration with a theatre hot shot: though the
music was by the unimportant Frederick W. Mills, the book and lyrics
were the work of Otto Hauerbach (later Harbach), mentor of Oscar
Hammerstein II and a major writing partner of Jerome Kern.
Now for the $64,000 question: was Eltinge gay? Of course, there
were rumors, based for all we know on nothing—but Eltinge was a
lifelong bachelor, then as now a curiosity. Straight men tend to
marry.
Meanwhile, there was an openly gay drag artist, one who—unlike
Eltinge—reveled in the campy rebellion of the male who is a queen
and wants the world to know: Bert Savoy. Also unlike Eltinge, Savoy
did not fit easily into story shows, having too much distracting gay
baggage for the boy-meets-girl tales of the day. Rather, Savoy
specialized in the “sophisticated” Broadway revue—the spectacular
Miss 1917 (coproduced by Florenz Ziegfeld) and the modest but
chichi Greenwich Village Follies, in 1918, 1920, and 1922.
These variety shows allowed Savoy to work within a self-
contained act. Using a “feeder”—in this case “straight man” Jay
Brennan—Savoy would flounce about in fifi getups, so drag in the
modern “flaming” sense that if gay hadn’t already existed, Bert
Savoy would have had to invent it.
Savoy had two catchphrases that gained a national presence,
quoted even by folks who had no idea who Bert Savoy was or why
anyone would address someone as “Dearie.” One was “You don’t
know the half of it, dearie, you don’t know the half of it.” The words
moved into popular song in George and Ira Gershwin’s Lady, Be
Good!, in “The ‘Half Of It, Dearie’ Blues,” conjured up for Fred
Astaire with rampageous tap breaks between the lines.
Savoy’s other catchphrase achieved even larger circulation, as it
offered Mae West the matrix for her famous “Come up and see me.”
The original version, Bert Savoy’s, was “You must come over!,”
pronounced with a louche lilt of delight, hand on hip and eyes afire
with mischief: “You mussst come over!” This line, too, found its way
into song, as Lewis E. Gensler, B. G. De Sylva, and Ira Gershwin
again seized on the fad in a semi-hit musical of 1925, Captain Jinks,
with “You Must Come Over Blues.”
Central to Savoy’s act was his recounting of the adventures of his
forever unseen gal pal Margie. A typical episode might take off with
a blatant double entendre, thus:
SAVOY: I’ve a new recipe for homemade candy. Oh, it’s all the rage—
all-day suckers! You mussst come over!
BRENNAN: You were telling me about your friend Margie.
SAVOY: Oh, that Margie! Always some new calamity! Why, just last
week she and her beau went to the movies to spark in the
balcony. All the kids do now, you know. Oh, they all go sparking
—the peppy ones. Yes, but even before Margie and her cavalier
take their seats, he gets into a conversation with a handsome
usher, and my dear he simply cannot tear himself away! Oh,
he’s so unusual!
Now, the well-made play habitually climaxes with the so-called scène
à faire, the “obligatory scene” in which the play confronts its devils.
The prodigal son shows up when his lover is marrying his brother.
The villain unknowingly sips from the poisoned chalice. The treasure
map is found: X marks the spot.
So, Bourdet has to produce Irène’s amour, so we can see for
ourselves this fascinating jailer of souls:
ACT THREE: The lesbian captor appears. She is insolent, sly, sure of
herself. She is the Queen of Shadows!
ACT THREE: She will be modest, attractive, pleasant, and she will give
Irène up.
But Bourdet cleverly omits the scène à faire altogether. The captor
never appears! And really, could any actress encompass the allure
and terror that Bourdet had built up—Jezebel, Circe, and Mata Hari
in one vessel? “She dominates three acts,” John Mason Brown wrote
in Theatre Arts magazine, “a hundred times more vividly than if she
had ever appeared.”
And who knows if this phantom really is a captor? Because just as
matters seem to smooth themselves out, Irène ditches her fiancé
after all and leaves to rejoin her lesbian lover. Is Irène truly the
prisoner . . . or a willing participant in the imprisonment? Even . . . a
captor herself?
The Captive was a classy production, not an indie affair but Big
Broadway. Gilbert Miller was the son of Henry Miller, a major actor-
manager who erected his own playhouse, rebuilt as the Stephen
Sondheim Theatre. And Junior opened The Captive at the Empire,
Broadway’s most prestigious house, built by Broadway’s most
prestigious producer, Charles Frohman.§ Further, The Captive’s cast
was very presentable, led by Helen Menken as Irène and Basil
Rathbone as her fiancé. In all, this was an imposing attraction, not
to be mistaken for an exploitation piece like the “sex comedies” that
had become popular since the late 1910s such as The Woman In
Room Thirteen, Up In Mabel’s Room, She Walked In Her Sleep, even
the salacious-sounding Twin Beds.
Nevertheless, an openly lesbian character was dangerous stuff in
1926, for the authorities had an extra irritation to deal with in the
person of Mae West, actress, playwright, director, and arguably one
of the most influential figures in opening the culture to information
that fascists of all kinds want kept secret. Remember, as Auntie
Mame says, “Knowledge is power.”
West was promulgating the avatar of the New Woman:
independent, entrepreneurial, and sexual. West’s characters—all
versions of West herself—were living autonomously rather than
within traditional social constructions. In other words, she was no
man’s woman. She knew this would outrage the authorities; she
meant to, in fact.
Moreover, she habitually concocted stories that combined the
outlaw world with Society, showing grandees getting involved with
crooks. This threatened to destabilize Americans’ respect for the
elite, especially those whores the professional politicians.
No wonder West insisted on writing her own lines when she got
to Hollywood, in 1932: she couldn’t trust anyone else to endow the
West Woman with the appropriate worldview. Try this snippet of
Paramount’s Goin’ To Town (1935), in which West tries to crash High
Socì:
The doctor also reminds us that many prominent persons have been
gay, forever and everywhere: “Kings, princes, statesmen, scholars,
fools!”
Truly, was anyone else—in or out of the arts—expressing so
cogent an argument for tolerance in The Drag’s 1927? True, you
could say that West simply had an affinity for outlaws, whether
crooks or the oppressed. Still, whatever her motivation, Mae West
was the first Broadway star to make a case for homophile
acceptance, which makes her unique among the innovators in this
chapter—Bert Savoy and his hissy campapalooza, Cole Porter and his
impish innuendo, Sophie Treadwell and the blunt naturalism of her
queen and his pick-up in Machinal, and even the people who put on
The Captive. Brave they must have been, yet its leading lady, the
aforementioned Helen Menken, declared after the show was raided
that she wouldn’t return to the production even if its impresario
successfully defended it in court.
Perhaps she realized that, after giving gay a bit of leeway as a
curiosity of the carnival side-show kind, the authorities were going to
lower the iron curtain. Typically, Julian Eltinge found himself all but
fired from show business, as “female impersonation” was now
illegal. Bert Savoy’s fate was harder yet: three years before the
Banton raids, in 1924, Savoy was struck by lightning while walking
along the sands at Jones Beach. One might almost see in it a
portent of things to come.
* “Gay,” when the word exploded nationally in its current meaning (as opposed
to its older denotation of “chic and carefree”) after the Stonewall Rebellion of
1969, referred to men and women alike. Over time, popular usage broke the
category into gay men and lesbians, perhaps in recognizing differences in the two
subcultures. I’m using “gay” in its 1969 sense, denoting males and females
generally.
†
Mr. Wix also gave the then unknown Jerome Kern his first substantial credit,
for Rice heavily revised the British score and Kern composed about half of the new
music.
‡ Seating nine hundred with a small orchestra and two balconies, the house still
be only one protagonist per work. Other principals are the deuteragonist and the
tritagonist, but the protagonist is the one the story is about—Oedipus, Molière’s
Dom Juan, Dolly Levi. We’ll be observing that usage in this book.
2
The 1930s
The Gays Who Came To Dinner
Then, too, Porter constantly slips parish code words into his lyrics.
We’ve already heard him talk of “queens,” and in “I’m a Gigolo,” from
Wake Up and Dream (1929), the singer admits “Of lavender my
nature’s got just a dash in it.” There’s more than a dash in “Farming,”
from Let’s Face It! (1941), which warns us not to “inquire of Georgie
Raft why his cow has never calved.” Aren’t animals supposed to
mate? Yes, though it turns out that “Georgie’s bull is beautiful but
he’s gay!” The G word, no less! And note Porter’s use of the
venerable folk wisdom that all the pretty ones play for the team.
At that, in the essential thirties Porter show, Anything Goes, one
of the hit tunes the piece was studded with, “I Get a Kick Out Of
You,” is the torch number of the girl who can’t land the guy—almost
a counterpart to the gay guy with a crush on the straight guy, a very
basic situation in gay life that Porter would have been well aware of.
It’s a subtly lavish number, its refrain built out of quarter and half
notes constantly alternating with triplets (though few singers
observe Porter’s notation correctly), giving the melody the air of
flight soaring above earthly cares.
Ethel Merman introduced it in the show, because she loves
William Gaxton while he’s after Bettina Hall.§ Thus Merman was
trapped for a time in the “extra woman” category, available for
laughs and songs. They called this type a serio-comic, meaning she
has the talent but not the oo-la-la. Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker
were others such; they tended to play vaudeville or revue rather
than story shows because they were too interesting not to star yet
weren’t right for the romance.
Merman was so interesting that she eventually got the guy, too.
Still, she didn’t turn soft, and in real life she was a phallic woman, a
tough New York broad with the filthiest mouth on Broadway. Sailors
ran blushing from the room. In fact, Merman exemplifies a diva type
that gay men have played courtier to since who knows when, and
Porter adored her, not least for her pinpoint diction, benison to
Porter’s lyricist side. At rehearsals, he would blow a whistle if a
performer wasn’t getting the words across; he never had to with
Merman.
Yet there was more to Porter’s admiration for this particular
performer—a love of the outsized, struck-by-lightning female talent
that gay men cultivate, as with Bette Davis, Mary Martin, Tallulah
Bankhead, Maria Callas, Carol Channing, Barbra Streisand, Bette
Midler. All marvelous one-of-a-kinds, they defy in various ways the
cautions of the culture. They don’t “look” right or they “overdo.” But
they give the public everything they have, and they can be just as
theatrical offstage as on.
Merman, for example, was blunter than a pawnbroker and
grander than Napoléon, very aware of whom she had to respect and
whom she could scold, and there was an excitement about her that
Porter seldom felt among the international café parasites he
hobnobbed with. In short, Merman was a Character. Whenever
someone mentioned Mary Martin, Merman would immediately pipe
up with “Dyke, ya know.” She was uneducated but fast and shrewd
in comeback. Long after her Porter years, during her brief and
stormy marriage to Ernest Borgnine, Merman (who was in her mid-
fifties at this point) returned from a TV taping so pleased with
herself that she had Borgnine snarling before she got through the
front door.
“What are you so happy about?” he caws.
“Well,” she explains, “they just loved my thirty-five-year-old face,
and my thirty-five-year-old figure, and my thirty-five-year-old voice.”
“Yeah? And what about your sixty-five-year-old cunt?” he
counters.
And she replies, “Nobody mentioned you at all.”
Merman epitomized a term I coined decades ago, the Big Lady,
but there was another gay performer type emerging in these inter-
war years, the Beautiful Male—and Porter’s next show after Anything
Goes, Jubilee (1935), offers one in Mark Plant. It was Jubilee’s
conceit—in Moss Hart’s book—that a royal family of vaguely British
hue would tralala off to romantic adventures. The King finds Elsa
Maxwell; the Queen hooks up with MGM’s Tarzan, Johnny
Weissmuller; the Prince gets a sort of Ginger Rogers; and the
Princess pairs off with Noël Coward. Plant played the Weissmuller
role as Mowgli, making a personal appearance at his latest film clad
in a bearskin that left most of Plant’s flesh open to view.**
The Hart and Porter Mowgli may have set the matrix for the
Beautiful Male as a dope. Plant’s entrance line is “Me Mowgli, me
save girl from elephants!,” and the formal speech that Hart wrote for
him is inane. “Well, folks, here we are,” it begins, going on to “I
guess we’re certainly all here, all right. Yessir, here we are,” and so
on. Then Porter steps in with “When Me, Mowgli, Love,” perhaps the
most bizarre song Porter ever wrote. The music tells of jungle drums
lightly pounding, palm trees swaying, and a lot of heavy sex, and the
lyrics report on Mowgli’s erotic prowess, as an audience of elephants
watch through opera glasses.
Keep in mind that the gym-expanded or even just well-toned
physique, de rigueur in leading men today, was all but unknown in
1935, when muscle training was little more than calisthenics. And, as
if Mowgli’s establishing number were not enough to define his erotic
bona fides, Porter wrote as well “There’s Nothing Like Swimming” for
Mowgli and the Queen, backed by the chorus boys, who encourage
her to get into a daring mesh outfit. As the Queen was played by
Mary Boland, the first name in the Dizzy Dame type so basic to
Hollywood’s screwball comedies, this was a comic piece. Its highlight
was Boland’s leap off a diving board, and Porter included a reference
to “Neptune’s Daughter,” in-crowd slang for a gay man who chases
sailors. But the number had a secondary purpose: to put the cutest
of the ensemble men into swimming togs. Ultimately, the scene was
dropped, as the show was running long—especially in its huge score,
counting twenty different songs.
Summing up our position thus far, we have on one hand the ever-
present threat of the Wales Padlock Law, clearly designed above all
to block any depiction of gay life from public view. As that line in The
Captive suggests, gay men and women had truly become the
shadow people. Yet nature finds a way. And theatre people are the
cleverest, most resourceful tribe in the population.
Consider Thomas H. Dickinson’s Winter Bound (1929), the tale of
two women living together in a rural northeastern setting. The pair
offer tintypes of the iconic lesbian couple, the butch and the femme
—yet it appears that they are celibate. Are they lesbians at all? Well,
the butch, known as Tony as opposed to, for example, Dorinda, is
brusque and athletic and dresses like a man. She’s also given to
saying things like “I know what you women are up against” (in
regard to menstruation) and “I’d hate to think I was a woman.”
The show didn’t run long, likely because it played the old Garrick
Theatre, just east of Herald Square, by 1929 too far south and east
of The Street to partake of that all-important walk-in business. In
fact, Winter Bound eked out its short run only because a few critics
noticed—and stated—that Dickinson seemed to be writing about
lesbians, which must have intrigued the more progressive
theatregoers. Much later, historian Kaier Curtin called Tony “the first
‘bull-dyke’ character ever seen on an English-language stage,” yet
when Curtin spoke of this to the original Tony, Aline MacMahon, he
says she was outraged at the very thought.
If Winter Bound gives us a serious view of cross-dressing, Julian
F. Thompson’s The Warrior’s Husband (1932) presents the comic
one. The title alone, when first viewed in the theatrical listings, must
have caused minority male hearts to flutter. But there is no gay here:
the warriors are the Amazons of Ancient Greece. They do the
fighting while the men do the housework, and as one of the
Amazons was the twenty-five-year-old Katharine Hepburn in her
breakout role, The Warrior’s Husband made a splash.
Hepburn’s big set piece was a physical battle with a Greek enemy,
Theseus, played by Colin Keith-Johnston, an English émigré who
played New York’s Stanhope, the protagonist of the famous World
War I play Journey’s End (London 1928, New York 1929). Classy and
heroic, Keith-Johnston was the perfect foil for Hepburn’s blithely
bellicose Antiope, and their armored wrestling match ended with
Hepburn backing her foe against the set, forcing her body against
his face-to-face, and grabbing his hair. It looked like rape, and a
photograph celebrating the moment became the wallpaper of the
season, an idée fixe for the media. Even your Aunt Prudence saw it.
You’d think that that shot alone would have made The Warrior’s
Husband a smash—and it played the Morosco Theatre on Forty-Fifth
Street, the very center of walk-in-business Broadway. Yet the run
tallied at only 83 performances.
Perhaps the public was uncomfortable with so many effeminate
male characters making so many gender-reversal jokes. The show’s
male lead, Sapiens (Romney Brent), admonishes his spouse with
“So! Woman’s brute force has failed and you have to fall back on
woman’s intuition” when he isn’t mincing about being afraid of
everything. Actually, this personality was already a type, known as
the “nance” (from “Nancy boy”), but nances really belonged on their
home turf, the burlesque house, where the exaggerated gestures
and phony caterwauling allowed the all-male audience to feel
superior to these absurd caricatures.
The Broadway public, however, wasn’t used to this gaudy
persona, too unreal to be called even a stereotype. Ironically, Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia’s prudish war on burlesque forced its adherents
to seek work elsewhere in show biz, including the stage, thereby
popularizing burlesque’s tropes. So by 1942, when The Warrior’s
Husband reappeared, now as the Rodgers and Hart musical By
Jupiter, the audience was amused rather than offended.
By Jupiter was a smash, not least for its Sapiens, Ray Bolger, who
integrated dance into his portrayal to make the character flighty and
whimsical rather than an outright nance (though some of the critics
thought he did too much smirking). And we should note one By
Jupiter lyric challenging Cole Porter for Gayest Line a Musical Ever
Got Away With, in “[Oh, how I miss] The Boy I Left Behind Me,” the
merry lament of Amazon soldiers. One of them admits, “The girl
behind the spear has little sport.” She’d be better off in the Navy, she
explains, “Because a sailor has a boy in every port!”
Now and again in the 1930s, we find a playwright daring to
include the odd gay character. Clifford Odets, a mainstay of the
leftwing Group Theatre, turned the nance inside out in Golden Boy
(1937), set in the boxing world and counting in one Eddie Fuseli a
promoter who was crooked, violent, masculine . . . and homosexual.
Or take Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938). Critics have long
thought that the local choir director, Simon Stimson, is gay, though
Wilder simply makes him the town drunk, a grouch and a suicide.
And Philip Barry’s Here Come the Clowns (1938) featured a
ventriloquist with a termagant wife who lives the life. “She was a
sweet kid once,” he recalls, but another character replies, “You mean
before the girls came around. . . the little ones—the soft ones—the
frilly ones—the girly-girls.” He does everything but call them the
femmes to her butch.
It appears that the trick to outwitting the Wales Law was to
feature a single gay figure rather than presuppose an entire gay
culture. Thus, the gay man or woman would be isolated—harmless,
in other words, for there is power only in numbers. That’s where
Mae West crossed a line: she reveled in unveiling gay men’s culture
(at least as it was supposed to be). And in The Captive, the husband
of the unseen lesbian speaks, we remember, of a world of
“shadows.” A world, mind you: an entire population rather than a
few . . . what, malcontents? Eccentrics? So the workaround lay in
setting a gay character or two against a “normal” heterosexual
background.
And it came from England: Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree
(1933). Hearing the plot premise, anyone of today would assume
that the show provoked another raid from the authorities: a wealthy
gay man buys a young boy from his father to raise him as his ward
in a life of aesthetic decadence. Now in his twenties, the boy is so
comfortable in his sybaritic lifestyle that he abandons his likeable,
sensible fiancée rather than give up his disapproving guardian’s
largesse.
And there is no way to see the guardian as anything but gay. His
name is Mr. Dulcimer, “Dulcie” for short; I mean, come on. Shairp
describes him as “a man who could fascinate, repel, and alarm,” and
introduces him arranging flowers and fussing over how they have
been cut. More precious yet, he is taking his ward, named Julian, to
the opera, but “I never arrive at Tristan till the second act.” Gracious
me, isn’t he the aficionado, though, more Wagnerian than thou.
Further, Robert Edmond Jones, one of Broadway’s go-to designers,
created the living room of Dulcie’s flat as a kind of lair, with its grand
piano, weaving loom, and artisanal lighting.
Note the source of the play’s title, in the Old Testament, The Book
Of Psalms 37:35: “I have seen the wicked in great power, and
spreading himself like a green bay tree.” The wicked—and after
Julian’s father shoots Dulcie to death, we see Julian settling into his
legacy: to become the next Mr. Dulcimer. The butler (who is also
gay) is about to bring in the flowers for Julian to arrange, so we
have come full circle. A death mask of Mr. Dulcimer hangs on the
wall, and as Julian smokes a cigarette, the lights dim till all we can
see is the mask—smiling, by the way—and the tip of Julian’s
cigarette as the curtain falls.
How on earth did they get away with it? For the show won
excellent reviews and enjoyed a five-month run, rather good for the
day. Here’s the secret: the playwright kept sex entirely out of the
very concept of Mr. Dulcimer: his relationship with Julian was, so to
say, purely secular. The play’s subject is not eros but hedonism. Or
so said the critics. The one exception was Robert Garland of the
World-Telegram, who got to the play a week late. Noting that his
colleagues thought The Green Bay Tree had “nothing to do with the
way of a man with a man,” Garland snapped back, “if it has nothing
to do with that it has nothing to do with anything.”
Noël Coward was responsible for getting the play to Broadway. He
urged it upon producer-director Jed Harris and all but demanded
that Julian be played by Laurence Olivier, an intimate of Coward’s
and the male half of the Second Couple in Coward’s Private Lives in
London and New York. Harris acceded to Coward’s pleasure; in fact,
he ignored The Green Bay Tree’s entire West End cast yet hired
nothing but Brits for New York. Olivier’s then wife, Jill Esmond (who
had also been in the New York Private Lives), was the fiancée,
James Dale Mr. Dulcimer, O. P. Heggie Julian’s homicidal father, and
Leo G. Carroll (later the befuddled hero of TV’s Topper sitcom) was
Dulcimer’s butler. To add to the fun, Jill Esmond was gay, too,
though it took her so long to figure it out that it almost doesn’t
count.
Julian is a much better role than the one Olivier had played in
Private Lives, yet he still hated the whole thing, partly because Jed
Harris was a monster but perhaps also because he felt too close to
Julian through a certain lack of interest in sex, as Olivier mentioned
in his memoirs. At that, Olivier had his own Mr. Dulcimer—Noël
Coward, who developed a tremendous crush on the young actor and
had a habit of ordering people around, even to coercing them into
joining him in bed. “He can be very persuasive,” Olivier warned his
son, who shot back, “Did he persuade you?”
Even more successful than The Green Bay Tree—in fact a smash,
at 691 performances— was Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour
(1934). Again, the play presents no gay subculture to antagonize the
authorities; there isn’t even a gay character in any effective sense
for the first two acts. For this play is about not homosexuality but
the art of the smear.
Anticipating the guignol frisson of little Patty McCormack’s
pigtailed serial killer in Maxwell Anderson’s The Bad Seed (1954),
The Children’s Hour’s brat, Mary, can steal the show from the
grownups in any revival. The leads are two youngish women who
run Mary’s school, the affable doctor engaged to one of them, and
Mary’s grandmother, the local beldame, who sponsors the school and
can at any moment destroy it.
And destroy it she does, when Mary concocts, out of nowhere,
the lie that the two schoolmistresses are sexually intimate. By this
time in the storyline, we know how evil Mary is, how she
manipulates adults and bullies her coevals, and we expect to see the
adults tear off her mask.
But no: Hellman creates a superb second-act curtain as Mary
threatens a schoolmate who stole another girl’s bracelet. Now, this
occurs in front of the four principals cited above, and while Mary’s
direly even tone warns the little thief that jail awaits her if Mary
exposes her, the four seniors—in that maddening way that
melodrama characters have of not seeing what is right in front of
them—simply don’t get the story the way we do. We watch in horror
as Mary forces the other little girl to support the big lie:
ROSALIE:(with a shrill cry) Yes! Yes! I did see it. I told Mary. What
Mary said was right . . .
LORD ALFRED: You would not believe what my father has put in this
letter.
WILDE: I can believe anything, provided it is quite incredible.
Or, in the first trial, as Wilde, standing in the dock, is asked about
the lads he consorts with:
queensberry’s defense attorney: [This young man] sold newspapers
at the kiosk on the pier?
WILDE: This is the first I have heard of his connection with literature.
Above all, the authors rounded out their Wilde so that the text
awaited only a performer gifted with Morley’s icy filigree in delivering
the epigrams—and Morley even looked like Wilde. As the play moved
from event to event, one began to notice that Wilde’s love of making
the important seem trivial and vice versa was a character flaw; it led
directly to his catastrophic lawsuit against Queensberry. For when
the court found Queensberry correct in calling Wilde a (in the
Stokeses’ version) “sodomite,” it followed that Wilde was guilty of
sodomy and must be tried and punished. Alas, when your life is a
performance, you fall into the false belief that, when matters get
dangerous, you can retire to your dressing room. Wilde retired to
Reading Gaol.
The theatregoing community of course knew who Wilde was, but
few knew the details of his downfall. So the play sustained suspense
during the rather long trial scenes, giving the show extra oomph that
enabled it to last 247 performances. True, its use of disconnected
events left out too much, less a life than its pieces. And it never got
to one of Wilde’s spiciest bons mots, when he was arrested and
rather roughly handled by the constable. “If this is how Her Majesty
treats her prisoners,” he said, “she doesn’t deserve to have any.”
Lord Alfred Douglas was not only a character in the piece but one
of its enthusiasts, and he wrote a preface to the published text,
pointing out how much was lost in “many masterpieces of dramatic
art” by Wilde’s brutal punishment and early death. “Let England bear
the responsibility,” he said, “for what she did to him.”
Noël Coward has much in common with Wilde, including a
fondness for sassy epigrams and a skill in expanding celebrity into
immortality. As John Lahr observes in Coward the Playwright, The
(so-called) Master “had his first Rolls-Royce at 26 and his first
biography at 33,” and “he knew what there was to know about
stardom.” The deft ones manage it, and a just-starting-out Coward
schemed that Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne would establish
imposing acting brands, marry and work only as a team, and then
appear with Coward in a comedy he would write specifically for
them, to the point that the three of them weren’t in the show. They
were the show: Design For Living (1933).
Ironically, while Coward was openly neither gay nor not gay (his
attitude was “You figure it out”), Design For Living is almost an
explanation of why it’s smarter to be gay than straight, at least if
one is of the bohemian mind. In his first-night review, the Times’
Brooks Atkinson noticed that the play gave the three stars
supporting characters to play against, because “Mr. Coward needs a
few dull persons to victimize”: the straights! Here’s Lynn on this
matter: straight means having children, a permanent address, “social
activities,” and financial security:
GILDA:Well, I don’t like children; I don’t wish for a home; I can’t bear
social activities; and I have a small but adequate income of my
own.
One of the neighbors is so startled that she drops the present she
has brought, some calf’s-foot jelly:
There’s more to the action than the way Woollcott commandeers this
bourgeois household for his own subversive uses: his long-suffering,
irreplaceable secretary has fallen in love with a local gentleman of
the press:
As for the secretary, Whiteside has this to say—and note how much
he sounds like Michael, the protagonist of The Boys In the Band,
thirty years later:
That last bit is the love tap of the fast-track gay, though Whiteside
can be spiteful even with friends—and his plot to destroy the
secretary’s amour is truly despicable. So Sheridan Whiteside—how
well Hart and Kaufman caught the very flavor of Woollcott in that
name!—is a rich role. It needs a comic who can play in the grand
manner, and when producer Sam H. Harris left the casting to the
two authors, they in turn left it to Woollcott.
He suggested John Barrymore—a great idea in theory, as
Barrymore in his heyday had the temperament. By 1939, however,
this one-time Hamlet was an old souse who couldn’t remember two
lines together. Woollcott’s second choice was Robert Morley (our
Oscar Wilde just a few pages ago), but they ended up with Monty
Woolley, who had been directing musicals and then got up on stage
himself in exotic roles—a quirky Russian in On Your Toes, a British
royal in Knights Of Song. Woolley was perfect—he did the hit movie
as well—and he was gay in the first place.
So was Moss Hart, sort of. But unlike Monty Woolley, who was
well in with the Cole Porter set, the coterie of anything goes, Hart
didn’t want to be gay. He even went into psychoanalysis—very
offbeat at the time—to find a workaround for it as the dutiful
“straight” son to Kaufman, a father figure of crucial import to Hart’s
self-esteem. And Kaufman hated gays. His daughter, Anne, told me
that Kaufman always avoided having to shake hands with the
prominent gay director Hassard Short “because my father worried
about where those hands might have been.”
Researching Dazzler, a biography of Hart, Steven Bach spoke to a
lifelong Hart intimate, an actor turned psychiatrist named Glen
Boles. “Moss,” Boles recalled, “was distressed by the occasional
involuntary attraction he felt around young actors.” And there was
one in The Man Who Came To Dinner, the extremely handsome
Gordon Merrick. (Another actor turned something else, Merrick
would have unhappy memories of Hart that he made public, as we’ll
presently see.)
Even after Hart married and sired children, he was bedeviled by
his “shadow” self. As late as the musical Camelot (1960), which he
directed, Hart shared with Boles his fear of “taking out on [Robert
Goulet, the show’s Lancelot] how much I resented him for being
attractive.”
This aside, Moss Hart was a gay (or something related) success
story, indeed a dazzler. It was said by the worldly that to get
anywhere in New York during its cultural Golden Age, one had to
know both gays and Jews, whether to spark a dinner party or to
pillage for ideas on everything from how to dress to where to invest
one’s capital. Hart was one of those whose very appearance for
cocktails with his wife, actress Kitty Carlisle, guaranteed a happy
evening. He was smart, ambitious, and energetic, qualities common
among northeast urban gay men. Today, someone like that would
want to direct movies; back then, someone like that would want to
enter the theatre.
He died young, because of a heart condition: in 1961, he and
Kitty were about to drive somewhere when she heard a thump, as if
something had banged against the car’s trunk. It was Hart, who had
collapsed and never regained consciousness. But he left behind the
example of how a gifted young guy pursues destiny and embraces
the public life of an artist, becoming a great influencer. People may
not think of The Man Who Came To Dinner as one of the great gay
plays, and of its three progenitors—Hart (whose idea it was),
Kaufman (his collaborator), and Woollcott (the play’s content), only
one-and-a-half were of the tribe. Nevertheless, they remind us that
an essential quality of the gay male is his power of observation,
developed in youth, when it is necessary to scrutinize hetero models
in order to imitate them in protective coloration, to defend oneself
from being ostracized.
Woollcott was an observer; it was the most interesting thing
about him. His insult comedy was a trivial sort of bonhomie: the real
Woollcott is found in his ability to recognize patterns of behavior,
almost as a psychiatrist does. He bullied his friends, but he
understood his friends. Once, George S. Kaufman was explaining
how his then wife, Beatrice, had taken a fancy to young Moss,
George’s new playwriting partner and thus a constant figure in the
Kaufman household, as George almost never wrote a play by
himself.
“You know,” Kaufman was saying, “Beatrice tends to adopt these
sensitive young Jewish boys.”
And Woollcott replied, “Sometimes she marries them.”
* A still active legend tells that, when Le Gallienne actress protegée Josephine
Hutchinson became Le Gallienne’s lover, Hutchinson’s husband named Le Gallienne
as the co-respondent in a bitter divorce. In fact, this was a scandal invented by
tabloid journalists. The divorce was amicable, and Le Gallienne’s name did not
come up in the proceedings.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Certainly, for the literary enjoyment of succeeding centuries, it
was a good thing that the memorials of this period of turbulence
were ultimately transformed, by the relieved people, into material for
legend and song; yes, even so that Scott could build Abbotsford
without moat or drawbridge. The poetry of the situation is vastly
more enjoyable to-day than was the prose of reality during several
centuries. In like manner, we, who, in our upholstered chairs, with
our feet against the fender of the winter fire-grate, delight in and
admire the red Iroquois in Cooper’s novels, necessarily take a
different view of the whole Indian “problem” than could our
ancestors, so many of whose scalps adorned the walls of the Long
House of the Forest Republic.
In our annals the name of General John Sullivan as one who
avenged the destruction of the Scotch settlements on the
Susquehanna, and opened for our fathers the westward paths of
civilization, must go down to history with the same halo of fame as
that which surrounds Sir William Cranstoun and his little company of
moss troopers of the new sort. Moreover, when the white man is no
longer busy in depositing lead inside the redskin’s cuticle, while the
copper-colored savage ceases to raise the hair of his affectionate
white brother, there is a better common understanding of one
another’s psychology, besides more room for mutual appreciation.
Verily, history fills with its oil the fragrant lamp of literature that
illuminates while it charms.
CHAPTER VII
THE LAY OF THE LAND: DUNFERMLINE
When we look into the name “Dundee,” we find that some derive
it from the Latin “Donum Dei” (the “gift of God”). Evidently those who
designed the town arms accepted this etymology, for above the two
griffins holding a shield is the motto “Dei Donum.” Yet beneath their
intertwined and forked tails is the more cautious motto, perhaps
meant to be regulative,—for “sweet are the uses of adversity,” in
learning as in life,—“prudentia et candore.” While prudence bids us
look forward, candor requires honesty as to the past. So the diligent
scholarship and editorial energy of modern days delete the claims of
local pride, as belated, and declare them “extravagant,” while
asserting that so favorable a situation for defence as has Dundee
antedates even the Roman occupation.
Others, not willing to abandon the legend savoring of divinity, find
the name in the Celtic “Dun Dha,” the “Hill of God.” The probabilities
are, however, that Mars will carry off the honors, and that the modern
form is from the Gaelic name “Dun Tow,” that is, the “fort on the Tay”;
of which the Latin “Tao Dunum” is only a transliteration. All Britain
was spotted with forts or duns, and the same word is in the second
syllable of “London.”
The name “Dundee” first occurs in writing in a deed of gift, dated
about a.d. 1200, by David, the younger brother of William the Lion,
making the place a royal burg. Later it received charters from Robert
the Bruce and the Scottish kings. Charles I finally granted the city its
great charter.
In the war of independence, when the Scots took up arms
against England, Dundee was prominent. William Wallace, educated
here, slew the son of the English constable in 1291, for which deed
he was outlawed. The castle, which stood until some time after the
Commonwealth, but of which there is to-day hardly a trace, was
repeatedly besieged and captured. In Dundee’s coat of arms are two
“wyverns,” griffins, or “dragons,” with wings addorsed and with
barbed tails, the latter “nowed” or knotted together—which things
serve as an allegory. In the local conversation and allusions and in
the modern newspaper cartoons and caricatures, the “wyverns”
stand for municipal affairs and local politics.
Such a well-situated port, on Scotland’s largest river, Tay, must
needs be the perennial prize of contending factions and leaders. But
when, after having assimilated the culture of Rome, the new
struggle, which was inevitable to human progress, the Reformation,
began, and the Scots thought out their own philosophy of the
universe, Dundee was called “the Scottish Geneva,” because so
active in spreading the new doctrines. Here, especially, Scotland’s
champion, George Wishart, student and schoolmaster (1513–46),
one of the earliest reformers, introduced the study of Greek and
preached the Reformation doctrines. Compelled to flee to England,
he went also to Switzerland. In Cambridge, he was a student in
1538. It is not known that he ever “took orders,” any more than did
the apostle Paul. He travelled from town to town, making everywhere
a great impression by his stirring appeals.
Instead of bearing the fiery cross of the clans as of old, Wishart
held up the cross of his Master.
Patriotism and economics, as well as religion, were factors in the
clash of ideas. Cardinal Beaton stood for ecclesiastical dependence
on France, Wishart for independence. Beaton headed soldiers to
make Wishart prisoner. Young John Knox attached himself to the
person of the bold reformer and carried a two-handed sword before
Wishart for his defence. After preaching a powerful sermon at
Haddington, the evangelist was made a prisoner by the Earl of
Bothwell and carried to St. Andrew’s. There, at the age of thirty-
three, by the cardinal’s order, Wishart was burned at the stake in
front of the castle, then the residence of the bishop. While the fire
was kindling, Wishart uttered the prophecy that, within a few days his
judge and murderer would lose his life. After such proceedings in the
name of God, it seems hardly wonderful that the mob, which had
been stirred by Wishart’s preaching, should have destroyed both the
cathedral and the episcopal mansion.
Was Wishart in the plot to assassinate the cardinal, as hostile
critics suggest? Over his ashes a tremendous controversy has
arisen, and this is one of the unsettled questions in Scottish history.
There was another George Wishart, bailie of Dundee, who was in
the plot. Certainly the preacher’s name is great in Scotland’s history.
One of the relics of bygone days, which the Dundeeans keep in
repair, is a section of the old battlemented city wall crossing one of
the important streets. This for a time was the pulpit of the great
reformer. With mine host of the Temperance Hotel, Bailie Mather,
who took me, as other antiquarians, poets, and scholars did also,
through the old alleys and streets, where the vestiges of historic
architecture still remain from the past, I mounted this old citadel of
freedom.
On the whole, the Reformation in Dundee was peacefully carried
out, but in 1645, during the Civil War, the city was sacked and most
of its houses went down in war fires. In 1651, General Monk, sent by
Cromwell, captured Dundee, and probably one sixth of the garrison
were put to the sword. Sixty vessels were loaded with plunder to be
sent away, but “the sailors being apparently as drunk as the soldiery”
the vessels were lost within sight of the city. “Ill got, soon lost,” said
Monk’s chaplain. Governor Lumsden, in heroic defence, made his
last stand in the old tower, which still remains scarred and pitted with
bullet marks.
Dundee rose to wealth during our Civil War, when jute took the
place of cotton. Being a place of commerce rather than of art,
literature, or romance, and touching the national history only at long
intervals, few tourists see or stay long in “Jute-opolis.” Nevertheless,
from many visits and long dwelling in the city and suburbs, Dundee
is a place dearly loved by us three; for here, in health and in
sickness, in the homes of the hospitable people and as leader of the
worship of thousands, in the great Ward Chapel, where he often
faced over a thousand interested hearers, the writer learned to know
the mind of the Scottish people more intimately than in any other city.
Nor could he, in any other better way, know the heart of Scotland,
except possibly in some of those exalted moments, when surveying
unique scenery, it seemed as if he were in the very penetralia of the
land’s beauty; or, when delving in books, he saw unroll clearly the
long panorama of her inspiring history.
Among the treasures, visible in the muniment room of the Town
House, are original despatches from Edward I and Edward II; the
original charter, dated 1327, and given the city by Robert the Bruce;
a Papal order from Leo X, and a letter from Mary Queen of Scots,
concerning extramural burials. Then the “yardis, glk sumtyme was
occupyit by ye Gray Cordelier Freres” (Franciscan Friars, who wore
the gray habit and girdle of St. Francis of Assisi) as an orchard, were
granted to the town as a burying-place by Queen Mary in 1564. The
Nine Crafts having wisely decided not to meet in taverns and
alehouses, made this former place of fruit their meeting-place; hence
the name “Howff,” or haunt. My rhyming friend Lee, in his verses on
the “Waukrife Wyverns” (wakeful griffins), has written the feelings
and experiences of his American friend, who often wandered and
mused among the graven stones, as well as his own:—
* * * * *
Vast meeting-place whaur all are mute,
For dust hath ended the dispute;
These yards are fat wi’ ither fruit
Than when the friars
Grew apples red for their wine-presses—
And stole frae ruddier dames caresses,
Else men are liars.”