All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959

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Authors: Ethan Mordden
Tags: Theater, Performing Arts, Broadway & Musical Revue
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disapproves; her best friend vamps the uncle. Why? Because when uncle sees what a heartless trollop the friend is, the chorus girl will seem ideal by comparison.
    What twaddle, of course: but all lies in the execution. Audiences enjoyed learning what a Nice Girl the trollop really was: in the evening’s biggest laugh, uncle Bruce McRae poured vamp Ina Claire some champagne and, when he turned away, she emptied her glass onto the carpet. Gold digger? She ended up revealing her scheme and marrying the uncle. She even had a mother, right there on stage; bad girls don’t have mothers. In fact, most of this gold digging was just talk and show. A lot of the show’s wickedness lay in the dialogue assigned to a pack of these fortune hunters, bragging about the millionaires they were fleecing. But were they truly living the life or striking a pose?
    There were such women, of course. Peggy Hopkins Joyce, the forerunner of today’s Pointless Celebrities such as Paris Hilton, was the gold digger of the age. But Peggy put out. Sex comedy was really about chastity only appearing to stray.
    *   *   *
    On the other hand, “society drama” liked its heroines disgraced. This form dealt with people who live in mansions rather than apartments, the social set later popularized by Philip Barry. Barry’s favorite question was How much independence is available in a world ruled by convention? Barry’s precursor, Zoë Akins, asked rather, How much independence is available to women in a world ruled by men?, and society drama’s typical protagonist was a woman, especially Ethel Barrymore in Akins’ Déclassée (1919). Lady Helen Haden, English by birth and breeding—the goddaughter, indeed, of a queen of England—is simply too principled for a reckless and unscrupulous beau monde.
    She is also “the last of the mad Varvicks,” but we see no madness: just nobility. Trapped by her own code, Lady Helen must reveal as a cheat someone who will take his revenge by making public her recent … indiscretion. He was the man in the case, and he has the letters to prove it. If she exposes him, he’ll expose her. Lady Helen’s reply—and the first-act finale—was Ethel at her most superb. As one always has a helping of the fashionable world waiting in the wings in plays like this one, Ethel called them in and announced, “I’ve something to tell you.” As she started in on the who, what, and where of the scandal that would destroy her, the curtain blushingly closed down the scene.
    So Lady Helen is now déclassée, and Akins’ script delineates the stages of degradation till there is no way out but for a taxicab to knock the heroine down just before she is to be reunited with the very man who caused her downfall, now mature and repentant. Too late. Though her final aria, onstage, was remarkably staid for someone dying of internal injuries—Akins permitted a single tasteful convulsion—Ethel made it radiant and thrilling within her narrow range.
    Interestingly, Akins’ The Varying Shore (1921) anticipated Kaufman and Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along (1934) by telling its tale—of another noble and thus devastated heroine—backward. In fact, she’s dead at the start, set in 1921, and “youthens” into her forties in Act Two, her twenties in Act Three, and seventeen at last, in 1847. The critics thought the work needed a stronger actress than the journeyman Elsie Ferguson; these society shows were, after all, star vehicles. Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (1925), from his novel, got Katharine Cornell, and it needed her badly. Novelist Arlen was Enjoying a Vogue at the time; it’s not clear why. His writing—his playwrighting, anyway—is overwrought and loaded with fifi philosophizing. Let’s let Brooks Atkinson describe Arlen’s characters: “restless, bored, cynical, worldly, futile.” Atkinson said this of another Arlen play that opened but three weeks after The Green Hat, These Charming People . This was an unproduced old

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