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

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Contents

To Erick Neher

To the staff upstairs at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center; to my excellent copyeditor, Adam Goldberger; to my wonder-working agent, Joe Spieler; and to my marvelous editor, Michael Flamini.

One cannot do justice to all the famous, important, or even ephemerally interesting plays and people of Broadway during the four decades of its most expansive activitynot in a single volume. Therefore, this is a theme-driven text rather than one meticulously collecting titles and names. All the influential developments in the non-musical American theatre between World War I and the Vietnam Era are here. What is missingor treated in passingis a portion of the works and personnel that some readers might expect to encounter.

In fact, this is less a theatre history than an examination of our theatregoing culture in its Golden Age: a time when Broadway and Hollywood enjoyed an extremely stimulating relationship, when the nature of celebrity underwent a provocative evolution, when the national sense of humor changed from folk-rural to urban-minority, and when our playwrights were the archons of social examination, the ones who asked the pertinent questions about how we live.

The symbiosis of theatre and film is especially arresting because it no longer exists in even vestigial form (except for movie stars new interest in making pilgrimages to the places of Actors Equity). The most obvious benefit, to Broadway, was Hollywood money, for even a flop might pay off on its sale to story-hungry studios. And Hollywood of course benefited from Broadways discovery of new acting and writing talent. However, the two different sources of entertainment were intimate in less apparent ways. For instance, one of American arts happiest inventions is the screwball comedy. It is entirely a creation of the movie industry: yet the materials were furnished by the stage. As well see, it is as if neither theatre nor film could have managed without the other in this and many other projects.

There is as well a striking change in the meaning of the word Broadway in this time. In the years just after World War I, especially during Prohibition but also after, Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon were town criers and Broadway meant not only the real estate of theatres from the Garrick on Thirty-fifth Street to Jolsons Fifty-ninth Street Theatre, nor yet the nations highest level of thespian craftBroadway as a guarantee of qualitybut rather a culture in West Central Manhattan that fascinated the entire nation. This was a world in which gangsters, prizefighters, and the press mixed with artists, socialites, and the famous. Restaurants and nightclubs were Broadway; the Astor Hotel and certain bars and barber shops were Broadway. The term denoted a belief system of almost lawless independence; and a language we might call Fluent Wisecrack; and a prominence in the very meaning of America that made periodic visits essential to anyonesave politicianswho thought of himself as notable. Much of our narrative artfiction, drama, and cinemawas set in and around this milieu, because that was where our society was developed and revealed.

Today, that setting is Southern California, just as the young genius of the 1920s who grew up wanting to be a playwright finds in his modern counterpart the would-be moviemaker. Ironically, even after the technology to record and reproduce sound liberated the movies to compete with theatre on an intellectual instead of merely sensual level, it was not till Hollywood made faithful renderings of important plays in the early 1930s that the stage began to lose its prestige superiority and devolve over the following decades into a kind of powerless older brother to the true inheritor. MGM made Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight with people like Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Marie Dressler, and two Barrymores. Can anyone today name who played the original shows on Broadway?

When Frank Bacon left school at the age of fourteen, his native California counted more jobs to fill than skilled labor qualified to fill them. If not exactly the anarchic frontier of legend, California in the 1880s nevertheless offered opportunity to anyone withas they put it thengumption. Young Bacon tried sheepherding, advertising soliciting, and newspaper editing, and even ran an unsuccessful campaign for the state assembly. Then he fell into acting.

It was easy to do at the time, for people went to theatre then almost as casually as they turn on the television today, and playhouses were literally everywhere. Some were operated by resident repertory troupes, the stock companies that sustained public interest with a constantly changing bill. Certain theatres in a given region were linked to form wheels of companies not resident but traveling as wholes from one house to another every six weeks or so; unlike the stock companies, who played everything, the wheels played host to certain genres, for instance in thrill melodrama or society comedy.

The expansion of the railroad doomed stock and eventually closed down the wheels, for now the combination troupe dominated the national stage: one unit of actors giving a single work and touring with all the necessary sets and costumes. A success in this line meant moving from one theatre to the next (with perhaps a hiatus in summer) for months or even years. Along with bookings in small towns and provincial capitals lay the possibility of an extended run in Chicago or New York.

Bacon ended up in one of the last stock companies, in San Jose, for seventeen years, during which he is alleged to have assumed over six hundred roles. One sort of character in particular seems to have caught his interestthe uneducated rustic, innocent of fancy fashion, who somehow gets the better of popinjays and rogues. It was a national stereotype, just then reaching its apex in the career of the third Joseph Jefferson (acting was a family trade), especially in Rip Van Winkle (1866). During his galley years in San Jose, Bacon envisioned a vehicle for his own version of the trope, a small-time hotelier named Bill Jones and ironically nicknamed Lightnin for his life tempo, as slow as paste and a kind of objective correlative for his low-key yet fierce sense of independence. No one crowds Bill Jones. Lightnin has wife troubles, money troubles, and to every question a set of deadpan retorts that exasperate all those in the vicinity yetBacon hopedamuse the public. Lightnins hotel straddles the California-Nevada border, the state line running through the middle of the lobby: so women can shield their reputations by claiming to be on holiday in California while more truly seeking one of those quickie Nevada divorces.

Bacon called his play The Divided House, and found no takers. Were managersthe contemporary term for producersleery of a character that had held the stage for over a century, or did Bacon fail to set him off properly?

By 1912, Bacon had made it to New York, then as now the goal of virtually any working actor; but Bacons New York was vaudeville or plays of no professional importance. Now forty-eight, he had been acting for twenty-two years and had every reason to assume that he would never be anything more than one of the many who got a modest living out of it but made no mark.