Authors: Boze Hadleigh
Broadway Babylon (11 page)
Williams reportedly came to regret some of the anti-gay screen changes to which he’d so readily, and profitably, agreed, as in
The Night of the Iguana
(1964), featuring extra lines—not by Tennessee—ordered by director John Huston which made the lesbian character Miss Fellowes seem more villainous and pathetic. Just as well that by the mid ’60s celluloid adaptations of Williams’s work were no longer guaranteed hits and finally petered out.
Gore Vidal, who remained friends with Tennessee—but not with fellow gay novelist Truman Capote; they had an amity-shattering argument in Tennessee’s home—observed that although Tennessee “survived witch doctors and envenomed press, they wore him out in the end.”
By his late sixties Williams was admitting, “I don’t feel a day over eighty. Not most of the time.” Success or no, he continued writing, which he considered his lifeline. The only time he’d been, as he put it, “scared scriptless,” was when he’d been hired by Hollywood to write heterosexual love dramas. When a British reporter inquired of the gay playwright about loneliness and whether he regretted being “childless”—or child-free—Tennessee responded, “Well, my children are my plays … they are my posterity. And unlike the other kind of offspring, they support me rather lavishly in my old age.”
Tennessee Williams’s body of work is arguably the greatest left behind by any American playwright. But he learned the hard way that personal truth costs. During the painful 1970s he pointed out, “In writing classes, they say, ‘Write about what you know.’ What they don’t say is, ‘Write about what you know
unless
we disapprove of who you are and what you know.’ ”
“W
ILLIAM
I
NGE WAS THE EXTREME EXAMPLE
of a playwright who killed himself for lack of continuing success,” said Tennessee Williams. “I think that unlike most homosexual playwrights, he felt too little of and about himself.… Without success and the sustenance of acclaim, he chose to end his residency.”
William Inge (1913–1973) put the Midwest on the Broadway map, dramatically speaking. Before him, many Midwestern characters were happy and/or rural, often musical, and frequently shallow. Angst was not part of the scene. Inge’s themes were loneliness, frustration, loss, and despair. His characters craved love, and he was to the Midwest what mentor and, briefly, lover Tennessee Williams was to the South. In the 1950s Inge enjoyed four consecutive Broadway hits:
Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop
, and
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
.
Picnic
won him a Pulitzer Prize, and he later earned an original-screenplay Academy Award for
Splendor in the Grass
, a 1961 movie. (The shy ex-instructor had declined to go to the ceremonies in Los Angeles until the studio stopped insisting he attend with a female starlet.) The statuette was Inge’s last glittering piece of professional success.
A deeply closeted man who apparently never lived with and never had a longtime partner, Inge didn’t introduce gay characters into his work until late in his career. His Jewish youth who kills himself because of anti-Semitism in
Dark
has often been called a stand-in for a homosexual character. Once Inge did include gays, all too often they were stereotypes, and he did not abandon his habit of endorsing majority mores and relationships, only.
Inge had begun as an actor but due partly to parental desires (he was a fifth and final child) focused on teaching. He was an occasional radio news announcer and scriptwriter; also an art, music, book, and drama critic for the
St. Louis Star-Times
. (St. Louis was Tennessee Williams’s hometown.) A college-level English teacher, Inge grew to hate the profession—although he returned to it temporarily, post-Broadway—and pinned his hopes on a successful play to remove him from it and the Midwest.
(One of Inge’s students, in a dramatics class, was fellow Kansan Vivian Vance, who soon left for what she hoped was Broadway stardom. After middling stage success, she finally achieved national recognition on television in
I Love Lucy
.)
In 1944, when he met the two-years-older but much more successful Tennessee Williams, William Inge resolved to become a playwright. (Tennessee, visiting St. Louis, accepted Inge’s invitation to visit his apartment, where their intense affair began.) After a positive Theatre Guild tryout in Westport, Connecticut,
Come Back, Little Sheba
, Inge’s second play, opened on Broadway in 1950. It won praise and prizes for him and star Shirley Booth, who repeated the role on screen and took home an Oscar for it.
Picnic
proved Inge was no flash in the pan, as did
Bus Stop
; the movie versions of his plays made him more wealthy and famous. But after
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
came a critical backlash. “It amazes me how violent they get when a play is not a hit,” Inge said. “They act as though it were a personal affront to them that such a presentation should be made.”
The onslaught was spearheaded by
New Republic
critic Robert Brustein, who wrote a poisonous article, widely publicized, in
Harper’s
, titled “The Men-Taming Women of William Inge.” The young non-playwright slashed
Dark
and all Inge’s earlier work, which he assessed as mediocre. Brustein’s “charge” of aggressive female characters who tame or put men down in Inge’s plays was the unimaginative but attention-getting tactic of more than one jealous and homophobic reviewer. It was also incorrect insofar as Inge’s women are heavily dependent on their male counterparts, and it applied more accurately to many females in the musicals of heterosexuals Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein—think of Mrs. Anna, Fraulein Maria, Nellie Forbush, and others who put pompous men in their place.
Unfortunately, Inge was devastated by Brustein’s malice and allowed it to interfere with his work. In any event, by the late ’50s change was in more than
the air, and many observers felt Inge was increasingly old-fashioned, others that he’d gotten away from the midwestern themes and milieux that had been his forte. His fifth Broadway play,
A Loss of Roses
, opened in 1959 and was his first flop. Movie rights had sold for a fortune, but the resultant
The Stripper
with Joanne Woodward was a bomb. All Inge’s subsequent plays failed, and he grew disgusted with Hollywood when his work on the film
Bus Riley’s Back in Town
(1965) was considerably altered to expand Ann-Margret’s purr-esence. Novels were a last resort, but both sold embarrassingly. After becoming more and more reclusive in the Hollywood Hills, the writer reached rock bottom and chose carbon monoxide poisoning while seated in his Mercedes, weeks after turning sixty.
Shirley Booth, who’d withdrawn from
A Loss of Roses
before it opened, felt, “That play wasn’t terribly well written, and it wasn’t well rewritten.… The previous ones were better, but what happened shocked him: at the first sign of a weak play, the ill-wishers who’d been holding their tongues suddenly all let loose … they opened fire on Mr. Inge.”
His friend James Leo Herlihy, whose novel
All Fall Down
Inge adapted for the screen, offered, “Bill was fragile, though he’d come up the hard way.… Success softened him. He got too used to it, and it lowered his defenses. He let that nasty Brustein character pierce him to the core.” Inge later admitted that the critic “represented all the things I feared,” including the intimation that the playwright’s great success had been a fluke. Herlihy, best known for his novel
Midnight Cowboy
, stated, “Bill had a melancholy streak, as you could guess from his work. But to my mind, that helped his plays. He tapped into something people hadn’t yet articulated about small-town America.
“Bill did care too much what others thought. Then, when other people’s esteem went away, it seemed to leave him with nothing.” Less than a year before his death, William Inge looked back to 1959, to the catastrophe of
A Loss of Roses
, the play he’d believed was his best yet: “I lost my audience, and I haven’t been able to get it back.”
Inge’s sister, with whom he lived and who found his body, lamented, “Sometimes, just the fear of writer’s block froze him up. And I don’t think he even had any writer’s block.… Writing was his life. He had no other interests.”
“A bad idea gone wrong.”—W
ALTER
K
ERR
on the 1965 musical
Kelly
, which closed on opening night
“Good Fielding. No hit.”—K
YLE
C
RICHTON
on a play version of Henry Fielding’s classic novel
Tom Jones
“It contains a number of those tunes one goes
into
the theater humming.”—K
ENNETH
T
YNAN
on a derivative musical
“A titanic letdown.”—the N
EW
Y
ORK
D
AILY
N
EWS
on the hit musical
Titanic
, which won five 1997 Tony Awards, including Best Musical
“With lyrics like these, hop a raft.”—the B
ERGEN
R
ECORD
on
Titanic
“The real
Titanic
sank five days into its maiden voyage 85 years ago.… The show may not run much longer.”—the S
COTTISH
D
AILY
R
ECORD
“Tripe.”—London’s S
UNDAY
T
IMES
on the popular and critical hit
Amadeus
(1979)
“I don’t believe in astrology. The only stars I can blame for my failures are those that walk about the stage.”—S
IR
N
OEL
C
OWARD
“… British actors remain more experienced, more dextrous, more poetic than their American colleagues.”—theatre historian E
THAN
M
ORDDEN
“Jones sounded like a one-stringed double bass with a faintly Calypso accent, and rolled about like a huge barrel set in motion by a homunculus
within.”—J
OHN
S
IMON
on James Earl Jones as a tribune in Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus
(1965)
“… she’s about as Latin as a New England boiled dinner.”—D
OUGLAS
W
ATT
in the
New York Daily News
on Jane Alexander in
Goodbye, Fidel
(1980)
“Nor will I say that
Portofino
is the worst musical ever produced, because I’ve only been seeing musicals since 1919.”—W
ALTER
K
ERR
in the
New York Herald Tribune
in 1958
“Our Town
is not only disappointing but hopelessly slow … [a] disjointed, bittersweet affair of smalltown New Hampshire life.”—V
ARIETY
in 1938; Thornton Wilder’s play ran “only” 336 performances, but won the Pulitzer Prize for drama
“Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katharine Hepburn run the gamut of emotion from A to B.”—D
OROTHY
P
ARKER
on rising star Hepburn in
The Lake
in 1933
“… this Broadway adaptation of the film classic—and really, is there a more frightening phrase in all of showbiz?…”—T
IME
O
UT
N
EW
Y
ORK
magazine (June 2002)
“Lord Alfred Douglas having an exciting melodramatic cup of tea with Beverley Nichols.”—G
EORGE
J
EAN
N
ATHAN’S
homophobic dismissal of John Gielgud’s 1930 Hamlet, otherwise critically acclaimed (Douglas was Oscar Wilde’s lover; Nichols was a famous 20th-century male writer)
“No smash hit, no blockbuster.”—V
ARIETY
on
Fiddler on the Roof
, which opened in Detroit in 1964; it opened later that year in New York, won the Best Musical Tony, and broke all attendance records
“Tony winner Tom Bosley of
Fiorello!
attained his niche on TV. But now he’s gone from
Happy Days
to Sappy Nights.”—
Movieline
magazine editor E
D
M
ARGULIES
on Bosley’s return to Broadway in
Beauty and the Beast
“The thing about Maggie Smith, who is a great performer, is that she never allows you to forget that she is performing.”—fellow thespian J
EREMY
B
RETT
“Fallen archness.”—F
RANKLIN
P
IERCE
A
DAMS
on Helen Hayes as Cleopatra(!) in Shaw’s
Caesar and Cleopatra
in 1925
“Mr. Ferrer likes pauses. He pauses at the slightest provocation. He pauses at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of every line.”—W
ALTER
K
ERR
on José Ferrer’s
Cyrano de Bergerac
(1947), the film version of which won him a Best Actor Oscar
“It is as long as
Parsifal
and not as funny.”—S
IR
N
OEL
C
OWARD
, after the 1960 Toronto tryout of
Camelot
, which scuttlebutt said hastened the death of director-producer Moss Hart and prompted the retirement of composer Frederick Loewe
“The most serious musical comedy I ever saw … Maurice Evans [Sam’s father on
Bewitched
] plays a crusading minister who wants to eliminate the production numbers.”—W
ALTER
K
ERR
,
Herald Tribune
, on
Tenderloin
“A largely marvelous Leonard Bernstein score that drags Alan Jay Lerner’s book and lyrics behind it like an unwanted relative … of all the patched-up musicals that have limped into New York, this is the most pitifully pieced together one I have ever seen.”—M
ARTIN
G
OTTFRIED
,
New York Post
, on
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
“ ’Tis pity she’s a bore.”—playwright B
OB
R
ANDALL
on Madonna in
Speed-the-Plow
(punning the title
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
)
“Guido Nadzo is nadzo guido.”—playwright G
EORGE
S. K
AUFMAN
critiquing actor Guido Nadzo
“You’ve heard of people living in a fools’ paradise. Well, Leonora has a duplex there.”—K
AUFMAN
on Leonora Corbett in the 1946 play
Park Avenue
“[Director] Terry Hands saw this slight story of an adolescent girl seeking peer group acceptance [
Carrie
, the 1988 musical] as a Greek tragedy. To this end, he staged the show not in a recognizable high school but on a bare monochrome set enclosed by sterile, all white, high-tech walls: ‘The Black and White Menstrual Show’ …
Carrie
the musical should have been
Grease
, not Greece.”—author M
ARK
S
TEYN
“Dreadfully lacking in box office appeal.”—V
ARIETY
in 1930 on Marc Connelly’s
Green Pastures
, a “race” (black) story which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1931, ran for 557 performances before touring for four years, then returning to Broadway in 1935, closing with its 1,653rd performance; it grossed a then-remarkable $3 million-plus, partly because its black cast was underpaid
“Strange Interlude
will probably interest a comparatively small public. It is solid gray in tone, slow-paced and repetitious in performance, and forbidding in length.”—
NewYork Daily News
critic B
URNS
M
ANTLE
in 1928; Eugene
O’Neill’s long and strange play became his biggest success, also one of the Theatre Guild’s most profitable productions
“… her very Whoopi-ness dilutes our sense of Rainey’s dark subterranean pain and knowledge. And with her uninformed singing voice, Goldberg fails to become what she must: the spiritual centerpiece for the music.”—E
NTERTAINMENT
W
EEKLY
on a 2003 revival of
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
“For those of you who missed it the first time, this is your golden opportunity: you can miss it again.”—M
ICHAEL
B
ILLINGTON
on a 1981 revival of the musical
Godspell
“The best play I ever slept through.”—an O
SCAR
W
ILDE
critique
“Well, for Crichton out loud.”—W
ALTER
W
INCHELL
, bored with James Barries play
The Admirable Crichton
“I saw it at a disadvantage—the curtain was up.”—W
ALTER
W
INCHELL
(also ascribed to G
ROUCHO
M
ARX
)
“It was one of those plays in which all the actors unfortunately enunciated very clearly.”—R
OBERT
B
ENCHLEY
“The scenery was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it.”—A
LEXANDER
W
OOLLCOTT
“There’s less here than meets the eye.”—T
ALLULAH
B
ANKHEAD
“The audience came out whistling the set.”—
ANONYMOUS CRITIC
on Irving Berlin’s 1949
Miss Liberty
and its less than memorable songs
“Irving Berlin’s score is musically not exciting—of the real songs, only one or two are tuneful.”—
PM
critic L
EWIS
K
RONENBERGER
on the 1946 Broadway opening of
Annie Get Your Gun
, the biggest success of Berlin’s stage career. Among its “real songs”: “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “They Say It’s Wonderful,” “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better,” “Doin’ What Comes Naturally,” “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun,” and “I’m an Indian Too”
“Me No Leica.”—W
ALTER
K
ERR
on
I Am a Camera
(1954)
“Hook ’n Ladder
is the sort of play that gives failures a bad name.”—W
ALTER
K
ERR
in the 1950s
“This is the kind of show that gives pornography a dirty name.”—C
LIVE
B
ARNES
on
Oh! Calcutta!
(written by a fellow critic)
“A Month in the Wrong Country.”—S
IR
N
OEL
C
OWARD
on a US production of Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard
, set in the Deep South
“Oh, to be in England, now that April’s here.”—B
ROOKS
A
TKINSON
assessing a British actress by the first name of April who was performing on Broadway
“I love Nathan Lane’s comedy performances. It’s such a funny one.”—W
AYNE
W
ARGA
of
Entertainment Tonight
“There was scattered laughter in the rear of the theatre, leading to the belief that somebody was telling jokes back there.”—G
EORGE
S. K
AUFMAN
on an unfunny comedy
“Odets, where is thy sting?”—R
OBERT
G
ARLAND
on
Clash by Night
, by the formerly fierce Clifford Odets
“It isn’t the sort of entertainment folks buy in the theater. Nor ever have bought, within my memory. There is no emotional satisfaction to be had from sheer ugliness.”—B
URNS
M
ANTLE
on
Tobacco Road
(1933), which, hillbilly or not, yielded 3,182 performances
“Zorba
is one of the ugliest, most life-denying pieces of evil shit ever perpetrated as a Broadway musical, not least because it pretends to be beautiful and life-affirming.”—theater historian E
THAN
M
ORDDEN
, appalled by the 1968 show’s selfish title character
“She says she wants to explore character on the stage. She means, of course, her own.”—producer L
ELAND
H
AYWARD
on Ethel Merman
“Not while I’m alive!”—G
EORGE
S. K
AUFMAN’S
reply when a mutual acquaintance opined that producer Jed Harris was his own worst enemy
“I’ll send you a bill for the suit.”—critic J
OHN
S
IMON
to actress Sylvia Miles after she dumped a plate of food on him due to a bad review
Her reply: “Good. It’ll be dry-cleaned probably for the first time.”
“If you were to ask me what
Uncle Vanya
is about, I would say about as much as I can take.”—R
OBERT
G
ARLAND
in
Journal American
in 1946
“The play opened at 8:40 sharp and closed at 10:40 dull.”—H
EYWOOD
B
ROUN
on a Broadway comedy
“The Messrs. Shubert seem to forget that the female knee is a joint and not an evening’s entertainment.”—P
ERCY
H
AMMOND
on girlie shows built around the then-shocking knee and popular in the 1920s; in another
review he noted, “I find that I have knocked everything but the chorus girls’ knees, and there nature anticipated me.”
“Miss Streisand’s contortions and shifting inflections while singing might be less jarring if she wore sunglasses—might one suggest a musical set in southern California?—due to her strabismus, or semi crossed-eye condition.”—W
YATT
C
OOPER
on
Funny Girl
’s star
“[Mrs. Warren] is a generous role for womanly and impassioned actresses, and many performers have essayed it. I can think of four, however, who have not: Totie Fields, W.C. Fields, Tutankhamen’s mummy, and a trained monkey. Not until now, that is; Miss Gordon’s performance combines elements of all four.”—J
OHN
S
IMON
on Ruth Gordon in Shaw’s
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
at Lincoln Center; he accused producer Joe Papp of (mis) casting her solely because of her Oscar-winning turn in the hit movie
Rosemary’s Baby
(1968)
“The most insipid, ridiculous play I ever saw in my life.”—S
AMUEL
P
EPYS
, British author and public official, on William Shakespeare’s comedy
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in 1662; however, Pepys disliked another play even more:
Romeo and Juliet
, “a play of itself the worst I ever heard in my life.”