All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 by Ethan Mordden Page B
Authors: Ethan Mordden
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to strangle her, she’s laughing and screaming at once—hysterical—and Belasco pulls out one last crazy trick: she will take hold of whatever’s within reach and try to beat him off with it. It turns out to be a bunch of flowers; and so she dies. With the gendarmes at the door, George embraces the corpse with agonized cries of “My Lulu Belle!” as the curtain comes down.
Lulu Belle ran 461 performances, the stay of a smash, and while Belasco died in 1931 his continued prominence on The Street in the 1920s marked one of the theatre’s most apparent connections with its primitive past. Another connection was the revival, extremely common at this time. In 1921, Trilby (1895) came back with its original Svengali, Wilton Lackaye (now nearly sixty), and two of his original colleagues, and five more recent successes returned that same year with the headliners of the premiere: The Squaw Man (1905) with William Faversham; The Easiest Way (1909) with Frances Starr; The Return of Peter Grimm (1911) with David Warfield; Peg O’ My Heart (1912) with Laurette Taylor; and Romance with Doris Keane. (We remember the last as Edward Sheldon’s great hit; in the excitement, he proposed marriage to Keane.) These really were revivals of memorable portrayals. Still, Arthur Hopkins brought back his production of The Jest seven years after the Barrymore brothers had stunned the town in it with, merely, Basil Sydney and Alphonz Ethier (who had in fact succeeded Lionel as Neri during the original run). Yet it ran ten weeks, impressive for such meager leftovers.
* * *
There were some new genres in play along with the familiar ones. The postwar attitudes toward sex, increasingly freer than before, encouraged the development of the so-called bedroom play into what we now term “boudoir farce”—that is, from the flirtatious into the sinful. In the first of the sophisticated musical revues, The Greenwich Village Follies (1919), a number called “I Want a Daddy Who Will Rock Me To Sleep” remarked on the growth of sex comedy by working applicable titles punningly into the song’s verse— Up in Mabel’s Room, A Sleepless Night, Twin Beds, The Dame in Room Thirteen, Newlyweds, and She Walked in Her Sleep (into the arms of married men, also outside an apartment building along the ledge of the sixteenth floor). These plays really were farces with come-hither titles; after 1919, the program got spicier. Otto Harbach’s No More Blondes (1920) typified the earlier form, as husband Ernest Truex and someone else’s wife Eileen Wilson got trapped together while various strangers intruded, spied, and threatened. But Avery Hopwood and Charlton Andrews’ Ladies Night (1920) set the whole cast running in and out of rooms in a Turkish bath, the men in drag; and Hopwood’s The Demi-Virgin (1921)—referring to a bride who abandoned her marriage at some point during her wedding night—so toyed with the cautions of the day that the police shut down the Pittsburgh tryout and there was further legal challenge in New York.
By far the essential early-twenties sex comedy was The Gold Diggers (1919), because it saw the world of men and women as a war of dupes versus takers. The men are rich and the women attractive, and the problem with the game they play is that only the women know the rules. Such a typifying entry should be produced by A. H. Woods, written by Avery Hopwood, and headed by Hazel Dawn, the genre’s prime practitioners. (It was Dawn, the violin-playing heroine of the 1911 musical The Pink Lady, who originated the title role in the best-remembered of the sex comedies, Getting Gertie’s Garter [1921].) But The Gold Diggers, by Hopwood, was produced by David Belasco and starred his latest discovery, Ina Claire.
The Gold Diggers wasn’t typical Belasco fare, with the same ordinary set for all three acts, a mere nineteen in the cast, and a narrative almost embarrassingly placid. Society Boy falls for Chorus Girl; his uncle
Lulu Belle ran 461 performances, the stay of a smash, and while Belasco died in 1931 his continued prominence on The Street in the 1920s marked one of the theatre’s most apparent connections with its primitive past. Another connection was the revival, extremely common at this time. In 1921, Trilby (1895) came back with its original Svengali, Wilton Lackaye (now nearly sixty), and two of his original colleagues, and five more recent successes returned that same year with the headliners of the premiere: The Squaw Man (1905) with William Faversham; The Easiest Way (1909) with Frances Starr; The Return of Peter Grimm (1911) with David Warfield; Peg O’ My Heart (1912) with Laurette Taylor; and Romance with Doris Keane. (We remember the last as Edward Sheldon’s great hit; in the excitement, he proposed marriage to Keane.) These really were revivals of memorable portrayals. Still, Arthur Hopkins brought back his production of The Jest seven years after the Barrymore brothers had stunned the town in it with, merely, Basil Sydney and Alphonz Ethier (who had in fact succeeded Lionel as Neri during the original run). Yet it ran ten weeks, impressive for such meager leftovers.
* * *
There were some new genres in play along with the familiar ones. The postwar attitudes toward sex, increasingly freer than before, encouraged the development of the so-called bedroom play into what we now term “boudoir farce”—that is, from the flirtatious into the sinful. In the first of the sophisticated musical revues, The Greenwich Village Follies (1919), a number called “I Want a Daddy Who Will Rock Me To Sleep” remarked on the growth of sex comedy by working applicable titles punningly into the song’s verse— Up in Mabel’s Room, A Sleepless Night, Twin Beds, The Dame in Room Thirteen, Newlyweds, and She Walked in Her Sleep (into the arms of married men, also outside an apartment building along the ledge of the sixteenth floor). These plays really were farces with come-hither titles; after 1919, the program got spicier. Otto Harbach’s No More Blondes (1920) typified the earlier form, as husband Ernest Truex and someone else’s wife Eileen Wilson got trapped together while various strangers intruded, spied, and threatened. But Avery Hopwood and Charlton Andrews’ Ladies Night (1920) set the whole cast running in and out of rooms in a Turkish bath, the men in drag; and Hopwood’s The Demi-Virgin (1921)—referring to a bride who abandoned her marriage at some point during her wedding night—so toyed with the cautions of the day that the police shut down the Pittsburgh tryout and there was further legal challenge in New York.
By far the essential early-twenties sex comedy was The Gold Diggers (1919), because it saw the world of men and women as a war of dupes versus takers. The men are rich and the women attractive, and the problem with the game they play is that only the women know the rules. Such a typifying entry should be produced by A. H. Woods, written by Avery Hopwood, and headed by Hazel Dawn, the genre’s prime practitioners. (It was Dawn, the violin-playing heroine of the 1911 musical The Pink Lady, who originated the title role in the best-remembered of the sex comedies, Getting Gertie’s Garter [1921].) But The Gold Diggers, by Hopwood, was produced by David Belasco and starred his latest discovery, Ina Claire.
The Gold Diggers wasn’t typical Belasco fare, with the same ordinary set for all three acts, a mere nineteen in the cast, and a narrative almost embarrassingly placid. Society Boy falls for Chorus Girl; his uncle
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