The theatre is an incredible refuge for an
unhappy child. —Moss HART
On December 26, 1936, Clare Boothe’s three-act satiric comedy The Women opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway, before a capacity audience and an astonishing array of some fifty critics and ten talent scouts.
Among the usual contingent of New York society figures was a battery of theatrical and literary élite: the celebrated Miss Barrymore herself, Irving Berlin, Gloria Swanson, Billy Rose and his wife Fanny Brice, Clifton Webb squiring Libby Holman, Max Gordon, the show’s producer, the historian Mark Sullivan, and Moss Hart, who, with George S. Kaufman, was rumored to have helped polish the play out of town.1
Mysteriously absent from this assemblage of regular first-nighters was the diaphanous blonde wife of Time publisher Henry Luce. She was missed in particular because she was the evening’s playwright. Having dined with family and friends, Clare Boothe Luce had ascended to—of all places—the top of the Empire State Building, in order to brace herself in solitude and reflect, not only on the performance about to begin thirteen blocks north but on the real-life drama that had brought her to this point.2
Just a year before, her play Abide With Me had flopped disastrously at the Ritz. It was a melodrama based on her first marriage, at twenty, to George Tuttle Brokaw, an alcoholic millionaire more than twice her age. In words that were burned on her brain, one critic had written, “Its lovely playwright, who must have been crouched in the wings for a sprinter’s start as the final curtain mercifully descended, heard a cry of ‘author,’ which was not audible in my vicinity, and arrived on stage to accept the audience’s applause just as the actors … were properly lined up.” A sheaf of other negative reviews—one even in Time—not to mention boos in the audience, had made Clare swear never again to attend her own opening nights.3
The evening was unseasonably warm. Fog curling off the Hudson River blotted out lights on the George Washington Bridge and veiled the upper reaches of Manhattan. There, on the fringes of Spanish Harlem, she had been born thirty-three years before, the illegitimate daughter of a traveling salesman and a beautiful twenty-year-old “typewriter.”4
Friends knew little about Clare’s childhood, but memories of its squalor and mendacities were painfully vivid to her, try though she always had to surmount them.5 As she stood now in her 102nd-floor eyrie, looking out over the glittering metropolis to Forty-seventh Street, where her name was up in lights, it struck her that “none of the ants on the street had ever heard of me.”6 Unless they could be made as sure as she was of her own worth, fame, so ardently sought, might be fleeting.
Clare’s ambitious mother had always encouraged her drive and taught her how to dissemble and manipulate men. “Don’t talk heavy stuff too much. Let them all tell you how blue the eyes are and golden the hair. But never let them see what makes the wheels go round.”7 Anna Clara Schneider’s fantasies of a theatrical career had been dashed after her teenage seduction by William Franklin Boothe. She had then pursued them vicariously, wangling Clare a job as understudy to Mary Pickford, and later a part in an Edison movie.
Pretty as the adolescent girl had been, with her pale gold hair and Bavarian blue eyes, she was not a natural actress. Professionals consistently beat her at auditions. She had shown more talent for stagecraft, mounting an adaptation of Cinderella when she was only fifteen. Upon graduation from high school, she had been undecided whether to become an actress or a dramatist. “I simply was certain I’d be one or the other.”8
Ambitions notwithstanding, she had allowed herself to be distracted by marriage, motherhood, and divorce, then by a brief but heady career in journalism. In just three years, Clare Boothe Brokaw had risen from caption writer at Vogue to managing editor of Vanity Fair, one of the most beautiful magazines in the world. She had followed these achievements with a syndicated news column. But her congenital hunger for applause had brought her back to writing plays. Not that much applause was forthcoming. Abide With Me had closed after only thirty-six performances, and a collaborative script with Paul Gallico remained unproduced.9
After marrying Henry Luce she had hoped for a place on the staff of Life, her husband’s new weekly photojournal. But having suggested both its name and its idea, she found herself barred from participation in its runaway success. Luce’s male editors were adamant that they would not accept her in any executive position at Time Inc.10
Enraged by their masculine bias, and the gender in which she felt imprisoned, Clare had taken herself off in the spring of 1936 to a West Virginia resort and in three days written a play packed with “the most brutal gossip” she had heard in beauty parlors, exercise studios, and fashion showrooms. She simply gathered together, in her imagination, groups of rich East Side women and Fifth Avenue shopgirls and, as she later put it, “set them to talking, and let it run.”11
With the help of her former lover Bernard Baruch, who spoke of Clare Boothe as the best female intellect he knew, she had sold The Women to Max Gordon. He had immediately shown the script to Moss Hart and George Kaufman. They were impressed enough with the play’s potential to invest in it.12 Clare, having lost money on Abide With Me, cautiously refused to back her own work again. Undeterred, Gordon budgeted $70,000 for lavish sets and costumes, and brought in the eminent Robert B. Sinclair to direct an all-female production—the first in Broadway history. More than two thousand actresses had fought over its forty roles. Now The Women faced its fate before the most demanding audience in the world.
Clare’s worry, just before the curtain rose on the consummation of her two childhood ambitions, was that her play might be perceived as trivial entertainment, rather than as a serious comedy of manners. Would lines composed in the heady mountain air of West Virginia, and re-composed at tryout time in the mists of Philadelphia, sound witty and pungent enough for New York’s sophisticated tastes? Should she have included some fashionable leftist political rhetoric? Intellectuals were bound to find The Women lightweight, compared with the social reformism of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty or Eugene O’Neill’s evocations of frustrated desire in Strange Interlude.13
There was also the question of commercial competition. All the forty-carat diamonds of the American theater seemed to be sparkling that winter night. Within a few blocks John Gielgud was wooing playgoers with his sonorous interpretation of Hamlet, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were polishing their partnership in Robert Sherwood’s Idiot’s Delight, and Margaret Sullavan was bewitching the Music Box in Stage Door, by George Kaufman and Edna Ferber. You Can’t Take It with You, by Kaufman and Hart, had just opened brilliantly at the Booth. Katharine Cornell was starring in Maxwell Anderson’s The Wingless Victory, Tallulah Bankhead in George Kelly’s comedy Reflected Glory, Helen Hayes in Gilbert Miller’s presentation of Victoria Regina, and Ruth Gordon in Wycherley’s The Country Wife. A rotating series of short plays by Noel Coward, entitled Tonight at Eight Thirty, was filling the National, with the author and Gertrude Lawrence in the leading roles. George Abbott’s production of the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes featured Ray Bolger, and Beatrice Lillie and Bert Lahr were billed in Vincente Minnelli’s revue The Show Is On. Crowning all these productions in longevity was Jack Kirkland’s adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, in its third year.14
How could a fledgling playwright take wing in such illustrious company?
Backstage at the Barrymore, under glaring work lights, the cast of The Women viewed the audience as an enemy to be won over.15 Dressers made last-minute adjustments to one hundred winter outfits designed by John Hambleton. (Spring, summer, and fall wardrobes would be needed in the event of a long run.) Twenty-seven stage technicians checked twelve scene settings by Jo Mielziner, while the props manager kept tabs on fifteen hundred feminine accessories, from lipsticks to a working bubble bath. The latter was going to require deft operation in Act Three. Four pails of water, mixed with special Swedish soap, would have to be pumped electrically for fifteen minutes in order to sustain foam around a naked actress through six minutes of dialogue.16
Out front in the auditorium, the atmosphere was cozy, even clubby. “Angels” in their top-price $4.40 seats looked optimistic. At two minutes to go a final bell summoned stragglers from the lobby and lounge. With twenty seconds left, the houselights dimmed to half power, then darkened.17
The curtain rose on a haze of cigarette smoke over four fashionable women playing bridge in a Park Avenue apartment. Ilka Chase, glossily feline as Sylvia, rasped across the footlights, “So I said to Howard, ‘What do you expect me to do? Stay home and darn your socks? What do we have money for? Why do we keep servants?’ ”
“You don’t keep them long, God knows,” Jane Seymour replied.18
Her character, a sharp-tongued writer named Nancy, was, according to backstage rumor, Clare’s alter ego. The game proceeded with more tough badinage, punctuated by the snapping of cards.
Men in the audience began to have the uncomfortable feeling they were snooping on a private female ritual—indeed, becoming almost voyeurs when Phyllis Povah, playing an obviously pregnant Edith, rose from the table in nausea.19 “Morning sickness! I heave the whole darn day. This is positively the last time I go through this lousy business for any man!”
She rushed offstage, only to return a few moments later and disgustedly pick up a sandwich. “Watercress. I’d just as soon eat my way across a front lawn.”
The laughter that followed this line was uneasy. Miss Boothe’s humor seemed as crude as her observation was surgical.
“I think Mary’s gone off terribly this winter,” Sylvia said, changing the subject. “Have you noticed those deep lines, here?” She gestured at her mouth.
The women began discussing their hostess, Mrs. Stephen Haines, who had yet to appear. Nancy accused Sylvia of being jealous of a contented woman. “And what are you, pet?” Sylvia wanted to know.
“What nature abhors,” Nancy retorted. “I’m—a virgin—a frozen asset.”
This was the kind of breathtakingly mordant line that, out of town, had caused both men and women to hiss Clare’s dialogue. Provincial audiences were not used to self-mockery.
When Peggy, the fourth cardplayer, acted by Adrienne Marden, wished aloud that she “could make a little money writing,” Nancy sniffed, “If you wrote the way I do, that’s just what you’d make.”
An expensively dressed party from Time Inc. laughed loudly. One woman gushed, “Isn’t it wonderful?” Her escort’s reply, clearly audible in adjoining rows, was an example of the corporate chauvinism still frustrating Clare. “Well, with the entire staff of Time’s rewrite men at her disposal, why shouldn’t she write a good play?”20
Margalo Gillmore entered as Mary. A lovely woman in her middle thirties, the stage directions read. She is what most of us think our happily married daughters are like. Her opening lines were deliberately bland. The audience had yet to feel Clare’s contempt for Mary as a complacent wife and mother—one who would be humiliated and then toughened beyond recognition by the evening’s end.
In a stage whisper, out of Mary’s earshot, Sylvia retailed to Edith the latest item of beauty parlor gossip. Stephen Haines was having an affair with “a blonde floosie.” Sylvia had it on the best authority: the woman who did her nails.
When Mary placidly remarked that Stephen would be working late that night, Sylvia pounced. “Are you sure it’s work, darling?” Playing with her prey, she started talking about a “wonderful new manicurist” whose colors Mary should try. She extended her fingertips for all to admire. “Jungle Red.”
Nancy quipped, “Looks as if you’d been tearing at somebody’s throat.” But Mary simply laughed.
“Jungle Red … I’ll remember that.” Cutting the cards, she said, “I feel lucky today.”
The Women, original Broadway production Margalo Gillmore, Jane Seymour, Phyllis Povah, Ilka Chase, Adrienne Marden (Illustration prl 1.1)
“Do you, darling?” Sylvia smirked. “Well, you know what they say, ‘Lucky in cards—’ ” The curtain fell.
A hair dryer hummed at the beginning of the second scene, as Mary kept her recommended appointment. The gossipy manicurist, not knowing who she was, revealed—as Sylvia intended—that Mr. Stephen Haines was keeping a Saks Fifth Avenue perfume salesgirl named Crystal Allen. Stiff with shock, Mary rose from her chair, leaving the Jungle Red unapplied.
A quick scene shift to the Haines apartment showed Mary’s mother, in the person of Jessie Busley, advising patience while Stephen’s affair ran its course. He was “tired of himself” after twelve years of marriage and needed rejuvenation. “Time comes,” she added, in a line of delicious double entendre, “when every man’s got to feel something new.”
There followed a scene of coincidence, as Mary and Crystal, played by the blonde Betty Lawford, stood in neighboring booths of a dressmaker’s salon, unaware of each other. Sylvia, vastly enjoying Mary’s fall from complacency, barged in to announce that Stephen had taken his small son and daughter to lunch with his mistress. (Crystal, meanwhile, was distracting men in the audience by trying on a negligée.) Then Mary learned from a saleswoman that her rival was next door and rushed out to confront her. “I won’t have you touching my children!”
As they shouted at each other, the curvaceous “floosie” made it plain she was determined to steal Stephen for good. “The longer you stay in here, the more confident I get … Mrs. Haines, you are a hell of a dull woman!”21
Clare, alone in her distant observatory, could only estimate the time of the first intermission and imagine the comments of playgoers in the Barrymore lobby. Had she been able to stroll among them, she might have been encouraged, if not flattered, by the general reaction. Women reveled in the bitchy dialogue. Men were titillated by what they had seen, yet disillusioned by what they had heard. Billy Rose snarled half-humorously at Fanny Brice, “I didn’t know what I married, and I’m going to kick you right in the teeth.”22
One tall man in gray remained in his seat, where he had brooded throughout. He was still there when the second act opened, to the sound of tango music in an Elizabeth Arden exercise salon. Bare thighs arched and buttocks rotated on wadded pink satin mats. Between gyrations, Edith confessed that she had leaked details of the dressing-room confrontation to a gossip columnist.
“I told her that Mary smacked the Allen girl!”
“Edith!”
“Well, that’s what Sylvia told me!”
“I didn’t!”
“You did, too!”
This was as much as the man in gray could stand. He pushed his way to the aisle and strode toward the exit, saying in a clearly audible voice, “It stinks!”23
Richard Lockridge of the New York Sun, meditating on his review, felt that Miss Boothe knew altogether “too many sabre-toothed tigresses” and “lived in an atmosphere of rather exaggerated dread.” Mark Sullivan had similar thoughts, albeit more personal ones. He knew Clare well and loved her as both a woman and a creative mind. But he had never guessed at the extent of her familiarity with scandal-mongering bitches and shopgirls. She must have had “some hard experiences.”24
Almost thirty years her senior, Sullivan worried about Clare prostituting her talent with distracting antics such as legs cycling to a Victrola. He must write and remind her that an Ibsen would not compromise important dialogue with visual gimmicks. All the same, Sullivan had to confess that he had never seen “such sustained brilliance” on any stage. “You might like it or not, but you were bound to look at it.”25
Moss Hart, too, felt ambivalent. His initial reaction to Clare’s script had been excitement. He thought it “stood the best chance” of any play he had seen in years. Now for some reason he found himself liking it less. In years to come, when The Women was still playing after hundreds of stagings around the world, he would revise his opinion yet again.26
Further autobiographical elements were plain toward the end of Act Two, at least to those who knew the story of the author’s divorce from George Brokaw. Mary, disregarding her mother’s advice, had gone to Reno to get a decree. Also improbably waiting for decrees were Peggy, Sylvia, and an ex-chorine who wanted to marry Sylvia’s husband.
There was a hair-pulling, leg-biting catfight onstage between Sylvia and her usurper. In the midst of it, Mary received a call from Stephen. He wanted to confirm that he would be marrying Crystal. Clare’s dramatic limitations were apparent as Mary cried out, “Oh, God, why did this happen?” and “It’s not ended if your heart doesn’t say so.” Slowly, the houselights went up.
The final act of The Women began with the new Mrs. Haines provocative in a black marble bathtub, bubbles up to her chin, smoking a cigarette. She complained to her maid about having to say good night to Little Mary, Stephen’s daughter, who had come for a visit. “He’s tried for two years to cram us down each other’s throats.”
The telephone rang. Crystal reached out energetically—to the horror of the stage manager, who noticed “there weren’t any bubbles left where they should have been.”27 Little Mary (an obvious portrait of Clare’s own child by George Brokaw) drifted in, and it soon became apparent to both child and audience that Crystal was hearing from an intimate acquaintance called “Buck.” Mark Sullivan, shocked that his angel-faced Clare could portray sexual duplicity so convincingly, once again felt serious moral questions were being overshadowed by extravagant effects.28
In the penultimate scene, Mary heard from her returning daughter all about the “lovey-dovey” telephone conversation. At the mention of the name Buck, she deduced that Crystal was sleeping with the husband of one of her own friends. This news, plus Little Mary’s “I think Daddy doesn’t love her as much as you any more,” encouraged her to confront both Crystal and Stephen with evidence of the former’s two-timing.
Clare’s climactic scene was set in what was, for men, the most revelatory sanctum of all: the ladies’ room of a nightclub patronized by all the major characters. Here Crystal, coming in to powder her nose, found herself entrapped by Mary. While she vainly protested her faithfulness to Stephen, Nancy took the opportunity to slip out for a quiet word with someone offstage.
A message came back: “There’s a gentleman called Mr. Haines. He says he’s been waiting a long time for his wife—” Crystal reached for her wrap, only to be deflected by Mary. “Tell him I am coming.”
“You are just a cat, like all the rest of us,” Crystal snarled.
“Well, I’ve had two years to sharpen my claws,” said Mary, gaily waving a manicured hand. “Jungle Red … Good night, ladies!”
The applause that followed the final curtain was too stunned to be overwhelming. Clare had long since descended from her tower, but she felt no need to join the cast backstage, having already sent each actress a bottle of champagne. Since it was Saturday night, there was no point waiting around for reviews: they would not appear until Monday. What mattered, for the next thirty-six hours, was word of mouth. Would the “ants” want to see her play? She could not be sure. So much in her life had turned sour when things seemed to be going well. Her mood, as she returned to her East Side apartment, was something less than optimistic.29
Outside the Barrymore, Sidney Whipple of the World-Telegram lingered to eavesdrop as patrons departed. He was particularly interested in the comments of Clare’s own sex. “So true, so faithful, so delightful!” “Why, I know a woman—you know her, my dear—exactly like—”30
“The most amazing thing about it,” Whipple would write, “is the cheerful feminine reaction to a comedy that ought actually to blister the ladies in their tenderest regions … They applaud the most brazenly cynical utterance. They delight in dissection. They may even take notes for their personal use.”31
Professional critics had mixed feelings about The Women. John Anderson of the New York Evening Journal called it “glittering, smart, hard, laughable, fascinating, heartless, and repulsive.” Douglas Gilbert of the World-Telegram found himself despising “these best-bred hellcats and social filth mongers” with their “ermined smut.” The play was “provocative,” he had to admit, but “poisonous.” Brooks Atkinson approved its portrayals of “unregenerate worldlings” but disliked it overall. Richard Watts of the New York Herald Tribune was unsure whether he objected more to its cynicism or its sentimentality. Mary Haines seemed “hardly a person at all” but “merely a kind of symbol representing Miss Boothe’s idea of the lost purity of American womanhood.” But he left the theater convinced that The Women would “make a million dollars.”32
Other theatregoers headed home. Louis Soboi, a columnist from the Evening Journal, told his wife he had seen a play about a classy woman who had lost her husband to “a broad,” only to take him back.
“How silly of her,” said Mrs. Soboi. “I wouldn’t … I’d never be sure after that. It’s all right to forgive—but don’t ever believe a woman can forget.”33