Emboldened and exhilarated by the opera’s reception in Hartford, the company now faced the altogether different problems of mounting Four Saints on Broadway in less than two weeks. Press agent Nathan Zatkin sent complimentary tickets for the February 20 opening to every New York art critic, music critic, theater critic, fashion writer, book critic, and even sportswriter. He compiled a mimeographed guidebook for the press that included not only reviews and production credits but two apologias, by Carl Van Vechten and Virgil Thomson. They provided critics with an accessible vocabulary for an experience that eluded conventional description. Thomson’s rationale for his all-black casting provided the press with a positive spin to the reigning black stereotypes. Among them, Thomson, Van Vechten, and Zatkin targeted their PR impeccably for modernism, fashion, and Negro chic.
Harry Moses booked Four Saints in Three Acts into the Forty-fourth Street Theatre, one of Broadway’s largest. The production had to be adapted to its wide stage, and the cast had to project their voices to an audience of 1,400, nearly five times the size of the original audience. Accustomed to singing before massive congregations, they had no trouble doing so, and Frederick Ashton relished the opportunity to expand the size of his movements. Virgil Thomson was similarly pleased to add a few new singers to the chorus and a harmonium and strings to the orchestra.
The set, however, posed a nightmarish problem. Stettheimer’s cellophane cyclorama reached only halfway up the back wall of the theater, and the set was so dwarfed by the theater’s expanse that Lee Shubert, who happened by at midweek, asked when the scenery was arriving. Florine Stettheimer offered no solutions for adapting her design. “I can’t do anything I don’t feel like doing,” she told a reporter. “I mean I really can’t.”1 Kate Lawson addressed the problem of scale by renting a black velour portal to mask the stage opening, and she added an inner red velvet curtain. To light the huge cellophane cyclorama for the theater’s cavernous expanse, Feder had no one to consult but the electrician at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre. “You have to put four times more light on that cellophane,” the electrician advised. “Otherwise it looks like shit.” Feder added four more border lights and supplementary blue light. He recalled, “For the first time I could see it. I put light behind it. It just shimmered. My Irish electrician friend said, ‘That’s better, Abe, but maybe you should put more lights.’ ‘I already got four lights!’ I said. ‘It’s embarrassing!’ ”
Just when it seemed that production problems were finally solved, fifty hours before the premiere, New York City’s fire marshal arrived. Holding a lit match to a swatch of cellophane, he watched the flame and promptly condemned in one fell swoop the cyclorama, the tarlatan trees, and the grass mats. (The week after the opera opened, the Fire Department passed a regulation that prohibited cellophane from ever appearing on Broadway again.) The pale, glum assembly was saved from despair by the theater’s janitor, who suggested they try a new fireproofing material called “water glass.” Within two hours it had been tested and found effective. An overtime crew spent the whole night on ladders spreading the smelly substance across acres of cyclorama and drying it with fans and projectors. Water glass made the tarlatan trees droop, so Kate Lawson had a duplicate set without water glass fabricated, the treated one to show the inspectors and the untreated one to be substituted just before the curtain rose.
While the water glass was drying, it began to snow. Snow fell on GERTRUDE STEIN and VIRGIL THOMSON, delineated in white lightbulbs on the theater marquee; it fell on city streets and skyscrapers and elevated train tracks. Nine inches accumulated, trains stopped, businesses throughout the city closed. But neither the snow nor a taxi strike, nor the price of the top ticket—at $3.30, the most expensive on Broadway—kept the stylish crowd or the journalists from opening night. As Lucius Beebe reported, “The intelligentsia in tortoiseshell glasses and the representatives of fashion with monocles descended in an avalanche of ermine and broadcloth on the old Forty-fourth Street Theatre.” Or as Cholly Knickerbocker’s column put it, “Who Says EVERYBODY is in Florida?”
The monied set was represented by Mrs. “Bill” Rockefeller and the Hohenlohe-Schillingfursts, who delayed their exodus to Palm Beach for the opening. The Algonquin crowd included Robert Benchley and Neysa McMein, Alan Campbell and Dorothy Parker. Cecil Beaton accompanied dancer Tilly Losch. Representing the performing arts were opera singer Lawrence Tibbett, George Gershwin, Theatre Guild producer Lawrence Langner, actresses Ina Claire and Helen Westley (who commented, “It’s very beautiful, but I like Elektra better”). One critic summed up the crowd as “an audience of almost Parisian choiceness and of quite unbearably dazzling intelligence.” They dressed en haute cérémonie, reported society and fashion columnists, and showed “more originality in their costumes than we’ve seen in many a fashion show.” The men served as a black-and-white backdrop for the women: Blanche Knopf in stunning jet, Isadora Townsend Pell “looking chicer than chic,” Lucia Symphorosa Bristed wearing an outsized tiara. Elaborate trains and postilion hats, unruffled chiffon, ostrich plumes, and velvet cloaks rivaled the stylishly formal clothes in Hartford a few weeks earlier. “Individualism was out hey-heying around the other night,” one fashion reporter wrote, adding, “It was no mere Greenwich Village brand of individualism, either.”
When the curtain rose a few minutes late, many audience members had little idea what to expect—they had come “either [to] have a good laugh or to feel snobbish.”2 Henry McBride reported, “The reception by the house was almost instantaneous. For the first five minutes they laughed at some of Gertrude’s words, but soon they were gasping in admiration at Florine’s marvelous color arrangements and Virgil’s really adorable music.”3
In the Stettheimers’ box sat Virgil Thomson, Henry McBride, and Florine and Carrie Stettheimer. (Ettie cabled Thomson that she could not attend because she was “SWELLING WITH ASTHMA AND CONCEIT AT HAVING BEEN ONE OF THE EARLIEST ADMIRERS OF YOUR MUSIC.”4) In the neighboring box sat Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield, who joined them after the first intermission. “I could hear him saying, ‘lovely, lovely,’ to himself, as each new little thing came along,” reported McBride, and “I was surprised to see how cool Virgil and Florine were. He is the most unfussed person I have ever met.”5 Gertrude Stein did not attend, but she alone graced the program cover in a photograph by George Platt Lynes.
As Vogue put it, “One sat and watched and heard and wondered and laughed and did not understand.” Before the evening was out, the audience surrendered to their delight. When the chorus finally ended the opera with “Last Act. Which is a fact,” John Houseman, standing in the wings, heard only silence. Then, “with a triumphant roar, through which I could vaguely distinguish the sharper tones of cheers and bravos, it came rushing at us out of the darkness, sweeping over the bright-lit stage, overwhelming the small, solemnly bowing figures of our astounded saints.” Carl Van Vechten whooped louder than the rest, and the Countess Ghika became so excited that, for the first time in recorded history, she dropped her monocle. Virgil Thomson bowed at center stage, and Frederick Ashton and Houseman entered from the wings, while Florine Stettheimer bowed from the stage box.6 As the onstage delivery of flowers continued and the curtain calls hit twenty, voices grew hoarse, Cecil Beaton was in tears, and sculptor Jo Davidson declared it the best thing he had ever seen in New York. The fireman on duty looked around and said, “Jeez, has everybody gone crazy or are they just stewed?” New York Times critic Olin Downes described the implications of that night’s ovation: “Debussy and the poor old Met were buried last night, buried to shouts of joy and hosannas of acclaim for the new dawn of the lyric drama.”
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Before John Houseman left the theater that night, he laid his face against the stage’s splintered wood and sobbed with exhaustion and joy. Then he went on to a party at Julien and Joella Levy’s apartment. Henry McBride reported that the party was a “terrific crush”; he left at one, hoping to sleep. “I passed a nuit blanche—the excitement had been too much.”7
Lucius Beebe predicted that the opera “will be most expressively the vogue for the next few weeks.” The subject dominated tea and dinner party chat, conversations about it erupted in automats and subways, and on the street people waved their programs at one another. One reporter observed people “laboring hugely in steam-filled air to convince various bewildered stay-at-homes that it was a cock-eyed, or it was not a cock-eyed, show.” George Gershwin declared Four Saints “refreshing as a new dessert,” prompting Franklin Pierce Adams to quip in “the Conning Tower” column, “Our conviction is that he can’t spell.” (From the opera Gershwin also drew inspiration for Porgy and Bess, produced a year later.) Julien Levy was so excited about the performance that he simply declined to talk to anyone who had not seen it. Among the opera’s repeat customers were Arturo Toscanini (twice), Henry McBride (four times), Dorothy Parker (five times), and Alma Wertheim, holding the record at seventeen times. Marianne Moore called it “a blasphemous but talented thing” and declared Saint Teresa’s to be the only bearable soprano voice she had ever heard.8 An inevitable backlash soon set in. “The smart thing among the younger artists is to be violently against it,” Paul Bowles wrote Thomson. “Stieglitz decides also to side with them. Most of the defense must be taken for Virgil, against whom they allow themselves to rage for having the audacity to give Gertrude Stein in modern dress.”9
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The most hermetic of operas, oddly enough, managed to enter the broad stream of American popular culture. While The March of Time broadcast three minutes on national radio and children across the nation skipped rope to “How many acts are there in it?,” a women’s club in Bronxville did a parody skit called “Four Paints in Compacts.” Realizing that money was to be made in merchandising Four Saints chic, Bergdorf Goodman offered a tea gown in five colors, called “Saint” because “it looks like one of the thrilling costumes in the much-talked-of Four Saints opera.”10 Gimbel’s featured modernistic, geometrically patterned tablecloths named after lines from the opera, and John Wanamaker promoted $16.95 cellophane and rayon ready-to-wear evening wear (“Four Wraps in Cellophane”) with matching handbags for an extra $3.95. Decorated for Easter Sunday, the most prestigious windows along Fifth Avenue evoked Florine’s sets: Elizabeth Arden showed Saint Teresa with an Easter egg, Bergdorf Goodman depicted Saint Teresa singing “April Fools Day a pleasure,” and Lord & Taylor and others followed suit. There were even rumors that the Republican Party would incorporate bits of the opera into its next party platform.
Gertrude Stein had anticipated this phenomenon in “Composition as Explanation,” which she had written nearly ten years earlier:
For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling. Now the only difficulty with the volte face concerning the arts is this. When the acceptance comes, by that acceptance the thing created becomes a classic. It is a natural phenomena, a rather extraordinary natural phenomena, that a thing accepted becomes a classic.11
Four Saints provoked views so divergent that one newspaper observed, “The opera has been called everything human ingenuity can suggest.” Some called it a masterpiece, others a cheap hoax. Some described it as futurist, while others thought the modernism of Stein’s libretto “exhaled an aroma of the quaintly old-fashioned.” Some interpreted the opera as a satire of Catholicism, others as a deeply devotional work. A few socialists claimed the opera as an expression of their political position, since it represented close cooperation among artists. Young children thought the people onstage were real angels and that the cellophane set showed how heaven really looked. Some writers tried to find whimsical equivalents, labeling the opera the Green Pastures of Mattewan or the Run Little Chillun of Bedlam. While not every critic found Stein’s words rhythmical, few casually dismissed their lack of sense. Some made no attempt to describe the opera but nonetheless recognized its entertainment value. Variety’s critic noted, “It is drivel, of course, but the most beguiling, fascinating twaddle one can possibly imagine.”
Because of his articulate celebration of the opera in the New York Sun, Henry McBride’s acquaintances telephoned him for a few quick tips about the opera: What was the symbolism? What was meant by “Pigeons on the grass”? Why two Saint Teresas? Weary of explaining Gertrude Stein to the public, as he had for two decades, McBride wrote her about the incessant queries:
All this is tiresome. After twenty years of cubism and abstract art, it seems that these unfortunate people have not yet heard of it. I loathe explaining any work of art, and always insist that any work of art that can be explained is worthless; yet nevertheless I suppose I must at least bully some of these people into reasonableness. What I really feel is, that people who do not feel greatness in the best things of Picasso and Braque (now being shown here by Paul Rosenberg), do not know what painting is; and those who do not see poetry in your Four Saints, do not know what poetry is.12
Virgil Thomson summarized the critics’ response: the music critics liked the words and not the music, while the literary critics liked the music and not the words. Nearly everyone applauded the contributions of Florine Stettheimer and Frederick Ashton. Talented humorists such as F. P. A. and Ogden Nash had a field day with Stein jokes,13 while less clever detractors printed sections of the libretto as self-evident commentary. Most striking was the newspapers’ generally serious discussion of the opera—their attempts to describe the indescribable to a broad, unsophisticated audience.
Most critics hailed the novelty and effectiveness of an all-Negro cast in a production that was not about Negro life. Although a few singled out the individual lead singers (notably Edward Matthews and Beatrice Robinson Wayne), most critics described the singers as a collective racial entity performing according to the dictates of their musical heritage. Vogue’s primitivizing response typified the praise, calling the Negro singers “the audible miracle” of the opera. “Whites could never in the world have sung that opera. The very essence of the work demands primal ignorance and native awkwardness of which only the Negroes are capable.… I could not help thinking of the triumph of these instinctive dark people over the conscious Miss Stein.” Other critics sounded the same notes of “praise”: the Negroes were “winning,” “joyous,” “spiritual,” “childish.” Some made the point that they combined “intuition with trained technical brittleness.” Only one major white critic, Olin Downes of The New York Times, challenged the condescension of “the assumption that [the black cast’s] naiveté and presumptively unsophisticated minds would enable them to do more with the Stein text, and be less self-conscious about it, than if white singers were engaged.” The fine line between celebration and racism was crossed repeatedly. The African-American periodical Opportunity summarized the depiction of the cast as simple, intuitive children, then dryly commented, “Just how these simple children were able to memorize the highly complicated, intellectualized libretto in the first place, was never explained.”14
Critics and audience members struggled for words to capture the ineffable feelings that could be linked to neither psychological identification nor narrative drive nor political sympathy, nor, indeed, anything outside the opera itself. Dance critic John Martin called the opera “a synthesis of the theatrical arts such as we have all been waiting for and talking about for years.” Theater critic Stark Young best captured the sui generis quality of the opera’s delight: “But only now and then in the theatre can we hope for something of the quality of a thing in nature (a tree, a melon, a sheet of water, a flight of birds). The point in such case is not that it is beautiful or not beautiful, but that it lives in itself, and is in essence a constant surprise.”
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During the Broadway run Virgil Thomson savored the barrage of telegrams and letters he received. Old Kansas City friends wrote, recalling their shared boyhood days of stealing apples, and fellow composers cabled. (One enthusiastically wrote, “BROTHER YOU ARE A CENTRIFUGAL WOW.”15) Even Gertrude Stein cabled that she was “HAPPY AS CAN BE NEW YORK NEWS.”16 It was her first telegram of congratulations, Thomson noted with irritation, and she had not even sent it to the correct address. He was miffed that Stein was receiving the majority of the publicity but hoped that her celebrity would translate into a longer life for the opera. Throughout the six-week Broadway run, Harry Moses proposed touring the opera—to Boston, to Philadelphia, to London, to Chicago—which excited Virgil. Houseman observed at the time, “Thomson is like any man who, never before having made any money, is dazzled by the prospects suddenly opened to him and determined not to lose any part of it.”17 Not understanding the vagaries of producing the opera or Chick Austin’s loose financial style, Gertrude Stein was disturbed at receiving no royalties from the Hartford production. Knowing that Austin was still in debt from the production overruns, Thomson told her not to bother Chick at the moment; Harry Moses had assumed his debt. (Moses never did pay the Hartford royalties to either Thomson or Stein.) When her go-between, Bradley, wrote her that the producers seemed to be reasonable men, she responded, “Moses and Houseman may be alright but you have to remember that they were chosen by Virgil and they may be very easily playing his game.”18 What was his game?
The sticking point was Thomson’s insistence that Maurice Grosser be paid a percentage of the royalties as the opera’s scenarist and that it should come from the librettist’s share. Thomson’s point, while valid, was an invitation to conflict. Everyone who had worked for free in Hartford was put on salary when the opera moved to Broadway, except for Florine Stettheimer and Grosser. (The former by choice, the latter not.) Stein simply said no, without explanation, while Thomson interpreted it as “a case of consent ‘unreasonably withheld.’ ” Thomson refused to conduct when the show went to Chicago unless Gertrude acceded to the legal agreement he had spent fifty dollars to have drafted. Gertrude budged not an inch, and Moses ended up paying Grosser a half percent out of the producer’s take. Thomson reconciled himself to Stein’s refusal by selling a letter from Stein for fifty dollars to offset his legal costs. He considered it poetic justice but did not tell Stein. “I did not care to risk another quarrel,” he wrote. “For Gertrude, about money, did not joke.”
Thomson did not prosper materially from the Broadway run of the opera as he had expected. He received no new jobs or offers to perform his music, and no music publisher wanted to publish the opera. The only interesting proposal came from Lincoln Kirstein, who suggested that Thomson create a score for a ballet of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (When Thomson received e.e. cummings’s scenario, he declared it unproduceable.) On the rare occasion when the press solicited his views on music, Thomson seized the opportunity to become the mandarin of the new American opera: “Very few know beans about musical declamation. Practically no Americans, excepting a few of the jazz boys, can be depended on to find a melody that will not only speak the sentiment but also the correct prosody of a simple phrase like ‘Lady, Be Good’ or ‘All Alone by the Telephone.’ … Our popular style is rich and racy. Our grander language is an uncharted sea.”
Thomson did receive offers to lecture in Kansas City, where he made a grand triumphal return. At the Kansas Citian Hotel he gave a ninety-minute lecture on “Music for the Modern World.” When a Kansas City Star reporter arrived at his parents’ Wabash Avenue home, Thomson conducted the interview dressed in black pajamas and a black robe, as if to prove that one could be a sissy cosmopolite and still appear in a midwestern newspaper.
During the opera’s Broadway run, John Houseman scraped bottom financially. “Why we have not made a fortune in New York is a profound mystery,” he wrote Chick Austin three weeks into the run. “Or rather I think the explanation is to be found in the word Stein.”19 Meanwhile, the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music owed him $350, and Houseman owed his agent. (Austin did not pay Houseman back until June, and then only by selling some of his own furniture.) But more important than the money, Houseman felt the enlivening conviction that, at the age of thirty, he had finally discovered his vocation.
Henry McBride reported to a friend, “Florine, as you can guess, is now quite up-stage with all the flattery she has been getting.”20 A New York University student hoped to write his dissertation on Stettheimer’s paintings; reporters requested interviews; and Julien Levy reported that dealers wanted paintings that were like Stettheimer’s—“féerique and candy box and magical”—and they hoped to give her an exhibition.
Carrie and Ettie Stettheimer expressed their ambivalence about their sister’s Broadway success by leaving town. They vacationed in Atlantic City during three weeks of the opera’s Broadway run, leaving Florine to care for their mother at the Alwyn Court, where the two lived principally on chicken broth and chicken hearts. To a tea one afternoon during the run Florine invited not only such regulars as McBride, Thomson, and the Askews but also Saint Teresa, the Commère, and another cast member. She wrote to her sisters that the addition of the cast members transformed the tone of the gathering: “They made their entree with an overlife-size great Danse. The conversation was such as never occurs in our salon—childbirth—thoroughly gone into by the three women—when the men joined us (sounds antiquated) stories of French—Paris—brothel life.”21 Such a mixed-race gathering would probably not have occurred had the two other sisters been home; black guests had rarely been received at the Alwyn Court before.
Two years earlier, Florine had written to Henry McBride, “Shall I never be rescued from oblivion?”22 But when that rescue came, she did not appear to enjoy it. She rejected a New Yorker reporter as lacking in knowledge, she pooh-poohed the Easter window displays along Fifth Avenue since she had not been consulted, she dismissed the new interest in her painting and continued to show noncommercially, and she thought the praise of her sets had become “shopworn.” And she warned a Sun reporter that she would be a difficult interview. “Others have tried it,” she said. “They seem to go away and find they haven’t anything to write about.”23 About the dissertation writer, Florine noted that he wanted to “discover and analyze me—I shall have to keep a secretary like the star members of our cast.”24 The flip side of fame, invasion, struck her as intolerable.
During the Broadway run of the opera, Harry Moses grew so enchanted with the cast that he planned to form a black opera company that would sing the standard repertory in English. Similarly, Frederick Ashton continued his love affair with the cast and with Harlem, and finally with the whole audience. He said, “Americans make you feel it when you’ve done something well.” He danced at uptown parties, once for four hours on end, improvising a pas de deux with a chair. His London friends observed that New York had raised Ashton’s energy level and increased his interest in drinking potent Horse’s Necks. “He was stirred up,” observed a friend. “New York stirs you up.” Ashton strongly considered staying. He asked John Martin, The New York Times’ dance critic, whether he could find work in New York. “You’re a classicist,” Martin replied. “There’s no room for you here.” Discouraged and homesick, Ashton recalled that he “suddenly got terribly nostalgic for an English spring.” On March 22, he boarded the S.S. Berengia on its final transatlantic voyage. He was touched to find a large contingent of the Four Saints cast lined up by the gangplank to wish him farewell. “Well duckie, I often think of our triumph last winter,” he wrote Thomson after his return to London, “and get very nostalgic indeed.”
Four Saints in Three Acts closed two times. The first closing, on March 17, played to a packed house. The opera was already considered a success, since it had doubled the planned two-week run; not only had 45,000 people seen it, but 16,000 tickets had been sold in the final week. Variety reported that the opera had already garnered more print coverage than any show in the previous ten years. The audience at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre on March 17 thought they were seeing the opera’s final performance, and they cheered and refused to leave until the theater manager came on stage and announced the likelihood of a resumed run in two weeks. Just as the opera’s opening had been celebrated by a party at the Levys’, so was its closing. Chick Austin performed his “Magic at Midnight,” and Joella Levy recalled that he did a trick with a balloon that was actually a condom.
Harry Moses reopened the opera at the Empire Theatre on April 2 and broke a theatrical tradition holding that shows that are brought back usually fare poorly. The opera played strongly through the first week, started the second week at dangerously low levels, and nearly sold out the last three performances. On the final night, McBride went to the Empire Theatre, not to see the opera for a fifth time but simply to bid farewell. “I sauntered in about 10 P.M. to say goodbye to the best of all operas and was surprised to see all three sisters in a box.”25 For the first time in a decade, the three Stettheimer sisters had left their mother alone.
When the Broadway run finally ended on April 14, the red velvet draperies were returned to their owner and Florine’s sets went into storage, in the hopes that the show would travel. The collaborators split up. Frederick Ashton had already left; Alexander Smallens was next. The cast resumed their varied workaday lives in Harlem and Brooklyn with the hope that they would be reunited for a tour. Before Virgil Thomson left, on May 19, he ate a last magnificent meal of halibut and lobster in mayonnaise aspic, squab, and gooseberry preserves at the Stettheimers’. He sailed again on the Ile de France and found himself on deck with Marcel Duchamp. “As we passed the lower end of Manhattan Marcel said, pointing to the skyline, ‘The reason that is beautiful is that nothing in it was built before 1900.’ ”26
After the final performance at the Empire Theatre, John Houseman watched the cast clean out their dressing rooms and dreaded their dispersal. It was the end of their collective lives together and the conclusion of an impossible—and miraculous—collaboration. “With their going I suffered a sentimental and physical loss,” Houseman wrote. “I had become accustomed to their warm, rich, world of color and scent and resonance: its sudden withdrawal made the all-white world to which I was returning seem pale and arid and cold.”