Nov. 10,
1950—Playwright Clifford Odets—onetime hope of the American theater,
more recently scorned as a Hollywood sellout—landed his last Broadway success with The Country Girl, which premiered at the Lyceum Theatre.
Though the
play ran for 235 performances—which, according to the economics for
non-musicals of the time, was enough to secure a profit—it has not been revived
as often as other works by major American playwrights, such as Eugene O’Neill,
Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee.
Most
Americans, if they are aware at all of this drama of an alcoholic has-been
reaching again for Broadway stardom, recognize it from the 1954 film
starring Bing Crosby, William Holden, and, in her Oscar-winning role, Grace
Kelly.
The
original play, staged by Odets himself, possessed nothing like the box-office
draws of the Paramount movie, though one principal had known renown, and two
others would experience it.
*Holden’s
role, as hotshot young director Bernie Dodd (with elements of Odets’ friend
Elia Kazan), was played by Steven Hill, better known to posterity as
the original team leader in the Mission: Impossible TV series and as
D.A. Adam Schiff on the long-running Law and Order.
*Georgie
Elgin, the alcoholic’s beleaguered wife played by Kelly, was originally
performed by Uta Hagen, who won the Tony Award for the role—and would
win another, a dozen years later, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, while earning additional recognition as an influential acting teacher.
*The
principal actor that I knew the least about was Paul Kelly (no relation
to Grace), who may have felt the greatest affinity with his character. Over two
decades before, he had served 25 months for manslaughter for killing in a
drunken fistfight the husband of his lover (and eventual wife). He had
painstakingly rebuilt his career since then, but surely experienced the same
regret as Frank Elgin’s over alcohol’s role in derailing his career.
The
Country Girl was
Odets’ second attempt in as many years to return to the heights of the New York
theater scene he had occupied in the mid-to-late 1930s, as a founding member and
most significant playwright associated with The Group Theatre.
When he came
back to the Great White Way after a financially rewarding but creatively
unsatisfactory stint as Hollywood screenwriter and director, he no longer
exhibited the concerns with the working classes that animated him previously.
But he continued to write about what he knew: in this case, actors.
In The
Big Knife (1949), he had implicitly indicted himself for yielding to
compromise and temptation—and explicitly assailed the studio system for
blackmail and other thuggish methods for keeping stars in line. But even the
presence of a real-life Hollywood star (and Odets friend) John Garfield hadn’t
been enough to keep the production going beyond three months.
The
Country Girl was different,
depicting a struggle in which the pressures from without were nothing like the
pressures from within faced by
The George Seaton screenplay departed somewhat from the play by making its fragile
leading man into a musical-comedy star, making the part more comfortable for
recording artist Crosby. But those encountering the drama after seeing the film
may be surprised by other changes, both in casting and dialogue.
For one
thing, Frank and Georgie have been married about 10 years before the play
begins, and the drab existence resulting from his drinking has robbed her of vibrancy and youth. At 31 years old, Hagen would have been closer to the
age that Odets had in mind than Grace Kelly, who sought to downplay her glamour
and youth by wearing glasses, brown wool, shapeless dresses, and cardigan
dresses.
In the
years since, actresses who played Georgie have been considerably older than
Grace Kelly or even Hagen, including, in TV productions, Shirley Knight (38)
and Faye Dunaway (40), and, onstage, Jennifer Jones and Maureen Stapleton (both
47), Christine Lahti (34), and Frances McDormand (51).
Additionally,
for whatever reason, Seaton chose not to use as much of what F. W. Dupee called
Odets’ “sad and seedy poetry”—idiomatic speech like “tense as a bug in June,”
or “an ulcerated sponge for a brain.”
And these days, some ethnic references (for instance, to Chinese laundry
workers) are likely to be deleted for stage shows because of political
incorrectness.
Odets
would likely have responded with dismay to at least some of these changes.
Producer Dwight Deere Wiman had postponed the play’s opening for the
1949-50 season to allow the playwright more time to tinker with the dialogue.
For all
the time and energy Odets devoted to getting the play right, he still marred it
with unnecessary touches—chiefly the complications arising from the
Georgie-Dodd relationship, at first a clash of adversaries before becoming a
love affair that takes them by surprise.
An anonymous reviewer from Time Magazine
adeptly identified the “austere telling without a false word or a florid
gesture” that would have sustained Odets’ “compact little tragedy of
misunderstanding” between Georgie and Dodd over who was really responsible for
Frank’s skittishness, depression and breakdown.
Even so, the
drama represented more than what Howard Barnes of the New York Herald
Tribune called “a fiercely affectionate anecdote about backstage doings."
There are
reasons why, despite critics’ predictable carping that this and other Odets
plays are “dated,” directors, dramaturges and actors have not utterly forgotten
this drama.
Odets
might not be writing anymore about the proletariat he sprang from, and the
mechanics of staging a show may have changed (near-endless small “workshopping”
instead of short, nerve-racking out-of-town tryouts).
But theater professionals
still know how well he showed the tension inherent in bringing an untried play
to the stage, as well as the raging, crippling insecurity that so often dogs
actors who depend on the public for approval that can never be enough.
Although
the history of the American theater is filled with alcoholics, Odets may have
been inspired by a relatively recent example: actress Laurette Taylor, who,
after years on the bottle, pulled herself together long enough in 1944 by offering
a career-defining performance in The Glass Menagerie.
Outside of Eugene O’Neill,
it’s hard to think of another play that limns so thoroughly the self-deception
of alcoholics and the vortex into which they pull those closest to them.
In the
remaining dozen years of Odets’ life, he would never repeat even the moderate
success he enjoyed with The Country Wife, let alone enjoy the acclaim
and hope generated by the half-dozen 1930s plays running from Awake and Sing
to Golden Boy.
Long under
FBI surveillance for his relatively brief Communist party membership in the
1930s, he was hauled in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Responsible for raising two children (including a daughter with severe
developmental disabilities) after the death of his estranged wife, he named
names, albeit none that hadn’t been provided previously to the committee.
He took one
more shot at Broadway with his retelling of Noah and the Flood, Flowering Peach.
But his relationship with producer
Robert Whitehead was rockier than the one he had enjoyed with his friend Wiman,
and any hope for greater attention to the play vanished when the advisory board
for the Pulitzer overruled the jury’s selection of his drama and rewarded it
instead to Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Back in
Hollywood, he masterfully rewrote Ernest Lehman’s initial screenplay for Sweet
Smell of Success, but the film’s cult classic status did not come till
after his death.
In the hospital with fatal stomach cancer, he was serving as script supervisor
for the short-lived (and even less remembered) anthology series, The Richard
Boone Show, a vehicle unworthy of his talent.
But long
before, he had already recognized the thin line between success and oblivion in
The Country Girl.
