I would
have preferred to use with this passage an image from the great 1980s British
mini-series adaptation of Waugh’s novel starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony
Andrews. But this one, from the 2008 film with Matthew Goode as narrator
Charles Ryder, Ben Whishaw as his doomed friend Sebastian Flyte, and Emma
Thompson as Lady Marchmain, contains in the background the kind of building I associate with this
quotation.
It’s hard
to find anyone today with much good to say about the film. When it came out,
critics and even those most closely associated with the outcome of the movie
felt just as strongly about the movie:
*Star Elizabeth Taylor took the role of promiscuous party girl Gloria Wandrous because
she had to, in order to fulfill the last in a three-picture deal.
*Singer Eddie Fisher, who got his supporting role (his first movie acting credit)
only at the insistence of his wife Taylor, never took another onscreen—perhaps
out of embarrassment, perhaps because Hollywood regarded it as proof positive
that he was best suited for his normal profession;
*Author John
O'Hara could be forgiven for his usual cantankerous attitude this time, as
he correctly believed that the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes screenplay had
badly oversimplified his Depression-era novel.
Admirers like myself badly miss a cinematic equivalent of his panoramic
view of class-ridden Manhattan in the Prohibition Era, as well as the bitter
lament of his Irish-American alter ego, James Malloy, about being viewed as
less than American by the WASP elite. (See my blog post from 14 years ago on the real-life scandal that O'Hara used as his springboard.)
With all
the disgust these figures felt, American moviegoers reacted differently. BUtterfield
8 earned $10 million at the box office, which, on a budget of approximately
$2 million, made it one of the biggest hits of 1960. And, in the new year,
Hollywood gave Taylor her the first of two Oscars for a role in a motion
picture that was little short of pornography.
The
Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s censorship arm, had made it
virtually impossible for more than two decades to bring O’Hara’s book to the
screen. Although Hayes observed late in his life that in 1960 films didn’t
encounter as many difficulties, that might have been in this case because the
screenplay eliminated the novel’s references to abortion and lesbianism.
There was also the matter of how to describe Gloria’s occupation: was she a prostitute or not? Certainly in the case of the movie, many have assumed that she was, even though she ostensibly modeled dresses in restaurants and other upscale settings.
But, particularly because of the opening scene, in which her married
lover Weston Liggett left her money from the night before (to pay for the dress
he tore in a drunken fit) and a joke by another lover that all the men she’s
been with “meet once a year at Yankee Stadium,” the thought lingered among many
that she was paid for her services.
(By the
way, for the benefit of younger readers, the first two capital letters in
“BUtterfield” are not a typo. They refer to how numbers were remembered in
those days—thus, “BU” represents 28.)
Conventional
wisdom holds that Taylor was awarded her Best Actress Oscar in sympathy for a
life-threatening bout of pneumonia that resulted in an emergency tracheotomy. I
won’t appraise the merits of the other nominees in the category. But it’s
doubtful that they had to surmount as much as Taylor—a subpar screenplay and an
extremely miscast co-star (Laurence Harvey).
The
opening scene, unfolding with hardly a word for nearly 10 minutes, depends
entirely on Taylor’s movements and expressions as she transitions from troubled
sleep to anger at the departed Liggett. And her confession to her platonic male
friend Steve of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child is searing.
Taylor
reportedly did not get along well with director Daniel Mann. (One story goes that,
when he handed her two eggs in their shells and told her to cook them in the next
scene, Taylor—whose schooling on the MGM lot evidently did not include home economics—responded,
“But what do I do with them?”)
Nevertheless,
I like to think that, with her great sense of humor, Taylor would have guffawed
at the notion that, even with a tawdry melodrama that brought such a sorry end
to the studio she had called home for 17 years, she had achieved a career
triumph in BUtterfield 8.
Here,
Foulkes provides a good reason for reading prolific authors: they’ll likely
know a great word to substitute for another when a thesaurus simply won’t do.
In this case, the word being replaced by “idiosyncratic” is “illegible.”
I can relate
to his feelings, and then some. A close relative came up with yet another "i" word to describe my penmanship. “My handwriting is illegible; yours is indescribable,” he told me some years ago.
The
problem with my scrawls was first noted, with extreme disapproval, by a nun
who taught me in sixth grade. Time has brought no improvement.
I can
still make out my notes from college classes. My first drafts these days
of works in progress? No dice. I have to transcribe my notes onto a computer as
soon as possible—like, within a couple of hours—and even then it can be touch
and go.
Fifty
years ago, a priest in my parish enjoyed some local renown as a prominent
graphoanalyst who could, like the hypothetical one mentioned by Foulkes,
determine character traits from handwriting. Thankfully, that priest never got
his hands on a specimen of mine.
Congratulations to Ms.
Griffin for her Best Folk Album Grammy nomination for Crown of Roses.
Rear
Adm. George Tarrant
[played by Fredric March]: “Son, whatever progress this world has made,
it's always been because of the efforts and the sacrifices of a few.”
Lt.
Harry Brubaker [played
by William Holden, pictured]: “I was one of the few, Admiral, at New
Guinea, Leyte, Okinawa. Why does it have to be me again?”
Tarrant: “Nobody ever knows why he gets
the dirty job. And this is a dirty job.”— The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), screenplay by Valentine
Davies, adapted from the novel by James Michener, directed by Mark Robson
I have
known about this movie for quite a while, but had never seen it till this
weekend, when I watched it in preparation for a talk next month on one of its stars,
Grace Kelly (who plays Holden's loyal but worried wife). This quote seems especially appropriate on Veterans Day.
The
screenplay is not everything it could have been, but it captures quite well the
ambivalence that even the best service personnel, like Tarrant and Brubaker,
feel about such conflicts.
And the
Oscar-winning special effects powerful approximate the visceral sensations
involved with flying into the form of hell known as the combat zone—something
that most of us will, fortunately, never experience firsthand.
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.
