May 4, 1958—The husband-and-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne appeared on the Great White Way in the old Globe Theater, renovated and renamed in their honor the Lunt-Fontanne, on opening night for what would be their last show, Friedrich Duerrenmatt's drama The Visit.
As they took their places under the spotlights, the king and queen of American theater were already living in the twilight of a Broadway very different from the one theatergoers know today. When they first began acting together in the 1920s, Hollywood's studio system was already putting stars under contract. The little free time this afforded, plus the lack of constant regularly scheduled cross-country flights, meant that actors inevitably had to choose East and West Coast. The Lunts had chosen Broadway.
By the time their play opened, the studio system was fracturing, allowing actors more independence and more time between projects as deals were ironed out. And in a couple of years, the glamour years of plane travel would begin, allowing stars to fly back and forth as they wished.
Broadway was a far more varied place than it is today, catering less to tourist tastes for musicals and much more willing to try straight dramas, such as Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, in which Fontanne played the leading role in 1928. (Such was her prestige that, it was long claimed, she had snipped enough of the massive play to get audiences out to their much-desired dinner intermission 20 minutes ahead of time!)
The Lunts lived in a hermetically sealed Broadway universe in which not only their work lives, but their entire social lives involved other actors, directors, and producers. Unlike today's actors, who will have issues advisers or testify before Congress on Darfur or stump for their (usually liberal Democrat) of choice, the Lunts would have been hard pressed to tell you the fine points of, say, Eleanor Roosevelt's views on foreign policy, though they were undoubtedly delighted to know she enjoyed their performances.
And yet, Lunt and Fontanne were considered the ultimate in “sophistication”—or, as Broadway chronicler Ethan Mordden deconstructs the word in his history of Broadway from 1919 to 1959 (roughly the decades in which the Lunts held sway), All That Glittered, everything that connoted “smart and worldly,” “complex,” “tolerant,” and “gay.”
Their exclusive, almost inbred social universe meant that the Lunts could exude Sophistiation without explicitly advertising their sexual preferences. For all their togetherness onstage, the couple were rumored (according to the Margot Peters bio, Design for Living, credibly so) to live in a so-called "lavender marriage" meant to provide cover for partners whose preferences were either gay/lesbian or bisexual. They were not likely to thank their current lover from the stage of the Tonys.
Homophobia certainly might have existed in the broader American society, but they had protection within their charmed circle, where the ruling piece of advice had been provided by George Bernard Shaw's favorite correspondent, the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell: “Does it really matter what these affectionate people do— so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses?” The curious, with a little bit of knowledge about the code of the sexual underground, could read between the lives of Design for Living, written for them by friend and co-star Noel Coward (between his friends in the photo accompanying this post).
That did not mean they meant nothing to each other. Far from it. As Fontanne noted years later, ''We were friends right away. . . . I loved him utterly. We were in the same profession. We were like twins.'' Those are the words of a soul mate, not of a lover – but, no matter how unconventional, their union held together for 55 years.
In the 1950s, Lunt and Fontanne starred in a trio of light comedies that, nearly everyone agreed, was held together—barely—by their talents. But, for their final show, the husband and wife chose a far more daring play-- Duerrenmatt's black comedy, in which an enormously rich woman offers a town an ungodly amount of money to betray to her the lover who ruined her life years before.
Instead of canning the show before it got to Broadway, after it had cratered on the West End, the Lunts did the unthinkable—they brought it to Broadway, turned it into their personal triumph, then brought it back across the Atlantic, where the critics had a change of heart.
No matter what their show—a star vehicle where they would be paid the maximum or something more experimental and riskier by an untried playwright, when they’d take a pay cut—the couple insisted on two clauses in their contracts: 1) they could only act together, not in separate plays; 2) they would not act during the summer, when they would vacation back at their Genesee Depot, Wisc. home, Ten Chimneys. As this NPR Story makes clear, locals were understandably agog at all the stars who managed to make their way out to this rural southeastern part of their state to see “The Fabulous Lunts.”
As they took their places under the spotlights, the king and queen of American theater were already living in the twilight of a Broadway very different from the one theatergoers know today. When they first began acting together in the 1920s, Hollywood's studio system was already putting stars under contract. The little free time this afforded, plus the lack of constant regularly scheduled cross-country flights, meant that actors inevitably had to choose East and West Coast. The Lunts had chosen Broadway.
By the time their play opened, the studio system was fracturing, allowing actors more independence and more time between projects as deals were ironed out. And in a couple of years, the glamour years of plane travel would begin, allowing stars to fly back and forth as they wished.
Broadway was a far more varied place than it is today, catering less to tourist tastes for musicals and much more willing to try straight dramas, such as Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, in which Fontanne played the leading role in 1928. (Such was her prestige that, it was long claimed, she had snipped enough of the massive play to get audiences out to their much-desired dinner intermission 20 minutes ahead of time!)
The Lunts lived in a hermetically sealed Broadway universe in which not only their work lives, but their entire social lives involved other actors, directors, and producers. Unlike today's actors, who will have issues advisers or testify before Congress on Darfur or stump for their (usually liberal Democrat) of choice, the Lunts would have been hard pressed to tell you the fine points of, say, Eleanor Roosevelt's views on foreign policy, though they were undoubtedly delighted to know she enjoyed their performances.
And yet, Lunt and Fontanne were considered the ultimate in “sophistication”—or, as Broadway chronicler Ethan Mordden deconstructs the word in his history of Broadway from 1919 to 1959 (roughly the decades in which the Lunts held sway), All That Glittered, everything that connoted “smart and worldly,” “complex,” “tolerant,” and “gay.”
Their exclusive, almost inbred social universe meant that the Lunts could exude Sophistiation without explicitly advertising their sexual preferences. For all their togetherness onstage, the couple were rumored (according to the Margot Peters bio, Design for Living, credibly so) to live in a so-called "lavender marriage" meant to provide cover for partners whose preferences were either gay/lesbian or bisexual. They were not likely to thank their current lover from the stage of the Tonys.
Homophobia certainly might have existed in the broader American society, but they had protection within their charmed circle, where the ruling piece of advice had been provided by George Bernard Shaw's favorite correspondent, the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell: “Does it really matter what these affectionate people do— so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses?” The curious, with a little bit of knowledge about the code of the sexual underground, could read between the lives of Design for Living, written for them by friend and co-star Noel Coward (between his friends in the photo accompanying this post).
That did not mean they meant nothing to each other. Far from it. As Fontanne noted years later, ''We were friends right away. . . . I loved him utterly. We were in the same profession. We were like twins.'' Those are the words of a soul mate, not of a lover – but, no matter how unconventional, their union held together for 55 years.
In the 1950s, Lunt and Fontanne starred in a trio of light comedies that, nearly everyone agreed, was held together—barely—by their talents. But, for their final show, the husband and wife chose a far more daring play-- Duerrenmatt's black comedy, in which an enormously rich woman offers a town an ungodly amount of money to betray to her the lover who ruined her life years before.
Instead of canning the show before it got to Broadway, after it had cratered on the West End, the Lunts did the unthinkable—they brought it to Broadway, turned it into their personal triumph, then brought it back across the Atlantic, where the critics had a change of heart.
No matter what their show—a star vehicle where they would be paid the maximum or something more experimental and riskier by an untried playwright, when they’d take a pay cut—the couple insisted on two clauses in their contracts: 1) they could only act together, not in separate plays; 2) they would not act during the summer, when they would vacation back at their Genesee Depot, Wisc. home, Ten Chimneys. As this NPR Story makes clear, locals were understandably agog at all the stars who managed to make their way out to this rural southeastern part of their state to see “The Fabulous Lunts.”
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