Quote of the Day (Sir William Watson, on April’s ‘Golden Laughter’)

“April, April,
Laugh thy golden laughter,
But, the moment after,
Weep thy golden tears!”—English poet Sir William Watson (1858-1935), “Song,” in The Poems of Sir William Watson (1936)
 
I had never heard of this poem until last week, when I watched Katharine Hepburn reciting these lines in Without Love (1945), the third of her nine films with Spencer Tracy. I’m not sure who was responsible for including this literary allusion: screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart or Philip Barry, who created the original Broadway play.
 
All of this got me wondering about other instances of poetry used in films. “S.G.,” the creator of the blog “Rhyme and Reason,” had a useful May 2016 post, “My Top Twelve Poems in Movies.” I’d like to add just one more: Joyce Kilmer’s “Rouge Bouquet,” recited movingly by the actor portraying him, Jeffrey Lynn, in this clip from the 1940 movie The Fighting 69^th.

This Day in Irish-American History (Playwright Philip Barry Scores 1st Broadway Hit With ‘You and I’)

Feb. 19, 1923— Starting a career that would see him become an integral part of the “Golden Age of American Theater,” Philip Barry achieved his first Broadway success with a comedy written for a college class that won him a prize—and enough money to assure he could make a living from the theater to marry the woman he loved.

You and I, premiering at the Belmont Theater in its first of 174 performances, launched the 26-year-old playwright on a quarter-century run as one of the leading lights of the Great White Way, with several of his plays—The Philadelphia Story, Holiday, and The Animal Kingdom—adapted into classic films.

Those works, like his first, were comedies of manners in which razor-sharp repartee was joined to piercing insights into the lives of the rich and well-born.

Barry also served as a key signpost of Irish-American success in the worlds of theater and literature. He made his Broadway debut the same year—and with more success—than F. Scott Fitzgerald would achieve with his play The Vegetable; a year after George Kelly enjoyed a long, profitable run with his comedy The Show-Off; and in the same decade that Eugene O’Neill steered American theater away from its former shallowness into more probing, psychologically oriented considerations of the human dilemma.

While the quartet were most consistently popular in the 1920s, the overturning of traditional norms during that time—and the subsequent collapse of the bubble prosperity with the Great Depression—led them to deeper, more pointed examinations of how personal conduct could survive under such an onslaught.

At that point, popular and critical regard for their work became harder to come by.

The unstable Fitzgerald became a casualty of this more negative reevaluation—and O’Neill would require superb posthumous productions of his last plays (The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten) to remind people of his greatness. Kelly, a member of the famous Philadelphia clan that also produced his brother John, an Olympic medalist and wealthy contractor, and niece Grace, lived with restraint and carefully managed his income.

The fickleness of success seemed far away for Barry when You and I packed the Belmont Theater. His play, colored by the anxiety of long-term failure, simultaneously celebrated a commitment to one’s muse and to one’s heart.

It was a triumph Barry knew intimately. He had followed his ambition to writing drama, even in the face of strong opposition from his brothers, who wanted him to take over the family’s stone-quarry business. He had followed his heart just as strongly, as hinted in his stage directions for the play’s ingenue, based largely on his fiancée and eventual wife, Ellen Semple—herself a talented artist:

She is about nineteen, slim, of medium height, with a decidedly pretty, high-bred face, lovely hair, lovely hands, soft, low-pitched voice  —whatever she may be saying. Heredity, careful upbringing, education and travel have combined to invest her with a poise far in advance of her years. She has attained the impossible—complete sophistication without the loss of bloom. Her self-confidence is an added charm —free, as it is, from any taint of youthful cocksureness.

The solid Broadway run of You and I also brought much-needed credibility to Barry’s Harvard drama instructor, George Pierce Baker. Barry had revised and renamed this play he had conceived of for Barry’s class, the “47 Workshop.”

By winning the prestigious Richard Herndon Prize for the comedy, the playwright was not only guaranteed a Broadway production, but also was able to vindicate the instructional methods of Baker.

Students in the latter’s class gained practical experience by mounting their plays on a makeshift stage far from the unforgiving eyes of New York critics. Many in the Harvard faculty had viewed Baker’s class with condescension and disdain.

But Barry’s success signaled that such a pedagogical approach could work in a real-world setting, and such other “47 Workshop” alumni as Sidney Howard, S.N. Behrman and Edward Sheldon effectively answered the naysayers, as I noted in this prior post on Baker.

You and I sprang from the urbane, witty side of Barry that not only captivated audiences but won him friends like artist Gerald Murphy, novelist John O’Hara, and Wall Street financier and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. There was another side—less successful, more experimental and preoccupied with religious and ethical concerns—that came to the fore in later years.

But, in whichever vein he worked, Barry was a diligent craftsman on whom nothing was lost or wasted.

In 2018, You and I enjoyed its first New York revival in 95 years at the Off-Broadway Metropolitan Playhouse. COVID-19 and the social disruptions of the last few years have led to more change in the New York theater scene than I recall during my lifetime. 

But when all is said and done, I hope theater producers and directors will look at Barry with the same fresh eyes they are using to assess everything else with.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Holiday,’ With a New Year’s Eve Party for ‘Very Unimportant People’)

Linda Seton [played by Katharine Hepburn]: [Making introductions] “My brother Ned—Mr. and Mrs. Potter—they're friends of Johnny's.”

Mrs. Susan Elliott Potter [played by Jean Dixon]: “He used to live with us.”

Professor Nick Potter [played by Edward Everett Horton]: “We've come to warn his future bride about him—he never puts the cap back on the toothpaste.”

Edward “Ned” Seton [played by Lew Ayres]: “Mm-hmm. Then we'll drink a toast to Johnny—he needs it.”

[Fills champagne glasses]

Susan: “Needs it?”

Ned: “Oh. I'm wrong. He doesn't need it. Johnny's doing all right.”

Linda: “What's on your mind, Ned?”

Ned: “Nothing's on my mind.”

Linda: “What do you mean—‘Johnny's doing all right’?”

Ned: “I mean he's doing All Right. He's having a whirl. Julia's got his hair slicked down and Father's seeing that he meets the important people.”

Nick: “My word—are there important people downstairs?”

Linda: “Oh—frightfully important—that's why I want to give a party up here.”

Nick: [Quoting an imaginary society column] “'Miss Linda Seton—on New Year's Eve— entertained a small group of Very Unimportant People.'”

[Lifting champagne glass]

Nick: “To our hostess.”

[They all drink to Linda]

Linda: [Chuckles] “May I drink, too?”— Holiday (1938), screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman, based on the play by Philip Barry, directed by George Cukor

The Philadelphia Story, a later Katharine Hepburn-Cary Grant rom-com, may be more famous, but Holiday has its own charms—especially in this New Year’s Eve scene, with Lew Ayres, as the sodden truth-teller Ned, almost stealing the picture from its stars.

Most of all, what I love about this film (and the original play, by the marvelous Irish-American playwright Philip Barry) is the sobriety that keeps rising to the surface amid all the bubbly—the price and glory of Linda and Grant’s Johnny as they resist convention.

In recent years, some commentators have seen Ned’s flip but ultimately submissive descent into alcoholism as the retreat of a gay son in the face of an overpowering father. I dismissed that, until I noticed other lines of his that seemed to sink under the weight of family history and suppressed sexual orientation:

“You see, Father wanted a large family so Mother promptly had Linda, but Linda was a girl so Mother promptly had Julia, but Julia was a girl and the whole thing seemed hopeless. Then, the following year Mother had me, it was a boy and the fair name of Seaton would flourish….Drink to Mother, Johnny—she tried to be a Seaton for a while, then gave up and died.”

In this same dynamic of a wisecracking drunk who constantly disappoints his father, other movie fans may be reminded of Dudley Moore’s decidedly heterosexual Arthur.

Aficionados of real estate development—not to mention of Presidential history—will summon up a relationship more recent, crushing, and sad.

(While The Philadelphia Story was turned into a celebrated Cole Porter musical, Holiday was transformed into one that gained far less notice: Happy New Year. This 1980 Broadway production, while also featuring songs by the great songwriter, also demonstrated the importance of a musical “book”—or, in this case, with an awkward one constructed by Burt Shevelove, what can happen with an inadequate one.)

This Day in Irish-American History (James Forrestal, Self-Made Man and Cabinet Casualty, Born)

Feb. 15, 1892—James Forrestal, who earned riches on Wall Street and acclaim as one of the architects of the national security state before succumbing to despair brought on by his workaholic style, was born in the upstate community of Beacon, N.Y.

Given what I have just written, you might wonder why my headline, instead of using the phrase “military history” or even “business history,” referred to “Irish-American history.” 

But Forrestal, the son of an Irish immigrant father and American mother of Irish descent, spent much of his adult life in near-total rejection of his background—not just Roman Catholicism but even his ethnicity and family.

This all-stops-out attempt at assimilation represented one means by which Irish-Americans of his time could fit into America and attain success. But it exacted a terrible cost: a lack of a home life or roots, culminating in a suicide that haunted his lofty social-cultural set and powerful figures in Washington, D.C. for generations to come.

Forrestal grew up in a time when the Ivy League was a WASP bastion, when Jews were excluded by quotas, and Catholics—particularly those of the lower-middle-class—were often looked down upon.

Initially rejected by Princeton, he was at last accepted, then shone so brightly, in academics and on the school paper, that the Class of 1915 voted him Most Likely to Succeed. Then, a few weeks before graduation, he dropped out, for reasons that remain unexplained.

The inability to get a degree, after the various sacrifices he and his parents had made to get him through school, appears to have led him to cut off contact with his family. (A tentative attempt to reconcile with his mother--who had originally wanted him to become a priest--by buying her a house a decade later went nowhere: she didn't move into the house.) 

Then, after a brief stint as a clerk/handyman—quite below what his classmates had been making—he took a job with William A. Read and Co., a New York investment banking firm that later became Dillon, Read and Co.

The resulting career there—interrupted only by service as a naval aviator in WWI—was astonishingly successful. He made partner at age 31, and by 1932, the heart of the Depression, he made $5 million—more than $82 million in today’s currency.

Although he wore the map of Ireland on his face, Forrestal continued to shed his heritage, becoming an Episcopalian, giving up on contact with his family, and refusing to refer to himself as Irish-American.

That denial allowed him to “pass” in WASP society, contract an advantageous marriage to a Vogue columnist beautiful enough to be photographed by Cecil Beaton, and advance on Wall Street.

In 1940, Forrestal left Dillon, Read to become one of the “dollar-a-year” businessmen who, forgoing their normal much larger private-sector salaries, helped the Roosevelt administration fulfill his desire to make America “the arsenal of democracy.” 

He worked seven days a week as undersecretary of the navy, so he was the natural choice to became secretary of the department itself in 1944 when his boss Frank Knox died.

So successful was Forrestal—first for FDR, then for Harry Truman—that he was tapped to spearhead the reorganization of the armed services into a single Defense Department; so exhausted was he in that effort by the dawn of the Cold War and constant political infighting, and so forlorn about being trapped in an unhappy marriage to his now-alcoholic wife, that he suffered a nervous breakdown.

After leaving the Defense Department, a depressed Forrestal, confined to Bethesda Naval Hospital for exhaustion, asked to see a Roman Catholic priest so he could confess. His request was denied. Not long afterward, he threw himself out the window of the 16th floor at the hospital. 

His death haunted his literary friends Philip Barry and John O’Hara, inspiring, respectively, the play Second Threshold and the sprawling novel From the Terrace.

This Day in Theater History (George Pierce Baker, Teacher of US Drama Giants, Dies)

Jan. 6, 1935— George Pierce Baker, an academic who influenced more than a generation of notable American playwrights—including Nobel, Pulitzer and Oscar winners—through innovative theater courses at Harvard and Yale, died in New York City at age 66.

I alluded briefly to Baker in a prior post on the unsuccessful playwriting experiences of student Thomas Wolfe, who caricatured him as “Professor Hatcher” in his 1935 novel Of Time and the River. But I have felt that the professor deserved a more extensive treatment that did justice to his career—and made his name known to people who had no idea he existed.

Before Baker arrived, the U.S. theater scene, influenced by Henrik Ibsen, was moving away from melodrama, spectacle and farce and more toward realism, but there were no significant counterparts to Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Synge, and other European giants of the stage. Starting in 1905, however, with the introduction of his famous Workshop 47 course, the likes of Eugene O’Neill, Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, S.N. Behrman and Edward Sheldon began to write in a strongly personal mode while learning the rudiments of practical dramatic construction in his class.

In an introduction to a collection of the plays of Barry, States of Grace, New Yorker critic Brendan Gill noted that students in Workshop 47 “met in cramped quarters in Lower Massachusetts Hall and acted out plays on a makeshift stage in the little Agassiz Theatre at Radcliffe.” The quarters were unprepossessing, but this also meant that the stakes were low.

The advantage that meant to his students was summed up by one, drama critic John Mason Brown, nearly 30 years later: “As a rule, the good plays that Baker's more famous pupils wrote were written long after they had ceased to work with him. They were helped in writing these good plays because of the patience he showed in dealing with the bad ones they had written for him.”

The photo accompanying this post gives a pretty good impression of Baker in class: peering gravely at students from behind his pince-nez. That look, initially, could appear cold. But students soon found what they needed here: a forum where, free to experiment, they could make mistakes and learn, and, throughout the process, encouragement to continue.

Baker’s perception could, in fact, be quite acute. In Barry’s case, he urged the young man to “amuse in such a way that one is thinking about the play afterwards—not exactly in amusement, but thoughtfully and pleasantly.” This, in fact, became the template of the creator of such sparkling but rueful comedies as The Philadelphia Story, The Animal Kingdom and Holiday.

A graduate of Harvard himself, Baker began at his alma mater as a professor of rhetoric. Especially in the first years of Workshop 47 (named for its place in the school’s catalog), many in the university’s administration undoubtedly wish he had stuck with rhetoric, for they remained suspicious of the utility of his playwriting class.

In 1925, after a generation of wearily enduring this placement at Harvard’s periphery--and unable to persuade it to offer a degree (not just a class) in playwriting--Baker took up Yale’s offer to become first chair of its Department of Drama in the School of Fine Arts. There he remained until 1933, when illness forced him to cease teaching.

Howard, who had his first Broadway success a half dozen years after taking Workshop 47—and who would go on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning play They Knew What They Wanted as well as the screenplay for Gone With The Wind—paid tribute to Baker by observing that “he taught his students truths more valid than technique. He taught them that plays are important and hard to write; that few subjects are worthy of dramatization; that characters must be imagined beneath their words; that art is an obligation, not a Sunday suit."

This Day in Theater History (“The Philadelphia Story” premieres)

March 28, 1939—Relegated to the slag heap by Hollywood, Katharine Hepburn took Broadway by storm in The Philadelphia Story, a comedy of manners written especially for her by Philip Barry, which premiered on this night at the Schubert Theatre.

I have written about Barry, one of the premiere playwrights of America’s version of Restoration comedy, for The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society (“The ‘Fox’s Eye’: The Celtic Sensibility of Philip Barry,” Fall 2002). Today I’d like to focus on Hepburn—which is entirely appropriate, given that this comeback vehicle certainly did.

In the summer of 1938, Hepburn was licking her wounds from her recent Hollywood experiences. A change-of-pace role in Sylvia Scarlett (1935), where she played a woman disguised as a boy, had unnerved audiences with its hints of sexual ambiguity (and added fuel to the Tinseltown rumors of a lesbian relationship with Laura Harding, who had given up her own New York theater career to accompany her friend out to California).

So stark was the fall from grace for this star who had already won an Oscar for Modern Glory that even better roles in more conventional films, such as the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby and the screen adaptation of Barry’s Holiday, did not succeed in erasing the damaging assessment of a film distributor who placed her high on a list of actors considered “Box Office Poison.”

Missing out on the role she so badly coveted—Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind—and offered increasingly insulting fare, Hepburn left Hollywood for Fenwick, the family compound on Long Island Sound.

Two major events occurred over the next few months. The first, on September 21, was the Hurricane of 1938, which tore the house apart and forced her and her family to rebuild the structure, more durably this time with brick. The second was a summer afternoon tea with Barry, from which she rebuilt her career on more solid foundations.

The two major accounts of this afternoon interlude that I have come across are contained in Anne Edwards’ A Remarkable Woman: A Biography of Katharine Hepburn (2000) and A. Scott Berg’s Kate Remembered (2003). The second of these—sort of like Edmund Morris’ Dutch, about Ronald Reagan—is an account by a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who inexplicably went mad. Morris invented a fictional character—himself!—as a foil for Reagan; Berg’s intimate account of his friendship with Hepburn appears to have been so rushed into print after the legend’s death that it did not even have an index. (Some free advice, Scott, as you work on your long-awaited Woodrow Wilson project: the President’s been dead for over 80 years, so there’s no excuse for not having an index now. Do yourself –and us—a favor: include one this time.)

To say that Hepburn was surprised by Barry’s overture would be an understatement. Though she had done a superb job with the screen version of Holiday, their crucial working experience remained eight years before in the play The Animal Kingdom, when Barry had helped engineer her firing as understudy. His explanation for the personnel change on the eve of that play’s opening did not feature his usual elegant dialogue: she was “simply no good.”

But now the playwright needed a comeback as badly as Hepburn. A master of high comedy, he had written in the 1930s seven plays that, while often ambitious in subject and stagecraft, had left audiences cold because of their interest in mythology and allegory. So, when he phoned from Maine and invited himself down for tea, the two were in almost equal positions.

The playwright, every bit as dapper in person as the characters in his drawing-room comedies, spelled out for the actress two of his projects. Significantly, both featured a judgmental daughter who can’t understand her father. (Barry’s own infant daughter had died four years before, leaving the playwright devastated.)

The first scenario, about a father suffering from despair, would be left unfinished at his death 11 years later, completed by longtime friend Robert E. Sherwood, and performed posthumously: Second Threshold. The second dispensed with drama and focused on a rich young divorcee on the eve of her remarriage, which ends up being disrupted by the ex who has never really left her life.

Kate thought the second idea “more fun,” and well she might—in attitudes, intonations and even life experiences (the first-husband hanger-on suggested Hepburn’s ex, Ludlow Ogden “Luddy” Smith), the heroine Tracy Lord unmistakably echoed herself. This was a part she could own because she lived it.

Proving she was as shrewd a businessperson as she was talented at acting, Hepburn, with help from past beau Howard Hughes, snapped up the movie rights—a decision that before long paid enormous dividends.

Over the next several months, the comedy went through the fits and starts that shows often make before opening, with many of the problems caused by Barry’s traditional difficulty in writing a satisfactory last act. In the end, however, he pulled it together, and the cast—including up-and-comers Joseph Cotton, Van Heflin and Shirley Booth—meshed perfectly. The Philadelphia Story was a critical smash.

More important, it was a financial one for Hepburn, whose windfall from more than 400 performances on Broadway and another 250 in the road company came to close to half a million dollars. And that was not even counting that movie deal, which also empowered her to get the casting (good friend Cary Grant and throw-in James Stewart, who earned his only Oscar in the role) and director (George Cukor) she wanted in the bargain.

The film’s witty dialogue highlighted her flair with comedy, and the romantic situation—three men in love with her—erased any lingering audience memories of Sylvia Scarlett. (Hepburn’s glamour would be heightened further when she was lovingly photographed two years later by another former beau, George Stevens, in Woman of the Year—her first collaboration with Spencer Tracy.) Hepburn’s Hollywood image—the willful goddess humanized—had taken root, and though she might stumble once or twice again, she would never suffer another losing streak.

This Day in Theater History (Philip Barry's 'Second Threshold' Staged Posthumously)

Jan. 2, 1951--The final play of Philip Barry (pictured)– best known nowadays for two Katharine Hepburn vehicles, The Philadelphia Story and Holiday – premiered in New York City, running for 126 performances.

The “dramedy” Second Threshold was completed posthumously with the assistance of Barry’s longtime friend Robert Sherwood (Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Roosevelt and Sherwood). Though the play was primarily inspired by the death of Barry’s infant daughter and friend Robert Benchley, the situation of the major character – a high government official driven to suicidal despair – owes much to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.

Forrestal’s suicide in 1947 shocked Washington. More than a decade later, a mutual friend of the playwright and cabinet secretary, novelist John O’Hara, used elements of the tragedy in his sprawling From the Terrace, mixing it with traces of the life of recently fallen British Prime Minister Anthony Eden.

As I’ve argued in an article for The Record: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society (“The ‘Fox’s Eye’: The Celtic Sensibility of Philip Barry,” Vol. 15, No. 2, Fall 2002), this final play of Barry’s attempts to mix the bright social comedy of manners of his most famous works with a more serious moral element running like a subterranean element through the rest of his work. As such, the play could profit from a revival.