The Smart Set on the Stage
Wherein the author considers comedies of manners, and players who succeed illy in living up to them.
“The theater has its own aristocracy”, declares the author of a book about families that, generation after generation, have given actors to that institution in America. It is not of “its own aristocracy” that I intend writing, but of the aristocracy it mimics. When I speak of “The Smart Set on the Stage”, the reference is to those men and women who trail their cigarette smoke and their gowns through the modern society play.
There are fashions in drama, just as there are in dresses, and managerial modistes begin to sense a return to favor of the tea cup comedy. Fifteen years ago, during an era of romance, the tinsmith superceded the tailor. A decade later, “guns” were more worn than girdles, and the prevailing mode in millinery was the Mexican sombrero, with a leather belt in place of a band. The hero of a play was the male who could shoot straightest. Now, once again, the hero is the gentleman who can successfully balance, at one and the same time, a punch glass, a plate of biscuits, and the arguments for and against running away with his friend’s wife. Within the past few months we have had such examples of their school as “Electricity”, “Smith”, “The Gamblers”, “Nobody’s Widow”, “Getting a Polish” and “We Can’t Be as Bad as All That”, the last by that inveterate dramatizer of the social whirl, Henry Arthur Jones. With Jones in his heaven, all’s right with the whirl’d!
Nor do these six compose a complete list. Mary Garden is still “wallowing”, and surely Salome belonged to one of the best families of the East! Lady Macbeth and her husband—not the Macbeths who make lamp chimneys; O, dear no!—must have been in the blue book of their day. We met some very nice people with Mary Magdalene, too, and Prince Bellidor, in “Sister Beatrice”, behaved like one of the idle rich, but inasmuch as their conduct in society, ancient or modern, was not the theme of the works in which they appeared I shall omit further mention of these works.
The rich we have always with us. That is why Thackeray is more popular than Dickens, and that is why the smart set has been paraded theatrically since Thespis took the first wagon show on a tour of Greece. We are a lot of Pomonas—particularly the women among us—and we cannot help revelling in the doings of dignitaries whose place in life, but for fear of making this article sound railroad-y, I should describe as an elevated station. The more humble we are the greater the craving and the delight. Lizzie Brown, who measures ribbon behind a counter from breakfast ’til dinner, naturally extracts infinite pleasure from spending her evenings with only a row of footlights between herself and wonderful beings who toil not and spin nothing but yarns. That is almost like moving in the best circles oneself; it is being transported to a world millions of miles from the brass tracks in the ribbon counter. Miss Brown half believes herself a great lady by morning, as you may judge by her manner if you go to her for a yard of baby blue. Everyone of us has something of Lizzie Brown in his or her make-up. The same instinct that moves us to marry our daughter to the Prince of This or the Duke of That causes us to remember “East Lynne” when we have forgotten “Hazel Kirke.”
Most of us outside the charmed circle have ideas of good society quite as exaggerated as the Biblical idea of Paradise. We may not fancy that fashionables go about with crowns of light and golden harps, but we do insist that on the stage they behave as little as possible like ordinary human beings.
That is why it is so difficult to write society plays. If the characters you create do not feel and think normally they become puppets, and if they do you are accused at once of having failed to suggest smartness. One night I stood in the lobby of the Criterion Theater as the audience came out after having seen “Her Great Match.” A woman who passed me remarked: “I think it was charming, but that man didn’t make love at all like a Prince.” Just what are the peculiarities of royal love-making the lady didn’t explain, and the idiosyncracies that got the only prince I ever knew into jail had to do, not with the way he courted, but with the number of times. In any event, it was proved afterward that my friend really was descended from a respectable veterinary surgeon, which disqualifies me as an authority on the subject. When I mentioned the matter to him, Mr. Fitch observed that he had been quite chummy with a prince or two, and that, while he never actually had seen them make love, he judged from their consorts that their powers of amatory expression were quite ordinary. “However”, quoth Mr. Fitch, “you can’t expect the public to believe that.”
It used to be a pretty general impression that nobody who had more than twenty thousand a year ever indulged in a show of emotion. I say “nobody”, although, of course, you are aware that wealthy parents in society plays always are exceptions to the rule of good breeding. Otherwise, imperturbability of the John Drew kind was supposed to be a trade mark of culture blown in the bottle. Common folk might laugh or cry under stress of circumstances, but the souls of the elect were sheathed in ice. The approved manner of translating a crisis into the dialogue of the drawing room was something like this:
Lord Dash: Good afternoon! Rippin’ weather, isn’t it? (Bus. of stroking mustache.) I’ve a bit of disagreeable news for you.
Lady Blank: Indeed? Will you have a cup of tea, Lord Dash? What is it?
Lord Dash: No, thank you; I never take tea. Your eldest son, havin’ been detected in an act of forgery, has just blown out his bally brains.
Lady Blank: Poor lad! He was always impulsive! I hope he isn’t seriously hurt, Lord Dash? Dead? Ah! Now you really must let me pour you a cup of tea.
Having to combat that sort of folly was the thing that made it hard to write a society play. It was like dramatizing a novel and trying to create a heroine who would agree with the ten thousand notions of her cherished by the ten thousand readers of the book. Gradually, as the mirror held up to nature has become more nearly true, we have grown to understand that, in the grip of a great joy or grief, a nobleman behaves very much like a bricklayer; sometimes a trifle better, and sometimes, as in the case of the bazaar disaster in Paris, a good deal worse.
One fact not universally understood by persons who criticize the smart set on the stage is that there are many kinds of society. The group depicted in “Gallops” or “Lord and Lady Algy” is antipodally different from that shown in “The Way of the World” or “His House in Order.” The self-made men of “The Pit” and “The Lion and the Mouse” are miles removed from the aristocrats of “The Idler” or “A Royal Family.” The gambling males and cigarette-smoking females of “The Walls of Jericho” and “The House of Mirth” have very little in common with the conservatives of “The Hypocrites” and “The Duke of Killicrankie.” All society looks alike to the assistant dramatic editor, however, and, if some girl delivers herself of a slang phrase, he is quick to realize that the playwright who created her can know nothing of good form.
The man who deals with fashionables on the stage fingers a pianoforte with a single octave. More than half of the conditions that produce sentiment and sensation in Harlem never get as far down town as Fifth Avenue. That is why most drawing room dramas are worked out with the same characters and about the same stories. Someone has said that there do not exist more than three plots for farce; certainly, not more than ten have been used in society plays. Of these, the favorite is the tale of the good-for-nothing gentleman who goes away with the wife of the studious or hard-working hero. Sometimes, he is only about to go away with this malcontent when the hero aforesaid finds her at midnight in the “rooms” of his rival. The places in which a woman is found at midnight are always “rooms”; never, by any chance, chambers, or apartments, or a flat. Occasionally, the lady, or the gentleman, or both, are quite innocent of wrong-doing. The lady may have come to save the reputation of another lady, or to prepare a rarebit, but when the husband has tracked her by the fan that years of Wilde have not taught such callers to hide with them, he gets into a towering rage and does not get out again until the end of the fourth act. Henry Arthur Jones calls tea the prop of our drama. I disagree with him. It is the careless lady with a penchant for nocturnal visits who makes the theater possible in England and America. You don’t believe it? Well, some of the comedies produced in New York during one season in which this incident figured were “Popularity”, “Man and His Angel”, “The Chorus Lady”, “The Three of Us”, “The House of Mirth”, “Daughters of Men”, “The Straight Road”, and “All-of-a-Sudden Peggy.” James M. Barrie satirized the situation in “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire”, and then employed it seriously for his most effective scene.
Of course, one or two of the pieces in the list given do not come strictly under the head of drawing room drama, but the fact remains that a majority of the young women who go calling on the stroke of twelve dive into indiscretion under Marcel waves. The coveting of his neighbor’s wife is supposed to be a specialty of the society man, and thus it is that so many comedies of manors are founded on that theme. The marriage of convenience is much used in plays of this type, too, as well as the mesalliance that afterward turns out well. Divorce is coming more and more into vogue as a subject. Then there are satires in which the follies of the smart set are held up to ridicule and execration; comedies in which the vulgarisms of a very rich man, usually an American and father of the heroine, are contrasted favorably with the culture of the aristocracy of Europe; and plays in which the wronged girl figures, wearing a wan expression and a becoming black dress. Add to these varieties that class of composition in which society is only the background for contests in politics, diplomacy, business, or detective work, and we have pretty well come to the end of our possibilities.
Whatever else happens in the society play, there always is a dance at which the juvenile lovers flirt, and the serious people discuss such tragic things as ruin and sudden death, while an orchestra “off at R.” fiddles through “Love’s Dream After the Ball.” Next to elopements, ruin and sudden death are the chief necessities of the society play. Whenever a gentleman gets on the wrong side of the market, or has the misfortune to possess a wife whose lover is the hero of the piece, instead of the villain, he promptly kills himself. After reading a succession of dramas like “The Climbers” and “The Moth and the Flame” one is amazed to discover that in the United States only about one hundreth of one per cent. of the population cashes in its checks self-endorsed.
If you have followed so far, patient peruser, you probably will join me in the conclusion that the society play is nothing on earth but melodrama in a frock coat. The effectiveness of the play depends upon the completeness of the disguise; with the dramatic tailor rests the question whether you sniff or sniffle. Undraped melodrama treating of fashionable folk is the funniest entertainment in the world, excepting “Charley’s Aunt.” Fine evenings, when my brain cells were closed for repairs and I was weary of musical comedy, I used to go over to Eighth Avenue and see “Why Women Sin” and “A Working Girl’s Wrongs.” I found that our class is responsible alike for the sins and the wrongs; that gentility is a thing to move virtuous burglars, comic green grocers and other honest men and women to a passion of righteous indignation. “I was ne’er so thrummed since I was gentleman”, wrote Thomas Dekker in an ancient comedy of unprintable title, and it is my opinion that he penned the line after seeing his kind through the astigmatic glasses of Theodore Kremer. Small wonder, indeed! On Eighth Avenue, in the old days, everyone sufficiently prosperous to be opposed to an income tax wore a silk hat and lived in a “mansion.” Apparently “mansions” were not places in which privacy was to be had, since the Eighth Avenue millionaire invariably came out into the street when he wanted to exhibit “the papers.” Eighth Avenue millionaires always were white-haired, drank cold tea and soda, plotted “dirty work”, and had closets so full of skeletons that any physician might have mistaken them for anatomical museums. “Little children”, I used to say to the progeny of a friend of mine, “when you grow up be careful not to be an Eighth Avenue millionaire.”
The smart set have rather a hard time of it on any stage, and, for that matter, so does the author who dallies with the subject. If there is one thing in which the dramatic grand monde are lucky it is their servants. Nowhere else under the blue canopy of heaven are such perfectly trained menials as one sees through the proscenium arch. They would make the fortune of any of those agencies misnamed “intelligence bureaus.”
I already have commented on the difficulties of the man who writes drawing room drama. I have said that, if he has a stirring story to tell, he must disguise it. On the other hand, if it be his ambition to compose comedies of manners, like “The Liars”, he must master the very fine art of interesting an audience for two hours without actually doing anything; of making a vacuum shimmer. The people in such society plays must talk like ordinary people who have been seeing society plays. Their dialogue must be cynical and clever, and just a bit what a witty Frenchman called “sans chemise.” A society play excellently exemplifies the truth of the adage: “Nothing risque; nothing gained.” Should the conversation be truly bright the critics may be counted upon to observe that real people never talk that way; but it is better to beard the critics than to bore the audience. If I may add to a line from “Clothes”: “Hell and the stage drawing room are two places where there are no stupid people.”
It is no easy matter for the average playwright to reproduce the atmosphere of Fifth Avenue. Many of the nabobs one glimpses in the theatre fall about three hundred and sixty short of the “four hundred.” Every second comedy of manners we see is a comedy of very bad manners. Men born with gold spoons in their mouths find it hard to articulate, and few of our fashionable families produce dramatists who “speak in a voice that fills the nation.” Only the most successful of the craft get an opportunity to study society at first hand. Perhaps that is fortunate. “The drawback to realism”, says Wilton Lackaye, “is the fate of the realist. If he goes into the slums he becomes base; if he goes into society he becomes soprano.” The average social lion being the sort of man one could push over, we ought to be glad of the barrier between the pen, which only writes, and money, which talks. Vigor and virility are more essential to good drama than absolutely faithful atmosphere. All other things being equal, the individual who would make the best pugilist would make the best playwright.
A good many of our society plays are marred by gaucheries of a serious nature. Glance over your mental list of tea-cup pieces. Clyde Fitch, who rarely offended in this respect, had one woman giving orders to the servants of another woman in “The Truth.” Jack Neville, in the Elsie de Wolfe performance of “The Way of the World”, whistled merrily while waiting in her parlor for his hostess. True, he didn’t whistle very noisily, but that palliation only makes one think of the retort courteous supposed to have been made by a well-bred woman after she had complained of a gentleman who whistled in her ball room. “It was very low”, plead the gentleman. “It was”, answered the lady; “very low.”
Cynthia, in the comedy of that name, received her husband while the hairdresser and the manicure were employed with her. Dick Crawford, in “Caught in the Rain”, tips a servant in the home of his friend, Mr. Mason. Everybody who visits Montgomery Brewster in the first act of “Brewster’s Millions” comments most vulgarly on that hero’s newly acquired wealth. Richard Burbank in “Clothes” mistakes Miss Sherwood’s piano for a hat rack, while that lady permits herself to be led away from a dance without bidding farewell to her hostess. In “The House of Mirth”, a sandless-souled hero, named Lawrence Selden, literally thrust himself past a protesting servant and into the rooms of Augustus Trenor. The young woman impersonated by Edna May in “The Catch of the Season” was given tiffen consisting of a hunk of bread an inch thick and tea in a cup that bore all the ear-marks of belonging to that family of unbreakable things that are used in the second cabin of ocean liners. These, of course, are “trifles light as air”, but what shall be said of Charles Richman in dress clothes and light boots in “Mrs. Dane’s Defence”, of Margaret Dale in decollette and walking hat in “Delancy”, and of Mrs. Fiske’s laying her handkerchief on the luncheon table in “Becky Sharp?” Above all, what shall be said of the gentleman in “The Triangle” who stabbed his better half with a carving knife at dinner. I may be ignorant of what I seek to teach and quite wrong about these other faux pas, but that certainly cannot be condemned too forcibly. It simply isn’t done!
“Popularity”, George Cohan’s play that afterward became “The Man Who Owns Broadway”, was a perfect mine of ill breeding. In the first place, the Fuller drawing room, as shown, was a flaring red, with a piano on which the manufacturer’s name was painted in letters two inches high. During the evening there were several callers, whom the Fullers left quite alone for a period of fifteen minutes. The butler atoned for this rudeness by shaking hands with one of the guests, a young gentleman unfortunately crossed in love, and expressing sympathy for him. The young gentleman said he was much obliged. The climax of this singular exhibition was reached when a “matinee idol”, dropping in without invitation on Papa Fuller, whom he had never met, lit a cigar, instructed the sympathetic butler to bring him spirituous liquor, and told his host a few things about gentlemen in general and the host himself in particular.
The familiarity of the butler in “Popularity” was as nothing to the behavior of the servants in “Forty-five Minutes From Broadway”, where several menials seemed to subscribe heartily to Paul Blouet’s dictum that “America is a country in which every man is as good as his neighbor and a damned sight better.” The mother in the noisy farce of “Julie Bonbon” who objected to having her son marry a milliner might have improved her own manners in any millinery shop on Fifth Avenue. A chambermaid in “Susan in Search of a Husband” introduced to each other two guests of her hotel; Vida Phillimore in “The New York Idea” received in her boudoir a nobleman who had been presented to her only the day before; Mrs. O’Mara addressed her daughter and ignored the visitor who was chatting with her in “All-of-a-Sudden Peggy.” The reception room revealed in “The Daughters of Men” looked like the interior of a jewel box, and served as the abiding place of a wonderful collection of amusingly stiff-backed men and women, representing the smart set as, at that time, it was imagined by Charles Klein.
Fortunately, errors of taste in staging society plays become fewer and less conspicuous every day. They are practically obsolete now in theaters like the Empire, the Lyceum, the Hudson, and the Belasco. With them has gone the time in which every fashionable apartment was furnished in exactly the same way and had doors in exactly the same place. The producer who “dresses” a stage today buys precisely as though he had a commission to “dress” the home of a wealthy and intelligent client. Under these circumstances, it is particularly fortunate that the comedy of manners and the drama of the drawing room have come to stay. Cultured people are pleasant companions in everyday life, and doubly pleasant when they have been idealized and super-refined for library or theater. We may be glad of the evident fact that plays may come and plays may go, but the society play goes on forever.