My Life in Pieces (51 page)

In 1959, mother and I were living in the tiny town of Fort Jameson in the very large country of Northern Rhodesia in the middle of the vast expanses of Africa. We shared a sprawling house with another fatherless family, and among our proudest possessions was a gramophone player,
in a fine-looking walnut cabinet; you had to wind it up when the battery ran down, and it was the very latest thing. We had just one LP: the Drury Lane recording of the original production of
My Fair Lady
, with a famously witty sleeve adorned with a cartoon in which a snowy-bearded George Bernard Shaw is shown manipulating Professor Higgins, who is himself manipulating Eliza Doolittle. We played it over and over, not just because it was all the rage, and because it was tuneful and witty, but because it was so perfectly and completely British. For a little boy from Streatham who felt himself to be alarmingly adrift in an incomprehensibly strange and different land, it was immeasurably comforting to listen to ‘Wouldn’t It Be Luverly’ and ‘Why Can’t the English?’

I don’t believe I realised for many years that it was in fact a Broadway show, directed by an American, that its lyrics were by another American, its score was by an Austrian, and that it would never have happened at all had it not been for a Hungarian. The very fact that it existed as a musical was a minor miracle, because Shaw loathed the musical theatre, and publicly denounced the only attempt to convert one of his plays into a show –
The Chocolate Soldier
, an operetta by Oscar Straus based, very loosely indeed, on
Arms and the Man
. A rather better composer than Straus, Franz Léhar, attempted to persuade the old man to let him adapt
Pygmalion
, but was sent off with a flea in his ear: ‘I absolutely forbid such an outrage…
Pygmalion
is good enough with its own verbal music.’ As if to prove his point, composers found it very difficult to adapt: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein attempted to wrestle it into musical form, but gave up. In any case, as long as Shaw was alive (he died in 1950) there was no possibility of getting the rights; after he died, the Shaw estate faithfully maintained his position.

There was, however, a loophole, which is where the Hungarian comes in, in the fabulously picaresque person of the producer – director – entrepreneur, Gabriel Pascal. This was the man who had succeeded where all the moguls of Hollywood had failed: he had persuaded Shaw to allow his plays to be filmed. Hollywood had offered millions (in the 1920s) for the rights, but Shaw was convinced that his work would be at the very least diluted and at worst destroyed in the Dream Factory. It is all the more extraordinary, then, that Pascal, a caricature of the Eastern European con man, incomprehensibly mangling the English language, patently mendacious and profoundly untrustworthy in all matters pecuniary, should have magicked the rights out of the canny if by now
elderly Irishman. Shaw adored him, above all, it seems, because he made him laugh. ‘I have had to forbid Pascal to kiss me,’ he said, ‘as he did at first to the scandal of the village.’ Pascal himself directed
Major Barbara,
Caesar and Cleopatra
and
Androcles and the Lion
, confining himself to merely producing
Pygmalion
. For this, he commissioned Shaw to write a screenplay, but, taking advantage of the octogenarian dramatist’s absence from the film set, Pascal and his collaborators, the director Anthony Asquith, and the star and co-director Leslie Howard, dropped several of the scenes he wrote, and (with the aid of three other writers) invented a couple of new ones. Some of these substantially diverged from the play and the author’s passionately expressed view of the characters and their motives; most heretically, they had Eliza come back to Higgins at the end.

Why Pascal is relevant to the story of
My Fair Lady
is that the splendid old rogue had, by means of one of his familiar contractual conjuring tricks, managed to prestidigitate away from the aged Shaw not merely the film rights to these plays, but the rights to any further adaptation, on stage or screen. Quite out of the blue, in 1952, he approached Alan Jay Lerner, who had just had a modest success with
Paint Your Wagon
, to ask him and Frederick Loewe, his composing partner, to write a musical version of the screenplay. Nothing came of it at the time, but two years later, Pascal having in the interim died, they secured the rights from his estate and plunged in. Using the screenplay as their dramatic template, they were relieved of the impossible challenge of setting closely argued Shavian dialogue to music. It also gave them the chance of creating vivid and colourful numbers, not strictly integral to the play’s action. With three exceptions – the Doolittle scenes (one in Tottenham Court Road, the other in Covent Garden), and the Ascot Gavotte, a re-siting of the tea-party scene in
Pygmalion
– all the ‘new’ scenes come from the film. These include some of the most famous scenes in the show: the ‘Rain in Spain’ scene (the phrases ‘the rain in Spain’ and ‘in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen’ are lifted directly from the screenplay); Freddy Eynsford-Hill’s vigil outside 27a Wimpole Street; the Embassy Ball, in which the oleaginous Karpathy tries unsuccessfully to unmask Eliza; and, finally, most significantly, the last scene of all, in which Eliza returns to Higgins, who is discovered listening to the first recordings he made of her voice.

Lerner and Loewe were joined by a team of incomparable collaborators of innovative brilliance: Oliver Smith, designer of
On the Town
,
Brigadoon, Oklahoma!
; Hanya Holm, choreographer of ballets, initially for her own avant-garde troupe, then for
Kiss Me Kate
and
The Golden
Apple
; Cecil Beaton, famous for his costumes for
Lady Windermere’s Fan
,
The School for Scandal
and
The Chalk Garden
, not to mention his standing as one of the world’s great photographers; Abe Feder, the greatest lighting designer the American theatre has ever produced, who lit not merely Orson Welles’s
Macbeth
and
Julius Caesar
, but also the Empire State Building. Before any of these, however, the producer Herman Levin had engaged as director the universally admired and loved Moss Hart, the writer and director who, in collaboration with George Kaufman and on his own, had been responsible for an unparalleled string of Broadway hits. This was the key appointment.

Hart’s most pressing task was casting the – as yet unfinished – show. Henry Higgins was, of course, the big question. Noël Coward was asked; then Michael Redgrave. Both, for different reasons, turned the show down. Next on the list was Rex Harrison. After a great deal of persuasion, he accepted the part, even though, as he said with characteristic tact, only two out of the five songs were any good. The authors immediately began to frame the part according to his capacities and personality. Fritz Loewe reimagined his songs as
Sprechgesang
(speech-song), an idiom familiar to him from the musical avant-garde of his youth in Berlin, while Lerner imported Harrison’s explosiveness and his incomprehension of the female sex (so many of whom he had married) into the lyrics. All other important roles were filled with veteran British performers: Stanley Holloway, a great variety star of the Thirties, was Doolittle, Robert Coote, a distinguished character man, Colonel Pickering, and Higgins’s mother was played by Cathleen Nesbitt, who seemed to embody the vanished Edwardian age of which her first boyfriend, Rupert Brooke, had been the poet laureate. The cast was so overwhelmingly British that a tea break, hitherto unheard of in Broadway rehearsals, had to be introduced.

Only the all-important casting of Eliza remained. It was the toughest role yet written for a woman in the musical theatre, in which, hitherto, the greatest crisis a heroine had had to face was a dating problem, or the enumeration of the children of the King of Siam. Mary Martin turned them down – ‘
How
could it have happened,’ she asked her husband after hearing the songs for the first time, ‘how
could
it have happened? Those dear boys have
lost their talent
’ – whereupon they offered it to Julie Andrews, from Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, twenty years old, and at
that moment starring on Broadway in the latest import from London, Sandy Wilson’s deliciously silly show
The Boy Friend
. They took a tremendous gamble on her lack of acting experience; and indeed, during rehearsals, the authors – and, without any attempt at concealment, her co-star – began increasingly to doubt their wisdom. Moss Hart, a wise and cunning old hand, kept his faith in her, suspending rehearsals for two days to teach her the role, gesture by gesture, inflection by inflection, line by line – a real-life Higgins to her real-life Eliza.

Inspiration ran very high. Beaton had sworn never to do another stage show, but was enchanted by the possibility of putting the elegant world of his childhood on stage. Oliver Smith, veteran of countless radical and innovative ballet designs, and later of highly successful musicals, used the inevitable succession of back and front cloths (the show has seventeen changes of scene) to evoke London interiors and exteriors in cleverly angled and stylised rooms and boldly painted vistas: the scene in the Covent Garden Market is an almost Expressionist vision of great arching roofs jostling each other at crazy tangents. Here was no tired realism, no chocolate-box charm. Hanya Holm likewise eschewed swooning waltzes and
Me and My Girl
knees-ups, finding instead a physical language of wit and droll allusion. The form of the piece, as devised by Alan Lerner (much aided by Moss Hart, who provided a similar service for him to the one he performed for Julie Andrews: a weekend-long seminar on structure and storytelling), was, with its quick succession of scenes, revue-like. Each scene required a brilliant visual image, a physical language which revealed the class and world of the characters, and acting which communicated vividly and amusingly.

We have one indispensable piece of evidence from that first production: the original cast recording, made on the Sunday after the Thursday opening. From the first note of the overture – dynamically propelled along by Franz Allers, another of the collaborators, the outstanding Broadway conductor of his day, a sophisticated musician who came from the world of classical music – the feeling is vital, brilliant, bold, theatrical. Harrison, still excited and challenged by the new medium, performs on a knife-edge, half speaking, half singing, his songs, almost seeming to improvise them. Andrews is suffused with rapture. Stanley Holloway brings a wholly authentic and grounded note of music hall to the proceedings, rough, real and earthy. Allers drives the score along at a delirious pace. The rhythms are pungent, the wit is always unexpected and the romance
breathtaking, whether in Freddy Eynsford-Hill’s effusions or Eliza’s self-discoveries. Higgins’s capitulation to feeling is tentative, unwilling and, ultimately, overwhelming.

In the 1958 recording from the London production at Drury Lane, the one I wore out all those years ago in our rondavel in Fort Jameson, everything has become a hundred times more accomplished; they had all been playing the piece for two years. Skill is supreme; and with it greater sophistication of feeling. Harrison’s ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ is a masterpiece of dramatic emotionalism. Something is missing, a certain edge; but in the face of so much brilliance, its loss is insignificant. In the film (1965), the tendency to smooth out, to varnish over, has become rampant. Oliver Smith, Hanya Holm, Moss Hart (who died in 1960, replaced for the film by George Cukor), Julie Andrews, have all disappeared. Cecil Beaton, now responsible for both sets and costumes of paralysing prettiness, Rex Harrison, a very different, mellower, softer Rex Harrison from the Rex Harrison of eight years before, Audrey Hepburn, ravishingly unconvincing either as flower-girl or as self-confident, independent and suddenly grown-up woman, and André Previn (seemingly determined to out-Mantovani Mantovani with his hundred-piece orchestra), rule the roost. The music has become slower and fatter; any attempt at stylisation in the settings has disappeared, without the introduction of any compensating realism; the choreography, by Hermes Pan, is entirely conventional. Paradoxically, the feeling of the film is theatrical: it seems to take place in Never-Never Land. The harsh elements of the story and the audacious wit of the stage show have become ironed out – the Cinderella dimension has become all, with the outcome never seriously in doubt.

My Fair Lady
should have all the attack, all the brilliance, all the fun and wit, all the fresh beauty of that original production. But the theatre has changed, and so have we. We need new ingenuities to tickle our fancies, new jokes to make us laugh, a new kind of beauty to gasp at. My collaborators and I have tried to treat
My Fair Lady
as if it were a script that had just fallen through the letter box. And an astonishing script it is to read; we’ve tried to wipe off the patina time has put on it. The show is about all kinds of important things – class, language, independence, feminism, love – but it’s always told by its multiple authors, Lerner, Loewe, and, of course, Shaw, with sharp, elegant wit. That’s what we’re after. Oh, and of course, we hope you’ll have a little cry, too.

I
was determined to break the mould established by the original produc
tion, but the new elements I had assembled – Fielding’s witty sets,
Conran’s trenchant costumes, Sacks’s offbeat and joyful steps – didn’t
quite add up by the time we opened. We needed more time: we weren’t
remotely ready. The production manager walked out, cursing the man
agement from the stage before he did so: ‘It’s all your fucking fault!’ The
lighting designer had a nervous breakdown when it was discovered that he
hadn’t been noting down the lighting cues as he plotted them. Edward Fox,
resentful of being amplified, ripped his microphone off and threw it into
the pit. Because of the glamorous conjunction of Edward and Jasper, the
national papers had insisted on reviewing (badly) the excruciating, fal
tering first preview in Manchester. One critic, Charles Spencer of the
Daily Telegraph,
to his undying credit refused to go, whereupon his editor,
Max Hastings, told him that if he didn’t, he’d be out of a job. Charles
went, and gave the show an entirely undeserved rave review. Before long,
with constant work (always more difficult once a show has opened),
things got better, and the individual elements started to cohere rather bril
liantly, but a big show, once it’s running, is like an ocean-going liner:
turning it round is a massive undertaking. Finally, in Southampton, after
four not-at-all unsuccessful months, financially speaking, and now
attracting properly deserved rave reviews, the exhausted management
decided to pull the plug, and the boat sank without trace – apart from the
hats, which, from time to time, surface in costume houses across the land.
For the first time in my career as a director, I had felt not entirely in com
mand of the actors, who were an oddly disparate, wayward bunch who
never gelled into a company. On the last day in Southampton, there was
a farewell party, at which some of chorus had got up a satirical cabaret in
which the stars and the creative team were none too affectionately sent
up. I got a mention: ‘Ah, the director – was there a director on the show?’
How I laughed.