One Summer: America, 1927 (56 page)

Liveright exacerbated matters considerably by investing heavily, and generally unsuccessfully, in the stock market and on Broadway. In 1927 he found temporary salvation from an unlikely source. He brought over from London a play that had been a big success there:
Dracula
. For the American production, he selected a little-known Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi. Although Lugosi had been in America for six years, he still spoke little English and learned his lines phonetically, without really understanding what they meant, which gave him interesting diction. Lugosi had started his career playing romantic leads, but in 1926 he played a villain in a small but memorably named movie called
The Devil in the Cheese
. On the strength of that, it seems, he landed the role of Dracula. On September 19, the play opened at the Shubert Theater in New Haven, Connecticut. After a successful two-week tryout, it had its formal premiere at the Fulton Theatre in New York on October 5, just before Lugosi’s forty-fifth birthday. In what may have been the best idea he ever had, Liveright hit on the gimmick of having a nurse stand by at each performance to help those who fainted, to emphasize just how terrifying an experience
Dracula
was. The ploy worked brilliantly.
Dracula
was a huge hit; it ran for a year in New York, then toured for two years more, making Liveright a lot of money when he most needed it.

It was also the making of Bela Lugosi, who devoted the rest of his career to playing Dracula. He starred in the 1931 movie and a great number of sequels. He also changed wives often—he was married five times—and became addicted to narcotics, but professionally he did almost nothing else for almost thirty years. Such was his devotion to the role that when he died in 1956, he was buried dressed as Count Dracula.

For Horace Liveright,
Dracula
proved a reprieve, not a solution. The firm went under in 1933, but by then its good work was done. Thanks almost entirely to Knopf and Liveright, American publishing was vastly more cosmopolitan and daring by the late 1920s than it had been just a dozen or so years before.

After an uninspiring spring and summer, Broadway was stirring promisingly at last. Two plays of lasting note were in rehearsals in September. One was
Funny Face
, with music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin. Starring Fred and Adele Astaire and Betty Compton, mistress of Mayor Jimmy Walker, it would be a great hit and would run for 250 performances. Among its songs were “My One and Only” and “ ’S Wonderful.” Jimmied into it in a burst of topical exuberance was a role featuring a “Lindbergh-esque aviator.” (The 1957 film version was completely different and cut the aviator. It also preserved just four of the original songs.)

Far more influential was a complex musical about life on a Mississippi riverboat. Called
Show Boat
, it would change musical theater forever. As one theater historian has put it: “The history of the American Musical Theatre, quite simply, is divided into two eras—everything before
Show Boat
and everything after
Show Boat
.”

Show Boat
was based on a novel from the previous year by Edna Ferber, who had just recently—and quite late in life—become extremely successful as a writer. Forty-two years old in the summer of 1927, she was from Appleton, Wisconsin, the daughter of a Jewish shopkeeper. She was small and round, never married or had a partner, and carried a sharp tongue. Once the camp author Michael Arlen, seeing Ferber in a double-breasted jacket, said, “Why, Edna, you look almost like a man,” to which Ferber replied, “Why, Michael, so do you.” Thanks to her wit, Ferber was welcomed to the Algonquin Round Table, the informal luncheon club of wits who gathered every weekday in the Algonquin Hotel, and professionally embraced by George S. Kaufman, the most successful comedic playwright of the day. They collaborated extremely successfully on a string of comedies.

However gifted Ferber was with comedy, her skills as a novelist have
not weathered well. The novel
Show Boat
is “a kind of hilarious anthology of bad writing” in the candid words of John Lahr. In evidence of Ferber’s propensity to write “like a teenager on diet pills,” Lahr cites this passage: “The Mississippi itself was a tawny tiger, roused, furious, bloodthirsty, lashing out with its great tail, tearing with its cruel claws, and burying its fangs deep in the shore to swallow at a gulp land, houses, trees, cattle, humans, even.” But it was a different age, and many found the book enchanting. Among its greatest fans was the composer Jerome Kern, who all but begged Ferber to let him make it into a musical. Ferber was doubtful that it could be done, but she allowed him to try. The result was what the theater historian Gerald M. Bordman has called “perhaps the most successful and influential Broadway musical play ever written.”

Kern was born in New York City in 1885 (the same year as Edna Ferber) into a prosperous household. His father was a successful businessman, and young Jerome was well educated. He trained in musical theory and composition at the New York College of Music, though he spent his early years working in Tin Pan Alley. His original specialty was creating new songs for imported plays—interpolations, as they were known in the trade—but soon he was cranking out original scores. Kern might never have become famous. He was booked to sail on the
Lusitania
in May 1915 on its last fateful voyage, but he overslept.

It was an extraordinarily busy time on Broadway. An average of fifty new musicals a year opened in the twenties. Kern was amazingly prolific—in 1917 alone, he wrote the music for five plays and a number of incidental songs as well—but he also developed further ambitions. In the same year he wrote: “It is my opinion that the musical numbers should carry the action of the play and should be representative of the personalities of the characters who sing them.” This was, improbable though it may seem today, a revolutionary notion, and it was
Show Boat
that would make it a reality.

Kern could do with a hit. He had already had one notable failure in 1927.
Lucky
had opened on March 22 to mixed reviews and closed two months later (on the day Lindbergh landed in Paris). The play apparently had one wonderful song, “Spring Is Here,” but Kern neglected to get it
published, and it is now lost. Of Kern’s five most recent plays, just one,
Sunny
, had been a real hit. The others had mostly been disappointing.
Dear Sir
closed after just fifteen performances. So
Show Boat
was both a crucial production for him and a bold gamble.

It had a complicated plot, it covered a span of forty years, and it addressed the highly sensitive issue of race—not the obvious makings of a night of lighthearted entertainment.
Show Boat
began rehearsals in the second week of September, almost three months ahead of its scheduled opening on Broadway, which was much, much earlier than would normally be the case, but its epic production numbers required careful preparation. With music by Kern, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, choreography by Sammy Lee, and sets by Joseph Urban,
Show Boat
debuted at the National Theatre in Washington on November 15, then moved on to Philadelphia, and finally opened on Broadway at the new Ziegfeld Theatre on December 27.
Rio Rita
, the play Charles Lindbergh never quite saw, had to move out to make room for it. The reception everywhere was ecstatic.

As Lahr put it in 1993: “Nothing like it had ever been seen on the American stage.” It marked the birth of the integrated musical, by which is meant simply that all the elements of a musical—script, songs, dance, sets—contributed to a coherent whole, exactly what Kern had been calling for as far back as 1917.

Show Boat
was racy stuff in every sense of the word. It involved relations between blacks and whites, including miscegenation, and dealt sympathetically with the plight of black people in the South. It had a chorus of ninety-six singers, equally divided between blacks and whites, and was the first production in the history of American theater in which blacks and whites sang together on stage. Just three years earlier, when authorities learned that Eugene O’Neill’s play
All God’s Chillun
proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it. So for that reason alone the play was tremendously exciting. For people inclined to be enlightened, this was a breakout moment.

The play contained six songs that are still widely known today: “Ol’
Man River,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “Bill,” “Make-Believe,” “Why Do I Love You,” and “You Are Love.” “Ol’ Man River” turned out to be uncannily like an existing song called “Long-Haired Mamma,” published earlier that year. The composer, Maury Madison, thought so, too, and sued Kern. They settled out of court.

The substance of the play itself was anything but an automatic hit. As well as dealing with miscegenation, it looked seriously at gambling and broken marriages. It was also extremely long, not finishing until after 11:30 p.m. But people flocked to it. Several members of the audience were moved literally to tears. From the beginning
Show Boat
was a smash hit, grossing $50,000 a week during the course of its run.

It was a memorable week for Edna Ferber. The night after
Show Boat
opened, a play she co-wrote with George S. Kaufman,
The Royal Family
, had its premiere. A comedy that deftly parodied the famously temperamental and self-important Barrymore acting clan, it was an immediate hit and ran for ten months. The Barrymores were eminently worthy of parody. John Barrymore once left a stage to punch an electrician who had not focused a light on him properly, and if someone coughed while he was emoting, he would stop and call out to the audience, “Would someone please throw that seal a fish?” Ethel Barrymore did her best to get
The Royal Family
stopped, but she failed.

Although Ferber and Kaufman squabbled endlessly and often bitterly, they wrote three great comedies together—
The Royal Family, Dinner at Eight
, and
Stage Door
—before breaking up in permanent rancor. When Kaufman was near death, Ferber came to visit him and thought they had made a reconciliation. As she left, Kaufman called her back and said, “Edna, are you going to the funeral?”

“What funeral?” she asked.

“Yours. You’re dead, Edna, dead!” he cried, and fell back on the pillows. He never spoke to her again.

Altogether eighteen plays opened on Broadway in the week that
Show Boat
premiered—eleven of them on the day after Christmas, making it the busiest single night in the history of Broadway. Theater seemed to be enjoying its greatest triumph, but in fact this would turn out to be
its last hurrah. Talking pictures were about to change the world of entertainment profoundly, not just by stealing audiences from live theater but also, even worse, by stealing talent. Talking pictures needed actors who were comfortable with the spoken word and writers who could create real dialogue. An enormous exodus was about to begin. Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Bette Davis, W. C. Fields, James Cagney, Claudette Colbert, Edward G. Robinson, Leslie Howard, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Cary Grant, Paul Muni, Paulette Goddard, and many more who could be seen in 1927 on Broadway would all shortly decamp to Hollywood. American theater would never be the same again.

When
Show Boat
went on the road in 1929, it didn’t do very well at all. Everybody was at the talkies.

*
Putting advanced societies on nearby planets wasn’t in itself a preposterous notion in 1927. The March issue of
Scientific American
, no less, contained an article solemnly speculating on whether Mars contained a civilization superior to our own. (It also had an article suggesting that humans might be evolving into a race of one-eyed Cyclopeans.) Other respectable publications posed similar questions about Venus, where it was supposed that the inhabitants lived in some kind of tropical paradise beneath thick Venusian clouds.

29

Of all the figures who rose to prominence in the 1920s in America, none had a more pugnacious manner, finer head of hair, or more memorable name than Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Landis was a slight figure—he weighed no more than 130 pounds and stood just five and a half feet tall—but a commanding presence. Sixty-one years old in the summer of 1927, he had a wizened face and parchment skin beneath a towering white mane. The radical journalist John Reed described Landis as having “the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead.”

Born and raised in Millville, Ohio, he owed his curious name to a bizarre circumstance. His father, a surgeon for the Union Army in the Civil War, lost his leg at Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, and, oddly, decided to commemorate the event by naming his son after the site (but with a slight adjustment of spelling).

Landis trained as a lawyer in Chicago, then by chance and good fortune landed a plum job as personal assistant to Walter Q. Gresham, U.S. secretary of state under President Grover Cleveland. As reward for diligent service to the nation, Landis was made a federal judge in Illinois in 1905. There he distinguished himself by his many rash and startling judgments.

He gained national attention by charging Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany with murder after the sinking of the
Lusitania
(on the grounds that he had killed a resident of Illinois). In his most famous case, he fined Standard Oil $29 million—an audacious sum—for violating antitrust laws. Soon afterward, an appeals court threw Landis’s judgment out, which is what often happened with Landis decisions. According to one authority, Landis had more cases reversed on appeal than any other judge in the federal system.

Wherever legal news was being made, Landis was uncannily present. He presided over the early stages of the famous libel suit between Henry Ford and the
Chicago Tribune
. (The trial was then moved to Michigan, outside his jurisdiction.) During and after World War I, Landis became particularly noted for prosecuting radicals. He sentenced Victor Berger, a socialist congressman from Wisconsin, to twenty years in prison for criticizing the war in a newspaper editorial. Later he said that he would far rather have stood Berger in front of a firing squad. That sentence was later overturned.