Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies)

by McHugh, Dominic

  A TITLE AND REHEARSALS

  December 1955–March 1956

  The year’s correspondence ends with letters from Levin to the key actors in which “the Pygmalion musical” is finally referred to as My Fair Lady; that to Robert Coote on December 28 appears to be the earliest example.145 The question of what to call the show was one of the most important decisions to be made. Lerner addresses the issue in his autobiography, saying that the early suggestions Liza and My Lady Liza “went to their final resting places in the trash basket” because “it would have seemed peculiar for the marquee to read: ‘Rex Harrison in Liza.’”146 He claims that My Fair Lady was considered and discarded because “it sounded like an operetta” and that Loewe liked Fanfaroon as a title “primarily I believe because it reminded him of Brigadoon.” Come to the Ball was also considered. Later, Lerner claims that “toward the second week of rehearsal,” Levin came to the theater and demanded that Lerner, Loewe, and Hart decide on a title, at which point they agreed to choose My Fair Lady because it was the one they disliked the least.147

  But this chronology is difficult to corroborate with documentary evidence. During the autumn of 1955, the show is typically referred to as My Lady Liza, and most of the contracts refer to this as the title. Then on November 29 Lerner wrote a long letter to Harrison, in which he mentioned the issue of the title in the postscript: “Fanfaroon has not been abandoned, although there is stiff opposition,” he wrote. “But My Lady Liza will definitely not be it. I know this will break your heart, because you seem so terribly fond of it.”148 Although Lerner claims in The Street Where I Live that the final decision was made during the second week of rehearsals, in fact it must have happened between December 16 and 28.149 My Fair Lady it was to be, and on December 30 Levin sent the record producer Goddard Lieberson an outline of the billing sheet for the show for use on the cover of the Original Cast Album with the new title stamped proudly across the middle.150

  Not surprisingly, the primary documentary sources for the remainder of the time leading up to the opening night on Broadway are less detailed than that for the preceding months. With the cast and crew in the same place for most of the time between the start of rehearsals (January 3), the opening night in New Haven (February 4), the Philadelphia tryout (February 15) and the Broadway opening (March 15), there was little need for written correspondence between the key players. This means that we have to fall back on the memoirs of figures such as Lerner, Andrews, Harrison, Holloway, Kitty Carlisle Hart (the director’s wife), and Doris Shapiro (Lerner’s assistant) to fill in many of the gaps, as well as newspaper reports and playbills. Nevertheless, a number of letters from this period remain, because Levin kept things ticking over while the show was being staged and rehearsed.

  On January 4, he wrote to Laurie Evans in London to tell him that “Rex arrived in good shape; rehearsals started yesterday; and everyone is working hard.”151 The cast was working upstairs at the New Amsterdam Roof, 214 West Forty-second Street in New York for the first four weeks until embarking for New Haven at the end of the month.152 The entire ensemble gathered onstage for the first time on January 3. Lerner tells us that “Around the edges of the stage Moss had arranged an exhibition of sketches of the scenery and the costumes, and the press was allowed in to do their first-day interviews. … The cast read the script aloud, with Moss reading the stage directions. Whenever they came to a song, Fritz and I performed it. After the first act the enthusiasm was high.”153 The exception was Rex Harrison, who felt that the character of Higgins had been put too much into the background in the second act. The solution was to add the song “A Hymn to Him,” better known as “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” Supposedly, the inspiration for this song came from Harrison himself, while walking down Fifth Avenue during the rehearsal period. Lerner reports that they had been “reviewing our past marital and emotional difficulties and his present one. … Suddenly, he had stopped and said in a loud voice that attracted a good bit of attention: ‘Alan! Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we were homosexuals?!’ I said that I did not think that was the solution and we walked on. But it stuck in my mind and by the time I reached the Pierre I had the idea for ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’”154 The lyricist adds that it was finished by the end of the eighth day of rehearsals.

  Hart’s rehearsal schedule was distinctive, incorporating an afternoon and evening schedule to leave the mornings free for other aspects of the production process. Andrews reports that “We began working every day at 2:00 p.m., took a break for dinner at 5:30 p.m., and then reassembled from 7:00 until 11:00 in the evening. Stanley Holloway and I kept up the British tradition of a cup of tea at 4:00 in the afternoon, and soon everyone was enjoying that welcome little break.”155 Lerner explains that the choice of this rehearsal schedule was deliberate: “Most directors like to begin in the morning at ten o’clock and rehearse until one or one thirty, returning at three and continuing until seven. Moss did not. He felt that by the end of the day the cast was usually so tired that little was accomplished in the last two hours,” hence the decision to start at 2 p.m.156 Another oft-repeated story about the show is that during rehearsals, Harrison kept brandishing a Penguin edition of Shaw’s Pygmalion and referred to it “at least four times a day, if a speech did not seem right to him,” according to Lerner. He would invariably cry out, “Where’s my Penguin?” and compare the text of the show to that of the play. After a week, Lerner’s response was to go to a taxidermist and purchase a stuffed penguin, which he had rolled out the next time Harrison asked the question. “From that moment on, he never mentioned the Penguin again and kept the stuffed edition in his dressing room as a mascot throughout the run of the production.”157

  It was not merely the nervous Harrison who made life challenging for Hart and Lerner during this time; the inexperience of Julie Andrews as an actress in a substantial piece started to cause problems, too. After two weeks of rehearsals “Moss decided drastic assistance was needed. He closed down rehearsals for two days and spent them alone with Julie.”158 Andrews herself adds that “it became obvious … that I was hopelessly out of my depth as Eliza Doolittle. … And that’s where Moss’s humanity came in. … [He] decided … to dismiss the company for forty-eight hours and to work solely with me. … For those two days … [we] hammered through each scene—everything from Eliza’s entrance, her screaming and yelling, to her transformation into a lady at the end of the play. Moss bullied, cajoled scolded, and encouraged.159 Lerner adds: “On Monday morning when rehearsals began again with the full company, Julie was well on her way to becoming Eliza Doolittle.”160 Though Andrews was now feeling more confident, Stanley Holloway in turn became unhappy that insufficient time was being spent on rehearsing his character, but on confronting the director with this issue he was told by Hart, “Now look, Stanley. I am rehearsing a girl who has never played a major role in her life, and an actor who has never sung on the stage in his life. You have done both. If you feel neglected it is a compliment.”161 The actor was mollified.

  One important job to be done during this time was for the show to be orchestrated. On January 5 Levin signed a contract with the arranger Guido Tutrinoli and three days later another with Robert Russell Bennett, who orchestrated the show with Phil Lang (and the “ghost” orchestrator, Jack Mason).162 It was Bennett who insisted that Lang be credited with the orchestrations along with himself, writing a letter to Levin on February 11 specifically asking it as “a favor.”163 Other things to be taken care of included ordering floral arrangements for the show from the Decorative Plant Corporation, and items such as necklaces and bracelets from Coro Jewelry, paying for the costumes Beaton had ordered in London, and finishing off the costume order with the Helene Pons Studio.164

  After spending January rehearsing the show in New York, the company moved to New Haven, where the New Haven Jewish Community Center had been hired for rehearsals between January 30 and February 1.165 Over at the Shubert Theatre, Biff Liff, the stage manager, “wrestled
with the scenery,” and although chaos ensued with the complicated sets, they were in sufficient order by Wednesday night to have a technical run-through.166 It was complete by Friday, and the orchestra arrived in the pit for the first time—“and blew Rex sky high,” according to Lerner.167 The actor’s inexperience as a singer meant that he was extremely intimidated by the overwhelming sound of the orchestra, and Hart promised he could rehearse alone with the orchestra the following afternoon.

  “But his terror of the orchestra did not abate,” Lerner continues. “Late that afternoon with the house sold out and a fierce blizzard blowing, Rex announced that under no circumstances would he go on that night.” The performance was cancelled, and announcements were made on the local radio stations. However, “by six o’clock that evening hundreds of people had braved the snow and were already queuing up at the box office. The house manager was livid. He swore to us all that he would tell the world the truth. … About an hour and a half before what would have been curtain time Rex’s agent arrived from New York. … No matter what happened that evening on stage, he said, Rex damn well had to go on. Fear of the consequences must have overshadowed his fear of the orchestra because one hour before curtain time, Rex recanted.”168 So in the end, the show did begin that night of February 4 at 8:40 p.m. Although there were some technical difficulties with the turntables and curtains, Lerner says that “the total effect was stunning and when the curtain came down the audience stood up and cheered.”169 Variety reviewed the show in its New Haven incarnation and reflected the reception that Lerner indicated, stating: “My Fair Lady is going to be a whale of a show … [It] contains enough smash potential to assure it a high place on the list of Broadway prospects.”170 Every aspect of the production came in for praise.

  After playing in New Haven for a week, the show moved to Philadelphia for a four-week run at the Erlanger Theatre. In preparation for Philadelphia, three numbers were cut, making the running time around fifteen minutes shorter: Higgins’s “Come to the Ball,” the “Decorating Eliza” ballet, and Eliza’s “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight.” The reaction to the show continued to be phenomenal. Joseph M. Hyman, who looked after Moss Hart’s affairs, wrote to Philip Adler to say that he thought it would be the biggest hit for twenty years.171 Arnold Weissberger, Beaton’s New York lawyer, told Levin that after the adjustments being made to the show, “it now has a 50–50 chance (50 to run for five years and 50 to run for ten years).”172 The reviews of the opening night performance on Broadway, March 15, 1956, concurred with these early opinions: the Daily Mirror called it “one of the all-time great song-and-dancers”; the World-Telegram and Sun said that it “prance[d] into that rare class of great musicals”; and the Herald Tribune ordered the reader not “to finish reading this review now. You’d better sit right down and send for those tickets to My Fair Lady.” But perhaps the most unexpected praise came from Lawrence Langner, who had brought the project to Lerner and Loewe on behalf of the Theatre Guild in 1952 and then been shut out of it when they recommenced in 1954. “You remember Mary of Scotland’s line—‘After I am dead you will find Calais written upon my heart’—that is the way I will always feel about Pygmalion. But the perfect job you have done certainly mitigates my suffering. I can only congratulate you on the superb welding of all the component parts with the original so that they seem to be conceived and executed by one master mind.”173 Even those with an axe to grind could not resist the charm of My Fair Lady, and the show went on to be Lerner and Loewe’s greatest triumph—one which they would never come close to repeating.

  3

  SHAVIAN BUT NOT SHAW

  DEVELOPING THE SCRIPT OF MY FAIR LADY

  With My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe were taking on Shaw’s most popular and perhaps greatest comedy. Working out how to make the adaptation was undoubtedly the most difficult aspect of writing the show. In Pygmalion, Shaw struck a balance between promoting his socialist outlook and creating a humorous and human vehicle. He did this with an ease that even he did not always manage to equal, and his unquestionable brilliance provided an intimidating precedent for everyone who approached the property with a view to making it into a Broadway musical. No wonder so great a dramatist as Oscar Hammerstein 2nd was interested in Pygmalion, and no wonder he eventually gave it up. No wonder, either, that it was the English-educated and ingenious wordsmith Lerner who eventually succeeded in the task, which required someone who could assimilate Shaw’s vast, imposing, and provocative work into a musical that would be related to but independent of Pygmalion. This chapter explores the background to the play in brief, before referring to documentary sources that track Lerner and Loewe’s initial ideas about the format of the show. It then reveals how changes made to the text initially used in Fair Lady’s rehearsals resulted in a vital shift of focus in the Higgins-Eliza relationship, and finally goes on to explore the structure of the completed show.

  SHAW AND PYGMALION

  George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin on July 26, 1856—just a few months short of a century before the premiere of My Fair Lady—and moved to London in 1876.1 Though he did not quite share Eliza Doolittle’s plight in his upbringing, the fact that he left school at fifteen and relied heavily on acts of self-education—such as visiting galleries, concert halls and theaters, and reading Shakespeare—to better himself in the world was undoubtedly a motivating factor behind many of his plays, including Pygmalion. Obviously, it would be unjustifiable to perceive too strong a link between the two, but Shaw was hardworking, just like Eliza; unlike her, Shaw was able to benefit from financial support from a parent (his mother, who left her husband when Shaw was a teenager). He was also, of course, a unique figure in the history of literature and had a remarkable intellect. But in spite of this difference, there is no doubt that the portrayal of Eliza’s desperate financial circumstances, and the ongoing insecurity that this creates within her, came from deep within Shaw’s heart. To climb the social ladder was a mutual ambition.

  In 1884 Shaw joined the Fabian Society, which championed social reform through debate. Here he was in his element, and in the same year decided to become a playwright. His first stage work, Widowers’ Houses, was eventually completed and performed in 1892. Its subject matter hints that Shaw started as he meant to go on: a young couple, Harry and Blanche, are thwarted in their love by Harry’s disgust at the exploitative behavior of Blanche’s father, a slum landlord. The following year, Shaw wrote Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a controversial play in which he suggests that prostitution is “an economic rather than moral problem, a position that caused the play to be banned from public stages in Britain for over twenty-five years.”2 In both these works, the oppressed and the poor are treated with sympathy, and Shaw’s defense of women’s rights in Mrs. Warren is particularly indicative of his stance on sexual equality. Poverty was also a theme in Major Barbara (1905), in which he described it as “the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes.” Another important factor is the style of these plays, which mix humor and lightness with a seriousness of purpose.

  Both this technical approach and these themes recur in Pygmalion, which Shaw started to write in March 1912. It took three months to complete, but it is documented that the basic premise of the play was in his mind from 1897.3 All along, Shaw envisaged using his muse, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in the role of Eliza Doolittle, but she took quite some convincing since, as Shaw himself said, she had “never appeared in a low life part.” The play received its premiere, in German, in Vienna in 1913, and was also performed in Berlin later that year, so it was not until April 1914 that it received its English-language premiere at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. (Several of Shaw’s previous works had also been given their first performances abroad, since the playwright abhorred the tastes of London’s critics and “knew [his plays] would be received more sympathetically by theatre managers and critics” in other countries.)4 Unfortunately, the rehearsal period was overshadowed by a three-way tension between Shaw, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Herbert Beerbohm Tr
ee, the actor-manager who ran Her Majesty’s Theatre and had been hired to play Higgins after much debate.5 It did not augur well for the work, which had long been one of Shaw’s pet projects.

  Pygmalion’s first-night reviews were sidetracked by Eliza’s line “Not bloody likely” from act 3.6 The word “bloody” had rarely been used onstage before and was controversial. This inevitably became the focus of the reviews, and Shaw was unhappy that it “had become a major distraction from the more serious elements of the play.”7 The first performance was also spoiled for Shaw by Tree’s divergence from the intended ending of the play. Shaw had underlined to the actors that Eliza and Higgins do not finish up together, and the original text of the scene makes this clear, too. Eliza bids a final farewell to the Professor, but quite casually he asks her to buy him a ham, some cheese, a pair of gloves, and a new tie. She retorts, “Buy them yourself.” Mrs. Higgins (who is present in the final scene, which takes place at her house in the play, rather than Higgins’s house as in My Fair Lady) offers to buy the tie and gloves in her place, but Higgins ends with: “Oh don’t bother. She’ll buy’em all right enough.”8 However, Shaw wrote to his wife that Tree depicted Higgins “shoving his mother rudely out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals to buy a ham for his lonely home like a bereaved Romeo.”9 Later in the run, this had developed further, with the actor throwing flowers to Eliza as she left the stage at the end.10