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

by McHugh, Dominic

  RS (1-2-13)

  DOOLITTLE: Well, I’m willing to marry her. It’s me that suffers by it. I’ve no hold on her. I got to be agreeable to her. I got to give her presents. I got to buy her clothes something sinful. I’m a slave to that woman, Eliza. Just because I’m not her lawful husband. And she knows it, too. Catch her marrying me! Come on, Eliza. Slip your father half a crown to go home on. An unmarried man has to deaden his senses much more than a married one.

  PS (17)

  DOOLITTLE: Well, I’m willing to marry her. It’s me that suffers by it. I’m a slave to that woman, Eliza. Just because I ain’t her lawful husband. [Lovably] Come on, Eliza. Slip your father half a crown to go home on.

  The first extract gives a sense of the extent of Doolittle’s misery at not being married to the woman with whom he lives. He says that he has no hold over her, and that he is obliged to buy her presents in order to keep her, because he has no legal rights. His final line (“An unmarried man…”) is tinged with a melancholy that we might not normally associate with the jovial “Lerner” Doolittle, but it is absolutely consistent with Shaw’s arguably more elegiac Doolittle. The replacement speech still contains reference to “slavery,” but it is not explained, losing the opportunity for a darker moment.

  The subject of Doolittle’s relationships, especially with Eliza’s current “stepmother,” was originally discussed more explicitly. Particularly important is the indication in RS that Eliza is aware that her parents were not married: when Mrs. Pearce asks Eliza about her parents, she replies, “I ain’t got no mother. Her that turned me out was my sixth stepmother, and my father isn’t a marrying sort of man if you know what I mean” (RS, 1-3-23). Lerner simplified this to “I ain’t got no parents” (PS, 30), almost as if she is simply an orphan, yet the original is more revealing, because we learn about Eliza’s insecure upbringing. It also discloses that she is aware her parents were not married, something her father later claims (to Pickering and Higgins, albeit in RS only) that she does not know. Again, the cut line derives from Shaw, who mentions Eliza’s “sixth stepmother” but does not have the comment about Doolittle not being “a marrying sort of man.”43

  The encounter (a couple of scenes later) between Higgins and Doolittle is white-hot. Deciding how to carve this scene must have been quite a challenge for Lerner: money changes hands for Eliza and Doolittle “sells” his daughter, which paints him in an unpleasant light, yet he has to remain a likeable rogue. One theme that Lerner originally explored more extensively was the “undeserving poor,” a label that Doolittle gives himself early on in the scene. An example is the line “They charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving” (RS, 1-5-33), which was later removed; here, Doolittle explains why he needs money. Later, he rejects Higgins’s offer to train him to be a preacher: “Not me, Governor, thank you kindly … it’s a dog’s life any way you look at it. Undeserving poverty’s my line” (RS, 1-5-34, derived from Pygmalion, 55). Soon afterwards, when Pickering says that he assumes Doolittle was married to Eliza’s mother and is firmly put straight on the subject, Doolittle adds: “No, [i]t’s only the middle class way. My way has always been the undeserving way. But don’t say nothing to Eliza. She don’t know” (RS, 1-5-35). This reintroduces the reality of Eliza’s background hinted at in the previous scene, and underlines the fact that she is illegitimate while more generally showing that she was brought up with a different sense of morality than the place in which she now finds herself (the additions are not from Shaw).

  Consistent with the changes made to act 1, scene 5, the relationship between Eliza and Doolittle is much darker in the rehearsal version of the Ascot scene too, even though he is physically absent. Eliza originally had a long speech (deriving from Pygmalion), dealing with the news that her father is an alcoholic (RS, 1-7-58). Mrs. Eynsford Hill expresses sympathy, but Eliza replies that “it never did him no harm” and assures her that he did not “keep it up regular.” Doolittle only did it “on the burst … from time to time,” and Eliza points out that he was “always more agreeable” afterwards. Her mother would send him out to drink himself happy if he was out of work. Eliza’s motto is simply that “if a man has a bit of conscience, it always takes him when he’s sober. … A drop of booze just takes that off and makes him happy.” This statement represents Shaw at his most acute.44 The comment not only exposes Eliza’s social status, it also gives a shocking insight into the emotional conditions in which she was raised. PS removes this element of the scene, retaining reference to Doolittle’s drinking habits only in passing for a joke (“Drank! My word! Something chronic,” 106). In consequence, PS maintains light comedy throughout the Ascot scene rather than adding new insights.

  Doolittle’s final appearance, in the Covent Garden scene in act 2, was also changed, specifically during his last exchange with Eliza. This confrontation is an invention of the musical, though it does have an equivalent in Pygmalion through Doolittle’s presence in the final scene. (In the play, Freddy, Mrs. Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza all depart for his wedding; crucially, Eliza does not attend the ceremony in the musical, and Lerner implies a final rift between them.) During rehearsals, Lerner excised several lines showing the “philosophical” Doolittle. He says that he was “free” and “happy” and didn’t want to be interfered with. He had no relatives, but now he has “fifty, and not a decent week’s wages among the lot of them.” He used to live for himself, but now he’s “middle class” and has to “live for others.” He concludes: “The next one to touch me will be your blasted professor. I’ll have to learn to speak middle-class language from him instead of speaking proper English” (RS, 2-3-17). This is an interesting speech that depicts Doolittle’s fate as part of a wider social commentary within the show; his previous life was one of freedom, whereas financial security has entailed social burden—a direct contradiction to Higgins’s philosophy, where the Cockney dialect binds the working classes and clear diction facilitates social liberation. The other addition to the speech follows the news that Doolittle is to be married to “Eliza’s stepmother”: “She wouldn’t have married me before if she’d had six children by me. But now I am respectable. Now she wants to be respectable. Middle-class morality claims its victims” (RS, 2-3-17). Again, Doolittle reinforces the idea of his social shift as being something imprisoning rather than giving him an opportunity, describing himself as a “victim” and making it clear that social respectability (not love or affection) is the reason for the marriage.

  Table 3.5. Outline 4

  Initiating the Eliza-Higgins Relationship

  The all-important battle between Higgins and Eliza was intensified throughout the script during rehearsals. In act 1, scene 3, Lerner added several lines after Mrs. Pearce’s question about whether Eliza is to be paid for taking part in the experiment. Higgins claims that Eliza will “only drink if you give her money,” much to her indignation; she appeals to Pickering, who comes to her defense and asks whether it occurs to Higgins that Eliza “has some feelings.” The Professor replies that he does not think she has “any feelings that we need bother about,” but Mrs. Pearce interjects and asks him to “look ahead a little” (PS, 30–31). Yet again, these lines show Lerner going back to Shaw’s text to add nuance to the musical.45

  Higgins’s character is further developed in his song, “I’m an Ordinary Man.” The dialogue leading into the number was changed quite substantially during the rehearsal period. In particular, his original line, “Do I look like the kind of person who roams about anxiously searching for some woman to upset his life?” (RS, 1-3-25), is noticeable in the way that Higgins seems to reject the idea of having a female lover at all. The replacement is less clear-cut, relating a history of relationships with women that have gone badly as the reason for his bachelorhood: “I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself become friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. So here I a
m, a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so” (PS, 35). Unusually, this is an example of PS making Higgins’s possible status as a lover more tantalizing, rather than more obscure.

  The revised speech is quite an improvement, because Higgins bares his soul in an unprecedented fashion, and thereby reveals his emotional repression: his relations with the opposite sex have been a disaster, and in his way he has been damaged by them. As before, Lerner reinstates several lines from Shaw. But he still omits the following statement of Higgins’s: “You see, she’ll be a pupil; and teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred. I’ve taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak English: the best looking women in the world. I’m seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of wood.”46 It is no accident that these lines were omitted from My Fair Lady: Lerner’s Higgins cannot exaggerate his immunity to the opposite sex if the musical’s ambiguous treatment of the Higgins-Eliza relationship is to be effective.

  Two scenes later, the subject of Higgins’s relationship with Eliza is again discussed openly, this time by Doolittle just before he departs the house: “I don’t know what your intentions is, Governor, but if you’ll take my advice you’ll marry Eliza while she’s young. If you don’t, you’ll be sorry for it after. But better her than you, because you’re a man and she’s only a woman and don’t know how to be happy anyhow” (RS, 1-5-36, partly based on Pygmalion, 56). This was later altered to a shorter speech in which Doolittle advises Higgins simply to give Eliza “a few licks of the strap” if he has any trouble with her. Originally, however, Doolittle explicitly states his assumption that Higgins desires Eliza. Such a line seems oddly out of place in the musical, but it makes sense in the context of other comments from RS, in which a union between Higgins and Eliza seems almost inevitable. So different was its tone, in fact, that Higgins does not even react to Doolittle’s comment about marrying Eliza. That Lerner changed this only during rehearsals suggests that the shift to romantic ambiguity was not yet complete.

  The next person to inquire about Higgins’s business with Eliza is his mother. In the original act 1, scene 6, Higgins and his mother discuss the experiment outside the race course; but the final version has Pickering in Higgins’s place. The most surprising part of the RS version of the exchange is when Mrs. Higgins asks, “Henry, do you know what you would do if you really loved me?” and Higgins replies, “Marry, I suppose” (RS, 1-6-51). It seems that even during the rehearsal period, the subject of Higgins’s possible matrimony was still openly discussed between the two characters, positing the Professor more overtly as a romantic lead. Later in the scene, Mrs. Higgins raises the issue again, asking where Eliza lives and on what terms she lives there (RS, 1-6-51). Higgins replies that she is “very useful,” “knows where things are,” and “remembers my appointments.” But, he concedes, “she’s there to be worked at.” Higgins confesses it’s his “most absorbing experiment” to date and that he thinks about Eliza “even in my sleep.” An element of this exchange was brought back for the film version of the show, in which a scene is added outside Ascot after the race and Higgins admits that he and Pickering are “at it from morning until night … teaching Eliza, talking to Eliza, listening to Eliza, dressing Eliza…” But in addition, Higgins tells us (in RS alone) that “Even in my sleep I’m thinking about the girl and her confounded vowels and consonants. I’m worn out thinking about her, and watching her lips and her teeth and her tongue, not to mention her soul, which is the quaintest of the lot.” Most of this comes from Shaw, but—significantly—Lerner replaces Shaw’s “As if I ever stop thinking about the girl” with “Even in my sleep…”47 That Higgins’s nights are absorbed in thinking about Eliza, coupled with the sensuous language he uses to talk about her lips, teeth, and tongue, signifies an infatuation that does not stop at intellectual intrigue.

  The replacement scene still touches lightly on the status of the Higgins-Eliza relationship, but Pickering is instantly dismissive of the idea of romance between the two when Mrs. Higgins asks if it is a love affair: “Heavens no! She’s a flower girl. He picked her up off the kerbstone” (72). This encounter increases the ambiguity of the relationship between Eliza and Higgins because Pickering, who lives with both of them, does not seem to have detected a romance. Nevertheless, his comment does not rule anything out, muddying the waters brilliantly.

  Freddy

  Another character whose personality was modified is Freddy. His main function in the Ascot scene is to provide Eliza with the bet on Dover, the horse that will bring about the memorable climax to the sequence. In PS he does this fairly discreetly, merely informing Eliza that he has a bet and offering it to her. However, in RS he is given a prominent entrance (RS, 1-7-55). When he arrives holding a ticket, his mother pounces on him and says: “You know you can’t afford it, dear.” He replies that he “had to” because the odds were “too good to resist.” In this original formulation, Freddy is depicted as a compulsive gambler. As the musical evolved, Freddy increasingly became the polar opposite of Higgins, so that the Eliza-Higgins-Freddy love triangle had a stronger dynamic. Arguably, the idea that Freddy is the sort of person who gambles for thrills and cannot resist the odds on Dover makes him a risk taker and a more masculine, virile character. Therefore, it is easy to see why Lerner removed this element of Freddy’s personality and made him into a faithful but dull lover for Eliza.

  His role in act 2 was similarly adjusted: his speech leading into the verse of “Show Me” was originally longer, including the lines “You’re beautiful and delicate and warm and desirable. Every night I look up at these very stars and dream of being near you. Eliza, you don’t know how potty I am about you” (RS, 2-2-12). It fits into the overall remodeling of Freddy’s character that this was removed; the rhetoric of “beautiful and delicate and warm and desirable” shows a sensibility far more intensely romantic than Freddy is ultimately capable of, while his nightly dreams of being “near” Eliza insinuate a potent sexuality that is incoherent with the rest of his behavior. Here, we can see once and for all how Lerner watered down Freddy’s personality to render him an impossible choice of suitor for Eliza, thereby introducing the parting of ways with the published epilogue to Pygmalion, in which the two are united in marriage.

  Intensifying the Higgins-Eliza Relationship

  The final three scenes of act 1 underwent the largest number of changes during rehearsals and previews, especially scene 9 of RS, which takes place “simultaneously with the preceding scene” (that is, at the same time as “On the Street Where You Live”) and shows us the aftermath of the Ascot scene. As the curtain rises, we see Mrs. Pearce comforting Eliza who, significantly, says, “I failed him.” As before, this makes the emotional connection between Eliza and Higgins stronger and gives her the air of someone who has failed the man she loves. The rest of the scene involves three musical numbers: “Come to the Ball,” in which Higgins seductively persuades Eliza to return to her lessons; the ballet, in which she receives dancing instruction, better posture, a cosmetician, and “the best hairdresser in London” (1-9-66); and “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” in which Eliza tells the servants of her anxieties.

  Lerner’s solution to the need to replace this long sequence of music with something much shorter—and in the process, go back to the original scenario for the scene as described in Outline 1—changed several emphases. Scene 9 of PS takes place “six weeks later” than the Ascot scene, whereas RS places the races in July and the ball in October. Therefore, Higgins’s work has involved much more pressure in the final version, giving him only a few weeks rather than a quarter of a year. Furthermore, although we perhaps lose out by not witnessing the pain gone through to complete Eliza’s education, the status of the Eliza-Higgins relationship is kept far more consistent by removing all flagrant suggestions of their emotional attachment. A subtle but important gesture is added, however. Eliza arrives at the top of the stairs in her gown; Pickering says that she looks beautiful, and then go
es on to prompt Higgins to agree with him. According to the stage directions, “Eliza turns to Higgins hopefully,” and Higgins, “having decided the gown is quite all right,” declares that it is “Not bad at all” (91). Eliza’s “hopefulness” is the salient point here, replacing the spoken line in RS about having failed him with the implication that she has dressed beautifully for him. Then come two of the most resounding gestures in the musical. First, having refused Pickering’s offer of port a couple of minutes previously, implying that he is not nervous about the ball, Higgins “looks furtively around to make certain Pickering doesn’t see him” and “pours himself a quick glass of port.” In itself this shows a more human side to Higgins, but what follows is even more surprising. As he starts for the door, “he pauses, turns and gazes at Eliza. He returns to her and offers his arm. She takes it and they go out of the door, Pickering following after.” Through this action, Higgins acknowledges Eliza’s dignity for the first time, going through the door with her rather than before her. This shows Lerner at his most brilliant and imaginative (the scene is a complete deviation from Pygmalion): one of the longest scenes in the play, including three musical numbers, is replaced by one of the shortest, yet in this instance gesture serves the overall drama more effectively than twenty minutes of song and dance.

  Resolving the Higgins-Eliza Relationship

  The first scene of the second act is one of the most crucial in the show, and it was changed in numerous ways during rehearsals, nearly always to adjust this climax in the Eliza-Higgins relationship. First, Higgins’s initial speech of reaction to Eliza’s admission that she is worried about “what is to become of her” was originally slightly shorter. One might take the addition of the line “Oh, I shouldn’t bother about that if I were you” (PS, 110) as a comfort to Eliza—suggesting that she has nothing to worry about—but at the same time, it also has an air of dismissal, as if her future is not worth contemplating. The rephrasing of the subsequent line from “You’ll settle yourself somewhere or other” (RS, 2-1-8) into “I should imagine you won’t have much difficulty in settling yourself somewhere or other” also hints at a split meaning: the first part becomes softer, but “somewhere or other” maintains Higgins’s apparently indifference towards Eliza’s precise fate (though this indifference could be perceived to be feigned).