There is a charming silent movie from 1926 called Exit Smiling, and when I watched it recently, I thought that it probably captured what it was like to be in one of those traveling rep companies as well as anything you could see today. Movies about small-time theater enjoyed a bit of a vogue in the 1920s. The director Frank Capra made a silent film called The Matinee Idol, about a Broadway star who falls in love with the lead actress in a troupe so lousy that he has brought them to New York to perform as a joke, just as Oscar Hammerstein did with the hapless Cherry Sisters. The recently rediscovered silent film Upstream, directed by John Ford, is a backstage tale about a Shakespearean actor and a woman from a knife thrower’s act. It was as though Hollywood’s moviemakers were already nostalgic for what seemed a simpler, more amateurish form of entertainment. Not that they didn’t make plenty of fun of it in these movies. The troupe in Exit Smiling is touring with a play called Flaming Women, in which the actor starring as the swashbuckling lover is really a prissy, seemingly gay, fussbudget, and the actress playing the sweet and innocent girl he must rescue is a sly, gum-snapping sexpot. “Among the very few places fortunate enough to have escaped ‘Flaming Women,’” one of the wry intertitles reads, “was the town of East Farnham.”
But there is affection in the portrait, too. Beatrice Lillie, a wonderful comic actress with a face like a crescent moon and luminous, intelligent eyes, stars as Violet, who plays the maid roles and acts as the company’s maid offstage. Violet is gawky, a lovable goof. She wears a beret that looks like a small flying saucer or a giant pancake. Trying for vampish sophistication, she tosses a marabou boa around her shoulders but it lands on her tush, where it hangs like a fluffy tail as she glides off, unawares. Still, Violet also has an irrepressible sense of her own fundamental worth; she can never resist applause, sashaying onstage for a curtain call when she hasn’t even been in the play that night. And she is touchingly convinced that her loyalty to the young runaway who has just been hired—with her finagling—as the juvenile actor will eventually earn her his love. (He’s played, with boyish eagerness and moodiness, by the ill-fated, drug-addled Jack Pickford, the younger brother of Mary.) The theater is full of kids and babies and grandparents, even when the play is the risqué-sounding Flaming Women. The backstage is a grubby jumble of backdrops and discarded costumes, with writing scrawled on the walls: “No check cashing at the box office,” “This show ruined me,” and below that, “Is that so?” One of the actresses steals a lightbulb from backstage and tucks it in her purse; one of the actors nicks a cloth napkin from a lunch counter and sticks it in his pocket like a handkerchief. On the train, the actors play cards together, looking up to stare at the desolate prairie outside the window. They set out chairs and use the platform outside the caboose as a front porch to read the newspaper or romance one another. And they eat together in their own train car, at a long, narrow table, complaining genially about the food. “Beans again—what is this troupe, the Boston opera company?” says the slatternly, gum-chewing actress. Every time the lantern-jawed old actor starts a story with “When I played with Edwin Booth . . .” his fellow actors get up, one by one, and leave the table.
I think that in those years as a traveling player my father cultivated his own collection of habits, and that they stayed with him, helped carry him, really, through life. He never had the steadiest of moral compasses, nor much in the way of self-knowledge, and at times, he might have been completely undone by his love of a good time and the wrong woman. But he always maintained the habits of professionalism and of small attentions to himself that can hold a person together when little else does. I think there are probably many people like that, people who manage to live good and productive lives less for any deep reasons of character than for the fact that they’ve acquired, somewhere along the way, certain rituals of reliability and self-respect. Lyle always showed up at the theater; he always knew his lines. He did not leave the house unless he was well turned out; he believed that was part of the social contract we implicitly make with our fellow human beings.
One of those clippings in his scrapbook from the 1920s is an article in which the writer observes how important it is for a stage artist to be beautifully attired and irreproachably prepared at all times. This writer had once asked an acrobat he knew, a man “who never slighted a trick no matter how unresponsive the audience,” how it was that he had come by this attitude. The acrobat says that he had been apprenticed to a troupe when he was a little boy and that every morning he would go practice for the boss, who would invariably be lying in bed reading the paper. Standing beside his boss’s bed, the young acrobat would perform forty backflips. And although the boss never took his eyes off the paper, he knew when the boy was cheating on a trick, and would strike him with a horsewhip. “He nearly killed me once for going onstage in soiled tights.” It was hard, the acrobat admitted, but it was good for him: “The audience has a right to see your best work done in the best way.” I think that was the sort of message my father took to heart all his life (though he would have had no sympathy for the use of the horsewhip), a message about a performer’s debt to his audience, and in fact, about all of our debt to our friends and acquaintances—the debt of charming them, of going to a party, a restaurant, or even the grocery store, animated by the sense that we are on, or should be, that yes, the world is a stage and we have a duty to bring a little sparkle to even the most mundane scenes in the play.
In those years as a bachelor on the road, Lyle became a man who could take care of himself, a man with a fine little set of domestic accomplishments. The father I knew could whip up an omelette as neat as an envelope, a tasty chow mein with water chestnuts and crunchy bean sprouts, a corned beef hash and poached egg breakfast that was like something from the diner of your dreams. He could darn a sock using a little wooden egg. He could fold handkerchiefs and shirts with the crispest of creases. His dresser drawers, which I sometimes sneaked into my parents’ room to admire, were models of bento box–like precision and symmetry; the memory of them sometimes shames me when I yank open the overstuffed nests of tangled clothes in my own house. He could pack, as he did for me when I was a girl, tasty, old-fashioned lunches—date-nut-loaf-and-cream-cheese sandwiches, cold fried chicken, celery and radishes and hard-boiled eggs accompanied by tiny foil packets into which he’d folded a sprinkling of salt, cans of apple juice he’d freeze overnight so they’d be ice-cold and slushy when I opened them at school.
His morning shower and its accompanying toilet were elaborate routines, more time-consuming than my mother’s or mine. After stepping out of the shower and wrapping a towel around his waist—the moment I might be allowed to come in if I needed to grab something from the bathroom—there was a careful side-to-side buffing of the shoulders and back with a second, coiled towel, followed by a generous sprinkling of talcum powder and an application of Sea Breeze astringent or Lilac Vegetal to the face and neck. The Sea Breeze smelled sharp and bright and then quickly dissipated, but the Lilac Vegetal was weird: it was an old-fashioned barbershop aftershave that smelled horrible—like rotting lettuce—straight from the bottle but then magically faded into an intoxicating, powdery lilac scent. He’d perfected the art of the short nap—a half-hour at about four, lying down fully clothed but shoeless in bed—that renewed him for the evening (definitely a useful habit in the theater). He knew from life on the road how to take care of himself with little treats, and truth be told, he hoarded some of them later in life, even when he wasn’t on the road. Maybe his broke fellow actors used to nip into his supplies and he’d never forgotten. (My mom and I occasionally pilfered from the drawers where he tucked them, though some of the treats—canned Vienna sausages—were treats only to him. The supplies of cocktail peanuts and Hershey’s bars, on the other hand, we’d happily skim from.)
His time with the traveling shows in the 1920s coincided with the crossword puzzle craze, and he got hooked. The puzzles had been appearing in papers since 1913, but the first cross
word puzzle book came out in 1924 (it launched the publishing enterprise of young Richard Simon and Max Schuster) and became an instant hit. Thesaurus sales shot up. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad outfitted all of its passenger trains with dictionaries. A man in New York was arrested for refusing to leave a restaurant until he’d finished his crossword puzzle. And Lyle started working them, scrunched in the passenger seat of the troupe’s automobiles with his knees tucked under his chin. His pals in the Chase-Lister company called him “the great crossword pizzler of Omaha.” This was to be a lifelong love. The New York Times Magazine was his and his alone in our household until he’d finished the Sunday puzzle, in ink.
• • •
ONE BIG CHALLENGE for any touring or stock company in those days was getting enough material. A touring rep company might do a different play every night for four or five nights; a stock company put on a different play each week. At the turn of the century, a lot of the companies had become dependent on play piracy. There was nothing new about the practice of secretively copying down plays, then selling them cheaply, in defiance of copyright. Some version of it had been going on since Shakespeare’s time (when a less meticulous copyist transcribed the most famous line from Hamlet as “To be or not to be, / Aye, there’s the point”). But at the end of the nineteenth century, the business had become organized and highly profitable.
The most “unblushing and enterprising” play pirate of the era, in the words of The New York Dramatic Mirror, was Alexander Byers, a businessman who operated out of a cramped office on LaSalle Street in Chicago, from which he dispatched stenographers to theaters all over the country to take verbatim notes on the dialogue and stage business in popular plays like The Rose of the Ranch and The Girl of the Golden West. In his office, he employed about twenty female typists who rendered the notes into scripts. Byers then sold the scripts, six for twenty-five dollars, to unscrupulous impresarios determined to avoid paying authors’ royalties, and to small-town operators who may not have known they were breaking the law. It was evidently an efficient operation: in 1911, after federal marshals raided Byers’s Chicago Manuscript Company, confiscating seven thousand manuscripts, The New York Times described the office as “not more than 20 feet square, and in this space were crowded the desks of the women employees as well as those of the officers of the company and the files of the plays.”
As the raid showed, though, play pirates and the repertoire they peddled were on the defensive in the early twentieth century. In 1909, Congress passed a stricter amendment to the copyright law, which made both stenographers who copied plays without permission and dealers who sold them liable to fines and imprisonment. (Previously, only actors and managers who put on pirated plays had been punishable.) Byers and others like him changed their spots and became legitimate script brokers.
By the late 1910s and the 1920s, small-town audiences wanted something different anyway. For years they had been satisfied with the hoary chestnuts of repertory, or what was known as the “the blood-and-thunder circuit”: endless iterations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the temperance melodrama Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, or the British weepie about thwarted mother love, East Lynne. Plays like The Old Homestead that trafficked in nostalgia for the frontier or encouraged their audiences to congratulate themselves on not being city folk were popular, too. Increasingly, though, small-town audiences wanted plays that showcased the new manners and morals of the 1920s—the lives of women who smoked and drank and necked and wore their skirts short; the challenges of companionate marriage between two independent-minded young people—shows that brought big-city sizzle and spark to the local stage. If a play could be advertised as straight from New York, all the better. It was no longer good business to hide a show’s Broadway imprimatur by rechristening it with a new title, as the play pirates did. The Old Homestead was out; Flaming Women was in.
In a way this was no surprise, for the social and sexual landscape of the 1920s was rapidly changing. Marriage rates were up, and people were marrying at younger ages. In 1890, the median age for men to marry was twenty-six, and for women, twenty-two; in 1920, the ages had fallen to twenty-four and twenty-one, respectively. The wider availability of effective contraception—condoms and diaphragms—was the key. Contraception permitted couples to postpone childbearing by means other than postponing marriage, and it encouraged them to expect mutual sexual satisfaction. For the first time, marriage manuals openly preached the importance of a happy sex life to a happy marriage. On the other hand, while the advice industry upheld the notion of companionate, sexually healthy marriage, it did not advocate economic independence or professional ambition for women. Feminism was a movement on the wane in the 1920s, and most men did not want their wives working outside the home. As the historian Paula Fass writes in her study of the decade’s young people, they “seemed to believe in complete equality for women in the home but not outside it.”
The 1920s gave rise to the first youth culture in the United States, to a succession of fads, and to the very notion of a fad. Peers exerted a new level of influence at a time when more and more young people were attending high school and college. Mass communications and national advertising meant that when a youth-driven fashion—raccoon coats or bobbed hair or mah-jongg—arrived on a campus somewhere, it was almost guaranteed to spread. The movies showed a world where lovemaking, ardent and artful, was at the center of life, and portrayed new techniques of seduction and arousal that young people, especially, learned to imitate. Manners and mores shifted in this way, too, and one result, writes Fass, “was a sexual revolution”—one that wasn’t predicated on a sudden increase in sexual intercourse but on “new patterns of sexual play. The young evolved a code of sexual behavior that was, in effect, a middle ground between the no-sex-at-all taboo officially prescribed by the adult world and inculcated by their families, and their own burgeoning sexual interests and marital aspirations. To this dual purpose, youths elaborated two basic rituals of sexual interaction—dating and petting” (both nicely facilitated by the automobile and the movie theater). Dating was an innovation in that it meant pairing off rather than socializing with groups, and unlike courtship, was not necessarily supposed to end in marriage. Petting could be anything from a kiss to making out to fondling the breasts and genitals, any of which, as Fass writes, “would have automatically defined a woman as loose and disreputable in the nineteenth century. . . . In the twenties, to maintain one’s position with peers, petting was permitted,” and even encouraged for unmarried young people (petting parties were a real phenomenon), but intercourse was not.
It was, of course, the era of the flapper. Flapper style meant cutting your hair in a chin-length bob instead of maintaining the long, heavy tresses that had to be elaborately pinned atop your head in public. It meant wearing loose, short, drop-waisted dresses that allowed for freedom of movement and a hint of androgyny, and silk stockings that revealed the skin beneath, instead of wool or cotton. Flapper behavior meant feeling free to apply lipstick and smoke in public and to drink alcohol. One of the ironic effects of Prohibition, in fact, was to encourage women to drink alongside men, now that alcohol consumption had been moved from rough bars and other masculine enclaves to fashionable speakeasies and private cocktail parties, where women were freely invited. It meant pretending to be, or really being, flippantly hedonistic and insouciantly frank. It meant taking rebellious, sometimes childish pleasure in scandalizing the many authority figures who disapproved of you.
And scandalize they did. In Kansas City, a woman’s six children were taken from her and placed in a Mennonite orphanage because her bobbed hair and flapperish attire had offended fellow citizens. School boards and hiring agencies banned teachers with short hair and skirts, or as the Eastern Teachers’ Agency put it, teachers who were “giddily attired.” Newspaper articles blamed suicides, divorces, and spikes in crime on bobbed hair and the looser morals that seemed to go with it. In 1922, when The Literary Digest asked college dean
s and high school principals, along with editors of religious weeklies and college papers, to offer their verdict on flappers and their fellows, the result was an article titled “The Case Against the Younger Generation.” The editor of The Lutheran declared that “a spirit of libertinism is abroad among our youth. . . . Women paint and powder and drink and smoke, and become an easy prey to a certain class of well-groomed and well-fed high-livers.” The dean of women at Gooding College in Idaho at least allowed that young people weren’t entirely to blame. How could they be expected to rise above the conditions modern society had surrounded them with, “in the way of jazz music, modern dance-halls, public swimming pools, auto joy riding, luxury and freedom, the sensual and suggestive movies, where they learnt to see nakedness and where immorality does not seem so bad?”
It makes sense, of course, that the movies would be a vector for these new attitudes. Movies fetishized beauty, they seduced by close-up, they partook of the kind of castaway morality that characterized the Hollywood colony’s early years. They invited spectators to swoon in the dark and to fit themselves, in their stirred up imaginations, into the arms of the lovers on screen. Even allowing for the exaggerated fretting about the effect of movies on youthful morals, there seems to be good evidence that people in general, and the young in particular, did indeed get ideas from them. The interviews with and essays by (mostly) University of Chicago students that were produced for the Payne Fund Studies, the first-ever investigation of the impact of the flickers on adolescents, are full of lively accounts of how the movies moved them. “No wonder girls of older days before the movies were so modest and bashful,” one female student writes. “They never saw Clara Bow and William Haines. They didn’t know anything else but being modest and sweet. I think the movies have a great deal to do with present day so-called ‘wildness.’ If we didn’t see such examples in the movies where would we get the idea of being ‘hot’? We wouldn’t. I know a fellow that (every time I’m with him) wants to neck. He wants to practice, I guess, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he got his method from the screen. It’s so absolutely absurd. I get a kick out of watching him work up a passion—just like John Gilbert, but it doesn’t mean a thing.”
The Entertainer Page 11