Broadway Boy

(See front cover)

The plight of the U. S. theatre as an industry is as sorry as that of any other industry. In October 1929, 30,000 people made their living from show business as actors in burlesque, vaudeville, stock companies, tent shows as well as in legitimate drama and musical presentations. How many of these still have work is not known, but paid-up memberships in the Actors' Equity Association have declined 70%. In Manhattan, the Actors' Fund, Rachel Crothers' Stage Relief Fund and the benignantly tactful Actors' Dinner Club--where nobody knows who pays for two dinners and who pays for none--have spent some $300,000 a year to temper the blight of hard times on the profession. But the show business will go on. Although probably not more than half of Broadway's theatres will be lit (two-thirds of them were dark last year), the 1933-34 season will present shows, good shows.

Guthrie McClintic is waiting until Tallulah Bankhead gets well to produce Owen Davis' Jezebel, a play about old New Orleans. George White will have a new Scandals, Lew Leslie a new Blackbirds. Walter Hampden is rehearsing Ruy Bias. Max Gordon is making ready Gowns by Roberta, with music & libretto by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach. The Brothers Shubert, scrambling out of bankruptcy, have already presented Joe Cook to gasping audiences, will put on a Follies with Fanny Brice. In collaboration with Jed Harris the Shuberts will produce The Green Bay Tree, a play about sexual abnormality calculated to shock as thoroughly as did The Captive. A sequel to Of Thee I Sing, by the same authors and with the same cast, will appear soon, to be called Let 'Em Eat Cake. Frederick Lonsdale's new play, Foreigners, will be given a production by Arch Selwyn. Maria Jeritza, a rich musical comedy personality, will be seen in the operetta Jerry. Dwight Wiman and Lawrence Langner are reviving Strauss's Die Fledermaus with Peggy Wood and Helen Ford singing the leads. George S. Kaufman, that perennial collaborator, and Alexander Woollcott have written a mystery play for Sam Harris. Philip Barry's new play, about the home life of some Boston Irish Catholics, is in preparation. All these and many more were sprinting toward the boards last week as the new dramatic season got really started. Six plays, half as many as had appeared in the preceding two months, opened in Manhattan (see p. 27). One was a superb musical show. One was a very funny comedy. And the Theatre Guild began its 16th season with a production which, if not the most important, was one of the most remarkable in U. S. theatrical history.

Ah Wilderness! is the name of the Guild's play. Its author is Eugene Gladstone O'Neill. Not only is it the first comedy sombre Playwright O'Neill has ever written, it is the first play that George Michael Cohan ever acted in (barring benefit performances) which he did not write himself.

There were rich comic moments in O'Neill's Marco Millions, the title role of which the Guild tried to get Mr. Cohan to take five years ago. In the first act of The Great God Brown, Playwright O'Neill searched an adolescent character's mind. But few playgoers would have guessed from these clues that Eugene O'Neill would ever set out to tell the Tarkingtonian tale of the Millers of Connecticut.

The year is 1906. Nat Miller (Mr. Cohan) runs a smalltown newspaper. He does not enjoy the patronage of many advertisers, but he has a houseful of children and kin. His son Arthur is home from Yale, smoking a bulldog pipe and very self-important. His daughter Mildred bubbles over with the slang of the period, which deeply pains her mother. What worries Mrs. Miller (Marjorie Marquis) even more than her brother's intemperance and her sister-in-law's painful spinsterhood is the behavior of her 17-year-old son Richard. Richard has just discovered Swinburne, Ibsen ("the greatest playwright since Shakespeare") and Shaw ("the greatest living playwright''). He scoffs at his family's observance of the 4th of July and to Mrs. Miller's horror he shows a fondness for Oscar Wilde. "A man that was run out of England for Heaven knows what wickedness!" gasps Mrs. Miller.

"It was bigamy," interpolates the family's Yale man.

Dreamily, Richard (Elisha Cook Jr.) confesses that the Rubaiyat is the best book of wilderness, all. "And thou beside me in the wilderness, ah, wilderness . . ." he sighs.

In his own private wilderness, Richard's companion is little Muriel. The 4th of July is definitely marred for him and the rest of the family when Muriel's dyspeptic father marches in to tell Nat Miller that Richard must never see his daughter again, that Richard has been trying to corrupt the girl by writing her letters which include some of the spicier passages from the Victorian poets. "I just did it," Richard explains to his father later, "to keep her from being afraid of life."

Actor Cohan rubs his chin thoughtfully; pity gleams in his hooded eyes. "I'm afraid she's still afraid," says he, producing a letter from Muriel telling Richard she never wants to see him again. A fit of adolescent hysterics sends Richard off to the Pleasant Beach House, a resort in which he finds a fascinating creature in high white kid shoes who terrifies him, fails to seduce him but manages to get him drunk. Richard reels home at the iniquitous hour of 11 p. m., collapses, is put to bed. Next night his father steels himself to give Richard a good talking to about the Facts of Life.

In this scene Actor Cohan rises to a pinnacle of high comedy. He hesitates, pounds the table to emphasize his feeble observations, chews the air in the traditional Cohan manner, wobbles his head, points his finger wisely in the air, repeats himself endlessly. "The point is," he concludes, "there are such--er--women. ... I mean, well, Whited Sepulchres. . . . That is. . . . Hell, you probably know more about it than I do." Richard, having meantime made up with Muriel, retires to the porch to watch the moon set. Nat Miller sits down to read his paper with his wife. He asks where all the family are. Arthur is at his best girl's house. Mildred is out strolling with a beau. The brother and sister-in-law are walking on the beach. Nat Miller smiles. "We seem to be completely surrounded by love," he remarks. He and his wife kiss each other and go to bed.

Those who like Ah Wilderness! will find it human, kindly, a surely-drawn picture of pre-War home life and a compassionate study of the tribulations of adolescence. Those who do not like it may say that the only reason the play is set in 1906 is to give some actors a chance to wear funny automobile costumes. They will complain that the play is far too long (it has an 8:15 curtain), that nothing happens. Dissenters, however, will be in the minority. At the close of its Manhattan premiere, Ah Wilderness! was cheered to the rafters.

"It's a study in human nature," explains Mr. Cohan. "I guess you would call it a comedy, but it's got a serious note in it. This fellow O'Neill doesn't ring the bell, he lets you pull it. The play just shows you this fellow's observation. You wouldn't call this a part I've got at all. It's a study. This fellow's got a great reading public, too --I imagine he has, anyway, and so it's got to be looked at from a literary standpoint, too."

George Michael Cohan need grudge no man his artistic output. In his autobiography he scores himself 31 original plays, 14 collaborations, 500 songs ("conservatively"). "It's been a great life," he adds.

Life started for him in Providence, R. I., 55 years ago on, as he is always ready to remind you, July 4. He trouped with his family, The Four Cohans, in "Jerry Cohan's Irish Hibernia" when he was nine. His sister Josie was billed as "America's Youngest and Most Graceful Skirt Dancer." "Master Georgie" was featured for his "violin tricks and tinkling tunes." Aged 13, George traveled the country in Peck's Bad Boy, grew inured to the beatings he had to take in every town from boys who were irked by the Peck boy's impudence on the stage. By the time the Spanish-American War was declared, The Four Cohans were one of the country's best vaudeville teams, and George had already written what he still considers the best song of his career: "Venus, My Shining Love."

A strike organized by the White Rats, vaudeville union, marred the New York premiere of The Governor's Son, Cohan's first musical comedy, in 1901. But after that nothing stopped him. When critics belabored his offerings, when editorial writers fumed at his famed flag-waving act, Cohan began publishing The Spotlight, a weekly throwaway. "Week after week I'd go after them," he recalls. "Week after week they'd come back at me. They slipped me at least a million dollars worth of free newspaper advertising." In 1904 he went into partnership with Sam Harris. They married the Nolan sisters of Boston, oldtime musicomedy favorites. They built houses next to each other at Great Neck, L. I. From then on the pinchbeck little kingdom which begins at Manhattan's Columbus Circle and ends at Herald Square was the private domain of George M. Cohan. He did things his own way. He has never felt at home in The Players Club on quiet Gramercy Square, but when the Friars made him a member he took a troupe of stars on tour, raised the money to build a new club house. The Friars gratefully elected him Abbot. He came to recognize himself as the world's best tap dancer, best songwriter, best playwright. Privately he probably still feels the same way. The Song & Dance Man, produced in 1923, was not a great play but it was a very good one. People still sing his "So Long, Mary" and "Give My Regards to Broadway." A whole nation sang his "Over There."

George M. Cohan is no more arrogant than George V of England. Neither of them sees any reason for humility. Cohan probably has more friends than any one in the show business. His dressing room is a salon. While Hirano slides deftly about waiting for a sign that his employer needs a cigaret, actors, journalists, policemen, priests, all sorts of people arrive and depart. Mr. Cohan owns gold badges given him by both the New York and Chicago constabulary. A good Roman Catholic, he never denies a Catholic charity the right to produce his plays. Many an actor has popularity and self-assurance, but it is Cohan's reckless generosity which imprints on him the final hall-mark of a Broadway boy. He is the apotheosis of what the district calls "regular." When a thing is not regular, Mr. Cohan does not want to have anything to do with it. In 1919, recalling the White Rats, he did not think that the newly organized Actors' Equity was regular. When Equity won its strike, Cohan dissolved his partnership with his brother-in-law, vowing he was through with the theatre. He was through with it three weeks.

In Manhattan the Cohan home faces the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue. There he writes his songs and plays. He turns out a play a year regularly. The last was Pigeons & People, a mad comedy which is now on the road. He writes his plays as rehearsals progress, pacing up & down the aisle dictating to a secretary and the actors. He moves about among the cast like a white-polled patriarch, stroking a girl's hair, giving an actor's arm a friendly squeeze. They love it. His motions are all deliberate, but even in his gravity there is a puckishness which matches the amused expression in his half-closed eyes.

If he has any regrets, he is probably sorry that none of his four children has shown much promise on the stage. He likes to be called Cohan, not Cohan. When he talks the words fall out of one side of his mouth, stamped with the argot of the district in which he has lived the best 30 years of his life.

''O'Neill's regular," he says. "I've known a lot about him since he's been coming along, but I never met him before. His father and my father were pretty good friends. They practically started the Catholic Actors' Guild. He's regular. He knows a lot of stories. He knows all the old circus jokes. I picked him for a winner in that first play we had, Beyond the Horizon. I knew right away he had the goods. Jeez, he's written a pile of them, hasn't he?

"Well, if this play doesn't make a hit, I'll take the kid into vaudeville with me. But I come first. It's got to be Cohan & O'Neill. That's my game."

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