Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  There were good reasons for both Spewack and Porter to be wary of investing so deeply in the project. The modern Shakespeare musical only dated back a decade to the 1938 show The Boys from Syracuse, based on The Comedy of Errors. The genre was distinctly American, ultimately tracing its roots back through vaudeville to the raucous and racist minstrel shows that had freely adapted Shakespeare in the mid-nineteenth century and had combined (somewhat haphazardly) text, song, and dance. The defining feature of the Shakespeare musical was its hybridity—mixing musical styles, mixing Shakespeare’s language with contemporary American idiom, mixing races, and mixing highbrow, middlebrow, and at times lowbrow. Getting the mix right was no easy task.

  On the heels of its modest success—The Boys from Syracuse ran for more than two hundred performances—a second Shakespeare musical, Swingin’ the Dream, based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opened on Broadway the following year. It starred mostly black performers and featured some of the most popular musicians of the day. Count Basie wrote music for it, and Louis Armstrong played Bottom. Benny Goodman’s band played on one side of the stage and Bud Freeman’s on the other. There were star performers center stage, including the Dandridge Sisters, Maxine Sullivan, and a hundred African American jitterbug dancers, choreographed by Agnes de Mille. Set designs by Walt Disney were used. Talent rich, it should have been a huge hit, but it turned out to be a box-office disaster, closing after only thirteen performances and losing its investors a whopping $100,000. Because the show was never recorded—only traces of it survive—it is difficult, in hindsight, to explain precisely why it failed. Perhaps Broadway audiences weren’t ready for so racially integrated a production. Whatever the explanation, the Shakespeare musical was no longer seen as a ticket to success. Nearly a decade passed before the next one, Kiss Me, Kate, would be attempted. It struggled to find backers, and had to be done on the cheap, under a budgeted $180,000. It was initially booked into a second-tier theater. Even the producers expected it to fail.

  By her own reckoning, it took Spewack six weeks to hit upon a story line with box-office potential. She decided to set it on the “opening night of the tryout of a musical version of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew at Ford’s Theatre in Baltimore.” Her working title for the musical was “Backstage,” which is where most of her interest was focused: a contest over women’s autonomy taking place in a messy and modern backstage world. This half of the story involved a recently divorced couple, Lilli Vanessi (“a star in musical films”) and Fred Graham (“the Orson Welles of musicals”). Backstage, the women in the musical make choices—about their careers and about the men they want in their lives. At the outset of the play, Lilli, still drawn to Fred, considers leaving show business to marry the wealthy if boring Harrison Howell. Fred also has a love interest, Lois Lane (“a night club singer and Fred’s ‘discovery’”), while a sexually liberated Lois has also had a fling with Howell, and has her eye on Bill Calhoun (a “dancer to whom Lois is faithful in her fashion”). Elements of Saint Subber’s original idea remained, hinted at in the names of the leads, Fred and Lilli, derived from Alfred Lunt and Lillie Louise Fontanne. Spewack, who consulted a copy of their 1935 playscript of The Taming of the Shrew, even penciled Lunt’s and Fontanne’s names into an early scene before thinking better of it.

  Backstage, people bicker, quarrel, gamble, drink, and listen to jazz; relationships are hard to maintain; people have affairs and regrets, and men worry about sexual dysfunction; there are hints of same-sex relationships. It’s also a violent world in which gunmen pack pistols and an ex-wife complains of being beaten “black and blue.” The backstage plot is set in motion when Bill Calhoun, who gambles, runs up a $10,000 debt (under Fred’s name) that he owes to a mobster, who sends a couple of thugs to the theater to collect the money. Fred, confronted by the gunmen, sees them as a means to keep Lilli in the production of The Taming of the Shrew, and tells them he will pay them out of the show’s profits if they keep her from quitting. Fred’s effort to pursue both his ex-wife and his new fling backfires when a bouquet he sends to Lois is mistakenly delivered to Lilli; after Lilli reads a card Fred enclosed to her rival, she storms onstage to confront him—conveniently for the show, at the very moment that her Katherine attacks his Petruchio. In the second Act, this backstage plot is resolved when news arrives that the mobster to whom the money is owed has been killed and the debt canceled—allowing Lilli the freedom to leave. The gunmen, for their part, deliver a vaudevillian song and dance number before Lilli, who has walked out on both Fred and Howell, rejoins The Taming of the Shrew just in time to deliver Katherine’s submission speech.

  The frontstage world of the Shakespeare play they perform couldn’t be more different. It is the traditional premodern world of The Taming of the Shrew, in which daughters are expected to obey their fathers and husbands, only men are free to do what they please, women are sold off in marriage, and shrewish women who challenge these norms are tamed. Its very first words are a daughter’s declaration of submission to her father’s will, as Bianca tells Baptista: “Father, to your pleasure humbly I subscribe.” (It’s enough that she says the right thing and acts dutiful.) It’s a nostalgic and brightly colored world and, unlike the backstage one, has an all-white cast. In this Renaissance world, Lilli plays Katherine; Fred her tamer, Petruchio; Lois is Bianca, Katherine’s obedient sister, who cannot marry until her older sister does; and Bill plays Lucentio, Bianca’s successful wooer. The scenes in which the plot of The Taming of the Shrew is reenacted are carefully spaced through the show and, enlivened by Porter’s lyrics, take up roughly a third of it. Spewack understood that the proportions had to be right; by her rough calculation, Shakespeare was responsible for twenty-two pages of the script, Porter for sixty, and she herself for the remaining seventy-two. Competing narratives about marriage, women’s independence, and domesticity are held up to each other, with the frontstage Shakespearean world standing in for old-fashioned values while the backstage world depicts more modern and liberal ones. Kiss Me, Kate offered, then, rival visions of the choices women faced in postwar America—one in which women are urged to capitulate and their obedience to men is the norm, and one in which independence and unconventionality hold sway.

  The tension between frontstage and backstage worlds was heightened by a third, offstage, level of contention, as the artistic team squabbled. This creative tension, invisible to audiences, was a by-product of the different temperaments and identities of the lead producer, writer, and lyricist. Saint Subber, Spewack, and Porter were outsiders who were keenly aware of cultural norms in 1940s America, the terrain on which the war between men and women in their musical was waged. Like many in the American theater of his day, Saint Subber was gay at a time when those who weren’t heterosexual had to mask their sexual orientation if they had any hope of thriving professionally. Saint Subber also likely knew that neither Lunt nor Fontanne was exclusively heterosexual; they even shared the friendship of the young and gay star Montgomery Clift, who reportedly encouraged Saint Subber to create the show, and who had been more or less adopted by Lunt and Fontanne, who took him in, invited him to act in their shows, and urged him to marry as well, for the sake of appearance, to protect his career. Lunt and Fontanne had perfected the role of a married if childless couple—even modeling what that behavior should be for many millions of admirers—while keeping out of the tabloids any trace of scandal, so that nowadays biographers struggle to find conclusive evidence that they were gay. Their successful performance as an ideal heterosexual American couple may have been their finest, and a necessary one, as hostility to gay culture intensified in the 1930s. No doubt Saint Subber’s initial idea for the show, in which a couple acts one way frontstage and more honestly backstage, was shaped by the split between the star couple’s public and private lives.

  Bella Spewack was also an outsider, as a woman playwright and an immigrant, one of those Eastern European Jews who entered America before its doors were barred. Born Bella
Cohen, and brought as a child to America by a mother whose husband had abandoned her, she was raised in harsh circumstances on the Lower East Side, and had a tough, at times violent, childhood. Sexual assault was no abstraction for Spewack, who recalls in a diary of her formative years how she repelled the advances of a neighborhood boy who pinned her against a wall and tried to assault her; she had to kick him repeatedly to make her escape. For the previous decade or so Spewack had thrived as part of a playwriting team with her husband, Sam, whom she married in 1922 in her early twenties. But at the time she was approached by Saint Subber, her long marriage was unraveling (Sam wrote to her that while he hoped they could continue collaborating professionally, he “would not be seduced, cajoled, bribed or frightened into a relationship that just won’t work”). Saint Subber later claimed that “Bella was in a state of desperation” while “composing the libretto,” for Sam “had walked out on her and was living with a ballerina.”

  On top of that, Spewack was treated with a disrespect that her collaborators would never have shown to a similarly accomplished man. In August 1948 she wrote—though perhaps never sent—a letter to the coproducer Lemuel Ayers, letting him know how greatly she resented his claim that “I will never apply my full creative powers to the further improvement of Kiss Me, Kate, and that I have been confused, evasive, and mentally distraught and will continue to be so.” The irony that they were reproducing the very double standard against which Lilli rebels in the musical (while employing Petruchio’s trick of asserting that Katherine is confused and distraught) seems utterly lost on the men behind the show. Three months later Spewack had to ask her lawyer to intervene when ads for the show put her name in smaller typeface than the director’s. Though she wrote the book, Saint Subber insisted that the story was really his, and would tell Porter’s biographer, William McBrien, that her early efforts—contrary to the archival evidence—were “complete failures,” and that all the drafts “were terrible.” The writing contract for Kiss Me, Kate was drawn up exclusively between Cole Porter and Bella Spewack. Sam Spewack was brought in late in the game to contribute, mostly on the gunmen scenes. Though Sam’s contributions to the book were limited, Porter asked that he not only be named but get top billing, and sent a telegram to Sam explaining that it “will make our public much happier to read ‘Book by Sam and Bella Spewack.’ Will you do this great favor for me?” Bella Spewack agreed to the arrangement.

  Porter too was an outsider: gay, but closeted and married, and extremely self-protective. He was also disabled, though he did his best to hide his crippling and excruciating injuries, sustained when a horse-riding accident had crushed his legs a decade earlier. He too knew the rules governing how one appeared in public. Privately, he could be cutting. When he grew irritated with Spewack he would mock her as “Russian” and address her as “Madame Spewack.” In “A Woman’s Career”—one of the backstage songs he wrote for Kiss Me, Kate—Porter couldn’t resist adding a stanza alluding to Spewack’s marital woes, underscoring how professional success would never be enough: a woman may write prizewinning Broadway plays, but if she can’t satisfy her husband she’ll end up bored and lonely.

  Their sniping notwithstanding, each of the principals nudged the musical in a daring, crucial, and quietly subversive direction. It would take a group of exceptionally talented artists, who all stood outside of the ideal of an American family of the 1940s, to fully grasp the contradictions of their society and create one of America’s most enduring musicals, one that turned on a woman’s ability to perform the pliant role demanded of her. They managed to do so by juxtaposing a frontstage Shakespearean world that mirrored the fantasy of a patriarchal, all-white America—with a backstage one in which black and white performers mingled and that was forthright about a woman’s say over her desires and her career. If this was Bella Spewack’s brilliant twist on Saint Subber’s initial conceit, Cole Porter’s contribution was to infuse both worlds of the play with hints of transgressive behavior. The provocative Kinsey Report—Sexual Behavior in the Human Male—had just been published, offering a long-hidden view of American sexual practices. It was so topical that Porter even name-drops “the Kinsey report” in his racy song “Too Darn Hot,” then alludes to Kinsey’s revelations about what American men were really up to: infidelity, masturbation (“pillow, you’ll be my baby tonight”), and homosexual activity (“A marine / For his queen”).

  It’s staggering what Porter got away with in Kiss Me, Kate, especially in the repressive frontstage world. So, for example, when Lois Lane’s Bianca sings about her desire to wed (because she is so eager to have sex), her seemingly clueless language is almost beyond the pale, as her willingness to marry any Tom, Dick, or Harry turns into a desire for what sounds like any “hairy Dick”—and then to a longing for what sounds identical to the words “a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick.” While it may have passed under the radar of more naïve playgoers, such lyrics, underscoring how much is repressed in the frontstage world, couldn’t have been more sexually explicit—and this and other songs from the show were banned from radio and television. Many theater historians attribute Porter’s comeback to his willingness to imitate the success of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s integrated musicals. I’m more convinced by the counterclaim made by Dan Rebellato, that Porter was more himself here than he had been in previous musicals, and that his contribution was “more of a manifesto of resistance than a sign of someone placing their talents beneath the master’s foot.” Lilli isn’t tamed, and Porter wouldn’t be either, though many assume otherwise.

  Spewack later claimed that her initial conception of Kiss Me, Kate turned out to be “exactly the show as it was,” but her successive drafts indicate that this wasn’t so. Spewack’s first impulse had been to tamper with the Shakespeare story, introducing into the scenes borrowed from The Taming of the Shrew a more feminist dynamic, featuring a Katherine who was creative and bookish, who chafes at being locked up, and who decides to go about dressed as a man. In an early draft we first encounter Katherine wearing men’s clothing, disguising herself so effectively that she fools her own sister. In this version, when Petruchio first meets her, they banter on equal terms, and even share a tongue-in-cheek song that Katherine has written, “Were Thine That Special Face.” Spewack, who had read a lot of Shakespeare in high school, recognized that many of his greatest heroines had to cross-dress to achieve their desires or to be taken seriously by men. Yet the idea was rejected by her collaborators, after Porter wrote to the director, John Wilson, agreeing that it was best “cutting out Bella’s scenes, where Kate is dressed as a boy,” unless “a lot of comedy” was lost by doing so.

  Their responses may have been yet another encroachment on Spewack’s contribution, but also turned out to be savvy, for embedding so obvious a critique of patriarchy in the frontstage plot would have muddied the sharp contrast between what was happening in the conservative Taming of the Shrew scenes and what was occurring in the transgressive backstage ones. For that contrast to work, Katherine needed to be seen from the start as trapped and, from the men’s perspective, shrewish. So, in the final version of the musical there would be no cross-dressing; and it is Petruchio, not Katherine, who is credited with writing, and then sings, “Were Thine That Special Face.”

  Kiss Me, Kate’s commercial potential depended on striking the right balance between questioning conventional values and giving the audience the happy ending many expected from Broadway musicals. That meant, in the end, eliminating a good deal that pushed too far. It wouldn’t do, at a time when there was terrific pressure for women to have children, for Katherine to say in her song “I Hate Men” that husbands “only give you children and with that I could not bother,” so the line was altered to “husbands are a boring lot and only give you bother.” Several of Porter’s songs had to be scrapped entirely, including a too-gay “What Does Your Servant Dream About” (“wine, men, and song”) and Bianca’s “
If Ever Married I’m” (which landed too squarely on why a woman might want to avoid the potentially homicidal boredom of domestic life). Also jettisoned, for similar reasons, was that backstage song “A Woman’s Career.” When Lilli declares, “I don’t have to marry anyone,” adding, “I’ve a life of my own. I’m a person in my own right. I don’t need any man,” Fred, echoing Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, counters that a careerist woman who walks away from marriage is doomed to unhappiness. Like the extra stanza that Porter had written attacking Spewack’s own ambitions, this topical exchange proved too harsh, so was cut as well.

  Successive drafts from the spring and summer of 1948 indicate that the creative team struggled with the two key moments when frontstage and backstage worlds collide. In the first, as the opening Act winds down, Petruchio puts Katherine over his knee and administers a spanking. Except he does so as Fred, and administers it to Lilli, after (as Katherine) she has kicked and slapped him: “All right, Miss Vanessi—you asked for this and you’re going to get it!” As the spanking gets more and more violent, a shocked Lilli also forgets that they are in character and cries out, “Fred, what are you doing?” before she screams and the stage goes dark. Afterward, backstage, a furious Lilli warns Fred: “That’s the last time you’ll ever lay your hands on me.” He replies: “You asked for it. May I remind you, Miss Vanessi, the name of this piece is The Taming of the Shrew, not He Who Gets Slapped.”

  The New York Times liked the spanking scene so much it put a photo of it above its admiring review. The image of a woman perched on a man’s knee, his palm open, her heels pointed skyward, about to be spanked, became iconic, and figured prominently in advertisements for the musical. The image of this spanking is so ingrained that it is easy to imagine that it must have been part of Shakespeare’s original play—or at least part of its long stage history. But it wasn’t: there was no precedent for a man putting a woman over his knee and spanking her in any Anglo-American production of The Taming of the Shrew; the convention, for more than a century, had been for Petruchio to crack a whip.