by Barry Day
But though he looked like thirty cents,
He packed an awful wallop.
And all the kings of Europe,
When they came to know his habits,
Pulled up their socks and ran for blocks,
He got them scared like rabbits.
In Jill the Reckless (1921) Erlanger appears as ‘Isaac Goble’ of Goble & Cohn …
He had been brought up in the lower-browed school of musical comedy, where you shelved the plot after the opening number and filled the rest of the evening by bringing on the girls in a variety of exotic costumes, with some good vaudeville specialists to get the laughs. Mr Goble’s idea of a musical piece was something embracing trained seals, acrobats, and two or three teams of skilled buck-and-wing dancers, with nothing on the stage, from a tree to a lamp-shade, which could not suddenly turn into a chorus-girl. The austere legitimateness of The Rose of America gave him a pain in the neck. He loathed plot, and The Rose of America was all plot.
Why, then, had the earthy Mr Goble consented to associate himself with the production of this intellectual play? Because he was subject, like all other New York managers, to intermittent spasms of the idea that the time is ripe for a revival of comic opera. Sometimes, lunching in his favourite corner of the Cosmopolis grill-room, he would lean across the table and beg some other manager to take it from him that the time was ripe for a revival of comic opera – or more cautiously, that pretty soon the time was going to be ripe for a revival of comic opera. And the other manager would nod his head and thoughtfully stroke his three chins and admit that, sure as God made little apples, the time was darned soon going to be ripe for a revival of comic opera. And then they would stuff themselves with rich food and light big cigars and brood meditatively.
(Jill the Reckless)
‘I’ve seen worse shows than this turned into hits. All it wants is a new book and lyrics and a different score.’
(Jill the Reckless)
* * * *
One of the more daunting tasks the Vanity Fair critic faced was reviewing his own Broadway debut …
I feel a slight diffidence about growing enthusiastic about Miss Springtime, for the fact is that, having contributed a few little lyrical bijoux to the above (just a few trifles, you know, dashed off in the intervals of more serious work), I am drawing a royalty from it which has already caused the wolf to move up a few parasangs from the Wodehouse doorstep. Far be it from me to boast – from sordid and commercial motives – a theatrical entertainment whose success means the increase of my meat-meals per week from one to two, but candor compels me to say that Miss Springtime is a corker. It is the best musical play in years.
For the next twenty years Wodehouse was actively involved in musical theatre on both sides of the Atlantic – all this at a time when he was also producing the substantial body of fiction for which he is best known. Not surprisingly, it got into his creative blood …
My heart was never really in [straight plays]. Musical comedy was my dish, the musical-comedy my spiritual home. I would rather have written Oklahoma! than Hamlet. (Actually, as the records show, I wrote neither, but you get the idea.)
*
Musical comedy is not dashed off. It grows – slowly and painfully, and each step in its growth either bleaches another tuft of the author’s hair or removes it from the parent skull altogether.
*
Writing musical comedy is like eating cherries: you can always manage just one more. No matter how many commissions you may have on hand, and no matter how definitely you may resolve that nothing will induce you to touch another, when the moment arrives, you always fall.
… we stage-lizards, we drama-snakes … whose only fault is that we wished to elevate the American drama by contributing a few chunks of musical comedy to it.
Every time I meet Guy Bolton, we vow that we will go on the musical comedy wagon, but our resolution never comes to anything. Somehow we find ourselves in Mr Dillingham’s office and there is the box of cigars on the table and Mr Ziegfeld in his chair by the window and everything jolly and homelike and innocent and then Mr Dillingham says casually, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we were to get up some theatricals just for a lark?’ and Mr Ziegfeld says, ‘Yes, wouldn’t it?’ and Mr Dillingham says he knows a place round the corner which he could hire for an evening or two, and Mr Ziegfeld says there’s nothing like getting something to do in your spare time, as it keeps you out of the saloons and bowling alleys; and you get the general impression that you’re all going to dress up and act charades for the children some evening later on; and then a voice through the smoke coos, ‘Sign here, boys!’ and you wake up on Broadway and find that you’re going to do the next show for the Century [Theatre].
(Vanity Fair, September 1917)
He was to continue to be concerned for it as a genre long after he had ceased to be an active player:
If you ever catch me in pensive mood, sitting with chin supported on the hand and the elbow on the knee, like Rodin’s ‘Thinker’, you can be pretty sure I am saying to myself ‘Whither the New York musical-comedy theatre?’ or possibly, ‘The New York musical-comedy theatre … whither?’ It is a question that constantly exercises me.
*
It became a constant point of reference for eccentric behaviour:
‘I’ve always maintained and I always will maintain that for pure lunacy nothing can touch the musical comedy business. Alice in Wonderland is nothing to it.’
‘Have you felt that, too? That’s exactly how I feel. It’s like a perpetual Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.’
(Wally Mason and Jill in Jill the Reckless)
*
[Bingo Little] always reminds me of the hero of a musical comedy who takes the centre of the stage, gathering the boys round him in a circle, and tells them all about his love at the top of his voice.
(‘The Pride of the Woosters is Wounded’ from The Inimitable Jeeves)
*
‘I hate you, I hate you!’ cried Madeline, a thing I didn’t know anyone ever said except in the second act of a musical comedy.
(Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves)
At the end of the revue Miss 1917 (1917) there is the following exchange between the hero and the heroine:
JOE: I’ve followed you through two acts and an intermission. Where have you been?
POLLY: I’ve been in the movies.
JOE: I should think from what I’ve seen of this show, that you’ve been in vaudeville.
POLLY: You’ve really followed me through all that maze of dancers and speciality people? Oh, Joe!
Even in 1917 there were premonitions of what was to come that would change Broadway and the theatre in general:
Dear old stage-door,
You’re not the same somehow.
All the idols we used to worship
Are in the movies now.
On Wednesday afternoons
We’ve nowhere to go;
For there’s no stage-door
At the moving picture show.
* * * *
There were all the genre stereotypes to be stirred. The Chorus Girl, for example:
‘I regard the entire personnel of the ensembles of our musical comedy theatres as – if you will forgive me being Victorian for a moment – painted hussies.’
‘They’ve got to paint.’
‘Well, they needn’t huss.’
(Heavy Weather)
*
‘I was in musical comedy. I used to sing in the chorus, till they found out where the noise was coming from.’
(Luck of the Bodkins)
*
‘They seem to think just because a girl works in the chorus she must be a sort of animated champagne-vat, spending her life dancing on supper-tables with tight stockbrokers.’
(Summer Lighting)
… and should the champagne go flat …
Today she resembled a Ziegfeld Follies girl who had been left out in the rain and had swollen a little.
(Company for Henry)
I love writing lyrics. For years scarcely a day passed whose low descending sun did not see me at my desk trying to find some lyric for ‘June’ that would not be ‘soon’, ‘moon’ … or ‘spoon’.
He would complain – but not too seriously – about the problems the would-be lyricist faced:
Whoever invented the English language must have been a prose-writer, not a versifier; for he made meagre provision for the poets. Indeed, the word ‘you’ is almost the only decent chance he has given them. You can do something with a word like ‘you’. It rhymes with ‘Sue’, ‘eyes of blue’, ‘woo’, and all sorts of succulent things, easily fitted into the fabric of a lyric. And it has the enormous advantage that it can be repeated thrice at the end of a refrain when the composer has given you those three long notes, which is about all a composer ever thinks of. When a composer hands a lyricist a ‘dummy’ for a song, ending thus …
Tiddley-tum, tiddley-tum,
Pom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom,
Tum, tum, tum …
…the lyricist just shoves down ‘You, you, you’ for the last line and then sets to work to fit the rest of the words to it. I have dwelled on this, for it is noteworthy as the only bright spot in a lyricist’s life, the only real cinch the poor man has.
(On the Writing of Lyrics)
Like Ira Gershwin – whom he considered pre-eminent among his successors in the field – he much preferred to fit the words to the music:
W. S. Gilbert always said that a lyricist can’t do decent stuff that way. But I don’t agree with him. I think you get the best results by giving the composer his head and having the lyricist follow him. For instance, the refrain of one of the songs in Oh, Boy! began: ‘If every day you bring her diamonds and pearls on a string’ – I couldn’t have thought of that if I had done the lyric first. Why, dash it, it doesn’t scan. But Jerry’s melody started off with a lot of little twiddly notes, the first thing emphasised being the ‘di’ of ‘diamonds’ and I just tagged along after him.
Another thing … When you have the melody, you can see which are the musical high spots in it and can fit the high spots of the lyric to them. Anyway, that’s how I like working, and to hell with anyone who says I oughtn’t to.
By all accounts Kern was not a comfortable collaborator – and in his career he worked with over seventy lyricists. Wodehouse apparently brought out most of the best of him and remembered him fondly – ‘In the Princess days he was one of the most cheerful and amusing men I have ever met, and an angel to work with, which many composers aren’t.’
* * * *
By the 1930s Gershwin, Hart, Porter, Berlin and other indigenous American lyricists had taken over the Broadway musical, each of them happy to recognise the debt they owed to Wodehouse for showing that the rhythms of everyday speech could express everything that was needed.
And even a metropolitan audience likes its lyrics as much as possible in the language of everyday. That is one of the thousand reasons why new Gilberts do not arise. Gilbert had the advantage of writing for a public which permitted him to use his full vocabulary, and even drop into foreign languages, even Latin and a little Greek when he felt like it.
(On the Writing of Lyrics)
His last major show was to have been Anything Goes (1935). In the end it was reassigned to others – not least Cole Porter. When he heard of Porter’s involvement, Wodehouse remarked – ‘What pests these lyric-writing composers are. Taking the bread out of a man’s mouth.’ However, by the terms of the original contract Wodehouse and Bolton still received writing credits and were paid. Wodehouse wrote to Townend:
There are two lines of mine left in it, and so far I am receiving £50 a week each for them. That’s about £3. 10s. a word, which is pretty good payment, though less, of course, than my stuff is worth.
To the end of their joint lives Wodehouse and Bolton were always hatching plans to write more shows together or revive old ones – a habit Bolton continued even after his friend’s death. As early as 1937 Wodehouse is reminding him of ‘what we have always said – that the way to get a hit is to take a couple of old hits and combine them’. Fifteen years later he can look back in nostalgia:
It is now just 40 years since we started working on Broadway, during which time we wrote twenty-three shows together and met every freak that ever squeaked and gibbered along the Great White Way. … I have encountered … enough unforgettable characters to fix up the Reader’s Digest for years and years.
He remained unduly modest about his own part in the collaboration – ‘I cannot recall one of them to which I contributed anything of importance – except perhaps a few lyrics.’
But the postwar Broadway Wodehouse encountered when he returned for good worked in new, mysterious and mostly unappealing ways:
I can’t get used to the new Broadway [he wrote to Bolton]. Apparently, you have to write your show and get it composed and then give a series of auditions to backers, instead of having the management line up a couple of stars and then get a show written for them. It’s so damn difficult to write a show without knowing who you are writing it for. It’s like trying to write lyrics without a book.
He was inclined to blame the politicians and the tax system:
Old Pop Truman has properly put the kibosh on the angel industry. You would never believe the way these angels [backers] are covering up. I don’t believe you could raise a cent for a show by God, adapted by Christ and the Holy Ghost.
To Gershwin he wrote on his Christmas card – ‘Ira, we are well out of it.’
But then, in his heart of hearts, he was never to be truly ‘out of it’ and he was never so happy as when he could transfer his own trials and tribulations to one of his unfortunate characters. After all, if a writer can’t act like some Great Producer-in-the-Sky on occasions …
In order to make a song a smash hit it is not enough for the singer to be on top of his form. The accompanist, also, must do his bit. And the primary thing a singer expects from his accompanist is that he shall play the accompaniment of the song he is singing.
(‘The Masked Troubadour’ from Lord Emsworth and Others)
He got through the song somehow and limped off amidst roars of silence from the audience.
(‘Extricating Young Gussie’ from The Man with Two Left Feet)
Among the papers found by his hospital bed after his death were his jottings for new lyrics for Kissing Time, a show that he had written in 1918.
* * * *
I have never regretted my flirtations with the drama. They cost me a lot of blood, sweat and tears, not to mention making me lose so much hair that nowadays I am often mistaken in a dim light for a Hallowe’en pumpkin, but one met such interesting people …
Even though he wrote (usually in translation or adaptation) or collaborated on more ‘straight’ plays than even a recognised contemporary playwright like Frederick Lonsdale, Wodehouse never – as he said – felt it was his principal métier. Perhaps it was his introduction to the form that seared his soul …
My first play was written in collaboration with a boy named Henry Cullimore when I was seven … Henry said we would have to have a plot. ‘What’s a plot?’ I asked. He didn’t know. He had read or heard somewhere that a plot was a good thing to have, but as to what it was he confessed himself fogged. This naturally made us both feel a little dubious as to the outcome of our enterprise, but we agreed that there was nothing to do but carry on and hope that everything would turn out all right. (Chekhov used to do this.)
He got as far as –
ACT ONE
HENRY: What’s for breakfast? Ham and oatmeal? Very nice.
… but there he stopped. He had shot his bolt.
How he was planning to go on if inspiration had not blown a fuse, I never discovered. I should imagine that the oatmeal would have proved to be poisoned – (‘One of the barbiturate group, Inspector, unless I am greatly mistaken’) – or a dead body would have dropped out of the closet where they kept the sugar. The thi
ng was never produced. A pity, for I think it would have been a great audience show.
Commercial reality sank in later:
A successful play gives you money and a name automatically. What the ordinary writer makes in a year the successful dramatist receives, without labour, in a fortnight.
(Not George Washington)
Nonetheless, there was a Wodehouse caveat:
Brooding, as I do almost incessantly over the boneheadedness of the human race and the miseries resulting therefrom, I have come to the conclusion that much trouble might be averted if the Legislature had the sense to pass a law forbidding the dishing up of printed fiction in play form … I would make a few exceptions, of course, I would permit, for instance, such dramatisations as that of Piccadilly Jim – not only because it is impossible for such a story to have too wide a vogue, but principally because the author, a thoroughly worthy fellow, happens to be furnishing a new apartment at a moment when there is an insistent demand on the part of his family for a new car.
(Vanity Fair, November 1917)
There will, of course, be a few local difficulties to surmount in rehearsal:
Any line that is cut out of any actor’s part is the only good line he has.
(Jill the Reckless)
There were certain plays that loomed large in the Wodehouse canon. There was something about the ‘Scottish play’:
I don’t know if you ever came across a play of Shakespeare’s called Macbeth? If you did, you may remember this bird Macbeth bumps off another bird named Banquo and gives a big dinner to celebrate, and picture his embarrassment when about the first of the gay throng to turn up is Banquo’s ghost, all merry and bright, covered in blood. It gave him a pretty nasty start, Shakespeare does not attempt to conceal.
