Love in Idleness / Less Than Kind Read online

  37.See, for example, Rodney Garland’s novel about homosexual life in London, The Heart in Exile. London: W. H. Allen, 1953, p. 104.

  38.See note 36; and also ‘Rattigan Talks to John Simon,’ Theatre Arts. 46 (April 1962), p. 24.

  39.Terence Rattigan and Anthony Maurice. Follow My Leader. Typescript. Lord Chamberlain Play Collection: 1940/2. Box 2506. [British Library].

  40.Quoted in Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 15.

  41.B. A. Young, op. cit., p. 162.

  42.Quoted in Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 56.

  43.Quoted in Sheridan Morley, op. cit.

  44.Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 308.

  45.Guardian. (2 December 1977).

  Love in Idleness / Less Than Kind

  What a difference a war makes. In late 1939, as hostilities formally broke out between Britain and Germany, in creative terms Terence Rattigan was at his lowest ebb. After the Dance had been met by respectful reviews but did not find an audience to match. The opening of his satirical farce about the rise of Hitler, Follow My Leader, was rapidly being overtaken by events. His one success, French Without Tears, was already a distant memory. Rattigan was running out of money and faith in himself. But six years later, as the war came to an end, Rattigan found himself fêted as one of the most celebrated playwrights of the age, with three solid-gold West End hits chalking up over 2000 performances between them.

  The two plays that had changed his fortunes were Flare Path and While the Sun Shines. The former had proved that an audience could be found for a serious play during wartime; the latter showed that Rattigan could also woo them with a brilliantly structured farce. Both plays, in their different ways, offered snapshots of the effect of the war on British life. Flare Path was a story of fear, displacement, relationships broken and remade. While the Sun Shines’ farce mechanisms depicted the war’s promiscuous slippages of class, culture and identity and looked forward to the social transformations of the post-war world. Love in Idleness was the third of an unofficial trilogy of war plays, this one also looking forward but now bringing into ideological conflict the values of the pre-war and the post-war world.

  The immediate impetus for writing the play came from the star of stage and musical comedy, Gertrude Lawrence. Rattigan’s now-regular producer ‘Binkie’ Beaumont had brought Lawrence to see While the Sun Shines, and afterwards they went out to dinner with Rattigan. When ‘Gertie’ asked if he had a script for her, Rattigan replied that he didn’t, but he had an idea. Seized by a belief that Gertrude Lawrence had virtually promised to be in his next play, Rattigan took himself off to The White Hart Hotel in Sonning and began to write. When, in the early summer of 1944, Binkie duly sent Lawrence a copy of the completed script, with a note that this was the play that she had asked for, she claimed not to know anything about it and refused even to read it. Less Than Kind, conceived and written for Gertie, looked to have been strangled at birth.

  And then, on 30 June 1944, at 2.07 p.m., a V1 Flying Bomb struck the Aldwych in Central London. Forty-six people were killed and many hundreds seriously injured. The nearby Australia House was badly damaged and the windows of the Air Ministry all shattered with the force of the blast. The bomb killed several people queuing at the box office of the Aldwych Theatre, the foyer of which was destroyed. The theatre was in the middle of a successful run of Robert E. Sherwood’s wartime drama, There Shall Be No Night, set in Greece under Nazi occupation and showing a scientist passing from acquiescence to defiance. This unusually serious play was doing well at the box office in part because of the presence, in the two main roles, of Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. The Lunts, as they were known, were a married acting couple and perhaps the most wholly beloved actors of the era, stars of Broadway since the 1920s. Their residency in London during the second half of the war had won them a new British audience, and, as we shall see, the critics struggled to find words laudatory enough to capture the pleasure they gave. But now their theatre had been bombed. Not wanting to abandon the production, the Lunts quickly made plans to take There Shall Be No Night on a short regional tour, but after that they were unprecedentedly unemployed.

  Rattigan had explained his anxieties about the play for Gertie to composer and actor Ivor Novello. He, in turn, was aware of the Lunts’ position and engineered a meeting for them all at his country retreat, Redroofs near Maidenhead. Rattigan was hesitant before offering his play to the Lunts: it had been written for a single female star; consequently, Alfred’s part was much smaller than Lynn’s, and he was anxious not to insult either of them. Alfred was reassuring: ‘Lynn and I, we don’t worry about whose role is bigger. Sometimes Lynn has the play and sometimes it’s my play. Mr Rattigan, if your play is good, I’ll be satisfied to hold a tray and let it be Lynn’s play. The play is what matters.’1 This is not quite how things turned out.

  The first draft was certainly Olivia’s play.2 Despite his breezy assurances, Alfred, who had appointed himself director as well as costar, began to ask for a few little changes. Perhaps reasonably enough, Alfred’s role, Sir John, became Canadian to suit the actor’s North American tones. (Lynn Fontanne had no difficulty adapting to the English Olivia, having been born in the suburbs of London.) But more and more requests came Rattigan’s way. The playwright, beginning to be rattled by these demands, visited Alfred in his Edinburgh dressing room, during the tour of There Shall Be No Night, and expressed his concerns. Alfred was aghast, assuring Rattigan that he and Lynn were both fully committed to the play, admired it tremendously, and was horrified to think that he might be distorting it in any way. His voice choking with emotion, he begged Rattigan to forgive him. The two men, weeping and arm in arm, tottered out into Princes Street, where Alfred, spying a haberdasher, impulsively bought the author a beautiful striped tie by way of apology and homage.3 Reassured, Rattigan finished the final few changes; the play was sent for licence to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which recommended only two tiny cuts,4 and plans were drawn up for casting and rehearsal.

  But even in rehearsals, Rattigan’s starry cast, in the politest possible way, continued to request changes. Alfred was indeed happy to play second fiddle to his wife, but he was less pleased to find himself upstaged by the juvenile lead Brian Nissen, playing Michael. The play depicts Olivia, a widow, in a relationship with the rich industrialist Sir John Fletcher. When her seventeen-year-old son returns from five years abroad, they are surprised to find him filled with socialist convictions. In an early scene, Sir John condescends to answer some of his prospective stepson’s questions, only to find that the young man, in Michael Darlow’s words, ‘wins the argument hands down’.5 Alfred’s desire to rebalance the play in his favour involved the invention of winning bits of business, requesting substantial rewrites of the author, and making it quite clear to Nissen who was in charge. As Rattigan described it: ‘Alfred’s way of rehearsing him is to take him over three lines in three hours, finally reducing him to tears and hysteria […] if he survives the next two months he is going to become the best juvenile actor on the English stage. If he doesn’t survive we already have a long list of others to choose from.’6

  The changes were not merely a matter of emphasis. The third act was almost entirely rewritten. The background of the three main characters is altered. The title of the play was changed from the downbeat Less Than Kind to the lighter Love in Idleness. The play was so substantially transformed that the producers had to send the new draft to the Lord Chamberlain for a new licence.

  At the time, Rattigan seemed content with the changes being made: ‘what he [Alfred] is making of the part is much better than anything I originally conceived,’ he declared in a letter to his mother. Later he would revise this opinion, but at the time, he had every reason for confidence. The production, as was common then, had a pre-London tour booked. In Liverpool, where it was playing the Royal Court Theatre, it broke all box-office records for both advance and first-night takings. Glasgow saw a sign of Lynn Fontanne’s remarkable command of the stage during
a special matinee for members of the armed forces. When the curtain rose on Lynn, stretched out on a sofa, dressed in a negligee, the audience, many of whom had been drinking all day, erupted with wolf-whistles and lewd comments. A member of the audience recalls her response: ‘She raised one finger, as if she were chiding a little child, and that entire theatre of soldiers stopped whistling. Never saw anything like it in my life – how she dominated the audience with one gesture.’7 When the tour moved to Leeds, Noël Coward, who had money in the production, came to see it. Rattigan, who had experience of Coward’s damning judgements before,8 begged him not to be too harsh. ‘Don’t worry,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll love it. I love everything you write and I love everything Lynn and Alfred do, so I have to love this play.’9

  Despite this, after the show, Coward came round to the Lunts’ dressing room and begin itemising the play’s failings. ‘The first act’s amusing but you’ve got no second and third act’, he explained. ‘Don’t open in London. It will be a disaster. I think you should close it this week.’10 Rattigan’s spirits slumped visible as The Master continued to tear his play apart; the Lunts, in an attempt to divert the conversation, suggested they repair to their suite at The Queens Hotel, but Coward continued his forensic analysis, insisting that the ‘play was so poorly written and so unfunny that it could not possibly be salvaged.’11 Rattigan attempted to get drunk to numb the sense of rising panic but to no effect. After a while of this, Lynn signalled to Terry to join her in the bedroom. There she told him, ‘Nothing that Noël has said or will say can affect me. This is an enchanting play and we’re going to do it in London. I know Alfred will want to close it. But don’t worry. I shall talk Alfred around. I have faith in the play.’ Later, with Coward continuing to hold forth, Alfred beckoned Terry to the bathroom: ‘As you can see,’ he confided, ‘Lynn is disheartened by Noël’s reaction. She’s going to want to close the play. But no matter what Lynn says, we shall do it. It’s a good play. Now don’t say anything. Leave it to me to talk Lynn around to my way of thinking.’12

  Coward’s attitude to the play may well have been coloured by jealousy. He and Rattigan vied for public favour during the war, Coward matching the runs of Flare Path and While the Sun Shines with his own successes, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit. And Rattigan was of the next generation, something both playwrights felt very keenly: one of Coward’s defining successes on Broadway was with Design for Living, in which he starred alongside the Lunts. Was Rattigan, the upstart, trying to steal his actors? (He may also have discovered that Rattigan had originally written the play for Coward’s great stage partner, friend and collaborator, Gertrude Lawrence.) Nonetheless, it was a considerably shaken Rattigan who embarked on a further range of rewrites and re-rehearsals before the London first night.

  The opening at the Lyric Theatre in December 1944 was a great social occasion. Leading figures of theatre like Coward, Glynis Johns, Ronald Squire, Michael Wilding, Vivien Leigh and Robert Helpmann, rubbed shoulder with pillars of the establishment like Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, and Colonel J. J. Llewellin, the Minister of Food, Sir John Anderson, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Duff Cooper, British Ambassador to France. The play was warmly received with gales of laughter, it would seem, greeting the Lunts’ every move. ‘Almost every remark,’ attested Philip Page in the Daily Mail, ‘was greeted with anything from a titter to a deafening guffaw’, while the critic from the Recorder claimed that the audience ‘went mad with delight’.13 Rattigan, perhaps still not trusting his luck, decided not to give a curtain speech, leaving it to Alfred who generously praised the young Brian Nissen as ‘a lovely fresh egg’ in this ‘cake’ of a play, a particularly lip-smacking tribute at a time of rationing.14

  The reviews were hugely enthusiastic. The play was admired. Ivor Brown in the Observer thought it Rattigan’s best yet; Beverly Baxter in the Evening Standard judged it his best-constructed play and singled out the portrait of Michael as particularly fine.15 But most critics found it hard to judge Rattigan’s work, so enraptured were they by the play’s two stars. The critic for the Recorder was typical: ‘But what about the author? It is so hard to say. The lines sounded as if they were the wittiest since the days of Oscar Wilde. What is more, they may have been. But what can a critic say when there are two actors who are so supreme in their art that they can make the mention of a boiled egg sound like the climax of human happiness or the depths of disillusionment?’16

  The Lunts’ movie career was not particularly distinguished and the general consensus is that their theatrical charms did not survive the transition to film, so we today can only speculate about what it was that generated such boundless adulation amongst the usually sober British press. ‘How to analyse this gift of the Lunts which takes a plain English sentence and makes it dance?’ asks Ivor Brown in stunned bewilderment. A. E. Wilson in the Star puts it down to a combination of ‘the perfection of their art, and the delicate harmony and adjustment of their styles’, while Herbert Farjeon points to ‘the perfection of their technique, the infallibility of their timing, the flawlessness of their interplay, and (one feels tempted to add) all the rest of it’. Beverly Baxter’s review takes the form of a mock-protest against the Lunts for the ‘effrontery’ with which they ‘remove the critical faculty and leaving us laughing and applauding just as if we had gone to the theatre to enjoy ourselves’, and concluding ‘I don’t believe they can be as good as they seem. It isn’t possible.’ Certainly, some of the critics do write as if under the influence of some giddyingly powerful witchcraft: ‘It is within the scope of their magic,’ rhapsodises Theatre World, ‘to make the most arid wastes of dialogue blossom like the rose and perfume the air with the subtlety of rare incense.’17

  What the Lunts seem to have perfected is a natural ease with each other, borne of personal familiarity and endless rehearsal. It is evident that audiences were very aware that they were married, and several critics commented that their intimacy on stage was itself part of their attraction. They offer, insisted W. A. Darlington, the ‘spectacle of two characters with a complete and perfect human relationship’.18 Ordinarily, a play that centred on an adulterous relationship could be an opportunity for prurience and titillation, but that the Lunts were married made all that respectable. ‘Is there anything in the evening more delightful,’ sighed The Times, ‘than the spectacle of the Cabinet Minister and the graceful widow from Barons Court making love at opposite ends of a vast room?’ Their marriage perhaps assisted the comic structure of the play; though the relationship between Sir John and Olivia appears to be irrevocably broken apart at the end of Act Two, the Lunts provide an underlying romance which remains unbroken: ‘They may be parted by the length of a whole stage and a flaming quarrel,’ observed the Observer, ‘but they still have hearts, and these beat, however tumultuously, as one.’ Whether this sanitised the play’s extra-marital relationship or licensed it is ambiguous. One of the play’s American critics tells the story of an audience member who had enjoyed ‘the dash, the unblushing intimacy, the unabashed honesty with which they had just romped through a love scene on the sofa’, and sighing with pleasure had whispered to his companion, ‘It’s nice, my dear, to know they are really married, isn’t it?’19

  The show had a limited run, because the Lunts were due to return to the United States. That said, it ran for 213 performances and, so it is said, never played to an empty seat. The total box-office for the run was £60,000, the equivalent of close to £2 million in 2011.20 On 27 January 1945, Winston Churchill paid a visit to the show. There had been cheers and a standing ovation when the Prime Minister and his wife entered the theatre,21 but when Sir John tells Olivia he’s been let go from the War Cabinet with a thank-you gift and produces a cigar, Alfred Lunt recalled: ‘such a cheering started as I’d never earned before by any stretch of the imagination. For five minutes, I suppose, they cheered and cheered and Churchill got right up, turned around and stood there waving and waving back at them.’22 The show was considered so good for mora
le that on 12 January 1945, the company performed the play without decor or lighting in an underground room of the Houses of Parliament for an audience of munitions workers. Then, after the West End run had come to its end, the Lunts took the play on a six-week tour of the ‘foxhole circuit’, playing to Allied troops stationed in Germany and France. This ended in Paris at the Théatre Sarah Bernhardt on 28 June. There was a last-minute crisis as neither Brian Nissen, nor his understudy Robert Raines, had got the proper exit permit. Hastily, an American soldier, Sergeant Ellis Eringer, was recruited to learn the part. Behind the scenes, the assistant military attaché at the US Embassy, Paul Warburg, called the show’s first-nighter Duff Cooper, to expedite matters. Nissen was delivered to the theatre only five minutes before curtain up. Amongst the audience members was General Patton, who wrote to Fontanne: ‘I, on behalf of the Third Army, should thank you, Mr Lunt and the others of your cast for the great pleasure which we derived from your unparalleled performances.’23

  But the Lunts weren’t done with the play yet. In January 1946, following a one-month try-out tour, a new production opened at the Empire Theatre in New York, under the new title O Mistress Mine. The Broadway opening more than matched London for anticipation and glamour. The $100,000 advance at the box office was a record for that theatre and a swathe of New York high society welcomed the Lunts back after three years away; there were so many flowers in Fontanne’s dressing room, says one report, that she couldn’t close the door. At the curtain, Alfred told the audience he hoped the play would bring lightness and laughter to ‘an angry and suspicious world’.24 The reviews echoed the London critics in disregarding the play in their rush to praise the performances: ‘I don’t think it’s a very good play. Frankly I don’t care,’ confessed Vernon Rice in the New York Post. ‘The Lunts could stand with their faces to the wall reciting the alphabet in pig Latin, and if they wanted me to laugh, I’d laugh. If it were tears they were after, I’d shed them. Just putty in their hands, that’s me.’25 In March, Lynn Fontanne notes that they had sold out until June: ‘we are just a couple of little hot cakes.’26