Gertie the Great

For weeks Broadway had buzzed with rumors that Playwright Moss Hart, who is being psychoanalyzed, would bring to town a Freudian musical play--a play that would startle the theatre as Doctor Sigmund himself once startled the hospital. Then Broadway stopped buzzing and began to huzzah, for last week Producer Sam Harris delivered Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark, a $130,000 baby.

Moss Hart's play idea is 18-carat. A hard-working editress of a fashion magazine, unhappy despite her enviable job and a devoted married lover, goes to get herself psyched. With that the play dissolves into a psychoanalytical circus with four revolving rings. The scene shifts from the psychoanalyst's office to the Allure office, to the young lady's dreams, and back again. Playwright Hart puts anything on the stage that he wishes--a love affair, sophisticated neuro-drama. fashion parades, farce, musical dream fantasias. And the lovely editress learns that she really wants to be less editorial and more seductive, to love not the married man but a cocky young charmer.

The play is neither quite so good as the idea nor so breath-taking as Broadway's swoon over it. Its dream fantasias are much less outlandish than the dreams any psychoanalyst might encounter in a day's work, sometimes lack sparkle, occasionally grow flatulent. But the whole production, spinning from reality to its not too fantastic reveries on four revolving stages, is lovely to look at and delightful to hear. It has one dream of glamorous evening blue, another gilded dream of an Oriental fairy tale, a glittering dream of a circus that turns into a mild nightmare. It has blandishing music, including a poignant song My Ship, by the German refugee composer Kurt Weill, who scored the productions of The 3-Penny Opera and The Eternal Road] and droll lyrics by Ira Gershwin such as:

The mister who once was the master of two

Would make of his mistress his Mrs.

But he's missed out on Mrs. for the mistress is through

What a mess of a mishmash this is!

Lady in the Dark has swarthy Victor Mature, latest in Hollywood's series of almost outrageously beautiful young men, who appears in every costume the feminine audience could wish, from breech clout to dress suit. Prepossessing young Macdonald Carey is the editress' eventual sweetheart. And Danny Kaye is very funny as a pansy fashion photographer who in true Cecil Beatonish style photographs a suit of armor with a blue chiffon scarf wrapped around its metal neck and stuffed doves perched on its shoulders. In the circus dream he scores the comic hit of the show with a jabberwockian song consisting entirely of the names of Russian composers.

But the secret of the show's success was given away by the raves of Manhattan's critics over its heroine. Said Richard Watts Jr. (New York Herald Tribune): "Lady in the Dark demonstrates with fine conclusiveness that Miss Gertrude Lawrence is the greatest feminine performer in the theatre." Wrote sobersided Harvardman Brooks Atkinson (Times): "As for Gertrude Lawrence, she is a goddess: that's all." John Mason Brown (Post) merely referred to her personality as "a welcome substitute for the Life Force.''

"G." Gertrude Lawrence, known to her intimates as "Gertie" or "G," has long had this sort of effect on the most bilious critics. After her Broadway debut in 1924, one of the most acid reviewers, the late Percy Hammond, said that "Every man in town is, or will be, in love with her." Struggling to describe her power over them, otherwise manly reviewers have often found themselves dithering about her large wistful eyes, her tiptilted, crinkling nose, her mischievous smile; or else about the huskiness of her voice, her exquisite back, or the grace of her slim, long-legged, clotheshorse figure.

Last week, ignoring these well-known physical data, the critics fell to raving about her theatrical versatility. In Lady in the Dark she does virtually everything but play a trombone solo. She is on the stage almost all the time. Gertie (age 42), who offstage has never been in a psychoanalyst's office, runs an emotional gamut from the romanticism of a schoolgirl in her teens to the neurotic distress of a mature young woman. She sings sweetly, does high kicks and jazz steps (though with the years they seem somewhat angularly British). She models as few other women could an ar ray of costumes -- from a trig purple suit to a sequined man-killer-- that had Designer Hattie Carnegie's telephone ringing constantly on the morning after the opening. Once, in changing costumes, Gertie does the next thing to a striptease' exposing herself in a cobwebby black lace slip. Naturally in Lady in the Dark she has no understudy. The show business knows no one who could fill the bill.

"An Orange & Dirty Stories." Versatile as she is, mankind is probably not so much affected by the Lawrence looks and talent as by the enduring Lawrence charm. She suggests the rakish, amusing, grey hound-style young women who in the middle '205 obsessed the fastidious heroes of Michael Aden's novels of Mayfair. Actually this Mayfairian tone is something Gertie only gradually acquired. She did not come to the theatre from England's upper crust. Born in London on July 4, 1898, baptized as Gertrude Alexandra Dagmar Lawrence Klasen, she was the daughter of a Danish interlocutor of a traveling minstrel show, and an Irish actress.

Since her parents were divorced when Gertie was very small, she was brought up by her mother. At ten she made her stage debut in London in a Christmas pantomime of Babes in the Wood. In another children's play she met a lisping small boy named Noel Coward. In his autobiography, Present Indicative, he has written: "She . . . gave me an orange and told me a few mildly dirty stories, and I loved her from then onwards." For a while she went to the Convent of the Sacre Coeur, Streatham, studied dancing under a Madame Espinosa, and acting at Italia Conti's London school. She had cards printed reading Miss Gertie Lawrence, Child Actress and Toe Dancer.

There is nothing so grim and grimy as the British provincial theatre, and Gertrude Lawrence had nearly eight years of it, in her teens, before she had a London engagement. When she got a call from the London revue producer, Andre Chariot, Gertie sneaked her clothes from the theatre where she was playing, borrowed the fare to London, and landed a three-year contract with Chariot starting at $16 a week. Shortly afterwards she married a showman named Francis Xavier Gordon-Howley who, as the justice remarked at the divorce proceedings several years later, seemed to have intended to spend the rest of his life living on her income.

"G" and "Bea." For some time Charlot's Revue was mostly hard chorus work for Gertie. But twice when Beatrice Lillie left the show (once on falling from a horse, again on getting married) her understudy Gertie had her chance to shine. In 1924 Chariot's Revue came to the U. S. featuring the ludicrous Lillie, the elegant Jack Buchanan, and Gertie. They arrived on Christmas Eve and while waiting for the customs Bea and Gertie sat on their trunks, cried, and sang carols. The revue flopped in an Atlantic City tryout, but a few weeks later it wowed Broadway. Twenty-five-year-old Gertie sang Philip Braham's murmurous Limehouse Blues and a sly comedy song beginning: "I don't know what you think he did that evening. . . ." She was still comparatively unknown in her native England, but that evening the Manhattan audience felt sure they were seeing the quintessence of Mayfair talent.

From then on express liners shuttled her back & forth across the Atlantic from hit to hit. Some of her plays were dramatically feeble -- but she was always the delectable Lawrence. The London Times's dramatic critic observed: "Miss Lawrence's performance is nearly always a matter of making bricks without straw." The management of His Majesty's Theatre once had to serve breakfast, lunch and tea to a queue of 300 who had lined up 24 hours before a Lawrence first night. In the U. S. she played in another Chariot's Revue, the Gershwin musicomedy Oh, Kay!, Treasure Girl, Candle Light with Leslie Howard, Lew Leslie's International Review, Noel Coward's Private Lives and Tonight at 8:30 with her old friend, recently Susan and God and Skylark.

To begin with she was not the finished, versatile actress she is today. She had a tendency to overplug her comedy with exaggerated gestures and grimaces, and she had little emotional range. But gradually, especially by working with the hyper critical and candid Coward, her acting began to acquire sureness and scope. After Private Lives even Robert Benchley was encouraged to say: "Certain curmudgeons m these parts will hear with relief that Miss Lawrence has somewhat abated since her last didoes in New York. She can now express wild surprise without such feats of contortion as really ought to be saved up for the more startling details of the Last Judgment."

In Coward's cycle of nine short plays called Tonight at 8:30 she surprised every one with her emotional flexibility, playing not only Mayfairian parts, but a shrewish lower-class wife whose husband revolts from their sodden routine, and a romance-starved middle-aged woman beginning and ending a hopeless affair in a railroad station restaurant. By the middle '30s it had become clear that while Gertrude Lawrence might not be the perfect understudy for Katharine Cornell, the versatile Miss Lawrence could come a great deal closer to putting across Juliet than Miss Cornell could to putting across Someone to Watch Over Me.

Gertrude's Men. Meanwhile she designed a private setting appropriate to one of the theatre's swankiest headliners. At various times she had lavish apartments or penthouses on or just off Fifth Avenue, and a London home with hundreds of mirrors and curtains of solid silver sequins. One of her London dressing rooms was described as ua corner of a dream." Through her salons moved such guests as Edward of Wales (who gave her his picture inscribed "To Gertrude--Edward P."); Manhattan Socialite Bertrand L. Taylor; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (who gave her a 30-foot cabin cruiser); Peruvian Artist Reynaldo Luza; Adventure Writer Edgar Wallace; and her distinguished leading man, the late Sir Gerald du Maurier (who, despite his distinction, she describes as having been "just like an inky schoolboy with frogs in his pocket").

Her engagement was often rumored, but Gertie could not seem to make up her mind about marriage. In 1928, when Mr. Taylor was in the offing, she said: "The duty of a wife is to offer constant companionship. . . . How can I, who must go to the theatre at night? ... I would like to marry Mr. Taylor very, very much. But I won't, because I don't think it would be fair for him to marry someone in my profession." But a few years later, when Doug Jr. loomed in her retinue, she stated: "Marriage in two establishments is by no means so absurd as it sounds."

In 1935 the luxurious House of Lawrence, assailed by two creditor laundry establishments, was forced into bankruptcy. In the London Bankruptcy Court Gertie cheerfully admitted "living beyond my means" and also mentioned illnesses, British and U. S. income taxes, gifts, publicity, entertainment. She let it be known that she had earned $93,000 since early in 1932; that during one period she had got five times as much from admirers ($34,000) as she had earned ($6,440); that she had lost $75,000 worth of jewelry to the pawnshops; that her assets were about $9,000 and her liabilities $121,000. She was discharged with a judgment against her of $15,000, payable in weekly installments. Her attorney declared that she had only her earning power left. She has never lost it since, and her current take of $4,000-$5,000 weekly from Lady in the Dark is one of the biggest on theatrical record.

Divine Service. In recent years world conditions have sobered Gertie's life as they have many another. In 1938, while she was playing Susan and God, a comedy dealing with the Oxford ("Moral Re-Armament") Group, she showed considerable interest in that form of evangelical Christianity. So did numerous other stage people--although stage interest suffered something of a setback when W. C. Fields announced that he didn't need Moral Re-Armament but would take anything in a bottle. Gertie did a scene from Susan and God and preached a sermon at the late Rev. Christian Fichthorne Reisner's Broadway (Methodist-Episcopal) Temple. The New Yorker hailed her entry into the pulpit with the comment: "That, fellows, is our idea of divine service."

Said she: "Religion has come to the Broadway theatre because it is a reflection of what is in people's hearts. I feel that there is a spiritual awakening among people everywhere. ... It is almost a revolt of the masses against the materialistic leadership of the dictators toward the glorious freedom and peace of their spiritual Liberator!"

Mrs. A. Last summer, while she was playing at the Cape Playhouse at Dennis, Mass., she married tall, dignified Theatrical Producer Richard Stoddard Aldrich, 38, son of a late Hood Rubber executive' who headed the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1924. A short time after the wedding Gertie got a congratulatory cable from England:

Dear Mrs. A.--hooray, hooray!

At last you are deflowered!

On this as every other day

I love you--Noel Coward.

Gertie cabled back:

Dear Mr. C.--you know me,

My parts I overact 'em.

As jor the flowers, we searched for hours,

My maid she must have packed 'em.

The Aldriches live in a penthouse, filled with Gertie's English accumulations, near Fifth Avenue in the Fifties. In former years Gertie was given to poker, backgammon, sewing, knitting, swimming, golf. Suddenly invited into a hole-in-one tournament in San Francisco in 1938, she kicked off her high-heeled slippers' and, stocking-footed, dropped her third shot 5 feet 6 inches from the cup. But today, unless they occur at after-theatre parties,' she has little time for diversions of any sort. When she is not at the theatre or taking her daily afternoon nap (which consists in piling right into bed, even if it is only for ten minutes), she works like a high-spirited horse for British relief.

As a prime mover in the American Theatre Wing of the British War Relief Society she has sewed clothing, organized parties and workshops, made speeches, helped move 54 children to the U. S.' from the British Actors' orphanage, been mistress of ceremonies on recordings made by Broadway stars for the British forces. She is now raising funds for entertainment units to perform for the troops, and arranging for the nationwide sale of Lawrence-approved fashions, the proceeds to go to Britain. She has a contract option for a three-month vacation this summer, expects to spend it playing in theatricals for English soldiers. The life she leads may well explain why she can eat anything she likes without losing her figure.

In the middle of her fourth decade in the theatre, Gertrude Lawrence still speaks of "just beginning to make a go of it." The remark does much to explain her determined, year-by-year climb to preeminence in one branch of the entertainment business after another. It is really quite foolish to speak of her as "a substitute" for the Life Force. Of that Force, she has at least eight or ten women's share.

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