Shadowed Cocktails: The Plays of Philip Barry from Paris Bound to The Philadelphia Story

2. Infidelity

34 2 Infidelity I get a feeling in this house that everyone’s either just going up a gangplank or just coming down one. —Philip Barry, Paris Bound In an interview three decades after the death of her husband, Ellen Barry offered brief glimpses of their years together. They met, she recalled, on Fifth Avenue—“where we used to promenade on Sundays”—and had tea at the Plaza Hotel. She recalled theirs to be “a happy marriage,” peppered by moments of her jealousy, “because Philip Barry, I must say, was constantly tempted by all those dazzling, beautiful women—I was even jealous of Kate [Hepburn] once and I was just furious once with him when I discovered he had sent yellow roses to Miriam Hopkins.” But aside from that, as she recalled from the distancing filter of her years without him, her husband “had the most understanding quality of wisdom and tolerance. . . . Since he was a writer and always at home, we were very close—we were so much of a team” (Gamarekian B15). They were married on July 15, 1922, at the Church of St. Francis in Mount Kisco, New York. Brendan Gill would refer to their marriage as “[t]he most fortunate event in Barry’s exceptionally fortunate life. . . . [H]e married the woman best suited to him in every way. From the start, their relationship was in a manner that playgoers would come to think of as Barryesque” (“Dark Advantage” 28). $QGHUVRQ&KLQGG $0 Infidelity 35 The enduring stability of the Barrys’ marriage teases when one encounters issues of marital fidelity looping through several of Philip Barry’s most successful plays of the 1920s and 1930s. It was a period of changing sexual mores, of course, and, for one like Barry, a period where any infidelities might well have been understood by others if not necessarily by Ellen. While they were much together, there would have been no lack of opportunity for one so intimately a part of the theatrical world and its own freedoms to have sampled indiscretion discretely. Perhaps he did; but, if so, there is no trail left by the intensely private Barry.1 Perhaps, too, he created enough “other women” through his writings to satisfy any need for breached boundaries. As we have seen even in his earliest plays, and will see repeatedly through the plays discussed in this chapter, he brought to life a virtual “harem” of women who were justifiably desirable to those seeking more than a traditional wife or traditional mistress, though many, as with characters like Ronny Blake in You and I, would bear a strong resemblance to Ellen. Whatever the connection, he would use them to explore life issues that seemed to need a re-visioning. Most important, he would use them to broaden the meaning of “fidelity” itself for a culture that measured the concept too much in terms of one bottom line: the sexual one. The three plays in this chapter happen to be among Barry’s most successful from a commercial standpoint. That could as easily lead one to believe they were also among his most successful from an artistic standpoint . It might be more to the point here, however, to say that they were, without exception, fascinating both individually and as they reflect shifting currents in the world Barry sought to capture and in the inner world of Barry himself. Brooks Atkinson, with his usual perceptivity, would comment years later in his review for The Philadelphia Story, “Under the immaculate surface of his comedy writing he has what Coleridge described as ‘that craving for the indefinite’” (“Barry to Hepburn to Guild” 131). Barry had the ability, most of the time, to make high comedy—and shadings of it—seem easy. However, the search he was undertaking beneath the easeful surface of these plays was not an uncomplicated one, and those who have dismissed his cultural importance then and later have apparently missed much of this. Paris Bound In his review of Paris Bound on December 28, 1927, the omnipresent Atkinson referred to the play as a “thistledown comedy,” using a timely Christmas reference to indicate Barry had finally arrived as a playwright of fulfilled potential: $QGHUVRQ&KLQGG $0 Infidelity 36 [T]he hopes and fears of all the years seem to have come true. In “You and I,” “In a Garden,” and “White Wings,” no one promised finer things than Mr. Barry...