Arthur Penn: American Director

15. Golden Boys

162 15 Golden Boys The collaboration between Arthur Penn and William Gibson is one of the most fruitful in American theater. While its public milestones are Two for the Seesaw, The Miracle Worker, Golden Boy, Golda, and Monday After the Miracle, the partnership also includes their families and fifty years of shared lives. Like all great friendships, theirs was tested in battle and survived, most significantly with the extraordinary rescue of the 1964 Broadway musical adaptation of Golden Boy. Written in 1937, Golden Boy was more than the latest play in the socially relevant canon of Clifford Odets, scribe-inresidence of the left-leaning Group Theatre. It was created to rescue that organization from financial straits, which it did. An additional gift is that, some thirty years later, it also created a financial legacy for Odets’s children, Walt and Nora. In a plot that would later become the stuff of parody, but which was serious, even touching, at the time, Golden Boy follows the family turmoil, professional conflicts, and moral dilemma of Joe Bonaparte, a violin prodigy who can escape his lower-class life only by becoming a prizefighter. While the most obvious jeopardy in such a trade-off is to his musician’s hands, the collision of art and violence, thuggery and family, and fate and free will provide innumerable textures. Margaret Brenman Gibson—Odets’s biographer as well as William Gibson’s wife—notes that Odets wove his own strained relationship with his father, Louis, into the tensions between Joe Golden Boys 163 Bonaparte and his father, to whom he doesn’t even give a first name. Fight promoter Tom Moody sees Joe as his ticket to success and sends his mistress, Lorna Moon, to woo the lad into staying in the ring. The drama comes to a head when Joe accidentally kills an opponent and ends when, brooding over his guilt, he commits suicide by running his car off the road, taking Lorna, the fallen woman, with him. The idea of turning Golden Boy into a musical came from producer-manager-agent Hillard Elkins. Elkins, who had represented lyricist Lee Adams and composer Charles Strouse for the Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie, caught a show-folkonly “midnight matinee” with Sammy Davis Jr. at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London in the early 1960s. Elkins says he had a “vision” during Davis’s show in which Odets would update Golden Boy into the civil rights era, Adams and Strouse would write a “serious” score, Davis would headline, and Broadway would gobble it up. Sammy agreed, and Elkins began working with Odets, who was in declining health (he died on August 14, 1963) as well as declining ability. Odets’s update was rooted in 1930s sensibilities, something its young British director, Peter Coe (no relation to Fred), was incapable of noticing, and Odets, for obvious reasons, did not correct. The show was in trouble from the start. “We were on the road with Golden Boy for twenty-two weeks, longer than most plays run on Broadway, because we were afraid to come in,” wrote Sammy Davis Jr. in his autobiography . “We opened in Philadelphia and got rapped badly. We had four weeks there to fix the show before our next out-oftown tryout in Boston.” The reviews for their Boston opening in the fall of 1964 were, in the producer’s word, “blistering.” Continued Davis, “Elliot Norton, their most astute critic, cut us to shreds. Hilly invited Norton to lunch and picked his brains.”1 “We knew we had a problem on the road,” Elkins agrees. “We knew we had a book that wasn’t working. Our director went back to London while the show played, and I took the liberty of inviting Paddy Chayefsky to come up. Paddy saw the show and put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Close it.’ Then William 164 Arthur Penn Gibson—whom I didn’t know—came up to me and said, ‘Would you like a first act?’ I said, ‘Yes, please.’” Only later did Elkins learn that Gibson had been Odets’s prot égé and that he would do anything for the man and his memory. “People in the show were saying [Odets’s] dialogue was ‘dated,’ Gibson wrote in his preface to the published Golden Boy. “Simply untrue. It remained what it always was, the best dialogue ever written by an American...