George Cukor: A Double Life

Chapter Three

C H A P T E R T H R E E hile Cukor was establishing himself upstate, summers in Rochester, he was also making headway on Broadway. The 1920s were Broadway's heyday, a decade in which the glorious past and optimistic future of show business rubbed up against each other and threw off sparks. It was a decade of innovation and promise in the theater, as well as of vanishing forms and emotional last hurrahs of turn-of-the-century legends. A phenomenal influx of talent from England and Europe filled the stages. Eugene O'Neill and Philip Barry exploded on the scene. Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman formed a collaboration. Other new playwrights included Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, Maxwell Anderson, Thornton Wilder, and Moss Hart. La Duse, Mrs. Pat Campbell, and Mrs. Fiske gave magical farewell performances. Cukor tried to see everything. But his favorites were often the plays molded around characterization and the genius of an exalted performer. Other theatergoers might remember a first-rate play. Cukor tended to recollect the "memorable moments" of lesser plays illuminated by the volatile inspiration of a great actress. He saw the subtle comedic actress Mrs. Fiske in a rather shoddy vehicle, but when she began to sob and cry in one scene, it was so moving that all of a sudden Cukor, too, began to sob and cry. And he saw the niece of Mrs. Fiske, Emily Stevens, in Zoe Akins's Foot47 w loose, playing a disagreeable blackmailer. Cukor was moved by a scene where the actress surprised herself, it seemed, by abruptly bursting into tears. Watching her, he surprised himself, too, by bursting into tears. He feasted on Ina Claire as she developed into one of the finest high comediennes of the era, in Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1921), The Awful Truth (1922), Groundsfor Divorce (1924), The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1925), Our Betters (1928), and Biography (1932). He attended Philip Barry's comedies, but the Barry play he often talked about was the highly charged and more cerebral drama In a Garden, with Frank Conroy, Laurette Taylor, and Louis Calhern. Cukor vividly recalled a romantic scene with Calhern in the foreground and Taylor half-obscured in shadow, yet Taylor riveting the audience with only her voice. He saw a magnificent production of Buechner's Dantons Tod. It was one of Max Reinhardt's mass spectacles, and Cukor was there to spot Rosamond Pinchot—whom he doted on (she was one of his Rochester leading ladies)—in a small role.* Cukor was with Laurette Taylor's son, the playwright and latterly screenwriter Dwight Taylor; neither of them minded that they could not translate the German fast enough. Cukor followed the arc of Alia Nazimova's career, and went to see her in a smouldering Hungarian drama, Dagmar. Although it was not a particularly good play, he and Stella Bloch attended it three times because they so admired the dark, intense Russian-born star. Cukor preferred the actresses who were enormously self-possessed. Their behavior was always sincere and genuine, purely individual. They were seemingly indestructible. Yet at surprisingmoments, they unexpectedly revealed their vulnerability by sudden "curious movements " of the heart that attacked the nerves and flooded the senses of the audience. These were the memorable moments that were deathless in his psyche. He knew he was forever influenced by and indebted to these actresses. And although he said he didn't draw on them consciously, the director knew there were borrowings from them in his films. *Pinchot had starred for Cukor in Rochester. Beautiful and elegant, she was one of his true loves, a frequent guest at his home in California. After some featured roles in Max Reinhardt productions, her career stalled, however. She became a mistress of Jed Harris's. Cukor was shaken by her suicide in January of 1938, at age thirtythree . According to Variety, Pinchot was found dead in her automobile in her garage at Old Brookville, Long Island. "In evening dress and an ermine wrap," the showbusiness paper reported, "she had left the motor running after leading a hose from the exhaust pipe into the closed car." 48 Katharine Hepburn once made the comment that one of the most amazing aspects of George Cukor's life was the "tremendous continuity " that he built into it. One can detect this continuity in the work, dating back to Rochester and Broadway years...