Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen

Introduction: Forgotten Innovator

1 Introduction Forgotten Innovator Rouben Mamoulian is one of the twentieth century’s most important overlooked cultural figures. His bicoastal life as a director in Hollywood and on Broadway was highly unusual and led to a roster of influential accomplishments in film and theater, yet historians in both fields usually mention him only in passing. While several of his films are familiar to fans of classic Hollywood movies from the 1930s through the 1950s, Mamoulian’s name is seldom associated in popular memory with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Queen Christina, and The Mark of Zorro. Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma! and Carousel are among the most familiar musicals of the last century, yet Mamoulian’s role in bringing them to the stage is seldom understood. Even the important part he played in establishing the grammar of contemporary filmmaking is usually relegated to footnotes . Before Mamoulian, the sound movies that followed The Jazz Singer were static, stagy, and often slightly ridiculous. He helped restore motion to motion pictures and eventually endowed them with color, cultivating all the while the idea that film could be artful as well as entertaining. “To make your life a true work of art is the highest achievement man can aspire to,” he wrote, and he strove to remain true to his ambition. Never less than elegant in appearance and erudite in speech, Mamoulian maintained the image and substance of an artist-intellectual, and yet was also a man of practical affairs. One New York reporter caught the essence of Mamoulian after the 1927 premiere of Porgy. “He seems spontaneously simple and direct in his conversation, talking about directing and the stage as a banker talks about banking and money; enthusiastically, MAMOULIAN 2 but with his feet on the ground. His complete lack of affectation indicates a well-balanced mind.”1 Mamoulian was engaged in a lifelong struggle to maintain the integrity of his artistic vision in the commercial environs of Hollywood and Broadway, but his vision encompassed the importance of finding a popular audience. During auditions for the debut run of Oklahoma! he argued with choreographer Agnes de Mille, insisting that only beautiful, leggy dancers need apply. The audience expected no less and without an audience, there would be no show. Because he considered himself an artist and a humanist, the culture of celebrity held no appeal for Mamoulian. Except for a reported affair with Greta Garbo and occasional sightings in the company of starlets, he was seldom the subject of gossip columnists or show business writers except when he clashed with producers over artistic control or money. His public life was defined by his role as a director, in which capacity he was remembered for his exuberance and intelligence as well as his habit of smoking cigars. Mamoulian was raised in comfort and insisted on living comfortably. His personal life was conducted in private or around the parties of his Hollywood and Broadway colleagues and left little impression on his contemporaries. “He carried with him a sort of unspoken protocol, a grand-ducal dignity and reserve that made his arrival anywhere something of an event,” remembered a friend from his early years in the United States before Mamoulian made a name for himself on Broadway. He added, “I don’t think I ever heard him give an equivocal judgment, even for the sake of tact and good manners, when the critical values of art were involved.”2 Mamoulian’s arrival in America coincided with a significant inflow of creativity and talent as artists and intellectuals poured from Europe into the New World. He always stressed that he was not a political refugee , but came to Rochester, New York, from London to accept a promising position at the Eastman School of Music. Of course, the full truth is more complicated. Mamoulian and the survivors of his family could not have returned to the nascent Soviet Union without being branded as class enemies. The Mamoulians were wealthy Armenian subjects of the Russian Empire who had lived for generations in Georgia; well educated and part of the region’s cultural elite, Mamoulian came to the United States draped in a cosmopolitan aura that served him well in a Introduction 3 nation still laboring under a sense of cultural inferiority. His carefully groomed, slightly exotic image was one of his passkeys to success. Unlike many émigrés of his class and credentials, Mamoulian...