When Prankhood Was In Flower

When acting was acting (as opposed to introverted shrugs and butt-scratching), when the thespian ego was encouraged and nurtured like an altar flame, when the paranoid princes and princesses of players were to the grand manner born – in those glorious days, a performer who did not indulge in devilish onstage pranks and unscheduled improvisations, or fall prey to blood-freezing mental blackouts in the middle of The Big Scene, was considered a timorous tyro unworthy of that noble nomenclature, Ham.

And when one speaks of hams, especially when one speaks of antic, eccentric, disaster-prone, sublimely irresponsible hams, then one must speak first of that biggest, juiciest, most heavily sugar-cured and clove-studded Smithfield of them all – John Barrymore. A script, to Barrymore's way of thinking, was a rough sketch, a mere outline to be filled in with bright Barrymore colors, even if that script was penned by Will Shakespeare. The audience, for Barrymore, was not separated from the stage by an invisible barrier – it was part of the act, a convocation of straight men, something to regale and talk back to.

Playing the title role in Richard III, he was greeted by an oafish guffaw from the gallery at the famous line "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" Wheeling in the direction of the offender, Barrymore pointed his sword at him and ad libbed, in impeccable meter, "Make haste and saddle yonder braying ass!" In Tolstoy's Redemption, the Great Profile became irritated at a particularly bronchial audience and, even while emoting at the peak of his powers, plotted a flamboyant dressing-down. The next time he was offstage, he paid a slavey to procure for him a sea bass of impressive size and aroma which he concealed under his coat. At the next burst of coughing from the audience, he whipped out the finny fellow and flung him into the laps of Row. A, yelping, "There! Busy yourselves with that, you damned walruses, while the rest of us proceed with the libretto!" In The Yellow Ticket, a play about a Russian prostitute who was forced to wear a yellow ticket as a badge of her shame, Barrymore played a sympathetic American newspaperman. Something about the yellow ticket he stared at night after night began to work on his mind, and soon a fiendish plot began to ferment. One night, after hearing Florence Reed as the prostie wallow in woe for several lachrymose minutes, he responded not with the newspaperman's customary solicitude, but with a practical suggestion inspired by the hypnotic sight of her saffron badge. Genially producing a long strip of IRT subway tickets from his pocket, he cooed, "Here, my dear, maybe business will pick up if you get around a little more – and in something faster than a droshky!" Miss Reed, caught off guard, floundered for an ad lib riposte, but when her Muse failed to come across, she signaled the stage manager to ring down the curtain. Producer A. H. Woods told the ticket-buyers that Barry more had been stricken by a gallstone attack. The next day, Woods received a small, gift-wrapped package containing a pair of costly topaz cuff links and a note: "My gallstones, and thanks. Jack."

Though one of the best, Barrymore was by no means the first or last of the great improvvisatori. The annals of the stage are filled to overflowing with examples of extempore extravagances. Why should this be? Perhaps because of the sameness of repeating the same line, in the same way, at the same moment, at the same spot, one night after another. Monotony nags at actors like the Chinese water torture. Nailed to their roles by run-of-the-play contracts, possibly they are just seeking relief by inventing new lines and business in bold defiance of playwright, director and audience.

To assist them in these acts of defiance, they enlist the aid of practically every mundane item on the prop table. The telephone, for instance:

The stage phone, though a too-convenient boon to lazy playwrights, is anything but a boon to actors. Not only does it sometimes fail to ring at the proper times due to faulty connections and/or gremlins, but it is also a diabolic instrument in the hands of pranksters. Actor Gerald du Maurier (dad of Daphne, the novelist) was one such, and the story of his classic telephonic prank has been told many ways. Our favorite version goes like this: During a lengthy London run of The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. Du Maurier noticed that a fellow actor was, at one point in the play, standing next to the telephone desk while Du Maurier was parked at the opposite side of the stage. The phone was not scheduled to ring at that moment, but (Du Maurier reasoned) if it did ring, the other fellow would be the logical person to answer it and sweat through an impromptu conversation. One evening, therefore, after Du Maurier had slipped a five-pound note to the electrician, the instrument jangled fiercely at a time when no phone had ever jangled before. The prankee, as planned, went pale and gulped visibly. The phone jangled again. The poor patsy's mouth snapped open and shut a few times, but no words came out. Finally, he picked up the instrument, croaked "Yes?" into the mouthpiece, and, after a decent interval, turned calmly to Du Maurier, fixed him with an icy look, drawled "It's for you, old boy," laid the phone gently on the desk and walked away. Du Maurier, so the story goes, was hoist with his own petar.

Stagehands were at the bottom of a telephone plot that deflated the outsize ego of Louis Mann, star of The French Kiss, a comedy that expired in New York's Central Theatre in 1924. Mann was an egregious actor who had been heaping oaths on the show's electricians and stagehands ever since opening night. During the second act he was supposed to chat over a phony phone, but when he picked it up one night, the phone was a practical model and he had his ears grilled with some four-letter dialog that caused him to drop the blower like a hot sparkplug. From that time on, he treated the backstage boys with deference and respect.

The backstage boys fouled corpulent character actor Robert Morley, too, again with a telephone, during the Australian run of Edward, My Son. Morley had made it clear to all and sundry that he considered Australia only slightly more civilized than the dark side of the moon, and the Aussie stagehands – staunch patriots – fixed him by not ringing the phone on cue. Morley, after stalling for several desperate moments, finally decided to pick up the silent phone and pretend to initiate, rather than receive, a call. At that point, the phone rang.

Telephones do more than ring – they can be lavishly larded with Limburger. Frank Fay used this device to flummox Bert Lahr in Delmar's Revels some 30 years ago.

An outside twist on the telephone theme was furnished by Robert Benchley, who, on an October evening of 1944, was to be found in the third row of the Henry Miller Theatre, dozing through the first act of The Visitor, a dull dual-identity doughnut. When the curtain rose on Act II, a telephone was ringing for suspense on an empty stage, and it kept on shrilling for 20 tiresome seconds. Benchley came to. "Why doesn't somebody answer that?" he demanded of all about him: "I think it's for me." Critics hailed the remark as the only bright spot of a dim evening.

A different variety of bell was used by Gertrude Lawrence to sabotage Donald Cook in Skylark. Gertrude rigged her second-act slippers with tiny tinklers and, each time Cook opened his mouth, she waggled her feet, drowning his words in a cadenza of ting-a-ling. At the next performance, Cook grabbed her ankles and released his grip with a ferocious tintinnabulating flourish only during her lines. After the show, she forked over the bells with the caustic comment, "Here's something for your trophy case."

Prop luggage tempts pranksters, too. It can spring open, disclosing all manner of outlandish contents. Or it can be weighted: Elsa Lanchester, playing Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, on one occasion found the black satchel that is all-important to the plot so heavy she couldn't lift it. She wasn't sure what cad had done the dirty deed, but she rather suspected the actor who was essaying the role of Dr. Chasuble: her mate, Charles Laughton.

Cigars are another occupational hazard. The most luscious Havana can be needled with horsehairs or doctored with any of a dozen ingredients guaranteed to annoy the adenoids during an otherwise restful armchair scene. It is said that the redoubtable Richard Mansfield was once put on the receiving end of such a stogie by a stage manager tired of the Mansfield temperament.

Stage drinks are also dangerous to stars who have had a falling-out with one of their company, especially if that one is the leading lady. In Oh Men! Oh Women!, a play of reasonably recent vintage, Tony Randall was required to consume a couple of first-act highballs constructed of the customary cold tea. This he did, night after night, but one night, when he picked up the glass, something new had been added by another cast member, Betsy von Furstenberg. Randall, in some now-forgotten manner, had unwittingly aroused the Von Furstenberg ire, and the exotic ingredient in his potation was Fernet Branca, an Italian digestive aid with marked astringent properties. His lips shrank to an asterisk and he whistled his lines for the remainder of the act.

Cruel as this was, it did serve to prove that the onstage improvisation did not go out when the T-shirt came in. If we previously seemed to be saying that such variations on the playwright's theme have vanished like the well-known snows of yesteryear, please strike that observation from the record: It was hasty, rash and ill-advised.

The King of the T-shirts, Marlon Brando, early in his career did some part (continued on page 54) Prankhood (continued from page 48) padding that turned out disastrously for him – because he did it at the expense of the show's star, one Tallulah Bank-head, a lady not to be trifled with. The show was an out-of-town tryout of Cocteau's The Eagle Has Two Heads, in which Senator Bankhead's kid played the queen of a mythical kingdom and Brando played Stanislas, a poet-peasant who became her lover. According to Cocteau's script, early in the first act Stanislas is supposed to burst into her boudoir bent into her boudoir bent on murdering the queen, but is swerved from his purpose by her beauty and her moving 30-minute monolog in which she welcomes death as delivery from her sad welcomes death as delivery from her sad state. Come to slay, he remains to play. But neither Cocteau nor Bankhead reckoned with free-thinker Brando, who scorned cues, curtains and directions. During Tallulah's long soliloquy, he ignored her, preferring to explore his nostrils, massage his abdomen and scowl at the stagehands in the wings. He cased the furniture, fidgeted with his buttons and glared at the bass viol player, while Tallulah jabbered on. Then, in the last scene, a double-death deal in which he was required to swallow a lethal toddy and ventilate La Bankhead with a pistol, Brando insisted on a lingering demise. While Tallulah lay spread-eagled head down on the palace steps, Marlon mooned around the stage for a full minute looking for a poetic spot to drop dead. His choice made, he went down as if clobbered by a hand grenade, with the audience laughing hysterically. Bank head's first-act speech had been eloquent and impassioned but it was bland as a noodle sandwich compared to the basic-English harangue she delivered after curtain calls. Brando never got to Broad way in that show. Helmut Dantine replaced him the following week, and Helmut, smart cookie, died on cue.

Tallu herself, early in her career, gave her fellow performers some trying moments with a stunt more outrageous than Brando's. Her hair, back then, was knee-length, and the aforementioned Gerald du Maurier (director, producer, star and co-author of a melodrama dubbed The Dancers) was a canny enough showman to realize that the Tallulah tresses were eminently theatrical, a great bit of visual razzle-dazzle. He counseled her to, at an otherwise flattish spot in Act III, unpin her lengthy locks and balloon them out over her head in a broad grandstanding gesture. The gimmick perked up the poky play, and Bankhead's hair became the talk of London – especially since bobbed hair was then at the peak of its vogue. Alas, Bankhead succumbed to that vogue one evil afternoon when, urged by a perverse impulse, she swept into a hairdresser's salon and commanded that her crowning glory be ruthlessly lopped off. That evening, when the hair scene rolled around in Act III, Du Maurier went into a state of shock and had to be helped to his dressing room, where he was heard to sob that Bankhead's crewcut had ruined his play.

Miss Bankhead has also been known to make entrances waving the Confederate flag – in non-Dixie dramas – and to effect quick stage-crossings by lifting voluminous period skirts navel-high and bridging the boards in veritable seven-league strides.

Some dramaturgical deviations are unplanned. Players will forget lines, enter on wrong cues, fail to enter on right cues, or blithely skip a full 10 minutes of vital dialog. This last calamity usually occurs when a character is given two rather similar lines, several pages a part. His mind leaps the gap and chaos reigns until he or a cagey colleague can ad lib the drama back onto the proper rail. Another mental pitfall is simple transposition of words. One stripling actor, who later entered another profession and whose blushes we must therefore shroud in anonymity, fell headlong into this verbal slit-trench with hair-raising regularity. In a repertory theatre production of Boy Meets Girl, he turned "Take him out in the garden for some sunshine" to "Take him out in the sunshine for some garden" and "I'm flying back to my native hills like a homing pigeon" to "I'm flying back to my homing pigeones like a native hill." The following week, in Design for Living, he emended "I thought about you for hours, I swear I did" so that it came out "I swore about you for hours, I thought I did." Surely taking the transposition cake of all time, however, were seasoned pros A. E. Matthews and the aforementioned John Barrymore. Matthews, in a trifle titled Mademoiselle, was alloted the line, "My dear, her beauty would have taken your breath away." His version: "My dear, her breath would have taken your beauty away." Barrymore, while under the influence, is reputed to have turned "What do I know about crude oil and gas?" to "What do I know about crude ass and goil?"

The illustrious Lunts, in one of their early shows together, were in the middle of a particularly rapid, monosyllabic, back-and-forth, building-to-a-climax patch of dialog, when suddenly they both stopped dead. Silence held sway. The stage manager, from the wings, whispered the forgotten line. Nothing happened. He whispered it again, louder. Still not a peep from the frozen Lunts. Finally, he called out the line quite loudly, where-upon Mr. Lunt strode over to the wings and enunirated, strong and clear: "My dear boy, we know the line – but which of us is supposed to say it?"

A performer billed simply as Fanny fouled up the opening night of a musical called Rainbow, back in the late Twenties. Fanny was a burro, and all through rehearsals she remained primly housebroken, just as her trainer had pledged. On the night of the premiere, through, and at a particularly romantic moment in the show, Fanny turned her fanny to the audience and bountifully fertilized the stage.

Audiences sometimes talk back to actors, chastising them for inadequate performances or banal scripts. Henry James, though he won fame as a novelist and writer of short stories, never wrote a successful play. One remarkably talky turkey was his Guy Domville, which London audiences found a long, spirit-crushing bore. The title character, some-where well past the middle of the evening, uttered the luckless line, "I am the last of the Domvilles." A cockney gallery god responded: "And it's a bloody good thing y'are!"

London's old Haymarllet Theatre was the scene of numberless audience riots. In 1749, a Haymarket placard announced the appearance of a conjurer who could "put himself into a quart bottle." The paying public flocked to the theatre in droves, but the incredible shrinking man did not appear. The manager, to placate the offended assemblage, assured them he would indeed appear the following night and would, by way of compensation, put himself into a pint bottle. But the following night, he turned up missing again. As Richard Moody tells it in his engrossing book, The Astor Place Riot: "The Duke of Cumberland rose from his box as furious as the rest of the crowd and, with his sword drawn, directed the infuriated mob to destroy everything within reach. Everyone seemed glad to oblige. The decorative trappings were ripped out, carried into the street, and thrown onto a large bonfire. It was later discovered that this expensive hoax had originated in the whimsical brain of the Duke of Montague."

Mr. Moody has also recorded the price riots at the Covent Garden Theatre in the fall of 1809. An increase in the admission fees caused irate audiences to greet every performance with chants of "Old pricesl Old pricesl" Actor-producer John Kemble believed that "When there is Danger of a Riot always act an Opera; for Musick drowns the Noise of Opposition," so he scrapped Macbeth and quickly scheduled The Beggar's Opera. It didn't help. The riots continued to the end of the year – at which time, it is refreshing to note, the rioters won and the prices came down.

Bernard Shaw witnessed and chroni (continued on page 92) Prankhood (continued from page 54) cled a three-way struggle among actor, audience and author in connection with a musico-dramatic masque, The Passion, produced in turn-of-the-century Paris. Sarah Bernharclt played both the Virgin and the Magdalen, while the character of Jesus was portrayed by a gasbag named Garnier. "On the whole," Shaw reported, "the audience bore up bravely until Garnier rose to deliver a sort of Sermon on the Mount some 40 minutes long: In a quarter of an hour or so the [audience's] coughing took a new tone: it became evident that the more impatient spirits were beginning to cough on purpose, though their lungs were as sound as Garnier's own. Then came a voice crying 'Music, music,' followed by applause, laughter, and some faint protest. Garnier went on, as if deaf. Presently another voice, in heartfelt appeal, cried, 'Enough, enough.' . . . but Garnier held on like grim death; and again the audience held their hand for a moment on the chance of his presently slopping: for it seemed impossible that he could go on much longer. But he did; and the 'storm broke at last all the more furiously because it had been so long pent up. In the midst of it a gentleman rushed down the grades of the amphitheatre: crossed the arena: and shook hands demonstratively with Sarah, then Garnier. . . . This was [the author] Haraucourt himself: and he capped his protest by shaking his fist at the audience, who reiterated their fundamental disagreement with him on the merits of his poem by yells of disapproval. Hereupon, exasperated beyond endurance, he took the extreme step of informing them that if they persisted in their behavior he would there and then leave the room. The threat prevailed. An awe-struck silence fell upon the multitude."

Scene-stealing is a universal villainy practiced by just about every actor who ever drew the sweet smell of greasepaint into his lungs. The notorious "upstaging" one hears so much about can be innocent, but more often is calculated: it consists merely of delivering most of one's lines from a point well toward the rear of the stage, forcing one's confreres (who are required by the script to look at the speaker) to turn then-backs on the audience. Undue cocktail swigging, ice-cube clinking and teacup clanking can draw disproportionate attention to an actor, too, as can overmuch lighting, puffing and ceremonious extinguishing of smokes (aside: did you know every cig lighter used onstage has a book of matches planted next to it, since lighters have a nasty habit of not lighting have a nasty habit of not lighting during performance; and did you know all stage ashtrays have a thin puddle of water in them to ensure quick crushings-out? Now you do). Good old-fashioned lint-picking, however, remains one of the most flagrant brands of scene-swiping extant. Kay Hammond irked Rex Harrison, during the London run of French Without Tears, by plucking lint from his lapel in their most intimate scenes. To chastise her, he cunningly coiled 30 feet of strong white thread beneath his lapel, then wormed one end through the buttonhole. Pouncing on the bait, Miss Hammond was dismayed by her haul. After three tugs had netted 10 feet of thread, she was ready to call it quits, but Rex grabbed her wrist and forced her to unreel the thread to its last centimeter.

For an example of more violent scene-stealing, we must go back to the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915, which featured clowns Ed Wynn and W.C. Fields. Programmed as Nut Sundae, the ubiquitous Wynn had muscled into all of the revue's skits save one – Fields' pool-table routine, in which Fields used rubber balls, a corkscrew cue and a special table to crumple the customers with convulsively repulsive shots. Writing with envy, Wynn finally sneaked under the table one night and tried to steal the act by miscellaneous monkeyshines. Fields caught on quickly enough, but bided his time until Wynn put his neck out too far, whereupon W.C. gave the cur a blockbusting clout with the fat end of the cue, raising on Wynn's dome a prominence resembling a king-size matzo ball.

Often there are compound motives at play when the stars double-cross each other. Was Sarah Bernhardt just being maverick or was she nursing a professional peeve when she slipped a raw egg into the dainty mitt of Mrs. Patrick Campbell during a performance of Maeterlinck's Pelléas and Mélisande? Whatever the reason, Mrs. Pat had to palm the goo until the curtain fell – then all hell broke loose backstage.

The egg trick was also a favorite gag of Enrico Caruso's, though he used two of them and was kind enough to leave them in their shells. While singing with baritone Giraldoni in La Giaconda, the great tenor once managed to get a hen-fruit into both of the victim's hands as he raised them to heaven to protest his hapless lot.

But it was in La Bohème that cut-up Caruso really ran riot. His didoes during Mimi's death throes in the garret unhinged his Left Bank cronies. When Scotti (another unlucky baritone) exited to fetch medicine for Mimi, he had to dart into the ostensibly cold night coatless because Caruso had sewn his sleeves together. A basso in the cast once found his hat filled with water; and on another memorable night, Mimi's deathbed was shifted to stage center as per custom, only to reveal a yawning chamber pot previously planted beneath it by the supposedly grief-stricken Enrico.

A more recent operatic upheaval occurred last year at the La Scala opera house in Milan, when volatile diva Maria Callas, miffed at La Scala's manager, Antonio Ghiringhelli, took grandiloquent revenge during a performance of Il Pirata. Claimed Time: "Instead of pointing offstage to her lover mounting the gallows, Callas leveled a finger at Ghiringhelli's box as she sang: 'There you see . . . distressing torture.'"

Ever since the treaty between the Actors Equity Association and the Producing Managers Association in 1919, performers have been subject to stiff penalties if they persist in padding or editing their roles. For such breaches they can be fined or suspended. Producers, understandably, resent having their attractions tampered with by mere actors. Because of this, ad libs, clowning and the resolving of personal vendettas on company time erupt less frequently today – save on closing nights when the offenders are beyond punishment.

A lot of high jinks are traditionally tolerated at final performances. If the show has had a long run, its farewell may take on a gala air. Good will and camaraderie, long conspicuous by their absence, may break out like hives. Often the management condones or participates in these capers. Singing Moonshine Lullaby in the sleeping car of the Wild West show in Annie Get Your Gun, Ethel Merman did a double take when the head of Irving Berlin, rather than the noggin of one of her stage brothers, split the curtains of an upper berth. About to render My Blue Heaven in Sing Out, Sweet Land, Alfred Drake rocked when the orchestra went into Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, the ballad he had bellowed in Oklahoma! two years before. Earlier in the same show, while Drake was singing Tenting Tonight, a fellow actor, in the guise of a wasted Confederate soldier, tottered from a pup tent supported by a ravishing chorus girl. The curvilinear chorine was a last-minute entry and gave the scene carnal implications alien to the intent of author Walter Kerr, now drama critic of the New York Herald Tribune. There was a touch of rancor in these shenanigans. Most of the players felt that the Theatre Guild had failed them by closing the show prematurely.

At the last performance of the 1934 New Faces, a spectator in the front row arose and sprayed Henry Fonda, James Stewart and Imogene Coca with a seltzer bottle. The culprit was one Besty Beaton. A member of the original company, Miss Beaton had bolted midway in the revue's run on receipt of a better offer. The carbonated salute to her recent cellmates was her nutty notion of a tribute.

Rex Harrison's farewell bow in the Broadway run of My Fair Lady went well until the Embassy Ball scene, in which Harrison wins his waggish wager that he can palm off his pickup as a duchess. The scene is climaxed with the entrance of the Queen of Transylvania, which had been played for the previous 700 nights by Maribel Hammer. But the queen for this final night was Harrison's own bride, Kay Kendall; and to further rattle Rex, Kay's consort was Moss Hart, director of the musical.

Last-night tomfoolery sometimes masks the ache of defeat for performers in an unsuccessful show. When Orson Welles' Around the World was closing, the star's unplanned exit led him straight through the audience. The script had called for Welles to shoot down a bartender. He did so, but the bartender wouldn't stay dead. He was Frank Goodman, Welles' press agent, unofficially substituting for the regular actor, and, gunned though he had been, he showed up grinning toothily behind the bar. Welles chased him off the stage, down into the orchestra and out of the house. The awesome Welles was also foxed on the closing night of his Mercury Theatre Julius Caesar. After delivering a stentorian curtain line, he turned to make a dramatic exit and found his cape safety-pinned to the backdrop.

Most actors, contemplating amusing themselves by slipping a raw oyster into the ingenue's bodice during a love scene, are brought up short not so much by the Treaty of 1919 as by recollection of a drastic act of discipline once dispensed by George M. Cohan. Cohan had written and produced a musical hit called Mary and when word came to him that the Boston company had got out of hand, Mr. Cohan boarded a New Haven train and went up to see about it. He entered the theatre late and quietly. Just before the final curtain, he sent word to the stage manager to have the entire company remain onstage in costume. As soon as the theatre had emptied, Cohan ordered the curtain raised and from a fourth-row seat he addressed his serfs:

"You had a great time kidding and mugging and ad libbing tonight," he told them. "You laughed throughout the performance. Now you're going to play Mary from start to finish just exactly as it was written. Let's see if you can make me laugh."

Did he laugh? It is not recorded, but from that night onward Mary was played strictly according to the book. Cohans and treaties notwithstanding, though, we have a hunch that as long as the theatre endures, and whatever future form it may assume, there'll always be a prankster.