Ethel Barrymore never forgave George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber for the play that they based on her family, the great theater dynasty, the Barrymores. She refused to speak to the authors for five years, and tried (but failed) to sue for libel. Then 15 years after The Royal Family had closed, Kaufman telephoned to ask her to appear at a benefit to be given at Radio City Music Hall during the World War II Bundles for Britain campaign. When Kaufman told her the intended date, she responded icily with one of Kaufman's own best lines, originally spoken by the Ethel Barrymore figure in the play that she had found so offensive. "I'm sorry," she told Kaufman, "but I plan to have laryngitis that day."
In spite of the fury of Ethel Barrymore, and both authors' unconvincing protests that the play's Cavendish family had little to do with the Barrymores, The Royal Family ran 345 nights in New York alone before going to London and then on to become one of the most popular and renowned plays of the century. The current revival, now playing at the Wilbur Theater in Boston through November 13, is an enchanting piece of work. It is a warm, witty play about a great acting family on one level, about the theatrical profession on another, and, on a third level, about the intense joy and satisfaction derived only from working at what one does best. What seems to have attracted Kaufman and Ferber in the characters they created in the Cavendish family is the enthusiastic emotional and spiritual commitment that they feel towards their work, and how this affects their attitude towards everything else they do.
Kaufman and Ferber have embodied--but never too seriously--this peculiar blend of love and commitment in the figure of the late Aubrey Cavendish, the patriarch of this royal family of the theater, whose portrait hangs high on the wall in the Cavendish living room. The great Aubrey Cavendish never quit. He allowed himself time off from his work only once in his life, after finishing the last performance of his last tour, which was ending that night. He did all four curtain calls and only when the curtain had dropped for the last time did he allow himself to go backstage and die.
But this theme is really only an undercurrent in what is more overtly a delightfully humorous and energetic play. Eva Le Gallienne, tritely but rightly called "one of the truly great ladies of the American theater," plays Fanny Cavendish, the aged grande dame of the family and of the stage, apparently modeled after Mrs. John Drew, the famous actress and manager of Philadelphia's Arch Street Theater at the end of the last century, and grandmother of Lionel, Ethel and John Barrymore. Eva Le Gallienne's performance is a masterpiece. She is the clear, ringing voice of Kaufman's satirical commentary on all things fashionable, vain or sentimental, and the vechicle for some of his greatest lines. Sam Levene, probable most widely known as the first Nathan Detroit in the original Broadway production of Guys and Dolls, plays opposite her as Oscar Wolfe, the family's long-suffering theatrical manager, forever hoping to salvage some remnant of his sanity and his job out of the daily chaos of the Cavendish household. Julie Cavendish, the majestic daughter of Fanny and current prima donna of the theater, is played by Carole Shelley, with Leonard Frey as her brother Tony Cavendish, the impossible, flamboyant movie star who is obviously John Barrymore.
The play is so good that the temptation is to tell Barrymore stories instead of trying, and invariably failing, to pin down the perfect mixture of comedy, seriousness and satire that makes it the exhilarating production that it is. The risk of misrepresenting it is too great.
The highly individualistic flamboyance that characterized the Barrymores was, fortunately for John, endearing enough that he was able to weather theatrical and professional typhoons that would have wrecked the careers of other actors who lacked the redeeming power of his personal charm. Ethel was a crucial figure in her brother's life, not only for getting him involved in the stage in the first place, but for extracting him from innumerable women, hauling him out of debt, and even helping him to flee the country when he was wanted as a witness in the Thaw trial. Long before anyone else, she apparently recognized her brother's genius; and long after others had thrown up their arms in exasperation, she never lost faith. The tales about John Barrymore are innumerable--his wildly confident impetuousness, his financial extravagances, the alcoholism that haunted him from the age of 14 onwards, and his legendary love life. Married, he said, "three and a half times," he used to refer to the period of his second marriage with the comment: "When archaeologists discover the missing arms of the Venus de Milo, they will find that she was wearing boxing gloves."
But Ethel was not without her own set of idiosyncracies. By the time she had reached the top of her profession, she is said to have been so imperious that when she once entered a party and found Tallulah Bankhead doing Ethel Barrymore impersonations, she hauled off and slapped the other woman across the face.
Yet they were committed to each other with the same complete dedication that binds the Cavendishes of The Royal Family to one another, a devotion that draws its vitality from the same root that invigorates their work. No matter how much the profession of acting puts unreasonable demands upon their lives, and no matter how unreasonable are the demands that one Cavendish puts on another, the commitment is never broken. It may be questioned in the course of the play, as in the course of their lives, but ultimately it is the foundation upon which everything else is built. To use Fanny Cavendish's own terms, it is what holds the family together and keeps them going. In spite of the pain and loneliness, it is the one thing of real value. When Julie announces that she is leaving the stage forever, in order to "have some fun," Oscar reminds her that as the greatest actress in the theater she has had more "fun" than anyone. For her, as it will always be for her mother even when she is no longer able to act, complete joy and fulfilment can be found only in the theater, in doing what they do best.
It is a strange coincidence that at approximately the same time that Kaufman and Ferber were most vigorously denying any connection between the Cavendishes and the Barrymores, Ethel Barrymore wrote in a manuscript that has never been published in full:
"An artist, a theatrical artist, must be a human being first and an artist second. When you applaud, it is not only our art but our life, for we are what we have been, not only on the stage but off it...I seem by accident to have hit upon the secret of the whole thing--the loneliness of all those who are trying to create. You can't escape it. You are alone, bitterly and inevitably alone."
During the last of many curtain calls last weekend, I watched Sam Levine bend down to kiss Eva Le Gallienne's hand. As he did, she leaned forward and lightly kissed his forehead--a gesture which seemed inadvertently to sum up all the grace and charm of Burry Fredrik and Sally Sear's production of The Royal Family. At the bottom of the first page of the Playbill it says, "The Kennedy Center--Xerox Corporation American Bicentennial Production." I still don't know what that means, but if it means that we have 1976 to thank for bringing this show to Boston, then I'd be willing to retract all the bad things I've said so far about the Bicentennial.
