Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady

Keith Garebian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317337096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

"An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,
The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him." - Henry

George Bernard Shaw famously refused to permit any play of his "to be degraded into an operetta or set to any music except its own." Allowing his beloved Pygmalion to be supplanted by a comic opera was therefore unthinkable; yet Lerner and Loewe transformed it into My Fair Lady (1956), a musical that was to delight audiences and critics alike. By famously reversing Shaw's original ending, the show even dared to establish a cunningly romantic ending.

Keith Garebian delves into the libretto for a fresh take, and explores biographies of the show's principal artists to discover how their roles intersected with real life.

Rex Harrison was an alpha male onstage and off, Julie Andrews struggled with her 'chaste diva' image, and the direction of the sexually ambiguous Moss Hartcontributed to the musical's sexual coding.

1

Rex Harrison

Alpha male

It is a fact universally acknowledged that the greatest Henry Higgins in the history of My Fair Lady was Rex Harrison. It is also a fact almost universally acknowledged that Harrison, in real life, was as chauvinistic, domineering, sneering, patronizing, and narcissistic as Higgins on stage. As he himself noted in a memoir, almost all his major roles were “of the self-centred type, who, in Higgins’s words, ‘desires nothing more / than just the ordinary chance / to live exactly as he likes / and do precisely what he wants’” (Lerner 1956: 56). In other words, his major roles were usually cads, though he strove to get an audience “to find something sympathetic in them, so they can identify, and even grow to like them” (Harrison 1991: 211). In his case, the actor’s medium was certainly himself – and what a self that was! England made him but he, in turn, remade himself, becoming, like Henry Higgins, an artist, husband, and father who demanded that he be in unchallenged control of things. Born the youngest in a family of three (he had two sisters) on March 5, 1908 (“the final flamboyant years of the Edwardian era”) in Huyton, a little village outside Liverpool, Reginald Carey Harrison was conditioned to a life of genteel poverty rather than of ostentatious wealth. Family folklore had it that his mother’s family “was descended from the great actor Edmund Kean (1787–1833), who was, in turn, descended from the poet-composer Henry Carey.” And though Harrison brushes this claim off as “a bit of family nonsense, if you ask me, and remains an unsubstantiated rumour” (Harrison 1991: 2), he was fond of claiming that his antecedents were virtually aristocratic. He told Patrick Garland (who directed a revival of My Fair Lady in London and for a tour in 1980–1) that his grandfather owned a great Georgian house called Belle Vale Hall, which a very young Harrison used to visit, enjoying the croquet lawns, lakes, tennis court, and rookery. Harrison’s grandparents had been used to provincial style before the family fortune foundered. Harrison’s father William was forced to declare bankruptcy, and it was rumoured that Belle Vale was turned into a jam factory and finally demolished to make way for a housing estate. This Dickensian image of genteel poverty may have been the most accurate one. In any event, Rex was brought up in a semi-detached house, and attended a little kindergarten and then a private school before making it into Liverpool College. However, the family myth about ancestral wealth was carefully cultivated by his sister Sylvia, Countess de la Warr; if this myth cannot be definitively proved or disproved, the fact remains that the family reflected “an affluence and indifference to the realities of life which had been passed down through recent generations” (Garland 1998: 67).

The counter-myth – that Harrison’s father was a butcher – also lacked credible evidence. William Harrison was a tall, straight-backed man who habitually wore a cornflower (the Harrow school flower) in the buttonhole of his Norfolk jacket. As his famous son wrote: “He had played hockey for England and run the hundred yards in 10.5 seconds, and had studied engineering in Germany, but throughout his life he did very little work – I think because there was nothing he really wanted to do” (Harrison 1975: 15). William (like Rex, born third but in a larger family) possessed charm, drifting through life “with a singular nonchalance, a certain arrogance, combined with an indifference to work” (Garland 1998: 67), and it seems that some of these character or personality traits were inherited by his son. What transcends both myths is the incontrovertible fact that Rex Harrison’s early years “were transformed and romanticized” (Garland 1998: 67). After a bout of childhood measles, he lost most of the sight in his right eye, so he was not sent to Harrow (where his father had been) but was kept at home and sent to a local school. Naturally, being so much at home and being the youngest, he became something of a mother’s boy, and he often wondered later whether that was how he first grew accustomed to having women around in his life – “in direct contradiction” to the line in the famous song from My Fair Lady: “You Should NEVER Let a Woman in Your Life!” (Harrison 1991: 4).

Early in boyhood, he decided that he was not a Reggie or a Reginald, and asked his mother if she would be so kind as to address him as Rex in future. In his memoir he explains that “this regal choice” was neither influenced by the heroic deeds of an ancient king nor even by admiration of George V, the reigning king of England at that time. Nor was it taken from a cinema or place of entertainment called the Rex. Instead it was but “a childish, arbitrary choice, which may, at best, have occurred because I heard someone calling his dog to heel” (Harrison 1991: 2). At seven, he wished his father (whose war job entailed making armour plate for battleships) wore “a glamorous uniform, festooned with decorations for heroic deeds performed ‘at the front’” (Harrison 1975: 17). Little wonder, then, that Rex fell in love with Uncle Vivian, who wore a rough khaki uniform with puttees, was an excellent sniper for the Canadian forces, and was full of stories of “unbelievable dangers, to say nothing of whisky and lice.” There was a large age-gap between Rex and his two sisters (Sylvia was four years older than he, and Marjorie eight), so from as early as age 8 or 9, Rex presented solo productions at home after seeing pantomime at the Hippodrome in Liverpool. But his first performance was startlingly original in its utter confidence: it consisted of no performance at all, except for repeated bows to the adulation and applause of his family. Star billing, it seems, came naturally and precociously to Rex Harrison, making him a legend in his own juvenescent mind.

As a stage-and-screen star, he was an actor who revelled in certain roles, especially sophisticated ones as an upper-class gent. The image of Harrison as the very model of an English gentleman was wholeheartedly accepted by Hollywood in the late 1940s, but Harrison was not necessarily comfortable living out the iconic role at all times. Garland reports that when Harrison’s fifth wife, Elizabeth Rees-Williams, showed him round the beautiful mansion in St. Jean-Cap Ferrat, he suddenly exclaimed: “I can’t possibly live here, Elizabeth, I’m only an actor” (Garland 1998: 62). A renowned Hollywood film agent once related a magical evening spent with Harrison, the actor’s sixth wife (Mercia Tinker), and a group of friends at a luxurious French restaurant, where for most of the evening Harrison talked passionately and lucidly about the glories of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, though there was no concrete evidence that he had read Proust in the original. On another occasion, the same agent witnessed Harrison working through an entire wine list in very stylish dumb show with a waiter who spoke only French and who assumed that Harrison was speaking French as well (Garland 1998: 63). Such displays of style and authority were part and parcel of Rex Harrison, who was able to parlay them to perfection as Henry Higgins, the incomparable epitome of English arrogance – even though Higgins’s flamboyance was more linguistic than sartorial, meant to dominate and intimidate rather than to edify or humanize.

Acting filled Harrison’s career at Liverpool College, where his first role was as Flute, the bellows-mender, who doubles as Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For one who was notoriously uneasy about any insinuation about homosexuality, this cross-dressing part of Thisbe (played in a rather large blond wig, an ample bosom, long dress, and with a lisp) seems like an ironic biographical footnote, but it does set off its own intriguing suggestions. In his first autobiography, Rex, the actor writes of falling in love “with the small boy playing Titania, only because he looked so beautifully like a girl” and of following him everywhere backstage (Harrison 1975: 20). But what might first seem like latent homosexuality was really something else – displaced or misaimed theatrical illusion – for Harrison’s affection “did not go beyond the costume, and when he took it off I had no time for him at all. Nor can I remember anybody following me about as Thisbe!” (20). The last sentence smacks of self-defensiveness that is, perhaps, symptomatic of a phobia that became more pronounced later in life, but Harrison at the time of the Thisbe experience was already a teenager, and so any discomfort with sexual ambivalence or ambiguity would not have been uncommon for a youth his age.

Harrison’s progress as a professional actor followed the common trajectory of English actors: parts in repertory (the Liverpool Repertory in his case), touring productions of plays that had been hits, and then larger parts in London, where a career can be made or broken. Drawing-room sophistication became his cachet in such comedies as S. N. Behrman’s No Time for Comedy (1939) and Noel Coward’s Design for Living the same year. Although Harrison had outstanding Broadway and Hollywood successes, he did not ascend the brightest heaven of artistic invention till My Fair Lady in 1956. This was not his first foray into the world of George Bernard Shaw: that distinction came with his performance as Cusins in Gabriel Pascal’s black-and-white film version of Major Barbara (1941), an artistic failure. Leslie Howard would precede him as Higgins on film in Pygmalion (1938), co-directed by Anthony Asquith and Howard. The film’s camera-work and montage effects now seem dated and strange, with quick dissolves and fades, but its great achievement is its literary sophistication (derived, of course, from Shaw), just as its most startling innovation is the un-Shavian ending, where the highly dramatic conflict between Higgins and Eliza is rendered in a manner that runs contrary to Shaw. Heavy script-editing and romantic acting by Howard shift the register of Higgins, and though he is superficially the proud, devilish chauvinist who returns at the end to imperiousness, Howard gives him an achingly soft vulnerability and a slower delivery to add weight to his words.

Both these touches are far outside Rex Harrison’s interpretation even at its best, but the probable cause is really the difference in the actors’ temperaments and techniques. As a film actor, Howard was all about English romanticism, often with reserve, and sometimes with grace notes of frailty or vulnerability. Rex Harrison could also be romantic on film, and he always cut a graceful figure, but his acting was not notable for suggestions of human frailty or aching vulnerability. He had vibrant power, suave sophistication, and in his best genre – which was really high comedy – he was (as Richard Burton claimed) “the highest of high comedians,” one in whom the acting and off-stage personality were inextricably bound together (Burton 2012: 636). Both men exemplified what Camille Paglia calls “the well-bred English ‘gentleman,’ a word that cannot be perfectly translated into any other language” – but which was illustrated by the likes of Cary Grant, David Niven, and Michael Wilding, for instance (Paglia 1991: 533). Both Howard and Harrison had a singular male beauty, were witty and polished, and typified a kind of heterosexual glamour. And both had qualities of what Paglia calls “smoothness and elongation” in terms of manner, appearance, and ectomorphic height. Howard was not averse to showing a feminine softness – as he did in Romeo and Juliet (1936), Intermezzo (1939), and Gone with the Wind (1939) – but this type of anti-machismo was beyond Harrison’s range or crafted stage-and-screen personality. Harrison was more suited to play kings or popes, aristocrats rather than plebeians, emperors rather than common men, although he remained forever English no matter whether he was pretending to be King Mongkut (Anna and the King of Siam, 1946), Julius Caesar (Cleopatra, 1963), or Pope Julius II (The Agony and the Ecstasy, 1965). Leslie Howard also remained English in his characterizations, but he was able to subdue his masculinity when required, which is something Harrison could not match. In Staircase, the 1969 film adaptation of Charles Dyer’s two-hander about an aging gay couple who own a barber shop in London, Harrison and Richard Burton (who was playing his partner) camp it up like a sideshow attraction. Although Harrison insists in a memoir that he and Burton would do their “damnedest to play homosexuals without in any way being ‘camp’” (Harrison 1991: 201), Burton contended that his co-star kept becoming less queer daily until he was “hardly queer at all – he’s almost professor Higgins” (Burton 2012: 234). But Burton is as guilty as Harrison in parodying mincing homosexual behavior. As a result, both actors are in embarrassing bad taste, as neither ever really wants to submit to his role or play for essential truth. Their parody becomes an affront to gay sensibility, but the actors (particularly Harrison) appear intent on stressing that they are so straight that even pretence at homosexuality would be self-violation.

My Fair Lady would allow Harrison to remain in control of his image as an alpha male, though it must have come as a shock to him to discover later that he was not the first choice for Higgins. He was certainly among the first to be considered for the role. Stanley Holloway claims in his memoir Wiv a Little Bit o’Luck (1967) that Noel Coward was given top consideration, followed by Michael Redgrave (Holloway 1967: 68). In fact, Redgrave, who could sing, agreed to play the role but then balked at a two-year commitment on Broadway. The only person involved with My Fair Lady who had wanted Harrison was Gabriel Pascal, but he was now dead. Harrison was not a singer, “nor was he an altogether sympathetic choice for a large general audience” (Bach 2001: 344). His Hollywood film career had come to a standstill in 1948 because of various scandals: while married to Lilli Palmer, he was having an affair with American actress Carole Landis, who killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates – some believed because of unhappiness caused by Harrison. Gossip columnists turned against him, and “sexy Rexy” (as he was dubbed) became persona non grata in the Hollywood film community. Harrison got the role “only after every other actor in England had been asked to play it, starting with Noel Coward and ending with John Gielgud” (Bach 2001: 345). Coward’s biographer Sheridan Morley says that it was Coward himself who suggested Harrison to the producers (Morley 1974: 343). Lerner had promulgated a white lie in his autobiography by claiming that the actor had always been everybody’s first and only choice. Lerner “was writing when Harrison was still alive, still playing the part in revival, and still one of the most difficult actors anyone – including Moss [Hart] – had ever encountered” (Bach 2001: 344).¹

To begin with, he was not easy to recruit for the role. When Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe visited the actor backstage in London where Harrison was performing in a long run of Bell, Book and Candle (1954) opposite Lilli Palmer (his wife at the time), they felt “an unmistakable strain and froideur in the air, and discovered that the two stars were unofficially separated off-stage because Harrison was in love with the brilliant comedienne Kay Kendall, whom he joined every night after he and Palmer had completed their curtain calls.” It was not easy to persuade him to undertake a leading musical role, especially one as important as that of Henry Higgins. Harrison let it be known promptly that he hated the two songs already completed for the show (“Please Don’t Marry Me” and “Lady Liza”), and the two composers, to their credit, agreed that the songs “were slick and instead of being acting pieces set to music, they were skin deep and clever word games” and were by no means final products. (Lerner 1978: 58). Next, they had to convince him that Leslie Howard had not been the definitive Higgins, with Lerner arguing that Howard’s Higgins wrongly indicated a full awareness of Eliza’s pain and of “the strange stirrings within himself.” Harrison finally agreed that Howard had been a touch too romantic and sympathetic, writing several decades later: “Alan said he didn’t believe that Higgins had the slightest idea what was worrying Eliza, and I agreed with him. I had to convey the genuine amazement of the man when he discovers that the girl has any feelings of any kind at all” (Harrison 1991: 122).

The next question was whether Harrison could sing well enough for a Broadway musical. Though the actor had appeared in musicals in London in the early 1930s and had even sung in them, his minimal singing ability had been forgotten. At the invitation of Lerner and Loewe, he attempted a verse of “Molly Malone” to piano accompaniment, to the composers’ quick approval. Lerner noted a “tenor timbre, which meant it would carry over an orchestra,” and he and Loewe later discovered that Harrison’s sense of rhythm was faultless. In short, Harrison was “instinctively musical” (L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Rex Harrison
• 2 Julie Andrews
• 3 Moss Hart
• 4 “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
• 5 Queer meanings
• Conclusion
• References
• Index