Free All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 by Ethan Mordden Page B

underline that last word, because today to mention this play is to conjure up the lurid antiques that tricked our grandfathers. Maugham himself thought little of his tale’s potential for the stage—but then, he thought little of any play below the level of Aeschylus or Shakespeare. Theatregoing, to Maugham, was akin to “wood-carving or dancing,” whose aim (and he meant this condescendingly) was “to afford delight.”
    Maugham was an authority in this matter, however. As a playwright himself, he was very much a part of Broadway at this time, like his fellow Brits James M. Barrie and A. A. Milne. It’s a loose confederation; Barrie was a Scot and Maugham, few recall, was born in Paris of Irish family. They were agreed on one point, that social-problem plays were for writers working on other stages. Maugham in particular favored light comedies about marriage, set in drawing rooms. Adultery, in Maugham, is quite the fashion, as in The Circle (1921) and The Constant Wife (1926), another of Ethel Barrymore’s outstanding successes. There really can be too much fidelity in this world, as in Maugham’s Home and Beauty, produced here by A. H. Woods and retitled Too Many Husbands (1919), as if it were one of Woods’ sex comedies. But there isn’t any sex, because Estelle Winwood has simply remarried, thinking her first husband dead. He isn’t. Worse, the two husbands are longtime buddies faithful to each other, each of whom insists that his alternate’s vows be honored. So Estelle does the only sensible thing and runs off with a war profiteer.
    Clearly, Maugham’s world was not ready for a Sadie Thompson, even if she was his invention. Note that when Maugham wrote his own South Pacific piece, in The Letter (1927), he was still plying such devices as adultery, murder, and blackmail. True, in telling his short story around Reverend Davidson, Maugham might not have noticed that Sadie had the makings of what Brooks Atkinson later called “one of the few bravura parts in the contemporary drama.” This brings us to the legend of the show: Jeanne Eagels in Rain .
    Cited as often as the John Barrymore Hamlet and Laurette Taylor’s Amanda Wingfield, Eagels’ Sadie encapsulates that favorite American concept of fame, ruin, and early death (at thirty-five). Barrymore and Taylor were brand names—though he was fresh and she a has-been—when they earned their myth, but Eagels was relatively unknown when, on Rain ’s opening night, the audience in Maxine Elliott’s Theatre gave her the ovation of the century. Here, again, is that idyll of the First Night, the reason why people made a point of attending them, fishing for the next heavy catch. In her prostitute’s business casual of black-belted white dress, lace mantilla and woolen scarf, five-and-dime beads topped by a feathery hat overlooking high-button spats, sporting an umbrella, and slipping from brusque and feisty to soothed and radiant within ten seconds, Eagels gave Sadie the dizzy magic of the drug addict. No wonder. After the New York run of 648 performances and two and a half years on the road, Rain closed, freeing Eagels for a show to be staged by New Top Director George Abbott. He found Eagels maddeningly unreliable, with loopy excuses, such as the “a strange man was following me, so I got on the train to Albany” kind of thing. Abbott hired someone else, and after a few silent films, an anticlimactic minor success in the play Her Cardboard Lover (1927) opposite Leslie Howard, and two talkies, Jeanne Eagels was dead, of substance abuse.
    While she was with us, she was Rain and Rain was Jeanne Eagels, as when she danced dirty with another of the marines that Colton and Randolph added to Maugham’s scenario. (“Oh, I love that step,” she says, bending backward for him to lean over her as the two shimmy on Sunday.) Few high-octane acting parts take in such wanton fun as well, and New Yorkers got a chance to test the uniqueness of the Eagels Sadie when Maria