MY FAIR LADY - Lincoln Center Theater Review

SPRING 2018 ISSUE NO. 71

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Spring 2018, Issue Number 71

Lincoln Center Theater Review Staff Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Executive Editor Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editor Strick&Williams, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Board of Directors Eric M. Mindich, Chairman Kewsong Lee, President Marlene Hess, Leonard Tow, and William D. Zabel Vice Chairmen Jonathan Z. Cohen, Chairman, Executive Committee Jane Lisman Katz, Treasurer John W. Rowe, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Annette Tapert Allen Mike Kriak Allison M. Blinken Eric Kuhn James-Keith Brown Betsy Kenny Lack H. Rodgin Cohen Memrie M. Lewis Ida Cole Ninah Lynne Ide Dangoor Phyllis Mailman David DiDomenico Ellen R. Marram Shari Eberts John Morning Curtland E. Fields Brooke Garber Neidich Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Elyse Newhouse Cathy Barancik Graham Augustus K. Oliver David J. Greenwald Robert Pohly J. Tomilson Hill, Stephanie Shuman Chairman Emeritus David F. Solomon Judith Hiltz Tracey Travis Linda LeRoy Janklow, David Warren Chairman Emeritus Kaily Smith Westbrook Raymond Joabar Kenneth L. Wyse Caryn Zucker John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth Honorary Trustees Hon. John V. Lindsay, Founding Chairman Bernard Gersten, Founding Executive Producer The Rosenthal Family Foundation, Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors, is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is supported by a grant from the Leon Levy Foundation.

Additional support is provided by the David C. Horn Foundation.

Our deepest appreciation for the support provided to the Lincoln Center Theater Review by the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at Lincoln Center Theater.

To subscribe to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

Cover art: The Heart of the Empire (detail), 1904, Niels Moeller Lund. Image source: Ian Dagnall Computing/ Alamy Stock Photo; Frank Modell/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; Opposite page: Willow Bough, William Morris © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Issue 71

The Making of a Musical DOUGLAS McGRATH 4

How to Stop a Show NANCY OLSON LIVINGSTON 10

An Ordinary Man AN INTERVIEW WITH JERRY ADLER 12

Insist on Joy JOHN LAHR 16

From Myth to Musical DOMINIC McHUGH 20

Pygmalion TED HUGHES 20

The Stunning New Woman KATHRYN HUGHES 24

Pygmalion’s Bride CAROL ANN DUFFY 29

Loverly: Impressions of My Fair Lady from Musical Makers 30

The Ingenue in the iPhone REBEKAH LOWIN 34

The Shaw Alphabet for Writers 41

What Women Might Be LYNDALL GORDON 42

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Dear Reader, This expanded edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is dedicated to the revival of an iconic musical, My Fair Lady, directed by Bartlett Sher, whom our audiences will know from many productions, including South Pacific, The King and I, and Oslo. My Fair Lady isn’t a love story or a princess myth. It is a story of transformation, though perhaps not the one we expect. Famously, Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl, is molded into a lady, scrubbed of her Cockney accent, and polished beyond recognition. But, really, Eliza arrives on Henry Higgins’s doorstep full of intelligence and ambition and a force of will matched only by Henry’s own intractability. Indeed, the greater metamorphosis belongs to Henry, a man who has spent his life stonewalled from his emotions who, finally, under Eliza’s tutelage, learns to be human.

Atul Gawande, the surgeon and writer, has observed that “to be human is to be limited.”

Often, we allow our limitations to shape our lives, but what happens when those limitations are challenged? As the lyricist Michael Korie articulates in this issue, “The real story of My Fair Lady, and the reason for our eternal fascination with it, is the conflict between brain and heart.

It’s the story of how we define our lives to ourselves, and of how much we dislike having that story disrupted by someone else.”

The very creation of the musical is its own fantastic story of disruption and transformation.

The Pygmalion myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses was the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which was the basis for Gabriel Pascal’s film of the same name and for the musical My Fair Lady, which Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe created. Within this evolution, we found transformation stories stacked like Russian nesting dolls. Jane Burden Morris, who inspired Shaw’s Eilza Doolittle, went from being the

daughter of a stableman to being the wife of the notable Edwardian artist William Morris and spent the second half of her life in London’s most exalted social and artistic circles. Lerner and Loewe went from making hits to not speaking to reconciling in order to write My Fair Lady. Even the original production of the musical, starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, demanded that both actors push past their limitations. In just this way, George Bernard Shaw, who brought the Pygmalion story into our time, was changed by the women in his life.

My Fair Lady brims with joy and wit, and

with memorable scenes and music we love, but also with big ideas. The articles, poems, and interviews in this special issue arose from the musical’s fascinating history and its provocative ideas about society’s rules, the almost insurmountable rigidity of the British class system, the subversive and modern idea that an individual can shape his or her own destiny, and even our relationship to artificial intelligence, which delivers us back to the question of what makes us human.

Our longtime readers will notice that, not unlike Eliza, the magazine has a fresh, new look.

Evolution is inevitable, and we particularly welcome it in the arrival of Charlotte Strick and Claire Williams Martinez, the new designers of the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

Alexis Gargagliano

The Making of a Musical DOUGLAS McGRATH

ng i k a The M

l a c i s u M a f o

H GRAT AS Mc L G U DO

DO

U

G L A SM c GR

ATH

5

NO ONE HAD A HIGHER OPINION of George Bernard

Shaw than George Bernard Shaw. This is not to say

that he did not have admirers, many of whom, over the years, approached him about making a musi-

cal—or, in those days, an operetta—out of his most

popular play, Pygmalion, the decidedly non-romantic comedy of manners and ideas that everyone wanted to make more romantic.

Shaw had agreed to let Oscar Straus turn his

Arms and the Man into the 1908 musical The

Chocolate Soldier. (Can you imagine a less Shavian title?) The experience was so unsatisfying that

when Kurt Weill and the Theatre Guild approached

Shaw more than thirty years later about turning The Devil’s Disciple into a musical, he replied, “Nothing

will ever induce me to allow any other play of mine to be degraded into an operetta or set to any music

except its own.” He would later use this same logic in declining offers to musicalize Pygmalion, saying

that it had “its own verbal music.” (He is not wrong.)

It was not just the artistic liberties of a poten-

tial musical adaptation that offended Shaw. He had

financial objections, too. Once The Chocolate Soldier existed, people preferred to do it instead of Arms

and the Man, reducing a stream of his income. So Shaw turned away all comers who wanted to get

their hands on Pygmalion, declaring, “Pygmalion is

my most steady source of income: it saved me from ruin during the war, and still brings in a substantial penny every week. To allow a comic opera to sup-

plant it is out of the question.” Nevertheless, the

suitors continued to call. Gertrude Lawrence, who had played Eliza, wanted Noël Coward to turn it

into a musical for her, an idea that Shaw dismissed as “crazy nonsense.”

He was immovable on the point until he died,

and then things started to move. The driving force

behind this change was Gabriel Pascal, a producer whom Alan Jay Lerner described as “a Romanian

who claimed to be a Hungarian and looked like a Himalayan. Architecturally, he was circular . . . his

accent defied any known place of natural origin and his conversation consisted of a medley of simple declarative sentences without articles. ‘You will come to restaurant. Tonight I go to theater.’ ” Pascal and Shaw first met in the nude.

Sometime in the 1920s, Pascal was on the French

Riviera swimming naked toward a red buoy. As

he got closer, he saw a skinny naked man with a long white beard holding on to the buoy. It was

Shaw, who commented on the golden brown of

Pascal’s buttocks and skin, and asked his nationality. Quickly at ease, Pascal revealed that he was a

struggling film producer and asked if he might produce a film of one of Shaw’s plays. Shaw declined,

but added, “If one day you are finally driven to the conclusion that you are utterly broke, and there

is no doubt that you will be, come and call on me.

Maybe then I will let you make one of my plays into a film.”

More than a decade later, a nearly penniless

Pascal rang the bell of Shaw’s cottage in Ayot St.

Lawrence. A maid answered the door. Pascal told

her to tell Mr. Shaw that the film producer with the brown buttocks was here.

“Who sent you?” the maid asked.

“Fate,” he replied, with a producer’s panache.

Shaw overheard this and approached. “Who are you?”

George Bernard Shaw © Hulton Archive / Getty Images

6

“I am Gabriel Pascal. I am motion picture pro-

ducer. Twelve years ago, you called after me from red buoy that when I was utterly broke you would

give me one of your plays. So we have a gentlemen’s agreement.”

Shaw interrupted him. “Young man, I am an

Irishman and not a gentleman.” He pressed Pascal on the matter of finances. “How much money do you have?”

Pascal checked his pocket. “Twelve shillings.”

“Come in,” Shaw said. “You’re the first honest

film producer I’ve ever met.”

Pascal did indeed make a film of Pygmalion,

the celebrated 1938 version with Wendy Hiller as Eliza and Leslie Howard as Higgins. The critic

Pauline Kael thought it was the best Shaw play ever filmed. Shaw wrote a few new scenes for it, but

W. P. Lipscomb and Cecil Lewis did the bulk of the

adaptation, with uncredited work from a few other writers, under Pascal’s supervision. Shaw approved

thoroughly of Pascal’s view of the other writers: “He thought everything they did was wrong and every-

thing I did was right. Naturally I agreed with him.”

Shaw won an Oscar for the screenplay.

The movie fleshes out certain locations in the

play, including a scene in Eliza’s flat. But the great

importance of the movie, especially to My Fair Lady,

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

is that it was here that Shaw’s original ending was changed. In the play, Eliza leaves Higgins after

a quarrel, and Higgins remains onstage alone, in what Shaw describes as “a highly self-satisfied

manner.” As if anticipating the disappointment of

his audience, Shaw then appends a six-and-a-half-

page epilogue in which he explains why Higgins and Eliza would never stay together, concluding with: “She liked Freddy and the Colonel; she does not

like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle.” He apologizes for

explaining it all but attributes the need to the way “our imaginations (are so) enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-

downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of ‘happy endings’ to misfit all stories.”

Knowing Shaw’s feeling about the ending,

Pascal conspired with Lipscomb and Lewis to

change it without telling him until the last possible moment. The last possible moment turned out to

be the film’s sneak preview, with Shaw and his wife seated beside Pascal. Nothing had been said about

the change, and when the scene arrived Shaw did not speak. He only smiled faintly. Miraculously,

it did not diminish his regard for Pascal, whom he called “a genius.” The film was an enormous international success.

Pascal would produce two other Shaw films,

Major Barbara, with Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison, and Caesar and Cleopatra, with Claude Rains and

Vivien Leigh. Neither had the critical or the com-

mercial reception of Pygmalion. So when Shaw died, in 1950, Pascal began to entertain requests to turn

it into a musical. After South Pacific, Mary Martin asked Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein

to take on this new project. They were not the last to try and come away confounded. Others who were sought and escaped: Frank Loesser; Cole

Porter, who declined because of what he said would be the difficulty of writing “English lyrics”; and Irving Berlin.

Finally, Pascal approached Alan Jay Lerner and

Frederick Loewe, whose Brigadoon was set in a

mythical Scottish village, giving rise to the hope

that they might suavely manage the Englishness of Pygmalion. Pascal met Lerner at Lucy’s, a popular

restaurant in Hollywood, where Lerner was working on the screenplay for Brigadoon. Pascal ordered

Gabriel Pascal © Arik Nepo / Condé Nast Collection / Getty Images

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DOUGLAS McGRATH

four plates of spaghetti, one for Lerner and three

for himself, plus four raw eggs. When everything arrived, he said, “I will show you only way to eat

spaghetti,” at which point he cracked one of the eggs over Lerner’s spaghetti and the other three

over his. Lerner recalled that after lunch, as they waited outside for Pascal’s car, “Pascal opened

his fly, extracted the contents, and proceeded to

relieve himself. I have not been able to be embarrassed since.”

Lerner and Loewe discovered the same prob-

lems that had defeated their predecessors. For

one thing, Pygmalion was largely a drawing-room comedy. Most of it took place in Higgins’s study.

Musicals of the day, even the more adult ones,

like Carousel, always had a B plot, with a support-

ing couple, usually comical, whose antics offered

variety from the more serious romance of the main leads. The closest Pygmalion came to a support-

ing comic character was Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza’s father. There didn’t seem to be any opportunities for a chorus or for dance numbers, and the text

was so perfectly constructed that it was hard to

figure out where a song was needed. Most vexing of all was the play’s non-romantic nature, and in

try again. The passing of time made the difficulties

those days musicals were almost always about

of the adaptation seem like possibilities.

a Democratic presidential rally held at Madison

had died. This meant that the rights to the play

what he was working on Hammerstein said sympa-

its artistic judgment. The movie studio MGM had

worked on it for over a year and gave it up.”

because of its prominence and its financial muscle

This discouragement precipitated a breakup in their

informed decision, so it hired the eminent literary

Before he could begin a new project, Lerner devel-

and Loewe immediately asked Freedman to become

a romance. Lerner ran into Oscar Hammerstein at

But there had been a sad change: Gabriel Pascal

Square Garden, and when he told Hammerstein

had gone to Chase Bank, which was not famous for

thetically, if ominously, “It can’t be done. Dick and I

expressed its own interest in the property, and

A few weeks later, so did Lerner and Loewe.

it had the edge. Chase felt unable to make an

partnership and a bad run of events for Lerner.

agent Harold Freedman to resolve the matter. Lerner

oped encephalitis, which led to spinal meningitis,

their agent. He did, and awarded them the rights.

When he recovered, he approached Burton Lane

and Loewe decided to approach Mary Martin for

from Covent Garden as he could get. Loewe, in the

Martin was appearing in Peter Pan, so one night

Sometimes the best thing about a separation

Loewe met Martin, her husband, Richard Halliday,

delirium, and the temporary paralysis of his left leg.

After they had written a few songs, Lerner

about turning “Li’l Abner” into a musical—as far

the role of Eliza, knowing of her earlier interest.

meantime, had begun working with Harold Rome.

after her show, a little past midnight, Lerner and

is that it puts the virtues of your partner in relief,

and Mainbocher, the famous couturier, and played

lunch was had, both Lerner and Loewe had contin-

“Please Don’t Marry Me,” “Lady Liza,” and “Say a

making the reunion all the sweeter. Time passed, a

five songs: “The Ascot Gavotte,” “Just You Wait,”

ued to think about Pygmalion, and they decided to

Prayer for Me Tonight.” (The last three were not

Poster of Pygmalion film 1938.

9

included in the show, but “Say a Prayer for Me

Tonight” was later used in Gigi.) The three guests listened in silence and left almost immediately

after the final note. (Only Mainbocher said anything, telling Lerner that he liked the songs very

much.) But Mary Martin didn’t share his enthusiasm. She went home and walked the floor in

distress, saying over and over, “How could it have happened? How could it have happened? Those

dear boys have lost their talent!” She was wrong in thinking that they had lost their talent, but she

wasn’t wrong in deciding that she shouldn’t play the part. Maybe she knew deep down that, even with all her magic—and she had a lot of it—she

wasn’t a Cockney English flower girl waiting to

become a proper English lady. Her decision would elevate a promising newcomer, Julie Andrews, into

one of the greatest of all Broadway stars. (This was not the last time Andrews would get a part asso-

ciated with Martin: Mary Martin was the original

Maria von Trapp on Broadway.) In taking Andrews for the role, Lerner and Loewe did something

unique in the role’s history: they cast someone who was almost the age Shaw had specified for Eliza—

eighteen. Martin was forty-three when they played the five songs for her, and even then she was six years younger than Mrs. Patrick Campbell had

been when she originated the role in Shaw’s first production.

Lerner and Loewe then went to London to woo

Rex Harrison for the part of Higgins. According to Lerner, Harrison was “a human thermostat who

changes the temperature of every room he enters.”

They played two songs for Harrison, which he

promptly told them he hated. (Lerner said that he was right, and they rewrote them.) Nevertheless,

Harrison, a gifted Shavian actor, was tempted. He kept them waiting for weeks while he considered it. (To finance this extended trip, Lerner, who

came from a family of means, sold his interest in a gold mine.)

While waiting for Harrison to make up his

mind, Lerner was urged by a friend, the film director Lewis Milestone, to use the time for research,

especially for the parts of the story he might least

understand. So one morning at 4 A.M., Lerner went

DOUGLAS McGRATH

begin their day. One of the things he noticed was how very cold it was, which had to have inspired

“All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air . . . warm face, warm hands, warm

feet.” He also overheard their Cockney slang, part of which includes inserting one word into the mid-

dle of another. It was this that led to his enchanting “abso-bloomin’-lutely still.”

Harrison, of course, eventually came in and was

generally needy and impossible throughout most of the rehearsals. He had a loyalty to Shaw that

Shaw himself might have envied, and whenever he suspected that a line had been written by Lerner

instead of by Shaw, he would call out, “Where’s the Penguin? Where’s the Penguin?,” and everything

would stop until the Penguin paperback of the play had been produced and Harrison had checked the

text. He called out “Where’s the Penguin?” so often that one day Lerner and the director Moss Hart gave him a real, taxidermist-stuffed penguin.

There are those two magic words: Moss Hart,

the other essential part of the alchemical magic

that made the musical what it is. Hart directed the show, by all accounts to perfection, and, unlike

many very gifted people who feel that their talent is an excuse for insensitivity (or worse), Hart was

beloved by his company. “He completely captured my heart,” Julie Andrews said. Lerner declared, “Moss Hart . . . had no understudies. He is and

forever will be irreplaceable to more people in more ways than any man I have ever known.”

Under Hart’s guidance and in congenial coop-

eration with his creative team, My Fair Lady opened in 1955 and became what it is: an enduring classic,

as valued for its virtues as Pygmalion is for its own.

When the musical was revived in the 1970s, The New Yorker asked how the world ever got along without it. Luckily, now we will never have to know.

DOUGLAS MCGRATH is a filmmaker and playwright.

His most recent film is the documentary Becoming Mike Nichols. He wrote and directed Emma, Nicholas Nickleby, and Infamous, and is the co-author of Bullets over Broadway.

His book for Beautiful: The Carole King Musical was nominated for a Tony. His new play is an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. He has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times.

to Covent Garden and watched the flower girls

Opposite page: Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, 1914, PF-(bygone1) / Alamy Stock Photo.

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LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

voice, he said, “Nance! (pronounced Naahnce) How are you? How are the children?”

How to Stop a Show NANCY OLSON LIVINGSTON

I told him that we were going to the country

the next morning and would love to see him. I

explained that Alan had an idea for a new work and there was only one person in the entire world who

could compose the music, and that was him. Could he possibly join us for lunch tomorrow? He asked, “What time?” I answered. “One o’clock.” He said, “I’ll be there!”

I told our cook and our nanny that we were

going to the country for the weekend and expected a visitor for lunch. Fritz arrived at one o’clock, and

the three of us sat in our small pine-paneled Early American dining room chatting away. It was obvious that Fritz was delighted to be there.

Alan explained that Dick Rodgers and Oscar

Hammerstein had tried for a year to conquer

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. They owned the rights but had decided to give them up and release them, convinced that this work could never be

transformed into a musical. Alan said they misunderstood how to approach the property: “They’re writing songs for Alfred Drake! They don’t get it.

We decided to shake up our lives. In September of

Higgins is the key. The lyrics and music have to be

house on East Seventy-fourth Street in New York

actor like Rex Harrison should play Higgins. He

along with their nanny, a cook, and a maid, and

stricken. What did Alan mean when he said, “He

Alan was desperate. One Friday morning, he sat on

said, “Don’t worry, Fritz. There will be a place for

that his career was over. He had tried everything and

will sing the love songs, and Eliza has to have a

Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion had become available

being transformed into a duchess.”

1954, we left our country house and leased a town-

an extension of Shaw’s dialogue. A great Shavian

City. We brought our two baby girls, Liza and Jenny,

doesn’t even have to sing that well!” Fritz looked

planned to stay for a year. By the time spring came,

doesn’t even have to sing well?” Alan smiled and

the edge of our bed and started to weep. He said

your melodies. Freddie, who is smitten with Eliza,

nothing was working. He said the rights to George

great voice to be able to sing about her feelings of

and he felt that he knew exactly how to adapt this

Fritz was intrigued, and the two of them were

famous work for a musical. He said that Fritz [Loewe]

so deeply engrossed in Alan’s ideas that I might as

but of course Fritz was no longer talking to him.

left the dining room, walked out the front door, and

my arms around him, and said, “Don’t you under-

ing at me, much less thanking me for lunch. By five

for your call?”

the top of our orchard, arranged for his mistress to

Fritz would answer the phone.

table every day for lunch and dinner.

and dialed Fritz’s home. The minute he heard my

ever had together. The excitement ran high as they

was the only composer who could possibly do it,

I sat up in bed and handed Alan a Kleenex, put

well have been invisible. They got up from the table, crossed the road to the studio without even glanc-

stand that Fritz is sitting by his telephone waiting

o’clock that evening, Fritz had rented the house at

Alan said that was nonsense, he doubted that

join him, and for one year sat at our dining-room

I said, “l’ll prove it to you.” I picked up the phone

Nancy Olson c. 1950s.

Perhaps that year was the happiest Alan and I

plunged into the work. They were both at the top

in the plain.” Pickering told Higgins that perhaps

grateful for the loving atmosphere that pervaded

cise. Higgins was not about to give up, and, sud-

little girls. Sometimes I would wake up in the mid-

the plain”—perfectly.

in the far corner of our bedroom, working on a lyric.

please say it again, which she did, and Fritz started

could read what he was writing to me. I was always

the two of them started singing and dancing and

of their game and knew it. Alan was content and

they should go to bed and forget the whole exer-

our little house in the country, with our two darling

denly, Eliza said, “The rain in Spain stays mainly in

dle of the night to discover Alan seated in the chair

Fritz rushed to the piano, Higgins told Eliza to

He seemed delighted that I was awake, so that he

quietly playing the phrase to music. Suddenly,

an enthusiastic listener.

bull-fighting, finally finishing by falling back on the

One particularly cold and stormy winter night,

I was abruptly awakened by Alan and Fritz shaking

settee in triumph.

I was speechless. They were no longer Higgins

my bed, telling me that I had to get up immediately.

and Pickering (and Eliza) but Alan and Fritz, looking

on fire, and where were the children! They said that

“How do you like it?” I looked at them very seriously

to get up and come to the studio to hear what they

said in panic, “What is it, Nance?” I quietly said,

my galoshes. Alan helped me put on my coat and

unable to continue. There will be such a reaction

and out into one of the worst blizzards I’d ever

take a bow in the middle of the first act. Not just

the driveway, and across the road to the studio,

the glow of hope and excitement in the room lit up

I was alarmed, thinking that perhaps the house was

at me with such expectation. Both said, in chorus,

the house and the children were fine but that I had

and said, “You have created one problem.” Fritz

had just composed and written. Fritz handed me

“This number will stop the show. The actors will be

muffler, and the three of us went down the stairs

from the audience that they may actually have to

experienced. We trudged through the snow, down

one bow but many.” As the wind howled outside,

which was already ablaze with light.

all of Rockland County.

facing the piano and a small settee. Very much like

NANCY OLSON LIVINGSTON is an American actress who received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Betty Schaefer in Sunset Boulevard (1950). She was married to Alan Jay Lerner when he wrote My Fair Lady, which he dedicated to her. She has starred on Broadway in several plays and has appeared in many motion pictures.

I walked in and was told to sit in the armchair

children playing, they set the stage and scene for

me. Alan said that he was both Higgins and Eliza,

and Fritz was Pickering. Alan was an exasperated Higgins who told Eliza to repeat and repeat and

repeat the sentence ”The rain in Spain stays mainly

Nancy Olson, Alan Jay Lerner, and Frederick Loewe © Gordon Parks / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.

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LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

An Ordinary Man AN INTERVIEW WITH JERRY ADLER

This winter John Guare, our co-executive editor, and Ira Weitzman, Lincoln Center Theater’s associate producer of musicals, spoke with Jerry Adler, a theater director and actor recognized for his roles as Herman Rabkin in The Sopranos and as Howard Lyman in The Good Wife.

He began his career in 1951, working as a stage manager on many notable shows, including the original production of My Fair Lady.

JOHN GUARE Your father, Phil Adler,

was the business manager of the Group Theatre. You grew up with Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, and all those people. Did you want to be an actor or a playwright?

JERRY ADLER I grew up at the Group. I was a seven-year-old kid. For a while, they were in terrible financial trouble.

The first hit they had was Men in White,

by Sidney Kingsley; it really pulled them out. I loved the theater, but I never thought of being an actor. Never had any training as an actor. I started acting

Jerry Adler © Craig Blankenhorn/HBO

in my Social Security years.

JG But you wanted to work backstage?

JA Well, my first job was as a stage manager on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and I always wanted to be a Broadway director.

IRA WEITZMAN How did you get the job as the stage manager on My Fair Lady?

JA I was in my early twenties, and I was on the road doing Lunatics and Lovers,

by Sidney Kingsley, with Zero Mostel when Herman Levin, the producer, sent me a telegram saying that he was going to do a musical of Pygmalion and they needed a stage manager, and that Biff Liff, the production stage manager, had recommended me. At the time, I had this marvelous house in California on the beach. And I kept thinking, a musical version of Pygmalion doesn’t sound like something that’s going to run very long.

JG What brought you to California?

JA I was on the road with Zero doing Lunatics and Lovers. We had a lot of problems, because the House Un-American

Activities Committee was after Zero.

Every night we would have to disguise him to come out the stage door, because the FBI was after him. So we would put different hats on him, we’d dress him as a woman or a janitor.

JG They never issued him a subpoena onstage?

JA They never caught him.

IW What were the rehearsals for My Fair Lady like?

JA Just before we went into rehearsal, Moss Hart took Alan Lerner away for a weekend in Atlantic City and redid the whole script, and then we started rehearsing in December 1955.

JG Was Rex Harrison really mean to Julie Andrews?

JA I wouldn’t say that Rex was mean to her, but he was difficult. He wanted more of Shaw in the play. He kept a copy of the Penguin edition of Pygmalion.

And he kept saying, “Mossy, Mossy, let’s hear what the old man has to say."

He had never done Pygmalion. He had

13

never done a musical. He was a nervous wreck, to begin with, and he took it out on everybody else. And even though she was a professional, the fact that he was concerned that she was too lightweight kind of worried Julie.

We were in rehearsal for about ten days, and Julie was worried. “Am I good enough? Is this strong enough? Is this correct? Is the accent right?” Every day was a problem for her. And Rex kept putting her in the background, and he kept saying, “Henry Higgins is the show.”

Moss thought that, unless Julie felt that she was the star of the show, the chemistry wasn’t going to work.

IW Was Moss kind to her?

JA Extraordinarily. Moss had a great instinct for those kinds of things. He dealt with her in a beautiful way. And he dealt with Rex in a very interesting way. He was cooperative but firm, and he tried to keep Lerner in the mix. And I think the result of Rex trying to add more of Higgins improved the narrative of the play. There is a great deal of Shaw’s dialogue in the musical, especially the scene returning from the ball.

JG I learned that Moss took Julie away for a weekend, and she came back the Julie Andrews. You were one of the few

AN INTERVIEW WITH JERRY ADLER

witnesses to that. What happened that weekend?

JA It was Christmas. Moss let the company go for the holiday but kept Julie on, and they met Biff Liff, the pianist, and myself at the rehearsal hall of the New Amsterdam—home of the Ziegfeld Follies, but at the time it was a ratinfested, unbelievably hideous place. It was a psychological weekend.

Biff Liff was Henry Higgins, and I was Pickering—a lousy Pickering. But we didn’t do too many scenes. It was more self-confidence-building. What Moss was instilling in her was: “You’re the star.

There is no show without you.”

But I didn’t know his words had landed until our first day back at rehearsal, when she interrupted Rex while he was talking to Moss about Shaw. At that moment, everybody knew that something had changed.

JG Did Rex listen to her?

JA Moss and Rex both listened.

JG Did Rex know that Moss had taken Julie away for the weekend?

JA Absolutely. Rex encouraged it, because he felt that she wasn’t up to par. He thought that Moss was going to give her line readings and give her a performance in terms of stature and style, and that she was going to copy what Moss told her. He didn’t realize that Moss was going to encourage her and give her stature.

IW That kind of mirrors the show itself.

JA Exactly. Another problem that Julie had was that Cecil Beaton was mistreating her. He didn’t feel that she had any kind of stature. He was a very snobby man, and it didn’t help that she was having trouble onstage. We sent her over to costumes, and Cecil would treat her as a secondary. He didn’t like her figure, didn’t like her style, didn’t feel that she carried herself well, and she used to come back in tears.

IW What was the first performance like?

JA We got to New Haven and there was an orchestra rehearsal at the Jewish

Community Center. It was the first time that Rex had heard the orchestra.

He had never sung with an orchestra before, and it was a major blow to him.

It was such a loud sound that he began to worry about whether his voice was big enough to be heard over the orchestra. He was terribly nervous.

During our tech rehearsal we got as far as “The Rain in Spain,” and Rex walked to the footlights and he said, “Mossy, I’m not opening in this play tonight. As a matter of fact, I may never open in this,” and he walked off the stage and into his dressing room.

Moss went into Rex’s dressing room and then came out and said, “Have everybody meet us back at the Jewish Community Center. We’ll have another rehearsal there.” Then he went back in, and I could hear Rex screaming.

We were supposed to open that night, but instead everyone else was given the evening off and we were all going to meet the next day at the Jewish Community Center. Herman [Levin] came. He was ready to sue Rex, so the lawyers were there. Everybody was in the dressing room—it was a great to-do.

The house manager went into the meeting and told them that he was going to go on the radio and tell everybody not to come to the opening, and that the reason they shouldn’t was that Rex Harrison wasn’t man enough to do the show.

While Biff and I were onstage waiting to hear the outcome, all this secret stuff was going on. Eventually, Moss came out and said, “Gather the players,” in his really marvelous way. “We’re opening.”

It was decided that we were going ahead with the first performance, even though we had never done half of the show. And, on top of that, we had to go out and try and find the cast. It was a terrible night. There was a blizzard. I was in movie theaters making announcements. Biff was going into restaurants and calling everyone. We gathered

14

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

everybody together except one woman, a singer.

JG What happened to her?

JA I’ll never forget her name. Rosemary Gaines was never found. We learned later that she had appendicitis and had gone to the hospital.

We went into that night with an audience without ever having done the whole show. And Moss got up in front of that audience and made one of the great speeches of all time. It was a warm thing about the theater and how great

showstopper. The audience wouldn’t stop cheering. Rex and Bobby Coote were sitting there, not knowing what the hell to do, and Julie grabbed both of them and said, “Okay, guys, let’s take a bow.”

JG What was happening backstage?

JA It was one of the great madhouses of all time. Nobody knew where anything was. We didn’t even know where the costumes were. People were running around. It was wild. It was incredible.

We had twin turntables, which met in the middle of the stage; this had never

it is, and how hard we had worked. He explained that we had never had the chance to rehearse because we had gotten to New Haven too late, and the snow had held up the scenery. And then he ended by saying, “But we depend upon the kindness of strangers.” And we started.

IW So the show went off okay?

JA It was four and a half hours. But the audience never stopped laughing and applauding and screaming. When we did “The Rain in Spain,” it was a

been done before. They were turned by a system of cables, run by a man using a winch. But, once he turned the winch off, the tables drifted a little bit. We never figured out the drift. So every time he used the turntables we’d sort of have to jack them back into place; it was endless. But it didn’t matter. The audience was enraptured.

JG What did Rex Harrison say at the end?

JA Rex got through. He was a bit of a zombie. (Laughs) At the end of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” he was

Moss Hart, Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. Photo by Friedman-Abeles © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

up on the little unit that looked like the house where Henry lived, standing in front of the door. And Rex finished the number and the audience was screaming.

The lights went down, and he was left in the dark. He was just standing there, and I opened the door from behind him and grabbed his jacket. He had no idea what to do next. He went, “What the . . . ?” And I said, “Come on.” He said, “Take me somewhere.” I took him to the last scene.

We did a lot of that. All night long we were running onstage pushing things around, because nothing was matching.

There were a million things going on.

At one point, Rex was walking upstage going into the ballroom, and the ballroom set came down and almost took his head off. I thought people were going to get killed! Lights would go out, we were in the dark, the turntables started turning, nobody knew where to go. It was panic. It was a nightmare. But we got through it. The day after the opening, we finally had a tech rehearsal.

JG Did Moss thank you for getting through that first performance?

JA He came in to see Rex, but he didn’t come by to say hello to everybody and congratulate us. The next day we had tech, though, and he told everybody how virtuous and extraordinary they were.

JG That was a time when things were less democratic. When there was just the star.

JA The stage managers really took care of everybody. We had meetings. It was very communal. When we got through that first performance, we said, “Hey, we’re alive. Nobody got hurt.” And I thought, “If this thing can run four and a half hours and the audience can go berserk for four and a half hours, sitting there in snow clothing, this is a smash.” (Laughs) JG How were Rex and Julie the day after opening?

JA Julie knew she was the star of the show, and Rex knew he could get through it alive.

15

JG Did the show change much after that first performance?

JA The only change that was ever made after that night was cutting a dance sequence called “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight.”

JG Which ended up in Gigi.

IW How long were you in New Haven?

JA We were there for a week, then we went to Philadelphia for two weeks, and then New York. But before we left New Haven I delivered a baby in the theater.

JG What do you mean?

JA It was the Friday night before we went to Philadelphia, and I was alone in the theater after the show, when I heard moaning out in the audience. So I went through the pass door. Everyone was gone. But in the box on the side there was this woman. She said, “I’m having a baby.” Her husband had run out to get a taxi and we were, the two of us, all alone in the theater. She was lying on the floor. I took off my jacket and put it under her, because the baby was beginning to come out. And I delivered the baby. It was a boy. In those days, we had tie clasps that had a little razor thing on the back. And I used that to cut the umbilical cord.

Everybody was great. Her husband came back and took her away. I never got my jacket back.

IW What was the response to the other first performances like?

JA Extraordinary. When we got to Philadelphia, people were standing in the lobby. My father was the general manager of the show. And I had come out to give him something, and the overture was on, and I said, “I have to run back, Dad.” But, listening to the orchestra, I said, “Listen to that. That’s music.” The box office was going mad.

People were throwing money at the box office, and my father said, “Oh, that’s not music— that’s music.” (Laughter) IW Were you the stage manager for the whole New York run, or did you leave at some point?

AN INTERVIEW WITH JERRY ADLER

JA Biff and I would take turns doing other shows. Of course, the thing ran for seven years.

JG Was it a happy run?

When we got through that first performance, we said, “Hey, we’re alive. Nobody got hurt.”

And I thought, “If this thing can run four and a half hours and the audience can go berserk for four and a half hours, sitting there in snow clothing, this is a smash.”

JA It was a great run. Stanley Holloway

was one of the greats. He was late one night for the second “Little Bit of Luck.”

The scene was coming, and he wasn’t in place. He was usually in place, so I knew there was something wrong. His dressing room was on the second floor, so I ran to get him, and I said, “Stanley, Stanley, you’re on.” He said, “How am I doing?” (Laughter) JG What about Rex—did he behave?

JA One night, I came out of the stage door and this couple was walking by.

At the Hellinger Theatre there were big pictures of Rex and Julie and Stanley Holloway. The woman said to her husband, “Do you think that Rex Harrison is his real name?” And he said, “Do I think Rex Harrison is whose real name?”

(Laughter) JG Did Rex and Julie get along eventually?

JA Not really. There was chemistry onstage, but they were never close

offstage. Rex’s wife, Kay Kendall, who we all called Kitty, was such a sweet lady. She was very ill at the time. She was dying, and he was taking care of her.

He would bring her to the dressing room every night, and she would sit there and sleep.

JG She died during the run.

IW Jerry, do you have a favorite moment from working on My Fair Lady?

JA There were many great moments.

I did an understudy rehearsal and played Doolittle, which I can. I always played Doolittle in rehearsals. And I always enjoyed doing that. (Laughs) I copied Stanley’s performance as much as I could.

Once Julie did a marvelous thing for me. There was a luncheon at Sardi’s for the nominees of the Tony Awards and she was at the theater, and she asked me to come with her because she didn’t want to go there alone. It was very nice of her to single me out. I’d accidentally walked in on her one night in her dressing room when she was stark naked, reading the newspaper. (Later, I heard she did that every night.) I closed the door right away. She came out with her robe on. She said, “What did you see?” I said, “Only the headlines, honey.”

(Laughter) JG What was opening night in New York like?

JA Well, by the time we opened here word was already out. The songs were already being played on the radio. So it was a fabulous opening-night party. It was in a private club, and we took over the whole building.

JG Did someone come in and read the reviews at the party?

JA Yeah, Phil Adler. The first one was from Brooks Atkinson: “Musical of the century.”

JG Not bad.

Insist on Joy JOHN LAHR

Alan Jay Lerner described his job this way: “I write

County—his permanent residence was in the

up to curtain down.” But Lerner’s songs, not his

owned a successful chain of women’s specialty

when Lerner hit his stride as a lyricist, America was

imposed on his lyrics and on his troubled life the

the history of Western civilization. Between 1945

to despise glamour,” Lerner said. His particular

lyrics were part of the luster of this Golden Age;

sadness that brings tears to my eyes but a longing

kle. In such memorable musicals as Brigadoon,

title song for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,

musicals—every word spoken or sung from curtain

Superbia of his imagination. His father, Joseph,

stories, are what live after him. In the late 1940s,

stores; Lerner’s emporium was Broadway. He

enjoying the greatest rise in per-capita income in

shellac of charm. “I can never find it in my heart

and 1955, individual wealth nearly tripled. Lerner’s

lyrical line was longing, not loss. “As a rule, it is not

his witty eloquence made the high times spar-

fulfilled,” he said. His impeccably crafted lyrics—the

Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot,

for instance, took ninety-one drafts and nearly a

Lerner whipped up verbal soufflés to accompany

year to complete—made an exhibition of perfect

the buoyant melodies of Frederick Loewe and put

equipoise.

its own well-being. Lerner insisted on joy; he even

boys in a fractious family. “My Pappy was rich and

“Camelot,” an Eden where “the climate must be

my father no longer thought so,” he writes in his

ity has more or less been banished, such fantasies

phony in three movements: arguing, separating,

were “the belle époque of American musical the-

ing father than with his roly-poly mother, Edie, who

before the American public a glamorous sense of

Lerner grew up his father’s favorite of three

incarnated it in the “happily-ever-aftering” of

my Ma was good-lookin’ but by the time I was born

perfect all the year.” To our sour age, in which frivol-

memoir. “Their life together was a familiar sym-

may seem antique. But if the fifties and early sixties

reuniting.” Lerner identified more with his high-roll-

atre,” as Lerner claims in his memoir, then he was

once slapped him because he looked like her hus-

Lerner was a Park Avenue princeling; he

old man. (Of Edie, he observed, “My mother didn’t

one of the most radiant belles of the ball.

band. “I adored him,” Lerner said of his misogynistic

exuded the optimism of his privilege. Although

start really loving me until after the success of

decades—a Manhattan townhouse, a villa in the

boxing matches and, from the age of five, to musi-

he lived in many deluxe homes through the

Brigadoon.”) Lerner regularly accompanied Joseph to

South of France, a colonial farmhouse in Rockland

cals. (He had been named for the insolent Hearst

Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner © Hans Knopf / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty Images

17

JOHN LAHR

drama critic Alan Hale.) His obsession with lang-

of Viennese operetta, was cultured and sardonic. He

with his father. Joseph dispatched his children to

début with the Berlin Philharmonic at fourteen,

acquire proper use of their mother tongue. “I never

Best Legs in Berlin),” the sheet music for which sold

notes in the margin suggesting more interesting

so hard and so long to find a theatrical foothold in

uage and its meticulous deployment also began

had been a child prodigy, had made his solo piano

Bedales, the exclusive British boarding school, to

and, at fifteen, wrote “Kathrin (The Girl with the

sent him a letter that he did not return to me with

two million copies. Perhaps because he’d struggled

ways of saying the same sentence,” Lerner recalled.

America, Loewe was given to loudly proclaiming his

(musicals, language, boxing, philandering) and his

ever knew,” said André Previn, who was the musical

Joseph, at the hospital for his fiftieth operation for

of his lushest melodies.)

scribbled his son a note and pressed it into his hand

Loewe’s were in operetta. According to Lerner,

suppose you’re wondering why I want to live?” he

locale, “providing it is not contemporary,” he said.

Lerner carried his father’s preoccupations

genius. (“He was the single most conceited man I

high expectations into adult life. In the mid-fifties,

director of Gigi, and for whom Loewe wrote some

throat cancer, which had left him unable to speak,

Lerner’s roots were on Forty-second Street;

as he was wheeled into the operating theater. “I

Loewe could musically characterize any period or

wrote. “Because I want to see what happens to you.”

“Alan felt there was something a little dated about

a way of recapturing the adoration in Joseph’s

that he should be writing with Richard Rodgers or

boxing at Harvard, literally had an eye for the

writes in her unpublished memoir, “A Front Row

times. “Alan was a broken man inside,” his third

insisted. “I always considered myself a dramatic

Olson, whose marriage to Lerner spanned his most

any emotion.”

Lerner’s lyrics were exercises in seduction,

[Loewe’s] composing. Somewhere he always felt

defining gaze. Lerner, who had lost an eye while

a more current ‘with it’ composer,” Nancy Olson

ladies. He was a courtly lover. He married eight

Seat.” “I never was really a songwriter,” Loewe

wife, the Academy Award-winning actress Nancy

composer . . . someone that can illustrate in music

creative period (1950–57), told me. “The only way

he could feel whole was when the eyes of another were on him.” Another of his ex-wives quipped, “Marriage was Alan’s way of saying goodbye.”

The glow of idealization was the intoxication of courtship—“almost like being in love,” as Lerner

famously admitted in song. About the affairs of his restless heart, his memoir is weasel-worded.

“The heart may have its reasons of which the

reason knows nothing; but reason all too often has no heart,” he wrote. Elsewhere, however, he confessed, “I wanted the thrill of love, not its disappointments.”

Lerner also had trouble being faithful to his

collaborator Fritz Loewe, which became an issue between them. When they formed their partner-

ship, in 1942, after a chance meeting at the Lambs Club, Lerner was an eager beaver of twenty-four;

Loewe, at forty-one, was a veteran of disappointment. Lerner was fast-talking, fast-thinking,

fast-moving—in other words, American. Loewe,

who was Austrian and whose father had been a star

Lerner could work without Loewe, but Loewe

couldn’t really work without Lerner. (Of Loewe’s

six musicals, five were written with Lerner.) In 1947,

after their breakthrough success, Brigadoon, Lerner jilted Loewe to collaborate with another diminutive émigré, Kurt Weill, on Love Life (1948). After

Stamp © United States Postal Service. All rights reserved.

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LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

their second success, Paint Your Wagon, in 1951, Lerner left Loewe again for a fling in Hollywood

with Burton Lane and Arthur Schwartz. As early as 1952, Lerner and Loewe had flirted with the idea of adapting George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, but, like many composing teams before them, they

could not crack the play’s structure to make it singable. In 1954, when the property became free again,

the American musical was undergoing a mutation.

“It no longer seemed essential that a musical have

a subplot, nor that there be an ever-present ensemble filling the air with high C’s and flying limbs,”

Lerner said. Even more important, Lerner had hit

upon the key to musicalizing Pygmalion: he made the lyrics an extension of Shaw’s dialogue. There

was only one problem: he and Loewe were not on speaking terms.

In the two years since they’d been in touch,

Lerner’s Hollywood projects had collapsed and his

mooted stage musical based on Al Capp’s Li’l Abner

had stalled. Olson remembers Lerner in tears at the

the show’s fifteen songs became standards. The

about the Shaw project. “He said Fritz was the only

of the most memorable in history. “A great night

edge of their bed, feeling washed up, and stymied composer that could possibly do it, but of course

Fritz was no longer talking to him,” Olson recalled.

“I sat up in bed and handed Alan a Kleenex, put

my arms around him, and said, ‘Don’t you under-

stand that Fritz is sitting by his telephone waiting for your call?’ Alan said that was nonsense, he

doubted that Fritz would answer the phone. I said,

‘I’ll prove it to you.’ I picked up the phone and dialed Fritz’s home. The minute he heard my voice he said, ‘Nance!’—pronounced Naahnce—‘How are you?’ I

explained that Alan had an idea for a new work and there was only one person in the entire world who

could compose the music and that was him. Could he possibly join us for lunch tomorrow? He asked, ‘What time?’ ”

By the end of lunch, the pair had begun work.

Loewe rented a house near Lerner’s, in Rockland County. “For one year Fritz sat at our dining-

room table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” Olson writes. Two false starts and thirty songs later,

Lerner and Loewe had made their masterpiece, a show that changed their lives and the shape of

musical storytelling. Lerner, who had never adapted a story, was at his most brilliant; almost all of

Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe © Gordon Parks / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images

Broadway opening of My Fair Lady, in 1956, was one for envy,” Oscar Levant called it. Lerner and Loewe owned thirty percent of the show. By the mid-six-

ties, when the revenues from the various productions, recordings, and the movie were calculated,

the show had grossed just over six billion dollars in today’s money.

As a partnership, Lerner and Loewe were a

study in contradictions. One was a workaholic, the other a bon vivant. One preferred gambling on the roulette wheels of the Riviera; the other’s flutter

was marriage. “You are a funny little boy,” Loewe

told Lerner. “You build a nest and then shit in it.” To the end of his days, Loewe, who had tried marriage once, preferred to play the field. Both were roués

of the Rialto. “It’s a melancholy fact that between

the two of us we have supported more women than Playtex,” Loewe said. Lerner liked to socialize with the Great and the Good, counting as friends his

Choate classmate John F. Kennedy and his Harvard collaborator Leonard Bernstein, with whom he’d written a Hasty Pudding Club show. By contrast,

Loewe preferred to keep to himself. “What’s the

point of seeing people: those poor sad faces with all their heartbreaking troubles?” he asked.

19

Almost all their songs were first inspired by

JOHN LAHR

After the hard slog to mount Camelot, in 1960,

Loewe’s improvisations at the piano, usually in his

at age sixty Loewe retired from the partnership.

always works,” Lerner writes. (“I couldn’t write a

nothing to mark the end of the long voyage we had

Brigadoon became a hit. “That is why I usually

to decode Loewe’s loud silence after a decade of

underpants, the “Byronesque costume in which he

“There were no formal farewells, no goodbyes,

note with clothes on,” Loewe told a reporter after

been on together,” Lerner writes, leaving the reader

work in the morning before I’m dressed.”) At the

sensational success.

for hours; Lerner listened, scribbling ideas, biting

the shift in Lerner’s luck. “Youth has many glories,

he wore surgical gloves. Once a melody caught

electronic amplification can turn a belch into an

“The poor little boy. I’ve knocked him up!” At that

at home unmoored both the musical and Lerner.

weighing in only when the song was done. “Fritz

overtaken by history and the wah-wah pedal. As he

was finished,” Lerner writes. “He refused to play

Have,” from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,

music that I didn’t like and I’ve never kept a word he

on Broadway in 1965:

piano, Loewe lost himself in the music, sometimes

The arrival of rock and roll also contributed to

his cuticles until they bled so badly that in public

but judgment is not one of them. No amount of

Lerner’s fancy, Loewe was in the habit of saying,

aria,” he writes. Vietnam abroad and assassination

point, Loewe would leave Lerner alone to write,

He, and his lyrical idiom, were suddenly passé,

never regarded the music as finished until the lyric

put it so brilliantly, in “What Did I Have That I Don’t

anyone a naked melody. He never kept a bar of

which was written with Burton Lane and premiered

didn’t like.”

I’M JUST A VICTIM OF TIME,

Lerner’s witty memoir, The Street Where I Live, charts

The Street Where I Live focuses exclusively on

Every Broadway hit is some kind of mystery.

OBSOLETE IN MY PRIME!

Lerner’s collaboration with Loewe, but his career didn’t end there. He went on to write nine more

musicals with other outstanding composers, André

Lerner’s lyrics were exercises in seduction.

Previn, Leonard Bernstein, and Charles Strouse

among them. He never had another hit. However, he had high hopes for a show with Andrew Lloyd

Webber. “Who would have thought it,” he wrote to Lloyd Webber from his hospital bed, where he the exhausting, sometimes hilarious roller-coaster

ride of this luminous body of work. In the wings of this lively account of a show-biz life are Lerner’s romantic entanglements, his mounting alimony payments, his tax evasion, and, finally, his discovery of the notori-

ous Max Jacobson—“Dr. Feelgood”—whose shots of amphetamines, laced with steroids, painkillers, and

animal hormones, lifted his spirits, along with those of many other depressed celebrities from Tennessee

Williams and Marilyn Monroe to J.F.K. Jacobson, who

was known as Uncle Max to Lerner’s children, became a fixture in Lerner’s life, administering his pick-me-up

jabs as often as three times a day. “Maybe those shots will destroy me but they make me see life in a good

light,” Lerner said, at the divorce proceedings of wife No. 4 in 1964.

died of lung cancer on June 14, 1986, at the age of sixty-seven. “Instead of writing ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ I ended up looking like him.”

JOHN LAHR has written for The New Yorker since 1992.

His unique inquiry has continued in twenty books, including studies of his father, Bert Lahr, Joe Orton, Noël Coward, Barry Humphries, and, latterly, Tennessee Williams, which won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for best biography and was nominated for the National Book Award. Lahr was the first critic to win a Tony Award, for co-authoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty. He is also the first critic to receive the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Achievement in Theater.

Excerpted from The Street Where I Live by Alan Jay Lerner, foreword by John Lahr. © 1978 by Alan Jay Lerner. Foreword © 2018 by John Lahr. Used with the permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

FROM MYTH TO MUSICAL DOMINIC McHUGH

PYGMALION TED HUGHES

The Pygmalion myth has its roots in classical Greek legend. Ovid tells us (in Dryden’s translation of Metamorphoses) that Pygmalion “loathing their lascivious life, / Abhorr’d all womankind, but most a wife: / So single chose to live, and shunn’d to wed, / Well pleas’d to want a consort of his bed.” The misogynist Pygmalion is a sculptor, and in spite of scorning women in general his “fear of idleness” induces him to carve a beautiful maiden out of ivory. Pleased with his work, Pygmalion “commends, admires, / Adores; and last, the thing ador’d, desires.” This neat progression from feeling pride in the product of his work to finding it an object of desire culminates in Pygmalion’s prayer to Venus, begging her to make the statue come to life. The goddess takes pity on Pygmalion and blesses the union of the sculptor and his creation by granting them a son, Paphos. Later versions refer to the sculpture as Galatea, while in his 1767 retelling Goethe calls her Elise, based on variations of the story of Dido (Elissa).

The myth was of interest to visual artists (Rodin, Goya), inspired numerous works of literature (from William Morris’s “Earthly Paradise” to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and was the subject of operas

by Rameau, Cherubini, and Donizetti, as well as Kurt Weill’s 1943 musical One Touch of Venus. Yet its most famous incarnation will probably always be George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play, Pygmalion, and the latter’s adaptation into the musical My Fair Lady.

From the poet’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

DOMINIC McHUGH is a lecturer in musicology at the University of Sheffield and the author of Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady.

Reprinted from Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady by Dominic McHugh, with permission from Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2014.

If you could ask the region of Amathus Where the mines are so rich Whether it had wanted those women The Propoetides, You would be laughed at, as if you had asked Whether it had wanted those men Whose horned heads earned them the name Cerastae.

An altar to Zeus, God of hospitality, stood at the doors Of the Cerastae, soaked— A stranger would assume—with the blood Of the humbly sacrificed Suckling calves and new lambs of Amathus.

Wrong. They butchered their guests.

Venus was so revolted to see offered Such desecrated fare She vowed to desert Ophiusa And her favoured cities.

But she paused: “The cities,” she reasoned, “And the places I love— What crime have these innocents committed?

“Why should I punish all For a few? Let me pick out the guilty And banish or kill them— Or sentence them to some fate not quite either But a dire part of both.

The fate for such, I think, is to become Some vile thing not themselves.”

The horns of the Cerastae suggested One quick solution for all— Those men became bullocks. As for the others, The Propoetides— Fools who denied Venus divinity— She stripped off their good names And their undergarments, and made them whores.

As those women hardened, Dulled by shame, delighting to make oaths Before the gods in heaven

21

Of their every lie, their features hardened Like their hearts. Soon they shrank To the split-off, heartless, treacherous hardness Of sharp shards of flint.

The spectacle of these cursed women sent Pygmalion the sculptor slightly mad.

He adored woman, but he saw The wickedness of these particular women Transform, as by some occult connection, Every woman’s uterus to a spider.

Her face, voice, gestures, hair became its web.

Her perfume was a floating horror. Her glance Left a spider-bite. He couldn’t control it.

So he lived In the solitary confinement Of a phobia, Shunning living women, wifeless.

Yet he still dreamed of woman.

He dreamed Unbrokenly awake as asleep The perfect body of a perfect woman— Though this dream Was not so much the dream of a perfect woman As a spectre, sick of unbeing, That had taken possession of his body To find herself a life.

She moved into his hands, She took possession of his fingers And began to sculpt a perfect woman.

So he watched his hands shaping a woman As if he were still asleep. Until Life-size, ivory, as if alive Her perfect figure lay in his studio.

So he had made a woman Lovelier than any living woman.

And when he gazed at her As if coming awake he fell in love.

His own art amazed him, she was so real.

She might have moved, he thought, Only her modesty Her sole garment—invisible, Woven from the fabric of his dream— Held her as if slightly ashamed Of stepping into life.

TED HUGHES

Then his love For this woman so palpably a woman Became his life.

Incessantly now He caressed her, Searching for the warmth of living flesh, His finger-tip whorls filtering out Every feel of mere ivory.

He kissed her, closing his eyes To divine an answering kiss of life In her perfect lips.

And he would not believe They were after all only ivory.

He spoke to her, he stroked her Lightly to feel her living aura Soft as down over her whiteness.

His fingers gripped her hard To feel flesh yield under the pressure That half wanted to bruise her Into a proof of life, and half did not Want to hurt or mar or least of all Find her the solid ivory he had made her.

He flattered her.

He brought her love-gifts, knick-knacks, Speckled shells, gem pebbles, Little rainbow birds in pretty cages, Flowers, pendants, drops of amber.

He dressed her In the fashion of the moment, Set costly rings on her cold fingers, Hung pearls in her ears, coiled ropes of pearl To drape her ivory breasts.

Did any of all this add to her beauty?

He gazed at her adorned, and his head ached.

But then he stripped everything off her And his brain swam, his eyes Dazzled to contemplate The greater beauty of her beauty naked.

He laid her on his couch, Bedded her in pillows And soft sumptuous waves of Tyrian purple As if she might delight in the luxury.

Then, lying beside her, he embraced her And whispered in her ear every endearment.

22

The day came For the festival of Venus—an uproar Of processions through all Cyprus.

Snowy heifers, horns gilded, kneeled Under the axe, at the altars.

Pygmalion had completed his offerings.

And now he prayed, watching the smoke Of the incense hump shapelessly upwards.

He hardly dared to think What he truly wanted As he formed the words: “O Venus, You gods have power To give whatever you please. O Venus, Send me a wife. And let her resemble—“ He was afraid To ask for his ivory woman’s very self— “Let her resemble The woman I have carved in ivory.”

Venus was listening To a million murmurs over the whole island.

She swirled in the uplift of incense Like a great fish suddenly bulging Into a tide-freshened pool.

She heard every word Pygmalion had not dared to pronounce.

She came near. She poised above him— And the altar fires drank her assent Like a richer fuel.

They flared up, three times, Tossing horns of flame.

Pygmalion hurried away home To his ivory obsession. He burst in, Fevered with deprivation, Fell on her, embraced her, and kissed her Like one collapsing in a desert To drink at a dribble from a rock.

But his hand sprang off her breast As if stung.

He lowered it again, incredulous At the softness, the warmth Under his fingers. Warm And soft as warm soft wax— But alive With the elastic of life.

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

He knew Giddy as he was with longing and prayers This must be hallucination.

He jerked himself back to his senses And prodded the ivory. He squeezed it.

But it was no longer ivory.

Her pulse throbbed under his thumb.

Then Pygmalion’s legs gave beneath him.

On his knees He sobbed his thanks to Venus. And there Pressed his lips On lips that were alive.

She woke to his kisses and blushed To find herself kissing One who kissed her, And opened her eyes for the first time To the light and her lover together.

Venus blessed the wedding That she had so artfully arranged.

And after nine moons Pygmalion’s bride Bore the child, Paphos, Who gave his name to the whole island.

TED HUGHES (1930–1998) produced more than forty books of poetry, prose, drama, translation, and children’s literature. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957, and his last collection, Birthday Letters, was named the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1998, and also received the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He was appointed the poet laureate of the United Kingdom in 1984.

“Pygmalion,” from Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1997 by Ted Hughes.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Opposite page: Clockwise from top left: Mrs. Patrick Campbell: photo by White Studio © Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Wendy Hiller: Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Courtesy Everett Collection; Lynne Fontanne: Photo by Vandamm Studio © Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Audrey Hepburn: image courtesy Everett Collection

The Elizas

TOP ROW

Mrs. Patrick Campbell Gertrude Lawrence Diana Rigg MIDDLE ROW

Audrey Hepburn Julie Andrews Wendy Hiller BOTTOM ROW

Lynn Fontanne

The Stunning New Woman KATHRYN HUGHES

“Walk? Not bloody likely. I’m going in a taxi!”

outburst. The young Irish playwright had first met

Majesty’s Theatre on April 11,1914, the audience

William Morris, the veteran socialist writer, crafts-

was Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney heroine of George

Mrs. Morris still radiated the extraordinary beauty

subject of Professor Henry Higgins’s experiment

mass of curly black hair, bee-stung lips, and swan’s

a duchess simply by changing the way she speaks.

Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the 1860s, including

“bloody” was the equivalent of today’s f-word—

business partner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For young

When these words rang out from the stage of His

Jane Morris in the mid-1880s through her husband,

collapsed into scandalized laughter. The speaker

man, and campaigner. Although now in her forties,

Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, who becomes the

that had made her the emblem of a generation. The

to see whether a flower seller can be turned into

neck had appeared in some of the most famous

It wasn’t just the bad language—a century ago

Proserpine, the masterpiece by Morris’s friend and

but the fact that Eliza delivered her gutter talk in

Shaw, who had worked as an art critic during his

tickled. The audience guffawed for seventy-five

watching a beautiful painting come to life, much

ing—which caused Shaw to panic that he had

statue, the exquisite Galatea, start to breathe be-

her newly acquired upper-class accent that really

early days, meeting Jane Morris must have felt like

seconds—the assistant stage manager was count-

as the sculptor Pygmalion beholds his beloved

sabotaged the whole point of the piece. Pygmalion

fore his eyes.

was not intended as a racy drawing-room comedy

An avid follower of artistic and political gossip,

but a scalpel-sharp investigation into the way that

Shaw couldn’t have been long piecing together

be pegged to the state of one’s vowels in twentieth-

Jane Burden, in Oxford, in 1839 to a father who

social identity (read: social opportunity) continued to

the story of Mrs. Morris’s early years. She was born

century Britain.

was a stablehand and a mother who was a wash-

figure on whom Shaw is often said to have modeled

divided than any in Britain, including London. On

betraying her social origins in such an ill-tempered

most ancient and prestigious seat of learning in

How ironic, then, to discover that the historical

erwoman. The city at that time was more socially

the character of Eliza would never have dreamed of

the one hand was the Gown, or the university, the

Study of Jane Morris for Mnemosyne, 1876, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

25

KATHRYN HUGHES

Britain, a magnet for rich and aristocratic young

Ophelia in Millais’s famous painting of 1852. With

Town, a network of inns, stables, shops, and laun-

offing, even the elastic Rossetti had to acknowledge

dle- and upper-class inhabitants run smoothly. The

woman of Jane.

Oxford, and, as Jane entered her teens, it seemed

offer himself as a substitute husband at this point

the lowest reaches of domestic service.

friend to take his place, since it would keep Jane

worlds of Town and Gown spectacularly aligned.

orbit. Or perhaps Morris was so caught up in the

Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, had recently won

to rescue Queen Guinevere from her real-life fate

interior wall of the Oxford Union library building. To

William out of coolly practical motives; years

fellow artists from London, including their friend

with him. To a working-class girl looking to better

ing member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Rossetti. While the latter might be an established

men swapped their usual religious subjects for the

a family fortune. Morris, by contrast, came from

Rossetti worked on Sir Lancelot’s Vision of the Holy

time financial security. Jane was now spirited away

men. Supporting this gilded existence was the

his much delayed wedding to Lizzie now in the

dries, all designed to make the lives of the mid-

that he was not in a position to make an honest

Burdens belonged emphatically to the Town side of

Quite why William Morris stepped forward to

inevitable that she would follow her mother into

we do not know. Rossetti certainly encouraged his

One day in the early autumn of 1857, the

Burden within their shared artistic and emotional

Two young graduates of the university, William

ideals of Arthurian chivalry that he felt compelled

a commission to produce decorative murals for the

as a domestic skivvy. Jane, for her part, accepted

help with the mammoth task, they invited several

later, she admitted that she had never been in love

the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a found-

herself, Mr. Morris was a far safer punt than Mr.

Since the Union was a secular space, the young

artist, he did not have the comfortable cushion of

Arthurian legends that had set their senses on fire.

money, and his proposal implied a guarantee of life-

Grail, Burne-Jones contributed Nimue Brings Sir

from her Oxford slum to the Red House, a glorious

Peleus to Ettarde After Their Quarrel, while Morris painted Sir Palomides’ Jealousy of Sir Tristram and Iseult.

Although the young painters were comfortable

posing for one another as knights of the Round

neo-Gothic manor that Morris had commissioned in South London from the fashionable architect

Philip Webb. Jane Burden hadn’t simply landed a prince; she had acquired a fairy-tale castle.

In having his Cockney heroine Eliza Doolittle

Table and even as the occasional wizard, when it

picked up in London’s theaterland by not one

they needed to look farther afield. In London, it

Higgins and the retired military man Colonel

came to finding models for the female characters

but two gentlemen phonetics experts—Professor

was their habit to haunt streets, pubs, and parks in

Pickering—Shaw was perhaps echoing the fact that

search of “stunners,” working-class girls with the off-kilter looks they so admired who were likely

to agree to sit for a shilling. It was a strategy that now paid off in Oxford. One night at the theater,

Rossetti and Burne-Jones were ecstatic to spot a girl in the audience with exactly the height, pallor, and

glorious hair to slip seamlessly into their Arthurian fantasia. Rossetti, indeed, was so delighted to find this unlikely swan in a sea of common fowl that he was quick to declare himself in love with the

stablehand’s daughter. He would have asked Jane to marry him, but there was one problem: he was already committed to another “stunner,” Lizzie

Siddal, the red-haired milliner who had modeled as

Photograph by John R. Parsons of Jane Morris, posed by Rossetti, 1865 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Jane had first been encountered and desired by at

least two and probably three Pre-Raphaelite paint-

ers: Burne-Jones, Morris, and Rossetti. But whether or not Jane was obliged to undergo the kind of

intense social makeover that Higgins demands of

Eliza is less clear. Certainly biographers have speculated that during the year of her engagement to Morris the teenager was given careful coaching,

including piano lessons and immersion in English literature, to prepare her for her new life as the

wife of an Oxford graduate. Even with these reparative measures in place, though, the relationship

was considered sufficiently scandalous that none

of the groom’s relations attended the wedding on April 26, 1859.

This social squeamishness might seem surpris-

ing, given William Morris’s great commitment to socialism—he was tireless in espousing a system

of common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. But he was also a young

man of his time, which meant that he felt a certain embarrassment at the thought of his working-

class wife meeting his widowed mother and sisters.

Rossetti, likewise, didn’t introduce Lizzie, the

daughter of a very respectable cutler, to his mother until five years into their relationship. Meanwhile, William Holman Hunt, another Pre-Raphaelite

Brother, paid for his teenage barmaid fiancée, Annie Miller, to have lessons in elocution and deportment in order to train her for the job of being his wife.

Painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress), 1868. Courtesy of Society of Antiquaries of London.

But Hunt’s plan had spectacularly unintended consequences. While the artist was away on a painting

expedition in the Holy Land, a newly polished Annie became friendly with a series of upper-class men,

including Viscount Ranelagh, whose first cousin she eventually married.

Pierre Bourdieu, the late-twentieth-century

social theorist, has written influentially about social embodiment, about how from birth

we absorb ways of sitting, standing, and speak-

ing, together with a repertoire of handshakes and nose-blowing, all of which announce our social

standing. It is these subtle physical signals, rather than anything intrinsic to our being, which deter-

mine how we are “read” and valued by a culture.

This is, of course, the premise on which Pygmalion

is predicated: Professor Henry Higgins wants to see if changing the way Eliza speaks will transform her

entire social trajectory, and even her inner life. It’s a process that Jane Morris instinctively grasped, too.

Evidence suggests that over the years she learned

how to modify her body and conduct in order to fit seamlessly into her husband’s milieu, which, while socialist and progressive, remained essentially genteel.

Jane’s approach was necessarily less theatrical

than the fictional Eliza’s. Rather than adopt an

entirely new way of speaking to eradicate her broad Oxford accent, she simply stopped talking in com-

pany. Shaw always maintained that Jane Morris was

Photograph by John R. Parsons of Jane Morris, posed by Rossetti, 1865 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

27

“the silentest woman I have ever met,” although

KATHRYN HUGHES

Shaw remained fascinated by Mrs. Morris

the fact that others recalled her as “queenly” sug-

throughout his long life. As an outsider himself—

as a supremely confident matron who felt no need

in which she had negotiated her way to the heart

self-containment, Jane may have been following

way of staying close to her, he also cultivated the

wife, who always gave the impression when in com-

Shaw’s diary shows him singing duets with May at

before it had even started.

the theater to sample the thrilling New Drama of

tricky to pull off when you had not been born to it,

men and women in this dawning age of sexual

Raphaelite artists famously advocated Aesthetic

Shaw in 1886, by means of a hand-painted Valentine

lines, cinched waists, and shrieking aniline colors

marry on the ground of poverty. (At this point, he

favored unstructured gowns made from rich, dark

Unwilling, though, to give up his connection with

gests that she came across not as a gauche girl but

Irish and relatively poor—he scrutinized the manner

to make small talk. In this retreat into nonverbal

of British artistic and political life. Perhaps as a

the example of Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti’s Cockney

intense affection of her younger daughter, May.

pany that she was keen to shut down conversation

Socialist League parties and accompanying her to

If speaking like a middle-class woman was

Ibsen, with its exploration of relationships between

dressing like one was altogether easier. The Pre-

equality. Despite May’s declaration of her love for

dress for their women. Instead of the huge crino-

card, the young Irishman declared himself unable to

of commercial fashion, Jane, Lizzie, and the others

was still a jobbing journalist living with his mother.)

fabrics that reminded some people of curtains or

the Morris household, Shaw maintained that a

upholstery. The intended effect was picturesquely medieval, as if the women had stepped straight out of the Oxford Union murals. So charming

was the Aesthetic look that it caught on in wellheeled bohemian circles, in effect turning Jane

and the other stunners into style icons. William Powell Frith’s panoramic A Private View at the

Royal Academy, 1881 shows the extent to which

progressive bourgeois women had adopted the PreRaphaelite stunners’ fluid style of dress by the end of the nineteenth century.

And, finally, there was the way that Jane Morris

looked. In the early days, her frizzy “foreign” hair,

thick boyish eyebrows, and androgynous jutting jaw had attracted sniggers in the street. But, thanks to her high-status visibility, showcased in such

iconic images as Proserpine, The Blue Silk Dress, and Pia de’ Tolomei, all by a still ardent Rossetti, Mrs.

Morris’s singular brand of beauty became the style to which every woman with pretensions to taste

now aspired. Indeed, by the 1870s the writer Mary

Eliza Haweis could suggest that, thanks to the PreRaphaelites, “certain types of face and figure once

literally hated [are] actually the fashion. . . . A pal-

lid face with a protruding lip is highly esteemed. . . .

In fact the pink cheeked dolls are nowhere; they are said to have ‘no character.’” In short, Jane Morris had changed the way that ladies looked.

“Mystic Betrothal” existed between him and May, a claim that was slightly spoiled by the revelation

that he was already involved in a sexual affair with a much older woman, a friend of his mother’s.

Some of this intergenerational tangling, not to

mention sexual ambivalence, found its way into the writing of Pygmalion. The audiences and even the

Painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Blanzifiore, 1873 © Dante Gabriel Rossetti

28

actors who were part of the first British run, in 1914,

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

Jane Morris was, likewise, no one’s idea of

were desperate for the play to end with a romantic

a grateful stooge. Far more than a mere artist’s

younger protégée, Eliza. But Shaw was quick to

cess of Morris & Co, the hugely successful enter-

engagement between Henry Higgins and his much

muse, she was an active contributor to the suc-

snap back that anyone who longed for such a thing

prise that her husband set up to disseminate the

play. Higgins may indeed harbor hopes that Eliza

that apparently humble and practical pastime,

statue who comes to life and marries her love-

ducing exquisite textiles that were seen in some of

entirely. She explains that acquiring middle-class

Jane consider herself so beholden to William Morris

something altogether more valuable: “self-respect.”

her own emotional and sexual needs. Just like Eliza,

the autonomy to forge her own path through life,

regardless of whether it suited other people. In the

the play, Higgins asks her to get him some gloves,

Rossetti, even living with him for stretches of time

returning her to the status of a servant, we sense,

manor house just a few miles from her birthplace.

had simply not understood the moral logic of the

Aesthetic style. Her particular skill was needlework,

will become a modern-day Galatea, the beautiful

which she elevated to the status of fine art, pro-

struck creator, Pygmalion. But Eliza has other ideas

the most discerning households in the land. Nor did

speech has given her not only “respectability” but

for rescuing her from penury that she suppressed

In practical terms, this means that she now has

she reserved the right to love whomever she chose,

wherever that may lead. When, in the final scene of

1860s, she finally consummated her love affair with

ties, and ham and cheese while she’s out, in effect

at Kelmscott Manor, her husband’s Oxfordshire

as the curtain comes down, that she will not comply.

Later, when she left Rossetti on account of his fatal drug addiction, she moved on to an affair with the travel writer and poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, on

one occasion visiting him in Egypt. In short, Jane

Morris had fashioned herself into exactly the kind

of self-directed, autonomous, informed, and skilled New Woman whom Shaw had worked so hard to introduce to British culture. She died on January

26, 1914, just six weeks before Eliza Doolittle took to the London stage to express her determination,

with explosive clarity, to travel through life exactly as she chose.

KATHRYN HUGHES’S latest book is Victorians Undone (Johns Hopkins University Press). She is a literary critic for the Guardian and a professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Photograph by John R. Parsons of Jane Morris, posed by Rossetti, 1865 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

29

PYGMALION’S BRIDE CAROL ANN DUFFY

CAROL ANN DUFFY

I didn’t shrink, played statue, shtum.

He let his fingers sink into my flesh, he squeezed, he pressed.

I would not bruise.

He looked for marks, for purple hearts, for inky stars, for smudgy clues.

His nails were claws.

I showed no scratch, no scrape, no scar.

He propped me up on pillows, jawed all night.

My heart was ice, was glass.

His voice was gravel, hoarse.

He talked white black.

Cold, I was, like snow, like ivory.

I thought “He will not touch me,” but he did.

He kissed my stone-cool lips.

I lay still as though I’d died.

He stayed.

He thumbed my marbled eyes.

He spoke— blunt endearments, what he’d do and how.

His words were terrible.

My ears were sculpture, stone-deaf shells.

I heard the sea.

I drowned him out.

I heard him shout.

He brought me presents, polished pebbles, little bells.

I didn’t blink, Was dumb.

He brought me pearls and necklaces and rings.

He called them girly things.

He ran his clammy hands along my limbs.

Pygmalion (detail), 1939, Paul Delvaux © RMFAB, Brussels / HIP/Art Resource, NY

So I changed tack, grew warm, like candle wax, kissed back, was soft, was pliable, began to moan, got hot, got wild, arched, coiled, writhed, begged for his child, and at the climax screamed my head off— all an act.

And haven’t seen him since.

Simple as that.

CAROL ANN DUFFY has been Britain’s poet laureate since 2009. Her collections include The World’s Wife, Rapture, and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. She has also received the Whitbread, Forward, and T. S. Eliot Awards, and the Lannan and the E. M. Forster Awards in the U.S.

“Pygmalion’s Bride,” from The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy. Copyright © 1999 by Carol Ann Duffy. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

30

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

Loverly IMPRESSIONS OF MY FAIR LADY FROM MUSICAL MAKERS

Say, I bet you can think of dozens and dozens

dead wrong. And the discovery occurs right

of love songs from musicals. The great majority

within the four or five minutes of the song

of them ponder one aspect of love, reinforced

itself, before our astonished and sometimes

by the song title. Characters wish to be in love

teary eyes, as the character fights the feeling,

again, or never to fall in love again; to know

refutes it, and ultimately emerges from the

what is this thing, or how to distinguish it from

song changed. What do we call this genre?

being sick. One character has never been in

“Stealth love songs”? I would put Carousel’s

love before, one falls in love with love itself,

luminous “If I Loved You,” with its big “if,” in

another’s heart is so full there’s no room for

the stealth category. Two other stealth love

anything else, one’s heart knows in a moment,

songs of genius don’t even bother to utilize the

soars on wings, or shatters when the party is

word “love,” or in any way sound like a stan-

over. What they all have in common is that they

dard love song. One is Lerner and Loewe’s title

halt the action to reflect, comment, explain,

song from Gigi, when Gaston discovers his

or describe love. They “tell” us about love. My

true feelings in the midst of a peevish hissy fit.

Fair Lady has one of the loveliest of the “tell

The other one is, of course, Henry Higgins’s

us” love songs, the rhapsodic “On the Street

“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” Higgins

Where You Live.”

is such a solipsistic and emotionally stunted

But My Fair Lady also contains one of

human being that it’s questionable whether

the other kinds of love songs, the infrequently

he is even capable of actual love for another.

occurring genre of “show us” love songs from

The audience is smarter than he is and under-

musicals where a character realizes with

stands that this epiphany is the closest he will

shock that his or her assumptions about

ever come to love in his entire life. To Higgins,

another character were deluded, in denial,

Eliza Doolittle’s ups and downs, smiles and

My Fair Lady Top Hat Glove and Cane Ruby Brooch. Courtesy of PatiktiksBoutique on Etsy.

Souvenir book: My Fair Lady logo © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. www.AlHirschfeldFoundation

31

IMPRESSIONS OF MY FAIR LADY

frowns have become second nature, like breath-

fortunate enough to see a revival of it at City

ing out and breathing in. “She almost makes the

Center, with Marni Nixon, I was captivated

day begin,” he is astonished to confess, the wind

by the tension beneath the cultivated surface

completely knocked out of the windbag.

of Edwardian manners and mores. Every

This lyricized cadence, so masterly in its

time I hear a song from the musical, I have to

composition, is followed by Higgins’s reas-

stop whatever I’m doing to listen and marvel.

sertion of his sexual immaturity and con-

I believe My Fair Lady will outlive the golden

firmed-bachelor cowardice, in the belittling

age of twentieth-century musicals, because as

and shamefully sexist pronouncement “I’m very

long as people insist upon lying to themselves

grateful she’s a woman and so easy to forget.”

to avoid emotional entanglement it will con-

We immediately recognize that the statement

tinue to fascinate us, amuse us, and then shoot

is a falsehood, and one made in desperation as

arrows into our hearts.

he flails to retrieve his old life from the rubbish heap where Eliza has tossed it. He never will forget her for as long as he lives, and admits

MICHAEL KORIE wrote the lyrics for War Paint and Grey

Gardens.

as much in the very next phrase: “and yet. . . .”

Notice how strategically Lerner and Loewe place the word “yet,” on the climactic note of the entire song and, therefore, of the show itself. Why so?

I think it’s because “and yet . . . ” is the real story, and the source of the suspense and drama in My Fair Lady. The rest—the thrilling revelation of Eliza as a woman of brilliance,

In high school, my best friend and I would

beauty, and feeling with a keen understand-

bum around Asbury Park in her battered

ing of society’s hypocrisy—that’s the plot. Nor

Dodge Dart, setting our own off-color lyrics to

is the actual story the one Shaw wanted us

famous theater songs and singing at the top of

to think it was. Higgins/Pygmalion does not

our lungs. My Fair Lady offered a number of

in fact “sculpt” Eliza/Galatea and fall in love

opportunities, including “On the Street Where

with his own “creation.” Eliza is, from the

You Live,” and a diatribe to an unfaithful boy-

outset, every bit Higgins’s match in strength,

friend—“Just You Wait, Jeffrey Pandolfe, Just

stubbornness, intelligence, and resourceful-

You Wait!” I think that even as I was over-

ness. The real story of My Fair Lady, and the

writing Mr. Lerner’s brilliant lyrics with my

reason for our eternal fascination with it, is

sophomoric ones, I was already in training to

the conflict between brain and heart. It’s the

be a lyricist.

story of how we define our lives to ourselves, and of how much we dislike having that story disrupted by someone else. That goes for both protagonists of the musical, and their journey of discovery is charted through a stunning, incomparable series of solo song-soliloquies that serve as signposts of who is winning and who is losing the war. It ranges from “Just You Wait” to “I’m an Ordinary Man” to “I Could Have Danced All Night” to “A Hymn to Him” to “Without You,” and, ultimately, to the show’s climax, as Higgins rages against the admission that Eliza has become his raison d’être, the center of his minuscule universe.

When I first heard My Fair Lady as a child, on the Columbia LP, and soon afterward was

LYNN AHRENS wrote the book and the lyrics for Once on This Island and the lyrics for Ragtime.

32

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

Since this is supposed to be a story about my

When I was twelve, St. Bernard’s Catholic

relationship to My Fair Lady, I’m going to tell

school decided to do a play. The teachers chose

you about the lady Pygmalion, our own Henry

My Fair Lady. I was the accompanist. I stud-

Higgins, who taught me and a bunch of other

ied, chewed on, and pulled apart this score. I

choir-challenged Galateas how to sing “On the

reveled in hearing my friends put on their finest

Street Where You Live.”

Cockney Pittsburgh accents. On opening night,

Miss Dale was my junior high school glee-

I was (for once) early and ready to perform. At

club teacher. She was tall, with a cultivated

“places,” I realized that I had forgotten my copy

manner and a rich, plummy voice. She would

of the score. So . . . I played it from memory. I’m

clasp her hands and pound them against her

sure I did “my version” of Mr. Loewe’s chords

gut as she commanded us to clutch our dia-

and added more R & B than he had intended. I

phragms and sing with gusto. And, just like

fell in love with the theater that night. Thank

little adenoidal nightingales, we clutched our

you, Fritz, for opening a door.

diaphragms, stretched our necks, and sang with great theatricality “And oh, that towering feeling/Just to know somehow you are near.”

STEPHEN FLAHERTY composed the music for Once on This

Island and Ragtime.

I’m sure Miss Dale probably had her moments of wincing at our counterpoint. But she never gave up lecturing and badgering and fiercely believing in us. And damned if, from time to time, we didn’t cause enchantment to pour out of every door!

KIRSTEN CHILDS wrote the book, music, and lyrics for The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin and Bella: An American Tall Tale.

My parents had three records that I can

The first time I heard the score for My Fair

remember: songs from Lester Lanin’s orches-

Lady was via the original Broadway cast

tra, Harry Belafonte performing at Carnegie

recording. I was in high school, in suburban

Hall, and the recording of My Fair Lady by

Cleveland, Ohio—a long way, indeed, from

the original cast. Because I grew up with My

Covent Garden and Ascot. I was immedi-

Fair Lady, and because it was perfect, I felt

ately struck by the vivid contrast between the

that it was always there, like the Grand Canyon

shimmering restraint in Loewe’s Viennese

and Dr. Seuss—immutable, not created by

musical elegance—as evidenced by songs like

human hands.

“I Could Have Danced All Night”—and the more

I must have listened to My Fair Lady a

dramatic, angular bite of an aria like “Show

thousand times, and especially to “I’ve Grown

Me.” High vs. low (no pun intended), smooth

Accustomed to Her Face,” a love song that

vs. rough, refined vs. coarse—all of which very

contains not one word of love—a revelation to

smartly mirror the plot of the musical.

an aspiring lyricist.

WILLIAM FINN wrote the music and the lyrics and co-wrote

the books for Falsettos and A New Brain.

My Fair Lady cast album LP.

SCOTT FRANKEL composed the music for War Paint and

Grey Gardens.

33

IMPRESSIONS OF MY FAIR LADY

My Fair Lady had a huge impact on our

I have two memories of My Fair Lady: One,

development as writers. The iconic songs

I remember being struck by the fact that the

underscored our upbringing, but it was in a

maids were singing, that they sounded quite

University of Michigan musical-theater class-

wonderful, and that I was just as interested

room that we were tangibly changed by them

in them, at that moment, as I was in anyone

as artists. The student on the hot seat that

else. Also, the moment when Eliza descends

day, asked to perform “On the Street Where

the stairs in that beautiful dress is a true les-

You Live,” sang the final few lines—“Let the

son in context. Had she made that entrance

time go by/I don’t care if I . . . ”—then took in a

surrounded by the others (perhaps they tried

giant breath to collect air for the final phrase,

that at first? I think I remember reading it), she

“can be here on the street where you live.” As

would have been one among other beauties.

we students sat rapt by his impressive perfor-

But here, in the house, with that underscor-

mance, our professor seemed unenthused. He

ing, she is the singular, glorious swan. I have

asked if the lyric had been conveyed just the

thought about that moment many times.

way Messrs. Lerner and Loewe might have wanted. Had the student “phrased from the lyric”? A few more failed attempts, and our

JEANINE TESORI composed the music for Caroline, or Change and Fun Home.

professor went on to explain that, in musical theater, taking that final breath can sometimes be lethal. The breath stops the thought in its tracks. One more attempt, and for the first time we heard the beautiful over-the-bar phrasing of “Let the time go by/I don’t care if I can be here/On the street where you live.” It was a small but magical moment. And that moment’s impact left an indelible impression on us as

My mother had a nicely illustrated Lerner and

young musical-theater artists.

Loewe songbook from the mid-sixties, from which she would play when guests wanted to

BENJ PASEK AND JUSTIN PAUL co-wrote the score for Dear

Evan Hansen and the lyrics for the film La La Land.

sing around the piano. The pictures were lively line drawings that hinted at the shows’ visuals.

Forever stuck in my brain with the infectious melodies of My Fair Lady are those drawings, along with my father’s smooth, resonant but totally off-tune voice. When I finally saw the show as a kid, it was a friend’s grade-school production, and it rocked. Since then, I’ve seen it at least ten times, with wildly varying production values, all over the world. It never fails.

The music is too perfect.

DAVID YAZBEK wrote the music and the lyrics for The Band’s Visit and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Cast album © Al Hirschfeld. My Fair Lady, 1976 @ The Al Hirschfeld Foundation, www.AlHirschfeldFoundation.org.

35

REBEKAH LOWIN

“EXASPERATING, IRRITATING, vacillating, calculating,

us. We squawk at Siri. We tsk-tsk at Cortana. We

the less-than-kind words Henry Higgins employs to

of confusion, holler at our hairbrushes. We do

agitating, maddening, and infuriating.” These are describe his tongue-tied, would-be protégée. They

are also the words one might use to describe one’s GPS. Particularly when one finds oneself in traffic.

damn at our Dots and even, in occasional moments it in cars and in restaurants and during yoga class.

Where bots are involved, human decency is not.

How have we managed to allow a bodyless,

Particularly when one initially inputs “Hartford,”

faceless voice to reduce us to the most vicious

for God’s sakes. “Okay, Siri,” one might utter, teeth

some large-scale version of the Stanford Prison

only to wind up in Hereford, in the pouring rain,

gritted, fists clenched. “Where is that blasted plain?!”

Not this writer, of course. After all, I’m a

patient, gentle woman. The sort who never would—

versions of ourselves, as though we were living out Experiment? What is it about a voice, anyway,

that vexes and frustrates and delights us so? And

never could—let an insulting remark escape her lips.

On the other hand—between ragged, impatient

breaths—the anonymous “she” just might tinker with the radio and be met by the dulcet tones of Rex Harrison.

“I was serenely independent and content before

we met,” he might croon. “Surely I could always be that way again, and yet . . .”

She might take a moment to stare sheepishly

at the all-knowing device propped up by her steer-

ing wheel. And she just might realize that there are

How have we managed to allow a bodyless, faceless voice to reduce us to the most vicious versions of ourselves, as though we were living out some largescale version of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

an awful lot of similarities between the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle and the voice inside her iPhone.

Not just because the two madden, exasperate,

and infuriate. And not just because both are, at

what does our newfound Higgins-esque behavior

Act II, or after the traffic jam, once again become

more bot-human interactions, and more thinking

because the ingenue and the iPhone alike are tragi-

To answer these questions, we’ll have to first

heart, entirely lovable beings who at the end of

mean for a future filled with more faceless voices,

admired, needed, idolized, and loved. No, it’s more

machines?

cally subject to the less-than-kind whims of their

understand what constitutes a virtual voice.

be the whims of her dreadfully snobbish speech

opened an email containing the latest script she’d

woman behind the wheel of a 2011 Honda Accord

had been sent to her by an engineer at an interac-

playbills.

be acquired by Apple Inc., and become the world’s

respective overseers. In Eliza’s case, those would

In July of 2005, the voice actress Susan Bennett

instructor. In poor Siri’s case, they’re those of a

been tasked with recording in her home studio. It

littered with empty Starbucks cups and dog-eared

tive-voice-response (IVR) company that would later

Fine.

largest speech-software company, responsible for

But it’s true for all of us, isn’t it? Lerner and

cially intelligent virtual assistants.

Me.

Loewe might as well have penned their beloved

providing the voice of one of the very first artifiIn a phone interview, the Atlanta-based

production in 2018, dubbed their protagonist Siri,

actress told me, “I began my career as a jingle

wielding an iPhone. Surely, whether we cop to it or

didn’t show up to read the actual commercial copy.

and modeled Henry Higgins on just about anyone

singer for commercials, and one day the voice actor

not, there’s a bit of Higgins-esque cruelty in all of

The owner of the studio said, ‘Well, Susan, you

Opposite page: Illustration of hand © Historical Images Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

36

don’t have an accent. Why don’t you come over and read this?’ I thought—ding ding ding!”

Bennett’s spent an entire career anonymously

lending her voice to radio and television commercials, promotions, and narrations. She guides us

through ATM withdrawals, shepherds us through mobile purchases and credit-card payments,

reminds us about poor weather conditions, coaxes us toward this or that highway exit, and even

escorts us, jetlagged and bleary-eyed, through Delta’s airport terminals.

And so in her home studio, headphones in

place, glasses on, she peered over the microphone

and took a closer look at the script she’d downloaded.

“Malitia oi hallucinate, buckra ockra ooze.”

She squinted.

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

recording it mattered more than ever. Every

sentence, every phrase, every word had to be read in precisely the same manner. Pitches had to be

normalized, pacing had to be balanced, and power had to be maintained throughout. There were to

be no “emotional ups and downs,” and certainly no “sing-songy” phrases. Monotony ruled. Peculiar as the project was, it was also an interesting chal-

lenge, at least for the first 1,500 sentences. But the English language is made up of more than

1,500 sentences, and Bennett was to keep at it for four hours a day, five days a week, for the entire

month of July. Besides, these phrases didn’t share the delightful resonance of something like, say,

“Hurricanes hardly ever happen.” Sometimes they

were simply the same sentences over and over, with one vowel changed. One such exercise still lingers

in Bennett’s memory: Say the shrodding again. Say the shrading again. Say the shreeding again. Say

the shriding again. Say the shroding again. Say the shrudding again.

There was also the matter of the actress’s vocal

health. “It all gets very irritating on the vocal cords, you know,” she reminded me. “To keep making

the same sounds and the same pitch over and over again.” And so, some days, she questioned the entire process.

Nevertheless, Bennett kept at the “most

tedious, mind-numbing gig ever,” and six years

later, on October 4, 2011, her voice floated out of Apple’s iPhone 4S for the first time.

Of course, she’d nearly forgotten the project

at that point. No one had gotten in touch to let her know the exciting news. Bennett found out that

her voice had been selected when it began emitting from iPhones around the world. Alas, since she’d

neglected to upgrade to the latest software herself, it was an old friend who first alerted her to Siri’s “Cathexis fefa tully. Sexual ease stump.”

“Fossa ask, Fossa ask, Fuzzy.”

The gobbledygook made her laugh a little, but

she’d been paired with a qualified voice director,

who worked to ensure that her voice remained as consistent as possible, even robot-like.

Consistency was, of course, always paramount

with IVR, but for the purposes of this particular

Music for Dreaming © ART X SMART by Kim Dong-kyu

existence, casually emailing to ask if “that new Siri character” was “really her.”

“I kind of freaked out,” Bennett recalled. “I had

ambivalent feelings. At first I thought, ‘Oh, well,

that’s cool. I guess I’m the new voice of Apple.’ And then it’s, like, ‘Yeah, but I didn’t know about this!’”

Bennett understood that being associated with

a recognizable voice or character could be a professional detriment. Generally, unless you’re Morgan

37

Freeman people don’t want to pay attention to an IVR professional’s voice. They’re merely interested in the information that the voice happens to be

disseminating. That’s not the case with Siri. Siri isn’t an anonymous robot voice. She’s a persona.

“People think of Siri as a real person,” Bennett

explained. “They speak to her several times a day.

So, whether or not they knew my name, they knew my voice. And this is why it scared me, and why it took me so long to reveal myself.”

Alongside technological advancements, Siri’s

voice (and the actress behind it) has actually

changed twice since 2011. But Bennett still finds

the whole thing a bit off-putting, and she doesn’t interact with Siri regularly.

“I guess I still find it a bit creepy,” she went on.

“I definitely didn’t talk to her when she really had

my voice, because it was just too weird.” She laughs.

“The most I ever use her now is when I’m going to a new place and I have to get directions. I look at directions beforehand, of course, but when I get

close I ask Siri. She tells me exactly where to turn.”

Bennett isn’t sure exactly how her voice ended

up in pockets and earphones and on nightstands

around the world. She doesn’t know who chose the voice or when or why. She does know that, shortly after her home recordings were completed, the

voice-recognition giant Nuance Communications

was acquired by its competitor ScanSoft, giving it access to the purchaser’s trove of monotonous,

gibberish recordings; that, two years later, the blueprint for Siri herself was crafted by three engineers working at Nuance-associated SRI International— Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, and Tom Gruber; that the trio formalized their invention as Siri, Inc., and

secured a cool $8.5 million in funding in early 2008; that Siri, Inc., joined forces with Nuance to give Siri

her lifelike voice; that Apple débuted the very first iPhone in 2007; that Siri appeared as an indepen-

dent iPhone app in January 2010; that, three weeks

later, Kittlaus received a direct call from Steve Jobs, asking to meet; that Apple acquired Siri, Inc., in 2010, and the rest is history.

But it began with “fefa tully,” or an equally

nonsensical word, without which we’d never get to “fast food,” let alone “Here’s what I found on

the Web for ‘best fast-food restaurant near me.’ ”

REBEKAH LOWIN

Gibberish proved essential to the creation of Siri’s

language, and it continues to be the most effective way to record the basic framework for any virtual dialogue. Imagine if Bennett had been forced to record every possible word used in every possible

interaction between every possible human and his or her iPhone—every slurred, sheepish request to dial an ex-lover’s phone number, every demand for an

alarm to be set or a song to be played. It would also require Siri to draw on a ridiculously large memory bank to produce relevant responses, exponentially delaying her reaction time and further agitating iPhone users everywhere.

A dictionary of words is simply not efficient. A

dictionary of sounds is, however. That’s where the

gibberish comes in. Siri’s base language begins with tiny units called half-phones, which are eventually pushed together, Lego style, to form meaningful

words and phrases. These individual building blocks make it easy for a virtual assistant to efficiently

select for hyperspecific sounds on command, and to alternate emphases and stresses whenever necessary. When all the possible sounds have

been recorded, they can be spliced into their base elements, and then thrown back together again

in an acoustically intelligible way at precisely the

moment Siri has to tell you, say, how far you’ll have to drive until you reach the next gas station.

Of course, just because a language is thrust

upon a software doesn’t mean it’ll know how to use it. Devising a sentence that sounds pleasant, means something, and actually answers (or, at least,

acknowledges) the query at hand requires a ton

of work on Siri’s part. She must first listen to our

commands, parse their meaning properly, hurriedly think of which word segments should be smushed together in response, and understand which

syllable to emphasize. She has to decide how to

pronounce a word placed at the end of a sentence versus one placed at the beginning, and how to

determine the pronunciation of a word that follows another word that changes its meaning, and so on

and so forth. Most of this is elementary knowledge that we take for granted, but Siri must learn it all.

Thanks to a combination of intentional

theatrics, kitschy pre-programmed phrases, and Steve Jobs’s own sense of humor, our beloved

38

virtual assistant often appears more advanced and “human” than she is. That endearing trait is less a

feat of engineering than an old-fashioned sleight of hand—and it’s something that stood out to Bennett the very first time she interacted with the bot.

“I remember saying, ‘Hi, Siri! What are you

doing?’ And she said to me, very disgustedly, ‘I’m talking to you.’ ” Bennett laughs. “And I said, ‘Oh. Okay. Sorry to bother you.’ ”

At moments when an older computer might

let you know that it’s “loading,” Siri will instead ask

you to “let her think for a second.” In place of a simple error message, she offers up a humanified “I’m

not sure I understand.” A declaration of the truest love, too, returns an all-too-calculated answer:

“Oh, I bet you say that to all your Apple products,” while a request for her to “sing a song” returns

the snarky “I’d rather leave that to the professionals.”

And—in what just might be the holy grail of

Siri-isms—simply whispering “I see a little silhouette of a man” will trigger a bizarre, spoken-word

performance of the remainder of the lyrics of the

“Bohemian Rhapsody” that lasts well over a minute.

Pre-programmed bits aside, the rest of Siri’s

personality showcases a very impressive and real understanding of how humans think and act.

Here we’ll take another cue from the wisdom

of musical theater. Think of Maria’s advice in

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music: “Do-re-mi-fa-so and so on are only the tools we

use to build a song. Once you have these notes in

your head, you can sing a million different tunes by mixing them up.” Siri, you see, has the tools—the

base sounds that make up every word in our human language—and now she needs to mix them up.

The von Trapp children learned to make music

by watching Maria. Siri learns how to make music by watching us. That’s the entire idea behind

artificial intelligence as we understand it today: a

machine must observe the human world in order to understand it. It’s the reason scientists often

quip that “data is the new oil.” Behind every brilliant bot lies troves of information. In Siri’s case,

engineers feed the software with a veritable library of data, introducing it to millions of recordings of human speech—not just Bennett’s voice, which

merely teaches it how to duplicate human sounds,

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

but ones that specifically illustrate human behavior, such as feature films, digital videos, and audiobook

recordings. Over time, thanks to this unbelievable plethora of real-world data and the assistance of

some fine-tuned algorithms, the virtual assistant

grows to understand what constitutes real, genuine human speech in real, genuine situations, and it’s

able to better mimic us. (Now, thanks to a handful of other voice actors, we can also choose to hear

voices more, or less, similar to our own: male or female, British or Australian).

After enough “mimicking”(i.e., enough pro-

cessing of enormous quantities of information), a software system may be able to apply its learning to our changing universe and self-educate—no

pre-programmed phrases or repeat-after-me gimmicks necessary. It’s soon able to adapt and figure things out for itself. Much to the excitement and

trepidation of scientists everywhere, some modern

software—similar to the algorithm that trains Siri’s voice—is able to learn entirely on its own, comparing new findings in the natural world with what

it already knows to be true. In the artificial-intelligence world, this is known as machine learning.

We don’t want to have to tinker with and train our robots forever. We want them to be self-fulfilling, self-building machines capable of training them-

selves. The inner workings of this process are still a

mystery to many researchers, and they are certainly nowhere close to perfection or even completion, but it is within reach.

Eliza Doolittle didn’t learn to speak beautifully

and eloquently by simply copying Henry Higgins.

Once she understood the basics, she could more or less figure things out on her own.

Rote memorization is not a stand-in for

meaningful learning. Hand-engineered language

systems—ones that rely on direct human input for

each and every output—simply do not work as well as “learners,” the ones that have been taught to

teach themselves, to infer from and make sense of the world around them.

Our world will one day be populated by more

and more of these thinking machines—true, thinking software that doesn’t just respond but remembers.

It’ll come to associate us with our sporadic com-

mands, making judgments for itself about whether

39

we are who we say we are, and whether we practice

what we preach. This would mean a machine capable of looking around and making sense of the world

without the help—or, more aptly, the hindrance— of its overseers. It will be able to personalize its

responses to suit our tastes, diminishing the need for pre-programming. Depending on what sort of

person she’s deemed you to be, the Siri of 2019 may not ask you to “let her think for a second”; instead,

she might ask you to “give her a second, will ya?” or “kindly hold for just a moment.”

We can’t yet determine how close these

machines will get to true humanness. Save for the more experienced computer scientists among us, there’s only one thing we can control right now:

what we will become in the wake of autonomous

REBEKAH LOWIN

machines. Armed with the intelligence we’ve

shared with these machines, as well as the extra intel they’ve gathered from experience, the software we’re creating right now will bring with it a

new sort of honesty. It’ll start to see us for who we really are.

“Letting robots learn ethics by observing

humans may not be such a good idea,” Pedro

Domingos, one of the world’s foremost data scientists, opines in his book on machine learning, The Master Algorithm. “The robot is liable to get seri-

ously confused when it sees that humans’ actions often violate their ethical principles. . . . Teaching

ethics to robots, with their logical minds and lack

of baggage, will force us to examine our assumptions and sort out contradictions. In this, as in

Mouth #7 © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA

40

many other areas, the greatest benefit of machine

learning may ultimately be not what the machines learn but what we learn by teaching them.”

Eliza concurs. “You see, Mrs. Higgins,” she

explains wisely to the professor’s mother. “Apart from the things one can pick up, the difference

between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.”

Man, they say, was created in God’s image.

Eliza, in some ways, was created in Higgins’s. And the voices of thinking machines will be created in

ours. Our best bet in creating a future to which we can look forward is to focus on fine-tuning that

image: our image. We shouldn’t worry about robots taking over the world. We should worry about

whether we’re building a world worth taking over.

And, of course, it’s not just Apple leading the

charge. Right now, at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, there’s a machine-learning revolution

under way. The company has always been at the

forefront of computer science, but now it’s ramping up artificial-intelligence development. Traditional computer-programming efforts, which require

humans to teach computers, step by step, will soon be obsolete. So, in the past two years, Google’s

management has allotted enormous portions of

its budget to the training of its proprietary neural networks. The company hired a group of expert

linguists to create what amounts to a bespoke data set: prodigious amounts of curated, proprietary

information used to feed the company’s software.

The idea is that, until the machines can learn in

an unsupervised manner, they have to be carefully taught by an élite, in-house team of Ph.D. speech experts—essentially, a team tasked with shaping

the future of communication. It’s no surprise that they’ve decided to call that team Pygmalion.

REBEKAH LOWIN is a writer and speaker based in New York City. At Text IQ, she manages content strategy and collaborates with engineers to develop and refine the company’s proprietary Artificial Intelligence software. She has written for nationally recognized publications, hosted several digital video series for NBC News’s Today show, and appeared on television news programs across the country. Rebekah holds a B.A. in creative writing from Columbia University.

Shavian alphabet typewriter.

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

41

THE SHAW ALPHABET FOR WRITERS

Among his countless artistic and intellectual endeavors, George Bernard Shaw was also fervently dedicated to creating a new alphabet that furnished simple, phonetic orthography, which he believed elegantly solved the difficulties of conventional English spellings.

For more than a decade Shaw served, alongside several advocates of phonetic writing, on the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English. He was acquainted with Henry Sweet, the creator of Current Shorthand (and an inspiration for the character of Henry Higgins), though Shaw himself used the shorthand system developed by Isaac Pitman. In Shaw’s will, Pitman was charged with establishing the Shaw Alphabet, which was to consist of at least forty letters, be as phonetic as possible, and be easily distinguished from the Latin alphabet so that the new spellings would not be mistaken for misspellings.

In 1958, a contest was held and four winners were selected, including Ronald Kingsley Read, who combined the four winning designs to create the new alphabet. But Shaw's will was contested and the trust could afford only to publish one book, a version of Shaw's play

Androcles and the Lion, in an edition that featured both conventional and Shavian spellings. The money from Shaw’s estate was instead distributed to three organizations: the British Museum, the National Gallery of Ireland, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Lyndall Gordon

43

LYNDALL GORDON

SHAW TAPPED INTO THE FANTASY of transformation

performance, so much so that with a self-mocking

Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the myth of a Cypriot sculp-

life is guarded, inaccessible even to himself.

when he conceived Eliza Doolittle. His source was

tor, Pygmalion, who has no interest in women until

speaker like Higgins you can’t know him. His inner It’s tempting, especially for directors of

he carves an ivory figure, later called Galatea, with

musicals, to present a variation on Cinderella with

kisses her, and they marry. In Shaw’s most famous

proachable ladyhood. But Shaw was a thinker, a

whom he falls in love. She comes to life when he play, Pygmalion (1912, staged 1914), and in the

musical based on it, My Fair Lady (1956), a professor of phonetics undertakes to change “a common girl” into a Queen of Sheba.

To all appearances, Professor Higgins succeeds

in his experiment. He takes in a Cockney flower seller, a “guttersnipe,” whose prospects will be

limited by her raucous vowels and routine bleats (“I’m a good girl, I am”). She comes to Henry

Higgins for speech lessons with a view to opening

a flower shop. He takes a bet with his professional colleague, Colonel Pickering, that if Eliza is taught received pronunciation he can change her class

within six months. Higgins is vindicated when Eliza passes for a lady at an embassy reception.

marriage as a reward for a performance of irre-

serious socialist, and a supporter of women’s suf-

frage. “My conscience is the genuine pulpit article,” he said. Shaw proclaimed all great art to be didactic and used Eliza Doolittle—who starts out as dirty as Cinderella, though more promisingly barbed—to

confront the audience of his day with social issues.

One such issue is voiced by Eliza after the embassy

performance: What next? She has shown an extraordinary aptitude for learning and now has the know-

how to teach others. Is this to be channeled into the traditional role of a helpmeet who fetches a man’s

slippers when he comes home? In fact, this was the question Henry James had raised in The Portrait of a Lady: What is an emergent woman to do?

Metamorphosis can be cruel in Ovid—Pluto’s

abduction of Proserpina to the darkness of his

underworld, or a girl hardening into a tree to avoid rape—but there’s scope, too, for comedy. Eliza’s

first ordeal is a bath; the grimy clothes she regards

as finery are burned. In fact, this humor has become dated. Nowadays, the joke is turned on those who are “too posh to wash.”

The enduring comedy is verbal: Higgins

Shaw was a thinker, a serious socialist, and a supporter of women’s suffrage.

“My conscience is the genuine pulpit article,” he said.

deploys insult to strip Eliza of her old self. She is a squashed cabbage leaf, an insect, “so deliciously

low.” His scorn and his determined teaching test

her resilience. In 1938, Shaw was brought in when a Hungarian, Gabriel Pascal, made his classic movie

Since Eliza is not alone among Shaw’s thinking

with Leslie Howard and the wonderfully convincing

women—Major Barbara, Vivie Warren, Candida,

exercises were introduced about “the rain in

tion. And this matter of women’s possibilities raises

the Cockney dialect: “In Hertford, Hereford and

perhaps deviant elements in woman’s nature; the

has to muster breath after breath to conquer

cannot see a woman beyond the way she appears;

Wendy Hiller, and it was then that the humorous

Saint Joan—how to act in the larger sense is in ques-

Spain” and the line that retrieves the “h” lost to

more difficult issues: the question of buried and

Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.” Eliza

question of mentors who, like Professor Higgins,

such words.

and the legitimacy presented by judges of female

tions, she will pick up the mannered conformity as

considered them) who in 1431 condemn Joan of Arc

As she tunes her ear to the professor’s intona-

well as the irony in polished English: language as

action, like those well-intentioned men (as Shaw

to the stake for heresy because she claims to have

Bird and Anemone, 1882. William Morris. V&A Images, London / Art Resource, NY.

44

been led to military victories not by feudal lords playing at tournaments but by inner “voices”— higher voices, Joan claims—who speak common sense.

Where did Shaw find such revolutionary mod-

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

Eliza’s narrative and that of Higgins turn out to

be at odds, and whether they can converge remains in doubt—less so in My Fair Lady, given the happy-

ending convention of musicals. Where Eliza’s

els of womanhood? He was born to an indifferent

absurdly silly suitor, Freddy Eynsford-Hill, is blinded

In his twenties, gaunt, pale, red-bearded, Shaw

He ignores what Eliza herself has achieved. For him,

Ireland to England, and there he hung on at home

a new life, but that’s not under discussion. Wendy

The young Shaw responded to the solitary Lyndall

emotion is palpable before she explodes, lunging at

by Olive Schreiner. Lyndall becomes a fearless

ously sexless—his undeniable charm deflected into

though he’d fathered her child. This novel of an

to change?

she is, shook up social norms at the same time that

Shaw himself, who admitted, “I have over and over

A Doll’s House. Schreiner, who read the Norwegian

ence to show the trick of him.” He stayed with his

mother who parted with her drinking husband.

by infatuation, Higgins is blinded by his triumph.

followed his mother and her music teacher from

the experiment is over. For Eliza, it should open up

whilst he tried his hand (with no success) at fiction.

Hiller, as Eliza, stiffens in protest. The suppressed

in the 1883 best seller The Story of an African Farm,

Higgins, who throws her down. His anger is curi-

speaker, refusing to marry an unworthy man even outsider, determined to find and to live by what

his verbal darts. Is this “confirmed bachelor” open The enigma of this character is close to that of

Nora shut the door on her play-acting marriage in

again taken [G.B.S.] to pieces before the audi-

drama in translation, praised Ibsen for showing

mother until he married, at the age of forty-two.

spoken of, and that some people do not believe

part substitute mother—did not wish the marriage

“some sides of women’s nature that are not often

His wife, Charlotte Payne-Townshend—part nurse,

exist—but they do.”

to be consummated, and to this Shaw agreed.

reading room of the British Museum, inventing an

lary, with actresses he admired. In a preface to his

An Unsocial Socialist. Sidney Trefusis (the son of a

on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty,

That year, 1883, Shaw spent his days in the

Instead, he had platonic affairs, largely episto-

outspoken heroine named Agatha Wylie in a novel,

correspondence with Ellen Terry, he wrote, “Only

millionaire, posing as a laborer in order to promote

truth, knowledge, virtue and abiding love.” A possi-

love him.

Patrick Campbell, the first actress to play Eliza. At

he reached his mid-thirties, when he woke up to

penned an indignant protest, not unlike Higgins’s

socialism) meets his match in Agatha, who doesn’t

Shaw did not find his voice as a dramatist until

ble exception was his proposal to take off with Mrs. the last moment, Mrs. Campbell broke away; Shaw

Ibsen. The dangerous reputation of Nora postponed

outrage when Eliza leaves.

Shaw saw the play five times, and then published

carries her own spirit of independence through her

time, Schreiner published her Dreams of rising

his mother, he’s a baby. She rebukes Higgins and

a full London staging of A Doll’s House until 1889.

The Quintessence of Ibsenism in 1891. At the same

Higgins sees Eliza as his creation. But Eliza

transformation. To her, the professor is a bully. To

women, which, to Shaw, was “a treasure.”

Pickering for being two babies playing with a doll,

Woman,” a phrase that entered the language in

not believe that Eliza would marry Higgins. In one

Victorian model of ladies as helpless and quiet. So

tain to fall on Higgins saying “Galatea” when Eliza

he stifling her with the propriety of “silence”?

metamorphosis: a statue that has come to life.

the freedom of the gutter for the constraints

Eliza’s inner development continues apart from

Starting in 1892, he devised roles for the “New

dressing her up—shades of a doll’s house. Shaw did

1894. Strong, outspoken women were replacing the

note—it didn’t enter the text—he wanted the cur-

when Professor Higgins trains Eliza to be a lady, is

returns. That would have emphasized the drama of

Is the price of transformation that she surrender of gentility?

Attempting the Impossible, 1928, René Magritte © 2018 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ Banque d’Images, ADAGP/ Art Resource, NY.

What Higgins had really created was a façade.

her mentor, and to convey this as suggestively as

46

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

Wendy Hiller does, largely through the language of

and tried. She is forced to accept that she is alone

of My Fair Lady (1964), the spectacular costumes by

strength.

her body, is the challenge of this role. In the movie Cecil Beaton—Audrey Hepburn’s cartwheel hat at

on earth and that in her loneliness she must find her Twenty-five years after her execution, the

Ascot; the glitter of bling at a fairy-tale ball; the

Church cleared Joan of heresy, and five centuries

hat, when the star sets out to drown herself; and

dream epilogue, she returns to life in the present

returns to Higgins—steal the show. Style thins the

demonstrates to his own age how uneasy men still

In contrast, when Wendy Hiller makes her début

unshowy she may be. All, including Shaw’s con-

glides silent, silver-gray, arms straight at her sides,

audience, it seemed nothing less than a “sacri-

to her.

Mrs. Pankhurst, the militant leader of the British

eye-catching orange number, complete with perky

later, in 1920, she was sanctified. In the play’s

the rose pink in which she’s swathed when she

day, as do her long-ago fellows and judges. Shaw

drama of metamorphosis to Hollywood makeover.

feel about a woman who moves ahead, however

in society, her inner absence speaks as her body

temporaries, find excuses to back off. To Eliot in the

moving as in a dream through the paces assigned

lege” to present a saint as a reformer in the vein of

Shaw was not one for fairy tales. His particular

heaven is reserved for “the masters of reality.” He

suffragettes.

Shaw’s women are an evolving breed. He jolts

wanted to inject reality into the theater, dismissing

his audience with their ordinariness—an upstart

turing language of Professor Higgins is from this

spotlights natural intelligence, observes it unfold,

about speech. But there are better mentors—Percy

gender undergoing transformation, and here,

education with his wife, a teenage Mary Shelley.

presumption, compounded by something Shaw

Frankenstein with a light touch, sensitive to Mary’s

hunting men as prey, like Ann Whitefield, a “boa

Victorian melodrama and romance. The punc-

from a French farmyard or a London market. He

point of view bracing, and he’s passionate at least

and sees it blocked. Here, before our eyes, is a

Bysshe Shelley, for one, who shared his privileged

too, is the darker side: resistance to unwomanly

He encouraged her to study Greek, and edited

himself felt: fear of the “Life Force” in women

words. And then there is the critic George Henry

constrictor” in Man and Superman. His biographer,

and acted as her agent. George Eliot was their joint

could overcome his vulnerability to women who

twin. Shaw was too astute, in a way too self-know-

his words, and then fall in love with his own verbal

Lewes, who pushed Marian Evans to attempt fiction

Michael Holroyd, discerns that the “only way Shaw

creation; she felt as joined to him as a Siamese

interested him was to envelop their bodies with

ing, not to be aware that Higgins is unfit to marry

clothing.”

Shaw said. “His relation to her is too godlike to be

LYNDALL GORDON is the author of Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds and the biographies of Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, and T. S. Eliot. Her work has earned her many awards, including the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Cheltenham Prize for Literature.

Gordon is now a senior research fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

Eliza. “Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion,” altogether agreeable.”

There is another, more serious critique of

unseeing men in Shaw’s one tragedy, Saint Joan

(1924). Joan is a prodiwns, as well as forthright and true. After she wins back French lands from the

English and crowns the dauphin as Louis VII in the

cathedral at Reims, no one thanks her; the king is as oblivious as Higgins after Eliza’s triumph at the ball.

When Joan offers to return to her father’s farm, he

answers, “heedlessly,” how “nice” that will be. Joan speaks “bitterly” to the men she’d led: “I know well

that none of you will be sorry to see me go.” None are prepared to stand by her when she’s captured

1910

1935

c.1920s

Ascot

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