It begins to look as though something in the nature of a day of retribution were actually at hand, and that the meek, represented during the past few years by the cash customer and member of the buying public who could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as inheriting the earth, might once more get at least a fifty-fifty break here and there. And if the wheel has come full circle and the customer is again about to have his innings, there is no valid reason why his revenge against arrogant shop clerks, supercilious waiters, sneering hotel clerks and impertinent cab drivers should stop this side of murder.
The signs of change, even without the election returns to underscore them, are discernible here and there, and by the time the new year rolls around it is possible that the dime tip will once more get a civil thank you. Already cab drivers in New York, perhaps the most offensively mannerless public servants in America, are assuming what almost amounts to toleration of the people who keep them alive; hotel rooms in San Francisco are filled only to about ninety per cent of capacity, which makes things better for everybody. And even the South Americans in New York night clubs are beginning to ask the price of champagne before they order more than half a dozen bottles. The shocking rise in barbers' fees in Manhattan is being met by a customer resistance which is expressed in terms of a haircut only half as frequently, and abated tips when one is necessary, and Saturday night on Broadway is approaching reasonable proportions rather than an explosion in the sub-treasury. There are plenty of men's shirts and shorts in the shops, phone operators only cut off the customers half as often, and if impatient motorists will only hold off a little longer they will be able to get a new car without permanently endowing a crooked salesman.
Only in the gyp state of Florida and a few other booby traps for tourists is there any prospect of the brave snow-storms of currency that in other years bought annuities for hotel clerks and made landed gentry of speculators in Pullman space. In Florida's racket resorts and among the tasteless goons who populate them frenzied finance promises still to hold sway. The almost complete breakdown and demoralization of air transport and the discomfort and unreliability of what flying services still function at all, have placed an unprecedented demand on rail space south with the resultant profiteering, and there are still enough phonies and punks in the chips to populate the Yahoo parades of Miami and a few other pickpocket paradises, but the chances are that another year will see Florida returned to the haunted house status it enjoys nine seasons out of ten. Make no mistake, the bloom is off the boob for a while and the chances seem to be that the customer's market, as dead under the New Deal as chattel slavery or the flat earth theory, may actually become a reality once more.
Matters sartorial are only the most casual concern of this department, which is generally dedicated more to inward and spirituous grace than to the minks and sables of outward substance. But a nice question has been posed, implemented by the published photographs of what is described as “a night club commuting service” between Miami and Havana, and we purpose to get a ruling from someone in the stratospheric know. In the pictures of this amiable and obviously well-promoted junket the participants are one and all formally and politely attired for the evening; low cut ball gowns for the ladies, white or black dinner jackets or mess jackets for the men, depending probably whether they were among the cash customers or the plain staff, as is the custom on ship-board. It was all, obviously, an evening when champagne and summer mink were taken for granted.
All of which poses a question hitherto rendered inconsiderable by reason of the limited space and general urgency of air travel. Will voyagers dress for dinner in the air? Until now air travel has been a matter of necessity, discomfort and general distress. That it has been possessed of certain advantages when functioning at its greatest reliability, which wasn't all the time and certainly isn't yet, is undeniable, but nobody but a humorist would suggest that until now the accommodations available have been in any way superior to, say, the early day-coach era of rail travel. It seems probable, however, that in future and despite a current trend toward mass air transport by the air lines under conditions which make steerage travel in the middle of last century a de luxe proposition by comparison, there may be some flights organized on a reasonably comfortable, even de luxe basis and that passengers will be able to ride from coast to coast without being strapped into their seats and allowed the dubious privileges of a single communal washroom. Should such flights be inaugurated it is almost inevitable that actual dining in the air will follow and supplant the present shoe-box lunch arrangement with its little nastinesses of paper towels and tea-room dabs of food. The intelligences which made it possible to get off the ground at all will almost inevitably make it at least partially bearable to patronize their devisings.
With the improvement of air travel to a degree where it is not an improbable adventure calling for rugged determination and garments of outdoor construction, the problem of dinner attire will eventually present itself. The precedents in the matter are various. Even the most stylish travelers on the Super Chief and City of San Francisco don't change to long skirts and boiled shirts, although the gesture isn't entirely unheard of. When Boni de Castellane was courting Anna Gould he remarked on the circumstance that aboard the Gould private train an appropriate functionary instructed him that full evening dress was required at dinner, and in the prewar film, Shanghai Express, all the masculine characters appeared throughout its action in British military evening attire complete with battle ribbons and glacé gloves. Similarly on a recent excursion over the narrow gauge rails of the romantic Rio Grande Southern Rail-road in the lonely mountains of south-western Colorado to which this department was courteously bidden by the railroad management, dinner jackets were the rule, to the surprise of the residents of Durango, Dolores and Telluride. In general, however, white ties or even black ones are foreign to the experience of travelers on the high iron.
On shipboard, however, dinner clothes have been the immemorial rule among more politely upholstered tourists and ship's personnel. That the war put no slightest dent in this observance is evidenced by the news photographs of the first run of the “Queen Elizabeth,” where, with the sole exception of the improbable Russians, everyone seemed to insinuate himself into a stiff shirt after six o'clock.
The requirements of air travel are, of course, different from either of these. The bulk and weight of luggage has until now been subject to stringent restrictions, and its availability and the space in which to dress and undress have been non-extant. Now the flying machine companies are optimistically promoting advertising layouts showing spacious lounges and sleeping quarters and a certain amount of hitherto strictly fictitious chic and luxury. The airplane wardrobe to date has been, willy nilly, a utilitarian one since travelers rode, ate, slept and performed all the functions of existence in the same pair of trousers, however great may have been his inclinations to change into the garments of civilization when cocktail time arrived. The advent of polite dining instead of scrounging fodder out of a shoebox which has been inaugurated, appropriately enough by Air France, a line which advertises that you eat for 500 miles, may indeed usher in an era of fashionable clothes and manners at stratospheric altitudes. The air lines have confected planes with two decks and a consequent stairway, or, at least, a companionway for semi-grand entrances. It remains for the patrons to do the rest if they want to.
The persecution of the cash customers of the theater by playwrights and producers so competently begun for the season by Eugene O'Neill was furthered and abetted by Maxwell Anderson, who couldn't say all he wanted to in Joan of Lorraine without requiring the patrons to be on hand at eight o'clock, on pain of being disallowed from hearing his deathless dialogue for another twenty minutes if they were late. It is notable that at the first night of the play in question a substantial number of thoughtful persons whose manners have never been in question, finished their dinner and arrived at the conventional quarter of nine just as though Mr. Anderson's pretensions to their attention were no greater than those of any other dramatist. There may or may not be some debate as to the propriety of late arrival on first nights when a substantial portion of the audience is present in the capacity of guests of the management, but there is none at all on other evenings when a customer has paid for seating space at what passes for entertainment and may occupy it with perfect justification for whatever part of the evening he pleases. If an author is unable to contain his professional devisings within the conventional and established limits of time which, as it stands, are just about as much as audiences can stand anyway, there is no valid reason why a play shouldn't be regarded like opera; something to be walked in and out on at the whim of the individual so long as such exits and entrances do not materially affect the pleasure of the other patrons.
Although there is a great deal to be said for The Razor's Edge as a film, particularly the really wonderful technique of Clifton Webb, whose supposedly incidental role pretty much steals the show, there is practically nothing to be said for the attempt of the producers of that film to introduce to Manhattan the synthesis of spurious celebrities, incredible bad manners, hysteria and self exploitation that passes in Hollywood for a first night. If Daryl Zanuck contrived to put on a pretty good show on the screen, his various pensioners on the other side of the stage apron did nothing more than reaffirm the notion, already almost universally entertained, that what passes currency for chic and good taste in Hollywood Boulevard is nothing more than the spectacle of a posse of baboons scratching themselves in public when the ape farm is let loose in civilized precincts.
If Mr. Zanuck really believes for a minute that New York is favorably impressed by the shoving and hysteria of a squad of special police screaming at his other guests to make way for what they termed at the tops of their voices to be “the stars,” he is mistaken. The average film mumper attempting an imitation of the manners, comportment and attire of accustomed urbanity, is at best a study in farce technique, and when his low comedy entrance to a theater is accompanied by platoons of hired and utterly unjustified police, his comedy becomes a public offense. No cinema personality has ever yet required the escort or protection of police. If their persons are manhandled by what pass for admirers, it is no more than the accomplishment of what their press agents have for years been hired to implement, and constitutes the achievement of their fondest dreams of success.
Some years ago the late Don Skene, a sports writer of vindictive wit who once became embroiled with the police in the course of a Longacre Square tumult, afterward explained that he had been “arrested for resisting a Shubert opening.” The remark is pertinent to the technique by which the tasteless tycoons of Hollywood attempt to dragoon theater goers into admiration of their usually shiftless wares, which consists of hustling them into an auditorium with the loud cries and stampings by which beaters are accustomed to spread terror and dismay among wild animals and then, once the unhappy audience is tightly wedged into its seats, of locking the fire doors, stationing guards at the gangways and refusing exit or intermission to anyone for three entire hours. There never was a film yet devised worth three hours out of the life of any man, let alone three hours of confinement with dubious company in the dark. Actually, in order to escape the dreary domesticities of The Best Years of Our Lives, this department was forced to engage in a fistic skirmish with a goon stationed at a fire exit with explicit instructions that none of the audience be allowed to make a getaway until the damned dull show was over.
In the midst of these skirmishes with Hollywood's pretensions and the shouted and virginal protestations of a loud Miss Paris of 1431 in the person of Ingrid Bergman, theater goers had one evening of complete competence and superiority in every department of the stage when they encountered Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest, which she had devised as a sort of antecedent sequel to The Little Foxes. Even if first nighters hadn't already been driven to a practically necessary alcoholism by the preposterous Miss Bergman and the triumphant smugness of Mr. Goldwyn, Miss Hellman's play would have been an engaging charade. As it was, with the spectators hoping the next patriotic virgin to appear on stage might be done to death with hammers right in front of their eyes, Miss Hellman's assorted scoundrels, spies, murderers, whores, traitors and idiots in the Alabama seventies assumed a sort of lyric charm, an almost transcendent plausibility.
The only even tolerably good person in Another Part of the Forest is almost completely demented, which also goes for Maxwell Anderson's Joan of Lorraine, but there, by incredible good fortune, the similarity ends, and Miss Hellman concerned herself with the various villainies and ambitions which made the murderous and rapacious Hubbard family what it later was to become in The Little Foxes.
Space here doesn't permit of any synopsis of Another Part of the Forest. Simply the play shows how the founder of the Hubbard fortunes, who had somewhat sketchily made a good thing out of the War of the States even though he was a Southerner, is black mailed into bankruptcy by the members of his own family who, in turn, set the stage for their own undoing in Miss Hellman's later play. There is no altogether virtuous or sane character in the entire play, a circumstance which would in itself recommend it if only by contrast to its Broadway contemporaries, even without Miss Hellman's good writing and superlative cast. The Hubbards are rapidly getting ahead in American society, and Miss Hellman promises new triumphs for them in the third play of a fully rounded trilogy.