A chance encounter, as it so happened, only a few hours before his death, with Ernest Boyd in the premises of Pete's Tavern, a resort deriving a certain tony clientele from the adjacent Players and National Arts Club, set this department to speculating, as it does more or less annually, on the estate of the boulevardier, the man-about-town, and the gay dog in the expansive manner of yesterday. It was only a few years ago that Mr. Boyd himself was an arresting type of man-about-town of letters, and his red beard, wing collars, and elegant Homburg hats were ubiquitous oriflammes of masculine fashion. Time had not dealt too kindly with Mr. Boyd, as his hearing was impaired and he himself said that he was out of circulation, but he was once very much a part of what may be termed the Age of the Back Room at the Plaza, when such mighty names supplied copy for the town's paragraphers as Condé Nast, Karl K. Kitchen, Caruso, Colonel Creighton Webb, Bob Davis, Frank Case, and Charles Dana Gibson.
Even while these names of weight and wit were illustrating the maître d'hôtels' reservation lists in the lobster palaces, it was, of course fashionable to mourn the vanishment of the true boule-vardier of the generation previous and the top hats and horse carriage grandeurs of such epic fellows as Stanford White and Richard Harding Davis, George Kessler and Mannay Chappelle, Center Hitchcock and Harry Lehr. The Oscar of the Waldorf Era supplied bar-room gab about Colonel William d'Alton Mann's latest blackmail through the agency of his “Town Topics,” about Evander Berry Wall's stock collars and velvet evening jackets, about Wilton Lackaye's most recent and outrageous gesture of glass-smashing which had got him barred from the Lambs for a year.
With the passing of time, the Oscar of the Waldorf Era and the Age of the Back Room at the Plaza merged in the mists of unreality and became only fragrant memories of yesterday, along with the little supper parties that were always being arranged for Lily Langtry and the time back in 1911 that Albert Keller first allowed ladies to smoke in public apartments in the Ritz. And by the time what may be described as the Jack and Charlie Cycle had rolled around, everyone seemed agreed that the boulevardier and man-about-town, the first-nighter of lobster-supper proportions and the stage-door Johnny, were one with the fauna of the Early Ordovician stage of geology—gone with the frock coat and the 1900 vintage champagnes.
But, like the champagnes themselves, a new vintage of fashionable masculine New Yorkers inevitably came into being, and although, in keeping with the custom of the times, almost all of them depended on their own professions and pursuits rather than on inherited chips for a living, all the hall marks of the public figure of style and elegant accomplishments were there minus only the Inverness cloak and the toasts drunk from a lady's slipper. Into the Jack and Charlie Cycle there survived such authentic old-timers as Frank Crowninshield, dean of all charming and affable Manhattanites, Charles Hanson Towne, whose name is so happily suited to his ways of life, and Colonel Creighton Webb himself. George Jean Nathan, Marc Connelly, and Harold Ross were part of a historic posse of eminentos who foregathered in Frank Case's Algonquin Hotel to practice poker and games with bottles; Clifton Webb became celebrated as the greatest dandy since the great Wall; and Mike Arlen took to carrying a gold-headed walking stick to his table in public restaurants, a custom not observed hereabout since Boni de Castellane was in full cry after Anna Gould. The boulevards teem with exquisites ranging in all degrees of fashion and age, style and occupation from Serge Obolensky, Alfred de Liagre, and Crosby Gaige to Jack Kriendler himself, who lends his name to an era, Jackson Hines, the monocled sourdough of San Francisco, Frank Chapman, Frederick Blake Payne, Paul Draper, and W. Averill Harriman.
Anytime some learned editorialist laments, or mannerless oaf hails, the passing of the man-about-town, Father Knickerbocker or Eustace Tilley, as the case may be, can afford a laugh up the sleeve of his newest Tony Williams tail-coat. Some vintages are better than others, but there's always a new generation of boulevard characters just around the corner.
The most determined and uncompromising stand yet registered against inflation has been reported to this department by a Boston correspondent who, just to show the type of agent we employ, is available to the cloistered precincts of the Boston Athenaeum. Three-cent tea has always been institutional in America's most stately private library, but to confirm and strengthen the Athenaeum's stand in times of crisis, there has been recently printed a menu for the tea hour on Beacon Hill, which reads: “Cup of Tea: three cents; Cup of Tea with Plain Biscuit: four cents; Cup of Tea with Plain Biscuit and Sweet Biscuit: five cents; Cup of Tea with Two Sweet Biscuits: six cents.” Beyond this Babylonish license it is evident that even the most profligate imagination of the Athenaeum hesitates to venture, and it's obvious that for a dime Belshazzar would have gone hog-wild among the files of The Atlantic Monthly.
In addition to the ordinary recommendations of the Plaza as a residence when in Manhattan, it is possessed of a specific fascination for Nunnally Johnson, Daryl Zanuck's ranking vicar, because of the elfin quality of the mail clerk. One morning recently the great man paused at the desk to inquire if he had any mail. “Well, Mr. Johnson,” said the young lady brightly, “temporarily, no!”
Quite aside from a good revival of Pal Joey, which was the best stage entertainment Broadway has seen in the last decade and could well be reproduced to the profit and pleasure of everyone concerned, what the theater needs most at the moment of the penning of these deathless strophes is some sort of mean or sense of balance which will give the reviewers an opportunity of avoiding the critical excesses to which they have been driven by the current season.
No matter if a play-reviewer be as objective and secure in his knowledge of excellence and its reverse as Wolcott Gibbs, and very few are, it is impossible for him not to react in a more or less uncritical manner to such a prolonged bout with mediocrity and down-right bathos as has been required of every aisle-seat practitioner during the past fall and winter. Probably no single show of the season elicited universal critical applause with the sole exception of Joan of Lorraine, a charade in which a bovine and expressionless actress named Bergman pushes virginal nobility and sacrifice around the stage in quantities too strong for the stomach of anybody but reviewers, a race who are under stern compulsion to applaud virginity and nobility on any terms even if they are exploited in a manner that would make a top hat look plausible on an Ojibway.
Aside from the good, the beautiful, and the cowlike Miss Bergman, no single player, let alone a single play, has claimed the wholehearted enthusiasm of all the reporters at once, and, by and large, they have been dragooned by the stage parade of mediocrity into devices of self-justification somewhat removed from the judicious use of their critical faculties. Brooks Atkinson, for example, newly returned to the Times, has simply said the hell with it, and in sheer desperation reported every successive production as something fantastically wonderful, in much the manner that Hearst employees used to greet the professional screen appearances of Miss Marion Davies. Simply, it seemed easier that way.
In the reverse direction Howard Barnes of the Herald Tribune has decided the hell with it and everything is terribly awful, so that he couldn't even have a good time at The Big Two, parts of which almost everyone else seemed to enjoy. Most people thought parts of Finian's Rainbow were justified, but a willingness to be sold on this particular song-and-dance fantasy was pretty well overcome by its insistence on socio-political allusions, a technique more honored this season in the breach than in the observance. What an outsider may gather about Broadway depends almost entirely on which paper he reads, and critical coherence is at a universal discount. So far as this department is concerned, The Big Two was about the only recent play which persuaded him that there still was life in the theater and that a seat in the Adelphi was even remotely preferable to home and bed on a cold night.
To begin with, The Big Two has a top-drawer company; it has an actual script with an idea by the very sophisticated Ladislaus Bush-Fekete, who always sounds like a character from one of his own comedies; and it is directed, produced, and performed in the obvious belief that the audience should have a lot of laughs, a little straight romance, and a deluge of atmosphere for its money. In fact, The Big Two is so long on atmosphere that a great deal of its progress is accomplished in Russian, German, and an assortment of unidentifiable European dialects, the recognition and possible translation of which are always gratifying to informed minorities in the house and which don't particularly impede the play's progress for anyone not a Berlitz graduate.
Against a setting of Russian-occupied Austria, Mr. Bush-Fekete has arranged an encounter between an American lady-correspondent (almost a must in any theater production these days) and a stern Russian militarist, with Claire Trevor and Philip Dorn in the leading polylingual parts and with a lot of old-time lush Mittel-Europa background and the incomparable acting of a large posse of wonderful bit players. Somehow Elliott Nugent and Robert Montgomery have contrived to bring back a touch of the theater to the stage, a trick almost incomparably infrequent at the current writing.
NOTES ON THE DE LUXE LIFE:
- The fragile and costly orchids which are part of the uniform of the pretty stewardesses who, in addition to the regular dinner-jacketed stewards, lend a decided chic to the atmosphere on dining-cars on the New Haven's celebrated Merchant's Limited on the Boston-New York five o'clock run.
- The fires maintained by horse-cab drivers on the Plaza cab rank to heat bricks for the feet of patrons in four-wheelers advertised as “heated cabs,” a scene right out of New York a century ago.
- The gentleman rookie cop on traffic duty at the corner of Madison and Fifty-seventh who wears, along with his shield and arm band, a Brooks-looking polo coat, snap-brim brown hat, expensive tan brogues, and pigskin gloves.
- The lineal successor to the universal American two-bit pocketknife: a solid gold-mounted, stainless steel penknife advertised in Fortune for $125, and sold in a plush-lined, wooden gift box. Whatever would Dan'l Boone have said to this?
- The red candle in a silver candle-stick used by the wine steward at Jack and Charlie's to hold behind a bottle of claret or Burgundy while decanting it to detect the sediment.
- The luxury editions of hunting books, ranging in price up to $50 and $75, a copy of which Abercrombie and Fitch uses as a window display incidental to the showing of $1,200 shotguns and Ritz-Carlton versions of pup tents.
- The smart idea of Podesta and Baldocchi, the classic San Francisco florists whose windows are a civic institution in Grant Avenue and the Fairmont, and who have started a weekly club delivery service for flowers beginning as low as $3.50 and serving distant points by air express.
- The amusing labels on a brand of tinned pheasant and other potted birds called “Henry VIII Brand,” showing the Merry Monarch tearing a grouse literally to shreds and tossing the bones under the table with fine Tudor abandon—Most amusing reading around the boulevards of New York these days is the luxury fur advertising featuring fur coats from $500 up which run regularly in the Evening Post and PM so that it only remains for the Daily Worker to start carrying the daily market reports.
- Successor to the late and charming O. O. McIntyre, first and greatest of all New York columnists, as collector and connoisseur of costly dressing robes, is Clifton Webb. Most of Webb's recent roles on stage and screen have called for multiple changes in lounging attire with the result that he is Sulka's best customer of the moment, and his collection is achieving proportions where it is a serious consideration in his rent scheme.
- A sign of the times in a Sixth Avenue drug-store window: “We have films; we have tissues; we have canned heat; we have almost everything.
- Even the stately minded old-timer who laments that druggists deal in everything but drugs and that there are no chemist's shops any more can't complain much about that!