<![CDATA[Dr. Maya Cantu - The World of Bradford Ropes]]>

<![CDATA[Dr. Maya Cantu - The World of Bradford Ropes]]>Sat, 23 Nov 2024 22:18:08 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[7. "A Michael Arlen Sort of Person:" On Bradford Ropes, "The Green Hat," and Tennessee Williams]]>Thu, 05 Jan 2023 15:29:06 GMThttp://mayacantu.com/the-world-of-bradford-ropes/a-michael-arlen-sort-of-person-on-bradford-ropes-the-green-hat-and-tennessee-williams

The title The Green Hat has for many years held a distinctive allure for me. One of the biggest and most scandalous bestsellers of the Jazz Age, Michael Arlen's 1924 novel was also adapted (by Arlen himself) and produced multiple times for stage and screen: on Broadway with Katherine Cornell, in the West End with Tallulah Bankhead, and on screen with Greta Garbo (as A Woman of Affairs) and Constance Bennett (as Outcast Lady). The role of the sexually magnetic, socially defiant, and grandly tragic Iris March (then Iris Fenwick, then Iris Storm)--who, as Arlen describes, "reached Excelsior in the abyss"--for years provided a potent star vehicle for these and other actresses.

More recently, I've been drawn to The Green Hat as one of the many allusions summoned by Ropes in 1932's 42nd Street, where the author uses it as a skillful stroke of characterization for Pat Denning, a bisexual actor who juggles his mercenary liaisons with Amy Lee and Dorothy Brock with a more sincerely ardent relationship with Peggy Sawyer. In conversation with Peggy at a Greenwich Village party, the small-town Ohio-born Pat both acknowledges the influence of the novel on his carefully crafted urbane persona---but also its distance from the reality of his life in the theater.

"But you've become a New Yorker." Peggy pointed out. "A suave well-fed man of the world."

Pat made a fearful grimace. "I suppose you picture me as a Michael Arlen sort of person who meets ladies in green hats, spills epigrams with that bored air that marks the perfect clubman, and who will reach a deserved end by running an Hispano Suiza off a cliff or drinking the poison concealed in a Borgia ring."

"You fit the portrait admirably. And now do utter some epigrams."

"My dear, the Hispano Suiza and the epigrams are non-extant. I struggle for a living like Geoffrey Waring; earn a few dollars every now and then; squander them on Sulka ties and Dobbs hats and then haunt the agents' offices for another engagement."

So when I stumbled across an inexpensive first edition of The Green Hat recently, in a Seattle used book store, I couldn't resist picking it up and finally reading it. The experience further illuminated how specifically Ropes uses The Green Hat (subtitled A Romance for a Few People) as a stroke of characterization for Pat, as an ambivalently "Michael Arlen sort of person." In the novel, Ropes draws a sharp parallel between Pat's hidden life as a gigolo and that "shameless, shameful lady" Iris, who strays from her patrician background to shock London high society with her multiple lovers. Though thoroughly a "child of Forty-Second Street," Pat longs for the life of luxurious European cosmopolitanism conjured by Arlen in The Green Hat: for views of the Bay of Capri; for "some villa near Cannes," and "drinking sidecar cocktails with Scott Fitzgerald."

Beyond more specifically noting The Green Hat's relevance to 42nd Street, I was also powerfully struck by a set of parallels I hadn't anticipated: the resemblance of the novel to the plays of Tennessee Williams. Reading an early passage in the novel, I immediately thought of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire--and specifically, the relationship between Cat's Brick and his dead college football teammate Skipper--in Arlen's description of the passionate feelings Iris's twin brother Gerald has held for Iris's first husband, the poet Boy Fenwick. Fiercely resenting his sister, Gerald believes that Iris, with her infidelities, has driven his hero Boy to suicide.

Iris discusses Boy with the novel's Narrator, through whose romantic perspective the reader perceives Iris:

I was sufficiently struck by the resonances with Williams's plays to see if the great American dramatist regarded the dandy-ish Arlen as an influence. What I found both confirmed and unsettled my instincts. In a 1976 interview with The New York Times, written shortly before the Broadway premiere of Eccentricities of a Nightingale (the revised version of Summer and Smoke), Williams confirmed that he was indeed very familiar with Arlen's steamy bestseller:

"A literary phenomenon of the Jazz Age was a hugely successful and atrociously bad novel titled The Green Hat. It was written by Michael Arlen, perhaps with the late and great Tallulah Bankhead in mind as the heroine of the stage or screen adaptation, since this heroine had many flamboyant mannerisms such as driving a yellow Hispano-Suiza about the late night, nearly dawn, streets of London, a vehicle rendered more notable by a long silver swan on its hood.

This Bankhead-type heroine gave the novel its title by wearing always a green hat when she was about to take on a new lover. She was a lady of high degree who had fallen not out of fashion, exactly, but out of respectable repute because on her wedding night, in Biarritz or Nice, her ideally handsome, youthful, and well-born bridegroom, known as Boy Fenwick, I believe, leapt out of the bridal suite to his death on the stones of the courtyard below, which caused a considerable sensation, probably making headlines, in two nations, mainly because of the heroine (Iris March) announcing to the press that 'Boy died for purity' and declining to go into further details on this intriguing matter."

In his article, Williams goes on to distinguish his own drive for literary and artistic purity--for a disciplined excising of the inessential--with the sordid tale of Iris March and Boy Fenwick, as he discusses rewriting Summer and Smoke and its transformation into Nightingale. He also (spoiler alert) goes on to reveal the true cause of Boy's "dive out the window," before concluding, "One good turn deserving another, she (Iris) kept his dreadful secret into her early grave. Not so Michael Arlen. He turned it into an atrociously bad novel which became, predictably, a runaway bestseller and he, at least lived more or less happily, or at least nattily, ever after."

The Green Hat is many things: lurid and sensational, written in deep-purple prose, and full of satire-ready town-and-country affectations, along the lines satirized by Ropes. It has character names like Venice Pollen; Napier Harpenden (Iris's true love, rather than Boy); and the decadent French artist/potential ice cream flavor Cherry-Marvel. It's unabashedly a melodrama, and Arlen shares with the novel's narrator a drive to be "as improbable as life" in his storytelling; to "destroy every cannon of art in a throb of a desire."

What the novel is not is "atrociously bad," and I suspect that Williams held The Green Hat in higher regard than he was willing to admit in 1976. At the very least, it appears to have influenced him deeply, at least on a subconscious level. There is perhaps not a very far distance between Iris March, shamed as a "nymphomaniac" by London high society while living according to her own defiantly romantic moral code, and the magic-seeking, realism-scorning Blanche DuBois (a character that Williams originally intended Bankhead to play, as she finally did, to exaggerated camp effect, at City Center in 1956).

The Green Hat may be full of lurid, "profligate melodrama"--but it's also fueled by Arlen's critique of class-bound English society that crushes non-conformists, and particularly sexually adventurous women, like Iris. She vows to the sympathetic Narrator, "Sweet, you and I shall stand arrayed against the warriors of conduct."

Returning to Bradford Ropes--

In Greasepaint Puritan, I discuss how Ropes--on the few occasions he discussed his literary inspirations--acknowledged as his biggest influences the names a select few gay or bisexual male writers. The Green Hat, given its only tacit implication of male homosexuality, has not historically been classified as queer literature. Likewise, the Armenian-British Arlen--a fascinating and colorful figure who was born in 1895 as Dikran Kouyoumdijan--seems to have publicly identified as heterosexual, entering into highly publicized romances with Nancy Cunard (who has been cited as an inspiration for Iris) and a marriage with Countess Atalanta Mercati. Nevertheless, The Green Hat converses with other iconic works of queer fiction, both in the implied relationship of Gerald March and Boy Fenwick, and through a baroque, hothouse prose style that situates Arlen as a predecessor of both Williams and Truman Capote.

Reading The Green Hat revealed to me not only Bradford Ropes's subtle use of the novel through his characterization of Pat Denning--but also illuminated a strand of camp modernist style that links Ropes to Tennessee Williams, by way of Iris March. Whether Ropes satirizing luxe "Michael Arlen sort of people" through contrast with the scarcities of backstage life, or Williams commenting on The Green Hat's "atrocious badness" while distilling its essences and purifying its excesses in the scenes of his plays, The Green Hat suggests fascinating conversations and continuities among the works of all three writers.

]]><![CDATA[6. Bradford Ropes and 'Wooing the Muse']]>Sat, 31 Dec 2022 16:33:02 GMThttp://mayacantu.com/the-world-of-bradford-ropes/bradford-ropes-and-wooing-the-muse

In the process of writing Greasepaint Puritan, I learned much about the sequence and circumstances of Bradford Ropes's writing, which encompassed 42nd Street (1932), Stage Mother (1933), Go Into Your Dance (1934), and Mr. Tilley Takes a Walk (1951), as well as several unpublished novels, ranging from biographical to mystery genres.

But the most interesting piece of archival research pertaining to Ropes's writing process itself comes from a hometown newspaper (c. early 1940s), and reveals to what extent dance not only informed the subject matter but the compositional method of his work as a novelist and screenwriter. I quote:

"He has a unique system of 'wooing the muse' as it were, when he is in the throes of writing a novel or scenario. Other novelists have written on ironing boards, atop refrigerators and in subway trains, but Mr. Ropes finds mental refuge in propping one leg over the arm of a chair, the foot stuck straight up, a handkerchief either clenched in his teeth or in his left hand breast pocket---and in front of him his typewriter, at which he picks rapidly with one finger. He is able to sit in that position because he is limber, still the result of his many years as a dancer. His method is not recommended for authors unless they have terpsichorean backgrounds."

One wonders not only which authors wrote atop ironing boards and fridges--but to what extent Ropes's method was a kind of Method, in the Stanislavskian sense, allowing him to access with embodied authenticity and memory the inner lives of his chorus boys and girls, and vaudevillian hoofers?

In thinking about Ropes with his propped-up leg and typewriter pizzicato, I was also inspired to seek out other cases of unusual writers' methods. Ropes joins multiple colorful examples: Ernest Hemingway standing over his typewriter; Jack Kerouac writing the first draft of On the Road on a continuous, 120-foot-long scroll; and Agatha Christie snacking on apples in the bathtub while plotting her books (more at this link). Christie would have likely approved of Victor Hugo's habit of writing in the nude, so as to force himself not to leave the house while wooing the muse.

]]><![CDATA[5. Bradford Ropes and "Ladies in Retirement"]]>Wed, 22 Jun 2022 21:21:50 GMThttp://mayacantu.com/the-world-of-bradford-ropes/bradford-ropes-and-ladies-in-retirement

One of the most fascinating aspects of the research that I've conducted over the last four years for Greasepaint Puritan has involved learning about some of the works of art loved by Bradford Ropes. I'll be covering some of these plays, writers, and novels in depth in the book, but also talking about a few of them here on this blog. Some of these were directly influential on Ropes's own work. Others more obliquely illuminate aspects of his voice and style.

In the latter category, I would include Edward Percy and Reginald Denham's 1940 Victorian gothic stage thriller Ladies in Retirement: the source of a grandly entertaining and absorbing 1941 film version starring Ida Lupino, Elsa Lanchester, and Edith Barrett.

Ropes appears to have held Ladies in Retirement in high regard. In 1940, he co-hosted a "theatre party" (that is, dinner followed by a play) for friends attending the play's glamorous opening night at Los Angeles's Biltmore Theatre. The thriller had previously played a successful run on Broadway and also toured to Washington, D.C., Boston and Toronto, among other cities. Character actress Renie Riano and others joined Ropes for the theatre party. Ralph Bellamy, Adolphe Menjou and Sterling Holloway were among the stars spotted in the play's audience and in the lobby of A.L. Erlanger's now-demolished Biltmore Theatre, which adjoined the still-standing Biltmore Hotel.

Though both the play and the film are somewhat obscure today, Ladies in Retirement was a substantial hit in its day, as a showcase for a foursome of grand dame actresses: the great English star Flora Robson as antiheroine Ellen Creed; Estelle Winwood and Jessamine Newcombe as her sisters Louisa and Emily; and Isobel Elsom as chorus girl-turned-lady of the manor Leonora Fiske, whom Ellen murders as she tries to protect her mentally unstable siblings from neglect and abuse in 1885 England.

Gilbert Miller's original production, directed by Denham, received stellar reviews, as The Actors Company Theatre described in the notes for its 2010 revival: "The New York Journal-American wrote, '[the play’s] chills should settle the theatre’s problem of summer air conditioning,' The New York Post stated it was 'the murder play New York has been starved for these many, many months,' and Variety called Robson, 'quiet and closely-reined, yet with range, shading, emotional depth and persuasive sincerity.'" Critic Jay Carmody, writing about the production in DC, aptly noted the play's blend of the genteel, the macabre and the eccentric: "In the best tradition of such imports from England, the play is generously touched with comedy without ever sacrificing its sinister, doom-like mood."

"Murder in the Thames Marshes" is how Ward Morehouse, reviewing the production in Toronto, described the plot of Ladies in Retirement:

"Ladies in Retirement doesn't attempt to fool you at any time. It takes you to an old house on the marshes of the Thames estuary, just a few miles from Gravesend. The time is 1885. The scene is the living room of a fantastic lady, one Leonora Fiske, who had her fling, and her romances, in the music halls, who wears snatches of make-up, plays snatches from Gilbert and Sullivan, likes a cold bottle, and wears a flaming wig. Her housekeeper-companion is Ellen Creed, played by Flora Robson. Ellen Creed is devoted to her two weak-minded sisters, who've been her charges all her life, and to the bleak house in the marshes she brings them for a visit. Their 'visit' goes on and on, Leonora Fiske rebels and orders the pair back to London, and such decision brings Ellen Creed to grim purpose. By the time Act Two begins, Miss Fiske has been done away with and the ladies in retirement, with the aid of the rascally male of the piece, Albert Feather, expertly played by Patrick O'Moore, take the story on from there."

The 1941 Columbia Pictures film version, directed by Charles Vidor, gives a strong sense of why the play was so successful the previous year. It recasts Ellen with Ida Lupino: a younger Ellen Creed whom critics considered more overtly "sympathetic" than Robson's "closely-reined" murderess. But Lupino gives a complex portrayal of Ellen--by turns chilly, noble and uncompromising--in the best tradition of the 1940s women's film, and Isobel Elsom, as Leonora Fiske, returns with her blend of charm and hauteur from the original Broadway cast.

Other new additions to Ladies in Retirement include Louis Hayward (who had recently married Lupino) as Albert Feather; Elsa Lanchester (replacing Jessamine Newcombe as Emily) and Edith Barrett (replacing Estelle Winwood as Louisa). Married to Vincent Price, Barrett was also an in-demand Broadway leading lady who concentrated on her stage work. She's nothing less than remarkable in the film version of Ladies in Retirement, all pop-eyed curiosity and live-wire openness as the foil to Lanchester's reticent, suspicious Emily. The film also has wonderful sets, lighting and cinematography, wrapping the soundstage artifice of the Thames marshes, and the Estuary House, in swirls of fog and jagged snarls of trees.

The film version of Ladies in Retirement, which can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube, abounds with wonderfully sinister and grotesque thrills and shocks: Ellen strangles Leonora Fiske as the latter plays on the piano The Mikado's "Willow, Tit-Willow" (a favorite from her touring days as a chorus girl); Leonora's flaming wig makes a surprise apparition from the realm of the dead. Officious, proverb-quoting nuns pop in and out of Estuary House, turning the thriller into a farce as sisters meet Sisters.

For all of the absurdity, the film treats the Creed sisters with respect and humanity. It turns a sympathetic eye to their marginalization in an 1885 London with little room for poor women who don't conform to domestic bourgeois norms: a frequent subject of gothic suspense drama. Both Louisa and Emily have been beaten and forced out of their lodgings for their socially unacceptable behavior. Barrett's Louisa may talk about pointing her telescope at the Thames and springing frogs into the marmalade--but she's also kind and adventurous. Lanchester's Emily earns the ire of Leonora Fiske "with her mania for collecting things" from the marshes, including bulrushes, shells and dead seagulls. However, she's also resourceful and conservation-minded. When Miss Fiske calls the sisters "insane," Ellen protests: "Please don't use that word again. Emily was right. But then people who have all they want never seem to understand what the smallest things mean to those who haven't."

I would love to know what Ropes thought of Ladies in Retirement that night with his friends at the Biltmore. Evaluating the play from the film version, I think he would have loved its high theatricality--from Miss Fiske's mobile wigs to her Gilbert and Sullivan-singing past. Ropes often blended his camp wit with touches of the gothic and the macabre, as I'm discussing at length in Greasepaint Puritan. In this, Ladies in Retirement would have been right up his alley. Finally, the portrayal of tough, resourceful women navigating harsh patriarchal systems runs through all of his backstage novels; I think he would have been fascinated by Ellen Creed, as played at the Biltmore by Flora Robson. It must have been quite the theatre party.

]]><![CDATA[4. Bradford Ropes and His Friends: Peggy Hopkins Joyce]]>Tue, 31 May 2022 18:28:08 GMThttp://mayacantu.com/the-world-of-bradford-ropes/bradford-ropes-and-his-friends-peggy-hopkins-joyce

A Ziegfeld Girl and movie actress, Peggy Hopkins Joyce was one of her era's most notorious and chronicled women, world-famous in the 1920s and '30s as the consummate gold digger. A marital chess master, she strutted down the aisle with six different millionaires and was summoned just about as many times in lyrics by Cole Porter (for instance: "Should I make one man my choice/And regard divorce as treason/Or should I like Peggy Joyce/Have a new one every season?," 1929, "Which?," Wake Up and Dream).

In my first book, American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy, I wrote about (pg. 60) Hopkins Joyce as among Anita Loos's inspirations for Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925):

"Originally a farmer's daughter from rural Virginia, Joyce had vowed, 'I am not going to have a Dull & Dreary life. I am going to have a thrilling and exciting life full of Ginger and Glory (as Joyce recounted in Men, Marriage and Me, her own 1930 'diary of a professional lady'). Born in 1893, the Gatsbyesque Joyce passed herself of as a Norfolk society belle, married her first millionaire at the age of seventeen, and by 1923, headlined the Earl Carroll Vanities in a $20,000 chinchilla coat. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Looks cheekily inserts Joyce into the narrative, as a friend of Lorelei attempts to introduce the gold digger to (movie censor) Henry Spoffard: "Mr. Spoffard turned on his heels and walked away. Because Mr. Spoffard is a very very famous Presbyterian and he is really much to Presbyterian to meet Peggy Hopkins Joyce."

Anathema to censors, Joyce also winningly plays herself in the 1933 Pre-Code Paramount farce International House, in which she vamps Bela Lugosi and W.C. Fields, and banters with the latter in still-shocking double entendres.

It was then a delight, and only something of a surprise, to learn that Joyce befriended Bradford Ropes in the late 1930s, during the latter's time in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Joyce was among a group of Ropes's Los Angeles friends who threw him a surprise 33rd birthday party. According to my source (which I will cite in Greasepaint Puritan), Ropes returned to his Hollywood apartment and found it festooned with poinsettas for the celebration. Patsy Kelly and her partner Wilma Cox (one of the few openly lesbian couples of 1930s Hollywood) were also among pals raising a toast to Ropes.

For all her vilification in the press, Joyce appears to have been a fun companion with whom to attend a swell party, as well as resistant to the systemic homophobia that surrounded friends like Ropes, Kelly and Cox. Her Getty Images page shows her both at a 1942 Hollywood Theatre celebration for Eddie Cantor celebrating the comedian's 25th anniversary on Broadway (pictured, at Cantor's left, blowing out the candles with Cantor and others among his former castmates); and at a Hollywood restaurant in 1934 with the comparably much-married Clark Gable and second-of-five-Gable wives, Maria "Ria" Franklin.

It's hard to contest that Peggy Hopkins Joyce exemplified the gold digger stereotype from which she extravagantly profited. Six years before Joyce helped throw Ropes's birthday party, the author briefly conjured her as such within 42nd Street: in the scene in which Geoffrey Waring visits his former cast-mate and implied sometime lover Pat Denning in the latter's midtown apartment. To Geoff, Pat downplays its relative luxury, enabled by his playing the "kept man" to two women, including Dorothy Brock. When Pat complains, "That's the hell of being poor," "Waring cast(s) an envious eye about the apartment. 'Poor? You and Peggy Joyce.'"

Whatever Joyce made of this literary nod (one of so many in the 1920s and '30s), she likely enjoyed the bawdy wisecracks in 42nd Street. She likely also appreciated Ropes's consistent empathy and insight into the lives of chorus girls in his backstage novels. Here, Ropes subverted stereotypes of female chorus dancers as mercenary, idle, and vain: misogynistic images that dominated the media, the stage, and the cinema.

In 42nd Street, Peggy Sawyer (far from the naïf of the film and stage versions) spits at a condescending frat boy with whom she misguidedly goes on a date: "You cheap, half-baked kid." Ropes sets up the insult to which Peggy responds: "He seemed to hold her in contempt, and although he was willing enough to embrace her and attempt a few kisses, she knew he mentally catalogued her as a cheap little gold digger who could be had for a price and then be discarded the moment someone more attractive came along."

While my research hasn't disclosed how close a friendship Ropes and Joyce actually had (my sense is that it was affable but casual), I would imagine that Ropes saw more depth in the dullness-discarding Joyce than the tabloids would have conceded her. He was also likely magnetized by one of the most mythologized women of the age: a self-invented menace to defenders of female "virtue;" and an exemplar of the bawdy, chiseling Times Square in which Ropes's work also played such an important role.

]]><![CDATA[3. Brad and the Bard]]>Sat, 23 Apr 2022 14:09:38 GMThttp://mayacantu.com/the-world-of-bradford-ropes/brad-and-the-bard

In the dust-jacket marketing for Ropes's 1932 novel 42nd Street, publisher Alfred H. King touted the book: "42nd Street is a great novel of the American theater, epic in scope, profound in insight, and enormously rich in the pageantry of its detail.... Shakespeare's dictum is reversed, for here the stage is a world. Showfolks run their little courses, become names in lights or drunken figures in alleways; but the show rumbles on with a sort of Olympian inevitability. "

Nobody would have appreciated the allusion to Jaques's As You Like It "seven ages of man" speech more than Ropes himself. In the first chapter of Greasepaint Puritan (in which I will fully cite the sources previewed here), I discuss Ropes's passionate and precocious love for Shakespeare's plays. As a youth, Ropes clearly gravitated toward not only the magical, but the metatheatrical, aspects of so many of the Bard's works. One of his earliest theatrical efforts drew from A Midsummer Night's Dream and Ropes wove Shakespearean allusions and resonances into all four of his backstage novels (also including Stage Mother, Go Into Your Dance, and the Boston-set Mr. Tilley Takes a Walk).

"At the age of seven, his favorite author was Shakespeare," revealed one profile, and another one elaborated: "When he was only eight, he started to rewrite Shakespeare in his own words!"

Another source revealed: “One of his former schoolmates…tells us how precocious and intense he was in his early interest in the drama and in the stage generally. Before he was 7 years old he had read all the plays of Shakespeare…. He had all the temperament that traditionally accompanies genius and if his audience was not duly appreciative of his rendition of Hamlet, for example, he did not hesitate to hurl a brick at it, or any other handy missile.” (Later on, hurling a self-deprecating brick backward in time at himself, Ropes satirized arrogant wunderkinds in the screenplay of his hilarious 1941 self-reflexive Hollywood comedy, Glamour Boy).

Did Ropes really read all 37+ plays by William Shakespeare by the age of 7? It's easy to sniff hyperbole in this account. Nevertheless, it's clear that at the age of the "whining school-boy," Ropes had started to read voraciously through the words of Shakespeare--and that the Bard's vision of the world as one of messy, multitudinous, sometimes Machiavellian theatricality formatively inspired Ropes in his later conception of 42nd Street. "That's entertainment," indeed.

Pictured above: Pierre-Emile Jeannest, "Child from Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man," c. 1850

]]><![CDATA[2. The Films of Bradford Ropes: "True to the Army" (1942)]]>Sun, 10 Apr 2022 07:00:00 GMThttp://mayacantu.com/the-world-of-bradford-ropes/the-films-of-bradford-ropes-true-to-the-army-1942

Florida-born Judy Canova occupied a unique niche at Republic Pictures, where, known as "Queen of the Hillbillies" and "The Ozark Nightingale," she starred in a string of eccentric comedies with titles like Puddin' Head, Sis Hopkins, The WAC from Walla Walla, and Singin' in the Corn. As her biography on TCM.com describes her, Canova played the same basic character, in film and on radio and television, "throughout much of her career: a man-chaser in pigtails, dressed in oversized ankle boots, bobby sox, short plain skirt, checkered blouse and straw hat who was given to produce an 'ear-bursting yodel."

Canova may have played decade-long variations of her rambunctious "Judy" character, but she was also a skillful, appealing vocalist and physical comedienne who could adapt herself to multiple genres....even a wartime backstage musical complete with drag-extravaganza finale. In 1942, she appeared on loan to Paramount in True to the Army (directed by Arthur S. Rogell), for which Bradford Ropes co-wrote the screenplay with Art Arthur, working with adaptors Edmund L. Hartmann and Val Burton, as well as composer Harold Spina and lyricist Frank Loesser (this was eight years before Broadway's Guys and Dolls--and it's a fun discovery that the nightclub in True to the Army is called "the Hot House"). The team based the screenplay upon Edward Hope's novel She Loves Me Not, which Howard Lindsay transformed into a hit 1933 play about a cabaret showgirl who, witnessing a mob murder, disguises herself as a male student at Princeton. The play had previously been adapted into a 1934 Paramount film starring Miriam Hopkins as the on-the-run dancer.

In True to the Army, Ropes and his collaborators retained the gangster-dodging gender-bending of the source Lindsay play. But they moved the action to the fictional Fort Bray army base, where Canova's Daisy Hawkins, a tightrope walker who loves to sing about "The Spangles on My Tights," witnesses a mob hit at the circus. She seeks refuge at the strictly women-forbidden Fort Bray, where her boyfriend, Private J. Wethersby "Pinky" Fothergill (Jerry Colonna), trains carrier pigeons. Pinky is also rehearsing magic tricks in the morale-boosting army revue, Swing in Line, directed by "Broadway Bill" Chandler (Allen Jones): "the bad boy of the musical comedy stage." When Daisy arrives in her circus garb at Fort Bray, she's mistaken for one of the GIs-turned-female impersonators in the show. "That one can't even walk like a woman," Chandler exclaims at her audition. But he's soon dazzled by Daisy's charisma and coloratura yodel.

Victor/Victoria-style hijinks ensue. When Chandler learns Daisy is "first a girl," he and Pinky devise a disguise: she'll cut her hair, dress in army uniform, and impersonate a soldier named Private Omstuck ("I'm stuck," Daisy drawls in frustration, when asked for her alter ego's name). As Daisy/Omstuck runs between rehearsal, out-sharp-shooting her fellow soldiers on the firing range, and lying low from the mob, Chandler pursues a romance with Vicki Marlow (Ann Miller), the defiant tap-dancing daughter of Fort Bray's commanding officer. "You're sable and silk, top drawer, Phi Beta Tappa," Chandler gushes to Vicki, who, as played by Miller, taps up a storm in two numbers: a patriotic tap reveille and "Jitterbug Lullaby."

Miller and Jones provide the requisite core of hetero-romance in the film. But just as Ropes had queered the Western genre with 1940's Melody Ranch (as I wrote about in my previous entry), here he fully embraces the potential of both the drag farce (e.g. Charley's Aunt; She Loves Me Not) and the all-male army revue to disrupt gender norms. Canova's film persona, too, invited this kind of subversion of bourgeois femininity: her raucous, freewheeling young mountain women can do anything men can do better, anticipating a line of tomboy heroines like Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and the title character of Calamity Jane (1953), starring Doris Day. Ropes also incorporate subtle suggestions of same-sex attraction into the screenplay. In one later scene in True to the Army, Daisy/Private Omstuck's soldier comrades prevail upon her to join them at the Hot House. At first, Daisy is reluctant to dance with Mary Treen's bobby-soxer Mae--but the two get close on the dance floor with a feverish jitterbug (though Mae's attraction to Omstuck dampens when she sees the GI applying powder at the table).

Ropes and his collaborators--writing for the always-risqué Paramount during the era of Rosie the Riveter--may have managed to dance around Hays Code censorship in their dialogue by suggesting Daisy's ultimate stability within heteronormative femininity; her masquerade as Private Omstuck will come to an end and she'll marry Colonna, her faithful pop-eyed "pigeoneer." Yet, first Omstuck will stop the show as the star female female-impersonator of Swing in Line, which climaxes with the eye-popping "Wacky for Khaki:" a drag fashion extravaganza with lyrics by Loesser.

The number is not the only movie army-show drag number of its period, when cross-dressed all-male shows were a staple of WWII military bases. Irving Berlin's This is the Army moved from Broadway in 1942 to a hit film version in 1943. Yet what distinguishes True to the Army is not only the lack of ridicule directed at the female impersonators in the "Wacky for Khaki" number as "men in dresses" (compare this to the "Ladies of the Chorus" number in This is the Army)--it's also the sheer pleasure and ease that the performers exude as they strut and pose in their gowns, dancing with both Canova's khaki-clad Private Omstuck and with the masculine soldiers who serenade her. Canova sings:

I just came to the fashion show to see the latest styles,
To watch the gorgeous models parade around for miles.
In silks and satins and velveteen and wool,
In polka dots and stripes and all that kind of thing,
But I don't see a sample of the very latest fashion
That fills my heart with patriotic passion.

I'm wacky for khaki and tan-brown belts
When I need a soldier, my heart just melts.
I'm one of those gluttons for buttons that shine--
Oh Captain, Captain, Captain, be my valentine.

I'm wacky for khaki, I'll say that twice.
It scratches a little, but it scratches so nice.
Oh, Captain, Captain, Captain, just look or I'll fall.
Cause I'm wacky for khaki, that's all.

Chorus: She's wacky for khaki.
Canova: Not tweed, not serge.
It's khaki, by cracky, that gives me the urge.
The stripes on the shoulders, they set me aflame.
Why sure I'll marry you, Lieutenant, what's your name.

Chorus: She's wacky for khaki.
Canova: I've gone with marines and with sailors in blue.
But don't you worry, I'll be true to Company B.

Chorus: Cause she's wacky for khaki.
Canova: That's me!

The whole delightful number can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube.

While not a hidden masterpiece of the movie musical, the out-of-print True to the Army certainly deserves a re-issue and a wider viewership. The film demonstrates once again Ropes's versatility and dexterity with movie musical comedies and, particularly, backstage stories with queer themes and subtexts. In Ropes's expansive world, a cowboy or a captain might be a chorus girl--and those who go "wacky for khaki" might also go wild over the spangles on their tights.

]]><![CDATA[1. Announcing "The World of Bradford Ropes:" Four Essential Films of Ropes as Screenwriter]]>Sun, 03 Apr 2022 19:43:47 GMThttp://mayacantu.com/the-world-of-bradford-ropes/launching-the-world-of-bradford-ropes-must-see-films-of-ropes-as-screenwriter

My book-in-progress, under its working title Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Gay Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes, is currently in the works. In the spirit of Julian Marsh doing a show, I'm excited to start a blog!

In Greasepaint Puritan, I'll recount the untold story of Ropes, the enigmatic author of the original 1932 novel 42nd Street, as he moved between "Proper Boston" and naughty, bawdy 42nd Street; American vaudeville, the European variety stage and Hollywood films; and from the worlds of dance and theater to popular fiction, as the writer of four wildly entertaining novels, "embellished with the pungent aphorisms of Times Square," all of which provide candid and colorful views of working backstage, with a particular focus on the lives and relationships of gay men, and the on- and offstage roles of women. These are: 42nd Street (the source of the legendary 1933 Warner Brothers film, and 1980 Broadway musical); Stage Mother (1933); Go Into Your Dance (1934) and the later Mr. Tilley Takes a Walk (1951).

In later entries in "The World of Bradford Ropes," I'll go beyond the pages of my book to share selections of my archival research about Ropes; his friends, inspirations and collaborators; and the worlds of show business among which he so fluidly danced. This research process has spanned the last four years and I've found considerably more than I'll be able to include in the book. I highly recommend Richard Brody's 2020 essay "What to Read and Stream: The Remarkable Out-of-Print Book That Inspired 42nd Street" as an excellent introduction to Ropes's source novel.

The best way to get to know Ropes's slangy and acerbic voice is through his novels (two of which, 42nd Street and Go Into Your Dance, have recently re-appeared in print). But he also worked in Hollywood from 1933 through 1950, as contracted with Republic Studios but also freelancing with MGM, Paramount, and more. Ropes wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for over three dozen films: ranging from musicals; to slapstick comedies (starring both Abbott and Costello, and Laurel and Hardy); to singing-cowboy westerns starring Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, to even a few film noirs. Ropes was a deft, versatile scenarist and screenwriter, who wrote in all kinds of collaborative configurations and contexts--but the best Ropes screenplays are the ones in which he took the lead in writing the dialogue, which is consistently witty and pungent, in films filled with self-reflexive show business satire, some with a surprisingly modern flavor. Though most of these are currently not streaming and somewhat hard to get, they are well-worth seeking out (I've used retailers like Zeus DVDs for the more obscure ones). Here are my recommendations for a few of the most exemplary Ropes screenplays:

1) Stage Mother (1933; MGM); directed by Charles Brabin

Working with John Meehan, Ropes adapted his own novel for MGM, in a big-budget musical melodrama starring Alice Brady as the title character Kitty Lorraine and Maureen O'Sullivan as her talented but stage-shy daughter Shirley, hurled into show business by her indomitable mother (sound familiar?). The source of the Freed-Brown standard "Beautiful Girl" (more famous from Singin' in the Rain), Stage Mother shows Ropes adapting his novel with a considerable degree of fidelity to the book--though its Hollywood ending grants the title character a redemption that remains much more elusive in the novel. Brady lends nuance and grandeur, ferocity and tenderness, to her psychologically astute performance as Kitty in a film also featuring Franchot Tone, Phillips Holmes, Ted Healy (of the Three Stooges), and Jay Eaton as a fey dance instructor.

2) Glamour Boy (1941; Paramount); directed by Ralph Murphy

Other than Stage Mother, Glamour Boy is the Ropes screenplay that most directly channels his novelistic voice: it's a tart, hilarious and affecting meta-satire in which the 18-year-old Jackie Cooper, playing a washed-up child star named Tiny Barlow, coaches Dickens-quoting radio whiz kid Billy Doran (Darryl Hickman) to star at Marathon Studios in a remake of his biggest hit: Skippy. Paramount re-used footage of Cooper's own famous early-Depression blockbuster, while allowing Ropes and collaborators Val Burton and F. Hugh Herbert to skewer the commodification of its child stars and Hollywood sentimentality in its many forms. Cooper is appealingly game as Tiny, and Edith Meiser wonderful as movie-mogul Gal Friday Jenny Sullivan, in a comedy that will appeal to fans of contemporary show-biz satires like "Flack" and "The Other Two."

3) Melody Ranch (1940; Republic); directed by Joseph Santley

The singing-cowboy western was a mainstay of Ropes's home studio of Republic--but only Melody Ranch unleashes the vaudevillian chaos of Jimmy Durante upon the Arizona town of Torpedo, and the charms of Ann Miller into the somewhat wooden arms of Gene Autry. The latter plays a fictionalized version of himself: a cowboy radio star, who, returning to his hometown to accept the role of honorary sheriff for the Frontier Days Celebration, remains behind to rid the town of racketeers. Broadway musical comedies like Whoopee! and Girl Crazy had previously blended New York city slickers and bronco busters; the sensibility of New York immigrant comedy and western tropes. Here, Ropes (working with co-writers Jack Moffitt and F. Hugh Herbert) takes pleasure in satirizing and queering the genre's machismo. At a town reception, an eccentric young townswoman named Veronica Whipple (played by brassy comedienne Barbara Jo Allen) welcomes Autry back to Torpedo with a light verse:

Here’s to our wondrous Torpedo
Neath shining hills and grassy…meedow.
I love it here in the Old Far West
Of the rest of the world I am wearied
Yes, it’s wonderful here in the Old Far West
Where women are women, and men are…period.

Mary Lee, Republic's answer to the young Judy Garland (and a superb, underrated singer), belts "Torpedo Joe," a song (with music by Jule Styne) loaded with censor-defying camp double entendres, leading Whipple to object: “Stop it…where did you learn that deplorable song?”

4) The Hit Parade of 1941 (1940, Republic); directed by John H. Auer

While Ropes's backstage novels are primarily concerned with theatrical show business--from Broadway to vaudeville to burlesque--his Hollywood films poke fun at other media technologies, including radio. In the 1940 MGM film Hullabaloo, for which Ropes conceived the idea with Val Burton, Frank Morgan flaunts his signature flim-flam: as a radio star who causes a national panic when he announces a Martian invasion a la "The War of the Worlds."

In 1937 and 1941, Ropes also engaged with radio in two of Republic's popular Hit Parade series, which showcased airwave crooners like Frances Langford and Kenny Baker (as Pat and David, the love interests here), as well as vaudeville stars and specialty acts. Filled with a delightful cast of zanies (Mary Boland, Patsy Kelly, Phil Silvers, Hugh Herbert, Sterling Holloway, and Franklin Pangborn among them), The Hit Parade of 1941 is the second Ropes film to anticipate Singin' in the Rain. Here, Ann Miller's aspiring diva Annabelle Potter, an ace dancer but a lackluster singer (unlike Miller herself), accepts Langford's lip-syncing aid after her imperious department store tycoon mother (Boland), the sponsor for WPX's "Trading Post of the Air," threatens to pull funding if Annabelle doesn't star in the show. Annabelle sings into a dead microphone as Pat unhappily croons in a hidden studio (complete with early television) offstage. But Pat's sister Judy (Kelly) reveals the woman behind the curtain, as Langford's voice pours out of Annabelle's turned-on mic. The Kathy Selden/Lina Lamont vibes are strong in a film that once again illustrates Ropes's inventiveness and savvy with show business satire.

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