ALL THAT GLITTERED

TARNISHED IMAGE By Clive Hirschhorn   ALL THAT GLITTERED,St. Martin's Press, 340 pages, $32.95 Having exhausted all there is to say about the Broadway musical in eleven comprehensive books on the subject, Ethan Mordden turns from song and dance to legit in All That Glittered. It's a canter, in his own inimitable albeit infuriating way, through the period 1919-1959, forty years he considers, quite rightly, to be the golden age of drama on Broadway. The twenties, he reminds us, launched this golden age with new voices and new subject matter, with the actor's strike and the proliferation of 26 new playhouses. The thirties emphasized social drama and realistic acting, saw the creation of The Theatre Guild and The Group Theatre, as well as introducing sophistication into the equation. The forties brought about the acculturation (a favorite Mordden word) of genuinely breakaway writing while the fifties sounded the last hurrah before the decline. The early years are presented as little more than a rehash of several more definitive histories by people like Brooks Atkinson, John Gassner and Harold Clurman who were actually around at the time and didn't have to rely on Lincoln Center's library of the Performing Arts for their material while it isn't until the fifties that Mordden's tone of voice and opinions become his own. For example, he's in his element, (though not always convincing) in discussing Auntie Mame (1956), a play with no gay characters in it, but which he regards as the quintessential classic gay play. Mind you, I'm not quite sure I know what he's talking about when he says "We have all but had Katharine Hepburn or James Cagney, but we never quite collect (Rosalind) Russell, and that's what makes her Mame titanic. What does this person do between projects, whom does she bed, what is she thinking? " Surely the same questions could be asked of both Hepburn and Cagney - and practically every other actor you care to name. Anyway, what does it matter? Sure, the play fashioned by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee from Patrick Dennis's novel contains a gay sensibility, but to say, as Mordden does, that, just because Mame Dennis is attracted to anyone born different she is "all but biologically gay" is gayspeak on a most exasperating cliched level. He also insists that Mame's first entrance finds her "dashing" downstairs because, prior to the arrival of her young nephew, she was a wastrel who was always in a rush. For starters, there is nothing in Lawrence and Lee's text to suggest she makes her entrance "dashing" downstairs or anywhere. It simply says, "she enters." Nor does her character change with young Patrick's arrival it's Patrick who changes. If it's possible to read a book with one's tongue in one's cheek, Mordden invites you to do just that. Every once in a while, he makes an observation that is spot on. Writing about William Inge he says that if Inge, rather than Truman Capote had written In Cold Blood, the play would have been about the victims rather than the perpetrators. And his remark that for years Ralph Bellamy gave "under-the-top performances" sums up this actor's early career most succinctly. Though the book covers all the important bases in the 40-year period under discussion, it skirts over the importance of Eugene O'Neill. Several of the plays are mentioned (how could they not be?), but with minimal insight in general and, O'Neill's flaws notwithstanding, their overall importance to the landscape of American drama in particular . O'Neill, despite Mary McCarthy's insistence that he couldn't write, and Mordden's description of him as a "mournful autobiographer, thrilled with his own incoherence and mythic to a fault," was the single most original voice to have cut through the torpor and crass commercialism of Broadway in the twenties. Just why O'Neill was so pivotal and the impact he created, is given short shrift by Mordden, who spends more time writing about Frank Bacon's Lightnin'(1918), which he sees as the beginning of Broadway's Golden Age than he does about O'Neill's first Broadway play, Beyond the Horizon, a smash. Mourning Becomes Electra(1931) is "dire and long" (as, he maintains, are the more famous later titles) the majesterial A Moon for the Misbegotten isn't even mentioned in the index, though he does admire Long Day's Journey Into Night - referred to as the Great American Play - but about which, he feels, there is little to add , so he doesn't. He does, however, make an interesting distinction between O' Neill and Rachel Crothers (whom he rates more highly than Lillian Hellman) when he writes" (He) "wrapped himself in myth and eternal verities, while (she) invaded faddish situations to analyze the culture of the everyday. She taught us how to live, he taught us how to die." The plays from which he convincingly draws this conclusion are Susan and God and The Iceman Cometh. Mordden is shockingly cavalier when it comes to Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie perceived at the time as mainly an actress's comeback triumph" (not true: it received some wonderful reviews). Fortunately the same fate does not apply to A Streetcar Named Desire, which he writes about at length, citing Jessica Lange's Broadway Blanche as the best he's ever seen. Clearly, we saw different performances, though her London outing in the role (for Peter Hall) was, at least, audible. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is more or less dismissed with an anecdote whose authenticity he fails to back up by providing its source. Could it be that both these plays fall into the same category as Long Day's Journey: nothing new to add? Regarding source material, apart from quoting several contemporary reviews and their reviewers, Mordden fails to provide any. He has O'Neill tell Lawrence Langner that he filled Strange Interlude( and Dynamo) with asides because actors were too one-dimensional to play a subtext. Where does the quote originate? We should be told. The critic Alexander Woolclcott wasn't just "a nonactor, but a terrible one. In S.N. Behrman's Brief Moment"he lolled about, waved a pudgy arm, and spoke to the audience rather than his fellow players." How did he know? He certainly wasn't there. He sites the first night of Durenmatt's The Visit (1958) starring the Lunts as "one of the last of the great ones." Really? has he been to every first night since? What's the source for the bizarre anecdote involving Tallulah Bankhead, Florence Eldredge and Fredric March in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth? Instead of source references, Mordden includes footnotes throughout - some of which he calls "shmengie" footnotes which are usually patronising. After a reference to the character Penrod, he writes: "Do I really have to educate any of you in America's greatest forgotten novelist and his apparently not entirely immortal characters?" He is equally patronising about William Gibson's The Miracle Worker and the major food-fight between Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Worst of all, though, is an incomprehensible reference to Kern and Hammerstein's song The Last Time I Saw Paris, jokingly referred to as "The Last Time I Saw Mahonoy City. * As usual with Mordden, there's some less than elegant writing, ("Having made a voyage of self-discovery" he says about the character Ralph in Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing, "he now wants to get into not show-biz....but progressive politics. " What does he mean by "the heavy dick of genuine liberty?" "boobois America", "metamythomaze" and "Wisecrack comedy creates disorder, which is arguably another word for classless democracy"? He can't resist a cheap crack: he calls George Kaufman's daughter Anne Schneider "Anne (Kiss of the) Schneider Woman", nor can he resist repeating that hoary old Pia Zadora gag concerning The Diary of Ann Frank. He keeps mentioning Broadway long-runs, but in the section on director Margaret Webster and actor Paul Robeson's Othello, fails to mention that this 1943 production continues to hold the record, at 296 continuous performances, for the longest-running Shakespearean production in Broadway history. Tennesee Williams's decline began in the sixties, not the seventies Moss Hart does not get the first credit on The Man Who Came to Dinner, Judy Holliday's career also included a stint as part of The Revuers, and it would have been nice to mention Arthur Laurents's name in connection with The Time of the Cuckoo. There are only four pages of photographs, so why devote one of them to Carousel, which is mentioned only in passing and doesn't even appear in the index? So, apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show? * Schmengie footnote: To be pedantic (as Mordden often is) true Shakesperean scholars will know that the correct phrase for "all that glittered" is "all that glisters....