GEORGE M. COHAN (1878-1942), DRAMATISTJack FoleyGEORGE M. COHAN (1878-1942), DRAMATISTFirst, think of something to say. Then say it the way the theatergoer wants to hear it said, meaning, of course, that you must lie like the dickens.This paper arises out of the fact that I came across George M. Cohan's play, Pigeons and People (1933) in a used book store. I was enchanted by the play, and it brought back to me some of my feelings about the author, who had been one of my father's great heroes. * The two full-length biographies of George M. Cohan call him, respectively, "prince of the American theatre" and--in a phrase taken from Cohan- "the man who owned Broadway." In The Marx Brothers Scrapbook (1973), Groucho Marx--not noted for the gentleness of his opinion of others--called Cohan "a dirty cocksucker. A no-good Irish son of a bitch": He once kicked his wife in the stomach when she was seven months gone. A real nice man! A big drunk, but a brilliant performer.Some of Marx's vehemence arises from his unforgiving recollection of Cohan's having sided with the managers during the early days of the formation of the actors' union, Actors Equity, and during the actors' strike of 1919. "Cohan," Marx says, "who was an actor sided with the managers...I never forgot that." Though personally generous and a particularly soft touch for actors, Cohan remained throughout his life "the only scab on Broadway." The actors in his productions all belonged to Actors Equity, but he himself did not and performed without the standard contract. George Michael Cohan was born in Providence, Rhode Island on (probably) July 4, 1878. Cohan's birthdate was never in dispute until his friend Ward Morehouse's book, George M. Cohan: Prince of the American Theater appeared in 1943--after Cohan's death on November 5, 1942. Morehouse reproduced Cohan's baptismal certificate, which shows him to have been born on the third of July. But neither birth certificates nor baptismal certificates are necessarily unimpeachably accurate documents. My father was born in 1895; his birth certificate shows him to have been born a week earlier than the day he was in fact born. In George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway (1973), John McCabe writes, The baptismal certificate hardly settles the matter. As was not unusual at the time, the birth was not recorded in the civic registry of Providence. There is, however, circumstantial evidence writ large that the July 3 on the baptismal certificate is a clerical error. Cohan's birthday was always celebrated on the Fourth of July by his parents, Jeremiah ("Jere" or "Jerry") and Helen ("Nellie") Cohan, and this many years before that date began to have profitable connotations for the Yankee Doodle Dandy. The utter probity of these two remarkable people who early taught their son that a man's word was his impregnable bond is the strongest proof that Cohan was indeed born on the Fourth.McCabe goes on to quote Cohan's mother, who described her son in a Theatre Magazine article (May, 1922) as "the babe born to me on Independence Day, 1878." McCabe asserts that "Little of Cohan remains in the American theatre. He is something of an unforgettable forgotten man": Outside of perhaps ten songs [including "Give My Regards to Broadway," "I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy," "Over There," "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Mary Is a Grand Old Name"], there is not much evidence of him today. In recent years his best play, The Tavern, has been revived by knowledgeable theatre people who recognize it for what it is, one of the great American farces. This recognition at least seems not likely to diminish. The dramatizations of Cohan's life in film (Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942) and musical theatre (George M!, 1969) were loosely structured entertainments which emphasized the man's musical work but barely examined his life and thought. Ward Morehouse's 1943 biography...outlines Cohan's life in interesting detail but with little psychological depth, and with scant evaluation of Cohan's artistry.Along with the two biographies and Cohan's own Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There (1924), two web sites are of particular interest: John Kenrick's http://www.musicals101.com/cohan.htmand Dave Collins' http://www.georgemcohan.net/are both excellent sources of information about this enigmatic, difficult man. George Michael was the third child born to vaudevillians Jerry and Nellie Cohan. The first child, Maude, died at the age of nine months; the second, Josephine, born in 1876, became a celebrated dancer. Her death in 1916 shook Cohan greatly, as did his much-loved father's death a year later. Cohan's mother, Nellie, died in 1928. George was born, writes Morehouse, not in a hospital but "in the tiny attic room at Mrs. O'Hern's." In that most family-oriented of entertainment media, vaudeville, the Cohans--billed as "The Four Cohans"or what George called "the four act"--became a performing family. Cohan's most famous curtain speech was one in which he named each of the members of his family: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you." "From his early vaudeville days--fresh, cocky, confident, pugnacious, and a hellion he was--until the very end, he was a headline-maker," writes Morehouse: A prodigy at sixteen, with songs published and sketches produced, he was his family's manager at twenty and a successful playwright at twenty-three. He tried to elope when he was in his teens. He was married when he was twenty-one. He was divorced eight years later and he re-married in 1907. Again and again he "retired" as an actor, but those retirements never were long lasting. He was a partner in a successful play-producing firm--Cohan & Harris. He casually wrote the greatest song of the first World War as he rode in one morning in 1917 from his home in Great Neck. [Cohan was the first of a show business colony there that was to include Ed Wynn, Ring Lardner, Gene Buck, and other friends of Cohan's.]...His career as a showman, as a man of the theater, was one of enormous success, but there were few periods in his life when he was without personal problems which always seemed, at the moment, overpowering...In his endless reminiscence with the few friends to whom he was devoted his talk was never of the theater of the moment or even that of his years of greatest success, 1910 to 1915, but nearly always of his knockabout vaudeville days, of the road adventures of the late Eighties, the Nineties and the early 1900's.Accounts of Cohan's life tend to focus on his work in the musical theater, which was of course an important aspect of his career. I heard first hand about some of the Cohan shows from my father, who had appeared as a tap dancer in the road companies of three Cohan productions: The Cohan and Harris Minstrels, written by Cohan and George ("Honey Boy") Evans (1909); Hello, Broadway, a revue written by Cohan in which he parodied current Broadway successes such as Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1914); and Mary, a "Cohanized" musical with book by Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel and music by Louis Hirsch (1920). This last boasted the very popular song, "The Love Nest," later the theme of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. Cohan made several silent films--including an excellent version of his popular play, Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913; film 1917); the play was based on a novel by Earl Derr Biggers, author of the Charlie Chan books. In 1932 Cohan went to Hollywood to star with Jimmy Durante and Claudette Colbert in The Phantom President, a musical with songs by Rodgers and Hart--whom Cohan referred to, unflatteringly, as "Gilbert and Sullivan." The musical is not without interest. Cohan plays a dull presidential candidate, Theodore K. Blair, as well as his song-and-dance-man double, Doc Varney. The scenes in which Cohan plays both Blair and Varney simultaneously--easily accomplished in film--would not have been possible on the Broadway stage. Like a later Rodgers and Hart film, Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933)--which featured another legendary Broadway star, Al Jolson--The Phantom President centered itself in real problems of the Depression and featured Larry Hart's "rhyming dialogue." Though the songs are weak, Durante is marvelous and there are wonderful, perhaps partially improvised moments between Cohan and Durante. (Cohan always felt that the ability to improvise was an essential part of an actor's craft; his productions often featured a scene, different each night, which had to be totally improvised.) Surprisingly, there is even a slight homoerotic "subtext" in the film, which insists that "The country needs a man" to solve its problems. And there is a much-too-brief version of Cohan's famous dance--the effect of which is quite different from what James Cagney does in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Cohan himself wrote that his dance--which he performed again on Broadway in I'd Rather Be Right in 1937--began as the result of an "accident." "I had always done a dance in the four act, to the tune of 'Coming Through the Rye,'" Cohan writes in Twenty Years on Broadway, It was an old-fashioned "essence of old Virginia" dance [a dance associated with the blackface comedian and dancer, George Primrose]. It had never taken especially well with the audiences, but was necessary to the act in order to give Josie a chance to make a change of costume.The orchestra leader agreed. Unfortunately, the music he substituted was "the weirdest melody I had ever heard": "the drummer accompanied the tune with a tomtom effect, characteristic of the American Indian. I tried my best to get into the dance, but my sense of rhythm was keen enough to make me immediately realize that the thing broke time, and also that the piece did not carry an even number of bars": It suddenly dawned on me that, instead of its being in six-eight time, to which I'd always done this particular dance, the thing they were playing was in two-four time...A sudden idea came to me...Why not try some buck steps? I'd always used two-four melodies for bucking...The tempo was very slow, so, in order to make the steps fit, I had to drag them out more or less, and so exaggerated the thing by leaping from one side of the stage to the other instead of sticking to the center.Cohan tells us that professional dancers often denigrated his dancing, though they occasionally praised his songwriting. He took out a newspaper ad in which he claimed "I could dance better than any living song writer, and write a better song than any dancer on earth." The detractors "'laid off' of me after that." The Phantom President was, unfortunately, an unhappy experience for Cohan. Critics were unkind--even cruel. Variety wrote, "For George M. Cohan it suffices to say that this is his first [talking] picture and maybe his last. For pictures such as these, light and frothy, he brings nothing to the screen which it has not already at hand....[T]his picture will do much to definitely establish that Cohan belongs to another generation. Love interest is not for him...." Cohan also found the actual making of the film dispiriting. "This racket out here isn't my business," he told Jimmy Durante, I don't know why they wanted me to come out here in the first place, or why I ever was dumb enough to come. But I want you to walk away with this picture, Jim...I've played all through the country, singing my own songs, dancing, or appearing as a star in productions. The public of most cities seemed to like me, and I've done pretty well up to now, but out here I'm dirt, and all the things I can throw to Jimmy in this picture I will. I'll give him not only the bones but the meat.Cohan's unhappiness about the film and his love for Durante are clear in this quotation, but so perhaps is his theatrical sense that The Phantom President was a far better vehicle for Durante than for him. Once the legendary actor has done his dance, there is little else for him to do. Cohan was to make one other film, Gambling (1934), described by allmovie.com as "cheaply filmed in an abandoned New York warehouse": a self-produced version of Cohan's play, "Gambling disappeared from view shortly after its release." For many years Cohan had been making an attempt to establish himself as a "legitimate" playwright--someone who could produce "dramas" as well as "musicals." In the 1930s the failure of that attempt was made clear, though the matter was complicated by Cohan's extraordinary success as an actor. Cohan's play, Pigeons and People opened on Broadway in 1933 and received reasonably favorable reviews; it ran only 70 performances. That same year, Cohan appeared to rave reviews in Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness. (Cohan played the father; the major role of the son was played by Elisha Cook, Jr.--"Wilber" in The Maltese Falcon. J.D. Salinger saw Ah, Wilderness and described Cohan's performance as "the first unstagey acting I think I ever saw on the stage. A real mind working.") In 1936, Cohan's play, Dear Old Darling ran for only 16 performances. John McCabe notes that the opening of 1937's Fulton of Oak Falls boasted "floral horseshoes cramming the lobby and...numerous theatre people present to celebrate." But the run was short: 37 performances. Marian Shockley Collyer, an actress friend of Cohan's, came backstage to see him during the run. McCabe quotes Collyer: Cohan waited until everyone had left the dressing room, put his arms around her and began to sob, repeating, "They don't want me any more, they don't want me any more." "I must have been there fifteen minutes comforting him," says Mrs. Collyer. "My heart just ached for him, he was so miserable."Later in 1937, Cohan was a sensation as President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Kaufmann and Hart production, I'd Rather Be Right (songs by Rodgers and Hart). Amazingly, Cohan played this disabled president as a dancer- "a song and dance president." No one saw anything odd about it. What was happening to Cohan's career was quite clear and Cohan undoubtedly understood it very well: The theatergoing public and the critics liked Cohan; his performances drew rave reviews. They did not like what Cohan wrote, however--even when he himself appeared in the play, as he did in Pigeons and People and Dear Old Darling. There was perhaps a manic-depressive side to George M. Cohan. One can see both the manic and the depressive in his brilliant song, "Give My Regards to Broadway." Played uptempo, the song is infectious and catchy--a hymn to joy. Played slowly, it is nostalgic and heartbreaking. Note the word "whisper": Whisper of how I'm yearningMarian Shockley Collyer may have been catching Cohan at a particularly "depressive" moment, but he was clearly aware of the actualities of his situation. Were the critics right about Cohan's "legitimate" plays? It's difficult to know, since very little of his writing is still available. Indeed, much of it was never even published. In a newspaper article, Cohan described his working habits: I can't sit down and deliberately make out a skeleton of what it is going to be. My plan is to collect half a dozen characters, make them well acquainted with each other, and with me, put them down on paper and then just let them run along. Whenever they want to say anything I let them say it. After I have finished one act I haven't any more idea than you have what the next one will be. I write my plays after midnight. I get back to my apartment after the theatre and have supper-a big one, too: a pound of beefsteak, a large collection of fried potatoes and a pot of coffee. Then I go to my room and write steadily until nine in the morning. At such times I never touch stimulants other than coffee, for I find they unnerve me and muddle me when I am keyed to a high pitch. It's like throwing sand on a hot bearing.That openness--the need for spontaneity--is an essential element in Cohan's sensibility. When asked by an actor what costume he would be wearing in the second act of one of Cohan's plays, the author answered, "I don't know, but if you'll tell me what you'd like to wear you might give me an idea for a second act." Pigeons and People was subtitled "A Comic State of Mind in Continuous Action"; it was completed in five days. The impetus to the play began not only with Cohan's frequent walks around Central Park (where he heard someone say, "Is he the kind of man who feeds pigeons in the park?") but, McCabe tells us, with a desire to do "something genuinely innovative" in the theater. "How would you like to see a play without any intermission at all?" Cohan asked. McCabe makes Pigeons and People sound like an early version of Seinfeld: "Cohan was quite serious in his project to write a very funny play about absolutely nothing...Its theme is that it has no theme." It may be, however, that something more is going on. In a poem, "Home Front," I wrote, What if the search to discover "mind" is self-defeating because "mind" doesn't exist? What if "mind" is a term made up out of a puritanical impulse to avoid thinking about the body-but has no actual existence? We say "mind thinks," but if mind doesn't exist this statement is meaningless. The statement nevertheless creates a false dualism because the moment we say "mind" we oppose it to "body." What if thinking is an activity of the body-like walking or peeing?I was surprised to come upon a similar statement in Pigeons and People. The central figure, Parker, is talking to Frisby, a "psychologist": PARKER. I don't think I am [a psychologist]. I know I'm not. And I know you're not. There's no such thing as a psychologist. Now I'll prove it to you. What is a psychologist? Now no fooling, what is a psychologist?(Parker insists that his "brain"--as opposed to his "mind"-- "goes to work whenever it gets a job." He adds, "Of course, not being a union brain, it's out of employment most of the time": a little jab at Equity!) Cohan was known for "Cohanizing" plays--which means that he reworked plays other people had written. Two of his best-known--and best--plays, Seven Keys to Baldpate and The Tavern, were written in that way. Another way to put it is to say that Cohan was taking existing material and transforming it. In Pigeons and People he is doing something similar with what in someone else's hands would have been a fairly straightforward comedy. An eccentric character of some sort enters into a world which, until his entrance, has been relatively stable. Suddenly, everything is turned topsy-turvy. We understand that the character is "mad," but he is also sympathetic, and the comedy lies in the interplay between the social expectations of the characters (and of the audience) and what the eccentric says and does to overturn those expectations. Marx Brothers films are like that. They are also a little bit like roller coaster rides: exciting, but once the excitement is over, it's over.* Both Pigeons and People and The Tavern are almost that sort of play. But they are something more as well. Pigeons and People is an attempt to simultaneously create and transform a Marx Brothers kind of play: it is an attempt to bring the audience into a state in which it believes absolutely anything may happen--which is to say, to bring the audience into the perception of total chaos. When a character wonders who could be at the door, Parker answers, It could be anybody. It must be somebody. Then again, the chances are it's nobody. You never can tell, the way things are breaking these days.And a moment later, he adds, What's the date? How's the weather? Stocks are up--stocks are down. Down with the rich. Pity the poor. God bless you, old pal. How are the folks? That's all there is to it, Doc. It's a fake. The whole thing's a fake. You know it's a fake as well as I do.Parker insists that he always "shoots straight away"--that he tells the truth. Yet to tell the truth in Pigeons and People is to enter a state of madness, to perceive that "the whole thing's a fake." Cohan is insisting that the illusory quality of the dramatic presentation is an analogue to an even deeper and more far-reaching illusion: that of "life" itself. A Marx Brothers comedy is meant to release energy--and it does so in an extraordinary way. But its effect is cathartic: we go back to our lives delighted and energized by the "madness" on the screen. Pigeons and People is more subversive: it is an attempt to rethink everything, an attempt not only to "change" our minds but to realize that "mind" itself is an illusion. "Now you're beginning to talk like him," says one of the characters after Parker finally leaves the stage; Cohan hopes that his play will have a similar effect on audiences. These themes are enunciated in a remarkable speech Cohan included at the end of The Tavern. There exists a recording of Cohan himself reciting the speech at the Catholic Actors' Guild in 1938: I don't know who I am and if I did I'd be the most miserable man on earth, for my greatest happiness lies in the fact that I occupy a most unique position--that of not having been cast for a part in the great world drama of life. (Slight pause) I am a lonely, single-handed spectator sitting back looking on and laughing at the monkey-shines of the great all-star company of several billions of men and women who are unknowingly playing the piece for me--they're playing the piece for me. I am the audience, but a good audience, withal, for I laugh- I am the audience, and if I may say so, a highly intellectual audience, for in all the changing scenes of this ever-beginning, never-ending plotless plot, I recognize the spiritual hand of a great director, a master director, who has so skillfully staged this tightly woven, disconnected, tightly knitted spectacle of tragic nonsense, and so I am amused, and I laugh, and I applaud. (Applauds) And if I'm any critic, it's a bully good show, and I hope some day to meet the author, and compliment him upon his marvelous entertainment. Alas, I have no one with whom I may discuss the merits of the play, for all the rest are on the stage. I'm sitting out in front, alone, all alone.It is hardly strange that a man who spent his whole life in the theater should finally come to regard theater itself as life. In the end, Cohan is not even a performer: only a member of the audience, someone whose lone perceptions are shared by no one. Cohan the great performer finally becomes Cohan the critic, a person who has no audience whatsoever--no one to whom he can tell the life secrets he has learned. His is a position of pure theatricality, an affirmation of the essential nothingness of life, though Cohan does assert the existence of a "master director." His "strong creative drive," remarked James Cagney, "gave him no rest." Near the conclusion of Pigeons and People, Parker asks, "Why should I permit life to make a fool out of me?" That's what's the matter with life, Doc. It's had too much of its own way. Somebody's got to give it a battle. Why not I?* A character who is "the strangest man I ever met" is one of the staples of Cohan plays. The Vagabond in The Tavern is such a character, as is Kid Burns in the brilliant musical, Forty- five Minutes from Broadway (1906). The television series Omnibus put on a marvelous and quite faithful production of Forty-five Minutes from Broadway in 1959. It starred Tammy Grimes, Russell Nype, and (in a stunning performance as Kid Burns, the Broadway wise guy with a heart o' gold) the late Larry Blyden. The audio portion of the performance was released on an album by AEI records in 1986 and is available as a CD. Forty-five Minutes from Broadway is fascinating for a number of reasons and has rightly been called "daring" by Gerald Bordman in American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle . One of the extraordinary things about the play is that it is a musical comedy without a love song. In a sense, both "Mary's A Grand Old Name" and "So Long, Mary" are love songs--but they are so only in the most indirect fashion. For this play Cohan produced no genuine love song--something which tells someone directly, "I love you." (The entire play may be in love with Mary and there are specific characters who are in love with her--but there is no song.) I think both Mary songs embody a kind of innocence for which Cohan, with all his Broadway "knowing," longed: perhaps the innocence was the childhood he never quite had and replaced with his early "know it all / can do it all / everybody else is a hayseed" attitude. The small town of New Rochelle is made fun of in the title song-- "Oh, what a fine bunch of rubens," "They have whiskers like hay"--but the characters eventually settle there: despite its provincialism, the town also has an idyllic quality. (After all, it contains Mary, though she was born in an equally provincial place: Schenectady.) I'm aware of no other songs which express so clearly that deeply American quality: a knowing innocence. Incidentally, there is still a hint of the difficult child Cohan was in Parker's "Somebody's got to give it a battle. Why not I?"
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Jack Foley