The Devil's Disciple

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There's the Devil to pay these nights just off Broadway on the stage of Manhattan's 46th Street Theater, but a sentimental Washington baseball fan who has bartered his soul for a .524 batting average gives every sign of welshing on the deal. To secure his investment in this "wife-loving louse," Satan calls in one of his ablest assistants, a flame-haired siren named Lola. Her job: get him.

As Lola, in Broadway's smash new musical Damn Yankees, a relative newcomer named Gwen Verdon (rhymes with spurred on) warms to her work like a flash fire in a dry thicket. Breathing a warning ("Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets . . .") that is already familiar to jukebox listeners all over the nation, she lays siege to her innocent quarry in a hectically eclectic attempt at seduction. No woman's wile is too corny or battle-worn for Lola as she romps about the stage to an insistent Latin rhythm, flinging caution and clothing to the winds. Stretched on a locker-room bench upstage, she sparks the onslaught with a try at the always reliable peek-a-boo technique. "Allo, Joe, it's meee-ee," she coos. A second later she is up and mincing forward as purposefully pigeon-toed as Betty Boop. Along the line two gloves and a skirt fly off; then, as suddenly sultry as the sirocco, Lola wheels to flaunt the angular arabesques of Theda Bara, flicks a shapely backside at her prey, slides out of a pair of lace panties, and departs northward to bump and grind in the old-fashioned tradition of burlesque. Pleased and bewildered, Ballplayer Joe sits happily helpless through it all, and in the end goes back to his wife, just as he intended from the beginning.

But if, for once, Lola has failed to get what Lola wants, the same cannot be said of the audiences who pack the theater eight times weekly to cheer her efforts. As a seductress with a sense of humor, Lola may seriously disappoint her Satanic master in the play, but as the most incendiary star on Broadway, Gwen Verdon does fine by her real-life boss, Director George Abbott, a genius of the darkling hours often credited with a magic as mysterious as Satan's own.

Sparked Memory. "His trouble," George Abbott once snorted of a famed contemporary whose plays had a way of winging off into blank verse, "is that he's always writing for posterity." Even with the recollection of fiery Gwen Verdon to spark its memory, posterity will have little trouble overlooking the book which Abbott himself, in collaboration with Novelist Douglass Wallop, has concocted for his new musical. As the legend of Faust, transposed to a ballpark, Damn Yankees offers no threat to Goethe or Marlowe, but under Abbott's direction it fills the theater with the kind of scintillant noise, color and action that movies and TV can never imitate. Bouncy with good tunes by 31-year-old Richard Adler and 29-year-old Jerry Ross, enlivened (by 26-year-old Choreographer Bob Fosse) with a baseball ballet that is danced by some of the most refreshingly ugly mugs ever to grace a male chorus, it is expertly performed by a cast of supporting actors (including Co-Stars Stephen Douglass and Ray Walston). Above all, by displaying Gwen Verdon as a Devil's disciple, Yankees provides gay and unflagging entertainment, fully representative of the kind of theater that Abbott has been dishing up for more than 30 years. Last week it was helping materially to boost the success of a season that is bringing the biggest grosses of all time (total take: $32 million) to Broadway box offices.

To achieve this kind of success, Broadway's shrewdest producers, like Abbott himself, were content this year to say pooh to posterity and to concentrate on the ticket-buying people out front. Of the 63 new plays produced, the ten that survived the end of the season* and now have good prospects of playing throughout the summer are characterized by a vivid triumph of showmanship over dramaturgidity. Playwright William Inge's Bus Stop, by all odds the liveliest straight comedy of the season, spins out the thin tale of a highly unlikely and inconsequential lovers' tiff by giving full vent to the spiritual and physical charms of Actress Kim Stanley, another new star whose skill is as subtle as Gwen Verdon's is flamboyant. As a harebrained and shopworn honky-tonk "chantoozy," romantically whisked away against her will to a farm in Montana, Star Stanley makes every helpless, idiotic gesture a pure delight, and her case is helped by the fact that a cast of fine actors all appear to believe in her inane problem.

Agatha Christie's slick whodunit Witness for the Prosecution is not top-grade Christie, and as a historical document, Inherit the Wind sheds no new light on the Tennessee "monkey trial" of the '20s. But in each of these two plays an unstinting production and the courtroom theatrics of Stars Francis L. Sullivan and Paul Muni lend a luster that is theater at its best.

Even the most solemnly decorated play of the season earned its honors largely by hiding a poverty of genuine dramatic content behind a scatological barrage of histrionic hypertension; in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which won both the Critics' Circle and the Pulitzer Prize awards, Author Tennessee Williams and Director Elia Kazan whip their characters into a frenzy of psychic exhibitionism without revealing much of anything but their nakedness. For many a theatergoer, however, the psychological striptease is richness aplenty.

In at least two cases (Fanny, Silk Stockings), Broadway reverted to an even more fundamental variety of striptease to woo customers away from its rivals. But, by and large, it relied on the plain good showmanship of which Abbott is a past master.

Competition Is Good. Ordinary denizens of Broadway, awash in their Gibsons and Bloody Marys, tend to regard erect, slim, silver-haired George Abbott as something of a freak along the street, for at 67, nonsmoking, nondrinking Abbott looks and acts about as theatrical as the vice president of a savings bank. In the firm belief that the theater is as much a sound business as any other, Abbott sees no problem at all in the constant threat of competition and rising costs. "In fact," he says, "it's good for us. With movies and TV against you, it takes more effort to get people into the theater, but they'll still come if you give them a good show."

In an Abbott production, no detail, however small, escapes his personal attention. At one point, during the Boston try-out of Yankees, Abbott threw out an entire production number, costing thousands of dollars, because it held up the action. At another, he stopped proceedings to examine the question of whether Singer Rae Allen, playing the part of a girl sportswriter, should or should not wear red nail polish. Far from being the dictatorial tyrant that he is sometimes pictured, Abbott frequently asks and takes advice from his actors. At the same time, he can be icily impatient with the kind of temperament that is merely seeking to inflate its own importance. For this reason Director Abbott, who runs a show with the cool efficiency of an admiral directing a task force, prefers, in general, to work with unknowns rather than big stars. In his new leading lady, Abbott has found a rare combination of both.

Boots & Toe Shoes. As stagy and theatrical in appearance and action as her boss is orthodox, Gwen Verdon is as exuberant, lively and unpredictable as Abbott is reserved. Her tumbling jumble of finespun, natural-red hair rides her head like a wild sunset. Her birdlike face and pert, pointed nose are those of a Continental soubrette. Her wide red mouth is constantly parted in bubbling mirth, while her green eyes, speckled with yellow, hide the ever-present suggestion of a tear behind heavily mascaraed lashes. Her hands and feet are overlarge for her trim, 5-ft.-4 1/2-in. frame, but their effect is to lend emphasis to the movements of a well-disciplined body which, on the stage, seems always to be making slyly witty comments of its own.

Unlike Showman Abbott, a Harvard man and the son of a Yankee politician from upstate New York, Gwen was never stagestruck. The theater was too much an integral part of her. Her great-grandfather was an actor in Shakespearean repertory touring the British provinces. Her grandfather was an English "step dancer," her English-born mother a ballerina, vaudevillian and dancing teacher. Her father, Joseph Verdon, is a stage electrician on the M-G-M lot in California's Culver City, where Gwyneth Evelyn Verdon was born 30 years ago.

Before she was three years old, a series of infantile diseases had left Gwen so rachitic and knock-kneed that she could barely walk. But circumstances that might have prevented another child from even dreaming of a stage career served, in Gwen's case, only to hurry it up. Vigorously rejecting a doctor's suggestion that her daughter's legs be broken and reset in the hope of straightening them, Gwen's mother tried instead the one course of therapy that she herself knew best--dancing. Laced into ugly, knee-high corrective boots during her off hours, Gwen Verdon, at three, was enrolled in her mother's dancing class to learn ballet, buck-and-wing, soft-shoe and the waltz clog. At four, she was already proficient enough to appear with her mother in an act at the Los Angeles Biltmore; at six (billed as "the fastest tapper in the world"), she was dancing at Loew's State and the Million Dollar Theater.

Just for Laughs. Like many another child, Gwen several times reacted to the stern household discipline of her father by threatening to run away. But, where other children pack a doll or two and a tube of toothpaste, Gwen always stuffed her little valise with grease paint. Working and studying constantly at her trade, always trapped in a modified form of the corrective boots in her off hours, she got what education she could in the brief classes of a school for professional children. At 15, Gwen was a seasoned veteran who, glibly lying about her age most of the time, had branched into the legitimate to play sophisticated Ina Claire leads in a Hollywood repertory company. She appeared in a revival of Show Boat with Helen Morgan and Paul Robeson, won a part in a water ballet with no previous experience in swimming, posed for bathing-suit ads on Venice Beach and, clad mostly in a layer of gilt paint carefully applied by her mother, was the eye-filling attraction of an N.T.G. revue at Hollywood's Florentine Gardens.

At 17, to the bitter disappointment of her mother, Gwen decided to give the whole thing up in favor of marriage to a man twice her age. Blond, brash, fun-loving Jim Henaghan. sometime screenwriter, gossip columnist, literary agent (for Mickey Spillane), promoter and general man-about-Hollywood, was an unlikely subject for it, but Gwen was as determined on happy domesticity as she had been on dancing. Nine months after her marriage, she had a baby son. "Gwen's old man was waiting with a shotgun," recalls Henaghan cheerfully, "to make sure the baby didn't come a day before it was due. He hated my guts." For five years, while her parents stood by to take care of little Jimmy, Gwen did her best to keep pace with her fast-moving husband as he restlessly prowled the dingier corners of show business. At his side, studying the strippers in Los Angeles' burlesque houses, she learned some of the technique that now stands her so well in the Yankees seduction number. But, in time, she had to admit defeat. "It was just one of those things," says Henaghan, still her good friend. "Gwen's a real good dame and a wonderful mother, but she wanted to be just a housewife." Shortly before her divorce, Gwen got an audition with Hollywood Dance Director Jack Cole. Impressed by her uninhibited dancing style, Cole offered her a job, as Gwen puts it, "just for laughs."

Some Sex for Jane. Gwen quit Cole once, but after her divorce she went back to work for him again, and "gradually," says Cole, "she got to be my partner. She was probably the hardest worker in our whole group. She's shy by nature, but she has an insane drive and a real Scotch-Irish streak of belligerence." When Cole went over to serve as general dance director for 20th Century-Fox, Gwen followed as his assistant. Time after time, Gwen would be called upon to do a dazzling dance number before the cameras, only to step aside and let a star take the bows when they rolled in for a closeup. One of her jobs was to teach Jane Russell how to seem more sexy. Another was to teach Marilyn Monroe to seem less so. Sometimes Gwen would get to do a dance bit all her own, as she did with Betty Grable in Meet Me After the Show, but when TIME'S Cinema critic sought to praise her for that number (TIME, Aug. 27, 1951), he had to wire to Hollywood to get her name. Over the years, backstage and behind the cameras, everybody knew about Gwen Verdon--her talent, her wit and her skill; the only trouble was that the people who go to the movies and the theater had never heard of her.

We Want Verdon. Two years ago Dance Director Michael Kidd urged Gwen to go to New York to audition for a new Cole Porter-Abe Burrows show called Can-Can. Gwen came and was even willing to dye her flame hair black to get the part. Author-Director Burrows hired her just as she was, but in almost no time Choreographer Kidd and Producers Feuer and Martin were regretting his decision. In every number she did, the newcomer outshone the expensive star, Lilo, who had been imported from Paris to head the show. Gwen's numbers were cut to the bone and carefully arranged so that she would be offstage and safely removed from applause before their end.

Disgusted and discouraged as Can-Can approached its Broadway premiere, Gwen offered to quit, and with a sigh of relief the producers said she could go as soon as they got a replacement. When the show opened in New York, Gwen Verdon was looking forward only to getting out of it. The crowd of first-nighters packing the theater, however, had quite another idea. At the end of her big number, while Gwen sat disconsolately in her dressing room taking off her makeup, the cheering audience set up a conventionlike "We want Verdon" chant, and Gwen had to be dragged onstage in considerable dishabille for bow after bow. "It was really tragic," was Gwen's only comment many weeks later, "because it got Lilo so upset."

From that moment, theatergoers became aware of the name Gwen Verdon. But Gwen herself had worked too long and too hard for personal success to let it turn her head. Being in the public eye makes her vaguely uncomfortable and selfconscious, as though she were still a little girl in high corrective boots. She would rather wander through the Fulton fish market than sit signing autographs at Sardi's, and she is probably happiest of all when she is backstage at Yankees, feeling herself a part of the show's color and action. Says Director Abbott: "She's a complete jewel--quick, indefatigable, cooperative and objective. She knows what's good for the show and what's good for her. She'll rehearse for hours and never complain. And though she has a mind of her own, she never questions any decision." Unlike the producers of Can-Can, Abbott spent the early weeks of Yankees striving to build up Gwen's part in every possible way. "Her first entrance," he says, "was much too late. Gwen knew it as well as we did, but until we made the change, she never said anything."

Few stars in the history of the theater have been so modest; yet Gwen Verdon is far from humble. She knows her ability, studies and practices her art constantly and, though she is impulsively zany enough to dye her white cat's tail pink on the spur of the moment, she takes her professional life with utter seriousness. Riding the wave crest of her first big success, modest Gwen Verdon gives herself only five more years as a dancer. But the suddenly astute showmen of Broadway and Hollywood seem little inclined, at the moment, to let her rest her talented legs so soon. Gwen's telephone these days is ajangle with fancy long-term contract offers which she is in no hurry to sign. "I don't want to get lost," says the new star, whose incendiary head and flaming personality are nightly adding new sparks to the blaze of Broadway.

* Like a financier's fiscal year, the Broadway "season" is a purely arbitrary period, extending from June 1 to May 31, when Actors Equity run-of-the-play contracts automatically expire.

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