The Charmer

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The curtain rises, and a hushed Manhattan audience gazes into illusion. The stage is London's Covent Garden Market, gaudy and loud with its night visitors. Out from behind a pillar pops a man--lean, lank, cave-chested, middleaged, his head stooped forward as if he were perpetually peering over invisible glasses. His accent is meticulously English, his habitual mood one of irascible impatience. His face scrooches up into a demoniacal, teeth-baring grimace that makes him look like a dissipated Walt Disney wolf, or falls into sagging folds reminiscent of a despondent bloodhound. He is insulting and unreasonable and indifferently cruel.

But somehow this irritable, elegant, hectoring man distills a charm which flows over the audience like a trance. He bullies the little cockney flower girl, and the audience laughs. He is outrageously rude, and the audience chuckles. His stooped figure has a negligent grace, even in a hip-length cardigan that might embarrass an impoverished English nanny. He rasps out songs in a voice that would insult a blue jay, but when he croaks a gruff admission of love for the little flower girl--"I've grown accustomed to her face"--there is a lump in many a throat.

Thus, every weekday night for the last four months, Actor Rex Harrison has brought thousands of willing playgoers under the spell of Professor Henry Higgins, gentleman bachelor and phonetics professor extraordinary. My Fair Lady is Broadway's biggest hit, and its 48-year-old star is Broadway's most unexpected new bright light. Charles Laughton is one of many fellow actors who has rushed backstage to offer his congratulations. Says Laughton: "In all my theater experience, I've seen only a handful of performances to match Rex's. He makes every man in the audience laugh at himself, and every woman laugh at the man beside her."

At bottom, My Fair Lady is nothing more than George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion with music added. First produced in London in 1914, Pygmalion told the story of Eliza, the caterwauling cockney girl, and the egotistical speech expert who, on a bet, turned her into the belle of a high-society ball. The spindly, thicket-chinned old master in knickers thus combined Cinderella and Svengali in a single play. Except for a girl-gets-boy conclusion that Shaw would not have abided, Fair Lady's Author Alan Jay Lerner did no tampering with a good thing.* Every line of dialogue, the theme of every lyric, is taken from some part of Shaw, though Lerner strayed as far afield as his personal letters and the preface he wrote for the published play. The result is more than the simple addition of music. Though the tunes are not as distinguished in themselves as Oklahoma!'s or South Pacific's, Composer Frederick Loewe has woven them into the play's fabric with an intimacy and relevance seldom matched on Broadway. Eliza's triumphant achievement of "the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain" gains an immense poignancy by sliding into song, to the contrapuntal rhythm of Higgins' delighted chant: "She's got it, she's got it, I really think she's got it!"

By thus plucking Shavian phrases from Shavian text for its lyrics, Fair Lady wondrously preserves the salt-and-pepper flavor of Shaw's intellect while transmitting the gaiety of his wit and adding a sweetness he only grumpily betrayed. From Professor Higgins' opening song the Shavian tone is set:

An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him.

The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.

One common language I'm afraid we'll never get . . .

The Scotch and Irish leave you close to tears.

There are even places where English completely disappears.

In America, they haven't used it for years!

Fair Lady is not all Rex Harrison. Producer Herman Levin has outfitted it sumptuously with Cecil Beaton costumes and Oliver Smith sets, had Hanya Holm contrive romping dances under Covent Garden's soaring arches. Stanley Holloway, a hook-nosed veteran of British music halls, makes Eliza's father an uproarious Shavian tribute to the "undeserving poor." Harrison's costar, a 20-year-old English girl named Julie Andrews, plays the role of the flower girl with heart-lifting simplicity. Switching convincingly from whining cockney to fluting aristocrat, she is raucous as she squawks her indignation at the rude Professor Higgins, touching as she manfully struggles with a mouthful of marbles (when she swallows one, Higgins says cheerily: "Oh, don't worry, I have plenty more"), uproariously funny as she balances a teacup opening day at Ascot and betrays her elegant new accent with hopelessly vulgar reminiscences of her aunt's influenza. ("My aunt died of influenza, so they said, but it's my belief they done the old woman in ... My father, he kept ladling gin down her throat. Then she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl of the spoon.")

The whole show James Thurber has pronounced "the finest union of comedy and music" in his experience. And others have said much the same thing. Shaw, always a canny man with a shilling, would have appreciated more vividly the coarser tribute of the money that is pouring into Lady's clinking till. Tickets are almost impossible to get; scalpers demand as much as $50 for choice seats. Overall, Fair Lady's producers expect to gross some $5,000,000 (including $5,000 a week for Harrison) on their $401,000 production, and the Columbia LP record of the songs should gross at least another $3,000,000.

Harrison & Higgins, Inc. In Higgins, Rex Harrison plays a character close to his own--which may actually be more difficult than hiding behind King Lear's beard or Pistol's putty nose. Harrison and Higgins are both aggressively British and crisply upper crust. Both are absorbed in their work and in themselves. Both are curt, clear, complacent. Both can be beastly and charming at the same time. Or, as Rex puts it: "I always find it less difficult than some actors to be irascible without being unpleasant. I've taken over some of Higgins and he's taken over some of me."

But one enormous difference remains. Higgins sings:

I'm a quiet-living man,

Who prefers to spend his evenings

In the silence of his room;

Who likes an atmosphere as restful

As an undiscovered tomb.

A pensive man am I,

Of philosophic joys;

Who likes to meditate,

Contemplate,

Free from humanity's mad, inhuman noise.

This is quite in character for Bachelor Professor Higgins, but so completely out of keeping with Harrison's own personality that he can think of no way to render it except satirically. Rex is no philosopher. He dislikes silence, books and classical music, and he avoids solitude strenuously. In the words of a friend, he is "a pouncer and a plunger."

In Fair Lady, Higgins' friend Colonel Pickering asks him: "Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?" Counters Higgins: "Have you ever met a man of good character where women were concerned?" Being a quiet-living man, Higgins tries to avoid the issue in life. Being just the opposite, Harrison flies to embrace it. Detractors call him Sexy Rexy--an epithet Harrison maintains was originally pinned on him by an ironic English lady whose charms he had declined. His friends insist: "Rex doesn't flirt with women; women flirt with him." There is no question that women find him attractive. Explained one: "A great deal of his charm is his humor and lightness of touch. No woman can resist the challenge of trying to make a man lose both of them."

Harrison himself says: "Women either love me or loathe me." For if Harrison's first love is the theater, his second is love itself. It is an avocation that has notably complicated his life.

There are other sharp contrasts between Harrison's stage personality and his ordinary life. So calmly self-assured on stage, Harrison in private is desperately uncertain, a worried hypochondriac who never goes anywhere without his white traveling case full of pills. "He buys pills like bestsellers," says a friend. If some one else swallows a pill in his presence, he is apt to demand one for himself on general principles. He dithers for days over the smallest decisions. He cannot keep track of his money.

Once, Rex promised to jot down every penny he spent, returned with a scrap of paper on which he had noted: "Taxi $1.50, tip 50-c- misc. items $83." He hates to close drawers or doors. Asked why, he mutters: "It seems so final." He cannot bear to be away from people, nervously insists he must "keep in touch." He hates to fly, walks out to the plane muttering, "Loathe it, loathe it, absolutely loathe it." On board, he takes a heavy shot of whisky and an enormous sleeping pill, sits moodily pulling his nose until the flight is ended.

Blood & Money. The real Reginald Carey Harrison was born in a Liverpool suburb on March 5, 1908. On his father's side was a certain amount of money from wholesaling, and on his mother's a fraction of the blood of famed actor Edmund Kean (1787-1833). "I was a seedy child," he sighs, "unbright, dull, and good at nothing except a bit of cricket. I started wearing glasses when I couldn't see the blackboard any more--I still can't see an elephant right beside me without my glasses. I was sick a lot. Nobody could guess what was the matter with me, but anyway it passed, and then some years ago a calcified gland was found in my intestines. Apparently I'd had TB of the intestines, which cured itself."

One of his schoolmasters remembers Rex as "what we called a posh boy, always neat and well groomed. Pretty unusual in a schoolboy. But he was likable."

Excruciatingly slow at his studies, Rex despaired of ever amounting to anything. Then he took part in a couple of school plays, and to his astonishment found himself applauded. His career was set, in a way that recalls H. L. Mencken's sour description of the sort of youth who generally gets stagestruck. "Is he," Mencken asked, "the alert, ingenious, ambitious young fellow? Is he ... the diligent reader, the hard student, the eager inquirer? No. He is, in the overwhelming main, the neighborhood fop and beau, the human clotheshorse, the nimble squire of dames. He seeks in the world, not a chance to test his mettle by hard and useful work, but an easy chance to shine."

At 16 Rex left school for the stage, got an apprentice job at Liverpool's Repertory Theater. Far from providing "an easy chance to shine," the job meant a series of obscure challenges. In facing up to them, Rex slowly changed from a fairly backward boy to a rather forward young man. Almost from the start he found himself devastatingly attractive to girls--and they to him. Yet Rex was never a playboy who happened to act. Even in his teens he was an actor who liked to play. Said a fellow actor of those days: "Rex always had a most commanding manner. You felt you didn't want him to leave the company. If he said he was going, you felt you had to press him to have another drink so he would stay."

Hanging & Scratching. Young Harrison long hung by his fingernails from the lower ledges of the theater world. He toured the provinces, living in boarding houses, and got an occasional bit part in London. He wore a monocle, used a long cigarette holder, fancied Scotch and hot music. He seemed rich and dashing even though he was actually poor and plugging. As things got harder he made his acting look easier. "Everything was always difficult for me," he says gloomily, and then brightens: "It's unfortunate that more American actors don't get that kind of experience. It's a marvelous backlog for you to learn the hard way!"

At 26 he charmed a pretty brunette French teacher and accomplished skier named Collette Thomas into marriage. They lived in "a series of ghastly, sordid rooms and flats," while he scrabbled up the drawing-room-comedy ladder. Then in 1936 he made his Broadway debut in Sweet Aloes and hit the top. Back in London he starred in French Without Tears, Design for Living, No Time for Comedy. Then, to "get a bit of money," Harrison temporarily left the stage for movies (a medium he dislikes), met George Bernard Shaw himself in the course of making Major Barbara.

Pulling & Providing. During World War II Rex taught radar in an R.A.F. school. By then his wandering blue eye had zeroed in on a beautiful young German-Jewish actress named Lilli Palmer. "He was very self-conscious," Lilli recalls, "as all Englishmen are when they're attracted to a woman. Later we went for a drive. He was wearing big fur gloves, and he was continually taking off one of his gloves to pull his nose. I watched him for a while and then said, 'Let me pull your nose for you. It'll be easier--and safer.'" Collette sued Rex for divorce, naming Lilli as corespondent. Soon afterward Rex and Lilli were married.

In 1945 the Harrisons went to Hollywood. They expected to be bored but hoped to make their fortunes. As it turned out, the experience was neither boring nor fortunate. Rex played his best screen role as the temperamental king in Anna and the King of Siam.* Thereafter he rejected scripts for months, finally accepted and starred in three flops. He got the reputation of being box-office poison. "I played parts I felt were not right for me," he grumbled. "A deadly feeling of hopelessness and helplessness would overcome me. I found the climate monotonous and unstimulating--the luxury is ruinous and the shop talk worst of all."

Rex refused to play "darling" with Hollywood's female columnists, who retaliated by breathing sulphurous fumes in his general direction. He quarreled with Lilli, who left for Manhattan. He developed a snootiness calculated to alienate co-workers by the hundreds--which it did. Snapped the Hollywood Reporter: "We don't remember an actor, foreign or domestic, who breached so many rules of good taste in his conduct among fellow workers. The wonder of the whole thing is that Harrison didn't have his face bashed in." But he charmed the most openhearted girl in town.

Death in the Afternoon. The girl was Actress Carole Landis. On Sunday, July 4, 1948, Rex dined at the home of his great and good friend Carole. He left at about 9 p.m. and did not return that night, unluckily. Next afternoon Rex appeared at the Landis house, bounded upstairs to the bedroom, and remained there for some minutes. When he came down it was to tell the maid her mistress was dead.

She had killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. A note to "Mommie" found near the body gave no explanation. Hollywood, disliking Rex, was ready to assume the worst, suggested darkly that there had been another note to Rex himself, and that he had pocketed it. (at the inquest, Harrison denied there was any such note.) Louella Parsons' column reported at the time that Carole "had been deeply in love with a man who was forced to tell her that nothing could come of their romance."

Actor Harrison did not improve matters by panic. After notifying the police without giving his name, he dashed away home. The public-relations office of his studio soon closed around him, and Lilli was flown back from Manhattan to be at his side. For days a battle raged between reporters who were trying to dig out the facts and pressagents trying to bury them.

"I felt no guilt complex--no, none at all," Harrison recalled last week, "but I did spend months afterwards going to psychiatrists, discussing the suicide with them, seeking the reasons for it. The plain fact is that Carole had a death wish!"

Back to the Boards. The Harrisons got out of Hollywood in a hurry. Luckily, Harrison had already signed to play Henry VIII in a Broadway production of Maxwell Anderson's Anne of the Thousand Days. He flung his skinny frame into the heavily padded king's role so frantically that once during rehearsals he had to be hospitalized. An X ray showed his stomach clenched into fist-size; Harrison claims the hospital is still displaying the plates as an example of what nervous tension can do.

The Harrison reputation was growing among professionals. When he and Lilli co-starred in an airy drawing-room spoof called Bell, Book and Candle, Author John Van Druten, who also directed, declared flatly: "I think he is probably the most brilliant actor I've ever worked with. He is fantastically meticulous. He will pause to think out every suggestion, and then try it over and over again until he's satisfied. He will even try out whether to put his weight on his toes, heels, or on the ball of his foot when he is turning and delivering a line." Jose Ferrer, then playing in The Silver Whistle, went to six matinees in a row, explaining: "I've been in this business a long time, and Rex Harrison is the only actor doing comedy that I can learn from." Noel Coward told him: "After me, you are the best light comedian in the world."

Lilli calls him "Harrisburg." Alternatively, she refers to him as "the youngest Blimp" with a mixture of affection and exasperation. Often she has tried to moderate his irritable perfectionism, which can result in his berating other actors. "Afterwards he's sorry, but no one is around then," she says. Harrison is equally harsh on himself, readily accepts criticism. "It's impossible to prick the man's bubble," says Lilli. "Rex doesn't have a bubble."

Rex and Lilli have a son, Carey, who is now at a swank British prep school. "I want the boy to have the education I missed." says Rex. "Fortunately I didn't need one in the theater." Noel, his son by his first wife, was an Olympic skier, now plays the guitar as an entertainer in European nightclubs. In London. Harrison moves confidently at any level of society; his sister married David Maxwell Fyfe, who was Home Secretary, and is now Viscount Kilmuir, the present Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, and a member of the Tories' top command. Five years ago Harrison built a villa overlooking the fishing village of Portofino on the Italian Riviera, where Rex fished, swam, sped about in speedboats. But he was always restless there. "I'm not really a country man in the hearty sense," he admits. He has a nervous habit of stroking his long nose, shooting his cuffs by stretching out his arms, and then running his hand down the length of his tie. "You haven't lived," observed a friend who visited the Harrisons in Portofino, "until you've seen Rexy go through that routine in nothing but a bikini."

Be a Chum. There were more quarrels with Lilli, and trial separations. "Let's face it," Lilli says, "Englishmen don't like women, at least not in the way that Italians or Frenchmen like women. Englishmen don't ever really look at a woman. The greatest compliment Rex can pay me is to say that being with me is as good as being with a pal. He's a man's man, an Englishman."

In Fair Lady Professor Higgins asks, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?"

Men are so decent, such regular chaps,

Ready to help you through any mishaps,

Ready to buck you up whenever you are glum,

Why can't a woman be a chum?

Actor Harrison gives that number all the conviction he's got. In fact, the strongly masculine tone of the show--typical of Shaw and atypical of musicals --was one reason he agreed to star in it.

He got the part not so much for his resemblance to Higgins as for his charm on the boards. A boulder of a word, reduced to pebble-size by too much fingering, "charm" comes from the Latin for incantation and implies the use of magic. No one who has seen Fair Lady denies that Rex exerts a sort of magic--who else could growl: "Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?" and make it a moving proposal of marriage--but few can agree on just where it lies.

Warmth & Pressure. Rex's secret is surely neither intellectual nor physical. Fellow Actor Orson Welles thinks it comes down to "chic--style without pressure." But stars of Harrison's brilliance are formed, like diamonds, under great pressure. As with diamonds, the process takes time--and warmth. "Rex himself must be a pretty nice guy," Charles Laughton argues, "or he couldn't give out the warmth and delight in life and humanity he does every night. You can't fake that."

"The key to Rex," says Moss Hart, who directed Fair Lady, "is that he's not a frivolous man. He's an actory actor, the least frivolous actor I've ever worked with and the most industrious. What he gets he gets from digging, digging, digging. Once I discovered this, I could forgive him a good deal. There were tremendous rages and stalkings-off during rehearsals."

"I was a damned nuisance," Rex agrees, "clinging to Shaw like mad. The one thing that gave me an absolutely terrible time was learning the lyrics. There's just no way of finding your way back when you blow a line; you have to keep on because the damned orchestra won't stop."

Harrison sings only a few notes. He speaks his songs, putting them over by subtle changes of pitch and by his timing--which is the envy of the profession. To actors, timing means not only pacing one's words and gestures to make them clear, but also establishing a rhythmic rapport with the audience. A theater audience is an unwieldy mass, and men who can control its feelings as a fly fisherman controls a trout are rare indeed. Rex is still working to dovetail his acting with the reactions of the audience, changes something in every performance. "The writer or director may not think the show has improved since it opened," he says. "From an acting point of view I believe it has, and will."

Between performances Actor Harrison lives in sporty luxury on an estate in Westbury, L.I. Legally separated from Lilli, he has grown increasingly close to British Actress Kay (Genevieve) Kendall. Like his former loves, she is lively, beautiful and efficient. With and without Kay, Rex has charmed the Long Island horsy set. "He can throw his charm around like handbills," says a friend. "He doesn't say anything very funny, but he laughs well." Rex pampers himself like an athlete, scrupulously sips a glass of hot water with lemon peel after every meal (for a misshapen gall bladder), in anticipation of the inevitable moment when he must climb into his black Cadillac convertible and go cityward to work.

"All day I'm building toward 8:30," he explains. "You wouldn't be an actor if you were bovine, so there always has to be this nervous tension. After the show I wonder why my stomach muscles haven't gone 'whoop' during the day. Then I can take a drink and relax for a bit. It's the only time I do relax, late at night, when most respectable people are in bed."

Stroking his long nose, wrinkling his brow and then pointing a long forefinger up at an imaginary stage, Rex murmurs: "It's awfully exposed up there, you know."

* In a long addendum to Pygmalion, Shaw insisted for several pages that Higgins would always remain a bachelor and Pupil Eliza would marry her young suitor Freddy Eynsford Hill. To assume that the heroine of a romance "must have married the hero of it" is "unbearable," Shaw snorted.

*When Yul Brynner opened in the same role in a Broadway musical version of the story (The King and I), Rex cabled him: THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING!

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