What does Marilyn Monroe have in common with Garson Kanin, the director, playwright, screenwriter, and twentieth century Renaissance Man? Blink and you’ll miss Kanin's name flashing through the closing credits of NBC’s drama “Smash,” inspired by his 1980 backstage saga of the same title. While Kanin's name is less well-known today, he was an esteemed figure of both Golden Age Broadway and Hollywood, creating the classic stage comedy Born Yesterday, the screenplays of the Hepburn-Tracy films Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike (co-written with wife Ruth Gordon), and directing the original productions of The Diary of Anne Frank and Funny Girl. Wide-ranging in genre, Kanin's works are distinguished by their blend of wit, grit, and generous humanism.
An absorbing and sprawling (522-page!) novel, inspired by Kanin’s experiences with Funny Girl, Smash details the creation not of a Monroe musical, but of Shine On, Harvest Moon, a fictional show about the rise of real-life vaudeville star Nora Bayes (pictured below). Narrated by pert 20-something Midge Maghakian, who gives up a promising publishing gig at Doubleday to work as Shine On, Harvest’s Moon’s Production Secretary, the novel takes the form of Midge’s production diary: a bustling collage of Company Bulletins, filled with artist bios and theater-themed quotes; transcribed conversations; and Midge’s gimlet-eyed impressions of the show’s creative process, even at its most destructive. The novel begins in August 1979 during Manhattan rehearsals, tumbles through the tumult of try-outs in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, and concludes as Shine On, Harvest Moon opens to smash reviews the following February.
Kanin’s novel has all the backstabbing backstage intrigue of its campy, guilty-pleasure NBC counterpart: sex scandals, a cocaine bust of the show’s dancers, and a Las Vegas-vet leading lady so egomaniacal that other characters refer to her only as “Star.” Smash is also packed with scintillating backstage lore; with stories and quotes about Cole Porter, Kaufman and Hart, and Thornton Wilder (who was Kanin’s mentor in the 1930s). But beyond the surface soap opera and theatrical anecdotes, Kanin offers a richly layered portrait of the agony and ecstasy of bringing a new musical to Broadway fruition. Hinging on the brutal, and potentially transcendent, conflict between artistic ego and theatrical collaboration, Kanin coaxes the drama of his Smash from the dynamic clash of backgrounds, sensibilities, and shifting alliances that fuels the creation of any new musical.
While the risks and stakes of mounting a Broadway musical have skyrocketed in the thirty-two years since Smash’s publication (Shine On’s million-and-a-half dollar budget now seems a droplet on Spider Man: Turn off the Dark’s corporate web), Kanin creates a recognizable landscape of life upon the wicked stage. As Shine On’s hard-boiled choreographer Jenny Flagg explains to Midge, a new Broadway musical is the ultimate labor:
“It’s giving birth, collectively...It’s hard enough to do it alone! But in collaboration! So it’s full of screwing and morning sickness and worry about what’s going to come out eventually...And the pains worse as it gets closer, and then the agony. And then it’s there, whatever it is.”
While not a memoir, Kanin’s novel resonates with the author’s personal experience, and, certainly, the Nora Bayes musical in Smash bears more than a passing resemblance to Funny Girl, the 1964 backstager about Fanny Brice for which Kanin suffered his own share of tsuris, despite the eventual triumphs of both the show and Barbra Streisand. The novel’s plot echoes Kanin’s replacement by Jerome Robbins during the Philadelphia try-out of Funny Girl, though Kanin retained directorial billing credit.
Numerous other parallels connect Funny Girl and Shine On, Harvest Moon. Funny Girl producer Ray Stark, who was the son-in-law of Fanny Brice, seems to have partially inspired Shine On impresario Art “The Barricuda” Clune, married to the grand-niece of Nora Bayes. (A husky-voiced singing comedienne, who introduced “Over There” during WWI, Bayes was no slouch in the diva department; she had her up-and-coming rival Sophie Tucker fired for stealing the show in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1909).
Nor does it tax the imagination to read Smash’s protagonist Larry Gabel, the charismatic, middle-aged director of Shine On, as an idealized, if not self-flattering, surrogate for Kanin himself. The most intense ideological battles in Smash pit Larry against Clune (or A.C.), as their tensions turn increasingly contentious. Kanin characterizes A.C. as a hot-headed Hollywood bigshot who trusts his first impressions, sees musicals as fixed products, and soothes hurt feelings with gifts of Hermès bags. By contrast, Larry Gabel is a consummate man of the theatre. He encourages revision, experimentation, and the essential importance of the collaborative process: each artist harnessing his/her ego to the greater good of the theatrical whole. He insists to A.C.:
"We're going to respect the audience. One by one, they may not be the best and the brighest -- but believe me -- as a group, they are terrifyingly brilliant and sensitive and intelligent. 'An idiot genius,' Moss Hart used to say. There's no light so powerful as the light shed by three thousand eyes all focused on one spot on one stage."
While the conflicts of Larry and A.C. drive the plot of Smash, Midge takes note of constant rivalries, rifts, “cliques and claques” splitting the Shine On, Harvest Moon creative team. “Star” seeks the spotlight more than giving an authentic portrayal of Nora Bayes; the songwriting team of lyricist Fred Monroe and composer Hy Balaban see Shine On as a showcase for their songs; and hackish librettist Christopher Feller wants to collect his paycheck from A.C. As Shine On is reshaped, retooled, and extensively rewritten, the creators argue over issues of authenticity and accessibility. Confronting an opposing set of challenges from a Marilyn Monroe musical, the Shine On team considers how to make a hit of a 1980 Broadway musical about a semi-forgotten vaudeville star. Should they interpolate a few of Bayes’s trademark hits (the title song, and her husband Jack Norworth/Albert von Tilzer's “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”), or opt for an entirely original score (à la Funny Girl)? Should the score sound more contemporary or ragtime-period?
Nora Bayes’s sexuality is also a source of contention in Kanin’s Smash. The book upon which Shine On, Harvest Moon is based turns out to be no ordinary biography, but a controversial account of Bayes’ rise “from the brothel to Broadway.” Written by a Chicago journalist named Gene Bowman, whom A.C. and his wife entrusted with Bayes’s personal papers, Nightingale for Sale claims that Bayes started as one of the courtesan “Butterflies” of the ritzy Everleigh Club in Chicago, and battled attempts to reveal her scarlet past as she rose to fame. (For the record, this prostitute history of Nora Bayes, who, née Leonora Goldberg, was raised in a strict Orthodox Jewish household, appears to have been a complete stroke of dramatic license on Kanin’s part. There’s certainly no mention of Bayes in Sin in the Second City, Karen Abbott’s meticulously researched account of the Everleigh Sisters and their Belle Époque bordello empire). When Feller’s Shine On book drains Nora of dramatic life, softening her from Everleigh Butterfly to mousy piano player, Larry arranges for Gene Bowman to replace Feller. Bowman rewrites the Shine On libretto along the candid lines of his book – a life-saving decision that steers the show in the direction of a hit.
For all its strengths, Kanin’s Smash contains some blatantly terrible sex writing, as Midge embarks on a love affair with Gene Bowman (as well as a bi-curious one-night stand with Shine On's costume designer Alicia Marble). These misguided erotic interludes suggest a Greatest Generation gent fumbling at late ‘70s Porno-Chic. Certainly, Kanin identified throughout his career as a feminist, co-writing not only the gender equality comedy Adam’s Rib with his actress/writer wife Ruth Gordon, but creating indelible not-so-dumb blonde Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday, and the story for the 1942 Katharine Hepburn classic Woman of the Year. It’s to Kanin’s credit that narrator Midge Maghakian (an attractive young woman described as “not the housewife type”) emerges in Smash not as a meek amanuensis, but a bold woman who asserts herself with increasing self-possession, even as she fends off sexual advances and harassment from assorted men in the novel. Snapping back at A.C., Midge frequently exercises a sharp tongue. She quips of hack librettist Feller, who’s following A.C.’s bidding, “He’s a secretary. Like me. Only he doesn’t take shorthand, so that makes him a writer.”
Kanin’s 1980 novel reflects not only shifting gender roles, but a changing Great White Way. Kanin’s novel portrays Broadway at the transitional twilight of a fading “Golden Age:” stunt casting is becoming more common (“Star” is a pampered Las Vegas personality rather than a disciplined Broadway performer), amplification is a vexing new phenomenon, and corporate interests are creeping into the traditional model of the single producer or producing team. A.C. has help with the financing of Shine On, Harvest Moon not only from “money lady” Cindy Sapiro (a forerunner to Anjelica Huston’s producer Eileen Rand on the NBC show), but from a record company banking on hit songs on the Shine On cast album.
Yet, even amid these changes, and all the “scheming and politicking and backbiting and perfidy,” the collaborators in Kanin’s novel perform their roles with purpose and passion. Larry Gabel knows why he wants to tell Nora Bayes’s story: “I love this show. It’s about things I care about.” As he tells Midge, Shine On, Harvest Moon is about morality, the double standard, talent, and love, of which “our culture’s sold the idea as candy.” If Kanin evokes the “Lullaby of Broadway” circa 1980 in all its more sordid ballyhoo, Smash is ultimately a romance of the theater, an account of the author’s decades-long love affair with the stage, and a very satisfying theatrical novel.
IMAGES: Nora Bayes, circa 1920; Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice in the Broadway production of Funny Girl; Katherine McPhee and Megan Hilty as dueling Marilyns in NBC's "Smash;" vaudeville advertisement for Bayes and Norworth; exterior of the Everleigh Club brothel in Chicago, circa 1900; Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, circa 1950s
*For more on the speculative
Funny Girl/Shine On, Harvest Moon roman à clef parallels in Kanin's
Smash, see
Peter Filichia's article on Playbill.com.
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