Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

(They kiss. MRS. HIGGINSruns out. HIGGINS, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.)

Despite Shaw’s unequivocal interpretation—and long before Pascal’s Pygmalion film in 1938 or the My Fair Lady musical in 1956—the original Higgins, Beerbohm Tree, had already taken liberties that would distort the play beyond Shaw’s tolerance. In reporting on the 1914 London premiere to his wife Charlotte, Shaw wrote: “For the last two acts I writhed in hell…. The last thing I saw as I left the house was Higgins shoving his mother rudely out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals to buy ham for his lonely home like a bereaved Romeo.”35 Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw created the role of Eliza, urged the playwright to attend another performance “soon—or you’ll not recognize your play.”36

When he summoned enough courage to attend the hundredth performance, Shaw was appalled to discover that “in the brief interval between the end of the play and fall of the curtain, the amorous Higgins threw flowers at Eliza (and with them Shaw’s instructions far out of sight).”37 To make explicit what he had perhaps naively assumed would be understood, Shaw published a sequel to Pygmalion in 1916, in which he explained in detail why Eliza and Higgins could not and should not be considered as potential romantic partners.

Considering his strong ideas on the subject, it is surprising that Shaw permitted Pascal to further alter the ending (and many other parts) of Shaw’s original screenplay for the 1938 Pygmalion film in order to create the impression that Higgins and Eliza would in fact unite. Perhaps Shaw was unaware that Pascal had actually filmed two other endings, including Shaw’s. In 1941, Penguin Books published a version of Shaw’s screenplay, which included reworked versions of five film scenes that were not part of the original play:

1. Eliza getting in a taxi and returning to her lodgings at the end of act I;

2. Higgins’s housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, giving Eliza a bath in the middle of act II;

3. Eliza’s lessons with Higgins at the end of act II;

4. The Embassy Ball at the end of act III (this scene is based on the Embassy Ball in the film—another Cinderella image—that replaced the ambassador’s garden party, dinner, and opera that took place offstage in the play);

5. Eliza’s meeting with Freddy when she leaves Higgins’s residence at the end of act IV.

In his book on Shaw’s films, The Serpent’s Eye, Donald P. Costello carefully details and explains how the printed screenplay departs from the actual film.38 Perhaps not surprisingly, the most dramatic departure between what was filmed and the published screenplay occurred at the work’s conclusion. This is what filmgoers saw and heard in the film:

Eliza’s voice is heard coming out of the phonograph:

ELIZA’S VOICE: Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!! I ain’t dirty: I washed my face and hands afore I come, I did.

HIGGINS’s VOICE: I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.

ELIZA’S VOICE: Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo!

HIGGINS’S VOICE: In six months … (Higgins switches off the phonograph. Close-up of Higgins’s sorrowful face.) Eliza enters the room, unseen by Higgins. He hears her voice, speaking with perfect lady-like diction, soft, gentle, lovingly.

ELIZA: I washed my face and hands before I came.

As Higgins turns to look at Eliza, the ballroom theme begins once more. Higgins looks at Eliza tenderly. Cut to a close-up of Eliza, looking back at him. Higgins just begins to smile; then he recollects himself, and says sternly, as the camera looks only at the back of his head:

HIGGINS: Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?

As the ballroom theme swells into a crescendo, a fade-out from the back of Higgins’s head. The lilting music of the ballroom waltz is heard as “The End” and the cast are flashed upon the screen.39

Before the 1941 publication of the screenplay (as altered by Pascal), however, Shaw managed to have the last word. It appeared in a letter of corrections from August 19, 1939:

MRS. HIGGINS: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. I should be uneasy about you and her if she were less fond of Colonel Pickering.

HIGGINS. PICKERING! NONSENSE: she’s going to marry Freddy. Ha ha! Freddy! Freddy!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! (He roars with laughter as the play ends.)

After submitting this final ending, Shaw parenthetically inserted the following remark: “I should like to have a dozen pulls of the corrected page to send to the acting companies.”40

When asked in an interview why he acquiesced to a “happy” ending in Pascal’s film, Shaw replied somewhat archly that he could not “conceive a less happy ending to the story of ‘Pygmalion’ than a love affair between the middle-aged, middle-class professor, a confirmed old bachelor with a mother-fixation, and a flower girl of 18.”41 According to Shaw, “nothing of the kind was emphasised in my scenario, where I emphasised the escape of Eliza from the tyranny of Higgins by a quite natural love affair with Freddy.” Shaw even goes so far as to claim that Leslie Howard’s “lovelorn complexion … is too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about.” Despite Shaw’s desire to grasp at this perceived ambiguity and despite the fact that audiences of both film and musical do not actually see Eliza fetch Higgins’s slippers, most members of these audiences will probably conclude that Freddy is not a romantic alternative.

Shaw’s denial to the contrary, the romanticization of Pygmalion introduced by Beerbohm Tree during the initial 1914 London run of the play was complete in the 1938 film. As Costello writes: “What remains, after a great deal of omission, is the clear and simple situation of a Galatea finally being fully created by her Pygmalion, finally asserting her own individual soul, and, becoming independent, being free to choose. She chooses Higgins.”42

The stage was now set for My Fair Lady, where the phonetics lesson introduced in the film would be developed still further, Alfred P. Doolittle would be observed on his own Tottenham Court Road turf (and given two songs to sing there, one