One Summer: America, 1927

of that, it seems, he landed the role of Dracula. On 19 September, it opened at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. After a successful two-week tryout, it had its formal premiere at the Fulton Theatre in New York on 5 October, just before Lugosi’s forty-fifth birthday. In what may have been the best idea he ever had, Liveright hit on the gimmick of having a nurse stand by at each performance to help those who fainted, to emphasize just how terrifying an experience Dracula was. The ploy worked brilliantly. Dracula was a huge hit and ran for a year in New York, then toured for two years more, making Liveright a lot of money when he most needed it.
    It was also the making of Bela Lugosi, for Lugosi essentially did nothing else for the rest of his career but play Dracula. He starred in the 1931 movie and a great number of sequels. He also changed wives often – he was married five times – and became addicted to narcotics, but professionally he did almost nothing else for almost thirty years. Such was his devotion to the role that when he died in 1956, he was buried dressed as Count Dracula.
    For Horace Liveright, Dracula proved a reprieve, not a solution. The firm went under in 1933, but by then its good work was done. Thanks almost entirely to Knopf and Liveright, American publishing was vastly more cosmopolitan and daring by the late 1920s than it had been just a dozen or so years before.
     
    After an uninspiring spring and summer, Broadway was stirring promisingly at last. Two plays of lasting note were in rehearsals in September. One was Funny Face with music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin. Starring Fred and Adele Astaire and Betty Compton, mistress of Mayor Jimmy Walker, it would be a great hit and would run for 250 performances. Among its songs were ‘My One And Only’ and ‘’S Wonderful’. Jemmied into it in a burst of topical exuberance was a role featuring a ‘Lindbergh-esque aviator’. (The 1957 film version was completely different and cut the aviator. It also preserved just four of the original songs.)
    Far more influential was a complex musical about life on a Mississippi riverboat. Called Show Boat , it would change musical theatre for ever. As one theatre historian has put it: ‘The history of the American Musical Theatre, quite simply, is divided into two eras – everything before Show Boat and everything after Show Boat .’
    Show Boat was based on a novel from the previous year by Edna Ferber, who had just recently – and quite late in life – become extremely successful as a writer. Forty-two years old in the summer of 1927, she was from Appleton, Wisconsin, the daughter of a Jewish shopkeeper. She was small and round, never married or had a partner, and carried a sharp tongue. Once the camp author Michael Arlen, seeing Ferber in a double-breasted jacket, said, ‘Why, Edna, you look almost like a man,’ to which Ferber replied, ‘Why, Michael, so do you.’ Thanks to her wit, she was welcomed to the Algonquin Round Table, the informal luncheon club of wits who gathered every weekday in the Algonquin Hotel, and professionally embraced by George S. Kaufman, the most successful comedic playwright of the day. They collaborated extremely successfully on a string of comedies.
    However gifted Ferber was with comedy, her skills as a novelist have not weathered well. The novel Show Boat is ‘a kind of hilarious anthology of bad writing’, in the candid words of John Lahr. Inevidence of her propensity to write ‘like a teenager on diet pills’, he cites this passage: ‘The Mississippi itself was a tawny tiger, roused, furious, bloodthirsty, lashing out with its great tail, tearing with its cruel claws, and burying its fangs deep in the shore to swallow at a gulp land, houses, trees, cattle, humans, even …’ But it was a different age, and many found the book enchanting. Among its greatest fans was the composer Jerome Kern. He all but begged Ferber to let him make it into a musical. Ferber was doubtful that it could be done, but allowed him to try. The result was what a theatre historian has called ‘perhaps the most successful and influential Broadway musical play ever written’.
    Kern was born in New York City in 1885 (the same year as Edna Ferber) into a prosperous household. His father was a successful businessman, and young Jerome was well educated. He trained in musical theory and composition at the New York College of Music, though he spent his early years