One Summer: America, 1927

Barrymore acting clan, it was an immediate hit and ran for ten months. The Barrymores were eminently worthy of parody. John Barrymore once left a stage to punch an electrician who had not focused a light on him properly, and if someone coughed while he was emoting, he would stop and call out to the audience, ‘Would someone please throw that seal a fish?’ Ethel Barrymore did her best to get the play stopped, but failed.
    Although Ferber and Kaufman squabbled endlessly and often bitterly, they wrote three great comedies together – The Royal Family , Dinner at Eight and Stage Door – before breaking up in permanent rancour. When Kaufman was near death, Ferber came to visit him and thought they had achieved a reconciliation. As she left, Kaufman called her back and said, ‘Edna, are you going to the funeral?’
    ‘What funeral?’ she asked.
    ‘Yours. You’re dead, Edna, dead!’ he cried, and fell back on the pillows. He never spoke to her again.
    Altogether eighteen plays opened on Broadway in the week that Show Boat premiered – eleven of them on the day after Christmas, making it the busiest single night in the history of Broadway. Theatre seemed to be enjoying its greatest triumph, but in fact this would turn out to be its last hurrah. Talking pictures were about to change the world of entertainment profoundly, not just by stealing audiences from live theatre, but, even worse, by stealing talent. Talking pictures needed actors who were comfortable with the spoken word and writers who could create real dialogue. An enormous exodus was about to begin. Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Bette Davis, W. C. Fields, James Cagney, Claudette Colbert, Edward G. Robinson, Leslie Howard, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Cary Grant, Paul Muni, Paulette Goddard and many more who could be seen in 1927 on Broadway would all shortly decamp to Hollywood. American theatre would never be the same again.
    When Show Boat went on the road in 1929, it didn’t do very well at all. Everybody was at the talkies.
     
    fn1 Putting advanced societies on nearby planets wasn’t in itself a preposterous notion in 1927. The March issue of Scientific American , no less, contained an article solemnly speculating on whether Mars contained a civilization superior to our own. (It also had an article suggesting that humans might be evolving into a race of one-eyed Cyclopeans.) Other respectable publications posed similar questions about Venus, where it was supposed that the inhabitants lived in some kind of tropical paradise beneath thick Venusian clouds.

C HAPTER 29
     

     
    OF ALL THE figures who rose to prominence in the 1920s in America, none had a more pugnacious manner, finer head of hair or more memorable name than Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
    Landis was a slight figure – he weighed no more than 130 pounds and stood just five and a half feet tall – but a commanding presence. Sixty-one years old in the summer of 1927, he had a wizened face and parchment skin beneath a white mane. The radical journalist John Reed described Landis as having ‘the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead’.
    Born and raised in Millville, Ohio, he owed his curious name to a bizarre circumstance. His father, a surgeon for the Union Army in the Civil War, lost his leg at Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, and, oddly, decided to commemorate the event by naming his son after the site (but with a slight adjustment of spelling).
    Landis trained as a lawyer in Chicago, then by chance and good fortune landed a plum job as personal assistant to Walter O. Gresham, US secretary of state under President Grover Cleveland. As reward for diligent service to the nation, Landis was made a federal judge in Illinois in 1905. There he distinguished himself by his many rash and startling judgements.
    He gained national attention by charging Kaiser Wilhelm ofGermany with murder after the sinking of the Lusitania (on the grounds that he had killed a resident of Illinois). In his most famous case, he fined Standard Oil $29 million – an audacious sum – for violating antitrust laws. Soon afterwards, an appeals court threw Landis’s judgement out, which is what often happened with Landis decisions. According to one authority, Landis had more cases reversed on appeal than any other judge in the federal system.
    Wherever legal news was being made, Landis was uncannily present. He presided over the early stages of the famous libel suit between Henry Ford and