Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) by McHugh, Dominic (best ereader for pc .TXT) 📗

telegram of January 25 to Levin mentions having had a “long talk with Kidd on Sunday”—and two letters written by Levin on April 1 suggest that the producer, composer, and lyricist intended to meet with Kidd during a trip to the West Coast on April 8, long before Hart was hired.20 A gap in the Levin correspondence from April 6 to April 30 suggests that the trip indeed took place. It is possible that the meeting between Hart, Lerner, Loewe, and Kidd occurred as Lerner claimed, but all mention of Kidd simply disappears after the April trip to Hollywood, indicating that a meeting of a similarly negative character to the one Lerner describes may have taken place during this time instead, only without Hart.

Linked to this are three letters between Levin and Oliver Smith. On May 30, Smith wrote to Levin that “Gower [Champion] sounds very good for dances,” seemingly in reply to Levin’s letter of May 17 in which he hoped “to know something more about the director and choreographer situation in about a week.” But Levin’s irritable response on June 2 not only proves that Kidd was no longer in the frame for the show but contradicts another aspect of Lerner’s chronology. Lerner claims that Gower Champion was the first choice for choreographer, but it is clear both from Smith’s mention of “Gower” on May 30 and from Levin’s reply that the team had turned to him a good six months after first pursuing Kidd. “I still haven’t made a deal with Gower,” wrote Levin on June 2. “All choreographers, it seems to me, have in the last couple of years been infected with an overdose of self-importance—and he is no exception. Who did the dances for Show Boat? I am meeting with him today and have some hopes that the matter will be settled then.”21 Levin’s letter does, however, corroborate Lerner’s account of the reason for Champion’s not becoming the choreographer: “When Herman sat down with [Champion’]s representatives, his terms were more than we could afford.”22

SEEKING ELIZA

January–March 1955

These negotiations with various choreographers—which did not cease until September 1955, when Hanya Holm signed her contract to do the show—were but a small part of the work faced by Lerner, Loewe, and Levin. Casting the lead roles took months of work. At the same time as pursuing Michael Redgrave and Noël Coward, their thoughts were turning to the role of Eliza Doolittle. As part of a telegram to Levin on January 25, Lerner made a reference to Judy Holliday, the future star of Jule Styne’s Bells Are Ringing, who was apparently an early possibility for the role.23 Nonetheless, Lerner and Levin soon opened talks with Julie Andrews during her stint in the first cast of the Broadway production of Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend from September 1954.

On April 1, Levin wrote to Oliver Smith to say that “Unless something goes awry, Julie Andrews, who plays the lead in The Boy Friend, will play Eliza.”24 During this three-month period of January–March 1955, then, Lerner and Loewe asked Andrews if she was interested in the role, auditioned her, and formally asked her to do the part, and Levin began negotiations with her agent. She signed an agreement to play the part of Eliza on March 31, earning $1,000 per week for the first of her two years under contract, being given second-star billing, performing on the original cast album for $1,000 per day, being permitted a personal dresser, and being allowed a lay-off of eight weeks after the first year.25

Yet both Andrews and Lerner appear to disagree slightly with this time-scale. In her autobiography, Home, Andrews says that as her contract for The Boy Friend “neared completion, I began to grow very excited about returning to London [in October],” but was then approached about playing the part of Eliza.26 However, it is difficult to see how January could be seen as “near the completion” of Andrews’s contract, which was not until the end of September 1955. Lerner, too, is curiously vague about when these events took place: he describes how he went to see The Boy Friend with Levin and Loewe, met with Andrews, and asked her not to make any commitments until the rights for Pygmalion had been acquired.27 But Andrews differs with this description slightly by saying that she was “amazed” when the offer “came through,” implying a time lapse between the audition process (during which period she also auditioned for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Pipe Dream) and the offer.28

Throughout this phase, the only evidence of another actress possibly playing the role of Eliza is in a letter from the agent Deborah Coleman, who wrote to Levin on February 3 to suggest Vanessa Lee (one of Ivor Novello’s leading ladies) for the part, but no further mention is made of Lee elsewhere in Levin’s papers.29 Four days later, Levin wrote letters to two agents to announce that he would be going to London on February 15 to “do some casting on the leads for the musical version of Pygmalion.”30 The ambiguity of the phrase “casting on the leads” may suggest that the team was undecided as to whether to use Andrews or not, and there is evidence that Petula Clark was auditioned for the show in March 1955 during the visit to London.31 But in truth, there seems never to have been a serious alternative discussed for the role once Andrews’s name had come up, and as history has shown, she was the perfect choice.

A VISIT TO LONDON

January–March 1955

Aside from the casting of Eliza, Levin’s letters of February 7 appear to uncover a massive discrepancy in Lerner’s autobiography regarding the visit to London in the early months of 1955. Lerner describes how, in order to fund the trip to England, he sold his share of stock in a gold mine left to him and his brothers by their late father—“And so it was that shortly after the first of the year, we took off to visit the original