Emperor Norton Arrives on the Great White Way
In 1934, a Who's Who of 20th–Century American Theater Gave the Emperor His Broadway Debut
HOW DID Emperor Norton get to Broadway? Apparently, not the same way one gets to Carnegie Hall — practice, practice, practice!
The story begins with the New York-based theater collective known as the Group Theatre — formed in 1931 by Cheryl Crawford, Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg.
Strongly inspired and influenced by the system of actor training and acting technique developed by the Soviet Russian director and teacher Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938), the Group became a laboratory for the approach to acting and theater that later became known as “the Method.”
After the Group disbanded in 1941, Group members Elia Kazan (1909–2003), Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis founded The Actors Studio in 1947.
Group member Lee Strasberg (1901–1982) joined the Studio in 1951 and was the Studio’s director from 1951 until his death in 1982.
Under Strasberg, “the Method” revolutionized American theater and film — and, it is Strasberg who today is most closely associated with teaching and promoting Method acting.
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DURING the decade-long lifespan of The Group Theatre, members often were active across a range of theatrical disciplines. Members who were actors in the Group’s productions also were working on their own scripts for the Group — or were developing their own ideas for how to direct.
Indeed, the Group was a training ground for several others — in addition to Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg — who went on to become extremely influential in shaping American theater and film, both as playwrights / screenwriters and as teachers.
For example, the Group produced the play, Awake and Sing!, that is regarded as the play-writing masterpiece of member Clifford Odets (1906–1963) — who may be best known today for his screenplay for The Sweet Smell of Success.
Members Stella Adler (1901–1992) and Sanford Meisner (1905–1997) went on to establish their own famous acting schools.
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ALL of these figures — Strasberg, Kazan, Odets, Adler, Meisner and more — came together in late 1934 to produce a play by Melvin Levy, Gold Eagle Guy, that has Emperor Norton as a character.
It appears that the Broadway production of Gold Eagle Guy marked the first time that Emperor Norton was portrayed on a Broadway stage.
In keeping with the Group Theatre’s mission of producing plays of contemporary social relevance, Golden Eagle Guy was a Depression-era morality tale about greed, corporate wealth and economic inequality.
The “Guy” of the title is Guy Button, an ambitious ruffian sailor who arrives in San Francisco in 1862 and spends the next 40-plus years building a shipping empire — turning himself into a titan while ruthlessly leaving everything and everyone else in his wake. Button gets his comeuppance in 1906, when the Earthquake and Fires bring his world crumbling to the ground.
The original production of Gold Eagle Guy was directed by Lee Strasberg, with Elia Kazan as Polyzoides (and also serving as stage manager for the production); Stella Adler as Adah Menken; Clifford Odets in two roles, as Burns and Jolais; Sanford Meisner in two roles, as Ortega and Guy, Jr.; and Luther Adler (1903–1884) — Stella’s brother — as Emperor Norton and, later, as Tang Sin.
Trivia time: In the 1950s and ‘60s, William Challee (1904–1989) — who played Pearly and Ah Kee in the production — appeared in several television Westerns and, indeed, is the actor who played Mark Twain in the 1966 Bonanza episode “The Emperor Norton.”
The play opened at the Morosco Theatre at 217 West 45th Street on 28 November 1934 and moved to the Belasco Theatre at 115 West 44th Street on December 25th.
Here are the vitals, as they appeared in the Playbill for the Belasco performances.
Three images (above) from Belasco Theatre Playbill for Gold Eagle Guy, which played at the Belasco 25 December 1934 to 26 January 1935 after a 4-week run at the Morosco Theatre. Source: Playbill
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IN GOLD EAGLE GUY, the story of Guy Button unfolds across five scenes in five different years: 1862, 1864, 1879, 1898 and 1906.
The character of Emperor Norton appears only in the first of these scenes, set in “a barroom built into what was once the grand salon of the packet ship Mantic, now land-surrounded, and a part of San Francisco’s ‘Long Wharf’” — “Mantic” being a thinly veiled reference to the legendary ship Niantic, abandoned then dragged up to a site at the northwest corner of Sansome and Clay Streets, where it was repurposed as an early “mixed use” building that housed shops, offices and a hotel.
The Emperor — apparently (but only apparently) included mainly for historical flavor — has only about a dozen lines. But, these lines include one volley in which the Emperor helps to frame the significance of the impending drama in a way that seems to have escaped contemporaneous reviewers.
Emperor Norton overhears “Sorenson” saying “The old man’s plum crazy!” and responds, Cassandra-like:
No. I’m not mad. I see doom rising in the sky, and you welcome it laughing. I see it open and spew forth! I see it drown the world.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had just been published in 1932. “I see doom rising in the sky, and you welcome it laughing.” It’s hard to imagine a more Huxleyan warning for Melvin Levy to have given the Emperor to utter like a one-man Greek chorus singing into the whimsical, self-distracting clamor of a ship-hull saloon. *
Happily, the tiny handful of photographs of the original Broadway production of Gold Eagle Guy include one of the Mantic saloon scene that has Emperor Norton front and center:
Saloon scene in Broadway stage production of Gold Eagle Guy, 1934. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Source: NYPL
Here’s a detail of the photograph showing Luther Adler as Emperor Norton. Note the pipe. Was Adler riffing on Virgil Williams’s 1872 portrait of the Emp?
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ALAS, neither Melvin Levy’s play nor the Group’s 1934 production of it are seen as having been among the Group Theatre’s better efforts.
At the time, critics generally were kind. But, they commended the ensemble production less as great theater than as great spectacle, giving special praise to the multi-level sets by Donald Oenslager — an innovation in 1934 — but judging the script to be a little too broad and unrefined and the performances to be variable.
In his 29 November 1934 review of the previous night’s opening performance at the Morosco Theatre, Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times wrote:
”Gold Eagle Guy” is more character study than drama. It might well be a good deal crisper and more comprehensive than Mr. Levy has drawn it; and the Group Theatre might give it a more vigorous performance…[b]ut the material is engrossing, and Mr. Levy’s half-admiring, half-amused point of view is full of relish; and the performance, staged with an imaginative use of active levels, is one of the most interesting of the season.
After paying further compliment to Oenslager’s settings, Atkinson turned to the individual performances, starting with J. Edward Bromberg, who played Guy:
Any one would enjoy acting in places like those. At any rate, Mr. Bromberg does; and since the part he plays is the core of the drama, the Group Theatre and the theatre-goers should be equally grateful. His Gold Eagle Guy is solid, blunt and resonant, and enkindled with the gleam of a man who likes what he is doing. There is flesh and blood in his acting. As a knavish banker, Morris Carnovsky gives one of those fine-grained performances that keep acting high on the plane of art.
Perhaps it is ungracious to wish that every trouper under the Group Theatre’s banner could also enjoy acting, and play with humor, dash and gusto. Certainly a drama of a flaring period in American history is the proper incident for muscular exuberance. From the ideal viewpoint the performance looks a little timid and fussy. But from a practical viewpoint let us acknowledge that it is painstakingly accomplished.
Atkinson went on to single out a few more performances, including Stella Adler’s, for honorable mention. But, that last phrase — “painstakingly accomplished” — was Atkinson’s way of saying that it was too obvious that too many of the actors were working too hard — they were not naturals, or at least could not make audiences believe that they were.
Ultimately, “theatre-goers” were not sufficiently “grateful” to enable the Group to get the production past 65 performances before having to close it on 26 January 1935.
Luther Adler had seen it coming. Before bringing Gold Eagle Guy to New York, the Group Theatre had done a 6-week residency at the Majestic Theatre in Boston, where the Group staged three plays, including Guy. In The Fervent Years, his history of the Group, published in 1945, co-founder Harold Clurman remembered that the Boston rehearsals for Gold Eagle Guy
had become increasingly difficult in their final phase. The actors had never been much impressed with the play, and [Lee] Strasberg was worried over it. Backstage, Luther Adler, referring to the play, said: “Boys, I think we’re working on a stiff.”
The Broadway production of Gold Eagle Guy did last for long enough to receive the garland of the following early Al Hirschfeld (1903–2003) cartoon, published in the New York Herald on 13 December 1934:
“Gold Eagle Guy,” 1934, by Al Hirschfeld (1903–2003). Published in the New York Herald, 13 December 1934. Source: Al Hirschfeld Foundation
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THE ASSOCIATION of Gold Eagle Guy with the Belasco Theatre affords the opportunity to conclude by observing a serendipity.
The Belasco is named after David Belasco (1853–1931), the legendary playwright, director, producer and impresario. Although Belasco, “the Bishop of Broadway,” is most closely associated with New York, he was born in San Francisco — and, it was in San Francisco that he cut his theatrical teeth, initially as an actor.
Belasco first received notice for his performance, at 19, as Prince Saucelita in a burlesque that played at San Francisco’s Metropolitan Theater in May 1873. Belasco’s character may have been called Saucelita, but, the local theatrical news sheet the Figaro made clear what the real joke was, noting that
Belasco took the house by storm with his make-up for “Emperor” Norton, which was quite a feature of the piece.
The title of the burlesque? The Gold Demon.
What are the chances?
* Information about the lines spoken by the character of Emperor Norton is from the published edition of the play: Melvin Levy, Gold Eagle Guy (Random House, 1935).
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