“Born Yesterday,” currently being revived at the Forty-sixth Street Theater, is Garson Kanin’s postwar political fable about a racketeer who makes the mistake of hiring a journalist to educate his mistress, thus turning her into responsible voter. The villain of the piece (played here by Ed Asner) is Harry Brock a scrap-metal tycoon who comes to Washington with the mistress in tow—a former chorine named Billie Dawn (Madeline Kahn)—for the purpose of buying a senator (John Wylie). A not entirely successful social encounter with the senator and his wife (Peggy Cosgrave) convinces Harry that Billie needs smartening up if she is not to embarrass him publicly, and, against the advice of his lawyer (Franklin Cover), he offers the job of coaching Billie to a muckraking New Republic writer named Paul Verrall. Before long, Verrall has Billie reading political philosophy and thinking seriously about the laws upon which this great nation of ours was founded. The result is a swift derailing of all Harry’s plans, and a denouement that teaches Harry the importance of the little guy while assuring the audience that “this country with its institutions belongs to the people who inhabit it”—or, as Billie puts it, “inhibit it.”
“Born Yesterday” is a play that earnestly believes that transforming all the uneducated bimbos in America into half-educated bimbos would make this country a safer place. As such, it is probably more than a little naive—at any rate, so Mary McCarthy seems to have thought when, reviewing the play for Partisan Review on the occasion of its 1946 opening, she called “Born Yesterday” “the smash-hit comedy that pimps for progressivism.” McCarthy’s chief objection to the play seems to have been its underlying hypocrisy: she praised it dryly for “coming out boldly against people who push other people around,” pointing out that “the play is ready with its own night stick” (“The unsuspecting enemy of the people is swindled out of his girl and his private papers, not to speak of his money, and the curtain falls on a victory for democracy”), and concluded that “violence is not this play’s enemy, but is alter ego.” McCarthy never once mentions Judy Holiday, the newcomer whose performance as Billie Dawn brought her overnight fame, or the names of any of the characters. Instead, remaining completely aloof from her subject, she refers to Harry Brock and Billie respectively as “the big, rich, mindless thug” and “the infantile blonde.”
Suppressing the names of the characters in a play is one of the more elegant ways a reviewer has for suggesting that its characters will not stand the test of time. But if time has not proved the substance o McCarthy’s review wrong it has certainly refuted her rhetoric. McCarthy’s bored, contemptuous tone notwithstanding, Billie Dawn has become a cultural icon—and that, I think, only partly because George Cukor’s 1950 film version of the play immortalized Holliday’s performance. Something about what she and the play represent—an unashamedly naïve idealism—must appeal to our foolish national spirit. It’ easy to see how McCarthy (as a woman and a real intellectual, as opposed to a stage version of one) would have found the play’s heroine—who cannot count without moving her lips, has never heard of the Supreme Court, and thinks a peninsula is “that new medicine”—infantile and its politics simplistic. If I love the play (and I’m afraid I do), I suppose it’s because I’m a sucker for a good Pygmalion plot, and because its central character appeals to me. I like the image of the buxom blonde willing to crack a book in exchange for a little nooky.
The current revival, directed by Josephine Abady, is a disappointment in every respect save one: Miss Kahn’s performance as Billie. Anyone who feared for Miss Kahn in having to combat our familiarity with the movie will be glad to hear that she is fully capable of imitating Holliday when that is what is called for and of bringing her own special quality to the role when it is not. That her approach consists largely in humanizing the character should not be very surprising: acting the part of a brainless sexpot—and acting it well—s Miss Kahn’s forte, but she herself came on the scene, and rocketed to stardom giving the figure of the kept bimbo a realistic aspect. (In Peter Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” she played the buxom floozy who firefly wins over the sour little girl by articulating the kept bimbo’s pathetic ethos.) Kahn’s performance shows the script to be funnier than Holliday’s performance gave it credit for being—at least in the movie, where whatever Billie said or did was funny purely for being said or done in a particular way by Holliday. The dumb blonde that Holliday created in “Born Yesterday” and revived in other Cukor-Kanin collaborations (“Adam’s Rib,” “It Should Happen to You”) may have gone on to become immortal, but she was never really human. The film’s famous card playing sequence, for instance, was never really about more than Judy Holliday’s ability to project an aura of cheap finesse. Miss Kahn plays the scene in such a way that it ends up being about Billie’s genius for making do with whatever comes to hand.
Unfortunately none of the actors who share the stage with Miss Kahn are adequate to the occasion. As the journalist, Daniel Hugh Kelly is too bland, too genial, and too uncritical of Brock. There’s no moral bite to his performance, or to Mr. Cover’s performance as the embittered lawyer in Brock’s employ. That Mr. Asner seems to be continually playing to a laugh track is problematic: the essence of Brock is his unself-consciousness, his obliviousness to the impression he is making on other people. Asner brings forth each instance o crudity so lovingly that the whole point of the Brock character is lost.
Much in this production seems amateurish. The entire first act goes by without the light outside the window ever changing—in spite of the fact that the scene takes place at evening and people are going to bed at the end of it. Miss Kahn spends most of the last scene separated from a small gray handbag poised prominently on top of a writing desk. It’s impossible not to be distracted by the handbag—not to worry about whether she will either have to go offstage without it or make an unscheduled passage across the stage to retrieve it. Miss Abady seems unaware of the difference between stage time and film time: she has lifted whole chunks of Cukor’s direction out of the movie and plunked them onto the Forty-sixth-street stage, as though there were a camera present to regulate the pace. Worst, perhaps, is that none of the actors—except Miss Kahn—seem to know how to inhabit a world in which “Soda or plain water?” is the natural response to a question like “How would you like to save my life?”
According to the program, Miss Abady’s production was “supervised by John Tillinger,” one of our foremost directors of comedy. It’s difficult to know what this means and not to wish that Mr. Tillinger had staged this revival himself. Pace Mary McCarthy, the play and Miss Kahn both deserve better.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, February 13, 1989