There was a culture war long before the last few decades — only the combatants weren’t liberal elites versus conservative regular Joes. This was a war between New York City and the rest of the United States. New York viewed itself as the only American locale of consequence, the singular place to which anyone who had the misfortune to be born elsewhere in America had to relocate if he wanted to make his mark. Just as Balzac’s Rastignac journeyed from the provinces to Paris, so the American Rastignacs had to make their way to Manhattan if they did not wish to be stifled by the small-mindedness of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt or by the rage of William Faulkner’s Snopes.
Of course, the fight was fixed. New York was the home of every major cultural industry (with the exception of motion pictures), so who was left to stick up for the rest of the country? Even those who attained a cultural eminence outside New York, like Baltimore’s H. L. Mencken, aided the city’s dismissal of middle America with dismissive talk of the “booboisie” — the sort of people who didn’t cram themselves into Manhattan apartments in pursuit of greatness.
There could hardly have been two more provincial New Yorkers than George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Kaufman was himself an escapee from middle America. Born in Pittsburgh, he got himself to Manhattan as soon as he could and wrote drama criticism before becoming a famous American wit. Hart was born a poor kid in the Bronx and by his teenage years was already a go-getter on the Great White Way.
They began collaborating in 1930 with Once in a Lifetime, the first and still one of the best Hollywood spoofs. Nine years later, they had the idea of bringing the culture war between New York and the United States to the stage in the barely disguised person of Alexander Woollcott, the now almost entirely (and justifiably) forgotten drama critic and radio personality who was famed for his unsparingly acid tongue and his friendships with the rich and powerful.
Kaufman and Hart wondered: What if Woollcott, the king of the Algonquin Round Table, found himself in a small Ohio town, delivering a lecture for vast sums of money to the culturally anxious ladies of the garden club — and then broke his leg and was forced to stay for weeks as the unwilling guest of the town’s foremost Babbitt? That is the inspired premise of The Man Who Came to Dinner, one of the most delightful comedies of the twentieth century. It has just been revived on Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre in a splendid production full of pizzazz and high 1930s style, with the effortlessly funny Nathan Lane in the role of Sheridan Whiteside.
Whiteside makes one of the great entrances in the American theater: After raging offstage for a while, he is brought in a wheelchair into the living room of the house on whose front step he took a tumble. He looks around and pronounces: “I may vomit.”
His host, industrialist Ernest Stanley, offers his best wishes: “I hope you are better.” “Thank you,” Whiteside replies. “I am suing you for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” He hurls invective at friend and foe alike, with particular vitriol directed at his nurse, Miss Preen, whom he accuses of having “the touch of a sex-starved cobra.” By act three, he has driven Miss Preen from the nursing profession: “I became a nurse because all my life, ever since I was a little girl, I was filled with the idea of serving a suffering humanity,” she tells him. “After one month with you, Mr. Whiteside, I am going to work in a munitions factory. From now on anything that I can do to help exterminate the human race will fill me with the greatest of pleasure.”
He orders the Stanley family to banish itself from the house’s first floor, and the madness that comes with being one of the world’s most celebrated people begins. He runs up a $ 784 phone bill (something akin to $ 10,000 today). Convicted murderers and twenty-two Chinese students come by for lunch. The naturalist William Beebe sends him an octopus and some penguins. The khedive of Egypt sends him a mummy case. The world’s foremost expert on insect life brings him a terrarium of ten thousand cockroaches: “You can watch them, Sherry, while they live out their whole lives! Look, here is their maternity hospital!”
Beverly Carlton, a character based on Noel Coward, stops by for a visit, as does a character based on Harpo Marx (whom Kaufman and Hart call Banjo, brother to Wacko and Sloppo). Still, Whiteside does manage to find a few local people worthy of consideration, among them a clever newspaperman named Bert Jefferson who can beat him at cribbage and has written a really good play.
But then Whiteside’s devoted secretary Maggie, who is well into her thirties, falls in love with the newspaperman and announces she is going to stay. “I’ve had ten years of the great figures of our time,” she tells Whiteside. “They’ve been wonderful years, Sherry, gay and stimulating — I don’t think anyone has ever had the fun we’ve had. But a girl can’t laugh all the time, Sherry. There comes a time when she wants Bert Jefferson.”
Whiteside flies into a rage at the inconvenience her departure will cause. “Don’t look at me with those cow eyes, you sex-ridden hag,” he shouts. “I have not been able to reach you, not knowing what haylofts you frequent.” He insists he is going to end her “Joan Crawford fantasy,” and so he imports the glamorous actress Lorraine Sheldon from New York to seduce Jefferson away. But when he comes to his senses, Whiteside realizes he has put into motion a plan to destroy the happiness of someone he loves — and he must act very fast to derail his own scheme.
The Man Who Came to Dinner is a marvel of theatrical construction, so durable that even its most dated aspects — glamorous names are constantly dropped that no one has heard in forty years — are charming rather than distracting. If you can’t make it to New York to see director Jerry Zaks’s terrific staging, you can rent the faithful 1942 movie version with Bette Davis as Maggie and Monty Woolley’s legendary performance as Whiteside. Both on stage and screen, The Man Who Came to Dinner offers a hilarious depiction of the collision between the monstrous but captivating world of New York and the dull but decent world of middle America — and somehow manages to give both their due.
A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz is a columnist at the New York Post.
