Review
"A warm, witty, wise, and wondrous account of the greatest double-act in theatre history."
-Sheridan Morley
From the Inside Flap
From the much-admired biographer of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and the Barrymores (“Margot Peters is surely now . . . our foremost historian of stage make-believe”—Leon Edel), a new biography of the most famous English-speaking acting team of the twentieth century.
Individually, they were recognized as extraordinary actors, each one a star celebrated, imitated, sought after. Together, they were legend. The Lunts. A name to conjure with. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne worked together so imaginatively, so seamlessly onstage that they seemed to fuse into one person. Offstage, they brawled so famously and raucously over every detail of every performance that they inspired the musical Kiss Me, Kate. At home on Broadway, in London’s West End, touring the United States and Great Britain, and even playing “the foxhole circuit” of World War II, the Lunts stunned, moved, and mystified audiences for more than four decades. They were considered to be a rarefied taste, but when they toured Texas in the 1930s, the audience threw cowboy hats onto the stage.
Their private life was equally fascinating, as unusual as the one they led in public. Friends like the critic Alexander Woollcott (whom Edna Ferber once described as “the little New Jersey Nero who thinks his pinafore is a toga”), Noël Coward, Laurette Taylor, and Sidney Greenstreet received lifelong loyalty and hospitality. Ten Chimneys, their country home in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, “is to performers what the Vatican is to Catholics,” Carol Channing once said. “The Lunts are where we all spring from.”
In this new biography, Margot Peters catches the magic of Lunt and Fontanne—their period, their work, their intimacy and its contradictions—with candor, delicacy, intelligence, and wit. She writes about their personal and creative choices as deftly as she captures their world, from their meeting (backstage, naturally)—when Fontanne was a young actress in the first flush of stardom and Lunt a lanky midwesterner who came in the stage door, bowed to her elaborately, lost his balance, and fell down the stairs—and the early days when an unknown and very hungry Noël Coward lived in a swank hotel in a room the size of a closet and cadged meals at their table to the telegram the famous couple once sent to a movie mogul, turning down a studio contract worth a fortune (“We can be bought, my dear Mr. Laemmle, but we can’t be bored”).
We follow the Lunts through triumphs in plays such as The Guardsman, The Taming of the Shrew, and Design for Living; through friendships and feuds; through the intricate way they worked with such playwrights and directors as S. N. Behrman, Robert Sherwood, Giraudoux, Dürrenmatt, Peter Brook, and with each other.
Margot Peters captures the gallantry of two remarkably gifted people who lived for their art and for each other. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were once described as an “amazing duet of intelligence and gaiety.” Margot Peters re-creates the fun and the fireworks.
From the Back Cover
"A warm, witty, wise, and wondrous account of the greatest double-act in theatre history."
-Sheridan Morley
About the Author
Margot Peters has been Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin and holds a Ph.D. in Victorian literature. She is the author of eight books, among them Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Brontë, The House of Barrymore, Mrs. Pat: The Life of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, andMay Sarton: A Biography. She lives in Lake Mills, Wisconsin.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
Lynn's Way: 1887-1919
Much of Alfred Lunt's early history Lynn Fontanne would learn from Alfred himself as well as from his mother, his half-siblings, his scrapbooks, his neighbors, and his childhood friends. Alfred would learn less about Lynn.
For one thing she came from across the pond. She was born on the wrong side of the tracks in a small Victorian house in Station Terrace, Snake's Lane, at Woodford Bridge in Essex, about ten miles northeast of London. He would not know her parents and seldom see her two sisters, Mai and Antoinette; meet few of her early friends and associates. And there was that British reserve: a cool customer, Lynn was less confessional than Alfred. One fact he would not learn till much later: Lillie Louise, renaming herself Lynn, was not born in 1892, as she claimed, but on December 6, 1887.
Lynn's father, Jules Pierre Antoine Fontanne, owned a typefounding business inherited from his father. Yet Fontanne was less a businessman than a would-be bon vivant. Lynn aspired to her father's imagined heights.
"I will be a mother," she said, "and have four children and twelve nursemaids."
She told everyone that her noble family had given up its title during the French Revolution. This was Fontanne fantasy; what was true was that her maternal great-grandmother came from a titled family in Ireland, though Lynn apparently did not know it.
Frances Ellen Thornley, Lynn's beautiful, dark-haired mother, resented her husband's impracticality. High-strung, her temper fueled by frustration and disappointment, she quarreled abusively with Jules. Lynn and her sisters often took shelter with their Irish grandmother, Sarah Ann Barnett, who lived nearby.
Lynn grew up poor one day, prosperous the next, but always in an atmosphere of fantasy. Her father read the girls Dickens, Tennyson, and Shakespeare. She memorized Shakespearean soliloquies, recited them in a voice that could "ring out like a bell." When the family moved for a time to the London suburb of Walthamstow, Lynn was often discovered missing from her bed. Antoinette knew where to find her: "She had climbed out of the window and was down the road where she had crept into the theatre to watch the performance." Taken to the Lyceum Theatre to see Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in The Merchant of Venice, Lynn stood up in the gallery and loudly recited the "quality of mercy" speech right along with London's reigning actress. Taken to The Worst Man in London, a thriller, she hid her face in her sister's lap, crying, "I never shall go on the stage-don't let me go on the stage!"
It was perhaps on that visit that she saw Queen Victoria riding in a carriage. There was a sudden stir in the crowd and shouting and she rushed forward. A bobby caught her arm; she stared as the Queen rode by, and the Queen's great blue eyes stared straight ahead: a performer, just what Lynn wanted to be.
"I was a very noisy, happy, and exuberant child until I was eight," Lynn told Maurice Zolotow, the Lunts' first biographer, "and it was then my mother scolded me for being clumsy and I got to be self-conscious and lost all confidence."
When Lynn was in her teens, Jules Fontanne was called to the side of a dying French aunt. She left him some money; he promptly celebrated by taking his family to Paris. Strolling in the Bois de Boulogne, Antoinette complained that a man was following them. Jules accosted the stranger: "I demand to know, sir, why you are hounding my daughters!" The man explained that he was Wilfred de Glehn, an artist and a member of the British Royal Academy. He was struck by the girls' beauty. He begged permission to paint them.
Great luck for Lynn. All three girls had to work to support themselves (Jules spent his inheritance at a rapid clip); but though Antoinette was the raving beauty, Lynn became the favorite model of de Glehn and his wife, Jane. As Jane de Glehn's girl in The Blue Coat and Wilfred de Glehn's señorita in The Spanish Mantilla, Lynn hung in the Royal Academy. The money she earned modeling kept her in tea and buns while searching for acting jobs. More important, the de Glehn connection led to an introduction to the great Ellen Terry.
It was a September afternoon in 1905 when Lynn called at the small Georgian house at 215 King's Road, Chelsea. Ellen Terry was fifty-eight, three years parted from Henry Irving and the Lyceum Theatre (Irving would die that October), depressed about her failing memory and poor eyesight. Yet she still encouraged aspiring actresses who flocked to her: "her little circle of girls," Lady Duff Gordon described them, who "would gladly have laid down their lives for her sake."
Lynn was shown upstairs. Ellen was lying in bed wrapped in shawls, untidy fair hair falling about her shoulders. She gazed at the thin dark girl with the turned-in toes, gestured her forward. As Lynn knelt at the side of the low bed, Ellen put her hands on her shoulders and impulsively kissed her.
"Do something!" she commanded in a husky voice as the maid brought breakfast on a tray. Lynn took a deep breath. "The quality of mercy . . ." she began-Terry's most famous speech. Ellen laughed but she listened.
"I will give you lessons. I don't know exactly when or what hours, or how often, but mind, when I call for you, you must come at once. You must make no other engagements, not even in the evenings, for I may want you to work in the evenings."
Lynn had to receive Ellen's messages through a neighboring plumber in Down Street, where she lived in a shabby-chic room with no water but fan windows and an Adam fireplace. The lessons were sporadic, though one session working from Ellen's own annotated script of King Lear deeply impressed her. "Oh, my dear father," said Lynn as Cordelia. Ellen interrupted: "No, don't say it like that. You love him. You must say 'Oh, my deeeere father.' Now, no more instruction for Cordelia, for the whole understanding of the part lies in this line." She also gave her pupil a key that unlocked the spontaneous technique Lynn used all her life: "Think of the meaning of what you are saying and let the words pour out of your mouth."
Ellen got Lynn a job in the chorus for the Christmas pantomime Cinderella at Drury Lane. She paid Lynn to read to her afternoons. She let Lynn take baths at King's Road. She invited her to her Elizabethan country house in Kent, paid her for odd jobs around the house, coached her in stage deportment. She pinned a bedsheet to the front of Lynn's dress and one to the back, then made her walk gracefully among the tangles. "Must get Lynn more money," Ellen reminded herself in her diary. "It's wicked. She is so intelligent."
But Ellen's attention was distracted by rehearsals of Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion, where she fell impulsively in love with the thirty-three-year-old actor James Carew. She managed to get Lynn a walk-on in July 1906 at the Savoy, and before she took Brassbound to America she gave Lynn a miniature boxed set of Shakespeare as a keepsake and a letter of introduction to the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree. "That's all I'm going to be able to do for you," she told Lynn, kissing her. "If I helped you any more, it wouldn't be good for your character, for each one runs his own race."
In 1907 Lynn got another walk-on, in Booth Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire at the Lyric, under the name Viva Fontanne. Perhaps she thought calling herself "Viva" would boost confidence, for when not acting she was painfully shy. "I thought to myself, 'Why are you so shy? What makes you stiffen up as soon as you meet anyone?' " She answered herself: "It is because you are wondering what it is they think about you. Now, don't think that any more. Wonder what it is you think about them. And when you go into a restaurant, instead of dying when you go in, just . . . have a look, Lynnie, and see who's there instead of bothering whether they're looking at you." Slowly she began to gain more poise.
That fall of 1907 she used Ellen's letter of introduction to Beerbohm Tree, who was looking for schoolgirl types for his staging of Dickens's Edwin Drood. Rather hard of the great Tree to demand experience for a mere walk-on, and Lynn, with her new confidence, rebelled. "But how will you find girls this young with experience? And how will I get experience if you don't give me work?" Delighted, the eccentric Tree hired her, cautioning her to give her address to future managers not as unfashionable Pimlico, but as Belgravia.
Like many shy people, Lynn was a comic. Antoinette took her to parties where she "kept these men in their thirties in fits of laughter." When Tony was invited to dinner by three men one evening, she asked Lynn along for protection. Immediately attracted to the apprentice lawyer Edmund "Teddy" Byrne, Lynn launched into comic impersonations and wild tales of life backstage. Teddy laughed. When they found themselves alone in a cab together, he kissed her and Lynn kicked him in the shins. He was impressed. "Oh, he had a beautiful baritone voice," said Lynn, "and he stole my heart away."
Lynn was still sitting for artists like the de Glehns. "He'd be waiting for me to finish modeling in some Chelsea studio. He was tall and quite slim and he had a raincoat draped over his shoulders and he'd be leaning on the Battersea bridge, waiting, looking down into the river." Teddy would take her to her flat, where she'd change into an evening dress she'd made herself, then on the town to the Cafe Royal, the Savoy Grill, Rules, or Hatchetts. It was all glamorous and glorious and she wanted to marry Teddy, but her career came first.
She longed for a London tour de force but, as Mrs. Patrick Campbell quipped, was forced to tour. In 1909-1910 she played a small role in Somerset Maugham's...
