Some Enchanted Evenings: The Glittering Life and Times of Mary Martin by David Kaufman

Author:David Kaufman [Kaufman, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250031761
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

“POOR JENNY, BRIGHT AS A PENNY”

For more years than a gentleman should mention my heart has belonged to Mary Martin. But Jennie does not make it easy to remain faithful.

—HOWARD TAUBMAN

There is no agreed-upon measure for gauging the greatness of a performer or a performance. The ambition to capture a transcendent performance with mere words is, almost by definition, self-defeating. It’s the equivalent to Virginia Woolf’s mandate for herself to pin down a moth; tantamount to Oscar Hammerstein’s attempt to phrase, if not solve, the problem that is Maria with his customarily brilliant lyrics: “How do you keep a wave upon the sand? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?” This is partly why, when attempting to describe what is ephemeral by nature, critics tend to circumnavigate the phenomenon without ever arriving at their destination.

Consider the well-wrought observations of both Stark Young and Harold Clurman, two of the deans of American theater criticism: “Technique, which is always composed of skill and instinct working together, is in this case so overlaid with warmth, tenderness and wit that any analysis is completely baffled,” wrote Young in 1945. “Only a trained theatre eye and ear can see what is happening, and then only at times.… She is the real and first talent of them all. [Her] special gift … is impossible to convey with anything like the full, wonderful truth.”

“A luminous confusion composed her aura,” wrote Harold Clurman, the following year. “It warmed us deeply because it was generated from the unrhetorical sources of an ordinary woman’s being rather than from any studied glamour. There was always something surprising about it.… Her face was always suffused with a look of startled wonder, at once happy, humorous, frightened, and innocent.”

Both Young and Clurman were describing the sublime Laurette Taylor, who became a national treasure as the initial Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. But they might just as well have been writing about Mary Martin.

Looking back at the life of Mary Martin, the biggest challenge is to try to comprehend her technique, to attempt to capture her effect on an audience. What was it about Martin that made her unique, that imbued any theater she played with her special gift, her aura that seemed to transcend time and space even while reveling in them? Every performance was the same only to the extent that it was different. By living and acting in the moment, Martin pinned down what was effervescent, making it seem everlasting.

* * *

While working on her portrayal of the legendary Taylor for her next Broadway musical, Jennie, in 1963, Martin told a reporter for Look magazine that Taylor had been a friend as well as an actress she idolized. The admiration was clearly reciprocal: Taylor saw Martin in Lute Song six times the year before she died. According to Halliday, when his wife told Taylor that “she was really an amateur at serious acting and was going to take lessons,” the grande dame of the American theater responded, “You and I need no lessons.

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