Hemingway Makes Stage Début, His Intent Intact at Last

This seems to be the season for new plays by dead writers. First came Mark Twain’s “Is He Dead?,” freshly dug out of the vault and adapted for Broadway by David Ives. And now the off-Broadway Mint Theater is mounting the first faithful production of “The Fifth Column,” the only play by Ernest Hemingway.The story of why “The Fifth Column” has been neglected is a complicated one, involving several mishaps, an inept Hollywood screenwriter, and a 1940 Broadway production of a bastardized version of the play.“Ernest absolutely disinherited it and had nothing to do with it,” Hemingway’s biographer, A.E. Hotchner, said of the Broadway production. “I think he was glad when it closed prematurely.”Hemingway wrote “The Fifth Column” in 1937, when he was living at the Hotel Florida in Madrid, covering the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. The play depicts the tense and dangerous existence inside the hotel, which is simultaneously occupied by journalists, counterespionage agents, and members of General Francisco Franco’s “fifth column” — spies for the rebels within Madrid.According to the artistic director of the Mint, Jonathan Bank, Hemingway wanted the play to call New Yorkers’ attention to the urgency of the situation in Spain. (America was officially neutral, but many Americans, including many prominent writers and artists, supported the Republic.) However, early attempts to mount a production failed. The first producer who signed a contract died in a plane crash on his way to audition actors in Los Angeles. Another wasn’t able to raise enough money. In 1938, Hemingway decided simply to publish the play, as part of a collection called “The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.”Meanwhile, Hemingway’s lawyer, Maurice Speiser, showed the script to his brother-in-law, Benjamin Glazer, who had written the screen adaptation of “A Farewell to Arms.” Glazer had some ideas that he thought would make “The Fifth Column” more dramatic and appealing to audiences, and Speiser persuaded Hemingway to work with him. Here, according to Mr. Bank, is where Hemingway made his big mistake: He signed an agreement with Glazer stating that, if he liked Glazer’s suggestions, he would rewrite the play, and it would appear under his name, with the two men splitting the royalties. If he did not like Glazer’s suggestions, Glazer could go ahead with his revision, but the play would be billed only as “Adapted from the published play by Ernest Hemingway.”As it turned out, Glazer’s revisions were so bad that Hemingway begged Speiser, unsuccessfully, to get him out of the deal. Glazer retained control of his script and ultimately got the Theatre Guild, an organization dedicated to bringing serious drama to Broadway, to produce it in 1940.Glazer’s primary criticism of Hemingway’s script concerned the moral character of the heroine, Dorothy Bridges, a beautiful, if slightly daffy, correspondent for Cosmopolitan. In Hemingway’s version, when the play opens, Dorothy Bridges is having an affair with one resident of the hotel, a married man named Robert Preston, whom she soon throws over for another, the play’s protagonist, a counterespionage agent named Philip Rawlings.Glazer thought audiences would be shocked that Bridges “kind of lightly decides she’s going to stop sleeping with one guy and start sleeping with another,” Mr. Bank said. “Glazer describes her as a nymphomaniac.”His solution was, first, to cut out Preston and, second, to change the way that her affair with Rawlings begins, to eliminate the suggestion that she has her own strong sexual desire and will. In Hemingway’s version, she and Rawlings first sleep together while the hotel is being shelled. In Glazer’s revision, the shelling drives Rawlings crazy, and he rapes her. His apology the next day becomes the beginning of their romance. Even in 1940, an audience might have found it hard to accept a rape blossoming into a love story. Hemingway’s objection to Glazer’s change, however, was more specific, and so intense that he cut off all contact with the producers until after the play’s opening. In a letter written from Havana in March 1940, Hemingway apologized to one of the producers, Lawrence Langner, for not having responded to his telegrams.“It wasn’t that I meant to be rude,” he wrote. “But I was in a very difficult position on the play and the only way not to comment was not to comment.”He explained why Glazer’s rape premise was fundamentally wrong:“People do not rape people during bombardment,” he wrote. “In a bombardment everybody is very nice to everybody else because the ones who aren’t afraid are helping out the others; the new ones. Even if you are quarrelling like hell when a bombardment starts you quit and act decent. I know because I have been in hundreds of them,” he added.“So given Barney’s rape premise, I can do such a scene and make it credible,” he continued. “But it is really wrong. When there is something wrong at the start, that rot spreads…”Hemingway never saw the production, but he asked Langner to convey his congratulations to Franchot Tone, who played Rawlings, and he expressed regret that Frances Farmer, who was originally to play Bridges, had dropped out of the production. Farmer’s beauty, he suggested, would have made the character, whom Glazer had turned into a “human ice box,” more human and believable.By 1940, Franco’s forces had triumphed in Spain, so the action of the play was already dated. Glazer also deleted all references to communism. In Hemingway’s script, Rawlings has dedicated his life to international revolution. He and his associates refer to one another as “comrades,” and during one climactic scene between Rawlings and Bridges, men downstairs in the hotel sing communist anthems.According to Mr. Bank, “The Fifth Column” has not been produced in New York since 1940. Mr. Hotchner, with Hemingway’s blessing, adapted a version for CBS’s “Playhouse 90” series in 1960. John Frankenheimer directed it, and Richard Burton played Rawlings.Mr. Hotchner found it necessary to make significant changes so that the play would work on television. His approach was to focus on the violent intrigue within the hotel and to de-emphasize “the long speeches about good and evil.”Mr. Bank, whose production will have its first performance February 26, said that he may cut a line or two, but in general he will be faithful to Hemingway’s script. He does, however, intend to make the character of Dorothy Bridges somewhat tougher and more serious than she appears on first read. He sees Bridges, who is described in the script as a tall blond Vassar graduate, as partially modeled on Martha Gellhorn, a tall blond Bryn Mawr graduate who was in Spain covering the war for Collier’s, and whom Hemingway was having an affair with when he wrote the play. She later became his third wife.“Knowing how smart and tough and sophisticated Gellhorn was informs a reading of a character who might be dismissed as stupid and frivolous,” Mr. Bank said. It “allows us to look at Bridges and say, ‘Maybe she’s not exactly what she appears to be.'”Mr. Hotchner said he didn’t see Dorothy Bridges as being inspired by Gellhorn. “People say that because he wrote it while he was involved with Martha,” he said. “But Martha Gellhorn was a very savvy, very intellectual woman, and Dorothy Bridges is kind of a flibbertigibbet.”The affair that Bridges has with Preston at the beginning of the play, Mr. Hotchner added, is reminiscent of the kinds of relationships being depicted in B movies at the time. “I think [Hemingway] was thinking in terms of what he thought the theater should be, and it didn’t really work,” Mr. Hotchner said. “He was not, at heart, a playwright.”

Hemingway Makes Stage Début, His Intent Intact at Last

Hemingway Makes Stage Début, His Intent Intact at Last

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