The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The Story Behind... Anything Goes
The musical was inspired by a tax dodge and saved from disaster by Cole Porter’s catsitter’s ouija board
Tap-dancing sailors, cruiseship romances and Cole Porter standards: Anything Goes is gold-plated musical theatre escapism. No wonder it was a smash hit in Depression-era America, with 420 performances in its first run, and has had frequent revivals ever since – the latest of which opens at the Barbican next week, starring Robert Lindsay and Felicity Kendal. Yet this feel-good, fizzing champagne glass of a show had its origins in murky waters.
It began with a tax dodge. Producer Vinton Freedley was behind many of the great jazz-era Broadway shows of the 1920s, including collaborations with George and Ira Gershwin, Fred and Adele Astaire, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. But when, on the heels of the Wall Street Crash, his 1932 show Pardon My English closed after just 33 Broadway performances, Freedley was left facing financial ruin.
In poor health (and hiding from his creditors), Freedley took to the high seas aboard the White Star liner, RMS Majestic – then the largest ship in the world, and offering “cruises to nowhere”, eluding Prohibition with brief forays into international waters, where passengers could legally be served drinks. Or did he? Another version of the story has him as a stowaway on a fishing boat in Panama. Whatever the vessel, Freedley found another perk of floating out of American jurisdiction – he was no longer liable to income tax. This planted the seed for his comeback: why not create a musical, set on a gambling ship?
Freedley approached the English duo of PG Wodehouse and Guy Bolton to write the book and lyrics, and Cole Porter to compose the score. At first they called it Crazy Week, then Hard to Get, then Bon Voyage. But the script was a mess from the start. According to George Eels’s Porter biography, The Life that Late He Led, Freedley despaired at the show’s tastelessness – and indeed it skewed very dark, featuring a bomb threat and the passengers stranded on a desert island where human trafficking was rife. Not exactly a cheery, jazz-hands night out.
But Freedley was spared a tricky confrontation with his team by a bizarre coincidence. On the morning of September 9 1934, an ocean liner, the SS Morro Castle, caught fire on its way from Havana to New York and ran aground off New Jersey, with the loss of 137 passengers and crew. The musical’s shipwreck plot was immediately scrapped. Freedley also jettisoned Bolton and Wodehouse’s Hollywood satire (the pair had littered the script with bitter film industry jokes), probably because he had an eye on a future film adaptation. Disaster and satire were out; romantic hijinks were in.
But by this point, the writing duo had left for England. A despairing Freedley turned to his director, Howard Lindsay, who reluctantly agreed to rewrite it, but only if a collaborator could be found. And found he was, though in bizarre circumstances. Cole visited the magazine illustrator Neysa McMein, who was keeping eight cats for him, at her country estate. McMein saw a name spelled out on her ouija board (or in a dream – accounts vary): Russel Crouse. A man of this name – a press agent – was duly found, and he and Lindsay went on to become a hugely successful partnership, writing The Sound of Music and winning a Pulitzer for State of the Union. “That makes me the original dreamboat, I guess,” Crouse said of McMein’s vision, “although I feel more like Cleopatra’s barge.”
Freedley supplied a dynamite cast, led by brassy, big-voiced Ethel Merman, and the comic duo of William Gaxton and Victor Moore. But when rehearsals began in October, there still wasn’t much of a show to rehearse. Lindsay ad-libbed a thrilling plot in his introductory speech – the trouble was that neither he nor Crouse could recall what it was. As Eels recounts, the designer Don
ald Oenslager needed to start ordering the set, but no one knew where the action was taking place. Freedley put him off with the immortal instruction: “Donald, give me an interior with exterior feeling.”
Eventually, the story came together. Billy Crocker stows away on the SS American, travelling from New York to London, in hope of wooing the heiress Hope Harcourt – who is engaged to a British nobleman, Sir Evelyn Oakligh. Crocker is aided by a gangster, Moonface Martin (the character was originally called Mooney, but the show received a threat from a disgruntled New Jersey mobster of that name), who is disguised as a priest. However, that leads to Crocker being mistaken for the FBI’s Public Enemy Number One, Snake Eyes Johnson. Also on board is nightclub singer Reno Sweeney, who has feelings for Crocker. Naturally, everyone is happily paired off by the end.
Reports differ as to how the show eventually got its name, but all reflect this frantic birthing. In one version, when Gaxton was asked if he could make his entrance two minutes after curtain up, he replied “In this kind of spot, anything goes!” “Title,” said Cole. In another, it was a frazzled exchange between two producers, discussing how they could be ready for opening night. One said: “From now on with this show, anything goes.” A third legend has it that Gaxton had told the doorman they didn’t have a title; the doorman replied: “Well, today anything goes.” Whatever its origin, the title encapsulates an extremely unlikely triumph.
And a triumph it was. Anything Goes opened on Broadway on November 21 1934 and ran for over a year, with a further 261 performances in London (Wodehouse was brought back to Anglicise some of the references). The New York Times called it “a thundering good show”, and the song Anything Goes became a popular hit, far beyond Broadway. In 1935, Time reported that it was “the smart thing” to know all the lyrics by heart.
Freedley’s wish came true: a film of it was made in 1936, starring Bing Crosby, and again in 1956, this time with Donald O’Connor – although the censors had views on a few of the lyrics: “some get a kick from cocaine” became “perfume in Spain” instead, and, subsequently, “champagne”. Over the years, extra Porter songs have been imported, such as De-Lovely, Friendship and
Let’s Misbehave, and the book frequently revised, as directors wrestle with a show that still bears traces of its chaotic origins. And yet its sheer comic verve, giddy romances and irresistible score make it an enduring favourite. Sometimes, audiences aren’t looking for earnest naturalism or a current affairs lesson; they just want to sail away.
Censors rejected the lyric, ‘some get a kick from cocaine’