Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies), McHugh, Dominic [fantasy books to read TXT] 📗

emerging trend in the mid-1960s whereby the show was beginning to be discussed with an air of nostalgia. Six years after the end of the original Broadway run, the show had already become an important part of theater history—one which audiences had taken to their heart and turned into a classic.

THE 1964 MOVIE ADAPTATION

Even before it opened, Lerner and Loewe were hoping for a movie version of the show. In fact, before CBS came in and backed the whole production, the team had first approached Paramount Pictures in February 1955 with a view to their investing in the stage show in exchange for exclusive motion picture rights.35 This fell through, but after the successful opening of the show the following year, many of the major studios and producers started approaching Levin, Lerner, and Loewe about a possible screen adaptation. These included Samuel Goldwyn, William Goetz, Columbia Pictures, and, most prominently, 20th Century-Fox, who wanted to cast Cary Grant as Henry Higgins.36 Since the show was such a commercial success on the stage, though, the film version was postponed for the time being. Then in 1961, Jack Warner (of Warner Bros.) and Arthur Freed (of MGM) both became determined to produce the movie version. Lerner seems to have favored the MGM team who were behind his enormously successful movie Gigi, and lined up its director, Vincente Minnelli, to helm the project. Additionally, he wanted Julie Andrews and Richard Burton—stars of the most recent Lerner and Loewe stage show, Camelot—to play the lead roles.37

But although Warner’s initial bid for the project was turned down, his determination to “outbid any offer by a million dollars” meant that in 1962, Warner Bros. won the rights to produce the movie for $5.5 million.38 In June 1963, the New York Times announced that it was to be the most expensive film ever made, with a total cost of around $12 million. Contrary to Lerner’s hopes of having the original Eliza (Julie Andrews) and a new Higgins (Richard Burton), Warner elected to retain Rex Harrison from the Broadway production and hire Audrey Hepburn—a bigger box office draw than Andrews—as Eliza. To Harrison’s dismay, he earned only a fifth of Hepburn’s deal—$200,000 to her $1 million—and neither of them was to participate in the movie’s profits, although he went on to earn royalties from the soundtrack album.39 Hepburn, however, received none, because her singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon. Hepburn had previously sung in a movie musical—Funny Face (1957)—as well as performing the Oscar-winning song “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), but her vocal ability was deemed inadequate for the lyric demands of Fair Lady’s score, and Nixon was called in to replace her voice, just as she had done for Deborah Kerr in The King and I (1956) and Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961). Stanley Holloway returned to play Doolittle, and Warner hired George Cukor to direct, best known for his work on classics such as The Philadelphia Story (1940) and A Star Is Born (1954). Cecil Beaton was brought in to reconceive his stage costumes for film, though the set designs were executed by Gene Allen, who is credited only for art direction; by all accounts (including their own), there was tension between Beaton and Cukor.40 Rehearsals began on June 17, 1963, and the film was completed in about four months.41

Even though the movie is often cited for its fidelity, and (with some justification) even described as “stage-bound” or something similar, Lerner’s screenplay is far from a literal transposition of the stage script. Indeed, Cukor himself later commented, “We used even more of Shaw’s screenplay than the stage version did.”42 It is striking that when comparing the stage show’s rehearsal script with the film, many of the lines that were cut before the Broadway opening were put back to their original version. Perhaps this is one reason why some portions of the film can seem overlong: the contraction and polishing done during rehearsals for the stage version was sometimes overlooked in the screen adaptation. On the other hand, bearing in mind that Lerner’s stage script is based on Shaw’s screenplay for Pygmalion, the movie of My Fair Lady returns the material to its source medium. Geoffrey Block has usefully summarized the changes to Fair Lady in its film adaption, which include everything from contracting Doolittle’s first two appearances into one scene (so that the reprise of “Little Bit of Luck” is heard in the same scene as its first sounding) to showing Eliza’s protestations in the bath while Higgins’s servants try to clean her on the night of her arrival. The Ascot scene is expanded and elaborated so that we see the racecourse from more angles and also observe a brief conversation between Higgins and his mother after Eliza’s gaffe. That said, the staging of this scene is the most stylized of the movie, and Block (among many others) considers it “a lost opportunity for cinematic extravagance.”43 Cukor said that “There was really no other way we could have done it. There’s a big number sung during the sequence, so it couldn’t be realistic. Nor could the picture as a whole. It had to take place in a kind of dream world.” Perhaps for this reason, the movie was not filmed realistically on location but in a stylized reinvention of Edwardian London.

There are, however, a few moments where Cukor uses cinematic techniques, such as the reprise of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” being heard as a voice-over to represent Eliza’s emotional memory, and we see much more of the geography of Higgins’s house, Wimpole Street, the Embassy, and the market locations than is possible on the stage. The movie also moves the intermission to the end of the scene of Eliza and Higgins’s departure for the ball (in which he shows her a newfound respect by extending his arm for hers), throwing further emphasis on their relationship by ending the first half of the film with a gesture about their ambiguous feelings toward