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

find some chap or other who would do very well,” 111). On the flip side, he admits to Eliza at the height of the scene that “You have wounded me to the heart” (113) and refers to his folly in having lavished “the treasure of my regard and intimacy on a heartless guttersnipe!” (114), emotive language that shows an attachment but still does not necessarily imply romantic love.

For her part, Eliza is deeply upset by Higgins’s behavior, since he does not care what is to become of her and she does not know what to do. She feels lost and abandoned, but if her resentment is derived from unrequited love, she does not really show it. The only gesture of possible significance here is Eliza’s returning of the ring Higgins gave to her during an unseen visit to Brighton, a symbol of the dissolution of a romantic relationship. But even this is outwardly just the return of a gift given out of friendship. Both the dancing in act 1 and the ring in act 2 are examples of how Higgins and Eliza are associated with tantalizing conventional symbols of love whose meaning is subverted: Pickering is part of their “Rain in Spain” dance, whose context is far from romantic; their Embassy Ball dance is part of their experiment; and the ring is rejected, having never been exchanged as part of the story in the first place. In each case, attraction glimmers between them but soon subsides.

After her tearful reprise of “Just You Wait,” Eliza departs the house and sings “Show Me.” Had this song been delivered to Higgins it would undeniably function as a demand for a tangible expression of love, but as Eliza sings it to Freddy it functions more generally as an articulation of her frustration with men. The exchange that really reveals the most about the Higgins-Eliza relationship takes place in act 2, scene 5, at Mrs. Higgins’s house. Here they discuss their unusual association for the first time. Higgins softens briefly and asks, “You never wondered, I suppose, whether I could get along without you” (143), later admitting “I shall miss you, Eliza. I’ve learned something from your idiotic notions. I confess that humbly and gratefully” (145). When Higgins proposes that she return to live with him, he adds that she can walk out at any point and go back to selling flowers, or perhaps marry Pickering. She responds directly: “I wouldn’t marry you if you asked me” (145). If this were not clear enough, she goes on to say that she does not want Higgins to be infatuated with her; she just wants “a little kindness. I know I’m a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I’m not dirt under your feet. … What I did was not for the dresses and the taxis: I did it because we were pleasant together and I come—came to care for you; not to want you to make love to me, and not forgetting the difference between us, but more friendly like” (146). The argument continues, and Eliza sings that she can live “Without You,” to which Higgins reacts alone with “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” But even though Eliza then returns to the house at the end of the song, it is difficult in light of the dialogue about friendship to see how this could be construed as a sign that they will marry. Indeed, the characters lay out quite explicitly the kind of terms in which they could live under the same roof together again. That is not to say, however, as Raymond Knapp has done, that Higgins must be homosexual, or that he is engaged in a sexual relationship with Pickering just because they both choose to live in a largely homosocial environment.36 As Shaw indicated in his epilogue, there must be a certain attraction between Eliza and Higgins in order for the tension to exist between them. What we don’t know is the degree to which they feel it, and this is at the heart of the show’s success. Nor is the fact that Higgins is a non-lyric role particularly significant in the interpretation of his sexuality: all along, Lerner and Loewe were looking for a male classical actor to carry Higgins’s huge, complex speeches, and it was to be expected that such an actor would not be a strong singer.

It is not just on the basis of the published text that the status of the Eliza-Higgins relationship can be understood as ambiguous rather than romantic. In this book chapters 1–6 show numerous examples of the writers initially going down more conventional routes with the lyrics, dialogue, music, and even the casting, and then retracing their steps. For instance, we saw in chapter 1 that their initial idea for the show was to pursue Mary Martin to play the lead role. Lerner’s letter to Gabriel Pascal, in which he says “I’m ready to do anything short of homicide to see Mary as Liza,” suggests that the show was to be written around her talents. This in itself would have had huge implications, since Martin was the hugely popular star of quintessential Broadway shows such as South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun (on tour), and One Touch of Venus. Furthermore, not only was she American but she was also approaching her thirty-ninth birthday when the idea was first proposed and would probably have been over forty by the time the show went into production. In both these respects she was the complete antithesis of the English, twenty-year-old Julie Andrews, who eventually got the part. The two singers’ vocal ranges and timbres were also completely different, with Andrews at the lighter soprano end and Martin at the warmer, lower end, which would obviously have had an effect on the style and range of the music. Though we do not know exactly what would have happened if the show had been built around Martin, it seems almost sure that it would have had