Blue-Grass and Broadway

[from New York Herald, Sun Jun 1, 1919]

The next time you are thinking of going to the theatre change your mind. Buy Blue-Grass and Broadway, by Maria Thomson Daviess, read it yourself, give it to the family, the maid, the telephone girl and the elevator boy and then send it to the soldiers, thus killing two or three hundred birds with one stone. If books can feel, this one will be insufferably conceited at the end of a week or two in camp. It is reported that Marjorie Benton Cooke's Bambi proved so popular in camp that the soldiers or lads or boys or whatever you like to call them were afraid to lay it down between readings. Blue-Grass and Broadway has stormed the camps in just such a manner. Read what one fighting man has to say of it:

"Say, if you see a book called Blue-Grass and Broadway, go to it. It's got all the thrills you want to meet for the next few days -- and then some -- all about the theatre game, inside dope and great stuff at that. And it's got a little girl from Kentucky in it that'll wind your heart around your neck a couple of times before she's done. The genuine article believe me. Oh, boy! But I've got to get back to camp and finish it.
"PRIVATE A E.F."

It is great stuff. Either Miss Daviess has learned the ropes of the theatrical world pretty well or she is just naturally a good sailor. Being a good deal of the playwright herself, besides a farmer and a business woman, she brings a nicely rounded knowledge of the world into her writing. The blue grass grows rather heavily in the middle of Broadway, perhaps, but a Kentucky noveliest who knows all about the women who grow up in it, and knows also how well other people enjoy reading of their charms, can afford to make lavish use of her knowledge.

When Patricia Adair of Adairville writes a plan to lift the mortgage from her home and save her aged grandfather's life, dresses up in her grandmother's clothes and brings her purring voice and long, curling, tearful lashes to New York to clinch the matter, there isn't a woman above the Mason and Dixon line who will be cat enough to wish her anything but success. There is something about these Kentucky girls, as Miss Daviess admits. One thing we must know. If crape myrtle grows in Westchester county, as Miss Daviess says it does, where, oh where, is the spot? Give us a bag and a net and lead the way. Let us have one more spray for old sake's sake.

[review headed with photo of Daviess in rural setting, wearing sunhat, surrounded by four little boys, one on a horse.]

I don't normally include such fulsomeness as the above contemporary review, but I had to with this one: it reads (especially the soldier's bit) like such a plant by the publisher, and that's so in keeping with the book's contents that it's kind of delightful. Oh, boy!

For more about Thompson Daviess, check out the entry for Out Of A Clear Sky -- she was an interesting person: author/playwright, suffragette, bisexual if not lesbian -- and Blue-Grass and Broadway is clearly reflective of her views and experience. In it, a sheltered country-raised girl goes to the big city, and, instead of being corrupted by it, finds the encounter broadening to both mind and sympathies. It's not that she changes her personal standards, but that she learns to accept people for who they are -- for where their personalities and lives have led them -- without judgment or censure. Daviess is much franker about sex, and moral compromise, in Blue-Grass than in any of her other books I've read -- it feels, actually, like a pre-code romantic comedy written about 15 years too early. The male main character, a cynical, urbane producer, feels tailor-made for someone like William Powell (or maybe even Cary Grant). His plan to stage a flop of a play to trim the sails of his prima donna contracted lead/mistress -- and then, having peeped the lovely playwright, his frantic efforts to pull together an ace team -- "play doctor", costumer, stage manager -- to undo what he's already half-wrought, is straight out of 30s screwball. Daviess knows and loves the NY theater world. Her depiction of the mechanics of bringing a play from page to stage are so vivid and entertaining and her description of The Great White Way, cerca 1919, as the theaters let out on a Saturday night, scintillates like the Broadway lights themselves. "This is the Big Show", Mr. Vandeford says, and you feel, with Patricia, that "it's all the world" and you're "part of it." (215) Bill Rooney, "who was born in a barrel down on the wharf and educated in the gutter, but is the best and highest-price stage director in New York" (159) is an especially attractive side character -- for a screwball or elsewhere -- and I could have gone in a big way for an interclass romance with him as the male lead. Read the book for the greasepaint atmospherics and for him!

The Southern romanticization, I don't quite get. Today, I feel like, when you hear Kentucky, you're less likely to think crape myrtle and female gentility than MAGA and maternal mortality but I will trust Daviess and the review that its blue-grass was having a moment back then. A more serious flaw -- and flag -- is the author's racial prejudice which comes through in a treatment of black characters and African-American culture that is paternalistic, at best, and occasionally, openly racist. There's a bit of questionable language around Jewish characters, too, but she has her producer openly state how much he respects the Jewish contribution to the arts and his opposition to anti-Semitism. And a repeated slur for Italians. Basically, she's pretty great on gender and a disaster on race/ethnicity.