“A life of don’t-care-a-damn in a boarding house is what I have asked for in many a secret prayer.”
- Mark Twain

Last night, as Joshua Logan’s film of Picnic (1955) unraveled the rather desperate lives conceived by playwright William Inge in the Kansas of his imagination on TCM, I found myself once more hoping that maybe this time, Arthur O’Connell would hop that freight with William Holden at the end of the movie. While the aging Holden and Kim Novak made a moving if unlikely couple, it was Arthur and SOTM Rosalind Russell’s desperate date with destiny that always gives me chills. As Ms. Russell’s schoolteacher character, who goes around defensively introducing herself as an old maid, experiences a booze-fired catharsis on Labor Day, she steamrolls poor Arthur, her indecisive, hapless suitor into marriage before the guy knows what hit him.

This role is well and vigorously played by Russell, (who should have allowed her name to be submitted for consideration as a Supporting Actress in the Oscar free for all for this film).

Still, I kept wondering, do they really have much more of a chance for happiness than Holden and Novak?

I have my doubts. Even if the pair are older and seemingly more settled, as Russell reflects at one point, she does “get crazier all the time” and O’Connell seems to have a spine of a wet noodle, and neither of those personality traits is likely to be a boon to marital bliss. Reflecting on Inge’s annoyingly real characters, however, I sometimes wonder if the somewhat over-the-top high school teacher Roz played just wanted to get out of that boarding house she perched in for so long with the Owens family, consisting of abandoned Mom Betty Field and her daughters Kim “What good is it only being pretty?” Novak and college-bound “ugly duckling” Susan Strasberg. Filmed in real homes in Nickerson, Kansas, the modest house, which reflects the genteel poverty of a family that is compelled by economic circumstances to rent a room seems to be a hotbed of female frustration, most loudly, that of Russell’s increasingly ragged Miss Sydney. (Come to think of it, maybe Betty Field, Kim Novak, Susan Strasberg and Rosalind Russell should’ve been the ones hopping that freight out of their small town. On second thought, perhaps they should ride the rails separately. All of them in one box car together might not hold that much estrogen comfortably). Though I am, as usual, being facetious, I must admit that movies that explore the psycho-social petri dish of the long gone institution of boarding houses do interest me.

Maybe we kid ourselves about our love of movies. Go ahead, if you must, intellectualize this most civilized of pleasures. Still, it’s not just the story, the actors or the cinematography that enchants us. It’s also because a movie can take us places and times we could never experience in one lifetime; making time travelers of each of us.

There was a time when a boarding house on screen was as familiar a setting to movie audiences as a dusty Western street or an art deco penthouse. It was still a part of everyday life through the years of World War Two on screen and off, but there are few boarding houses in movies today. People live in apartments, modest homes, and occasionally in palatial houses and sometimes secret lairs, (if they’re superheroes), but classic films seemed to delight in depicting this plebeian sign of a mobile population in need of cheap housing. Boarding houses still exist in corners of our society, but on screen, these temporary quarters were often seen by filmmakers as a chance to to bring some very disparate characters together. After all, there was some dramatic potential in any setting where strangers take up residence, sharing bathrooms, kitchens, common living rooms and a certain amount of forced intimacy that almost seems exotic to contemporary viewers.

Barely existing now, (though there are some urban planners who think the boarding house concep may be poised for a comeback), in the movies the depiction of boarding houses served to give us a glimpse of American social history—however it was sometimes idealized. The concept of a boarding house, which, in America and Britain arose out of the rapid urbanization in the 19th century and business booms such as the Gold Rush in isolated areas, along with the rise in high-priced housing (some things never change, alas), and a highly mobile working population following economic trends. Some of the movies set in these temporary households have intrigued me enough to decide to devote an occasional blog to this social phenomenon by occasionally looking at boarding houses in the cinema. Here’s a first look at one of my favorites in this sub-genre, the theatrical boarding house, at its peak on film:

The theatrical boarding house, filled with ambitious, anxious would-be actors, whose status is often gauged by how well the landlady feeds those who are “between engagements”, was a setting of several entertaining movies in the ’30s and ’40s. Often maintained by a woman whose show biz prospects dried up at about the same time that Mr. Right blew out of town, such movies as Stage Door* (1937), It All Came True (1940), The Lady With Red Hair(1940) and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) all offer glimpses of this once thriving institution.

Somewhere in a hospitality netherworld between a private home and a residential hotel, boarding houses of varying degrees of luxury were a fact of life for the vagabond existence lived by everyone from the illustrious Barrymores, Booths and Bernhardt to vaudevillians with acts featuring baboons on roller skates. One of the most memorable depictions of such a place was “The Footlights Club”, immortalized in Gregory La Cava ’s antic adaptation of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman play of their 1936 Broadway play. Written with an arch anti-Hollywood flair by the noted playwrights, the play, which incorporated elements of the penurious existence of young women on the fringes of show business, became something more interesting in Stage Door (1937). Using semi-improvisational dialogue and a large cast of verbally dextrous actresses, including a fast-talking Ginger Rogers, working her way out of her niche as Fred’s dance partner, Katharine Hepburn as a naive patrician taking a flyer on the “theauh-tuh”, and the delicious Eve Arden as a cat-toting wisecracker as well as a very young Lucille Ball as a gal from Seattle; the large cast developed a way of talking over one another that seemed modern yet familiar, spontaneous and like a slightly seedy sorority. The camaraderie is constantly in motion, changing and evolving as each of the characters blows off steam or cheers one another’s small triumphs. The portrait of this lively household is rounded out by a touching Andrea Leeds as a girl whose initial success leads to the inevitable heartbreak and even a few non-showbiz women such as the elderly proprietress, Mrs. Orcutt (Elizabeth Dunne), who ineffectually tries to referee the loud, free-for-all arguments amongst the women by shouting: “Girls! What’s going on here?…How do you expect me to run a respectable house…?”

The flippant remarks by the residents, especially those tossed off by Ginger Rogers, is epitomized in the exchange she has with the hissable Gail Patrick and the clueless, very formal Hepburn, who, hearing Ginger’s roommates snickering, notes that “Evidently, you’re a very amusing person.” Patrick, as a cynical conniver dating the far older producer (Adolphe Menjou) for whatever it can gain her, is not above stealing Rogers’ last nylons when she needs them. As Ginger leaves the room, she haughtily murmurs, mocking both Kate and Gail, “If you young ladies will pardon me, I shall take the wolfhounds for a stroll through the park. To Gail Patrick’s character of Linda she adds “Oh, need I remind you that Mr. Powell’s car awaits without.” Because of the dialogue such as this, the touching moments at just the right time in the film, and the zest of all the performances, Stage Door remains one of the freshest films of the ’30s.

Today, if you walk down West 53rd Street in bustling Manhattan near Columbus Circle between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and pause before the building at Number 45 you’ll see the American Folk Art Museum , one of my favorite spots in the metropolis, though not just because of the folk art. Granted, the exterior of the museum, (seen below) may not be the most organically lovely structure to house American quilts, primitive paintings and “outsider” art, but, if you listen carefully, you just might hear some remembered laughter and a few tears that were once shed on this very spot, when a place called The Rehearsal Club once occupied that spot.

The club, begun in July, 1913 by an Episcopalian lady named Miss Jane Hall with an interest in theatrics, was the inspiration for Stage Door. According to a contemporary news report, “intended to provide only those girls in immediate need” with a safe place to stay along with something to eat and to help those “whose girlish dreams are unrealized” with some respite from the solitude of the sprawling city’s urban anonymity. It soon became a spot well known to aspiring actresses in the New York area where they could live frugally. Over the years, the club housed generations of would-be stars and working actresses trying to save a few pennies in between auditions, including Margaret Sullavan, (who would star in the play about the place in 1936), Carol Burnett, (who had the gumption to start “The First Annual Rehearsal Club Revue” showcasing the talents of the residents),character actress Liz Sheridan, (who met her boyfriend James Dean in the cafeteria there before he was famous) Leigh Taylor-Young, and even a Sandy Duncan or two. Eventually underwritten in part by The Theatre Guild , it lasted until 1980, when the city, in its infinite wisdom, decided to revoke the tax free status of the club, (hey, anything for the arts, right?). At least the real estate on the former site is still devoted to some form of the arts.
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* Stage Door (1937) is scheduled to be shown on TCM on the following upcoming dates:
Aug. 30th@ 9:30AM ET
Sept. 15th@ 10:30PM ET
Oct. 15@ 8:00AM ET

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Sources:
The New York Times,“Rehearsal Club, For Lonely Girls”. July 6, 1913.
Ferber, Edna, Kauffman, George S., Stage Door, Dramatist Play Service Inc., 1941.
Morris, Gary, “Forgotten Master: The Career of Gregory La Cava”, Bright Lights Film Journal, May, 2004.