"Wives Is What I Hanker For": Mormons Take Center Stage

by Stephen J. Gertz

We shift from rare prose literature to rare literature of the theater today, inspired by an item offered in Swann Galleries upcoming Vintage  Posters sale, August 7, 2013.

During the 1880-1881 theatrical touring season the Goesche-Hopper Company presented 100 Wives, an anti-Mormon tabloid-theater comedy-melodrama with a dash of anti-Chinese racism that appears to have sold out every performance in every town and city it played in.

The playbill set forth the proceedings:

EMBLEMATIC TABLEAU - Inner Temple of the Mormons. The Danites Receiving a New Covenant. The Solemn Oaths of the Blood atonement. The Chant of the Priests. Immediately following this picture, which illustrates the mission of the Destroying Angels, the curtain rises upon the Play.

ACT I - Salt Lake City. Arrival of the English Colony at New Jerusalem. Elder Bezum's Wicked Designs. The McGinley Family. Elsie Bradford Hears Terrible News. A Timely Rescue.

ACT II - Nick's Ranch at McGinely's Gulch. The Chinese Question. A Boys Celebrate. A Lost Child. The Danites in Pursuit. Bezum Baffled. The Dead Restored To Life.

ACT III - TABLEAU I - McGinley's Home. Reconciliation and New Terrors. Mrs. McGinley's Plan. "Wives is what I hanker for." TABLEAU 2 - Up among the Mines. Little Bessie Prays for her Papa. The Death Fall from the Cliff.

ACT IV - Exterior of the Mormon Tabernacle. The Marriage. Elder Bezum presses Hard. The Mormon Church is Supreme. Surprise. The Govermnet has Something to Say at Last. "Home Sweet Home."

First on the bill, the play's lead character possesses my new favorite name, one right out of S.J. Perelman. Elder Bezum, third on the bill, is the zealous Mormon who declaims, "Wives is what I hanker for." A better headline for a personal ad  would be difficult to compose, "SWMM Seeks Wives! Wives, Wives!" lacking its quaint colloquial fervor.

The Cast:

Confucius McGinley, a Doubtful Convert.
Edward Branford, a Gentile.
Elder Bezum, A Pillar of the Church.
Hung Li, a Celestial.
Mrs. Sophronia McGinley, an Ambitious Woman.
Elsie Bradford, a Deceived Woman.
Mrs. Andrews, a Deluded Woman.
Little Bessie

"If this play could run for a hundred nights instead of closing this week, it would still not exhaust popular interest, for every one who has once seen it must want to go again. It has taken the town by surprise, and that, too, in the midst of election excitement; such a fresh and dramatic story, based on a matter that all are familiar with, yet that for the first time seems to come home to the audience with all its tragic capabilities.

"The popular idea of the 'American play,' with its slang and localisms of manners and dress, is very far indeed from all that is presentd in 'The Hundred Wives.' Nor need any one fear to be introduced into the American harem at Salt Lake, or be treated to any moralizing sermons or situations, in themselves demoralizing and disgusting. On the contrary the plot of this Mormon story is worked out with a hand at once delicate and skilful.

"The believer and the Danite, Mormon Apostle and Destroying Angel, are given just that touch of fanatic devotion and of quaint phraseology as brings out the livery this creed has adopted to serve the devil in, and the opening tableau of the Danite vow in the Mormon Tabernacle is the real keynote to the story. The skill, too, with which the Chinaman is made to foil a Mormon plot is very noticeable, especially as he is a typical Chinaman, of the California pattern, not above the tricks of his tribe - yet turning his secretive qualities to good and loyal effect as the plot thickens.

"Here are the two nearest problems that the American people have to deal with - the Chinese and the Mormon - most ingeniously worked out, and although the audience is in a broad ripple of laughter from beginning to end, there is an undercurrent of appeal constantly that this is a live story, and here is a matter that must be presently be settled in one or another way.

"The entirely novel humor and style of acting of Mr. De Wolf Hopper and Miss Ada Gilman have already been noticed. Both are such natural and such new personations, and both have such unusual physical advantages for the comic situation, that the matrimonial argument is irresistible whenever the diminutive wife takes her tall, strapping miner in hand. Mrs. Sophronia, with her unwavering attachment to the Mormon creed, and her undisguised horror of it when the reality os played off upon her by her own earnestness and her husband's joke, is altogether delightful.

"…In fine, the play is an argument, such as people can understand, against the hideous Mormon creed, which is suffered to exist by virtue of popular indifference to its every-day features. There will certainly be a change in public sentiment wherever the 'Hundred Wives' is played, for it is the one wife that comes out triumphant.

"Forcible as the plot is, it is none the less a clean plot, and all the more dramatic for being a true bill" (The Scrap Book, Volume 2, Sept. 1906- Feb. 1907, pp. 723-724, reprinting a review from the Philadelphia Ledger, 1880).

"This talking drama will occupy the boards at the opera house on Monday night next. The New Orleans Democrat pays the entertainment the following flattering tribute: The new American play, 'One Hundred Wives,' which has created an immense sensation wherever presented, was produced here last night and made a decided hit. The theater was filled from top to bottom, and the unanimous verdict of the immense audience was, that the drama is the best thing in its line which has ever been brought before a New Orleans audience. Though it is somewhat on the order of 'The Danites,' it is far superior to that play both in plot and detail. The company presenting it is an excellent one" (Decatur Review, January 28, 1882).

Producer-Actor De Wolf Hopper (1858-1935), who portrayed Confucius McGinley and was, presumably, the play's writer-director, was ninety-four marriages shy of "100 Wives." Married only six times, his fifth pass at the altar espoused him to actress Elda Furry, who later became the famed Old Hollywood gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper.

The world awaits a play with clean plot and true bill whose lead character is named Lao Tse McGonagle, Mencius O'Malley, or Zhaozhou Schwartz.

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Images of 100 Wives and De Wolf Hopper courtesy of Swann Galleries; image of 100 Wives flyer courtesy of Ebay, with our thanks.

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Tennessee Williams' Sweet Sacred Ibis Of Youth

By Stephen J. Gertz

Cover by C.C. Senf.

"Hushed were the streets of many peopled Thebes. Those few who passed through them moved with the shadowy fleetness of bats near dawn, and bent their faces from the sky as if fearful of seeing what in their fancies might be hovering there..."

An emotionally iffy ancient Egyptian princess, sister to the Pharaoh, seeks revenge on those who conspired to execute her beloved brother, ascends the throne, builds a temple as an elaborate death-trap, drowns them all with sadistic glee, and then kills herself.

It's Tennessee Williams' first published story, his second appearance in print, The Vengeance of Nitocris, issued under his given name, Thomas Lanier Williams, and published by Weird Tales,  the American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine, in 1928. It might just as well have been titled  A Chariot Named Desire, or The Orisris Menagerie. 
 

"I was sixteen when I wrote [the story], but already a confirmed writer, having entered upon this vocation at the age of fourteen, and, if you're well acquainted with my writings since then, I don't have to tell you that it set the keynote for most of the work that has followed" (Tennessee Williams, New York Times interview, as cited by Francesca M. Hitchcock, "Tennessee Williams' Vengeance of Nitocris: The Keynote to Future Works," The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 48, 1995).

A strong if emotionally fragile woman, a close brother-sister bond, a descent into madness, and  death - this is, indeed, Williams territory, with revenge and lurid blood and guts thrown in as a nod to the Bard, Titus Andronicus, according to Hitchcock, William's favorite play by Shakespeare. In this weird tale for Weird Tales, as in so much of Shakespeare - and pulp fiction - everybody dies miserably ever after. It's necropolis-noir.

Little Tommy Williams was in good company in this issue. Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, contributed the featured story, Red Shadows, which introduced 17th century Puritan swashbuckler Solomon Kane and is considered to be the first published example of Sword and Sorcery fiction.

This issue also contains Crashing Suns, a story by science-fiction pioneer Edmund Hamilton. Hamilton, in 1946, married science fiction writer, and screenwriter, Leigh Brackett, perhaps best known for her collaborations with William Faulkner (The Big Sleep, 1946);  five Westerns for director Howard Hawks; Robert Altman (The Long Goodbye, 1973); and Lawrence Kasdan (Star Wars' The Empire Strikes Back, 1979). This copy, in fact, belonged to Hamilton and Brackett; their ownership stamp appears on its first page.

"What more horrible vengeance could Queen Nitocris have conceived than this banquet of death? Not Diablo himself could be capable of anything more fiendishly artistic. Here in the temple of Osiris those nobles and priests who had slain the pharaoh in expiation of his sacrilege against Osiris had now met their deaths. And it was in the waters of the Nile, material symbol of the god Osiris, that they had died. It was magnificent in its irony!...

"When in the evening the queen arrived in the city, pale, silent, and obviously nervous, threatening crowds blocked the path of her chariot, demanding roughly an explanation of the disappearance of her guests. Haughtily she ignored them and lashed forward the horses of her chariot, pushing aside the tight mass of people. Well she knew, how-ever, that her life would be doomed as soon as they confirmed their suspicions. She resolved to meet her inevitable death in a way that befitted one of her rank, not at the filthy hands of a mob.

"Therefore upon her entrance into the palace she ordered her slaves to fill instantly her boudoir with hot and smoking ashes. When this had been done, she went to the room, entered it, closed the door and locked it securely, and then flung herself down upon a couch in the center of the room. In a short time the scorching heat and the suffocating thick fumes of the smoke overpowered her. Only her beautiful dead body remained for the hands of the mob."

Sweet Sacred Ibis! The maturation from purple pulp to poetic prose may have been Williams' greatest achievement as a writer, though the recognizable, often delicately tough, real yet unnatural and not quite of this world turn of his language can be glimpsed this early.

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WILLIAMS, Thomas Lanier [Tennessee Wiliams]. The Vengeance of Nitocris. [In Weird Tales, p. 253]. Indianapolis, Indiana: Popular Fiction Publishing, 1928. Octavo. 288 pp. Illustrated wrappers.

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Images courtesy of Between the Covers, with our thanks.
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Of related interest: 

Unpublished Significant Early Tennessee Williams Poem Surfaces. 

Tennessee Williams Rocks the Rare Books Round Up at L.A. TImes Festival of Books.

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Unpublished Significant Early Tennessee Williams Poem Surfaces

by Stephen J. Gertz

Between the end of May and the beginning of September 1937, Tennessee Williams, 26 years old and a student at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote a startling prose poem, one never published and completely unknown to Williams scholars.

The piece, titled The Body Awaits, a monologue spoken by a bum in a St. Louis flophouse, appears to be related to Williams' fourth apprentice play, Fugitive Kind, also written in 1937 and occurring in a flophouse. It is unclear whether the piece was working preparation for Fugitive Kind, or, alternatively, grew out of it, Williams sensing something that he wanted to develop independently from the play.

The work is eerily prescient of his sad, later years. It begins:

I am tired. I am tired of speech and action. If you should meet me upon the street and still know me in spite of my present condition I would prefer that you passed me without salutation. Your face is unknown to me now. I do not remember your name. Maybe we drank together once or shared grub in a jungle of flop-house somehwehre [sic] in a different state or different city but that was a long time ago.

And ends, in this draft:

Death is the last convenience. Perhaps it will be a truck skidding close to a corner on which I stand. Accident or on purpose? Who cares! A step or two forwards or backwards and the whole thing's done. The body awaits identification at the city morgue. Will you perform a post-mortem? In the heart of me you will find a tiny handful of dust. Take it and blow it out upon the wind. Let the wind have it and it will find its way home.

In corrected typescripts of two different versions of Williams's working drafts, the earlier is typed on both sides of a single sheet, double and single-spaced in blocks of text on the first side, with several versions of some lines; on the reverse a portion is  double-spaced, with a line by line layout.

These two drafts contain about twenty-five words in Williams's hand in pencil.

The later version is double-spaced on four pages (including two drafts of the second page), and has thirty-four words and other corrections in pencil, by Williams. It's signed in type and dated June, 1937.

Thomas A. Goldwasser, of Goldwasser Rare Books, currently offering the typescript, said,  "It is particularly interesting to see the budding playwright experimenting with voices and phrases and trying to expand his imaginative world."

Williams typescript/manuscript material is extremely difficult to acquire. "Almost all such Williams  material is held by institutions, and rarely appears for sale," Goldwasser notes.

Here we have, pre-Tennessee, Thomas Lanier Williams III, unhappy in childhood, depressed in adolescence, and only two years after a nervous breakdown, contemplating, in his mid-twenties, a void in the heart, exhaustion with life, a turning within and away from the world, and an acceptance if not welcome of death.

It ends with what would become Williams signature language, a soft, stylized tongue never heard in real life, the song of a splendid bird with broken wing who sought compassion for all the injured and sung with a voice desperately seeking lyric poetry in a brutal prose world. In the beginning he saw his end with a yearning to return to the refinement that he never knew as a child yet mourned just the same, the Never-Neverland of a tortured Peter Pan from Mississippi who sought grace in all things but experienced its subversion by gross reality.  Tennessee Williams was Blanche DuBois. In The Body Awaits, Blanche lies with her brothers, the lost, helpless souls wounded beyond salvation.

"In the heart of me you will find a tiny handful of dust. Take it and blow it out upon the wind. Let the wind have it and it will find its way home."

The body awaits delivery to where the mind has already arrived, to that supernal place where nightmares subside, dreams are never disturbed, and the kindness of strangers is no stranger.
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Image courtesy of Thomas A. Goldwasser Rare Books, with our thanks.
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