Shutterbug to the Stars

One of the most common pieces of advice given actors is, “Be in the moment.” When you think of it, however, theater performers have no other choice; their performances exist only in the moment. When a moment is past, little or nothing is left of it. It wasn’t until photography was refined in the 19th century that a true record of how actors look as they emote began to be established. By the 20th century, images started to accumulate of the theater people behind the actors: the playwrights, directors, producers, designers.

There is reason to rejoice over Mary C. Henderson’s latest labor of love: The theater historian has memorialized the work of the late theater photographer Eileen Darby with Stars on Stage: Photographs 1940-1964 and, featuring a savvy intro by John Lahr, what a treasure trove it is! Stagestruck, as perhaps all great theater artists must be, Darby left Portland, Oregon in the late 1930s and, after apprenticing with the likes of Cornell Capa and Alfred Eisenstaedt, opened her own shop, Graphic House. Her first recorded theater assignment was to snap George M. Cohan in his final stage appearance, The Return of the Vagabond. (These may be the last extant shots of the famous actor-producer-manager.) Shortly thereafter, Darby was asked to capture Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Montgomery Clift, and their colleagues in There Shall Be No Night (1940). The rest, thanks largely to Henderson, is now theater history.

Before Darby started shutterbugging, theater photography was a formal affair. Darby mixed that up when she began going about her tasks, usually in one of two ways. Frequently, she sat in an auditorium’s front row and photographed during a performance; just as frequently, she set up her shots after out-of-town performances. She was interested in getting as much a sense of action as she could into her frames, and she succeeded. Moreover, shooting as she did from the front row and from somewhat beneath her subjects, Darby often infused her shots with a broad streak of the heroic. She was the pedestrian gazing up at the sculpture of the famous person.

That’s the nature of the practically signature portrait of Carol Channing wherein the stars greets the Harmonia Gardens waiters with open arms in Hello, Dolly! It’s the same with a series of studies of Bert Lahr in Two on the Aisle, in which the famous clown’s brand of buffoonery is clearly communicated. Also shot from below, although posed, are Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy in A Streetcar Named Desire. (That picture is so important to Darby’s canon that it’s included twice in Henderson’s book.) Brando’s brow is furrowed in puzzled disgust, and Tandy — the hem of whose frilly dress Brando raises ominously — cowers before him, simultaneously frightened and intrigued.

In other words, Darby distills Tennessee Williams’ illusion-shattering play to one telling glimpse. She had a talent for that. There’s another Streetcar photograph that’s nearly as poetic as Williams’ prose: It’s a wide shot of Blanche being led away at fade-out while Stanley comforts Stella (Kim Hunter). Also taken from below stage level, this Streetcar picture could be one of Darby’s most effective front-row clicks. And talking of poetry: Darby photographed Williams’ Summer and Smoke in 1948, preserving a generous view of Jo Mielziner’s set with the symbolic statue of a kneeling angel upstage center. (Mielziner nailed most of the plum set-design assignments during those years, and Darby recorded many of them sensitively.)

Darby’s images of Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman are also prime examples of getting a play’s essence down in black and white. (There are no color photographs in the book.) Indeed, it was Darby who, throughout the ’40s and ’50s, produced six times for the cover of Life magazine representative stills of shows — stills that, you might say, are rarely still as Henderson organizes them chronologically by show.

Although Darby could deliver a so-so photograph, it was a rare occurrence. More often, her photos are among the best available of theater people at work. She took perhaps the most eloquent picture of Tennessee Williams that we have: Wearing an open-necked shirt and high-waisted trousers with braces, lofting a cigarette in a holder, Williams peers down into the camera’s lens with a confident disdain that may be about to loosen into a smile. This could be Darby’s single greatest photograph — it’s little short of monumental — but she catches the fascinating aspects of many others as well.

There’s Ethel Waters beaming at the kitchen table in Member of the Wedding and, in the same Lester Polakov kitchen, Julie Harris in profile with cropped hair, lording it over Brandon de Wilde. There’s a beetle-browed and playful Ralph Richardson in stormy beard and costume as Falstaff for the celebrated Old Vic production of Henry IV, Parts I and II. Two pages later, there stands Laurence Olivier, poised and darkly pensive before making an entrance in Oedipus. Ray Bolger leaps up gleefully against a Three to Make Ready show curtain. (Darby most often used a Rolliflex and must also have had a highly efficient stop-motion camera always at the ready.) The Hepburns, Katharine and Audrey, are here with their charm and cheekbones.

For more charm and chic bones, a long-necked Lynn Fontanne teases a suspicious Alfred Lunt during a scene from their long-running but now forgotten O Mistress Mine. That brings me to perhaps the most cogent reason for recommending this book: In snagging so many significant aspects of what is often called Broadway’s Golden Age, Darby almost always freezes a certain glamour, a certain grandeur. Even Richard Rodgers, wearing an Oklahoma! bonnet and puffing merrily on a cigar, looks as if it’s a grand night for singing. And then there’s Cole Porter, observed warbling to his beloved dog (a skipperke) at a piano on which perches a three-ring binder labeled “Numbers Thrown Out of Shows.” (“From This Moment On” has to be in there!)

Almost all of these photographs contain the heavy suggestion of artifice, and rightly so. For much of the early years when Darby was toiling, theater was a vaunted arena. Stage life was expected to be bigger-than-life; it was to be looked at from below, as Darby intuitively understood. Pretty much every theater practitioner adhered to this belief. Yet, on page 13 of Stars on Stage, there’s a contact sheet in which Laurette Taylor appears 12 times over. Shot head on, she’s acting the famous telephone scene from The Glass Menagerie. Were Darby’s frames cut out and placed on top of one another in sequence, the result could serve as a Glass Menagerie flip book. Taylor has bangs dropping from under a head covering. She’s alternately talking and listening, animated and downcast. The only long-necked object in these photos is the telephone.

This is a rare record of what many people considered to be the greatest theater performance of the era. It’s still talked about without anyone being quite able to explain what made Taylor’s turn so outstanding, so startling, but Darby’s photos suggest that Taylor’s Amanda Wingfield was the axe of naturalism breaking through the ice of artifice. She was stripping away glamour and leaving only everyday reality behind; no wonder that her performance was so exhilarating. For these photographs more than for any of the others in the classy volume, Mary C. Henderson’s Stars on Stage belongs in every genuine theater lover’s library.