He was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross...

[...and a lot of television plays and television commercials.]

I finally got around to reading Ronald Alexander’s comedy Nobody Loves an Albatross, whose title will surely be recognized by aficionados of Rosemary’s Baby, both novel and film, as one of Guy Woodhouse’s two Broadway credits.

The other, to be sure, is John Osborne’s Luther.

A rare glimpse of Guy Woodhouse in Luther, in the midst of his celebrated “involuntary reaching.” “That’s strange,” Mr. Castevet said; “I was quite certain that you were [Albert Finney’s] understudy. I remember being struck by a gesture you made and checking in the program to see who you were; and I could swear that you were listed as Finney’s understudy.” As long as we’re here, let’s note Ira Levin’s unusual use of semicolons.

Even aficionados may be surprised to learn that Nobody Loves an Albatross is the actual title of an actual play that ran at the Lyceum from December 1963 through June 1964, though if novelist Ira Levin had wanted to concoct out of thin air a plausible title for a plausible commercially intended play in the early-mid 1960s, he couldn’t have done much better than Nobody Loves an Albatross in a decade that also saw productions of You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running; Ready When You Are, C.B.!; A Race of Hairy Men!; Absence of a Cello; and Baby Want a Kiss,¹ to say nothing of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad.

At the time of Albatross’s opening, playwright (and occasional screenwriter) Ronald Alexander was probably most famous for Time Out for Ginger (a very 1950s title, I’d say), which had similarly enjoyed a six-month Broadway run, back in 1952–53,² and then gone on to inescapability in regional and community theaters across this great nation of ours, and for all I know it’s still being produced.

Sure, I’d go see Melvyn Douglas in Time Out for Ginger, wouldn’t you?

I’d long been curious about Albatross, and now that I’ve scratched my itch I can report that it’s the sort of satire that, pace George S. Kaufman,³ doesn’t close on Saturday night, probably because it’s toothless and seems to exist largely to make its audience feel clever. And, like most failed satires—particularly, I’ve found, of Hollywood matters—it’s helplessly enchanted by the thing it purports to satirize, which rather defeats the point of satire, I think.

The play’s protagonist is Nat Bentley, a television wheeler-dealer writer-producer who preys on everyone around him, and though on paper he’s a relentlessly charmless huckster who lies even more easily than he breathes, we’re meant to be utterly enamored of him (I’m sensing a throughline here) because his preadolescent daughter adores him madly and his housekeeper and secretary laugh indulgently at every single g.d. one of his mirthless, overcooked jokes. Oh, and he makes faces whenever anyone’s back is turned.

All of this is no doubt why the role was cast with Robert Preston, who knew a thing or two by then about playing relentlessly dishonest hucksters of whom audiences were meant to be utterly enamored, and I’ll bet they were, at least for six months.

Though at least, in The Music Man, Preston had a glorious Meredith Willson score, to say nothing of Barbara Cook, to work with.⁴

Anyway, here’s Robert Preston as Nat Bentley in Nobody Loves an Albatross, and by the way I have no idea why the play is called Nobody Loves an Albatross:

But what about Guy Woodhouse?, I hear you inquiring.

The way I figure it, Guy was the understudy to Richard Mulligan, who played an earnest, desperate young writer whose work Preston’s character appropriates for small change and passes off as his own for big bucks, and presumably at some point, and presumably without a satanic spell to assist him, Guy took over the role.

It’s a pretty thankless gig, but I bet that Guy was just fine.

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Though I do attempt to make these ’stacks amusing (and informative!) for a broad swath of readers, I’m going to confess that I wrote this one mostly to amuse myself. Perhaps I underestimate the interest in trivia, to say nothing of the silliness, of my readers.

Do have a lovely rest of the day.

Benjamin

1. Semicolons have many practical uses, to be sure, and one of their most practical uses is to separate items in a list when any of those items in that list include commas—even if, as here, it’s just the one item that includes a comma. If I’d set Ready When You Are, C.B.! last in this list of play titles, I could have used commas rather than semicolons, to be sure, but that wouldn’t have been as much fun for me.

2. En dash alert!

3. Here’s the deal with “pace,” which as a preposition means “contrary to the opinion of,” and though Merriam-Webster adds “usually used as an expression of deference to someone's contrary opinion,” in my experience it tends to be used as an expression of “this person is an idiot and their opinion is even more idiotic.” There seem to be any number of ways to pronounce the prepositional “pace”—does it feel like a preposition to you? it sure doesn’t to me, though I don’t know what else to call it, an adverb maybe?—including “pay-see,” “pah-chay,” and “pah-kay.” All that said, it’s the sort of word I’d only ever write and would never dare attempt to say aloud.

4. To say nothing, truly, of one of the most brilliantly American storylines in all of American musical theater. If you held a gun to my head—though you needn’t—to name the best Broadway musical ever concocted, I’d probably name The Music Man. Not even probably.