| George Axelrod and The Great American Sex Farce |
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| Written by Jack Newcastle |
 On November 20, 1952, a comedy in three acts premiered at Broadway’s Fulton Theatre. It was funny, it was frank, and according to New Yorker critic Wolcott Gibb, ‘it went on about sex in its most specific possible aspect; that is, with an adultery that takes place as nearly in full view of the hopeful audience as the rules of decorum and the ordinances of Manhattan will permit.’ As opening night approached, producers Courtney Burr and Elliott Nugent had not only begun to fret over that indecorous subject matter but with the final weeks of rehearsal marred by frantic rewrites and last-minute cuts a sense of doom had settled upon the production. How long could the show possibly run? A week? Ten Days? Though the opening-night audience proved to be receptive, first-time playwright George Axelrod knew his success would entirely depend upon the words of Misters Atkinson, Kerr, and Chapman, the newspaper critics who ran 1950s Broadway. The following morning, still too nervous to read the reviews and having woken to an empty wallet and no groceries, it was in a cold snow that Axelrod headed uptown to the theatre with the hope of obtaining a ten-dollar advance. It was from the address of 71 Irving Place, located in the Gramercy section of Manhattan, that Axelrod began his final trek as a man of average means and moderate success, and today the small ground floor apartment that housed his family of wife and two sons is there still. No longer, however, is it an apartment but a business establishment, and for Axelrod, a writer who loved verbal irony, so begins a tale of the cosmic kind that would take a half-century to play out, its final twist not coming till after his death in 2003. For Axelrod had drawn inspiration from that apartment and wrote his entire play around its most curious feature, a staircase that ran from floor to ceiling and went no farther, wooden planks precluding any progress to the rooms above. ‘Throw a guy in a spot and let him work his way out of it,’ he said in a 1953 interview. ‘If the spot is one that enough people have been in themselves, you’re in business,’ and upon reaching the corner of Forty-sixth Street, Axelrod did discover he was in business and it turned out to be for millions: stretching from the Fulton box office up to Seventh Avenue and beyond was a line of theatre patrons all looking to secure tickets to the hottest show in town. Vanessa Brown played The Girl, Tom Ewell, the bumbling Richard Sherman, and making its debut into the American psyche was this troublesome notion of marital ennui called The Seven Year Itch. Having forgot about the ten dollars advance he had hoped to receive, Axelrod savored his moment of success and went home to read the papers. ‘The town has another hit,’ wrote Louis Sheaffer of The Brooklyn Eagle, and ‘a delightful addition to the season,’ enthused The Herald Tribune’s Walter F. Kerr, and even the usually severe John Chapman of The Daily News wrote, ‘it has been a long time since the Broadway theatre was funny on purpose.’ By Monday, the producers were running full-page ads in all the major newspapers, and though they had billed Itch as ‘A Romantic Comedy’, in actuality, it is The Great American Sex Farce, with Axelrod being progenitor of the genre.  A writer in complete synchronization with his time, Axelrod had opened the lid on a nation still simmering over the Kinsey Report and it was with the eventual help of friends Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield that he cynically turned up the heat to let it boil over. Later in the decade the bedroom comedies of Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, Shirley MacLaine, and James Garner would all owe their success to Axelrod’s original recipe: take a pretty girl, a randy executive, a New York apartment, and vigorously mix them together with a healthy dose of liquor. It was a swank era of hi-fis and highballs, and Axelrod, who was to become the highest paid writer in Hollywood, lived it to the fullest.A New York City native born in 1922, it was from his high school days that Axelrod knew he wanted to be a writer, yet he also had the good sense to know that very few people needed to hear anything from an eighteen year-old. Garnering experience in life, and in theatre, was deemed a necessary means to his goal and toward that end he joined a Massachusetts stock company in the capacity of actor, but after a few weeks on the stage, a well-meaning director advised him to perhaps seek a theatrical career best suited to his talents. Pragmatically, Axelrod took to stage managing and through a quick turn of events one of his productions had been picked up for a Broadway run and he found himself back in New York making connections that would lead him to radio. Having been handed a script for a drama he read the cues of Music Up and Music Down, thought, ‘So that’s how it’s done,’ and got to work on his first effort which he sold to the producers of Manhattan at Midnight, a popular late-night romantic drama. At only twenty years old he was already on his way to a full-time writing career, continuing to take ideas and ‘run ‘em through the typewriter’, as he liked to describe the creative process, his keen knack for the medium allowing him to make a minor name and little money for himself by contributing to radio crime dramas such as The Shadow. All of his efforts during this era were, in fact, dramatic, Axelrod claiming that he didn’t know of his comedic talent till his service with the army signal corps in World War II. To pass the time he told jokes to the ‘hillbillies’ in his outfit which proved to be the foundation of his comedy career, for when the war over, he began contributing material to The Grand Ole Opry, writing cow jokes for hillbilly comics Rod Brasfield and Minnie Pearl. Though he admitted to this being churned out low comedy, it was during the post-war era that he would author a comic novel so finely executed that it is surprising to learn he didn’t care much for the form. ‘He was not happy with books,’ said former writing partner Max Wilk in an interview with The Cad, ‘but that was my table and not his.’ From the opening passage of Beggar’s Choice, the reader knows he’s in for a screwball ride as hero Richard Bender relates: ‘THE NOVEL THAT was to make me famous was published on April first, which, in addition to being All Fools’ Day, was our fifth (or wooden) wedding anniversary. It had a striking cerise and blue jacket and was found by the Court of Special Sessions (see People v. One Book Entitled ”In My Lady’s Chamber”) to be wholly obscene and in violation of the existing laws.’ What follows is a comedy to the order of an American P.G. Wodehouse. While Mr. Bender and wife Sue await appeal to the Supreme Court, they find themselves strapped for cash and in need of work. They take summer jobs as servants – he as a cook and she as a chauffer. Their wealthy employers turn out to be a family of loons with the father on the brink of nervous breakdown, the son an aspiring cheesecake photographer, and the mother a self-appointed protector of young women’s morals. There's also the family dog that Richard has no idea what to feed and so tries various concoctions such as cacciatori sauce with angel food cake. The action is fast-paced and the humor delightfully dry, such as when Richard sits in on one of the son’s photo sessions: ‘There was something so epic, so overpowering about Miss Falkner’s nakedness that it became a little boring. You can only stare at the Grand Canyon just so long. After that it becomes simply an unreasonably large hole in the ground.’ Beggar’s Choice is screwball comedy at its finest and if it weren’t for the entire plot hinging on the cheesecake photography and what the characters refer to as ‘The Questionnaire’ (it’s all about sex), in all likelihood the novel would have been transferred to the screen, moving Axelrod’s film career up by a few years. In 1947, however, Hollywood still had to answer to the censors at the Breen office and Axelrod would have to go on to make his living in the new medium of television, another form to which he professed no particular affinity. ‘I escaped in fifty-two,’ he related in Backstory, a 1995 book on screenwriters. ‘They used to let one television writer out over the wall every year to keep the courage of the others up.’ Axelrod had been determined to make that break from radio and television for years. As a boy, he had read a Vanity Fair article by Robert Sherwood stating that if a person had a play in him, it should be gotten out before he’s thirty; Axelrod’s own thirty-year deadline was coming up on June 9th of 1952. It didn’t matter that a second book, the pulp fiction Blackmailer, was going to be published that summer, nothing less than an edition of Playbill with ‘A New Comedy by George Axelrod’ on its cover was going to be his yardstick of success. The plot, recalled Mr. Wilk, came to Axelrod all at once. It was during the short run of a disastrous Philadelphia saloon show that the team had written for one of Eddie Cantor’s daughters; the girl had wanted to be a star and she financed the show herself. ‘Her mother came to a reading of the show,’ said Wilk, ‘and she grabbed her daughter and took her around the room and she said to her in a loud voice ‘They’re stealing your money.’’ The girl and the show were that bad, he admitted, and the writing team had trouble scrounging up money just to get back to New York. Once they did, however, Axelrod started to run his ideas through the typewriter to create The Seven Year Itch. ‘I believe Itch derived from the fact of an actual girl upstairs and Dad's over-active imagination,’ wrote son Steven Axelrod to The Cad, but in a 1953 interview George Axelrod claimed there was no one but a little old man living above them at the Gramercy residence. There is some evidence, however, that at the time of Itch’s wildly popular success, the married Axelrod might have been rewriting history to save himself from a little embarrassment. Certainly, there could have been a little old man above, but the girl he imagined walking down those steps was a very real actress, as were some of the other details that went into the play.  ‘His wife had gone up to the country,’ said Mr. Wilk recollecting a key element to the plot. ‘She had gone to the cape to see somebody. That actually did happen…and we wrote a show called All About Love. It was a two-act show and it was a big hit. It ran all year long. Everybody loved it. We had such interesting girls. George’s wife was pregnant, and my wife was pregnant, and we were busy casting beautiful girls for this show. Oh my God. The guy who was casting it was an old Broadway caster, and we were just sitting around going ‘…ugh…ugh…God,’ we were so…we couldn’t get laid for anything, and he says ‘Fellows, I’ll tell you one thing, at my age I’ll settle for an enema.’ That was our favorite line for all those years. We cast two girls. They both got very big successes,’ and one of them was the girl who would be imagined coming down the staircase in Axelrod’s apartment.Though at the time of interview Mr. Wilk couldn’t recall the girl’s name, a subsequent investigation turned up evidence that suggests Axelrod’s imaginary lover was brassy actress Barbara Nichols. With a physique that rivaled Monroe’s and Mansfield’s, Miss Nichols, was, during that period, just launching her career by appearing in New York revues and saloon shows. She was also a close friend of Axelrod’s and in 1954 would appear in his Confessions of a Nervous Man, an autobiographical Studio One television production starring Art Carney. With the plot and girl firmly in mind, Itch was written in fifteen one-hour sessions from Easter Sunday to Fourth of July 1952, completed only a month after Axelrod’s self-imposed deadline of age thirty. The writer then took the script over to an acquaintance, producer Courtney Burr, and within nine days they raised $60,000. ‘The next thing I knew,' said Axelrod, ‘we were in Hartford.’ ‘The apartment of the Richard Shermans,’ the script begins ‘about half a block fom Gramercy Park, in New York City. We see the foyer, the living room and the back terrace of a four-room apartment – the ‘parlor floor’ through – in a remodeled private house. The foyer is a platform step or two above the living room, U.C. The terrace is D.R. A flight of narrow stairs U.L. leads up to a gallery along the back wall above the foyer. At the end of the gallery the stairs continue up again until they reach the ceiling where they stop. In one of the earlier phases of remodeling, this apartment and the one above it were a duplex. But now they are rented separately and the ceiling is boarded up.’  Believing contrived plots old-fashioned, Axelrod purposely kept the storyline simple: there’s a girl upstairs and Sherman, on the brink of his thirty-ninth birthday, wants her downstairs. Despite the producers’ claims of it being ‘a romantic comedy’, the show has nothing at all to do with romance, singularly centers on sex and sex alone, and it is within five minutes of curtain that Axelrod sets the tone as the summer bachelor begins to reminisce about all the girls who wanted to get him ‘in the sack’. There’s his secretary, Miss Morris, his wife’s best friend, Elaine, and that French girl, Marie Whatever-her-name-was with whom he went skinny-dipping. No Broadway play before had opened with such blatant priapism, and if that weren’t enough to shock audiences there was Axelrod’s characterization of The Girl still to come. Today, audience are only familiar with the sanitized screen version of Itch in which Richard is the sole pursuer, but in the original play, The Girl does her fair share of pursuing as well. Somewhat presciently, or perhaps in promotion of a post-war feminism, rather than the sex object portrayed by Monroe in the film, the original character of The Girl is an independent woman who has come to terms with her sexuality. It is revealed through the voice of her conscience (the play was the first to utilize a sound system for this purpose) that at only twenty-two years of age she wants to experience life before settling down and this is her reason for turning down requests for dates by boys she think will fall in love with her. She doesn’t want to be in love, she only wants sex, and Axelrod bluntly handles the material, The Girl’s conscience reminding her she is not a virgin. ‘There was Jerry,’ she recalls, of whom it is implied was rather sloppy and too quick in his lovemaking, but he ‘still counted.' Thus she rationalizes that with Richard’s being married he won’t fall in love and she seizes the opportunity for her own ‘no strings’ affair. As the producers had suspected, Itch opened in controversy, the decency and religious groups descrying the loose morals of The Girl and the adultery that goes unpunished, yet morality aside, from a dramatic standpoint, Richard’s lack of comeuppance does in some way mar the play. Spurred by jealousy and his delusions of being found out by the wife, whom he imagines to shoot him dead, he comes to realize he does love her, yet there is no real remorse for his illicit romance. Richard gets to have his cake and eat it too, and the play ends without catharsis, or at best, a weak one. Through an article he wrote for The New York Times, Axelrod would later admit he loathed writing third acts, that he could only get them to work with some difficulty, and bearing witness to the trouble of Itch’s ending is producer Elliott Nugent’s original working script. Archived in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection in New York, the third act is littered with penciled revisions of dialogue and complete scenes either deleted or re-ordered.  It is of course possible that Axelrod wanted Sherman to go unpunished in order to make his one last comment on the burgeoning sexual energy of 1950s America, and this comes a full year before the appearance of Hugh Hefner with his premiere issue of Playboy. ‘There’s not a thing in the world to worry about,’ Richard soliloquizes. ‘Two very attractive, intelligent people happened to meet under circumstances that seemed to be…propitious…it happened. It was charming and gay. In fact it was wonderful. But now it’s over. We will just say good-bye like two intelligent people.’ At the end of the play, one of those intelligent people, The Girl, appears from the bedroom, nonchalantly collects her shoes, and goes off to work. To hell with the puritans and their scarlet letters, Axelrod seems to say, this is the new America and we’re gonna screw. The infamous interference of the Breen Office with its order to excise the adultery from the script, has, unfortunately, left us with a film version of Itch that makes no comment on the burbling consciousness of the era. Thus, Axelrod’s true legacy is lost. The Wilder film is more of a romantic comedy than a sex farce for the simple fact that Richard Sherman does romance The Girl but never actually gets to the sex. The censorship was just one irony in the career of Axelrod who, with the success of Itch, had finally escaped that prison of television, the medium where he had argued for the inclusion of a simple ‘hell’. Axelrod never duplicated the success of Itch on Broadway. His next show, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, opened to lukewarm reviews, although it did run for over a year while making a star of Jayne Mansfield, and in 1959, his third outing, Goodbye, Charlie, would close in only four months. He continued to flourish in Hollywood, however, through the mid-60s, highlights coming with his adaptations of Bus Stop and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the latter of which earned him an Oscar-nomination. His finest screen work, and one of the tightest scripts ever to come out of Hollywood, period, was on The Manchurian Candidate. In 1965, there would come his bookend to the era of sex and swank, the sinister comedy How to Murder Your Wife, starring Jack Lemmon, and the following year would bring Lord Love A Duck. ‘This motion picture is a pure act of aggression’ read the tagline for the film about a psychotic teen, and though panned during its initial release, the Axelrod written and directed black comedy is now considered a classic. The following 1968 box office failure of The Secret Life of an American Wife, also directed by Axelrod, had him leaving Hollywood for a number of years. He moved to London to write third and final novel Where am I Now - When I Need Me, and a decade later began to make sporadic returns to screenwriting. He died of heart failure, in Los Angeles, at the age of 81.  As noted, the final irony of Axelrod’s life came after his death, playing out in the same ground floor apartment where he took inspiration from that ‘staircase to nowhere.’ Sitting there at his typewriter in the spring of 1952 he wondered what would happen if the floorboards were suddenly removed and down came the drop-dead gorgeous girl of his dreams. Today, the former residence off Gramercy Park is a chic coffee-shop and at any given moment there are a dozen gorgeous girls - college students, models, and even aspiring writers – seated at tables sipping their espressos and lattes. Big-busted, small-busted, brassy, blue-eyed, brown-eyed, delicate, they all seem to be indifferent to the history of theatrical priapism that permeates the walls and iconic staircase that still runs up to the ceiling. Somewhere, George must be wide-eyed and salivating over them all.On Location: The Filming of The Seven Year Itch It took some investigation and a lot of legwork but The Cad managed to track down the location of the Sherman house used in the film version of The Seven Year Itch. In the scene where Richard Sherman walks home, an elevated train passes in the background and that gave us our best clue. Presuming the film was shot in Manhattan, we knew the only elevated train still in operation at the time of production was the Third Avenue Line. Believing the Gramercy section a most likely candidate, since that is where the play takes place, we began a leisurely stroll from the southern boundary of the neighborhood at 14th Street. One block after another proved to be a washout and we began to suspect the house had been torn down for condominiums, but hours later, we were trudging down East 61st Street where a row of townhouses began to match the stills in our hands. Finally, at the address of 164 East 61st, we found it. Though now painted tan rather than black, and despite the missing shutters and a chiropractor’s awning jutting into the street, the railing, stairs, doorway, and windows are the same. Even the tree is still there. Looking up, one can imagine Marilyn popping her head out to welcome you home.
George Discovers Jayne Mansfield  At the opening Itch's second act, the curtain rises on Richard and a Dr. Brubaker, the two men discussing the illustrated cover of Brubaker’s book that Richard has renamed Of Sex and Violence. Dr. Brubaker: This, then, is why my book is to be published with a cover depicting Gustav Manerheim in the very act of attacking one of his victims... Richard: I must take the responsibily for the coer myself, Doctor... Dr. Brubaker: And also for making Meyerheim’s victim – all of whom, incidentally, were middle-aged women – resemble in a number of – basic characteristics – Miss Jayne Mansfield. The reference to Jayne Mansfield was a private joke for Axelrod, for at the time of premiere in 1952, Mansfield was practically unknown. It wasn't till 1954 that Mansfield and her husband didn’t hit Hollywood to begin her publicity blitz, and so we are left to wonder how Axelrod came to mentioning her in the play. The Cad contacted Orson Bean, the actor who played George McCauley opposite Jayne Mansfield's Rita Marlowe in the stage version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and he explains: ‘She was completely unknown – he found her in Texas. After, she came in and auditioned. He had auditioned all kinds of faded movie glamour girls and he fell in love with Jayne when he saw her and she immediately became a big celebrity – sort of the Paris Hilton of her day – and she was the only one who appeared twice in one year on the cover of Life magazine while she was starring in the show.' When asked if Axelrod was key to Jayne Mansfield’s success, Mr. Bean replied, ‘Absolutely.’ |
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