Stage legends in a kind spotlight

The theater had obsessed Alfred Lunt (born in Milwaukee) and Lynn Fontanne (born more than 4,000 miles away, near London) since childhood; and it seems appropriate that their first encounter occurred at a New York theater and was notably theatrical. In 1919, when Lunt was 27 and Fontanne 32, they joined the same stock company, and as he arrived backstage for the first rehearsal of “A Young Man’s Fancy” he saw her seated in the wings, a few steps below. He bowed, lost his balance and landed at her feet.

Later that year, Booth Tarkington’s “Clarence” made Lunt a Broadway star, and in the summer of 1921 a comedy by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly, “Dulcy,” did the same for Fontanne. By then they were courting, and after “Dulcy” ended its run in the spring of 1922, they got married. But although they stayed together until Lunt died at 84 and acted together in 26 plays, their marriage became and remains food for speculation.

Several young actresses, including Helen Hayes, fell in love with the painfully self-critical and introspective young Lunt, who does not appear to have felt a strong attachment to any woman (except his flamboyant and possessive mother) until he met Fontanne. Self-assured and openly ambitious, she was his temperamental opposite, and the couple’s best friend was Noel Coward, who would say no more than “[c]atching a moonbeam in your hand would be falling off a log compared with catching and holding the truth about the Lunts.” But Coward provided food for further speculation when he wrote, expressly for himself and his two friends, a comedy about a trio of elegantly bohemian artists and spiked it with hints of bisexuality. When “Design for Living” opened in 1933, it was already an open secret in theatrical circles that Coward was gay; and after Edna Ferber described the Lunts as “double-gaited,” theater historians took the Ferber report for granted. But in her shrewd, engrossing and doubtless definitive biography of this fascinating couple, Margot Peters points out that no one has ever come forward with a single name of their “same-sex partners.” The only real certainties, she adds, are that Lunt was “sexually ambivalent” until he met Fontanne, and that for both of them the theater was much more important than sex.

Djuna Barnes, author of that enduring cult masterpiece “Nightwood,” also wrote theatrical profiles for New York magazines. When she arrived “pen in hand” to see “Lord Alfred and Lady Lynn,” they asked to be interviewed separately. Fontanne, who looked “extremely royal,” took the lead, and remarked that the advantage of being a married couple was that they could rehearse anywhere, “at breakfast, at dinner, in taxicabs, and in bed.” What else they did in bed seems less important than what they rehearsed there. After two years of marriage, the Lunts appeared in “The Guardsman,” Ferenc Molnar’s comedy about the sexual games of a married acting couple. It was a triumph that established them as major stars and Broadway aristocrats, as well as setting the pattern for nearly all their greatest successes. The erotic situations in “Design for Living,” Robert Sherwood’s “Reunion in Vienna” and “Idiot’s Delight,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Amphitryon 38” (Giraudoux, adapted by S.N. Behrman), and Terence Rattigan’s “O Mistress Mine” stimulated them to all kinds of “suggestive” body movement and foreplay -- smooching, slapping, spanking, rolling about on the floor, and even (aged respectively 59 and 54) lying on a couch while Lady Lynn felt up Lord Alfred’s trouser leg.

For the couple who projected sexuality onstage with such persistent, urbane enthusiasm and, as Peters writes, “worked out a design for living to suit them both,” it seems more than likely that the theater became the arena for a total sublimation of sex. Offstage, it also seems more than likely that Fontanne sometimes found total sublimation a problem. Peters gives a bizarrely revealing account of Lady Lynn asking her lord if he likes her new hat, as she parades in front of him wearing nothing else. Alarmed, he begs her to get dressed immediately. But once back where they both belonged, all was well. Their ideal marriage lasted more than 50 years, Fontanne remarked years later, because “when we were acting, I had a new lover every night, and so had he.”

Until they became an acting couple, Fontanne had been considered rather plain and far from elegant, while Lunt had felt uncomfortable the only time he played a straight romantic lead -- in a 1923 silent film, “Backbone.” As “The Lunts,” they set a spectacular example of self-reinvention and became, as Alfred told Djuna Barnes, “a living unit.” A freedom that only marriage could bring allowed him “that charmed byplay known as the pinch in the right place, and he could only know the right place, or places, when the actress was his wife. It was marriage, he added, that opened the door to ‘that subtle interlocking of lines that makes everything seem so natural.’ ”

But if either Lunt or Fontanne mistimed an effect of overlapping dialogue onstage, they would argue furiously about it later. Their brilliantly artificial spontaneity was the product of a technique as precise, demanding and competitive as their “charmed byplay,” and in the pursuit of consummate illusion no detail escaped them. Cecil Beaton, who designed the sets and costumes for Coward’s “Quadrille,” recalled a desperate Fontanne, a few minutes before opening night curtain, realizing that her own wedding ring was too “modern” for a period piece and Lunt agonizing that his bowtie was too “puny.”

More than one watcher of the Lunts has remarked that the parts they played were less important than how they played them. But the parts they played affected the way they played them. The first time I saw the famous couple was in Sherwood’s “There Shall Be No Night,” written to protest American isolationism in World War II. The Lunts had opened it on Broadway in 1940, with Lynn as the gallant American wife of Alfred’s Finnish neurologist, a Nobel laureate whose pacifist convictions are shattered when his son is killed during the Soviet invasion of his country. By the time they brought it to wartime London in 1943, Finland had become a German ally in the invasion of Russia, and Sherwood switched the setting to German-occupied Greece. During the performance I saw in London, a German rocket exploded in the distance and the theater trembled. It was the only moment of reality in a phony play that made the Lunts appear equally phony. Sherwood’s dialogue was verbal greasepaint, and the thicker he applied it, the more distractingly mannered the Lunts became.

But in “O Mistress Mine” (then titled “Love in Idleness”) a few months later, and “Quadrille” a few years later, they lived up to their legend. The plays were minor Rattigan and minor Coward but struck a vein of romantic make-believe that allowed the couple to work their magic. Insulated from any reality except their own, they were irresistibly charming, marvelously inventive, mysteriously ageless. It had taken the rude, brutal eruption of World War II to blow that perfected reality sky high.

By 1960, the year of Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros,” Pinter’s “The Caretaker,” Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man” and Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” you might have thought their time was up. But seeing the Lunts in their last appearance on Broadway, I realized how cannily they had sensed the winds of change and how determined they were not to be blown away. In Friedrich Durrenmatt’s “The Visit,” a wealthy old lady arrives in a provincial Swiss town to avenge herself on the lover who made her pregnant years ago. Having inherited a fortune, Claire is prepared to spend a substantial part of it on any person or persons willing to kill Anton -- even though, when they meet again, she realizes that she still loves him.

In Durrenmatt’s original German version, Claire was an ugly old lady with a wooden leg and an artificial hand. With his permission and the Lunts’ approval, translator Maurice Valency and director Peter Brook eliminated both prosthetics, and at Fontanne’s insistence they lowered her age from 65 to 50. She also chose the blood-red wig and matching cape (Lanvin-Castillo) for Claire’s chic but deadly first entrance, while Lunt was almost unrecognizable in his shabby, small-town grocer’s suit. By replacing Claire’s grotesqueness with a sinister glamour, Anton’s desire for her in the past became more convincing and made him more vulnerable to her power when they met again. In this way the Lunts accommodated Durrenmatt’s play to their own reality without diminishing its horrible force. Fontanne’s ironic seductiveness was familiar, but not its malignant subtext, and Lunt’s unwilling response added a grisly new dimension to their old erotic games. And when a group of townsmen, whom Anton had thought were his friends, responded to Claire’s wealth by closing in for the kill, he gave a virtuoso display of terror and loneliness.

By stretching their talents so unexpectedly, the Lunts made “The Visit” a hard act to follow and, much as they wanted to, they never found a play to turn the trick. Instead, they retreated to their farm in Wisconsin. After Lunt died of prostate cancer in 1977, Fontanne stayed on alone, played cards, and (white-haired, timeworn, still vital) recalled on a PBS documentary her life as one half of the most famous acting couple in the English-speaking theater. At 93, though visibly frail, she flew to Washington to accept a Kennedy Center Honor for the Performing Arts. Soon afterward she developed Alzheimer’s, and 18 months later she died.

Their 1931 film of “The Guardsman” had proved that the camera was no friend of the Lunts. Moving in close, it stripped their artifice of its magic by exposing the calculation behind it and denied Fontanne the illusion of beauty; when the couple, reluctant to give up acting altogether, appeared in a few TV productions before Alfred died, the small screen emphasized their need for the space as well as the distance of the stage. But Margot Peters has moved in close, and unlike the camera her biography is probing yet friendly, a vivid portrait of a dazzling, elusive couple whose subtle and complex technique was allied to a steely singleness of purpose. *