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Alfred Lunt: Plays
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Lunt was educated at the private Milwaukee Academy and then at the Carroll College Academy in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Upon graduation, he enrolled at Carroll College. He considered studying set design or architecture but soon realized that theater performance was his true calling. He became a member of the Carroll Players under the direction of May Rankin, whom Lunt consistently praised in later years for the excellence of her teaching and for her encouragement of her students.
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[Real-life husband and wife theatrical co-stars, Lunt and Fontanne re-created their stage roles in Ferenc Molnar's marital comedy Broadway stage play - the film turned out to be the sole sound film the couple made in their careers. It was ... the first time a married couple received simultaneous acting nominations.] Note: She is also noted for being the first performer to win these four different awards - Oscar (1932, 1970), Tony (1947, 1958), Emmy (1953), and Grammy (1976), by 1976!
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In 1964 when Richard Burton was playing in Hamlet at the Lunt-Fontaine, each night after the performance a bubble-top limo would pull up to the stagedoor and Burton would get into the car where Elizabeth Taylor was waiting. Elizabeth would give Richard a big kiss and the crowds surrounding the car would cheer.
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There is ... the enigma of the Lunt marriage. Peters notes frequently that they were believed to be homosexual or bisexual. It is hard to say whether this is simply standard theater gossip, fueled by the intimate friendships both maintained with homosexual actors like Noel Coward and Montgomery Clift. The whispering certainly increased after Coward wrote Design for Living for them: the two men in the play's love triangle are ostensibly competing for the woman, but critics quickly noted that the subtext was the men’s attraction to each other. The play was both a hit and a source of controversy, termed “decadent” and “unholy” by some critics. George Jean Nathan was particularly vitriolic in his review for Vanity Fair, calling it “a pansy paraphrase of Candida, theatrically sensationalized with ‘daring’ gay allusions to hermaphrodites, ‘gipsy [sic] queens,’ men dressed as women, etc.” Yet such remarks hardly seem enough to warrant Peters’ implicit assumption that the Lunts were gay, an assumption she never substantiates with any real evidence or even with identifiable hearsay.
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While at the Carroll Academy, Lunt became friends with Ray and Andrew Weaver, fellow students who boarded for three years at his mother and stepfather's house. The three wrote a play, The Greater Love, which they hoped to have staged at the college, but the work was never produced.
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Some existing legitimate theaters were renovated as well, most notably the former Globe (Carrere & Hastings, 1909), which became the Lunt-Fontanne in 1958. [At this point in the Stern text there is the first of about three footnotes that cite various sources, including a July 1958 Interior Design article and a May 6,1958, "New York Times" article entitled "Broadway Agog as Theater Opens"]. . . . Once the most luxurious of Broadway playhouses but used for movies since the 1930s, the theater was redecorated by the British designer Arthur Boys, who was asked by the new owner, Robert W. Dowling, to base his work on the music room of Frederick the Great's Sans Souci Palace and on Venice's Fenice Theater. Because according to Dowling, "Going to the theater should be like visiting a charming and gracious home," he wanted the redesign to have "a new elegance and comfort." Marya Mannes said that the original Globe had been considered "the most beautiful" theater of its day, "with Grecian pillars and a balcony promenade that drew such phrases as 'commodious and handsome.'" Although she acknowledged that this style was "no longer supported by public taste," she found the renovation showy, lacking the dignity required for serious drama: "Mr. Dowling has spent millions in painting the reconditioned house pale-blue and white, encruting it with rococo, stringing it with crystal chandeliers, upholstering it with damask and carpeting it in deepest pile; and what is his idea of a gracious home is my idea of an inflated poweder room."
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