My Fair Lady: Much Ado About Doolittle

My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)

One day I'll be famous, I'll be proper and prim 

Go to Saint James so often I will call it Saint Jim 

One evening the king will say Oh Liza, old thing, 

I want all of England your praises to sing 

Next week, on the twentieth of May 

I'll proclaim Liza Doolittle day 

All the people will celebrate the glory of you 

And whatever you wish and want I gladly will do 

Thanks a lot, King says I in a manner well-bred 

But all I want is Henry Higgins 'ead

"Just You Wait, Henry Higgins"

'Tis the 20th of May, and I have come here to argue the future of Ms. Eliza Doolittle. Just the fact that I use that title no doubt betrays my feelings on the matter. 

The movie that studio mogul Jack Warner made of the Lerner and Lowe musical version of "Pygmalion" is a faithful adaptation of the famous Broadway hit (although I find it—despite the many joys of Cukor playing up the fantasy, but making the film immaculately stage-bound—rather elephantine, looking (ironically) at any nearby time-piece around the "Get Me To the Church On Time" number. And the musical is a faithful adaptation of the 1938 film version of Pygmalion, starring Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard, the screenplay of which is credited to Bernard Shaw*, who wrote the original play. It's a bit more faithful to that movie than the play itself, given the note on which the author ended it.

You know the story: based of the Greek myth of Pygmalion—a sculptor who fell in love with a statue of his making—"Pygmalion"/My Fair Lady tells the story of an academic of grammar, who attempts to turn a cockney flower-girl into a lady of manners, able to pass the scrutiny of the upper-class. The "expert dialectician and grammarian", Prof. Henry Higgins, espouses a belief that the class system is a charade, a veil or pretense in society that is, with the proper dialect and appropriate apparel that can be exposed as a mere veneer. The secret is that Higgins is so comfortable in his own place in society that he can act like a lout and not be considered base.

Higgins is also a misogynist, which makes his taking on the transformation of flower-girl Eliza Doolittle a task that makes him susceptible to transmogrifying his role as teacher/mentor/task-master to possessiveness and coveting her, and then taking umbrage when her transformation emboldens her independent spirit. Once you're used to be the upper-hand of uneven power dynamic, any change will feel like a sacrifice. He will always see her as a creature of the gutter—and never let her forget it—even while he has fallen in love with his creation. Never mind that her soul is of her own making and not his, and she is an individual with her own thinking, her own wishes and dreams, far removed from that of her manipulator.** In Higgins' mind, a student should always be subservient.

Shaw understood that. He took umbrage with producers and directors who would change his play's ending—Eliza chooses a life of independence and walks out on Higgins—and impose a "happy ending" where Eliza comes back to the professor, to supposedly live a life of dependence. Most gallingly, Higgins reacts to this (in the 1938 presentation and the musical) with the line "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?" It's a knife in the back of an already appalling scene.

Shaw added a post-script to his play, entitled "What Happened Afterwards" in which he argues that, despite the apparent need to sustain the relationship between the two lead characters, it runs counter to his intent of the play (and the inspiration for it). Still, when the 1938 film was made, the producers plopped a five second shot of Eliza, present in the room, returned like an obedient pet, and the musical-makers took their cue from it.

It is so wrong. The triumph of Eliza Doolittle is her own, merely proctored by the professor. Why should she come back, when the musical numbers make their mutual antipathy so clear? Eliza, at one point, imagines overseeing Higgins' demise ("Just You Wait, Henry Higgins") and towards the end calls him out on his narcissism and egotism ("Without You"—"so go back in your shell, I can do bloody well...").

In My Fair Lady, Higgins is given the final number, expressing his feelings for Eliza, both pro and con ("I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face"—really, is that the best you can do?) as he vacillates between his own fantasies of the disastrous consequences of her leaving him and his own measured longing for her. This is not a match made in heaven...even if it sells in the box office.

In recent years, there have been experiments—Bartlett Sher's revival had Eliza return, Higgins delivers his "slippers" line, and then Eliza exits the stage through the audience. Okay, if you want to remain true to the text and the spirit of the film. But, better to be true to Shaw. Instead, have Higgins crawl back to his shell of a study, play his gramophone of Eliza's voice ("I washed me face and hands before I came, I did...") and have him say the line "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers" to empty air, leaving him true to his nature, for all the bloody good it does him. 

Give him his scene, his song, his recordings and his memory and leave him with that. And his illusions.

It may be a tragedy for him. But, it's a triumph for Eliza.

* Also credited are Cecil Lewis, Ian Dalrymple, and W.P. Lipscomb, who all won that year's Oscar for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay). Shaw added the ballroom scene with Karpathy and added montages of the training (which were directed and edited by a young David Lean).

** If you're looking for a comparable theme in the movies, Vertigo springs immediately to mind, as well as the tendency of its director, Alfred Hitchcock, to transform his actresses into his image of perfection, and then treat them—particularly "Tippi" Hedren—abominably, when they didn't acquiesce to his needs.

I'll use any excuse to show Bob Peak's poster-art