Re-creating Lonesome

There’s no beating “Your Arkansas Traveler”. Were anyone to anthologize the best of the short stories on which Hollywood based the most golden of its Golden Age productions, Budd Schulberg’s story about a fella called Lonesome Rhodes would be a strong contender for inclusion. Schulberg’s narrator tells of the time when she was working at a radio station in Wyoming – in walks Larry Rhodes, a folk singer, looking for work. “They call me Lonesome.” She hates folk-singing and she hates guitars, but Rhodes has something – not only a voice, but charm and numberless impromptu stories about his home town of Riddle, Arkansas. What choice is there but to hire him? He knows how to touch his listeners’ hearts; he knows how to sell sponsors’ products without sounding like a sell-out; and he knows how to use mere chatter on the radio to outmanoeuvre the local sheriff when he wants to.

To cut the short story shorter: the local success of the man Time magazine describes as a “younger, fatter, coarser Will Rogers” takes him first to Chicago, then to New York. The patter proves powerful – lucratively powerful – and the power goes to Larry’s head, not least as influence tilts in a political direction. For her part Marcia recognizes that she is responsible for this dubious phenomenon, even as she went on acting as his right-hand woman. She has reason to be uneasy about what they did and to be reflecting on it, the reader gathers, well after the dust has settled.

Around the time that Schulberg’s story made its first appearance in book form, in his collection Some Faces in the Crowd (1953), the director Elia Kazan was busy falling out with Arthur Miller and dropping him as the writer for his film On the Waterfront. Schulberg took over. A former member of the Communist Party, he, like Kazan, had testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and named names in the film business. Following On the Waterfront they collaborated again a few years later, turning “Your Arkansas Traveler” into a film. A Face in the Crowd (1957) starred Andy Griffith (in his break-out role) as Lonesome Rhodes and Patricia Neal as the long-suffering Marcia. As Mel Miller, a writer who falls for Marcia, but is overshadowed by Larry, Walter Matthau gamely completes a love triangle absent from the source material. Retained here is the preoccupation with entertainment and politics getting mixed up – an all too American rather than Un-American activity. Schulberg refined his own work at the same time that, arguably, he perverted it. Kazan saw it, according to his notebooks, as the case of a man adopted as the people’s “partisan”, only to be spoilt by them and ultimately betrayed. “Love turns to hate.”

Much of the charm of “Your Arkansas Traveler” lies in Marcia’s first-person narrative voice – a streetwise counterbalance to the Lonesome shtick. In Kazan’s film, however, instead of providing an introductory narrative voice, Neal has to stand around, gazing in entranced silence as Griffith does his comedic thing. Likewise, the short story leaves space for at least a little uncertainty about its central relationship – and the original Marcia insists that “I wasn’t in love with the man, just involved with him in some perverse professional way”. Whatever her feelings for him, however reliable she is as a narrator, the story cannot be seen as a mere love story. Yet Kazan’s film places coarse emphasis on her entrancement. The threat of Larry quitting show business has her drawing him into her bedroom with unmistakable intentions. He isn’t to be trusted, but Marcia isn’t to be put off – even when hordes of hysterical young women, possibly fresh from screaming at Elvis Presley, flock to his public appearances.

At the Young Vic, for Kwame Kwei-Armah’s final production as artistic director, A Face in the Crowd has undergone a further metamorphosis. It is now a peppy musical, starring Ramin Karimloo as Larry and Anoushka Lucas as Marcia. The songs are supplied by Elvis Costello. The book by Sarah Ruhl combines elements from both the film and the story; Ruhl begins, for example, with Marcia reflecting on the Lonesome Rhodes experience, as in the story, then flashing back to her discovering him in the jailhouse, as in the film. Crucially, the film bolsters her claim to have “created” him, or at least to have created the myth, by making her the originator of his nickname. “You’re my intellectual property”, she later asserts. Is this a Frankenstein for the age of mass media? Ruhl keeps that notion. She ditches the film’s idea that the radio station where Marcia works is some kind of cosy family business. She restores some of the verve and independent spirit that Neal’s Marcia was denied. “I make my own breakfast”, Lucas’s Marcia asserts, and she means business.

Schulberg and Kazan were trying to keep up with the times and satirize them. The Young Vic’s adaptation, by contrast, exercises restraint when it comes to any resonances the story might have with the present, when the man from the American version of The Apprentice is running, again, for the American presidency. It sticks to the 1950s. But this still means that part of Marcia’s job is to steer Larry away from delivering his half-baked “thoughts on immigration” live on air. Anna Fleischle’s sets offer a bright pastiche of the period, as does Lizzi Gee’s chirpy choreography. Veering out of the period at will, Costello’s songs form what could be seen as a whole artistic subplot in itself. His abilities as a pasticheur were evident from the start of his musical career – not just in the Buddy Holly posturing, but in the retro stylings of his first album, My Aim Is True (1977), and the Motown mania of Get Happy!! (1980). To Karimloo’s Rhodes, Costello gives bombastic rock and roll in place of mere folk songs, as well as some of his idiosyncratic melodic inflections (including a few gruesomely high notes for which, happily, Karimloo is a match). A beaming trio harmonize their way through saccharine commercial jingles, while some pensive ballads recall the mood of Costello’s collaborations with Burt Bacharach on Painted from Memory (1998). The Young Vic audience get a taste of the real American campaign trail when they are given flags to wave and the chance to stomp along to a patriotic anthem called “Blood and Hot Sauce”.

Here is certainly “Kojak variety” (as Costello called one of his later cover albums), even if much of it feels more parodic than anything else, and not always sparky enough; as a musical dramaA Face in the Crowd could perhaps have used a little more by way of instrumental passages and motifs to make its point. Yet moving the Lonesome Rhodes story into musical territory makes sense. It helps having the charismatic, dangerous-looking Karimloo on hand to dominate scene after scene, as well as Lucas’s strong-willed Marcia. The leads get a break when Olly Dobson’s dapper Mel Miller sings/sighs with his colleagues that “nice guys always come last” (but are they nice?) in affairs of the heart. Mel’s later duet with Marcia serves as a reminder to these two media types that “there is a world out there” beyond their bubble – not that they stand much chance of getting “out there” and seeing it.

Kwei-Armah ensures that the action seldom lags and, as well as Dobson, there is some well-pitched support from Emily Florence as Larry’s squeeze, Betty Lou, Stavros Demetraki as his agent, Joey De Palma, and Annie Wensak in a number of potentially unrewarding one-scene roles. Sarah Ruhl (or whoever found a way to end the show on a slightly different note to the short story and the film) deserves high praise.

Michael Caines is an editor at the TLS

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