High Society (1956) — that classic summer tale, set in Newport, Rhode Island, with a star-studded cast, including Bing Crosby; Grace Kelly (poised at the time to marry Rainier III, Prince of Monaco); Frank Sinatra; and Louis Armstrong — is a story of grace and redemption.
Little wonder.
For the play on which this musical remake of the original 1940 film, The Philadelphia Story, was based, was written by Philip Barry, born to a well-to-do Irish-American devoutly Catholic family.
Formed at Catholic schools in Rochester, New York, he later attended Harvard and Yale where he honed his playwriting skills and poured them into artful literary works such as this popular comedy of remarriage.
That Barry infused his play with Catholic sensibilities is obvious from the start.
Originally set on the Main Line country estate of the wealthy Lord family, northwest of Philadelphia, the story centers on smug socialite Tracy Lord, who had divorced her husband, C.K. Dexter Haven, after a short marriage, because of his excessive drinking.
Relegated to playing “a high priest to a virgin goddess,” he used alcohol to cope with her exacting nature and unforgiving standards, demanding perfection. Lacking the empathy for human foibles, the flames of love doused, their marriage ends — bitterly.
Two years later, Tracy is engaged to marry rags-to-riches George Kittredge — once a coal miner, now an industrial tycoon and aspiring politician — who holds Tracy up on a pedestal.
After the play’s smash-hit Broadway run at the Schubert Theatre from March 1939 to March 1940, it was just a matter of time before Katharine Hepburn — dubbed “box office poison” by The Hollywood Reporter for her poor-selling films and prickly personality — grabbed up The Philadelphia Story to turn it into box office gold. She tapped George Cukor to direct and Donald Ogden Stewart — an Algonquin Round Table member and friend of Barry — to write the Oscar-winning screenplay.
In this film version, Hepburn played opposite Cary Grant, her often-intoxicated shipbuilder and polo-playing husband; whereas, in the musical remake, Kelly plays opposite Crosby, a blue-blood star musician, rich with old Newport money, joining Armstrong and his band at the Newport Jazz Festival.
The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther described High Society as “flimsy as a gossip-columnist’s word,” missing “the snap and the crackle that its un-musical predecessor had.”
Yet, while the 1940 film is more cinematically rich (including that opening scene where Hepburn throws Grant and his golf clubs out of the house, famously breaking one over her knee), the 1956 musical has soaring moments of grace, notably the iconic opening number, “High Society.” Armstrong and his band perform, with the aerial view of stately Newport mansions, predicting Tracy and Dexter will get back together.
It’s increasingly clear that Satchmo’s right: Tracy’s relationship with Kittredge lacks the je ne sais quoi of Dexter and Tracy.
But Dexter has just 48 hours to make her realize she is really in love with him — a task made easier with help from like-minded Spy Magazine reporter Macaulay “Mike” Connor — played by James Stewart, who received top billing in the 1940 film and an Oscar.
Soon enough, the couple is mired in recriminations.
“You seem quite contemptuous of me all of a sudden,” Tracy tells Dexter.
“No, Red, not of you, never of you,” he says. “I’m contemptuous of something inside of you, you either can’t help, or make no attempt to; your so-called ‘strength’, your prejudice against weakness, your blank intolerance.”
“You’ll never be a first-class human being,” he says, “or a first-class woman, until you’ve learned to have some regard for human frailty. It’s a pity your own foot can’t slip a little sometime – but your sense of inner divinity wouldn’t allow that. This goddess must and shall remain intact.”
After their tiff, Dexter leaves her a scale-model replica of the True Love sailboat, which he built and they honeymooned on. In High Society, this scene occurs as soon as Dexter shows up. Yet, timeline differences notwithstanding, the effect is the same. Tracy’s heart begins to melt.
Enter her father, Seth Lord. While having drinks on the veranda, Tracy challenges him over his dalliance with a dancer — her mother countering that it only concerns “your father.” Very wise, he says. “What most wives fail to realize is that their husband’s philandering has nothing whatever to do with them.” When Tracy angrily questions its source, he replies, “A reluctance to grow old, I think.” That and the want of “the right kind of daughter.”
“I think a devoted young girl gives a man the illusion that youth is still his,” making it unnecessary to “to go out in search of his youth.” Tracy, he says, has “a good mind, a pretty face, a disciplined body” but lacks “the one essential: an understanding heart. And, without that you might just as well be made of bronze.”
Truth hurts. Her haughty nature makes her too perfect in her demands on others, rendering her actually quite flawed, in need of letting her tiara slip now and then on the way to growing that understanding heart.
Later, at the Wedding Eve Party, her transformation continues — punctuated, in the 1956 musical, by Crosby, joined by Armstrong and his band, performing “Now You Has Jazz”
Her growth is evident when she tells Mike Connor after a late-night swim, that “The time to make up your mind about people is never.” (A scene that occurs earlier in High Society.)
Tracy’s pedestal shatters when, at the end, she recognizes her own “unholy mess.”
And that love — true love — is all that matters.
