Urinating in the Town Supervisor’s Swimming Pool Is So Gauche
To many, the musical comedy Struggle into My Girdle seemed destined for Broadway and a slew of Tony awards. For one thing, there was the nudity. Not as much bare flesh as say, Oh Calcutta!, but enough to satisfy the artistically curious. After all, nudity on stage is nudity. It sells tickets and reviewers can’t resist taking a peek.
But Struggle into My Girdle had more. It had Mossman and Garrigues, the stage musical team that brought the world Jump, Mate! Jump, the engaging quasi drama set to song and dance about an itinerant carpenter who travels the Australian Outback with his wallaby. Who can forget Jump’s rollicking signature, the duet Billabong that the carpenter and the wallaby sing in the desert after they drink the last of their water?
With Mossman writing the book and Garrigues the libretto for Girdle, and with the real estate magnate cum theatrical producer Izzy Griswold steering the business course, it looked like the musical couldn’t miss, particularly when some select members of the media got an early listen to I love Latex, the clever ballad that Girdle’s heroine, Sallie Erskine, belts out in the second act after her Saturday night date stands her up.
The piece ‘d resistance on Girdle’s fast track to the Great White Way was Griswold’s brilliant plan for opening the musical. Rather than take it to big cities across the country and steadily march toward New York, he chose to open a mere 60 miles from Broadway in the Laughing Waters Playhouse on the banks of the Delaware River northeast of Philadelphia. The plan was that Girdle buzz would quickly filter back to Gotham, carried by the weekend literati ever in search of the Next Great Thing.
So what went wrong?
In the early postmortem, Girdle’s book itself came in for sharp criticism. Struggle into My Girdle spans four decades in a woman’s life and chronicles her love affair with the latex girdle, which became popular with American women in the 1950s as they used it to shape and mold excesses of flesh into the epitome – at least at that time – of what the fashionable female silhouette should look like. As time passes and heroine Sallie Erskine bulges more and more, her struggles each day to don her latex accessory become more difficult. Her silhouette, however compressed, leaves her less and less satisfied.
In the first act of Girdle, the young Sallie’s worries about bulge and her love affair with latex are filled with comedic angst. But by the third act, a Sallie in her sixties – divorced, alcoholic, and a candidate for Jenny Craig intervention – is merely sad as she struggles into her girdle. Sallie’s morose “I Hate Latex” at the end sends theatergoers home on a downer.
The much ballyhooed nudity turned out to be a liability. Sallie’s bared breasts in the first act were a major plus for the production, particularly after Constance Levine was cast as Sallie. But by the third act, the director faced a daunting problem, how to age your leading lady in a convincing way and stage a nude scene with her as she struggles into her girdle. How do you make a young naked woman look like an old naked woman and still be funny and sexy? The answer: with great difficulty.
It’s possible Girdle could have overcome such technical problems if local politics hadn’t entered the picture, specifically, the bitter rivalry between Izzy Griswold, the producer, and Bruce Loudon, the chairman of the board of supervisors.
The locals saw Griswold as a fast-talking New York wheeler-dealer with more money than brains. The Loudons arrived on the local scene ten minutes after William Penn himself. If you wanted to get anything done in the township, you needed Bruce Loudon on your side.
Three years before Girdle struggled at Laughing Waters Playhouse, Griswold had run against Loudon for a spot on the board of supervisors. It was a bitter contest, old guard insider versus obnoxious, moneyed New Yorker. Loudon won, narrowly, after Griswold poured tons of money into advertising and Loudon countered by calling in a lifetime of chips that people owed him.
Several months after the election, Loudon sought to make peace by inviting Griswold to dinner with a half dozen other couples. It was a casual catered affair, a sit down dinner poolside. When Loudon rose to offer a toast, Griswold rose, too. He sauntered to the edge of the pool, unzipped, and proceeded to urinate in the water in full view of all.
Thus, those who parse local politics closely weren’t surprised when the township police raided the third performance of Girdle at the point in the first act when Sallie has taken off everything but her panties and then turns her back on the audience to remove them and struggle into her girdle. The director and most of the cast were escorted to the police station. The officers sought Griswold, too, but he was nowhere to be seen. Some recalled him in the lobby as the lights dimmed for the first act.
Griswold must not have been too far away, because within an hour his lawyer showed up and the cops let everyone go after issuing citations for misdemeanor lewdness. At first, Griswold vowed to fight. But his lawyers must have prevailed because after a couple of weeks of back and forth with the Loudon camp, the township agreed to forget the matter if Griswold agreed not to reopen Girdle.
In this media driven age, having the police raid your play might be just the ticket to rocket the production straight to Broadway and every regional theater from Solvang to Bangor. Curiously though, the news stories from the raid were almost uniformly about how the local townspeople, offended by nudity imported by the brash outsider, had repelled him and his lascivious girlie show posing as a musical comedy headed for Broadway.
Izzy Griswold still has his house on Starling Lane and the gardener says he comes out from New York about once a month. Bruce Loudon is still chairman of the supervisors. He was the leading force behind the recent push to upgrade the township’s sewage treatment plant. Next month, Laughing Waters will put on a four-week run of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.