supreme confidence in himself as an actor and his immense pride of accomplishment in winning the heavyweight boxing championship encouraged him three weeks after his triumph in Philadelphia to make a telephone call to the biggest, most important producer on Broadway, Lawrence Langner. Langner was Bernard Shaw’s theatrical agent in New York and had co-founded the New York Theatre Guild, which by the mid-1920s had produced the most successful shows on the Great White Way.
An appointment was made for mid-October at the Guild offices.
The boxer whom Langner would meet still retained the earnest, boyish presence, good humor and clear blue eyes that had charmed the nuns, and the honesty and polite manners that had made him John McNamara’s best butcher boy. Gene did not have a fighter’s face. No sign of the fractured nose received from Greb. No cauliflower ears. The only telltale mark was a raw, hoarse throat, the result of a savage left hook by Dempsey in the fifth round in Philadelphia. The punch had smashed into his Adam’s apple and crippled his larynx, preventing him for the rest of his life from ever shouting or talking without a slight rasp in his voice. He moved with the upright, easy gait of an athlete, and his fine, chiseled features and erect carriage would cause people to stop and look, even if they hadn’t recognized him. He returned smiles, patted children on the head and was quick to respond if someone needed a door opened, a package carried or help crossing a street. Fastidious about style now that he could afford it, he dressed like a business executive, with the best shoes and blue serge suits, even a gold watch chain on his vest.
Langner was well aware of Shaw’s “keen interest in boxing and prizefighting” and said Shaw “prided himself on his knowledge.” The producer had no idea what Tunney wanted to discuss, but he was delighted at the opportunity to meet the new heavyweight champion personally, if only to tell his main client more about him. He also would have been aware that sports celebrities, anxious to take advantage of their fleeting fame, frequently looked toward the theatre, vaudeville or film as a way of expanding their franchise and earning money between sporting events.
They met on a fine autumn day in Langner’s private office, its walls hung with dozens of black-and-white theatrical photographs depicting scenes from plays featuring Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Helen Hayes and others. There was also a photograph of Winifred Lenihan in the title role of Saint Joan, the play that had prompted Shaw’s Nobel Prize for literature in 1925.
“Shaw’s best,” said Gene, referring to Saint Joan. “A masterpiece! But how did you resolve the demands to cut it?” The play, as produced, was three and a half hours long and didn’t finish until about 11:30 pm. New York commuters complained bitterly that they couldn’t make their trains, and Langner said that indeed a considerable amount of pressure had been put on Shaw to trim the dialogue. Langner felt the length of Back to Methuselah, another Shaw play, had sabotaged its appeal. But Shaw, he said, wouldn’t budge, and rarely did on matters he felt were important. Shaw, he said, was a genius.
At a time when the English stage trafficked in romantic frippery, he said Shaw had awakened audiences to social ills by challenging conventional morality, ossified institutions and bourgeois respectability.
“Before the advent of Shaw, the theatre of ideas was like a church in which a little congregation of so-called intellectual theatregoers took itself so seriously that its influence was confined to a group which regarded itself as the elite custodians of modern thought,” Langner would write. Shaw, he said, transported the theatre of ideas into a wider world of the popular theatre.
Gene noted that Pygmalion, starring Lynn Fontanne as the flower girl Eliza Doolittle, was sold out for its November opening. Gene had read the play, had seen it produced and was especially struck, he said, by the transforming concept of elocution as a way to help change one’s social status. (The idea of perfecting pronunciation was one he had adopted for himself. Gene was inspired by the makeover of the urchin Eliza, who, with lessons in proper speaking and manners, becomes a lady.) Langner invited Gene to be his guest for the new production of Pygmalion. Up to this point, the discussion had been so congenial that Langner almost forgot that the bright young man sitting across from his desk had come with an agenda.
Sitting back in the armchair, Langner’s visitor crossed his legs, straightened his jacket, cleared his throat and made his pitch: he, Gene Tunney, wanted to take the lead in a stage production based on Bernard Shaw’s novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession, the fourth of five novels Shaw had written before turning to playwriting. The new champion wanted to be an actor.
If he was surprised, Langner, an amateur actor himself, didn’t show it. Lawrence Langner was a man who took risks in the theatre. He knew that Shaw had been furious over the theatrical misappropriation of his boxing novel 30 years earlier, but it was also the only one of Shaw’s novels still in print. Tunney was a champion with potential box office appeal, and he was offering himself up for what might be a huge commercial success. Women had gone to Tunney’s fights in increasing numbers, attracted not by the fighting but by the boxer’s sex appeal. Among the 8000 or so women who saw him win the championship were many who had swooned loudly as Tunney arrived.
Women at the fight had repeatedly shouted, “Isn’t he handsome!” Ladies saw him as the boxer who read Keats. Newspapers quoted one woman as trilling, “He knows his dictionary.” A woman in a black gown embroidered with gold dragons called out, “Has he got a book under his arm?” “Show your Irish, Gene!” women yelled during the fight. “I wish I could hear the sock of the gloves,” gushed a female fan. Sex appeal. What better credibility for a stage or movie audience?
Langner showed Tunney around his offices, and Gene noticed on one wall a familiar picture of the English poet John Masefield, who had spent his early days working in a saloon owned by Luke O’Connor, one of Gene’s earliest patrons. A stunned Langner wrote Shaw that the boxer “told the entire Theatre Guild, to their amazement, that he had read many of his works and knew Masefield had worked in a saloon down in this part of town when he was a young man. In fact,” Langner continued, “though it sounded like a fairy tale, one can almost envisage Tunney as a literary connoisseur who wins world championships to pay for his library.”
After cabling the playwright in London, Langner followed up with a letter to Shaw describing the champion as a handsome young man with a charming personality.
“I was impressed with the possibility of his doing a good job of the play,” Langner wrote Shaw. “I am extremely favorably impressed with the character of the boy and his ability to play the part. He has none of the characteristics of a prizefighter other than a magnificent physique, which strikes you the moment you see him, but there is nothing brutal or animal about him, like Dempsey. In fact, as everyone who saw the fight testifies, his performance was a fulfillment of your own prophecy, made to me several years ago, that Dempsey would some day be beaten by a boxer.”
Leaving Langner’s office, Gene almost skipped down Broadway. He was elated at the outcome of the meeting, and at the prospect of being linked up with George Bernard Shaw, a man whose intellect and fame surpassed virtually all other cultural icons of the era. He felt vindicated that he could carry on a two-hour conversation with a man like Langner, discuss Shaw and the theatre, and hold his own. His future, he thought, might be coming together. He was more optimistic about his prospects than he had ever been and felt he had a clearer vision of the life of culture he might pursue beyond the ring.
“Mr. Shaw doesn’t usually respond by cable,” cautioned Langner. “He feels they cost too much.” But Langner said he was in regular contact by mail and would add his endorsement to Gene’s proposal. Gene didn’t expect to actually meet Shaw but felt that the mere possibility of acting in a film or play with Shaw’s blessing would be validation that he had within him talents beyond the boxing arena. Not only that, but the story of Cashel Byron was one he felt destined to play; indeed, it was a story he was actually living.
One of his closest friends, the multimillionaire
