The Roaring or Boring ’20s

Back in the 1920s Wodehouse and Bolton were collaborators writing a swath of Broadway Musicals. Many of them were hits. Big hits! They were famous! Bring On the Girls is a memoir of those years. It tells the behind the scenes tales! All the juicy gossip! Character assassination galore! Girls and more girls!

And it is the 1920s! The Roaring 20s! Flappers and speakeasies and, did I mention, girls! For reasons which elude me, there is an incredible fascination with the era. The Great Gatsby is one of the Great Books on the Most Beloved lists of my students. When I ask why, the answer is inevitably some variant of “Duh. It’s about the 1920s.” (No, my students do not actually say “duh.” They just give me that look.  You know the one.)

And then, we have P.G. Wodehouse! That man can write! He is funny and witty and hysterical and amusing. Guy Bolton? You probably have never heard of him unless you are an aficionado of 1920s Broadway musicals. But, no matter. Wodehouse Himself in a co-author!

What could go wrong with a book like this? You can imagine the birth of the idea. It’s the early 1950s. Wodehouse is world famous. People buy his books. So why not a memoir with Bolton about their time together in the 1920s? Instant Best-Seller.

Structurally, the storyline is perfect. They meet, they work together, and their first musical is a smash hit. Elation! Their next few, mixed bags. Depression! But, wait, then come more hits! Hooray! More hits! Double Hooray! And then, the crowning achievement. They get contracts to go to Hollywood! To write for the movies! They travel West! They arrive! Book ends: “And they knew they were really in Hollywood.”

Should you rush out and read this book? Not so fast. All that promise. The payoff? Eh.

Have you ever been to one of those cocktail parties where you end up getting stuck talking to the guy who is an inveterate name-dropper? The whole conversation is just one long exercise in listening to stories whose sole function it to allow the person to mention a famous person. Painful, right?

Now imagine 294 pages of name-dropping. Nonstop name-dropping. This book even has an index, so you can look up all the names. It is an eight page index. There are over 300 individual people listed in that Index. Do the math. The book has more than one name dropped per page.

Ah, but surely it is wonderful to read about Wodehouse (P G. Himself!) hobnobbing with all these famous people, right? Well, to be fair, you have never heard of almost all those 300+ people. Well, I suppose if you study the world of Broadway in the 1920s; then you might have heard of more than half of them. There are some famous people here, though, that even we regular people will recognize. If you read this book, you will see those famous people mentioned. Like these marvelous tidbits:

You have heard of Clark Gable, right? Here he is:

Sylvia Hawkes was not only pretty, she had a pretty sense of humour. George Gershwin was swept off his feet by her, so was Lord Ashley, heir of the Earl of Shaftesbury, so was Douglas Fairbanks, Sr, so was Lord Stanley of Alderley and so, finally, was the very sure-footed Mr Clark Gable.

That is the only mention of Clark Gable in the book. But, how about Ring Lardner or Oscar Hammerstein? Well, they share a sentence:

There were other neighbors. Eddie Cantor for one, Ring Lardner for another, Elsie Ferguson and, most esteemed of all, a young man named Oscar Hammerstein, who was just beginning to make a name for himself in the musical comedy field.

Charlie Chaplin? He gets a whole paragraph! It’s a description of a sketch he did in a variety show on a boat. O’Henry? He gets half a page! A conversation in which he says nothing. And so on.

To be fair, George Gershwin gets a bit more face time, since he collaborated with Wodehouse and Bolton. Flo Ziegfeld and his Follies get mentioned often for the same reason. Fred Astaire shows up too! W.C. Fields get a few pages!

The bulk of the book is just watching names drop by for a brief visit. Surely, you object, there must be some Wodehousian moments. Some levity and funny stories. Yep. They are there. Some of them are straight out of Wodehouse’s other stories. Or in one case, the other way around. There is a tale of Bolton’s misguided involvement with an Umbrella Club. The story reappears in Wodehouse’s novel French Leave:

“I was thinking of my Umbrella Club.”
“What’s that?”
“Haven’t I mentioned it to you? It’s an idea I got from a delightful book of reminiscences by a couple of musical comedy writers”

Now that is funny—a character in a Wodehouse novel has read Wodehouse’s memoirs! But, if you want to learn more about the mysteries of the Umbrella Club, French Leave is a much better book to read.

This isn’t the only cross-reference. Wodehouse has a butler, for example, who acts and talks exactly like Jeeves. I mean, exactly like Jeeves.

The appearance of Jeeves under a pseudonym gives up the game. This is not a reliable account of the 1920s. A brief hunt around reveals the story. Guy Bolton wrote the bulk of the text. He is undoubtedly responsible for the endless, pointless name-dropping. Wodehouse, who was famous for writing funny books, then comes along and tries to make the book funnier by adding in some comic relief.

The best summary of Bring on the Girls is in the book itself in a description of one of the stars of the day: “There are no doubt by this time a whole generation of voting-age who will fail to see the significance of all this enthusiasm.” Exactly.

This isn’t really a bad book, it is just a thoroughly disappointing book. The only type of person to whom I could recommend it is someone who thought Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was fantastic. If you like rambling anecdotes about the 1920s which do little other than offer an excuse to drop a name or two, then you’ll love this book. If you just want to read Wodehouse being Wodehouse, look elsewhere.