Many thanks to Harry for sending me more background on the romantic comedy The Little Hut which was a smash hit on the London stage in the 1950s. He’s included the script of the vital moment when Philip is goaded into spanking his wife Susan, and answered quite a few other points that I had pondered over including the identity of the actors in the b&w still I used in my previous post. There’s also a fascinating extra story about Ava Gardner.
I’ve updated the earlier post with the information about the picture. This is the rest of his piece:
The spanking in The Little Hut was added by Nancy Mitford for the English translation; it isn’t in the 1947 French script by Andre Roussin. It happens early in the second act when Susan teases her estranged husband Philip by calling him to the telephone – except of course there is no telephone on a desert island…
SUSAN: Now you’re in a bait.
PHILIP: I’m not in a bait at all, I’m very angry indeed.
SUSAN: Temper-temper.
PHILIP: And you must be punished.
SUSAN: Catch me first.
(They dodge around the mast – he catches her and pretends to slap her bottom.”
SUSAN: Ow! Mercy! (Shrieks) Help – murder
(Enter Henry)
HENRY: What – oh no, it’s too much.
(Henry exits)
SUSAN: You’re really hurting.
PHILIP: Yes, I mean to.
That is from the original version, which I have seen in typescript. The scene developed in rehearsal, so that the published version is more precise about the stage action:
He puts her across his knee with her head upstage and counts out twelve slaps. What is especially remarkable is that he lifts her skirt and spanks her on her black lace panties – and this was in 1950!
The first production was directed by the legendary theater director Peter Brook. It opened at the Edinburgh Lyceum in July 1950 and toured before opening in London. (There had been a plan to open it at the London Globe in June, but this fell through.) Robert Morley played Philip and Henry was David Tomlinson (the father in Mary Poppins). It was Morley who suggested American actress Joan Tetzel for the part of Susan.
There were some cast changes during the run: Tetzel was understudied by Doris Duke, who appeared on occasion, and Joyce Redman took over for a month to allow Tetzel a holiday. Likewise Robert Flemyng stood in for Morley for some time. In 1952 the play was recast with Hugh Sinclair and Diane Hart, who played the roles for the rest of the London season and then for a protracted tour in 1953-5. So it was a production which ran for five years – and that’s a lot of spankings!
The spanking scene was included in the script of the film version which went to the Hays Office in 1956, but was later cut. Whether this was Ava Gardner’s doing is something we shall never know for sure, but I can tell you that Ava very nearly got a public spanking in a California bar during an interview with Joe Hyams of Look magazine. He had asked her a slightly near the knuckle question and she punched him, knocking him out of his chair. In his autobiography, Mislaid in Hollywood, he tells what happened next:
Picking myself up, I jerked Ava from her chair and started to lay her over my knee for a spanking. It was the first time I had touched her, and I was surprised that she was so light, and so soft and feminine. For a moment we were frozen in a tableau. Then I was aware of sounds around us and eyes on us. ‘Don’t ever do that again,’ I said, slowly releasing her. She looked at me then, but instead of being angry she was smiling.
Hyams doesn’t explicitly give a date for this, but from references to other events it looks like it must have been in 1955, the year before she avoided the spanking in The Little Hut…
(Ed:This incident is mentioned prominently in Hyam’s obituary in The Times – he died in 2008).
I can name some more actresses who didn’t escape. There was a summer stock tour of the US in 1954 with Barbara bel Geddes (later of Dallas), and on the other side of the ocean in the same year there was a repertory production with Pauline Yates (later the wife in Reginald Perrin).
Blonde film starlet Felicity Young got her spanking in 1958 (the year before she appeared on screen in black lingerie in Cover Girl Killer), and a 1974 revival featured James Villiers spanking Geraldine McEwan, the television incarnation of Miss Jean Brodie. I also heard rumors that there was a revival in the 1980s with Mandy Rice-Davies of Profumo notoriety, but I was living permanently in the US at the time and couldn’t follow it up.
*****
Don’t miss my earlier post about a NEW production of The Little Hut which is currently wowing audiences in the UK.
Karl Friedrich Gauss
/ May 6, 2010Wow, it’s amazing that anyone would know all this about such an obscure play from so long ago. It’s all fascinating news, of course, from a spanko perspective.