From 'Hello, Dolly!': Dolly Gallagher Levi
By MARA BOVSUN
Musty, miserly old Horace Vandergelder of Yonkers was not big on romance, but late in life, after earning a bundle selling feed and hay, he began to yearn for some of the sweet things only a woman could provide.
"A man," said the 60-year-old half-a-millionaire, "needs someone to take out the garbage." A mistress wouldn't do, or a maid. Neither would bring the appropriate amount of spirit, energy and dedication to the job. He'd have to have a wife."Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder," observed the ever-gallant Vandergelder.
Finding a wife wasn't easy for a man of such charms. So he hired a matchmaker to scour the social registers of turn-of-the-century New York for a suitable bride, one with long lashes and soft fingers, well suited to cleaning stables, washing clothes and fixing plumbing.
He got much more than he bargained for when he retained Mrs. Dolly Gallagher Levi for the task.
Matchmaking was just one of her many skills. "I am a woman who arranges things," was how she put it. At any point, she could produce a business card to trumpet her expertise in all kinds of specialties — parties, poker games, dance lessons — anything that might be needed at that particular moment. "Mrs. Dolly Gallagher Levi. Varicose veins reduced," read one. "Mrs. Dolly Gallagher Levi. Instruction in the guitar and mandolin," announced another.
Dolly was the widow of a Vienna-born bon vivant who had left her with many happy memories but not one cent. In those days, few options existed for women of an uncertain age and even less certain means. Dolly had to live by her wits. "I do things," she explained. "I put my hand in here, and I put my hand in there, and I watch and I listen — and often I'm very much amused."At the point we meet Dolly, she is planning to put her hand in Horace Vandergelder's cash register.
She simply can't stand the thought of all that money sitting in big useless piles. "Money is like manure," she theorizes. "It's not worth a thing unless it's spread about, encouraging young things to grow." She'll just have to convince the crabby old skinflint that there's only one woman for him.
That would be herself — not that she ever intends to polish anything except her nails, if that. Vandergelder will have little to say about it. Once Dolly has decided what's good for you, there's no use fighting.
Thornton Wilder discovered this when he brought Dolly to life in his 1938 farce "The Merchant of Yonkers." That play was based on an 1842 comedy by Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, which itself traced its roots to an 1835 English play, "A Day Well Spent," neither of which had a Dolly in it. She'd been suggested to him by a character in Moliere's "The Miser," Wilder explained, and he wrote the part specifically for his friend and favorite actress, Ruth Gordon. But Gordon wouldn't work with Wilder's choice of director, Max Reinhardt, and "The Merchant of Yonkers" flopped after 39 performances. "The ugly duckling," Wilder called it. But something kept him from giving up. "It will come into its own someday," he predicted in 1949.It took until the mid-1950s for Wilder to figure out what had really gone wrong: The spotlight hadn't been enough on Dolly. He revised his original comedy — and this time Gordon happily took the title role in "The Matchmaker," which opened to raves in December 1955, ran for 486 performances and quickly turned into a Shirley Booth movie.
All this convinced the tiny terror of Broadway, producer David Merrick, to see if Dolly could sing. Jerry Herman, a promising young songwriter, was given the chance to score the show Merrick had dubbed "Dolly: A Damned Exasperating Woman."The title seemed to refer more to the production itself. Nothing went right at first, and the musical seemed destined to follow "The Merchant of Yonkers" into oblivion.
Again the choice for a leading lady, Ethel Merman, turned the part down, even though Herman had crafted the songs with her one-of-a-kind voice in mind. And so the role went to Carol Channing, a comedienne with eyes like pinwheels and a vocal range deeper than most men. Her singing limitations didn't seem to matter. Channing was Dolly.
The title eventually changed, after jazz great Louis Armstrong made a recording of one of the songs while the show was being fine-tuned. It took just one twirl of Armstrong's record on the turntable to transform "A Damned Exasperating Woman" into "Hello, Dolly!"The song celebrates Dolly Levi's decision to stop mourning her late husband and return to the human race, something she can achieve by marrying Vandergelder and his money.
"There comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or not — a fool among fools or a fool alone. As for me, I've decided to live among them." These were the words Wilder put in Dolly's mouth. In the musical, that moment comes in the swank Harmonia Gardens, one of those New York palaces of Gilded Age gluttony where swells like Diamond Jim Brady and stage goddess Lillian Russell would stuff themselves.While Dolly's husband was alive, she'd been the queen of the Harmonia Gardens, "the lady who always had the happiest smile, the warmest heart and the largest appetite in New York," gushed the headwaiter. But in the 1890s, such places were off limits to a woman alone, and the widow Levi no longer went there.
Vandergelder is her reentry card. Decked out in a red, jeweled gown and a tall feathered headdress, Dolly majestically walks down the long stairway to the restaurant's ballroom, back where she belongs.
In time, practically every great stage and screen diva would put her stamp on Dolly. Ethel Merman finally walked down those long stairs, as did Ginger Rogers, Betty Grable, Martha Raye, Dorothy Lamour, Yvonne de Carlo and Phyllis Diller, among others. Pearl Bailey led an all-black cast. Mary Martin brought the show to Vietnam. Barbra Streisand, who had lost her Tony as "Funny Girl" to Carol Channing's Dolly, brought it to the screen.
The movie flopped, but that didn't keep the old girl down. More than three decades after she first descended that glittering stairway, a septuagenarian Carol Channing was still chasing Vandergelder's bucks, and it's a pretty good bet that right now somewhere in some dinner theater, community playhouse or college auditorium, Dolly Levi is alive and well.As the song goes, "Dolly'll never go away again."
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