Rain Notes

Rain opened to a lukewarm reception on November 7, 1922, which held steady the second night, and the third. Panicked, the producers threatened to close the show if the play was not rewritten, but co-writer John Colton insisted on leaving it as it was. On Friday night, with the possibility of closing with the next performance looming overhead, the tide abruptly turned. The house was packed, and a hasty decision was made to keep the show open a second week. A week became a month, then two months, and the closing date was then left indefinite as audiences flocked to see Jeanne Eagels’s stunning performance as the sensational Sadie Thompson. Quickly becoming a classic of the next few generations of theater and movie goers, this near-catastrophe turned triumph began in the most unassuming way.
The highly successful play was based on a short story by W. Somerset Maugham entitled “Miss Thompson,” which was in fact based off Maugham’s personal experience while temporarily stranded in Pago Pago, small island in American Samoa . He had spent several days awaiting a ship to the neighboring island of Apia, and had stayed in a room next to an “uninhibited, brazen strumpet from Honolulu,” to quote a 1961 article on the story’s inspiration. The events of real life followed Maugham’s account very closely, as the real Sadie Thompson was deported back to Honolulu under the complaints of missionaries that had come on the same boat as Maugham and Thompson. It was a curious encounter that made a good story, but it is doubtful that Maugham foresaw the fortune it would make for him and one very determined playwright.
John Colton, now famous for The Shanghai Gesture, was flipping through the proof-version of a collection of Maugham’s short stories when he happened upon the account of Miss Thompson, and saw the potential for a play. When he asked for permission to rewrite it, Maugham idly gave his consent, saying, “Dramatize it if you wish, but there is no drama there.” Unaware of the difficulties that stretched ahead of him, Colton asked the actress Clemence Randolph to assist in dramatizing the story, but differences of opinion and a generally hostile environment caused the relationship to fall apart and Randolph went to Egypt on another project. Colton continued working, but when he had made the final revision, he was unable to find either an actress for Sadie or a willing producer. Finally, a friend took the play to Producer Sam Harris, who immediately made a deal with Colton to produce the play.
The search for an actress to play Sadie Thompson was not so quickly resolved; no one seemed to want the part, and those who did want it didn’t do Sadie justice. While out for a walk, Colton ran into Jeanne Eagels, whom he knew slightly, and realized he’d found his Sadie. After casting Robert Kelly as Reverend Davidson and Catherine Brooke as Mrs. Davidson, the worst of the troubles now seemed over, but rehearsals proved another ordeal as various small difficulties threw monkey-wrench after monkey-wrench into the course of production; the scare of closing in the opening week did nothing to soothe the already shaky nerves of the cast and crew. The show’s phenomenal success in the second week was a welcome relief after months of panic, despair and determination.
After all the initial turmoil, Rain enjoyed theatrical success like few other plays of its generation. It ran for 256 performances between November 1922 and June 1923, enjoyed a run in London, a revival in 1935 starring Tallulah Bankhead, and three feature films. Gloria Swanson played Sadie in the 1928 silent film, succeeded by Joan Crawford in 1932 and Rita Hayworth in 1953. Although Crawford’s version is probably the most well known, Swanson’s is arguably the best of the three. Released under the title Sadie Thompson, Swanson starred opposite Lionel Barrymore as the fanatically religious Reverend Davidson. It is often said that this was Swanson’s best overall performance, however, the film was buried by the advent of sound, and the last ten to fifteen minutes of footage were lost due to decay while in storage.
Joan Crawford would take on the role of Sadie just four years later, using Rain as a catalyst for her own career. Reviews of the time seem to be in unanimous agreement; an excellent performance by Crawford, confirming her as a true actress and not just a movie personality, but an overall ineffective version of the original play and short story. Walter Huston tiptoed around his characterization of Reverend Davidson, and the writer and director approached the story with too much caution, resulting in a visually excellent interpretation, but with none of the fragile psychology that made the original stage production so interesting.
Rita Hayworth also gave a performance as the tempestuous Sadie in the 1953 adaptation Miss Sadie Thompson. The film was a musical escapade, briefly released in 3D, used primarily to market Hayworth to movie-goers and movie-makers. Jose Ferrer as the Reverend Davidson is turned into a complaining chairman of a missions board, while Hayworth’s Sadie is an American party-girl on vacation in the largely sunny tropics. A negligible Technicolor production, it possessed none of the passion and pathos of Maugham’s short story or of Colton’s play.
When Tallulah Bankhead brought the infamous Sadie back to Broadway at the Music Box Theater in 1935, she brought most of the history of the original production with her. After she was denied the starring role by Maugham himself thirteen years earlier, critics were given the opportunity to see if he had been wrong. Performing alongside much of the original cast, under the original director, and carrying Eagels’s handbag, Bankhead found herself in the shadow of her predecessor’s performance. Where Eagels’s Sadie was subtly shaded and deeply internal, Bankhead’s interpretation was extremely physical, with none of Eagels’s subtle psychology. The play closed after only 47 performances, and was the beginning of a dry spell in Ms. Bankhead’s career.
Though each re-interpretation brought a new version of Sadie to the public eye, none could compete with the original. The highlight of Eagels’s tragically short career, Sadie made Eagels famous, and Eagels made Sadie infamous; and the alias of one woman in the South Pacific went down in history as the brash, beautiful, and heartbreaking girl who swaggered on stage and into the hearts of a generation of theatergoers.