Herbert Brenon | Peter Pan / 1924 || Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske | Peter Pan / 1953 [animated movie] / Clark Jones | Peter Pan / 1955, 1956 [TV musical]

the sewn-on shadow

by Douglas Messerli

 

Willis Goldbeck (scenario, based on J. M. Barrie’s fiction Peter and Wendy), Herbert Brenon (director) Peter Pan / 1924

Milt Banta, Bill Cottrell, Winston Hibler, Bill Peet, Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Ted Sears, and Ralph Wright (story), Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske (directors) Peter Pan / 1953, animated movie

Jerome Robbins (adaptation, based Peter Pan by James M. Barrie), Jule Styne and Mark Charlap (music), Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Carolyn Leigh (lyrics), Clark Jones (director) Peter Pan / TV musical 1955, 1956 (other versions 1960, 2000)

           

Practically everyone knows the story of Peter Pan, “the boy who hated mothers”...no, change that—that was the first of J. M. Barrie’s subtitles to his fairy fantasy—“the boy who wouldn’t grow up.” The character, which first appeared in Barrie’s fiction The Little White Bird, or Adventures in Kensington Gardens (1902), reappeared as a stage play in 1904 (published in 1928), and was returned to again in Barrie’s fictions Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), When Wendy Grew Up: An Afterthought (written in 1908, but not published until 1957), and Peter and Wendy (1911), the latter upon which the 1924 film, long thought to be lost, was based, that movie rediscovered in 1950 and restored in 1994.

 

     At the center is the young boy, who having left his mother and father as an infant upon hearing of their plans for him concerning his education and later office job, flew off from the house, returning later to find the windows barred, now become a boy named Peter Pan.    

      Somehow Peter later hooked up in his Never Never Land with several other pre-teen boys who had evidently fallen out of their perambulators when their nannies weren’t looking, and there together they consorted with Indians, mermaids, and pirates, some of the favorite fantasy figures of young British boys’ imagination (there were no cowboys, an American adult must remind himself, in Great Britain).

     Flying back every once in a while, perhaps to check to see if his bedroom window is still barred, Pan has been scouting the Darlings’ house, wherein lie the eldest daughter Wendy, son John, and the youngest boy Michael (played by Mary Brian, Jack Murphy, and the beautiful child Philippe De Lacy in the 1924 movie). Mrs. Darling (Esther Ralston) has even spotted the young boy, calling out to him, one time the window closing and cutting “off clean” his shadow, which she has hidden in a bureau.

      The prowling boy worries her, and forces her and her husband all the more to rely on their beastly “nanny,” the dog Nana, replacing all the other nannies which evidently did not properly live up to the expectations of the exacting Mr. Darling (Cyril Chadwick).

      Peter comes back to retrieve his shadow, meets Wendy, exchanges a few “thimbles,” the children’s word for kisses, and if you’ve seen any of the many cinematic or television versions of the “children’s classic”—the 1953 Walt Disney animated version, with which I grew up or the Jerome Robbins, Mark “Moose” Charlap” and Carolyn Leigh TV musical adaptation which was expanded into a full musical version with music by Jule Styne, and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and starring Mary Martin—you know that within a few minutes Peter introduces them to the one of the last of the remaining fairies, Tinker Bell, teaches them how to fly by thinking nice thoughts and tossing a little pixie dust their way, before Peter absconds with them to his Never Never Land hideaway, Wendy almost dying as she shot down from the sky by one of the “lost boys” to whom the jealous Tinker Bell has told to is simply a bird to be done away with.

      Wendy, who immediately develops a crush on the confused Peter, becomes their de facto Mother, feeding them medicine and plenty of hugs, and suggests it’s time to return home to their certain-to-be fretting mother only to be kidnapped all over again along with her brothers and the lost boys by the nefarious Captain Hook.

      Hook (Ernest Torrence) has already had an unfortunate run-in with Peter Pan in which he has lost his left hand to a crocodile, who liking the taste of him, haunts him day and night--that is until Hook forces the beast to swallow a clock that warns him of Hook’s presence.

      The other big moments, before the final battle, are when the Indian chief attempts to be a matchmaker to Tiger Lily (Anna May Wong) and in order to save Michael from drinking the poison that Hook has poured into his medicine bottle, Tinker Bell drinks it herself, a nearly suicidal act that can be remedied only by all the children (and adults) watching the film admitting they believe in fairies and clapping to prove it.

     The piece ends with a battle royal between the boys and Hook’s pirates, with even the little Michael besting Hook’s left-hand man Snee, and Peter not only wounding Hook but forcing him to walk the plank with the croc waiting somewhere below.

 

    Changing the ship’s flag from the pirate insignia to the Union Jack, Peter steers the ship back home, permitting the Darling children to snuggle up once more into mother’s and father’s arms, after which the “lost children” also appear and are immediately adopted by the Darlings.

     What a lovely children’s story so many generations of adults have long proclaimed, their children certainly nodding their obedient heads in agreement. In the 1950s, the only time I visited Walt Disney World in Anaheim, California, my favorite ride of all was the Peter Pan ride, were one had the sensation of flying over London.

      Living in a far less innocent time, we now look at Barrie’s tale with a more suspicious gaze. After generations of having to encounter and marry permanently adolescent males who in 1983 Dr. Dan Kiley’s book were described as suffering from the “Peter Pan complex”—mature males who refuse to grow up—women, feminists certainly also resented the fact that Wendy was represented merely as a mother, never a true lover.

     Any normal LGTBQ individual and even straight boys and girls having grown up in a culture that has assimilated “camp,” cannot help but snicker at the idea of a boy who hangs out with mostly those of his own gender, who leaves home to become friends with fairies, and daily does battle with a mad queen, which is generally how Hook has been performed from the very beginning; you can see the roots of the homosexual actor Cyril Ritchard’s memorable performance in Torrence’s 1924 version of Hook. It doesn’t come as any surprise that these “boys” and their fairies don’t like women or, at least, comprehend women only as potential mothers.

      And surely it was inevitable that someone like Austin Chant would write a book like Peter Darling (2017) which features a romance between an adult Peter Pan—formerly named Wendy who became a transgender man—and Captain Hook (it won the Rainbow Award for best transgender science fiction/fantasy); or that the Peter Pan story would eventually be turned into a  bandes dessinées French cartoon six-volume series (1990–2004) by Régis Loisel presenting Peter’s backstory as a bawdy and sexually charged Dickensian-like world; or that in The Lost (1997) cartoonists Marc Andreyko, Galen Showman, and Jay Geldhof would feature Peter as a vampire boy hustler heading a small group of vampire boys including Michael, who lure in a girl named Wendy to join them; or, finally, that in Lost Boys (ロストボーイズ) (2004) manga artist Kaname Itsuki would draw a character named Peter who brings a young man to Neverland to become romantically engaged with him as a father. There are many others like these.

    The transsexual aspect of Barrie’s strange myth is certainly to be expected given the fact, moreover, that almost all the Peter Pans performing the role in film or in TV videos have been female. There are a great many justifications for this since the work, as a fantasy play, comes out of a pantomime tradition in Britain, in which women often performed male roles. Nina Boucicault played the first Pan in the 1904 production and Maude Adams performed in the first US production of 1905. Keeping very close to the original, the 1924 Paramount film let Barrie himself cast the young female actor Betty Bronson, who performs the role quite well. Others have argued, somewhat superficially I’d suggest, that it’s easier to for a young female to be fitted up with ropes in order to help her “fly” than it for is a male, but I’d argue any slim young boy could fly just as well with the proper support.

      Perhaps we should simply recognize this role as fitting in a series of larger conventions such as those the Elizabethans accepted in demanding that males play all Shakespeare’s and other playwrights' female roles or the way today we have learned to accept racial, gender, and cultural diversity in many theater roles that in another era would have gone only to Caucasian males and females. Anyone who loves opera understands that there are numerous “trouser roles,” male characters sung by females.

      Yet, such casting cannot erase all sexual implications. Where precisely might we draw the line between drag and transgender/interracial casting? In Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, for example, we have a complex situation in which three people are lying in the same bed in the dark, the Countess attempting to make love to the Count, while a male Isolier lies between them, receiving most of the loving attention of both parties, interceding by planting kisses on the lips of the woman he secretly loves. It is an absurdly funny scene, given the fact that Isolier is played by a female mezzo-soprano. Accordingly, if you perceive the situation as it is in the fiction, Ory is making love to the male Isolier, who in turn passes the kisses on to the Countess; two men and a woman share the bed. However, if you perceive the work in terms of their actual sexes, it is two women lying upon the bed with a man, all eventually becoming wound up and around each other as if in orgiastic joy that is either gay or lesbian. When the deception is finally revealed, Ory stands with a slight smile upon his face, as if he has not at all minded the confusion of sexual identities, singing out in praise of marriage which brings home the man. With the help of Isolier, he makes a final escape, presumably to seek out others to trick into love.

     In short, even with a conventional trouser role, sexuality can become confusing. It may have, in fact, been Barrie’s attempt to diffuse the sexual situations in which the child Peter hugs and kisses his fellow buddies that led him to choose girls for the role, but when Wendy puts her hand on Peter’s leg in the 1924 movie and awards him “thimbles” or Tiger Lily moves her body closer to Pan in anticipation of a response about which he has no understanding, we cannot help but also perceive these as somewhat lesbian gestures, and their innocent actions become somewhat sexualized. In a decade in which drag was regularly introduced into pictures as a device aimed to generate laughter and even mockery, we cannot completely dismiss the sexual implications of such scenes, even if we know that at the age these figures are supposed to be gender is amorphous. Oddly, with an adult actress of the stature of Asta Nielsen playing Hamlet the problem doesn’t seem to arise. It is precisely because of their youth and Peter’s love only for his own gender that something seems just a little off when Wendy so suddenly becomes enamored by Peter.

    Ron Fortier and Gary Kato’s comic book Peter Pan: Return to Never-Never Land (1991) told a tale in which Peter brings two modern African-American boys to Never-Never Land. 

    And, of course, there is the real life Michael Jackson who not only named his ranch Neverland, but thoroughly imagined himself as Pan. As J. Randy Taraborrelli reported in his 1991 biography Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness, when in the early 1980s Jane Fonda and Jackson were discussing what possible new film projects Michael might undertake, she suggested Peter Pan, a subject both filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola were then considering:

 

“Tears,” writes Taraborrelli, “began to well in Michael’s eyes. He wanted to know why she suggested that character. She told him that, in her mind’s eye, he really was Peter Pan, the symbol of youth, joy, and freedom. Michael started to cry. ‘You know, all over the walls of my room are pictures of Peter Pan. I totally identify with Peter Pan,’ he said, wiping his eyes, ‘the lost boy of Never-Never Land.'”

 

    We know now what direction that “Peter Pan complex” took Jackson, who gathered who his own “lost boys” around him and treated them to what he must have imagined as new sexual delights. The genteel myth seems to have become utterly perverted.

     But perhaps that was because in Barrie’s case there is always something in the play that is not fully spoken. The history of how he came to write the Peter Pan books has been well researched. In the Hollywood version of the facts, Finding Neverland, Johnny Depp portrays Barrie as a charming hero, devoted to large dogs and children.

     In reality, Barrie, a married man—whose marriage was apparently unconsummated and ended in divorce when his wife began an affair with another man and refused to stop seeing him when Barrie discovered the relationship—gravitated on a regular basis to other people’s children. Genius, he confessed, “is the ability to be a boy again at will.”

      Although generally explained as an accidental encounter, in truth he may have actually stalked the two Llewelyn Davies boys, a 4-year-old named George and his younger brother Jack with their nanny in Kensington Gardens near where he lived.

     As James Parker observed in his essay “The Real Peter Pan” in the July 22, 2009 issue of The Boston Globe:

 

“George was wearing a red tam-o’-shanter; for Barrie, it was love at first sight.

      ....Barrie, [his dog] Porthos, and the boys would meet regularly, and the spontaneous, compulsive, extraordinary fabulating began. Later he would stew up his feelings in a 1902 novel titled The Little White Bird, in which George becomes 'David,' Barrie becomes 'Captain W' (a childless writer), but Porthos, with a St. Bernard’s faithfulness, remains Porthos. David, wrote Barrie, ‘strikes a hundred gallant poses in a day, and when he tumbles, which is often, he comes to the ground like a Greek God.’

     It was as nothing for Barrie to install himself in the boys’ affections; his child-friends were numerous, and by now he had quite an arsenal of seduction. There was his ear-wriggling and what he called his ‘famous manipulation of the eyebrows,’ one going up and one going down ‘like two buckets in a well.’ There was also his habit of silence, the mysterious brooding pauses that so disconcerted adults but which children apparently found quite companionable. And above all there was his huge instinct for make-believe.

     George and Jack, and later their brothers Peter, Michael, and Nico, became delightedly embroiled in Barrie’s ghost-world, a parallel-universe Kensington Gardens in which babies flew from their prams like birds and children who stayed in the Gardens after lockup were buried by an eager, ambiguous sprite named Peter Pan, always 'ready with his spade.' By the time he finally met the boys’ parents, the glamourous Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies, at a high-society dinner party, Barrie was part of the family’s dreamlife: They had no choice but to accept him. Soon he was a regular at their house at 31 Kensington Park Gardens.”

 

     Sylvia was one of two children of George Du Maurier and Arthur Llewelyn Davies who was a celebrated barrister. Du Maurier, a noted cartoonist and writer, author of Trilby and Peter Ibbetson and a close friend of Henry James, was highly admired by Barrie. And Sylvia’s brother Gerald soon became Barrie’s favorite actor, performing in Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton (1902) and later playing Mr. Darling and Captain Hook in his 1904 production of Peter Pan.

    Gerald’s daughters became the noted writers Angela du Maurier and Daphne du Maurier (the later famous for, among other works, the original books upon which Alfred Hitchcock based his Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, and The Birds) and artist Jeanne du Maurier.  And according to Justine Picardie in the London Telegraph piece in 2009 “How Bad Was J. M. Barrie” Angela appeared in the Pan production as Wendy. So at least by 1904 Barrie was embedded with nearly the entire Du Maurier Llewelyn Davies families.

     Although Barrie befriended the boys, telling them stories, based in part on their own behavior and activities that would later be woven into the Peter Pan tales, he clearly never induced in any member of the family, mother, father, or the boys themselves, to feel a sense of unease. They permitted him not only to spend time alone with them but to take them on some weekends to his other home of Black Lake in Surrey, where, upon one occasion, he took photos of the boys playing pirates and other games much like those in which Peter Pan and his friends engage. He made two copies of the book, one of which he kept and the other of which he gave the boy’s father, who claimed he accidently left it behind on a train, a clue perhaps that he was not as appreciative of some of the photos, apparently a few of which showed them nude, as his wife was.

                                                               Jack Llewelyan as the pirate at Black Lake

                                                                 Michael Llewelyan as Peter Pan, Black Lake

       It was in The Little White Bird where the stories of Peter Pan first appeared. That fiction—narrated in the first person, Barrie thinly disguised as Captain W., who also happens to be writer who regularly enjoys long walks in Kensington Gardens with his St. Bernard dog—was described by The Times Literary Supplement as “an exquisite piece of work...one of the most charming books ever written.” The reviewer continued, “If a book exists which contains more knowledge and more love of children, we do not know it.”

     Clearly Barrie’s reputation was something that made readers turn blind while reading certain passages, or perhaps they simply read them at the turn of Twentieth century in a manner in which it is hard to read them today. Picardie quotes the following passage from the book, describing a night alone with the child:

 

“David and I had a tremendous adventure. It was this—he passed the night with me... I took [his boots] off with all the coolness of an old hand, and then I placed him on my knee, and removed his blouse. This was a delightful experience, but I think I remained wonderfully calm until I came somewhat too suddenly to his little braces, which agitated me profoundly... I cannot proceed in public with the disrobing of David.”

 

      Later, Captain W. crawls into bed:

 

“‘Why, David,’ said I, sitting up, ‘do you want to come into my bed?’

‘Mother said I wasn’t to want it unless you wanted it first,’ he squeaked.

‘It is what I have been wanting the whole time”, said I, and then without more ado the little white figure rose and flung itself at me. For the rest of the night he lay on me and across me, and sometimes his feet were at the bottom of the bed and sometimes on the pillow, but he always retained possession of my finger, and occasionally he woke me to say that he was sleeping with me. I had not a good night. I lay thinking.”

 

     The Captain thinks of “this little boy, who in the midst of his play while I undressed him, had suddenly buried his head on my knee” and of his “dripping little form in the bath, and how when I essayed to catch him he had slipped from my arms like a trout.'”

     When Arthur Llewelyn Davies died of cancer five year later, Barrie became even more involved with the family through his financial support. Three years later, Sylvia also died, Barrie insisting that had they had been engaged to married. There is no evidence of that fact, but Sylvia did leave a will that appeared to state that she intended Barrie to care for the orphans.

     Later a handwritten letter was found stating: “What I wd like wd be if Jenny wd come to Mary & that the two together wd be looking after the boys & the house.” Mary was the boy’s nanny, and Jenny was her sister. But when the note was found, Barrie himself transcribed it and sent it to Sylvia’s mother, altering the name Jenny to Jimmy, her nickname for James Barrie. Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert could not have proceeded more cleverly.

     Picardie observes that Barrie’s primary biographer Birkin states the “transcription was no doubt unintentional”; whereas Barrie’s far more critical biographer Piers Dudgeon sees the alteration as an indication that “Barrie's strategy was predatory.” “Whatever the reason, the boys became Barrie's own.”     

     There is no evidence that the playwright and fiction writer actually did have sex with or invited any of the boys into his bed. The youngest, Nico expressed his feeling that "I don't believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call 'a stirring in the undergrowth' for anyone—man, woman, or child. He was an innocent—which is why he could write Peter Pan."

       Or one might counter, which is why he wrote Peter Pan, perhaps to lay his fantasies to rest. Yet, these same fantasies can definitely be said to be behind the final form which the play took. Parker makes a similar point:

 

“The sublimation was total, and totally purifying. The hard, golden, irreducible figure of Peter Pan — ‘gay and heartless,’ waving his dagger and tooting idly on his pipes, gnashing the ‘little pearls’ of his baby teeth and bellowing orders in his ‘captain voice’ — is the quintessence of Barrie’s child-centered dreaming. Peter’s cruelty counters the ooze of Barrie’s sentimentality, his selfishness punctures Barrie’s whimsy. He is not a symptom. He is the cure.”

 

      But even a cure is doubtful; Barrie continued his deep friendship with the boys long after their adolescence and even later into their lives. On Michael’s 8th birthday, in June 1908, four years after the stage play, Barrie unable to attend the party, wrote:

 

“I wish I could be with you and your candles. You can look on me as one of your candles, the one that burns badly - the greasy one that is bent in the middle. But still, hurray, I am Michael's candle. I wish I could see you putting on the redskin's clothes for the first time... Dear Michael, I am very fond of you, but don't tell anybody.”

 

      In 1921, just short of his 21st birthday, Michael, with whom Barrie corresponded daily throughout his years at boarding school and university, drowned at a well-known dangerous spot at Sanford Lock near Oxford; some speculated that it was suicide. In 1960 Peter threw himself under a train near Sloane Square Station. George was killed in World War I.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).