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).
