Stage Center For The Heavyweights

Nowadays when a boxer makes it big he is lucky if he gets to take a bow on The Ed Sullivan Show. Around the turn of the century, however, top fighters gathered in money by the fistful appearing on the stage as performers in plays. Perhaps the best of the lot was the handsome, mannered James J. Corbett. Gentleman Jim liked acting and was intellectually ambitious about it, playing—for instance—the title role in Cashel Byron's Profession, adapted from one of George Bernard Shaw's early novels.

The first of the bruiser-emoters was John L. Sullivan who. in such epics as Honest Hearts and Willing Hands, used a method of acting a lot simpler than Stanislavski's and a lot louder than that of the Actors Studio. John L. would stand up to audiences and yell the lines like a saloon fighter bawling that he could whip anybody in the house who was man enough to step outside.

Sullivan's roaring style was plausible because the vehicles written for him required little subtlety of characterization. In addition to the works tailored for him, he once played Simon Legree in Uncle Tom's Cabin. John L. renamed the melodrama Me and the Bloodhounds. Chasing Eliza possibly involved his first encounter with ice, for he normally preferred everything straight.

Other fighters followed Sullivan on the boards. Bob Fitzsimmons toured in something titled A Fight for His Life before settling down with his fourth wife and becoming an evangelist. Jim Jeffries had a go in a semihistorical tour de force named Davy Crockett. But it was Corbett, Sullivan's conqueror, who scored the greatest triumphs on the stage. Cashel Byron's Profession brought together two obsessive drives: Corbett's determination to be known as a leading actor rather than a fighter and Shaw's appetite for royalties.

From the very beginning. Corbett considered boxing mere advertising for his acting. He once said. "I want to reach the point where people will turn around and say. "There goes Jim Corbett. the actor,' not, "There goes Jim Corbett, the prizefighter.' " The social theme of Cashel Byron appealed to Corbett, for in it a despised fighter rises above his station by wooing a society lady. Corbett often compared his stage talent with that of such greats as John Drew and Richard Mansfield.

Shortly after Corbett won the heavyweight championship from Sullivan in 1892, he appeared in Gentleman Jack, written by his manager and a collaborator. Corbett portrayed a college youth, saddled with a convict father and falsely accused of a crime himself, who wins a championship fight against one of his detractors. Other plays manufactured for Corbett were A Naval Cadet, Pals and After Dark, the last subtitled obscurely. Neither Maid, Wife or Widow. Boxing became a poor second to acting in Corbett's life. He gave up the championship to Fitzsimmons in 1897 and was beaten by Fitz's successor, Jeffries, in 1900 and 1903. By 1906, Corbett had completely lost his taste for the ring and found George Bernard Shaw.

G.B.S. discovered prizefighting in England in 1882 when it was still illegal. After attending his first clandestine fight, he said cynically of the buffs, "Anyone with a sense of comedy must find the arts of self-defense delightful (for a time) through their pedantry, their quackery, and their action and reaction between amateur romantic illusion and professional eye to business." He scoffed at the professed admiration for boxing techniques and went on, "The spectators did not want to see skill defeating violence: they wanted to see violence drawing blood and pounding its way to a savage and exciting victory in the shortest possible time."

Despite this ridicule, Shaw saw in the sport a platform for controversy, and he wrote the novel that was to become Corbett's vehicle. In it Shaw wanted to know why the law permitted vivisection and other bloodletting and banned prizefighting. In an afterpiece to his dramatization of the novel he deplored the knockout but remarked: "It is only fair to add that it has not been proved that any permanent injury to the brain results from it. In any case the brain, as English society is at present constituted, can hardly be considered a vital organ."

As a clothesline on which to hang his social dissertations, he concocted a plot in which a professional fighter (Cashel), training near the mansion of a regal lady (Lydia Carew), wins her affections in competition with a Member of Parliament and her enamored butler.

Some years after writing the novel, G.B.S. got wind of a plan to dramatize it in the U.S. In order to protect his copyright Shaw hastily wrote a blank verse adaptation, by his own admission borrowing freely from Shakespeare and Marlowe.