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Richard Bissell.
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The Pajama Game librettist Richard Bissell not only worked for a pajama manufacturer but wrote about it first in his novel, 7 1/2 Cents
by Marc Miller
The old adage “write what you know” suited Richard Bissell (1913–1977) well. Author of a dozen novels and two plays (both hits), the Dubuque, Iowa native frequently based his fiction on autobiography, and enjoyed his biggest successes when he did. Though he attended prep school in New Hampshire and graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in anthropology, Bissell soon returned to Dubuque, the quintessential small town on the Mississippi, and became a towboat pilot, while living on a houseboat. This neo-Mark Twain existence inspired his first novel, the well-received (and still available) A Stretch on the River (1950). By that time, however, Bissell had left the river and begun working at the H.B. Glover Company, a shirt-and-pajama manufacturer founded by his grandfather. His experiences in middle management at Glover became the basis for his best-remembered novel, 7 1/2 Cents (1952).
Viewed from the distance of 50-plus years, it's a quaint work, but hardly a docile one. Sleep-Tite, Bissell's stand-in for Glover Co., is a bustling but stressed survivor of the first big wave of American industrialism, a circa-1910 pajama factory whose steam pipes, button sewers, and felling machines (whatever they are) are forever breaking down. Foreign competition is unknown, but bigger American pajama factories are constantly cutting costs and making things tougher for midlevel shops like Sleep-Tite. The lessons of Frederick W. Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management are heeded albeit casually, and the overwhelmingly blue-collar workforce is kept just prosperous enough, on about $1.35 an hour, to keep turnover down. It's a union shop, and management and labor constantly growl at each other. Management sees every union organizer as a potential Communist–this was, remember, the height of McCarthyism. There's a vague anti-Semitism on the floor, too, with Middle America viewing each outsider as a suspicious Other.
Producers Frederick Brisson, Robert Griffith, and Harold (yes, Hal) Prince liked to take chances, and they saw this gloomy proletarian milieu as an unconventional setting for a musical comedy. They invited Bissell out East to turn 7 1/2 Cents into a musical, partnering him with far more experienced hands–George Abbott's–to write its book.
The Pajama Game opened May 13, 1954, ran for 1,063
performances, and changed Richard Bissell’s life.
Comparing 7 1/2 Cents with The Pajama Game, one is struck by Bissell's faithfulness to his own source material. Plant superintendent Sid Sorokin and his love interest, sleeve-setter Babe Williams, are very much the same couple in both versions, though younger in the book: He's 28 and she's 20. (As originally played on Broadway by John Raitt and Janis Paige, they were roughly a decade older.) Their management-labor conflict is identical, and Babe's directness and sassiness startled placid mid-century readers: At one point in the novel, during the equivalent of a second-act argument, she intones, “I suppose that you think you own me now, just because we Did It a few times.” Such frankness–and the unapologetic
attitude toward premarital sex, a novelty in a 1950s musical– surely contributed to The Pajama Game's popularity.
Sid's secretary, Mabel, also occupies identical positions in novel and musical, though the 7 1/2 Cents Mabel is more comically preoccupied with who's sick, who's dead, and who's interested in whom. Hines, the time-study man played so memorably by Eddie Foy Jr. in the original production, is also in 7 1/2 Cents, but is a relatively minor character–and Gladys, his love interest, was fashioned out of whole cloth for the stage, to make a star out of Carol Haney (and understudy Shirley MacLaine). Old Man Hasler, Sid's disagreeable boss, is a much larger presence in the novel, a disciple of conservative radio broadcaster Fulton Lewis (sort of the Bill O'Reilly of his day) and an old-time factory man who blames virtually all his troubles on the New Deal. 7 1/2 Cents also exhibits more class consciousness than The Pajama Game: At one point, Sid, on the rebound from Babe, is seduced by socialite Celeste Watson, a stageworthy plot turn Bissell and Abbott nevertheless omitted.
The Pajama Game opened May 13, 1954, ran for 1,063 performances, and changed Richard Bissell's life. He moved his family East, not to return to Dubuque until 1975, and wrote another roman á clef, this time about the adventures of a Midwestern family man invited to New York to turn his Iowa novel into a stage musical. Sound like a familiar story?
History repeated itself: Say, Darling was adapted by Bissell, his wife Marian, and Abe Burrows into a 1958 “comedy about a musical,” with incidental songs by Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. Broadway insiders had a fun time guessing which characters were based on whom: Leading man Johnny Desmond and leading lady Vivian Blaine were only sort-of versions of Raitt and Paige, but Robert Morse's young, go-getting producer was certainly an ingenious impersonation of Hal Prince. A nine-month hit, Say, Darling is an amusing look at the 1950s Broadway musical-making machine running full-steam, a machine that produced The Pajama Game.
Marc Miller is a copy chief at Business Week and writes frequently about the theatre.
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