For years, I’ve been struggling to remember some details of an occasion that took place when I was a teenager and my parents were living in Germany where my father was a Foreign Service Officer serving at the U.S. embassy in Bonn, the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany at the time. It was pretty significant in my life—you’ll see why shortly—and I recall much of it, but one particular detail has evaporated from my memory.
Here’s what I could remember, some of which I recounted in my article about the 1957 broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (“Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)” [25 April 2013]):
Actress Celeste Holm (1917-2012), a favorite actress of mine because of, among other roles, Ado Annie in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! (1943), a performance I only knew from my dad’s cast album, and the Fairy Godmother in the 1965 remake of the R&H Cinderella, and her then-new husband (1966-96 [his death]), Wesley Addy (1913-96), had completed a State Department goodwill tour of the Middle East.
On their way back to the States, they stopped in Germany, and did a special show of their performance for an invited audience of the embassy. As I was home from college in the States—I pegged the period of the performance as the summer of 1966 or ’67, when I’d have been 19 or 20—I attended with my parents.
My dad was the Cultural Affairs Officer at the time, which made him the ostensive official host, so after the performance, my parents held a reception for the little troupe in our apartment in the embassy residence compound in the Plittersdorf section of Bad Godesberg, then a Bonn suburb—now a borough of the larger city—where most of the embassies were located.
So, Celeste Holm was a guest in my parents’ apartment in Germany years after the first Cinderella in 1957 (which is the topic of the linked post above), and shortly after the remake (which aired on 25 February the year before the embassy performance). As Cultural Affairs Officer at the embassy, my dad was her troupe's official host in Bonn—but all I knew was Ado Annie is in my house!
(If you read “A Broadway Baby” [22 September 2010], you’ll understand why I was so thrilled about this happening. I was still in high school in Geneva when Cinderella débuted in February ’65, but I saw it in a rebroadcast when I was back in the U.S.)
The Holm-Addy show was a collection of scenes from plays and prose literature that showed love, romance, and relationship between a boy or man (Addy) and a girl or woman (Holm) through different ages, from teens to seniors.
One I remembered, but couldn't identify now, was from a story. The couple were college students and the boy was constantly instructing the girl on her decision-making because, he insisted, she was using her emotions to reach her conclusions, not logic. (The undertone was that this was the difference between men’s thinking—superior—and women’s—inferior.)
Finally, the girl tired of this and broke up with the boy and informed him she was going out with another boy at the school. The now-dumped boyfriend argued that she couldn't choose this guy over him, and she countered each of his points with logic, just as he’d been instructing her. He quickly descended into pure emotional appeals, and she pointed this out and turned on her heels, leaving him standing alone on stage, completely defeated.
My main problem is that I've never been able to identify the story. I thought it was a Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) piece, but since that could have been wrong, I was flying blind. (Less important was putting a date, or at least a year on the Bonn performance, and maybe the title of the show itself, if it had one.
There was a program, possibly just a mimeographed sheet, because I remember that Holm announced that it was her custom to “sell” her autograph for cash that would be going to UNICEF, and I got her to sign my program. This has stuck in my mind, first, because I thought it was sweet, and, second, because she charged 25¢—but she accepted quarters or any (close) equivalent in other currency, such as West German marks (a mark at that time was worth exactly 25¢), French francs (20¢), or Swiss francs (23¢). Unfortunately, I no longer have the program.
Finally, in the past couple of weeks, I was able to dig out more of the pertinent facts.
First, I went to Google AI. (I had tried plain Google years ago, before there was Google AI, and came up with nothing because I couldn’t devise useful search words. I’d had the same problem with another search, the one that was about what turned out to be “Ragamuffin Day” [26 November 2016], but then I stumbled on the main clue by chance.)
With AI, I could ask questions and keep narrowing down the answers until I had something concrete. Then I found a New York Times report on the Holm-and-Addy tour that filled in more information. Here’s what I ended up with:
First, AI narrowed down the source material for the scene as a classic short story called “Love Is a Fallacy” by Max Shulman (1919-88), a humorist best known for his short story and television character Dobie Gillis. (The story was written in the mid-to-late 1940s and was first published in the June 1951 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.)
(It wasn’t Parker, obviously, but another scene I remembered from the performance—about a newly married couple on a train to their honeymoon—was from one of her stories [“Here We Are” (Cosmopolitan, 31 March 1931)].
(In this story, a young bride and groom, married for exactly “two hours and twenty-six minutes,” are on a train bound for their honeymoon. Overwhelmed by nervousness about the looming consummation of their marriage, about which they never speak, the couple acts out their anxieties by picking petty, passive-aggressive fights. The newly-weds seem to have come to an unspoken consensus by the end, but Parker implies that this is only the first of many failures to communicate.
(I knew Parker was somewhere on the program! But that also explained one reason that I could never identify the story I was looking for: I was searching works by the wrong author!)
I was already pretty sure the Shulman was the right piece because in logic, a “fallacy” is an argument, or apparent argument, which professes to be decisive of the matter at issue, while in reality it isn’t. That’s exactly what the boy in the scene accuses the girl of doing, and what she later forces him into doing himself in the end.
AI also gave me a link to an online copy of the story so I could read it without having to get to a library and search through short-story anthologies to find a print copy.
Google AI also summarized “Love Is a Fallacy” so I could see that it fit the description of what I was looking for based on what I could remember (which I had fed into the AI):
The unnamed narrator, a “freshman in law school,” is an insufferably arrogant, self-proclaimed genius college student. He views his roommate, Petey Bellows, as “dumb as an ox,” and sets his sights on Petey’s beautiful girlfriend, Polly Espy. Deciding that Polly has everything he needs in a wife except a brain, he cuts a deal to trade Petey a coveted raccoon coat, which he wants more than anything, in exchange for the chance to court Polly.
In his endeavor “to get her mind up to the standard I required” as a suitable wife, the narrator takes Polly out on a series of “educational” dates where he condescendingly teaches her the fundamentals of logic, using all the academic Latin names for the devices of argument and the logical fallacies, explicitly to correct her “emotional” female thinking. (This is where the scene in the performance started.)
He explains, for example, that Dicto Simpliciter means an argument based on an unqualified generalization and that Hasty Generalization is generalizing from inadequate evidence. The narrator then gives Polly an example of Post hoc [ergo propter hoc] (“after this[, therefore because of this”]), a fallacy which presumes an event causes a closely succeeding one merely on the grounds that it followed so soon afterwards. The law student, who, “It happened . . . was taking a course in logic,” proceeds to teach Polly five more logical fallacies.
After the first session, the narrator is discouraged because Polly only agrees with everything he tells her without seeming to understand it. He keeps trying, and begins to see some signs “that Polly was not altogether a cretin.” He admits that he even loves her, comparing himself to Pygmalion and Polly to Galatea.
After days of lessons, the narrator decides Polly is finally “enlightened” and confesses his love. When Polly rejects him to stay with Petey, the incipient lawyer is furious and argues that she’s making an illogical choice. Every time he screams an argument at her, Polly perfectly identifies the logical fallacy he’s committing, throwing his own lessons back in his face.
The would-be attorney entirely abandons his “superior logic,” descending into desperate, emotional pleading. Polly calls out his final fallacy and walks away, choosing Petey simply because Petey owns a raccoon coat.
Now, the Holm-Addy tour. Google AI informed me that it went out in the spring of 1966, so I was basically right about that. It didn’t just cover the Middle East, however, but also parts of Europe. The performance was entitled With Love and Laughter or Invitation to Love, apparently depending on where it was being presented.
The New York Times article—“Tour Abroad Set By Celeste Holm” by Louis Calta, 26 March 1966—contradicted Google AI on the last detail, reporting that the show was called Interplay – An Evening of Theater in Concert. Since I have no recollection on this point, I can’t resolve this conflict. The paper said that it would “primarily . . . be performed before university students studying English,” though, of course, that didn’t apply to the special performance at the Bonn embassy.
I’m not positive, but I think the show was presented not at the embassy itself, but at the Embassy Club, a community center located in the Plittersdorf residence compound. The audience was made up of invitees of the ambassador (and my dad’s ultimate boss) George C. McGhee (1912-2005; U.S. Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany: 1963-68), but the club, which was tax-exempt and duty-free, was generally open only to employees of the American embassy and foreign diplomatic personnel so as not to complete with local German businesses and commercial establishments.
(If he wasn’t out of town at the time, the Deputy Chief of Mission, the second-in-command at the embassy and my father’s immediate superior, Martin J. Hillenbrand [1915-2005; DCM in Bonn: 1963-67], would also have been at the performance. In June 1972, about a year after I arrived in Berlin as a Military Intelligence officer, Hillenbrand took up his post as the new ambassador to the FRG; on 7 July, he made his first visit to Berlin, where the ambassador maintained an office in the Headquarters Compound, where my unit was also located.)
The six-week tour began in Cairo, Egypt, on 29 May 1966 and then traveled on to Syria, Lebanon, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. Six weeks from 29 May would be 10 July; that’s when the troupe should have finished up their tour.
From what I’ve learned, the troupe finished in Reykjavik, Iceland, and flew to Germany the next day. They were apparently in Bonn for the following three days, departing for the States on the 15th. Making allowances for a rest day after six weeks and 6,565 miles of traveling and performing, and time to pack and handle the departure logistics for the final flight home, it seems the performance on 12 July was most likely, leaving the 13th for PR, press, and courtesy calls.
I would have easily been home from college in Virginia after my freshman year. That makes perfect timing for what I remember. I was 19 on my previous birthday, December 1965.
(As it happens, I had to stay in Washington for a week or so after the end of classes and exams that summer, but school was finished by early June, so there’s little doubt that I would have been back in Germany by mid-July.)
The show ran two hours, according to the Times. It was divided into two parts, “Before Marriage” and “After Marriage.” Calta (1913-90), a theater reporter and reviewer for the paper for 49 years at his retirement in 1977, noted that the texts were drawn from the work of 22 writers. (Holm told Calta that she “was reluctant to give details about the program’s format because of the possibility of imitators.”)
The article mentioned both Holm’s work on Oklahoma! and her practice of charging 25¢ for her autograph.
As a result of this inquiry—which, by the way, was no longer of practical use, so it was now only a matter of scratching a really annoying itch that I’d had for something like 15 years—I learned a few surprising things about the story. First, it’s a Dobie Gillis story. Yep, the “unnamed narrator” is Dobie!
After the first publication in Cosmopolitan, “Love Is a Fallacy” was compiled with Shulman’s other Dobie Gillis stories in the book The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: Eleven Campus Stories (Garden City Books, 1951). That’s what revealed that Dobie was the narrator, since his name is never used in the story.
When the stories were turned into a weekly TV series (after the film adaptation of the anthology, The Affairs of Dobie Gillis [MGM, 1953]), The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963, a first-season episode was based on (and entitled) “Love Is a Fallacy” (episode 22, 1 March 1960).
I had watched the first two seasons of Dobie Gillis (then I went away to boarding school, where I didn’t watch TV much, and then I went to live in Germany, where, as you might imagine, there wasn’t any American television). But I’d never read the stories—I didn’t know there were stories!—so I didn’t know that the Dobie Gillis of the TV show (played by Dwayne Hickman [1934-2022]) was very different from the character in Shulman’s stories (even though the author was creator, writer, and executive producer of the show.
The reason that I first started to look for the information on what turned out to be “Love Is a Fallacy” is that I was working on a post for Rick On Theater for which I wanted the name of the piece. The post was “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011).
It was a question my boss handed me when I was teaching middle school theater at a private school in Brooklyn back in 1977. As I recall, it was prep for answering the question, voiced apparently by some parents, why their child should take a theater class at all. (The school mandated that middle schoolers take a class in theater, dance, and visual arts each for one-third of each year.)
When I started ROT, I thought blogging on that question—“How does theater compare to other academic disciplines?” with regard to educational value—would be worthwhile. One point I was making in my post was that there are plays that can be used as models of logic, and the scene I remembered from the Holm-Addy performance leapt immediately to mind as a great example.
But, aside from not being able to identify the source of the scene, I came to realize that it was almost certainly not from a play at all. That made the search moot, and I used other scripts to exemplify that point. But the failed search stuck in my head (and my craw), and I wanted to find the source of that scene that had made such an impression on me, even though the need for the information no longer existed.
And, so, here we are. Mission accomplished at long last. I won. Even if there’s no prize, I still won.
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