Come Fly Away

I recently read Samuel Taylor's The Pleasure Of His Company, a minor Broadway hit from the late 50s. It's the story of a jetsetting divorced father returning home to see his daughter, whom he hardly knows, get married. He shows her a potentially exciting new life and at the end she decides to run away with him. Of course, she says she'll be gone for a year and then return to her beau, but who knows how it'll turn out.

Taylor is the sort of middlebrow sophisticate who could thrive on the Broadway of the 50s, a type that is essentially extinct today, or perhaps moved on to television.

I read the play because I've seen the 1961 movie starring Fred Astaire--in a non-musical role--and Debbie Reynolds (the only cast member from Broadway who made it into the movie was Charles Ruggles, who was already well established on the screen), and I'm always fascinated to see how movies made under the Production Code diverge from the source material.

As you might expect, the movie has Astaire charm his daughter to death. But running away with him was too much to ask of an early 60s audience. In the end, she rejects him and goes with fiance Tab Hunter. I bet if the movie had been made just a few years later (say, 1967, the year of The Graduate) they could have kept the original ending.