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In The Loves of Charles II Monologist Cornelia Otis Skinner succeeds in giving something of the color and depth of a full-sized play by threading the six characters she personifies on a single theme. Charles's women, in Miss Skinner's contraction of history, included two queens and four trollops. His French mother, Henrietta Maria, had already resigned herself to his random affection for tavern-maids when he appeared at her shabby court in Paris in 1649. On his way back to England and the crown in 1660 Charles stopped long enough to steal a kiss from a Flemish baggage who fleeced him of a diamond ring, 500 guilders and his new lace cuffs. The Jezebel among Charles's mistresses in England was Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine. whose mouth he finally shut with the title of Duchess of Cleveland. Wrench No. 3 was Louise de Queroalle. Cockney Nell Gwyn surprised her master because she asked for nothing, was more than satisfied when he ennobled their children. Almost contented, Charles turned from her to his queen, Catharine of Braganza, only on his deathbed when he apologized for taking so long to die.
To fashion her one-woman play, which she herself wrote, Monologist Skinner levied on many an Old Master. Each of her six scenes opens with a tableau which suggests or exactly duplicates a painting of the period. The result in color and rhetoric is not unlike one of the swaggering tragi-comedies of the Restoration.
In her youth a skinny, awkward girl, Cornelia Otis Skinner made her stage debut at the age of 14 as "Starving Armenia" without makeup. She studied acting at the Comédie Francaise, wrote a play called Captain Fury which was briefly seen in Philadelphia in 1925 with Otis Skinner, her famed father, in the title role. Before reaching Broadway as a monologist she once heard the chairman of a ladies' club in Boston tell the audience: "Ladies, we have Miss Skinner with, us today, due to the high price of Admiral Byrd." By way of contrast to her ambitious The Loves, of Charles II and The Empress Eugenie, she still presents skits like that of the Nebraskan about to be presented at the Court of St. James's, has added a sharp topical piece called "Lynch Party." In private life the wife of Broker Alden Sanford Blodgett, she has a three-year-old red-haired son, lives near Helen Hayes in Manhattan's Gracie Square.
The First Apple (by Lynn Starling; Lee Shubert, producer). When the naive daughter (Irene Purcell) of a fluttering female evangelist allows a garrulous young writer (Conrad Nagel) to seduce her to the music of Brahms in his Greenwich Village flat, she is so ashamed of herself that she becomes engaged to a South Dakota bumpkin devoted less to her than to her mother's teachings. Aided by a worldly wise aunt (Spring Byington), the writer arranges alliances between the evangelist and her daughter's fiance, between the daughter and himself. A minor obstacle in the way of able Conrad Nagel's return from Hollywood to the stage, The First Apple contains such lines as "I am a pagan—so are you," adds up to a torpid little imitation of Noel Coward.