Lydie's Broken Statue

A group of us went to see this new play.  The play ain’t bad.  If you are from Ponca City or associated with the town, go see it.  But it sure isn’t factual from what I know.  Just enjoy the story as fiction.

I spent a good deal of time researching Marland and Lydie to teach Elderhostel class in the 90’s, “Petroleum: From the Ground to the Glamour”.  As I watched the play, I kept thinking I had rocks in my head, because I didn’t remember things happened this way.  Then it dawned on me that the author had played fast and loose with characters, rather like Hollywood does routinely.  There is some guy named Craggins who is supposedly nemesis of Marland.  No such person.  He’s a composite of Lew Wentz and the wildcatters like Tom Slick who followed Marland around trying to hog down on leases around his acerages. (My attorney and friend Geraldine Miller told me how crooked Lew Wentz’s leasing was, much proof of his violations in abstracts, but he made amends by his charity)  Since Marland always seemed to strike oil, they knew he was onto something.  What Marland was doing was drilling surface expressions (hills) when there was an absence of outcrops on the hillsides.  Hence it was reasoned that the subsurface geologic layers were bent into a dome and not flat.  This was the beginning of geologic prospecting. In 1911 it was considered oddball.  By 1923 it was all the rage.  I do credit the author, Perry, with having several lines and a vignette in the play about Marland’s use of geology.  Good show!

It was advanced that Lydie had a big love affair with Walter Johnson.  If you read the biographies, Lydie is held by all to have been an extremely private and shy individual who was only rumored to have had a liking for a boy named Walter Johnson.  Never proven. Where’s Walter?  What we do know is that she and George were taken in by the Marlands, who could not have children.  But as was common in those days rich relatives took in the teenage children of poor relatives to provide an education and get them started at a better advantage.  Lydie and George Roberts lost parents and grew up dirt poor.  EW’s dad in Pittsburgh was wealthy as well.  Perhaps the easiest story to read about Marland and Lydie is in “Oil in Oklahoma”.  A chapter about them is just a few pages long and a good summary.  Was Lydie in love with EW?  She certainly was at the end of her life.  Jan Proh, former director of the Pioneer Woman Museum told about how she had a collection of old time clothes, many dresses of first ladies and governors from OK history.  Several times a year, Lydie would come down to the Museum and ask if she could see some of EW’s clothes.  Jan told about how she would hug his shirt tightly and weep.  Was the marriage just a marriage of convenience in the beginning?  Not according to Jack Baskin and Bob Fakin.  Jack related how Lydie was often the only person to be at the train station when Marland came home from his many business trips.  Bob’s dad was the gardener of the gardens of Marland’s grand home, which looked like Palace of Versailles going east down the hill to 14^th Street. He told me how his dad often noted, after Virginia’s death, the two of them sitting in the gardens together.  She was very athletic and rode with the fox hunts.  Marland loved athletics and was reputed to have hired many of the football and baseball players around the area.

Hence the play doesn’t do much to advance the idea that Lydie and EW were in love, but then history would be getting in the way of the love triangle between a protective and violent EW, naïve but ardent Walter Johnson, and Lydie the timorous.  Trouble with this is that EW was Mr. Smooth. Unlike Frank Phillips and Bill Skelly who were hard-driving and got into a fist fight in the Hotel Tulsa, or many other oil men of the era, Marland didn’t make his money by fighting for prime lease acerage or shooting at people spying on his wells. He didn’t run his brother off like Frank did Wade Phillips.  Marland scienced the game.  Likewise he was a visionary politician, two term governor (although he didn’t seem to have the common touch in the struggles of the 30’s).

But there are things in the play that are spot on.  The use of projection to set scenes from the photos of the era is splendid.  (Exception is the Ponca Cemetery --modern picture of headstones.  Was originally grave racks and bodies in trees which would have been pretty spooky to kids as one scene suggests.) The two fictional women who appear and gossip incessantly was great.  Indeed, Marland’s ventures, his marriage to Lydie were the constant talk of quiet gossip.  (But how does your pastor publically preach against Marland when his church receives a generous donation every year!)  Joe Miller’s business-like cowboy character was perfect. 

The play is narrated by a character named Charlie.  No Charlie exists, although I thought it might be CD Northcutt or Earl Krieg or some such composited friend.  Earl was sitting across from me in the theatre frowning at times. In the end, I don’t think this play does much to explain Lydie.  CD says she was just so shy and didn’t want the expectations of the gossipy public, that she was a free spirit who in that sense was like EW.  Beats me.  Ask Earl or CD.