Pygmalion and My Fair Lady

News Flash: The ending that I so hate to My Fair Lady is not Shaw's ending.

Okay, I should have read the play, Pygmalion. In my defense, I can't read every great play, and Shaw is not in my field of concentration. I have always intended to read it. Finally, I did. (Actually I didn't, but I skimmed through to get the gist and to see if the ending matched My Fair Lady.) Not only does Eliza not go back to Higgins, but the play ends with her determination to marry Freddy. Shaw leaves the rest ambiguous. We don't know what she does, but fall at Higgins feet and fetch his slippers, she doesn't.

My estimation of Shaw went up several notches.

Apparently, he hated the "romantic" happy endings that directors insisted on tacking on to Pygmalion. My Fair Lady has one of those sappy, happy endings -- Eliza returning to Higgins to accept being his downtrodden what? Not wife, certainly. Dependent, perhaps. A fitting 1950's Stepford-Wife ending.

Shaw wrote a long essay about what happens next to the characters. He thought it was pretty obvious – and so do I. Based on the play as he wrote it, the happy ending of Eliza and Higgins getting together just doesn't work. Of course, he is not the only author to be forced to change his ending or to have his ending changed for him. People in general -- and publishers and producers in particular -- have a hard time accepting ambiguous endings, that life is ambiguous. They seem to want it tied up in a nice little package with nothing real leaking out.

Life leaks out.

So I was right to hate the ending. My storyteller's instincts were right; it didn't fit the rest of the play.

Not that anything is going to change.

As I've said before, when you're right, you get to be right.