Whatsis, Whosis, Thesis! Part 3: The World of the Play

The World of the Play

            Damon Runyon wrote well over fifty short stories popularizing his exploits throughout New York.  However, only thirty-two of these stories are considered his “Guys and Dolls” collection.  That does not necessarily mean they were used for the musical.  Instead, the characters of the musical are the ones who appear in these stories. 

            Runyon writes of a dark seedy world, full of colorful characters and colorful situations.  You have the pleasantly rotund Nicely-Nicely Jones, who partakes in an amazing eating contest to find who the best eater is in the whole United States (“A Piece of Pie”, Runyon 40-54); Harry the Horse, who falls in love with a teetotaler during the waning days of Prohibition (“Delegates at Large”, Runyon 27-39); and Big Jule, the supposedly “hottest guy in the world”, wanted by every policeman from New York to San Francisco (“The Hottest Guy in the World”, Runyon 208-217).

All of the characters seem to be acquaintances of the nameless narrator, thought to be a stand-in for Runyon himself.  Through the narrator, we hear such awkward speech; Runyon wrote everything very stylized: there were no contractions used, but every character spoke with a certain elegance and in an educated manner, yet they were still capable of taking you out back, and fitting you with a pair of cement shoes.  These men were hoodlums, but they ran the city in a fair and just manner.

The Three Stories

Out of all of Runyon’s stories, the creative team were able to narrow down the ones that would be the story for their musical: “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown”, “Blood Pressure”, and “Pick the Winner”, which actually came from another one of Runyon’s collections. 

“Idyll” provided the basic storyline: The Sky, the highest betting man in the country, comes to New York, and sees a mission band playing on the street.  They are led by Miss Sarah Brown: “She is tall, and thin, and has a first-class shape, and her hair is a light brown, going on blond, and her eyes are one-hundred-percent eyes in every respect” (Runyon 18).  He is soon following the band around, and helping Sarah garner larger crowds for her services.  Everything is going peachy until it is revealed that he is a gambler, and she abhors the practice.  He lets her be, though he is not the same man he once was.  At a crap game one night, provided by Nathan Detroit, Sky has the idea to bet his fellow gamblers for their souls; then they would have to attend Sarah’s meetings.  However, he gets into a scuffle with Brandy Bottle Bates; the two of them are playing craps, and Bates dupes Sky into losing his cash by unsportsmanlike means: Bates has been rolling “loaded” dice the entire night.  This is important to note as it helps define Sky: he does not care that he has been losing all night.  He would rather be beaten by fair means, and Bates’s dice simply are not fair.  Just as Sky is preparing to do something awful, Sarah bursts in.  Without realizing, she has stopped Sky from shooting Bates point blank.  She claims to bet Sky for his soul.  Upon rolling the dice, she wins, saving Sky and Bates from certain death and from further loss of their dough.

The second story to flavor the script was “Blood Pressure.”  In this one, our narrator has come from the doctor, where he has found out that his “blood pressure is higher than a cat’s back” (Runyon 154).  Unfortunately, he runs into Rusty Charley, a most unfortunate fellow known for causing trouble and destruction.  Rusty soon grabs him and drags him off towards Nathan Detroit’s crap game, which is full of far too much excitement for a man like our narrator: “Now, of course, I do not wish to go to Nathan Detroit’s crap game; and if I do wish to go there I do not wish to go with Rusty Charley, because a guy is sometimes judged by the company he keeps, especially around crap games, and Rusty Charley is apt to be considered bad company” (Runyon 156).  After facing serious trouble at the game, and being dragged throughout the city for the rest of the night, the narrator finds his way home and collapses, praying that his blood pressure will drop.

As mentioned in the previous two stories, Nathan Detroit’s crap game is a massive part of the stories and of the script.  However, Nathan is not a large character in the world of Runyon.  He only appears in the background of a handful of stories.  When it came time to write the script, they knew Nathan needed to be there if they wanted to have the crap game.  Therefore, they went to another one of Runyon’s stories, “Pick the Winner”, and transplanted the tale of Hot Horse Herbie and Cutie Singleton over to Nathan and Adelaide. 

In “Pick the Winner”, we meet Hot Horse Herbie and his ever-loving fiancée Cutie Singleton.  Herbie is a race fiend, and is waiting to win big so that he can finally marry Cutie.  Sadly, they have been engaged for ten years, so no one knows when they will ever tie the knot.  They spend a good amount of time at the racetrack in Miami, and Herbie meets a professor.  Together, they figure out a system for the horses so they can make oodles of money.  It ends up working for them considerably well, but they eventually have a stinker of a day, and Herbie loses the money.  This sorrow is made worse once he receives a letter from Cutie:

“Dear Herbie,’ she says, ‘I do not believe in long engagements any more, so Professor Woodhead and I are going to Palm Beach to be married to-night [sic], and are leaving for Princeton, New Jersey, at once, where I am going to live in a little white house with green shutters and vines all around and about.  Good-by Herbie,’ the note says.  ‘Do not eat any bad fish.  Respectfully, Mrs. Professor Whitehead’” (Bentley 273). 

This story establishes so much in the Nathan/Adelaide relationship.  She has suffered for a long time, and he was never truly respectful of her.  Therefore, Cutie had to “pick the winner” when she found him.  The writers just altered the simplest of things to make the situation work for the musical, and it adds another layer to Nathan; he has to realize that he cannot take Adelaide for granted.  Otherwise, she may just leave him, and then he will suffer.