History of a Broken Ending

My Fair Lady's famous final line

I grew up on My Fair Lady. I have watched it over, and over, and over. To this day, when I feel joyous about something, my brain will wind up singing "I Could Have Danced All Night." To call it a well-loved musical would be an understatement. But gone are the days when I could wink at the final scene and tell myself that it isn’t cataclysmic for Eliza Dolittle. Irretrievably demolished is the notion that she can accept Henry Higgins’s dismissive welcome back to his home and life, and still hold onto to her newfound knowledge of her own worth. There are certain experiences that alter forever the way you see relationships like Eliza’s and Henry’s or Petruchio’s and Kate’s (from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew). You can no longer shield yourself from the hard edges by chuckling and refusing to take them seriously. I’ve had the growing opportunity of such experiences, and because of it, I feel a profound need to fix that ending.  

First, though, I want to unpack how we got such a broken ending in the first place. It didn’t start that way. It was a gradual process involving a brilliant playwright who didn’t quite understand his audience or, arguably, his lead characters; a film adaptation that prioritized reconciliation over character growth; and a musical treatment that more fully crystallized the characters so that the ending lands even worse. 

Shaw's Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw is the brilliant playwright whose most popular play, Pygmalion, was a retelling of an ancient Greek myth. In the myth, Pygmalion was a man who became disenchanted with women and determined instead to devote himself entirely to sculpting, only to fall so madly in love with an exquisite and extremely life-like alabaster statue he created that Aphrodite brought her to life and blessed their marriage. 

In Shaw’s retelling, Pygmalion is not a sculptor but a linguist, Henry Higgins, and he doesn’t create a woman; he just imagines that he does because he sees her as an object – his masterpiece – instead of as a human being in her own right. Eliza Dolittle is the woman, and so alive, impassioned and engaging that she becomes the protagonist although the play is named after him. Her goal when the story begins is to master the Queen’s English well enough to be a lady in a flower shop. But his goal is to pass her off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party, his equivalent of creating an exquisitely life-like statue. And he succeeds – by dint of his capable teaching and her enormous efforts, ready intelligence and extraordinary ear. Even then, though, he fails to recognize her as a real woman. That transformation occurs in Shaw’s final scene, when Eliza realizes that her worth is completely independent of Higgins’s assessment of her. “Oh,” she says, “when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.” 

Higgins is at first affronted, but she is so brilliant in her newfound power that he exclaims, “By George, Eliza, I said I’d make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.” But she accuses him of just trying to make up to her, now that she can do without him. Then she bids him a comprehensive goodbye and walks out the door. 

The curtain comes down on Higgins, chuckling to himself and confident that she’s coming back. Will she or won’t she? She’s been in love with him for some time and he evidently cares for her a great deal more than he’s willing to admit. He’s accustomed to bullying her and calling her names, but she claims she doesn’t care about that. What she cannot abide is how he treats her as inconsequential, and she has just learned that she is not. So, is she playing hard to get? And can she maintain it long enough for him to overcome his fear of vulnerability and start treating her like an equal? The ending is ambiguous, and apparently, Shaw made it so as a kind of concession to the public, who wanted the romantic comedy to end with at least the suggestion of a happily ever after. But when the first actor to play Higgins ignored Shaw’s directives and started throwing flowers after the departing Eliza, Shaw weighed in rather strongly. 

Shaw's Epilogue

He wrote an epilogue to the play, explaining that Eliza does not marry Higgins because she could never fully capture his heart or measure up to the standard set by his excellent mother; he stands too much in the place of a god for her; and besides, he’s much too old for her. Instead, she marries Freddy, despite describing him as weak and poor. She has to “look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers” and so she chooses the latter, while secretly wishing she could get Higgins “alone, on a desert island.” 

This is not a truthful argument: Eliza has proven quite capable of driving Higgins to distraction; his mother seems rather to admire than look down upon her; far from regarding Higgins as a god, Eliza is devastated when, after the garden party, he talks as if she was his creature; and surely Shaw could age him down. Neither is it a satisfactory ending to Eliza’s saga to land her with a slave when what she longs for is an equal.

The Film Adaptation Attempts a Fix

Thus, when Shaw finally gave permission for the play to be turned into a movie, the screenwriters had the difficult task of bringing Eliza and Higgins back together by audience demand, without provoking Shaw to scuttle the project. Their solution was a final scene that shows Higgins coming home in great distress and accidentally turning on the gramophone, which starts to play Eliza’s voice.  He turns it off and hears her voice behind him, saying “I washed my face and hands before I came, I did.” He turns eagerly toward her, then masks his pleasure by swiveling away and asking, “Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?” Then we cut to the credits, accompanied by a yearning melody.

Shaw found this final scene irritating but dismissed it as “too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about.” Audiences loved it. Sure, Eliza’s re-entry into Higgins life was premature, as evidenced by his pretending that he didn’t care. But she knew he cared and so, now, did he. That should be enough to promise them happiness, right? 

The Messy Message

I used to think it did, along with generations of spouses who practiced patience with partners that preferred to push us away than admit to loving us. You can embrace the wisdom that informs you your spouse’s dismissiveness is really about their fear of letting you know how much you matter. But when you accept the indignities day after day after day, something in your psyche begins to believe that you deserve them. And your spouse begins to believe it too. 

In the second to last scene, Higgins tells Eliza, “I think a woman fetching a man’s slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch YOUR slippers?” So what, then, does he mean when she waltzes back into his life and he asks, “Where the devil are my slippers?” It’s not romantic; it’s a put down. And if she accepts it, she’s agreeing to walk small in the relationship. I don’t think the screenwriters consciously meant to doom Eliza’s dream of an equal partnership when they wrote that final scene. I think they just didn’t understand it. It was 1938, and the notion of equality in a romantic relationship (especially one across a class divide) didn’t have many buyers. They didn’t think Higgins could tell Eliza how much she meant to him without coming across as less masterful, less manly. So the public got an inconclusive, “romantic” ending that perpetuated a painful fable about relationships. 

Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe had the chance to fix that in 1956, when they turned the popular play into a musical. They got close. The depth they added to Eliza in the second to last scene, when she steps into her power, is breathtaking, which makes her final submission worse. Please come back next week for more on that, and an alternate ending that aims to do justice to Eliza, Higgins, and an audience that wants to see them happy.

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See you next week for Part 2 on My Fair Lady and the ending that ought to have been.