The steps necessary to transform an aging old queen into a glamorous cabaret star before the eyes of the audience were worked out with mathematical precision. The application of each piece of makeup, the wig, the dress, the boa—all were carefully timed to the music. George rehearsed and rehearsed so that all the technical parts of the song didn't get in the way of what made it emotionally moving and finally thrilling: his acting, his performance. Albin started the song aging, discouraged, disheartened; the life force emerged and he began to get stronger, younger—transformed himself from a used-up has-been to a glamorous, invincible star. The song needed both elements to work, and it got them.
In the revival, Zaza—he was never Albin in “Mascara,” only Zaza—also began in midair, on a platform in a glistening black gown against a black curtain. When he sang of putting “a little more mascara on,” the involuntary question was, where? There wasn't conceivable room for more, or for a millimeter more makeup of any kind: he was slathered in it, it was inches thick, it looked heavier than the dress. Nor was there any attempt to progress from the “ugly duckling to a swan” the lyric described. The change he did make was to rip off the glistening black gown and—surprise?—a glittering black-sequin gown underneath. What, then, was the song about? A change of costume. A camp number by just another drag queen, not a musical soliloquy by an aging artist determined to keep going. The choreographer responsible for the staging won the Tony that season.
The difference between the two approaches reflects the difference in the Broadway theatre at the time of each production. The twenty-first-century Broadway theatre shows Hollywood's influence—not just on musical theatre, on all theatre. The play is no longer the thing; the star is the thing. Musicals? Styled for the same audience as the multimillion-dollar blockbuster—one with neither heart nor mind. The Broadway blockbuster favors frenetic musical numbers with a thinly satirical connective tissue and a presumably saleable, presumably original element—a zoftig drag leading lady in Hairspray, for example. Actual originality, with a very occasional exception like LoveMusik, is found in transfers from Off Broadway like Spring Awakening. But even there, the originality is in the musical staging and the powerful rock music; the story, shocking in its long-gone day, is banal today, the bungled abortion is predictable, and the moaning that follows is merely sentimental slop to the new young audience rocking in its expensive seats to the music that brought it there. The heart and mind were not affected. Nor were they affected by the revival of La Cage aux Folles.
Question: over two decades earlier, did the Broadway theatre seek to touch the heart and provoke the mind? Often. Did the original production of Cage?. Yes, the director surely did. Did he achieve what he wanted?
No, judging by the sneers of the activist gays during the first weeks of what was an enormous, unexpected hit. They loudly complained the show was vanilla, white bread, and timid, though beautiful to look at. (A year later, at an expensive fundraising gala dinner, the Human Rights Campaign, a premier gay organization, awarded Jerry, Harvey, and me their premier prize. Well, they needed names to sell the expensive tables.)
The view from the stage of the Palace Theatre differed from that of the denigrators. The Cagelles in the opening number looked out and saw men burying their faces in their programs rather than look at other men in drag. At the end of the show, the Cagelles saw the same men on their feet applauding them. When I watched in the aisles to check the audience response, the white of Kleenex taken out of purses invariably caught my eye at the moment when Jean-Michel, juvenile and son, acknowledged Albin as his mother. Also sentimentality? At least an emotional response. At the beginning of the second act, there was a rather corny number in which musical-comedy Riviera sailors and waterfront types instructed Albin on how to be a man. Scott Salmon, whose choreography throughout the show was consistently remarkable, did what he could, but what can you do with however determined but still basically chorus boys pretending to be butch seamen? Director and choreographer then worked in tandem. George Hearn was given the image of a boy who had been called “faggot” all his life, and the dancers, who could identify, were the cowardly bullies kicking the sissy underdog. The number acquired not depth, as much as that was desired, but a dimension that removed it from the toothpaste-smiling world of musical comedy. The emotion was on the stage, not in the audience; but at least it was somewhere. In today's theatre, it is rarely anywhere.
The advent of AIDS took more of a toll on the company than on the box office—perhaps because of the absence of sex in the show; perhaps because of the fantastic costumes, which graced the show with an aura of unreality; perhaps because the audience didn't want to believe in the reality of the plague. Considering the preponderance of gays in the cast, the number of the afflicted was relatively small. The first to fall was a Cagelle who had steadfastly maintained he was straight. When he became infected, there was no schadenfreude; when he died, everybody mourned. No one was mourned more than Fritz Holt—executive producer to some, superb PSM to others, beloved by company, crew, everyone, closest of friends to me. One day he walked into my living room—it seems long ago and not so long ago—stretched out his six feet four inches on my couch, and opened his shirt. A port for AZT had been implanted in his chest.
“Do you want to live like that?” he said. “I don't.” And he didn't. He went dancing at the Saint and continued to do drugs.
He was directing a national company of Cage when I got a phone call: “Fritz is sick.” I went to rehearsal. I hadn't seen him in two weeks; I was told to be prepared—which, of course, was not possible. His long hair had fallen out in clumps, he had lost pounds—he was always wanting to lose weight, but not this much, this way—and his eyes were all terror. I gave a good performance; by then, I'd had a little practice. I took over rehearsals. Less than a week later someone came in and said Fritz was dead. I lost it then; everyone in the room did. We just sat for a moment, and then we went back to work—not because the show must go on, though it must and should, but because we didn't know what else to do.
Death always seems recent to me, I've lived through so many. The latest, Tom Hatcher from lung cancer, was really recent. We were together for fifty-two years. I'm unable to live through the empty space; I can only survive.
AIDS didn't end the run of La Cage aux Folles. What did end it was what began it. The air rights to the Palace Theatre, our home for four years, were sold to a chain that wanted to build a new hotel over the theatre. It was contractual time for construction to begin. The show had to move out, but that was fine: we were set to move to the Mark Hellinger. The Moonies, however, wanted the Hellinger for their tabernacle. They offered Allan Carr a lot of money—Allan, not the show, not his investors, his partners, his cronies; Allan. He took it, and that was the end of La Cage aux Folles, the musical. He was why it began; he was why it ended. It was always his show. He went back to his Ingrid Bergman house in Beverly Hills, where he waited to end his run.
• • •
Cage was a singular experience. As a director, I learned so much in a variety of areas, largely by taking chances and going where instinct told me to go. The most important learning usually comes from pain, but here it came from the opposite: the love that was as much a part of each company in this country and abroad as the title of the show. A simple life lesson: enjoy the work while you're doing it for the sheer pleasure of doing it. If you can be proud of the result, you've succeeded, no matter what happens. With La Cage aux Folles, I succeeded. Neither the show nor I will go down in any books (the Tonys roster doesn't count for me), but I succeeded and had an amazingly good time doing it.
P.S. Everyone made money.
SIX
Why?
“WHY DID I DO IT?” asks Rose. A familiar question at one time or another to anyone, including the director of a flop musical. After Nick & Nora, I asked myself why I did it. The answer was friendship—no, not excusable, but a trap for anyone in any role in the theatre. I also asked myself why I persisted with i
t even though Tom had told me it was doomed and I should stop. The answer to that was ego: I could get it on—I did. And I could get it to work—I couldn't. There are all sorts of reasons I would like to claim, like the show being dead in the water before it opened because of false allegations made in a carnivorous press during too many weeks of previews; but the fact is, the show flopped.
Now put the question in the present tense. Obviously, the actors have to ask: why is my character doing this? What about asking, Why am I singing? Why am I dancing? Those questions are for the director even if the authors have or think they have answered it. With West Side Story, however, those questions were never asked—not by the director, not by the cast, not by the audience, not by the critics, not by anyone, because we never asked them. We were telling much of the story through dancing and singing; it was a natural way to us, consequently it was natural. We did spend an inordinate amount of time seeking a name to describe what we were doing before we settled on “lyric theatre”— not too pretentious (or too meaningful), used in early interviews and then forgotten by all except the Library of Congress. There's a comfort in having a label identifying what you're doing when what you're doing doesn't quite fit in any category. Once it's over and done, it no longer needs a label. At least, what we had done didn't need any label for me. For me, we had come closer than I had thought possible to what we had dreamed. Time to move on to the next whatever it would be in whatever form.
Even before I began actually writing the book of West Side Story, when I was making an outline to structure the story, and thus give us something concrete to work from, I described the prologue as being danced with three or four spoken words. What better way to set the style, to tell the audience this story was going to be told primarily through music and dance?
That style was influenced to some extent by the fact that the choreography was to be by Jerome Robbins. Similarly, preceding the murderous rumble that ends the first act with a quintet sung by the whole company was influenced to a great extent because the music was to be by Leonard Bernstein. Lenny and Jerry were two of the most remarkable musical-theatre talents of that time, of any time. How could that not affect the style of the show?
Many say West Side forever changed the American musical—a claim made these days by shows like Rent and Spring Awakening with no visible proof—because of its use of dance and music. To me, it used those elements better than they had ever been used before; but what it really changed, what its real contribution to American musical theatre was, was that it showed that any subject—murder, attempted rape, bigotry—could be the subject of a popular musical.
Because of the conscious emphasis on music and dance, West Side had the shortest book of any musical to date. I became adept at providing the briefest of lead-ins to a song or number. In the second act, for example, Anita knocks on the door to the bedroom where Tony and Maria have just made love. Tony slips out the window; Maria opens the door. Anita comes in and looks at the bed. Maria says:
“All right! Now you know!”
Anita says: “And you still don't know! Tony is one of them!”— and sings, “A boy like that who'd kill your brother!”
Two lines and we're into a searing, climactic duet. Not bad, and helpful to the show, but a technical proficiency traceable to my beginnings in radio, where I learned economy in dialogue. What came just as easily but meant more to the show and was more gratifying to me was the obstacle that kept Tony from getting the crucial message about Maria. Instead of a delayed messenger as in Shakespeare, it was bigotry—a basic theme of the show. In Shakespeare's native country, that change received a great deal of attention; in this country, it went unnoticed. It provided the show's last use of music—the underscoring of the attempted gang rape.
Oddly enough for a show that relies so much on song and dance, there is neither in the last half of the second act. That was not intended. A long speech Maria has just before the end, I wrote as a dummy lyric for a final aria. Why no aria? Unfortunately, Lenny never found music that pleased him. To this day, Maria delivers that dummy lyric as an impassioned speech. So “masterpieces” are created.
Because of my belief that West Side Story should be done as it was done originally, I had no interest in directing any production. In 1980, there was a none-too-successful revival mastered by Jerry that didn't change my mind—it largely replicated the original, but it was bland. Yet in 1998, I redirected an English touring company headed for London. Why? Enter Freddie Gershon.
Freddie is MTI—Music Theatre International, the best company to handle subsidiary rights to musicals all over this country, Europe, Japan, South Africa, tomorrow the world. Freddie loves musical theatre and has made a life interest of bringing musical theatre to high-school kids, and vice versa. Following journalistic practice, I disclose that Freddie and his wife, Myrna, the high priestess of originality, can be counted among the best friends Tom and I ever had. MTI is still the leader in its field. But back to the English touring company.
It wanted to play London. A member of one of the estates in control of the rights to West Side saw the production and judged it ready. One of Freddie's people reported otherwise. Freddie, knowing I was going to be in England, suggested I see the touring company fast. I did—in Southampton—and put the transfer to London on hold. When I came home, I phoned Jerry: two weeks with Jerome Robbins, I reported, could make the company worthy of the transfer. Jerry was sick, much sicker than I suspected, too sick to direct. He asked if I would take over for him. That surprised me. Equally surprising, I agreed. Why all the surprise? Our personal relationship had been nonexistent for years.
We had met and become good friends during World War II— yes, that far back, and I'm still going. At the time we met, I was a sergeant in the army, writing radio propaganda; Jerry was a soloist in Ballet Theatre. He had a lot of friends and was a lot of fun. By happenstance—I knew nothing about ballet; my interest was in the person who took me—I was at the opening night of Fancy Free. Jerry didn't have quite as many friends after that overnight success. He became suspicious of people, and the theme of Gypsy—the need for recognition—buried his life. With me, however, he was still Jerry, not Jerome Robbins.
We were both in Hollywood when I met Tom and, for the moment, was resisting joining my life with his. Jerry more than approved of Tom, Tom was what I needed, but I was resisting and set to return to New York. Jerry forestalled that by insisting I stay with him—ostensibly to talk about West Side Story—in the Beverly Hills house he was renting while he did The King and I for the movies. That eliminated my excuse for having to go back to New York.
I have always remembered Jerry and me being close in those days, but I didn't know how close until, clearing out some files, I came across a long letter from Jerry dated October 6, 1955. Instead of mailing it to me in New York, he was sending it via Tom, who was moving there to live with me, because he thought it would reach me faster. How slow was air mail in 1955?
“I will sure be sorry to see Tom leave,” he wrote, “but as he says, what a wonderful Christmas we are all going to have together in New York and I do look forward to the fact that both of you will make New York a happier place to be in.” Jerry Robbins wrote that, a Jerry Robbins I don't remember.
The Jerry I do remember turns up in what he writes about “ROMEO” (aka West Side Story)—how he has waited seven years for Lenny and me to sit down and start writing but he didn't mind because he wouldn't have wanted anyone else. And, much to my surprise, about my play A Clearing in the Woods. In his version, he loved the play and wanted badly to direct it but I held him off; in my version, he backed out of directing it. Which is true? How would I know?
The last paragraph of the letter is written by the Jerry Robbins who wrote the first, the Jerry I don't remember. “Write me, bubby [sic], and tell me all. I envy you the Fall in New York, the life in Quogue, but I am happy for all the happiness that you will be having. With all my love, Jerry.” Those were the days. Those are the days that we miss,
that are the best, that we should never forget, but memory, like success, can be a spoiler.
When West Side Story finally happened and succeeded, Jerrys excessive need for recognition went into high gear, slowing down only when McCarthyism struck him. That added to the disintegration of our relationship, already under way. Those memories are too sharp.
On the occasion of a birthday party he was giving himself, he asked Nora Kaye, known variously as the Duse of the Dance or the Red Ballerina and rumored at various times to be marrying Jerry and/or me: “Do I have to invite Arthur?”
When Ahmet Ertegun, the record mogul, gave him a party for his seventy-fifth birthday, Jerry called me at really the last minute and said grumpily: “I know you know it's the last minute but I'd like you to come.” I went and had a good, if strange, time. It was a huge party at Maxim's in New York: black tie; champagne like tap water; two tables of show folk, two hundred tables of big money and big celebrities; an orchestra; dancing; entertainment; speeches; and—finally—Jerry. He spoke of late-nightly meetings with his neighbor Mica Ertegun, Ahmet's famous interior-decorating wife, as they walked their dogs, Jerry alone, always alone—“I'm a loner,” he said wistfully. Sitting with the show folk was his ignored lover, Jesse Gerstein, a photographer. Phyllis Newman said, “If I had a gun, I'd shoot Jerry right now.” Jesse died of AIDS at the age of thirty-four.
Our professional relationship wasn't smooth, but it was always characterized by mutual respect. He may have had to make himself drive over to my house in Quogue from his in Watermill to ask— Jerome Robbins asking!—for my help with his Jerome Robbins' Broadway, but drive over he did. The reunion wasn't without laughter. And tears, actual, visible, from him when I said I would trust him (about royalties). I gave him as much help as I could with his show, for which he was very appreciative.
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