by Staggs, Sam
The decision to incorporate less rather than more of the Mankiewicz screenplay was made in view of artistic demands, as Comden and Green later explained: “All About Eve is made up of almost two-and-a-half hours of brilliant dialogue and situations which had to be adapted into a show that could contain no more than an hour-and-a-quarter of dialogue to allow for at least an equal amount of music and dance—and which could emerge on its own with a new and vital identity. And of course the film had to be metamorphosed into musical theatre that would be less ‘all about Eve’ and more ‘all about Margo.’”
At the outset, Comden and Green had been reluctant to take the assignment, the main reason being that in all their successful years together they had never done only the book to a musical. They had always written the lyrics as well. But Strouse the composer and Adams the lyricist had already completed much of the score by the time Comden and Green were hired.
It was a difficult decision. Not only were they unable, initially, to use the Mankiewicz script, they were also reluctant to tamper with a classic movie that so many people knew almost by heart. A further disadvantage was not being asked to write the lyrics and, in Betty Comden’s words, “Sometimes when you work with an old friend things don’t turn out well.” The old friend was Lauren Bacall.
Bacall had met Comden and Green years earlier in Hollywood. The three became close friends, and Bacall says she was as nervous about working together as they were. Despite her hesitation, however, Charles Strouse recalls that she was the one who demanded Comden and Green. Betty Comden herself, when asked “Was it Lauren Bacall who suggested to the producers that they bring in you and Adolph Green to write a new book?” answered elliptically, “I’ve heard that.”
If Bacall engineered Sidney Michaels’ replacement, she surely had sound artistic reasons for doing so. She also had too much at stake professionally to go after any talent but the best, friendship or no. Comden and Green must have struck her as the best possible team for Applause, since they had written the scripts for such popular backstage satires as The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and The Band Wagon (1953). Highly regarded by both Broadway and Hollywood, Comden and Green commanded more fame, prestige, and box-office draw than Strouse and Adams. More, in fact, than anyone in the show except Bacall herself.
As it turned out, working together placed no strain on the friendship. Comden says, “This was a perfectly professional relationship all the way. In other words, the work was the work and if we saw each other for dinner, that was a separate thing. There was no running to talk to her without consulting the director. We were the authors, she was the star, and everything went through the director, as it should. We came out of it close friends. I have happy memories of that show.” When the libretto was published in 1971, Comden and Green dedicated it to Bacall.
Reading that libretto now, it’s easy to find fault. Inevitably, the greatest temptation is to criticize it for what it isn’t; and it isn’t All About Eve. Rather, it reads like a paraphrase of Mankiewicz, minus censorship. In place of his psychological insight, his shrewd view of why fulfillment in the theatre is, for many, worth all the risks, Comden and Green supply mainly a PR notion of life on the stage. In their libretto even the suffering and betrayal are whittled down to rueful one-liners. A typical example of psychology replaced by shtick is this exchange from Scene Two of Applause:
MARGO
That line reminds me, and the audience, I’m playing someone considerably younger than myself.
BILL
You’re sick, Margo.
MARGO
No—I’m forty.
In places, the libretto evokes an early-seventies sitcom: Margo to Bill as he leaves for Rome: “Hey, don’t eat too much pasta. I want to be able to get my arms around you when you come back.”
On the other hand, a libretto is not intended to stand alone. It’s one piece of machinery in the vast spectacle of a musical show. Looked at from another angle, the Comden and Green libretto is the foundation of a stylish edifice constructed to encase the talents of Lauren Bacall and a number of other show people. Their work wasn’t intended to compete with All About Eve. It was written as a deft variation on the Mankiewicz theme.
Aaron Frankel, who taught workshops in musical-theatre writing at the New School for Social Research in New York, describes the process of musical adaptations: “It is necessary to move completely from one medium with its conditions to another with very different conditions. The spirit of the source material is what must be cleaved to, and the letter forsaken. The aim of an adaptation is to exist as a clearly new experience.”
The new experience in question started to rev up early in November of 1969. There was a reading of Applause at Ron Field’s home on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, with actors, authors, and composers present. This meeting was of course full of excitement and promise. It was also politely tentative and, for a gathering of show people, somewhat reserved. Bacall explains why: “This was the first meeting of actors who were going to work together for a long time to come. Along with the others, I was quite self-conscious at first, then I had to rise above who and what the rest of the company thought I was. The main problem for me was that they all came in with their minds made up.”
By the end of the evening, however, those present felt that the ice was broken. The general impression among younger cast members was that Bacall wasn’t expecting star treatment. In Ron Field’s living room she seemed more like Brooklyn’s Betty Perske (her real name) than Hollywood’s Lauren Bacall. After the read-through, Field served drinks, and by the end of the evening the consensus was that Applause was off to a good start.
The following week the cast went into formal rehearsal for two months. Bacall had started voice lessons in September. These continued. She also enrolled in a gym, and took dance classes with Ron Field’s assistant, Tommy Rolla.
Although Bacall had always wanted to do a musical, when the time came she was scared. And understandably so, because she had never sung or danced professionally. She was also forty-five years old and had made only a handful of films since Bogart’s death in 1957. No one would come right out and say it, but Lauren Bacall had evolved into a legendary bystander. She was the most famous widow in Hollywood.
Back in New York, her hometown, she had done two earlier plays. Goodbye Charlie opened in 1959 and lasted for only 109 performances. Cactus Flower, which opened in 1965, was a hit. Bacall played it for two years.
The lead in Applause, however, was bigger than anything yet. It could turn her into a new kind of star. Or finish her off. Later, in her book Now, she put into words the emotions she felt at the time.
The Margo Channing of Applause and myself were ideally suited. She was approaching middle age; so was I. She was insecure; so was I. She was being forced to face the fact that her career would have to move into another phase as younger women came along to play younger parts; so was I. And she constantly felt that the man she was in love with was going to go off with someone else, of course someone younger, and I, too, had had those feelings. So Margo and I had a great deal in common.
Bacall was actually in a deeper crisis than Margo Channing. Margo, a star in great demand, must learn to act her age, onstage and off. She must also battle a younger rival while trying to calm her paranoiac fears that Bill is about to desert her. Bacall, on the other hand, wasn’t getting any film offers, she had just divorced Jason Robards after an eight-year marriage, and her mother’s recent death had left her devastated. She had every reason to work harder than she had ever worked before. If Applause didn’t work, Lauren Bacall might soon be the name of a Hollywood remnant.
Facing the challenge and the risks of the show, she bulldozed ahead with a gutsy pronouncement that might have come from a Bogart-Bacall movie: “I’ve made an ass of myself before.”
The first day of rehearsal started off with the press. Reporters and photographers milled around. Ron Field and Bacall performed a couple of dance steps fro
m Margo’s big number. Flashbulbs and questions: “How do you feel about doing a musical, Miss Bacall?” Then the press left and hard work began.
Len Cariou played Bill Sampson. In the play Bill is eight years younger than Margo; in reality Cariou was fifteen years junior to Bacall. Born in Canada in 1939, he had acted primarily at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario and at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis before making his Broadway debut in The House of Atreus in 1968. As a newcomer to the New York stage, Cariou of course had much to gain from Applause. Musically he had an advantage, since he possessed a smooth, creamy singing voice that recalled Gordon MacRae’s. The fortuitous romance that blazed up between Cariou and Bacall during tryouts in Baltimore also proved an aesthetic asset onstage. Like Bette Davis and Gary Merrill twenty years earlier, this Margo and Bill saw to it that life imitated art.
In the process of translating All About Eve to the stage and updating it for the 1969–70 Broadway season, Comden and Green gave Birdie Coonan, the Thelma Ritter character, a sex change. In Applause Birdie is replaced by Duane Fox, Margo’s hairdresser and confidant.
Ron Field spotted an actor in the movie Star! who he thought might be just the one to play Duane. The actor was tall, handsome Garrett Lewis. In the 1968 picture, starring Julie Andrews as Gertrude Lawrence, Lewis played actor-producer-director Jack Buchanan, one of Lawrence’s colleagues in the London theatre. Lewis seemed to have it all: looks, a singing voice, experience as a dancer, and a Broadway résumé that included My Fair Lady and Hello, Dolly.
In Los Angeles, Garrett Lewis got a call from his agent asking him to fly to New York to audition for Applause. “I talked with Ron for a long time about the show,” Lewis recalls. “He had a particular interpretation in mind for the role of Duane. The character was a gay guy but Ron said, ‘I don’t want him to come across as a gay stereotype. For once, if there’s a homosexual onstage I’d like him not to be effeminate.’”
When Garrett Lewis auditioned for the part of Duane Fox in the fall of 1969, homosexuality was just officially out of the closet, even in New York. The Stonewall riots had erupted a few months earlier, in June. Up to then, even the most “advanced” portrayals of gays on stage and screen were largely stereotypical, as in The Boys in the Band. So the character of Duane Fox as written by Comden and Green, and as envisioned by Ron Field, was a departure from the usual stock portrayals.
“It was tricky for males in show business at that time,” Garrett Lewis says. “And being a dancer certainly had an onus. I had built up a nonstereotypical image in my work, and I wasn’t interested in ruining it. The part of Duane seemed ‘safe,’ so I took it.”
Lewis signed a run-of-the-play contract. He flew back to Los Angeles to pack, then moved into a big apartment in Manhattan expecting to be there for a while. “I had heard horror stories about Lauren Bacall,” he laughs, “but I didn’t experience anything like that.”
At rehearsals, Lewis seemed to stick out because of his height. He’s six foot three. The first time Bacall saw him she exclaimed, “My God, he’s so big!” He towered over Len Cariou, who said at the audition, “I don’t know if I can be on the same stage with him.”
After several weeks of rehearsals, Lewis and his agent felt that some of those connected with the show—Comden and Green, or perhaps Strouse and Adams, or maybe the producers—wanted more of a certain kind of humor in his portrayal of Duane Fox. Lewis also perceived a certain dissatisfaction with the fact that he and Cariou were, in a sense, both leading men. It was all very unspecific, according to Lewis, but someone seemed to want a more recognizably homosexual interpretation of Duane, Margo’s hairdresser. Was Garrett Lewis too butch? The question hovered at every rehearsal, unasked and unanswered.
In Act I, Scene Two, shortly after the initial encounter of Margo and Eve, Margo asks Duane to escort her and her new friend out on the town. “I’ve got a date,” he says. “Bring him along,” says Margo, which is the libretto’s only explicit reference to Duane’s homosexuality. Margo’s matter-of-fact line—and Bacall’s delivery of it—were commendably nonstereotypical. Indeed, Applause was a minor landmark as the first Broadway musical to present a gay character as having a viable sexual identity. Previously such characters were written and played as fops and fairies.
Feeling pressure to make Duane a shade more effeminate, Lewis decided to give them what they seemed to want. One day at rehearsal, when Bacall said, “Bring him along,” Lewis swished. “I camped it up,” he recalls, “and they all laughed hysterically. I suddenly realized I had made a terrible mistake.”
Lewis had played the stereotype too well. In a sense, he emasculated the character—and himself. At that moment the powers that be spotted a cliché portrayal that would grab a cheap laugh. If it had been a movie they would have yelled, “Cut! Print it.”
Instead, there were “long conversations,” as Lewis puts it. He won’t specify who said what, but the upshot was, “That’s how Duane’s got to be; he has to be nellier.” Lewis was immensely uncomfortable. “I got crazy,” he says. “I thought, I don’t want to do this!” He turned it over to his agent, who held discussions. The issue couldn’t be resolved, there were hard feelings, and Garrett Lewis quit the show.
It would be a mistake to assume that Lewis’s departure was in protest at the offensive depiction of a gay character. His decision was personal, not political. He left the show because he wanted to maintain his straight-arrow image in order to continue working in movies. Then as now, Hollywood got the jitters over actors who were perceived as gay—unless they would settle for prissy Franklin Pangborn roles.
“I didn’t want to play a character who was instantly recognizable to the audience as gay,” Lewis says. “That’s the way I live my life, but it’s certainly not something I flaunt. Besides, it’s a very different world in California from the Broadway stage, and the West Coast was where I wanted to work.”
Another person who was there at the time tells a radically different story. According to that source, “Garrett Lewis was replaced. The problem was that he was extremely good-looking, like a GQ model. Len Cariou, the leading man, lacked traditional leading-man handsomeness. The original casting didn’t work right because the second male lead, played by Garrett, was stunning and Cariou wasn’t. The humor just wasn’t right.”
The anonymous source betrays no maliciousness in recounting this. Indeed, the person is still indignant at the way Garrett Lewis was dismissed: “He was given his notice at the New Year’s Eve party, just about like this: ‘Happy New Year, you’re fired.’”
Lee Roy Reams, who had auditioned for the role of Duane Fox but had lost to Lewis, was called in a short time later. He has a lot to say about Applause, but first a flash-forward to the subsequent careers of Garrett Lewis.
As it turned out, Lewis didn’t continue for long in front of the cameras. By the time he appeared in Funny Lady in 1975, musicals were rare and other genres didn’t interest him as much. Just then a friend of his, agent Sue Mengers, bought Zsa Zsa Gabor’s house in Bel Air. Mengers and her husband liked the way Lewis had done his own home, so they asked him to redesign their new acquisition. Mengers said, “If it’s good—and it had better be—you’ll get lots of business. I’ve got the biggest mouth in Hollywood.”
First Lewis removed the lemon-yellow shag carpet that Zsa Zsa had put down in abundance, along with her waterfall in the den. When the house was stripped to its bones he designed new carpets, new furniture, and tailored the place to the pleasure of its new chatelaine.
Garrett Lewis’s second career was under way. Word of mouth from Mengers led to commissions from Barbra Streisand, Barry Diller, Herbert Ross, and many others. Then, in the late seventies when Ross was directing The Turning Point, he called Lewis in to decorate a couple of the sets.
A bit later Ross called again. He was at work on California Suite and not entirely pleased with some of the art direction. Lewis became a visual consultant on that picture. Career number three took off. As set decorato
r—“That means I do everything but the walls”—Garrett Lewis has received four Academy Award nominations, for Beaches, Glory, Hook, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
* * *
Singer-dancer-actor Lee Roy Reams, raised in Kentucky, came to New York in the mid-sixties. He appeared in Sweet Charity, a Lincoln Center revival of Oklahoma!, and on television he danced on all the variety shows.
When Garrett Lewis left Applause, Reams stepped in to play Duane Fox. Shortly after Margo invites Duane to escort her and Eve on the town and to “bring him along” (i.e., his date), there’s a scene in a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Reams describes Ron Field’s original concept: “We walked into the bar and there was the date I was meeting. Margo, Eve, and I went up to him. Then he and I kissed, a little peck, not a big deal. It seemed perfectly natural to all of us.
“Then, during tryouts in Baltimore, when we did the gay-bar scene there was a gasp from the audience because two men had done a little kiss like you might give your father, for God’s sake. It actually cast a pall; the show didn’t play well that night.
“Next day we came into rehearsal and Ron said, ‘Lee Roy—and I said, ‘Don’t tell me—you want to cut the kiss.’ And we did. Ron replaced it with a hug.”
Reams adds that Comden and Green had originally intended his character to be not only gay but black. “They were aware of the shortage of roles for black actors, and that’s one reason they considered making Duane Fox African-American,” he says. But the idea was dropped. Perhaps a double-barreled minority character struck the producers as too volatile. A same-sex interracial date might have caused a riot in Baltimore, and elsewhere.
Reams, a quick study and a polished pro, soon absorbed the shock of Garrett Lewis’s departure. Now the cast seemed permanent: Bacall, Cariou, Reams, Brandon Maggart as the playwright Buzz Richards and Ann Williams as Karen, his wife. Diane McAfee, a twenty-one-year-old singer and dancer, was Eve Harrington. Another young performer, the energetic Bonnie Franklin, along with her fellow chorus gypsies, performed the show’s title song as though it were the first show-stopping number in theatre history.
