by Staggs, Sam
A second major change would soon cause another shock, but not until after the gypsy run-through.
Lauren Bacall had never been to a gypsy run-through before. In fact, she claims she didn’t know what one was. But she liked the Applause gypsies—“the kids in the dance corps,” as she calls them.
Here is Bacall’s take on a gypsy run-through: “You do the show—no costumes or sets or orchestra, only a piano—in a theatre filled with the casts and gypsies from other shows running on Broadway.”
Ron Field had scheduled the gypsy run-through of Applause on the Sunday before the cast left for Baltimore. Bacall remembers the nerves and the exuberance: “The date was January 18, 1970, the place the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. I was dressed in slacks and turtleneck sweater. The theatre started to fill up. There was no curtain. The actors were shaking in the wings, the gypsies warming up way upstage in corners, using pipes as barres.
“Finally it was time. Ron, as is customary, walked downstage to explain the set, time, and place. As I heard ‘Margo Channing’ I made my first entrance. The applause was tumultuous. With no sets or costumes, the audience must use its imagination. They’re privy to a new birth, the first unveiling of a creation. At the last curtain call the stage became flooded with every musical director, producer, writer I’d known—and actors, all bursting with enthusiasm.”
Diane McAfee, playing Eve, recalls the gypsy run-through for its “wonderful screaming acceptance that was so overblown.”
Lee Roy Reams remembers Bacall in the wings that day, waiting to go on, and her hands shaking quite visibly. “I clasped her hands in mine. I said, ‘My career’s on the line today as well as yours.’ She laughed. We did not let go of one another’s hands until the announcer said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Margo Channing.’”
Reams felt sure after that performance that the show would be a hit, the main reason being its star. “She had this walk, and this voice, and that tossing of the hair—and it had nothing to do with Bette Davis,” he says. “Besides that, she wears clothes like nobody else.”
The first night in Baltimore, Lauren Bacall and Len Cariou, at the start of a flourishing romance, walked out of the theatre en route to a nightcap. They glanced at the marquee and did a double take. Their names were up in lights, but his was misspelled: “Ben Cariou.”
* * *
Guys Like Us, We Had It Made
The most famous song by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams was not sung by Lauren Bacall or anyone else in a Broadway show. It’s a tune almost as familiar as “Happy Birthday,” yet of the millions who know it, few could name the composer or lyricist. It was made popular in the early 1970s by Archie and Edith Bunker, for it’s the theme song of All in the Family.
According to Strouse, the Bunker music came about because he and Norman Lear, producer of All in the Family, became friends while working on The Night They Raided Minsky’s. Strouse composed the music for that film, and Lear was co-writer. A little later, Lear showed Strouse several All in the Family scripts, and asked him and Adams to write a song. Strouse doubted that such controversial material would make it to television.
The number of people hearing the Strouse–Adams theme song in any broadcast of the sitcom was vastly greater than the number who have heard all their show music in every performance since their first collaboration, including the ubiquitous “Tomorrow,” from their 1977 hit, Annie.
* * *
The Baltimore reviews of Applause were lukewarm. Lee Roy Reams recalls one notice that summed up the show as “a lot of homo ho-hum.” The cast was depressed, the producers verged on panic. They had eight weeks ahead to improve—or else. “The pressure was constant,” Bacall remembers. “Rehearse all day—scenes, songs, dances; performance at night; drinks at the hotel, sleep, breakfast, and start all over again.”
A couple of weeks after the Baltimore opening Ron Field went to Bacall’s dressing room before the Saturday matinee. He looked dour. Bacall guessed that the rumors were true: A cast member was to be replaced.
“Don’t you think it’s that out-of-town panic?” she asked. “The minute something isn’t quite right, an actor is fired.”
Field asked, “Do you like Diane?”
“Yes, I do,” Bacall answered.
He said, “But you shouldn’t; that’s the problem. As Eve Harrington, she should present a threat to you. That’s why the show isn’t working the way it should. She doesn’t come across as all those things Eve Harrington must be.”
Sometime later Brandon Maggart, who played Buzz Richards in the show, knocked on Diane’s dressing-room door. He said, “I have to tell you something.”
She looked at him with sympathy. From his tone of voice, he must have gotten bad news.
“What’s the worst news you can think of?” Brandon asked.
Diane gasped. “You got fired!”
He paused. Suspense built; he didn’t answer. He might have been playing a climactic scene onstage. But the drama was real. Diane ran to Brandon and embraced him, for in recent weeks they had started to fall in love. “Brandon, I can’t believe it! You got fired.”
The pause ended. “No,” he said. “You did.”
It was probably the worst shock of Diane McAfee’s young life. She could only stammer, “Why?”
Ron Field, Charles Strouse, and Lee Adams all gave her the same reason: “You’re too young and rosy to scare Margo Channing, especially Lauren Bacall’s Margo Channing.”
According to McAfee, Ron Field felt so terrible about replacing her in the Broadway Applause that he immediately hired her to play Eve Harrington in the show’s bus-and-truck tour. Specifying the difference between the national tour and the one she did, McAfee explains: “The national is the A-class tour—the one that Lauren Bacall eventually took on the road. That one tends to stay longer in each place, and they fly you to it. The bus-and-truck tour, on the other hand, is exactly what it sounds like. You give one or two performances and you travel by bus. My contract at least stipulated that I got a double seat. I bought beads at Kmart for that seat, and a little plant to hang in the window, and a wine rack for the overhead luggage bin.”
For ten months the bus rolled across the Midwest, to Arizona and New Mexico, up and down the coast of California. The various bus-and-truck Margo Channings included Patrice Munsel and Alexis Smith.
When her tour ended, Diane McAfee returned to New York and lived for many years with Brandon Maggart. They have two daughters, the youngest of whom is the singer and songwriter Fiona Apple.
Three decades later, Diane McAfee betrays no bitterness. She says, “It’s nice to dream that I might have had a glamorous career, but perhaps that would have precluded my having children. And that I can’t imagine. Yes, it’s hard finding the right direction for my life right now, because there’s nothing I really like to do except perform. I tried about five years ago to go back into musicals, but I discovered a different world. It wasn’t the theatre I had left.”
* * *
The Saturday after Ron Field told Bacall that Diane McAfee was to be replaced, he came to Bacall’s dressing room again. The matinee was ready to start; why was the director’s gaze pinned to the floor? When Bacall asked what the hell was eating him, Field intoned: “Just look in the fourth row center this afternoon. You’ll see Gower Champion sitting there.”
“So what?” replied the puzzled leading lady.
“So I’m being replaced,” he muttered.
“What?” Bacall screamed. “Over my dead body!”
Gower Champion, sometime star of Hollywood musicals, was now a theatrical éminence grise, for he had gained a reputation as a doctor of shows ailing in tryouts. To Bacall, he might have been Doctor Death. If ever there was a perfect moment for a fasten-your-seat-belts scene, this was it. And Bacall was magnificent. If the critics could have seen her backstage!
“Come to my hotel after the performance,” she ordered Field. Margo Channing, at that matinee, flamed with added fire and music.
Len Cariou
joined Bacall and Field in her hotel suite. She phoned Joseph Kipness, one of their producers, and let him have it. “If the ship sails without him, it sails without me!” she thundered. Ron Field made frantic signals across the room. With the evening performance coming up, he was afraid she’d damage her voice.
Kipness tried to placate her. “Gower just came down to visit, he’s passing through, we’re old friends. As a matter of fact, he’s meeting me in the bar in a little while.”
“Oh he is, is he?” Bacall growled.
She hung up and called her agent. “If Ron goes, I go. Make it clear to Kippy!”
Bacall was livid. She grabbed Cariou with one hand and Field with the other. “Let’s go to the bar and say hello to Mr. Champion,” she drawled, and the acid in her mouth could have etched metal.
Just before entering the bar she linked arms with her two men and in they marched. She smiled ravenously at Kippy and Gower.
“Great show,” said Champion, as Joe Kipness squirmed.
Bacall patted Ron Field’s shoulder. “It’s all because of him,” she purred. “I don’t know what I’d do without my director,” she added with satiny significance.
And that’s how Bacall showed them what a “difficult” star she could be. Years later, as an afterthought, she laughed about her scene in the hotel bar. “I did everything but flutter my eyelashes,” she crooned.
* * *
Diane McAfee’s replacement as Eve Harrington was Penny Fuller, who had previously auditioned for the part but couldn’t shake her misgivings about the show.
Toward the end of 1969 Harold Prince summoned Fuller from Los Angeles to audition for his production of the new Sondheim musical, Company. Fuller, many years later, recounts the story of her lucky breaks as though she were telling the plot of a Ginger Rogers movie: “After the audition for Company I was walking out of the stage door when this guy called my name. He said, ‘Oh, you’re here. We were going to fly you in but they wouldn’t pay for it.’”
Fuller looked at him in amazement, but before she could speak the man blurted out, “I’m the stage manager of Applause. I’m sure Ron Field will want to see you.”
“Fine,” she said, still taken aback.
How did this man know who she was and what she could do? Fuller’s nonchalant reply: “I don’t know, darlin’. I guess I was somebody.” Perhaps the stage manager had seen her in Barefoot in the Park, her first Broadway show. Or in Cabaret. In it, as Jill Haworth’s understudy, Fuller went on more than a hundred times. (“I developed an Eve Harrington reputation,” she says, “because I was the understudy who kept taking over. But unlike Eve, I was a nice person— as far as I knew, anyway.”) Besides her stage work, Fuller had appeared on television in The Edge of Night and other programs in the sixties.
She auditioned for Ron Field without having read all of the script of Applause. Everything was rushed because she had to catch a plane back to Los Angeles to do a pilot for a comedy series. She read the script on the plane. Her reaction: “I thought, Oh God, don’t let me get this because I don’t have the nerve to turn it down but I don’t think it’s very good.”
While shooting the comedy pilot Fuller got a call from a friend, a theatrical agent who had attended the gypsy run-through of Applause. He told her, “The show is fabulous, but the girl playing Eve—don’t think she’s there yet.” Penny was relieved. At least she had escaped the agonizing decision of whether to take the role or turn it down.
A few weeks later she was at the hairdresser’s. “My head was in the sink and they were rinsing out the soap,” she says, sounding like Ginger Rogers again. “Someone told me I had a call from my manager. They handed me the phone while my head was still in the sink. My manager announced, ‘They want you to fly to Baltimore tonight to consider replacing McAfee in Applause.’”
With her hair still damp she dashed home and threw clothes into a suitcase. In Baltimore, Larry Kasha’s secretary gave her a ticket for the next performance. Penny jumped when she saw the location. “You can’t put me in the second row. Those gypsies will see me and they’ll know why I’m here!” The secretary suggested, “Can’t you tell them you’re visiting an aunt in Baltimore?”
“Not with my reputation as Miss Replacement,” Fuller exclaimed. But it was the only seat left in the house. “So I go in, sit down, and of course the very first thing, one of the gypsies does a pirouette, sees me, and I could see him see me, and I could just feel him telling everybody backstage, ‘Penny Fuller’s in the audience!’”
When the performance was over Penny knew exactly what was wrong. “My job was literally to be the villain. As yet, Margo wasn’t really threatened.”
Next day, a Sunday, Penny agreed to replace McAfee. She met Lauren Bacall. On Monday she had a music rehearsal, Tuesday a rehearsal with understudies, Wednesday she learned a new dance from Diane McAfee, Thursday she rehearsed with the actual cast, Friday there was a dress rehearsal with orchestra and lights, and at some weary hour of the afternoon Larry Kasha brought her a sandwich. Groggy from fatigue, Penny said to herself, “This is the pinnacle, honey. It doesn’t get any bigger than this, when the producer brings you a tuna salad on rye.”
Penny Fuller seldom gets the jitters. That Friday night, however, waiting to go on, she panicked: “I’m about to play to a theatre full of people, in a show that I’ve had two rehearsals for.” Her next thought was more drastic: “If I get up right now and leave, nobody can stop me.” But the next moment it was too late. She heard the announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, at this performance the part of Eve Harrington will be played by Penny Fuller.”
At that instant she had a flashback to childhood. “When I was a little girl in Lumberton, North Carolina, Photoplay magazine ran a contest called ‘Come to Hollywood.’ I didn’t win. But I remembered that the magazine had three speeches for contest finalists. One was Ann Blyth’s thing from Our Very Own, which was about being adopted. I don’t remember what the second one was, but the third was Anne Baxter’s ‘Eddie and the Brewery’ scene from All About Eve. I had worked on that speech upstairs in my bedroom when I was ten years old. And now here I was, about to go onstage and play ‘Eddie and the Brewery,’ even though in Applause Eve’s boyfriend is no longer called Eddie and he’s not a soldier in World War II but in Vietnam.”
Penny Fuller vows it was the flashback that kept her from running out that night. “I said, ‘I gotta see if I can do this.’”
And she gave the performance of her life—in Diane McAfee’s clothes. “But Diane’s shoes didn’t fit me so I put a pair of gloves in them to keep them on. One of them flew off during a big number, so I just kicked the other one off and made it a theatrical moment.”
Next day all agreed: Penny Fuller was silicone injected into a sagging show. Lee Roy Reams says, “Diane McAfee and Penny Fuller are both friends of mine, but I have to say that changing the actress who played Eve made a big difference. Penny played the role as a woman. Diane played it as a girl. And a girl was no competition for someone of Bacall’s stature.”
No doubt Fuller was a more convincing Eve Harrington because, at age thirty, she was older than twenty-one-year-old Diane McAfee. She was also a more experienced actress.
Knowing that her portrayal of Eve must be unlike Anne Baxter’s in the film, Penny set herself a difficult task in the role. “I wanted to fool the audience at first, make them believe they didn’t remember the story right. I wanted them to think, Why, Eve really is a sweet girl.”
* * *
After Baltimore, the show moved to Detroit for a couple of weeks. There the reviews were much better. Next stop was New York for previews. And then March 30, 1970: opening night.
Perhaps a line from the Judy Garland song ran through Lauren Bacall’s head as that evening approached: “Until you’ve played the Palace, you haven’t played at all.” She had been in show business most of her life, her film work had made her famous, her dreams had come true—and yet how often Lauren Bacall had wondered whether she might
end up like Bette Davis and so many other ladies in decline, doing third-rate pictures and tepid TV adaptations of schlocky best-sellers.
The Palace Theatre, at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street, was sold out. But were they coming to praise Applause or to bury it? After all, as one commentator pointed out, “It was the tenth musical of a long and dismal season, the year of one-word titles—Coco and Jimmy and Purlie and Georgy and Gantry.” Perhaps the show’s prospects were actually raised by such lackluster arrivals. The same commentator asserted that “it looked especially good at the end of a dreary week that brought both Minnie’s Boys and Look to the Lilies.” And Applause had time to establish itself as a smash before Company, that other one-word hit of the season, opened a month later.
Opening night was everything they hoped for. The show unfolded without a hitch. Curiously, no one connected with Applause remembers exactly who attended, though Betty Comden neatly evokes the splash: “Whoever first-nighters are, they came. Many famous people, many famous names.”
When Lauren Bacall made her entrance the applause was unstoppable.
At intermission Ron Field dared to be optimistic. He was a worrier, but—the show was actually going very well. No one forgot a lyric, flubbed a dance step, or missed a cue. Set changes glided with perfect precision; nothing stuck. If Ron superstitiously anticipated disaster in Act II, he was off. Nothing untoward took place. Then at last, the finale.
Field staged the curtain calls like a musical number. First the company took their calls, then stood in a V formation with arms outstretched toward Bacall, who was upstage center, at the apex of the V. Her back was to the audience. On cue she swirled around, flung her arms high in the air, and headed downstage. The audience adored her, loved her performance, loved her bow. She and all the others came back for repeated curtain calls.
