Everything Was Possible

by Ted Chapin

  Before rehearsals, the “sweetening” tapes for “Who’s That Woman?” and “Loveland” were rerecorded. As the company gathered around the foot mikes for a brief rehearsal, Hal Hastings reminded everyone of the notes in the final chord of “Who’s That Woman?” Ethel Barrymore Colt lost her note and, reaching into her past as a recitalist, asked, “What was the penultimate note of that chord?” It seemed so in character. There wasn’t time, unfortunately, to test the new tape with the orchestra before the evening performance, and, of course, the synchronization was chaotic. Everyone kept on dancing, and much of the audience probably had no idea anything was amiss.

  Since Michael Bennett wasn’t around, Hal could rehearse whatever he wanted. He chose to run the Prologue and to try a slight rearrangement of the dialogue around “In Buddy’s Eyes.” Jim and Steve also took the opportunity to work with the actors directly. Jim had brought a new line for Yvonne for her entrance. He had two ideas, both of which were tried at different performances: “This reminds me of alumni day at Forest Lawn” and “I got my start on this very spot, four score and seven years ago.” These were to replace her lines “Act? Me, act? I just go out and let fly and heaven help the leading man.” This became a pattern with Jim—bringing in small line changes, many of which were tweaks to make lines land better. Large-scale libretto changes didn’t seem to be under consideration. Steve took Hal Hastings, Phil Fradkin, the Old Four, and the Young Four into one of the lounges for a rehearsal of “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” Steve was unhappy with the performance, which had gotten musically sloppy. He said he wanted “to hear the downbeats” and told Gene, “It is important that the first section be as square as possible. You tend to be a little off the beat.” Hal corroborated the places where Gene and the others tended to get sloppy. The second section, conversely, was “too sharp. It should be more of delight and not as if someone is challenging you—it shouldn’t have the feeling of recollecting a blow.” Steve said that as soon as Gene sings “I remember, me and Ben . . .” the audience “should feel that the song is an ‘up.’ ” He wanted Alexis more wry when she sings “One of them was borrowed and the other was blue.” Then he wanted them to anticipate the “down in a minute” section, not to do it square but rather with anticipation. His direction was precise, detailed, and brilliant—he knew exactly what he wanted. The session may have gone a bit over the heads of the performers, but they were game.

  Saturday, February 27

  The matinee was nearly sold out, with only a few seats left in the extreme corners of the house. A good sign. I stayed backstage to watch the routines that had developed during the running of recent performances. Starting at the half-hour call, the stage turns into a veritable gymnasium. Dancers and actors are stretching against parts of the set, using the levels as supports and the pipes in the movable units as ballet barres. John McMartin marked through his number, muttering to himself. Going up on his lines on Thursday had spooked him, and he wanted to pace himself ahead of time. Ursula, the tallest showgirl, the one who is preset when the curtain rises, walked through some of her blocking trying to figure out how best to deal with the heavy, beaded train to her dress. She has to maintain a ghostlike aloofness, but at one performance the train had gotten caught on some of the rubble in the set. Freeing it up while remaining in the ghost reality wasn’t easy. She was trying to find a foolproof path that would minimize the possibility of its happening again. Hal Hastings sat on one of the levels of the set in his white tie and tails, talking with the stage managers. Several members of the company wandered out on the stage, said hello, asked the stage managers some questions, and wandered off. John Grigas, as stage manager number three, went around to all the dressing rooms collecting “valuables”—wallets, jewelry, whatever—that needed to be put in a safe during the performance. Once “places” was called, Fritz Holt stood, headphone on, at his desk immediately off stage right, and George Martin manned his desk on stage left. John Grigas was now arching the occasional eyebrow when escorting the same older women to their same entrance spots.

  During the performance, most actors kept to themselves as they prepared to make their entrances. Alexis and John were of this school. In fact, Alexis preferred to stay in her dressing room until right before entering, and she preferred everyone to be quiet around her. One night she said she must have scared one of the showgirls to death by turning around and telling her to shut up. Dorothy, on the other hand, had no problem socializing right until the moment she was to go on, whether the scene about to be performed was comic or emotional. At one moment when she finished a scene with Ben and wandered upstage to one of the party tables, I could see that she huddled right in with the rest of the actors, giggling along with them.

  An intercom system brought sound to all the dressing rooms on every level. In addition to piping in the show, the “squawk box” system allowed for announcements by the stage managers, who would give warnings and cues, and sometimes specific calls to actors who might not be on the “deck,” ready for their entrances. Wardrobe people were stationed at strategic spots backstage, either for quick changes or, in the case of the showgirls, to assist with the large costumes. Mostly those actors with costume changes had enough time to go back to their dressing rooms. On Follies, only Alexis and Dorothy had individual dressers.

  During intermission, some costumes were taken from the stage to the dressing rooms or down to the wardrobe department for cleaning or repair. Since the set didn’t change between acts, there wasn’t a lot of activity during the intermission—a good thing, since by the time the show opened in New York, the intermission was gone.

  In between shows I went to dinner with Yvonne and an actor who had done Hello, Dolly! with her on a tour. With two young potential gigolos on her arms, she downed two large martinis before dinner and generally enjoyed being the center of attention. That night, however, when it came time for her entrance for “Fox Trot,” she forgot to step onto the platform that brought her onstage. I was in the stage managers’ office on the fifth floor, typing some script changes and listening to the performance over the intercom, when I heard some very odd ad-libs—” Hey, Carlotta, come on out here, we want to hear your number!” Later I learned that she turned offstage to Pete Feller and yelled, “Hey, I missed the boat! Bring it back!” And so he did, reversing the platform until she could step easily on. Apart from the missed cue, her good spirits made for a carefree rendition of the song, which she sang correctly for the first time in several performances.

  Sunday, February 28

  Rehearsal call was for “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” Out of concern for how the song was coming across, Steve changed the last four lines of the lyric. The original lines:

  Though we know now life is immense,

  Full of wars and marriages and things that make sense,

  Time was when one of the major events

  Was waiting for the girls upstairs.

  were changed to:

  Life was fun but oh, so intense.

  Everything was possible and nothing made sense

  Back there when one of the major events

  Was waiting for the girls upstairs.

  There were people in the company who couldn’t understand why the change was made. The change placed the lyric in the past instead of the present, and it had been pulled off deftly. Another example of the puzzle man at work.

  The Young Four were not called at the beginning of rehearsal. After the new lyric had been run and Hal had adjusted the staging of the dialogue going into the song, including cutting four stinging chords that had introduced the number, the Old Four got up onstage to run the entire song, with fixes. When they got to the transition section when the young counterparts appear, the Young Four were just arriving in the theater. As they heard the transition, they started singing from wherever they were while making their way to the stage—Virginia Sandifur and Harvey Evans dashing in from the wrong side of the stage, Marti Rolph running down the aisle of the theater and crawling o
ver the orchestra pit, and Kurt bouncing on from stage right. Somehow, they all made it to their spots right on cue. Everyone laughed; it was one of those spontaneous moments that could never have been rehearsed and would never be repeated.

  Michael showed up back from New York, refreshed and ready to work. He had watched the show on Saturday night, and was poised to get started. His first order of business was to cut the middle section of “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” Despite Yvonne’s efforts at portraying the low-voiced football-playing jock and the high-voiced poet, and despite her game attempt at singing a trio all by herself, the middle section now became her simply pointing at two different men in the company, dancing with each one briefly—a box step only—and rejecting them both. It needed only a simple line change, from “I can’t find him” to “I find him—you!” and then she plucks two guys from the party. Michael had her choose John J. Martin and Dick Latessa, who were still playing “Sally” and “Margie” in drag in “Buddy’s Blues,” and it was suspected they were picked because it was doubtful they would remain in the “Buddy’s Blues” number much longer. By this time, Yvonne had discovered there was a big laugh to be gotten in the line “Remember when they used to dance at college?” by emphasizing, for all it was worth, the word “dance”—and waiting for a reaction. She got it every time.

  Another fix made and rehearsed was the rearrangement of the Montage. Clearly, “Broadway Baby” was the hit, and one of the high points of the entire show. To sandwich it in between the throwaway “Rain on the Roof” and Fifi’s “Ah, Paris!” was to put it at a decided disadvantage. “Rain on the Roof” was never intended as much more than a vignette—the stage direction from an early script says: “the number goes as quickly as it came, almost as if it never happened.” As the older characters emerged in the various early drafts of the script, the sequence saw “Broadway Baby” added as well as a new song for a French chanteuse, titled “Hello, Doughboy.” The latter only got as far as one version of the script. The lyrics were about a French tart imploring her GI beau to take her back to the good old U.S.A. now that the war was over:

  Cheri,

  Now the war is finis.

  Hail the land of the free!

  Pin your medal on,

  Take me back to Oregon,

  Pin your medal on—

  (By the way, my name’s Yvonne)—

  Pin your medal on

  Me!

  That song somehow turned into “Ah, Paris!” As the Montage was assembled and rehearsed, the ending with all three songs together never quite worked. Now the task was to switch the order, placing “Ah! Paris” in the middle (and cutting its first verse) while moving “Broadway Baby” to the end. Steve, Michael, and Hal Hastings devised a new ending, in which the three songs would appear to come together, building to a rousing trio finale. This was rehearsed on both Sunday and Monday so it could go into the performance Monday night. Obviously, it made both Fifi and Ethel nervous, but they had no choice. Somehow when Fifi became aware of the shift of order and the elimination of the first verse of her song, she grew very quiet. Ethel simply did what she was told. But despite this strengthening of her song, she was troubled once again, about her salary. She hadn’t acted on her urge to ask for a raise while the show was in rehearsal, but now she was bothered enough to speak up. She told me what she was making—$225 per week plus an additional twenty-five dollars to cover out-of-town expenses. Somehow she had found out that Fifi was making $400 per week, and that galled. (To put this in perspective, Alexis was making $1,500; Gene, $2,000; Dorothy, $1,000; John, $1,250; and Yvonne, $1,000.) She decided to go and speak with the company manager and say that she needed a fifty-dollar-per-week increase or she would have to leave the show—she would stay until a replacement was found, but she just couldn’t remain, it was too insulting. After she had approached company manager John Caruso and asked him to take her request to the general manager, Carl Fisher, Ruthie came over to tell her that Hal had overheard the conversation and that he was giving her a raise effective immediately, not the fifty dollars she had requested but a hundred. That pleased her. On the lighter side, she mentioned that both Soupy Sales and Jack Cassidy had been spotted in the audience on Saturdaynight and that she’d heard a rumor Hal was not happy with John McMartin and was thinking of replacing him with Cassidy. That seemed unlikely; Cassidy was an old friend of the Princes, and I was sure that that was the entire reason for his being in attendance. Ethel also said there were rumors that Soupy Sales was having an affair with one of the dancers, and she wondered aloud if Sales couldn’t just replace Fifi.

  Fiji D’Orsay—a feather duster in sensible shoes.

  Monday, March 1

  Hal began the rehearsal by addressing the full company. “We’ve got a lot of text that’s going to be changed, and I’ve just seen six to eight pages which we’ll try to get staged tomorrow. What I want to say, though, is that we are in a grace period during which we can take out the flab by really performing the material that is there and pruning what isn’t essential. I’m going to ask the stage managers to be on top of the lines in the script and make you pick up any lapses.”

  He then ran some small changes in the Prologue, once again trying to coax a stronger performance out of Ed Steffe. Michael changed a few steps at the end of “Uptown, Downtown,” gave some notes for “Live, Laugh, Love,” telling the dancers not to react to Ben’s breakdown, and announced that Suzanne Rogers and Rita O’Connor were going to be taking over the roles of Sally and Margie in “Buddy’s Blues.” No longer would the two roles be played in drag.

  Monday was busy. I had no access to a Xerox machine the way I had in New York, so I had some serious typing to do to produce enough copies of revised script pages. I could make around ten good copies from one fat batch of carbons, but because I often had to distribute copies to more than ten people, I would have to type the pages out again, sometimes as many as three times. Late in the afternoon, Gene Nelson asked me to send an urgent telegram authorizing his wife to be admitted to a hospital in Los Angeles for a routine but necessary medical procedure. I had to find a Western Union office in Boston that stayed open after six, and then when I returned to the theater I was asked to take Mike Misita, one of the dancers, to the hospital because he was ill and no one could tell what was the matter. Knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to perform that night, Bob Avian made adjustments to the dances and made the decision that the Vincent and Vanessa dance team would have no ghost figures in “Bolero d’Amour,” since no one knew Mike’s role as Young Vincent well enough to attempt it. Graciela (Young Vanessa) was relieved. Simple adjustments were made in other places where Mike had solo bits—mostly in the Prologue and in “Loveland.”

  The performance went well, for the most part. The shift in the Montage worked better than anyone could have expected. And “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” was at least shorter, although Yvonne wasn’t happy with the hand she received at the end; she sensed it was measurably less enthusiastic than what she was used to. Alexis slipped and fell in the dance section of “Who’s That Woman?” She picked herself up, kept smiling, and went on dancing. Later, she explained that she feels it’s vitally important for a performer to get right up if something happens onstage that might make the audience nervous. Keep smiling, keep going, and then once you’re off, look to see if you’re hurt. She seemed to be uninjured, but she did admit that she wasn’t feeling well in general, which may have contributed to her concentration not being at peak.

  I had an interesting test in my role as gofer. Richard Avedon was scheduled to do a Follies photo shoot for Vogue at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel after the performance, so I was dispatched in mid-afternoon to rent a panel truck large enough to hold several of the ornate showgirl costumes. The only place I could find to park it until the end of the performance was an indoor parking garage that turned out to be so tight that I came within an inch or two of getting the truck stuck in the circular ramp going from one level to another. After the performance, I had to back th
e truck into “Allen’s Alley” and wait until a rack of showgirl costumes and wigs were loaded in. The call was for six of the women—two of the real Vegas showgirls and four dancers from the ensemble. As all these expensive costumes were loaded in, with my help, George Green, the show’s Master Propertyman and quite a character, laughed and said, “United Truckers better not find out you’re doing this.” I wasn’t sure how funny that comment was meant to be; I was simply doing as I was asked. But it did strike me as a little odd that with all the union jurisdictions around every aspect of the show, here I was driving a truck full of costumes to a photo shoot. I did, however, get to stay and watch the shoot, which was fascinating. A large roll of white paper, maybe fifteen feet across, hung from one side of the room to the other, allowing enough space for the dancers to stand in front and Avedon and his assistants to move freely in front of them. First, he had Suzanne Rogers and Rita O’Connor dress in their “Who’s That Woman?” ghost costumes and go through the dance steps in place. Avedon kept snapping photographs, and when he came to the end of a roll he simply handed the camera to an assistant, who handed him another camera. As Avedon kept going, the assistant detached the removable film-back from the first camera and replaced it with a new one. Next, Kathie Dalton and Margot Travers, two of the Bennett dancers who also played showgirls, were asked to strike various poses. These two women had great style and they looked gorgeous in their dresses, one white and one black. It was harder going with the two actual Vegas showgirls, who seemed to have no idea how to pose. Avedon had to be unusually precise with them—“Now, can’t you do something with that arm?” Because they were both so tall and were wearing such large headdresses, there were problems with height as well. At the end, Avedon expressed surprise that they were such trouble, since he had assumed they would be the easiest to shoot.