Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  She relishes this label of versatility.

  “People say Suzanne Farrell is a lyrical dancer. That’s nice but I don’t want to do only ‘Swan Lake.’ I don’t want to be typed. I love doing ‘Barocco’ first and then ‘Slaughter’ because I’m saying: ‘See, audience, you thought I could only do that. I can do this too.’”

  Has success spoiled Roberta Sue then?

  “Maybe I am spoiled, like my mother says. She says I was spoiled as a child, but I don’t think I’m spoiled. I had a certain amount of luck, but I worked hard.”

  Her mother took her off the street, down from that tree when she was eight and sent her to ballet class in the hometown. The teacher recognized the talent, the gifted talent, and wrote Balanchine’s School of American Ballet suggesting an audition for Roberta Sue. Diana Adams, the ballerina, came to Cincinnati and agreed that this girl, then fourteen, should go to New York for an audition. She auditioned—“For Mr. B.”—on her fifteenth birthday, won a scholarship from the Ford Foundation to study at the Balanchine school, and in November 1961 joined the company of the New York City Ballet.

  The talent—how did it emerge, and why?

  “I was rather normal,” Miss Farrell said, sitting in a backstage room at the Saratoga theater and exuding longitude of hair, face, finger and limb, but not much latitude—five foot seven, she weighs only 108 pounds. “I wasn’t sold on ballet in the beginning. I wasn’t crazy about it, didn’t want to be a ballerina. When we would start working on the recitals I was always the boy. Always the prince, never the princess, because I was always the tallest. I wondered, ‘This is what ballet is all about? A career of lifting other girls?’”

  But ah, wait. Then Roberta Sue got her first tutu, and performed for the first time on a legitimate stage.

  “I looked out, and the music and the auditorium and the audience hit me, and I said ‘This is what I want to be.’”

  She worked, read books on ballet, formed the New York City Ballet Junior with her friends, which consisted of slumber parties at which girls talked about ballet and saw “who could jump higher, whose leg could go higher, who could do more pirouettes.”

  “I never saw the New York City Ballet,” she said, “until 1959 when I played hooky and went to Bloomington to see it.”

  She was thirteen then and remembers no particular dancer, only that all the people on stage, “even in the corps,” danced. “If I were to stay in the corps all my life,” she said, “I knew I’d get to dance, not be just a tree.”

  So when she did get into the New York City Ballet as a member of the corps she stayed in it only ten months, a short-timer, and then got her first solo.

  “Mr. B. cast me in the part but left town and didn’t see me. It was in ‘Serenade’ and everybody said I was very good. Even the other ballerina said I was very good, but I couldn’t go up and say ‘George, everybody says I was very good.’”

  But no doubt someone did, for Balanchine cast her next in “Barocco.” And after that the ballet mistress of the company came and said, “Mr. Balanchine wants you to learn Titania in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’” And Miss Suzanne Farrell (a name out of the phone book) said: “T-t-t-who?” and thought the ballet mistress was kidding. But she wasn’t. And after Titania came two ballets, “Meditation,” and “Movement for Piano and Orchestra.”

  “Mr. B. choreographed them for me,” said Miss Farrell, “and I thought: ‘I guess he likes me.’” That was in 1963 and since then it has been as much stardom as a ballerina can get in a company full of such illustrious performers as Melissa Hayden and Jacques d’Amboise and Edward Villella and Patricia McBride and Marnee Morris.

  The preference Balanchine shows for Miss Farrell is not solely professional. “The last two weeks in June,” she said, “Mr. B. and I went to Europe for a gastronomic tour—strictly for the food in Paris. He needed the rest and we love French food.” The trip dropped her out of her daily routine and so when she opened in the first few performances of the Saratoga season she felt inept.

  “My first couple of ‘Nutcrackers’ and my first ‘Barocco’ were pretty bad,” she said. “It may not have looked so bad to some but it did to me. ‘Farrell,’ I said, ‘how did you ever get where you are?’”

  The question was such a good one that we asked for an answer. And her explanation of what is really inexplicable is this: that it is a combination of luck, work, God-given talent. “And you also have to have a brain. Not an IQ brain, but brain in the common sense.”

  And it involved perseverance: “If I was going to do something I was going to do it well. If I’m not good at a thing I won’t do it.”

  It involved single-mindedness of purpose: “I was going to school in New York and, when it became obvious to me that ballet was going to be my career, I said, ‘Forget the diploma and go to ballet. You can go to school later.’”

  Also it involved George Balanchine.

  “All I could think of,” said Miss Farrell, “was how desperately I wanted to please Mr. Balanchine. Sometimes he wouldn’t even look at me, and I’d think, ‘He doesn’t like me anymore.’ But I understand what he wants, and what he means when he says something. Other kids in class hear what he says and don’t understand, or can’t do what he says, or don’t want to. I can. And I want to.”

  And the future? That is as mystical as the past, centering evermore on Mr. B.

  “I want to stay as long as I can in this company with Mr. B.,” she said. “He’s the greatest. If I can’t be with him I don’t think I want to be a dancer. I don’t think. But if I did, I would continue to do Balanchine ballets, promote Balanchinism. If he isn’t around there wouldn’t be a certain amount of magic in the air.”

  1968

  The Cotton Club Stomp

  The Cotton Club, the movie: could it (could any movie) really be worth $47 million? Could it have escalated to that from a mere $25 million during the year I worked on it? Will it be the comeback film for Francis Coppola? (Yes.) What’s a novelist like me doing in this movie, or in the movies at all? Doesn’t Hollywood poach novelists for lunch at the Polo Lounge? Shouldn’t I have stayed home in Albany, unpoached, unpoachable? Think of Scott Fitzgerald, who didn’t stay home. Think of Nathanael West, who squandered his too brief days writing clunkers. Think of James Agee, who died of movies (and gin and cigarettes). Think of it.

  David Thomson, a critic and fiction writer in San Francisco, thought about it and asked me why I was bothering to write movies. I said I was having a fine time, didn’t expect much, wasn’t naive. He smiled, said that when characters in my novels say they aren’t naive you know something fearful is about to happen to them. It may be that I’ll one day want to strangle the entire population of Beverly Hills. Intimations of this are already afloat on the easterly breezes. But so far the game is well worth all the candles I burned collaborating with Coppola.

  The beginning, in mid-July 1983, was an offer to come to New York and write dialogue for him. I qualify as a lifelong movie freak and erstwhile movie critic; I admired Coppola’s work in The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, and I thought The Godfather I and II, which he and Mario Puzo wrote from Puzo’s whiz-bang novel, were peerless modern films. So I checked into a hotel on Central Park South and went to work with this mythic character who earns his myth the hard way.

  We talked for two days about the story, and we began the survival pattern that would continue for weeks: noshing on imports from Zabar’s, DDL’s deli, and the Yellowbird saloon in Astoria, sipping Vinoforte from Coppola’s winery, Irish whiskey from you-know-where, and orange juice by the gallon. We planned to talk longer, but when the choreographer came in to discuss the script there was nothing new for him to see. So while Coppola coped with things musical, I stepped into the next room, wrote Scene One, and off we went. Out of an IBM Selectric, a pile of books on Harlem, gangland, and jazz, out of a phonograph playing Duke Ellington from morning till dawn, there came, in ten days, a raunchy, eighty-two-page, unfinished monster called the Rehearsal Draft,
the script the actors worked with for three weeks.

  Coppola had set up shop in a sizable but ramshackle second-story suite in the Kaufman Astoria Studios, a block-square concrete bastion of movie history where the Cotton Club’s 1929 interior was being sumptuously reconstituted by production designer Richard Sylbert. The suite, which was being somewhat renovated (the roof was leaking seriously onto our noshables), had been in use since the 1920s—by legend, as dressing space for Gloria Swanson when she made Queen Kelly with Erich von Stroheim, for the Marx Brothers when they made The Cocoanuts, and so on.

  But not until the Cotton Club crowd moved in had it been the arena of such rarefied expectations, such a stratospheric budget, such palpable rancor, scandalous rumor, public babble, contagious frenzy, and mass gastrocolonic anxiety. A few weeks into the project, Richard Gere passed through my office, nonplussed. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “Everybody’s afraid they’re going to be fired.”

  I wasn’t afraid. I was too new to the world of movies to be anything but an amused and earnest observer. Gere was not afraid either. He was the star. But he wasn’t a happy star. He had script approval in his contract, and so far he hadn’t approved of much of the script. I can’t blame him. The script then was a peculiar document. Only Coppola and I knew what was really going on with it, and sometimes I wasn’t too sure about Coppola. Or me either.

  Coppola had been hired by producer Robert Evans, who started the film from Jim Haskins’s documentary picture book The Cotton Club. Evans, who originally planned to direct the film himself, asked Coppola to rewrite the early scripts created by Mario Puzo and rewritten somewhat by Evans. Coppola chose to start anew, and the Puzo-Evans scripts were set aside for reasons that preceded my arrival. Coppola signed on as director after writing two scripts, and then I came in.

  The subject we were dealing with was this preeminent Jazz Age and Depression-era nightclub which existed from 1923 to 1935 at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, the black neighborhood that was a parallel carnival to the Great White Way of Broadway. But the club had a most ironically exclusionary racial structure. It was patronized only by whites, employed only black help and black entertainers, was owned by white gangsters (principal figures: Owney Madden, a Liverpool Irishman, and George “Big Frenchy” DeMange), who allowed in no black customers, with some exceptions—prestigious blacks, performers’ relatives, black racketeers, a limit of twelve—who were relegated to the worst booths.

  The white customers who after the crash of ’29 could still afford a $2.50 cover charge per person came in evening clothes, from abroad, from royal circles, from high political perches, from Hollywood, Broadway, and gangland. Solvent tourists from Cleveland were also admitted. Some thought of their excursion into Harlem as “slumming,” but that was rich man’s contumely. This so-called slum was producing a major shelf in the pantheon of black entertainment: Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ethel Waters, Lena Home, Jimmie Lunceford, Lucky Millinder, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson. Harlem was wide open, very wide, all night long. Satchmo, Billie Holiday, Fats Waller were playing in clubs—Connie’s Inn, Pod’s and Jerry’s, the Savoy, Small’s Paradise. But the Cotton Club was supreme.

  The Cotton Club Girls were a major draw, categorized as “high yellow.” Near-white miscegenational beauties—mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, tall (five-foot-eight minimum), elegantly but scantily clad sex objects (stride bikinis beneath transparent chiffon, fishnet hose)—they were exotic temptations to the racial voyeurs, in a phrase, “tall, tan, and terrific.” The club was a “window on the jungle … a cabin in the cotton” which those with passports might safely and pleasurably enter.

  A Cotton Club Girl, Estrellita Brooks Morse, came to the set one day during rehearsal. Tall, light-skinned, her solid-gray hair coiffed in waves, dressed to the teeth, she was, in her late sixties, still a knockout. “My God,” she said of Dick Sylbert’s set, “this is just like the Cotton Club!”

  She spoke of her performing days, the girls wearing Wheatcroft body makeup to cover veins or blemishes: “Everybody was looking right up you. You couldn’t have no marks.” She remembered the gangster owners pampering the girls: Big Frenchy always soft-spoken, Owney Madden sending champagne backstage. She remembered celebrity customers, and George Raft treated like family when he turned up.

  The Cotton Club Girls, along with the “ponies” (shorter dancers of darker hue), the Cotton Club Boys, and the musicians, were Harlem royalty. Howard (Stretch) Johnson, a Cotton Club Boy who became a professor of sociology and was the film’s technical adviser, spoke of his excitement at being catapulted from a small-town environment into the heart of the black entertainment world. But he added: “The Cotton Club radicalized my perspective. I saw the close connection among high society, the mob, and the politicians, and that there was not much chance to make it without their consent.”

  Our script sought to reflect such things, matching a pair of black dancers, the Williams brothers (Maurice and Gregory Hines), who perform at the club, with a pair of Irish brothers, Dixie and Vincent Dwyer (Richard Gere and Nicolas Cage), who work for Dutch Schultz (James Remar), a beer baron waging war on Harlem numbers bankers. Gregory Hines falls in love with a Cotton Club Girl (Lonette McKee) who can pass for white. Gere falls for Dutch Schultz’s mistress (Diane Lane).

  What we created was a gangster story about race and subjugation, about rising in the world through show business, all this pervaded by music and dancing. What we also had was six hundred people building sets, creating costumes, arranging music, rehearsing dancers, or just waiting for the script—at a cost of $250,000 a day, a throbbing condition that can put a certain stress on a writer.

  The stress was like deadline pressure in journalism, the copy moving so rapidly from typewriter into word processor that Coppola stood up, pounded the table, and declared: “This is the city desk!” Fourteen-, sixteen-hour workdays were not unusual, and once we worked thirty-four hours without sleep. Coppola called this sort of stint “the death trip.” From July 15 to August 22, when shooting began, we produced twelve scripts, including five during one forty-eight-hour, nonstop weekend. We lost track of the number of scripts we turned out, but it was somewhere between thirty and forty.

  A new script, by my definition, is one with major new dynamics, and we had more of those than any writer needs. One of Coppola’s methods of rewriting was to lift the climax of reel six, say, and put it in reel two. This does things to reel three that you probably hadn’t counted on, and also leaves you with a problematical hole between reels five and seven. At times he would ravage the entire script, insert long-dead sections of old scripts, and offer up an unrecognizable new document. Work would then begin anew to make it make sense.

  This created such confusion that I wrote in my notes: “If this has any coherence it will be a miracle of ingenuity.” But one can also argue that the ingenuity lurked in the major transpositions he made that led to intensification of the dramatic line.

  The continuously unfinished, unfathomable script vexed the production department and created an army of critics and second-guessers who read each new version as if it were the last word. Coppola viewed each version as raw material. Like the actors, he and I were in rehearsal for the final product.

  “When does this scene take place?” I asked him after one major reshuffling.

  “I don’t know the whens,” he said.

  In retrospect it seems akin to writing a novel that turns out to be a short story. Any number of scenes and characters were created only to be later demolished. Coppola decided after one conversation with an Irish twist to it that we should include James Joyce in the story. He handed his aide, Tony Dingman, his copy of Ulysses and said, “Find us something.” Tony riffled the pages, stopped at page 67, where Leopold Bloom thinks about his daughter, Milly, and recalls Boylan’s song:

  Those girls, those girls,

  Those lovely seaside girls.

  We had no seaside in The Cotton Club, so I invented an Irish we
dding at which the best man toasts the bride, from Atlantic City, and quotes the song. Gere was playing cornet with a rickytick band at the wedding, which was the excuse for the scene. Coppola decided I should play the best man because I look rather Irish from the side and front. I revved up for this, but then in a revised script not only was I missing but so was Joyce. Gere remained, however.

  Concision is the operative word with Coppola, who will intercut even a short scene with another one to accelerate the pace. I thought I was already a concise writer, but after Astoria I created a screenwriting axiom: what you wrote yesterday, cut in half today.

  I brought to this new form the logic of a storyteller, if I may presume myself to be logical, a strongly visual imagination conditioned from early childhood by the movies, a penchant for dialogue, and this matter of concision, which I think of as journalistic knowledge. “Get the story in the first paragraph” is the same advice I got from a screenwriter: “Jump into the bottom of the scene.” The recurring need is to home in on the significant action, find the kernel of continuity, dramatize it, pare it to the bone, move along, and do it again.

  In film the poetry lurks in the ensemble effect—the script’s architecture, the cameraman’s eye, the designer’s sense of color and form, the actor’s narrowed glance, the bare bones of a single line, an insistence on action, an absence of serenity, complexity banished to avoid confusing the mass audience. When it works well it is a lovely gift to the world, but it has its limitations. Since we were fiddling with Ulysses, I remarked that no movie will ever approach Joyce’s complexity. Coppola retorted that we are only at the beginning of cinema, that future technology will reduce moviemaking costs to penny-ante figures compared with today’s blockbuster costs, and that this was the avenue to poetry and complexity. He said a filmmaker might one day inexpensively make a hundred movies to put Ulysses on film. “Cinema could be something unbridled,” he said. “Cinema is more than the little movies we make, more than what we do with it.”