In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  At the Guthrie in Minneapolis, Michael Langham began staging it with the same high style he had done in the past, but the result was a trifle too static for a musical and it was clear that we needed a top choreographer to move it along. Gregson and Alpert pulled the best rabbit out of the hat that money could buy and in a run-through just before the dress rehearsal in walked that miracle man of dance whom Agnes de Mille had let loose upon the world, Michael Kidd. Kidd, best known for his Guys and Dolls (stage and screen) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, among many another gem, was the most original and dynamic of all pre-Fosse innovators. It would have been ideal had Langham been in charge of the text and Kidd the musical numbers, but both men were too individual in their fields, too talented and too proud to settle for that. Kidd laid down the law firmly but with his customary twinkle. “If I’m not in total control, I walk!” He was right, of course. At this stage, the show needed a musical autocrat, so Langham gracefully gave up the reins. The cast, who had loved Langham, now fell in love all over again for M. Kidd—a dynamo who began to move the piece with such energy, vitality and humour, it was very difficult to catch one’s breath.

  The cast was a treat. Leigh Beery, a lovely lady with a most beautiful soprano, played Roxanne. Handsome young Mark Lamos, who later became a well-known stage and opera director, was our Christian. As Cyrano’s old chum Le Bret, a very fine actor from Canada bubbling with charm, James Blendick, exuded such warmth in the role I had to fight extra hard to wrest some of the audience’s sympathy from him. Although I missed the great John Colicos as le Comte de Guiche (he was sadly unavailable), Louis Turenne, who had enormous style, filled his shoes admirably and brought all the required grandeur to the evening. Arnold Soboloff, who excelled in eccentric comedy, gave a rich performance as the baker Ragueneau and all the dancers and supers had the proper period look, not always easy to find on Broadway.

  Michael Lewis, at Kidd’s insistence, kept plying me with new numbers as if I hadn’t enough to do just playing the huge role itself. There was “From Now Till Forever,” of course; then to replace the famous “No Thank You” speech, a solo number called not surprisingly, “No Thank You.” Then the “Nose Song” to be sung during that exhausting duel with Ken Campbell as de Valvert. There was also a duet with Roxanne called “Bergerac” and my favourite, “I Never Loved You,” which I sang as the dying Cyrano. There is no question I was “oversonged,” and my singing voice, never much to write home about anyway, was beginning to feel the strain.

  The old Cyrano

  There is a scene with de Guiche in the play where a masked Cyrano jumps out of a tree, frightens de Guiche and tells him he has just landed from the moon. In the play, the scene works admirably, but in a musical, it is far too long and talky. It is an important one, however, and can’t really be cut—what was one to do? Kidd instinctively knew. “The whole thing should be turned into one insane madly funny song. It’s the eleventh hour and the audience will need to be kept awake. Where’s Anthony?” “Just flew in from Rome,” I said. “You go tell him, he doesn’t always listen to me.” I found Anthony in one of the offices. “We need a song urgently—a short one that replaces the whole moon scene.” There was a long silence. Burgess, who always thought of song lyrics as utterly banal, gave me an icy glare and said, “All right, get out of here—give me ten minutes.” I thought he was kidding, but in approximately ten, he came out of the office and handed me the new number scribbled on a piece of paper. It was just a series of unfinished sentences and it was the wittiest, zaniest, maddest piece of magic in the whole piece. He called it “On the Thither, Thother, Thide of The …” and it stopped the show!

  In Toronto at the Royal Alexandra, where we next took it, I expressed my desire to make my first entrance swinging from a chandelier. This would be fairly risky as I would have to jump from a balcony on the set, catch hold of the chandelier and swing down to the stage below. A crew member offstage would control the rope attached, keeping it at a fairly safe speed so I could land on my two feet as gracefully as possible. This worked pretty well for a few performances, but one night the man in charge had got himself nicely pickled (beware alcoholic stagehands) and let go of the rope at the wrong time. I hit the floor so fast and hard I saw stars for several seconds and kept bouncing up and down rather like the Marx Brothers emerging from the elevator crash. We scrubbed that entrance idea quickly enough and I decided instead to jump onto the stage from an adjacent box in the dress circle—not quite so effective but twice as safe.

  The next city was Boston where we were an instant hit. “Good,” said slave driver Kidd. “We can stay here a few extra weeks and keep working on the show.” Gregson and Alpert kept firing one conductor after another, so whenever I came on to the stage I never knew who was wielding the baton. All of them worked with a different tempi—it was absolutely terrifying. The Palace Theatre, where we were to open in New York, was still fully occupied with another show and a few more weeks went by before it was ready. It was now going into May in New York—very late to open anything—but we finally moved into the famous old building. We had played eight long prosperous weeks in Boston. It had been hugely popular—we could have easily stayed for the whole summer.

  The Palace, if it could talk, would tell tales of its history that could leave one staggering. Of the many great ones who had trodden its boards, it was the “Divine Sarah” (appearing there more than once as part of her many farewell tours), who made it her own. Her dressing room was not on stage level. It was in the basement. She’d picked it as it was the roomiest one in the theatre. But because of her amputation and the fact that she hobbled about on a wooden leg, she had demanded that a lift be installed so she could ascend to the stage with ease. It was still there when I moved in and still operating, believe it or not. I was not in the least intimidated by her ghostly aura. After all, the play was French; I was Cyrano himself, and La Bernhardt had once played Roxanne to my role’s creator, Constant Coquelin. It all seemed perfectly natural and right—like an anniversary of sorts, a celebration of nineteenth-century Théâtre Français where the spirits of both those old superstars could come to my aid.

  Cyrano poster and record cover

  Enfin, everything was now in readiness. The orchestration was placed into the hands of Philip J. Lang, our final music arranger. We now had a permanent conductor who would be there every night and who knew how to deal with actors. Kidd, with his perpetual cheerful countenance and generous heart, rallied us one final time. Burgess and Lewis nervously mumbled their messages of luck and bundled off to the nearest bar. Richard and Alpert & Co. took up their places standing at the back of the stalls biting their nails. It was a Sunday night; the place was packed. I shared the elevator with the Divine Sarah on my way to the stage. Behind the curtain, I heard the rousing overture begin—yes, we’d opened! What a splendid first night. What a reception! Everyone I knew in New York was there. Vince Sardi was the most gracious host. It was a high—Cyrano’s little standard fluttered triumphantly aloft. I was to win the Tony and all the attending prizes; everyone in it was praised. Kidd’s direction, Leigh Beery’s Roxanne, Desmond Heeley’s gorgeous sets, Anthony’s play was golden—but not, alas, the musical. Leigh’s songs were touted—they all had the proper size. Everyone agreed Lewis’s score was charming and elegant, but there was no main “hit” song to really lift it off the ground. There was no “Impossible Dream” as in Man of La Mancha or “This Nearly Was Mine” from South Pacific, and even if there had been, I would not have had the vocal power to sing them. No matter how beautifully Michael Kidd had moved it, the Burgess/Rostand words simply overwhelmed and swept everything before them.

  No, to do a Cyrano musical, one must throw the great Rostand, that scene-stealer, out the window, make a clean sweep and start from scratch. Go back to Cyrano’s own story, Voyages to the Moon and Sun, and begin from there—the real Cyrano, da Vinci’s disciple, who tried to invent the balloon and succeeded, in a way, but like Howard Hughes’s wooden masterpiece,
The Spruce Goose, it did not remain airborne for very long. Start the evening with Cyrano in his balloon, falling out of the sky and crashing to earth. As long as the stagehands stay sober, that would be some entrance for the Great Schnozz, I’ll wager.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHEKHOV AND SIMON, KIPLING AND HUSTON

  Neil Simon is the consummate professional. From gag writer to playwright, he has structured with architectural precision, play after play, sketch after sketch, to achieve phenomenal success. His mathematical formula has hardly ever let him down. He is so successful in fact that as a fairly young playwright he owned his own theatre, the Eugene O’Neill on West Forty-ninth Street. I can think of only two other playwrights in history who boasted a theatre of their own—Richard Brinsley Sheridan in Restoration times, and Edgar Wallace in the early twentieth century—both in London. Now, as I write, there is yet another theatre on the famous West Side that proudly bears the name of Simon.

  A modest unassuming man in life, he nevertheless radiates a confidence in knowing how to get laughs in his sleep and how to design for the stage his particular sort of comedy—very New York Jewish. He knows the “street” and the characters that live on it like the back of his hand. He even talks to you in one-liners. A Neil Simon play on Broadway is almost certain to be a surefire hit.

  However, the general verdict has always been that his work, though not quite of the boulevard variety, is alas, a mite short on substance. But then why must he be anything other than hilariously funny or warmly human? What on earth is wrong with that? But “Doc” Simon was not content to remain so and decided to raise the bar a moitier by adapting several short stories by his hero Anton Chekhov and turning them into a play called The Good Doctor. The leading character is Chekhov himself who talks to the audience, introduces the stories and then becomes a character in each of them. One is high comedy, one is a warm human yarn and one or two are outright farce. For the actors, it is a delightful exercise in versatility.

  His habitual producer and friend Emanuel “Manny” Azenberg, to my pleasant surprise, arranged a meeting with Simon and me at the Russian Tea Room. As most of my theatre life had been spent in the classics, this promised to be a welcome change. I was also highly flattered that the Azenberg-Simon entourage seemed to trust me with their brand of comedy. I got to like them immediately. They were relaxed and funny, and I found Doc so easy to deal with simply because he took on the habit of a fellow worker with no time for personal grievances or the flexing of egos. He loved his profession so totally he allowed nothing to impede progress or stand in his way. “How’s your memory?” he asked me. “Because I change things all the time, and I’ll throw a lot of new stuff at you every night.” “Fine with me,” I swaggered. I could see there was no chance I would ever be bored.

  He was as good as his word. While we rehearsed onstage, we could hear him typing away in a dressing room just behind the flats. Before the end of the day I generally ended up with a new script. During the tryout later in New Haven in front of the audience, I could hear him typing away furiously in the background. It was deafening. Even falling madly in love with Marsha Mason, who was playing the young ingenue roles, didn’t deter him. In fact, it spurred him on. He was his own severest critic. He would slash and delete wonderful material at a second’s notice and give me his rewrites—most of them far superior. However, he sometimes got bored and changed his dialogue purely for the sake of change, a weakness which he was reluctant to conquer. One night, he handed me a long speech he’d just written. “It goes into the second act,” he whispered urgently. “Can you learn it during intermission?” This was becoming a sort of Russian roulette. All at once, he decided to use the small orchestra in the pit for more practical purposes than mere background atmosphere, deleting whole scenes in favour of a song or two. I remember I had to sing at least two numbers, one rather mawkish ditty about “Little Toby Dogs”—for the life of me I could not see what bearing it had on anything at all.

  (clockwise from left) Me, Marsha Mason, René Auberjonois, Barnard Hughes, Frances Sternhagen

  Neither Fuff nor I wanted to live in the city, so we rented an adorable cottage perched right on the Sound at Bell Island, Connecticut. It belonged to Barron Polan who once managed Judy Garland and my ex-wife Tammy. Of course, it was winter now and we needed a car for the daily commute to the theatre. A friend, Dale Sarjent, who had driven me during Cyrano but now had an important job to go to, suggested we employ his sister Deborah. I got myself a big new Cadillac and did just that. Debs was an extremely pretty if a trifle tomboyish girl of eighteen. She was aggressive, efficient, had a lot of anger, was outspoken, fought constantly with her parents, Joan and Alex, had a fierce pride in everything she did, and we liked her a lot. We actually came to love her and she has remained both a friend and an ally to us, the very best kind, over the years. She was a terrific driver—if you liked speed and danger—but she always got me wherever I had to be in one piece, if a few years older. If someone was in her way or holding her up, she’d roll down the window and a salvo of obscenities would escape her mouth. Once in the city, this Boadicea of the wheel could make a cab driver wish he’d never gotten off the boat!

  She would sit at the back of the theatre during rehearsals and get very impatient with me if I muffed a line. She seemed to know the whole damn play by heart. I think she became more exhausted by the changes Neil threw at me than I did. When “Little Toby Dogs” was introduced she learned it before me and would sing it to me in the car, with gestures, going full speed. Terror stricken tho I was, she did make me laugh!

  A. J. Antoon, who had been praised highly as a director of the moment (That Championship Season), had been put in charge. We slowly discovered he was not exactly suitable for the material. The production team also thought, I am positive, that as he was a serious student of the Drama, he would understand the whimsical side of Chekhov and take care of that department with ease. But A.J., a devout Jesuit, seemed devoid of any humour. Now I’ve known one or two Jesuits who had terrific senses of humour, but in his case, being one certainly didn’t help. I remember at a run-through early on, René Auberjonois, that splendid player so adept at wistful and outrageous comedy, had brought on all of his own design a new, hilariously inventive interpretation of his role as an experiment. He, like everyone else in the cast (the incomparable trio, Barnard Hughes, Marsha Mason, Frances Sternhagen), had been getting no help whatsoever, not that that experienced threesome needed much. When he was giving his notes afterwards, A.J. insensitively remonstrated René in front of everybody, telling him in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t in the least bit funny. This was strange as we had all fallen about watching him. Looking helpless, René shrugged, “Well, tell me what I should do then.” A.J. stared at him through his rimless glasses and snapped, “Just be funny.”

  Actors are vulnerable creatures who need encouragement constantly, so René went into a blue funk for the next few days, as did we all. Realizing he had lost our respect and finding himself uncomfortably at odds with the Simon formula, A.J. became defensive and began to sulk. He would not address anyone in the cast directly—only through a stage manager. At the first dress rehearsal wearing the sumptuously made costumes that Tony Walton had designed, I stopped for a brief moment to ask a technical question about the lighting. From the darkened theatre came the voice of the stage manager: “Mr. Antoon asks you not to stop but to proceed without further interruption.” I was dumbfounded. Then I remembered my name was above the title and decided to take full advantage. I walked to the front of the stage and called very quietly in the dark to Azenberg. “Manny,” I said, “could I speak to you for a moment?” In two seconds he’d climbed onto the stage and was whispering in my ear, “Don’t worry, he’ll be gone tomorrow.”

  There are any number of directors who would give their eyeteeth to work for “Doc” Simon, but he wanted one in particular—the most sought-after musical director on Broadway, that precocious whiz kid Michael Bennett. Bennett came to
watch a performance in New Haven and agreed to take over the reins. We were all extremely relieved and excited, but “Oh, my God,” I thought, “he’s going to throw a satchel full of songs at me!” The whole thing had become more a musical than a play. Doc had got out onto another track—was it possible that this normally secure craftsman had begun to distrust his own writing? We all sat around on the stage anxiously waiting for the verdict. Michael B. made his entrance and announced straightaway that he was taking every bit of music out of the show. “It’s trying to be something it isn’t. It’s a perfectly charming and entertaining play as written and has to remain so.”