Offstage, the Tony apparatchiks picked up Allan’s award shortly after he walked into the wings of the Gershwin Theater. They told him it needed to be engraved. “I’m not leaving New York until I get mine back!” he promised. Following the telecast, Allan held court at the ball. He was Broadway’s premiere producer, and for an hour or two, it didn’t bother him that his creative team—Laurents, Herman, and Fierstein—had thanked each other in their acceptance speeches but not him. “He was happy, and it was fun to watch that kind of happiness,” says Fierstein. Allan’s Tony moment effectively erased every personal insult and career mishap of his forty-seven years—that is, until he woke up the next day.
Allan’s friends—and some who weren’t friends—joked that Allan Carr produced La Cage aux folles on Broadway so that he could eventually bring it to Hollywood to show that he still had the stuff of a real producer. With Tony in hand, he concentrated on his grand return to the West Coast as the proud presenter of La Cage aux folles. The musical should have played there in a medium-size theater, like the Shubert in Century City. But the Shubert Theater (1,700 seats), in 1984, continued to house A Chorus Line, which the mighty theater organization had produced on Broadway. The Ahmanson Theater (2,000 seats) was a bit large, but it housed only limited runs due to its status as a nonprofit theater. Allan didn’t want a limited run for La Cage. Not in Los Angeles, anyway. He wanted the real thing, a first-class sit-down production that wouldn’t run for weeks or months but years. Since the Nederlander Organization, one of the show’s producers, owned the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, that venue emerged as the logical, if not the perfect, fit. At a gargantuan 2,700 seats, the mighty Pantages, a former home of the Oscars, is twice the size of the average Broadway theater.
It made economic sense to put out a national company of La Cage aux folles; there was its big Tony win and the show continued to sell out on Broadway. But once again, despite its New York success, the musical’s gay content proved a hard sell. Broadway wasn’t like the rest of America. To ease into the California market, Allan decided to open in homophilic San Francisco for a few weeks and then bring the show down to Los Angeles for an open-ended run.
“Allan wanted to show his pals in Hollywood what he could do,” says Barry Brown. The San Francisco engagement scored. “We played fourteen weeks there and sold out, and could have stayed another six months.”
Los Angeles, however, rotated in another orbit in the theater universe. The positive reviews there exceeded the New York notices, and instead of his Pan Am lobby extravaganza, Allan brought a hometown touch to the L.A. opening by taking over one of Hollywood’s favorite eateries, the legendary Chasen’s restaurant. He even renamed the place Chez Jacqueline, after the restaurant in La Cage aux folles, and made it a veritable children’s playground with sand drifts of plastic confetti on the floor and colorful balloons within balloons suspended from the oak rafters. If Allan didn’t get his wish to paint the Palace Theater pink, he indulged that fantasy by hanging huge swaths of pink fabric throughout Chasen’s, which turned the restaurant into a very festive-looking Chinese laundry.
At the opening-night party in Los Angeles, Allan kept repeating his formula on how to entertain as if it were his new mantra: “What does it take to make a great party? It takes Alan Bates, Phyllis Diller, Christopher Atkins, Sidney Poitier and Audrey and Jayne Meadows and Peter Falk in the same room still talking to each other. This is old Hollywood and new Hollywood. We made Chasen’s a cross between 21 and Joe Allen’s.” He then nearly slipped on all the plastic confetti under his shoes. “I’ve gotta sweep this stuff up! Somebody thought it was cocaine on the floor,” he grumbled with good cheer.
For a while, the publicity and positive reviews worked. The Pantages sold out, but only for a few weeks. Twenty-seven hundred seats is equal to filling two Broadway-size theaters on a nightly basis, and within a couple of months, the place was half empty on most week nights. “You needed binoculars even if you were sitting in the first row. It was like playing on a football field” is how Arthur Laurents described it.
La Cage aux folles ran one year in Los Angeles, not exactly the record longevity of A Chorus Line, but four times as long as most Broadway shows played in this notoriously nontheater town. The loss: $2 million. “Los Angeles should have been a stop on the national tour,” says Barry Brown.
Allan did not tempt fate with a London production; instead, he licensed La Cage to some British producers. Laurents busied himself with that overseas project, while Allan and Jerry Herman concentrated instead on finding future Albins and Georges for their New York production, which continued to do, in Variety slanguage, “boffo biz.” On Broadway, Allan wanted to replace the ailing Gene Barry, who had suffered a heart attack, with Regis Philbin. Laurents balked. He found daytime TV personalities “not classy enough” for his musical, and went with 1940s heartthrob Van Johnson instead.
Johnson, in time, grew increasingly tone-deaf in the role—“He would have sung it forever, if they let him,” says cast member John Weiner—and eventually the former movie star also required a replacement. Two years earlier, Robert Stack had auditioned for Allan and Arthur Laurents at Hilhaven Lodge, where, Jerry Herman recalls, “There was a Lucite grand piano in the living room. It had absolutely no business being there.” Laurents thought the actor needed singing lessons, to which Allan replied, “But Bob’s aunt was an opera singer!” Laurents also expressed concern that Stack, best known for his portrayal of Elliot Ness on TV’s The Untouchables, had never appeared on Broadway and his stage experience “was limited to five weeks of summer stock twenty years ago,” according to the director.
Allan did not heed Laurents’s advice. When La Cage aux folles needed a Georges replacement after Van Johnson’s departure, Allan went ahead and signed Stack. Advertisements were printed to announce the new cast member, and with Laurents still putting the London cast through its paces, it fell to Fritz Holt and an assistant director, Jim Pendecost, to rehearse Stack for the New York production. Then Laurents returned to New York City on a Sunday night. It had been a bumpy opening night in London.
“Everyone was in a bad mood because of the bad reviews,” says Jon Wilner. “You don’t tell the English how to do drag in the Palladium.” Indeed, weeks earlier, Harvey Fierstein had complained about putting La Cage in the 2,400-seat theater in the West End. “I stood in the back of the house and looked down at that stage so far away, it was like I was seeing it from Passaic.” The thought hit him, “They had forgotten what the show is about. It is a show about a couple in love. It’s about human emotions. The ego of these people.” And there were other problems. Despite the appearance of George Hearn, “It wasn’t well cast in the West End,” says Shirley Herz.
Into this maelstrom of nasty news from London dropped Robert Stack, who was to have his first run-through with a jet-lagged Arthur Laurents on the very day, Monday, that the autocratic director got his first look at the full-page ad in the New York Times heralding the appearance of TV’s Elliot Ness in La Cage aux folles. If Allan could get his way when it came to taking out advertisements, Laurents was about to show the Broadway community that he controlled everything from the “orchestra rail to the back wall of the theater.”
That Monday morning, Stack performed the role of Georges onstage with the full cast. Georges’s opening monologue, in which he invites everyone to club La Cage aux Folles, didn’t go well. According to Laurents, the meeting that led to Stack’s leaving the show took place between the two men. “After the rehearsal, I met with Bob onstage alone. They had all gone. They fled,” Laurents says, referring to the cast, management, and producers.
Producer Barry Brown and actor John Weiner recall being present that day, and they tell a slightly more theatrical story.
Sitting in the auditorium of the Palace Theater, surrounded by a few cast members and assistants, Laurents was not a happy director, according to Brown and Weiner. “I’m going to be rid of him after this rehearsal,” he said of Stack.
“It’s not going to get better,” Laurents cracked.
Among other problems, Stack found it difficult to negotiate the furniture onstage. Worse, his role required that he function as the evening’s emcee, and he simply lacked the requisite charm and bonhomie that Van Johnson and Gene Barry exuded. Laurents made minor adjustments in Stack’s performance, but it soon became clear that Stack had progressed from clumsy to downright scared. Then Stack launched into “Song on the Sand,” the love song he sings to Albin.
No sooner had he finished than Laurents called a halt to the rehearsal, and made his way to the stage. It’s never a good sign when the director leaves his orchestra seat to confront an actor face-to-face onstage. Again, Laurents made minor suggestions to Stack. At first, they were delivered sotto voce, but soon his voice began to escalate, and in front of the full company, who had gradually made their collective way to within earshot, he told Stack, “You can’t sing. You can’t act. What can you do?”
Marvin Krauss, the show’s general manager, materialized from the wings. “Everybody in the lobby!” he announced as if speaking to a room of eavesdropping schoolchildren. But the company of actors didn’t leave fast enough, and as they shuffled out, they were able to catch Stack’s defense. “Jerry Herman and Allan Carr heard me sing and thought I sang very nicely,” he said.
“Well, I resent Jerry Herman and Allan Carr saying that,” Laurents replied.
“You think I’m doing this show?” Stack sputtered.
It’s exactly what Arthur Laurents wanted to hear. He didn’t have to fire Robert Stack. Robert Stack fired himself.
Laurents wrote in his book Mainly on Directing that he delivered his rejection of Stack in private and that the actor took it “without a trace of resentment,” that “we shook hands, he quit that day, and I never saw him again.”
Regardless of who was present (or eavesdropping) during the infamous showdown between Laurents and Stack, there’s no doubt that the director’s next encounter with his producer, via a letter, was not so amicable. In a missive posted from Quogue, New York, Laurents chastised Allan in withering detail: “You, the Veteran Producer (according to your theatre program bio which, however, lists absolutely no previous experience worth mentioning), waited until I was in London and then insisted on signing Stack without anyone hearing him read, let alone sing, in a theatre. Now you were in high gear and really on a power trip.” Laurents went on to accuse Allan of costing the production $100,000 as a result of the Stack hiring/firing: “Did you pay? No, the show did, the investors did. Will they ever know? How creative is your bookkeeping? As creative as your ducking responsibility? Because who, in this whole painful and unnecessary episode, who got off scot-free? You did.”
There it was, finally, out in the open. The two men hated each other, and that animosity only escalated La Cage’s ongoing marketing wars. Laurents had always loathed the print ads that stressed the show’s transvestite subject matter. “After three years, we were sick of Arthur complaining,” says Wilner, who, along with Allan, decided to release what was called their “straight campaign,” one that featured the young lovers, Jean-Michel and Anne. No sooner did the new advertisements appear in newspapers than the gay activist group ACT UP voiced its objection in the “Page Six” gossip column of the New York Post.
Allan consulted no one. He read the Post’s ACT UP item and ordered, “Get rid of the new ads! We didn’t do this show to hurt the gay community. Pull everything. Go back to the original.”
Early in the show’s run, Rock Hudson and his longtime friend and occasional lover Tom Clarke paid a visit to La Cage aux folles. They even made the obligatory visit backstage to say hello to the show’s stars and pose for photographs. If AIDS would eventually claim many of Broadway’s finest in the 1980s, including one of the show’s executive producers, Fritz Holt, it took its most famous victim, Rock Hudson, on October 2, 1985. His death came on a Wednesday, and by the end of that day’s matinee, CBS had already dispatched its camera crew to the sidewalk in front of the Palace Theater to ask theatergoers what they thought of not only the movie star’s death from AIDS but Broadway’s only gay musical, La Cage aux folles.
“La Cage aux folles had nothing to do with AIDS, but in people’s mind it was about gay people and the equation was made,” Allan lamented. After the CBS report aired, box office at La Cage aux folles took an immediate tumble, never to return to its former superhit status. The impact was even greater elsewhere. “The AIDS epidemic was partially responsible for the show’s failure in London,” says Barry Brown. And on the West Coast, it didn’t help La Cage’s box office when the Screen Actors Guild responded in the press to reports that homosexual actors were being discriminated against because of AIDS.
The media stoked the AIDS frenzy, which quickly turned into a gay backlash, especially in the once-friendly terrain of the downtown nightlife. In New York magazine, Bianca Jagger was quoted as saying that she appreciated the heterosexual atmosphere at Steve Rubell’s new club, the Palladium. And Rubell himself remarked, “Gay, it’s an empty life,” despite the fact that he was already taking the drug AZT to control his HIV, which, four years later, would take his life.
By summer 1987, La Cage’s company was ready to traipse a few blocks north from the Palace to the smaller Mark Hellinger Theater. AIDS wasn’t the only thing that forced the planned move: Air rights had been sold over the Palace Theater, to make way for a new DoubleTree Hotel. The move looked like a sure thing. Actor Lee Roy Reams from 42nd Street had been rehearsed, the Hellinger sported a new La Cage marquee, and while the show’s box office continued to dwindle in the wake of the AIDS crisis, the marketing director, Jon Wilner, welcomed the move away from the discount tickets booth, known as TKTS, that sat directly in front of the Palace Theater in Duffy Square. La Cage had heretofore never been able to take advantage of the booth, because “If you sold half price, you could never get full price,” says Wilner. In residence at the Hellinger, the musical would finally be able to go the discount route.
Wilner never got to test his theory. Shortly before the planned transfer to the Hellinger, Marvin Krauss called a meeting in lawyer John Breglio’s office. It was not a good sign. “You never have a meeting at a lawyer’s office,” says Wilner, “because it means you will be canceled.” Allan didn’t attend. Suffering from his kidney stones, he remained in California.
Breglio got right to the point. “There is no [current] economic justification for La Cage,” he said. The show’s advance ticket sales were in freefall, and according to the lawyer, the show’s box-office decline was due to forces outside anyone’s control. “It was sad and depressing,” Breglio later observed. “Because of the AIDS crisis, [the subject matter of La Cage] was no longer something you could easily fool with.”
Broadway itself was reeling. In addition to Fritz Holt, the theater community had lost Michael Bennett, Company star Larry Kert, and many others to AIDS. “No one closes a hit show. La Cage had run four and a half years. It had run its course,” says Brown.
Arthur Laurents took the opportunity to blame Allan for the early closing, and he offered a bizarre explanation: “We were set to move to the Mark Hellinger. The Moonies, however, wanted the Hellinger for their tabernacle. They offered Allan Carr a lot of money. . . . He took it, and that was the end of La Cage aux folles, the musical.”
The followers of Sun Myung Moon, of course, had nothing to do with the show’s shuttering. The Mark Hellinger Theater eventually became the home of the evangelical Times Square Church, but not before another musical, the Peter Allen flop, Legs Diamond, opened and quickly closed there.
If Allan was too indisposed to make it to Breglio’s office to deliver the bad news, he didn’t miss the opportunity to attend a good party two weeks later. After their final performance on November 15, 1987, the cast members of La Cage said good-bye to each other at a small restaurant on the corner of Amsterdam and West 79th Street.
“We were surprised that Allan came to the party,” says cast member Mark Waldrop. “Everyone was mad at him.”
Wilner disregarded the cast’s negative attitude. Many of the actors were young, and didn’t know that La Cage had been a rather atypical Broadway experience. Producers often replace casts on a yearly basis, but Allan proved much more generous and loyal to his actors. As the marketing director points out, “The cast kept getting raises on a regular basis. There were few defections. They didn’t go to other shows.”
John Weiner, who never left the Broadway La Cage during its entire four-year run, agrees: “We had parties all the time, they treated us like gold.” He recalls one of the older cast members telling him, “This is a real special kind of thing.”
Regardless of Allan’s largesse for the preceding four years, the sudden posting of the closing notice made for hurt feelings. If Allan sensed that Macbeth atmosphere, he didn’t advertise his outsider status. At the closing party, he even smiled when three of the Cagelles sang the tune “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” but changed the lyrics to reflect the occasion. As La Cage’s trio put it to the newly unemployed among them, “Hey, don’t you remember? I was a star in my fabulous prime. I once did a show for Allan Carr. Brother, can you spare a dime?”
twenty-five
Goya, Goya, Gone
Before he shuttered La Cage aux folles, Allan made a visit to the Metropolitan Opera as the guest of Sybil Harrington. A Texas oil heiress worth close to a billion dollars, give or take a few barrels, the silver-haired Mrs. Harrington was such a dutiful patron of the opera house that the management named its 3,800-seat theater in her honor while she could still enjoy it. Before the Texas heiress did ascend to that great Valhalla in the sky, Harrington liked to show her friends the newly placed bronze plaque on the orchestra level. It read “The Sybil Harrington Auditorium.” One flight of marble stairs up, on the parterre level, she often took up residence in the general manager’s primo left-corner box. On this particular evening, her guests were Placido Domingo and Allan. During the first intermission, the opera novice among them made the faux pas of asking the great Spanish tenor a naive question.
Party Animals Page 25
