“You know, being a lesbian was terrible, and I wasn’t going to bring up an infant who’s going to follow me and be like me. I was terrified of that because I wasn’t feeling special anymore. I really hit reality after all these years—that it was no good thing to be a lesbian. Because of all the harassment in the streets and the bars closing, being raided and run by Mafia. It was just an ugly world, and I certainly wasn’t going to be responsible for bringing a child into that world.”
Kern and Cathy took a Greyhound bus back to New York and moved in with Kern’s mother on Amboy Street (her father had died before she moved to California). A few weeks later Kern was in the hall outside the delivery room at Sydenham Hospital in Harlem—“pacing with the other husbands”—when the doctor came running to her:
“Sandy!’ he says. ‘It’s a girl, it’s a girl, it’s a girl!!’ Oh, God, I was so happy. We had tried to abort the baby. But we were both so innocent. We had no idea about abortions. And thank God, the baby was born. We decided to call her ‘Rosemary’ (a pseudonym). When I looked at her the first time there in the hospital, I thought that she looked exactly like me. You know, ‘cause her father is Jewish—she had that Jewish look. And we brought her home, and I did everything but feed her from my breast. She was like my own daughter. I was crazy about her. I worked and supported them—until Rosemary was about four years old.
“Then I started to get frightened because I knew she was going to be starting school soon and I didn’t want her to have any hassles from the other kids: ‘Who’s that lady living with your mother?’ You know, all that horrible stuff. So I decided to leave. And also—I didn’t want her to start emulating me. It was the biggest mistake of my life, leaving, but in those days I wasn’t going to take any chances. So for her benefit I left, and we were both brokenhearted, that kid and I. I feel tearful. She used to come and visit me every weekend. I had a motor scooter then. So I would take her on rides with me. We had a great time.
“Today Rosemary is thirty-eight years old. I see her all the time. She has a little factory. She manufactures children’s clothes. And I work for her—I work for her as a salesperson, on a volunteer basis. And Rosemary now has her own son. So I’m like a grandma. He’s eight years old. I still see Cathy. But after I left her, she never got involved with a woman again, or a man.”
DESPITE ITS MANY HARDSHIPS gay life in New York City in the fifties offered more possibilities than it did anywhere else. Like San Francisco on the opposite coast, the city was a magnet for artists and iconoclasts of all sexual persuasions, a spiritual safe haven for Americans who felt like strangers in their own land everywhere east of the Bay Bridge or west of the Hudson. During the fifties, New York’s cosmopolitan appeal was only enhanced by America’s passionate embrace of the conventional.
Gay life acted like a bracing undertow, exerting a powerful opposite pull beneath waves of conformity. Because being a rebel is almost always an essential part of accepting one’s homosexuality, it was both especially difficult and especially satisfying to be gay in an age like this. Beneath the prevailing waters there was a thriving world of creativity and indulgence which resembled nothing on network television. The sterility of mass culture made the life of an outsider particularly attractive to writers, artists, actors and painters. Stress often feeds the sublimation that produces a vibrant culture, and this synergy was conspicuous in the plays, poems, books, and canvases produced all over Manhattan.
Many gay historians have claimed a connection between homosexual orientation and artistic avocation. However, Edward Sagarin, the first American historian of gay life in the fifties, argued that homosexuals are hardly confined to the arts. He suggested that artists were simply more likely to leave behind hints about their sexuality than “scientists, businessmen, [and] political leaders”—men and women who “not only leave no such evidence,” but are forced to engage in “vehement denial and deliberate misinformation.”
One reason that lesbians and gay men often make great artists may be that being gay and creating art both require similar strengths: the ability to create an original world of one’s own, and a willingness to jettison the conventional wisdom in favor of one’s own convictions. Sagarin wrote that “homosexual creativity” is “often freed from conventional thought, with imagination unbound and unfettered—and sponsored by the need for perfection to overcome the doubt of oneself.” Notable gay nonconformists who struggled against the fifties tide included poets like Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara; painters as diverse as Paul Cadmus, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly; the composers Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, John Cage, and Aaron Copland; and playwrights and screenwriters like Gore Vidal, William Inge, Arthur Laurents, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams.
THE FIFTIES were the magical age of musical comedy in America. Broadway was lit up by The King and I, Guys and Dolls, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and My Fair Lady. But the most original production in this medium, the first “tragic musical comedy,” was the creation of Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim: four gay Jewish men, all working at the very top of their craft. Bernstein was married and the father of three children, but Laurents considered Bernstein “a gay man who got married. He wasn’t conflicted about it at all. He was just gay.” Sondheim refused to characterize Bernstein’s sexuality. But he felt that Bernstein’s family was very important to him. “The idea of family was deeply rooted: patriarchy. It had nothing to do with pretending to be heterosexual or anything like that.”
Jerome Robbins got the idea for the musical after a gay actor named Montgomery Clift asked the choreographer how he should play a modern Romeo. Robbins’s original conception was for something called “East Side Story,” and he called Bernstein at the beginning of 1949 to pitch it to him. “Jerry R. called today with a noble idea,” Bernstein wrote in a diary he published eight years later, “a modern version of Romeo and Juliet set in slums at the coincidence of Easter-Passover celebrations. Feelings run high between Jews and Catholics.… But it’s all much less important than the bigger idea of making a musical that tells a tragic story.” In an entry dated four weeks later, he added: “Prejudice will be the theme of the new work.… The music will be serious music. Serious yet simple enough for all people to understand.” In that ambition, Bernstein would be magnificently successful.*
The project was shelved later that year, partly because Bernstein and Robbins discovered that the “Catholic-Jewish, Irish-Jewish” situation had changed after the war, and partly because Arthur Laurents was ambivalent about writing the book for the musical. “I didn’t want to write Abie’s Irish Rose with music,” said Laurents.
The musical came back to life five years later when Bernstein ran into Laurents at the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool. When they noticed a headline in the Los Angeles Times about gang fights between Mexicans and “so-called Americans,” they suddenly realized that their moment had arrived. Back in New York, Robbins became “wildly excited” because this was the “living, breathing reincarnation of the Romeo story, and it was topical.” Now, for the first time, it became West Side Story.
Laurents recruited Sondheim for the project after an audition at which Sondheim played a whole show he had written in school. Sondheim was initially unenthusiastic about the musical because he was asked to be only colyricist with Bernstein; and now Laurents was ambivalent about working with Robbins because of his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. But the surge of electricity created by their collaboration obliterated every misgiving.
Bernstein adored working with Sondheim: “We thought the same way; we were word people and note people.… I could explain musical problems to him and he’d understand immediately, which made the collaboration a joy. It was like writing with an alter ego. To me, it was like Gilbert and Sullivan, like Strauss and von Hofmannsthal.” And Bernstein was amazed by Laurents’s generosity. When the decision was made to add a new song called “Som
ething’s Coming,” Bernstein and Sondheim stole from Laurents’s dialogue, in which he had written, “Something’s coming, it may be around the corner, whistling down the river, twitching at the dance—who knows?” Bernstein said, “We raped Arthur’s playwriting. I’ve never seen anyone so encouraging, let alone generous, urging us, ‘Yes, take it, take it, make it a song.’” Sondheim decided later that some of his lyrics sounded ridiculous coming out of the mouth of a Puerto Rican girl, especially “I feel pretty.” On the other hand, in “Gee, Officer Krupke,” he was hip enough to include the first sung reference to marijuana in an American musical hit.
“I remember all my collaborations with Jerry in terms of one tactile bodily feeling,” said Bernstein. “Composing with his hands on my shoulders. I can feel him standing behind me saying—four more beats there, or no, that’s too many, or yeah—that’s it!” Robbins fondly recalled “the amount of fuel that we fed each other, the ideas and chemistry between us, each one taking hold of something and saying, ‘Hey, I think I can do that,’ or saying, ‘No, don’t write it as music, we can do it better in book’—or ‘Don’t do it in song! We can do it better in dance! The continual flow between us was an enormous excitement.”
Originally, Robbins wanted only to direct the show, and he planned to get someone else to do the choreography. But his collaborators insisted that he do both jobs—because they believed he was the greatest choreographer in America.
Laurents contributed a compact, clever book, which included an invented slang that would take young America by storm after Hollywood brought the work to a mass audience—especially the word cool. “I twisted syllables and did all sorts of things because the show needed a language,” Laurents told Sondheim’s biographer, Craig Zadan. “It was lyric theater and if you used actual language it would have been flat.” Bernstein was writing much more sophisticated music than Broadway was accustomed to, while Robbins figured out how to translate gang wars into beautiful ballets. The exacting choreographer often dominated the creative process. Bernstein wrote to his wife, Felicia, “Jerry continues to be—well, Jerry: moody, demanding, hurting. But vastly talented.”
Robbins said, “The idea was to make the poetry of the piece come out of our best attempts as serious artists: that was the major thrust.” But despite all the talent they brought to bear on the project, they alternated between great expectations and intimations of catastrophe. “I thought it would run three months,” said Laurents. “I thought it was a sure turkey. But we were doing what we wanted to do.” Sondheim remembered everyone saying, “It’s such a shame you can’t hum the music.”
Six weeks before rehearsals were scheduled to begin, West Side Story almost vanished from the stage forever after one of its original producers, Cheryl Crawford, withdrew from the show. “We thought at that point that it would not get on,” said Bernstein. “Everybody told us to stop. They all said it was suicidal. I don’t know how many people begged me not to waste my time on something that could not possibly succeed. After all, how could we do a musical where there are two bodies lying on the stage at the end of the first act and everybody eventually dies? A show that’s so filled with hatefulness and ugliness?” (Actually, not everyone dies. In a crucial modification of the Shakespeare original, Laurents allowed Maria to live.)
The producer Harold Prince was in Boston rehearsing another show with his partner Robert E. Griffith when they heard about the crisis in Manhattan, and the two of them decided to keep West Side Story alive. Their gamble seemed worthwhile when it opened in Washington to fabulous reviews—and Bernstein bumped into a weeping Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter during the intermission.
Despite the triumphant opening, Sondheim remained unhappy because he only had a cocredit for the lyrics. In a remarkable act of magnanimity, Bernstein removed his name as colyricist to placate his young collaborator. “It was extremely generous,” Sondheim remembered.
But Laurents remained dissatisfied because the line above his book credit still read, “Based on a conception of Jerome Robbins.” Laurents recalled, “The next day I went to Robbins and I brought up what Lenny had done for Steve. And I said, ‘You know, Jerry, obviously they think conception means this whole thing of juvenile delinquency and the gangs and the color thing. So I think you should remove that credit.’ So he said, ‘Well, let me think about it.’ The next day he said, ‘You’re right, but it means too much to me.’ So that’s when I learned: once an informer, always an informer.” By the time the show opened in New York, none of the other collaborators was talking to Robbins, according to Laurents. But out of all their struggles, they had produced a masterpiece.
These four young artists absorbed the romance, energy, anger, and pathos of the streets of New York; then they managed to make all those elements pulsate through every moment of the musical. Sondheim’s lyrics were moving, clever and funny; Laurents’s spare book managed to tie everything together unobtrusively, while Robbins’s choreography also functioned as brilliant storytelling.
Bernstein’s music was West Side Story’s sublime achievement. His synthesis of Broadway, jazz, Latin rhythms, and Aaron Copland perfectly captured the city’s astonishing spirit. “The purity of the music was most important,” said Laurents.
The actor Alan Helms remembered announcing at a Christmas party shortly after West Side Story opened that the person who obviously deserved the most credit for the show was Steve Sondheim.
“A man tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You’re wrong,’” Helms recalled. ‘“The man who deserves most credit is Arthur Laurents.’”
“How would you know?”
“I’m Steve Sondheim,” the man replied.
Thousands of gay Americans fell in love with West Side Story when they were children in the fifties. And for legions of kids of all persuasions, the show provided them with their first concrete notion of romantic love. To many gay adults coming of age in the sixties, the romance, violence, danger, and mystery so audible on the original cast album all felt like integral parts of the gay life they had embraced. The lyrics of “Somewhere” in particular seemed to speak directly to the gay experience before the age of liberation. In 1996, it was one of the songs chosen for the first mass gay wedding of two hundred couples in San Francisco, presided over by the city’s mayor, Willie Brown.
But none of the collaborators (or their 1950s contemporaries) ever suspected there was anything gay about their very heterosexual love story. (Coincidentally, Larry Kert, who starred as Tony, was also gay.) “It was never an issue that we talked about,” said Murray Gitlin, who fell in love with the show when it opened. “I never thought about it as gay.”
“There is one sensibility all four of us share which is much more important and really does inform the work,” said Arthur Laurents. “We’re all Jews. Think about it and what it means. Creative work is undoubtedly the sum of the creators but certain elements take a bigger role than others at different times. West Side can be said to be informed by our political and sociological viewpoint; our Jewishness as the source of passion against prejudice; our theatrical vision, our aspiration, but not, I think, by our sexual orientation.” Gore Vidal agreed that the sexuality of the authors was irrelevant to their work: the fact that they were gay didn’t mean that they couldn’t do “boy-girl stuff. I mean boy-girl stuff is no different from boy-boy stuff.”
Sondheim reacted angrily to the suggestion that there might be anything gay about the lyric of “Somewhere.” He said, “If you think that’s a gay song, then all songs about getting away from the realities of life are gay songs.”
On one level, this debate simply highlights the similarities between the experiences of Jews and homosexuals in New York City: two oppressed minority groups who have struggled mightily, and very successfully, to travel out of invisibility and assimilation to proud self-declaration.
Regardless of whether the collaborators’ portrayal of prejudice was shaped more by their gayness or their Jewishness, together they had created the most
vibrant musical portrait of twentieth-century Manhattan ever mounted on the New York stage—an achievement that is still unrivaled today. The show has been performed tens of thousands of times in almost every major city in the world. “What we did was to aim at a lyrically and theatrically sharpened illusion of reality,” Laurents explained. What they achieved was a show that remains remarkably ageless.
When the show opened on September 26,1957, the New York critics were enthusiastic. “The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” Walter Kerr wrote in the Herald Tribune. He praised “the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we’ve been exposed to in a dozen seasons.” In the Times, Brooks Atkinson called it “a profoundly moving show… as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving.… Everything contributes to the total impression of wildness, ecstasy and anguish. This is one of those occasions when theater people, engrossed in an original project, are all in top form. … The subject is not beautiful, but what West Side Story draws out of it is beautiful.”
It was not, however, a big commercial success. It was too hip and too smart—too far from “I Love Lucy” and too close to the sensibility of the urban sophisticate. “It was a big hit with theater people but not with the audiences,” said Sondheim. “It never sold out for very long,” said Harold Prince. “It’s an important show, but most shows that are important are not smash hits,” Prince said. The smash hit on Broadway that year—the one that took most of the awards and made the most money—was The Music Man, the musical comedy whose “Seventy-Six Trombones” were perfectly in tune with the white-bread taste of the fifties. Only after Hollywood had produced a broader and coarser West Side Story with Natalie Wood did the show become a box office smash. “The picture failed for me,” said Laurents. But it was the movie and its soundtrack that finally brought big profits to its creators.
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