by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
Although ostensibly about World War I, the show seemed to offer up-to-the-minute commentary on the current political situation—the American occupation of Vietnam. “We were in a time of producing shows that had virtually no contemporary political or social significance,” recalls Martin Charnin. “The shows that were going on then were The Happy Times and How Now, Dow Jones? Stuff like that. We wanted to do something of real substance… . We thought that the Vietnamese experience and how ugly and terrifying the war was could be paralleled by virtue of the Mata Hari story.”1 Charnin was slated to direct. All he and his partners needed was a producer willing to roll the dice.
In 1967, showman David Merrick was recovering from several recent failures, most notably a misguided musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s that featured Mary Tyler Moore as a singing, swearing Holly Golightly. This recent catastrophe aside, Merrick’s Broadway record spoke for itself: Gypsy, Hello, Dolly! and Carnival. If anybody could make a musical out of the legend of Mata Hari, it was Merrick. When Martin Charnin pitched the musical to Merrick, he was pleasantly surprised that the unpredictable producer seemed receptive to the concept—even the antiwar theme. What’s more, Merrick wanted to move ahead immediately—though with a director more experienced than Charnin (whose mega-smash Annie was still a decade away). Merrick believed that it was important to have a big name attached to such an ambitious, epically scaled production.
At that moment, Minnelli was once again a hot commodity in Hollywood, thanks to the announcement that he’d soon be directing Barbra Streisand in a lavishly budgeted screen version of the Broadway musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. But in terms of Broadway, Minnelli was about as sought after as an Actor’s Equity strike. In fact, the sixty-five-year-old Minnelli hadn’t directed a theatrical production since Very Warm for May, way back in 1938—when Zsa Zsa Gabor was still on her first husband. Despite Vincente’s former glories on the Great White Way, selecting him as the director of a piece that addressed the futility of war seemed ill-advised at best. “It was totally Merrick’s idea to have Minnelli as the director,” Charnin says. “We were not given a choice. It was sprung on us. It was all about having a name director. Even though the name was a little musty. Even so, there was this gigantic cachet just in terms of Minnelli’s name value.”2 Merrick would surround Minnelli with a team of top theater professionals, including designer Jo Mielziner and two transplants from Hollywood whom Vincente knew and respected—choreographer Jack Cole and designer Irene Sharaff.
For the role of Captain LaFarge, an actor with a powerful stage presence and voice to match was required. Yves Montand was offered the role but declined. Pernell Roberts, best known as Adam Cartwright on television’s highly rated Bonanza, agreed to star.
In terms of the crucial casting of the leading lady, it was not Vincente but Minnelli’s wife Denise Giganti who played talent scout. A stunning Viennese-born model regularly appearing in the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar had caught her eye. “It was Denise, who made the first contact with Marisa Mell,” Vincente recalled. “After they met in Rome and lunched together, Denise cabled back, ‘She’s your girl.’” Washington Post Times Herald reporter Eugenia Sheppard, however, noted that “since they spoke in Italian all through the luncheon, Mrs. Minnelli forgot to ask Marisa if she spoke English. She didn’t find out, either, whether she could sing.”3
Although Mell’s English was acceptable, many connected with the show recalled that her “singing” was not. In fact, prior to Mata Hari, Mell’s only musical experience had been a stint in an obscure European touring company of Kiss Me Kate. “Marisa Mell was only hired to be the lead because she was having an affair with Denise Minnelli,” says Hugh Fordin, who was David Merrick’s head of casting at the time.4 Whether or not the rumors were true, a Broadway musical featuring a lead performer who could neither sing nor dance proved to be the tip of the iceberg.
As Fordin recalls:
I was casting Mata Hari for Minnelli and he had the nerve to have Elaine Stritch come in to audition for what turned out to be the Tessie O’Shea role in the second act—a flower girl. Ridiculous… . Minnelli turned to me during one of the audition days and said, “Remind me before we start to go into rehearsal, I want to run my movie of The Band Wagon for the whole company.” And instantly I knew what he was saying was that this was going to turn into that disaster in The Band Wagon—the musical version of Faust.
Even at the beginning, when I sat in the office to read that script and meet the three guys who created the show, Martin Charnin was not talking to Ed Thomas, the composer, nor was he talking to Jerome Coopersmith, the book writer. This was even before Minnelli came in. And I went into Merrick and told him it was going to be a disaster and he said, “I don’t care. It’s not my money anyway. It’s RCA/Victor’s money.”5
Minnelli rehearses Pernell Roberts and Marisa Mell for the ill-fated Mata Hari in 1967. “Jesus, what a nightmare it was …” dancer Antony DeVecchi says of the musical, which still ranks as one of the greatest debacles in theatrical history. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
The record label had ponied up most of the money for Mata Hari and planned to recoup part of the investment with the release of the original Broadway cast album. As fate would have it, neither the album nor Mata Hari on Broadway would ever materialize.
There were signs of the disaster to come early on. Although the cast was excited to appear in a production helmed by the legendary Vincente Minnelli, they were dismayed to discover that their director still seemed to think that he was back on a Culver City soundstage. As dancer Antony DeVecchi remembered:
We’d all be ready to rehearse and Vincente would be sitting out in the audience, and he’d yell, “Camera! … Action!” And we’d say to each other, “What the fuck is going on?” We were used to direction like “Move downstage left,” you know? We were theater people. But it wasn’t his direction that killed the show. It was the script. It was just a lousy, uninteresting story. It didn’t only kill Vincente. It killed all of us. Mata Hari was this nondescript character. Basically, she was a hooker screwing everything she could get. She didn’t have a brain. If Mata Hari had just been a supporting character who came in and left and you focused on the Deuxième Bureau, the FBI of France, we would still be running on Broadway.6
Others close to the production believed that Minnelli was the show’s primary problem. “I think he was lost,” says Martin Charnin:
To me, Vincente was very much living in a fantasy about what he thought the show was about. I mean, we had written a very dark musical, but Vincente was far more interested in whether or not there were enough crinolines in the dresses on stage. I mean, he had more meetings with Irene Sharaff than he had with the writers. Practically from minute one, the Mata Hari that we had created began to sink into this frou-frou world, and it never recovered. It was swallowed up by silk and feathers.7
Vincente seemed to be approaching the material as though it were a Radio City Music Hall revue circa 1934. “Minnelli made it sexless,” writer William Goldman observed. “He had taken a deadly serious anti-war effort and directed it as if it were a Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald movie.”8 When actress Martha Schlamme asked Minnelli about her motivation in a key scene, the director reminded her that it was of the utmost importance that her Galeries Lafayette shopping bag should be displayed in such a way that the label would be clearly visible to the audience.
Although advance publicity had promised that the show’s leading lady would emerge a shining star, Mata Hari would prove to be anything but Marisa Mell’s Funny Girl. Antony DeVecchi befriended the overwhelmed actress and believes that she, like everyone else, was weighted down by the overproduction:
Marisa knew what she could do and she knew what she couldn’t do and she told that to Vincente. She couldn’t sing. She couldn’t dance. So, in came Jack Cole. In came Irene Sharaff. And she was surrounded by probably the top ten male dancers in the country. She moved very well but she was not trained as a dancer. O
n top of all that, Irene would put her in a costume and it was made of gold-plated chains. The costume weighed seventy-five pounds. It took almost three of us to lift her. I mean, you could put Pavlova in that thing and she’s not going to move.9
Before its Broadway opening, which was scheduled for January 13, 1968, Mata Hari would be previewed at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., and presented as a benefit for the Women’s National Democratic Club. The audience of VIPs would include Lynda Bird Johnson, the president’s daughter. After observing some of the rehearsals, Washington Post drama editor Richard L. Coe was hedging his bets about Mata Hari: “It could come out as the latest triumph of the American musical stage and it could resound with a shattering thud.” On November 17, 1967 (a date that will live in theatrical infamy), Mata Hari proved to be the thud heard round the world. Variety declared the preview (which dragged on past midnight) a “shambles” and noted that “the advance show was a mishap almost too exaggerated to believe… . The audience roared with laughter in all the wrong places as far as the script was concerned. The night was so bad, there was no curtain call… . The direction by Vincente Minnelli is, at best, confused.” Martin Charnin managed to sit through it: “All I could think of was, ‘How quickly can I get the Amtrak out of Washington? Or was it legitimate to stand up on the stage at the end of the show and say to an aggregate audience, ‘I apologize. This is not at all what we meant.’ … It was purely and simply the agony of seeing something that we had created being totally destroyed with no conscious recognition of what was being done.”10 As writer Ethan Mordden recalls, “It really was a bad staging of a very good show.”
In his “Window on Washington” column, Bill Henry had a field day surveying the ruins:
The Thanksgiving holiday was made a bit merrier for people in Washington—at least for those who enjoy disasters… . The audience was in a gay mood when the curtain rose and was positively giddy by the time it went down when scenery fell apart, costumes came undone, dancers tripped and the whole thing began to look like something planned by Mack Sennett. Although producer David Merrick, before the curtain went up, warned the audience that “this is just a rehearsal,” he hardly expected such things to happen as leading man Pernell Roberts being left stranded in his half of a cottage while the other half disappeared suddenly into the loft. And leading lady Marisa Mell, having “died” before a firing squad, raised her hand to her head just after the doctor pronounced her lifeless. Neither producer Merrick nor director Vincente Minnelli nor either of the stars showed up at the big after-the-premiere party.11
According to Antony DeVecchi, by that point Minnelli was long gone. “He never finished that show. He quit. He left it all in the hands of Jack Cole… . Vincente’s hands were tied with the stupidity of what was going on with that show. Jesus, what a nightmare it was.” As Charnin recalls, at one point a desperate Merrick hit upon an idea to rescue the production: “After Washington, Merrick said, ‘I got it! I know how to save it!’ We all leapt to attention and he said, ‘We’ll do it as a spoof with Bert Lahr and Nancy Walker.’”12 Ultimately, wiser heads prevailed. Taking a loss of approximately $700,000, Merrick canceled Mata Hari’s Philadelphia engagement and Broadway opening.
In 1968, the Theatre de Lys presented a pared-down version of the musical entitled Ballad of a Firing Squad, which Charnin directed himself. Despite encouraging reviews, the production closed after a discouraging seven performances. Although the musical’s original creators made a valiant attempt to show audiences what they had intended, it seemed that nothing could obliterate the outrageous spectacle that had come before.
As set designer Jo Mielziner memorably said, Mata Hari was “one third Minnelli, one third Mielziner, and one third shit.”
36
On a Clear Day
IF VINCENTE’S RETURN TO THE STAGE had been noteworthy for all the wrong reasons, Hollywood wanted him back—and in a big way. In June 1967, Minnelli signed on the dotted line. He was now under contract to Paramount Pictures to direct a screen version of the musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, which had been a modest success on Broadway in 1965. A year and a half would pass before principal photography began in January 1969. By that time, the Hollywood that Vincente had known intimately for three decades was beginning to disintegrate.
Despite the critical acclaim and commercial success greeting such daring, cutting-edge releases as Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Easy Rider, and The Boys in the Band, the film industry still seemed largely oblivious to the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and the Stonewall riots. Instead, Tinseltown was almost single-mindedly obsessed with replicating the unprecedented success of a certain cinematic phenomenon.
The Sound of Music had ushered in a slew of would-be imitators—overblown, extravagantly budgeted musicals (Doctor Dolittle, Finian’s Rainbow , Sweet Charity, Star!) that succeeded only in proving that The Sound of Music was, in the lingo of studio accountants, “a nonrecurring exception.” Nevertheless, every producer in town had eyes trained on Broadway’s marquees, searching for the next surefire winner in the blockbuster musical sweepstakes. Originally entitled I Picked a Daisy, On a Clear Day had plenty to recommend it. Its theatrical pedigree was impressive: book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Burton Lane (who had partnered with Lerner after Richard Rodgers had left the project in its early stages), and musical numbers staged by future director Herbert Ross.
With plot elements involving reincarnation, ESP, and telekinesis, On a Clear Day couldn’t have been more in tune with the psychedelic ’60s. Lerner’s story was both highly original and ahead of its time: While under hypnosis, kooky co-ed Daisy Gamble reveals that she’s lived before—as Melinda Wells, eighteenth-century England’s most delectable coquette. Daisy’s psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Bruckner, falls for her former incarnation—the super-swan Melinda—while ugly duckling Daisy is entranced by the hypnotic charms of her doctor.ax
While never as celebrated as the music Lerner and Loewe had created for My Fair Lady or Gigi, the score for Clear Day nevertheless contained some of Lerner and Lane’s finest work, including the self-affirmative title tune and one of the great, underappreciated ballads of all time, “She Wasn’t You” (redressed as “He Isn’t You” for the film).
Barbara Harris had won unanimous praise for her performance in the original Broadway production, though when it came time to cast Minnelli’s movie, producer Howard W. Koch insisted on a major star with plenty of box-office pull. The role of the supernaturally gifted protagonist was offered to Audrey Hepburn, who turned it down, perhaps sensing that Clear Day’s doctor-patient relationship was in some ways too reminiscent of the professor-pupil scenario of My Fair Lady.
Although it didn’t seem so at the time, Hepburn’s turndown was a blessing in disguise, as the challenging dual role of Daisy/Melinda required a powerhouse musical-comedy star who could pull off playing Brooklyn’s answer to Bridey Murphy in the contemporary scenes and then switch gears to become the elegant landed lady of the regression sequences. On the short list of performers who could handle the leap from Flatbush to Fair Lady and belt out the score besides, there seemed only one worthy contender … and her name was Barbra.
As Streisand herself explained, she was perfect casting: “I am a bit coarse, a bit low, a bit vulgar, and a bit ignorant. I am also part princess, sophisticate, elegant and controlled.” Besides, Our Lady of Brooklyn had seen the Broadway production and pronounced it “just heaven”: “The two parts are close to my schizophrenic personality. They appeal to the frightened girl and the strong woman in me.”1
Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Richard Harris were all considered for the role of Daisy’s singing psychiatrist, but the part was ultimately awarded to Yves Montand, who finally landed in a Minnelli production after being passed over for the Henri Baurel role in An American in Paris and wisely rejecting the male lead in the ill-fated Mata Hari.
To surround Streisand, Paramount assembled a supporting cast composed of every availab
le male in the Screen Actor’s Guild: Larry Blyden signed on as Daisy’s too tightly wound fiancé Warren Pratt; John Richardson would play Melinda’s weak-willed husband; and for the small role of Daisy’s “exstepbrother,” Minnelli chose a refugee from Roger Corman B-movies, an offbeat newcomer named Jack Nicholson. “I wanted to see what it would be like to be in a big Vincente Minnelli musical,” Nicholson would tell Rex Reed. “It’s a radical departure for me, ’cause he makes a certain kind of movie, you know? … I think I got it because Minnelli was looking at a film I did called Psych-Out for some lighting effects and they saw me in it… . Boy, I’d like to make a movie of Vincente Minnelli watching Psych-Out, man.”2
In the transition from stage to screen, countless changes were made. It was Vincente’s idea to shift the regression scenes from the eighteenth century to the more photogenic Regency period. Some songs from the Broadway show, such as “On the S.S. Bernard Cohn” (which the critics had singled out for praise), were dropped, and others, such as the exquisite, Streisand-tailored “Love with All the Trimmings,” were added. Melinda Wells morphed into the more exotic Melinda Tentrees, and with France’s Yves Montand on board, the character of Dr. Mark Bruckner was gallicized into Dr. Marc Chabot.
