Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Could anyone make it stop? Paul’s old friend and super-successful director Mike Nichols spent a day or two watching rehearsals and meetings, coming back with a frank and useful opinion that prompted quick action. Paul and his theatrical partners tossed The Capeman’s directorial keys to Jerry Zaks, a top-drawer Broadway director whose ten-year hot streak of smash productions included the likes of Six Degrees of Separation, Smokey Joe’s Cafe, and Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Zaks greeted the beleaguered cast and crew with thousand-watt gusto: “You are the best of the best!” he proclaimed. “This will be a fantastic show!” Twenty years later, he looks back and laughs. “I was very sick at the time,” he says. “I had a very bad case of hubris.”

  The scheduled January 3 opening was pushed back another four weeks to give Zaks enough time to tighten some scenes and fix a few others, but soon enough it was 8:00 p.m. on January 29. The lights went down, the curtain came up, and The Capeman came to life.

  * * *

  The first act began with Agron as a child, an open-eyed Puerto Rican boy with no idea where New York City was, let alone what lay in store for him there. He was soon joined by Blades as the grown-up Salvador, just out of prison and addressing his mother. “There’s a truth that still needs to be spoken,” he sings, and a moment later Anthony as the teenage Sal appears, running around a playground in the company of some other boys, joined by Blades’s late-life Salvador, both describing the sweep of their existence with the lyrics of “I Was Born in Puerto Rico.” A flashback showed Agron as a small boy in Puerto Rico, a spirited child with a sunny smile. Yet when his mother decides to move to New York, she takes him to visit a santero who looks into his eyes and sees only darkness. Indeed, Agron will be battered, he will be tormented, he will be seduced, he will commit a horrible deed and spend the rest of his life paying for it. Blades and Anthony were in top form, the younger performer doe-eyed and spring-heeled, an innocent from the toes of his sneakers to the highest notes in his sweet tenor vocal range. Blades played the older character in shades of quiet anger, persistent faith, and moral confusion. The world had set him up: the cruelty of the nuns and his wicked stepfather; racism, poverty, and classism. Society spent his first fifteen years dehumanizing him, then threw him into a prison because they thought he’d done something inhuman? In his mind, the Salvador who committed the murders no longer existed. He spent twenty years in prison growing into a man who had nothing to do with that bloody night in the playground. And maybe the younger Sal wasn’t really to blame, either.

  The songs were generally beautiful; so many of them really do stand up to Paul’s greatest works. Bob Crowley’s sets were quietly spectacular, particularly the setting for Salvador’s New York: the street corners, housing projects, and buttonhole playgrounds a geometric wonder of triangles, rectangles, and distorted perspective. There were video screens, photos, and film clips of the real Agron and the New York City of the rock ’n’ roll 1950s. The show’s first act zipped by in a rush of songs, colors, and motion, all of it bedazzling and all of it cursed. The Vampires were beautiful, mordantly funny, and lightly sinister. They danced and sang their way from the projects to a gleeful shoplifting expedition at a clothing store to the chain-linked concrete grounds of Hell’s Kitchen, where the steps became a frantic death ritual. The knife tore into flesh, blood flowed, and as Salvador sang in “Adios Hermanos,” the song that closes the first act, “it’s time for some fuckin’ law and order.”

  The second act began with a video montage of headlines describing Agron’s progress through the next fifteen years: the death sentence; the pleas for clemency from Eleanor Roosevelt, among many others, that convinced New York governor Nelson Rockefeller to reduce the sentence to life. If the first act was a 1950s delinquent fantasia gone bad, the second was a 1970s sociologist’s lecture on the social and economic factors that can transform an innocent boy into a killer: the physically abusive stepfather who wielded God like a cudgel; the racism faced by all new immigrants; the poverty it creates; and the street violence that is echoed by a vengeful justice system. Being locked in a cell opens Agron’s mind and then frees his soul as he explores poetry, philosophy, and leftist political theory. The New York State Department of Corrections dressed prisoners in white, which gave Agron a saintly look underscoring his spiritual rebirth and, more important, the fact that he had always been a vessel that others used to carry their shame, their schemes and hatreds. The musical visited the families of Agron’s victims and registered the never-ending tragedy of their lives, but the socioeconomic biases facing the Irish immigrants pale in comparison to those that shaped Salvador and his people.

  Here again Salvador Agron feels like a vessel, only now he’s carrying Paul Simon’s fears and fantasies: the innocent youngster wounded by circumstance and fate, hardened by his subculture, made into a celebrity, and then made to pay for other people’s inability to understand who he really is. Asked to summon sympathetic or even apologetic words for the parents of his victims, Agron can only say that if they treat him in a forgiving manner, he’ll treat them humanely—which doesn’t really cut it when you’re addressing the parents of the children you’ve been convicted of murdering. Yet with so many political and economic factors working against him, how can Agron accept full responsibility, let alone apologize for anything? With no redemptive breakthrough available in his true story, the play digs deeper into its spiritual narrative. Did the young Agron ever have the power to change his fate or did the santero’s vision mark him for life? Was his inability to atone for his crimes balanced by his subsequent ability to comprehend the forces that slipped the blade into his hand? When the world failed him, Agron pinned his hopes to the spirit of St. Lazarus, to whom Jesus restored life after four long days in his tomb. For a while it seemed that the saint had done his job, but when Agron’s heart froze in place two days before his forty-third birthday, he was locked into his tomb, just as the santero foretold.

  Paul had reinvented himself continually since he was fifteen years old, and though he had taken himself further than anyone might have imagined, he still could not land the jump to Broadway—possibly because he never really wanted to. He’d gone in with no idea how Broadway worked and every confidence that he didn’t need to find out. As if he had discovered a new door, locked it shut, and then put his head down and tried to sprint through the solid wood. You didn’t need to be a santero to predict how that was going to end.

  “But he can’t leave his fears behind.” St. Lazarus sang those words during The Capeman’s final performance, just sixty-six nights after it opened. “Phantom figures in the dust / Phantom figures in the dust.”

  CHAPTER 23

  THE TEACHER

  The Capeman made its premiere in front of an audience packed with investors, families, and celebrities including actors Julia Roberts, Mark Wahlberg, and Jimmy Smits, Saturday Night Live star Molly Shannon, and comic actress, director, and old friend Penny Marshall. Salvador Agron’s sister Aurea was there, accompanied by four of her children and a grandchild. The audience stood and cheered at the end, and then the cast, crew, and a mob of friends walked the short distance to the Marriott Marquis Hotel, where the opening party was soon in high gear. The guests juggled plates of paella and champagne glasses, while Tito Puente’s band played and the months and years of anxiety melted away, at least for a few hours. Paul, the New York Times Style section reported, showed up with his usual baseball cap “look[ing] almost happy.” His moderate cheer wouldn’t last much longer.

  The morning newspapers ran with blood. “‘The Capeman’ is a dud,” declared USA Today. “A sad, benumbed spectacle,” growled the New York Times. “Damp, sputtering logs of received non-wisdom” sniffed the New Yorker a few days later. Not all the reviews were quite that brutal. Variety pointed out that Paul’s score “ranks among the best Broadway scores of this or any recent season, an exquisite glen of salsa, 1950s American doo-wop and Simon’s own impeccable artistry.” Dan Hulbert from the Atlanta Journal-Const
itution set the evening into full perspective, praising the score and Bob Crowley’s sets before acknowledging that the haters were right. “It’s as if the world’s best engineers were so busy designing the coolest race car body, they forgot to put in the engine.”

  Ticket sales, which had been sinking since The Capeman’s troubles came to dominate the preshow news coverage, fell by an additional 30 percent. Dan Klores, coproducer and spokesman, said the show, in the highest Broadway tradition, would go on. “We’re ready to swing our fists,” he said. “We’ll be here for the Tonys.” Yes, the notices had been unkind, but the critics didn’t represent the tastes of most theatergoers, he argued, or even Broadway insiders. Surely the real pros would recognize the amount of talent and work that had gone into the show’s acclaimed score and sets. And wouldn’t they want to draw attention to the work of celebrated non-Broadway, nonwhite performers Blades and Anthony? Possibly, but that would also require the Tony Awards Administration Committee members to forget all the times Paul dismissed their genre for being so predictable and stupid for so many years. Oh, dear. When the investors, already ten million dollars in the hole, pulled the plug on The Capeman on March 29, the Tony Award nominations were still five weeks away. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d waited: the show earned a total of three nominations, one for Paul and Walcott’s score, another for Crowley’s set design, and the third for the year’s best orchestrations. It didn’t win any of them.

  If you watch the New York Public Library’s DVD of the original production—part of the organization’s collection of recordings of first-run Broadway shows—you’ll see one of the show’s final performances, a Wednesday matinee less than a week from the show’s demise. You can sense the disappointment in the actors’ faces, just as you can pick up the excitement in the significantly Latino audience. There is at least one group of grade-schoolers in the orchestra section, and a few organized clusters of Puerto Rican social groups and retirees. When an offstage announcer mentions that the performance will be preserved for the ages on video, there is applause, then cheers. It is, the announcer says, quite an honor. When the curtain rises on a stage full of Latino performers, Latin music, and the vibrant culture of Puerto Rico, the audience cheers again. Heads bob to the familiar rhythms and melodies. Every so often a wide shot of the stage will reveal a beaming brown face, eyes sparkling with bittersweet recognition. Yes, it’s a sad and jagged story with an indistinct conclusion, but if all the people who stood up to cheer the final curtain hadn’t lived their own version of that story, you have to think they either knew or were related to someone who had.

  The end arrived when the curtain came down on the Saturday evening performance on March 29. Paul had kept his distance from the show for most of its run, but he was at the Marquis Theater for the day’s 2:00 p.m. matinee, walking the backstage areas, then rallying everyone for a pre-curtain talk. He started haltingly as he thanked the cast, the musicians, the crew, and everyone else for all their hard work. By the end, he was in tears, barely able to get the words out. He left quietly; no one expected to see him at the evening’s show. Yet he was back that evening, too, this time in a sharp-cut blue suit and a new baseball cap. The audience jumped to its feet when he came up the aisle to his eighth-row seat, and Paul happily signed his name for all the fans who came to shake his hand during the intermission. He joined Marc Anthony and Rubén Blades for the final bows, and when the cast returned for their bows, more than a few came out with fists held over their heads. Handed a full-size Puerto Rican flag, Anthony wrapped it around Paul’s shoulders and stood back to lead everyone in another round of cheers. When the ovation quieted, Paul gestured around the stage and the crowd and shouted back, “If this is a failure, what’s success?” That touched off another ovation, another few moments of exaltation, before the house went dark for the last time.

  * * *

  Louis Simon found his resting place in January 1995 at ninety years old. The end had been coming for some time. He’d lived his life, done his work with care, and raised two fine boys, both of whom had followed his steps into the music business. Younger brother Eddie was the first to take up the guitar, and became the better player of the two boys, then continued Louis’s path into education by starting and running the Guitar Center, a place for lessons and theory he founded in 1972 with an investment by Artie Garfunkel. Louis had a more difficult time coming to terms with his elder son, the one whose musical talents outstripped his own by many factors, and whose earliest wave of success was profound enough to fulfill the dreams of a hundred immigrant families. Sometimes it seemed that Louis would never abide the life Paul had chosen for himself. He’d listen to the records and come out for a show, but the lights and the noise and the cheering still put him off. Such ostentation, and for what? Paul had accrued so much knowledge over the years; he could find a classroom somewhere and make a real difference in some students’ lives.

  It had nothing to do with love or lack thereof. Louis loved both his sons as all good fathers must, beyond reason, beyond measure. Yet he still couldn’t be satisfied with Paul. Success, money, and fame were easy. So everyone loves you, he said. Who cares? Lou had left the music business for teaching and quickly concluded that that was the purpose of life. “Teach! That’s the purpose.” He was near the end of his life before he found the words to tell his son that he had always been proud of him, that he knew he had achieved rare and mighty things. Paul took it to heart, but it’s the things your dad tells you when you’re five or fifteen or twenty-five that shape your internal geography, not the addendum that comes when you’re in your fifties.

  In the fall of 1997, when there was still cautious optimism around the production offices of The Capeman, Paul confided to the New York Times Magazine’s Stephen Dubner that his father’s thoughts on the transcendent value of being an educator had given him a new sense of what the purpose of his elaborate musical truly was. “I’m starting to think, without getting maudlin and psychological, that this whole ‘Capeman’ thing is about teaching.”

  As his struggle over The Capeman became all-consuming, Paul swore that his recording and performing days were over. He’d already moved on; he had found deeper, more satisfying things to do with his life. Of course, he said that sort of thing a lot, going as far back as the days of Tom and Jerry, when he and Artie both told reporters that pop stardom was just a goof on their way to college and graduate school. Paul had repeated it multiple times during the height of the Simon and Garfunkel era (fiction writing was his first love, etc.), reaffirmed his pledge when he went solo in 1971, and again at the end of his tours in 1973, 1975, and 1980. He’d seemed committed to the idea when he was promoting his new Broadway career during the mid-90s. “I’m thinking of ‘The Capeman’ as a very big ending,” he said, going on to say that he was done making records, too. It sounded pretty definitive, even if he did end up carving himself just a bit of wiggle room (“That’s sort of my thinking at the moment…”). By the time the play closed in late March, he had decided that he was done with Broadway shows, too.

  He was leaving, he was leaving. Best friend Lorne Michaels had stopped taking it seriously years earlier. “Since I met Paul, he’s been saying that he’s getting out of show business.” It was a tactic, a defensive mechanism, a way to say, I’m above all this anyway, so why should I care if you like what I do? He’d pretend to go, linger by the door for a while, then pop right back in with a big smile and a brand-new record, a brand-new tour, a brand-new Paul.

  Paul stuck with his retirement vow for slightly more than a year. An offer to co-headline a concert tour with Bob Dylan, Paul’s perpetual influence, rival, friend, and enemy, in the summer of 1999 proved irresistible. The two musicians convened in New York for a few days to work through some ideas for duets. Dylan was hoping to do “The Only Living Boy in New York” and “The Boy in the Bubble,” and Paul talked about trying out “To Ramona” and “Forever Young.” Ads and posters for the tour, built around a painting of two locomotives thunder
ing down two parallel tracks, alluded to the separate paths the two singer-songwriters had followed through the world. The dream of the onstage collaboration was prettier than the real thing. Barnstorming arenas and amphitheaters, the two folk-rock icons took turns opening and closing the shows, with one end intricately prepared and exuberantly played and the other rough-edged and blazing. Critics noted that the artists’ mutual admiration didn’t necessarily equal onstage chemistry. As much as Dylan got into singing with Paul on “The Sound of Silence,” his inability to master the lyrics or sing the same combination of notes in the same way from night to night made their harmony something less than silky. Knowing all attempts at reining in his fellow bard would be pointless, Paul stood back and reveled in the moment. In the wake of a particularly shaggy go at “Helllooo darkness mah ol’ freee-yennnnnn / I come to talllk to yewwwwagai-yennn” near the end of the tour, Dylan leaned across the microphone and shouted into his fellow icon’s ear, “On a scale of one to ten how do I compare to Artie?”

  Paul was so convulsed with laughter that it was a wonder he didn’t fall down.

  A similar tour with Brian Wilson in 2001 dispensed with the duets, even though Paul’s beautifully deconstructed guitar-and-voice cover of “Surfer Girl” had been one of the high points of a Wilson tribute at Radio City Music Hall a few months earlier. Wilson and his band opened the shows with ninety minutes of his greatest songs (from “Surfin’ USA” to “Good Vibrations” to “Love and Mercy”), one finely cut gem after another. Then Paul would come with his band and “The Sound of Silence,” “Kodachrome,” and “You Can Call Me Al,” and the party would get even wilder. Fifteen years later the Graceland songs had ascended into the pantheon of pop music, the sounds hard-wired into the synaptic receptors for joy and comfort.