I guess there were several persons who wanted to produce this musical play, and Harvey, who wrote the music and was responsible for the wonderful script in the title, later told me the reason they went with Lore was that he came to the reading in a white suit with his attorney. I was the attorney.
Lore set about immediately making this one-act play into a two-act play, and the name was changed to The Fantasticks. I remember sitting around the apartment of Tom and Harvey with Harvey at the piano and suggestions coming from Jerry Orbach, Kenny Nelson, and Rita Gardner, but the additions were all Tom’s and Harvey’s.
Theatre Law?
What did I know about theatre law? Answer: nothing. I didn’t know there was such a thing, although I did muddle through the documents for The Failures. Now Bob Montgomery from the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind and I had to put together some real documents for this little musical. Bear in mind that when it came to theatre law, Bob Montgomery was an expert on Broadway and I was expert on nothing to do with theatre law. Together, over fifty years ago, Bob and I cobbled together some agreements that are used almost verbatim today for all Off-Broadway productions, with only minor changes.
So the play opened in May of 1960 and the summer was rough. The thing that saved us was the entertainment gang, the cast and crew in showbiz, all of whom loved the show. On some nights after opening during that summer, the only ones in the audience were a few people and the seven-year-old and nine-year-old who lived in the building and Annie and me. After eighty-two performances and a load of scotch each night starting at six thirty and ending at two thirty a.m. and driving home to Merrick, LI, pickled (except the one night we were too drunk and Tom Jones made us stay at his place on 74th Street in the city), it became obvious that if we were going to be in this theatre business, we would have to move to the city. It was just a question of time before I would wrap the car, with us in it, around a telephone pole.
The next weekend I went to the city, hocked my life insurance, and bought an apartment on 75th Street off Madison Avenue. That was over fifty years ago. We raised our children there and are still living there. When we bought the apartment, the Whitney Museum was just a hole in the ground and was built after we became city dwellers.
We loved The Fantasticks. In fact, obviously a lot of people must have loved it and still do. It played all over the world, and as I said, it is still running on 50th and Broadway in New York City.
Janice Mars
One of the people who saw The Fantasticks and wanted to promote it was Janice Mars. I debated with Janice, who was Janice Marks at Lincoln High School. When she came to New York and became Janice Mars, she also became friendly with Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, and Maureen Stapleton, who together financed the Baq Room, a dingy nightclub on Avenue of the Americas in the 50s in New York City. She was also a popular method chanteuse, as this hideaway was frequented into the late morning hours after the Broadway plays closed by her following, which was comprised of the New York cognoscenti, including Judy Holliday, Lauren Bacall, Richard Burton, Comden and Green, Noel Coward, and Marlon Brando, who had an affair with her that was at times indescribable in its intensity and fervor. But they remained friends forever, even after the lovemaking cooled. It was very dark in the Baq Room, but on any given night you could still make out the famous faces: Tennessee Williams, Judy Holliday, who brought Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Christopher Plummer, Lauren Bacall with Jason Robards, Maximilian Schell with his sister Maria, Anna Magnani, who was, Janice was later to say, the best audience she ever had, Curt Jurgens, and one time even Thornton Wilder.
We could write books about Janice and the night we were at her house and she threatened her husband with a carving knife. He escaped with his bodily parts intact. But since this is about The Fantasticks, what is important is that she got ahold of the music and was singing it nightly at the Baq Room to all these famous people. It helped the play.
The Fantasticks meant more to me than just a diversion, it meant a whole new career. After the play opened, there was an influx of small Off-Broadway musicals, and I was asked to represent a number of them. Also straight plays were represented by me, including a play The Sudden End of Anne Cinquefoil, written by Dickie Hepburn, Katharine’s brother. We were attending opening nights two or three times each month.
That was when Annie was buying me a Gucci tie for every opening and fifteen dollars was a lot of money for her to be spending on a tie. Off-Broadway opening night parties in those days were not easy to imagine. They usually took place either in someone’s living room, someone’s playroom in the basement, on a crowded stage, or in someone’s dressing room. There were rarely enough seats, if any, so it meant balancing a plastic cup of wine in one hand and a paper plate full of pasta in the other hand. During the evening I splashed food or drink on my new Gucci. It happened so many times it was not fun. I came up with the obvious answer.
For openings after that, Annie started buying me Guccis, and later other label, bow ties. Then when I would slop on a piece of clothing, I was slopping on the washable shirt and not the uncleanable expensive Gucci tie. You may have noticed that if I am wearing a tie, which is almost always when I go out, it is a bow tie. So now you know why I wear bow ties. There is a reason for most things, and sometimes the reason may even make sense.
Bohickee Creek
When we moved to the city our lives changed. All of those famous people one reads about in the newspaper were ending up at parties at our house, and in many instances we didn’t know how famous they were. Some became famous later, very famous.
During this time I represented a play called Bohickee Creek written by Robert Unger, which opened in 1965 at Theatre 73 on East 73rd Street in the city. There were so many fascinating things that happened with this play. It was directed by a client, Donald Moreland, who was one of the producers. The music was written by not yet famous Richie Havens, and during rehearsal they spent a lot of time trying to find him, as he wanted to be left alone and would retire to a rooftop in the neighborhood. The plays starred not yet famous, but soon to become very famous, James Earl Jones, Moses Gunn, Billie Allen, and Georgia Burke. Bohickee Creek was a very sensitive play about the plight of the blacks, and it was written by a white guy.
In the order of the happenings: (1) opening night at intermission, the author’s wife had a drink, and at the beginning of the second act, a row in front of us, she managed to vomit mostly on a very famous critic. That did not make a hit with the critic, and (2) the cast party was at our house. Heaven forbid, at two forty-five in the morning we were sitting around in the kitchen with Jimmie Jones (James Earl to y’all) and Moses Gunn and a few other uninvited but welcome guests, and we ran out of bourbon. We never ran out of booze. But bourbon was the stuff of choice that night. The author and his wife did not attend the cast party at our house. My recollection is that she left the theatre in a hurry right after the start of the second act.
What Annie and I didn’t know then, but now know, is that in certain cultures an invitation to a cast party means the cast can bring their friends, relatives, and anyone in the dressing room at the time. But it was fun.
Frank Loesser
Frank Loesser was very, very famous when I met him and got to know him. I didn’t know how famous. He wrote the lyrics for many songs, including “Two Sleepy People,” “Heart and Soul,” and “I Hear Music.” He also worked with many famous composers such as Newman, Arthur Schwartz, Burton Lane, and Hoagy Carmichael.
Frank wrote the music and lyrics for Guys and Dolls, a musical with book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. It is based on “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” and “Blood Pressure”—two short stories by Damon Runyon. A film version was released in 1955 and starred Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra, and Vivian Blaine. Loesser, an avid smoker, died of lung cancer at age fifty-nine in New York City.
Bob Fosse, who won an unprecedented eight Tony Awards for direction and choreography, and was nominated for an Academy Award four times, winning
for his direction of Cabaret, called Guys and Dolls “the greatest American musical of all time.”
The Fantasticks had opened, and Frank loved it like we did. Frank was also putting together a licensing agency called Music Theatre Inc. Frank, brilliant as he was, wanted to own his own musical licensing agency. It was a humble start and Frank wanted The Fantasticks for his catalog. It just so happened that at the time my office was located on 42nd Street off Madison Avenue and we lived at 75th Street and Madison. Frank’s office was in the 50s in between my office and my apartment. This made it comfortable for me to stop off on my way home once or twice a week for a number of months to schmooze with Alan Whitehead, Frank’s assistant, and with Frank and to drink their scotch, which they always lavished on me.
Frank wanted The Fantasticks for his catalog for MTI in the worst sort of way, and I certainly didn’t mind drinking his scotch. It took about six months for us to work out the deal for them to license the play. During that time, in addition to becoming friendly with Frank Loesser, this very famous man whom I did not realize was so famous, I also became very friendly with Alan Whitehead, so friendly that shortly after that, he brought Antoinette Perry to our house to help us decorate our Christmas tree. Antoinette Perry was the lovely lady that the Tony Awards were named after. And Frank was so pleased that the years he gave two Christmas parties, one at the Plaza and one at the Warwick Hotel, bless him, he invited Annie and me to both.
It is so coincidental how our lives are intertwined with people in show business who are related in one way or another. I started teaching a course in theatre production at The New School for Social Research. The course consisted of an hour-and-a-half lesson once a week for thirteen weeks. I met Drew Cohen a few months ago, and he said he wanted to thank me so much for what I taught him at The New School, and in fact he said that I was responsible for his theatre career. Drew Cohen, still a very young man, is now the president of Music Theatre International, the successor to Music Theatre Inc., which Frank Loesser started, and which I helped him start by drinking a lot of his scotch, and oh, yes, by granting him the rights to license The Fantasticks as part of his new licensing agency.
One of the great plays that Frank composed the music for and wrote the lyrics was How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which had a book by Abe Burrows. The musical starred a saucy young kid, Bobby Morse, who recently has been seen a lot on the hugely successful TV series Mad Men, in which he is and now plays a gruff little old man. That series helped further the career of Jon Hamm, a very talented performer. Life goes on.
It was customary for me to ask at the end of my session at The New School if anyone wanted to ride uptown with me in a cab. About six weeks into one of the sessions, a young man said, “Don, I will go uptown with you.” I accompanied him down in the elevator and there was a big limo waiting there with a license plate that said just the word “NINE.” I then realized that this guy, Kenny Greenblatt, had produced the play Nine, and he was taking my class together with his wife.
Of course, I asked, “For goodness sakes, Kenny, why would you be taking my class?” He replied, “I won two Tony Awards, and each time when I was walking up to get the award, I said to myself, I really don’t know a thing about this business.” We became friendly. The class was great.
Zia Mohyeddin
When Zia came to our house to sign the sublease on the apartment of Tamara Geva and we sat up talking into the middle of the night, we learned a lot about Zia, a poor Pakistani young man who came to England and got a job washing dishes to get enough money to study at RAMDA, the Royal Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.
As fate would have it, Zia had starred in a production at Oxford of a play called The Guide, based on a story of the Indian author, R.K. Narayan, and the eminent critic Kenneth Tynan wrote a review praising Zia. In The Observer in London dated Sunday March 12, 1961, Tynan wrote of Zia’s performance:
“…I have seldom been exposed to such intensity of feeling, coupled with such clarity of utterance, speed of delivery and precision of gesture. Physically Mr. Mohyeddin is no Teuton, but he would have no trouble playing Mediterraneans, in whom Shakespeare abounds; there lies my hint, and I hope someone takes it up.”
Someone did take the hint: the Old Vic engaged Zia to play Romeo opposite Dorothy Tutin as Juliet. What an opportunity for this unknown poor Pakistani actor to play opposite the most beautiful, classic actress in England at that time.
In order to be available to play the part, Zia had to go to his friend David Lean, who had cast Zia in the movie that he would be directing, Lawrence of Arabia. David Lean was very kind to Zia and said that he would move him to a shorter role, casting him as the person who teaches Peter Sellers how to ride a camel at the beginning of the film so that he could play Romeo. David Lean then recast the other part that Zia would have played.
Things did not go so well in the rehearsal of Romeo. Zia and the director, Peter Hall, had an argument, and Zia asked a question you never ask a director if you are a performer: he asked Peter Hall if he should quit. The answer was yes, and Brian Murray played the part of Romeo opposite Dorothy Tutin for the opening and that run of the play. Opening night, Zia was in Rome alone, or maybe not alone, but not very happy. Zia’s theatrical career at this time was not atypical. That’s showbiz!
Oh, yes, I didn’t tell you that the part Zia gave up in the movie Lawrence of Arabia went to another unknown, a guy by the name of Omar Sharif. That’s showbiz; no one or almost no one has heard of Zia Mohyeddin, and Omar Sharif became a huge star, all resulting from his playing the part that Zia gave up so that he could star as Romeo, which didn’t happen. Omar Sharif starred in Doctor Zhivago, Funny Girl, and a whole lot of other major roles during his lifetime. So we became friendly with Zia and his wife, Sherry. We played a lot of bridge with them, ate a lot of Pakistani food with them, helped them find places to live in New York City.
Zia and I were very close and he would just borrow or take my Gucci ties and leave me a Madras tie in its place. Then one day, as a special gift, he gave me the suede boots that he wore when he was making Lawrence of Arabia. The only problem was that Zia came back to visit us a couple of years later, went into my closet, and took the boots back.
Ironically, we became very friendly not only with Zia, but also with Harvey Breit, who wrote the play The Guide that Zia performed in at Oxford that so impressed Tynan.
Yolande Bavan
One night in October of 1961 we left Zia’s about seven in the evening, heading downtown to see the a preview of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was starring this young actor Bobby Morse. The music was by Frank Loesser, whom I told you I had become acquainted with, and we were all keyed up. Before we could get on the elevator to go down, a striking young lady in a sari got off the elevator and introduced herself as Yolande Bavan. Yolande was from Ceylon, trained in England, and we got friendly with her and became her family here in the States.
Yolande at this time was part of the jazz trio Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan. Yolande had replaced Annie Ross in the trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, which really was the top jazz trio in the country at that time. Another unbelievable story is how this happened. When Annie Ross turned herself in as an addict, they needed a woman singer fast. Yolande had never sung with them, but she had met them at a party somewhere.
They called Yolande in England on a Wednesday night, told her they needed her to sing with them on Sunday night here in the United States. Yolande had a party she could not miss on Thursday night, but the next day, Friday into the night, she got the recording of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, listened to the music, and learned the parts that Annie Ross had been singing.
Yolande got off the plane on Sunday in Schenectady, New York, went onstage in this cabaret having never sung with them, got rave reviews, and continued to tour with them.
They were an unusual group, and Yolande’s debut was truly amazing. She has a tremendous musical range and an unusual voice. Dave Lambert was
a carpenter in the West Village before joining the trio. He would drive for the group when on tour. Whether the trip between gigs was fifty miles or five hundred miles, Dave would have a fifth of vodka beside him while he was driving, and the contents of the bottle would always be gone when they arrived at their destination. They drove through treacherous roads, deep snow in the mountains, and never an accident.
After the trio broke up and they all survived Dave’s vodka-infused driving, Dave was on the Connecticut thruway and stopped to help a stalled car that had broken down. Dave was hit by a passing motorist and killed instantly. The vagaries of life are not easily understood or accepted.
Yolande lives in Manhattan and sings and acts when there are appropriate parts for a talented woman in a sari. Jon Hendricks wrote most of the lyrics, which created a whole new style and were adopted in large part by Manhattan Transfer and other groups trying to be cool.
Jose Quintero
We became very friendly with Jose Quintero, who became famous as the director of the Eugene O’Neill plays. Jose and I thought we had the same birthday and should celebrate together. Actually he was born on October 15, 1924, and my birthday was October 19, 1923, but both of us could not miss an opportunity to celebrate something, so we settled on a lunch at the Plaza Hotel.
We had our usual martinis, lunch, and were having a cognac, something I tried to avoid at lunch, even back then, when I observed that when one is drinking one becomes very repetitive in the conversation department, repeating things, but that it makes little difference to the listener, who has been drinking also and who is hearing the repetition like it is the first time. Alcohol does this to both the talker and the listener, and Jose told me this story.
Jose was invited to the party at the St. Regis Roof for Mary Martin, who had just finished a successful tour, and when he arrived late, the empty chair was next to Jason Robards, who was there with his wife, Lauren (all in the biz called her Betty) Bacall. Jason told Jose that his wife had him on the wagon but under his chair was a bottle of scotch and that when Jason shrugged his shoulders, Jose should fill both their glasses. Jose swears he filled them once, but I suspect it happened more than that.
I Hated to Do It: Stories of a Life Page 6
