Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  They were an odd couple—Jacobs, in his sixties, dour, gruff, sober; Bennett, in his early thirties, wiry, energetic, a smoker, drinker, and drug-taker. But those who saw them together noticed the chemistry. “They loved each other,” said Robin Wagner. “Bernie thought Michael was as good a son as you could get. And Bernie was the perfect father—wealthy, strong, powerful, and protective. If anybody said anything against Michael, they’d be in trouble with Bernie.”

  Bennett was a frequent guest at Bernie and Betty Jacobs’s weekend house on Shelter Island. Designed by Norman Jaffe, the house had a long hallway that opened onto the kitchen. Bennett used it as dance ramp. Seated in matching white leather chairs, Bernie and Betty would watch with delight as Bennett demonstrated a new dance on the ramp. He taught the older couple how to do the Hustle. He gave Jacobs his first joint. “I remember Michael dancing on the ramp, and Bernie lying on the floor, smoking pot and laughing,” said critic Martin Gottfried, another frequent guest on Shelter Island.

  As the money from A Chorus Line rained down on him—$90,000 a week, according to Variety—Bennett began to play the part of the Broadway impresario. He couldn’t drive, but he bought a white Rolls-Royce and hired a full-time chauffeur. He moved into a penthouse on Central Park South. He took to wearing a long white fur coat at Broadway openings. And he married his star, Donna McKechnie. Jacobs encouraged the marriage. “Bernie’s attitude toward homosexuality was, You just haven’t met the right girl yet,” said his friend Albert Poland. (Jacobs admitted the marriage was his idea. “I made some comment, which in retrospect was kind of stupid,” he told Kevin Kelly, author of One Singular Sensation. “I said, ‘Why don’t you straighten out and marry Donna?’ ”)1

  Bennett’s drug and alcohol use accelerated as well, and with it his paranoia. He showed up in London to direct A Chorus Line with “an entourage of people who spoke of him in hushed tones as if the Almighty was about to descend,” said Robert Fox, a young producer at the time. Fox was working with Michael White, an established West End producer who was presenting A Chorus Line. Fox was drawn to Bennett—“he was unbelievably charismatic”—and it was his job to look after the director in London. “He didn’t want to have dinner with Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard,” said Fox. “He wasn’t remotely interested in any of that. He wanted to hang out at the hotel and drink and chat and watch TV. That’s how I got to know him. I’d go over to the Berkeley Hotel and have dinner with him almost every night.”

  Soon after he arrived in London, Bennett caused a public scandal. White had hired Elizabeth Seal, England’s leading musical theater star, to play Cassie. Ten minutes into a rehearsal, Bennett turned to Fox and said, “I’m going to fire her. She can’t do it. I’m telling you it won’t make any difference if I sit here for another eighty minutes and watch the rest of the show. She’s gotta go.”

  Fox was taken aback. “We have to be very careful,” he said. “Her husband is a photographer for the Sunday Times. She’s very connected with the press, and it will cause a huge scandal.”

  “I don’t give a fuck,” Bennett said. “She can’t do it.”

  After the run-through, he met Seal in the stage manager’s office. “Look, darling, it’s not going to work.”

  “What do you mean?” replied a flustered Seal.

  “You can’t do it, and I can’t make you do it. So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna tell them that you broke your foot, OK?”

  But Seal and her husband were having none of it. As Fox had feared, they gave the story to the papers, which pit the arrogant Broadway director against one of the West End’s beloved performers. Bennett wanted to put McKechnie in the show, but British Equity, led by Vanessa Redgrave, kicked up a fuss. The union would not permit an American actor to replace a British actor. Photographers began chasing Bennett all over London. “And he was being driven around in Michael White’s Bentley by a chauffeur who was buying coke for him in ounces, not grams,” said Fox.

  Bennett left town. A Chorus Line opened at the Drury Lane to mixed reviews. It managed to run three years but was never the phenomenon it was in New York.

  • • •

  Bennett’s next port of call was Hollywood. Universal bought the film rights to A Chorus Line and wanted him to direct it. They paid him $6.5 million upfront, and agreed to give him 20 percent of the distributor’s gross after the first $20 million. “There had never been a deal like that in the history of Hollywood,” said Breglio. In addition, Universal agreed to produce three more movies of his choosing and provided him with fancy offices on the lot. He lasted six months. He tried to develop a movie for Bette Midler called Road Show, which was about his experience in Detroit fixing Seesaw. Universal didn’t like that idea and it became tangled up in studio bureaucracy. Bennett was discovering what David Merrick had learned about Hollywood: The studios had all the power.

  He called Breglio.

  “I’m out of there,” he said. “I hate it here. I hate all these people. I never want to look at Hollywood again. I’m leaving, and I’m leaving a note on the door and it’s going to say, ‘Gone Fishin’.”

  And that’s what he did. He and Bob Avian made a big sign that said GONE FISHIN’ and stuck it on the door of their fancy studio offices. They left without telling anyone. Universal “went berserk,” said Breglio. “They’d paid $6.5 million for A Chorus Line and they assumed Michael was going to direct it. But you can’t force someone to do something they don’t want to do. He said, ‘Tell them I don’t want their money.’ And he was gone.”

  When Bennett abandoned Hollywood, Universal approached every major director—Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet, Sydney Pollack—to direct A Chorus Line. Bennett met with them all. Over lunch or dinner he would dazzle them with his concept for the movie. After the meeting, the directors would call Universal and turn down the offer. Bennett, they said, was the only person who could direct the movie. His ideas were far better than anything they could come up with. “Remember,” said Breglio, “his motivation was to never have the movie done. In those days, everyone was convinced that when a movie came out, the show would close. We had a six-year hold back on the movie because we assumed A Chorus Line would be closed by then. No one thought it would run fifteen years. So Michael didn’t want a movie. He would drop enough of his ideas, which were brilliant, to scare everybody away.”

  Richard Attenborough, who had just won the Oscar for Gandhi, didn’t scare so easily. Bennett had dinner with him and when they were through, he called Breglio. “He didn’t say he was going to do it, but I know he is.”

  “How do you know?” Breglio asked.

  “Because we just had a lovely dinner and he never asked me one question about the show or what I would do. He just told me everything about what he was going to do.”

  Attenborough directed the movie version of A Chorus Line, which was released in 1985. It was one of the biggest flops in the history of Hollywood musicals.

  • • •

  Bennett returned to New York ready to work on his next Broadway show. He shed the trappings of the Broadway impresario. Gone was the fur coat. He was now wearing his old uniform—jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. Gone was the Rolls-Royce, replaced by a van with a state-of-the-art sound system so he could listen to tapes of new scores while he was being driven around the city. To Bennett’s friend Robert Fox, the van represented “the beginning of quite severe psychosis and paranoia” fueled by increasingly heavy cocaine use. “The van was kind of a paranoid fantasy—that you could be on the move and nobody would be able to get you,” said Fox.

  Another trapping Bennett shed was McKechnie. The marriage lasted only a few months, though the friendship endured. Bernie Jacobs helped draw up the divorce agreement and, through his contacts in the real estate business, set McKechnie up in her own apartment at 710 Park Avenue.

  Now that he was back in New York, Bennett needed a base of operations. And he didn’t mean an office. He wanted a building, with rehearsal studios, music studios, a theate
r, a gym, and space for his designers. He wanted his own self-contained theatrical empire, the one he dreamed about years ago over dinner in a greasy spoon with Tommy Tune. And he found it—890 Broadway, an eight-story warehouse on Broadway and Nineteenth Street. Jacobs and Breglio put together the deal, and Bennett got the building for $700,000.

  “The first thing he did was put in dressing rooms and lockers for the dancers,” Wagner said. “Most of the rehearsal spaces back then were filthy. He wanted a place where people weren’t embarrassed to work.” He put in a restaurant and hired a chef who had the unfortunate habit of getting drunk while cooking. “The first course was always terrific, but the second course was terrible, burnt, because he was smashed,” said Wagner. Bennett also leased out space, at low rents, to the American Ballet Theater, the costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge, Barbara Matera, who made the costumes, a milliner named Wally who made the hats for Broadway shows, and Woody, who made shoes for dancers. Bennett gave Wagner half a floor to use as his design studios. As a gift to his good friend, he did not charge him rent.

  Bennett also put Betty Jacobs to work as a script reader. “I hadn’t worked since Bernie and I got married,” she said. “Michael used to say to me, ‘When people ask you, ‘what do you do?’ what do you say?’ I said, ‘I don’t do anything.’ And Michael said, ‘Well, tell them you work for Michael Bennett.’ It was very nice. It really was.” Bennett was inundated with scripts for musicals, and Jacobs read them all. “But I decided then that you really can’t read musical scripts,” she said. “I mean, if I had read A Chorus Line, I don’t think I would have done it. So much of it is the director’s vision.”

  Bennett also drew up plans for a theater in the basement where he could workshop his shows. It would be called the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.

  One night after the renovations to the fourth-floor dance studio at 890 Broadway were completed, Bennett invited Breglio and his wife, Nan Knighton, to ride down in his van to see the building. It was a beautiful winter night, a fresh blanket of snow covering the city. They went up to the fourth-floor dance studio. Moonlight poured in through the windows. The floor-to-ceiling-length mirrors were covered with paper. Bennett turned on the lights and tore down the paper. Then he began dancing in front of the mirrors. “Look at this!” he exclaimed. “Is it really mine? Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Bennett had a raft of ideas for his next show. He wanted to do a musical version of Love Me or Leave Me, the 1955 movie about singer Ruth Etting and her stormy affair with gangster Martin Snyder. He was also drawing up plans for an extravagant stage adaptation of Easter Parade. And he wanted to do a new adaptation of Peter Pan. In the end, though, he went back to what he knew best—dancers. A Chorus Line provided work for Bennett’s friends and contemporaries. But there was a whole group of older dancers who, Bennett knew, might never work again on Broadway. He wanted to employ them, and so he acquired the rights to Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, a 1975 television drama about a lonely widow who falls in love with a married postal worker she meets at a dance hall. It was a poignant, kitchen-sink story written by Jerome Kass. Bennett would turn it into a Broadway musical by expanding the dance hall numbers, making them fantasy sequences.

  The Shuberts wanted to produce it. Anything Bennett wanted to do would be a smash, Jacobs believed. He also believed that the Shuberts, and only the Shuberts, should be his producer. But Bennett decided to finance the entire show himself. He was cynical about show business, and he knew that whatever he did after A Chorus Line was going to be a target. He told Breglio, “Nobody can be as successful as I am. My next show is going to be a flop because they will go after me no matter what it is. They will bring me down.” And so Ballroom was born of cynicism—and Bennett didn’t want anyone to risk a dime on a cynical venture. He wrote the check for the $1 million production cost. He also asked Breglio to join him as coproducer. The thirty-two-year-old lawyer was thrilled. He’d always wanted to be a producer, and this was his chance. He was going to leave his law firm and work full-time for Michael Bennett, the most powerful theater director in the world. Joining them would be Bob Avian and Susan MacNair, Bennett’s indispensable secretary. They decided to call their company Quadrille Productions. And they swore one another to secrecy. No one was to know about the partnership until they announced it. Bennett knew Jacobs would not be happy. “Bernie was paranoid someone else would come into Michael’s life,” said Wagner. Bennett wanted to prepare Jacobs for the news. But Jacobs had the Broadway grapevine at his disposal. He soon heard what Bennett and Breglio were doing.

  The phone rang early one Saturday morning in Breglio’s apartment.

  “I know the deal you guys are doing,” Jacobs said. “You know how close I am to Michael. I don’t want this to get in the way of my relationship with Michael.”

  “There’s no reason for it to get in the way,” Breglio replied. “All I can do is make things even better for Michael. We’ll produce more shows. Fill your theaters up even more.”

  “Yeah,” Jacobs said, “but just keep in mind—if I want to, I can crush you.”

  • • •

  To play the lonely widow in Ballroom, Bennett hired Dorothy Loudon, now a Broadway star after winning the Tony as Miss Hannigan in Annie. Vincent Gardenia was cast as the married postal worker. Kass adapted his teleplay, and Billy Goldenberg wrote the music. The lyrics were by Alan and Marilyn Bergman.

  Marilyn Bergman took on the role of mother hen, bringing chicken soup to rehearsals and fussing over Bennett as if he were her son. But when Bennett began demanding changes to her lyrics, she turned on him. She started calling Bennett “that little faggot.”

  “And that was probably the nicest thing she called him,” said Breglio. “By the end of the process they hated each other. I think they would have killed each other if it was legal.”

  Bennett was battling on other fronts as well. In putting together A Chorus Line, he had created the workshop process. In the past, shows rehearsed three or four weeks, played an out-of-town tryout, and then opened on Broadway. It was a brisk production schedule. But in a workshop, a show comes together over an extended rehearsal period, with cast and creatives experimenting and improvising. There was no timetable, no deadline. The show was ready to go when Bennett said it was. For such a process to work financially, nobody could expect to be paid much money. But after the success of A Chorus Line, Actors’ Equity was determined that its members be compensated fairly for their time and effort. The union feared the workshop process would become a way of exploiting actors. Bennett resisted Equity’s involvement, but Breglio—and Jacobs—knew it could not be avoided. An Equity representative told Breglio that “unless we formalize the workshop process, make sure our actors get paid a decent salary, and get a piece of the show’s future, we’re not going to let them work on Ballroom.” Jacobs arranged a meeting in his office with Breglio and the representative from Equity. They started negotiating at seven in the evening and by morning had hammered out a workshop contract that remains in place to this day. Actors are paid for their services, but at a lower rate than they are when formal rehearsals begin. Should the show become a hit, the union and the workshop actors get a share of the profits.

  “This was not a business proposition,” said Breglio. “It was an artistic imperative.” Bennett wanted more time to create shows. But he couldn’t do it without the cooperation from the union. The final agreement “was good,” Breglio said.I

  Though Jacobs helped Breglio negotiate with Equity, he still resented the young lawyer’s presence at 890 Broadway. “The tension was palpable all the time,” said Breglio. “He wasn’t happy I was there. He was on the phone with Michael every day, telling him he didn’t need me. His message to Michael was: ‘I can do everything and anything for you. I have the Shuberts. I have the theaters. I have the knowledge. I have the experience. What do you need him for?’ ”

  Psychologically, Bennett was not in good shape. He was cynical about Ballroom, but he felt the pressure to deliver
another hit. He eased the tension with pot, Quaaludes, and cocaine. His drug dealer visited his office every day. “He had a briefcase with every drug under the sun in it,” Wagner said. “Michael would lay out lines of coke every day at lunch.” The cocaine heightened his paranoia. The mob, he said, was coming to collect on his father’s old debts. But there was someone who could protect him, Bernie Jacobs, the most powerful man on Broadway, “the Godfather,” as some began to call him. In the end, Jacobs had his way. Breglio lasted just five months at 890 Broadway. Bennett walked into Breglio’s office one day and said, “It’s not going to work. They won’t let us do this.”

  “It was traumatic for both of us,” Breglio recalled. “For me it was traumatic because I’d been in the arts my whole life. I became a lawyer by accident. But now I was going to do what I wanted to do all my life—produce. And do it for Michael Bennett. It was traumatic for Michael because all his life he dreamed of having his own theater empire. And here was somebody very powerful telling him you can’t have it. Do your dancing and your directing and your creative stuff. But don’t build your empire. We, the Shuberts, will give you all your business support. You will depend on us.”

  That night Bennett phoned Breglio and asked him to come over to his penthouse at 40 Central Park South for dinner. Breglio declined, but Bennett insisted. “I want to play something for you,” he said. As soon as Breglio arrived at the apartment, he could tell Bennett was drunk. He’d been listening to Billy Joel’s new album, The Stranger, over and over again, especially the song “Vienna.” He wanted Breglio to hear it, to pay attention to the lyrics—“Slow down, you crazy child/ . . . When will you realize . . . . Vienna waits for you?”