And Long was put off by Tune and his team.
“I thought they were preposterous and pretentious,” he said. “They held hands and talked about Karma, and Michel Stuart carried around a bag of crystals that, he said, had magic powers. Somebody would blow up a balloon before rehearsals, and they’d pass it around because it contained the ‘soul’ of the show. Really? Tommy had his head in the clouds, but of course he is taller than everybody else. I definitely had no idea what was going on.”
That night, after rehearsal, Tune convened a meeting of the designers at his apartment on West Fifty-Fifth Street. Lawrence Miller, the set designer, presented sketches of ideas for scenery, and Tune explained the visual concept of the show. It was to be set in a spa in Venice. The set would be all white tiles, and all the women would be dressed in black. “Who here has been to Venice?” Tune asked. Long was the only one who raised his hand. “I had done the grand tour, as all young southern—gay!—gentlemen did back then. They said, ‘Tell us about Venice!’ They had all these books about Venice, but no one had ever been there. So I started talking about the water and the shimmering light and the silence because there are no cars. What did I really know about Venice? Nothing! I was free associating.”
While Tune and the company rehearsed in the freezing cold of the New Amsterdam Roof garden, Long spent weeks researching Italian fashion designers. Postrehearsal production meetings were usually held at Charlie’s, a pub on West Forty-Fifth Street. The creators were putting Nine together over beer and hamburgers. Long would often explain his ideas for costumes, but several weeks into rehearsals, he still hadn’t drawn anything. Then one night his assistant said, “We’re not leaving here until you draw every single black dress you’ve been talking about.” The napkins at Charlie’s were long and thin, perfect for sketching costumes for the tall women Tune had cast in Nine. By three in the morning, Long had sketched over thirty black dresses on the napkins.
On February 7, 1982, Tune staged a workshop for the show’s backers, including Barry Diller, who was running Paramount. Diller arrived with his friend Warren Beatty. A few days later, Diller told Sam Cohn that Paramount was dropping out of the project. He didn’t think Raul Julia was a big enough star to carry the show. And there was one more thing. “Warren Beatty told him he thought the show was awful,” Tune recalled.I
Rehearsals were suspended while Michel Stuart and Cohn scrambled to find new backers. An aspiring young producer named Francine LeFrak, whose father was the real estate developer Samuel J. LeFrak, had attended the presentation and loved the show. One of the things that impressed her most was a steamy dance performed by Anita Morris, playing one of Guido’s lovers. Her number was titled “A Call from the Vatican,” and it was the first—and thus far only—phone-sex number in a Broadway musical. Morris had choreographed it with her husband, Grover Dale, on a trunk in their living room. LeFrak thought it was a showstopper. She offered to help raise money. “Maury came over to my office and played the score, and I filled the room with potential investors,” LeFrak said. “Maury is the biggest schmaltz operator in the world, and when he played ‘Be Italian’ and ‘Unusual Way,’ I just collected checks.”
Stuart, whose family was in the garment business (his real name was Kleinman), tapped the rag trade business for backers. Cohn turned to the Shuberts, arranging for Jacobs and Smith to see a presentation of Nine.
“It was an interesting show, and you could tell that Tommy Tune had a lot of talent,” Smith said. “But at that point, with Dreamgirls such a big hit, there was no room in Bernie’s life for anyone but Michael.”
The Shuberts passed.
But Jimmy Nederlander, who had recently bought the New Amsterdam with the intention of restoring it, jumped in. He also offered the producers a theater, the 46th Street, which was right next door to the Imperial, where Dreamgirls was playing to sold-out houses.
Nine was back on. But there was no money for an out-of-town tryout. The show, which was capitalized at $2.5 million, would open cold on Broadway. The opening night for Nine was set, appropriately enough, for May 9, which also happened to be the cut-off date for Tony Award eligibility. That was press agent Judy Jacksina’s idea. She knew Nine had to make a splash in a field dominated by Dreamgirls. She told Cohn, “Sam, listen, this is an esoteric piece. We got people on boxes singing ‘La-la-la-la-la!’ We have to create some excitement.” Opening on the ninth was gimmicky, but it meant that the reviews would be out on the morning of the tenth, and the Tony nominations would be announced that afternoon. If, as Jacksina suspected, the show received many nominations, “we would take over the newsstands.”
Jacksina had other stunts up her sleeve. Her greatest weapons were the show’s twenty-one striking women. Why not cover the front of the theater with life-size photos of them in their black costumes? “I wanted to seductively represent what was going on inside the theater,” she said. “I didn’t want cute little tap dancing photos. I wanted sex.”
There was one hitch, however—the costumes had yet to be made. All that existed were Long’s sketches on his napkins. “I had to make twenty-seven costumes in two weeks,” Long recalled. “I’ve never worked under such pressure in my entire career. We were killing ourselves.”
Long brought his twenty-seven dresses to the photo shoot, which lasted twenty-three hours. Two days later, at 7:30 a.m., workmen started covering the front of the 46th Street Theatre with life-size photos of the gorgeous women dressed in black—everyone except Anita Morris, whose costume had been rejected because Tune didn’t like it. She was represented by a giant head shot. At 11:00 a.m., Jacksina received a phone call from a friend. Traffic was tied up on Forty-Sixth Street. Drivers were stopping to look at the photos. And there were five camera crews from local TV stations shooting the front of the theater.
Nine had yet to play a performance and already it was news.
“You know what those photographs were?” Long said. “They were a ‘Fuck you!’ to Dreamgirls.”
A few nights later, Tune, exhausted from a marathon rehearsal at the New Amsterdam, was about to climb into bed when the phone rang.
“Darling!” Michael Bennett said. “You have to go out of town with your show. That’s what we do!”
“I know. But, Michael, we don’t have any money. We can’t afford to go out of town,” Tune replied.
“But, darling, you must go out of town,” Bennett insisted. “You will go out of town, and I will help you, and you’ll come in in the fall.”
“It’s not possible, Michael,” Tune said. “We have no money. We have to open now.”
“You will go out of town, do you hear me?” Bennett hissed. “You will go out of town.”
Bennett’s tone frightened Tune. It was, he remembered years later, “black, it was the devil, it was Mafia-like. He had become the thing he feared.”
“I can’t talk to you Michael,” Tune said. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
He hung up the phone and stood in the kitchen shaking. His friend who had once told him, “Never fear, never fear,” had frightened him.
• • •
In March, the cast and crew of Nine left the New Amsterdam and decamped to the 46th Street for further rehearsals. Every night around 9:30 they heard people cheering next door at the Imperial. That was the time Jennifer Holliday brought down the house with “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”
“You could hear the screams through the brick wall,” Long said.
On the other side of the 46th Street Theatre another drama was reaching its climax. The wrecking ball was closing in on the Helen Hayes. On their lunch break the women from Nine would run to the Hayes or the Morosco (around the corner on Forty-Fifth Street) and join the protesters. They would return to rehearsals in tears. “I’m going to lie down in front of the bulldozers,” Karen Akers declared.
Tune had little patience for the histrionics. “I’d say, ‘Girls, come on. Pull yourselves together. We have work to do!’ I felt like I was unloyal to Broadway, bu
t I had a show to put on.”
The little Bijou Theatre fell to the bulldozers in January. By March, all that stood between the Morosco and the Hayes and the bulldozer was the Supreme Court, which had agreed to hear one last legal challenge to their demolition. Local and state lawsuits had been resolved in Portman’s favor. A campaign to have the Morosco and the Hayes designated national landmarks failed. Portman’s hotel got a significant boost when the J. W. Marriott Corporation agreed to manage it. As soon as Marriott signed on, the Reagan administration approved $22 million from the Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) program for the project, despite administration officials openly advocating ending UDAG. Opponents of the hotel pointed out that J. Willard Marriott, founder of the corporation, had been chairman of Reagan’s finance committee during the 1980 presidential campaign.3
For Joe Papp, the fight to save the theaters had become a full-time job. He commandeered office space from the Broadway advertising agency Serino, Coyne & Nappi. The company was located on the fourth floor of One Astor Plaza, and its conference room looked down on the Morosco. “I’m moving in,” he told Nancy Coyne, and made free use of her faxes and phones to wage his battle. He was frequently photographed gazing down at the doomed theater.
On March 22, while vacationing in Puerto Rico, Ed Koch took a phone call from an aide who told him the Supreme Court had lifted the stay against the destruction of the theaters that morning.
“If we’re going to do it, we should do it now,” the aide advised.
“Go ahead,” Koch replied, and headed to the pool.
When Papp got word the Supreme Court had lifted the stay, he burst into the conference room at Serino, Coyne & Nappi trailed by a phalanx of reporters, photographers, and cameramen. He leapt up onto the radiator so that the Morosco and the bulldozer were in his frame, and as the cameras clicked and whirred he shouted, “Arrest me, arrest me! They’re going to have to arrest me to get me out of the way!”
The press conference over, he rushed down to the Morosco where a crowd of more than a thousand had gathered. The celebrity protesters included Richard Gere, Christopher Reeve, Susan Sarandon, Estelle Parsons, and Raul Julia and the cast of Nine. Several actors were reading scenes from O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. Papp jumped up on the flatbed truck with his bullhorn. “These theaters are going to come down,” he told the crowd. “The Supreme Court has lifted the stay.”
There were screams and tears and angry shouts of “Shame on Koch! Shame on Koch!” And then the crowd, led by Papp, scrambled over the barricades to block the demolition crew from doing its job. All the demonstrators were arrested, peacefully, and carted off to a nearby precinct where they were charged with criminal trespass and then released.4 Most returned to the Morosco, but this time they stayed behind the barricades. Shortly after 2:00 p.m., as a giant wrecking claw from DeFilippis Crane Service began closing in on the Morosco, the crowd began to sing “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “America the Beautiful.” And then the claw took a chunk out of the theater’s facade. The mezzanine, with its chandeliers and rows of horsehair-stuffed seats, was exposed. Another swipe from the claw, and the last two letters of the name “Morosco” on the theater’s marquee came loose and dangled above the sidewalk.
“We were in tears,” Roberta Gratz recalled. “Everybody there was in tears. We were in disbelief that they could really destroy something so important.”
By the end of the day, the Morosco and the Helen Hayes were piles of rubble. Technically, the facade of the Hayes was supposed to be preserved. But in the melee of protest and destruction it was, said Gratz, “dispersed.”
Every now and then a chunk of it winds up on eBay.
• • •
As the crane tore into the Hayes, Tommy Tune was racing to finish Nine next door. Previews were to begin April 22, and the second act was still a mess. There were “twelve different endings,” Jacksina said, as well as a long homage to rococo opéra bouffe in the middle of the second act called “The Grand Canal.”
“Oh God, it was longer than Aida!” Jacksina said.
There were other hurdles as well. During an advertising meeting one of the producers announced he had to go to Rome.
“Why are you going to Rome?” Jacksina asked.
“I have to go talk to Mr. Fellini. We don’t have the rights.”
“What? What? What?” Jacksina exploded. “We’re about to start previews in two weeks and you don’t have the rights from Mr. Fellini? What?”
“Would you stop saying, ‘What!’ the producer responded, and then headed to the airport.II
Long, meanwhile, still hadn’t cracked Anita Morris’s costume. She and her husband “sent word,” Long said, that she would be wearing black pants and a black turtleneck in the show. It would be a dramatic look—flaming red hair atop a black body. Against the white tiles, the black costume would accentuate Morris’s double-jointed extensions in “A Call from the Vatican.”
But Long wasn’t ready to admit defeat. He asked Tune to lunch and begged for one last chance. “If this doesn’t work, tell her I will go to Bonwit Teller and buy her the most expensive silk turtleneck and pants in the store,” he said.
“OK,” said Tune. “You can have a second chance. But that’s it. She’s very delicate, and she’s very nervous about her costume.”
Long dashed to the costume shop at 890 Broadway and began designing. “I saw lace, stretch lace from head to toe,” he said. “I was going to take her idea of a long black costume, but make it nude—a nude body suit covered in lace.”
A few days later Morris showed up for the fitting.
“Thank you for coming, Anita,” Long said. “I’m sorry that I have failed you. I missed who you are. I was successful with the other ladies, but their characters are one note. You’re more complicated.”
“I have the mumps,” Morris whispered. “I feel terrible. I don’t think I can stay here.”
“Please give me one more chance,” Long implored. “I see lace. I see a stretch version of what you and Grover want, but nude.”
“Can you get me some tea?” Morris asked.
She stripped down to her bra and thong, and Long began wrapping her in lace. But the lace didn’t stretch, which would make it impossible for Morris to pull off her double-jointed dance numbers. Long noticed some fabric in the trash can that had been used for some capes in the show. It had patterns on it and was stretchable. He grabbed a roll of it from the trash can. “Shut your eyes,” he told her. Then he held it out in front of her. She opened her eyes and “her mumps were gone,” Long recalled, laughing. Off came the bra and thong, and for the next two and a half hours Long and his assistants pinned the fabric to her naked body.
They had her costume—a neck-to-ankle stretchable bodysuit covered in black patterns. Morris would wear nothing underneath.
“Oh, let’s not tell Tommy!” she said. “Let’s surprise him.”
• • •
On April 19—three days before the first public performance of Nine—Long staged a costume parade for Tune at the theater. There was Karen Akers in her chic, understated black jacket and skirt. There was Liliane Montevecchi in a black mink hat and black Folies-Bergères boa. There was Shelly Burch in her low-cut blouse, revealing her ample bosom. And there was Anita Morris in her see-through body suit. Tune turned to Long, and “shot daggers at me,” Long recalled. “And then he began a slow, cold clap.”
The entire cast and crew burst into applause. But not Tune. He continued to glower at Long, clapping his hands slowly, deliberately.
“I learned an important lesson that day,” said Long. “Never, ever surprise your director.”
And now the race was on to haul Nine to the May 9 finish line. The set was still being built and painted in the theater; the “Grand Canal” number was still running longer than Aida; and Long was still finishing the costumes, including another thirty that were all white for the finale. Tune wanted doves released over the audience during the final scene. The first
time the doves were released in rehearsal, they relieved themselves on actress Taina Elg’s white hat.
“Dove doo is gray when it first drops,” Long said. “But when you try to wash it, it turns lime green. And so Taina’s hat was now lime green. She didn’t get a new white hat until after we opened because they didn’t have any money.”
The painting of the set was completed an hour or so before the first preview. The ladies in the show were told not to sit on their boxes that night, or they’d have white paint on their behinds. Some of them were drying their boxes with their hair dryers.
The first preview was rocky. There was no intermission, and some baffled audience members walked out in the middle of the show. Those that remained could hear the roar that went up next door at the Imperial when Jennifer Holliday sang “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”
Tune and Jacksina lingered outside the theater after the first performance so they could hear what people were saying.
“What was that?” one woman asked her friend.
The other woman replied, “I think it was a heroin trip. I think the Italian director is having a heroin trip.”
“How do you know?” the first woman asked.
“Well, I’ve been reading up on heroin trips and that’s what they’re supposed to be like.”
At the next performance, as people once again began walking out of the theater midway through the show, Jacksina turned to Tune and said, “If you don’t put an intermission in this show, I am going to die. Do you hear me? I am going to die.”
An intermission went in the next day. And then Tune began to cut, mercilessly. Out went most of “The Grand Canal,” and with it many of Long’s costumes. The ending still wasn’t working. One night writer Arthur Kopit said, “Let’s cut the white finale. Nobody understands it. It looks like they’re all getting married.” Long had had enough. He’d already lost most of his costumes from “Grand Canal” and he didn’t want to lose anymore. He didn’t want his first Broadway show to be nothing but black costumes. “Fuck you, Arthur!” he screamed. “It’s about rebirth, it’s about hope!” Tune, who never lost his temper amid the chaos, listened impassively. Then he said, “The finale stays.”
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