Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  The Shuberts had spent several hundred thousand dollars gussying up the Winter Garden for 42nd Street, which, at Merrick’s urging, had moved to the Majestic. The theater was in beautiful shape, but it would have to be reconfigured to accommodate John Napier’s junkyard set and giant hydraulic tire. So the tire could fly into the heavens, the Shuberts had to punch a hole through the roof. And that wasn’t all. Napier and Nunn insisted the entire interior be painted black. The Shuberts would share the $4.5 million production cost of Cats with their partners. But the cost of renovating the theater—now approaching $1.5 million—would be borne by the Shubert Organization.

  “This show had better work,” Jacobs told Smith one day as they were going through the numbers. “We’re laying out a lot of money here.”

  Mackintosh negotiated his and Lloyd Webber’s deal with the Shubert Organization. He met Jacobs in his sumptuous office above the Shubert. They sat around a coffee table, where Jacobs liked to conduct business. He showed Mackintosh photographs of his family, and they gossiped about various shows in New York and London. And then he asked Phil Smith to come around. “He always wanted Phil there,” said Mackintosh. Smith settled down on the couch by the coffee table, and the negotiation began.

  “And that was the first time I saw Bernie the calculator,” Mackintosh said. “He was absolutely brilliant at that little round table. As you talked numbers, you could almost hear the clicking going on in Bernie’s mind. He could work out instantly the ramifications of shifting a goal post here or there. He knew to the dime what it actually meant, whether he was giving something away or, in a brilliant sleight of hand, gaining more than you knew. As soon as I clocked that with Bernie, I started taking my time in the negotiations.”

  The young producer had a few cards of his own to play. Mackintosh had worked in every area of the theater, including the box office. He knew that a popular show generated strong advance ticket sales. The theater owner controlled the advance so that a crooked producer couldn’t make off with it in the night. The interest on the advance—called the “flow”—accrued to the theater owner. Cats would likely open on Broadway with the biggest advance in history, in the millions, no doubt. The prime rate in 1982 hovered around 15 percent. The flow on the advance for Cats would be significant.

  “I knew how damn valuable the box office was on it, and so I said I want some of it or it’s a deal breaker,” Mackintosh said.

  “No, no, no,” Jacobs replied. “We will never do this for anyone.”

  “Well, I’m not anyone, and you’re going to have to do this,” Mackintosh shot back.

  In the end, Jacobs agreed. He could not lose Cats. The Shuberts split the flow with Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber. From then on, Mackintosh always took a piece of the flow on his shows—Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon, all of which opened with millions of dollars in the bank.

  The deal done, Jacobs turned to artistic matters. “Cameron, Cats is a wonderful show,” he said. “It is a work of genius. You know how much I love the show. And you know my friend Michael Bennett, who is also a genius?”

  “Of course I do,” said Mackintosh.

  “Michael wants to come see the show, and I would love him to.”

  “We’d be honored to have Michael.”

  “Your show is magnificent,” Jacobs continued. “It’s genius. However, the choreography sucks.”

  Mackintosh was taken aback. Cats was a dance musical and much of its success was due to Gillian Lynne’s choreography.

  “I don’t agree with you,” Mackintosh said. “Gillian’s done a brilliant job staging the show. It couldn’t possibly exist if it wasn’t for her, and that is what the audience is responding to—and that is why you bought the show.”

  “I know, I know,” Jacobs said. “Gillian’s a great choreographer. But Michael Bennett’s a genius.”

  Bennett did fly to London to take a look at Cats. He met with Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh after the performance and told them the show would be a hit in New York.

  Mackintosh responded: “Yes, but Bernie said the choreography isn’t any good, and he wants you to become involved.”

  “I know what Bernie said,” Bennett replied. “Sure, I might come up with a few better steps. But I’d never come up with a better show. And that’s what Bernie doesn’t understand.”

  • • •

  In the spring of 1982, the Shuberts announced Cats would open at the Winter Garden in October. Now it was time to crank up the publicity machine. Turning the crank was a young publicist named Fred Nathan. He’d worked for David Merrick on 42nd Street, but lost his job the day after the show opened. News of Gower Champion’s death made headlines around the world. The Daily News quoted one of Nathan’s assistants saying the party at the Waldorf that night felt more like a wake than a Broadway opening. Merrick hated the word “wake.” He fired Nathan.10

  Little on Broadway escaped Nathan’s attention. He knew Cats was likely to be a winner. He also knew the Shuberts were producing it in New York. He began hanging around the Shubert offices, schmoozing the secretaries. He pressed Phil Smith for a meeting with Bernie Jacobs. The Shuberts favored conservative press agents who placed an article or two in the Times and then passed out tickets at critics’ previews. Nathan was brash. He impressed Jacobs with his enthusiasm and creativity. Cats was an unusual show, he said (though he’d never seen it), and it needed an unusual publicity campaign.

  Nathan also had a talent for something Jacobs enjoyed—gossip. He seemed to know everything that was going on backstage at every show and in the offices of producers, agents, and casting directors. He was, Jacobs thought, “a good piece of manpower.” He got the job.

  • • •

  Growing up in Queens in the 1960s, Fred Nathan was obsessed with two things—Barbra Streisand and Broadway shows. “He did a wicked Barbra Streisand imitation, and he did it every day,” said Rick Elice, Nathan’s best friend at Francis Lewis High School in Queens.IV

  As for Broadway shows, Nathan’s favorite was Hello, Dolly! starring Pearl Bailey leading an all-black cast. He went to the show at least once a week. Bailey had a habit of talking to the audience during the show. At one performance, thirteen-year-old Fred Nathan ran up to the stage and handed her an invitation to his bar mitzvah the following week. She opened the invitation and told the audience, “This boy down here has invited me to his bar mitzvah. Now he knows I can’t do it because I got a show on Saturday!”

  “She didn’t come,” said Elice. “I invited Soupy Sales to my bar mitzvah, but he didn’t come, either.”

  Nathan was always dragging Elice into Manhattan to see Broadway musicals. They saw a number of Hal Prince shows because Prince had a two-dollar obstructed view policy—which “was cheaper than a movie,” Elice said. One Prince show they saw was Company, with a score by Stephen Sondheim. They hated it. “We couldn’t understand what it was about,” said Elice. “So we made fun of it.” They saw Follies the next year—and became obsessed with Sondheim. “It was a real turning point for us,” Elice recalled. “The way it looked, the way it sounded. It got under our skin.”

  For Hanukkah one year, Elice received a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Every Saturday, Nathan and Elice would catch a Broadway matinee and then buy the script and the cast album, assign each other parts and perform the entire show into Elice’s recorder. “And then we would listen back to our wonderful talent over and over and over again. That’s how I spent most of my teenage years. When I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”

  Nathan went to Boston College so he could attend tryouts of Broadway shows at the Colonial Theatre. Elice attended Cornell. But every week Nathan would send him a letter containing that week’s grosses from Variety. “He kept tabs on how well the shows were doing, especially the Sondheim shows,” Elice said.

  After college Nathan applied for a job with theater press agent Saul Richman. He wrapped his résumé around a Nathan’s hot dog. Richman said anybody who does that to get a job “deserves to
be a press agent.” Nathan moved up the ranks. He opened his own office in the late 1970s, and by the time he landed Cats, he’d already handled publicity for Broadway revivals of Oklahoma! and Brigadoon.

  For Cats, Nathan lined up stories in every magazine from Esquire to Penthouse.11 Months before the show even went into rehearsal, he persuaded the Shuberts to lease the largest billboard in Times Square, paint it black, and put a pair of yellow eyes in its center. They splashed the same logo across the front of the Winter Garden, which stretched up Broadway from Fiftieth to Fifty-First Streets. Radio and TV spots ran with the tagline, “Isn’t the curiosity killing you?”

  • • •

  Cats began rehearsals with an American cast led by Betty Buckley as Grizabella. She was not the first choice. David Geffen wanted his friend Cher. Others wanted a Broadway star—Patti LuPone, Bernadette Peters, Liza Minnelli. Buckley was not in that league. A native of Texas, she only had two Broadway shows under her belt, 1776 and Pippin, before going off to Hollywood to appear as Abby in the television series Eight Is Enough. But her agent got her an audition for Cats, and she sang “Memory” for the casting department. She was wrong for the part, they told her. “You radiate health and well-being and we’re looking for someone who radiates death and dying.”

  A few weeks later, however, she was called in to audition for Trevor Nunn at the Winter Garden.

  Nunn directed her to sing “Memory” as if she wanted to commit suicide. She did it. “Do it again,” Nunn said, “and be even more suicidal.”

  “I turned my insides out,” she recalled. But Nunn just stood there, noncommittal. Buckley walked to the edge of the stage.

  “Mr. Nunn, may I speak to you for a second?” she asked. “I know you’ve auditioned a lot of people for this part, and I know many of them can do it very well. But nobody can do it better than I can, and it’s my turn. I just did a television series called Eight Is Enough. That probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but I think there are some people who’d be curious to know that Abby can sing.”

  Nunn looked at her “as if I were nuts,” she recalled.

  She continued. “I’m a really good actress, Mr. Nunn. If you impart your vision, I can do it. If you want me to be smaller, I’ll be smaller. If you want me to be thinner, I’ll be thinner. If you want me to be older, I’ll be older. You just have to tell me what it is you want, and I will deliver it for you.”

  Her speech finished, she turned and walked off the stage. As she was leaving, she saw the rehearsal pianist. He gave her the thumbs-up. In the wings, she ran into the stage manager. He gave her the thumbs-up as well.

  But her agent did not.

  “When are you going to learn to keep your mouth shut?” she asked Buckley over the phone. “He’s a British director. He doesn’t want some American actress who talks too much.”

  Dejected, Buckley took herself to lunch at her favorite restaurant, Woods, on Madison Avenue. The maitre d’ came up to her and said she was wanted on the phone. It was her agent. “You got the part.”

  • • •

  Rehearsals for Cats began in the summer of 1982 at 890 Broadway, Michael Bennett’s building. Nunn believed in research, and he liked to impart his research to his cast. On the first day of rehearsal, he lectured the cast on the life of T. S. Eliot and the history of modern British poetry.

  “You would have thought he was teaching a seminar at Yale,” recalled Geoffrey Johnson, the casting director. “And he went on a long time. The kids in the show—all the gypsies—had no idea what he was talking about. Watching their faces was fabulous. They were completely confused. And Trevor was oblivious. He just kept on talking.”

  The seminar over, Nunn and his cast spent the next three weeks doing improvisational theater games to bring the cast together as a “tribe,” to use his word. One day he passed out pieces of paper on which he’d written an adjective describing each actor’s cat. The actors had to incorporate that adjective into their theater games. Nunn instructed them to study cats and to begin behaving like cats from the moment they entered the rehearsal room.

  “We did an improvisational exercise on our hands and knees, and that exercise went on forever,” Buckley said. “I decided my cat was going to be a sleepy cat. So I found a sunny spot by a window, curled up and went to sleep. That’s how I got through that improvisational exercise.”

  As rehearsals went on, Nunn began to ignore Buckley. He barely spoke to her and brushed off her questions. The company, picking up on Nunn’s lead, shunned her, too. “It was torture,” she recalled. “I felt like a buffoon. Then they started working on the dance numbers, but I only had one song, so they put me in a room for hours every day with a pianist going over the song again and again. I was completely cut off from everyone.”

  Slowly, Buckley began to understand Nunn’s game. Grizabella is alone in the world, isolated from the tribe of cats. Nunn wanted the actors to feel that way about Buckley. The day of the first run-through, Buckley joined the company for the first time in weeks. When she sang “Memory,” people began crying. Nunn stopped the run-through and said to the company, “What everybody’s feeling right now, you have to feel eight times a week. So figure out what that feeling is because this is what I want every time she sings this song.”

  In September, Cats began previews at the Winter Garden. The Shuberts hiked the top ticket price to forty-five dollars, the highest ever for a musical. But that didn’t prevent the public—and the ticket brokers—from snapping them up. By the first preview, Cats had racked up an advance of $4 million. By opening night, the advance would hit a record-breaking $6 million.

  But all was not well with the show. And Buckley was the problem. She had one assignment: stop the show with “Memory.” But it wasn’t happening. “I was only getting tepid applause,” she said. Nunn started calling her in for special rehearsals during which he would tell her the story of The Winter’s Tale and how she needed to incorporate the mood of that play into her performance. “I hung on his every word,” she said, “but I had no idea what he was saying to me.”

  Other members of the creative team told her to think of Grizabella as the Marilyn Monroe of Cats, worn down by too much alcohol, too many drugs, too much sex, too many men.

  A frustrated Lloyd Webber drilled her through the song again and again. “Placido Domingo was in last night and said, ‘Just tell the girl to sing the song!’ ” he yelled.

  “But I am just singing the song,” Buckley said. She began to panic. Everybody was upset. Oh fuck, she thought. I’m going to be fired.

  She asked her friend James Lapine, the director, to see the show. “You’re doing everything nicely,” he told her, “but I don’t know what you feel.”

  “What I feel?” she said. “I feel what Trevor wants me to feel. I feel The Winter’s Tale. I feel what Andrew wants me to feel. I feel what Placido Domingo wants me to feel!” Lapine put a hand on her shoulder. “Betty, calm down. You’re playing a cat.”

  Frustrated, she turned to her vocal coach of thirteen years, Paul Gavert, for help. She went over to his studio and explained her predicament. He threw a pillow on the floor. “Get down on the floor and start hitting this pillow,” he told her.

  “I’m about to get fired from the biggest show on Broadway, and you want me to hit a pillow?” she asked.

  “Do it,” he said.

  She started hitting the pillow, harder and harder. And then she began sobbing. “All these feelings started pouring out of me,” she said. “And I suddenly realized the only person I hadn’t consulted was myself, the kid who does the work, who sings the song. It sounds really New Age, but that’s what happened.”

  A few days later, leaving her West End apartment, Buckley saw a “beautiful homeless woman, who was older, whose hair was exactly the same color as Grizabella’s.” The woman wore white pasty makeup and her face was marred by lipstick smears. And she floated down the street “like she was the most beautiful thing in the world,” Buckley recalled. Their eyes met
and Buckley had “this distinct feeling that she really took me in. It was like she was saying, ‘There is so much I could share with you, but you don’t have the time and neither do I.’ And then she just floated off down the street.”

  That night in her dressing room, Buckley added a lipstick smear to her makeup. The next day—“as if I didn’t get the message from the universe the first time”—another beautiful homeless woman with hair the moonlit color of Grizabella’s and with white pasty makeup and a lipstick smear on her face floated across her path.

  “There was a sense of beauty and dignity about her,” Buckley said, “as if she, too, had something to share but couldn’t because the world had turned its back on her.”

  Beauty. Dignity.

  And a breakthrough.

  Buckley realized what was wrong. She’d been directed to make the audience feel pathos toward Grizabella, so she played the part pathetically. But Grizabella wasn’t pathetic. She was beautiful. She had dignity. She had lived, she had wisdom, she had much to share, and if the other cats didn’t care, that was their problem, not hers.

  The night before the critics came to see Cats, Buckley sang “Memory” and received a standing ovation. She had completed her assignment. She had stopped the show.

  • • •

  Cats opened in New York on October 7, 1982, to critics who approached this presold juggernaut skeptically. Their disdain for all the hype bled into their reviews. Douglas Watt, in the Daily News, said the razzle-dazzle of the production “may be enough to keep you in your seat for two and a half hours, if not exactly on the edge of it.”

  “It’s quite a musical, but hardly purr-fect,” said Clive Barnes of the New York Post.

  Kevin Kelly of the Boston Globe, a big champion of Michael Bennett, wrote, simply, “Cats is a dog.” And Michael Feingold, of the Village Voice, wrote, “To sit through [the show] is to realize that something has just peed on your pants leg.”