The immediate diagnosis was transient global amnesia, a neurological disorder that renders the victim incapable of remembering anything but the last few moments of consciousness. Bernie Jacobs, who only the day before could tell you what the stop clause was on David Merrick’s production of Promises, Promises in 1968, could not remember where the bathroom was in his house.
• • •
Chess, the most expensive, the most anticipated musical in West End history, was now without a producer. It fell to Fox to steer the show to opening night. But Fox was not in good shape. He was drinking heavily and doing a great deal of cocaine. He was also leaving his wife for his lover, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter. To make matters worse, Fox was fighting with Nunn, who, perhaps to show his disdain for the young producer, always called him “Roger.”
There were problems with the set. The hydraulic chessboard, which weighed more than a ton, was operated with a joystick by a technician named Barry. But he was having trouble maneuvering the machinery. The board kept scratching the stage with an ear-piercing screech. Then, on a Saturday before the first week of public performances, Barry managed to work the board without a hitch. There were cheers—and relief—from the company.
But the chessboard still posed problems for the actors. When it became a mountain (some scenes in the show were set in the Italian Alps), the actors had to climb it. The trouble was, it was slippery. “Every time Murray tried to scale it, he ended up unceremoniously in a heap,” said Paige. “But Murray was kind of Mr. Cool, anyway. He’d get back up, still singing, start climbing again—and tumble down. It was really very funny.”
Finally, somebody had the idea of attaching thick rubber soles to the actors’ shoes. It did the trick, though the entire company was now two inches taller.
• • •
In May 1986, with Chess about to begin previews at the Prince Edward Theatre, the Shuberts arrived in London. “Bernie was really not in good shape,” said Fox. He was tired and depressed, often addled. Once, during a meeting in his suite at the Berkeley Hotel, he got up to use the bathroom and walked into the closet.
And he was drinking, which, aside from an occasional Scotch, he never used to do.
“We were in my office at midnight after one of the previews, and Bernie’s drinking vodka practically out of the bottle,” said Fox. “Everybody is saying to him, ‘Bernie, you cannot drink! You must not drink!’ But he was lost. He was really lost. And so were the rest of us. Because he was the strong guy, and the strong guy was no longer there.”
And yet there were flashes of his quick wit. At a production meeting at the back of the theater after a preview, chubby Jerry Schoenfeld jumped up onto the bar. Jacobs scowled. “Get off there. You look like Humpty Dumpty!”
As for the show itself, Jacobs’s verdict was simple—“Michael would have done it better.”
Which was unfair to Nunn. He’d taken over a complex production at the last minute and brought it to opening night. “And it was not a catastrophe,” said Fox.
The reviews were mixed, ranging from “gift-wrapped and gorgeous” (the Telegraph) to “inchoate mess” (the Guardian). But the show, largely on the strength of the popular concept album, did good business, managing to run nearly three years in London and break even.
Encouraged by its success in London, Schoenfeld and Jacobs decided to produce it on Broadway.
• • •
Back in New York rumors swirled around the unexpected news that Bennett was selling 890 Broadway. He was pouring $3 million a year into the place, subsidizing all his friends and colleagues who had sweetheart deals on their rent. Now that he was sick, he had to unload the money pit.
Editors at the New York Times, which thought it covered Broadway as aggressively as it covered the world, knew there was a story there. Jeremy Gerard joined the Times in September 1986 as the theater reporter. One of his first assignments was to find out what was going on with Michael Bennett. “The Broadway community was really shaken up,” said Gerard. “Something must be seriously wrong for Michael to put that building up for sale.”
Gerard was also hearing rumors that Bennett had AIDS.
He started calling Bennett, leaving messages for him at his apartment in New York and his house in East Hampton. Bennett always returned his calls—but to his answering machine at the Times late at night. “Oops! Sorry I missed you. Try me again!” he’d say.
Gerard started preparing his story, which would run with or without Bennett’s cooperation. Close to deadline his phone rang. “This is Michael. What do you want to know?”
They spoke for two hours, about Bennett’s life and career and the state of the Broadway musical. Gerard asked him if he was ill. “I have what my doctor is calling stress-related angina,” Bennett told him.
“I never asked him if he had AIDS,” Gerard said. “There is no question in my mind that other reporters would have pursued it more aggressively. But at the beginning of the epidemic we were trying to figure out where privacy ended and where the public’s need to know began. I was not going to be the one to say to somebody, ‘Are you dying of AIDS?’ So I was tactful. Maybe too tactful.”
Gerard’s story ran on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section on November 2, 1986, under the headline WHY MICHAEL BENNETT HAS SAID GOODBYE, FOR NOW, TO BROADWAY. Bennett said he would soon undergo surgery for angina. “I’ve never been more scared in my life,” he admitted. He discussed the collapse of Scandal and his withdrawal from Chess. He said he was being forced to sell 890 Broadway because it was a financial drain. At times he sounded philosophical, at other times bitter. “What Broadway community?” he said at one point. “There is no Broadway community. I went to the Shuberts and said, ‘Buy the building, or you and the Nederlanders buy the building.’ They weren’t interested.”
The interview ended on an optimistic note. All he needed, Bennett said, was six months to recover from surgery and a new show to work on.
“I think I’ll be able to make my comeback at forty-four without a problem,” he said.
“It was a great piece about Michael Bennett,” said Gerard, “but it starts with his lie.”
“Poor Jeremy Gerard,” said Robin Wagner. “He got fucked.”
• • •
A few weeks after the article appeared, an “intimate” of Bennett’s phoned Gerard and requested a meeting. The friend brought along Bennett’s hospital records. He showed them to Gerard. “I saw with my own eyes the incontrovertible proof that Michael Bennett had AIDS,” said Gerard.
Gerard didn’t know what to do with the information. And then in March 1987 another prominent theater figure, Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, withdrew from directing Titus Andronicus for Joseph Papp in Central Park. On a hunch, Gerard called St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, which, he knew, was where many AIDS patients went. He asked for Charles Ludlam and was put through to his room. Ludlam would not say he had AIDS, but admitted he was suffering from pneumonia. “I’m going to beat it,” he said.
“But his voice already sounded haunted,” Gerard recalled.
A few months later the press agent for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company called Gerard to tell him Ludlam had died. The family wanted the Times to report he had died of pneumonia.
But Gerard could not knowingly put a lie in the New York Times. And he knew, as a cultural reporter, the toll AIDS was taking on the arts. He believed it was time to write about it. He made his case to Ludlam’s grieving family. “The only way we can stop stigmatizing this disease is to be honest about how people whose names we know died. It will make it easier for the living to be able to deal with this—not in the closet, not in shame, not in private places where, in some cases, even their families don’t know what is going on.”
As Gerard was writing the obit on deadline, Ludlam’s parents called to say that, yes, he could write that their son had died of AIDS. The obituary ran on the front page of the New York Times. “Charles Ludl
am, one of the most prolific and flamboyant artists in the theater avant-garde, who seemed to be on the verge of breaking into the mainstream of American culture, died of pneumonia early yesterday,” Gerard wrote. “He was forty-four years old and had been suffering from AIDS. Mr. Ludlam’s death stunned a theater community that is struggling daily—mostly, until now, in private, personal ways—with the devastation of AIDS.”
Ludlam’s obit broke the dam. The Times had been reluctant to cover AIDS. The Village Voice and the New York Native, an openly gay newspaper, had been writing about it since the beginning of the 1980s. Activists like Larry Kramer, a founder of ACT UP, criticized the Times for ignoring what was now being called a plague. But the paper would make up for lost time. With Gerard as the lead reporter, the entire cultural staff set about writing a two-part series on AIDS and its impact on the arts in New York City. Gerard’s assignment was the theater world, and he knew that Broadway’s most celebrated director was dying of AIDS. He met with Arthur Gelb, the powerful managing editor of the Times who oversaw the paper’s cultural coverage, and told him he’d seen Bennett’s medical records.
“Arthur was very generous in allowing me to grapple with it,” he said. “I felt we should print it because Michael used his access to the press not to say, ‘It’s none of your business,’ but to put out a lie. And he certainly didn’t care about my credibility—or the paper’s—when he did that.”
Gerard’s story—CREATIVE ARTS BEING RESHAPED BY THE EPIDEMIC—appeared on the front page of the New York Times on June 9, 1987. Beverly Sills, the head of the New York City Opera, said in the article that within the past two months, two dozen members of City Opera—singers, musicians, administrators—had died of AIDS. She had delivered ten eulogies.
Joseph Papp said, “I have had so many people around me dying of this, I don’t want to talk about it.”
A few paragraphs later, Gerard noted AIDS was affecting artistic works still being created. “Michael Bennett, one of the most influential directors and choreographers of his generation, withdrew as the director of the musical Chess when, according to information confirmed by the New York Times, he was stricken with the illness. He has been in Tucson, Arizona, since December battling the disease that has prevented him from working for more than eighteen months.”
Gerard never told Bennett—or his friends and representatives—that he was going to reveal that Bennett had AIDS. “I knew they would deny it,” he said.
Blindsided by the revelation, the Bennett camp was furious.
“Michael went berserk and I went berserk,” said Breglio. “I told Jeremy I would never speak to him again about anything having to do with Michael. As far as I was concerned, the Times had violated their policy by writing about Michael’s illness and then not asking us for a comment. Yes, Jeremy was lied to. But it was Michael’s option to tell people whether or not he had AIDS. It was his life. He didn’t want to be a poster child for AIDS. He just didn’t. It was a different time.”
Bernie Jacobs called Gerard. “You didn’t have to write that,” he said as much in sorrow as in anger.
The reporter stood his ground. “With all due respect, Bernie, I did because I knew it to be true.”
• • •
In Tucson, Bennett received regular blood transfusions at a clinic conducting experiments on AIDS patients. He bought a handsome adobe house, designed in the 1930s by Josias Thomas Joesler, at the foot of the Catalina Mountains. He lived with a nurse and a couple of close friends who had nothing to do with Broadway. He would only allow a few theater friends to visit him—Bob Avian, Robin Wagner, John Breglio. But not Bernie Jacobs. They spoke on the phone, but Bennett would not allow Jacobs to visit him in Arizona. He’d come to resent Jacobs for manipulating him out of buying the Mark Hellinger Theatre. And now that he was dying, he was determined to break free of Jacobs’s control.
“It’s all about business with Bernie,” Bennett was now saying. “Don’t kid yourself. It’s about business.”
“The relationship deteriorated,” said Breglio. “By the end of his life, Michael didn’t want to see Bernie. He cut him out.”
Jacobs did not feel that way about Bennett. Distraught, he spiraled into a deep depression.
Michael Bennett died at his home in Tucson on Sunday, June 28, 1987.
For more than a year, whenever Jacobs spoke of him, he did so in the present tense.
* * *
I. The complicated love lives of British theater people always amused Bernie Jacobs. During Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Trevor Nunn, and set designer John Napier all left their wives for younger women playing cats. In Lloyd Webber’s case, the woman was Sarah Brightman. “The trouble with the English is that they have too many wives,” Jacobs often said.
II. The revival of Nicholas Nickleby opened in Los Angeles and did no business despite a strong plug from Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. The production lost money everywhere it played. It opened in New York on August 24, 1986, at the Broadhurst Theatre and closed after just twenty-nine performances.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming!
Throughout the eighties and nineties, obituaries of theater people who had died of AIDS appeared almost daily in the New York Times—Wilford Leach, the Tony Award–winning director of The Pirates of Penzance and The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Tony Richardson, the director of Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer; Larry Kert, the original Tony in West Side Story; stage and screen star Anthony Perkins; Brad Davis, who gave a memorable performance in Larry Kramer’s play about the AIDS crisis, The Normal Heart; Leonard Frey, the “ugly pockmarked Jew fairy” in The Boys in the Band; Ethyl Eichelberger, playwright and drag queen; A. J. Antoon, director of That Championship Season; Michael Peters, co-choreographer of Dreamgirls.
The most famous show business AIDS victim was Rock Hudson, who died in 1985. Shirley Herz, the press agent for La Cage aux Folles, said the box office plunged in the wake of the publicity surrounding Hudson’s death. “People were afraid they’d get AIDS at the show because it was about homosexuals,” she said. La Cage survived another two years, but it fell apart after the death, from AIDS, of its shrewd executive producer, Fritz Holt.
Jerry Herman, the composer of La Cage, was diagnosed with HIV in the mid-eighties. He moved to Los Angeles where, he said, he thought he would die. As it turned out, Herman became a longtime survivor of HIV. As of this writing, he’s eighty-two and living in Miami Beach.
In addition to famous Broadway names, AIDS claimed countless chorus kids, some of whom, had they lived, would probably have become well-known performers, directors, and choreographers themselves. Michael Bennett stepped out of the chorus line to become the most important Broadway director of his generation. But he was cut down in the prime of his life. Who knows how many great shows he had left in him? Who knows how many young dancers he would have helped turn into first-rate directors and choreographers?
And, in fact, with Bennett’s death the great tradition of the director-choreographer was coming to an end. Jerome Robbins, who began it with such shows as West Side Story and Gypsy, had abandoned Broadway for the ballet. Gower Champion, who staged Hello, Dolly! and 42nd Street, was dead. And Joe Layton, director of George M! and Barnum, was suffering from AIDS (he would die in 1994).
Another giant—Bob Fosse—dropped dead of a heart attack on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., walking to the Willard Hotel from the National Theatre after the opening night of his revival of Sweet Charity.
The previous year, Fosse had tried to make a Broadway comeback with a show called Big Deal, which he wrote, choreographed, and directed. Based on the movie Big Deal on Madonna Street, the Shuberts produced it at the Broadway Theatre. It lasted just sixty-nine performances, and it ended the Shuberts’ always-contentious relationship with Fosse. During tryouts in Boston, Fosse battled Schoenfeld and Jacobs. Every time they gave him a note on the production, Fosse would say, “I’m the director. You’re the produce
r. Let me make my show, so shut the fuck up.”1
Jacobs thought the physical production was too dark. But whenever he asked Fosse to lighten it up, Fosse would turn to Jules Fisher, the lighting designer, and say, “Jules, make it darker.”
After the show opened to tepid reviews, Jacobs told the ad agency, Serino, Coyne & Nappi, “We’re not going to support this show with advertising. But we have to do one thing. We have to make a TV commercial because it’s in Bob’s contract. So we’re going to make the TV commercial, but we’re not going to air it a lot.”
“They hated him by that point,” Rick Elice, who worked on the commercial, recalled.
When Fosse died, Jeremy Gerard called Jacobs for a comment for an obituary he was writing in the Times. “Within a short time, we’ve lost Gower Champion, Michael Bennett, and now Bobby,” Jacobs said. “It’s an enormous loss. And who’s in sight to take their places?”
But then he added, “Bobby could be the nicest, most decent, politest, most considerate man you could ever hope to meet. He was thorough and he was hardworking, but he was not a very nice man. He was not just nasty to other people. He was nasty to himself.” The comment enraged Fosse’s widow, Gwen Verdon. She banned Jacobs from the funeral.I
But Jacobs had raised a serious point in Fosse’s obituary. Who, indeed, would carry on the tradition of the American musical theater now that Bennett, Champion, and Fosse were gone? There was, of course, Tommy Tune. But he was touring in My One and Only and wouldn’t come up with another musical until the spectacular Grand Hotel in 1989.
In the mid-eighties, Broadway looked a little thin. There were only thirty-one shows in the 1984–85 season, down from fifty just two years prior. And, for the first time since 1981, attendance began to drop, reaching a low of 6.5 million in 1985.2
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