Broadway Babylon (14 page)

In
Psycho
’s revelation scene, in which Norman appears in drag dressed as his own late mother, Perkins was supposed to “scream as loud as I could” when John Gavin grabs him and saves the life of Marion’s sister, Lila (Vera Miles). However, Tony was committed to his singing lessons, and told
The Hollywood Reporter
, “I asked if I could pretend to be screaming—to save my voice—and they could dub in screams later. Hitchcock liked the silent screams so much he never added the sound.”

Unfortunately for the earnest star, Frank Loesser wasn’t as accommodating or tolerant as the English Hitchcock, who once admitted that except for his (mousey and bespectacled, also very talented) wife, Alma, he might have lived homosexually. Loesser, difficult to begin with, was “a screamer,” according to George Roy Hill. Loesser had wanted an established theater director like Moss Hart (himself rumored to be a closeted nonheterosexual), but Tony, then relatively uncloseted, felt more comfortable and trusting with Hill, who after
Greenwillow
went to Hollywood for keeps.

Record producer Ben Bagley, for whom Tony sang on six albums, stated that the reportedly homophobic Loesser deliberately gave Perkins notes too high for him to sing, and also insisted that Perkins was never loud enough. Tony’s most demanding song was the showstopping, semi-operatic “Never Will I Marry,” the sole song from
Greenwillow
to live on, due to recordings of it by Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and Linda Ronstadt. The song refers to
the curse endured by male members of the Briggs clan, each fated to be a wanderer, visiting his hometown only to help “plant” a baby, but never able to settle down in one place with one partner. The curse can only be broken when a male Briggs chooses not to marry and not to beget another wandering generation. Gideon makes that same choice. (Notice that male singers refrained from recording this masculine but anti-marital song.)

“Never Will I Marry” had the most high notes of any of Perkins’s songs. Despite the vocal training and extensive rehearsals Tony undertook, several insiders felt his voice wasn’t up to carrying a musical. Frank Loesser was particularly exasperated because his last two shows,
Guys and Dolls
and
The Most Happy Fella
, had been big hits, and he sensed that
Greenwillow
might be anything but. Perkins was almost neurotically dissatisfied with the recordings he’d made, and one reason he agreed to do
Greenwillow
was to prove to himself that “my voice was better than it sounded on those records.”

Though he tried to increase his volume, he had to be miked while singing—today a commonplace, then a rarity. Partly to camouflage his vocal deficiencies, Tony over-gesticulated madly during “Never Will I Marry.” He may have been unaware of how bizarre it looked. Perkins biographer Charles Winecoff wrote that “Loesser silently, maybe even maliciously, failed to correct” the broad gestures that were also incorrect. Cast member Maggie Trask recalled, “When it came to lines like, ‘Wide my world, narrow my bed,’ Tony would throw his arms open on ‘narrow my bed’—which was just the opposite. Maybe he was being funny? I never figured it out.”

Actor-dancer-singer Don Atkinson remembered that Perkins would “hyper-extend his arms back with stiffened elbow” while singing. “He looked so strange, because he was big and had a huge arm span. I told him to at least bend his arms a bit at the elbow.”

Lee Cass, who played a villager, offered, “Everybody sang well except Tony Perkins. I heard him sing [“Never Will I Marry”] later … and it was even worse than I remembered it.” She was referring to a 1985 PBS-TV special,
Best of Broadway
, in which Perkins, visibly stiff and nervous and already cadaverous (though pre-AIDS), reprised the song “with excruciating difficulty,” yet no doubt proud to remind viewers of a past when he’d starred on Broadway instead of playing endless kooks and killers, increasingly in a supporting capacity.

In 1960 audiences and most critics disparaged Perkins’s voice, but he had his defenders. One was pal Stephen Sondheim, who felt Tony’s peculiar vocal style was right for his characterization. “One of the things that makes ‘Never Will I Marry’ so brilliant is the crack of his voice when he reaches the tenth.”

George Roy Hill adjudged Tony’s singing “remarkably good. It didn’t have the timbre of a real Broadway voice, but it didn’t have the hard edge. It had a
quality of its own.” Alas, that quality was too specialized or offbeat for the time, and poor word of mouth hurt
Greenwillow
at the box office. Advance ticket sales were enough to keep the show running for thirteen weeks, mainly on the strength of Loesser’s name. The lure of a movie star lead was nowhere near what the producers had imagined. Things might have been quite different had the phenomenally successful
Psycho
already been released.

To Loesser’s chagrin, even pre-sold theater parties didn’t help fill the theater weeknights. The show’s musical director Abba Bogin noted that on Friday nights “You could graze sheep in the theater—there was nobody there!” Though he tried his best to hide it, Tony Perkins’s embarrassment was acute, and colleagues were embarrassed for him. One,
South Pacific
’s Ray Walston, went to see
Greenwillow
but left before the second act. He didn’t know that his presence and his premature departure had been reported to Perkins, who soon after ran into Walston in a Manhattan pharmacy:

“I’d never realized how tall he was, despite the fact that I’d made a film with him. Maybe it was because he was angry. He looked at me and said, ‘Why didn’t you come backstage? Even if you didn’t like the fucking thing, why didn’t you come backstage and at least say hello?!’ And I couldn’t answer him, just stood there looking into those brown eyes. He got what he had ordered, walked out the door, and that was it.”

Later on, Tony tried to paint the experience as an uplifting one. “When I played in
Greenwillow
, we’d get terrible houses—only a handful of people on some nights. I always liked that … I always felt if there were five or ten people out there, I could give each one my individual attention.”

Despite its closing after ninety-five performances,
Greenwillow
yielded Perkins a Tony nomination. Ray Walston recalled, “It just floored me. But once in a while a Hollywood notable gets handed a nomination merely for lending his gilt-edged presence to the Great White Way.” (Jackie Gleason won the award that year.) Tony Perkins conclusively learned that his Broadway presence was not gilt-edged when he returned in 1962 to make his comedy stage bow in the satire
Harold
. (Celebrated playwright George S. Kaufman once quipped that satire is what closes on a Saturday night.)

Harold
folded after twenty-six performances, losing its investors nearly all their money. In the future, Perkins virtually ignored
Harold
in conversation and interviews, yet continued to rhapsodize over
Greenwillow
. Ray Walston, a (Rexford Drive, Beverly Hills) neighbor of this author, confided, “Tony was too androgynous to be a commercial stage lead. Filmmakers and cameras have their tricks and subterfuges, but out on that stage, it’s all you. On the stage, you are exposed. Tony once said his fondest ambition was to become a beloved musical comedy star. He wanted to be a singing as well as acting talent. In other words, to outdo his father.”

In 1989, three years before Perkins’s death, Susan Loesser, Frank’s daughter, requested an interview with Tony about
Greenwillow
for her upcoming biography of her father. By then less inclined to play the stellar game of glorifying one’s failures, Tony declined, informing friends that his “most miserable days” had been working with Frank Loesser. Which, considering the downhill years after
Psycho
, was saying something.

P.S. Anthony Perkins had married at forty, partly to change his image and to become a father. Though the relationship was said to be a loving one, he continued having casual sex on the side and eventually died of AIDS. Widow Berry Berenson (Marisa’s sister) died nine years later, in 2001, when her airplane flight, guided by Muslim terrorists, slammed into Manhattan’s World Trade Center on 9/11.

D
ANCER, ACTOR, CHOREOGRAPHER, AND DIRECTOR
Tommy Tune is the only individual to have won Tonys in four different categories and to win the same two Tony Awards two years in a row. Yet he couldn’t land a movie career to speak of—he had passing roles in
The Boyfriend
and
Hello, Dolly!
and costarred in a European film. Here’s why:

On “New Year’s Eve, nineteen-seventy-something,” Tune attended a Josephine Baker concert at the Palace Theatre in New York. Professionally, he was riding high with a long run at the Uris Theatre in
Seesaw
, playing one of the first openly gay major characters in a mainstream Broadway musical comedy. Hollywood had recently come calling; a team of producers who’d expanded their scope from theater to an Oscar-winning film musical had developed a musical screenplay tailored for Tommy Tune, future star. His contract included a clause providing for a trailer dressing room tall enough for the dancer with the heron’s legs to be able to
stand
while changing into his wardrobe.

At the Baker concert, the older diva was vainly requesting people from the mostly elderly audience to come up and “Dance weez me, we make beeg deescotheque on Palace stage deez very New Year’s Eve,” as she cooed in her semi-genuine French accent. Tommy recalled, “Not an old soul was stirring in that nostalgic crowd.” She pleaded, “Come on, come on!” until Tune took pity and joined her on the stage. Josephine didn’t know who he was, but many in the audience did, and applauded. The two danced, and he finally returned to his seat somewhat embarrassed and thrilled.

Until the next day, when he read a newspaper account of the gala evening. Just before the curtain had gone up, Tommy explained, “a tall, heavily perfumed black man in a turban and white caftan—it could have been Geoffrey Holder,
but it wasn’t—passed up and down the aisle flamboyantly passing out bouquets of red roses with the whispered command, ‘These are for Josephine. Throw them on the stage for her. Let’s cover her in roses.’ ”

In the newspaper, a venomous critic who according to Tune used “cruel, disheartening, washed-up descriptions,” wrote dismissively about the tall man in the turban and caftan, a “sashaying, sentimental camp follower.” Tommy Tune was mentioned by name in the same paragraph, so that the impression given was that the dancer-actor was “a flamboyant drag queen come to pay homage to his gay icon,” as he later described it.

Sure enough, “the big boys in the Hollywood studios [sic]” picked up the item and called the producing team, who called Tommy, demanding, “What in the hell did you think you were doing last night? You’ve caused a big problem for us out there with the guys in California. I mean they kept it quiet about Cary Grant but he wasn’t ever dancing around in drag onstage with Josephine Baker!”

Despite his insistence that he wasn’t the tall man in the article and had not appeared in drag, but had simply gone onstage to help a faltering star out, the damage was done. “It doesn’t sound like that in the paper!” Tommy was told, for heterosexual publicity—the truth be damned—is crucial for movie stars, or potential ones. The movie deal dissolved, not immediately, but “by subtle lessening degrees, and then one day it was invisible, like it had never happened.” The picture never got made, as it had been so specifically tailored to Tune, plus musicals were by then a financial risk.

“And I never became a movie star,” Tommy wrote in his 1997 memoirs, in which he finally came out. He prefaced the story with “I have no regrets,” which, in light of his subsequent Broadway career, could well be true. Besides, how many 6′ 6½″ movie stars have there ever been?

I
N
1952, R
ICHARD
R
ODGERS
called
Pal Joey
the first musical in “long pants,” that is, the first grown-up musical. Rodgers and Hart’s sophisticated show centered on an opportunist named Joey who loves himself first and last and who falls in lust, not love. He’s also a man kept by an older woman: Vera, an ex stripper. The musical eschewed lovey-dovey, moon-in-June romanticism for realism, even promiscuity. For instance, the now-classic song “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” had to have some of its lyrics—sung by Vera about her stud muffin—altered before it could go on radio to become a national hit.

Ahead of its time,
Pal Joey
was not a hit. Twelve years later when it was revived, things had changed enough that it was successful and acclaimed. However, and of course, the 1957 film version subverted much of
Pal Joey
’s innovative quality. Two successful stage revivals in 1961 and ’63 starred Bob Fosse in the title role.

After
Pal Joey
, Richard Rodgers wished to musicalize Lynn Riggs’ unsuccessful 1931 play
Green Grow the Lilacs
. But Lorenz Hart, an urbane gay man—Jewish, like Rodgers—driven to alcoholism by a mixture of homophobia and
misery over his extreme shortness, wasn’t interested in the rural project that would become
Oklahoma!
and which opened months before his premature death.