Broadway Babylon (26 page)

“Attila the Hitler”—what one
ASSISTANT
to Jerome Robbins called him, according to biographer Greg Lawrence (
Dance with Demons
)

“I let him come in my dressing room, but I’ll tell you something, I never shook his hand.”—Z
ERO
M
OSTEL

“As a person, Robbins was a rat fink. He was a rat and he finked. If he hadn’t gone into the dance, he’d have been a rat catcher, on the theory that it
takes one to know one.”—actor E
DDIE
A
LBERT
(TV’S
Green Acres
), whose Mexican wife, Margo, was blacklisted

“He was usually nice to children. But adults were all fair game, potential victims. You explain it to me.”—stage and TV (
Rhoda
) actress N
ANCY
W
ALKER

“At a party in New York in 1975 he came on to me. In a very cold, condescending way. That’s not why I dislike him—and I did say no, by the way.… He’s one of those people I hate to admit is gay. And since he tried so hard and so long to hide it, maybe we don’t have to count him as gay.”—musician turned journalist L
ANCE
L
OUD

“Jerry Robbins claimed not to be in any way inclined toward fascism. That may have been true. But he played right into their hands, and he couldn’t hide the eagerness—the selfish eagerness—with which he did so.”—lyricist N
ANCY
H
AMILTON
(
One for the Money
)

“I don’t think anyone on Broadway was ever so admired and so hated, simultaneously.”—playwright B
OB
R
ANDALL
(
6 Rms Riv Vu
)

“He did not treat [dancer-choreographer] Carol Haney very well at all. I thought it was awful the way he treated her … and she was very sick. He tended to take people who were weakened and get at their weak points.”—
Funny Girl
stage manager T
OM
S
TONE
; Haney was fired after Robbins came aboard but retained her choreography credit

“Bea Arthur was ready to quit. Bea was brilliant [as the matchmaker], but Jerry wanted the focus on Tevye and his wife, Golde. So he kept cutting [Bea’s role] down.… I was so angry in Washington, D.C.—we were playing the National—and I stormed out of the theatre. There’s a long alley by the side … Bea was sitting there smoking a cigarette. I came out and I said, ‘Bea, I’m going to rip his cock and balls off and shove ’em down his throat.’

“And Bea looked at me, she took a puff of her cigarette, and she said, ‘What cock? What balls?’ And then took another puff. I never forgot that; the timing was superb, naturally.”—
Fiddler on the Roof
dancer C
HUCK
R
ULE

“Naturally, Robbins adored the ballet, and who knew better than he what dedicated, disciplined, and strong athletes they are? So it irked the hell out of him when bigoted ignoramuses like [New York City Mayor Fiorello] La Guardia publicly said [in the 1940s] that he loathed male ballet dancers. Robbins came out publicly against that statement, defending the ballet and
[saying] in Europe it was a beloved and historic art form.… After Robbins capitulated to the bigots in 1953, it killed him that these were the very men who would most hate ballet, especially male dancers.”—
Dance
magazine editor-in-chief W
ILLIAM
C
OMO

“Jerome Robbins’s father was against his becoming a dancer and tried to stop it. Jerry hated his father. But then he went and transferred that hatred to a goodly percentage of the people in show business.”—D
ODY
G
OODMAN
, who worked with Robbins in
Wonderful Town
(1953)

“He has his own way of doing things … I don’t judge, and I don’t get involved if I don’t have to. I’m the boss, but I trust his judgment.…The great thing is, he takes care of every detail of the dancing. He loves all that stuff.”—G
EORGE
A
BBOTT
, who directed several of the musicals that Robbins choreographed

“… after a certain point he just can’t do it anymore. And then he turns. And it was really true. He was trying so hard to be nice [to people he liked], and then he just lost it. And he did that with so many people … pretty much with almost everybody in the office.… I think it was like being in an abusive relationship if you stayed with him. You became like a victim of domestic violence, because that’s what it was like in the office. I know that he could be really difficult elsewhere, but I think there are more people who have nice things to say about him in the theatre than people that worked with him administratively. Because the [theatrical] end product was so amazing.”—former assistant S
ARA
C
ORRI

“He would push me to do more, but never mock me or make fun of me as he did with the chorus. Boy, if they couldn’t do it, he would chew them up one side, down the other. I would walk away in horror at this person—I’m looking at Jekyll and Hyde.”—star N
ANETTE
F
ABRAY
of the 1947 hit
High Button Shoes

“(
Miss Liberty
, 1949) was in trouble, and of course that meant trouble for Robbins. He was shouting at everyone. I didn’t have much dancing [in it … but] I was in the middle of one of my routines, and he shouted at me. So I stopped and walked over to him and said very quietly, ‘If you do that again, I’m going to throw you up on the fucking balcony’ I didn’t have any trouble with him after that.”—E
DDIE
A
LBERT

“What Jerry loved to do was create friction between his dancers. Not just competition. He’d go so far as to tell one dancer something nasty that another dancer had supposedly said about him.… He was a malicious
child with an adult’s talent.”—C
AROLYN
L
EIGH
, co-lyricist of
Peter Pan
(1954)

“It’s been said, and I fully agree, that Jerome Robbins was not evil because he informed but, rather, that he informed because he was evil.”—B
EATRICE
A
RTHUR

“Unlike many who were hauled up before HUAC (the Republican Congress’s House Un-American Activities Committee), Jerry had actually joined the Communist Party. Which it was legal to do.… As an actual party member and as a homosexual man without wife and no kids, he was extremely vulnerable. What he did was wrong, but HUAC was wrong to begin with, and the times were horrendous. Honestly now, how many communists, or former communists, who were Jewish
and
gay would have spat in HUAC’s slimy face? If you didn’t cooperate, they merely put a stop to you. The real horror, after America had fought European fascists [in WWII], was that the domestic ones could now put a stop to you.”—stage star H
ERSCHEL
B
ERNARDI
(
Fiddler on the Roof
)

“There was a period when [Robbins] wanted to become an actor. An impetus for that was the relation to a genuine movie star, Edward G. Robinson. He was born Emanuel Goldenberg and was a relative of Robbins’s uncle Benjamin Goldenberg. What turned Jerry off acting, I don’t know. Unless it was his father’s ridicule.”—stage producer R
OBERT
F
RYER
(
Wonderful Town, Chicago
)

“The genesis of Robbins’s ballet
Fancy Free
(1944), which opened so many doors to him, was a painting titled
Sailor Trilogy
by the gay artist Paul Cadmus. It got banned in Washington due to some minor gay content or innuendo, but it really captured Robbins’s imagination. Of course
Fancy Free
became totally heterosexual in theme.”—C
HRISTOPHER
I
SHERWOOD

“Montgomery Clift and Jerome Robbins had an affair. After, it became a friendship.… It was Monty who first suggested, when they did line readings together from
Romeo and Juliet
, that somebody should do a modern-day production of the play as a musical and use gangs instead of warring families. Robbins seized the idea, and later he claimed the ‘conceived by’ credit for
West Side Story
(1957). But it was not his idea, he wasn’t creative that way.…The friendship came to a halt when Robbins testified; Monty lost any respect or admiration he’d had for Jerry.”—Montgomery Clift biographer R
OBERT
L
A
G
UARDIA

“Jerry wanted everything so thoroughly, so quickly, that every fiber of your being had to be at his command.… He was brutal, he would humiliate us, always in front of the entire company.… Instead of saying, ‘You’re just not warm enough in this scene,’ or, ‘I don’t believe you,’ he would say, ‘You’re the most talentless idiot I’ve ever met in my life, why can’t you
get
this?’ It was like being cut in two.”—C
AROL
L
AWRENCE
(
West Side Story
)

“One time his lawyer calls me. She says, ‘Megan, we’re filing a lawsuit against you and a police report.’ I start laughing and say, ‘What for?’ And they were totally serious.… She said, ‘You’ve stolen the doggie raincoats, the Persian rug, and the vacuum cleaners.’ So I had to pay somebody to go out to his house out in the Hamptons and get these things out of the house and bring them back so that I wouldn’t be prosecuted. Doggie raincoats. And I had two days in the office of him screaming at me because he thought I had stolen them. And the rug was rolled up in his bedroom closet in Manhattan.”—former assistant M
EGAN
R
ADDANT
(as for the pet raincoats and vacuum cleaners, they’d been misplaced by a maid)

“Nobody working or contemplating working with Jerry doesn’t know to expect wounds. It goes with that particular, very talented territory.”—L
EONARD
B
ERNSTEIN

“You know in those interviews where they ask if someone couldn’t have done what they did, what would they have been? If there were one person show business would have rejected that would have become a serial killer, that person would be Jerome Robbins. And then his neighbors would say on the evening news, ‘Well, we did hear shrieking and ranting next door, but whenever we saw him he was such a shy, quiet, ice-seeming little guy.’ ”—J
ACK
G
ILFORD
(
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
)

“I was in this flop comedy play,
The Office
, and the famous Jerome Robbins directed. I don’t think we even made it out of previews. A member of the crew said to me, ‘Well, the bad news is we’ve folded. But there’s good news.” What’s that?’ I inquired. ‘No more walking around Jerry Robbins’s eggshells.’ ”—J
ACK
W
ESTON

“[Robbins] is stingy with compliments and approval. Some people just are. What made it kind of rotten is once he realized you want his approval, then you’re sure not to get it.”—fellow choreographer M
ICHAEL
B
ENNETT
(
A Chorus Line
)

“It’s never been gone into in depth, but several people who knew him well say he had a horrendous childhood … terrible things were done to him. The
ironic tragedy is that, like Eugene O’Neill, who turned around and did to his kids what his father did to him, Robbins nurtured the negative experiences and memories and became a machine of exceptional negativity. He was
so
un-Zen!”—
A Chorus Line
dancer G
REGG
B
URGE

“Jerry worked for the Paris Opera for a time.… If it weren’t for the language, he might have moved there. He loved that in France he was more esteemed than Balanchine was, where in the United States it was the reverse. And that had to do with greater French tolerance of homosexuality.… One time, the subject came up of all the awful Jerry Lewis movies on American TV. Robbins didn’t like them either, but refused to criticize Lewis. I later heard it was because the French liked Lewis and Lewis’s first name was
Jerry
. Everything always boiled down to Jerry Robbins.”—L
EONARD
F
REY
(
Fiddler on the Roof
)

“First, Robbins wanted to direct [the 1993 TV movie of
Gypsy
]. When it became clear that would not happen, he told the producers he wanted to co-direct with me. I idolized his work, but no way.… He tried to have telephone relationships with me and Bette [Midler], but we wouldn’t call him back. So he abused the producers with really venomous phone calls and threats—things that could have been reported to the police and probably would have been if he hadn’t been Jerome Robbins.”—director E
MILE
A
RDOLINO

“I think that all the people who worked with him became the equivalent of abused children.”—
Gypsy
telefilm executive co-producer C
RAIG
Z
ADAN

“He seriously considered writing his memoirs. But how could he? The witch hunts, his behavior, all the enemies, the Hollywood episode … He couldn’t, he would not deal with that. He gave it up. In its place he wanted to do an autobiographical ballet or theatre piece about his troubled relationship with his father. So in 1991 he devised what was called
The Jew Piece
, then
Robbins by Rabinowitz
, then
The Poppa Piece
, but it was all too frank and disturbing and personal, and finally he dropped it completely.”—record and revue producer B
EN
B
AGLEY
(an ex-lover of Montgomery Clift)

“When it came time to do what became
Jerome Robbins’ Broadway
with all these dance numbers from his past shows, it was very peculiar and yet impressive in that Robbins didn’t remember the staging of many of his own numbers, and they had to recruit half of Broadway’s surviving VIPs to help to remember and recreate them.”—J
ACK
K
LUGMAN
(
Gypsy
)

“When he was hospitalized for a slipped disc or had open-heart surgery, yes, there were more than a few people in New York City who got together for lunch or drinks, to celebrate.”—Broadway costume designer M
ILES
W
HITE
(
Oklahoma!, Bye Bye Birdie
)