Broadway Babylon (30 page)

He finally solved the problem by having her sing the line minus the final word. She was baffled but cooperative. The next day, he played a note on the piano and had Lucy sing only the word ‘door,’ which she did correctly, with the half-tone. Jerry said thank you, then clipped the note into the track. “I clipped the entire soundtrack together that way.” When the film’s record album was released, the cover featured only Lucille Ball—no mention of Jerry Herman, who was her vocal coach, the movie’s musical supervisor, and the composer-lyricist of every song in
Mame
. Herman threatened lawsuit, and a label was hastily tacked on to every single album. Of course once the movie flopped—more so critically than financially—the album flopped bigger, for it contained Lucy’s singing but none of the comedy or classy visuals.

Ironically, Ball had wanted the film to be as close to the Broadway musical as possible (ergo her early insistence that Bea Arthur reprise her stage role). But as Jerry Herman told Warner Bros. after they cast Lucy, “Mame Dennis is not a clown. She is an elegant woman, and when she slides down the banister it’s funny
because
she’s an elegant woman. It won’t be funny when Lucille Ball slides down the banister because she is always doing much more outrageous things than that.”

He summarized, “Lucille Ball can’t sing and she can’t dance. So will you please tell me why you have cast her in my show?” The studio’s first choice had been non-singing, non-dancing Elizabeth Taylor, who did star in the film of the Broadway musical
A Little Night Music
, which, no surprise, was a bigger, if lower-profile, flop than
Mame
.

T
HE CLASSIC
A
GNES
G
OOCH
was Peggy Cass, whose career highpoint was the movie
Auntie Mame
. In 1984, she looked back, “The story and its message of tolerance was what made
Auntie Mame
so great.… The musical has great music, but all the songs kinda detract from the incidents and relationships. The sad thing is that since the musical came along, there went the straight play.
It would be revived today, it could still be a big hit—maybe more than evah—but all they ever revive is the effing musical.

“Today it seems incredible they let Roz Russell do Mame for the movie. It was such a habit to choose somebody else—usually younger—than the person who originated the part on Broadway.… For my money, Roz was the best Mame; you liked her at the same time you looked up to her.”

Cass acknowledged, “I did hear about that rumpus with Ann Miller. That didn’t shock me, ‘cause every Mame wants a homely Gooch. They’re willing to have Vera be rather grand and nice-looking, but poor Agnes has to be a plain Jane.… She’s there as sort of a test of Auntie Mame’s tolerance, but she also isn’t a threat to anyone. Let me tell you, you have to be pretty secure to play someone so insecure, and God forbid you should step on the star’s toes!”

When Coral Browne worked with Rosalind Russell she discerned “attitude behind the very professional smile. I’ve no idea if Miss Russell was at all intimidated by my more extensive stage training, but she soon saw I have as much backbone as she did, and we reached an understanding. In England, actors are all equals, and we have only one Her Majesty.

“Besides, what could I take away from her? No one in the States knew me then, and if you think about it, Vera Charles is a foil to Mame Dennis, more of a parody than a character. A man could play Vera beautifully; in fact, one famous critic said that’s what Miss Arthur did, in [
Mame
, the movie].… People in the 1950s and up until Betty Ford were quite dismayed when a character, a famous theatre actress, was depicted as alcoholic. That enhances Mame Dennis, of course. It also made everyone ask each other who Vera really was, and the consensus was Tallulah Bankhead, who herself would have made a marvelous non-singing Mame.”

In Jerry Herman’s opinion, the ideal (musical) Mame was Angela Lansbury. She was neither too funny, too madcap, too good a singer, too beautiful, nor too overwhelmingly glamorous. “Miss [Ginger] Rogers tried to swamp her character in rhinestone dazzle and boas,” wrote one critic of the actress who in some interviews objected to Mame Dennis’s “clearly very liberal politics.” When Susan Hayward briefly played Mame, it was said she over-dramatized the role and was too distractingly beautiful.

Herman recalled that when the Oscar-winning redhead “came to my house so I could teach her the score, she took my breath away. With that sweetheart face of hers, she was movie-star gorgeous. You could tell she knew how to wear clothes just by the way she had this cashmere sweater draped casually over her shoulders. I have met many handsome and stylish women in my day; but Susan Hayward and Lana Turner were the most beautiful women I ever saw in my life.”

Celeste Holm, by contrast, was a pared-down Mame whose performance lacked much of the warmth she’d exhibited in earlier Broadway shows like
Bloomer Girl
and
Oklahoma!
When Susan Hayward had to leave
Mame
(she would die prematurely from a brain tumor), she warned her replacement, Holm, that if she didn’t treat the young cast right, Hayward would hear about it and return to “kick [your] ass.” Stage star Holm had long since left the theater for Hollywood with hopes of screen stardom. Leading lady Joan Fontaine was quoted, “I once told Celeste Holm, ‘You’re so lucky not to be a big Hollywood star, not bound to a contract.’ Celeste is cool to me to this day.”

I
N HIS MEMOIRS
, J
ERRY
H
ERMAN
declared that his dream Mame would have been Judy Garland. He’d hoped to pay tribute to her by offering her the role of Mame Dennis following Angela Lansbury’s departure from the hit show after about a year and a half. But in offering the fast-fading icon the role, he inadvertently caused her pain during a downward spiral that would, in 1969, turn fatal.

When Herman heard via the William Morris agency that Judy Garland was interested in taking over the role, “I just about lost my mind.… I was the craziest, the most ardent Judy Garland fan of all time. I still am. I worshipped that woman. It was a passion that went beyond reason.… She sang, and it was a religious experience for me.”

He admired Judy’s underrated acting talent, also her dancing ability, and believed she would be a perfect Mame, making the role her own and the show a bigger hit than ever while staging a definitive and prestigious comeback.

Several meetings took place with Garland, who was charming and “trying very hard to be ‘good,’ in a professional sense. She believed in her heart that she would be there every night, faithfully.” But her private life was chaotic and she was rumored to be drinking. Even Jerry had to admit, “Miss Garland had a reputation for not being reliable.” At roughly the same time, after a screen test, costume fittings, and a public announcement that she’d gotten the role, Judy was fired from the movie
The Valley of the Dolls
, replaced by Susan Hayward as Broadway bitch-diva Helen Lawson, based on novelist Jacqueline Susann’s ex friend Ethel Merman.

Although Jerry Herman persuaded several
Mame
backers that Garland would be a breathtaking Mame—particularly singing his songs—the final decision was no. “We are very sorry, Jerry,” he was informed by the producers, “but we cannot do it. We cannot entrust this show to Miss Garland. We have the backers to consider, and we cannot risk a show that is at its peak and has many more years to go. If it all falls apart because she doesn’t show up on opening night, we will have destroyed everything that we all worked so hard to create.”

Later, Herman said he replied rashly: “I don’t care! Even a bad performance from Judy Garland would be an event. Just to have Judy Garland in this show for
one night
would be magical—historical.” He’d spoken with his heart,
not his business head. Word got back to Jerry that Judy “was destroyed” when she found out she didn’t get the role. She told daughter Liza Minnelli that “her heart was broken, because she knew how
right
she was for it.

“That is something I have had to carry in my own heart through the years,” Herman has noted. “This was a woman I truly idolized. I still can’t bear to think of how hurt she was because of something I wrote [
Mame
]. It was a very sad experience for me and I have always felt bad about it, because I never wanted to cause that woman pain.” The man who brought Mame to musical life felt, then as now, “Judy Garland stood for show business, in all its emotional, theatrical glory. I still hear that sound when I write.”

A
bout a year after my book
The Lavender Screen
was published in 1993, I received a letter from actor Cliff Gorman in New York City. “I became aware of your book thanks to
Premiere
magazine but did not purchase a copy. The subject matter does not interest me. An actor friend recently mentioned it in a favorable light but then informed me you devote an entire chapter to
The Boys in the Band
. Over the weekend I browsed through a copy in a bookstore. I did not and will not buy it.

“It may interest you to know, although I doubt it, that I’ve done many other roles,
nonhomosexual
, and that my performance in
The Boys in the Band
was just that … I am not a stranger to awards and nominations both on and off the stage, and my career was never limited to that one film you focus on.”

What Mr. Gorman, who died at sixty-five and not of AIDS in 2002, hadn’t grasped was that
The Lavender Screen
was intended to focus on movies featuring major gay, lesbian, or bisexual characters. Space didn’t allow for individual actors’ other credits. (In
An Unmarried Woman
he played—equally convincingly—an extremely sexually aggressive heterosexual opposite Jill Clayburgh.) It was Gorman who chose to do Emory in the 1968 Off-Broadway play that ran 1,000 performances and in its screen version. He also chose to play yet another flamingly gay character, a murder victim, in
Justine
(1969). He couldn’t have known that the much-anticipated George Cukor picture would turn out to be a costly and critically reviled flop.

A former publicist for Gorman admitted off the record, “He does regret [
The Boys in the Band
]. He’s done great work in so numerous things, but most people mainly remember Emory. And some still think you are what you portray.” That may be true, but why doesn’t that restriction necessarily apply to actors who play wife-beaters, rapists, gay-bashers, and murderers?

It was generally known in the business that Gorman apparently wasn’t gay. Just his luck that out of
Boys
’ nine-man ensemble, Emory was one of the hardest characters to forget. He had many of the best lines, and Gorman played the funny, amiable, and vulnerable role to perfection. Yet the result was bitter. His letter to me concluded, “I have had to work long and deliberately to move away from that image,” as if the issue were the quality of one’s work, rather than the overarching problems of stereotyping and homophobia.

Boys
’ other most indelible character was Leonard Frey’s Harold, the birthday boy, a “pock-marked Jewish fairy” of considerable personality and menace. Frey, who’d appeared in
Fiddler on the Roof
, had considerably more post-
Boys
success than Gorman, for a while. For the screen version of
Fiddler
he was Oscar nominated for portraying a husband and father (Tevye’s first son-in-law), almost as if the ever-far-from-pro-gay Academy was relieved Frey could play straight—though in fact he was gay.

“When Lenny’s nomination was announced, I rang up Cliff, among others,” offered Frederick Combs (Donald), who by 1986 was a drama coach in Los Angeles, where I’d just moved. “Mis-ter Gorman was indignant, not happy for Lenny. Very close-mouthed … He knew I was gay too, and I always got the vibe that he looked down on us. I didn’t call back when Lenny didn’t win the award. In fact, I don’t think I spoke to Cliff Gorman again.”

R
OBERT
M
OORE DIRECTED
Mart Crowley’s play, which broke ground in that it featured a virtually all-gay set of characters. “The timing was very right,” recalled Moore in New York in 1980 while promoting his film
Chapter Two
, by Neil Simon. “It was before, during, and after Stonewall … People heard the play was daring, insofar as you had all these outspoken queers on stage. They heard there was lots of laughs and wit, and a party game to boot—the truth game, you know, on the telephone.”

Moore was not often willing to discuss
The Boys in the Band
. Maybe one reason was that he didn’t get picked to helm the screen version. (Almost invariably, Hollywood prefers heterosexual or “straight-seeming” directors.) Frederick Combs explained, “Bob’s being gay was common knowledge. He did try to hide with anti-gay jokes and slurs … Bob loved stars and loved acting the star. He wanted to be one, but couldn’t.” The flamboyant redhead’s few acting roles were small and stereotypical. He was Phyllis’s gay brother on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, later directing episodes of its spin-off
Rhoda
. In Otto
Preminger’s offbeat
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon
, starring a pre-
Cabaret
Liza Minnelli, Moore was a crippled gay man who teams with two other “misfits.” (Leonard Frey had a bit gay role in
Junie Moon
.)