Broadway Babylon (34 page)

Although
Miss Moffat
played only fifteen performances, it was fully insured, so the half-million-dollar loss was covered. Logan was said to harbor regret
over the tremendous box-office advances that had to be refunded. The musical could have been a crowning, toward-the-end-of-a-career triumph for both star and director. Josh Logan died the year before Bette, in 1988, but worked less than she did after
Moffat
. In his controversial book, Logan wrote, “I’ve written enough about Bette Davis. She’s a book I’m trying hard to close.” His memoirs ended on that same page.

Lily Moffat did have one more hurrah in store (to date), in a different medium. After offering
Miss Moffat
to Mary Martin and before offering it to Davis, Logan had sent the script to Bette’s friendly and aloof rival Katharine Hepburn. She politely but firmly declined, due perhaps to the musical demands (in Kate’s sole musical,
Coco
, even she felt that she sounded “like Donald Duck”) or Logan’s difficult reputation. Or perhaps her lack of familiarity with him. Rather, Hepburn played Miss Moffat in the 1978 telefilm
The Corn Is Green
, directed by old friend George Cukor—their tenth and final collaboration.

Set in Wales, the superior TV movie earned ample acclaim. Davis was said to bitterly regret that the producers, or even former nemesis George Cukor, hadn’t approached her first about redoing “her” role. Unlike the 1945 black-and-white version, the color project was shot on location and yielded Hepburn an Emmy nomination. (Davis didn’t earn an Oscar nomination for the film.)

In 1982, Emlyn Williams averred, “Bette doesn’t mind the assorted actresses who played Moffat on the boards, for those are all vanished memories, unlike picture performances. Now, thanks to the mastery of Hepburn and Cukor, there are two surviving Miss Moffats, and Bette’s version must stand constant comparison to Hepburn’s.”

N
EOPHYTE
B
ETTE
D
AVIS
didn’t get much chance to shine in the Blanche Yurka Company. Despite eventual assertions that in young Bette her expert eye discerned a future star, Yurka (1887–1974) was by most accounts a self-involved and self-protecting diva. (Or is that redundant?) In 1929 critic Brooks Atkinson called the Czech-born Yurka “an actress of great depth of emotion, blessed with a voice of almost eerie timbre.” Like her frame and personality, Blanche’s voice was Big.

The veteran stage star had made her belated movie bow in the 1935 version of
A Tale of Two Cities
starring Ronald Colman. She appeared in over twenty films, but her indelible Madame Defarge, the knitting, bloodthirsty French Revolution harridan, became her signature screen role. Yurka’s very
close Russian lesbian friend, the actress-producer Alla Nazimova (godmother to Nancy Reagan), had been sought for the part but was judged too petite. Five years later, Blanche would seek a role that finally went to Nazimova (whose home became the Garden of Allah hotel). It would be Alla’s screen swansong, in
Escape
, one of the first Tinseltown movies to acknowledge the existence of concentration camps—but minus mention of any Jews therein. The character was a woman interned in a death camp due to anti-Nazi activism. Yurka was judged too large for that part.

“I was born too soon and of too ambitious a structure to become a picture star,” allowed Yurka, whose ambition had led her during the 1920s to briefly wed a much-younger (possibly gay) actor named Ian Keith. It was printed that “Her career has always come before her private life,” something seldom declared of heterosexual actresses. In time, Yurka’s image as a tough dame overshadowed her diminishing Broadway career. In 1940, she starred in
Queen of the Mob
, which she naively believed could have done for her on screen what
Little Caesar
did for Edward G. Robinson. Paramount, however, made numerous cuts and finally released it as a B movie.

While Bette Davis’s star rose, the maturing Blanche’s fell, although she soldiered on, “yurking,” as she put it, via occasional plays and appearances at women’s clubs and colleges where she did programs of readings. In 1969 she starred Off-Broadway in
The Madwoman of Chaillot
. (Katharine Hepburn starred in a flop film version the same year.) But critics roasted the play and theatergoers mostly ignored it, so Yurka published a letter in the
Times
bidding adieu to New York audiences.

The following year she published her autobiomythography,
Bohemian Girl
. (Her parents were Bohemian.) The book disappointed many because it failed to address not only sapphic aspects of the former stage star’s private life, but the persistent rumor that she had once killed a man and gotten away with it. “When I worked with her, I hadn’t heard the rumor,” explained Bette Davis. “I heard it much later. But then I kept hearing it, and it did sound plausible. Did she do it? I don’t know. Was she capable?
Brother
!” (The last word indicated
yes
.)

It was unrealistic to think Blanche Yurka would discuss the matter, let alone possibly admit to murder in the pages of a book. The topic might have received posthumous book treatment, but after Yurka died in 1974 at age eighty-six even her memorable Madame DeFarge was little remembered (pre-VCR and DVD), and her once-heralded performances as a former stage great were but footprints in shifting sand.

“If she’d been younger,” admitted Bette Davis, “she might have had a film career similar to mine. But she was too large for the big screen. I was outsized, but I was
young
—my timing was lucky.”

B
Y CONSENSUS, THE BEST FILM
ever made about the theater was the 1950 classic
All About Eve
, which earned a record number of Academy Award nominations and resuscitated Bette Davis’s fallen screen career, post-Warners. What was the real story behind the movie’s Machiavellian plot, and who were the women behind Eve and stage diva Margo Channing? Tallulah Bankhead often claimed
she
was Margo, and rumor had it that the Margo-Eve relationship was inspired by the bisexual Bankhead and her
Skin of Our Teeth
understudy Lizabeth Scott, whose Hollywood film career was badly damaged by a 1950s “outing.”

However, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s literate and witty, albeit sexist, script was based on a short story by Mary Orr titled
The Wisdom of Eve
, published in
Cosmopolitan
magazine in 1946. In 1949 Orr adapted the story into a radio play and changed Margola Cranston’s name to the more euphonius Margo Channing. In 1952, there was a one-hour radio version of the movie, with Tallulah as Margo and Mary Orr as Karen Richards (Celeste Holm in the film). There followed a stage version of
The Wisdom of Eve
by Mary Orr and her husband, which steered clear of Mankiewicz’s screenplay. (He’d won two
All About Eve
Oscars, one for writing and one for directing.) A 1970 Broadway musical of the movie was titled
Applause
and starred Lauren Bacall as Margo; she was succeeded in the role by Anne Baxter, who’d played Eve in 1950.
Applause
was: “Based on the film
All About Eve
and the original story by Mary Orr.”

An actress turned writer, Orr based her story on two real people: Elisabeth Bergner (
née
Ettel), a European stage and screen star better known in the UK than the US, and her twenty-four-years-younger fan Martina Lawrence, born in 1921. Like Eve Harrington, Martina married a man who served during World War II. While he was away, she treated herself on her birthday in 1944 to a performance of
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
at the Booth Theatre in New York, starring Bergner. (The 1947 film version teamed Humphrey Bogart with sapphic stars Barbara Stanwyck and Alexis Smith.)

After the show, Martina—
née
Ruth Hirsch—met the star’s husband-manager, Dr. Paul Czinner, who was gay—unlike the movie’s Bill Sampson, upon whom the treacherous Eve tried to work her wiles. But, then, Elisabeth Bergner was also gay, or possibly bisexual.

Martina thereafter attended the play several times. As la Bergner had no car to drive her and her partner home (he co-produced her play), Lawrence made herself useful by helping him to hail taxis. “After a month of flagging cabs … my reward came. One afternoon after the matinee, Miss Bergner took me home with her.”

In time, Martina went to work for Czinner as his secretary. Eventually he asked Lawrence, who claimed to have memorized the leading lady’s part, to read a scene with hopefuls auditioning to replace the departing actress who played the first Mrs. Carroll. After a replacement was picked, circumstances conspired to place Martina Lawrence upon the rehearsal stage where she read Bergner’s lines opposite the new actress, who would make her debut the following day—while the star’s husband watched from the shadows. Afterward, he warmly praised Lawrence on her talent.

That night, when the newcomer asked Martina to replay a scene with her, both Czinner and Elisabeth Bergner viewed the performances. “Several other people were around, on the stage and elsewhere,” Martina said. “They were all watching Bergner. Those eyes I had felt fixed on me were hers. Only hers. I’m sure of that.”

Miss Bergner was not amused. It didn’t help that after Martina’s performance, one stagehand yelled to another, “It’s that kid that’s always hanging around out front. She’s just as good as Bergner, and what’s more, you can hear her!” The star was known for her small, chirpy voice, and for playing younger than her years and at times overacting. George Bernard Shaw said of her in his
Saint Joan
, “Miss Bergner played Joan as if she were being burned at the stake when the curtain went up instead of when it went down.”

Martina later recalled, “Imitation is the highest form of admiration, and that’s all I had shown Bergner.” But the impersonation threatened the star. “She was so cold! Never before had I felt such a chill. I realized at once that, knowing
the actress
Bergner quite well, Elizabeth the human being was a stranger to me.”

Martina Lawrence was banished from the theater, although Bergner allowed her to continue working for her husband. “For several weeks after that terrible night, I waited in the alley [outside the theater] six days a week, before and after every show, six evening performances and two matinees, hoping she would relent and speak to me.” Bergner completely ignored her talented admirer. Rather, Martina met Mary Orr, whose husband, Reginald Denham, was directing
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
, and spoke to her about her experience with the diva. Martina became Eve and Elisabeth Margola, and Lawrence’s story the basis of
The Wisdom of Eve
.

In the movie classic, Eve becomes a star in New York and then goes to Hollywood. In real life, Martina went to Hollywood to become a star, having co-won an acting competition. But she didn’t become a star and didn’t remain an actress very long.

An anonymous friend of Lawrence’s—a fellow alumna of the Rehearsal Club and an ex-Rockette—volunteered decades after, “Martina later latched
on to Renata Tebaldi. I gather she also played Eve Harrington to her, except that this was the world of opera. Good luck finding out about it.… Divas don’t like to admit they’ve been had.”

R
ight beneath the title
A Chorus Line
comes the line “Conceived, Choreographed and Directed by Michael Bennett.” Underneath this come the credits for four co-creators who also received a Pulitzer Prize for what would become Broadway’s longest-running American musical: “Book by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante,” “Music by Marvin Hamlisch,” and “Lyrics by Edward Kleban.”

Four of the five died prematurely. Heterosexual Marvin Hamlisch, best known for his movie scores, survives. More than most Broadway productions,
A Chorus Line
, or the men behind it, was/were affected by AIDS. (The so-called Curse of
The Boys in the Band
particularly affected cast members, and is a story and chapter in itself.)

“It’s difficult to relate to the overall impact of AIDS on show business,” record producer Ben Bagley once said. “That’s so general, overwhelming. You get a better feel for it if you just look at
one
musical,
A Chorus Line
 … most of its creative artists and their future contributions lost to AIDS… [and bear] in mind that as with Jimmy Kirkwood, AIDS as cause of death is sometimes the unofficial but real one.”

Despite his sweeping billing, Michael Bennett (born Michael DiFiglia, with a Jewish mother) did not conceive
A Chorus Line
—which he co-choreographed—the show that made him a multimillionaire and a celebrity in his own right. He married
Chorus Line
performer Donna McKechnie in 1976,
but they divorced soon thereafter. She later bemoaned not the end of the marriage, but of their friendship.

The record-breaking success of
A Chorus Line
, which put dancers on the map, as it were, might never have happened but for a little-noted 1973 flop titled
Rachel Lily Rosenbloom (And Don’t You Ever Forget It!
). It starred Paul Jabara, who also did the musical’s book, music, and lyrics. A would-be actor who appeared in the non-hit film of
The Day of the Locust
, Jabara’s most popular efforts were two Streisand disco tunes he composed.
Rachel Lily Rosenbloom
was produced by publicity-shy stage, music, and film impresario Robert Stigwood, who made John Travolta a movie star. According to actor and Broadway historian Denny Martin Flinn, “Stigwood was thought to have produced the show as something of a favor to Jabara” (who later died of AIDS).