Broadway Babylon (38 page)

“A
T THE OUTSET
, I think [Martin and Channing] hoped to be chums,” said Lindsay Anderson. “Sort of ‘us old broads against the world.’ It wasn’t destined to last. It’s too situationally difficult for stars of the same gender to work together and be friends.” But if the thrill of working together in the much-publicized, eagerly anticipated play wore off quickly, its stars were loath to publicly indicate they were anything but dear chums. Ironically,
Legends!
was loosely based on the Davis-Crawford feud in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
The two aging stage stars had probably hoped
Legends!
would do for their careers what
Baby Jane
had done for the faded celluloid superstars.

Kirkwood admitted his play was about “two feuding actresses, legends in their time, who were somewhat over the hill, down at heels, [and] had made one film together that was a box-office hit but represented personal hell during the making.”
Legends!
became somewhat of a personal hell for its stars as well as many involved. When one producer finally made up with Kirkwood and proclaimed, “Well, we had quite a good year out of it, didn’t we?” the playwright thought:

“
Good?
No director, a star who couldn’t remember her name, one producer dead [the renowned Cheryl Crawford], another down with AIDS, robbed in Portland, all manner of feuds, a stack of dreadful reviews. ‘Yes,’ I finally said, ‘a really great year. One more like this and I quit!’ ”

Not unlike the Davis-Crawford feud, this one featured two veteran contenders. As always, there would be one victor—in both cases, the younger one. Like Davis, Channing had more stamina as well as greater chutzpah, due partly to not being tied to a perpetually ladylike image. Martin was used to occasional catty or ignorant remarks, like one Palm Beach socialite’s praise (which Mary did not overhear) about how wonderful of the Broadway legend to be touring the country “at practically eighty.” Such comments, in person or in print, were and are part of the territory for an older working actress. Same for Carol Channing, who toured in
Hello, Dolly!
for the last time in her seventies—it was widely known as “the death tour.”

But Martin was alarmed as well as hurt by the “playful” Channing’s comments, even in front of the media. At the end of their opening run in Dallas
(Martin was from Texas), prior to playing LA, the city honored Carol Channing, who was immediately asked where her costar was? The
New York Post’
s Page Six column chortled, “Quicker than you could say ‘putdown,’ she quipped, ‘She is in her hotel room learning her lines.’ As Carol stoked the fires, a spokesman for the show hastened to assure one and all, ‘Miss Martin has been word-perfect from Day One.’ ”

Carol reportedly resented that unlike Mary Martin she had to hide her blondeness (actually a blonde wig) onstage beneath a dark wig. Martin’s blonde hair was via peroxide. Though eight years younger than Mary, Channing was playing her contemporary. Martin was, of course, more sensitive about the numerous age jokes, and used her clout to veto more lines than Carol did. America’s Broadway Sweetheart would have been very uncomfortable saying a Channing line like, “And Ethel Merman opened her purse and said, ‘Well, babe, here’s five bucks—go fuck yourself!’ ” (The punchline to an apocryphal story about Loretta Young, who kept a swear box on her movie sets to collect coins each time somebody used foul language.)

After Carol’s public crack in Dallas, Mary toughened up. Kirkwood related, “She was suddenly acting quite the queen. She no longer wanted to lose lines to Carol; she wanted to think about changing the final curtain,” etc. “She no longer had the little-girl-lost look or the ‘I’ll do anything anyone wants’ attitude.” She simply started decreeing what she would and especially what she wouldn’t do or say. Kirkwood believed it was Mary’s way of getting back at Carol, even though it was directed at him and the management. When Mary began taking her time doing bits of stage business, Carol grew incensed, but at Jimmy, not Mary. When he tried to be neutral, it often backfired. At one point Channing “gave me a look that would have frozen Joan Crawford” before rehearsals could resume. “If I didn’t automatically side with one lady, she made it clear—not so much in words—that I was siding with her rival.”

The house of cards inevitably collapsed. Jimmy’s pal James Leo Herlihy (author of
Midnight Cowboy
) noted, “Mary Martin wasn’t about to limp into New York, her town of habitual triumph, with Carol Channing in the ascendant. She’d sooner take down the whole ship with her, and that’s what she did.” The fact that she was able to was due to Channing’s illogical ultimatum that if Mary went, she went too. Official
Legends!
photographer Kenn Duncan theorized, “Carol liked working with Mary, to the extent that she could sometimes almost get away with murder. Carol’s a lot funnier than Mary, and
Legends!
is nothing if not a comedy, at times a farce.

“Mary also brought prestige to the project.… With Mary out, Carol would have had to work harder to sparkle.… Then there was the question of billing. If Martin left, Carol would not be willing to take second billing to anyone”—except to an unavailable movie star like Julie Andrews.

“U
LTIMATELY
,
L
EGENDS
!
WAS ABOUT EGO
,” said Herlihy. “The practical lesson it taught is: Don’t hire someone too old to retain her lines and too willing to use her age as an excuse to get out of the deal. Oh, and don’t hire someone too prudish to play along with the writer and her costar.”

Mary Martin’s departure, Jimmy Kirkwood unofficially admitted, was a relief. A younger actress was called for, and he was still hopeful. But when Carol Channing soon jumped ship as well, he penned a singular letter to the departed divas (reproduced in its entirety in the 1989
Diary of a Mad Playwright
). Dated November 16, 1986, and addressed to “Dear Mary and Carol and Carol and Mary,” it read in part:

“I’ve known some dummies in my life but you are two of the dumbest white women I’ve ever encountered. Talented and dear and both a bit crazy in your own very different special ways, but dumb as cat shit.

“… here you’ve been breaking your kishkas, to say nothing of your balls, whipping this play and your performances together over one helluva long, torturous, painstaking year.… So—now what happens? Well, Mary’s tired and doesn’t want to come to New York and Carol wouldn’t think of doing the play without Mary.” He emphasized how audiences ate the play up and how it would sell out during its limited Broadway run—“The show would even pay back.… But apparently that isn’t important.

“Mary can go back to Rancho Mirage (a retirement community near Palm Springs, aka Death’s Waiting Room) and get in the pool and Carol can do
Hello, Dolly!
in Fargo, North Dakota.…” He ended with “cc: to almost everyone involved.”

Kirkwood returned to his house in Key West. He never received a reply or acknowledgment from Mary, while Charles Lowe telephoned to say Carol and he thought it one of the most hilarious letters they’d ever gotten. “You son of a bitch, how did you know Carol always wanted to play Fargo, North Dakota?” However, Channing would not return to the show or consider a Broadway stint. Not without the humor-free Mary.

Due to management and the media’s extreme tact, Martin’s defection was not revealed as due to failing memory and ego conflict. Rather, it wound up reflecting poorly on Kirkwood’s play, which Carol Channing rejected because she didn’t want to be seen as less picky than Mary, or willing to keep touring in Mary’s reject with a replacement star.

Legends!
closed in January 1987. A year and a half later, James Kirkwood confessed, “I have not spoken to or seen Mary, Carol, or Charles since. I sent them Christmas cards this year, and I received one from Carol and Charles, but no word from Mary.” Co-producer Bob Regester died of AIDS in the fall of 1987. Mary Martin, born in 1913, died in 1990 of cancer, a year after
Kirkwood died at age sixty-four, officially also of cancer, although several sources have attributed his death to AIDS.

Lindsay Anderson, one of
Legends!
’ directors, called it “Jimmy’s smashed triumph … his last hurrah.” The Briton felt it should have opened on Broadway, but the producers and corporate backers saw a chance to rake in big bucks on the road on the strength of Martin’s and Channing’s names. “So Jimmy and company, in his tour de force, were forced to tour. The two stars had no objections, thanks to their highly remunerative financial arrangements.”

Ben Bagley noted, “Kirkwood was, by Broadway standards, a nice guy. Had a spine, but likeable. In the end, though, the two women walked all over him … they broke his heart over
Legends!
He was losing weight during the whole ordeal. I think
Legends!
literally helped kill him—that whole sordid experience. Which could have been worth it had it all ended up on Broadway, covered in glory, as originally planned. A Broadway hit makes most anything worthwhile, as most any playwright or diva would agree.”

P.S. In 2006, it was announced that
Legends!
would be revived as a vehicle for dueling
Dynasty
divas Joan Collins and Linda Evans. James Kirkwood had told this writer, “As long as there are ambitious, glamorous older actresses, this play
will
have a shelf life.”

M
any operas and classic stories have been updated into modern musicals, from
Romeo and Juliet
into
West Side Story
to
La Bohème
into
Rent
. Perhaps the most ambitious and controversial was
Miss Saigon
, loosely based on
Madame Butterfly
—which also inspired a
South Pacific
subplot about interracial love that ends with anything but “Happy Talk.”
Butterfly
was updated to the American war in Vietnam, yet the musical’s creators were French, the producer and director Britons.

Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schöenberg rejected the more insensitive aspects of Puccini’s 1904 opera, whose colonial protagonist Pinkerton abuses the stereotypical Japanese female whose masochism—abandoning her people, converting her religion to her foreign master’s, and suicide—matches his callousness. Pinkerton eventually returns only to cart off his half-American child; both versions added dramatic “weight” by making it a son. Boublil and Schöenberg tried to craft a love story of peers.

Miss Saigon
unfolds during the final weeks in 1975 before Saigon changed from American control to communist Vietnamese control. The archetypal story still ends tragically—for the woman, of course—but Kim has more dignity and integrity than Cio-Cio-san was given. The non-heel American’s wife is fleshed out and gets her own song. As in
Evita
, there is a cynical male commentator on the action, in the form of a half-French Eurasian pimp. Britisher Jonathan Pryce was accused of playing the part completely with a sense of wry irony; theater critic Richard Brestoff advised, “This tool should be used sparingly and balanced with many other elements.”

From the onset, the European team made an effort not to offend American theatergoers’ sensibilities. Schöenberg explained, “Nobody can say we are either pro- or anti-American.”
Newsweek
Vietnam War correspondent Edward Behr was hired as an “honorary consultant” to the musical. Vietnam itself went unexplored on any but a superficial level.
Miss Saigon
would be, for commercial and traditionally biased reasons, Occidentally focused. Schöenberg noted, “It’s not a history of the Vietnam War. It’s the story of two people lost in the middle of a war.”

Although the musical’s hero is symbolically named Chris, he isn’t a throwback to the Ugly Missionary. He respects Kim’s cultural background (as does she) and her person—although when they meet she’s a Saigon bar girl and he’s looking for nonmilitary action. “Considering that we were writing for 1989,” said Schöenberg, “we tried to improve the human aspect.” Unbeknownst to Chris, he gets Kim pregnant. After he departs Saigon, she escapes with her son, Tam, to Bangkok, where she meets her formerly single lover’s American wife.

Kim determines that Tam should have a more prosperous and stable future in the United States, and so shoots herself, forcing Tam’s father and his wife to take him there. Once again, the East is personified as female, as exotically alluring yet too alien to coexist with—as passive, desperate, even masochistic, and as a victim.

Despite efforts to cast East Asians as Saigon bar girls—they wound up mostly Filipinas—
Miss Saigon
under-represented male East Asian actors, a problem that would cause more resentment in the US than in the UK. When the creative team approached London’s Vietnamese embassy for help with décor and costumes, it was politely pointed out that, technically, the show should now be titled
Miss Ho Chi Minh City
. The leading lady, Lea Salonga, seventeen at the time, was discovered in Manila. She almost didn’t get the plum part because of her very maternal, omnipresent parent; producer Cameron Mackintosh declared, “Stage mothers frighten me.”