Read Broadway Babylon Online

Authors: Boze Hadleigh

Broadway Babylon (40 page)

In 1992, Patti LuPone bowed as Norma Desmond in England in a “peek” at the long-awaited musical of
Sunset Boulevard
. It began its London run in 1993, but Patti’s new triumph was deeply marred by Webber’s company’s announcement that the US opening of the show in Los Angeles later that year would star movie star Glenn Close. Why was the American version opening in LA? Because, said Englishman Webber, it was a Hollywood story. Also, LA critics had been kinder—in general—than New York ones.

LuPone publicly questioned the choice, affirming, “I am, after all, a New Yorker.” She’d already soured significantly on Webber when he granted Barbra Streisand the right to record the musical’s two most famous numbers, “As If We Never Said Goodbye” and “With One Look,” on her
Back to Broadway
album before the original cast album was recorded with LuPone. The
New York Times
understatedly declared that Barbra’s stealing Patti’s thunder “apparently doesn’t make Ms. LuPone too happy.”

But Patti still had Broadway to look forward to. Glenn Close in LA would be replaced there by Faye Dunaway, an actual faded movie star, and LuPone would play Norma in New York. Then, in London in 1994, around Valentine’s Day, just before a performance, Patti received a phone call from her agent back home, with news from Liz Smith’s gossip column that Webber had chosen Glenn Close instead of her for Broadway. LuPone’s face reportedly contorted “into a strange witch doctor mask.” She went on with the show, after memorably trashing her dressing room. (She later admitted, “Things went flying into the street.”)

After the curtain fell, news of LuPone’s humiliation reached London’s theater world. She missed three performances, then settled down to playing out her contract for the remaining weeks.

Patti further vented her rage privately, with lawyers backing her up. Years after, she acknowledged, “The best thing that could have happened was getting fired from that show. I got all this money.” Insiders pegged the amount at over
$1 million, more than enough to pay for what LuPone called her “Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool” at her rural Connecticut home.

A sizable
Sunset Boulevard
ad in the
Los Angeles Times
on May 29, 1994, read, S
TARRING
G
LENN
C
LOSE
N
OW
T
HROUGH
J
UNE
26. S
TARRING
F
AYE
D
UNAWAY
B
EGINNING
J
ULY
5. The Webber-Dunaway association had not begun smoothly. The star had been told to keep quiet, but days before the contract was signed her manager contacted the Associated Press and Faye telephoned
Variety
columnist Army Archerd. Webber’s spokesman did not hide his anger. Dunaway then issued a statement saying she would now save her voice—speaking voice too—to “stay in training and prepare for the work ahead.”

It was unusual that Webber had chosen non-singer Dunaway for the musical Norma Desmond. (Glenn Close had sung, pre-stardom, and had been Tony nominated for the musical
Barnum
.) Actresses who auditioned for him in Los Angeles or were reportedly eager for the role included Diahann Carroll, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Shirley MacLaine, Rita Moreno, Chita Rivera, Diana Ross, Cybill Shepherd, Meryl Streep, and Raquel Welch, bless her heart. Dunaway had all of three weeks to learn to sing professionally. Neither Andrew Lloyd Webber nor director Trevor Nunn was pleased with the results; each later accused the other of turning thumbs down on Faye—and of wanting her in the first place.

Besides, tickets hadn’t sold as well as expected on her name. On June 22, Faye Dunaway heard that the LA production would shut down for good on June 26, Glenn Close’s final performance. Glenn and most of the cast would re-open in November, on Broadway. Thus Dunaway wasn’t exactly fired; she was made redundant. But of course she was fired.

Dunaway blasted back, deeming the move “another capricious act by a capricious man.” At a press conference the done-wrong diva declared, “I hope I am the last in a long line of artists who have come to this man’s productions in good faith and have suffered great personal and professional injury at his hands.” For good measure, she was suing Webber for $1 million for breech of contract and $5 million on various fraud and defamation charges, also punitive damages.

Webber’s spokesman stated from New York, “It’s a stickup, and we’re not going to tolerate it.” Webber himself then added that he planned “the severest action against her insulting, damaging, and defamatory remarks.”

By the following January, all legal complications and details were worked out. A joint press release announcement said that “a private settlement was reached today in the dispute between Faye Dunaway and Andrew Lloyd Webber.… The agreement stipulates that its terms will remain confidential.” This time, Dunaway didn’t say an extra word. The amount is rumored to have been between well under $1 million and a mil and a half.

In November 1994,
Sunset Boulevard
opened in Manhattan to great anticipation and robust box office. In March 1995, a tired Glenn Close took two
weeks off from the show
Variety
thereafter allowed, “During that time the industry watched closely to see what impact the star’s absence would have at the Minskoff box office.” Close would be leaving the show in July, and everyone was curious as to whether
Sunset
would sink without her. No one was more curious than Sir Andrew; his North American employee Edgar Dobie apprised
Variety
that the musical had sold $724,789 of tickets during Close’s two-week vacation, when in truth it had sold $569,720, a drop of over $222,000 from Close’s last week in the show.

Obviously Dobie, or Webber and Dobie, meant to give the impression that a capable but virtually unknown understudy in Close’s place had meant a diminution of only $67,807 in sales over a fortnight. Perhaps Webber and company didn’t imagine an actress would have her finger on the box-office pulse of her own vehicle, but Close did. She shot off a single-spaced, two-page fax—which got intercepted and widely publicized—to Webber, asserting:

“I am furious and insulted. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my performance turned
Sunset Boulevard
around. I made it a hit. It has existed on my shoulders … and yet a representative of your company went out of their way and lied to try to make the public believe that my contribution to this show is nothing, that Karen [Mason]’s performance is equal to mine, and that my absence had absolutely no effect whatsoever on all the thousands of dollars that supposedly kept pouring into the box office. It sickens me to be treated with such disregard.

“If I could leave it in May, when my contract says I can, believe me, I would. At this point, what is making me stay is my sense of obligation to all the people who are holding tickets until July 2.”

Although he termed Dobie’s action “idiotic,” Webber didn’t accept his proffered resignation. Webber’s company blamed
Variety
for “sensationalizing” the episode. After tremendous publicity that boosted the box office, Webber and Close publicly patched things up, issuing a joint communiqué ruing the fact that “a very private communication between [us] found its way into public hands, especially since the matter has since been completely resolved.” Presumably without a large settlement.

The
New York Times
observed that “Nearly every actress to touch the role of Norma Desmond … ends up in a public dispute with Sir Andrew.” Glenn Close later revealed she’d had additional provocation via Webber’s “bad producing. It wasn’t only that one incident.” A positive review of her understudy was blown up and posted in the theater lobby during Close’s absence. “I had an amazingly wonderful understudy [Karen Mason], but what was written in that review kind of cast aspersions on me. I thought that was in incredibly bad taste, since I was getting out there eight times a week and making their money for them.”

Veteran Broadway producer Arthur Cantor said of all the bad press, “It can’t hurt the show. The next thing is for Betty Buckley to get enraged at [Webber].” Buckley took over for Glenn Close. She cattily advised
New York Daily News
columnist Linda Stasi, “I play Norma
much younger
than Glenn.” When Stasi inquired what Betty thought of Glenn’s letter to Andrew, she cooed, “It’s too bad people’s mail goes public. How
does
a thing like that happen?” Just lucky, I guess.

22

THE PRODUCER: DAVID MERRICK

“W
hy should I give interviews? The facts speak for themselves.… Let people guess,” said producer David Merrick (1911–2000), also known as the Abominable Showman. “Anyway, the facts are in my career,” stated the man born David Margulois, who had renamed himself Merrick after the great British actor David Garrick. Although Merrick projected himself as a ruthless attorney turned producer who was “more interested in theatre in the black than theatre in the round,” the son of a salesman loved Broadway more than he let on, and once declared that David Margulois had died and David Merrick had been born on November 4, 1954, the opening night of his breakthrough musical hit
Fanny
.

Stage manager Robert Schear, who began as a production assistant in Merrick’s office and worked for him for many years, stated in late 2003, “I get so many interview requests about David Merrick and especially Barbra Streisand,” whom the producer kept insisting should be fired because of her looks. “But I’m not interested. It gets twisted and misquoted, and in Mister Merrick’s case people want to gossip or condemn and speculate.

“However, as Mr. Merrick said, it’s in the facts.” So here are several of them, regarding the man whose Broadway producing career will never be equaled:

• David Merrick’s theatrical career spanned 1942 to 1996. During the 1963–1964 season alone, he produced eight plays and musicals.
Time
magazine estimated in 1966 that he employed twenty percent of Broadway’s work force.

• Celebrated British playwright John Osborne told
Women’s Wear Daily
that he’d actually enjoyed working with Merrick because unlike other producers, “He didn’t have any creative ideas.”

• Merrick sometimes denied being Jewish and so hated his hometown of St. Louis that he refused to fly TWA because their flights passed over or through St. Louis. His parents had fought long and loud—“It was like living on the set of
Virginia Woolf
”—and divorced when he was seven.

• Merrick didn’t attend his own mother’s funeral. He did ask a friend to attend it, in St. Louis. Biographer Howard Kissel theorized that the eventual giving way of Merrick’s mind was perhaps the legacy “of his poor, crazy mother. There had always been a screw loose. Now it got looser.”

• Merrick first married in 1938. The bride’s family refused to attend the wedding. Leonore’s inheritance allowed the couple to move to New York in 1939 and David to invest $5,000 in 1940 in an upcoming play that became a hit.

• As a young man, Merrick had such bad ulcers that certain insiders didn’t give him long to live. The ulcers excused him from service in World War II.

• “Merrick is profoundly a lawyer,” said Reid Shelton, who costarred in the producer’s
Oh What a Lovely War!
in 1964. “He loves litigation and uses it, frequently, to manipulate associates and the media. And his other specialty is publicity. He’s as much a publicist as a producer.”

• Critic Frank Rich noted that Merrick was “chastised not only for his misanthropy and financial ruthlessness, but for being an importer and packager rather than a truly creative producer.”

• The producer was famous for affecting a mortician’s look of severe black clothes.
  “He looked like Mephistopheles when he glared or sneered at you,” said
Hello, Dolly!
leading man David Burns. “Or like a Disney villain.… The glasses he wore magnified his enormous pupils. He loved to intimidate and frighten as many people as he can.” Merrick’s office was done all in red—walls and carpeting—reinforcing the impression of a devil in his lair.
  Though he dressed conservatively, Merrick tried to present a
with-it attitude if not a with-it look. When future film and TV producer Joel Thurm, who worked for several years in Merrick’s office, came to work one day in platform shoes, bell-bottom blue jeans, and a marine dress uniform jacket, Merrick stared, then stated, “No matter what anybody says, you wear that.”

• Merrick’s legendary tantrums affected some people more than others.
Hello, Dolly!
composer-lyricist Jerry Herman explained that the producer’s out-of-town pre-Broadway rantings “almost did major damage to our costume designer Freddie Wittop, who went through the tortures of the damned.” One day, Herman found him at the back of the local theater in tears during a show. Wittop revealed that Merrick had informed him “that the costumes were ugly and he was ashamed to have such wretched rags in his beautiful show.” As Wittop explained, Herman’s “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” number began with actors strutting about in costume. The combination of clothes and music typically elicited strong applause from audiences. Herman thus pointed out that they were clapping before the music even started.
  “They are applauding your gorgeous costumes.” Freddie hugged Jerry and felt better.

• From Kaye Ballard to Streisand, Merrick disliked non-beauties and whenever possible avoided casting them. Talent was a secondary consideration. Unlike the mostly gay men he worked with on
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
(1962)—Barbra’s Broadway bow—Merrick didn’t believe she had a big future, and failed to put her under contract, to his later fiscal regret when she starred in
Funny Girl
.

• When a reporter asked Merrick what he thought of the women’s rights movement, he snapped, “A woman’s place is in the oven!”—quite a Freudian slip from the secretly Jewish misogynist. When a notably fat Jewish Canadian critic who had panned several Merrick shows died and was cremated, the producer publicly commented, “The fat’s in the fire.”

• Unlike his first wife, Leonore, Merrick never wanted children. Five days shy of their 25th anniversary, the marriage terminated because he’d fathered a child via another woman. Eventually he was survived by two official daughters.


Gypsy
set designer Jo Mielziner observed, “Merrick has little if any respect for women. He has contempt for unattractive ones and
considers all the attractive ones interchangeable.” Merrick routinely treated leading ladies badly, excepting a rare Ethel Merman who wouldn’t tolerate such treatment. When Anna Maria Alberghetti missed performances in his hit
Carnival
(1961), Merrick publicly stated he didn’t believe her claims of poor health and would administer a lie-detector test to her in hospital. Actors in general Merrick considered “unruly children.”

• Early on, Merrick displayed a flair for publicity, no matter how outlandish. His 1949 play
Clutterbuck
was boosted by his practice of having bellboys and telephone operators page “Mr. Clutterbuck” during cocktail hour in midtown-Manhattan restaurants and bars. More effective were two-for-one tickets that kept the fiscal failure running for six months.

• It was said that David Merrick liked to be the first to do something, or if need be, the tenth or twentieth. But never the second.

• When a Merrick show took a critical drubbing, he would often sigh and tell an associate, “Time to tack up posters in the men’s room again.” He meant primarily in the subways, where he pioneered Broadway advertising. After the method and venue proved successful, fellow producers stopped scoffing and followed suit.

• “His ideas are usually cornball and his taste’s mostly in his mouth,” felt record and revue producer Ben Bagley, “yet his gimmicks have worked surprisingly often.” Merrick’s idea of wit was embodied by his ad line for his 1980 production
42nd Street
—“The All-Singing All-Dancing Extravaganza with a Cast of 54 (Some Younger).”

• Merrick began publicizing his breakthrough production
Fanny
(1954, co-produced with Joshua Logan) by plastering men’s-room mirrors with suggestive stickers asking, “Have you seen Fanny?” He then commissioned a life-sized nude statue of the show’s belly dancer and had it erected atop an empty pedestal in Central Park one night—illegally, of course. And of course with enough clues so members of the press and police force could find it the next morning.

• One reason Merrick promoted the hell out of
Fanny
was to make it a hit despite Richard Rodgers having declined to do the music, a fact Merrick never forgave. Rodgers was consistently at or near the top of the producer’s enemies list. According to critic Frank Rich, “Such was his detestation of Rodgers that even after the
composer’s death he took revenge on his elderly widow by seating her in the upper balcony at
42nd Street
.”

• When asked by a reporter why he had the reputation of being a mean man, David Merrick logically replied, “Because I
am
mean—what else?”

• When he disliked someone, that person stayed disliked. Merrick taunted
New York Times
critic Howard Taubman more often than most critics, and relished needling him publicly, for instance on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
. The insults finally descended to the level of Nazi analogies, at which point Taubman threatened to sue, and Merrick issued a rare apology.

• Taubman’s successor at the
Times
, Stanley Kauffmann, was also detested by Merrick, who didn’t want him to review a preview of
Philadelphia, Here I Come
in 1966 and prevented him from doing so by canceling that performance after announcing that “a rat” was loose in the theater’s generator. The cancellation and its cause made page one of the paper, garnering the show more in publicity than the amount that had to be refunded for tickets.

• Broadway producers often asked a show’s creators to give up part of their weekly royalties when business wasn’t enough to meet the weekly nut (the amount required before profits commenced). But on
Do Re Mi
(1960), for example, Merrick insisted on such a cut from the creative team and star Phil Silvers during good weeks as well as bad. When Merrick’s demands weren’t met, he’d cut back on advertising and publicity.

• Merrick didn’t like his performers earning outside money. Kaye Ballard was already a Broadway name when she signed to do
Carnival
at $650 a week. Friday afternoons she did a regular appearance on Perry Como’s TV show. Merrick had it written into Ballard’s contract that should she arrive at the Imperial Theatre one minute late on Friday, she’d have to pay David $750.

• Merrick wasn’t intimidated by any actress. He admitted to Carol Channing that initially he didn’t want her for
Hello, Dolly!
“I [didn’t] want that silly grin with all those teeth that go back to your ears.” When Phyllis Newman was Tony nominated for his
Subways Are for Sleeping
, Merrick, seated near her, lied when the list of nominees was read: “Streisand’s going to win. I voted for her.” Seconds later, Newman won, and the producer “sincerely” congratulated her.


“Merrick was a sadistic hypocrite,” offered lyricist Adolph Green. “He himself went for young girls and was not known for lengthy relationships. But he liked to try and provoke me over the years about my younger wife”—Phyllis Newman, to whom Green was married from 1960 until his death in 2002.

• Merrick often spoke for shock effect, especially to the press. “Homosexuals are taking over the theater” was the theme of one interview he did, after which gay writer-director Arthur Laurents warned that more such verbal bigotry “and we won’t work for you.” Merrick’s “faux-macho general manager—with a penchant for Puerto Rican boys—signaled frantically behind Merrick’s back for me to lay off. Merrick wasn’t fazed.
  “ ‘It’s only for publicity,’ ” Laurents quoted Merrick as saying. “ ‘I wouldn’t have anyone on my staff who wasn’t homosexual. They have no one to go home to so they work late and don’t complain.’ ” For the record, Laurents has been wedded to his life partner far longer than Merrick was to any of his contractual wives.

• Jerry Herman, who eventually came out as a gay man, confessed that it took him years to get over the trauma of Merrick’s informing him in front of the whole company that his songs for
Hello, Dolly!
were “an embarrassment.” Merrick probably really liked them but felt he was encouraging Herman to create better ones. “He really believed he could get better work out of everybody if he frightened them half to death and made them feel two inches tall.” Herman rued, “It could have been such a happy time, my first big hit. But I still look back on it with discomfort and trepidation.”
  
Hello, Dolly!
leading man David Burns agreed. “Mr. Merrick is a screamer. Literally. When all else fails and he wants to improve a show, he’ll try and scream it into shape.” Burns added, “Woe to anyone Mr. Merrick believes to be homosexual.… In
Dolly!
he had some unforgettably choice words for Charles Nelson Reilly [a supporting actor], both in front of and behind his very flamboyant back.”


Hello, Dolly!
was Merrick’s most famous and ongoing hit. It cost $440,000 and grossed over $60 million in its original run of 2,844 performances.

• Merrick’s ideas didn’t evolve with the times. When
Dolly!
’s business fell off after almost four years, he decided to mount an all-black version starring Pearl Bailey in 1967. In 1989, after
42nd Street
finally closed, he announced he would bring it back with an all-black cast. He wasn’t able to.
  (In the ’60s, Merrick had discussed a new
Dolly!
with Jack Benny in drag, opposite Benny’s pal George Burns. Benny was willing, but only for one week. Merrick also pursued Bette Davis for the musical title role. She called it “a fifteen-minute show,” referring to the famous title number.)

• Merrick married former, but still far younger, flight attendant Etan Aronson, a brunette Swede, twice. The litigation surrounding their second divorce (his fifth) lasted a decade. Their first marriage, in 1969, lasted three weeks before he obtained a Mexican divorce. During their second marriage (which began 1983), at Etan’s instigation, she and Merrick adopted two daughters. Eventually he denied in court that he’d been a willing participant in the adoptions.

• “The more his taste and antics are derided,” said David Burns, “the more he revels in his outrageousness.” For his 1955
Hello, Dolly!
antecedent,
The Matchmaker
, Merrick hired an old-fashioned black taxicab with dual controls. While a human drove the vehicle from the backseat, a “monkey” sat up front at the dummy wheel, flabbergasting onlookers. The cab’s side read: “I am driving my master to see
The Matchmaker
.”

• “I think deep down Mr. Merrick is contemptuous of the media and people, even,” felt David
Charlie’s Angels
Doyle, who appeared in the producer’s 1964 flop
I Was Dancing
. “He seems to like the theatre but not theatregoers very much.… Some of his p.r. stunts almost seem intended to offend.” Such as for the French musical
Irma La Douce
(1960), for which Merrick paid sandwich-board men to walk the streets wearing portable pissoirs.

• On the other hand, Merrick was the first producer to buy full-page newspaper ads for a Broadway show. The practice was criticized as vulgar, trivial, wasteful, and egotistical—until it became commonplace.

• Via the tax dodge of a foundation he set up, Merrick imported a large quantity of quality British fare by avant-garde playwrights, featuring talented actors. Some, like
Marat/Sade
with Broadway newcomer Glenda Jackson, became actual hits.

• Merrick and John Osborne’s British drama
Look Back in Anger
(1957) failed to generate much American excitement until
Merrick hired a woman to pose as an affronted theatergoer who got up on the stage and attacked the actor portraying an unfaithful husband. Newspapers duly reported the incident and noted the play’s powerful effect on certain viewers. The hoax extended the run by several months (and was revealed weeks after the stunt occurred).

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