Broadway Babylon (43 page)

P
EARL
B
AILEY
,
House of Flowers
. “If that’s a failure, honey, just call me madam.… It didn’t work out too great. They hired me, then sort of ganged up on me. When you hire a star, listen to your star. I wasn’t about to play the little newcomer girl for anybody, not even Capote and company. So I didn’t have much say. What could have been real special and made a ton of money, well, it just … it went
kaput
.”

S
HELLEY
W
INTERS
played the Marx Brothers’ mother in the 1970 flop
Minnie’s Boys
. “I still don’t know what the hell happened.”

R
OBERT
P
RESTON
,
Mack and Mabel
. “You cannot beat Jerry Herman’s music in that. And the story was better than in many hits. As far as I’m concerned,
Mack and Mabel
did not disappoint. But the audience did.”

B
ETTE
D
AVIS
,
Miss Moffat
. “I loved the material … I’d already made a hit with [the film]
The Corn Is Green
, and I was open-minded enough to see them update it and put it in the South with blacks. [Originally it was set in Wales.] But I should have gone with my instinct about [director] Mr. Joshua Logan. The things I’d heard! I should have had my head examined before deciding to work with him.”

R
ICHARD
K
ILEY
,
Her First Roman
, about Cleopatra. “It wasn’t the history that did us in. So Cleopatra wasn’t black [though played by Leslie Uggams]. American audiences don’t know and don’t care. It was that … nothing
jelled right. A mess. It still hurts to remember. Oh, God. Don’t mess with historical characters. Maybe they put curses on us—like with King Tut’s tomb.”

D
IANA
R
IGG
starred as
Colette
, a 1982 flop that closed on the road. “A fascinating woman. Too complex for Broadway. Or at any rate for a musical. End of discussion, thank you.”

T
RUMAN
C
APOTE
wrote the at-times lyrical
The Grass Harp
, which was musicalized in 1971 and lasted seven performances. “Too many people only want to see a big star emoting, or some flashy showbiz musical
about
a big star.… Today’s theatre-goers usually want the obvious; subtlety completely escapes them. Most audiences belong at a boxing ring. Or preferably in it.”

K
ENNETH
N
ELSON
, best known for
The Boys in the Band
, starred in
Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen
, a 1970 musical from the hit play and film
The Teahouse of the August Moon
. “What’s quaint or cute in one decade [the ’50s] doesn’t necessarily
play
in another. I don’t feel the picketing or any boycott threats [by the Oriental Actors of America, who noted the preponderance of Caucasian actors in East Asian roles] hurt us. The war in Vietnam did.
Ladies
was set in Okinawa, but to most people that’s the same as Vietnam. By the time we came along, nobody wanted to hear or see anything more to do with that whole part of the world.”

J
AMES
C
OCO
was obviously miscast as Lee the Chinese “houseboy” who helped rear the two sons who are the protagonists of
Here’s Where I Belong
, based on John Steinbeck’s
East of Eden
, the film version of which made James Dean a star. “Steinbeck was a great writer,” Coco said, “but his works are often heavy and depressing. He’s not been successfully adapted on Broadway.” An understatement. The March 3, 1968, opening night of
Here’s Where I Belong
was also its closing night and set a new record for a one-night performance Broadway loss: $550,000.

As James Dean fans recall, the plot involved a son finding out his “dead” mother is alive and well and running a bordello. When
Belong
wasn’t depressing, it was reportedly dull; one song and dance revolved around the packing and shipping of lettuce—the setting is California’s agricultural Salinas Valley. The doomed musical was picketed by nineteen members of the Oriental Actors of America due to Coco’s casting.

P
EGGY
L
EE’S
one-woman show
Peg
flopped, unlike that of fellow singer Lena Horne. “Chocolate, or café au lait, was in, not vanilla … [in] the ’80s. Flavor of the decade, I guess.”

J
OE
L
AYTON
conceived and directed
Bring Back Birdie
, a 1981 sequel to the smash hit
Bye Bye Birdie
(1960). Both starred Chita Rivera, but in the later musical, in Dick Van Dyke’s charming and occasionally hilarious place was a lumpish, very middle-aged Donald O’Connor. The sequel was set twenty years after the original. “So many factors.… Sometimes technology seduces us. We had umpteen television monitors as a major part of the Look of the sequel.… People loved the original and felt warmly about it. This meant if they weren’t delighted by
our
show, they’d hate it. And did.… Mr. O’Connor was making his belated debut on Broadway. Any sparkle he had was long gone. Along with any slimness or sex appeal.”

During one of the final performances (out of four), O’Connor, who had costarred in the celluloid classic
Singin’ in the Rain
(1952), forgot the words to his song “Middle-Aged Blues.” Embarrassed, he asked the band for help, then angrily exploded, “You sing it! I hated this song anyway!” Theater historian Ken Mandelbaum wrote, “
Bring Back Birdie
may rank as the worst Broadway musical ever to be created by top-level professionals.”

T
ENNESSEE
W
ILLIAMS
wrote
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
. “I think audiences were neutral about a poetic play about death. A play or movie about a violent murder, perhaps. Because death happens to everyone, but murder happens to someone else.”

V
INCENT
P
RICE
played Abraham Lincoln in
Yours, A. Lincoln
(1942), based on the book
Why Was Lincoln Murdered?
“For whatever reasons, the critics did not accept me as Mr. Lincoln.… Years and years later, when I enacted Oscar Wilde, the critics were kind and accepting, either because of my age or they found I was more Wildean than Lincolnesque!” Critic George Jean Nathan wrote in 1942 that “the Price Lincoln, had [assassin] Booth not taken the job himself, would have been shot on the spot by every dramatic critic present in Ford’s Theatre on the fateful night.”

K
AREN
M
ORROW
.
“The Selling of the President
was based on a best-selling book.… [But] suddenly it was the same old thing. We started with a bad director, and we began getting into trouble. I had no way of knowing how to fix myself. I had the lead. I was the driving force in the show, and I just wasn’t a substantial enough actress to know what to do.”

G
EORGE
T
YLER
produced one of playwright George S. Kaufman’s rare flops,
Someone in the House
, an adaptation of a French farce. “Timing can be crucial … we opened at the height of the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed more people than the First World War. People were avoiding theatres because they were afraid of catching the disease in any place full of people.”
Kaufman half-jokingly recommended that his play be advertised, “Avoid crowds—see
Someone in the House
at the Knickerbocker Theatre.”

M
ARTHA
S
COTT
was a huge success as Emily in
Our Town
, but had a flop with
Design for a Stained Glass Window
(1950), about religious persecution in sixteenth-century England. She played a Catholic who preferred death to forcible conversion to Protestantism. “It was the consensus that I underacted and the rest of the cast overacted. [But] I felt Margaret, my character, would be calm … very spiritual. I don’t know, maybe those were Protestant critics. But I was very surprised. And disappointed. I thought it would be both lofty and a success.”

Charlton Heston, not yet a screen name, was in the cast. George Jean Nathan deemed him “a pretty fellow whom the moving pictures should exultantly capture without delay, if they have any respect for the dramatic stage. [He] duly adjusts his chemise so the audience may swoon over his expansive, hirsute chest, and conducts his prize physique about the platform like a physical-culture demonstrator.” (Shades of Schwarzenegger.)

M
AUREEN
S
TAPLETON
. “If people knew what makes a flop, there wouldn’t be any. How can you ever tell? You do your best and hold your breath.” In 1953 Stapleton acted in
The Emperor’s Clothes
. George Jean Nathan felt, “Miss Stapleton played the part as though she had not yet signed the contract with the producer.”

R
OBERT
V
AUGHN
is best known for the TV series
The Man From U.N.C.L.E
. and most recently for
Hustle
. In 1977, he played President Roosevelt in
F.D.R
. “One-man shows were not as popular or commonplace as today. Political shows were, and are, even trickier.… This was also a sequel of sorts to a very popular show. Perhaps it was too simple.”
F.D.R
. was penned by former MGM chief Dore Schary as a follow-up to his hit
Sunrise at Campobello
(1958), which was not a one-man show.
Variety
compared the Vaughn show to “listening to only one end of a telephone conversation.”

R
OSEMARY
H
ARRIS
starred as Eleanor of Aquitaine in
The Lion in Winter
, one of the 1965–1966 season’s best plays. James Goldman’s take on a Plantagenet family gathering in 1183 was brilliantly written, as was the popular 1968 film version with Katharine Hepburn (for which she shared the Best Actress Oscar—with Barbra Streisand (
Funny Girl
)). “How can I answer,” said Harris when asked why the play didn’t draw patrons. A history and a mystery, for the
Herald Tribune
’s Walter Kerr dubbed Harris’s Eleanor one of the ten or twelve best performances any theatergoer would likely see in a lifetime.

C
HARLES
M
AC
A
RTHUR
and Ben Hecht cowrote several hit plays, including
The Front Page
. One of their few flops was
Ladies and Gentlemen
, in 1939, starring MacArthur’s wife Helen Hayes. Screenwriter Anita Loos, a close friend of Hayes, later explained, “A certain critic of homosexual persuasion took strong exception to the play and to Helen starring in her husband’s play.… Charlie was much more upset than Helen. It ate at his masculine pride.” So when his lunchmates inquired what he planned to do about the gay critic, he cracked, “I’ll take care of him, guys. I’m going to send him a poisoned choirboy.”

G
YPSY
R
OSE
L
EE
is best remembered for her memoirs,
Gypsy
. Before that, the stripper penned an autobiographical comedy play titled
The Naked Genius
. “Our producer, Mike Todd, finally decided that if the play was lousy, he’d capitalize on it, and actually advertised it that way. Imagine, truth in advertising! One of Mike’s ads said, ‘Guaranteed not to win the Pulitzer Prize.’ ”

J
ULES
F
EIFFER’S
Little Murders
had a lengthy Off-Broadway run, but first played Broadway—for seven performances. During intermissions, friends would sincerely congratulate the cartoonist-playwright on what they believed would be a big hit. Feiffer later recalled, “If the audience was happy at the first act, if the actors started playing the jokes and didn’t play the characters, we were finished. When they played the characters, there was a kind of tension.” He felt the play had a future once audiences stopped enjoying the first act so much and after they didn’t tell him halfway through that he had a hit on his hands.

J
EAN
A
RTHUR
attempted a comeback via a 1967 comedy aptly titled
The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake
, produced by Cheryl Crawford (one of three founders of the Group Theatre in the 1930s). A shy, reluctant star, Arthur had abruptly left the hit-play-in-the-making
Born Yesterday
to be replaced by future star Judy Holliday.

Jean managed to convince Cheryl that she’d matured in the twenty-one years since her notorious “sick” walkout on writer-director Garson Kanin’s
Born Yesterday
. But on the third day of
Freaking Out
previews, Arthur stopped the show to confide that her doctor had suggested she not continue to perform.

She informed the audience, “I am told that I must go on, and I’m going to because I believe in the show … but if something happens …” The play folded that evening, and Crawford told Arthur that the whole investment of a then-hefty quarter-million dollars was going down the drain. Garson Kanin said of the future enemies, “There was no love lost between the two ladies, despite their mutual sapphistry.”

V
IVIEN
L
EIGH
appeared on Broadway for the last time in John Gielgud’s 1966 production of
Ivanov
. She was by then reluctantly divorced from Laurence Olivier and would die of tuberculosis the following year. In the play, she essayed a deserted wife dying of tuberculosis. Many fans complained that Leigh’s character died prematurely after the first act, but the still-lovely star half-joked, “That’s better than the whole show should die.” Gielgud attributed the play’s lack of success to “American audiences—they have trouble accepting an English cast playing Russians. Especially as Americans aren’t fond of Russians in the first place.”

T
RUMAN
C
APOTE
was the “Tiny Terror” with the big mouth. The 1966 musical of his novella
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
—five years after the hit movie starring Audrey Hepburn—became a notorious and costly flop. Capote did his bit to sabotage the show by informing
Women’s Wear Daily
that he disliked the score and leading lady Mary Tyler Moore. Producer David Merrick was furious and threatened to advertise the musical as “David Merrick Presents in Cold Blood
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.”