Broadway Babylon (16 page)

S
TAGESTRUCK
IS THE DEEPLY IRONIC TITLE
of novelist and playwright Sarah Schulman’s non-fiction book about Jonathan Larson’s alleged plagiarism of her 1990 novel
People in Trouble
for his musical
Rent
(1996).

By his own admission and that of colleagues, Larson was poor at plot and narrative.
Rent
’s story owed a lot to
La Bohème
and, apparently, to characters and storylines from Schulman’s novel, the first about East Village artists struggling with AIDS and homelessness.
Rent
includes several parallels and similar or identical details. It turned out that Larson knew the novel, which Schulman’s reps shopped around extensively for a prospective rock opera (one team of composers that declined Schulman’s story instead did one about a gay man, Harvey Milk), and had allegedly told an associate he was “using” it for
Rent
(but made no effort to contact its author).

Schulman’s novel was lesbian centered. Larson made
Rent
male- and heterosexual-centered.
“Rent
acknowledges that lesbians exist,” explained Schulman, “therefore it claims to be tolerant. The fact that it repeatedly inscribes lesbian relationships as unstable, bickering, and emotionally pathological is the required conceit.” Schulman added that the brilliant composer-lyricist—not known for the depth of his characters—“claims that heterosexuals are the heroic center of the AIDS crisis” and that
Rent
“clearly depicts a world in which heterosexual love is true love.

“Homosexual love exists but is inherently secondary in that it is either doomed or shallow or both.” Schulman accused Larson and other artists, and the corporate interests behind them, of routinely co-opting the work of women and minorities to lend a fashionable and profitable aura of diversity and authenticity to their own work/product.

When Schulman sought to publicize her plagiarized situation, she found herself blocked at every level.
Rent
was a huge hit, the media was championing it—“
Rent
,” she observed, “gives New Yorkers a comfortable image of themselves.… ‘AIDS is so sad, but straight love is real love, what a relief.’ ”—and almost no one wished to oppose
Rent
or the accelerating financial interests driving it. A
Wall Street Journal
article about Larson’s estate added up the sales, licensing, merchandising, and other
Rent
deals “now worth one billion dollars.”

“In the middle of the night” Schulman “suddenly realized that if Larson had done the right thing and taken out an option on my novel, even at the rock-bottom rate of 2.5 percent, my share would now be $25 million.”

Meanwhile, Lynn Thompson,
Rent
’s dramaturg, had sued his estate for a fairer share than the $2,000 she’d originally been paid—closer to $40 million. She declared that she’d written nine percent of the song lyrics and forty-eight
percent of the libretto. Although the judge acknowledged Thompson’s contributions as considerable, she lost the case, which further discouraged Sarah Schulman from legal action. She’d been warned time and again to drop the issue—The
New York Times
wouldn’t touch it; an article finally appeared in
New York
magazine on January 13, 1997—or else it might harm, even destroy her career.

In
Stagestruck
she clarified that, contrary to the movies, justice is not readily available to those who can’t afford it (the lesbian activist-writer sometimes had to purchase food on a credit card and couldn’t afford tickets to most Broadway plays) or who challenge institutionalized white-heterosexual-male privilege.

In her 1998 book, published by Duke University Press, Schulman moved on from her low
Rent
experience to larger questions of how lesbian and gay people, as well as people with AIDS, are misrepresented and commodified in American culture. She argues convincingly that had
Rent
not been presented by a white heterosexual male, with “straights” as the focus of AIDS, struggle, and poverty, it would never have been welcomed with such open—and rewarding—arms.

P.S. The 2005 film version of
Rent
, like that of the similarly heralded and innovative stage musical
A Chorus Line
, was a resounding critical and financial flop.

I
n 1960 Lucille Ball was at a crossroads. Approaching fifty and in the process of divorcing Desi Arnaz, her husband of nineteen years, she believed she was through in television. “I will never do another TV series. It couldn’t top
I Love Lucy
, and I’d be foolish to try. In this business, you have to know when to get off.” (Of course, she would go on to do three more TV series and umpteen television specials.)

For a change of scene and pace, she chose to star in a Broadway show. A musical—never mind that she couldn’t sing. Her misadventure in
Wildcat
illustrates the high esteem in which even the biggest stars then held the Great White Way and the fact that extreme success in another medium may interfere with qualitative success in the theater.

While completing filming on a “mature comedy” with Bob Hope titled
The Facts of Life—
about adultery—Ball told the press, “The Broadway stage has always been my first love. I never made it, and I want to prove something to myself. Years ago, before I came to Hollywood, I was a showgirl. But just before a new revue or musical would start, I’d always get fired. I was shy and had no personality—I don’t blame them.

“Wildcat
is a story about a female [oil] wildcatter in 1912. It’s sort of a tomboy sort of role. She wants to link up with the top male wildcatter in the territory and spends the show chasing him.”

Desilu announced it would invest $360,000 in
Wildcat
, holding original cast album rights and planning a TV “spectacular” around it called
Lucy Goes to Broadway
. Ball publicly admitted, “I’m terrified of the musical end of it. But
I have some good people who know I’m not a singer and will write accordingly. I’ll be doing a lot of cavorting around while I’m singing—and maybe that will keep people from paying too much attention to the quality of my voice.” Ironically, she would end her lengthy film career with a flop musical,
Mame
(1974), for which she was deemed too old and her singing voice roundly criticized.

The star explained that she would “stay with (
Wildcat
) a year and a half.… I’d like to devote about five years to Broadway.”The musical’s libretto was by N. Richard Nash, who’d written the hit
The Rainmaker
. Michael Kidd would choreograph and direct, both men co-producing. Lyricist Carolyn Leigh and composer Cy Coleman teamed for their first Broadway show—unfortunately their score would yield only one hit: the rousing “Hey, Look Me Over.”

Nash had created his heroine, Wildcat or “Wildy” Jackson, as a twenty-seven-year-old, yet Lucy saw the part as ideal for herself. She no doubt wished to continue playing onstage the leading roles that her age increasingly precluded before the camera. Nash opined, “If it had been a straight play, the difference in ages between her and the rest of the cast would not have been so pronounced, but she was a generation away from them and had never been truly trained as a dancer or singer.” One chorus member was future TV star Valerie “Rhoda” Harper.

Outwardly, Ball was gung ho on
Wildcat
and starting a new lease on life and work. Nash observed, however, “She desperately wanted to get away from Hollywood and get away from [Desi]. So for her, this musical was a period of major escape.… She was deeply, deeply unhappy.”

Leaving California behind, Lucy moved to the Big Apple with five van-loads of possessions; her mother, DeDe; her two children; two maids; the children’s nurse; a driver; a limousine; and a regular automobile. Lucy’s new home was the new luxury highrise the Imperial House at 69th Street and Lexington Avenue. Publicity surrounding her relocation was widespread, as were the public expressions of hope—spearheaded by columnist Walter Winchell—that America’s favorite couple would reconcile.

Besides being psychically wounded, Ball was still physically bruised from an accident incurred while making
The Facts of Life
. Preparing to step into a rowboat, she’d caught her foot and fallen nine feet, gashing her leg and hitting her face hard enough to become unconscious for several minutes. The egg-sized bump on her forehead healed; but when she went into rehearsals for
Wildcat
she still bore facial scars that had to be covered with special makeup.

The pressure of the musical, in which the star was the focus of every scene, helped relax her mind. It was an era when divorce made many people, women especially, feel ashamed of the public knowledge that they’d failed at marriage. Lucy later confessed to having been very depressed and “… very
ashamed. Very embarrassed.” As usual, she immersed herself in her work, attentive to every detail though not yet—Broadway was after all new territory for her—the “control freak” boss she became on subsequent TV series (see this authors
Celebrity Feuds!
).

Wildcat
opened in Philadelphia on October 29, 1960. Local critics were generally loving, and
Variety
pronounced the show “Surefire for Broadway,” adding, “Miss Ball sings acceptably and dances with spirit.” But Desi Arnaz was on hand, still playing mentor to the older and more successful Lucille Ball. He strongly felt that Wildcat should behave more like Lucy Ricardo: childlike and lovable. For instance, like Lucy, Wildy should not be disreputable; if she was greedy and at times conniving, it would be only because she wanted to take care of her crippled younger sister.

The aging Ball had already proclaimed her desire to put Lucy Ricardo behind her, and Nash’s lines could not, legally, be altered without his consent. However, “We saw the show was not coming together as hoped,” Nash said; it was his first musical. Also, Lucille’s confidence enacting a new character on the stage was shaky. Her prior experience had been in a touring company of Elmer Rice’s
Dream Girl
in 1948, when her movie career was mostly washed up. Although Ball resisted Arnaz’s suggestion that “Hey, Look Me Over” be sung at the musical’s beginning, ending, and twice in between, she started Lucy-fying her lines and performances, to which Nash hardly objected, since audiences ate it up.

For example, when an actor came onstage in a nightgown and Wee Willie cap, the same getup that always got a laugh for William Frawley on
I Love Lucy
, Ball as Wildcat quipped, “Say, you know a fellow named Fred Mertz?” From a formally theatrical point of view, worse was yet to come, particularly after the New York opening on December 16. Critics liked Lucy but not the show. They derided it as a
tame
cat, and its plot similarities to
Annie Get Your Gun
and
The Rainmaker
(which Nash would later musicalize as
110 in the Shade
) only pointed up the inferiority of
Wildcat
’s storytelling and music. Nonetheless, people swarmed to see the fabulous redhead—wearing a long fall and blue jeans—in person.

World-Telegram
critic Frank Aston stated, “The ovation greeting the frisky lady threatened to reach into next month. And all evening affection ran so high that the last words and notes of specialties were drowned in applause.”

Thus, Lucy Ricardo gradually took over. When Lucille Ball muffed her lines, she would halt the show, point out her mistake, then start again, captivating most audience members while breaking a cardinal rule of the theater. If her children attended the show, she called them up on stage to join her. When an animal relieved itself during a performance, Lucy joked that her contract
called for her to clean up after it, and with a broom and dustpan she did so. When she entered, she salaamed.

She mugged and gladly admitted to it in chatty press interviews. (During
I Love Lucy
she’d been forbidden to do TV talk shows by her husband and co-producer, who didn’t want the public to learn the big difference between Lucy and Lucille.) A “third act” at curtain call found Ball talking to the audience, dancing, and doing a lively encore of “Hey, Look Me Over.”

Tickets sold out, word of mouth was great regarding the star turn, and the massive divorce publicity made Ball the most spotlighted celebrity in the country. “She was desperate for laughs, and so she would ad-lib on stage,” explained Nash. “Sometimes her laughs came off, sometimes they didn’t. She would ask me to write laugh lines for her; I was not a gag man by any means. She wanted gags right at the beginning of the show.”

Desi Arnaz eventually called the playwright to ask if he could send out two
I Love Lucy
writers to add material? Nash acquiesced, but the new material didn’t work. “Michael [Kidd] and I went backstage [afterward] and said, ‘It’s a different medium, Lucy’ … She took all the lines out instantly. That was a bad shock for her. In television, those lines had worked.”