Broadway Babylon (47 page)
Authors: Boze Hadleigh
The show was the 110th Broadway production of eighty-year-old director George Abbott, but its timing was unlucky: during the opening-night intermission,
audience member and New York Mayor John Lindsay was advised that King had just been assassinated in Memphis. Word spread throughout the theater, and many people fled amid rumors that riots would ensue all over the country. Because Lindsay attended
Education
when the news broke, the show suffered to some degree by association. However, without a true star, with mostly poor reviews, and without good word of mouth,
Education
probably wouldn’t have survived much longer than its twenty-eight performances.
P.S.
Education
did indirectly contribute to a huge musical hit, for in 1968 dancer Donna McKechnie contacted
Education’s
choreographer to plead for work in the show. He created a dancing part for her, and six years later McKechnie recounted this episode during the taped interview sessions that were the basis of
A Chorus Line
. The situation was incorporated into the new musical, with McKechnie playing the semi-autobiographical part of Cassie.
Rumor
: Edward Albee wrote
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (
1962) about two male couples but passed it off as a work about heterosexual marrieds
.
Reality
: Such a rumor owes much to the misconception that one can only write about what one knows. (Yet don’t most gay playwrights have heterosexual parents?) Years later when a San Francisco theatrical group put on the play with an all-male cast, Albee obtained a legal injunction that stopped the production after its first performance. “If I wanted to write a play about two homosexual couples,” he announced, “I know how to write a play about two homosexual couples.” One could reply, “Butcha haven’t, Ed, ya haven’t.” Though openly gay, the senior citizen writes about, like his musical counterpart Stephen Sondheim, hetero characters and lifestyles.
Rumor
: After the flop of his final musical
, Mr. President,
in 1962, Irving Berlin retired in shame and went into seclusion
.
Reality
: His previous show,
Call Me Madam
(1950) with Ethel Merman, was a smash hit. Naturally, Berlin’s comeback at seventy-four—he would live another twenty-seven years—was eagerly anticipated, especially as its topic, during the Kennedy years, was an inside look at a fictional First Family. However, the stiff, somewhat menacing Robert Ryan was decidedly un-Kennedyesque, and Nanette Fabray was no Jackie in the looks and glamour departments. The nervous Joshua Logan’s direction was widely panned; the book was criticized and so were the unattractive sets.
Mr. President
’s music—Berlin’s first full stage score was composed in 1914—was merely adequate, and the plot went nowhere.
The Jewish composer of
White Christmas, Easter Parade
, and “God Bless America” was disheartened by
Mr. President
’s non-hit status. It ran 265 performances, only thanks to advance bookings. Blame fell on Berlin because his
name no longer guaranteed a smash. Not a fan of “modern music,” especially rock ’n’ roll, Berlin withdrew from Broadway and did grow increasingly remote from the outside world.
Rumor
: Anne Bancroft was a frustrated Broadway musical star
.
Reality
: This one may have started because a costar said in an interview that Bancroft (born Anna Maria Italiano) loved to sing but seldom got to. Then too, Bancroft was a frontrunner to play Fanny Brice in
Funny Girl
, eventually enacted by Barbra Streisand. Before that, Jerry Herman’s
Milk and Honey
(1961) had been the first Broadway musical set in Israel. Bancroft was to have starred later that season in another musical:
The Blue Star
, cowritten by Joshua Logan and with a Burton Lane—E.Y. Harburg score. But egotistical producer David Merrick had canceled it, not wanting to be
second
with a set-in-Israel musical.
(Another role Bancroft nearly played was Joan Crawford in the film
Mommie Dearest
. However, she disliked each screenplay draft and finally departed the project, clearing the way for Faye Dunaway’s
Grand Guignol
performance.)
Rumor
: Linda Lee, composer Cole Porter’s wife, was a lesbian
.
Reality
: When they wed, 1919 headlines read, B
OY
W
ITH
$1 M
ILLION
W
EDS
G
IRL
W
ITH
$2 M
ILLION
!! The smart set on both coasts knew that Porter was gay. Lee was an unknown quantity. Most people correctly assumed it was a marriage for Porter’s “convenience” and that sex was immaterial. Inquiring minds thus wondered if Lee would miss “it.”There’s no evidence that Linda was lesbian. Or bi or heterosexual. Perhaps she was asexual or postsexual. At any rate, she was relieved. Her first husband reportedly beat her, before settling a fortune on her. (The tuneful biofilm
De-Lovely
cast a younger Ashley Judd opposite Kevin Kline as Porter, reversing the reality; Linda was several years Cole’s senior.)
Rumor
: Gertrude Lawrence, star of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1951 hit
The King and I,
didn’t really die of cancer, but of something more sinister
.
Reality
: The rumor derived from Western reaction to Thailand’s ban of the anti-factual and irreverent musical that made a star of shaven-headed newcomer Yul Brynner. The ban also took in its nonmusical predecessor
Anna and the King of Siam
and Jodie Foster’s ‘90s flop
Anna and the King
. Some theatrical gossips and tabloids hinted that Lawrence (1898–1952) had been poisoned or otherwise lethally punished for enacting the British tutor who in her memoirs grossly exaggerated her role at the Siamese court and misrepresented the highly educated and able Mongkut, who’d been a Buddhist monk for several years before ascending the throne. Chalk this one up to another “curse of” fantasy inspired by the “exotic” East.
Rumor
: Bisexual Yul Brynner seduced teenaged Sal Mineo, the crown prince
(
thus the king’s son
)
in
The King and I.
Reality
: It’s more likely that the two simply bonded in fictional Siam, when Mineo joined the cast in 1952, playing a prince to Brynner’s king. Much later they costarred on screen, and who knows what happened then or had happened by then, for Mineo was admittedly gay. The two remained good friends until Mineo’s murder by a sadistic robber who happened upon him in his carport when Sal returned home after rehearsals for an LA stage production of James Kirkwood’s
P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!
.
Rumor
: “Composer’s composer” (according to composer Burton Lane) Frederick Loewe had a protégée named Anna Maria von Steiner who was a “world-famous pianist and [the] inspiration of [sic]
My Fair Lady.”
Reality
: So said the Palm Springs press, without checking any of the facts. The Viennese-born “Fritz” Loewe was much more private than professional partner Alan Jay Lerner, with reason. The latter, much married and very sexist, once said, “Women should be obscene and not heard.” One of Loewe’s escapades, included in the book
Palm Springs Babylon
, was passing off his pal Allan Keller as Anna Maria von Steiner. Palm Springs bought the impersonation, but after the cat was out of the bag there was no more print coverage of the man behind la Steiner or about Frederick and Allan’s relationship. P.S. your bias is showing.
Rumor
: Montgomery Clift got his big break in the Pulitzer Prize–winning
The Skin of Our Teeth (
1942) via sexual favoritism from playwright Thornton Wilder
.
Reality
: Clift, born in 1920, did become close to Wilder, born in 1897, a major playwright in his day. Before that, Clift had become even closer to actor Alfred Lunt, born in 1892, a major actor via his professional and marital association with wife Lynne Fontanne, five years his senior. Whether or not the beauteous youth slept with any of his gay benefactors is unknown. (He did
not
sleep with his
Skin
director, the virulently homophobic Elia Kazan, who made numerous anti-gay comments on into his old age.)
Rumor
: Laurence Olivier, familiar with John Gielgud’s habits, arranged for him to be arrested for “importuning” in a London john in 1953 to eliminate him as competition
.
Reality
: Gielgud was entrapped and arrested by an undercover police officer, as happened decades later in a Beverly Hills restroom to
Hogan’s Heroes
actor Robert Clary and visiting British singer George Michael. Gielgud was then convicted, not long after being knighted. A national scandal ensued, with the homophobic popular press on the warpath. Gielgud seriously considered giving up acting and sought his colleagues’ advice. They all urged him to continue,
except longtime rival Olivier. (Critic Kenneth Tynan famously declared Gielgud the world’s best actor from the neck up and Olivier best from the neck down.) Courageously, Gielgud chose to move forward with his next project, acting in and directing a West End production of N.C. Hunter’s play,
A Day at the Sea
. To Gielgud’s heartfelt relief, he was warmly received by theatergoers, as opposed to average tabloid readers.
P.S. Leading British playwright Terence Rattigan wanted to dramatize the episode in
Separate Tables
. But the closeted writer was persuaded to turn the character into a man arrested for approaching women in cinemas. When the play moved to Broadway, Rattigan hoped to restore the character’s intended sexuality. But closeted British actor Eric Portman and American producer Robert Whitehead vetoed the idea. Ironically, the role won an Academy Award for David Niven in the 1958 film version; the otherwise charming Englishman was far from pro-gay and habitually closeted numerous gay or bisexual celebrities in his books and interviews.
P.P.S. Alec Guinness was also arrested in a men’s room, in Liverpool. However, that information only came out posthumously, because Guinness hadn’t been famous at the time, hadn’t given his real name at the police station, and, unlike Gielgud—who outlived the closetedly bisexual Olivier by fourteen years—Sir Alec covered his true sexuality with a wife.
P.S. III. After his arrest, Sir John was initially refused entry into the United States, to costar in the 1953 all-star film of Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
, which first-billed (the eventually openly bi) Marlon Brando. Why? Because the Republican administration had recently enacted sterner laws against allowing homosexuals into what tennis champion Martina Navratilova has labeled “the land of the free heterosexual.”
“After even Off-Off-Broadway revues became costlier to produce, I launched my legendary series of recordings. Everyone has sung for me, all the Broadway biggies, and everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Tony Perkins to you-name-them. I’ve specialized in offbeat and discarded songs by the great composers, cut from Broadway shows.
“My record label, Painted Smiles, was legendary too, and sexy, because the pair of lips in the very center surrounding the hole that goes over and down on the metal pole of your record player creates a symbolic sex act each time you played one of my records—now, of course, available on CD.
“Cowrite my memoirs with me—and I’ve threatened to write them for years!—and we’ll have a regular Broadway Babylon on our gilded but culturally relevant hands. I’ve got the down and dirty on everyone in showbiz, or at least everyone in showbiz in New York, which is those worth knowing about.”—revue and record producer B
EN
B
AGLEY
in a 1995 letter to this author. (He died in 1998 at sixty-four.)
“For her two Broadway shows, Barbra Streisand was Tony nominated, for supporting and then for starring. She lost both times.… Streisand was admired for her talent and briefly cheered for overcoming anti-Semitism and the prejudice against unlovely girls. But what happened is her ego blossomed along with her stardom, and she treated people quite badly. Awards are where behavior like that can catch up with you.”—columnist B
OYD
M
C
D
ONALD
“Larry Olivier would talk about the brotherhood or fraternity of actors in front of a group, then turn right around and look through an individual actor like he was a dirty pane of glass.”—costar A
NTHONY
Q
UINN
(
Becket
, 1960)
“I’ve been offered it. I passed. Everybody musically inclined’s been offered it.… It’s one of the great Broadway scores, but don’t hold your breath.”—M
ADONNA
in 1997 on the proposed movie of
Chicago
“Stabbed by the wicked fairy!”—playwright Jerome C
HODOROV’S
brother, E
DWARD
, when named as a communist by Jerome Robbins in 1953
“Jerome Robbins complied with the witch hunters because he didn’t want them to tell his mommy he was gay.”—G
REG
L
AWRENCE
, author of
Bullets over Broadway
“Stephen Sondheim wasn’t ready to come out of the closet until his mother died.”—M
ERYLE
S
ECREST
, Sondheim’s biographer
“Either you’re a fireplace person or you’re not, and I’ve never trusted anyone who wasn’t. Stephen Sondheim, who lives next door to me, complains because the smoke gets into his living room. A most disagreeable man. I don’t think he’s a fireplace person.”—K
ATHARINE
H
EPBURN
“The big shocker [in Tommy Tune’s memoir] was one paragraph about the cum facials he and Andy Warhol used to engage in—each using their own. They were inspired by Mae West, who was so young looking. Tommy admitted that they didn’t seem to work very well, and wondered if it was more effective with someone else’s cum? For, Miss West used that of the muscle-men in her nightclub act.”—Tony winner M
ICHAEL
J
ETER
(
Grand Hotel
)
“I don’t think a day has passed in the last 15 years that I haven’t contemplated suicide. Have I been in a state of depression for the last decade and a half? I don’t think so.”—T
OMMY
T
UNE
in his 1997 book
Footnotes
“There are always fewer genius directors than there are shows going into rehearsal. Careful—or you’ll end up with Garson Kanin directing yours.”—writer E
THAN
M
ORDDEN
“David Merrick is a turd in human clothing.”—L
AURENCE
H
ARVEY
, who departed a Merrick musical after the abrasive producer yelled at his star
“In the 1930s, with the Great Depression, jobs were scarce all over, and very scarce on Broadway, as they still are. We were grateful to have jobs there, and we were young but we were responsible. Now I read about how in
Rent
, which is a hit for quite a while already, several of the actors at any one time are out sick or playing hooky. Even when we were sick, we
showed up and worked. We never put the audience or our ethics second.”—
King Kong
star F
AY
W
RAY
, who performed in three Broadway shows in the 1930s, speaking in 2002
“When I saw
Rent
I had a feeling of déjà vu. No, not
La Bohème. Hair
. Think about it … so many similarities. The sex and drugs and death and youth and bigotry, the anger and exuberance, and, yes, the still canyon-sized generation gap.”—D
AVID
D
UKES
, who starred in the 1988 nonmusical M.
Butterfly
“First they took
Romeo and Juliet
and made
West Side Story
out of it. Okay. I liked the music, anyway. But what did poor
La Bohème
ever do to deserve
this
?”—screenwriter J
EFFREY
B
OAM
(
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
) on
Rent
“My audition for the great Harold Arlen [for her first Broadway show,
House of Flowers
] didn’t work out very well. It was also rather confusing. He told me, ‘You need to go away and live a little.’ I was 18, but I was auditioning for the part of a 14-year-old.”—D
IAHANN
C
ARROLL
“The problem is that most of America thinks the Tony Awards have something to do with hair or hair products.… Once the unsophisticated majority finds out the Tonys are about the theater, most of them yawn and watch something else.”—anonymous PBS-TV E
XECUTIVE
in 2001
“I thought B.D. Wong was fabulous in
M. Butterfly
. But then he seemed to disappear … not that surprising, as Broadway has few roles for Asian-American actors, let alone gay East Asian ones.… I saw him in a spoof of the Charlie Chan [films] called
Shanghai Noon
. Now he has a book out [in 2003] about becoming a father and coming out of the closet.”—New York journalist L
LOYD
G
ORDON
“As much as I admire him, Stephen Sondheim is not my world. Oscar Hammerstein’s are the sort of English lyrics I would aspire to write.”—French lyricist A
LAIN
B
OUBLIL
(
Les Misérables
)
“They’re not Parisians. They’re good Jewish boys—like most writers of the theatre. They’re in the new tradition of European Jewish writers, which is after all where most of the American musical theatre comes from.”—British producer C
AMERON
M
ACKINTOSH
on Claude-Michel Schöenberg and Alain Boublil (
Miss Saigon, Les Miz
)
“You’re revolting, and on top of that you’re not even very feminine.”—the words from C
AROL
C
HANNING’S MOTHER
that Carol said drove her to the stage, where she felt more accepted
“Excuse me, but Mary Martin’s charm largely eludes me. Of course she’s competent, but unlike Merman who was too big for the screen, Martin was too small for it.… Her Pollyanna image fronts a will of iron and a savagely ambitious husband who’s become her producer and hatchet man.”—playwright J
OHN
V
AN
D
RUTEN
(
I Remember Mama
)
“I knew her better than a husband would.”—B
EATRICE
L
ILLIE
on stage star Gertrude Lawrence (
The King and I
)
“At a certain point, she wanted to be a singer—a mezzanine soprano, as she says. But she’s much too funny, and at heart she’s an anarchist. Whenever she opens her mouth it’s mutiny on the high C’s.”—stage star I
VOR
N
OVELLO
on Bea Lillie
“Musical!”—S
IR
W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL’S
succinct reply to W. Somerset Maugham as to what it was like bedding the handsome Ivor Novello. (The statesman claimed the actor-writer-composer-producer was his sole same-sex affair; his mother, a nonpolitician, claimed otherwise.)
“The last I saw of Bea Lillie was her being led away—forever, as it turned out—from a Museum of Modern Art screening in Manhattan after she bared her bosom. If she’d been several decades younger, it would probably have been laughed off; it wouldn’t have ended her career and all public appearances.”—Tony-winning actor B
ILL
M
C
C
UTCHEON
of
Anything Goes
(Lillie lived to ninety-four.)
“You Americans always assume Englishmen are queer anyway—the way we speak, our good manners … So we can get away with more. And do.”—gay or bisexual stage star C
YRIL
R
ITCHARD
(originally Australian), Captain Hook in
Peter Pan
, who once declared, “My singing isn’t really as bad as it sounds.”
“As you may know, the real Chanel was bisexual. But Kate [Hepburn] would be the last to let that come into the open … too close to home. What she liked to emphasize was how she and Chanel both idolized their fathers, with whom each woman identified very strongly.”—
Coco
costar G
EORGE
R
OSE
“She was a woman who was uncomfortable with being a woman.”—A
RTHUR
L
AURENTS
on Katharine Hepburn, who starred in the film version of his play
The Time of the Cuckoo
“Most people do think of me as just another pinko faggot, a bleeding heart, a do-gooder. But that’s what I am.”—L
EONARD
B
ERNSTEIN
“What Lenny did is unheard of in the theatre. Too many people get credit for things they don’t do, much less remove their names.”—agent F
LORA
R
OBERTS
, on client Leonard Bernstein’s giving up his credit as co-lyricist for
West Side Story
, which he composed; he gave sole lyrical credit to younger man Stephen Sondheim
“It is very rare indeed what Lennie [sic] did for Stephen. And I know that a great deal of that generous act’s motivation was the feeling and camaraderie that one gay man can feel for another.”—gay actor M
AX
A
DRIAN
, Dr. Pangloss in Bernstein’s original
Candide
in 1956
“I won’t name him, to protect the talentless … an irritating actor who used to come to my parties and drink bottles of gin. Bragged constantly about his nonexistent theatrical triumphs. The last time he ever showed up, he rambled prominently as usual, but I heard an opening and used it. He’d just finished saying, ‘And I had the audience glued to their seats.’
“I said, ‘Dahling, how fiendishly clever of you to think of it!’ ”—T
ALLULAH
B
ANKHEAD
“I remember Tallulah Bankhead telling of going into a public ladies’ room and discovering there was no toilet tissue. She looked underneath the booth and said to the lady in the next stall, ‘I beg your pardon, do you happen to have any toilet tissue in there?’ The lady said no. So Tallulah said, ‘Well, then, dahling, do you have two fives for a ten?’ ”—E
THEL
M
ERMAN
“After Tallulah appeared in one play for which she was a bit mature, some of the critics took notice. She was devastated.… She phoned up one of her more fearless friends and asked, ‘Dahling, I don’t look 40, do I? Be honest, now’ So he said, ‘No, Tallulah, you don’t. Not any more.’ ”—friend and costar E
STELLE
W
INWOOD
“Estelle Winwood is not Tallulah’s best friend! I am! And I’ve got the scars to prove it!”—P
ATSY
K
ELLY
(
No, No, Nanette
)
“I admire any actress who can clothe the outrageous with style. One of my heroines was the divine Sarah Bernhardt. As everyone knows, she eventually had to have a leg amputated. While recuperating, she received a telegram from the monetarily obsessed head of the Pan-American Exposition in San Francisco. He offered $100,000, an unheard-of fortune at the time, if Bernhardt would allow her leg to be exhibited. She wired back to him, ‘Which leg?’ ”—actress C
ORNELIA
O
TIS
S
KINNER
(daughter of actor Otis Skinner), who authored a book on Bernhardt
“I’ll tell you who I admire. Not so much these movie stars who come to Broadway and get exorbitant publicity and fees on a silver platter, milady, but women who run things and get in there and make it happen. Imagine the guts and effrontery of a woman theatrical manager with her own troupe back in 1865—yes, that was happening, folks—at a time when no woman could vote or even own property in her own name.
That
is to admire.”—E
ILEEN
H
ECKART
“Carol Channing tries to give forth a positive word about anybody she’s asked about, no matter how heinous. But one person you shouldn’t bring up is Danny Kaye. Back during
Let’s Face It
[1941], his costar was Eve Arden. Carol, her understudy, went on when Eve got sick, and Carol wowed everyone. Except Kaye. Carol was shortly dismissed. Kaye was a prima donna.”—showbiz publicist C
HARLIE
E
ARLE
“Carol [Lawrence] told me a story about how some performers lose interest during a long run, forcing you to take steps.… At the end of
West Side Story
, Maria, disgusted by the violence, threatens a gang member with a gun. Well, this one actor didn’t react with fear; rather, he was nonchalant, wasting the moment and ruining it for the audience and for Carol, who, after the performance, demanded what the hell happened?
‘I didn’t feel it anymore,’ he just said. She was furious. But she gave him back his motivation, because the next night her gun was loaded with blanks, and as the guy began to sneer at her, she cocked the gun in his face, and he went pale. From then on, he never went out of character in that scene.”—revue and record producer B
EN
B
AGLEY