Broadway Babylon (55 page)

“I do not speak ill of the hand that feeds me, but oh, yes, it is good to be back in the theatre.… The theatre is typically more straightforward than Hollywood … I remember when Warners bought
The Man Who Came to Dinner
, which Monty Woolley made such an enduring success in. They then proceeded to rewrite it for Cary Grant—just sabotaged the play!… I told them I’d do it if they restored it to the original and cast Woolley in the lead. They did, and we did it, and it was a great hit.”—B
ETTE
D
AVIS
in the 1970s (in the screen version she was first-billed though playing Sheridan Whiteside’s secretary)

“When Bette Davis came [to see the show], Anne was a wreck, and she went up on her lines. But there was Eve Harrington at last being Margo Channing and having to face the first Margo—it was really too much.”—costar L
EE
R
OY
R
EAMS
on Anne Baxter in
Applause
, the musical of the film
All About Eve

“She’d be wearing her mink coat, and a couple of times, when something was going wrong with the show, she’d say, ‘I’m a very gifted actress. I’ve won two Academy Awards.’ I thought, this is so sad she has to say this. But she had to do it to bolster her confidence.”—actress J
ULIE
K
URNITZ
of
Minnie’s Boys
(1970), starring Shelley Winters as the Marx Brothers’ mother

“When it came to undisciplined, unprofessional behavior … that was Jennifer Holliday in
Dreamgirls
, which I choreographed [with director Michael
Bennett]. The reason they put up with her was that her solo was a standout … not hummable and a hit tune, but she performed the shit out of it. But I wonder if it justified all she put us through.”—M
ICHAEL
P
ETERS
(best known for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video)

“Well, I don’t really like to criticize him. I mean, I’m not sure if he’s really alive still.…”—
Fiddler on the Roof
librettist J
OSEPH
S
TEIN
on producer David Merrick

“When I first met Yul Brynner in 1949, he was producing wrestling shows for one of the [TV] networks [and] his only accent was straight out of the South Bronx.”—columnist J
AMES
B
ACON
(Brynner became a star via
The King and I
on Broadway, then a “foreign” star in films.)

“I’ve been openly gay for nearly 50 years … I’ve been acting for almost 47 years, and I’ve played all but six of Shakespeare’s plays.”—D
ANIEL
D
AVIS
(Miles on TV’s
The Nanny
), costarring in the 2004 revival of
La Cage aux Folles
with also openly gay Tony winner Gary Beach (Broadway’s
The Producers
)

“Kevin Spacey has a refreshing lack of the masculine acting tricks most young actors still cling to.… He does tend toward smugness and defensiveness too often, I think, to be effective in plays over the long run.”—
Lost in Yonkers
costar I
RENE
W
ORTH

“In the first scene I’m on the left side of the stage, and the audience has to imagine I’m eating dinner in a crowded restaurant. Then in scene two I run over to the right side of the stage and the audience imagines I’m in my own drawing room.”—actress R
UTH
G
ORDON
, describing her new play

“And the second night you have to imagine there’s an audience in front.”—playwright G
EORGE
S. K
AUFMAN’S
response

“When I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes thrown in Jed Harris’s face.”—the last wish of playwright G
EORGE
S. K
AUFMAN

“I don’t dislike hardly anybody, but he’s one exception. But I’m not going to say why at this time.”—stage actor turned game-show host (
Hollywood Squares
) P
ETER
M
ARSHALL
on stage actor (
Cabaret
) turned game-show host Bert Convy

“You like old movies? Then you owe a huge debt to Broadway. A mighty percentage of the movies Hollywood made were from Broadway plays. That’s where Hollywood looked first, for stories and stars. Now, too often, it looks in the gyms, gutters, ghettoes, and high schools.”—movie director G
EORGE
S
IDNEY
(
Show Boat, Bye Bye Birdie
)

“Broadway has something for everyone. It’s not all high-brow, it’s not all musicals. You could go see Anne Heche of
Ellen
[DeGeneres]fame in a play, or now see Elizabeth Berkley of
Showgirls
fame or infamy in a revival of
Sly Fox
, based on a play from the 1500s but starring Richard Dreyfuss. That’s variety!”—theater columnist V
ICTORIA
N
EWTON
in 2004

“Somehow, the most memorable thing about this less than starry but rewed-up
Cabaret
revival is Scotsman Alan Cumming’s darlin’ nipple ring. It seems yet the focus and the symbol of this provocatively pansexual actor’s show-stealing performance in a non-lead role.”—critic M
URA
T. F
ALCO
(
Going Out
)

“I did have one homosexual husband. At least. Guthrie McClintic. He was an extremely famous Broadway producer who loved his fellow man—often. I wasn’t the only actress he married. He married Katharine Cornell. But it was different for her than me—like her husband, she was attracted to her own kind. You know: Birds of a feather fornicate together.”—E
STELLE
W
INWOOD
on her second of four husbands

“One day Eugenie Leontovich, who was the star of
Grand Hotel
, asked me if I would like to meet Katharine Cornell, whom I had much admired. There were some very sordid stories about her husband, Guthrie McClintic, carrying on—even something about having [male lovers] in the back of the balcony while she was performing—but I had never heard anything about Cornell.

“We went to her house on the East Side, and watching Leontovich and Cornell together—there was a certain subtle intimacy in their rapport from which I was excluded—I understood why she would be married to a man like McClintic.”—H
ERMAN
S
HUMLIN
, producer of
Grand Hotel
and
The Children’s Hour

“That was a really strange group of people. I think Ethel [Shutta] was 75, and Fifi [D’Orsay] was 80, and they both needed a babysitter. They really acted like kids.… Alexis [Smith] was really the Ice Goddess … if we all cracked up onstage—and we did—she’d never participate.… Yvonne [De Carlo] was famous for being great in rehearsal. She would tap dance her little heart out and then change her shoes, go on stage, and lose it. She also used to put all these hairpieces on, and they’d fly all over the stage.”—S
HEILA
S
MITH
,
Follies
(1971) actress and understudy

“Barbra has the voice and talent. I just don’t think she’ll ever come back to Broadway.… She strives for technical perfection, but she doesn’t really relate to audiences, and that’s so important when you work live.”—L
IZA
M
INNELLI
on Streisand

“May I go down on you?”—J
OHN
B
ARRYMORE’S
greeting, with arms open and ready to bow, in the dressing room of any given star whose performance he’d greatly admired

“Wouldn’t that be rather difficult at the same time?”—J
ERRY
H
ERMAN
to officially bisexual Liz Smith when she bowed and told him and Carol Channing after an admirable benefit performance, “May I go down on you?”

“I can’t do this show … I’ve never been that poor, and I’ve never even
known
a Puerto Rican!”—S
TEPHEN
S
ONDHEIM’S
initial reaction when asked to write the lyrics for
West Side Story

“John Waters says
Hairspray
is
Cats
for fat people. I think John Waters is Woody Allen for gay people.”—R
OBERT
D
OWNEY
J
R
.

“Somebody forgot to tell Bobby Short he was black. But he forgot to tell he was gay. At least he kept his own nose.”—D
ON
R
ICKLES

“Completely all voice and no internals. I left that show because I said, ‘The play is lost in your palate. I’m an acting teacher. I can’t have my name involved with this kind of exterior performing. You have only this ‘This is CNN’ voice.’ ”—C
HARLES
N
ELSON
R
EILLY
on James Earl Jones in
Paul Robeson

“She was a little troublesome. She didn’t like working with other people. She was much more comfortable alone when she wrote her little ditties.”—C
HARLES
N
ELSON
R
EILLY
on his former acting pupil Lily Tomlin

“Ever since they costarred in that movie
Stage Door
, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers have been rivals, with Rogers always upstaged and outraged.… Ginger also followed her in touring
Coco
on the straw-hat circuit. Her Chanel portrayal was deliberately more feminine, and was written up as ‘less strident’ than Katharine Hepburn’s.”—G
EORGE
R
OSE
, costar of the Broadway
Coco
starring Hepburn

“As yet, [George] Bernard Shaw hasn’t become prominent enough to have any enemies, but none of his friends like him.”—O
SCAR
W
ILDE
on a fellow Irish playwright

“I saw your
Private Lives
the other night. Not very funny.”—actress D
IANA
W
YNYARD
to Noel Coward

“I saw your Lady Macbeth the other night—very funny!”—C
OWARD’S
reply (not funny at all was the result of Wynyard’s realistic playing of the sleepwalking scene with her eyes closed: she fell over a parapet and broke several bones)

“You
couldn’t
have been better.”—actor E
RNEST
T
HESIGER’S
(Dr. Pretorius in
The Bride of Frankenstein
) backstage greeting to a not-very-talented colleague

“Claire Trevor once went back to see Judith Anderson after a performance of
Medea
. She had been truly bowled over and she said, ‘I simply can’t find the words to tell you how superb you were.’ Judith Anderson just said, ‘Try.’ ”—R
OCK
H
UDSON

“If you don’t have a rod of steel in your spine, you’re never going to survive in the arts in this country.… I tell my students, ‘If you can find anything else in your life that will make you happy, do it. Because in the theatre, virtue is not its own reward. But if you’ll be unhappy if you’re not in the theatre, if you like swimming in polluted water with sharks, come on in.’ ”—playwright E
DWARD
A
LBEE

“Darling, I don’t care what anybody says—I thought you were marvelous.”—B
EATRICE
L
ILLIE
to a rival performer

Costume designer O
RRY
-K
ELLY
: “[Tallulah Bankhead] gives these grand cocktail parties, invites the finest people, and then when she opens the door to usher them in, she’s wearing a large black garden hat, a strand of pearls, and her black pumps. That is all. And, you know, it isn’t pretty.”

C
AROL
C
HANNING
: “What isn’t, Orry?”

O
RRY
-K
ELLY
: “It looks like an old Chinaman’s mustache.… It’s food stained … and it’s on the bias. It has a sneer.”

“I did wonder if [his] career would come to a grinding halt with this crazy, almost subversive play. [
MacBird!
, 1966] was based on a character based on our president, LBJ, played by Stacy [Keach]. He arranges the murder of his boss, named John Ken O’Dunc, which is avenged by his brother, Robert Ken O’Dunc. You couldn’t have had anything like this in the ’50s, under the Republicans.…
MacBird!
was written by a Barbara Garson.… That was Off-Broadway, about 25 years ago. I hope Ms. Garson is still alive and well.”—S
TACY
K
EACH
S
R
.

“You know, for all her work on
Oklahoma!
Agnes de Mille only got $1,500. True, she wasn’t famous before, but without her choreography there was no
Oklahoma!
The producers knew they had to do something or there’d be a scandal. Instead of giving her any kind of future percentage, which in time could come to millions, they paid her an extra $50 a week for the duration of the Broadway run.”—G
WEN
V
ERDON

“I never played myself or even my own mother in
Gypsy
, but I played another part closer to myself, darling. It was far from Broadway, someplace in
Ohio. I starred as
Auntie Mame
. That part was
much
more me.”—G
YPSY
R
OSE
L
EE

“I’m not related to Ken Mandelbaum, whose musical-theatre writing I admire. Years ago I was introduced to Carol Channing, who thought I was Ken. She talked so much and so quickly that I never got a chance to correct her.”—H
OWARD
M
ANDELBAUM
, photographic entrepreneur

“How
dare
you call yourself an actor? You’re not even a bad actor. You can’t act at all, you fucking stupid hopeless sniveling little cunt-faced cunty fucking shit-faced arsehole.”—L
AURENCE
O
LIVIER
to Laurence Harvey at a dinner party after Harvey criticized John Gielgud’s acting, as quoted by Harvey’s biographer and sister-in-law, Anne Sinai

“What a lucky child to have two fairy godfathers!”—actress D
AME
M
AY
W
HITTY
at the baptism of the son of bisexual actor Emlyn Williams, whose former lovers Noel Coward and John Gielgud attended the ceremony