Authors: Boze Hadleigh
Broadway Babylon (44 page)
Though he claimed otherwise, Capote got the title via a friend’s story about a wealthy New Yorker who’d spent the night with a man in uniform. The younger man had never been to Manhattan, and when his happy host offered next morning to take him for breakfast anywhere he wished, the out-of-towner suggested the expensive-sounding Tiffany’s. Merrick eventually described the musical as “an excruciatingly boring evening.” Despite a million dollars in advance ticket sales, he closed the widely panned show and took full responsibility for the financial loss.
G
ORE
V
IDAL
and Truman Capote began as friends with much in common. Apparently too much. Both young gay novelists were intensely ambitious, and celebrity divided them. Both eventually wrote plays, and their mutual, enduring friend was Tennessee Williams, in whose apartment they had their worst in-person falling out.
For the 1967–1968 Broadway season, Vidal attempted a commercial play that owed inspiration to the recent hit movie
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
, which was about an affluent young white woman bringing home her black fiancé.
“Gore’s play was dull as well as derivative,” crowed Capote. “He just switched the genders, which Gore is good at—look at
Myra Breckinridge
. He had a white boy bringing home his black girlfriend. Or mistress, because Gore is never subtle. And since he’s too permanently in a rage to avoid politics, Gore made it be the son of a presidential candidate.… It flopped for the same reason Gore was defeated both times he ran for Congress: no substance!”
P
ETER
A
LLEN
starred as gangster
Legs Diamond
in the eponymous 1988 musical flop. The Australian singer-songwriter, a popular concert performer, was unprepared for the venomous personal attacks surrounding his bid for Broadway stardom. He recalled in San Francisco, where he went after being diagnosed with AIDS, “I never said I was a great actor … but no one believed Harvey Fierstein’s idea of making
Legs
a dancing gangster.… What it really was, was homophobia. I was as out as a non-out celebrity could be then, and while the press tolerated me in my own shows, they drew the line when I tried to crash their mainstream party. How dare I aim so high or try and impersonate a butch hoodlum?”
A
NTHONY
N
EWLEY
enjoyed more success onstage than in movies, via
Stop the World
—
I Want to Get Off
and
The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd
. Eventually he also became known as one of the ex-husbands of Joan Collins, whom he reviled in print often while she was on
Dynasty
. He flopped big in a comeback stage project he thought couldn’t miss: the 1983 musical
Chaplin
, which closed on the road. Newley identified with Charlie Chaplin, as both were reared fatherless and were Cockneys from London’s East End.
Besides charisma,
Chaplin
lacked action, with most of the screen legend’s exciting life occurring offstage and Newley announcing rather than showing what was happening. Then too, three actors played Chaplin—sometimes all onstage at once—and the show had three narrators, including Newley as “himself.” The music was described as so-so or less, and another actor tried to recreate the memorable and beloved Stan Laurel, Chaplin’s former associate and rival.
Anthony Newley revived
Chaplin
briefly in 1985 but thereafter toured in his prior, more successful musicals.
L
IV
U
LLMANN
, movie-critics’-darling-turned-director, starred in one of the biggest flop movie musicals,
Lost Horizon
, in 1973. Six years later she headlined the ballyhooed, costly flop Broadway musical—Richard Rodgers’ last—
I Remember Mama
, based on the screen classic. Ullmann, being Norwegian, was considered perfect casting to play the Norwegian immigrant, though she couldn’t sing. Universal Pictures supplied half the $1.25 million budget, convinced that the family-centered story had big-screen potential, like
The Sound of Music
.
Despite Ullmann’s placid image, there were clashes before and during New York. Director-lyricist Martin Charnin of
Annie
fame was fired after
Mama
got poor reviews in Philadelphia. Charnin announced, “Ms. Ullmann and I do not see ‘I to I’ about how musicals are made. To make a long and ugly story short, there’s no longer a fjord in my future.”
Charnin later admitted he’d irked the star by wanting to replace her. (Florence “Brady Bunch” Henderson was one candidate.) “Singing,” he revealed, “frightened her, and she couldn’t memorize her lines … I had thought of it as an ensemble piece, she thought of it as a vehicle for her.” Richard Rodgers, seventy-six and ailing, was upset by the goings-on but didn’t try to get involved. When Charnin then suffered a serious heart attack, he publicly attributed it to his being fired. Liv Ullmann told the press, “I hope that Martin Charnin will start doing something more constructive than blaming his failures and illnesses on other people.”
The musical lost $1.5 million, and Richard Rodgers died four months after its closing.
G
INGER
R
OGERS
did two Broadway musicals before Hollywood snapped her up. The second was in 1930. In 1959, her Tinseltown heyday behind her, she returned in
The Pink Jungle
, a musical set in the beauty industry, which closed on the road—Rogers herself campaigned against bringing it into New York. By then she was upset that costar Agnes Moorehead (later most widely known for TV’s
Bewitched
) had received nearly all the good notices. Rogers, as was her wont, was too old for her role as a beautician. Since Moorehead was both a draw and the critics’ favorite, she was in a secure position for the run of the show. Rogers had to content herself with her fourteen lavish Jean Louis outfits.
Original director Joseph Anthony opined after his firing that audiences were attending for three things—Rogers’s wardrobe, Moorehead as a cosmetics tycoon, and the impressive sets—and in spite of one thing: Ginger Rogers. The once-superstar was given two dance numbers for old times’ sake, but didn’t carry her songs very well. She realized, “We would have been foolish [Ginger more than Agnes] to face the seven New York critics. They would have shot us out of the water.” Post-
Pink
, Rogers appeared in several safe musicals, in roles created by genuine musical-comedy stars.
M
EREDITH
W
ILLSON
of
The Music Man
fame tried six years later to wring another megahit, out of the 1963 musicalization of the much-loved motion picture
Miracle on 34th Street
, which had made a child star of Natalie Wood in 1947. The leads of
Here’s Love
, Janis Paige and Craig Stevens, were ably supported by comic actors Fred Gwynne and David Doyle. The latter would become best known as Bosley on TV’s
Charlie’s Angels
, while Gwynne would
earn small-screen immortality as Herman Munster on
The Munsters
.
During rehearsals for
Here’s Love
, Fred Gwynne’s baby daughter died by drowning. The trouper, though brokenhearted, returned to the show for its opening. (Ironically, Natalie Wood later died by drowning off Catalina Island in 1981 at forty-three.) Of her dozens of movies, probably Wood’s most popular and widely seen remains
Miracle on 34th Street
. None of its remakes—not the stage musical, a TV movie, nor another feature film—ever approached the original’s acclaim or perfect casting.
A
LMOST NOBODY REMEMBERS
a 1962 flop musical titled
We Take the Town
, based on the screenplay
Viva Villa!
about Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. The show, which never made it to New York, starred Robert Preston, post–
Music Man
and long before the movie musical
Victor/Victoria
. Preston’s costars were John Cullum (much later of
Urinetown
), Carmen Alvarez, and Kathleen Widdoes.
We Take the Town
might or might not have been a hit had its star not rejected casting a young singer then performing in boîtes around town.
Producer Stuart Ostrow was “knocked out” by this aspiring actress’s singing voice but informed her, “The part calls for an aristocratic Mexican lady.”
“So what?” replied Barbra Streisand. “When I sing, there is no nationality.”
Ostrow was sold, but couldn’t convince Preston, who insisted on a more experienced actress. Streisand later recorded “How Does the Wine Taste?” from the show’s score—its only song that more or less endured. As Pancho Villa had been in 1923,
We Take the Town
was shot down—by Philadelphia critics. It didn’t reach New York, where it had been booked for the Broadway Theatre. John Shubert returned Stuart Ostrow’s $20,000 deposit for the theater, with a note: “Try again, kid; we need new producers.”
Looking back in 1999, Ostrow noted, “Today, symptomatic of the theatre’s bottom-line mentality, the Shubert empire is run by its former lawyer, who, I can assure you, would not have returned my $20,000 deposit.”
S
TAIGER OR
S
TREISAND
… which one would become a star?
So near, and yet so far apart. It’s often presumed that hit musicals must be better works than flop musicals. It ain’t necessarily so. The difference, occasionally, is negligible. Sometimes it’s timing. Sometimes, especially when a
biographical musical revolves around one character, it’s who plays her.
Sophie
and
Funny Girl
were both about singing Jewish comediennes who became stars against the odds and despite their looks. For, Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice both had talent and fascinating personas and life stories.
Both shows opened at the Winter Garden Theatre—
Sophie
on April 15, tax day, 1963. (How much did that timing hurt?) They had much in common, including a proverbial Jewish mother, an unhappy husband overwhelmed by his mate’s blossoming success, an “Irish hoofer sidekick” and a kindly black maid. Each show starred a relative newcomer with a highly praised voice, each a potential Broadway star. Both shows endured rough going out of town en route to Broadway. The Brice musical had several titles, among them
My Man, A Very Special Person
, and
The Luckiest People
, before producer David Merrick came up with
Funny Girl
.
A pet project of agent-turned-producer Ray Stark, Fanny’s son-in-law, the Brice musical had five opening-night postponements and forty rewrites of the final scene alone. Yet it was the Tucker musical, starring Libi Staiger, that folded within a week and is virtually forgotten, like its subject and certainly its star. Fanny Brice might be forgotten too, but for the 1964
Funny Girl
, which launched Barbra Streisand. (Of course, the hit musical became a hit movie, in 1968—starring Streisand, unusual in that films of musicals typically jettison the Broadway star. That movie later yielded a sequel, 1975’s
Funny Lady
.)
Sophie
the hit would have launched Libi Staiger. But
Sophie
the flop stopped her career in its tracks. Its music was deemed second-rate; of Steve Allen’s oeuvre of 1,000-plus songs, only one, “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” became a major hit (other hits of his include “Picnic,” “Impossible,” “Gravy Waltz,” and the Dixieland tune “South Rampart Street Parade”). Staiger had a following, but not a cult, like the fourteen-years-younger Streisand. She had more stage experience than Barbra, including supporting roles on Broadway in
Wonderful Town
and
Destry Rides Again
with Andy Griffith in 1959.
Sophie
was her fifth and final major production, followed by occasional guest TV and film roles.
Twenty-one-year-old Barbra Streisand had a lot riding on her unproven shoulders. Her only previous Broadway role was Miss Marmelstein the secretary in
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
in 1962. Her future was by no means assured. Talent alone—a Staiger’s or a Streisand’s—is never enough in show business, which
is
a business. When a costly, much-anticipated musical centers on one performer, she’ll either win big or lose big. Second chances are rare—rarer for female performers.
“You know,” explained Vera Caspary, who wrote the screenplay for the pre-musicalized
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
(1951), starring another Brooklynite, Susan Hayward, “so many myths invariably grow up around the
people who become stars. From most of what I heard about [the musical]
Wholesale
, Miss Streisand was good, but she was not this legendary standout talent and budding superstar that everybody now claims to have instantly recognized.
“And the fact of her standing out had as much to do with her bizarre looks and posturing as her singing talent. Some people did feel that her singing verged on wailing. Today that may be a sacrilege, but the beauty of Miss Streisand’s voice was not, then, a universally foregone conclusion.”
Caspary, best known as the author and screenwriter of the ’40s classic
Laura
, pointed out that
Funny Girl
’s producers had initially sought Mary Martin, Anne Bancroft, or Carol Burnett to shoulder the box-office burden. Composer Jule Styne strongly favored young Streisand, who was finally given a very big chance. Had the show been a flop, the producers and indeed the showbiz establishment would have been quite unforgiving. Barbra might have moved on to a solid singing career, but as an actress she almost certainly would not have enjoyed star parts on big or little screen, nor in future Broadway endeavors, if any. (Just how close
Funny Girl
came to bombing—people actually walked out during out-of-town pre-Broadway engagements—is chronicled in Ethan Mordden’s book
Open a New Window
, about ’60s musicals.)
Had things been different back in ’63 and ’64, today we might be reading about la Staiger (aka Libs) and her latest project or political endorsement, and asking “Barbra who?” while playing a game of Broadway trivia.
